The Routledge Companion to Architecture and Social Engagement 9781138889699, 9781315712697

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The Routledge Companion to Architecture and Social Engagement

Socially engaged architecture involves a blend of practices and principles committed to refocusing the profession away from its market-driven proclivities towards new forms of altruism and activism: prompting an increased emphasis upon participatory, egalitarian and emancipatory pedagogies. The Routledge Companion to Architecture and Social Engagement offers a critical enquiry of socially engaged architecture’s current context characterized by socio-economic inequity, climate change, war, increasing global poverty, microfinance, the evolving notion of professionalism, the changing conception of public, and finally the growing academic interest in re-visioning the social role of architecture. Organized around case studies from the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Rwanda, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Nepal, Pakistan, Iran, Thailand, Germany, Australia, Taiwan, and Japan, the book documents the most important recent developments in the field. By examining diverse working methods and philosophies of socially engaged architecture, the book shows how socially engaged architecture is entangled in the global politics of poverty, reconstruction of the public sphere, changing role of the state, charity, and neoliberal urbanism. The book presents debates around the issue of whether architecture actually empowers the participators and alleviates socio-economic exclusion or if it instead indirectly sustains an exploitive capitalism. Bringing together a range of theories and case studies, this companion offers a platform to facilitate future lines of inquiry in education, research, and practice. Farhan Karim is an assistant professor at the University of Kansas and the author of Modernism of Austerity: Designing an Ideal Home for the Poor. His current research focuses on the involvement of Euro-American architects in Pakistan (1947–1971). His research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Aga Khan Fellowship, Mellon-Volkswagen Fellowship, and Australian Leadership Award.

The Routledge Companion to Architecture and Social Engagement

Edited by Farhan Karim

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Farhan Karim to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested. ISBN: 978-1-138-88969-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-71269-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures ix List of Contributors xiii xvi Notes on Contributors Forewordxxvi Jeremy Till Acknowledgementsxxix Preface: Monumentality and Insurgency xxx Arvind Rajagopal Introduction: Architecture and Social Engagement Farhan Karim Postscript: How and When Was Architecture Socially Engaged? Simon Sadler

xxxiii xxxviii

PART I

Engagement as Discourse

1

  1 What If . . . or Toward a Progressive Understanding of Socially Engaged Architecture Tatjana Schneider

3

  2 Understanding Social Engagement in Architecture: Toward Situated-Embodied and Critical Accounts Isabelle Doucet

14

  3 Toward an Architecture of the Public Good Tom Spector

27

  4 Radical Democracy and Spatial Practices Tahl Kaminer

37

v

Contents

PART II

Targets of Engagement

47

  5 Retracing the Emergence of a Human Settlements Approach: Designing in, From and With Contexts of Development Viviana d’Auria

49

  6 The United Nations and Self-Help Housing in the Tropics Nancy Kwak   7 Tracing the History of Socially Engaged Architecture: School Building as Development Aid in Postcolonial Sub-Saharan Africa Kim De Raedt   8 The Opera Village Africa: Christoph Schlingensief and His Social Sculpture Susanne Bauer   9 Seeking Appropriate Methods: The Role of Public-Interest Design Advocacy in the High Himalaya Carey Clouse

64

71 87

102

PART III

Structures of Engagement

115

10 Reconceiving Professionalism in the Twenty-First Century Nils Gore

117

11 The Aga Khan Award for Architecture and Social Engagement via the Built Environment Mehreen Chida-Razvi and Mohammad Gharipour 12 Sale Ends Soon: Epistemological Alternatives to Flying Architects Ijlal Muzaffar 13 Creating the Environment for Social Engagement: The Experience of Venezuela Carlos Reimers

126 143

155

PART IV

Subjects of Engagement

167

14 Housing for Spatial Justice: Building Alliances Between Women Architects and Users Ipek Türeli

169

vi

Contents

15 Children’s Engagement in Design: Reflections From Research and Practice Matluba Khan 16 The Garden of Liberation: Emptiness and Engagement at Suan Mokkh, Chaiya Lawrence Chua 17 The Darker Side of Social Engagement Yutaka Sho

186

201 215

PART V

Tectonics of Engagement

231

18 A Comparative History of Live Projects Within the United States and the UK: Key Characteristics and Contemporary Implications Harriet Harriss

233

19 The Do-It-Your(Self ): The Construction of Social Identity Through DIY Architecture and Urbanism Cathy Smith

243

20 Building the Unseen: A Shift to a Socially Engaged Architecture Education R. Todd Ferry

257

PART VI

Environmental Engagement

269

21 Umdenken Umschwenken: Environmental Engagement and Swiss Architecture Kim Förster

271

22 Material Participation and the Architecture of Domestic Autonomy Lee Stickells

289

23 Salvage Salvation: Counterculture Trash as a Cultural Resource Greg Castillo

306

PART VII

Mapping Engagement

323

24 Marginality, Urban Conflict and the Pursuit of Social Engagement in Latin American Cities Felipe Hernández

325

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Contents

25 Understanding Public Interest Design: A Conceptual Taxonomy Joongsub Kim

337

26 Architecture Before 3.11: Unspoken Social Architecture During the Blank 25 Years of Japan Tamotsu Ito

350

27 The Reciprocity Between Architects and Social Change: Taiwan Experience After the 1990s Chun-Hsiung Wang

366

28 Transforming the Spatial Legacies of Colonialism and Apartheid: Participatory Practice and Design Agency in Southern Africa Iain Low

380

PART VIII

Engagement in Emergency

397

29 What We Can Learn From Refugees Thomas Fisher

399

30 Displacement, Labor and Incarceration: A Mid-Twentieth-Century Genealogy of Camps Anoma Pieris 31 Are Architects the Last People Needed in Disaster Reconstruction? Mojgan Taheri Tafti and David O’Brien 32 Architecture Without Borders? The Globalization of Humanitarian Architecture Culture Shawhin Roudbari

413 429

441

Index449

viii

Figures



2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 5.1

5.2

5.3

5.4

7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6

8.1 8.2

8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6

Wall tapestries designed for the Jonction 4 × 4 exhibition Wall tapestries designed for the Jonction 4 × 4 exhibition San Francisco Federal Building San Francisco City Hall The use of human settlements as a reference term epitomizing a shift from a purely economic idea of housing to a holistic approach inclusive of housing is illustrated by UN publications devoted to the Africa region dating respectively from 1965 and 1976 C. A. Doxiadis, founder of ekistics, the science of human settlements, based his con-disciplinary approach on a comparative understanding of morphologies that could be synthesized to achieve an evolutionary anatomy of human settlements In their seminal publication, Caminos, Steffian and Turner compared settlement structures from both rapidly urbanizing and ‘developed’ contexts by means of a systematic trans-scalar documentation at different scales Christopher Alexander’s final entry for the UN PREVI competition would be based on the study of sixty-seven patterns enabling the design of a double-coded urban architecture merging ‘formal’ with ‘informal’ fabrics Load-bearing structure for the primary schools in Niger, built with prefabricated steel elements Image of a completed school. KPDV, rural primary school building project, Niger, 1962 Nigerien laborers producing the mud and cement bricks on the building site Floor plan of the school, showing the decoupling of the metal structure and the brick walls. KPDV, rural primary school building project, Niger, 1962 Image of a rural primary school under construction in Burkina Faso View of the school showing the layout and composition of the building: a concatenation of barrel vaults of varying heights, with a claustrum at the head end of each unit. UNESCO Regional Office for Education in Africa (BREDA), Agriculture school, Nianing, Senegal, 1977 Opera Village Africa aerial view Early project sketch of the snail-like master plan of the Opera Village with the Festival Hall in the center School buildings at Opera Village Africa Hospital: Centre de Santé et de Promotion Sociale (CSPS) School life School children experimenting with cameras

20 21 28 35

50

52

56

58 74 75 77 78 79

82 88 90 92 93 96 98

ix

Figures

9.1 Early morning foundation work on a French-funded school for 103 nuns in Tungri, Zanskar 9.2 Looking across the Zanskar Valley in June. This pass can be closed eight months 107 out of each year, from October to May 9.3 A village stakeholder reads the booklet that has been prepared by visiting 109 designers to explain their vision 9.4 The ceiling material at Zangla’s solar school incorporates small pieces of locally 110 sourced willow, or talu 9.5 A foreign architect and funder meet with stakeholders to discuss goals at the 112 nunnery in Tungri 11.1 Agricultural Training Centre, Nianing, Senegal 133 11.2 Khuda-ki-Basti Incremental Development Scheme, Hyderabad, Pakistan 135 11.3 Revitalization of Birzeit Historic Centre, Bir Zayt, Palestine 137 12.1 Cover shot of Rem Koolhaas and Bregtje van der Haak’s Lagos Wide and Close: An Interactive Journey Into an Exploding City147 12.2 Cover for MoMA exhibition catalogue Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities148 13.1 Conventional housing sector structure (before 1989) 156 13.2 Conventional housing model (no social engagement) 157 13.3 Existing housing sector and flow of their relationships 158 13.4 Proposed housing sector and its relationships 158 13.5 Proposed housing model 159 13.6 Proposed structure of the housing sector 159 14.1 Women’s School of Planning and Architecture participants forming a woman symbol, 1975 171 14.2 Introductory session of the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, St. Francis College, Biddeford, Maine, August 10, 1975 172 14.3 “174 Camp Street,” a triple-decker renovated and converted into rental units for low-income people by Women’s Development Corporation in Providence, Rhode Island, next to its “before and after” plan layouts featured in Joseph Giovanni, “Planning New Living Spaces for the Nontraditional Family,” The New York Times (Thursday, September 20, 1984), C10 175 14.4 Identification of fasteners for Katrin Adam’s core course “Demystification of Tools,” Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, August 1975 179 14.5 Apartment plan configuration produced at a participatory design workshop held by Women’s Development Corporation in 1979 181 14.6 Participatory design workshop held in 1979. Katrin Adam overlooking two participants working on their ideal plan diagrams 182 15.1 Children in Bangladesh are drawing what they want to have in their school ground 194 15.2 Model making was child-directed and shared decisions with adults 195 15.3 Children making playground equipment for the model 196 15.4 The model of the school ground children would like to have 197 15.5 Children are carrying bricks to the site of the amphitheatre in a government primary school in Bangladesh 198 16.1 Rong Mohorosop Tang Winnyan or Spiritual Theater, Suan Mokkh (Chaiya, c. 1962–1972 ce)204 16.2 Reua Tham or Dhamma Boat, Suan Mokkh (Chaiya, c. 1962–1972 ce)205 16.3 Reua Yai or Big Boat, Suan Mokkh (Chaiya, c. 1962–1972 ce)206 16.4 Interior of the Spiritual Theater 208 x

Figures

16.5 Five khandhas on the main gate to Suan Mokkh 211 16.6 The Buddhadasa Indapañño Archives or Suan Mokkh in Bangkok (Arsom Silp, 2009–2010) 212 17.1 A conversation on reconciliation, PIASS, Huye 219 17.2 Sofia’s house, Kirehe district 221 17.3 Theodore’s house, Kirehe district 223 17.4 REACH’s construction site, Kirehe district 226 19.1 Fence Parasite (2014–2015), Newcastle, Australia, by Cathy Smith and Rowan Olsson 248 19.2 Conditions and Speculations (2014), an exhibition of work by the students of the Master of Architecture, The Emporium, Renew Newcastle 250 19.3 The 33 Degrees South Soap Factory in the same space (2015) 251 19.4 The Contessa café fitout, Brisbane (2016) 252 20.1 POD Initiative diagram 261 20.2 Three CPID Pods: (L) Trot Pod, (M) Cocoon Pod, (R) NW Pod 262 20.3 Students at work, designing and building the Trot Pod 263 20.4 Interior of the Trot Pod (L) and the NW Pod (R) 264 21.1 Catalog cover (design: Bill Schäfer) for the first edition of the exhibition catalog (AGU 1975a) 273 21.2 An “eco-labyrinth” as the entrance to “Umdenken Umschwenken” 277 21.3 Devices for a laying battery, promising animal-friendly conditions 278 21.4 Different solar panels exhibited in the main hall of ETH 281 21.5 Cover design for the exhibition catalog for “Umdenken Umschwenken” in the second edition (AGU 1975b) 283 21.6 Cover design for the exhibition catalog for “Umdenken Umschwenken” in the German edition by Achberger (AGU 1977) 285 22.1 Students lunching at the autonomous house construction site, 1974 290 22.2 Autonomous house under construction in late 1974. Michael Muir, one of the student builders, stands in the doorway 292 22.3 Filled beer bottles being laid by Fraser Clark (a visiting student from 294 New Zealand) and Linda Haefeli 22.4 Methane digester under construction, c. 1975 295 22.5 The bathroom, c. 1978 297 22.6 Utopian Fair: 27–28 May 1978 300 23.1 Curtis Schreier, Freestone chart of Bay Area design activism, “Advertisements for a Counter Culture,” Progressive Architecture, July 1970 307 23.2 “Educational Environments—Play Sculpture,” Big Rock Candy Mountain: Resources for Our Education (Sam Yanes, editor), Winter 1970 310 23.3 James Campe, “Trash Can Do It,” Farallones Designs poster, c. 1969 314 23.4 “The Arc” communal room and drafting studio under construction, UC Berkeley “Outlaw Builder Studio,” Inverness, California, 1972 316 23.5 Gordon Ashby, “New Possibilities Show” poster for the California Office of Appropriate Technology (OAT), 1977 318 26.1 Individual investors ratio among OECD countries 354 26.2 One sample of Dame-kenchiku in Made in Tokyo, titled “Park-on-Park” 356 26.3 An example of an actor network map, drawn for a project called 1K358 26.4 A hyper linear design process of a Building K project 360 26.5 A hyper linear design process of a Tsurugashima-lab project 361 26.6 Discussions with students and the local community through a physical model 362 xi

Figures

27.1 Kuan-Yin-Ting Youth Activity Center in Penghu, 1984 27.2 The map of the first vascular bundle project, 1995–2008 27.3 The first vascular bundle project: Yilan Social Welfare Center on the left, the West Bank Bridge in the center and the Jin-Mei Parasitic Pedestrian Pathway on the right 27.4 New Moat, 2010–2013 27.5 Thao Tribe Resettlement Community, 2000 27.6 Collaborative construction led by Ying-Chun Hsieh in Lipin Village, Chima Township of Sichuan Province, China, 2008 28.1 NBRI to RDP housing approach: participation as contestation of the one-size-fits-all modernist approach 28.2 PHP: Victoria Mxenge Migrant Women’s group save and self-build settlement Cape Town 28.3 VPUU: before-after, active box and urban park: Harare, Khayelitsha 28.4 VPUU: Emthonjeni waterplaces as sociocultural infrastructure in the informal sector 28.5 TSRP: tell-the-tale detail and typologies demonstrating local with user participation, Lesotho 28.6 TSRP: multiple manifestations of the spatial and tectonic potential of the system, Lesotho 29.1 Aerial view of Za’atri Refugee Camp, Syria 29.2 Refugees living on the Canal St. Martin in Paris 29.3 Dadaab refugee camp 29.4 Unloading refugee bus in Afghanistan 29.5 Refugees outside of Johannesburg 30.1 “Cheap Auto Camp Housing for Citrus Workers” by Dorothea Lange, Tulare County, California, February 1940 30.2 Manzanar Relocation Center, Manzanar, California. Barrack homes at this War Relocation Authority center 30.3 United States: Farm Security Administration camp, Tulare: general plan of property scale, Vernon DeMars, FF33, College of Environmental Design Archives, UC Berkeley 30.4 Aerial view of Tulare Assembly Center, California, c. 1942 30.5 Manzanar Relocation Center, California 30.6 Aerial view of Seabrook Farms. Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center 31.1 Housing project abandoned by the target population. Bojnurd earthquake housing reconstruction 31.2 People covered the windows for privacy because they are close to the main road. Sheikh village, Ardebil 31.3 During the reconstruction people did not construct the unnecessary and costly elements in plans. The left-hand plan is designed by an architect in Bam and the right-hand plan is the implemented one

xii

369 371

373 374 376 377 383 386 388 389 392 393 401 402 404 406 409 415 416

419 420 422 424 431 432

435

Contributors

Viviana d’Auria

Isabelle Doucet

Assistant Professor in International Urbanism at the Department of Architecture, KU Leuven, Belgium

Senior Lecturer School of Environment, Education and Development The University of Manchester

Susanne Bauer

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, Brazil Greg Castillo

Associate Professor of Architecture, College of Environmental Design University of California Berkeley Mehreen Chida-Razvi

Research Associate in the Department of the History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS, the University of London in London. Assistant Editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture Lawrence Chua

Assistant Professor School of Architecture Syracuse University Carey Clouse

Assistant Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture School of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning University of Massachusetts Amherst

R. Todd Ferry

Research Associate and Faculty Fellow, Center for Public Interest Design Portland State University Thomas Fisher

Professor, Director of the Minnesota Design Center, and Dayton Hudson Chair in Urban Design University of Minnesota Kim Förster

Associate Director of Research Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montréal Mohammad Gharipour

Associate Professor School of Architecture and Planning Morgan State University Nils Gore

Professor School or Architecture and Design The University of Kansas

Kim De Raedt

Harriet Harriss

Assistant Academic Stuff Department of Architecture and Urban Planning University of Ghent

Senior Tutor Interior Design Royal College of Art, London xiii

Contributors

Felipe Hernández

David O’Brien

Senior University Lecturer Fellow of King’s College Director of Studies for Christ’s College and King’s College University of Cambridge

Senior Lecturer Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning The University of Melbourne Anoma Pieris

Tamotsu Ito

Architect, and Design + Research Assistant at ETH Zurich

Associate Professor Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning The University of Melbourne

Tahl Kaminer

Senior Lecturer in Architectural Design and Theory School for Architecture and Landscape Architecture The University of Edinburgh

Arvind Rajagopal

Professor Media, Culture and Communication New York University Carlos Reimers

Assistant Professor, School of Architecture and Design The University of Kansas

Assistant Professor School of Architecture and Planning The Catholic University of America

Matluba Khan

Shawhin Roudbari

Assistant Professor Bangladesh University of Architecture and Technology

Assistant Professor Program in Environmental Design University of Colorado Boulder

Joongsub Kim

Simon Sadler

Professor College of Architecture and Design Lawrence Technological University, Southfield

Professor of Design University of California Davis, Arts

Farhan Karim

Tatjana Schneider Nancy Kwak

Associate Professor Department of History University of California San Diego

Senior Lecturer School of Architecture The University of Sheffield Yutaka Sho

Iain Low

School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics University of Cape Town, South Africa

Assistant Professor School of Architecture Syracuse University Cathy Smith

Ijlal Muzaffar

Assistant Professor History of Art + Visual Culture Rhode Island School of Design

xiv

Senior Lecturer School of Architecture and Built Environment The University of Newcastle

Contributors

Tom Spector

Jeremy Till

Professor School of Architecture Oklahoma State University

Professor and Pro Vice-Chancellor University of the Arts, London, Central Saint Martins

Lee Stickells

Ipek Türeli

Associate Professor Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning The University of Sydney

Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Architecture of Spatial Justice School of Architecture McGill University

Mojgan Taheri Tafti

Chun-Hsiung Wang

Assistant Professor Faculty of Urban Planning University of Tehran

Professor Department of Architecture University of Shih Chien University

xv

Notes on Contributors

Viviana d’Auria is Assistant Professor in International Urbanism at the Department of Architecture, KU Leuven (Belgium), and NWO Rubicon research fellow at the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands). Her dissertation, titled ‘Developing Urbanism in Development: Five Episodes in the Making of the Volta River Project (1945–1976)’, explored the epistemological contribution of development aid to the discipline of urbanism through the lens of a large-scale river basin development project in sub-Saharan Africa’s first independent country. Exploring ‘practiced’ and ‘lived-in’ architecture is an integral part of her research within a more general interest in the transcultural construction of cities and their contested spaces. She is co-editor of Water Urbanisms (SUN, 2008) and Human Settlements: Formulations and (re)Calibrations (SUN Academia, 2010). Viviana is also an active participant in the Network-Association of European Researchers on Urbanisation in the South (N-AERUS) and teaches core courses for the Master of Architecture and Human Settlements and Master of Urbanism and Strategic Planning (Dept. of Architecture, KU Leuven). Susanne Bauer received her diploma in architecture from the University of Applied Sciences Augsburg in Germany, a Master of Arts in Histories and Theories of Architecture from the Architectural Association in London, and a PhD from The London Consortium, where she undertook research on the color white in modern architecture. She was Visiting Scholar at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York, Visiting Scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and Postdoctoral Scholar at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism and Design at the Federal University of Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, Brazil, where she received a scholarship from the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES). She practiced architecture in Germany, the UK, and the United States and developed research discourses on modern architecture. Greg Castillo is Associate Professor at the College of Environmental Design at the University of

California, Berkeley, and Research Associate at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has received grants and fellowships from the German Fulbright Fund, the Getty Research Institute, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Ford Foundation. His publications on Cold War design politics and practices include a monograph, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and essays in Cold War Modern: Art and Design in a Divided World, 1945–1975 (Victoria & Albert Museum, 2008) and The Politics of the Kitchen in the Cold War (MIT Press, 2008). While continuing to investigate European interwar and postwar design, he is currently also researching San Francisco Bay Area counterculture design and has contributed essays on the topic to the online journal Places and the exhibition catalogue Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (Walker Art Center, 2015).

xvi

Notes on Contributors

Mehreen Chida-Razvi is a research associate in the Department of the History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS, the University of London in London, England, and an assistant editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. She obtained her first MA degree in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, while her second MA and PhD in the History of Art and Archaeology were undertaken at SOAS. She has been the recipient of several research and travel grants, including the Opler Grant for Membership for Emerging Scholars from the Society of Architectural Historians, research and travel grants from the Barakat Trust, and the Nehru Trust-V&A India Travel Grant. Her publications include: ‘A Sultan Before the Padshah? Questioning the Identification of the Turbaned Figure in Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaykh to Kings’, in Art, Trade and Culture in the Near East and India: From the Fatimids to the Mughals, eds. A. Ohta, M. Rogers, R. Wade Haddon (The Ginko Library, 2016); ‘Where Is ‘The Greatest City in the East’?: The Mughal City of Lahore in European Travel Accounts Between 1556 and 1648’, in The City in the Muslim World: Depictions by Western Travel Writers, eds. M. Gharipour and N. Ozlu (Routledge, 2015); and ‘The Perception of Reception: The Importance of Sir Thomas Roe at the Mughal Court of Jahangir’, Journal of World History 25 (2–3) ( June/September 2014): 263–284. She has further authored numerous entries for encyclopedic resources, including Islam: A Worldwide Encyclopaedia, Sahapedia: An Online Encyclopedia of Indian Culture and Heritage, the Archnet.org Timeline, and the Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE. Lawrence Chua is a historian of the global modern built environment with an emphasis on Asian

architecture and urban culture. He is an assistant professor at the School of Architecture, Syracuse University, and was most recently a fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies in Leiden and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg. His writing has appeared in the Journal of Urban History, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, and Senses and Society. He received his PhD in the History of Architecture and Urban Development from Cornell University in 2012. Carey Clouse is Associate Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She holds a post-professional degree (SMArchS) in Architecture and Urbanism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BArch from the University of Oregon. In addition to teaching, she is co-partner of Crookedworks, an award-winning architecture firm. She served as a 2014–2016 Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Scholar in India. Kim De Raedt graduated in 2010 as a civil engineer–architect. Between 2010 and 2017, she was a

research and teaching assistant at Ghent University, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning. She recently finished a PhD project dealing with architectural production in postcolonial Africa (1960–1980). More particularly, her research focused on educational buildings realized through international development aid. Studying school architecture in Africa through this specific lens allowed her to frame the production of buildings in the so-called era of development within its wider political and economic context. This helps one to better understand the current (re-)emergence of ‘socially engaged architectures’ in Africa and beyond. Besides regular contributions to international conferences, workshops, and symposia, Kim is the author or co-author of several publications in scientific journals and books. Between 2010 and 2014, she was also part of the COST-Action ‘European Architecture Beyond Europe’, financed by the European Community. After finishing her PhD in October 2017, Kim switched to architectural practice, in order to operationalize part of her expertise gained during her academic trajectory and give it a new, contemporary dimension. Isabelle Doucet is Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on the

relationship between (urban) politics, aesthetics, and social responsibility in architecture, which she

xvii

Notes on Contributors

examines through both historical and contemporary cases. She is the author of The Practice Turn in Architecture: Brussels After 1968 (Ashgate, 2015), and co-editor, with Nel Janssens, of Transdisciplinary Knowledge Production in Architecture and Urbanism (Springer, 2011). Her current research centers on countercultural architectures in 1970s Belgium. Isabelle is currently also a researcher for the Mellon Multidisciplinary Research Project called ‘Architecture and/for the Environment’, coordinated by the Canadian Centre for Architecture. R. Todd Ferry is Associate Director and Senior Research Associate at the Center for Public Interest Design (CPID) within the Portland State University School of Architecture. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy from the University of Georgia and a Master of Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin. Before pursuing architecture, Todd worked for over a decade in the nonprofit field, including founding KIU ART, a service-learning organization working with a small community in Mwanza, Tanzania, to build classrooms and exchange ideas. His current work investigates how social needs can be addressed by architecture in underserved communities, and he seeks to develop new tools and models of engagement to aid in this effort. Recent projects at the CPID include the design of a sustainable community center in Inner Mongolia, China; a collaboration with the Portland Opera to create a mobile opera stage to bring the arts to more communities; an initiative to provide new visions for addressing homelessness in Portland through design; and a consultancy with the Sacramento Area Council of Governments to identify design and investment strategies to benefit disadvantaged neighborhoods. This work is incorporated into his teaching in architecture design studios, courses on design thinking for social innovation, public interest design seminars, and design-build initiatives. Many of these courses are part of the university’s Graduate Certificate in Public Interest Design, which he coordinates. Other research interests for which he has been awarded travel fellowships include the architecture of Rudolf Steiner in Dornach, Switzerland, the evolution of museum typology in Oxford, England, and contemporary interpretations of the Spomenik Monuments of the former Yugoslavia. Ferry is Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Sustainable Solutions and Director of the Architecture Summer Immersion Program at Portland State University. Thomas Fisher is a professor in the School of Architecture, the Dayton Hudson Chair in Urban

Design at the University of Minnesota, and the Director of the Metropolitan Design Center at the College of Design. He was recognized in 2005 as the fifth most published writer about architecture in the United States and has been recognized four times as a top design educator by the journal Design Intelligence. He has written nine books, over 50 book chapters or introductions, and over 400 articles in professional journals and major publications. His newest book, published in May by the University of Minnesota Press, is entitled Designing Our Way to a Better World. Kim Förster is an architectural historian and works as Associate Director for Research at the Canadian

Centre for Architecture, Montreal. Having studied English and American studies, geography, and pedagogy, he holds a PhD in Architecture from ETH Zurich, where from 2013 to 2015 he taught in the doctoral program at the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture. He has published in architectural magazines and journals, such as Arch+, Architectural Histories, Archithese, Bauwelt, Clog, Places, Project, werk, and bauen + wohnen, and was co-editor of An Architektur. He has collaborated on several publications with the practice common room and is currently guest editor of Candide. His manuscript on the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (New York, 1967–1985) is forthcoming. Mohammad Gharipour is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning at Morgan State University in Baltimore, USA. He obtained his master’s degree in Architecture from the

xviii

Notes on Contributors

University of Tehran and his PhD in Architecture and Landscape History from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. He has received several grants and awards, including the Hamad Bin Khalifa Fellowship in Islamic Art, the Spiro Kostof Fellowship Award from the Society of Architectural Historians, and the National Endowment in Humanities Faculty Award. Gharipour has published several books, including the following: Bazaar in the Islamic City (American University of Cairo Press, 2012), Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in Poetry, Arts and History (I.B. Tauris, 2013), Calligraphy and Architecture in the Muslim World (co-edited with Irvin Schick, Edinburgh University Press, 2013), Sacred Precincts: The Religious Architecture of Non-Muslim Communities Across the Islamic World (Brill, 2014), The City in the Muslim World: Depictions by Western Travelers (co-edited with Nilay Ozlu, Routledge, 2015), Historiography of Persian Architecture (Taylor and Francis, 2015), Contemporary Urban Landscapes of the Middle East (Routledge, 2016), and Synagogues of the Islamic World (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Gharipour is the director and founding editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. Nils Gore is a licensed architect and a professor in the Architecture Department at the University of Kansas, where he focuses on community-engaged scholarship through completion of student design/ build projects in the public realm. His work has won numerous design awards, has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Batture: Amnesiascope, Cityscape and the Journal of Architectural and Planning Research and has been presented in numerous public lectures and scholarly presentations. He is a graduate of Kansas State University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and has taught at the Boston Architectural Center, Mississippi State University and the University of Kansas. Harriet Harriss (RIBA, FRSA) is a qualified architect and leads the research program in Architec-

ture at the Royal College of Art, London. Her teaching, research, and writing are largely focused upon pioneering new pedagogic models for design education as captured in Radical Pedagogies: Architectural Education & the British Tradition (2015). Her 2016 publication, A Gendered Profession, asserts the need for widening participation as a means to ensure the profession remains as diverse as the society it seeks to serve. Dr. Harriss has won various awards for teaching excellence, including a Brookes Teaching Fellowship, a Higher Education Internationalisation Award, a Churchill Fellowship and two Santander awards. Before joining the RCA, she led the MArchD in Architecture at Oxford Brookes and was appointed Principal Lecturer of Student Experience. She was most recently awarded a Clore Fellowship (2016–2017) and elected to the European Association of Architectural Education (EAAE) Council in the summer of 2017. Dr. Harriss was recently appointed to the UK Department for Education construction industry panel, and is currently working on a book that explores women’s leadership in architectural academia. Felipe Hernández is an architect and codirector of the M.Phil. in Architecture and Urban Studies. He teaches architectural and urban design, while giving courses and seminars in the theory and history of architecture and urbanism. Felipe has worked and published extensively on Latin America and other areas in the developing world, including Africa and South East Asia. Felipe is also Chair of Cities South of Cancer (CSC), an interdisciplinary research group whose members work on a wide variety of urban issues in Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. CSC collaborates with academic institutions in the United States, Latin America, and Indonesia. The group also offers internships and summer courses abroad, and operates as consultant to governmental, nongovernmental, and private organizations involved in urban research and development in cities around the world. Felipe is the author of Bhabha for Architects (Routledge, 2010) and Beyond Modernist Masters: Contemporary Architecture in Latin America (Birkhauser, 2009). He is also co-editor of Rethinking the Informal City: Critical Perspectives From Latin America (Berghahn, 2009) as well as Transculturation: Cities,

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Spaces and Architectures in Latin America (Rodopi, 2005). He is currently co-editing a second volume on Latin American informal settlements for Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Tamotsu Ito is a registered architect in Japan and currently a Design + Research Assistant, Chair of Prof. Momoyo Kaijima at ETH Zurich, where he teaches design studios and diplomas, as well as engaged in ongoing design/research projects. He received his post-professional Master’s degree in architecture in 2016 from Harvard University GSD with the Letter of Commendation, and the Bachelor of Engineering from the Department of Architecture at the University of Tokyo in 2008. His practice and researches range from furniture, residential design, to public architecture, many of which have aspects of social engagement such as school design in Japan, an art center with construction workshop engaging immigrant communities in the US, and a community house project engaging refugee communities and neighbors in Germany. Tahl Kaminer is Senior Lecturer in Architectural Design and Theory at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (University of Edinburgh). He has published the monographs Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation: The Reproduction of Post-Fordism in Late-Twentieth-Century Architecture (2011) and The Efficacy of Architecture: Political Contestation and Agency (2017), both with Routledge, and co-edited the volumes Houses in Transformation (NAi, 2008), Urban Asymmetries (010, 2011) and Critical Tools (Lettre Voilee, 2012). Tahl is a co-founder of the academic journal Footprint and co-edited three of its issues: ‘Transdisciplinary’ (issue 1); ‘Defying the Avant-Garde Logic: Architecture, Populism, and Mass Culture’ (issue 8), and ‘The Participatory Turn’ (issue 13). He completed a PhD at TU Delft. Farhan Karim is an assistant professor in the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Kansas. He received a PhD in the History of Architecture from the University of Sydney, Australia. His forthcoming book, Modernism of Austerity: Designing an Ideal Home for the Poor (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), focuses on the discursive development of housing for the urban poor and the emerging industrial workers in postcolonial India. His current research studies how the collaboration between Euro-American grants agencies and Ayub Khan’s authoritative regime cultivated a unique form of architectural modernism in postcolonial Pakistan (1947–1971). His articles and reviews have appeared in Fabrication, Planning Perspectives, Journal of Cultural Studies of Asia, International Journal of Islamic Studies, and Architectural Theory Review. His research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Aga Khan Center for Muslim Architecture at MIT, a Volkswagen fellowship, Australian Leadership Award, and various research funds from the University of Kansas. Matluba Khan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture, Bangladesh University of

Engineering and Technology. Dr. Khan received a PhD in Landscape Architecture from the University of Edinburgh, UK, in July 2017. Her PhD research project included co-design and development of a schoolyard in a government primary school in Bangladesh with children, teachers, and the community and investigated the influence of schoolyard design on children’s learning, motivation, and play. Dr. Khan received numerous awards for her research work, including the ASLA Honor Award 2017 (Student Community Services Category), EDRA Great Places Award 2016 (Place Design Category), EDRA best student paper and overall best paper award (2014), and winner of Falling Walls Lab Edinburgh 2014. She was selected as the Scottish Graduate School’s first ever Thinker in Residence to work on her research in Deveron Arts in Scotland. She co-devised an Innovative Learning Week event titled ‘Play+Design=Learning’, where children designed the open yard at the heart of Edinburgh College of Art, which won the Best Community Event Award in 2016. xx

Notes on Contributors

Joongsub Kim, PhD, AIA, AICP, Professor at Lawrence Technological University, directs its Detroit Studio (an off-campus, community-based design facility) and Master of Urban Design Program. After graduating from MIT and the University of Michigan, he focused on public interest design, and has received an ACSA/AIAS New Faculty Teaching Award; a Boston Society of Architects National Research Grant; an ACSA Collaborative Practice Award citation; a Graham Foundation Advanced Studies Grant; an NCARB Integration of Practice and Education National Grant; an AIA Michigan President’s Award; and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Knight Foundation. His work has been published in Urban Design International, Journal of Urban Design, Places, Environment & Behavior, Open House International, IN_BO, Architectural Record, and Architect. Nancy Kwak is an associate professor of history at UC San Diego. Her book A World of Homeowners:

American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid (University of Chicago Press, 2015) tells the history of American development aid after World War II. In the book, she argues American advisers urged countries around the world to embrace a peculiarly American model of homeownership, with mixed results. She is now pursuing a new project on informality in American cities in the twentieth century. Iain Low is a professor at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where he convenes postgraduate

programs in architecture. He was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome. His research interest is in space and transformation and the socio-spatiality of the post-apartheid city and its emerging typo-morphologies. As a practitioner he was Project Architect for the World Bank/GoL, where he researched and designed schools for the Training for Self Reliance Project throughout Lesotho, and has designed an award-winning reinstallation of Iziko SA Museum’s San Rock Art in Cape Town. His essays have appeared in AD|Architectural Design and the Journal of South African Architecture, and most recently he published a chapter in Representation & Spatial Practices in Urban South Africa. He is editor of the Digest of South African Architecture and the Digest of African Architecture. Ijlal Muzaffar is an assistant professor of Modern Architectural History at the Rhode Island School

of Design. He received his PhD from MIT in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art. He also holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton University and a BA in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Punjab. His work has appeared in edited volumes, biennale catalogues, and peer-reviewed journals, like Grey Room, Future Anterior, and Aggregate, an architectural history research collaborative and publishing platform, of which he is also a founding member. He is currently working on a book titled The Periphery Within: Modern Architecture and the Making of the Third World, which looks at how modern architects and planners played a critical role in shaping the discourse on Third World development and its associated structures of power after the Second World War. David O’Brien is a lecturer at Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne. He

practiced as an architect before joining the Melbourne School of Design. He has since worked in community development projects with Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, Western Australia, and Queensland and internationally in Papua New Guinea and Thailand. He coordinates the award-winning Bower Studio projects to consult, design, and build community infrastructure projects alongside community groups, government agencies, aid workers, industry partners, engineers, and sociologists. Anoma Pieris is an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning. She is an

architectural historian by training with a specialist focus on South and Southeast Asian architecture. Her interdisciplinary approach draws on history, anthropology, and geography with an additional xxi

Notes on Contributors

interest in gender studies. Her publications include Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The Trouser Under the Cloth (Routledge 2012) and Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History of Singapore’s Plural Society (University of Hawaii Press 2009). Anoma is co-author with Janet McGaw of Assembling the Centre: Architecture for Indigenous Cultures: Australia and Beyond (Routledge 2014). Arvind Rajagopal is a professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, and an

affiliate faculty in the Department of Sociology, and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, at New York University. His book Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge, 2001) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize from the Association of Asian Studies in 2003. Recent edited publications include Media and Utopia, edited with Anupama Rao (Routledge 2016) and The Indian Public Sphere (Oxford 2009). Recent articles include ‘The Emergency and the New Indian Middle Class’ in Modern Asian Studies (2011) and ‘Special Political Zone’ on the anti-Muslim violence in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociale, Paris (2011). His latest book is under contract with Duke University Press, on a global genealogy of media theory. In 2010–2011, he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. In 2016–2017 he was a senior EURIAS fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Carlos Reimers is an expert on residential environments, including minimal and emergency hous-

ing, affordable and low-cost housing, multifamily residential planning and design, and incremental and informal housing in North America, Latin America, and Asia. His practice includes residential (collective and multifamily), commercial, and corporate architecture. He has been a technical consultant on social and low-income housing for the Inter-American Development Bank and has served as senior housing advisor to many NGOs and low-income community organizations. His research interests include urban planning and design, open architecture and sustainability in housing, collective and multifamily residential planning, design and production, the future of the city, sustainable alternatives to conventional urban development, and the influence of modernism in Latin American social housing. Before joining CUArch in 2010, he taught at the University of Texas at Arlington, Texas A&M University, and Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, where he was Chair of the School of Architecture between 1997 and 2001. Reimers received a PhD from Texas A&M University, a Master of Science in Urban Studies and Planning from MIT, a Master of Architecture from McGill University, and a Bachelor of Architecture Professional Degree from Simon Bolivar University. Shawhin Roudbari studies ways design professionals around the world shape their political and pro-

fessional power. In doing so, he brings transnational perspectives to ways architects, planners, and civil engineers (as professionals engaged in the design and planning of our cities) tackle social and environmental injustice. He employs qualitative and ethnographic methods in his studies of political and community engagement. Shawhin is currently leading two federally funded projects: the first is an investigation of ways dissent is absorbed from the fringe into the mainstream of the design professions and the second is a critical inquiry into the ethics of university-based community engagement work. Shawhin is Assistant Professor in the Program in Environmental Design at the University of Colorado Boulder. He completed his PhD in Architecture at the University of California Berkeley. He has master’s degrees in Architecture and in Civil and Environmental Engineering and worked as a professional engineer for five years before pursuing his graduate research in architecture. Simon Sadler teaches the history and theory of architecture, design, and urbanism at the University

of California, Davis, where he is a professor in the Department of Design. His research examines

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ideologies of design since the mid-twentieth century, especially the roles proposed for design in political, cultural, and economic transformation. His publications include Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (MIT Press, 2005); Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism (Architectural Press, 2000, co-editor, Jonathan Hughes); The Situationist City (MIT Press, 1998); and numerous articles, chapters, and essays about American and European counterculture (see https://ucdavis.academia.edu/SimonSadler). Tatjana Schneider is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield. She received her architectural education in Germany and Scotland. She has worked in architectural practice in Germany and was a founder member of the workers’ cooperative Glasgow Letters on Architecture and Space (G.L.A.S.) and the Sheffield-based research center AGENCY. Tatjana’s work is concerned with the social and economic mechanisms of the production of the space. She understands architecture as a collaborative, empowering, and essentially political discipline. This focus takes various expressions: sometimes, it is formulated visually or in written form as critique against normative intellectual and pedagogical tendencies; in other instances, it is expressed through direct spatial interventions; and, occasionally, it takes activist dimensions. The main funded research projects she has been working on over the past years include ‘m-NAP’ (with M. Edwards), ‘Flexible Housing’ (with J. Till), ‘Spatial Agency’ (with J. Till), and ‘Right to Build’ (with A. Parvin, D. Saxby of 00:/ architecture, and C. Cerulli). Yutaka Sho is an associate professor of architecture at Syracuse University in New York, and a

partner at GA Collaborative, a nonprofit design and advocacy firm. Her investigations focus on roles of architecture in the international development industry and post-conflict reconciliation. In Rwanda GAC is constructing self-build homes while training the end users in construction skills. In 2014 GAC’s Masoro Village Project received the EDRA Great Places Award. Sho is the recipient of 2012 Arnold Brunner Grant from the American Institute of Architects New York chapter and 2007 Deborah Norden Fund research grant from the Architectural League of New York. Sho holds bachelor’s degrees in Landscape Architecture and Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design and a master’s degree in Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design. Cathy Smith is an Australian architect, interior designer, and academic. With professional and

research qualifications and experience in architecture and interior design along with a PhD in Architectural Theory and History (USyd), Cathy operates at the theory-practice nexus. She is the inaugural Turnbull Foundation Women in the Built Environment scholar at the University of New South Wales (2018–2020) and a recipient of a Richard Rogers fellowship and residency, Harvard University Graduate School of Design (fall 2018), focusing on property guardianship in London. As an academic, she has taught in the subject areas of design, history and theory, and construction at several Australian universities, including the University of Newcastle (current), the University of Queensland, and the Queensland University of Technology. Her scholarly research of DIY architecture and DIY urbanism appears in a number of international journals, including Australian Feminist Studies, Architectural Histories, Interstices, Architectural Theory Review, and IDEA. Tom Spector is a professor of architecture at Oklahoma State University. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and his professional degree from Georgia Tech and is a life fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University. He holds architectural licenses in both Georgia and California. He is the author of The Ethical Architect: The Dilemma of Contemporary Practice and more recently co-author of How Architects Write. He has published in such diverse journals as Harvard Design Magazine, Environmental Ethics, Contemporary Pragmatism, Journal of Aesthetic Education, and

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Notes on Contributors

Building Research and Information. He is the managing editor of the journal Architecture Philosophy. In recent years he has been working on the concept of the public good as the ethical basis for the architecture profession. Lee Stickells is an associate professor in Architecture at the University of Sydney. His research is

characterized by an interest in the potential for architecture to shape other ways of living, particularly its projection as a means to reconsider the terms of social life—of how we live together. It is focused on developing histories that connect experimental architectural and design strategies with environmental, political, technological, and social transformations. Lee co-edited The Right to the City (2011) and has contributed to anthologies, including The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design (2013), Beyond Utopia (2012), Trash Culture (2010), and Heterotopia and the City (2009). His essays have appeared in journals such as ARQ: Architectural Research Quarterly and Fabrications. Lee is currently an editorial committee member of the journal Architectural Theory Review and a SAHANZ Editorial Board member. Mojgan Taheri Tafti is an assistant professor at the University of Tehran, Faculty of Urban Planning. She holds a PhD from Melbourne School of Design, at the University of Melbourne. Mojgan has worked in a number of teaching, research, and operational roles in post-disaster reconstruction and housing projects for disadvantaged households in different countries, including a postdoctoral fellowship at Melbourne Social Equity Institute. Her main research interests are housing policy analysis in the context of post-disaster reconstruction, inequality, and vulnerability. Jeremy Till is an architect, educator, and writer. He is Pro Vice-Chancellor at University of the Arts London and Head of Central Saint Martins, widely considered one of the world’s leading centers for art and design education. His extensive written work includes the books Flexible Housing, Architecture Depends, and Spatial Agency, all three of which won the prestigious RIBA President’s Award for Research. His teaching and research concentrate on the social and political aspects of architecture and spatial production. As an architect, he worked with Sarah Wigglesworth Architects on their pioneering building, 9 Stock Orchard Street, winner of many awards, including the RIBA Sustainability Prize. He curated the UK Pavilion at the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale and also at the 2013 Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. Ipek Türeli is Canada Research Chair and Assistant Professor of Architecture at McGill University.

She holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of California Berkeley. Her published work focuses on visualizations of the city in photography, film, exhibitions, theme parks, and museums. She has been awarded several grants and fellowships for this work, by the Graham Foundation, the Middle East Research Competition, the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University, and the Aga Khan Fellowship at MIT. She is the co-editor of Orienting Istanbul (2010) and Istanbul Nereye? (2011), guest editor of International Journal of Islamic Architecture’s special issue ‘Streets of Protest’ (March 2013), and the author of Istanbul, Open City (2017). Dr. Türeli’s current research spans the full range of social engagement in the profession, from the longer history of humanitarian architecture, such as that of religious missionaries, to more recent efforts by contemporary designers to contribute to social movements, and is supported by FQRSC, SSHRC, and CRC. Chun-Hsiung Wang is Associate Professor in the Architecture Department of Shih Chien Univer-

sity and President of Alliance for Architectural Modernity, Taiwan. He has worked on the architectural and urban histories of modern Taiwan and their relationship with the neighboring regions with a focus on development after World War II. He is the former editor of Taiwan Architecture Magazine

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and the author of Architecture x Regionalism: 10 Architects (2016, with Sheng-Fong Lin and Wei-Jen Wang), Taipei Unveiled (2013, with Shu Chang), Romantic Realty: Exhibition of Postwar Lanyang Architecture (2011, with Tseng-Yung Wang), and Rustic and Poetic: An Emerging Generation of Architecture in Postwar Taiwan (2008, with Ming-Song Shyu). Now he is in charge of Making Places: Fieldoffice Exhibition, touring in Europe with Juhani Pallasmaa and editing the first monograph of Fieldoffice.

xxv

Foreword Jeremy Till

To talk of socially engaged architecture is surely to talk of a given. All architecture is socially engaged. Period. Architecture is nothing without the engagement of everyone involved in its production and occupation—designers, collaborators, participants and users—and this engagement is by definition social because it depends upon human interaction. One might imagine therefore that the history of architecture as process and product would be told through the story of these human interactions, and how they play out spatially. Yet the very existence of this book suggests that narratives of human life are overlooked in the official histories of architecture, and so there is a need to bring them to the surface. Indeed, it may be argued that socially engaged architecture is an irritant to the dominant discourses of architecture and, as such, something that needs to be suppressed. The reasons for this suppression are recounted through the pages of this book. First is that the history of architecture is predominately told though the history of its products as formal and aesthetic devices. While the production of these buildings at any one time is influenced by the social construction of taste, such external forces are generally discounted in order to promote a smooth, unfettered narrative of the succession of architectural forms. The second reason for the suppression of the social arises out of the first—namely, that in the concentration on the products of architecture, the processes are left largely under-described. These processes, both in what comes before the building and what comes after in terms of occupation, inevitably involve others, and this multiplicity gets in the way of the myth that the architecture is the manifestation of individual genius. The third reason—well, I could go on and on about the various reasons for the suppression of the social. I and many others have made the arguments elsewhere. More important is to make the argument as to why such a suppression is unacceptable, which is why this book is important and timely. The main issue is that in the presumed sidestepping of the social, architecture also sidesteps the political. Architecture becomes, in contemporary parlance, post-political. This is an all too convenient position for the profession to take, because it suggests that architecture is in some way a neutral act of formal production, neutral that is to the contestations of the political world. But in giving up any pretence to the political, architecture also gives up any sense of political agency. It thus leaves itself exposed and available to other controlling forces, most notably those of the neo-liberal market. Many of the essays in this book make the point that architecture has abandoned itself to the market, and with this has become complicit in the machinations and exploitations of the market. Worse than this, it has capitulated to the political forces that present themselves as post-political, most clearly those of the Trump regime and Brexit campaign. One only has to look at the disgraceful statement of support for President Trump released by the American Institute of Architects on the day after the election to see quite how compliant the profession has become to the axes of power. Most of the essays in this book were written before Trump’s election in 2016, but this astounding political event, and that of Brexit in the United Kingdom, gives added urgency to the tenets of the essays, and suggests that the arguments be extended from social engagement to a more explicit xxvi

Foreword

political activism. Although these political conditions emerged in the west, they are already having profound consequences on the rest of the world. In the face of such extreme global politics, architecture’s post-political turn looks like an abrogation of any broader societal responsibility. The normal response to a call for architecture to rediscover its social, and with it political, purpose is that architects should not take sides in the political debate. This was the reason given by the RIBA for not committing to one side in the Brexit referendum, when all the evidence pointed to remaining in the European Union as being of clear benefit to the profession. The pretence that architecture is in some way neutral in respect to political positions superficially relieves the profession of any need for engagement. Decisions are determined by the short-term demands of the client, who now too often is simply the agent of the market, and architecture is reduced to the reification of the processes of capital. But of course every mark made on a computer screen describes in one way or another a social relation. This book is a call for a realignment in the way that we understand the marks and voices of architecture as part of a broader social project. Instead of seeing a plan, section or elevation as set of compositional devices, they should always be interpreted in the context of how they will construct social and spatial relations. However, before a mark is made, the first necessity for the socially engaged architect is to engage all the voices associated with a project, and to do so in a manner that respects the different forms of knowledge that everyone brings to the table. This implies that what is at the core of socially engaged architecture is empathy—a human quality that has been squeezed out by the divisive and binary rhetoric of current politics. Empathy can be used productively, not just in a personal capacity but also in a professional one, when the relationship with others becomes a matter of mutual understanding and not of expert imposition. In turn, the development of an empathetic approach to architecture suggests a recalibration of the values and processes of architectural education. This book has a number of inspiring examples of how educators are reaching out beyond the internalized systems of the academy. Sadly, however, such expansive pedagogic practices remain the exception rather than the norm. Architectural education inevitably edits down the social context of any project: rushed site visits, often abstract briefs with no clear user or client to engage with, and compressed timescales all mitigate against development of the skills required for socially engaged architecture. In addition, the standardized diet of juries, long nights and isolation from other disciplines further consolidates the de-socialization of architecture students as they are admitted into the rituals of the tribe. A move toward a more socially engaged practice therefore needs a distinct shift in the processes, projects and ethos of architectural education. My sense is that this shift is being increasingly demanded by students, but resisted by staff, who feel comfortable in the execution of known systems of power. The second shift required is within the professional institutions. Initially these were set up as definers, defenders and developers of architectural knowledge, in order to define the discipline in distinction to others and to amateurs. With this attachment to knowledge comes an ethical responsibility, in so much as knowledge is never neutral, particularly when, as with architecture, it is played out in a social field. However, all the evidence suggests that professional bodies have more or less suspended their ethical stance, aside from very token nods to diversity, inclusivity and sustainability. It is too great a burden to expect individual professionals to always formulate their own ethical response to each condition. But it is a role that professional bodies can and should assume through the formulation of new ethical codes. This will come only through the democratic engagement of their members, and from a collective will to acknowledge the human, social and environmental consequences of architectural production. A third necessity to establish socially engaged practice is to believe that such practices are ­possible—to have hope. In the current political and economic landscape it is hard to summon up alternatives; hope is being squeezed. Capitalism’s brilliant subterfuge is to present itself as the sole possible mode of operation. The lack of ability or opportunity to think outside of the pervasive economic system limits considerations of social alternatives, and with it spatial alternatives. The xxvii

Foreword

dominance of market-led imperatives in architecture means social exchanges are defined by economic value rather than human value. But right now, as capitalism struggles to adjust from crisis to crisis, we have to allow the invention of alternatives, and acknowledge that there are other value systems beyond those of monetary gain. There is always the potential, indeed necessity, for architects to contribute to the imagining and constructing of such alternatives, because they find their shape through spatial interventions. In this light, socially engaged architecture becomes much more than a subset of architectural practice. Rather, it contributes to a wider debate as to how to escape the democratic deficit and how to imagine new ways of living.

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Acknowledgements

The idea of this book was first formed in 2013 when I organized a special panel titled Architecture’s Return to Humanist Aporia for the Society of Architectural Historians at the annual conference of College Art Association (CAA), Chicago. Initial conversation with Tom Spector, Adnan Morshed and Ijlal Muzaffar helped me to consolidate my ideas about this book. I would like to thank Aziza Chaouni for her thoughtful suggestions on the themes of this book. Special thanks to Sean Anderson and Anooradha Iyer Siddique for their advice. Many of the contributing authors of this book have participated in a symposium titled Scholarship of Social Engagement, which Farhana Ferdous, Joe Collistra, Tim Hossler and I organized at the University of Kansas in 2016 with financial support from the KU Commons. The book has greatly benefitted from the discussion that we had during the symposium. Thanks are due to Vaisali Kumar, PhD candidate, and Mahruf Kabir, graduate student at KU, for their assistance in preparing the manuscript. My sincerest thank to Farhana Ferdous, who has been central force to this project. My heartiest thanks to the prompt and efficient production team at Routledge. Since the inception to the final production, this book has been shaped and reshaped many times by argument and discussion among the authors and myself, and it is the contributors without whom this book would not be possible.

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Preface Monumentality and Insurgency Arvind Rajagopal

Monumentality as Social Engagement Sigfried Gideon has contrasted the creation of exquisite public squares and other spaces for collective life built by eighteenth-century architects with the very different situation of architecture in the nineteenth century. There was a radical break in the nineteenth century because of what he calls the Napoleonic influence. Although Napoleon Bonaparte sought to spread the message of the French Revolution across Europe, the style of the previous ruling class became the garb of legitimacy. The result was pseudo-monumentality, celebrating symbols of moribund social forms without critical revaluation. The feudal order was no more; society now made it possible for individuals to shape their own lives more than ever before. But the ways in which they imagined their lives could be completely at odds with the built spaces they navigated and the public symbols they engaged with. “Napoleon represents the model that gave the nineteenth century its form: the self-made man who became inwardly uncertain,” Gideon writes.1 From then to now, Gideon writes in his 1944 essay, pseudo-monumentality has become the rule in architecture observed by all governments. However, monumentality is an eternal need, Gideon writes. Monuments visibly join the here and now with the hereafter. They give visible form to a people’s desire for belonging, and become a symbol of their convictions. The “demand for monumentality cannot, in the long run, be suppressed. It will find an outlet at all costs,” he writes.2 If not unfashionable, the theme certainly sounds old-fashioned, and the language of symbols itself appears dated, like a kind of primitive media theory. The idea that architecture could be in tune with its times is a challenging one. Many of the monuments we still prize emerged in deeply hierarchical societies, for example. If monuments are exemplary spaces, their symbolism is not continuous with social order but exists on a different plane. Moreover, in an age over-saturated with symbolic production, how can we distinguish the truly monumental from so many other claimants to be the real thing? Gideon’s essay is valuable because it suggests that architecture can bring inner and outer life together, or nurture our sense of place in a world while shielding us from the elements. It is thus relevant for socially engaged architecture in different contexts. These are themes that, for example, Heidegger discusses in his well-known essay, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.”3 Language is the first layer of human dwelling, Heidegger observes. We inhabit the world as we shelter in a dwelling. It is not only with brick, stone and wood but first of all with words that we build and dwell, in habitations that accommodate our embodied ways of being, our habitus, which we become habituated to and cease to notice. The German Bauen, for building, originally means to dwell. This reminds us of the essential meaning of a building, and if it feels distant to us, that is a loss which we should overcome; it still xxx

Preface

calls to us, Heidegger writes. I am reminded that in Hindi and in Urdu, this intimate connection of the meanings of building and dwelling is easily accessible, but mainly for the poor. The connection between basti, which today identifies the makeshift structures where the poor live, and basna, to settle, inhabit or dwell, is well known; basti thus connotes fragility and ephemerality. The rich may dwell in homes designated as buildings or flats, names without poetry or resonance, but their occupants can dwell in more secure ways than the poor, for whom every invocation of home has the echo of their degraded and precarious condition. Heidegger asks us to heed the primal call of language, and pay attention to meanings that dwell silently beneath the surfaces of words we use. But desensitizing ourselves to those silent meanings also protects us from a reality too brutal to confront continuously. Similarly, if Gideon presumes the need for a kind of fluidity or transparency between private, social and public spaces, we should reflect on its implications. When Gideon envisions monuments that communicate people’s inner aspirations and at the same time orient them toward a kind of harmony with each other, that is both desirable and difficult. He offers an ideal of architecture as a communicational sublime, aligning human motives and needs toward a positive sense of collectivity. But where collective spaces are damaged or dysfunctional, barriers will exist—they are needed. Communication became a mid-twentieth-century ideal that inspired intellectuals across the arts and sciences. But without its companion concept control, unrealistic conceptions arose about its possibilities. It’s fair to say that the infatuation with communication, as if the ideal was sufficient to solve problems by itself, is over, at least for the moment. With our increasing awareness of the threats of surveillance and the loss of rights to privacy, we should remember that total surveillance was also the demand of political absolutism. The Enlightenment philosophes forgot this battle with absolutism once they had won their battle for political representation and for transparent rule.4 Today those earlier battles against the ancien régime are worth remembering because they have to be restaged, albeit against different and greater powers. For example, Enlightenment victories such as citizens’ rights to due process are repudiated by elected governments as democracy turns illiberal in many countries. Not full transparency but ways to salvage spaces for sociality become the new challenge, when the built form itself can become a weapon against the majority of its occupants.

Political Monumentality No discussion of architectural monumentality is complete without political monumentality, which is the tacit counterpoint of Gideon’s essay. It might seem from his words that one can substitute for the other if architects intervene appropriately. The disconnect between pseudo-monumentality and the inner uncertainty of modern life was concealed by declaring that real belonging came from collective grandeur, and could be sublimated in war. If architects could build real spaces of rich and meaningful social interaction, the political monumentality that enthralled large portions of the world might not arise, Gideon implies. Architects had overlooked the emotional needs of the masses in their focus on addressing more obvious utilitarian functions. Hence they had ignored our failure to occupy the vastness of the world with others, leaving a void to be filled. This void was of the imagination as well as of built form, and it was social as well as political. The twentieth century’s most prominent solutions were of warring political monumentalities, of Communism and Capitalism, each insistent that it had found the unique answer. Each sought mass upliftment on a scale never before attempted in history, but with the end of that conflict, mass upliftment as a collective task for the foreseeable future is on the defensive. The interregnum of national socialism scaled up political monumentality to the point of implosion: the people could not, it turned out, be collectively sacrificed at the altar of their collective beliefs, monuments or leaders. The lesson was that neither architectural nor political monumentality could organically reflect people’s beliefs xxxi

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and values, much less promise salvation on earth. To adopt the language of Susan Buck-Morss, the end of the twentieth century marked the passing of mass utopia in both East and West.5 Architects today work in an age where all-embracing visions for the masses appear in the past. Far from being renewed today, those older visions are discredited in favor of more embattled and exclusive political programs. In fact we seem to be entering a period defending rather than celebrating collective values, demanding battlements and not monuments. It’s worth pausing to reflect on the shift this represents, from a time not long ago when the structures built for post offices and railway stations could elevate the spirit as if they were cathedrals, embracing crowds, suggesting always that there was room for more, displaying art and expertise that could exhilarate. These still exist, and where they have not been redesigned and repurposed, they retain their power to uplift. But capital today flows toward airports and malls, where the masses disperse rather than congregate, and where the discreetly competitive charms of affluence undermine the more elemental pleasure of belonging in a crowd.

Insurgent Architecture If architecture today encloses public space and guards against its turning into a collective symbol, or a space for collective uses, the crowd in turn has its ways of repurposing built form, conferring public functions upon available objects through insurgent forms of occupation: The street itself is thereby manifest as a well-worn interior: as living space of the collective, for true collectives as such inhabit the street. The collective is an eternally awake, eternally agitated being that—in the space between the building fronts—lives, experiences, understands, invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls. For it, for this collective, . . . [w]alls with their “Post No Bills” are its writing desk, newspaper stands its libraries, display windows its glazed inaccessible armoires, mailboxes its bronzes, benches its bedroom furniture, and the cafe terrace is the balcony from which it looks down on its household.6 Meanwhile large populations, far from being accommodated in built space, may be abandoned to the open, relegated to the refugee camp or the urban slum. The challenge for socially engaged architecture is how to address this “extrusion” and exhibition of remaindered lives. Examples would include families fleeing civil war, migrants undertaking dangerous journeys across borders, poor people living in shantytowns subject to demolition raids for their illegal presence, though they may have nowhere else to go. In an age that raises monuments to capital rather than to the collective itself, and that erects exquisite built spaces alongside de facto exhibitions of those who have lost the right to shelter, we may have to seek an insurgent architecture. This volume is an effort in that direction.

Notes 1 Sigfried Gideon, “The Need for a New Monumentality,” in S. Gideon, Architecture You and Me: The Diary of a Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1958), 29. 2 Ibid., 28. 3 Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in David Farrell Krell (ed), Heidegger: Basic Writings, tr. Albert Hofstadter (Abingdon: Routledge, 1993), 348. 4 Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 39. Of course the fact of governance inherently implies a limit to transparency; it is this limit where absolute or sovereign power still reigns, in the domain of the deep or secret state, and that has become more prominent today. 5 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 6 Walter Benjamin, “First Sketches,” in The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 828. xxxii

Introduction Architecture and Social Engagement Farhan Karim

Architecture and Social Engagement Very few of us would agree that a socially unengaged architecture is possible. One could convincingly argue that the Megalithic temples at Hagar Qim in Malta, third millennium bce, and the Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, 2570 bce, were not built merely to appease the gods or to please tyrants. Rather, these were shared spaces that opened up new possibilities for engaging the multitudes of society, either by igniting a collective spiritual experience in the mysterious enclaves of the temples at Hagar Qim or by nurturing a sense of camaraderie through the collective participation of the people of Old Kingdom Egypt in the gigantic, larger-than-life construction process of the pyramid at Giza. So, if architecture from its very beginnings, as it is presented in any standard survey textbook, works in close collaboration with society, then why would it be important now to coin a new term, “socially engaged architecture,” and to form a new theoretical position, as we do in this book? And why it is important now to consider social engagement as a subject of investigation? We can answer this question with an argument that society as a precondition for the production of architecture needs little or no investigation, but that society as an essential part of architectural discourse, as in the concept of socially engaged architecture, demands close attention because this discourse has not been a prior basis of the discipline. Rather, the concept has been culturally and politically constructed and has evolved over time through various media and representational tools, such as exhibitions and various kinds of print and web publications (see Chapters 1, 2, and 3). The term “social engagement” immediately points to an asymmetrical power relationship in which trained professionals exchange knowledge with untrained populations. Despite this concept’s association with an asymmetrical power relationship, a substantial number of contemporary architects believe that professional engagement with society would help to mitigate many pressing issues in today’s world. With this hope in mind, architects across the globe are now working to redefine architecture from a market-driven profession to a profession informed by a complex mix of praxis, altruism, and activism, one that intends to eradicate poverty, resolve social exclusion, and construct an egalitarian global society. Socially engaged architecture proposes to equate design with activism and calls for an entrepreneurial model of the profession that would break it away from the conventional model of the architect-commissioner dyad. The discourse of social engagement offers to shift architecture’s professional obligation from fulfilling idiosyncratic demands of individual clients to working toward the common causes of the public good. Social engagement represents optimism both pragmatically, by proposing to expand the scope of the discipline in the context of resource scarcity, and morally, by refuting the apolitical and acritical premise of architecture. xxxiii

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But is it a dilemma if socially engaged architecture, which operates within an asymmetric power relationship, aspires to promise social justice? This is a difficult question to answer because professionals, educators, curators, and academics all have contested views on social engagement. The working methods and sociopolitical contexts of contemporary architects who are considered socially engaged are so diverse that it would be a mistake to reduce this complexity to a single term. But still the conceptualization does exist, and it is thriving through various efforts, as we see in numerous books, conferences, exhibitions, awards, and academic programs that present some modes of architectural practice as socially engaged and some others as not (see Chapters 7 and 12). These propositions—both socially engaged and unengaged—nevertheless are fraught with many theoretical challenges and trigger debates about architecture’s relationship with the public, with humanitarianism, and with social change, and they revisit the justification of architects as political agents and representatives of the public (see Chapter 3, 6, and 12). In addressing these challenges, architects across the globe have devised tactics that have varied considerably, depending on the economic, political, and cultural context of the country (see Chapters 24–28). While the goals are same, the methods vary significantly. Against this context we may ask, if social engagement as a topic of investigation is indefinite and pluralist, and has so many loose ends, then how can we even create a common platform to discuss this topic? This book tries to answer this question from the following four perspectives.

Four Perspectives on Social Engagement in Architecture The first perspective is that, instead of considering socially engaged architecture as a binary opposite of socially unengaged architecture (or market-driven architecture), the book studies the use, scope, and limitation of engagement as a theoretical tool kit and calls for a critical investigation of how different forms of spatial knowledge are being produced and exchanged among various stakeholders (see Chapters 1, 6, and 17). Instead of creating a binary opposition, the book studies social engagement as a result of historical process in which market-driven and insurgent architectures are not only entangled within a broader economic and political structure but also informed and shaped by each other. For instance, socially engaged architecture’s methodological focus on interdisciplinary practices (see Chapters 2 and 10) could be read vis-à-vis avant-garde conviction in bringing sociopolitical emancipation through disciplinary autonomy (see Chapters 21–23). But both approaches were borne of grappling with capitalist forces. Socially engaged architects advocate for working directly with the community, often in collaboration with philanthropic organizations and nongovernmental organizations and often by bypassing the state authority manifested through local public administration. In a way, socially engaged architecture’s main role as being a representative of community portrays an ideal neoliberal world in which the state would have very limited control over the perceived community. Socially engaged architecture prefers to work piecemeal and shows disliking for any grand master plan for radical social change, as the basic concept of engaged practice has emerged from the loss of faith in large organizations—both on the Right and on the Left (see the postscript). However, the social engagement position apparently stands in opposition to the avant-garde, which advocates for a radical withdrawal from normative social systems by creating a mental shock that upsets established norms. Social engagement criticizes this position by arguing that critical distance from society makes architecture vulnerable to neoliberal forces, thereby making architecture a tool for commercial spectacle. In summary, the book understands social engagement as part of the historical process and not as a novel category or as a drastically different way of doing architecture. The second perspective is that the book studies socially engaged architecture not only as pragmatic responses to economic and technical problems but also as a way to understand the spatial experiences of marginal subjectivities, such as those of women, children, ethnic groups, refugees, immigrants, and displaced populations (see Chapters 14–16 and 29–32). This book recognizes that if we study social xxxiv

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engagement exclusively as a problem-solving tool, we will overlook the lived experiences of diverse groups of marginalized populations who are central to such projects. Exclusion of subjectivity means the exclusion of issues regarding gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, and above all the lived experience of the participants. And by excluding the issue of subjectivity, we reduce socially engaged architecture to a discourse on “now and here.” This exclusive view flattens architecture from a complex spatial experience of diverse subjectivities to a random combination of sporadic and intuitive actions for fixing problems at hand. This book shows that it is not enough to identify the target population as “low-income” or “disenfranchised” or “marginal community” because the poor are not an abstract amalgamation of demographic data and spending capacity; they are living communities and individuals having diverse contexts and subjective experiences. This book also contends that recognition of this subjectivity in our dealing with social engagement helps us explain the structural base of inequality, and it provides a mechanism for forming the political agency of architecture. The third perspective is that socially engaged architecture is studied as part of the development of global capitalism and not as exclusive efforts aimed at creating spaces outside of capitalism. The essays of this book investigate how the development of capitalism creates a financial context and sociopolitical need for the engaged practice. Without establishing this relationship between the politics and spread of global capitalism, it is difficult to establish a knowledge base about social engagement in architecture. Especially in case of the work of Euro-American professionals in developing nations, if we study the projects only from the architects’ experience and their vantage points, then in most cases we would conjure up images in which western experts are trying to build romantic spaces that are liberated from capitalist apparatus and the exploitation of modernization (see Chapters 7 and 8). This book suggests that it is important to contextualize socially engaged architecture aimed at mitigating poverty within the political factors of poverty and the economic issues of landownership because, without this insight, social engagement would be flattened to a question of techniques. However, the book also presents examples in which the rhetoric of socially engaged architecture was intentionally used to transform political problems into technical questions, thus hiding the realpolitik. Social engagement is often used to interpret poverty as a problem that could be solved through organized technology. While the solution of “poverty” requires political negotiation, socially engaged architecture offers only an exclusive technical solution to the problem (see Chapters 6, 7, and 12). In order to shed new light on this issue, the essays in this book investigate the contemporary transnational practice of social engagement by looking at its historical formation within global capitalism (see Chapters 5,11, 24, and 32) and shows that the instrumental use of architecture by Cold War diplomacy to preempt Third World poverty and to avoid the specter of communism has taken a very complex form in the recent decades of prolonged economic austerity, resource scarcity, and neoliberal globalization. The book observes that contemporary architects want to counter the economic problems of the developing world through the creation of artistically driven and engaged spaces, thereby bringing economics into confrontation with culture. Or, in other words, economics is being equated to culture, and vice versa. The fourth perspective is that, instead of judging the success and failure of socially engaged architecture in bringing actual social change, the book studies the role of socially engaged architecture in forming public discourse and the methods and agendas of socially engaged architecture for working with public institutions. The book considers social engagement not as the total solution for a social problem but as the provider of evolving models for how change could be brought in through political institutions. Socially engaged architecture is indeed a tactic for establishing communication among stakeholders. Architecture is considered a mechanism for displaying and communicating ideology, and thus it contributes to the formation of critical public discourse. From this regard, if we consider socially engaged architecture primarily as the creator and facilitator of public discourse, then we may consider social engagement to be a network of signs and metaphors of social change; architecture plays its role by creating a matrix of symbols, narrations, and subnarrations similar to xxxv

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those in the cinema or theater that induce a sense of change and feelings of empowerment in the audience. Implicit in the staging or screening of empowerment through architecture is the optimism that the actual actions would be performed or replicated in the real world by live human institutions. The strength of socially engaged architecture lies in the power of that subconscious sign that could be reinterpreted and eventually appropriated for different situations. From this perspective the book observes that socially engaged architecture and the institutions that support and promote it are creating an architectural idea, if not architecture as an idea, and thus it challenges the very notion of architecture being the remedy for every possible sociopolitical evil. Architecture may or may not offer actual changes, but it always constructs a discourse for future possibilities. However, it provides only a fragment of a contingent possibility and an allusion. In this regard, it is important for the socially engaged architecture to unveil the concealed production process and also to exhibit the demonstration of the construction process. The demonstration is aimed at simulating reality and creating a total immersive experience both for the professionals and students who are involved in the construction process and for the users (see Chapters 18–19). This immersive experience, formed by opening up the hidden tectonics of architecture (see Chapter 19) and through the articulated material setting (see Chapters 21–24), would create, as believed by the socially engaged architects, a new kind of public awareness that would instigate everyday action (e.g., altering consumer behavior and lifestyle) rather than a public investment in time or physical presence for political action in the conventional sense. These essays study the role of architecture as a catalyst or mediator that facilitates the creation of the public sphere through an opinion-building mechanism. In summary, the book studies how socially engaged architecture facilitates the organization and formation of public discourse and creates politically engaged spaces in which material fabric and spatial articulation provoke users to act politically and recombine and rearrange their environment. Taken together, the essays in this book demonstrate how the concept of social engagement has been entangled in the global politics of poverty, the reconstruction of the public sphere, the changing role of the state, charity, neoliberal urbanism, and—above all—the transformation of the modern avant-garde, which engages in a ceaseless grappling to negotiate between the architect’s role as a social agent and the discipline’s exclusive aesthetic implications. These essays look critically at the context of socially engaged architecture: economic austerity, climate change, war, foreclosure, increasing global poverty, microfinance, the evolving notions of professionalism, the changing conception of the public, social businesses based on nongovernmental organizations, and, finally, the growing academic interest in revisioning and sustaining utopia—architecture as a means of social change.

Structure of This Book The essays are organized into eight themes. The opening section, “Engagement as Discourse,” discusses how architects and designers consider and perceive the potential and limits of the public sphere, the reciprocal relationship between citizens and professionals, and community and society in their work. This section investigates why it is important for the discipline to review the individual client–based model, to emphasize the abstract concept of collective society as a client, and to evaluate the benefits these changes could bring to the discipline. The main questions of this section thus could be summarized as, can architecture and planning contribute to constructing and sustaining a new discourse of the public sphere in a true sense? The second section, “Targets of Engagement,” discusses how resource scarcity, poverty, and socioeconomic exclusion set the boundary conditions for design and how socially engaged architecture responds to those conditions. A core issue of this investigation is to understand how financial, ecological, and humanitarian crises set new targets for architecture. The focus of the third section, “Structures of Engagement,” is on the ways in which formal and informal institutional structures—such as academic programs in universities, academic and xxxvi

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commercial publishers, awarding and granting agencies, and professional associations—disseminate knowledge about social engagement. This section argues that it is important for us to understand not only how knowledge is produced, who produces that knowledge, for what purpose, and under what context but also, and just as importantly, how that knowledge is managed through translocal and transcultural structures. The diffusion and dissemination of knowledge are essential for understanding how society eventually appropriates, accepts, and interprets knowledge about social engagement. The fourth section, “Subjects of Engagement,” discusses spatial tactics of social engagement that attempts to include racial, political, and gender populations that have historically been excluded in the decision-making process. This section argues that such practices, using the idea of social engagement, are aimed at not only creating economic emancipation but also recognizing marginal subjectivities and devising a new kind of citizenship. The fifth section, “Tectonics of Engagement,” demonstrates how do-it-yourself projects, live projects, and design-build projects in academia and in architectural practice help to form a new mode of civic engagement and a new definition of citizenship. This section shows that the visibility of the construction process and the people attached to that process plays an important role in how society values space as political tool. The sixth section, “Environmental Engagement,” looks at the manifold relationships among community, the built environment, and nature and how socially engaged architecture transfers nature and climate from being abstract ideas into operative tools. This section contends that a critical inquiry is required to understand the politics of co-relating nature with disenfranchised communities.The seventh section, “Mapping Engagement,” asserts the need for a critical survey of the diverse approaches of socially engaged architecture across the globe. Mapping and surveying are an essential part of creating a sense of the diverse and often contested ideas about social engagement in different countries. Essays in this section argue that the surveying of socially engaged architecture must be done in historical, political, and cultural contexts. Despite the methodological differences in different regions, this section shows that architecture’s turn toward the social and public good marks a common moment of architecture’s self-reflection—a moment of exit from purist ego, an exit from the comfort zone of the conventional professional model, and, finally, an exit from the trajectory of its self-acclaimed journey to an alternative future. The last section, “Engagement in Emergency,” examines the politics and working methodology of post-disaster settlements, refugee housing, ghettoes for illegal immigrants, shelters for war refugees, and the like. The section’s central focus is to investigate to what extent architecture can contribute to, and learn from, the issues regarding emergency and humanitarian crises.

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Postscript How and When Was Architecture Socially Engaged? Simon Sadler

A social historian of architecture would argue (rightly, I think) that architecture is inevitably a social art. So in enquiring after social engagement, we are trying to isolate purposeful traditions of using architecture for drawing a greater number of people into political life, and better implementing architectural knowledge for the common good, even if that means de-emphasizing innovations in form and style. With this more targeted definition of social engagement, is it possible to map the architecture of social engagement? The subject is so vast that it might be best to start with a conjectural outline, one in which architectures of social engagement shift tack much as the organization and ambitions of society itself change. Perhaps socially engaged architectures are the tools, tactics or diagrams through which we can observe the unfolding of a schematic history of modernizing societies, organized initially top-down (through noble power), then more laterally (through social contracts), and then bottom-up (from “the people”). This active construction of society has been necessarily something more ambitious than vernacular architecture, which, for all its qualities, posits no overt collective social innovation. Indeed, social engagement is so ambitious as to resemble a dream-image of architecture, which we can quickly recount before flagging some of the problems it still faces in current practice.

Flattening Let’s first consider the top-down design of social engagement. In one of the founding documents of both philosophy and utopian design, the ideal city imagined by Plato c. 380 bce would have been rigorously planned, physically and politically, as a mode of statecraft to guarantee the greater good. More pragmatically, Roman urbanism offered a program of temples, viaducts, forums, markets, agora and entertainments, the better to sustain quality of life, shared belief and myth, and civics. Statecraftby-design is renewed in the European Renaissance, seen in the Parisian urbanism of Henri IV in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to recall but one example, a keynote for civilizing design through to Baron Haussmann’s Paris in the nineteenth century. But the “soft” top-down autocracy of glittering civic centers and high-tech infrastructure, though still promoted by today’s “starchitecture” and “smart cities,” is becoming unconvincing as a mode of social engagement for those contemporary architects most committed to the principle of social betterment. This is likely due to the long, slow “flattening” of ideal social organization. For example, xxxviii

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Christianity and Islam brought the divine closer to ordinary individuals, with a corresponding intimacy in pastoral provision through the hospitals and schools of mosques and monasteries. Here, too, was an origin of “community,” surely a key concept for a history of social engagement. In his pioneering sociology, Ferdinand Tönnies explained in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries how social groupings maintain their feelings of togetherness through Gemeinschaft (community). Romanticism further suggested the existence of a binding “life-force,” a concept inherited by John Ruskin and William Morris from Friedrich Schiller, and eventually passed to the twentieth-century avant-garde.1 “Community” acquired an affective aesthetics through devices like bounded spaces—the courtyards, cloisters, quadrangles and village greens of the Middle Ages became the Garden Cities and social housing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the Settlement Houses (like Toynbee Hall in London, 1884), the German siedlung (like Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner’s 1925–1933 Berlin Horseshoe Estate) and the more sensitive examples of welfare state design by members of Team X, such as Aldo van Eyck. The New Urbanism movement of the 1980s shifted the sensibility toward private market provision. A sense of community was affected through the revival of fraternal labor practices and mutualism from the Arts and Crafts movement on—Walter Gropius chose to name his 1945 office The Architects’ Collaborative—and in the reconsideration of the architect-client relationship through participatory architecture, exemplified in the work of Ralph Erskine in England, or the socialist Portuguese government’s SAAL (Local Ambulatory Support Service) experiment in the mid-1970s. Fusing space and practice, community gardens have been one of the most pervasive and benign forms of engagement since the 1970s (the New York City Parks Department, for example, launched a community gardening division, GreenThumb, in 1978). A second “flattening” of ideal social organization was termed by Tönnies as that of Gesellschaft— “society.” As the Garden City and Team X’s projects might be to Gemeinschaft, the nineteenthcentury wide streets programs of Europe’s congested cities and the tower blocks in the 1960s might be to Gesellschaft. If “community” is nostalgic for intimacy, “society” impersonally scales up, as its individual members surrender some independence to pursue the betterment of all as the best means to pursue their own interests, bound less by some organic identity than by social contract (identified in the seventeenth century by Thomas Hobbes, the initial inspiration for Tönnies’s studies). Some compromise between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft can be detected in the architecture of the Scandinavian welfare state and in the Progressivist architecture advocated in the United States from the 1920s on by Catherine Bauer, Lewis Mumford and others, seeking to combine the impersonal efficiencies of planning with intimacies of scale and contact with nature. Progressive urban planning led by “strong mayors” has revived something of a Gesellschaft spirit in the early twentyfirst century—Enrique Peñalosa’s investments in Bogotá, Colombia, are one key example. But the high-water mark of social architecture probably remains the functionalism advocated by the Dessau Bauhaus during 1926–1933 and, prior to its dissolution into Team X, by CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, founded 1928), the better (it was argued, most famously by Le Corbusier) to deliver the benefits of scientific progress to the greater number, through the building by central government of expert-planned cities, schools, universities, hospitals and, above all, housing.

Postmodern Architectural Social Engagement The postmodern turn since the 1960s against this long, modernizing legacy of urban beautification and hygiene stemming from the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment and Hegelianism has been well documented. With that turn, hastened by pressure from 1960s countercultures, came an increasing interest in the social and political dimensions of architectural practice, including among practitioners themselves. But much beyond its celebrated attacks on the most bureaucratic Gesellschaft architecture—the criticism led out by the 1961 publication of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of xxxix

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Great American Cities of Robert Moses’s plans for New York and of the housing project of PruittIgoe in St. Louis, and the eruption of Parisian protests in 1968 from the austerely planned campus of Nanterre University, and so forth—the precise contours of a postmodern architectural social engagement remain surprisingly undefined. It might be, though, possible to make some general observations about postmodern architectural social engagement, which is, for all its lack of definition, a burgeoning field. The old architectural social engagement of nobility and social contracts could be visualized and planned in advance—through drawings, diagrams and quantification—and that option of a broad, civic social engagement was influentially sustained from the late 1960s on in the postmodern urbanism of Italian Tendenza, its hefty piazzas, arcades, blocks and towers a “memory” of collectivity in a fragmented political economy and built environment. But, mostly, postmodern architectural social engagement veers away from this traditional practice of design, and toward activism, pragmatism and praxis, in so far as it prefers action, in real space, in the now, engaging actors immediately, without its instigators presuming to program the future on behalf of others. Of innumerable possible case studies of this since the 1960s, we could stay in Italy to recall its “radical architecture” around the studios of Archizoom, Superstudio, Gruppo Strum and Gruppo 9999. Postmodern architectural social engagement tends to reinvent welfare state and progressivist engagement as pure practice, still pursuing the fruits of community and society, but with minimal dependency on the apparatuses of communal and social authority (organized religion, states, corporations, political parties and the like). Dissensus is recognized as an inevitability that can be creatively channeled rather than artificially (and violently) homogenized. The 1969 participation of architects from the College of Environmental Design (the erstwhile center for Catherine Bauer’s social vision) in the anarchic People’s Park a few blocks away in Berkeley could be taken as a founding gesture of this tendency. Embedded among other social actors as participants, advocates and consultants, architects supposedly rescinded their visionary, vanguard role. Pursuing instead actually existing change rather than the symbolism to which even such redoubtable designers of social engagement as the Russian constructivists of the 1920s had to resort (revived still more symbolically in postmodern deconstructivism), the supersession of vanguardism supposedly put paid to modernism. Or did it? It could also be the case that as an instigator of social engagement without the state—without, even, a clear political mandate—the postmodern architecture of social engagement has been astonishingly vanguard. In practice, though, the pursuit of pro bono supplements to ordinary professional design practice became close to rote, part and parcel of architectural education since the 1960s (the design-build initiatives of Yale, under the deanship of Charles Moore, were one origin). This “outsourcing” of “the social” to an architectural “voluntary sector” seems at once deeply compatible with the monetarist and neoliberal “rollbacks” of progressivist and welfare state social provisions, and a noble reminder of social possibility and obligation crudely ground under by the instatement of the market as the sole arbiter of value.

Tactics of Contemporary Architectural Social Engagement By way of initiating a mental map of the tactics of contemporary architectural social engagement, we might very briefly recall some of its most iconic recent examples. Largely nongovernmental, and questioning of architecture’s purpose as a social art, these examples can claim lineage to the reignition of the discipline’s “conscience” in the 1960s and 1970s, ever more reflexive to the neoliberal “rollbacks” of progressivist and welfare state social provisions, as though architecture itself survives as a benefactor, still attendant to community and social need. At Quinta Monroy, Chile, 2016 Pritzker Prize laureate Alejandro Aravena and his studio, Elemental, settled squatters in permanent, legal, community-oriented housing in 2003 that has since been completed by the occupants. This we might use as an illustration of a self-help approach, which xl

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historically drew upon 1960s architectural studies of Latin American squatter settlements (barriadas) by John Turner, by the 1965–1974 PREVI experiment (Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda) in Lima, Peru, in the Habitat programs started by the United Nations in 1978 after a series of conferences, and in the fieldwork of NGOs. Brad Pitt’s 2007 “Make It Right” project is a prominent instance of another strategy, which we might call philanthropic voluntarism. Pitt conscripted “starchitects” like Frank Gehry, Morphosis and MVRDV to build sustainable contemporary homes in the predominantly African American district wiped out in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina overcame inadequate infrastructure in 2005. Elsewhere in the American South, Rural Studio, founded in Alabama in 1993, assigns design-build teams of students to create ultra-low-cost houses and community structures for the rural poor, often with salvaged materials, so that the new structures join up social engagement with that other political keynote of contemporary design, sustainability (Make It Right uses extensive solar energy). City streets have been “reclaimed,” through an annual meter-feeding Parking Day, by “parklet” public space created from parking lanes and parking spaces, a tactic (now spread worldwide) initiated in San Francisco in 2005 by architectural practice Rebar. It is a mode of what has become known as tactical urbanism, institutionalizing the spontaneous diversion of public space from functional circulation to creative amenity. Once a proposition of avant-gardes like situationism, and a familiar sight of the revolutionary occupations of the 1960s, this “hacking” of event-space can be logged as a further strategy of postmodern architectural social engagement—of an “expanded architecture” that follows the lead of other “expanded” media of the 1960s and 1970s in the making of sites, rather than the reproduction of existing media. It reads space, infrastructure and capital as a ready-made waiting to be redirected. There are surely more strategies of postmodern social engagement we could describe, but for the moment we can close the account with one more, in which we find markets and consumption revisited as media of social engagement. The resurgence in the last four decades of farmers markets recalls a Jeffersonian ideal (especially in North America) of agrarian markets, outside of corporate control. Serving as renewed market squares—with their deep ancestry, via piazzas, to the forum and agora—farmers markets model an ideal of (literally) grassroots change, especially when coupled with urban farming.

The Political Economy of Contemporary Architectural Social Engagement The revanchist and vanguard social engagement of these four strategies is symptomatic of a loss of faith in large-scale organization that has overtaken the left and right alike since the 1960s—at once a response to, and abetting of, the withdrawal of states and corporations from their historic modern role of social management. The macroeconomic background story to this is that of the turn from Keynesianism to ­neoliberalism— of counter-cyclical investments by the state in housing, say, become gentrification and market-rate housing. Simultaneously, constituencies supportive of socialist and centrist safety nets have been persuaded to believe in entrepreneurialism, be it via the medium of the market, or the social enterprise of community activism, or by informal networks carried by information technology. Several generations of architects have been encouraged to turn away from governance by an impressive intellectual skepticism spread dizzyingly across the political and philosophical spectrum—from the classical liberalism of Friedrich von Hayek to the activism of Jane Jacobs and the design methods of Horst Rittel; from the neo-Marxism of Henri Lefebvre and Manfredo Tafuri to the poststructuralism of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; from the constructionism of Bruno Latour to the political and aesthetic philosophy of Jacques Rancière. xli

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The challenge for architectural social engagement became to forge social bonds without resorting to control. Though postmodern social engagement in part reacted against the far left of 1960s counterculture, there is in it the specter of a revived anarchism—of a conviction that we, the people, know how to organize and cooperate, a conviction that had been ground under and made invisible by the very planning to which anarchism contributed (at its inception, by Patrick Geddes). The capacity to organize and cooperate had been superseded by corporate and state technocracy, it was widely assumed in the 1960s, prompting a gloomy, post-1968 despair at the capacity of architecture to bring change, assuming architecture was only ever scripted by the perpetual upheaval of capitalist development—its gestures in effect safely contained by grids and networks of the city and, below that, by the capitalist economic base, over which architecture had little control beyond the capacity of architects to affect social-democratic governmental policy through land use and housing design.2 In the last half-century, though, the beguiling architectural alternative to a conventional parliamentary and bureaucratic politics that would produce drawings, diagrams and quantification has been (we might argue) a politics by milieu—that is, by the live making of preferred situations (houses for the dispossessed, social space instead of traffic, productive land instead of wasteland etc.) that activate new coalitions and redirect resources. In positing architecture as politics, the relevance of the architectural discipline is revived, and though its power may never again be as extensive as it was when directing urban projects wholesale, its moral authority is deepened, revealing space as actionable by all, and architecture as praxis, not the imposition of hegemony. The architectural discipline can therefore inculcate an ideology in its shirtsleeved students (if less so in its pressed-shirt practitioners servicing neoliberal growth) that architecture does good, and that the discipline’s revived compassion recalls the origins of social engagement in religion and communitarianism. The ingress of theories of political autonomy (notably from the 1970s Italian extra-parliamentary left) simultaneously put the design discipline somewhere near the forefront of contemporary political theory, a trajectory peaking with architectural sympathies for the Arab Spring in 2010–2011, with the 2011 Occupy movement, with the 2013 protests in Turkey and Brazil, with the movements in the urban squares of Greece and Spain, and with the application of architectural methods to the critical study of the security apparatus in sites such as Israel.

Political Limits to Architectural Social Engagement Nonetheless, it is probably politically most realistic to pursue an architecture of political engagement— not as political engagement. That’s to say, postmodern architectural social engagement is likely better when positioned as an instrument of a larger politics, just as architecture was an instrument of the politics of social contracts and noble power earlier in history. To focus wholly on architectureas-change may well shore up the identity of the discipline, even as the definition of architecture expands, yet history is also in the making all around architecture—an architectural parti likely will not outflank a political party. This is because the contexts in which architecture operates produce huge challenges for social engagement: the diminutive scale of its impact, and the difficulty of riding, or outflanking, a capitalist political-economic system that resists any definition of social justice (i.e., of the fair and just relation between the individual and society) that cannot be met through markets. Regarding impact, for instance, many residents of Hale County, Alabama, have been given shelter by Rural Studio, and parklets have served as placeholders for expanded sidewalks in San Francisco. But the footprint of these architectures remains nonetheless limited. These commendable architectures of social responsibility have to be limited to those few and tiny sites where architects can provide free or reduced-rate labor (sometimes building as well as designing) with charitable benefactors. They operate at a radically different physical and economic scale to the built environment at large, and usually avoid the key cost of building, which is high-value land. That this might be a xlii

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limitation inherent to pragmatic micro-engagement was deftly recognized and then flipped by the title of the 2010 Museum of Modern Art show promising Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement, which implied some deep local effect, or an impact that might be multiplied through repetition by others (e.g., through the Architecture for Humanity charity, now the Open Architecture Collaborative). But these architectures are largely unsupported by the political and economic forces driving socially uneven and inequitable development in the first place (Make It Right seems unlikely to seed the recovery of the Lower Ninth Ward, and like Rural Studio, it must in the meantime manage a racial asymmetry with its clients while remaining vigilant about paternalistic and colonial roles). And where an expanded social engagement architecture uses social media, the architect must first ensure near-universal access—but how? Indeed, one problem for a convincing architecture of social engagement is to offer properly “counter-hegemonic” alternatives when “social engagement,” in its varying definitions, is a whitehot commodity: the standard sociological definition of social engagement is an individual’s degree of participation in a community or society, which almost elides with the social media design paradigm of Silicon Valley that is mostly committed to the expansion of capitalism, with probably uneven effects across race and class, and with an increasingly distorting effect on politics much-analyzed following the 2016 U.S. election. Architectures of social engagement are then particularly likely to find themselves along the fault line of “criticality” and “post-criticality” in architecture. Even Occupy, one of the most convincing hosts for architectural criticality (as it ruptured business-as-usual in favor of its “mic check” deliberations on collective issues), is questioned in retrospect for the ease with which some of its tech-savvy participants moved across roles into highly remunerated jobs in tech and finance. In this, social engagement is akin to the pragmatist Progressivism of the early twentieth century. Because culture, politics and action are indeed fluid, and must be acted on from within, prior to any future utopian realignment, many architectures of social engagement try to be fastidiously apolitical, or politically coy, or post-political, allowing them to maintain institutional support and avoid official censure, but at the cost of avoiding direct engagement in unequal political and economic structures. Most regrettably, it could abet those structures—this has been the concern of observers linking urban livability, renewed through tactical urbanism, with gentrification, and of critics who associate humanitarian architecture with the maintenance of statelessness and neoliberal economic restructuring.

What Next for Architectural Social Engagement? Social engagement must then stay abreast of the changing historical contexts that it aspires to modify. If, up to 2016, the bugbear of social engagement architects was the social, economic, racial and climatic inequality and unsustainability of globalized neoliberal growth (e.g., how to ameliorate the shortage of affordable housing in global cities), as of 2016 social engagement architecture must face, in numerous regions, the far-right, neo-nationalist answer to those very same questions. That postmodern architectural social engagement had left some practitioners ideologically unprepared for this latest political reality was suggested in the statement issued by a small U.S. practice in defense of its submission to the Trump Administration’s 2017 Request for Proposals (RFP) for a wall built between the United States and Mexico: “Given our tools as architects, what can we, as practitioners, do to redirect the conversation to a more humane and aesthetically aware border infrastructure, material and otherwise?”3 The answer to this question surely is not to cooperate with the proposal, even “critically.” Naïve pragmatism risks appeasing political forces likely hostile to the social flattening and humanism of architectural social engagement, feigning political neutrality even as the enemies of humanistic architectural engagement learn how to argue architecturally—“I think the wall is a noble and wonderful project to enforce the integrity of our country” counters one respondent to a journalist’s dismay that xliii

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architects would submit to the RFP for the Border Wall.4 One of the perils of Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft (community) was that community necessarily excludes, and it can moreover be appropriated by nationalism. The slippage was illustrated by a 2017 “Irrigation Wall” proposal for desalination infrastructure, a winning entry for a competition to reconceptualize the wall.5 It was a clever enough idea and execution and yet, without apparent irony, the winning competition entry separated agricultural workers by high mesh fencing, and 1960s-style collage techniques pasted in picnickers at a farmers market. The possibility of mass resistance to a border wall was presented already parceled out. To the degree that a right-drifting politics can be met in the near term by architectural social engagement, it will likely be through insisting on core services (the money-saving loss of clean water to Flint, Michigan, in 2014 was an astonishing reminder of the fragility of our social contract), migrant and refugee sanctuary and, beyond that, through expanded architectures of coalition and communication. The more architecturally enjoyable practices of social interaction can be restored, stronger, as soon as everyone can safely take part. But it might in the meantime be necessary to principally approach social engagement collectively, not architecturally.

Notes 1 See Adrian Forty, “ ‘Dead or Alive’—Describing ‘the Social,’ ” in Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 103. 2 For a comprehensive recent survey of architectural practices of resistance, see Tahl Kaminer, The Efficacy of Architecture: Political Contestation and Agency (London: Routledge, 2017). 3 Jake Matatyaou and Kyle Hovenkotter ( June/July), quoted in Antonio Pacheco, “These Architects Want to Critically Engage With Trump’s Border Wall,” The Architect’s Newspaper, March 3, 2017, https://archpaper. com/2017/03/junejuly-border-wall/ (accessed 3/31/17). 4 Steve Gaines, comment dated 3/3/17, to Pacheco, “These Architects Want to Critically Engage With Trump’s Border Wall.” 5 See Gautier Piechotta and Wu Di (Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture, Paris), “Irrigation Wall” concept, winner of a competition by the Third Mind Foundation to reconceptualize the U.S./Mexico border wall, 2017, http:// buildingtheborderwall.com/second-wall-of-america (accessed 3/31/17).

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Part I

Engagement as Discourse

1 What If . . . or Toward a Progressive Understanding of Socially Engaged Architecture Tatjana Schneider

My bookshelf is filled with books, exhibition catalogues and project documentations that carry names such as Urban Catalyst, Urban Pioneers, The Other Architect, What Design Can Do, Tactical Urbanism: Short-Term Action for Long-Term Change, Design for the 99%, Design Like You Give a Damn, Start-Up City, Happy City, Urban Acupuncture, Future Practice, Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, Good Deeds, Inclusive Urbanization, Good Design: Community Service Through Architecture, Where Are the Utopian Visionaries?: Architecture of Social Exchange, Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement and AFRITECTURE—Building Social Change. The list goes on. The books’ titles almost speak for themselves. The story they tell might be particular to this part of my bookshelf; it might be giving away where my interest lies or the field I am interested in, but I don’t think this captures all there is to it—the sheer number of publications indicate a different narrative—one that is about a growing interest in the role that design can play in the reimagination of the production of space along ethical, communitarian and equitable principles. They are all about the hope—in one form or another—that cities can be constructed from below, that every little bit helps. Some of the strong recurring themes of those publications and the theories they put forward concern situatedness, embeddedness and the challenging of class or patriarchal relationships. They talk about the importance of relationships and processes before they engage material concerns, which often are secondary to the declared need for spaces and buildings to have social impact. There is talk of social justice through spatial interventions. Interventions in urban interstices are celebrated as beholding the power to trigger change. We find claims about resilient forms of design c­ ombatting— among other things—climate change. And, other authors who argue that a choice of a specific material might contribute to less inequality. The excitement I felt when some of these books first came out, however, has given way to a growing unease, skepticism and sometimes-polemic response when I’m alerted to the release of yet another publication in this field. It might seem strange that one could feel troubled about projects that critique the profession’s unreconstructed structures, architectural pedagogy’s reliance on images, or developments that counter the construction of global sameness. Yet, I can’t get rid of this suspicion that what’s been termed the ‘social turn’ in architecture has, in fact, not managed to go beyond its good intentions. On the contrary, the naivety of some of the projects (that was so seductive to begin with) has come to play into the hands of those very neoliberalist and commodifying forces it was critical of to begin with. The radical nature of the urban beach-bar, the pop-up cinema, meanwhile uses, modes of participation and the development of process-based strategies have seemingly been absorbed by the marketing and branding mechanisms of the ‘corporate 3

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city’—fully integrated by city elites into event management structures that churn out one biennial and triennial after another. With history repeating itself (think about the counter-spaces produced and counter-events performed by Coop Himmelb(l)au in the 1960s and 1970s and their absorption into popular culture) one could ask why the current ‘social turn’ should end up any different. Why should today’s social architecture, contrary to its earlier incarnation, manage to escape the clutches of hegemonic productions of space—even if we wished it to? All this speaks of an enormous dilemma. On the one hand, social engagement offers the real possibility of actualizing the (theoretical) desire to make the world an equitable place with the aid of design—an ambition articulated by professionals, professional bodies and schools of architecture alike. On the other hand, however, spatial disciplines are fundamentally dependent on mechanisms outside of their control, including but not limited to ownership structures, political decision making and financial markets. Given this context, it could be asked if spaces of hope exist today that suggest a transformative potential of and for social engagement. And, if they exist, where can they be found and how can they be nurtured? Drawing on Friedrich Engels’s description of ‘universal emancipation’ through a form of production focused on the public good (he talks about the socialized appropriation of the means of production) and Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of spaces of ‘maximal difference’ the remainder of this text aims to sketch out the contours of a possible view of a production of space that is neither entrapped by structure nor naïve about its capability to make a difference (Awan, Schneider, and Till 2011, 31). Acknowledging the historical and complex underpinnings that architecture is a discipline that serves, I propose here an agonistic encounter of architecture’s ethics with Donna Haraway’s (2014) call for the cultivation of response-ability, or the realm of “rendering each other capable.” This aims to mobilize other imaginaries for architecture’s political economy by opening up juxtapositions, concurrences and alternate trajectories that, sometimes, might find themselves in parallel development.

Situating Architecture and Social Engagement Connecting social engagement to architecture entails particular associations, but despite its frequent use, the meaning of socially engaged architecture and social engagement in architecture remains ambiguous. Hence, it is important to ask what exactly professionals and researchers mean when talking about ‘social engagement’ and, equally, what is suggested when they talk about ‘architecture’. References to ‘architecture’ can be about the practice of architecture, its field of operation and the discipline. When connoting a certain formal and physical output, it can be about a small shelter, a housing complex, a hospital or an airport. More broadly, architecture can also refer to the design of systems and networks but also delineates a field of knowledge and ideas. ‘Social engagement’ is equally multifaceted. It suggests participation and alludes to notions of community. ‘Social engagement’ is, simultaneously, an activity as it is a theory that is charged with the dynamics of collective versus individual, action versus inaction, community versus isolation, public versus private, resilient versus weak, transformative versus universal, sustainable versus unsustainable, process versus form. What, then, is an architecture of social engagement? What is socially engaged architecture? Where and how it is practised? Is there a difference between an architecture that is socially engaged— inscribing agency into the physicality, materiality or spatiality of a building or process—and a socially engaged architect—someone whose actions might be defined by a certain framework or ideology? What, if any, are the consequences for someone practicing socially engaged architecture? Given the widespread use of the term ‘socially engaged architecture’, one must further ask: whose social engagement? Where does it take place? And, most importantly, given architecture’s dependency on other decisions and mechanisms of control, what are the possibilities and capacities of the mobilization of the term in theory and practice? 4

What If . . .

Social engagement has found increased exposure in many disciplines in recent years. It is the fields of design, and here in particular the disciplines that focus on the production of space, that have come to deploy social engagement in a variety of ways. Despite the differences in use, there are also striking similarities. In particular, in fields of architecture, urban design and planning, the utilization of the term ‘social engagement’ refers to an interest in how spatial forms interact with, determine, inhabit or enable social processes. The recent ‘social turn’ in art and architecture draws much on the more sustained discussions around the ‘spatial turn(s)’ in human and cultural geography and challenges, in a similar fashion, long-held disciplinary attitudes and codes of conduct. Some suggest that the rise of socially engaged architecture ought to be understood as a fundamental critique of the architectural profession (Solomon 2012). Socially engaged architecture, then, often refers to a range of approaches, methods, attitudes and tactics; some call it “conscious planning” (Gatsby 2014), while others discuss a practice’s “belief and commitment to the social value of architecture” (Active Social Architecture 2015). The architectural critic Justin McGuirk (2014) talks about “designing social change” that shifts focus away from the traditional focus of architectural production to other geographies and needs (Moises and Lepik 2013). And, for others yet, socially engaged architecture is solely about creating “excellent work in the public interest and to contribute to the high quality design of the public realm” (Institute for Public Architecture 2016). Regardless of underlying motivation, socially engaged architecture has come to stand for ‘small but impactful’ and ‘people-centered’, but, at the same time, it is being championed by powerful cultural organizations, including the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation. It is here that I want to frame architecture, and with it also socially engaged architecture, within some of its more substantial constraints. The urban theorist Lawrence Vale writes of cities as complex and intricately planned things. Cities, he (Vale 2014, 195) suggests, “are not uniform landscapes of randomly distributed persons but are, instead, organized in ways that both produce and reflect underlying socio-economic disparities”. The organization of these varied and composite landscapes, the sociologist Fran Tonkiss (2013, 3) enforces, its distributions and densities of population; housing stock, public buildings and places of work and consumption; the design of transport systems and other services; the balance between public and private space; the relation of the city to its environment are products of social, economic and political designs for the city. In other words, only after wide-ranging and strategic decisions have been made about the layout of roads or the zoning of areas, will these smaller parceled sites become, as Tonkiss (2013, 3) says, “products of architects or designers”. This point is pivotal for this discussion here. The built and social environment, she contends, is fixed before smaller components—pocket parks, primary schools, office buildings, housing estates, community centers, museums or swimming pools—are slotted into an already preexisting design of physical and nonphysical, visible and non-visible infrastructure. If fundamental infrastructural decisions have already been taken well in advance of an architect’s appointment, how can there be any claim for architecture to have an effect beyond its most immediate context? How does this understanding of cities as landscapes of essentially preconfigured and determined sites of intervention chime architecture’s ambition to ‘make the world a better place’? It doesn’t, the editors of Scapegoat, a journal on architecture, landscape and political economy, argue. Architecture is little more, Adrian Blackwell and Etienne Turnpin (2010, 1) say, but “subtle and consistent attempts to express determined property relations as open aesthetic possibilities”. In this reading, architecture’s role is one of beautifying, glossing over and camouflaging power and other relations at best. At worst, however, architecture and buildings become the material manifestation of fundamental socioeconomic inequalities: they turn, as Lefebvre (1997) writes, into justifications of privilege.1 Accordingly, buildings and spaces more generally are signifiers of underlying 5

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social, political and economic systems. They are at the same time a result of a chain of commands as much as they come to represent the values of the system that created them in the first place. Tonkiss (2013, 8) speaks of buildings as “the tip of an iceberg”, expressive of the underlying systems in both an aesthetic and a socioeconomic sense. Bound to and intertwined with these complex processes and the capital that makes spaces possible, this state of dependence emphasizes key questions about the internal and external dynamics of architecture, and socially engaged architecture in particular. Given socially engaged architecture’s declared scope of operation within the realm of social change, how can it—in this context of dependency on the other—facilitate other kinds of social, spatial and economic relations? Is socially engaged architecture not equally entrenched in the same systems, the same structures and mechanisms of production and finance?

Encounters With Universal Emancipation and the Powers of Social Practices Forms or processes of making spaces might seem abstract. However, as Tonkiss (2013, 8) argues, while they might be harder to individualize, they are “not less social”. By extension, this accepts that space is made—meta-level decisions of policy or micro-level everyday adaptations—through social processes. Regardless of the outcome of the processes—whether they might be a motorway or expandable fruit stall; a health center or makeshift toilet floats; a resettlement scheme or selforganized garbage collection—all processes are social. In Tonkiss’s initial outline of the term ‘social’ it straightforwardly refers to interactions between people; it does not classify the qualitative nature of the interactions or processes that take place when making decisions but states a matter of fact: processes that take place or are carried out in society and in-between people are social by their very nature. Where does this leave socially engaged architecture? If Tonkiss’s argument holds true, is not all architecture socially engaged? Raymond Williams (1976), in his seminal book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, points out that the term ‘social’ is more than a neutral or abstract container. He writes that there are two radically different ways to understand it, though. In its first sense, social “was the merely descriptive term for society in its now predominant sense of the system of common life” (Williams 1976, 286). The second sense, however, denotes ‘social’ as an “emphatic and distinguishing term, explicitly contrasted with individual and especially individualist theories of society” (Williams 1976, 286). Williams argues that ‘social’ in the second sense came to be deployed in a very distinct way whereby “a competitive, individualist form of society—specifically, industrial capitalism and the system of wage-labor—was seen as the enemy of truly social forms.” Williams does not refer to the works of the political theorist and social commentator Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) directly in this section. However, Williams’s latterly described meaning of ‘social’ draws heavily on Engels’s work and in particular his book Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1892), where he outlines the consequences of the changes that occurred in the mechanisms of production during industrialization. Despite the historic nature of this reference, it offers constructive insight that is relevant to today’s discussions around socially engaged architecture and an emerging type of progressive praxis.2 Engels, writing at the outgoing nineteenth century, is interested in the relationship between worker and product in the context of widespread mechanization of the tools of production. He (Engels 1892, 308) describes in detail how, during the Industrial Revolution a century earlier, spaces of labor changed (from workshops to mills) along with the means and mechanisms of production (from spinning wheel to spinning-machine) and the nature of the product (from individually crafted to joint product of many workers). Engels (1892, 308) describes the work taking place in these new spaces of labor (the mills and factories) as “social acts” and the ways of operating as “social production”. For him, these forms of social production, however, were problematic because of the wider economic and political structures they were embedded in: the capitalistic appropriation of social 6

What If . . .

production. Enslaved by capitalist forces of production, workers are, as Engels argues, reduced to mere wageworkers—with others controlling the means of productions as well as the commodities produced.3 In order to regain control over these processes and their own social interrelations, he calls for a fundamental transformation of the forces of production through social ownership or the social appropriation of production—in fact a transfer of these products into public property. This, in brief, is Engels’s way of achieving what Williams describes as “truly social forms”. The ‘problem’ is not the factory as such but the relationships of power that are inscribed in the ownership of the means of and mechanisms of production. By re-formation of the power structures and the re-association of ‘social’ with a different way of structuring processes of making and doing, Engels suggests that the resultant political economy that emerges is distinct in that it benefits not just the owners of the means of production but all those who produce it. Engels (1892, 325) calls this shift “universal emancipation”. In architectural discourse, universal emancipation has been criticized as “[untenable] metanarrative” due to modernism’s link to “modernization understood as social progress” (Larson 1993, 251). Despite this, I wish to present it here as a productive term that not so much describes a movement or theory of the contemporary surge of social engagement. Instead, I aim to discuss ‘universal emancipation’ in the context of a wider contemporary discussion that has been liberal in the mobilization of the terminology of social engagement. Focusing on ‘emancipation’, I argue, enables a perspective of socially engaged architecture that engages the very core of production—including but not limited to the production of space. Following Engels, it could be argued that rather than focusing on the methods, approaches, aims and motivations for socially engaged architecture, it might be more fruitful to unravel their difference, or indeed indifference, to the (social) contradictions of capitalistic production methods. The starting point for the actualization of social production in Engels’s terms lies, as Karl Marx points out, in the conscious solidarizing and mutualizing of the very social practices that make the capitalistic political economy.4 The capacity to change, both Engels and Marx argue, rests with social practices: they hold the power to realize a political economy that is based on true social production. Capitalism, it follows, is not an abstract force but is made and remade by social practices. By extension, and in the words of J. K. Gibson-Graham (Casco 2016), the economy then “is something we do, and not just something that does things to us”. Social practices—we—have the power to influence and change these forces. This is especially valid today, when practices that present alternatives to the capitalistic metanarrative “are no longer simply jottings in the margins of a central text about global neo-liberalization” (Gibson-Graham 2006, vii–viii) but occupy debates and discourse and the wider realm of action. Does architecture have a role to play in this discourse? Well, it depends. Until very recently the discourse on distributed and diverse economies was almost exclusively led by scholars in management studies, geography, anthropology, sociology and activism. Architecture did not seem to exist as part of these discussions because of its all too close links to structures of power, described either as something that is expressive of underlying systems (Tonkiss 2013) or as a signifier for “durability, stability and persistence” that through these qualities communicates “greater purchase on social reality than more ephemeral phenomena” (Gibson-Graham 2006, 255). Architecture (including socially engaged architecture), understood as a practice and product that is in the thrall of these structures and powers, has little to contribute to the discourse of emancipation. Yet, there is another possible reading of architecture that borrows from J. K. Gibson-Graham’s study of capitalism. She (2006, 256) states that “[u]nderstood as a unified system or structure, Capitalism is not ultimately vulnerable to local and partial efforts at transformation.” As an “uncentered aggregate of practices” (2006, 255), however, capitalism breaks down into different ‘manageable’ and much less intimidating components and its re-formation, all of a sudden, moves into the realm of possibility. Breaking up the monstrous whole through segmentation results in a loss of its seemingly totalizing power and allows for different types of economies—previously only in existence in the mathematical margins. The other, which before comprised only small fractions here and there, 7

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can now, in this scenario, sit alongside other fractions. If translated to the field of architecture, or the production of space more widely, this understanding points to the possibility of addressing the seemingly unified system of architecture in a similar fashion. When architecture stands for expertism as well as patriarchy, elitism, protectionism, complicity and sexism, then—once disaggregated into distinct parts—each of these segments can be equally re-formed through (performative) interventions by (social) practices. This, indeed, does not address architecture’s dependency on other forces within the wider systems of social and spatial planning as discussed by Tonkiss or Vale. Yet, it points to the real possibility that these forces—if understood in Graham-Gibson’s terms—are not monolithic and impenetrable but made up of multiple and diverse factors. Subsequently, each of those parts and segments can then become the focus for suggested re-formations and new imaginaries. Is, after all, the optimism that has been invested in the diverse architectures of the social turn justified? Can the multitude of examples of what alternative spatial futures might look like—from urban gardening to community action and from coproduced planning documents to self-managed housing ­developments—produce something that is more than the sum of its parts?

Induced Minimal or Produced Maximal Difference Post-structuralist discourse sees hope in the infinite fragmentation of concerns. There is, as Shmuely (2008, 222) argues, “possibility for virtually anything that might contingently emerge”. From this point of view, even the smallest and most fleeting of interventions is important as it produces spaces for the articulation of this difference. Are all those spaces socially produced in the sense that social practices make them? Yes, certainly. The key question, however, is a different one. Consider Engels again. In this context, the question is not so much about the type of practice that produces the intervention, but its intent. Instead, the question is about whether those diverse architectures knowingly go beyond their own limits and solidarize with other social practices in order to propose emancipatory spaces that also address the means of production. Neil Brenner, in discussing proposals exhibited as part of the 2015 MoMA exhibition Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, further argues that the redesign of urban spaces needs to go hand in hand with the redesign of institutions. Only then, Brenner (2015) says, can other forms of architecture and urbanism “become effective as tools for envisioning alternatives to the neoliberal city”. This, arguably, is crucial if socially engaged architecture is to avoid the trap of continuing to “promote a profit-oriented, speculationdriven growth model” (Brenner 2015). To further this line of thought on how specific types of socially engaged architecture can implement new imaginaries while at the same time avoiding naïve articulations of their possibilities to effect change, I am mobilizing Henri Lefebvre’s notion of minimal and maximal differences, and that between induced and produced differences. Lefebvre (1991, 372) writes, Within logico-mathematical sets, the difference between one and one (the first one and the second one) is strictly minimal: the second differs from the first only by virtue of the iteration that gives rise to it. By contrast, the difference between finite cardinal and ordinal numbers on the one hand and transfinite cardinal and ordinal numbers on the other is a maximal difference. An induced difference remains within a set or system generated according to a particular law. It is in fact constitutive of that set or system: for example, in numerical sets, the difference between the successive elements generated by iteration or recurrence. Similarly: the diversity between villas in a suburb filled with villas; or between different “community facilities”; or, again, variations within a particular fashion in dress, as stipulated by that fashion itself. By contrast, a produced difference presupposes the shattering of a system; it is born of an explosion; it emerges from the chasm opened up when a closed universe ruptures.

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Following Williams and Engels, the difference between socially engaged practice and true socially engaged practice could emerge from a mobilization of Lefebvre’s distinction between minimal induced and maximal produced difference. When the former alludes to spaces that are easily appropriated by the structures and logic they wish to escape and simply represent “differences internal to the dominant form of space” (Lefebvre 1991, 374), the latter “escape[s] the system’s rule” (Lefebvre 1991, 382). To produce spaces of maximal produced difference, in other words,“implies a fundamental social transformation” (Goonewardena et al. 2008, 292). The question shifts yet again. What needs to be asked instead is how true socially engaged practices can contribute to actualizing maximal produced difference.

The Issue of Ownership and Property Neil Brenner (2015) writes, “[t]here is no doubt . . . that design has a fundamental role to play in defending vulnerable populations and neighborhoods against further disempowerment, dispossession, and spatial displacement.” Yet, as he (Brenner 2015) continues to point out, tactical urbanisms appear more likely to bolster neoliberal urbanisms by temporarily alleviating (or perhaps merely displacing) some of their disruptive social and spatial effects, but without interrupting the basic rule-regimes associated with market-oriented, growth-first urban development, and without challenging the foundational mistrust of governmental institutions that underpins the neoliberal project. As Lefebvre before him, Brenner too points to the need for a shift in focus onto systems—­ planning—to be accompanied by robust spatial propositions that support, foster and nurture “alternative futures based on grassroots democracy and social justice” (Brenner 2015). To use Fran Tonkiss’s metaphor, this articulates the necessity of the social transformation of the entire iceberg—­including the non-visible and difficult-to-judge portion that true socially engaged architecture ought to engage with. Yet, how does one get there? David Harvey (2012, 125) argues that radical transformation of the system cannot be achieved by relying on radical small-group visions, which, as he says, “are impossible to operationalize at the scale of a metropolitan region, let alone for the 7 billion people who now inhabit planet earth”. Despite the larger problematic, however, I would argue that Graham-Gibson’s undoing of ‘the’ system points to a different role for the small-group and smallscale visions. Dismissing them so easily simply because there is no strategy (yet) for operationalizing and actualizing the lessons gained from these schemes on different scales seems hasty at best. And yet, in the context of ceaseless appropriation of these projects by creative city discourses, mobilizing them effectively could, as Brenner (2015) puts it, lead to “a broader assault on neoliberal urbanism”. Here arises a further issue. I have already established that it is unhelpful to define capitalism or neoliberal urbanism as a monolithic and colossal enemy. Doing so immediately diminishes the potency of anything that is not as immense. Equally, dismissing architecture as ineffectual means falling into the same trap of accumulating and solidifying a range of diverse practices into one umbrella term. This does not mean, however, that architectural practices that engage robustly in questions of wider social transformation can be employed as miracle cures. They can’t be ‘flown-in’ and ‘injected’ and neither can they be ‘decanted’ and simply ‘pulled out’ of a drawer when needed. All of those tactics play into the hands and bolster rather than undermine segments of neoliberal urbanism. When practices become employed in such manner, socially engaged architecture, as much as other architectures, remains “a tool of capital” (de Graaf 2015), maintains its role in expressing “determined property relations as open aesthetic possibilities” (Blackwell and Turpin 2010), and persists in being “complicit in a real-estate market that exacerbates social inequality” (Smith 2016).

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The social transformation implicit in Lefebvre’s notion of spaces of produced maximal d­ ifference— one could also call it the implementation of spaces that support solidarity, mutuality and practices of commoning—though, is a thorny issue. After all, a large proportion of architectural practice remains focused on clients who are, predominantly, private landowners and privatized associations rather than public bodies who tend to control the means of production, including finance and land. If “property is the unanalyzed foundation of architecture” (Blackwell and Turpin 2010), then a political economy of true socially engaged architecture will have to address these relations, taking into account the system of production as much as the system of politics. Here, historical and contemporary ­examples— self-building groups, the network of ecovillages and other co-operative housing groups—help us understand how, for example, different forms of living might emerge and how they might be actualized through the implementation of other relations (Smith 2016). It is Reinier de Graaf ’s (2015) overt acknowledgment of architecture’s complicity with capital, however, that returns us again to the wicked problem of who will finance the space of universal emancipation—for current spatial alternatives, and in particular the Baugruppen phenomenon, are by and large a middle-class phenomenon, in theory as much as in practice. Gibson-Graham is less dismissive about these insular schemes and argues that instead of proclaiming ourselves victims of a total capitalism, it is necessary to claim that part of it that is always “in motion, providing a space of becoming, of undecidability” (Gibson-Graham 2006, 89–90). She (2006, 90) writes, [i]f we are to take postmodern spatial becomings seriously then it would seem that we must claim chora, that space between the Being of present Capitalism and the Becoming of future capitalisms, as the place for the indeterminate potentiality of noncapitalisms. In this space, we might identify the range of economic practices that are not subsumed to capital flows. What she envisages is illustrated by her reference to the sociologist Glyn Daly’s list of what he calls “radical enterprises [which] exist within the sphere of the market”. Daly refers to credit unions, co-operatives of every type, housing associations, radical journals/literature, alternative technology and alternative forms of entertainment as “counter-enterprise culture” (Daly 1991, 88). And yet, doubt persists. Given the entanglement between architecture and capital, space and property, building and real estate, Gibson-Graham’s “indeterminate possibilities” might simply be too weak to offer anything but island-like openings into another world that has been carved and configured by a few for a few. Worse still, they might enforce and even benefit the “neoliberalized urban rule-regime” (Brenner 2015).

Cultivating Response-Ability One doesn’t help but wonder whether this discussion on true social engagement in architectural practice matters at all in the context of continued population growth, ecological and humanitarian crises and the finite nature of resources. Where and how is socially engaged architecture, true or otherwise, significant? Is socially engaged architecture not simply another invention—the brainchild of a few ‘Western’ academics and professionals keen to reinvent and, in the process, reaffirm their identities as experts for all sorts of spatial interventions in the name of ‘community’? Despite the dangers for socially engaged architecture to become the latest version of an intellectual obsession, it nevertheless offers the possibility of a critical reflection upon a wide range of spatial interventions. One of the strongest possible contributions of the discourse, however, might be that it has opened up not necessarily real possibilities for a different trajectory for the production of space, but at least the knowledge that there already are multiple possibilities for other forms of intervening and acting. How, though, does this intelligence address global crises? How can solidarity among social practices, including architecture, lead to the actualizing of broad emancipatory visions that are based not only 10

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on social production but also on social appropriation? Do we actually have to take the risk, as the philosopher Slavoj Žižek (2008, 459) argues, “to endorse once more large collective decisions”? Why would this be necessary? And if we accept that it is necessary, how can this be done? Let’s look again at some of the reasons why socially engaged architecture has been emerging with such force over the past decades. This again is not a homogenous force. But, beyond some of the more self-serving rebranding of architecture as an inherently social discipline led by increasingly outdated professional bodies, some clear tendencies are emerging. Some of these have already been mentioned: a renewed focus on commoning practices, for example, that is coupled with a suspicion of top-down strategies, which seems to be a defeated ideology. And yet, as Harvey (2012) outlines, the scale of the problem is such that it is difficult to imagine how individual acts of social ­engagement—for example, the self-organized provision of housing—can change destiny. And, yet, destiny is at stake. Are we simply accepting the fact that ongoing neoliberalization will eventually take over all aspects of life? The problem is, as Žižek (2008, 454) contends, that although our (sometimes even individual) acts can have catastrophic (ecological and so forth) consequences, we continue to perceive such consequences as anonymous/systemic, as something for which we are not responsible, for which there is no clear agent. In the field that I’ve been attempting to outline here, ‘the’ economy and neoliberal urbanism continue to be outlined by urban scholars as the big enemies in the actualization of other types of productions of space. How would one even begin to address ‘the’ economy with a self-built playground or an event on social practices and the city? The force is too abstract and the composition of agents too unclear. Keeping projects small and insular, in this context, also means that they can be controlled better. The need to dismantle, to disaggregate this force, therefore, seems to be more crucial than ever. I want to offer two possible ways of doing this by looking, initially, at the potency of developing different imaginaries through altering historical notions of time and, secondly, by focusing on the ways in which that which is perceived as inescapable destiny can be dismantled by propagating capabilities to act. Let’s start with time. Žižek (2008, 459) states that [if] we are effectively to reconceptualize the notion of revolution in the Benjaminian sense of stopping the ‘train of history’ which runs towards a catastrophe, it is not enough just to submit the standard notion of historical progress to critical analysis; one should also focus on the limitation of the ordinary ‘historical’ notion of time: at each moment of time, there are multiple possibilities waiting to be realized; once one of them actualizes itself, others are canceled. Time, Žižek claims, needs to be thought of differently in order to alter fundamentally what is and what is not thought possible. To do this, Žižek mobilizes the theorist Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who argues for the introduction of a new notion of time. In Dupuy’s conceptualization, the ‘time of a project’ needs to be re-envisioned. Rather than conceiving time in fixed loops with a closed circuit existing between the past and present, Dupuy conceives time as a thought experiment which Žižek calls “Dupuy’s paradoxical formula”. This formula begins, as Žižek (2008, 459) contends, with the premise that “our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place.” But instead of resorting to despair, Dupuy (quoted in Žižek 2008, 460) proposes acceptance of this destiny and to “mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past”. Let’s stay with Dupuy here for a moment and “insert” true socially engaged architecture as “a possibility into the past”. What would this achieve? I have so far argued for the need of a conscious shattering of the unifying concepts of ‘the’ economy or ‘the’ neoliberal city by establishing their nature as essentially composed of a diverse range 11

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of social practices. This can be done, however, only if practices that fall into the category of socially engaged architecture begin to articulate radical reformulations of progressive productions of space that also look at the mechanisms and means of production. Without this context, socially engaged architecture all too easily becomes coopted by the very forces it is critical of. But here emerges one of the biggest conundrums: too often, action is postponed, delayed or conceptualized as a temporal intervention in the face of seemingly unbeatable forces. Another conception of time might open an experimental space for other imaginaries. But this might not be enough. We need to articulate much more our abilities to respond to challenges, cultivating what the feminist studies scholar Donna Haraway (2012, 302) calls “a praxis of care and response—response-ability”, something that is about “rendering each other capable” (Haraway 2014). Haraway (2012, 311) moves beyond individual actions, here, suggesting that this notion needs to be viral so that it can carry meanings and materials across kinds in order to infect processes and practices that might yet ignite epidemics of multispecies recuperation and maybe even flourishing on terra in ordinary times and places. Call that Utopia; call that inhabiting the despised places; call that touch; call that the rapidly mutating virus of hope, or the less rapidly changing commitment to staying with the trouble. In the context of true social engagement in the field of architecture and elsewhere, I read this as the necessity to care for the other and as a call to act in ways that think about how to infect other processes and practices. I want to argue that the already perforated and fragmented political ecology of capitalism offers a unique chance to reformulate its scope by inserting “response-ability” into “the past of the future” (Žižek 2008, 459). None of this can happen without the articulation of what is through books, pamphlets and other publications that are crowding my shelves. Yet, broader alliances and coalescences across disciplines and practices will be necessary to actualize the true potential of this type of practice.

Notes 1 Lefebvre (1997, 67) writes, “As for the rich and powerful, they always feel threatened. They justify their privilege in the community by sumptuously spending their fortune: buildings, foundations, palaces, embellishments, festivities.” It seems ironic that the ‘alternative’, the architecture of the ‘social turn’, which set out to do the exact opposite, is now being cautioned of the dangers of falling into the same trap by serving as “ ‘camouflage’ for the vicissitudes, dislocations, and crisis-tendencies of neoliberal urbanism” (Brenner 2015). 2 The term ‘praxis’ is synonymous with its use in Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture, where praxis is understood “in the sense of action propelled by a critical understanding of external conditions, [which] moves away from the normative concerns and structures of traditional practice, and also away from the endless deferral and retreat of ‘critical’ theory and practice” (Awan, Schneider, and Till 2011, 29). 3 This thought is elaborated further here: Schneider, Tatjana. ‘Notes on Social Production a Brief Commentary’ in Doina Petrescu and Kim Trogal (eds) The Social (Re)Production of Architecture: Politics, Values and Actions in Contemporary Practice (London: Routledge, 2016). 4 For a detailed interpretation of Marx’s concept of human emancipation see Schmied-Kowarzik, Wolfdietrich. 1998. ‘Karl Marx as a Philosopher of Human Emancipation’. In Marx’s Theories Today, edited by Rysard Panasiuk and Leszek Nowak, 60: 365–378. Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities. Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi.

Bibliography Active Social Architecture. 2015. ‘Asa: Active Social Architecture’. Active Social Architecture. www.activesocial architecture.com/. Awan, Nishat, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till. 2011. Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture. London: Routledge.

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Blackwell, Adrian, and Etienne Turpin. 2010. ‘Editorial Note’. Scapegoat (Fall): 1. Brenner, Neil. 2015. ‘Is “Tactical Urbanism” an Alternative to Neoliberal Urbanism?’ Post. Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe. March 24. http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/587-is-tacticalurbanism-an-alternative-to-neoliberal-urbanism. Casco. 2016. ‘WTM Forum I: Commoning Economy’. January 6. http://cascoprojects.org/wtm-forum-icommoning-economy. Daly, Glyn. 1991. ‘The Discursive Construction of Economic Space: Logics of Organization and Disorganization’. Economy and Society 20 (1): 79–102. de Graaf, Reinier. 2015.‘Architecture Is Now a Tool of Capital, Complicit in a Purpose Antithetical to Its Social Mission’. The Architectural Review. April. Engels, Frederick. 1892. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. London: Swan Sonnenschein. Gatsby, Claudia. 2014. ‘Social Architecture: A New Approach to Designing Social Spaces’. The Huffington Post. June 5. www.huffingtonpost.com/claudia-gatsby/social-architecture-a-new_b_5448130.html. Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. 2nd Edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goonewardena, Kanishka, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid. 2008. ‘Globalizing Lefebvre?’ In Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, edited by Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid, 285–305. New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 2012. ‘Awash in Urine: DES and Premarin® in Multispecies Response-Ability’. Women’s Studies Quarterly 40 (1/2): 301–316. ———. 2014. The Thousand Names of Gaia Interview by Juliana Fausto, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Déborah Danouwski. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x0oxUHOlA8. Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso. Institute for Public Architecture. 2016. ‘Institute for Public Architecture’. http://instituteforpublicarchitecture. org/mission/. Larson, Magali Sarfatti. 1993. Behind the Postmodern Facade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1997. Writings on Cities. English Edition. Oxford: Blackwell. McGuirk, Justin. 2014. ‘Activist Architects: Designing Social Change’. Al Jazeera. January 10. www.aljazeera. com/indepth/opinion/2014/09/activist-architects-designing--2014928103659390595.html. Moises, Jürgen, and Andres Lepik. 2013. ‘Building for the Breadline—Socially Engaged Architecture’. GoetheInstitut—SÜDAFRIKA. December. www.goethe.de/ins/za/en/joh/kul/mag/arc/11970902.html. Shmuely, Andrew. 2008. ‘Totality, Hegemony, Difference: Henri Lefebvre and Raymond Williams’. In Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, edited by Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid, 212–230. New York: Routledge. Smith, Giles. 2016. ‘Outrage: “The Designers of Generation Rent in the UK Have an Obligation to Their Contemporaries” ’. The Architectural Review. January. www.architectural-review.com/rethink/outrage-thedesigners-of-generation-rent-in-the-uk-have-an-obligation-to-their-contemporaries/10001742.fullarticle. Solomon, David. 2012. ‘Plural Profession, Discrepant Practices’. In The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, edited by Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen, 430–443. London: SAGE. Tonkiss, Fran. 2013. Cities by Design: The Social Life of Urban Form. Cambridge: Polity. Vale, Lawrence. 2014. ‘The Politics of Resilient Cities: Whose Resilience and Whose City?’ Building Research & Information 42 (2): 191–201. Williams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords—a Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.

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2 Understanding Social Engagement in Architecture Toward Situated-Embodied and Critical Accounts Isabelle Doucet

Since the 1960s, the social project in architecture has undergone another round of important innovations and revisions under banners as varied as participatory architecture, self-build, community design, user-based design, advocacy planning, and so-called “live” projects. The emancipatory ambitions and perceived successes of such projects often evolved around the empowerment of the user over the designer, layperson over expert, and bottom-up over top-down. When such ambitions become overly reliant upon the opposition of user and designer, layperson and expert, they risk not doing full justice to the complexity of architecture’s social agency. Architecture’s social responsibility operates through a tangle of actors, including not just users, designers, builders, and decision-makers but also materials, ideologies, construction techniques, aesthetics, activism, technology, and so on. Not only does such tangle resist being theorized through oppositional pairs, but there is also the perceived problem of ideals associated with socially responsible architecture, such as emancipation, otherness, resistance, democratic inclusion, creativity, and collectivity, having become co-opted, and sometimes de-politicized, in mainstream architectural and urban design. Art historian Claire Bishop (2012: 13, 16), for example, argued that virtues typical of socially engaged art have been appropriated by neoliberal politics in terms of entrepreneurialism, risk-taking, self-interest, and performance. In addition, as eventually all spaces risk getting absorbed into capitalism’s cause of growth, the “outside” position as locus for (oppositional) resistance is questioned. The challenge thus becomes to rethink social responsibility and emancipation in terms of resistance from within.1 Such resistance from within can, in architecture, be contextualized in recent critiques of the limitations of critical theory and a proposal of a pro-practice approach that would, rather than through predefined ideologies and concepts and through a withdrawal from the real, operate through practice. While many pro-practice approaches are still closely connected to a critical program for architecture (e.g., Awan et al. 2011; Bell 2004; Hill 1998; Doucet and Cupers 2009; Borden et al. 2000; Crawford et al. 2008 [1999]; Rendell et al. 2007), others grew associated with a post-political and postcritical turn, declaring the critical theory program in architecture as obsolete (for a good exposé of these different strands see Sykes 2010: 14–29; Malgrave and Goodman 2011; Saunders 2007; Doucet 2015: 1–38). Meanwhile, pragmatist-relational perspectives as they occurred in philosophy and the social sciences (including science and technology studies [STS] and actor-network theory [ANT]) offered 14

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an attractive alternative for architectural and urban studies in their search for more complex, relational, and realistic readings of architecture and the city. With their emphasis on “things”, “assemblages”, “quasi-objects”, “matters-of-concern”, and processes of making, the popularity of the work of Bruno Latour and ANT in architectural thought can be understood (e.g. Latour 2004; Latour 2005; Latour and Yaneva 2009). Pragmatist-relational approaches have, however, also been criticized for “merely” describing spatial interventions in a value-neutral fashion, not judging them. With architecture and social responsibility moreover operating at the intersections of analysis, intervention, and projecting into the future, such value-neutral analyses are believed to hamper the emancipatory and transformative potential of architecture. The challenge is therefore to imagine social responsibility neither in terms of abstract critical unmasking nor through value-neutral accounts of the practices of architecture and the city, but through forms of transformation from within. Inspired by pragmatist-relational thinkers with an explicit ethical bias, including Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, I have called such transformation from within “criticality-from-within” (Doucet 2015). Criticalityfrom-within depicts an ethical-methodological gesture that is not just a matter of thinking from within (theory through practice) but of thinking from within in a transformative fashion. While depicting actions through practice, criticality-from-within thus also denotes care for the critical project in architecture.

Criticality-From-Within, or the Art of “Making a Fuss” Instead of theorizing architecture through predefined categories and taxonomies, criticality-fromwithin operates through embodied, situated, and relational accounts. This “criticality”, following Irit Rogoff (2003), is distinct from “critique”, understood as the unmasking of hidden power structures, and instead emphasizes the situatedness of things. It is akin to what Donna Haraway (1991, 190) calls partial perspectives or “subjugated viewpoints”. A situated, embodied criticality does not operate through abstract, external viewpoints but in terms of critical engagement through practice. In this chapter I will conceptually refine the understanding of criticality-from-within, starting from Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret’s book Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf, published in English in 2014, and originally in French in 2011.2 The book is the result of a close reading of Virginia Woolf ’s “Three Guineas” (2000 [1938]), and collects the thoughts of the two authors as well as reflections based on exchanges with colleagues. As indicated on the back cover, the book asks, What is this civilization where appeals are made to culture and intellectual freedom as if they could stop wars, but whose institutions responsible for cultivating and transmitting culture and free thought work as assembly lines producing beings that Woolf describes as both submissive and violent, thirsting, if not for money, then for recognition, ready for all sorts of brutality if they feel that the abstract ideals that give them their identity are threatened? (Stengers and Despret 2014, back cover) This group of self-proclaimed “unfaithful daughters” of Woolf asks how resistance can emerge while being “within”. Namely, unfaithful to Woolf, these scholars have accepted to join a “college for the daughters of educated men” (Woolf 2000 [1938], 157) that is modeled onto the old plan of the college of men—a model that both Woolf and, as we can learn from the foregoing citation, her unfaithful following deemed problematic. Virginia Woolf ’s “Three Guineas” offers a response to a request she received to sign a letter in an effort to prevent war. Woolf refused to sign the manifesto not because she did not want to prevent war but because she believed that the methods and ideals represented by her country—­ competitiveness, oppression, exclusion, division of and prostitution of intellectual labor—and which 15

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she was asked to defend, in no way contributed to the prevention of war. Thus, instead of encouraging women to support their fathers and sons in the prevention of war by means of signing a manifesto in support of their society, she called to challenge those values: But as a result the answer to your question must be that we can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods. We can best help you to prevent war not by joining your society but by remaining outside your society but in co-operation with its aim. The aim is the same for both of us. It is to assert “the rights of all—all men and women—to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty”. (Woolf 2000 [1938], 272) Woolf was wary of women joining a university that is built on the old model of the society of men, for: it followed that the college for the daughters of educated men must also make Research produce practical results which will induce bequests and donations from rich men; it must encourage competition; it must accept degrees and coloured hoods; it must accumulate great wealth; it must exclude other people from a share of its wealth. (Woolf 2000 [1938], 157) Her call for resistance is therefore explicitly not within; she encourages the daughters and sisters to remain outside the society of men, including the university, given that it is built on the same ideals, rules, and principles. And yet, Woolf ’s methods for making precisely this point also hint at a form of resistance that does operate from within. Namely, Woolf shows that by reclaiming, reliving, and rethinking, through the detailed work of memoir, one can refuse to take for granted the dominant words, knowledges, and methods through which one is accustomed to think and operate. Such quest for remaining skeptical and resistant despite being “within” can be found in Stengers and Despret’s Women Who Make a Fuss. While having accepted, rather than rejected, joining a university modeled onto the college of men, these women refuse to fully embrace it as such. Despite being grateful for having been accepted to join the university, they refuse to forget about the sufferings, injustices, and contradictions that have been at the origins of that entitlement. To “make a fuss” is the faithful response of the “unfaithful daughters” of Woolf to the question as to how one can challenge systems from within. Despite enjoying their entitlements, they refuse to give in to the suggestion that “we have merited what happens to us, that the least we can do is accept it, with dignity, without making a fuss” (Stengers and Despret 2014, 163). In this chapter, we will learn how “making a fuss”, while originating in the feminist struggle, can also be instructive as part of a wider, epistemological rethinking of emancipation and responsibility in architecture (one that is no longer strictly “feminist”).3 But how exactly does “making a fuss” work as a form of criticality-from-within? In what follows, we will learn how “making a fuss” involves a combined ethical-methodological move of conceptual reshuffling through “category work”, of “reclaiming” history, and of questioning tactics in order to overcome contradictions and polarizations.

“Category Work”, or How to Resist the Taxonomies of Architectural Theory Donna Haraway’s call for “category work” (2006, 143) invites us to rethink the taken-for-granted concepts, analytical categories, and taxonomies that have come to determine architectural theory. 16

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Haraway uses the notion of “taxon” (1992, 299) in reference to the figure of the “inappropriate/d other” (by Trinh Minh-ha): “To be inappropriate/d is not to fit the taxon.” Theory then becomes a quest for alternative configurations, a practice that is itself subjected to (future) appropriation.4 Such theory resists an operational logic based on the inclusion or exclusion of ideas, actions, actors, and forms of knowledge according to ideological selection procedures. It is, instead, an architectural theory that encourages studying those actors that “matter” to the questions posed, not those that fit theory’s taxon. These actors may, at first, seem at odds with theory, but if they matter in the specific situation that is observed, are they not worthy of consideration? An example, in the context of Brussels, is the word “architek”. It is an insult in Brussels’ popular dialect that was invented in reference to Joseph Poelaert, the architect of the Palais de Justice, a construction so vast that it resulted in the expulsion of parts of the popular Marolles neighborhood. Because the word circulates in popular culture and everyday life rather than architectural or urban discourse, it is unlikely to figure in architectural theory and history. However, architek arguably has an important agency in the status and perception of architecture in Brussels. Namely, it reinforces a negative connotation for a profession that is otherwise associated with a sense of optimism. Its persistent presence in popular literature, travel guides, cultural production, and everyday life (see the detailed analysis in Doucet 2012) makes the word “architek” a protagonist in keeping this image of architecture alive. Architek shows that words can have unexpected agency. It shows that words can have what Virginia Woolf calls “odour”: an atmosphere of association that is situated and context-dependent, and that significantly determines how these words act, how they travel. Woolf gives the example of the odor of the word “miss”. While it may have a “delicious” odor in the private atmosphere, so Woolf argues, it may well smell more “disagreeable” to the noses of Whitehall (Woolf 2000 [1938], 174). For Woolf, odor, despite being impalpable, proves a powerful and discriminatory agent: “it is likely that a name to which ‘Miss’ is attached will, because of this odour, circle in the lower spheres where the salaries are small” (174). Woolf likens odor to atmosphere: Odour then—or shall we call it “atmosphere”?—is a very important element in professional life; in spite of the fact that it is impalpable. It can escape the noses of examiners in examination rooms, yet penetrate boards and divisions and affect the sense of those within. (Woolf, 2000 [1938], 174) Because of the power exercised by impalpable yet powerful odor—Woolf calls atmosphere “a very mighty power” (175)—changing odors can offer a powerful form of resistance and empowerment. Namely, it invites us to understand, and where needed counter, the odor that, wittingly or not, operates around ideas, concepts, or projects. Studying the forceful atmosphere around the word “architek”, for example, helps in understanding the sensation in Brussels of a mysterious force that was for long believed to have surrounded, and to have influenced, attempts toward ambitious and bold architecture (Doucet 2012). Rather than dismissing such force for being outmoded, conservative, or conspiratorial, understanding it in terms of “odor” helps in understanding the importance of its agency. Also, my use of the term “criticality-from-within” can be seen as a productive manipulation of odor. Namely, while recognizing the limitations of critical theory, retaining the term “criticality” allows us to rescue some of that “old” odor. In the face of a post-critical fatalism, the word “criticality” helps to keep ethical preoccupations at the heart of the pro-practice turn.5

Reclaiming, or How to Refuse to Forget? Keeping the word “criticality” at hand and working on its “odor” require, paraphrasing Donna Haraway (2006, 139), a willingness to work through, rather than dismiss, the contradictions of one’s 17

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intellectual heritage. It combines questioning and rethinking that heritage, while also respectfully recovering workable parts. Reclaiming and reliving are therefore at the heart of the “category work” Haraway suggests. Namely, in order to not take for granted the historical sacrifices that accompany the comfort and entitlements of positions “within”, criticality-from-within relies on reclaiming. Reclaiming means to not forget—to “forget to forget” (Braidotti 2006, 141). As Stengers and Despret (2014, 13) argue: “One quickly forgets the history, once a right is acquired and one is living in the general conditions permitting one to benefit from that right.” Because problematizing acquired rights is an act of reclaiming the history of that right, Stengers and Despret (2014, 28), like Woolf, refuse “amnesiac mobilization.” Woolf resisted such amnesia by creating a work of memoir, of memory: by writing an account of the injustices and sufferings that were at the basis of newfound rights and entitlements (Stengers and Despret 2014, 24). This work of memoir is, however, not a neutral account; it is embodied in that it reconnects with that past by reliving it. As Stengers (2012, 6, 2008, 58), in reference to Starhawk (1982, 219), puts it, “to smell the smoke [of the burned witches] in our nostrils [again].” Following Stengers and Starhawk, I understand reclaiming as not being about a—nostalgic or other—recuperation of the past but about learning to reintegrate those aspects of our pasts we have grown uncomfortable or disengaged with. Reclaiming is, therefore, also a matter of care and of healing: “It is not only a question of recuperating what one was separated from but to ‘heal’ the effects of that separation” (Stengers and Despret 2014, 154, footnote 4; on “care” see also Maria Puig de la Bellacasa 2017).

