Real Estates: Life Without Debt (final proof)

REAL ESTATES

INTRODUCTION 15

NEOLIBERALISATION with Neil Brenner 27 SHADOW STATES with Keller Easterling 35 OUT OF THE JUNGLE Mario Carpo 41 A ROOM AGAINST OWNERSHIP Pier Vittorio Aureli 45 TUTTI PROPRIETARI Roberta Marcaccio 51 FOR ME, MYSELF AND I: ARCHITECTURE IN THE AGE OF SELF-REFLEXIVITY Peer Illner 57 THE SELF-DESTRUCTION MACHINE Wouter Vanstiphout 67 CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM Urban-Think Tank

75 MONEY : TIME : SPACE Sam Jacob 81 DERIVATIVE ARCHITECTURE Jack Self 97 SILVER BULLETS with Finn Williams 105 THE POLITICISATION OF DEBT Ross Exo Adams 113 UNREAL ESTATES Mark Campbell 121 WRESTLING THE RIGHT with Eyal Weizman 127 GETTING REAL Brett Steele 131 Biographies Supplement: REAL ESTATES ADDENDUM

What we’re waiting for is the countercounter-revolution, led by progressives who have learned the lessons from the age of neoliberalism and are unafraid to make use of its instruments in order to overthrow them. Plenty have started trying. Someone will get there in the end, and maybe by the end of the decade we will discover who. But it is unlikely to be anyone near a position of power right now.1 Real Estates

Housing crises are always popular subjects within the architectural discipline, in part because – whether one’s stance is critical or propositional – they make participants feel good about themselves: the academic fosters a reputation as a pragmatic intellectual and political theorist; the designer identifies a cornucopia of ‘problems’ to be ‘solved’ by ever more extreme typological, formal and increasingly social or financial experimentations. Even the term ‘crisis’ conveys a sense of urgency while simultaneously suggesting (falsely) that architects retain a social importance in shaping the urban realm. As spectators, architects never directly cause housing crises, which is why they also cannot hope to resolve them. They therefore pontificate, knowing they are doing so from positions of total security and blameless righteousness. Nonetheless, the reason why the discipline increasingly views itself as charged with ‘solving’ housing crises is not hard to discern – it is simply that, for several decades, central government has failed to outline any clear policies aimed at tackling artificial shortages, and architects are by nature fiercely entrepreneurial. What makes the assumption of responsibility problematic is some confusion within the profession about what ‘housing’ actually signifies. On the one hand, the home is seen as the traditional location of domestic bliss – as the fundamental and timeless seat of familial solidarity, unconditional love, safety, relaxation and social reproduction. Architects are taught that the design of the home must poetically represent the bonds of its inhabitants, their individual and collective identities.

On the other hand, architects are painfully aware that housing is always the product of some form of real estate exploitation (whether commissioned or speculative). The home is therefore subject to highly specific parameters that

Fulcrum Introduction

influence its form and function; most notably, its design must not diminish its value as an asset. This has never been truer, since the accelerating deconstruction of the welfare state has transformed the home into a fiscal necessity (without which pensionless retirees would have no financial safety net to support them in their prolonged old age). Today, the purchase of long-term debt contracts tied to property consti tutes – if not a universal obligation – then at least a popular compulsion. From whence this motivation originates is something to be established.

In order to reconcile the obvious discomfort of a space at once poetic and pecuniary (in other words, to render the home fungible) housing is reframed in legal terms as ‘real estate’. This abstraction permits the home to become a repository for forced savings or forced expenditure without compromising its aura of familiarity. There is only one important difference between owning and renting: in neolib eral moral terms, the former leads ultimately to redemption, while the latter to eternal damnation. The paths are the same, the terms of the debt broadly similar.

The percentage of housing in Britain that is architec turally designed is so low that riba doesn’t bother to record it. Further, since the vast majority of homes are designed ‘on spec’, it is impossible for the designers (whoever they are) to know very much about the potential inhabitants. Thus it is not the architect or even the building industry that decides on the form domestic life will take, or the terms of its reproduction, but rather the financial institutions, which bankroll the developers who promote a sophisticated language of metrics targeted at increasing fiscal efficiency. Accordingly, what is at stake in the architecture of the home is to rescue its use-value as a space of dwelling from

Real Estates

its exchange-value in relation to all other homes, present and future.

The mistake often made by architects is in thinking that housing crises primarily emerge from failures in the markets to correctly regulate the supply and demand of places for people to live. In fact, to truly apprehend the current housing crisis, we must recognise that situations like the strategic manufacture of domesticity and the indoctrination of home ownership as a general aspiration are agents of the same process: the pacification of the populace at large by their subjugation through conditions of debt, and the redistribu tion of their resources to an elite who exist beyond democracy, beyond transparency and beyond justice. On the whole, crises only serve to accelerate these processes.

Understanding the historical roots of the current crisis in Britain, and indeed the provenance of neoliberal housing crises in general, requires a conceptual framework capable of integrating a vast array of apparently disparate processes into a coherent structure. The methodology pursued in this book aims to do this by abstracting patterns found in specific cases until they demonstrate general theories. This first involves recognising that neoliberal economics operates at a variety of geospatial scales (in frequently contradictory ways), and in every social and political arena – for example, we can only speak of a neoliberal ideology of ownership when we understand how the function of the single room interpenetrates that of the special economic zone; or conversely, we can only make positive moral assertions about the governance of the city when we have scrutinised the ethics of personal credit.

Given the nature of the introduction so far – which has lambasted the architect as a powerless figure ignorant of his

Fulcrum Introduction

or her function as an agent of social injustice – it might seem hypocritical to then present a book about the problematics of real estate authored predominantly by architects. On the contrary, since the 2007 08 financial crash, which found its origins in the property markets, the built environment is not only incidental to global economic stability, it is instru mental. Accordingly, material equality, and thus the balance of social power, represents an inherently architectural problem – even if architects on the whole do not yet possess the tools required to formulate a meaningful response. This, in a sense, is how this collection of essays and interviews aims to distinguish itself with respect to other studies. Real Estates is less concerned with constructing a coherent historical metanarrative to neatly explain away a specific condition than it is with articulating the complex interrelationships of at once the whole and the part. This activity is founded on the proposition that a crisis in housing is necessarily a crisis of the juridical category of real estate, which implicates a crisis of democracy, representation, sovereignty and authority; a crisis of dwelling; and a crisis of faith in ownership.

This book was compiled as part of Fulcrum ’s ongoing research into the role of the built environment in the process of aggressive wealth redistribution apparently intrinsic to neoliberal or late-capitalist economics. Although conceived as a research project to underpin a specific architectural proposal (the Ingot), the broader intention of Real Estates was always to form a theoretical basis from within architecture to contribute to the coming counter-counter-revolution. Fulcrum is a collaborative work that anonymises and synthe sises a spectrum of ideological perspectives into one autho rial voice – a voice that since its inception has attempted to promote strategies for spatial justice. Fulcrum recognises the

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architect ‘is not near a position of power right now’ but is ‘unafraid’ to confront the instruments of neoliberalism in order to overthrow them. That confrontation begins with their detailed articulation.

1 David Runciman, ‘Counter-Counter-Revolution’, London Review of Books, vol 35, no 18 (26 September 2013).

Fulcrum Introduction

fulcrum The word ‘neoliberalism’ appears in the media with increasing frequency, yet it crops up in such diverse contexts that it’s not always easy to understand what is meant by the term. Are we to think of it as philosophy, as policy, as economic theory, ideology or moral doctrine?

neil brenner The way I grapple with neoliberalism is defined by the work I do as an urbanist, which entails trying to understand processes of regulatory restructuring at various spatial scales. Neoliberalism is connected to a broader phil osophical doctrine, which posits that markets are the best, most efficient basis for allocating social resources. It’s a radically anti-statist ideology, which insists that public and common institutions of any kind are inefficient and should be minimised or dismantled. There are other nuances and variations that flow from what regulatory goals the particular advocates of the neoliberal position promote. However, instead of understanding neoliberalism as a doctrine or worldview implemented in some pure form, it’s better to think of it as the ideological expression of a process of market-disciplinary regulatory restructuring – a process of neoliberalisation . In other words, neoliberalisation entails the constant attempt to promote a commodified, marketised, regulatory order.

f In an issue of Fulcrum , 1 the bbc ’s Paul Mason discussed the post-neoliberal state and what it might look like. Under pinning the exploration was an assumption that neoliberalism has ended. Your own work proposes that the death of neolib eralism is a fallacy…

nb The question of whether neoliberalism is dead depends on what you mean by ‘neoliberalism’. David Harvey made

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that point several years ago. Nik Theodore, Jamie Peck and myself 2 would argue it also depends what you mean by ‘dead’. The question of defining these categories has major impli cations for how you interpret what’s going on around us, in the wake of the 2007 09 global financial crisis (which is in some ways ongoing). When the crisis first started to ricochet around the world economy it prompted speculation that neoliberalism was over, and that we were in a post-neoliberal era. From our point of view, those positions hinge upon an untenably monolithic concept of neoliberalism.

If you think of neoliberalism as a total system, as a singular ideology, then a crisis like that, in which state institutions at both global and national scales have been aggressively mobilised to reconstitute markets, and to deal (albeit selectively) with serious market failures, then it obviously contradicts the neoliberal ideology. From that point of view, we’ve surpassed this moment of orthodoxy.

But from our point of view that’s an extremely simplistic, even naïve, idealisation of the past, present and future because neoliberalisation has never occurred in a pure form, and thus its crisis is also not likely to take the form of a ‘big bang’ style collapse. What was implemented in Pinochet’s Chile was totally different from Thatcher’s Britain, or Reagan’s us , post-socialist Poland, post-reform China, post-Katrina New Orleans or post-Saddam Iraq. Even if you start with a tenet with global provenance like ‘freemarkets, less state’, which is in some ways the essence of neoliberalism, when it collides with an inherited institu tional landscape (whether of Keynesianism, developmen talism, state socialism or otherwise), the outcomes are necessarily conditioned by specific contexts, institutional legacies and struggles.

Neil Brenner Neoliberalisation

Another important question relates to the timing and consequences of crisis. Neoliberalisation projects are deeply contradictory. They may aspire to unleash markets, to promote unrestrained economic growth. And sometimes they actually do this. For a little while, under Thatcher, property markets in the southeast of England boomed due to liberalisation policies. The problem, however, was that the strategy that was mobilised was not sustainable: the plan that produced the boom also produced a crisis. Neoliberalism can unleash quasi-volcanic bursts of growth, but those growth spurts are not sustainable because the marketisation tactics of neoliberalism do not create or sustain an institutional infrastructure to promote a stabilised, longer-term formation of growth. In this situation, you essentially have a crisis, manifested in housing-market polarisation and a speculative bubble that soon burst.

One could make a similar argument regarding the spec ulative strategies that underpinned the more recent sub-prime lending crisis in the us . The question is, what does one do with that particular situation of crisis? Continue to mobilise a neoliberal strategy, or abandon it? Interestingly, the domi nant strategy in response to the post 2007 crisis has been to intensify and recalibrate neoliberalisation strategies rather than abandon them. Neoliberal politics gains further momentum from its own crises by perennially unleashing regulatory failures and then using those failures to open up political and institutional space for additional rounds of neoliberalisation. In short, the global financial crisis is a colossal example of neoliberal strategies being morphed and reconstituted. This contradicts classic capitalism, which would imply abandoning them due to their own intrinsic crisis tendencies.

In many parts of the world, certainly not all, key basic principals remain intact: markets are the privileged basis for allocating resources; economic growth is the most funda mental concern around which other priorities of governance are pursued; the notion of a minimal state, modelled on corporate ideologies of lean management. These basic tenets have certainly not been abandoned, even though one might begin to question their efficacy in relation to the sorts of goals many politicians claim to be trying to pursue.

f The problem of efficiency is a significant one, as is the primacy of economic rhetoric within political discourse. In a sense, the ruling mandate of the uk ’s current coalition government is an economic technocratic one, based on the idea that they could reduce the deficit and reduce national debt, and that they would restore growth. Accordingly, growth has been considered the principal indicator of whether they are succeeding as a government. The inability of George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, to maintain the uk ’s triple-A bond rating caused a more substantial blow to the government’s international credibility than their deeply immoral austerity measures. This is because the common good is now deprecated below market confidence, at the level of national debate. The symbolic indicator of governmental robustness has weirdly become, not public approval, but the Bank of England’s quarterly growth figures…

nb The obsession with endless growth is not just the essence of neoliberalism, but also the essence of capitalism. Neolib eralism is just one strategy of regulation and one set of ideological justifications within a broader capitalist system. As Marx put it, capitalism is the endless pursuit of capital

Brenner Neoliberalisation

Neil

accumulation – growth for growth’s sake. Neoliberalisation is a set of strategies that takes that priority to an extreme consequence through the creation of accumulation-centric regulatory arrangements.

Obsessive concern with these quantitative growth indi cators completely brackets the question of the social, ecolog ical, moral consequences of particular growth strategies. Statistics hide the conditions of the labour market. You might have falling figures for unemployment, but you don’t have any indication of what that might mean in terms of whether people are being paid a living wage or not. Or how long they’re working, and what the benefits of those jobs are. Do they provide for adequate social reproduction, and do they manage the externalities of production, in terms of the environment and our urban landscapes? Those types of substantive considerations, which are fundamental matters for social and polit ical life, are effectively externalised within the neoliberal worldview, and the associated epistemological apparatus manifested in statistics on economic growth.

David Harvey has been eloquently making the point for some years about neoliberalism: it’s essentially a form of class struggle. We can debate about what that means; is it simply the financial class, or more specific classes of political and economic elites, that benefit from the neoliberal project of reorganising economies, state and society? It’s clearly a redistributive project, in which public resources and public insti tutions are harnessed in ways that systematically channel resources from society as a whole towards those that have ownership and discretionary control over investment decisions.

That has devastating consequences for people who are reliant on the wage for their own social reproduction, and it has also had devastating consequences for the planetary

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commons. Modern capitalism is not just contributing to, but intensifying, processes of environmental destruction. The neoliberal approach to dealing with this destruction is through market mechanisms, which has so far proven to be extremely ineffective – it simply uses the market to redis tribute the destruction (for instance, through carbon credits) rather than addressing systemic institutional causes). Mean while, there’s an ongoing social crisis in which continuing processes of dispossession across the global landscape are effectively enclosing people within commodified, monetised means of social reproduction.

f The endless pursuit of growth and the redistribution of wealth in society rests on the capitalist principle of indus trious investment. For neoliberalism, this is manifest as the logic of credit, or conversely debt. The key moral aspect is therefore the relationship between debtor and creditor, or the person who has the ability to create credit, and the person who is subjugated through debt. Neoliberalism essentially freezes time, by buying the future labour of the debtor. The creditor is therefore mainly interested in stability and certainty about the future, which leads to a process of social, political and ethical ossification.

nb There’s a whole dimension to this process that involves financialisation, or strategies to intensify profits through financial exchange rather than through the direct production of useful items. This is a parallel dimension of debt and credit on the individual level, but it’s important to mention. I agree with you that the status of debt in society has changed dras tically in recent times. This speaks to the ways in which neoliberal strategies involve certain projects of constructing

Neil Brenner

Neoliberalisation

new forms of individual subjectivity. Some scholars call it a kind of ‘regime of selfhood’.

f How do the built environment and property operate within this mechanism? Wage growth in Britain climbed fairly consistently up to the late 1970s and then flatlined. Real growth was replaced almost overnight by personal debt, itself fuelled by capital gains in the property market. House prices continued to go up, and based on fictional (or market-determined) values, people borrowed more and more. It was credit, or debt, that patched the difference between stagnating wages and ‘rising’ consumer purchasing power. I’d like to hear more about how your own work, in terms of its relation to the built environment, factors into this thinking.

nb In a recent seminar at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, we were talking about the notion of design. What does it mean to design? As designers, we may be experts at thinking about very specific elements of the built environment – interiors, exteriors, or even larger scales from the city and region to the megalopolis and territory – but we are also equipped in our intellectual practice to think more generally about the basic meaning of design, which is essentially: how do we organise life, and how do we organise the world? I encourage people who are interested in that question to scale it up to the very structures that govern the planet. In that respect, the world economy is a design problem.

