January 2024
"Agonistic Assemblies" by Markus Miessen

"Agonistic Assemblies" (Sternberg Press, 2023) is a call for a revised form of spatial politics. It stresses the relevance of small-scale and decentralized spatial formats of local knowledge production to community building and embedded political decision-making in the context of the socio-ecological transition. It reinforces the role of both individual and collective action while proposing distributed assembly and proximity as core attributes in the production of the contemporary and future city.

The book asks: how can spaces—both physical and virtual—be envisaged to create publics? How is collectivity and society being generated spatially and in terms of policy? How do we “practice” society as a bodily, spatial form, and how does this practice contribute to spatial justice? Are there specific spatial settings that can intensify these practices? What kind of spatial design can we imagine as platforms for change?


Markus Miessen will discuss the project in the context of a series of launch events that include:

Feb 07: SciArc, Los Angeles
Feb 08: CCA, San Francisco (w. Neyran Turan, Berkeley, and Neeraj Bhatia, CCA)
Feb 13: Harvard GSD, Cambridge MA (w. Diane E. Davis)
Feb 14: Columbia GSAPP, New York
Feb 29: ETH/ MILK, Zurich (w. César Reyes)