Housing after the

Neoliberal Turn
International
Case Studies

Wohnungsfrage

The housing question is a universal question.

Everywhere, it speaks differently but directly
to the challenges that define our times: social
inequality, ecological crisis, displacement, asylum,
migration, and privatization. The volume
Housing after the Neoliberal Turn: International
Case Studies interprets the neoliberal context
as a defining condition for contemporary housing.
The book consists of two parts: a series of essays
by authors from the fields of architecture,
anthropology, economy, and literature depicting various, often-contradicting contexts, and,
part two, an Atlas of global housing that takes
the neoliberal turn as its starting point.

Haus der Kulturen

der Welt, Berlin

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s shed light on the challenges and

of contemporary housing production:
rew Herschers research on the politics
in Detroit, AbdouMaliq Simones
tion of the struggle between formal
mal infrastructures in Jakarta, Rana
s description of the pseudo-farmhouses
w middle class in Delhi, Mariana Fixs
of the implementation of large-scale
olicies in Brazil, Sandi Hilals Roofless
herent contradictions of refugee housing
ne, David Maddens critique of the
of neighborhood describing the transof Brooklyns waterfront, to Justin
s text on domesticity as data and the
housing question disappearing in the
of Things.

Atlas, conceptualized and compiled by Anne

Kockelkorn and Reinhold Martin, serves as a
starting point to discuss and think about housing
produced and consumed under a neoliberal
doctrine. Developed as a tool for the Wohnungsfrage Academy (directed by Reinhold Martin),
the Atlas does not assume a complete history of
housing, but sets thirty-three examples side by
side which are rarely seen in parallel, and whose
juxtaposition in a densely synthesized framework
puts national conditions and local settings in
perspective; it invites the reader to think of
housing as an unstable constellation evolving
within the power relations of territorial processes.

Essays

David J.
Madden

Spatial Projects:
The Politics of
Neighborhood
in New York City

The idea that the neighborhood is a public good is one of

the central tenets of contemporary urban development.
It has become one of the imperatives of neoliberal urbanism that cities must develop vibrant, livable
neighborhoods. Real estate developments that contribute little or nothing in terms of social housing or other,
more concrete public benefits are justified by reference
to their contribution to neighborhood vitality.
However, within urban studies, the concept of
neighborhood remains under-theorized. The dominant
usage of the term, echoing concepts from early twentiethcentury urban sociology and planning, tends to see
neighborhoods as naturalistic human-ecological units.
This perspective is inadequate to capture the dynamics of
power and inequality that shape urban space today.
Neighborhoods, I argue, are not the clearly bounded,
politically neutral spaces on a city map implied by the
mainstream view. Rather, they are the contingent outcomes of what we can call spatial projects. They are inherently political and, often, explicitly conflictualthe products of complex, long-term struggles between groups
over land use, ownership, planning, identity, and purpose.

of definitions.3 Here I use the concept of spatial projects

in a general way to signify coordinated, continuous,
collective campaigns to produce and format space according to identifiable logics and strategic goals, pursued by specific actors, utilizing particular techniques.
Spatial projects are, as the phrase has it, spatial projections of social power; they produce space, in an ongoing,
contingent, uneven manner. These projectspursued by
different collective actors in various places at different
timesare non-mutually exclusive, productive of overlapping spatial formations, which are experienced and
shaped in a variety of unequal ways by unequally situated actors. They operate at varying temporal scales,
shaping both the present and the future of spaceand,
by promoting particular ways of understanding a spaces
identity and purpose, and possibly by activating dormant spatial attributes, they can operate on the past as
well. They are rooted in the political-economic process,
because the classes and productive techniques that are
dominant in any social formation, as a rule, are better
able to spatialize their political and social interests than
the excluded, dispossessed, or marginal. They are not,
however, because of this, completely determined by
wider political or economic developments; in unequal,
conflictual societies, spatial projects are always contested.
This conflict can be either explicit or submerged but still
present.
This general account of spatial projects can help develop a more critically incisive and empirically precise
approach to understanding neighborhood as an urban
phenomenon. Neighborhood, I want to argue, is a term
that describes spatial projects at the sub-metropolitan
scale. To adapt a well-worn formulation: city-dwellers
produce their own neighborhoods, but they do not make
them as they please. They do so under circumstances
given and transmitted from the past and in a field of
contestation with other actors in the present.

From such a perspective, we can develop a more

critical politics of neighborhood in the contemporary
city. As spatial projects, neighborhoods can be both resources for resistanceand they can also be tools for
profit and power. We should not affirm neighborhood as
such, but instead seek to understand how neighborhood
development is used to bolster or undermine the presence of different social groups within the contemporary
unequal city.
Towards a Critical Conception of Neighborhood
From the early twentieth century until the present day,
the mainstream sociological discourse about neighborhood has undergone significant changes. However, the
history of social scientific analyses of neighborhood, and
the history of planning programs geared toward neighborhood improvement, reveals a number of continuities.1
The mainstream conception of neighborhood has
gone through a number of changes, but some core tenets
have persisted. Neighborhoods have usually been promoted as natural areas, or expressions of a naturalistic
human need for community. They have almost always
been seen as containers, as well-defined, spatially integral zones. Clear neighborhood definition and demarcation have generally been considered desirable characteristics. Neighborhoods have often been posited as having
a life independent of the forces, institutions, and policies that shape them. Yet for all of the importance that
has been accorded them, neighborhoods have been
viewed as fragile, always on the verge of disappearance.
The traditional way of understanding neighborhood
tends to represent them as ahistorical, depoliticized, integral territoriesas clearly bounded, naturally occurring
communities. What might be called the Westphalian
neighborhood imaginary portrays the city as fully divided among different neighborhoods, pictured as nonoverlapping and of clear outline, almost as sovereign
republics.2 Just as the vision of the world chopped into
sharply demarcated, bounded nation-state units reflects
(and produces) a distorting, ideological image, so too
does the vision of the city chopped into sharply demarcated, bounded neighborhood units.
In contrast, I argue that neighborhoods should be
seen as the products of spatial projects. We can adopt the
concept of a spatial project from the critical urban studies
literature, where it appears in work by Henri Lefebvre,
Manuel Castells, Neil Brenner, and others, with a variety

Reworking the Waterfront

The waterfront area in downtown Brooklyn, New York,
provides an opportunity to understand neighborhood as
a spatial project.4 The area is now generally known as
Dumbo, which is an acronym for Down Under the
Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Long a center of industrial
production, now the neighborhood is dominated increasingly by art, design, and media companies, as well as by
residential spaces that are among the most expensive

Heights, who had long been spending time in Dumbo,

explained it to me this way:

in New York City. Directly across York Street from some

of Brooklyns most expensive private housing, stands
Farragut Houses, a 16.61-acre public housing development built by the New York City Housing Authority
(NYCHA). Farragut was completed on May 7, 1952, at a
time when the area was a center of industrial manufacture as well as the kinds of institutionssettlement
houses, churches, housing organizations, and others
that sought to soften the hard edges of industrial urban
capitalism. Farragut is situated across the street from the
old Brooklyn Navy Yard, and it abuts Ingersoll Houses
and Whitman Houses, two other NYCHA developments.
Taken together, Farragut, Ingersoll, and Whitman were
once one of the largest collections of public housing in
the city. Taken as a whole, the areaknown at the time
variously as the Navy Yard District, Fulton Ferry, or as
Brooklyns Junglewas once a prime example of a
Fordist-Keynesian neighborhood, with all of the contradictions and political ambivalences of that era.
The creation of Dumbo in this area exemplifies the
synthetic, conflictual nature of neighborhood in New
York City. Dumbo essentially has been an elitist project
pursued by two major collective actors: real estate developers, whose accumulation strategy is based partly upon
the legitimation provided by cultural prestige, on the one
hand, and as well as community groups strongly invested
in the identity of the cultural producer and the elite consumer. Both of these groups, it should be said, are for the
most part staunch neighborhood boosters and supporters, although this support has not always meant the same
thing. There have been numerous instances where the
two groups have been at odds with one another, often
quite contentiously so, but their projects are to large extent overlapping and mutually reinforcing.
Various state agencies have also participated in this
project, but they have for the most part merely codified
existing spatial order and not intervened to change it radically. The exclusion of the areas public housing residents
from the Dumbo project is crucial to this story. I argue
that, by orienting the area toward elite goals and uses that
do not serve the areas working class and poor residents,
the Dumbo project is a prime example of the production
of an unequal neighborhood in contemporary Brooklyn.
Many of the Dumbo residents and visitors with
whom I spoke tended to circulate a kind of pioneer narrative5 of the neighborhoods rebirth from post-industrial decrepitude. One resident of nearby Brooklyn

Its amazing whats happened in Dumbo. The Dumbo

story is incredible. One man transformed an area
that no one would go to, no one would step foot in,
he transformed it into something beautiful that can
be used for everybody. A complete transformation,
a complete vision.
Others spoke about the pioneering artists who moved
to the area before the developers came along. Real estate
companies and art galleries shared this narrative of
the areas redemption from industrial abandonment by
heroic cultural elites.
An analysis of historical planning documents reveals
a different story. As is well known, New York City as a
whole underwent vast political-economic transformation during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Between 1950
and 1980, the city lost more than half a million industrial jobs.6 But this has not happened everywhere evenly.
The downtown Brooklyn waterfront persisted as a zone
for industry far longer than many people today realize.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, to many of the citys
planners the neighborhood was a vital and growing
industrial area providing over 8,600 jobs.7 A 1972 planning study of Fulton Ferry noted, Quietly and uncharacteristically the predominantly industrial uses have
been on the upsurge.8 A 1973 planning document also
noted the large concentration of industrial jobs located
in this thriving area.9 Even as other parts of the city
were subjected to residential conversion, the downtown
Brooklyn waterfront area remained an industrial hub.
As the 1980s began, Fulton Ferry was considered a relatively healthy manufacturing district.10 Between 1972
and 1981, manufacturing employment in Fulton Ferry
declined by only 8 percent, compared to 44 percent in
the rest of Brooklyn and 34 percent citywide. The area,
according to the citys planners, was an important
source of income for working-class minority families
in central Brooklyn.11 A 1983 study of the areas industrial sector noted that, Eighty percent of the jobs are
filled by Brooklyns minority population; local people
from the surrounding neighborhoods hold 45 percent of
the jobs.12
Even into the 1990s, at least some sectors of the
citys planning apparatus maintained the image of

As originally conceived, the companys vision for a

res
idential and commercial neighborhood under the
bridges was stymied. In response to a request for propo
sals sent out by the states Urban Development Corporation for a fifteen-acre site on the river, Two Trees promoted the transformation of the downtown Brooklyn
waterfront under the name of Fulton Landing. Modeled loosely on Manhattans South Street Seaport, this
was to be a shopping and business district, including a
mix of retail, entertainment and cultural activities with
parking for visitors,16 partially on publicly owned land.
At this point, more than 145 companies, representing
5,000 industrial workers, still operated in the proposed
renewal area.17 A number of groups came together to oppose the plan, including loft-dwellers, planners, artists,
and unions, such as Amalgamated Clothing and Textile
Workers. Along with some elected officials, these groups
formed a coalition under the banner of Save Our Jobs.
The coalition held protests and rallies in the area,
and used the local community board to contest the areas
development. The Fulton Landing development, as it
was then proposed, was not to be. City officials ultimately ruled that Two Trees lacked the requisite capital
to complete the project and removed Two Trees as the
developer of the Fulton Landing site. But a 1984 compromise allowed some manufacturers to stay put with
ten-year leases, and more than a thousand New York
state jobs were moved into the Two Trees-owned Clock
Tower Building, with a ten-year lease. Over the next
decade, the company continued to renovate and convert
buildings in the neighborhood, creating a growing collection of luxury apartment buildings, such as the Clock
Tower, redesigned by Beyer Blinder Belle, and reopened
in 1999.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, tenants living
often in violation of the zoning codein the downtown
waterfronts lofts pursued their own project for the
neighborhood. Organizations such as the Old Brooklyn
Waterfront Alliance and the Fulton Ferry Local Development Corporation mobilized around the identities of loft
tenants and artists to oppose large-scale development.
Today this project is continued by the Dumbo Neighborhood Alliance (DNA), the Fulton Ferry Landing Association, and the Vinegar Hill Neighborhood Association,
as well as numerous galleries and arts organizations.
Especially where issues surrounding the pace and manner of residential conversions are concerned, Dumbo

Fulton Ferry as a thriving industrial area, rather than a

languishing pre-gentrification wasteland. A 1993 City
Planning Department report on citywide industry
affirmed the continuing industrial presence along the
Brooklyn waterfront, with an average of seventeen indus
trial jobs per acre in an area not including the former
Navy Yard.13 Granted, since the 1960s, some industrial
lofts were being converted into residential quarters or
art studios, and eventually the citys artist-in-residence
program supported this practice. The New York Staterun Urban Development Corporation looked into transforming what it dubbed the Fulton Ferry Urban Renewal
Area into housing and attractions. But these plans were
not completed, and for the most part, planners, workers,
and residents in the area appear to have continued to
conceive of it primarily as a working class and industrial project. Far from having been an area abandoned
before it was reclaimed by art and real estate, it would
be more accurate to say that the industrial neighborhood project and the gentrifying neighborhood project
coexisted in the 1980s, before the latter triumphed with
the assistance of the state.
Making an Enclave
The broader political-economic transformation of New
York City militated against the persistence of industry
in the downtown Brooklyn waterfront area. But we can
trace the process whereby its particular deindustrialized form was established. From the 1980s onward, real
estate capital pursued the project of building a luxury
neighborhood on the waterfront. Real estate development in this part of Brooklyn is nearly synonymous
with Two Trees Management Company, the firm led by
the Walentas family, which remains a major real estate
company in Brooklyn. David Walentas is often referred
to as the areas king, mayor, or owner, although other
developers also own properties there and coexist uneasily
with the company.
Two Trees first purchased property in the neighborhood in 1981, buying from Harry Helmsley the early
twentieth-century factory complex built by Robert Gair.14
The company had been involved with real estate in SoHo
in the 1970s. Drawing on this experience, the company
was quite explicit about their strategy of claiming a rent
gap along the downtown Brooklyn waterfront. By 1982,
Two Trees owned nearly 90 percent of the waterfront
area.15

community groups and their predecessors have come

into serious conflict with local landlords, which have led
to protests and legal action. Some Dumbo residents put
in years worth of sweat equity, working hard to renovate
their apartmentsand then fought tenaciously against
landlords intent on evicting them. In the midst of one
such controversy, one landlord, speaking about loft tenants with a reporter, said I feel like they are animals and
they ought to be put in cages. Were trying to get rid of
them. They are in our way.18
Many community group participants see themselves as promoters and protectors of neighborhood in
Dumbo. They identify quite closely with the ongoing
Dumbo project. One community participant told me,
New York is a city of neighborhoods, you really identify
with your neighborhood. Its like an extension of your
home, its the only thing. Another longtime Dumbo
resident, active in such community groups, told me:

area into a larger neighborhood called Old Brooklyn,

including the construction of affordable housing, a local
history center focused on manufacturing and public
housing, and a continuing role for industrial employers.
But the proposal was never submitted.
Certainly, many local activists see development in
the area in a broader political frame. One DNA member
told me, A lot of these things are social justice issues,
and decried the areas takeover by yuppie communities
and tourism, you know, the glamour thing. But these
groups also see neighborhood amenities as desirable
goals. They offer a strong neighborhood of middle-class
amenities as a public good. This same activist told me,
Looking from a neighborhood perspective, I want my
streets to be lively, I want trees on my block, I want the
baby carriages, I want to know people, I want the shops,
you know, they want it to be a community. A Dumbo
gallerist told me:

I came here in the early 1980s, and I wasnt even first

generation. Every building, every tree, nothing
had been scarred yet. It was a group of artists
I think back how dumb we were, like people who
would want to come to a place named Dumbo.

Im very left wing, you know, I certainly recognize

how gentrification has real effects on real people.
But, for example, if we look at what happened with
the Williamsburg rezoning, thats not peoplefriendly, not artist-friendly. Whats happened over
there isnt very great for many people, except the
very wealthy. But whats happened here has bene
fited some people who are not wealthy I mean because there are organizations which are subsidized,
the fact that there are organizations in subsidized
spaces means they can run a program for local atrisk high school students, which some organizations do. It means they can offer a studio space for
real artists. Its real benefits for working artists.

The very name Dumbo itself was originally a manifestation of this sentiment. The name was coined by participants in these organizations as a gesture of resistance against the corporate development of the area. A
former resident and organizer wrote, In 1978, as the
inevitability of development became apparent, the community decided that, if we were to die, at least we should
be buried under a name of our choosing.19 The thought
was that Dumbo was sufficiently silly, even stupid
sounding, that it might deter corporate-led redevelopment, or at least shape it.
Working through the local community board, members of some of these groups put together a 197-a proposal
an official mechanism for community-based planning.
Calling the area Old Brooklyn, the plan offered a number of Old Brooklyn District Planning Principles, such
as, Development and planning initiatives should act to
draw the Districts various neighborhoods together, and
ensure that all the Districts residents and stakeholders
including youth, lower income, and elderly residents
benefit.20 The 197-a plan recommended various actions
that would have tied together the various parts of the

Proponents of Dumbo as a social and spatial project do

see neighborhood struggles as political issues. But for
them, it is predominantly artists, small businesses, and
creative people who are the imagined public and subjects for neighborhood development here.
The Dumbo project, then, has consistently been
divided between these two different neighborhood
projects. But it is important to see what this supposed
conflict between developers and community groups obscured. From the beginning, Dumbo was a class project,
pursued sometimes by what Pierre Bourdieu saw as the
dominated fraction of the dominant class,21 and sometimes by what is clearly simply the dominant fraction of

sidies emerged as a viable economic strategy: with some

spaces acting as a loss leader, other properties could be
priced much higher. Rent subsidies for artists and art
galleries are, in effect, an investment in the form of prestige. The companys strategy is quite clear. We have millions of square feet and have given several hundred
thousand to artists because we like to have art. It adds
value to the whole area.26 The neighborhood itselfnot
just specific storefronts or buildingsfunctions as a
commodity.
Dumbo is also, in some important ways, a state spatial project. While various agencies of New York City
and New York State governments have at times opposed
specific plans for the neighborhood, on the whole they
have supported the project of making Dumbo a luxury
enclave. Joseph B. Rose, Chairman of the City Planning
Commission, said of proposed zoning changes to allow
for residential conversions, Were definitely sympath
etic to the goal it allows for the emergence of new
SoHos and TriBeCas.27 The state has more or less abandoned its older emphasis on industrial retention, and
supports the Dumbo neighborhood project by facilit
ating the transformation of the waterfront area into a
space for commerce, housing, and cultural events.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the City Planning
Commission approved a series of amendments to the
citys zoning map allowing the transformation of the
area from a manufacturing to a mixed-use, luxuryhousing district.
The Dumbo Business Improvement District (BID),
as a semi-public, largely privatized organization that
works to bolster, brand, and promote the Dumbo identity,
typifies the neoliberalizing states participation in the
process of neighborhood formation. With the backing of
local landlords, construction companies, and non-profit
organizations, the Dumbo BID was authorized in 2005.
The organization sees its goals as enhancing DUMBOs
public spaces and promoting our neighborhood as a
world class destination.28 In cooperation with Two Trees
and other private companies, the BID has pursued numerous initiatives for neighborhood development, like
free wireless internet access and a business incubator
for technology companies. The BIDs participation in the
project of building an elite enclave has been a source of
contention among some neighborhood participants. One
longtime participant in neighborhood groups told me,
its a little disturbing, theyre founded by developers

the dominant class. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the

industrial lofts were being populated not just by painters and sculptors, but with dancers and writers and
even a handful of bankers, lawyers, teachers, and salespeople.22 Loft-dwellers themselves can be considered
small-scale real estate capitalists.23 As one longtime community participant told me, reflecting on the community
opposition to various Two Trees-led developments, the
joke is that we were just trying to protect the value of our
condos. And even the self-identifying artists who did not
come to own real estate should still be seen as cultural
capitalists pursuing a vision of community that can be
located within the citys larger cultural and economic
hierarchy. Dumbo community groups like the DNA continue to mobilize in support of small businesses and
artists, working to oppose increased zoning heights, to
maintain historic preservation, and generally to maintain
the areas antique atmosphere.
This is not to say that conflict between these groups
and developers is not serious or real. At times, the conflicts between these two branches of the Dumbo project
have become seriously contentious. That said, cultural
consumption is inseparable from the ideology of contemporary neighborhood development projects. As the
research on gentrification and culture industries demonstrates,24 in todays city, there is a clear harmony between real estate and the mainstream art world, despite
the occasional outward appearance of hostility. No matter the periodic conflicts that arise, the project of producing neighborhood as a sellable commodity dovetails
with the project of producing neighborhood as a distinctive community.
Thus, the original Dumbo project of an arts-oriented,
historically preserved enclave was easily integrated with
the corporate project for the neighborhood pursued by
Two Trees and other real estate companies. As David
Walentas put it, enriching the mix downstairs with
some sort of conspicuously consumable art can increas[e]
the value of whats upstairs.25 The scale of Two Trees
holdings in the area enabled possibilities not available to
smaller developers. In essence, the company controls the
neighborhood itself as a giant commodity, which makes
possible a distinctive strategy. Two Trees offers subsidized rents to artists, galleries, and organizations that
promote the performing and visual arts, and has a cultural affairs director on staff. Because the company
owned so much property in the area, cultural cross-sub-

