Social Practices and City Spaces

This book examines the relationship between social practices and built space, focusing on current cooperative/participative and posthuman approaches to its production and management. From a social-cultural-and-ecological perspective, it explores the modes of engagement of all factors in the constitutional processes of inhabited space.Throughout this interdisciplinary collection, built space is reconsidered in the light of other schools of thought such as philosophy, anthropology, social sciences and political theories and practices. It covers new ground at conceptual, epistemic and methodological levels, focusing on inhabited space from within the framework of globalisation, biopolitics, cultural changes, environmental crisis and new technologies. Organised into three parts, Parts 1 and 2 focus on the role of architects in the emergence of a new ethos for habitation, as well as the modalities of the inclusion of differences in design, discussing the importance of participation and narrative at a theoretical and practical level in architecture. In the third part, the chapters delve into questions regarding the intersection of design, ecology and technoscience in a posthuman approach, which might support the inclusion of differences in design and the emergence of a new environmental ethos.Providing a stimulating landscape of arguments and challenges to new readings of architecture, society and the environment, this book will be of interest to researchers, students and professionals of architecture, urban planning, anthropology and philosophy.

Kyriaki Tsoukala is Professor Emerita at the School of Architecture of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She received the title of doctorate of Social Sciences, as well as the title of doctorate of Urban Geography from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and also holds the title of Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) from the University of Paris X-Nanterre in the Organisation of Space. Tsoukala has published numerous articles in scientific and architectural journals and books in Greece, France and the United Kingdom. Key topics of focus include: the link between architecture and the human sciences and philosophy; places of the upbringing of children and youth; the affiliation between the child-urban spaces; and the theories of Socio-Psychology of Space. She has written the following books: Trends in School Architecture-From the child centered functionality to the postmodern approach (1997, Thessaloniki/Paratiritis, in Greek), L’image de la ville chez l’enfant (2001, Paris/Anthropos-Economica), Les territoires urbains de l’enfant (2007, Paris/L’Harmattan), Child urban territories, Architecture and mental representations (2005, Athens/Gutenerg, in Greek), Urbanisation and Identity (2009, Thessaloniki/Epikentro, in Greek), Fluid Space and Reflective Counterpoints on Education (2015, Thessaloniki/Epikentro, in Greek), Fluid Space and Transformational Learning (2017, London/Routledge) and Body and Architecture (2023, Thessaloniki/Epikentro, in Greek).