Authorships and Collective Practices Toward a Shared Spatial Agency

The debate on authorship in visual arts has long oscillated between the myth of the individual creator and the recognition of transformation as a collective process. In the field of architecture and design disciplines, starting from Giancarlo De Carlo’s participatory and Lucien Kroll’s socially engaged projects, the question of who designs – and for whom – has revealed that the production of space and spatial thinking are never individual acts, but a “negotiation” (Till 2005, 23) among multiple human and non-human agents (De Carlo 1972; Kroll 2015). The contributions presented in this section of the CA²RE Milano 2025 conference expand this cultural debate, reframing authorship as a fluid, processual, and distributed condition. They demonstrate that design-driven knowledge is often co-authored through diverse collaborations – between designers and users, matter and memory, theory and practice – resulting in a shared “spatial agency” (Awan et al. 2011).

Here, the established figure of the author-designer has been deconstructed. It might be argued that space can perform as an author itself, – as in Nina Bačun’s paper, echoing Umberto Eco’s notion of the “opera aperta” (Eco 1962) – with the concept of auteur space that resonates in Cedric Price’s idea of architecture as an unfinished script. By reframing the architect as mediator and the spatial environment as an active agent, it is possible to reinterpret authorship through the lens of collective and material agency. The author’s role becomes one of orchestration rather than domination, aligning with De Carlo’s advocacy for architecture as a process of communication (1972).

These instances are extended if design theory is intertwined with ecological psychology. As in Ivana Fabrio and Nina Bačun contribution, this union reveals how ordinary objects accumulate meanings through collective use. Authorship, in this sense, emerges from interaction rather than invention, because objects and spaces become repositories of shared cultural intelligence. Referencing Roland Barthes’ “death of the author” and Walter Benjamin’s “author as producer” (Barthes 1977, 142; Benjamin 1934), a fluid authorship arises, foregrounding production and use over originality: the designer acts as a scriptwriter of affordances, enabling the world to co-author itself through practice.

A similar sensibility informs what we can call collective infrastructures, as Raffaella Cavallaro shows in her research. Proposing a methodological reframing of authorship within research-by-design, the architect operates as mediator between pedagogical, administrative, and spatial dimensions. Authorship here is understood as a continuous translation between theory and practice – a recursive, non-linear process akin to Aldo van Eyck’s in-between realm. By viewing educational architecture as a living system shaped by many voices, we can situate authorship within shared governance and narrative, a kind of co-production (Petrescu 2005).

Some other interesting intersections can be found between authorship and collective care, according to Francesca Ripamonti’s and Zhihang Lin’s pieces. Design-driven research can be framed as a tool to reconnect architecture with the social and political realities of health promotion: through the notion of designer as auctor, reclaiming the Latin root of authorship – as one who augments, adds meaning – it is possible to emphasize architecture’s interpretive agency within interdisciplinary contexts. Likewise, transitional spaces between care and cure, public and private, become thresholds where design and life intersect, in the direction of co-production of space. This resonates with Kroll’s principle that the architect must accept to be one of the inhabitants (Kroll 1996), asserting that the built environment’s authorship is inseparable from the communities it serves.

In order to deepen this understanding of collective authorships, Marie Stalpaert introduces the lens of participatory action research PAR. In this cultural-design environment, authorship is defined as curation – an act of care, mediation, and attunement. The emerging profile is the architect-as-curator one: not a designer of objects but a facilitator of relationships and narratives. Curation thus extends authorship beyond the material artifact toward the immaterial ethics of collaboration and continuity. This notion of curating as ongoing commitment echoes De Carlo’s insistence on open-ended processes and anticipates recent notions of spatial commoning (Vervloesem et al. 2016).

In addition, the reflection on collective authorships expands authorship beyond the human realm, as in Michele Porcelluzzi paper. This reinterprets design as co-production between social, ecological, and institutional systems. Drawing on Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva’s relational theory (2017), it can be argued that space and process are mutually constitutive: to design the process is already to design the space. Authorship is thus decentered, shared among maintenance rituals, human participants, and non-human agencies. The more-than-human approach situates architecture within the ethics of care and reciprocity developing a proper ecological thought. In this way, the architect’s authorship dissolves into assemblages of living and non-living collaborators.

Within contemporary design research on recycling and reuse, upcycling can be understood as a dialogic act between past and present authors – as Wenquan Zhang writes. The continuity of material traces, vernacular intelligence, and contemporary reinterpretation illustrates Hegel’s dialectics of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis applied to architectural time: the designer becomes a mediator within a chain of authors – craftsmen, materials, communities, and environments – whose collaboration embodies the cultural evolution of architecture itself. By expanding this dialogue to the territorial scale – as in the case of Petra Boudová's reflections on post-industrial landscapes – participation and living laboratories can constitute mechanisms of collective authorship in the regeneration of cultural heritage. In such a vision, the landscape is considered both an archive and a laboratory, where users, scientists, and designers share the power to shape adaptive futures. This participatory philosophy is in line with the contemporary need for co-design processes that integrate environmental, social, and cultural dimensions.

Yi Xing Chow’s contribution, finally, introduces yet another layer: the authorship of research communication. Through infographic methodologies, it is possible to highlight how visual representation can democratize architectural knowledge. By transforming data into narrative diagrams, the author constructs a shared understanding between experts and lay audiences. Authorship becomes an act of translation – visual, rhetorical, and ethical – bridging the gap that separates professional discourse from public comprehension. This perspective situates the author not as authority but as communicator and catalyst of collective awareness.

Across this section of the CA²RE Milano 2025 conference’s book of contributions, a pattern emerges: authorship is reframed as relation rather than possession. Whether through participatory action (Stalpaert), ecological reciprocity (Porcelluzzi), pedagogical mediation (Cavallaro), or material continuity (Zhang), each work redefines creative agency as a distributed, negotiated, and often contested practice. In this light, authorship functions less as a signature than as a practice of exchange, binding heterogeneous actors across time and scale. This shift resonates with the avant-garde’s critique of artistic genius and with post-structuralist notions of intertextuality. Yet in design disciplines, its spatial implications are profound: authorship now describes not a personal imprint, but a field of forces – a spatial ecology of contributions. As Giancarlo De Carlo envisioned, the architect’s task is to build the conditions for participation rather than to impose form (De Carlo 1972). The ten essays discussed here reaffirm that architecture relevance today depends on this openness: its capacity to host multiple authorships, to negotiate between care and control, and to translate shared narratives into spatial form. Authorship, once tied to autonomy, becomes a practice of attentive dependence – a collective endeavor shaped by empathy, temporality, and interrelation.

In this expanded field, the designer-researcher is neither a sovereign auteur nor a neutral facilitator but a situated actor within an evolving network of co-authors: human, spatial, ecological, and institutional. Authorship, then, is no longer an individual claim, but a spatial condition: a choreography of participation through which architecture continually redefines itself as a shared work in progress.