Staff, students and alumni are invited to a London launch event for a new book including contributions by Kent Law School Senior Law Lecturer Dr Thanos Zartaloudis on Tuesday 22 November.
The Archipelago of Protocols, (with Aristide Antonas) will be launched in the AA Bookshop, 32 Bedford Square (WC1B 3ES), at 6.30pm with a presentation by Ethel Baraona Pohl and César Reyes (from publishers dpr-barcelona) and a brief introduction by Pier Vittorio Aureli. There will also be a discussion with authors Aristide Antonas and Dr Zartaloudis.
The book attempts an innovative experimentation between legal regulation and architectural practice and theory.
Dr Zartaoludis said: ‘The concept of Urban Protocol names a strategy concerning the condition of Athens today. It would serve as an experimental pseudo-methodology that faces the condition of the city “in crisis”. The Urban Protocols are meant to introduce legal temporary occupancies of the abandoned city center that will be accepted and controlled by a reconceived municipal authority towards the purpose of ‘common uses’. In this regard, the purpose of an Urban Protocol would be to establish cluster-like micro-legislative constructions with communal functions. Urban Protocols are formed as systems of rules. Using, among else, a video game terminology we may say that the Urban Protocols are “play-tested” in the city, performed and improved via Internet. The system of rules they represent could be transformed and re-established easily testing the separation of the rightless-user from the right-holder. Indeed at its most sophisticated part this project would have to deal with the relation between user and citizen.’
Dr Zartaloudis has research interests within philosophy, social theory, legal history, as well as a wide range of spatial research in direct or indirect relation to legal study. He is the head-editor (with Anton Schütz) of the book series titled Encounters in Law and Philosophy, published by Edinburgh University Press. Dr Zartaloudis is also a Lecturer at the Architectural Association in London and serves on a number of research centres and associations, including as a Co-director of the Centre for Research in Political Theology (Birkbeck College/Kent Law School); and as the Co-director of Kent’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Spatial Studies (KISS).
