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Architecture of the New Society
by Chris Spannos ; August 19, 2004
Every city is a deeply interconnected web of spatial designs and
patterns. From the urban to the suburban, our built environment is
carved out into commercial and residential areas. Buildings, parking
lots, garages and gas stations are built into streets, freeways,
shopping malls, industrial parks and transit routs. Apartments, houses,
yards and sidewalks all lead to schools, churches, temples, parks,
grocery stores and restaurants. All woven together and mediated by noisy
traffic, nauseating air pollution and aggressive advertising.
The institutions of our cities provide interrelated roles and
relationships for our day to day activities, expected behaviors, and
usual outcomes. The private ownership of productive property, markets,
and corporate hierarchies of capitalist cities produce and reproduce
class rule, social segregation, and hierarchy. Housing is stratified by
income so poor people are ghettoized, their communities living in
decomposing buildings and neighborhoods. Residences with nice houses,
safe streets, pleasant views, and clean parks are often reserved for
rich and upper class communities. Communities from separate ethnic
backgrounds often live in separate ethnic quarters. Sex and gender
development in society has evolved into spatial patterns founded on the
myth that the women's place is either in the home or out shopping.
Spatial functions often exclude consideration for those with mental or
physical barriers. Patterns in our built environment have evolved into
patterns facilitating mass consumption and competitive production.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, subsequent spread of corporate
globalization, and privatization of our public goods and services,
government policy has combined with market pressures to further weaken
worker and consumer control over city space and urban planning. Third
world economies have mostly suffered from integration with the global
economy. Trade liberalization, structural adjustment programs,
international debt, financial speculation, capital flight, war, and
imperialism have exported these disparities in wealth, spatial design,
and loss of democratic control globally.
Of course, not everything is bad, we can consent or resist the
institutions of our built environment. Islands of community and social
space have been fought for and won. Important experiments have emerged
and provide valuable lessons. However, the vast majority of our built
environment is not the product of our own decision making needs and
desires but that of someone else's. Better ways of life are turned into
fleeting fragments, mere instances and potential possibilities of other
ways of being. Transformation of our cities means developing broad
strategies for radical reform and fundamental institutional change
across political, economic, cultural, and kinship spheres.
This essay describes a broad vision of how cities, architecture, spatial
design and our built environment evolve within a participatory economy.
Such a city is an alternative to cities dominated by private property,
capital, and markets as well as cities based on command economies with
central planning authorities and corporate hierarchies. It assumes
construction and design within the context of a participatory economy
and equally liberatory political, community, culture, and kinship
visions. It’s architectural structure, aesthetics, and design are
democratically planned and try to embody and promote the values of
equity, self-management, solidarity, diversity, and efficiency as well
as compliment and promote the values of other spheres of social life.
Other Post-Capitalist Visions of Cities:
There are volumes of already existing research and decades of activism
making links between capitalism, our built environment, corresponding
modes of social relations, and their consequences. That the institutions
within our city space can produce and reproduce racist, sexist,
classist, and authoritarian social relations within our society is not
controversial. What is controversial is to suggest concrete values,
procedures, and defining institutions about how cities of a new society
might be built.
