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We can define architectural design studios as environments of simulation. Within this simulation limitations of real life architectural problems are constructed, yet the constructed reality is far from the reality of existing practice.

In Architecture: Story of Practice, Dana Cuff, makes a sociological study of the architectural design practice and in the volume she discusses design studios as limited versions of the actual design practice. As compared to the actual practice in the studio the students are alone, there isn’t a multiplicity of actors involved in the process, and the design problems are clearly defined. Cuff points out to these shortcomings and provides guidelines to overcome them.

One of the shortcomings mentioned in Cuff’s study is that: design studios do not represent the variety of actors that are present in a real life situation. Cuff suggests to include representatives of different actors in the studio practice to overcome this. If the studio fails to support itself with a variety of actors, to compensate the short coming of actors, the instructors start taking the role of many possible participants of a design process. The instructors simulate: the user, the owner, the engineer, the contractor and so on so forth. This type of an approach in the design studios leads to a certain result: the ideological construct of the instructors becomes the foundation of the constructed reality of the studio.

This study explores the ideological construction of the design studio through active involvements with undergraduate students. Through the findings of two discussion sessions, students’ own ideological positions, their relationship with the external realities and limits imposed on such relations by the studio instructor’s own ideological stances are explored.

This essay asks: How can we understand and theorise the impacts of robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) on everyday life based on Radical Humanism? How can Lefebvre's ideas be used to reveal the ideological character of contemporary accounts of the impacts of robots and AI on society? It engages with rather unknown works of the Radical Humanist Henri Lefebvre on the sociology and philosophy of technology such as Vers le cybernanthrope (Towards the Cybernanthrope). Foundations of a Lefebvrian, dialectical, Radical Humanist approach to the sociology and philosophy of technology are presented. This essay introduces Lefebvre's notion of the cybernanthrope and sets it in relation to robots and AI in contemporary society. Based on Lefebvre's critique of the cybernanthrope, this chapter develops foundations of the ideology critique of robots and AI in digital capitalism. It discusses examples of technological deterministic and social constructivist thought in the context of robotics, AI, and cyborgs and argues for an alternative, Lefebvrian, dialectical approach. This essay situates Humanism in the context of computing, AI and robotics. The chapter advances a Lefebvrian Radical Humanism by engaging in analyses of AI and robots in Post-humanism, Transhumanism, techno-deterministic approaches, social construction of technology approaches, techno-optimism, techno-pessimism, acceleratonism, the mass unemployment hypothesis and Spike Jonze's movie Her. This chapter shows that the major lesson we can learn from the Radical Humanist sociology of technology and Henri Lefebvre's works on technology is that Radical Humanism helps creating and sustaining technologies for the many, not the few. This insight remains of high relevance in the age of digital capitalism, smart robots and AI.

This chapter embraces a rhythmanalytic approach to address the complexities of a city recovering from a disaster. Bridging Henri Lefebvre's work on everyday life with his later work on rhythms this chapter engages his theory to analyse the case of L'Aquila, a city in central Italy that was destroyed by an earthquake in 2009. To this day, the city's skyline is dominated by cranes, while life unfolds along with sounds of the ongoing reconstruction. While the city is still recovering from the earthquake, the landscape of ruins co-exists with a landscape of construction. More than 10 years after the earthquake stripped away life from its historical centre, the city continues to live in a temporal in-between the disaster and its future ‘rebirth’. While most of the current research on the city neglects the city's everyday experience, my research decentres the debate by analysing the everyday rhythms of L'Aquila's historical centre. Additionally, drawing from walking interviews this chapter highlights the perplexing aspects of everyday life in the city emphasising how the city is negotiated and learned from the locals. This chapter highlights the way different temporalities blur in the everyday practices of reconstruction, emphasising how the city is lived and created in the here-and-now.

This paper explores the potential of Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis to understand data as an appearance assumed by the quantitative abstraction of everyday life, which negates a qualitative disjuncture between different natural and social rhythms – specifically those between embodied circadian and biological rhythms and the rhythms of working life. It takes as a case study a prototype performance research method investigating the methodological and practical potential of quantified self technologies to reconnect the body to its forms of abstraction in a digital age by means of the collection, interpretation and sonification of data using wearable tech, mobile apps, synthesised music and modes of visual communication. Quantitative data were selectively ‘sonified’ with synthesisers and drum machines to produce a 40-minute electronic symphony performed to a public audience. The paper theorises the project as an intervention reconnecting quantitative data with the qualitative experience it abstracts from, exploring the potential for these technologies to be used as tools of remediation that recover the embodied social subject from its abstraction in data for critical self-knowledge and understanding.

This paper aims to present a critical analysis of placemaking by the urban poor based on the Right to the City, Henri Lefebvre’s influential theory regarding the production of space and placemaking.

This study reflects Lefebvre’s production of space and the right to the city theories and containing three main pillars including holism, the urban and praxis, and the use of spatial dialectics. Also, for collecting information in this research, along with scrutiny of documents and books, residents of the poor settlements of Sanandaj have also been interviewed.

In Sanandaj, urban poor who lack formal housing reclaim the Right to City by creating informal settlements. Such settlements, such as Shohada, Baharmast and Tagh Taghan, cover 23% of the city’s area but house 69% of the urban population.

This research seeks to understand placemaking in urban slums by low-income inhabitants using Henry Lefebvre’s critical theory of social production of space and the Right to the City. This case study examines the city of Sanandaj, Iran, where most residents are poor and live in cooperative informal settlements. It illustrates how the urban poor, as marginalized inhabitants, overcome the constraints of conventional planning and property ownership to creatively and cooperatively develop communities that reflect their needs. This indicates a schism between formal and informal sectors.

This chapter is an account of a rhythmanalysis of a representation of daily life in Venice in calle Rugagiuffa in a YouTube series. This series – named Rugagiuffa in reference to the calle in which was filmed – was self-produced by a group of young friends struggling with an everyday reality very different from the one presented by tour operators: a lack of rental property, unemployment or work that is demeaning and strictly off the books. In the first part of the chapter, I refer to the basic concepts of the rhythmanalytic methodology developed by Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier and use it to describe Venetian rhythms starting from the relations between the body and urban space. Then, I adapt Lefebvre's thought in order to show how the status of ‘city of art’ coincides, for Venice, on the one hand, with its commodification for exclusively tourist purposes and, on the other hand, with the trivialisation of Venetian daily life, reduced to a tourist spectacle. In the final part, I use Rugagiuffa as a bittersweet mise-en-scène of the ability of the tourist monoculture to take possession at various levels of daily life and its relationship with the residents. I argue that the daily life of the Venetian citizens is subsumed within the city's tourist-commercial spectacle to the point of imposing, in spite of themselves, a high degree of consensus, adherence, commitment and integration.