Paste your essay in here…Introduction
Circumstances surrounding alienation in regards to social housing. (Re)invention and (Re)intergration. To what extent are architects responsible for the alienation and ultimate failures of social housing? What role do they play?
To What Extent are Architects Responsible For the Failure of Their Designs as Forms of Social Housing?
There is a stigma surrounding social housing, but what exactly is this stigma and who is driving it? The issue is that this problem has never been correctly diagnosed. Social housing is not just housing for the poor, this demonisation is a by-product of Capitalism and Neoliberalism and exists worldwide. There are lots of people who do not feel they need protecting, or that they are poor but this stigma overrides them. So what role do architects, planners and urban designers play, and to what extent are they responsible for the alienation of social housing? Part of this stigma relates to the issue of groups of experts and professionals casting a generalised view over social housing, that their design services can solve problems on behalf of tenants. In order to transform the currant stance, we must reconnect with our roots and rediscover the valued judgements that were made after World War II, when the social housing movement began to take shape. These roots were built around a sense of trust, and the dignity of people, to provide quality housing for all and remove the slum conditions that existed at the time. At this time, the mass production of large concrete blocks began as a popular form of social housing, initiating the ideas of Le Corbusier and his dreams for the ‘ideal city’. But mass production is no longer the answer, if the fundamental aspects of design are no longer relevant. Without proper urban form, future developments will fail in the same way previous developments have. Design must be socially just, in order to prosper and not feed the private market at the expense of society.
Habitat, our natural home or environment, should be more than just shelter. It should be about more than just achieving the minimum requirements of design standards and maximising the number of beds. Habitat should be complemented by a healthy neighbourhood that promotes human interaction and encourages prosperity. I feel that architects have a duty, to cross the lines of their profession and act as anthropologists in order to prevent a reoccurrence of what has come before. Social processes, as systems of communication help to define communites, but what factors have led to a decrease in quality of housing schemes and led to a disorienting sense of exclusion?
Capitalism
Urbanisation
Neoliberalism
Patrik Schumacher
Autopoiesis
Privatisation vs State
Economic ideology
social housing
Capitalism and privatisation are major contributing factors in the ultimate alienation of urban residential zones on the peripheries of metropolitan cities, and these areas have been in decline.
The role of capitalism in society, neoliberalism.
The system of architectural urbanism, which universalises structures and forms leaves our built environment as one characterised by non-places. The issue of universal form, or a ‘world architecture’ as it has been referred to, is that it means that architecture is no longer responsive to urban conditions. Diminishing authority and pre-destined forms on development, leave architects with a reduced influence within the industry of Capitalist production, long before they have the opportunity to even consider their design. This issue was spoken about 60 years ago through the writings of Ian Nairn, yet very little has changed.
Non-places are everywhere, and yet what they describe is a sort of nowhere. Most modern architecture constructed today simply confirms that there is no alternative to Capitalism, or a future outside the current system as the most viable form of political and economic control. This near-total capture of the building industry within the capitalist hollow space indicates that the all conquering totality of the current social, economic and political system makes such alternatives unimaginable. The spaces we inhabit are in complete control of the market, which will in turn lead to future spaces being colonised by the same totalitarian body.
The origins of Capitalism, according to Marx stems from ‘a mass of wealth accumulated and a mass of landless vagabonds with nothing to sell but their labour power’ (Marx P18)
Trudging through the ruins, Capitalism is what we are left with when our beliefs have collapsed. It presents itself as a shield to society, protecting us from the dangers of these beliefs and what they may entail. Expectations are lowered, but this is a small price to pay for our protection from the terror that awaits.
The world of private interest and exploitation serve little more than to extract the real differences that separate members of civil society. This partial emancipation of the State imposes its universality and the citizens their communality, yet even the most perfect form of democratic state is based on the contradiction of political and civil society and therefore must be deemed incompetent. If Capitalism is so flawless, then where can an effective challenge come from? Inherently dysfunctional, the cost of its appearance as being the only social system to work is very high although we would also be naive to think we can eradicate issues like famine, poverty and war, as these are inevitable forms of reality. It is possible however, to combat Capitalism by exposing it as being inconsistent or illogical.
The social field is defined by political determinations and will never achieve any success if the ideologies surrounding it are seen as values rather than facts.
Neoliberalism is a term used to refer to an economic system that by definition favours “free market capitalism”. Any efforts to create a more equal form of society are in truth counterproductive as the market will always ensure that everyone gets what they deserve, a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. It secretly relies on the State and cannot function without it. Neoliberalism is not the natural progression from industrialised capitalism that it may portray, and is in fact a contrived and held up belief system that actively creates wealthy elites. It does not impose itself on us forcefully, through structures of discipline or penal measures, but gradually shapes our understandings of ourselves and the world around us through our everyday lives.
