October 2024
Harvard GSD seminar on Agonistic Assemblies

The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) announces its fall 2024 schedule of public programs and exhibitions, many of which offer interdisciplinary perspectives on conflict, power, and design as a means of communication.
On October 8, Markus Miessen will run a seminar on his most recent book Agonistic Assemblies, On the Spatial Politics of Horizontality.
In the series of events Democracy and Urban Form (October 9–10), Michael Sandel, Richard Sennett, Diane Davis, Claire Zimmerman, and Markus Miessen discuss how the design of our cities can empower citizens and facilitate modes of discourse essential to democratic societies.
Democracy and Urban Form
Richard Sennett, Diane Davis, Claire Zimmerman, Markus Miessen, and Guests
Panel Discussion
October 10, 12:30pm
All events are taking place at Harvard University Graduate School of Design
48 Quincy St
Cambridge, MA 02138
USA
For more information: www.gsd.harvard.edu

"Democracy and Urban Form" by Richard Sennett:
“Never have the potential political consequences of architecture been greater, and never has the political sensibility of architecture been less.”
This was the state of the discipline that social theorist and urban thinker Richard Sennett declared when he addressed an audience at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1981. Over a series of six lectures, Sennett presented social discourse as the foundation of democracy, and posited that our cities are uniquely positioned to either empower or constrict this discourse—and that the difference could lie in architecture and urban design.
Now, over forty years later, as political polarization persists and its consequences arise in both new and familiar ways, Democracy and Urban Form revisits questions that remain relevant: If discourse is the foundation of democracy, how can the design of our cities empower and enable it?
"Agonistic Assemblies, On the Spatial Politics of Horizontality" by Markus Miessen:
This anthology presents work on cultures of assembly. 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. It calls for a revised form of spatial politics.
Miessen’s ongoing research trajectory Cultures of Assembly was initially kicked off during a Harvard GSD fellowship in collaboration with Joseph Grima, in which the two architects investigated the sociopolitical dimension of (urban) spatial design. Observing the Kuwaiti cultural and social landscape with a specific interest in the politico-spatial phenomenon of Diwaniya, this distributed urban form of para-institutional assembly established a starting point for a long-term body of research.
Agonistic Assemblies 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?