Episode 59: Conservation 3: Who Counts with Micha Frazer-Carroll and Samir Pandya

Aimi: Welcome to our third podcast conversation about accessibility, disability, culture, and design. Beyond the conventions of functional access, we wanna explore different understandings and approaches to disability from an interdisciplinary perspective, from both within and outside architectural discourse and practice.

Today we're talking to an architect, educator, and a writer journalist who both center access in their work. We hope to understand how some body minds come to be understood as productive or unproductive, and who counts as a valued body mind within architecture. We're also interested in how these ideas shape access to buildings and environments, and finally, we wanna think about how to resist or push back against these ways of valuing and devaluing bodies.

Jos: If we're talking about who counts in a society, then while we're starting from a disability in, in all of these podcasts, of course that's something that's inherently intersectional because your gender or sexuality or the color of your skin also becomes an assumed category of difference that affects who has access and who doesn't.

So we also want to expand our conversations in those different directions. And as we talk, we hope to draw out what we call productive or generative friction around the concept of access. What do we mean by productive frictions? We may often think about friction as something like a conflict that shuts down a discussion, but a friction can become productive when it generates further inquiry, curiosity, and collaboration in the context of disability.

Generative frictions can often resulted in new design practices and in shared explorations towards resisting inequalities and discrimination. So I'm Jos Boys. I'm one of the co-hosts for this podcast. I've been a design activist over many years. I'm based in the uk. I've got a background in feminist and community architectural practices, and that includes being part of Matrix Feminist Design Collective in the seventies and eighties.

And also co-founding, something called The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, which brings the creativity of disability, disabled artists, designers, and architects into collaboration with the Built Environment, education and practice. 

Aimi: And I'm Aimi Hamraie, the other co-host based in the US. I'm a disabled designer and researcher, and I direct the Critical Design Lab, which does projects on accessibility through the framework of disability culture.

Jos: Today we've invited Micha Fraser Carroll, a UK based writer and journalist and author of Mad World, the Politics of Mental Health, whose work centers around racial and disability justice. Micha, you'll be in conversation with architect, researcher, and educator, Samir Pandya, associate Head of College of Design, Creative and Digital Industries at the University of Westminster, London.

So welcome to you both. Welcome Micha and Samir.

Micha: Yes. Thank you for having me. So yeah, as you mentioned, I'm a writer and journalist by training. I wrote a book called Mad World, the Politics of Mental Health for Pluto Press, which came out in 2023.

And this book really sprung from a kind of frustration with what I called the mainstream mental health awareness conversation that was happening around the time that I was writing, which I felt was very devoid of political perspectives. And one perspective that I felt was really missing from the way people were talking about mental health was the lens of disability and kind of the lens of disability justice as well.

So the book does lots of different things. It aims to take a very anti-capitalist approach and also look at the ways that oppression impacts our experiences of mental health. But there's also this kind of thread of disability and thinking about the ways that disability is constructed in our society, which really underpins the entire way that I look at mental health throughout the book.

Aimi: And Samir, could you also please introduce yourself and talk a little bit about disability and why access is emerging as an area of concern for your teaching and professional practice? 

Samir: Yeah, thank you, Aimi. And, and firstly, it's a pleasure to be here with you all and to be in conversation with, Micha.

I'm an architect, an academic, and at the moment I'm associate head of college, the College of Design Creative and Digital Industries at the University of Westminster, in London. I have a background in architectural practice, working mainly in housing and education sectors and gradually migrated from practice, into academia. And that migration was prompted by, a certain kind of, frustration, around the lack of engagement, with questions of race, ethnicity, and more broadly cultural identity, both in architectural education, and in practice. And a key, space within which to have discussions about moving from practice to academia for me, and of, in a sense was much more of a foundation than my education as an architect, was membership of the Society of Black Architects. And so this was in the, late 1990s when the term Black in a political sense, , anyone who was not white. And through discussion then, we articulated that there was this gap. And so I moved into academia to explore how to address it.

And really there were two main bodies of work within academia that I engaged with that perhaps begin to explain why. I'm here with you today. The first one was the, entry point into academia, which was through writing a design led MA course, including theory, but essentially design led, which addressed questions of I guess, racial justice, and looked at questions of globalization, which were quite urgent at that time.

I co-wrote that with a colleague called Lesley Lokko. And I led that course for 10 years just to explore how architecture, theoretically, in terms of method, , representational techniques could engage questions, essentially of difference. The other body of work, that, perhaps is more directly, connected to our conversation today, is through a module that I led called Critical Practice, and that module was effectively interested in the bureaucracy of architectural practice, and it's through that module that I came into contact with DisOrdinary Architecture, and that organization had quite a profound impact on my thinking about access.