Tactics, or How to Work Through Contradictions and Dichotomies Now that, under neoliberalization, several long-standing tensions in social architecture and activism are magnified, it has become increasingly important to work through, rather than against, the contradictions and ambiguities of activism. In addition, groups and theories that share ideals may nevertheless offer diverging tactics of resistance. Is, therefore, judging tactics on solely moral grounds, still realistic and effective? A fascinating response can be found in the anti-globalization movement’s struggle to reconcile its internal tensions between violent and nonviolent branches. This struggle is described by Starhawk, an American self-claimed “Pagan, feminist, Witch, and anarchist” (2008 [2002], 9) who is active in anti-globalization activism as a street protestor, educator, and writer— counting Isabelle Stengers among her readership. In her book Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising (2008 [2002]), Starhawk suggests, rather than choosing between the tactic of violence or nonviolence, working with and through the tensions between both. For Starhawk, discussing tactics offers an opportunity to creatively rethink what a movement shares rather than focusing on what divides it. From Starhawk I learn that, in order for a movement to gain strength, it must learn to resist polarization and dichotomist organization. To resist polarizations, so Starhawk argues, discussions around chosen tactics are to move beyond purely moralistic grounds. The more police brutality the anti-globalization movement had to face, the more its defense of nonviolence and solidarity was tested.6 The question emerged as to whether remaining “ideological and purist” (114) about nonviolence was justified in the face of such violent repression. One of the stumbling blocks was the so-called black bloc, a small group of protesters wearing black masks, sometimes also using violent and destructive actions (Starhawk 2008 [2002], 15, 8). However, rather than dismissing this violent branch of the movement, Starhawk suggests using them as an occasion to discuss the possibilities of a “diversity of tactics” (93) and, by doing so, showing “solidarity even with people whose choices we disagree with” (95). Also, Starhawk acknowledges that, precisely because of their use of violence, the black bloc triggers the kind of media attention that is otherwise difficult to achieve with nonviolent protests alone (209–210). Criticality-from-within thus also requires critiquing, with mutual respect, within the ranks, and having discussions around

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tactics not just on moral but also on pragmatic grounds. It involves asking not as much whether certain tactics are per se right or wrong but asking, “ ‘Do these particular tactics support our goals and objectives?’ and ‘Are they actually working?’ ” (Starhawk 2008 [2002], 150). If criticality-from-within suggests working through such contradictions, this means, for architecture, not weighing one manifestation or method of social responsibility against another, and not too easily dismissing methods on moral grounds for being too naïve, too romantic, too reformist, too radical, or too utopian. Do diverging tactics, when sharing the goal of making architecture contribute toward a more just world, not deserve, if not approval, at least our consideration? Such post-dichotomist reading of social responsibility is moreover reinforced by the acknowledgment that every history and ancestry are always entangled, and thus non-polarizing. Starhawk argues that reclaiming the past allows for breaking with oppositional identity politics between the oppressed and the oppressor, black and white, women and men (195). Ancestry, for Starhawk, teaches us something quite powerfully: “In fact, there is no one alive whose ancestry includes only Pure Victims of Noble Hera/os of Resistance. Nor is there any group of Purely Evil Oppressors. Every one of us is born of both oppressors and oppressed” (195). Such recognition of entangled, implicated ancestries runs counter to any division of the (present) world into moralistic camps.

Stirring Architecture From Within For architectural theory, practice, and history, the combined act of reclaiming, category work, and post-dichotomist tactics reads as an invitation to reconnect with those aspects of the past one has become estranged from or that sit uncomfortably. That by reliving the past also a process of healing can start is, in my view, shown by the Jonction event in Brussels, as a series of cultural activities organized between September 2011 and December 2012 as part of the debates surrounding the future of the Brussels north-south railway junction, a 60-year-old urban scar that resulted from the tunneling of the inner-city railway connection (Doucet 2015, 79–110).7 As part of the events, four architectural firms were commissioned to develop proposals for the site, by means of 4 × 4 m tapestries, displayed in the 4 × 4: Four Visions on the North-South Junction exhibition (Figures 2.1 and 2.2).8 4 × 4 forms an act of digesting and reclaiming in that it promotes optimistic urban imaginaries that challenged Brussels’ skepticism vis-à-vis innovative designs, while also remaining loyal to the Brussels “situation”, showing respect for its urban culture and history, including the urban traumas from which its population suffered and of which the north-south junction serves as a symbol. While exemplifying a new confidence in the importance of architectural and urban design competitions, the Jonction initiative did not opt for global icons or star-architectures as we have seen emerging elsewhere. Instead it encouraged bold architectural statements that remained close to Brussels’ complex architectural, political, and sociocultural legacy. The four commissioned architects (Studio 012 / Secchi-Vigano/Karbon, V+, XDGA, and 51N4E) were, perhaps not coincidentally, renowned architectural firms with a thorough knowledge of the Brussels problématique. Also, instead of commissioning design projects, communicated through the traditional tools of architecture, such as sections, plans, models, and elevations, the architects were invited to work on the imagination for this site through the design of a 4 × 4 m wall tapestry. These tapestries were, with their avoidance of technical jargon, also hoped to communicate with the wider public. Tactics and “category work” (not plans and sections but tapestry) thus complemented the act of reclaiming in that they allowed for an ambitious statement that was nevertheless respectful of the historical pain and suffering of the citizens of Brussels, as such contributing to the “healing” of the Brussels trauma. In reconnecting with Brussels’ situatedness, the traumatization of its population, and a desire for architectural boldness and prestige, 4 × 4 formed, rather than a grand gesture, an act of digesting.

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Photographs by Kevin Laloux and Maxime Delvaux. © Bouwmeester Maître Architecte bMa, asbl Recyclart, and asbl Congrès.

Figure 2.1 Wall tapestries designed for the Jonction 4 × 4 exhibition.

Photographs by Kevin Laloux and Maxime Delvaux. © Bouwmeester Maître Architecte bMa, asbl Recyclart, and asbl Congrès.

Figure 2.2 Wall tapestries designed for the Jonction 4 × 4 exhibition.

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“Another Architecture Is Possible,”9 or Criticality-From-Within as a Hopeful Perspective Jonction also demonstrates that criticality-from-within—or “making a fuss”—in addition to critiquing a situation from within evokes hope for a better, or at least different, future. Such hope is informed not by transcendental utopian dreams whereby a brand-new world will one day replace the current one: as Stengers and Despret state: “The fuss is not the heroic statement of a grand cause, in the name of which sacrifice would be de rigueur” (Stengers and Despret 2014, 163). Instead, hope emerges when working through the tensions and contradictions of everyday practices and by doing so transforming everyday reality piecemeal, incrementally, and without any guarantee of the outcome. Woolf ’s call (2000 [1938], 198) “to build a new and better world” (and to prevent war) requires, rather than grand visions or models, developing a different set of skills and virtues that can gradually contribute to achieving a better world. These virtues include, in Woolf ’s analysis, “poverty, chastity, derision, and freedom from unreal loyalties” (204), whereby chastity suggests that “when you have enough money to live on by your profession you must refuse to sell your brain for the sake of money” (Woolf 2000 [1938], 205). It also implies, for Woolf, to refuse any loyalties that come with essentialism: whether nationalist, religious, academic, or sexual (205). The form of hope that comes from criticality-from-within is therefore neither transcendentally utopian nor fatalist vis-à-vis the conditions within which one operates. It is a form of everyday empowerment that is further emphasized in Starhawk’s call for “empowered direct action” (2008, 98): a form of activism that does not propose to wait for any form of grand revolution, but instead encourages to ask, in the here and now, “What kind of world do we want? Maybe we can’t articulate it, but we can embody it in how we organize, and in how we treat each other” (59).10 Resistance from within, or what Starhawk calls “power from within,” implies the “ability to dare, to do, and to dream; our creativity” (2008, 7) but also a willingness to invest effort not just into, for example, street protests but also into the laborious, unglamorous effort of endless phone calls, making flyers, emails, and fundraising that is required to make street action possible (57). To resist is then to challenge systems from within: “If we refuse to comply, if we call the legitimacy of the system itself into question, ultimately the system cannot stand.” (8). Empowering resistance can take place in the shape of visible action, such as street protests, but it is also very much part of an everyday critical attitude. One paragraph in Starhawk’s Webs of Power depicts this everyday reflection and resistance beautifully: Are the people who produce the tools of my trade, my food, my clothing and luxuries paid a living wage? Are their health and safety protected? Are their children well educated? Can they afford to buy the products they produce? What is the true cost of this work, this product, this toy to the soil? The waters? The air? The complex and irreplaceable habitats of this earth? The health of our communities? Who pays that cost, and in what coin? Money? Cancer? Extinction? Who profits? (Starhawk 2008, 38) Starhawk reminds us that this is an empowering resistance that is slow: “Slowly, slowly, they eat into the foundations of the structures of power” (2008, 48). For architecture, slow but structural resistance means to scrutinize, on an everyday basis, the ethical justifications of the profession: the construction methods used, the building materials and the divisions and conditions of labor they induce, the clients and users that are included or excluded . . . In terms of social responsibility in architecture, it means to not theorize social responsibility from a position of autonomy and withdrawal (e.g., in the drawing-manifesto or utopian scheme) but to test countercultural ambitions in and through practice. For theory and history the question becomes not as much the validity (the right or wrong) of ideas, ideals, and ideological ambitions but the practices through which such 22

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ideas are effectuated and the ways in which radical counter-projects survived the test of practice. In addition, discovering the potential of slow change from within guides researchers away from seminal architectural works and critiques into resistant practices that emerge from the wider mundane environments that impact the production of the built environment—for example, construction, contracting, certification and legislation, real estate, policy making, and everyday use and appropriations of space. Ultimately, such is an invitation to study resistance not understood as marginal, understood not as outcasts on the outside but those choosing to act otherwise, to disrupt the dominant stateof-affairs from within.11 It is a marginal position understood as “interstitial” (Stengers 2005a, 2005b; Debaise 2008, 2013; Doucet 2015, 79–110): that which “escapes description because our words refer to stabilised identities and functioning” (Stengers 2002, 245). Otherness (i.e., margins, peripheries, the excluded) no longer operates as an externalized category but as destabilizing and disruptive forces that allow for resistance also in places that are central. The aim of this chapter was to think about social responsibility beyond dichotomist, oppositional, and reductive readings of architecture and beyond the post-critical affiliations of the pro-practice turn. Criticality-from-within and “making a fuss” were introduced as analytical and critical vehicles for thinking about social engagement through practice. With the help of, among others, Virginia Woolf and her “unfaithful daughters” criticality through practice became understood as operating through a combination of reclaiming, memoir, reliving, category work, and manipulating “odor”. Together, these pave the way for a socially responsible architecture that not only is transformative but also “heals.”12 The ethical-methodological combo suggested by criticality-from-within therefore offers a hopeful perspective. By combining daily on-the-ground struggles for justice with “think we must” (Woolf 2000 [1938]), criticality-from-within offers a path for social engagement that takes architecture seriously as a “transdiscipline” (Rendell 2004; Doucet and Janssens 2011): namely, operating as both a discipline and profession and thus forced to imagine social responsibility and change across theory, history, design, profession, and education.

Acknowledgments I am grateful for exchanges of ideas that have, often unwittingly and implicitly, inspired the writing of this chapter. I refer to discussions with Hélène Frichot and PhD students of the doctoral seminar held at KTH Stockholm in October 2015 and discussions during the AHRA conference in Leeds in November 2015.

Notes 1 This chapter is untypically theoretical in nature. While indeed “untypical” because I usually address the questions raised in this chapter, in and through the study of concrete urban situations and architectural productions, I feel that it is important to point out that these practical experiences, albeit implicitly, nourish this chapter. 2 Elsewhere I have tested, through concrete situations, the potential of critical operations from within. In the context of Brussels (Doucet 2015) I studied instances of critical engagement as they occurred after 1968: from the oppositional critique of 1970s counter-projects to an interstitial urban activism in the 1990s. 3 This distinction between the feminist struggle and epistemological rethinking of social responsibility in architecture is important in order to invite also research that would otherwise feel excluded for not being “feminist.” I am grateful that the importance of this distinction became articulated through exchanges with Hélène Frichot in the context of the Call for Paper announcement for the 2016 AHRA Conference at KTH Stockholm. Hélène and I have subsequently addressed such questions as part of the thematic issue we edited for the journal Architectural Theory Review on the topic of “Resist, Reclaim, Speculate: Situated perspectives on architecture and the city” (Vol. 22, no.1, April 2018). 4 In her book In Catastrophic Times, Isabelle Stengers (2015 [2009]), calls for different stories and imaginations that can resist the logic of what she calls the “first history”—the capitalist history driven by an unshakeable 23

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justification of economic growth, deemed unavoidable—and instead help to live the “second history” (the one that is happening) and in which it is, for Stengers, urgent to explore ways of life after economic growth; to “explore connections with new powers of acting, feeling, imagining, and thinking” (pp. 23–24). 5 While working on the final edits of this paper, a memory returned to me! Unless I remember this incorrectly (in which case I apologize for this recollection), I recall how in a seminar at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, several years ago, Professor Katja Grillner made an interesting observation about the usefulness, in some circumstances, to continue using those concepts and terms that one challenges, in order to keep involved precisely the audiences that one would like to see exposed to that challenge. 6 Compared to the actions around the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle, the movement was believed to have met escalated police brutality in Genoa in 2001. 7 Jonction was initiated by the collectives Congres and Recyclart, and institutional partners Agence de Développement Territorial/Agentschap voor Territoriale Ontwikkeling (ADT/ATO) and the Brussels Master Architect (bMa). This project discussion is, albeit in shorter form, taken from (Doucet 2015: 79–110), where it was analyzed within the wider context of “interstitial activism” of architectural and urban design in Brussels in the 1990s and 2000s. 8 The exhibition took place between December 7, 2012, and February 10, 2013, at BOZAR Brussels (see Jonction.be, accessed June 13, 2014). 9 The slogan “Another world is possible!” is taken from the anti-globalization movement (e.g., Starhawk 2008 [2002]); 260) and was used as a slogan for the United Nations’ World Social Forum’s annual conferences in 2001 and 2002, as collected in the report published in 2003 under the same name (William F. Fisher and Thomas Ponniah, eds. 2003, Another World Is Possible, World Social Forum Proposals for an Alternative Globalization). It is also used by Stengers (2011) in her plea for slow science. The artist Mark Titchner used the slogan, literally, as a main feature in his 2015 artwork Let the Future Tell the Truth. Another World Is Possible. 10 When this chapter was already in its editing stages, Haraway’s (2016) book was published under the fitting title Staying With the Trouble, a fascinating call for “learning to stay truly present” (p. 1). 11 I here take AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2007) wariness of reading peripheries as “other” spaces as a warning, because, doing so would, paraphrasing AbdouMaliq Simone (2007), risk unleashing the “real” city (that is chaotic, self-organizing,“lived”) while treating the rest of the city (the center) as presumably stable and normalized. 12 In recent debates within the environmental humanities, notions of care, kinship, and encounter are introduced as important ways of world-making and of healing. See, for example, the entries in the “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities”: http://environmentalhumanities.org/lexicon/.

References Awan, Nishat, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till (2011). Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture. London: Routledge. Bell, Bryan (2004), ed. Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service Through Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Bishop, Claire (2012). Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso. Borden, Iain, Joe Kerr, and Jane Rendell (2000), eds. The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Braidotti, Rosi (2006). Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity. Crawford, Margaret, John Kaliski, and John Chase (2008 [1999]), eds. Everyday Urbanism. New York: The Monacelli Press. Debaise, Didier (2008). “The Living and Its Environments”, Process Studies 37, no. 2. Debaise, Didier (2013). “A Philosophy of Interstices: Thinking Subjects and Societies From Whitehead’s Philosophy”, Subjectivity 6, no. 1: 101–111. Doucet, Isabelle (2012). “Making a City With Words: Understanding Brussels Through Its Urban Heroes and Villains”, City, Culture, and Society 3, no. 2: 105–116. Doucet, Isabelle (2015). The Practice Turn in Architecture: Brussels After 1968. Burlington: Ashgate. Doucet, Isabelle and Kenny Cupers (2009), eds. “Agency in Architecture: Reframing Criticality in Theory and Practice”, Footprint Journal 4 (Spring). Doucet, Isabelle and Nel Janssens (2011), eds. Transdisciplinary Knowledge Production in Architecture and Urbanism: Towards Hybrid Modes of Inquiry. New York: Springer. Haraway, Donna (1991). “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna (1992). “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics of Inappropriate/d Others”, in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. London: Routledge, 295–337. 24

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Haraway, Donna (2016). Staying With the Trouble, Making Kin in the Chtulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna and Nicholas Gane (2006). “When We Have Never Been Human, What Is To Be Done? Interview With Donna Haraway”, Theory Culture & Society 23, nos. 7–8: 135–158. Hill, Jonathan (1998), ed. Occupying Architecture—Between the Architect and the User. London: Routledge. Latour, Bruno (2004). “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2: 225–248. Latour, Bruno (2005). Re-assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno and Albena Yaneva (2009). “Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture”, in Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research, ed. Reto Geiser. Berlin: Birkhauser, 80–89. Malgrave, Harry Francis and David Goodman (2011). “Pragmatism and Post-Criticality”, in An Introduction to Architectural Theory: 1968 to the Present. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 177–193. Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria (2017) Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Rendell, Jane (2004). “Architectural Research and Disciplinarity”, Architecture Research Quarterly 8, no. 2: 141–147. Rendell, Jane, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser, and Mark Dorrian (2007), eds. Critical Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge. Rogoff, Irit (2003). “What Is a Theorist?” [In German], in Was ist ein Künstler, ed. Katharyna Sykora. Berlin: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. The translation by Rogoff is available online. Accessed April 1, 2011, www.kein.org/ node/62 Saunders, William S. (2007), ed. The New Architectural Pragmatism. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Simone, AbdouMaliq (2007). “At the Frontier of the Urban Periphery”, in Sarai Reader 07: Frontiers, ed. Monica Narula et al., 469. Accessed June 2, 2014. http://sarai.net/ sarai-reader-07-frontiers/. Starhawk (1982). Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex & Politics. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Starhawk (2008 [2002]). Webs of Power: Notes From the Global Uprising. Gabriola Island, Canada: New Catalyst Books. Stengers, Isabelle (2002). “A ‘Cosmo-Politics’—Risk, Hope, Change: A Conversation With Isabelle Stengers”, in Hope: New Philosophies for Change, Marie Zournazie. Annandale: Pluto Press, 244–272. Stengers, Isabelle (2005a).“The Cosmopolitical Proposal”, in Making Things Public—Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Karlsruhe and Cambridge: ZKM and The MIT Press, 994–1003. Stengers, Isabelle (2005b). “Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices”, Cultural Studies Review 11, no. 1 (March): 183–196. Stengers, Isabelle (2008). “Experimenting With Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism”, Subjectivity 22: 38–59. Stengers, Isabelle (2011). “ ‘Another Science Is Possible!’ A Plea for Slow Science”, Inaugural lecture as Chair Willy Calewaert 2011–2012, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, December 13. Accessed June 13, 2014, http://three rottenpotatoes.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/stengers2011_pleaslowscience.pdf. Stengers, Isabelle (2012). “Reclaiming Animism”, E-Flux Journal 36 ( July). Stengers, Isabelle (2015). In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Open Humanities Press and Meson Press; originally published in French by Editions La Découverte, Paris, France, in 2009. Stengers, Isabelle and Vinciane Despret (2014). Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf, Univocal. Minneapolis, MN. Translated from French (2011, Editions La Decouverte, Paris) by April Knutson. Sykes, A. Krista (2010), ed. Constructing a New Agenda: Architectural Theory 1993–2009. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Woolf, Virginia (2000 [1938]). “Three Guineas”, in A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas. London: Penguin Books; originally published by The Hogarth Press.

Further Reading Doucet, Isabelle and Frichot, Hélène, eds. (2018, April). “Resist, Reclaim, Speculate: Situated perspectives on architecture and the city”, thematic issue, Architectural Theory Review, 22, no.1. Haraway, Donna (2016). Staying With the Trouble, Making Kin in the Chtulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 25

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O’Gorman, Emily and Kate Wright, eds. (n.d.). “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities”. http:// environmentalhumanities.org/lexicon/ Rawes, Peg, ed. (2013). Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity. London: Routledge. Stengers, Isabelle (2005). “The Cosmopolitical Proposal”, in Making Things Public—Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Karlsruhe and Cambridge: ZKM and MIT Press, 994–1003; Stengers, Isabelle (2015). In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Open Humanities Press and Meson Press; originally published in French by Editions La Découverte, Paris, France, in 2009. Zitouni, Benedikte (2014). “Planetary Destruction, Ecofeminism and Transformative Politics in the Early 1980s”, Interface: A Journal for and About Social Movements 6, no. 2 (November): 244–270.

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3 Toward an Architecture of the Public Good Tom Spector

The San Francisco Federal Building, designed by Morphosis (with SmithGroup Architects) and completed in 2007, likely heralds a new age in public buildings in the United States at a time when the concept of “public building” needs a reboot (Figure 3.1). The result of a “unique combination of avant-garde formal autonomy and political engagement” (Lavin 2007, 106) whose appearance was largely justified by sustainability objectives, it exemplifies an approach that stands to help the architecture profession overcome its relegation to the status of “weak service provider,” in educator Sylvia Lavin’s dismissive turn-of-phrase in a critique of the building (Lavin 2007, 106). Many in the field of architecture are pinning their hopes on sustainability to provide both a formal agenda and a strong moral mission for contemporary architecture, but this is unlikely to be a complete solution because sustainability is better thought of as a means than as an end in itself. After all, there is no logical conflict between a building’s being both perfectly dreadful and sustainable. Its sustainability credentials certainly have not insulated the Federal Building from controversy over its imposing yet mute appearance on Mission Street. The liabilities of the approach to form making illustrated by the Federal Building suggests that for the profession to overcome its relative powerlessness in the construction economy, a more inclusive public good served by architects engaging in their core activities of designing buildings and spaces for human use is worth exploring. But what is the content of the public good? How is it achieved? Lavin (2007), unimpressed with this line of thinking, would have it that Morphosis’s approach creates opportunities for newfound relevance. But perhaps a more generalizable source of guidance to both penetrate and operationalize the concept of the public good can be found in the registration laws familiar to American architects that break this good down into the tripartite of protecting the “public health, safety and welfare” (NCARB 2016, 11). As this requirement plays out in practice, architects are charged with such negative obligations as not physically endangering people with our buildings, not making them sick and not flouting community development standards. But is there no positive side, no creative side, to advancing the public welfare? Part of the problem with answering this question affirmatively is that, since “public welfare” is hardly less vague than “public good,” this third term mostly goes unremarked in practice. And so it seems that, even though a few “do-nots” can be culled from the concept of “health, safety and welfare,” what the phrase has mainly served to do is to call attention more sharply to what is lacking in our understanding of what serving the public good means.

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Figure 3.1

San Francisco Federal Building.

Photograph by author.

The largely pro bono or in some way subsidized design practices by such entities as the San Francisco–based Public Architecture, the now-defunct Architecture for Humanity, and the many individual initiatives by architecture firms around the world that do good works and generate considerable publicity for doing so have begun to provide proven creative outlets for architects’ public spirit. These entities’ works serve the public good much as lawyers’ do: as something that must be achieved outside the boundaries of for-profit practice. The shortcoming of this approach, however well-meaning and welcome it may be, is that it marginalizes the pursuit of the public good as merely an ameliorative use of the profession’s excess capital. It’s wonderful if you can do it, but if you can’t, that’s okay too. If we want to be able to make the stronger assertion that the architecture profession’s limited market protections are necessary to enable its crucial role in advancing the public good, then we need a conception of practice for which this outcome accrues as a direct result of everyday architectural practice and not as something done on the side, when we want to, and as a gratuity. But before we can even assert the existence of such a service to the public good in order to establish a better foundation for the profession’s ethical legitimacy, we need a better understanding of just who is the public, and what is its good.

The Concept of the Public The public is a problem. Or, rather, our understanding of just who or what is the public is a problem. Today, in the United States at least, we tend to identify the public as something that has always 28

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existed and that is roughly synonymous with “everyone” or with the government. “Public land,” for example, belongs to the people through the intermediary of the U. S. government. But historically none of this is true. In its telling by Jürgen Habermas, the thinker who has done more than anyone to theorize it, the modern concept of the public arose in the Enlightenment as a “realm of discussion unaffected by social hierarchy” (Mah 2000, 163). Or, as philosopher Charles Taylor tells it, “the new public sphere” functioned as “a discourse of reason on and to power, rather than by power” (Taylor 1995, 265). In some ways, our contemporary identification of the public with the government is a victory for the concept. That we now largely associate the public, especially in terms of property rights, with that which we all own in common through the government is a reflection of the public sphere’s successes in promoting the institution of both universal suffrage and equality of rights. But in an important way this association is also an indicator of defeat, because it provides evidence of the waning of the public sphere’s critical capability, a capability originating in the coffeehouses in London and the salons in Paris as a self-organized realm capable of opposing reason to the inherited privileges of the aristocracy and the dogmatic moralism of the church. Through reason, both sources of unreason could be resisted and a modern space could be fashioned in which the rising bourgeoisie could assert itself. Thus the invention of public spaces belonging not to the king or to the church but to citizens; the invention of the art market, in which cultural achievement could be debated and purchased; and the gradual reintroduction of democracy itself after a 2000-year hiatus. But if the public realm is the government, then the bourgeois public’s critical role becomes absorbed in bureaucratic processes. Thus, as Habermas has observed, “Tendencies pointing to the collapse of the public sphere are unmistakable, for while its scope is expanding impressively, its function has become progressively insignificant” (Habermas 1989, 4). Thinking of the public as a stand-in for “everyone” is no more satisfactory. Even though the Enlightenment was guided by the concept that one’s status as a human being counted for far more than one’s inherited social status, to allow the public good to be guided by what everyone can agree upon is to set the bar quite low. Most of the time the public is rife with contestation. How are we supposed, then, to make decisions for the benefit of everyone when everyone does not agree on what is in their best interests? The bourgeois public described by Habermas allows for and even encourages this contestation, as long as it takes the form of rational dispute guided by the force of the better argument.

The Erosion of the Public The bourgeois public—self-organized, nonhierarchical, guided by reason, critical of authority—is a great starting point for crafting an architecture serving the public good. But we need to know what we are up against and why the public has lost most of its critical force in recent times. What began in the seventeenth century as an intermediate realm between state and pure domesticity among an emerging reading, bourgeois social class has, in recent times, become progressively less a self-­organizing place of resistance and more a childlike beneficiary of welfare state solicitations and consumer of capitalistic displays calculated, in a process Habermas terms “refeudalization,” to generate widespread acquiescence. This transformation has occurred because, as it developed, the bourgeois vision of open participation became progressively clouded in the nineteenth century by the unfair reality of an underclass apparently unable to penetrate into the public realm—a reality that was overturned only by radically democratizing the admission standards. According to its own logic, the idea of a bourgeois, literate public realm was obliged to expand or else show itself as less than egalitarian. This logic led to the inevitable expansion of the voting franchise in the United States from landowners to all free men, to all men, and finally, to all adults. This necessary expansion entailed the unfortunate side effect that, as it expanded democratically, the public lost its potential for critical self-appraisal and critical opposition to state authority: “The principle of the public sphere, 29

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that is, critical publicity, seemed to lose its strength in the measure that it expanded as a sphere and even undermined the private realm” (Habermas 1989, 140). Expansion of the public to the point where there is no one in power on its outside means that criticism has to be turned, to some large degree, in on itself. The public realm must divide itself to retain its capacity for rational criticism. But this expansion and flattening of its critical capacity are not the only source of its current dormant state. Most forms of civil society, of which the bourgeois public is the most politically engaged form, have been in retreat since their high-water mark shortly after World War II. Robert Putnam, in the book Bowling Alone, has amply documented the decline in recent decades in all sorts of informal organizations: bowling leagues, civic organizations, garden clubs, alumni organizations, churches and more are all shrinking. Richard Sennett’s Fall of Public Man charts the seeds of decline even earlier, to the late nineteenth century. Latter-day capitalism has played its role as well. Thus, Rem Koolhaas’s assertion concerning the demise of public life that “everything has turned into shopping: Airports, museums, theme parks, even universities, libraries, and churches. Cities themselves are morphing into gigantic malls” (Ockman 2002, 77) fits Habermas’s diagnosis perfectly. Even if it were possible to reclaim a significant public realm, one capable of critical resistance to power, neoliberal economics would call into question the purpose. According to this view, an intensified private realm of leisure and consumption is the desired end result, so it seems, for which the bourgeois public realm described by Habermas was only a way station. This economic interpretation of the good life has thoroughly inundated other, more politically engaged, conceptions of the good. It has, in particular, hastened the demise of the republican concept of democracy in favor of the liberal interpretation. In a republican democracy, personal initiative and self-improvement serve a greater public aim of participatory self-government, which is seen as the essential requirement for and expression of liberty. This republican conception of citizenship has been replaced in capitalist democracies by the procedural, liberal democracy. The liberal democracy operates, instead, on the assumption that the most important prerequisite for liberty is the right to be left alone; the most liberty is therefore secured by government that adopts a neutral framework to the activities of its constituents and lets each decide for himself or herself the ends worth pursuing. “On the liberal conception, by contrast (to the republican conception), liberty is not internally but only incidentally related to self-government. Where liberty consists in the opportunity to pursue my own interests and ends, it may or may not coincide with democratic government” (Sandel 1996, 26). The liberal conception regards the republican view with suspicion, casting doubt on the idea that an engaged electorate can be produced without cajoling and coercing people to participate and that coercing participation is a peculiar concept of freedom. Republicans believe that demanding participation is a small price to pay for the good of true self-government. To accelerate the retreat of the public realm, the philosophy of utilitarianism, which maintains its dominance on the public imagination through cost benefit analyses and similar justifications for decisions affecting large numbers of people, provides an ideal moral justification complementary to liberal interpretations of the good. Utilitarianism is an outlook that cherishes, above all, “states of feeling as the source of all value in the world” (Hampshire 1978, 2). The state of feeling usually identified as most worthy of cultivation is happiness. By privileging happiness as the ultimate good toward which all moral actions aim, utilitarianism provides further justification for the liberal and economic interpretations. This is so because the idea of happiness is virtually unintelligible as a public good. Happiness is something ordinarily experienced by individuals; group happiness, to have any meaning at all, is only the sum of individuals’ happiness. Utilitarian outlooks favor the idea of architecture as a good that enables certain experiences that increase the overall happiness in the world, and this leads back to the conception of architecture as a consumer good maximized in a society as free as possible from the narrowing, distorting influence of government.

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The idea that actions and material goods are ultimately justified by their ability to increase the experience of happiness in the world parallels the hierarchy observed by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore that as capitalism matures and standards of living improve, consumption moves from material goods to services, to information, and lastly to experiences (Pine and Gilmore 1999). This observed hierarchy provides empirical justification to utilitarian claims of the primacy of the experience of happiness. Happiness, or the perception of well-being, turns out, after all, to be exactly what people ultimately seek, once they have satisfied basic bodily needs. Bentham was right all along about the fundamentals of pleasure and pain. Michael Benedikt argues that architecture, too, has been swept into the justification of design actions through appeals to experience: Although rather few architects today are interested in perpetuating the classical-historical pastiche that Postmodernism first favored, many are still interested in the proposition that all buildings . . . ought to provide exciting and memorable encounters, albeit with trendier shards and curves or luminous twisted volumes crammed with electronic paraphernalia. Follow this trend and extend it, and ultimately we must arrive at a new general understanding of architecture—to wit, architecture as experience. (Benedikt 2001, 85) Benedikt is concerned that the supremacy of experience as the ultimate aim undermines the pursuit of authentic architecture. The creation of new realities and the reflection of reality back on ourselves are a traditional goal of architecture that gets lost. While the liberal and utilitarian views seem to abet the withering of the public realm, newly emboldened libertarian conceptions even call into question whether such a thing as a “public good” can really exist. The somewhat ironically labeled public choice theory disputes the validity of the distinction between individuals seeking their own gain and something called the public pursuing a distinctly different set of goods. The public will, according to this conception, is not some mysterious, transcendent force for doing good in the world. It is nothing more than the sum of individual actions, and individual actions are primarily motivated by self-seeking ends. The division of the physical world into public—that is, government-owned property—or pseudo-public—that is, owned by forprofit enterprise—is the result. Public choice theory justifies the incursion of the private realm of economic man into the political by arguing that the attainment of something other than the sum of individual goods is not possible; and that the political realm is incapable, therefore, of improving mankind’s lot over and above that which can be achieved by the rewards and penalties of the market. “Logically, if economic man maximizes self-seeking behavior in the economic realm, he also pursues selfish gain in social and political life. But where markets are self-correcting, politics is self-infecting” (Kuttner 1996, 333). Politics is self-infecting because it only introduces inefficiencies into market mechanisms; it cannot correct them. If politics is incapable of doing anything but redistributing goods in ultimately selfdefeating (because skewed and inefficient) ways, then the associated public realm that makes politics possible is best minimized. The cumulative effect of the logic of laissez-faire economics, procedural democracy and subjective philosophies of the good is to discourage the exploration for new interpretations of facts and values for public benefit. Classical economics instructs that nonintervention in market mechanisms is the speediest route for people to obtain what it is they want, liberal democracy holds that government is incapable of defining the good without coercion, and subjective philosophies of the good intimate that the good can be found only by looking inward. At every turn, the idea that the good can be sought via public forum in rational argument is discouraged or dismissed. Facts are seen as value-neutral by these conceptions, and values are seen as incapable of rational exposition (due to

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their origin in subjectivity), and therefore pointless for public debate. Indeed, the very idea of public debate becomes suspicious as inherently manipulative; “deliberation is taken to be mere logrolling, never legitimate consensus-building or problem-solving” (Kuttner 1996, 338). And yet, even the public realm’s most strident enemies seemingly cannot do without it. As philosopher Charles Taylor observes, “The public sphere is a central feature of modern society. So much so that, even where it is in fact suppressed or manipulated, it has to be faked. Modern despotic societies have generally felt compelled to go through the motions” (Taylor 1995, 259). This is so because a functioning public sphere does much to self-justify social and political legitimacy.

The New Pragmatism in Architecture The low fortunes of the concept of the public are a sad spectacle, but they do provide an opportunity for architecture to have some significant revitalizing effect. Recognizing the force of neoliberal economics on the production of public space (or what passes for it these days), and largely unimpressed with the marginal improvements made possible by pro bono work, a new unsentimental pragmatic attitude toward the public good has asserted itself in the architectural academy. Not wishing to be taken in by mere nostalgia for a time that never really existed, Sarah Whiting expresses with illdisguised disdain that Lament-drenched, postlapsarian narratives about a lost public sphere . . . invariably feed futile “retrieve and recover” missions that share success/failure rates with other contemporary missions based on myths. The public sphere in the US has, from its inception, been tied as much, if not more, to business than to its presumptive origin in government or some variant of public organization. (Segal et al. 2008, 102–107)1 Whiting uses the term bottom line public spaces (BLPS) to identify public and pseudo-public spaces created by business interests. She thinks these have long been and are likely to continue to be the only public spaces created in the United States. BLPS “dot the entirety of American urbanism and are very likely the only hope for public space that we will see in the near future” (Segal et al. 2008, 106). This new pragmatism toward the public realm seems to see only two choices, as Dana Villa observes: “It is the choice between a politics of mourning and a politics of parody, a politics that remembers the res publica and a politics engaged in the endless subversion of codes” (Villa 1992, 719). This determination to adopt an unsentimental attitude toward the Habermasian concept of the public realm questions not only its efficacy but also its legitimacy. Margaret Crawford argues that, like the ancient Athenian democracy, which in reality was based in multiple exclusions, the bourgeois public sphere “began by excluding women and workers” (Crawford 1995, 4). “Moreover, the requirements for rational deliberation and a rhetoric of disinterest privileged middle class and masculine modes of public speech and behavior by defining them as universal norms” (Crawford 1995, 4; Fraser 1993).2 This argument, developed out of an influential essay by Nancy Fraser, is beside the point. The point of the bourgeois public sphere is not contained in its origins, which were indeed imperfect, but in its logic—and its logic was and still is centrally about the worth of the individual and the ideal of egalitarianism. And while much of the concept of the public has always had a distinctly idealistic content—Harold Mah calls it a phantasm (Mah 2000, 153)—in this particular instance history actually bears out its ideals. The public realm actually did transcend its bourgeois origins to widen its inclusivity to include all rational adults capable of its participatory requirements. In the United States it actually was receptive to civil rights claims in the 1960s. And most recently it continues to be responsive to appeals to LGBT rights. One hopes that the feminist objection here

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is not the self-abnegating one against rationality as being a province of the male intellect. There is nothing distinctly masculine about the exercise of one’s rationality nor about patiently listening to, discussing and considering each other’s arguments. Crawford’s examination of the informal public realm of Los Angeles takes it as a nonstarter that the actions of architects do anything at all to create, reinforce or redirect a public amenity. Instead, she concentrates on street vendors and other “bottom-up” refashionings of a public space out of government-owned (e.g., streets and sidewalks) or privately owned property (e.g., parking garages). “The emergence of these new public spaces and activities in Los Angeles, shaped by lived experience more than built space, raises complex political questions about the meaning of economic participation and citizenship in our cities” (Crawford 1995, 9). In the search for genuine grass-roots public spaces, how is it possible that all the buildings that architects have a hand in making to create the urban environment are left completely out of the equation? The expansion of the private realm has led to severely diminished expectations of the public and, by extension, of what architects can do to beneficially influence it. The pragmatic determination to avoid nostalgia for a time that never really existed leads, ultimately, to the serious proposition by Dana Cuff that the public be rebranded merely as infrastructure: “communities”—particularly those located in suburbs—undermine anything resembling a coherent, cosmopolitan expression of collective identity. In contrast to these fragmented, local associations, designers must now try to wring a form of public architecture from those lowly infrastructures that transcend the local—sewers, storm water channels, power grids, highways, and rail lines. (Cuff 2012, 62)3 And so it’s come to this. The prime opportunity remaining for architects in economically advanced Western societies to creatively engage the public is the sewer system. At least there is no further to fall.

The Spatialized Public Why must the public be imagined in terms that are only tangential to architecture when philosophers, historians and sociologists have been quick to see that the concept of the public has always had a spatial component? For Hannah Arendt’s beloved ancient Greeks, it was intimately bound up with the agora. For Habermas, though first and foremost a social construct, the budding bourgeois public had its coffee houses, salons, reading clubs and art exhibits. But contemporary theorists generally see the idea as existing within a discoursal space first and a physical space afterward. That is to say, the operations of a bourgeois public depend on establishing a “space of resistance,” or a “critical distance.” It is understood as a “realm” that individuals can enter, inhabit and exit. “Historians have rhetorically ‘spatialized’ the public sphere, conceiving of it as a space or domain of free expression and argument that is accessible to any social group” (Mah 2000, 154). According to Charles Taylor, a public space is “a kind of common space . . . in which people who never even meet understand themselves to be engaged in discussion, and capable of reaching a common mind” (Taylor 1995, 265). The bourgeois public occupies a different rhetorical space from the ancient polis. Whereas the discussants among the members of the polis understood themselves to be preparing for a decision by the very same people doing the discussing, a modern public is self-consciously extrapolitical; it is addressed to power and not in itself an exercise in or a preliminary rehearsal in political power. This extrapolitical character of the modern public is not a lack but rather a positive feature. This feature allows the public to deliberate, ideally, “disengaged from partisan spirit” (Taylor 1995, 265). It provides an outside check on political power, which did not exist in ancient times.

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This discoursal space easily elides into a conception of three-dimensional, open, urban space among historians and sociologists as much with architects. As much as we heard about the “internet revolution” during the Arab Spring, or the Internet’s role in the Occupy movement, it was not until bodies place themselves in urban space in Cairo, Istanbul or Wall Street that the critical capability of opposition movements is realized. But unfortunately open urban space is rarely the architect’s creation. It is what is left over from the creation of buildings—and so once again the architect’s contribution to the public good occurs mostly in the margins. The upshot is that a public good derived from architecture is always spoken of as something tangential to architects’ core activities. It’s what happens in the interstices and around buildings, but the potential role of buildings themselves in creating and reinforcing a vibrant public realm is neglected. Thus, it is entirely reasonable, from this perspective, that both Margaret Crawford and Stan Allen would see more creative potential for shaping contemporary public space in the work of landscape architects and in the emerging field of landscape urbanism than in the work of architects (Segal et al. 2008, 106). Buildings such as the San Francisco Federal Building that erase all signs of human habitation within or sense of human scale without are disregarding the public’s need to mentally inhabit context in order to make sense of it and, more pointedly, to be able to intuit the existence of well-meaning humans at work within its government buildings. The metallic screen covering the south wall could hardly speak louder of impervious, faceless, panoptic bureaucracy. The people inside, if there are people inside, can survey the public, but the public can have no sense of the building’s inhabitants. This disregard for a government building’s public face makes sense if there is no significant public to face. In yet another sign of the fallen fortunes of the concept of publicness, this observation has largely escaped mainstream architectural criticism. Though a neglected idea today (Blondel was promoting this in the eighteenth century as the concept of caractère), a building’s public face and form can contribute mightily to the public’s sense of ownership, belonging and orientation (Grignon and Maxim 1995, 33).4 Indeed, as Lavin asserted in a well-known essay on Quatremère de Quincy, mechanisms that encouraged and required standards both of literacy and legibility were built into and enabled the very notion of a public space. And while paradigms of cultivated taste and of architectural legibility have changed since the eighteenth century, their use as evaluative criteria in assessing the publicness of architecture, and of the spaces it defines, remains almost uncontested. (Lavin 1994, 192) Uncontested and yet, also, apparently, too dowdy to be of any creative interest (Figure 3.2). The blankness and superhuman proportions of the Federal Building stand in stark contrast to another government building, San Francisco’s City Hall, only a few blocks away. City Hall, with its hierarchical neoclassical composition building on a central rotunda, provides all the elements missing at the Federal Building. Members of the public, even those not schooled in classicism, can read the façade and the form for visual cues. One can well imagine where the important offices are, where council meetings are held, where to enter and what windows to protest outside of, all signs of which are deliberately erased in the Federal Building. San Francisco City Hall bespeaks of the grandeur of local democracy: the Federal Building reads as a technological instantiation of the leviathan justified in the name of sustainability. The “paradigms of cultivated taste and architectural legibility” have been lost here, but hopefully not for all time. Perhaps this example can serve as a caution to pay attention to architecture’s public face as one component of serving the public good. When architects start regularly asking themselves, “What in my design helps further the public good?” untold opportunities will arise that can now be only hazily envisioned.

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Figure 3.2 San Francisco City Hall. Photograph by author.

Notes 1 Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel, eds. with Stan Allen, Marcel Smets, Sarah Whiting, and Margaret Crawford, “Architecture and Dispersal,” in “Cities of Dispersal,” Architectural Design 78, no. 1 ( January/February 2008): 102–107, 103. In the same interview Stan Allen expresses this perception: “I think to start with we need to be skeptical of this vague notion of ‘public space’. Public space is a concept that is on the one hand hardly ever defined with any degree of specificity, and on the other never questioned as to its value. That’s a dangerous combination” (102). 2 The Nancy Fraser essay is from “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 3 Cuff (2012, 62) will begrudge the following: “Of course there are still city halls, parks, courthouses, libraries, and schools, and these continue to materially render what we share. Today, these buildings are portraits of efficiency and utility, dressed in an aesthetic that could be called ‘thriftwashing,’ a thin coat of architecture that expresses a priority on economizing, whether or not the building is actually cost-effective.” 4 “On the basis of the new authority given to rational argumentation, the objects of critical discourse, such as painting, music, and architecture, themselves became autonomous disciplines, exchanging their traditional ritualistic function for a new status of commodity” (Grignon and Maxim 1995).

References Benedikt, Michael. 2001. “Reality and Authenticity in the Experience Economy.” Architectural Record 189 (11): 84–87. Crawford, Margaret. 1995. “Contesting the Public Realm: Struggles Over Public Space in Los Angeles.” Journal of Architectural Education 49 (1): 4–9. doi:10.1080/10464883.1995.10734658.

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Cuff, Dana. 2012. “Collective Form: The Status of Public Architecture.” Thresholds (40): 55–66. Fraser, Nancy. 1993. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” In The Phantom Public Sphere, edited by Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-phantom-public-sphere. Grignon, Marc, and Juliana Maxim. 1995. “Convenance, Caractère, and the Public Sphere.” Journal of Architectural Education 49 (1): 29–37. doi:10.1080/10464883.1995.10734661. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hampshire, Stuart. 1978. “Morality and Pessimism.” In Public and Private Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuttner, Robert. 1996. Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lavin, Sylvia. 1994. “Re Reading the Encyclopedia: Architectural Theory and the Formation of the Public in Late-Eighteenth-Century France.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53 (2): 184–192. doi:10.2307/990891. ———. 2007. “CRITICISM: One Person at a Time.” Architectural Record, August. Mah, Harold. 2000. “Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians.” The Journal of Modern History 72 (1): 153–182. doi:10.1086/315932. NCARB. 2016. Legislative Guidelines and Model Law, 2016–2017. https://www.ncarb.org/sites/default/files/ Legislative_Guidelines.pdf Ockman, Joan. 2002. “The YE$ Man.” Architecture. Pine, B. Joseph, and James H. Gilmore. 1999. The Experience Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press. Sandel, Michael J. 1996. Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Segal, Rafi, Els Verbakel, Stan Allen, Marcel Smets, Sarah Whiting, and Margaret Crawford. 2008. “Architecture and Dispersal.” Architectural Design 78 (1): 102–107. doi:10.1002/ad.619. Taylor, Charles. 1995. Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Villa, Dana R. 1992. “Postmodernism and the Public Sphere.” American Political Science Review 86 (3): 712–721.

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4 Radical Democracy and Spatial Practices Tahl Kaminer

The Democratic Deficit In December 2015, the most prestigious of British art prizes, the Turner Prize, was awarded to the architecture collective Assemble, to the shock and dismay of the British art world. The Turner had earned a reputation as a provocateur in the 1990s, but those provoked were the conservative elements in the art world and in the British media. This time, the decision of the jury was a provocation directed unapologetically at the ‘progressive’ art world itself. This was a peculiar slap in the face, carried out with work which was not anti-art, critical of art, or, in fact, particularly concerned with art, at least not in the conventional sense. Rather, Assemble won the prize for their involvement in the urban renewal of Granby Four Streets, in Liverpool’s deprived Toxteth. Like many of their projects, it intertwined citizen participation with crafts, hobby arts, social enterprise, and self-build. The jury’s decision was also an unintended response of sorts to art critic Claire Bishop, who had succinctly argued (2012: 5) that despite endless discussions surrounding the social and political impact of socially focused and participatory artistic work, such work was first and foremost grounded in aesthetics. Assemble, as a collective active outside the world of art, destabilizes Bishop’s argument. Their work’s aesthetic features are secondary to the question of societal impact. The Turner marked the institutional recognition of the increasing commitment by artists, architects, and urban activists to urban participation, to forms of engagement with society and politics, and to (socially) transformative processes. Only a few months earlier, Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates won the Artes Mundi prize for his urban renewal work in his home town. And while the art institutions in Britain appear more advanced than their architectural counterparts, in the United States such recognition has been in the making for a number of years. In 2008, the work of Estudio Teddy Cruz took centre stage in the United States pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennial. In the same year, the Curry Stone Prize was established to ‘promote and honour designers who address critical social needs’ (Curry Stone Design Prize, n.d.). The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York exhibited in late 2010 Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement (October 3, 2010–January 3, 2011), curated by Andres Lepik, which included work by Teddy Cruz, Elemental, Lacaton and Vassal, Urban-Think Tank (U-TT), and Rural Studio. ‘Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good’ was the title of the official U.S. presentation at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, with MoMA’s 2014 Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities exhibition (November 22, 2014–May 25, 2015) including specially commissioned work by

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Atelier d´Architecture Autogérée (aaa), Cohabitation Strategies, MAP, and others. This ascendance to hegemony was underlined by Alejandro Aravena of Elemental winning the 2016 Pritzker Prize and curating the Venice Biennale in the same year. ‘His built work gives economic opportunity to the less privileged,’ announced Thomas J. Pritzker (2016), the president of The Hyatt Foundation; ‘[it] mitigates the effects of natural disasters, reduces energy consumption, and provides welcoming public space. Innovative and inspiring, he shows how architecture at its best can improve people’s lives.’1 The rise to disciplinary prominence of the socially and politically committed architects has coincided with the growth of this group.2 The diverse interests which feed into the work include social and environmental sustainability, democratization via participation, and everyday life. Projects include the use of car parking spaces by Rebar as temporary public space; urban agriculture and community gardening by aaa and many others as a means of increasing local sustainability and strengthening community cohesion; infusing everyday life into ‘vacuous’ urban areas in the form of play-elements by Cirugeda; temporary structures as spaces of community formation by Raumlabor and others. There are numerous possible approaches to describing, categorizing, and critiquing the work of these architects, each of which amplifies some aspects at the expense of others. In this chapter, the focus will be on what is considered to be the democratic deficit, an issue which animates many of the aforementioned architects (see Kaminer 2014; 2017). The demands to democratize institutions, processes, and procedures of planning and urban development echo the emergence of a shared concern for the shortcomings of contemporary liberal democracy in other territories. The democratic deficit has primarily been theorized as a post-political condition (Wilson and Swyngedouw 2014b). The philosopher Slavoj Žižek understands the post-political as the end of class struggle, epitomized by the collapse of the USSR; for the philosopher Jacques Rancière, it is driven by the absence of equality, whereas for the political theorist Chantal Mouffe it is created by the banishing of antagonism from the political sphere. In this chapter, the post-political will be understood primarily as the process of political self-emaciation in which power has been transferred from politics to the economy, a key element in the neo-liberal programme of empowering the market. The recent discussions of the post-political condition often develop from earlier critiques of liberal democracy, which have questioned the logic of periodical voting, of representative systems, of an idea of a quantitative aggregate of citizens’ votes, of the need for legal mechanism external to the democratic process to guarantee rights and freedoms, or have associated the logic of liberal democracy with the free market. In the built environment, the concern for the democratic deficit takes the form of the critique of planning and urban development, in which developers and government are perceived as colluding against the interest of citizens. In this sense, a direct line connects current architects to the critique of planning and development launched in the 1960s by Jane Jacobs (1964), Paul Davidoff (1993; 2009), ‘Non-Plan’ (Banham, Barker, Hall and Price 1969), Sherry Arnstein (1969), Giancarlo de Carlo (2007), and others. The response by governments to these critiques was to introduce new legislation and consultation procedures, as in the 1968 Planning Act in Britain (1969 in Scotland). These, however, are today described by participatory advocates as no more than ‘tokenism’ (Kaminer 2017; Blundell Jones, Petrescu, and Till 2005: xiv). The demand for expanding democracy by placing decisions regarding urban development and redevelopment in popular control is central to the loose group of architects agitating for enhancing architecture’s political and social role. While some are agnostics regarding participation and others, such as Markus Miessen (2007; 2010), have opposed it, participation is a core principle to which the politically committed architects have reacted. This chapter will concisely introduce and analyse the key political theories which have influenced, directly and indirectly, the group of architects in question, and specifically aided in grounding the demands for citizen participation. It will not address insightful political theories or relevant works within philosophy that have remained largely within academic territories or at a distance from politically committed architects, such as the work of Giorgio Agamben, Ernesto Laclau, Rosi Braidotti,

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or Judith Butler. Neither will it address other theories which animate the group, such as Lefebvre’s right to the city, production of space and critique of everyday life, de Certeau’s ‘practices of everyday life,’ or the situationists’ dérive and detournement. Many of the political theories that are posited as alternatives to the dominant liberal democracy are referred to as theories of ‘radical democracy,’ a term which has a long history but limited specificity. Radical democracy was significant to many of the May 1968 protesters, and has been associated with the ultra-left. It was also an idea and term in circulation among the scholars of the Frankfurt School and, surprisingly perhaps, within the Italian Communist Party (PCI), when restructuring itself after the Second World War (Hobsbawm 1977; Müller 2013: 90). While the chapter focuses on the political theories relevant to the loose movement, it raises an urgent concern regarding the architects’ approach to the state and to neo-liberalism. Many of the theories animating the architects—political theory as well as social theory, sociology, and others—are anchored in ideas developed around May 1968 by the radical Left. Some of the work (Lefebvre, situationists) was produced in that era; for others (Negri, Rancière) May 1968 was a defining moment. Among the key conclusions radical groups such as the workerists in Italy and, to a lesser extent, Socialisme ou barbarie in France reached was that the process described as technical and technological development, supported by Left and Right governments worldwide in the postwar years, favoured capitalist expansion; that the social-democratic governments of Western Europe and, more generally, Keynesian economic policies, were merely means of advancing capitalism through state intervention. Consequently, the state was one of the main targets of May 1968, and this anti-statism formed what Foucault called ‘the negative theology of the state as the absolute evil’ (Foucault 2008: 116). These anti-statist sentiments allowed the emergence of the neo-liberal solution, in which power is transferred from the ‘evil’ state to the economy. ‘Since it turns out that the state is the bearer of intrinsic defects,’ wrote Foucault of the logic involved, ‘and there is no proof that the market economy has these defects, let’s ask the market economy itself to be the principle, not of the state’s limitation, but of its internal regulation from start to finish of its existence and action’ (Foucault 2008: 116). This ‘collusion’ of ultra-leftist critique of the state with neo-liberalism is not at the fore of the chapter, but forms a significant subtext. Useful here is the identification of a specific territory for politics, defined by parliaments, political parties, trade unions, and the like, often referred to in science and technology studies (STS) as Politics with capital P, versus an external territory—everyday life, in effect—in which politics with a lowercase p take place. Rancière and Mouffe distinguish between the specific territory of ‘politics’ and the irrational and passionate morals of ‘the political,’ in Mouffe’s terms. The latter can take place within or without the territory demarcated as ‘politics.’ There should be little doubt that the expansion of citizen participation to urban development and redevelopment is a political endeavour: the processes and institutions that must be created or transformed in order to accommodate participation are necessarily political. The process of democratization is itself at the centre of the political; without broad participation in political discussions and decision-making, ‘politics’ becomes merely the technocratic realm of administration of policies. Diverse forms of participatory democracy relate in the most direct manner to the attempts to expand popular control of urban development. The most familiar theory of participatory democracy is republicanism. It foregrounds ideas of solidarity, common good, and community (Benhabib 1996b: 6; Habermas 1996b: 21–26). As in other forms of direct democracy, sovereignty is understood as nontransferable to representatives, a property of the citizen. Another form of participatory democracy is associative democracy, which argues for the partial transfer of power from state to associations. The latter can include NGOs as well as representative bodies for industry or employees. It is a means of increasing citizen participation and is implemented in many Western countries in diverse forms: in the requirement of (environmental) federal Superfunds in the United States to include a local NGO

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on their boards, or in the participation of local community councils in Britain in some local government decision-making processes. Such associations can enhance democracy, it is argued, by providing information to policy-makers; equalizing representation by putting forward the needs of those previously unheard; providing a political education to their members; and by helping to formulate and implement public policies—i.e., providing ‘alternative governance.’ (Carter 2002: 233) They risk creating an interest-based corporatist democracy. The following pages will study the political theories of Jürgen Habermas, Mouffe, Rancière, and Antonio Negri. The limited length of this chapter necessitates a violent reduction of the complexity and richness of the theories in question. The purpose, then, is to provide not an in-depth analysis of each theory but a broad overview which allows bringing to the fore certain concerns. These concerns have implications for the politically committed architects, as will be outlined in the concluding pages.

The Political Kernel A particular theory that has had significant influence on the discussion of participation in political circles and inevitably has some traction among the current architects is the theory of ‘deliberative democracy,’ developed by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and widely disseminated by the 1996 publication of Between Facts and Norms. Habermas’s theory has been broadened and refined since then by theorists such as Selya Benhabib, John Dryzek, and Iris Marion Young (Dryzek 1990; 2000a; 2000b; Benhabib 1996a). In liberal democracy, the political moment occurs in a secluded territory of institutional politics, by representatives who are legitimized as an indirect ‘channelling’ of the aggregate of citizens’ will. In contrast, in deliberative democracy the political moment takes place within society itself. The deliberative moment is the kernel of the political process, and the focus on deliberation privileges issues which can be discussed rationally; it requires equality on all levels of participation, coupled with the right of all to question the topics, the rules of the discussion, and the procedures and processes involved (Benhabib 1996c: 70; Scheuerman 2006: 95). Deliberation forces citizens to think reflexively, to order their thoughts, to develop a rational argument, and to hear and consider others’ opinions and positions. According to Benhabib, deliberative democracy’s emphasis on process and procedures enables society to accommodate difference and pluralism: the demand that deliberations end with agreement empowers minorities (Benhabib 1996c: 73). Deliberative democracy depends on, and asserts, a universal normative. It posits a horizon, an ideal condition toward which the process of democratization should strive. Following Enlightenment ideals, Habermas conceives of state institutions as a direct extension of civil society (Habermas 1996a: 182). Deliberative democracy is not necessarily anti-statist, and can accommodate ideas of global governance and institutions (Young 1996; Scheuerman 2006). The critics of deliberative democracy argue that it shares too much with liberal democracy: its ability to accommodate current liberal processes; its ‘constitutional’ tendencies; its interest in achieving consensus (Dryzek 2000b: 82; Scheuerman 2006: 94). They highlight the idealistic, and hence delusive, aspects of the proposition—the inability to create a condition of equality necessary for fair ­deliberations—that is, the argument that power structures are embedded in social structures, in language, and in social reason to an extent that they cannot be bypassed. The critics chastise the exclusion from deliberation of irrational issues, which are vital for identity and subjectivization (Mouffe 1999). Among the vocal critics of deliberative democracy is the political theorist Chantal Mouffe. The point of departure of Mouffe’s own proposition, ‘agonistic democracy,’ is the differentiation between ‘politics’ as the specific area demarcated for power contestation within society, and ‘the political,’ the 40

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‘passions’—morals—which animate individual subjects and groups (Mouffe 1996a; 2005; 2013). The political, for Mouffe, is an essential ingredient of society which can never be completely circumvented or suppressed. It is produced by fundamental binary associations of friend/enemy. Liberal democracy’s desire for consensus, fear of antagonism, and focus on individual subjects have meant that irrational ‘passions’ are kept outside the territory of politics. Mouffe argues for a more inclusive politics, which, by allowing the irrational passions into politics, also transform their manifestation from antagonism, based on the friend/enemy binary, to adversity, based on an adversarial, and hence non-violent, relationship (Mouffe 1996b; 2013: 202–203). Attempts to depoliticize political issues, to manage conflict, to force a consensus are thus attempts to eliminate the political from the territory of politics. Such a project is bound to fail, according to Mouffe, because it contradicts the political itself. It results in explosions of discontent outside politics, and consequently a form of contestation that is also more violent, destabilizing, and dangerous than adversarial contestation within ‘politics.’ Mouffe’s agonistic democracy, similarly to deliberative democracy, does not address the ‘content’ but only the form of the political process. The ‘irrational’ could be misogynist or racist as much as emancipatory—agonistic democracy is content-neutral. Agonistic democracy is developed from the analysis of existing conditions, and hence is primarily radical as a political theory; evidence of antagonistic and adversarial contestations, after all, is everywhere. While Habermas posits an ideal horizon, Mouffe forwards an argument based on the analysis of existing condition, of the political as is. In contrast to both, Rancière’s political theory is a direct political intervention, the provision of an argument and a battle cry to activists seeking radical change. The demand for equality, for Rancière, is the political kernel. If the lack of equality is at the heart of the post-political condition, and ‘the police’ is the force that attempts to erect and maintain boundaries and divisions (‘partitions’) which maintain inequality, then ‘equality’ is the battle cry of those who are marginalized. ‘Equality’ universalizes the specific demands of a narrow group, suggesting ‘equality for all’ as a basic principle of universal justice (Rancière 1991; 1992; 2007). Inequality, disempowerment, and subjugation in society are brought about by the division of labour, which presupposes a state of inequality, and hence affirms it. The distribution of the sensible, Rancière’s formulation of the division of labour, is the manner in which what is seeable, sayable, and thinkable is distributed within society—the specific presumptions, limits, partitions, and boundaries which determine diverse practices and possibilities of individual subjects and groups (Rancière 1992; 2014). Where scholars such as Bourdieu identify the privileges of class in legitimizing a specific language and delegitimizing others, the privileges Rancière identifies stem from the disciplines and professions themselves, from the attempts of sociology and philosophy to monopolize the position of power from which only ‘experts’ are permitted to speak. The presumption of inequality by disciplines, the systematic preventing of the marginalized from speaking for themselves, means that the ‘non-experts’ capacity to think and speak is denied (Tanke 2011). An example of ‘policing’ is the manner in which the common reduction—carried out by sociology, political science, or the media— of the workers to a single meaning assigned to their class ‘character’ artificially maintains barriers and limits, and ignores the diversity and complexity of workers’ lives. It ignores their individual subjectivity, let alone their capacities of acting ‘outside’ or beyond the roles and limits assigned to them: writing poetry or prose, or painting. Disputes in society arise from equals getting unequal parts, or vice versa, Rancière argues (2014). Existing distributions (and exclusions) have to be anchored in and legitimized by a sense of justice. Inequality, then, relies on a presumption of equality to justify itself; and the demand for equality (of intelligence, of access to logos) questions the justice of current conditions. Hence, the demand for equality is the vital practice which triggers a rupture of existing order and its dissolution, followed by the creation of a new ordering, a new distribution of the sensible. The emphasis on equality and its universalizing principle are important contributions by Rancière. But while his argument for empowerment is strong, his demand for a presumption of equality 41

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and rejection of narratives (from ‘above’) of victimhood is problematic. Such narratives may affirm conditions of inequality, at least to some degree; but they are also means of correcting them. Rancière’s argument infers that it is only the subalterns themselves who can change their condition, and that the conscious and political deployment of the demand for equality is the means of achieving this. Excluded here are the diverse routes to equality that can be enabled politically, socially and economically only by those in advantageous or dominant positions in society. The translation into English of Rancière’s writings on aesthetics (Rancière 2004; 2009; 2014) broadened his readership to include art critics, curators, and artists in the early 2000s. Through collaborations with curators and artists, the politically committed architects have been exposed to Rancière’s work. The writings of Negri and Hardt, in contrast, entered the field obliquely through collaborations with activists, many of whom have been animated by books such as Empire (Hardt and Negri 2000), Multitude (Hardt and Negri 2006), and Commonwealth (Hardt and Negri 2009). The work of Hardt and Negri offers, similarly to Rancière’s, an argument and political intervention. Whereas the anti-statism supported by many participatory advocates is driven by localism, Hardt and Negri’s anti-statism is anchored in globalization (Negri 2003; 2005; Merrill 2010: 150). ‘Empire’ is the current globalized condition dominated by multinational corporations and dubious global institutions. ‘Empire’ is destructive in multiple manners, but this destruction, and particularly the withering of the nation states, also offers opportunities. Hardt and Negri argue (2000) that a new condition is immanent within the existing one, that a better future will emerge through contestations from within ‘Empire.’ The historic protagonist is neither Marx’s proletariat nor the populist ‘the people,’ but Spinoza’s ‘multitude.’ Where Rancière argues that intelligence is equally pre-distributed and therefore must be recognized, Hardt and Negri argue (2000: 65–66) that power is likewise already available to the multitude. Developing consciousness of the power already residing in each individual is the necessary step to enable the use of such power to shape the world. Hardt and Negri’s books lack any discussion of institutions of power or the processes needed to transform society. There is no ‘plan,’ no precise description of a horizon, nor are there practical recommendations. Instead, the work is uplifting, positive, and empowering.

Spatial Practices Some of the committed architects have specifically referred to the political theories in question (Miessen and Mouffe 2007; Miessen and Basar 2006; Boano and Kelling 2013; Querrien, Petrescu and Petcou 2007); others have not. Most of the projects which involve the empowerment of local residents either are informed, directly and indirectly, by Habermas’s deliberative democracy and other theories of participatory democracy, or demonstrate the potentials and shortcomings of such theories. Developing community gardens, for example, requires mobilizing locals to take control of their immediate environment and often results in community-formation or greater community cohesion. Such projects require extensive discussions and deliberations among locals and negotiations with city councils and other stakeholders. In their urban regeneration project in Toxteth, Assemble was invited by residents to lead the project, and the collective contributed through a series of meetings and discussions with residents, the creation of a local social enterprise, and much more. These projects are consensus-driven, empower local residents, and attempt to improve a specific area in physical, social, and political senses, in some cases contributing to its economy and environmental sustainability. Such projects often have difficulties addressing adversity within a community—hence the preference for consensual projects, such as community gardens. Adversity by a substantial group of locals undermines the legitimacy of the project and the straightforward argument of response to locals’ demands.3 The focus on localism is argued not just as an antidote to globalization but also

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as a means of empowering the subaltern, those residents of deprived neighbourhoods who are ‘not counted,’ in Rancière’s terms. But localism, as a general principle, not only is embedded in a global condition, and hence ‘glocal,’ but also limits redistribution. The conditions in the United States demonstrate a (political, administrative) empowerment of community groups at the expense of provision of a route out of poverty. Localism policies often enhance spatial segregations—economically, ethnically, and socially. Affluent communities become richer; struggling communities become poorer. Participatory projects are often criticized for enabling government retrenchment: the curtailing of government programmes is facilitated by the empowerment of the voluntarist sector (Mayer 2011; Searle 2015). Such retrenchment may empower communities, but at the expense of providing viable support to those in need. A less consensual trajectory is taken by activists, artists, and architects who propagate subversive and transgressive practices. Some of these are only marginally adversarial, such as yarn-bombing or guerrilla gardening. They add colour, wit, and spontaneity to the city. But other practices are controversial and highly partisan and introduce a level of conflict by, for example, spatial occupations and appropriation (squatting; Occupy), by cultural activities which are not condoned by the local government or community (graffiti). Such practices either eschew participation or simply promote a specific political-social-cultural group against more conventional, centrist opinions and sensibilities. Whereas the consensual mode of operation reflects Habermasian ideas, the adversarial practices exemplify Mouffe’s understanding of the political and, to a limited extent and in some specific cases, Rancière’s ‘dissensus.’ A major concern regarding projects which create more greenery, better public space, and stronger schools and community is gentrification and the dislocation it entails. The prevention of dislocation is beyond the means of the committed architects and artists. What is needed is governmental involvement, primarily on a legislative level: ending speculation in real estate; providing protections for the weak tenures, such as free-market renters; strengthening rather than weakening planning; or, in London for example, preventing boroughs from selling council housing stock.4 All this leads to conclusions reached by many of the more experienced practitioners: the need for both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ strategies. The anti-statism driving much of the agitation disregards the need for redistribution, for guarantees of equal access to deliberative processes, for legal and other protections for the poor—all of which can be provided by a willing and, if possible, benevolent government.

Notes 1 The material included in this chapter overlaps material addressed in Kaminer, The Efficacy of Architecture (London: Routledge, 2017). 2 A very partial list of some of the more familiar names includes U-TT, Rebar, Santiago Cirugeda, Studio Miessen, An Architektur, Atelier d´Architecture Autogérée (aaa), Stalker, Rural Studio, Architecture for Humanity, Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), Raumlabor, Elemental, and BAVO. Addressing these architects as a ‘movement’ is necessarily problematic, considering the diversity of positions held by the protagonists and span of practices involved (see Maria Theodorou 2014). It is an act of ‘ordering’ and categorizing that can be self-defeating. Yet the architects in question have shared platforms (exhibitions, symposia, publications) and developed a distinct discourse which is markedly delineated vis-à-vis other architectural discourses and preoccupations. 3 A well-known example is Giancarlo de Carlo’s participatory project in Matteotti Village that came to a premature end because of opposition to the project by residents of the existing village (Molinari 2015). Splits within communities often leave them exposed to the dictates of government, preventing locals from speaking ‘in one voice,’ as in the case of Edinburgh’s Craigmillar, where a struggle among locals prevented a common position toward the city’s urban regeneration plan of 2005. 4 Cash-stripped, many London boroughs have been selling council housing stock, redeveloped as high-end housing for international investment. New housing is provided for those evicted, but in areas with a weaker real estate market, at a great distance from the tenants’ work, family, and social network.

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References Arnstein, S.R. (1969) ‘A Ladder of Citizen Participation’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 216–224. Banham, R., Barker, P., Hall, P., and Price, C. (1969) ‘Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom’, New Society, Vol. 13, No. 338, 20 March, pp. 435–443. Benhabib, S. (ed.) (1996a) Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——— (1996b) ‘Introduction’, in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Benhabib, S., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 3–18. ——— (1996c) ‘Towards a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy’, in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Benhabib, S., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 67–94. Bishop, C. (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London: Verso. Blundell Jones, P., Petrescu, D., and Till, J. (2005) ‘Introduction’, in Architecture and Participation, eds Blundell Jones, P., Petrescu, D., and Till, J., London: Taylor & Francis, pp. xiii–xvii. Boano, C., and Kelling, E. (2013) ‘Towards an Architecture of Dissensus: Participatory Urbanism in South-East Asia’, in ‘The Participatory Turn in Urbanism’, Footprint 13, Vol. 7/2, Autumn, pp. 41–62. Carter, A. (2002) ‘Associative Democracy’, in Democratic Theory Today: Challenges for the 21st Century, eds Carter, A., and Stokes, G., Cambridge: Polity, pp. 228–248. Carter, A., and Stokes, G. (eds) (2002) Democratic Theory Today: Challenges for the 21st Century, Cambridge: Polity. Curry Stone Design Prize. (n.d.) ‘What Is the Curry Stone Design Prize?’, available at (accessed 25 November 2015). Davidoff, P. (1993) ‘Democratic Planning’, in Architecture Culture 1943–1968, ed. Ockman, J., New York: Rizzoli, pp. 442–445. ——— (2009) ‘Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning’, in The Urban and Regional Planning Reader, ed. Birch, E.L., London: Routledge, pp. 148–155. De Carlo, G. (2007) ‘Architecture’s Public’ [1970], in Architecture and Participation, eds Blundell Jones, P., Petrescu, D., and Till, J., London: Taylor & Francis, pp. 3–41. Dryzek, J.S. (1990) Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy, and Political Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2000a) Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (2000b) ‘Discursive Democracy vs. Liberal Constitutionalism’, in Democratic Innovation: Deliberation, Representation, and Association, ed. Saward, M., Oxon: Routledge, pp. 78–89. Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, trans. Burchell, G., London: Palgrave Macmillan. Habermas, J. (1996a) Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. Rehg, W., Cambridge: Polity Press. ——— (1996b) ‘Three Normative Models of Democracy’, in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Benhabib, S., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 21–30. Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— (2006) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, London: Penguin Books. ——— (2009) Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1977) The Italian Road to Socialism: An Interview by Eric Hobsbawm With Giorgio Napolitano, London: MW Books/Journeyman P. Jacobs, J. (1964) The Death and Life of Great American Cities [1961], Harmondsworth: Penguin in Association with Cape. Kaminer, T. (2014) ‘The Contradictions of Participatory Architecture and Empire’, Architectural Research Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 31–37. Kaminer, T. (2017) The Efficacy of Architecture: Political Contestation and Agency, Oxon: Routledge. Mayer, M. (2011) ‘Neoliberal Urbanization and the Politics of Contestation’, in Urban Asymmetries: Studies and Projects on Neoliberal Urbanization, eds Kaminer, T., Sohn, H. and Robles-Duran, M., Rotterdam: 010, pp. 46–61. Merrill, M. (2010) ‘Commonwealth and “Commonism” ’, International Labor and Working-Class History, Vol. 78, No. 1, September, pp 149–163. Miessen, M. (ed.) (2007) The Violence of Participation, Berlin: Sternberg Press. ——— (2010) The Nightmare of Participation, Berlin: Sternberg Press. Miessen, M., and Basar, S. (eds) (2006) Did Someone Say Participate? An Atlas of Spatial Practice, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Miessen, M., and Mouffe, C. (2007) ‘Articulated Power-Relations’, in The Violence of Participation, ed. Miessen, M., Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. B37–48. Molinari, L. (2015) ‘Matteotti Village and Gallaratese 2: Design Criticism of the Italian Welfare State’, in Architecture and the Welfare State, eds Swenarton, M., Avermaete, T. and van den Heuvel, D., New York: Routledge, pp. 259–275. Mouffe, C. (1996a) ‘Democracy, Power, and the “Political” ’, in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Benhabib, S., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 245–256. ——— (1996b) ‘Radical Democracy or Liberal Democracy?’, in Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship, and the State, ed. Trend, D., London: Routledge, pp. 19–26. ——— (1999) ‘Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism’, Social Research, Vol. 66, No. 3, pp. 745–758. ——— (2005) The Return of the Political [1993], London: Verso. ——— (2013) ‘For an Agonistic Model of Democracy’ [2000], in Hegemony, Radical Democracy and the Political, ed. Martin, J., Oxon: Routledge, pp. 191–206. Müller, J.W. (2013) ‘The Paradoxes of Post-War Italian Political Thought’, History of European Ideas, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 72–102. Negri, A. (2003) ‘Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State’ [1967], in Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of StateForm, Hardt, M., and Negri, A., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 23–51. ——— (2005) Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy, London: Verso. Pritzker, T.J. (2016) ‘Announcement’, available at (accessed 23 May 2016). Querrien, A. (2007) ‘The Exodus Lives on the Street Corner’, in Urban Act: A Handbook for Alternative Practice, eds AAA and PEPRAV, Montrouge: Moutot Imprimeurs, pp. 307–313. Querrien, A., Petrescu, D., and Petcou, C. (2007) ‘What Makes a Biopolitical Place? A Discussion With Antonio Negri’, in Urban Act: A Handbook for Alternative Practice, eds AAA and PEPRAV, Montrouge: Moutot Imprimeurs, pp. 290–299. Rancière, J. (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Ross, K., Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ——— (1992) ‘Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization’, October, Vol. 61, The Identity in Question, Summer, pp. 58–64. ——— (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Rockhill, G., New York: Continuum. ——— (2007) On the Shores of Politics, trans. Heron, L., London: Verso. ——— (2009) Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Corcoran, S., Cambridge: Polity Press. ——— (2014) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Corcoran, S., London: Bloomsbury. Scheuerman, W.E. (2006) ‘Critical Theory Beyond Habermas’, in The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, eds Dryzek, J.S., Honig, B., and Phillips, A., Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 85–104. Searle, A. (2015) ‘Power to the People! Assemble Win the Turner Prize by Ignoring the Art Market’, The Guardian, 7 December, available at: (accessed 8 December 2015). Tanke, J. J. (2011) Jacques Rancière: An Introduction, New York: Continuum. Theodorou, M. (2014) ‘Reservoir Thinking’, in Architectural Research Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 3, September, pp. 201–203. Wilson, J., and Swyngedouw, E. (eds) (2014a) The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ——— (2014b) ‘Seeds of Dystopia: Post-Politics and the Return of the Political’, in The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics, eds Wilson, J., and Swyngedouw, E., Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1–22. Young, I. (1996) ‘Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy’, in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Benhabib, S., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 120–135.

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Part II

Targets of Engagement

5 Retracing the Emergence of a Human Settlements Approach Designing in, From and With Contexts of Development Viviana d’Auria

A human settlements approach is a key conceptual instrument for the (development) process, and indeed it has been said that national planning through strategies for settlements is a means of humanizing and socializing the whole development process. The human settlements approach sees man in its totality—in work, in play, at home; and in relationship with nature and the environment. Its objective is to ensure the spread of development efforts—the quality of life—to the people. The major components are to promote productivity, through spatial considerations, and public service delivery systems, for human welfare. (Carlson 1978, 173)

The celebratory synthesis made by the head of the Human Settlements Program at the United Nations Environmental Program in 1976 is a most obvious testimony of the extent to which a human settlements approach to development was under intense promotion by the late 1970s. At this point in time, international aid actors and national planning bodies alike were compelled to endorse human settlements as an integrated approach to development. Aligned with human settlements’ conceptual propositions, homonymous agencies were founded, conferences were launched, and technical reports, charters and institutional frameworks were drafted, as shown by Figure 5.1. While discussions around the term had already begun earlier, and in part had been covered during the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, politicians would first become familiar with the concept of human settlements four years later (Turin 1978, 191). The 1976 United Nations Conference on Human Settlements—also known as Habitat—­generated three main outcomes, among which sixty-four recommendations represented world consensus on the objectives governments should follow in their human settlements policies. Alongside the official UN event, a multitude of NGOs participated in the Habitat Forum, which contributed to the general recognition that the most needy had not been catered to by the formal housing provision system—whether private or public (Turin 1978, 190). As a means for rendering development more socially acceptable, environmentally sound and culturally tailored, the emergence of a human settlements approach placed emphasis on a more

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© United Nations.

Figure 5.1 The use of human settlements as a reference term epitomizing a shift from a purely economic idea of housing to a holistic approach inclusive of housing is illustrated by UN publications devoted to the Africa region dating respectively from 1965 and 1976.

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integrated and human transformation, where economic criteria alone could no longer stand as the measure of a prosperous development practice. Even if human settlements never became defined in a meaningful programmatic way (Carlson 1978, 171), development was to stop being “ecocidal” (Weissman 1978b, 180). In retrospect, three conceptual underpinnings can be distilled from Carlson’s opening summary: firstly, that of development itself, questioned in its societal and environmental impact but not in its foundational premises and general aspirations to improve existing conditions in a “worlded” globe; secondly, the significance of development’s humanization; and lastly, that settlements themselves were to be at the core of such humanized and holistic transformation, situated at the nexus of environmental and developmental forces. The built environment’s prominence is hardly surprising at a time in which urbanization was being heralded as planetary. The human settlements approach was therefore posited as a tool capable of handling rapid urbanization, societal change and ecological tutelage in a swiftly changing world. Relatedly, the implications for how spatial knowledge and practice were to be crafted and disseminated in the context of a recalibrated relationship between resources, institutions and design were remarkable. Solicited to the forefront by such ambitions, architecture and urbanism could hardly remain unconcerned as potential contributors to the articulation of a developmental process under readjustment. More than the mere physical manifestation of developmental objectives, design was epistemologically entwined with the reconceptualization of spatial production envisaged in the name of a human settlements approach. A concern for patterns of how people use, organize and create space as part of a single and integrated focus on the spatial distribution and organization of human activity became therefore primary concerns for development experts. Cultural practices, labor dynamics, local geographies and the specificity of natural resources were considered as dynamic shapers of spatial relations across various scales and contexts. Methods to chart insight from a variety of contributing fields became much needed, leading to several attempts to integrate social and spatial knowledge into increasingly complex grids and matrixes (Doxiadis 1968; Tyrwhitt 1985). In the most idealist interpretations, the disciplinary boundaries of those fields contributing to development (anthropology, economics and planning among several others) were expected to disintegrate and merge into one con-disciplinary science of human settlements (Doxiadis 1968). The trajectory enabling human settlements to become an acknowledged conceptual tool for redefining development through a revised approach that included the design disciplines was the outcome of a multifaceted liaison between capital, humanitarian aid, architecture and urbanism. As transcultural exchange it involved, among other professionals, architects and urbanists from a plethora of cultural and geographic backgrounds (Nasr and Volait 2003; Stanek and Avermaete 2012; Lagae and De Raedt 2013). Amid global experts and displaced emigrés whose work was often grounded in firsthand experience in the so-called Third World, an array of progressive practitioners and politicians were directly engaged with liberation struggles and decolonization in their territories of origin or residence. Undoubtedly, the work of ‘development experts’ did not escape questions of positionality (Muzaffar 2007). These have been partly discussed and debated, including the dubious impact of present-day benevolence (Indaba 2010; Johnson 2011; Watson 2012) and the aid industry’s political economy. Without denying the insidiousness of developmental thinking and the array of consultancies and commissions that careering in the international aid sector guaranteed to an increasingly select group of professionals, this contribution aims to discuss relations between design and development with a different focus. The investigation posits human settlements as a key urbanism paradigm that was constructed in, from and with the so-called Third World, with all the nuances, tensions and ambivalences that transcultural exchange entails. By means of a critical selection of projects, personalities and texts, the exploration retraces how human settlements formed a new conceptual framework rooted at least in part in the efforts of transculturally engaged design professionals and planners. 51

From Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements (1968), pp. 108; 188.

Figure 5.2 C. A. Doxiadis, founder of ekistics, the science of human settlements, based his con-disciplinary approach on a comparative understanding of morphologies that could be synthesized to achieve an evolutionary anatomy of human settlements.

Emergence of a Human Settlements Approach

As indeed was noted by Ernest Weissmann, director of the UN Centre for Housing, Building and Planning (1965–1966), it would take nearly three decades since the end of World War II to partially repair the omission of the fields of human settlements and the environment from the original UN structure as worldwide problems deserving a specialized agency status (1978a, 227). Reconstructing this narrative supports ongoing efforts to understand the transcultural history of urbanism and design without negating the pervasiveness of neocolonial activities occurring in the name of development’s self-perpetuating prophecy of improvement yet-to-come. While not a linear process but rather the output of exchange and tensions between distinctive practitioners, scholars, government officers and educators at work in various contexts and fields, by the early 1970s a combination of environmental and pro-poor movements heavily condemned the reductive conflation of development with a one-size-fits-all techno-economic growth. As part and parcel of this endeavor, the delineation of a human settlements approach supported a holistic understanding of a multiplicity of cultural, social, economic and spatial forces at work in the environment. After a long struggle for identity, by 1976 human settlements would after all be considered the principal manifestation of welfare and environmental development (Turin 1978, 187; Weissmann 1978a, 237).

Building a Science of Human Settlements on the Ruins of Modernism The entwinement of modern architecture and urbanism with colonialism first, and with development later, has been the object of intense scrutiny in the past decades (Wright 1991; Heynen 2005; Lu 2011). The varied trajectories of modernists in exile, nomadic experts and local architects and activists have been explored as part of a multifaceted process of encounter and exchange (le Roux 2004; Verdeil 2005; Jackson 2013; Shoskes 2013; Lee 2015). Even before the eye-opening CIAM IX of 1953, where Morocco-based contributions on “habitat for the greatest number” and explorations of Algerian bidonvilles would challenge the tenets of the Athens Charter, design professionals involved in late colonial urban planning had already began questioning the applicability of modernist principles across distinctive cultures, climates and urbanization rates. As planning models and design ideas were hybridized, transmuted and even abandoned, development’s cultural and social side effects were increasingly displayed. The seeds of a critical and internationalist kind of modernity were therefore being sown while professionals travelled across the globe as colonial advisors or consultants in search of a commission (Bonillo et al. 2005; Crimson 2011). The emergence of human settlements as a revised approach to city making became inherent to the deconstruction of modernism and the disciplinary refoundation of urbanism and architecture. In this context, functionalist abstraction lost credibility whereas the everyday increasingly became a source of inspiration, whether in East London or in the West Indies. From 1949 onwards until its disintegration a decade later, discussions within CIAM on the idea of developing a new charter around the contentious notion of ‘habitat’ sparked divergences in many guises. Discussions ranged from emphasizing the unviability of universal guidelines to the necessity of extending research on everyday environments beyond dwelling space (Mumford 2000). Generally speaking, the built environment began to be understood through social practice, with housing conceived as an evolutionary and adaptive process. Though the charter would never see the light of day, the debates on ‘habitat’ would continue through exchanges between former CIAM members, such as Tyrwhitt, Sert and Giedeon, as well as through interaction with international aid agencies, with which CIAM had attempted collaborations since 1947 (Linorter 2012). In fact, the humanist turn was hardly a prerogative of the most established modernist architecture networks, but was extensively present in the discussions and recommendations of international and regional aid agencies. Exemplarily, the Inter-American Centre for Housing and Planning founded in Bogotá in 1951 underscored the importance of the human factor for inner-city slum improvement (Albano 1957). The initial focus of the United Nations Technical Assistance Administration 53

Viviana d’Auria

on low-cost, low-income housing throughout the 1950s was superseded by an increasing concern for contextual and cultural specificities, reflecting a broadening in scope that the human settlements approach epitomized. Twenty years later, human settlements would be internationally acknowledged in Vancouver as a concept enabling housing, building and planning to be considered relationally and in connection with environmental change and international development (United Nations 1976). The shift was also made obvious by institutional renaming, marking a step further in the process from when the UN Centre for Housing, Building and Planning had been founded in 1965. By 1976 remnants of CIAM’s engagement with the term were left to the hands of Josep Lluis Sert, who presented the ‘Habitat Bill of Rights’ in collaboration with the Iranian government at the United Nations Conference in Vancouver, following which “Habitat,” the UN Centre for Human Settlements, was earmarked as a new global institution devoted entirely to the field. One of the professionals who would deliberately attempt to extend the ‘habitat’ debates articulated within CIAM and in the context of international aid was the Athens-born architect Constantinos Doxiadis. At the heart of several networks related to his global practice with commissions by the UN, IBRD and Ford Foundation, he launched the Delos Symposia as an instrument to create a community of practice, including core members of CIAM as well as new participants from the aid world, such as Barbara Ward and Charles Abrams, in addition to representatives from emerging nations, such as the Ghanaian Alfred Rhule Otoo (d’Auria 2015). Bringing different networks together was paralleled by efforts in bridging disciplines summoned during development’s enactment. This integrative aspiration was translated into expectations for technological, social and design-based fields to merge in one overall science of human settlements capable of dealing with “planetary housekeeping” (Ward 1976, 125). For Doxiadis such discipline was to be called ekistics, a new field capable of apprehending past and present environments so as to guide urbanization and relationships between all units of space and time, from man to Ecumenopolis, the City of the Future. Most of his ideas found shape as new town master plans and national housing programs in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, where an amended modernism enabled intensive construction to appear more palatable by means of essentialized and culture-specific design components (d’Auria 2010).

Making Squatter Architecture Work The relevance of both ‘habitat’ and ekistics discussions for the 1976 Conference in Vancouver and the establishment of the UN Centre for Human Settlements in Nairobi in 1978 did not mean that Doxiadis’s con-disciplinary science and amended modernism were picked up as major drivers for refining the development agenda. Rather, the Greek architect’s advocacy for a multi-scalar method of urban design faded in the light of seemingly people-centered approaches to urban transformation, such as aided self-help. Indicatively, even Doxiadis himself felt compelled to acknowledge winds were changing; in the course of a decade-long involvement in Ghana, for example, the design of neighborhoods in the new industrial town of Tema shifted from fully finalized experimental dwellings in 1962 to self-help schemes for the urban poor in 1968. Indeed, while Doxiadis convened colleagues, potential commissioners and other interested parties at biennial events in Greece, research and educational institutions, such as the New School in New York and the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies, assembled somewhat the same crowd as the Delos symposia, with the important integration of ‘barefoot’ practitioners, such as John Turner. Relatedly, Ford Foundation funds followed the flow, enabling the Urban Settlement Design Program at MIT’s School of Architecture to be launched in 1965 under the guidance of Horacio Caminos. Interest in Latin America, where aided self-help housing had been first promoted after its inception in California and Puerto Rico under Jacob Crane’s endorsement in the 1930s (Harris 1998, 1999), met with Turner’s experience of self-organized urbanization in Peru. Bridgeheaders’ quest for a house of their own was particularly congenial to those thinkers who thought individual home 54

Emergence of a Human Settlements Approach

ownership was a panacea to all urban evil, and well aligned with U.S. development policy abroad. As such the idea of residents transitioning from individual units to collective high-rise typologies once social transition was complete and urbanity would be a fully fledged lifestyle—as advocated by professionals with a modernist derivation, such as Ecochard and Doxiadis—lost accountability when compared to the reassuring idea of incremental growth. While Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements (Doxiadis 1968) was more of a closing line than the celebration of a widely practiced method to tackle rampant urbanization across the globe, the same could not be said of Urban Dwelling Environments: An Elementary Survey of Settlements for the Study of Design Determinants (Caminos, Turner and Steffian 1969), published only a few months later. While both volumes presented trans-scalar and comparative studies across urban morphologies and typologies, the first looked to the historical accumulation of morphologies, biological metaphors and megalopolitan growth, whereas the second emphasized self-builders’ city-making process and everyday efforts. It did so by combining area plans from above with photographic insight from below, as shown in Figure 5.3. The MIT-based threesome invited professionals to intervene where people were thought most vulnerable: neighborhood planning and service infrastructure layouts were key actions to enable the autoconstruction of shelter that urban pioneers could instead handle well. Consequently, in the eyes of Caminos, Turner and Steffian, neither house-specific nor citywide reflections appeared crucial for the effective implementation of a process-sensitive urbanization. The new town of Ciudad Guayana marked the shift away from ekistics even if the Venezuelan initiative had all in common with Doxiadis’s working sites premised on high modernist ambitions. Typically, Ciudad Guayana featured a hydroelectric project centered on damming the Caronì River and the industrial potentiation of the already existing Puerto Ordaz. Together with Venezuelan counterparts, a group of advisors from the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies was in charge of the town’s layout and organization. Among its most well-known contributors, the advisory group counted Lloyd Rodwin, Willo von Moltke and Kevin Lynch. Ethnographic insight by Lisa Peattie, the only anthropologist on the team, emphasized how squatters based in the rapidly growing informal settlements of Ciudad Guayana perceived the new town’s development and its impact on social inequality in the region (Peattie, 1968). Mismatches between developmental planning, neighborhood design and the actual conditions of workers flocking to the city were an obvious verification of how prioritizing economic targets could hardly be conflated with the inclusion of the urban poor and the redistribution of wealth. Nonetheless Ciudad Guayana would also be the location where ‘Progressive Urban Improvement Units’ would be implemented on an experimental basis in 1963 before incremental development would become the most noticeable approach to low-income housing in the 1970s and 1980s (Reimers 2002). Planned progressive development intersected, at least in part, ideas on self-­management, dweller autonomy and mutual aid that were derived from the actual practices of squatters and slum dwellers (Laquian 1983). Accounts by Charles Abrams (1965), John Turner and William Mangin (1963) and Elizabeth and Anthony Leeds (1970) are the most recognized works having revealed the dynamics of housing provision by self-organized communities and the affordability questions that progressively developed dwellings entailed. They were neither the first nor the only to do so (Ward 2012), yet the time had become ripe for these accounts to inform policy, first and foremost that of the World Bank, who rapidly tailored sites and services projects into its free-market ideals. Following the principle of ‘affordability, cost recovery, replicability,’ international donors turned wholeheartedly to planned progressive development. Also approximated with sites and services, this approach was a major protagonist in Vancouver together with on-site slum upgrading. The recommendations of the UN Conference on Human Settlements favored in fact spontaneous settlement reorganization and sites and service schemes. As the Self-Help and Low-Cost Housing Symposium running parallel to the conference testified, aided self-help was to play a lead role for human settlements. The recommendations sanctioned an ongoing process, whereby the World Bank alone would fund sixty-eight 55

From Urban Dwelling Environments (1969), pp. 174, 183. © MIT Press.

Figure 5.3 In their seminal publication, Caminos, Steffian and Turner compared settlement structures from both rapidly urbanizing and ‘developed’ contexts by means of a systematic trans-scalar documentation at different scales.

Emergence of a Human Settlements Approach

projects between 1972 and 1984 after placing its weight behind the sites and services agenda (Mayo and Gross 1987, 302; Reimers 2002, 17). This seemingly novel approach carried the fresh promise of escaping the incongruities of hardcore modernism, however critical it may have been in its amended intentions. Rather, most projects avoided large-scale master planning, and considered only the overall organization of the intervention area. This would frame the design of ingenious housing types expected to evolve over time by following architectural specifics rather than being left to the celebrated ingenuity of self-build processes. Commissioning architects from the context itself appeared to reflect a general consciousness toward the inappropriateness of expertise provided by practitioners away from their region of origin. Typically, architects embedded in the context of intervention, like Mutiso Menezes International in Nairobi, or Ahmedabad-based Balakrishna Doshi and the Vastu Shilpa Foundation in Indore, were charged with important sites and services projects. The approach increased in palatability as a key ingredient of development policy abroad, not only by the United States but also by Great Britain. In Egypt the Ministry of Housing and Reconstruction and the British Ministry of Overseas Development funded core housing in El Kekr and Abu Atwa as part of the Ismailia Demonstration Project, featuring Clifford Culpin, Aziz Yassin and Over Arup as planners. The World Bank’s shift from housing to urban projects during the 1970s also meant that several sites and services became significant tools to reorient citywide development, as the case of Nairobi’s 1973 Metropolitan Growth Strategy exemplifies. Other experiments occurred both within the framework of leading aid agencies and outside of it. After participating in the PREVI competition launched through the joint initiative of the Peruvian government and the United Nations in the late 1960s (see Figure 5.4), Christopher Alexander continued to work on ways to combine standardized building components with individually self-built insertions as a means to restructure the entire decision-making process. He could test his idea of the “architect-builder” in practice in Mexicali, under the sponsorship of the governor of Baja California (Alexander 1985). Alexander was persuaded that building houses with a small group of families would effect a fundamental transformation in dwellers’ quality of life (Alexander 1984, 77). The experiment condemned the abstraction of modern housing and the non-transformability of living environments. While this position owed much to John Turner’s ideas on dwellers’ autonomy and control, Alexander had a more prominent confidence in the accumulation of morphologies and patterns from which design principles could be extrapolated and endlessly reused as a procreative code. In both Lima and Mexicali the coexistence of low-tech solutions within industrially manufactured building components would be developed in response to the challenge of “producing modernization without Westernization” (Fromm 1985, 48), aligned with emerging ideas on appropriate building techniques and intermediate technology. The idea of a generative grammar found its culmination in A Pattern Language (1977), where 253 patterns were illustrated so as to provide a manual for a ‘doit-yourself ’ city. During this time, the critical role of architecture and planning was not only being questioned in the so-called developing context but also being challenged in European and North American cities. The act of building as a means of self-expression could not be separated from its physical outcome, and vice versa. While progressive development and self-build construction made incremental design, land subdivision and the attendant infrastructure provision key ingredients of a revised approach to ‘Third World’ urbanization, encompassing ‘informal’ city making became important for the ‘developed’ parts of the globe as well. John N. Habraken, based in Eindhoven but strongly influenced by a childhood spent in Indonesia, founded Stichting Architectuur Research (SAR) in 1964 within the context of post-reconstruction in the Netherlands. Looking for alternatives to mass housing, SAR premised its investigations on the working hypothesis that a distinction could be made between “support structure” and “infill package” (Habraken 1961, 1972). In consultation with SAR, Nabeel Hamdi and Nick Wilkinson advanced related efforts by conceiving Primary Support Structures and 57

ININVI (1979).

Figure 5.4 Christopher Alexander’s final entry for the UN PREVI competition would be based on the study of sixty-seven patterns enabling the design of a double-coded urban architecture merging ‘formal’ with ‘informal’ fabrics.

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Housing Assembly Kits that were expected to enable London residents to design the layout of their own dwellings within an already designed envelope (Hamdi 2010, xv–xvi). In later stages of SAR research, comparisons of old and new fabrics in terms of function and morphologies would help define tissues as tools for urban plan formulation. In both Alexander’s and Habraken’s views, systematizing design-related decisions and placing them in the service of communities would enhance adaptability and participation, disentangling design from the exercise of hegemonic power.

From ‘Small-House’ Critiques to the New Urban Agenda While the World Bank steered away from sites and services with the beginning of the urban management era in 1986, efforts to “ ‘design’ a solution to the housing question” (Mumtaz 1988, 18) became the object of critiques by a number of architects who had been involved in contexts of development. Commenting in retrospect on the experience, Nabeel Hamdi concluded that architects and planners became preoccupied by the technically rational design emphasis characterizing sites and services: “these projects lacked art. They were ignorant of context and resentful of culture” (2010, 4). Indeed, in the attempt to lower costs and rationalize the planning process, sites and services had also reduced shelter to the most bare of material manifestations. Babar Khan Mumtaz, writing in Mimar: Architecture in Development, denounced for example how “small-house development led naturally first to smaller rooms, and then parts of a room and finally to nothing” (1988, 19). Mimar, the journal hosting Mumtaz’s reflection, was first published in 1981 as the only international architecture magazine of its kind, “aimed at exchanging ideas and images between countries which are developing new ideas for their built environment” (Khan 1984, 7). The focus on architecture in the developing world was reflected in contributions not only on self-built urban housing projects and the richness of vernacular artefacts but also on the demythologizing of colonial architecture (Taylor 1984) and on expressions of regional modernism (Khan 1984). In the course of its forty-three issues, Mimar voiced debates produced from deep within the “developing world,” accommodating articles by Charles Correa and Udo Kultermann, and on the work of William Lim and Hassan Fathy. Some of Mimar’s contributing authors would also voice their concerns in the pages of Habitat International, established at the UN Habitat Conference in Vancouver in 1976 with the principal aim to publish original research, review articles and case studies relevant to the implementation of Recommendations for National Action adopted at the conference (Marbach 1986, 167). With land, water, shelter, transport and institutional change registered as the five key topics for human settlements (Turin 1978, 189–191), Habitat International devoted its issues to monitoring the agenda’s advancement. The articles published were authored by many of the individual specialists, private professionals and researchers who had contributed to the studies and seminars and provided direct assistance to governments as part of the aspiration to establish a permanent, intergovernmental agency within the UN structure devoted to the field of human settlements only. The questions raised by this broad group of practitioners not only focused on institutional rearrangement but also were related to the emergence of a new kind of project. As Weissmann noted, the inclusive initiatives that professionals such as Abrams, Atkinson, Tyrwhitt, Koenigsberger, Doxiadis and Tange had in mind were built on the conception of an inextricable relationship between urbanization, environmental development and overall national development. . . . In all these projects, socio-economic aspects of environment and culture were closely integrated with those of technology, administration and management. (1978a, 236) While the multidimensionality of human settlements projects proposed by the array of professionals mentioned by Weissmann can hardly be disagreed with, there remained substantial divergences 59

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between the ekistics of Doxiadis and Koenigsberger’s approach to tropical housing and building, not to mention Kenzo Tange’s design proposals for Skopje’s post-earthquake reconstruction in 1963. The significant differences between Abrams and Tyrwhitt, Koenigsberger and Doxiadis, Atkinson and Tange can hardly be downplayed; they, however, testify to the nebulosity of the human settlements approach as a direct consequence of rapidly changing development paradigms and the multiplicity of exchanges within UN agencies and global aid players. After all the 1976 UN Habitat Conference may have well been the biggest event of its kind, but it was also “the first conference that managed to be held without defining its own terms of reference: nobody provided a definition of ‘human settlement’ ” (Turin 1978, 186). For this reason even the most enthusiastic advocates of human settlements’ all-encompassing definition claimed ‘habitat’ to be more effective as a concept to harness widespread action (Carlson 1978, 171). The haziness of its terminology can easily be associated with development’s slippery nature itself, viewed by many post-development scholars as the key to its pervasive success. Nonetheless, just as development persists as a phenomenon that is “reflective of the best human aspirations and yet . . . liable to be used for purposes that reverse its original ideal intent” (Peet 1999, 2), so ‘habitat’ is reminiscent of a reformist agenda. This agenda inherited the placing of housing and shelter at the core of their action from modernist urbanism, within the aspiration to provide minimum standards to a large majority, including the most vulnerable and least wealthy. To this end, a wide-ranging and versatile concept of human settlements became instrumental for negotiating the position of modern architecture and urbanisms in the changed setting of postwar and decolonization. However, humanitarian-labeled concerns also set the modernist agendas of authoritarian colonial regimes, in the context of which ‘development’ first appeared as a guiding notion. Likewise, the tools to co-opt the poor into internationally sanctioned systems of trade and production under the aegis of development—and the implacable logic of economic globalization—have been many. Human settlements, however, were initially launched as an approach able to amend a developmental ideology focused solely on economic goals. In contrast with development itself, they became a somewhat open-ended methodology rooted in the exchange of knowledge on housing, planning and the environment. The transculturality of human settlements’ production makes the bundle of ideas associated with its approach significantly different from when ‘development’ was founded within the particular history and culture of U.S. foreign policy. By continuing to recover a transcultural narrative of the formative years that led to Vancouver and extended efforts well into the twenty-first century, human settlements can also be recognized in their core project to operate holistically and across social and spatial complexities. Moreover, expanding research on the range of contributors to the formulation of a human settlements agenda over time is bound to provincialize the role of ‘Northern’ and ‘Western’ professionals within this constellation of critical practitioners further. Ultimately, human settlements originated from an attempt of architecture and urbanism to enlarge their disciplinary spectrum in order to address the growing challenges of settlement worldwide. Over the decades, due to the prominence of social and economic fields and the rise of urban management, the spatial dimensions of projects have unfortunately taken a back seat. This remains a loss for human settlements’ foundational conviction that space remains the medium that allows the integration of social, economic, cultural and ecological dimensions of transformation. In fact, land was already declared a finite resource in 1976, making it a key issue of human settlements. The situation today can hardly be described as improved in terms of the scarcity of space, which compels us to be reminded of human settlements’ early ambitions. The outcome of Habitat III, the New Urban Agenda, is expected to guide policy for the next two decades through universally applicable goals, formulated for the first time without marked distinctions between ‘worlded’ geographies across the globe. 60

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One should nonetheless remain vigilant with regard to the plethora of recommendations, however wide a consensus may be reached, since the Habitat Agenda remains a nonbinding declaration of intent. As Jorge Hardoy skeptically commented once the 1976 Habitat Conference was over, Many left Vancouver convinced that the sequel would be more important than the Conference. Anyone who reads the post-Conference reports will probably . . . have the same concerns I have now: how serious, how real is the commitment of governments? . . . For many who attended the Conference, the fact that it took place and that there was a general agreement about human settlement policies was a step forward. But for the world’s poorest, who comprise 60% of the world’s population, for the people who live in the badly built, badly equipped houses, in the unsatisfactory surroundings of the urban and rural settlements of the poor regions of the world, the Vancouver Conference meant nothing. Many of those poor will die of disease or malnutrition before governments decide to act. (1978, 166) If, once again, much will be determined by the qualms of single governments and institutions, for the design-related professions operating in the context of ‘development,’ this may be an open invitation to recover the emancipatory ambitions of particular projects, events and texts foundational for the human settlements agenda. If we are to believe Alejandro Aravena and his statement as director of the 2016 Architecture Biennale, there is still a frontline of the built environment where several battles need to be fought, and several frontiers that need to be expanded in order to improve the quality of the built environment and people’s quality of life (Aravena 2016).

References Abrams, C. (1965) Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Albano, J. (1957) El factor humano para la rehabilitaciòn de los tugurios, Bogotá: CINVA. Alexander, C. (1984) “Mexicali Revisited,” Places Journal 1 (4), 76–77. Alexander, C. (1985) The Production of Houses, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alexander, C., et al. (1977) A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aravena, A. (2016) 15th International Architecture Exhibition ‘Reporting from the Front’, Special Preview Day, Venice, 25 May. Bonillo, J.L., et al. (eds.) (2005) La modernité critique: autour du CIAM 9 d’Aix-en-Provence—1953, Marseille: Imbernon. Caminos, H., et al. (1969) Urban Dwelling Environments, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carlson, E. (1978) “A Note on Post-Habitat Action,” Habitat International 3 (1–2), 171–177. Crimson, M. (2011) “Modernism Across Hemispheres, or, Taking Internationalism Seriously,” in W. Lim and J. Chang (eds.) Non-West Modernist Past, Singapore: World Scientific, 47–58. d’Auria, V. (2010) “From Tropical Transitions to Ekistics Experimentations: Doxiadis Associates in Tema, Ghana,” Positions on Modern Architecture and Urbanism 1 (1), 40–63. d’Auria, V. (2015) “Taming an ‘Undisciplined Discipline’: Constantinos Doxiadis and the Science of Human Settlements,” in T. Avermaete et al. (eds.) Crossing Boundaries: Transcultural Practices in Architecture and Urbanism. OASE Journal for Architecture 95, 8–21. Doxiadis, C.A. (1968) Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements, London: Oxford University Press. Fromm, D. (1985) “Alternatives in Housing, 1: Peru: Previ,” Architectural Review (1062), 48–54. Habraken, J.N. (1961) De dragers en de mensen: Het einde van de massawoningbouw, Amsterdam: Schelterma & Holkema. Habraken, J.N. (1972) Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing, New York: Praeger. Hamdi, N. (2010) The Placemaker’s Guide to Building Community, London: Earthscan. Hardoy, J. (1978) “The Recommendations of the UN Conference on Human Settlements and Their Viability in Latin America,” Habitat International 3 (1–2), 161–166. 61

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Harris, R. (1998) “The Silence of the Experts: ‘Aided-Self-Help Housing’, 1939–1954,” Habitat International 22 (2), 165–189. Harris, R. (1999) “Aided Self-Help Housing, a Case of Amnesia: Editor’s Introduction,” Housing Studies 14 (3), 277–280. Heynen, H. (2005) “The Intertwinement of Modernism and Colonialism: A Theoretical Perspective,” Modern Architecture in East Africa around Independence. ArchiAfrika Proceedings. Dar es Salaam (27–29 July), 91–98. Indaba, J. (2010) World of Giving, Baden: Lars Müller. ININVI (1979) Documentaciòn del Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda— PREVI, Lima: Ministerio de Vivienda y Construcciòn del Peru. Jackson, I. (2013) “Tropical Architecture and the West Indies: From Military Advances and Tropical Medicine, to Robert Gardner-Medwin and the Networks of Tropical Modernism,” Journal of Architecture 18 (2), 167–195. Johnson, C.G. (2011) “The Urban Precariat, Neoliberalization and the Soft Power of Humanitarian Design,” Journal of Developing Societies 27 (3–4), 445–475. Khan, H-U. (1984) “Regional Modernism: Rifat Chadariji’s Portfolio of Etchings,” Mimar: Architecture in Development 14, unpaginated. Khan Mumtaz, B. (1988) “The Housing Question (and Some Answers),” Mimar: Architecture in Development 28, 17–23. Lagae, J. and K. De Raedt (2013) “Global Experts ‘off Radar,’ ” ABE Journal 4. Available at: https://abe.revues. org/743 (accessed 14.01.2016). Laquian, A. (1983) Basic Housing: Policies for Urban Sites, Services and Shelter in Developing Countries, Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. le Roux, H. (2004) “Modern Architecture in Post-Colonial Ghana and Nigeria,” Architectural History 47, 361–392. Lee, R. (2015) “Otto Koenisberger: Transcultural Practice and the Tropical Third Space,” in T. Avermaete et al. (eds.) Crossing Boundaries: Transcultural Practices in Architecture and Urbanism. OASE Journal for Architecture 95, 60–72. Leeds, A. and E. Leeds (1970) “Brazil and the Myth of Urban Rurality: Urban Experience, Work and Values in ‘Squatments’ of Rio de Janeiro and Lima,” in A.J. Field (ed.) City and Country in the Third World: Issues in the Modernization of Latin America, 229–285. Linorter, C. (2012) “Habitat: The Unwritten Charter.” Available at: http://transculturalmodernism.org/?layer=10 (accessed 12.01.2016) Lu, D. (ed.) (2011) Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity, London: Routledge. Marbach, C. (1986) “A Review of Ten Years of Habitat International,” Habitat International 10 (4), 167–205. Mayo, S.K. and D.J. Gross (1987) “Sites and Services—and Subsidies: The Economics of Low-Cost Housing in Developing Countries,” The World Bank Economic Review 1 (2), 301–335. Mumford, L. (2000) The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Muzaffar, I. (2007) The Periphery Within: Modern Architecture and the Making of the Third World, PhD diss., MIT. Nasr, J. and M. Volait (eds.) (2003) Urbanism: Imported or Exported? Native Aspiration and Foreign Plans, Chichester: Wiley. Peattie, L. (1968) The View From the Barrio, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Peet, R. with Hartwick, E. (1999) Theories of Development, London: Guilford Press. Reimers, C. (2002) After Sites and Services: Planned Progressive Development Strategies in Low Income Housing During the 1990s, MSc. Thesis, MIT. Shoskes, E. (2013) Jacqueline Tyrwhitt: A Transnational Life in Urban Planning and Design, London: Ashgate. Stanek, L. and T. Avermaete (eds.) (2012) “Cold War Transfer: Architecture and Planning From Socialist Countries in the ‘Third World,’ ” Journal of Architecture 17. Taylor, B.B. (1984) “Demythologising Colonial Architecture,” Mimar: Architecture in Development 13, 16–25. Turin, D. (1978) “Exploring Change: What Should Have Happened at Habitat,” Habitat International 3 (1–2), 185–195. Turner, J.C. and W. Mangin (1963) “Dwelling Resources in South America,” Architectural Design 33, 366–370. Tyrwhitt, J. (1985) “Planning Tools and Grids,” Ekistics (52), 314–315. United Nations (1976) The Vancouver Declaration on Human Settlements: From the Report of Habitat: United Nations Conference on Human Settlements. Available at: http://habitat.igc.org/vancouver/van-decl.htm (accessed 12.10.2016) Verdeil, E. (2005) “Expertises nomades au Sud: Eclairages sur la circulation des modèles urbains,” Géocarrefour 80 (3), 165–169. Volker, W. (2004) “Talking Squares: Grids and Grilles as Architectural Tools for Analysis and Communication,” in D. van Heuvel and G. de Waal (eds.) Team 10 Between Modernity and the Everyday, Delft: TU Delft, 181–189.

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Ward, Barbara (1976) “The Home of Man: What Nations and the International Must Do”, Habitat International, 1 (2), 125–132. Ward, Peter M. (2012) “Self-Help Housing Ideas and Practice in the Americas,” in B. Sanyal et al. (eds.) Planning Ideas That Matter: Livability, Territoriality, Governance, and Reflective Practice, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 283–310. Watson, J.M. (2012) “Aid, Capital, and the Humanitarian Trap,” Thresholds 40, 238–244. Weissmann, E. (1978a) “Human Settlements—Struggle for Identity,” Habitat International 3 (1–2), 227–241. Weissmann, E. (1978b) “The Next Step,” Habitat International 3 (1–2), 179–183. Wright, G. (1991) The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Further Reading Viviana d’Auria et al. (2010) (eds.) Human Settlements: Formulations and (re)Calibrations, Amsterdam: SUN Academia.

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6 The United Nations and Self-Help Housing in the Tropics Nancy Kwak

“Architecture is rediscovering its social conscience,” New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff (2010) commented in 2010 after viewing a groundbreaking exhibit on architectures of social engagement at MOMA. By the early twenty-first century, social, economic, and environmental issues had become too pressing to ignore for many in the field; words and phrases like “collaboration,” “democratic design,” “humanitarian architecture,” and the “social good” became the new language of architects who subscribed to the art of “giving a damn.” In 2016, Tom Pritzker praised that year’s Architecture Prize winner Alejandro Aravena (2016) for “pioneer[ing] a collaborative practice that produces powerful works of architecture and also addresses key challenges of the 21st century,” for “show[ing] how architecture at its best can improve people’s lives.” “Pioneer,” “rediscovery”—such words signaled a new moment had arrived, that architects had opened their eyes once more to the larger purpose and mission of their field. This framing of past and present is compelling, to be sure. Unfortunately, however, it is also inaccurate. The language of newfound social mission belies a longer, more continuous history of engaged architecture, particularly in intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations. Since at least the mid-twentieth century, UN administrators and itinerant advisers worked under the mantle of human rights broadly conceived, embracing “community development” and connecting their selfproclaimed expertise with homegrown efforts to improve the everyday lives of ordinary folk. No heroic architects rose to take the helm of these intergovernmental projects during the era of high modernism, and UN efforts experienced no turn to “radical aestheticism” or dramatic rupture during the postmodern moment. Rather, intergovernmental efforts at improving living conditions chugged along with little fanfare through the second half of the twentieth century, powered primarily by an army of obscure planners, architects, and administrators that few remember today. Perhaps because of this lack of star power, some have chosen to depict the work of UN officials as outliers. Consider the preface to the aforementioned 2010 MOMA exhibit publication, for instance, which argued the population explosion in the Global South “added renewed urgency to the search for innovative solutions for the proliferation of slum-dwelling”—activities that had, up to now, been “confined largely to government agencies and the United Nations” (Bergdoll 2011, 10). Now however, the author continued, the poor were expected to work as partners in solving problems of urban poverty. Past international and national efforts at installing self-help (in Latin America, autoconstrucción) were top-down, whereas current efforts were largely bottom-up strategies by activist architects and local officials (Medina 2015). 64

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There are two parts to this framing that need consideration: first, did past international efforts actually take on a more top-down approach, while efforts in the more recent past moved from the grassroots up? And second, did the work of government agencies and the UN properly belong at the margins of a history of innovative, socially engaged architecture? To take the first question first: certainly, UN efforts were organized—by definition—at the level of the international. This did not mean that the work was necessarily top-down, however. In most cases, UN representatives were simply not powerful enough to enact top-down urban design in the places they worked: they lacked the authority and political strength to force their ideas on others. Instead, technical assistance missions and advisers brought foreign ideas that sometimes took root and other times did not. UN workers struggled to make sense of very different cultural and material contexts, and they often failed to understand the local logics underpinning what they perceived as a uniform global housing crisis. National and local governments were much more powerful agents in this story of modernization and rapid transformation of the built environment, but even these officials could not dictate the terms of “engagement”—a rather strange term to capture the relationship between state and less powerful citizens, to be sure. Local populations, meanwhile, hardly possessed the weapons to realize their vision of property rights or community life in the face of overwhelming modernization campaigns (Scott 2000). Instead, they built incrementally where old homes had been cleared, drew electricity from private power lines, fell behind on mortgage and rent payments, and generally failed to behave in ways that fit with official visions of a modern city. Put another way, everyday architecture was never wholly top-down or bottom-up. Then, to consider the second question: even a cursory examination of the UN’s work makes clear the organization’s past is hardly marginal to global histories of architecture, despite the limited or even nonexistent role of brand-name architects within many UN missions. Incremental architecture did not die out in 1932 with the exile of architects like Walter Gropius, Hugo Haring, and Egon Eiermann, but rather took on new forms with “land and utilities,” “installment,” “serial,” “progressive development,” “core housing,” and “sites and services” programs of the UN and of other key players, like development banks (Napier, n.d.). The present-day embrace of “slum upgrading” can find intellectual roots in Kampung Improvement Programs sponsored by the UN in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, we might draw a line between the 1990s versions of “teaching by example” and the transnational experiments with demonstration and model communities decades earlier. And speaking to the relative impact of UN work as opposed to that of well-known architects, famous individuals like Frank Lloyd Wright may have worked briefly with rammed earth construction in the late 1930s, but it was really UN-sponsored projects in the 1950s and 1960s that had much more significance, transporting compressed earth blockmakers around the world and stimulating global debates about ideal housing materials (Easton 2007; Benmergui 2013; Offner 2012; Kwak 2015). It is important, then, to center histories of social engagement by the UN and by other intergovernmental bodies as well as by development banks and other unlikely architects of human settlements. Threaded through efforts past and present is an emphasis on self-help and aided self-help—an ideology that first took shape in the context of development assistance and postcolonial nationbuilding projects in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and that eventually became part of the neoliberal vocabulary of the late twentieth century. In the evolving language of self-help, the obligations of the state changed but the role of the citizenry did not: architects’ social engagement was expressed as the activation of a more durable system of self-help on the part of individuals and communities. Put another way, mid-twentieth-century “social engagement” typically involved a program of aided self-help, wherein outsiders helped “locals” improve their own built environment through contributions like machinery or technical knowledge. Ultimately, effective social engagement would render “outside” state/IGO/NGO assistance unnecessary. What, then, did these programs look like on the ground? And how did UN workers decide which places—specific people, circumstances, and locations—merited this sort of attention? 65

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Choosing Targets of Social Engagement No matter how well intentioned or charitable, no organization could claim enough resources to assist with every crisis unfolding at the end of World War II. Certainly this was true of the newly birthed UN. In trying to decide where and how to help, UN workers joined with others to develop new rubrics of “public health,” “human rights,” and “community development” to structure their efforts (Cullather 2011; Immerwahr 2015; Hunt 2008). Perhaps one of the most remarkable changes in the world after 1945 was the emerging concept of a universal standard of decency—and with it, a burgeoning debate about what a basic standard of living might mean in terms of the built form. It was a radical concept, to declare every human deserving of an adequate house—but if the United Nations Charter unequivocally put forward this right, it also left open for discussion what adequate meant. It also left unanswered questions of other possible rights, such as that of public or communal space. Architecture and design became sites of negotiation: between expert and local, rich and poor, urban and rural. “Self-help” became the dominant ideological vehicle to achieve other postwar constructs of human rights, public health, and so on. Given the dominance of American funding, the United States played an outsized role in UN programs as well. In the midst of these political and national pressures, one of the first coordinated efforts at improving design and architecture took shape in 1950 as the start of what would become a series of “tropical housing” studies. In the roughly half century preceding the UN, researchers had already established tropical health and architecture as categories of study in the management of various European empires; by the postcolonial period, “tropical” denoted an “enduring imaginative geography” that juxtaposed temperate with tropical regions and that simultaneously exoticized and homogenized different climates and cultures in the latter category (Chang 2016; Driver and Yeoh 2000; Baweja 2008). There were simply no journals or research groups dedicated to the study of temperate architecture to match this interest in tropicality, no Departments of Temperate Architecture or Schools of Hygiene and Temperate Medicine. UN advisers led the way in joining together a general concern for humane living conditions with an interest in the “tropics.” The first tropical mission chose to focus on living conditions in this climatic zone, members wrote in their summary report, because they wanted to “help toward the solution of a great human problem.”1 The UN team consisted of four members: Jacob L. Crane (American chairman), Jacobus P. Thijsse (Dutch member), Robert Gardner-Medwin (British member and rapporteur), and Antonio C. Kayanan (Filipino member and secretary). Each found his attention focused on lower-income living conditions in the tropics because “the magnitude of the Asian housing problem is far greater than that of any other part of the world.”2 The four men believed “more than 100,000,000 Asian families (perhaps as many as 150,000,000) at present live in crowded, unsanitary, sub-standard quarters, urban or rural,” with extreme overcrowding and problems with vermin, ventilation, and sanitation.3 They observed an “urgent need” for trained architects and planners, noting good architecture must spring from the fulfillment of social and cultural needs, achieved through scientific application of building materials and systems. This is not to deny the power or the validity of creative design but to give point and purpose to it.4 In all the language generated in these reports, tropical housing experts emphasized their charitable intent and their interest in the general welfare of lower-income people around the world. Without doubt, then, UN workers had genuinely humanitarian intentions in attempting to improve living conditions in the tropics. It is not the good intentions of UN workers that demand closer scrutiny, but rather the particular worldview expressed in the assessment of need, and in particular, in the selection process. While there were undoubtedly problems with disease eradication, clean water, and building maintenance in cities coping with explosive growth and waves of rural 66

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migration, Southeast and South Asia or even generalized hot, humid regions across the world did not hold a monopoly on these problems. How did officials choose where to engage, when? And what tools did these UN workers use to assess the condition of very different built environments? Here, other interests—perhaps less admirable but more powerful and certainly better funded—rose to the fore. Above all, questions of global political security drove UN workers to prioritize some sites over others, focusing in particular on strengthening local governments’ ability to manage urban growth in ways that made sense to more powerful nation-states already dominant in a linked world economy. Slum clearance efforts in the Philippines illustrate the ways in which architects’ and planners’ “social engagement” became a form of international political relations. In 1966, UN Physical Planning and Housing Adviser Morris Juppenlatz attempted to organize a Central Institute for the Training and Relocation of Urban Squatters, or CITRUS, in the Philippines. Rationales for CITRUS followed the usual formula, generated cooperatively by the UN and Philippine national representatives (including President Ferdinand Marcos as well as officials from the Department of National Defense and National Economic Council): CITRUS would remove slum and squatter families who presently “devalue[d] central area land values, [bred] communicable diseases, retard[ed] the normal economic development of the cities and frustrate[d] further investment.”5 Impoverished urban dwellers needed the expertise of those equipped to “economize in the provision of better human comfort” and “rais[e] the standards of human comfort conditions of dwellings for the hot humid climate.”6 Without concerted efforts to eradicate the “phenomena of urban squatters . . . now visibly in evidence . . . throughout the developing countries in Latin America and the Afro-Asian countries,” both UN and Philippine government representatives agreed, “the stability of organized economic urban life [would be] threatened.”7 Rather than thinking of aid as charity, a better way to understand UN programs to improve the built environment is as a claim to authority in politically important parts of the world—a claim that UN workers chose to articulate through specialized, technical knowledge of “tropical architecture.” While UN officials may not have taken positions in local or national politics, they did work to sustain a particular vision of world order and global security. This vision was capitalist, individualist, and free of class revolt. Two years after independence, for instance, UN workers urged the Ministry of Health and Housing in the Kenyan government to consider cooperative and aided self-help housing. “African ownership of houses” could help address the rapidly deteriorating housing situation, A. A. Carney, an adviser for regional and aided self-help housing, suggested.8 While putting such housing programs into place, the Kenyan government along with others on the continent might benefit from the establishment of an African tropical institute similar to the one in London but devoted especially to French speakers, another UN advisor continued. Africans should also work to establish a system of regional advisors trained in professional methods, although at present, yet another UN worker lamented, there were too many governments that were poorly informed on the subject and that did not understand the benefits of foreign advisers.9 Even with the end of empire, former colonial officials continued to claim expertise with impunity. When the UN Industrial Development Organization held a meeting in Vienna in 1969, for instance, the Centre for Housing, Building, and Planning proposed a paper on tropical building, to be presented by experts like G. A. Atkinson, an architect and British colonial liaison officer, who had “down to earth British empirical knowledge,” or Stanley Jewkes, an architect and former director of Public Works at the Federation of Malaya, or J. Dreyfus, a French bioclimatologist who had “spent years in Africa” and who consequently had “good experience both in hot humid and arid behaviour of materials.”10 Gardner-Medwin, one of the four architect-planners involved in the initial UN tropical housing study, continued “aiding and encouraging the continuation of British architects working in Colonial/post-colonial settings, with students operating as the ‘knowledge creators’, measuring and recording, defining what was important, worthy of preservation and dictating the method (measured drawing) by which this was to be done” ( Jackson 2013). In observing the 67

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participants of social engagement, and in particular in seeing the continuities with colonial regimes, it becomes abundantly clear that the process of “social engagement” was all too often a way to impose a particular technocratic world order that placed former colonial regimes in positions of authority. This was hardly a subtle shift from the language of empire to a postcolonial internationalism: for instance, the 1956 Architect & Building News offered explicit suggestions for “conditions of engagement” abroad (Weymouth 1956).

Self-Help as a Source of State Authority Even a brief discussion of the emergent field of tropical architecture thus begins to unravel some of the complicated logic of social engagement on the part of architects and planners. Surprisingly, perhaps, their work then and now has striking parallels: with few exceptions, practitioners believed they should help others because of their superior technical know-how and professional training. (Even Bernard Rudofsky’s enticingly titled book, Architecture Without Architects, praised “communal” or “non-pedigreed architecture” only during more exotic, largely “premodern” times, ignoring the large numbers of individuals and families building informal shelter for themselves in the past half century; Rudofsky 1987.) Social engagement did not stimulate a radical reenvisioning of class relations or a broadening of the definition of “architect” or “planner.” And in a strange twist, local knowledge at times became a way for western-trained architects and planners to claim intellectual turf among peers. What distinguishes mid-twentieth-century efforts from those today, however, is the way UN workers like Crane, Thijsse, Kayanan, and Gardner-Medwin envisioned their task to be simultaneously the design of houses and communities and the strengthening of state authority. International action should “help each government in tackling its problems of housing and community development,” the UN bulletin on housing in the tropics stated unambiguously.11 This contrasted sharply with, for instance, Cameron Sinclair’s depiction of his NGO Architecture for Humanity’s experiences in Kosovo, where the then interim government became an obstacle to humanitarian design assistance. If Sinclair had moved forward in collaboration with the UNHCR, this next project would have also focused on refugees, or those living by definition at the edges of circuits of state power (Sinclair 2006). The reasons for this peculiarly mid-century connection between state and socially engaged architecture were simple. Unlike current-day humanitarian design, UN workers in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s had to show their unwavering support for postcolonial regimes. As experts hailing from North America or Western European nations—countries that had once dominated large empires or that were feared to have global ambitions—UN workers needed to make clear their respect for new governments. At the same time, they also subscribed to a view of global security that required strong states to manage a developmentalist agenda. The promotion of self-help fit with this vision of state-managed development and self-sustaining growth. Only with development could citizens realize an improvement in their material circumstances and be deterred from participating in radical politics. Only with strong states could development be realized. “Social engagement” thus ended up requiring close cooperation with states, since western architectural techniques required bureaucratic and legal apparatuses to manage, for instance, land titling or enforcement of standards. It is on this foundation that nongovernmental organizations, charities, and firms now build privately or IGOfunded programs today.

Conclusion Current movements draw from deeper historical wells, then, and today’s socially engaged architecture and design emerge from a much longer trajectory of global work by professionals interested in a public good. Put simply, socially engaged architecture is not new. But why does this rootedness matter? What is the importance of such history? 68

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There are a number of ways to think about the relevance of past efforts. On the one hand, they offer insight into some of the assumptions embedded in socially engaged architecture today: there is the lingering assumption, for instance, that “global” expertise brings together academic and technical knowledge with “local” best practices and that architects and planners can play a central role mediating between the two, or that good design accommodates cultural differences while ultimately upholding the rights of the individual and the principles of democratic governance. Whether in the mid-twentieth or early twenty-first centuries, socially engaged architects and planners present(ed) themselves as practical problem-solvers seeking pragmatic, affordable, and localized solutions to large-scale problems with global poverty. Across time, socially engaged architecture presumes a shared definition of human rights and decency in much the same way it operates within the parameters of liberal political values. These practices continue to be espoused, not only as a part of basic human ethics and human rights but also as part of a larger system of global security: decent standards of living can diminish the appeal of radical Jihadist movements, for instance, much as they could lessen the appeal of global communism during the Cold War. And perhaps most obviously, engaged architects and planners posited then and now that members of their professions possess unique and necessary skills for addressing questions of inequality and for facilitating social change. A history of socially engaged architecture thus allows a more critical examination of the threads connecting past with present. On the other hand, there are clear gaps between the efforts of the postwar decades and today, and it is important to observe change and evolution as much as continuity. For example, UN advisers unabashedly embraced a modernist, macro-level, professional planning approach at odds with the present-day emphasis by activist planners and architects on grassroots change and the vernacular. UN advisers also worked closely with political heads of state, pursuing larger development agendas that meshed more with Cold War agendas and with geopolitical strategy than with the sustainability and social justice principles that inspire now. Overall, however, a historical examination of UN efforts reveals not only the larger impacts of social engagement but also the framing of the concept itself. The idea that “social engagement” entails an ethical, humanitarian engagement by professional architects and planners with an ostensibly nonprofessional, untrained, untechnical audience is a one-sided understanding of design, to be sure. In the end, social engagement is perhaps an inaccurate phrase to capture the sort of exchanges necessary to open up different forms of spatial knowledge.

Notes 1 “Low Cost Housing in South and South-East Asia,” Report of Mission of Experts, 22nd November–23rd January, 1951 (New York: Department of Social Affairs, UN Secretariat, 1951), United Nations Archives. 2 Ibid., p. 11. 3 Ibid., p. 11. 4 Ibid., p. 79. 5 Report of the Social Welfare Administration, Office of the President, Government of the Philippines, to the UN Special Fund, August, 1966, p. 6, BOX-S-0175–1720–06, United Nations Archives. 6 Ibid., p. 14. 7 Preliminary Outline of the Proposal to Establish a CITRUS, Draft, March 1966, p. 1, BOX-S-0175-1720-06, United Nations Archives. 8 United Nations Economic Commission for Africa: Report on the Mission to the Ministry of Health and Housing to the Kenya Government, Nairobi November 19–December 4, 1965. Memo from A.A. Carney, Regional Adviser, Cooperative and Aided Self-Help Housing (Addis Ababa: December 16, 1965), Folder Part B, Box S-0175–0079–02 Self-help housing—Africa AFR (240–241), United Nations Archives. 9 Pierre Emery, “Du role du conseiller régional dans l’élaboration et l’application d’une politique de l’habitat,” n.d., Folder Part B, Box S-0175-0079-02 Self-help housing—Africa AFR (240–241), United Nations Archives. 69

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10 Letter from Mr. A. Gonzalez-Gandolfi, Chief, Building Section, Centre for Housing, Building and Planning to Victor Olgyay, School of Architecture, Princeton, June 4, 1969, Folder SO 144(32), RG 3/9, Box 54, United Nations Archives. 11 UN Report of Mission of Experts, “Housing in the Tropics,” UN Housing and Town and Country Planning Bulletin 6 (May 1952): 96.

References Aravena, Alejandro. 2016. “Alejandro Aravena of Chile Receives the 2016 Pritzker Architecture Prize.” Accessed March 20, 2017. www.pritzkerprize.com/2016/announcement. Baweja, Vandana. 2008. “A Pre-History of Green Architecture: Otto Koenigsberger and Tropical Architecture, From Princely Mysore to Post-Colonial London.” Doctoral Dissertation, University of Michigan. Benmergui, Leandro. 2013. “The Transnationalization of the ‘Housing Problem’: Social Sciences and Developmentalism in Postwar Argentina,” in Edward Murphy and Najib B. Hourani, eds., The Housing Question: Tensions, Continuities, and Contingencies in the Modern City. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Bergdoll, Barry. 2011. “Introduction,” in Andres Lepik, Small Scale: Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, p. 10. Chang, Jiat-Hwee. 2016. A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience. New York: Routledge. Cullather, Nick. 2011. The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Driver, Felix, and Brenda S.A. Yeoh. 2000. “Constructing the Tropics: Introduction.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21 (1): 1–5. doi:10.1111/1467-9493.00059. Easton, David. 2007. The Rammed Earth House. Rev. ed. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green. Hunt, Lynn. 2008. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W. W. Norton. Immerwahr, Daniel. 2015. Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jackson, Iain. 2013. “Tropical Architecture and the West Indies: From Military Advances and Tropical Medicine, to Robert Gardner-Medwin and the Networks of Tropical Modernism.” The Journal of Architecture 18 (2): 167–195. doi:10.1080/13602365.2013.781202. Kwak, Nancy H. 2015. A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Medina, Samuel. 2015. “The Future Was Latin America: Barry Bergdoll on the Region’s Legacy of Visionary Modern Architecture.” Metropolis. March 19. www.metropolismag.com/architecture/moma-curatorbarry-bergdoll-regions-rich-legacy-visionary-modern-architecture/. Napier, Mark. n.d. “The Origin and Spread of Core Housing.” http://web.mit.edu/incrementalhousing/arti clesPhotographs/pdfs/Origins-Spread-CoreHousing.pdf. Offner, Amy Carol. 2012. “Anti-Poverty Programs, Social Conflict, and Economic Thought in Colombia and the United States, 1948–1980.” Doctoral Dissertation, Columbia University. Ouroussoff, Nicolai. 2010. “Real-Life Design: Erecting Solutions to Social Problems.” The New York Times, October 14. www.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/arts/design/15change.html. Rudofsky, Bernard. 1987. Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture. Albuquerque: UNM Press. Scott, James C. 2000. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Nachdr. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sinclair, Cameron. 2006. “Introduction.” In Architecture for Humanity, Design Like You Give a Damn. New York: Metropolis Books. Weymouth, William. 1956. “Opportunities Abroad for Architects.” Architect and Building News.

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7 Tracing the History of Socially Engaged Architecture School Building as Development Aid in Postcolonial Sub-Saharan Africa Kim De Raedt

A project that is exemplary of the recent proliferation of socially responsible architecture is the school complex in Gando, Burkina Faso, designed by the Berlin-based architect Diébédo Francis Kéré. Kéré engaged in the project in the late 1990s, starting first with the design and construction of a primary school. This kind of public program is emblematic of the wide range of architectural typologies that currently emerge under the banner of ‘social engagement’, such as markets, assembly halls, cultural centers, sports facilities, health clinics and so forth. The enterprise had a special meaning to the architect, as the beneficiary of the school was the community in which the architect had grown up before leaving for Germany to commence his architectural education. In order to raise money for the project, Kéré established his own foundation, Schulbausteine für Gando. By relying on local materials, such as clay and wood, and techniques native to the region, such as vault construction, Kéré could employ local artisans, builders and laborers, and even involve the community in the realization of the school. The importance of the participatory process, the architect explained, was to allow the people of the region to identify with the building (Kéré 2014). At the same time, Kéré introduced an explicitly modern element in the design by using steel reinforcement bars and corrugated iron plates for the construction of the roof. The large, cantilevering roof is necessary to protect the clay brick walls from damaging rains. By doing so, the architect hoped to transform the typical associations of traditional materials and techniques with poverty into a sense of pride. He thus appears to be imagining a building that fosters the users’ recognition and appreciation of their sociocultural past and traditions, while simultaneously speaking to their identification as (or aspirations to be) citizens of a globalized society.

Development Aid as an Instrument of Postcolonial Geopolitics While Kéré’s approach, along with that of many of his socially engaged colleagues, is often presented in media, exhibitions and publications as a new mode of practicing architecture in Africa (Lepik 2009, 2014), the very same themes, concepts and concerns were in fact part of architectural discourse already in the 1960s and 1970s. Upon decolonization, countless development aid agencies got involved in the construction of new buildings and infrastructure, all in the name of progress and modernization. Among them was the European Development Fund. The agency was established in 71

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1957 as a byproduct of the wake of the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) and officially launched two years later (Adebajo and Whiteman 2011; Frisch 2008; Arts and Dickson 2004; Grilli 1993). The purpose of this new economic constellation, including Italy, France, West Germany, and the Benelux countries, was to increase economic cooperation and expansion through trade.1 While France and Belgium pleaded to include their soon ex-colonies—with which they had important economic ties—in the agreement, Germany was very much opposed to such a regionalist (and therefore exclusionary) aid policy. A substantial amount of money was allegedly proposed by the German chancellor Adenauer in return for a ‘Europe-only’ membership to the EEC, but to no avail. As Britta Schilling (2014) has explained, the West German Deutscher Entwicklungsdienst was much more in favor of the so-called watering can principle, “in which financial help was distributed evenly and indiscriminately” among African nations (Schilling 2014, 92). Following intense debate, the six member states finally agreed to include overseas countries in the agreement, and contribute financially to their development and modernization. In return, a free trade zone was established, replacing the formerly exclusionist and protected colonial markets. In the first ten years of its existence, the EDF invested significantly in the construction of social infrastructure in Africa. Indeed, given the rather belated and inadequate efforts of the colonial powers in this domain, education, health care and related social services were seriously lagging behind. With regard to education in particular (which is the focus of this chapter), between 1959 and 1975 the EDF financed the construction of several hundred secondary schools, vocational and technical schools and higher education institutes, and several thousand classrooms for rural primary education (DG VIII: Joanna Alimenastianu-Van Bel 1983). One of the first of such nationwide rural primary education projects was undertaken in Niger, where school enrollment rates were particularly low at independence (EDF Archives, BAC 9/1974, File 708). One hundred and sixteen new schools were planned, distributed across the entire southern (and most populated) region of the country. Fifteen hundred kilometers of desert road would separate the two schools furthest apart. The introduction of a basic level of literacy in the rural regions of African countries was framed by the EDF and the government of Niger—which right after independence still consisted mostly of French civil servants—as the starting point for developing sustainable national economies, and thus for increasing social welfare in Africa. Yet under the pretext of building welfare states through the expansion of education, the EDF also helped the EEC to strengthen and solidify its relations with the former colonies. With decolonization unfolding right in the middle of the Cold War, African countries were sought-after allies, from a political, economic and/or military point of view. To win the hearts and minds of new heads of state and citizens alike, various new (super)powers, ranging from the United States and the Soviet Union to Japan and China, deployed rather aggressive aid programs that simultaneously targeted the economy, social infrastructure and the military force of countries in Africa. Meanwhile, European countries’ status as powerful nation-states, especially France and Germany, had been thoroughly affected by the war. The loss of the colonies and the disintegration of old empires further underlined the weakened position of European countries. In this context, it was difficult for the newly created EEC to profile itself alongside such a wide spectrum of new, powerful players. The key to reaffirm its credibility on the international scene, then, was to ensure a strong bond with Africa in the future, with which it had had vital economic ties since the colonial period (Claeys 2004). These geopolitical ambitions manifested in the vision of a Communauté Eurafricaine, much like Britain had its Commonwealth, and France imagined a France-Afrique after decolonization. The EEC in other words had the greatest possible interest in ‘socializing’ African countries into this idea of a Communauté Eurafricaine. However, politically speaking, this was very delicate. Given the tense geopolitical context of the Cold War, and even more so considering the colonial background of several of the EEC’s member states, it was essential that the EDF was framed as a politically neutral agency for which aid was purely a technocratic matter. Primary schools projects like the one 72

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in Niger played an important role in this regard. Jacques Ferrandi, the French director of the EDF, tellingly used it to claim that the EDF, which . . . could have chosen the easiest solution by financing such large spectacular works that are showcased, for propaganda, in capital cities, has chosen to pursue a bush policy, a rural policy, by planning its interventions in the vicinity of agricultural communities, even, and especially, when it concerns the construction of social infrastructure. (Translated from French by author; EDF 1964) Building small primary schools of no apparent representational value was in other words ‘proof ’ that the EEC had no intentions of continuing the asymmetric relations of power and exploitation which its member states had upheld for several decades during the colonial era. The underlying discourse was that, while other development aid agencies were, often with larger budgets, only attending to the educational needs of an elite in big cities because the visibility of such projects catered to their political and economic interests, the EDF’s social engagement was truly altruistic and humanitarian. While African heads of state were undoubtedly aware that the EDF did indeed have a double agenda, even if it so vehemently claimed not to, they nevertheless accepted it, as it gave them an unseen power to negotiate the aid they received.2 Hence, if, during the colonial period, EEC member states had had full control and decision power over their overseas territories, after decolonization they were suddenly in a position where their fate was inconstricably bound to their capacity to indulge the needs and requests of those whom they had formerly subjected.

School Building as a Return on Investment As soon as the financing agreement between the EDF and the Nigerien government had been signed, a young French architecture office, Kalt—Pouradier-Duteil—Vignal (KPDV), was assigned to make a preliminary study for the design of the 116 new schools (De Raedt 2014b). The project brief required a classroom for about 45 pupils, and a small house for a teacher. Aside from this, the EDF had no preconceptions regarding the architectural approach of the project. The agency suggested only that simple concrete block walls would probably be the cheapest structural solution (EDF 1974). KPDV, however, proposed to reduce the price of the schools by exploiting the potential of “bulk” that was implied in the commission. The architects more concretely designed a standardized structure that could be built as a meccano, out of single metal elements that would be mass-prefabricated off-site. The structure consisted of slender columns supporting triangular roof trusses extending about 2 meters to protect the outer walls from the rain and as protection against the sun (Figure 7.1). These trusses were covered with perforated plates on the inside, and with corrugated aluminum sheets on top. In a final stage, prefabricated sun and wind regulating façade elements were fixed to the metal frame on the inside, leaving the metal frame visible on the outside (Figure 7.2). Because the elements were mass-produced in the closed environment of a factory, the quality of the building would not be dependent solely on the skills of laborers and the quality of (local) materials. However, given the fact that no large metal manufacturing plants existed in Niger, all the elements had to be imported from a factory in Europe, and then transported hundreds of kilometers across desert road, to finally be assembled on site by a specialized team. Compared to the design of traditional, late colonial one-off schools, which were usually based on a combination of locally available building materials, such as concrete and brick, and imported specialized equipment and finishing elements, this was a revolutionary proposal. Of course it did not, however, emerge as a deus ex machina. The industrial analogy, whereby design is inspired by the rational-scientific delivery logic of mass production, was at the very heart of the emerging modernist discourse in the early twentieth 73

Figure 7.1 Load-bearing structure for the primary schools in Niger, built with prefabricated steel elements. EDF Archives, BAC 9 /1974, File 710, Box 2423.

EDF Archives, BAC 9 /1974, File 710, Box 2423.

Figure 7.2 Image of a completed school. KPDV, rural primary school building project, Niger, 1962.

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century. But it was the Second World War that created fertile ground for the application of the assembly-line analogy in architecture on a truly large scale. Already during the war, the prefabrication industry, which flourished because of the multitude of applications in the military sector, was being put to the use of, and later reoriented to, the housing and school building sector, in particular in the UK. From the mid-1940s onwards, pilot work was undertaken in the county of Hertfordshire, which soon led to experiments in other counties, all backed by newly created administrative structures (Saint 1987; Bullock 2002). Inspired by the success of what was going on in the UK, the French Ministry of Education also started to look into the possibilities of turning industrial production techniques to the use of mass school building. France was indeed confronted with massive destructions of its social, economic and cultural infrastructure, and had to cope with a substantial shortage of schools. In 1948, and again in 1953, the French Ministry of Education organized an architecture competition to challenge architects to design “buildings that could be obtained in large numbers, easy to mount and adaptable to any site” (translated from French by the author) (l’Architecture d’ Aujourd’hui 1957: unpaginated). The competition yielded a wide range of prototypes for small, standardized pavilion-like structures. While several proposals, in particular of the first competition, were traditional in terms of construction methods and building materials, others were more adventurous, based on the use of a light metal (either aluminum or steel) mass-prefabricated structure filled in with prefabricated façade elements. With their almost machine-like appearance and construction system, and their modern overall expression, the schools represented the arrival of the welfare state in postwar Europe. All the while, the strategy of mass production also offered a financial boost to building companies and large contractors that had suffered during the war or repurposed their production in function of it. Effectively, for the French government, promoting mass-producible buildings also meant expediting the economy, or in other words securing an indirect return on investment. Seeing the scale of the project in Niger, the EDF apparently appreciated the potential, which this approach to school construction could also offer the EEC’s economy when applied in Africa. The market for large companies that were already operating in this field back in Europe could indeed be considerably expanded when prefabricated schools would also be introduced in Africa, especially given the fact that no large metal manufacturing plants existed in Niger.3 After having designed the schools for Niger, KPDV was assigned the commission of 225 new primary schools for Burkina Faso, and 441 new primary schools for Senegal. In the course of the following years, several similar projects were approved by the EDF. By the early 1970s, an estimated 3,300 classrooms had been built in which the design was based on standardization, rationalization and a large degree of prefabrication.

Architecture for Self-Reliance With their modern materials and technologically advanced construction method, the schools in Niger obviously operated in the same register of symbolic representation as the prefabricated, massproduced schools in Europe did, signaling the arrival of modernity. Yet while the KPDV architects could very easily have chosen to have all the building elements produced and imported from Europe, they explicitly chose to have the prefabricated structure filled in with mud and cement bricks, produced locally and laid by laborers from the region (Figure 7.3). This had a significant effect on the appearance of the buildings. The non-load-bearing wall develops entirely free of the metal frame (Figure 7.4). Thus, the effect of two interwoven structures was generated, with the load-bearing structure being rigidly defined by the modularity of the prefabricated elements, and the brick structure more ‘free-form’ and adaptable (Figure 7.5). The decision to search for a solution that combined the ‘best of two worlds’ can be explained by the specific background of the three architects. In particular the unique moment in time in which they commenced their architecture studies inspired the more sensible approach, from both 76

EDF Archives, BAC 9/ 1974, File 710, Box 2423.

Figure 7.3 Nigerien laborers producing the mud and cement bricks on the building site.

Private archive of Michel Kalt.

Figure 7.4 Floor plan of the school, showing the decoupling of the metal structure and the brick walls. KPDV, rural primary school building project, Niger, 1962.

Private archive of Marie-Thérèse Pouradier-Duteil.

Figure 7.5 Image of a rural primary school under construction in Burkina Faso. The design is slightly altered compared to the Niger version. More particularly, the roof was slightly curved and made of continuous so-called bacs autoportants, an invention of the French engineerarchitect Jean Prouvé. This improved the impermeability of the buildings compared to traditional gable roof construction. KPDV, rural primary school building project, Burkina Faso, 1963.

