Abstract:
What is indeterminacy in architecture? How can we curate indeterminacy? Can architecture engage with the potential harboured within such indeterminacy? These questions are the essential inquiries this thesis aims to address in search for collaborative creation of freespace. The thesis understands the idea of indeterminacy as a discipline to support the power of liberating ‘action’ of individuals and communities which promotes equity, inclusion, diversity and belonging in our cities. Hence, this thesis is titled as "discovering action through architecture." At its core, the interest is to study and shed light on the potential of counter-spatialities and counter-culture resulted from the liberating forces found in our act of re-appropriation of places, goods and practices that have been commodified by the system of advanced capitalism. Such advanced capitalism has generated today’s post-civil society by instrumentally annihilating associative and differential processes mirrored in our actions. It has produced homogenisation by turning our public spheres into a pseudo-space of interaction in which individuals no longer 'act' but merely behave as economic producers and consumers. Re-identify pre-existing actions. Detect marginalised daily practices and actions. Often deemed mundane and hidden within the folds of the overdetermined systems, these practices and actions are characterised by its contingency and indeterminacy that represents our source of creativity, identity, and thus freedom. In dominated societies, these liberating practices and actions create residual counter-spatialities of differentiation that are housed by open systems of indeterminate architecture. The project, Autopia depicts a world where a car-oriented urbanism has transformed the city into an unlivable place without a car and exacerbated the crisis of our civic sphere. By re-evaluating the crisis of our civic sphere, Autopia seeks to highlight the formation of countering-spaces and culture harboured in the overdetermined city around cars. This research takes an allegorical approach, envisioning a speculative fiction that addresses the car-centricity of Auckland and proposes a counter-spatial condition that affirms the reappropriated and residual values of the automobile culture as paramount human practices and desires for a refoundation of the civic realm. The re-appropriation of the irregular abundances of the auto-centric city of Auckland is critically investigated and articulated, and rendered in instances of concrete utopia. Foreshadowing possible alternative ways of consuming cars, this thesis advocates for people's action that allows individual autonomy. Instead of dealing with the conventional critique to environmental pollution, traffic congestion and urban splintering, the project addresses and investigates how indeterminacy plays its role in an over-determinant system exemplified in the auto-centric city of Auckland. Rather than pretending to find an answer to the issues of Auckland’s transportation system, the project aims to critique the socio/spatial crisis caused by the instrumentalism of advanced capitalism. Hence, Autopia is concerned with addressing different questions on the future urban society. It offers a speculation that deals more with the idea of how we are to live within the car-dominated world rather than denying the lifestyle that is already intricately built around cars.