Jos: Thank you both for your introductions, Micha and Samir. And I think in some ways it sounds like you're quite different from each other, but I also think that the, what we want to talk about today, which is this idea of productivity, that there are actually quite a lot of overlaps about what we mean by productivity.

Why we think some sorts of bodies and minds are more productive than others, that process of what it is to be productive and what it is to be considered unproductive or worthless or even less than human. So there's a whole set of things, I think, where there are potential overlaps and hopefully also some, generative frictions.

So when we come to talk about the idea of productivity. What do you mean by it? Where do you think it comes from? What sort of impacts do you feel it has on both everyday life and on the practice of either the profession of architecture or other kinds of disciplines?

Micha: An anti-capitalist or Marxist approach to disability and mental health, I think always brought me back to this question of productivity because as I looked more at the history of the development of the category of what was called madness or is sometimes called mental illness it really brought me to the factory and the emergence of the capitalist economic system.

This was the period in which there was a huge expansion of what were historically called lunatic asylums, which were spaces in which people who were described as mad, where essentially warehoused. And sometimes there was a kind of attempt at rehabilitation. But a lot of the time people were warehoused in these institutions for their whole lives.

And it was really looking at this process of institutionalization, which like I said, happened at the same time as the emergence of the capitalist economic system that I really, pinpointed that this was the moment that madness as a category was really hardened in terms of its boundaries.

And you can see this with the development of the factory. So when the factory became the primary mode of organization of labor, people who previously might have been able to be looked after at home or maybe contribute to processes of domestic production, suddenly were swept into these institutions.

Which, like I said, people would often spend their entire lives. Madness became more solidified as a concept. But I also argue in my book that disability more broadly became hardened as a concept. And this was of course, underpinned by this idea of who is productive and who is not productive under this new economic order.

And it was overwhelmingly people who couldn't work in the factory environment. Which were very harsh conditions who were then excluded and deemed to be non-productive or unexploitable. And I think that's something that really threads to present day in terms of how we think about mental health and mental illness, which is my area of expertise.

Because, if you look at the ways that mental illness is diagnosed now, often a kind of diagnostic manual called the DSM is used and the DSM still mentions the word work almost 400 times. And these are primarily questions like, to what extent does this complaint interfere with your ability to go to work or if you're younger, to go to school? And I think that's really important in thinking about what we determine to be real madness or mental illness and what we don't. I think we often don't draw attention to it or shed light on it, but actually this idea of can you produce is still really central.

I also think questions of productivity are really tied to forms of treatment that were offered. In Britain specifically, if you go to get support for your mental health through the NHS, you're most likely to get offered medication or cognitive behavioral therapy. And these are both, quote fixes that are much faster than others and also seem to be more cost effective as well.

And rather than kind of having a focus on necessarily getting people to full flourishing, often the concerns of doctors are about getting you back to work. And that's not to say that these modes of treatment can't be really useful for some people, but I argue throughout the book that the NHS is primarily focused on getting us back to the production line. And getting us back to exploitability.

Jos: Samir, I know you've also looked at, I mean in a way you've looked at this at a different scale, at the scale of societies and national belonging and national identity in relationship to architecture. But I don't know what your immediate response is?

Samir: I guess in my work, the question of productivity is quite profound and I found no answers to understand what that meant to architects and to architecture from within architecture. So I had to go beyond it. One of the fields of inquiry that's informed the way I understand it, has been kind of post-colonial studies and post-colonial theory.

And, when you look at questions of productivity from within that kind of theoretical framework, it's very clear. And I felt very comfortable, with thinking conceptually about productivity, as a, , I guess a colonial, , and capitalist invention. So it's

a constructed concept tied to a kind of moral and economic imperative. . So value as tied to, labor efficiency, , and output. And of course what that leads to inherently is marginalizing, bodies, who don't conform to those ideals, and that's expressed in architecture in a number of different ways.

Something, I guess is an example called The Metric Handbook. And I know that you know, Jos, you will be familiar with this. So the Metric Handbook, just as an example, perpetuates certain kind of ableist norms, and includes a kind of standardized set of measurements and spatial guidelines.

So these texts are seen as neutral, and make lots of normative assumptions, about the human body what's considered ideal. IE upright, mobile cited, hearing neurotypical, et cetera. , And it's a document, which is a kind of classic example of technocratic ambition. So essentially what it does is impose, order onto a world which is complex, diverse and messy.

So I, I think about the Metric handbook, . Other documents, like it as a kind of deterministic architectural, uh, script. It makes huge assumptions about access and, which bodies are productive, how they move through space, how they negotiate and navigate through space, and it's incredibly, reductive.

But in a sense there are other things not to do with guidelines and not to do with, handbooks. , They're to do with I guess the way in which students think about architecture, the way in which architecture is thought, , and what hovers over, our architectural education and practice, and it's still there despite attempts to get rid of it, is this, figure of the architect heroic.