Dumbo as explicitly racialized, and a number of black

residents told me that they feel unwelcome in Dumbo.
I am not arguing that neighborhood projects create
urban inequality, but I am arguing that neighborhood
projects format and express urban spatial inequality in
significant ways. As social spaces, neighborhoods can
take more or less egalitarian forms. They can be spaces
of shared struggle or collective consumption; or they
can be elitist, exclusionary enclaves. In neither case does
neighborhood determine class position. But in functioning as shared resources or as instruments of division,
they contribute to the form and experience of inequality,
and can heighten or dampen its impact.
Dumbo as a neighborhood is not a resource for the
areas working class and poor population, who consistently have been excluded from the plans for the neighborhood. The groups that shaped Dumbo have produced,
and continue to pursue, the neighborhood as an elite
enclave. In a very real way, the development of Dumbo
has displaced Farragutnot in the sense of facilitating
its removal (although rumors about imminent redevelopment abound constantly), but in the sense of remaking
Farraguts surrounding into a new kind of place that
is oriented toward other developmental needs, goals,
and logics. The Dumbo project supplied a new collective
developmental subjectowners of luxury housing,
participants in cultural production and consumption,
participants in hi-tech industriesthat replaced the
older developmental subject of working class and poor
Brooklynites. The areas dominant spatial projects
were once oriented towards the industrial middle- and
working-class public of public housing. Now, in the
form of Dumbo, the area is oriented towards an elite and
elitist version of the public and its interests.
There is a widespread acknowledgment among Farragut tenants that these new developmental goals and
spaces do not help the areas poor and working-class
residents. Many public housing tenants would agree
with the words of one Farragut tenant who, talking
about all these condos, told me, Its not our world. It
aint for us. Few of the areas wealthy residents send
their children to public schools or socialize with Farragut families. One Farragut resident told me, speaking of
residents of all those condos, Theyre wealthy folks.
They got private play circles in their buildings, they dont
need to use city parks. They got their own thing going
on there. What theyve done over there is disgusting.

and commercial interests in the neighborhood, and thats

what their focus should be, but theyre taking over some
of the advocacy stuff too, which makes me nervous
because of the underlying issues. Another community
participant described the BID straightforwardly as
Walentass organization. But the organizations goals for
the neighborhood are barely distinguishable from that of
the community groups. An employee of the BID told me,
Our board is made of property owners, so a lot of people
in the neighborhood see us as the enemy. But there are
many things that community groups are 100 percent behind. Having art out on the street, I mean, we have this
wonderful indigenous artistic community, there should
be public art all over. Despite some differences, these
various groups have together pursued Dumbo as a spatial project in the waterfront area.
An Unequal Neighborhood
Transforming the downtown waterfront area into
Dumbo, then, has been a decades-long process pursued
both by developers and by community groups, with the
participation of the state. This process continues today.
There have been conflicts between these groups, but
their overall projects for the neighborhood are in many
ways quite similar: creating an enclave, that is, in the
words of an advertisement that blazons a Two Trees
building, NYCs Creative Capital. What has been the
impact of this approach to neighborhood formation?
The clearest consequence is the creation of a distinctly
unequal urban order. North of York Street, Dumbo and
Vinegar Hill have a median annual household income of
$163,147. On the other side of York Street, Farragut
Houses, sitting just across from a number of new condominiums, has a median income of $18,702. In 1970, these
figures were less than $2,000 apart. Between 1980 and
1990, the median home value in Dumbo rose more than
500 percent;29 the average private apartment in Dumbo
in 2005 sold for more than one million dollars.30 According to United States census figures, nearly a quarter of
Farragut residents are unemployed, compared with only
2 percent of Dumbo residents. Nearly half of Farragut
families live below the poverty line, compared to a negligible figure for Dumbo. Dumbo has also been a racialized project. Dumbo above York Street in 2000 was only
15 percent African-American and more than 60 percent
white, while more than 57 percent of Farragut tenants
were black. Many Farragut tenants told me that they see

It is also clear to many who live in Farragut that the

development of Dumbo has not brought any opportunities for well-paid work. One Farragut resident in his
mid-twenties told me:

downtown Brooklyn waterfront area has instead established a developmental agenda that has no place for them.
It is this form of displacement that should be seen as the
major effect of neighborhood formation in this area.

We cant even get a job out of it. I go over there, I say

I live in the area and I need a job, and theyre like, No.
Its wrong. Yall come to our turf, and you cant just
give us a job? We just want to work. There aint no
jobs for us. Theres the bakery, but thats about it.
I mean, dont get me wrong, it might be good in some
ways, but its not for us.

Conclusion
Neighborhoods are made, not born. The making of
Dumbo has been predicated upon not only the displacement of industrial uses but also the exclusion of the areas
public housing residents. Dumbo might be an extreme
caseto an unusual degree, it has been built by a single
monopolistic developer intent on creating an exclusive
enclave. But in an unequal city, neighborhood development is always going to be implicated in inequality. It is
just particularly obvious when looking at the history of
Dumbo and Farragut.
The ideology and idolization of neighborhood often
helps to legitimize an unequal urban order. In contrast,
conceptualizing neighborhoods as spatial projects can
help shed new light on a number of contemporary issues in urban studies and urban development. Chief
among them is how to understand the consequences of
gentrification. When neighborhoods are seen in this
way, new forms of displacement come into focus. As has
been the case with Dumbo, even when only small
amounts of direct displacement have occurred, we can
still speak of a kind of displacement when new spatial
projects re-orient a neighborhood toward new goals and
uses. It is possible for a community to remain in place of
residence, yet still to be in an important sense displaced
as the subject of neighborhood development. Merely
staying putwhich itself is becoming increasingly
difficult for many city-dwellers32is cold comfort for
working class and poor communities when the neighborhoods in which they live are being re-oriented toward
new goals and new uses that generally exclude them. By
seeing neighborhoods as spatial projects, critical scholars
can refocus the discussion around the political questions at the heart of the gentrification debate: whose
spatial projects tend to prevail in the contemporary city?
Urbanists should dispense with the notion of neighborhoods as natural community areas. And city-dwellers
should resist the romantic affirmation of neighborhood
as an urban public good in itself. Instead, we should
inquire into the ways in which neighborhood projects
can be mobilized toward many different ends. Neighbor
hoods are political all the way downwhich is to say

Its not for us exemplifies the exclusion that many New

Yorkers experience as a result of contemporary neighborhood development.
I did speak to some Farragut tenants who had found
temporary work in luxury apartment buildings. But
many longtime Farragut residents remember when the
neighborhood was an industrial center and see the few
precarious jobs on offer throughout Dumbo and the rest
of gentrified Brooklyn as cold comfort. As a president of
the Farragut Tenant Association told a reporter, If we
went down there, for restaurants and basic activities,
it would be too expensive for most of us. Its not
designed around the needs that we have.31
Recent neighborhood development in the downtown Brooklyn waterfront has been a kind of regime
change, as various post-industrial, neoliberal projects
replaced older industrial, FordistKeynesian neighborhood projects. That public housing does not figure centrally in the political, social, and spatial goals of recent
development is glaringly obvious to public housing tenants. Discussing the ways in which downtown Brooklyn
was changing, a housing activist with the group Families
United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE)
told me:
These are strong communities. We have to protect
them. Fort Greene, Farragut, Ingersoll, Whitman,
these are stronghold communities, they are political
strongholds. They need to be valued for that. We
need to protect our stronghold communities.
The Dumbo project, it is clear, has not entailed the protection of Farragut and other public housing developments. The production of new neighborhood space in the

10

that the politics of neighborhood will always ultimately

remain an open question. Some neighborhood projects
might be in some instances vehicles for resistance to
an unequal urban order. But they can just as easily be
deployed by political actors who seek to maintain and
profit from urban inequality. We should not affirm an
ethic of neighborhood placemaking per se, but rather
pursue a sharper analysis of neighborhood itself as a
politics of place.

5
6
7
8
9

10
11
12
13

14

15
16

11

On the history of neighborhood and urban planning in the United

States, see: Leo Kuper, Social Science Research and the Planning
of Urban Neighbourhoods, Social Forces, 29, 3 (1951): 23743;
Christopher Silver, Neighborhood Planning in Historical
Perspective, Journal of the American Planning Association, 51, 2
(1985): 16174; Patricia Mooney Melvin, Changing Contexts:
Neighborhood Definition and Urban Organization, American
Quarterly, 37, 3 (1985): 35767; Rachel Kallus and Hubert Law-Yone,
What Is a Neighbourhood? The Structure and Function of an Idea,
Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 27, 6 (1997):
81526; W. Dennis Keating and Norman Krumholz, Neighborhood Planning, Journal of Planning Education and Research, 20, 1
(2000): 11114; and William M. Rohe, From Local to Global:
One Hundred Years of Neighborhood Planning, Journal of the
American Planning Association, 75, 2 (2009): 20930.
Fraser argues, The Westphalian understanding of the who went
with a specific picture of political space, a Westphalian political
imaginary. In this imaginary, political communities appeared as
geographically bounded units, demarcated by sharply drawn
borders. See Nancy Fraser, Who Counts? Dilemmas of Justice
in a Postwestphalian World, Antipode, 41, 1 (2010): 28197;
here 28182. Something analogous can be seen on the neighborhood scale.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991/1974); Manuel Castells, The Urban
Question: A Marxist Approach, tr. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1977); and Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban
Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford/New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004).
These data were collected as part of a larger ethnographic and
historical study of place and politics in the downtown Brooklyn
waterfront. See David J. Madden, Neighborhood as Spatial
Project: Making the Urban Order on the Downtown Brooklyn
Waterfront, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38,
2 (2014): 47197. I collected archival information on housing,
community groups, local history, architecture, real estate, political
figures, activists, planners, religious leaders, journalists, art
galleries, and many other relevant actors and topics, using archival
and published sources, as indicated. Between 2007 and 2010,
I conducted fieldwork in public places, community centers, socialmovement organizations, community-board meetings, protests,
rallies, fundraisers, and other events. I also conducted open-ended,
unstructured interviews with more than three dozen activists,
residents, workers, and community participants. Here, I present
selections of my data, emphasizing the larger narrative of neighborhood formation and change.
See Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the
Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996), 1218.
A. J. Neches and P. E. Aarons, The City Approaches Industrial
Development, New York Affairs, 6, 2 (1980): 4346.
Department of City Planning, Fulton Ferry (New York:
Department of City Planning, 1972), 3.
Ibid., 1.
New York City Planning Commission, Large-Scale Development in
New York City: Comprehensive Planning Workshop (New York:
Department of City Planning, 1973), 90.
Department of City Planning, Plans, Programs and Policies
19801985 (New York: Department of City Planning, 1985), 29.
Ibid., 30.
New York City Planning Commission, Fulton Ferry (New York:
Department of City Planning, 1983), 4.
New York City Department of City Planning, Citywide Industry
Study: Geographic Atlas of Industrial Areas (New York:
Department of City Planning, 1993), 52.
New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission,
Dumbo Historic District: Designation Report (New York: Landmarks
Preservation Commission, 2007), 18.
Joseph, P. Fried, Fulton Ferry Revival: A Clash of Ideas,
The New York Times (October 31, 1982).
New York City Planning Commission, Fulton Ferry, 4.

17

18
19

20

21
22
23
24

25
26

27

28
29

30
31

32

Robert A. M. Stern et al., New York 2000: Architecture and

Urbanism between the Bicentennial and the Millennium (New York:
Monacelli Press, 2006), 114546.
Lynda Richardson, Amid Old Brooklyn Factories, A Shrinking
Canvas, The New York Times (July 24, 1995).
Crane Davis, How Dumbo Got Its Name and What It Was Almost
Called, Dumbo NYC, Notes from the Brooklyn, NY Neighborhood
(2007), n.p., online: <http://dumbonyc.com/2007/05/21/
how-dumbo-got-its-name/> (accessed 7/24/15).
Executive Committee, Community Board 2, A Community Based
Plan for the Old Brooklyn District: Including the neighborhoods of
Farragut, Vinegar Hill, Bridge Plaza, DUMBO, and Fulton Ferry
(New York: Brooklyn Community Board, 1999).
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste,
tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Davis, How Dumbo Got Its Name.
See Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989).
See, for example: Elizabeth Strom, Artist Garret as Growth
Machine? Local Policy and Artist Housing in U.S. Cities,
Journal of Planning Education and Research, 29, 3 (2010): 36778;
Stuart Cameron and Jon Coaffee, Art, Gentrification and
Regeneration: From Artist as Pioneer to Public Arts, European
Journal of Housing Policy, 5, 1 (2005): 3958; David Ley, Artists,
Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification, Urban Studies, 40,
12 (2003): 252744; Smith, The New Urban Frontier; and Rosalyn
Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1996).
David Walentas, quoted by Peter Hellman, Over the River,
No Longer Fringe, The New York Times (October 24, 2002).
David Walentas, quoted by Susan Saulny, Brooklyn Group of
Artists Settles In New Quarters, The New York Times
(December 19, 2000).
Joseph B. Rose, Chairman of the City Planning Commission,
quoted by David W. Dunlap, SoHo, TriBeCa and Now Dumbo?,
The New York Times (October 25, 1998).
Dumbo Improvement District, Annual Report 20082009
(New York: Dumbo Improvement District, 2009), 3.
Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology and
Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2006), 146.
New York ACORN, Sweetheart Development: Gentrification and
Resegregation in Downtown Brooklyn (New York: ACORN, 2006), 2.
Somini Sengupta, A Neighborhood Indentity Crisis: Transfor
mation Brings Anxiety in Brooklyns Dumbo, The New York Times
(June 9, 1999).
Kathe Newman and Elvin K. Wyly, The Right to Stay Put,
Revisited: Gentrification and Resistance to Displacement
in New York City, Urban Studies, 43, 1 (2006): 2357.

12

Mariana
Fix

The Real Estate

Circuit and
(the Right to)
the City:
Notes on
the Housing
Question
in Brazil
Since its re-democratization in the 1980s, Brazils progres
sive agenda on urban reform and participatory city mana
gement has been widely recognized for its initiative in
many areas. These include participatory budgeting,1
slum upgrading, land regularization, participative design
and technical advice on architecture for social housing,
the management of construction sites by housing movements, the creation of participatory committees for the
management of sectorial funds for housing and urban
policies, the struggle for approval of the constitutional
principle of the social function of urban property,2 and
the Estatuto da Cidade (City Statute).3
These initiatives are part of a legacy of achievements
in social and institutional movements seeking to produce
greater equality in cities in a country that, despite periods of rapid growth, is one of the most unequal in the
world. This is a history that begins in the context of
the Base Reforms of society,4 at a time when a collection
of ideas on social and urban transformation aroseexpressed in terms such as Urban Reform, Right to Housing, and Right to the Cityand which were then put
on hold when conservative forces seized power. Reforms
shelved during the twenty-one year military regime
then resumed, to some extent, in the cycle of democratic

13

and participatory urban administrations of the mid1980s and 1990s.

Since that time, this progressive agenda has come
under increasing pressure from groups that seek to expand and re-shape cities according to their own interests.
Property developers,5 in the manner of activists, push for
change in urban planning and housing policy: the opening of new grand boulevards, an increase in verticalization indices, and the introduction of housing subsidies.
In addition there have been changes to the regulatory
frameworksuch as the creation of the Brazilian Sistema
de Financiamento Imobilirio (Real Estate Financing SystemSFI), (including the creation of Certificates of Real
Estate Receivables (CRIs) that resemble US Mortgagebacked Securities, or MBSs)and changes imposed as
part of the battle to host international mega-events such
as the World Cup and the Olympic Games.
While some of these initiatives were introduced
through international organizations (i.e. the World Bank
(WB) and the inter-American Development BankIDB),
many were also promoted (legitimated) by speeches,
theories, or ideologies such as, global cities, publicprivate
partnerships (PPP), the strategic planning of cities, city
marketing, and the revitalization of historic inner-city
areas.6 It is not, however, simply about the opposition
between two watertight groups: at various times, there
have been alliances between representatives of the two
different approaches, claiming that both capital and labor
could benefit by greasing the wheels of the urban growth
machine.7 As Pedro Arantes points out, The social face
of the popular democratic Urban Reform was subdued
in favour of market solutions and PPPs.8
The real estate circuit of capital accumulation,
strengthened during the military regime with the creation of the Banco Nacional da Habitao (National Housing
BankBNH), faced funding difficulties because of the
debt crisis of the late 1980s; this in turn led to the demise
of the BNH.9 Urbanization continued at a rapid pace
nonetheless, with a growing portion of the population
resorting to illegal settlementsthe slums, tenements,
and irregular land divisions their only possible option.
Initial changes to housing policy occurred in the
1990s, during the administrations of Fernando Collor de
Mello (199092) and Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995
2002), via the countrys greater involvement in globalization, i.e. PPP, pension funds acting as urban investors,
and through conditioned loans from the WB and the IDB.

