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Narrate, Speculate, Fabulate: Didier Debaise and Benedikte Zitouni in Conversation with Isabelle Doucet

par Debaise, Didier ;Doucet, Isabelle;Zitouni, Benedikte
Référence Architectural theory review, 22, 1, page (9-23)
Publication Publié, 2018-03-08

Article révisé par les pairs

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Résumé :

On Monday, 25 September 2017, I convened a conversation with philosopher Didier Debaise and social scientist Benedikte Zitouni in Brussels, and meandered between French and English discussing the ways in which we study and research the world. This "world" is, for Benedikte , a world of activist urban practices, nineteenth-century urban planning in Brussels, urban agriculture, and eco-feminism, whilst Didier studies, as a philosopher, the concepts, ideas, and regimes of thought through which philosophers have guided us to study reality, nature, and science. Their work is relevant for architectural studies in that it inspires modes of inquiry, emphasises the importance of narration and story-telling, and helps in discussing reservations about making truth claims in architectural discourse. Their work resists developing generalisations from specific and situated problems, and encourages us to resist the conceptual taxonomies, comparative approaches, and projected abstractions through which theory all too often pretends to study the world and, worse, justify its findings. Instead, I find in Benedikte and Didier's writings companions for my own quest for situated accounts of architecture, and a welcome sense of hope that such accounts carry the potential of resistance and of imagining other possible futures. This imagination, exercised not in a distant future but in and through the thickness of the present, seems to me a task that demands our attention in a world of environmental collapse wherein we are yet to learn how to inhabit the knowledge that we are about to hit the wall, as Isabelle Stengers powerfully argues in In Catastrophic Times. 1 1 Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, London: Open Humanities Press, 2015. I believe that architects have a role to play in healing our relationship with and care for Gaia, provided they relearn to celebrate the wildly imaginative nature of the world and of their own training as well as developing instrumentalised "solutions" (e.g. sustainability, green roofs, solar panels).