Involved in solo artistic endeavor, hugely productive, highly productive, that, students, and practitioners think they have to live up to. , That figure, I guess, is drawn from, a book called the, fountain Head by Ayn Rand, but it's about never compromising, never sacrificing your dreams in order to meet a client's needs.

Pursuing your vision relentlessly with limitless energy. And so the way in which that comes out every day in the studio, is students, for example, working all the hours God sends, all night, in ways that really affect their wellbeing. Their, health, , their perspective as well, you know, that's something that we're trying to get rid of, and there are are students that do that.

They do work all night, two, three, nights in a row. But there of course, students that cannot do that, who are unable to do that, whether it's right or wrong. So it's a, it's an interesting kind of trait, within studio culture that's almost ever presence, really. This kind of notion that one has to be productive, you know?

Aimi: I wanna pull some of these threads together. So Micha, in your work, you show the relationship between capitalism, diagnosis and madness. And you're thinking about this a lot in relation to psychiatry and the kind of whole like mental health industrial complex, and it's reliance on neoliberal individualism.

And of course, there's this interesting historical relationship between psychiatry and architecture, like through the asylum or the institution. Samir, in your work you address spatial belonging in architectural and urban context. And you have this lens of decolonial theory and, nation and colonialism.

And I was thinking about how architecture is in so many ways at the forefront of the production of capital and property ownership. And there's also this part of your work that's really interesting where you bring in affect theory, which I think is connected to some of the ideas of mental health that Micha's talking about in interesting ways too.

'cause it's about the felt sense of an everyday use of the built environment and stuff. And so I wonder if we could, bring your critiques of these two fields, psychiatry and architecture into conversation. and you started to talk about this a little bit, but what can we learn about how productivity operates?

These fields and what is similar or different between them?

Samir: The Architect has a really interesting relationship to productivity. And it's one that, , begun, , a kind of negotiation, uh, in the 1990s . The profession was, probably,, one of, the most scrutinized and reported on, , and, , interrogated.

And the reason for that was that the government, , over that, decade, identified architecture and the construction industry as highly unproductive and highly unprofitable. So a series of reports were written in order to identify how, . Architects architecture, the industry could become more, , productive.

And the recommendations which emerged, , were , really revolved around the need for architects to be more client focused, , and to be more collaborative. , And what that led to was a kind of profound reformation of procurement boots through which to construct buildings. So all the arrangements, the way in which design and construction teams were, reconfigured.

And during that process, the architect was moved away from a position of leadership, much more towards the kind of margins or, becoming part of a collaborative team. And on the surface that's really healthy, because what that foregrounds and centers, is the architect as part of a kind of interdependent collective.

Working together to shape the built environment. But when you look closely at the recommendations and the detail, what's really obvious and at some point it was explicitly confirmed that all of the reports, and I'm mentioning two now just directly, one was called the Egan Report and one was called the Latham Report.

These were inspired by, fores principles of efficiency and lean thinking. So really the driving, factor , it wasn't about collaboration, it wasn't about interdependence, it was about profit. And so today, fast forward a couple of decades, , in the studio with students learning about this stuff, there is a .

Lack of awareness of all this kind of recent history. So students are internalizing, some of this stuff without realizing, that there is a kind of insidious embedding of ways of working, of ways of thinking or ways of practicing which are profoundly capitalist and students aren't really questioning it.

, Part of that is to do with the kind of lack of proper history and theory teaching relating to practice and relations of power. And part of it, is I guess to do with the direction and neoliberal of higher education that really doesn't wanna address this stuff. , So the reason I mention that side of, , this question is because in the face of it, architectural theory, while remaining urgent.

Really needs to be seen as part of a wider cultural, political economy. That must involve for me, activism, and, a kind of, broader awareness,, of these kind of relations of power. I'm kind of really in interested to see what to hear what Micha has to say about this.

Micha: Yeah. Some of the things that you've mentioned made me realize that I'm often discussing architecture and that my critique of society overlaps quite clearly with the critique or analysis of architecture.

Because, something you said prompted me to think, I always discuss the asylum and the factory. And the modern workplace. , And I also talk a lot about prisons as well in my book. And I see all of these as kind of areas in which our understanding of mental health and, the institution of psychiatry developed from.

And one area of commonality that was getting clearer for me. As you were speaking I was thinking about this idea of both psychiatry and architecture, playing some role in defining and shaping this idea of how a person should be, or I think you said, you know, how a person moves through space, how a person should move through the world.

I thought it was interesting that we both mentioned in our first answers kind of manuals or books that describe how things should be. This is a really central part of my critique of psychiatry is that it is a tool for social control and also defining what is normal, what a normal person, is like, or how a person should be.

And I think In terms of my critique of psychiatry and other kind of architectural elements feels like this idea of the ways that psychiatry often focuses on keeping people in a physical space. So like I said, this idea of getting people back into the workplace, or keeping people within institutions.