For me, the starting point of design is the proposition that things could be otherwise. In other words, if you believe in design, you believe that things can be changed, and are changeable. Neoliberalism is a design principle that insists markets are the basic organisers of design; it promotes a

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kind of design monoculture, which is misrepresented at once as free choice and irresistible necessity.

My way into this line of questioning was through a book

I was writing called New State Spaces (Oxford, 2004), which was a study of the reorganisation of statehood and governance in Western Europe from 1950 2000. What I argued was that after the Second World War, during what we often call the Fordist-Keynesian period of capitalism, there was a very broad commitment across Western Europe to establishing spatial equity at a national scale. This was seen as the best way to promote macroeconomic growth, and it was quite a fascinating moment in the development of strategies to regu late the built environment at the national scale, because a whole range of strategies – from regional policies, infrastruc tural investments, nationalised industries, and different kinds of intra-national fiscal transfers – were mobilised to ensure that there was an adequate or relatively equal distri bution of population, and infrastructure, and investment, across the entire national territory.

From the 1970s, this commitment to nationally scaled equalisation was gradually abandoned, and during the 1980s, a series of market-driven, market-disciplinary strategies were mobilised to flip this idea on its head. At that time the consensus, which I would now argue is very much a neoliberal one, was that macroeconomic growth is best secured through spatial inequality at all scales. New policies were mobilised to strengthen the socioeconomic assets and infrastructural resources of those cities and city-regions that were already the most strategically central nodes of capitalism. The periph eries and margins were increasingly left to their own devices, and a neoliberal geography of inequality and polarisation thus superseded the equalising principles of the post-war order.

Neil Brenner Neoliberalisation

f Considering Britain’s post-war architectural development, this makes a lot of sense. There’s an almost ethical under pinning to movements such as brutalism, motivated by social equality and homogeneity, which is lacking thereafter. It’s also fascinating to think of localism or regionalism as contem poraneous with a new form of financial globalism. Does this open up the fragility to better subjugate smaller territories to progressive global neoliberalisation?

nb I would agree with your formulation, but I would not argue that this proliferation of localisms and regionalisms, including through the activities of national states, is the necessary spatial essence of neoliberalism. There are a number of different spatial and scalar geometries with which that process could be consistent.

It’s also possible to envision many other scenarios for the geography of this regulatory system, and the political geographies of neoliberalism are extremely contradictory. You sometimes have situations in which the regulatory struc ture of capitalism can simultaneously promote and destabilise neoliberal strategies. For example, when national governments aggressively promote a kind of nationally scaled version of the market economy, as under Thatcher. But Thatcherism is also an example of a moment in which local governance units – including the Greater London Council (glc) – were aggressively pursuing what might be called local socialisation. 3 This produces an oddly contradictory constellation with national neoliberalism coexisting with local neo-Keynsianism, neo-socialisation, etc. National deregulation is met – contra dictorily – with local reregulation, and so forth.

Even though it persisted into the Thatcher years, the glc was promoting a very different project of local (and societal)

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development. Certainly it was concerned with the specificity of London, but it was also very much about promoting labour retraining, and creating social goods, and transforming the built environment into a common space. As many radical British geographers have shown, quickly after Thatcher’s time the former local socialisms actually became the frontline of neoliberal governance. We saw the transformation of local governance in Britain, which began to promote an even more aggressive marketisation of the economy and society than Thatcher ever did at a national scale. 4

It’s thus important to develop a multiscalar conception of governance. So we can look at a city, look at a building, or a block or neighbourhood – however you demarcate the site – as being embedded both economically and politically within multiple scales of transformation and governance that mediate the reorganisation of the built environment. This example about the national-local is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the types of questions that get opened up when you frame the conditions this multiscalar way.

f What are the possibilities for change with these condi tions, presuming, that in articulating these things, the inten tion is to resist them…

nb For starters, we should debate this very question, a lot. Just by posing that question you’ve already opened up the possibility for thinking otherwise about what is and what could be. Whatever our role in the design world, we too often assume we have to work within certain narrowly defined, market-based parameters. And yet, around the world, archi tects and designers have long been viewed as visionary crea tors with an ability to produce extraordinary interventions

Neil Brenner

Neoliberalisation

in the built environment that may even point towards a different form of society. Surely it’s possible for students of design today to build upon that projective legacy in ways that destabilise and counteract the destructive and socially regressive forces of market fundamentalism.

It would be extraordinary if the great architects of our time were to begin to talk fundamentally about questions of social justice, wealth redistribution, democracy and ecological crises. This would be a contribution to the public agenda, to destabilising the continued hegemony of neoliberal ideology and market fundamentalism in the public domain.

Young architects need to realise that this is a profession that has long contained an untapped potential to promote radical forms of social change. As Henri Lefebvre recognised, unless you transform spatial organisation, no revolution can ever be possible. Neoliberalism has certainly transformed the space of the world in quite revolutionary ways during the past 30 years. Surely architects and designers can and must contribute to envisioning a very different form of the built environment, at every spatial scale, based on social needs, democratic empowerment and social justice rather than the unfettered rule of the commodity form.

1 Paul Mason, ‘The Recession’, Fulcrum 23 (12 October 2011).

2 Authors of Civic City Cahier 4: The Afterlives of Neoliberalism (Bedford Press, 2012).

3 I’m building on the work of a colleague Jamie Gough, a British geographer.

4 The works of Martin Jones, Gordon MacLeod, Mark Goodwin and Joe Painter are essential for understanding such topics.

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SHADOW STATES

fulcrum I’d like to understand how neoliberalism manifests itself internationally, in special economic zones, such as free trade zones, and other types of extrajudicial or extra-national environments. Is it fair to consider these spaces as a global economic infrastructure?

keller easterling Yes, I think so. This formula for world cities has become a kind of urban paradigm, probably the most highly contagious urban formula in the world right now. It seems that every country wants and thinks it needs global financial cities to signal its entry into the global markets. Because these spaces are often jurisdictionally independent from their host-nations they form a global network amongst themselves by offering one-stop entry into a foreign country. They also provide a known or expected set of economic incentives that may include cheap labour, tax holidays, foreign ownership of property permissions, lax labour and environmental regulation, or streamlined customs. While these special zones were intended to simply jumpstart the economies of developing countries, their conditions have now become the expectation – the addiction – for most global companies that operate within them.

f Is there an imperialist aspect to the way the West has profited from this structure?

with the rhetoric of relaxation and freedom, neoliberal economic trade and open doors. It led to exploitation of developing countries. At some point in the 1970s, the un and the World Bank determined that zones were sub-optimal economic instruments. They even thought the zone could be an economic time bomb, but by then it had already been adopted by China and the Middle East. Over the last 40 years, zone growth has been accelerating – from just a handful at midcentury to now thousands and thousands. The form of the zone has also morphed. It is no longer necessarily authored by the West, or by Washington consensus, or by the un , or anything like that.

The way the zone has been used in China and the Middle East is pretty interesting. It’s almost as if Dubai, awakened by oil after centuries of relative poverty, recognised the zone as a tool of its old entrepôt or pirate culture. Both China and Dubai made the zone into a complete city. It’s no longer a fenced-in warehouse compound; it’s everything. It is a double of the major cities, or perhaps more accurately it is a way of generating world cities.

f In addition to being an economic imperative during the twentieth century, neoliberalism also had a certain moral rhetoric about freedom and liberty, and optimisation of social organisation. Have those arguments necessarily carried through to its adoption in other parts of the world?

ke I’m not so sure I could say that now. It is true that during the post-war period it was definitely a unido -sponsored (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) format that the West was directing – holding seminars in Shannon and Kaohsiung to teach developing countries how to do this free-trade-zone thing. It was coming from the West

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ke We need to be careful about the way we use the word neoliberal. It can be useful to describe some things about a very specific chapter of thinking around the Thatcher-Reagan era. However, I need to qualify or question the word, espe cially as the word ‘liberal’ is being used in many different

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Keller Easterling Shadow States

contexts, and the way in which the term itself has so wildly oscillated from one thing to its complete opposite and then back again. I hesitate to use the word neoliberal when talking about the political reality of Dubai or China. Nonetheless, there are things about the term that make it durable, and the companies residing in many of these corporate enclaves do fit the profile we often give to the neoliberal.

f One of the terms I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is ‘shadow state’. It’s interesting you mention the pirate culture of Dubai – it’s almost as if these zones are the priva teers of the twentieth century.

ke Yes, that’s the way I’ve been characterising them – as the shadow the state needs, the shadow working for them. Clearly many countries recognise the need for a shadow or doppelganger to take advantage of different markets. As zones wildly morph, many countries are now (with a bit of laundering) talking about them as ‘new towns’. Major cities want to have their zone double for business that must be done outside the restrictions of the state, such as Navi Mumbai or New Songdo City, a satellite of Seoul.

f How do you situate your own architectural thinking in relation to these ideas?

ke The book I just finished, Extrastatecraft , was all about that. It didn’t seem enough to simply write an exposé, or to limit the work to reportage. During the course of my inves tigation people would ask me the sorts of questions you’re asking, and expect me to have answers, strategies – a way to get under the hood.

I have been thinking about this for a long time, beginning perhaps with my work on ‘spatial products’ – the repeatable formulas for making spaces that are the same anywhere in the world. The zone is arguably another one of these spatial products, but scaled up: it’s a formula for a city.

I’ve also been working on altering a habit of mind about design; we might extend the power and reach of our object forms with active forms. Spatial products are examples of active forms that, like a software, organise the components of the field and unfold with time-released powers. The zone, for instance, is an incredible multiplier. It’s contagious as a global urban form. And a multiplier is an active form – not a masterplan, but a carrier of some new technology or spatial protocol that acts like a germ within the population of zones. It’s been mutating so wildly in the last 40 years. What alternative politics might it carry?

That’s one way to address the question. Another way is simpler still. I’ve been spreading the rumour that some of the next zone entrepreneurs are questioning the enclave form. Why should it be an ex-urban form? Why not just map some of the special infrastructures and incentives back onto the city? Instead of taking the premium infrastructure out of the city, from Nairobi to Guadalajara or Moscow, why not return it to the city and thus return more benefit to the domestic economy?

As urbanists we know that the city manifests an envi ronment more robust and productive than the enclave. Given the zone’s ambition to swallow the city, perhaps it is the carrier of its own antidote. I don’t mean to say that the incentives of the zone should replace the workings of the city but that the city might dissolve some of the intractable lawless aspects of the zone.

Keller Easterling Shadow States

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f It seems that with every kind of proposition in which you play with these conditions there’s always the risk that it produces the exact opposite of the intended action.

ke The object-form for which we have such a good training is hugely important. We’re connoisseurs of object, outline, shape, and it can be politically powerful. But in my work

ke Absolutely, these are all socio-technical networks that change over time. The architect’s notion of the masterplan as singular prescription doesn’t seem to work here. Protocols with interdependent variables are better at regulating and accommodating change.

f Do you consider the city to be the key unit of scale in dealing with these issues?

I’m also trying to augment the powers of that object-form with active-forms of different kinds – remote controls, multi pliers and protocols, composed interdependent spatial vari ables. The political world could use these kinds of active-forms from us – from practitioners who know something about space and urbanity.

ke I don’t know. While it’s interesting to think about dissolving some of these enclaves, by mapping the zone onto the city, they might also dissolve for other reasons. In Kenya, for instance, the technologies of mobile telephony make the spatial segregation of the zone redundant as they bring airborne broadband, previously available only in the zone, to more remote towns and the villages.

f One of the other subjects Fulcrum has been pursuing is the agency of the architect. Alejandro Zaera-Polo 1 described a political apathy amongst his generation and a great will ingness to absolve themselves of a certain architectural responsibility or agency. By contrast, we have seen a rapid and radical politicisation of younger generations in recent years. Do you think it is possible for architects to invent a new form of agency or reclaim some of that which they perhaps have lost in the past?

Global financiers, consultants, managers and the like are speaking in the terms of econometrics, infometrics and other forms of technical languages. But no one is speaking in a language of spatial variables. They’re talking in technical formulas that have spatial consequences, but none of them are leading with spatial consequences. What the world needs from us is a type of form-making in another register, which can be part of the other global protocols deciding how our world works. Our knowledge can be incredibly useful, both our understanding of object-form and active-form, not as a science, but as an art.

1 Alejandro Zaera-Polo, ‘Imagining Architecture’, Fulcrum 40 (21 April 2012).

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Keller Easterling Shadow States

OUT OF THE JUNGLE

Indeterminacy has long been a staple of digital design and postmodern thinking. However, recent technical, cultural and political developments have added a new spin, a new emphasis and a new urgency to more traditional theories on the power that some systems use to adapt, self-organise, and even fight against the very category of design.

I can’t predict the future of digital design, however I can imagine it going in a few different directions: some I like, some I fear. In my opinion, indeterminacy as a tool of design, and not only of digital design, contains a lot of risks. A fear of indeterminacy might simply mean that we are not used to it. It might mean that we are retrograde, or that we are behind. It might also be a question of ideology.

There is something inherent and embedded in the tech nical logic of digitality 1 that pushes in the direction of increased indeterminacy. Perhaps this stems from the fact that every digital tool has parametric qualities – and parametricism inevitably implies the possibility of an open form of authorship. This also suggests the possibility of situations in which many people may interact with the same notation, as with crowdsourced entities like Wikipedia. In short, by using digital tools we unavoidably alter the status of authorship.

This condition presents both a risk and an opportunity. We may choose to resist it, but if you do try to fight a battle against the direction towards which the combined forces of economy and technology are headed, you’re likely to lose. Look at the music industry, which tried to combat file-sharing and illegal downloads. You can see how successful they were. As an ideology, the imperative of indeterminacy may be exploited, and it is possible this might be one of the most reactionary political agendas of our time. But it’s by no means an inevitable reality, and I would not advocate employing

the digital in this way. In either case, we must be aware of what is at stake, so we can act as responsible citizens.

As far as I’m concerned, designers should design and governments should govern. I do not think that objects are capable of self-organising, nor should society be allowed to self-organise. The epitome of the self-organised system is our conception of nature – it’s the jungle. But societies are not the jungle; societies are an alternative to the jungle. The city constitutes an alternative to the jungle precisely because we prefer to live in a system that is not self-organised, but organised and designed by us.

When we discuss indeterminacy in design we must be clear to distinguish whether we are referring to its role in the design process or in the activity of form-making. That is, are we talking about the management, or the style, of indeterminacy? We certainly think indeterminacy must have a certain look, and it’s an aesthetic that has been around for 30 years or more. I’m not only referring to the open work of art, but also the many digitally created objects designed by trendy architects, designed in the most meticulous ways. Somehow, people understand that indeterminacy is a pivotal characteristic of our epoch, and that employing it can be a good way to get attention. After all, it means you’re cele brating the power of nature, which is indisputably good. So the emergence of a corresponding visual style testifies that we’re all aware – at least the digitally intelligent avant-garde are aware – that indeterminacy is one of the crucial arguments of today’s digital design.

However, designers don’t like to be indeterminate in their design, paradoxically because they want to stylistically convey an idea of what they think the superior indeterminacy of nature actually looks like. This imitation of indeterminacy is exactly

Real Estates Mario Carpo Out of the Jungle

what is happening now. Some objects are pure deceptions, but many designers are actually victims of their own persua sion. They think they’re celebrating indeterminacy, but in order to produce its image in a built object they’re spending six months or more in front of a screen. Even the most appar ently random movement of the object is precisely calculated.

There is another possible misunderstanding here: build ings, once built, are unlikely to be indeterminate, or indeterminable. The open aspect of design is the process itself, which is pure information.

This is where the game may happen; the building can only represent this process in a metaphorical or stylistic way. In some architecture the process is reflected in the final structure. A number of our friends are creating objects that visualise a certain idea of indeterminacy, even though when the building is poured in reinforced concrete, the maximum adaptability is fairly fixed. Since buildings stand for a long time, the potential for indeterminacy extends to perhaps operable windows, movable partitions, or some technical system that can do automatic things. But these are gadgets, and this is not what’s at stake.

Indeterminacy as an ingredient, as a component of the design process, is an epistemological and ontological problem. It affects the nature of the author. Who makes what? What are the limits that you make? When the building is built, it may or may not represent the conundrums and the problem atics embedded in the process, which are purely notational. Reinforced concrete is ultimately not an indeterminate material; a sponge might be, although sponges are not very useful for making buildings.

