What is space, architecturally speaking?
According to Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Architecture is a functional art that creates the framework around our lives: it is not simply produced, it must be experienced. Winston Churchill said “we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” Which is to say, that man first puts his stamp on the implements he makes and thereafter the implements exert their influence on man. To bring order and relation into human surroundings specifically, is the task of the Architect, and the object of all good architecture is to create an integrated whole. Erik Christian Sørensen said, taking a step further, that architecture has two innate convictions: the spiritual, and the sensitive: that Architecture is essentially tied in its expression to the human senses and orientation, to the space-phenomena of nature. The materials an Architect works with create their own laws, but the real intellectual understanding of the space is through human interpretation.
Architecture can be thought of as an object in space, as a space itself, or as the synthesis of object and space. In this way, its ideation includes the external circumstances surrounding the Architecture. Within a city, space is the socio-spatial organization of human life, mediating relations between human beings and their surroundings. One way to define space is as a built answer to a collective need (rather than to individual requirements): the need for unique and adequate spaces for people.
Urban spaces are inherently shaped by urban practices, which innervate the spaces with the larger social dynamics, contributing to its values and symbolic meanings. Such practices are both individual and collective actions that play a part in the material and symbolic construction of built spaces. They work alongside larger processes like Industrialism and Capitalism that produce urban spaces and dictate their use based on principles of growth and profit. These dynamics can provoke forms of resistance and opposition by the larger community. Since most urban practices are put in place to attract investments and resources to help support the economic development of the territory, oftentimes they also serve to increase the residential segregation and expand the gap between the upper and lower classes. This dichotomy forms a cycle wherein the poorer groups of the population become increasingly fragmented and excluded. This cycle gives way to resistance and conflict within the urban population against the injustices produced by this predatory urbanization and gentrification.
Human life organized within alternative urban spaces calls for the need to define these various spaces: According to Henri Lefebvre, French author and sociologist whose work centered around the production of social space within the city, there are five main categories of spaces:
Heterotopic: these are spaces that sponsor spontaneous convergence. Next, counter-spaces: these work in opposition or contradiction to the dominant political and economic systems. Lived space: the result of the mechanisms of appropriation and collective signification of space and of the uses and functions that individuals and groups assign to it. Insurgent public spaces: these respond to the need for groups and communities to build entities where they can express and grow their own identities, experimenting and cultivating social relationships based on distinct and autonomous assumptions in participatory ways. Lastly, counter-hegemonic public spaces: these contest the dominant models and develop new forms of participation and intervention in city, which can lead to the creation of new urban imaginaries capable of influencing and orienting the action of individuals.
Conflict, therefore, is a fundamental and constitutional element of urban space. This resistance can take shape in urban revolts or the building of alternative routes, such as in the case of Làbas and the Portici.