And I think you mentioned a little bit exclusion and I was thinking about the ways that exclusion and segregation form like a really central part of my critique of psychiatry, which is, like I said, you know, some people being kept in one space and people also being kept out. The profit motive also feels like an area of commonality in terms of our frustrations with our kind of respective areas of inquiry.

I think that the treatments that people are offered are often underpinned by questions of profit rather than questions of what people actually need. you know, Lots of people say, I have culturally specific modes of healing, or I would be interested in going into, say, a longer term form of therapy like psychoanalysis.

But these modes of healing are seen as far too expensive and costly, and so people don't get them. And I think one thing I was also thinking about, when I was thinking about your work and especially my analysis of asylums, is the ways that, architecture within psychiatry historically has often really symbolized and represented ideology and like the kind of predominant ideology of the time. So one thing that I was really interested in and did a lot of research on when I was, writing my first chapter, which is on the asylum, , was the Royal Bethlehem Hospital in London, which is the world's oldest mental hospital and has moved around various kind of parts of London. but the second incarnation of Bethlehem was in the very middle of the city. It was this really grand, beautiful building, which was intended to represent this benevolent sort of ideology, you know, this idea that there's something very charitable about taking people in, rehabilitating them, looking after them, when they're the most vulnerable in society.

And I think that's something that, looking back on, I'm very critical of, as a kind of representation to London of the ways that, psychiatry was relating to people who experienced madness or mental illness. But yeah, I was thinking about the ways that ideology in terms of the physical visual representation was represented through architecture.

I see a kind of a lot of areas of overlap in our analysis and critiques. 

Samir: Yeah. And I mean, just to come back on it's interesting that I think through your work, you think about buildings as meant for in your context, containment and compliance, as opposed to for care.

And I think that that's something that kind of, architectural, discourse actually is trying to wrestle with now. Especially now, it's become more interdisciplinary. It is drawing more and more, on, disability discourse, disability studies. Just to look at more kind of hopeful trajectories.

There is a kind of loosening up of the kind of edges of architecture to be more accommodating of new conceptions. In terms of what might prevent or frustrate progress, for me is, is really about the canon of architecture , and one part of that canon is, related to visual primacy. So the idea that what you see is the truth, and the focus on what building symbolize, , and the ideologies that they align with as somehow the beginning and the end of the narrative of that building. And this is as opposed to what it might feel like to inhabit a building, to move through it, what impact it has on your senses, , and your bodily relations.

And in fact, there has been in the history of architecture, a complete absence of acknowledgement of the body. When one looks at representations of buildings, photographs, drawings at any stage. Up until recently, there was no questioning of the fact that people were not in those images.

They were sanitized, environments , presenting objects to be critiqued and valorized, as opposed to understanding what it is like to be in those spaces. What psychological impact, , they could have on you, who they include, who they exclude. And this is the constant struggle to reconcile my architectural training and conditioning and a much more diverse way of understanding embodiment. So there was a body, I wasn't questioning what that body was. I assumed and essentialized it.

. It's such an alien, concept, in terms of mainstream architectural thinking to think about embodied experience of buildings. And one thing I drew from post-colonial theory, is that sometimes something called strategic essentialism is really vital to give traction to liberation movements. And that was really apparent in, mid 20th century struggles for, independence from colonial rule. There is no nation, but you use the concept of nation in order to overthrow your oppressors. So in the same way I'm thinking actually in terms of architectural discourse, do we need to strategically essentialize the body in order to understand and, build a case, , for centering, embodied, experience of architecture?

Micha: Yeah. this question of strategy and it does make me think a lot about histories of, different forms of strategy and tactics in liberation movements and the ways that I think they have often ended up historically leaving disabled people behind.

I think that it, it's something I talk about a bit in the book, various strategies for example, , the occupation of buildings, things like this, the occupation of, say, prisons by, feminist groups and things like this in order to, take hold of a space and potentially repurpose it. But also the ways that disabled people have often said , especially if there's like a situation where there is urgency.

And what I'm hearing in some of what you're discussing is like this idea of an urgent need for a particular demand. It often is disabled people who are relegated to, okay, well like that can come next kind of thing. And I know that that's something that disabled people have often critiqued.

It's also something that's come up in different kind of protest movements as well. Disabled people saying, the emphasis on, for example, physical protest. While that is again, a question of urgency and a really important thing when an issue is very urgent, it's a means of protest that can feel, exclusionary or leave disabled people behind.

And so I wonder if it's like a question of both. And is there a way to work with and deploy this kind of strategic essentialism, strategically but also to concurrently, use approaches that emphasize diversity and are not exclusionary to the huge range of bodies that exist.

I wonder if it could be both. 