The truly indeterminate building, one that preserves all the complexity of its parametric information, cannot be

constructed. Although I’m waiting for the moment when someone, claiming to have visited it, writes a beautiful review printed in an authoritative magazine, illustrated only with excellently forged digital renderings. Then some of us can privately say, ‘Ho, ho. That building was never built.’

1 As modernity denotes the era of the modern, ‘digitality’ does the same for that of the digital (ed).

Real Estates Mario Carpo Out of the Jungle

A ROOM AGAINST OWNERSHIP

PIER VITTORIO AURELI

Since the 2007 recession, an effort has been made – primarily by the left-wing media – to represent the evils of neoliberal economics as the greed of bankers and tycoons. We have become so familiar with images of luxurious condos or ‘iconic buildings’ that they now serve as emblems of the capitalist’s rapacious appetite for profit. However, I would argue that this condemnation – of luxury and greed as the generators of social inequality – could not be a more distorted view of the evils of real estate.

From its inception in the Middle Ages, real estate has meant the possibility of private property as something that is no longer private, but which has a social dimension; it is a form of property that affects the lives of others. Marx noted that the origin of private property is the origin of the possibility of owning the means of work and production. Owning a piece of land, a working tool, or even a house, was understood as having the potential to own the labour of people. You don’t claim ownership of an object unless it has economic value, which in turn only works if it can generate profit. Therefore, refusing the ownership of something means simply using it.

The concept of use is thus the opposite of the concept of property, as the Mendicant order of the Franciscans understood very well. A fundamental tenet of their rule was the refusal to own things as a way of refusing their potential economic value and thus the possibility of exploitation of others. Rather than owning a tunic, a house or a book, they would use these things. Use is here understood not as a value, but as the act of sharing things and thus as the supreme form of living together in common . The concept of use is thus the opposite of the concept of ownership. To use implies the temporary appropriation of an object by an individual. This object may be released after its use, and subsequently shared

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with others. In its simplicity, the concept of use implied for Francis a radical abdicatio iuris (abdication of juridical rights), since the whole modern conception of rights is fundamentally affected by the individual’s legal right to private property. As Giorgio Agamben has noted, Francis’ concept of altissima paupertas (poverty as a self-imposed and desired form of life) was inspired by the life of animals, in which the concept of ownership does not exist. On the contrary, real estate has its roots in appropriation – not for the sake of use, but for the sake of domination. By transforming the household, or even simple tools, into property, one not only invests them with economic value but also utilises them to exercise power over others who are dispossessed of these things.

In order to work effectively, property had to become an ideology – to which architecture has made a fundamental contribution. The invention of the villa and its most affordable version – the single-family house – has proven to be the most powerful ideological support for the naturalness of property. This typology for living was proposed as early as the sixteenth century, not only for patrician families (as in the case of Andrea Palladio’s villas), but also for merchants, artisans and poor peasants (as noted in Sebastiano Serlio’s Sixth Book on domestic architecture). Until the beginning of nineteenth century one of the major threats to social order was the presence in the city and countryside of countless vagabonds and homeless people. By forcing them to own their houses, the government would not only provide these people with a stable address, but would tie their interests to the economic system. Property, then, must be understood as a twofold condition that sanctions individuals to dominate others while tying these individuals to the more stable power structure – the legal, juridical and financial framework – that regulates

Pier Vittorio Aureli

A Room Against Ownership

the right to property. It is for this reason that the logic of property became more vicious and pervasive among the lower classes of society. Dispossessed people would have nothing to lose in revolting against the economic system that oppressed them if their living space had not been turned into their property.

Perhaps the most radical challenge to the idea of the house-as-property was put forth by the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer. Unlike many architects of his generation, he never designed apartments or single-family houses. Instead, Meyer’s major contribution to domestic architecture was the 1924 Co-op Zimmer, designed for a nomadic worker and reduced to one single room containing only the essentials: a bed, a cupboard, and a foldable chair. 1 Such a decision implies that, apart from for the minimum space for selfseclusion, the rest of the space – building and city – are consid ered as things to be shared with others.

Meyer may have wanted to design a contemporary version of a monk’s room, in which the lack of property (and thus the need to maintain such property by putting households into an economic system) realises the possibility of happiness. Co-op Zimmer reveals what could be seen as an architecture of use against the architecture of property. While the latter must always be the reflection of the identity of the owner, Meyer’s room is radically generic and anonymous. Precisely for this reason, it promises its inhabitant the possibility of a life liberated from the burden of household property.

1 In Meyer’s mock-up for the project, atop a miniature table sits a gramophone, whose curvacious form contrasts with the room’s bareness and introduces a sense of ‘superfluous’ possession within the existenz-minimum living condition. And it is precisely this small detail that manifests a sense of hedonist enjoyment in this modest but welcoming living space.

44 Real Estates

TUTTI PROPRIETARI

ROBERTA MARCACCIO

Selling the nuda proprietà (bare property) of a house means selling its ownership but not the right to use and derive profit from it (a right that remains the prerogative of the usufruc tuary 1 until his or her death). The scheme comes at a certain cost, which is why it is traditionally popular only amongst the elderly, who in the last years of their lives may choose to sell the bare ownership of their house without being forced to move out. Today, however, this financial formula is becoming increasingly popular amongst a younger demo graphic: in Italy, 35 per cent of those seeking to sell bare ownership of a property are under 50-years-old. The number of those in their 40s, 30s and even 20s is steadily rising.

The value of a bare property is determined by a number of factors relating to the age of the seller. The older the usufructuary, the less time he or she will occupy the property. Therefore, the selling price is higher and closer to the market value. Alternatively, a seller can accept a fixed-term 10-year usufruct, for which the property value is typically estimated at around 50 per cent of the going rate.

Daniele is an accountant, 38 and in debt. He has just sold his apartment in Milan for 55 per cent of its current value. In return, he is allowed to live there for the next ten years. During this time Daniele will be liable for all the expenses related to the property but if he wanted to he could move elsewhere and rent out the property. ‘For me it has been like drawing a line,’ he says. ‘I have used my property value to liquidate my debts, because I cannot lead my life if I am constantly worrying about what I owe; a life without debt is an asset in itself.’

For those looking to buy, bare ownership can be a great deal. The purchaser benefits from a reduced price and generous tax discounts (bare property does not appear on

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the buyer’s tax return). By contrast, this kind of sale is usually a last resort for the original owner. In Daniele’s case his debt had been transferred into a cessione del quinto – a loan paid back through enforced deduction of one-fifth of his paycheck. He, like many others, also realised that even if he retained full ownership of the property, he bore the risk that taxes would erode its remaining value.

Daniele sacrificed almost half the value of his home for a one-time liquidity hit. That, according to current calcula tions, equates to 30 years of paying for the house: from Tares (waste charges) to vat (on the various consumptions) and imu (the infamous property-tax on first homes that the technical government has recently introduced as an emergency measure against the crisis), to name only a few.

All these taxes on Daniele’s property would suggest that the Italian government had at some point injected a huge amount into real estate that they were trying to pay off. In reality, it put up little or no money at all, which is odd, and certainly casts a rather sinister light on the neoliberal ambi tion that aimed, and still aims, to make tutti proprietari (everyone a homeowner). This was a slogan commonplace during another era of crisis – one scarily statistically similar to the present – a slogan that the Italian state has consistently used to brainwash its citizens since the post-war era. 2

After the Second World War, housing was called upon to solve the labour problems magnified by the conflict: in 1949 the Piano Fanfani became into effect. The project was deployed with the explicit intent of boosting the economy and using public intervention to support private develop ment.3 The idea was to keep construction (and architecture to some extent) at the service of other sectors, and at a preindustrial, strictly manual level. This would allow for the

Roberta Marcaccio Tutti Proprietari

‘absorption’ of all those unskilled workers that had remained unemployed after the war, while simultaneously providing low-cost houses for the population.

Interestingly, the Piano Fanfani envisaged the possibility for occupiers to redeem their homes: in paying the equivalent of a rent (which was in essence a mortgage) over several decades (typically 30 40 years) eventually the coveted prop erty would become their own. At which point the owners would ‘only’ have the various aforementioned taxes left to pay.

While on the one hand there has been a constant pres sure to move towards widening home ownership, on the other, after the Piano Fanfani, the number of public and social housing initiatives have gradually become more exiguous (to the advantage of the private speculators). Housing prices have continued to grow due to the high levels of demand, despite the fact that since the mid-1970s, Italy (as well as the rest of the ‘developed world’) has registered stagnant, if not falling, average wages.

As a consequence, the purchasing power of the popu lation could no longer keep up with inflation, or the pressures imposed by the market. The solution to this has been central ised personal debt, administered by the financial sector, which principally took the form of mortgages.

It is probably sensible to take on debt when making an investment likely to yield a return in the long run. But the relationship linking the mortgage system and the property market actually pushes the debtor-consumer towards a completely different direction. As long as the property market continues to go up, then the ‘value’ of the property increases proportionally, and its owner is trusted to borrow more from the banks. He or she (the debtor-consumer) can thus take out new mortgages to satisfy all those desires – whether cars,

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tv s, holidays, etc – that one’s wage alone can no longer guarantee.

The problem is that the value of a property is determined by the market, which means that when bubbles burst, as in 2007 08, they can have devastating consequences – terri fying numbers of repossessions, huge repayments and so on – all caused by the fact that the debt on the property is higher than its value, and all burdening the property / mortgage owner who has contracted the debt.

It is clear that what hides behind the slogan tutti propri etari is not really the intention to make everyone a property owner, but rather a ‘mortgage owner’. The problem is not paying off debt, but rather the ultimate goal of producing an indebted individual, perpetually bound to repay his / her own debt.

Daniele’s decision to undersell his property might seem suicidal from a financial point of view, but it is significant that, for him, a life without debt is a type of asset. What he achieves is freedom, a fortune that will elude the majority of us. Most of western society in the twenty-first century will undoubtedly live out its life in a state of perpetual debt.

1 Usufruct is a right of enjoyment, enabling a holder to derive profit or benefit from property that either is titled to another person or held in common ownership, as long as the property is not damaged or destroyed.

2 Actually, the phrase began with Fascism, though without the same insistence.

3 Situated in areas far away from the urban centres, which were clearly less costly to purchase, these public interventions attracted the private-property speculators, which gradually reached and hemmed them in, taking advantage of the infrastructures created by the public operator.

Roberta

Marcaccio Tutti Proprietari

FOR ME, MYSELF AND I: ARCHITECTURE IN THE AGE OF SELF-REFLEXIVITY

Recent years have seen widespread and far-reaching changes in western governments’ approaches to housing and infra structure. Formerly considered a valuable public good, the neoliberal turn of the 1980s has shifted both domains distinctly towards privatisation; either through the direct sale of council property (housing) or through the introduc tion of public-private partnership schemes (infrastructure).

There have been two great moments of ‘crisification’ in which the demise of public housing has been confronted by a labour crisis in architecture – one in the early 1980s and one today. Both eras reveal a story of the increasing integra tion of the architect into the hordes of precarious service workers – a ‘proletarianisation’ of the architect that creates the conditions for a political reconsideration of architectural practice (building) as essentially connected to dwelling.

With the rise of Thatcherism in 1980s Britain, the ideal of affordable public housing that had been a primary polit ical concern of post-war governments came to a radical end. The early 1950s had seen architects appointed en masse to design large-scale projects – projects intended to house exponentially growing urban populations in clean and healthy conditions. However, Thatcher’s privatisation of social housing sounded the death knell for such citywide schemes and led to a generalisation of private debt through the exten sion of mortgages. It also inadvertently reformulated the social role of the architect. Once employed as an informed planner who carried out expert operations in an objective and knowledgeable way, the architect as socio-political designer became increasingly obsolete. The neoliberal turn inscribed architecture in a genealogy of menial design labours that, disconnected from their social context, perform an endless variation on style. Today, architects are expected

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to inexpensively provide aesthetic form while the building and planning process is relegated to the developer. In this context, ‘the architect – often no longer needed – has been reduced to the one who places ornamental cherries on a finished cake.’ 1

In this regard, architects suffer as much from the neolib eral restructuring of the creative industries as designers, academics and artists. Grossly indebted upon graduation from increasingly expensive art schools, they start as unpaid interns, working for free in exchange for a big architect’s name on their cv . Later, work is often freelance or projectbased and without regular income. Even if contractually employed in an office, working overtime without remuneration and having little or no job protection is customary. In this context, individual workers appear as the atomised individuals Franco Berardi has classified as the ‘cognitariat’. 2 Cognitarians encounter each other as competitors on a fierce market and hence rarely unionise or form alliances to campaign for better working conditions. In the absence of this struggle for recognition, the relation between employer and worker increasingly appears like Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, only without the dialectic. What remains is simply the lordship of the master-architect and the bondage of the employee.

In this generalised state of precarity, the distance that once separated the architect (as provider of social housing) from the industrial worker (as patron of social housing) disappears. It is now the architect herself who, under constant threat of pauperisation, will most likely qualify for social housing at some point in her career. This is where our present perversely concludes the neoliberal restructuring of the 1980s. However, the fact that architects are today building

Peer Illner

For Me, Myself and I

council blocks they might inhabit themselves adds a crucial element of self-reflexivity to the design process. To stick with the Hegelian register; doesn’t this equation of the architect and the ‘common worker’ offer the potential for self-consciousness to occur? If in the question of social housing, today’s architects are themselves put at stake, they must encounter building as fundamentally related to dwelling. This opens up an avenue for rethinking the entire field of architecture.

Already in the 1951 essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, Martin Heidegger had critiqued the division of labour pertaining to contemporary construction, claiming that in the differentiation of the architectural field into client, developer, architect and builder, the original meaning of buildingas-dwelling had been lost. Rather than an activity among others, dwelling for Heidegger designates our primary onto logical embeddedness in the world or ‘the manner in which we humans are on the earth.’ 3

Thus dwelling is not a result of building as we customarily understand it. Dwelling is not enabled by architecture. Rather, building and dwelling are coextensive, which means that the notion of building-as-constructing must be completely relativised. Rather than the instrumental execution of a prior plan, building has to be thought of as both enabled by our primary spatial embeddedness, and at the same time enabling new spaces and spatial uses. Heidegger’s example here is the bridge that, rather than connecting two predefined shores, is the device that enables them to be understood as shores in the first place. For Heidegger, the good architect is someone fundamentally attuned to the space in which we find ourselves, and to the uses and connections its inhabitants have established with it. Rather than detached and objective,

Real Estates

she is essentially self-reflexive, and conceptualises her activity starting from her relation to the spatial world.

If Heidegger saw the nightmarish dimension in the modern process of rationalisation, today we have gone even further. Our world-relation appears to us as commodified and without a pure ontological opening from which proper dwelling would still be conceivable. Relating Heidegger’s equation of building and dwelling to Marx’s account of the class relation, we could argue however that dwelling becomes thinkable again at the point of the complete subsumption of life under capital. When architects are forced to abandon their abstract position as planners, and enter the brute condi tions of urban survival, there is a chance for a prise de conscience ; rather than executing client orders, the architect could start questioning her relation to building and dwelling.

In a lecture on human freedom, Heidegger had claimed that only existential danger could trigger the Angriffscharakter (challenging character) necessary for a fundamental critique. 4 In this sense, the sudden existential stake of the architect in relation to housing, the very material risk of impoverishment could function as the beginning of a struggle for emancipation.

The fact that the 2008 financial crisis was a housing crisis points to the acuteness of addressing capitalism’s systemic incapacity to provide decent living conditions in the world. At times when, as Owen Hatherley has remarked, ‘council housing is used as shorthand for general lumpen proletarian venality and violence,’ 5 the invention of a political imaginary rooted in a new form of public dwelling becomes increasingly pressing. Today’s architectural labour crisis might sow the seeds for such a collective emancipation precisely where building is taught and takes place, in the profession of architecture itself.

Peer Illner

For Me, Myself and I

1 Marcus Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009) 29.

2 Franco ‘Biffo’ Berardi, The Soul at Work (Los Angeles, ca : Semiotext(e), 2009) 85.

3 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York, ny : Harper Perennial 1971) 145.

4 Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Human Freedom (London: Continuum, 2005) 91.

5 Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism (Hampshire: Zero Books, 2005) 8.

Real Estates

THE SELFDESTRUCTION MACHINE

Our Structural system [for the Stadskantoor]… enables us to improvise and to liberate the ground almost in its entirety, to interpret the City Shop (Stadswinkel) as an unencumbered public space, in which we arrange the interaction between citizen and city in a dignified, spacious urban landscape, with an almost ‘Roman’ scale and materiality.