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an esthetic and moral point of view. Two out of the three of them having participated actively in the war and having lived the destructions to the built environment firsthand, the architects were intensely motivated to contribute to the construction of the ‘new world’.4 As Kalt and Vignal recall, they saw tremendous opportunities, not only in the reconstruction in Europe but also in the programs of late colonial development in the overseas territories, to bring modern architecture closer to the people. Effectively, inspired by the postwar climate of optimism, they shared a concern to participate in the development of a modern architecture that would be both technology advanced and socially as well as esthetically responsible—an architecture that would be no longer in tune with their classical and/or Beaux Arts training, nor aligned with the strictly functionalist precepts of prewar modernism. They endorsed the rising contemporary critiques of the “boîtes de savon”5 that had been built before the war, regretting—not unlike the future members of Team X and other postwar CIAM apostates—the loss of craft, as well as human and esthetic sensibility in many hardlined International Style projects. The use of locally produced mud and cement bricks, laid by local laborers, in the prefabricated schools in Niger should be understood in light of these experiences and context. The architects hoped that this ‘mediated’ approach would foster a sense of identity and dignity in the future users of school, while at the same time it had the added advantage of partially mediating the return on investment logic inherent in the EDF’s modus operandi. Effectively, in retrospect, Michel Kalt emphasized the fact that using local materials and labor had allowed the large European enterprises and the local user communities to divide more equally the profits of the building process. At this point in history, right at the brink of decolonization, these were fairly progressive intentions, compared to many late colonial and early postcolonial school building projects, which, despite stylistic differences, were usually built with a combination of locally available building materials, such as concrete and brick, and imported specialized equipment and finishing elements. Moreover, the use of materials commonly associated with indigenous construction in public buildings right after decolonization was absolutely not selfevident, as a quote which the architects once encountered on the façade of a house in Africa tellingly reveals: “We are not going to spend our time looking for straw. Here, we are free, look at our house!”6 In retrospect, however, given the overall conditions of the project, the architects’ proposal might seem immature, or maybe even a little naïve. Transporting an exact number of metal elements unharmed all the way from Europe to villages in the ‘bush’ effectively turned out to be difficult at times. Missing parts and damage as a result of inadequate storage or transport complicated construction, and in Senegal, the production of the earth-concrete blocks and the construction of the walls by local laborers were in several cases of questionable quality. Nevertheless, over the course of the 1970s, the idea of involving beneficiary communities in the construction of social infrastructure became increasingly popular, in Africa as well as elsewhere in the world. The dehumanizing effects of high modernism, and the authoritarian and deterministic attitude it implied, were increasingly criticized against the background of the Cold War. In the wake of May 1968, the idea of learning from, and appealing to, the creative potential and capacities of people and communities gained prominence within architecture culture.7 More and more architects attempted to redress the power balance between architects and users by recognizing and calling upon their responsibility to play an active role in the shaping of their environment. Notions such as spatial agency, participatory architecture, self-help and self-reliance thus became prominent themes in architectural debate from the late 1960s onwards. The idea of empowering people was particularly palatable to the subsidiary bodies of the UN, not least UNESCO’s education division, which, among many other things, was also involved in school building. In 1960, at the height of the decolonization wave in Africa, the agency adopted a resolution that declared that the organization would have “a vital part to play in promoting the freedom and independence of colonial countries and peoples through its programs in the fields of education, science and culture” (UNESCO 1960, 74). In other words, decolonization was inextricably linked 80

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with the development, and in particular the reform and expansion, of education, as it was believed to foster self-reliance and self-determination. Planning, designing and building new schools were considered to be as imperative as urgent in this regard. In order to assist governments to outline and execute school building programs, UNESCO established a global network of experts and research stations in the Global South (De Raedt 2014a). Architects played a key role therein as advisors of school design, mapping, planning and construction.8 In 1976, the staff of the UNESCO Regional Office for Education in Africa got involved in the design of a new agriculture school in Nianing, Senegal. A team of UNESCO consultants9 under the guidance of the Swiss architect Pierre Bussat10 was brought on board, to collaborate with a number of students and professors from the School of Architecture of Dakar. The new school would receive 54 students in a two-year training program in market gardening and small-scale animal husbandry, where they would be familiarized with new agricultural methods that would help increase selfreliance. The school was conceived as a concatenation of very thin, short-span barrel vaults resting on mud-brick walls. These materials have a high thermic inertia, which allowed the building to stay relatively cool during the day. Internally, the load-bearing walls were opened onto one another through archways, thus creating a flexible learning environment between the different barrel vault units. Screen façades in facing walls permitted air to circulate freely, and allowed filtered sunlight to enter the classrooms (Figure 7.6). The design was thus conceived so that builders from the region could realize the entire complex, from beginning to end. Indeed, as the design team argued, “self-reliance constitutes a means for less privileged communities to improve their living conditions and reduce their dependence on the better offs” (Educational Facilities Section 1978, 2). Based on compression instead of traction, the vault and arch system eliminates the need for expensive construction materials, such as steel, and rare materials, such as appropriately treated wood beams. Moreover, it allowed local masons and laborers to build the school without any heavy machinery or complicated equipment. The fundamental idea was indeed that, since human potential was/is one of the most abundant resources in Africa, the building process should be labor-intensive rather than technology-intensive. Only this, the architects reasoned, could open the path to true self-reliance. In Nianing, a master mason, D’Iallo, and his assistant were made responsible for up to 10 professional masons as well as 20 unskilled workmen (mainly local peasants), who were gradually trained as proper masons. In this way, more than 60 percent of the total building cost ended up being spent on local labor, while the building site also became a place of training, and therefore local capacity building.11

The Turn Toward the Vernacular This remarkable building appeared against the background of an intensification of attention for, and engagement with, the ‘vernacular’ in architecture. In Africa, indigenous living patterns and building traditions, in particular in countries in the ‘hot and arid’ regions, seem to have been sources of inspiration for practitioners trying to create an architecture that could mediate the alienating effects of modernization and globalization. One of the protagonists of this movement was the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, who strongly advocated the revival of indigenous craftsmanship, the mobilization of local skills and labor, the reinterpretation of traditional living patterns, and the revalorization of indigenous building techniques. Through the publication of Architecture for the Poor, an English version of Fathy’s account of his 1940s and 1950s experience with the relocation and construction of the village of New Gourna in Egypt (Fathy 1973; El-Wakil 2013), the architect’s thinking got disseminated throughout the world (in particular in France and francophone Africa), leaving a significant mark an entire generation of architects operating in developing countries, though in many cases the original complexities in Fathy’s work have been essentialized and reduced to its typical formal expressions (Pyla 2007). 81

© Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

Figure 7.6 View of the school showing the layout and composition of the building: a concatenation of barrel vaults of varying heights, with a claustrum at the head end of each unit. UNESCO Regional Office for Education in Africa (BREDA), Agriculture school, Nianing, Senegal, 1977.

The History of Socially Engaged Architecture

As a matter of fact, Pierre Bussat, designer of the agriculture school in Nianing, was thoroughly inspired by the work of Fathy, who had visited the UNESCO Regional Office for Education in Africa in the early 1970s.12 He had himself been conducting experiments with flexible short-span structures for low-cost educational buildings during his previous position as an architect-consultant in the UNESCO Regional Office for Education in the Arab States, in Beirut, Lebanon (Bussat et al. 1973). While these experiments had been primarily driven by a search to create flexible learning environments that could be created within the boundaries and possibilities of the local building industry, the esthetics of Fathy’s work inspired Bussat to exacerbate the formal expression of his own, more technically oriented ideas in Nianing. Very quickly, this ‘turn’ to the vernacular was institutionalized through organizations such as ADAUA (Association pour le Développement naturel d’une Architecture et d’un Urbanisme Africains 1975) and CRAterre (1979), which respectively aimed to revive indigenous African architecture and train local inhabitants in appropriate technologies, and to promote earthen architecture specifically (ADAUA 1983).13 In the same period, this notion of an architecture that is both collective and participatory, and socioculturally and climatically appropriate, was instrumentalized in a political agenda of identity construction. In 1977, the so-called Aga Khan Award for Architecture (AKAA) was established, rewarding architecture that not only provides for people’s physical, social and economic needs, but that also stimulates and responds to their cultural expectations. Particular attention is given to building schemes that use local resources and appropriate technology in innovative ways.14 Central to the awarding philosophy is a recognition and promotion of sociocultural identity through architecture. Not coincidentally, the agriculture school in Nianing received an AKAA in 1980.

“Afritecture”15 in a Globalized World In retrospect, it appears that the small schools designed by the KPDV architects in the late 1950s epitomize a crucial transition period in the thinking about architecture in Africa. If complexes and buildings realized in the immediate postcolonial period were characterized by an outspokenly modern architectural articulation, this seems to have been no longer always a primary concern from the early 1970s onwards. In the wake of the oil crisis in 1973, many foreign investors and companies retreated from Africa. This ‘evacuation maneuver’ exposed the critical problems of the imported modernism that had been introduced in Africa since the 1940s—problems such as its reliance on building parts and elements from abroad for replacement, restoration or maintenance, and the sensitivity of typically Western construction materials for the elements and the climate in Africa. Hence, room was created for a new approach, which was reflected in the agriculture school in Nianing, but also in many later projects of KPDV for that matter. From roughly the mid-1960s onwards, the work of KPDV inscribed itself completely in this evolution. Tellingly, one of the office’s last projects in Niger, the new Grand Marché de Niamey (completed in 1986), was nominated for an Aga Khan Award for Architecture (1989 cycle) for being climatically well adapted and respecting the atmosphere and functioning of a typical African market. Interestingly, history has repeated itself since the turn of the millennium. Low-tech architecture projects, grounded on sustainability—in not only an environmental but also a human sense—emerge all over Africa. In many cases, they bear similar material and formal markers as 40 to 50 years ago, even though this is often not acknowledged (consciously or not). While this kind of architecture remained relatively unrecognized at the time, appearing at the margins of architectural culture, today it does definitely not suffer from a lack of media attention. Kéré’s primary school was a great success from the moment it was completed, both within the region and internationally. It was widely 83

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acknowledged as a prime example of sustainable building and socially responsible architecture, and tellingly received the 2004 Aga Khan Award for Architecture.16 Very soon, money was raised to extend the complex with a secondary school, a library, a woman’s center and an atelier. Six years later, the primary school in Gando appeared in the MoMA in New York as a prime example of Small Scale, Big Change, the exhibition that featured 11 projects from around the so-called Global South which “exemplified the degree to which architects can orchestrate change, prioritizing work that has social impact but also balances very real concerns of cost, program, and aesthetics”.17 “In addition to new modes of participatory design”, the curators claimed, “the projects on display incorporate pioneering site-specific ecological and socially sustainable practices, including the exploration of both new and traditional materials.” As the account of two historical projects has illustrated, the approaches that are celebrated in the exhibition are not very new, nor pioneering for that matter. A more compelling issue is whether this socially engaged attitude in architecture can be sustainable to the point where it can inspire, in a more abstract sense than the purely formal or esthetic, future architecture practices, and thus create a cascade effect of social change and transformation. In that sense, one of the challenges for architects who see themselves as socially engaged will be to find ways to translate the lessons learned in projects like the school complex in Gando, beyond context specificities, and just as importantly, to projects of a larger (even urban) scale, or to programs that are not intuitively associated with social engagement, such as government buildings (especially in Africa).

Acknowledgments This text is based on extensive research in institutional and private archives, as well as on several interviews conducted since 2011. Firstly, I would like to thank Christina Beckers and her colleagues for helping me find my way in the archives of the EDF in Brussels. Equally, thanks to the staff of the UNESCO archive in Paris for providing me access to all the relevant files, in particular Adele Torrance and Alexandre Coutelle. I am also grateful to Jan De Bosch Kemper, Michel Kalt, Pierre Vignal and the late Daniel Pouradier-Duteil’s wife, Marie-Thérèse, for being so kind as to allow me access to their personal archives, as well as for the many pleasant conversations and discussions about their work and professional life.

Notes 1 The impetus for this had already been given in 1952 with the creation of the European Community of Coal and Steel. 2 Firmin Kama, former advisor to the Congolese President Mobutu, for example, recalls that “the EDF often proposed projects which they wanted to do because they had to obtain their nationality quota. They, for example, once proposed an agriculture project for the DR Congo because the quota required that the EDF hired more German expertise, and agriculture was one of their specialties. We told them we had no need for this project” (translated from an interview conducted in French Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, July 21, 2014). 3 The importance of this return on investment for the EEC can hardly be understated. Indeed, given the latter’s interest in maintaining good relations with African countries after decolonization, the EDF did not offer loans for development projects, but entirely non-refundable grants. This implied a substantial financial sacrifice for the EEC, having only just recovered from WWII itself. 4 Michel Kalt and Daniel Pouradier-Duteil had both served in the army of the famous French general Leclerc, otherwise known as Philippe de Hauteclocque (1902–1947). 5 Interview with Michel Kalt, Bazoches-sur-Guyonne, France, July 12, 2015. 6 Unpublished brochure about the primary schools projects in Niger, Burkina Faso and Senegal, from the private archive of Michel Kalt. Original quote in French: “On ne va pas se fatiguer à aller chercher de la paille. Ici, nous sommes libre, regardez notre maison.” Architects who work on projects in Africa today still 84

The History of Socially Engaged Architecture

encounter great resistance against the use of ‘indigenous’ materials, as they appear to remain intimately associated with a lack of modernity and ‘backwardness’. 7 The counterculture that emerged in the 1960s had a broad foundation within architecture and urbanism, and was nourished and stimulated by publications, exhibitions and manifestos, such as Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), or Bernard Rudosfky’s Architecture Without Architects: An Introduction to Nonpedigreed Architecture (New York: Doubleday, 1964). 8 The first school building center was located in Khartoum, Sudan, the second one in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and the last one in Mexico City, Mexico. 9 Besides Pierre Bussat, the following people were involved: Kamal El Jack, Oswald Dellicour, Sjoerd Nienhuys, Christophorus Posma and Paul de Wallik. 10 Pierre Bussat (1921–1996) was hired at the end of 1964 as a UNESCO school building specialist. He was involved in the Commission on School Construction of the International Union of Architects, and had worked at the International Center for School Building in Lausanne. In January 1969, he was hired as a fulltime UNESCO consultant, undertaking short-term missions to several African countries. In 1971, he took up a post at the Regional Office for Education in the Arab States, in Beirut, Lebanon. As the only architect there, he had to collaborate with educators and educational planning specialists to investigate the needs and solutions to questions of education and school construction in the Middle East. He later transferred back to Africa, to the Regional Office for Education in Africa (BREDA) in Dakar. At the end of the 1970s, Bussat finally moved to the World Bank as a school building specialist. 11 Several reports of this project can be found online, such as the file that was submitted to the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Cycle of 1978–1980 (see: www.akdn.org/architecture/project/agricultural-training-centre). 12 Interview with Jan De Bosch Kemper, former colleague of Bussat at UNESCO, June 10, 2015. 13 CRATerre is a French research laboratory created at the School of Architecture of Grenoble, which provides training and technical assistance in earth-built construction. See Craterre.org. 1 4 www.akdn.org/our-agencies/aga-khan-trust-culture/aga-khan-award-architecture/about. 15 This term is borrowed from Lepik (2013). 1 6 www.akdn.org/architecture/project/primary-school. 1 7 www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/smallscalebigchange/about.html.

References ADAUA, “Building Toward Community: ADAUA’s Work in West Africa,” MIMAR 7: Architecture in Development (1983): 35–51. Adebajo, Adekeye and Whiteman, Kaye, eds., The EU and Africa: From Eurafrique to Afro-Europa (London: Hurst, 2011). Arts, Karin and Dickson, Anna K., eds., EU Development Cooperation: From Model to Symbol (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). Bullock, Nicholas, Building the Post-War World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain (London: Routledge, 2002). Bussat, Pierre, Heimo Mantynen, and Jørgen Sønderberg, Flexible Short-Span Structure for Low-Cost Educational Buildings: Proposals for Hot-Arid Areas (Beirut: UNESCO Regional Office for Education in the Arab States, 1973). Claeys, Anne-Sophie, “ ‘Sense and Sensibility’: The Role of France and French Interests in European Development Policy Since 1957,” in Arts, Karin and Dickson, Anna K., eds., EU Development Cooperation: From Model to Symbol (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004): 113–132, 113. De Raedt, Kim, “Between True Believers and Operational Experts: UNESCO Architects and School Building in Postcolonial Africa,” The Journal of Architecture 19 (1) (2014a): 19–42. De Raedt, Kim, “Shifting Conditions, Frameworks and Approaches: The Work of KPDV in Postcolonial Africa,” ABE Journal (4) (2014b). DG VIII: Joanna Alimenastianu-Van Bel, The European Development Fund. Education—Training. 1958–1980 (Brussels and Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1983). EDF, 1964 Speech at the Académie Française des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 1964 (EDF Archives, BAC 25/1980, File 1323, Microfilm). EDF Archives, “Niger, Constructions scolaires: Instruction—exécution”, BAC 9/1974, File 708–171. Educational Facilities Section, UNESCO Regional Office for Education in Africa, Dakar, Senegal, the Story of a Prototype in Senegal. Paper presented at the 4th seminar of the International Union of Architects: “Self-reliance in Educational Facilities,” Dakar, March 7th–10th 1978, p. 2. El-Wakil, Leïla, ed., Hassan Fathy dans son temps (Paris: Éditions Infolio, 2013). 85

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Fathy, Hassan, Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). Frisch, Dieter, The European Union’s Development Policy: A Personal View of 50 Years of International Cooperation (Maastricht: ECDPM, 2008). Grilli, Enzo R., The European Community and the Developing Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Kéré, Diébédo Francis, “Architecture Is a Wake-Up Call,” interview with Diébédo Francis Kéré, September 30th 2014, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. (www.world­architects.com/architektur­news/ film/Diebedo_Francis_Kere_Architecture_is_a_wake_up_call_868) l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 72 (1957), theme issue “Constructions Scolaires.” Translated from French. Lepik, Andres, “Afritecture—Building Social Change,” Architekturmuseum der TU München, September 13, 2013–January 12, 2014, curated by Andres Lepik and Anne Schmidt (exhibition catalogue edited by Andres Lepik, published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Munich, 2013). Lepik, Andres, “Small Scale Big Change,” New York, October 3rd 2010–January 3rd 2011, curated by Andres Lepik (exhibition catalogue edited by Andres Lepik and published by MoMA, New York, 2009). Pyla, Panayiota I., “Hassan Fathy Revisited: Postwar Discourses on Science, Development, and Vernacular Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education 60 (3) (2007): 28–39. Saint, Andrew, Towards a Social Architecture: The Role of School Building in Post-War England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). Schilling, Britta, Postcolonial Germany: Memories of Empire in a Decolonized Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 92. UNESCO Records of the General Conference, 11th Session, 1960, p. 74.

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8 The Opera Village Africa Christoph Schlingensief and His Social Sculpture Susanne Bauer

The Opera Village Africa allows for a different approach to social engagement that does not primarily touch on themes of architecture and politics but was rather conceived of as an idealistic concept of cultural engagement and social change. The project near the capital of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso was dreamed up by well-known German filmmaker, theater director and performance artist Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010) in early 2008, after he had learned that he was suffering from cancer. As the initiator of this idealistic endeavor he used German sculptor Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture as a framework for his participatory engagement in West Africa. Together with German-trained architect Francis Kéré, originally from Burkina Faso, who steered the project away from its idealistic to a more realistic path by first building a school, housing for teachers and artists in residence followed by a hospital, Schlingensief realized his idea of social change by providing health care and education for the local community. Yet, the achievement of a predominantly cultural project born out of ideas surrounding his theater and opera environment in Germany and relocated to a rural place in one of the poorest countries in the world, as shown in Figure 8.1, is still in question. The controversial term ‘opera’ attracts many associations attached to music, theater and high culture. In Laogo, in Burkina Faso, the term was reinterpreted when the Opera Village Africa (Operndorf Afrika)1 was founded in 2010. Imagined as an ‘opera in Africa’, it was supposed to provide a stage for cultural collaboration and exchange between African artists as well as artists from other countries. At first the project was perceived of as a ‘festival hall’ with rehearsal stages, a school, hospital and a church. In a way it might have also been Schlingensief ’s own monumental statement to consolidate his position as one of Germany’s most prolific artists in recent years. After his initial idea for the project became a pressing mission for him to accomplish, as he declared in his 2010 published ‘cancer diary’ (“then I promised that I would build a church, a school, a hospital and a theatre, an opera house in Africa”; Schlingensief 2010, 17),2 Schlingensief was searching for an architect as well as a site to realize this project. He was adamant to point out that the project was not regarded as being a ‘social project’ but rather a cultural project, a way of learning from Africa. As he wrote, “For a long time now I have felt deeply connected with Africa. I have shot films in different African countries and I frequently feel more at home there than I do in familiar Europe . . . I am obsessed with this anti-colonial exchange of life forms” (Schlingensief 2010, 215). Having had ties to filmmakers from Burkina Faso, he had learned about their rich theater and film culture and challenged the global perception of cultural activities, such as the film festival Fespaco,3 held every other year in 87

© Francis Kéré.

Figure 8.1 Opera Village Africa aerial view.

The Opera Village Africa

Ouagadougou, largely unknown to an international audience due to the lack of international funding as well as publicity. However, the path of the project also changed into a more pragmatic reality through the introduction of Schlingensief to the German-based, Burkina Faso–native architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, whose work is largely based around the realm of social architecture, due to the close intertwining of his architectural work with his native country (Lepik 2016, 14). Francis Kéré was born in the small village of Gando, where his father was the village chief. Gando, like many other villages in Burkina Faso, does not have electricity, has limited access to clean drinking water and at the time did not have a school building. As his father wanted him to be educated, Kéré was sent away to school, later studied architecture in Germany and is now a well-known and award-winning architect.4 His philosophy of creating local identity by using local materiality has been employed in his projects throughout, always working with the community to create buildings out of local products. In Burkina Faso, he therefore commonly used clay as a building material, which he used in the production of bricks. For this he developed a method to produce pressed clay bricks out of a mixture of clay, sand and a small percentage of cement, to ensure its durability during the rainy season in Burkina Faso. As energy sources are sparse in rural regions, the bricks need to be dried rather than burned, and the technique to produce and assemble them needs to be practical for the community to take part in. By training the locals in the skills of building, Kéré claims that the social concept of aiding the community is further substantiated by offering alternate ways of providing for their families in the future. He has used these principles of building in all of his earlier projects that were built in his native country of Burkina Faso. “This decision to put his education directly at the service of the family can be seen as a special sign of solidarity and the assumption of personal responsibility from a European perspective” (Lepik 2016, 14). He has lectured widely on his philosophy of building with the community rather than for them and was consequently a big influence for Christoph Schlingensief ’s vision of an ‘opera in Africa’ turning into an ‘opera village’. Through Kéré’s previous work in Burkina Faso and his ties to his native country, a site in Laogo near the capital of Ouagadougou was found with the help of the government of Burkina Faso. “Advised and inspired by Kéré, whose previous buildings had merely served the education and health care needs of the respective local population, Schlingensief modified his original vision to a multifunctional opera village” (Lepik 2016, 80). At first named ‘Remdoogo’, which means ‘festival’, the project was inaugurated with the foundation stone ceremony in February 2010. The renaming to Opera Village occurred as the project was further developed, emphasizing the village-like structure, growing in stages and creating a community. Architecturally, it was envisioned to construct different projects for different needs, such as education facilities for children and working places for their parents, not as an option to relocate people but rather to offer concepts for the existing local community. The master plan of the project, representing a snail with a central hub around which everything resolves, represents the hope for a growing and developing village. The spiral shape thereby facilitates organic growth as need arises, with new buildings added within a system of flexible modules, which avoids having to design new buildings for each building type, as shown in Figure 8.2. The central focal point of the snail-like site is allocated for the festival hall, a project which is still in planning. The first development at the Opera Village was the school, which was still being planned and organized by Christoph Schlingensief. After Christoph Schlingensief died in August 2010 and the construction of the buildings paused temporarily, the school was opened in October 2011.5 Built primarily with clay bricks Kéré had already developed in his previous projects, the school consists at present of two elongated buildings, housing classrooms for the five primary school years. Kéré applied the double roof system he had already applied at his earlier school projects in Gando and Dano. Again, his innovative technological developments that had already provided him with clay bricks were established to adjust to the local climate conditions and provide a ventilation system without the need for electricity. Developed as a natural air-conditioning, the buildings consist of 89

© Francis Kéré.

Figure 8.2 Early project sketch of the snail-like master plan of the Opera Village with the Festival Hall in the center.

The Opera Village Africa

two roofs to supply cross ventilation. The space between the inner solid roof and the outer corrugated sheet metal roof supported by a suspended metal structure allows air circulation and protects the inside from overheating, as shown in Figure 8.3. Along each of the long sides of the buildings, numerous windows with movable horizontal shutters allow cross ventilation and air supply within the classrooms. As it was Christoph Schlingensief ’s vision to bring life into the village, the school functions very much as the implementation of this concept, especially as the festival hall at present is not yet being built. An extension to the school is already in planning and a new curriculum was introduced in Burkina Faso for the school at the Opera Village, according to which art classes are taught for the first time. Further buildings were constructed along the spiral form of the master plan consisting of smaller buildings grouped in modules that have different functions. Five of these modules are dedicated to art and media labs and offices, and three further ones are the school canteen, which provides a cooked meal for all children. Seven further buildings, some of them two-story buildings, are built as housing for teachers, visiting artists and Opera Village staff. The large protruding roofs of these buildings provide shade and shelter from the rain. The latest phase of the project was the completion of the clinic, the Centre de Santé et de Promotion Sociale (CSPS), in 2014. It is the only building that sits rather outside of the spiral site plan away from the central hub and the school. The project was already envisioned by Christoph Schlingensief to provide basic health and medical resources for the around 5,000-strong surrounding rural community, such as dentistry, gynecology and obstetrics. It is projected that around 20 children per month will be born in the clinic. The building consists of examination rooms, inpatient wards and offices for staff. It is built around several shaded courtyards, which function as waiting areas. The walls are constructed as a double envelope to provide extra rain protection, with multiple smaller openings in these walls offering unique views of the surrounding landscape,6 as shown in Figure 8.4. All buildings on site are largely constructed out of local material, such as clay, eucalyptus wood, laterite stone, and local rock and metals, a characteristic that has made Kéré an award-winning architect for his reinterpretation and use of local products, as commented on in the latest publication about Kéré’s work: If, therefore, one considers the traditions of clay, which are still alive in the rural context of Burkina Faso, the projects of Francis Kéré are by no means to be seen as new interpretations of the vernacular. Rather, they represent their own new examinations, which transform both perspectives into a third path. (Lepik 2016, 15) Through the use of local materials Kéré aims to create local identity in his projects. For him, architecture is about people and the environment. He therefore uses the building process to get the community involved and to teach them how to build simple and sustainable architecture out of the materials on hand. The notion of building an opera in Africa, however, can be explained—albeit inadequately—only by describing the work and life of Christoph Schlingensief himself. Schlingensief was an artist who worked in between the defined categories of art, always challenging boundaries and reacting to social moments, forcing the audience to examine their e­ nvironment— someone who “provoked awareness and wanted responsibility” (Biesenbach 2010, 66). Born in 1960 in the Lower Rhine area near Düsseldorf, Germany, he already started as a child to produce films and later arranged small art events where he first met other artists, actors and directors of the region. After his studies in philosophy and art history he worked in television before he made his first experimental films dealing with German historical events of the twentieth century.7 These surreal, absurd films provoked irritation and shock from the audience, as his art projects throughout his career were characterized by overstepping the boundaries of taste, not acting within specific genres as well as working in between such categories. While starting out as a filmmaker he later worked as a performance and installation artist, staging projects to force the audience to be actively 91

© Francis Kéré.

Figure 8.3 School buildings at Opera Village Africa.

© Francis Kéré.

Figure 8.4 Hospital: Centre de Santé et de Promotion Sociale (CSPS).

Susanne Bauer

engaged in a cultural and political discourse.8 He demanded a similar reaction with his talk shows he produced and presented for German television, always challenging engagement from the audience, which in turn would also generate media attention to further his causes. Through such actions and art projects Christoph Schlingensief became a well-known activist, performance artist and ultimately cultural icon in Germany.9 Eventually his later projects, the stage productions for theater and opera, would give him credit as a serious stage director as well as instigate his vision of an ‘opera in Africa’. Throughout his life, and most noticeably in his later projects, he was heavily influenced by his Catholic upbringing, broaching the issue of spirituality and religion in his theater productions Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within (2008) and Mea Culpa (2009), dealing with his cancer diagnosis in 2008 and his subsequent illness. His ensuing search for a religious or spiritual purpose of life can also be found in his initial ideas for the Opera Village, as he remarked in his later published account of his illness: ‘I have such a need to do something sensible!’ (Schlingensief 2010, 191). He also admitted that the spiritual and emotional issues the project brought up were very rewarding, stating, This may sound terrifying to many people, but I can only say that if you are in such situations, it is the greatest happiness to experience moments of emotionality and spirituality. The whole rationalists who claim that they have nothing to do with this that this would be silly—I do not believe them. (Schlingensief 2010, 168) Although he was later quick to reject the Opera Village as an aid project, it is similarly noted that he considered it as a possible way of redemption over his illness by admitting that he “would, of course, be glad if this African project were to turn out to be the path leading to victory over the disease” (Schlingensief 2010, 65). Christoph Schlingensief died in August 2010, after he had taken part in the foundation ceremony of the school, the first project in the Opera Village, six months earlier. The opera association of the ‘Opera Village’ project is based on his work from 2004 onwards, where he put on many opera productions, most notably The Flying Dutchman at the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil, and Parsifal, which he staged for the famous Bayreuth Festival in Germany. The Bayreuth Festival is one of the most celebrated and illustrious theater events in Germany, drawing crowds of people and many celebrity guests for its strictly Wagnerian productions. The building itself was established in 1876 by Richard Wagner with the help of King Ludwig II of Bavaria solely for Wagner’s musical productions, which he wanted to be presented as Gesamtkunstwerk (total works of art). He therefore tailored the design of the building to allow ideal viewing conditions uninterrupted by architectural distraction for an immersive reception of the Gesamtkunstwerk. The construction of the Festival House was also the cause for the infamous and permanent rift between Richard Wagner and his good friend and architect Gottfried Semper. Semper, who had made initial plans for the Festival House to be built in Munich, was later dismissed as architect for the Bayreuth Festival House, which sits on the renowned ‘green hill’ in Bayreuth. Christoph Schlingensief therefore often used the analogy of the “opera on the red hill” when talking about his opera project in Africa. He was in fact very adamant about distancing his own opera house from the glamorous world of the Bayreuth Festival, not least because he often blamed the quarrels of his own time in Bayreuth as a source of his illness. He wanted to redefine the term ‘opera’ and in thus was keeping with his characteristic of pushing boundaries and playing with categories and their definitions, as he is quoted: Opera House is a term that has accompanied me, from Manaus [and] Bayreuth . . . and other operas . . . in Germany and all over the world. [Its] a kind of hypernym; It’s held to embody high culture . . . I think it enjoys a higher draw, that it has more [glamor] than even theatre does . . . 94

The Opera Village Africa

But I think the term is good. People only got on board because they knew I was in Bayreuth. They wouldn’t have otherwise. (Dahrendorf 2012) The notion of opera was therefore also thought-provoking and attention-grabbing in terms of his usual method of working within conflicting ideas and situations. Moreover, opera’s ambivalent associations with colonialism, where opera was previously used to bring culture to an underprivileged race, was challenged by Schlingensief by redefining the meaning of opera and thus giving it different value. His vision for the project was the ambitious goal to change the term ‘opera’ in our culture to something not only connected to ‘high culture’ but also a place where people would come together to establish a community, to provide basic needs of health care, education, and art and culture as a form of education (see Figure 8.5). His argument that education varies between urban and rural areas similarly to different cultures and countries presents the need for education—and thus art—to bridge this gap: the cultural concept of his project thus becoming a social issue and cultural engagement therefore being treated as social engagement. The term ‘opera’ and the term ‘village’ were therefore equally important and equally focused on in his idea of an ‘opera village’. As he is quoted as saying in a documentary filmed during the process of founding the Opera Village, My vision of this place is based on the hope that a few parts will start to come to life, once people start living here and going to school . . . I’m not worried about a Wagnerian being disappointed because he only sees goats, a school, a sports field and a fountain. If he’s disappointed it just shows he hasn’t understood what opera is about. It isn’t important because arias are sung there or symphonies played there. That can happen, but it’s not necessary. The idea of the opera village is already travelling around the world. And people will want to go there and have a look. And you see the kids, the school, the sports field, crops, and the clinic . . . and the stage which will always be accessible, so that you can go up and say something . . . That’s probably what it’s about. (Dahrendorf 2012) Besides challenging our expectation of opera, Schingensief ’s more ambitious intention was to redefine the term ‘opera’ as free of class structures and disconnecting opera from such terms as avantgardism or colonialism, often connected to opera. This notion of the ‘Opera Village’ becoming a social project was greatly influenced by one artist Christoph Schlingensief admired: Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), also from the Lower Rhine area like Schlingensief, created works mostly as a sculptor, installation and performance artist. Yet, his theories and pedagogies were most influential for subsequent art generations in terms of his belief in the capacity of art to change social and political systems. His artwork always revolved around the human individual and his place in society. His famous statement that “everyone is an artist” is likewise generated out of the concept of the arts’ ability to change society. Beuys’s most influential concept is thus the ‘social sculpture’ that he developed within his theories about the role of art in society. By social sculpture he meant that any form of art should interact with society and that the human being should always be regarded as the central objective of the artwork. Art could therefore transform society and society in turn was an integral part of art. Inspired by the anthropologist Rudolf Steiner, who had called for the social organism to be rebuilt on a completely new foundation and aimed at creating an organization that would effectively found a new social organism, Beuys remarked that he founded “a movement that is still necessary today, a movement of which many people ought to be aware, and a fundamental idea for the renewal of the social whole that leads to ‘Social Sculpture’ ” (Stachelhaus 1991, 14). This invisible sculpture, as Beuys called it, was related to every human. The 95

© Francis Kéré.

Figure 8.5 School life.

The Opera Village Africa

anthropological perspective on society and art was very pertinent in Beuys’s art as he always included these ideas in his artwork in a pursuit of an alternative future society. In the center of this alternative society are the freedom of the individual and thus the freedom of a new social order. For Beuys, this would mean being free from restrictions, indoctrinations and ideologies of states, economic interests and capitalistic systems. In that sense only the creative force of art of the individual would be able to achieve this alternative state of society. The individual must therefore be free to create this new democratic structure as well as another economic system (Devolder 1988). This concept of social sculpture in consequence centers on art to be related to the individual, who in turn becomes the artist of the social sculpture. Every individual is therefore an artist and art is restricted not to the production of a material art piece but rather to the work of the individual for the greater good. When Beuys said that everyone was an artist, he did not mean that everyone was a painter or a sculptor. He meant that everyone possessed creative faculties that must be identified and developed . . . Creativity belongs to everyone. As an anthropological concept, the term art refers to universal creative faculties. They manifest themselves in medicine or in agriculture, just as they do in education, law, economics, or administration. The concept of art applies to human work in general. (Stachelhaus 1991, 61) It is this interpretation precisely that Schlingensief used to challenge the meaning of opera as well as that of the artist itself, envisioning a social sculpture accomplished through the creative forces of every individual, as shown in Figure 8.6. Christoph Schlingensief used this idea of art transforming society, as he declared in his ‘cancer diary’: Maybe I have to do things that are even more related to society. In the end, no matter when, I want to be sure that my work had a social idea. That my projects have investigated the question of why some systems need constraints and others don’t, how these strange constraints work, and above all why some people do not exist in these systems. So maybe this is the idea behind the Festival House in Africa. I want to build something where other currencies can be created, along with people who are not at the money printing machines. I imagine that we build a church, a school, a hospital and a theatre with rehearsal stages in a village . . . In any case, we are all romping around together and pushing everything onto the stage. That would be a kind of transformation box. And I hope that these transitions of images and texts of different cultures will create new currencies in the system. (Schlingensief 2010, 32) Schlingensief was very outspoken about his inspiration and link to Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture, as it is also mentioned in a bid for funding for the Opera Village: The concept follows the idea of Social Sculpture in which Joseph Beuys has pursued the goal of an overall social and intercultural art. In contrast to a formal aesthetically justified understanding of art, the concept of Social Sculpture propagates a human action which is oriented towards the shaping and consolidation of social structures. The concept of art is no longer reduced only to the tangible artefact. The social form itself becomes an artefact, a work of art. (Mühlemann 2011, 92) The cultural interaction that Schingensief therefore envisioned for his project becomes social change, initiated by the individual and carried forward by the community itself.

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Figure 8.6 School children experimenting with cameras.

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Joseph Beuys’s pedagogical view also expands to his dictum that “everyone is an artist,” which is not to say that everyone should produce art to be shown in galleries but rather that his theory of social sculpture, developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, centred on the belief that the concept of art could include the entire “process of living”—thoughts, actions, dialogue, as well as objects—and therefore could be enacted by a wide range of people beyond artists. Combining the creation of objects, encouragement of dialogue, and his political activism, [such] projects . . . were think tanks for enacting change through art. ( Jordan 2013, 144) Schlingensief therefore implemented Beuys’s notion of a social sculpture literally in his Opera Village, a work of art created by the individual where—in turn—the human is in the center of it, thereby becoming art itself and creating a new communal society. He thus also transferred Beuys’s “every human being is an artist” into “art is in all of us,” as he was quoted: “And even the concept of an artist is questionable. To call oneself an artist is actually already senseless . . . Art is there for all of us and we are all part of this art” (Dahrendorf 2012, 16). In another connection, this is in a sense close to what Wagner’s aim for a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, was: society as a whole as a great work of art where the experience of the whole is more important than their single parts. Similarly to Beuys, Schlingensief therefore placed the human in the center of his art. In his speech at the foundation-laying ceremony he declared, In its ideal form, art is an organism which grows out of life and with life itself. Generating new energy . . . the bond between people should be the world’s greatest art form. A spiritual place, open, unrestrained, an immediate embrace of life, linking heaven and earth, that’s what Remdoogo should be . . . Learning from Burkina Faso. That is our opening motto. When the first visitors arrive, maybe they’ll look for an opera singer, with a wonderful voice. Instead, they might hear the first cry of a baby, born in our small clinic in the opera village. (Dahrendorf 2012, 16) Schlingensief ’s social sculpture therefore needs the concept of art to be created. It is thus not surprising that he defined the Opera Village as a cultural project, rejecting the aspect of social engagement attached to political decision making, but rather shaping a new kind of ‘opera’ out of the individuals participation to form a new social organism. The concept of social sculpture embodied in the Opera Village was equally made possible by the architect Francis Kéré, whose participatory approach to engage the local community was already established before the idea of the Opera Village originated. Kéré’s association with social architecture could therefore be another translation of Beuys’s social sculpture and the collaboration between the two made possible the application of theory to practice, as Kéré is often credited with giving the visionary and “from the beginning completely overstated project” (Lepik 2016, 16) a more practical turn.10 However, Kéré also benefited through the publicity which was attached to a project by Christoph Schlingensief, as “the project of the opera village . . . played an important role for his popularity in the German-speaking world. Because of this project, the great circle of friends and admirers of the director was made aware [of] the architect from Burkina Faso” (Lepik 2016, 15). Kéré’s intention to further education in Burkina Faso by highlighting the need for projects in Burkina Faso was likewise aided by the media attention and the attachment to Christoph Schlingensief. As in all of Schlingensief ’s projects a sensationalistic, cynical and sarcastic undertone forced the audience to question their beliefs in politics, language and culture. He stated that the idea of an opera in Africa was perhaps “just as crazy as anything else. But crazy is the wrong expression. It is 99

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not about foolery” (Schlingensief 2010, 106). In his art, Schlingensief always challenged such notions and systems, questioning if foreign aid was indeed always aiding society and how involved art could become in the process. Rather than aiding an underdeveloped region by bringing cultural goods and customs, he wanted to learn from them and offer a cultural exchange, thus challenging the method and system of foreign aid. By creating an art project on the scale of a village, generating media attention and challenging the perception of art, he thus questioned the purpose of development aid. Yet, his so-called cultural engagement could also be seen as social engagement, certainly within a new approach but also with a similar outcome. Through Schlingensief ’s status as a well-known and popular contemporary German artist, the project was assured to receive a vast amount of media attention and was under much scrutiny as a project of social engagement, funded by governmental aid agencies. The provocation of the name Opera Village, Schlingensief ’s association with opera and his bid to transport this into a society where more practical needs, other than art and culture, were prevailing were much criticized and discussed. Envisaged was that people from different backgrounds should be able to work as artists and to exchange views about art with each other . . . this has manifested itself, in the form of a platform for intercultural exchange programs and relevant postcolonial discourses, which makes a new and differentiated image of Africa visible.11 However, through the development of an art project in conjunction with Beuys’s theory of the social sculpture, the envisioned art project turned into social architecture.

Notes 1 Operndorf Afrika is a limited company now under the management of Christoph Schlingensief ’s widow, Aino Laberenz. 2 All translations by the author. 3 Festival Panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou. 4 Francis Kéré’s projects include the School Projects in his native Gando, as well as the extensions to the school, the School Library and the Teachers’ Housing, all in Gando, the Centre for Earth Architecture in Mopti, Mali, as well as the buildings at the Opera Village, the School buildings, the Teachers and Artist Housing and the Hospital, the Centre de Santé et de Promotion Sociale (CSPS). Kéré’s projects have been exhibited at such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Royal Academy in London, and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2016. He was awarded the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for his Primary School in Gando, which introduced his philosophy of working with the community using local materials. 5 The Opera Village employs at present six teachers and a school director, two cooks for the school kitchen, a general practitioner, a midwife, a dentist, a pharmacist and three administrative employees working in Berlin and Burkina Faso. The Festival Hall in the center is still in planning, with an atrium-like construction providing space for about 600 visitors. The Opera Village “was initially pushed with the financial and logistic support of the Federal Cultural Foundation, the Goethe Institute, the Federal Foreign Office, [and] the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development” as well as private funding. 6 Quoted from Francis Kéré’s website (www.kere-architecture.com), 2017. 7 The so-called German Trilogy consisted of these films: 100 Years Adolf Hitler: The Last Hour in the Führerbunker, The German Chainsaw Massacre: The First Hour of the Reunification and Terror 2000: Germany Out of Control. 8 Christoph Schlingensief created such activist projects as “Chance 2000” (1998), a political party he founded for the German federal elections, where everyone could vote for themselves and which operated under the slogan “celebration of failure” and the project “Please Love Austria!” (2000), where he installed ‘Big Brother’ containers for asylum seekers in Vienna, making the audience vote for the people they wanted to keep and the ones they wanted to leave the country. 9 Quoted from Christoph Schlingensief ’s website (www.schlingensief.com). 10 “The twelve containers which contain stage equipment, which still sit unopened at the edge of the empty building site for the festival hall, can thus be viewed as a memorial for the fact that a more detailed

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examination of the real needs of the people in Burkina Faso is far more complex than the genius director from Germany envisioned.” Lepik, Andreas (ed.). Francis Kéré: Radically Simple. Berlin: Hantje Cantz, 2016, p. 16. 11 Quoted from the Opera Village website (www.operndorf-afrika.com), 2017.

References Biesenbach, Klaus. “Schlingensief,” in Flash Art, Vol. XLIII, No. 274, October 2010, Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore Srl, p. 66. Dahrendorf, Sybille. Knistern der Zeit: Christoph Schlingensief und sein Operndorf in Burkina Faso (Crackle of Time). Berlin: filmgalerie451, 2012. Devolder, Eddy. Conversation With Joseph Beuys. Salzburg: Edition Tandem, 1988. Jordan, Cara. “The Evolution of Social Sculpture in the United States: Joseph Beuys and the Work of Suzanne Lacy and Rick Lowe,” in PAD: Public Art Dialogue, Vol. 3, Nr. 2, 2013, Oxford: Taylor & Francis Journal, Routledge, p. 144ff. Lepik, Andreas (ed.). Francis Kéré: Radically Simple. Berlin: Hantje Cantz, 2016, p. 14. Mühlemann, Kaspar. Christoph Schlingensief und seine Auseinandersetzung mit Joseph Beuys. Frankfurt: Peter Land GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2011. Schlingensief, Christoph. So schön wie hier kann‘s im Himmel gar nicht sein: Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung. Munich: btb-Verlag, Random House, 2010. Schlingensief, Christoph, Forrest, Tara and Scheer, Anna Teresa (eds.). Christoph Schlingensief—Art Without Borders. Bristol: Intellect, 2010. Stachelhaus, Heiner. Joseph Beuys. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.

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9 Seeking Appropriate Methods The Role of Public-Interest Design Advocacy in the High Himalaya Carey Clouse

Introduction When the Indian government officially opened the Kingdom of Zanskar to foreign visitors in 1974, dozens of mountaineers, geologists, Buddhist scholars, and tourists ventured into this remote Himalayan mountain region. This number grew steadily over the years, and with it, so too did the relationships that would foster ongoing humanitarian sponsorship and aid. Today many of the small villages in this high Himalayan region have benefitted from architectural and planning assistance donated by international sponsors, NGOs, and visiting volunteers. Virtually all of the projects that have been built in this context reflect a desire to improve the living conditions of Zanskari villagers, and to share new technologies and ideas in a climate of crosscultural exchange. However, while visiting designers may bring valuable experience to Zanskari building projects, their deep-seated professional norms, inevitable cultural distance, and unrealistic construction expectations threaten successful outcomes. This chapter explores the friction of crosscultural aid in the Zanskar mountain region, and suggests a way forward for practitioners of publicinterest design engagement.

The Problem With International Pro Bono Practice In an effort to connect design services to Himalayan communities in need, foreign architects, urban designers, and landscape architects have, over the course of the last several decades, participated in a wide-ranging array of pro bono design projects (Figure 9.1). These community-oriented projects can benefit from the guidance of an external design team, whose valuable design insight and vision, expertise with building technologies and innovative materials, and links to both funding sources and international media outlets would otherwise prove inaccessible (Aquilino 2011; Harris 2011). In addition, these public service projects often have the effect of catalyzing new development around a highly visible built project, demonstrating the potential for cascading benefits caused by a single design intervention. However, the “gift” of design service also may carry significant drawbacks, well understood in postcolonial and post-disaster contexts (Bell 1999; Clouse and Lamb 2013; Escobar 1998; Hyde 1979). Design teams bring their own interests and agendas to a pro bono building project, all too often shrouded in a mantle of aesthetic superiority and design expertise. This type of engagement 102

Photo by Amandine Lepers.

Figure 9.1 Early morning foundation work on a French-funded school for nuns in Tungri, Zanskar.

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conjures up some of the same attitudes that drove the high modernist schemes described by James C. Scott, which “despite their quite genuine egalitarian and often socialist impulses,” tend to show little confidence “in the skills, intelligence, and experience of ordinary people” (Scott 1998, 346).1 Such hierarchical distancing threatens successful project outcomes; without stakeholder investment and a climate of mutual respect, designers too easily overlook important functional, cultural, and aesthetic cues. Physical distance also jeopardizes collaborative schemes. Without firsthand knowledge of and lived experience near a project site, many visiting designers fail to comprehend the unique climactic, social, and cultural context that would necessarily ground a successful design intervention (Perkes 2009). This physical remove becomes even more evident once the project is underway. Without a lasting on-site presence, and a real stake in the project, absentee designers may struggle to bring a project to fruition. Visiting design teams may begin projects abroad and then depart before they are finished, or if the project is completed, could be conspicuously absent when components need maintenance or servicing.2 Even the most experienced designers practicing in international contexts recognize the limitations of working abroad and the difficulty of shepherding a successful process without a consistent presence on the ground. It could be argued that designers who work on pro bono projects in foreign countries have an ethical responsibility to model the very best practices for international engagement. Because these efforts tend to be highly visible, community-oriented, and outside of the normal scope of conventional work at that location, public-interest design projects necessarily have more at stake. Moreover, because many of these interventions intentionally target vulnerable or marginalized communities, the power dynamic between designer and client can be lopsided, and this imbalance must be taken into consideration in order to ensure equitable transactions. This is not to say that service work should be abandoned; rather, as public-interest design practice becomes a more common form of volunteerism in the design disciplines, professionals will need to grapple with both the positive and negative implications of their work. Skillful practitioners who move forward with full awareness of these challenges are needed more than ever, if only to set the tone for appropriate practice (Bell and Wakeford 2008).

Toward a Selfless Practice From the swagger of Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark to the most prominent Starchitect heroes, hubris has become one of the defining characteristics of the architectural profession in Western popular culture (Deamer 2014). This conceit is reinforced by an architectural academy that celebrates the production of radical, unmoored creations (Fisher 2013) and increasingly complex modes of modeling, representation, and distribution. While courageous creative expression is central to the teaching and practice of architecture, more grounded modes of engagement must also be recognized and cultivated. Architectural educator Sergio Palleroni has developed a model for integrating public-interest design into the classroom, where students effectively dismantle their architectural egos. For each of his international pro bono design|build projects, he asks students to first spend a “year at their home institution, investigating the physical and cultural characteristics of the client community, documenting the site and programmatic requirements, and engaging in group charrettes” (Palleroni 2011, 227). Thomas Fisher suggests a similar approach for subverting architectural ego in his recent writing in support of professional activism. He advocates for an active, rather than passive, approach, in which “professions will need to take a more active role, in partnership with public interest groups, in helping define and identify problems before they occur rather than just reacting to the problems that others define to benefit their own interest” (Fisher 2013, 33). The concept of selfless service is not a new idea for the discipline of architecture, nor is it exceptional in India. In his book on the life and work of Laurie Baker, Gautam Bhatia suggests that an architect’s contribution to society could “be 104

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looked upon as the public’s perception of him as a socially responsible professional, and his work as a socially responsible act” (Bhatia 2000, 66), and Laurie Baker was just one of the many architects who helped to shape India’s public-interest design repertoire. Moreover, just as the desire to contribute to an ethical practice is a goal shared by many practitioners (Deamer 2014), in India it also suggests one of the time-tested routes to achieving appropriate development. Despite a professed interest in more altruistic forms of practice, many designers have trouble charting a professional path that incorporates these ideals of social justice and public service. According to Nandini Bagchee, The contribution of architects and architecture to the public realm has long been in question. In 1974, the critic Manfredo Tafuri bemoaned the loss of the social utopia of the early modernists and argued that capitalist development had reduced the role of architects in such a way that forms are without social purpose and architecture is reduced to “sublime uselessness.” Forty years later, architects are finding themselves even more complicit in the diminishing of the public realm. (Bagchee 2015, 73) According to architectural educator Panayiota Pyla, this problem stems in part from the discipline’s narrowly defined professional curriculum, where architectural education is skewed toward instrumental training as a way to maximize students’ job-finding potential, when past experience shows that the bypassing of historical, theoretical, and forms of humanities training brings severe, if apparently hidden losses in terms of shaping critical professionals. (Pyla 2015, 11) However, Pyla also puts stock in the transformative potential of the profession, noting that “Our disciplinary terrain has often undergone self-reflection, turning crisis into critique, and opportunities for reform and change” (ibid.). Today many design educators look to curriculum as an opportunity to repair this professional disconnect (Fisher 2013; Pearson 2002; Taylor and Etheridge 2013). A selfless practice really should begin in architecture school: unless students are trained, early on, to address the tough issues of social justice and equity as they relate to design disciplines, this crisis of conscience will only continue to haunt professional practice.

Zanskar: Self-Sufficient Living The semiarid Zanskar valley is located in the rain shadow of India’s Greater Himalayan Range. The region has been called a high-altitude cold desert, with regular winter temperatures dropping to −30°C and an average annual rainfall of less than 100 mm (Crook and Osmaston 1994). Despite this harsh and unforgiving climate, several dozen subsistence farming villages have prospered in the valley for centuries. Central to their longevity is the value that Zanskari people place on environmental adaptation and attendant self-sufficiency. Journalist Jonathan Mingle suggests that this is a natural outcome of the Zanskari climate, where villagers just happen to live in a place that is harder than most, and where the contours of survival are exceedingly legible. They are inheritors of traditions born of painful trial and error over many centuries that have evolved to mitigate the considerable risks of life at 12,000 feet, in an arid, raw landscape. (Mingle 2015, 383–384) 105

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One striking example of this adaptation is visible in the finely tuned irrigation and land management practices that underpin the region’s high-altitude subsistence agriculture (Daultrey and Gergan 2011). Although Zanskar is characterized by low soil fertility and a short growing season, farmers have historically produced excellent grain yields using high-altitude varieties of barley, wheat, and peas (Crook and Osmaston 1994). This ability to capitalize upon, and effectively manipulate, scarce natural resources has led researchers and visitors to extol the region as a model for self-sufficiency and stewardship in the face of extreme environmental conditions (ibid.; Norberg-Hodge 2000). In conjunction with this agricultural autonomy, the rugged mountain topography surrounding Zanskar has effectively protected villages from political, social, and economic disturbance. The Zanskari people have historically lived at the state’s periphery, exhibiting many of the same characteristics that James C. Scott outlines in his study of Upland Southeast Asia and calls “adaptations designed to evade both state capture and state formation” (Scott 2009, 9). The remote and relatively inaccessible location of Zanskar appears to be central to the people’s relative independence; Scott suggests that such peripheral societies “may well have chosen their location, their subsistence practices, and their social structure to maintain their autonomy” (ibid., 8). In addition, Scott’s articulation of the friction of travel3 suggests that Zanskar’s relative seclusion has effectively served as a buffer to both mainstream Indian and Western influences. While the difficult conditions of this high Himalayan region may challenge Western notions of comfort and livability, Zanskari people share an ­environment-centered skillset defined by extraordinary competence, and a lifestyle of cultivated political autonomy (Norberg-Hodge 2000). Unfortunately, the “narrative of misery” has more recently been used in this context as a tool to justify development interventions that are not only unnecessary but also born out of misinformation (Demenge 2012, 58). According to scholar Jonathan Demenge, recent development in the area “illustrates how the notion of isolation is consciously manufactured and utilised, and a complex reality simplified and constructed into an object of knowledge—a poor, remote, backward, and isolated Lingshed—to build the case for intervention” (ibid.). In this context, neoliberal attitudes toward development and aid threaten to erode the traditions, daily lifestyle, and sophisticated social fabric that Zanskari villagers have cultivated over centuries, all the while bolstering the state’s hegemonic ideology. As designers prepare to collaborate on projects in this region, they must first recognize the numerous and complex socio-spatial influences on development in the area, including the formal and informal systems of governance, physical context, and power relationships that have heretofore shaped this society.

Design Engagement in India North India has a relatively short record of international design engagement as compared to rest of India, primarily due to its remote location, which only recently opened to foreigners. The extreme inaccessibility of these villages restricts the technologies, building materials, and tools that can be incorporated in construction projects (Figure 9.2). In addition, many villages lack the basic provisions and infrastructures that would facilitate Western-style development, such as reliable electricity for powering tools, or viable roads for truck deliveries. Regardless of these difficulties, visiting foreigners have supported small construction projects since the 1970s, a constellation of altruistic outcroppings incorporating new materials, technologies, and forms. As would be the case in any other village context, Zanskari communities exhibit an embedded cultural sensibility, aesthetic loyalties, and functional attachments that necessarily impact most vernacular construction motivations and outcomes. Many of their building traditions come from a placebased wisdom developed over many centuries (Crook and Osmaston 1994; Norberg-Hodge 2000). In this context, however, pro bono architectural engagement threatens to dismantle or challenge those established values. For instance, the predominately Buddhist populations in Zanskari villages 106

Photo by author.

Figure 9.2 Looking across the Zanskar Valley in June. This pass can be closed eight months out of each year, from October to May.

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have a strong interest in maintaining collective harmony, and in general they will go to great lengths to ensure consensus. According to Jonathan Mingle, “given [Zanskar’s] agrarian-­communitarian history, people tend to value avoiding conflict over social innovation” (Mingle 2015, 274) and so it can be inferred that this mind-set might also impact the development of public works. If Zanskari cultural norms support acquiescence, rather than consultation and interrogation, visiting designers must employ creative ways to engage honest community participation and feedback.

Charting a Course for Responsible Public-Interest Design Even as every site and client offer unique constraints and opportunities, educator Jay Wickersham’s call for “a shared set of principles and behaviors, which can help guide global practice in the future” (Wickersham 2014, 35) is needed now more than ever. However, very little scholarship supports this guiding framework in northern India, despite the relative popularity of intercultural public-interest architecture projects in the region. The subsequent working list of considerations is aimed at launching a broader conversation around public-interest design involvement in northern India. Do your homework: before reaching out to a client or accepting a project, learn as much as possible about the myriad factors that impact development at that location. This is especially critical in India, for as Wickersham notes, “Architects working abroad face a further challenge, perhaps even more complicated and confusing: making sense of the social and political projects in which they are involved” (2014, 35). Without this grounding, visiting designers risk entering into a collaboration without the requisite information needed to be useful. Collaborate with stakeholders: public-interest architecture engagement can bring value to both client and design teams. Central among these benefits is the opportunity to bring people together, across borders, to collaborate on a common cause. As Sergio Palleroni notes, “The community is both our client and collaborator” (Palleroni 2011, 228), suggesting a bold restructuring of development roles. Collaborative work in north India may require additional attention to stakeholder roles and responsibilities, the intentional inclusion of underrepresented groups, such as women and children, and creative new ways to draw out dissenting voices. Translate your work: both in the design phase and in the construction phase, work should be translated so that the local inheritors of new projects will be able to manipulate them to meet their needs. While many trained designers capably navigate Western software, representational methodologies, tools, and building techniques, their working methods can also inadvertently exclude clients with different skillsets. One way to avoid this professional disconnect is to translate design ideas, drawing output, and construction methods into specific design language tailored to the local context. This translation also has the power to improve built outcomes: Palleroni notes that “After the students become familiar with local building technologies and resources, they are better able to finalize the details in ways that are pertinent and resonate with local culture” (2011, 229). Consider local building norms: while vernacular building wisdom has much to teach visiting designers, the appropriation of local building norms should be a considered and informed decision. Is it the responsibility of the architect, especially the outsider designer, to reference local norms and building values, or to thoughtfully import an aesthetic, technique, and performance outcome from another place? During his architectural career in India, Laurie Baker felt that “the imitation of foreign techniques of building and the superficial superimposition of Indian details” were “aspects that only exaggerate[d] the poverty of the country’s architecture” (Bhatia 2000, 22). Clearly, a nuanced approach for referencing both local and imported design values will be useful to public-service architectural engagement abroad (Figure 9.4). Get creative: often, international projects challenge designers to chart new creative territory, as they grapple with material scarcity, low budgets, short timeframes, and foreign cultural, legal, and economic conditions. Public-interest projects in north India may require that architects do more 108

Figure 9.3 A village stakeholder reads the booklet that has been prepared by visiting designers to explain their vision. Photo by author.

Photo by author.

Figure 9.4 The ceiling material at Zangla’s solar school incorporates small pieces of locally sourced willow, or talu. Because the region is a high-altitude desert, very few trees grow for wood.

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with less and approach these projects with new levels of resourcefulness. Just as “Baker’s work has often been referred to as the architecture of marginality [because] his designs make optimum use of available funds and materials,” visiting designers will need to expand upon their creative and technical training to effectively produce work in northern India (Bhatia 2000: 48). Involve local culture: while “architecture, construction, and urbanism are particularly complex technical domains that require deep technical knowledge,” sustainable design also mandates the overlay of a cultural lens (Coulombel 2011, 287). Indeed, sustainability necessarily involves a cultural fit, and Adrian Parr suggests linking social values and cultural context to “design in a manner that fosters a sense of agency once more; only then can design interventions be truly sustainable” (Parr 2009, 8). Adjust your expectations: international design-build projects take time. This reality is abundantly clear in the Zanskar Valley, where roads close for approximately eight months each winter, extreme winter temperatures impair year-round construction efforts, and Zanskari social norms demand a significant measure of formal socialization. In this context, expectations around what can be done, and on whose timeline, need to reflect the social, cultural, environmental, and political conditions of the site. A Hungarian-sponsored school in Zangla, for instance, has been slowly evolving as a design project since 2008. In remote locations such as north India, it can be difficult for volunteers to get to the site, much less build a project with limited access to electricity, tools, and materials. It might help to think small: consider Emilie Taylor and Dan Etheridge’s reminder that “there is real meaning and change possible by acting small and often” (Taylor and Etheridge 2013, 12). Assimilate: international public-interest design efforts can have lasting benefits for both client hosts and visiting design teams. However, these symbiotic relationships tend to grow out of a designer’s willingness to join a community and participate fully (Figure 9.5). North India has had a checkered history with external design assistance, born primarily out of the well-intentioned but poorly grounded efforts of visiting designers. Consider that even Peace Corps volunteers, who may spend three years serving in a foreign country, have often been cast as tone-deaf or out of touch with local needs. Get schools involved: public-interest architecture training could be built into design curriculum at the university level. According to Palleroni, “Confronted by globalization, urban poverty, cultural hegemony (and resistance to it), and the realities of budget, time, client relationships, and group design dynamics, students quickly come to grips with the community’s concerns and needs” (Palleroni 2011, 231). This early exposure to the tough challenges of international advocacy projects gives students the freedom to explore this territory under the guidance of a more experienced practitioner. Moreover, if schools build relationships with communities over years of continued involvement, they will be able to build a working methodology with better cultural awareness, more realistic expectations, informed construction techniques, and stakeholder trust.

Conclusion In the rapidly modernizing context of north India, where progress is increasingly measured by the physical manipulation of landscapes and buildings, external design practitioners can help the region envision a current, future-forward development agenda. The new structures conceived, funded, and built by foreign groups also provide physical evidence that villages are in the process of shedding old traditions in favor of new, optimistic futures. In borrowing design ideals and aesthetic language from abroad, these constructs not only reinforce global notions of progress and improvement but also signal the village group’s ascension into the modern world. In this sense, development trends in present-day Zanskar resemble the development trajectories witnessed in other parts of the world, where architectural language serves as both a symbol and tool for liberating a social group from outmoded trappings of the past (Pyla 2013). Zanskar’s geographical isolation from the rest of the developing world has, until recently, preserved many of the cultural, social, and physical characteristics of traditional village life. However, as the number of foreign visitors increases, as subsistence agricultural practices wane, as new roads 111

Photo by author.

Figure 9.5 A foreign architect and funder meet with stakeholders to discuss goals at the nunnery in Tungri.

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are completed, and as access to the Internet and television grows in these remote regions, Zanskar’s distinctive cultural, social, economic, and environmental characteristics will increasingly bend toward more globalized uniformity (Brenner 2014; Demenge 2011; Mingle 2015). This transition appears to be all the more legible on the austere canvas of Zanskar’s traditional landscapes, where Jonathan Mingle notes that “With its relative lack of safety nets, its position at the bitter end of global supply chains, and its singularly demanding environment, the pace of change and the arc of development is [sic] made uncannily visible in Zanskar” (Mingle 2015, 113). As the inevitable tide of globalization sweeps through Zanskar, designers—especially those coming from practices abroad—have an opportunity if not an ethical imperative to consider the unique climate and context of their sites of engagement. In so doing, visiting designers might draw from the values of Kevin Frampton’s critical regionalism by embracing guidance from social and cultural frameworks. To ensure contextually appropriate development abroad, designers must thoughtfully tailor a nuanced, site-specific response that combines a wide variety of interests and sources of knowledge. If, as David Harvey and Susanne Langer suggest, architecture is “an ethnic domain” (Harvey 2009, 31) or “a physically present human environment that expresses the characteristic rhythmic functional patterns which constitute a culture” (Langer 1953, 72), then international public-interest design practice also should reflect local social constructs. Such involvement suggests a hybrid, neovernacular approach for pro bono design practice: one in which time-tested traditions, building wisdom, materials, and environmental sensibilities are paired with new technologies, higher standards for safety and health, and the aspirational thinking of local stakeholders. By referencing deep-rooted cultural values, visiting designers have an opportunity to illuminate a community’s independence, rather than reliance, on external sources. Sergio Palleroni notes that in his service work, “Each project reaffirms architecture’s role as a cultural product that facilitates dynamic exchange, while acting as a constant reminder of the power of communities to provide for themselves” (Palleroni 2011, 231). This connection between cultural expression and sovereignty is even more pronounced in international practice, where neoliberal aid practices tend to frame development work. Many of the neoliberal ideals that have heretofore characterized architectural aid abroad—evidenced in narratives that highlight designers who swoop in to save communities that cannot save themselves—appear to be outmoded as well as patronizing. Accordingly, public-interest design practitioners must be careful to avoid, in Jay Wickersham’s words, “acting as unwitting tools of inequality and repression” (Wickersham 2014, 33). In intentionally reframing the power dynamic of international practice, skillful publicservice design projects can provide a useful vehicle for what Peter Evans describes as “­counter-hegemonic globalization” (Evans 2008, 271). Public-interest design engagement offers an opportunity to transcend traditional design roles to actually elevate architecture to a form of public service. Naturally, public-interest design practitioners will realize such lofty desires only when their work is conceived in partnership with local stakeholders. This chapter suggests that designers can draw from the rich environmental and cultural context of north India to create useful, appropriate, and forwardthinking design interventions well suited to Zanskar. Moreover, it recognizes that this type of design engagement will be valued by community members not because it represents noble charity or the gift of state-of-the-art space but instead because the work reflects authentic and lasting partnerships.

Notes 1 Scott proceeds to note that in the case of high-modernist statecraft, “the progenitors of such plans regarded themselves as far smarter and farseeing than they really were and, at the same time, regarded their subjects as far more stupid and incompetent than they really were” (Scott 1998, 343). 2 In the United States, the Rural Studio program recognized early on that once visiting students left a project, someone else would need to provide ongoing maintenance and attention. They instituted a clerk of the works position: an employee, rather than a volunteer, who has the responsibility of maintaining projects over time. 3 Scott describes the “friction of travel” as a method for considering the added dimension of difficult terrain in access calculations (Scott 2009). 113

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References Aquilino, M., ed. (2011) Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity. New York: Metropolis Books. Bagchee, N. (2015) “Building for Peace in New York City,” Journal of Architectural Education, 69:1, 73–85. Bell, B., and Wakeford, K., eds. (2008) Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism. New York: Metropolis Books. Bell, M. (1999) “American Philanthropy as Cultural Power,” in David Slate and Peter J. Taylor (eds.) The American Century: Consensus and Coercion in the Projection of American Power. Oxford: Blackwell, 284–297. Bhatia, G. (2000) Laurie Baker: Life, Works, & Writings. Delhi: Penguin Books India. Brenner, N., ed. (2014) “Introduction: Urban Theory Without an Outside,” in Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis. Clouse, C., and Lamb, Z. (2013) “Post-Crisis: Embracing Public-Interest Architecture With Humility,” Journal of Architectural Education, 67:2, July, 186–194. Coulombel, P. (2011) “Open Letter to Architects, Engineers, and Urbanists,” in Marie J. Aquilino (ed.) Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity. New York: Metropolis Books, 286–295. Crook, J., and Osmaston, H. (1994) Himalayan Buddhist Villages: Environment, Resources, Society and Religious Life in Zangskar, Ladakh. Bristol: University of Bristol Press. Daultrey, S., and Gergan, R. (2011) “Living With Change: Adaptation and Innovation in Ladakh,” Climate Adaptation, February, 1–11. Deamer, P. (2014) “Invitation to a Dialogue: Less Ego in Architects,” The New York Times, August 4, p. A 20. Accessed 12.23.2015 at: www.nytimes.com/2014/08/04/opinion/invitation-to-a-dialogue-less-ego-inarchitects.html?_r=0 Demenge, J. (2011) “Road Construction, Dependency, and Exploitation in Ladakh, North India,” Journal of Workplace Rights, 15:3–4, 303–326. Demenge, J. (2012) “The Road to Lingshed: Manufactured Isolation and Experienced Mobility in Ladakh,” Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 32:1, Article 14, 51–60. Escobar, A. (1998) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Evans, P. (2008) “Is an Alternative Globalization Possible?” Politics & Society, 36:2, 271–305. Fisher, T. (2013) Designing to Avoid Disaster: The Nature of Fracture-Critical Design. New York: Routledge. Harris, V. (2011) “The Architecture of Risk,” in Marie J. Aquilino (ed.) Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity. New York: Metropolis Books, 12–22. Harvey, D. (2009) Social Justice and the City, revised ed. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. Hyde, L. (1979) “Some Food We Could Not Eat: Gift Exchange and the Imagination,” The Kenyon Review, New Series, 1:4, Autumn, 32–60. Langer, S. (1953) Feeling and Form. New York: Scribner’s. Mingle, J. (2015) Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity and Survival on the Roof of the World. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Norberg-Hodge, H. (2000) Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh. London: Rider Books. Palleroni, S. (2011) “Cultivating Resilience: The BaSiC Initiative,” in Marie J. Aquilino (ed.) Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity. New York: Metropolis Books. Parr, A. (2009) Hijacking Sustainability. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pearson, J. (2002) University Community Design Partnerships: Innovation in Practice. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Perkes, D. (2009) “A Useful Practice,” Journal of Architectural Education, 62:4, 64–71. Pyla, P. (2013) Landscapes of Development: The Impact of Modernization Discourses on the Physical Environment of the Eastern Mediterranean. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pyla, P. (2015) “Crisis Spins,” Journal of Architectural Education, 69:1, 8–12. Scott, J. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, J. (2009) The Art of Not Being Governed, an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Taylor, E., and Etheridge, D. (2013) “Radical Incrementalism: An Open Letter in Defense of the Small,” Oz Journal, 35, 10–15. Wickersham, J. (2014) “Code of Context: The Uneasy Excitement of Global Practice,” Architecture Boston, 17:4, Winter, 32–35.

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Part III

Structures of Engagement

10 Reconceiving Professionalism in the Twenty-First Century Nils Gore

In early 2016, as this essay is being finalized, news regarding the winner of this year’s Pritzker Prize has just come out. In addition to the announcement of the prize itself, follow-up news articles on the winner, Alejandro Aravena, were penned as was criticism of the award jury’s decision, in honoring an architect thought—by some—to be undeserving of the honor. According to its website, the Pritzker Prize has been awarded annually since 1979 to honor a living architect or architects whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision, and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture. (Emphasis mine) The list of honorees reads like a Who’s Who of architecture, and includes many of the most heralded architects of the age. A simple analysis of the winners reveals the following: 39 “entities” have won the award. Of those entities, 37 are individual people and 2—Herzog & deMeuron and SANAA— are partnerships, meaning that 41 individual people have been honored, 39 of whom are men and 2 of whom are women. Geographically (by continent), the distribution is as follows: Europe leads with 49 percent, North America with 22 percent, Asia with 20 percent, South America with 7 percent and Australia with 2 percent. Seventy-one percent of the winners come from Europe and North America, while the rest of the globe claims 29 percent. Further consider that seven of Asia’s eight winners are Japanese; and eight of North America’s nine are from the United States, and we have 85 percent of Pritzker winners from Europe, Japan and the United States. With perhaps the exception of Glenn Murcutt, whose oeuvre consists largely of relatively modest single-family houses, these architects have made their names by serving important business and cultural clients to cement their reputations and build their practices. Again, when considering all of the possible building types not to be represented in the work of Pritzker Prize laureates, we find a fairly narrow slice of the highculture/business industry represented by the winners. To put it plainly, 95 percent of the winners are Western/Caucasian/Asian men who serve a very particular kind of wealthy client for high-culture building types (Patterson 2012; Sorkin 2005). This is not to say that there aren’t exceptions within any of these architects’ bodies of work—for instance the pre-Bilbao Frank Gehry (Pritzker ’89), who then, post-Bilbao, “became the epitome of a generation that set out to be part of an avant-garde, and ended up as highbrow, copy-paste establishment” (Miessen 2011)—but still the point remains. 117

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As for criticism of Aravena’s selection, Patrik Schumacher, the business partner of Zaha Hadid (Pritzker ’04 and the first woman to win the prize), became the poster boy for dissent when he complained in a Facebook post (quoted in full): The PC takeover of architecture is complete: Pritzker Prize mutates into a prize for humanitarian work. The role of the architect is now “to serve greater social and humanitarian needs” and the new Laureate is hailed for “tackling the global housing crisis” and for his concern for the underprivileged. Architecture loses its specific societal task and responsibility, architectural innovation is replaced by the demonstration of noble intentions and the discipline’s criteria of success and excellence dissolve in the vague do-good-feel-good pursuit of “social justice”. I respect [what] Alejandro Aravena is doing and his “half a good house” developments are an intelligent response. However, this is not the frontier where architecture and urban design participate in advancing the next stage of our global high-density urban civilization. I would not object to this year’s choice half as much if this safe and comforting validation of humanitarian concern was not part of a wider trend in contemporary architecture that in my view signals an unfortunate confusion, bad conscience, lack of confidence, vitality and courage about the discipline’s own unique contribution to the world.1 Considering the world Schumacher lives in, it’s not hard to imagine why he would have this take. He is just like 90 percent of the Pritzker Prize winners to date. He’s a man, he’s Western, and he serves the rich by building iconic buildings. His club is loosening the rules for membership and it’s discomfiting! Schumacher clearly doesn’t consider “social justice” nor “humanitarian concerns” to be included in the “discipline’s criteria of success and excellence,” nor congruent with Pritzker’s aims to honor “consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment.” Judging from the commenters on various online publishing platforms, many people agree with him.2 This isn’t the first time that Schumacher took exception to the Pritzker selection. In 2014, he spoke out on Facebook to criticize Shigeru Ban’s selection: “I am afraid that if criteria shift towards political correctness great iconoclast-innovators like Wolf Prix or Peter Eisenman won’t ever stand a chance to be recognized here.”3 About a month before the latest Pritzker announcement, the Turner Prize, “widely recognized [since it was established in 1984] as one of the most important and prestigious awards for the visual arts in Europe,” selected Assemble, a collective of architects and designers working in derelict Liverpool neighborhoods on projects that are decidedly not of the Art World. Like Schumacher, the Telegraph’s Mark Hudson was not impressed by the jury’s decision: “Assemble’s structures are not revolutionary. Many of them are rather ordinary, and if such cross-discipline projects are to be nominated in the future, I hope the line-up will include projects that are more creative” (Hudson, 2015). Like the Pritzker, the Turner is typically awarded to an individual person—someone who has earned the respect of the Art World.4 For the latest Turner to be awarded to a collective called “Assemble,” which doesn’t even list individual member names on its website, is truly radical—and to some, inherently troubling. In contrast to these two awards, I will briefly note the Curry Stone Design Prize, which was established in 2008 to honor exactly the kind of work that Pritzker and Turner are being criticized for honoring.5 Its latest honoree, Rural Urban Framework, is a research and design firm whose work is a “critique against the overwhelming trends that saturate architecture and building in China today” (Homecoming: Rufwork 2013). It is a critique of the kind of work that Schumacher holds up as “the discipline’s own unique contribution to the world.” Each of these awards reflects the intentions and values of the award creators, juries, and the times in which they operate. Times change, and these anecdotal instances of recent controversy point to a fundamental split—a kind of cognitive dissonance—in architectural and professional culture 118

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that just now, since the Great Recession, seems to be playing out in a more public way. But the theoretical background behind the emerging trend toward the “social” has been brewing much longer—for ­decades—fueled by events (i.e., Hurricane Katrina, Haitian earthquake, financial crisis, climate change), exhibitions (i.e., Small Scale, Big Change, Design for the Other 90%, 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale), movements (i.e., Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter), education programs (i.e., Auburn Rural Studio, Tulane City Center), and emerging practices (i.e., MASS Design, BC Workshop), and reported on in both scholarly and mass-market texts (i.e., Kaminer’s Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation, Miessen’s Nightmare of Participation, Sennett’s Uses of Disorder, Hyde’s Future Practice, Awan, Schneider and Till’s Spatial Agency, Sinclair’s Design Like You Give a Damn). This suggests that the Pritzker and Turner fusses are merely a more public indicator of the larger trend toward the social “effects” of architecture (Stickells 2011). Schumacher’s rants belie a typical reactionary, conservative backlash by the establishment at seeing the world change around it, despite its self-acclaimed avant-garde pretensions6 (Mitchell 2004). The remainder of this essay will look at the background of this trend and speculate on what it might mean for the future of the discipline and profession.

Effects, Affects, and Facts The danger of naming names—like Schumacher’s—and citing anecdotes in an essay like this is that it personalizes and localizes the issue in a way that one could dismiss as an aberration. And it also could lead to a naively binary understanding of architectural culture in an X vs. Y sort of way: good vs. bad, formalists vs. functionalists, capitalists vs. Marxists. That would be a mistake, for these projects, awards, and practices evolve over decades, in response to changes in culture, clients, ideas, economies, technologies, laws, and natural disasters. Then they are revealed and get interpreted by journalists, critics, historians, and the larger public in ways that might be unfair, misleading, or wrong. Then these interpretations become a story in their own right—as in the case of Schumacher’s pronouncements, perhaps obscuring the real issues underlying them. In Architecture’s Desire, Michael Hays (2010, 1) declaratively asserts, “I am not primarily concerned with architecture as the art of building per se, nor do I consider it as a profession, Rather, I examine architecture as a way of negotiating the real, by which I mean intervening in the realm of symbols and signifying processes . . . rather than the making of things,” identifying the cognitive structure in which he operates and seeming to align (as we will examine) with the ethos of the pre-2014 Pritzker juries. But then he goes on to acknowledge that things are more complex than he suggested at the outset: “Nevertheless, I hope to suggest too that the architectural impulse is part of daily social life and its wide-ranging practices. . . . I am concerned here with the effects and affects as well as the facts of architecture” (1).

Professionalism and Ethics One of the “facts” of architecture today is that in most industrialized societies, the practice of architecture is legally constrained to a licensed set of professionals, and thus burdened with the assumptions underlying the notion of professionalism. Professions in Anglo-American society are defined as the class of knowledge-based occupations requiring a period of specialized vocational training and experience, often requiring licensure as a mechanism of occupational control and market closure (Evetts 2003). At their root the idea of professions is based on the premise that an exclusive set of people is trained to dispense expertise in certain jurisdictions of knowledge (i.e., medicine, law, accounting, architecture). With specialized training, professionals help the society cope with the risky propositions embedded in that jurisdiction (health, legality, finance, safety). In exchange for assuming the responsibility—and liability—for 119

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the work, society grants the licensed professional a kind of monopoly on the work. For instance, the state requires that doctors hold a license to dispense medicine; lawyers a license to stand at the bar; and architects a license to prepare construction documents. Non-licensed individuals attempting to encroach on that monopoly power will be prosecuted by the state. Guarding the gate is a fundamental responsibility of the professional associations. At their best the professions are the stewards of desirable social goals, such as good health, justice, or environmental quality; at their worst they are regarded as self-interested economic cartels. The crisis felt by many in the professions lies in the temporary and evolving nature of such arrangements: the state laws requiring licensure are essentially an early twentieth-century invention, and carry with them early twentieth-century assumptions that may or may not be relevant a century later (Simon 1997). With licensing, the state is attempting to ensure that architects’ work will be of a quality that preserves and respects the public’s health, safety, and welfare. These concerns range from “buildings shouldn’t kill people” to less consequential, and harder-to-standardize concerns, such as “aesthetic inappropriateness” (Tappendorf 2002). Society’s interest in safe buildings, defined by the complex rules and arcane language in building and zoning codes, is thus relegated to people who have been formally educated, and subsequently licensed, to practice architecture, as individual professionals—not as corporate entities. These assumptions have evolved over time. One base assumption is that the professional is a singular, licensed individual of high repute, whose personal license and reputation are at stake; another is that the client is an individual seeking professional assistance for his or her personal needs. Today, with the increase of the corporate architecture practice working for corporate clients, the conditions of employment permit a degree of detachment—on both sides of the relationship— that diminishes its fiduciary potency. It seems—and is—more like a commercial exchange between entities whose existence is based on the notion of limited legal liability (McKinlay and Marceau 2002). The more “commercial”—and less “professional”—these business arrangements get, the more they are subject to competition from other commercial entities. At one time professional canons of ethics in architecture, as defined by the AIA, prohibited licensed architects from seeking employment in any business entity other than those whose ownership was by other licensed architects. It was possible to maintain a sense of solidarity with one’s fellow professionals and resist commercial encroachment. In the United States, until the 1970 Supreme Court ruling outlawing the practice, it was even permissible for architects to collude in the setting of fees, to avoid the race to the bottom as some architects “low-balled” their fees to compete. Yet another assumption that has eroded in the past century is the notion that professionals have a responsibility to the public trust larger than their own self-interests. The 2012 AIA Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, for instance, states, “Members should . . . promote and serve the public interest in their personal and professional activities” (2012, 2). Yet there is little, aside from a sense of personal obligation as a voluntary member of that professional organization, that would enforce such a canon. It is a vestige of a prior age, when society at large (perhaps) adhered to a shared notion of civic responsibility and the greater good. Late twentieth-century neoliberal economic attitudes and policies can be recognized as eroding the power of the professions to perform the desirable social functions described by the root meaning of the term “pro bono”: for the (public) good. And at the same time, those same neoliberal policies have eroded the actual quality of life for those without the economic capacity to hire professionals to help them maintain their health, seek justice, or improve their environment. Consequently, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the providers of professional services follow the money.

“Magnificence Is a Virtue” In early fifteenth-century Italy, it was regarded as unseemly for the wealthy to use their money in shows of ostentation—for instance in the construction of personal monuments ( Jenkins 1970). This 120

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reflected prevailing negative attitudes toward usury. But attitudes started to shift in the middle of the century, when Cosimo de’ Medici transgressed those norms; in reference to Cosimo it was declared that “[m]agnificence is a virtue. . . . [Cosimo’s buildings] are not to be condemned for their excessive size, but praised for the excess of virtue in the patron’s mind, shewn by his having spent more than he need” ( Jenkins 1970, 165). By the end of the century, ostentation in personal buildings was no longer considered unseemly, but rather virtuous; and architects—meant as the singular designers that create buildings as an act of intellectual force—were regarded as great men who could bring a patron’s personal monument into fruition (Carneiro 1981). Much of architectural historiography has aligned to reinforce such thinking.

Great Man Theory: Individual Genius or Cultural Circumstance? Patrik Schumacher’s public critique of the Pritzker represents an underlying, and largely unquestioned, ethos about the “proper” societal role of architects that has persisted since the Renaissance. His discomfort in Aravena’s award reflects the fact that the predominant history of architecture has been written as if it were rightly a subcategory of art history—a discipline “whose primary concern is properly with aesthetics . . . [thus encouraging] the architectural historian to ignore the wider context by focusing solely on authorial authenticity, the link between the individual maker and the individual work, and the aesthetics of style” (Arnold, Ergut and Ozkaya 2006, xvii). The Pritzker jury, with its selection of the last three awardees, Aravena, Frei Otto, and Shigeru Ban, has acknowledged in its citations an expanded set of concerns which matter in architecture just as much as aesthetics.7 Time moves slowly in architectural culture and, thus, slowly does its culture evolve too. These recent Pritzker awards (and Turner Prize, and Curry Stone awards) are but a reflection of wider trends in the discipline, in historiography, in education, and ultimately in society that started decades ago. In 1968 Whitney Young “called out the entire profession of architecture for its lack of social engagement. In an oft-quoted passage, he challenged them to become a more positive force for social change, saying, ‘You are not a profession that has distinguished itself by your social and civic contributions to the cause of civil rights. You are most distinguished by your thunderous silence and your complete irrelevance” (Corser 2009, 3). A generation later the Carnegie Foundation’s “Boyer Report” challenged a generation of architectural educators and students to consider the social impact of the work of architecture. In the UK, around the same time, the “Burton Report” addressed similar issues. Perhaps the larger culture is just now seeing the actual results of those challenges. Earlier in this essay I drew a distinction between what society, through licensing, expects from architects (safe buildings serving the public good) and the values that the profession espouses through its highest honor awards (iconic buildings serving the magnificent). It is encouraging to sense an expanded field of architecture as reflected in these latest awards. But I don’t take it as a sea change, for there continues to be a conflict between the potential future of architects as leaders in a society facing complex socio-economic and environmental issues and the image of the architect as a privileged sophisticate using aesthetic skill to serve the upper echelons of society. (Anderson 2012, 268) If I judge from much of the work published in the media, winning design awards, and emulated in the work of students in schools, the attitudes espoused by Schumacher et al. are largely still the norm. But new times demand new attitudes. In the larger sociopolitical context in the United States, beyond architecture, recently we find movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street and political discussions regarding income inequality in the forefront, and raising general consciousness. In Europe, the refugee diaspora raises questions about how to house and provide services to 121

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desperate, impoverished families fleeing war zones. Everywhere we have an increasing recognition that the built environment has an impact on public health and well-being. Many of these problems have physical, spatial, and infrastructural components that architects can help understand and address.

Twenty-First-Century Professionalism In 2011 I heard Thomas Fisher, then dean of the University of Minnesota College of Design, give a talk where he briefly recounted the establishment of the public health profession, as distinct from that of medicine, and in that talk, suggested that something similar ought to happen for what he called “public architecture” (and what we now may have settled on calling “public interest design”), meaning the design of the built world that needs to happen outside the bounds of the bespoke project on the individual piece of land which typifies the vast majority of architects’ work.8 He used the example of a pandemic which might start in a squatter settlement in the developing world, incubating and flourishing because of the lack of adequate infrastructure, and that rapidly spreads around the world, as a result of the mobility of all people everywhere. (Since then the Ebola virus in West Africa and now the Zika virus in the Americas have given us a glimpse of what that might look like.) The costs of dealing with a pandemic would be enormous, and might be prevented with a much less costly and better-designed housing settlement with adequate infrastructure. Fisher argued that the costs of providing public design services would be a better value proposition than waiting for the outbreak to occur and then dealing with the catastrophic outcomes. This is but one example of a public interest project. We can include community design issues such as alternate transit systems, energy systems, the food system, design for equity, racial and social justice, affordable housing, and design for public awareness as other projects needing attention. A century ago, the medical profession served its patients similarly to how architects largely serve their clients today: individual doctors served individual patients on a case-by-case basis (Fee 1992). At the same time, in the United States, an influx of immigrant families became situated in substandard tenement housing along the eastern seaboard, supplied with communal privies and polluted water sources. City streets were heaped with garbage, including dead and decaying animals, and the waste products of small manufactories; factories produced their own noise smells, smoke, and industrial wastes to add to the dirt and confusion of the new industrial order. Children died young of diarrheal and respiratory diseases, diphtheria, whooping cough, smallpox and typhoid fever. Tuberculosis and other infectious diseases killed young adults and further impoverished families already struggling for survival. [. . .] Though public health departments existed in some cities and states, much of the work in addressing these problems were carried on by an ad hoc collection of voluntary social reform organizations—not the medical profession. (Fee 1992, 3) Over time, the work of city health departments expanded to include street cleaning, sanitation, statistics, engineering, bacteriological laboratories for disease testing, and inspectors. The challenge was to find adequately trained personnel to carry on these duties. In the American south hookworm was a particular public health problem, and in 1909 the Rockefeller Foundation—a private, philanthropic entity—funded a project to eradicate the disease, and leading to the establishment of the first school of public health at Johns Hopkins. (Fee 1992, 4) Elizabeth Fee notes that these practitioners of public health are defined by their goals—a healthy public—rather than as a specific disciplinary body of knowledge, as in the case of, say, clinical 122

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medicine. The public health “discipline” consists, in fact, of many different disciplines: doctors, engineers, nurses, statisticians, epidemiologists, lawyers, and inspectors, all contributing to the mission of keeping the public healthy (1992, 4). As is typical in the professional realm, as the profession of public health came into being, jurisdictional disputes emerged between the subdisciplines involved, in an attempt to claim public health: competition between physicians (who saw public health as a medical problem) and sanitary engineers (who saw public health as an infrastructural problem) became intense in the early years of the twentieth century (ibid., 5). Ultimately it was agreed by all that scientific education should be a unifying principle, whether one took a social, clinical, or infrastructural approach to the work, and that both research and practice considerations should be part of the educational curriculum (ibid., 7). It was further determined that public health should be a new, separate profession from medicine, with its primary focus on clinical diagnosis and treatment; public health would focus on prevention of disease at the population level (ibid., 8). It is worth noting—and not coincidentally—that medical education was reorganizing itself at the same time through the efforts of Abraham Flexner, strengthening the profession of medicine to what we know it as today (Duffy 2011). To conclude, let’s draw some parallels between the birth of the professionalization of public health a century ago and the birth of public interest design today: at that time physicians served individual patients with individual problems but realized that there was a class of problems that weren’t getting solved by the medical profession, and it invented public health to address them. As a result, communicable disease, poor hygiene and sanitation, and questionable food and water systems were tackled. Today, we are realizing that many public spatial and infrastructural problems need addressing by the design professions, along with the expertise of social scientists, public health experts, civil engineers, transportation engineers, urban policy planners and other disciplines. This confluence of expertise, working to improve the public realm, is formed on an ad hoc basis, without a rigorous educational curriculum feeding it, or a business model to make the economics pencil out. It is common to see 5 percent (or 2 percent, or 1 percent) called out as the portion of buildings that actually get designed by architects. Whatever the actual value, it is a minute portion of the total building economy. That money is generally supplied by the “haves.” The next half-century will see an explosion of growth in urban areas by the have-nots. And though they might not have the economic power of the haves, they still, together, have considerable economic power. The design challenges to housing them will be significant, and the architects who can invent business models to provide services to the noncorporate mass of have-nots will profit from it. For that to happen, those architects will have to shake off the self-imposed chains that they carry with them from the early twentieth century and their self-conception of what architects are and do, and how and who they serve. The invention of that business model is an immediate design challenge in itself. We are starting to see, particularly in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, calls for a new profession of urban design based on theories of what Alexander Cuthbert calls spatial political economy, and relying heavily on the theoretical base of urban social theory, human geography, and cultural studies (Cuthbert 2005). Markus Miessen has also observed the “recent invention of particular titles and names . . . such as ‘spatial consultant,’ ‘urban researcher,’ ‘architectural curator,’ ‘spatial tactician,’ or ‘framework designer’ ” (2011, 81). Cuthbert’s vision of a new profession would include the expertise of architects and urban planners, but would generate and use a body of knowledge that doesn’t fit comfortably inside either of those existing professions. As an example, in the UK, the Urban Design Group (UDG) began as a loose affiliation of practitioners in 1979 who acknowledged that the institutes of architecture and of planning no longer recognised each other’s legitimate role in the creation of the urban scene. The public realm had become, by default, largely the consequences of mechanistic decisions by highways, traffic and municipal engineers.9 123

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Today, some 30 years later, UDG publishes a journal to share knowledge, has an emerging certification process underway, and is active in promoting educational curricula through universities. It has a manifesto that serves as a kind of code of ethics. All of these—body of knowledge, certification, educational system, ethical code—are the indicators for when a profession actually becomes a profession with its own jurisdictional claims (Abbott 1988). Others, elsewhere, are undoubtedly pursuing burgeoning professionalization in their own fledgling efforts to solve these problems. Time will tell how these play out, but it’s pretty clear that the time is now for such a profession to emerge.

Notes 1 Schumacher, Patrik, January 13, 2016, Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/patrik.schumacher.10/ posts/10207222111024032. Emphasis mine. 2 Keskeys, Paul, n.d., “Patrik vs. Pritzker: Schumacher Reignites the Debate Over Political Correctness in Architecture”, Architizer. http://architizer.com/blog/patrik-vs-pritzker. 3 Schumacher, Patrik, March 25, 2014, Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/patrik.schumacher.10/ posts/10202674357973048. 4 See Danto, Arthur C., 1981, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), to understand why Art World is capitalized. 5 What Is the Curry Stone Design Prize? Curry Stone Design Prize. http://currystonedesignprize.com/about. 6 Schumacher made the news again in late fall 2016, “when he called for social housing to be scrapped and public space to be privatised” and earned the condemnations of “Zaha Hadid’s closest confidantes . . . Rana Hadid, Peter Palumbo and Brian Clarke—the three other trustees of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, and executors of Hadid’s estate.” www.dezeen.com/2016/11/29/zaha-hadid-foundation-family-friends-disownpatrick-schumacher-housing-statement. 7 The Pritzker jury members “are recognized professionals in their own fields of architecture, business, education, publishing, and culture” (Pritzker website, www.pritzkerprize.com/about/jury), thus making selections from within their cultural milieu even more likely. 8 Conference session, “Bridging the Gap: Architectural Internships in Public Service” at Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture 99th Annual Meeting, March 5, 2011. 9 Urban Design Group. www.udg.org.uk/about/history.

References Abbott, Andrew. 1988. The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. American Institute of Architects. 2012. 2012 Code of Ethics & Professional Conduct. https://www.aia.org/ pages/3296-code-of-ethics-and-professional-conduct Anderson, Nadia M. 2012. Public interest design: A vehicle for change in architectural education and practice. In CHANGE, Architecture, Education, Practices Conference Proceedings. ACSA. Arnold, Dana, Elvan Altan Ergut, and Belgin Turan Ozkaya. 2006. Rethinking Architectural Historiography. New York: Routledge. Carneiro, Robert L. 1981. Herbert Spencer as an anthropologist. The Journal of Libertarian Studies 5 (2): 153–210. Corser, Rob. 2009. Design in the public interest—the dilemma of professionalism. Imagining America. Paper 14. http://surface.syr.edu/ia/14 Cuthbert, Alexander R. 2005. A debate from down-under: Spatial political economy and urban design. Urban Design International 10 (3–4): 223–234. Duffy, Thomas P. 2011. The Flexner report—100 years later. The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 84 (3): 269. Evetts, J. 2003. The sociological analysis of professionalism: occupational change in the modern world. International Sociology 18 (2): 395–415. Fee, Elizabeth. 1992. The Welch-Rose report: Blueprint for public health education in America. Washington, DC: Delta Omega Honorary Public Health Society. Hays, K. M. 2010. Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Homecoming: Rufwork. 2013. www.rufwork.org/index.php?/publication/homecoming/ Hudson, M. 2015. Turner Prize: Is This the Moment That British Art Changed Forever? The Telegraph. 7 December. www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/turner-prize-is-this-the-moment-that-british-art-changedforever/

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Jenkins, A.D. Fraser. 1970. Cosimo de’ Medici’s patronage of architecture and the theory of magnificence. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33: 162–170. McKinlay, J. B., and Marceau, L. D. 2002. The end of the golden age of doctoring. International Journal of Health Services 32 (2), 379–416. Miessen, M. 2011. The Nightmare of Participation. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Mitchell, Katharyne. 2004. Geographies of identity: Multiculturalism unplugged. Progress in Human Geography 28 (5): 641–651. Patterson, Matt. 2012. The role of the public institution in iconic architectural development. Urban Studies 49 (15): 3289–3305. Simon, W H. 1997. Ethics, professionalism, and meaningful work. Hofstra Law Review 26: 445. Sorkin, Michael. 2005. What can you say about the Pritzker? Perspecta 37: 106–111. www.jstor.org/stable/ 40482245. Stickells, L. (2011). The right to the city: Rethinking architecture’s social significance. Architectural Theory Review, 16 (3): 213–222. Tappendorf, Julie A. 2002. Architectural design regulations: What can a municipality do to protect against unattractive, inappropriate, and just plain ugly structures? The Urban Lawyer 34 (4): 961–969.

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11 The Aga Khan Award for Architecture and Social Engagement via the Built Environment Mehreen Chida-Razvi and Mohammad Gharipour

Introduction: The Inception of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture Founded in 1988 at the behest of His Highness the Aga Khan, hereafter referred to as His Highness, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) is one of the key avenues through which the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) interacts as a philanthropic entity within the developing world. Having emerged as one of the premier forces in supporting responsible, sustainable architectural practice in Muslim countries, the primary goal of the AKTC is to invigorate communities in these areas through several means, including physical, social, cultural and economic.1 One of the areas of focus for the AKTC is that of architecture in the Muslim world, evident in the many and varied programs that support it.2 One of the key ways through which this is done, and the topic of this chapter, is the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (AKAA), established in 1977 before coming under the aegis of the newly formed AKTC. The AKAA scheme was a direct result of His Highness’s desire to address the architectural needs of populations in the Muslim world, composed predominantly of countries considered to be part of the developing world. The idea of the award came about via His Highness initially asking one question: can Muslim societies of today still produce great works of architecture like those of the past?3 The result of this simple inquiry was ultimately the AKAA. Established with the idea that it is the inherent humanistic traditions of Islam that ultimately direct how architecture and the built environment should be approached,4 His Highness initiated the award with two primary aims: to halt the damage to and deterioration of the built environment and architectural heritage of the Muslim world, and to promote the building arts, which Islamic societies had excelled at and historically been known for far and wide. Additionally, two other goals of the award’s establishment have been highlighted by Suha Özkan during his tenure as secretary general of the AKAA,5 the first being to identify excellence in the field of architecture while the second was to increase the capacity for debate, dialogue and the exchange of ideas around concepts of the built environment in Muslim societies; the overriding intent of both of these was to improve human life through the medium of architecture (Özkan 1994).6 When asked to share his thoughts on the award’s inception, advancement and shortcomings, His Highness shared a thoughtful and profound desire to address how the past and the contemporary were able to cohabitate and coexist within the built environment.7 Furthermore, recognizing the 126

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contrast between how the physical environment in the developed world was created before being recreated at need—which is to say that built structures and environments could be easily torn down or restructured to adapt to new purposes and usages—and the developing world—in which it was unaffordable to alter buildings and environmental spaces with any great frequency—led to His Highness questioning why flexibility of design in the developing world was not more prevalent nor part of the local, ‘traditional’ way of thinking.8 This resulted in one of the traits that came to be a requirement for projects to be declared winners of the AKAA—the ability for the built spaces/developments to adapt to their environment. From the time of the first award cycle (1978–1980), the winning projects were recognized because they were deemed to have been important to and created at a local level, for local needs, and were a result of local decisions.9

The Evolution of the AKAA: Explanations and Critiques Since its establishment, the AKAA has been the world’s largest prize for architecture; today it totals US$1 million, half of which is actually a grant for the promotion of replicable aspects of the winning designs. Having a three-year cycle, it recognizes projects that not only are architecturally important but also ‘set new standards of excellence in architecture, planning practices, historic preservation and landscape architecture.’10 It is not just the physical space which is deemed important but also how the created space fits into an established community, aids and enhances life in that community, and responds to local needs and cultural expectations.11 Furthermore, the architectural projects have been required to use local resources and innovative technologies to accomplish such community enhancement.12 What is seen, then, is that inherent in the award and its purpose is an indisputable element of social engagement. In addition to the various requirements just listed, this is further emphasized by the preference highlighted earlier, that elements, if not the totality, of the concept behind awardwinning projects can be replicated both within and outside of the Muslim world. Part of this desire is evident through the compiled documentation of over 9,000 building projects to date which have been viewed and critiqued, from the first award cycle to the latest (2014–2016), by on-site technical and research teams and the Master Juries.13 When the AKAA was established, there was an awareness of certain challenges that would need to be addressed by the two bodies which drive the award forward in their respective briefs, the Steering Committee and the Master Jury. For the former, theirs related to the direction pursued by the AKAA, and for the latter, to the criteria by which they would judge nominated projects. Based upon the initial basis for the award’s establishment, the first of these was being aware that there needed to be a method of reconciling notions of heritage in Islamic architecture with modernity, an area to which much resistance had been felt in many parts of the Muslim world. It seemed to be the case that in those geographic regions, heritage was given priority over modernity, which was frequently interpreted as ‘Western.’ However, the ‘heritage’ solutions being created within architectural production of the broader Muslim world was not catering for a changing world and the changing dynamics which went along with that. One of the most important of these, and which has been a prevailing part of the AKAA since its inception, was (and still is) the need to address housing for low-income families. The second challenge takes the flip side of the same coin, which is that it was necessary to make sure that the use of new and modern technology—for the most part developed outside of the Muslim world—did not lead to a collective dismissal of the local past and of the built heritage. The final challenge to be overcome was that of education—the need to improve education of local populations, training opportunities for architects within Muslim countries, knowledge of the historical and cultural past, and the latest technologies for building, engineering and construction. Only after such educational enhancement was achieved could the first two challenges be appropriately addressed. With these challenges in mind, when establishing the criteria for the first AKAA cycle (1978– 1980) it became clear that there were going to be inherent difficulties and shortcomings in the award 127

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process, and an understanding arose that the AKAA would need to adapt and address these as they arose moving forward. Indeed, it has been the case for many of the award cycles that the Steering Committee has had to address issues that arise out of each cycle and attempt to reconcile them for the one that follows. In an attempt to minimize the possible difficulties of the first cycle, a purposeful decision was taken to not have any formal or social criteria of excellence be under consideration by the Master Jury; rather, each project was viewed based on its own merits. However, architectural excellence was not enough for a project to be declared a winning one.14 The intention for the first cycle was that five prizes would be given out without promoting a particular architectural style or idea; however, when the Jury announced the winners in 1980, 15 were declared, defined under seven different themes (Serageldin 1994, 13). This indicates that issues arose during the selection of the winners that did not conform to any pre-existing ideas of what would classify a winning project as being worthy of the honour. In retroactively explaining why the announced winners of the first cycle were three times the original number intended, Ismail Serageldin, an Egyptian architect and planner who served as a member of later Master Juries and Steering Committees,15 cited an August 1983 memo that highlighted two issues which needed to be addressed moving forward and that explained the approach to be taken by the subsequent award briefs from 1986 Juries onward: the scope and coverage of the award (Serageldin 1994, 13). This showed an awareness of the difficulties the AKAA faced and would continue to face due to the far-reaching, all-encompassing nature of the award. Keeping in mind the vast scope and coverage of the AKAA, the Committee members and Jurists highlighted three architectural challenges that needed to be considered when determining how the scope of the award needed to alter: the protection of ‘at-risk’ heritage in the Muslim world; the needs of the poor through shelters and/or other constructions; and the need to create a new architectural vocabulary and means of visual expression for Muslim societies that needed to define themselves in what was then perceived to be a very rapidly changing world (Serageldin 1994, 13). This last challenge was seen as a key requirement as—at that time—the majority of areas that the AKAA encompasses within the definition of ‘the Muslim world’ had basic concerns similar to most developing countries: providing shelter for the poor and fighting disease, malnutrition, illiteracy, high infant mortality, and short life expectancy (Serageldin 1994, 12).16 This three-part definition of the scope of the AKAA was formally adopted during the fourth awards ceremony held in October 1989 in Cairo, establishing firmly in place criteria for what needs were to be enshrined within the constructs of future potential award winners. Despite these criteria being established, due to the sheer scope and coverage of the award in many instances named winners did not appear to have much in common with each other (Serageldin 1994, 13). The broad definition of the Muslim world meant that projects from West Africa to Southeast Asia were able to be put forth, as were those that examined both rural and urban needs. In addition, neither individual architects nor new constructions or projects still in the design stage could be considered (Attoe 1994, 105), so while these limitations were put in place the totality of projects which could be encompassed and nominated was still vast. This complexity was likely a contributing factor to one of the primary critiques of the AKAA, that it was—and in some ways still is—viewed as having a very opaque selection process. In essence, the world saw the emergence of the award every three years without really understanding how and why the selection of the winners occurred. Serageldin put this down to a lack of clarity in the public message of the AKAA, which, to his mind, could have been fixed by conveying more widely and clearly the seriousness of the award and its importance as the most detailed award of its kind, rather than the relatively short press statements which accompanied each announcement of the award winners to date (Serageldin 1994, 13).17 Likely the communication strategy had been hampered by how complex the award was in comparison to others. To combat this, the Master Jury of the 1993–1995 cycle introduced for the first time to the public aspects of the decision-making process. To do so, 128

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they asked that their proceedings be transcribed and made available to scholars as evidence of their discourse and debate; excerpts of these proceedings have since been available in the resultant publications from each awards cycle.18 This was done to give an element of transparency to the process of choosing the winners, and to share with a wider public the different levels on which the winners could be appreciated.19 In a 1995 speech in which he discussed this, His Highness specifically pointed out this fact to highlight what he referred to as the broader value of the award—that the winners were to be considered not as final, definite solutions to be perfectly replicated elsewhere but as projects which could trigger debates and contribute to the emergence of new solutions within the confines of the discussions which emerged. It is important to note that these were not to be considered and promoted only within a Muslim environment, but universally.20 Additionally, the desire was that by making aspects of the decision-making process available to a broader audience the award could, firstly, contribute to the wider critical discourse in the field and, secondly, further the discussion of how the award winners contributed to Muslim societies. For example, the 12 winning projects of the 1993–1995 cycle were grouped into three themes, and it was publicized that the reasons for their presence included that they could contribute to architectural and social discourse on a global scale, not just in the Muslim world, highlighting that there were elements of the projects which were generic enough that they could be replicated anywhere.21 Since aspects of the Master Juries’ discussions began to be made available to a wider audience, the output of the award has become more freely accessible as well. This has been primarily through Archnet, the website conceptualized and created through collaboration between the AKTC and MIT.22 Launched in 1998, it has become the largest online database of Islamic architecture in the world, and the material which is available on it includes digital copies of the publications which are a result of each awards cycle—each of which includes a version of the Master Jury deliberations.23 In addition, all the research documentation relating to the shortlisted projects surveyed by technical teams since the establishment of the AKAA is available there (there is also a full archive of this material held in Zurich, where the headquarters of the AKAA is based). Through these means, there are materials, discussions, critiques and the like available to anyone who wishes to search for them. In this way, it can therefore be said that there is the potential for a wider public discourse around the award, and one which furthermore has the prospective capacity to allow for input from and interaction with said public. Despite this potential, however, this latter point cannot be said to be the case, and in this way there is still a critique which can be made of the selection processes of the AKAA—there is no public contribution to the discourse which surrounds the selection of the award parameters or winners. While true that the projects nominated for the award in each cycle are submitted by individuals outside of the Aga Khan programs, these individuals have also been referred to as ‘designated professionals’ from around the Muslim world.24 Each awards cycle sees the establishment of a new Steering Committee, headed by His Highness, and a Master Jury. While the Steering Committee does see the return of members in sequential cycles (Nathoo 2016), for each cycle a new Master Jury is selected by the Committee. There is no public engagement with this decision, it being made by the award office and its director (ibid.). Furthermore, it is the Steering Committee which establishes the criteria for each awards cycle and the themes which are to be addressed, as well as the long-term planning of the award. Beyond the fundamental criteria discussed earlier, those established for each new awards cycle necessarily must be fluid as they are altered and adapted every three years. Recognizing the need to further explain the process of choosing the award winners, in his 2001 speech for the AKAA presentation, His Highness stated that the Steering Committee was made up of distinguished scholars and professionals from various fields and—he made sure to add—from different faiths. Each awards cycle meant that this committee would carry out new deliberations and define what the brief was which the Master Jury was to follow. Once the Master Jury had been selected by the Steering Committee, they were then free to interpret the brief established by the 129

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Committee, determine their own definitions of what it actually contained, and then use their interpretations to deliberate among the various projects which had been nominated for a given awards cycle.25 Once the nominated projects have been given to the Master Jury for consideration and chosen projects shortlisted, the only ‘public’ aspect of the deliberation process that determines the final winners that can be seen to have a bearing on the outcome of the award is the use of technical reviewers and on-site research teams, who thoroughly document each site. Based upon their findings, which are presented back to the Master Jury, the latter then makes the decision as to who the winners will be. It seems to be the case, however, that at certain stages various aspects of the whole process remain in a state of ambiguity. For example, the meaning of the award criteria established by the Steering Committee for each cycle is open to interpretation by the Master Jury.26 By extension, this would imply that the criterion set by the Steering Committee has an element of fluidity to it, but only at the discretion of the Master Jury. To emphasize this, it is worth making note of the following: in his speech for the second presentation of the awards cycle in 1983, His Highness made a point of mentioning that the Master Jury’s decisions on the winners are entirely their own as it maintained the integrity of the award.27 It was the Master Jury which determined what they would choose to emphasize or focus on within the parameters set for them by the Steering Committee.

The Role of Architecture Within the Context of the AKAA All institutions of the AKDN have the same guiding principles for the work they carry out. These are threefold: the promotion of a community’s ability to have self-sustaining development which contributes to the long-term advancement of the local economy and social harmony; that local communities should be active participants in all development efforts; and that there should be a shared responsibility between the AKDN networks and the local communities to bring about positive change.28 What is clear is the heavy emphasis on the continued engagement with and participation of the local communities benefitting from the AKDN schemes, something that the AKAA has exemplified not only from its absorption into the AKTC but also from its very inception in 1977. Thus, since its creation, the AKAA placed notions of architectural engagement with the community and issues of sustainability at the heart of its being. This emphasis is also indicated by the fact that the AKAA recognizes only architectural projects that have been functionally in use for at least a year, rather than single architects, new constructions or designs on paper (Attoe 1994, 105). Other than the emphasis placed on the architectural enhancement of the Muslim world, this is one of the aspects that makes the AKAA stand apart from other prestigious international architectural awards, such as the Pritzker Architecture Prize, given to a single living architect for his or her achievements in the field of architecture, or the RIBA Stirling Prize, which recognizes a building deemed to be the ‘best’ built that year. What, then, can we consider the role of architecture itself to be within the confines of the AKAA? Firmly believing that humanity is instructed to leave the world a ‘better place’ than when they entered it, His Highness perceives one of his duties to be to increase the quality of life for future generations through the built environment,29 with an emphasis on constructing for the general population and, in particular, for the benefit of the poor, a belief of his which has been long-standing. Highlighting this in a 2001 interview, His Highness noted that one of the things that the award tries to respond to is not how architects drive change but how society itself does.30 Indeed, what will emerge throughout the discussion in this chapter is the role of the AKAA as a facilitator of discourse revolving around how architecture can drive societal change. In this sense, within the context of the AKAA, architecture can be seen as an idea, rather than a thing itself. This is especially true when we consider, for example, the stress the award places on the need to have ideas from and aspects of winning projects be replicable, both within the Muslim world and globally. 130

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For example, one of the impetuses behind His Highness’s establishment of the AKAA was the desire to bring attention to the needs of the rural environment. One of the driving forces of mass urban dwellings inhabited by the poor is the migration of rural citizens to urban centres as a means of improving their economic quality of life. However, this created the problem of housing for these exceptionally poor populations within the urban environment. In regard to this, His Highness calls attention to an incredibly important ideal and one which the AKAA can be seen to be a catalyst for: if improvements in rural communities were beneficial enough, if those populations were taught to self-build—not just shelter but also sewage systems, facilities for clean water, open spaces, medical spaces—then the mass migration of these individuals to urban centres would drop.31 This notion is something which would have global ramifications, and so despite the fact that His Highness raised awareness of this phenomenon and the potential solutions in relation to rural migration within the Muslim world, the suggested solutions would be applicable everywhere. While true that the AKAA serves as a facilitator of discourse, it must also be said that it does appear to actually push forward specific ideas relating to social change and responsibility—but always through the medium of the built environment. This can be seen via the seminars associated with each awards cycle and through its own reputation and output, including publications and lecture series. We make this claim despite a stress by individuals associated with the award that it serves merely as a catalyst for change, to encourage but not itself direct such change.32 However, it does seem that soon after its creation the award morphed into a means by which it did actually direct the discussion and creation of architecture. In his speech in Marrakesh on 24 November 1986 recognizing the award winners of the 1984–1986 cycle, His Highness declared that the award winners were those who had ‘courageously and generously broadened their research and provided responses to the questions we raised almost a decade ago.’33 Implicit in this statement, then, is the ambiguity we can perceive within the claimed role of the AKAA; not only do we see the idea of the award as a means of furthering the discourse and as a catalyst of change, but also through the process it claims credit for the questions raised via the award, for the resultant discussion and, ultimately, the architectural commissions which ‘responded’ to them and were declared winners of the cycle.

Case Studies of Winning Projects As mentioned, one of the primary concerns of the AKAA is the emphasis it has placed on the social aspect(s) of the declared winners’ projects, and its stress for these projects to inherently advance the lives of the local communities in which they were placed. It has been clearly evident that the populations benefitting from the winning architectural spaces have seen an improvement in their quality of life. With these facts in mind, it is clear that the AKAA itself serves as a social catalyst for change through the recognition and advancement of the ethos behind the winning projects. Having just completed its thirteenth awards cycle (2014–2016), with 6 winners named from 348 nominated, the AKAA has had too many winners, covering a multitude of regions and building types/architectural spaces, to be able to discuss more than a few here. In an attempt to indicate the breadth of time covered—1980 to the present—and the AKAA’s emphasis on social engagement— three winning projects will be highlighted here, from the 1978–1980, 1993–1995, and 2011–2013 cycles. Each of these projects specifically addressed the needs of low-income population groups and can be seen to have served as a social catalyst for change The first of these is the Nianing Agricultural Training Centre in Dakar, Senegal, from the 1978– 1980 cycle. Planning began on the complex in the first half of 1976 and the project was completed in July 1977. In addition to following an ethos that emphasized, and required, a constructed space created by local labour and local and inexpensive materials, and open to a wide array of local usages, this project further created a location in which the local youth population was introduced to new methods of agricultural production—both in a classroom setting and through practical experience in 131

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farming and its associated skills (Holod 1983, 70). The engagement with the local population at the grass-roots level in the creation of this space thus permeated every element of its creation. Economically, the use of local materials and labour meant that money was put into the local economy not only through the consumption of the required materials of construction but also through the employment of a local work force. The existence of the Training Centre then had a positive impact on the subsequent and future livelihoods of the villagers through the learning environment which was created. In addition to the students who attended the school benefitting from the teaching and tutelage they received, their own learned knowledge was then shared with the wider society once the new graduates returned to their own communities after two years of training. The skills they learned, and then shared, included training in agriculture, animal husbandry, hygiene and first aid (ibid.). In examining the actual architectural space created, a barrel-vaulted structural system used to create the rooms and chambers of the training centre was built using only local materials of sand and cement (Figure 11.1); because there was no imported steel or timber employed the extra expense required for such materials was spared (Holod 1983, 71). The methods of construction and the practicalities of building that had to be taken into consideration also impacted on the advancement of the wider community. Due to ‘inadequate workmanship’ not being tolerated, when walls built by the local labour groups were deemed to have been constructed incorrectly, they were destroyed and rebuilt. In addition, the masonry was left uncovered—going against the local custom of covering it—which meant that the standard of the bricks and bricklaying needed to be of a great calibre; this led to the craft being learned to a higher standard (ibid.). A final note about this particular project should be made regarding its recognition by the AKAA as a social institution and how it exemplified the condition set by the award to enhance notions of social architecture. Eight projects based on the same type of vault construction employed at the Nianing Agricultural Training Centre were completed elsewhere in Senegal, and each was constructed using local labour, local materials and other community resources, ensuring that their costs were considerably lower than more conventional means of construction in the area at the time; this was further proof of the self-sufficiency which came about through architectural means (Holod 1983, 75).34 The second case study is a project which highlighted the necessary need for affordable housing for the rural poor migrating to urban centres. It is clear that the lack of affordable social housing is an issue that the AKAA has continuously desired to address and is one of the challenges continually highlighted by His Highness. In the early 1990s, for example, the creation of housing for low-income communities was identified as one of the major requirements for Islamic cities (Davidson 1995, 25), and with the continued mass migration it remains so, and not just for Islamic cities but globally. In the 1993–1995 awards cycle, the Khuda-ki-Basti Incremental Development Scheme in Hyderabad, Pakistan, implemented in 1986 and completed in 1989 and ongoing since, was one of the winners in the theme of ‘architecture as a part of critical discourse on society.’ This project was lauded by members of the Master Jury as it not only provided shelter for the homeless but also allowed them to create their own communities. The scheme was described in the following words: The key is access to land that cannot be appropriated by the middle classes. The project is based on a sensitive participatory process that identifies the truly poor and homeless through a screening process that involves a two-week waiting period at a reception site. It gives the participants a sense of dignity by providing access to ownership and involves them, through payments, in the selection of the improvements to be provided. The actual housing is built incrementally as individual incomes allow; the social transformation is profound and inspiring. . . . This project, which has successfully reached the apparently

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Figure 11.1 Agricultural Training Centre, Nianing, Senegal.

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unreachable, is financially sustainable and economically viable, and deserves widespread recognition and emulation. (Davidson 1995, 57) We thus see an architectural project which had profound implications for the societal advancement of some of the most destitute locals, engaging with them in a manner that created new social institutions. By allowing them to claim land themselves, rather than through the construction of housing upon it, a system was created which saw the land settled by individuals first, followed by the building of shelter; after, infrastructure was incorporated into the area as well (Davidson 1995, 58). In addition, because the plots of land purchased by the families were arranged in a planned system, unplanned slums in the area were controlled, which is to say that they did not appear (Figure 11.2). This scheme therefore also eliminated the sprawl associated with many areas of low housing that began, in essence, as slums. Moreover, the project had a social dimension to it—by creating an environment in which poor families were able to own the land on which they then constructed their home, it permitted the integration of the urban poor into ‘mainstream society’ (ibid.). After undertaking the two-week screening and making a down payment of 1,000 rupees, a family was allocated a plot of land; the full price of the plot (at that time 9,600 Rp/$50.00) was to be paid over an eight-year period (ibid.). As more payments were made, infrastructure was developed and utilities for the dwellings put into place based upon the needs and desires of the population inhabiting the development scheme (ibid.). Completely unsubsidized, this project permitted the creation of low-income housing, social mobility and inclusion, and community—the neighbourhood was provided with health and education facilities as well (Davidson 1995, 62). On this project, it was commented that The difference between this settlement and the slum growths in Karachi and Hyderabad is its planned layout, conditions that permit permanently ownership and serviced utilities. . . . The Khuda-ki-Basti concept is centred around the home, the implication being that a better home leads to an improved life. It has stimulated and generated interest in many professional groups who deal with housing, especially because affordability is the basic concept. (Davidson 1995, 62–63) In conversational excerpts of the Master Jury’s deliberations, the Khuda-ki-Basti project was noted as being the only scheme submitted in the 1993–1995 awards cycle that ‘convincingly’ impacted the poorest members of society, in that it allowed the homeless to purchase property and have the basic human right of shelter (Davidson 1995, 73). It was precisely because the AKAA continued to place emphasis on recognizing the need for low-income, social housing that this project was declared a winner. This was clear by the fact that the Master Jury did not necessarily believe the architecture of the Khuda-ki-Basti to be exemplary; in fact, in comparison to other project winners for the cycle— including others which addressed the need for social housing for the poor—it was certainly deemed inferior (Davidson 1995, 74–75).35 However, it was the social aspect of the architectural project and the self-sufficiency built into it which permitted the purchase of land and the construction of houses and infrastructure that led to its prize. Furthermore, the replicability of the scheme was also a deciding factor in its winning as it had more ideas and concepts employed in the scheme that could be extrapolated to other projects of a similar ilk. The final project to serve as an example of the AKAA’s propulsion of social engagement with architecture is the revitalization of Birzeit Historic Centre, in Birzeit, Palestine, a 5-year project commissioned in 2006 and a winner of the 2011–2013 awards cycle. The pilot in a program to conserve Palestinian heritage while at the same time boosting the local socio-economic climate of declining/ declined villages in the West Bank,36 hallmarks of this project which led to it being one of the AKAA winners included community participation, the enhancement, restoration and conservation of the 134

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Figure 11.2 Khuda-ki-Basti Incremental Development Scheme, Hyderabad, Pakistan.

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village, and major improvements to the civil infrastructure of the village—thus ensuring improvement in the quality of life for the residents (Mostafavi 2013, 112–113). Recognized by the Master Jury was the way in which the project promoted the healing of the community and reclaiming of heritage while at the same time transforming the lives of the villagers living there (Mostafavi 2013, 116), as well as the fact that it promoted long-term development; this was especially true as it was the first of 50 villages intended for the same treatment and served as a prototype which could be replicated throughout the West Bank and beyond. The concentration of the conservation efforts was on upgrading the infrastructure and restoring the historical urban fabric and main buildings of the Centre (Figure 11.3) (Mori 2013, 48). While differing from the previous two examples in that this was a pre-existing site rather than a brand-new purpose-built one, the same ideals promoted by the AKAA are seen to be present: the conservation of the site not only provided employment for the villagers who were still there37 but also contributed to the revitalization of traditional crafts;38 local materials were used throughout the entire conservation project; the results of the project could easily be applied elsewhere in both an urban and rural context. Important to highlight also is the fact that the conservation of the historic centre was not the ultimate goal of the project, but rather it provided a framework of infrastructure that allowed for the town and local community to be transformed (Mostafavi 2013, 13).

The Impact of the AKAA: Does It Actually Promote Social Change? Based upon the discussion of the AKAA thus far, can it be said that the award actually promotes social change? Its methodology means that in fact the award is not meant to be considered as an actual producer of social change, but rather as an entity which facilitates the discourse that can lead to such change. But as mentioned earlier, this is an area in which ambiguity can be seen to be present. From the beginning of its creation, the award did not intend to be a means through which a ‘school of architecture’ was created—the award winners were not meant to be indicative of support for a particular school of thought. However, according to His Highness, it was soon realized that the award had an impact on ethical and aesthetic values of architecture, and that an educational role for the AKAA was inherently necessary.39 There is thus acknowledgement of the fact that the award does drive forward a particular way of thinking of architecture, establishing a framework for what should be considered ‘good and important.’40 The winning projects therefore set a standard against which other architectural endeavours are judged; conversely, this could be taken to mean that projects which are not nominated, or not selected as finalists for the award, are lacking in something as they do not conform to the standards set by the Steering Committee and Master Jury. In fact, it is the winners chosen by the Master Jury that are deemed to provide a ‘renewed definition of excellence in architecture.’41 Does the AKAA in fact then promote social engagement, either consciously or unconsciously? The ambiguity continues. According to Özkan, it was the fifth cycle of the award that ‘established the social responsibility of architecture as a core concern of the award.’42 It seems fair to say that there are aspects of the award that have been and still are very much concerned with the framing of a narrative which was meant to be expounded upon and ultimately shape how people thought about architecture and its role in the advancement of humanity. This occurred and occurs in both overt and covert ways. For the former, it is necessary only to look to the seminars which have been run in conjunction with the award presentations as part of the award system. In 1987, for example, a seminar was held on architectural criticism which addressed critical engagement with architecture and attempted to develop a conceptual framework which was meant to ultimately be a way for ‘Muslim people’ to approach architecture and its role.43 Another example just a year later, in 1988, was at a seminar in Zanzibar which focused on the issue of housing and what different strategies governments and communities could adopt in order to address the housing need for a growing population.44 It is not 136

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Figure 11.3 Revitalization of Birzeit Historic Centre, Bir Zayt, Palestine.

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possible to say that there is no attempt by the AKAA to produce specific ideas of social change when such events—and these are only two of many—take place in order to do exactly that. One of the aspects of the AKAA stressed in this chapter, albeit only a part of the totality of the award as a whole, is that elements of the winning projects should be replicable, both within the Muslim world and—as stressed earlier—on a global stage. While it is fair to say that the AKAA is unique in many ways, the most obvious—and probably the most uncomfortable for those outside of its sphere—is that it takes as its axis of being the Muslim world, and the spirit of Islam as its fundamental reason for being. Together, these two factors indicate a religio-regional limit from which the award winner can be chosen.45 The discomfort which can arise from this among ‘secular’ professionals and architectural societies can be described using a philosophical reference by Hamid Dabashi, who writes of the idea that when people from a geographic area other than Europe make their idea of place/space their own central idea—what he terms their ‘ground zero of thought’—this tends to make those from outside these particular geographic regions very uneasy (Dabashi 2015, 10). This is especially true as we can consider the AKAA to be an avenue of creating discourse that has meaning and relevance firstly within the religio-regional limits of the Muslim world, but which is also replicable outside of that sphere in, by extension, spaces that fall outside of these limits—namely, non-Muslim countries. This leads to another of the themes which emerge when examining the history of the AKAA, the importance of removing the discussion of architectural heritage from a diametrically opposed definition of East and West, but rather creating an environment which views architecture in the Muslim world and its impact on societies on a global stage and which gives it a global platform. It has been imperative that the building projects nominated for the award were concerned with the human and cultural facets of society, and, by doing so, challenged the perceived notion that Islamic architectural heritage was universally homogenous (Nanji 1994, 9).46 Despite the concerns raised during the evolution of the award and the critiques which can still be made, one of the hallmarks of the winning projects is that issues which they address in the Muslim world were and are issues also facing the wider world, and this was and is true of not only developing countries but also ‘first-world’ countries subject to social problems as well. This was stressed at the beginning of the AKAA’s existence, when His Highness noted that ‘it may just be that, as the Award highlights the search of the Muslim world for an architecture centred in man and proclaiming the potential of life, an example is given to the whole world of how this can be done,’47 and again a decade later, when Özkan claimed that One of the central themes in the deliberations and written report of the 1992 Master Jury is the conviction that these 9 winning projects represent solutions not limited to the Islamic world— the specific constituency of the AKAA—but which are universal in nature. (Özkan 1994, 92) Today, it is clear that this emphasis is still very much in place. One of the far-reaching elements of the award is that winners have never been chosen based upon the prevailing tastes or aesthetics favoured by architects and architecture at any given time. Instead, the Steering Committee and Master Jury have looked beyond this, attempting to identify projects that are important for their ethical and practical elements of construction and application, through identifying the needs of a specific local population and responding to them through the creation of specific built projects.48 It should be noted that while the Steering Committee establishes themes for each award cycle, at heart it continues to remain true to the inherent qualities promoted by the AKAA. Regardless of what theme or themes is/are chosen, the fact remains that there is always a social target to them and the intention is that the projects highlight and promote the importance of long-term architectural solutions to societal advancement. 138

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On another level, the AKAA can be seen to have many different types of impacts on the production of architecture and the built environment. The award has apparently reached such a state of success that it is at times used as a bargaining chip for architectural firms trying to woo clients, with promises being made that if their firm is chosen, they will bring the AKAA to the client.49 Additionally, the AKAA has come to influence what architectural clients determine they want from their commissions. This has occurred because of the fact that the award is given to projects—not architects—and so is given to everyone involved in the former, including the clients, architects and financers. In fact, anyone who has made a contribution to the project is deemed to be a part of the winning ensemble.50 Furthermore, the award has expanded the definition of architecture, altering what should be considered as architecture, and expanding on what its purpose and role in society are and should be. These are incredible consequences to be had from the existence of the AKAA. We see then that pressures and patterns of change in Muslim societies lead to creativity and opportunities in the built environment,51 but the problems addressed by the award are global in their significance. One such example of this can be seen in the influence that the award had on financing structures in the developing world. In 1989, with the awarding of the AKAA to the Grameen Bank Housing Project in Bangladesh, one of the elements considered to be of utmost importance was the fact that there was a collateral-free, microcredit mechanism in place for those who lived at the site. Due to that project winning the award, the concept of microcredit gained wider renown and an awareness of the financing system was raised, thereby helping many more individuals outside of this one particular project.52

Conclusion: The AKAA as an Impetus for Social Change One of the goals of this volume is to debate whether socially engaged architecture empowers those whom it is constructed for and helps to combat socio-economic exclusion or, despite the best of intentions, actually inadvertently contributes to it. It is clear that from the beginning of the AKAA’s inception and from the foregoing case studies and discussion that an inherent ethos exists within the constructs of the award which promotes and pushes forward an architectural discourse and agenda that contributes to vast improvements in the quality of life for communities in the Muslim world. Quoting His Highness, Attoe brings attention to the fact that there was a specified intent of the award to encourage an architecture in the spirit of Islam, an architecture that would enrich the future physical environment of the Muslim world [and] recognise completed projects which meet today’s needs while in close harmony with their own culture and climate. (Attoe 1994, 105) Architecture and society are inherently a duo, with one inextricably linked to the other; it must be realized that at its most fundamental purpose architecture is created for a society, or for elements of that society. The AKAA continues to embody His Highness’s belief that architecture is essential for the creation, sustaining and advancement of social development and improvement of humanity’s quality of life. The ways and means through which the projects submitted for the AKAA responded to the needs of people and society have been one of the key ways through which we can see that the AKAA has promoted social change and diffused the notion throughout the Muslim world and beyond. It must be realized that the contents of this chapter address only a fragment of the AKAA’s societal impact; the award is a complex phenomenon that has multiple narrations in which social engagement is but only one thread. Completing the tapestry of the award requires awareness of the fact that while the award promotes social good, community engagement and empowerment, these are entangled with the other narrations of the award. 139

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The discussion and projects highlighted here clearly indicate that the AKAA winners have responded to the needs of the poor through improvements to the built environment via developments and advancements to societal infrastructure. The projects were seen to be extra valuable as they were able to be replicated and led to a sense of empowerment within the local communities they served; through this, such communities were not seen by themselves to be receiving aid or charity, but were active participants in their own evolution to improved social welfare (Serageldin 1994, 16). Encapsulating the ongoing ethos of the AKAA, Hami Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, who has served both as a member of the AKAA Master Jury and, in 2011–2013, on the Steering Committee, wrote: A world has still to be built . . . nothing must deter us from this truth. A worn-out world deserves our urgent attention. An unborn world deserves our creative intelligence. A world has to be built as best we know it, and as best we can do it, because that is our debt to the past and our duty to the future. (Bhabha 2013, 343)

Notes 1 ‘About the Aga Khan Trust for Culture,’ 2018, www.akdn.org/our-agencies/aga-khan-trust-culture. 2 Underneath the umbrella of the AKTC are several branches which focus on architecture within the Muslim world, including: The Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Archnet, and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. For information on each of these, see www.akdn.org/ our-agencies/aga-khan-trust-culture. 3 ‘Aga Khan Award for Architecture Ceremony, Solo,’ www.akdn.org/speech/his-highness-aga-khan/agakhan-award-architecture-ceremony-solo. Speech delivered by His Highness in Solo, Indonesia, on 25 November 1995 at the presentation of the AKAA winners of the 1993–1995 cycle. 4 ‘Aga Khan Award for Architecture Ceremony, Samarkand,’ www.akdn.org/speech/his-highness-aga-khan/ aga-khan-award-architecture-ceremony-samarkand. Speech delivered by His Highness in Samarqand, Uzbekistan on 19 September 1992 at the AKAA ceremony for the 1990–1992 cycle (5th cycle). 5 An architect by training, Özkan served as deputy secretary general of the AKAA in 1983, and then as secretary general until 2006. 6 Suha Özkan, ‘The Aga Khan Award for Architecture,’ in The Aga Khan Award for Architecture: Building for Tomorrow, ed. Azim Nanji (London: Academy Editions, 1994), 92. 7 His Highness the Aga Khan, ‘Preface’ to Architecture and Community: Building in the Islamic World Today, ed. Renata Holod (New York: Aperture, Islamic Publications, 1983), 11. Referencing Pakistan, His Highness remarked,‘There, better perhaps than anywhere else, the richness and glory of both the past and the creations of today can be seen in the context of a vibrant and exciting concern for the environment. For it is indeed for that concern that an award has been established.’ 8 Robert Ivy, ‘Interview With His Highness the Aga Khan,’ 31 August, 2001, www.akdn.org/speech/ interview-his-highness-aga-khan. 9 His Highness, ‘Preface,’ 11. 10 ‘The Aga Khan Award for Architecture,’ 2018, www.akdn.org/our-agencies/aga-khan-trust-culture/agakhan-award-architecture/about. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 The 2014–2016 awards cycle winners were announced on 3 October 2016, in Abu Dhabi. Six projects from a shortlist of 19 were chosen. For further information, see www.akdn.org/press-release/2016-agakhan-award-architecture-recipients-announced. 14 His Highness, ‘Preface,’ 12. ‘We are only beginning to grasp the social, intellectual, aesthetic, cultural and historical needs and emotions of the Muslim world. To impose from the very outset of the Award process formal or even social criteria of excellence would be not only an exercise in vanity and folly, but a profound moral wrong. We only know the issues and the problems. We know that social changes of momentous proportions are taking place everywhere. We know that expectations have arisen for both a good life and a good Muslim life. We know that we are far too ignorant of our past and far too careless in preserving it. We

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know that Muslim lands are subjected to pressure and temptations from cultures that are not Muslim, even though nearly all Muslim lands are independent of foreign rule.’ 15 He was a member of the Master Jury for the 1981–1983 awards cycle, and on the Steering Committee for the 1984–1986, 1987–1989, and 1990–1992 cycles. 16 Ibid., 12. This was deemed especially important because the population and economic forecast then determined that within the following decade (1994–2004), the Muslim world would grow much larger in population and be more impoverished, and that basic shelter would become a primary concern for many of these individuals. 17 Serageldin, Ismail. 1994. ‘The Aga Khan Award for Architecture: The Anatomy of an Approach to Promoting Architectural Excellence,’ in The Aga Khan Award for Architecture: Building for Tomorrow, ed. Azim Nanji. London: Academy Editions, 13. ‘Only briefly has the Award started to do justice to its mission of architectural criticism, when it sponsored the seminar on architectural criticism in Malta in 1987 and the subsequent seminar on the expressions of Islam in buildings held in Indonesia in 1990. But the lack of continuity in both presence and discourse made these appear as isolated events rather than parts of an ongoing search, which they were.’ 18 The publications which have resulted from each awards cycle from 1980 until 2010 are available online at Archnet: http://archnet.org/collections/47. 19 ‘Aga Khan Award for Architecture Ceremony, Solo.’ 20 Ibid. 21 ‘Creative Discourse for Creative Transformations: Report of the 1995 Award Master Jury,’ in Architecture Beyond Architecture: Creativity and Social Transformations in Islamic Cultures, the 1995 Aga Khan Award for Architecture, ed. Cynthia C. Davidson (London: Academy Editions, 1995), 20. 22 www.archnet.org. 23 ‘Aga Khan Award Recipients (Cycles),’ https://archnet.org/collections/663/details. From this webpage it is possible to access documentation relating to each awards cycle. 24 ‘2001 Award Presentation Ceremony of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture,’ www.akdn.org/speech/ his-highness-aga-khan/2001-award-presentation-ceremony-aga-khan-award-architecture. Speech by His Highness, Aleppo, Syria, 6 November 2001. What is unclear is the following: does this mean that their professions are ones which have been deemed appropriate to nominate for the award? Or does it mean that the individuals themselves are ‘designated’ as being appropriate nominators? 25 ‘2001 Award Presentation Ceremony of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.’ 26 Ibid. 27 ‘Aga Khan Award Ceremony, Istanbul,’ www.akdn.org/speech/his-highness-aga-khan/aga-khan-award ceremony-istanbul. Speech delivered by His Highness in Istanbul, Turkey, 4 September 1983, at the awards ceremony for the 1981–1983 cycle (2nd cycle). 28 ‘AKDN’s Approach to Development,’ 2018, www.akdn.org/about-us/akdns-approach-development. 29 Robert Ivy, ‘Interview With His Highness the Aga Khan,’ Aiglemont, France, 31 August 2001, www.akdn. org/speech/interview-his-highness-aga-khan. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 ‘Aga Khan Award Ceremony, Istanbul.’ ‘The Award will, I hope, now build on this catalytic role, by becoming a medium for the exchange of information and reflection through which everyone concerned with the built environment can gain the stimulus to think about the deeper implications of what they are doing. Thus at the highest level of the Award we should be able to assist the decision makers of today to become more aware of current concerns and ideas. . . . At the level of research we could enlarge its contribution to the international discourse about architecture. At the academic level we could utilise the dossiers resulting from nominations, which are in themselves a valuable if not unique record of contemporary thought and practice, to assist those institutions where the professionals of the future are trained.’ 33 ‘Aga Khan Award for Architecture Ceremony, Marrakech,’ www.akdn.org/speech/his-highness-aga-khan/ aga-khan-award-architecture-ceremony-marrakech. Speech given by His Highness in Marrakech, Morocco, 24 November 1986, at the award presentation for the 1984–1986 cycle. 34 The eight other projects were: chicken coops for the agricultural centre; grain silos, Ndiarao; a private school, Nianing village; a chapel, Sandiara; a nursery school, Dakar; an intermediary technical school, Nguekohe; a centre for intermediate practical education, Koubanao; and a Quranic school, Melika. It should be noted that each of these was also a space for the advancement of, and of great benefit to, the community. 35 It was stressed in the discussion of the winning projects in 1995 that for some, including the Khuda-ki-Basti, ‘If we reward policy, we must make it clear that we are not rewarding architecture.’ 36 Suad Amiry, ‘Our Story,’ n.d., www.riwaq.org/our-story.

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37 When work began on Birzeit, only 183 individuals—from 36 families—lived in the village; of those, 20 rented their dwellings and the other 16 families owned theirs. Additionally, only three businesses were still in operation—a bakery, grocery store and mechanic’s shop. See Mostafavi,‘Revitalisation of the Birzeit Historic Centre,’ 113. 38 ‘2013 Winning Projects: Revitalisation of Birzeit Historic Centre,’ www.akdn.org/sites/akdn/files/media/ documents/AKAA%20press%20kits/2013%20AKAA/Revitalisation%20of%20Birzeit%20Historic%20 Centre%20-%20English.pdf. 39 Ivy, ‘Interview With His Highness the Aga Khan.’ 40 ‘A Quarter Century of Change: Interview with Suha Özkan, Secretary General of the Award’, www. akdn.org/speech/suha-%C3%B6zkan-secretary-general-award/quarter-century-change-interview-suha%C3%B6zkan-secretary. Geneva, Switzerland, 10 July 2004. In this interview, one of the points made is that the Master Jury—through their overall selection of winners since the AKAA was established—has set this standard. 41 ‘Aga Khan Award for Architecture Ceremony, Samarkand.’ 42 ‘A Quarter Century of Change: Interview With Suha Özkan.’ 43 ‘Aga Khan Award for Architecture Ceremony, Cairo,’ www.akdn.org/speech/his-highness-aga-khan/agakhan-award-architecture-ceremony-cairo. Speech by His Highness in Cairo, Egypt, 15 October 1989, for the 1987–1989 awards cycle. 44 Ibid. 45 Regarding the religious element of this duo, this is not to say that the nominees must be Muslim, or that the project must have been constructed for the use of Muslims—in fact, there have been winners and nominees who have had no Muslim presence in any way associated with the projects. Rather, the nominees must be from somewhere within the geographic boundaries of the Muslim world. 46 ‘Enabling Conversations,’ Introduction to The Aga Khan Award for Architecture: Building for Tomorrow, ed. Azim Nanji (London: Academy Editions, 1994), 9. 47 His Highness, ‘Preface,’ 12. 48 ‘Enabling Conversations,’ 9. 49 ‘A Quarter Century of Change: Interview with Suha Özkan.’ This is a statement made by architectural firms which of course has no basis in fact and offers no guarantee of such a result whatsoever, but it does emphasize the popular awareness and prestige of the award. 50 Ibid. 51 ‘Aga Khan Award for Architecture Ceremony, Samarkand.’ 52 ‘A Quarter Century of Change: Interview with Suha Özkan.’

References Attoe, Wayne. 1994. “The Aga Khan Award for Architecture, a Critical Commentary.” In The Aga Khan Award for Architecture: Building for Tomorrow, edited by Azim Nanji. London: Academy Editions. Bhabha, Hami. 2013. “From Public Space to Public Sphere.” In Architecture Is Life, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi. Zurich: Lars Müller. Dabashi, Hamid. 2015. Can Non-Europeans Think? London: Zed Books. Davidson, Cynthia C., ed. 1995. Architecture Beyond Architecture: Creativity and Social Transformations in Islamic Cultures: The 1995 Aga Khan Award for Architecture. London: Academy Editions. Holod, Renata, ed. 1983. Architecture and Community: Building in the Islamic World Today: The Aga Khan Award for Architecture. New York: Aperture, Islamic Publications. Mori, Toshiko. 2013. “Innovation and Judgement.” In Architecture Is Life, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi. Zurich: Lars Müller. Mostafavi, Mohsen. 2013.“Revitalisation of the Birzeit Historic Centre.” In Architecture Is Life, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi. Zurich: Lars Müller. Nanji, Azim. 1994. The Aga Khan Award for Architecture: Building for Tomorrow. London: Academy Editions. Nathoo, Elisha. 2016. “Hanif Kara Looks Back on Four Decades of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.” The Ismaili. October 3. www.theismaili.org/heritage-expressions/hanif-kara-looks-back-four-decades-agakhan-award-architecture. Özkan. 1994. “The Aga Khan Award for Architecture.” In The Aga Khan Award for Architecture: Building for Tomorrow, edited by Azim Nanji. London: Academy Editions. Serageldin, Ismail. 1994. “The Aga Khan Award for Architecture: The Anatomy of an Approach to Promoting Architectural Excellence.” In The Aga Khan Award for Architecture: Building for Tomorrow, edited by Azim Nanji. London: Academy Editions. 142

12 Sale Ends Soon Epistemological Alternatives to Flying Architects Ijlal Muzaffar

Given the constant flux of Biennale news, exhibition openings, and magazine launches, this perhaps is a story too old to recall. But it is worth reciting, for neither its subject nor its impulse has left us. On November 22, 2006, a lecture by the famous Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas at MIT was turned from slide show to a “conversation with faculty and students” when his PowerPoint presentation refused to work.1 It must have been some failure of technology that the entire tech support apparatus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology couldn’t summon up a solution to make the event unfold as planned. For Koolhaas, however, this was a fortune in disguise, which proved the point of his lecture. We have to plan on the go, not beforehand. This was the topic Koolhaas intended to discuss in light of his eleven-year study of Lagos, the city where, the architect maintained, nothing works as planned and everything is an exercise in constant re-strategizing. For these reasons, Lagos presented, Koolhaas argued, a model for the megacities of the future the world over where planning solutions will have to be improvised on the run. Not everyone had been so enthused by this provocation. Koolhaas’s analysis of Lagos has been criticized in a variety of circles. A New Yorker article on Lagos by George Packer soon followed Koolhaas’s claims and described the architect as part of the group of vanguard researchers who abstracted away the difficulties of life in places like Lagos by framing it as a “hip icon of the latest global trends” (Packer 2006, 66). For Packer the most troubling facet of Koolhaas’s attention on Lagos was the comforting distance of his research from the poverty on the ground, epitomized by the now notorious flight over the city in the helicopter of President Obasanjo with his collaborator and a long-time “photographer of Africa,” Edgar Cleyne. Packer recounts how in his essay “Fragments of a Lecture on Lagos” (2002) Koolhaas “described how his team, on its first visit to the city, was too intimidated to leave its car. Eventually, the group rented the Nigerian President’s helicopter and was granted a more reassuring view” (Packer 2006, 10). This reassuring view was described by Koolhaas in the essay as follows: From the air, the apparently burning garbage heap turned out to be, in fact, a village, an urban phenomenon with a highly organized community living on its crust. . . . What seemed, on ground level, an accumulation of dysfunctional movements, seemed from above an impressive performance, evidence of how well Lagos might perform if it were the third largest city in the world. (Koolhaas 2002, 177) 143

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For Packer, this manner of looking is “not so different from the more common impulse not to look at all,” to reiterate and reinforce the positioning of Lagos squatters as superfluous to globalization (Packer 2006, 75). Evaluating the broad terrain of theoretical responses since the 1980s to the direction of global urbanization, Matthew Gandy, an urban geographer by training, similarly accused Koolhaas of not dealing with the “substantiality” of life in Lagos (Gandy 2005). “Chaos may also be characterized” Gandy writes, as a more sophisticated, resilient and adaptable form of order as Rem Koolhaas has suggested with respect to the dynamics of West African urbanism. The theoretical novelty of such a perspective sits sharply at odds, however, with the capacity for what one might term “avant-garde urbanism” to actually explicate any substantial dimensions to urban change. (Gandy 2005, 31)2 For Gandy, the most critical effect of the architectural avant-garde urbanism like Koolhaas’s has been to draw attention away from the possibility of a “politically driven strategy for the creation of more socially inclusive cities” (Gandy 2005, 42). Indeed, Koolhaas himself has given fodder to these accusations of distance and abstraction. In an interview with Jennifer Sigler for Index magazine, in response to the comment that Lagos “must have been beautiful from a helicopter,” Koolhaas remarked, “The city has these unbelievable—you can only call it abstract—compositions. Red turning into white turning into black. You’ve never seen geometry at that scale in the world” (emphasis added).3 What, however, is not evaluated in these criticisms of Koolhaas’s abstract thinking about urbanization at the supposed periphery is how the impulse to abstract intersects with broader discourses of access and intervention in the global context, for if the objections are limited to the question of abstraction and lack of substantiality, then it seems these concerns have already been answered by William Mangin and John Turner, who, as is well known, resided within the squatter settlements in Lima in the early 1960s precisely to document the “material” and “substantial” experiences of the residents. Turner and Mangin’s reversal of earlier planning approaches was another abstraction itself that worked to incorporate squatter politics and practices into the development discourse under the guise of proclaimed intimacy. How then does the next wave of “abstractions” coming from architects (e.g., Koolhaas) operating on the global platform reiterate the notion of a central periphery within the current circuits of globalization? Here, Perry Anderson’s critical view of the UN’s function in the global geopolitical arena may be helpful (Anderson 2007). Anderson reevaluates the mounting praise of Kofi Annan, the seventh UN secretary general in office from 1997 to 2006, as an independent figure that stood up to dominant political powers on the global stage. Annan, however, Anderson argued, in appearing to stand independent, censored dissenting voices and legitimized the U.S. political agenda, from the mode of intervention in Rwanda to Kosovo, Iraq, and Darfur, and thus was far more associated, albeit transparently, with the dominant political calculations than the most ideologically motivated of previous secretary generals. Anderson’s key point in mounting this critique is this: the role of the UN is not to secure action, political or military. Rather, the role of the UN is to create legitimacy for a particular path of action over others. Modern architecture and planning’s role in the postwar development arena can also be explained in a similar light. In the development discourse, architecture and planning have constantly overstepped their circumscription as tools of implementing particular development approaches and have created legitimacy for economic and policy initiative. This legitimacy, however, is of a different order than the diplomatic negotiations and the resulting resolutions that legitimize political action.

