Inaugural speech Wouter Vanstiphout

PROF. WOUTER VANSTIPHOUT INAUGURATION SPEECH: ‘DESIGN IS POLITICS’ AS HELD ON JUNE 9TH 2010 AT THE DELFT UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

ARCHITECTURALHISTORIANS

DESIGN IS POLITICS

Dear Rector Magnificus, members of the Executive Board, Professors and other members of the university community, dear listeners, Towards the end of his increasingly hopeless campaign to hold on to the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown gave an inspired speech to Citizens UK, an activist movement for social justice. The speech was impressive because, coming at a time when the beleaguered social democrat had been shorn of the last vestiges of his political arrogance, it allowed a suppressed memory to float to the surface. He cast his mind back to the reform movements that laid the foundations for the socio-economic achievements of our time. Brown harked back to the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, the battle for female suffrage at the dawn of the twentieth century, and the US civil liberties movement and the struggle against South Africa’s Apartheid regime in the second half of the twentieth century. Brown pointed out the similarities between Citizens UK and all these social movements which, starting from a marginal position, had gone on to achieve major breakthroughs. “This movement,” he asserted, “like every great movement in modern history, is built on moral convictions”.

He could have added one more example to his litany of breakthroughs: the emergence of modern urban planning.

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Modern urban planning in the twentieth century is part of the heritage of last century’s social reform movements. Its main articles of faith were pressed into existence by the campaigns and lobbies of outsiders. Ebenezer Howard was convinced that in order to free the workers from the industrial metropolis, a self-sufficient system of settlements had to be founded, completely divorced from state control. With this aim in mind, he launched the Garden City Movement and unwittingly wrote the genetic code of modern urban planning design. He and his associates sought to bring about the foundation of a new social order through the design of a new city.

The very conceptualisation and construction of an urban community is in itself one of the great breakthroughs of the twentieth century. In order to make sure that the city benefits the many rather than the few, it has to be designable: it is in this notion that the moral roots of urban planning lie.

The emancipatory essence of urban planning is not only in evidence during its primitive stages; it also applies to its further development. The changes in ideological course and the new paradigms that have determined the nature of urban planning have time and time again been determined by the demands of movements and activists. This applies to the post-war campaigns by AbbÊ Pierre for the building of public housing in France founded on principles of human dignity and to the battle that Jane Jacobs waged against urban renewal in 1960s New York. It applies to the urban renewal that took place under executive councillor Jan Schaefer in 1970s Amsterdam and to the grassroots movement which heralded the birth of New Urbanism in Miami in the 1970s and 1980s. And it also applies to the squatters’ movement that colonised industrial complexes and turned them into cultural incubators, a kind of urban design which, in its institutionalised form, has become commonplace as the Creative City. The fact that the Dutch government has since criminalised squatting gives this institutionalisation a nasty aftertaste.

At each of these moments, a new protagonist was ushered into the political arena and with them came a new design for the city. From the garden city to the creative city, the history of urban planning is a cycle in which reform movements succeed in pushing through a new urban paradigm which subsequently becomes embedded and institutionalised. This new system then degenerates into a technocracy, thereby invoking another wave of activism, which in turn leads to another new paradigm, a new model and a new design.

Such is the history of urban planning. But is this also its future?

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Over one year ago, the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment decided to establish a Chair of Design and Politics. The ministry observed that spatial policy had become a self-perpetuating machine which rolled out a blanket of generic policy over the Netherlands but was no longer able to successfully operate on the basis of assignments set by society. At the same time, keen minds at the Directorate General for Spatial Policy, the department responsible for founding this chair, observed that increasing urbanisation means that society’s assignments are manifesting themselves in an increasingly layered and therefore spatial way. The economic crisis, the ecological crisis, the leadership crisis and the socio-cultural crisis are all becoming spatial crises. The making of political choices is becoming spatial; it is turning into design. In founding this chair, the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment is bringing spatial design back into the realms of controversy, back into the arena of political debate.

