Designing the Other:

Critical Places, Shared Legacies

This text is an invited essay, and we would like to thank Prof. Scavuzzo for agreeing to contribute to this issue of the journal.

Who is the other, what form do they take, in what body do they incarnate, where do they appear and materialize? The title of this journal issue draws attention to a crucial dimension in the mechanisms of exclusion: the relationship with the other. Considering the architectural domain, this topic challenges the ways in which space is constructed, inhabited, and regulated with respect to those who deviate from the norm, the average, or the majority. Franco Basaglia, emblematic figure in the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, alienated (from the Latin alius, meaning “other”), the others ­by definition, described the above-mentioned majority as “deviant”¹.

This evokes what Michel Foucault termed “heterotopias of deviation”. If heterotopy is the “other space”, the heterotopias of deviation are spaces such as asylums, prisons, designed to contain those perceived as a threat due to their deviation from social norms.

By overturning the label of deviance, attributed to the majority, Basaglia aims to redirect attention to the system that exclude, to the collective, political, and social logics that enable, or even systematize, exclusion.

A powerful allegory of the heterotopia of deviation, proposed by Foucault himself, is the image of the stultifera navis — the ship of the mad— embodying the myth of those no land wishes to receive. Rejected and condemned to eternal wandering, the mad are surrounded not only by the sea but also by a symbolic boundary they carry like a brand.

This image resonated today with disturbing relevance. Ships laden with migrants, turned away in the name of national borders, remind us that the dynamics of exclusion which deny space and recognition to the other — are not at the margins of history, but rather at the heart of our present.

Another philosopher, Jacques Derrida, in Plato’s Pharmacy, investigates the motives of exclusion, both in social and urban scale, by invoking the figure of the pharmakos.

The clear reference is to the ritual practice of scapegoating, present in ancient Greek cities, is expelled by the city to be purified and redeemed. The pharmakos is a man, chosen for his physical repulsiveness or perceived abject or uselessness, who is fed and kept by the city, only to be expelled or killed during ritual occasions or crises. The expulsion serves to assuage the community’s anxiety in the face of contamination or looming danger. Hence, the pharmakos is, at the same time, an outcast and a savior, allowing the community to restore its equilibrium and safety.

The ritual, following Derrida’s interpretation, has both a spatial meaning and implies oppositions such as interior/exterior, inside/outside:

The inner body of the city thereby reconstitutes its unity,  closing in upon its own security […] by violently excluding from its territory the representative of threat or external aggression. This figure represents the alterity of evil that infects and infiltrates the inside. […] The pharmakos ceremony thus occurs at the limit of inside and outside, which it must continuously trace and retrace. Intra muros/extra muro².

The central question guiding this issue is how architecture, through its history, in contemporary practice and in inherited legacies, has addressed — and continues to address — the seemingly inescapable issue of the other and of exclusion. Far from being neutral, architecture structures social life, guides the use of resources and shapes urban futures. Through its forms and tools, it reflects and enacts spatial policies and power relations, influencing access to heritage, culture, and care—ultimately shaping how society perceives and engages with alterity. This role and responsibility are often underestimated.

Also Michel Foucault, while acknowledging the spatial dimension of power—especially in psychiatric settings—paid limited attention to the person who designs space: the architect. When questioned about the political potential of architecture³,  Foucault considered its influence minor, subordinate to that of physicians, priests, or administrators. He added, with disillusionment, that “there are no liberatory machines.”Thus, architecture often remains relegated to a pre-political realm, its social and discriminatory effects ignored, even by law⁴.

A rare exception, at least in Italy, is found in the 1978 Law 180, which explicitly prohibited the construction of psychiatric hospitals⁵:  one of the few instances in which an architectural typology was outlawed due to its inherently exclusionary nature.

Although the abolition of some isolated institutions, the “wall” as a device of separation and segregation has not disappeared from our gaze or even from our relational landscape: it has only taken on new forms. In the field of mental health, invisible barriers still continue to divide the “inside” from the “outside,” the so-called normal from the abnormal, in the form of stigma—a symbolic mark still borne by those with psychological suffering.

There is also a widespread form of invisible exclusion embedded in the urban fabric through hostile architecture: design elements and furnishings intended to discourage the presence of bodies or behaviors deemed inappropriate—particularly those of homeless individuals—thus pushing them out of public space.

Despite the celebratory rhetoric surrounding “inclusion” in public discourse, the term often risks becoming hollow when reduced to a slogan. Inclusion implies a complex set of strategies aimed at embracing and valuing difference, but it also necessitates concrete choices—about which differences to recognize. Herein lies its ambiguity. It is telling that “exclusive,” that is, the antonym of “inclusive,” often bears positive connotations—elegance, prestige, desirability. Gated communities exemplify this contradiction: contemporary heterotopias where privilege is preserved through segregation.

In architectural practice, another risk lies in outsourcing inclusion to narrow disciplinary domains—for example, relegating it to accessibility standards for people with disabilities. Reducing inclusion to a matter of technical compliance reflects an overly simplified view of difference, stripping it of its social and civic implications. What is lost is architecture’s deeper responsibility: to express, represent, and give dignity and visibility to differences and vulnerabilities in public space.

