Wang, Hanxi; (2023) HOME-steading: Subversions, Reversions, and Diversions of the Moral Right to Space. In: critic|all V International Conference on Architecture Design & Criticism Digital Proceedings 2023. (pp. pp. 333-343). y critic|all PRESS + Departamento de Proyectos Arquitectónicos (ETSAM-UPM)

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Abstract

It can be argued that putting to words one’s relationship with the earth has always been a prerequisite of architectural construction, and that such proclamations have required, in turn, structures of the abstract - moral, economic, legal, and of course, linguistic, that assign the necessary hierarchies of value and power to the human and nonhuman entities involved. Therefore, words are, like bricks and mortar, fundamental to the spatial construction of our world. One of the most powerful definitions of such kind, with legacies both catastrophic and subversive, can be found in the evolution of the word “homestead”. Built upon the philosophical ideas of John Locke, the conception of “homestead” invalidated an entire population’s relationship with the earth, eradicated their livelihoods, cultural systems, rights to the land, and replaced them with colonial bodies, practices, and beliefs. Under the banner of this word, over 270 million acres of land and countless lives were indelibly altered. Yet, in contemporary times the invocation of “homestead” has facilitated instead the adverse possession of the weak and marginalised, who act in resistance against institutional structures to appropriate their own space in an environment designed for their absence. Through an in-depth discourse analysis of 城市开荒 (urban homesteading), a phrase used to describe an emergent informal practice that leverages the Lockean proviso to re-appropriate expropriated land and ruralize China’s rapid urbanisation, this paper examines the paradoxical agency and the intense spatial creativity that can be found through the subversion of words within the urban context. Gathering utterances and writings from TikTok to legislative policy, internet games to classical literature, I argue the importance of understanding not only the construction of words within a spatial context, but also the fungible, paradoxical and entangled ways of they act within the world.

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