Drawing on our new book Nonsolution, we will expand on this concept of actively refusing, yet aiming at, solutions in planning, building and politics at large. In understanding social issues, especially problems of space and property, we are today faced with ideological discourses of “solutionism” that reduce strategies to technical matters, leaving existing power relations unquestioned. Focusing on irreducible contexts and consequences of solutions, but at the same time dissatisfied with a certain orthodoxy of ambiguity, we offer nonsolution as a radical democratic approach to the problem of solutions. Coined by sociologist, historian and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer, nonsolution opens a conceptual field for mapping out forms which include countertendencies and conflicts pointing beyond their definitions. We will discuss this with examples from architecture and urban planning (e.g. a Vienna “non-building plan”), from social struggles and political theory (connecting movements and institutions), and from mainstream movies (e.g. Jordan Peele’s social thriller Us).

Gabu Heindl is professor and head of the department Architecture Cities Economies at the University of Kassel. As an architect and planner, she runs the Vienna-based studio GABU Heindl Architektur. In her building practice as well as in her research and publications, she focusses on housing, on public space and on wealth distribution and divisions of labor, also on justice regarding migration and the climate crisis in architecture and urban planning. Among her recent books is the monograph Stadtkonflikte – Urban Conflicts on Radical Democracy in Architecture and Planning (2020).

Drehli Robnik is a Vienna-based essayist and theorist in matters of politics, film and history; he is also an edutainer and disk-jockey. He has co-edited books on Siegfried Kracauer, on X-Men and (with Joachim Schätz) on male violence in domestic thrillers. He has written monographs on anti-nazi-resistance, Jacques Rancière, Kontrollhorrorkino, and pandemic cinema. His recent monographs are Ansichten und Absichten (on popular film and politics, ed. Alexander Horwath, 2022) and Flexibler Faschismus on Siegfried Kracauer’s analyses of right-wing mobilization then and now (2024).