Tatjana Schneider: Spatial Agency and Architecture as a Collective Form

In times when collectivity and notion of working-with have become magical solutions with which to turn around the fate of the production of space and decades of neoliberal exploitation, it seems apt to reconsider the potentialities of such concepts and their enactment. Hence, the short talk with subsequent discussion will focus on ways of doing that take into account the multitude of human and non-human relationships. It will look at why collectivity might be a concept worth investigating, why it might be worth fighting over and for, and why it might be a useful tool–together with a healthy dose of pessimism–to re-envision and make truly emancipatory futures.

Tatjana Schneider is an architect and academic. She is currently head of the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture and the City (GTAS) at the Technical University Braunschweig in Germany. From 2004 to 2018, she was a Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield, England, where she co-initiated long-term research project Spatial Agency in 2006 that presents a new way of looking at how buildings and space can be produced. In 2014-2015, she held the post of the Professor for History and Theory of the City at HafenCity University Hamburg, Germany. Schneider was one of the founding members of the architectural workers cooperative Glasgow Letters on Architecture and Space (GLAS 2000–2007), a practice that worked at the intersection of theory and practice to produce alternatives to the capitalist production and consumption of space, and the Radical Architectures Network established in 2013.