Interlude 2: Five ways to make design and mobility political

Architecture’s relation to politics is commonly understood in the light of traditional foundational theories of politics related to ideology, state, nation, government, policies and activism. These realities are foundational in the sense that we tend to start with them before proceeding to justify and explain everything in architecture within their terms. Politics is a separate domain of action with its own logics, institutions and practices; it is outside of architecture’s remit and far from the architectural objects and processes. The chapter traces linear causal relations between politics and architecture. The architectural literature has preciously preserved the modernist roots of official architectural scholarship and, in particular, the dualist split between people and things, between the free-standing material world of architecture and infrastructure, created, fabricated, built, governed, mastered and controlled by powerful humans.