Rem Koolhaas

Real Estates

oma ’s winning proposal for the 2009 Stadskantoor competition (Addendum Figure A) eloquently reiterates the modernist link between transparency and democracy. As a cloud made up of homes and offices, the proposed building was to rise up in a formless accumulation of transparent and translucent cubes, creating a free zone at ground level, and dissolving the boundary between city and structure. This zone housed the most important component of the project: the City Shop. Instead of forcing citizens to humbly enter through a back door at city hall, the City Shop would have permitted them to effortlessly engage with governance in a way that was visible and accessible – a relationship between govern ment and public that remains an ideal worth striving for (and one that certainly justifies a complex and expensive project). Unfortunately, once construction work began on Stadskantoor, the City of Rotterdam realised it could no longer afford the City Shop. The urban plaza is now set to be filled with either very large stores or a strip mall. Either option will have disastrous consequences for the architecture.

Upon completion, the building will constitute the ruins of its initial concept, serving only as a reminder of a time that once cherished the illusion of a confident public sector. The ‘Roman’ scale to which Rem Koolhaas referred in his statement would thus indeed be realised – a crumbled, ancient forum amidst an inner city dominated by traffic and shops. The story of the Stadskantoor is an example of the instability of today’s public sector, as well as of the problems of adapting architecture to suit it.

A closer examination of the reasons why so many munic ipalities are no longer able to find the funds to complete their agoras and forums reveals something disturbing: for more than a decade, the regular revenues from municipal taxes

Wouter Vanstiphout The Self-Destruction Machine

and governmental grants have been insufficient at carrying out even basic tasks. For staffing libraries and developing cultural programmes, as well as for constructing and main taining parks, boulevards, pavements and squares, munic ipalities relied upon revenues from land-development activities, some of which required risky investments.

As a result, municipalities have become dependent upon growth and capital appreciation in order to carry out their public duties. They are eager to participate in major projects, under the assumption that the value of commercial programmes will increase, thereby making it possible to pay for the unprofitable – ie, public programmes.

In many different ways, through many different channels, and at many different scales over the past decade, the daily maintenance of the welfare state was made dependent upon a perpetuum mobile of appreciation through growth. 1 What began with a financial boon for the municipality – involving housing construction projects that had to be built anyway to meet demand – ended with projects that became ends in themselves. And eventually, the financial windfalls became structural parts of the budget. Construction was necessary to keep the mechanism working, even without an immediate need, and even when there was actually no money for it. However, borrowing was always an option.

The perpetuum mobile also had a substantial impact on architecture. The past 15 years have seen the emergence of an entire generation of buildings whose character, scale and programme were not determined by new answers to contem porary questions, but by the manner in which they were financed. The many combinations of cultural or other public facilities with homes and offices are products of ‘circular accounting’, or the distribution of risk amongst various

Real Estates

partners in which the role of the architect is similar to that of an insurance consultant – enticing investors with ingen ious combinations of office storeys guaranteed to generate money for the cultural facility located on the ground floor (a cultural facility relocated from the centre of the city by the municipality in order to make an outlying area more attractive to residents).

The architect / insurance advisor does more than simply assemble the package; he or she creates the illusion of a natural state to surround it. A building without an inner purpose, whether functional or cultural, must be retroactively provided with an external necessity. The image of the building is random, with ‘recognisability’ and reproducibility as the only criteria. It becomes more complicated, however, when a major public programme is located within the building. Such cases must be retroactively provided with an image of ‘the public’. Buildings must radiate the impression that they are there for the city, leading to an appliqué of architectural forms that suggest urban embeddedness.

A metaphor for the state of the public sector is the type of unclear and complex architectural and urban project that brings together too many interests in a way that has nothing to do with the real question. The interweaving of public and private interests, even to the point of making the public dependent, is bad for the legitimacy of the government. The municipal policy has thus become the sum of deals and structures over which there is little possibility of democratic control and that the citizens do not understand.

Moreover, the government has lost its dignity as the only party with democratic legitimacy, with which it must justify its monopoly on money, tax levies and even the use of force.

Wouter Vanstiphout

The Self-Destruction Machine

One underrated obligation of the government involves its predictability and reliability: it must always be there to perform its core duties, for everyone and in equal measure. This kind of predictability and reliability is placed in jeop ardy when some key duties must be funded from profits generated by land speculation.

The most important danger for the evolving government, however, lies in the fact that it is difficult to think about the future of the city, determine which priorities should be set and what we should share with each other in an open and collective manner. If the city is bound, hand and foot, by contracts with private parties, then with whom are citizens actually speaking, when talking to councillors, aldermen and officials about the future of cities and towns? By exten sion, if architects say that their projects are good for the city – enhancing life on the street, creating a unique identity – on whose behalf are they making these claims, and what is the exact value of their words?

It is my belief that the architectural profession is primarily a public profession, and that the primary responsibility of the architect is not one of representing the interest of the client, but representing the public interest. Moreover, the profession has kept deep ties with the government for centuries – beginning with the construction of palaces for kings and emperors, proceeding through to the infrastructural design of the entire welfare state, and arriving at the public buildings that continue to be highly valued in architectural portfolios. These ties distinguish architecture from other design disciplines.

At the same time we can observe how the architectural profession has suffered – in commercial terms and, even more severely, in substantive terms – due to the fatal

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intertwining (or more accurately, the fusion) of the public with the private. More specifically, architecture has played an important role in making the public interest dependent upon financial appreciation, particularly through its central role in real estate deals. Over the past 15 years, this has led to enormous investments in the quality of the field. Archi tects, and all of us, have obviously benefited: without the perpetuum mobile , we would be deprived of innumerable cultural buildings, town halls, luxurious public areas, dras tically restructured working-class neighbourhoods, and thousands of architects would have otherwise never had a job, or may never have even chosen the profession.

But now the perpetuum mobile is jammed. What we are currently experiencing might later be understood as the violent self-destruction of the insane machine we have built ourselves – using bits and pieces from public tasks, the private sector, speculation and the financial industry – that we thought would run on forever. We now hear about municipalities that are being forced to halt expensive construction projects, and about how negative returns on land development from these works are impinging upon the cities’ ability to provide for their own citizens. Many municipalities are tens of millions in the red with projects once expected to yield millions.

We are also hearing dramatic messages about how the profits of architectural firms have been cut in half, even as the number of firms has doubled. This doubling obviously reflects all of the architects who lost their jobs and started their own firms. In the midst of this misery, some munici palities continue to carry out monumental semi-public projects, which, similar to the banks that failed during the first years of the crisis, were labelled ‘too big to fail’. Now the fusion of various financial and political levels has grown

Wouter Vanstiphout

The Self-Destruction Machine

so dense and inscrutable that municipalities do not even know how to stop, despite the fact that continuing means making drastic cutbacks on basic amenities.

The construction industry is desperately looking for a way to get the perpetuum mobile up and running again. But what if this machine is simply beyond repair? What if the ‘business model’ with which we have managed to build and maintain the welfare state no longer exists? Perhaps we are not going through a rough patch and are instead experiencing a seismic shift that is far from complete – one that could leave us with a world that looks very different, but which also offers many new opportunities for our orphaned citizens and, indeed, our orphaned architects. What would we like to see in this new world? More specifically, what role might architects and their clients play in it?

The English political thinker and theologian Philip Blond has argued that public tasks, like education, care for the poor and sick, and social housing have actually undergone two consecutive operations by the British government. First, the post-war Labour governments extracted them from community organisations, scaled them up, professionalised them and bound them completely to the state. This led to public university education, the National Health Service and a massive production of housing (designed, constructed and rented by the state).

Precisely because all of these institutions were no longer dependent upon community organisations, but on the state, Thatcherite conservatives were able to throw these services en masse to the markets. As it turns out, this has made them even further removed from the influence and needs of the citizens than the bureaucratised institutions had been under the previous regime.

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But let’s assume this structure is now definitively collapsing. What would we like to see in its place? More specifically, what role might architects and their clients play within it?

In the avant-garde tradition, I think we must take a giant leap beyond the present to an idealised past – made up of a strong and diverse society – where we can draw the inspira tion for our future vision. We can point to the first garden cities envisioned by Ebenezer Howard, built and developed completely outside of the government. The suffragettes, garden-city prophets, theosophists, modernists and montes sorians could provide us with an entire arsenal of new ideas, images, techniques and spaces. It would not be until after the Second World War that they would be encapsulated by governance and implemented on a large scale, using the monopolies possessed by the state. The true invention of the modern welfare state really took place without the state.

We should start our search by looking for the social movements – the anarchist, political or spiritual initiatives of that time. We should seek the new prophet-designers, politically engaged but disillusioned by politics. But you have obvi ously heard this tale before: the romance of the do-it-yourself architects, the temporary, the pop-up, the bottom-up, ‘with the people’ and without the government, all preferably incor porating some form of sustainable ‘urban farming’.

The real task lies elsewhere.

What form and character, what scale and materiality will the democratic, emancipated and honest futures have?

Urban projects are currently so dominated by the complexity of the political and the financial process that this has become a major obstacle to an effective collective and public debate on the future of the city. Citizens are brought

Wouter Vanstiphout

The Self-Destruction Machine

in only when an existing long-term project suddenly needs to gain a hint of participation or democratisation.

We need a government apparatus that can cut itself loose from conflicts of interests with private concerns (possibly the most painful surgery ever). One that can demolish business models based on growth. Once ‘clean’, this government will have to focus on the radical clean up of civil society, making it as transparent and accessible as possible to citizens and their initiatives.

It will also be necessary to realise the public aspect by creating facts on the ground: concrete, realistic, well-embedded spaces and initiatives that triumph over the status quo through the tremendous efforts of a group of pioneers. The young generations of architects obviously play a crucial role in this regard, most likely without any clients at all. They prove that it can be done, that it is not impossible, unsafe, unprofitable, implausible or foolish.

For architects, as well as for ordinary citizens, the greatest challenge in the coming years will be to develop radically different and specific places and programmes at the same time, transcending our differences in the process and protecting ourselves from the mechanisms of trivialisation, alienation and exploitation.

1 The perpetuum mobile, or perpetual motion machine, is a utopian mechanism able to produce an infinite flow of energy without requiring any energy itself.

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CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM

The most prevalent contemporary model of social housing – government-owned and constructed spaces that are rented to the public at affordable, subsidised rates – is only one of many possible approaches to providing dwellings for those members of society excluded from traditional property markets. In the vein of alternative social housing, we see the possibility for government to help establish conditions for the construction of homes without actually providing the home itself. We feel the key is balancing self-determination with top-down planning.

We have spent more than a decade working in informal settlements around the world, researching and experimenting within communities that have developed outside of the traditional housing market – circumventing or hybridising the usual methods of both private sale and public housing. Based on what we have consistently observed on the ground, we approach the central question of how to reconcile or find sustainable compromise between social housing and neolib eralism through historical examples and personal projects.

Ironically, we take inspiration from one of the fathers of neoliberal thought, Milton Friedman.

In his book, Capitalism and Freedom , Friedman argues: ‘If funds are to be used to help the poor, would they not be used more effectively by being given in cash rather than in kind? Surely, the families being helped would rather have a given sum in cash than in the form of housing. They could themselves spend the money on housing if they so desired.’ 1

Here Friedman suggests that it is paternalistic for the state to decide that housing presents a greater need above all else, and that the adult citizen / consumer cannot be trusted to choose housing over other things he or she needs. If the argument is flipped, and the responsible adult chooses

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housing, why should the government dictate (beyond safety and environmental standards) what elements are necessary for a house? In this way, the neoliberal emphasis on selfdetermination tacitly supports the freedom of individuals to construct their own dwellings according to their needs and desires. And in reality, this freedom is usually only possible with state-sponsored support for basic infrastruc tural utilities and systems.

The task of creating, constructing and administrating social housing must be balanced with infrastructural input by the government, as well as innovative development by the individual property / homeowners or private collectives. 2 Contrary to the suggestions made by the economist Hernando de Soto, we do not believe that freely distributing property rights is a sustainable, productive model; instead, focus should be placed on infrastructure as the physical foundation of self-determination and local-scale democracy as the foun dation for fair real estate markets.

We believe in the creation of a limited amount of government-led planning (be it through the social contract of zoning or the built environment via infrastructure) that applies to an area in which people can establish property rights and are free to construct their own living spaces to the specifications necessary to meet both their essential needs and their financial constraints. In a world comprising many post-socialist cities (with free market elements), and many post-capitalist cities (with elements of social welfare), we are constantly searching for the intersections, the hybridity that arises when ideology is complicated by reality. Over the years we have discovered architectural manifestations of attempts to find this ‘hybridity’. Each presents a self-organised alternative to the traditional housing market. There is no

Urban-Think Tank Capitalism and Freedom

single right typology or policy when it comes to social housing, but we do believe there are strategies and processes for arriving at a successful project, which can be achieved by looking into the past (and especially instances of incre mental development).

One project that offers an alternative scenario to the status quo is the massive United Nations-funded, Lima-based Programa Experimental de Vivienda (previ ) project, launched in 1968, organised and designed by the British architect Peter Land. previ quickly became the global zenith of social housing experimentation.

Originating with Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino House proto type and the landscape designs of Leberecht Migge in 1920s 30s Berlin, Europeans brought the principle of piece meal growth across the Atlantic when they immigrated to the us before and during the Second World War. By the early 1950s, the strategy had spread, and architects and planners across Latin America were exploring the possibilities that incremental development offered to financially constrained local governments facing housing shortages.

One of the hotbeds for such activity was Lima, Peru, where, due to a large portion of early twentieth-century post-colonial urban growth, large swathes of favelas (referred to locally as barriadas) developed. The 1950s and 60s in Peru were marked by a variety of progressive, government-sponsored initiatives to address the sprawling housing needs of this explosive population growth. previ was the answer.

The architect, Peter Land, had been seeking new models of social housing and invited 13 Peruvian architects and 13 more international architects to design low-rise, high-density homes on the dusty periphery of Lima. Renowned firms such as those of Aldo van Eyk, Fumihiko Maki, Charles Correa,

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George Candalis, Atelier 5 and James Stirling participated. Land framed previ as a competition to determine effective home design and construction strategies for the world’s urban poor, with a focus on prefab construction processes, pedes trian and public-oriented urban design and incrementally modifiable architecture. While a committee of international judges awarded six designs as official winners, 24 of the proposed typologies were also accepted for construction.

The well-intentioned plan was never fulfilled. As a consequence of shifting housing policy priorities following the military coup and regime change of 1969, the government ended previ ’s development in 1974, after only 500 units were constructed – a third of the initial target. Despite un backing and the publicity generated by a collaborative effort amongst globally elite architects, previ quietly disappeared from the maps of urban ambition. But the 2008 release of a new book on previ , titled Time Builds! , by trio of young Chilean architecture students – Fernando Garcia-Huidobro, Diego Torres Torriti and Nicolas Tugas – created small ripples of interest in the design community. Urban-Think Tank visited previ to see first-hand how the project evolved.

In its maturation, previ has found success, though perhaps not in the way any of its creators intended. Through organic and incremental growth, the urban settlement has transformed from a formal development into an informal, middle-class neighbourhood. While the original facades of previ ’s single-storey units are occasionally discernable beneath decades of bright coats of paint, most of the original houses have sprouted second and third floors with myriad renovations and ingenious appendages common to favela structures. Sidewalks have been partially appropriated for patios and gardens; interior and exterior staircases have been

Urban-Think Tank Capitalism and Freedom

inserted; windows have been added and removed. The community is safer, quieter and more socially vibrant than the surrounding urban sprawl, and its infrastructure has required little public investment due its original quality. It is, in many ways, a highly functional hybrid between many of Lima’s barriadas and lower-middle-class neighbourhoods.

Another example in the vein of incremental construc tion by communities existing outside the traditional housing market is Torre David. 3 The 45-storey office tower in Caracas, designed by the distinguished Venezuelan archi tect Enrique Gómez, was almost complete when it was abandoned following the death of its developer, David Brillembourg, in 1993, and the collapse of the Venezuelan economy the following year. In 2007 it was occupied by groups from surrounding barrios , and today, it is the improvised home of a community of more than 750 families living in an extra-legal and tenuous occupation that some have called a vertical slum.

