The Routledge Companion to Architecture and Social Engagement

Farhan Karim, Farhan Karim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317495703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architekturdesign

Socially engaged architecture is a broad and emerging architectural genre that promises to redefine architecture from a market-driven profession to a mix of social business, altruism, and activism that intends to eradicate poverty, resolve social exclusion, and construct an egalitarian global society. 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 handbook 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.

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 combatting—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 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?

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 pre-configured 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 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 self-organized 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 ...