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<p>This dissertation examines the relationship between architecture and democratic
politics in late-modernity. It identifies the refusal of architects to consider the
political dimensions of their work following the failures of 20th century High Modernism
and the scant attention that the intersection between architecture and politics has
received from political theorists as a problem. In order to address these deficiencies,
the dissertation argues for the continued impact of architecture and urban planning
on modern subject formation, ethics, and politics under the conditions of de-centralized
sovereignty that characterize late-modernity. Following an opening chapter which
establishes the mutual relation architectural design and political culture in the
founding text of political science, Aristotle's Politics, the dissertation offers
a genealogical critique of modern architectural design and urban planning practices.
It concludes that modern architecture shapes individual and collective political possibilities
and a recursive relationship exists between the spaces "we" inhabit and the people
that "we" are. In particular, it finds that there is a strong link between practices
of external circulation and the interior circulation of thoughts about the self and
others. The dissertation concludes by proposing a new understanding of architecture
that dynamically relates the design of material structures and the forms of political
practices that those designs facilitate. This new definition of architecture combines
political theorist Hannah Arendt's concept of "world-building action" with the concept
of the "threshold" developed and refined by Dutch architects Aldo van Eyck and Herman
Hertzberger.</p>
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