Michel Foucault’s theories explain how modern society is a disciplinary society, where power is exercised and organised around enclosed spaces, Spaces such as factories, schools, prisons and in the new control societies in which all institutions are embedded, as a form of social control. Power and institutions go some way to describe the role Neoliberalism plays in contemporary architecture. This concept extends out of economics and into the way we actually see and act in the world. Virtually every aspect of our social world is in its grip, and perhaps choosing an alternative may seem impossible and may end in failure, but doing so is the first step towards new possibilities. As Foucault describes, the direct correlation between knowledge and power as a form of social control has over the course of time lead to a tiered societal system. The choice is still there to be made however, to decide whether this order is acceptable or to declare that it is not.
With the rejoice of this form of free market capitalism, bureaucracy was supposed to be rendered obsolete. However, for those that live and work in late Capitalism it very much remains part of everyday life. The transfer of authority from the state through to private interest has changed its form instead of disappearing, suggesting that Capitalism works in a very different way to the way it is presented.
Patrik Schumacher, director of Zaha Hadid Architects, is one that feels the world needs more Capitalism rather than less. His desire is to abolish social housing and banish prescriptive planning regulations in favour of the wholesale privatisation of streets, squares and parks. According to Schumacher, the real tragedy is that social housing tenants have the rights to “precious” city-centre properties. It is an idea that the privatisation of such spaces would, in a truly free market, lead to better utilisation of land. Describing second home owners in London he states that: “even if they’re only here for a few weeks and throw some key parties, these are amazing, multiplying events”. The displacement of the poor, privatisation of public space and the decimation of social housing are exactly what he argues for. Schumacher believes that “the market” should be left to its own devices and sees no alternative. His belief is that free enterprise is the best means of the “human development of prosperity and freedom”. ‘The Autopoiesis of Architecture’ is Schumachers comprehensive theory of architecture. Autopoiesis by definition refers to a system of ‘self-making’, regeneration, maintenance, three terms that can be used to highlight exactly what we have not done to combat alienation in social housing.
The movement of society from pre-capitalist to capitalist has had a negative effects on community life because of the impact of its separation from civil society. All elements of daily life directly determine social standing within the political sphere. This form of social standing only began to emerge through materialistic values when private property began to be set free.
“Civil society as such only develops with the bourgeoisie; the social organisation evolving directly out of production and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis of the State and of the rest of the idealistic superstructure, has however, always been designated by the same name” (P6) Karl Marx quote
We are all individuals, it is our interests that relate us to others. In the views of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, these others are viewed primarily as means toward the acquirement of our own ends, and the State as an external power of which we must take into account. It is the role of the State to appear as an external organisation and limit freedom and particular desires.
Hegel’s view is that it is the role of the State to limit possibility. But what if power is put back into the hands of the State? The issue is that privatisation and capitalism promote separation in communities. This is a pattern we have seen repeat itself since the 1960’s. However, the issue of capitalism and architectural urbanism is…
Relate back to social housing and alienation.
‘But if men comprehend that true freedom is based on rational principles common to them all, their wills find satisfaction precisely in the universal order realised by the State’. (P6)
Patterns of Alienation
social housing
Social Systems
Framing Devices
Khruschev
Existing environment
By-product of capitalism
Marxism
Lefebvre
Conditions that limit possibility
Socio-spatial segregation
Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory illustrates how various modes of communication form a subsystem of society, and architecture is a major autopoietic function system with its own responsibility for societal function. The theory, which stipulates that the overall societal life-process – understood as a communication process – is no longer integrated vertically via the unitary hierarchy of a stratified social order. Instead, modern society is seen as being distinguished into certain modes of differentiation, specifically: segmentation, centre-periphery differentiation, stratification and functional differentiation. If we identify the main systems of everyday life such as politics, economy or science, then we can understand modern society and maintain its complexity.
The societal function of architecture is unique, in that it creates a provision of spaces that frame communication, to order and adapt as a complex system. The spaces we create can be seen as our contribution to society, or framing devices.
The dependance on the exploration and rule of the material world brought about a new theory in contrast to Michel Foucault, the complex systems theory. This system is constituted with a large number of individuals, where each individual has a certain level of intelligence. Compared to the Newtonian mechanics’ simple system, the complex system is constituted with a large amount of individuals. These individuals then interact with a complex environment and will adjust their behaviours depending on the environmental information, thus leading to a loss of identity and integrity. Complex systems have a higher probability of survival in a complex environment, ant colonies, human society and the internet all have the features of the complex system.
