Platz nehmen

Urban administrations and governments are increasingly obsessed with the image of their city, plunging into a marketing competition aimed at tourism, investors, and real estate markets. The people living in the city become targets of architectural displacement measures. Mickaël Labbé illustrates how entire segments of the population are excluded as undesirable through a barely noticeable architecture of disdain. Surveillance cameras, benches with slanted seating, or armrests that prevent sleeping, along with other subtle measures, particularly complicate life in the city for socially marginalized individuals such as the homeless. In response to this trend, Labbé argues for the necessity of reinventing a city that caters to all of us. Instead of exclusionary mechanisms, we need spaces where we can reconnect with one another. A city that is no longer oriented towards communal use, consisting only of homogeneous ghettos where we can no longer confront each other in all our differences, is a loss for all of us. Labbé describes functioning examples of an architecture of recognition and advocates for a reclamation of public space.