Together with collaborators in the eth Institute of Technology in Architecture, the u-tt Films team and the photographer Iwan Baan, our group spent more than a year and a half studying the physical and social organisation of this ruin-turned-home. Where some see only a failed devel opment project, we see a laboratory for the study of the informal. Torre David presents a rare opportunity to study the large-scale adaptive reuse and continual modification of a space that was never intended as housing. The property itself is technically owned by the government (seized from the private developer when the financial group supporting the construction collapsed), which raises even more questions about the intersection and definition of government socialhousing policies and neoliberal markets.

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Classical modernism views favelas as expressions of a pre-architecture construct, suggesting that such entities exist in some partially evolved or ‘backward’ state. However, outside the realm of formal modern and postmodern mandates, incremental development in the south continues to affect cities in ways that cannot be ignored. Informal zones command attention and respect not only for their scale, but also for the integrity of their organic, creative and resourceful design.

Informal development arises from population-wide needs, which can occur at different points during the construction process. u-tt seeks to intervene and participate in the process, adding formal elements where the informal hasn’t sufficed, providing room for the informal where formal structures haven’t adequately provided for the community.

Describing the favela-dweller as a member of a ‘marginalised community’ may connote economic and social detach ment, but it also signifies the potential for operating on the borders of established thought, innovating outside the confines of orthodoxy. Marginalised communities build themselves, both physically and philosophically. The long conversation regarding the right to the city speaks to the concerns of favela dwellers. Somewhere between Lefabrvre and David Harvey’s perspectives on the subject – one straddling the discourse of self-determined, everyday life, and the other analysing oppres sive and liberating structural processes – lies a framework for viewing incremental development.

Incremental development is not a solve-all design element, but it is surely one of the more important and commonly overlooked elements missing from contemporary housing solutions. While its application is most dramatically necessary in many of the impoverished urban zones of South and Central America, its elegant response to the

Urban-Think Tank Capitalism and Freedom

human need for renovations, growth and improvisation is widely applicable.

Social housing’s aim should be to create contradictions within neoliberal housing policies and markets that do not result in failures for the citizens or ‘customers’, but rather subvert the profit-motives within the market itself. The idea here is to carve out a space in which society’s un-housed may find housing through the well-lubricated cogs of the system, and then change the organisation of those cogs over time, and with collective-determinism.

1 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition, (Chicago, il : University of Chicago Press, 2009) 178.

2 We do not align ourselves with any ideology or particular ideologue. We’re inspired by some systems of thought but ultimately informed by what we observe on the ground.

3 Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2012).

MONEY : TIME : SPACE

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We can think of money as a kind of potential energy. Not a natural form of energy governed by fundamental laws of physics, but something else: an imaginary human value that encompasses power, value and opportunity. Newton’s Law of the conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it simply changes from one form to another. Money-energy is different in that it can be created and destroyed. It’s an imaginary form of energy, despite its very real effects on the world.

Like potential energy, money can be stored. It can be held and released from various states: cash, bonds, shares and electronic data, and it can also be stored as architecture. In this sense, cities are simply dense accumulations of capital that also produce more power, or more of themselves, as they accumulate value.

Time and money are also linked; time, as Benjamin Franklin wrote, is money, and it’s certainly an economic resource. The more a factory can produce in a given time span, the greater its productivity and economy. Interest and inflation can modify money’s time-value – increasing by accruing interest, or decreasing because inflation has pushed up the value of other things relative to it.

Money operates at global, national and local spatial scales – coins and notes pass from one hand to another, but at larger scales, the exchange transcends protocol, as money becomes liquid capital that flows through its own economic space created by laws, customs, trading and politics. It also often exceeds the jurisdiction of these entities. Money does not just occupy geography; it has a geography of its own. This transformation of space is the basis of city production. We can map how economics alter the given grounds of geography, and we can feel the force of money exerted within

the physical spaces we inhabit. However, money’s transformation of time is not as apparent.

Think of a simple financial product – a loan, for example, brings money from the future into the present. The sum that arrives in the present is delivered through a wormhole constructed out of time and risk – essentially the parameters that determine the value of repayments (or the fuel spent to transport money through time). But just like space, capital can congeal in time as it is sucked out of the future and leveraged by the past.

Deregulated finance freed money from time and space. What once emerged from raw materials, labour and fixed locations became alchemical: suddenly, money could emerge from itself. In the 1980s, it became a manmade substance that could exceed the possibilities of quantum physics. Even ‘Big Bang’ – the term used to describe the moment the London securities market was deregulated – echoes money’s cosmo logical dimension. Once freed from the ties that bound it, money possessed the ability to affect and manipulate those very constraints – to shape space and alter the flow of time.

But with this, one can read an end-version of history in 1980s architecture. Rather than functioning as a form of social and technological progress, western building projects suffered an historical prolapse as classical architecture flowed back into the mainstream. Reanimated originally as a postmodernist counter-cultural device, it arguably became the default style of Reaganomics. From at&t to London’s Docklands, the historicist turn had allies at the very centre of financialisation.

With the implosion of finance and classicism, historical value was sucked into the present, ready to be exploited as though it were an actual resource. As a result, strategies of

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Sam Jacob Money : Time : Space

nostalgia have become so complex that algorithms distort your own images, making them appear with instamatic halos – which we can understand as the edge of the future manu facturing images of the past in the present.

More than half of all European mobile consumers gain access to the technology through contracts (even more in the us ). Far from being ours to own, the handset is a gateway to a fiscal wormhole, siphoning money from our futures and pouring it into the dark glass rectangle of the present. You can most likely only instagram because of the financial plan wrapped up in your phone. Therefore, nostalgic products such as Instagram are themselves only made possible by time shifting. The past and the future have been bent backwards on each other to enable the fake 70s glow of the selfie you’re currently posting.

The human space-time continuum has been riddled with wormholes created by money’s own energy. Fashion cycles might be explained by Klein bottle-shaped rifts, in which time is a loop through which particular aesthetics endlessly circle.

As any trip to hipster locales reveals, history has not exactly ended but has become amplified and overlaid. A handlebar mustache sits alongside space-age retroness. Cold War chic dresses as though it were the landed gentry. Low-fi implements, such as fixed-gear bikes and ukuleles, are produced with digital technologies. The texture of time itself has been worked over by the energies of finacialisation, whipped into something overly rich and super thick, a landscape through which we can traverse. It is capital’s accumu lation of time, just as cities are accumulations of capital compressed in space.

Cities and architecture are fully subject to this finan cialised space-time continuum. Fuelled by debt, the

manifestation of tomorrow’s money today, secured by value created in the past, architects – often subconsciously – mani fest this aesthetically. Neo-modern, minimalist-Georgian, vernacular-techno, eco-spaceage, digital-constructivist are just some of the debt-enabled time-shifting energy forms that we commonly describe as contemporary architecture.

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Sam Jacob Money : Time : Space

DERIVATIVE ARCHITECTURE

If debt is indeed central to understanding, and thus combating, neoliberalism, it is because neoliberalism has, since its emergence, been founded on a logic of debt [which] reduces the future and its possibilities to current power relations… The principal explanation for the strange sensation of living in a society without time, without possibility, without foreseeable rupture, is debt.1

Maurizio Lazzarato

Credit must be viewed as far more than a financial arrangement, for it is nothing less than a fundamental dimension of our society, and in effect a new ethical system.2

Jean Baudrillard

In the spring of 1973 a catastrophic collapse in the property markets wiped three quarters off the value of the London Stock Exchange. Lulled into complacency by steady capital gains during the 1960s, financial institutions had been unscru pulously lending to practically anyone wanting to build a house. The bubble quietly grew for more than a decade because the banks only recorded mortgages as revenue and equity. This created a debt blind spot at the centre of balance sheets – risk they couldn’t see, and a scale of exposure they couldn’t accurately gauge.

To prevent a cascading chain of failures, the Bank of England bailed out three-dozen of the smallest (so-called ‘secondary’) banks, saving the sector but failing to control inflation, which rapidly hit 25 per cent. Within a year, Britain’s gdp had contracted by six per cent. This was a significant event in the history of British property busts, but it was also significant for another reason in that it marked the statistical uncoupling of three previously interrelated factors: house prices, household debt, and wage growth.

Before the crisis, wage growth and house prices had risen together (associated with general increases in post-war production), while household debt had fallen to historic lows (linked to cheap social renting). After the crisis, impacts on industrial output (the 1974 Oil Shock), policy change (the abolishment of fixed rents), and ultimately the economic reform that accompanied globalisation (the tran sition from industrial capital to financial capital), permanently stalled western wage growth – which still hasn’t recovered. Meanwhile, household borrowing started to go up, and by 1975 it had effectively replaced wage growth. This is the origin of the uk ’s debt addiction, the beginning of the long-term property bubble that ended in 2007, and

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Jack Self Derivative Architecture

the foundations upon which a certain form of the neoliberal project was constructed.

For the past 40 years our ‘lifestyle’ has been funded by credit linked to household equity. The value of this equity is calculated by subtracting a home’s total liabilities from its total worth. As property prices went up this number got bigger, since the debt on the property was still tied to its cost at the time of purchase. Banks issued personal loans based on a home’s equity, believing that if the debtor defaulted they could sell the house and get back all of their money, which explains the connection between rising house prices and increased debt. However, in order to keep func tioning, the system as a whole relied on infinite capital gains in the property markets, to perpetuate the extension of what was actually unsecuritised credit (Addendum Figure B). If that gain were to slow or stop, making a home worth less than the sum of its debt, everyone would be in deep trouble. And that’s precisely what happened.

By July 2007 the sub-prime mortgage crisis, which had been devastating poor black neighbourhoods in the us for at least five years, finally crossed a line in the sand and began taking a toll on the white middle class. On 9 August, officials of the French bank bnp Paribas issued a statement saying ‘…the complete evaporation of liquidity in segments of the us securitisation market [read: those incorporating mortgages] has made it impossible to value certain assets fairly.’ In other words, who knew how much these home loans were worth, if anything. They concluded optimistically, ‘The valuation of these funds will resume as soon as liquidity returns to the markets.’ 3

The liquidity never did return, in part because of the shockwave that rippled out from the press release itself,

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which precipitated a global credit crunch. Even before the repossessions could begin, large banks started getting bailed out. Property-related debt had been so finely dispersed within other products that even calculating what you had lost became impossible. In turn, this indeterminate debt triggered a crisis of faith in inter-bank lending, which stopped the constant flow of capital needed to keep the banks running. In this way, the bailouts were not inherently tied to problems in the property markets at all, but to blockages caused by a profound lack of confidence in the very system itself. This clearly demonstrates how real estate as a physical asset is not sine qua non the cause of property market crashes. Rather, it is the fiscal armature surrounding property that is crisis-prone.

The nature of the bailouts exposed something deeply sinister about the power of the financial sector. Rather than allowing financial institutions to fail, as the rules of capitalism dictate, everything was done to save them. Perhaps the most obviously undemocratic solution to the lack of liquidity took the form of ‘quantitative easing’, in which the uk printed more than £300bn of new money and gave it to the biggest banks. Rather than lending to small and medium-sized enterprises as asked, the cash was pumped back into the stock markets, which consequently became massively over valued (because the extra money that flowed in wasn’t tied to increased production) and extremely fragile.

In these moments, capitalism reveals itself as neither logical nor natural, but fundamentally flawed. It continues to exist only by periodically transcending itself, ruling by planned inconsistency, rather than rationality by planned rules.

Parallel to these factors, the fourth parameter in the property-debt process is social inequality. In the early 1970s, Britain was more economically equal than ever before.

Jack Self Derivative Architecture

Several decades of targeted taxation on the very rich, coupled with middle- and working-class welfare stimulus, had not so much redistributed existing wealth, as directed new wealth to the lower socioeconomic bands. Understanding why social inequality has since spiked upwards necessitates analysing where the credit came from: centralised financial institutions controlled by a wealthy elite. In effect, the servicing of debt channelled any popular capital surplus to the top of society.

Some of this money might have come back down again in the form of benefits, if taxes on corporations and the rich had remained high. But they did not. In 1979 Sir Geoffrey Howe cut the top rate of tax from 83 per cent to 60 per cent, citing the ‘trickle down’ effect. This suggested that lowering taxes for the rich would incentivise them to be more productive and drag up the standard of living for the less wealthy. As Thatcher maintained in her final address to the Commons in 1990, if we would give more to those who have the most, we will all have more on the whole. There has never been any economic evidence to suggest this is the case, nor is it a morally justifiable position. It’s not even an argument found in neoliberal philosophy – it’s pure plutocratic invention. In 1988 Nigel Lawson delivered the mortal blow to Britain’s social democracy, by cutting the top rate of tax to 40 per cent, from which it has not much moved. The effect is stark: in 1979 the top one per cent of society controlled seven per cent of all the wealth 4 . Today that figure is 21 per cent. 5

We can understand the era of austerity as an epoch defined by the management of debt. And we know that a lot of this debt stems from the financial infrastructure surrounding real estate. In fact, most personal debt stems from mortgages.

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We also know that the two biggest impediments to future growth are the housing shortage and the sluggish construc tion industry.

British architecture’s specific goal must be, simply, to build more housing, but not at any cost. Current government incentives – the so-called ‘right to buy’ policy – assist firsttime homeowners with a deposit, and use taxpayer monies to underwrite a portion of the loan. All this does is transfer the risk of default to the citizenry, leaving profits in the hands of the banks. (There is also evidence that the scheme is fuelling a new property bubble.) The ambition of building more must not interfere with the aim of liberating people from the soul-crushing burden of debt, which ‘reduces the future and its possibilities to current power relations.’

The more general goal must be to extract property from the chaos and danger of the market cycle, in which the deci sions of a few dictate the fortunes of the many. We must examine how architecture might be used to reverse the historical trends of social inequality and disenfranchisement. Could the way we finance buildings act as a barrier to wealth accumulation and promote spatial (socioeconomic and geographical) justness?

There are a number of preconditions that already narrow the scope for possible answers to these questions. Foremost, this is not an intellectual thought experiment, nor an invocation for more paper architecture. Accordingly, we must operate within the bounds of reality as much as possible. This means that proposals for any post-neoliberal architec ture must come from within the existing ideological, jurid ical and fiscal frameworks of neoliberalism itself. In essence, architecture of this sort must emerge from latent conditions that are already suitable for manipulation.

Jack Self Derivative Architecture

If the premise for an architecture capable of these things precludes ideological regime change (revolution, mass protest, dissolution of national and global order), then it must also preclude the gewgaws of ‘participatory’ architec ture. I’m profoundly sceptical of anyone with such limited vision as to think ‘grass-roots’, ‘community’, or ‘crowdsourced’ design could be agents for meaningful social change in the face of such a venerable, hyper-stable opponent. Nor should this architecture be based on charity, political excep tions or fragile litigious loopholes. It must simply exploit, or re-deploy pre-existing financial conditions for social ends. The only indisputable requirement, of course, is that this architecture, which is capable of restructuring power relations, must be financially profitable.

This might seem like a contradiction. Is profitability enough to force neoliberalism to unwind itself? Very possibly, as long as none of the conditions that let this architecture exist are construed as excuses for transcending its own rules. After all, global capitalism often paints itself into corners that later turn out to be in conflict with its ruling elite (hence the bailouts) – undesired results caused by pursuing the absolute logic of neoliberalism to its most illogical endpoints. As Žižek notes, ‘Wherever the globalist system is forced to violate its own rules, there is an opportunity to insist that it follow those rules. To demand consistency at strategically selected points where the system cannot afford to be consistent is to put pressure on the entire system.’ 6 ⁄

When volumes of mortgages are traded in the markets the entity being bought and sold is not, strictly speaking, property.

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Rather, it is a financial abstraction with no intrinsic worth, whose value is derived from estimating the asset value of the underlying real estate. This is possible because market agents ‘trust’ that the institutions issuing the loans have taken due diligence in minimising the risk of default. Of course, it’s not faith alone that permits this; there are diverse regulatory requirements as well as other means of independently calcu lating the integrity of the mortgages.

The power of abstracting property loans into revenue streams is namely this: the separation of creditor (investor) and debtor (homeowner) by some managing institution liberates the anonymised occupant from certain ethical assessments. The investor has no interest or say in the aesthetic qualities of the home, its manner of occupancy or the lifestyle of its inhabitants. Their only concern is fiscal – that a given sum be paid throughout a given period. The moral dimension of debt is instead the concern of the finan cial institution, which, like a capitalist Ammut, is charged with weighing the debtor’s heart against a feather. The source of agency in the perpetuation of neoliberal power relations is almost exclusively the financial institution. This is what makes the architect so impotent as a figure of social change; they do not even negotiate the terms of debt directly with the source of the capital, but through several tiers of bankers, developers and other corporate bureaucrats.

