UNSETTLEMENTS:
"Real" Estates Elsewhere in Europe
Tower Hamlets, London, UKEstates are being torn down, renovated, relocated, and built anew. They are both the harbingers of dangerous futures and the embodiment of the right to affordable housing. As a societal gyroscope desperately in need of calibration, the estate offers a reading of the city’s acute predicaments, which is often accurate in terms of the registers of social life that it engages but always off in terms of its measurements. In cities across Europe, estates have become repositories of inhabitants that social orders think they know all too well, and thus need to house in particular ways, and, conversely, those who they simply can’t “process” or “integrate” and thus need to be put somewhere.
What is the estate and who is it for? What happens there, not as a matter of empirical conviction, but as a residue of both what could happen and might be happening that conventional observation just doesn’t have access to? It is the syncopated and often ill-conceived attempts at making cities from the unsettlements of “real” estates that we want to examine. With this project, we seek to think through the interstices of the trajectories and calibrations that make European estates into particularly vibrant forms of unsettlements.
Taastrupgaard Housing Estate, Taastrup Municipality, DenmarkThe method that we propose for examining estates is guided by the nature of the object of study. What we want to examine is something that has acquired its significance by being inherently unknowable. We therefore cannot approach the estate through a rigid set of definitions and project design. Instead, we propose to make this project into a collaborative journey which seeks to map out the phenomenon being studied without making any assumptions about what it might or might not be.
Gellerup Housing Estate, Brabrand Municipality, DenmarkThe project is built around two initial operations: The Dossier and The Logbook. The Dossier archives those European estates that we focus on. It charts the ways in which these unsettlements make and unmake the cities in which they are located. The Logbook registers our collective and ongoing reflections, our concerns and ideas.