Political Theory and Architecture

Duncan Bell, Bernardo Zacka, Duncan Bell, Bernardo Zacka

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350103764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Estetica in filosofia

What can political theory teach us about architecture, and what can it learn from paying closer attention to architecture? The essays assembled in this volume begin from a common postulate: that architecture is not merely a backdrop to political life but a political force in its own right. Each in their own way, they aim to give countenance to that claim, and to show how our thinking about politics can be enriched by reflecting on the built environment. The collection advances four lines of inquiry, probing the connection between architecture and political regimes; examining how architecture can be constitutive of the ethical and political realm; uncovering how architecture is enmeshed in logics of governmentality and in the political economy of the city; and asking to what extent we can think of architecture-tributary as it is to the flows of capital-as a partially autonomous social force. Taken together, the essays demonstrate the salience of a range of political theoretical approaches for the analysis of architecture, and show that architecture deserves a place as an object of study in political theory, alongside institutions, laws, norms, practices, imaginaries, and discourses.

Part One

Architecture and Political Regimes

Chapter 1

What (if Anything) Is “Democratic Architecture”?

Jan-Werner Müller

Can architecture be democratic? Most people would readily agree that architecture (and, more broadly speaking, the built environment) is bound to be political. As Thomas Jefferson put it, design activity and political thought are indivisible. But what does that mean concretely? In the popular imagination the combination of “architecture” and “politics” is bound to conjure up distinctly undemocratic figures: totalitarian leaders designing monumental edifices and avenues for eternity. And if authoritarians fancy themselves as architects, so a particular logic might go, architects often act like authoritarians: at best they might create something for the people, but not anything meaningfully seen as being of the people and certainly not anything by the people.¹ This is especially the case if—as has become commonplace in our public discourse today—“the people” are categorically opposed to “the elites.” As Giancarlo de Carlo once observed drily, “In all epochs, whatever the importance of his role, the architect has been subject to the world view of those in power … As a professional, the architect became a representative of the class in power.”

Yet in our day there is also plenty of pious, if not outright kitschy, talk by architects about how their creations will reflect or even reinforce democratic values—even when the actual product happens to be placed in a clearly authoritarian context such as China. We live in an age when cities are marketed for mass tourism with iconic buildings—the famous “Bilbao effect”—and it clearly can seem beneficial if, alongside an icon, one’s firm can deliver an uplifting story about liberty, equality, or whatever it might be that sounds best as part of public relations campaigns which sell cities partly by making visitors feel good about themselves morally and politically. As Bjarke Ingels, the brilliant, ever-enthusiastic Danish architect, who is guaranteed to provide a good story with every building design, once put it (in a way that cannot be called anything but utterly disarming): “I really like this idea that architecture is the art and science of trying to make everybody happy.”²

Who knows whether architecture will ever be able to make everybody happy; what we know for sure is that, by creating forms and spaces, architecture always both coerces and enables: it keeps some out; it allows some to meet and talk under a shelter; it makes us move in certain ways and blocks others. In that sense, it inevitably has a political dimension: it is deeply connected to the dynamics of association and dissociation;³ it also renders some things visible and others invisible; it is implicated in the creation of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity.⁴ Yet in what sense, if any, might it be specifically democratic?

This chapter sketches ways to think about this question more systematically. It also, in a very tentative manner, suggests some substantive answers as to how architecture, and the built environment more broadly, might be thought of as specifically democratic. Of course, the meaning of democracy itself is not uncontested; I shall not pretend that it is. However, the continuous contestation of the concept of democracy is not an insurmountable obstacle to a meaningful discussion of architecture and democracy, as long as the assumptions about what constitutes democracy are made reasonably clear. Less obviously, bringing architecture and democracy together might have an unexpected benefit: if we give up the notion of just mechanically applying definitions of democracy to architecture and the built environment, and instead try to shuttle back and forth between reflections on architecture and different spaces on the one hand and understandings of democracy on the other, perhaps we will see something about democracy that we just did not see before.

To possibly get to that point, I shall first examine what many observers might take to be the most obvious way in which architecture and the built environment could be said to be related to democracy: decisions about architecture and urban spaces (I shall leave aside rural planning in this chapter) should be the outcome of processes that maximize popular participation. After discussing a number of problems with this seemingly straightforward demand, I shall consider the alternative notion that it is really the results of architectural and spatial “production” themselves—not the process—that should be judged more or less democratic. Here a rather crude distinction between representing democracy and facilitating actual democratic practices needs to be put in place. I shall then further distinguish ways in which the built environment might help or hinder particular practices, in the process sowing some doubt as to the pedagogical project of representing democracy before the people. Following the lead of political theorists John Parkinson and Philip Manow, I end with reflections of how spaces inside and outside official buildings in a representative democracy might best be structured to do justice to democracy’s dual nature: the necessarily tension-ridden coexistence of a locus of collective decision making on the one hand and a space for continuous political opinion formation and, more generally, political contestation on the other.

By the people? “Democratic architecture” as process

At first sight, the obvious way in which architecture and urban planning could be democratic is by involving as many citizens as possible in the planning process.⁵ This is of course easily said—but it is exceedingly hard to do. The reasons are not just practical ones along the lines of: how do we get everybody into the same room at the same time or how do we select “representative citizens” from a larger group? For who exactly should be included in the process in the first place is far from clear. A typical candidate for a criterion of who to include is the notion that all those affected by a building decision should have standing to enter the planning process. But just who is to count as affected? And who decides who counts as affected? One would have thought it has to be the inhabitants of a building (or of a neighborhood), or of a city as a whole, or of an entire country, and in some special cases: perhaps nothing less than the world population as such.