Further changes came about during the administrations

of Luiz Incio Lula da Silva (200310)10 and Dilma
Rousseff (2011present), which saw the recovery of the
Sistema Financeiro da Habitao (Household Finance
SystemSFH) and expansion of public subsidies for
large urban housing programs.
Major transformations affected all areas of housing:
for example, access to and the regulatory framework of
loans; the ownership structure of companies, their connection to public subsidies and international finance
capital, and their relationship with the construction sites
run by these companies. Add to this also both the social
imaginary and ideology of home ownership (as opposed
to the idea of the right to housing and to the city) and
the expanded range of housing projects that managed to
create urbanization without urban qualities.
This essay poses four questions with emphasis on
aspects relating to housing provision: Who builds housing in Brazil? How does housing policy feed the real
estate circuit

? Who controls housing development

today? and Where and how are the large estates of
low-income housing developments built?
Finally, some of the differences and similarities
between the transformations in Brazil and those that
occurred in the United States are explored, taking the
latter country as a counterpoint because the connections between real estate and finance have evolved
there the most.11
Who Builds Housing in Brazil?
For much of Brazils history, the answer to the housing
question has been in the practice of self-construction:
building was carried out by residents themselves, their
families, or by way of an informal private order with
small contractors and hired masons. Self-construction in
Brazil is not limited to houses, however, but extends to
other working-class sites as well, including some urban
infrastructure.12
The housing solution as seen in resident self-builds
viewed as marginal and backward, by manyin fact,
has proved to be an aspect of Brazilian (conservative)
modernization that benefited from lowering the reproduction costs of labor-power.13 In addition, most selfbuilds are illegal constructions, in part because they violate construction codes, but mainly due to their illegal
land tenure. Barriers to land access have a long history
in Brazil dating to the enactment of the Land Law in

14

1850; and it is no coincidence that the banning of the

slave trade shortly after this date was a harbinger of the
abolition in 1888.14 Land bought, could then be sold at
exorbitant prices to workers and recently freed slaves;
thus, the first town house of the newly freed slave was
the tenement and the second, the favela.
Save for a few periods in history, therefore, this
means that the huge mass of wage-earning Brazilians
were not included in the market for capitalist housing
production; while at the other end of the spectrum was
the miniscule bourgeois housing marketarchitect designed, built by hand, to order. While the capitalist production of homes has been severely restricted throughout most of Brazils history to a small portion of the population,15 between these two extremesself-construction
and the bourgeois mansionthere has been the narrow
mass-market16 consisting of neighborhoods in which
the highest income brackets of society have segregated
themselves spatially in the Brazilian metropolis.17
The Brazilian state has rarely produced housing
directly and the housing market has not grown sufficiently to justify building housing on a large scale. The
first time large-scale development did occur in Brazil
was with the aforementioned BNH when, from 196486,
the state attempted to stifle popular pressure and ease
the housing crisis while at the same time meet the commercial interests of the construction industry. Using
resources taken from the compulsory working-class employment security fund, the Fundo de Garantia por Tempo
de Servio (Guarantee Fund for Length of Service
FGTS) and the Sistema Brasileiro de Poupana e Emprstimo
(Brazilian Savings and Loan SystemSBPE), the BNH
created a huge and relatively new artificial middle-class
market.18
The second growth period began in 2005 through
the work of the Ministry of Cities, which resulted in the
political-electoral and real estate invention known as the
affordable or economic segment. Now that housing
development companies had succeeded in expanding the
supply of housing beyond their customary social bracket,
that is, to cater for lower-income sections of society, the
process continued with the housing program Minha Casa
Minha Vida (My Home, My Life), launched in 2009.19
Therefore, though the practice of self-construction
and construction by small contractors has remained relevant in the production of houses in Brazil, in recent
decades, there has been a broadening of production by

developers and construction firms. The increase in the

circulation of capital through the built environment has
generated important qualitative changes to this special
kind of production-realization system,20 here termed
the real estate circuit,21 as we shall see.
How Does Housing Policy
Feed the Real Estate Circuit?
As the credit system and the expansion of the real estate
circuit in Brazil lacked the stability of the real estate
market in the United States, institutional changes associated with the financialization of the economy in Brazil
were based on very different foundations to those found
in the real estate securitization of this models country
of originthe US.
In Brazil, when the credit supply plummeted following the debt crisis of the 1980s it stalled the SFH for
two decades: In four years (19831986), only 184,300
real estate properties were financedor 71% of what
had been financed in a single year (1982).22 Housing
financing would not return to its high growth rates
until 2005, as outlined below.
In the 1990s, the Brazilian government took steps
to promote the countrys inclusion in the financialization era with initiatives such as monetary stabilization,
open trade agreements, the opening of the Brazilian
securities market to foreign capital, and the gradual
removal of controls on international capital flow.23 At
the same time, the WB and the Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac agencies, among others, promoted the United States
mortgage system as the model Brazil should follow.24
What was later known as the US housing bubble had
been promoted in Brazil, as well as in other countries,
for its supposedly virtuous character at a time when its
house of cards character was suspected but not known;
of course, with predictably devastating consequences,
as confirmed by the 2008 subprime crisis.
By the late 1990s, the creation of the Real Estate
Financing System (SFI) in Brazil relied on the defense of
a deregulated real estate financing system, in opposition
to the SFH, which regulated the interest rate and the capture and allocation of resources. The North American
mortgage securitization system was chosen as the model
for Brazil to use in the creation of the SFI for its supposed
ability to provide financial liquidity to the operations and
not to have any dependence on direct funding or mandatory targeting of resources. However, in order to establish

15

itself the new financing system used and still uses public funds to leverage resources, thus minimizing risk.
Once again, the discourse of flexibility, deregulation,
and a minimal state was concealing a new way to capture public funds, as Luciana Royer demonstrated.25
In the same decade, the true scope of urban need and
the scale of resources required in order to address the
problem was recognized. This, combined with the discourse of the minimal state,26 strengthened the case for
an urban planning model that would bring real estate
developers closer to the state. In Brazil, the hegemonic
prescriptions applied to cities took the form of urban instruments such as joint urban operations, urban concessions, PPP, projects to revitalize central areas, and, in
general, the strategic planning for cities and global cities.
At the beginning of the Lula administration in 2003,
due to the vision of planners and social movements
motivated by the size of the urban problem and aware of
the urgent need to tackle it, the Ministry of Cities was
created. The measures adopted by the Ministry meant
that between December 2004 and December 2008 the
housing finance supply in the country (at early 2014
prices) jumped from R$41.5 billion to R$84.5 billion,
raising its percentage of GDP from 1.3% to 2.1%.27
At the same time, policies to decrease inequality between workers incomes (not, however, in the functional
distribution of income between profits and wages) contributed to the inclusion, via consumption, of a portion
of this population of workers into the consumer society
and these businesses clienteles.
These changes affected the ownership structure and
strategies of real estate developers: the Initial Public
Offerings (IPOs) on the stock exchange, foreign capital
inflow through private equity and the purchase of
shares, and the concentration and centralization of capital.28 Soon, however, this movement ran to limits that to
some extent are intrinsic to the way the sector functions
in Brazil, accentuated by repercussions of the global
financial crisis.
The City Statute, the Brazilian law of Urban Reform,
a popular initiative submitted to the National Congress
with over one million signatures and approved in 2001,
gave municipalities the opportunity to put the principles of the social function of property into practice.
The ruling of the real estate growth machine, in the
words of John Logan and Harvey Molotch, however,
prevailed.29

The 2008 global financial crisis was the pretext for

the reformulation of the housing problem. In the terms
proposed by the real estate sector in direct negotiations
with the Chief of Staff Office, shaped in the 2009 package Minha Casa Minha Vida that was later transformed
into a housing program, the ideology of home ownership was once again mobilized directing real estate
developers to produce affordable housing.
The program has two distinct logics of operation:
range 1 is for families with a monthly income of up
R$1,600 and ranges 2 and 3 is for families with an i ncome
of between R$1,600 to R$4,500. For the poorest (range
1), who represent 83 percent of the demand for housing,
housing provision is organized by individual municipalities, supplying houses constructed by private companies
that are remunerated per housing unit built. Families pay
a small portion of the costs, which should not exceed 5
percent of their monthly household income, with the rest
financed via public funds. In this way, housing for people
in range 1 is subsidized housing. For those above the
range-1 income bracket, the developers define the terms
of the project and the properties are then sold on the
open housing market. Families in range 2 receive subsidies in the form of discounts on their loan installments.
Similarities between this program and other initiatives of this sort implemented in Latin Americaparticularly in Chile and Mexicoreveal their kinship. The
reform of the Chilean housing sector began in 1977, supported and funded by the WB and the IDB. During the
Pinochet administration, Chile became a sort of laboratory for neoliberal policies in Latin America. Years later,
the problems with los con Techo (Those with Homes)
were as Alfredo Rodriguez and Ana Sugranyes point
out: segregation, fragmentation, insecurity, and overcrowding.30
For the Brazilian population in the highest income
bracket, access to housing credit has broadened through
the use of savings resources such as the Brazilian Savings
and Loan System (SBPE), which as they are paid back
at regulated rates are a relatively inexpensive funding
resource. A percentage of SBPE funding can be provided
in accordance with the rules of the SFH, at below-market
rates, which therefore indirectly represents a subsidy.31
These loans are available to anyone, even those who could
finance themselves at market rates.
Loan applications grew significantly from 2005 onwards, due both to favorable macroeconomic conditions

16

and changes in regulation, and, as of 2009, according to

Claudia Eloy, as a result of the work of public banks.32 Of
the total funds raised in savings via SBPE, in 2002 only
15 percent was invested in housing or used to finance
the SFH; 18 percent in 2005; 24 percent in 2008; and 35
percent in 2011. In December 2014, the system had
peaked at 52 percentwith R$272.7 billion invested in
housing loans.33
Who Controls Housing Development Today?
If housing policy feeds the private real estate housing
circuit, we need to ask who controls the companies today and what their strategies are.
While international capital increased in the Brazilian
manufacturing sector during the 1950s, the real estate
circuit has remained restricted to the Brazilian elites and
has kept its eminently commercial nature, finding parallels in the banking sector and the agribusiness. While
multinational companies established in Brazil increasingly produced cars, televisions, white goods, and even
food, housing, built for sale on the formal real estate market,34 in turn, has been a sector that was traditionally
composed of local capital, mainly Brazilian family-owned
firms.
The speculative nature of how the real estate circuit
functions, together with its dependence on state privileges for expansion, make this industry a privileged recipient of investments of non-industrial capital. Carlos
Lessa argues that the portion of mass of profit appropriated by the large national private capital tends to outweigh the appreciation opportunities of its own sectors,
which implies a permanent structural problem. This allows the real estate capital an important role in the economy, in this kind of capitalism, driven by the recurrent
surplus of those sectors in the hands of national private
capital. Investors sought to gain at least the equivalent of
the higher organic composition sectors of industry.
Hence, in the interpretation of Carlos Lessa, the import
ance that real estate speculation has assumed in Brazilian cities mirrors the difficulties in containing it.35
In the 1990s, when the Brazilian economy was going through a process of denationalization, construction
and real estate development activities did not follow
other sectors, but remained under national control.36
With the policies launched by the Ministry of Cities
in 2003, the restructuring of the credit system, and
mainly after the launch of Minha Casa Minha Vida in

2009, various real estate developers, which had previously focused on projects restricted to high-income sections, launched brands directed at the affordable or
economic segment. These development companies designed new products together with regional firms and
bought up some developers already working within
low-income housing provision. At the same time, expanding their geographic reach towards mid-sized cities
and other states, finally, many of these developers floated on the public stock exchange as a means of raising
more funds for yet more expansion.
Between 2005 and 2007, nineteen Brazilian developers issued IPOs on the Stock Exchange.37 This raised
R$12.8 billion for the companies (as primary offerings),
and approximately R$2.8 billion for their shareholders
(as secondary offerings). This combination of loans and
grants from public and semi-public funds (middle-class
savings (SBPE), and the workers funds (FGTS)) and
finance capital (private equity and portfolio investments
on the stock market) has brought about changes in the
real estate circuit, which includes changes in the ownership structure of companies.
The result of this is that former owners of several
real estate development companiesespecially those
that floated on the stock exchangehave lost relative
participation and been forced to share their power with
owners of the finance capital and their managers, asset
management companies, and private equity companies.
Managers assess which companies are most likely to increase their market value according to the location of
their land bank and the type of housing they produce.
The outside position of the shareholders (and their managers) often leads to disputes over decisions regarding
land purchases and allocation.
Local knowledge, pressure on public authorities (executive, legislative, and judiciary), a lack of articulation
with the worlds economy, and the distance between
capital markets and the housing market are all factors
that make the expansion of foreign capital in this sector
in Brazil nonetheless difficult. A number of companies
have thus remained entirely in the hands of Brazilian
families. These companies are fueled by public funds in
the form of direct loan subsidies, tax reductions for
building materials, and in some cases donations of land for
construction projects. In short, therefore, arrangements
are constituted, combining new legislation with old
elements, such as land rent extraction (land ownership

17

and real estate development), finance rent (share ownership), surplus value (construction profits), interest (loans),
and public funds.
Thus, the most significant changes in the housing
construction sector have come about as the result of a
combination of public and semi-public funds (federal
budgetary resources (OGU), FGTS, SBPE) and international finance capital. Real estate securitization mechanisms introduced in Brazil (such as CRIs, for example)
have not yet reached the same size as they have in countries such as the US and have had a lesser impact.
Where and How are the Large Estates of
Low-income Housing Developments Built?
The result of instructing developers to meet the socalled housing shortage38 has been a productivist model
for the construction of housingthe location, typology,
construction site, and architectural design of which is
determined mainly by developers within the parameters
of their profit forecasts, and combined with expectations
of rentier gains (land rent capture and stock market appreciation).
The range of proposals that have been advocated by
city architects and planners for decadesi.e. quality and
project diversity, mixed-use and integration, community
spaces and squares, resident participation in determining
design and construction management, the recycling
of buildings in central areas, slum upgrading with
the involvement of residents and with minimal relocation, public buildings for rental by the community, and
the use of technologies and materials appropriate to
the climatic, geographical, and cultural conditions
have largely been eroded by the Minha Casa Minha Vida
program, launched in 2009. Minha Casa encourages the
production of housing projects, by private companies,
that are large, massified, homogeneous, mono-functional,
and have low urban quality.39
Although an increase in the scale of production may
encourage progress at some construction sites towards
industrial-type rationalization, at the same time, it
strengthens the figure of the developer as the agent that
seeks to control the process.
Minha Casa projects tend toward constructions in
new or already-established suburbs far away from areas
with significant infrastructure, social services, or jobs.
Thus, while producing many city homes, the homes are
often without a city.40 Among the companies commercial

strategies is the purchase of rural land by the hectare

and the rapid legal conversion to urban land, which the
company then sells by the square meter. Thus, the master
plan of the municipality is thwarted by the investment
decisions of private companies, which change the expansion vectors provided for by planning. The result is an
urban sprawl and enhanced spatial segregation.
In range 1, the choice of land is usually the companys,
and the municipality guarantees and manages demand.
In ranges 2 and 3, by contrast, choice of location is part of
the enterprises marketing spiel.
Many companies that operate in range 1 use construction systems that require homogeneous mass production, with sliding molds and concrete walls, which
therefore require large plots. These large plots of land
are generally more difficult to obtain in consolidated
areas. The rising price of land, which is much higher than
the cost of construction and inflation in recent years,
also pushes the projects farther into the hinterland.
With this as the rule, among all ranges, one can find
better located projects. In range 1, the municipalities can
donate land for construction projects. However, while
the governments ability to purchase and concede new
plots has been hampered precisely by higher land prices,
the construction companies meanwhile have managed
to establish land banks. The fact is, then, that with large
land tracts in the hands of private firms for future projects, these companies end up driving urban growth
in the direction of their own business strategies. This
phenomenon does seem to be more common in medium-
sized municipalities than in the capital municipalities of
the metropolis, however.
Regarding typology, the increase in the financial
scale of the operation was accompanied by an increase
in the scale of the projects, whether horizontal (houses)
or vertical (apartment buildings). However, the 500-unitlimit that the housing program set was then circumvented by companies by building adjacent (vertical) condominiums under a horizontal project remit, totaling
over 2,000 housing units. In ranges 2 and 3, besides
the horizontal projects, vertical structures of various
heights are also constructed.
With production of some companies reaching 30fold growth, inevitably, the financial scale of the operations changed the management and techniques of construction. Irrigated by new financial flows, construction
sites provided different answers to the problems that

18

arose in the field of production. Several companies followed with traditional solutions from the point of view
of building techniques, on grounds that new technologies do not guarantee productivity gains. Other companies have introduced rigorous standardization processes
both in the design and in the specification of componentssometimes combined with working conditions
likened to slavery, for which some developers have been
sentenced to Conduct Adjustment Terms by the public
prosecutor. Still other firms sought to build systems
that enabled the production of large horizontal projects
in a short time, and adopted solutions such as aerated
concrete with sliding, reusable molds, previously seldom
used in Brazil. This has been the case for several companies operating in range 1 of the program: the financial
leap in this case needs accompanying by modifications
to the construction site, which is to say that in some
cases traditional techniques are barriers to accumulation.
Commodification of Housing and the Right
to the City: Brazil and the USA
The means of producing houses and cities today is an
expression of these tensions and contradictions, between
the advancement of commercial speculative capital and
finance capital in the urban environment, and the
progressive agenda of social movements and some democratic administrations in a very unequal society. These
contradictions are different to those posed by the transformation of homes into financial assets as seen in the
United States, where, besides use and exchange value,
property became one of the ballasts of financial appreciation, through securitization.
The financial crisis of 2008 highlighted the explosive nature of the ties between the right to housing, real
estate, and the financial sphere in the worlds core economies. In countries such as the USA and Spain, where
millions of people have faced eviction from their homes,
entire districts have been devastated, and construction
projects have been put on hold.
As David Harvey stated in 1982, The land must become a form of fictitious capital and be treated as an
open field for the circulation of interest-bearing capital.
Only under such a condition does the apparent contradiction between the law of value and the existence of
rent on land disappear.41 Thus, when property begins to
circulate like a financial asset and is priced in the secondary market then its price, like any other asset, is set

by the present value of the expected future income. The

guarantee of a place to live contradicts the conditions
imposed by financial agents, therefore; for instance, in
the event of default when buildings are hastily repossessed or when buildings do not meet their function as
financial valuation ballasts. Ultimately, then, housing
cannot be recognized as a right, because its financial
functions are superimposed onto its social functions.
Although globalization in Brazil began late compared to other Latin American countries, by early 1990,
it had accelerated. The spread of its main features towards the built environment in Brazil, however, was
not automatic; on the contrary, it found resistance, but
overcame or circumvented it through mechanisms that,
although unlike those observed in the United States,
were inspired largely by the US model.
While the mortgage market was irrelevant in the
Brazilian context, in the United States, it had already
spread widely, and home ownership had fast become a
net financial asset. The liquidity needed for the operation
of securities similar to the Mortgage-backed Securities
of the US was based, at least initially, on funds raised
at low cost from the savings accounts of the SBPE. In
Brazil, despite the discourse that prevailed in the 1990s,
the credit system continued to be fed by semi-public
fundsvia the SBPE and FGTSthat proved to be a
condition of accumulation and the financialization of
the housing policy.42
The restoration of the former SFH, powered by
semi-public funds, and combined with federal budgetary
resources and finance capital, together, fueled the real
estate circuit. The scale of financial growth in this sector
spurred the creation of a new product that developers
coined the affordable or economic segment. This later
expanded within a housing program launched by the
federal government: the Programa Minha Casa, Minha
Vida or PMCMV.
The so-called economic segment in Brazil is a major
political real estate invention. Its apparent triumph
means defeat for social movements that struggle to produce a city endowed with architectural and urban qualities defined according to parameters other than capital
accumulation.
The movement is twofold: Brazilian companies have
capitalized on resourcing to the capital market; but, seen
from another perspective, the cloud of international
finance capital found a channel through which to connect

19

with a real estate circuit previously reserved for the

local elite.
The state was decisive in its action to remove barriers
in the movement of capital. The passage of capital from
other circuits to real estate depended on the credit system
(besides banks, the stock markets), which was reshaped
by the Ministry of Cities.
Now capitalized, the real estate sector found barriers
specific to Brazilian social formation, which it sought to
circumvent through various innovations. Capital flows
drive changes in the ownership structure of companies,
in their land and market strategies, in the way that construction sites are organized, and in the forms of the
urban environment and architecture. In all of these
fields, the transformations remain mixed with old-style
Brazilian property development, precisely because of the
impossibility of a complete metamorphosis taking shape.
Capital flows overcome or circumvent these barriers in
order to expand in the city, and then return and meet
those very barriers when limits and contradictions
manifest.
Thanks to Adriana Kauffmann and to Mandi Gomez
for their careful editing.

Translated from the Portuguese by Adriana Kauffmann.