When the project engages with these issues, it may provoke fears of “disciplinary transgression”—of becoming “too sociological.” But this remains—and must remain—architecture. The question is not whether these themes belong to architecture, but what role architecture can and must play in addressing them. 

Key figures of the discipline, during periods of institutional upheaval, have assumed this responsibility, demonstrating that architecture cannot remain neutral or indifferent but must “keep pace with major social transformations”⁶. 

In 1978, the journal Hinterland devoted a monographic issue titled Segregation and the Social Body⁷  to exclusionary spaces such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals, facilities for the disabled, and elder care homes, adopting a common and transdisciplinary lens.

In the editorial, Guido Canella identified three adjectives to describe architecture’s potential stance toward these realities: propositive, autonomous, and dialectical. He called for dialogue across disciplines and institutions, asserting a central role for design in imagining alternatives to exclusion. Canella also spoke of collective reappropriation of spaces and themes of exclusion.

The term “inclusion” was not in vogue at the time, yet this concept closely aligns with what was then framed as collective responsibility toward conditions of vulnerability and dependence.

To architecture, and to its capacity to express and transmit values, falls the task of materializing and representing the collective act of care.

Today, in a vastly different cultural and historical context, the transformation of decommissioned exclusionary spaces—psychiatric hospitals, prisons, reformatories—into shared heritage is neither simple nor uncontentious. Yet this very difficulty can foster a new system of values capable of confronting contemporary exclusion without rhetorical detachment.

This is a complex legacy, since in these spaces the very idea of community has been negated. Such spaces reveal how communities define themselves—who they include and who they exclude, ostensibly in the name of the “common good.” Reimagining them as common goods requires communities to interrogate themselves, their contradictions, and their ability—both symbolically and concretely—to make space for the other.

The regeneration of such sites differs from that of typical urban brownfields. It is not merely about reactivating built heritage or returning abandoned areas to the public. Here, the project must engage with a memory of exclusion inscribed into the place and with the imperative to resignify space.

Former psychiatric hospitals and prisons are emblematic spaces of separation—between a reassuring, normative “us” and a perceived deviant or dangerous “them.” These are sites that reflect the past but in which current dynamics remain visible—especially the fragility of belonging to that “us”: a diagnosis or a social origin is enough to forfeit rights and legitimacy.

Each prison reflects society’s ambivalent and often contradictory relationship with its most vulnerable or troubling members. This produces a stigma that also taints the physical space, consigning it to symbolic contamination and urban oblivion (damnatio memoriae).

Yet such places can become shared heritage—if returned to the community not as neutral containers, but as repositories of critical memory and platforms for new social processes.

In this case, restitution is twofold: first, as the reintegration into the urban fabric of spaces condemned to marginality and oblivion by their own histories; second, as a restitutio textus—an interpretative act that reconstructs, reinterprets, and conjectures new uses. In this sense, architecture becomes a tool for reading and transformation: a scaffolding upon which collective practices and social experimentation can grow—practices capable of resisting the binary and pathological logic of “us” versus “them,” which architecture itself has too often helped construct.

This is an opportunity to reimagine spaces whose institutional function has ended, closed in the name of hard-won rights and politics, and which architecture must now open to the community to safeguard rights never fully guaranteed.

The pressing question today is how to design an architecture that counters exclusion, in a world still more inclined to build walls than bridges. Certain institutions—prisons, nursing homes, migrant centers—cannot simply be abolished. They require architectural approaches that sustain their highest aims: rehabilitation, care, and hospitality. Otherwise, they risk degenerating into spaces of segregation and marginalization.

The history of asylums shows how their descent from places of care to sites of abandonment and abuse coincided with the marginalization of the architect’s role—reduced to mere executor of disciplinary psychiatric reasonings or bureaucratic logic⁸. 

This history warns us: architecture cannot retreat from spaces of exclusion. Rather, it must maintain the critical, autonomous, and propositive stance advocated by Canella. This means not relegating design to a purely technical or specialist function, but asserting a cultural and civic role, capable of questioning and transforming spatial dispositifs.

Mauro Palma, former National Ombudsman for People Deprived of Liberty, urges us to rethink the architectural device of separation—the wall—not as a “signal” of otherness or stigma, but as an “object” with a specific function, to be transformed through systems of connection with the outside. Heterotopias must also interrogate those who remain outside, destabilizing the certainties of the so-called normal world, and “sowing doubt within our unconscious, self-sufficient well-being.” The outside, after all, is not innocent—it actively participates in constructing the separation, “it is the builder itself”⁹. 

Vittorio Gregotti, citing the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, affirmed that “Architecture, while autonomous, is also bound to purpose; it cannot deny people as they are, even if, by virtue of its autonomy, it must”¹⁰. 

Architecture must engage with human reality as it is—without ceasing to pursue what it might become. For Gregotti, the discipline’s task is to confront this tension and translate it into design¹¹. 

If cities and societies still seek to identify their scapegoat—their pharmakos—to declare themselves “healthy,” then we can envision an architecture of resistance to that logic. An architecture that refuses to be a merely technical or functional tool, and instead embraces its critical and cultural responsibility.

This also requires overcoming the misconception of disciplinary autonomy as detachment or individualism. Following Palma’s call, we may imagine heterotopias—spaces of deviation and marginality— as thresholds of reflection, capable of opening fissures toward a possible utopia.