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Architecture and planning constitute the sites where legitimacy is secured before negotiation, framing the possibility of what can be negotiated in the first place. In both their abstract and intimate garbs (Koolhaas or Turner), architecture and planning create legitimacy for particular modes of access into the supposed periphery, modes which are critical to the operation of a host of Third World development approaches. The partial incorporation of the Third World into circuits of global capital was advanced at first along national and regional lines, and nowadays, it is incorporated along what can be called the disseminated, spectacular and discontinuous field of cultural and economic globalization. The shifts from one scale of intervention to another are not discontinuous but form a series of displacements that betray Koolhaas’s provocations to be standing in the same trajectory of development that includes not only Turner and Mangin’s intimate celebrations of creativity of the poor on the ground but also the celebration of their potential labor and initiative by other development experts, like Charles Abrams and Otto Koenigsberger. I have written about Abrams and Koenigsberger’s “self-help” architecture proposals elsewhere (Muzaffar 2012, 2014, 2016). Here, it is important to identify how Koolhaas’s analyses of the rise of modern urban phenomena in different parts of the world have curiously followed Abrams and Koenigsberger’s development missions. In Koolhaas’s seminal book with Bruce Mau, SMLXL, we were given news of a “rogue” Europe rising in Singapore (Koolhaas 1995). There, the hyper modernism of the Pacific Rim was blamed partly on the idealist suggestions of Abrams, Koenigsberger, and Japanese planner Susumu Kobe’s UN mission that had visited the island in 1963. In 2001, Koolhaas appeared in Lagos, once again a city that had previously been exposed to the master planning approach of Abrams, Koenigsberger, and Kobe. Though, in Lagos, Koolhaas doesn’t acknowledge this development precedence by name, he nevertheless situates his analyses as a challenge to the modernist master planning approaches based on “ideas such as carrying capacity, stability, and even order, canonical concepts in the field of urban planning and related social sciences” (Koolhaas 2001, 652). Such proclaimed oppositions, however, are staged on continuing thematics that tie Koolhaas to his precursors in the development arena: Koolhaas reads Lagos as an interconnected and disseminated set of “ingenious, critical alternative systems” (Koolhaas 2001, 652), a nonlinear and shifting arrangement that “resist[s] the notion that Lagos represents an African city en route to become modern” (Koolhaas 2001, 653). Here Koolhaas seems to turn the modernizing, evolutionary narrative of development on its head. “We think it is possible to argue,” Koolhaas asserts, “that Lagos represents a developed, extreme, paradigmatic case study of a city at the forefront of globalizing modernity” (Koolhaas 2001, 653). Saved from being an example of a primitive past in the present, Lagos is projected as being an element of the future of modernity: This is to say that Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather, we may be catching up with Lagos . . . The fact that many of the trends of modern, Western cities can be seen in hyperbolic guise in Lagos suggests that to write about the African city is to write about the terminal condition of Chicago, London, or Los Angeles. (Koolhaas 2001, 653) Despite its “nonlinear” narrativization, Koolhaas’s project of finding the “paradigm of the future” in Lagos, however, cannot shake its developmental shadows so easily. First, there are some surface affinities. For Abrams and Koenigsberger, specifically, development planning was never a project of simply outlining an evolutionary model of change from the primitive to the modern for the Third World. Their proposals, instead, cast development as a case study for identifying the West’s own desired future. Similarly, they rarely presented development as a project of implementing Western precedence in Third World contexts. Rather it was seen as a project of establishing a comparative framework of mutual learning. Koolhaas’s own comparative impulse to identify the future of

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modernity in the West through Third World development is thus in line with the precedence he seeks to differentiate himself from.

Law of Value, Value of Law But more substantially, the strongest affinity between Abrams and Koenigsberger’s development planning approach and Koolhaas’s analysis lies in the positioning of law, or its absence, as the engine of urbanization, a linear argument that underlies the chronologic nonlinearity projected by both analyses. For Koolhaas, the ingenuity of urban solutions in Lagos stems from the transforming boundaries of property and ownership, both spatially and legally. “Despite the presence of both land-use data collected at the regional scale and the national grid system” (Koolhaas 2001, 661), Koolhaas tells us, [A] boundary of Lagos has never been drawn or agreed upon. . . . Property lines are continually reassessed and renegotiated in accordance with intersecting land law, taxes, claims, and interests. This structural skein camouflages its ordering system, but recognizes that one’s right to reside and work in the city is flexible and mutable. (Koolhaas 2001, 661) This mutating topography of the city “works” and reworks, Koolhaas argues, the basic elements of modernist planning—such as the line, wall, and plot—on its own terms. The traffic “bottleneck,” a negative phenomenon in the traditional logic of traffic planning, is described as an urban presence that has its own economy of street vendors and other “entrepreneurial activity” (Koolhaas 2001, 685). In the aerial photographs taken from the presidential helicopter, we see how Kobe’s proposed highway intersections, flyovers, and exit ramps have turned into parking lots, markets, and makeshift factories (Figures 12.1, 12.2). This “illustrates” Koolhaas asserts, “the large-scale efficacy of systems and agents considered marginal, liminal, informal, or illegal according to traditional understandings of the city” (Koolhaas 2001, 652). This staging of negative terms of traditional urbanism as positive urban phenomena in their own right, however, keeps the logic of development intervention intact. The most critical aspect of Turner and Mangin’s as well as Abrams and Koenigsberger’s housing and land reform proposals was the staging of the individual as an originary legal subject that preceded the political process surrounding the emergence of discourse of rights and citizenship. In this framing of development, it is law, and not politics, that constitutes the originary moment of change. The result is the axiom that if proper laws are instituted, development would happen by itself. Koolhaas’s transforming topography of urbanism is simply a reversal of this positioning of law as an originary moment before politics. For Koolhaas, it is the absence of law that gives Lagos its unique character of modernity. Both the positions argue for the presence of quasi-natural legal phenomena to draw attention away from the political dimensions of socioeconomic change. This view has been given renewed economic sanctity by the Peruvian economist and Nobel laureate Hernando de Soto, in his book, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (Soto 2000). De Soto claims that it was not that the poor do not have assets. Rather, “they hold these resources in defective forms” (Soto 2000, 7). De Soto proposes finding legal solutions to bring the land-based assets of the poor into the legal system. There is “an implicit legal infrastructure,” de Soto asserts, “hidden deep within their property system—of which ownership is but the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the iceberg is an intricate man-made process that can transform assets and labour into capital” (emphasis added) (Soto 2000, 9).4 This “iceberg” is none other than an expanded loan structure that could be based on the legalized property as collateral. By situating law as an originary moment, whose foundations are already latent within existing resources, de Soto’s argument shifts the seat of value from labor to circuits of finance and commercial capital. Thus, what 146

Source: Lagos Wide and Close: An Interactive Journey into an Exploding City (Submarine Channel: 2014). Photo by Edgar Cleijne.

Figure 12.1 Cover shot of Rem Koolhaas and Bregtje van der Haak’s Lagos Wide and Close: An Interactive Journey Into an Exploding City.

Source: Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities (Gadanho 2014).

Figure 12.2 Cover for MoMA exhibition catalogue Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities.

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the poor need is not recognition of their labor but only entry into the global system of loans. Once their assets are linked to this capital, they would simply grow with its circulation.5 For development institutions, Third World policy-makers, and major First World political figures alike, the translation of property into legal forms that can serve as collateral for loans is nothing short of a miraculous solution to the crisis of Third World development. In addressing the British Labor Party in 2002, the former U.S. president Bill Clinton described his recent African tour as follows: I have just come here from a trip to Africa which provided me with all kinds of fresh evidence of the importance of politics. . . . In Ghana . . . a new President is working with a great Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, to bring the assets of poor people into the legal system so they can get collateral for loans.6 The president of Ghana, John Agyekum Kufuor, also reiterated the same line of thought when he described that with establishment of individualized tenure, land is transformed into “bankable property,” giving title holders access to credit. “[T]his could prove,” Kufour argued, “the vital part of the missing link that might help generate prosperity that we all yearn for” (emphasis added).7 This linking is indeed an architectural project, a project that makes materiality available to abstraction. It is not a coincidence that Colin Powell, then U.S. secretary of state, quoting de Soto, declared with enthusiasm in 2002 that “ ‘the hidden architecture of sustainable development is the law.’ The law. The law. The rule of law that permits wonderful things to happen.”8 As we stated earlier, architecture in the development theater serves as an instrument not of implementing particular policy approaches but of creating legitimacy for them. Architecture here constitutes the stage which determines what can be possibly imagined on it. For legal academics, such as David Kennedy, the emphasis on law-making betrays a desire to skirt the “perplexing political and economic choices” entailed in projects of land reform. Development practitioners and scholars have tended, Kennedy has argued, to exclude political confrontations in favor of “law, legal institution building, the techniques of legal policy-making and implementation— the ‘rule of law’ broadly conceived—front and centre” (Kennedy 2003, 18). Kennedy points out that we must take into account “the idea that building the rule of law might itself be a development strategy” (Kennedy 2003, 17). For other scholars of African land reform, such as Ambreena Manji and A. Claire Cutler, the interest in centrality of law cannot be separated from the gender and class divisions that permeate particular contexts. For Cutler, the emphasis on neutrality and centrality of law is supported from within particular national contexts by groups who stand to gain from the “particular legal culture informed by neo-liberal values and the privileging of private ordering as the most natural, efficient, consensual and just means of regulating commercial and productive relations” (Cutler 2002, 231). For Ambreena Manji, “[l]and, as a social and economic asset, invites . . . contestation perhaps more than any other. How land may be dealt in, and by whom, is a question of social, political and economic importance” (Manji 2006, 12). For Manji, deemphasizing the importance of politics results in exclusion of civil representative groups from policy and legislative discussions. The brunt of this exclusion falls, Manji argues, on women, whose chances of gaining access to land are further limited as land is individualized and held as collateral. What role does architecture play in this domain? From the perspective we have been outlining, architecture as a basis of socioeconomic activity constitutes not only the object of this legal debate but also the site where the development subject who forms the possibility of this debate is staged. “Assets need,” De Soto avers, “a formal property system that draws out the abstract potential from buildings and fixes it in representations that allow use to go beyond passively using buildings only as shelters” (emphasis added) (Soto 2000, 60). The “abstract potential” of Lagos drawn out by Koolhaas’s analysis serves this legalizing discourse even as it identifies the absence of legal relations in the 149

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malleable terrain of property in the city. It constitutes urbanization as a process that could be reduced to formal relations, legal or illegal, and thereby lays out new terms of access and intervention.

As Big as Big Koolhaas ushered a wave of similar urban analyses not only on Lagos but also elsewhere. Prominent among these is a more recent show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, titled Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, which invited teams of architects to imagine promising futures for cities across the globe with striking income disparity.9 Stressing the “rapidly expanding” and “explosive” growth of megacities, both the preface by Barry Bergdoll and the introductory essay by Pedro Gadanho point to a pending global crisis whose implications are not limited to any one locale. “[M]egacities, megalopolises, and other large urban networks,” stresses Gadanho, “are crucial nodes for flows of information and people. Accordingly, they also contain the potential to rapidly propagate any crisis or collapse to the whole system” (Gadanho 2014, 15). For Bergdoll, it’s the future of “humanity” itself that hangs in the balance when we ignore this global phenomena (Gadanho 2014, 11). But in framing the global as a “system,” in talking about humanity in planetary terms, the megacity is wrenched from the space of history and placed in an abstract global space that is larger than any specific historical account or political meaning. In 1949, Albert Sauvy, a French demographer and economic historian, poignantly outlined the fallacy of such substitutions in a paper titled “The ‘False Problem’ of World Population” (Sauvy 1949). Here, Sauvy, who would later coin the term “Third World” (Tier Monde) in 1952 to refer to the decolonizing countries which wanted to align with neither the Soviet nor the NATO bloc (Sauvy 1952), was not contesting that in the middle twentieth century the world did not have more people on its surface than it had, say, three hundred years ago. The rate of population increase since the onset of European industrialization and colonial expansion in the seventeenth century has also been a contested issue in demographic studies. The UN world population estimates cited by Bergdoll as matters of fact have been challenged for being both too low and too high (Caldwell and Schindlmayr 2002). But for Sauvy, to talk of world population as a totality was a meaningless proposition. As Paul Demeny and Geoffrey McNicoll have elaborated, Sauvy instead was insisting that to present a population problem anywhere in terms of the idea of the “world population” was to pose the problem in a way that only led to useless conclusions: For the time being, there exists no world government, nor are there institutions that would come close to such a construct. Even if some political conflicts are adjudicated at international tribunals, and even if some studies are carried out internationally and some principles are established on that level, such coordination of efforts falls far short of the degree of solidarity that would be needed to make the expression “world population” acquire real meaning. (Sauvy 1949 quoted in Demeny and Geoffrey McNicoll 2006, 3) For Sauvy, there was no world population, only French population, Indian population, Japanese population, or British population. Population was an abstraction. It couldn’t be considered simply a count of people, for such a number in itself couldn’t be judged to be too large or too small. Population was an abstract understanding of the relationship between human, natural, and industrial resources a country could control. When this socioeconomic control was dependent on an order of world trade and politics that was tied to particular national interests, it was meaningless to talk about the world population. A population number made sense only in terms of how much out of kilter it was in relation to particular national means and interests and the ability to manage them. Sauvy’s view might now seem outdated, a remnant of the international world still understood through the lens of competing national interests. But it presses us to account for our unit of analysis 150

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even when we aspire to speak globally or describe it through universalizing terms, such as megacities or megapolises. Even if we need to imagine a collective future and planetary politics in the face of an environmental crisis and movement of capital that are beyond the control of any single national interest, we need to articulate the epistemological contours of our understanding of the global. When we talk of global megacities as a planetary crisis, we are very much articulating a frame. Global too is always particular, invoked from a particular perspective. It too is a frame that has politics. Only one that rarely declares them. The global evoked by the megacities exhibition assumes the city as a self-evident unit of analysis. But it is self-evident only at the scale of the global world population crisis, which, as Sauvy noted, is not a self-evident scale at all. How can we understand the size of the city, whether it is mega or mini, without reference to the political units—and to this we must add historical and epistemological units—that give meaning to that size? Is the concept of the world, or the globe, a political unit? Only asymmetrically. Is it a historical and epistemological unit? Yes, invoking population or urban crisis at the level of the world serves the agendas of particular intuitions and agents. Aren’t we bound to acknowledge this specificity, this asymmetry? Shouldn’t we account for the difference in the meaning that the terms “world” and “global” hold for the architect flying over the megacity or proposing solutions in museum workshops and the different inhabitants he claims to speak for through these frames? Framing the population problem or the problem of megacities as a global problem, as the MoMA exhibition does, ignores how these “cities” are embedded within particular, historically situated, political, social, and economic relations, with particular spatial and temporal rhythms that might not be evident from the presumed universal scale of the megacity. With the boundary of the megacity unquestioned, the next move can be made also without hesitation. The potential of the city could be claimed to lie within its own terrain, in a space outside of history, made apparent to us by visual analysis while flying over or standing within its “informal” neighborhoods. The contrasting juxtapositions presented on the exhibition catalogue cover itself, by the very fact that they are presented as contrasting, presume the presence of an untapped value in the contrast visible to the naked eye. The informal is that which is not yet formalized. The architect’s role as an activist is to quickly step in, and out, as a catalyst of this formalization, to translate the dormant aspirations of these communities into social and economic value. But what if the informal is already formalized along specific historical trajectories, different for different “megacities,” that don’t care for our analytical distinctions between the rural and the urban? What if the spatial contours and temporal rhythms of these trajectories escape our attempts to formulate comparative global phenomena under the banner of megacities? What if striations of history have already absorbed all “hidden” value we project onto these “informal” settlements? What if what is there is already the future? Sounds depressing? That’s okay. A little loss of euphoria might be what is needed to account for the politics of our analytical frame. Here, we are not asking to simultaneously pay attention to the rural while we think about the city, but rather to sublate this distinction itself through specific historical research. Housing activists and international experts like Catherine Bauer had already proposed “comprehensive” planning and decentralization as early as 1962 (Wurster 1962). But those visions of comprehensive regional planning too maintained the distinction between the urban and the rural and presented the visible formations of the former as alibis to ignore the historical determinations that are irreducible to its contours. In the entire exhibition catalogue, the rural is presented as an abstract netherworld from which equally abstract subjects called the migrants appear to populate the megacity of visible visual contrasts. Who are these migrants? What are there trajectories? How do they perceive the boundaries of the megacities? Are their journeys one-directional, or multivalent in space and time? The megacity cannot be the universal unit of our analysis because it has no meaning in particular historical 151

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circumstances of the past or the present. The concept of the megacity, without the articulation of its specific historical and epistemological basis, serves as an alibi that only preserves the future of the activist architect, curator, and museum.

New Informants, Old News It is important to note that in all of Koolhaas’s discussion of Lagos the traditional anthropological alibi of the “native informant” is never invoked. As we have seen, many of Koolhaas’s critics mistakenly ask for this voice as a substitute for historical specificity. But this is not to say that there isn’t a native informant in Koolhaas’s or for that matter in MoMA’s deliberation on the megacity that lends an air of authenticity to their visual abstractions. In both accounts, instead of an individual, it is the city itself that is staged as the witness to modernization. The title of Koolhaas’s book on Lagos asserts this point: Lagos: The City That Works. It is Lagos itself that is the “native informant” of Koolhaas’s globalizing maps, positioned as one of many such urban agents. As the caption on the cover of the DVD (released as a companion to the Lagos book) states, “Koolhaas doesn’t want to build or change, but aims to learn from Lagos, fascinated by the energy of this city and his wish to understand modernity in all its aspects.” Koolhaas is not alone in this framing. Robyn Dixon, a staff writer of the Los Angeles Times and one of the few journalists who have described Koolhaas’s excursion in a favorable light, also describes the city as the subject of global modernity: “Papered all over walls and suspended from any pole,” Dixon writes, “are advertising billboards and banners, as though the city were screaming out its own exuberant and often perplexing monologue” (Dixon 2007). The change in scale from the individual to the city also displaces the project of situating law, the theme we discussed in the first part of this essay, as the originary moment of development onto an even more liberating scale. For experts such as Abrams and Koenigsberger too, the individual’s actions were rational on a scale that was deemed beyond her understanding, the scale of the nation. This allowed the experts to invoke the idea of the individual while bypassing the question of what the implications of that framing were for the individual inhabitant. For Koolhaas, Lagos is rational and efficient at an even larger scale, the scale of globalization, where the city can be seen to operate beyond the logic of national urbanization and modernization. Thus Koolhaas’s analysis of Lagos does away with the question not only of national politics but also of geopolitics altogether. Marx had identified “work” as a temporal phenomenon whose fixed duration belied the social costs of regenerating the worker. For Marx, work and rest were inseparable terms woven together in the open-ended chain of value production. If Abrams and Koenigsberger had bypassed the question of work surrounding the category of the individual in the development context, Koolhaas forecloses that question by asserting that it is Lagos, the city, and not its inhabitant, “that works” as a participant in the process of globalization. This notion of work belies the contradictions of asymmetrical modernization in Lagos and frames them as productive and positive negotiation of modernity at the global scale. Nothing in Lagos points to the dissolution of the logic of globalization. It is the hidden rationality of a city that “works” that makes it available to the abstracting eye of the global observer. With this framing, Koolhaas erases how the working of Lagos as a city is built in continuity with, not in contradiction to, the long history of successive development approaches, mobilized from both national and international theaters. When Lagos “works” as a global city, it is this dimension of globalization that is erased. Lagos then appears as a site of the process of global modernization that is operating on its own. Consequently, the expert in the presidential helicopter is a neutral observer following the unfolding of this process across the globe, and not as the latest chapter in the history of the new modes of socioeconomic management that took hold in the postwar era with the idea of development. 152

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Architecture and planning’s primary role on the global platform has been to create terms of legitimacy and access that satisfy the requirements of partial incorporation of the decolonizing world into the circuits of global capital. How the terms of this access are utilized by international institutions can be witnessed in the fact that Edgar Cleyne’s photographs which constitute the centerpiece of Koolhaas’s book and the DVD have already graced the cover of World Bank reports on African urbanization (Kessides 2006). Without this legitimacy, the logic of perpetuating intervention that has characterized the development discourse cannot be sustained. If architecture and planning in the development arena draw on development economics, they also open the space for its possibility. By looking at architecture and planning as mediums whose impact is not limited to the question of symbolism alone, we can begin to outline how they have been interwoven with the staging of new means of access, control, and legitimacy in the global arena. “Everyone needs a permanent alibi,” asserted Horkheimer, to negotiate the unfolding patterns of modernity (Horkheimer 1982). For Horkheimer that alibi was the unreflective conformation of modern man to the requirements of mass culture. In the postwar era, modern architecture and planning have provided such permanent alibis for the changing faces of development and its attending structures of power.

Notes 1 Reported by Stephanie Schorow for the MIT News Office in “Controversial Architect Koolhaas Discusses Future of Cities,” November 22, 2006. See web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/koolhaas-1122.html. 2 Gandy here refers to Koolhaas’s “Fragments of a Lecture on Lagos,” and the “Harvard Project on the City,” in Mutations (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2001). 3 Jennifer Sigler, “Rem Koolhaas, 2000,” in Index Magazine. See www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/rem_ koolhaas.shtml. 4 According to the Institute for Liberty and Democracy established and run by De Soto, there are 9.3 trillion dollars in assets held by the poor in the Third World to which they do not have legal titles. 5 For de Soto, “law is the instrument that fixes and realizes capital” (Soto, 2000, 164). Developing countries therefore, de Soto argues, “shouldn’t just focus on the macroeconomic side of the formula: stable money, fiscal equilibrium, and privatisation. The core of the capitalist system . . . is essentially a legal property system.” See www.imf.org/external/pubs/tt/fandd/2003/12/pdf/people.pdf. Quoted by Ambreena Manji (Manji 2006, 3). 6 Cited in “Bill Clinton Helps Ghana’s Poor Gain Property Titles,” by the UNDP. See www. undp.org/dpa/ frontpagearchive/2002/October/7oct. Quoted by Manji (2006, 2). 7 Cited by de Soto’s Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD). See www.ild.org.pe/home.htm. Quoted in ibid., p. 11. 8 Colin Powell, “Remarks at State Department Conference, Meridian International Center,” Washington, DC, July 12, 2002. See https://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2002/11822.htm. 9 See MoMA, NY, Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, November 22, 2014–May 25, 2015, www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1400?locale=en.

References Anderson, P. (2007, May 10), “Our Man,” London Review of Books 29.9: 9–12. Caldwell, J. and Schindlmayr, T. (2002, June), “Historical Population Estimates: Unraveling the Consensus,” Population and Development Review 28.2: 183–204. Cutler, C. (2002), Historical Materialism, Globalization and Law. New York: Rupert Mark. Demeny, Paul and Geoffrey McNicoll (2006), “World Population 1950–2000: Perception and Response,” Population and Development Review 32.S1: 1–51. Dixon, R. (2007, June 25), “Lagos: ‘The New York of Nigeria,’ ” LA Times. Gadanho, Pedro, ed. (2014), Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Gandy, M. (2005, March), “Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29.1: 26–49. Horkheimer, Max (1982), “The End of Reason,” in E. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum. 153

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Kennedy, D. (2003), “Laws and Developments,” in Amanda Perry and John Hatchard, eds., Law and Development: Facing Complexity in the 21st Century. London: Cavendish. Kessides, C. (2006), The Urban Transition in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications for Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction. Washington, DC: The Cities Alliance and the World Bank. Koolhaas, R. (1995), “Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis . . . or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa,” in Koolhaas and B. Mau, Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large: Office for Metropolitan Architecture, New York: Monacelli Press. Koolhaas, R. (2001), “Harvard Project on the City,” in R. Koolhaas, S. Boeri, S. Kwnter, N. Tazi, and H. U. Obrist (authors), Mutations. Barcelona: ACTAR. Koolhaas, R. (2002), “Fragments of a Lecture on Lagos,” in O. Enwezor, C. Basualdo, U.M. Bauer, S. Ghez, S. Maharaj, M. Nash and O. Zaya, eds., Undersiege: Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos, Documenta 11: Platform 4. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje, Cantz. Manji, A. (2005), “ ‘The Beautiful Ones’ of Law and Development,” in Doris Buss and A. Manji, eds., International Law: Modern Feminist Approaches. Oxford: Hard. Manji, A. (2006), The Politics of Land Reform in Africa. London: Zed Books. Muzaffar, I. (2012), “Boundary Games: Ecochard, Doxiadis, and the Refugee Housing Projects Under Military Rule in Pakistan, 1953–1959,” in A. Dutta, T. Hyde, and D. Abramson, eds., Aggregate: Governing by Design. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Muzaffar, I. (2014), “The World on Sale: Architectural Exports and Construction of Access,” in OfficeUS Agenda, the catalogue of the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Zurich: Lars Muller. Muzaffar, I. (2016), “The Prisoners of the Present: Depoliticization of Housing in the Postwar Era,” in After Belonging, an Oslo Architecture Triennale Book. Zurich: Lars Muller. Packer, G. (2006, November 13), “The Megacity: Decoding the Chaos of Lagos,” The New Yorker: 62–75. Sauvy, Alfred (1949), “Le ‘faux probleme’ de la population mondiale,” in Population 4.3 (English translation) in Population and Development Review 16.4, December 1990: 759–774. Sauvy, Alfred (1952, August 14), “Trois Mondes, Une Planéte,” L’Observateur Issue 118. Soto, H.D. (2000), The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. London: Black Swan. Wurster, Catherine Bauer (1962, February), “The Optimum Pattern of Urbanization: Does Asia Need a New Type of Regional Planning?” in Ekistics 13.76: 85–89.

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13 Creating the Environment for Social Engagement The Experience of Venezuela Carlos Reimers

Introduction During the end of the twentieth century, Venezuela set up the policy, financial and institutional framework to stimulate and enable social engagement in the production of affordable housing for the low-income sector of the population. The limited reach and relatively small impact of more than six decades of heavily subsidized public housing programs led the government to propose a shift on the paradigm in social housing delivery. The conventional mechanism of mass-produced housing was to be progressively replaced by a participatory model involving key sectors across the community in the organization, planning, funding, design, construction and management of social housing projects. An innovative strategy to increase social equity and to develop a more efficient housing delivery system was carefully planned and implemented by government authorities and specialists to empower communities to have an active role in the production of their built environment. This chapter is a comprehensive account of the experience and a critical examination of its eventual impact and outcomes. The experience was designed and implemented from the top of political power to decentralize and transfer power to the lower end of regional and local governments, enabling and empowering the social actors at the community level. The chapter shows the outcomes and limitations of implementing top-down strategies of decentralization in highly centralized governments in developing countries. The chapter emphasizes the organizational aspects and environment surrounding the experience. The information and data for this chapter have been drawn from several documents and sources. There are a small number of written pieces, annual reports and technical papers produced by professionals who were at different points more or less directly related with the National Housing Council of Venezuela and the implementation of the Technical Assistance National System. There are also the legal documents and publications by the Venezuelan government. However, more important in this chapter are the testimonies and conversations with high-rank directive and managerial personnel of the implementation agencies and their views on the experience. Finally, there is my own experience as a trainer for two years of community organizations and groups of professionals while working with an NGO. In my role as trainer I had the opportunity to see the beginning of a very promising process of enabling and empowering communities that did not crystallize. I share regrets with many enthusiasts of the idea for the weakening and eventual disappearance of a promising social initiative. 155

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The Political Context for Social Engagement The Technical Assistance National System was created in Venezuela with the enactment of the Housing Policy Act in 1989 (CONAVI 1989). The act was part of a national strategy for decentralization and transference of power to the regional and local governments. Its main objective was to improve the quality of life of the population by improving their housing living conditions and ensuring the coherence and continuity of housing policy in the medium and long term (CONAVI 1989). The act also involved changing the role of government to enabler and supporter of communities, acknowledging its past limitations as housing provider. Under the act, a new public organization, the National Housing Council (CONAVI), was created to inform and enforce housing policy, and to coordinate housing organizations at the national, regional and local levels (CONAVI 1989). The act also secured the necessary resources from public and private sources to finance low-income housing (CONAVI 1989).1 The Technical Assistance National System created the theoretical and operational framework for the participation of all actors of the housing sector. These included public and private organizations already involved in the production of housing. To promote decentralization, however, the Technical Assistance National System proposed the creation of new regional and local actors, and formalized the participation of the existing ones. These last were mainly organized communities and NGOs.

Setting Up the Environment for Community Participation Since the creation of the first public housing organization in 1928,2 public housing production in Venezuela became a centralized institution in Venezuela (Lovera 1996). During the following decades, new public organizations were created to expand and complement the production for the increasing demand for low-income housing. With the exception of a rural housing program, all these organizations depended on the Ministry of Urban Development.3 For many years, these organizations represented the public housing sector and the arms of centralized planning in housing (Figure 13.1). Information and resources would flow from headquarters located in the country’s capital down to their regional offices to deliver finished, standardized lowincome housing to the final beneficiaries (Caro, Reimers and Vegas 1997).4 Regional offices of these organizations had no discretionary control over their work, and even beneficiaries were often forced to contact the headquarters directly, involving time and travel to deal with many of the bureaucratic procedures. For instance, loans or purchase contracts were signed by the beneficiaries and highrank officials (often the president of the institution) at the organization headquarters.5 While these procedures actually aimed to bestow a higher significance on these acts, they lessened the role of the regional offices to that of mediators, increasing bureaucracy in the process. Consequently, even

Figure 13.1 Conventional housing sector structure (before 1989). 156

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though regional offices of national housing organizations were better informed of the housing needs in their geographical locations, their participation in the organization of the housing production was limited and they had no opportunity to inform housing policy. The beneficiary of this process was also seen as its final user, with no possibility of say or participation in the production of their habitat. Housing under this model was the product of the uninformed process and its user the final consumer without other options (Figure 13.2).

Organizing Community and Resources The innovations proposed by the Technical Assistance National System (TANS) were the product of the review and analysis of the relationships of the existing housing sector. The sector was the network of public, private and community-based organizations in which all the housing actors were included, but their interrelationships were very limited. Power was centralized by the central government in the existing low-income housing promoter organizations (HPO). These organizations were old and had grown in size and complexity in a disproportionate way vis-à-vis their capacity to produce affordable housing. There was little or no coordination between their activities and often overlapping of functions. Quantity was imposed over quality of housing and administrative processes consumed a substantial amount of the resources destined for housing. Bureaucracy was complex and hampered by red tape, inefficiency and opportunities for corruption. Public housing in Venezuela presented serious limitations to making a significant contribution to the needs of the low-income population (Figure 13.3). The communities, in the lower end of the flow of relationships, were unable to give feedback to the network or to inform change and policy. The TANS sought to strengthen the network of housing organizations by coordinating the work of housing promoter organizations and encouraging decentralization of political and economic power to the local and community level. The National Housing Council occupied a special position within this structure informing housing policy. However, most importantly, the TANS aimed to enable communities to access all the organizations of the housing sector. Communities were at the center of the housing sector and the active part of the new housing model (Figure 13.4). The other two innovative entities introduced by the TANS were housing community organizations (HCO) and housing intermediary organizations (HIO). Communities organized in HCOs had

PUBLIC

Land Proposals Funding

Construction

People

$ HOUSING

?

Housing Maintenance Improvement

PROCESS

$

PRIVATE Land Proposals

People Funding

Construction

Figure 13.2 Conventional housing model (no social engagement). 157

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GOVERNMENT

BUILDING MATERIAL PRODUCERS

HOUSING CONSTRUCTORS

COMMERCIAL SECTOR

MINISTRY

FINANCING INSTITUTIONS

COMMUNITY

PROFESSIONALS

HOUSING PROMOTERS

RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS

NGOs

Figure 13.3 Existing housing sector and flow of their relationships.

GOVERNMENT

BUILDING MATERIAL PRODUCERS

HOUSING CONSTRUCTORS

COMMERCIAL SECTOR

MINISTRY

FINANCING INSTITUTIONS

CONAVI

HOUSING PROMOTERS

COMMUNITY

RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS

PROFESSIONALS

HOUSING NGO

Figure 13.4 Proposed housing sector and its relationships.

a protagonist role in conducting their housing processes. Community-based activity and organization were a spontaneous phenomenon largely studied in low-income populations in Venezuela, specifically in informal settlements. The TANS sought to empower and enable these communities with the technical capacities to undertake the management of their housing processes. In this new model, public, private and nongovernmental organizations could enter the process at any time required by the community (Figure 13.5). The Housing Policy Act (HPA) defined CONAVI as an autonomous organization, within the structure of the Ministry of Urban Development, which coordinated the national housing promoter 158

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$

Land

proposals

Community

Maintenance Improvement

Construction

HOUSING

PUBLIC

PROCESS

PRIVATE

NGOs

Figure 13.5 Proposed housing model.

MINISTRY OF PUBLIC HEALTH

MINISTRY OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT CONAVI

Rural Housing

National Housing Institute INAVI

Reg. Offices

Reg. Offices

Fund for Urban Development FONDUR

Reg. Offices

Foundation for Community Development FUNDACOMUN

HOUSING STATE COMMITTEE

IMUVIS

Reg. Offices

INREVIS

HPO (Housing Provider Org) HCO (Housing Community Org) HIO (Housing Intermediary Org) Figure 13.6 Proposed structure of the housing sector. National Registry of HIO and HCO

organizations and administered the resources generated under the HPA (Figure 13.6). This was a complex definition in the environment of the existing public organizations. On the one hand, the organization’s head was designated by the president of the country, as were ministers and heads of other public autonomous organizations. However, its operational budget came from the Ministry of Urban Development. On the other hand, CONAVI coordinated the functions of all the housing promoter organizations, either in or out of its ministry structure. Finally, it supervised the utilization 159

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of a considerable amount of resources at the national, regional and local level to fund housing. However, these resources were not in the budget of the Ministry of Urban Development. These coordination and supervisory functions were difficult to understand and accept by other housing organizations, which considered CONAVI at their structural level. The HIOs were another key part of the proposed network, based mainly in the early work of NGOs and due to their experience working with communities. Although low-income housing was a relatively unexplored area for NGOs, these organizations were attracting more professionals looking for socially oriented careers. NGOs also enjoyed a higher credibility and prestige within the society than public organizations. The TANS also proposed the creation of regional and local housing institutions to generate the necessary structure for decentralization of public housing. At the regional level, the TANS promoted the creation of the Housing State Committee (HSC) and the Regional Housing Institute (INREVI: Instituto Regional de Vivienda). At the local level, it promoted the creation of the Municipal Housing Institute (IMUVI - Instituto Municipal de Vivienda). The Housing State Committees were intended to coordinate, supervise and inform housing policy at the regional level. The INREVIS and IMUVIS were modeled from public housing organizations that were already developing from the bottom in the stronger regions and municipalities of the country. Together with the regional offices of the national housing organizations they represented an improved version of the housing provider organizations in the new structure of the housing sector. The emphasis of the TANS, however, was shaping the HCO and HIO as the most important organizations of the new housing sector.

Changing Paradigms and Institutional Frameworks in Housing The TANS was launched with two major foci: providing attention to communities, and providing attention to housing organizations. Four programs were implemented to achieve these goals. The first was a technical office to provide information and address specific questions about the TANS. The office was located in the capital but it could be addressed by mail, phone or in person. The second program was a guide for mayors, with detailed explanations about how the housing sector was intended to operate within the new participatory framework and how the resources from the Housing Policy Act should be utilized. The third program involved the organization of periodical meetings at the national, regional and local levels. These meetings were made to exchange experiences, information and common concerns between HPOs, HCOs and HIOs. The fourth was a training program to induce HIOs and HCOs to operate within TANS’s proposed housing framework and to access the resources of the HPA. A training package was developed by CONAVI to promote the formation of HIOs. HIOs became then responsible to inform and assist HCOs in the technical aspects of their housing process—namely, the social, organizational, legal, financial, administrative, urban and constructive aspects of planning, designing, building and maintaining a housing project. The CONAVI used the experience of two existing NGOs in assisting communities in housing issues. The training package was developed in 15 months and tested in 10 of the 23 states of the country before their final implementation took place. The contents of the package introduced the general subjects of decentralization, changes in the housing paradigm, community organization, sustainability and self-management strategies for settlement maintenance, improvement and consolidation. Several specialized modules deepen the subjects of project management, financing, accounting, legal and administrative issues in housing, building technologies, construction supervision and so

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forth. The objective of training HIOs first was to multiply the number of organizations able to work with HCOs within the shortest possible period.

Early Evaluations of the Implementation Process Participants of the HIO training showed great interest in the idea of enabling communities to work out their housing projects within the proposed framework. Most of the participants were aware of the deficiencies of conventional housing programs in suiting people’s needs and agreed that participation could help to overcome this problem. The instructional package was evaluated as very good, although too extensive for the training period (ten half days). Almost all the participants agreed with the multidisciplinary nature of the HIO. However, once the training was over, the formation of new HIOs was not as successful as expected. Many participants went back to their daily routine and reported that it was very difficult to assume the HIO role within their working environments, or motivating their organizations to enroll in this kind of work. Some of the HIO that did start working found it difficult to afford promotion of their services among low-income communities, and even in middle-income ones. The promotional costs of training communities were underestimated and externalized into the HIOs. Some of them were unable to assume this cost without external support or sponsorship. Almost overlapped with the end of the experimental phase, in 1994, a reform of the Housing Policy Act made HIO assistance compulsory for HCOs aspiring to access HPL funds. The National Housing Council was forced to speed up the HIO training program. Housing promoter organizations, HPOs, were allowed to incorporate budgets for HIO technical assistance as part of their housing project.

Evaluation of Registered HIOs and HCOs Two evaluations were made between 1995 and 1996. The first included 15 HIOs located in different states. The second and more detailed evaluation was of a bigger sample of 41 organizations: 19 HIOs and the 22 HCOs they were assisting. According to the surveys, five HIOs gave up activities because of difficulties arising with the HPOs, and the high maintenance costs of the HIO office. Other two HIOs did not attend the interview, one of them because it was under fraud investigation regarding an HCO. The most relevant observations made in both evaluations were the following: The HCO-HIO Program was still not well known by all the organizations of the housing sector making [it] very difficult for the HCO to find funding to pay for the services of HIOs’ technical assistance. For some HPOs, mainly at the regional and local level, financing technical assistance was not part of their mission, but it was understood as “social promotion” expenditure. These organizations were reluctant to spend money in projects that would produce “HCOs, instead of houses” as referred by a high rank official of an important HPO. (From conversations with the head of the TANS) The application procedures and requirements were too different between housing organizations. Applications to different organizations were time-consuming, inefficient and often excessive in the amount of required paperwork. The training program revealed weakness in the subjects of organization and administration. People were not confident enough about the mechanisms to provide legal and administrative forms to their HCO. There was insecurity in the responsibilities involved in creating a formal housing association.

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Some institutions and organizations were found acting outside of their roles. For instance, some HPOs started their own programs to train HCOs. Similarly, some HIOs started offering a full package of services that included construction of finished housing.

Quantitative and Qualitative Outcomes In 1997 an evaluation was performed for the National Housing Institute (INAVI; traditionally Venezuela’s largest provider of conventional housing). INAVI was one of the national housing organizations more severely threatened by the changes proposed by the TANS. With almost 70 years of existence, INAVI was a big, vertical, centralized and complex organization. INAVI’s hypertrophied structure was unable to adapt to functioning within the TANS operational framework. For instance, as a heavily vertical and centralized organization, INAVI concentrated big projects in its central office, while the smaller or simpler ones were handled by its regional offices. Under the TANS no change was introduced in this practice. Projects involving more than 150 dwellings were administered and developed from the headquarters of the INAVI in Caracas. Smaller projects, usually involving fewer than 100 dwellings, were administered from the regional offices of INAVI. This practice made it difficult for low-income communities to participate under the proposed scheme because of the expenses and time involved in coming to the capital. INAVI started interpreting this fact as a low demand for the HIO-HCO program and started offering HCOs its conventional housing programs. Conventional programs later were also managed from the regional offices because “they were easier to implement” (from conversations with the head of the TANS office). Eventually, INAVI and other HPOs started boycotting the TANS, arguing that the procedures proposed by the HIO-HCO program extended unnecessarily the bureaucracy and paperwork involved in getting access to housing. Officials of INAVI and other HPOs started spreading the word within political circles of the low efficiency of the HIO-HCO program as compared to conventional housing programs. Among detractors of the program was a new minister of urban development, a former INAVI director and private housing developer, who seriously opposed the continuity of the program. The HIO-HCO program was severely weakened when the central government, under a new president who favored centralized and paternalistic policies, negotiated a pilot project of directly subsidized housing with the Inter-American Development Bank. The project was implemented by INAVI. Many HCOs that started their projects with INAVI under the TANS scheme lost motivation and confidence in the program when they observed people accessing directly subsidized housing faster and more easily. At the community and professional organization level, the HCO-HIO program initiated an interesting mobilization of community-based groups searching for official financing and assistance opportunities. Organized communities were actually capable of dealing with the administrative procedures of the housing sector if there were clear mechanisms to access funding. Low-income communities were open to incorporating technical assistance into their projects and paying reasonable fees for this service if access to formal housing mechanisms was ensured (CONAVI 1998). Similarly, groups of professionals were motivated to form consulting teams (HIOs) to assist communities to participate in the program. The program was permeated, however, by fraudulent developers, who took advantage of the voids in the proposed scheme. The costs of financing the promotion of HIO services, especially when the program was just starting, were too high for HIOs themselves. The National Housing Council incorrectly assumed housing institutions would be willing to afford promotion of the HIOs’ role within their publicity budgets. No remedial efforts were made by CONAVI to promote HIOs (Carvalho and White 1996). 162

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At the HPO national level, the demand rapidly exceeded the capacity of response of almost all the HPOs. Many of the organizations saw themselves entangled in adapting their operative procedures to the program. The HCO-HIO scheme required adjustments and changes in the operative structure of many institutions, which were not considered in their annual budgets. In some cases, their programs had very little in common with the HCO-HIO scheme and were very difficult to adapt. Many of the institutions were not prepared to finance technical assistance within their programs and did not understand the conceptual shift in measuring housing efficiency from numbers of produced units to numbers of satisfied households. Funds for technical assistance from HIOs were not included in their financial packages. Most of the HPOs were not prepared to respond to the rising need for information and assistance coming from HCOs and HIOs, and redirected the requests to the National Housing Council. Eventually the National Housing Council was also overloaded with requests for information. Even though the HIO-HCO association became required by law to obtain access to funding, public housing agencies such as INAVI maintained and even expanded their original programs of conventional housing, ignoring program guidelines and even boycotting the TANS itself. At the HPO regional level, many INREVIs and IMUVIs (regional and local housing organizations) faced difficulties to implement the program. Some of them argued that there were not enough HIOs to face the HCO demands for technical assistance. Many of them, especially those which already existed, resumed programs of conventional housing using HPA funds. It was also difficult to promote the HIO-HCO scheme in the regional context, where strong paternalism is still present, particularly in the most socially and economically depressed areas. It was also very difficult to convince the government officials of the advantages of community participation in low-income housing. Housing was still regarded as a problem of number of units produced over time.

Reflections on the Experience The HCO-HIO program failed to identify all the actors involved in the existing housing process and their particular interests. The program mainly focused on the instructional contents required to train groups of professionals and communities. While the TANS was deeply concerned about getting these new actors involved in production of housing, it missed the new role that existing organizations were called to perform. Even when the proposed scheme considered their participation, housing institutions were reluctant to change their practices. Mazmanian, Daniel and Sabatier (1989) define three necessary perspectives for implementation: (1) the center or policy maker, (2) the target group and (3) the periphery. They add that projects usually fail to adequately consider the third perspective. It was naïve to “impose” decentralization using a centralized top-down scheme, especially in a country with a short decentralization history and without the adequate mechanisms to obtain feedback to redirect and reformulate the program. Mazmanian, Daniel and Sabatier (1989) also propose a top-down approach to policy implementation that emphasizes the need to reformulate policies implemented on the basis of experience over time. It was also naïve to think that modern governments would keep supporting decentralization in the same way and with the same intensity. Neither were central institutions willing to release power, nor were regional and local entities ready to undertake it (Rothenberg 1980). A big mistake of the implementation strategy of the TANS was not considering the interests of individuals or economic and political groups, which were involved in traffic of influences and corruption. But the most surprising finding was that, knowing the poor performance of 70 years of public centralized housing, communities did not claim or stand for better institutional formulas. Although obsolete, conventional approaches to housing were still very present in officials’ and politicians’ convictions. Ordinary people, especially those in need of housing, were more willing to 163

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try new approaches. But it was difficult to compete with the image of instant housing offered by existing institutions. Decentralization is not a spontaneous process, especially in countries with a long history of centralized government. A managerial style that advocates decentralization can be followed by another that disparages it. The process depends on developing regional and local capacities to perform well in their new responsibilities, rather than on releasing central power and enforcing legal and budgetary support. In housing, Venezuela showed low levels of political, technical and management capacities in most regional and local housing institutes. The country also showed a population able to assume new responsibilities but either lacking the necessary convictions to change existing housing delivery structures or profoundly skeptical of the feasibility of doing so and unwilling to participate in decision-making in housing production. Merilee Grindle (1980) refers to the idea that low-income groups may be more willing to invest their efforts in areas where the number of political factors involved in the process of decision-making can be minimized. The association between HIOs and HCOs to generate low-income housing as it was proposed is not currently in use in Venezuela, and the changes that the TANS aspired to did not survive the abandonment of the program. The figure of the HIO no longer exists within the housing framework and a new act for the creation of the national housing subsystem, within a larger social security act, derogated the HPA in 1999. The implementation process of the TANS concentrated many mistakes in a country with little decentralization history, where housing had always been centralized, and without giving proper attention to all the stakeholders traditionally involved in the housing sector and their organizational complexities. In fact, the National Housing Council has lost many of its original objectives to become itself an agency for housing provision. But if top-down decentralization is ever attempted in housing in Venezuela, it would be important to follow up on the changes introduced by the TANS that may have persisted at the national and regional levels, and to evaluate some of the projects that may have been completed under the scheme.

Notes 1 Resources to fund low-income housing included 5 percent of the national budget, and 5 percent of the regional and local budgets. A housing saving fund was implemented involving employers and employees of the public and private sectors. The fund was made from the deduction of 1 percent from the monthly employee salary and an additional 2 percent contribution of the employer. Other sources could include private or multilateral funds. 2 The Worker’s Bank or “Banco Obrero” was the first public housing organization created by the government to attend to the increasing demand produced by the early process of urbanization fueled by a new and increasing oil industry. After 1976 the organization changed its name to National Housing Institute (INAVI). 3 Initially known as the Ministry of Public Works (MOP) and currently as the Ministry of Infrastructure. 4 From a study about housing organizations made for the Inter-American Development Bank. 5 From direct conversations with the beneficiaries in 1996.

References Caro, Avelina, Carlos Reimers and Diana Vegas. 1997. Estudio de Fortalecimiento Institucional, Programa de Soluciones Habitacionales de Interes Social BID-VE-0055. Study for Institutional Strengthening, Social Housing Project BID-VE-0055. Caracas, Venezuela: Inter-American Development Bank. Carvalho, Soniya and Howard White. 1996. Implementing Projects for the Poor. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Consejo Nacional de la Vivienda. 1989. Informe Annual 1989. Caracas: MINDUR, CONAVI. ———. 1998. Informe Annual 1998. Caracas: MINDUR, CONAVI. Grindle, Merilee. 1980. Politics and Policy Implementation in the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lovera, Alberto. 1996. Leopoldo Martinez Olavarria: Desarrollo Urbano, Vivienda y Estado. Caracas: Asociacion Leopoldo Martinez Olavarria.

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Mazmanian, Daniel and P. Sabatier. 1989. Implementation and Public Policy. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Rothenberg, Irene. 1980. “Administrative Decentralization and the Implementation of Housing Policy in Colombia.” In: Grindle, pp. 145–169.

Further Reading Gaceta Oficial de la Republica de Venezuela. 1989. “Ley the Politica Habitacional” (Housing Policy Act). Presidency of Venezuela. ———. 1993. “Reforma de la Ley de Politica Habitacional” (Reform to the Housing Policy Act) # 4.659, 12/15/93. Presidency of Venezuela. ———. 1998. “Decreto con rango y fuerza de Ley que regula el Subsistema de Vivienda y Politica Habitacional” (Decree-Act regulating the Housing and Housing Policy System) # 36.575, 11/05/98. Presidency of Venezuela. ———. 1998. “Reforma de la Ley de Politica Habitacional” (Reform to the Housing Policy Act). # 4.659, 12/15/98. Presidency of Venezuela. Ghinaglia, Emma de. 1995. “Informe presentado por Venezuela del avance de los planes nacionales para la Cumbre de la Ciudad.” Seminario Regional Andino. Quito, Ecuador. Hall, Richard H. Organizations: Structures, Processes, and Outcomes. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Portela, Maria del Carmen. 1997. “El Sistema Nacional de Asistencia Tecnica SNAT.” The Technical Assistance National System TANS, Paper for the XI ISO Conference on the Habitat and Built Environment, Alexandria, Virginia. Quintana, Leandro. 1991. “Sistema Nacional de Asistencia Técnica.” Technical Assistance National System, MINDUR, CONAVI, Caracas. ———. 1997. “Venezuela ante el Hábitat II: Ciudades para un futuro más sostenible” (Venezuela Before Habitat II: Cities for a Sustainable Future). http://habitat.aq.upm.es/iah/ponenc/a005.html Paper for the Iberoamerican Meeting Before Habitat II. Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.

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Subjects of Engagement

14 Housing for Spatial Justice Building Alliances Between Women Architects and Users Ipek Türeli

Today, many architects are seeking to transcend conventional disciplinary concerns and to directly address social problems through the design of the built environment. Historical perspectives that can guide this commitment, however, tend to be limited in their emphasis of the singular visionary (and usually male) architect, if not altogether missing. New histories of socially engaged architecture and public-interest design must necessarily acknowledge the conditions of the profession itself, such as the value of labour, and gender and racial inequality within the profession. With this conviction, I examine how a group of feminist American architects arrived at low-income housing as a form of alternative, experimental practice in the late 1970s. Based on archival documentation and oral histories, I discuss two interrelated organizations, the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA), a radical pedagogical project, and the Women’s Development Corporation (WDC), a nonprofit developer of housing. My examination situates these organizations in their economic, political, and policy contexts: the end of Fordism, and the resulting funding cuts for social and public services which led to decline in low-income neighborhoods in urban centres, and the rise of community development corporations (CDCs). WSPA was originally founded in 1974 as a two-week summer gathering of women architects. The motivation at the beginning was to foster collective learning in a non-hierarchical environment and to make design education and professions more inclusive to women. Within a couple of years, the focus shifted to social justice, and three of the “sisters” went on to establish WDC to work in the field of housing for low-income single parents, virtually all of whom were women of ethnic and racial minorities. These architects were concerned about their marginalization in a “male-­dominated” profession yet simultaneously cognizant of their class and racial privileges as white, middle-class, professional women. Aligning with other marginalized women, specifically, lowincome single mothers, would support their broader cause toward the spatial dimension of social justice—that is, of “spatial justice,” a term relatively recently coined by the Los Angeles–based urban geographer Edward Soja (2010). This study of these interconnected organizations, WSPA and WDC, provides a demonstrative case for political scientist Nancy Fraser’s (2013a, 2013b)—passionately challenged (Aslan and Gambetti 2011; Funk 2013; Bhandar and Ferreira da Silva 2013)—characterization of second-wave feminism as a “handmaiden” of capitalism. This study also contributes to concerted efforts to acknowledge or “unforget” the contributions of women architects (Stratigakos 2016). It offers a lens onto women architects’ contributions to socially engaged design, remarkably as a means of self-empowerment 169

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through building alliances with women users, and seeks to encourage further scholarship in the history of socially engaged architectural practice.

Women and the Design of the Built Environment Second-wave feminism ought to be credited for its critical role in raising consciousness both among women architects and about them—that is, in expanding research on the history of the built environment to include women’s contributions (Torre 1977; Rendell 2012). Second-wave feminism also led to increasing awareness, in the context of the United States, that the housing stock, most of which was for the nuclear family, with a working father and homemaker mother, did not address demographic trends. The women’s movement fought against the paternalistic values of the statemanaged capitalism of the immediate post-war era—with the suburban single-family house as its emblem, “prisoning” the women at home—at a time, however, when that model was rapidly eroding. Economic restructuring following the OPEC oil crisis of 1973 had led to the weakening of the unions, and the feminization of the labour market in flexible and part-time, low-paid configurations. Without acknowledging or being aware of this change in labour relations and conditions, feminist women in architecture took issue with the suburban house as the culprit. They convincingly argued that the form of new housing had to speak to women’s needs. Especially influential for architects was Dolores Hayden’s Redesigning the American Dream (1984), which praised and publicized Women’s Development Corporation, WDC, founded by three WSPA “sisters,” as an exemplary project that achieved economic equity, spatial integration, and urban revitalization, all at once. Of course, efforts for networking and collaboration among women architects predate secondwave feminism. Regardless, women remained marginalized in both education and professional practice by the 1970s (and despite their increased numbers, they remain so, if, for instance, the award system is taken as a litmus test). Most efforts toward professional alliances focused on alleviating this marginalization. Calls for professional networking among women in the early 1970s led by the end of the decade to concerted efforts to ally with women living at the margins, women suffering from different types of oppression. The San Francisco–based Organization of Women Architects, Cambridge (MA)-based Women in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Planning, and New York–based Alliance of Women in Architecture were all formed in 1972; Chicago Women in Architecture in 1974. It is no coincidence that such organizations were founded in metropolitan areas. Networking could help women architects resist and reverse their marginalization within schools and offices, academia and the profession. First meetings increasingly communicated that there could be alternative ways of making architecture, and despite the dominant image of the architect as a “pipe smoking, tweedy suited white male,” that “It’s OKAY to be a Woman Architect,”1 that women architects did not have to choose between the private and social parts of their lives—for example, as mothers and wives, and their identities as professionals. From earlier concerns about improving their numbers and wages, participating women architects moved to a questioning of the boundaries of the discipline and the profession. The seven founders of WSPA—Katrin Adam, Ellen Perry Berkeley, Noel Phyllis Birkby, Bobbie Sue Hood, Marie I. Kennedy, Joan Forrester Sprague, and Leslie Kanes Weisman—who had been living in Boston, New York, Detroit, and San Francisco areas, met through various networking events from 1972 to 1974, conferences in Los Angeles, Oregon, and Lincoln, Nebraska. Most of the preparatory work, however, was realized over the mail and through phone conversations. Only Spraque and Kennedy were in existing collaboration as partners in the non-hierarchical, all-women “Open Design Office” in Boston. In fact, the seven of them met together for the first time in the first WSPA summer session of 1975, the 52 participants of which came from 21 states in the United States and from Canada. It is important to note that, as affiliations, most listed educational institutions: Katrin Adam, City College, School of Architecture (New York); Ellen Perry Berkeley, Columbia 170

Figure 14.1 Women’s School of Planning and Architecture participants forming a woman symbol, 1975. From the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College (Northampton, Massachusetts).

Photo by Patti Glazer. From the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College (Northampton, Massachusetts).

Figure 14.2 Introductory session of the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, St. Francis College, Biddeford, Maine, August 10, 1975.

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University; Phyllis Birkby, Pratt Institute; and Leslie Kanes Weisman, New Jersey School of Architecture. Two of these seven women would go on to found WDC: Boston-based Sprague and New York-based Adam. Typical of most experimental work back then as today, their alternative practices were co-supported by educational institutions in an indirect way. A graduate of Cornell University’s professional program in architecture (for a BArch) and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education (EdM), Sprague produced work ranging from furniture to collective housing for low-income women and children at the aforementioned Open Design Office. She worked as consultant to Benjamin Thomson Associates as well as several other prominent local firms and institutions. Also active as a writer, she published manuals (1984, 1986, 1988, 1991) for other women to take up her kind of community work. Adam was born in Germany and studied carpentry and architecture at the State Academy of Beaux Arts and at the Cabinetmaking Guild of Munich before she came to the United States to work with a number of prominent architects, including Eero Saarinen in Connecticut and Frank Gehry in Los Angeles, California.2 During the latter time, in Los Angeles, she got involved in the women’s movement. She finally settled in New York and started taking leadership roles in community design. Today, Linda Nochlin’s 1971 article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (Art News) is remembered as a turning point—for challenging the notion of greatness or genius that had hitherto characterized the art historical canon as well as shaping contemporary criticism since. Los Angeles had a particularly active scene for women artists who defied accepted norms about art production and the cult of the artist as genius: for example, at “Womanhouse,” a collaborative installation, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro—founders of Feminist Art Program (1971) at CalArts—­transformed an abandoned Hollywood mansion with installation work that “confronted” stereotypical American middle-class domestic roles of women (Chicago and Meyer 1995). Secondly, in opposition to the male-dominated art world, women artists did collective work. The feminist social practice of “consciousness raising” was a key concern in this type of work, especially through group discussions. This practice sought to enable women to identify patterns and beliefs that perpetuate dictated gender norms, and to question these norms, to change their own behaviour, and to lead to collective action, especially among women (Rosen 2006). WSPA was very much influenced, informed, and in conversation with such collaborative and radical artistic work, and feminist-identified, women-only educational programs at its inception; it was the only one in the United States focusing on architecture and the built environment (Kahn 2014). There were five WSPA sessions: the first one took place in 1975 at St. Joseph’s College in Biddeford, Maine; the second one in 1976 took place at the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Stephenson College; the third in 1978 at Roger Williams College in Bristol, Rhode Island; the fourth one in 1979 at Regis College in Denver, Colorado. The first four were two weeks long. The final one in 1981 took the form of a weekend symposium in Washington, DC, in 1981. WSPA co-founders Katrin Adam and Joan Forrester Sprague teamed up with a younger participant of WSPA sessions, Susan Aitcheson, to found WDC. Aitcheson had graduated from the University of Nebraska with a bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1975.3 She participated in the first session of the Women’s School in Maine and continued to attend the sessions, becoming part of the planning group in 1978. Having worked on (Bridgewater) prison and (Monsanto’s) chemical plant projects until that moment, she wanted to “integrate feminism and architecture”4 and establishing the non-profit housing corporation seemed like an effective way of changing both women’s professional roles and the client groups that they served.5 While the first session of WSPA was very much in the spirit of consciousness raising, subsequent sessions led the organization to focus more on action, and led Adam, Sprague, and Aitheson to choose Providence, the capital city of Rhode Island, to build affordable housing for women in need. It was midway from Boston, where Sprague was based, and New York, where Katrin Adam was based. They regarded Rhode Island as an “empty field” since there were no other CDCs with which 173

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they would be competing.6 In Aitcheson’s words, “it was possible in Rhode Island, the smallest state in the United States, to have the governor, the mayor, everyone in the same room. So [they could] push things along more quickly.”7 Furthermore, the state had rejected most of the federal investment in urban renewal in the 1960s, avoiding the fate of other inner-city areas in major U.S. cities, such as Boston and Chicago. As a result, there were many historic residential buildings they could renovate and adopt. In Providence, the trio met and invited to their group Alma Green, originally from Mexico, and a recent graduate of Brown University, with work experience in the mayor’s office and an understanding of local actors and federal and community grant opportunities. Just as WSPA was inspired by and part of a larger women’s movement, WDC was not founded or operating in a vacuum. There had been slightly earlier as well as parallel efforts both in providing housing for women-headed households and by women-focused housing corporations elsewhere in the United States as well as abroad (Ahrentzen 1989; Anthony 1991). All these efforts and the reporting on them consistently point to the fact that the rates of divorce and the proportion of singleparent families had noticeably increased; a high share of single-parent families were women-headed, and financially disadvantaged (Ahrentzen, 1988, 442). Housing alternatives for the changing family thus had emerged as a focus of feminist design practice as well as historical inquiry (Hayden 1984; Ahrentzen 1989). It must be noted, however, that women designers were historically ghettoized within the profession as house designers (Wright 1977). The profession encouraged women to specialize in housing based on sexual stereotypes, with the home as the sphere of women. As a result, those women who were concerned with social aspects of the built environment became, in Gwendolyn Wright’s words, “adjuncts to the profession” (Wright 1977, 284). The three WSPA sisters’ move to the field of housing occurred in light of contemporaneous discussions on women’s environmental needs perhaps perpetuating rather than confronting long-established stereotypes.

Housing as a Field of Action for Gender Equity WDC’s origins lie in the women’s movement in architecture but it also emerged as a result of a major shift in housing policy, which allocated governmental spending from that of direct housing supply to dispersal programs that ranged from community development programs to vouchers (Goetz 2003). Not only in the United States but also internationally, many public housing programs moved to a public-private partnership model in their financing or provision. Interestingly, this move was paralleled with a celebration of user participation in housing design with acclaimed examples, for example, by Lucien Kroll and Christopher Alexander, where the architect-expert retained control over the project, despite soliciting participation in the earlier design phase (Ruesjas 2012).8 Indeed, their works have been interpreted mostly within an architectural discourse that still focuses mainly on architectural and social intentions rather than financial or regulatory underpinnings, or rather than outcomes and impact. In stark contrast to these better-known examples by male architects, by the time the three women architects from WSPA decided to establish WDC, they chose to establish not an architectural office or firm but a community development corporation (CDC), in order to be able to tap into federal grants. WSPA sisters had reasoned early on that their marginalization within the profession was somewhat liberatory, allowing them to “devise solutions men may be too restricted to consider” (Leslie Weisman, quoted in Reif 1975). This solution turned out to be community development (which is much more comprehensive than “community design”). At the moment of its founding, WDC founders were concerned not solely with unit design, financing, and delivery but also with providing other kinds of social support mechanisms, such as an informal daycare network so that women could come to meetings, and the provision of training in self-help concepts and techniques (Adam et al. 1981). Finally, they were interested not only in new buildings but also in adaptive reuse 174

Figure 14.3 “174 Camp Street,” a triple-decker renovated and converted into rental units for low-income people by Women’s Development Corporation in Providence, Rhode Island, next to its “before and after” plan layouts featured in Joseph Giovanni, “Planning New Living Spaces for the Nontraditional Family,” The New York Times (Thursday, September 20, 1984), C10.

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(Adam et al. 1981). The founders started out by rehabilitating a factory building, and with help from Providence Preservation Society, they continued with abandoned Victorians, colonials, and tripledeckers. These scattered conversions helped revitalize neighbourhoods. WSPA’s move toward housing production was nurtured by the federal government. HUD, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, had taken a special interest in these emerging women’s organizations (Skinner 1978). In 1976, the “Women’s Policy and Program Division” was approved as a special unit within HUD to improve women’s access to housing. While community development and women’s housing had been central concerns in specific courses during WSPA’s 1975 and 1976 sessions, the grant opportunities provided by HUD and explained at the 1978 session in person by HUD representatives gave these issues an increasing importance and led to group workshops on the potential of Community Block Grants for the special needs of women (Adam et al. 1981). It is no coincidence that WDC was established following this session. In the end, HUD did not finance the proposal by Adam, Aitcheson, and Sprague, but the Women’s Policy and Program Division within HUD guided them toward other agencies, the Community Services Administration and the Economic Development Administration, which granted funding by October 1979 (Adam et al. 1981). In WDC’s initial scheme, housing planning was connected to supporting women’s participation in the workforce and thereby independence from welfare, while also achieving urban revitalization.

Reinventing the Image of Low-Income Housing WDC’s housing projects in Providence focused initially on the adaptive reuse of abandoned historic properties, and helped downtown revitalization. Because the units were dispersed, their earlier projects avoided the stigmatization associated with living in public housing projects as well as in unmaintained slum-type rental units in the private real estate market. This stigmatization was a key reason that WDC founders could recruit local women for their community design workshops. The participating women attended these meetings because they wanted to get out of public housing to a place which they thought would be closer to one’s home, simply by not being labeled as a “project.” For example, two of them (interviewed on 19 May 2011), Fanny and Jessie, were both living at that time in a local public housing project called Chad Brown. Chad Brown was developed by the Providence Housing Authority in 1942 (Campbell 2007). It consisted of 28 two-story row houses with 198 units spread out among 13 acres of land, which was landscaped. It was originally built to house 600 war production workers, upon the departure of which—that is, by the 1960s— primarily low-income residents of Providence had moved in (Campbell 2007). Chad Brown was quite different from the tower blocks that came to characterize public housing projects in the postwar era. It was stigmatized nonetheless as a “project,” and suffered visibly from lack of maintenance and investment by the 1960s. The dominant image of public housing in post-war United States has been the high-rise, highdensity “project.” Yet, this model was relatively short-lived. By the end of the 1960s, legal measures and programs (e.g., Fair Housing Act of 1968) paved the way for scattered-site projects that sought to overcome racial discrimination and the concentration of poverty (Goetz 2003). Perhaps the most famous of these high-rise, high-density projects, Pruitt-Igoe—designed by Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth and built in the early 1950s in St. Louis, Missouri—was demolished in the 1970s. The highly publicized and broadcast demolition of the first of the 33 blocks on March 16, 1972, by the federal government became an iconic moment in housing policy debates. Within architectural circles, the spectacle of the demolition was glorified as the end of modernism and the beginning of postmodernism, most memorably by Charles Jencks (1977) in The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, and much quoted via Jencks in seminal books, such as The Condition of Postmodernity by David Harvey (1990). According to the chain of authority established by repeated

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comments, the failure of Pruitt-Igoe was in its design. Katharine Bristol’s 1991 Journal of Architectural Education article entitled “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” and, 20 years later, the 2011 documentary film with the same title by Chad Freidrichs aim to “debunk” the myth by showing how the project’s operation was plagued by a number of political, economic, and social contextual factors—such as the white flight to the suburbs enabled by mortgages underwritten by the federal government, the lack of funds for maintenance, and managerial discrimination and failure. The “myth” served the architecture discipline trying to legitimize its new direction (Bristol 1991). What the myth served in housing policy and broader policy debates is another question. Not disconnected to the impending oil crisis of October 1973 and the ensuing economic recession, in January 1973, President Richard M. Nixon halted federally administered housing production programs (Oberleke 2000). Over the next decades, federal policy shifted from a project-based approach to tenant-based assistance. However, federal funds kept flowing into lowincome housing production through subsidies, including housing vouchers, housing block grants, and the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (Oberleke 2000). These policy tools encouraged nongovernmental players (non-profit corporations and for-profit firms) to participate in shaping new programs that delivered low-income housing and other social services. David J. Erickson (2006, 167) explains, “more than one million federally subsidized apartments for low-income tenants that were built in the 1980s and early 1990s . . . primarily by for-profit and non-profit housing developers and funded largely with tax credits and federal block grants.” Referring to the 2008 census, Alex Schwartz (2010) provides the figure of 1.61 million low-income units built by nonprofit community development corporations alone. In summary, the welfare state did not simply disappear but, according to Erickson, “became less transparent, lost in a confusion of public-private partnerships and back-door financing techniques” (2006, 168), many of which were fulfilled by non-profit housing developers, such as WDC, as well as for-profit developers. In short, WSPA’s move toward housing production for low-income marginalized women was nurtured by the federal government’s changing housing policy and the creation of a special unit within HUD that engaged women’s housing issues.

The Question of Participation While non-profits in low-income housing provision had existed for a long time in the United States, before the 1970s they were mostly religious organizations, labour unions, or settlement houses—­ notably, housing was not at the centre of their services (Schwartz 2010, 294). The non-profit scene that emerged in the 1970s consisted of predominantly community development corporations (CDCs). CDCs, in turn, have roots in community design centres, established by professionals (Schumann 2006; Comerio 1984). The first community design centre was established in 1963 New York City (Architects Renewal Committee in Harlem) in opposition to urban renewal plans threatening inner-city neighbourhoods, part and parcel of the civil rights movement. Architects who got involved with such initiatives questioned the legitimacy of the profession, especially of the modern movement, which proposed to offer solutions to social problems but created, in their eyes, more problems. For example, high-rise, tower-form public housing projects, which sought to improve the conditions of inner-city slums, exacerbated racial discrimination and poverty for their residents. In its earlier phase, “community design” meant a group of professionals, mostly university-based ones, worked with a local community in challenging top-down plans. In many instances, they did not find a “community” that was organized and unified; hence their tasks included galvanizing public support and forming the very communities they hoped to work with. Mary Comerio (1984) identifies a shift from this earlier idealist 1960s’ phase to the 1980s’ pragmatic entrepreneurialism. In the 1960s, advocacy programs started receiving government support but by the 1980s national

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political and economic agendas had shifted, and along with it professional concerns for environmental and distributive justice subsided. Even before the era of Reaganism—that is, by the late 1970s—­community designers had shifted their focus from process to product—namely, delivering built projects (Comerio 1984). In WDC’s case, this meant benefiting from newly made available funds for scattered-site low-income housing programs. The availability (or thereof the lack of ) funds partially explains why the participatory design workshops WDC initiated when they started out in Providence in 1979 were terminated after 1981, but they flourished as a housing developer until today. Comerio explains, “advocacy and citizen participation did not demystify professional knowledge, but instead created a new category of expertise in special interest politics” (Comerio 1984, 239). WDC is very much part of this expertise; it is still within the realm of community design because they produce affordable housing not merely for the generic user but for a specific constituency. By 1981, when WDC had produced its first buildings for low-income single mothers, WSPA held its last session.

Participation in the Field The founders of WDC applied the ideological agenda of WSPA directly into practice in the field in Providence. WSPA proposed alternatives to conventional architectural practice. The curriculum was designed to offer subject matter unavailable in standard academic or professional settings. Maledefined and ‑identified education was competitive and hierarchical; in contrast, WSPA founders and organizers turned their focus toward pleasure, humour, and fun. “Cake campus” exercise at the 1975 session and commemorative necklaces, passports, and other memorabilia they produced as well as recordings reveal these aspects of the school. In their applications of pedagogic experiments in the field, the courses acquired practical goals. For instance, one WSPA course was called “Demystification of Tools in Relations to Design.”9 Offered by Katrin Adam, who had trained in carpentry and cabinet-making back in Germany, this course taught participating women to work with wood. Such a class was not meant to directly advance women architects in their professional careers but to empower them through know-how. However, when adapted for WDC, in Providence, the “Women in Construction” class offered under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), and again taught by Adam, was quietly utilitarian: this training could allow several (of the 225) participants to enter the highly gendered and well-paid construction trade as builders and developers. Most strikingly, the fantasy drawing classes which were originally conceived by Weismann and Birkby for well-educated, mostly white women architects to imagine their ideal environments as poetic statements were repurposed in WDC’s community design workshops with local mothers to gather design information (Torre 1977). Weisman (1992, 170) explains the following about the WSPA sessions: Workshop participants entered a room in which long rolls of paper and a large supply of coloured markers stretched across the floor. We instructed women to get comfortable, close their eyes, and imagine their ideal living environment. With long pauses, in between, we asked:“What does it look like?” “What size and shape?” “What is it made of?” “Where is it located? “What do you do there?” “Is there anyone else there?” “Where?” and so on. As pictures came to mind, the women silently began to draw, allowing their images to develop by free association. . . . As our collection of drawings grew, we began to notice patterns that spoke of shared experiences and common aspirations among the participants. Four themes emerged: the women needed private, safe space; they wanted control over who could enter it, why, and for how long; they wanted the physical arrangement of their dwellings to adjust to changes in their moods, activities, and relationships with others; and they felt that it was important to have contact with nature and natural materials that soothe and stimulate the senses. 178

Photo by Patti Glazer. From the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College (Northampton, Massachusetts).

Figure 14.4  Identification of fasteners for Katrin Adam’s core course “Demystification of Tools,” Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, August 1975.

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In the WDC workshops, in Providence, however, the women participants were not asked to do fantasy drawings. Instead, they were given clearly defined ruled papers, and small coloured pieces of paper to explain their ideal domestic configurations. They were then asked to create floor plans using the coloured pieces, each of which stood in for a type of activity, and to use heart-shaped pieces to identify spaces special to them. The collages that were generated were in turn used by the WDC founders and architect Nancy Santagata (Breitbart 1990) to generate a prototypical plan solution, which would then be incorporated into each new project. The participatory design workshops of WDC founders and local women lasted for more than a year. These sessions were used by WDC founders, in the words of Weisman “to break down the barriers between design professionals and low-income client groups, particularly those who speak English as a second language” (Weisman 1992, 170). How effective the guided drawing exercises were in terms of cross-class solidarity is a question that remains unanswered. The participating low-income women understood the purpose of the drawings for the architects but did not necessarily enjoy them as a poetic exercise in the same way as women architects participating in the WSPA drawing sessions did. The workshops did give them a sense of participation in a process, and helped them form bonds among the group that have continued until this day. However, especially because the WDC founders remained as managers of the properties they converted or built anew, the power relations between the architects and the “clients” became more problematic over the ensuing years, with WDC leadership having the sole incentive in the shaping of the housing, and in decisions regarding who has access to their housing units. Though WDC cared about residents’ feedback—for example, it commissioned Myrna Marhguiles Breitbart (1990) to do a postoccupancy study in 1986–1987—in subsequent projects, it focused its efforts on real estate management, development, and fundraising. Since federal grants became extremely competitive over the years, WDC diversified its target groups to include elderly, disabled, and other marginal groups to tap into other types of local, city, and state funds as well. And since the historic housing stock is not so readily and cheaply available today, they have also engaged in building new housing in clusters, which inevitably looks like low-income housing, which undermines to a degree the non-profit’s founding goals.

Conclusion WSPA advocated that women architects engage not only with the design aspect but with all aspects of the housing process, from planning to designing, from building to maintaining, from creating housing codes to lobbying development authorities. Among these WDC chose to focus on building and management. WDC’s path and approach to development fitted perhaps too well with the restructuring of the economy and its impact on cities: just as downtown revitalization schemes corresponded with the feminist critiques of suburban living, the rise of complex public-private collaborations encouraged a new generation of architects to turn to development (most significantly marked by the opening of “real estate” units in academic institutions, such as Harvard University) and this alternative path of “architect-as-developer” corresponded with and spoke to the feminist critique of the male-dominated architectural design office. Second-wave feminism had emerged as a critique of the state-managed capitalism of the post-war era; feminist architects’ critique of suburban home and endorsement of public-private partnerships and inner-city redevelopments dovetailed with new urbanization trends under neoliberalism. And emancipatory aspects of feminism, such as solidarity, collaboration, horizontality, and participation, were key ideas which somewhat lost steam on the way. WSPA had showed its participants that their marginalization within the profession was not a singular phenomenon, and if they had more presence—say, within the AIA, within architecture schools, as students and as faculty, and in architecture offices—it would not solve all that much because the whole built environment was designed by male-dominated institutions within a male-dominated 180

Figure 14.5 Apartment plan configuration produced at a participatory design workshop held by Women’s Development Corporation in 1979. Courtesy of WDC.

Figure 14.6 Participatory design workshop held in 1979. Katrin Adam overlooking two participants working on their ideal plan diagrams. Courtesy of WDC.

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spatial paradigm. Thus, if they instead aligned with other marginalized groups, they could create new kinds of spaces that foster human equality. Hence, they organized and networked in experimental summer schools, horizontally organized open offices, and development corporations that would house low-income people. “Users” for these women were not generalizations; they advocated a design process involving specific future users from the start. Hence they fulfilled Italian architect Giancarlo De Carlo’s (2005 [1969]) call to not “design for” but “design with” users, as well as American planner Paul Davidoff ’s (1965) to be advocates for disadvantaged groups. The right to housing would be the basis for a just society. To remember WSPA and to examine WDC’s trajectory in a continuum is significant today for a number of reasons. Feminist architects discussed here challenged conventional forms of (top-down) practice in how they themselves organized as professionals. They opposed institutional methods of housing delivery and instead opted for the participation of users and working with specific user groups. They were aware of their relational power in choosing to work with other women of different racial and class backgrounds and experiences, but they necessarily wanted to build alliances—­ alliances which would challenge the norms of the “male-dominated” built environment and empower both the user groups and themselves as architects. WSPA’s interest in housing initially had to do with the critique of suburbia and was based on second-wave feminism. Yet, the interest in building low-income housing was nurtured directly by the federal government at a moment when federal policy was shifting from a project-based approach to tenant-based assistance, from centralized provision of units to dispersal housing programs. The connection and continuity between WSPA, the itinerant women architects’ school, the radical pedagogical project, and WDC, the non-profit housing developer and manager, are an illustration of Fraser’s aforementioned argument that “second-wave feminism became capitalism’s handmaiden”; that “it has entangled in a dangerous liaison with neoliberal efforts to build a free-market society” (2013b). Fraser’s point is not to condemn feminism but to point to ways it can be reclaimed as a critique of contemporary capitalism. Uncovering or not forgetting this story seeks to first acknowledge the unique role of women architects in histories of participation in the profession, and second, to promote models of horizontality and collaboration, and most importantly solidarity, which were informed by their feminist perspective.

Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to WDC founders Alma Green and Susan Aitcheson, and to past and current WDC tenants for sharing their stories with us. This project was initiated in 2010, when Design Media Research (DMR)Lab, a design and media consultancy founded by Gökçe Kınayoğlu and myself, was commissioned to produce a short film about the history and accomplishments of WDC. Most of the archival research and subject interviews were realized during this collaboration, the result of which is available online at www.dmrlab.org/housing-options-after-pruitt-igoe. Subsequent archival research was conducted at the Records of the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. Thanks to research assistants Camille Bédard, Oletha McGillivray, Gül Kale, and Ayça Köseoğlu for their help in sifting through the WSPA materials. Thanks to Elizabeth Kahn, who shared her scholarly insights on WSPA. Thanks are also due to colleagues Annmarie Adams, Drew Armstrong, Mrinalini Rajagopalan, Yael Alweil, Rachel Kallus, Meltem Gürel, and the McGill Journal of Sustainable Development Law & Policy ( JSDLP) Lecture Series for speaking opportunities on this research and for the feedback.

Notes 1 See the poster of “Organization of Women Architects,” 1974. Available from http://owa-usa.org/docs/ 1974poster(front).pdf [Accessed 13 September 2016]. 183

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2 “Coordinator’s credentials for the 1978 session.” Box 8 Folder 7; WSPA, 2002 Reunion Album, 1–2. Records of the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. 3 Interview with author on December 8, 2010, at WDC, RI. 4 “Participant List for 1979 Session,” Box 9, Folder 13. Records. 5 “Program for the 1979 Session,” Box 9, Folder 14. Records. 6 Interview with author on December 8, 2010, at WDC, RI. 7 Ibid. 8 For example, Ana Laura Ruesjas’s post-occupancy study of Christopher Alexander’s Mexicali project shows how the buildings were transformed during use because, while the result of a participatory process, the design was removed from the residents’ immediate realities. Swedish architects Ralph Erskine and Johannes Olivegren, British architects Walter Segal and John Turner, Italian architect Giancarlo de Carlo, and American architects Sandy Hirshen, Richard Hach, Charles Moore, Karl Linn, David Chapin, James Vann, Randy Hester, Henry Sanoff, and Troy West are some of the well-known names associated with participatory design processes and community design. Among contemporary practices, muf, which was founded in 1994 in London, has made a name for itself as an all-women collaborative of artists, architects, and urban designers. 9 “Background Facts of WSPA for the 1976 Session,” Box 1 Folder 1. Records.

References Adam, K., Aitcheson, S.E. and Forrester Sprague, J. (1981) “Women’s Development Corporation,” Heresies, special issue “Making Room: Women and Architecture” 3: 19–20. Ahrentzen, S. (1988) “Single-Parent Housing,” in J.A. Wilkes and R.T. Packard (eds), Encyclopaedia of Architecture: Design, Engineering & Construction, New York: Wiley, pp. 442–448. ——— (1989) “Overview of Housing for Single-Parent Households,” in K. Franck and S. Ahrentzen (eds), New Households, New Housing, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, pp. 143–160. Anthony, K.H. (1991) “Housing the Single-Parent Family,” in W.F.E. Preiser, J. Vischer and E. White (eds), Design Intervention: Toward a More Humane Architecture, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, pp. 11–36. Aslan, Ö. and Gambetti, Z. (2011) “Provincializing Fraser’s History: Feminism and Neoliberalism Revisited,” History of the Present 1: 130–147. Available from: www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/historypresent.1.1.0130 [Accessed 13 September 2016]. Bhandar, B. and Ferreira da Silva, D. (2013) “White Feminist Fatigue Syndrome: A Reply to Nancy Fraser,” Critical Legal Thinking. Available from: http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/10/21/white-feminist-fatiguesyndrome/ [Accessed 6 May 2016] Breitbart, M.M. (1990) “Quality Housing for Women and Children,” Canadian Woman Studies 2: 19–24. Available from: http://cws.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cws/article/view/10743/9832 [Accessed 13 September 2016] Bristol, K.G. (1991) “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Journal of Architectural Education 3: 163–171. Available from: www. jstor.org/stable/1425266 [Accessed 13 September 2016] Campbell, P. (2007) A Community Apart: A History of Public Housing in Providence, East Providence, RI: Rhode Island Publications Society, pp. 242–243. Chicago, J. and Meyer, L. (1995) “Judy Chicago, Feminist Artist and Educator,” in P. Chesler, E.D. Rothblum and E. Cole (eds), Feminist Foremothers in Women’s Studies, Psychology, and Mental Health, New York: Haworth Press, pp. 125–140. Comerio, M. (1984) “Community Design: Idealism and Entrepreneurialism,” Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 1: 227–243. Davidoff, P. (1965) “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 4: 331–338. De Carlo, Giancarlo (2005 [1969]) “Architecture’s Public,” in P. Blundell-Jones, D. Petrescu, and J. Till, Architecture and Participation, London: Spon Press, pp. 3–22. Erickson, D.J. (2006) “Community Capitalism: How Housing Advocates, the Private Sector, and Government Forged New Low-Income Housing Policy, 1968–1996,” Journal of Policy History 2: 167–204. Available from: DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jph.2006.0003 [Accessed 13 September 2016] Fraser, N. (2013a) Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis, London: Verso. ——— (2013b) “How Feminism Became Capitalism’s Handmaiden—and How to Reclaim It,” The Guardian. Opinion (October 14) Funk, N. (2013) “Contra Fraser on Feminism and Neoliberalism,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 28 (February): 179–196. Goetz, E.G. (2003) “Housing Dispersal Programs,” Journal of Planning Literature 1: 3–16. 184

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Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford: Blackwell. Hayden, D. (1984) Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life, New York: W.W. Norton. Jencks, C. (1977) The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, London: Rizzoli. Kahn, E. (2014) Project Space(s) in the Design Professions: An Intersectional Feminist Study of the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (1974–1981). Thesis (PhD), University of Massachusetts Amherst. Kanes Weisman, L. (1992) Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Nochlin, L. (1971) “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Art News 69, 9 ( January): 22–39, 67–71. Oberleke, C. (2000) “The Evolution of Low-Income Housing Policy, 1949 to 1999,” Housing Policy Debate 2: 489–520. Reif, R. (1975) “Architecture: Feminist Ferment,” New York Times (August 9) Section Real Estate, p. 33. Rendell, J. (2012) “Tendencies and Trajectories: Feminist Approaches in Architecture,” in C.G. Crysler, S. Cairns and H. Heynen (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, London: SAGE, pp. 85–97. Rosen, R. (2006) The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, New York: Penguin. Ruesjas, A.L. (2012) “Lessons From the Mexicali Experimental Project,” in E. Krasny (ed.), Right to Green: Hands-On Urbanism 1850–2012, Hong Kong: MCCM Creations, pp. 200–302. Sanoff, H. (2016) “Origins of Community Design,” Progressive Planner Magazine (Winter). Available from: www. plannersnetwork.org/2006/01/origins-of-community-design/ [Accessed 4 May 2016] Schumann, A. (2006) “Introduction: The Pedagogy of Engagement,” in M. Hardin, R.A. Eribes and C. Poster (eds), From the Studio to the Streets: Service-Learning in Planning and Architecture, Sterling, VA: Stylus, pp. 1–15. Schwartz, A.F. (2010) Housing Policy in the United States, New York: Routledge. Skinner, A.J. (1978) “Women Consumers, Women Professionals: Their Roles and Problems in Housing and Community Development Are Concerns of Special HUD Office,” Journal of Housing 35 (May): 228–230. Soja, E. (2010) Seeking Spatial Justice, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sprague, J.F. (1984) A Development Primer: Starting Housing or Business Ventures by and/or for Women, Boston, MA: Women’s Institute for Housing and Economic Development. ——— (1986) A Manual on Transitional Housing, Boston, MA: Women’s Institute for Housing and Economic Development. ——— (1988) Taking Action: A Comprehensive Approach to Housing Women and Children in Massachusetts, Boston, MA: Women’s Institute for Housing and Economic Development. ——— (1991) More than Housing: Lifeboats for Women and Children, Boston, MA: Butterworth Architecture. ——— (1994) More than Shelter: A Manual on Transitional Housing, Boston, MA: Women’s Institute for Housing and Economic Development. Stratigakos, D. (2016) “Unforgetting Women Architects: From the Pritzker to Wikipedia,” Places Journal. Available from: https://placesjournal.org/article/unforgetting-women-architects-from-the-pritzker-to-wikipedia [Accessed 4 May 2016] Torre, S. (1977) Women in American Architecture: A Historic Contemporary Perspective, New York: Whitney Library of Design, Watson-Guptill. Wright, G. (1986 [1977]) “On the Fringe of the Profession: Women in American Architecture,” in S. Kostof (ed.), The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 280–308.

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15 Children’s Engagement in Design Reflections From Research and Practice Matluba Khan

Introduction Outside of the circles of scholars on children, design professionals hardly think children as the active agents of spatial production. Although scholars perceive children as equally competent as adults in decision making about their own spaces, children in general are considered as a category of scholarly or design investigation from which data could be collected. To counter this position, in recent decades a substantial number of scholars argued for the creation of new methods and techniques aimed at total engagement of children in research and practice. Opinions of children of different age, sex and capability can be incorporated in the actual production of space. However, no matter how objective adults intend to be in executing the research on children’s space the extent to which children are engaged in design depends on adults’ agenda and more importantly the specific cultural construct of children and childhood within which the adults operate. Adults’ perception of ‘childhood’ and the status of children in society have undergone multiple turn-shifts and transformed radically over time. How children are understood by the society influences their role in the production mechanism and management. Children are increasingly valued as participants in research concerning them and planning and design of the spaces used by them. This is motivated by the shift in the conceptualization of children as less competent and passive objects to more active social agents. Children’s participation in research concerning them and design and planning of the places that involve their interest and use have attracted increased attention of researchers in the past two decades (Francis and Lorenzo 2002; Samborski 2010). Researchers and theorists who are in doubt of children’s equal competence as adults ask why there should be different methods for children (Punch 2002). How children’s competence is perceived is cultural, whereas immaturity is a biological fact; therefore, it’s adults’ responsibility to consider children’s developmental phases while selecting appropriate tools and techniques (Iltus and Hart 1994; Khoo-Lattimore 2015). The playground, orphanage, day-care centre, children’s museum and boarding house are among important places where we can observe the changing relationship between adult and the children, but it is probably the school and the design of the classroom that most acutely give us the picture. The modern schooling system emerged from the Industrial Revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century that formalized the education primarily provided by the church and other religious or charitable organizations (Saint 1987; Dudek 2000; Uduku 2015b). The educational system 186

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of European countries was exported to their respective colonies; this pre-war model of education which regarded children as only the receiver of education remained until the late 1950s. After the 1950s, there was a shift from teacher-directed and textbook-centred learning to child-focused or student-centred learning in countries in Europe and the United States (Uduku 2015b). The contemporary child-centred education practices encouraged children’s participation in design, which in most cases is limited to the design of school playground as a place for play and not learning. This chapter discusses aspects of children’s participation in design reflecting on history of childhood, prevailing theories related to children’s participation in design and my experience of engaging children in design and development of school grounds as outdoor learning environments in Bangladesh.

Changing Role of Children Before the sixteenth century children were perceived as elements of pleasure as adults, particularly women, got pleasure from watching them and cuddling and pampering them (Aitken 2001). Many male educators and preachers of the sixteenth century perceived children as fragile creatures who needed protection and reform (Aitken 2001). During the seventeenth century children were regarded as rebellious and fundamentally wicked, for whose betterment edification by parents was compulsory. No matter whether childhood was regarded as a state of imperfection or innocence, their education was guided by adults’ specific understanding of children’s nature. This further influenced gender differences in children’s education and segregation of spaces for men and women. Boys received education on rationality and logic to function in the public sphere while girls were instructed in etiquette and ethical duty and remained in private domestic spaces. The division of public and private further influenced social processes and contributed to formation of a spatially separate family identity. The concept of childhood and youth has undergone several changes between 1800 and the early twentieth century, with ‘changing cultural attitudes, expectations and fears adults have harboured about the young’ (Hendrick 1984, 88). Children in Europe were protected from working before the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century was described as the beginning of a ‘new world’ for children; during that time, children were glorified as ‘small adults’, the Industrial Revolution creating working-class children to work in the factories while at the same time the upper class adopted a more glamorized view of childhood (Hendrick 1984). The home life of working-class and middleclass people became increasingly private and separate at that time. In the nineteenth century, children’s place was established in the private sphere along with women (Aitken 2001). ‘Childhood’ was standardized at that time by the introduction of a formal schooling system and welfare works. Formal education further separated children from the adults’ world. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the concept of childhood changed, accompanied by a colonial modernity1 in most of the urban centres of the Indian Empire, particularly in what was then the Bengal Presidency.2 The institutions responsible for primary education of children in the Bengal Presidency were known as pathshala—the house for learning. Pathshala was very much different in its character than what we know as schools, as its scope was very limited and the main objective was to enrich children with knowledge of practical skills. The children were taught by one teacher, who was known as the guru, and the teaching was conducted under a big tree or in a room. There was no division of grades; children of all age, class and caste studied in the same room and played together. With the establishment of ‘schools’ in the urban areas, children from rural Bengal shifted to cities in search of a modern ‘English’ education as opposed to their father and forefathers, who depended on agriculture and went to the village pathshala. This shift—from pathshala to an entirely different schooling in a missionary school in the city, from one kind of world-view to another, from the indigenous concept of childhood to a western one—was very typical of the times and was also evident in other European colonies—for example, French colonies in West Africa. 187

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Abiding by the Charter Act of 1813, some English employees of the East India Company, businessmen and military officers, such as David Hare, William Butterworth and Sir Edward Hyde, contributed to the introduction and promotion of knowledge of sciences in the Indian subcontinent. The main purpose of this education reform was to introduce and spread western education in English (Shahidullah 1987). Affluent and rich people of the Bengal, such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Radhakanta Dev, actively supported this initiative and the Christian missionaries used English as the medium of education and to preach Christianity. Almost at the same time, starting from the midnineteenth century in England, the school as an institute was formalized with standardized furniture, classroom sizes and design layouts (Saint 1987; Uduku 2015b). The whole system was exported to the colonies of England and other European countries, where children of the elite could learn the same curriculum in an environment copied from the schools in Europe (Uduku 2011; Uduku 2015a; Uduku 2015b). The introduction of compulsory primary education at the beginning of the twentieth century took children out of the industries and public places further, creating a distinguished division between children and adults. Children were being perceived by adults as a separate social group—less competent, unskilled and passive members limiting their access within home and schools (Hussain 2010). This perception also alienated children from their rights to participate in social activities and decision-making along with adults (Archard 2004). During this time, children were further separated from the sites of adults’ workplaces through establishment of playgrounds across Europe and the United States (Aitken 2001). Playgrounds were considered important for children because they retracted children’s attention from streets to a supervised environment to discipline their bodies while public schools took the responsibility of disciplining the mind. After the establishment of the United Nations, in the 1950s to 1960s, UNESCO worked with the mission of setting up school design standards and building schools in some countries of the emerging world by experts trained in the ‘West’ (representing the UK, the United States and France) (De Raedt 2012; Uduku 2015b). The international standards of the school design were based mainly on UK/U.S. research and funded by means of loans from bilateral agencies, like the World Bank (De Raedt 2014). As Uduku (2015b, 202) stated, ‘The context for school design history over the post– World War Two years has been dominated by global policies and trends dictated by international bodies, the most influential of those being the World Bank and UNESCO.’ The export of adultperceived notions of childhood in the form of global policies intricately influenced modern constructs of gender, individuality and family life. Still today schools, particularly classroom architecture, in most low-income countries conform to policy agendas. Expansion of national school building programmes to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of universal primary education for all children led to mass production of educational spaces across the emerging world following the international school design standards set by UNESCO. During the late 1970s and 1980s emphasis was put more on ‘what’ is being taught and ‘how’ it’s being taught, funding being sanctioned for training of teachers and learning materials. Therefore, despite the changes in pedagogical process, the place ‘where’ education occurs ‘went out of fashion’ (Uduku 2015b, 196). During late 1950s and onwards, the pre-war ‘give and take’ model of education has been challenged by educational theorists and psychologists, such as John Dewey and Maria Montessori. This has led to a student-focused or child-centred learning, which had an effect on the design of ‘classroom’ or ‘school architecture’ for early years’ learning in the developed world. There are now quite a few examples of newly designed schools situated mostly in Europe and the United States which considered the transition in learning styles (Dudek 2000, 2014) in their design. More recently, some of these agendas have been exported to low-income countries by non-government organizations and high-profile architectural practices focusing on the use of local labour and construction materials, the terms ‘sustainable local resources’ and ‘participatory engagement’ appearing numerous times related to these projects (Muzaffar 2014; Uduku 2015a). 188

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Public participation in the design of community projects attracted a world-wide scholarly and professional interest by the establishment of community design centers3 in the United States and the UK in the 1960s, particularly focusing on the inclusion of deprived and marginalized communities in the process (Newman and Thomas 2008). The participatory planning process was extended to including children and young people by American urban planner Kevin Lynch’s Growing Up in Cities (Lynch and Banerjee 1977), a cross-cultural research exploring children’s experiences and understandings of their environments focusing on urban areas. In continuation of the project, Cosco and Moore (2002) worked with 32 children whom they described as ‘consulting experts’ to explore children’s lives and neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and created a community action programme based on children’s insights and priorities. Children’s engagement in planning and design of built environments has been increasingly valued after the 1960s and 1970s (Birch et al. 2016). Though contemporary education practices locate children centrally in the pedagogical process, practical examples of actually engaging the ‘physical children’ in the design of the learning spaces in schools are less evident.

Evolution of Children’s Participation in Design Children’s participation has evolved through several distinct stages, from manipulation (children are engaged only to justify the end results) to more effective child-initiated, shared decisions with adults (Hart 1997; Francis and Lorenzo 2002). It must also be considered that child-initiated, ‑directed or ‑shared decisions with adults can be possible only with children above 12 years old. According to Druin (2002), children can play four roles—user, tester, informant and design partner in the design of technology. While the informant design approach sees children as not having enough knowledge, expertise and time to work as equal partners, it can open up possibilities for ‘consulted and informed’—the fifth level of children’s degrees of participation (Hart 1997; Hussain 2010). Hussain (2010) thinks, in case of the countries of the emerging world, there can be another level between informant and design partner at which children can be engaged in the design process. The three degrees of participation derived by Hussain are included (observing children while using products), consulted (children’s views were sought which do not influence design directly) and empowered (engaging children in the design process with great effort on designers’ parts). Francis and Lorenzo (2002) identified seven realms of incorporating children’s views and opinions in the development process through an observation of 30 years history of children’s participation in design and planning. The first realm is the romantic period, dating back to the 1960s and early 1970s, which viewed children as planners or futurists and believed that the environment would be better if it were designed only by kids. This approach disregarded adult input as part of the process, it is still practised by designers and researchers who search for more ‘child-generated idea[s] of the future’ (Francis and Lorenzo 2002, 161). The second realm overlapping with the romantic period is known as advocacy, which grew out of the advocacy planning movement.4 Adult planners (for children) became advocates of the needs of the underprivileged; however, the outputs were not holistic and children who were advocated for were not engaged in the design process (Francis and Lorenzo 2002). The third realm is the research-based approach or ‘needs realm’ that uses environmental psychology research to address children’s needs (Francis and Lorenzo 2002). The needs realm contributed key findings about how children’s environments can be better from interdisciplinary research by geographers, psychologists, landscape architects, planners and sociologists, including Lynch and Banerjee (1977), Hart (1997), Moore (1990) and Chawla (2001). Significant scientific articles were produced on children’s views and opinions, and the benefits of open space for children; however, there always has been a gap between academia and practice unless the researchers themselves are involved in designing the places. 189

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The fourth realm is ‘children as learners’, which identified learning as an important outcome of the participation process, which creates an appraisal of the built environment and leads to learning and social change (Adams 1990; Titman 1994; Stine 1997) without actual change in the environment (Francis and Lorenzo 2002). ‘Children as citizens’ is a more recent movement in compliance with the United Nation’s Convention on the Child Rights, which viewed children as fully empowered participants in the design process. Though the movement has become popular in many countries, it is more inclined to children’s social rights compared to their environmental needs. The last two realms are institutionalization and the proactive approach. Institutionalization regards ‘children as adults’ and offers children full authority; however, children participate only within boundaries set by adults (Francis and Lorenzo 2002). The proactive approach combines research, participation and action; in this approach children are active participants along with adults, and specially trained designers play an important role. This approach might not be possible to execute in every project; however, several examples in the sustainable city design movement are relevant. Things can happen at two opposite ends when engaging children in architectural design. At one end adults who adhere to romantic notions of childhood advocate giving children full freedom to reveal their innate creativity. At the opposite end, many local authorities both in the developed and the emerging world, who are in charge of execution, hold preconceived ideas of children’s lack of participation or believe children’s proposed ideas would be less creative, not encompassing, banal, superficial and predictable (den Besten et al. 2008). Again, ‘over-privileging’ (indulging) children’s knowledge of their places and ‘valorizing’ the all-knowing and all-seeing child are seen as concerns in social and cultural studies (Lomax 2012). Therefore, though children’s engagement is encouraged in policies and theories, there is doubt about how much of children’s ideas actually informs the physical design.

Children’s Engagement in Design: From Policies Although the status of children has changed in society and education, historically children have always been left out of the whole discourse of school or classroom architecture. Adults’ perception of unskilled and less competent children was not challenged until the end of the twenty-first century. This view was challenged by various authors of histories of young people (see Gillis’s 1974 review of these works), and they urged the liberation of children from the positivistic social scientist view, which determines children’s position in society in relationship to adults. The new sociology of childhood perceived children as having their own status of ‘being’ and valued child agency as the basis for children’s interpretation of their reality (Hendrick 1984). The changing image of children as more active members of society having ideas and being capable of expressing them was recognized in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1989 (UNICEF 1989). Articles 3, 12, 13, 15, 24 and 31 of the CRC state children’s right to play and participate in decision making about aspects concerning them. Article 12 of the convention declares, State Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child . . . Children’s rights to be consulted, heard, listened to and taken seriously, in accordance with their age and maturity. (UNICEF 1989, 5) These perspectives also have influence on national policies. The UK government’s statutory guidance (Section 176 of the Education Act 2002) bounds the local authorities and governing bodies in schools consulting with pupils in making of decisions concerning them in accordance with their age and ability (Newman and Thomas 2008). The 190

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Department for Education and Skills (2004) published guidance on definitions, methods, benefits and practices of students’ participation. Though actors at all levels (e.g., architects, educators and local authority) are bound by the policies and acts to include children in the decision making about programs concerning them, there are gaps within the policies that can go without consideration. Building Schools for the Future (BSF), an investment by the UK government in 2003, encourages participation of students in the process but does not prescribe it nor is it legally required. To what extent the students would be involved in the consultation process depended on the choice of local authorities. The low-income countries of the emerging world, which conform with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, specify opinion sharing and participation of children in their policies. For example, Article 6.13 of the National Children Policy 2011 of Bangladesh stresses the participation of children in all programs concerning them to guarantee children’s rights and their development (MoWCA 2011, 11). However, there are no published guidelines or resources about how children will be engaged or to what extent their participation will inform programs concerning them. One of the key challenges the emerging world is dealing with is to bring millions of children back to school and provide them quality education. Learning spaces—in other words classrooms—are still the most important infrastructural requirement. Building more classrooms is considered the main parameter of the development of the physical environment (DPE 2014; Kalra et al. 2014), and these classrooms are built following the standard set by UNESCO during the 1950s (e.g., 10 sq. ft. per person). Bangladesh is one of the first few countries that formally accepted the CRC and National Child Policy 2011’s emphasis on engaging children in decision making about things that concern them. However, participation of children in the design of their schools is not evident in practice. The reason it is not implemented might be related to children’s position in society and culture. Underestimation of children’s capability and skills to contribute to the design of the built environment is a universal problem; however, children in the emerging world are especially susceptible to this relegation (Hussain 2010). Schooling is until today more like making the ‘evils’ disciplined, teaching them to conform with rules and regulations, sitting still in their benches and listening to teachers. Though in recent projects, such as ‘Each Child Learn’ and ‘ESTEEM’ by the Department of Primary Education (DPE) (Unterhalter et al. 2003), Bangladesh (supported by foreign aid) focused on children’s abilities as individuals, the physical spaces in the schools hardly provide teachers with the opportunities to adopt creative approaches to teaching. The recently built classrooms are even smaller than the older ones. A recent report analysing the efficiency of the primary school classrooms suggests revision of the design of the prototypes based on technical measures to make the schools ‘child-friendly’ (Kalra et al. 2014). However, it is rarely questioned whether building new smaller classrooms without the involvement of children and not informed by research is the appropriate way to make the education system child-friendly.

Methodological Challenges of Children’s Engagement Children’s participation in the design is not equal across all methods. While some feel comfortable in telling their stories, others might be more competent in drawing and making. Some methods—for example, interviews with children—might limit opportunities and wind down chances for other children to share their stories. A wide age of choice in ways of getting engaged in planning, design and building decisions through the use of multiple medias can ensure participation of children of all age groups and also adults (Iltus and Hart 1994). The widely used method to engage children in design and planning is drawings. Nevertheless Hart (1997) discouraged the use of individual drawing as the primary method; some children might not have the skills or desire to express their preferences through drawing. Modelling is a very effective strategy for engaging children of different ages in the 191

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design of their schoolgrounds and playgrounds (Hart 1997). In everyday play children communicate with each other with toys, which can be used as a medium to engage them in activities that may help designers know about their desires. There are many challenges related to children’s engagement in architectural design and the planning process. Engagement of children in the design process is driven or guided by adult agendas, time frames and priorities, which can shape and constrain children’s knowledge and understandings. Children’s portrayal of their needs and desires meaningful to them might be curtailed by ‘the constructions of children and childhoods deployed by the adults around them’(Lomax 2012, 106). Besides, children’s produced drawings and objects as outcomes of different techniques are very much open to adult interpretation; many times children’s ideas are given credibility when they are considered more adult-like. Incorporating children’s creative and unadulterated thoughts into planning and design or transforming those into physical forms can be a challenge for designers, who need to abide by all the rules, guidelines and restrictions. Among others, there are issues of access, commitment, power differentials and role delineation (Goodwin and Young 2016), which can be overwhelming. Whether designers’ creativity would be compromised in the process is also a thing to consider. The main challenge in the participatory process is to create a framework considering the complexity of problems from multiple viewpoints (Derr 2016). All the actors in a project—city planners, architects, community people and children— should be engaged at the same time. A common forum should be established where children and adults can share their ideas while respecting each other’s expertise. The success of the participatory process lies in the creative negotiation process among children and different parties involved in the project (Francis 1988; Iltus and Hart 1994).

A Case Study From Bangladesh Though children are at centre of contemporary educational practices, their engagement in the creation of ‘learning spaces’ is not that prevalent, as mentioned earlier in this chapter. Successful case studies of children’s engagement are mostly in designing parks or playgrounds and open spaces in cities. Children were engaged in designing school grounds guided by the conception of the outdoor environment as only a space for play. They are not perceived as ‘experts’ of the pedagogical process and, therefore, are kept away from the design of educational spaces. Children may have limited knowledge of the various innovative teaching methods and places; however, this might be the case with teachers too, who might find educational reform difficult and can be protective of the traditional approach to teaching (Newman and Thomas 2008). The challenges related to the methods of engaging children might be universal, which can be overcome by taking appropriate measures. However, a participatory design approach can empower the children and the community only when they can engage in the process with the same authority of the designers. The way the words ‘community engagement’ and the ‘poor’ of the emerging world appear in projects undertaken in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia is something very instrumental, where the differences between communities in two different continents with different societal norms and culture are disregarded (Muzaffar 2014). While the METI school in Rudrapur, Bangladesh, designed by Austrian architect Anna Herringer, provides a learning environment to children, the engagement of the community was only as ‘unskilled labours’. A western idea of community engagement in low-income countries is being realized in such community projects in Asia and Africa. Again, the engagement of children is still missing from current architectural practices. I co-designed a schoolyard in a government primary school in Bangladesh with children, teachers and the community as a place for teaching and learning in 2014 as part of my PhD research.5 The proactive approach, participation with vision—the seventh realm of children’s participation—was adopted for this project. Multiple methods were used to enable full participation of both the children 192

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and the teachers in the design of their school ground.6 While the focus group discussions with children and teachers were led by me (combined with a drawing session; see Figure 15.1) separately as the lead researcher, children themselves led the model-making workshop once all the information was given (Figures 15.2 and 15.3). In order to reduce errors related to methods, different measures were taken, such as asking children to explain and annotate what they drew and providing them mouldable materials that they could shape and make things of their choice with. The children negotiated with their teachers in terms of where they would locate certain elements and settings, such as whether the gardens should be near the classroom or near the entrance. The master plan was developed based on the information elicited through these methods; however, the design was flexible enough to accommodate changes based on the issues arising during the construction. The children and the teachers gave input during the whole process, from initial planning to execution (see Figure 15.4 for a completed model of the schoolground). The children participated in the construction process, engaging in different activities, such as curing the bricks and carrying them (see Figure 15.5), making the garden beds, sowing seeds in the garden and planting the grass. The project benefitted from creative and technical input from a local architectural consultancy firm, Ghorami.jon, and eight architecture students from different institutes in Bangladesh volunteered during the construction. The construction was completed in January 2015 and the children have been using the schoolground for outdoor learning and play since then. The research project further investigated whether the school ground design influenced children’s academic attainment and motivation and a whole new line of research can be conducted to further investigate how children’s engagement in architecture can influence their behaviour and learning.

Conclusion According to Lefebvre (1991), a human group needs to produce or generate their own space in order to be recognized by others, which might be applicable for children. Children are not given the right of participating in decision making about creation of their own spaces. Adults perceived the importance of creating space for children and young people (e.g., playgrounds in the twentieth century across Europe and the United States). However, they often kept this responsibility to themselves and created children’s spaces based on their own specific understanding of children’s nature and childhood. Though the concept of childhood is a sociological construct, children are considered more ‘­biological’—their perceptions and experiences are influenced by their developmental stages. Preferences concerning architecture or landscape architecture elements by children and young people of similar age can be similar across different countries and culture; however, the expression of such preferences and their experiences are influenced by the society and culture they grow up in and the level of independence they exercise within their society. Different age groups of children hold different perspectives; representatives from all ranges of people should be involved in the design process and the perspectives of the full range of ages should be reflected in any design output. The selection of appropriate methods and application of those using the right props can eliminate the difference of age between the designer and the children. Before going to the field, knowledge of and experience with using child-friendly methods are a prerequisite for the designers. The change in school architecture informed by new pedagogical practices in the developed world has not yet influenced school architecture for the mass of people in the emerging world. Children’s engagement in architecture is missing from the discourse of the whole world. The good examples of contemporary school architecture also do not conform with the CRC guideline and there is little evidence of children’s engagement informing the final design. Whereas participatory design with children has potential for a minor shift in the pedagogical process, it can empower both teachers and children, motivating them to create innovative teaching-learning processes (Khan 2016). In order to ensure this empowerment, participation should be proactive, where everyone can participate with 193

Children in Bangladesh are drawing what they want to have in their school ground.

Photo by author.

Figure 15.1

Model making was child-directed and shared decisions with adults.

Photo by author.

Figure 15.2

Children making playground equipment for the model.

Photo by author.

Figure 15.3

The model of the school ground children would like to have.

Photo by author.

Figure 15.4

Matluba Khan

Figure 15.5 Children are carrying bricks to the site of the amphitheatre in a government primary school in Bangladesh. Photo by author.

the same authority and children are not engaged only as a token to justify the end result. Children’s engagement in architectural design processes can be a way to bring change and give identity to uniformly designed primary schools in the whole emerging world with different social values and cultures.

Notes 1 Colonial modernity can be defined as a ‘culturally specific conceptualization of modernity which recognizes the power of technology, rationality and mobility to universalize and control difference and overcome the constraints of the natural world’ (Wilson 2011, 1). 2 The Bengal Presidency was an administrative subdivision of colonial India which extended from the North West Frontier Province to Burma, Singapore and Penang. 3 The Charter Act was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which renewed the charter issued to the British East India Company and allotted a budget to promote education in the Indian Empire. 4 The advocacy planning movement was formulated in the 1960s by Paul Davidoff, an American planner, when planners advocated for the needs of marginalized communities. The movement contributed to the emergence of community design centres, stated earlier in the chapter. 5 The project was the winner of the Great Places Award 2016 in the place design category by Environmental Design Research Association (2016). 6 In order to learn more about the methods, the scientific procedure and the design please consult my PhD dissertation, entitled ‘Environment, Engagement and Education: Investigating the Relationship Between Primary School Grounds and Children’s Learning: A Case Study From Bangladesh’.

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References Adams, E., 1990. Learning through landscapes: A report on the use, design, management and development of school grounds, Winchester: Learning Through Landscapes Trust. Aitken, S.C., 2001. Geographies of young people: The morally contested spaces of identity, London: Psychology Press. Archard, D., 2004. Children: Rights and childhood. Children, p. 246. Available at: http://eprints.lancs. ac.uk/35346/. Birch, J., et al., 2016. Creativity, play and transgression: Children transforming spatial design. CoDesign, 12(4), pp. 245–260. Chawla, L., ed., 2001. Growing up in an urbanizing world, London: Earthscan. Cosco, N.G. and Moore, R.C., 2002. Our neighbourhood is like that! In L. Chawla (Ed.), Growing up in an urbanising world, pp. 35–56. London: Earthscan. De Raedt, K., 2012. Building the Rainbow Nation: A critical analysis of the role of architecture in materializing a post-apartheid South African identity. Afrika Focus, 25(1), pp. 7–27. De Raedt, K., 2014. Between “true believers” and operational experts: UNESCO architects and school building in post-colonial Africa. The Journal of Architecture, 19(1), pp. 19–42. den Besten, O., Horton, J. and Kraftl, P., 2008. Pupil involvement in school (re) design: Participation in policy and practice. CoDesign, 4(4), pp. 197–210. Department for Education and Skills, 2004. Working together: Giving children and young people a say. Nottingham: DfES. Derr, V., 2016. Integrating community engagement and children’s voices into design and planning education: Integrating community engagement and children’s voices into design and planning education. CoDesign, 11(2), pp. 119–133. DPE, 2014. Bangladesh primary education annual sector performance report—2014. Dhaka: Directorate of Primary Education. Druin, A., 2002. The role of children in the design of new technology. Behaviour & Information Technology, 21(1), pp. 1–25. Dudek, M., 2000. Architecture of schools: The new learning environments, New York: Routledge. Dudek, M., 2014. Kindergarten architecture, New York: Taylor & Francis. Francis, M., 1988. Negotiating between children and adult design values in open space projects. Design Studies, 9(2), pp. 67–75. Francis, M. and Lorenzo, R., 2002. Seven realms of children’s participation. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 22(1–2), pp. 157–169. Gillis, J.R., 1974. Youth history: Progress and prospects. Journal of Social History, 7(2), pp. 201–207. Goodwin, S. and Young, A., 2016. Australian social work ensuring children and young people have a voice in neighbourhood community development. Australian Social Work, 66(3), pp. 344–357. Hart, R.A., 1997. Children’s participation: The theory and practice of involving young citizens in community development and environmental care, London: Earthscan. Hendrick, H., 1984. The history of childhood and youth. Social History, 9(1), pp. 87–96. Hussain, S., 2010. Empowering marginalised children in developing countries through participatory design processes. CoDesign, 6(2), pp. 99–117. Iltus, S. and Hart, R., 1994. Participatory planning and design of recreational spaces with children. Architecture & Comportement/Architecture & Behaviour, 10(4), pp. 361–370. Kalra, R., Khan, I. and Rehman, O., 2014. Final report: Efficiency analysis of classroom infrastructure for primary education in Bangladesh. Evidence on Demand. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/ media/57a089afed915d622c000355/PEDP_Final_Report_V13May2014.pdf Khan, M., 2016. Environment, engagement and education: Investigating the relationship between primary school grounds and children’s learning: A case study from Bangladesh. Unpublished doctoral thesis. University of Edinburgh. Khoo-Lattimore, C., 2015. Kids on board: Methodological challenges, concerns and clarifications when including young children’s voices in tourism research. Current Issues in Tourism, 18(9), pp. 845–858. Lefebvre, H., 1991. The production of space, Oxford: Oxford Blackwell. Lomax, H., 2012. Contested voices? Methodological tensions in creative visual research with children. Journal International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 15(10), pp. 1364–5579. Lynch, K. and Banerjee, T., 1977. Growing up in cities: Studies of the spatial environment of adolescence in Cracow, Melbourne, Mexico City, Salta, Toluca, and Warszawa, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Moore, R.C., 1990. Childhood’s domain: Play and place in child development. Berkeley, CA: MIG Communications. MoWCA. (2011). National Children Policy 2011. Dhaka: Ministry of Women and Children Affairs. Muzaffar, I., 2014.“The world on sale”: Architectural exports and construction of access. In OfficeUS agenda, Lars Müller Publishers, pp. 227–241.

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Newman, M. and Thomas, P., 2008. Student participation in school design: One school’s approach to student engagement in the BSF process. CoDesign, 4(4), pp. 237–251. Punch, S., 2002. Research with children: The same or different from research with adults? Childhood, 9(3), pp. 321–341. Saint, A., 1987. Towards a social architecture: The role of school-building in post-war England, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Samborski, S., 2010. Biodiverse or barren school grounds: Their effects on children. Children Youth and Environments, 20(2), pp. 67–115. Shahidullah, K., 1987. Pathshalas into schools. Dhaka, Bangladesh: Bangla Academy. Stine, S., 1997. Landscapes for learning: Creating outdoor environments for children and youth, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Titman, W., 1994. Special places, special people: The hidden agenda of school grounds, Godalming: WorldWide Fund for Nature UK. Uduku, O., 2011. School building design for feeding programmes and community outreach: Insights from Ghana and South Africa. International Journal of Educational Development, 31(1), pp. 59–66. Uduku, O., 2015a. Designing schools for quality: An international, case study-based review. International Journal of Educational Development, 44, pp. 56–64. Uduku, O., 2015b. Spaces for 21st-century learning. In Routledge handbook of international education and development, pp. 196–209. London: Routledge. UNICEF, 1989. Convention on the rights of the child. New York: UNICEF. Unterhalter, E., Ross, J. and Alam, M., 2003. A fragile dialogue? Research and primary education policy formation in Bangladesh, 1971–2001. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 33(1), pp. 85–99. Wilson, L., 2011. Definition of colonial modernity. Global Mobilities. Available at: https://globalmobilities.word press.com/2011/10/13/week-7-definition-of-colonial-modernity/ [Accessed January 20, 2017].

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16 The Garden of Liberation Emptiness and Engagement at Suan Mokkh, Chaiya Lawrence Chua

Introduction Socially engaged architecture in the northern hemisphere has historically been motivated by a model of activism based on Western metaphysical dualism or the philosophical distinction between matter and spiritualism that dominates the history of modern European thought.1 This model has asserted that without property in the self, there can be no political agency (Descartes 1980; Haraway 1991). Engaged Buddhism suggests another approach to activism in which liberal conceptions of the “self ” are in fact an obstacle to social liberation. The term “engaged Buddhism” is thought to have been coined by the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh in the 1950s during the Cold War–era escalation of political violence in Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese term used by Thich—dao phat di vao cuoc doi—literally referred to “entering into life, social life.” Engaged Buddhism, according to Thich, had two meanings. It referred to both the quotidian practice of Buddhism and the cultivation of wisdom that responded to contemporary events. “As a mindfulness practitioner,” he wrote, “we have to be aware of what is going on in our body, our feelings, our emotions, and our environment” (Thich 1964, 30–31).2 Thich’s call to connect across the scales of “inner peace” and “world peace” had a powerful effect, particularly in nearby Thailand, where the majority of the population practices a form of Theravada Buddhism. The Thai monk Phra Thepwethi (P. A. Payutto) contributed to this discourse of engaged Buddhist practice by arguing that human rights are a compromise rather than an ideal. He traced their historical emergence as a concept to the development of a minimum level of morality that prevented Protestants and Christians from killing one another in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European wars of religion (Phra Thepwethi 1996, 71; Jeffreys 2003, 274). For Payutto, human rights were a useful convention for navigating the environment but did not support the deeper aims of Buddhism to uproot greed, hatred, and delusion. As such, they were not capable of alleviating suffering. Since the 1960s, a diverse group of Buddhist thinkers and social movements have used the loose framework of “engaged Buddhism” to challenge not only conventional Buddhist theology but also realpolitik. While the intellectual contributions of engaged Buddhist thinkers and the social movements they stimulated across Asia, Europe, and the United States have been the subject of a growing body of scholarship, little attention has been paid to the spaces in which engaged Buddhism is practiced and taught. This elision is striking, given the ways that architecture and the built environment have been integral to the development of engaged Buddhist movements around the world. Such

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movements have largely flourished alongside of existing institutional frameworks, providing new forms of infrastructure and public space for largely disenfranchised populations. For example, the initial impetus for the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement’s interventions in the Sri Lankan civil war can be traced back to the rebuilding of local villages (Bond 2004). The Dalit Buddhist movement initiated by B. R. Ambedkar challenged the caste system by asserting a new identity for “scheduled castes” through pilgrimages to Buddhist monuments, claiming many of the rock-cut temples in Maharasthra as their own (Tartakov 1990, 410). Landscape has been critical to the practice of Thai environmentalist monks (phra nak anuraksa), like Phrakhru Pitak Nanthakhun, who ordained trees in Thailand’s Nan province to prevent deforestation. The Dhammayietra or peace walks started by Cambodian monk Samdech Preah Maha Ghosananda to begin the reconciliation and repatriation process were themselves a form of place making, in which a group of people led by Samdech took vows of nonviolence, received instruction in Buddhist meditation, and walked peacefully through parts of Cambodia that had experienced extreme violence for several decades (Weiner 2003, 113). Engaged Buddhist movements like these have built on the historical role of the monastic complex in catalyzing community, producing knowledge, and shaping world views in Buddhist countries. This essay examines the architecture of Suan Mokkhaphalaram or Suan Mokkh (lit., “the Garden of Liberation”) (Chaiya, 1932–1980), a Buddhist monastic complex in the south of Thailand founded by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu (Phra Thamkosachan or Phra Phuttathat Phiksu, 1906–1993), one of the twentieth century’s most influential and prolific Buddhist thinkers. It argues that Suan Mokkh’s first large-scale, “permanent” structures executed in the 1960s and 1970s drew on both “conventional” and “Dhammic” languages to create spaces that emphasized the importance of independent experience, eschewed blind obedience to doctrinal liturgy, and narrated a “translocative” form of engaged Buddhist art and architecture that challenged nationalist orthodoxy. The distinction in engaged Buddhist discourses between daily practice and contemporary social issues is paralleled in the distinction between “conventional” and “Dhammic” or doctrinal language. The Thai monk Phra Bodhiñāna Thera (Chah Subhaddo or Ajaan Chah) described conventions as a necessary step to liberation, but not an end in and of itself. “All things in life have a conventional reality,” he said. “Having established them we should not be fooled by them, because getting lost in them really leads to suffering” (Phra Phōthiyānathēra 2007, 149). Buddhadasa famously pointed to this dual character in language: everyday language (phasa khon) could describe physical experiences and things that were accessible to the ordinary person, but Dhamma language (phasa tham) had to do with the nonphysical aspects of our reality. “The religion in everyday language is temples, monastery buildings, pagodas, yellow robes, and so on; the religion in Dhamma language is the truth which genuinely serves humanity as a refuge,” Buddhadasa said (Phra Thēpwisutthimēthī 2008). The architecture at Suan Mokkh sought to point to the deeper aspects of Buddhist doctrine—like suññata or emptiness—while engaging with the everyday needs of the community that it served. It suggests that ideas about engaged Buddhism were used to reframe conventional approaches to ecclesiastical architecture as well as humanist conceptions of political agency by pointing instead to the ideas of suññata or emptiness at the core of Buddhist philosophy and the five skandhas or aggregates that form a living being’s mental and physical existence.

Buddhadasa Bhikkhu and Dhammic Socialism In the 1960s, Buddhadasa Bhikkhu began to assert that Buddhism was basically socialist in nature (Phra Thēpwisutthimēthī 1989b, 184). These were bold claims to make in the political climate of Vietnam War–era Thailand, where the right-wing military vied with labor organizers and students over the future of the country. Buddhadasa noted that political systems that did not focus on society were immoral and criticized liberalism for promoting selfishness and privileging the individual over society. In its place, he advocated a “dictatorial dhammic socialism.” He wrote, “Anyone infatuated 202

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with the word freedom or free democracy should remember that upholding the personal freedom of individuals who are ruled by defilements (kilesa) goes against the fundamental meaning of politics which is concerned with the good of the whole” (Phra Thēpwisutthimēthī 1989b, 186). Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Thailand was pulled into the Cold War and its regional conflict, the Vietnam War.3 During this era, Buddhist monks were routinely threatened into refraining from political comment that challenged the military regime (Santikaro 2006, 1). It is likely that Buddhadasa’s thinking was stimulated by the simultaneous resurfacing of radical thinking that had emerged in the 1960s in opposition to American political, economic, and cultural influence (Phongpaichit and Baker 2002, 304). It was during this same period that work began on several of the most iconic structures at Suan Mokkh. Although Suan Mokkh was founded by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu in the southern Thai village of Chaiya in 1932, it developed in stages. It moved to its present location in 1942 and it was not until 1962 that permanent structures began to be built out of concrete. These buildings, the Rong Mohorosop Tang Winnyan or Spiritual Theater (Figure 16.1), the Reua Tham or Dhamma Boat (Figure 16.2), and the Reua Yai or Big Boat (Figure 16.3), similarly drew on historical transregional trajectories outside of the nationalist historiography of the state that imagined a direct succession from the premodern regional polities of Sukhothai and Ayutthaya. Nationalist historiography positions the narrative of the Thai state as a linear account of a single leader nation-state that emerged in direct succession from these earlier polities to the currently reigning Bangkok dynasty. It champions the Cakri monarchy as the savior of indigenous culture and political sovereignty in the face of modernism and colonialism, both of which originate in “the West.”4 Suan Mokkh’s eclectic approach to architecture challenged this narrative by integrating transregional historical forms within a distinctly modernist architectural language that had come to be used by nonaligned and newly independent nation-states in the global south after World War II.5 As a result, the use of modern materials like steel-reinforced concrete and modern technologies of representation like abstraction, along with historical representations of suññata and attention to local building economies and sites at Suan Mokkh, produced a form of architecture that challenged royal- and state-based histories of Buddhism and modernity. Although not a state religion, Theravada Buddhism is the professed faith of more than 90 percent of Thailand’s population and has served as a foundation of state ideology (Ishii 1986; Somboon 1993). Under King Chulalongkorn, the hierarchy of the order of Buddhist monastics or sangha was reorganized under a centralized administrative structure that paralleled the civil administration (Subrahmanyan 2013). All monks had to register with the authorities and conduct themselves according to state directives, including delivering sermons in Central Thai and privileging academic study over meditation practice.

Suan Mokkh and the Spiritual Theater From its inception in 1932, Suan Mokkh articulated new spaces for religious practice that decoupled Buddhism from state and royal practices that privileged the architecture of the central region around Bangkok, the capital of the nation and seat of the monarchy, in ecclesiastical building. It turned instead to its immediate context and produced a landscape that could be used as both an object of meditation and a stage for engaging in critical Buddhist practice (Phra Thēpwisutthimēthī 1986, 62). During the early period of Suan Mokkh, most sermons and rituals took place in the open air. Santikharo Bhikkhu, a resident monk during the 1970s, noted that the communal buildings at Suan Mokkh during this period were built out of necessity in the most “functional” and “economical” way possible. “Although some are a bit eccentric, they fit in with the forest, each giving space to the other.” For instance, the uposatha, or main ordination hall, was “a hill scattered with rocks, with trees for pillars and walls, and the sky for the ceiling.” The main lecture hall was a slope leading from 203

© Buddhadasa Indapañño Archives.

Figure 16.1 Rong Mohorosop Tang Winnyan or Spiritual Theater, Suan Mokkh (Chaiya, c. 1962–1972 ce).

Figure 16.2 Reua Tham or Dhamma Boat, Suan Mokkh (Chaiya, c. 1962–1972 ce). Photo by author.

Photo by author.

Figure 16.3 Reua Yai or Big Boat, Suan Mokkh (Chaiya, c. 1962–1972 ce).

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the gate to the base of the hill where the uposatha was located. He wrote, “The trees provide shade, background harmony, showers of leaves, towers for lights and electrical wires, and play grounds for birds, monkeys, squirrels, and the cicadas that often compete with the sound system” (Santikaro 1988, 49–50). Rather than displace the existing landscape and the congregation’s relationship to it, the three concrete structures that were built at Suan Mokkh in the 1960s and 1970s sought to create places where “nature’s law and our duty within it” could be more deeply understood by Suan Mokkh’s congregants. The most active of these structures is the Spiritual Theater or Rong Mohorosop Tang Winnyan, intended as a lecture hall and theater for the teaching of Buddhist doctrine through visual and audio materials. It is an unusual building for a Buddhist monastic complex, but Buddhadasa considered it the most important built structure at Suan Mokkh (Phra Thēpwisutthimēthī 2001, 111). An avid and critical historian of Buddhist art and architecture, Buddhadasa was appointed the director of the provincial museum at Chaiya in the early 1950s and both contemporary imagery and historical imagery figure prominently in his teachings and writings. The term “rong mohorosop” has referred historically to buildings of popular entertainment, like a cinema or a music hall. In naming one of the largest buildings at Suan Mokkh this way, Buddhadasa sought to both popularize and “purify” the teaching of Buddhist doctrine, but also to create a space for the physical experience of Buddhist teachings and not just through doctrinal pontification. “Anything fun and not boring we call mohorosop,” he said. “Sitting preaching in a pulpit is totally boring both to the people listening and the person preaching. But using art to show and tell is not boring. Therefore, we use nature and pictures to help create an interest in the dhamma.” (Phra Thēpwisutthimēthī 1982, 12, 16) This relationship between nature and images can be seen in the way that images are deployed inside the hall, where every surface is covered with copies of artwork in a seemingly random and organic manner. The murals are diverse in style and content and have been described by Buddhadasa variously as caricatures, proverbs, heart-to-heart images, and, most frequently as pritsnatham or “dhamma puzzles.” In contrast to the busy quality of the murals, the hall is dominated by a panel with a recessed empty circle, a symbolic gesture toward the core concept of “emptiness” at the heart of Buddhadasa’s approach not only to Buddhist doctrine but also to art and architecture (Figure 16.4). The building is composed of a large rectangular mass that sits on a smaller rectangular base. The lower rectangle forms a gallery while the upper is punctuated by bold geometric protrusions, recessed grid panels, a large mosaic mural, and round decorative bas-relief friezes on the upper band. Protruding from the front of the building is a tiered portico, on top of which sits a lattice, crowned by a dhamma wheel. A large mosaic mural in a pseudo-Egyptian motif, “Jaek duang ta tham” or “Distributing the Dhamma Eye,” dominates the southern façade of the building (Figure 16.1). Designed by Phra Kovit, it depicts a large seated figure giving out symbolic eyes to a congregation. According to Phra Kovit, Buddhadasa asked that the mural be made to look “Egyptian,” suggesting Buddhadasa sought a universal aesthetic language to communicate ideas about Buddhist doctrine that transgressed its nationalist iterations (Phra Kovit 2015, 177). While this mural underscores the importance of the visual in teaching Dhammic principles, there is also much more to the architecture of the structure than can be gleaned from a cursory visual examination of the façade. Although the fundamental geometry of the structure points to an embrace of modern architecture’s universal tendencies, a closer examination reveals that the building is also attentive to regional expressions. This is the result of amendments that were made to the original design of the building. While there is no mention of an architect or an engineer, photographs of a scale model of the building suggest that the building’s original design was professionally executed.6 Reading Buddhadasa’s recollection of the construction process against an examination of this image reveals that these 207

Photo by author.

Figure 16.4 Interior of the Spiritual Theater.

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changes happened incrementally and often took place during the building’s ten-year construction period. In the original plan there was no portico or porch, and the main entrance was composed of a level plane that bisected the building’s eastern façade horizontally. Buddhadasa claimed that this original plan had several problems, including an interior that was too narrow. The original stone cladding turned out to be too expensive, so this was changed to historic bas-relief Buddha images that were less expensive. The bas-reliefs, which will later be discussed in more detail, were added in 1965 and most of the images on the inside were painted in 1972 (Phra Thēpwisutthimēthī 1992, 250). Most importantly, Buddhadasa added two other entrances to the building. Today, the original entrance is seldom used as such, although the interior lip of the entrance ramp is used as a teaching stage by monks. This modification democratized the viewing space of the Rong Mohorosop by allowing for multiple viewing perspectives and approaches. There is no single viewpoint from which to look at the murals, and there is no single image that is privileged in the hall.

Suññata and Development A clue to the kind of development Buddhadasa pointed to lies in the imagery deployed throughout Suan Mokkh. Suññata, or emptiness, is at the core of this idea of development. This idea of emptiness is communicated through a set of sophisticated symbols that draw on both modern art historical techniques of abstraction and techniques of representation in Buddhist art. The casual observer to the galleries will note that there are nearly as many images of Jesus Christ as there are of the Gautama Buddha inside the hall. Often, religious paintings accommodate political themes, like the painting of a United Nations meeting that proclaims “Everyone Talks of Peace but Prepares for War” (Phra Thēpwisutthimēthī 2006b, 135). This conscious break with physical representations of the Buddha is also a break with identifiable objects of worship. It echoes Buddhadasa’s teaching that the higher goal to which Buddhism points is suññata or “emptiness,” the opposite of the condition of attachment to objects and the self (Swearer 1982, 483). The large panel with a recessed empty circle that dominates the Spiritual Theater serves as a reminder of this framework of emptiness. The empty circle figures in much of the painting and architecture at Suan Mokkh, including a frieze on the entablature of the Big Boat.7 The concept of emptiness is repeated in the series of stone carvings that decorate the outer walls of the Spiritual Theater and the ceilings of the Big Boat. They are copies of what Buddhadasa claimed were the first set of historic Buddha images in the world, produced in Amaravati during the Andhra period, sometime between 243 bce and 143 ce (Phra Thēpwisutthimēthī 1964). One of these carvings, above one of the entrances to the Spiritual Theater, depicts the Jataka tale of the Buddha taming a mad elephant Nalagiri. A jealous monk had turned loose a mad elephant on the Buddha’s alms round in the hope of killing him. The elephant had already killed one person and was headed straight for the Buddha but when he approached the Buddha, the elephant fell to his knees before him. In the frieze, the elephant can be seen carrying a corpse in his trunk on the left. On the right, he prostrates himself before a stone order. The use of an architectural order to signify the presence of the historic Buddha, and the deployment of its depiction over an entrance to the Spiritual Theater, not only suggests the historical relevance of architecture in the teaching of Buddhist doctrine but also points to the ways that ideas about emptiness and abstraction were integrated in Suan Mokkh’s first steel-reinforced concrete structures. Buddhadasa’s interest in the abstract can be traced back to his early engagement with Buddhist art and architecture in India. In a diary entry from a voyage to India dated November 5, 1955, Buddhadasa noted a conversation he had about the difference between “idols” and “symbols.” He divided worshippers into three groups: those who wai or pay homage to idols, those who wai symbols, and those who don’t wai anything and worship and respect the Dhamma completely

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(Phra Thēpwisutthimēthī 2006a, 332). In a later interview, Buddhadasa noted, “It shows the technological progress of that age that they didn’t pray to images” (Phra Thēpwisutthimēthī 1992, 252). Buddhadasa’s comment linked progress to aniconic representation. “The people who made these early Buddha images were looking for a way to express that even though they were Buddha images, they were only a symbol and the goal was not to make them into idols,” he wrote. Even though it has the mood or appearance of the Buddha, we can agree that it has historically been only a symbol. The more we speak of the principle of suññata, the more we see that the search for a way out of the path of suffering increases. The person who is free through the dhamma is inevitably free from stimulation or decoration of every kind. Therefore, there is no style or image that is truthful to him. (Phra Thēpwisutthimēthī 1964) The rejection of style or image as the absolute expression of Buddhism undermines the concept of a stable self. In place of the concept of self, Buddhist doctrine posits five aggregates or khan (Thai) or khandhas (Pali), which make up a living being’s mental and physical existence.8 The first khandha is form or rupa, the living, physical body of a sentient being. The second khandha is sensations or feelings received from form or vedana. The third khandha is perception or sañña, the process of becoming aware. The fourth is active mental activity or sankhara. The fifth is consciousness or viññana, the function of knowing objects perceived by sense organs like the eye, ear, nose, tongue, skin, and the mind itself. Buddhadasa explained that the five aggregates were the sites of clinging and that people often grasped at one of these groups as a self depending on their level of ignorance. For example, a boy who accidentally bumped into a door might kick the door to relieve his anger and pain but he was simply grasping at a purely material object that was made of wood as a self (Phra Thēpwisutthimēthī 1989a, 76–77). Reminders of the five khandhas are everywhere in Suan Mokkh but most notably in the five slender concrete posts that rise from the front gate of the complex (Figure 16.5). Just as the posts are a form of aggregated material (concrete) that do not support a coherent structure, the khandhas are aggregates that do not together form a self. Like the purely symbolic posts, the khandhas serve a pedagogical function by pointing to the ways that sentient beings can liberate themselves from the oppressive attachment to both the self (me) and selfishness (mine) that gird neoliberal capitalism by recognizing the ways that we engage with our environment (Phra Thēpwisutthimēthī 1989a; Thanissaro 2013).

Conclusion: A Taste of Nirvana Engaged Buddhism was an intellectual approach to social practice that drew on Buddhist doctrine to critique state violence and neoliberal patterns of consumption in the Global South during the 1960s. The architecture of Buddhadasa Bhikkhu’s Suan Mokkh can be understood as an example of engaged Buddhist architecture in that it emphasized core Buddhist approaches to built form and representation to articulate new spaces for contemplative action. By reorienting an eclectic body of material, images, and construction techniques, a series of buildings constructed in the 1960s at Suan Mokkh mounted a critique of consumerism, blind acceptance of religious doctrine, and nationalist orthodoxy. Key to this approach were the related concepts of suññata or emptiness and the khandhas or aggregates, which demanded a critical reexamination of not only the self but also activism based on the self. Suññata translated into architectural terms in diverse ways: from the lack of a central focal point in the Spiritual Theater to the use of eclectic elements drawn from a history of Buddhist space in the Big Boat. This approach deployed both conventional and Dhammic understandings of material, form, and symbolism: conventional materials like concrete were used to produce extraordinary 210

Photo by author.

Figure 16.5 Five khandhas on the main gate to Suan Mokkh.

Figure 16.6 The Buddhadasa Indapañño Archives or Suan Mokkh in Bangkok (Arsom Silp, 2009– 2010). Photo by author.

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forms like the Dhamma Boat, which served as both a congregation hall and a monumental symbol of the impermanence of all things. As an ensemble, the complex created new forms of community even as it critiqued the concept of an individual self, which has been a fundamental part of calls for human rights originating in the “West.” The architecture of Suan Mokkh continues to engage its users to form communities of mindful practice beyond its original site in Chaiya. In 2007, the first trees were planted in what would become the Buddhadasa Indapañño Archives in Bangkok. Commonly known as Suan Mokkh in Bangkok, the archives are described as a “spiritual fitness and edutainment center” and reprise much of the architectural language of the original Suan Mokkh in Chaiya (Buddhadasa Indapañño Archives 2011, 9). A three-story building cantilevers over a pond in the tradition of a ho trai or scripture library in a monastic complex (Figure 16.6). The three floors have been interpreted as the Buddha’s teachings, the practice of Buddhism, and the insight that comes from that practice (Buddhadasa Indapañño Archives 2011, 16). The building not only is a repository for Buddhadasa’s archives but also seeks to empower a new urban audience through meditation, study, and lectures. From across the pond, the building projects an evocative, neo-brutalist image of a lotus floating on water. As at Suan Mokkh, the structure reveals itself as a series of puzzles, a sequence of various meditation spaces and curious gardens tucked within the ferro-concrete façade. On the second floor, a meditation chamber known as the “Nipphan chim long” or “Taste of Nirvana” opens to visitors through automatic sliding glass doors. Meditators sit on stones or cushions under a convex dome that resembles a giant stereo speaker. The room is dimly lit with diffuse pin lights. A gallery with interactive exhibits and projected slides of Buddhadasa’s writings surrounds the meditation chamber. While the room’s name and design are reminiscent of some of the more stylish coffee shops in Bangkok and signal a turn toward a more commercial design approach, they are also consistent with the original Suan Mokkh’s reshaping of modern architectural vocabulary. The archives suggest to a new, urban audience that while Nirvana has historically been represented in Southeast Asian manuscripts and murals as a distant and fabulous city, the practice of liberation lies in the here and now.

Notes 1 Although the philosophy of dualism has been traced back to Plato’s Phaedo, in which Socrates describes the body as a prison of the soul, it was René Descartes who described the self as the tight joining of mind and body. Cartesian ideals informed Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant and serve as the basis of contemporary European philosophy. In a groundbreaking twentieth-century polemic, Donna Haraway has pointed out that a major thinking in Western philosophy is underway that challenges conventional dualisms, such as culture and nature. 2 The article was originally published as part of a series in the Vietnamese-language newspaper Dan Chu but later republished as a book (Thich 2008, 30). 3 The Thai government aligned itself with American military interests starting in 1954 by joining the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization. The country would play a strategic role in American military expansion in the region well into the 1970s, with the United States installing seven air bases from which more than 80 percent of airstrikes against the North Vietnamese army were carried out. It also sent nearly 40,000 volunteer soldiers to support efforts against the Viet Cong in South Vietnam in the late 1960s. See Ruth (2010). 4 This approach is best characterized by the work of Prince Damrong Rachanuphap. The first critique of this dynastic perspective was Udom Srisuwan (Aran Phrommachoomphu, pseud.) (1950). See Loos (2006, 14). 5 These include the Capitol Complex of the State of Punjab (Le Corbusier, Chandigarh, 1951–1963), the Brazilian National Congress Building (Oscar Niemeyer, Brasilia, 1960), and the Sher-e-Banglanagar (Louis I. Kahn, Dhaka, 1961–1982). 6 Although there is no architect of record, Colonel Sali Palagun (สาลี่ ปาลกุล) of the Military Communications Department (กรมทหารสื่อสาร) not only was instrumental in publicizing and raising funds for the construction of the building but also helped find a craftsman to help with the design of the space. 7 The same parable is narrated by a series of paintings on the western wall of the Spiritual Theater. 8 The Pali term khandha is used in Theravadan Buddhist literature. The Sanskrit term, skandha, is used in Mahayana Buddhist literature. 213

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References Bond, G.D. (2004) Buddhism at Work: Community Development, Social Empowerment and the Sarvodaya movement. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian. Buddhadasa Indapañño Archives. (2011) Ruang na ru suan mokkh krung thep (Things Worth Knowing About Suan Mokkh Bangkok). Bangkok: BIA. Descartes, R. (1980) Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, Donald A. Cress, trans. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Ishii, Y. (1986) Sangha, State, and Society: Thai Buddhism in History. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i. Jeffreys, D. (2003) “Does Buddhism Need Human Rights?” in C. Queen et al. (eds.), Action Dharma: New Studies in Engaged Buddhism. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Loos, T. (2006) Subject Siam: Family, Law, and Colonial Modernity in Thailand. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Phongpaichit, Pasuk and Baker, C. (2002) Thailand: Economy and Politics. Selangor: Oxford University Press. Phra Kovit. (2015) A Sandy Path Near the Lake: In Search of the Life Story of the Illusory Khemananda. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Phra Phōthiyānathēra. (2007) “Convention and Liberation,” in The Teachings of Ajahn Chah. Ubon Ratchathani: Wat Nong Pah Pong. Phra Thēpwēthī. (1996) Buddhist Solutions for the 21st Century. Bangkok: Buddhadhamma Foundation. Phra Thēpwisutthimēthī. (1964) Phap phutta prawat hin salak (Historical Buddha Image Stone Carvings). Chaiya: Thammathan Foundation. ———. (1982) 50 pi Suan Mokkh: Meua khao phut theung rao (Fifty Years of Suan Mokkh: When They Speak About Us). Bangkok: Suanusom muliniti. ———. (1986) Phap chiwit 80 pi phutthathat phikkhu (Images of Life: 80 Years of Buddhadasa Bhikkhu). Bangkok: Muliniti Setikoset-Nakaprathip. ———. (1989a) Handbook for Mankind: Principles of Buddhism. Bangkok: Buddhadasa Foundation. ———. (1989b) Me and Mine: Selected Essays of Bhikkhu Buddhadasa, Donald K. Swearer, ed. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. (1992). Lao wai meua wai sontaya: atchiwaprawat khong than phra phuttathat (When Told at Twilight: The Autobiography of Buddhadasa Bhikkhu). Bangkok: Kommon Kim Thong Foundation. ———. (2001) Phuttathat kap suan mokkh: prawat kan tham ngan khong than phutthathat (Buddhadasa and Suan Mokkh: History of Venerable Buddhadasa’s Works). Bangkok: Thammsopha. ———. (2006a) Bantheuk pai India khong Phutthathat (Memoir of Buddhadasa’s Journey to India). Surat Thani: Suan Mokkh and the Khana Thammathan. ———. (2006b) Phapprisanathamsen jak Suan Mokkh (Zen Dhamma Puzzle Images From Suan Mokkh). Bangkok: Thamsapha. ———. (2008) Keys to Natural Truth. Bangkok: Sukhaphapjai. ———. (n.d.) Phap jitrakam nai rong mohorosop thang winnayan. Bangkok: Thammasapha. Ruth, R. (2010). In Buddha’s Company: Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i. Santikaro. (1988). “The Garden of Liberation,” Monastic Studies, 18. ———. (2006) “Buddhadasa Bhikkhu and His Practice of Dhammic Socialism,” Turning Wheel: The Journal of Socially Engaged Buddhism, www.liberationpark.org/arts/tanajcent/TW_3.pdf. Somboon Suksamran. (1993) Buddhism and Political Legitimacy. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University. Subrahmanyan, A. (2013) “Reinventing Siam: Ideas and Culture in Thailand, 1920–1944.” Berkeley: PhD dissertation. Swearer, D. (1982) “Buddhadasa Bhikkhu: ‘Stream-Winner,’ Reformer,” in 50 pi Suan Mok (50 Years of Suan Mok). Bangkok: Suan Usopmuliniti. Tartakov, G. (1990) “Art and Identity: The Rise of a New Buddhist Imagery,” Art Journal, 49:4, 409–416. Thich Nhất Hạnh. (1964). Engaged Buddhism (With Other Essays). Saigon: Lá Bối. ———. (2008). “History of Engaged Buddhism: A Dharma Talk by Thich Nhat Hanh, Hanoi, Vietnam, May 6–7, 2008,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 6:3, Article 7. Udom Srisuwan (Aran Phrommachoomphu, pseud). (1950) Thai kung muan kheun (Thailand: A Semi-Colonial Country). Bangkok: Mahachon. Weiner, M. (2003). “Maha Ghosananda: Social Activist,” in C. Queen (ed.), Action Dharma: New Studies in Engaged Buddhism, London: RoutledgeCurzon.