In order for architects to exercise the kind of agency required to pursue our general goal, they must directly mediate between ‘end-user’ (occupant / client) and ‘investor’ (free market equity) – they must leverage the power of property in such a way as to become both the monetary fixer of debt and its moral evaluator. This vision does not at all correspond with that of the architect-as-developer. Quite the contrary,

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rebuilding at this level demands a bypassing of the entire development profession – eliminating its greed and monopoly and operating in parallel. This is the image of the architectas-financier. The Ingot, a project for a tower in the City of London, might be considered a first attempt at this prospec tive ‘derivative architecture’ characterised by a total sepa ration between financial form and social function.

The specific goal of the Ingot project was to find a way to make high-quality, generous apartments affordable for living wage workers in or close to the City of London.7 Regardless of where on the political spectrum one sits, this is a desirable ambition – even hardcore neoliberals recognise that macro economic growth depends on low-paid workers living close to their places of work, and maximising their disposable income for increased consumption (Addendum Figure C). A site was selected adjacent to London Bridge, directly on top of the ruins of the ancient Roman forum. This colossal structure, that for 400 years remained the largest building north of the Alps, was the civic heart of the provincial capital and the main reason why London became, and remains, a global economic centre. The desire was very much to mini mise occupation at ground level and open up a terrain that could be the City’s only truly public square.

Subversion of a system first requires mastering an under standing of how it works. For this reason the starting point had to be an imitation of how a standard developer would approach the project: by conducting a ‘surplus land value assessment’ to determine the potential profit on a building at market rate. This process is not so dissimilar from calcu lating the surplus equity in a normal home – add up all the costs (price of the land, demolition and construction) then subtract this from the maximum value of a potential structure.

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Unless developers can extract 20 per cent profit, they rarely bother and sites go undeveloped.

Property development is a constant negotiation between three critical factors: time, space and money – to get closer to the required profit figure developers are always working towards the highest feasible density at the lowest possible cost in the shortest turnaround. The result of the land assess ment showed that a 20 per cent profit margin was achievable, making the land viable 8 for standard redevelopment (Addendum Figure E). There was a major problem with this, however: no fiddling of the factors could reduce the purchase price very much below market rates – the developer’s profit precluded it – making it several fold too expensive for workers on the living wage (who lack equity to buy in any case).

In order to make an impact on end price, a parametric algorithm was developed to manipulate these factors indi vidually (Addendum Figure D). One important financial precedent for the algorithm was how universities raise equity for constructing new buildings (specifically at uc Berkley and Queen’s College Cambridge). These institutions issue long-term bonds, often 50 years or longer, to fund new dorm rooms or science blocks, while the interest on the bond is secured against future tuition. The university ends up paying quite a lot for the investment capital, but does so over such a long period that the repayments are manageable. Schemes like this are highly attractive to entities looking for stable and predictable returns, and investors often include insurers, banks and sovereign or pension funds. If we replace tuition with rent and dorms with housing, the basic model holds, and the developer as a source of finance becomes unnecessary. Of course, in theory almost any company can issue a longterm bond – in practice, the rate of interest on such a bond

Jack Self Derivative Architecture

is relative to the trust the markets have in that company. A well-respected international university has leverage where an architect certainly does not. To address this trust issue, the building itself becomes the security underwriting the bond, which can be sold at market rate if at some point the mechanism fails. The market wager then becomes whether the architect is capable of delivering the building on time and budget (although popular perception of architects’ tardy extravagance might prove problematic).

Security also lies in the fact that if this architect-bank were providing apartments at 46 per cent of the market rate (which is what would be necessary to make it affordable for the living-wage worker) there would have to be a 54 per cent drop in London property prices before it would become unfeasible. The worst housing slump in British history (1914 22) was caused by a combination of the First World War and the introduction of industrial manufacturing tech niques in construction (oversupply in the markets), which saw prices fall by around 35 per cent. Given the current climate of unprecedented shortage, probably only a cataclysmic environmental disaster could produce such an effect. To insure against this event, we can also add security into the material of the building itself. There is a direct correlation between economic instability and global gold prices, because of its perceived international fungibility. The Ingot’s facade would be electroplated with some 170kg of gold. In a worse case scenario, the Ingot itself is a fungible commodity, a hedged bet against crisis, functioning outside the property market.

In order for the Ingot to be funded by a 50-year bond, a number of parameters have to be true. The building certainly cannot be sold within the period of the bond, which

Real Estates

means inhabitants must accept the idea of never owning the property, but nonetheless retaining usufructuary rights. To amortise the debt at the bond’s maturity, the annual payment (interest plus 2 per cent of the principal) must be equal to or less than the income gained from rental. In other words, there is a fixed ratio between construction cost and rental revenue that will determine what the annual surplus from a living wage apartment would be, in turn dictating the massing of the building and its total rentable space. Since the debt is issued and held by a company also responsible for the construction, maintenance, letting and management of the building, the company itself is the location of the moral dimension of the debt obligation (thereby liberating the renter). Needless to say, there are more than several complex interrelations to this calculation.

Resolving these parameters required working backwards – starting at the face value of the bond and thereby deter mining the rate of return. This figure was estimated at 4.5 per cent per annum, which included 2.5 per cent in interest and two per cent in principal repayment. For comparison, over the last century the mean capital gain on a property was just 2.4 per cent per annum. The interest dictated how much surplus an apartment had to generate in rent each year, which fed backwards into how big it could be, or how much it could cost per square metre.

Once the viability of the scheme had been established, the next process was to maximise the possible density of the building. To do this, the Ingot exploited the same planning rule, Section 106 (s106) that allowed the Shard to extend its maximum height envelope from 65 metres to 310 metres. s106 was originally intended as a form of tax on new devel opment. If a developer were to build 100 new homes on a

Jack Self Derivative Architecture

green field site in a small town, the added pressures on local infrastructure and public services would be considerable. So the developer would negotiate a one-off sum to be put towards specific projects (new school buildings, improve ments to police, fire, health, new roads, etc). Over time, this concession became flipped into a type of local governance bribe by developers to permit increased density.

The total construction cost of the London Bridge Quarter was about £1bn (of which the Shard tower made up £350m). In exchange for an added height of 245 metres, the developers contributed £50m (five per cent of the construction cost, or two per cent of the final market value) to the refurbishment of London Bridge Station. Since s106 is negotiated individually in each case, it wasn’t an easy factor to include parametrically. Expressed as a ratio it became: every one per cent of construction cost translated to a 49-metre height extension. This was converted into floor area within the tower, so that rather than a cash injection, the City would simply receive an allotment of rent-free space (intended to relieve pressure on local services, which suffer from space shortages). Because there is no intention to profit from the Ingot, this produced some thing of a recursive feedback loop, in which added height gave higher s106, which gave higher envelope. The scheme was capped at 350 metres, based on the moment at which building height and foundation cost for the London clay became fiscally untenable (not for any reasons of governance, which would have likely seen a cap around 320 metres). The final optimised concession to s106 was 15 per cent of the building’s floorplate, or 43,000 square metres (Addendum Figure F (a)).

This, in a nutshell, is how the optimised form and volume of the Ingot was arrived at, and how it redeploys common-

Real Estates

place financial mechanisms to achieve its specific goal . It has been described as form following finance, although it might be more accurate to say that it is function following finance, where the form is not intrinsically relevant.

The Ingot answers the general goal of derivative archi tecture in a number of ways. A long-term bond is a selfcontained financial instrument, since once the principal has been raised no new funds are required and the repayment rate is fixed. This insulates the building and its residents from the boom and bust of the markets, as well as fluctuations in property values – it amounts to rent control.

However, one could say that the most important aspect of the Ingot’s social function occurs after the bond has matured – when rental revenue might be further lowered until it matches only the operational costs of the building, or maintained at a low rate and the surplus that was paying off investors redirected towards welfare and amenities to residents. As a debt-free asset it might be refinanced to fund the construction of other buildings (thereby creating a network of low-cost housing), or sold for a symbolic sum to the residents themselves.

This is just one scenario of one particular model, moti vated by what I see as a general poverty of aspiration in architecture today (a reluctance to position the architect as a figure capable of meaningful social change) as well as a lack of pragmatism (inasmuch as our utopian vision for urban transformation surpasses our actual political influence and economic power). If architecture is to exist as anything more than the ornamental resolution of facades, or the sculptural expression of domesticity, it must clearly articulate a new position with regard to the role of property and ownership in the global economy.

Jack Self Derivative Architecture

1 Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man (Los Angeles, ca : Semiotexte, 2012) 46.

2 Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (London: London Verso, 2008) 19.

3 bnp Paribas Press Release (August 9 2007). www.bnpparibas.com / en / news / press-release / bnp-paribas-investment-partners-temporaly-suspendscalculation-net-asset-value-fo Accessed August 20 2012.

4 Prem Sikka, ‘Corporate governance: what about the workers?’, Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol 21, no 7 (2008) 955 77.

5 hmrc , ‘Distribution Among the Adult Population of Marketable Wealth (Series C)’, table 13.5 (2005), online at: http: // webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk / + / http: // www.hmrc.gov.uk / stats / personal_wealth / 13-5-table-2005.pdf

6 Slavoj Žižek ‘Trouble in Paradise’, London Review of Books (18 July 2013) 11.

7 There is a sophistic contradiction at the core of how the London Assembly defines ‘affordable’ with respect to property and ownership, one that has major implications for the city’s demographics. On the one hand, the term ‘affordable rent’ is described as being less than 35 per cent of a worker’s total take home pay. On the other, ‘affordable housing’ is defined as 80 per cent of the market rate. The disparity between these two figures – real wages and market value – means about two-thirds of the uk are priced out of the capital. Workers on the minimum wage are effectively locked out altogether, since they cannot easily rent (except in conditions of poverty or overcrowding), and the cost of transport from elsewhere precludes commuting. A worker on the living wage fares equally poorly, though at this level a Spartan lifestyle in the outer suburbs becomes just about achievable. See Addendum Figure C , based on the Valuation Office Agency’s figures of private rental market rates.

8 Each year the Halifax Group analyse thousands of uk property trades to determine geographic mean market values per square metre (mostly by borough, city or county, sometimes by postcode). Their kind provision of this data was indispensible for accuracy in imitating how developers operate.

Real Estates

SILVER BULLETS

finn williams What I like about the Ingot is that, funnily enough, it’s very similar to a building I’ve been reviewing on the Tower Hamlets Design Review Panel. Apart from the gold cladding, it is basically this extraordinarily large slab of private housing, bang in the middle of Canary Wharf. The Ingot is a condensed diagram of what happens anyway. And although it might seem almost absurd, to the extent of being a sci-fi proposition, like all good propositions these buildings stem from a strange reality. They just make what’s going on visible and tangible and malleable.

Of course, when you get a building of that scale, the decision of how big you let it go becomes completely warped. If you are dealing with a three- or four-storey block within a conservation area, a single storey becomes a huge negoti ating point. The basis for these towers are already slabs 50 by 20 metres or larger, and in the case of this Canary Wharf application, 70 storeys high. At that point, plus or minus 10 storeys is almost immeasurable. The way you do measure it is through financial viability. In order to meet concession quotas developers have now gone up to 77 floors. The extra profit from these storeys is enabling them to regenerate the whole area south of the Isle of Dogs for affordable housing – and not normal affordable housing; it’s the most beautiful, best designed, really generously proportioned housing, with good quality materials, and so on. fulcrum And presumably the developers are still making a healthy profit even on their concession?

fw They’re guaranteed their 20 per cent whatever happens. In a way what your project is doing is illustrating the negotia tion that happens on almost every large-scale application. You

Real Estates

get bare-minimum schemes that the developer can put forward to break even. Breaking even, in the current climate, is now almost unacceptable. And then there’s this process whereby that scheme is inflated – pumped up beyond what the bare minimum is, to be able to generate surplus profit, to be able to cross-fund public amenities. That’s basically what Section 106 is, or what a Community Infrastructure Levy (cil ) is. It’s why developers construct affordable off-site housing. In fact, it’s basically how affordable housing comes about at all.

It can generate a situation of complicity between the planning department or local authority and a developer, where both realise that there’s something in it for them if they allow a scheme to get bigger and bigger. If you are looking at it cynically, the threshold is how far you can push before democracy gets in the way. For the Ingot, the question would be: how does, politically, one make the argument for what is a monstrously big building to all the different players involved? It’s easy to make a financial argument to the people financing it. The problem is always making a convincing argument to anyone who may not be profiting. How far are people willing to tolerate this massive scale, and how can you sell that to them?

f A good part of the work on the Ingot has been ensuring that the models are accurate representations of the existing conditions. How important are incentives, and what types of incentives motivate the planner to permit these types of structures?

fw At some stage in the development process, the developer hands his or her accounting books to the council, which will employ an external consultant to establish what ‘fat’ or

Finn Williams Silver Bullets

surplus, there is in the scheme for the provision of public goods. It typically assumes the developer’s profit to be 20 per cent. As long as developers make at least 20 per cent profit, they don’t really care what the ‘fat’ (or extra profit) is spent on. Of course they’d prefer it if it came back and benefited their own development directly, because that in turn feeds their own project and raises the value. But strictly speaking, it’s up to the local authority to prioritise, and any extra profit effectively gets driven to the public coffers, and is something that we can spend on social needs. In principal the s106 payment, to mitigate the effects of development, could be thought of as a sort of formalised bribe…

f How do you define a social good, and how do you prior itise them?

f This relates to alternative models of council funding. At the moment there seems to be fairly traditional or straight forward modes by which councils can look for extra sources of funding, which involve exploiting the limitations of the powers they already have. The Ingot explores the idea of using global financial markets at a local scale and in a sense bypasses the nation-state.

fw We make a shopping list of all the things we think we need – how many schools, how many health facilities, what improvements we need to make to our public realm – and we cross-check it against current inventory, then weigh it against the costs. Like every authority in London we know a gap exists between what you can fund on your own and what actually needs to be paid for. A permanent structural deficit has to be made up by development as best as possible.

It’s interesting to think of a building – especially on the scale of the ones we’ve been talking about – as a kind of silver bullet, in terms of infrastructural costs. You could think of it as a building that comes along and wipes clean all of the social needs or demands of the place. To do that it has to be of an extremely large scale, but that scale would also be publicly acceptable, because everyone would recognise that it is solving all our problems in one fell swoop.

fw Since the coalition came to power, there is a much wider scope for local authorities to work proactively on the ways they raise finance, and also the ways they work with the private sector to use this finance. The classic example is the local-asset backed vehicle, which is a public-private partnership – a joint venture in which a local authority raises money through prudential borrowing, for which they get better rates. In Croydon’s case, there is a local-asset backed vehicle with John Laing, and effectively the deal is 50:50 –the council puts in the land, and the developer puts in the skills and the expertise, and they develop local authority-owned sites to generate the minimum profit that the developer needs. John Laing has a guaranteed profit, and any ‘fat’ gets returned to public services. This is a more proactive model of devel opment. Similarly, Hackney Council is being proactive in how it regenerates housing estates – rather than sit back and build the bare minimum social housing, or relying on existing housing stock, the council is actively redeveloping a series of estates by introducing the private market to cross-subsidise the schemes.

f Why are skills and expertise expected to come from the private sector? If you think about the London County Council Architects office, in 1952 it was the largest architectural office

Real Estates

Finn Williams Silver Bullets

in the world. They employed more than a thousand architects to develop some of the most cutting-edge infrastructural and architectural projects of the era. Now we don’t have that type of institution and are forced to lose 20 per cent profit. It seems like a serious loss of revenue.

fw The assumed 20 per cent profit is a 20 per cent loss for the public purse. If local authorities looked slightly longer term, rather than fire-fighting the cuts that they are currently dealing with, they could be making a profit that goes directly into public services or to the public purse. But there is an inherent leakage in the system, which only becomes apparent at the scale of these public-private partnerships over the very long term, when the costs that you’ve lost in terms of inad equate maintenance have to be mopped up by the public sector. In 30 or 40 years, people are going to be amazed that we entered into these deals on hotels or on hospitals. But there’s also leakage on the very small scale in relation to consultants, and who does what within an authority. Even when a council is building private-market housing for itself, as Hackney is, it is still employing private architecture firms for the design.

f How effective is localism? We’re talking about the inherent weaknesses of localism, which mainly seem to be caused by the tensions between the ambitions at the local scale and the ambitions of the national scale, and the players that interact between those two scales.

fw It’s hard to define how well localism works because it isn’t well defined. There are a number of mechanisms it relies on, particularly neighbourhood planning. Ironically, being

able to give people freedoms at a supposed local scale requires huge amounts of unwieldy legislation, which puts a lot of people off getting involved. It’s almost as though, in an effort to try and work around the complexity of the current plan ning system at a slightly larger-than-local scale, the govern ment has created an extra tier of bureaucracy. It isn’t speeding things up at all.

f The sceptic in me would say the dissipation of public enthusiasm is intentional, from a national scale.

fw The largest issue is political representation at a local level. Realistically no one is going to be able to make all these decisions themselves. Of course there are a few people with too much time on their hands, but most of us are going to have to rely on voting someone else to do it.

