Natalie Novik

About Natalie Novik

I am a spatial practitioner, researcher, maker, and educator working at the intersection of urban studies, speculative design, and artistic research. At the core of my practice is a central question: How do we live together? I came to artistic research from a different disciplinary background. Trained as an architect and urban planner, I hold a Master’s degree in Design and Planning Beyond Sustainability from Chalmers University of Technology and have worked professionally in both fields. In my work, I investigate how space is produced beyond the boundaries of formal institutions and professional constraints—particularly through self-organised groups, informal initiatives, and alternative forms of spatial practice. I explore the role of self-organisation in reimagining the use and value of living environments in both urban and rural contexts. My research engages with critiques of neoliberal urban conditions that produce homogenised environments and social exclusion. I am particularly interested in how unwanted, abandoned, or neglected architectures can become grounds for collective reimagining, experimentation, and new forms of common life.

Since 2018, I have worked with dialogue processes for urban development projects, often using games and participatory tools as methods of engagement. Through principles of urban curating, I develop prototypes for co-design methods that support collective design processes. More importantly, I see these tools as forms of amplification—helping underrepresented and nomadic presences in the city to become visible, heard, and spatially recognised.

As a researcher within an artistic research program, I am invested in exploring the intersections between urban studies, architectural humanities, and artistic methodologies. My work seeks to investigate the distinctive forms of knowledge production that artistic practices, rooted in experimentation, imagination, and situated engagement, can contribute to the discourse on spatial practices. 

Currently I am enrolled in a doctoral programme in artistic research at HDK-Valand. My PhD research project explores how environments discarded by the progress-driven development process are activated and sustained as community spaces through ethics of maintenance work. My intention is to understand the practice of urban commoning conducted by non-architects.

PhD project 

Across diverse contexts and forms, self-organised cultural initiatives boldly assert their presence in reclaiming urban spaces through practice of commoning. Despite this, their contributions remain largely unacknowledged within architectural historiography. This study is focused on, but not limited to, members of Trans European Halles (TEH), a network for independent cultural centres, which originated in Belgium in 1983 as a means to establish connections among cultural venues housed within abandoned industrial sites throughout Europe. 

This project asks what are new ethical perspectives for the design professions in the emerging era of post extractivist thinking. Working closely with self-organised cultural initiatives, I am to unravel their role in shaping living environments; their in-between position socially and geographically; the oftentime need to operate in nomadic ways due to frequent relocations; occupying unwanted leftover places, filling in the gaps and voids in the built environment and taking care of unwanted architecture; and mostly importantly their role in production of commons. This research places emphasis on the ethics of care and the practices of maintenance, especially as a form of critical engagement that challenges the social and political norms of rough neoliberal urban development projects.

The theoretical framework draws from spatial theory, queer-femeisnt studies, degrowth driven approaches to community organising and political economy of labour. Employing methodologies such as participatory action research and drawing upon the framework of critical theory and queer-femsint studies, I use ficto-critical and speculative methods, counter-mapping and walking/movement techniques, employing both literary and visual tools in my work. 

My research interest include:

-self-organisation and social movements, specifically intentional communities

-degrowth and alternative economies in a framework of critical organisational studies

-commons, practices of commoning, and collective living

-histories of labour and production and reproduction of space

-queer-feminist studies, feminist post-humanities, new materialism

-ethics of care

Pedagogical work

In 2024, I proposed and developed the elective course Spatial Activism, taught to first-year master’s students across the programmes of fine art, design, embedded design, craft, film, and photography. The course is closely connected to my ongoing research on self-organised spatial practices and invites students to collectively explore, through their respective artistic practices, what it means to work spatially and what such work entails in public, common context. By engaging with theories from spatial theory, critical geography and queer-feminist studies, degrowth and diverse economies, students examine the relationships between space, labour, societal networks, designed city, and one another.

My pedagogical methods combine spatial analysis, participatory methods, processes of dialogue building, inventive mapping, and systemic thinking with relational and embodied approaches such as walking, witnessing, hosting, assembling and sensory engagement. I encourage students to connect deeply with the contexts and communities they work within, developing practices that are situated, responsive, relational, and socially engaged.

Over the years, I have been deeply engaged with various forms of informal education and working in an independent cultural sector. My work has been presented at international conferences and seminars; I have been invited to lecture and hold workshops at both universities and self-organised spaces. For example, in 2024 I was invited as a tutor at the Summer School Spatial Activism at the VARES Architectural Residency. Together with an interdisciplinary group of artists and architects, we explored the border town of Valga—shared by Estonia and Latvia—through the concept of urban interstices, investigating the unseen and overlooked spaces of the city.