See Brian Wampler, Participatory Budgeting in Brazil

(Pennsylvania, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2007).
2
As Erminia Maricato states, the 1988 Constitution was vague
when addressing the enforcement of the social function of
property, and enforcement was postponed until a specific law
was passed to regulate it thirteen years later: the Estatuto da Cidade
(City Statute). See Ermnia Maricato, Fighting for Just Cities in
capitalisms periphery, in: Peter Marcuse et al. (eds), Searching for
the Just City (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 194213.
3 The Estatuto da Cidade is a Federal Law (No. 10.257, 2001),
available in English in: Celso Santos Carvalho and Anaclaudia
Rossbach (eds), The City Statute of Brazil: A Commentary (So Paulo:
Ministrio das Cidades e Aliana de Cidades, 2010), 91117,
online: http://www.citiesalliance.org/sites/citiesalliance.org/files/
CA_Images/CityStatuteofBrazil_English_fulltext.pdf (accessed
08/24/15). See also contributions in the same publication by
Ermnia Maricato, Edsio Fernandes, and Jos Roberto Bassul
among others.
4
The term Base Reforms refers to a broad set of initiatives
that were at the heart of President Joo Goularts administration
(196164), including banking, fiscal, urban, administrative,
agrarian, and university reforms.
5
The real estate sector consists of several agents: the landowner,
the developer, the builder, the financier, and the investor. In the
current essay, developers are those companies known as
incorporadoras. In the Brazilian context, therefore, the developer
takes on the role of coordinating the production process as
well as responsibility for marketing the product. See Luiz Cesar
Queiroz Ribeiro, Dos cortios aos condomnio fechados (Rio de Janeiro:
Civilizao Brasileira: IPPUR, UFRJ, 1997). Incorporadoras may
also take on the construction, but subcontract to other companies
to do the labor.
6
For a critical vision of these discourses, see among others:
Pedro Fiori Arantes, Urban Adjustment: World Bank and IDB
Policies for Cities, in: Mrcio Moraes Valena et al. (eds), Urban
Developments in Brazil and Portugal (New York: Nova Science
Publishers, 2012); Beatriz Cuenya et al. (eds), Grandes proyectos
urbanos: miradas crticas sobre la experiencia argentina y brasilea
(Buenos Aires: caf de las ciudades, 2012); Beatriz Kara-Jos,
Polticas Culturais e Negcios Urbanos: a Instrumentalizao da Cultura
na Revitalizao do Centro de So Paulo 19952000 (So Paulo:
Editora Annablume, 2007); and Otlia Arantes et al., A Cidade
do Pensamento nico. Desmanchando Consensos (Petrpolis:
Vozes, 2000).
7
Cf. John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes:
The Political Economy of Place (Los Angeles, CA: University of
California Press, 1987).
8
Pedro Fiori Arantes, Da (Anti) Reforma urbana brasileira a um
novo ciclo de lutas nas cidades, in: Plnio de Arruda Sampaio Jr.
(ed.), Jornadas de junho: a revolta popular em debate (Sao Paulo:
Instituto Caio Prado Jr (ICP), 2014).
9
Marcio M. Valena, The Closure of the Brazilian Housing Bank
and Beyond, Urban Studies, 36, 10 (1999): 174768.
10 See Daniela Magalhes Prates and Leda Maria Paulani, The Financial Globalizaton under Lula, Monthly Review, 58 (2007).
11 The United States mortgage system and its counterpoint with
the situation in Brazil is explored further in Mariana Fix,
Financeirizao e transformaes recentes no circuito imobilirio
no Brasil, unpublished Diss. in partial fulfillment of a PhD
in Economic Development under the supervision of Professor
Wilson Cano (So Paulo: Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2011).
12 Erminia Maricato, Produo Capitalista Da Casa (E Da Cidade) No Brasil
(So Paulo: Alfa-mega, 1979).
13 Francisco de Oliveira, Crtica Razo Dualista / O Ornitorrinco
(So Paulo: Boitempo, 2003).
14 Jos de Souza Martins, O Cativeiro Da Terra (So Paulo: Contexto,
2010); Erminia Maricato, Metrpole Da Periferia Do Capitalismo:
Ilegalidade, Desigualdade, Violncia (So Paulo: Hucitec, 1995).
15 Srgio Ferro, Arquitetura E Trabalho Livre (So Paulo: Cosac Naify,
2006).
1

20

16 Ibid.
17 Flvio Villaa, Espao Intra-Urbano No Brasil (So Paulo: Studio Nobel,
1998), 327.
18 Ferro, Arquitetura E Trabalho Livre. See also Gabriel Bollaffi,
Habitao e Urbanismo: O Problema e o falso Problema (Rio de Janeiro:
Ensaios de Opinio, 1975).
19 The continuity of the program, similarly, is under threat by the
current political and economic crisis.
20 As David Harvey states, economic agents have taken on new roles:
Landowners receive rent, developers receive increments in rent
on the basis of improvements, builders earn profit of enterprise,
financiers provide money capital in return for interest at the same
time as they can capitalize any form of revenue accruing from use
of the built environment into a fictitious capital (property price),
and the state can use taxes (present or anticipated) as backing
for investments which capital cannot or will not undertake but
which nevertheless expand the basis for local circulation of
capital. See David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso,
1982/2006), 395.
21 The expression is used by Carlos Lessa in some texts, e.g. in the
essay written with Sulamis Dain, Capitalismo Associado:
Algumas Referncias para o Tema Estado e Desenvolvimento,
in: Luis Gonzaga Belluzzo and Renata Coutinho (eds), Desenvolvimento
Capitalista no Brasil: Ensaios Sobre a Crise (So Paulo: Brasiliense, 1982).
22 Fabio Pahim Jr., A maturidade do sistema de crdito imobilirio,
Revista do SFI, 29 (2014): 1821.
23 Leda Maria Paulani, A insero da economia brasileira no cenrio
mundial: a situao atual luz da histria, Boletim de Economia
e Poltica Internacional, 10 (2012): 89102.
24 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are two government-sponsored
private corporations that bundle individual mortgages into
packages that are then turned into marketable securities.
See Peter Marcuse, Subprime Housing Crisis, online: http://www.
hic-gs.org/content/subprime_housing_crisis.pdf (accessed
08/20/15). The visit to Brazil by two representatives of a North
American corporation is documented in a report by the University
of Colorado, Denver: On April 8 to April 11, 1999, over eighty
respected Brazilian and U.S. business, government, non-profit,
and academic leaders participated in the second BrazilUS Aspen
Global Forum on Expanding Primary and Secondary Mortgage
Markets and Housing Opportunity, in Sao Roque, Brazil. They
included investors, rating agencies, mortgage bankers, originators
and servicers, government, quasi government and private sector
secondary market participants, and housing policy analysts.
While they did not always agree on particulars, they did reach
consensus on a broad framework to reform Brazils housing
markets. They also concurred on many immediate strategies and
next steps to further Brazils current efforts to establish effective
primary and secondary mortgage markets. See Luciana de Oliveira
Royer, Sistema Financeiro Habitacional e Sistema Financeiro
Imobilirio: limites e possibilidades, unpublished paper presented
at the public meeting, Conferencia do Desenvolvimento CODE,
Brasilia (Brazil, 2011), available online: www.ipea.gov.br/code2011
/chamada2011/pdf/area7/area7-artigo3.pdf (accessed 08/24/15).
25 Luciana de Oliveira Royer, Financeirizao da poltica habitacional:
limites e perspectivas (So Paulo: Annablume, 2014).
26 For a critical view of the concept of the minimal state as
employed in the policies of Margaret Thatcher (UK Prime Minister
197990) and Ronald Reagans administration (US President
198189) and inspired by them, see Francisco de Oliveira,
O surgimento do anti-valor, New Studies, 22 (October 1988).
Oliveira shows that while this discourse is apparently directed
to [the] Moloch State, its goal is to dissolve the specific arenas
of confrontation and negotiation. That is, it is not really about
reducing the state in every area as publicized, but concerns a
dispute for public funds destined for capital reproduction and
funds to finance the production of public goods and social services.
27 Rafael Fagundes Cagnin and Claudia Magalhes Eloy, A expanso
do crdito e a valorizao dos imveis residenciais no Brasil
(2005 a 2013), unpublished paper presented at the public meeting

VII Encontro Internacional da Associao Keynesiana Brasileira

(So Paulo, August 2014).
28 These changes are discussed in greater detail in Fix, Financeirizao
e transformaes recentes no circuito imobilirio no Brasil.
29 See Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes. Other instruments included in the City Statute continued to stand outwhich were already
in use, before approval, since the 1990sand that favored the
expansion of the capital circulation base in the built environment.
This included urban operations (a kind of PPP), but nothing that
could possibly interfere with real estate interests, such as Special
Areas of Social Interest, which sets a minimum percentage of
building of affordable housing in certain perimeters of the city.
30 Alfredo Rodrguez and Ana Sugranyes, El problema de vivienda
de los con techo, Revista eure, 30, 91 (Santiago de Chile, December
2004): 5365. Also on Chile, among others, see Rodrigo Hidalgo,
La vivienda social en Chile y la construccin del espacio urbano en el
Santiago del siglo XX (Santiago: Instituto de Geografa,
P. Universidad de Chile/Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barrios
Arana, 2005).
31 Claudia Magalhes Eloy, Os 50 anos do SFH, Valor Econmico
(So Paulo, October 15, 2014).
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 As already mentioned, a significant proportion of housing is selfbuild constructions, not built (directly) for the market, although
participatory in the informal circuits (purchase, sale, and rental).
35 Carlos Lessa, A Crise Urbana e o Circuito Imobilirio, unpublished paper (1981). See also Wilson Cano, Reflexes sobre o papel
do capital mercantil na questo regional e urbana do Brasil,
Discussion Paper, No. 177 (So Paulo: State University of Campinas
(IE/UNICAMP), May 2010).
36 The real estate circuit saw an increase in the amount of inter
national capital in some segments: i.e. the retail sector (building
materials: cable, wiring, and electrical equipment; paint, and other
cosmetic features such as cladding, glass, tiles, etc.); and in the
consulting industry, including activities around high-rise offices
in the central business districts.
37 An Initial Public Offering (IPO) is the first sale of shares of a
company on the market, i.e. the first public offering when the company goes public. It allows the company to raise capital for its
expansion.
38 In 2009, the Joo Pinheiro Foundation estimated the housing
deficit to be six million homes. The deficit, calculated from census
data, considers several components: precarious housing, family
cohabitation, excessive burden of rent, and increased density of
rented homes.
39 Joo Sette Whitaker Ferreira (ed.), Produzir casas ou construir cidades?
Desafios para um novo Brasil urbano (So Paulo: FUPAM/LabHabFAUUSP, 2012); Caio Santo Amore, Beatriz Rufino, and Lucia
Shimbo (eds), Minha Casa E a Cidade? Avaliao do Programa
Minha Casa Minha Vida em seis estados brasileiros (Rio de Janeiro:
Letra Capital, 2015); Cardoso, Adauto Lcio (ed.), O programa minha
casa minha vida e seus efeitos territoriais (Rio de Janeiro: Letra Capital,
2013).
40 This problem was noted in early criticisms of the program shortly
after its release: cf. Raquel Rolnik and Kazuo Nakano, As armadilhas
do pacote habitacional, Le Monde Diplomatique, So Paulo, 20
(March 2009): 45; Pedro Fiori Arantes and Mariana Fix, Como
O Governo Lula Pretende Resolver O Problema Da Habitao,
Correio da cidadania, 30, 7 (2009). Six years later, extensive,
qualified literature was published to which I cannot do justice
within the limits of this note. Among the most recent, see for
example: Caio Santo Amore et al. (eds), Minha Casa E a Cidade?
with contributions by many other researchers. See also Adauto
Lucio Cardoso (ed.), O programa minha casa minha vida e seus efeitos
territoriais (Rio de Janeiro: Letra Capital, 2013). In order to gain
better understanding of the economic impact of the program, the
Economic Development Studies Center at UNICAMP conducted
research in which I, together with Professor Claudio Maciel and
Professor Humberto Miranda do Nascimento, as well as graduate

21

and undergraduate students, took part. A national evaluation that

allows for comprehensive analysis, taking regional differences into
account, and which, at the same time, is precise and synthetic is
still lacking. Data made available by the government is limited and
does not provide sufficient information to enable a precise quantification of location and typology.
41 Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 371. See also David Harvey,
Right to the City, New Left Review, 53 (2008); and Rebel Cities
(London: Verso, 2012).
42 Royer, Financeirizao da poltica habitacional.

22

AbdouMaliq
Simone

Housing
Systems as
Environments
of Practice
and Information

Much of the focus in urban policy and development today

concerns providing sufficient land and basic infrastructure for the expansion of cities. It is assumed that the
majority of urban residents, no matter where they are
located, prefer to live in settings that accord them the
possibility of affordable homes or home ownership and
where transportation to and from work is not an arduous
or expensive proposition. The assumption is that people
want space, and that they want to live in structured
environments where the provision of basic services,
amenities, and economic opportunities do not come
down to them having to provide most of the effort,
resources, or responsibility. Keeping the conditions of
everyday urban living as clear and simple as possible is
assumed to be what people want. Given the volatilities
of urban life and the rapid transformation of urban
landscapes and actions, indeed most residents, regardless of economic or cultural background, will buy into
these assumptions.
From many years of research, development, and advocacy in places like Jakarta, Phnom Penh, Bangkok, Lagos,
and Johannesburg, I have noted the lingering doubts
and frustrations on the part of residents as to the conditions and formats through which such inhabitation is

23

conventionally engineered. At times, people give up the

labor-intensive messiness of everyday efforts to work
out problems and possibilities in favor of conditions
that seem more secure and predictable, but are also
replete with boredom, isolation, and internal household
conflicts. At times, the very practices that enabled the
accumulation of funds necessary to buy a small house
far from the urban core leaves households in settings
where the possibilities of impromptu work and entrepreneurship are substantially reduced. The terms for
the acquisition of limited security often entail taking on
long-term debt, assumed either on an individual or
household basis, which redirects the scope of obligation
away from relations of reciprocity with neighbors, kin,
and other associates to a host of financial institutions.
The balance between affordability and the viable
and judicious provision of infrastructure and services
neither needs produce the same kind of spatial products
nor constitutes these through securitization or subsidy
systems. The rollout of standardization of all kinds
tends to diminish the complexity and possibility of inter
facial relationships within spaces designed, managed,
used, and inhabited in very different ways. It is these
relationships at the interfaces of different economies,
livelihood practices, and built environments that contin
uously generate friction which need to be recalibrated,
worked out. Working out these disjunctions not only
generates productive contestation but also gives rise to
multiple conduits of exchange.
In the urban core of many southern cities, most
districts were an interweaving of the lower working
class, working class, and lower middle-class residents.
These districts exuded a plurality of incremental adjustments, adaptations, and small innovations that not only
reflected a heterogeneous social body, but were also a
platform for intricate differentiation among the people.
These were sensory, spiritual, cognitive, performance,
and experiential environments in addition to being
built-up and economic domains. They were elaborations
of various information and ways of connecting and disconnecting everything. These environments were full
of everything, which because of their lack of fit, lack of
seamless articulation, exerted different impacts on each
other at different scales and with different processes.1
Sometimes residents were consciously attuned to
the entire interwoven bodily, physical, and political
machinery at work. All of the exertions performed in

kitchens, workshops, streets, bedrooms, factory floors,

storerooms, vacant lots, and all of the angles and interstices in-between. Sometimes, they paid attention to
particular vistas, horizons, issues, and performances,
and not at others. This labor of paying attention was
distributed across persons and networks, but also distributed across spaces and materials as well. The daily
wear-and-tear of objects and people, all of the links and
cuts, all of the decisions that had to be madeabout
whom to devote time and resources to, about where to
go, and where to shopwere also complemented by an
entire world of inputs, effects, and relations where no
explicit decisions were made.
These relationships may have been the by-products
of the way people built things, put things together,
but these things had a world of relations on their own,
in conjunction and in distinction to social practices.
Information-rich environments were continuously resupplemented and experienced, giving residents many
things to work with as a means of cooperating with
each other. In urban environments that are either overdesigned or mass-producedwhere technical operations are limited to particular forms of cost-accounting,
risk analysis, and surveillancethe critical question is
whether there is the potential for the urban majority
to take back the possibility of creating information-rich
environments for themselves and thus to rekindle their
ability to use social relations as a means of collaborative action.
Contemporary emphases on security of tenure, propriety through property, inclusiveness through debt, on
the equation of affordances with affordability, and the
enforced promotion of resilience through the attenuation of social contracts, goes a long way toward disentangling various solidarities, collaborations, and eco
nomies built on the continuous updating and plying
of relations among different kinds of actors and activit
ies. This disentangling is part of the remaking of cities
and urban regions as a continuous mesh. Mesh is a
word Timothy Morton uses to refer to a concatenation
of infinitesimal differences through computation and
through rendering a landscape amenable to visualization as a series of interoperable nodes.2 This is possible
by flattening the city, opening up its opacities, its multiple logics of inhabitation, and making ends meet, the
multiple ways in which different actors might appropriate and use the city to more normative, standardized,

24

optimal performance-driven operations. Above all, the

expansion of urban private-property regimes constitutes a mode of making the city visible, a means of structuring the view that residents have when they look
upon the city and what they then consider possible to do
within it.3
The Capacity to be Housed
In the massive performances of property development
in Jakarta, the domestication of inhabitant behavior is
just as important as the mobilization of property as a
means of generating value or as the medium through
which heterogeneous activities are parceled and organized. This domestication upends practices of endurance,
which have largely been a matter of proliferating intersections between affordability and affordances. A probable majority of those who continue to reside in the
urban core of Jakarta live within small margins. They
are compelled to provide for basic consumables, the
costs of which inevitably rise, and to put money away
simply in order to maintain their present status, as they
invest this supplementary surplus in education, small
enterprise, one-off opportunities, essential repairs, or
strategic social relations. The question of how to keep
costs down is coupled with opening up new windows of
opportunity. Even if households become the integral
unit of accumulation, management, and expenditure,
the balancing of plural needs and aspirations requires
intricate collaborations with others, and thus residents
turn at various times to a full suite of social connectionsfrom geographic affiliations to kinship, occupational clusters to shared school attendance. The gradation of space into clearly delineated functions and ownership can impede the elaboration of collaborations such
as these.
For example, keeping food expenditure down requires circumventing conventional commercial mediations, acquiring commodities in bulk, and arranging
appropriate storage spaces. Entrepreneurial ventures
require low-cost workshops, low-risk deployments of
venture capital raised through aggregating small household surpluses, warding off extractive intrusions from
authorities and police, securing sufficient markets, disseminating information, and arranging trade-offs with
potential suppliers. Built environments need maintenance; often they need to be infused with additional
value without rendering them unaffordable. Particularly

important, built environments become the objects of reshaping, so that they might mediate the multiple provisioning of various affordancesto act alternately as
residences, markets, community centers, workshops,
storage spaces, retail outlets, and social hubs.
Like many metropolitan areas in the south, Jakarta
experiences substantial housing shortages. Policy-
makers repeatedly invoke the exigencies of climate
change, infrastructure adaptation, and the need to promote greater social equity as a matter of national security,
as rationales for finally doing something about urban
poverty. The need to mitigate the worsening flood-
related problems by re-engineering the Ciliwung River
that runs through the city will force the removal of
nearly 400,000 residents. The remaking of the north
shore to stem rising sea levels and to restructure the
port system is likely to entail the resettlement of nearly
one million people over the coming decade. The absence
of a functional public transport system, near-gridlock on
the roads, and the adamant demand for greater densities
of commercial and mid- to high-end residential complexes are displacing large numbers of inner-city residents to distant and largely dysfunctional peripheries.
In turn, extending one- and two-story residences into
multistory boarding houses and rooms to rent in the
urban core has become a means of supplementing the
incomes of the majority of inner-city residents.
The multiple problems faced by the national and municipal state in acquiring land, further complicates the
resettlement issue. The lack of available land for development is normatively attributed to an excessive volume
of urban sites having ambiguous status. The fact that
parastatal organizationssuch as railway corporations
and military complexesretain enormous amounts of
centrally located undeveloped land as devices to paper
over budgetary deficits and speculation is only rarely
calculated in as factors to these land shortages. Informal settlements are accused of complicating state and
municipal initiatives to provide affordable housing.
Acting in the name of more equitable and comprehensive housing and provisioning systems for the poor,
generates a wide range of ramifying effects. Take the
issue of low-cost housing, perumahan rakyat. As states
have largely signed on to a host of international concords proclaiming shelter as a human right, states have
largely withdrawn from any direct responsibility for
subsidizing the costs for constructing and maintaining