Samir: Yeah. Yeah. And that's kind of very interesting. I mean, it also points to, as you described there a range of, tactics that might be available to us, to pursue a kind of strategic advancement, against ableist, discourse, , and rhetoric; and how that makes me think or rethink, architecture. You know, architecture, I think in an attempt to engage with these critical, issues, has tended to expand more and more in terms of the scope. Of what it thinks it can achieve as a discipline.

So part of me thinks that's really healthy. Yeah. So become more interdisciplinary, become more involved with questions of spatial justice, by expanding its scope. becoming more involved in policy reform becoming more informed, and involved in how to counteract things like gentrification or land reclamation.

So this kind of doubling and tripling of architecture scope on the one hand is healthy. But in another way, I think actually coming back to the core of what architects, and architecture is charged with, dealing with i.e. Creative, and to some extent intellectual endeavor when it comes to the built environment. What can we do there, that is, incisive, transformative, and, that we have some sense of direction over. , So there is this kind of ambivalence that I have about the expanding scope of architecture on one hand, helping to deal with questions of, uh, disability justice and, the need to actually, , become far more, , reflective, , about its limits, and actually pushing the value of what it can offer in a kind of, its in terms of its core remit.

I'm thinking, as an [example, , of work that I've tried to progress with students when they think about these things and we co-design or explore them together. And this is something that has emerged. From the collaboration with DisOrdinary Architecture more recently looking at questions of neurodivergence,

and that's been going on for a few years now. And what was really interesting about the journey, from the beginning of exploring,  that until till now, is that there was a real transition really in the student's work, in terms of designing space that responds to diverse body minds.

A transition away from deficit and empathy based approaches to approaches that were critical and creative. And that was a process of kind of endurance that was difficult, you know, students found it very difficult, , to move from one, , to the other. But right now it's kind of very interesting because there are two things that really emerge in the work.

One is that it's now much more about complexity, and contradiction. So students seem to be far more comfortable, with, looking at designing for, let's say, neurodiversity in a way that complexifies it. for example, designing projects which admit their limitations. designing a space that works, equally for somebody who, needs to avoid sensory overload, to designing for somebody who's partially sighted, to somebody who, lives with chronic fatigue, might demand conflicting responses.

So how do we resolve that complexity? , So there's a kind of messiness about it all that students are becoming more and more comfortable with, and realize that they need to make creative judgments to, to arrive at a solution.

So I think there's a lot of effort that's been put in just getting to a point where we can accept the messiness of the world really. 

Micha: I think that's really interesting. Yeah. I also find myself very, drawn in by this idea of mess and complexity. Plurality also flux. I think that another shared critique that's emerging is yeah, this idea of there being simple blanket solutions to things which is another of like my primary gripes with psychiatry, which I feel is very focused on categorization, fixity saying kind of this is what the problem is, like you say, about in the architecture world, here's the clear fixed response to this problem when actually the reality of the world and of body binds is that they are extremely messy.

They are also in flux. They're constantly changing. And I like this idea that you touch on as well of conflicts and access needs as well, because I think that's something that practically comes up very frequently in disability communities and disabled organizing spaces. For example, the reality that we can try our best, but sometimes we do see conflicts and access needs and leaning into those conflicts and being like, okay, what do we do about that?

Or what's the best kind of compromise we can come to? Embracing complexity, embracing conflict rather than shying away from it or saying it has to be one thing or the other. Or this is something that we can't actually talk about. I think , that approach of embracing it. And also it feels like you are talking a bit about the idea of, flexibility as well, like maybe approaches that.

For someone with one access need could go one way for another access need could work another way, I think is really important. And yeah, really fascinating. I try to kind of emphasize in the book is, you know, we often talk about disability as this fixed concept. But actually it's a, category that is very leaky as I describe it. You know, people move in and out of it as well.

And there are lots of people who might need particular things but not consider themselves to be disabled. And incorporating all of that into how we think about disability, how we think about mental health, and also imagine how we think about architecture feels like, yeah. mess that we should lean into.

Aimi: So I wanna bring us back to the question of access and productivity and kind of ideas of normalcy. , And tie it maybe back into, our, education , and productivity as well.

So one of the things that I've written about in my work is how historically the idea of access was, only provided to those who are deemed productive. And I write about the concept of the productive spatial citizen which was something that was created by rehabilitation professionals and like medical professionals who were the people who invented the idea of disability access before the disability rights movement.

And they predicated people's access to public space on their ability to be productive. So the justifications for accessible architecture were, and continue to be that this is going to improve people's performance in the workplace and it's going to contribute to the national GDP and things like that.

And so in listening to you all talk about how in psychiatry and in architecture, the demands for standardization and formalization and productivity are so pervasive, I'm thinking about what it means to advocate for something like access when it's also so tied to productivity fundamentally, , politically and like what other like discourses can we use to, to reframe that or to talk about access in a different way.

