URBAN DESIGN ONE

IN DIALOGUE / 1
THURSDAY 5TH DECEMBER 6PM @ THE BARTLETT, ROOM G04, 22 GORDON
ST LONDON WC1H 0QB
THE VIOLENCE OF
PLANNING
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City of Acul - Military Model Village, Ixil Territory, Guatemalan Highlands, circa 1986.
IMAGE TITLE: GEOS-5 aerosol transport simulation IMAGE CREDIT: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
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THE VIOLENCE OF PLANNING
Departing from the strategies of spatial development that were implemented in the
forests of Mezzo-America and Amazonia by the military dictatorships that ruled Latin
America in the 70s, this presentation is an inquiry into the violent logics of territorial
planning schemes that are currently being reinvigorated by a new global wave of
plunder of lands and natural resources amidst climatic chaos - with China at the lead, this
violence is a new geopolitical/geophysical order set by design.
Paulo Tavares is a Brazilian architect and urbanist based in Quito, Ecuador. Tavares teaches at the Facultad de
Arquitectura, Diseo y Arte, Quito, and previously held teaching posts at the Centre for Research Architecture
- Goldsmiths, and at the Visual Lab of the MA in Contemporary Art Theory, also at Goldsmiths, UK. His work has
been exhibited in various venues including CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts - Glasgow, Haus der Kulturen
der Welt - Berlin, Portikus - Frankfurt and the Taipei Biennial 2012.
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IN DIALOGUE is a new series of advanced research seminars established within the
M.Arch Urban Design, Bartlett, UCL that set out to radicalize the idea of a case
study. The series will bring together two leading researchers in an extended
conversation about their recent work within a seminar like setting.
*
Adrian Lahoud was Director of Urban Design Masters at University of Technology Sydney before moving to
London and the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths to take up a role as Director of the MA
programme, and teach in the Projective Cities M.Phil Programme at the Architectural Association. Currently he
is Programme Leader of the M.Arch Urban Design and a Reader at Bartlett School of Architecture, University
College London.
There is no relation between the ecological and the political, today they are one and the
same. In their enthrallment to notions like emergence, complexity and autopoesis,
contemporary debates about environmental transformation reproduce a despotic image
of unity and synthesis that covers over diference, conict and ultimately violence.
Drawing on recent climatological, anthropological and epidemiological research that
indicates a strong causal relationship between pollution in the industrialized north of
Europe and environmental destitution in the Sahel, this presentation will set out a new
framework for thinking these diferential relations in terms of scales that are
ontologically and epistemologically distinct. The proposition being made is that climate
change and climate negotiations represent a new form of structural violence waged by
developed nations against the poor with far-reaching and as yet dimly perceived
implications for many of our most cherished ethical, legal and scientic norms.

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