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17 The Darker Side of Social Engagement Yutaka Sho

Every year millions of people visit sites and off-site memorials and museums dedicated to wars, disasters and accidents. In the year 2000, Foley and Lennon termed visits to places of death and violence “dark tourism” (Lennon and Foley 2000). The architectural disciplines have immersed themselves in such visits for some time. Post-disaster emergency relief and development projects in low-income countries have been popular preoccupations for socially engaged designers. The term “dark” is controversial, because socially engaged architecture sees itself as uplifting, responsible and positive in experience and outcome. The term “tourism” is controversial due to its frivolous and opportunistic connotation. But in substance the architectural discipline is already integral in the pilgrimage to and transformation of dark sites, inviting, hosting and becoming tourists. Theories and case studies of dark tourism have been well documented (Sharpley and Stone 2009; Strange and Kempa 2003, 386–405; Doss 2010; Trouillot 1997; Walsh 1992; Williams 2007; Savage 2009; Meringolo 2012; Thomas 2014; Knell, MacLead and Watson 2007; Connerton 2009; Young 1993). Dark tourism accommodates not only tourists but also scholars of history and conflict resolution, and state officials commemorating anniversaries, joining affected people and their relatives. The municipality and local industries develop supporting programs, infrastructure and master plans that cater to them. Inevitably spatial design affects its success or failure as a cultural representation of the event and as a business (Young 1993). The spatial and aesthetic experiences influence our collective understanding of the dark event, with possible implications for policies to prevent future conflicts and disasters (Sho 2016).

Case of Rwanda To investigate dark tourism and architecture, this chapter will focus on Rwanda, an East African nation that survived a genocide that killed up to 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994. Architecture’s relationship to Rwanda and perhaps to other nonindustrialized countries has been mediated by global development and modernization agendas set by the global North. The racial connotation of the word “dark” in the context of Africa, and the metaphorical association of its people with poverty, violence, illnesses and savagery, has great consequences. These predetermined images of darkness invite architects to conclude that Africans are helpless. The images overwhelm and hinder the architects from creating their own practice and educational criteria. I hope to contradict such predetermination while holding on to the term “dark tourism” to call attention to its problematic nature. 215

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Dark tourism is a broad term that encompasses various players, tools and scales. In the architectural disciplines, design firms and academic programs have actively intervened in low-income or conflict regions in the name of social engagement. Numerous design firms, including my own, have built in such “dark” sites in partnership with academic, NGO or corporate social responsibility (CSR) partners. In academia, Northern architecture schools host programs in dark sites and some have founded independent research institutions.1 Socially engaged architecture has been thus far uncritical of the prepackaged relationship between architecture, dark tourism and global development. This chapter hopes to divorce architecture and dark tourism from powerful development agendas so as to regain autonomy and accordingly become better aligned with the aspirations of the society that designers want to serve. Dr. Kazuyuki Sasaki’s project in Rwanda is a case that unbinds architecture and dark tourism from development. Sasaki is a practitioner-scholar of peace and development studies at the Protestant Institute of Art and Social Science or PIASS in the city of Huye. Sasaki and members of a local NGO called REACH have been organizing reconciliation workshops with genocide survivors and former offenders. During one of their workshops, a former offender proposed they build houses for the survivors. In the last ten years they have built 7 houses in the Kirehe district and consulted on 18 more.2 Unlike other war memorials, Sasaki and REACH’s project requires nuanced sociopolitical understandings that are not easily accessible to outsiders. Yet it is funded by a Japanese Christian organization whose donors occasionally visit the construction sites in what could be called “mission tourism.” Furthermore, it does not have the typical development goals, such as raising GDP, introducing modern technology or any that may “teach them how to fish” (Ferguson 2015). Certainly ownership of a durable house contributes to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals in many ways, but there are easier and faster ways to provide low-cost houses. REACH’s house building project is an anomaly: it does not fit into the development agenda, it is more complex than typical dark tourism, yet it invites outsiders to visit, support and witness the construction process—to become “architectural tourists.” Understanding REACH’s house construction project gives us an insight into architecture’s roles and stakes in dark sites, and allows the discipline to reconceptualize its relationship to both dark tourism and development.

Architecture, Dark Tourism and Development In his lecture entitled “To Hell With Good Intentions” prepared for the 1968 Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects or CIASP in Mexico, Ivan Illich criticized “voluntourism” as western pacification efforts of low-income nations (Illich 1968). Illich was responding to “mission-vacations” promoted by Pope John XXIII’s 1960 call for North American missionaries to “modernize” the Latin American Church (Smith and Smith 1994, 435). Religious and academic charity programs like CIASP also align with Harry Truman’s 1949 call for development (Escobar 1995, 4). During the rise of the neoliberal economy in the 1980s, NGOs rushed in to fill the gap left by the withdrawal of governmental social safety nets, effectively replacing elected governments (Feher 2007). Opponents of development maintain that today the development industry has become a tool to manipulate international diplomacy and the global market while exonerating NGOs from political responsibilities (Escobar 1995, 57; Esteva 2003, 14; Michael 2004; Heilprin 2011). In Africa specifically, Northern architects and planners served colonial governments and continued to serve native governments after independence, and today the job option has expanded to serving transnational organizations and NGOs (Low 2014, 285; Lagae and Raedt 2014, 178–189; Hertz et al. 2015; Berre and Bonesmo 2014; Drew and Fry 1964; Memmi 1965). There is no doubt that independent postcolonial African architecture and art thrive (Okeke-Agulu 2015; Udechukwu and Okeke-Agulu 2012; Elleh 2002; Avermaete, Karakayali and Von Osten 2010; Nuttall 2007). But

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instances of architectural development projects show that forces of the global economy and neocolonial governance may exclude local participation. Architecture for Humanity (AfH) serves as an example. AfH constructed a soccer field in Khayelitsha township in the outskirts of Cape Town in South Africa as the first of the Football for Hope initiative funded by FIFA, a nonprofit organization. The project was meant for the community’s low-income children, yet it was fenced off on the opening day when important officials visited. A few kilometers away in downtown Cape Town, local vendors were spatially demarcated and excluded from the economic benefits of 2010 FIFA World Cup. Low-income residents were deported from the city center to what locals nicknamed Tin Can Town (Doherty 2012). Socially engaged architecture in this instance was funded with the profit gained from excluding those it claimed to serve. The Khayelitsha example suggests that interventions in “dark” sites may end up imposing the global North’s development values on to the South if historical contexts and economic motives are ignored or manipulated. In such instances architecture may help expand the North’s consumer base by supporting cultural assimilation and desire creation, as witnessed in recent increase of Northern projects in the South.3 Spaces and objects are bound with economic status and identities, such that we as a global society correlate the presence of modern spaces and objects with levels of development (Ferguson 2007, 176). For instance, the presence of Northern architecture in Africa tends to sanction the popular picture of what it looks like to be modern and therefore defines the aesthetics of development, and their absence equates to traditional society and therefore defines the aesthetics of underdevelopment (Geschiere, Meyer and Pels 2008, 1; Sho 2014a; Ferguson 2014). On the other hand, as multiple NGO workers in Rwanda have related to the author, if a country does not look “sufficiently poor” the funders may pull out their support. In this development climate, architectural projects may endorse and reinforce the global development agendas via architectural aesthetics, and could work to widen the gap between the gift giver and the recipient. In 2011 architect Farshid Moussavi caused a stir when she commented that her Harvard design students who chose to work in low-income nations did so in search of an easy alternative to working in the United States, and they tended to be weak students (Moussavi 2011). In the global South there is less competition and being a Northerner comes with prestige. Advanced building technology, enabling funding and expertise are scarce and construction tends to be simple and “easy.” As Moussavi points out, in the United States, buildings are larger, more complex and costly, and therefore commissions tend to go to established firms. Moussavi reminisced about her fledgling career in Europe, the opportunities she was able to seize, and sympathized with today’s young designers in the United States. Building in the global South is not easy, however, for different reasons. In Rwanda, foreign architectural and construction firms may have an advantage over locals. Most large construction projects, public and private, are funded by global development funds and are often constructed and managed by Chinese and Kenyan firms. Smaller community projects go to American and European ateliertype firms.4 For the majority of low-income Rwandans, it is difficult to construct their own projects. It is especially so for the genocide survivors and former offenders. When appealing to the municipalities or to funding organizations about the hardships of acquiring decent housing, inevitably they must address the existing inequity. But speaking about ethnicity and potential political and economic disparities outside of the official government narrative is illegal in Rwanda (Blair and Stevenson 2015; Purdeková 2011; Sundaram 2016). Under the double bind of restricted speech and aggressive international development agendas, nongovernmentality and activism are nearly absent in Rwanda. Moussavi is in Illich’s company in her critique of Northern students’ assumption that designing in “dark” societies would automatically make them “activist architects,” morally superior and academically original. Blaming the students is misguided, however, for it is the institutions that market and profit from such programs.

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Northern architects in Rwanda are caught in another conundrum. Being foreigners, they are to some extent excused from political and social taboos, and are able to address development discrepancies between ethnic groups, economic classes and identities. While Northern architects may be able to negotiate with local leaders on equal terms, low-income, rural or uneducated citizens may not do so (Sho 2014b). In these strange situations, Northern designers may find themselves representing their hosts. Furthermore, many architectural and planning projects are funded by governments, private investment or charity funds from the North. While the designers’ stated clients are the locals who will use and live with the projects, the designers must also answer to the Northern funders’ goals. The global development industry makes a closed loop when Northern designers satisfy Northern organizations’ goals, leaving little room for rural Rwandans to assert their autonomy. Negative impacts of architecture-development entanglement do not necessarily mean that architects should refrain from engaging the global issues. Illich may call for the withdrawal of the charity industry from Mexico, but he does not call for the country’s isolation. Illich’s critiques are targeted toward Northerners who institutionalize and impose development policies on low-income nations. Finger and Asun interpret Illich’s attitude toward education and healthcare, “Illich is not against schools or hospitals as such, but once a certain threshold of institutionalization is reached, schools make people more stupid, while hospitals make them sick” (Finger and Asun 2001, 11). Illich extends his critique of institutionalization and ensuing counterproductivity to the development industry. In the closing of the same lecture, he said to the American volunteers that he was “here to entreat you to use your money, your status and your education to travel in Latin America. Come to look, come to climb our mountains, to enjoy our flowers. Come to study. But do not come to help” (Illich 1968, 320). Illich extends an invitation to receive gifts from Mexico, a poor nation, instead of insisting on giving. For Illich, rejection of institutionalized charity and development on one hand and the inclusion of tourism, education and exchange on the other are not mutually exclusive.

Rwandan Conversation on Architecture For Northern architects and researchers in “dark” sites, Illich seems to suggest that it is possible to divorce dark tourism from the concept of development. What could be gained from such a divorce? To think about this question, I refer to a conversation that took place in Huye, Rwanda. During this conversation with the genocide survivors and former offenders who build houses for each other, definitions of and the relationships between victims and offenders became blurred. The relational diagram was further complicated by the presence of a third party, the Northerners, adding an insider/outsider dynamic to the conversation. What became clear in the experiment was that when development agendas recede, architecture and dark tourism could create an open, contradictory and therefore truly inclusive public space. In 2015, Kazuyuki Sasaki and I hosted a conversation about the relationships between architecture and development to candidly discuss the successes and difficulties of current development projects led by the government and NGOs. We focused on the testimonies of citizens who were rural nonexperts, and yet who have contributed directly to building projects. Rural and low-income citizens are affected by development projects of all scales but have little say in them. To reveal this situation, Sasaki and I co-organized “A Conversation on Reconciliation: Space and Practicable Peace” at PIASS in Huye where Sasaki teaches (Figure 17.1). We were joined by his colleagues and students from Peace and Conflict Studies, along with my architecture interns from University of Rwanda. All participants excluding the organizers and exchange students experienced the genocide one way or the other. At the center of the Huye conversation were the members of two local NGOs that conducted post-genocide reconciliation projects involving house building. One organization was the Association

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Figure 17.1 A conversation on reconciliation, PIASS, Huye.

Yutaka Sho

Modeste et Innocent or AMI, named after two Catholic fathers who founded the organization in 2000 in the Huye district.5 Their house construction project was funded by a German NGO.6 The other is Reconciliation Evangelism And Christian Healing (REACH). The interdenominational organization was founded in 1996 and is active in five districts in the Eastern and Northern Provinces (REACH n.d., para. 1). Their major funding sources are Protestant ministries in the UK, United States and Japan, and the house construction project was predominantly funded by Sasaki’s Japanese support group.7 Prior to the Huye conversation, Sasaki and I interviewed the house building participants. To protect their privacy I will use pseudonyms. Two AMI members, a survivor Catherine and a former offender Ian, welcomed the interview team consisting of Sasaki, a translator and myself at their respective homes in the Huye district. The translator and I also visited REACH members, a survivor Sofia and a former offender Theodore, at their homes in the Kirehe district. The team prepared 60–70 questions for the interview. I was most interested in why the restorative justice had to be delivered in the form of architecture in this particular situation. Further, I wanted to know why this architecture had to be a domestic residence and not a public space. Northern architecture teaches that public space ensures open debate and democracy. One would assume that, in a post-conflict, low-income, tightly controlled nation like Rwanda, the need for and the benefits from such space would be paramount. I have asked the same questions previously and wanted to continue questioning for they are not the kinds of questions that would lead to the same answers (Sho 2014a). For AMI and REACH, the position that house construction occupied in the reconciliation process was different. AMI stated that house construction is not for reconciliation but a measure against poverty. House construction is one of many income generation projects that AMI conducts, they are available to all, and therefore former offenders could receive a house if they are poor. In fact, AMI helped Ian renovate his house. Before the members engage in house construction, the former offenders and survivors go through training sessions together, for former offenders to repent and for survivors to forgive. Then the former offenders pay cash reparation to the survivors, often in installments. Members may create businesses together to generate income. The next step is to identify vulnerable survivors and support them. Only after these steps are complete do they construct houses, in the same sense as buying mattresses, flip-flops and soaps for those who need them, which AMI also does. “You cannot think of a house before you have inner peace,” AMI members said. The foregoing description was related during the Huye conversation in public by an AMI member and a former offender Daniel, and an AMI officer. Daniel was invited by AMI as a spokesman. But what Ian said during the private interview at his home, and echoed by Catherine, differed slightly. For Ian, house construction was more meaningful than other AMI activities because it allowed him to spend time with Catherine. In return for the house, Catherine shared food and water with the builders, and the event helped lessen the fear between them. “I was afraid of Catherine,” Ian said—afraid of a frail 60-year-old woman suffering from PTSD. Sasaki confirmed that it is a common sentiment for former offenders to be afraid of people they harmed during the genocide. When AMI approached Catherine about the house of her own, at first she did not believe them, and thought that the former offenders came back to kill her. But once 50 former offenders showed up at her shed and continued to come back to make adobe blocks for her new house, she started to bathe and dress better so that she would appear respectable to them. Catherine and Sofia both said that before the new house was given to them, they imagined that they would soon die with their children, referring to the state of the structures unfit for living. Sofia’s old house is still standing next to her new house (Figure 17.2). The walls do not have plaster, openings are small with no window frames, and the floor is unfinished.

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Figure 17.2 Sofia’s house, Kirehe district.

Yutaka Sho

Durable housing is one of the most desirable, and most deficient, goods for low-income Rwandans. For instance, a government-built two-bedroom “low-cost” house in Batsinda, a suburb of capital Kigali, is built with Hydraform, cement-mixed adobe blocks. Their original cost in 2008 was 3.5 million Rwandan francs (around $5,000) without land (Rangira n.d., para. 12). In rural Kirehe or Huye, a house built with sundried adobe blocks would cost much less than the urban and well-built Batsinda house. Yet most rural Rwandans are subsistence farmers and have little to no cash income. The official number of $1,800 GDP per capita is much higher than the $0–$400 that rural farmers have told us (CIA World Fact Book 2015).8 Some of the farmers we spoke with assist farm owners with cultivation and in return are given a small share of the harvest and a small house to live in, and did not engage in cash transactions. Their houses are built with sundried adobe blocks, using grass as aggregate and plaster to make it water-resistant. Because cement is expensive the quality of the plaster is low, and is prone to erosion in rain. If cement is not available local lime is used, as in REACH’s Theodore’s house (Figure 17.3). Lime finish requires reapplication a few times a month. But many do not have either plaster or lime, as in Sofia’s old house. The government requires the roof to be corrugated steel sheets, which cost around $9 for three square meters. The size of the house is often determined by the number of roofing sheets one can afford. Thatch roof (nyakatsi) has been banned in the name of development and the government demolishes structures under the policy “Bye Bye Nyakatsi” (Musoni 2010). The floor is usually unfinished or made with a mix of lime, ash and cow dung. Rwanda imports all construction materials, including petroleum, from Kenya, Uganda, the DRC and China. It is a land-locked country and the material cost is said to be 30–40 percent higher than Kenya. To build a house is a colossal act in Rwanda. It was Theodore who first organized other former offenders, wrote a letter to REACH and proposed to build a house for Sofia as part of the reconciliation process. “I needed to give Sofia something tangible to express my repentance,” he said. “How could I ask for forgiveness from someone who does not even have a house?” Theodore served a six-month sentence for murders, and as part of the sentence he was deployed as a construction worker in the Travaux d’Intérêt Général (TIG) or community service program. TIG was originally conceived as a part of post-genocide reconciliation process by the government. One of the projects was to send convicted offenders back to their native village to rebuild what they had destroyed. Soon after the implementation, however, TIG workers became a free labor pool for development, such as infrastructure and public building projects, and most inmates were housed in work camps far from their own neighborhoods (Sasaki and Bayisenge 2012). As a TIG worker Theodore participated in the building of around 20 houses, none of them for survivors of his own crimes. AMI’s Ian on the other hand served six years in TIG, three of which in work camps. Ian said that the living conditions in TIG work camps were worse than being in a prison. But Ian’s other three years in TIG were spent in his own village while living at home with his family, and he was able to contribute to rebuilding his neighborhood. While the work done in TIG camps is for general public development projects, Theodore and Ian wanted to restore what they destroyed during the genocide. Furthermore, they wanted the projects to directly benefit the survivors of their own violence. Ian did not harm or murder anyone, nor destroy or loot property, but could not oppose or stop the genocide. That was the crime for which he served a total of 12 years. Theodore admitted to murders and an attempted murder against Sofia and was sentenced to six months. Many of the former offenders obeyed the kill orders, or they and their families would have been killed. It is not my intention to diminish the atrocity inflicted on the genocide victims. But in Rwanda, distinction between victims and non-victims is not as clear as one expects. Reconstruction projects that serve only the survivors, or ones that neutralize the issue by claiming “we are all Rwandans,” may contradict the reconciliation process.

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Figure 17.3 Theodore’s house, Kirehe district.

Yutaka Sho

Dealing With Dark Memories in Public Philosopher Masachi Osawa encountered the contested line between victims and offenders in neocolonial Okinawa, Japan. His reflections help us to understand Illich’s critique of institutional development projects in the Rwandan context. Osawa starts the recollection of his Okinawa visit in 2000 with a story of his own mistake (Kaneko and Osawa 2002, 25). He met with a young activist who was protesting against the construction of the new U.S. army base in Henoko and the Japanese government’s historical disregard for Okinawan’s rights in this matter. In a show of support, Osawa said to the activist, “The Japanese government is terrible, isn’t it?” To this, the activist suddenly exploded with anger. Osawa, a mainlander, wanted to express that he was on her side, that he was just like her. Later, during the same trip, Osawa spoke with a native novelist whose comment surprised him. The novelist said that, although Okinawans have been portrayed as victims of the United States’ and Japanese colonial policies, they were also offenders in an Asian context. During the Japanese occupation of East and Southeast Asia in WWII there were Okinawan soldiers who carried out the massacres. If there was to be a reconciliation and cooperation in postwar Asia, it would not be possible without recognizing the violence inflicted by Japanese, including Okinawans. In these two episodes in Okinawa, Osawa saw the same but reverse equation between victims and offenders producing the opposite effects that could be applied to any international development project. In the first episode, an islander-victim-activist, whose land and civil rights have been given up by her own government as a hostage to the U.S. military, rejected comradery expressed by Osawa, one of the mainlander-offenders. She rejected Osawa’s “offender = victim” equation. By accusing the Japanese government and making Okinawa’s struggle “our” struggle, the mainlanders like Osawa attempt to claim Okinawans’ pains and loss as “our” own, even though “we” did not experience them. Osawa cannot possibly share the urgency of Okinawans, host to 74 percent of all U.S. military bases in Japan (and which would become a target in case of pan-Asian war), not to mention the daily abuses they endure. The Okinawan activist’s fury overlaps with skepticism expressed by Illich and Moussavi. Development workers are well-meaning visitors who claim they empathize with the victim/the poor but without sharing the risk. Osawa realized that the offender = victim equation was offered by an offender (himself ) who has been defining rules and memberships for “public space,” in this case the right of Okinawans to use their common land as they wish. Expression of empathy with Okinawans who have been excluded from the decision-making processes conceals and neutralizes the historical structural violence that the offender has supported and benefitted from. It allows the offender to covertly redefine public space as if it was always open and universal by annexing the victim to it, as if to claim “we are all Japanese” just as in the slogan “we are all Rwandans.” But in practice the offenders remain offenders, and the public space continues to exclude and create inequalities within it (Kaneko and Osawa 2002, 36). In the second episode, however, an islander-victim-novelist empathized with the mainlanderoffenders and had taken on equal responsibility for the war. Instead of being self-preserving as the offender in the first case, this reverse “victim = offender” equation appears as courageous and sublime, Osawa says. When the victim says “we victims are also offenders like you,” in an attempt to establish a universal public space, its universality enfolds irresoluble oppositions, grudges and loss. Instead of ignoring or exonerating the past offenses, it embraces and faces them in hopes to deflect the future violence. It does not insist on the cul-de-sac of the victim/offender dichotomy but it does not neutralize the conflict either. Because the public space created by the victim = offender equation embraces contradictions, it is able to include both victims and offenders (and perhaps even tourists), and expand infinitely (Kaneko and Osawa 2002, 36). In Rwanda, due to the restricted speech and controlled membership in the public sphere, this expanded public space materializes in a domestic residence.

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At the closing of the Huye conversation, one of the PIASS students said that, while AMI constructs houses for income generation and REACH constructs them to achieve reconciliation, they both make space where opposite sides of the genocide could come together. This space and time must be the Rwandan equivalent of universal, contradictory and infinitely expanding public space. Both AMI and REACH are committed to grappling with a gradation of darkness that resides in the genocide and subsequent development, and they use architecture to bring out the contradictions that cannot be defused by development agendas and erasure of memories. Their projects also reveal a capacity of architecture to spawn and nurture inclusive public space, in this case during the construction process of a domestic residence. During the individual interview, Theodore surprised us by revealing that recently his niece married Sofia’s adopted son. At REACH’s construction site where Theodore works, a visitor feels useless and inadequate. It is partly because no ordinary Northerner is as strong as rural Rwandans. But it is also because people are working and conversing, like at any construction sites (Figure 17.4). The visitors from the North are invited to simply enjoy the process instead of helping. Thus far no architect has been invited to design their homes. At the closing of the Huye conversation, Reverend Philbert Kalisa, the founder of REACH, asked the academic participants what they planned to do with the findings. It was a polite challenge to restructure the academic involvement in the practice of architecture and social engagement. Certainly the challenge should be extended to the development industry.

Architecture for the 101 Percent The Rwandan house construction project contradicts typical development agendas. The film theorist Louis-Georges Schwartz gives us an insight to explain how. In the post-2008 U.S. housing market crash, the Occupy Wall Street movement’s slogan “We are the 99 percent” became popular. Schwartz contested their claim 99 percent of the United States was the underrepresented class of the late capitalist system. “If the set included all of the people on earth,” he countered, “the 99% would become part of something close to 1% of the wealthiest individuals globally” (Schwartz 2012). Perhaps those in Zuccotti Park were part of the 100 percent, because they are not as entitled as the 1 percent but nonetheless conspiring with and benefiting from global inequality, as most of us in this global society. Instead, Schwartz considers citizens who belong to the 0 percent as the real constituents of global struggles. Rwandan genocide survivors and former offenders belong to the 0 percent who had little choice but to fight, who can pay no taxes to contribute to development, and whose voices are not counted in the society. It could be argued that typical development projects serve the 100 percent when Northern designers serve the interests of Northern governments, NGOs and CSRs. But the Rwandan house construction project is by and for the 0 percent, a form of architectural engagement with dark sites that is independent of and yet a prerequisite for development. The potential of socially engaged architecture is in creating universal, therefore inherently contradictory public space with the 0 percent. But for Northern designers to claim that they can be part of the 0 percent (offender = victim) is laughable. Responding to this conundrum, one of my graduate students proposed, what if we design for the 101 percent? Those who have not been born yet, those far away, and those for whom we cannot foresee the impact of our projects will be included in it (see also Osawa 2012).9 The dead will be included also, whose presence and forgiveness we seek in dark sites, for whose honor we create and visit the dark attractions, and in a promise not to repeat the mistakes we are bound with them (Adorno 1966). In the Rwandan house project the dead always cohabit the space. The project is not only for the future reconciliation for the living but also to recognize our responsibility to the dead. The Rwandan project binds the 101 percent through domestic public space. It conveys that participation in universal public space may start with dark tourism.

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Figure 17.4 REACH’s construction site, Kirehe district.

The Darker Side of Social Engagement

Notes 1 Examples are Urban Design Lab with the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and Earth Institute, Columbia University; Future Cities Laboratory, ETH Zurich; International Planning concentration at Harvard GSD’s Urban Planning and Design Department; and a Kigali project led by Peter Rich and University of Arkansas Community Design Center. In addition numerous schools participate in programs such as Solar Decathlon at international sites. 2 An interview with Theodore in the Kirehe district, August 1, 2015. 3 The August 2012 issue of Architectural Record titled “Into Africa: Economic Growth + Rapid Urbanization Create Opportunities for Architecture” highlighted projects in the continent by Western trained architects. 4 MASS Design, Active Social Architecture, Sharon Davis Design, Dominikus Stark Architekten are some of them. 5 Interview with AMI officer on July 27, 2015, in Huye; and from the AMI website, accessed December 24, 2015: http://ami-ubuntu.net/spip.php?article6. The Rwandan geopolitical structure consists of, from larger geographic areas to smaller, province, district, sector, cells and villages. 6 Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen zivik Funding Programme. Interview with AMI officer on July 27, 2015, in Huye. 7 In an email correspondence with Sasaki on January 11, 2016. 8 The unofficial number is taken from the interviews with about 50 building participants in General Architecture Collaborative’s project in northern Gasabo district, July 2013. 9 Conversation with Peter Lee, October 7, 2015, in Syracuse, New York.

References Adorno, T.W. (1966) “Education After Auschwitz,” original radio script in H.W. Pickford (trans.), Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, 191–204. Avermaete, T., Karakayali, S. and Von Osten, M. (eds) (2010) Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the Future, London: Black Dog Architecture. Berre, N. and Bonesmo, G. (2014) “Forms of Freedom. African Independence and Nordic Models,” Nordic Pavilion, the 14th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. Available from: www.labiennale.org/ en/mediacenter/video/fundamentals19.html [7 January 2016]; and at The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway, January 23–April 19, 2015. Available from: www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/ exhibitions_and_events/exhibitions/national_museum__architecture/Forms+of+Freedom.+African+inde pendence+and+nordic+models.b7C_wlfQ2b.ips [7 January 2016]. Blair, S.L. and Stevenson, J.A. (2015) ‘What Do the Dead Say? The Architecture of Salvific Discourses in PostGenocide Rwanda,’ Journal of Power, Politics & Governance, June, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 27–45. CIA World Fact Book: Rwanda: Economy: GDP—Per Capita (PPP). (2015) Available from: www.cia.gov/ library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/rw.html [2 August 2016]. Connerton, P. (2009) How Modernity Forgets, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doherty, K. (2012) ‘Cape Town: The City Without and Within the White Lines,’ MAS Context 13/ Ownership, Spring. Available from: www.mascontext.com/issues/13-ownership-spring-12/cape-town-thecity-without-and-within-the-white-lines/ [7 January 2016]. Doss, E. (2010) Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Drew, J. and Fry, M. (1964) Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zones, Malabar, FL: R.E. Krieger. Elleh, N. (2002) Architecture and Power in Africa, Westport, CT: Praeger. Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development: The Making of the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Esteva, G. (2003) “Development,” in W. Sachs (ed.), Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge and Power, London: Zed Books. Feher, M. (2007) “The Governed in Politics,” in M. Ferher (ed.), Nongovernmental Politics, Brooklyn: Zone Books. Ferguson, J. (2007) Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ——— (2014) ‘Humanity Interview With James Ferguson, May 31, pt. 1: Development as “Swarming State Power,” ’ by Editorial Collective, published on June 10, 2014. Available from: http://humanityjournal.org/ blog/humanity-interview-with-james-ferguson-pt-1-development-as-swarming-state-power/ [7 January 2016]. ———. (2015) Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Finger, M. and Asun, J.M. (2001) Adult Education at the Crossroads: Learning Our Way Out, London: Zed Books.

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Geschiere, P., Meyer, B. and Pels, P. (eds) (2008) Readings in Modernity in Africa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heilprin, J. (2011) ‘Fraud Plagues Global Health Fund Backed by Bono, Others: As Much as Two-Thirds of Some Grants for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Lost to Corruption,’ Associated Press, January 23. Available from: www.nbcnews.com/id/41221202/ns/health-health_care/t/fraud-plagues-global-health-fundbacked-bono-others/#.Vo8tHFLih-4 [7 January, 2016]. Hertz, M., et al. (2015) African Modernism—Architecture of Independence, Zurich: Park Books. Illich, I. (1968) ‘To Hell With Good Intentions,’ a lecture transcript. Available from: https://depts.washington. edu/egonline/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Illich-Reading.pdf [6 January 2016]. Kaneko, M. and Osawa, M. (2002) Mitakunai shisouteki genjitsuo miru (Staring at the Philosophical Reality That We Avoid), Tokyo: Iwanami. Knell, S.J., MacLead, S. and Watson, S. (2007) Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed, London: Routledge, Lagae, J. and Raedt, D.K. (2014) ‘Building for ‘l’Authenticité’: Eugène Palumbo and the Architecture of Mobutu’s Congo,’ Journal of Architectural Education, Fall, Vol. 68, Issue 2, pp. 178–189. Lennon, J.J. and Foley, M. (2000) Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Low, I. (2014) “Architecture in Africa: Situated Modern and the Production of Locality,” in D. Rifkind and E. Hadda (eds), A Critical History of Contemporary Architecture: 1960–2010, Burlington: Ashgate. Memmi, A. (1965) The Colonizer and The Colonized, New York: Orion Press. Meringolo, D.D. (2012) Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Michael, S. (2004) Undermining Development: The Absence of Power Among Local NGOs in Africa, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Moussavi, F. (2011) “Implicate & Explicate: The Aga Khan Award for Architecture,” a lecture recording given at the ceremony on 18 November at Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Available from: www.archi tecturefoundation.org.uk/programme/2011/implicate-explicate-the-aga-khan-award-for-architecture [20 December 2015]. Musoni, J. (2010) Transmission of Terms of Reference for the Joint Task Force Shelter Scheme, Ministry of Local Government, December 27. Available from: www.minaloc.gov.rw/index.php?id=514 [2 August 2016]. Nuttall, S. (2007) Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Okeke-Agulu, C. (2015) Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Osawa, M. (2012) ‘Mirai’ tono rentaiwa kanoudearu. Shikashi donoyouna imide? (It Is Possible to Create Solidarity With Future. But in What Sense?), Fukuoka, Japan: Fukuoka U Booklet. Purdeková, A. (2011) “ ‘Even If I Am Not Here, There Are So Many Eyes’: Surveillance and State Reach in Rwanda,” Journal of Modern African Studies, Cambridge University Press, Vol. 49, No. 3, pp. 475–497. Rangira, B. (n.d.) ‘Batsinda: An Affordable Solution to Our Slums,’ Kigali City Homepage. Available from: www. kigalicity.gov.rw/spip.php?article512 [2 August 2016]. REACH’s Homepage (n.d.) ‘Where We Work.’ Available from: http://reachrwanda.org/where-we-work/ [2 August 2016]. Sasaki, K. and Bayisenge, F. (2012) ‘Community Service for Reconciliation? Perspectives on Rwanda’s TIG Program, Public Reforms in Rwanda,’ PIASS Publication Series no. 1, Huye, Rwanda: Protestant Institute of Arts and Social Sciences. Savage, K. (2009) Monument Wars: Washington D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape, Berkeley: University of California Press. Schwartz, L-G. (2012) ‘0%,’ And/or Evacuate, January 9. Available from: http://occupyeverything.org/2012/zeropercent/ [2 August 2016]. Sharpley, R. and Stone, P.R. (2009) The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, Bristol, UK: Channel View. Sho, Y. (2014a) ‘Looking Like Developed: Aesthetics and Ethics in Rwandan Housing Projects,’ Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 68, No. 2, pp. 199–208. ——— (2014b) ‘Northern Designers in Africa: A Political Diary of Building a House in Rwanda,’ in S. John and M. Wilson (eds), 102nd ACSA Annual Meeting Proceedings, Globalizing Architecture/ Flows and Disruptions, pp. 186–193. ——— (2016) “Fukushima Dark Tourism,” in A. Awotona (ed.), Planning for Community-Based Disaster Resilience Worldwide: Learning From Case Studies in Six Continents, London, UK: Routledge. Smith, L.G. and Smith, J.K. (1994) Lives in Education, New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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Strange, C. and Kempa, M. (2003) ‘Shade of Dark Tourism: Alcatraz and Robben Island,’ Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 386–405. Sundaram, A. (2016) Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship, New York: Doubleday. Thomas, L.L. (2014) Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race and Historical Memory, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Trouillot, M-R. (1997) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Udechukwu, O. and Okeke-Agulu, C. (eds) (2012) Ezumeezu: Essays on Nigerian Art and Architecture—a Festschrift in Honour of Demas Nwoko, Glassboro, NJ: Goldline and Jacobs. Walsh, K. (1992) The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World, London: Routledge. Williams, P. (2007) Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities, Oxford: Berg. Young, J.E. (1993) The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Part V

Tectonics of Engagement

18 A Comparative History of Live Projects Within the United States and the UK Key Characteristics and Contemporary Implications Harriet Harriss

Introduction Live projects1 feature heavily within the current zeitgeist for more socially engaged and civically relevant forms of architectural education. Strictly speaking, however, their pedagogic pedigree has a longer, more enduring history under different synonyms. This chapter provides an abbreviated yet pertinent historical overview of the origins of live projects within the UK and the United States as a means to critically consider their societal impact and professional efficacy. Within existing literature, the live project ‘movement’ has so far been most conspicuously catalogued in two key regions: the United Kingdom and the United States, where they have evolved almost in parallel.2 In the United States, the term ‘design build’ has prevailed over live projects. In the UK, however, ‘design build’ refers to a form of procurement and contractor-led project, which might account for why its adoption has been resisted (Chappell and Willis 2010, 170). Subsequently, the proto-practical term ‘live projects’—devoid of any confusion with professional practice—seems to more easily encompass live project activities. These have been characterized as client and/or community engagement (Sara 2004, 5; Chiles and Holder 2008, 1; Watt and Cottrell 2006, 98); ‘liveness’ or real-world activity (Watt and Cottrell 2006, 98) featuring a social or ethical element or commitment (Charlesworth, Dodd and Harrison 2012); involving collaboration and/or teamwork with other students, tutors and stakeholders (Sara 2004, 5; Anderson and Priest 2012); involving operations situated largely outside the academy (Sara 2004, 133; Watt and Cottrell 2006, 98; Harriss 2012, 1),3 and a form of proto-practice (Harriss and Widder, 2014). As the name asserts, live projects are interested in ‘liveness’—architecture activities that involve real people, real structures or spaces and take place in real time. In doing so, they react against a 300-year-old tradition of teaching architecture within a simulated design studio, commonly located within an exclusive, campus environment (Webster 2008, 63). To ask why live projects are increasingly popular involves reflecting on when, where and why they emerged—in essence to understand what they are a reaction against or a departure from. In doing so, it may be possible to identify whether live projects’ commitment to social engagement acts as a critical checklist of what’s missing

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from more established forms of architectural education. The question then becomes whether they also provide a tacit mandate for educational reform: offering an alternative model of architectural learning that relocates people at the heart of place making.

The Origins of the British Live Project History’s pledge is to offer us a deeper and even useful understanding of the legacies that surround us. Yet architectural education as an independent discipline and informed by multiple epistemologies is relatively young. Prior to the 1670s, ‘master builder’ expertise was largely acquired through a practice-situated system of tutelage, preferring apprenticeships to academies (Saint 1983, 66). The traditions established within the first architecture school—Le Académie Royale d’Architecture in Paris (founded in 1671, and subsequently absorbed into L’Academie Des Beaux Arts)—provide the foundations of today’s prevalent pedagogies in both the UK and the United States (Salama 1995, 44; Gibbons 2007; Saint 1983, 57;4 Stevens 1998). It took the British longer than the French to ‘institutionalize’ architectural education, however. Instead, the tutelage system prevailed until two disillusioned young architects set up the Architectural Association (AA) School in 1847—‘as a reaction against the conditions under which architectural training could be obtained’ (Bottoms 2010). These young ‘radicals’ 5—Robert Kerr and Charles Gray (aged 23 and 18, respectively)—offered the only alternative to a system ‘whereby large premiums were advanced to private architects in return for imparting an education and training,’ which was ‘rife with vested interests and open to abuse, dishonesty and incompetence’ (Crinson and Lubbock 1994, 60). Soon after this autodidactic rebellion, ‘technical’ colleges began offering building design and ‘construction’ courses (Brown 2009) as a more affordable and accessible option to those of limited means. This collective resistance to the lure of academy continued until the 1958 Oxford Conference on Architectural Education in the UK, whose mandate was to collectively shift architectural education out of the technically focused building colleges and into the intellectually inclined universities (Crinson and Lubbock 1994, 152). One of the legacies of this decision was the increase in ‘academic’ rather than strictly ‘vocational’ outputs such as research (Musgrove 1983; Parnell 2008), although not everyone supported this departure, however (Crinson and Lubbock 1994). While the idea of an academically standardized curriculum offers certain benefits in terms of consistency, it also involves a further ‘retreat into the academy’ (Ewing 2008, 122), away from the inevitable ‘inconsistencies’ of real life. After the 1958 Oxford Conference, RIBA Education undersecretary Elizabeth Layton was charged with evaluating the successful implementation of the academic mandate. An unlikely institutional turncoat, her report criticized the ‘remoteness’ of students from the realities of architectural practice and also compared the professional learning experiences of architecture students unfavorably with those from other professional disciplines, such as medicine and engineering (Crinson and Lubbock 1994, 146; Layton 1962). Evidently, the task of situating architectural education in an even more societally removed and exclusive context was proving problematic. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the emergence of the first live projects coincided with conference’s pledge to transpose architecture into the academy. The first (or at least first documented) UK live project program was initiated at Birmingham University and its associated narratives provide a compelling insight into how these early live projects were received. What makes the literature on Birmingham particularly useful is the combination of two sources of information: (1) the trade press—which is generally understood to represent the practice perspective and; (2) the RIBA course validation process (RIBA 2011), which is tasked with ensuring comparable standards among schools, and thereby gives an overview of the general standards within school and the pedagogic and professional values held at that time. In the example of the trade press, Architecture and Building and Architect and Building News6 commissioned a journalist operating under the pseudonym ‘John Doe’ (intended to mean the average architect) to report on all 73 UK schools of architecture (Smith 1958). Although his findings of the 234

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majority of these schools were critical, his review of Birmingham University School of Architecture identified that the live project program’s intention to ‘do a little, thoroughly, rather than a lot, superficially’, was wholly commendable (Smith 1961). The 1952 RIBA validation board, however, was a lot less supportive. Arguing against the emphasis on ‘group work’, they insisted that ‘most of the student’s efforts should be directed in solving his own problems’ (quoted in Benedict-Brown 2012),7 placing firm emphasis on ‘the primacy of the individual’ (Cuff 1991, 45) that has no doubt contributed to the current ‘starchitect’ phenomena. Head of school Douglas Smith’s response to the report was appropriately intransigent, arguing that amid the ‘chaos’ and ‘complete uncertainty’ that prevailed in architectural education and that to some extent the task of educating architects was grounded in conflict, regardless of the context in which it was taught. As he described it, ‘The desire to train useful assistants but also to train people who will one day make good architects with vision and initiative . . . [but that] . . . nobody has yet discovered whether these two things are entirely compatible’ (RIBA, 1952). The RIBA’s less than sympathetic report on Birmingham’s 10-year-old live project program may well have deterred live project intentions of other UK schools of architecture. While the activities taking place within these live projects were considered good preparation for practice by the trade press,8 the RIBA’s report established a pedagogical fissure between their ideals for architectural education and those of practicing architects. Having been placed on the periphery of architectural education by the RIBA’s report and doggedly resistant to the notion of re-situating within architecture practices, the emergence of the university-based ‘Project Office’ (Smith 1962) could be viewed in part as an attempt to provide an enabling and validating space for live projects. The Welsh School of Architecture was one of many that established a (live) project office with the intention of encouraging students to undertake real practice work, most often with groups or community organizations with acute needs yet limited means, from a position within the academy. However this project office—as well as many others initiated in the 1960s—did not survive, and those operating today could be counted on one hand.9 After 22 years, the Welsh School Project Office closed in 2002, after it simply became untenable to offer ‘bona-fide design practice from within architecture school’ (Forster, Coombs and Thomas 2008, 363).10 While this demise could be attributed to the pressure research-based schools of architecture face to ‘academize’ the discipline (Forster, Coombs and Thomas 2008, 366), it is interesting to note the surviving project offices that operate today have successfully integrated research into their activities, often emphasizing brief defining and process design as core activities of equal value (Morrow and Brown 2012, 278; Chiles and Holder 2008, 197).11

The Origins of the U.S. Live Project Given the vastly different scale of urbanization within the two nations, American architectural education offers many more case studies to draw from than the British exemplar of this period. By the middle of the twentieth century, the United States required a vast construction up-skilling strategy to accommodate the rapid rate of industrial expansion. Subsequently, the first school of architecture was founded at MIT (Saint 1983, 76), followed soon after by the University of Illinois Urbana (1867) and Cornell (1871). Although the European tradition held an initial influence over American architectural education, the United States’ emerging culture and drive toward independence meant an instinctive rejection of European values and systems (Chakraborty 2014, 42). As American academic Andrew Saint described it, ‘the American architectural profession commenced more rudely than its counterpart in Britain,’ a sentiment quite probably based upon his estimation that only 10 percent of buildings constructed after the First World War involved architects rather than builders (Saint 1983, 72). The initial resistance to institutionalizing architectural education reflects the value that American culture places on practical skills, having so essentially required 235

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them for the country’s early development. For many Americans, there was ‘nothing superior about the status and skills of an architect as opposed to a builder’ (Saint 1983, 72), which may account for why there are over 100 ‘design-build’ programs in 123 NAAB accredited architecture schools in operation today (Gjertson 2011). American live projects are first examined in literature in relation to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Studio (1931-), which began when 23 students (or ‘fellows’ as they were known) came to live and learn in Lloyd’s former studio home. Influenced by the 1914–1933 Bauhaus School commitment to prototyping, craft and making, students were also required to engage with a broad, interdisciplinary agenda, encompassing painting, sculpture, music, drama and dance ‘in their places as divisions of architecture’ (Pevsner 1999, 880).12 Even today, students are required to build and inhabit their own shelters.13 Taliesin’s remote prairie location (as opposed to campus context) proved very effective in this regard. Taliesin’s live projects weren’t limited to sybaritic structures for the individual, either. During the U.S. great depression of 1933, attention was refocused upon meeting the needs of the immediate community and maintaining or expanding their working and living environment, resulting in a range of innovative structures in the surrounding landscape. It was the focused integration with, and in response to context, that was similarly investigated by Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, who migrated their Yale Studio Project of 1968–1970 to Vegas, along with 13 students, to focus on a situated response to the architectural contradictions of the Las Vegas Strip (Venturi, Brown and Izenour 1977). The contrast between Yale—an ‘Ivy League’ university situated on a leafy and semi-rural campus and housed within a classical vernacular template—and the neon temporality of the Vegas Strip could not be more acute—and this was no doubt the motivational intention. This was not the first attempt at rejecting privileged isolation of these schools, however. In the early twentieth century, America witnessed the rise of city-based universities. These ‘city as campus’ schools were stimulated by the opportunity to develop education programs that directly connected to the exciting new possibilities inherent in industrial expansion, cultural diversity and environmental complexity (Haar 2011, xiii). City as campus was most expertly realized within the development of the Chicago universities, whose ‘founding premises and historical trajectories rest on their relationship to the city with its unique conditions be they social, cultural, physical or economic’ (Haar 2011, xiv). Rather than simply manufacture practice-ready architects, these universities were committed to educating ‘urban citizens’ to address ‘social, and urban forms that will lead to new ideas about . . . urban reform, and ultimately new models of urban planning and design’ (ibid., xiv), within and beyond their ‘diffuse and ill-defined campus boundaries’ (ibid., xiii). In this way, the city served as ‘a site of pedagogy and a viable location for the larger purpose of the academic community: the production of knowledge’ (ibid., xiv), offering further students the opportunity to participate in a model of responsive, co-authored learning. For many architecture schools within U.S. cities, engaging with the urban fabric inevitably involved working directly with its inhabitants. It is likely, therefore, that the burgeoning growth of American cities provided students of the period with an unparalleled opportunity to participate in shaping the cities in which their universities were situated. In doing so, they set a precedent for some forms of civically engaged scholarship that the war-damaged and bankrupted countries of Europe struggled to compete with. In addition to this, the U.S. Land Grants (Morrill Act of 1862, the Morrill Act of 1890 and the Agricultural College Act of 1890) created a land endowment system that enabled state universities to fund ‘liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life’.14 In the 1960s, the Land Grants served to facilitate the emergence and evolution of the role of community design centres in reaching out to the ‘industrial’ or non-academic communities surrounding their campuses, as the trend toward greater socio-economic equality became a common political preoccupation (Wilmes 2015, 226–228; Goodman 2014, 506). The CDC movement subsequently proliferated in both urban and rural schools (Pearson and Robbins 2002, 12),15 with 236

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the stated purpose of revitalizing poorer neighbourhoods (Boyer 1996, 18; Wilmes 2015, 228). Not all CDCs were campus-based, however. Many chose to position themselves within the communities they sought to assist. These included the University of Pennsylvania’s Neighborhood Renewal Corps (1959–1961), which involved the community in its construction, and California Berkeley’s Asian Neighborhood Design (1971–1973), which began as a community-situated design centre and later became a not-for-profit, independent facility focused upon providing ‘specialized services to needy clients and vocational training for at-risk youth . . . [helping] the practice survive as the activist fervor of the 1960s and 70s dwindled’ (Goodman 2014, 505, 508). Perhaps the most enduring and more recently world-renowned example of community-situated and engaged learning comes in the form of Rural Studio in Alabama, which emerged from a practice established in the 1970s. As the late founding director, Samuel Mockabee, explained, Rural Studios’ intention was to use architecture to ‘nudge, cajole, and inspire a community’ (Oppenheimer and Hursley 2002, 13). However, this could be achieved only via ‘subversive leadership’, from academics and practitioners, who are tasked with ‘reminding students of the profession’s responsibilities’ to wider society (ibid.). As the evidence suggests, the CDC movement played a pivotal role in pioneering and then shaping the community development principles of today, including ‘community planning and architecture, social architecture, community participation with emphasis upon the involvement of local people in social and physical development of the environment they are living in’ (Sanoff 2000, xi). The CDC movement also helped schools redirect student architects toward serving the needs of impoverished communities rather than focusing on designing to serve the interests of private clients. In doing so, they nurtured new, more diverse forms of architectural activity, ‘leading to lasting, useful social change and creating alternative markets for investment’ (Bell 2004, 62).16 That architecture schools should prepare students for practice is never called into question. However, to create learning opportunities that enable students to shape and influence architecture practice—as the CDC movement did—is perhaps more important, even if this contribution is seldom acknowledged.

Compatibility, Conflict and Contemporary Legacies UK schools of architecture presently offer far fewer institutionally supported live project opportunities than their U.S. counterparts.17 In the UK, live projects are generally offered as an adjunct to design studio,18 whereas in the United States, many are delivered through one of over 50 NAAB accredited community design centres.19 While U.S. live projects mostly offer credits to participating students,20 this varies significantly between different schools of architecture in the UK (Chiles and Till 2011, 2). In today’s grade-driven educational culture, it’s highly likely that many UK students are subsequently less incentivized to participate in live projects than their U.S. counterparts. In 2014, NCARB revised its Intern Development Program to allow students to count live project experience toward their professional accreditation, including those undertaken at undergraduate level. In contrast, the RIBA PEDR offers no such recognition, despite the fact that many live projects would meet many of the requisite ‘categories of experience’.21 Where the NCARB system becomes problematic is in relation to live project work undertaken where credits toward a degree have already been awarded, assuming the commonsensical view that the same piece of work should never be marked twice. This plunges many schools into conflict on the issue because if live projects lack credits, then negotiating the institutional resources needed to implement them becomes more challenging. One way to tackle this problem would be for schools and NCARB to work together on how they might assess very different activities within the same live project. For this to happen, NCARB recognition becomes essential, rather than at odds with any one school’s live project ambitions: a strategy that the RIBA might also be wise to consider adopting, too. One of the challenges around attaching credits to live projects is their diverse and often unstable nature. For example, the ‘liveness’ of live projects—such as site conditions, the needs of stakeholders, 237

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participation and resource levels—is often mutable. In contrast, design studio conditions are more closely analogous with a laboratory environment—where variables are stable and predictable, which makes the achievement of RIBA/NAAB criteria more straightforward. While both design studio and live projects are concerned with students acquiring key skills and knowledge, how they are ‘tested’ is quite different. Design studio emphasizes the ability of students to demonstrate knowledge by designing a representation of a building. In contrast, live projects emphasize the ability of students to demonstrate but also test their knowledge when the outcomes are often uncertain. Subsequently, professional behaviours—not just knowledge—such as teamwork and client collaboration are more often rewarded. This greater exposure to uncertainty is arguably more reflective of the unstable nature of today’s professional practice.22 Arguably, both design studio and live projects play essential roles in helping students acquire skills that are vital to the practicing architect. Buildings are designed in the office—and not on site—in the world of practice, after all. But what live projects seem particularly effective at offering is a kind of feedback loop for educators, identifying how much of the instruction being given within lectures and design studio is actually being absorbed by student—judged on their ability to apply it in real circumstances. In this way, live projects also evidence whether the curricula set by the validating bodies of the NAAB and RIBA are useful or relevant to contemporary practice. Were this feedback system to be properly harnessed, the scale of the gap between the skills taught in schools and those needed in practice—as many practices are eager to emphasize23—could be significantly reduced.

What Next for Live Projects? As the evidence examined identifies, both UK- and U.S.-based live projects share ‘universal’ characteristics derived from philosophically and practically compatible origins and their contemporary applications—which sit easily under a shared terminology. Despite developing within two different regions with widely differing resources and affluence, they share three principal values that resonate with the challenges faced by today’s schools of architecture in both locations. Firstly, they are largely situated off-campus and within the communities they seek to serve at a time when campuses are becoming cost-ineffective and overpopulated. Secondly, they seek to directly address societal concerns at a time when welfare provision is being continually eroded. Thirdly, they de-partition the university from the community in which it sits, by offering more diverse forms of engagement and participation between students and community members. But with UK architectural education currently poised for reform, will this compatibility continue? In March 2015, the RIBA hosted a ‘special’ Education Forum to respond to the 2013 European Union legislative changes to the Professional Qualifications Directive statute. During this proposal review, it was agreed that UK schools would need to replace the tripartite route to qualification with an EU- and U.S.-aligned bipartite model, bringing the duration of training closer to 6 years, rather than 7+.24 At present, the two-stage NAAB route to qualification is roughly equivalent to the UK’s RIBA accredited Part I (BA) and Part II (MA) route forming stage 1, and the RIBA Part III, PEDR process resembling the practice-based Intern Development Program (NAAB 2014).25 It was also proposed that UK students follow their EU counterparts in being legally permitted to call themselves ‘architects’ upon graduation—without having any professional practice experience. Subsequently, a greater proportion of RIBA Part III/PEDR experience would need to be provided by UK schools—which may prove to be a positive consequence in terms of increasing the number of live projects taking place in UK schools. In contrast, the United States stands alone in offering the longest—and by implication the most expensive—route to qualification of the three regions, followed closely by China.26 This represents a clear disadvantage to U.S. students, and as the cost of education becomes even more contentious, is likely to have a knock-on effect on where students with increasing global mobility may then choose—or can afford to choose—to study. 238

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Live projects in both the UK and the United States also face another threat. It has been reported that universities are increasingly subjected to standardization-fuelled ‘hyper-bureaucracy’ (Tahir 2010) and are quite reasonably concerned by the growth of student litigation.27 The result is that many universities feel obliged to take significant precautionary measures to avoid liability arising in a potential dispute, which has huge implications for off-campus activities, particularly those involving a level of physical risk, as live project construction work inevitably does. Since the United States is generally viewed as the more litigious of the two nations, it remains to be seen as to whether this threat curtails its current live project advantage over the UK’s less institutionally facilitated offer. While recent literature on live projects has done much to demonstrate the pedagogic integrity of live projects,28 what is less celebrated is the role they play in offering feedback—not on the efficacy of design studio but on the relevance and efficacy of the validating criteria of both the NAAB and the RIBA too. As products of legislative and institutional support, they also provide a litmus test on the priorities of the intentions of both systems of education. Live projects are exposed to the socioeconomic contingencies faced by real communities. They demand that students learn to adjust their professional practice to adapt to unanticipated change—and in doing so become responsive but capable professionals in uncertain times. Although today’s live projects have taken architectural education back out of the academy, they haven’t run in the direction of professional practice either. An exploitative tutelage system may well be a distant memory, but the rise of unpaid internships is a real and present danger in both the UK and the United States (Fisher et al. 2003; Mark 2013).29 And anyway, live projects prefer to be situated in communities of people, not company practices. Indeed, live projects’ explicit and even earnest commitment to acts of socially engaged architecture seems to highlight a shortfall in what academysituated architectural learning currently lacks—namely, to learn about becoming an architect by working with the people architecture seeks to serve, and not just those who provide architectural services. To educate students to become ‘professionals’ means—by definition—to commit them to ‘public service’ (Webb 1917). Through this commitment, live projects may even lead the pedagogic field in facilitating a collective questioning of the values and purpose of architecture in general, and not just architectural education.

Notes 1 See Harriss (2014), Section 1.4.2, for a more detailed discussion on the origins of this consolidated definition. 2 Despite the regional limitations of the established literature, live projects are an increasingly global activity, a fact evidenced by the case studies listed on the Live Projects Network website, which features an open invitation for anyone to list their live project activities, regardless of region. Available at: http://liveprojectsnet work.org. However, the disclaimer on perpetuating the regional bias is twofold. Firstly, this is a historical analysis and by implication it relies on established literature. Secondly, however, the affluence of the UK and United States is more closely aligned than other regions, enabling a stronger critique of what the professional criteria prioritize in terms of civic engagement. 3 The School of Architecture at Birmingham University, UK, was the first to conspicuously use the term ‘live projects’, in reference to a row of terraced houses that the students built themselves in a small town known as Water Orton (Brown 2009) 4 Saint identifies that from 1660 onwards there were two classes of architect: ‘talented amateurs with architectural proclivities’ and ‘the higher building craftsman’. After 1750, new industrial processes meant that ‘the practical craftsmen became the master builders and the amateurs professional architects’ (Saint 1983, 57). 5 In Latin, ‘radicalis’ means ‘of or having roots’—in essence, Gray and Kerr were recommitting architecture to its professional ethic. 6 Reporting in 1958 and again in 1961. 7 RIBA (1952). Report of the RIBA Visiting Board upon the School of Architecture, the College of Arts and Crafts, Birmingham. London: RIBA. Cited in Benedict-Brown, James (2009), Be Bold and Proceed: Live Projects at the Birmingham School of Architecture. 6th annual AHRA PG Conference, Welsh School of Architecture, 239

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Cardiff, 12.12.09. https://learningarchitecture.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/be-bold-and-proceed-live-pro jects-at-the-birmingham-school-of-architecture, last accessed 29/1/2018. 8 Architect and Building News (1951, 734–735); Architects’ Journal (1951, 701); Builder (1951, 830–831). 9 The Bureau of Design Research (BDR) at Sheffield University, the Architecture Research Unit at London Metropolitan’s CASS School of Architecture, the University of Portsmouth Project Office, Leeds Beckett Project Office. 10 A separate discussion might well examine whether project offices should aim to operate as ‘bonafide’ practices. Apart from the risk of undercutting practices, they should surely avoid sharing the same commercial and profit-driven aspirations if they are to be committed to real social impact. 11 ‘From a tutor’s point of view, the live project is not just about the product; it is more about process. Failure is expected and even welcomed but is sometimes difficult for the students to accept” (Chiles and Holder 2008, 197). 12 The Taliesin School website. Last accessed 05/10/2012 www.taliesin.edu/history.html. 13 Taliesin Student Shelters. Available from: http://taliesin.edu/shelters/shelters1.html Last accessed 15/04/2014. 14 Quoted in 7 US Code (USC) 304 - Investment of proceeds of sale of land or scrip: Morrill Act of 1862, the Morrill Act of 1890 and the Agricultural College Act of 1890. 15 Community design centres are formally organized under a national network: Association for Community Design. 16 See also www.communitydesign.org. Last accessed 01/01/2016. 17 There is no official register of schools that operate live projects in the UK. In the United States, however, NCARB has an online database: www.ncarb.org/Experience-Through-Internships/IDP2-ExperienceSettings/IDP2-Supplemental-Experience-Core/Community-Based-Design-Collaborative/Design-Collab orative-List.aspx. Last accessed: 14/04/2014. 18 The Live Project Network—http://liveprojectsnetwork.org. Last accessed: 14/04/2014. 19 Ibid. 20 This assertion is based upon a web survey of architecture school prospectuses in comparison to the number of live projects listed on the Live Project Network (www.liveproject.network.org). A few schools—for example, Heriot Watt, Plymouth and Sheffield—do offer live project ‘modules’ with credits attached. 21 PEDR available from: www.pedr.co.uk/Guide/EmployerEligibility. Last accessed: 14/04/2014. See also Harriss (2014) for a more detailed appraisal of how live projects meet the RIBA’s qualifying criteria. 22 A more comprehensive discussion on risk-taking in Live Projects is covered in Harriss (2015). 23 Practices have expressed concern over students graduating with a lack of relevant skills, and this has been widely reported by the trade press in both the UK and the United States for decades. The 2015 RIBA Skills Report identified that four out of five employers feel students still lack basic skills. Interestingly, students also share this view. 24 At present, completion (point of registration) rates in the UK are estimated by the RIBA to be around 8–9 years. 25 NCARB Intern Development Program (IDP). Available from: www.ncarb.org/Experience-Through Internships.aspx. Last accessed: 15th April 2014. 26 Reported by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) 2013. See www.acsa-arch.org/ resources/data-resources/how-long. Last accessed: 01/01/2016. 27 There are countless news articles from both the UK and the United States reporting that increasing numbers of students are successfully suing their university. 28 See the References section. 29 In 1993, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) passed a resolution ‘condemning’ but not banning unpaid internships. Needless to say, the practice continues. In the UK, however, the RIBA banned its members from offering them in 2012—although this was almost 10 years after the AIA first responded to the problem. There are approximately 33,000 registered architects practising in the UK (Architects Registration Board figures) and 28,000 of these are chartered (RIBA figures), meaning they are affected by the RIBA ban. Scope therefore remains for unpaid internships to persist in both locations.

References Anderson, J. and Priest, C. (2012). Developing a Live Projects Network and Flexible Methodology for Live Projects. Paper presented at the Live Projects Pedagogy International Symposium 2012, Oxford Brookes University, May. Architect and Building News (1951). Terrace Houses at Rednal for Birmingham Corporation; Designed by: Students (3rd Year) of Birmingham School of Architecture, 27 December, pp. 734–735.

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Architects’ Journal (1951). Terrace Houses at Rednal for Birmingham Corporation; Designed by: Students (3rd year) of Birmingham School of Architecture, 13 December, p. 701. Bell, B. (2004). Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service Through Architecture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press. Benedict-Brown, J. (2009). Be Bold and Proceed: Live Projects at the Birmingham School of Architecture. 6th annual AHRA PG Conference, Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff, December 12. Benedict-Brown, J. (2012). A Critique of Live Projects. PhD thesis, Queens University Belfast. Bottoms, E. (2010). An Introductory Lecture to Archives for London and the Twentieth Century Society, February. Available from: www.aaschool.ac.uk/AALIFE/LIBRARY/aahistory.php (Last accessed 11/04/2014). Boyer, E. (1996). The Scholarship of Engagement. Journal of Public Service and Outreach, 1(1), 11–20, 18. Builder (1951). Terrace Houses at Rednal for Birmingham Corporation; Designed by: Students (3rd year) of Birmingham School of Architecture, 14 December, pp. 830–831. Chakraborty, M. (2014). Designing Better Architecture Education: Global Realities and Local Reforms. Uttar Pradesh: COPAL. Chappell, D. and Willis, A. (2010). The Architect in Practice, 10th edn, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Charlesworth, E., Dodd, M. and Harrison, F. (eds) (2012). Designing With People. Melbourne: RMIT, p. 278. Chiles, P. and Holder, A. (2008). ‘The Live Project.’ The Oxford Conference, a Re-Evaluation of Education in Architecture Conference Proceedings, S. Roaf and A. Bairstow, eds. presented at The Oxford Conference 2008, 50 Years on—Resetting the Agenda for Architectural Education, University of Oxford, pp. 195–200. Chiles, P. and Till, J. (2011). Live Projects: An Inspirational Model, the Student Perspective. York: Centre for Education in the Built Environment. Cohn, J. and Jersey, B. (Dir.) (2012). Eames: The Architect and the Painter [DVD]. Crinson, M. and Lubbock, J. (1994). Architecture, Art or Profession: Three Hundred Years of Architectural Education in Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cuff, D. (1992). Architecture: The Story of Practice. Cambridge: MIT Press. Ewing, S.C. (2008). Coming and Going: Itinerant Education and Educational Capital. In: S. Roaf and A. Bairstow, eds, The Oxford Conference: A Re-Evaluation of Education in Architecture. Southampton: WIT Press, pp. 119–123. Fisher, T., et al. (eds) (2003). The Intern Trap. The AIA Journal of Architecture, 1–16. Fisher, Thomas R. (2000). In the Scheme of Things: Alternative Thinking on the Practice of Architecture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Forster, W.P., Coombs, S. and Thomas, R. (2008). The Architect and the Academy: Research Through Design at the Welsh School of Architecture. In: S. Roaf and A. Bairstow, eds, The Oxford Conference: A Re-Evaluation of Education in Architecture, 2 edn. Southampton: WIT Press, pp. 195–200, 363. Gibbons, E.N. (2007). Effects of Litigation in the Construction Industry: Stratification and Insolubility. Proceedings of the Construction and Building Research Conference, of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA, 6–7 September. Gjertson, W.G. (2011). House Divided: Challenges to Design/Build From Within. 2011 ACSA Fall Conference, Local Identities, Global Challenges, pp. 23–34. Goodman, A. (2014). A History of Community Design/Build in Four Moments. Globalizing Architecture/Flows and Disruptions: Proceedings of the 102nd ACSA Meeting, May. Haar, S. (2011). City as Campus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harriss, H. (2012). Architecture Live Projects, Oxford School of Architecture 2010–2012. Oxford: Oxford Brookes University. Harriss, H. (2014). Architecture Live Projects: Acquiring & Applying Missing Practice Ready Skills. PhD Thesis, Oxford Brookes University. Harriss, H. (2015). Architecture Live Projects—Managing Emergent Ambiguities in Risk Management and Ambiguity Tolerance, Charette. Journal of the Association of Architectural Educators (UK), 2(1). Harriss, H. and Widder, L. (2014). Architecture Live Projects: Pedagogy Into Practice. London: Routledge. Mark, L. (2013). Architecture Students Call for an End to Unpaid Internships. Architects Journal, Online 20 February. Available from www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/architecture-students-call-for-an-end-to-unpaidinternships/8642935.article (Last accessed, 30/01/2017). Morrow, R. and Brown, J.B. (2012). Live Projects as Critical Pedagogies. In: E. Charlesworth, M. Dodd and F. Harrison, eds, Designing With People. Melbourne: RMIT, p. 278. Musgrove, J. (1983). Architectural Education: The Growth of a Discipline. Architectural Education, (1), 105–112. NAAB. (2009). Conditions for Accreditation for Professional Degree Progress in Architecture. Washington, DC: National Architectural Accrediting Board.

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Oppenheimer, A. and Hursley, T. (2002). Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press. Parnell, S. (2008). Back Issue Coverage of the 1958 Conference Was Harsh and Influential. Architects’ Journal, 228(3), 47, July 17. Pearson, J. and Robbins, M. (2002). University Community Design Partnerships: Innovations in Practice. Princeton, NJ: National Endowment for the Arts, Princeton Architectural Press. Pevsner, N. (ed.) (1999). A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (5th ed.). London: Penguin Books. RIBA (1952). Report of the RIBA Visiting Board Upon the School of Architecture, the College of Arts and Crafts. London: RIBA. Cited in: Brown, James (2009) Be Bold and Proceed: Live Projects at the Birmingham School of Architecture. 6th Annual AHRA PG Conference, Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff, 12 December. RIBA (2011). RIBA Criteria for Validation. London: RIBA. Saint, A. (1983). The Image of the Architect. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Salama, A. (1995). New Trends in Architectural Education: Designing the Design Studio. Raleigh, NC: Tailored Text & Unlimited Potential. Sanoff, H. (2000). Community Participation Methods in Design and Planning. New York: John Wiley and Sons (p. xi). Cited in Toker, Zeynep (2007). Recent Trends in Community Design: The Eminence of Participation. Design Studies, 28 (2007), 309–323. Sara, R. (2004) Between the Studio and the Street: The Role of the Live Project in Architectural Education. PhD Thesis, University of Sheffield. Saylor, H. (1957). The AIA’s First Hundred Years. London: Octagon. Smith, J. (1958). The Schools. Architecture and Building, February, 42–69. Smith, J. (1961). Schools of Architecture—2—Birmingham. Architect and Building News, 22 February, pp. 257–263. Smith, J. (1962). The Schools in Transition. Architect and Building News, 14 February, pp. 239–244. Stevens, G. (1998). The Favored Circle: The Social Foundations of Architectural Distinction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tahir, T. (2010). ‘The Irresistible Rise of Academic Bureaucracy’, Guardian Newspaper, 30 March. Venturi, R., Brown, D.S. and Izenour, S. (1977). Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Chicago: MIT Press. Wates, N., and Knevitt, C. (1987). Community Architecture: How People Are Creating Their Own Environment. London: Penguin, p. 17. Cited in Toker, Zeynep (2007). Recent Trends in Community Design: The Eminence of Participation. Design Studies 28 (2007), 309–323. Watt, K. and Cottrell, D. (2006). Grounding the Curriculum: Learning From Live Projects in Architectural Education. International Journal of Learning, 13, 97–104. Webb, S. and Webb, B. (2017). New Statesman, 21 April 1917, article by Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb quoted with approval at paragraph 123 of a report by the UK Competition Commission, dated 8 November 1977, entitled Architects Services (in Chapter 7). Webster, H. (2008). Architectural Education After Schön: Cracks, Blurs, Boundaries and Beyond. Journal for Education in the Built Environment, 3(2), 63–74, 12. Wilmes, A.R. (2015). Altruism by Design: How to Effect Social Change as an Architect. London: Routledge.

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19 The Do-It-Your(Self) The Construction of Social Identity Through DIY Architecture and Urbanism Cathy Smith

Introduction This chapter traces a historical trajectory spanning six decades indicating a continued association of ‘DIY’ (‘do-it-yourself ’) with the construction of the individual and communal self. Through reference to the discourses on DIY from the post–World War II era through to the present—including those related to ‘DIY architecture’ and ‘DIY urbanism’—a shifting focus from individual to dispersed communal social identity will be identified, a shift that inflects not only the self-actualization of the do-it-yourselfer but also the identity of architect as an authorial figure and master planner. Since the popularization of the term and notion of DIY in the mainstream media of 1950s North America, it has been associated with a diverse if not divergent range of self-initiated design projects, from small domestic artefacts through to the construction of entire buildings and urban installations. In the words of historian Stephen Gelber, DIY is understood “quite literally as anything that people did for themselves” (Gelber 1999, 283). Although DIY conventionally refers to non-professional pursuits, it has nevertheless been associated with architects and architecture since the popular Time magazine featured a cover story on the DIY phenomenon in 1954. Whether self-building their own homes or temporary community projects, the DIY ethic enables professionally trained architects to diverge from their traditionally independent professional role in order to become a coexistent project initiator, hands-on builder and project occupant. Regardless of the typological and ideological diversity of projects associated with DIY—and concerns about its association with mass consumerism and therefore non-localized production—it is consistently associated with sociality in both the popular media and scholarly publications on design, architecture and urbanism. This chapter identifies and concentrates on DIY’s links to selfactualization in three related though distinguishable historical milieus. The first historical milieu is the early post-war period of 1950s North America, when the DIY phenomenon as we know it today first emerged, and was later exported to Britain (Sparke 2004, 120). The second historical milieu relates to the 1960s and 1970s countercultural movement in North America, when radicalized howto publications were targeted at an alternative “do-it-yourself-obsessed generation” (Kirk 2007, 5). The third and current DIY milieu of the third millennium relates to the discourses and practices of DIY urbanism and the allied ‘maker movement’; both of these forms of DIY remain closely associated with North America but have spread elsewhere through online global networks (Radjou, in Tsai 2014).

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When DIY first emerged as a significant phenomenon in North America, the connection between DIY and the production of social identity was initially posited as a source for its widespread appeal (Time 1954). The increasing cost of specialist labour and remnant skillsets from World War II were also offered as additional explanations for DIY’s popularity (Time 1954, 47; Haan 1954, 8); yet its association with self-actualization remains both persuasive and persistent. In his 1958 scholarly account of DIY, Albert Roland of the now-defunct United States Information Agency also linked DIY with individual well-being, homemaking and the social aspirations of nuclear family. More recently, ‘DIY urbanism’ has been connected to community coherence and the attendant reimaging of the city “as a better place to live” (Taylor 2011, 47). Due to DIY’s socio-economic complexity and widespread appeal to ideologically diverse communities, none of its discourses can provide irrefutable ‘proof ’ of DIY’s transformative efficacy. Instead, these discourses highlight the perceived intractability of DIY action from the construction of the individual and/or communal self. To explore this issue in more scholarly depth, reference will be made to these historical discourses on DIY as well as the philosophical notions of self-individuation invoked by contemporary poststructuralist philosophers and theorists. These theorists suggest that any notion of the self is neither given nor inherited but creatively ‘produced’: an argument implicit in the various discourses on DIY from the post-war period through to the present. A new term will be invoked to acknowledge the coexistence of these fluxive individuating processes with do-it-yourself pursuit: that of the ‘do-it-your(self )’, constructed in and of the matter of everyday life.

Locating the DIY Self in the Homemaking Manual of 1950s North America Many contemporary philosophers and poststructuralist thinkers argue that social identity is actively ‘produced’ through the coexistent intersection of inorganic and organic forces (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2014, 187, 426). For the seminal twentieth-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator, psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, individual subjectivity is also malleable, indeterminate and site-specific; it cannot be isolated from the temporal contexts or milieus in which it emerges. Thus ‘individuals’ are seen to be part of a social assemblage: “an individuating function within a collective” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2014, 308). Although the discourses on DIY differ in focus and content from the aforementioned philosophical writings and notions, they consistently argue a similar point about the social self: that is, that the self is actively produced by individuals who are simultaneously engaged in (do-it-yourself ) activities. In August 1954, the widely read Time weekly news magazine wrote of the “craze” and “cult” of the emerging DIY phenomenon and its “$6 billion-a-year” contribution to the North American economy (Time 1954, 46). Quoting anecdotal evidence from individual American homemakers, the article argued for the personal and social benefits of DIY, to the extent that it was described as “Good Medicine” for an anxious post-war citizenry (Time 1954, 47). In one cited example, retired Santa Fe architect Joseph Wertz and his wife became do-it-yourselfers through the design-building of their house renovations and other household artefacts, and in doing so, “found a new source of happy companionship in doing tasks together” (Time 1954, 47). The DIY manuals of this era consistently featured images of men and wives working, together thus conflating DIY with the construction of marital identity while “helping to confirm the importance of the close-knit, post-war nuclear family” (Sparke 2004, 120). DIY was also described as a remedy for office-based workplace stress and general “nervous breakdown” (Time 1954, 48) because “the therapeutic value of do-it-yourself is hard to overestimate. One Dallas doctor, a do-it-yourself addict himself, often advises patients to ‘go home and start doing things themselves’ ” (Time 1954, 47). In late 1951 through to January 1952, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) even established a public woodworking facility for

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apartment dwellers, enabling them to simultaneously cultivate their craft skillsets and satisfy “the individual’s need for self-expression” (The Museum of Modern Art 1951, 2). This early post–World War II period was associated with the proliferation of many how-to manuals, including those published by established American magazines, such as Home Beautiful, Reader’s Digest and Popular Mechanics. Time referred to both the quantum and diversity of the DIY manual genre as evidence of its popularity: “in New York City’s public library, there are 3,500 how-to books [. . .] There are dozens of books on How to Buy a House and how to make it better. There is even one on How to Make Sense” (1954, 46). While some manuals were linked to commercial publications featuring product advertising, most could not be described as retail catalogues in the conventional sense due to their cultural, social and educational rather than exclusively retail focus. For example, the Better Homes and Gardens Decorating Book—first published in 1956 and rereleased in 1961—claimed to inspire its readership to achieve “the homes of their dreams” (Better Homes and Gardens 1961 [1956], 148). Different decorating styles and furnishings were seen to create varying familial identities: for example, while the “Smiths look for comfort, informality in Smart Contemporary Design” (Better Homes and Gardens 1961 [1956], 148), the Browns “favour Contemporary Architecture” (Better Homes and Gardens 1961 [1956], 154). In a later publication of The Reader’s Digest Do-It-Yourself Manual, readers were urged to invest in their homes because “[a] house can have a soulless and dehumanised atmosphere, no matter how lavishly and expensively it is decorated, unless it expresses the personalities of the people who live in it” (Reader’s Digest 1978 [1969], 60). Through a combination of verbal and visual imagery, these DIY manuals point to a direct, affective reciprocity between the character of the self-created house and those individuals creating and subsequently inhabiting it. Publications such as the Better Homes and Gardens Decorating Book (1961 [1956]), The Handyman and Home Mechanic (1959) and The Reader’s Digest Do-it-Yourself Manual (Reader’s Digest 1978 [1969]) were distinguished from standardized bound publications by their updatable and customizable formats. If DIY action was seen to be intractable from self-expression and identification, then the rearrangeable publication format implied that the self is as easily updated as the interiors, gardens and homes contained with the manuals. The Handyman and Home Mechanic, for example, consisted of project guides on individual, fold-out loose-leaf inserts stored inside a hardcover folder. The Reader’s Digest Do-It-Yourself Manual and the Better Homes and Gardens Decorating Book also contained fold-out information and project pages within ring binders. According to contemporary historian Carolyn Goldstein, the updatable format reinforces “notions of individuality and self-sufficiency behind do-it-yourself ” (1998, 40). While it may be difficult to assess the uptake and success of this customization, it is nevertheless clear that that the DIY manual genre was “predicated on the notion and processes of ‘individuation’; it was intended as a basic guidebook that prompted individual interpretation and the customisation of projects, at least to some degree” (Smith 2014, 6). Time’s early and largely unsupported claims for the social and therapeutic value of DIY were further solidified by the first scholarly essay arguing that “do-it-yourself helps individual realisation” (Roland 1958, 163).1 In his 1958 essay on DIY, Albert Roland of the United States Information Agency also noted “the relation of do-it-yourself to society as a whole” (163). For him, financial motivation alone could not account for the widespread popularity of the DIY phenomenon, particularly when its project outputs often proved to be expensive or time-consuming compared to their professionally executed counterparts. Making reference to both the 1954 Time article and additional personal anecdotes, Roland argued that otherwise-unqualified American became self-­empowered by creating an object from scratch in order to “assert personal identity” (1958, 164). Interesting philosophical parallels were drawn between American writer Henry Thoreau’s self-built forest cabin Walden (and autobiography of the same name), and the converted home garage workshop of the post-war homemaker. Roland argued that both Walden and the home workshop facilitated a sense

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of escapism from the mundanity of working life experienced by the average American officeworker because its self-production enabled a temporary release from “a consumption-orientated culture” (Roland 1958, 162). Although much of the early post-war discourse on DIY focused on individual identification—of the ‘handyman’, the ‘housewife’, the ‘nuclear’ family and so forth—the social benefits of residential DIY were seen to extend beyond the immediate domestic sphere. Contemporary theorist and feminist Penny Sparke suggests that the drawn and photographic illustrations of men, women and children working together in DIY manuals supported a larger sense of communal purpose and identity, thus counteracting the isolation of family units within an increasingly individualist American society (Gelber 1997, 1999; Goldstein 1998; Sparke 2004, 120). Through their shared interests, post-war doit-yourselfers could also create their own “fraternity” (Smith 1950, insert page) and social support networks like those established through “Men’s Garden Clubs” (Roland 1958, 159). Roland saw the existence of social groups for likeminded do-it-yourselfers as evidence that DIY was ultimately “a social phenomenon focusing on relationships among people” (1958, 162). Even so, certain DIY pursuits were seen to be of limited personal benefit if “self-identification” and “social status” were achieved only through consumerist participation—that is, through the purchasing of DIY paraphernalia (Sparke 2004, 120). Roland spoke particularly acrimoniously about the DIY products and kits which “eliminate the need for long practice and the learning of complicated skills” (1958, 159). For him, proper self-actualization is the by-product of careful, cultivated DIY process that invokes the manner of the “oldtime craftsman” for whom the “the greatest source of satisfaction is in doing” (Roland 1958, 159).

A Continuously Renovated Social Self: A Radical Co-Option of the Retail Catalogue Whereas the DIY manuals of the 1950s and early 1960s were targeted at the mainstream consumer and a stereotypical nuclear family, the countercultural manuals of the 1960s and 1970s were targeted at a different readership bonded by shared values rather than bloodlines: the North American countercultural “extended family” (Ant Farm in Scott 2008, 70). To promote self-reliance and an independence from “mass-market consumerism” (Wild and Karwan 2016, 52), the countercultural manual disseminated practical how-to information and philosophical advice to its dispersed readership. For example, Steve Baer’s seminal Dome Cookbook (1967–68)2 and later, Lloyd Kahn’s Domebook (1970) and Domebook Two (1971) outlined patterns and techniques for dome-building: an initially popular building typology for North American communalists living in off-grid rural communes. One of the most notable countercultural DIY manuals of this period was the Whole Earth Catalogue or WEC, regularly published from Fall 1968 through to 19723 as “a catalog of goods that owed nothing to the suppliers and everything to the users” (Brand as quoted in Kirk 2007, 1). To serve its radical social and cultural agenda, WEC’s founder, journalist Stewart Brand, co-opted the format of two different publication precedents, each targeted at widespread audiences: the North American L.L. Bean commercial retail catalog (Brand in Kirk 2007, 1) and Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751–1776), a document aspiring to mass education and democracy (Brand 1994, 5). On the one hand, the WEC was primarily understood an “educational prototype” (Brand 1971, 438) rather than a business venture because it encouraged an environmentally conscious and localized approach to self-production at odds with globalized capitalism (Kirk 2007, 64; Scott 2008, 81). On the other hand, the WEC was seen to promote “new understandings of consumption” (Frank 1997, 27) as it contained advertising for service providers and retailers aligned with the countercultural ethos. The WEC readership was thus redirected toward the informed and environmentally aware consumerism of which the “CATALOG is made” (Brand 1971, 438). In the WEC, one can also see a nuanced shift in the sociality associated with DIY through the explication of a link between individual self-actualization and collective social transformation. The 246

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WEC encouraged autonomy from mainstream thinking and “large institutions” (Rheingold 1994, cover insert) but it equated this independence with a sense of communality: the “power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested” (Last Whole Earth Catalog 1971, 1). Through its favourable review in the 1969 Issue 5 of the influential British Architectural Digest or AD, WEC influenced many emerging practitioners who identified with the countercultural ethos and the experimental architectural forms synonymous with the movement. DIY manuals produced by countercultural architects included the Farallones Scrapbook: A Momento [sic] & Manual of Our Apprenticeship in Making Places and Changing Spaces in Schools at Home and Within Ourselves (Van der Ryn 1971); the Inflatocookbook (Ant Farm 1971, 1973) and its video companion, Inflatables Illustrated (Ant Farm 2003 [1971]), both guides for self-built air-inflated architecture; and Paolo Soleri and Scott Davis’s Paolo Soleri’s Earth Casting: For Sculpture, Models and Construction (1984), primarily based on Soleri’s silt-cast architecture of the 1950s through to the 1970s. The Inflatocookbook and Inflatables Illustrated were produced by the California-based art and architectural collective Ant Farm, who also ‘advertised’ in the WEC. Like its post-war forebears, the first 1971 edition of Ant Farm’s Inflatocookbook was customizable and consisted of mono-coloured fold-out pages inserted into a transparent plastic sleeve for easy update. Ant Farm also believed that making and then inhabiting an air-inflated structures freed do-it-yourselfers from the “rectangular limits” and habitual social behaviors associated with regular architectural spaces and forms (Ant Farm 2003). Powered by fans and generators, the unusual and continuously changing spaces of Ant Farm’s large inflatable structures were easily aligned with the social experimentation of the countercultural movement. Although the exact nature of these social transformations remains unclear,4 the key output of Ant Farm’s inflatable DIY architectures was not shelter per se but rather a reinvented and liberated sense of self. To quote directly from the Inflatocookbook, “He takes what he needs from different places, producing only one thing: HIMSELF, a system resource center for creating tools to solve any problem. Where he is going is where he is at” (Ant Farm 1970, 1973, ‘Good Taste Page: Pneumatics’).

The Maker Movement and DIY Urbanism in the Third Millennium The countercultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s saw the extension of the DIY ethic into the experimental, dispersed communes of the mostly rural North America. This geographical relocation of DIY was accompanied by a parallel shift in its social focus from the conservative suburban family to the liberated countercultural collective. The latter’s social transformations were claimed to be as varied and ambiguous the “New brain patternings” of Ant Farm’s self-made inflatables (Ant Farm 1970, ‘Rasberry Exercises’) and “the evolution of the human spirit” associated with Paolo Soleri’s silt-cast DIY architecture (Soleri and Davis 1984, 106).5 Interestingly, the DIY urbanism of the third millennium denotes a third nuanced shift of DIY into the urban realm of everyday citizens and neighborhoods: “reconstructing selves” through responsible acts of “DIY citizenship” (Ratto and Boler 2014, 3). The “social justice” (Deslandes 2013, 217), “urban politics” (Iveson 2013, 945), “grassroots activism” (Zeiger 2011) and “arts activism” (Zeiger 2012) associated with DIY urbanism differentiate it from mainstream, consumerist-focused DIY. The nomenclature of DIY urbanism is generally used to categorize typologically diverse, self-initiated and community-focused projects involving a “bottom-up” production methodology (Stiegler and Fayner 2013, 2013b). DIY urbanism can also be enacted by socially focused architects and designers operating outside of traditional ‘top-down’ procurement methodologies and state-sanctioned planning frameworks (Taylor 2011, 47; Zeiger 2012; Smith and Chapman 2015). One such example is the Fence Parasite (2014–2015), urban furniture installation that enables the temporary co-option of an underutilized footpath for spontaneous 247

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community-initiated events (Figure 19.1). Self-initiated by myself (a professionally trained architect and designer), and with design contributions and construction by Rowan Olsson (an architectural graduate and designer-maker), Fence Parasite can be constructed using basic tools and materials readily available from the local hardware suppliers: its components are cut out from a single sheet of formwork plywood and joined using standardized hardware and manual tools or, if desired, a CNC (computer numeric controlled) router. The project template is also available online for download. Fence Parasite’s foldable stools and table currently sit camouflaged over a front property fence and do not require local council approval. When open, the stools and table have been deployed as a temporary infrastructure for neighbourhood drinks, a local guerrilla market and children’s school holiday gatherings.6 While the Fence Parasite has enabled new and distinctive albeit ephemeral community incarnations, it is difficult to evaluate its broader sociocultural impacts. Indeed, many theorists of DIY

Figure 19.1 Fence Parasite (2014–2015), Newcastle, Australia, by Cathy Smith and Rowan Olsson. Photo by author.

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urbanism remain concerned about the potential co-option of its “amateurism, marginality and informality” (Deslandes 2013, 218) by mainstream commercial and institutional entities (Zieger 2012b; Deslandes 2013, 218; Finn 2014, 394; Kendzior 2014; Munzner and Shaw 2014). Through its visible improvement of neighbourhood amenity and identity, the low-budget and temporary projects of DIY urbanism may inadvertently accelerate the processes of gentrification, paradoxically making inner-city living increasingly financially unviable for the same residents who initiated the DIY urbanism. For example, planning academics Keiken Munzner and Kate Shaw are critical of the temporality of the Renew Newcastle (RN) not-for-profit scheme involving the temporary occupation of buildings in the post-industrial city of Newcastle, Australia (2014, 15). While Munzner and Shaw are concerned that RN could bolster real estate markets instead of long-term urban cultural programmes, others see its temporality as beneficial to the local artisanal community participating in the low-cost, experimental scheme (Smith 2015, 621–622; Westbury 2015, 146–147). In 2008, event curator, writer and media personality Marcus Westbury and his collaborators initiated RN as a response to Newcastle’s “urban decay”; the latter associated with the closure of the Newcastle’s BHP steelworks and the withdrawal of property investment capital in the decade prior (Messer 2010).7 Using an innovative rolling monthly participation agreement, RN manages the short-term occupation of abandoned shopfronts and office space by willing local artists and artisans until or if a commercial tenant is secured by the property owner (Figures 19.2 and 19.3). RN’s primary objective remains the social and cultural rejuvenation of “Newcastle’s empty CBD” rather than business incubation or property improvement per se (Renew Newcastle 2011). Although RN began as a form of “DIY urban renewal” (Westbury 2013), it is now acknowledged as a successful model for urban regeneration and is supported by state funding. Importantly, RN has been associated with the transformation of its host city’s identity: it is cited as a key reason for Newcastle’s transformation into a tourist destination “even cooler than Seattle” (Barrett 2012). Rather than seeing RN’s relation to property owners as an ideological compromise, the conjunction of grassroots and mainstream ­entities—artists and property owners, DIY and mainstream urbanism—appears to be the source of its sociocultural productivity and its identification (Smith 2015, 622). In a similar challenge to the ideological opposition of sociality and economics, production and consumption, French philosopher Bernard Stiegler coined the term the ‘contributory economy’ to describe a renewed and more socially nuanced model of consumerism for the third millennium (Stiegler and Fayner 2013, 2013b). The contributory economic model is intractable from social media and online knowledge-sharing platforms which proliferate and popularize DIY production methodologies, and the current “reign of amateur” or do-it-yourselfer and her identification more broadly (Stiegler and Fayner 2013, 2013b, 2). According to Stiegler, millennial consumers have transmuted from passive recipients of ready-made goods and services into active producers. Using the interconnectivity of the Internet, consumers can (in theory) directly contribute to the production of the artefacts they consume, whether interacting with a localized artisan-maker or accessing the ‘how-to’ information, technologies and labour necessary for self-production. Do-it-yourselfers specifically benefit from Stiegler’s participatory economic model because their vested interests in production systems are seen to be part of broader processes of self-actualization and identification (Stiegler 2010, 70). Unlike the industrial worker, the do-it-yourselfer is involved in all aspects of production, from project initiation through to construction and use. The DIY production ethic of Stiegler’s contributory economy is variously referred to as the “sharing economy” (Marshall 2014, 22), the “maker movement” and the “third industrial revolution” (Tsai 2014). Consistent with earlier arguments about DIY’s links to selfactualization, the founder and CEO of Maker Media, Dale Dougherty, argues that the “maker is just not taking the world as it is given . . . it gives me an identity” (Dougherty in Tsai 2014). The open-source, globally navigable spaces of the World Wide Web also invoke a dispersed and fluid sense of design authorship through the dissemination of design and fabrication information to 249

Photo by author.

Figure 19.2  Conditions and Speculations (2014), an exhibition of work by the students of the Master of Architecture, The Emporium, Renew Newcastle.

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Figure 19.3 The 33 Degrees South Soap Factory in the same space (2015). Photo by author.

different online communities. The once-authorial figure of the architect appears similarly absorbed within a globally connected community of producers: creating a new identity for the architect which is both “plural and compositional . . . woven into a relational fabric. The new architect is situated between top-down and bottom-up” (Ratti and Claudel 2015, 111). The argued transmutation of architectural identity is particularly evident within DIY procurement strategies in which economic and design agency is intentionally dispersed by the architect herself. A case in point is the architectural approach used in the Contessa Café fitout for the locally based Blackstar Coffee Roasters (Blackstar) in Brisbane, Australia.8 The owner and co-founder of Blackstar, Martin Richards, describes Blackstar as “a ‘social enterprise through coffee’ philosophy . . . It’s a philosophy that’s particularly close to the heart of my business partner Ali, who’s a former refugee from Afghanistan and now a permanent resident in Australia” (Richards in National Australia Bank, n.d.). Contessa’s CBD shopfront space has limited services and thus limited appeal to mainstream commercial tenants. Designer and architectural graduate Andrew D’Occhio developed a low-budget design strategy for the space involving the “DIY Labour” of the Blackstar employees themselves (D’Occhio 2014, 16). Contessa’s self-production required a personal commitment and ethic of care atypical of commercial fitouts, yet consistent with its identity. As such, its procurement strategy enabled the project to be both fiscally viable and consistent with Blackstar’s focus on social entrepreneurship and localized production. To minimize the costs of specialist contractors and servicing, simple ‘off-the-shelf ’ timber and plywood components were assembled into movable benches and seating (Figure 19.4). 251

Figure 19.4 The Contessa café fitout, Brisbane (2016). Photo by author.

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The physical mobility of the furniture also facilitates programmatic flexibility and the accommodation of a parallel social programme of “public events, education seminars and informal meetings” (D’Occhio 2014, 18). Contessa’s DIY approach has enabled an independent, community-focused business to solidify its social identity and economic security using limited skillsets within a semi-redundant space in the city, thus transferring the economic and attendant personal gain traditionally reserved for large corporate entities to a small, community-focused business with limited investment capital. For architectural theorist Jill Stoner, it is not only the interior of such DIY projects that is transformed but also the social identity of all project participants, including the architect, who becomes “a composite of blurred identities” (Stoner 2012, 76). This is because the transformation of buildings and self is seen to be coexistent, and as such “individuals, like interiors, may become deterritorilized” (Stoner 2012, 76). As observed by Roland in 1958, it may be impossible to evaluate the success of the ineffable social transformations associated with any form of DIY because “if you try to understand the motivations behind do-it-yourself, it begins to appear as if it were many things to many people” (1958, 155). This lack of ‘evidential proof ’ does not diminish the social value of DIY per se, but rather attests to the complexity of its social transformations—transformations in thoughts, identities and bodies which are not easily discussed, verified or represented.

Conclusion This brief survey of DIY discourses and manuals from the post-war period through to the present indicates an ongoing association of the phenomenon with the formation of the social self, regardless of ideological difference. There is no particular or singular type of self that emerges through DIY pursuit. However, the social transformations associated with DIY have progressively shifted in focus from the individual to communal self: beginning with DIY’s initially exclusively association with the stereotypical nuclear family unit, through to the dispersed, radical countercultural ‘extended family’, and now, the increasingly dissolved architectural subject. The ongoing association of DIY with sociality remains nebulous because of the minimal explication of how DIY might generate multiple or variable selves or of why DIY is intractable from social formation in the first instance. Although the DIY discourses and manuals themselves do not evidence the rationale or motivation for DIY pursuit per se, they nevertheless reinforce the idea of an important connection between environmental self-creation and individual self-actualization. Accordingly, it appears that the processes through which an environment is procured are equally if not more important than the physical built outcome itself, because it is the self which is being conterminously produced through the very act of DIY. If the DIY phenomenon is positioned as both a philosophical and design problem involving human individuation, it may be understood as a manifestation of the processes through which the self is continuously composed and recomposed, however cursory or superficial this self-actualization may be. Interestingly, the DIY self invoked throughout these discourses is persistently interlinked with the processes of consumerism, mainstream or otherwise. The latter connection is unsurprising given that the DIY phenomenon has always been both positively and negatively associated with American consumerism. While the construction of do-it-yourself identity may appear to be as inconstant as the potentially globalized flows of capital it is intractable from, its attendant approach of localized self-production can halt and thus redirect these flows toward the benefit of the producer-consumers themselves, and in doing so, reassert their particular identities. While both physical and online DIY manuals are intractable from the DIY production ethic invoked within them, the general accessibility of digital knowledge-sharing platforms has also prompted an increasingly nuanced incarnation of the DIY self in the third millennium. As such, the communally focused do-it-yourselfer is no longer posited as the peripheral and radical figure once 253

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synonymous with the counterculture but is instead central to Stiegler’s purported ‘reign of the amateur’ and larger urban transformations inflecting professionals and non-professionals alike. The ongoing ideological debates concerning the relation between DIY pursuit, mainstream consumerism and sociality reinforce the complexity of a phenomenon that consistently defies straightforward ideological and philosophical categorization. Perhaps the ongoing popularity of the DIY phenomenon could be attributed to its conceptual nebulosity and attendant alignment with fluid, open-ended understandings of the human subject. We might therefore think of DIY as a site of productive social indeterminacy: where subjects merge with objects, amateurs with professionals, sociality with ­economics—the individual with the communal.

Notes 1 According to historian Stephen Gelber, Roland was “the only academic analyst of do-it-yourself in the 1950s” (Gelber 1999, 292). 2 According to Lloyd Kahn, editor of Domebook One and Domebook Two, Dome Cookbook was the predecessor for the better-known WEC (Kahn 1998, 1–3). 3 Further issues were published sporadically until The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog (1994). 4 Refer to the broader discussion of Ant Farm’s Inflatocookbook and Inflatables Illustrated within my doctoral thesis (Smith 2012, Chapter 5). 5 Note that although architect Paolo Soleri and Scott Davis’s DIY manual Paolo Soleri’s Earth Casting: For Sculpture, Models and Construction was published in 1984, its content referred primarily to work produced in the 1950s through to the 1970s. 6 For more information on the Fence Parasite, see http://diyarchitecture.wordpress.com/. The project was selffabricated by Rowan Olsson. 7 Including festival manager Marni Jackson and architect Craig Allchin. 8 This is the second of Blackstar’s retail premises following the success of its first roaster and café in the nearby vibrant community of West End, Brisbane.

References Ant Farm (1970) Inflatocookbook, San Francisco, CA: Ant Farm, November 10–December 10. ——— (1971) ‘Inflatocookbook,’ in The Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools. San Francisco, CA: Harmondsworth: Portola Institute, Penguin Books, 107. ——— (1973) Inflatocookbook, Second Edition. San Francisco, CA: Ant Corps, July. ——— (2003 [1973]) ‘Inflatables Illustrated,’ in Ant Farm Video, Original Produced by Allan Rucker and Curtis Schreier, ed. Chip Lord. Colour and B&W NTSC DVD, 23 min, United States: Ant Farm. Baer, S. (1967–1968) Dome Cookbook. Coralles, NM: Lama Foundation. Barrett, A. (2012) ‘Five Global Hipster Meccas Even Cooler than Seattle,’ The Seattle Globalist, Travel section, April 13, www.seattleglobalist.com/2012/04/13/five-global-hipster-cities-cooler-than-seattle/2296 (accessed 19/04/2014). Better Homes and Gardens (1961 [1956]) Better Homes and Gardens Decorating Book. Des Moines, IA: Meredith. Brand, S. (1971) ‘Money,’ in The Last Whole Catalog, ed. Howard Rheingold. San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco/Point Foundation, 438. ——— (1994) ‘Civilization and Its Contents,’ in The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, ed. Howard Reinngold. San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 5. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari ([1980] 2014) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. London: Bloomsbury. Deslandes, A. (2013) ‘Exemplary Amateurism: Thoughts on DIY Urbanism,’ Cultural Studies Review, Vol. 19, No. 3, March: 216–227. D’Occhio, A. (2014). ‘Project Contessa: Design Strategies.’ Unpublished PDF document. Finn, D. (2014) ‘DIY Urbanism: Implications for Cities,’ Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, Vol. 7, No. 4: 381–398, DOI:10.1080/17549175.2014.891149. Frank, T. (1997) The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Gelber, S.M. (1997) ‘Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity,’ American Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 1, March: 66–112. ——— (1999) Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America. New York: Columbia University Press. Goldstein, C. (1998) Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in 20th-Century America. Washington, DC: National Building Museum, Washington, DC, and Princeton Architectural Press. Haan, E.R. (1954) Popular Mechanics Press Book Special Issue: How to Remodel Your Home. Chicago: Popular Mechanics Press. The Handyman and Home Mechanic: A Comprehensive Guide to Household Repairs, Maintenance, Decoration and Constructional Work of All Kinds in Three Volumes. (1959) London: Odhams Press. Iveson, K. (2013) ‘Cities Within the City: Do-It-Yourself Urbanism and the Right to the City,’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 37, 3 May: 941–956, DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12053. Kahn, L., ed. (1970) Domebook. Bolinas, CA: Shelter. Kahn, L., ed. (1971) Domebook Two. Bolinas, CA: Shelter. Kahn, L. (1998) ‘Lloyd Kahn on 20 Years of Whole Earth Catalog,’ in Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas, Winter: 1–3, http://wholeearth.com/issue/1340/article/410/lloyd.kahn.on.20.years.of.whole.earth. catalog (accessed 17/09/2009) Kendzior, S. (2014) ‘The Peril of Hipster Economics’, Aljazeera, Opinion, 28 May, www.aljazeera.com/ indepth/opinion/2014/05/peril-hipster-economics-2014527105521158885.html (accessed 21/07/2015). Kirk, A. (2007) Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. The Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools. (1971) San Francisco, CA/Middlesex: Portola Institute/Penguin Books. Marshall, K. (2014) ‘Good Job,’ The Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Good Weekend’ supplement, July 5, 22. Messer, B. (2010) ‘Renewing Newcastle (From the Creative Industries Innovation Centre),’ Renew Newcastle: City Revitalisation Through Creative Use of Empty Space, http://renewnewcastle.org/media/renewing-new castle-from-the-creative-industries-innovation-centre/ (accessed 10.01.2018). Munzner, K., and K. Shaw (2014) ‘Renew Who? Benefits and Beneficiaries of Renew Newcastle,’ Urban Policy and Research, 3 December: 1–20, DOI: 10.1080/08111146.2014.967391. The Museum of Modern Art (1950) ‘90751–90749’, Untitled media release, www.moma.org/docs/press_ archives/1541/releases/MOMA_1951_0059_1951-09-07_90751-49.pdf?2010 (accessed 06/09/2013). National Australia Bank (NAB) (n.d.) NAB Microenterprise Loans Case Study: Blackstar Coffee, www.nab.com.au/ vgnmedia/downld/Martin_Richards.pdf (accessed 21/12/2015). Parvin, A. (2013) ‘Alastair Parvin: Architecture for the People by the People,’ TED Talks, 8.35 minutes mp4, February, www.ted.com/talks/alastair_parvin_architecture_for_the_people_by_the_people.html (accessed 07/01/2013). Ratti, C. and Claudel, M. (2015) Open Source Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson. Ratto, M. and M. Boler (2014) ‘Introduction,’ in DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1–22. Reader’s Digest (1978 [1969]) The Reader’s Digest Do-It-Yourself Manual, Second Edition. Sydney: Reader’s Digest Services Sydney. Renew Newcastle (2011) ‘About,’ Renew Newcastle: City Revitalisation Through Creative Use of Empty Space, http://renewnewcastle.org/about/ (accessed 03/05/2015). Rheingold, H., ed. (1994) The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog. San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco. Roland, A. (1958) ‘Do-It-Yourself: A Walden for the Millions?’ American Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 2, Part 1, Summer: 154–164. Scott, F.D. (2008) Living Archive 7: Ant Farm Allegorical Time Warp: The Media Fallout of July 21, 1969. Barcelona: Actar. Smith, A. (1950) New Australian Home Carpentry Illustrated, ed. W.A. Shum. Sydney: The Sunday Sun/A Colorgravure Publication. Smith, C. (2012) Productive Matters: The DIY Architecture Manuals of Ant Farm and Paolo Soleri, PhD Thesis, Sydney: Department of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney. ——— (2015) ‘The Artisan, The State and the Binaries of DIY Urbanism,’ in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 32, Architecture, Institutions, Change, ed. Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan. Sydney: SAHANZ, July 7–10, 616–626. Smith, C.D. (2014) ‘Handymen, Hippies and Healing: Social Transformation Through the DIY Movement (1940s to 1970s) in North America,’ Architectural Histories, Vol. 2, No. 1: 2, 1–10, DOI:http://dx.doi. org/10.5334/ah.bd.

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Smith, C. and M. Chapman (2015) ‘Contributory Economies, Design Activism and the DIY Urbanism of Renew Newcastle,’ IDEA Journal: Design Activism: Developing Models, Modes and Methodologies of Practice: 66–79. Soleri, P. and S.M. Davis (1984) Paolo Soleri’s Earth Casting: For Sculpture, Models and Construction. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books/Gibbs M. Smith. Sparke, P. (2004) An Introduction to Design and Culture: 1900 to the Present. London: Routledge. Starr, J. Jr. (1941) Fifty Things to Make for the Home. New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book. Stiegler, B. (2010 [2009]) For a New Critique of Political Economy, trans. D. Ross. Cambridge: Polity. Stiegler, B. and E. Fayner (2013a) Bernard Stiegler: “We Are Entering an Era of Contributory Work,” trans. S. Kinsley, SamKinsley, www.samkinsley.com/2013/02/06/bernard-stiegler-we-are-entering-an-era-of-contributorywork/ (accessed 16/12/2013). ——— (2013b) ‘Nous entrons dans l’ère du travail contributif ’. Rue89, Le Nouvel Observateur, February 2, www.rue89.com/2013/02/02/bernard-stiegler-nous-entrons-dans-lere-du-travail-contributif-238900 (accessed 13/11/2014). Stoner, J. (2012) Toward a Minor Architecture. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Taylor, J. (2011) ‘DIY Urbanism—Sydney Reconsidered,’ in The Right to the City, exhibition catalogue, ed. Lee Stickells and Zanny Begg. Sydney: Tin Sheds Gallery, University of Sydney, 46–51. Time (1954) ‘Do-It-Yourself: The New Billion-Dollar Hobby,’ in Time, Pacific edition, Business: Modern Living, August 2, 46–51. Tsai, Mu-Ming, dir. (2014) Maker: A Documentary on the Maker Movement and Its Impact on Society, Culture and Economy in the U.S, written by Pei-Yun Lai and Mu-Ming Tsai, colour DVD, 66 min (Taiwan/USA). Van der Ryn, S. (1969) ‘Whole Earth Catalog,’ Architectural Design, Cosmorama section, Issue 5, May: 239. ——— (1971) Farallones Scrapbook: A Momento [sic] & Manual of Our Apprenticeship in Making Places and Changing Spaces in Schools At Home and Within Ourselves. Point Reyes: Farallones Designs. Westbury, M. (2013) ‘About Marcus,’ Marcus Westbury, October 26, www.marcuswestbury.net/about/ (accessed 16/12/2013). Westbury, M. (2015) Creating Cities, Melbourne: Niche Press. Wild, L. and D. Karwan (2016) ‘Agency and Urgency: The Medium and Its Message,’ in Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, ed. Andrew Blauvelt, Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 44–57. Zeiger, M. (2011) ‘The Interventionists Toolkit, Part 1: Places,’ Places, March 1, https://placesjournal.org/arti cle/the-interventionists-toolkit/ (accessed 03/02/2015). ——— (2012a) ‘The Interventionists Toolkit, Part 2: Posters, Pamphlets, Guides,’ Places, March, https://places journal.org/article/the-interventionists-toolkit-project-map-occupy/ (accessed 03/02/2015). ——— (2012b) ‘The Interventionists Toolkit, Part 4: Project, Map, Occupy,’ Places, March, https://placesjour nal.org/article/the-interventionists-toolkit-posters-pamphlets-and-guides/ (accessed 03/02/2015).

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20 Building the Unseen A Shift to a Socially Engaged Architecture Education R. Todd Ferry

Surely among the most commonly quoted phrases about architecture, Goethe’s axiom that architecture is “frozen music” beautifully communicates architecture’s ability to profoundly move us and pays deference to the music’s composer, the architect. It supports an idea that architecture is an art that can be appreciated by fully immersing oneself in the experience it offers, but is to be primarily “listened to” passively as an audience member. While it is a striking metaphor, architects risk perpetuating a potentially deleterious perspective of their profession if it is not questioned. What if, perhaps more accurately, we thought of architecture as a musical instrument, not as the music itself? What if we considered the architect the instrument maker who creates everything required to make music, also recognizing that the instrument is a work of art to be appreciated for its firmness, commodity, and ability to delight?1 If we indulge this other perspective for a moment, then we might recognize that music comes from the activation of the instrument (space) by people and nature. The Pantheon is “played” by light pouring through the great oculus, marking time through its slow path along the building’s curved walls, perhaps illuminating rain joining its descent to the marble floor, reflecting the footsteps and whispers of visitors. If architecture is the instrument, then great architecture is an instrument that fully allows life and the poetic to flourish by all who use it. A small, well-loved house, thoughtfully designed and adapted by its owners over time, might be less grand than the Pantheon but can still allow for music to thrive in its walls. And if architecture is an instrument, then a thoughtful collaboration with the music makers, both human and ecological, will likely promote a better result. While lacking the punch and poetic brevity of Goethe, this metaphor is merely offered as a demonstration of how deeply embedded beliefs within a traditional conception of architecture might be challenged to recognize that an emphasis on the user and the unseen impacts of design can potentially shift thinking and practice toward a more meaningful approach to twenty-firstcentury design—a shift in approach to making architecture that is inclusive, participatory, and socially engaged. Within this framework, this chapter will discuss this shift in approach that guides the projects and pedagogy of the Center for Public Interest Design (CPID) at the Portland State University School of Architecture. This approach is led by the recognition that it is the unseen impacts, the nonphysical dimension, that ensure the long-term success and impact of public interest design work, and the area of architectural education that we are trying to develop through research and strategic fieldwork.

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Public Interest and the Architect “The profession will have grasped its full responsibility only when every member of it recognizes in the public interest [lies] his first and greatest obligation.” So ends a short but passionate essay from the architect Milton B. Medary Jr. in a 1922 article titled “Public Interest and the Architect,” published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Medary 1922). While his minor manifesto certainly contains conceits of its time, such as a male-centric focus, Medary’s positions will likely be jarringly familiar to public interest designers today. Written just a few years before his tenure as president of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the essay discusses prioritizing community need over client desire, architecture’s complicity in poor housing conditions arising from developers’ pursuit of profits, concern about architecture’s environmental consequences, and the need for the public’s engagement with architecture and the profession in forming their society. Medary’s primary assertion is that the architecture profession has a duty not only to serve the public interest but also to educate the public on the role design can play in their society. The fact that Medary’s challenge to the profession was written nearly a century ago but closely foreshadows the calls of today’s public interest designers speaks to the formidable task of shifting the approach of traditional practice. While Medary was certainly forward-thinking, he was writing on the threshold of modernism taking hold around the world while the movement was still rooted in social aims before “aesthetic interests and judgment, ever more sophisticated and theory-based, [became] predominant” (Glazer 2007). Public interest design has its origins more deeply embedded in the grassroots social movements of the 1960s, in which an emphasis on local action and community engagement replaced the prevalent goal found in modernism of designing one-size-fits-all solutions for the faceless masses. Despite rhetorical/semantic similarities between Medary’s call and public interest design today, there were actual substantive differences to today’s version that hinge on the meaning of public interest design and the meaning of social engagement. The question of what constitutes public interest design is an important and difficult one. Our students at the CPID often have spirited debates about this, discussing where the line is between something that is or is not a public interest design project. Sometimes responses can feel like the famous judgment by United States Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart in a 1964 ruling on pornography in which he explains that he could probably “never succeed in intelligibly” defining pornography “but I know it when I see it” (Gewirtz 1996, p. 1023). As revealing perhaps as what public interest design is, is what it is perceived to be. In the comprehensive study, Wisdom from the Field: A Guide to Public Interest Design Practices in Architecture, the authors found that 80 percent of architects surveyed (nearly 400) believed that they practiced public interest design when public interest design was characterized as “putting their creative abilities to use to improve quality of life in communities” (Feldman et al. 2013, p. 3). For its advocates, this could be looked at as either a very positive sign or a cause for worry. The optimist would see this percentage as recognition by the profession of the importance of public interest design practices and a desire to contribute. The concerned position would hold that this high number must suggest a misunderstanding about public interest design and its principles that risk being diluted by inconsistent application of the term. A definition of public interest design will almost certainly include concepts of “serving the underserved,” designing “for the broader public good,” and a belief that “design is not just a privilege—it is a public right” (Feldman et al. 2013, p. 4). As evidenced in emerging research and an increasing number of case studies, the key component to current public interest design practices, which is notably absent from Medary’s conception of architecture and those of most firms still today (even some of the aforementioned 80 percent), is a fundamental emphasis on community engagement and an inclusive and participatory design process. What Medary was largely encouraging is what persists in much of architectural practice today without ill intent, a paternalistic approach of a well-educated

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profession defining what they do and bestowing it upon the public, whom they hope to convince of their value. During a recent talk at the CPID, David Perkes of the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio suggested a similar shift toward a participatory process that, while seemingly subtle, represents a profound reframing of architectural practice. While sharing his work, he reflected upon the curious fact that architects often lament among themselves that the general public does not recognize the profession’s worth. Perkes’s response to the perennial question among architects, how do we convince the public of our value?, is that we are asking the wrong question. He suggests that the question should be, how do we make ourselves most valuable to the public? And the easiest and most overlooked way to find this answer might be to simply ask the public. This is a radical reframing of the question because it actually asks the public to participate in defining what they need from architects and, therefore, what the profession might do on a fundamental level.2 The issue that David raised is at the heart of The Center for Public Interest Design’s (CPID) mission to expand the role of architecture to address the needs of underserved communities through a participatory process that results in work that is socially conscious, environmentally sustainable, and economically accessible to all. The CPID is a university-based research and education center, as well as a professional community design center committed to executing meaningful work while training the next generation of public interest design leaders. One avenue for this training is the development of our Graduate Certificate in Public Interest Design, which has grown out of the lessons learned (and that continue to be learned) in the field, and draws on research into the work of other practices and educational efforts. The creation of the certificate responds to growing student and professional desire for formal training in public interest design practices through applied coursework and fieldwork. Recent studies reveal a profession increasingly recognizing the ability for architecture to make positive social impact and the desire of professionals (particularly young ones) to apply their skills toward the public good. Reports by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) have shown that public interest practices are the fastest growing segment of the field and that 70 percent of a statistically significant number of firms nationwide ranked interest in public interest design as a top priority, ahead of sustainability alone (AIA 2013). This growing public interest design movement stems from the recognition of the ability of designers to positively impact communities and a desire to be more socially engaged. The CPID is among the first centers of its kind, but many more university-based, nonprofit, and for-profit firms with similar goals are emerging throughout the country and, indeed, around the world, building on decades-long efforts of community design centers and design-build initiatives.3 As we (both as an individual research, education, and design center and as part of a network of practitioners) develop programs, projects, and curricula to tackle important social issues and educate the next generation of designers about public interest design practices, we are forced to continually examine central questions around the issue of methods, levels, and meaning of social engagement in architecture. While the public interest design movement has arguably moved from the fringe to a place at the table within architecture, its challenge to the profession is long-standing. The CPID was created in response to these challenges and educates students through immersion in real-world initiatives. Our deeply held conviction that a participatory process leads to a more successful product is at the heart of our pedagogy and has developed from hard-earned lessons from the field (Ferry & Palleroni, 2016). The following case study of a recent CPID project illustrates our approach, applied philosophy, and various means of working with students.

Partners On Dwelling (POD) Initiative In the fall of 2015 the city of Portland declared a state of emergency on housing due to the high number of houseless individuals living on the streets.4 A point-in-time report earlier that year

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released by the city counted 1,887 unsheltered and 3,801 individuals meeting HUD’s definition of homelessness on a given night (Kristina Smock Consulting 2015). When including people “doubled up” by necessity in some form of housing, that number reached 16,344. With overburdened shelters and a lack of affordable housing, a range of initiatives have been proposed and/or attempted to address the need for adequate shelter for houseless Portlanders. These proposals have ranged from building or transforming giant warehouses and partitioning them to shelter hundreds or thousands to small-scale interventions. The crisis also led to the formation of the Village Coalition, a group made up of advocates, activists, and houseless individuals committed to combatting homelessness from many sides of the issue. Several CPID Faculty and Student Fellows began working with the Village Coalition in the spring of 2016. It quickly became clear that: (1) informal “villages” being established by the houseless themselves were finding incredible success in creating vibrant, safe, supportive, and self-governing communities and could serve as a replicable model. (2) Design was an unmet need that had a significant role to play to aid these efforts and those of the Village Coalition. (3) Initiatives to change perceptions about homelessness would be essential for the success of any effort that integrated houseless individuals into Portland’s central city fabric. Through regular meetings and discussions with other members of the Village Coalition, the CPID joined forces with others to activate Portland’s design community to address homelessness. Operating under the name Partners On Dwelling (POD) Initiative, the group’s first step in this work was to ask designers to design and potentially build small, beautiful, and safe dwellings to be collectively displayed in downtown Portland before being placed as a village and occupied by those who need them. This initiative was not intended to be the solution to homelessness in Portland, but one entry point to begin addressing the pressing issue and a potential model for supporting community-making. On October 1, 2016, the CPID and partners hosted an open design charrette attended by over 100 designers, social workers, activists, students, and houseless individuals. Speakers providing context and background included: Mayor Charlie Hales (City of Portland), Vahid Brown (Village Coalition), Todd Ferry (CPID), Mark Lakeman (City Repair + Communitecture), Sergio Palleroni (CPID), and residents of Hazelnut Grove—a village of houseless Portlanders. Following these introductory remarks and group discussions, the designers worked with the diverse group at their tables to come up with preliminary ideas for “pods,” categorized in this context as small structures with a footprint of between 6' × 8' and 8' × 12', and as tall as 10'8".5 Parameters for the pods were established in partnership with Portland’s Bureau of Development Services, allowing the pods to fall outside of other categories of building while meeting agreed-upon standards, such as insulation values, structural requirements, and portability. Using Hazelnut Grove as a case study (which attendees were invited to visit before the charrette), these pods were designed to be part of a model village in their aggregation that would share infrastructure, such as bathrooms, a communal kitchen, and gathering spaces. Different groups generated ideas about water collection, adaptability, creative material reuse, and modularity, among many other innovations. The inspiring day ended with teams ready to develop their nascent ideas into full designs. Teams continued to participate in the initiative and submitted 24" × 48" project boards of their designs in mid-November that illustrated the design drivers of their pod proposal and included drawings that communicate how to construct the pod. These boards were displayed at City Hall at a press conference announcing the project, and continue to be displayed at events around Portland for both the design community and the larger public. Fourteen teams manifested their designs into built pods with financial support from the Portland Mayor’s Office and The Larson Legacy.6 These teams worked alongside one another on the construction of their pods in a large warehouse along the Willamette River. The pods were then moved by forklift onto a flatbed truck and transported to downtown Portland, where they were exhibited 260

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outside of the Pacific Northwest College of Art in the North Park Blocks between December 9 and December 27, 2016, which was crucial for gathering attention and support for the initiative. The city has worked quickly to find a site for these pods to form a village, which they are proposing will be established in the North Portland neighborhood of Kenton. At the time of this writing, the proposal is that the village of these 14 pods and shared facilities will consist of a community of all women and be operated through a collaboration between Catholic Charities and Portland’s Joint Office of Homeless Services. The city is working with these groups, as well as the Village Coalition, The CPID and POD Initiative, and the Kenton Neighborhood Association (among others) to ensure that this pilot project is successful and can serve as a model for future initiatives of this kind throughout Portland (see Figure 20.1). In addition to organizing the POD Initiative with students and partners in the Village Coalition, the CPID was involved in the design and construction of three pods (see Figure 20.2). The Trot Pod was designed by 15 of the author’s PSU Architecture students in their penultimate undergraduate studio (see Figures 20.3 and 20.4). The studio aimed to study Portland through the lens of homelessness. Students researched and mapped topics related to homelessness, such as urban amenities and

Figure 20.1 POD Initiative diagram. Created by CPID and Maria Benavente.

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Figure 20.2 Three CPID Pods: (L) Trot Pod, (M) Cocoon Pod, (R) NW Pod.

Photo by author.

Figure 20.3 Students at work, designing and building the Trot Pod.

Photo by author.

Figure 20.4 Interior of the Trot Pod (L) and the NW Pod (R).

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resources, village precedents, city laws and codes, and root causes of homelessness. Every student then created an individual design for a pod and village before working together on a collective design proposal. As part of the studio process, students regularly interacted with a range of stakeholders, from the mayor of Portland to residents of Hazelnut Grove, who gave feedback on their designs. Under the guidance of Visiting CPID Faculty Fellow Dr. Pedro Pacheco, the Cocoon Pod team explored a range of issues, including various stages of shelter, the ability to expand, and material reuse. The team was led by two CPID student fellows in the Graduate Certificate in Public Interest Design program, Olivia Snell and Santiago Mendez, and was created with a range of volunteers, including other CPID student fellows, local professionals, and houseless individuals interested in contributing to the work. The Cocoon Pod is made almost exclusively from found or reclaimed materials. The most striking feature of the pod is a full window wall made of discarded glass cabinet doors attached to a structural tree-like frame, which also holds a donated quilt for additional insulation, privacy, and customization. The CPID partnered with Neighborhood Works Realty on the creation of a third pod—The NW Pod—that explored issues of flexibility, modularity, material efficiency, and customization options. By necessity, it was also designed to be a prototype that could be built quickly, as the team assembled it just one week before the pod needed to be completed in order to fill in for a team that at the last minute was not able to build a pod as planned. The NW Pod employs the smallest allowable footprint for a pod at 6' × 8', with an independent 4' × 6' deck. With such a small unit, the interior was designed to maximize flexibility and usage with seats that double as storage and bed support, and a lightweight system of hinged torsion boxes that allow both the bed and table/privacy screen to fold into the wall. The Neighborhood Works Realty team led the construction of the CPID-designed pod with help from faculty and students from the CPID. The way in which these three pods were created illustrates the range of approaches the CPID used to involve students, community members, volunteers, and professional collaborators. Perhaps most encouraging to us was the number of participating teams creating other pods that were led by young design professionals who have come through CPID’s programs and are now at some of the most renowned architecture firms in the region. It is incredibly encouraging to see former students apply lessons learned in the classroom and in our fieldwork programs as practitioners and activists. This POD Initiative represents architecture as activism in action, with stakeholders at all levels included. The architecture community recognized that it had a role to play in addressing an urgent need in our built environment, and agreed to invest time and resources in this project before many pieces were in place. At the time of the charrette, there was no project funding, no place to build the pods, and no designated site for the pods to be occupied once they were finished. However, the designers recognized the urgency and saw the opportunity to provide a new vision to the city for addressing homelessness and could leverage the process, the designs for pods and villages, and the built structures to force the city to respond through action and collaboration, reversing the standard practice of an architect waiting to receive a request from a client before work begins. The speed of the process responded to the urgency of the situation, with just ten weeks between the design charrette and the completion of the built structures. The physical structures will provide safe and dignified shelter for those who need them most, but the unseen results—a coalition of architects now invested in addressing homelessness, over 30 students educated in alternative approaches to architectural practice, increased capacity among a range of stakeholders, a city more receptive to new approaches for transitional housing, and new friendships and partnerships formed—could very well have the most lasting impact. This initiative could be discussed as several distinct but related projects: charrette planning, individual pod designs, village designs, design-build pedagogy, and so forth; and this is useful when involving students and discussing scopes of work with collaborators. But the organization and process of this initiative are what has been most exciting to our partners and colleagues. The initiative arose 265

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from an urgent community need and the requests of those combatting homelessness, was informed by the work of groups of houseless individuals forming villages, and was a participatory process that included stakeholders in the project conception, pod design, pod construction, and village design (see Figure 20.1). Most notably, individuals from the homeless community were recognized as the experts to inform and support the work of the professionals (architects). When approached with care, public interest design initiatives such as the POD Initiative amplify the community voice and are part of a larger framework to create a true exchange between all involved, rather than being merely a means of delivery or reception of services.7

Process Frames Product The question of an emphasis on prioritizing process or product is a key issue for many practitioners. At the CPID we believe that process frames product. One is not more important than the other— they are inextricable. You cannot have the process without a goal and the product is more than what is seen—it is the instrument that will allow for the music. One way to describe the thinking behind this approach is to consider the following. A building (or landscape, public space, etc.) is one of the largest investments an individual or community makes, and a participatory process aims at a better design result that leverages the design process to build capacity and empowerment among the community. If the sole focus is on the final product (building) in a traditional sense, then when a project falls through due to politics, a lack of funding, or other common challenges, then the community/ client may be worse off for the time and possible financial investment, not to mention unfulfilled hopes. On the other hand, if the process is treated as an equally valuable part of the design deliverables as the finished building, then value was already gained even if a project is not realized, perhaps through built knowledge, a shared community vision, active working groups, or political will. In short, the community should be stronger because of the process. Ultimately, an architect is uniquely suited to create great architecture, but the tools and the processes of architecture also have immense value. We recognize this in other professions. A doctor who takes extra time to explain an ailment in detail by giving a patient extra attention to provide context to understand a condition has created a more mindful, informed, and healthy patient than a doctor who simply diagnoses a problem and hastily hands over a prescription. This is not to mention the peace of mind for the patient. Architecture is similar—the general public may not fully understand what architects actually do but they are usually eager to learn and benefit from participation in the process. Some professions have caught on to this and have embraced design thinking in their own fields. Design thinking for architects is simply thinking, no modifier required. Are we really willing to withhold a substantial part of the value we have to offer (design thinking and the design process) to avoid potential pushback or for the big reveal when a building is completed, along with a few primary images in a magazine or website? Students at the CPID are learning through applied fieldwork that a well-designed community engagement process can make for a better product, a stronger community, and a more personally fulfilling design experience.

Conclusion In Medary’s 1922 article “Public Interest and the Architect” he emphasizes the architecture profession’s recognition of the obligation to benefit the public with their professional knowledge, as evidenced in the AIA’s constitution with the inclusion of an objective “to make the profession of ever-increasing service to society.” Public interest design practitioners are attempting to do just that. If there is a more specific objective today, it could perhaps best be summed up by the suggested mission statement for public interest design from Wisdom from the Field, that “every person should be able to live in a socially, economically, and environmentally healthy community” (Feldman et al. 2013, 266

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p. 3).8 As we shift thinking toward the reframing of the question, how do we convince the public of our value? to how do we make ourselves most valuable to the public?, we will need to rely on the benefits of a participatory design process to achieve these goals. At the Center for Public Interest Design, we are endeavoring to teach the importance of participatory processes through coursework and fieldwork aimed at addressing the largely unseen impacts of architecture in addition to the built work. Our belief that process frames product is the result of extensive experience in the field, which is a cornerstone of the CPID’s education. In a project like the POD Initiative, which explored the design of individual pods, villages, systems, and even the structure of the initiative itself with students, a thoughtful and inclusive process in all aspects can improve design results and leave the community stronger in countless less visible ways. Our mission in our public interest design education is to teach students to operate in this unseen dimension of work that will truly make a project belong to the community and succeed in its goal to be the instrument for the music makers within.

Notes 1 A cursory search for similar conceptions of this idea of architecture as an instrument introduced Jacob Voorthius, an associate professor in the School of Architecture at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, who promoted a similar concept in relation to acoustics with his speech, “Architecture is Not Frozen Music,” www.voorthuis.net/Pages/Acoustics%20and%20architecture_speech.pdf. 2 Jeremy Till is driving at a similar point when he asks, “What right does any profession have to determine the course of its own operation, and on what basis can the voice of the user possibly be denied?” in the foreword to Architecture Participation, and Society, 2010. 3 CPID’s founding director, Sergio Palleroni, cofounded the international design-build program the BASIC Initiative nearly three decades ago. This service-learning program was an express response to both the needs of vulnerable communities around the globe and a desire to expand the role of architects to address social and environmental issues (Palleroni & Merkelbach, 2004). In many ways, the CPID has grown directly out of the extensive work of the BASIC Initiative and its network of the thousands of students and collaborators who have helped underserved communities achieve a sustainable and equitable way of life through the organization’s work. 4 A brief note on terminology: while homeless and houseless can be used interchangeably, at the CPID we respect the desire of our collaborators to use the term “houseless” when referring to individuals—a term that they feel acknowledges that they are part of a place and community and simply need housing. We use the terms “homeless” and “homelessness” in reference to the larger issue of people living on the street or without safe or adequate shelter, as well as when referencing the work of others that uses the term “homeless.” 5 The term “sleeping pods” has caused some confusion, as to many it suggests horizontal tubes or boxes not much larger than the human body. However, the term was decided upon with partners in the Village Coalition and City of Portland to emphasize their primary function and avoid falling into building codes established for “tiny houses” or other related structures. 6 Participating firms/teams that both submitted drawings and built pods include SERA Architects, Holst Architecture, Mackenzie, SRG Partnership, William Wilson Architects, Scott Edwards Architecture, Communitecture, LRS Architects, MoMaMa, Mods PDX + Shelter Wise, Architects Without Borders Oregon, City Repair, the Center for Public Interest Design, the CPID—PSU Arch 480 Studio, and CPID + Neighborhood Works Realty. 7 Colleagues like The Detroit Collaborative Design Center argue that the goal of public interest designers is not to give a community a voice. Rather, everyone already has a voice and they see their role as establishing “processes to amplify the diminished voice” so that all voices are heard equally (Pitera, 2014, p. 103). 8 Seventy-seven percent of professionals surveyed believed this to be a valuable mission statement for PID.

References AIA (2013). National Objectives, AIA National Grassroots Conference, Washington, DC. Feldman, R., Palleroni, S., Perkes, D., and Bell, B. (2013). Wisdom From the Field: Public Interest Architecture in Practice. 2011 Latrobe Prize Research. www.publicinterestdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Wisdomfrom-the-Field.pdf [Accessed 15 April] 267

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Ferry, R.T., and Palleroni, S. (2016). Research + Action: The First Two Years of the Center for Public Interest Design. In B.D. Wortham-Galvin et al., eds. Sustainable Solutions: Let Knowledge Serve the City. Greenleaf. Gewirtz, P. (1996). On “I Know It When I See It”. Yale Law Journal, Faculty Scholarship Series, Vol. 105, pp. 1023–1048. http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1706 [Accessed 14 May 2016]. Glazer, N. (2007). What Happened to the Social Agenda? American Scholar, Spring [online]. https://theameri canscholar.org/what-happened-to-the-social-agenda/#.V57PzZMrKt9 [Accessed 2 October 2016]. Kristina Smock Consulting. (2015). 2015 Point-in-Time Report: Count of Homelessness in Portland/Gresham/ Multnomah County, OR. A Home for Everyone. https://multco.us/file/42320/download Medary, M.B. Jr. (1922). Public Interest and the Architect. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 101, The Ethics of the Professions and of Business, pp. 105–107. Palleroni, S., and Merkelbach, C.E. (2004). Studio at Large: Architecture in Service of Global Communities. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Pitera, Dan (2014). Syncopating the Urban Landscape: More People, More Programs, More Geographies. Detroit: University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture.

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Part VI

Environmental Engagement

21 Umdenken Umschwenken Environmental Engagement and Swiss Architecture1 Kim Förster

In architecture history, the environmental turn of the 1970s, often attributed to the rise of an ecological consciousness and responsibility in Western societies, has recently been argumentatively linked to the military-industrial-academic complex. Seen as a historic milestone, the UN Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, discussing environment and development especially in the global south, revealed that man’s impact on earth became established as a political issue, and that Western and Eastern Bloc countries alike as a reaction founded environmental departments, yet with different tasks. Many historians note that corporate capital at this crucial point in history, too, recognized the looming ecological crisis, as demonstrated by the publication of Limits to Growth in the same year, a study of MIT scholars on behalf of the Club of Rome first presented at St. Gallen Symposium, Switzerland, producing different scenarios regarding world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion and predicting that if the global economy continued according to the business-as-usual model, earth’s limits would soon be reached (Meadows et al. 1972). However, issues of environmental ethics and justice back then already encompassed a critique of economic paradigm of growth and the belief in technological progress, dominant in industrialized societies during those decades that became known as the great acceleration. Shortly after the invention of global environmental policies and this neo-Malthusian theorizing, the year 1973 saw two publications that somehow dealt with negative ecological and social consequences of industrialization, and became essential readings for the nascent environmental movement, not only in the English-speaking world but also in German-speaking countries, Austria, Germany and Switzerland, offering new theories for intermediate technology and alternative lifestyles: one, Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality, calling for human-scale devices and services, instruments and means that do not exploit labor (and one might add nature), but help people to communicate, develop and live together (Illich 1973); and two, Ernst Friedrich Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, promoting Buddhist-influenced humane forms of economic practice, restricted by local operation and local resources, and founded upon social relations based on cooperation and solidarity, but also organic agriculture, ecological production and consumption according to ethical and just aspects, beyond any form of materialism (Schumacher 1973). In the same year, one could have registered in politicized German cultural debates a profound critique of political ecology, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger in an essay titled “Kritik der politischen Ökologie”, published in the journal Kursbuch, argued that ecology’s disciplinary challenges gained range and complexity only once human action was integrated in the ensemble of socio-natural 271

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relationships (Enzensberger 1973). Here, Enzensberger highlighted that in genealogical terms, although the ecological hypothesis, which called for the end of those forms of society advocating industrialized technology and benefitting from it, found wide consensus, there was still dispute about time periods, crucial factors, horizons of expectation and fear. The differentiation of three main groups of people who contribute to the glorification of the ecological was underlying his analysis: the technocrats, who serve the ruling classes; the concerned and responsible citizens, who in their militancy might become the embryo of a mass movement; and the eco-freaks, who escape from the city and civilization and find salvation in food customs and agricultural techniques—to conclude that ecological movements joined forces with a range of political motives and interests. From this conflictual situation, marked by epistemic uncertainties and the claiming of agency regarding politics, economy and legislation, a new generation of architects arose in Central Europe— environmentally engaged, often politically active—who looked for answers to react to the ecological and structural challenges. Especially in the case of “Umdenken Umschwenken” (think and act differently)—a unique exhibition first shown at ETH Zurich in 1975, before it travelled to more than 25 venues in Switzerland, as well as in Germany and in Austria (Figure 21.1)—a new movement formed, given the opportunities and based on a collective identity, who utilized media strategies of mobilization and action—a movement to be distinguished from postmodern tendencies, such as the then fashionable neo-rationalism taught at the architecture school.2 In what follows, I take “Umdenken Umschwenken” as a quintessential example for a paradigm shift and the nascent alternative movement that was driven by a new generation of students and emerging academics, among them architects, based on not only a moral but also an economic argument. In particular, I will discuss in three parts first that different actors in the run-up of the exhibition got involved in formulating a critique that was reinforced by the 1973 oil crisis and concrete practical options, secondly how both content and design of the exhibition and the accompanying catalog were already conceived as forms of sociopolitical engagement, and thirdly to what extent they had an impact on both the discipline and profession of architecture, and more generally on academia and society. More specifically, with this micro-historical approach I intend to unearth which contexts of argumentation architects in dialog with academics from other backgrounds included themselves to define eco-critical fields of action; how they utilized architectural knowledge and skills to identify and showcase alternatives, both nationally and internationally for an eco-conscious and socially engaged architecture; and to what extent they were able to go beyond the alliance of nationstate politics, industrialized economies and their reliance on oil.

AGU’s Anti-Expo The exhibition “Umdenken Umschwenken” originated in Zurich’s academic and to a certain degree alternative milieu of a generation of the socially and politically engaged, which emerged as part of a new social movement that formed around antinuclear protests, combined with environmental issues (Kupper 1998).3 The organizer and curator was the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Umwelt (Working group on the environment, or AGU), located at the two leading academic institutions in Zurich, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH) and the University of Zurich, which was founded by students and assistants in the early 1970s.4 The group was formed following a well-attended symposium at ETH on the topic “Schutz unseres Lebensraums” (protecting our environment) in the fall of 1970, organized by Hans Leibundgut, a leading Swiss forest scientist, advocate of natural silviculture and the former president of the school (Leibundgut 1971). Among others, the participants discussed “Null Wachstum” (zero growth) being an alternative to a society characterized by individualism and consumerism and the postwar economic miracle based on decade-long faith in growth and technological development. The symposium concluded with a call to stop the self-destruction and to design the environment at a human scale; and the encouragement 272

Figure 21.1 Catalog cover (design: Bill Schäfer) for the first edition of the exhibition catalog (AGU 1975a).

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that any initiative out of the university would find institutional approval and support. As a result of a leaflet campaign, which had a tremendous response and gathered about 50 people with backgrounds in various academic disciplines, AGU was formed—a loosely organized association, which became a forum of people from diverse schools of thought: for the environmental movement, the left, the pragmatists, the realists, the Steiner supporters, the new generation of entrepreneurs and so forth. As their representative, they elected Christoph Leuthold, a charismatic spokesperson who held a doctorate in forest engineering, as AGU’s first president.5 In the early years, AGU’s environmental engagement crystalized around specific themes and was characterized by a diversity of oppositional activities and protest forms. While next to Leuthold academically advanced group members, such as Werner Edelmann, Theo Ginsburg, Christian Thomas or Uwe Zahn, with a background in architecture, biology and geography took a leading role, AGU paved the way for the interdisciplinarity necessary. Some members of AGU worked at the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture, which in its projects became heavily politicized, as they resisted the influence of the industry on higher education policy (Eichenberger 2012). Others have repeatedly interfered in local political debates on subjects of the modernization of urban infrastructure, which sparked in Zurich in the early 1970s—for example, against the “Expressstrassen-Ypsilon”—namely, the new construction of inner-city express roads that were to meet in y-shaped junctions in the city center, threatening to cut off the urban fabric, or of a new subway rather than a city train network in Zurich. As communication medium and first main organ of AGU, the alternative publication Bla Bla (an abbreviation for “Blaues Blatt”, but also German slang for nonsense), was launched in December 1971. Self-published by Uwe Zahn, the newsletter soon developed into an independent biweekly, which published on a range of environmental topics, but moreover on fashionable “off the grid” solutions, as well as questions of decentralization and self-management due to the editor’s interests. AGU also took advantage of the possibility offered to all students at ETH to define the content of their own lecture formats, by offering innovative courses twice: an “interdisciplinary seminar on ecology” in the academic year 1972/73, and a series of lectures on “problems of our environment” in 1973/74 (AGU 1973, 1974). While ETH housed Pierre Fornallaz’s symposium “Technik für oder gegen den Menschen” (Technology for or against humans) in November 1973 (Fornallaz 1975), and started to provide for funds for environmental research, those academic alternatives functioned as postgraduate studies, bringing agronomists and ecologists to ETH from other German-speaking countries (ETH Board 1974, 1975a). Being unsettled by their reading of Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, as the bleak scenario raised consciousness for the planetary dimension of the ecological problematic, AGU members became more and more invested in new social, ecological and economic structures, according to a holistic approach. Initially, single AGU members took on an active role in environmental debates, being invited to the Gottlieb-Duttweiler Institut (GDI) in Rüschlikon, to act as experts in panel discussions.6 What is more, they started to collaborate in planning processes at different scales, in city commissions, in cantonal initiatives and in federal legislation (e.g., the law on spatial planning), so that environmental issues were part of their everyday academic, scientific and political life and work. As they later on openly admitted, it was their major frustration and disillusionment with the scope for realization that eventually led them to claim agency beyond the state, economy or legislation, and formulate a handson approach in the realization of alternatives. Research for “Umdenken Umschwenken” had started in November 1973, to be first on display in Zurich in the spring of 1975. AGU members formed a discussion group on alternatives, headed by Werner Edelmann, reaching out nationally and internationally to generate content. Not only did the group envision running their own hamlet, which stayed a utopian project, but also they sponsored a design competition entitled “Wir bauen unser Ökohaus” (We are building our eco-house). Meanwhile, Bla Bla regularly informed its subscribers about the upcoming show and invited them to join in, to deliver contributions or to participate in one of the working groups. The topics addressed included alternative forms of agriculture and livestock, house construction and types of settlements, technology, energy and society, with a strong 274

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focus on pioneering architectural approaches and solar and self-built houses. Born as an initiative out of academia, AGU for a while was supported by ETH (ETH Board 1975b); in advance of “Umdenken Umschwenken” they were provided two part-time positions, a coordinator and a secretary, and could take an office in one of the school’s buildings. Still, as preparations advanced, AGU was increasingly challenged, when they raised their voice against the foreseen large-scale technological energy futures, and at the height of the Swiss antinuclear movement participated in protests against the site for a new nuclear power station in Kaiseraugst (Kupper 1998). During the opening of “Umdenken Umschwenken” on May 12, 1975, which eventually was made possible with financial support of WWF Switzerland, the Audimax at ETH was bursting at the seams, and two more auditoriums were connected by video transmission. While ETH president Professor Heinrich Ursprung had withdrawn from delivering the opening address, AGU was lucky to get Ivan Illich, the Austrian philosopher, priest and critic, then at the height of his notoriety, to deliver the key note. Illich in his lecture titled “Spezifische Kontraproduktivität” (specific counterproductivity), drawing on Tools for Conviviality, put forward the argument that our institutions altogether missed to meet their targets, and that they rather bring the opposite results of what we have them for, which is evidenced, to him, in the devaluation of the environment and the production of unevenness in industrialized societies—for example, by the waste of resources or the pollution of air (Illich 1975a, 1975b). AGU had invited him for thought-provocation and listed his essay Energy and Equity, critical of the contradictions, which are concealed by the use of a term like “energy crisis”, as source of inspiration (Illich 1974). Illich gladly returned the favor and hospitality, remarking that the exhibition in some future will have retrospectively proven to be the most significant achievement of ETH in the 1970s, an appraisal that was quoted in the press. Hence “Umdenken Umschwenken” had the self-proclaimed aim of nothing less than to point to societal contradiction and to promote a change of consciousness among visitors, challenging the predominant notion of civilization. The exhibition comprised different parts—owing to the spectrum of subjects suggested by E. F. Schumacher—to offer new approaches for structural change. Over many months different subgroups operating quite independently to diversify the problems to be addressed had compiled best-practice examples of environmentally and socially engaged projects, to be decided upon democratically in AGU meetings; yet the focus was clearly on Western and Central Europe (only a few projects were actually located in the Global South). In 1975 during the run-up, a core group of 21 members across disciplines worked on the exhibition; at peak time AGU’s enlarged circle had grown to 200—those from ETH being overrepresented compared to those from University of Zurich. One special aspect of “Umdenken Umschwenken” was AGU’s ability to mobilize for an interdisciplinary dialogue between architects, agronomists, structural engineers, production engineers, biologists, chemists, forest scientists, mechanical engineers, economists, pedagogues, physicists and planners, to come to a critical understanding of the planetary situation and the negative impact of human activity on nature. Their largest coup, however, was that for an exhibition of this political volatility, they had been able to secure the main hall of ETH’s central building—the very heart of Gottfried Semper’s venerable school building, once a sculpture hall, to be crossed by professors, staff and students alike every day. Accompanying the exhibition, to reach out to a wider public and demand responsibilities for the environment, AGU produced a catalog financed by the GDI, in a first edition of 2,000. In their commonly written foreword to the catalog, the core group of organizers and curators communicating the exhibition’s meaning and purpose defined “Umdenken Umschwenken” as an “anti-expo”, which, unlike those expos that serve the interest of industry and economic growth, was actually critical of large-scale technologies (AGU 1975a, 1975b). Rather, they conceived the exhibition and catalog as a guide that might point toward an alternative future and thus leave behind the constraints of industrialized societies. In addition to a mere moral argument of environmental ethics and justice, the authors took up Illich’s thought and terminology, in particular his notion of conviviality and the criticism of externalized vs. internalized costs to oppose to industrialized processes of production in state capitalism 275

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(also in state socialism, as they pointed out), as illustrated by a series of self-drawn cartoons that accompanied the remarkably defined text, and challenged notions of society and progress that were underlying the great acceleration of the postwar era. As activist-curators, they saw “Umdenken Umschwenken” in contrast to the manner of the mainstream media and advertising industry, as a political practice to express social criticism and criticism of society, and thus the structure of power. For AGU it was clear that as they aimed at environmental and social engagement, exhibition and catalog could not be neutral.