Let me illustrate this last, initially perhaps absurd-sounding question with one well-known example. Think of the symbolically very charged site “Ground Zero.” 9/11 undoubtedly was an event with global ramifications. But does that make every human being part of the constituency for decisions about sixteen acres in Lower Manhattan? Among political theorists, there is hardly consensus about how to answer this question; there are no agreed criteria for deciding who should count as affected.⁶ The experience of planning for Ground Zero, for many years undoubtedly the most closely watched piece of land in the world, illustrates the difficulties. There were carefully planned exercises in participation, branded as “Listening to the City,” to involve ordinary New Yorkers through a series of moderated conversations.⁷ But the relatives of the victims of the terror attacks, not without good reasons, argued that their voices should count for more in the design decisions. Even when it comes to elected officials, questions of standing (and who has authority to decide on standing) are not easily settled. For instance, should Michael Bloomberg, the then mayor of New York City, have had more of a say than the governor of New York State, George Pataki, whose voice was in the end decisive for picking the master planner of the site, the architect Daniel Libeskind?

Such questions—about enfranchisement, territoriality, and divisions of competences—are not specific to architecture and urban design challenges, of course. And the fact that, in general, the answers as to who is affected and who is to decide are indeed highly contested does not mean that nothing can be said at all. Two issues might helpfully be distinguished: who has standing and what mechanisms should there be for translating whatever input those with standing wish to offer into binding decisions?

Prima facie, public buildings need public discussion. After all, they are paid for by citizens; they inevitably communicate a message about a particular polity; and, in very many, if not all, cases, they are actually to be used by the public. The latter point is obvious in the case of many administrative buildings—think of ones containing social services—but it also applies to highly representative buildings where the public has at least some limited access—think of parliamentary viewing galleries or a place like Congress, where many constituents really want to see their representatives in their offices (and take selfies with them, etc.). For these reasons, it should be relatively uncontroversial that public building projects come with public presentations, the possibility of hearings (and, to be sure, actual listening), and, ultimately, transparent decisions such that decision makers can be held accountable by the public (which in practice means: specific, territorially bounded constituencies).⁸

Of course, one could argue that elected representatives should simply take the required decisions and that there is no special burden here to make decision-making more open and participatory than is the case with laws in general. The rather obvious counter-argument is that especially symbolically charged buildings and urban spaces—ones that are ultimately about national self-representation—really do concern everyone directly. At the same time, it is harder to argue that special expertise is in any way necessary to enter debates about such self-representations.

At least some private buildings and larger private urban spaces need discussion, too: after all, they can change the character of neighborhoods profoundly. Less obviously, they might eventually result in urban patterns—let’s say, highly exclusionary ones—which a wider public might rightly see as being at odds with the democratic commitments of a polity as a whole. Citizens might also come to see such patterns not just as failing to live up to certain political ideals, but also as very concretely rendering certain types of interactions more difficult, or even impossible. Here exclusions could be doubly pernicious: they are an injustice in and of themselves, but they also diminish the quality of a democratic political culture as a whole, since we lose a sense of different parts of the demos. The most disadvantaged become a pure abstraction; as has been shown by many studies, they no longer see democracy as doing anything for them; less obviously, other citizens in effect might cease to see them as important for democracy.

Think of the fact that in ancient Athens political discussions took place not just in the ekklesia on the Pnyx, but also in the agora (similar arguments can be made about the Roman forum).⁹ In the ekklesia, citizens gathered for a directly political purpose, passing decrees, and there was a penalty for failing to attend (the famous red rope that marked democratic slackers). Most accounts affirm that in an assembly with raked seats all eyes were on the speaker (who had to face the sun to ensure maximum visibility of his face), while all those in attendance could also see each other (thus maximizing what has sometimes been called “inter-visibility”).¹⁰ In other words, everyone could hear and see the speaker, and everyone could see everyone else’s reactions to the speaker.

By contrast, the agora was not dedicated to a single purpose; it simultaneously served as a space for religion, for leisure, and, above all, for economic activities (and, occasionally, specific political tasks, most famously, ostracism). In the agora, people met more by chance, conversations drifted toward politics or not, as the case might have been, and all kinds of people could be passing through. One element of Greek political life was also permanently present though: citizens could peek into the old Bouleiterion, sited on the edge of the agora; in this “Council House” the agenda for the ekklesia was being prepared; citizens could possibly even eavesdrop on the debates.¹¹

The point is that in democratic Athens official political sites for debate and decision making were complemented with spaces where the demos could meet in its diversity. There people came across issues and problems about which they might not otherwise have heard and perhaps directly experience citizens’ and non-citizens’ difficulties. The problem with certain urban patterns today is that such an experience of diversity and, above all, manifest disadvantages, is becoming more difficult, if not impossible.¹² For one never sees—let alone talks to—certain kinds of strangers in the polity.¹³

As Jürgen Habermas once put it, the demos can only appear in the plural;¹⁴ there is no such thing as a non-pluralist democracy. The question is how to render that pluralism visible without violating citizens’ legitimate concern not to have their life become constantly politicized, or to feel exposed and put on display somehow. Witness Daniel Libeskind’s pronouncements about his planning for Ground Zero:

I think in a democracy we need pluralistic architecture, we need variety. We really need to concentrate on things that are not so obvious, which [at Ground Zero] is public sp...