There’s basically been a shift in expectations in local engagement – this idea of choosing and participating when you want. This means that voting once every four years for a councillor you never actually see and don’t remember the name of suddenly seems inadequate. Rather than tackle the basic form of government, we created this kind of parallel luxury that allows citizens to choose whether they want to get involved in localism. For most of us localism doesn’t address the fundamental issue, which is: who are these people who are representing us in day-to-day decisions, and how can they be aligned to what we actually want? Localism will never work unless it really addresses political representation at a local level.

f We’ve spoken previously about political will and the housing crisis, and the fact that the only way of meaningfully

Real Estates

Finn Williams Silver Bullets

addressing it seems to be through government-led, large-scale public construction. What do you think are the major barriers to this kind of programme – keeping in mind the type of scheme proposed by the Ingot, which essentially attempts to be a profit-free, long-term public-private partnership?

fw If you look at figures in housing construction since the war, private housing construction has pretty much levelled out. The private sector can build housing, but its capacity to increase or even decrease that amount isn’t huge. There’s a proportional relationship to demand and the current crises, and the lack of public housing. You can chart it. Councils simply don’t have the stock they used to –whether that’s in individual housing estates or in their ‘estate’ overall. They have powers that enable them to acquire more land, such as Compulsory Purchase Orders, and there’s no doubt that the housing crisis as it stands could justify Compulsory Purchase on a larger scale. This is a last resort for a development, but it’s reached a point where a number of local authorities are considering it. The alternative is housing people who need social rent outside the borough, even outside London, even outside the southeast, and those are already really extreme measures.

f Something seems deeply immoral about that…

fw Possibly.

104 Real Estates

THE POLITICISATION OF DEBT

Life and property, being and having, person and thing are pressed up together in a mutual relation that makes of one both the content and the container of the other.1

Roberto Esposito

Real Estates

Private property has come both to reside at the centre of our individual lives and to spill beyond the horizon of our (or rather their) political imagination. It is also the mechanism that transformed forever the notion of debt, displacing it from its ethical form, as a bond between people, and embed ding it into a totalising mechanism of economic sovereignty.

Lazzarato’s punchy exegesis on debt argues that debt is the originary apparatus of subjectivity (creditor-debtor relation), which develops its intimate purchase on the subject from its most ancient configurations, through capitalism, to the contemporary neoliberal debt economy, bearing evermore deeply into the construction of the self. Reading Marx and Nietzsche (via Deleuze), Lazzarato argues that in its capitalist form, ‘debt exploits the ethical action constitutive of the individual and the community ’ by mobilising faith, trust and confidence toward the general goal of capitalist expansion. 2 However, by mapping the growth of debt economy onto the history of capitalism, he misses a crucial transposition in the very workings of debt that coincides with the history of capitalism without being the result of it: debt, far from merely ‘exploiting’ the ethical sphere of the individual and community, is liter ally uprooted from this sphere in order to neutralise it. In other words, the very construction of both the Hobbesian state and the liberal nation-state was predicated on the neutrali sation of the dangers of communal ethics – the perils of unregulated debt (munus) circulating throughout and under mining the social whole. It would be precisely the possibility that such communities (communitas), bound together outside of any social contract, could erupt uncontrollably, which threatened the neat homogeneity of both the Commonwealth and civil society, each defined by and sustained through their status as singularities.

Ross

Exo Adams

The Politicisation of Debt

If we forgo the impetus to identify capital as both a means and ends of the modern world, we recognise that already by the seventeenth century, much more was at stake in the formation of the modern state than the expansion of capitalism, namely the preservation of life. This singular ambition marked not only Hobbes’ ideal commonwealth, but also Locke’s prescriptions for government in that it defined the central political objective of modern politics. For Hobbes, the preservation of life came in the security and protection of a commonwealth – the Leviathan endowed with the paranoid apparatus to violently safeguard its subjects from the state of nature. In opposition to Hobbes, Locke proposed that sovereignty needn’t be concentrated in an ‘artificial’ agreement between a singular sovereign and his subjects – a relation of domination – but could be prefigured by and conditioned through the ‘natural’ mechanism of private property, a far more effective mechanism, as Locke attests, to achieve the preservation of life. 3

For millennia, the notion of property was a liberty strictly exercised by the highest rulers, whether princes, kings, feudal lords or God himself. It was an expression of absolute political dominium over all who resided within the land. While property (as dominium) assumed many spati alities, it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that an emer gent liberalism (enlightenment), following Locke, would dedicate itself to reordering the political landscape according to a radically new conception of property corresponding to the private ‘individual’. From Locke’s concep tion, property – a condition seen to extend from the ‘natural ownership’ of each and every person over his or her body – would be leveraged in the struggle against absolute power; against domination .

Real Estates

Locke’s notion of property conceives of it as a natural right based on the labour one exerts in the state of nature to appropriate objects, removing them from their common status in the world. Kant advances this by asserting that possession over objects wrested from the common world can only truly be owned as long as a distance can be maintained between the individual and his or her object without threat ening the integrity of this relation. The ‘natural’ capacity to appropriate objects from the common world, it seemed, required a third party juridico-political apparatus to guar antee the privation of the common state of nature. These principles, in their rough state, form the foundation of our contemporary juridical understanding of private property.

Here, a certain paradox emerges. The entire episteme of private property that emerged in the eighteenth century is predicated not on the freedom to possess as such, but rather on the liberty to withdraw one’s self and one’s possessions from the sublime angst of a world opening up to itself – a condition brilliantly summarised by Arendt: ‘Society, when it first entered the public realm, assumed the disguise of an organisation of property-owners who, instead of claiming access to the public realm because of their wealth, demanded protection from it for the accumulation of more wealth.’ 4 Through its generalisation as a natural right, private property extended itself to a principle of universality – as a condition of existence for modern sovereignty. Just as the Hobbesian state could claim control over the totality of its citizens through the universality of its power, so too would the liberal nation-state claim a totality in the name of the universality of private property.

Either via the transcendent sovereign’s pledge to protect his subjects or through the immanence of private property

Ross Exo Adams

The Politicisation of Debt

as an apparatus for protecting life, in each case, an ‘immunisation’ of the social body takes place. The result is the construction of an individuated subject as the basis of a political body by either prohibiting (Hobbes) or making redun dant (Locke) the communal debts (munus) that formed the bonds between each member of a given community (commu nitas). In turn, while also demanding a singular relation between subject and sovereign, individual and law. Immunisation promises to preserve life by neutralising the terror of a common world, an offering that comes at the cost of the permanent possibility of violence in sacrificing the individual (Hobbes) or in the radical alienation of a world held in collective isolation (Locke).

Through the generalisation of private property, debt has literally been restructured, displacing it from its role as an ethical bond (munus), whose shared relation formed the basis of a particular community (communitas) to become instead the political instrument through which social control is maintained and through which state power is exercised. Debt, only in its modern form, is politicised. The state, founded not on its ambitions to expand capitalism, but on the protec tion of private property, at once neutralises debt as an ethics, while monopolising its dispensation of debt in its economic form. In this transposition, debt goes from an immanent relation between people to a transcendent relation either between subject and sovereign or between debtor and the ‘universal creditor’ of capital. Private property is the dominion over which our sovereign rules. At the same time, it is the disciplinary chamber in which we obediently endow such a sovereignty with its transcendence.

In this terrain, debt is on the one hand the singular relation with which we are held to sovereign account, while

on the other, it is the weapon of choice for waging perpetual, global war.

In the last two centuries, an equally radical new spati ality has materialised from this radical transformation of debt: the urban . Urbanisation, it can be argued, is the terri torialisation of private property through the deterritorial isation of debt (munus) and its subsequent reterritorialisation as a political relation between everyone and the material world (immunitas). The urban (as opposed to the city or any other configuration) becomes a matrix of private property whose endless expansion across the territory simultaneously corresponds to the immunisation of each individual dwelling within its statistical consistency.

The urban is the spatial counterpart necessary to secure this condition of an immunised totality (‘society’), precluding not only the possibility of the irruption of debt in the form of communitas within the social continuum, but indeed of any form of contingency that would shutter the form of sovereignty that courses through a society of isolated debtors. The irony of a world that relinquished its ethical obligations long ago in exchange for the safety of private property comes in the fact that it now finds itself crushed by the very form of debt it took on to do so.

1 Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis, mn : University of Minnesota Press, 2008) 64.

2 Original emphasis, Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An essay on the neoliberal condition (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 2012) 66.

3 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 224.

4 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, il : University of Chicago Press, 1958) 68.

Ross Exo Adams

The Politicisation of Debt 110 Real Estates

UNREAL ESTATES

In 1980, two years after the artist Gordon Matta-Clark died, the city of New York began reappropriating the oddly shaped parcels of land – or ‘gutterspaces’ – he had assembled as his Reality Properties: Fake Estates (1973 4). After receiving a shoebox of loose photographs, receipts, deeds, maps and miscellaneous drawings, his executor had understandably failed to grasp the impetus of the work and as a result neglected to pay the requisite property taxes. ‘Several property tax bills arrived at the loft,’ Jane Crawford, MattaClark’s wife, remembered of this inheritance. ‘Having had no experience in paying property taxes, or even realising what they were, I ignored them… By 1980, I received several rather nasty letters saying the properties were being confiscated by the city for nonpayment of taxes. Again, I had no idea what they were talking about.’ 1 In this context Crawford’s misunderstanding is doubly understandable in that it first illustrates how it was only in retrospect that the artist’s friends and wider art world realised the significance of what Matta-Clark himself considered his ‘art pranks’. Secondly, it offers an example of the bureaucratic banality often associated with commercial property exchanges alongside the necessity for diligent financial maintenance, which he sati rised in this project.

Fake Estates was purchased during two property auctions in October 1973 and originally consisted of 15 plots – 14 in the New York City borough of Queens and one on Staten Island. ‘The idea of buying property in New York City for $25 $75 was the American dream!’ Crawford said, recalling the project’s impetus. ‘This was a myth that he could really get behind: America had so much land that there was enough for everyone.’ 2 (A generosity that extended to the artwork, with Matta-Clark intending the property deed for each

Real Estates

property to be signed over to whomever bought the work.) Like any mythology, this value was symbolic rather than actual, and this promise of affordable surplus was negated by the unusability of these ‘estates’, which the artist described in a 1974 interview as ‘so absurd as to ridicule the idea of function’. ‘When I brought those properties at the New York City Auction, the description of them that always excited me the most was ‘inaccessible”,’ he said, elaborating, ‘What I basically wanted to do was designate spaces that wouldn’t be seen and certainly not occupied. Property is so all-pervasive. Everyone’s notion of ownership is determined by the use-factor.’ 3 This sense of determinacy was directly chal lenged by these ‘gutterspaces’, which were the ‘artefacts of a spatial process’ that provided the ‘unseen punctuation in the text of physical architecture’. 4 (In this way, Fake Estates further illustrates the artist’s fascination with property and provides a ‘preamble’ to his ‘use of this construction world as his raw material’.)

As the critic Pamela M Lee notes in her essential work on the artist, Object to be Destroyed (2001), this project was ‘organised principally around a business transaction’, with the act of purchasing such ‘useless and irrelevant’ property exposing the ‘absurdity of real estate’, together with the conflicted rationality of New York City’s planning demar cations. In this way, the ‘deadpan character’ of the photographs, drawings and textual documentation that form the work refer to the ‘rhetoric of bureaucracy, of contracts and property rights, deeds and lot numbers’, 5 a rhetoric that Lee concedes ‘affords no visual pleasure’. (Indeed, despite its obvious debt to conceptual art, as an aesthetic operation, Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates offers a less convincing meditation on the absurdities of empirical measurement than that offered

Mark Campbell Unreal Estates

by a number of other works, including his godfather Marcel Duchamp’s seminal 3 Stoppages Étalon , 1913 – a work produced by dropping three strings, each measuring one metre in length, from a height of one metre in order to generate a new system of measurement.) This rhetoric of bureaucracy was not only aesthetically limiting, but also conceptually arresting. ‘Gordon didn’t know what to do with it,’ a fellow member of the anarchitecture group recalled. Fake Estates ‘had become tedious to the point where he was letting it go’. 6 However unfinished, in the context of a world rightly concerned with the scarcity of resources – as eloquently described by Pier Vittorio Aureli and the University of Westminster’s project for ‘Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment’ 7 – Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates offers a crucial reference for considering the notion of architectural surplus, a notion I have recently been exploring through an examination of other proprietary absurdities, or ‘unreal estates’, across the US, among them being the Salton Sea and the city of Detroit. ⁄

and 22,000 fully serviced residential plots connected to one another by an infrastructure of paved roads, electricity, water and telephone lines. In short, it housed all of the ‘comfort, luxuries and necessities of planned growth city’ as advertised by a real estate film promoting the venture. 8

Besides recognising the commercial potential of this ‘miracle in the desert’, the ambition of Salton City evidences the possibilities inherent in the spatial abstraction of the desert (Addendum Figures H–K), in which the prospect of the surveyor’s sightline was only restricted by the curvature of the earth itself, rather than any impeding objects. (An opportunity ‘limited only by your imagination’, as the Holly Corporation noted.) In these terms, this abstraction extended beyond even that of the surveyor’s demarcation to allude to a ‘pure conception of space’, caught in the heat and silence of desert so romantically described by Reyner Banham in his Scenes in American Deserta (1982), or Jean Baudrillard in his astonishing travelogue, America (1986).

In 1905, the planned diversion of the Colorado River went awry. Before the flow could be stemmed almost two years later, 350 square miles of the Colorado Desert basin in California had been flooded, which resulted in Salton Sea – an ‘accidental sea’ that quickly became a tourist attraction and an opportunity for rampant architectural speculation. The most prominent of these speculations was Salton City, developed by the Holly Corporation of Los Angeles, which incorporated a motel, restaurant, post office, convenience store, elementary school, airport, yacht club, golf course

Unfortunately the Salton Sea was fed solely by agricul tural run-off from the adjacent Imperial Valley, the most heavily mechanised farming region in the us , and the promise of the ‘California Riviera’ soon faded with the toxic reality of 140° f summer temperatures. This unfortunate combina tion of environmental factors resulted in apocalyptic wildlife die-offs of tilapia, overstocked to provide the sea with an abundance of assured sport fishing, with the stench of these rotting corpses baked into every surface. Only seven per cent of Salton City’s 22,000 lots were ever sold and shoreline properties remain the most affordable. Now the palm trees and telephone poles that were planted to demarcate the different residential areas only measure the expanses of unoccupied desert.

Mark Campbell Unreal Estates

While the failed development of Salton City indicates the possibilities – and disappointments – of ill-guided prop erty speculation, the city of Detroit, Michigan offers a more perverse counterpoint to Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates. If we agree with Sigfried Giedion’s assertion in Space, Time, Archi tecture (1940), that ‘architecture represents the unconscious will of society’ and an argument built on a Germanic arthistorical tradition extending from Henrich Wölfflin to Jacob Burckhardt, then in the wholly American terms of Detroit, architecture also exists as a kind of redundant or residual by-product – a redundancy cruelly evidenced in the 100,000 abandoned houses and vacant skyscrapers of this once elegant city. The home of the us auto industry’s ‘Big Three’ – Ford, Chrysler and General Motors – ‘Motor City’ now relies on federal life support. It also has enough vacant land to accommodate Manhattan, Boston and San Francisco combined and a population that has contracted by more than 40 per cent since 1950 – making it difficult to remember that under the governing influence of Henry Ford, Detroit once expanded at an astonishing rate, in terms of both population and scope (it might even be argued it encompassed Fordlândia, the prefabricated town in the Amazon jungle the industrialist built to provide an unending supply of rubber). 9

Following the precipitous collapse of the automobile industry, Detroit has become synonymous with the decline of America’s post-industrial cities (Addendum Figure G).

