This book presents a conceptual framework that introduces architectural and urban researchers and practitioners to core ethical concepts and principles.

Grappling with ethics can disorient and disturb your peace of mind in the small hours of the night. Practising Ethics transforms ethics from an obstacle to an opportunity by offering a poethic infrastructure to guide the development of ethical practice in architectural and urban research.

Practising Ethics bridges the gap between research volume and textbook. The book’s two-part structure creates a dialogue between ethical concepts derived from decolonial, ecological, feminist, and queer theory and lived ethical experiences that are explored through specific situations. A series of opening essays present hotspots, touchstones, keystones, blindspots, moonshots, and milestones as different ethical orientations in a six-point methodology. This is followed by six case studies in which practitioners and researchers navigate these orientations through narrative figurations that describe ethical deliberations arising from social science, humanities, practice-led and participatory art, and architectural design research in El Salvador, India, Nigeria, Peru, and the United Kingdom.

The book acts as a companion to an award-winning online toolkit and is illustrated by Judit Ferencz, who offers creative exercises for readers to develop their own poethic infrastructures.

Jane Rendell is professor of critical spatial practice at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL). Her recent publications include The Architecture of Psychoanalysis, Silver, and the coedited volume Reactivating the Social Condenser. She curates site-writing.co.uk and criticalspatialpractice.co.uk. With Yael Padan and David Roberts, she established, cocurates, and edits www.practisingethics.org. David Roberts is associate professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is part of collaborative art practice Fugitive Images and of the architecture collective BREAK//LINE. He has exhibited, screened, and installed work at Tate Modern, Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and Peer. Yael Padan is a researcher working in the interface of architecture, planning, and sociology. She received her PhD in sociology from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben Gurion University, Israel. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, working on the Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality program.

List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements

Preface: ethics as a living practice
Vanesa Castán Broto and Caren Levy

Introduction: practising ethics
Jane Rendell, David Roberts and Yael Padan

Part I: Orientations

1 Hotspots
Jane Rendell

2 Touchstones
Yael Padan

3 Keystones
David Roberts

4 Blindspots
Yael Padan

5 Moonshots
David Roberts

6 Milestones
Jane Rendell

Part II: Figurations

7 Research amid despair: participatory architecture in times of hunger
Belen Desmaison

8 The transitoriness of research ethics: when values and practices travel
Vikas John and Priya Singh

9 Full-bodied ethics or ‘You look good in short skirts'
Ariana Markowitz with Cristian Olmos Herrera

10 Crying in the field: I struggled to control my own emotions, feeling tears welling up inside me
Zubaida Umar Baba

11 ‘Reperforming’ as a practice for preserving confidentiality
Naomi Gibson

12 Halema’s kitchen
Judit Ferencz

13 Conclusion: a poethic infrastructure – six reorientations
Judit Ferencz with Jane Rendell

Epilogue: the grit of a future ethics
Pia Ednie-Brown, Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt

Index