Alternatives to the Status Quo Eventually, AGU had identified six thematic fields in which to become active, presented under headings such as “Agriculture, Food,” “Construction, Housing,” “Energy,” “Waste, Recycling,” “Social Issues” and “Miscellaneous”. Upon entrance through the foyer of the ETH main building from Rämistrasse, visitors of “Umdenken Umschwenken” first encountered a three-dimensional “ecolabyrinth” (Figure 21.2) that showcased the relationship between forms of energy, technology and society and suggested different decision paths of how to act environmentally and politically responsibly. In the building’s main hall and adjacent corridors, AGU had put up display boards that featured a total of 50 projects, and that were reprinted in the catalog, introduced by diagrammatic drawings (AGU 1975)—all showing alternatives to the status quo, ranging from organic and biodynamic agriculture, solar houses and communes to new ways to study and improve the water quality. On display were furthermore several material objects—for example, devices for a laying battery (Figure 21.3), an alternative chicken house, but also architectural models and solar panels, as well as handicraft products from Steiner schools, color boards, slide shows and instruments for organ experience. “Umdenken Umschwenken” thus gave concrete suggestions for how to achieve a good life, presenting as alternatives (1) natural cycles, instead of industrial production; (2) ecological building and living, instead of inhospitable cities; (3) renewable energy sources, instead of the combustion of fossil fuels; (4) recyclable waste, instead of a thoughtless throwaway society; and (5) social interaction, instead of careless exploitation. AGU produced and disseminated interdisciplinary knowledge that combined environmental, sociocultural and economic lines of argument, calling for a clear reduction in the use of resources, both material and energy. While “Agriculture, Food” set the tone in terms of reducing the influence of industry and limiting external energy, “Construction, Housing” (coordinated by Armin Binz), with a total of 16 contributions, was the most comprehensive section. AGU here argued for the formation of a new social structure based on decentralized technology, economy and power. Explicitly referring to Europewide research into autonomous, ecologically integrated houses—for example, in the UK (with the Autonomous House Research Programme at the University of Cambridge), the Netherlands (with the THAASEB system—a prototypical Thermodynamic, Hydrolic, Aeolic, Autarkic, Solar Energy Building developed at TU Eindhoven) and France (with the eco-architecture of Groupe d’Etude de la Maison Ecologique G.E.M.E.)—AGU even then understood well that neither the energy nor the environmental problematic was to be solved on pure technical or scientific grounds. The most elaborated and comprehensive contribution, however, came from Zurich-based working group Plenar—acronym for “Planung-Energie-Architektur” (planning-energy-architecture)— around Peter Steiger but here represented primarily by Conrad Brunner. Their study for the “Plenar-Haus-Konzept”, an energy-conscious multiparty house, they presented on 12 display boards on “climate understanding”, “orientation”, “spatial disposition”, “use of space”, “light”, “wind and ventilation”, “wall construction” and “heating system”—namely, a mixture of environmental factors and architectural elements. For the exhibition, the map and the diagram, especially the mind map and curve diagram, as well as the floor plan and the cross section, as specific architectural forms of info-graphics for visualizing natural processes, such as solar radiation and energy balances, provided them with plausible metaphors for both signifying scientific diagnosis and political action. Likewise, 276

© 2017 KEYSTONE.

Figure 21.2 An “eco-labyrinth” as the entrance to “Umdenken Umschwenken”.

© 2017 KEYSTONE.

Figure 21.3 Devices for a laying battery, promising animal-friendly conditions.

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Plenar’s house design itself, with its horizontally and vertically layered structure, a living-diningkitchen core as a “réduit”-zone, and the installation of solar collectors (about one-third of the surface), can be seen as another form of visualizing both their ecological and social engagement (Steiger et al. 1975). Totally different from the neo-rationalism which has been made fashionable at ETH by Aldo Rossi (Kockelkorn et al. 2013), Plenar’s eco-modernist approach, integrating medium technology and a formal, constructive approach, combined three central strategies of how to adjust comfort with the claim for increasing self-sufficiency: (1) reducing the heat demand through a “réduit”-strategy in the winter, (2) storing excess heat in the fall for two to three months, and (3) temporarily using an additional heating system. To illustrate these three interrelated spatial, architectural and technological strategies, Plenar drew on cartoonish and iconic illustrations of household items, such as the sardines tin, the thermos flask and the hot-water bottle. What is more, they referred to traditional Swiss building types (quoting Bernard Rudofsky’s reference to windscreen-installations in Hyderabad, Pakistan, from his groundbreaking 1964 MoMA exhibition Architecture Without Architects) to argue for a contemporary interpretation of vernacular architecture: the Bernese farmhouse with its façade stratification, utilizing loggias as habitable buffer zones; the Ticino tower house with its vertical stratification, using the rising warm air as automatic heating; and the Engadine house with its massive walls and small windows, storing heat (Roesler 2009). In contrast to the formal, often Protestant rigor of high modernism that dominated Swiss architecture and planning until then with a few exceptions, the more esoteric and spiritual, anthroposophic and biomorphic architectural examples featured in “Umdenken Umschwenken” called for an environmental consciousness quite differently—for example, in the case of Auroville, the experimental town in South India, which was founded in 1968 by Hindu philosopher, yogi, guru and poet Sri Aurobindo (whose writings in Switzerland were published by Steiger), and which was of immediate interest for AGU because of its specific planning approach, connecting both environmental research and education on themes such as alternative agriculture, energy, food and building materials; but also cases from Austria and Germany—for example, the study group “Integrale Bio-logische Architektur” (Integral biological architecture, or IBA) from Vienna, which defined as some characteristics of an alternative architecture key concepts such as longevity, naturalness and simplicity; the environmental designs of the “Gesellschaft für angewandte und experimentelle Ökologie” (Society for applied and experimental ecology, or GEO), a team led by Merete Mattern from Starnberg near Munich, acting on different scales, in terms of landscape, urban planning, village-scape and house construction; the holistic approach of Theodor Henzler, coming from Buddhist teaching instead of dialectic thinking; or the integrated approach of the working group on “Gesundes Bauen—Gesundes Wohnen” (Healthy building—healthy living), based on scientific-technical construction biology. In addition, AGU with “Umdenken Umschwenken” also presented some promising Swiss projects in housing and urban design from the previous decade experimenting with primary technology, solar energy and mixed use. On the other hand, they were well aware that the few urban projects they exhibited were rather of a utopian nature and not to be realized in the short run, the most noteworthy being that of working group “Kreis 5 vor 12”. Kreis 5, one of Zurich’s then troubled inner-city districts around Röntgenplatz, was facing problems, since the former industrial neighborhood was threatened by the pressure of city center development, transit traffic, an aging population and the lack of political participation. In the 1970s, negative-affected local residents had thus joined forces to protest urban developments, proposing a city planning from below with the protection of housing, traffic calming, renovation work and self-government, receiving even more attention when on display. The moral idealism of those best-practice examples selected for the “Construction, Housing” section of “Umdenken Umschwenken”, be it proposals for multiparty houses or processes of densification and reurbanization, somehow reflected the critical architectural and urban discourse that infiltrated the architecture department at ETH and the Swiss architectural press, explicitly two 279

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recent publications, both the subject of public debate at that time: “Göhnerswil”: Wohnungsbau im Kapitalismus (Bachmann et al. 1972), a critical study conducted in the framework of a student seminar at ETH led by Jörn Janssen of the conditions and effects of the housing industry by the example of the corporate general contractor Ernst Göhner AG; and Rolf Keller’s Bauen als Umweltzerstörung (Keller 1973), the visualization of recent large-scale techno-utopian yet in the end inhuman and destructive trends in architecture and planning in Switzerland through photography, as building was seen as environmental degradation. A fundamental part of “Umdenken Umschwenken”, next to “Construction, Housing”, formed the section on “Energy”. According to the critical thought of those days, AGU’s topical introduction (written by Ruedi Kriesi and Daniel Feuermann, the coordinators of this section) argued an essential relationship between atmospheric pollution (climate change and global warming were not yet a topic), resource depletion and urbanization processes.7 Calling for a transition to renewable energy sources, based on new science, technology and innovation on an intermediate scale, AGU provided a survey of solar technology as a rather young field—for example, the interdisciplinary solar energy research that was carried out at EPFL in Lausanne on the interplay of façade elements, thermal equipment, storage facilities and surfaces design, in which the departments of architecture, physics, mechanical and electrical engineering were involved, or the latest technological developments of solar engines in combination with parabolic mirrors to generate electricity, as well as the application of solar collectors and heat pumps to small and medium-sized residential buildings. AGU members themselves made a large contribution: most outspoken was Ueli Schäfer, an architect by training and central figure in the Société Suisse pour l’Energie Solaire (Swiss society for solar energy, or SSES), who showed the potential for solar energy use in Switzerland by depicting in diagrams a systemic link between control, distribution, insulation, sensor, cooling and heat production. Besides, the SSES, a private-law association founded by Pierre Fornallaz only in the previous year, campaigning for an ethically acceptable energy policy as an alternative to nuclear energy, put forward energy-saving plans with respect to the fields of transport, heating, household, industry and commerce, based on an overview of energy consumption complied by Theo Ginsburg, previously the proponent of a peaceful use of nuclear energy in Switzerland himself. “Umdenken Umschwenken” consequently, with the intricate interplay between actors in science, industry and politics, marked an important turning point in recent Swiss energy and environmental history regarding a transformation from countercultural aspects of the sustainability debate to those of an ecological modernization, based on the mixing of architectural elements and technological devices. This became apparent, since AGU in connection with the SSES displayed a total of ten solar panels—different models, both flat-plate and parabolic collectors, all prototypes and some products from different manufacturers, which had entered the market only in the beginning of the year 1975 (Figure 21.4). An act of self-defense, AGU in their foreword to the catalog emphasized that they saw solar panels not just as new gadgets, but also as a medium-technology plant for energy production, a “materialization of good will”, to be less dependent on the large-scale, externally determined, profitoriented energy sector (AGU 1975, A4). Notwithstanding all disclaimers, the exhibition became advertising for solar panels as a new green product, although the economization of ecology was yet to come. While Schäfer in an SSES bulletin, pointing to the exhibits, polemicized against too much bureaucracy—explicitly the Swiss Patent Office—that hindered the launch of solar panels on the market, to save the world, “Umdenken Umschwenken” in displaying some of them advertised for the penetration of new technologies in the economy (Schäfer 1975).

Results of the Protest and Alternatives Movement Although the other sections of “Umdenken Umschwenken”, such as “Waste, Recycling” and primarily “Social Issues”, were less developed, AGU indeed achieved success: they anticipated a wide 280

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Figure 21.4 Different solar panels exhibited in the main hall of ETH.

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appeal and organized an extensive accompanying program of 25 lectures, panel discussions, screenings and so forth, which were held for six weeks at ETH, every night during the week, on topics such as construction and housing, the threefold social order, organic farming and energy. As a special event to further mobilize, educate and network assistants and students, in June 1975, AGU organized a full day of workshops with E. F. Schumacher, which put forward the formulation of new, larger academic research projects, the design of immediately realizable projects, and the establishment of a working group on medium technology, followed by a lecture by the figurehead of the alternative technology movement, titled “Small is beautiful, small is possible, small is necessary” (Schumacher 1975). Besides, AGU continued to be active and while “Umdenken Umschwenken” was still up they founded AG Energie (Working group on energy) and AG Alternative Technologie (Working group on alternative technology). Of crucial importance for an increasing awareness of environmental issues was that they were in contact with other organizations: environmental clubs such as WWF, Aqua Viva, Concerned Scientists, Schweizerische Akademische Gesellschaft für Umweltforschung und Ökologie (SAGUF), the NAWU-group, Neue Analysen für Wachstum und Umwelt (New analysis for growth and environment), Schweizerischer Tierschutzverband (Swiss animal welfare association) and the co-operative Neu Walser Bund. Impact can be measured not only by that the exhibition period was extended by two weeks; the catalog sold out in three weeks only and was reprinted in a slightly extended version with a new cover, this time in an edition of 5,000 (Figure 21.5). The effects of “Umdenken Umschwenken” can be specified at different levels, first of all because it started a new debate on environmental engagement in architecture in German-speaking countries. In parallel, as a practical supplement to the exhibition, the GDI published the Alternativkatalog on topics such as building, communities, communication, transport and recycling, edited by the group Dezentrale (headed by Bla Bla editor Uwe Zahn)—a Swiss-German version of the DIY guidebook Whole Earth Catalog of U.S.-American counterculture that offered practical information, addresses and facts—and it was followed by two more editions and sold a total of 30,000 copies (Zahn et al. 1975–1978). Ultimately, “Umdenken Umschwenken” became part of a larger initiative of greening in terms of energy, technology and economy, and last but not least architecture. In the Swiss architectural press, too, eco-architecture soon became a topic—for example, when in a 1977 special issue of Bauen + Wohnen, a leading professional magazine, Ruedi Kriesi, commissioned by Ueli Schäfer, reported extensively on a research trip he did in the aftermath of the exhibition to visit eco-solar houses in North America, while in Technische Rundschau, he published on active and passive solutions and their pros and cons (Kriesi 1977a, 1977b). Although the paradox is that the handling of resources and energy in Switzerland with increasing globalization did actually not change, but on the contrary intensified (Kupper 2003), the historical relevance of “Umdenken Umschwenken” for an environmental engagement can nevertheless be measured in several respects that crystallized around the exhibition: first, with regard to the immediate impact not only among AGU but also more generally in Swiss society, since due to good contacts with journalists and the comprehensive public relations work, both exhibition and events were featured in the daily press, among others the liberal Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the alternative Tagesanzeiger, as well as on radio and TV (Galle, 1975; schi, 1975). The student press, the monthly Das Konzept and Zürcher Student, both reported on AGU’s activities, publishing their accompanying thoughts about the exhibition and statements on educational policy. Secondly, “Umdenken Umschwenken” from the start was conceived as travelling exhibition based on transportable display boards, and right after ETH, was shown at the GDI in the summer of 1975; a complete copy of the panels only, without the diverse objects, machines and devices, was shown in the West German town Aachen in the fall of 1975; and the whole exhibition, this time supplemented by a functioning solar heating apparatus, was installed on the museum’s roof, at the Gewerbemuseum (Museum of Applied Arts) in Basel, in the winter of 1976—where in 1975, too, at the initiative of German chemist and 282

Figure 21.5 Cover design for the exhibition catalog for “Umdenken Umschwenken” in the second edition (AGU 1975b).

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environmental activist Hanswerner Mackwitz, an independent AG Umwelt had been founded at the University of Basel. Subsequently, “Umdenken Umschwenken” was on display in other Swiss towns (Schaffhausen, Lucerne, Lenzburg, Rorschaerberg, Aarau and St. Gallen), disseminating the new environmentally and socially engaged corpuses of knowledge compiled, and thus legitimizing the support AGU received from WWF and GDI, but also in further German and in Austrian locations. In Austria, the initiative grew out of the Arbeitsgruppe Alternativen (Working group on alternatives, or AGA), headed by Werner Kvarda, which continued AGU’s decentralized, participatory principle of organizing and curating and in 1977 put together an exhibition of their own chosen examples at the Österreichische Bauzentrum in Vienna, which subsequently was shown in all nine provinces, each time supplemented by local projects, here again a first indication of the rising environmental movement, which eventually led directly to the formation of the Austrian Green Party. In Germany, the original exhibition was shown at several universities (among others at RWTH, a second time in Aachen within a short time, and at University of Kassel), at cultural places (e.g., Frankfurt’s Paulskirche) and at alternative venues, such as the “Umweltfestival” in Berlin in the summer of 1978 (DdU 1978). In both countries, reeditions of the catalog were published, in Germany by alternative Achberger Verlag (AGU 1977) and in Austria by an independent, self-published publication under the title “Schluss mit der ewig gestrigen Zukunft” (Put an end to yesterday’s future, AGA 1977), which grew with each exhibition (Figures 21.6). Although in the immediate aftermath of “Umdenken Umschwenken”, AGU discussed their professionalization and developed a concept for continued work, a sustained engagement for the group proved to be difficult. In 1976 next to attempts to bring in new members they had to find new resources to finance activities, since the exhibition had been in deficit, and moreover reorganize their relationship to ETH, but eventually they faced adversities and hindrances. Despite international success and having been awarded the Swiss medal for environmental protection, in 1976 AGU’s work within and outside of the academic institution became a major political issue. The student newspaper in a lead article was questioning the impact of “Umdenken Umschwenken” on research and ­education— for example, whether the architecture department was actually working on low-cost housing and eco-solar houses, and whether urban sprawl and decentralization was seriously addressed—and arguing that alternative technology was not wanted (Hodel 1976). The torch of societal conflict, however, was that the politically more outspoken AGU members, leaning to the left, became subject to private intelligence, “Umdenken Umschwenken” being incriminated for subversion and illegality, which has to be understood in the context of the political climate of the time (Anonymous 1976a, b; Bäriswyl 1976). AGU afterwards lost official institutional support, resulting first in expulsion from their offices (ETH Board 1976; Zahn 1976). In the end, AGU broke apart, as a process of clarification failed to find a solution, which eventually led to the demise of all their activities. In spite of the political situation, “Umdenken Umschwenken”, in the medium term, had a decisive impact on individual biographies. While some former AGU members afterwards dropped out of the conventional system, others continued their environmental careers by working in academic or professional research and teaching, founding independent research and consultancy offices on energy and environment, entering politics, or operating a business in the private sector, inter alia developing companies with the aim to push the fields of solar energy or biogas (Binswanger/Geissberger/Ginsburg 1978; Bundesamt für Energiewirtschaft 1980). AGU thus made an impact on the professional landscape, as they established new joint ventures, agencies, foundations and associations, especially in the fields of energy and technology, complicating the question of what might be an alternative. As a direct consequence of “Umdenken Umschwenken”, AGU members established the Schweizerische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für alternative Technologien (Swiss working group on alternative technologies, or SAGAT) in December 1975, which shortly afterwards merged with the Schweizerische Vereinigung für Mittlere Technologien (Swiss association for medium technologies, or SVMT), yet different ideas of what was 284

Figure 21.6 Cover design for the exhibition catalog for “Umdenken Umschwenken” in the German edition by Achberger (AGU 1977).

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to be understood by alternative technology were prevailing. In 1976, some started the Schweizerische Energie-Stiftung (Swiss energy foundation, or SES), a lobby group for solar industries, which positioned itself against nuclear power, advocating an intelligent, environmentally and people-friendly energy policy. All this contributed to the fact that Switzerland in the 1980s set out to be a pioneer for a greater environmental responsibility, before normalization prevailed in the 1990s, when Europe-wide pragmatic and techno-optimist approaches became predominant in the context of neoliberalism. Currently, major instruments of environmental control and regulation in Switzerland, in particular the Minergie certification, and the “2000-watt society” scenario can be traced back to initiatives from the 1970s, showcasing the paradoxes of greening and ecology, economic growth and energy transition. After photovoltaic had been tested in pilot and demonstration projects at the federal and cantonal level (Humm 1993), both attempts at a more sustainable architecture, which can be considered long-term impacts of “Umdenken Umschwenken”, took different trajectories. Based on his experience with a “zero-energy housing” in Wädenswil near Zurich, Ruedi Kriesi (with architect Ruedi Fraefel), then head of the energy department of Canton Zurich, and Heinz Uebersax as business partner in 1994 conceived of the Minergie label, a private-sector standard for low-energy houses, which since 1998 was applied to largely residential and office buildings—a total of approximately 42,500 to this day (Kriesi 1989, 1990, 1997). Highly dependent on high-insulating windows and automated ventilation with highly efficient air-to-air heat recovery, Minergie fell into disrepute (Kriesi 2005), and in recent years—by now differentiated in the subcategories Minergie-P, MinergieA and Minergie ECO—has been challenged by engineers and architects—for example, with the concept of a “zero emissions building”, developed by Hansjürg Leibundgut at ETH, that is based on heat sensors and ground storage, to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide (Leibundgut 2011). The ambitious vision of a “2000-watt society”, on the other hand, an energy policy model that proposes reducing the energy need of each individual to the average of the 1950s, was also developed in 1994 by ETH researchers (Kesselring and Winter 1994). First adopted by the city of Zurich in 2008, the “2000-watt society”, which at some point was criticized for not recognizing embedded energy, today is part of the Swiss energy program and has been adopted for buildings with the specification of the Schweizerischer Ingenieur- und Architektenverein (Swiss society of engineers and architects, or SIA), with regard to energy efficiency and renewable energies. “Umdenken Umschwenken” in a genealogical perspective marked the beginning of a new kind of engagement across disciplines, and to some extent, this unique exhibition and publication, complicating the issues of environmental responsibility, of the agency of the state and the academy, of planetary ethics and justice in architecture, still has a repercussion on architecture and urbanism today.

Notes 1 I first presented this text on June 3, 2015, at the conference of European Society for Environmental History at University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines on a panel entitled “Media, Architecture and Global Environmental Imaginaries”, organized by Daniel Barber. 2 The exhibition may yet come to be seen as seminal. Forgotten for a long time, Swiss architect and theorist Sascha Roesler in an article on two exhibitions, comparing “Umdenken Umschwenken” with Bernard Rudofsky’s “Sparta/Sybaris”, on display in Vienna in 1987, was the first to unearth it (Roesler 2009). 3 In Switzerland at that time, one could have registered growing interest in different environmental issues also in the architectural circles. In 1971 these became institutionalized with the founding of the Federal Agency for Environmental Protection. Yet it took 12 years before an environmental article added to the constitution in the same year was implemented into national law (Hänggi 2016). 4 The archival situation on “Umdenken Umschwenken” is unclear, and in general AGU is barely documented. While the archives at ETH Zurich do not have any holdings, except official bulletins and the student newspaper, the archives at the University of Zurich hold few documents on AGU’s activities, especially its ending. Elsewhere, there are archival holdings on “Umdenken Umschwenken” at the state’s archives in Basel and Lucerne, where the exhibition travelled. Moreover, in 2014 and 2015, I was able to realize oral history 286

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interviews with four former AGU members: Armin Binz (August 20, 2014), Ruedi Kriesi (May 5, 2015), Christoph Leuthold ( June 9, 2015) and Christian Thomas ( June 15, 2015). All provided me with access to documents in their private archives (bylaws, early protests, membership lists, publicity documents, press coverage, itinerary for exhibition travelling, expulsion, etc.). 5 Christoph Leuthold in our interview clarified that of a full-time position at ETH he spent half for AGU. Curiously, he also confirmed that Christoph Blocher, the later head of the right-wing, most powerful Swiss People’s Party (SVP), was one of the founding members and moreover served as AGU’s first secretary, producing the minutes. 6 The Gottlieb-Duttweiler Institut, an independent research center, which goes back to the ideas of and is named after Gottlieb Duttweiler, the founder of the Migros Cooperative, today is the oldest think tank in Switzerland; throughout the 1970s, then under the direction of Hans Pestalozzi, the GDI supported environmentally progressive projects. 7 Ruedi Kriesi in our interview pointed out that for him a decisive trigger to join AGU was an event called “Sonnenenergie auf dem Weg zur praktischen Nutzung” (Solar energy on the way to practical use), organized by the Société Suisse pour l’Energie Solaire (SSES) at the GDI in December 1974.

References Anonymous, “AGU klagt gegen Cincera”, Die Tat, vol. 41, no. 289, December 8, 1976a, p. 2. Anonymous, “Klage gegen Cicera”, Die Tat, vol. 41, no. 284, December 2, 1976b, p. 1. Arbeitsgemeinschaft Alternativen. Schluss mit der ewig gestrigen Zukunft, Vienna: Selbstverlag, 1977. Arbeitsgemeinschaft Umwelt (AGU). Interdisziplinäres Seminar in Ökologie: WS 1972/73, Zurich, 1973 (unpublished reader). Arbeitsgemeinschaft Umwelt (AGU). Probleme unserer Umwelt—wo steht die Universität? Ringseminar WS 1973/74, Zurich, 1974 (unpublished reader). Arbeitsgemeinschaft Umwelt (AGU). Umdenken Umschwenken. Alternativen, Wegweiser aus den Zwängen der grosstechnologischen Zivilisation: Energie und Gesellschaft, Landwirtschaft, Sonnenhäuser, Wohnen, Technik, Recycling, Schule, Kommunen, Zurich: AGU, 1975a. (reprinted in 1975, and, by Achberger Verlagsanstalt, in 1977) Arbeitsgemeinschaft Umwelt (AGU), “Begleitgedanken zu einer aktuellen Ausstellung ‘Umdenken Umschwenken’ ”, Zürcher Student, vol. 53, no. 3, June 1975b, p. 2/3. Bachmann, Heini et al. (eds.). “Göhnerswil.” Wohnungsbau im Kapitalismus: Eine Untersuchung über die Bedingungen und Auswirkungen der privatwirtschaftlichen Wohnungsproduktion am Beispiel der Vorstadtsiedlung Sunnebüel in Volketswil bei Zürich und der Generalunternehmung Ernst Göhner AG, Zurich: Verlagsgenossenschaft, 1972. Bäriswyl, Bruno, “Arbeitsgemeinschaft Umwelt (AGU) klagt gegen Cincera”, Das Konzept, vol. 5, no. 12, December 1976, p. 6. Binswanger, Hans Christoph, Geissberger, Werner and Ginsburg, Theo (eds.), Der NAWU-Report: Wege aus der Wohlstandsfalle, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1978. Bundesamt für Energiewirtschaft (ed.), Wärmesparen im Haus: ein praktischer Ratgeber für Bewohner, Eigentümer und Verwalter, Bern: Eidgenössische Drucksachen- und Materialzentrale, 1980. Dokumentationsgruppe des Umweltfestivals (ed.), Wer keinen Mut zum Träumen hat hat keine Kraft zum Kämpfen: Dokumentation zum Alternativen Umweltfestival Berlin. (4.6.–16.7.1978), self-published, 1978. Eichenberger, Ursina, Ökologie und Selbstbestimmung: Das Forschungsinstitut für ökologischen Landbau (Oberwil, CH) 1970–1984 im Kontext der ökologischen Alternativbewegung, Zurich, 2012 (unpublished licentiate thesis). Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, “Zur Kritik der politischen Ökologie”. In Kursbuch 33: “Ökologie und Politik oder Die Zukunft der Industrialisierung”, Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, October 1973, pp. 1–42. ETH Board, “Forschung über Umweltprobleme”, ETH Bulletin, vol. 8, no. 96, October 24, 1974, p. 13. ETH Board, “Aus der Schulleitung. Multidisziplinäre Forschung über Umweltprobleme: Neue Richtlinien für die Finanzierung”, ETH Bulletin, vol. 9, no. 104, May 29, 1975a, p. 10/11. ETH Board, “Arbeitsgemeinschaft ‘Umwelt’ beider Hochschulen in Zürich. Ausstellung ‘Umdenken Umschwenken’ ”, ETH Bulletin, vol. 9, no. 104, May 29, 1975b, pp. 31–33. ETH Board, “Aus der Schulleitung: Geschäfte vom 1. November”, ETH Bulletin, vol. 10, no. 126, November 30, 1976, p. 18. Fornallaz, Pierre (ed.), Technik für oder gegen den Menschen? Die neue Aufgabe der Hochschule, Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1975. Galle, Samuel, “Umdenken Umschwenken: Eine Ausstellung zum Umweltschutz an der ETH”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), no. 108, May 13, 1975, p. 41. Hänggi, Marcel, “Wir Umweltverwalter”, Die Zeit, April 18, 2016, online: www.zeit.de/2016/17/klimawandelschweiz-selbstverstaendis-umweltschutz-veraenderung/ 287

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Hodel, Georg, “Alternativtechnologie an der ETHZ nicht gefragt? Das Gewissen der Technonormen”, Zürcher Student und Das Konzept, vol. 54, no. 6, November 1976, p. 1. Humm, Othmar, “Photovoltaik und Architektur: Solarzellen als Teil der Bauhülle”, Schweizer Ingenieur und Architekt, vol. 111, no. 27/28, 1993. Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality, New York: Harper and Row, 1973. Illich, Ivan. Energy and Equity, New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Illich, Ivan, “Spezifisch Kontraproduktivität”, lecture held at ETH Zurich on May 12, 1975a (unpublished). Illich, Ivan, “Wenn Medizin krank macht”, Das Konzept, vol. 4, no. 6, June 20, 1975b, p. 3. Keller, Rolf. Bauen als Umweltzerstörung: Alarmbilder einer Un-Architektur der Gegenwart, Zurich: Verlag für Architektur Artemis, 1973. Kesselring, Paul and Carl-Jochen Winter, “World Energy Scenarios: A Two-Kilowatt Society—Plausible Future or Illusion?” In Energietage 94: Proceedings 10th–12th November 1994, Villigen: Paul Scherrer Institut, 1994, pp. 103–116. Kockelkorn, Anne, Sowa, Axel, Reichlin, Bruno and Janssen, Jörn, “Zurich, 1971: A Conversation on the Housing Question, Academic Intrigue, and an Italian Maestro”, Candide, no. 7, October 2013, pp. 113–140, online: www.candidejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2014/12/CAN07_ENCOUNTERS_Janssen_ Reichlin_Kockelkorn_Sowa.pdf Kriesi, Ruedi, interview with Ueli Schäfer, Bauen + Wohnen, vol. 31, no. 7/8, 1977a, pp. 255–288. Kriesi, Ruedi, “Aktive oder passive Solarheizung”, Technische Rundschau, August 9, 1977b, no. 32, pp. 9–11. Kriesi, Ruedi, “ ‘Null-Heizenergie’-Konzept in einer Siedlung in Wädenswil”, Schweizer Ingenieur und Architekt, vol. 107, no. 45, 1989. Kriesi, Ruedi, “Energieplanung im Kanton Zürich”, Schweizer Ingenieur und Architekt, vol. 108, 1990. Kriesi, Ruedi, “Die Minergie-Mythen”, Wohnen, vol. 80, no. 1–2, 2005. Kriesi, Ruedi and Schwager, Alois, “Energieverbrauch auf nachhaltig tiefes Niveau absenken: Interview mit Ruedi Kriesi, Leiter der Energiefachstelle des Kantons Zürich”, Schweizer Ingenieur und Architekt, vol. 115, 1997. Kupper, Patrick, Abschied von Wachstum und Fortschritt: Die Umweltbewegung und die zivile Nutzung der Atomenergie in der Schweiz (1960–1975). Preprint zur Kulturgeschichte der Technik, No. 2, Zurich, 1998. Kupper, Patrick, “Die ’1970er Diagnose’: Grundsätzliche Überlegungen zu einem Wendepunkt der Umweltgeschichte,” AfS, vol. 43, 2003, pp. 325–348. Leibundgut, Hans (ed.), Schutz unseres Lebensraumes: Symposium an der Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule in Zürich vom 10.–12. November 1970. Ansprachen und Vorträge, Frauenfeld: Huber, 1971. Leibundgut, Hansjürg, LowEx building design: für eine ZeroEmission Architecture, Zurich: Vdf Hochschulverlag, 2011. Meadows, Donella H., et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, New York: Universe Books, 1972. Roesler, Sascha, “Nach Sparta: zwei Ausstellungen als Plädoyers für eine schwach technisierte Lebensweise,” Kunst + Architektur in der Schweiz, vol. 60, no. 2, 2009, pp. 6–13. Schäfer, Ueli, untitled, SSES Bulletin, no. 2, 1975. schi (author’s abbreviation), “Anfänge einer neuen Zivilisation”, Tagesanzeiger, May 14, 1975. Schumacher, Ernst Friedrich, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered, London: Blond & Briggs, 1973. Schumacher, Ernst Friedrich, “Es geht auch anders. Technik und Wirtschaft nach Menschenmaß”, Technologische Rundschau, vol. 67, no. 19, May 6, 1975. Steiger, Peter, et al., Plenar, Planung, Energie, Architektur, Niederteufen: Niggli, 1975. Zahn, Uwe, “Open letter to the school administration of ETH Zurich”, Bla Bla, vol. 106, September 8, 1976, pp. 4/5. Zahn, Uwe et al. (eds.), Alternativkatalog 1–3, Porrentruy: Dezentrale, 1975–1978.

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22 Material Participation and the Architecture of Domestic Autonomy Lee Stickells

In the mid-1970s architecture students at the University of Sydney researched, designed, built and occupied Australia’s first “autonomous house” (Figure 22.1). They were energized by challenges, both globally and locally, to social structures, institutions and even individual consciousness that emerged from the tumult of the 1960s’ social movements and counterculture.1 Connected to an alternative culture that wanted to do more than just reject society as it existed, the students involved actively experimented with the construction of new social and political collectivities, everyday economic practices and their attendant spaces. The design of the domestic realm offered particular possibilities at a time when the personal was becoming articulated as political.2 It was especially important to the Sydney students as a site in which private action could align with planetary needs—the emerging ecological consciousness of the 1970s manifested through building. Encouraged by the charismatic and politically engaged lecturer Colin ‘Col’ James, the students’ initial objective was to design and construct a structure on campus that would test the integration of various technologies for domestic self-sufficiency. Vaguely aware of similar experiments elsewhere, they intended to include features such as a wind-driven generator for power and a methane digester for waste recycling. This chapter draws extensively on interviews with participants in the Sydney project, as part of a wider study of 1970s autonomous houses.3 Reflecting on the students’ experiences, it points to a way of thinking about how architecture and participation can matter ­politically—in the capacity of architectural objects to assemble living experiments—and to open up new possibilities for historical reflection on ecological design practices. What was meant to be a one-year, student-led, design-build exercise spilled over into a four-year public experiment in sustainable living that gained coverage in national and international press. This wasn’t due to any great success in its architectural design. The ramshackle structure that emerged on a scrap of university land to the south of the architecture faculty could well be described as a failure. Widely held to be an eyesore, the autonomous house was crudely built and its technical performance was underwhelming. The experiment was barely tolerated by much of the faculty. However, the students’ faltering, sometimes naïve attempts to build a functioning autonomous house can also be understood as a sustained, material engagement with an assortment of issues, from environmental pollution and resource depletion to consumerism and centralized industrialization. The students’ grappling with those issues—through the process of planning, designing, constructing and inhabiting the house—brought together materials, technologies, actors, sites and concepts in emergent propositions for more sustainable, ethical modes of living. The house might not have advanced technological 289

Photo by Tone Wheeler.

Figure 22.1 Students lunching at the autonomous house construction site, 1974.

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design responses or provided the aesthetic innovation privileged by the discipline but, unconnected to any formal research program, it worked as an experimental site in which the architectural object offered a capacity to unfold domestic spaces and actions as possible sites of politics.

The Autonomous House The autonomous house at the University of Sydney emerged from a period of student unrest that culminated in a strike and the negotiation of a new curriculum. In this changed context, students and staff more openly pursued educational projects that addressed pressing social and environmental issues (Stiles 1974, 63). Radical young lecturer Col James, at the time experimenting with collaborative and community practice models, was pivotal. He drew the students into advocacy and participatory design experiments, extending even to an alliance with the New South Wales Builders’ Labourers’ Federation (BLF) through the green bans (Devenish 1981; Goad and Willis 2012; James 1988).4 A defining educational experience for most of the students involved in the autonomous house was building showers and latrines at the 1973 Aquarius Festival (a project also led by James). The festival was a countercultural arts and music event, often considered the defining moment for Australia’s hippie movement (Garbutt, Dutton and Kijas 2014). Thousands of young Australians experimented with an escape from the nuclear family structure, the practicing of a new environmental ethic and an antiwar stance, and the rejection of corporate capitalism. The Sydney students were inspired by the application of their growing design skills in the festival’s attempts to achieve self-reliance and materialize new lifestyles (Kijas 2011, 106). Building on that experience, the autonomous house was one of the most ambitious, and notorious, projects to emerge from the new openness at the architecture faculty. A cohort of approximately 20 undergraduate students commenced work in the first semester of 1974. Grounded in broader environmental and social concerns, their program for the house more specifically responded to a global energy consciousness emerging from the 1973 oil crisis. The students latched on to the autonomous house ideal being explored around the world at the time, known to them primarily through a fellow student’s 1973 research trip through North America and the UK (Anthony Wheeler, unpublished data).5 The students were excited by the autonomous house ideal of an integrated technological system, able to generate its own energy, collect and recycle water, treat its own wastes and even grow food. The aim for their own project became to create a building that operated independently of all services infrastructure and was constructed primarily from recycled materials (ATU 1977). Permission was granted to construct a temporary structure on university land behind the architecture faculty (Wheeler, unpublished data). Following a semester’s research and a rapid design process, construction of the house was commenced in second semester (Figure 22.2). The students’ methods adapted to the contingencies of an unusual project: The complexity of the problem and the number of variables precluded the traditional practice of working from design drawings and resulted in the house progressing according to what materials came to hand and the people who were present to put them together. (54 Alma Street Darlington [1978?]: 1) By the end of the year the shell of the building had emerged. In 1975 a few of the original student group occupied the building, and were joined by new participants, including some recent graduates and tutors. Over its lifespan the house had even more occupants—some staying for months, others for days. While a good number of those involved saw it as simply an exercise in developing practical design and construction skills, the more engaged participants (especially the occupants) saw the house as an urgent exercise in exploring models for more ecologically attuned design and living. The building was in a constant state of “metamorphosis” as each new participant brought new ideas and contributed to its physical evolution (ATU 1977, 16). 291

Photo by Tone Wheeler.

Figure 22.2 Autonomous house under construction in late 1974. Michael Muir, one of the student builders, stands in the doorway.

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The house had a simple rectangular plan with a total enclosed area of 96 square metres. The interior was predominantly an open, “communal” area with kitchen cupboards on its south-west corner walls. A small bathroom and toilet were located on the western side of the house, and there were verandas on both the eastern and western façades. Nick Hollo lived in the house for around 15 months: “We built our own sleeping arrangements up in between the rafter spaces, it’s almost like we were roosting chickens [. . .] the beauty of the autonomous house was that it was one big space” (Nick Hollo, unpublished data). A range of passive design strategies and technological systems were incorporated with the aims of energy efficiency and a reduced environmental impact. However, the project had no real construction budget—one of the participants recalls only $30 was spent in total ( Julia Dwyer, unpublished data). Still, it was principled energy efficiency as much as financial scarcity that resulted in the house being built primarily from recycled, discarded and scrounged materials. The Trombe-Michel wall that formed the northern edge to the habitable interior was constructed from water-filled beer bottles scrounged from laneways in surrounding neighbourhoods and sealed with new (donated) crown caps (Figure 22.3). This worked in conjunction with other tactics, such as the dark brick floor with high thermal mass, thermal insulation of the building envelope, and the design of windows and doors to maximize cross ventilation. Along the length of the northern façade was a greenhouse intended to grow food and “freshen air.” Water was captured in a 2,000-gallon tank and handpumped to a 400-gallon header tank, providing potable supply. Water from the sink was recycled for use in the greenhouse and water from the bath was used for toilet flushing. Very few systems in the house were commercially produced. For example, the student-designed experimental solar hotwater system was an unusual integrated collector and tank. Plans for a unique, shell-shaped enclosure were abandoned for a simple weatherproofed plywood case. This housed an insulated tank and used polyvinyl fluoride sheeting to line the reflective surfaces (Hollo, unpublished data; 54 Alma Street Darlington [1978?], 7). Multiple systems were employed to produce electrical energy on site. One of the few major purchases for the project was a 12-volt 200 watt Quirks wind generator. It was installed along with lead acid storage batteries to power “five lights, a small transistor radio and a small freezer unit or television” (ATU 1977 16). However, its performance was intermittent and the batteries had to be charged in nearby university buildings for a large part of the year (City of Sydney 2011). Another less than successful component of the project was the methane digester (Figure 22.4). Forty-fourgallon drums were cut and welded to make a unit in which human and organic garden waste could be converted into both fertilizer and methane gas for cooking. This proposal was rejected by the local authority as part of the development application but, in any case, the students never managed to construct a working system (54 Alma Street Darlington [1978?], 6; Hollo, unpublished data; Wheeler, unpublished data). Plans to house pigs as another source of methane gas were also rejected by council (Dale 1980). Apart from energy production, there was an emphasis on minimizing energy use through design and frugal living. A small fuel stove was used to heat the communal space during winter and this was supplemented for cooking by a hibachi stove. Rather than electric refrigeration, a traditional bush “Coolgardie Safe,” which works by simple evaporative cooling, was used as a cold food store (ATU 1977, 16). A piano took up precious space, but underlined the commitment to interrogating what living in “ecological harmony” might require. An occupant of the house observed, And to the question asked surprisingly often by visitors to the house—“But is there a wind generator capable of running my 240-volt stereo system?” The answer might be—“take up the flute.” (54 Alma Street Darlington [1978?], 7)

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Photo by Tone Wheeler.

Figure 22.3 Filled beer bottles being laid by Fraser Clark (a visiting student from New Zealand) and Linda Haefeli.

Figure 22.4 Methane digester under construction, c. 1975. Courtesy of the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney. Photo by Tone Wheeler.

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The Material Life of the House The house functioned for about four years. In 1978 the university had the unoccupied structure bulldozed, claiming its unsightliness (Dale 1980). In trying to gauge the impact or success of the project, the students involved stressed the way that the shifting occupancy of the house changed its performance requirements. It underwent continual modification, and they observed that the building would never be finished in a conventional sense. This was not an orthodox design project. They argued that “as such it does not present ‘the answer’—it presents one specific view in a wide range of alternatives” (54 Alma Street Darlington [1978?], 1). Taking up their suggestion to shift assessment of the project away from the technical accomplishment of a completed, functioning house, an emphasis can be placed instead on their materialization of a dynamic space of socio-environmental, technological and political change. Occupied, observed, measured and publicly discussed by the students and others, the autonomous house brought together technological demonstration and social research with a form of moral enquiry (Figure 22.5). Engagement with an assortment of issues, from environmental pollution and resource depletion to consumerism and centralized industrialization, unfolded through the considered design, material framing and undertaking of activities such as washing, heating, cooking and defecating. While the initial aim was for a “demonstration” house, the project never offered a simple, or single, model for sustainable design. If it “failed” in that regard, however, it did not “fail” in all respects. The house became a site of public participation through architectural experimentation. A series of alternative technology fairs hosted at the house is the most obvious example. In a 1997 interview, Col James recalled thousands of people visiting what he and the student housebuilders, influenced by the ideas of Ivan Illich, envisaged as an experiment in opening up the university as a free public educational resource ( James, unpublished data). The house staged the fairs’ intersection of objects, bodies and discussions connected to environmental and social issues. An article in Undercurrents, the UK journal of alternative science and technology, described the range of ideas and objects on display, which included: solar cookers and ovens, solar cells running a kinetic sculpture, and a prototype solar house model (Baxter and Grayson 1976, 29). Children ran among the rabbit hutches, goat pen and the organic vegetable garden; organizations such as Friends of the Earth established information stalls; and public discussions were held on topics such as the energy crisis and permaculture. Posters produced by house residents for the fairs foregrounded the autonomous house as the integrating and enrolling element.6 Other aspects of the autonomous house project also generated conversations and rendered visible issues connected to ideas of self-sufficient and energy-efficient lifestyles. For example, attempts to raise productive animals—goats, pigs and rabbits—engendered conflict and dialogue with local authorities, adjacent university faculties and other neighbours, around issues of noise, disease and aesthetics ( Jane Dillon, unpublished data). A popular but unauthorized Indonesian restaurant was constructed and operated adjacent to the house by one of the students. He provided lunch each day, and kept ducks on site. Generating a surreptitious cool, the restaurant became part of the city’s arts scene (City of Sydney 2011). Almost every aspect of the design and construction of the house enrolled others in the negotiation of its living experiment, to varying ends. The sourcing of building components drew manufacturers and suppliers into dialogue about the intended use of their donated materials. The autonomous house occupants coaxed access to nearby university buildings to recharge batteries, shower and empty a portable chemical toilet. A presentation of the project to faculty resulted in protracted discussion about marginal gains in the solar collector surface’s thermal emittance (Wheeler, unpublished data). The students were also drawn into deliberation among themselves: the shifting roster of occupancy over its lifespan compelled a continual reassessment of the terms of living within the house. While some students simply desired the experience of designing and building something for themselves, others were very focused on exploring the environmental and societal implications of their living experiment. Occupation of the house changed the project’s disposition, reorienting it from a

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Figure 22.5 The bathroom, c. 1978.

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technical demonstration to an inhabited dwelling. The students involved weren’t the only ones to scrutinize what was going on at the house. News media reported on the project, including a television item by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and a documentary was made by the university’s media unit. A commercial television soap opera even used the house as a backdrop. This attention became something of a joke to the students: Some of us referred to it as [. . .] the celluloid house because it was much more a media thing than a real working thing, you know, I mean, we had a camp toilet, from the caravan, and we’d go and empty that in the toilets in Wentworth every morning [. . .] it didn’t really work, but it was full of noble intentions. (Hollo, unpublished data) The media attention highlights the way the autonomous house project breached its initial disciplinary focus—as a technical demonstration of design integration. Still, the participants were concerned with the project’s architectural significance. They wrote articles that appeared in Architectural Design (AD) and Architecture Australia, as well as producing a mail-order pamphlet explaining the project (ATU 1977; Wheeler 1975; 54 Alma Street Darlington [1978?]). A few designated themselves the faculty’s “Autonomous Technology Unit” and established an informal lending library of autonomous technology-related material. Media coverage and personal connections also brought an unanticipated stream of visitors to the house. The attention required the students to rethink the operation of the building. A schedule of opening times was developed, and the house occupants led visitors, including school groups, on guided tours. Col James described thousands of school children visiting over the life of the house: “twice a week to gawk and talk about systems and things” ( James, unpublished data). At one point OZ magazine co-editor Richard Neville was cajoled into painting the roof (Wheeler, unpublished data). The publicity and observation of the house fascinated the students. A section of their mail-order pamphlet about the project, 54 Alma Street Darlington, was titled “The Anomalous House—A Resident Reflects.” In it, the author contemplated the “strange” relationship visitors prompted by news articles and television programs had with the project: They see the Autonomous House as a meaningful thing: despite what you might tell them about there being barely enough wind power at all times to run the small electrical appliances and that the methane digester is not connected yet and maybe it won’t work so well anyway, or that we use a wood burning stove in winter to boost the solar space heating wall and overcome the heat leaks. (8) That hesitant reflection on the prospect of the autonomous house as a “prototype of the house of the future” was preceded by a series of sections that detailed various aspects of the house’s design and construction. These sections included technical details, frank evaluation of their performance, and the consideration of potential alterations to the fabric and occupation of the house. For example, ruminating on the dysfunctional and dismantled methane digestor, the authors envisaged future installation of a Clivus composting system for food scraps, human wastes, sawdust, ash and grass clippings; and they described potential lifestyle modifications: Experiments have been conducted on our diet—eating raw vegetables and fruits, “cooking with water rather than fire”, e.g. sprouting seeds and eating them. Reliance on cooking can be reduced and in Australia’s hot summers this is desirable. (6) 298

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By the end of the project it had become clear that the Sydney autonomous house was not an ideal model for sustainable living, and especially not an architectural exemplar. Rather, in retrospect, the life of the house transpired as an experimental scenario in which a technical solution for the initial aim of self-sufficiency and energy efficiency was not appropriate. A new mode of living was tested, requiring not only the production of new technologies but also new bodies, new cultural practices and their interrelationships. Apprehending the project in this way means treating the autonomous house not simply as an object passively constructed and deployed by the students but as itself “acting” with obduracy or fragility in the construction of a self-sufficient domestic setting. Taking this approach in developing a historical narrative about the project follows a recuperation of material thinking in fields as varied as urban, legal, postcolonial, feminist and performance studies (Bennett 2010; Harman 2005; Latour 1993; Miller 2005; Whatmore 2006). Associated theoretical developments have extended understandings of political participation beyond a mode of citizenship functioning through deliberation circumscribed within the public sphere. There is recognition of a far greater variety of locations, devices and genres through which participation occurs, and a conception of its forms and public representation as socio-material collectives (Kearnes and Chilvers 2015; Latour and Weibel 2005). More particularly, the expository framework deployed in this chapter assimilates developments in the social sciences, such as Bruno Latour’s conception of “dingpolitik,” that put socio-material objects at the centre of networks of concerned actors (Latour 2000; Latour and Weibel 2005). Latour and others in the field of science and technology studies have challenged modern understandings of the distribution of agency (as held by the social and exercised over the natural) and framings of democratic participation (as fundamentally discursive) (Barry 2013, Callon 1986, Latour and Woolgar 1986). Albena Yaneva’s studies of contemporary building design processes provide rich, consonant examples of the relevance of such methodologies to architecture (Yaneva 2009, 2017). This chapter puts aspects of such approaches to the socio-material to work in an historical context. As well as a renewed material thinking, this chapter also draws on scholarship that reframes understandings of experimental practices, suggesting that a greater diversity in their informational, technological and political environments can be recognized (Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe 2009, 67). Noortje Marres’s work notably brings together conceptions of material participation and public experimentation in thinking about the political implications of sustainable living projects (Marres 2009, 2012, 2013). Drawing extensively on pragmatist political theory, she concentrates on ways in which material settings can enable public participation in complex environmental issues through simple everyday actions (Marres 2012, 3). Marres also considers the contemporary phenomenon of “sustainable living experiments” in which people test environmentally conscious lifestyle changes for themselves, and report on them through public media, such as blogs. She emphasizes the novelty of their attempts to transform everyday material practices into practices of public involvement (Marres 2009, 2013). Marres’s concentration on everyday dealings with things and the material world informs this chapter’s approach to the history of architectural experiments in sustainability. It is used to open up for questioning understandings of experimental architecture as devices of problem-solving (Figure 22.6).

Conclusion: Understanding the Autonomous House In struggling with cold showers, sprouting seeds, recalcitrant methane digesters and unexpected visitors, the students at the autonomous house began to see architectural design as not just about constructing buildings but also about constructing questions and controversies. The house became a disputed site in which participation in the creation of an alternative future foregrounded the conflicts and interests of the different actors and objects involved. As an ecological design experiment it couldn’t provide answers to political questions, but it did generate questions that required political resolution. The intuition of the pamphlet’s “reflective resident” that the house was a different kind of 299

Courtesy of Tone Wheeler. Photo by Tone Wheeler.

Figure 22.6 Utopian Fair: 27–28 May 1978.

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architectural prototype (“I find it strange—even worrying”) points to the rebellious context for its production. The students were seeking ways to manifest a discontent that encompassed social, political and especially environmental concerns, a desire to reinvent the everyday, and a disillusionment with the profession they were entering. In understanding the students’ discontent, and the mode of participation they developed through the autonomous house project, we can look to the upheavals of Australia’s “sixties,” a period bookended by the 1965 decision to conscript soldiers for Vietnam and, a decade later, the progressive Whitlam government’s dismissal.7 In the midst of this, student radicals were pursuing a new kind of politics—often transnational—as global issues like Vietnam or apartheid in South Africa intersected with local concerns, such as compulsory national service, Aboriginal land rights, and civil liberties (Lothian 2005; Piccini 2016; Rootes 1988, 2015). Participants in the Sydney autonomous house project were profoundly affected by this atmosphere of social, political and institutional transformation, and the exchanges of an international counterculture. Student discontent and desire for change spurred transformation in the curriculum of the Architecture Faculty and made unconventional projects such as the autonomous house more possible (Hill and Lee Stickells 2012). Critique of architecture’s modernist orthodoxy also ran through the project, resonating with a broader, international disaffection among students of architecture (Stiles 1974, 63; Taylor 2003; Tin Sheds Gallery Archive).8 Working on the autonomous house bridged the participants’ ambitions to become design professionals and a strong ethos of self-sufficiency and artisanal competency that connected them with the 1960s counterculture, in which do-it-yourself homebuilding was a key practice (Farber 2016; Kern, 1975; Re, 1979; Stickells 2015). The self-built home was immensely appealing to those seeking a new way of life. It was consistently perceived as means to create “liberated spaces” for rethinking cultural practices, for gaining self-actualization through self-production, and achieving a relative autonomy from the money economy.9 The Sydney students saw the domestic realm as a critical space for experimentation and the material realization of such alternative lives. And their building techniques corresponded—they scavenged and scrounged materials, and they built frugally, with a raw aesthetic of assemblage—“funk,” to use the term that had begun to be applied in North America (Castillo 2015). The home was also an arena in which private action could align with planetary needs—ecological consciousness manifested through building. The 1970s saw a developing ecological consciousness open up a massive new problem-complex—linking industrial pollution, resource depletion, urban sprawl, consumerism, population growth, technological progress, habitat destruction and political crisis. Ecology became a philosophy of life, a source of political legitimacy, and a watchword of protest movements (Radkau 2013, 8, 114–171). Australia experienced its own convergence of environmental concerns in this period. In the early 1970s urban environmental campaigns developed innovative approaches that linked everyday places with broader ecological issues, exemplified by the green bans in Sydney. From 1973 the Whitlam government was even providing funding for environmental organizations, such as the Australian Conservation Foundation (Hutton and Connors 1999; Doyle 2000). Meanwhile, René Dubos had urged people to “Think Globally, Act Locally” at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. A powerful connection was being made between a global viewpoint and the local life world—including the implications of material dwelling choices. This was influenced by a countercultural environmentalism that gained significance during the 1970s, and tended to propose political action aligned with an agenda of radical personal transformation (Kirk 2007; Zelko 2013). Particularly through the influence of popular ecology, and other forms of holistic thought, nature was taken as a blueprint for living and a post-materialistic political order—influencing alternative modes of living focused on themes such as self-sufficiency, voluntary simplicity, bioregionalism and organic design (Wood 2010; Zelko 2004; LaFreniere 2008, 301–310). The oil shock of 1973 sharpened the sense that modern institutions were on the brink of collapse, and increased the emphasis on decentralization and domestic autonomy in discussions of a necessary 301

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paradigm shift. Architecture’s engagement with this situation involved experimentation—often connected to phenomena such as the alternative technology movement—with renewable energy and new forms of energy conservation, as well as alternative social models and lifestyles (Anker 2010; Blauvelt 2015; Denzer 2013; Macy and Bonnemaison 2003; Zardini and Borasi 2007). As one participant in the Sydney autonomous house framed their own experimentation, I and many of the other students felt that what was lacking was architects working with a much, much clearer idea and a purpose about how what we did sat within the environment, and sat within what we saw as a very inequitable social order. (Hollo, unpublished data) Interest within mainstream architectural culture about the counterculture’s rediscovery of ecology and the kind of “whole design” thinking it encompassed was short-lived.10 However, projects for prototypical autonomous houses reflected the fascination during the 1970s with the implications of ecological thinking for design (Stickells 2015). They were conceived as a means to recalibrate the “infrastructuring” of everyday life and reshape relationships between the household and interconnected environmental, societal and economic systems.11 The autonomous house as an ideal flourished around the world for about a decade from the late 1960s, and was described in a 1976 Architectural Design (AD) editorial as “one of the prevailing cult projects among the architectural avant garde” (3). It held strong appeal for the Sydney students, suggesting a clear, material response to their anxieties about architecture’s entanglement in socio-technical processes and an environmental totality. It seemed to allow a testing of architecture’s capacity to positively redirect technological change to take more account of social, environmental and human needs, as well as more accountability and public participation in the shaping of socio-technical processes. An exploration of the kind of living experiment carried out at the Sydney autonomous house can be useful in further developing histories of architecture’s entanglement with 1970s environmentalism. The students began with an ambition to showcase closed-systems ecological design but became enrolled in a faltering, real-life domestic setting that foregrounded unexpected dilemmas. Rather than a purely expert and technological problem that could eventually be solved through the design of more efficient devices and architectures, the life of the house disclosed that sustainability (as we might now frame it) needed to be understood as a cultural and political problem (Guy and Moore 2005). Architecture, in the autonomous house, became a propositional process, where new domestic spaces, new practices and new ways of cohabitation that a sustainable future might require began to emerge. Another dimension to the history of ecological design is suggested by attending to the political engagement undertaken in this form of experimentation. Rather than insistently chronicling architecture’s pursuit of technological fixes, it would assemble instances in which architecture’s material conditions have been key to prospecting more sustainable lifeworlds and the enabling of public participation in complex environmental issues through simple, everyday actions. Architecture’s enrolment in such living experiments offers a form of material participation in environmental politics, through the drawing of new connections and attachments between domestic bodies, technologies, environments and cultural practices.

Notes 1 Globally, through the 1960s and into the 1970s a constellation of liberatory movements around race, gender and sexuality emerged. Experiments with intentional communities, globally conscious environmentalism and a New Left politics that straddled international boundaries grew and spread. In Australia, by the early 1970s, the sociopolitical situation was transforming. The Labour Party won the Federal Election of 1972 and began a “New-Left” program of reforms immediately, including: withdrawal from the war in Vietnam, 302

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the introduction of anti-racial and gender discrimination legislation, universal public health care and the abolition of university tuition fees. 2 The 1970s’ second-wave feminism influentially framed inequality and oppression in personal and familial relations as a political question, and opened up public discussion of issues previously seen as private and therefore beyond public scrutiny. This powerful understanding of the personal as political resonated in other movements, such as for gay liberation. 3 “Designing Life Off the Grid: 1970s Prototypical Autonomous Houses” (Chief Investigator: Lee Stickells; University of Sydney Human Ethics Research Committee approval 2015/755). I am also grateful to Therese Kenyon for access to interview recordings with Col James, Peter Johnson (faculty dean in the 1970s) and Warren Julian (architectural science faculty member). The interviews were undertaken as part of her 1994 Tin Sheds Gallery history project, which resulted in the book Under a Hot Tin Roof (Kenyon 1995). 4 The green bans were a remarkable form of environmental activism formulated by the BLF in the 1970s. The builders’ labourers refused to work on projects that were environmentally or socially undesirable. The green bans movement, as it became known, was the first of its type in the world (Allaby 1983, 234; Burgmann and Burgmann 1998). 5 Anthony “Tone” Wheeler completed an honours thesis on autonomous housing. The material he gathered included slide photography of Steve Baer’s Zomeworks, Robert Reines’s Integrated Life Support Systems Labs, and Street Farmer’s Eco-House (Wheeler, unpublished data; Hollo, unpublished data; Dillon, unpublished data). 6 Mark Arbuz and Steven Stokes were architecture students who lived at the autonomous house and produced the posters. They were part of Earthworks Poster Collective, which focused on environmental issues, Aboriginal land rights, gay and lesbian rights, the women’s movement and the anti-nuclear movement. (Kenyon 1995). 7 Swept to victory in the 1972 federal election, Gough Whitlam’s Labour government used its three turbulent years in office to implement a strikingly progressive program of social and legislative reform, in areas such as law, social policy, the arts, land rights and foreign policy. 8 A 1970 issue of the Australasian Architecture Students’ Association (AASA) broadsheet, INK, captures this international connection. It reproduced impassioned statements from the London-based ARSe (Architects Revolutionary Socialist Enclave), the 1968 AIA New Haven conference, and students at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, which decried a profession that was ruled by bureaucracy and profit over social benefit. Two student-edited issues of the professional journal Architecture in Australia, in 1974 and 1975, severely criticized and satirized conventional educational and professional practice models. 9 In The Practice of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau influentially conceived of “liberated spaces” as those where assigned functionality is transgressed, revised and re-embodied through the everyday practices of dwellers (104–105). Spatial politics were important in the 1970s counterculture, and ideas of liberated spaces, or territory, operated as utopian counter-sites in the struggles for social change. 10 Architectural historian Simon Sadler coined the notion of “whole design” to describe aesthetic practices connected to the ecological thinking contained in the hippie directory of the Whole Earth Catalog (Sadler 2008). 11 In defining infrastructure, the sociologists Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker stress the relation between organized human “doing” and the social systems and technologies that support this, and they allow for understanding “infrastructuring” as a more comprehensive term for the creative design activities of professional designers and users (Star 1999; Bowker and Star 2002).

References 54 Alma Street Darlington. [1978?]. Sydney. Allaby, Michael, ed. 1983. Macmillan Dictionary of the Environment, 2nd edition. London: Macmillan. Alternative Technology Unit (ATU). 1977. “Australian Autonomy.” Architectural Design (AD) 47 (1): 15–17. Anker, Peder. 2010. From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Architectural Design (AD). 1976. Special Issue: “Autonomous Houses” 46 ( January). Architecture in Australia. 1974. 63 (February). Barry, Andrew. 2013. Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Baxter, Mark, and Russell Grayson. 1976. “Bottling Up the Sun: Details of a Self-Built Autonomous House in Sydney, New South Wales.” Undercurrents 18: 28–29. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blauvelt, Andrew, ed. 2015. Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center. 303

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Bonnemaison, Sarah, and Christine Macy. 2003. Architecture and Nature: Creating the American Landscape. New York: Routledge. Burgmann, Meredith, and Verity Burgmann. 1998. Green Bans, Red Union. Environmental Activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Callon, Michel. 1986. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay.” In Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge, edited by John Law, 196–233. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Callon, Michel, Pierre Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe. 2009. Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. Translated by Graham Burchell. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castillo, Greg. 2015. “Hippie Modernism: How Bay Area design radicals tried to save the planet.” Places Journal, October 2015, https://doi.org/10.22269/151026 Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendell. Berkeley: University of California Press. City of Sydney. 2011. “City of Sydney Oral History Project.” Accessed August 9th 2016. www.sydneyoralhis tories.com.au/ Dale, Jim (director). [1980?]. “Autonomous House.” Copy of 25-minute colour film. Sydney: University of Sydney Film Unit. Denzer, Anthony. 2013. The Solar House: Pioneering Sustainable Design. New York: Rizzoli. Devenish John. 1981. “Woolloomooloo.” Architecture Australia 70 (September): 55. Doyle, Timothy. 2000. Green Power: The Environment Movement in Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Farber, David. 2016.“Self-Invention in the Realm of Production: Craft, Beauty, and Community in the American Counterculture, 1964–1978.” Pacific Historical Review 85 (August): 408–442, doi:10.1525/phr.2016.85.3.408 Garbutt, Rob, Jacqueline Dutton, and Johanna Kijas. 2014. M/C Journal “Counterculture” special issue. 17 (December), accessed August 20th 2015. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/ view/930 Goad, Philip, and Julie Willis. 2012. Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Guy, Simon, and Steven A. Moore. 2005. Sustainable Architectures: Cultures and Natures in Europe and North America. London: Taylor & Francis. Harman, Graham. 2005. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago: Open Court. Hill, Glen, and Lee Stickells. 2012. “Pig Architecture.” Architecture Australia 101 (2): 75–77. Hutton, Drew, and Libby Connors. 1999. A History of the Australian Environmental Movement. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. INK. 1970. 4 (March). James, Colin. 1988. “Class War, Conflict, and the Rebirth of Woolloomooloo.” In The Design of Sydney: Three Decades of Change in the City Centre, edited by Peter Webber, 106–119. Sydney: The Law Book. Kearnes, Matthew, and Jason Chilvers, eds. 2015. Remaking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics. London: Routledge. Kenyon, Therese. 1995. Under a Hot Tin Roof: Art, Passion, and Politics at the Tin Sheds Art Workshop. Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press. Kern, Ken. 1975. The Owner-Built Home. New York: Scribner. Kijas, Johanna. 2011. Caravans & Communes: Stories of Settling in the Tweed 1970s & 1980s. Murwilumbah: Tweed Shire Council. Kirk, Andrew G. 2007. Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. LaFreniere, Gilbert F. 2008. The Decline of Nature: Environmental History and the Western Worldview. Dublin: Academia Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2000. “The Berlin Key or How to Do Words With Things.” In Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, edited by Paul Graves-Brown, 10–21. New York: Routledge. Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel, eds. 2005. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, second edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lothian, Kathy. 2005. “Seizing the Time: Australian Aborigines and the Influence of the Black Panther Party, 1969–1972.” Journal of Black Studies 34 (4): 179–200. Marres, Noortje. 2009. “Testing Powers of Engagement Green Living Experiments, the Ontological Turn and the Undoability of Involvement.” European Journal of Social Theory 12 (1): 117–133. 304

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———. 2012. Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2013. “Why Political Ontology Must Be Experimentalized: On Ecoshowhomes as Devices of Participation.” Social Studies of Science 43 (3): 417–443, doi: 10.1177/0306312712475255 Miller, Daniel, ed. 2005. Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Piccini, Jon. 2016. Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Radkau, Joachim, 2013. The Age of Ecology: A Global History. Cambridge: Polity Press. Re, Peter. 1979. Living Shelter: Handmade House in Australia. South Melbourne: Macmillan. Rootes, Christopher. 1988. “The Development of Radical Student Movements and Their Sequelae.” Australian Journal of Politics & History 34: 173–186, doi:10.1111/j.1467–8497.1988.tb01173.x ———. 2015. “Exemplars and Influences: Transnational Flows in the Environmental Movement.” Australian Journal of Politics & History 61: 414–431, doi:10.1111/ajph.12111 Sadler, Simon. 2008. “An Architecture of the Whole.” Journal of Architectural Education 4 (61): 108–129. Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist November 43 (3): 377–391. Star, Susan Leigh, and Geoffrey C. Bowker. 2002.“How to Infrastructure.” In Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs, edited by Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone, 151–162. London: SAGE. Stickells, Lee. 2015. “Exiting the Grid: Autonomous House Design in the 1970s.” In Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 32, Architecture, Institutions and Change, edited by Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan, 652–662. Sydney: SAHANZ. Stiles, Mark. 1974. “Contribution From Sydney University.” Architecture in Australia 63 (February): 63–64. Taylor, Jennifer. 2003. “In Memoriam: Professor RN (Peter) Johnson 1923–2003.” Archetype 10 (August): 8. Tin Sheds Gallery Archive, University of Sydney. Whatmore, Sarah. 2006. “Materialist Returns: Practising Cultural Geography in and for a More-Than-Human World.” Cultural Geographies 13 (4): 600–609. Wheeler, Tone. 1975. “Autonomous House Article.” Architecture in Australia 63, no. 4 (August 1974): 72–76. Wood, Linda Sargent. 2010. A More Perfect Union: Holistic Worldviews and the Transformation of American Culture after World War II. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yaneva, Albena. 2009. Made by the OMA: An Ethnography of Design. Rotterdam: 010. ———. 2017. Five Ways to Make Architecture Political: An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice. London: Bloomsbury. Zardini, Mirko, and Giovanna Borasi, eds. 2007. Sorry, Out of Gas: Architecture’s Response to the 1973 Oil Crisis. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture. Zelko, Frank. 2004. “Making Greenpeace: The Development of Direct Action Environmentalism in British Columbia.” BC STUDIES 142/143 (Summer/Autumn): 193–239. ———. 2013. Make It a Green Peace! The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism. New York: Oxford University Press.

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23 Salvage Salvation Counterculture Trash as a Cultural Resource Greg Castillo

Crediting hippie builders as socially engaged designers seems self-contradictory. The image of the hippie as a stoned, sybaritic loafer preoccupied with sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll was (and is today) the reigning cliché: a trope devised as much to exploit the newsstand appeal of counterculture “otherness” as to buttress the values of the postwar “consumer’s republic” mapped by cultural historian Lizabeth Cohen (2004). The carcass of the counterculture was subsequently appropriated by corporate interests and gutted for its fleece—the raw material from which to spin profits from music, fashion, herbal cosmetics, and organic granola bars (to mention a few commercial byproducts). Rather than reducing hippie culture to this lowest common denominator, this essay examines overlooked counterculture initiatives to devise a new materiality of trash. Hippie builders viewed waste as both a repressed material artifact of ecological degradation and, conversely, an underappreciated resource with which to create alternatives to postwar affluenza. In essence, salvage provided a path to salvation through recycling and “self-build” practices: the latter implying both the lay acquisition of construction skills and their use as a catalyst for self-education and the formation of new postwar subjectivities.

Hippie Power/ Knowledge “Advertisements for a Counter Culture,” a hallucinogenic insert within the otherwise staid July 1970 issue of Progressive Architecture, represents a key document of hippie design activism. A diagram created by Curtis Schreier of the Ant Farm art collective provided a glimpse into the varied hippie enterprises presented at the Freestone gathering, a counterculture design festival staged three months earlier on a bucolic farmstead 60 miles north of San Francisco (Figure 23.1). Held on the vernal equinox, Freestone marked the culmination of three consecutive conclaves offering what Whole Earth Catalog impresario Stewart Brand described as “a meld of information on Materials, Structure, Energy, Man, Magic, Evolution, and Consciousness” (Brand 1971, 112). Alloy, staged on the 1969 vernal equinox in New Mexico, celebrated the culture of hippie bricoleurs, as Andrew Kirk defines them: the “polymaths—carpenters, ex-servicemen, engineers, mathematicians, photographers, and scientists” who, as “jacks of all trades” and without formal design training, pioneered contemporary sustainability practices (Kirk 2016, 352). Peredam, the second in the series, sought to connect “those working within establishment research and academic worlds, and those living in intentional communities and working in so-called ‘underground’ enterprises” (Evans 1969; 306

Figure 23.1 Curtis Schreier, Freestone chart of Bay Area design activism, “Advertisements for a Counter Culture,” Progressive Architecture, July 1970.

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Lord quoted in Kallipoliti 2010, 411, 409).1 Organized by David Evans of the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute and held on a forested site north of Santa Barbara during the 1969 autumnal equinox, Peradam celebrated the cross-fertilization of Bay Area cybernetic and alternative cultures (Turner 2006). In deliberately scheduling these events to coincide with the celestial calendar, organizers synchronized their Aquarian activities with both cosmic and mechanical time: a manifestation of the philosophy that design historian Simon Sadler calls “hippie holism” (Sadler 2008, 2015). Summoned to Freestone by an invitation circulated by Sim Van der Ryn, a professor of architecture at UC Berkeley, groups and individuals exploring communal life, ecological sustainability, alternative education, guerilla theater, and grassroots urban planning gathered “to learn to design new social forms, new building forms, that are in harmony with life . . . to build a floating university around the design of our lives” (Wilson 1970, 70). The social engagement of Van der Ryn’s “floating university” can be traced in a set of experiments that merged educational and ecological activism through radical recycling, and which connected actors including Ant Farm; Hirshen/Van der Ryn Architects, sponsor of the Farallones Institute, a laboratory for sustainable and socially conscious design; Arch 284, a studio course in design-build activism taught by Van der Ryn at Berkeley; Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog; Zomeworks, a builder of structures derived from geodesics founded by Steve Baer, his wife, Holly, and associates; Pacific High School, the alternative academy celebrated for its geodesic building program in Lloyd Kahn’s Domebook series; and Bob Greenway and his partner, Salli Rasberry, alternative education proponents on whose land the Freestone gathering took place. Their deployment of design as an instrument of social change, while driven by a quest for self-awareness and ludic delight, undercuts stereotypes of the indolent, apolitical hippie concerned solely with self-gratification and psychedelic spectacle.

Children of the Revolution The author Salli Rasberry and her partner, Robert Greenway, a disciple of psychologist Abraham Maslow, retreated to the Sonoma County farm that hosted the Freestone gathering in order to embark on a joint project: compiling a catalogue of tactics to “free our children from the controls that warp their growth” (Rasberry and Greenway 1970, i). Both were leading figures in a “free school” movement that advocated a revolution in childhood learning practices. Hippies revered the child as the bearer of a privileged subjectivity—one that perhaps echoed their idealized self-portrayal as noble savages. The admiration was mutual, according to Bay Area cultural historian Theodore Roszak. In The Making of a Counter Culture, the 1969 bestseller that gave a movement its name, he wrote, “The hippie, real or as imagined, now seems to stand as one of the few images toward which the young can grow without having to give up the childish sense of enchantment and playfulness, perhaps because the hippie keeps one foot in childhood” (Roszak 1969, 39–40). For hippies, the archetypal child took many forms. The peripatetic Shivalila commune, located at the outer limits of the psychedelic cosmos, worshipped the tribe’s babies as incarnations of Neolithic simplicity.2 At the opposite end of the technological and generational spectrum, the elderly Buckminster Fuller, a visionary inventor and unapologetic technocrat, personified “the childlike innocence that many New Communalists sought to bring into their own adulthoods,” as historian Fred Turner notes (Turner 2006, 55). Cultural reactionaries inverted this fascination with the child’s subjectivity, portraying the 1960s as “no more than a long decade of arrested development that refused to pass into adulthood” (Watts 2012, 223). Defamatory as well as nostalgic descriptions of the hippie “youth culture,” while literally correct, remain myopically circumscribed in formulation. As Ron Miller, a scholar of postwar American pedagogy, points out, “nearly all historians of this era have overlooked the radical critique of education below the university level” (Miller 2002, 6). Although the free

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school movement was a central project of Bay Area hippies, historians of the counterculture mention it only in passing, if indeed at all. Free school doctrine reflected the hippie perception of cultural and political liberation as conjoined goals. “It is a revolutionary act to be involved in a free school,” Rasberry and Greenway declared. The free school rebellion meant “Saying ‘no’ to the heart of a culture . . . and establishing an alternative system for learning is an explicit rejection of a set of beliefs, and the web of premises, myths, rituals . . . that goes with [it].” Convinced that public schools had spiraled beyond reform, Rasberry and Greenway dedicated their manifesto, The Rasberry Exercises, “To the millions of children still in prison in the United States and to the handful of adults trying to spring them” (Rasberry and Greenway 1970, 37, frontispiece). To appreciate their rhetoric, contemporary readers must be reminded how far from humanist principles the vanguard of U.S. public education had strayed. In the mid-1960s, a novel building type, the windowless school, represented the latest advance in modern functionalism. When a Board of Education in Illinois considered the benefits of including windows in new school construction against “the availability of adequate artificial light,” “lower construction costs,” and the advantage of “a controlled environment wherein students would have their attention directed upon classroom activities,” board members “could not find sufficient reason that windows were absolutely necessary” (Salt and Karmel, 1967, 176). In 1967, Time magazine hailed Harlem’s windowless I.S. 201, the most expensive public school built to date in Manhattan, as “the city’s finest, an architectural gem and potentially an academic joy” (Time 1966).3 Batteries of psychological tests subsequently revealed what should have been intuitively obvious: that students deprived of any connection with the outside world for most of their waking hours suffered forms of “maladjustment,” ranging from institutional estrangement to “serious disturbances” (Salt and Karmel 1967, 176). Child psychologists implored school boards to prioritize the “mental health and educational growth of children” over “the economy of one building type over another, [or] the desire to be in the avantgarde of school architecture” (Salt and Karmel 1967, 178; Cannato 2001, 272–274). Having shaped an alternative culture and its values, hippie free schoolers chose to remove their children from an educational assembly line that they believed had been calibrated to nurture docile conformists, and which seemed poised to mass-produce a generation of neurotics as well. Free schools, according to Len Solo, coordinator of the Teacher Drop-out Center, were democratic, non-compulsory, and culturally and racially heterogeneous communities. All stakeholders shared in decision-making; children chose learning activities from a variety of meaningful experiences (Solo 1972). A regional surge in grassroots publishing proved crucial in fomenting the free school rebellion, as indicated by the subtitle of Rasberry and Greenway’s primer: How to Start Your Own School and Make a Book. New, reasonably priced, user-friendly technologies allowed neophytes to generate justified copy, shoot halftone images, and create camera-ready paste-ups that could be taken to any printer. The weapons of choice for shoestring outfits—an IBM Selectric composer and the Polariod MP-3 halftone camera—inaugurated desktop publishing decades before digital word processing and Internet blogs (Binkley 2007).4 The final step in DIY publishing, a trip to the printer, was easy in the Bay Area, which offered the greatest concentration of small, independent, politically progressive press shops anywhere in the world.5 Grassroots publishing initiates, in a transaction typical of the hippie gift economy, gladly showed ingenues the ropes. Rasberry learned how to make books in the garage of the Rancho Diablo estate in Menlo Park, the graphics studio set up by Stewart Brand for production of the Whole Earth Catalog, the first of the region’s alternative publications to achieve a sizeable national readership (with revenues to match). Big Rock Candy Mountain, a free school analogue of the Whole Earth Catalog, traced its origins to an offhand comment Brand had made to Sam Yanes, the groundskeeper at Rancho Diablo: “Would you be interested in tackling the educational part of what I’m doing here?” (Figure 23.2). His query suggests the freewheeling nature of hippie meritocracy, in which credentials did not ordain

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Figure 23.2 “Educational Environments—Play Sculpture,” Big Rock Candy Mountain: Resources for Our Education (Sam Yanes, editor), Winter 1970.

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qualifications, an individual’s calling was defined by whatever a person was passionate about doing rather than what he or she had been trained to do, and income served less as a mark of status than as a fungible resource.6 Brand’s suggestion, prompted by the recent founding of the New Schools Exchange at a Menlo Park conference a few months before, represented an attempt to make good on his own abortive initiatives predating the Catalog’s success. These included Brand’s attempt to launch an “educationist’s newsletter” with related teaching fairs, and “another doomed project,” the “E-I-E-I-O Electronic Interconnect Educated Intellect Operation.”7 Yanes accepted Brand’s proposition. A Brandeis graduate recovering from his own failed attempt to launch a Northern California commune, Yanes bequeathed its proposed name to the new catalog and procured a production grant from Brand’s benefactor, Dick Raymond of the Portola Institute. From start to finish, Big Rock Candy Mountain epitomized Brand’s motto “Fail young.” Youth was a time for experiments, according to Brand, “and if they didn’t work, so be it.”8 Salli Rasberry and Michael Philips canonized Brand’s aphorism in a counterculture business bestseller, The Seven Laws of Money (1974). Portola Institute funding echoed his aphorism: projects received a threeyear lifeline, after which they were expected to dissolve. Without any prior exposure to free school debates on pedagogy, Yanes absorbed them “on the fly.” His start-up journal duplicated the Whole Earth Catalogue format, size, and interior layout; used the same production equipment; contracted printing to the same press; and relied on the same distributor, Book People in Berkeley (Kirk 2007, 47; Phillips 1974).9 Both publications elevated the ragged style of political leaflets and underground ­newspapers—derived from urgent circumstances and skinflint production—as a graphic arts aesthetic. With their cheap saddle binding, cut-and-paste illustrations, and a patchwork of typefaces leavened by snippets of amateur calligraphy and hand lettering, Portola Institute publications exuded a homespun quality that mainstream publishers found risibly crude, but that telegraphed hippie credentials by embedding traces of the handmade within a mass-produced commodity (Binkley 2007, 101–128). Big Rock Candy Mountain echoed Brand’s belief that “access to tools,” as announced on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalogue, would be pivotal in the construction of a counterculture. Yanes’s free school analogue showcased structures tailored to “self-build” activities, in both the literal and figurative senses. “Free schools have a fantastic opportunity to enjoy space in new ways, to experiment with indoor-outdoor stuff,” Rasberry and Greenway wrote. “Kids building spaces and then learning what’s unique to that space” nurtured antiauthoritarian and ecological values, they maintained: “learning how to be active rather than submissive when involved with man-made things; and submissive rather than active when involved with natural environments” (Rasberry and Greenway 1970, 105, 108). The tools for creative learning featured in Big Rock Candy Mountain also were on display at the Freestone gathering, which resembled a free school trade fair. Children painted on paper, themselves, and each other at an outdoor “kids art” area. They clambered over a space-frame play structure assembled on site by its makers, Steve Baer and his associates at Zomeworks. They romped with their parents inside and atop Ant Farm’s low-pressure polyethylene “Pillow” inflatable—commissioned by a rock concert promoter in Japan, used as a “bad trips pavilion” for therapy seekers at the Altamont Speedway music festival, and promoted by its makers as the “antithesis to River City Union High’s anti-environment.” According to Ant Farm confederates, inflatables excelled both functionally and spatially as pedagogically indeterminate objects: “The freedom and instability of an environment where the walls are constantly becoming the ceiling and the ceiling the floor and the door is rolling around the ceiling somewhere releases a lot of energy that is usually confined by the xyz planes of the normal box room,” announced the group’s Inflatocookbook, a self-published, do-it-yourself manual (Ant Farm 1970, n.p.). The spidery playground climbers manufactured by dome-building pioneer Steve Baer boasted similar free school credentials. Baer first experimented with zonahedral structures in the mid1960s at Drop City, the Colorado commune whose meteoric rise and drugged-out disintegration provided one of the templates for a mass-media “hippie death-trip” master narrative (Rabbit 1971; Sadler 2006; Curl 2007; Fairfield 2010; Matthews 2010; Elder 2012, 3–20). Journalists were far less 311

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interested in the story of hippie social activism entailed in Baer’s creation of a joint-stock company specializing in innovative educational resources. Zomeworks climbers, hauled cross-country in a repurposed school bus for on-site demonstrations, arrived in bundles of steel struts and aluminum connectors “easily assembled in almost any shape imaginable” by “a group of kids with wrenches and a brief introduction to the system” (Zomeworks 1970, 27). Alternative space-making also built the collective morale called for in free school manifestos. At the troubled Pacific High School in Santa Cruz, too often used by well-heeled parents as a drop zone for difficult teenagers, a singular moment of group cohesion occurred when students began building communal geodesic residences under the tutelage of carpenter-turned-dome-guru Lloyd Kahn. “Last year they were best known for sex and dope, but this year the focus is on building domes for kids to live in,” announced the unfazed authors of Progressive Architecture’s “Advertisements for a Counter Culture” (Wilson 1970, 73; Kaye 1972).

Alternative U Hippies disdained academia, particularly California’s “multiversity” system, explicitly designed to boost postwar industrial and economic expansion. However, regional universities bankrolled the cognitive capital of Bay Area counterculture. Cheap, state-subsidized tuition brought a continuous stream of intellectually adept and politically impassioned students to contribute volunteer labor to activist ventures. The Berkeley free speech movement of 1964 and the creation of People’s Park in 1969 both demonstrated how shared ideas could forge collective agency among thousands of individual actors (as well as the university’s unintended ability to construct communities through shared antipathy to its policies). While academia may have been reviled, pacts with the leviathan established strategic outposts that straddled “outlaw” and “inlaw” realms, as Stewart Brand called them.10 At UC Berkeley’s Department of Architecture, Sim Van der Ryn conducted an ambitious set of experiments in free school spatial pedagogy, beginning with Architecture 284, a 1969 graduate design studio focused on DIY building systems devised as classroom interventions. The network of participants included hippie free schoolers, University of California scholars, Berkeley Unified School District administrators, and Ford Foundation officers, as revealed by Marta Gutman, a historian of designed environments for children (Gutman 2014). As one of the first U.S. cities to voluntarily integrate its public schools, Berkeley became a case study in the inequities of educational apartheid. Students with incommensurable differences in preparation suddenly shared the same grade level, with chaotic results.11 In a meeting with the local superintendent of schools, Van der Ryn prescribed a radical reconfiguration of classrooms and offered to enlist architecture students to designer “liberated spaces” for the foundering school district. A Ford Foundation architect-in-residence grant supported what became known as the “Odyssey” initiative. Its “Active Learning Environments” curriculum proposed craft instruction using recycled materials and new pedagogical methods introduced through classroom consultations staged as “happenings” (Gutman 2014). In 1968, architecture students installed a prototype “math-science playground,” in the basement of UC Berkeley’s new Lawrence Hall of Science, where students learned in “an environment filled with domes, soft inflatables, climbing toys, ropes, and parachutes” (Gutman 2014). Citing excessive noise and behavioral incompatibilities, the science facility asked the experimental program to vacate its premises in 1971, exiling Odyssey to the school district’s more conventional classroom spaces. Architecture students charged with devising the Odyssey crafts curriculum not only provided new childhood learning experiences but also in the process brought free school philosophy into their own graduate student education. Their design interventions included “super-carrels” that parceled homogenous schoolroom space into stacked units occupied in the manner of an informal urban settlement. Within a modular wooden scaffold, children used cardboard or fabric partitions to create personalized environments posted with rules for use, permitting a degree of autonomy previously 312

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unknown in primary school settings. “The Quiet Room—Girls Welcome,” announced one carrel sign, with a list of “restrictions” that included “no socking holes in the wall,” “no banging on the roof,” and “no loud or profane talking.”12 The Odyssey experiment also introduced children to ecology and recycling through “the Eagle,” a surplus U.S. mail van converted into an ad hoc “school on wheels” by Jim Campe, a Van der Ryn student and collaborator. The van roamed the East Bay for scrap materials suitable for reuse in craft projects, dropping off gleanings at participating schools and picking up kids for participatory scavenging (Wilson 1970, 76).13 A promotional flyer features a photo of the van and its road crew in an East Berkeley industrial neighborhood under the headline “Trash Can Do It” (Figure 23.3). Campe is behind the wheel; Van der Ryn stands on a garbage can pedestal surrounded by architecture students. Some hold bin lids, and others gaze at the “Dial a Pile” motto mounted on their “reverse garbage truck.” The group portrait conveys the impact of ecological consciousness in Berkeley, which in the late 1960s was one of the few towns in America where parents could be persuaded that having children collect and reuse rubbish constituted a progressive agenda for educational reform. Free school theory, hippie environmentalism, communitarian idealism, and salvage bricolage came together as an integrated architectural practice in a studio offered by Van der Ryn and Campe during the 1971–1972 academic year. Listed in the Berkeley course catalog as Arch102: “Integrated Synthesis of the Design Determinants of Architecture,” the course recruited participants for an entire academic year of research and construction on a forested hillside adjacent to the Point Reyes National Seashore in Marin County. This “on-site experience in the theory and practice of basic building design, land use, and village technology” offered practical know-how on “Making a Place in the Country”: a nod to the hippie back-to-the-land movement.14 The course content also acknowledged disenchantment among hippie builders with their homegrown versions of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesics. With scores of roofing seams, low-tech domes had turned out to be particularly unsuited to rainy climates. After two installations of his bestselling Domebook, created on the model established by the Whole Earth Catalogue, Lloyd Kahn repudiated geodesics as the all-purpose solution to counterculture housing. Persuading him that Fuller’s domes were a form of industrial design rather than architecture, Kahn’s coeditor, Bob Easton, introduced him to Bernard Rudofsky’s 1964 exhibition catalogue Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-pedigreed Architecture.15 “In the past year,” Kahn wrote in 1972, we have discovered that there is far more to learn from the wisdom of the past: from structures shaped by imagination, not mathematics, and built of materials appearing naturally on the earth, than from any further extension of whiteman technoplastic prowess. (Kahn and Easton 1973, 112) In addition to being cheap and dependable, low-tech construction also coincided with counterculture politics, according to Kahn’s analysis. “In addition to the practical and aesthetic disadvantages I’ve found in plastics, there is the idea that one is dealing with Dow and the oil industry—that is, the people [U.S. President Richard] Nixon works for” (Kahn and Easton 1973, 113). A demonstration by MIT’s Architecture Machine Group at a construction technology conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, completed Kahn’s conversion to vernacular building. “I was particularly disturbed by the vision of the architect sitting at the cathode tube, drawing his design into the computer, the computer causing the [polyurethane] foam truck to build the house. The ultimate in laziness, machine worship” (Kahn and Easton 1973, 113). In Berkeley, reformist design pedagogy, as conceived by Van der Ryn and Campe, would instead explore hands-on vernacular building methods using salvaged materials: practices antithetical to the cybernetic future being invented at MIT. Far from rejecting advances in science and technology, the skills advanced in “Making a Place in the Country” fused new ecological modes of analysis with older building traditions and cultures 313

Figure 23.3 James Campe, “Trash Can Do It,” Farallones Designs poster, c. 1969.

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of land custodianship. Mornings were devoted to workshops in skills needed to establish a rural foothold, including “adapting to the natural environment,” site mapping, shelter design, tool use, carpentry and wood frame construction, and “energy and waste systems.” These fundamentals were supplemented by afternoon and evening seminars conducted by visitors “expert in areas of knowledge or technique relevant to our interests.” The course syllabus lists on-site talks on “Mobile Life Styles” by members of the Ant Farm collective; graphic documentation by Gordon Ashby, an alumnus of the Eames design office and special issue editor of the Whole Earth Catalog; material properties of wood by the sculptor J. B. Blunk; regional ecology by Gordon Onslow Ford, a former member of André Breton’s circle of Paris surrealists and a disciple of the San Francisco Zen master Hodo Tobase; ecopsychology by free school and wilderness-therapy advocate Robert Greenway; and “scrounging” by Doug Hall, a member of the San Francisco T. R. Uthco art collective.16 The variety of guests and breadth of their lectures perfectly convey the expanded field of counterculture design theory and practice and its heady mix of empirical, spiritual, and aesthetic epistemologies. Over the course of the academic year, the architecture students constructed what amounted to a DIY village. It coalesced around “the Arc,” a building workshop and drafting studio that also served as a communal dining room and lounge. Surrounding it sprang up personal sleeping cabins and treehouse roosts, a sauna, a cookhouse, an outdoor oven, collective shower facilities, a composting outhouse, and a self-composting chicken coop. Building progress conformed to the stages of embodied knowledge acquisition outlined by Kahn in Shelter. “There is wisdom, especially for a new builder, in starting small, simply, and heeding local advice,” he counseled. You can watch the rising and setting of the sun and moon, study outlook and orientation, learn about seasonal temperatures and wind direction, rainfall: the many considerations that should help you decide what kind of house will suit your needs and fit the site. . . . You will change during the building process. (Kahn and Easton 1973, 37) Acquiring building materials through scrounging rather than a cash transaction also proved transformative, imparting a new skill set that internalized abstract understandings of environmental sustainability. “Wrecking is a way of thinking, a totally different approach to building than working with new materials,” Kahn maintained in his catalogue of vernacular shelters (Kahn and Easton 1973, 80). Under the heading “The Only Growing Resource Is Trash,” he advised, “If you find a condemned or abandoned building you can often arrange with the owner to tear it down and clean the site in exchange for salvaged materials” (Kahn and Easton 1971, 65). Berkeley studio communards scavenged old-growth redwood planks from chicken coops abandoned by the local poultry industry in its switch to factory farming. Dismantling ramshackle sheds, scraping chicken droppings from salvaged wood, and trucking the hard-won gleanings back to camp, each student earned a new nom de guerre, celebrated with certificates that entitled holders “to be known to all as an outlaw builder, with all the rights and privileges attached thereto” (Van der Ryn 2005, 40). In one sense, the “outlaw” moniker was no joke: nothing that the students built conformed to code requirements or had been granted a building permit. Salvaged wooden doors, windows, and siding made the student village a case study in funky hippie bricolage. Students produced a joint-authored final report on the experimental studio in the form of an underground publication, Outlaw Building News, which sold out as fast as it could be printed (Figure 23.4). Assessing her hippie apprenticeship, a participant wrote, “This . . . was the first in 13 years of school where community and environment were not contradicted but constructed” (Van der Ryn et al. 1972, n.p.). It was a “life architecture class,” reflected another, an opportunity to “build a house in which my physical self could exist and . . . a consciousness in which my spiritual self could exist” (Van der Ryn et al. 1972, n.p.). The studio’s idyllic alternative to the violence and social turmoil 315

Photo courtesy of James Campe.

Figure 23.4 “The Arc” communal room and drafting studio under construction, UC Berkeley “Outlaw Builder Studio,” Inverness, California, 1972.

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gripping campuses engaged in protest against the Vietnam War struck some as escapist: “My social conscience tells me that I’m playing elitist games,” commented an outlaw builder (Van der Ryn et al. 1972, n.p.). “We share some belief in what we are doing as a way to learn about ourselves and about building,” Van der Ryn reflected. “We shared few explicit esthetics except perhaps a common regard for the land, and a desire to use as many salvaged and native materials as possible” (Van der Ryn et al. 1972, n.p.). Mixing formal instruction in scrounging, nomadics, and eco-metaphysics with a blithe disregard for zoning regulations and building codes, Van der Ryn’s course offering epitomized the “disturbance of the sensible” associated with acts of dissensus, as defined by Jacques Rancière, a belated contributor to free school philosophy.17 Van der Ryn’s experiments in design pedagogy, conducted within an academic program certified by the National Architectural Accrediting Board, created to regulate and reproduce established professional competencies, established his preeminance as a go-between linking students enrolled in an accredited school of architecture with Bay Area purveyors of hippie expertise in environmentalism, philosophy, and aesthetics. In drafting his subsequent project proposal for an “ecotectural house,” Van der Ryn understood that many of his contemporaries would find its features alienating—not just aesthetically but also in terms of prevailing norms of domesticity. Rather than accepting the role of the postwar American home as a platform for affluent consumption, he called for homes that facilitated energy and food production as well as waste recycling. The project’s twin goals were to reduce resource use and, just as important, to make conspicuous the resident’s place within broader ecological structures. “The idea of ecotecture is to design in terms of the smallest coherent system, so that we become aware and thus responsible for the effects of our actions” Van der Ryn (1972, n.p.) asserted. Encouraging residents to see holistically would redefine the communal household as “a mini ecosystem in which rabbits, chickens, fish, honeybees, plants, microbes, and people interact in a flourishing example of interrelated self-reliance.”18 In contrast to the Foucauldian notion of biopower and biopolitics, in which human subjects are the sole sources of animate agency, Van der Ryn’s philosophical grounding in “hippie holism,” as design historian Simon Sadler calls it, regarded the biological community—from plants, animals, and insects to the microorganisms breaking down composting toilet waste—as “a partner in life on Earth” (Sadler 2015, 118). Graduate architecture students at Berkeley provided the research and development talent required to create a prototype for ecotectural home technology. In 1973 they erected a multistory timber scaffold supporting a patchwork of machine parts as the final project for Van der Ryn’s “Natural Energy Design” studio. Built largely from lumber salvaged from a demolished barn, their “Energy Pavilion” incorporated a wind-driven electrical generator, homemade solar collectors, rainwater reservoir barrels, a greenhouse bedded with lettuce and snow peas, and a composting toilet. The ungainly structure was, in fact, the freestanding service core of Van der Ryn’s planned ecotectural house. Local news reports attracted long lines of visitors as well as the unwelcome attention of the Campus Committee on Grounds and Buildings, which demanded the structure’s immediate ­demolition—but not before a wealthy young donor, Harlow Daugherty, offered funds to continue the project through the Farallones Institute, headquartered at the Hirshen/Van der Ryn design office (Van Der Ryn 2005, 45–46). As word of Van der Ryn’s experiment spread, his counterculture enterprise network expanded to include Sterling Bunnell, a psychiatrist; Helga Olkowski, an ecologist and avid gardener; and her husband, Bill Olkowski, an entomologist and cofounder of the Berkeley Ecology Center. With enthusiastic Berkeley students again providing labor, they created an urban demonstration home as a foil to the “back to the land” rural commune movement (Stickells 2016). A run-down worker’s cottage previously used as a drug rehab center in Berkeley’s industrial district became an ecotectural demonstration home through the addition of a greenhouse, solar collectors, rabbit and chicken pens, raised vegetable beds, beehives, an aquaculture pond, a windmill built of recycled oil drums, and a composting toilet. Despite its conceptually radical remodeling, the unassuming exterior form of the 317

Figure 23.5 Gordon Ashby, “New Possibilities Show” poster for the California Office of Appropriate Technology (OAT), 1977. Courtesy of Gordon Ashby.

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cottage assured that it would be ignored by professional architecture journals. For over a decade, a resident student collective gathered data, hosted weekend visitors, and contributed to the 1979 Sierra Club monograph The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City, one of the earliest guides to sustainable household design (ibid., 47–51; Reynolds, “Urban Homesteading.”). As the first California state architect, a new office created by Governor Edmund ( Jerry) Brown Jr., Van der Ryn took the campaign for sustainable domestic technology into the streets, quite literally. Moving his field of action from design studios to public service, he organized the Office of Appropriate Technology, a state organization promoting innovations in alternative energy production and resource conservation across all scales of consumption. Van der Ryn commissioned another alumnus of the Freestone gathering, Gordon Ashby, to design a traveling exhibition on home energy efficiency. In May 1977, the brightly painted trailer of “The New Possibilities Show” began its statewide circuit (Figure 23.5). Five years later it still was making rounds of schools and colleges, corporate parks, and shopping centers, demonstrating simple home technologies of solar energy, water conservation, and recycling to 250,000 visitors yearly (Office of Appropriate Technology 1982, 25–26). Ashby’s promotional graphics for the New Possibilities Show remained true to the project’s hippie roots: a genealogy apparent in his use of the mandala as a means of visualizing ecological holism. Although an entering Republican governor, George Deukmejian, eliminated the Office of Appropriate Technology in 1983 as one of his first acts upon taking office, the legacy of the New Possibilities Show and its counterculture imperatives of ecological activism and sustainable design had been firmly planted at the grassroots level, and proved impossible to extinguish through neoconservative fiat.

Notes 1 http://who1615.com/pdfs/EarlyContactwithSBrandplus5pp.pdf, accessed 22 April 2016. The document provides evidence that the Peradam event occurred in September 1969 rather than “the fall of 1970,” as stated by Chip Lord in an oral history interview with Linda Kallipoliti. 2 Shivalila members are interviewed in the documentary Commune, DVD, 78 min., Five Points Media, New York, 2005; the cult’s philosophy is reviewed on a website dedicated to its founder, Gridley Wright: gridleywright.com, accessed 2 February 2015. 3 Marta Gutman, “Spaces of Childhood: A Radical Agenda for Design and Research,” paper presented at Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley, 30 October 2014; “Radical by Design: The Odyssey School in Berkeley,” paper presented at the Society of Architectural Historians conference, Pasadena, 7 April 2016. 4 Sam Yanes, interview with author, 1 February 2015. 5 Lincoln Cushing,“Red All Over: Political and Countercultural Printshops of the SF Bay Area,” lecture at San Francisco Public Library, 13 April 2014: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU9CsU0aZfQ&feature=youtu.be, accessed 1 February 2015. 6 Sam Yanes, interview with author, 1 February 2015. 7 Guide to the New Schools Exchange Records, MS 889, Yale University Library http://drs.library.yale.edu/ HLTransformer/HLTransServlet?stylename=yul.ead2002.xhtml.xsl&pid=mssa:ms.0889&clear-stylesheetcache=yes, accessed 1 February 2015. 8 Sam Yanes, interview with author, 1 February 2015. 9 Sam Yanes, interview with author, 1 February 2015. 10 Interview with Gordon Ashby, Pt. Reyes Station, CA, 14 November 2014. 11 Ibid. A brief oral history of school desegregation in Berkeley by Gabrielle Morris, “Carol Sibley: A School Board Member Champions the Integration of the Berkeley Public Schools,” can be found at www.youtube. com/watch?v=-aw194sEeCQ#t=13, accessed 31 January 2015. 12 Photo 12–073–261, Jim Campe collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley. 13 Photos 12–073–169–186 and 12–073–278, Jim Campe collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley. 14 Sim Van der Ryn and Jim Campe, “Course Description” for Architecture 102ABC, Fall 1971, 1–2. 15 Author interview with Bob Easton, Berkeley, 6 May 2016. 319

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1 6 Van der Ryn and Campe, “Course Description,” 5. 17 In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, published a generation after the free school movement swept American counterculture, Rancière argued for educators to abandon any notion that children suffer from a knowledge deficit and instead approaching the classroom as a collective of equals pursuing intellectual self-fulfillment in virtually unlimited directions. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). His theory of dissensus is elaborated in Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2010). 18 Sim Van der Ryn, “Abstract of a Proposal to Build an Ecotectural House,” November 1972, unpaginated; Sim Van der Ryn papers (uncatalogued), University of California Environmental Design Archives; Julie Reynolds, “Urban Homesteading: The Integral Urban House,” Mother Earth News, November/December 1976 (www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/urban-homesteading-zmaz76ndztak. aspx, accessed 20 March 2015).

References Anonymous, “Windowless School Under Siege as Negroes, City Fight for Control,” The Lewiston Daily Sun (26 September 1966). Anonymous,“Who Builds a School Without Windows?” undated. http://newyorkers.livejournal.com/4706084. html (accessed 11 March 2015) Ant Farm, Inflatocookbook (San Francisco, CA: Ant Farm, 1970). Binkley, Sam, Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Brand, Stewart, “Alloy,” in Stewart Brand, ed., The Last Whole Earth Catalog (New York: Random House, 1971). Cannato, Vincent, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 272–274. Cohen, Lizabeth, A Consumer’s Republic (New York: Vintage, 2004). Curl, John, Memories of Drop City, the First Hippie Commune of the 1960s and the Summer of Love: A Memoir (New York: Universe, 2007). Elder, Erin, “How to Build a Commune: Drop City’s Influence on the Southwestern Commune Movement,” in Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, eds., West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 3–20. Evans, David, Peradam Invitation, undated (September 1969), http://who1615.com/pdfs/EarlyContactwith SBrandplus5pp.pdf (accessed 22 April 2016). Farifield, Richard, The Modern Utopian: Alternative Communities of the ’60s and ’70s (Los Angeles, CA: Process, 2010). Gutman, Marta, “Spaces of Childhood: A Radical Agenda for Design and Research,” unpublished paper presented at Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley, 30 October 2014. Gutman, Marta, “Radical by Design: The Odyssey School in Berkeley,” unpublished paper presented at the Society of Architectural Historians conference, Pasadena, 7 April 2016. Kahn, Lloyd and Easton, Bob, eds., Domebook 2 (Bolinas: Shelter, 1971). Kahn, Lloyd and Easton, Bob, eds., Shelter (Bolinas: Shelter, 1973). Kallipoliti, Linda, “Interview with Chip Lord and Curtis Shreier,” in Beatriz Colomina, Craig Buckley, and Urtzi Grau, eds., Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196X to 197X (Barcelona: Actar, 2010), 409–411. Karmel, Louis J., “Effects of Windowless Classroom Environment on High School Students,” Perceptual and Motor Skills, no. 20 (1965): 277–278. Kaye, Michael S. The Teacher Was the Sea: The Story of Pacific High School (New York: Links, 1972). Kirk, Andrew, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007). Kirk, Andrew, “Alloyed: Counterculture Bricoleurs and the Design Science Revival,” in David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray, eds., Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 305–336. Matthews, Mark, Droppers: America’s First Hippie Commune, Drop City (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010). Miller, Ron, Free Schools For Free People: Education and Democracy After the 1960s (Albany: University of New York Press, 2002). Office of Appropriate Technology, OAT’s Sixth Year: Summary of Accomplishments (Sacramento: The Office, 1982): 25–26.

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Phillips, Michael, Raymond, Dick, Rasberry, Salli, and Brand Stewart, The Seven Laws of Money (New York: Random House, 1974). Progressive Architecture, Vol. 51, No. 7 (1 July 1970). Rabbit, Peter, Drop City (New York: Olympia Press, 1971). Rasberry, Salli and Greenway, Robert, The Rasberry Exercise How to Start Your Own School (and Make a Book) (Freestone, CA: Freestone, 1970). Roszak, Theodore, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969). Sadler, Simon, “Drop City Revisited,” Journal of Architectural Education 58, no. 1 (2006): 5–14. Sadler, Simon, “An Architecture of the Whole,” Journal of Architectural Education 61, no. 4 (2008): 108–129. Sadler, Simon, “Mandalas or Raised Fists? Hippie Holism, Panther Totality, and Another Modernism,” in Andrew Blauvelt, ed., Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2015). Salt, Syd and Karmel, L.J., “The Windowless School,” The Clearing House 42, no. 3 (November 1967): 176–177. Solo, Len, “Some of Our Children May Live: A Study of Students in Alternative and Innovative Schools” (PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1972; cited in Miller, Free Schools For Free People, 60). Stickells, Lee, “The Integral Urban House: Architecture and Sustainable Living Experiments,” paper presented at the Society of Architectural Historians conference, Pasadena, 7 April 2016. Time, “Integration: The Sorry Struggle of I.S. 201,” vol. 88, no. 4 (September 30, 1966). Turner, Fred, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 55. Van der Ryn, Sim, “Abstract of Proposal to Build an Ecotectural House” (Unpublished) (1972). Van der Ryn, Sim, Design for Life: The Architecture of Sim Van der Ryn (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2005). Van der Ryn, Sim, et al., “Inventory,” Outlaw Building News (1972), n.p. Watts, Michael, “Caught on the Hop of History: Communes and Communards on the Canvas of ’68,” in Iain Boal, Jennifer Stone, Michael Watts, and Cal Winslow, eds., West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012). Wilson, Forest, Editorial Introduction, “Advertisements for a Counterculture” Progressive Architecture 51, no. 6 ( June, 1970): 70. Zomeworks, Big Rock Candy Mountain (San Francisco, CA: Zomeworks, 1970).

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Part VII

Mapping Engagement

24 Marginality, Urban Conflict and the Pursuit of Social Engagement in Latin American Cities Felipe Hernández

The last decade of the twentieth century marked an important shift in the study of Latin American architecture and urbanism. Previously, most attention had been given to mainstream practices, particularly to the way in which architects throughout the continent had appropriated and developed modern architecture, producing some of the most extraordinary buildings and urban assemblages of the century. The rapid growth of cities during the second half of the century, however, drew attention to the economic realities of a vast urban population. Tremendous disparities between the wealthier elites and the poor became apparent, as did the lack of infrastructure to accommodate a growing population of urban poor. Thus, since the late 1950s, there have been numerous and extensive studies looking into the causes of poverty and underdevelopment. Theories like ‘modernization’, ‘developmentalism’, ‘marginality’ and ‘dependency’ attempt to explain why Latin American nations remained poor while nations in the West/North became wealthier. Such theories inspired policies to alleviate poverty, mostly by attempting to generate employment with the aspiration that Latin America could play a more active role in the global economy. The lack of infrastructure was addressed through the construction of largescale social housing schemes—which often implied relocating people from slums to peripheral, poorly serviced, areas. To support new social housing schemes governments also invested in public facilities like schools, universities and hospitals. It is not the purpose here to evaluate the success of twentieth-century urban policies and interventions, nor is my intention to criticize governments for past—even present—­ failures. Instead I want to draw attention to the fact that key social issues, such as race, gender and even the origin of urban populations, never received the necessary attention.‘The poor’ were conceived as an undifferentiated mass of marginalized people who needed support to enter the economy. This resulted in policies which, in spite of their good intentions and legal sophistication, could simply not accomplish their goals because the subjects whose lives they intended to improve were Black, Indigenous, or female or simply because they were rural migrants. These conditions prevented ‘the poor’ from being employed, buying a house, starting a business and even from getting a place at university. In her most recent book, Favela: Four Decades Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro, Janice Perlman (2010) complains that [w]hile much has been written about race and gender in Brazil, there is no work I have seen comparing racism or sexism with other forms of exclusion based on place of residence, place of community (central or peripheral) and place of origin (Rio de Janeiro versus migrant). (Perlman 2010, 153) 325

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I have argued elsewhere that the historical prevalence of these issues, in Brazil and other countries in Latin America, has materialized in geographies of social fragmentation that are clearly perceptible in the fabric of cities today (Hernández 2017, 3–49). Perlman demonstrates how the residents of favelas in Brazil are mainly Black or darker than the people who live in affluent areas. In his book Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities, Carl Nightingale argues that the residents of poor neighbourhoods around the world are generally darker-skinned than those in the more affluent areas (Nightingale 2012). These conditions of racial exclusion and geographical segregation have caused deep-rooted problems in many Latin American cities, from urban fragmentation to social conflict. In this chapter I revisit the concept of marginality. Used originally in the 1960s and abandoned in the 1970s, the term has returned to scholarly discourse. Recent interpretations of marginality appear to be useful to study certain conditions inherent in the fragmented urban fabric of Latin American cities. Among those conditions are social dis-identification and spatial discontinuity. The former refers to the way people in deprived communities protect themselves against derogatory representations and the latter refers to the physical disarticulation caused by such protective attitudes. Both conditions obstruct social engagement, which is essential for the development of cities and societies. A resulting condition is social conflict, which I will explore briefly before reflecting on the experiences of Cities South of Cancer in Queretaro, Mexico, and Cali, Colombia.1 Finally, I will argue that urban and architectural design can certainly act as a catalyst for change, but to do so designers need to understand the complex issues—socio-economic, racial and political—that are enmeshed in the urban fabric.

Marginality Revisited The notion of marginality came to occupy a central position in discussions about development and urban planning in Latin America during the second half of the 1950s.2 It emerged as a useful term to address the socio-economic disparities caused by a precarious industrialization. Marginality referred simultaneously to the mass of people living in precarious conditions of the outskirts of cities, and to the position of peripheral economies developing on the margins of capitalism. These two aspects are intricately related, in so far as the latter is the reason why the former exists. The sociologist Gino Germani and the Jesuit priest Roger Vekemans, two influential figures who embraced marginality theory in the 1960s, argued that modernization and industrialization caused a series of social divisions which disenfranchised the poor, who were unable to attain the same benefits possessed by other members of the urban population. It follows that to overcome underdevelopment, it was necessary to integrate excluded populations, so the poor could enjoy the full benefits of urban life, and have the same prospects of social mobility as everyone else in society. This led to the creation of programmes of economic formalization, slum upgrading and eradication and to the construction urban infrastructure. By the end of the 1970s, critics of marginality theory had developed convincing arguments to show that the poor were not always marginalized. Instead the poor were seen to play key functions in both society and the economy. In her book Favela: Four Decades Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro, Janice Perlman recalls her own argument in the earlier book The Myth of Marginality (1980), where she affirmed that people in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro were ‘socially well organised and cohesive, and their residents capable of making good use of the urban milieu and its institutions’ (Perlman 2010, 149). Furthermore, Perlman contends that favela residents were involved in politics and fully cognizant of their capacity to influence policy to obtain benefits.3 Perlman also points out incisively that marginality became so powerful a concept in Brazilian planning practices that it was used to justify favela eradication programmes, thus triggering the divisions that caused marginalization in the first place. The result of these critiques, based on extended ethnographic work, was a decrease in the use of the term ‘marginality’, rarely employed in the 1980s and early 1990s.4 326

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In recent years the concept has reappeared in academic circles, not so much in order to study deprived groups on the peripheries of Latin American—or the developing world—cities but rather to study the persistence of poverty in first-world cities. The concept of ‘advanced marginality’, for example, championed by the sociologist Loïc Wacquant (2008), is used to describe how a significant part of the urban population has become irrelevant in economic terms and, therefore, excluded from the rest of the city, relegated to ‘segregated ghettoes’, due to capitalist forms of development. Latin American critics disclose a certain scepticism, indicating that Wacquant’s notion of advanced marginality is very similar to earlier definitions of the term produced in Latin America, a point that Teresa Caldeira argues in her article ‘Marginality, Again?!’ (2009). Let us, however, explore other aspects of recent debates on marginality, before we return to the discussion on advanced marginality. In their essay ‘Concepts in Social and Spatial Marginality’, Mehretu et al. (2000) describe marginality as ‘a complex condition of disadvantage which individuals and communities experience as a result of vulnerabilities that may arise from unfavourable environmental, cultural, social, political and economic factors’ (90). The conditionality of this definition, ‘vulnerabilities that may arise’ from a wide range of conditions, is important because it opens the discussion to include key factors that received much too little attention in the 1960s: the cultural and social aspects of marginality. To these I add the historical dimension inherent in collective conditions of urban disadvantage. The concepts of marginality put forward by Mehretu et al. are useful to explore these issues. The first concept is systemic marginality. In their own words, Systemic marginality results from disadvantages which people and communities experience in a socially constructed system of inequitable relations within a hegemonic order that allows one set of individuals and communities to exercise undue power and control over another set with the latter manifesting one or a number of vulnerability markers based on class, ethnicity, age, gender and other similar characteristic. Unlike market-based inequalities, systemic marginality does not lend itself to reform policies of the welfare state. This is because systemic marginality is a deliberate social construction by the dominant class to achieve specific desirable outcomes of political control, social exclusion and economic exploitation. Systemic marginality is of particular significance in countries that have experienced pervasive inequity and oppression under colonial and/or neo-colonial regimes in the less developed world. (Mehretu et al. 2000, 91–92) It arises from this definition that ‘systemic marginality’ is not a form of disadvantage caused by an internal inability of national governments to regulate the economy, or by its failure to guarantee opportunities for all people—as it was implied in the 1960s—nor is it the fault of groups of people who are unable to succeed by themselves due to their own incompetence (i.e., it is not a failure of the poor).5 Instead, the authors assume marginality as an artificial—‘socially constructed’—form of disadvantage imposed upon and experienced by groups of people who have been excluded from the structures of political control. The historical dimension of systemic marginality can be found in the positional polarity between Black and Indigenous peoples and the White population, who are perceived and conceive themselves as descendants of former European colonial settlers and who continue to exercise political and economic control. In the case of Latin America, Afro-descendant groups continue to have limited access to the institutions of power and, therefore, little political influence (indeed, little representation).6 The origin of these polarities is colonial, as are the geographies of racial distribution in most Latin American cities: Black and Indigenous populations have occupied different geographical positions in relation to the colonizer’s centrality since the foundation of cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In fact, these racial designations and their position in the city were preserved after independence, and continue today, which is why I argue strongly that the conditions of marginality that 327

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we see today in most Latin American cities are magnified expressions of a pattern of urban growth initiated by the Spanish and Portuguese with their segregationist approach to urban planning and design during the colonial period. It is no coincidence that these two socio-ethnic groups remain poor, under-represented and excluded from the dominant economic system. The long-standing sociocultural and racial classifications and markers which underpin these conditions of exclusion cannot be removed easily through the construction of infrastructure, employment policies or, even, equal opportunities (affirmative action) laws. As a result, economic policy offers little opportunity to improve the living conditions of those marginalized groups. It may guarantee access to credit for Black and Indigenous people, for example, but they are unable to trade on equal terms in a Whitedominated market place. Similarly, local governments may build schools, and offer training to people in slums, most of whom are ethnic minorities, but they cannot access higher education or get betterpaid jobs precisely because they are dark and live in slums. The second concept I would like to address here is ‘collateral marginality’, a phenomenon that affects millions of individuals throughout Latin America and, indeed, a phenomenon we have encountered in our own work in Medellin, Bogotá and Cali, Colombia. According to Mehretu et al., Collateral marginality is a condition experienced by individuals or communities who are marginalized primarily on the basis of their social or geographic proximity to individuals or communities that experience [. . .] systemic marginality. Generally, individuals or communities who are collaterally marginalized may not, in themselves, share vulnerability markers, but they suffer marginality by contagion as a function of their presence in a social or geographic milieu that is pervasively disadvantaged by contingent or systemic forces. (Mehretu et al. 2000, 93) While this expression of marginality is pervasive in Colombia and the rest of the continent and is relatively well known in scholarly discourse, it is significantly absent from architectural debates and political discourse in Latin America. While studying some of the urban interventions on the peripheries of Bogotá, Cali and Medellín, Colombia, we discovered that residents of deprived areas, such as Ciudad Bolivar (Bogotá), Comuna 21 (Cali) and Santo Domingo (Medellín), often deny that they live there—these are sites where important infrastructure has been built, such as the first Metro Cable and the famous Library Spain, known as Santo Domingo Library, in Medellín, or Transmicable in Bogotá, and Tecnocentro in Cali. Many forge their address because the association with these areas carries a negative stigma that can affect their chances of getting a job.7 People who live in areas of the city perceived as sites of criminality, violence, vice and immorality deploy protective mechanisms to disassociate themselves from the physical and social context where they belong. Not only do they lie about the place where they live but also they deny knowing their neighbours and adopt a self-deprecating view of themselves, embracing derogatory representations held by others and applying them to their neighbours.8 These attitudes of dis-identification often lead to a retreat into the privacy of the home as a way to avoid contact with the community. Ultimately, these attitudes of withdrawal hinder social engagement, creating instead an environment of distrust, self-protectionism and socio-spatial fragmentation. Let us now return to Wacquant and his concept of ‘advanced marginality’, which addresses many of the complex realities I have just described. For Wacquant, The qualifier ‘advanced’ is meant here to indicate that these forms of marginality are not behind us: they are not residual, cyclical or transitional; they are not being gradually reabsorbed by the expansion of the ‘free market’ [. . .]. Rather, they stand ahead of us: they are etched on the horizon of the becoming of contemporary societies. (Wacquant 2008, 232) 328

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Wacquant refers primarily to poor neighbourhoods in The United States and France, although he starts and ends his book Urban Outcasts making allusions to other regions of the world. Teresa Caldeira has taken him to task for implying that urban conditions in decaying cities in the United States and France are comparable to those in the developing world. She also denounces Wacquant’s definition of advanced marginality for being ‘nearly identical to the theses of authors such as José Nun (1969) and Anibal Quijano (1971), who theorized about the appearance of a “marginal mass” in the Latin American countries that industrialized under a condition of dependency’ (Caldeira 2009, 849). Similarly, Perlman takes issue with the fact that most residents of the favelas she has studied in Rio for over 40 years are not ‘forcibly relegated’ and have the opportunity to move out of the favela—as indeed some have over the length of her study. Both Caldeira and Perlman refer to specific cases in Rio de Janeiro.9 In other parts of Latin America, particularly in countries affected by armed conflicts—like paramilitary wars in Colombia, or drug cartels in Mexico, among others—people are ‘forcibly’ displaced from the countryside to the outskirts of cities, which they have little opportunity to leave. Thus, some neighbourhoods in Colombia and Mexico fit closely—though not precisely—Wacquant’s notion of the hyper-ghetto: they are quasi-prisons that store a surplus population unable to retain formal jobs and unsupported by the state, where new hierarchical systems develop on the basis of violence and territorial control. As mentioned earlier, these are places where interpersonal relations are affected by suspicion and distrust, where public spaces are perceived as dangerous, where residents avoid one another in order to protect themselves. Indeed, the rise of gang violence in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, to mention only a few countries where this phenomenon is rampant, highlights a situation that is ‘ahead of us’, and so ‘advanced’ in Wacquant’s terms. I must conclude this section clarifying that invoke the concept of marginality not because I believe it encompasses the entire and complex set of issues at stake in the study of Latin American cities. Nor am I avoiding the use of other terms, or attempting to replace them. Other terms, such as urban informality, for example, offer important opportunities to address urban issues in Latin America. To be sure I do not believe there is one single term capable of engaging every aspect of such a vast and complex area of study. I invoke the notion of marginality because it is useful to reveal the socioethnic dimensions of poverty, the longevity of exclusionary socio-ethnic designations—since the colonial period—and the resulting geographies of deprivation that can be perceived in Latin American cities today. These three distinct but fully interconnected issues have not received the attention they deserve in architectural debates. The dominant tendency is to assume that marginal or informal architectures are a twentieth-century phenomenon caused by an uneven industrialization that attracted rural populations to the city. Rural-to-urban migration may indeed have been exacerbated by processes of industrialization, causing cities to grow at a fast pace. However, the socio-economic, cultural and political structures that kept those populations of migrants marginalized were already in place, and had been in place since colonial times. I maintain that the fragmented fabric of most Latin American cities is the result of prolonged processes of marginalization, which in turn prevent social engagement and create conditions for social conflict to arise.

Architecture, Urban Form and Conflict in Cali, Colombia In the previous section I demonstrate that poverty and race are intrinsically linked and, also, that these two social aspects occupy a distinct place on the geography of Latin American cities: the peripheries. It is important to note, however, that ‘the peripheries’ are a representational site. The peripheries are not always on the periphery, but refer to people who, and socio-economic and cultural activities that, do not occupy a dominant position in the urban structures. Indeed, so-called peripheral—or ­marginal—sites may be located near the geographical centres of cities, although they remain peripheral in relation to dominant socio-economic practices. It is equally important to highlight that 329

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peripheries, as the representational site occupied by ‘the poor’, are not a homogeneous. The peripheries accommodate a vast range of marginalized groups: Black, Indigenous and mixed-raced peoples, who can also be rural immigrants or long-standing urban dwellers.10 In addition to racial divisions, we must add political and ideological affiliations (very important in some countries like Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia—among others—where political issues carry great weight), religion (there is a growth of religious movements, like the Pentecostal in Brazil) and class, all of which exacerbate urban fragmentation. The point to be made here is that different social groups, and subgroups, tend to occupy clearly distinct areas of the city. As a result the fabric of cities is significantly fragmented, not simply between the poor and the wealthy (the formal and the informal, or the marginal versus the core) but in many parts. Since fragments are not simply pieces of empty urban land but places occupied by groups of people with needs, desires, cultural baggage, political ideologies and so forth, conditions of urban fragmentation are susceptible to conflict. Indeed, social conflict is a key, yet largely unattended, issue in Latin American urban and architectural debates. Colombia has concluded an extended process of peace negotiation with the largest guerrilla movement, FARC, and is entering a period of post-conflict. Mexico is struggling with drugs cartels and the enormous violence they cause. In Brazil many favelas have become battlegrounds between the police, drug dealers and other criminal organizations. That is why a discussion about the architectural implications of conflict in Latin American cities is not only necessary but also urgent. In her essay ‘Spatial Discontinuities: Conflict Infrastructures in Contested Cities’, Wendy Pullan (2013) argues that spatial discontinuities are simultaneously a cause and a result of urban conflict. She shows how walls, barriers, buffer zones, mobility regimes and the like are used in order to contain and separate territories and people aggravating the conditions that generate social conflicts. Many Latin American cities are divided cities. The fact that some of the most celebrated urban interventions in Bogota, Medellin, Rio and Caracas, for example, are transport systems which help people move faster through the city, while providing access to previously inaccessible areas, is indicative of the physical divisions that existed in those cities—divisions that have not been fully overcome despite such infrastructures. Latin American cities may not have walls and buffer zones in the same way that Jerusalem and Nicosia have. Yet the kinds of conflict infrastructures Pullan refers to do exist. Walls separate affluent communities from deprived settlements, and there is controlled access (by way of private armed guards) to gated communities in most Latin American cities and towns. Even access to universities is restricted and controlled by private guards (Caldeira 1996, 303–328; Coy 2006). Consequently, transport systems allow people from deprived areas to travel through the city, but they do not have access to all institutions, facilities or amenities (Hooker 2005; Hoffman and Centeno 2003).11 As Pullan argues, these infrastructures cause severe spatial discontinuities which affect the very nature of the urban experience and, ultimately, prevent social engagement. So far, we have seen how the existence of sustained socio-economic exclusion materializes in different forms of urban fragmentation, which in turn perpetuate and accentuate physical decay. Here we find a cyclical situation. On the one hand, physical decay precludes the possibilities for those who live in deprived areas to overcome their disadvantages and vulnerabilities. On the other, disadvantages and vulnerabilities force people to remain in deprived areas, whose physical conditions continue to decay. As the definitions of ‘systemic’ and ‘advanced’ marginality suggest, these conditions cannot be resolved via traditional urban formulas for poverty alleviation—such as economic formalization and slum upgrading, or through the construction of urban infrastructure alone—because the sociocultural markers that cause disadvantage and vulnerability remain in place and unchallenged. In such conditions of social exclusion, social engagement is extremely difficult to attain. In order to explore the notion of social engagement, the difficulties and possibilities of attaining it, as well as the way in which architecture can contribute to its attainment, I will reflect on the experiences of Cities South of Cancer, a research group located in the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. The group has carried out academic research on several cities around the 330

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world, and led participatory projects with other universities, governments, private institutions and deprived communities. We recognize the importance of social engagement as a sustained commitment to the people we work with.

Taller Activo Taller Activo is design-build studio led by architect Juan Alfonso Garduño, former dean of architecture at the Facultad de Arquitectura, Universidad Tecnológica de Monterrey in Queretaro, Mexico. In 2012 Juan Alfonso presented his work at the ‘Informality: Re-Defining Architecture and Urbanism in Latin America’ conference, organized by the University of Michoacán in Morelia, Mexico. Juan Alfonso offered a thorough introduction to their achievements and a heart-felt reflection on why their projects did not always accomplish the studio’s expectations. Taller Activo had built a handful of structures in various deprived neighbourhoods of Queretaro, where residents had shown interest and had participated in the design and construction of each project. However, most had been left unused after completion. It became clear that the academic exercise had not had the expected social impact. After the event in Morelia, Taller Activo established an exchange programme with Cities South of Cancer to bring students from the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, to Queretaro, where they would help to run participatory workshops with local communities and, subsequently, design and build public facilities. Having established that one-off interventions did not have a long-standing social impact, the purpose of the programme was to build various small structures in the same neighbourhood. This would allow greater understanding of the community, their needs and their internal politics. Juan Alfonso ran an urban studio and selected a community near the university campus. It was a semi-established squatter settlement whose residents were in the middle of a titling process.12 Although the settlement had existed more than 20 years, only a school had been built, and a basketball court served as park and football pitch. There was no other supporting infrastructure in place. The beginning of the project proved complicated because internal rivalries became immediately apparent. The site of the first project, on a vacant plot next to a basketball court/park, provoked the fury of informal vendors who used it to set up a weekend market. They argued that the building we proposed would affect their commercial activities, ultimately, affecting their income. The vendors turned out to have contacts in the planning office and were able to exercise pressure, first delaying the start of the project and, lately, requiring a minor relocation—on the same site, but a few metres west. Negotiations with vendors were tense at times, and introduced us to the complex socio-­economic organization, and political influence, of one of the groups at the interior of the community. In addition to the vendors’ opposition there was the hostility of other subgroups. It turned out that different sectors of the neighbourhood had different community leaders with diverse political alliances. They challenged the location of the project, arguing that it would benefit only a small group in the neighbourhood. Each group wanted the project to be sited in their own territories. At that point we discovered that an invitation to participate in the construction of a public facility could cause social detachment, just as it could generate engagement. We were forced continually to reflect on our participatory strategies, so that we could demonstrate that this would be the first of a series of structures, in different parts of the neighbourhood. We explained that we intended these different structures to be linked and complementary to one another, so as to become a neighbourhood-wide network public support. The community leaders of other sectors accepted but remained sceptical. During the construction of the building, a group of local women cooked lunch and dinner for us every day. There were children who came regularly to watch us work, played games with us and occasionally helped in the construction. Local men, many of whom were builders, also came to check on the progress and gave construction advice. Members of rival groups, and politicians, showed 331

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up regularly to ask questions. As the building progressed, rival groups became more belligerent, but our relation with the leaders of the sector where we were working became stronger. The completion of the first project and, indeed, the start of the second gave Taller Activo a great deal of credibility among the larger community. Other community leaders and politicians started to visit, no longer to contest but rather to discuss the future of the neighbourhood. Everyone became engaged in a sustained discussion about the way in which future small interventions would help the development of the entire neighbourhood—rivalries did not disappear, but there was a visible attitude of collaboration. To put it in the terms I used earlier, the strategies of social dis-identification that we perceived at the beginning of the project receded, creating ampler opportunities for engagement. Taller Activo brought about possibilities for individual residents—women, community leaders, unemployed men and, of course, students from Cambridge and Mexico—to develop new social roles in the community that gave them a sense of purpose in the collective pursuit for a better living environment. The first building, completed in 2013, received the First Prize in the Servicios y Asistencia Pública category of the 2014 CEMEX Awards. It helped to bring different factions of a divided community together and facilitated the construction of subsequent structures. Each structure contributes to the continuous development of the neighbourhood, providing more of the support needed by the community. It was not merely the participation of local residents and students from the universities of Cambridge and TEC Monterrey that created the success of the project but also the commitment of all the participants to work together in a sustained manner toward the achievement of a collective goal: the production of a better environment.

The Cali Project In 2013 Cities South of Cancer organized a one-week workshop with students of architecture and sociology at the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia. The workshop focused on two key locations along the bank of the River Cauca, in a flood-risk area. Indeed, one of the locations, Potrero Grande, is considered the most dangerous neighbourhood in the city. The purpose of the workshop was to create links with the local community leaders in order to establish a design-build studio similar to the one in Queretaro. However, the socio-economic and urban conditions in Cali were different from those in Queretaro. We found that the prevalent social condition was social detachment in the worst possible expression: a gang armed conflict. The majority of Potrero Grande residents are Black.13 Colour of skin, however, is not a sign of socio-ethnic homogeneity. The government built Potrero Grande between 2004 and 2007 in order to relocate residents from various informal settlements along the bank of the River Cauca, a sector called El Jarrillon. Subsequently people from other inner-city shanty towns were brought in: Laguna del Potaje, Charco Azul and Nueva Ilusion. These residents were also Black, yet they were not linked to the communities from the riverbank. Although they were Black, putting these communities together caused social distrust and territorial rivalries. Multiple gangs have formed to defend internal territories and to protect their own commercial interests. However, gangs also extort local residents and engage in a wide range of illegal activities. To make matters worse, Potrero Grande later received migrants from other regions in the country, mainly Cauca, Choco and Nariño. Although most people from these locations are ethnically Black,14 they were largely members of fishing and mining communities displaced by guerrilla and paramilitary conflict in their regions. The inhabitants relocated to Potrero Grande from the city’s shantytowns used to live illegally on squatted land. For them, moving to a planned neighbourhood with proper infrastructure (water, electricity, schools, parks, etc.), where they own their property, amounts to an upgrade. The experience is different for those who were displaced by violence: they lost their land, their livelihood and their cultural roots. People from Cauca, Choco and Nariño resented the 332

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fact that the government accommodated them alongside shantytown dwellers, a fact that has caused tension and, even, violence among residents. As mentioned earlier, racist attitudes have been rampant among middle- and upper-class residents of Cali. Black citizens are not permitted access to certain areas and denied membership to various local organizations. Black people—as well as those of indigenous origin—have statistically fewer opportunities to get jobs than mestizo (or White) people do. Therefore, it is harder for Blacks to overcome poverty. Racism exacerbates socio-ethnic fragmentation, ultimately segregating certain groups, who are forced to live on the margins of the city—geographically as well as economically. Racial discrimination and the stigmas attached to Potrero Grande have contributed to create situations of social dis-identification: the image of Potrero Grande is such that residents deny that they live there because it would make them suspicious. Local residents also conceded in interviews that they avoid establishing social relations with neighbours, trying to meet people from other neighbourhoods instead. Thus, Potrero Grande can be described as a hyper-ghetto, a place that stores a surplus population unable to obtain or retain jobs, who receive little support from the state and where hierarchies evolve on the basis of gang membership.15 These turbulent conditions foment social detachment rather than engagement. However, our research led us to discover an interesting occurrence: on Sundays, there is a football league and the teams are made up of members from different gangs. Violent conflict is suspended momentarily while people engage in a recreational activity. Although brief, this peaceful event indicates that there are times and spaces when/where residents engage productively with one another. Up to that point we had been looking at opportunities to build something where people could meet to do things. Yet, discovering the football league showed that those spaces already existed. Instead of building new structures, the purpose of the workshop shifted to identifying and articulating existing areas where social interaction already occurs. This would allow us to propose strategies to increase the possibilities for sustained social engagement. A one-week workshop became a four-year-long intermittent collaboration with Universidad del Valle, imagining a new urban landscape for Potrero Grande, a landscape which links the existing institutions that shelter people from violence and encourage productive social interaction: the school (primary and secondary), the two churches16 and Tecnocentro del Pacifico (a private-public organization that offers technical training and further education). It is called a landscape because it consists of a series of public spaces that allow easy and safe transit across different internal territories dominated by gangs. We have also identified a number of productive activities carried out by small groups and individuals, which could form part of an economic network capable of generating employment in the area. Let us examine the role of Tecnocentro del Pacifico in the neighbourhood before concluding this reflection on our work in Cali. Tecnocentro was created by a local non-profit organization, the Alvaralice Foundation, whose founders are well-established industrialists. The foundation raised money from various private institutions and the government in order to build a technical centre to assist people in the most dangerous neighbourhood of Cali. Through consultation with local residents it became clear that the name of the centre should reflect the origin of the people, Tecnocentro del Pacifico; the Black majority comes from the pacific coast of Colombia. According to its former director, Whitney Cox, a prestigious commercial architect, Nagui Sabet, donated the building, and local construction companies donated some of the materials. Initially the centre offered a limited range of courses, a pre-established curriculum including computer and music classes. However, over the past three years the curriculum has been modified in order to include training in areas that relate to the productive activities carried out in the neighbourhood. Tecnocentro has also created a network of employers who offer jobs to their students. As mentioned earlier, the residents of Potrero Grande were not only discriminated against for being Black but also stigmatized for living in the most dangerous area of Cali. The network of employers created by Tecnocentro is a positive step, addressing racism and removing some of the stigma attached to this part of the city. The effect 333

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is that more people are coming to the centre to be trained and there has been a small reduction in the number of crimes committed in Potrero Grande. Tecnocentro liaises with the School (run by Comfandi, which is also a stakeholder in the centre) and with the parishioner in order to organize outdoor activities during weekends, stretching those brief moments of spontaneous conflict suspension when members of different gangs put their differences aside to play sports. While some conditions have improved, and the centre, the school and the church provide educational, social and community support, neither of them address deeper structural issues in Cali’s society. The jobs local residents can get fulfil the need for labour in local industries, but do not contribute to their social mobility. In other words, local industrialists who sponsored the construction of Tecnocentro benefit from the training of slum residents far more than the residents themselves, who remain poor and continue to live in a deprived area. The discourse of social engagement adopted by the organization, and the local government in Cali, and other Colombian cities, reverts back to earlier discourses on marginality, trying to generate employment as a way to alleviate poverty. This tackles only the economic aspect of the social exclusion it intends to remedy, while reinforcing the factors that caused the exclusion in the first place: race and location in the city. Spatial conditions in Potrero Grande remain dreadful. Most productive activities are carried out outside houses, on the streets and in parks, disrupting domestic life and causing environmental damage. The parks are poorly maintained, and there is little street lighting and no supporting facilities (toilets, changing rooms, bleachers, etc.). Capitalizing on the limited success of Tecnocentro del Pacifico, Cities South of Cancer continued to work in the design of a landscape of conflict suspension where people can further engage in the kind of social, commercial, cultural and recreational activities that Tecnocentro is helping to make visible and enhance. The aim of the project was to rearticulate the spatial discontinuities that cause, and result from, urban conflict in order to create a suitable environment for social engagement. Although The Cali Project was suspended in 2017, Cities South of Cancer continues to work in Cali and to develop strategies to facilitate social engagement through public participation in production of urban space.

Conclusion Architects, urban designers, planners and politicians are all preoccupied with finding solutions to overcome urgent problems in cities: poverty, unemployment, crime, illiteracy and so forth. Lack of infrastructure is often seen as one of the aspects that cause these problems and, therefore, the provision of infrastructure is perceived as a solution. Better housing, for example, can help to improve conditions of habitation and to reduce possibilities of disaster. Schools help to educate people, eradicating illiteracy, thus sustaining a more employable society. Similarly, transport facilitates mobility and, thus, maximizes opportunities to access jobs, which, in turn, will allow people to pay their own way out of poverty, urban deprivation and exclusion. The urgency to resolve these problems, as well as their sheer scale, deviates attention from their longevity. I hope to have demonstrated that both the social and urban (by which I refer to the physical) fabric of the contemporary city is a magnified expression of a colonial pattern that established the relational positions of different social groups against one another. These positions are not simply socioeconomic. Instead they are largely based on race and on the geographical position different racial groups occupy in the city. It is my contention that the persistence of these positions continues to obstruct social engagement and, for that reason, no infrastructural intervention will ever be able fully to achieve its purpose. Only when the historical obstacles that separate groups of people on the basis of race, origin and their location in the urban structure are overcome will there be an opportunity for infrastructural interventions to result in a better city. Large urban infrastructures are necessary, as is the construction of urban landmarks—the positive impact these have had in cities like Medellin is unquestionable. Yet, in Medellin architects, planners 334

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and politicians have discovered the importance of following up with social programmes to promote great public participation in productive initiatives, as well as in educational and recreation activities. They discovered rather quickly that libraries, parks and cable cars alone were insufficient to transform the fragmented landscape of districts whose residents had suffered from years of violence and exclusion. More had to be done, and it is now, but it is ten years since completion of the first few libraries and only feeble signs of social transformation begin to be perceived. The experience of Cities South of Cancer reveals that urban and architectural design can be catalysts for social engagement. Punctual isolated interventions have little impact and, indeed, diminish architecture’s capacity to instigate social change. On the other hand, sustained interaction with a given group generates greater transformational opportunities. I argued at the beginning of this chapter that, in order initiate change, designers need to understand the complex issues—socio-economic, racial and political—that are enmeshed in the urban fabric. Such understanding requires commitment and dedication to discover the political nuances of different neighbourhoods and districts. Designers need to understand the historical provenance of current conflicts. Sustained interaction with people is necessary, not only to gain their confidence (which is a basic aspect) but also to generate a sense of co-production that can be more beneficial to the people. Indeed, if buildings are to facilitate social engagement, it is the process of design and not the building where the focus ought to be placed. If the process of design engages the community, the likelihood that buildings will be positively adopted by its members is increased. This principle is not new, but has seldom been tested. That is why questions about social engagement lie at the very core of architecture today. With all these points I am proposing a revaluation of traditional approaches to architectural and urban interventions in Latin American deprived communities, because their vulnerabilities are much older than we have always assumed.

Notes 1 Cities South of Cancer is a research group in the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge of which I am chair. 2 This section results from my larger project on marginality, and includes excerpts from my introductory chapter for the book Marginal Urbanisms: Informal and Formal Development in Cities of Latin America (2017). See Hernández, F. (2017) ‘The Challenge of Marginality in Latin American Cities’, in Hernández, F. and A. Becerra (eds.) Marginal Urbanisms: Informal and Formal Development in Cities of Latin America. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 3–49. Two members of Cities South of Cancer, Angela Franco and Giulia Torino, study the aspects of marginality discussed in this section (i.e., the intersectionality between race, gender and urban geography) in Colombia as part of their PhD theses. 3 It important to underline the fact that her studies were carried out in Rio de Janeiro. Although there are similarities in other Brazilian cities, and even across Latin America, there are also significant differences and the same claim would not be valid in some slums in Bolivia, Peru or Colombia. 4 Perlman was, of course, not the only critic of marginality theory. There were others, like Anibal Quijano, Emilio Pradilla and Benjamin Singer, to name a few. 5 One of the most common reactions we have found in Latin American cities, particularly in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, is that ethnic minorities remain poor and live in slums because of their own incompetence: they are lazy, disorganized, uneducated and so forth. 6 In Brazil, for example, where Afro-Brazilians make nearly half of the country’s population, they represent almost 80 percent of those living below the poverty line and contribute under 20 percent of the national GDP (Morrison 2007). It may also be useful to highlight that, in 2015, 39 Brazilian government ministers in Dilma Rousseff ’s cabinet were White (Barbara 2015). Conveniently, only the head of the Special Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality was not. 7 Some authors who have explored the demoralizing effects of living in slums in Latin American cities include: Gilbert and Ward (1985), Nightingale (2012), Perlman (1980, 2010) and Turner (1976). 8 Angela Franco’s research on the Comuna 18 in Cali, Colombia, shows how urban Black residents in deprived areas describe rural immigrants, who are also Black, as lazy, untrustworthy and even uneducated (the research is ongoing and unpublished, part of a PhD thesis). 335

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9 Indeed Caldeira can be challenged for extending a specifically Brazilian condition to other countries of Latin America where sociopolitical circumstances are significantly different. 10 In her book Favela (2010), Janice Perlman writes extensively about ‘stigmas and discrimination’ by race and rural-urban origin in Rio de Janeiro. In our own work with Cities South of Cancer we have detected similar discriminatory patterns, as I will discuss ahead. 11 For details on the patterns of exclusion in Latin America see Hooker, J. (2005) ‘Indigenous Inclusion/Black Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity and Multicultural Citizenship in Latin America’, in Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2 (May, 2005), 285–310. See also K. Hoffman and M. Centeno (2003) ‘The Lopsided Continent: Inequality in Latin America’, in Annual Review of Sociology Vol. 29, 363–390. 12 In fact, residents received the titles of their houses while we were working there. 13 It is important to note that Cali has the largest Black population (Afro-descendants) and racist attitudes are rampant among the mestizo middle and upper class (who have assumed White identities). 14 There is a minority itinerant Indigenous population from Cauca and Nariño and a very small number of people from Antioquia and Caldas. 15 Other social hierarchies also emerge. For example, women have formed groups of self-support and many rise as community leaders. There are also networks of commercial activity, with members of different households associating so that they can operate in various parts of the neighbourhood simultaneously. Gangs, however, are growing problematic, especially for the young, and hierarchies among this sector of the population depend largely on membership in them. 16 There are two Catholic churches, but there are also a number of other Christian institutions where residents meet: Baptists, Evangelicals and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Works Cited Caldeira, T.P.R. (1996) ‘Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation’, in Public Cult, Vol. 8, No. 2, 303–328. Caldeira, T.P.R. (2009) ‘Marginality, Again?!’, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 33, No. 3, 848–853. Coy, M. (2006) ‘Gated Communities and Urban Fragmentation in Latin America: The Brazilian Experience’, in GeoJournal, Vol. 66, No. 1/2, 121–132. Gilbert, A. and P. Ward (1985) Housing, the State and the Poor: Policy Practice in Three Latin American Cities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hernández, F. (2017) ‘The Challenge of Marginality in Latin American Cities’, in Hernández, F. and A. Becerra (eds.) Marginal Urbanisms: Informal and Formal Development in Cities of Latin America. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 3–49. Hoffman, K. and M. Centeno (2003) ‘The Lopsided Continent: Inequality in Latin America’, in Annual Review of Sociology Vol. 29, 363–390. Hooker, J. (2005) ‘Indigenous Inclusion/Black Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity and Multicultural Citizenship in Latin America’, in Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2 (May), 285–310. Mehretu, A., B. Pigozzi and L.M. Sommers (2000) ‘Concepts in Social and Spatial Marginality’, in Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 82, No. 2, Development of Settlements, 89–101. Nightingale, C. (2012) Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Perlman, J. (1980) The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro. Oakland: University of California Press. Perlman, J. (2010) Favela: Four Decades Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro. New York: Oxford. Pullan, W. and B. Baillie (2013) Locating Urban Conflicts: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Everyday. London: Palgrave McMillan. Turner, J.F.C. (1976) Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. London: Marion Boyars. Wacquant, L. (2008) Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. London: Polity.

