Neoliberal Emancipation
Why?
Architecture has always played a role in cultural and political commentary, and over the last century has challenged the status quo and proposed new ways of conceiving our world through buildings.
The Bauhaus movement, the city designs of Le Corbusier and the freeing of the plan offered liberty to architects and occupants, but come the Cold War and the subsequent introduction of Neoliberal economics, many of these rationalisations of space became perfect for efficient and swift globalisation.1
Post Modernism’s attempts to critique the failures of these universal designs could not offer a sufficient counter to stop the proliferation of neoliberal architecture.2 In fact, the new ways of thought brought through cybernetics and diagramming only increased the monetisation of buildings and their programme.3
The architect’s role, however naïve, is not only to build our world, but to propose new ways of doing it.4
Architects have been isolated from political and economic discourse. In this isolation, architects have become disenfranchised with the idea of creating a new world and are failing to provide architecture for the people who need it.5
Financial incentives have been allowed to dictate our lives and the misguided understanding that trickledown economics will rescue the poor has led advanced stage capitalism to become detrimental to low socioeconomic communities.6
As buildings have become more profit driven and privatised, they have drifter further away from humanity, with the rich acquiring more space exclusively for themselves, forcing the poor to live in unnecessarily bad conditions.7
Neoliberal Emancipation calls for a New Humanitarian Architecture that frees spaces from economic commodification to focus on the greater good of humanity to close the gap and provide equal opportunity for all.8
The Five Points for a New Humanitarian Architecture outline the strategies that will overcome the architect, community, and government’s neoliberal imprisonment through gradual changes in the way architecture is designed, procured and financed.
How?
The Five Point for a New Humanitarian Architecture calls for architects to standfast against the influences of neoliberalism and privatisation in order to conduct best practice that honours humanity rather than the highest bidder.9
Architects can no longer design buildings that allow segregation of space and infiltration of multinational corporations into our remaining societies.10 Architecture cannot be manipulated into being a neoliberal Trojan Horse, but must enrich our lives through social and cultural activities, comfort, security, and connection to nature.11
The architect must become an essential figure in our communities, much like doctors and teachers, as a character who inspires, supports, and works for the community not against it. Working with communities from the bottom up to design buildings with local materials and technologies can inform programme, tectonics and uses that suit that community.12
This revolution is not exclusive to developing nations, the low socioeconomic classes of developed nations must also benefit from a New Humanitarian Architecture that will champion safe, affordable housing for those who need it most.13
The architect must become a moderator between government bodies, NGO’s and communities, keeping the end user at the heart of the project and allowing governments to reclaim their role that has been slowly revoked by deregulation and privatisation.14
The reclamation of architecture for human life will involve an exaggerated, aggressive, and widespread proliferation of the Five Points in order to release architecture from its neoliberal homogeneity and corporate facadism.15
Emancipating the client and the government from the perceived commonsensical dogma of the ‘free’ market through the production of community driven architecture must become the architect’s role in the twenty-first century.16
The modernists dreamt of new worlds that moved architecture and society into the twentieth century. Architects must now dream of a new world where there is equity in space, community in design and opportunity for all.
We live in a rich and complex global society, so let’s build one!
[1] Douglas Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 1-10. Accessed September 14, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474299824.
[2] Ibid., 1-10.
[3] Ibid., 161-163.
[4] Eric Cesal, “Humanitarian Architecture Is Hip. Now What?” In AD Reader Ground Rules for Humanitarian Design, edited by A.M. Soo Chun and I.E. Brisson, 2015: 214. doi:10.1002/9781119148784.ch15
[5] Elizabeth Yarina, “How Architecture became Capitalism’s Handmaiden: Architecture as Alibi for The High Line’s Neoliberal Space of Capital Accumulation,” Architecture and Culture, 5:2 (2017): 241-263, doi: 10.1080/20507828.2017.1325263
[6] Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri, “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” Finance & Development, 53:2, June 2016, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/ostry.htm
[7] José Gámez & Susan Rogers, “Introduction: An Architecture of Change,” in Expanding Architecture: Design As Activism, edited by Bryan Bell and Katie Wakeford, (New York: Metropolis Books, 2008), 25.
[8] Cedric G. Johnson, “The Urban Precariat, Neoliberalization, and the Soft Power of Humanitarian Design,” Journal of Developing Societies, 27:3 (2011): 447, doi: 10.1177/0169796X1102700409
[9] MacKinnon, Manifesto Outline. 2020.
[10] Lorena Zárate, " Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century," Design for The Just City, October 13, 2020, https://www.designforthejustcity.org/read/essays/zarate
[11] Johnson, “The Urban Precariat,” 449.
[12] Bower, “Towards an articulation of architecture as a verb”, 352.
[13] Kubey, and Fishman, “The Global Crisis of Affordable Housing,” 24.
[14] Benjamin Ramm, "The Meaning of the Public in an Age of Privatisation." In Cultural Heritage Ethics: Between Theory and Practice, edited by Sandis Constantine, (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2014), 39. Accessed September 14, 2020, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1287k16.9.
[15] Ivonne Santoyo Orozco, “The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance,” The Journal of Architecture, 22:8 (2017): 1369-1372, doi: 10.1080/13602365.2017.1396728
[16] Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism, 1-10.