The UIA World Congress of Architects 2023 is an invitation for architects from around the world to meet in Copenhagen July 2 – 6 to explore and communicate how architecture influences all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For more than two years, the Science Track and its international Scientific Committee have been analyzing the various ways in which architecture responds to the SDGs. The work has resulted in the formulation of six science panels: design for Climate Adaptation, design for Rethinking Resources, design for Resilient Communities, design for Health, design for Inclusivity, and design for Partnerships for Change. An international call for papers was sent out in 2022 and 296 of more than 750 submissions from 77 countries have been invited to present at the UIA World Congress of Architects 2023 in Copenhagen. ArchDaily is collaborating with the UIA to share articles pertaining to the six themes to prepare for the opening of the Congress.
In this fifth feature, we met with co-chairs of design for Inclusivity architect Magda Mostafa, Professor of Design, Department of Architecture, the American University in Cairo and architect Ruth Baumeister, Associate Professor of Theory and History, Aarhus School of Architecture.
Read on to discover the conversation.
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Inclusivity in context of the built environment is often limited to issues of accessibility, age groups, and to some extent gender and socio-economy, however, your approach is more holistic and also articulates architecture’s role in relation to racism, neurodiversity, the non-human and more. Can you tell us about how you view inclusivity in architecture and how this has reflected in your work with the panel?
Magda Mostafa: My work with autism has encouraged me to embrace and think of the world - and many of its issues - beyond the binary in the form of a spectrum of issues, that are nuanced and blurred. I layer on to this concepts of intersectionality - which means in simple terms that no individual is ever only one thing, and that those multiple intersecting identities can have a compounding effect on your experience of and in the built world. The problem lies in the fact that the conventional process of architectural discourse and production often reduces our users into silos of singular monolithic identities - if we are designing a school we think of students, teachers and staff - but each individual in these user groups also identifies as a gender, has an ethnic group that they belong to, is of a certain age, comes from a certain socio-economic background, maybe be neurodivergent etc.
Ruth Baumeister: My work focuses on the history and theory of modern architecture, design and urbanism, particularly in their cultural, socio-political and economic dimension. I have investigated how gender related issues have historically impacted how we conceive of the profession of the architect, which led me to explore the various ways in which material objects and environments shape gendered subjectivities and control their users´ bodies and identities in contemporary design. Soon, I broadened my focus by looking at groups of people with different abilities, from different cultural, racial and ethnic backgrounds and generations. As an educator, I find it important to support students in conceiving of spatial environments that embrace diversity, but that also mandates identifying the obstacles. During the past three years in preparing the UIA together with Magda, we identified numerous of those, both in academic scholarship as well as in practice.
MM & RB: In the course of collaborating on planning, curating and presenting this panel of Design for Inclusivity, we have had multiple discussions about language, particularly its shortcomings given the impact it has on how we understand, frame and critically discuss this complex issue. We discovered that the notions of Inclusion and even Accessibility themselves are inherently othering, in that they assume a norm from which one group deviates and needs to be “included” or given “access”. The concept of inclusion works on the dialectics of including and excluding, but doesn´t inclusion bring about exclusion therefore? Moreover, who includes whom and doesn´t this inevitably create mechanisms of exclusions?. Although noble in its intent, because of this semantic construct it poses the danger of reinforcing that which it actually sets out to dismantle. Throughout our work on this panel we propose an alternative nomenclature around the concept of “Availability”, a concept that is more adequate and democratising in that it does not presume a norm and an other, but rather presents an open notion into which any user can engage on their own terms with personal agency over their body and its identity in that space.
The exclusionary effects of the built environment oftentimes mirror cultural values, societal structures and their histories. What reflections have you had on the significance of exchanges of practice and research knowledge across different geographies and knowledge cultures? Can we speak of ‘universal design’ when we speak of inclusivity?
MM & RB: Through the course of conversations over these more than two years of planning for the discourse that we hope will unfold in Copenhagen, we have had multiple increasingly layered conversations about this very issue. The value of having this dialogue on such a global scale is exactly that: what does inclusion - better what we would like to be defined as an aspiration toward availability - actually mean in different socio-cultural contexts? And is the process itself by which we engage in this conversation actually really inclusive?