Websites Barbara, V. (2015) ‘In Denial Over Racism in Brazil’. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes. com/2015/03/24/opinion/vanessa-barbara-in-denial-over-racism-in-brazil.html?_r=1 Accessed 5/5/16. Morrison, J. (2007). ‘Race and Poverty in Latin America: Addressing the Development Needs of African Descendants’. UN Chronicle, Vol. 44, No. 3. Retrieved from http://unchronicle.un.org/article/race-andpoverty-latin-america-addressing-development-needs-african-descendants/

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25 Understanding Public Interest Design A Conceptual Taxonomy Joongsub Kim

Introduction Public interest design (PID) is defined in various ways. However, certain key attributes of PID are found in literature. Among the most frequently mentioned terms are “community design,” “socially responsible design,” and “design that serves the disadvantaged” who have no access to architectural and related professional services (Smith 2007, 2011). “Design for the broader public good” is another frequently used term to define the core value of PID according to the surveys with PID practitioners who assert that “access to design is not just a privilege—it is a public right” (Feldman et al. 2013, 4). This chapter introduces several partially overlapping public interest design practice models to students and practitioners in architecture, urban design, and allied disciplines, as well as participants in community development. The intent is not to “label” practitioners according to the types, but to seek clarity in various PID practices. The chapter does not claim that these are the only practice types in PID, but rather it discusses them as a PID taxonomy to understand the diversity and complexity of PID in terms of the focus, approach, and other important characteristics of each type. Through an extensive literature review and through the author’s teaching, applied research, service learning, and community-based projects in PID in collaboration with various partners in Detroit and other cities, we have observed that several recent trends in the architectural field and economy have attracted increasing attention from the public, academia, and the profession to PID (Kim 2013), as we shall see later. Despite an increasing interest in PID, participants in our studies have raised a number of questions concerning PID. Some of these questions include the following: “There seem to be many kinds of PID or PID practices. Where is the best place to learn about them? How should I go about understanding them?” “What are some key trends or common themes running through various PID practices?” “Are there any clearly defined primary or dominant approaches or types of PID?” “Is there a framework of understanding PID in general or popular PID practices? What are they? How do they differ from each other?” “What are some unique aspects of each practice type in PID?” “What are some examples?” These inquiries have motivated the author to focus on PID typologies.

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Context In recent decades, many notable social, economic, and environmental challenges in the United States have had significant effects on the built environment and building industry. Consequently, architecture entered an age of uncertainty (Mangold 2014; Yaneva 2012). Among those challenges, what stands out strongly are the Great Recession (Mannes 2010) and increasing criticisms directed toward irrelevance of the architectural profession (Groat 2000; Schneekloth and Shibley 2000). These challenges were felt more deeply in postindustrial regions and shrinking cities (Martinez-Fernandez et al. 2012; Mannes 2010). The Great Recession had a detrimental effect on the building industry across the country, and diversification and hybridization of architectural and design practices, particularly, in postindustrial cities, are some notable responses to the recession (Conlin 2015; Enigbokan 2015). Those cities now demand new urban models (Morris 2012), and the need for adaptable architectural practices has become a call for relevancy, to which architects respond through flexible, accessible, and responsible design practices (Ryan 2012). One such new trend is PID (Garlock 2015). Although PID and other similar practices (e.g., socially responsible design) existed even before the recent recession, this national crisis, arguably, has accelerated the development of PID. Critics have long argued that the influence of the architectural profession has steadily diminished over the past several decades (Duffy and Rabeneck 2013; Jamieson 2011). Concerns over such trends seem evident especially in the American Institute of Architects (AIA)’s national conventions in recent years (AIA.org. 2013a, 2013b, 2013c). Their conversations revolve around several important initiatives or positions that the AIA advances: making architecture more relevant, repositioning the profession, emphasizing community engagement, and increasing in diversity (e.g., via mentoring and support of emerging architects and small firms). These shifts are likely inspired in part by public interest design or socially responsible practices. The AIA’s recent significant funding support for research on PID (e.g., the Latrobe Grant Award) notably validates the AIA’s growing interest in PID. Moreover, the popularity of PID among the public, academia, and the profession is partly attributable to the increasing interests of architectural educators and practitioners in reconsidering the significance of ethics in architectural practices, the reconciliation of moral obligations to the public, and the concept of what it means to serve the public interest (Forlano 2014). These interests are relevant to key concerns, and to the underlying concepts and philosophies of PID. A growing number of architects have turned to PID to explore alternative architectural practices in recent years (Anderson 2014). However, PID is not only an “alternative” architectural practice but also a collective desire for healthy growth and evolution of the practice, which can also expand the influence of architecture (Anderson 2014). The proposed taxonomy of PID is one way to examine PID with respect to the issues discussed earlier.

Study Approach A cross-disciplinary typological approach to understanding diversity of design practices (Lang 2005; Larice and Macdonald 2012; Franck and Schneekloth 1994) is used for exploring the richness of PID. This chapter also uses combined research strategies for triangulated, grounded and empirical investigation to clarify complex phenomena (Groat and Wang 2013) and complement the typological study. What follows is the theoretical and empirical basis for this chapter to lay the groundwork necessary to propose a PID taxonomy. PID taxonomy as a system of scaffolding, mapping, and overlapping: The PID taxonomy is “scaffolding” ’ for “inclusion” (of PID and the broader public interest into mainstream architecture), as opposed to

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“exclusion.” “Mapping” and “overlapping” complement scaffolding. While Reed’s model of “learning by mapping across situations” (2012) is useful, Anderson’s scaffolding is more relevant. Anderson refers to PID as “scaffolding” for contemporary practice (2014). Anderson’s description of “scaffolding” is similar to the PID taxonomy as a “framework,” as it seeks clarity through mapping of where contemporary PID practices stand before the backdrop that is contemporary architecture practice. Advancing the mapping idea to learn by mapping across situations (Reed 2012), one can find a proper stage(s) in the larger design process where the nine models, individually or collectively, contribute. The nine broadly defined types in aggregate are used as scaffolding to map design practices for the broader public good, to benefit more diverse constituencies. Alstyne (2007) builds on Anderson’s idea, suggesting overlapping the different models. Building on their ideas, one can suggest that PID typologies and their applicability to various stages in the design process likely make architecture more responsive to increasingly diversifying social conditions. Alstyne also suggests “emergence” of innovative tools, such as emergence of new types of practices or methods, and the dire need to use them to advance design through, for example, overlapping different types of applications or methods (e.g., PID typologies) in design. What that implies is that a designer can overlap various PID types, use them as design methods or approaches, and apply them at different stages in the design process. Spatial agency: Just as our effort of mapping PID is beneficial, it is equally useful to respond to similar earlier efforts of mapping “alternative” design practices. The spatial agency model is particularly relevant to PID. In the book entitled Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture, the authors (Awan et al. 2011) took Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory and a theory of agency to map the socially engaged practices. The success of many of the nine PID practices likely depends on an architect’s willingness and ability to act as a change agent on behalf of the communities she serves, build a network of partners, and advance public interest. However, an effective and willing actor and agency alone will not be enough to ensure public interest design is achieved. Also needed is a democratic design process facilitated by a socially responsible agency. Democratic design process: All nine PID practice models would require a democratic process to design for the broader public good in increasingly complex pluralistic societies. While each model might require different strategies to achieve democratic ideals, three partially overlapping schools of thoughts drawn from planning and related social science literature are worth noting to be applicable to development of the physical environment. First, collaborative rationality deals with c­ omplexity— namely, in overcoming the challenges of complexity, fragmentation, and uncertainty (Innes and Booher 2010; Healey 1997). Deliberative practice entails encouraging citizen participation, building a working relationship, and dealing with differences (Forester 1999). Communicative action focuses on the role of information in a decision-making process, calls for the information to be produced and agreed upon via substantial debate among key players; it uses a social process to develop shared meaning for the information, and advocates for the use of many types of information, not just “objective” information (Innes 1998). These influential works aim to advance democracy in twentyfirst-century society, while simultaneously addressing the potential and pitfalls for democracy. To conduct the study, the author first identified various approaches to practicing PID based on a literature review and case studies. The author went through numerous processes of categorizing and grouping exercises to trim the list to nine PID models. The author then verified the models through questionnaires given to small samples of architecture students and architecture practitioners across the United States. The surveys included items such as, “Please rank the following nine practice types in terms of their relevance to public interest design.” Content analyses were conducted to find significant common or recurring threads. Afterwards, the author used focus groups—a group of architectural practitioners and a group of students, separately—to clarify and gauge support for the findings from the literature review, case studies, and surveys.

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Taxonomy of PID The nine practice models proposed as a framework for examining PID are discussed ahead in no particular order.

Design as Political Activism Designers in this group strive to respond to calls for social justice, environmental justice, inequality, racism, access to the public good, the right to the city, urbanization of injustice, social movement, and the like (Thorpe 2014; Brillembourg et al. 2011; Harvey 2009, 2008; Kingwell and Turmel 2009; Low and Smith 2006; Mitchell 2003; Merrifield and Swyngedouw 1997). The Architects’ Resistance (TAR) group that was active in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States is a good example of this approach (Millard 2013). But in more recent decades, this movement has become more crossdisciplinary in its scope and nature. Consequently, design activism has enjoyed growing interest and research in various fields (Markussen 2013; Fuad-Luke 2009). More examples of this trend are found in practices where people in architecture and other disciplines collaborate or where design activists cross the boundaries of various fields. Buser et al. (2013) and Long (2013) discuss the intersections of cultural activism and a creative practice concerning the impacts on and from political resistance, raising awareness, and advancing social justice. Similarly, Thorpe (2014) reports on interdisciplinary research where insights into design activism were sought through the use of methods from social movement studies. Thorpe discusses a “designerly” repertoire of action, a set of tactics that designers use in acts of resistance through bridging design and social scientific approaches. Markussen (2013) offers a theoretical framework for design activism and suggests three roles of design activism. Two of them are worth noting as they are more relevant to PID: (1) promoting social change; and (2) raising awareness about values and beliefs (e.g., in relation to climate change). As shown earlier, design activism frequently includes multiple disciplines of design, and increasingly, seeking cross-disciplinary efforts (Tayebi 2013).

Open-Source Design This model focuses on developing systems or software via the Internet to help build buildings such as houses. Architects with technical knowledge in this area collaborate with other architects and anyone else who needs the information. The open-source design is a new collaborative way to design places at an architectural level and technological level simultaneously. It allows designers to participate in the design phase both practically, with technical contributions, and actively, with constructive criticism and intelligent and innovative suggestions through nested iterations (Di Quarto et al. 2014). WikiHouse (www.wikihouse.cc) is a well-known example of this kind of online-based practice. WikiHouse is a project where architects around the world work together via the Internet to develop a “Total Open Source House Building System” using a trial-and-error, collaborative process, sharing the results with designers, builders, and the public. The fields of urban design and planning also use wide variations of open-source design. For example, Desouza and Bhagwatwar (2012) discuses “citizen apps,” an approach to creating a digital communication network to address real-time urban issues (e.g., potholes, lighting, crime). Consequently, innovations in other fields advance open-source design in architecture, and its applications have become increasingly diverse, thereby expanding the boundaries of architecture (Desouza and Bhagwatwar 2012; Janssen et al. 2012; Robinson et al. 2012; Supak et al. 2014). Parvin (2013), cofounder of WikiHouse, advocates the open-source design as part of a larger criticism against traditional “slow” architecture, and positions the purpose of the open-source design as one that challenges the 1 percent (i.e., only 1 percent of the world’s buildings are designed by architects). Taken together, 340

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“fast” architecture, accessibility, democratization in design, and socialist interests in the architectural sector (Vardouli and Buechley 2014) are among the emerging themes in this model.

Advocacy Design Architects who follow this model focus on humanitarian crises around the world and on helping meet the urgent daily needs of people in unfortunate circumstances, such as war, earthquakes, or hurricanes. Designers in this camp may design temporary shelters, infrastructure, or a system to supply clean water, to name just a few. Architecture for Humanity used to be one of the most well-known examples of this kind. Besides globally recognized organizations, many other locally or regionally based groups of architects work with other professionals and philanthropic groups along the lines of this model (Stohr and Sinclair 2006; Bell 2004). Several ideas informed by the literature underpin the advocacy design: social architecture, consideration of values of the powerless, and pluralism. Clouse (2013), while discussing the importance of architects responding to destruction, advances social architecture as an evolving practice, particularly to address long-term effects of destruction such as Hurricane Katrina and the rebuilding of New Orleans, and considers the values of powerless groups and pluralistic approaches to design. However, a clearly defined cause and constituency must exist to make social architecture a practice of advocacy. To that end, Georgeen outlines the useful concept of advocacy. Georgeen (2014) references Paul Davidoff ’s “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning” (1965) and builds on the idea that designers function in the same way lawyers operate, which is serving as advocates and representatives for clients. Georgeen outlines the three main ways an architect can advocate: (1) choose a cause, (2) create constituency, and (3) add an agenda. Not only are these ways that designers can operate social architecture but also they can promote advocacy and public interest design.

Social Construction While all nine models involve some form of interaction, this camp focuses primarily on building opportunities for social encounters and promotes it as a way to actively involve people in community development. This model advances the process of constructing socially meaningful projects and vetting them in a democratic, interactive manner, through which social values are upheld. For example, SOUP, which is a “Monthly Dinner Funding Micro-Grants for Creative Projects in Detroit,” advances social entrepreneurism (http://detroitsoup.com). Typically, residents congregate in a large community place. Residents bring soup or salad and eat together. Then, several people present their proposals for funding support. Next, all attendees review and rate all proposals. Finally, one proposal will receive a grant. Zoethout and Jager (2009) and others have studied meaningful relationships between architecture, participation, and society ( Jenkins and Forsyth 2009); between organization, interaction, and practice (Llewellyn and Hindmarsh 2010); or between the social and design (Ward 1996). They describe the importance of social environments in relationship building, social learning, and social practices. Zoethout and Jager also point out the general lack of social interaction or lack of an environment that encourages social engagement within the creative process. While their work is more about cognitive abilities and psychology, it is applicable to social construction within PID; for example, considering the designers’ experience in the complex design and construction process, they have skill sets to assist the lay (public) participants with group decision making, collective learning, and social responsiveness, and contributing to the social capital building. Similarly, Hou and Rios (2003) promote the social practice of participatory design in the making of public space. Thorpe (2011) supports socially responsive design through social construction by facilitating the participation of multiple actors in developing discursive consciousness and space. 341

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Collective Capability Architects, especially those who have technical expertise in developing software, are the key players in open-source design. In contrast, laypeople are the main participants in collective capability. This model focuses on involving non-designers with the design process via the Internet. Unlike opensource design, where architects lead the development of building systems in collaboration with others, collective capability focuses on encouraging laypeople to share their design ideas with others online. For example, “NEXT STOP DESIGN” (http://nextstopdesign.com) uses a digital platform for laypeople to share their proposals for bus shelter designs in virtual forums. The “codesign” process (McDonnell 2009) and “collaborative imaging” (Murphy 2005) are relevant to collective capability. Significant to codesign is the quality of conversations and participatory imagination (Buur 2010), which are also sought by collective capability. Buur advocates development of new formats of collaboration for complex contingents of stakeholders, where conflicting intentions are encouraged. While the “codesign” does not necessarily focus only on non-designers’ participation in the design process (Sanders 2014), the codesign is helpful in understanding the underlying concepts of collective capability. In particular, collaborative “making” and a creative “transformation of meaning” in codesign support collective capability, because they emphasize the more active role of lay-designers in design or collaborative “making” of “lay meaning” as opposed to “professional meaning.” Concerning lay vs. professional, Lee’s article (2008) is helpful to understanding collective capability’s emphasis on the immense participation of laypeople in collective making via the Internet. Lee, quoting Sanders, suggests that with the help of technology, the world of design is undergoing a massive change: design is becoming an everyday activity rather than a professional endeavor. In other words, the peoplecentered era is finally replacing the market-driven era and the bigger phenomenon is that people without design education are designing. (Sanders 2006 in Lee 2008, 34)

Participatory Action Research and Practice In this model (PARP), resident-experts as local knowledge generators-investigators and architectexperts as technical knowledge generators-investigators work together as equal partners in the placemaking process. This process promotes a negotiated interaction between “experience” (i.e., residents have “thick” knowledge of their community) and “expertise” (i.e., architects possess technical knowledge), a concept informed by Collins and Evans’s studies of expertise and experience (2002). Another theory that grounds PARP is the place theory (Canter 1977) and other relevant theories (Gieseking et al. 2014; Shields 2010; Hayden 1997). Using the place theory’s key components (place features, place activities, and place meaning), residents may investigate their activities in a given place and its meanings. Meanwhile, architects may also investigate the physical characteristics of that place. PARP focuses on the generation and application of practical knowledge. To that end, PARP incorporates participatory action research, ethnomethodology, and civic social assessment in anthropology and sociology into placemaking (Low 2009; Garfinkel 2005; Kruger and Shannon 2000; Reardon 1997; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Additionally, Unsworth’s research (2014) on the intersections between civic participation (led by resident-experts) and policy-making (led by technical experts) concerning the making and use of public spaces (e.g., place features as in Canter’s place model), a sense of community (place meaning), and local events (place activity) is useful to understanding how PARP can be implemented. Also critical to the success of PARP is effective communication between resident-experts and architect-experts. Unsworth suggests that information technologies for communication have become 342

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powerful tools to enable city residents to increasingly participate in renegotiating and redefining urban spaces, which is an important aspect of placemaking (Markusen and Gadwa 2010). Howard (2014), Sanoff (2000), and many other scholars (e.g., Schuler and Namioka 1993) have suggested an intense, well-grounded design workshop or charrette would help to support participatory action research and design.

Grassroots Design Practice This practice is often led by small, grassroots, nonprofit organizations engaging in revitalization efforts. They build alliances among themselves, share limited resources, and engage in installations, graffiti arts, murals, sculpture, urban gardens, or small-scale design-build projects. For example, the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative in Detroit (www.miufi.org), which is run by a group of engineers, architects, designers, residents, and volunteers, buys vacant lots, transforms them into productive land, and invests its profit in developing programs that benefit disadvantaged communities. Another example focuses more on social and environmental justice, at least initially. Wells (2012) discusses a small group of community members who launched a local movement not only to protest a despised highway that ran through their neighborhood and did not meet EPA standards but also to advocate for a low-speed parkway in its place. Their group efforts helped them become recognized within the city council and among stakeholders who could seriously consider their wants and needs as part of a larger community’s genuine concerns. Grassroots efforts shown earlier may become a foundation for strong physical or environmentally and socially responsive design practices (Awan et al. 2011). Martínez (2008) refers to grassroots as a growing field of communitybased practice. Martínez suggests that grassroots endeavors operate on collective action and can easily be transferred to design in various ways. According to Martínez, what produces grassroots action can be grouped in several categories; the scope and level of operation of grassroots actions are often initially small and local, but some of them could eventually become regional or national in scope (see, e.g., http://betterblock.org). Grassroots initiatives or functions include housing, health care, civil rights, environment, economic activities, networking, and leadership training. The variability of scale and scope of grassroots action allows architects to collaborate with grassroots groups in various ways.

Pro Bono Design Services Architects working in this model dedicate a certain number of hours to socially responsive projects for needy people. “The 1+” (https://theoneplus.org), formerly known as 1%, has been one of the leading organizations in this regard. Recently, the American Institute of Architects and The 1+ have begun collaborating in the pro bono design service movement and joined forces in encouraging firms to participate. 1+ recreates the branding and image of the original 1 percent movement. Officially, 1% is now 1+ (http://publicarchitecture.org). According to the same website, since 2015, Public Architecture has committed to supporting access to development in America’s underserved communities through its 1+ online platform marketplace. 1+ connects nonprofits and municipalities with pro bono architecture and design services in order to address local social and environmental challenges. 1+ intended to help architecture and design firms that wish to allocate at least 1 percent of working hours to pro bono services for underserved municipalities. The platform is open to projects that seek to positively influence or contribute to community, civic vitality, and good civic policy. Public Architecture states that 1+ is the first and largest pro bono service network within the architecture and design professions. 1+ is the flagship program of Public Architecture, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Public Architecture’s mission is to provide the network and knowledge necessary to use design as a tool for social gain. 343

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While the work of 1+ is led by a national organization, many local firms across the country also engage in pro bono services for disadvantaged communities (Cary 2010). It is usually based, however, on anecdotal information. More robust research is needed to verify the facts, to learn how pro bono services are provided locally, and to ascertain how to advance the pro bono practice as a viable and sustainable public interest design.

Architect-Facilitator In this model, architects do not play the role of project director (the role that is generally perceived by the profession to be a primary role of architects); rather, they serve as a cultivator or curator in the design process. Straus and Doyle (1978) introduced the architect as facilitator as a new role that architects can play. They suggest that this role involves a shift from that of problem solver to that of a facilitator of problem solving. In this role the architect facilitates critical meetings and assists in the design and management of the total planning process. There are a few other roles relevant to architects as facilitators. The role of cultivator and the role of curator complement the role of facilitator. The architectcultivator more emphasizes promoting the culture of collaboration for social gain, locating resources and key players, and forging partnerships. Alternately, the architect-curator focuses on organizing collaborative efforts and turning them into physical projects or outcomes to create visible public good. In both cases, the architect-cultivator or architect-curator may not be directly responsible for creating design, but both facilitate collaborative design and development processes. Groat proposed a framework of architects as cultivators (Groat 2000; Groat and Wang 2013). There are other models similar to hers, but they all advocate a role for architects as facilitators, beyond those of technicians and artists (two conventional roles of architects). They argue that the need is growing for architects to act as facilitators, in addition to filling roles as technicians and artists. This is because architects should be able to manage effectively increasingly complex design and development processes and diverse participating constituencies. Such changing demographic, social, cultural, and political contexts require architects to be more responsive to varying needs of diverse societies and populations.

Implications and Application of the Nine Models Several takeaways from the PID taxonomy are grouped ahead: Common attributes of PID practices: Cutting across the nine types, we find several common threads: (1) advancing social responsibility, inclusiveness, and ethics; (2) addressing social, economic, and environmental justice and equality; (3) taking community-based approaches and making grassroots efforts; (4) offering architectural services that are valuable, affordable, and accessible to those currently underserved or unserved by architecture; (5) building communities’ and individuals’ sense of ownership in the design decisions; and (6) promoting architects’ and communities’ collaborative process of identifying shared values and goals and defining quality design. Similar results are found in the literature (e.g., Garlock 2015; Freear and Barthel 2014; Angotti et al. 2011; Butin 2010; Lepik 2010; McDonnell 2009; Palleroni 2008; Smith 2007; Sinclair and Stohr 2006; Bell 2004; Hou and Rios 2003). Emerging approaches: Technology (information technology, digital media, etc.) increasingly plays an important role in design (Papanek 2005) as well as in the nine PID models. In particular, social media is heavily used, especially in open-source design and collective capability. Also worth noting is an increasing emphasis on research (Engle 2012), especially applied research, and cross-disciplinary approaches to PID (participatory action research and practice, open-source 344

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design, design as political activism, social construction). A rising interest in facilitation is significant. Design still dominates the culture and policies of the architecture profession and academia, but curating and facilitating design also receive increasing amounts of attention from designers. PID taxonomy toward validation: Although the purpose of the proposed taxonomy is not PID certification, it is possible to use the PID taxonomy as initial criteria to assess whether a design project is considered PID. For example, some open-source design–based projects may be PIDbased in a limited way. If a project builds, however, on multiple PID models (e.g., incorporating attributes of design as political activism, advocacy design, and pro bono design services, etc.), that project, arguably, is highly likely to be PID-based. Similarly, an agency can use the taxonomy to determine the direction of a PID project or choose a specific PID approach. For example, if an agency is a place-specific, locally based, start-up organization or has limited resources, it chooses grassroots design practice so that alliances can be built with other organizations in similar situations. It is also possible for an association of community development organizations to use the PID taxonomy as a validation or designation system to determine whether a given agency is qualified to be a genuine PID-based organization, or whether an agency is considered a start-up or an experienced PID-based organization. This deserves further research.

Concluding Remarks Several themes that emerge in the responses of the study participants in the surveys are noteworthy and deserve further research. First, we have seen the emergence of “crowd” power (e.g., growing opportunities for expressing a private citizen’s opinion in global forums via social media), which can also promote more active and easier public participation in design and contribute to advancing collective capability (Shelton et al. 2015; Tayebi 2013; Poplin 2012). Second, we have seen the rise of new types of “creative” classes pursuing social change (e.g., young, insurgent, grassroots-based, socially conscious designers working collaboratively in disadvantaged communities), who are likely to lead grassroots design practice, social construction, and advocacy design (Conlin 2015; Papanek 2005; Fisher 2006). Third, PID in general will likely make architecture more relevant and responsive to societies and PID could expand the influence of architectural professions in the long run. Fourth, in response to the author’s question about what practical abilities architects need to have in order to implement the nine models more effectively, several practical roles stood out more strongly than others: (1) an ability to explain to others what currently exists, what is possible, and how they can contribute; (2) an ability to manage complex information, processes, and people; (3) an ability to build long-term working relationships; (4) an ability to respond sensitively to human emotions and conflicts arising in the process; and (5) an ability to perform professional tasks in key areas where technical competence is required as an architect. Currently, we do not typically teach students about the first four abilities in architecture school. If we are interested in expanding the architectural profession, it will be necessary to consider modifying the current curriculum to help educate students about the benefits, principles, and techniques of the four abilities in a way that advances PID and enriches architecture. Service learning, environment and behavior, urban planning, political science, negotiation, and sociology literature have touched on some of the educational challenges mentioned in the fourth theme earlier (e.g., Leach and Wilson 2014; Angotti et al. 2011; McDonnell 2011; Butin 2010; Forester 2009; Fisher 2006; Himley 2004; Furco and Billig 2002; Bringle and Hatcher 2000; Boyer and Mitgang 1996; Ghirardo 1991; Schön 1990; Forester 1989; Blau 1987), but more research on these findings would be beneficial. 345

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The majority of participants in this study agreed that the nine models are useful because they clarify what exists in the realm of PID, what is possible, and what is emerging; these models help the participants consider their career goals. They agree, however, that the nine models require practical guidelines (e.g., what to prepare, how to start, how to find funds), so that the nine models can be truly useful and implemented in practice. The nine models may not be the only dominant models, but they are a useful start. It is important to recognize the growing list of alternative architectural practices that exist throughout world. It would be educationally valuable to expose students and practitioners to those emerging practices. It would also be beneficial to teach students how architects can and should do far more than what they normally do in a design firm.

Acknowledgment I wish to thank my graduate research assistant Kimberly Buchholz for help with finding additional sources to support and update my research.

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26 Architecture Before 3.11 Unspoken Social Architecture During the Blank 25 Years of Japan Tamotsu Ito

Introduction Among those who study and practice architecture in Japan, the news of the Pritzker Prize for Toyo Ito in 2013 was long overdue, but at the same time one may wonder what made him the Pritzker Laureate, because after the tsunami triple disaster in 2011, Toyo Ito declared that he entirely changed his architectural philosophy. Ito declared that his work would aim for “social” contribution, especially for the destroyed Tohoku region. A year after Ito, Shigeru Ban also received the prize. The jury citation put significant emphasis on Ban’s contributions for refugees and disaster relief, besides his tremendous contributions to create new architectural language by employing innovative use of structure, materiality, form, and detail (Palumbo 2014, p. 1). The global appreciation that came through the prestigious prize for Ito and Ban, the two icons of contemporary Japanese architecture, solidified the notion of social architecture in Japan. After the March 11, 2011, tsunami triple disaster, often referred to as 3.11, an emerging number of Japanese architects have argued for the need for social architecture. A good example of this emerging trend is the exhibition Architecture Since 3.11, which featured a number of architects, including Ito and Ban, and called for a social turn in Japanese architecture. However, while professionals urged the use of architecture for the common social good, in Japan the prevailing notion of social architecture was largely nonprofit and pro bono. The broader professional implications and the other more complex or interdisciplinary methods of operation were initially not explored as sustainable professional models, which is partly because most of Ban and Ito’s projects that are regarded as social projects have been done pro bono (Ban 2013, p. 64). Social architecture in Japan became a prominent trend after 3.11, though this trend emerged not only for the purpose of disaster relief but also in response to many other chronic social issues, as described by Taro Igarashi, an architectural historian and the curator of Architecture Since 3.11. Of course these currents (social problems) have gradually emerged after the crash of bubble economy with gorgeous and extravagant post-modern architecture as well as the falling birthrate plus aging population. 3.11 made them quite apparent earlier than we have thought, as the issues we need to tackle. (Igarashi and Yamazaki 2014, p. 18, translation by author)

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As Igarashi suggests, there prevails a strong conception that social architecture and its associated new methodology or new interdisciplinary frameworks in Japanese architecture have been a result of social consciousness fostered due to 3.11. The question remains, however: why did it take 3.11 for social architecture to emerge in Japan, while the current of social architecture in other countries emerged much earlier? Furthermore, besides the fame of Ito and Ban, why is social architecture viewed as mostly voluntary work in Japan? This essay argues that in Japan the narrow view of socially engaged architecture, as often portrayed through Ito and Ban’s practice, is far from complete. This essay contextualizes what socially motivated Japanese architects were doing before 3.11, situating them in a broader sociopolitical history and institutional structures of Japan. By looking at the exemplary approaches of Atelier Bow-Wow and Ryuji Fujimura, this essay argues that different societal background shapes different ways of methodology/theorization around social architecture. Their idea of social engagement operates not through questioning the framework but through exploring more deeply the aspects within architecture itself, such as form, program, materiality, typology, and design process.

Changes to the Role of Individual Architects From Postwar to Post-Bubble After the Second World War ended in 1945, the Japanese economy incredibly grew by the reconstruction of the built environment and rapid industrialization, facilitated by the Korean War in the 1950s, Tokyo Olympic in 1964, and the sudden rise of people’s living standards. Between 1945 and 1973, we see a parallel growth of the modern economy and modern architects in Japan. Many young architects and urban planners at that time were involved in national construction projects, and some of their projects became the icons of Japanese postwar architecture. The most recognized architect, Kenzo Tange, was one such icon, designing the important Hiroshima Peace Center war memorial, the national Olympic gymnasium in Tokyo, and the Osaka EXPO main plaza. The year of Osaka EXPO, 1970, was one of the turning points for individual architects when the rapid economic growth of the nation came to a pause. Arata Isozaki pleaded with architects to retreat from public architecture and urban design, arguing that there would be no future for individual architects because in urban design individual creativity would be replaced by large capital venture (Fujimura 2014, p. 70). It was the time when large offices, such as Nikken Sekkei, Nihon Sekkei, and Yamashita Sekkei, became much more involved in urban design. These large offices grew phenomenally in a short period of time and whose size and experience became too large for individual architects to compete with. Individual architects no longer participated in national projects, and began to dignify themselves more as solo practitioners and the notion of the star architect began to take shape. At first they designed and published magnificent housing projects in journals, and often won the competition for public projects (Kuma 2006, p. 1). In this way the division of the role of individual architects and corporate firms was established. During the time, the division of the professional framework between architects and urban planners also emerged in Japan. Initiated by Kenzo Tange in 1962, the first urban planning department at the University of Tokyo was established. While Tange’s projects and research at that time had integrated both disciplines of architecture and urban planning, after this division of disciplines, the possibility of being cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary, or developing common professional values and languages between government and private practice, has become less likely. The Japanese culture of “lifetime employment” further accelerated this situation1 (Arita 2014, p. 4; Minohara et al. 2014, p. 9). After the First Oil Shock of 1973, the professional scope of the individual architect in Japan narrowed considerably. Even the “stardom system” deteriorated gradually. Japanese government tried to maintain the economic growth after the 1970s just as before, promoting government-subsidized

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public buildings in rural cities. During the 1980s and 1990s a good number of public buildings were designed and built by competitions and private practices. However, when government bureaucrats decided on the programs and floor areas for these buildings, local needs were often overlooked. Local governments often built large buildings for the sake of economic vitalization or to meet the national criteria for subsidization even if the local communities actually did not require those buildings. These buildings were often too big for local cities to maintain in the long term and eventually resulted in serious financial deficits. This economic and infrastructural failure came to be known as “Hakomono policy,” meaning that the projects were made solely for the sake of construction, having shown no consideration to the people’s actual economic and cultural demand (Hako-mono means a box or hardware). However, although the failure was a result of an erroneous government policy, since the tangible expression of this failure came in the form of large and extravagant buildings, it was the architects who were also blamed for this fiasco. In 2006, the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma wrote an essay titled “From Paddock to Karaoke,” which describes the end of the architect’s stardom framework (Kuma 2006). Kuma suggested that the opportunity for young architects to participate in competitions for public project dramatically decreased because of the increasing criticism of public buildings as Hako-mono and the resulting stagnant economy. The selection process of architectural firms to design government-funded public projects did not focus on the strength of the design proposal but rather focused more on the work experience and financial solvency of the participating firms. This process naturally excluded young architects. Kuma described that the situation of individual architects’ housing design became like karaoke instead of a paddock race, in which the participants sing different songs with each other as they like, and mutually talk about them without opening any discussion outside of their circle. Young professionals could no longer contribute to society through public design projects. Even when famous architects commit to urban redevelopment project, they often just design façades, while corporate firms design structure and infrastructure (Fujimura 2014, p. 94). The Japanese notion of the “architect” as a profession also devalued what individual architects would esteem as the core of their profession. As an embedded system in Japanese society, architects are not asked or expected to express their own personal values. Design fees are often decided without any consideration for how creative a design is, taking into account only the time to produce technical documents based on the total construction areas, assuming that the design concept is just following the standardized facility planning guideline and that architects have not spent much time on the concept design (Yamamoto 2012, p. 15). Another Japanese architect, Riken Yamamoto, states one of the most problematic issues: In Japan the designers of architectural spaces are treated as engineers who design facilities. . . . “Engineers” signify the designers of spaces that have been cut and divided beforehand into facilities—designers who do not question why those spaces have been cut and divided in this way. That is, the system is premised on the non-ideological character of designers. In Japan, those who are regarded as excellent engineers are non-ideological engineers. (Yamamoto 2012, p. 15) In addition to Yamamoto’s argument, an “architect” can be described using two different Japanese translations, which are “Kenchiku-ka” and “Sekkei-sha” (Kuma 2006, p. 1). Sekkei-sha is closer to what Yamamoto describes as a nonideological engineer. Many architects, especially those who think they have any philosophy of design, want to call themselves as kenchiku-ka, but if architects experience a public project, they know all the client side regards them sekkei-sha. Thus, as a framework, a typical government does not include the value of ideas in the fee nor in their expectations. Of course, in most public competitions there are no design fees even if an entry advances to a finalist. 352

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The Question of Small Government in Urban Planning The emergence of neoliberalism, which is often regarded in relation to small government, privatization and globalization, had a very different trajectory in Japan. In the age of rapid globalization, the close tie between government and large corporate firms thrives and prevents the empowerment of local governance. This trend prevented the establishment of a strong social agenda in architecture. The major factor that favored large corporations and stifled social architecture is that Japanese government placed higher priority on road construction to facilitate national economic growth. Providing better housing was never a prime goal. The origin of this prioritization goes back to the late nineteenth century when Akimasa Yoshikawa, a mayor of Tokyo, provided a statement in 1884. Known as Hon-Matsu Ron, this statement schematizes the hierarchy of the urban development, saying “Road + Bridge + River development is Hon (Main), Housing development is Matsu (Sub)” (Honma 1996, p. 76). This prioritization actually took place during Yoshikawa’s time and continued as a fixed framework of Japanese urban development. Between 1964 and 1982, around 60–80 percent of the national annual construction budget has been spent for road construction and river-water management, whereas 7–17 percent has been spent for housing. The second factor is the Urban Planning Act in Japan of 1919, which limited the authority of local public administrators to decide on urban zoning. The notion of small government often implies the shift of power from national government to local and private sectors, but it was not until 1992 when this shift of the power happened through a revision of the law and act (The Land Institute of Japan 2015, p. 1). The third factor is the very close relationship—even corrupt relationship—between large corporations and the government, which has been increasingly reinforced since the Second World War. In order for the government to make the war mission go smoother the National Mobilization Law was established in 1938, which gave absolute power to government to lead all private sectors. This law came to be known as the “1940 Regime.” Since then, the relationships between the government and private sectors became so close that they could be considered corrupt. This overall framework and regime actually continued even after losing the war. Rather than decreasing this regime’s influence, prime ministers after the war took advantage of this regime as the means of economic revitalization. The Doubling Incoming Plan by Hayato Ikeda (premiership 1960–1964) in 1960 and Japan Land Reformation Plan by Kakuei Tanaka (premiership 1972–1974) in 1972 are based on these close relationships between government and large corporations, which also had the civil engineering section within the group (Honma 1996, p. 194). Even in the era of Reagan and Thatcher neoliberalism in the 1980s, which celebrated “small government,” this structure of “big government” did not change in Japan. The prime minister at that time, Yasuhiro Nakasone (premiership 1982–1987), promoted Minkatsu, meaning “private development.” Minkatsu was actually just another version of government-led development fostering corrupt relationships with private corporations. In this way, in the area of urban planning and construction, even after the 1980s the power of the big government has remained.

Poor Financing Infrastructure for Social Architecture Without a small government and the support from public sources, financing by small private sectors or individuals is the only way left for social architecture. However, as Figure 26.1 shows, both investments and donations from individuals or small banks to small firms (including NPOs and NGOs) have been considerably less than other OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, reformed in 1961) countries in size and in ratio of GDP (Ono 2013, p. 6). Also, the finance of NPOs and NGOs in Japan is much less than it is in the United States. Furthermore, there is a much smaller market for crowd funding in Japan than in the United States.2 353

Figure 26.1 Individual investors ratio among OECD countries. Produced by author.

Architecture Before 3.11

Japanese society holds a very different cultural perspective about philanthropy than the United States. While Judeo-Christian values encouraged philanthropic culture, many Japanese people do not have a similar cultural framework within which philanthropic institutes might emerge as supports to social infrastructure. Tetsuro Watsuji’s best-known book, Fudo (2000 [1935]), explains that Japanese culture is largely based on the notion of “family,” meaning that they put importance on the unity and shared value within a family, an organization, a community. And normally Japanese people have not established mutual help among individuals beyond such a “family.” The lack of donation culture is further inhibited by Japan’s taxation system. The main idea in Japan until 2011 was that the government financially supports small firms, NPOs, and NGOs. As a system, the Japanese government has not encouraged private sectors to donate to small organizations. The government charged a local tax for 90 percent of donations until 2011, contrary to the tax exemption system for private donations that is in place in the United States. The government has decided whom to support financially, and has given very little consideration for tax exemption for private donations (Sadakiyo 2011, pp. 20–21). The investment framework of major banks in Japan at least until the collapse of the Japanese bubble economy in early 1990s has also been partially responsible for inhibiting the social architecture system. Until the collapse major big banks had defined the majority of the investment framework as the stable and continuous investment in the already established stable large corporations. Small regional banks had followed the scheme of major banks, and did not have any opportunity to develop independent frameworks to invest in emerging small firms and organizations as venture capital (Cabinet Office 2014, p. 3). As a result, until 2000s there had been no initiative or notion of the investment of venture capital for growing small firms, NPO, NGOs, or individuals. In summary, longer government-led regimes in conjunction with the monopoly of the banking system hindered the financial basis of social architecture in Japan.

Architects Approach Social Architecture Before and After 3.11 As seen earlier, the situation has been in fact too “blank” for individual architects to imagine social architecture as more than voluntary projects for disaster relief. It was too difficult for them to imagine updating their professional framework either from the public or private realm in an interdisciplinary manner. However, it does not mean that there have been no Japanese social architects; actually there are some who have explored social aspects without being interdisciplinary. The latter half of this essay introduces two exemplary practices originally focusing on social architecture within architectural discipline. It is true that these architects also started more interdisciplinary approaches after 3.11. However, the unique aspect of these two is that, even before 3.11, they have continuously publicized their theories and practices aiming for the social realm as a discourse of contemporary architecture and urbanism.

Atelier Bow-Wow—Architectural Ethnography Atelier Bow-Wow is a Tokyo-based architectural practice led by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima. They have steadily published unique architectural research, theories, and drawings globally since their early career. In their debut book Made in Tokyo, published in 2001, they present a thorough study of the anonymous buildings in Tokyo that have unique hybrid features (Figure 26.2). They positively nicknamed these buildings Dame-Kenchiku (No-good architecture). Their study took an ethnographic approach, starting from specific data to holistically grasping an argument. If one tries to extract something from Tokyo’s urban environment, one tends to see Tokyo simply as chaos because of too many exceptional cases to generalize. The approach of Bow-Wow provides a possible way to connect the complex real world with architectural design, an approach that has long been ignored by contemporary architecture (Kaijima et al. 2001, p. 11). 355

Courtesy of Atelier Bow-Wow + Team Made in Tokyo.

Figure 26.2 One sample of Dame-kenchiku in Made in Tokyo, titled “Park-on-Park.”

Architecture Before 3.11

Bow-Wow published a number of project books and theoretical books, such as Pet Architecture Guide Book, WindowScape, Post Bubble City and Behaviorology, and worked on numerous housing projects, public space and spatial installations. Their common attitude is to regard the built environment as a holistic entity of conditions, culture, customs, people and community, critically transcending the limit of modern society, whose framework divided each element and thought of them separately. Bow-Wow’s approach in combining research and practice has been significantly supported by the research laboratory system in Japanese universities—for Bow-Wow it has been Tsukamoto Laboratory in the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Kaijima Laboratory in Tsukuba University. Every master student belongs to one professor’s laboratory during his/her two-year program. In addition to taking courses and writing a thesis within the school-wide curriculum, students also work for the laboratory, playing major roles in lab research and projects. While the activity of each laboratory depends on each professor’s interests and methods, both Tsukamoto Laboratory and Kaijima Laboratory have continuously developed research and drawings, updating the potential nexus of architecture and society. Atelier Bow-Wow’s interests have expanded from Tokyo to various cities in the world and Japanese countryside, and their arguments and methodologies have also developed alongside. At first their method was about how they can learn from Tokyo, or urban built environments, which was very similar to Learning From Las Vegas by Venturi and Scott Brown, or Architecture Without Architects by Rudofsky. Meanwhile, their recent exploration has been about how architects can contribute to the society in more direct ways, rather than just learning. They started to tackle chronic issues, such as depopulation of rural areas and revitalization of suburban communities since 2006, using their new methods for research and drawing. Starting from mapping research for local cities and architectural typologies (Mito and Kanazawa), they developed their drawing methods so that they can engage more social realms. Public drawing done for Kitamoto, a suburban city of Tokyo’s metropolitan area, helped people in the community reimagine their vibrant future by drawing the station front plaza together.3 In their understanding, drawing was not simply a techno-aesthetic medium to communicate architects’ idea to other stakeholders; rather they take drawings as a means to map the complex social process of the production of space. Drawing became a research method to create a body of knowledge about various social agents related to the spatial production. Atelier Bow-Wow’s developing idea of the actor network scheme of architecture was deeply inspired by Bruno Latour’s actor network theory (1999, 2008), and has helped visualize the invisible quality of architecture. In the 2012 Core House project for the Tohoku region devastated by the tsunami (Ishinomaki and Minamisoma), Bow-Wow and several other architectural professors, such as Yasuaki Onoda, Kazuhiro Kojima, Manabu Chiba, formed a voluntary group with their laboratories to undertake research and design to envision a more resilient community. Bow-Wow’s area of focus was a fisherman’s village whose housing was completely destroyed by the tsunami. BowWow proposed a three-tiered design solution to the housing problem: (1) build small first, and then enlarge (Core House for a more affordable self-revitalization process); (2) develop an architectural typology for the local fishermen’s lifestyle (architecture for the specific community or typology for more communicative neighborhood); and (3) use local craftsmen and local materials, such as timber (situating architecture within the local social/natural ecosystem). Then, they drew a network map to connect all the people and materials around this project, regarding all of them as “actors” supporting architecture. This method, designing the actor network (Figure 26.3), is their ongoing development of methods and notations that could serve as potential resources to intervene in communities with urgent/chronic issues. This visualization of the actor network makes it possible for architects and other stakeholders to share their argument and vision through design, and to imagine a new lifestyle and relationships between public space and design. The idea of the actor network scheme also comes from a motivation to propose an alternative of top-down disaster reconstruction, such as the proposal to build a gigantic seawall, justified by too 357

Courtesy of Atelier Bow-Wow + Fukushi Gakudan + Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tsukamoto Lab.

Figure 26.3 An example of an actor network map, drawn for a project called 1K.

Architecture Before 3.11

complex of a rationalization to examine, like a black box. In order to define the size of walls, governments established an overly complex formula utilizing the effects of tsunami, cost efficiency, and societal influence as parameters. However, even if we notice that it does not consider local ecosystems and the lives of communities, we cannot touch this overly complex black box and cannot argue whether this seawall is appropriate. Tsukamoto emphasizes the importance of developing a methodology like the actor network map as a way to deconstruct such a black box, and becoming interdisciplinary in order to tackle the whole issue. He describes how modernization brought Japanese people not only convenience and a richer lifestyle but also complex systems and protocols of social infrastructure which are now forcing us to follow rather than to change. Tsukamoto’s goal is to get the vibrant life back by visualizing the complex fabric of such systems so that small local communities and architects can tackle the systems for better change (Abe et al. 2016, p. 1).

Ryuji Fujimura—Architecture of Open-Process Dialogues in the Complex Society Having studied in Yoshiharu Tsukamoto’s laboratory in the Tokyo Institute of Technology, the architect Ryuji Fujimura has experimented with a series of methods to critically overcome modern capitalism and commercialism. He calls it critical engineering-ism, which recalls critical regionalism by Kenneth Frampton. He coined the term “hyper linear design process,” meaning the continuous and cumulative design development process, in order to attain a holistic and complex architecture whose elements are synthesized in equal responses to numerous conditions in the project, such as function, cost, neighborhood, spatial proportion, structure, mechanical engineering, rather than prioritizing one or two of them. Instead of changing the mode of production along with the development of design ideas, he intentionally outputs the uniform scale of physical models periodically, like once a week (Figure 26.4), and then “observes and makes a critique on it” to gradually develop the scheme in a more objective way than just thinking/sketching in his head (Fujimura et al. 2014, p. 3). Repeating such observation, critique, and development, his architecture is full of complex stories on many scales, emerging from different criteria and opinions, sometimes synthesized/divided, but keeping the whole at the same time. In a dense urban context, his architecture neither stands alone by insisting on its abstract form, nor is it totally embedded in the urban fabric of the neighborhood around it by surrendering to the dominant local regulations (e.g., Building K, Apartment B). In the suburban context, his architecture generates a comfortable publicity and critique by synthesis of local vernacular and familiar architectural gestures and abstract forms, as well as the close reading of functional needs and desires (e.g., Tsurugashima-lab, Shiraoka New Town). Fujimura has also applied his methodology to new methods of architectural design education, encouraging the relationship between architects and the public domain. Instead of imagining forms at first from precedents, his dialogue, as if it were regular client meetings in an architect office, finally produces each student’s original answers from bottom-up integrated dialogues. It shows his design method’s possibility as a way to communicate more openly with different stakeholders, regardless of whether they are clients, contractors or students. After 3.11, he developed his methodology into an unforeseen design studio framework called “Social Design Studio” conducted in collaboration with Kazumi Kudo, a professor at Toyo University and the principal of Coelacanth K&H architects.4 The studio confronts real issues in a city and collaborates with the local government. It does not sound so unique in the U.S. studio pedagogical framework, but it is unique in how Fujimura applies the hyper linear design process in the Japanese context, in which the physical model output by students is similarly applied as his own projects (Figure 26.5). For instance, he integrates the design process with voting systems in regular meetings with 359

Courtesy of RFA.

Figure 26.4 A hyper linear design process of a Building K project.

Courtesy of RFA.

Figure 26.5 A hyper linear design process of a Tsurugashima-lab project.

Courtesy of RFA.

Figure 26.6 Discussions with students and the local community through a physical model.

Architecture Before 3.11

local citizens and governments, which are five to six times in a 15-week studio, much more often than any other studio framework. Therefore, this studio’s focus is not only on final products but also on the design process and sharing it with citizens simultaneously. This system produces interesting feedback to both students and citizens/governments (Fujimura, Architecture, 215). This constant engagement with the local community and students enabled Fujimura to inform students, citizens and governments in what design can do for the city (Figure 26.6). Of course it was possible only through the city’s positive support and commitment. Fujimura in turn also gave great feedback to the city, by taking this opportunity as the chance to publicize the city as an innovative government trying to solve the chronic issues of depopulation and shrinking all over Japan, through a series of symposiums and exhibitions.5 Fujimura provides an example of how to open and share the complex design process of architecture to society, and to integrate the practical issues of each city with architectural form.

Conclusion: Architectural Hybridity as a Node of Networked Society The unique situation of recent Japanese society and the unique practices of Japanese architects make it possible to envision a richer common ground between social architecture and the discourse of architectural theory. While Fujimura and Atelier Bow-Wow’s methods might not look like a typical approach to social architecture, it is just a difference of where to find “the state of hybrid” at first; typical social architects find it in a relationship between architecture and other realms (interdisciplinary), and Bow-Wow and Fujimura originally found it within architectural design discourse. Ultimately, these practices and their research are based on simple and common motivations for envisioning a better society, shared by social architects all over the world. Therefore, the practices of such Japanese architects can be revisited as exemplary cases of integrating theory and practice, by which the whole discourse would be able to envision a more sustainable and resilient future of social architecture with solid theorizations. The situation has started to change after 3.11 among Japanese architects, and there emerged a small possibility for them to envision more interdisciplinary approaches, similarly to other countries.6 While there are still large gaps between Japan and other countries in terms of the base for social architecture, it is also beneficial for other Japanese architects to recognize that some individual architects and small firms in Japan have already developed a unique potential of social architecture, envisioning highly theorized—therefore potentially more resilient—methodologies for Japanese society.

Notes 1 Lifetime employment (終身雇用) has been a popular employment framework in Japan for many firms and governments to hire a person as a newly graduated freshman until retirement at the age of 60–65. The good aspect of this system is that the employee is secured a stable income and the possibility of promotion based on his or her age and experience within one firm. The bad aspect is that each firm tends to develop its own corporate culture and methods without common value with other firms, which sometimes results in huge gaps between different firms, even within the same kinds of professions. 2 According to the Japan NGO’s website, there is $2,803,098,340 pledged to Kickstarter (until December 2016). Meanwhile, the combined total amount pledged to the main crowd funding organizations in Japan, such as Readyfor, Campfire, and Makuake, is still less than $80,000,000 (until November 2016). See http://visualizing.info/cr/crowdfunding/jptrend/#m=a1; www.kickstarter.com/help/stats (viewed 28 December 2016). 3 In January 2017, an exhibition was held at Harvard GSD titled Architectural Ethnography by Atelier Bow-Wow, which reviewed Atelier Bow-Wow’s exploration of drawings and research. Atelier Bow-Wow also held a workshop of public drawing for the exhibition.

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4 Japanese architect group Coelacanth, which is now separately run by Coelacanth K&H, Coelacanth and Associates (Tokyo and Nagoya) and Koizumi Atelier, is known for innovative school architecture design since early the 1990s. They considered a school program not only as a means to achieve social engagement but also as a part of larger urban dynamics. 5 Fujimura used Tsurugashima City Hall as a venue of public meetings and exhibitions of the student works designed for Tsurugashima City. Fujimura later brought the projects to Shibuya, one of the most populated central areas in Tokyo’s metropolis. Three symposiums accompanied the exhibition at a small exhibition space of Shibuya Hikarie, which attracted an astonishing number of 6,300 visitors in six days. www.hikarie8.com/ court/2012/11/2012.shtml (viewed 28 December 2016). 6 The latest symbolic event showing this emerging trend is the award-winning Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2016. The pavilion introduced many emerging architects whose works resonate with the architects described earlier. The pavilion was titled “EN: The Art of Nexus,” and served as a showcase of various projects of these architects; some of them were also featured in the exhibition Architecture After 3.11. EN (縁) means link, connection or nexus. Each project aimed to address various chronic issues in Japan rather than urgent problems, but in contrast to before 3.11, their project framework is very interdisciplinary. For more details see the official website: http://2016.veneziabiennale-japanpavilion.jp.

References Abe, Takaki, Kunihiro Ando, Yasuaki Onoda, Momoyo Kaijima, Toshio Katsukawa, Yuji Kishi, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, and Satoshi Masuda. “The Symposium on San-sui Fukko Gaku.” 復興山水学シンポジウム. Tsukuba University, Tohoku University, n.d. Web. 27 Dec. 2016. http://hamatsukuri2013.sakura.ne.jp/ review.html date of the symposium: 11 Jan. 2015. Arita, Tomokazu. “International Comparative Studies on Changes and Restructuring of Planning Profession and Planning Education.” N.p., 2014. Web. 26 Dec. 2016. https://tsukuba.repo.nii.ac.jp/?action=repository_ action_common_download&item_id=34145&item_no=1&attribute_id=17&file_no=1 Ban, Shigeru. Ban Shigeru. Vol. 7. Tokyo: Nikkei BP Sha, 2013. Print. NA Architect Ser. Cabinet Office. “The Summary of the Study Group on Promoting Provision of Growth Investment.” National Finance Advisory Board. Cabinet Office, Government of Japan, 20 Nov. 2014. Web. 26 Dec. 2016. www5.cao. go.jp/keizai-shimon/kaigi/special/finance/pdf/interimreport.pdf Fujimura, Ryuji, Taro Igarashi, and Ken Tadashi Oshima. Prototyping: Many Models and Remarks. Tokyo: LIXIL, 2014. Fujimura, Ryuji. Architecture of Critical Engineering-ism: Towards the Social Architecture. Tokyo: NTT, 2014. Honma, Yoshihito. Doboku Kokka No Shisō: Toshiron No Keifu/The Philosophy of Civil Engineering Nation: A Genealogy of Urbanism in Japan. Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyōronsha, 1996. Igarashi, Taro, and Ryo Yamazaki. Architecture Since 3.11: New Relationships Between Society and Architects. Kyoto: Gakugei Shuppansha, 2014. Kaijima, Momoyo, Junzo Kuroda, and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto. Made in Tokyo. Tokyo: Kajima Inst., 2001. Kuma, Kengo. “From Paddock to Karaoke.” Shin-kenchiku April (2006): 51–55. www.japan-architect. co.jp/jp/backnumber/book.php?book_cd=100604&x_book_search=1&x_keyword_search=&book_ name=SK&book_year=06&keyword=&magazine=&special=&book=&x_page=1 The Land Institute of Japan. The Revision History of Urban Planning Act and Building Standard in Japan (都市計画 法・建築基準法改正一覧) (n.d.): n. pag. The Land Institute of Japan, 2015. www.lij.jp/info/landpolicy_ history/lawrevision_history.pdf Latour, Bruno. Science in Action ( Japanese Translation). Trans. Masaru Kawasaki and Kiyoshi Takada. Tokyo: Sangyo Tosho, 1999. Latour, Bruno, and Kumiko Kawamura. Kyokō No Kindai = Nous N’avons Jamais été Modernes (We Have Never Been Modern). Tokyo: Shinhyōron, 2008. Minohara, Kei, Shin Aiba, Michio Ubaura, Naoto Nakajima, Chie Nozawa, Naohiko Hino, Ryuji Fujimura, and Akinobu Murakami. Hakunetsu Kōgi Korekara No Nihon Ni Toshi Keikaku Wa Hitsuyō Desu Ka/Seminar—Is Urban Planning Necessary for the Future Japan? Kyoto: Gakugei Shuppansha, 2014. Ono, Arito. “Financial Strategy for the Growth of Small Firms.” Mizuho Insight—Policy (2013): n. pag. Mizuho Research Institute. www.mizuho-ri.co.jp/publication/research/pdf/insight/pl130313.pdf 13 Mar. 2013. Web. 27 Dec. 2016. Palumbo, The Load, Alejandro Aravena, Stephen Breyer, Yung Ho Chang, Kristin Feireiss, Glenn Murcutt, Juhani Pallasmaa, Ratan N. Tata, and Martha Thome. “Jury Citation.” Jury Citation: Shigeru Ban | The Pritzker Architecture Prize. The Hyatt Foundation, Mar. 2014. Web. 27 Dec. 2016. www.pritzkerprize.com/2014/ jury-citation 364

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Sadakiyo, Eiko. “Research Report—the Overview of Our Nation’s Donation 調査報告-わが国寄付動向に ついて.” Research Report, Summer 2011 74 (2011): 15–23. Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, June 2011. Web. 8 Jan. 2017. www.smtb.jp/others/report/economy/cmtb/pdf/repo1106_2.pdf Watsuji, Tetsurō. Fudo Ningengakuteki Kousatsu. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2000. (originally published in 1935) Yamamoto, Riken. Riken Yamamoto. Tokyo: Toto, 2012.

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27 The Reciprocity Between Architects and Social Change Taiwan Experience After the 1990s Chun-Hsiung Wang

The social implication of architecture was not a major concern for Taiwanese architects before the 1990s, even though some have recognized the need for a social turn in architecture for years. However, in the last decade, the search for the social implication of architecture has become one of the fundamental factors of Taiwan’s architectural development. This chapter aims to explore how to present such transformation. By looking at examples of two important contemporary practices in Taiwan, Sheng-Yuan Huang with Fieldoffice and Ying-Chun Hsieh with Atelier-3,1 this chapter contextualizes socially engaged architecture in Taiwan. The essay explores why and how social engagement as a methodology has been transformed from a loosely defined theory to practice.

Social Change and Community Empowerment in Relation to the Development of Regionalist Architecture The founding of architectural professionalism in Taiwan was greatly influenced by the United States (Hsiao 1998; Han 2001, 70–166; Huang 2011, 245–353). During the period of Japanese Occupation (1895–1945), Taiwan was forced into the capitalistic world but the architectural profession was yet to be modernized. The professional system was established only after the end of WWII in 1945 (Wang 2012; Wang, Sun and Hsieh 1999). Being influenced by the United States, architecture firms focused more on the division of labor and production line of drawings (Larson, Leon and Bollick 1983, 251– 279, Cheng 2007). Before the 1990s, mainstream architecture firms tended to run in a ‘company’ style, like Haigo Shen Architects and Associates, Fei & Cheng Associates, C. Y. Lee & Partners and J. J. Pan and Partners, architects and planners in the 1980s and 1990s. They simulated the typology of the U.S. large-scale firm and could be categorized into partnership, corporation and affiliate according to the ways of organization (Blau 1981; Blau et al. 1983; Cheng 2007; Liang 2008; Pan 2010). The architectural profession has been controlled mainly by market forces. The clients were mostly developers and big corporations and the design accorded with the standard of western developed countries. The social consciousness within the architecture discipline was comparatively low. Participating in the international division of labor, which led to progressive economic development and rapid capitalization from the end of the 1950s, accounted for the foregoing phenomenon in Taiwan (Wang 2012; Sung 2014). After the 1980s the core values of architectural professions transformed from conventional ­market-driven practice to more socially conscious practice. There were several determinants for the 366

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change. First was the social movement in the advent of democratization.1 Taiwan never experienced democracy since the Order of Martial Law was imposed by the Kuomintang government in 1947. Any experimental social and cultural movement was suppressed and restricted by military rule. This authoritarian regime prioritized the cultivation of superficial Chinese nationalism in the cultural domains. The democratic campaign in the 1980s coerced the state into lifting the Order of Martial Law for 38 years in July 1987. The social movement flourished within two decades before and after the lifting (Hsu and Chou 1989; Chang 1990; Huang, Wong and Huang 2010). Community empowerment through giving more power to the local public administrative bodies was one of the most important parts of the social movement. The community empowerment can be categorized into two streams; one was the reactive crisis relief, with the famous example of the Lukang antiDupont movement.2 Another was the proactive community improvement, like Yong Kang Jie Game Lane. In 1985, two professors from the Architecture Department of Christian Chung Yuan University, Bao-Lin Hu and Chao-Chin Yu, were invited by the Urban Planning Department of Taipei city government to experiment with the first community-participation planning in Taiwan after some had advocated public participation in urban planning for years. The Yong Kang Street neighborhood was chosen and some residents were invited to participate in the planning of some lanes becoming a car-free playground for children in the afternoon. Although the plan itself was not successful at that time, the spirit of citizen participation has been going around for both professionals and citizens (Huang 2003). These movements as evolved over time unveiled many hidden crises of the society and helped to form an important social movement related to the built environment. For instance, the local demand of preserving and protecting local history and the culture of the lane eventually coalesced into a national preservation campaign (Tseng 2007, 36–45). The vibrant development of the community movement attracted some architecture professors and students to participate and initiated the community movement with local residents (Chen 1996; Hsia 2004; OURs 2008). The state also participated in the movement. In 1994, the ruling party of the central government, Kuomintang, announced the Comprehensive Community Development Policy by the Council for Cultural Affairs of Executive Yuan in 1994 to encourage the local community to develop its own cultural characteristics and participate in discussions on community public issues through the inspiration of art and culture. At the same time Taipei City, governed by the opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), proposed the Regional Environmental Improvement Program, aimed at improving the physical environment through citizen participation. The program also requested professionals’ involvement to achieve economic benefits and social justice.3 Until 2017, community development has always been one part of the government policy (Tseng 2007, 8–57). The intervention of the policy provides financial aid which advances community-based development. Meanwhile, more architecture teachers and students participated, like the Organization of Urban Re-s, which constituted the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, Department of Architecture, from Tamkang University & Christian Chung Yuan University. In 1999, the Taipei city government founded the ‘community planner,’ aiming at attracting young architects to participate in the empowerment (National Taiwan University Building Research Foundation 2000). Apart from community empowerment, the development of Taiwan’s regionalist architecture after the 1980s also acted as the bridge between social upheaval and architecture. Unlike the community movement, which is directly linked with civil rights reform, the development of regionalist architecture is more likely the result of proactive reformation within the architectural discipline. Compared to community development, which involves participation and consensus among local residents, regional architecture focuses on the formation of cultural and communal identity through architectural symbol and metaphor. However, although regionalist architecture and community empowerment might seem two different trends—the former deals with the identity politics in built form while the latter deals with issues of social agency in architectural production—these two trends became intertwined during and after the 1990s. 367

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Pao-Teh Han (1934–2014) was one of the pioneers of the development of Taiwan regionalist architecture. Being the head of the architecture department of Tunghai University during 1960– 1970, he initiated the pioneering study of the traditional architecture and towns of Taiwan. In 1969 he founded the magazine Architecture and Planning and two years later another magazine titled Environment and Form magazine. In these two magazines Han published analytical essays about contemporary urban issues and environmental and living problems (Han 2001; Hsia 2007). Han’s initiatives of forming an architectural discourse of regionalism were complemented by the emerging self-awareness in Taiwanese cultural environment—for instance, the vernacular literature movement in the 1970s (Yu 1996). In 1976, the research institute of civil engineering at National Taiwan University established the Urban Planning Group, which was the former body of the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning (GIBP). The organization has gradually developed into the most noticeable advocate of social architecture, and done a substantial amount of research and preservation on traditional architecture and towns. One of the pioneers of GIBP is the professor Chu-Joe Hsia (1947–), who also served as one of the editors of Architecture and Planning magazine from 1972 to 1973. Through these initiatives a distinct architectural discourse emerged, which later came to be known as the regional architecture that valued regional cultural forces, local heritage and the need to assimilate local society in the production of architecture. After the 1980s, Taiwan regionalist architecture evolved into two distinct trends (Wang 2012, 804–808). One was the Hankuang Office, led by Pao-Teh Han, which underwent a series of design experiments, including the Changhua County Cultural Centre (1981) and Kuan-Yin-Ting Youth Activity Center (Figure 27.1) in Penghu (1984) (Kuo 2004). Han’s experiment was followed by the architects of the next generation with representative projects such as Lin Wei Kuan Memorial Library (Hao Chun, 1982) and Yangmei Jiang Residence (Wu, Lin, 1984). The second trend was centered around Yilan county in northeastern Taiwan. In 1981 Ding-Nan Chen (1943–2006), member of the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party, Taiwan), was unpredictably elected as the county magistrate. Under his governance, Yilan became the crucial ground for the experimentation of regionalist architecture. He commissioned Sheng-Fong Lin (1951–), who became famous for his design of Yangmei Jiang Residence. At that time Lin was working at GIBP as a county consultant. Lin also invited Atelier Zo from Japan to design the Dongshan River Park (1994) and the Yilan County Administration Building (1997) and Takano Landscape Planning Company to design Luodong Sports Park (1996). Cumulatively these projects emphasized the relationship between architectural form and its landscape and thus cultivated strong regionalist fervor in architecture. The success of Yilan attracted a younger generation, who was mostly born in the 1960s, to participate in the work in Yilan in the 1990s (Wang 2011). Sheng-Yuan Huang, one of these younger-generation architects, who took part in the development of the regionalist architecture in Yilan, is discussed in the following section.

Fieldoffice and the Yilan Vascular Bundle Project Yilan is situated in the northeastern part of Taiwan. Although it is in close proximity to Taipei, the inaccessibility due to the Central Mountain range allows the agricultural landscape to be preserved, unlike the overdevelopment in western Taiwan. Sheng-Yuan Huang (1963-) was born and raised in Taipei. Before settling in Yilan in 1993, he was not familiar with the place at all. He received a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Tunghai University in 1986 and a master’s degree from Yale University in 1991. In the early years he worked in Eric O. Moss Architects as a project associate, and before returning to Taiwan, he taught at North Carolina State University. He established an atelier in Yilan in 1994, which was later renamed Fieldoffice, employing around 20 people. However, in the next two decades after he settled in Yilan, Huang concentrated his work on Yilan County, and completed nearly 50 projects, of which almost all of them are in Yilan and within 30-minutes’ driving distance from his office. In the first two years in Yilan, Huang spent all of his time studying the 368

Photo by the author.

Figure 27.1 Kuan-Yin-Ting Youth Activity Center in Penghu, 1984. Pao-Teh Han’s design experiment emphasized adopting the formal vocabulary of Taiwan’s traditional architecture for modern design.

Chun-Hsiung Wang

sense of the place, and completed only two projects, a basketball stand and an adjacent poultry farm. He argues that architects ought not to start a project blindly without understanding the place, and understanding of place means not only the climatic geographical setting of the site but also the workings of the political and social institutions of the community. He strived to design a network for better living through which freedom of living can be achieved. As Huang said, “architecture serves the living . . . [and] understands the meaning of real freedom, which is not about being able to leave, but about being able to stay. There’s no need to follow the others. And there’s no need to rely on consumption in finding and sharing values” (Fieldoffice +Huang 2015, 61). These are not empty words. In the exhibition Fieldoffice at Work in Taipei in 2013, Huang explained how to execute the way he believed would lead to social freedom. Huang said to his Fieldoffice colleagues that architects need to transform their roles from outsiders to “both the residents and professionals.” He further recounts, Choosing to stay in Yilan, as there is a throb beyond words. A throb supports them to cast off the bondage and explores freely in their everyday life. Their spatial imagination is like ivy creeping around towns and countryside, not necessary the main space. And there is no need to rush for an answer to confine the development potential. With sufficient nutrients, more creative imagination can be crept, connected and opened; with the growing branches, more spatial opportunity can arise. It is like our everyday life where different ethnic and religious groups inhabit together in the city, and overlap, penetrates, shine and reflect each other, such that they intertwine to become a forest. (Sheng-Yuan 2013, 52) Within his note, “resident” is put prior to “professional,” which expresses Huang’s idea about the unique relationship between architecture and society. As per Huang, an architect needs to be one of the residents before being a professional. As a local resident, an architect needs to be familiar with every little detail in the environment and both customs and culture before undertaking architectural design. In addition to objective fact-finding, from my personal observation of the staff in Fieldoffice, most of them moved to Yilan to work in Huang’s office, except the very few who were born in Yilan. Like Huang, the staff adapts to the environment and changes parts of themselves to become the residents of Yilan. The reconstructed identity of the architect as a member of the community for which they are designing allows professionals to blend into the place. But at the same time, the reconstructed identity also lets them adopt a critical perspective instead of following the local norms without question. Huang won the design competition of the Yilan Social Welfare Center in 1995 (completed in 1998). This was his first crucial project through which he formulated his idea of vascular bundle—an integrated system of transportation networks and land use (Figure 27.2). It took almost a decade to hone the idea and give it a specific name (Fieldoffice+ Huang 2015, 42–87). The first vascular bundle was based in the northeastern riverside of Yilan old town, which was originally built in the Ching Dynasty (1644–1912). The site had been used as a slaughterhouse, which the affluent community of the area regarded as a filthy place for the destitute and less developed community. Through the collaboration of the residents and government officials for 14 years, Fieldoffice learned by doing and gradually renovated the area. The Welfare Center, which is part of the first vascular bundle project, is situated between the Yilan River and the existing community. The site was being blocked by the embankment and the expressway. When designing the Welfare Center, the strategy of Fieldoffice was to make the building an urban node to encourage exchange between the community and the natural open space by the Yilan River. The spatial quality of the community will be improved by absorbing the open space as part of the community. Meanwhile, the natural space can be articulated by the community. However, execution of this project was challenging. The cement embankment was uncultivated while the 370

Courtesy of Fieldoffice.

Figure 27.2 The map of the first vascular bundle project, 1995–2008.

Chun-Hsiung Wang

community was impoverished, and demographically, the aging population is relatively greater. Due to limited resources, the office considered using an empty lot lying adjacent to a temple and about a hundred meters away from the future Welfare Center. Although the temple authority planned to use the vacant space for a future extension, Huang along with a group of local scholars convinced the temple authority to turn the empty lot into Yang Shih-Fang Memorial Garden (1997–2003). By then, the renovation work of Guang Da Lane, located between the Garden and the Welfare Center, had begun. Although there was no financial support to construct the Memorial Garden, Fieldoffice started to persuade the local residents to raise funds for the project. An unexpected turning point came when a covered pedestrian walkway was built to connect the Welfare Center and the embankment, as the local public administrators saw potential in the project. The bridge was named West Bank Bridge (1999–2004). The county government also began to renovate the embankment as a Yilan riverside green path. The challenging renovation of the lane was completed soon after the county government suddenly approved the project budget in 2005—four years after the firm started its community outreach. During the reconstruction of the lane, Fieldoffice initiated another project, the Jin-Mei Parasitic Pedestrian Pathway across Yilan River (2005–2008). Clinging to the side of the bridge, which allows only cars to pass through, the pathway allows people to cross the river safely and get close to the Yilan River (Figure 27.3). Toward the end of the first vascular bundle project, in 2004 Fieldoffice embarked on its second project, located southwest of the first vascular bundle project. This new project is 1 km long, which is three times larger than the first one and includes more than ten projects. The establishment acts as a catalyst of development and transforms the decaying southern edge of the old town, which was previously the city center, into a vibrant place (Figure 27.4). This large-scale renovation project consists of much preservation, restoration and renewal work of the historical landscape, achieved by synergy among the community, government and professionals. In 2009 the third vascular bundle project was established. As of now (2018), there are two projects in progress. Fieldoffice’s other significant project is Luodong Township Cultural Corridor, located in Luodong township in the central part of Yilan county. This project was planned with completely a different strategy and execution procedure, but with the same vision. Luodong Culture Center is designed as a giant pavilion that accommodates large-scale public activities along the urban corridor. The project has become a landmark, tying the sense of belonging of the local people with economic and functional needs. Among the important buildings of this project are Shipai Jinmian Scenic Platform and Cherry Orchard Cemetery Corridor’s Overpass and Service Center up the hill; the Landscape Public Lavatory by Dongshan River Sluice Gate, the Sand Dune Landscape Museum and the Landscape Strategy beside Letzer Incineration Plant at the seaside; the revitalization of Yuan-Shan Kamikaze Aircraft Shelter as the War Time Museum and Public Performance Shelter for Sanxing Township. Each and every space produced re-energized the place within Yilan County.

Ying-Chun Hsieh and Atelier-3’s Thao Tribe Collaborative Construction Ying-Chun Hsieh (1954-) graduated from Tamkang University in 1977, ran a construction company for a few years and finally established his atelier in Hsinchu. He earned his reputation as the prominent regionalist architect of Taiwan. The disastrous 9.21 earthquake prompted him to think about different modes of practice and the possible models of socially engaged architecture. Invited and funded by historians and anthropologists, he moved his office to the Sun Moon Lake to assist the Thao people, one of the aboriginal peoples in Taiwan, with post-disaster reconstruction. The adopted self-help method for housing design facilitated the recovery of many disaster-struck areas. Thao is a rapidly shrinking indigenous community in Taiwan; only about 300 people exist today. Yet, the Thao community surprisingly managed to preserve its unique and complete traditional 372

Courtesy of Fieldoffice.

Figure 27.3 The first vascular bundle project: Yilan Social Welfare Center on the left, the West Bank Bridge in the center and the Jin-Mei Parasitic Pedestrian Pathway on the right.

Courtesy of Fieldoffice.

Figure 27.4 New Moat, 2010–2013. New Moat is one of ten projects of the second vascular bundle.

Taiwan Experience After the 1990s

culture. However, like most of the other aboriginal peoples of Taiwan, such as Amis, Thao’s land had been eaten up by Han Taiwanese and the government for many years and the tribe can no longer make a living by farming and fishing; hence, they became the blue-collar workers of the tourism industry, such as peddlers and cleaners. The 9.21 earthquake severely damaged the tourism of the region and immediately after the disaster the entire Thao tribe lost their jobs. If Thao tribe members could not get stable jobs in their native area, the last surviving members of this indigenous group would scatter and the tribe would eventually go extinct. Providing Thao people stable jobs was crucial for the survival of the tribe, and Hsieh realized that the conventional way of working as an architect as he was familiar with was no longer suitable for the work. Facing a critical time, Hsieh proposed collaborative construction to rebuild the Thao community as a base for preservation and revitalization of its culture. The focus of his proposal was housing that would help to connect people, extend the culture and thus revive the economy. Hsiegh contended the preservationist approach of academic sociologists and anthropologists and argued that the professionals should be involved in the real-life experience of the Thao community to form a sustainable economic model through which the community could thrive (Hsieh, Yin-Chun and Associates 2000, 45). Through design Hsieh wanted to achieve three major objectives: to ensure the collective land ownership of Thao tribe, to establish the traditional ceremonial space as the new community center, and to maintain a strong cohesion with landscape (Shi and Feng 2006). Using Thao’s traditional spatial planning to lay out the house allows people to participate in housing construction, and consequently raises the tribe’s self-awareness and self-recognition. Due to the need for a high degree of coordination among the workers, the cooperation of Thao people becomes the fundamental determinant of cohesion. Hsieh observed that When Thao’s people massively participate in the construction process, the power structure of the community and social relationship will be inverted. It is actually a complete flip-over of the community towards the powerful organization and relations. Once there is any core committee talks about the hardship of the process, he/she has tears in the eyes. Imagine, within the 8-hrs work every day, participants and administrators are challenged by each other in all aspects of life every second, no matter in terms of the wage, the work and the century-old hatred. It is only the belief to have a house to live keeping them to work. It urges the people to find their ways to work with each other, either by negotiation, or hiding, or even subordination. But then, the construction needs to be continued such that they have a place to live. (Hsieh, Yin-Chun & Associates 2001) Hsieh wanted to keep the structure and construction method simple so that nonprofessional and unskilled workers, such as women and elderly members of the Thao community, could participate in the construction process. In this regard, Hsieh’s preference for simplicity was related not only to technical issues, such as to ensure an unimpeded workflow and smooth labor organization and management. Hsieh’s quest for designing a simple structure and system was deeply related also to economic issues. Half of the cost of self-help housing is the workers’ wages. Hseih suggested that through the self-help method of construction collective unemployment could be temporarily solved. To ensure participation of the unskilled workers, especially women and the elderly, the techniques of construction must be simple. The structure of the house is mainly light steel; the outer layer is bamboo with waterproofing material and plywood, and the bamboo wall has non-woven fabric or foamed foil to resist heat, water and bugs. Unskilled Thao communities can very easily finish the main structure and install the roof and outer wall. Even welding is not necessary for windows and doors, beds and toiletry aggregation (Figure 27.5). The work is safe and the house is easy to demolish and amend. In the next 17 years, Hsieh adopted the vision and methodology of collaborative construction around the world wherever there was large-scale natural disaster or a group of people marginalized 375

Courtesy of Ying-Chun Hsieh.

Figure 27.5 Thao Tribe Resettlement Community, 2000. This photo shows that Thao people were holding a festival.

Photo by Ying-Chun Hsieh.

Figure 27.6 Collaborative construction led by Ying-Chun Hsieh in Lipin Village, Chima Township of Sichuan Province, China, 2008.

Chun-Hsiung Wang

by capitalization. He gradually developed an “open platform” idea through which designers provide only a platform that allows workers and users to participate in the construction. The open platform consists of two parts, open architecture and simplified construction, as Hsieh called them. For Hsieh, open architecture refers to the openness and adaptability of the space, structure and construction, such that it is easy to manipulate with local materials and techniques. Hence, the demand for a mainstream construction company and money can be reduced through the local labor force and materials. Simplifying the production equipment reduces the cost as well. Hsieh applied this method in many different projects, such as village housing in Dingzhou, Hebei, Lankao, Henan and Fuyang, Anhui in China, herdsman settlement housing in Tibet, post-disaster relief in Aceh, Indonesia, and Sichuan, China, and tribe reconstruction in Taiwan (Figure 27.6).

Conclusion As has been demonstrated by the practice of Huang and Hsieh, the voluntary pursuit of the social implication of architecture is neither following a trend nor a theoretical predisposition. For both architects, architecture is like a bridge, to connect people living in the neighborhood, to share knowledge and resources freely, to have dialogues with each other and to create the possibility of recognition. This also explains why Juhani Pallasmaa described Huang’s architecture as “spaces of invitation,” because Huang is not only an architect giving physical form but also “the initiator, coordinator and spokesman of his projects” (2017). Huang has thus significantly expanded the traditional role of the professional designer. Although Huang and Hsieh have different methodologies to interpret the social implication of architecture, their efforts make changes to Taiwan architecture. Huang focuses on transforming localized space into place, while Hsieh focuses on turning housing construction into a social movement. They redefine how the profession of architecture could be conducted by making social implication a key element that architects should pursue. Furthermore, they change how people think about what architects can do and should do in the discussion of social issues.

Notes 1 Under martial law, although the Kuomintang government allowed the market freedom, a lot of restrictions were imposed, such as no freedom of the press, assembly and associations. After lifting the Order of Martial Law in 1987, a good number of civil associations emerged. The new associations affected many kinds of public policies and made a great contribution to the progress of political democratization (Chang 1990). 2 When DuPont, an American multinational chemical company, announced it would build a new factory in Lukang in July of 1986, tens of thousands of residents gathered within two days to protest the plan because of environmental concerns. The protest soon got national attention and became a big political issue. After an eight-month protest, the plan was withdrawn. The Lukang anti-DuPont movement is the first successful protest in the period of martial law and had a profound impact on the future. 3 See Taipei Metropolitan Government, Regional Environmental Improvement Project, in Loval Wiki, Taipei Community to Create database. https://localwiki.org/taipeicommunity/%E5%9C%B0%E5%8D%80%E7% 92%B0%E5%A2%83%E6%94%B9%E9%80%A0%E8%A8%88%E7%95%AB [Accessed 4 May 2016].

References Blau, J.R. (1981) Architects and Firms: A Sociological Perspective on Architectural Practice, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Blau, J.R., La Gary, M.E. and Pipkin, J.S., eds. (1983) Professionals and Urban Form, Albany: State University of New York Press. Chang, M.G. (1990) Social Movement and Political Transformation, Taipei: Yeh Chiang. Chen, R.D. (1996) “The Organizational Professional in the Process of Urban the Case of OURs”, Master Thesis, National Taiwan University. Cheng, M. (2007) Xi Zhu Yi Wan (Memoirs With Architecture), Taipei: Architecture and Culture.

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Fieldoffice + Huang, S.Y. (2015) Living in Place, Tokyo: TOTO. Han, P.T. (2001) Poa-Teh Han’s Memoirs, Taipei: Bookzone, 2001. Hsia, C.J. (2004) “Social Architects Emerge in the Dusk”, Available from: www.atelier-3.com/2004/2_ Concepts/2003.09_H-R/Xia/index.html [Accessed 4 May 2016], also from: www.ptt.cc/bbs/NTUBPR92/M.1095745035.A.730.html [Accessed 15 March 2017] ——— (2007) “Transplantation and Transformation of Modernity: On the Discursive Formation of Modern Architecture in Taiwan and the Architectural Reflections of P.T. Han”, Cities and Design 17: 77–116. Hsiao, B.H. (1998) “Dependent Modernity: The Discursive Formation of Taiwanese Architectural Schools from the Middle of 1940s to the End of 1960s”, PhD Dissertation, National Taiwan University. Hsieh, Yin-Chun & Associates (2000) “Thao Tribe Resettlement Community”, Architecture Dialogue 39: 42–53. ——— (2001) “Design Description of Thao Tribe Resettlement Community”, Available from: www.atelier-3. com/mediawiki/index.php/Concepts_2001.08_Thao [Accessed 4 May 2016]. Hsu, C.K. and Chou, W.L., eds. (1989) Emerging Social Movements in Taiwan, Taipei: Chu Liu. Huang, J.L., Wong, H.L. and Huang, C.S., eds. (2010) The Edge of Empire: Study on the Modernity of Taiwan, Taipei: Sociopublishing. Huang, Li-Lin (2003) “Community Participation in Taipei’s Urban Planning in the 1990s: The Impact of Globalization Process, Local Politics and Neighborhood Response”, Journal of Geographical Science 34: 61–78. Huang, Y.C. (2011) “Architecture, Space and National Identity: Modern Architecture in Taiwan (1895–2008)”, PhD dissertation, University College London. Kuo, Chao-Li, ed. (2004) Dream Builder: Pao-Teh Han’s Architecture, Taipei: Garden City. Larson, M.S. (1983) “Magali Sarfatti Larson, ‘Emblem and Exception: The Historical Definition of the Architect’s Professional Role’ ”, in Judith R. Blau, Mark E. La Gary and John S. Pipkin, eds., Professionals and Urban Form, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 49–89. Larson, M.S., Leon, G. and Bollick, J. (1983) “The Professional Supply of Design: A Descriptive Study of Architectural Firms”, in Judith R. Blau, Mark E. La Gary and John S. Pipkin, eds., Professionals and Urban Form, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 251–279. Liang, M.K. (2008) “Haigo Shen: an Architectural Giant in the Destitute Taiwan During the 50s to 70s”, in Proceeding of Rustic and Poetic: A Symposium for the First-Generation Architects After War World Two, hosted by Bureau of Cultural Heritage of Ministry of Culture and executed by Ming Chuan University, Nov. 29, page no. not found. National Taiwan University Building Research Foundation (2000) Sharing a Table: 10 Years From a Planning Group to a Foundation, Taipei: National Taiwan University Building Research Foundation. The Organization of Urban Re-s (OURs) (2008) “Introduction”, Available from: www.ours.org.tw/ [Accessed 4 May 2016]. Pallasmaa, Juhani, “Architecture for Healing: The Urban Surgery of Sheng-Yuan Huang”, Unpublished, will be recorded in the upcoming portfolio of Fieldoffice on September 2017. Pan, J.J. (2010) The Fundamental Principles of My Life, written by Lan, Li-Juan, Taipei: Booklife. Sheng-Yuan Huang, to explain Fieldoffice’s design philosophy in the exhibition Fieldoffice at Work in 2013. Shi, J. and Feng, C.Z. (2006) “An Interview With Yin-Chun Hsieh”, on 27 May 2006, Available from: www. atelier-3.com/mediawiki/index.php/Events_2011.03_Studio-X_Talk [Accessed 4 May 2016]. Sung, L.W. (2014) “Humanistic Orientation of Taiwan’s Contemporary Architecture Profession”, in the Proceeding of Architecture for People: Challenges and Opportunities of Contemporary East Asian Society, Organized by Architecture Department of Christian Chung Yuan University, Architecture Department of Shih Chien University, JUT Foundation, Spatial Native Language Foundation and Chinese Institute of Urban Design Taiwan, pp. 147–153. Tseng, S.C. (2007) Community Empowerment in Taiwan, Taipei: Walkers Cultural Enterprises. Wang, C.H., ed. (2011) Romantic Reality: Exhibition of Postwar Lanyang Architecture, Yilan: Lanyang Museum. ——— (2012) “Republic of China and Architecture: A-Hundred-Year Development”, in A History of Republic of China: Education and Culture, Taipei: National Chengchi University and Linking Books, pp. 769–808. Wang, C.H., Sun, C.W. and Hsieh, H.C. (1999) “On the Building of Architectural Professionalism in the Nationalist Era”, Cities and Design 9/10: 81–116. Yu, S.K. (1996) The Rise and Development of Nativism in Taiwan Literature, Taipei: Avanguard.

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28 Transforming the Spatial Legacies of Colonialism and Apartheid Participatory Practice and Design Agency in Southern Africa Iain Low

This essay explores a concept of engagement that privileges the social over the spatial. This privileging is considered particularly significant in postcolonial contexts where entire populations have been historically marginalized. Spatial tactics of including people who have previously been excluded from decision-making processes because of race and gender are now being identified as a forceful means of expanding social engagement. Within this context, self-reliance has emerged as a unifying attribute capable of building community and shelter in parallel. This essay explores social engagement through a diverse range of participatory projects. At this moment in our history, socially engaged architecture appears to have become the domain of academics, the Pritzker and the Venice Biennale. Engagement is increasingly being mobilized to enhance the saleability of projects—and the egos of their designers—rather than making a deep, genuine contribution to the social project of architecture. This current preoccupation with the issue of social engagement is probably reflective of a sustained period of apparent neglect. Advances in theoretical, technical and economic concerns have tended to promote material design outcomes at the expense of the social. In this context, the resurgence (Stanek 2011) of Lefebvre’s dialectic between the social and the spatial (Lefebvre 1991) has afforded a timely reminder of the necessity for architects and designers to (re)engage the social relations of production, particularly as this relates to everyday life. In poorer communities, often bereft of even the most basic of material necessities, the social remains an important base for everyday and celebratory life. This has relevance for contemporary societies, where the social appears to have become subsumed within consumer culture, and yet stands as a powerful binding counterforce to the traditional ties that bind and support engaged communities. The architecture imposed in the context of colonialism has impacted heavily on the social. Nowhere has the effect of social engineering been experienced more acutely than in the South and on the African continent in particular. The configuration of space is perhaps the most enduring legacy of colonialism and apartheid (Low 2014). The ‘setting apart’ that characterized the construction of the built environment in the colony concretized the parallel production of dual but unequal societies (Western 1996). Predominantly implemented in the twentieth century, these settlements were created for the ‘served’, as personified by the white colonizer, and ‘native townships’ created for

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the ‘servant’, as personified by the disenfranchised, indigenous communities. Today poverty, inequality and unemployment have emerged as socioeconomic legacies, endemic to these contexts. The loss of modernism’s original social program, notably its attempt to support dwelling in comfort by providing housing (Low 2014; Dutton and Mann 2008), is evident in the black apartheid townships of South Africa. In Soweto, for example, the reductionist four-roomed NE51/9 matchbox house, conceptualized by Douglas Calderwood in the 1950s, created an environment of relentless monotony. In many cases standard basic schools were provided, but for most, the private realm predominated at the expense of any communal or public amenities. In the absence of physical space for social action, the street constituted a realm for both collective (protest) action and recreational pleasure, a practice remaining as a significant strength of everyday township life in the postapartheid era (Western 1996). Coming into power in April 1994, on the basis of its Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) election manifesto, the African National Congress (ANC) presented a coherent plan of action for the transformation of South Africa from a segregated society predicated on white privilege to an integrated democratic state in which difference might coexist (ANC 1994). Drawing directly from the Freedom Charter (SAHO 1955), as the earliest demand articulated by marginalized communities, and the new constitution (DoJ 1996), the RDP provided the basis for effecting delivery through transformed democratic governance, thereby rectifying the damage of apartheid’s discriminatory practices. Despite the current concerns regarding the state of African nations and the capacity of their ruling parties to govern justly, significant social gains have been achieved in the post colony, largely through socially grounded initiatives that have explicitly addressed the transformation of colonial/apartheid spatial legacies. The South African national government’s introduction of the Breaking New Ground (BNG) Sustainable Human Settlements (SHS) housing policy (DoH 2004) was intended to move from the autonomy of delivering single-family RDP houses on individual plots toward establishing more integrated settlements. The integration desired is both spatial and social, social cohesion between previously racially segregated communities being one of the more significant challenges of the postapartheid era.

Architecture and Participatory Praxis Community participation in the design and implementation of built environment projects in developing contexts of the South has been foregrounded as a critical component to ensure positive social outcomes. Not only could real needs be confronted, but also the legacy of colonial heritage might be simultaneously addressed. Community-based projects have provided a significant basis for exploring transformation in the post colony. However, for most, rather than effecting a culture of development and self-reliance, community-based projects have been based in a narrow interpretation of inclusion whereby shallow consultation reduces this process to a perfunctory mechanism. Genuine community participation demands integrative social processes whereby communities are empowered to engage in making informed choices about their needs. This integration can also serve to (re)build community as a parallel process. The origin of this sensibility lies in indigenous, humancentered cultural practices, such as that of ubuntu (Collins 2012), and a respect for cultural difference, so as to promote more resilient outcomes in potentially conflicted circumstances. ‘African architecture’ has relatively recently emerged as a contemporary classification or category in our discipline. The somewhat reductive interpretation of this term serves to link it with projects whose materials and image fit within a popular notion of what constitutes African. Often associated with the neoconservative appropriation of local vernaculars, this approach is image-based and avoids the potential of effecting a locally situated or non-western modernism (Low 2012). How is it possible to become modern while still maintaining connectivity with the origins embedded in

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one’s unique traditions (Ricouer 1965; Hountondji 1996)? In confronting this dilemma it has been necessary to engage with alternative forms of cultural production, particularly those capable of confronting the top-down autonomy of conventional professional practice. In this respect, coproduction is emerging as a transformative counterapproach, essential in the postcolonial context. Recognizing the value of preexistent social formations, coproduction can realign power relations within a horizon of interconnectivity. It is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather constituted by balanced respect for participants’ differences. Inclusionary processes that respect plurality, and often competing differences, might contribute in informing particular outcomes that are unique to that set of interrelations. Consequently, its practice is grounded in an awareness of or radical empathy for the Other (Fanon 1967). This cuts against ‘best practice’, presenting a potentially new alternative, and demands investment and work on constituting a socius through which each project may be uniquely effected. As such it holds implications for professional practice. This calls for a radical rethinking of the primacy of the architect. The role of design then must extend to critically reading a particular socio-spatial context, to creatively interpreting its constituents with conceptual clarity, and then enabling a design translation. The necessity of engaging multiple stakeholders facilitates an inclusive participation without which the transformative capacity for social cohesion and coexistence cannot be enacted.

House | Home: Dwelling in the New South Africa One of the primary intentions of the ANC’s 1994 Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) manifesto was Mandela’s election populist promise of a house for all. This promise has been largely delivered upon in the state’s provision of about 4 million housing opportunities during the course of the first two decades of democracy. Unfortunately, however, the focus on quantity has tended to undermine any attention to quality: not only have the majority of these units been poorly constructed but also, perhaps most significantly, these new houses, known colloquially as RDPs, have replicated the NE 51/9 model (non-European, 1951, 9th prototype) (Calderwood 1953) of the National Building Research Institute (NBRI) from the apartheid era—that is, a stand-alone, fourroomed unit, independently positioned in the center of its plot. ‘One house, one family, one plot’ has come to reflect the suburban ‘white’ dream that came to characterize western modernism across the globe in the last century. Fundamentally autonomous, it fosters an antisocial model of settlement development. Predicated on both the nuclear family and car ownership, its spatial configuration stands as anathema to accommodating the average black South African family. At a time of radical local and global transformation, the sustainability of the South African nuclear family is characterized by uncertainty. The consequences of tradition and the practice of ubuntu demand flexible arrangements for the traditional black African family structure. Families are not nuclear; either they are necessarily double-extended and flexible—that is, they are likely to contain at least three generations and comprise a core family with grandparents and very possibly a sibling with or without his or her family—or at the other extreme they may be childheaded households overseen by an elder sibling. As circumstances alter and family members perhaps pass on or move out, others might just as easily join and move in. Combined with the legacy of apartheid and its debilitating effects of poverty, inequality and unemployment, this necessitates that a house needs to operate far beyond that of the average western nuclear family—and yet this is of course far from the reality on the ground. Notwithstanding the limitations of the state’s NBRI/ RDP (Figure 28.1) approach to housing, a series of responses to this condition have produced highly specific alternatives, varied and, to a significant extent, remarkably innovative solutions to this social housing dilemma. Othering has become an unconscious design action in responding to the need for spatial transformation (Foucault 1986).

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Photo by UCT/author.

Figure 28.1 NBRI to RDP housing approach: participation as contestation of the one-size-fits-all modernist approach.

Iain Low

The most prominent response to the RDP house has been that of a beneficiary family moving into a shack at the rear of the plot, thereby permitting the new RDP house to be rented out to provide a necessary source of income. Formal additions to the main house, to accommodate extended family setups, are another common response, but one posing problems for the shifting demands for privacy and communality. The needs of a second family—for example, a sibling with spouse and offspring, or elderly parents who may be ill, and possibly of limited resources—or alternatively of the children, or cousins of a sibling from a rural area who come to the city for better education, each having their own set of dynamics, cannot be accommodated by the four-roomed, stand-alone RDP house. Where a house also accommodates an economic enterprise these conditions are exacerbated, surfacing conflicts that are often detrimental to domesticity and dwelling in comfort. Spaza informal shops, daycares and shebeens are common income generators for the home. The shebeen, a homebased tavern, poses the most significant and complex problem for the stability of the individual home within which it is based, as much as for the surrounding neighboring community. Community self-help is not a unique South African phenomenon. It is evident in most developing contexts, particularly where colonial exploitation has overridden indigenous practices and left local communities destitute in the advent of so-called independence. Similar strategies have been explored to various degrees of success on a global scale. PREVI Lima, in Peru (Land 2014), represents a widely recognized and established attempt to confront this problem on the scale of the settlement. Devised through an architectural competition, the project attracted numerous provocative spatial design responses to the challenge of accommodating temporal dimensions of growth, and thereby addressing uncertainty through the housing challenge. Four decades later the built work stands as a vibrant example of the inherent capacity of communities for self-reliance in building for themselves. In the case of PREVI Lima this may be directly linked to the agency of design to foresee the possibility of participation through direct user engagement. The project proved to be an early example of open building systems in its encouragement of user agency. The project is a site for post-occupancy evaluation (POE) analysis, holding promise for new knowledge that might significantly contribute toward the design of humane settlements in the context of limited resources. The more recent and internationally recognized case of Elemental Chile closely resembles the South African situation (Low 2011). Chile shares both a similar exploitative colonial past and a comparable subsidy system for delivering housing to low-income earners. In the case of Elemental the approach has been to offer recipients half-a-house together with a shell, or embedded enabling framework, that holds clues as to the possibility for self-build toward full completion by the owneroccupant. The enablement resides in an acute reading of the local: its capacity for construction, its appreciation for different building materials and its particular socio-spatial needs. The clarity of the project’s didactic approach facilitates user participation by means of extension and completion. It nevertheless considerably limits options, being predominantly delivered as mono-functional, singlefamily units in row housing or in perimeter blocks. Significant compromises to the production of desirable diversity and a more engaged public realm have become apparent in Elemental’s housing oeuvre. Similar open-system strategies are evident in South Africa, having been explored to various degrees of success at the local level. As housing experiments these have emerged in direct response to an evolution of government policy from the state’s housing ministry. The renaming of the Department of Housing (DoH) to the Department of Human Settlements (DoHS) parallels government’s introduction of the Breaking New Ground (BNG 2004) within the Sustainable Human Settlement (SHS 2004) approach to housing policy—intended to provide integrated human settlements, as opposed to the quantitative approach of simply building houses. Gauteng, South Africa’s most progressive and wealthiest province, has initiated new development instruments in the form of the Johannesburg Development Agency ( JDA 2001), to effect necessary infrastructure needs, and the Johannesburg Housing Company ( JHC 1995), a dedicated 384

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social housing instrument, mandated to provide entry-level inner-city rental accommodation for an emerging white-collar black population, as they become participants in an emergent urban economy. As a part of the sustainable human settlement strategy these have contributed the first live-work units, thereby linking economic opportunity and social benefits for people disenfranchised by apartheid. The JHC Albert Road and Brickfield social housing rental projects exemplify these approaches. Located in downtown Johannesburg, they are tightly managed by JHC, ensuring maintenance, social regulation and financial stability. Each project is constituted by a well-balanced environment with the integrated provision of a day care, dedicated play areas for children, block area washing-drying areas, recycling areas, on-site parking and high-level security. Another socially empowering model has been the national government’s People’s Housing Process (PHP). Predicated on the capacity of poor people to form and sustain their own communities, to effectively save and establish a viable capital base, and to build for themselves, the PHP is indicative of the existence of local social infrastructure (Simone 2004) as a necessary precondition for optimizing effective user participation and creating the long-term sustainability required of human settlements. The most successful example of this form of development has been the Victoria Mxenge Migrant Women’s Settlement in Cape Town (Figure 28.2). Victoria Mxenge settlement in Lansdowne/Goven Mbeki Road, Cape Town, arose from a women’s saving group. Using the government subsidy system as base finance, women living in the settlement (who moved to Cape Town from the Eastern Cape to join their migrant worker spouses) consolidated their savings to achieve the construction of shelters of 50 percent additional floor area above that of the national average. Delivered as a walled shell envelope, these were constructed by the women themselves, on a piecemeal unit-by-unit basis, as more money became available. The choice to maximize enclosed floor area, rather than fit out interiors, was a conscious decision of the community. Each unit is resolved in relation to the immediate need for maximum shelter and the capacity of individual families to effect their own temporary internal arrangements. The subsequent upgrade over time relates directly to both financial capacity and the specifics of individual household spatial needs. Currently, a builders’ warehouse, constructed from donated containers, has been repurposed as a community center for meetings, while also being occasionally hired out for income-generating purposes. These projects showcase the capability of local communities, which, once assisted, have real capacity to take responsibility in attending to their own needs by participating in a broader economy. The resultant housing units transcend the house provided by the state and become homes provided by owners—reinforcing and sustaining the associated community that emerges once people feel ‘at home’ in the world.

Coproduction: The Case of the Violence Protection Through Urban Upgrade (VPUU) Project (Krause 2011) The Violence Protection through Urban Upgrade (VPUU 2006) project is a Cape Town–based initiative that demonstrates an approach to urban settlement upgrading, intent upon the building of community as a parallel process to the upgrading of the spatial environment (City of Cape Town 2016). The initiatives are coproduced by local communities through their respective development fora and the local authority or municipality, with a third party, the German Development Bank, KfW, as facilitating donor-mediator. This approach is designed for intervening at scale, particularly in apartheid township contexts where entrenched poverty and inequity foster insecurity. Crime and associated violence have become defining characteristics of everyday life for township inhabitants. The VPUU method seeks to confront this reality by building community in parallel with public infrastructure and thereby institutionalize social coproduction through its implementation strategy. Supportive of horizontal relations between key players, it is also intended to establish social cohesion between communities in stress, as much as it is dependent on the provision of upgraded infrastructure. 385

Photo by author.

Figure 28.2 PHP: Victoria Mxenge Migrant Women’s group save and self-build settlement Cape Town.

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The first such project in South Africa commenced in late 2005 and was initiated by the Khayelitsha Development Forum (KDF), the local organized community-based organization (CBO). Together with the City of Cape Town (CoCT) as the local government authority, and the German Development Bank aid agency (KfW), it is delivering through Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods (SUN), a local implementing agency. Khayelitsha, meaning new home in the local indigenous language, isiXhosa, is located some 35 km east of Cape Town’s Central Business District (CBD). Initiated in 1990, just prior to political liberation and the advent of democracy in South Africa, Khayelitsha represents one of the country’s larger townships (500,000), after Soweto (1.3 million), outside of Johannesburg. Since this neighborhood project is area-based, as opposed to sector-based, the possibility of achieving socio-spatial continuity is much greater. From the inception through to implementation, the project proceeds to subsequent management, and supports the building of sustainable community. The resultant social cohesion is apparent across a variety of urban concerns with project engagement informed by (1) an explicit community-based participatory method (Figure 28.3) rooted in the new South African Constitution and the obligations of local governments in relation to its Bill of Rights, and complemented by (2) a mutually pre-agreed Community Action Plan (CAP) (Figure 28.4) that is expanded through time and across human settlement need. Whereas infrastructure delivery represents the tangible dimension of the project, the intangibles are aligned to social development, economic opportunity, community participation, institutional development and longer-term knowledge production and management. In placing the social at the core, community-based development has the potential to evolve a cohesive citizenship in a divided society—of which infrastructure delivery as urban places contributes toward establishing safer neighborhoods. Solutions are driven by means of a cooperative negotiation between the various stakeholders. The role of leadership emanating from the locally accountable development forum becomes essential to the project’s success. Community leadership and participation are consequently recognized and further developed. This has proven particularly successful through accessing local information to establish demographic profiles, areas of criminal activity and the concomitant need to prioritize and locate social and other infrastructure. Voluntary local engagement is recognized in kind by means of reward certificates toward training programs that advance a member’s future capacity for upskilling. The first phase of VPUU is focused in Khayelitsha’s Harare neighborhood (45,000), where the KDF and community leadership prioritized the combat of serious crime (rape, murder and robberies) along community-identified pedestrian routes. A strategy of introducing new hybrid buildings was evolved to counter the need to rely solely on neighbourhood patrols for security. The Active-Box has become a recognizable feature of the VPUU method and of the Harare neighborhood in particular. Comprising a medium-sized 2–3-story building and housing community functions such as early childhood development (ECD), community meeting rooms or radio stations with a residence above, it affords significant urban vigilance by virtue of the dual complement of both functions and form. Their placement at strategic road crossings or transit points within the Harare settlement further contributes toward urban legibility, defensibility and safety. A second intervention has been in the introduction of the local live-work housing units, with dwellings above and retail below, which similarly provides urban vigilance, spatial character and a higher degree of 24/7 activity at street level. Together these afford a sense of urbanity for the peripheral dormitory township. Higher-order socioeconomic infrastructure has been introduced in order to create a sense of place along the identified routes. These comprise urban parks and squares, which act as foci of civic life and youth development. The former has been reinforced in the provision of a FIFA-sponsored ‘Football for Hope’ amenity from the World Cup 2010, while the latter is anchored by a library, which serves as a ‘house of learning’ for the youth in after-school hours. These interventions are intended to serve a wider community and encourage a secondary form of social cohesion by bringing in people from surrounding neighbourhoods, thereby further contesting the spatial segregation of the apartheid planning order. 387

Images courtesy of VPUU/Michael Krause.

Figure 28.3 VPUU: before-after, active box and urban park: Harare, Khayelitsha.

Photo by author.

Figure 28.4 VPUU: Emthonjeni waterplaces as sociocultural infrastructure in the informal sector.

Iain Low

In the adjacent informal settlement, Monwabisi Park, both the urban fabric and the community structure are less robust and characterized by the ubiquitous poverty, unemployment and inequality. In these circumstances it is often women, children and the disabled, as those marginal within the marginalized, who suffer the most severely. These are also communities where social capital is often absent, compromising strategies that may be predicated on coproduction. Here the approach has been to identify the Emthonjeni as forming an appropriate communal infrastructure (Figure 28.4) that might serve as a platform in contributing toward the building of essential social relationships. Emthonjeni is an isiXhosa word and the indigenous African term for a water source in the eastern Cape of South Africa. It also has connotations of life source. The need for basic services in the informal settlements is linked to three interconnected attributes of human existence: safety and security; water and sanitation; protection of the vulnerable. The Emthonjeni strategy is one of a series of area-based interventions for informal settlements. Comprising water and sanitation infrastructure, combined with paved and planted areas, Emthonjenis act as spatially identifiable clearings in the midst of informal shack developments. Contributing toward the building of community, they perform as ‘urban commons’. Aside from their utilitarian use, they function as safe gathering areas, especially for children to play while mothers may be washing clothes, and a weekend relief place for relaxation in contrast to the minimal dwelling units. The inclusion of trees and greenery marks them as social places with shade and individual character and demonstrates the creative capacity of design agency in building with limited means. Early childhood development (ECD) and higher-order recreational grounds represent a next level of experimentation in providing social infrastructure that is locally produced. Each of these interventions—individually and in concert, when functioning optimally—has the potential to significantly impact on and improve the urban fabric and contribute toward safer environments (Krause 2012). Everyday use, increased socioeconomic activity and crime reduction have convincingly demonstrated this. The broad based coproduction model has brought together a wide range of community-based and professional service organizations with those of government agencies. Although projects of this nature take longer to implement and might be slightly more expensive, there are significant rewards in terms of social achievement.

Self-Reliance: An Integrated Education Project in Lesotho The Training for Self-Reliance Project is an integrated education program of the government of Lesotho with the International Development Association (IDA) of the World Bank (WB). Predicated on a system of low-interest development loans for least developed countries (LDCs), this project was intended to improve and build capacity across the education sector. Interventions were delivered in phases in approximately 4–5-year cycles. The scope of each project phase was pre-agreed across multiple aspects of education relative to pre-identified outcomes. A Project Implementation Unit (PIU), constituted by an act of Parliament, established the Training for Self Reliance (TSRP) as a developmental project to improve education throughout the Kingdom of Lesotho. Accountable through its Project Authority (PA), its implementation has been interpreted to afford multiple socioeconomic advantages for beneficiary communities. Delivering civil works in the form of new and upgrades to existing schools, the project was designed to provide classrooms, latrines, kitchens and other education facilities together with in-service training for unqualified teachers, a supply of textbooks on a revolving fund basis and a supply of furniture. The mandate for the architecture division responsible for the design and implementation of each phased program focused primarily on rapid design and implementation so that World Bank loans could be efficiently mobilized. However, in order to prevent the project from becoming a bean counting exercise, as with many housing delivery projects in developing countries, there was a concerted effort to engage indigenous conditions. The intention was to ensure that local communities would derive the socioeconomic benefits of infrastructure development. 390

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Participatory praxis demands the reconfiguration of professional practice as a tool for local empowerment. When addressed through social upliftment the leverage afforded to beneficiaries can directly support sustainability. Nevertheless, participation by communities in design projects is often limited to that of consultation around issues pertaining to the prioritization of a project’s programming and siting. Public works programs in postapartheid South Africa have included a component to guarantee local employment in the production of new work. Termed the Extended Public Works Program (EPWP), the program is directed at represencing labor in the site, as a means of providing meaningful economic opportunity, particularly in the impoverished areas. The most obvious field of intervention is through entry-level unskilled work opportunities; however, these often simply translate only into the ability of a worker to ‘put bread on the table’, as opposed to that of moving out of poverty. The real potential of these work-based types of engagement lies in the potential for low-level labor to enter the construction industry though the acquisition of new skills, or better still, to graduate to a small business. From the perspective of theory grounded in the ‘South’, the emphasis should be on the production of space that has profound relation to local conditions (Lefebvre 1991; Appadurai 1996). The adaption of vernacular traditions through design interpretations that reincorporate spatial and material practices with local materials presents a positive and obvious source for exploring this production. This is evident in the Training for Self-Reliance Project (TSRP) through the imaginative incorporation of site-quarried stone (Figure 28.5), as represented in both traditional and colonial vernacular structures. The tell-the-tale detail (Frascari 1984) that establishes a DNA for this architecture rests in a tectonic combination of roughly hewn stone with cement concrete blocks. Design agency is evident in its application to the challenge presented by an ever expanding requirement for new building types, new technical solutions and creative responses to the preexistent. As a unique phenomenon, design agency is best tested in response to the difficulties and complexities that rise when working within constrained environments. Building with limited means demands that we should gain more with less—and this became a kind of mantra for the project. A quoined column established a primary tectonic for the project and was utilized in various ways to address specific requirements for light and ventilation, for structure and enclosure and for the activated bounding of outdoor space. This afforded a unique experiential quality of the work: the pleasures of everyday use, the quality of natural light, the warmth of finishes, and the artisanal crafting of the locally self-produced parts. Infill panels act as decorative finishes while simultaneously fulfilling their rudimentary function. Opportunities for addressing the temporal needs of growth and expansion are accommodated by the addition of end shell-structures and double-story stilted buildings, suggesting possible future action by the local community, not dissimilar to Elemental’s half-a-house strategy (Figure 28.6). This inherent valency within the architectural language extends to the general public whereby the project has contributed toward the expansion of the local contracting industry, developed contractors in other sectors and prompted private individuals who have sought to emulate the system. A new set of complementary projects has contributed toward sustaining a contemporary vernacular. This, then, is the measure of development—not only what the project might achieve in its lifetime but also, more importantly, what it might yet afford through sustained engagement after completion.

Conclusion The current global intrigue with architecture and social engagement requires deeper location. In a context of injustice as maintained by the systemic structural imbalance of the global economic order, spatial inequality will remain a direct outcome of mainstream design. Countercurrents are possible when we focus on local production that reflects both the history of the past and the potential of a future yet to come. 391

Photo by author.

Figure 28.5 TSRP: tell-the-tale detail and typologies demonstrating local with user participation, Lesotho.

Photo by author.

Figure 28.6 TSRP: multiple manifestations of the spatial and tectonic potential of the system, Lesotho.

Iain Low

In a sense social engagement will be conceptualized as an ameliorating action, rather than as the impetus for all architectural action. Space is the medium of our profession, and without an emancipatory social content, design is necessarily rendered as formalist. Such a conception of design has considerable implications for practice, for our method and the deployment of resources, most particularly the intellectual ones that frame the asking of thoughtful questions—as opposed to merely solving (economic) problems. As a discriminatory activity, design must take responsibility for its outcomes, and if these preclude the social then they are necessarily unethical. Social justice and spatial equity are twin phenomena that arise as complementary conditions in a quest to achieve a productive transformation within the project of human coexistence, and without which there can be no genuine forward movement. Consequently, the critical issue that architecture and social engagement bring to the surface is the dialectic between agency and instrumentation. To what extent can objects have agency, or is this a capability that only humans have the capacity to exercise? How might designers reimagine and extend the life of forms (Focillon 1992)—and to what extent can design be deployed to program buildings toward extended performance (Latour 2007; Law 2008)? Beyond social engagement, is there potential for design to imbue architecture with forms of artificial intelligence? In anticipating human action, can we program the surface (Wall 1999) in a manner that initiates interactions with human intelligence? These are issues and questions that will challenge the limits of social engagement, while ensuring a restructured and radically reinformed relationship between the lived and the built. Despite its local method of coproduction and its modern interpretation of the social in the African tradition, VPUU was unfortunately overlooked by the Aga Khan Award judging panel in its most recent round of assessments (2016). The posturing of glamor architecture in social guise is particularly apparent in Africa, most notably where design work is undertaken through western intervention, lacking the necessary empathy and understanding for the unique exigencies of local social contexts. In the final analysis the primary precondition for a socially grounded architecture is in the production of spaces that maximize human life and promote social cohesion. In recognizing this we must also be sensitive to the primary informants of that possibility—the schools of architecture comprising faculty members who can engage the Lefebvrian dialectic by critically straddling the formal/spatial and the social/experiential. Where design agency is evolved without a capacity to deeply read the cultural practices and social needs of clients, then architecture is often reduced to a ‘tectonic commodity’. The simple reengagement of social anthropology and ethnographic methods in introductory courses to architecture could have a profound research implication for a student’s capacity to read contexts with inclusive precision. In the absence of revolution, spatial transformation becomes the measure of our discipline’s progress. The social is a necessary turn in balancing the technocratic, especially in an age dominated by the digital. In South Africa, the more successful socially driven architectural project arises under conditions where the conventional top-down power relations have already been contested within the modes of design and production. It is unusual for these relations to appear organically. Coproduction between competing interests often flourishes when horizontally mediated by particular instruments that are capable of advocating on behalf of weaker participants. Nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) have become important negotiators, mediating between the state and community. Rural Studio in the United States represents a similar arrangement— straddling academia and the profession, its structure and personnel being inherently committed to authentic social engagement, as evidenced in the sustained success of their outcomes. Nevertheless, on the whole, the global community’s newfound love affair with humanitarian architecture seems more reflective of the sustained loss of modernism’s social project than of any genuine desire to recenter other forms of human interaction, bodily experience and delight for everyday life through the project of architecture. 394

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References ANC. (African National Congress) (1994) White Paper: On Reconstruction and Development—Government’s Strategy for Fundamental Transformation, www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=232 Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. BNG. (2004) A Comprehensive Plan for the Development of Integrated Human Settlements, www.dhs.gov.za/sites/ default/files/documents/26082014_BNG2004.pdf Calderwood, D.M. (1953) Native Housing in South Africa, Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand. City of Cape Town. (2016) Violence Protection Through Urban Upgrading Project, www.capetown.gov.za/en/ MetroPolice2/Pages/Violence-prevention.aspx Collins English Dictionary. (2012) Collins English Dictionary—Complete & Unabridged Digital Edition, www.dic tionary.com/browse/ubuntu?s=t DoH. (Department of Housing) (2004) Breaking New Ground: A Comprehensive Plan for the Development of Sustainable Human Settlements, Pretoria: DoHS. DoJ. (Department of Justice) (1996) The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Pretoria: Department of Justice of South Africa www.sahistory.org.za/article/congress-people-and-freedom-charter Dutton, T. and Mann, L. (eds.) (2008) Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Discourses and Social Practices, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fanon, F. (1967) The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin. Focillon, H. (1992) The Life of Forms in Art, New York: Zone Books. Foucault, M. (1986) “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16 (1). Frascari, M. (1984) “The Tell the Tale Detail,” in VIA 7—the Building of Architecture, New York: University of Pennsylvania/Rizzoli. Hountondji, P. (1996) African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. JDA. (2001) Johannesburg Development Agency: Building a Better City, www.jda.org.za/index.php/whatwedo/ programmes JHC. (1995) JHC in Action, www.jhc.co.za/about/about-jhc Krause, M. (2012) “Violence Protection Through Urban Upgrade,” in I. Low (ed.), Digest of South African ­Architecture—Vol. 16, Cape Town: Picasso Headline. Land, P. (2014) PREVI Lima 1969—Experimental Housing Project Revisited, www.transfer-arch.com/counterpoint/ previ-lima-1969/ Latour, B. (2007) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, London: Oxford University Press. Law, J. (2008) “Actor-Network Theory and Material Semiotics,” in B.S. Turner (ed.), The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, Oxford: Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space, London: Blackwell. Low, I. (1998) “Building and Self Reliance,” in H. Judin and I. Vladislavic (eds.), Blank —: Architecture, Apartheid and After, Rotterdam: NAi. ——— (2011) “Elemental Chile—Alejandro Aravena and the South African Experience,” in Architecture SA | Journal of S A Institute of Architects, Cape Town: Picasso Headline. ——— (2012) “Situated Modernism: The Production of Locality in Africa,” in W.S. Lim and J-H. Chang (eds.), Non-West Modernist Past—On Architecture and Modernities, Singapore: World Scientific. ——— (2014) “Architecture in Africa: Situated Modern and Production of Locality,” in E. Haddad and D. Rifkind (eds.), A Critical History of Contemporary Architecture: 1960–2010, Farnham: Ashgate. Ricouer, P. (1965) History and Truth, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. SAHO (South African History On-Line). (1955) The Freedom Charter. SA History On-Line, www.sahistory. org.za/article/congress-people-and-freedom-charter SHS. (2004) A Comprehensive Plan for the Development of Integrated Human Settlements, www.dhs.gov.za/sites/ default/files/documents/26082014_BNG2004.pdf Simone, A-M. (2004) “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg,” in Public Culture Vol. 16–13, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stanek, L. (2011) Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. VPUU. (2006) A Manual for Safety as a Public Good, http://vpuu.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/VPUU_ a-manual-for-safety-as-a-public-good.pdf Wall, A. (1999) “Programming the Urban Surface,” in J. Corner (ed.), Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Western, J. (1996) Outcast Cape Town, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Part VIII

Engagement in Emergency

29 What We Can Learn From Refugees Thomas Fisher

We all have a lot to learn from the over 1 million refugees across Europe (Chan 2015), among the 60 million people—1 out of 122—worldwide ousted from their homes (D. A. Graham 2015) and the 232 million migrants moving around the planet in search of a better life. Those lessons, evident in a number of recent books about refugee camps listed at the end of this chapter, may not seem obvious to those who leave and return to the same abode and who go to and from the same workplace every day, but such a settled existence has begun to change for increasing numbers of people, which makes the global migration now underway one of the largest in human history, a useful case study in what many people will face in the future (Adams 2015). This migration also has profound implications for architecture, especially when we define it broadly as the built environment and human habitation of all sorts. While the percentage of migrants has remained relatively steady, at roughly 3 percent of the population, the forces that have prompted the movement of so many millions of people will affect almost everyone on the planet to varying degrees. The refugee situation in Europe may seem like an unusual case, the result of civil war in just two countries—Iraq and Syria—but many experts see climate change as the real culprit for the crisis, with a long-term drought in Syria leading to economic and political instability (Baker 2015) and the emergence of enormous refugee camps, such as the one in Za’atri (Figure 29.1). And the negative impact that climate change will have on the lives of every person, rich and poor, now seems indisputable, with economists estimating a global per capita gross domestic product 23 percent lower than it would have been by 2100 (Worland 2015). A nearly one-quarter reduction in average income around the planet will affect some more than others—the poor barely scraping by cannot forego a quarter of their already inadequate income—although even the wealthiest in the world cannot escape the effects of extreme weather, as we have seen with the Syrian refugees in Europe, many of whom have considerable education and skills. Indeed, the rich have the farthest to fall when the systems they depend on collapse in the wake of environmental and economic disruptions, as Rebecca Solnit (2009) describes in her book on disasters that cut across socioeconomic lines. On top of the tipping point we have reached with the climate—having just had the hottest year on record, part of a five-year record-breaking stretch (Chew 2015)—we have seen a tipping point in terms of human population, now at 7.3 billion and growing at a rate of 1.2 percent per year (Gao 2015). Population growth and the competition it brings for everything from jobs to housing to food have helped fuel the number of the migrants moving around the planet, looking for opportunities that they cannot find at home. Although such figures suggest that we will need more buildings of 399

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almost every type, as people move into virgin territory as well as into cities at record rates, the reality of so many people becoming mobile as they search for something better than what they experienced at home raises questions about how much and what kind of architecture many people will need in the future. That architecture, as refugees in Paris and in other European cities suggest, may be much lighter and more mobile than buildings (Figure 29.2). An equally important shift in the human condition involves technology, especially the rise of mobile digital devices able to link to the Internet from almost anywhere in the world. We have seen what widespread Internet access has done to the music and news industries, and those impacts seem likely to spread across the entire global economy, affecting virtually every industry, as Gutenberg’s invention of a moveable type printing press did over 500 years ago (McLuhan 1962). Smart phones, for example, have become an essential tool for the refugees in Europe, who use these devices to remain in communication with family members and to find their way in unfamiliar territory (L. Graham 2015). That millions of people now carry their address with them, on their smart phones, represents a dramatic shift in how we should think about concepts such as home and ownership.

Hunting-and-Gathering Architecture Consider the relationship of buildings to the movement of people. For most of human history, people lived in small communities, hunting and gathering, moving with their prey and often carting their belongings and accommodations with them. This involved owning very little and, as we would say now, living lightly on the land, leading lives well adapted to the environments in which they lived and leaving behind relatively few traces of their existence (Harari 2014). Our ancestors lived this way for over 99 percent of humanity’s time on earth, and while it seems like an odd existence to most of us, we evolved as a species in this pattern and many of the challenges we face come from having veered from it. The shift happened about 10,000 years ago, when humanity entered the “agricultural revolution” and began to live in permanent settlements. Architecture as we commonly think about it began at this point, with relatively permanent structures that people occupied over long periods of time, and we have so normalized this way of being that we rarely think about its drawbacks and the strangeness of it. The environmental historian Jared Diamond has called our agricultural revolution “the worst mistake in the history of the human race” because of the economic inequality, property-related violence, environmental pollution, and poor health that came in its wake, and, regardless of whether you agree with his assessment, it reflects the change in thinking that has emerged in recent decades as we deal with the damage that a rapidly growing human population has wreaked upon the world (Diamond 1987). Staying in one place, for all of its personal conveniences, makes us vulnerable to climate change, political and economic disruptions, and health impacts of all sorts. That comes, ironically, from our having become alienated from the very places we occupy, and unlike our nomadic ancestors, who understood how to steward the land, we have come to see the land as something to own and from which to extract resources. This brings us to the lessons that we might learn from the refugees around the world. Faced with some of the downsides Diamond talks about—economic, political, and climate-related disruptions— refugees represent a nomadic alternative, moving across a vast terrain in search of a better life. Various countries have responded differently to this migration, some with open arms and some with closed borders, which has long characterized the reaction of settled communities and place-based cultures to nomads. But too few have recognized the refugees afoot around the world as the leading edge of a phenomenon that will only increase over the course of this century and those that follow. Unlike hunter and gatherers in the distant past, today’s migrants rarely carry their shelter with them, apart from the occasional camping tent; instead, they occupy the space or land accessible to them at the moment, knowing that the industrial economies that arose out of humanity’s agricultural 400

Photo by Sharnoff’s Global Views, Flickr Creative Commons.

Figure 29.1 Aerial view of Za’atri Refugee Camp, Syria.

Photo by Evan Bench, Flickr Creative Commons.

Figure 29.2 Refugees living on the Canal St. Martin in Paris.

What We Can Learn From Refugees

revolution overproduce almost everything and that, at any given moment, even economically depressed places often have more food, shelter, and clothing than they need or can consume. Modern nomads don’t bring their belongings with them as much as appropriate available resources, using the Internet and digital maps to find what they require and to make their way to places of refuge, such as the Dadaab camp shown in Figure 29.3. As such, the refugees and migrants now moving around the planet represent a hybrid of the previous two eras in human history, hunting and gathering food and shelter as our ancestors did for hundreds of thousands of years, while adapting to the fixed boundaries and enclosed spaces that have characterized civilization over the last ten thousand years. They may yearn for a stable setting and a settled existence and they have taken to the road, in large part, because of the instability and unsettled nature of life back home. But they are also not the last or even the largest tide of refugees we will see. In 2013, Benjamin Strauss of Climate Central estimated that 710 million people lived within 10 meters of sea level, and 1.3 billion within 25 meters, the height with which the oceans may rise depending upon different scenarios of melting polar ice caps (Chillymanjaro 2017). Add to that estimates of 100 million people lacking housing and approximately 1 billion people having inadequate shelter (“Downsizing Globally” 2017), out of a total of 1.9 billion households (“Global Homelessness Statistics” 2017), and we seem poised for a massive amount of human migration over the next century, with an equally extraordinary impact on architecture as it gets appropriated by diverse people and adapted for uses not originally intended.

The Sharing and On-Demand Economies This phenomenon has coincided with the rise of the so-called sharing or on-demand economy. Those two terms, while related, do not mean quite the same thing and that difference matters. The sharing economy—epitomized by companies like Airbnb that enable ordinary homeowners to rent out spare living and sleeping space—involves peer-to-peer exchanges of goods and services as well as information and ideas, all of it facilitated by mobile digital devices providing access to the Internet (Moazed 2015). While many have associated the sharing economy with middle- and upper-class consumers, the migrants moving across Europe represent one form of that economy, sharing information and finding accommodations through their Internet connections, which suggests a much broader reach of this economic model than previously thought. The on-demand economy brings a temporal aspect to the sharing: it involves peer-to-peer services able to respond quickly to a call. The car-sharing service Uber embodies that idea. Its drivers not only use their own automobiles to pick up Uber members and take them to their destinations but also offer that service with a rapid response that makes it as fast as an ordinary taxi service, without the cost and hassle of customers owning a car. The rapid response of entrepreneurs in Europe to the needs of its 1 million refugees, selling food, shelter, and transportation services to people in need of such things, shows that here too, the on-demand economy applies not only to well-off customers but also to a wide range of people at various income levels. These on-demand services have also enabled so many people to move so quickly across the continent, something that could not have happened in this way before. Some have argued that these new economic models spell the end to capitalism, by putting the means of production, as Marx would have said, into the hands of ordinary people (Mason 2015). Regardless of whether that comes to pass, it seems unquestionable that the sharing and on-demand economies have begun to wring inefficiencies out of the environments that capitalism helped create over the last century. In many places around the world, we built too much space that goes empty too much of the time and fabricated too many vehicles with seats that go unoccupied too frequently, and services like Airbnb and Uber take advantage of that fact by meeting people’s needs at a lower cost and with equal convenience, while providing revenue for those who own this excess capacity. 403

Photo by Bjørn Heidenstrom, Flickr Creative Commons.

Figure 29.3 Dadaab refugee camp.

What We Can Learn From Refugees

Some owners may continue to want an excess capacity in their homes and cars in order to have the option of renting it out to others, in which case the sharing and on-demand economies may not bring much change to the environments in which we live. But these new economies, especially when deployed by the migrating populations, have revealed the inefficiency and wastefulness of the mass-production and mass-consumption economy that dominated much of the twentieth century, suggesting that the environments we design for ourselves in the twenty-first century will have a much different character and capacity.

On-Demand Environments One of the distinguishing characteristics of this century will be the automation of repetitive or dangerous work. Autonomous or self-driving vehicles offer an example of this, using the on-demand service model that Uber has developed with a mode of transportation less costly, more reliable, and much safer than riding in a car driven by a stranger (Samani 2017). Unlike driven cars, autonomous vehicles also don’t care who they pick up or where they go, which opens up transportation options to a sizable segment of the population who now lack mobility, be they people too young or old to drive or refugees who do not have licenses to drive. Imagine migrants’ increased mobility if, upon landing on a shore, they could call up a vehicle to take them to their destination via any number of possible routes. The automation of transportation also suggests a very different way of thinking about the landscape. Just as migrant populations have shown us how much land lies available for human habitation, at least on a temporary basis, so too will autonomous vehicles free up a great deal of land now used for the storage of cars. One study of several American downtowns showed that these cities devoted between 15 percent and nearly 30 percent of that expensive land to the parking of cars, a use that will nearly disappear once mobility services like Uber switch to autonomous vehicles (Gardner 2011). Such vehicles move continuously during the day, like automated taxicabs, and can park in inexpensive, remote locations in the middle of the night when few calls come in. Consider the amount of space now devoted to parking that will become available for other uses, from housing and job-producing activities to parks and various eco-service functions, like wetlands and natural habitat. Think, as well, about the implications of such automation for daily life. Ever since the agricultural revolution, and certainly since the Industrial Revolution, we have envisioned life as one in which we work in order to buy the things we need, like a place to live and the goods to fill it and the services to maintain it. The sharing and on-demand economies, though, represent a shift from an ownership model to one based on access, in which we call up goods and services when needed and let their suppliers own and maintain them (Early, n.d.). While it still requires money to pay for this access, people will have much more latitude in what they use and when to use it, without the carrying costs of ownership. In that sense, we will all become like the migrants now moving around the world, acquiring what we need when we need it without owning it or carrying it with us, like the migrants moving by transit in Afghanistan in Figure 29.4. That in turn suggests that, instead of fearing the refugees in our midst, we have much to learn from them as they exemplify a way of living that will increasingly characterize life in the twenty-first century, even if lived within a few miles of our places of birth. The ability of refugee populations to meet their needs with so little of their own makes them a model of the ingenuity and grit that we may all need to have as we face a world of rapidly changing climatic conditions. Their example may even represent a third phase in human development, in which we deploy the tactics of nomadism and the excess capacity of industrialism to live as sustainably and resiliently as most of the other species on the planet. No other species demands so many resources to meet its needs and generates so much non-biodegradable or climate-altering waste as we do, and as a result no other animal has prompted an extinction event on the planet, as we have (Kolbert 2014). 405

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Figure 29.4 Unloading refugee bus in Afghanistan. Photo by Gustavo Montes de Oca, Flickr Creative Commons.

And no amount of climate denial on our part will alter the likelihood, as I have argued elsewhere, that our Ponzi scheme with the planet will soon collapse (Fisher 2013). Ponzi schemes collapse suddenly and without warning, as happened with the financial pyramid scheme of Bernard Madoff, and they result in those heavily invested in them losing the most, which, in this case, means all of humanity. This leaves us two options: we can relearn how to live as lightly and with as minimal an ecological footprint as our distant ancestors—and as the refugees among us have done—or we can wait to be forced to do so when the unsustainable systems we count on are no longer there.

Room Aplenty What if, instead of viewing this prospect as a threatening situation that we should resist or deny, we see the example that refugees provide us and the possibilities that sharing and on-demand economies offer us as opportunities: as chances to rethink our relationship with the planet and with each other more creatively? One such opportunity involves connecting people to the spaces they need. The architecture and design community, as well as those in the housing community, tends to think that providing accommodations for people requires either renovating existing structures or building anew, while on-demand services have shown how much space already exists. This suggests that the solution to people’s needs may have more to do with reinterpreting what we have rather than always creating something new—at too great a cost and slow a pace to make much of a difference. Think of the paradox of homeless people living on the streets of a city full of office buildings standing empty at night. I led a design studio a few years ago in which students designed living units 406

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that would fold out at night to provide beds for homeless people and storage space for their belongings in empty rental-office space or office-building corridors and fold up and be stored during the workday. These buildings, with their guarded entrances and ample services, have more than enough room to accommodate the homeless population of a city and with enough financial incentive, their owners might recognize the revenue or tax advantage of utilizing unused space in this way. On the public sector side, leveraging existing space for this purpose would cost us much less than providing separate homeless shelters. Once we stop putting space in single-use categories and start thinking about it more creatively, we would see that we have more than what we need to accommodate everyone. This remains true even if we stick with just the housing sector. In New York, a housing advocacy organization, Picture the Homeless, showed that the city could house every homeless person and family in currently unrented apartments (Briquelet 2009), while in San Francisco, the writer Justin Hall observed that the vacation rental services like Airbnb could house a sizable number of the homeless in the rooms that go unrented any given night (Hall 2015). With an estimated 5,459 Airbnb listings in San Francisco in July 2015, and an estimated 6,686 homeless population that same month, this strategy would not totally meet the need, but would go a long way toward doing so (Anderson 2015). Housing advocates might understandably see such strategies as temporary and not a permanent solution to the problem, although in a future in which permanent accommodations of any sort may become less important than flexibility and mobility in a rapidly changing set of circumstances, this approach deserves attention. Just as universal design has become widely embraced because of an acknowledgment that we may all have limited mobility at some point in our lives, so too should ondemand access be more widely accepted in a world in which environmental, economic, or political disruptions will likely affect all of us to some degree in the future.

Design Empowerment The design community has developed a wide range of mobile, owner-occupied living units as well. While humans have long lived on the road, from gypsy caravans and Conestoga wagons to today’s recreational vehicles, the last several decades have seen a dramatic increase in creative work in this area, documented in books by Jennifer Siegal, who leads the Office of Mobile Design (Siegal 2002; Siegal 2008). This work ranges from the “body architecture” of Studio Orta (“Studio Orta” 2017) to the tree-tents and tent villages of Dré Wapenaar (“Studio Dre Wapenaar” 2017) to the wagon stations of Andrea Zittel (“Andrea Zittel” 2017) to the desert-seal design of Andreas Vogler (“Andreas Vogler Studio” 2017), all of them at a scale that one person or a small group of people could carry and readily deploy. While few of these designers refer directly to the needs of refugees or migrants, all of them envision a more nomadic future for humanity, one in which we live, literally, more lightly on the land. Such work often has an unstated political aspect, expressed most explicitly in the work of the Danish group N55, which defines itself as “a platform for persons who want to work together, share places to live, economy, and means of production” (“N55” 2017). Echoing the communitarian and libertarian ideas that emerged from the 1960s and 1970s, recently dubbed hippie modernism (Blauvelt 2015), N55 has produced a series of open-source manuals that enable anyone to construct structures such as a rolling “snail shell” and a modular “floating platform,” and products such as expandable “bed modules,” a lightweight “table,” a movable “dynamic chair,” and a series of service units that do everything from composting waste in a “soil factory” to growing food in a “home Hydroponic Unit” (“N55” 2017).1 Even more impressive are N55’s community actions: owning land around the world that everyone has access to, creating exchange bins that people can contribute to or take from, envisioning rooms that anyone can use as needed, establishing factories that make fabrication equipment 407

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available to all, and creating a barter system that would let people exchange work without money and a fund that would allow people to finance each other’s activities. Behind all of this lies a political agenda, captured in N55’s notion of movement: “Movement is a political movement that any person ought to take part in. The aim of Movement is to find ways of living with as small concentrations of power as possible” (“N55” 2017). Here, the sharing economy meets communitarian politics, enabled through the communicative power of the Internet. Many advocates for the poor might find this work too conceptual or “arty” for the needs of refugees, but this work raises questions about the ways in which we have dealt with migrating populations in the past. As we have seen with the refugees in Europe, governments still treat them as a problem population, moving them around in mass transit and closing their borders to them at will, in a very paternalistic and patronizing way. Designers have countered that with work that enables individuals to create their own shelter, without relying upon government agencies—or well-intentioned housing advocates—to meet their needs. Such empowerment makes a pragmatic as well as political point. Not only should we not depend upon possibly unreliable governments or resource-strapped organizations, but also we should not assume that, in a disrupted future, such entities would even be there for us. Breaking down power into as small a unit as possible, as N55 suggests (see Figure 29.5), remains the most resilient option available to any of us.

Waste Not We can learn from migrants not just about the appropriation of unused space and the sharing of survival strategies but also about how to repurpose waste of all sorts. Here, too, humanity has long known how to do this, evident in the relative lack of any remains from most human settlements prior to the agricultural revolution. Our hunter-gatherer forebears learned how to live with very little, and to thrive while leaving almost nothing behind—and we need to relearn what people once knew if we have any hope of living within an ecological footprint that the planet can sustain. Designers have shown the creative possibilities of this idea. The design company Droog has made furniture from found objects, such as their dresser consisting of recycled drawers strapped together into a big circle (“Studio Droog” 2017). At the architectural scale, Steve Baer’s use of the recycled roofs of automobiles as cladding for the geodesic domes in Drop City (“Drop City”), the Rural Studio’s deployment of recycled tires and car windshields in a couple of chapels in rural Alabama (“Rural Studio”), and Shigeru Ban’s use of recycled paper tubes as structural elements in everything from emergency shelters to large-span trusses (“Shigeru Ban Architects”) all represent examples of human ingenuity in reinterpreting materials and repurposing products that will become increasingly a part of how we construct environments for ourselves in a future in which more and more people will have less and less of almost everything. This suggests that we increasingly need to design things with their alternative use in mind. That has long characterized the built environment in which spaces accommodated multiple functions and buildings accepted diverse programs, but it will increasingly define what we design in the future. This will involve the creation of mixed-use neighborhoods, as has already become common in many cities, and mixed-use buildings, with not only diverse functions in different parts of the structure but also varied activities in the same spaces. As Greg Lindsay, a senior fellow at the New Cities Foundation puts it, “We’re about to enter a new era of ‘mixed-up-use—strange new combinations of living working and lifestyle amenities” (Keskeys 2015). The single uses that have characterized zoning in the recent past will increasingly get combined within buildings in ways that recall the mix of uses in buildings of the past, with people living, working, and making things in the same space or structure.

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Photo by Bjørn Heidenstrom, Flickr Creative Commons.

Figure 29.5 Refugees outside of Johannesburg.

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Stoic Space Of all the lessons to learn from refugees, it is as much about how they react to situations as it is about what they do. The images of a million people moving across Europe, with a mix of determination and resignation, capture the stoicism that remains key to their survival in such trying conditions (New York Times 2015). Stoics know that we cannot control what happens to us, but only our response to it, and that getting upset about things outside of our control makes no sense. While we might think of modern design, with it minimal and logical features, as an example of stoicism, most modernists have used design to control the environments we inhabit and the products we use to the point where consistency and purity trumped functionality. The refugees show a different way of being. Rather than trying to make the planet fit their idea of what should happen, rather than assuming that the earth’s resources exist for their use, and rather than expecting others to serve their needs, the migrants of the world adapt to what they find, accept what is possible, and accommodate themselves to the situation—a sense of humility and stoic resolve that serves as a model for the rest of us, facing a future as uncertain as that of today’s refugees. This does not mean that we should not try to change the world for the better. It does mean, though, that we need to think about how we go about designing our future, not by doing what we still now do—overconsuming resources, overheating the atmosphere, and overwhelming other species—but by working within the limits that nature imposes upon us and seeing those constraints as an aid rather than an annoyance. This, in turn, suggests a role for design that transcends the creation of goods and environments. Every designer seeks constraints, knowing that they provide useful boundaries on what we can do, while making it easier to make decisions that will have a greater likelihood of realization. While the world’s refugees may not seek constraints, they too accept them and work within them, and their ability to move so effectively across so much territory reflects a degree of ingenuity and parsimony that characterizes the best design. A future in which we won’t have the resources to keep doing what we now do does not mean that we will live lives “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” as Thomas Hobbes put it (Hobbes 1952, 13:85). Instead, it foretells a time in which we will relearn the skills we once had, able to meet our needs without harming the ability of other species or future generations to meet theirs.

Design’s Future Such design has begun to emerge everywhere. Consider Robert Nightingale’s design he calls “the water shelter,” in which shelter can be air-dropped into remote locations, with the parachute doubling as a tent (Nightingale 2007). A water roller, containing supplies, also collects rainwater off the tent’s surface and serves as an easy and compact way to transport the tent to other sites if necessary. Or look at Michael Rakowitz’s “paraSITE” idea, in which a plastic tent, small enough to fit in a backpack, unfolds and connects to the exhaust air coming out of buildings to inflate and heat the enclosure (Grozdanic 2014). This recycles waste heat, adapts to diverse locations, and enables people to devise their own shelter strategies. Or think about Abeer Seikaly’s design for portable desert shelters that use traditional weaving techniques with stretchable fabric to create folded structures that open in summer for ventilation or close in winter or during cold nights for greater comfort (Seikaly 2017). That cross between traditional crafts and natural heating and ventilation on one hand and advanced fabrics and solar energy on the other shows how design can mediate between past and present, while reinforcing cultural identity and expanding job skills in the process. Designs like these, and so many others like them, should give us hope. While we all face a dramatically different century ahead than the one we just passed, the next hundred years will mark the difference between our species thriving in the future or not. That may sound strange in an era in 410

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which humanity has never seemed more dominant and more powerful than we are now, but this is precisely the moment when we need to pay most attention to what threatens the viability of our civilization, as we have become ever more dependent on ever more resources, many of which we have already pushed to exhaustion. Design helps us envision possible futures, especially those that we have not seen or thought of before, and we have never needed that skill more than we do now, with the stakes never higher than they are now.

Note 1 N55, www.n55.dk/MANUALS/Manuals.html.

References Adams, Paul. 2015. “Migration: Are More People on the Move Than Ever Before?” BBC News, May 28, sec. World. www.bbc.com/news/world-32912867. Anderson, Lamar. 2015. “A Modest Proposal: Could San Francisco Finally House the Homeless With Help From Airbnb?” San Francisco Magazine. www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/modest-proposalcould-san-francisco-finally-house-the-homeless-help-airbnb. “Andrea Zittel.” 2017. Accessed March 27. www.zittel.org/work. “Andreas Vogler Studio.” 2017. Accessed March 27. www.andreasvogler.com/portfolio/desertseal/. Baker, Aryn. 2015. “How Climate Change Is Behind the Surge of Migrants to Europe.” Time, September 7. http://time.com/4024210/climate-change-migrants/. Blauvelt, Andrew, ed. 2015. Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia. Walker Art Center. www.academia.edu/ download/46545990/Parrish_Hippie-Modernism.pdf. Briquelet, Kate. 2009. “Homeless Organizers Eye Vacant Buildings, Not City Shelters to Solve Problem.” Pavement Pieces, October. Chan, Sewell. 2015. “Milestone of Strife: Migrants in Europe Now Top 1 Million.” New York Times, December 23. www.pressreader.com/usa/star-tribune/20151223/281732678447916/TextView. Chew, Jonathan. 2015. “U.N. Says 2015 Has Been Hottest Year On Record.” Fortune, November 25. http:// fortune.com/2015/11/25/united-nations-record-hot/. Chillymanjaro. 2017. “Rising Sea Level Will Displace a Substantial Fraction of the Human Population.” The Watchers—Daily News Service | Watchers.NEWS. Accessed March 27. https://watchers.news/2013/01/29/ rising-sea-level-will-displace-a-substantial-fraction-of-the-human-population/. Diamond, Jared. 1987. “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” Discover 8 (5): 64–66. “Downsizing Globally: The Impact of Changing Household Structure on Global Consumer Markets.” 2017. Accessed March 27. www.euromonitor.com/downsizing-globally-the-impact-of-changing-household-struc ture-on-global-consumer-markets/report. “Drop City.” 2017. Drop City. Accessed March 27. www.dropcitydoc.com/about. Early, Katherine. n.d. “Access over Ownership Is the Future of Consumption.” The Guardian. www.theguardian. com/sustainable-business/access-over-ownership-future-consumption. Fisher, Thomas. 2013. Designing to Avoid Disaster: The Nature of Fracture-Critical Design. Routledge. https://books. google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=eUUspOsMOsMC&oi=fnd&pg=PP2&dq=Thomas+Fisher,+Design ing+to+Avoid+Disaster:+The+Nature+of+Fracture-Critical+Design,+New+York:+Routledge,+2013& ots=XTfpiMzaKv&sig=eaVfAmFucahhTGdq7pC0J_xazo8. Gao, George. 2015. “Scientists More Worried Than Public About World’s Growing Population.” Pew Research Center, June 8. www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/08/scientists-more-worried-than-public-aboutworlds-growing-population/. Gardner, Charlie. 2011. “Old Urbanist: We Are the 25%: Looking at Street Area Percentages and Surface Parking.” Old Urbanist, December 12. http://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2011/12/we-are-25-looking-at-streetarea.html. “Global Homelessness Statistics.” 2017. Homeless World Cup. Accessed March 27. www.homelessworldcup.org/ homelessness-statistics/. Graham, David A. 2015. “Violence Has Forced 60 Million People From Their Homes.” The Atlantic, June 17. www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/refugees-global-peace-index/396122/. Graham, Luke. 2015. “Smartphones Are a Lifeline for Europe’s Migrants.” CNBC, September 11. www.cnbc. com/2015/09/11/how-smartphones-are-helping-refugees-in-europe.html.