This comes as something of a surprise, for in recent years we have seen how the Dutch government has steadily retreated from making large-scale spatial choices. Regarding the role of urban design, a consensus seems to have developed between the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment, the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management, the academic design programmes, the urban planning departments, the major design studios, local government institutions and housing associations. Their position can be paraphrased as follows: “Now that we know society can no longer be shaped to our will, politicians no longer need to deploy urban planning as a tool for shaping society. Urban planning must therefore turn away from the government as its privileged partner and piece together its mandate by consulting market agents, residents’ associations and local government bodies.” As this position implies, today’s urban planners are no longer engaged in thinking up the city for themselves. Instead they carry out maintenance work on the city on behalf of others and illustrate the various choices available to aid others in this decision-making process.

Urban design has become fluid, enabling it to seep into the nooks and crannies of the governmental machine. Adopting too strong a political or moral position will result in rigidity.

Modern Dutch designers prefer to focus on spatial quality, convincingly demonstrated under the most improbable conditions with a virtuosity that inspires envy abroad. This approach involves processing an impressive amount of different kinds of data in an increasingly detailed network of predictive models. It gives rise to design scenarios which are completely acceptable in their own right, almost regardless of the choices made by others.

But what of the time when the design of the city was a question addressed to the collective conscience, imbued with notions of justice, freedom, modernity and solidarity? Those days appear to have vanished forever. It is a role that design simply cannot play anymore.

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Cannot play or will not play? For in the past decade, the Netherlands has been dominated by one of the greatest spatial challenges since the national recovery after World War Two: the restructuring of its post-war housing projects. The most striking aspect of this undertaking is that the design has in no way, shape or form reflected the scale or the fundamental nature of this challenge, neither to the general public nor to the designers themselves. This task has generated hundreds of relatively small-scale assignments in which dozens of designers have exhausted themselves to create spatial quality on square metre at a time. The fact that these assignments formed part of an immense overhaul of the demographic and socio-economic structure of hundreds of neighbourhoods hardly influenced the design at all. Dutch urban planning had said farewell to the notion that society could be shaped at will while at the same time working on the biggest makeover of the Dutch city since the advent of urban renewal. In doing so, urban planning missed the opportunity to adopt a concrete position in the debates on integration, big city problems, safety, privatisation and virtually all of the relevant political issues of the last decade.

Has the design of the city really vanished from the political spectrum for good? Should this chair have been instituted as part of architectural history instead of the department of urban planning?

The answer, quite simply, is “no”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Allow me to explain why, with reference to a handful of spatial projects which have appeared in the news in recent weeks.

My first example comes from Forbes Magazine on 17 May. The Indian government, together with a number of Japanese high-tech companies, has announced a plan to develop a corridor stretching thousands of kilometres between Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata. This would not only consolidate freight traffic routes between these cities but would also reorganise the country’s urbanisation in a series of eco-friendly new towns. The plan involves building tens of millions of homes and investing almost 10 billion euros for each new town. With a single gesture in the form of an inverted V, the urbanisation vectors of the subcontinent will be etched into the landscape for centuries to come. It also represents a rhetorical step from a country that has always been ruled as an immense collection of villages towards a nation that draws its strength from its towns and cities.

My second example comes from The Guardian newspaper on 9 May. OMA, the firm run by our former colleague Rem Koolhaas, has drawn up a plan for the European Climate Foundation.

Entitled Roadmap 2050, its aim is to reduce carbon emissions by 80 per cent in 2050. The solution is to create an integrated infrastructure which would distribute and store the unpredictable production of sustainable energy on a continental scale. This involves entire regions specialising in a single energy source, in accordance with their geological qualities, while also sharing in the profits from the energy produced in the other regions. The project is not only technological but primarily political in nature. OMA proposes dividing all of Europe up into new states, each one completely devoted to a single form of energy production. The North Sea coast for example, would become the Isles of Wind. The Atlantic coasts would become the Tidal States, where energy is generated from the tides. Around the Alps, an Enhanced Geothermalia could be formed, with heat being extracted from the Earth’s crust. The Mediterranean coast would become Solaria, the former Yugoslavia would be reunited as a Biomassburg, and parts of Poland, Ukraine, Russia and the Czech Republic would become the CCSR (Carbon Capture and Storage Republic). Europe would no longer be Europe but Eneropa.