To the former, and largely because of the socio-cultural framing of the moment that the question seems to want to explore - diversity and inclusion can mean different things in different contexts. For example over the past few years after the murder or George Floyd, which ultimately became a tipping point in the racial discourse in the United States, we saw a renewed energy behind the Black Lives Matter movement, and the majority of conversations around inclusion and diversity - quite rightly for that context - were focused largely around race. In Europe, for example, immigration mainly from the countries of the Global South posed different issues, which are also but not exclusively about race, but about human rights, social issues, economic inequalities, etc. In other contexts that focus may shift to another lens such as gender, age, poverty or ability or neurodiversity, again driven by the urgency of the exclusionary landscape within which it is unfolding. And again, we would like to stress that none of these issues are isolated, they intersect in various different ways and it is important for scholarship especially, to acknowledge this as a given fact. This dynamic is necessary and cultures have the right to prioritise their most urgent, pressing and critical needs. What our conversation is trying to do is to reinforce that these priorities can still - and perhaps even must- exist within the constellation of intersectional identities that other lenses present. The irony, however, of some conversations around inclusion is that they themselves out of reactions to very real and often very violent exclusionary and discriminatory practices may lead unintentionally to exclusionary practices themselves. We think the importance of the sort of conversations that will hopefully happen in Copenhagen is that they open a dialogue and work to find points of intersection and common ground, while promoting respect and broader understanding of the complexity of the collective human identity.
In which ways do you find that engaging with the 17 UN SDGs can contribute to a better understanding of inclusivity in architectural research and practices? What are your thoughts on architecture’s role in driving the sustainable transformation of our societies?
MM: Simply put I believe there can be no truly sustainable solution that excludes, it must in order to be successful include us all. I propose that the economics of sustainability will not work if we do not provide solutions that include all needs and identities. The cost of correcting for exclusion are far greater than the cost of authentically being inclusive in the first place.
RB: I very much agree with Magda in such a way that any kind of solution that leads to exclusion is not sustainable and most definitely architecture - in the form of academic scholarship as well as professional practice - can play a decisive role in this. The great gap between the Global North and South in terms of economic power, financial potential, national privileges on the one hand and economic distress, poverty, political suppression, national disadvantages, etc. we identified as major obstacles in the strive towards a future which is available to all.
What are the most exciting developments and promising movements you have identified in the papers submitted to Panel 5: Design for Inclusivity?
MM: As rich and diverse the movements and ideas that are identified in the papers are, it is perhaps not the content but the inclusiveness of the format, the authorship and the provocation around the process and future of architectural scholarship that excites me the most. Our call for papers included 4 formats - three of which are perhaps unusual in that they diverted from the traditional research paper format. By allowing for narratives we included notions of lived experience and story-telling as valid forms of scholarship. By inviting argumentative essays we allowed for opinion. And by including visual essays we presented the graphic form as a valuable and respected form of investigation, documentation and communication. This in and of itself was an act of inclusion.
RB: It might sound odd, but for me one of the most exciting developments was gaining insight in the conditions under which scholars from different parts of the world produce their scholarship and how this affects not only the methods they use, but also the content they produce. Access to different sources and archives is required to prove an argument, but what if the context you live, work and research in does not allow that? What if freedom of speech is not granted in the context you operate in? That inevitably restricts your scholarship. It is not a simple question of courage to oppose but can be a question of life and death. In so many ways scholars in the Global North work under highly privileged conditions and it is obvious, that no matter how hard somebody from other parts of the world will try, these kinds of obstacles clearly restrict their possibilities when being measured by current academic standards.
What are you hoping the Congress delegates will take with them from the UIA World Congress 2023 CPH and what legacy from the event would you hope to see?
MM: Copenhagen will be the 6th UIA Congress that I have been involved in and attended in various capacities; as a representative of Africa in the Education Commission, then Co-Director of that same commission and now a member of the Scientific Committee. I believe that the UIA Congress has evolved over that period of time and think that Copenhagen in some ways has the potential to be a paradigm shift, at least in how we engage, produce and value architectural scholarship. I also hope that our work on the Design for Inclusivity panel will provoke important conversations and allow us to critically reflect on ourselves as an organisation and a community, to identify the tremendous potential role we have to play in being more inclusive of the diverse architectural voices from around the world - and our responsibility towards ensuring that we do not fail to do so. Future congresses should take lessons from our small, but hopefully growing experience around inclusivity and hopefully be more available to the broadest representation of our architectural community.
RB: I think the organisers made a great effort to make a difference with what they were doing with this congress and that not only remained in words but also caused actions. I think they really cared! For example, scholars, who were supposed to present at the congress were denied visas to come to Denmark finally got accepted to travel to the conference because of the organisers´ efforts. It might sound as a minor detail in the organisation of a conference that attracts several thousands in the eyes of some people, and yet, it is especially there, where exclusionary practices occur and where we must raise our voices and need to act.
Stay tuned to the collaboration with UIA World Congress of Architecture 2023 and to our coverage of Copenhagen, the UNESCO World Capital of Architecture for 2023.