25

low-cost housing.4 Like many countries, selling mortgage-backed securities on capital markets has become
the dominant source of finance for housing projects in
Jakarta. It is true that even when the state continues to
subsidize low-cost housing its volume is woefully inadequate in relationship to need; but the assumption that
aggregating the not-insignificant savings of many lower
income (if not virtually destitute) households as the basis
for the long-term capitalization of sustainable housing
programs seems problematic. The assumption is that such
a strategy enables banks to lend at affordable interest
rates over long periods.5
However, in order for securitization to work, land
must have unequivocal status, its ownership clearly
determined and registered. Estimates suggest that up to
70 percent of land in Jakarta remains uncertified, with
most land parcels falling nebulously into the category
legally but not legitimately occupied. This is because,
historically, land transactions were agreed mainly at local
level and through localized processes of registration
with district authorities, a process from which ensues a
highly diverse mixture of lease rights, shared ownership, and land trusts.6 Responsibility for land certificationas opposed to the actual multiple modalities of
informal land transactionsbelongs with the Badan
Pertanaman Nasunal (The National Land Agency).
For a long time, the advantages of land regularization have been widely touted in terms of the ways in
which property can become a fungible asset for lowerincome households and institute greater security of tenure. But many Jakarta residents either cannot afford the
many different fees that surround the actual certification costs, or the subsequent rise in taxation that usually ensues from certification. These costs include investigations of any competing claims and payment of past
taxes to local district councils. Residents often cannot
deal with the social implications of definitive assignation of ownership in tenure situations where multiple
actors have long-worked out complementary responsibilities with regard to land use. Many land parcels are
sites of multiple subcontracting relationships, which
avail associated actors participation in several different
activities in the same spaceresidence for some, workshops, storage places, and meeting halls for others.
Certification is not just a matter of bureaucratic effi
ciency. The National Land Agency has initiated a program
that sends mobile offices across the city to accelerate the

certification process. For many residents, certification

entails complex re-adjustments of already intricate social
and economic relationshipsre-adjustments for which
either they are ill-prepared or reasonably afraid will
eventually force them out of the city.
In 2011, the government established the Liquidity
Facility for Housing Finance program with an initial
$268 million in investmentsa facility that encourages
both the consolidation of land needed to build low-cost
housing at scale, incentivize developers to provide low
cost housing, and to precipitate the financial packaging
necessary for households to take on affordable mort
gages. Again, this approach not only requires land certification but also proof of creditworthiness, but credit is
only available to those who can provide proof of formal
full-time employment.7
As such, this facility, purportedly undertaken in order
to increase opportunities for long-term residences for
low-income households in the city, potentially bifurcates
neighborhoods where tight intermeshing between formal and informal employment has existed for decades.
These are areas where residents may have formal employment only at certain periods of the year, or, more
significantly, where levels of stable income register no
significant difference between those employed in formally registered production and service units and those
working either at unregistered firms or, as is more often
the case, working for shifting networks among formal
and informal firms.
For example, many workers in Jakarta might be affi
liated with formal firms but not be employed directly by
them. Instead, they either work in what often turn out
to be much more lucrative jobs in subcontracting positions or in plying the relationships between different
kinds of firms. For instance, a person may work as a
mechanic in a formerly registered motorcycle parts and
repair shop part-time, but spend more time servicing
company pools that use a large number of motorbikes
for their work; a service that a number of different
formal shops share, but for which there is no formal
contract of employment with any one firm.
This does not mean that there are no differences
between formal and informal work, that they always
complement each other, or that there are not a great
number of instances where informal work is simply a
means of avoiding paying the minimum wage or other
employment-related taxes. Formal work, even if its direct

26

remuneration does not always exceed informal wages,

conventionally comes with benefits and guarantees not
available to informal workers.
Rather, the point is to emphasize that most districts
in central Jakarta have elaborated complicated interdependencies, market sharing, and mixed labor uses. This
is likely to have a significant deleterious impact on the
urban economy if devices such as formal land certification and creditworthiness of individual heads of households are the only means available for accessing largescale government programs of housing finance. Tools of
administration are of course necessary in order to curtail misuse of informal mechanisms. In the absence of
clear ownership and use-provision, a lot of land becomes
tied up in protracted legal struggles, usually among
family members, often about inheritance rights, which
much of Indonesian culture prefers remains ambiguous.
But any land regulation and adjustment system must
make provision for the long-established historical efficacies in how land is actually used.
Running the System
The capacity to acquire land, build houses, and access
services for large numbers of residents often depends on
complicated negotiationsbetween landowners, brokers,
local customary authorities, bureaucrats working in
municipal tax, land registration and infrastructure
agencies, political party representatives, religious leaders,
and unofficial mediators and enforcersas well as on
both long periods of waiting and a capacity to act quickly
at a moments notice. But the format of deliberations,
calculation of costs, circumvention or creation of rules,
and the formulas that dictate specific outcomes are often
not clear.
This is not because these procedures are by nature
opaquealthough the ability of these diverse actors to
work together does require large measures of invisibility
rather that the processes of working things out often
takes many different twists and turns and generates
multiple unanticipated feedback loops. The actors are
not simply trying to get their financial cut, but also to
use their involvement in these processes to open up different spaces of maneuverability and reach, cultivate
dependencies and obligations, as well as to carve out
new spaces of autonomous action. In other words, while
individual actors may be seeking to fill their own pockets,
additional cloudy strivings are also at work.

It is for this reason that it is important to pay attention to the interfaces between different places within
the city and find ways of re-describing particular formations and situations, in terms of capacity and potential,
which at first they may not appear to embody. For example, take the Kalibata City complex in central Jakarta.
Built by the countrys largest developer, the Podomoro
Group, the complex is part-replication of the now-standardized middle-to-upper-middle-class all-in-one apartment block, combining residence, shopping mall, leisure
zones, schools and social services and part low-cost,
densely packed towers of small flats in which social
class divisions are built into the spacing and composition of dwelling.
Rusunami Kalibata Residences provides 6,000 units
averaging 26m2 spread out across seven towers. Kalibata
Regency offers 2,500 units in three towers, and Green
Palace Apartment has 3,000 units in six towers averaging
thirty-two units. Prices range from $21,000 to $50,000
for a one-bedroom apartment depending on the complex.
Roughly 30,000 people live in the complex, and unlike
many other similar developments, there has been some
effort in landscaping at ground-level with scores of small
shops, restaurants, coffee houses, and public spaces. As
residents are both thrown together in an environment
with limited history and situated in a context where rela
tions of authority and civility can no longer rely upon the
mores and practices of long-honed, thickly enmeshed
residential/commercial districts, those who live in Kalibata are still trying to figure out ways of working with
and around each other. Yet the complex is surrounded
by the old, working-class neighborhoods in varying states
of disrepair, which are folded into convoluted ecologies
precipitated by the complex, and which find new functionsas producers/procurers of low-cost items for the
residents of Kalibata.
In some respects, the project could be considered a
relatively slapped together attempt at cross-subsidization, where the provision of solidly middle-class designs,
space, and amenities are met, in order to cover some of
the costs for the provision of minimalist low-cost units.
The marked differentiations in construction values are
obvious, and whether most of the buildings can actually
absorb the wear-and-tear of such large numbers of residents in densely packed conditions for many years is
questionable. For now, though, it brings together elements
of the popular neighborhood and the mega-complex at

27

an unprecedented scale in Jakarta, servicing primarily

a youthful population of single people and families who
reside in various combinations and want to or need to
remain in the central city. These are residents who wish
to accumulate savings without having to be dependent
upon residing with kin, who want to chart out ways of
doing things with greater anonymity than that afforded
by the watchful eyes of popular neighborhoods, and
more importantly, who want to expand their coverage of
Jakarta through accessing a larger number of networks.
Despite the problems of sustainability over the long
termits cheap construction, dense population, and lack
of amenities for the majority of its residentsKalibata
City nonetheless acts as an important laboratory for res
idents to figure out a range of probable futures in their
everyday engagements with each other, freed to a signifi
cant extent from the mores and obligations of the past.
For example, lower-income residents (in the lower
zone) find ways to take advantage of their proximity to
middle-class residents (in the upper zone). Thus, residents enact various performances, not so much to anchor
themselves in specific positions and build reputations,
but to make use of the nascent character of the complex
as a platform for opportunist ventures across the surrounds. Young men pay particular attention to various
equipment carried by young women living in the upper
zonephone chargers, pens, cell phones equipped with
particular applications, books, or laptopsas a means to
initiate conversation, requesting the temporary use of
such items for purported exigencies.
Young women pay particular attention to gatekeepers, such as security guards, managers, or maintenance
personnel, offering cigarettes and conversation as a means
of cultivating the ability to cross boundaries, particularly
in order to gain access to the amenities or services of the
upper zones. There is particular attention paid to those
who have some kind of power, and in the deployment of
various games of facilitating proximity to opportunities,
the nature of power itself changes. The powerful may
continue to be those who have money, good jobs, and
the latest consumer goods, but they also envelop those
who may not have direct access to them but know how
to put otherswhose identities and backgrounds may
make them more eligible to affiliate with such resources
in touch with the people who control them, through
duplicity, stealth, or tact.

The small shops and cafes attract and curate niche

groups and audiences at different times of the dayolder
men living with younger women, older women living
with younger men, women in polygamous marriages
who want to have legitimate sex and children but dont
particularly want the burden of living with a full-time
husband, and other couplings of various genders and
sexual preferences. The commercial and public spaces are
aligned in such a way as to separate lifestyles, such as
sexual performances, that might clash, but to keep them
in a mutual view sufficient to satisfy curiosity, permit
tentative forays across thresholds, or at least temper the
inclination of any one constellation of actors to impose
their codes of propriety upon the others. Thus the complex acts as an important line, connecting the past to the
future, gathering up at least a large number of diversities
of the city without further distributing them across
more segmented spaces. It is a line across and through
which to try to imagine and actualize other stories.

28

3
4

See Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity,

Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (London/New York: Taylor
and Francis, 2006); Solomon Benjamin, Occupancy Urbanism:
Radicalizing Politics and Economy Beyond Policy and Programs,
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32, 3 (2008):
71929; Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the
Middle East (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010);
Tim Edensor and Mark Jayne (eds), Urban Theory Beyond the West:
A World of Cities (London: Routledge, 2011); Colin McFarlane,
Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Teresa Caldeira, Imprinting and Moving
Around: New Visibilities and Configurations of Public Space in
So Paulo, Public Culture, 24 (2012): 385419; Juan Velsquez
Atehorta, Barrio Womens Invited and Invented Spaces Against
Urban Elitisation in Chacao, Venezuela, Antipode, 45 (2014):
83656; and Alexander Vasudevan, The Makeshift City Towards
a Global Geography of Squatting, Progress in Human Geography,
39 (2015): 33859.
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End
of the World (Minneapolis, MN/London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2013).
William Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty,
and the Logic of Competition (London: Sage, 2014).
See Marja C. Hoek-Smit, Financing Housing for the Poor:
Connecting Low-income Groups to Financial Markets, in:
Ingrid Matthaus-Maier and J. D. von Pischke (eds), Connecting
Public and Private Sectors in Housing Finance (Berlin/New York:
Springer Verlag, 2008), 6781; Alain Durand Lasserve and Harris
Selod, The Formalization of Urban Land Tenure in Developing
Countries, in: Somick Lall et al. (eds), Urban Land Markets: Improving Land Management for Successful Urbanization (New York:
Springer, 2009), 10132.
Gustaaf Reerink, Tenure Security for Indonesias Urban Poor:
A Socio-legal Study on Land, Decentralisation and the rule of law in
Bandung (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2011); and Abidin Kusno,
Housing the Margin: Perumahan Rakyat and the Future of Urban
Form of Jakarta, Indonesia, 94 (2012): 2356.
Mercy Corps and the Urban Regional Development Institute,
Summary of Land Tenure Findings in Jakarta, Urban Bulletin,
2 (March 2008).
Kusno, Housing the Margin.

29

Sandi
Hilal

Roofless

If we build a plaza in our refugee camp then

it should be a closed one.
Al-Fawwar Refugee Camp inhabitants

This was the challenge posed by the inhabitants of

al-Fawwar Refugee Camp, near Hebron, to the UNRWA
Camp Improvement Program.1 I was directing the team
of architects during the period of design and construction of a plaza in one of the camp neighborhoods.
Throughout the participatory design process, the most
emphatic requests came from several women who suggested the camp needed more safe spaces between
houses for children to play under the eyes of their
mothers. The few recreational spaces on the outskirts of
the camp are used mainly by teenage boys. These spaces,
usually enclosed by walls, locked at night and protected
by a guard, are the only image the camp inhabitants
have of anything resembling public open space.
Camps are political spaces and their built environment is a symbol of political struggle. How can one build
an open public space in an exceptional environment
where the concept of public and private does not exist;
where any urban elements that resemble those of a city
are perceived to threaten the temporality of the camps

31

from. Is it historically acceptable to think about the

public space of a temporary camp? What is defined
as private in the camp is not in fact private because
the homes are not registered as private property, and
what is defined as public is not in fact public because
neither the host government nor the residents themselves recognize it as such. Thus, how does one define
private and public in a camp anyway?3

and therefore jeopardize the refugees right of return?

This has been a dilemma plaguing the refugees since they
were forced to replace their tents with houses. Lebanese
author Elias Khoury remarkably describes this moment
in his novel, Bab el-Shams (Gate of the Sun):
What do you call the refugee camp? Now you see
houses, but early on, the camp consisted of a group
of tents. Then after we had built huts, they allowed
us to put roofs over them.
It was said that if we put actual roofs on our houses
wed forget Palestine, so we just put up zinc sheets.
Do you know what zinc sheets do to you under the
Beirut sun?2
Now, more than sixty years after the Nakbathe establishment of the state of Israel and the Palestinian peoples
displacementI am sitting with our team of architects
and a group of concerned refugees questioning what
building a plaza in a refugee camp might represent:
Among them are Abu Rabih and Abu Rami, considered among the founders of al-Fawwar Refugee
Camp. They witnessed the tents being replaced with
masonry homes and now they are observing their
neighbors beginning to acknowledge the spaces
between the houses as well. Surely, Abu Rami is
remembering how difficult the decision was to build
concrete walls instead of maintaining the tents.
Would this move allow the world to forget what they
really wanted: to return home to their villages rather
than settle permanently in the camps? Would a plaza
be another concession, another way of accepting the
permanency of the camp? Is this merely a wretched
attempt to mitigate the conditions of total subjugation? Alternatively, is the plaza the physical indication that the refugees have abandoned their strategy
of convincing the whole world of their personal
misery through the architectural misery of camps;
that they are instead initiating a new strategy of
capitalizing on their strengths as refugees rather
than their weakness as victims? Abu Ramis father
had been among the main opponents of building
the more durable homes. No doubt, he remembers
his father telling him, Once you begin to enjoy your
life in the camp, you will forget the land you came

The Closed, Roofless Plaza

The plaza had not only brought up questions about normalization but also about the political reality of camps:
If there was no private property and no authority advocating for public space who, then, was responsible for its
maintenance? Who would decide how it may be used
and who can use it? Would women be allowed to gather
in this space even though initially they requested it for
their children?
I asked some of the women in the neighborhood if
they would ever gather to drink coffee or tea in the plaza.
One of the women answered forcefully, with humor, It
would be a shame for a woman to leave her home without a proper reason. What woman would leave her home
and her kids for coffee and tea outside? Do you want
them to write about us in Al-Ahram?4 We already cannot
deal with our husbands; never mind us going out and
having tea and coffee in the plaza!5
Finally, as the discussion geared towards how the
plaza might look, the community decided that a wall
should enclose it. Many were convinced that the plaza
would never work without doors, locks, and a guard.
The people in the neighboring houses were emphatic:
they did not want the faades of their houses to be part
of the structure around the plaza as they felt they would
lose privacy. They also felt that by enclosing this space
whoever wanted to use it had to enter deliberately and,
therefore, would respect it more and take responsibility
for the care of it.
Abu Ata, one of the neighbors explained, The enclosure of the plaza was a very important step, I think, and
absolutely essential. Imagine if kids were to kick a ball
through a neighbors windows.6
There it was, a plaza, enclosed by four walls. Remem
bering the early history of the camp, when refugees first
replaced the tents with roofless houses, the walled plaza
seemed like a good compromise: open and always acces-

32

sible, but also enclosed, and not entirely either public or

private. There were no locked doors and no guards. Once
built, the plaza quickly became a popular venue for weddings and funerals, and children could run around with
their balls without disturbing the neighbors. The skeptics soon began to understand the purpose of the space.
The Traditional Marriage
In 2011, I met Ayat, a young woman from al-Fawwar
camp whom I had met initially during the selection process of participants for Campus in Camps,7 an experimental educational program. Meanwhile, the plaza was
almost in its final stages of construction. Al-Fawwar
Refugee Camp is not like other camps. It is located on
the southern tip of the West Bank, a few kilometers
from Hebron. As constant clashes occur between Israeli
settlers and Palestinians around the main road that
leads to the camp, it is isolated from the rest of the territory, and its community is among the more conservative.
However, after years of working in this camp it always
manages to surprise me: it is in this same campwhere
it is socially inappropriate for women to be seen drinking
coffee in the plaza in front of their houseswhere we
encountered some of the strongest female candidates for
Campus in Camps.
Ayat, in her mid-twenties, is open to challenges and
convinced of her rights as an individual and the possibilities of changing her society. Throughout the interview, she highlighted the importance of being an active
member of her camp community. For six years I had
struggled to involve the women of the camp to participate in the design of the plaza, and the few women I
managed to engage were over forty, married, and with
children. In conservative places, such as al-Fawwar
camp, the unmarried woman is treated like a treasure,
to be preserved and kept away from the eyes of everyone,
until she is married. Thus, many women see marriage
as a way of escaping their family and obtaining some
measure of freedom. As I would later discover, this was
not the case for Ayat.
When I asked Ayat if she had visited the plaza and
asked her what she thought about it, I was not surprised
to hear that she had yet to set foot inside it and had never
had the opportunity to be part of the various meetings
that took place around its design. I immediately felt that
Ayat was exactly what the plaza needed and, in some
ways, maybe the plaza would be exactly what she needed.

