All rights reservedIossifova, Deljana2024-08-202024-08-202010978-83-7493-570-8https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14235/1868Book of proceedings: Urban change : The prospect of transformationDuring the years that I spent working as an architect, I often found myself struggling to maintain a last shred of professional integrity; the realisation that I was making a living from the continuous invention of potential future scenarios in the form of speedily produced designs of all varieties and scales – solely based on information conveyed to me in semi-professional briefs produced by up-and-coming developers or recent government officials with very particular interests – left me perplexed and devoid of answers to plaguing questions. Did being an architect, I was wondering, make me complicit in the methodical production and reproduction of the kind of socioeconomic processes that, under different circumstances, I would be committed to actively combat? Was I prepared to bear the responsibility for the possible social, economic, and environmental repercussions of my seemingly innocent practice as an architect? In view of questions like these, I chose to stop being a full-time architect for a while and shift the focus of my activities from the incessant production of random designs to the slightly slower pace and remoteness of ‘non-action’. I treated myself to the freedom of being a full-time researcher, instead (or rather, it was the Japanese Ministry of Education that treated me with that option by awarding me a Monbukagakusho Scholarship). Shanghai – where I had lived and worked over the last few years, and the city that I had learned to love – would serve as the setting for my research, its extremes so blatantly apparent.EnglishopenAccessconferenceObject68-75