Gil M Doron
The research The Dead Zone & The Architecture of Transgression is an examination of the discourse of the �void� in architecture and urban planning and the illusive existence of such a space in the city. Furthermore, the research tracks urban nomads and argues that their activities constitute, or more precisely render, architecture of transgression.
The research began inadvertently as a journalistic investigation into an area at the edge of Tel Aviv that the city planners called a �dead zone� and doomed to �redevelopment�. The investigation revealed that before 1948 the area was a Palestinian fisherman village, and a camp for a Bedouin tribe. Whilst the planners portrayed the area as a void the city authorities were trying to evict a descendant of one of the Palestinian fishermen, who was claiming back the family hut and had opened in it a small cafe, as well as some squatters who had taken over some of the village�s other dilapidated huts. Apparently, the alleged void was used also for many other marginalized activities such as rave parties, bon fires, fishing, sex, and graffiti art, and as a popular film location.
The findings of the investigation, and Doron�s personal experience in this place, took him on numerous journeys in alleged �dead zones� in twenty-one European, Asian, and American cities - all featuring various activities and communities. On his derive� in these cities, Doron found the urban nomads not only at the edge of the city but everywhere. Their activities corresponded to Michael de Certeau�s tactics, and to the Foucault�s definition of Transgression i.e. actions that are based on temporality, on testing limits and on opening up boundaries. Working within a (given) space, or within its boundary, the urban nomads� transgressive tactics are not to be understood as revolutionary, resistance, in opposition to, or an endeavor to constitute another system or new enclosed space.
These �stubborn procedures... elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised�. The spaces that the urban nomad create correspond to, Deleuze�s and Guattari�s smooth space, and to Derrida�s concept of Spacing which �As distinct from space, it is first and foremost not a thing but a movement of setting aside�� it is �a displacement that indicates an irreducible alterity� a space in �which may designate the existence of difference�. The urban nomads actions do not produce (delimit) space. They de-territorialize space and identity, and generate a system of difference.
The research argues that the transgressivness of the urban nomads activities is at the same time inherent and extrinsic to them. Drawing on Mary Douglas observation on pollution and taboo, the urban nomads activities are considered as transgressive only because they are carried out in an �improper place� for example commercial activity on the sidewalk and not in a shop, sex in a park and not at home, dancing in an abandoned warehouse and not in a regulated club, or jumping on a bed that is considered to be an art work, exhibited in a gallery. Conversely, the inherent transgression of the urban nomads� tactics is in the way they produce spaces and in the kind of the space they produce.
They are transgressive in correlation to the delimited space of politics, architecture, and planning. The transgressive actions of urban nomads rather than produce (their own) space, open up of a space, generating critique and differences. Doron argues that the urban void (transgressive space_, has qualities that any city should retain. Similarly, he argues for the urban nomad�s transgressive architecture, seeing it as an architecture that is never positive or reductive but productive and generative. Seeing and more importantly experiencing the architecture of transgression brings into question common urban design strategies, and architectural practices. It actually questions what �to design� means.
Invitation for publication of the Cultural Imperialism Conference @ Centre for European Studies University of Trier (upcoming)
Contribution for the book Possible Urban Worlds II Ed. By the International Network for Urban Research and Activism (INURA). (Upcoming).
UmBau (Vienna) , The Non Existing Void, 5/2003
Loud Paper Magazine (San Francisco ), Transgressive Architecture, 5/2003
City - analysis of urban trends,culture, theory, policy, action, The Dead Zone & The Architecture of Transgression (02/2000); The Bad Sheets (04/2002).
AD- Architectural Design (London), A Global Derive�, 07/200
Archis (Amsterdam) 02/2002 Untitled � A Reply to Richard Rogers
04/2000 The Dead Zone & The Architecture of Transgression
07/2000 Guerrilla Gardening: Reclaim The Streets active in London
09/2000 Kyong Park in Detroit: A New Urban Paradigm
12/2000 Rethinking the Squat
Blue Print (London) 03/2000 � Lost Zones
12/2000 � The 4th Dimension
