Finance, Urban Life, and Architecture An Interview with Louis Moreno by Shengze Chen
Finance is making today’s economies, urban fabrics and life styles in both the advanced economic countries and the developing world. Finance, in the process of urbanisation over the last three decades, is fundamental to the building activities but surprisingly gains little attention from the architectural intellectuals. It is timely and crucial, after the financial crisis in 2007/08, to give a serious attempt to understand financial architecture today. Louis Moreno is an urban theorist and writer based in London. He presented his research on financial architecture and the urban life with the title “Bleeding Edge - financial architecture, built form and urban ideology in the contemporary city”, in his keynote lecture for the MA HCT Debates Series Dis-Locutions: Architecture and the Political at the AA on 13 March 2015. This interview was conducted following this event by Shengze Chen at the AA Bar on 26 March 2015.
Shengze Chen: Thank you Louis for coming to the AA today. I know that you are completing your PhD called “the Architecture of Financial Crisis”. During your lecture we have also discussed about discrepancy between hospitality and speculation in architecture. My first question is very general, but relates to your research. In retrospect, how did architecture contribute to the financial crisis started in 2007/08, and can architecture also play a role in the economic recovery from this crisis? Louis Moreno: The full title of the thesis is “the architecture, urban culture and financial crisis”. The reason why it is urban culture is it seemed to me that it wasn't just architecture, or the more practical language – real estate development. It’s explicit in all of this, its all of the stuff that goes into the program of the building because its almost that building is about programming over environments. So the thing that interests me in relation to think about the complexity of architects, is what role they had in pomp priming. it's not just an investment boomed in the built environment, because in the British case it's been not like we have too many buildings, it's just we have everywhere too much debt. Chasing people actually. that causes the problem. so the question is then how does the production of the built environment more generally mediates the process where debt finance, mortgages, rental arrangements, interest, political economist would say, loanable capital and loanable funds are moving through the building as the point of context whereby you can develop? what is the role of the architect and the urban designer in all of that? The practical research I have done is that I have looked at the way in which there was a shift I think that took place in 1990s whereby a particular type of architects, well-known architects like Richard Rogers, were very interested in re-animating and revivifying what London is, as it was a moment in time London's future seemed open. Richard Rogers talked about the life of the city, not necessarily the form of architecture. He got involved in politics just because of that. Architects said "we are not pushing an
aesthetic question or programme, because we have learned from the critics like Jane Jacobs and the anti-modernist tradition. What we want now is to engage in consensus and popular interest, so that we bring people back to the city." So it was about creating a new framework of urban governance, in which to create change and shape change is through moving out of particular types of industrial economy or changing the compositions of the organisations of housing. They were involved in creating pleasurable social space. I think it was unintended consequences. It's like the questions of the sensors without getting paranoid [laugh]. If you look at the document Towards an Urban Renaissance, which Rogers lead in author, you would find it was an urban task report. But there is nothing in there about who is interested in funding this new type of city actually, if you talk about a new type of knowledge worker, or a restructuring away from industrialisation. Presumably they did actually have an interest in the critical mass of people, they might have got the human capital, and then there was a language of human capital which was linked into urban design and urban transformation. You can look for a more practical way to do a construction management – how architects have been interested in new building systems in order to speed up. In China that would be such an interesting approach. But I think in the UK case or maybe the western European case of historical cities, we are adapting the industrial fabric to these expectations, the architects have been interested in not so much more the built than what they said. They said it in a supposedly neutral position of acting in the public interest, and that is allowed in a conversation of public partnership to develop cultural messages. So what are very structural processes of arranging the debt market intersects with public investment? These have been wrapped now in the architectural urban design civic veneer. That has been a problem because that’s allowed for new structural cities to take place without much discussion about what the future and result is, turning the whole chunk of the urban into this new type of physical material which absorbs so much expected capital game. So what we do about that? I don’t know [laugh]. Maybe education has a role in this, breaking out of this past dependency on professionalization, and make ways for activism. Activism need evidence gathering, analysis, information, but also these visualisations which can engender social movements for discussions about what the future looks like. The question about what can you detain that in an education institution, the standard education institution that sets up the moment to deliver this particular type of templates of urbanisation, is a question really for universities. What kind of students are they creating, just technocrats who can advise on how things should be done to people? Or are we thing about the education of architect interested in urban questions? It may have plenty of consequences which could be not paranoid but hopeful [laugh]. At the moment we do have a very cynical understanding of the development process. I think it's about turning it into more active engagement with it.