There have been proposals for what future post-capitalist cities may
look like. Dolores Hayden, in her 1983 essay “Capitalism, Socialism and
the Built Environment”, succinctly outlines classical visions from many
communitarian socialists of the 19th century where “...a return to the
environmental harmony of the pre-industrial village was essential to
their visions of the socialist future. Even Marx and Engels observed the
Shakers carefully, while Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, William Morris
and Ebenezer Howard all shared their environmental ideals to the
exclusion of much urban concern at all. Fourier and Owen suggested that
individuals combine work in agriculture, industry and domestic life, and
live in groups of about twelve hundred to sixteen hundred people. For
William Morris and other members of the Arts and Crafts movement, return
to a world of small villages would permit the intensive, personal,
artistic labor which industrialization had banished. Hand carved and
hand-painted public buildings were a sign of a happy populace.” (1)
In the same tradition, but later in the 20th century, Murray Bookchin
proposed a "Communalist" vision of the city. Bookchin’s Communalism is
comprised of "Social Ecology" and "Libertarian Municipalism", which
“...seek to recover and advance the development of the city (or commune)
in a form that accords with its greatest potentialities and historical
traditions." Bookchin speaks of post-scarcity anarchism and identifies
modern technology as the force generating a new landscape integrating
town and country. (2)
In 1887, Edward Bellamy published “Looking Backward: 2000-1887”. Bellamy
imagined a socialist Boston city in the year 2000 which was
technologically advanced, decadent, and where consumer goods were plenty
and in abundance, “At my feet lay a great city. Miles of broad streets,
shaded by trees and lined by fine buildings, for the most part not in
continuous blocks but set in larger or smaller enclosures, stretched in
every direction. Every quarter contained large open squares filled with
trees, among which statues glistened and fountains flashed in the late
afternoon sun. Public buildings of a colossal size and an architectural
grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles on every
side.” (3)
As for shopping and stores, “’Here we are at the store of our ward’,
said Edith, as we turned in at the great portal of one of the
magnificent public buildings I had observed in my morning walk. There
was nothing in the exterior aspect of the edifice to suggest a store to
a representative of the nineteenth century. There was no display of
goods in the great windows, or any device to advertise wares, or attract
custom. Nor was there any sort of sign or legend on the front of the
building to indicate the character of the business carried on
there"...”Edith said that there was one of these great distributing
establishments in each ward of the city, so that no residence was more
than five or ten minutes walk from one of them.” (4)
From the 1950's to the 1970's social movements rose that sought to
break away from older traditions in the classical Left. Among those who
attempted a complete break, proposing a radical departure were the
"Situationists". Inspired by the DADA and Surrealist art movements, and
playing an agitational role in the Paris uprising of 1968, Situationists
proposed "...truly grand public visions of constructing whole new
revolutionary cities...much more ambitious than those...of [other]
artists." (5) Broadly, Situationist visions were comprised of concepts
of "psychogeography" combined with workers councils, self-management,
poetry and art to construct a "revolutionary every day life".
The basic theoretical underpinnings of Situationist visions began with
the activity of constructing "situations", "A moment of life, concretely
and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of unitary
environment and the free play of events." (6)
The concept "Psychogeography" was defined as the "study of the precise
effects of geographical setting, consciously managed or not, acting
directly on the mood and behavior of the individual." (7) With this
concept they experimented with the "Dérive", "An experimental mode of
behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique for
hastily passing through varied environments," where people would drift
perpetually through separate city quarters. (8)
The Situationists also developed a theory of "Unitary Urbanism", a
"theory of the combined use of art and technology leading to the
integrated construction of an environment dynamically linked to
behavioral experiments." (9) Unitary Urbanism was the basis for the
development of situations, as a game and as a serious way of building a
freer society. Unitary Urbanism means that the social and aesthetic
could not be separated on the level of every day life. Instead of being
organized, designed and controlled by the needs and demands of commerce,
industry, and the circulation of traffic, in short capitalism, unitary
urbanism sought to make the city a free space, open for play and
adventure. (10)
Ivan Chtcheglov developed an early proposal that later inspired many
Situationist visions of cities. In his essay "Formulary for a New
Urbanism" Chtcheglov imagined a city with a 'Happy Quarter', 'Historical
Quarter', 'Nobel and Tragic Quarter' etc. Chtcheglov's architecture was
constructed out of labyrinths, covered passage ways, mazes, ramparts,
and stairways which led nowhere. (11)
Other Situationist proposals included the "New Babylon", a city designed
by the utopian architect Constant Nieuwenhuys. (12) This city abolished
town planning for a continuous drift, perpetual movement between spaces
or 'sectors' such as a 'floating city', or 'hanging sector' which was
suspended over the movement of traffic. 'New Babylon' was not, of
course, a feasible project, Constant himself admitted as much. (13) It's
function, like much fiction, was to provoke the imagination, to think of
architectural possibilities and how we could actually incorporate grand
vision into of every day life.
Other visions for cities include sustainable cities, small scale cities,
self sufficient cities, walking cities, garden cities, etc. Some modern
tendencies include “anti-civilizationists” and primitivists who both
oppose sidewalks, bicycles, cities, and almost every other construct
that is “unnatural” and harmful to the environment.
Although many of these proposals provoke our imaginations about spatial
design and spatial reorganization, they are vague at best since they do
not specify any guiding rules, procedures, or institutions for how
architecture, design or social space could be allocated in a democratic
way in day to day life. They do not outline how people choose what it is
that they want to consume and why. They do not propose h