I smiled at the idea that this might be something like a

traditional marriage, but between a woman and a space.
The Vandalized Plaza
After several discussions about the plaza, we decided to
hire a bus and visit this space with all fifteen participants of Campus in Camps. We arrived at the camp during the early winter of 2012, after a long ride, a bus-full
of enthusiastic young men and women, music blasting
from the buss speakers.
Fifty-five days had passed since the beginning of the
UNRWA employees strike, demanding better employment
conditions. This is a common event, and as the UNRWA
is responsible for garbage collection, a strike quickly res
ults in mountains of garbage piled up on the camp streets.
As we made our way through the narrow alleys, stepping
over piles of trash, we finally arrived at the plaza.
To my relief, the plaza, unlike the rest of the camp,
was not littered with garbage. We all sat on the plaza
stairs under the warm winter sun. The feeling of relief,
however, quickly turned to distress as I glanced at one of
the walls that we had perforated with small openings as
a way to create permeability between the street and the
plaza. The holes had been infilled with cement and an
adjacent lower wall had been covered with oil in order to
prevent teenagers from sitting on it. The space had been
completely vandalized!
While I was lost in thought about the role of architecture in a place like al-Fawwar, one of the participants
of Campus in Camps interrupted me and gasped: The
plaza is much smaller than I imagined. The image on the
website is of a much nicer and much bigger space! The
plaza was now bursting with eager children who had
swarmed around us. There were so many, we had a hard
time hearing each other as we drank our coffee brought
to us by one of the neighbors.
One of the kids replied, offended: But this plaza
was much smaller before. Exactly here in the place
where we are sitting now stood my uncles two very old
UNRWA shelters, which had to be demolished in order
to enlarge the plaza. While you have imagined it much
bigger, I remember it much smaller. I jumped at the op
port unity and asked him, If you are so happy to have
this big plaza then why do you destroy it, why arent you
taking care of it?
This question had haunted me from the first moments I began working in public spaces, places with a

33

long history of colonialism and marginalization. Where,

as Ayat would later put it, People have no culture of
belonging to what is outside their houses. However,
I also believe that when the relation between people and
the authorities is so tense, as it is in refugee camps, then
the public space is the first victim of such tension. That
day we spent hours in the plaza discussing the dilemma
of not belonging and the appropriation of public space.
Months later, having experienced several activities in
the plaza, Ayat complained about how she didnt understand why the children, having planted trees and flowers as part of an activity held in the plaza, would immediately vandalize them. Is it the way they are raised? Is
it the school? Why do they behave differently inside
their homes? she wondered. Is it because the camp is a
constant reminder of not belonging; that the public
realm is dominated by the reality of oppression and colonialism, is that why, consequently, the public realm, in
this sense, is the enemy itself?
The Quiet Revolution
The rights of the women to become active members of
the public realm became Ayats personal cause within
al-Fawwar camp. She managed to bring together a group
of women to join her in her adventure. She organized
several events in the plaza, including cooking sessions,
morning exercises, collective breakfasts, and twice a week
they would meet for coffee or tea. Although the women
in the group are older than Ayat, she is the leader of what
she believes is a revolution without a lot of noise.
A fierce defender of her rights and her freedom from
within the social framework of the camp, Ayat is not
trying to detach herself from her community, she is not
about to refuse the camp that fails to give her the freedom she seeks. She does not seek to escape either herself
or the place in which she lives; instead, Ayat is trying to
create a new space that challenges stereotypes through
activities that will eventually make it normal for women to venture outside the walls of their homes. Ayat
believes in a womans right to be free beyond the confinement of the private home.
However, I was still confused about why Ayat had
not recruited other young women to join her revolution.
When I asked her why the women in the group were all
older, she replied, Firstly, I feel I learn from them and
they learn from me, as knowledge is not conditioned by

time or space or a degree. Secondly, I feel older than my

age and relate better to older people. Lastly, and maybe
the most important reason has to do with my mothers
refusal to leave the camp. My mother suffered from
what the camp people call an illness of not being able to
sit in the car. Whenever she got into a car, she would
begin to shout, hurt the driver, and herself, and would
even go so far as to destroy the car. Many doctors tried
to intervene by giving her several types of drugs, but it
never worked. I have no idea whether my mother was
afraid that if she left the camp she would never find it
again, as happened to her mother, with her home, during
the Nakba. With this illness, my mother had seemingly
decided to guard the camp and never leave it. The very
few times she did have to leave to go to the doctor in the
nearby city, we would wake up very early and then walk
for two hours to reach the doctor. All the camp would
know that, that day, my mother would be walking and
not guarding the camp. I remember my sisters wedding
was in the city of Dora, a four-hour walk from al-Fawwar.
Since it was so difficult for my mother to leave the camp,
I normally stood in for her on social occasions held outside. My mothers illness forced me to be responsible and
mature at a very early age, as I had to accompany my
father everywhere.
Ayat was born at al-Fawwar camp. She is now part
of the third generation of women refugees living there,
and she is trying to redefine what being a refugee means
to her. Ayats mother is afraid to leave the camp as she
feels she will again lose her home. In a way, her mother
believes that her right of return is secure only if she is in
the camp guarding it. However, for Ayat, her right of
return is a more abstract idea, one not linked to a physical
space she has to protect. It consists in her right as a
woman to be an active political subject: she refuses to be
a victim.
A lot of the time, the struggle for liberation for people
living under colonialism keeps them from dealing with
important basic human rights, which are subsumed by
one gargantuan struggle: the end to occupation.
In this case, the plaza has become a key protagonist
in Ayats struggle to define resistance to the camp, the
plaza being a community space from which it is possible
to imagine a future. The process of decolonization begins
with negotiations, discussions, and inevitably, contradictions within their community.

34

Ayats Mother
Although I worked with Ayat for more than two years,
I never had the chance to meet her parents. Ayat had
been able to fill the plaza with women of her mothers
age, but she had never managed to convince her mother
to join them.
In June 2015, together with some colleagues, we visited Ayat and her group for some tea and biscuits in the
plaza. It was evening and everyone was in good spirits
as we chatted in the summer breeze while children
played around us. Prayer time arrived, and the women
wanted to go back home, but one of them said, Why
dont we pray in the plaza? Despite skeptical looks, this
woman began praying and another woman joined her,
while the rest of us continued chatting, laughing, and
discussing until they were finished. As night fell and
lights came on, it felt as if someone had rung a bell to
remind the men and young teenagers to get some fresh
air outside their homes, too. As I was saying goodbye to
everyone, Ayat proposed that we go to her Aunts house
to continue the evening together.
We arrived at the house of Ayats aunt and found
ourselves in a beautiful green garden, with an olive tree
planted in the middle, surrounded by mint, basil, rosemary, and oregano. Invited to sit in the salon for guests,
I insisted we remain outside in the garden. We sat under
the tree in semi-darkness, Ayats aunt sitting next to the
open door of the house through which some light escaped
from inside.
Later on, Ayats mother arrived and immediately
asked why we were sitting under the tree and not in the
salon. We all reassured her that we had requested to stay
outdoors. Her voice was identical to Ayats and we
kissed each other, both feeling that we should have met
up a long time before. Ayat interrupted and excitedly
announced that they were all celebrating that her mother
had finally been liberated from her illness. Her mother
began to tell us the story:
Two months ago I had a very bad pain in my knee.
I was unable to cope with it any longer so we prepared for the walk to Hebron to visit the doctor.
I woke up very early in the morning and walked for
three hours with pain that increased with each step.
When we arrived, I was completely exhausted. The
doctor was shocked to hear that I had walked all the

way from al-Fawwar camp to Hebron city, and insisted that he would call a car to take me back to
Fawwar. He gave me two injections, assuring me
that this would p
ermit me to get into the car. To be
honest we did not believe him. Six doctors before
him had tried to give me various injections to cure
me of the panic attacks, and it had never worked. As
I got into the car we were all elated that I was only
shouting; I did not hit the driver, hurt myself, or
destroy the car. Arriving at the camp, I felt like a
celebrity: everyone had gathered around to witness
the scene of me g
etting out of the car.
I did not know whether I should believe this story, it
was so fantastic it seemed as though Ayats mother had
invented it as a metaphor of the sixty-eight years of exile
in the camp. As she described the journey, it reminded
me of the image of Palestinian refugees preferring to
live under the heat of a zinc roof in the hot, Beirut summer rather than accept a more comfortable life under a
concrete roof.
To be uncomfortable and unsettled is a form of
struggle, a reminder of refugee status. As time went by,
the camp was turning into the only legitimate witness
of a refugees loss. Preserving the image of the unsettled,
roofless camp was a way of preserving their history and
their right to return home. Ayats mother never wanted
to leave the camp because she was afraid that, if she left
it unguarded, she might lose its existence; subsequently
she thought she would lose her grandfathers house as
well. The house she had always longed for in her dreams,
which she learned through her father and grandfathers
stories is only protected if the camp is still there to witness the loss and continue to remind the world of the
right of return of Palestinian refugees. As the entire
camp came outside to watch as Ayats mother arrived in
the car, were they publicly witnessing her relinquishing
responsibility for guarding the camp? Of course, she
was still shouting inside to show that she was suffering,
but she also accepted that, like others, she could leave
the camp behind.
Just as I realized at some point that perhaps Ayats
mother embodies the camp, it followed, then, that perhaps
Ayat represents the plaza. The condition of the camp is
the condition that lives inside Ayats mother. In order to
protect her family and her home she refuses to leave the

35

camp on wheels, and accepts the camp as her prison, in

order to protect herself against the notion of home disappearing.
Freedom Project
As we are sitting in the garden, Ayats sister tells me that
she has won a scholarship for a Masters program in Berlin.
I look at her with a puzzled expression; I know that she
will not be permitted to go to Berlin on her own. Almost
as if she is reading my thoughts, she adds that her father
will accompany her.
Almost shouting, I ask, What will your father do
for two entire years in Berlin?
Ayats mother replies, He will find a mosque where
he will pass his days.
Ayat adds, He wants to go; he would love to accompany her. This is what she wants, and he is willing to do
anything to please her.
Ayats mother groans, The other solution is that she
finds a husband and takes him with her. Many young
men have asked for her hand in marriage, from the
worker to the doctor, and she has never paid them any
attention. She continues, Mainly I would like to see
both my daughters marry. Each one of them could take
her husband wherever she would like to go. If they had
yet to receive any marriage requests I would accept it as
Gods will, but what I cannot accept is that they are
rejecting them all. I cannot think that they dont not like
any of them, but believe they are against the idea of
marriage as such. They want their life as it is.
One of the women from Ayats group says, Marriage
is a very good thing, as religion tells us. It is not right
that you refuse marriage.
Ayat quickly replies, This has nothing to do with
religion. I still have work to do. I still have many things
I would love to achieve in my life. If I encounter a person
to marry, then he is welcome in my life; if not, I am not
concerned. For now, Im happy, Im not interested in a
man that will come and control my life. Leave me alone.
Ayats mother is disappointed, Did you hear? This is
the main reason she refuses marriage. She is not even
open to the possibility.
Ayat pauses and tries to explain, Its not because Im
snobbish; all Im longing for is a person who understands who I am inside and outside. Im happy and free
in the house of my father. Why should I get involved
with someone?

I felt moved: from the outside, one might perceive

Ayats freedom as meaningless. She is a young woman
not allowed to travel unaccompanied, who has constantly
to negotiate her actions outside her home, who has to
rush home at sundown. However, Ayat feels she has
agency over her own life to change it and to help change
the life of others around her. The freedom that Ayat is
trying to defend she is not willing to compromise by
getting married. However, this contradicts the unspoken rules of her society. The reason, in the end, that many
of the women in her group are older is because younger
unmarried women are not willing to compromise the
social image they are trying to preserve: no revolution
before marriage. First, we get married and then we
change. Otherwise, we risk our chances of finding a
proper husband.
The beautiful thing is that Ayats family supports
her bravery. Her father tries to find ways within the
framework of religion and society that permit Ayat the
maximum freedom of a woman her age in al-Fawwar
camp. Ayat understands this better than any one else
and, as with all the other limits she faces, she is convinced that her father is a believer in her project for freedom but finally fears she will never find another man to
be her ally.
One of the women in the group says, But your
father and mother will not live forever.
Ayat asserts, I have God and myself. I hope God
will give my parents a long life and eventually my sister,
my aunt, and I will make a fantastic group together. We
will take care of each other.
Ayats mother shakes her head, This is what she
will tell anyone who comes to ask for her hand in marriage, that she is not in need of a husband. She is looking
for a partner, and when they tell her that her husband
will be her shelter, he will protect her, she furiously
answers that she is not looking for any shelter; she feels
sheltered enough and has no need for a man to do so.
Ayat remarks, I absolutely hate the language they
use.
Ayats mother looks towards me for help. She asks
whether I feel it is appropriate for Ayat to be speaking
this way. I feel trapped. I like Ayats mother very much
and want to please her, but what Ayat is doing is what I
have always hoped to see happening at al-Fawwar. I ask
Ayats mother to forgive me, Unfortunately, I cannot be
on your side this time, I reply.

36

Rooflessness
As much as I would like this to be a story about how the
plaza improved life inside the camp and how Ayat managed to transform womens rights in al-Fawwar camp,
the truth is that both the plaza and Ayats revolution are
vulnerable experiments.
As much as Ayat seems to be a strong revolutionary
and visionary, she has also placed herself in a position in
which she is extremely fragile. The same applies to the
plaza. Its strong presence within the camp is what
makes it vulnerable: it challenges the very meaning of
the camp.
Ayat recently sent me a letter: I feel that the plaza is
the place that represents me. The plaza is a challenge for
the camp as it represents public space in a temporary
place. It is very similar to the challenges of women, proclaiming our right to be out in public, to my rebellion
against all the stereotypes, the reality in which I live. I
feel that there are many similarities between the plaza
and me: both of us are roofless; my thoughts have no
limits but are still contained within what is acceptable,
with walls built from religion and society. My thoughts
have no limits when I think about how much it is possible for me to change my reality and the reality of other
women my age in the camp.

2
3

4
5
6
7

37

The United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian

Refugees in the Near East launched the Camp Improvement
Program in 2006 focusing on improving the physical and social
environment of refugee camps through a participatory, communitydriven planning approach, see online: <http://www.unrwa.org/
what-we-do/infrastructure-camp-improvement> (accessed
08/07/15).
Elias Khoury, Bab al-Shams (Beirut: n. s., 1998); Gate of the Sun,
tr. Humphrey Davies (New York: Picador, 2006), 236.
Excerpt from Sandi Hilal, A Plaza in a Camp: A Play in Four Acts,
in: Esther Choi and Marrikka Trotter (eds), Architecture is All Over
(Barcelona: ACTAR, 2015), Act 1.
Al-Ahram is one of Egypts most popular daily national newspapers.
Excerpt Hilal, A Plaza in a Camp: A Play in Four Acts, Act 1.
Ibid., Act 2.
Campus in Camps is based in Dheisheh Refugee Camp in
Bethlehem, Palestine, co-founded by Alessandro Petti and
Sandi Hilal in 2012. It is a space for communal learning
and production of knowledge, grounded in lived experience, and
connected to communities. It engages young participants in a
two-year program dealing with new forms of visual and cultural
representations of refugee camps after more than sixty years of
displacement. The group of program participants was selected
following a three-month period of interviews, consultations with
the community, and public announcements in newspapers and
mosques. See online: www.campusincamps.com (accessed
08/07/15).

Andrew
Herscher

Blight,
Spatial Racism,
and the
Demolition
of the Housing
Question
in Detroit
Blight is a cancer. Blight sucks the soul out of everyone
who gets near it, let alone those who are unfortunate
enough to live with it all around them. Blight is radio
active. It is contagious. Blight serves as a venue that
attracts criminals and crime. It is a magnet for arsonists.
Blight is a dangerous place for firefighters and other
emergency workers to perform their duties. Blight is
also a symbol. It is a symbol of all that is wrong and all
that has gone wrong for too many decades in the oncethriving world-class city of Detroit.
Detroit Blight Removal Task Force Plan, 2014

Introduction
The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force Plan
Splicing together references from science and religion,
disease and crime, and emergency and everyday life, the
all but hysterical prose that introduces the 2014 Detroit
Blight Removal Task Force Plan nevertheless emplots
blight into an all too conventional narrative.1 What
connects the disparate references in the plans introduction is its evocation of a condition that primarily affects
not those who are unfortunate enough to live with it

39

all around them, but rather those who imagine that

their fortune is vulnerable to a threat that cannot be
kept at a distance. Thus, as in contemporary American
architectural and urban-planning discourse, civic imag
ination, and politics more generally, the term blight in
the Task Force Plan translates the inadequate housing of
communities disenfranchised by racism and class prejudice into a menace to the health, security, property value,
and prosperity of the entitled.
The Task Force Plan therefore attends in minute detail
to the disposition of blighted properties, while attending
not at all to the disposition of the inhabitants of those
properties displaced by the plan itself. The demolition
proposed as the primary response to the appearance of
blight is, then, a dislocation and dispossession of the
already dislocated and dispossessed: a doubling of violence that is fully comprehensible only in light of the
political invisibility of the politically excluded. As such,
blight can be usefully understood in light of a dynamic
that Friedrich Engels had already described in 1872 in
his analysis of the housing shortage facing workingclass communities in German towns and cities:
The so-called housing shortage, which plays such a
great role in the press nowadays, does not consist in
the fact that the working class generally lives in bad,
overcrowded and unhealthy dwellings. This shortage is not something peculiar to the present On
the contrary, all oppressed classes in all periods suffered more or less uniformly from it (T)his housing shortage gets talked of so much only because it
does not limit itself to the working class but has
affected the petty bourgeoisie also.2
In this sense, the history of blight as an object of urban
politics and expertise over the course of the twentieth
century is one in which the housing interests of marginalized communities have struggled, ultimately unsuccessfully, for recognition against the social, political,
and economic interests of the entitled. The history of
blight in Detroit provides one of the clearest examples
of how these latter interests, mediated by racism, have
reformulated a housing question into a question of public fear. Thus, the continual failures of blight-removal
projects in Detroit on their own terms have been accompanied by continual successes in extending the disenfranchisement of those already disenfranchised by race,

as well as the posing of that disenfranchisement as a

response to the fears that blight conjures.
In the following, I place the Task Force Plan in the
contexts of both the history it ignores but extends and
the future it disavows but advances. The history within
which the plan inserts itself begins with neglectful
owners unwilling to maintain their properties; in so
doing, the plan excises from politics and public conscious
ness the structural racism and discriminatory government and corporate policies that have yielded a population of predominantly African-American homeowners
unable to maintain their properties. The future to which
the plan imagines itself to yield is one where hope is
restored to neighborhood residents; in so doing, it similarly excises from politics and public consciousness the
afterlife of the properties it repossesses and clears as
commodities traded in the real estate market. Why
are houses being destroyed when the housing needs of
Detroits citizens are so pressing?3 As the repeated
posing of this question for at least the last fifty years
indicates, the housing needs of Detroits citizens have
been more or less irrelevant in the programs that demo
lish blighted houses; a study of the Task Force Plan
reveals that these needs remain irrelevant in the current
mobilization against blight.
Prehistory: Blight, Slums, Housing
Nothing can so effectually destroy a citys future as the
disproportionate increase of homes that are unsanitary,
damp, dark, unclean, unattractive, unventilated, overcrowded and immoral. And this disproportionate
growth is exactly what is taking place today. The cancer
is spreading.4 Echoed one hundred years later in the
introduction to the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force Plan,
these words were spoken in 1910 by Luther Lovejoy,
general secretary of the Detroit Housing Commission
at just the moment when Detroit was beginning its period of
unprecedented metropolitan growth. Here, then, is a preliminary expression of the inextricable relationship
between capitalist urban development and urban phenomena staged as obstacles, dangers, or threats to that
development. Not only did unsanitary housing accommodate the population of reserve labor on which
Detroits industries dependeda feature of the housing
question on which Friedrich Engels had remarked in
The Condition of the Working Class in Englandbut this
housing, as underdeveloped property, also existed as a

40

location in which to reinvest the surplus value accumulated by those same industries.5
In a gesture that would be continuously reprised
into the present, Lovejoys invocation of an urban future
threatened by an architectural cancer would lead, first,
to a comprehensive survey of the city to counteract this
danger. We intend to make a systematic study of conditions in Detroit, Lovejoy proclaimed. We will pick out
sections in different parts of the city, find out just what
is the environment of the people living in these sections,
and how it should be improved. We wish to be in a position to speak intelligently, not of isolated cases, but of
the actual situation in Detroit.6 As today, the city would
be studied in an effort to detect and manage seemingly
pathological conditions. As today, these conditions
would be posed as the product of marginalized urban
communitiesdescribed by Lovejoy as a poor and
ignorant alien immigration. And as today, the state
would act on these conditions by criminalizing those
who were compelled to inhabit them, so Lovejoy recommended that the inability to maintain property be regarded as a violation of the general nuisance act of the
citya legal translation of substandard housing into a
public danger would be consolidated and advanced with
the development of concepts of blight up to and through
the Task Force Plan.
The Detroit Housing Commissions invocation of
architectural conditions that presumably threatened

the citys future, inaugurated a history in which projects

that were framed as responses to the inadequate housing
of marginalized communities would yield the dislocation
and dispossession of those very same communities.
As elsewhere, inadequate housing in early twentieth-
century Detroit, was typically described by a vocabulary
of slums, tenements, and decadent districts. As early
as 1917, moreover, an article in the Detroit Free Press
related inadequate housing to the growing wave of
African-American migrants to the city.7
The term blight would enter this set of terms in
the 1920s. In late seventeenth-century British agricultural discourse, blight named an invisible, unknown,
or atmospherically derived cause of plant disease, in the
eighteenth century, the term also came to specify plant
diseases caused by fungal parasites.8 By the end of the
nineteenth century, in the context of the industrializing
metropolis, blight moved from countryside to city in
both Britain and the United States, becoming a m
etaphor

for undesirable, strange, or menacing urban conditions.9

Early in the twentieth century, blight joined a lexicon
of other terms that social scientists from the period
drew from ecological and agricultural discourse to conceptualize the modern cityand, in so doing, naturalize
that citys politically structured forms and conditions.10
In architectural and urban planning discourse,
blight became associated with the term slum, a linkage that was a particular focus of interest after the
advent of the Great Depression. In a typical formulation,
Clarence Perry wrote that, blight refers to an insidious malady that attacks urban residential districts. It
appears first as a barely noticeable deterioration and then
progresses gradually through many stages toward a
final condition known as the slum.11 Here, blight provided a way to understand the origin and development
of the slum; as such, blight was not a phenomenon
that extended into adjacent urban areas but one that intensified into the more deteriorated form of the slum
a genealogical model that was also visualized in a series
of diagrams in Henry Wrights Rehousing Urban America.12
Depression-era discourse on blight, then, usually
discussed blight removal in the context of housing
reform; the demolition of blighted or slum housing
would be prescribed in conjunction with the construction of new housing. According to a typical proposal of
the time from Detroit, the same economic and racial
group as that now occupying the area is to be rehoused, and the measure of the success of the schemes
proposed is the extent to which this can be accomplished.13 This rehousing would prevent the putative
consequences of unchecked blight from unfolding:
depreciated property values, the collapse of tax revenues,
and a wholesale exodus of population followed by a
racial invasionin other words, the replacement of
middle-class white neighborhoods by working-class
African-American ones.14 In Detroit as nationally, the
perceived benefits of avoiding these consequences motivated state support for rebuilding or rehabilitating
presumably blighted areas through new channels of
funding for urban redevelopment and new municipal
legislation and policy for condemnation.15
Blight Removal and the Unhousing of Detroits
African-American Communities
In 1946, The Detroit News published a map prepared by
the Detroit Bureau of Governmental Research revealing,