I feel there is always a contradiction between this hope and the market, which is really bothering me. How can architecture play a role in developing a critique of finance capital, if architectural production is
determined by market in the process of urbanisation in the first place? If we come back to the images we were talking about earlier (renderings of interior of aircraft), they are not about hope [laugh]. But it's interesting, and it's something effective. Just to use a philosophical distinction, which I think is very interesting, by French Philosopher Bernard Stiegler, between drive and desire. He says in culture society generally what we have is a sense of satisfying drives. When we talk about economic growth, growth always seems successful, and satisfies that driven grow. And that drive can be pretty primitive, as we see in those images. Desire on the other hand is more difficult, which is the transformation of this cycle of drive, and the stability to elaborate a new set of pathways for these drives. So the mechanisms of drives can be transformed, rather than simply saying "it's just marketising and gentrification, and I don’t like it". Because one of the difficulties is if you just set up a black box, and say it's just where all the evil happens, then you can’t really do anything with it. All it’s to do is just the general division of labour, which you couldn’t influence; broadly it gives you the excuse to remove yourself from it. You can turn it into a moral question, but what you haven’t done yet is you haven’t smashed open that box, which is in fact transparent, not black, as we all know what is happening. So the point would be to do an analysis about what produces not just buildings which serve the market system like a commercial building or high-end real estate or mix-use urban regeneration schemes, but how do these built forms actually construct the market. They might be the foundations upon what the market builds itself. We would look at how the built environment now in different ways of this molecular level is the platform actually in which market institutions are allowed to grand away in the ways they always have to base upon serving monopoly power and collusion of political and financial interest. Then This becomes narrative looking at these particular cities which seem to be the most viable culturally and absolutely most integrated in preserving political structure that is based upon a very brutal set of drives, which is just to absorb as much wealth as it can, and particular built forms and the organisation of the management people in that particular space. The question would be to do a market analysis, asking how that system is constructed spatially and politically. And the practical point wouldn’t be difficult to be found in which you engage with people outside the sphere of architecture educations, in order to see how this analysis stacks up in the midst of the problem. In London social movements are just emerging all over of the places to do with housing.
I went to Canary Wharf last Sunday. I was very impressed by the density of office towers and the concentration of the headquarters of banks, which to a certain extent symbolizes the concentration of wealth. My question is, what do you think is the political and economical logic of why purposely planning a concentrated high-end business district from a government’s point of view? In other words, what is the political goal behind such financial speculation? If you look at the history of Canary Wharf, it's again unintended consequences. The financial bid is about capitalising uncertainty. You turn uncertainty into a commodity, which can be priced in a financial
market. Urban society is all about uncertainty. That's the freedom of living in the city in a way, or say city seems more free to us, not in a monetary way, but culturally and socially free. All of this state turns into an amazing market for managing and insuring against that freedom. The development of Canary Wharf is very specialised. At the beginning, in the late 70s and 1980s, it was completely uncertain what the future of London was going to become. It wasn’t intended to be a financial and business service centre. That was something which emerged in an accidental way during the course of the negotiations, discussions, and class struggle conflict between Thacher's administration and vast interests in Britain. So they took an idea from urban planning, which is free ports, special economic zones, deregulating neoliberal style approach of planning, although the Thacher's government was anti-urban and did not get much money. They were not interested in developing cities, which is part of the irony of neoliberal urbanism - when start, they didn’t know what a neoliberal city was, but knew only deregulation. Then what happened was very quickly a particular type of developers like creatures in the urban system, emerged between pricing uncertainty and political uncertainty, and they were able to link financial markets and global investment funds, specialising in this type of risk and talking to politicians. What you could do then became clear – turn Canary Wharf into a specialised area. They say they can do the thing the politicians need to do in order to get elected, because the Politicians need to present change. That actually caused Canary Wharf an internal competition with the City of London. Consequentially they began to overdevelop. To cut a very long story short, when all the dusts settled, and recession started in 1990s, they realised they were not at war with each other, but with Tokyo, Manhattan and Frankfurt. They started to think Canary Wharf and City of London were just one big financial centre. Now if you go to Canary Wharf, you feel like you are at Manhattan, or any of other urban design commercial office centres that emerged in the 70s and 80s. That is the spatial product that Keller Easterling talks about. But what is more interesting is not that we can commodify space, but the way in which that spatial product changes and can influence the way in which the city itself imagines itself and how politically it's discussed as a set of values that needs to be maintained and turned into goals, Therefore, it becomes a programme about every type of development in the city. It needs to satisfy this driving system.
Retail, comparing to office space, is more accessible to the public and often more spread in the urban fabric. In China, new shopping malls have greatly restructured the way people spend their leisure time during the last two decades. In cities like London and Leeds, does the built form of retail space speculation play a role in either stabilising or altering the subjectivity of the citizens? That's a great question. In a way, this is where knowledge need to be brought now because this is where the people who are most interesting. You talk to the real estate economists or facility managers in shopping malls like Westfield, they tell you fascinating things about the way in which they programme and curate social space. And they talk about culture, in not cynical but hopeful way (because they've got
a job to do [laugh]). They talk in a way which is very architectural, or at least they are very interested in the architectonics, understanding when a panic consumption becomes cultural trend, and how you internalise that in the organisation, the programming of the retailers, and also the retail experience. All of this is fascinating because in a way if you really want to do a concentrated analysis – how space is programmed and linked into these system of credit creation in a very open way, and hope that comes with commodities, or the drive that consumer has to satisfy themselves, gorging on the particular basket of consumer goods, you would go out and speak to, not necessarily the architects, but the people who are involved in the facilities management – the real estate people who are interested in recruiting particular type of architect and linking them into particular type of brand. You could link to the case in China, but also in Leeds. In Leeds, massive consumer real estate companies would say we need to position Leeds as a retail destination, their financial entities, because they exist in global market, what they offer is they produce real estate which has a financial market promise that is really plugged into the system. What they say is, we are not about job growth necessarily, what we are interested in is absorbing all of the shopping in a region. My colleague and friend Matt Lightwoods in the Bartlett School of Urban Planning and Economics, talks about that commercial development is like acting sponges. I think if you want an image of what the built environment is, it's a sponge form, it’s just about absorbing and modulating with flow of people as well as flow of money, but the flow of money not necessarily determines the consumer's desire, yet the consumer's desire activates the flow of money. And the retail buildings bring all this together, concentrating and centralising in architectural form, which serves the purpose how you market urban city.
Transcribed and edited by Shengze Chen, 27 March 2015.