And maybe there are some insights here from post-colonial theory. Maybe there is also an intersectional framework that can , help us understand this better.

Micha: Yeah, to be honest, I think the language of access is not something that I've put much. Thought to, until you were just speaking Aimi and I was thinking about when we talk about access needs, you are right.

Like so often it does remind me of, of language of the workplace, or language of the state, I dunno, it makes me think of reasonable adjustments. That's language that I often find to be very loaded, but I know was used all throughout my university days. And that idea of reasonable that you should only have access needs accommodated if they are seen to be reasonable, by the powers that be.

And I think I, I was thinking about when you're speaking the language of access, also inherently implying that resources is gate kept within a specific area and like letting people in to this space. I'm not sure that's necessarily the right way round of thinking about things, or it reminds me, of arguments for inclusion or civil rights, which in the area of disability activism has been like, actually like quite a contentious one.

You know, throughout the 20th century, there was a big emphasis on assimilation, inclusion, civil rights. I know both in the UK and US disability rights movements, and as we moved more into the 21st century, there was the shift towards disability justice, which was, more underpinned by ideas like liberation, anti-capitalism, abolition.

When thinking about this question of, language, I agree with you that I think we should be maybe more critical about this idea of access., And bringing people into predominant hegemonic spaces, when perhaps just metaphorically, perhaps there's kind of a more liberatory way of thinking about it.

I dunno quite like what that language would be, but yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. 

Samir: It really is. And it's interesting to me because it's a question that doesn't get asked, with within architecture or at least not, often. In a way that demands attention, sustained attention.

And so for me it's, it's a question that isn't asked because that whole question about access productivity, and I guess this question of civic value and the rights to the city, et cetera, that's, a very entangled, intellectual terrain, architectural education, again, struggles to find the space to, address that.

This is where we come back to the question of what is the methodology to advanced, anti ableist, approaches to the built environment

and I don't know whether post-colonial, , theory is it, far more interesting for me and productive is creativity and imagination. And, combining that with a kind of far more serious, approach to understanding the history of theory of, , access, , and questions of compliance within architecture.

Creativity and imagination because, , they are transgressive tactics, rather than, becoming bound up with developing a kind of philosophical or intellectual case, for, disability justice, actually just get there. I wouldn't underestimate the need for a proper history and theory of this stuff, and I point to one, final example, on this, which is taken from

the 2014 Venice Biennale, which was curated by an architect called Rem Koolhaas, who is a very interesting character who I feel very ambivalent about because on one hand he strikes me as a colonialist. And on the other he's done more than perhaps, any other architect in advancing our understanding of the limitations of architectural practice.

But there was one part of that exhibition that he curated called, Elements of Architecture. And he broke down the elements, of a building, whether it's floor, stairs, ceiling, window doors, and presented an entire history of each of those elements. Incredibly diverse histories, incredibly, intercultural in many ways.

But also, what those histories exposed was how our understanding of building elements has become naturalized and apolitical. And one of the elements for me, was that was most interesting was the kind of history of the ramp, and its place within architectural culture and questions of access.

And how a ramp was seen as a kind of proxy for authentic access. Well, actually it's far from it and has never been authentic. But it's that complexifying, of, access that I think we need to, to contend with really. 

Jos: That's really, really interesting and important.

And I think both of you are very much involved in , different ways of coming at this through history and theory. In terms of tactics, you know, like practical tactics or concrete things that you are both involved with or would like to do if you had the time and the energy.

I thought it'd be nice if we just came down to kind of real grounded ourselves in some things that could happen. in the context in which you both work. What would you like to be doing next?

Samir: I'll share a couple of thoughts really on that, Jos. And it is a really good question. 'Cause there's never enough time to do, stuff that you're tasked with doing, let alone, pursuing, and finding space, you know, carving out space to do these things.

 For that reason, when I think about what's next and the concrete steps, I always think from a kind of institutional perspective, you know, I, I work at a university, and actually, institutions like universities, , can be enabling or disabling. , And, , of course the big realization from recent calls for, , social justice, global calls for social justice is the recent realization that, , that there's a necessity for, structural change.

I always think institutionally, where are the spaces? What are the structures that we can, , change, in order to achieve, justice? How do we, pursue, various kinds of justice, from within institutions. And it's a kind of, I guess a kind of cultural Marxist, perspective.

And for me there are , two things really. , So one is to take the work, and this is very particular, , is take the work that I've been doing with students and scale it up. , I was describing earlier the insight that their work has provided in terms of redesigning, spaces within our university to respond to, neurodiverse conditions.

And one thing that's really emerging, and I didn't mention it earlier, is, that, aside from negotiating and trying to reconcile these conflicting needs, what was surprising to me is the work, it really wasn't about the architectural or spatial approaches to accommodating difference and diversity.

