What is indeterminacy in architecture? How can we curate indeterminacy? Can architecture engage with the potential harboured within such indeterminacy? These questions are the initial inquiries this thesis aims to address in search for collaborative creation of free-space. 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.
Its core interest is to study and shed light on the potential of counter-spatialities and culture resulted from our act of re-appropriation of places, goods and practices that have been commodified by the system of advanced capitalism. Such advanced capitalism represents today’s post-civil society that instrumentally annihilates associative, differential and communing processes mirrored in our actions. The advanced capitalism which this thesis conceives as the system of overdetermination promotes homogenisation, which turns our public spheres into a pseudo-space of interaction in which individuals no longer act but merely behave as economic producers and consumers.
The approach this thesis takes to this problem is to re-identify the pre-existing actions from the daily practices and acts that are often deemed mundane and hidden within the folds of the overdetermined system of power. This action is characterised by its contingency and indeterminacy that represents our source of creativity, identity, individuality and thus freedom. In dominated societies, liberating action creates residual counter-spatialities of differentiation that are housed by an open system of indeterminate architecture. The project Autopia is a series of five social moments that fictionally depicts the counter-formation of space and culture, resulted from the crisis of our civic sphere, where pro-car urbanism has transformed it into unlivable city outside a car. Autopia takes an allegorical approach, envisioning a speculative fiction that centres the residual values of the automobile as paramount human practices and desires. The re-appropriation and re-exploitation of the abundances of the auto-centric city of Auckland through daily practices and acts render instances of concrete utopia foreshadowing possible alternatives ways of consuming cars that advocates the moments of individual autonomy.
Although the project does not deal with prevailing issues of traffic jam in the central motorway junction, it proposes to investigate how indeterminacy plays its role in an over-determinant system exemplified in the auto-centric city of Auckland. Rather than pretending to impose an ill-prepared answer to the issues of Auckland’s transportation system, the project aims to suggest unexpected ways of responding to the
instrumentalism of the advanced capitalism. Hence, Autopia is concerned with seeking different questions of the future, 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.