41

according to columnist James Sweinhart, that 30% of

the city is blighted.16 When Detroits urban planners
began to script the citys postwar development, they
placed their attention on this blight as a fungus-like
growth (that) menaces the entire city, threatening to
invade and destroy every neighborhood in the community.17 Now, blight was no longer imagined to intensify
into a slum, but to expand into adjacent neighborhoods;
to check the spread of blight, planners thus argued,
a broad program of rebuilding must be undertaken.18
In this rebuilding, as in subsequent urban renewal and
redevelopment, the Progressive-era housing reform
ambitions that were initially included in blight discourse
began to be abandoned in favor of the development of the
citys seemingly threatened business districts and neighborhoodsstill supported, however, by the same publicfunding streams and legal mechanisms that emerged to
assist inadequately housed communities.
Detroit Mayor Edward Jeffries, Jr., thereby emphasized that the 1946 Detroit Plan for Blight Elimination
prepared by the citys Housing Commission is not in its
essential a housing plan.19 In the Detroit Plan, which
ultimately yielded the Lafayette Park development designed by Mies van der Rohe, the Housing Commission
pointed out that the citys blight has particularly struck
areas immediately surrounding the high-value downtown commercial district and that surrounding the
central commercial district with an increasing number
of inhabitants of subsidized housing would not be conducive to the maintenance of that district.20 The plan
therefore proposed that the city condemn and acquire
one hundred blighted acres adjacent to the Central
Business District, sell this land at a loss to a private deve
loper, and then recover this loss through the increased
tax revenues generated by the redeveloped site.
The residents who were to be displaced by this plan
were almost all African-American.21 The plan proposed
that these people should be admitted to residence in
newly constructed public housing projects but, crucially,
these projects were regarded as the object of a different
planand a plan that would never be made. In sub
sequent decades, blight elimination projects would
continue to externalize the rehousing of the predominantly African-American communities that were displaced by those projects. In 1955, for example, the Detroit
City Planning Commission conducted a citywide housing

survey that discovered fifty-three neighborhoods

threatened by the encroachment or actual presence of
blight. Remarking, symptomatically, that the continued
spread of these conditions is a menace to adjacent stable
neighborhoods (i.e. the unstable neighborhoods described
as blighted were not the problem at hand), the Commission noted that the foreseeable displacement of
families caused by public improvements as a result
of this program will present no major problems.22
In these postwar years, as previously, the housing
available to Detroits displaced African-American
communities was fundamentally determined by racial
discrimination and its legal and illegal manifestations.
First, African-Americans had only limited access to the
citys public housing; as Thomas Sugrue has described,
because of the citys discriminatory (public housing)
policy, most black demand for public housing went
unmet through the mid-1950s.23 Second, in the wake of
the 1934 Federal Housing Act, the federal government
and lending institutions collaborated in restricting
mortgages to white borrowers seeking to live in white
neighborhoods; non-white inhabitants, regarded as signs
or agents of decline, were prevented from receiving
loans to buy homes in those neighborhoods. In the
words of June Manning Thomas, the FHA (Federal
Housing Administration), bankers, builders, real estate
agents, local officials, private home owners, and landlords were almost completely unfettered by fair housing
laws until 1968 or by antidiscrimination mortgage laws
until 1979. Even after that time, enforcement was weak
and sporadic.24 The result of these policies in Detroit was
that the chief source of dwelling units for Blacks was
housing vacated by White families moving out of aged
structures within older parts of the central city.25 Third,
not only were African-Americans structurally d
irected
towards inferior housing to purchase, but because they
usually had to purchase these homes with land contracts,
they then had less capital to devote to maintaining or
improving their homes, as well.26 Fourth, municipal
authorities often failed to enforce zoning codes and planning guidelines in neighborhoods occupied by African-
American communities. An editorial in the Michigan
Chronicle noted a reluctance or refusal of responsible
authorities to continue and enforce land-use restrictions
in areas where Negroes have moved in. The net result
has been to propel the process of deterioration.27

42

 omas also describes how Detroits building, health,

Th
and fire departments did not enforce housing codes:
racial discrimination in code enforcement was documented; Black renters could not depend on the city
either to enforce the code or to prevent landlords from
evicting them once they complained about violations.
This led to a protracted war by civil rights organizations
against slum landlords.28
Through the 1960s and 1970s, municipal surveys
continued to discover that 15 to 30 percent of Detroits
properties and/or buildings were blighted.29 The passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 (Title VIII of the
Civil Rights Act), which prohibited discrimination on
the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in
the sale, rental, and financing of dwellings, did not so
much shift attention to the substandard housing of
African-American communities in Detroit in blighted
areas as it shifted the forms and beneficiaries of spatial
racism. As an alternative newspaper noted at the time,
HUD officials and real estate sharps joined forces to
take advantage of inexperienced home-buyersselling
substandard housing to financially insolvent people at
exorbitant rates.30
More recently, in the 1990s and 2000s, predatory
mortgage-loan practices, in which low- and middle-
income African-Americans were issued high-risk loans,
sometimes fraudulently, elevated foreclosures and home
abandonment in Detroits central and predominantly
African-American neighborhoods.31 Those named as
neglectful owners in the Detroit Blight Removal Task
Force Plan, that is, can more precisely be called the inher
itors of a century of racist housing practices carried out by
a constellation of federal, state, municipal, and corporate
actors. Moreover, even as some, if not all, of those racist
practices changed over time, their effects continued to
structure urban space; those effectsthe architectural
dimension of racist housing practicesbecame threats
to urban order in their re-description as blight.
Demolition Urbanism
From Urban Renewal to Blight Removal
In the 1980s and 1990s, as Detroits population dramatically shrank, the demolition of substandard houses was
separated not only from the construction of new housing,
but also from urban renewal and urban redevelopment
schemes, becoming the free-standing urban goal of blight

removal in the process. As Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer

put it in 1997, when you say youre going to tear down
abandoned houses it creates an enormous pride in
the city.32
Two problematic elisions lay at the base of this demo
lition urbanism. First, blighted houses were elided
with abandoned and vacant houses. This elision overlooked the many people who homestead in otherwiseempty homesa number that homeless advocates in
Detroit have estimated in the tens of thousands.33
Second, depopulation was elided with surplus housingthe dramatic drop in the citys population was
correlated with a dramatic increase in housing availability. This elision overlooked the question of housing
affordabilitythe fact that housing was only available if
it was affordable. The demolition urbanism that emerged
as the consequence of these two elisions thereby produced a situation in which increasing numbers of houses
were destroyed precisely at a time when needs for afford
able housing were increasing.
While the city was never able to achieve planned
levels of demolition, it tore down around 38,000 houses
between 1995 and 2010, with ten times more demolition
permits than building permits given during this period.34
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing initiated his tenure in 2010
with the ambition to demolish 10,000 of what a contemporaneous study determined was 33,000 vacant houses
in the city. In his State of the City address, Bing proclaimed that:
Blight is more than an eyesore. Abandoned and
dilapidated buildings are hotspots for crime and a
living reminder of a time when the City of Detroit
turned a blind eye to owners who neglected their
properties. Tonight I am unveiling a plan to demolish
3,000 dangerous residential structures this year and
setting a goal of 10,000 by the end of this term.35
In the Bing administration, this program was a project
proposed by an elected municipal official and carried
out by municipal authorities with the aid of federal
funding. A few years later, however, demolition urbanism
and the unhousing of Detroits most disadvantaged
communities became privatized along with many
other city programs and services. In March 2013, the
governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, placed Detroit under

43

emergency financial management and Kevyn Orr, the

citys appointed emergency manager, filed for bankruptcy
protection in July 2013. A month earlier, Governor
Snyder had announced a plan to use $100 million from
the federal Hardest Hit Fundintended to assist homeowners struggling to pay their mortgages by providing
mortgage payment assistance, new affordable mortgages,
and elimination of second lien loansfor blight removal
in five Michigan cities.36 Then, in August 2013, in the fine
print of Emergency Order No. 15, Emergency Manager
Orr declared a blight emergency in Detroit.37
According to its own narrative, the Detroit Blight
Removal Task Force commenced work in September
2013. Led by Dan Gilbert, billionaire owner of the online
mortgage lender, Quicken Loans, and major investor
in Detroit real estate, the Task Force brought private,
philanthropic, nonprofit, federal, and state partners
together with the city.38 As such, the Task Force represented the privatization of blight removala transfer
of procedures for defining, documenting, and removing
blight from the public sector, where it was guided by
elected officials, to a consortium of actors, funded, and
led by, corporate interests and corporately funded foundations. Indeed, the bright colors, infographics, highlighted taglines, and other reader-friendly design features
of the Task Force Plan, released in May 2014, were precise
registrations of the Task Force Plans status as a private
initiative that required public advertising, rather than a
public initiative to be collectively formulated, debated,
and decided upon.39
The Task Force Plan both drew upon and radicalized
the citys deployment of blight as a means to raise
public fear and correspondingly render demolition

urbanism a management of that fear. The survey commissioned by the Task Force discovered 84,641 blighted
parcels among the 377,602 surveyed. The vast majority
of these blighted parcels72,328, or one-third of the
structures in the entire citywere single-family dwellings. What was new here, however, was not the documen
tation of this blight by individual parcelsclaimed as
an innovation of the plan itselfbut rather the propo
sition that every blighted parcel in the city be demolished and that existing legal and bureaucratic procedures structuring the administration of these parcels be
bypassed in favor of an expedited foreclosure process
and aggressive eradication timeline.

The plan thereby advanced the transformation of

racially based socioeconomic disadvantage into public
threat and legal offense. Extending the existing definition of blight, the Task Force Plan defined the public
ownership of property or ownership by Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac as an indicator of future blight (p. 14) and
redefined boarded-up properties as dangerous properties
and therefore as blighted (p. 103).40 It recommended
increased penalties for blight offenders (p. 202), foreclosure on properties with unpaid blight tickets (p. 110),
legislation to prevent violators of blight ordinances
from bidding on foreclosed property (p. 204), and taking
aggressive action to gain title to blighted property
through nuisance abatement, or demolition liens and
foreclosures (p. 102). The Task Force Plan also proposed
that squatting be redefined as non-occupancy so that a
squatted property can be legally considered vacant
and therefore blighted (p. 100).
Conclusion
The Demolition of The Housing Question
Urban historians have amply documented how racial
prejudice and violence in Detroit yielded a racially segre
gated city. The same forces can also be related to the
citys repository of substandard housing and the disproportionate ownership and occupancy of this housing by
African-American communities. This relation has been
clear to many in those communities. A 1976 article in
the alternative newspaper, The Sun, for example, claimed
that Detroits thousands of abandoned structures are
much more than an eyesore and an immediate danger to
those who live near them; they are one especially visible
and undeniable consequence of decades of racism, corporate greed, and inhuman callousness.41 In this sense,
the 84,461 blighted parcels identified by the Detroit
Blight Removal Task Force Plan, index Detroits long history
of race- and class-based inequities in access to housing.
This is a history that traverses legally sanctioned and
informal neighborhood segregation, redlining, and discriminatory lending practices, as well as race-based
dispossessions of property in the frame of slum clearance,
urban renewal, and urban redevelopment.
In 2014, the Detroit Land Bank Authority was alloc
ated $52 million from the federal Hardest Hit Fund
allocated to Michigana fund intended to assist homeowners struggling to pay their mortgagesfor blight

44

removal. Using data collected by the Detroit Blight

emoval Task Force, the Detroit Land Bank Authority
R
initiated a project to demolish 3,300 blighted buildings
in the city and then auction off the properties where
blight had been removed.42 It is too early to determine
what will happen to these properties in and after their
auction, but the fate of auctioned tax-foreclosed properties in Detroit provides a useful comparison. The most
detailed study of these auctions has found that only
10 percent of auctioned houses were purchased by buyers
of only one propertyin other words, buyers who
purchased houses to occupy; the other 90 percent of
auctioned properties were purchased by businesses, investors, and nonprofits, with eleven buyers purchasing
24 percent of all properties sold at all auctions from 2002
to 2010.43 Five of those eleven were investors practicing
equity extraction, renting properties until they become
uninhabitable, while five others were speculators who
purchased multiple properties in order to sell them to
developers.44
If the auction of properties subject to blight
removal will resemble the auction of tax-foreclosed
properties, then the blight removal process will not only
dispossess and displace Detroits most disadvantaged
communities, but will do so as part of a land transfer
from those communities to real estate investors and
speculators. It is symptomatic that the Detroit Blight
Removal Task Force Plan ignores the relocation of those
who would be dispossessed by the planinhabitants of
blighted houses, from owners, through renters, to homesteaders. Among those who would be dispossessed by
the plan would be an estimated 13,000 people who occupy
so-called vacant houses, along with the uncounted
inhabitants of 40,000 or so occupied but blighted
houses.45 While the plan deals with tens of thousands of
houses, it is, quite precisely, the opposite of a housing plan.

Here, and in the following, I write blight in quotation marks

to stress the enormous gap between the terms material referents
and the meanings and identities with which these referents are
conventionally endowed. This strategy is intended to counter the
usual assumption that blight is capable of substantive definition,
an assumption that guides even seemingly nuanced definitions
of blight as, for example, a complex and dynamic phenomenon
with different meanings shaped and influenced by a variety of
actors and institutions: see Vacant Properties Research Network,
Charting the Multiple Meanings of Blight: A National Literature Review
on Addressing the Community Impacts of Blighted Properties, Final
Report (Virginia: Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, 2015), 2.
My perspective is closer to the counter-position that its hetero
geneity of form and substance seems to deny to urban blight
consistency and cohesion: see G. E. Berger, The Concept and
Causes of Blight, Land Economics, 43, 4 (1967): 369. However,
I conjoin the semantic indeterminacy of blight to its practical
efficacy in bracketing the needs and rights of the disadvantaged
in urban d
evelopment.
2
Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question, ed. C. P. Dutt (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1942/1877), 17.
3
David Weiss, Abandoned Buildings in Detroit City, The Sun
(April 22, 1976), 4.
4
Housing Plans are Mapped Out, Detroit Free Press (December 9,
1910), 8.
5
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England,
tr. W.O. Henderson and W.H. Chaloner (Oxford: Blackwell,
1958/1845). On the relationship between housing and automobileindustry investment in Detroit, see Michael McCulloch, Building
the Working City: Designs on Home and Life in Boomtown Detroit,
19141932, unpublished PhD Diss. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan, 2015).
6
Housing Plans are Mapped Out.
7
Len Shaw, Detroits New Housing Problem, Detroit Free Press
(June 3, 1917), E1.
8 Blight, Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015).
9
On references to urban blight in late nineteenth-century
American contexts, see, for example, The Real Estate Field:
Much Business is Doing and the Promise is Good, The New York
Times (March 10, 1895), 23; Chinatowns Doom is Foreshadowed,
San Francisco Chronicle (September 25, 1898), 9; and The Tenement
House Blight, Chicago Tribune (July 10, 1899), 6.
10 On the use of ecological discourse in early twentieth-century
urban study, see Jennifer S. Light, The Nature of Cities: Ecological
Visions and the American Urban Professions (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
11 Clarence Arthur Perry, The Rebuilding of Blighted Areas (New York:
Regional Plan Association, 1933), 8. See similar definitions in
Mabel L. Walker, Urban Blight and Slums (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1938); and Edith Elmer Wood, Slums and
Blighted Areas in the United States, Housing Division Bulletin,
1 (1935).
12 Henry Wright, Rehousing Urban America (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1935), 8.
13 Allan A. Twichell, A Planned Housing Community for Rehabilitation
in a Blighted Area on the East Side of Detroit, Michigan: A Preliminary
Study (Ann Arbor, MI: Earheart Foundation, University of
Michigan, 1933), 13.
14 Ibid., 2.
15 On this history, see Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall,
18801950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 34680.
16 James Sweinhart, What Detroits Slums Cost Its Taxpayers (Detroit,
MI: Detroit News, 1946), 8.
17 Detroit City Plan Commission, Toward a Greater Detroit (Detroit, MI:
Detroit City Plan Commission, 1944), 3.
18 Ibid., 4.
19 Detroit Housing Commission, The Detroit Plan: A Program for Blight
Elimination (Detroit, MI: Detroit Housing Commission, 1946), n.p.
20 Ibid., 5.

45

21

Of the 1,355 dwelling units condemned, 1,224 of them had

known non-white occupancy: see ibid., 6.
22 Detroit City Plan Commission Report, A Ten Year Investment and
Program to Eliminate Deterioration and Prevent Blight and Slums
in Detroits 53 Middle-Aged Neighborhoods (Detroit, MI: s.n.,
October 19, 1955).
23 Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in
Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 58.
24 June Manning Thomas, Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City
in Postwar Detroit (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2013),
87; see also Alex F. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States
(New York: Routledge, 2006), 238.
25 Ibid., 84.
26 Ibid., 96.
27 Michigan Chronicle (January 16,1960); Thomas, Redevelopment
and Race, 89.
28 Ibid., 89.
29 In 1962, for example, a study by the City Plan Commission found
that, at present the City of Detroit has blighted areas comprising
almost 10,000 acres. About 15 percent of the citys land is now in
some stage of blight deteriorated structures on this land comprise
18 percent of all structures in the city: see Detroit City Plan
Commission, Renewal and Revenue: An Evaluation of the Urban Renewal
Program in Detroit (Detroit, MI: Detroit City Plan Commission,
1962), 13.
30 Weiss, Abandoned Buildings in Detroit City.
31 See Homes Cant Hide Blight, The Detroit News (September 28,
1999); and MCA Exec Pleads Guilty to Fraud, The Detroit News
(August 29, 2001). In the ongoing case Adkins et al. vs. Morgan Stanley
it is alleged that African-Americans in Detroit were 70 percent
more likely to receive a subprime loan from New Century Financial
Corporation than economically comparable white borrowers
between 2004 and 2007; see American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),
Morgan Stanley Sued For Racial Discrimination in Pushing Predatory Loans to Black Homeowners (October 15, 2012), online:
https://www.aclu.org/news/morgan-stanley-sued-racial-discrimination-pushing-predatory-loans-black-homeowners-0 (accessed
07/20/15); and ACLU, Justice Foreclosed: How Wall Streets Appetite
for Subprime Mortgages Ended Up Hurting Black and Latino Communities
(Washington, DC: ACLU, 2012).
32 Dennis Archer, quoted in Jennifer Dixon and Darci McConnell,
HUD Hands Detroit a $160-Million Gift Days Before Election,
Detroit Free Press (October 29, 1997).
33 For a current estimate, see 2013 State of Homelessness Annual Report
for the Detroit Continuum of Care (Detroit, MI: Homeless Action
Network of Detroit, 2013).
34 Andrew Herscher, Detroit Art City: Urban Decline, Aesthetic
Production, Public Interest, in: Margaret Dewar and June
Manning (eds), The City After Abandonment (Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 69.
35 Bing State of the City Address (March 24, 2010), online:
http://archive.freep.com/article/20130213/NEWS01/130213094/
Full-text-Mayor-Dave-Bing-s-State-City-address (accessed 07/20/15).
36 Michigan Set to Receive $100 Million in Fed Funds for
Demolitions, The Detroit News (June 6, 2013), A1.
37 Emergency Manager, City of Detroit, Order No. 15: Suspending
Certain City Wrecking Requirement to Address Blight (August
29, 2013), 3. The declaration of the blight emergency was not
publically recognized for two weeks; see Nolan Finley, Blight
Rises to Emergency Status, The Detroit News (September 12, 2013), 1B.
38 Detroit Blight Removal Task Force Plan (Detroit, MI: Detroit Blight
Removal Task Force, 2014), 2.
39 The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force Plan lists its Book Design
Director as Rock Ventures, the real estate development company
owned by Dan Gilbert.
40 Fannie Mae is the Federal National Mortgage Association and
Freddie Mac is the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Association; both
buy mortgages from lenders in order to expand the funds available
for mortgage lending; both are also intended to keep mortgage
interest rates low and support affordable housing.

