Architecture><Community

This scoping study looks at the role architecture plays in humanities research into the cohesion and/or disintegration of communities, and suggests areas for collaboration. Without prejudice to other disciplines we developed the architecture – psychoanalysis collaboration as a worked example. The project has 5 components:

• Literature review of humanities databases beginning with keywords ‘architecture and community’;
• Peer-reviewd journal paper based on this work titled ‘Architecture and its Communities’ authored by Thomas Deckker;
• Study visit to recent housing in the Netherlands in which social science and humanities people advised the design team;
• Symposium in Dundee: a presentation of findings to our humanities advisory group + a discussion of future collaborative research;
• Proposals for collaborative research with the humanities disciplines.

Regarding architecture research,… Architectural design, in which complex social economic and material issues are given a clear spatial intelligibility, is a form of disputation. The resolution of a complex plan – like the resolution of an argument in philosophy – can itself constitute the answer to a research question. Additionally architecture has a long legacy of mapping projects, in which the social relations and affections of a community can be visualised and spatialised as part of a research project.