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Thirdly, let’s take a look at a report in the LA Weekly newspaper on 18 May. Douglas Hughes, candidate for the governorship of California, presents his voters with a drastic solution to the problem of child sex abuse. Paedophiles will be given the option of going to jail for life, leaving the country, or living on the island of Santa Rosa off the Californian coast. On this uninhabited island, a number of self-sufficient villages would arise to give this community of paedophiles everything they need to live without being exposed to the temptation of abusing children. In his election manifesto, Mr Hughes presents a highly detailed and comprehensive description of his vision.

The first group of colonists would consist of a “lead team” of paedophile agricultural engineers, paedophile doctors, paedophile administrators, paedophile subcontractors and paedophile surveyors. Their mission would be to come up with a master plan for the island, to set up a basic infrastructure, construct the main public buildings, found institutes and write a constitution. Mr Hughes would not appear to be driven by retribution, hatred or rancorous populism but rather a puritanical pioneer morality. A fresh start, doing everything for yourself, the self-sufficiency of a new community far from the temptations of the big city and the modern world: Mr Hughes’ vision suggests that this could have a healing effect on these men.

My fourth example is a report featured in the Detroit Progress on 5 April. The mayor of Detroit, a former American Football legend who goes by the name of Dave Bing, has decided to stake his political fate on a five-year master plan to completely overhaul of the troubled city. Since the 1960s, when the middle classes fled the inner city race riots, Detroit has been transformed into a deserted ruin with a casino and an annual Auto Show as its only attractions. In 1950, the city was home to 1.8 million people. Now it houses only 900,000 residents and that number looks set to fall to 700,000. Mr Bing is the first mayor to take this radical shrinkage as the starting point for a largescale transformation project which might even be described as visionary.

The mayor wants to demolish tens of thousands of the 78,000 homes currently standing empty and concentrate the residents in a handful of districts. He wants to get rid of over 50 schools and concentrate them in educational facilities run by more professional school boards and housed in attractive modern buildings. He plans to redevelop the former MGM Casino into a monumental police headquarters and to build a new bridge that spans the Detroit River and links the city with its Canadian neighbour Windsor. He wants to use the huge expanses of land freed up by the demolition of tens of thousands of homes to create urban agriculture, organised in three large urban farms which will shoulder the responsibility for part of Detroit’s food production. The mayor also wants to see the return of an urban planning department in the city, under the leadership of Toni Griffin, Adjunct Associate Professor of Urban Planning at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. The city was able to employ her services thanks to a gift from a private nonprofit organisation. The time frame of five years has been set and the objective is to tailor the structure of Detroit to fit the size of the population for the first time since the 1960s. Mayor Bing has said he is not interested in a second term as mayor or in running for another political office.

He insists that these changes have to happen now and that the political consequences for him personally are irrelevant.

Of course, we could easily add dozens more projects to this fairly random selection from the world of present-day urban planning. What about the plan by Executive Councillor Adri Duijvesteijn to double the size of the town of Almere to make it one of the five biggest cities in the Netherlands?

Or French President Nicolas Sarkozy cosying up to the world’s most celebrated architects to show that it’s the French president who rules the roost in Paris, and not the city’s mayor? All these examples show that spatial planning and urban design are being used as never before to achieve political ends.

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The political objectives for which planning and design are used can be highly diverse. The can embody a reformist utopia, such as OMA’s Eneropa, or respond to a community’s desire to shake free of fear, such as Douglas Hughes’ Paedophile Island, or take an entire population out of its rural comfort zone in an effort to make it spatially and economically governable, as in India. The political objective might be to create a recognisable and cohesive vehicle, which gives coherence to all of the component solutions and interventions of a single term of government, as in Detroit.

It can also boil down to a purely symbolic consolidation of power relations, as in Sarkozy’s Grand Paris. Or the aim might be to change the balance of political power in a region by increasing the demographic basis, as in the Dutch town of Almere.

In any case, there can be no doubt that, from an international perspective, politics can still effectively wield the spatial project as the ideal instrument with which to achieve its central goals, goals which are just as diverse as the types of government which are currently endeavouring to govern their own part of the world. It should therefore come as no surprise that this political diversity gives rise to such a great diversity of spatial models, images, methods and theories.

