Gabu Heindl (Universität Kassel) – Composing Holes and Decomposing Wholes: Nonsolution as a Concept in Planning Practice (w/o Drehli Robnik) In our book Nonsolution (German 2024; English version forthcoming) we aim at a politicized concept that can inform architectural and planning practices. We connect insights from Critical Theory, from philosophies of agency and from radical-democratic hegemony theory to highlight possibilities of nonsolution (a term we take from works of Siegfried Kracauer). Nonsolution means insisting on arriving at forms without deleting their contradictions and counterforces; it means being sensitive to contingency without fetishizing ambiguity; it maintains gaps/holes in collectives and relies on active passivity – enters into contact with popular agency manifesting itself where ruling distributions of power and property foresee only complacency. This feeds into our notion of just architecture with its double meaning: it ́s just architecture, so it takes political alliances to work on just – less unjust – spatial relationships and realities. We use recent examples from our own research, planning and building practice to explore and question these points: especially the tension between actively not doing something and the impossibility to refrain from exerting a modicum of expert power (in Hannah Arendt ́s sense); and also the ‘massness’, self-complication and critique of property inherent in building groups acting along the lines of solidarity economy and commoning.

Designing Refiguration – Refiguring Design
6/7. November 2025, IFA Forum – TU Berlin