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Liang-Yi Yen, Ph. D.

College of Art

Professor

Department of Landscape Architecture

Personal Website


Spatial Consciousness in Social Design: A Case Study of the Anti-Eviction Movement in Wenzaizun

        This essay aims to explore the relatonship between social desing and urban movement through the observation and analysis of Wenzaizun Anti-eviction Movement. First of all, tohrough an ontological reflection on the relationship between design and society, I point out that urban movemnt is one way to resist capitalist space production by desing practice. Second, I analyize the way anti-evoiction group emplys phisical and media sapce to protests the government and proposes alternative city desing plan, and how these actions force the govronemt to revise its orginal plan. Third, by analysing three plasces of memory, I show how community residents reprent their collective memory in a public place of the community, and how it enforces and sustains the social network of community mobilization. Finally, I discuss the self-pedogagy process of antieviction activists, who develops a new spatial conscoiusness that holds use value as oppose to exchange value, which also become the source of imagination of alternative design. In conclusion, what we can learn from Wenzaizun Anti-eviction Movement is that when combining urban movment with desing thinking, we are more likely to embody the ideal of “dising for the society”, opening a larger space for the design pracitce aming to resist the pressure from ficious commodication .

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