These systems display behaviours that are deemed as emergent and may exhibit results that can only be studied at a higher level, despite being sufficiently determined by the activity of its basic constituents. Termites in a mound all have biological and physiological elements that are at one level, however they will display different social behaviour when building a mound, a process that emerges from the collection of termites. By means of simulating individual behaviours and interaction, whole systems can emerge. These behaviours could in turn be programmed by a designer in order to address multiple demands, from personal to social, aesthetic to functional and emotional to environmental. This is the core concept of design and digital architecture, that when individual elements interact and display different behaviours, the result is the emergent complex system.
Alienation is a process whereby a subject suffers from dependance upon an external agency that was originally his own product. The result, the consequence of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself. Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labour. This must be understood as a creation of human activity and social life, and not as some eternal self-subsistent entity.
All the divisions that capitalism entails, life and work, urban and rural, and within communities themselves equates to alienation. Specifically to the loss of a more directly lived and experienced life, this carries with it great social and individual costs in terms of a wide range of social and individual circumstances. This alienation and loss of communities in the city should point to the desire for renewed spatial forms, for deeper thought about how spaces should be (re)invented.
“man created God in his own image and then treated himself as dependent on his own creation”. (P16) (Marx)
We require a theory for practice that is concrete enough to make imagining the interdependence of formal closure within architecture and social processes of community as core to the problem of reinventing spaces while also providing for its inhabitants. At present, architecture can only go as far as re-inscribing alienation into the built environment rather than removing it. It is little more than a form of repetition, characterised by social emptiness or cultural irrelevance. Individual experiences are generally discovered within social spaces, and real social, political or architectural reform can only be discovered by observation of real conditions. Our environment is characterised by spaces that are trapped somewhere between happiness and unhappiness. The loss of formal boundaries has led to a situation that in truth doesn’t offer that form of liberating identity that we desire, instead the reward of this form of alienation and separation can easily be associated with concrete blocks of poorly designed flats that we are so used to seeing littered across our landscape, failing and falling into disrepair. These supposed environments for living are in fact, isolated, unconnected and constraining for society. These urban communities have become territorial units due to their isolation and alienation end. Collective ownership of the management of their space has become difficult as they are the opposition to the side of power. Invention can only stem from interaction between both. It is only through encounters with the existing reality that proposals escaping this domination can be invented, we need to encourage the production of places that create healthy neighbourhoods for both individual and group interaction and not territorial spheres.
The new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to what is new. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all (P3)
There is a gap at present with not only how these spaces are represented, but also how they are directly lived in. As architects, urban designers, planners recognition must be made that the spaces we represent are at best fantasies about future potential and may never come close to the eventual lived reality. If we begin to acknowledge this and pay closer attention to how society actually occupies these spaces, perhaps by looking to the past as an alternative, then this form of critique might enliven our imaginations. After all, the intersection between past and present is the setting of everyday.
Social life is the product of circumstance, a view criticised by Marx. That is to say that if we have better circumstances and upbringings then we become better people, that these materialist tendencies are supposedly what condition society. Where is the transition between the first situation and the second? We are all products of circumstance, but we also have the ability to change those circumstances.
When we look at the work of Henri Lefebvre, it holds out substantial possibilities for change, even at a time which dwindling of the state, privatisation and free markets through neoliberal consensus are imagined as ensuring freedom through economic growth. However, Lefebvre was unwilling to propose concrete spatial forms which might parallel renewed forms of social (or everyday) life. It is fair to say that imagining new spatial forms that analogise and support renewed social forms and processes is a much more difficult task than imagining those new social forms in the first place.
‘To change life, society, space, architecture, even the city must change’ Lefebvre quote. (P37)
There was major overconfidence in modernity and the wonders of the bustle it brings with it. The transparency and alienation of neglected residential zones have portrayed that the idea that the modern city is not just a product of capitalist society, but some putative sickness of society. It can be seen as a framework for capitalist consumption rather than for communication. These formulations divert attention away form the criticisms of space to replace critical analysis.
If we seek to conceptualise cities as being organisms that make society sick and that can only be cured by major surgery, then this mind-set avoids confronting the underlying issues that produce this apparent morbidity within society. This was one of the main issues to present itself through Modernism, where demolishing large chunks of cities by choice became the necessary habit for progress and development. Capitalisms vocation for constant activity and change, and the consequential alienation necessary for it to survive. This form of urban surgery radically transforms the physical character of our cities. If most contemporary architecture is alienating, it is because we have been born into a dominant system of our given context, with the limits of possibility determined by our social conditions. The ultimate goal of a reunified society must be to overcome this alienation and divorce itself from the illusory communal life currently presented. The ultimate goal of architecture must be to present the social and spatial framework for society to interact and prosper.