However, if we examine the way in which planned development in the world is evolving from the perspective of the urban planner, this diversity inspires more fear than hope. Architecture, urban development and planning sees itself as a profession with a history and a theoretical and professional basis, a profession which is developing and which is anchored in time. Urban planning is marked by time and succeeds in leaving its own mark on time, creating recognisable periods. This historical nature of the profession of planning and urban design also implies that there are certain things we no longer do, because they are not appropriate to our times, because we are aware of the possible consequences or because we know that things just don’t work that way. Or should I say, we believe that we no longer do certain things.

Yet, when all is said and done, what is OMA’s Eneropa project but a reincarnation of the plans of German architect Hermann Sörgel? In the Great Depression, he came up with a design for a series of hydroelectric dams, hydroelectric plants and other installations which would link Gibraltar with Tangiers, lower the level of the Mediterranean Sea and unite Europe and Africa in one peaceful and prosperous supercontinent which he called Atlantropa.

Douglas Hughes’ plan for a paedophile island on Santa Rosa is also a striking case of déjà vu. It bears more than a passing resemblance to the banishing of criminals to Australia in the 19th century, to the plan to relocate all Jews in Madagascar and the persistent suggestion that a Moluccan Republic should be established on the Wadden Islands. But the most striking resemblance is to the remarkable elements isolated in the empty spaces of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City diagram: the Epileptic Farms, the Home for Inebriates, the Insane Asylum and the Home for Waifs.

Last but not least, the plans to drive a backbone of hypermodern urbanisation clear through the Indian subcontinent, complete with centralised perspective and foreign advisors, can lay just as little claim to novelty or uniqueness. Fifty years ago, this was the formula Greek urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis used to construct enormous cities and urban corridors, backed by funding from the US government and from NGOs such as the Ford Foundations. The aim was to transform the population of the former # from villagers with an archaic lifestyle and way of thinking to modern urbanites who believed in the values of the free West.

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Present-day Tema, Khartoum, Sadr City in Baghdad, Marsa al Brega in Libya, Karachi and Islamabad in Pakistan all form a fascinating collection of fragments from national master plans that once seemed inevitable. Without exception, these plans went awry within a matter of years and made way for unpredictable developments, both spatial and socio-cultural. When we look back in 50 years’ time, will the Japanese hyper master plan in India really have achieved the objectives which are now being envisioned?

It is as if all of the phases and important moments in the history of urban planning do not in fact succeed one another in time but occur again and again, alongside and atop one another. Yet their application does not seem to involve any reflection on the results achieved in the past. The urban planning instruments used, the theoretical models applied, the paradigms dusted off and the rhetorical arguments employed are all determined by the political aims that others plan to achieve by means of the design. One and the same designer is carrying out assignments in China according to an uncompromisingly modernist tabula rasa mentality yet simultaneously positioning himself in a European context as a disciple of Jane Jacobs, thereby implying a categorical rejection of all forms of modernist top-down planning. There is something unsettling about the lack of even the least notion of consensus in present-day urban planning production, especially when such contradictions manifest themselves within one and the same firm.

This fundamental unease lies in the fact that urban planning as a professional discourse has divested itself of universal model thinking and the notion of shaping society and has embraced relativist contextualism, while the actual production of cities remains every bit as modernist and “shaping” as it was before. In other words, the urban planner has lost control over his own political position. The aversion to shaping society is an ideological vaccine which allows urban planning to pay service to any commission or political objective, even if that very objective is itself rooted in the assumption that society can be shaped.

Just how imperfect this ideological vaccine can be is illustrated by one of the most disastrous episodes in urban politics in recent years: the 2005 riots in the French banlieues. Starting with an incident at an electricity substation near Le Chêne Pointu, in Clichy Sous Bois near Paris on 27 October 2005, the unrest spread within a week to hundreds of cités and grand ensembles in almost all of France’s major cities. One striking aspect of the riots was that the locations where they took place were all designed according to the same prototype: La Ville Radieuse.

In the debates that followed the riots, this gave rise to one recurring hypothesis: that modernist urban planning had contributed to the sense of alienation and isolation among the residents and therefore to the explosion of violence. This analysis confirmed the views of administrators and housing association directors – all of them now followers of Jane Jacobs, without having actually read her work needless to say. It convinced them that they should press on with the demolition of post-war high-rise districts in the interests of preventing even worse unrest. This argument was also applied to the Netherlands, enlisted in the battle against the notion of urban design as shaper of society.

