Irreparable present

The limits of reparative critique in planning, the cruel optimism of design and the destituent project

What would be different in planning and design thinking if the present condition of economic, human and ecological catastrophe were taken as impossible to resolve? The session aims to reflect, provocatively and incompletely, on the limits of the problem spaces of reparation – in their variegated forms of reconstruction, resilience, adaptations, repair – thinking through different, variegated philosophical and theoretical trajectories which operationalise a different telos towards salvation and redemption. Accepting and not escaping the constituent “cruel optimism” of architecture, the reflections suggest not a nihilistic approach but one able to embrace the negative, a destituent approach, one that accepts future frictions and inhabits the collapse.

Camillo Boano is an architect and Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the Polytechnic University of Turin in Italy. He previously taught at the Development Planning Unit at UCL in London and worked in contexts of conflict, emergency, and urban informality across the Global South, focusing on radical pedagogies and collective planning in Asia, the Levant, and South America. His work focuses on design critique and radical philosophies, investigating urban processes, conflict, migration, and the practice of inhabitation. He is the author of books such as Displacement Urbanism. Politics of bodies and spaces of abandonment and endurance (Bristol; Bristol University Press, 2026 with Giovanna Astolfo), Destituire l’architettura.  Lineamenti per un progetto a venire (Efesto, 2026, with Edoardo Fabbri), Polvere a Gaza. L’impossibile ricostruzione (Donzelli, 2026, with Tomà Berlanda) Projecto Menor. En búsqueda de la minoridad en el proyecto urbanístico y arquitectónico (Bifuscaciones, 2025) and journal articles as A Destituent Gesture for Disaster Studies. Minor Language and Lateral Agency as a Form of Critique (Journal of Disaster Studies, 2025), The design politics of migrant farmworker ghettos of Borgo Mezzanone, Puglia (Environment & Urbanization, 2025 with Grimaldi, Mastromarino, Peragine and Stopani).