Social and Spatial Structures of the City
Functionally different modern society
Modernism
Le Corbusier
Smithsons
van Eyck
Mies van der Rohe
Brutalism
Look to the past
social housing
We are living at a time of a functionally different modern society. However, the disappointments and failures of social housing do not lie within Utopia or with incompetence but rather the limitations anti-utopianism places upon social and physical reality. In the search for potential to recapture the meaning and value of everyday life in its depth, a crack can always be found – even in apparent totally closed systems. Everyday life has the potential to supersede social and spatial practices that may otherwise seem immortal. Instead of ‘describing’ spaces, we must analyse them comprehensively and search for a deeper understanding of space. These tendencies rest in the dissolution of spaces, as most modern cities already confirm, and are never really questioned because the are supposedly in harmony with the detachment bounded to contemporary social conditions.
The implications are significant, highlighting the problems with zoning and making it virtually impossible to create cities that are more integrated. Architects have a major role in developing spaces to form a much more complex unity. On a closer level, the loss of ethics in relation to the design of social housing has shown the destructive forces of modernity and capitalism, because it is social it need only be designed to achieve the absolute minimum in terms of design standards, as that is all that the world of private interest care to fund. In order to create this unity then the spaces we design must reflect a deeper form of analysis and care, creating a spatial frame that is vital to social life.
The influence of Le Corbusiers values and also the progression of the Smithsons concept of ‘Streets in the Sky’, dictated the way in which social housing has been designed and constructed since World War II. Whilst exploring what it is that constitutes a failure of social housing schemes, it is also important to analyse various aspects that can result their popularity or decline. In the years after WWII achieving high quality in new homes became imperative to design. Post war housing policies called for the standards of social housing to be much higher in order to begin to clear the problem of overcrowding in lower class slums that still remained, the theories and visions of Le Corbusier would prove to be key. One of the most influential architects of his time, and a pioneer of the brutalist movement, Corbusiers ideas initiated the movement which saw the ‘slab block’ become the most popular form of social housing at the time. One of his most influential works, the Unité d’Habitation was designed as a “total living environment”, an all-inclusive block long before the term ‘mixed-use’ was coined. Le Corbusier had visions of residential buildings that would contain all the facilities that may otherwise be expected in town and city centres. Described as ‘zoning’, the division of buildings into zones of function including corporate, industrial and residential. This was seen as a new way of achieving a Utopian city, and the mass production of housing became popular. However, this approach was seen by Henri Lefebvre as inevitably leading to the destruction of social life, similar to the aims of the State.
In contrast, Aldo van Eycks anthropological approach to architecture can help demonstrate the relevance of Lefebvre’s claims. The central importance he gives to the social dimension of everyday life as a form of potential, but also of the conditions that may limit possibility present a counter form to Lefebvre’s thinking. Van Eyck’s work focused on the problematic between architecture and urbanism, he believed that both could become counter forms to everyday life. His work offers us set of tools for imagining counter-practices.
Van Eyck’s theories in relation to design are aimed at making the world a better home for the social and intimate rhythms of the everyday. Unfortunately, the lack of consideration in modern construction due to the problem of repetitive elements defeats the legibility of the built environment. Traditional arrangements may offer a way for us to think, beyond the limitations of modern condtions. Van Eyck’s theories included ‘Twinphenomena’ as a set of elements that appear as being opposed to one another, despite their interdependent association, and the ‘in-between’, as a basis to link and separate opposed conditions the gaps that it describes. The actual applications of his innovations would in truth be far more responsive to the complexity of individual and social frames than orthodox modern architecture could ever be. This complexity is to be welcomed, and offers a far more dialectical approach to architectural design.
Projects of urban renewal without clear strategies to reform the underlying sources of the existing conditions they are meant to transform will fail. Ultimately, a circular dialectical approach is what makes it possible to test the limits of possibility. The persistent failure of urban renewal projects and social housing schemes has been down to an approach of totalisation. My aim is not to totalise, but to respond, analyse and create a new framework for social and spatial structures within a healthy neighbourhood environment. This requires engagement with the past, whys its worth considering, and what it offers to the future without falling into the trap of nostalgia. After all, the modern is the inescapable context of our lives, and therefore is the centre of all future possibilities. The goal is to create genuine communities and overcome the egoism of civil society, where social space, the space of individual and group life, incorporates social actions. Spatial practice, as a form of social practice, must be directly lived before it is even conceptualised. It is difficult to break free from what already is, but it is up to the individuals and communities to implement this mental framework and accept a directly lived social practice. These are the basic principles in order to create counter-spaces for society and promote human interaction.