ARC3016Y S
Instructor: Michael Piper
Meeting Section: L0108
Tuesday, 2:00pm - 6:00pm; Friday, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

A barber who lives in a predominately Sikh neighborhood in Brampton bought a million-dollar home and is now falling behind on his mortgage because, well, he’s a barber, and only makes $30K a year. To help cover his debts, he leases his basement out to two college students and rents out unused upstairs bedrooms to truckers who pass through for the night. Home owners in his neighborhood are pressing their local MP for more bus lines—not really because they themselves use buses—but rather to provide a form of mobility that their basement tenants need to make renting their basements possible. Article here.

Arrangements such as these suggest new modes of collective life. If more traditional modes can be understood as fixed, long term, homogenous, or singular¹; a platform collective—as suggested here—may be dynamic, short term, contingent and diverse². Although these kinds of loose social arrangements existed before, they have increased in recent years thanks to digital technologies. Information and communication platforms have enabled individuals to form short-term cooperative relationships such as the ones described in the paragraph above. And while many such platforms are hosted by private businesses that are motivated primarily by profit³, it is possible to imagine alternative formations that align the disparate interests of individual citizens in the pursuit of a good they have in common.⁴

Both advocates and critics of digital platforms thought they might replace physical space. Amazon was going to diminish the importance brick and mortar retail, for instance. Instead, platforms have shifted how certain physical spaces are configured and occupied. So, retail space is changing from a space of stocked inventory to an experiential environment or showroom. Bank buildings are no longer being imagined as stately vaults for storing hard cash but are shifting to an image of interface.

This studio is not for designing digital platforms, web-apps, or otherwise. Instead, we will focus on their implications for physical space. How might a neighborhood or house be designed to accommodate variable forms of cooperative living? How might a street be shaped to allow for dynamic transit—that is, a kind of ride share system that doesn’t use fixed stations? Or, how could a school, mall, church, or restaurant be configured to welcome other occupants during off-hours to optimize the untapped value of their space? And perhaps most importantly, might the physical design of such spaces produce more collective cultural qualities that parallel the transactional nature inherent to their arrangements.

Platform Collectives is an umbrella topic within which students may personalize their thesis preparation research. I’ve listed several potential topics above but there are, of course, many more to consider. Paralleling this independent thesis preparation, students will also work on the design of housing for the research studio. Students may choose whether to design a discreet building for collective occupation, or to visualize or narrate the urban infrastructures, as both physical and digital platforms, that might make alternative formations of collective life possible.

¹Architects and urbanists frequently often refer to a more traditional idea of a universally accessible public space as described by sociologists and political theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Richard Sennett.
²The kind of complexity that digital platforms may afford had been more theorized generally in political discourse by theorists such as Nancy Fraser or Chantal Mouffe.
³In Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek critiques terms such as “share economy,” or collective consumption for the fact that they conceal the profit seeking nature of the businesses they are used to describe.
⁴This possibility is described in Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence, where Antoine Picone describes a bottom-up, or emergent form of urbanization that makes use of such communication platforms.