^{South Plaza Lowrider Event, South Phoenix, Arizona. Photo Credit: Sam Gomez, 2022.}

I.

The first three issues of CriticalProductive Journal are reflective of the overall mission of the publication and its allied activities: CriticalProductive Media website and moving image content, CriticalProductive Dialogues + Events that include in-person conversations and presentations, CriticalProductive Collabs featuring collaborations with designers and artists, and the CriticalProductive Black Cities initiative that spotlights activities in Black diaspora cultural production. In this third issue of the publication, we take up the theme of non-space and resistance, having dealt with the themes of Sovereignty and Populism (Issue No. 01) and Currents/Flows (Issue No. 02). 

During a period of rampant urbanization and modernization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, conceptions such as non-place, a term popularized by Marc Augé in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (first published in 1992), and junkspace, a term popularized by architect Rem Koolhaas in The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (first published in 2001), were influential for architects learning how to grapple with late capitalism. These twin terms emerged as attempts to locate the meaning of certain proliferating quasi-functional and seemingly unprogrammed spaces—for example, vacant land, urban lots, abandoned warehouses, former industrial sites, gas stations, casinos, theme parks, shopping malls, airport waiting lounges . . . Attempts at defining this type of space, which had significantly permeated the daily lives of so many, effectively simplified and emptied it of political import. However, such space, simultaneously ubiquitous and lacking in clear definition or prescribed use, popularly serves as the unofficial site for individuals to exercise various types of agency, warranting its revisiting and reconceptualizing toward a recognition of all its latent political and social energy.

Koolhaas’s and Augé’s readings of the phenomena of the modern growth of cities, and the voracious appetite of real estate developers working with real estate investment trusts and larger deployments of financial capital, neatly reconcile ideological tensions into a semblance of a theory of the late capitalist city. Augé states that, “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.”¹ Koolhaas states that “The built . . . product of modernization is Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout.”² These texts, published eight years apart, come well after the opus of theoretical works such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981), and The Anti-Aesthetic, a book of critical essays on contemporary art practices and identity, edited by Hal Foster in 1998—all of which take up the ideological challenges that late capitalism poses for identity as such.

This issue, and the contributors’ work, explores non-space and resistance with a particular interest in discovering the ways in which urban design, contemporary art, visual culture, and spatial practices can constitute forms of resistance, whether politically, socially, economically, or otherwise. Non-space—a new term we are offering up for the purpose of this exploration and reconceptualization—might evoke, or be evoked by, spaces that have been neglected or whose intended function has grown obsolete, spaces that lack official ownership, or spaces that are characterized by marginalization, liminality, or vacancy; all these of course being spaces nonetheless. The term suggests an elusive quality, and the potential to evade systems that determine validity. Unbounded by the semantic and cultural accumulations of its antecedents (i.e., non-place and junkspace), non-space, we imagine, may also differ from those precursors in its potential to be overtly political, responsive to the demands of commerce and control. How is non-space already part of a collectivity that might be deployed to resist the speculative forces of capitalism? 

Historically, resistance in visual arts and spatial practice has been constructed as speculative and utopian. Given the political and social circumstances of the present day, how can resistance expand the imaginary around what the world could be, sponsoring a kind of fugitivity and re-worlding that drives change? Whether conceptualized spatially, politically, artistically, socially, or in some far broader sense, resistance may be thought of as the refusal to accept, to comply, or to obey—especially to the expectations of an authority. How are the disciplinary protocols of artistic, design, and spatial practices complicit in the very entanglements of how space navigates its value and social meaning? In the globalized and fractured media environment, what does resistance look like today? How is resistance visualized, spatialized, and made tangible to a broad group of persons?

II.

In their own ways, contributors to this issue are in fact up against the assumption that the ubiquity of both designed and undesigned space and spatial geographies—at this stage of capitalist production—have become devoid of essentialized meaning, and unable to attain the stability that architectural objects and typologies had enjoyed centuries ago. But I want to return to the linguistics of description—as Marc Augé links “identity” with “relational” when he states that a space that is not about identity is a non-place (not a non-space). Place and placemaking have become defined terms for those who believe that architecture as such has ceased to be a human-centered activity. Ideologically, space becomes an excess of place; just as Koolhaas frames junkspace as the excess of functional space captured by capitalist forces.

The contributors counter the classificatory regimes that subtly marginalize urban communities, peoples, and spaces. Whether in South Los Angeles, the swimming pool at the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida in 1960s America, or in virtual digital spaces and data centers, contributors thread together contemporary concepts of identity so as to compel meaning from every space of the city—a counternarrative to Koolhaas, and to some degree to Augé, but in syncronicity with Jameson, and Deleuze and Guattari. In the experiences of queer, Black, and inner-city residents, contributors find visual and spatial practices emerge in an effort to elevate and dignify the persons and the spaces that they occupy.

As we bear witness to a vast effort, a global effort, to delegitimize democratic space and the space of the civic, we must interpret space as a form of resistance; and non-space as political, dynamic, and responsive, yet possibly beyond the functional protocols of capital and defined authority. 

_{1. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (Verso, 1995), 63.}

_{2. Rem Koolhaas and Hal Foster, Junkspace with Running Room (Notting Hill Editions, 2016), 3. See also The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, https://archive.org/details/isbn_3822860476/page/n9/mode/2up.}