I am a London-based architect and researcher. I hold a diploma in Architecture from the School of Architecture of the University of Patras, Greece (2015) and was awarded a PhD from the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art (2022). My research focuses on solidarity and decolonial movements, with an emphasis on the role of space and architecture to their expansion and transferability. My PhD thesis dealt with the survey of the materiality of grassroots, ad hoc and mutual aid projects created by social movements in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis(2010-2020) in Europe and the United States, with an emphasis on solidarity economies and their relationship with the state. My investigation explored territories of social and state abandonment in Greece, Spain and the US, where policies of debilitation of bodies and withdrawal of welfare architectures were imposed upon marginalised groups. My work—pedagogical, research and practice—is embedded in the articulation of ideas about work in the academic and professional life of architects. I have curated and produced numerous public events and experiences, and founded collective groups and projects that deal with issues of work and equity in the architectural profession (The Architecture Lobby—London Chapter), social housing and participatory design (Cohab Athens), and the scarcity of inclusive public spaces and projects of urban commons in urban environments (Koino Athina), among others.
Elisavet Hasa
Supervisors: Dr Adrian Lahoud, Dr Platon Issaias
My thesis draws on the series of social movements that sprang up during the last decade to provide support to marginalised groups and their needs as a form of collective direct action. I investigate how social movements create micro-infrastructures for care provision and interrelate in various forms with state institutions.
The argument of my thesis is that during the past decade, social movements have rendered the infrastructural domain as one of the most important public sites of collective participation and struggle. Through my research I find that social movements are wiring the activities of their spaces with the devices, networks or architectures that they deem worthy of local attention or concern. From decentralised spaces and interiorities diffused across the city to concentrated consolidations of social movements in the same area, infrastructural projects of solidarity and care, become techno-material artefacts that social movements take upon themselves to design, service and maintain. I claim that such interventions signal the rise of protocol systems and design of prototypes to capture the qualitative data, design methods and relationships between different subjects and space. This fact that speaks for the transformation of the urban syntax and architecture, directly challenges the public qualities of welfare infrastructure, and reflects the power of solidarity bodies that enable another way of creating and thinking through infrastructure.
Alongside an in-depth discussion of how social movements and the state institutions claim the same spaces and how space interferes within the concept of institutionalisation of the activities of social movements, I explore the engagement of numerous social movements in the solidarity movement for welfare provision (healthcare, housing, education, food) in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis in Greece, and their activism as part of the anti-austerity movement. Focusing on Athens, the main finding of my thesis is that institutional structures monitor the spatial manifestation of the activities of social movements through data quantification systems —such as templates, matrices, legal and administrative protocols and portals. Most importantly, as part of the social solidarity economy framework, social movements are required to produce design work and drawing packages to be able to occupy the spaces that the state has to offer.
Essentially, I investigate through architecture, the system-building symptom of these initially small-scale independent micro-infrastructures. This conception places a focus on ad hoc practices of routinisation, spatial expansion, transferability of equipment and, finally, of adaptation of protocol systems into a digital record.