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But if we analyse the riots more closely, we can see that the renewal of these districts played a far more direct role in sparking the riots than the original design forty years previously. The complex relationships between urban design and urban violence form the subject for the lecture series “Blame The Architect” which we will launch from next semester. It turns out that large-scale demolition and new construction projects, combined with a seriously segregated society, has sparked intense forms of urban violence on a number of occasions. The Civil Rights Riots in the American inner cities at the end of the 1960s are a prime example of this. Will the French cités follow in the footsteps of the American inner cities to become no-go zones abandoned for decades and surrounded by fortified suburbs? There appears to be a very real danger of this now that investment in the cités has dried up in the wake of the riots and the Grand Projet de Ville is being reduced to demolition without new construction. The designers of the dozens of renewal projects in the French banlieues have so far been able to sidestep all debate on this issue, sincere in their belief that the problems were not caused by their apolitical “filling in the gaps” architecture, but by the visionary approach of their modernist predecessors. Like their Dutch counterparts in the world of restructuring design, they were blind to the political impact of the project to which they were contributing.

The sweeping scale and the disastrous nature of the above examples show that designers still wield alarmingly powerful tools in the shape of urban planning and design. In our view, urban design on any scale needs to once again become fully aware of its impact on society and therefore of its political nature. This means that, from its unique, spatial perspective on society, it should be able to formulate its own assignments and organise the parameters for its own success.

Most importantly, young designers in Delft need to become aware that urban planning by definition has an impact on society. And while the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment states that political choices are increasingly becoming spatial choices, it is up to us to point out that every spatial choice is - by definition - a political choice.

This is particularly relevant today, when we are being confronted with the treacherousness and uncertainty of the social context in which we work. We stand here today in complete ignorance of the political choices our potential new government has in store for us, to say nothing of their spatial implications and the people they will affect. But instead of quaking in our boots as we wait to see what policies are heading our way from government departments, provincial authorities, municipalities and districts, or sitting around speculating about what the market wants, we should be equipping young designers with the keenest possible awareness of the opportunities their profession gives them to push through social changes or to protect what they regard as valuable and vulnerable.

Urban planning as a profession finds itself in a precarious position. All too often it tends towards toothless subservience, takes sentimental flight into traditionalism or loses itself in self-obsessed fantasies of the future. In other words, it is an insecure profession in an uncertain world. It would therefore do the profession a power of good to immerse itself in its own past and to draw strength and inspiration from this experience, but without falling into the usual pitfalls. Instead of simply being inspired by what people used to make and how, it would be better to study why people designed and for whom. The intense moral conviction with which people fought to achieve the right design for a city, as a form of resistance against a technocracy that devastated all in its path: this provides a stimulating example to the profession in its present state, stimulation in the form of castigation.

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It is difficult to imagine a better source of nourishment for a renewed sense of political engagement in the world of urban design than this faculty. The range of political convictions is enormous, a multiple of the many nationalities and ethnicities we contain. This reservoir of potential political engagement is the greatest treasure we possess. I therefore see it as our task to make this kaleidoscope of convictions explicit, to reinforce them and to prime them for use. For our first graduate studio, which will address the theme of urban segregation under the title In The Ghetto, we are therefore not adopting a position for or against ghettos, never mind prescribing a method of design. Instead we are inviting students to develop their own position and to channel it into credible proposals for real-life situations, so that they can learn that it is possible to take responsibility for their own designs. After all, a community of likeminded individuals in Tehran is not the same as an involuntary accumulation of poor residents in Paris. Similarly, the concept of an Open City cannot simply be transposed from Manhattan to the outskirts of Moscow.

That is why we say to the architectonic activists and urban design suffragettes, to the collectives of young Turkish and Moroccan artists, to the Green Iranians, to the landed libertines and the constructive conservatives, to the new community workers, the polder Muslims and the slum Samaritans, to the new master planners, the spatial acupuncturists and the digital futurologists who populate this school: the world – and the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment – is counting on you.

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More about Wouter Vanstiphout and the chair of Design as Politics on: http://designaspolitics.wordpress.com/