It was more so about the spaces between their interventions. So they began to think not just in material and spatial terms, but also temporal terms. So time and the relationship between time and space became really quite central. And for me that was, strategically really useful. But it also began to dislodge the kind of visual primacy

there always is within architecture. I think scaling that up actually trying to create awareness of that and embedding it in the curriculum, across different levels, and across different disciplines could be a way of thinking, actually, can we think differently? And the only other thing that I've been, thinking about, in terms of next steps is to address the increasing, data scape of higher education, and the, increasingly aggressive use of metrics to measure how we're responding to questions of justice expressed in the form of terms like equality, diversity, and inclusion within universities.

And the metrics are really actually reductive in the way they, frame, student groups, and their needs, , the way in which they evade questions of intersectionality. I'd be interested in really interrogating data and coming up with alternative sets of metrics really, and, metrics to do with, things like joy, dignity, , emotional labor, boundary crossing, various forms of mobility.

So an alternative set of metrics upon which to measure the student experience and progress.

Micha: the umbrella, of the directions I've been moving in are I think this idea of broadening out how we think about disability and really bringing disability more into the mainstream. I think that when we think about liberation struggles, often disability justice doesn't feel like it is quite there in the mainstream discussion.

I think that people still very often think of disability as this kind of niche issue or something that affects a much smaller, proportion of the population than it actually does. And so I was thinking about, you know, the organizing that i've been doing probably over the last decade, a lot of it has actually come under the banner of racial justice, and that's still something that I do a lot of organizing and writing around.

But to me I don't see it as, something that can be disentangled from disability justice. You know, I think that for example, when we're talking about mental health and critiques of psychiatry, , it's black men who are the group that are most likely to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act and institutionalized.

And so if we're talking about, , how to, support people who are vulnerable to these forms of state violence, like we have to also be thinking about both race and disability and that intersect. And I think that the work that I've also been doing in terms of communication around the book and around mental health following the book since it's come out, has been very focused on this idea that I've touched on that actually.

Anyone can be, become disabled at any point in their life. Disability justice activists often say, if you live long enough, you will become disabled. And I think the, flexibility of this category is something that I've been, doing a lot of, like communication work around, because I think that, especially when it comes to mental health, it's very easy to, experience a job loss, a loss of housing, breakdown in a relationship and actually move into the category of madness or mental illness.

And I think that's something that I've also been exploring in, the upcoming very early stages, fiction work, that I've been working on, which, was a move I made, moving towards fiction. It's the first fiction, project that I've worked on, there's a move I made because I felt that I was interested in exploring kind of a first person, more embodied experience of madness and someone's experience of going mad.

And part of that project I think is articulating the precarity that anyone who might consider themselves to be sane or not to have experienced mental distress, like actually that precarity the fact that anyone can move into that category. I think overall initiatives that try to bring disability more into mainstream conversations.

Samir: that's a fascinating move from towards fiction. And I'd really be interested in understanding what that affording to you,, in the sense of a kind of method, the method of fiction writing and what that unlocks or, reveals as kind of potential, for you.

I'm thinking because of your published book, what was interesting to me about that was, , in addition to it being anti- capitalist, which of course, is a plus point for me, is its breadth. And it read to me almost like a kind of mapping exercise of the intellectual, territory, a kind of scaffolding and framework.

It never seemed to settle. It was always about lateral connections and had a kind of horizontality about it. So not so much about staying in one place and digging, but actually connecting, in a kind of rhizomatic way. All these, parts of the, , political, cultural economy of mental health and madness, in order to make it more vivid , and to help people to orientate themselves within that whole kind of world.

So for me, that was really interesting as a kind of method, and the ultimate, apart from the kind of, I guess, hopefulness, of the book ultimately, was interesting is you could use what you'd set out to connect, individual suffering to the, systemic dysfunction that increases that suffering.

And so all of your labor, all of your work, just to get to that point where you can connect those two, I think is a profound achievement. And so I'm wondering actually, in the move to fiction, is it clear to you yet how that could help to, advance your, project in terms of method fiction writing as method for towards disability justice?

Micha: Yeah, that's really interesting. I've never had someone describe it that way in terms of mapping. I think that definitely does ring true to me in the way that I conceptualize the project. And I wonder if it's also something you've noticed as someone who's edited like a large collection as well.

This idea of trying to touch on lots of different areas. That is one thing that I've been thinking about with this novel is basically, yeah, how to explore maybe a narrow, narrower set of experiences by virtue of having a limited number of characters, but to experience the depth of experiences of madness, I think, because I think that's one thing that was impossible to get at in the kind of book that I wrote.

And also I think something that I was quite reluctant to do because at the time of writing, or when I started writing around 2020, I felt that there was a real dominance of these personal memoirs, for example, about mental health. I felt like a lot of the discussion we had of mental health was really personal and focused solely on lived experience and not on the structural political stuff.

