1.
As a mytheme, the figure of the scapegoat carries the burden of the city and its sins. Walking in exile, the scapegoat was once freed from the constraints of civilization. Today, with no land left unmapped, and with processes of urbanization central to political economic struggles, SCAPEGOAT is exiled within the reality of global capital. The journal examines the relationship between capitalism and the built environment, confronting the coercive and violent organization of space, the exploitation of labour and resources, and the unequal distribution of environmental risks and benefits. Throughout our investigation of design and its promises, we return to the politics of making as a politics to be constructed.
Our inaugural issue (00) examined the centrality of the problem of Property because it is the literal foundation for all spatial design practices. We believe that this buried foundation must be exhumed. Architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design each begin with a space that is already drawn, organized, and formed by the concrete abstraction of the property lines. From our perspective, Property stands as the most fundamental, yet underestimated, point of intersection between architecture, landscape architecture, and political economy. What is a “site” except a piece of property? What are architecture and landscape architecture but subtle and consistent attempts to express determined property relations as open aesthetic possibilities? And, decisively, how can these practices facilitate other kinds of relation?
Since our first issue on Property appeared in the Winter, 2010, we have witnessed the exacerbation of the latest global economic crisis, increasing demands for a programme of global austerity to ‘save capitalism’, and the confrontations that arise from these intolerable conditions. Within the autohysteria of the crisis, architecture and landscape have been called on to manifest a new iconography for a collapsing civil society. Scapegoat responds: in the service of what future will our designs take form?
In our second issue (01), SCAPEGOAT looks to current practices to intensify our concept of Service—as a problem. That is, how can we develop new models for self-management and mutual aid that move beyond unidirectional forms of service as clientelism and dependency? How can we think through service provision beyond the State? How can we privilege voluntary association and ethical reciprocity rather than volunteerism? How can new approaches to training and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge be radically re-organized? How has the rise of the populist Right coincided with mechanisms of gentrification and the ideologies of the so-called ’creative city’? How can we counter the predominance of economic metaphors in our attempts to articulate values and commitments? How could design services work in solidarity with the labour of extraction, construction, and maintenance?
As a practice of composition and inquiry, SCAPEGOAT attends to both physical manifestations of and cultural and theoretical influences on design. Through architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism, the journal also engages mechanisms operating above, below, and behind these disciplines, such as infrastructure, governance, regional planning, land speculation, and militarization.
The editorial board of SCAPEGOAT includes Adrian Blackwell, Adam Bobbette, Nasrin Himada, Jane Hutton, Marcin Kedzior, Chris Lee, Christie Pearson, and Etienne Turpin. SCAPEGOAT is designed by Chris Lee.
To propose features, projects, or reviews for forthcoming issues, please consult our Style Sheet, available on our website, and send an abstract of your proposal via email.
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