If ‘America is the original version of modernity’, as Baudrillard believed, then Detroit’s decline provides us with a vision of what the end of modernity might look like – simultaneously subsumed and manifest in the overt ‘ruin porn’ of such undeniably skilled photographers as Andrew Moore (Detroit Disassembled , 2010), Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

Real Estates

(Ruins of Detroit , 2010). Despite our familiarity with these dissociated images, the presence of these buildings defies – or at least resists – such consumption, if only because no image can contain the monumental scope of this panoramic destitution. Set against the magnitude of this contemporary situation, the scale of Matta-Clark’s documentarian fasci nation with the ‘left-over properties from an architect’s drawing’ looks increasingly antiquated. 10 And his absorption with what lay outside the usability defined by these survey lines, while retaining proprietary value, means his Fake Estates remains regulated by an act of exclusion – of marking what ‘wouldn’t be seen and certainly not occupied’.

By contrast, the indolently swaying palm trees of Salton City and Detroit’s abandoned avenues explicitly illustrate what lies within or what is consciously planned by the architect’s drawing. In this way, the dutifully serviced lots surrounding the Salton Sea evidence the notion that ‘America had so much land that there was enough for everyone’, while also presaging the sub-prime mortgage-inspired collapse of the American dream. Detroit further represents a poignant and highly visible excess of architecture, in which the notion of ‘usability’ has become irrelevant and the promise of affordable surplus ridiculed by a lack of desired occupation, with the shrinking population effectively resulting in a termi nally declining tax base. The political resonances of this collapse, together with its painful visibility, were acknowl edged by one Financial Times correspondent, who dryly noted on Michigan’s appointment of an Emergency Financial Manager for the city, ‘Detroit is being watched closely for clues on how a heavily indebted municipality can regain its financial footing and longer-term viability’ 11 – a formulation that reveals how, in its correlation of viability with function,

Mark Campbell Unreal Estates

and by extension a discernable use-value, the ‘unreal estates’ of such municipalities as Detroit and Salton City can only appear less lazily optimistic than patently absurd.

1 Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi and Frances Richard (eds), Jane Crawford interview with Jeffrey Kastner in Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘Fake Estates’ (New York, ny : Cabinet Books, 2005) 52.

2 Ibid, 51.

3 Gordon Matta-Clark, interview with Liza Bear, ‘Splitting: The Humphrey Street House’, Avalanche (December 1974) 34 7.

4 Richard Nonas, interview with Jeffrey Kastner, Odd Lots, 63.

5 Pamela M Lee, ‘The Soul of Property’, Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 2001), 98 104.

6 Tina Girouard, interview with Jeffrey Kastner, Odd Lots, 48.

7 On this project see: www.scribe.eu

8 The Holly Corporation, A New Miracle in the Desert (1967), promotional film for prospective investors in Salton City. On the contemporary dilemma of the sea, see directors Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer, Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea (2004).

9 On the precipitous decline of Detroit see: Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy (2013); Scott Martelle, Detroit: A Biography (2012); and Jerry Herron, After Culture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History (1993). On the managerial and neocolonial ineptitude of Ford’s expansionist vision of Detroit, see Greg Grandin’s Fordlândia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (2010).

10 Matta-Clark, interview with Bear, 34 7. As Jeffrey Kastner has noted, Matta-Clark’s habitual disdain for architecture led him to substitute ‘surveyor’ for ‘architect’ – a conflation of one figure who delineates space with another who assigns that space a value through the design of architecture that is illuminative.

11 Henry Sender, ‘Emergency Manager heads for Detroit’, Financial Times (13 March 2013).

WRESTLING THE RIGHT

Eyal Weizman’s book Yellow Rhythms: A Roundabout for London (nai 010, 2000) centres on architecture’s contin gency on time and finance. It explains how developers operate on borrowed money and highlights the utter inability of modernism to incorporate the evolution of structures over time into its vision of architecture in the present / future. Using St George’s Wharf at Vauxhall Cross, Weizman demonstrates how ‘off-the-plan’ apartment sales (in which only a deposit is paid in advance of construction) can be used to speculate on London property prices. Highly profitable, though also highly illegal, his ‘property futures’ model of derivative trading in architecture bets on assets that don’t (yet / ever) exist. This financialised architecture depends on the algo rithmic exaggeration of gearing property investments to the financial markets – in which land value, supply / demand, quality, location, etc, can all have rapid and unpredictable impacts on the ultimate rates of return and profit.

To finance his architectural proposal – a phenomenal roundabout with an internal space owned by the Greater London Authority (gla ) – Weizman imagines Real Estate Equity Derivatives (reeds ), which would disperse property ownership and allow ‘every Londoner to become a shareholder’. Unknowingly, in 2000, Weizman described perfectly the mechanisms that produced the 2007 sub-prime mortgage crisis. Fulcrum interviewed Weizman at the summit of London’s Centrepoint tower, itself a locus of absurd financial conditions.

fulcrum One of the key research elements to Yellow Rhythms is how the built form of the Efra development (St George’s Wharf) reflects a particular financial pattern of boom and bust. How does that work?

eyal weizman Yellow Rhythms is a reflection on two systems of government, and two systems of space-making. One of these is based on an old Lefebvrean rhythm-analysis. In this, different layers and aspects within the city operate as a system of regulation and control at various geographic levels. Although this analysis suffers from the Lefebvrean problem of dividing our understanding of the city from the execution of politics – the level of the planner is clearly different from the level of the actor. I think this division is highly misplaced. Therefore, the book operates by proposing a very tongue-in-cheek architectural proposal, as if Lefebvre were looking at the traffic light as a mediator, a transistor, between vehicular traffic and pedestrian traffic.

Interestingly, roundabouts are invented as an urban apparatus at the same time theories of liberalism – forget about neoliberalism – are experimented with in both finan cial and political domains, and the roundabout emerges as the twentieth-century answer to a question posed by nine teenth-century urbanism: what do you do at the intersection of the great avenues, cut through by Hausmann and Hausmann-like people, in different cities? How do you reconcile the question of acceleration with the question of regulation?

From this condition emerges the apparatus of a rhythmic exchange – the model of boom and bust. At the urban scale, the roundabout goes against this, because it seeks to regulate rhythm into flow. It turns the stoppage of flow into a modu lation that is in a way a Deleuzian understanding, from the

Real Estates Eyal Weizman Wrestling the Right

Lefebvrian layers of action. The roundabout by itself creates an exceptional space. And that space, much like Keller Easterling’s description of the Special Zone, is cut by a wall of speed and inaccessible. The roundabout’s centre is where speculation could occur, and to a certain extent, the finan cial revolutionary speculation that perhaps Yellow Rhythms is trying to promote is mirrored by the political speculation that happened in the circle of Tahrir, in the circle of Manama, in the circle of Tehran, in Tunis… All of them around round abouts. How did those nodes that are all about controlling the city become the place for its undoing?

It’s interesting to think of a situation where boom and bust are not synchronised fluctuations but existing simultaneously in a single system. Why must we think of economic activity as a line continuously moving along the axis of time? It would be more accurate to imagine ‘financial density’, with parts of society in boom, and parts bust. And I think declaring an exception, designing for an exception, insisting on an excep tion, or creating an exceptional zone within a city, is about creating space not only out of space but also out of financial time.

Freedom, or at least a kind of deregulation, comes out of a precise apparatus with its own radius, width and traffic laws that attempt to replace police. Before traffic lights, whole battalions of police managed big intersections. The question was how to get rid of these people through design? So of course, there is a paradox: you need a certain infra structure to design for deregulation. But deregulation is a double-edged sword because capitalism has nothing to do with it, and this is a mistake that people make. Capitalism is a state of working for financial interest, supporting and channelling money from the poor to the rich, and designing society in a way that supports the vested interest of capital.

f Sure. But I don’t believe wealth redistribution is an inherent quality of capitalism. Wealth redistribution is only an inherent quality of capitalism as it existed in the second half of the twentieth century – and indeed in earlier periods. However, I don’t think it’s such a fundamental quality that it could never be otherwise.

ew So many things operate outside the boom-and-bust cycle, yet the cycle absorbs us. As architects, we must think about how space – as the creation of an exceptional zone, an extra-territorial zone, an extra-juridical zone, extra-financial zone and free from any kind of regulation – can escape this obsession. This is architecture as a sensor, as sentient space, and this is where I think the algorithm can operate: between the city, finance and politics. Algorithms are the great converters between these different domains.

f One of the major tools of neoliberalism is financialisation – the intention to extract financial value from exchange value, not from real-world increases in production. This is problematic because your argument that the form of an object captures the spirit of its time – a Marxist historicalmaterialist argument about the urban environment – relies on the idea that ‘the times’ are integral to the object’s aesthetic value. Financialisation means that is no longer the case. If it were still the case, in architecture the archi tect-as-designer would be more important. Today, it’s very rare for architects to really design details, or even components at very large scales. When architects design facades, they open a book of facade products and choose one. At the scale of the quality of the city, material decision-making is no longer being done by designers, but by product developers

Real Estates Eyal Weizman Wrestling the Right

working within corporations. In a way, architecture would be much better served to pay more attention to fluctuations within financial or abstract values rather than in the physical design of buildings.

ew You have to stop being so Lefebvrian! A design is a refraction of value, belief, ideology, sentience and regulation, and these are not separate levels. Rather than saying, ‘I’m not interested in design; this is not a design project I’m planning. Actually it’s only about a code, about a dna for a new financial structure,’ you are showing how materiality refracts those forces that enter into society one way and exit in another.

As theoretical architects of the left, the problem for us is that we have abandoned form to bulldogs, and they are like a pit-bull terrier, with a very good bone in the mouth. We need to wrestle it out of their mouth, we need to really pull it out. Because this is not like our conception of politics is immaterial: it’s highly material, specific and every design of apparatus can enable or disable or refract the politics differently. If you want to speak about the sentient capacity of architecture, it’s to do with its form, its materiality, and its organisation. These are your entry points to this game. As William Burroughs said, ‘Architecture is an agent’s best disguise.’ Why should anyone listen to you if you don’t bring it in, this idea, through a kind of architectural vehicle?

What we need to produce is specificity. We need is to be able, at the level of an intellectual project, to be original and precise. In the world in general, ideas are intricate. And they can only become intricate if they respond to a specificity of a situation, to a specificity of ideas, and to a narrative.

126 Real Estates

GETTING REAL

BRETT STEELE

I would give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground.

Many routinely overlook architecture’s main property: that it simply is property. And the fact that architecture is always something owned is just about the hardest thing for architects themselves to own up to. When considering its myriad other properties, this inevitability – architecture as owned –remains absent from the discipline’s most regarded histories, gymnastic theories and the glossy language of its prominent personalities.

Modern architects have long made careful plans, which reliably fulfill their purposes while also producing something else entirely: space – long known (but often ignored) by architects to be the world’s most stable form of property. Unique and powerful, it offers models, opportunities and insights into not only other types of property but also (and crucially) our lives.

For the better part of the twentieth century artists mined this reality to reveal the avant-garde’s own complicity in the production of commercially valuable cultural property. As Adorno and Horkheimer noted, when you think of the culture industry, the important thing to remember is that it is an industry. From Duchamp’s objet trouvé, to Schwitters’ Merzbau , critical cultural projects like these transformed into the kinds of ‘institutional critique’ that advanced the capacity of art to produce property. By the 1970s Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings was literally mapping the architectural real estate holdings of the trustees of the very museum in which he was to show his first-ever retrospective. In a no less brutal demonstration of architecture’s muscular and material qualities as property, one need only recall the transformation of architecture into art object – collectable property, revealed by Gordon Matta-Clark’s cutting away of sculptural fragments of abandoned industrial buildings

Brett Steele Getting Real

Shakespeare, Macbeth

in New York in order to bring the displaced pieces into the context of the gallery.

In contrast to modern art, neither practitioners nor the discourse of architecture have shown such facility or interest when it comes to the discipline’s dependence on property. Architecture deserves something more than what neoliberalism or postmodernism can offer: a real dialogue on space – one with the courage to fully address and challenge the profession's role in real estate, thus initiating an altogether different kind of property, and outlook on it.

Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and theorist. He currently teaches at the aa and is visiting professor at Yale University. He is the author of many essays and several books, including The Project of Autonomy (2008) and The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011).

Shumi Bose is an architectural writer and researcher. She is currently senior editor at Blueprint magazine and was curator and editor for David Chipperfield’s 2012 Architectural Venice Biennale. She teaches at the aa and Central Saint Martins, and is on the editorial board of Fulcrum .

Neil Brenner is Professor of Urban Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (gsd ) and coordinator of the newly founded Urban Theory Lab gsd . He is the author of numerous publications, amongst them New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (2004).

Mark Campbell is an architect and educator who has taught history and design at the aa since 2004, and taught previously at Cooper Union, Princeton University and Auckland University. He is the Director of the Paradise Lost aa Research Cluster, which explores notions of architectural obsolescence.

Mario Carpo teaches architectural history and theory at Yale University’s School of Architecture, and at the École d’Architecture de Paris-La Villette. His most recent books are The Alphabet and the Algorithm (2011) and The Digital Turn in Archi tecture, 1992 2012, an ad Reader.

Keller Easterling is an architect, urbanist, writer and teacher. She is currently Associate Professor of Architecture at Yale University. She is the author of several publications, and her forthcoming book Extrastatecraft centres on issues of urbanism, architecture, national sovereignty and globalisation.

Ross Exo Adams is a PhD candidate at the London Consortium and is examining circulation as a paradigm of urbanism and its relationship to the construction of liberal politics. He teaches at the aa and Bartlett ucl , and his writing has been published in Radical Philosophy, Log and Thresholds.

Peer Illner is a researcher in aesthetics at Universität der Künste, Berlin. He has studied sociology, media studies and art theory. He completed a dissertation on education and systems of measure at Goldsmiths, University of London, and his current research centres on art and design as forms of value.

Sam Jacob is a director of the architecture practice fat and a design critic for Art Review. He is Professor of Architecture at uic and director of the aa Night School. His recent book, Make it Real , is published by Strelka Press.

Jack Self is an architect, journalist and theorist. His work has appeared in the Architectural Review, Architectural Design and at the Venice Biennale. He has an ma Phil on the ethics of neoliberal economic theory. He co-founded Fulcrum in 2011 and is editor-in-chief of its weekly publication.

Brett Steele is an architect and educator. He has been Director of the Architectural Association since 2005. He founded and was previously Director of the aa Design Research Lab. He is a Partner of desArchLab, an architectural office in London, and has taught and lectured at schools throughout the world.

Urban-Think Tank is an interdisciplinary design practice concerned with contemporary architecture and urbanism, implicating architects, engineers, landscape architects and communication specialists. Their text is written by Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, with Ilana Millner and Daniel Schwartz.

Roberta Marcaccio is an architectural writer, curator and educator. Her work as a translator has been significant in the development of her cross-cultural insight into forms of design practice, art, history and philosophical speculation. She holds an ma in Histories and Theories from the aa .

Wouter Vanstiphout is an architectural historian and Professor of Design and Politics at tu Delft. He is a co-founder of Crimson Architectural Historians research collective, with whom he recently presented ‘The Banality of Good’ exhibi tion at the 2012 Venice Biennale.

Eyal Weizman is an Israeli intellectual and architect. He is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, a ‘laboratory for critical spatial practices’, which he created within the Department of Visual Cultures in 2005.

Real Estates Biographies

Finn Williams is an architect and urban planner. After almost five years with Croydon Council’s Placemaking Team, Finn is now Regeneration Area Manager for North West and Central London with the Greater London Authority (gla ). He co-founded Common Office in 2008, and co-authored Sub-Plan , a manual to building legally without consent.

Real Estates

Real Estates: Life Without Debt

Edited by Fulcrum (Jack Self, Shumi Bose)

Published by Bedford Press

Copy editor: Sarah Handelman Design: Wayne Daly Art Director: Zak Kyes Printed in Germany by ggp isbn 978-1-907414-37-4

© 2014 Bedford Press and the authors. All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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