So yeah, I think with Mad World, that wasn't so much the approach, but I think there is something to be said for delving deeply into an individual experience. And I think another kind of thing that I found that fiction has been able to offer that my last book couldn't necessarily offer, is more kind of freedom and more delving into something that I call like mad thinking, which I talk about in the first book, but I don't think I necessarily embodied in the way that it's written because the book was aimed towards a very mainstream audience.

It was aimed towards an audience who might not have grappled with those ideas before, and also might not necessarily consider themselves to be on the left or have radical politics. And so I felt that some of the writing, felt very, like watertight in many ways in that it came from more of a defensive position came from more of this, approach of trying to persuade and argue and build this very comprehensive, thesis by the end.

And I'm glad that I did this book that way. But I think with fiction, there is more space to embrace weirdness, go write in a way that might be unsettling at some points, strange or illegible, that might not make any sense. allow the reader to sit with uncertainty. And I think that is a way of embodying a kind of matter approach to writing and communication.

And yeah, that was something like I was really interested in. How to write in ways of, for example, embracing non-linearity, ways that felt a bit more like madness. 

Samir: And that certainly connects for me with the conversation slightly earlier when we were talking about, the messiness of the world, but also, embracing the fact that because of that messiness one cannot always find solutions.

And, things are incomplete, disruptive, , or disrupted, , surreal, , open-ended. And so that the challenge that, that for me, the challenge that has to architecture is quite profound and radical, but also in terms of fiction, that must be a kind of wonderful, creative, challenge, , the , non-linear narratives.

I know there's a whole genre of that, but actually the political impulse within that approach, and how you put that to work will be fascinating really. 

Micha: Yeah. And it also, makes me think a bit about your discussion of strategy as well, because I guess with the first book, like I was saying, there was this idea of this is the strategic way to make this argument, and this book is a vehicle , for bringing certain ideas to people.

But maybe there's, with the fiction, there's like a concurrent strategy that is about maybe speaking to people who are already on board or in a way that's like less apologetic, that does something very different and maybe both kind of existing at the same time.

Jos: Thank you so much both of you. That's, I feel like this has been a really rich and a really deep conversation when I'm trying to think about kind of summarizing what's gone on. There's so many levels. We started with talking about having a better understanding and critiquing how productivity is used to enforce a hierarchy of which body minds matter, which don't, and how that has, that kind of, has some effect on the shape of the built environment and on, on the kind of practices, not just the, everyday social practices, but on the way that education works and the way that architectural training works.

We've talked about, ways forward and how disability is still being left out of kind of liberation movements. We've talked about how, truth is, our body minds are all quite vulnerable. But somehow there's a huge strength to this disavowal the non-disabled to that, like they just, they want to block that out somehow.

We've talked about, how we might bring some criticality to functional access to this idea of productivity. We might have a more liberatory language of access. Samir, you were suggesting alternative sets of metrics like joy and dignity and emotional labor. And you've both talked a lot about, really useful and thoughtful ideas about theories and methods of thinking about this differently.

Aimi: The thing that I think just continues to shock me because it's like that you can just say it and this is Samir, that you just say it as it's true. I know it's true from my background in architecture that you study architecture, you are not taught anything about embodied experiences. And I think if you say that to non architects or people outside the discipline, it seems almost unbelievable that a subject, which is all about how we occupy space, how we relate to each other, what our kind of encounters are with people and things that, somehow it, it's abstracted from that. I thought it was so interesting to hear about the material convergences and places where you're both looking and analyzing and critiquing. Like Micha, you pointed out that both of you're talking about handbooks.

It was making me think about how, so many of the structures that we take for granted are shaped by these professionalized standards in different fields and that there are so many points of conversion between them is very interesting and I think it gives us something to think about in terms of how, discourses of psychiatric abolition and also like police abolition and stuff can inform architecture and I think in some ways they have.

But, from a disability justice perspective, I think it's especially interesting and it's something I'm definitely gonna take from this and, keep thinking about. . Thank you all so much. This is wonderful. 

Micha: Thank you for having us. 

Samir: Yeah, thank you. It's a pleasure.

Outro music

Aimi: you've been listening to Disability Meets Architecture, a series of episodes of the Contra Podcast focused on the productive frictions within critical access theory.

Disability meets Architecture was created by Jos Boys from The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, and Aimi Hamraie from the Critical Design Lab and the Contra Podcast with support from Scar Barlay and Paul DeFazio, and funding from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Our editor is Ilana Nevins.

You can find out more about this project and our respective organizations on Instagram at Ordinary Architecture, at Critical Design Lab, and at Labs for liberation. The Contra Podcast is licensed under a creative commons attribution, non-commercial share, like International 3.0 license. That means you can remix, repost, or recycle any of the content.

As long as you cite the original source, aren't making money, you don't change the credits and you share it under the same license.

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