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Grozdanic, Lidija. 2014. “paraSITE Inflatable Shelter Uses Excess HVAC Air to Keep the Homeless Warm.” March. http://inhabitat.com/parasite-inflatable-shelter-uses-excess-hvac-air-to-keep-the-homeless-warm/. Hall, Justin. 2015. “Shall We House the Homeless in Vacation Rentals?” Justin Hall, October 24. https:// medium.com/@jah/homeless-folks-in-vacation-rentals-130c3073a122#.miz3a4gyj. Harari, Yuval Noah. 2014. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Random House. Hobbes, Thomas. 1952. Leviathan. Vol. 23. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keskeys, Paul. 2015. “Liquid Architecture: The Dynamic, Adaptable Spaces Emerging From the Fluid State of Design.” Architizer, October 20. http://architizer.com/blog/liquid-architecture/. Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Picador. https://books.google. com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=wlnCAwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=Elizabeth+Kolbert,+The+Sixth+ Extinction,+An+Unnatural+History,+&ots=hpEmAoMUmi&sig=oKtrziQ7yydcxh-zsQV48MypijA. Mason, Paul. 2015. “The End of Capitalism Has Begun.” The Guardian, July 17, sec. Books. www.theguardian. com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun. McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Moazed, Alex. 2015. “Services Wars: The On-Demand Economy Is Swallowing the Sharing Economy.” Applico, Inc., October 5. www.applicoinc.com/blog/services-wars-demand-economy-swallowing-sharing-economy/. “N55.” 2017. Accessed March 27. www.n55.dk/. The New York Times. 2015. “The Year in Pictures 2015.” December 21. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/ 12/27/sunday-review/2015-year-in-pictures.html. Nightingale, Robert. 2007. “Water Shelter—Sustainable Shelter Solutions by Robert Nightingale.” Yanko Design, June 15. www.yankodesign.com/2007/06/15/water-shelter-sustainable-shelter-solutions-by-robertnightingale/. “Rural Studio.” n.d. www.ruralstudio.org/projects.html. Samani, Kyle. 2017. “Autonomous Cars Break Uber.” TechCrunch. Accessed March 27. http://social.techcrunch. com/2015/09/18/autonomous-cars-break-uber/. Seikaly, Abeer. 2017. “Structural Fabric Weaves Tent Shelters Into Communities.” Accessed March 27. www. abeerseikaly.com/weavinghome.php. “Shigeru Ban Architects.” 2017. Accessed March 27. www.shigerubanarchitects.com/works.html. Siegal, Jennifer. 2002. Mobile: The Art of Portable Architecture. Princeton Architectural Press. https://books. google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=-u_ijvoRNeYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&dq=Jennifer+Siegal,+Mobile:+ The+Art+of+Portable+Architecture,+New+York:+Princeton+Architectural+Press,+2002&ots=FTkWN 42Oq1&sig=p2zw2_Js5ihMjTqA-_FE7H_ICsg. ———. 2008. More Mobile: Portable Architecture for Today. Princeton Architectural Press. https://books.google. com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=trUDAfU7BWoC&oi=fnd&pg=PA22&dq=Jennifer+Siegal,+More+Mobile: +Portable+Architecture+for+Today,+New+York:+Princeton+Architectural+Press,+2008.&ots=wQiTras 8r4&sig=ZaUCVUF_EiFoWYjY3ep7LQlho7I. “Studio Dre Wapenaar.” 2017. Accessed March 27. www.drewapenaar.nl/. “Studio Droog.” 2017. Accessed March 27. www.droog.com/. “Studio Orta.” 2017. Accessed March 27. www.studio-orta.com/en. Worland, Justin. 2015. “Climate Change Could Wreck the Global Economy.” Time, October 22. http://time. com/4082328/climate-change-economic-impact/.

Further Reading Agier, Michel. 2011. Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government. Cambridge: Polity Press. Esnard, Ann-Margaret, and Sapat, Alka. 2004. Displaced by Disaster: Recovery and Resilience in a Globalizing World. New York: Routledge. Hertz, Manuel. 2012. From Camp to City: Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara. Zurich: Lars Mueller. Rawlence, Ben. 2016. City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Solnit, Rebecca. 2009. A Paradise Built in Hell, the Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. New York: Viking.

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30 Displacement, Labor and Incarceration A Mid-Twentieth-Century Genealogy of Camps Anoma Pieris

Although typically associated with provisional spaces for settlement, education and entertainment, camp environments are increasingly linked with humanitarian relief provision in the face of environmental or man-made catastrophes. They form part of the broader genealogy of power-­knowledge relations conceptualized by Michel Foucault with regard to modern institutions, and emulate associated pedagogical and disciplinary programs (Foucault 1980, 83).1 This chapter examines two contrasting responses to the accommodation of mass human displacements that occurred before and during the Second World War (WWII) in the United States. It situates them in a comparative and visually discursive spatial genealogy that highlights the instrumental role of spatial planning. This chapter’s argument is that the meanings and associations of the ‘camp’ as a phenomenon underwent a transformation from a model environment for rehabilitation to a punitive alternative across a range of functions for different groups of subjects, including American citizens, Japanese citizens, ‘enemy aliens’ and enemy prisoners of war. During the Depression era, camp types varied from Hoovervilles and migrant camps, or company-run labor camps, to Farm Security Administration (FSA) emergency relief camps, subsistence homesteads, greenbelt towns, and permanent and mobile camps for seasonal labor (Conkin 1959), regarded among the best examples of community-centered planning at that time.2 During WWII, camp typologies expanded to include Civilian Assembly Centers and Relocation Centers under Executive Order 9066 and Justice Department detention camps, Citizen Isolation Centers, Federal Bureau Prison camps, U.S. Army Facilities and Immigration and Naturalization Service Facilities. Their military-barrack-style designs and limited civic amenities highlighted embedded forms of racial discrimination within mid-twentieth-century social democracy. The first of the examples studied in this chapter is a progressive social experiment in community building during the 1930s—the Food Security Administration (FSA) camps erected to house racially ‘white’ sharecroppers, tenant farmers and laborers fleeing the drought-stricken southwestern plains. An estimated 1.1 million destitute migrants entered California in 1930 alone, evidence of the enormity of the crisis (Baldwin 1968; Worster 2004, 48–50). However, even before the decade-long dust storms devastated their crops, the low productivity of their tenancy-based pattern of agriculture compounded by economic depression prompted state-led rural rehabilitation programs. They were realized in 1933 with President F. D. Roosevelt’s proposal of the New Deal. A raft of laws and presidential executive orders followed and the Resettlement Administration (RA, 1935–1936) and later 413

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the Farm Security Administration (FSA, 1937–1946) were placed at the helm of relief programs that integrated physical planning and social reform (RA: Interim Report 1936; Hise 1997, 87). By doing so, the federal government advocated forms of collectivism antithetical to capitalist enterprise. The purpose-built, community-oriented camp environments that were planned by FSA architects and engineers exemplified enlightened experiments in “relief, rehabilitation and reform” (Baldwin 1968, Chap. 3, 47–84). Although declared a failure (due to the lack of steady employment that could sustain permanent settlement), and typically evaluated as provisional facilities the program “had important links with, and over time informed and advanced, the environmental reform movement, modern community planning, and modernization in building practice,” observes Hise (1997, 87). In comparison, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 saw the transformation of the camp into a different model for incarcerating Japanese-born resident aliens and Japanese American civilians evacuated from the West Coast military exclusion zones (covering substantial portions of Arizona, California, Oregon and Washington states). A presidential executive order, EO 9066 in February 1942, authorized the evacuation, while a second order, EO 9102 in March 1942, appointed the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to oversee the process. This blanket exclusion of culturally Japanese residents (a policy not extended to German or Italian Americans) was a direct consequence of racist immigration policies that denied overseas-born Asian immigrants citizenship and landownership (Burton et al. 1999, 27; CWRIC 2000, 290–292). A population of 118,803 persons was confined, initially in 17 Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) Civilian Assembly Centers, until later moved to ten Relocation Centers in remote semiarid environments across seven states (Kashima 2003: 136; see also Robinson 2001; Daniels 1971). Each facility was designed to hold around 10,000 persons. Their confinement within fences with sentry towers and searchlights, compulsory loyalty questionnaires and punitive segregation of dissenters led to the descriptor “concentration camp” (Daniels 2005, 183–207). Impoverished by their dislocation and put to work on farms and in industries associated with the camps, the Japanese American population provided labor for wartime production. The executive orders of a president lauded for liberal, socially oriented policies linked these two displacement histories, one progressive and community-oriented and the other planned for confinement, yet represented very differently by FSA-commissioned photographers, like Dorothea Lange, among others. The aesthetics of human trauma captured in photography and novels proved evocative methods for conveying radical political positions with respect to the former (Shindo 1997). For example, Lange in partnership with agricultural economist Paul Schuster Taylor presented their joint findings to a Senate committee on civil rights violations against immigrant farm workers in 1939 (Taylor 1968).3 Her iconic and explicitly emotive images of ‘Dust Bowl’ migrants were famously exhibited at the First International Photographic Exhibition in New York’s Grand Central Palace in 1938 (Cohen 2009; Steichen 1962) (Figure 30.1).4 Yet when employed by the WRA along with Clem Albers and Francis Stewart to document the Japanese American Relocation Center camps, Lange’s record of internment was cautious, potentially mindful of WRA and U.S. Army censorship, suggests Linda Gordon, and her focus was the “respectability, Americanism, work ethic, good citizenship, and achievement of people now being treated as criminals” (Gordon 2006, 28, and JAER Records, Part 1, Section 3, Reel 013, 0527; see also Gerald Robinson 2002).5 While in Gordon’s view these photographers conveyed the humiliation of being rationalized, tagged and inoculated (2006, 29–30), the machinery of incarceration—the fences, gates and sentry towers—and evidence of distress or resistance were excluded from these images (Figure 30.2). The same might be said of Ansel Adams, whose 1944 collection on Manzanar, Born Free and Equal, argued explicitly for the liberties of the Japanese American community. Yet their failure to represent the deeper emotional distress caused to Japanese or Japanese American evacuees at that time deferred a more explicit critique of the associated societal injustices. The indignities of incarceration were not ameliorated through camp designs. 414

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Figure 30.1 “Cheap Auto Camp Housing for Citrus Workers” by Dorothea Lange, Tulare County, California, February 1940 National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 83, Records of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics. (83-G-41555) NAI 521799.

The camp examples in this essay are typically discussed as discrete histories and have not been compared or connected in academic discourse. The FSA camps are discussed as forms of community planning in broader histories of suburbanization (Hise 1997) or through the careers of specific architects (Treib and Imbert 1997). A comprehensive survey of the Japanese American incarceration environments has been provided in the book Confinement and Ethnicity (Burton et al. 1999), published by the National Park Service. Lynne Horiuchi writes critically on the racial and spatial implications of their architecture and planning, describing the camps as prison cities (2005, 2015). Harlan D. Unrau has documented Manzanar in great detail (1996). Other camp programs have not attracted architectural historians, possibly due to their temporary materiality and general uniformity (a very 415

6/30/1942, Central Photographic File of the War Relocation Authority, 1942–1945, Records Group 210. NAI 538159.

Figure 30.2 Manzanar Relocation Center, Manzanar, California. Barrack homes at this War Relocation Authority center.

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few publications include Van Slyke 2006; Hailey 2009; Gillem 2007). Studies of post-disaster refugee accommodation linked to contemporary border protection policies have had greater resonance in recent years (Anderson and Ferng 2013; Herz 2012; Pugliese 2008). Although largely focused on political sovereignty (see Agamben 1997, 1998; Agier 2011; Ramadan 2013; Diken 2004) rather than physical planning (Kennedy 2008), there is a case to be made for their co-relation. Experiences in camp environments convey important messages of citizenship. These are the intellectual parameters for examining these two contemporaneous but very different camp histories. The observations and arguments advanced here are based on research at the archives at University of California, Berkeley. The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records, 1930–1974, Dorothea Lange’s photographs and oral histories and documents related to the FSA farm labor projects are found at the Bancroft Library. The College of Environmental Design archive holds the collections of the FSA architects Vernon DeMars and Garrett Eckbo. The Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley has much of the secondary literature on the Japanese American incarceration that has been referenced here. Although the material on this period is vast and is spread across numerous collections, and the majority of the material may be found at the National Archives and Records Administration sites in Washington, DC (National Archives, Records Group 210), and College Park, Maryland, this essay is shaped by the aforementioned sources.

The FSA Camps The historical juxtaposition of these utopian and dystopian camp environments amplified those progressive sensibilities that were nevertheless constrained by unacknowledged, racist policies and prejudices, ideological positions and fiscal imperatives. In the first instance, programs for social welfare and reeducation paralleled efforts at modernizing agriculture, alleviating poverty and spearheading economic recovery and were the political context for idealistic experimentation through camps. The relief camps for destitute migrant workers were a small part of the FSA’s grand plan to collectivize agriculture by setting up subsistence farmstead communities to educate farmers out of debt cycles, offer purchase loans and provide health services to farming families. By the war’s end, notes Michael Grey, there were 250 permanent and temporary federal camps (Grey 2002, 80). Taylor describes a total capacity of 48,600 persons in permanent camps and a further 20,435 in temporary camps (1951, 199). Small farms of 80–300 acres were created next to the permanent facilities, so that “long-term camp-dwellers could rent homes and farm collectively” (Grey 2002, 80). Serviced facilities with civic amenities and the shift from tent shelters to cabins were designed to raise this itinerant population from abjection to civility. A powerful critique of this period, John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, compares FSA camps favorably against the physical accommodation available to itinerant workers. He describes the local hostility, intermittent labor and further impoverishment faced by Depression-era migrants and their accommodation in “rag-tag” squatter towns of “tents, and weed-thatched enclosures, paper houses, a great junk pile” colloquially known as Hoovervilles (Steinbeck 1992, 245–246). Such towns swelled during picking season to accommodate 3,000 to 6,000 seasonal workers, their perpetual itinerancy and serial spatial dislocations capturing modernity as experienced by destitute internal migrants rather than progressives. In contrast, Steinbeck’s account of the Weedpatch camp at Tulare (believed to be the Arvin FSA Camp) suggests the rationalization of both the camp and its occupants, its orderly, well-kept streets and its central sanitary unit a feature of their reeducation into modern standards of living (Steinbeck 1992, 301). The Weedpatch camp is fenced in, and has a store, a dance platform, a meeting room and a management committee, suggesting systems of self-governance concomitant with its modern democratic ethos. In contrast, a third alternative, the company-run camps, are described by Steinbeck as exploitative and hostile environments comprising four rows of “little square, flat-roofed boxes, 417

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each with a door and a window” and “two men armed with shotguns” guarding each row (Steinbeck 1992, 385). The overpriced provisions at the company store which syphoned off the workers’ daily wages revealed the underlying violence of the profit motive. Large growers were threatened by the increasing federal presence and scrutiny of their employment strategies, observes Grey (2002, 80). In comparison, the FSA camp administration was humanitarian and benevolent. This perception of benevolence was advanced through professional publications such as Built in the USA, 1932–1944, in which the FSA camps for agricultural workers exemplified the teamwork, economy and functionalism of this otherwise “bureaucratic architecture” (Mock 1944, 60–63).6 Periodicals of the period such as Pencil Points and Task corroborated these perceptions, publishing model FSA communities (Hamlin 1941; DeMars 1941) alongside other planned communities for workers in war industries (Bauer 1943). The FSA team designed rural labor camps for Arizona, Texas and in particular California’s Central Valley. The communities planned by the San Francisco office (Regions IX and XI) from 1939 to 1942 were Ceres, Gridley, Winters, Thornton, Westley, Firebaugh, Mineral King, Tulare, Shafter, Arvin, Brawley, Marysville, Woodville, Yuba City and Coachella (Imbert 1997, 122; Hise 1997, 87).7 These were the first experiments in rural public housing in which community buildings expressed modernist design ideals, exemplified in the simple structures and utopian hexagonal plan of the Tulare County FSA Camp.8 According to Treib, California practitioners Vernon DeMars, Burton D. Cairns and Garrett Eckbo, who were members of the Telesis Environmental Research Group, underscored their New Deal projects with attributes of the Bay Area regional style following a prevalent conservative and often sentimental desire to evoke “the perceived stability of prior eras” (1997, 43).9 As illustrated in plans and photographs of Tulare camp found in the architects’ archives, important features of the plan include expansions to an existing school, a permanent utility building (a brick structure) placed centrally as an organizing element, and the administrative buildings: the manager’s house, first aid clinic, isolation unit, warehouse, gatehouse and assembly room, which dominate one side of the hexagon. The focus was on laying out the camp environment and designing utility structures, meeting rooms or playgrounds, and in humanizing the arid environments through designs by Californian landscape architect Garrett Eckbo (Treib 1997, 44–46, 47). In contrast, the standardized units available for these settlements frustrated the program’s architects, who developed “an architectural ecology of sorts,” notes Trieb, and these ranged from temporary tents, trailers and sheds to more permanent metal housing and apartment blocks (1997, 46). At Tulare there are rows of Tennessee Coal and Iron cabins serviced by comfort stations, more permanent suburban-style two-bedroom units around cul-de-sacs as well as barrack-type linear accommodation (DeMars 1992, 83, 101, 106, 114) (Figure 30.3). The model of community planning devised by the FSA sought to collectivize itinerants of varied European cultural origins who had assimilated into America, where the form, materiality, scale and orientations of structures emphasized community bonds. Prominence given to shared spaces and programs demonstrated the significance of civic spaces for social cohesion. In fact, large employers objected to these camps because it placed labor outside employer control. The findings of the U.S. Civil Liberties Committee on California’s industrial agriculture stated the importance of these forms of independent accommodation for the maintenance of civil rights (Taylor 1951, 199). When compared with these enlightened precedents, the regimented barracks designed for Japanese and Japanese American internees seemed geared to strip them of their rights and their social relations, while the common messing and washing facilities substantially eroded the cohesion of family units.

Japanese American Incarceration The camps for Japanese and Japanese American evacuees were segregated carceral facilities, part of a broader taxonomy of prisoner of war and civilian internment camps. The first stage of evacuation 418

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Figure 30.3 United States: Farm Security Administration camp, Tulare: general plan of property scale, Vernon DeMars, FF33, College of Environmental Design Archives, UC Berkeley.

was to 17 WCCA Civilian Assembly Centers, typically in extant recreational facilities (Burton et al. 1999, 36, Table 3.1), while Justice Department Detention Camps held those identified as potentially threatening based in many cases on their affiliation to cultural or political organizations. For example, the military converted the Tulare King’s County Fairground to house 4,978 internees for four months (Densho Encyclopedia, Tulare Detention Facility).10 Nineteen stalls and sheds, formerly used for livestock, were repurposed as accommodation and a further 152 barracks were built by the military (Figure 30.4). A 6.5-foot perimeter fence, eight watch towers and a company of 100 military police were assigned to secure the facility, ostensibly from external threat. The residents of Tulare were from Los Angeles and Sacramento Counties and the Southern California Coast. In nearby Inyo County the Owens Valley Reception Center at Manzanar (March 21– June 2, 1942) housed a large population from Los Angeles. Converted to a relocation center under WRA administration, from June 1942 to November 1945, its population peaked at 10,046 persons. 419

Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved on February 29, 2016, from http://encyclopedia.densho.org/sources/en-denshopd-i224-00012-1.

Figure 30.4 Aerial view of Tulare Assembly Center, California, c. 1942.

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Other relocation centers were at Gila River and Poston in Arizona, at Granada, Colorado, at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, at Jerome and Rohwer, Arkansas, at Minidoka, Idaho, at Topaz, Utah, and at Tule Lake, California (Burton et al. 1999, 2, figure 1.1).11 They all followed the standardized military grid plan (Bancroft Library, JAER Records, Final Reports, vols. I–V, 1946, reel 148). The site plans of Manzanar show military-style layouts of barracks, mess halls, latrines, dispensary and recreational buildings, hospital, laundry and ironing buildings, garages, a pump house and sewage treatment plant (NARA, WRA Records, Manzanar, Record Group 210) (Figure 30.5). The severity of internment and its punitive intentions are further conveyed by perimeter fences and sentry towers with searchlights. The layout plan at Manzanar reveals 64 rectangular grid blocks, including three zones assigned to firebreaks, with 39 residential blocks—each housing 15 barrack buildings, a mess hall and central utility buildings (Unrau 1996, 220–225, 281–292, 470–476; maps and plans, 835–848). The standard 20’x100’, theatre-of-operations-type barracks were divided into six or nine living units or doubled up across the width to form the mess hall. The hospital, the auditorium and industrial/farming areas, the administrative section and the staff and military police quarters deviate from this schema. Yet the monotony of the barrack landscape was socially transformed through internee-led community programs—canteen, community hostel, Protestant, Catholic and, Buddhist churches, department store, music hall and co-operatives—that were not reflected in the physical planning. Internee-built gardens and recreational areas softened the military grid. Photographs by Adams, Lange, Albers and Stewart provide an intimate physical record of these community activities at Manzanar augmented by those of Toyo Miyatake, a professional Los Angeles photographer who smuggled his camera equipment into the camp. However, their focus on such humanizing strategies diverts our attention from how civic deprivation was used to discipline culturally different subjects. The reality of their confinement is poignantly conveyed by Miyatake’s photograph of three boys gazing beyond the boundary fence, one of the most frequently produced image of this incarceration history (Alinder 2009, 87).

FSA Involvement in Japanese American Incarceration In her revealing critique of FSA activities, Lynne Horiuchi highlights these contrasts and their troubling implication in the wartime incarceration of Japanese and Japanese American communities, including FSA involvement in preparing layouts for permanent internment communities (Horiuchi 2015: 101–120; see also DeMars 1992, 224 and Eckbo 1993, 56, 66). She notes a visit by FSA architects to Manzanar during the early stage of evacuation in 1942. The team developed site plans for Manzanar and for Gila River, and some features of the latter were adopted by the military. Moreover, Horiuchi notes that prior to 1942, the FSA office employed two Japanese American architects, Hachiro Yuasa and Siberius Saito, members with these and other prominent architects in the Telesis Environmental Research Group. Both Saito and Yuasa were evacuated and incarcerated in the Tanforan Assembly Center in the spring of 1942, and later at the Central Utah Relocation Center (Horiuchi 2015, 101). Despite DeMars admitting to being emotionally upset by the evacuation, since the young Japanese American architects were close friends, the architects, like many professionals of the period, remained passive participants in the process. “We thought we ought to make the best of what we felt was a very unfair and unnecessary proposition,” he is noted as having remarked (DeMars 1992, 224). Horiuchi (2015) interprets the architects’ passivity as mirroring forms of societal racism embedded in institutional and professional activities, positions particularly hypocritical of a nation championing democracy overseas. Indeed, as illumined by Jean-Louis Cohen in Architecture in Uniform (2011), the fraught social sensitivities of wartime construction played out in many arenas, exposing the profession’s sociopolitical ambivalence. However, as highlighted by Horiuchi, while their determination to introduce community planning amenities into the camps emulated “the social architecture of FSA’s 421

Records of the War Relocation Authority, 1941–1989, Record Group 210, National Archives, USA, NAI 4688259.

Figure 30.5 Manzanar Relocation Center, California.

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New Deal community planning,” the most innovative designs by FSA architects were confined to the non-Japanese and non-Japanese American WRA staff members who administered the camps (Horiuchi 2015, 108–109). Unlike the rigid linear geometries of barracks for internees, the FSA staff quarters are diagonally arranged to allow for the diverse planting schemes proposed by Eckbo. Architectural preferences and discrimination as well as the different meanings and associations conveyed through camps across wartime America suggest the volatility of a typology deployed by the same organizations and in similar environments both for social mobility and confinement. The passage of Japanese and Japanese American civilians across these various models is similarly revealing; however, their intersections are embedded in a broader American immigrant and labor history.

Japanese American Farm Labor FSA involvement at the planning phase of Manzanar or in the initial construction of the camp is not mentioned in published sources. Its responsibility was for transferring farmlands that had been previously farmed by Japanese and Japanese Americans, and ensuring fair compensation for former owners and correct use of their agricultural land (see Hewes 1942). Evacuation created a vacuum in agricultural production, since nearly two-thirds of the Japanese American workforce depended on agriculture; some 6,118 farms operated by them on the West Coast were valued (at that time) at US$72,600,000 with an estimated US$6 million of equipment (CWRIC 2000, 122). In California, the community dominated the wholesale and retail distribution of fruit and vegetables and the Los Angeles County flower market business (CWRIC 2000, 123). The property loss to the Japanese American community due to evacuation is estimated to be US$4 billion to US$5 billion (Burton et al. 1999, 1).12 They were dispossessed, impoverished and reduced to manual workers on the farms associated with the camps. At Manzanar, apart from gardens within the camp planted for local camp consumption, evacuees cleared, planted and irrigated 440 acres for farming vegetables (Burton et al. 1999, 169). Additionally due to pressures from producers, the site perimeter became porous to seasonal labor (along with soldiers and college students). Toward the end of 1942, some 10,000 evacuees were on seasonal leave and resettlement was under discussion, contingent, however, on an internally divisive loyalty review determining further segregation, repatriation, expatriation, enlistment and leave clearance (CWRIC 2000, 180–184). By December 1944, 31,000 evacuees were on indefinite leave (CWRIC 2000, 203). They were offered US$25 and transportation costs. Consequently, in the latter half of 1942, when war-related industries swelled California’s migrant population, there began an inverse eastward migration of Japanese Americans. Many agro-­ businesses that were expanding to meet wartime demands actively recruited from the camps and the FSA created or reused extant facilities as mobile farm labor camps. The path to a specific labor camp, Seabrook Farms in New Jersey, which employed some 2,500 Japanese American workers alongside immigrants of other nationalities, exemplifies this new labor mobility (UCLA, Young Library, Fuju Sasaki Papers, Coll. 1440, box 1, folders 1–4) (Figure 30.6). Japanese American evacuees arriving there from the relocation centers describe a Hoover Village comprising four rows of 16’x48’ tar-paper-roofed, prefabricated barracks, with three living units per barrack. It was “just like camp” (Rutgers University, Community Repository, Oral Histories, online).13 But the village had greater physical diversity, including federal housing units, linear, single-story apartments and dormitories, and purpose-built recreational facilities; in short, it responded to various employee groupings with an expanded spatial genealogy reminiscent of FSA labor camps. Despite the harsh climate and g­ rueling labor (12-hour days farming or at the processing plant), there were greater degrees of spatial agency, community and freedom (see Harrison 2003 and Sawada 1986–87 for more on Seabrook Farms).

423

Retrieved from New Jersey Digital Highway, http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3T72FX6.

Figure 30.6 Aerial view of Seabrook Farms. Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center.

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After Camp Both the FSA farm labor camps and wartime relocation centers were designed for assimilation either of itinerant workers into a new industrial ethos or of a culturally distinct communal collective into Anglo-American values. Both comprised temporary structures and similar material palettes that were transformed by the intention to rehabilitate or punish, and by the desire on the part of authorities to manage an agricultural labor force and to (or not to) provide relief. Both groups encountered the societal hostility that differentiates insiders from outsiders, compounded in the case of Japanese and Japanese Americans by the political hostilities and cultural confrontations of the Pacific conflict. The transformation of the camp from an instrument conceived for the public good to a model for racial segregation and punishment—both of these rationalized through architecture and planning— illustrated the mutability of the modern spatial template in its most temporary manifestation of institutionalized freedom or control. And yet, the materiality of camps seemed blatantly antithetical to more familiar punitive architectures and their barbed wire fences presented the illusion of accessibility to the surrounding landscape, a recurring image in the photographs that delivered news of these environments to the wartime public. The place of these camp environments in housing and urban planning history was obfuscated by progressive examples demonstrative of community planning. In fact postwar townships based on defense housing models dominated publications of the 1950s. The contribution of Japanese Americans to wartime agricultural production was likewise under-researched. Such details sat uncomfortably within official histories still focused on the cultural experiences and values of the Anglo-European majority. Intimate experiences of barrack living in congested interiors and uniform surroundings would be revealed more slowly as the Japanese American community became vocal about their treatment during the 1970s. An outpouring of literature included personal memoirs, artworks and histories. Among the most revealing works on Manzanar were the photographs of Toyo Miyatake, the details of the Manzanar riot and the leadership of Sue Kunitomi Embrey in leading the annual pilgrimage that would spearhead the establishment of a national historic site (Adams and Miyatake 1978; Embrey et al. 1986; Bahr 2007). The memoir Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston (1973) would be subsequently adopted as part of the high school curriculum in many California schools (Hudson 2010).14 However, these vocalizations had suffered a lengthy hiatus across the period of resettlement. The resettlement of these two groups, the Dust Bowl migrants and the Japanese American community, both in the face of considerable societal hostility, is also comparable and revealing of discriminatory policies. FSA housing types evolved in their complexity across migratory labor camps, farm labor homes, cooperative farms and garden homes, suggesting progressive developments in social housing provision. The FSA team would eventually place their camps at the nucleus of permanent satellite communities, exemplified at Woodville in Tulare County (Hise 1997, 109). When diverted to designing defense housing for a new migratory workforce, the FSA was able to draw on these experiences (Hise 1997, 115). In contrast, at the end of the war, between 1945 and 1946, the Relocation Centers were decommissioned and salvaged while the Japanese American community left for trailer parks and campsites on the urban fringe of major cities. There they would struggle to recover properties and rebuild lives. Returning servicemen brought news of wartime Japanese aggression home to the population, augmenting societal hostility and discrimination (see Greg Robinson 2012; Thomas et al. 1952), even though there were no cases against them of proven espionage (Burton et al. 1999, 25). The injustices against the Japanese American community were suppressed in the aftermath of WWII, the suspension or erasure of previously held rights and individual and community identities providing the tabula rasa for assimilation after camp. It took a further four decades for the Japanese American redress movement to gain compensation, by which time the physical evidence of their incarceration had disappeared.15 425

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However, unlike the progressive associations replete in literature of the era, the term ‘camp’ prompted sentiments of shame, persecution, injustice and emotional trauma for the Japanese American community. Contextualized in their postwar struggle to regain their faith in American society, their civic deprivation and liberation through labor were twisted instruments of democratic power.

Acknowledgments My thanks to the staff at the Bancroft Library and the College of Environmental Design Archives, to Greig Crysler at UC Berkeley and in particular to Lynne Horiuchi, who advised and commented on a draft of this chapter. This research is funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT140100190 (2015–2018) titled Temporal Cities, Provisional Citizens: Architectures of Internment. This chapter was first published in part in AnnMarie Brennan and Philip Goad, eds., GOLD: Proceedings of the Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ 2016; see Pieris 2016).

Notes 1 Michel Foucault (1980) describes genealogy as a combination of erudite and local knowledge “which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and make use of this knowledge tactically today” (83). Among the works associated with this method is his book on the penal system, Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1983). 2 Hoovervilles were colloquially named after President Herbert Hoover, who was blamed for the economic depression. 3 The La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, 1939–1941. 4 Others, including Ben Shahn, John Vachon, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, John Collier, Jr., Carl Mydans and Gordon Parks, were hired by Roy Stryker, who headed the historical section of the FSA. 5 The JAER Records include WCCA Information Service Division correspondence regarding impounding of specific photographs taken by Dorothea Lange. 6 Details of the projects are found in oral histories of the architects: Vernon DeMars (1992) and Garrett Eckbo (1993). 7 Vernon DeMars became acting district architect after the death of Burton Cairns; Herbert Hallsteen was district engineer and Nicholas Cirino, regional engineer. Other sites noted by Treib and Imbert include Walla Walla, Granger and Yakima in Washington; Yamhill in Oregon; Caldwell and Twin Falls in Idaho; Yuma, Glendale, Agua Fria, Chandler, Casa Grande, Eleven-Mile Corner and Baxter in Arizona; Weslaco, Harlingen, Robstown and Sinton in Texas. 8 Based on plans and photographs located in College of Environmental Design Archives, UC Berkeley, Vernon DeMars, FF33, and Box 27, Folder VI, 13. 9 They adopted Telesis after sociologist Lester Frank Ward’s philosophy of directed social advancement. 10 The following description is from accounts on an important website for Japanese American community histories. 11 The figure identifies sites in the western United States associated with the relocation of Japanese Americans during WWII and is based on WRA data. 12 Calculated according to 1999 property values. 13 Oral histories of Iddy Asada, Robert Hasuike, Anne Lowe and Fusaye Kazaoka. 14 The account states that in 2003, Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante arranged for 10,000 VHS copies of Farewell to Manzanar along with copies of the book and lesson guides for teachers to be distributed free of charge to all public middle schools, high schools and libraries in California. 15 This was achieved through the enactment of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, based on the findings of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians.

References Adams, A. (1944) Born Free and Equal, New York: US Camera. Adams, A. and Miyatake T. (1978) Two Views of Manzanar: An Exhibition of Photographs, Los Angeles, CA: Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, University of California.

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Agamben, G. (1997) “The Camp as Nomos of the Modern”, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, in H. de Vries and S. Weber, eds. Violence, Identity and Self-Determination, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 106–118. Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agier, M. (2011) Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government, Cambridge: Polity Press. Alinder, J. (2009) Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Anderson, S. and Ferng, J. (2013) “No Boat: Christmas Island and the Architecture of Detention”, Architecture Theory Review, 18(2): 212–226. Bahr, D.M. (2007) The Unquiet Nisei: An Oral History of the Life of Sue Kunitomi Embrey, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Baldwin, S. (1968) Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Farm Security Administration, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, “Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records, 1930–1974”, BANC MSS 67/14 c. Bauer, C. (1943) “Outline of War Housing”, Task 4: 5–8. Burton, J., Farrell, M.M., Lord, F.B. and Lord, R.W., eds. (1999) Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites, Tucson, AZ: National Parks Service Publications in Anthropology. Cohen, J-L. (2011) Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War, Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture. Cohen, S. (2009) The Likes of Us: America in the Eyes of the Farm Security Administration, Boston, MA: David R. Godine. Conkin, P.K. (1959) Tomorrow a New World, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. CWRIC ([1997] 2000) Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Daniels, R. (1971) Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Daniels, R. (2005) “Words Do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of the Japanese Americans,” in L. Fiset and G. Nomura, eds. Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 183–207. DeMars, V. (1941) “Social Planning for Western Agriculture”, Task 2: 4–9. DeMars, V. (1992) A Life in Architecture: Indian Dancing, Migrant Housing, Telesis, Design for Urban Living, Theater, Teaching, Berkeley, CA: The Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. Densho Encyclopedia, Tulare Detention Facility, available at http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Tulare (detention_ facility)/. Diken, B. (2004) “Refugee Camps to Gated Communities: Biopolitics and the end of the City”, Citizenship Studies, 8(1): 83–106. Eckbo, G. (1993) Landscape Architecture: The Profession in California, 1935–1940, and Telesis, Berkeley, CA: The Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. Embrey, S.K., Hansen, A.A. and Mitson, B.K. (1986) Manzanar Martyr: An Interview With Harry Y. Ueno, Fullerton: California State University. Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1983) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1st ed. 1977, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Pantheon Books. Gillem, M. (2007) America Town, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gordon, L. (2006) “Dorothea Lange Photographs the Japanese American Internment”, in Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, New York: W.W. Norton, 5–45. Grey, M.R. (2002) New Deal Medicine: The Rural Health Programs of the Farm Security Administration, New York: Taylor & Francis. Hailey, C. (2009) Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hamlin, T.F. (1941) “Farm Security Architecture”, Pencil Points (November): 709–720. Harrison, C. (2003) Growing a Global Village: Making History at Seabrook Farms, New York: Holmes and Meiers. Herz, M. (2012) From Camp to City: Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara, ETH Studio Basel, Zurich: Lars Mūller. Hewes, L.I. (1942) Final Report of the Participation of the Farm Security Administration in the Evacuation Program of the Wartime Civil Control Administration Civil Affairs Division Western Defense Command and Fourth Army, Farm Security Administration, United States Department of Agriculture, San Francisco, CA. Hise, G. (1997) Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Horiuchi, L. (2005) “Dislocations and Relocations: The Built Environments of Japanese American Internment”, PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA. Horiuchi, L. (2015) “Architects at War: Designing Prison Cities for Japanese American Communities”, in Beth Tauke, Korydon Smith, and Charles Davis, Diversity and Design: Understanding Hidden Consequences, New York: Routledge, 101–120. Houston, J.W. and Houston J.D. (1973) Farewell to Manzanar, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Hudson, S. (2010) “The Legacy of ‘Farewell to Manzanar’ ”, The Japanese American Museum Store Online, 26 July, available at: www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2010/7/26/farewell-to-manzanar/ [23 May 2016]. Imbert, D. (1997) “The Art of Social Landscape Design”, in M. Treib and D. Imbert, eds. Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living, Berkeley: University of California Press, 106–177. Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records, 1930–1974, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley including the Manzanar Relocation Center, California. Kashima, T. (2003) Judgement Without Trial: Japanese American Internment During World War II, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Kennedy, J. (2008) “Structures for the Displaced: Service and Identity in Refugee Settlements”, Dissertation, International Forum of Urbanism, Delft University of Technology, Delft. Mock, E., ed. (1944) Built in USA, 1932–1944, New York: The Museum of Modern Art. National Archives, USA, Records of the War Relocation Authority, 1941–1989, Record Group 210. Pieris, A. (2016) “Sociospatial Genealogies of Wartime Impoverishment: Temporary Farm Labour Camps in the USA”, in A. Brennan and P. Goad eds., SAHANZ 2016, Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 33, Melbourne, Australia, Melbourne School of Design, The University of Melbourne, 558–567. Pugliese, J. (2008) “The Tutelary Architecture of Immigration Detention Prisons and the Spectacle of ‘Necessary Suffering’ ”, Architecture Theory Review, 13(2): 206–221. Ramadan, A. (2013) “Spatialising the Refugee Camp”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38(1): 65–77. Resettlement Administration. (1936) Interim Report of the Resettlement Administration, 1936, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Robinson, G. (2001) By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Robinson, G. (2012) After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press. Robinson, G.H. (2002) Elusive Truth: Four Photographers at Manzanar. Ansel Adams, Clem Albers, Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, Nevada City, CA: Carl Mautz. Rutgers University Community Repository, Oral histories of Iddy Asada; Robert Hasuike; Anne Lowe; Fusaye Kazaoka, Seabrook Farms Educational and Cultural Center, “I remember Seabrook”, available at https:// rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/search/results/?key=root&rtype%5B%5D=&query=I+remember+Seabrook. Sawada, M. (1986–1987) “After the Camps: Seabrook Farms, New Jersey and the Resettlement of Japanese Americans, 1944–1947”, Amerasia, 13(2), 117–136. Shindo, C.J. (1997) Dust Bowl Migration in the American Imagination, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Steichen, E., ed. (1962) The Bitter Years, 1935–1941, Rural America as Seen by the Photographers of the Farm Security Administration, New York: Museum of Modern Art. Steinbeck, J. (1992) The Grapes of Wrath (1st ed., New York: The Viking Press, 1939), New York Penguin Books. Taylor, P. (1951) “Perspective on Housing Migratory Agricultural Laborers”, Land Economics, 27(3): 193–202. Taylor, P. (1968) “California Farm Labor: A Review”, Agricultural History, 42(1): 49–54. Thomas, D.S., Kikuchi, C., and Sakoda, J. (1952) The Salvage, Berkeley: The University of California Press. Treib, M. (1997) “The Social Art of Landscape Design”, in M. Treib and D. Imbert, eds. Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2–104. University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Charles D. Young Library, Fuju Sasaki Papers, 1944–1986, Collection 1440, Box 1, Folders 1–4, weekly reports. Unrau, H.D. (1996) The Evacuation and Relocation of Persons of Japanese Ancestry During World War II: A Historical Study of the Manzanar War Relocation Center, Denver, CO: US Department of the Interior, National Parks Service. Van Slyke, A. (2006) A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890–1960, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Worster, D. (2004) Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1st edition, 1979), New York: Oxford University Press.

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31 Are Architects the Last People Needed in Disaster Reconstruction? Mojgan Taheri Tafti and David O’Brien

Two years after the 2001 Gujarat earthquake struck the city of Bhuj, a group of activists, a local newspaper, a regional NGO and a local architectural firm negotiated with the local authority to allocate assistance and land to disaster-stricken, low-income renters who had lost their places of residence. While it was estimated that rental units accounted for 40 percent of the housing loss and around 4,000 renters lost their homes, housing reconstruction policies did not consider any direct assistance allocation to these households (Tafti and Tomlinson 2013). Having no housing option after the earthquake, these renters resided in a site known as GIDC (Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation), which had been initially planned as temporary housing on the urban periphery. As a result of the advocacy and negotiation of non-governmental entities and their partnership with local and state governments, a housing project was developed to provide housing for around 450 of these households at the same site. Ten years after the earthquake, the built units have been transformed by an incremental addition of new spaces, such as balconies, additional rooms, shops and even second storeys. The project was initially designed to accommodate self-grouped households in small clusters in response to their requests to live close to their relatives and friends. Communal spaces in each cluster offer a space where families sit together, chatting, tie-dying or minding children. As we zoom out and look at the project at the larger scale, however, we found it to be a part of a larger settlement located beyond the city’s outer ring road. The rest of this settlement, with units initially built for the temporary phase, now accommodates the remaining low-income renters and sharers—who are still waiting for the government’s housing assistance—as well as migrants from surrounding rural areas. Without adequate bus services or good roads, and being located a considerable distance from the city, households are facing many difficulties accessing job opportunities and quality health and education services; children are deprived of high school education. As a result, this population is likely to suffer a downward spiral of social vulnerability. The GIDC case is one of many that exemplifies the achievements and limitations of the practices of architects in the context of post-disaster reconstruction. This chapter highlights that while architects have contributed to the recovery of affected people in small-scale, scattered projects, they have been less engaged with the broader landscape of displacement following disasters. The contribution of architects to small-scale projects has often been achieved when they transgress their conventional professional boundaries. Engaging with the larger-scale process of recovery and playing a

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constructive role in countering the intensified inequalities and displacement after disasters, we argue, require architects to further reflect, negotiate and redefine their professional confines. To address this issue, we expand on the argument put forward by David Sanderson (2010) that “without a change in their traditional role, architects are often the last people needed in disaster reconstruction”. This call for change in the traditional role of architects repositions the architecture field toward the social end of the formal/social spectrum of the discipline, beyond the symbolic design projects belonging to the formalist shades of the spectrum. Rather than unsettling the field of architecture, the quest to renegotiate its conventional boundaries seeks possibilities for justifying and theorizing the involvement of architects in humanitarian and development activities, as evidenced by a burgeoning literature on architectural projects after disasters (e.g., Architecture for Humanity 2006; Lepik 2010; Charlesworth 2014). In this chapter, we explore the achievements gained from rethinking the traditional role of architects in different cases of post-disaster reconstruction and identify gaps that persist in these practices. Our particular focus is on housing reconstruction after disasters. Locating architects in housing reconstruction after disasters needs to be understood within the wider context of the humanitarian sector—its main actors, their networks and the flow of funding, knowledge and people within these networks which shape particular humanitarian practices and paradigms. Within this context, we examine the position of architects within three major paradigms of reconstruction: two established paradigms and an emerging one. Drawing on field data collected in different contexts (after the earthquakes of 2001 in Gujarat, India; in Ardabil 1997, Bam 2003, Borujerd 2006, all in Iran; and the 2004 tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia), we examine the role that architects assumed in reconstruction projects under these different paradigms. The chapter then outlines the achievements and limitations of current, socially engaged practices of architects, and highlights their inadequate engagement with the problems of increasing inequality and the displacement of marginalized groups following disasters.

Locating Architects in Disaster Reconstruction In the Global South, the architecture discipline has been rarely involved in shaping residential landscapes (Elleh 2014; Van Ballegooijen and Rocco 2013), in particular those that are most prone to disasters and those that often become the space of humanitarian activities after disasters, such as informal settlements located in hazardous locations. Yet architects have played a role and are increasingly claiming a bigger role in these activities. Claiming such a role, therefore, needs to be legitimized by offering additional ‘values’ to the pragmatic and undertheorized processes of reconstruction that have been taking place for centuries and would take place without their involvement. Exploring the values that architects can add to this process also raises the question of whose values and interests architects are serving and should serve. Exploring these values requires us to examine the role that architects have assumed in previous disaster reconstruction situations. This role to some extent depends on the way that reconstruction and the ‘agency’ in the reconstruction are conceived. Three major paradigms (two established and one emerging) represent different conceptualizations of agency in reconstruction. Reviewing these provides a better understanding of the role of architects, among other experts, within the general humanitarian system and the values they bring to the reconstruction processes. These values are juxtaposed with those of the affected people and the involved institutions.

Provider Supply The first paradigm is provider supply, where the provider may be governmental or non-governmental organizations and/or international institutions. Provider supply has been dominant in disaster

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reconstruction projects, in particular in the 1980s and 1990s (Davis 2011). It remains as a major approach in the delivery of housing after disasters among NGOs. These projects are increasingly dominated by relatively few but large bilateral or multilateral agencies and NGOs with little or unstable core funding (Lyons 2009). The reliance of these actors on donors, and hence their need for creating demonstrable success, makes their post-disaster practices different from their day-to-day development projects (Lyons 2009). In particular, grass-roots participation is often undermined in the face of an urgent need for a rapid fix for housing problems (Davidson et al. 2007). The nature of these projects and the ways these organizations operate locate architects at the periphery of the humanitarian system. The role of architects is limited to the design of a few housing prototypes or the layout of the settlements; the role of disaster-affected people is often limited to that of recipients of housing or participants in labour. Architects in this sense design housing for an institutional client rather than for its users, and the architect’s role is defined as a service-oriented practice as part of a reactive and top-down creation of physical artefacts (Boano and Hunter 2012). The hazard literature reports numerous examples of the failure of these housing projects, which include the abandonment of the project by the supposed beneficiaries (Figure 31.1) or the beneficiaries selling their units’ components (Barakat 2003; Ahmed 2011), or even the house builders jeopardizing residents’ health through poor practices, such as the use of asbestos in developments in Aceh (O’Brien and Ahmed 2012). It is not rare to see cases of projects being designed by architects who have never visited the project’s site (Mulligan and Shaw 2010, Figure 31.2) or cases of architecture being employed simply as a means for communicating the generosity of the donor or its ideology (Chen 2014; Burnell and Sanderson 2011). The lack of communication between the architect and

Figure 31.1 Housing project abandoned by the target population. Bojnurd earthquake housing reconstruction. Source: Zamani and Tafti 2004.

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Figure 31.2 People covered the windows for privacy because they are close to the main road. Sheikh village, Ardebil. Source: Zamani and Tafti 2004.

the user often results in the cultural and economic dimensions of housing in the given context being overlooked or misunderstood (Ahmed 2011). One of the premises of building a core house is to address problems that arise from the lack of communication between the architect and the user. The idea is that users will alter and consolidate the core housing to adapt it according to their needs and aspirations, often over an extended period and as their resources permit. This idea is increasingly being adopted in reconstruction projects. Our case studies in Aceh and Ardebil (conducted ten and five years after the disasters respectively) show that most residents put significant resources into improving their homes (Zamani and Tafti 2004; O’Brien and Ahmed 2012). Such projects, however, require designing a flexible core unit and training local artisans on safe construction practices. In the provider supply paradigm, the reconstruction is initiated and developed by an external agency, aimed at providing a solution for a perceived problem—that is, inadequate shelter—and enhancing the efficiency of the intervention. There is often a disjunction between the donor’s, the architect’s and the user’s conceptions of the problem, solution and what housing does and represents. For instance, humanitarian agencies often frame and construct the problem as having to build a given number of houses at minimum cost. As a result, many of these projects are built in locations where land is cheap and it is easy to build. Such projects, however, have long been challenged by the urban poor, who vote with their feet and move away from poorly located projects at the periphery, to areas closer to jobs and services (Payne 2002).

Aided Self-Help The second paradigm, aided self-help in housing and development, goes back to the 1930s (Harris 1998). It was, however, the earthquake of 1958 in Peru which worked as a catalyst to put this 432

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idea into practice at a large scale and with higher publicity by the architect and prolific author John Turner, who saw the earthquake as an “opportunity which predisposed everyone to accept new ideas and methods” (Turner as cited in Gyger 2013, 107). The central concern of aided self-help development, as theorized in Turner’s writings, is “who decides and who does what for whom”, which is built upon the call for “housing by people” (Turner 1977, 4). This concept challenges the hierarchy and power relationship between the supplier/architect and the user. In practice, the power relations between a pro bono architect and the so-called beneficiary might lead to paternalistic attitudes far from the conventional client-commissioner relationship. Fichter et al. (1972) posit that users should be in control of the major decisions in their lives and have discretion in the trade-offs which establish their priorities. Proponents of this concept are primarily concerned with housing in the context of poverty and emphasize that having the opportunity to make contributions in the design, construction or management empowers the poor and produces more economically sound and culturally acceptable outcomes. Aided self-built housing presents a shift in practices of architects from the technical and aesthetic domain to an advisory one, with a pedagogic agenda being attached to their role. This concept locates architecture at the social end of the formal/social spectrum and challenges the materiality of space as the prime concern of the discipline. Turner (1987, 278) sees the architect as an “enabling practitioner”, defined as an architect who “applies more skill in communicating with people, and seeks greater knowledge of the requisite tools, as well as all the knowledge and other skills any competent architect must have”, while disaster-affected people retain the ability to define and pursue their goals. Aided self-help housing after disasters, however, is rarely funded and realized only in small and scattered projects. Examples are Oxfam and World Neighbours after the 1972 Guatemala earthquake (Stohr 2006), INTERTECT after the 1977 Andhra Pradesh cyclone and Tearfund and EFICOR after the 1993 Lature earthquake in India (Davis 2011). Harris (1999) posits that self-help housing has never been part of mainstream development. The concept, however, endured among architecture theorists as a socially engaging practice (Hamdi 1991). Yet, it seems that disconnections persist between the values of the architect ‘as enabling practitioners’ and those of the very poor, which tend to be the security of tenure and location, and less the materialized or the yet-to-be materialized house. More importantly, proponents of aided self-help housing, including Turner, have been criticized for overlooking the political economy of housing—the fact that self-help housing cannot substitute for resources indispensable for its realization, like land and infrastructure (Marcuse 1992; Burguess 1982). So the involvement of architects and other experts in self-help housing reconstruction, in particular in cities, deals with uncomfortable realities less debated by the proponents of the paradigm.

Owner-Driven Model—A Third Paradigm? The 2000s saw the resurgence of aided self-help housing reconstruction in its new form: the ownerdriven model of housing reconstruction. This model first was implemented in a few villages after the 1993 Lathur earthquake in India and then become prevalent after the 2001 Gujarat earthquake (World Bank 2010). Growing momentum in adopting this paradigm was driven by strong support from the multilateral agencies, including the World Bank ( Jha et al. 2010) and international institutions, including UN-Habitat (2007) and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC 2010). The model has become the default strategy in post-disaster housing recovery (Tafti and Tomlinson 2015), in particular because of its alignment with the World Bank’s monetarist liberal philosophy (Boano and Hunter 2012). The owner-driven model has been adopted by the World Bank’s major-funded housing reconstruction programmes in the twenty-first century: after the 2003 Bam earthquake in Iran, the 2005 Pakistan earthquake and in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami. 433

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The premise of both paradigms seems to be to enable individuals to take control of their housing reconstruction, while receiving financial and technical support. Despite their apparent similarities, the owner-driven and aided self-help paradigms have a fundamental difference. This difference lies in the ways in which the financial and technical support is conceptualized and delivered, which in turn establishes ‘who decides what’. Central to the aided self-help paradigm, at least in the eyes of its original proponents, like Turner, is self-governance, an idea that was never attractive to politicians or major international agencies. While the owner-driven model is often considered as a decentralized framework for housing supply, its assistance disbursement mechanisms to a large extent direct the ‘beneficiary’ to do what is defined as the ‘right thing’ to do (Tafti and Tomlinson 2015). These mechanisms include an instalment-based disbursement of financial assistance and calculating the amount of assistance based on the size of the built house. Although these disbursement arrangements are introduced to ensure safe construction practices, they carry other implications. For instance, disaster-affected people cannot decide to build a smaller house and allocate a portion of their assistance to their income recovery (Tafti and Tomlinson 2015). Often this limits the opportunities for households to decide about their recovery priorities and where to build, what to build and when. Another major difference between the two paradigms is the reliance of the owner-driven paradigm on a narrow property logic. The shape, logic and possessory outcomes of this model regulate and coordinate assistance distribution among the disaster-affected community. Home-/landownership in this paradigm operates as the normalized logic, articulating who is eligible/ineligible for receiving assistance and what should be the outcome of assistance distribution. In two of our case studies, Bam and Bhuj, where housing reconstruction was mainly funded by the World Bank and the owner-driven model was the cornerstone of housing reconstruction policies, the non-home-/ landowners were largely excluded from the programme. The role of the architect in this paradigm is close to the conventional role of designing a house for a client. Post-disaster reconstruction in Bam (Iran) after the 2003 earthquake provides an illustrative example, which reinforces Sanderson’s argument that architects are the last people needed in disaster reconstruction. Given the high level of physical damage in Bam (80 percent of all buildings damaged or collapsed) and due to the inadequate capacity of the construction sector in the affected and neighbouring areas, the government invited architecture firms from across the country to participate in the city’s reconstruction. The more prominent companies sent their newly graduated architects, who had up to that point rarely had an opportunity to demonstrate their design skills and were keen to do so. Under the owner-driven housing reconstruction programme, homeowners had the opportunity to discuss the design of their houses with the invited architects. Costs of designing, preparing plans and issuing building permits were covered by the government. Policy discourses around housing reconstruction were framed around preserving ‘the unique architectural identity’ of the city and building earthquake resilient housing. To pursue these aims, a high council was formed to establish architectural guidelines for architects to follow and their designs were assessed accordingly (Naghsh-e-Jahan 2007). A review of the documents prepared by the architecture companies involved reveals the predominant conceptualization of the role of architects in reconstruction and an ongoing focus on form. These conceptions seem to be out of touch with the realities of the most affected population and what they conceived as their priorities in reconstruction. The report of the coordinator of architecture consultants, Naghsh-e-Jahan (2007), for instance, highlights that the “low financial capacity of most of Bammi people limited the quality of design” (p. 80). The low financial capacity of people was conceived as a barrier to creativity: “Creative capacity of the architects deteriorated and was limited only for locating bathroom, kitchen, or bedroom [. . .] in a small rectangular shape, due to economic reasons” (p. 88). Unsurprisingly, the initial designs overlooked the issue of affordability. Consequently, during the construction process households often did not construct unnecessary elements of housing plans to reduce expenses (Figure 31.3). 434

Photo by author.

Figure 31.3 During the reconstruction people did not construct the unnecessary and costly elements in plans. The left-hand plan is designed by an architect in Bam and the right-hand plan is the implemented one.

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More importantly, many lower-income homeowners chose to build housing units with readymade plans and prefabricated structures to avoid the lengthy process of building design and consultation with experts, as well as bureaucratic processes of assessing designs and issuing construction permits. Particularly in lower-income areas of the city, the dominance of these prefabricated buildings reveals the irrelevance of architects—in their conventional roles—to the urban poor. Architects instead played a role in addressing the demands of their better-off clients and architecture served as a medium for communicating social inequalities that were exacerbated following the disaster.

Small Victories and Realignments in the Discipline Self-reflective accounts of architects about their role in disaster reconstruction have already highlighted that their meaningful involvement requires some realignments in the field (e.g., Charlesworth 2014). Both in development and disaster reconstruction contexts, architects have been engaged in negotiating the traditional confines of the discipline and redefining their positions in relation to communities and in disaster reconstruction or development processes. In particular, three realignments in the field have extended the involvement of architects beyond short-term ‘altruistic’ engagements. The most transformative realignment has arguably been the primacy of the process over a materialized outcome. The idea of building a core house, as an intermediary object, which can be transformed and incrementally expanded, transgressed the narrow conceptualization of the discipline as being concerned with a finished object (a building). The idea sits comfortably with the realities of post-disaster recovery as a long-term process within which the external agencies fulfil their humanitarian mission of providing minimum shelter, and dwellers incrementally expand and personalize it over years. Nevertheless, the potential and limits of this concept in higher-density, urbanized areas are yet to be investigated. The second realignment, embedding a pedagogical agenda into the discipline’s domain, also sits well with post-disaster reconstruction with the increasing attention being paid to ‘building back better’. Yet examples of a successful transfer of the construction technology to the local communities have been rare (Davis and Alexander 2016), due to unaffordability, inaccessibility of technology and inadequate training. In Iran, for instance, our field survey, conducted five years after the 1997 earthquakes in Ardebil and Bojnurd, showed that in 25 percent of cases people’s attempt to expand their units caused structural damage to the inflexible core units, making them fragile in the face of a future earthquake (Zamani and Tafti 2004). The third transforming realignment has involved repositioning architects and their role within the power relation between the architect and the intended beneficiaries in all stages of design and construction. This realignment can be located within the context of changes in the broader field of development practices in response to the calls voiced by activists, development practitioners and progressive thinkers for a greater involvement of people in decisions that matter to them. Nevertheless, the idea of the architect as an enabling practitioner has been rarely a part of mainstream architecture education. These realignments in the profession, in general, have all been in line with the general premise of helping people help themselves in disaster reconstruction or development contexts. So far, however, achievements have been limited to small-scale projects of reconstruction and rely heavily on the individual architects’ skills of social intermediation between communities and donors. The increasing complexity of disasters and conflicts, in particular in urbanized areas (IASC 2010), requires a more critical rethinking of the discipline.

The Increasing Gap: Displacement After Disasters In this final section, we argue that beyond small-scale projects, architects can and should play a role in challenging larger-scale changes and trends that take place after disasters. Our argument 436

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is grounded in the proposition that there is an increasing trend of displacement of marginalized groups after urban disasters. The major drivers of this displacement are: first, the proliferation of unplanned parts of cities that are often the most vulnerable settlements, the destruction of which provides an opportunity to clear inner urban areas for renewal and redevelopment; and second, the increasing predominance of market-driven policies in disaster reconstruction activities and the associated gentrification of inner urban areas and exacerbation of pre-existing socio-spatial inequalities in cities. The disaster literature is increasingly reporting involuntary displacement or outmigration—what Miller (2012) calls the expulsion of ‘surplus people’ during the reconstruction processes (e.g., Weber and Peek 2012; Tafti and Tomlinson forthcoming). Informal settlers represent a significant proportion of those who are displaced (McCallin and Scherer 2015). Low-income renters and sharers are another group that is often displaced due to an often inadequate investment in poorer neighbourhoods, the subsequent very slow supply of affordable rental housing and prevalence of price gauging and red-lining practices after disasters (Tafti 2015). In addition to these market drivers, post-disaster recovery policies that are often designed to protect the interests of homeowners result in nonhomeowners being the first to be displaced after disasters. Our case study of Bhuj is illustrative of the major limitation in focusing on small-scale projects after disasters. While the project showcased many of the achievements discussed in the previous section, such as flexibility and incremental consolidation, it was unable to address the plight of the residents due to inadequate access to services, jobs and the disruption of their pre-earthquake social networks as well as segregation and stigmatization. The residents of this project—low-income renters formerly living in affordable rental housing in the inner urban areas—were displaced, while new middle-income groups replaced them in gentrifying neighbourhoods. In one section of this site, with 92 houses, 55 percent of the new owners sold or rented out their new houses and moved to informal settlements closer to income-earning opportunities and education facilities (Tafti and Tomlinson 2013). The involvement of different advocacy groups for the housing recovery of the marginalized groups, like those with no formal ownership tenure, has repeatedly resulted in well-intentioned projects that in practice lead to the socio-spatial and symbolic segregation of these groups and the reproduction of vulnerability and poverty. The intended ‘beneficiaries’ of these projects often leave their designated dwellings and move back to the city in order to access jobs and services (e.g., Barenstein and Rivas 2012). Disaster reconstruction does not take place on a clear ground. It takes place in space that has been occupied and used and is linked to people’s lifeways, livelihoods and memories. Lefebvre (1991, 360) points out, it is easy to imagine that the architect has before him a slice or piece of space cut from larger wholes, that he takes this portion of space as a ‘given’ and works on it according to his tastes, technical skills, ideas and preferences. In short, he receives his assignment and deals with it in complete freedom. This space has nothing innocent about it. Dismissing the bigger picture of displacement through restructuring space after disasters and remaining silent and complicit architects (Boano and Hunter 2012) implies breaking the promise of humanitarian involvement in helping the most vulnerable. Decisions that lead to the displacement of marginalized groups after disasters are political and there is a role for architects—within the broader alliance with communities, activists, NGOs and other experts—to engage with and challenge these processes. Instead of surrendering to the narrow logic of involuntary relocation of the urban poor to the urban fringes, the innovative spatial strategies of architects can be instrumental in creating alternatives that maintain the rights of these groups to the city. These innovative solutions can strengthen the capacities of communities and their allies to 437

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collectively negotiate with other stakeholders (Boonyabancha 2009). Even beyond this, the architecture discipline can play a role in lessening the spatial and symbolic distinction in cities based on class, race or ethnicity during reconstruction by rebuilding the city in a more spatially just way. The possibility for transformative changes that involve architects has already been debated in the context of international development and slum upgrading. Dovey (2013, 87), for instance, in the context of slum upgrading notes that “there is a need for the innovation of a range of spatial types at different densities that enable high levels of internal adaptation, subletting and spatial trading whereby houses and enterprises expand and contract with changing circumstances”. Instances of these practices are already emerging in cities of the Global South in different forms and by different actors, such as SPARC (the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres), which mounted housing exhibitions for the urban poor (McFarlane 2004), and the South African SDI Alliance in Joe Slovo in Cape Town, where architecture students were involved in a re-blocking project after a massive fire (Bolnick and Bradlow 2011).

Conclusion Returning to the argument put forward by Sanderson, the prospect of a meaningful involvement of architects in disaster reconstruction processes lies in a critical rethinking of the profession’s ideology, its theoretical underpinning and pedagogical goals. This critical rethinking in the discipline has already been articulated and debated in the literature and put into practice in humanitarian and development projects. Ideas and debates arising from self-reflection include the renunciation of the fixation of the form (Dovey 2013) and offering of flexible spatial solutions, which can serve as seeds for later changes, incremental expansion and consolidation of communities (Hamdi 1991, 2004) and exchanging knowledge with and enabling the disaster-affected people. This chapter adds to this ongoing debate a call for a further transgression from the central concerns of the architecture profession and a willingness to take a critical position against the displacement and socio-spatial segregation of marginalized groups after disasters. Disaster-affected cities often produce “more socially divided versions of themselves as they rebuild” (Pais and Elliott 2008, 1448), and their socio-spatial reconfiguration after disasters is often associated with the displacement of groups like low-income renters, sharers and slum dwellers. We argue for a proactive engagement of architects in interdisciplinary practices and building alliances with communities, activists and NGOs to provide innovative solutions and alternatives for the housing recovery of marginalized groups. By offering their design and communication skills to the marginalized groups, architects can expand the bargaining power of these groups in claiming their right to the city. Disasters can be seen as an opportunity for transformative changes in cities and architects can play a role in this process by utilizing the transformative role of space and design as their repertoire for change.

Acknowledgment We would like to thank Professor Carolyn Whitzman for her constructive comments on the first draft of this chapter. This research is partly funded by Melbourne Social Equity Institute at the University of Melbourne.

References Ahmed, I. (2011) “An overview of post-disaster permanent housing reconstruction in developing countries”. International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 148–164. Architecture for Humanity (ed.). (2006) Design like you give a damn: Architectural responses to humanitarian crises. New York: Metropolis Books. 438

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Barakat, S. (2003) “Housing reconstruction after conflict and disaster”. Working paper, Humanitarian Practice Network (HPN), London. Barenstein, J.D. and Rivas, B.M.R. (2012) “Is resettlement a viable strategy to mitigate the risk of natural disasters? Views and voices from the citizens of Santa Fe, Argentina”. Barenstein, J.E.D. and Leemann, E., Postdisaster reconstruction and change. New York: CRC Press. Boano, C. and Hunter, W. (2012) “Architecture at risk (?): The ambivalent nature of post-disaster practice”. Architectoni.ca, Vol. 1, pp. 1–13. Bolnick, J. and Bradlow, B. (2011) “ ‘Rather a better shack now than wait twenty years for a formal house’. Shack Dwellers International and Informal Settlement Upgrading in South Africa,” Trialog, Vol. 104, No. 1, pp. 35–41. Boonyabancha, S. (2009) “Land for housing the poor—by the poor: Experiences from the Baan Mankong nationwide slum upgrading programme in Thailand”. Environment and Urbanization, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 309–329. Burguess, R. (1982) “Self-help housing advocacy: A curious form of radicalism. A critique of the work of John F.C. Turner”. Ward, P., Self-help housing a critique. New York: Mansell, 56–98. Burnell, J. and Sanderson, D. (2011) “Whose reality counts? Shelter after disaster”. Environmental Hazards, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 219–231. Charlesworth, E. (2014) Humanitarian architecture: 15 stories of architects working after disaster. New York: Routledge. Chen, T.Y.S. (2014) Religious NGO approaches to post-disaster housing reconstruction in Sri Lanka. Doctoral degree, University of Melbourne. Davidson, C.H., Johnson, C., Lizarralde, G., Dikmen, N. and Sliwinski, A. (2007) “Truths and myths about community participation in post-disaster housing projects”. Habitat International, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 100–115. Davis, I. (2011) “What have we learned from 40 years’ experience of disaster shelter?”. Environmental Hazards, Vol. 10, No. 3–4, pp. 193–212. Davis, I. and Alexander, D. (2016) Recovery from disaster, New York: Routledge. Dovey, K. (2013) “Informalising architecture: The challenge of informal settlements”. Architectural Design, Vol. 83, No. 6, pp. 82–89. Elleh, N. (2014) Reading the architecture of the underprivileged classes, Burlington: Ashgate. Fichter, R., Turner, J.F. and Grenell, P. (1972) “The meaning of autonomy”. Turner, J.F. and Fichter, R., Freedom to build: Dweller control of the housing process. New York: Macmillan, 241–254. Gyger, H.E. (2013) The informal as a project: Self-help housing in Peru, 1954–1986. Doctor of Philosophy, Columbia University. Hamdi, N. (1991) Housing without houses: Participation, flexibility, enablement. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Hamdi, N. (2004) Small change: About the art of practice and the limits of planning in cities. London: Earthscan. Harris, R. (1998) “The silence of the experts: ‘Aided self-help housing’, 1939–1954”. Habitat International, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 165–189. Harris, R. (1999) “Slipping through the cracks: The origins of aided self-help housing, 1918–1953”. Housing Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 281–309. IASC. (2010) “IASC strategy—Meeting humanitarian challenges in urban areas”. Working paper, Inter-Agency Standing Committee Working Group. IFRC. (2010), “Owner-driven housing reconstruction guidelines”. Working paper, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Geneva. Jha, A.K., Barenstein, J.D., Phelps, P.M., Pittet, D. and Sena, S. (2010) Safer homes, stronger communities: A handbook for reconstructing after natural disasters. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Lefebvre, H. (1991) The production of space. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Lepik, A. (2010) Small scale, big change: New architectures of social engagement. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Lyons, M. (2009) “Building back better: The large-scale impact of small-scale approaches to reconstruction”. World Development, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 358–398. Marcuse, P. (1992) “Why conventional self-help projects won’t work”. Mathey, K., Beyond self-help housing. New York: Profil Verlag, 15–23. McCallin, B. and Scherer, I. (2015) “Urban informal settlers displaced by disasters: Challenges to housing responses”. Working paper, International Displacement Monitoring Centre. McFarlane, C. (2004) “Geographical imaginations and spaces of political engagement: Examples from the Indian Alliance”. Antipode, Vol. 36, No. 5, pp. 890–916. Miller, L.M. (2012) “Controlling disasters: Recognising latent goals after Hurricane Katrina”. Disasters, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 122–139. Mulligan, M. and Shaw, J. (2010) “Achievements and weaknesses in post-tsunami reconstruction in Sri Lanka”. Karan, P. and Subbiah, S.S., The Indian Ocean tsunami: The global response to a natural disaster. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 237–260. Naghsh-E-Jahan, C. (2007) “Urban housing reconstruction plan of Bam: Evaluation and documentation of plans and activities”. Working paper, Naghsh-e-Jahan Consultants, Tehran. 439

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O’Brien, D. and Ahmed, I. (2012) “Donor-driven housing, owner-driven needs: Post-tsunami reconstruction in Aceh, Indonesia”. Kaufman, N., Pressures and distortions—city dwellers as builders and critics. New York: Rafael Vinoly Architects, 237–338. Pais, J.F. and Elliott, J.R. (2008) “Places as recovery machines: Vulnerability and neighborhood change after major hurricanes”. Social Forces, Vol. 86, No. 4, pp. 1415–1453. Payne, G. (2002) “Tenure and shelter in urban livelihood”. Rakodi, C. and Lloyd-Jones, T., Urban livelihoods: A people-centred approach to reducing poverty. London: Earthscan, 151–165. Sanderson, D. (2010). “Architects are often the last people needed in disaster reconstruction”. The Guardian, March 3, 2010. Stohr, K. (2006) “100 years of humanitarian design”. Humanity, A.F., Design like you give a damn. New York: Metropolis Books, 33–55. Tafti, M.T. (2015) “Housing assistance distribution after disasters: Does it enable affected households to recover?”. Environmental Hazards, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 361–377. Tafti, M.T. and Tomlinson, R. (2013) “The role of post-disaster public policy responses in housing recovery of tenants”. Habitat International, Vol. 40, No., pp. 218–224. Tafti, M.T. and Tomlinson, R. (2015) “Best practice post-disaster housing and livelihood recovery interventions: Winners and losers”. International Development Planning Review, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 165–185. Tafti, M.T. and Tomlinson, R. (Forthcoming) “Long-term socio-spatial transformation of earthquake-affected neighbourhoods in Bhuj: Who stayed, who left and who moved in?”. International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 230–258. Turner, J.F. (1977) Housing by people: Towards autonomy in building environments, New York: Pantheon Books. Turner, J.F. (1987) “The enabling practitioner and the recovery of creative work”. Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 273–280. Un-Habitat. (2007) “Building back better in Pakistan”. Working paper, UN-Habitat, Nairobi, Kenya. Van Ballegooijen, J. and Rocco, R. (2013) “The ideologies of Informality: Informal urbanisation in the architectural and planning discourses”. Third World Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 10, pp. 1794–1810. Weber, L. and Peek, L. (eds.). (2012) Displaced life in the Katrina Diaspora. Austin: University of Texas Press. World Bank. (2010) “Implementation completion and results report, Bam earthquake emergency reconstruction project”. Working paper, The World Bank. Zamani, M.A. and Tafti, M.T. (2004) Evaluation of post-disaster housing reconstruction projects in three disaster-affected provinces of Ardebil, Nother Khorasan and South Khorasan Housing Foundation of Iran.

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32 Architecture Without Borders? The Globalization of Humanitarian Architecture Culture Shawhin Roudbari

Introduction In a recent interview, one of the founders of the popular architecture news website ArchDaily explained how their site was part of a historical shift in architecture culture. Architecture publications based in the Global North have dominated the production and dissemination of architectural knowledge for consumption by the rest of the world for decades (e.g., through texts and journals, as discussed by Crysler 2003). But ArchDaily—based in Santiago, Chile—has been challenging that dominance by bringing a sizeable segment of the production of architectural knowledge to the Global South.1 This statement is one about architecture’s borders. The vitality of architecture depends heavily on global flows of information, knowledge, and ideas. As a field that straddles arts and technical fields, architecture is intimately connected to avant-garde arts movements as well as innovations in the sciences. Further, as a field connected to urban and rural development, real estate, and national identity, architecture is also tied to political, economic, and social forces (see, e.g., Castells 2000; Kanna 2011; Ong 1999). As a result of architecture’s groundings in the arts, sciences, and development, the geography of knowledge production and consumption in architecture is as uneven as the geographies of political economy. Humanitarian architecture, like architecture in general, is shaped by global flows of knowledge, information, and ideas. Best practices in community engagement, the aesthetics of humanitarian architecture, and ideas about the role of professionals with respect to the public each represent forms of knowledge that are produced, circulated, and consumed. This essay is a reflection on the structures and agents that participate in the exchange of humanitarian architecture knowledge globally. Attention is given to institutions (Powell 2007) as the structures that govern the production, circulation, and consumption of humanitarian architecture culture. In their collection of essays, Transnational Civil Society, Srilatha Batliwala and L. David Brown (2006, 8) note the importance of “a transnational public discourse” as a set of frameworks that define the problems and solutions that humanitarian workers enact. Batliwala and Brown (2006, 8–9) write that some transnational discourses have reshaped transnational agreements on values, norms, and assumptions, which have in turn shaped the behavior of intergovernmental institutions, national governments, and even ordinary citizens and their communities.

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This statement speaks to the same triad, highlighted in the previous paragraph, of the production (via discourses), dissemination or diffusion (via transnational flows), and consumption as teaching or patterning behavior (e.g., shaping behaviors of people and organizations). Batliwala and Brown’s argument is directly applicable to the world of socially engaged architecture. In the context of humanitarian architecture, the institutions that produce, diffuse, and teach humanitarian architecture include organizations like Architecture for Humanity, publications like Design Like You Give a Damn (Architecture for Humanity 2012), and news sources like ArchDaily. Before turning to the stories of these institutions and telling about their role in shaping cultures of humanitarian architecture, I turn to scholars who have studied the nature of architecture culture. Professions have cultures. Judith Blau (1987), Beatriz Colomina (2010), Dana Cuff (1992), Robert Gutman (1988), Spiro Kostof (1977), Magali Sarfatti Larson (1995), Joan Ockman (1993), and Garry Stevens (2002) are among scholars who have studied and written about the culture of the architecture profession and architecture practice. They write from sociological, historical, economic, geographic, and cultural studies perspectives. Collectively, these scholars shape an understanding of architecture practice that is contingent on specific social, political, and economic moments and places in the world. They tell us how and why architects in different professional cultures do work differently. But perhaps the most relevant study of professional cultures for this essay comes from outside architecture. In her study of the field of economics, Marion Fourcade showed how differently the professional and academic fields evolved in France, England, and the United States (Fourcade 2009). In France, economics has strong characteristics of a political science. In England, it serves the economic interests of the colonial enterprise. In the United States, economics is a highly rationalized and technical field. Fourcade’s research showed that a field is shaped as much by national cultures as it is by abstract principles of the work itself. Extending Fourcade’s findings, we can appreciate that how an architect thinks about and does humanitarian work depends on the culture of her profession. Humanitarian architecture done by organizations based in the United States will be done differently from humanitarian architecture done by organizations based in, say, Chile. Some of the questions that underlie the discussion in this essay were born from this understanding. If we consider humanitarian architecture a field of work, like economics, then what are the implications of national professional cultures on the kind of work that humanitarian architects do? Is there an approach to humanitarian architecture in the United States that is different from the approach to humanitarian architecture in Chile? Are, say, North American humanitarian architects more entrepreneurial? Or do they tend to frame their involvement in developing communities as part of a savior model? Do, say, Indian humanitarian architects depend more on local knowledge? Or do North American humanitarian architecture institutions condition ways architects around the world think about humanitarianism? Consider criticisms that exist of transnational humanitarianism and humanitarian architecture: that humanitarian work is inflicted with a White savior complex (e.g., Cole 2012); that humanitarian design is a space for architects and engineers to work in developing communities to practice aesthetic and technical innovations (e.g., Goodman 2014); or that designers doing short-stint humanitarian work in foreign developing communities lack the training to bring sustainable infrastructural improvements to those communities. These criticisms are connected to specific ways of thinking and doing humanitarian architecture, many of which are shaped in the Global North through doing work in the Global South. An important question thus arises: do ways of thinking about humanitarianism in architecture that are shaped in one part of the world coerce architects in other parts of the world to think about and do humanitarian architecture in similar ways? This question of coercion can be analyzed by thinking about the production, global diffusion, and consumption of humanitarian architecture culture. The author conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with about 80 architects concerned with social engagement in Canada, Chile, Iran, the United States, and the United Kingdom, between 442

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2012 and 2017. Many of the architects were active in the production, dissemination, or consumption of ideas about humanitarian architecture. Participants in the research included, for example, editors of major architecture news sites, educators, leaders of organizations, students, professionals who had migrated between countries, and humanitarian architects. In order to protect the anonymity of interviewees, the author has used alternative names and combined elements of different architects’ experiences to create fictional but representative cases. Data in the form of interview transcripts and texts by and about architects and humanitarian architecture grounded a qualitative content analysis of cultures of architectural practice. The data and analyses from this research are presented in this essay as vignettes that provide a better understanding of the nuanced processes driving the globalization of humanitarian architecture culture.

Producing Humanitarian Architecture Cultures Schools, organizations, and professional bodies are among the sites that institute humanitarian architecture. According to the New Oxford American Dictionary (2015), the verb to institute means to “set in motion or establish.” Many universities have programs that train students to do humanitarian architecture. Auburn University’s Rural Studio, Portland State University’s Center for Public Interest Design, the University of Colorado Boulder’s Praxis Studios, and the University of Illinois’s Chicago Design Center are examples of dozens of programs that represent an academic institutionalization of humanitarian architecture work. These programs institutionalize humanitarian architecture by offering degree programs, certificates, or core curricular components. Beyond academia, organizations, such as Habitat for Humanity and Architecture for Humanity (now defunct), have established a set of practices of humanitarian architecture through home construction and transnational development projects. And professional bodies, such as the American Institute of Architects (AIA), support humanitarian architecture by, for example, recognizing and celebrating humanitarian architecture projects. In these ways, these academic, organizational, and professional sites institute humanitarian architecture. But these are not the only sites that set the practice of humanitarian architecture in motion. Magazines, books, websites, and even awards similarly play a role in instituting humanitarian architecture. Popular publications, weblogs, and design competitions are often what a global audience of architects looks to first. The glossy pages of fancy books on humanitarian architecture do much to attract attention. And in doing so, they define humanitarian architecture through such things as the essays in a book, the title of the publication ( just as this volume does), and discussions around the book in reviews, criticisms, and praise. The popularity of blog posts and TED talks that cover humanitarian projects gather momentum and go viral. Students of architecture emulate what is popular, not just what is vetted in board meetings of professional associations. This latter set of institutions of humanitarian architecture is distinct from the first set in a number of ways. Publications, websites, and awards often require less capital to operate. A small team can launch a popular humanitarian architecture news blog in a couple years, whereas a university program in humanitarian architecture requires layers of approval, funding, and the commitment of larger resources. Publications, websites, and awards distribute their message globally and rapidly. Architects in most parts of the world can participate in international design awards, whereas only a select few can participate in the awards offered by professional associations. And this reflects an important point of distinction. Publications, websites, and awards are more nimble, less regulated, and as a whole, less formal—or informal—institutions. Universities, large organizations, and professional bodies are often larger, with more developed bureaucratic structures, and represent more formal institutions. Consider the comparison of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and ArchDaily’s Building of the Year Award. The Pritzker Prize builds on expert juries and an elaborate process for nomination, review, and selection. It is an example of a formal institution of architecture culture. ArchDaily’s Building of the Year Award, by contrast, is “a peer-based, crowdsourced architecture award” that is “chosen 443

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by the collective intelligence of over 75,000 votes from ArchDaily readers around the world.”2 It exemplifies an informal institution. When the Pritzker was awarded to Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena in 2016, it broadcast a message about the importance of socially engaged architecture to a broad and global audience of architects. The Pritzker Foundation plays a powerful role in shaping architecture culture through recognition. But as a formal institution, the Pritzker Prize is limited in how it engages architects in geographies off the beaten path of globalization. In contrast, ArchDaily’s Building of the Year Award is based on an informal form of producing recognition. As such, its readership and influence run deep across a much broader geography (Roudbari 2018). The story of a nongovernmental organization founded by a small collaborative of architects and urban planners in Iran—Shahri—illustrates the power of informal institutions in defining socially engaged architecture cultures. The project was the brainchild of a recent graduate of a PhD program in urban planning in Canada, Maryam.3 In 2010, Maryam had migrated to Canada from Iran for graduate school. Motivated by concerns over urban inequality in her hometown of Tehran, she studied social movements in architecture and planning. After graduate school, she returned to Tehran and engaged her peers in discussions around public-interest design and ideas around the right to the city (building on the work of Henri Lefebvre [1991]). She hosted informal conversations that evolved to teach-ins and she began circulating increasingly in-demand email invitations to events. Maryam’s efforts gained the attention of a large number of architecture and planning students deeply concerned with inequality and socially engaged architecture and planning. At the time of my writing, only a couple years after its informal beginning, Shahri is a growing organization. It is instituting a culture of socially engaged architecture and planning in Tehran. Shahri still operates through email updates, hosted informal conversations, and now, coordinated official events. Many architects I interviewed spoke about the significance of Shahri in instilling a culture of socially engaged architecture practice in Tehran’s professional scene.

Disseminating Humanitarian Architecture Cultures The examples of the Pritzker Prize, ArchDaily’s Building of the Year Award, and Shahri all speak to the production of knowledge. But there is an important difference between how formal and informal institutions transcend borders through the dissemination of knowledge. In this section, it is argued that the knowledge produced by informal institutions transcends international borders more successfully than knowledge produced by formal institutions. Consider the following vignette. After completing graduate school in architecture in 2000, Rosh worked with leading architects in Mumbai. She became increasingly interested in the work of globally prominent architects like Shigeru Ban. Rosh liked Ban’s work with cardboard and his creative approach to post-disaster housing. Shigeru Ban is well known for innovations in humanitarian architecture (Ban and Christian 2014). He has used recycled cardboard to build emergency shelters after disasters and Rosh thought this was fascinating. As her enthusiasm for her professional work at home waned, Rosh’s desire to work for a globally recognized architect, like Ban, grew. One summer, a friend visiting from the United States brought her a large compendium book on contemporary architecture—a heavy, thick, coffee table book with beautiful pictures and glossy pages (e.g., Taschen’s architecture compendiums). She found that the end of the book contained the addresses of the featured architects’ offices. This is before the Internet made finding information like this trivial. Until this book landed on her table, Rosh hadn’t had a resource for getting in touch with foreign architects. She sent her resume to several offices in Europe—including Shigeru Ban’s. To her amazement, she was offered an interview and later that year began working at Ban’s office, where she was exposed, firsthand, to the practice of the architect she had admired from a distance who seemed worlds away. Working at Ban’s office, Rosh found the rigorous work around the clock to be meticulous and challenging. But she did not get the exposure to the creativity in design she imagined she might have 444

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if she had the chance to work with Ban himself. After a couple years abroad, she returned home. She had a strong urge to share things she learned abroad, in the office, and in her own explorations, with students like her past self. She knew there was a thirst for the cutting edge in humanitarian architecture among her younger peers. As a new, young teacher, Rosh used a studio on low-tech design solutions for humanitarian crises to explore pure geometries, everyday materials, and affordable, basic shelters with her students. Meanwhile, in their South of Market office in San Francisco, the team at Architecture for Humanity was piecing together what would become their first major publication. An employee browsing the web stumbled upon a picture of a shelter that Rosh and her students designed and built. Its simplicity was intriguing. Its use of scrap wood and mud was convincing. A printout of the project image made it to the pin-up wall of the office with scores of images of other projects from around the world. Eventually, the shelter that Rosh and her students made found its way into Design Like You Give a Damn (DLYGD, Architecture for Humanity 2012). DLYGD, like the compendium that landed on Rosh’s table years earlier, is a heavy, glossy, and attractive book of images and ideas. Like the other compendium, DLYGD has travelled with aunts, cousins, and friends to become gifts to young, idealistic architects in many parts of the world. DLYGD has become a reference for humanitarian architecture scoured and cited by designers around the world. And Rosh’s project was in it. Rosh’s practice gained credibility by virtue of having been published in a globally circulating book. Young architects in her home city of Mumbai looked to her as a representative of the global wave of humanitarian architecture spread by DLYGD and popularized by the over 1 million views of Architecture for Humanity cofounder Cameron Sinclair’s TED talk. Through the project published in DLYGD, her subsequent work, and growing participation in international workshops for humanitarian architecture, Rosh shaped for her employees, students, and the community of leading architects in Mumbai an understanding of humanitarian design and a way of doing it. Rosh’s story illustrates the range of impromptu, informal, and formal channels that play a role in the global diffusion of humanitarian architecture culture. A combination of formal institutions (the architecture profession in her home country) and informal institutions (the globally circulated book that her work was shown in) is at play in Rosh’s story. But the informal institutions are the ones that cross borders more easily. These institutions are the ones that hundreds of young architecture students in many corners in the world are tapped into. For more on theories of diffusion of knowledge and cultures of practice relevant to architecture, the reader is pointed to work by James Faulconbridge (2010), Robert Kloosterman (2008), Kathryn Mitchell (2004), Minoo Moallem (2011), and Aihwa Ong (1999). These scholars represent a range of disciplines, from anthropology, architecture, and economic geography to transnational feminist geography.

Consuming Humanitarian Architecture Cultures Informal institutions are often easier to work with and to work through. An architecture student can easily submit a humanitarian design concept to a website that circulates humanitarian architecture design ideas, worldchange.org, for architects around the world to study. Many architects can play on the global stage when the backdoor pass is an informal institution. Access is more distributed. Arjun Appadurai writes that the “strength of many actors and movements that wish to join their efforts across national boundaries is often their ad hoc, unstructured, and evanescent material shape” (Appadurai 2006, xii). He goes on to write, “they always face the danger of becoming hierarchical, bureaucratized, slow, and conservative as they become better networked, supported, and institutionalized.” Informal institutions enable the proliferation of humanitarian architecture around the world. The global proliferation of humanitarian architecture work is intimately connected to the workings of the institutions of architecture. Most notable among these institutions are universities, large 445

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organizations, professional associations and weblogs, publications, and awards. For these institutions to establish projects or partnerships with similar groups in other countries is often a complex process. By contrast, more informal sites, such as crowdsourced design news sites, exchange ideas and information across borders almost seamlessly. The experiences of those transnational architects whom I interviewed suggest that it is the unfiltered and informal ideas about humanitarian architecture that transcend borders most readily. The filtered or more vetted ideas take longer to spread around the world and to trickle down into the ranks of architects. A tour through popular websites, publications, and awards for humanitarian architecture reflects the ideas about humanitarian architecture that are spreading around the world. George Thomas, a scholar of globalization, writes (2009, 117), “activists, in particular, define problems as global and identify rational goals of peace, justice, and participation as properties of a global good society.” He continues: “while many resist global forces and world cultural elements, they through their contentions are building a world polity and cultural reality.” In the context of architects participating in informal institutions, Thomas’s sentiment underscores their role in shaping a global culture of practice that transcends borders. Here, it helps to distinguish domestic from international institutions—and both of those from transnational institutions. Institutions of the architecture profession were defined earlier as including professional associations, regulatory bodies, licensure, publications, awards, and competitions; add to that list education and continuing education in the form of lectures, colloquia, and workshops. These are the sites that define the profession, educate its membership, and build and disseminate knowledge, credibility, and authority (Abbott 1988; Evetts 2003; Fourcade 2009; Larson 1977). There is another category of institution, which operates transnationally and is defined here as professional institutions that are not identified as belonging to a given national profession. The transnational institutions of the architecture profession traditionally include a number of organizations that identify themselves as “international,” such as the International Union of Architects (UIA) and, historically, the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM). Transnational institutions also include, however, those organizations and projects that circulate, recognize, and bestow accolades upon architects and their projects around the world. Examples include globally circulating and internationally oriented design magazines, such as DOMUS; international design awards, such as the Pritzker Prize or the Aga Khan Award for Architecture; international design expositions and fairs, such as the Venice Biennale; and, recently, design websites, blogs, and among them, the growing cadre of international design competition websites, such as the World Architecture Community Awards and the World Architecture Festival. ArchDaily, discussed earlier, is an example of a powerful transnational institution. The vignettes of Rosh and Shahri illustrate how the dissemination of cultures of humanitarian architecture is rooted in such transnational institutions.

Shaping a Global Humanitarian Architecture Culture? The primary motivation for the research presented in this essay was a concern with ways formal institutions of humanitarian architecture were shaping—even coercing—architects around the world into a specific form of practice. Colonialist framings of humanitarianism are rife in architecture practice. Critics of humanitarian architecture, such as Eyal Weizman (2011), Kenny Cupers (2014), and those cited in the introduction earlier, write about this. The global diffusion of those framings and epistemologies is something that architects thinking about social engagement should be concerned about. Others in this volume describe the magnitude of growth that humanitarian architecture has seen (Chapters 29, 30, 31). Instead of enumerating the spread of humanitarian architecture work around the world, the vignettes in this essay offer a view into how that growth happens. This view comes not from a quantitative analysis of humanitarian architecture work but from a qualitative study of the 446

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experience of architects. The architects I interviewed spoke directly about the production, diffusion, and consumption of cultures of humanitarian architecture practice. Theirs are exemplified by the stories shared earlier. Importantly, several of those interviewed also spoke about the coercive nature of global architecture culture. A globalized culture of humanitarian architecture can be interpreted as the dominance of one model of humanitarian architecture work over others. In this interpretation, what would happen if that dominant model were one that occasionally exploits the situations of those in need to produce exciting work for those who can help? The result would not be great. It would mean that there is an increasingly popular model of doing humanitarian architecture work that is being adopted by more people around the world. That model could, for example, consist of architects—as presumed experts or saviors—designing and building projects in communities less developed than the ones in which they live. There are a couple ways of theorizing the globalization of institutions that support how one thinks about the globalization of humanitarian architecture. One is world polity theory and the other is world culture theory (see Beckfield 2003 for a comparison). Theorists in both camps are concerned with some idea about global culture. And in both camps, theorists consider the role of organizations, individuals, and institutions in generating culture. To simplify, the world polity theorists see international organizations and institutions as shaping a homogeneous culture. The world culture theorists argue that global culture has local flavor to it. The vignettes offered in this essay suggest that informal institutions of humanitarian architecture transcend borders more regularly. But, as informal institutions, they can also reflect intimately the culture of the professionals who shape them. Informal institutions produce, disseminate, and teach humanitarian architecture. It remains to be seen if informal institutions can carry humanitarian architecture culture across borders without homogenizing that culture (in keeping with world culture theory) in a way that is different from the homogenizing effects of formal institutions (as per world polity theory). With the growing power of informal institutions, like ArchDaily, the monopoly of formal institutions is challenged. Such institutions as universities, CIAM, and the Pritzker Prize are no longer the primary producers and distributors of cultures of architecture. They share the pedagogical power of how those cultures are consumed with informal institutions. Coercion is still taking place. The difference now, however, is that cultures of humanitarian architecture are no longer just produced in the West and consumed by the rest. With crowdsourced channels for knowledge production (e.g., ArchDaily’s Building of the Year Award process) on the rise, and with informal knowledge more easily traveling across borders (e.g., the distribution of ArchDaily content or the informal production of content in Design Like You Give a Damn), humanitarian architecture may yet find a way to transcend the borders that shape its cultures of practice.

Notes 1 Author interview with ArchDaily, 2017. 2 ArchDaily Building of the Year Award webpage, accessed February 2017. 3 In order to protect the anonymity of interviewees, the author has used alternative names and combined elements of different architects’ experiences to create fictional but representative cases.

References Abbott, A. (1988) The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Appadurai, A. (2006) Foreword. In S. Batliwala and L.D. Brown (eds.), Transnational Civil Society: An Introduction. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Architecture for Humanity (2012) Design Like You Give a Damn 2. New York: Abrams. 447

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Ban S. and M. Christian (2014) Shigeru Ban: Humanitarian Architecture. Aspen, CO: Aspen Art Press. Batliwala, S. and L.D. Brown (2006). Transnational Civil Society: An Introduction. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Beckfield, J. (2003) “Inequality in the World Polity: The Structure of International Organization,” American Sociological Review, 68. Blau, J.R. (1987) Architects and Firms: A Sociological Perspective on Architectural Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castells, M. (2000) The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Oxford University Press. Cole, T. (2012). “The White-Savior Industrial Complex,” The Atlantic. Colomina, B. and C. Buckley, eds. (2010) Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196X to 197X. New York: ACTAR. Crysler, C.G. (2003) Writing Spaces: Discourses of Architecture, Urbanism, and the Built Environment, 1960–2000. New York: Routledge. Cuff, D. (1992) Architecture: The Story of Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cupers, K. (2014) “Where Is the Social Project?” Opinion in Journal of Architectural Education 68(1): 6–8. Evetts, J. (2003) “The Sociological Analysis of Professionalism: Occupational Change in the Modern World,” International Sociology 18(2): 395–415. Faulconbridge, J. (2010) “Global Architects: Learning and Innovation Through Communities and Constellations of Practice,” Environment and Planning A 42: 2842–2858. Faulconbridge, J.R. and D. Muzio (2011) “Professions in a Globalizing World: Towards a Transnational Sociology of the Professions,” International Sociology 27(136): 136–152. Fourcade, M. (2009) Economists and Societies: Discipline and Professions in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Goodman, A. (2014) “The Paradox of Representation and Practice in the Auburn University Rural Studio,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 25(2): 39–52. Gutman, R. (1988) Architectural Practice: A Critical View. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press. Kanna, A. (2011) Dubai: City as Corporation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kloosterman, R. (2008) “Walls and Bridges: Knowledge Spillover Between ‘Superdutch’ Architectural Firms,” Journal of Economic Geography 8: 545–563. Kostof, S., ed. (1977) The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Larson, M.S. (1977) The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Larson, M.S. (1995) Behind the Postmodern Façade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Cambridge, MA: Wiley. Mitchell, K. (2004) Crossing the Neoliberal Line: Pacific Rim Migration and the Metropolis. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Moallem, M. (2011) “Objects of Knowledge, Subjects of Consumption: Persian Carpets and the Gendered Politics of Transnational Knowledge”. In R.S. Hegde (ed.), Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures. New York: New York University Press, pp. 159–177. Ockman, J. (1993) Architecture Culture, 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology. New York: Rizzoli. Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Portes, A. (2001) “Introduction: The Debates and Significance of Immigrant Transnationalism,” Global Networks 1(3): 181–193. Powell, W. (2007) “The New Institutionalism,” entry in The International Encyclopedia of Organizational Studies. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Roudbari, S. (2018) “Crowdsourced and Crowd-Pleasing: The New Architectural Awards and the City,” Journal of Urban Design. Stevens, G. (2002) The Favored Circle: The Social Foundations of Architectural Distinction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thomas, G.M. (2009) “World Polity, World Culture, World Society,” International Political Sociology 3(1). Weizman, E. (2011) The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence From Arendt to Gaza. New York: Verso Books.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures and those with n indicate footnotes. Abrams, Charles 54, 55, 145 – 146, 152 actor-network theory (ANT) 15 Adam, Katrin 170, 173, 178, 179, 182 Adams, Ansel 414 ADAUA (Association pour le Développement naturel d’une Architecture et d’un Urbanisme Africains) 83 advanced marginality 327, 328 – 329, 330 advocacy 189 “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning” (Davidoff) 341 advocacy design PID model 341 African National Congress (ANC) 381 “Afritecture” 83 – 84, 83n15 Aga Khan 126 – 127, 129, 130 – 131, 132, 136, 138 Aga Khan Award for Architecture (AKAA) 83, 126 – 140, 446; Birzeit Historic Centre, revitalization of 134, 136, 137; critiques of 128 – 130; evolution of 127 – 130; impact of 136 – 139; inception of 126 – 127; Khuda-ki-Basti Incremental Development Scheme 132, 134, 135; Master Jury of 127 – 130, 132, 134, 136, 138, 140; Nianing Agricultural Training Centre 131 – 132, 133; role of architecture within 130 – 131; scope of 128; social change and 139 – 140; Steering Committee of 127 – 128, 129 – 130, 136, 138, 140; winning projects, case studies of 131 – 136 Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) 126 Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) 126 Agamben, Giorgio 38 agonistic democracy 40 – 41 agricultural revolution 400 AGU see Arbeitsgemeinschaft Umwelt (AGU) anti-expo AIA see American Institute of Architects (AIA) AIA Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct 120 aided self-help, disaster reconstruction and 432 – 433 Airbnb 403, 407 Aitcheson, Susan 173 AKAA see Aga Khan Award for Architecture (AKAA) Albers, Clem 414

Alexander, Christopher 57, 58, 174 Allen, Stan 34 Alliance of Women in Architecture 170 Alstyne, G. 339 Alvaralice Foundation 333 Ambedkar, B. R. 202 American Institute of Architects (AIA) 258, 259, 338, 343, 443 Anderson, N. 339 Anderson, Perry 144 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, The 258 Annan, Kofi 144 Ant Farm 247, 306, 308, 311 Aravena, Alejandro xl, 38, 61, 64, 117, 118, 121, 444 Arbeitsgemeinschaft Umwelt (AGU) anti-expo 272 – 276, 273; thematic fields chosen for 276, 277 – 278, 279 – 280 Arch 284 308 ArchDaily 441, 442, 446, 447; Building of the Year Award 443 – 444 Architect and Building News 68, 234 architect as facilitator PID model 344 architects: defining characteristics of 104; disaster reconstruction and 429 – 438; as enabling practitioner 433; politically committed 40 – 42 The Architects’ Resistance (TAR) group 340 Architectural Association (AA) School 234 Architectural Design (AD) 298, 302 architectural monumentality xxxi architectural social engagement xxxiii – xxxvi; future of xliii – xliv; introduction to xxxiii – xxxiv; perspectives on xxxiv – xxxvi; political limits to xlii – xliii architecture: before/after 3.11 350 – 363; defined 4, 5 – 6; emancipation discourse role of 7 – 8; globalization of humanitarian, cultures 441 – 447; new pragmatism in 32 – 34; of public good 27 – 35 architecture and building 234 architecture and planning 368 Architecture Australia 298

449

Index

Architecture for Humanity 28, 68, 217, 341, 442, 443, 445 Architecture for the Poor 81 Architecture in Uniform (Cohen) 421 Architecture’s Desire 119 Architecture Since 3.11 (exhibition) 350 Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-pedigreed Architecture (Rudofsky) 313, 357 Arendt, Hannah 33 Arnstein, Sherry 38 Artes Mundi prize 37 Arup, Over 57 Ashby, Gordon 315, 318, 319 Asian Neighborhood Design, California Berkeley 237 assemble 37 Association Modeste et Innocent (AMI) 218, 220 Asun, J. M. 218 Atelier-3 366 Atelier Bow-Wow 355 – 359, 356, 358 Atelier d´Architecture Autogérée (aaa) 38 Atelier Zo 368 Atkinson, G. A. 67 Attoe, Wayne  139 Auburn University Rural Studio 443 Augmented Human Intellect Research Center 308 Aurobindo, Sri 279 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) 298 Australian Conservation Foundation 301 Austrian Green Party 284 autonomous houses 289 – 302; Aquarius Festival and 291; material life of 296 – 299, 297; overview of 289, 290, 291; at University of Sydney 291, 292, 293, 294 – 295 Baer, Holly 308 Baer, Steve 246, 308, 311 – 312, 408 Bagchee, Nandini 105 Baker, Laurie 104 – 105, 108, 111 Ban, Shigeru 118, 121, 350, 351, 408, 444 – 445 Banerjee, T.  189 Bangladesh case study 192 – 193, 194 – 198 Batliwala, Srilatha 441 – 442 Bauen als Umweltzerstörung (Keller) 280 Bauen + Wohnen 282 Bauer, Catherine xxxix, 151 Bayreuth Festival 94 Behaviorology (Bow-Wow) 357 Benedikt, Michael 31 Benhabib, Selya 40 Benjamin Thomson Associates  173 Bergdoll, Barry 150 Berkeley, Ellen Perry 170 Better Homes and Gardens Decorating Book 245 Between Facts and Norms (Habermas) 40 Beuys, Joseph 87, 95, 97, 99; see also Opera Village Africa Bhabha, Hami 140

450

Bhagwatwar, A. 340 Bhatia, Gautam 104 – 105 Big Boat, Suan Mokkh 203, 206, 209 Big Rock Candy Mountain 309 – 311,  310 Birkby, Noel Phyllis 170, 173, 178 Birzeit Historic Centre, revitalization of 134, 136, 137 Bishop, Claire 14, 37 Bla Bla (alternative publication) 274 Black Lives Matter movement 121 Blackstar Coffee Roasters 251, 252 Blackwell, Adrian 5 Blau, Judith 442 Blunk, J. B. 315 Bojnurd earthquake housing reconstruction 431 Bonaparte, Napoleon xxx Born Free and Equal (Adams collection) 414 bottom line public spaces (BLPS) 32 bourgeois public 33 Bowling Alone (Putnam) 30 Braidotti, Rosi 38 Brand, Stewart 246, 306, 308, 309, 311, 312 Breaking New Ground (BNG) Sustainable Human Settlements (SHS) housing policy 381, 384 Breitbart, Myrna Marhguiles 180 Brenner, Neil 8, 9 Breton, André 315 Bristol, Katharine 177 British Architectural Digest 247 British live projects, origins of 234 – 235 Brown, D. S. 236 Brown, Edmund (Jerry) Jr. 319 Brown, L. David 441 – 442 Brown,Vahid  260 Brunner, Conrad 276 Buck-Morss, Susan xxxii Buddhadasa Bhikkhu 202, 209; dhammic socialism and 202 – 203 Buddhadasa Indapañño Archives 212, 213 Building Schools for the Future (BSF) 191 Built in the USA, 1932 – 1944 418 Bunnell, Sterling 317 Buser, M. 340 Bussat, Pierre 83 Butler, Judith 39 Butterworth, William  188 Buur, J. 342 Cairns, Burton D. 418 Caldeira, Teresa 327, 329 Calderwood, Douglas 381 Cali project 332 – 334 Caminos, Horacio 54 Campe, Jim 313, 314 camps 413 – 426; Farm Security Administration 413 – 414, 415, 417 – 418, 419; Japanese American farm labor 423, 424; Japanese American incarceration 418 – 423, 420, 422; overview of

Index

413 – 414; transformation of 425 – 426; types of 413 – 415 capitalism, architecture and 7 – 8 Carlson, E. 49 Carney, A. A. 67 category work 16 – 17; reclaiming and 18 CDC movement 236 – 237 Center for Public Interest Design (CPID) 257 – 267; defining public interest design 258; introduction to 257; Medary’s “Public Interest and the Architect” 258 – 259; Partners On Dwelling (POD) Initiative 259 – 261, 261 – 264, 265 – 266; process frames product at 266 Central Institute for the Training and Relocation of Urban Squatters (CITRUS) 67 Centre de Santé et de Promotion Sociale (CSPS) 91, 93 Chad Brown (public housing project) 176 Chawla, L. 189 “Cheap Auto Camp Housing for Citrus Workers” (Lange) 415 Chen, Ding-Nan 368 Chiba, Manabu 357 Chicago, Judy 173 Chicago Women in Architecture 170 children: changing role of 187 – 189; as citizens 190; education of, in Bengal Presidency 187, 187n2; as learners 190; as planners or futurists 189 children’s engagement in design 186 – 198; Bangladesh case study 192 – 193, 194 – 198; challenges of 191 – 192; changing role of children and 187 – 189; evolution of 189 – 190; introduction to 186 – 187; policies and 190 – 191; realms of incorporating views 189 – 190 Chulalongkorn, King 203 Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within (Schlingensief) 94 CIAM 53, 54 Cirugeda 38 Cities South of Cancer 326, 326n1, 330 – 332, 334, 335 Citizen Isolation Centers 413 city as campus schools 236 Civilian Assembly Centers 413 Cleyne, Edgar 143, 153 Climate Central 403 Clinton, Bill 149 Clouse, C. 341 Cohabitation Strategies 38 Cohen, Jean-Louis 421 Cohen, Lizabeth 306 collaborative rationality, PID models and 339 collateral marginality 328 collective capability PID model 342 Collins, H. 342 Colomina, Beatriz 442 colonialism and apartheid, legacies of 380 – 394; community participation, architecture and 381 – 382; NBRI to RDP and 382 – 385, 383, 386;

overview of 380 – 381; Training for Self-Reliance Project 390 – 391, 392 – 393;VPUU project 385, 387, 388 – 389, 390 colonial modernity 187, 187n1 Comerio, Mary 177 – 178 Commonwealth (Hardt and Negri) 42 Communauté Eurafricaine 72 communicative action, PID models and 339 community development corporation (CDC) 174, 177 Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) 178 CONAVI (Consejo Nacional de la Vivienda) 156, 162; HIO training package of 160 – 161; HPA definition of 158 – 159; Ministry of Urban Development and 159 – 160 ‘Concepts in Social and Spatial Marginality’ (Mehretu) 327 Condition of Postmodernity, The (Harvey) 176 Conference on Inter-American Student Projects (CIASP) 216 Confinement and Ethnicity (Burton) 415 consciousness raising 173 conscious planning 5 contemporary architectural social engagement: political economy of xli – xlii; tactics of xl – xli contributory economy 249 coproduction 382 Correa, Charles 59 Cosco, N. G. 189 Cosimo de’ Medici 121 countercultural manuals, 1960s/1970s, DIY self in 246 – 247 counter-hegemonic globalization 113 Cox, Whitney  333 Crane, Jacob 54, 66 CRAterre 83 Crawford, Margaret 32, 33, 34 criticality-from-within: defined 15; as hopeful perspective 22 – 23; as manipulation of odor 17; reclaiming and 18; social engagement in architecture and 15 – 16; Starhawk on 18 – 19 Cuff, Dana 33, 442 Culpin, Clifford 57 Cupers, Kenny 446 Curry Stone Design Prize 37, 118 Cuthbert, Alexander 123 Cutler, A. Claire 149 C.Y. Lee & Partners 366 Dalit Buddhist movement 202 Daly, Glyn 10 Dame-Kenchiku (No-good architecture) 355, 356 dark tourism 215 – 226; Osawa encounter with 224 – 225; overview of 215; Rwanda case of 215 – 223; Rwandan house construction project 225, 226 Das Konzept 282

451

Index

Daugherty, Harlow 317 Davidoff, Paul 38, 183, 341 Davis, Scott 247 Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs) xxxix – xl de Carlo, Giancarlo 38, 183 de Graaf, Reinier 10 Deleuze, Gilles xli, 244 deliberative democracy theory 40; critics of 40 – 41 deliberative practice, PID models and 339 Delos Symposia 54 DeMars,Vernon  418 Demenge, Jonathan 106 Demeny, Paul 150 Department of Human Settlements (DoHS) 384 design as political activism PID model 340 design build, live projects and 233 Design Like You Give a Damn (Architecture for Humanity) 442, 445 de Soto, Hernando 146, 149 Desouza, K. C. 340 Despret,Vinciane 15, 18, 22 Deukmejian, George 319 Dev, Radhakanta 188 development, suññata (emptiness) and 209 – 210 development aid agencies 71 – 73 Dewey, John 188 Dhamma Boat, Suan Mokkh 203, 205 Dhammayietra 202 dhammic socialism, Buddhadasa Bhikkhu and 202 – 203 Diamond, Jared 400 Diderot, Denis 246 dingpolitik 299 disaster reconstruction, architects and 429 – 438; aided self-help and 432 – 433; displacement and 436 – 438; locating 430; overview of 429 – 430; owner-driven model and 433 – 436, 435; provider supply and 430 – 432; realignments in field and 436 dis-identification 326, 328 displacement after disasters 436 – 438 Dixon, Robyn 152 DIY architecture/urbanism, social identity through 243 – 254; in countercultural manuals of 1960s and 1970s 246 – 247; in homemaking manual of 1950s North America 244 – 246; introduction to 243 – 244; maker movement in third millennium and 247 – 253 DIY publishing 309 DIY urbanism 247 – 253 D’Occhio, Andrew 251, 253 Domebook (Kahn) 246, 308, 313 Domebook Two (Kahn) 246 Dome Cookbook (Baer) 246 DOMUS (magazine) 446 Doubling Incoming Plan 353 Dougherty, Dale 249 Dovey, K. 437

452

Doxiadis, C. A. 52, 54 – 55 Doyle, M. 344 Dreyfus, J. 67 Droog 408 Druin, A. 189 Dryzek, John 40 Dubos, René 301 Dupuy, Jean-Pierre 11 East India Company 188 Easton, Bob 313 Eckbo, Garrett 418 Edelmann, Werner  274 EFICOR 433 Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH) 272, 275, 277 E-I-E-I-O Electronic Interconnect Educated Intellect Operation 311 Eiermann, Egon 65 ekistics 52, 54 – 55 Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements (Doxiadis) 55 Elemental 37, 38 Embrey, Sue Kunitomi 425 Empire (Hardt and Negri) 42 Encyclopédie (Diderot) 246 Energy and Equity (Illich) 275 engaged Buddhism 201 – 202 Engels, Friedrich 4, 6 – 7, 8 environmental engagement: autonomous houses 289 – 302; salvage salvation 306 – 319; Swiss architecture and 271 – 286; see also Umdenken Umschwenken Environment and Form 368 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 271 – 272 Erickson, David J. 177 Eric O. Moss Architects 368 Ernst Göhner AG 280 Erskine, Ralph xxxix Estudio Teddy Cruz 37 Etheridge, Dan 111 ethics, professionalism and 119 – 120 European Development Fund (EDF) 71 – 73 European Economic Community (EEC) 72 – 73 Evans, David 308 Evans, Peter 113 Evans, R. 342 Extended Public Works Program (EPWP) 391 Fall of Public Man (Sennett) 30 “ ‘False Problem’ of World Population, The” (Sauvy) 150 Farallones Institute 308 Farallones Scrapbook 247 Farewell to Manzanar (Houston and Houston) 425 Farm Security Administration (FSA) emergency relief camps 413 – 414, 417 – 418, 419; Japanese American incarceration and 421, 423

Index

Fathy, Hassan 59, 81 Faulconbridge, James 445 Favela: Four Decades Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro (Perlman) 325 – 326 Federal Bureau Prison camps 413 Fee, Elizabeth 122 – 123 Fei & Cheng Associates 366 Feminist Art Program, CalArts 173 Fence Parasite 247 – 249,  248 Ferrandi, Jacques 73 Ferry, Todd  260 Fespaco film festival 87, 89 Fichter, R. 433 Fieldoffice,Yilan vascular bundle project 366, 368, 370 – 372,  371 Fieldoffice at Work (exhibition) 370 Finger, M. 218 Fisher, Thomas 104, 122 Flexner, Abraham 123 Foley, M. 215 Ford, Gordon Onslow 315 Ford Foundation 54 Fornallaz, Pierre 274, 280 Foucault, Michel xli, 413 Fourcade, Marion 442 “Fragments of a Lecture on Lagos” (Koolhaas)  143 Frampton, Kenneth 359 Frampton, Kevin 113 Francis, M. 189 Fraser, Nancy 32, 169, 183 free school movement 308 – 312, 310 Freidrichs, Chad 177 friction of travel 106, 106n3 Friends of the Earth 296 “From Paddock to Karaoke” (Kuma) 352 Fudo (Watsuji) 355 Fujimura, Ryuji 359 – 363, 360 – 362 Fuller, Buckminster 308 Gadanho, Pedro 150 Gandy, Matthew 144 Garden of Liberation see Suan Mokkh Gardner-Medwin, Robert 66, 67 Garduño, Juan Alfonso 331 Gates, Theaster  37 Gautama Buddha 209 Gehry, Frank 117, 173 Gelber, Stephen 243 Gemeinschaft xxxix, xliv Georgeen, T.  341 Germani, Gino 326 Gesamtkunstwerk 94, 99 Gesellschaft xxxix Gesundes Bauen-Gesundes Wohnen (Healthy building-healthy living) 279 Ghorami.jon 193 Gibson-Graham, J. K. 7 – 8, 10

GIDC (Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation) 429 – 430 Gideon, Sigfried xxx – xxxi Gilmore, James 31 Ginsburg, Theo 274, 280 Goldstein, Carolyn 245 Gordon, Linda 414 Gottlieb-Duttweiler Institut (GDI) 274 Graduate Institute of Building and Planning (GIBP) 368 Grameen Bank Housing Project 139 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck) 417 grassroots design practice PID model 343 Gray, Charles 234 Green, Alma 174 greenbelt towns 413 Greenway, Robert 308, 309, 315 Grey, Michael 417 Grindle, Merilee 164 Groat, L. 344 Gropius, Walter xxxix, 65 Growing Up in Cities (Lynch and Banerjee) 189 Guattari, Félix xli, 244 Guggenheim 5 Gulf Coast Community Design Studio 259 Gutman, Marta 312 Gutman, Robert 442 Habermas, Jürgen 29 – 30, 33, 40, 41 habitat 49 Habitat for Humanity 443 Habitat International 59 Habraken, John N. 57 Hadid, Zaha 118 Haigo Shen Architects and Associates 366 Hako-mono policy 352 Hales, Charlie 260 Hall, Doug 315 Hall, Justin 407 Hamdi, Nabeel 57, 59 Han, Pao-Teh 368 Handyman and Home Mechanic, The 245 Haraway, Donna 4, 12, 15, 16 – 18 Hardoy, Jorge 61 Hardt, M. 42 Hare, David 188 Haring, Hugo 65 Harris, R. 433 Hart, R. A. 189, 191 – 192 Harvey, David 9, 11, 113, 176 Hayden, Dolores 170 Hays, Michael 119 HCOs see housing community organizations (HCO) Henzler, Theodor  279 Herringer, Anna 192 high Himalaya, public-interest design in 102 – 113; collaboration and 108 – 111, 109 – 110; India, design engagement in 106 – 111, 107; introduction to 102;

453

Index

pro bono design projects, problems with 102 – 104, 103; selfless service concept and 104 – 105; Zanskar valley, self-sufficient living in 105 – 106 HIOs see housing intermediary organizations (HIO) hippie bricoleurs 306 hippie design activism 306 – 308, 307 hippie holism 308, 317 Hirshen/Van der Ryn Architects 308 Hise, G. 414 His Highness the Aga Khan see Aga Khan Hollo, Nick 293 Home Beautiful 245 homelessness, HUD’s definition of 260 homemaking manual, 1950s North America, DIY self in 244 – 246 Hon-Matsu Ron 353 Hood, Bobbie Sue 170 Hoovervilles 413, 417 Horiuchi, Lynne 415, 421, 423 Horkheimer, Max 153 Hou, J. 341 housing community organizations (HCO) 157 – 160, 158, 159; decentralization and 163 – 164; evaluations of 161 – 162 housing intermediary organizations (HIO) 157 – 160, 158, 159; decentralization and 163 – 164; evaluations of 161 – 162 Housing State Committee (HSC) 160 Houston, James D. 425 Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki 425 Howard, Z. 343 how-to manuals 245 How to Start Your Own School and Make a Book (Rasberry and Greenway) 309 Hsia, Chu-Joe 368 Hsieh,Ying-Chun 366, 372, 375, 378 Hu, Bao-Lin 367 Huang, Sheng-Yuan 366, 368, 370, 378 Hudson, Mark 118 humanitarian architecture cultures: consuming 445 – 446; disseminating 444 – 445; globalization of 441 – 447; introduction to 441 – 443; producing 443 – 444; shaping global 446 – 447 human settlements 49 – 61; building a science of 53 – 59; Carlson on 49; defining 60; overview of 49 – 53, 50, 52; small-house development and 59 – 61; squatter architecture and 54 – 59, 56, 58 Human Settlements Program (UNEP) 49 hunting-and-gathering architecture 400, 403, 404 Hussain, S. 189 Hyatt Foundation 38 Hyde, Edward 188 hyper linear design process 359, 360 – 361 Igarashi, Taro 350 – 351 Ikeda, Hayato 353 Illich, Ivan 216, 271 Immigration and Naturalization Service Facilities 413 454

INAVI see National Housing Institute (INAVI), Venezuela Index (magazine) 144 India, design engagement in 106 – 111, 107 Inflatables Illustrated (Ant Farm) 247 Inflatocookbook (Ant Farm) 247, 311 institute, defined 443 institutionalization 190 insurgent architecture xxxii Inter-American Centre for Housing and Planning 53 International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) 446, 447 International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) 433 International Union of Architects (UIA) 446 INTERTECT 433 Ismail Serageldin 128 Isozaki, Arata 351 Ito, Toyo 350, 351 Izenour, S. 236 Jacobs, Jane xxxix – xl, xli, 38 Jager, W.  341 James, Colin ‘Col’ 289, 291, 296, 298 Janssen, Jörn 280 Japanese American farm labor camps 423, 424 Japanese American incarceration camps 418 – 421, 420; FSA involvement in 421, 423 Japan Land Reformation Plan 353 Jencks, Charles 176 Jewkes, Stanley 67 J. J. Pan and Partners 366 Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA) 384 Johannesburg Housing Company (JHC) 384 – 385 Jonction 4 × 4 exhibition 19, 20 – 21 Journal of Architectural Education 177 Juppenlatz, Morris 67 Kahn, Lloyd 246, 308, 312, 313 Kaijima, Momoyo 355 Kalt, Michel 80 Kalt-Pouradier-Duteil-Vignal (KPDV) 73, 74 – 75 Kampung Improvement Programs 65 Kayanan, Antonio C. 66 Keller, Rolf 280 Kennedy, David 149 Kennedy, Marie I. 170 Kéré, Diébédo Francis 71, 83, 87, 89, 91, 99; see also Opera Village Africa Kerr, Robert 234 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Williams) 6 khandhas (aggregates), Suan Mokkh 210, 211 Khayelitsha Development Forum (KDF) 387 Khuda-ki-Basti Incremental Development Scheme 132, 134, 135 Kirk, Andrew 306 Kloosterman, Robert 445 Kobe, Susumu 145

Index

Koenigsberger, Otto 145 – 146, 152 Kojima, Kazuhiro 357 Koolhaas, Rem 30, 143 – 153; critiques of 143 – 145; global effects of 150 – 152; Lagos study by 143 – 146, 147, 149 – 150, 152; native informants and 152 – 153; planning on the go and 143 – 144; positioning of law and 146, 149 – 150 Kostof, Spiro 442 Kriesi, Ruedi 282, 286 “Kritik der politischen Ökologie” (Enzensberger) 271 – 272 Kroll, Lucien 174 Kudo, Kazumi 359 Kufuor, John Agyekum 149 Kultermann, Udo 59 Kuma, Kengo 352 Kursbuch (journal) 271 – 272 Kvarda, Werner  284 labor camps 413 Lacaton and Vassal 37 Laclau, Ernesto 38 Lagos:The City That Works (Koolhaas) 152 Lakeman, Mark 260 Lange, Dorothea 414 Langer, Susanne 113 Language of Post-Modern Architecture, The (Jencks) 176 Larson, Magali Sarfatti 442 Larson Legacy, The 260 Latin American cities, social engagement in 325 – 335; Cali project 332 – 334; marginality and 326 – 329; overview of 325 – 326; peripheries and 329 – 330; Taller Activo project 331 – 332; urban conflict and 329 – 331 Latour, Bruno xli, 15, 299, 339, 357 Lavin, Sylvia 27, 34 Layton, Elizabeth 234 Le Académie Royale d’Architecture 234 Learning From Las Vegas (Venturi and Brown) 357 Lee,Y.  342 Leeds, Anthony 55 Leeds, Elizabeth 55 Lefebvre, H. xli, 4, 5, 193, 380, 437; minimal and maximal differences theory 8 – 9 legitimacy, postwar development and 144 – 145 Leibundgut, Hans 272 Leinweber,Yamasaki & Hellmuth 176 Lennon, J. J. 215 Lepik, Andres 37 Leuthold, Christoph 274 liberal democracy 40 Lim, William  59 Lin, Sheng-Fong 368 Lindsay, Greg 408 live projects 233 – 239; British, origins of 234 – 235; compatibility of British and U.S. 237; conflicts of British and U.S. 237 – 238; design build and 233; future for 238 – 239; introduction to 233 – 234; United States, origins of 235 – 237

L.L. Bean catalog 246 Long, J. 340 Lorenzo, R. 189 Luodong Township Cultural Corridor 372 Lynch, Kevin 55, 189 Made in Tokyo (Tsukamoto and Kaijima) 355 Madoff, Bernard 406 Mah, Harold 32 “Make It Right” project xli Maker Media 249 maker movement, DIY urbanism and 247 – 253 Making of a Counter Culture, The (Roszak) 308 Mangin, William 55, 144 Manji, Ambreena 149 Manzanar Relocation Center 415, 416 MAP 38 marginality 326 – 329; advanced 327, 328 – 329, 330; collateral 328; critics of 326; defined 326; modernization/industrialization and 326; systemic 327 – 328,  330 ‘Marginality, Again?!’ (Caldeira) 327 market-driven architecture xxxiv Markussen, T.  340 Marres, Noortje 299 Martínez, R. 343 Marx, Karl 7 Maslow, Abraham 308 Master Jury, AKAA 127 – 130, 132, 134, 136, 138, 140 Mattern, Merete 279 Mau, Bruce 145 Mazmanian, Daniel 163 McGuirk, Justin 5 McNicoll, Geoffrey 150 Mea Culpa (Schlingensief) 94 Medary, Milton B. Jr. 258 – 259 Mehretu, A. 327, 328 Mendez, Santiago 265 Michigan Urban Farming Initiative 343 Miessen, Markus 38, 123 Miller, L.M. 437 Miller, Ron 308 Mimar: Architecture in Development (journal) 59 Minergie 286 Mingle, Jonathan 105, 108, 113 minimal and maximal differences 4, 8 – 9 Ministry of Urban Development,Venezuela 156, 156 – 157; CONAVI and 159 – 160 Minkatsu 353 Mitchell, Kathryn 445 Miyatake, Toyo 421, 425 Moallem, Minoo 445 Mockabee, Samuel 237 Montessori, Maria 188 Moore, R. C. 189 Morphosis xli, 27 Morris, William xxxix Moses, Robert xxxix – xl Mouffe, Chantal 38, 39, 40 – 41 455

Index

Moussavi, Farshid 217 Multitude (Hardt and Negri) 42 Mumford, Lewis xxxix Mumtaz, Babar Khan 59 Municipal Housing Institute (IMUVI—Instituto Municipal de Vivienda) 160 Munzner, Keiken 249 Murcutt, Glenn 117 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 5, 37 – 38, 244 – 245; Uneven Growth:Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities 148, 150 Mystery of Capital:Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, The (Soto) 146, 149 Myth of Marginality, The (Perlman) 326 Naghsh-e-Jahan, C. 434 Nakasone,Yasuhiro  353 Napoleonic influence xxx National Building Research Institute (NBRI) 382 National Housing Council of Venezuela 155, 156; see also CONAVI (Consejo Nacional de la Vivienda) National Housing Institute (INAVI),Venezuela 162 – 163 National Mobilization Law, Japan 353 NBRI see National Building Research Institute (NBRI) NBRI to RDP housing approach 382 – 385, 383, 386 needs realm 189 Negri, A. 40, 42 Neighborhood Renewal Corps, University of Pennsylvania 237 Neighborhood Works Realty 265 Neue Zürcher Zeitung 282 Neville, Richard 298 New Cities Foundation 408 New Possibilities Show 318, 319 New Schools Exchange 311 New South Wales Builders’ Labourers’ Federation (BLF) 291 New Yorker 143 New York Times 64 “NEXT STOP DESIGN” 342 N55 407 – 408 Nianing Agricultural Training Centre 131 – 132,  133 Nightingale, Carl 326 Nightingale, Robert 410 Nihon Sekkei 351 Nikken Sekkei 351 Nixon, Richard M. 177 Nochlin, Linda 173 ‘Non-Plan’ 38 Nun, José 329 Occupy Wall Street movement 121 Ockman, Joan 442 odor, words and 17 Odyssey initiative, UC Berkeley 312 – 319, 316; “the Arc” at 315, 316, 317; design interventions of

456

312 – 313; ecology/recycling and 313, 314, 315; sustainable household design 317 – 319, 318 Office of Mobile Design 407 Olkowski, Bill 317 Olkowski, Helga 317 Olsson, Rowan 248 on-demand economies 403, 405 on-demand environments 405 – 406,  406 “The 1+” 343 – 344 Ong, Aihwa 445 Onoda,Yasuaki  357 Open Design Office 170, 173 open-source design PID model 340 – 341 Opera Village Africa 87 – 100; aerial view of 88; Beuys and 95, 97, 99; health and medical clinic phase of 91, 93; Kéré and 87, 89, 91, 99; opera association of 94 – 95; Schlingensief and 87, 89, 91, 94 – 95, 97, 99 – 100; school development at 89, 91, 92, 96; snail-like master plan of 90; social engagement approach of 87; social sculpture concept 87, 97 – 99,  98 Organization of Women Architects 170 Osawa, Masachi 224 – 225 ostentation in personal buildings 120 – 121 Otoo, Alfred Rhule 54 Otto, Frei 121 Ouroussoff, Nicolai 64 Outlaw Building News 315 owner-driven model, disaster reconstruction and 433 – 436,  435 Oxfam 433 Özkan, Suha 126, 136, 138 OZ magazine 298 Pacheco, Pedro 265 Pacific High School 308 Packer, George 143 – 144 Palais de Justice 17 Palleroni, Sergio 104, 108, 111, 113, 260 Paolo Soleri’s Earth Casting: For Sculpture, Models and Construction 247 paraSITE 410 PARP see Participatory Action Research and Practice (PARP) Parr, Adrian 111 partial perspectives 15 Participatory Action Research and Practice (PARP) 342 – 343 Partners On Dwelling (POD) Initiative 259 – 261, 261 – 264, 265 – 266 Parvin, A. 340 pathshala 187 Peattie, Lisa 55 Peñalosa, Enrique xxxix Pencil Points 418 People’s Housing Process (PHP) 385 peripheries 329 – 330 Perkes, David 259

Index

Perlman, Janice 325 – 326, 329 Pet Architecture Guide Book (Bow-Wow) 357 philanthropic voluntarism xli Philips, Michael 311 Phra Bodhiñāna Thera  202 Phrakhru Pitak Nanthakhun 202 Phra Kovit 207 Phra Thepwethi  201 Picture the Homeless 407 PID see public interest design (PID) Pine, Joseph 31 Pitt, Brad xli Planung-Energie-Architektur (Plenar) 276 Plenar-Haus-Konzept 276, 279 Poelaert, Joseph 17 politically committed architects 40 – 42 political monumentality xxxi – xxxii Popular Mechanics 245 Portland State University Center for Public Interest Design 443 Portola Institute 311 Post Bubble City (Bow-Wow) 357 post-dichotomist tactics 18 – 19 Powell, Colin 149 praxis, defined 6n2 PREVI Lima 384 pritsnatham (dhamma puzzles) 207 Pritzker, Thomas J. 38, 64 Pritzker Architecture Prize 130, 443 – 444 Pritzker Prize 38, 117 – 119, 350, 446, 447; honorees of 117; Hudson’s critique of 118; Schumacher’s critique of 118, 121 – 122 proactive approach 190 pro bono design projects, problems with international 102 – 104,  103 pro bono design services PID model 343 – 344 professionalism 117 – 124; effects, affects, and facts 119; ethics and 119 – 120; Hudson’s critique of Pritzker and 118; ostentation in personal buildings and 120 – 121; Pritzker Prize and 117 – 119; Schumacher’s critique of Pritzker and 121 – 122; twenty-first-century 122 – 124 Progressive Architecture 306 Protestant Institute of Art and Social Science (PIASS) 216; conversation on reconciliation 218 – 220, 219 provider supply, disaster reconstruction and 430 – 432 Pruitt-Igoe (high-rise, high-density project) 176 – 177 “Pruitt-Igoe Myth, The” (Bristol article) 177 “Pruitt-Igoe Myth, The” (Freidrichs film) 177 public: bourgeois 33; concept of 28 – 32; erosion of 29 – 32; spatialized 33 – 34 public architecture 122 Public Architecture 28, 343 public good, architecture of 27 – 35; new pragmatism in architecture 32 – 34; overview of 27 – 28; public, concept of 28 – 32; public, erosion of 29 – 32; San Francisco Federal Building 27 – 28, 28; spatialized public 33 – 34

“Public Interest and the Architect” (Medary) 258 – 259,  266 public interest design (PID) 337 – 346; advocacy design model 341; AIA funding support for research on 338; architect as facilitator model 344; attributes of 337, 344; collective capability model 342; definition of 258; democratic process for 339; design as political activism model 340; future research for 345; grassroots design practice model 343; Great Recession and 338; implications/ application of, models 344 – 345; introduction to 337; mapping 339; open-source design model 340 – 341; PARP model 342 – 343; pro bono design services model 343 – 344; questions concerning 337; social construction model 341; spatial agency model and 339; taxonomy as scaffolding 338 – 339; technology and 344 – 345; validation and 345 Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria 15 Putnam, Robert 30 Pyla, Panayiota 105 Quatremère de Quincy 34 Quijano, Anibal 329 radical democracy 39 Rakowitz, Michael 410 Rancière, Jacques xli, 38, 39, 40, 41 – 42, 315 Rand, Ayn 104 Rasberry, Sally 308, 309, 311 Rasberry Exercises, The (Rasberry and Greenway)  309 Raumlabor 38 Raymond, Dick 311 RDP see Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) Reader’s Digest 245 Reader’s Digest Do-It-Yourself Manual, The 245 Rebar 38 reclaiming 17 – 18; defined 18 Reconciliation Evangelism And Christian Healing (REACH) 216, 220, 222 Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) 381, 384 Redesigning the American Dream (Hayden) 170 Reed, S. 339 refeudalization process 29 refugees, learning from 399 – 411; on-demand economies 403, 405; on-demand environments 405 – 406, 406; design community and 407 – 408; future of design and 410 – 411; hunting-andgathering architecture 400, 403, 404; overview of 399 – 400; sharing economies 403, 405; space and people, connecting 406 – 407; stoicism and 410; waste and 408 Regional Housing Institute (INREVI: Instituto Regional de Vivienda) 160 Relocation Centers 413 Remdoogo 89

457

Index

Renew Newcastle (RN) 249; Conditions and Speculations exhibition 250 research-based approach 189 Research Institute of Organic Agriculture 274 Resettlement Administration 413 response-ability: cultivation of 4, 10 – 12; described 12 Reua Tham 203,  205 Reua Yai 203,  206 RIBA 234, 235 RIBA Stirling Prize 130 Richards, Martin 251 Rios, M. 341 Rittel, Horst xli Rockefeller Foundation 5 Rodwin, Lloyd 55 Rogoff, Irit 15 Roland, Albert 244, 245, 246 romantic period 189 Rong Mohorosop Tang Winnyan 203, 204, 207, 209 Roosevelt, F. D. 413 Rosh 444 – 445,  446 Rossi, Aldo 279 Roszak, Theodore  308 Rothenberg, Anne F. 140 Roy, Ram Mohan 188 Rudofsky, Bernard 313 Rural Studio 37, 237, 408 Rural Urban Framework 118 Ruskin, John xxxix Rwanda dark tourism case 215 – 223 Saarinen, Eero 173 Sabatier, P. 163 Sabet, Nagui 333 Sadler, Simon 308, 317 safe buildings 120 Saint, Andrew 235 Saito, Siberius 421 salvage salvation 306 – 319; free school movement 308 – 312, 310; hippie design activism 306 – 308, 307; Odyssey initiative, UC Berkeley 312 – 319, 314, 316, 318; overview of 306 Samdech Preah Maha Ghosananda 202 Sanderson, David 430 San Francisco City Hall 35 San Francisco Federal Building 27 – 28, 28, 34 Sanoff, H. 343 Santagata, Nancy 180 Santikharo Bhikkhu 203, 207 Sarvodaya Shramadana movement 202 Sasaki, Kazuyuki 216, 218 Sauvy, Albert 150 – 151 Scapegoat (journal) 5 Schäfer, Ueli 280, 282 Schapiro, Miriam 173 Schiller, Friedrich xxxix Schilling, Britta 72 Schlingensief, Christoph 87, 89, 91, 94 – 95, 97, 99 – 100; see also Opera Village Africa 458

school building, Sub-Saharan Africa 73 – 76, 74 – 75 Schreier, Curtis 306 Schulbausteine für Gando 71 Schumacher, Ernst Friedrich 271, 275, 282 Schumacher, Patrik 118, 121 – 122 Schwartz, Alex 177 Schwartz, Louis-Georges 225 Scott, James C. 104, 106 seasonal labor permanent and mobile camps 413 second-wave feminism 169, 180; built environment and 170 Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities, (Nightingale) 326 Seikaly, Abeer 410 self-help architecture 145 self-help housing 64 – 69; overview of 64 – 65; social engagement targets, choosing 66 – 68; as source of state authority 68 selfless service concept, architectural 104 – 105 self-reliance architecture 76 – 81, 77 – 79 Semper, Gottfried 94 Sennett, Richard 30 Sert, Josep Lluis 54 Seven Laws of Money, The (Rasberry and Philips)  311 sharing economies 249, 403, 405 Shaw, Kate 249 Sheikh village, Ardebil 432 Shmuely, Andrew 8 Siegal, Jennifer 407 Sigler, Jennifer 144 Sinclair, Cameron 68, 445 slum upgrading 65 small-house development 59 – 61 Small Is Beautiful (Schumacher) 271 Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement (MoMA) 37 Smithsonian Institute 5 SMLXL (Koolhaas and Mau) 145 Snell, Olivia 265 social, meanings of 6 – 7 social architecture, financing infrastructure for 353 – 355,  354 social change, AKAA and 139 – 140 social construction PID model 341 Social Design Studio 359 social engagement: architecture and xxxiii – xxxvi, 14 – 23; colonialism and 380 – 381; contemporary architectural, political economy of xli – xlii; contemporary architectural, tactics of xl – xli; darker side of (see dark tourism); defined 4; flattening of xxxvii – xxxix; in Latin American cities 325 – 335; monumentality as xxx – xxxi; Opera Village Africa approach to 87 – 100; political context for, in Venezuela 156; postmodern architectural xxxix – xl; uses for 5; in Venezuela (see Venezuela, social engagement in); via built environment 126 – 140; see also Aga Khan Award for Architecture (AKAA) Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Engels) 6

Index

socially engaged architecture 14 – 23; category work 16 – 17; criticality-from-within 15 – 16, 22 – 23; Jonction 4 × 4 exhibition 19, 20 – 21; overview of 14 – 15; post-dichotomist tactics 18 – 19; pragmatist-relational approaches 14 – 15; reclaiming 17 – 18; self-help housing 64, 66 – 68 socially engaged architecture, history of 71 – 84; “Afritecture” and 83 – 84, 83n15; development aid and 71 – 73; overview of 71; school building in Sub-Saharan Africa 73 – 76, 74 – 75; self-reliance architecture 76 – 81, 77 – 79; vernacular in architecture 81 – 83,  82 socially engaged architecture, progressive view of 3 – 12; architecture, defined 4, 5 – 6; emancipation and 7; minimal and maximal differences and 8 – 9; overview of 3 – 4; ownership/property issues 9 – 10; response-ability, cultivation of 10 – 12; social engagement, defined 4 – 5; universal emancipation and 6 – 8 social sculpture concept 87, 97 – 99, 98; see also Opera Village Africa Société Suisse pour l’Energie Solaire 280 Soja, Edward 169 Soleri, Paolo 247 Solnit, Rebecca 399 Solo, Len 309 SOUP 341 South African SDI Alliance 438 SPARC (the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres) 438 Sparke, Penny 246 Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (Awan) 339 spatial agency model: PID and 339 ‘Spatial Discontinuities: Conflict Infrastructures in Contested Cities’ (Pullan) 330 spatial discontinuity 326 spatialized public 33 – 34 spatial justice 169 spatial justice, housing for 169 – 183; field participation and 178 – 180, 179; overview of 169 – 170; public housing image and 176 – 178; Women’s Development Corporation 174 – 176, 175; Women’s School of Planning and Architecture 170 – 174, 171 – 172 spatial practices, democracy and 37 – 43; democratic deficit 37 – 40; examples of 42 – 43; political process and 40 – 42 Spiritual Theater, Suan Mokkh 203, 204, 207, 208, 209 Sprague, Joan Forrester 170, 173 squatter architecture 54 – 59, 56, 58 Starhawk 18 – 19,  22 Steering Committee, AKAA 127 – 128, 129 – 130, 136, 138, 140 Steiger, Peter 276 Steinbeck, John 417 – 418 Steiner, Rudolf 95 Stengers, Isabelle 15, 18, 22

Stevens, Garry 442 Stewart, Francis 414 Stewart, Potter 258 Stichting Architectuur Research (SAR) 57, 59 Stiegler, Bernard 249 Stoner, Jill 253 Straus, D. 344 Strauss, Benjamin 403 Studio Orta 407 Suan Mokkh 201 – 213; Buddhadasa Bhikkhu and 202 – 203; Buddhadasa Indapañño Archives 212, 213; introduction to 201 – 202; khandhas (aggregates) and 210, 211; Spiritual Theater and 203, 204, 207, 208, 209; suññata (emptiness) and 209 – 210; uposatha at 203, 207 subjugated viewpoints 15 subsistence homesteads 413 suññata (emptiness) 202, 203; development and 209 – 210 super-carrels 312 – 313 systemic marginality 327 – 328, 330 Tafuri, Manfredo xli Tagesanzeiger 282 Taiwan, architectural development in 366 – 378; Fieldoffice,Yilan vascular bundle project and 368, 370 – 372, 371, 373 – 374; social change/ community empowerment in relation to 366 – 368, 369; Thao tribe collaborative construction 372 – 378, 376 – 377 Takano Landscape Planning Company 368 Taliesin Studio 236 Taller Activo 331 – 332 Tanaka, Kakuei 353 Tange, Kenzo 60, 351 Task 418 taxon 17 Taylor, Charles 29, 32, 33 Taylor, Emilie 111 Taylor, P. 417 Taylor, Paul Schuster 414 Teacher Drop-out Center 309 Tearfund 433 Technical Assistance National System (TANS) 155, 156; goals of 160 – 161; HCOs and 157 – 160, 158, 159; HIOs and 157 – 160, 158, 159; Housing State Committee 160; INAVI and 162 – 163; Municipal Housing Institute 160; Regional Housing Institute 160 technology, PID and 344 – 345 Tecnocentro del Pacifico 333 – 334 Telegraph 118 Telesis Environmental Research Group 418, 421 Theravada Buddhism 201, 203 Thich Nhat Hanh 201 Thijsse, Jacobus P. 66 third industrial revolution 249 Thomas, Christian 274 Thomas, George 446 459

Index

Thoreau, Henry 245 Thorpe, A. 340, 341 “Three Guineas” (Woolf) 15 – 16 3.11, architecture before/after 350 – 363; Atelier Bow-Wow approach 355 – 359, 356, 358; financing for social architecture and 353 – 355, 354; Fujimura approach 359 – 363, 360 – 362; individual architects roles, changes to 351 – 352; introduction to 350 – 351; small government and 353 time, altering historical notions of 11 – 12 Time magazine 243, 244, 245, 309 Tobase, Hodo 315 Tonkiss, Fran 5, 6, 9 Tönnies, Ferdinand xxxix, xliv Tools for Conviviality (Illich) 271, 275 Training for Self-Reliance Project 390 – 391, 392 – 393 Transnational Civil Society (Batliwala and Brown) 441 – 442 Travaux d’Intérêt Général (TIG) 222 Treib, M. 418 Truman, Harry 216 Tsukamoto,Yoshiharu 355, 359 Turner, Fred 308 Turner, John xli, 54, 55, 57, 144, 433 Turner Prize 37, 118 Turnpin, Etienne 5 twenty-first-century professionalism 122 – 124 2000-watt society 286 Uber 403, 405 ubuntu 381, 382 Uduku, O. 188 Uebersax, Heinz 286 Umdenken Umschwenken 271 – 286; AGU anti-expo and 272 – 276; catalog covers 273, 283, 285; overview of 271 – 272; protest/alternative movement results 280, 282, 284, 286; thematic fields chosen for 276, 277 – 278, 279 – 280 UN Centre for Housing, Building and Planning 53, 54 Undercurrents 296 UNESCO 188; Regional Office for Education, Africa 80 – 83,  82 Uneven Growth:Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities (MoMA) 8, 37 – 38, 148, 150 UN-Habitat 433 United Nations Conference on Human Settlements 49 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) 190 – 191 United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) 49 United Nations Technical Assistance Administration 53 – 54 United States Information Agency 244, 245 United States live projects, origins of 235 – 237 universal emancipation 4; criticism of 7; defined 7; social practices and 6 – 8

460

University of Colorado Boulder Praxis Studios  443 University of Illinois Chicago Design Center 443 University of Zurich 272 Unrau, Harlan D. 415 Unsworth, K. 342 urban conflict, social engagement and 329 – 331 Urban Design Group (UDG) 123 – 124 Urban Dwelling Environments: An Elementary Survey of Settlements for the Study of Design Determinants (Caminos, Turner and Steffian) 55 Urban Outcasts (Wacquant) 329 Urban Planning Act, Japan 353 Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) 37 U.S. Army Facilities 413 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) 176 U.S. Land Grants 236 – 237 utilitarianism 30 Vale, Lawrence 5 Van der Ryn, Sim 308, 312, 313, 317, 319 van Eyck, Aldo xxxix Vekemans, Roger 326 Venezuela, social engagement in 155 – 164; community and resources, organizing 157 – 160, 158, 159; community participation, environment for 156, 156 – 157, 157; HIOs/HCOs, evaluations of 161 – 162; housing frameworks, changing 160 – 161; Housing Policy Act 156, 158 – 159; implementation process, evaluations of 161; introduction to 155; Ministry of Urban Development 156, 156 – 157; political context for 156; quantitative/qualitative outcomes 162 – 163; Technical Assistance National System 155 – 160 Venice Biennale 446 Venturi, R. 236 Victoria Mxenge Migrant Women’s Settlement 385, 386 Villa, Dana 32 Village Coalition, Portland 260 Violence Protection through Urban Upgrade (VPUU) project 385, 387, 388 – 389, 390 Vogler, Andreas 407 von Hayek, Friedrich xli von Moltke, Willo 55 VPUU see Violence Protection through Urban Upgrade (VPUU) project Wacquant, Loïc 327, 328 – 329 Wagner, Richard 94 Wapenaar, Dré 407 Ward, Barbara 54 War Relocation Authority (WRA) 414 Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) Civilian Assembly Centers 414 water shelter 410 Watsuji, Tetsuro  355

Index

Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising (Starhawk) 18, 22 Weedpatch camp 417 Weisman, Leslie Kanes 170, 173, 178 Weissmann, Ernest 53, 59 – 60 Weizman, Eyal 446 Wells, C. 343 Welsh School of Architecture 235 Wertz, Joseph 244 Westbury, Marcus 249 Whiting, Sarah 32 Whole Earth Catalog 246 – 247, 282, 306, 308, 309, 311, 313 “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (Nochlin) 173 Wickersham, Jay 108, 113 WikiHouse 340 Wilkinson, Nick 57 Williams, Raymond 6 Window Scape (Bow-Wow) 357 Wisdom from the Field: A Guide to Public Interest Design Practices in Architecture (Feldman) 258 “Womanhouse” 173 Women in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Planning 170 Women’s Development Corporation (WDC) 174 – 180, 175; as community development corporation 174, 176; field participation of 178 – 180, 179; founders of 173; housing as gender equity for 174 – 176, 175; low-income housing image, reinventing 176 – 178; overview of 169 – 170; participatory design workshops 178, 180, 181 – 182 Women’s Policy and Program Division, HUD 176 Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA) 170 – 174, 171 – 172; founders of 170, 173; overview of 169 – 170

Women Who Make a Fuss:The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf (Stengers and Despret) 15, 16 Woolf,Virginia 15 – 16, 17, 22 World Architecture Community Awards 446 World Architecture Festival 446 World Bank 188, 433, 434; International Development Association 390 World Neighbours 433 Wright, Frank Lloyd 65, 236 Wright, Gwendolyn 174 Yale Studio Project 236 Yamamoto, Riken 352 Yamashita Sekkei 351 Yanes, Sam 309, 311 Yaneva, Albena 299 Yang Shih-Fang Memorial Garden 372 Yassin, Aziz 57 Yilan Social Welfare Center 370 Yilan vascular bundle project 368, 370 – 372, 371, 373 – 374 Yong Kang Jie Game Lane 367 Yoshikawa, Akimasa 353 Young, Iris Marion 40 Young, Whitney  121 Yu, Chao-Chin 367 Yuasa, Hachiro 421 Zahn, Uwe 274 Zanskar valley, self-sufficient living in 105 – 106 Zittel, Andrea 407 Žižek, Slavoj 11, 38 Zoethout, K. 341 Zomeworks 308, 311 – 312 Zürcher Student 282

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