41

David Weiss and Derek VanPelt, What Can Be Done About

Detroits Abandoned Buildings? The Sun (March 25, 1976), 4.
42 See www.buildingdetroit.org (accessed 05/17/15).
43 Catherine Coenen et al., From Revenue to Reuse: Managing Tax-
Reverted Properties in Detroit (Ann Arbor, MI: Urban and Regional
Planning Program, University of Michigan, 2011).
44 Ibid., 7383.
45 On homesteading in Detroit, see Fast Facts, Detroit Rescue
Mission Ministries, online: http://drmm.org/services/fast-facts/
(accessed 07/20/15).

46

Justin
McGuirk

Honeywell,
I'm Home!
The Internet
of Things
and the New
Domestic
Landscape
In 1972, as part of MoMAs exhibition Italy: The New
Domestic Landscape, the Radical Design group Superstudio installed a small cubic room with mirrored walls
that appeared to replicate itself into infinity. The groups
proposal, submitted to the curator Emilio Ambasz, had
taken the form of a one-page statement describing exactly how this microenvironment should be installed,
followed by a further nine typed pages of theoretical
exposition by Superstudios co-founder Adolfo Natalini.
In those nine pagesa manifesto of sorts, veering off
into prose poems and short storiesNatalini outlines a
new way of living. The attributes of this hypothetical
existence include permanent nomadism, life without
objects, and life without work. These conditions are
made possible by a mysterious gridded structure that
Natalini refers to only as the network.
It is only too easy to root around in the archives,
extract something highly selective, and proclaim this or
that radical to have been prophetic. In this case, however,
Natalinis vision appears uncannily prescient. Of course,
the network of his imagination was simply an act of
wish fulfillmenthe hadnt the slightest idea what it
was exactly (although, by coincidence, 1972 was also the
year that ARPANET was first demonstrated in public),

47

he knew only that it was a total system of communi

cation. In Superstudios photo-collages, it took the form
of a grideither an abstract gridded plane or a gridded
megastructure called The Continuous Monument. Theirs
was only a mock utopia, serving to critique both modern
ism and consumerism, and yet, ineluctably, the network
came to pass. It is not, however, a megastructure. In fact,
for all intents and purposesfor the majority who
cannot see the server farms and the undersea cablesit
is invisible.
The effects of the Network Age on urban life in the
early twenty-first century are roughly as Natalini predicted, if less utopian. Immaterial labor has led to a flexible but precarious existence in which, for the young at
least, permanent nomadism is not so far from the truth.
Objects, meanwhile, are dematerializing into live
streams, downloads, e-books, smartphone apps, and the
so-called sharing economy. We have witnessed the
primacy of software over hardware.
Most significantly, what we think of as domestic
space is being completely redefined. We need look no
further than the rise and rise of Airbnb. The rental website epitomizes a new era of nomadic, vicarious living, in
which one can simply slip into different lifestyles like
dresses. Its evangelists proclaim a utopian mission of
sharing over owning (CEO Brian Chesky famously
claims not to own a home), and like good neo-Marxists
they talk of use-value rather than exchange-value. But
of course Airbnb enables a global population to be part
of the rentier class. It is as much a symptom of precarity
as of networked livingit is the means by which many
now pay their own rents and mortgages. Airbnb is what
we have instead of state-subsidized affordable housing,
and it is leading to the wholesale commodification of
domestic space.
For the first time since the mid-twentieth century
with its labor-saving household appliances and rising
quality of lifethe domestic is once again the site of
radical change. And though domestic space appears to
fall within the realm of architecture, architects themselves have been almost mute on the implications of
such change. Architecture, it seems, has given up its
dreams of imagining how we might live, and so into
that void technology is rushing. That tired old trope of
the house of the future has been replaced by what is
now called the smart home. The smart home is the
networks great white hope for ubiquitous connectivity.

It sounds benign enough, and may conjure Jacques Tatistyle mise-en-scnes populated by absurd devicesthe
smart home is prime territory for farcebut it is also an
ideology. It is the house-shaped manifestation of the inter
net of things, according to which all our devices and
appliances will join the network, communicating with
us and each other.
To say that the internet of things is an ideology is to
suggest that the use-value of the concept has yet to be
sold to the consumer. It is easily mocked by skeptical
hacks who question the need for talking fridges and
washing machines that you can program with your
smartphone (You still need to put the clothes in yourself, right?). Bruce Sterling argues that the internet of
things has nothing to do with the consumer and everything to do with the business interests of the service
providers. Given that data is the new currency, the inter
net of things is an epic power grab by the lords of the
networkSterling focuses on the big five of Google,
Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoftto gain control
of as much human data as physically possible.1 As the
primary interface of the internet of things, the smart
home is effectively the tendrils of the network rising
out of the ground and into every one of our household
appliances to allow mass data collection and digital surveillance.
That, at least, is one interpretation. It goes without
saying that the internet-of-things agenda is being driven
by the technology industry with the eager boosterism
of the business community, which sees a blizzard of dollar signs. And while the evangelists of the IoT would
hardly define themselves in Sterlings terms, neither do
they contradict him. As an effusive cover story in the
Harvard Business Review put it recently, It is the expanded
capabilities of smart, connected products and the data
they generate that are ushering in a new era of competition.2 For better or worse, the smart home is the new
New Domestic Landscape.
The question is, what are the implications for architecture? Do these developments have spatial ramifications? Should we plan and build in new ways to accommodate this technological surge, or is it just a case of
running a few extra wires into the walls? Can architects
continue to design according to age-old principles of
good form and sound proportions (or stick to the boilerplate floor plans prescribed by greedy developers, as the
case may be)?

48

The history of architectural historians overlooking

the impact of technological innovations is a long one,
and its best chronicler was Reyner Banham. In The Archi
tecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, he charts the
effects of successive environmental revolutions, such as
electric lighting and air-conditioning, on built form.
Banhams geeky enthusiasm for ducting and electrical
services enables him to propose a parallel history of archi
tecture according to which the Royal Victoria Hospital
in Belfast (1903), despite its outmoded, castellated styling,
was far more pioneering than anything that had been
designed by Walter Gropius because it was the first
building to include a form of air-conditioning.
The trajectory of this parallel history takes in the invention of the suspended ceiling, in the late 1940s, which
was required to hide the electrical services once concrete
floor slabs had done away with the dead spaces in
which that messy tangle used to be hidden. Banham can
gleefully point out that the advent of the suspended ceiling, now ubiquitous in commercial buildings the world
over, passed without comment in architectural literature. And yet it is precisely such technical details that
allow for the Cartesian glass prism of Le Corbusiers
United Nations building in Manhattan and thereafter
the International Styleto exist in the first place.
So are we in danger of overlooking a similar technical detail when it comes to the internet of things and the
smart home? After all, before revolutionizing architecture, air-conditioning was slow to catch on (introduced
first in factories and then in cinemas, where it was most
cost effective). But there is one salient difference. When
air-conditioning finally took off as a domestic revolution,
after the Second World War, millions and millions of
consumers knew exactly why they wanted it. One cannot yet say the same of the smart home.
Just What Is It That Makes Todays
Homes So Different, So Unnerving?
The internet-of-things evangelists proclaim that it is
that most disruptive of phenomena: a paradigm shift.
Bearing in mind Banhams assertion that electrification
was the greatest environmental revolution in human
history since the domestication of fire, one naturally
looks for equivalent consequences when it is claimed
(no doubt accurately) that the network is the new electricity.3 So just how, exactly, will the internet of things
revolutionize domestic life?

The proposals to sell this revolution to the consumer

are myriad and many splendored. But perhaps the poster
product of this new domestic landscape is the Nest smart
thermostat, which not only tells you exactly how much
energy youre using but can also learn your energy-use
patterns and adjust itself according to your established
preferences. The ostensible motive is environmental sustainabilityNest is helping us be better planetary citizens.
But of course the reason why Nest was purchased by
Google is that its smart thermostat is also a data hoover
a point we shall return to later.
The potential applications of the domestic internet of
things cover a whole array of multi-billion-dollar indus
tries, from security and healthcare to lifestyle and gaming.
Thus Microsoft is developing kitchen counters that can
recognize foodstuffs and display appropriate recipes.
There are smart mattresses that monitor your sleep patterns by measuring your breathing and your heart rate.
There are any number of smart locks now available that
open when you walk up to the door and that can be programmed to let in your friends or guests (perfect for the
Airbnb generation). There is cautious excitement about
the potential of ambient assisted living for the elderly.
A University of Manchester research group has developed smart carpeting that can tell when someone has
fallen and that can even diagnose potential mobility
problems from their footsteps.
Most of these products correspond to Arthur C.
Clarkes third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic. And it may well be
that magic is precisely the quality that will seduce the
consumer into embracing a world of all smart mod cons.
The world of hyper-performance products, colluding in a
domestic ecosystem that we barely understand but that
lay its manifest intelligence at our disposal, may be our
inevitable destiny. Banham was skeptical about this,
averring with amusing bathos that while space capsules
may require omni-competence, here on Earth it will
often prove that drawing a blind over a window is all
that is required.4 More trenchantly, Sterling argues that
we the consumer will have little choice in the matter
either way. The internet of things is like electrification:
if we are even able to opt out, we will simply be routed
around and made redundant.
In the meantime, there are various intractable problems to solve. Some of them are technical. For instance, it
is widely understood that the effective interconnectivity

49

of all our household devicestheir ability to sync and update and communicate with each otherdepends on a
single unifying platform. All tech companies agree on
this and that is why they are all beavering away at solving
the problem with their own proprietary platform that
will not work with all the others. The idea that all our
products may have to be either Apple-compatible or, say,
Samsung-compatible, is a disincentive. As for the rapid
cycle of updates and obsolescence, well, architects simply
do not think in such ephemeral time spans. There are
also security concerns: our houses become eminently
more hackable the more connected devices we have.
Experts evoke a cyber-security nightmare of botnet
armies using smart toasters to launch DDoS attacks, etc.
But lets concern ourselves with the ethical implications
of the smart home. Because if we are in the midst of a
subtle domestic revolution, its consequences are in new
forms of labor, the erosion of privacy, and the monopolization of control.
It is a truism worth restating here that our homes
are increasingly the primary sites of production. This is
not just true of new flexible labor models that allow
many people to work from home; it also applies to the so-
called sharing economy (read the digital rental economy)
that allows us to commodify our private spaces so
effortlessly. Already, the idea of the home as a retreat,
a sanctuary from work, comes into question. But it is
also literally true that our homes are sites of production
simply by dint of rising property values. In London,
with its 18 percent price rises in recent years, it is quite
likely that your home makes more money every year
than you do.
Added to this is the fact that the proliferation of
smart, connected products will turn the home into a
prime data collection node. It is estimated that there
will be fifty billion wi-fi-connected devices by 2020, and
all of them will collect data that is transmitted to and
stored by their manufacturers. In short, the home is becoming a data factory.
Our participation in this process has been underway for some time, not least through social media, which
has helped constitute the post-Fordist world in which
we no longer fabricate machine parts but subjectivities
opinions, lifestyle choices, our public image. Different
theorists come at this from different angles. Zygmunt
Bauman calls it the commodification of the self, while
Franco Bifo Berardi calls it cognitive labor, which is

essentially a labor of communication. It is not hard to

extrapolate Berardis theory of the info-commodity to
the smart home. The insidious aspect of the smart home is
that even as we go about our lives consciously producing
dataas happily tweeting members of the cognitariat
we will also produce vast quantities unconsciously. Some
of this data will be of use to us knowing how much
energy we are using or knowing on the way home
whether there is milk in the fridgebut much of it, especially the metadata, will not. All of it, however, is valuable
currency to the producers of those products.
The home, then, becomes an extension of our imma
terial labor. It is the producer of metrics. Just as our wear
able tech counts our footsteps, our homes will monitor
and measure us in other ways. All of our devices will
cooperate in one great collective data harvest. Why is
that data useful to the tech companies that own the
appliance companies? Because they will use it for
consumer profiling, all the better to send you targeted
advertising. They will also use it to try and streamline
our future customer experiences through predictive analyticsthe same tools that allow Amazon and Netflix to
suggest that we might want to read more Dave Eggers or
watch the new season of Homeland. Our countless daily
actions and choices around the house become what define
us. As Eggers puts it, Having a matrix of preferences
presented as your essence, as the whole you? It was
some kind of mirror, but it was incomplete, distorted.5
I think you know what the
problem is just as well as I do
The most obvious and often-raised concerns about all of
this, of course, have to do with privacy. The mass harvest
ing of our data and metadata may not be equivalent to
inserting CCTV cameras in our homes, but it is a form of
digital surveillance. One might ask whether we are returning to the ancient Greek notion of privacy that
Hannah Arendt argued was not particularly private.
That private realm was neither considered particularly
noble. It was only centuries later that private property
would offer the only reliable hiding place from the
common public world, not only from everything that
goes on in it but also from its very publicity, from being
seen and being heard.6
Here, the private becomes not exactly public but exposed to other private, corporate entities. The trade-off
that the tech companies will offer us in exchange for the

50

may happen through financial penalties. If your smart

treadmill doesnt clock a certain number of miles a day,
your insurance premium will go up. Furthermore,
smoking or enjoying the taste of Bourbon just a little
too much may constitute deviant behavior that renders
you uninsurable.
The efficiency doctrinesaving energy, saving on
healthcare costsslips very easily into the empty vessel
that is the smart home. That is especially true given that
it will be introduced through desirable, hyper-performing products. One is reminded of the famous letter that
Aldous Huxley wrote to George Orwell arguing that the
boot-on-the-face totalitarianism of 1984 was less likely
than the dystopia of Huxleys own Brave New World:
The lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by
suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. The change will
Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased
HAL: Im sorry, Dave. Im afraid I cant do that.
efficiency.7
Dave Bowman: Whats the problem?
That particular vision situates the home very clearly
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as
as the site of a shift from a modernist paradigm to an
well as I do.
emergent paradigm of the information agea shift from
The notion that smart, connected products will lead in- efficiency to paranoia, from the machinic to the anthropo
morphic. Where Le Corbusier could speak of being proud
evitably to patterns of control has been addressed at
of a house as practical as a typewriter, Rem Koolhaas
some length by the ever-watchful Evgeny Morozov. He
now coolly asserts, Very soon your house will
calls it solutionism. In the name of efficient problem
solving, we increasingly rely on sensors, apps, and feed- betray you.8
A year before the MoMA exhibition, Superstudio
back loops, and then these tools are designed to elicit
dreamed up the 2000-Ton City. The citizens of this
prescribed forms of behavior. He gives the example of
Procter & Gambles Safe Germ Alarm, a smart soap dis- megastructure live in a techno-utopia in which all their
desires are fulfilled, unless they entertain any idea of
penser used in public toilets in the Philippines. Leaving
dissent, in which case their ceiling will come down on
the stall sets off an alarm that only goes off when you
push the soap dispenser. Similarly, there have been var- them with the weight of two thousand tons. As we
ious reports of the UK government trying to nudge noted earlier, the smart home is made for black humor
and dystopian fantasy.
citizens into better behavior through the use of smart
In fact, the smart home is far from dramatic. Unlike
devices. A report by Westminster Council called for the
linking of housing benefits to trips to the gym, moni- Superstudios modernism ad absurdum or even the very
Fifties-ish capsule of Alison and Peter Smithsons House
tored with smart cards. Most recently there were calls
to cut benefits for the obese unless they went on a diet. of the Future, the smart home is utterly prosaic in its
appearance. It may look no different than your home or
Suddenly the smart fridge takes on a whole new set of
mine. When Time magazine put The Smarter Home on
associations.
However, more realistic than nanny-state, nigh- its cover last year (The dwellings of the future will make
you calmer, safer, richer and healthier), it chose a cheaptotalitarian social engineering is the probability that we
looking, suburban cookie-cutter house. (It may well be
will be negotiated into patterns of better behavior by
that the absence of a pitched roof and the addition of a
financial imperatives. The fact that insurance, rather
climbing wall were indicators of the height of innovathan advertising, is being touted as the native business
tion, but such subtleties are difficult for a European to
model for the internet of things suggests that control
smart home is efficiency. And we the consumer will be
willing accomplices for the simple reason that we are
becoming very used to paying for services with our free
datasome of these products may even be supplied at
next to no price in return for the data they produce. But
there is a fine line between efficiency and control. When
Rem Koolhaas interviewed Tony Fadell, the CEO of
Nest, at the Venice Biennale in 2014 (Nest was one of
the sponsors of Koolhaass Elements exhibition), he
suggested that it was a small leap from a thermostat that
knows how to save energy to one that proposes that, in
fact, you have used enough energy for one day and that
its time for bed.
Its possible that, as a child of the 1960s, Koolhaas was
calling on memories of Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey:

51

read.) This was very shrewd of Time. Because if the smart

home is to become a reality, it will have to adapt itself to
the majority of existing homes or be doomed to a tiny
market of wealthy eccentrics.
As Dan Hill has pointed out, in a city such as London
(which has the oldest housing stock in Europe) the
smart home will have to negotiate Victorian walls and
Edwardian pipes. In Londons overheated property
market, money is made hand over fist by simply redecorating, leaving the sins of our ancient infrastructure
behind a kind of nationwide Farrow & Ball sticking
plaster.9 Because getting behind the wallpaper and updating the wiring would be considered overcapitalizing.
The more metaphorical network, thenthe metanetwork of the internet of thingsis reliant on a literal
network of rusty pipes and underground cables. Banham
reminds us that Edisons lightbulb would have been useless without his invention of the mains electricity delivery system, reinforcing his point that services (gadgetry
and geekery) are what make modernist form possible.
But even when the deployment of electrical services
determines the outward form of the building (e.g., Louis
Kahns Richards Memorial Laboratories in Philadelphia),
architects go to great lengths to hide them.
We prefer our network infrastructure invisible, and
consequently we elaborate nebulous metaphors such as
the cloud. Deep down we know that the cloud is a giant
server farm somewhere outside Houston, but out of
sight out of mind. Timo Arnalls film Internet Machine,
shot in a data center in Spain, lingers eerily on the stacks
of servers, the whirring fans, and the miles of fiber-optic
cable precisely to make such metaphors tangible.
All of which goes to say that the smart home is
merely the consumer entry point to a vast new economic
territory of invisible infrastructure. The mundane (or
even intimate) domestic data of the smart home accumulates into the big data of the smart city. And here there
are powerful corporate forces at playforces that our
neoliberalized, austerity-riddled municipal authorities
may be increasingly powerless to resist. Again the ostensible motive is efficiency: smart waste bins that know
when they need to be emptied and smart traffic lights
that can recalibrate themselves based on traffic flow. But
these services are politicized through their transfer to
the private sector.
When James Bridle quipped recently, Beneath the
paving stones, the cloud, he was pointing to a material

reality, just as Arnall was, but the political connotations

of that adage are worth dwelling on.10 Who owns the
cloud? Who owns the smart city? Follow the money. The
real financial assets of the city will be measured less in
ostentatious skyscrapers than in the invisible substrate
of cables and sensors. The implications of what Keller
Easterling calls infrastructure space for architects and
architecture are not entirely clear, but what is fairly certain is that the discipline thus far lacks a truly infrastructural perspective. Data as a tool for creating parametric form has an established, if polarized, position,
but a genuine network thinking has yet to infect architecture. Architecture is still focused on objects. Or, as
Easterling puts it: Architecture is making the occasional
stone in the water. The world is making the water.11

1
2

3
4
5
6

7
8
9
10
11

52

Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

(Moscow: Strelka Press, 2014).
Michael E. Porter and James E. Heppelmann, How Smart,
Connected Products are Transforming Competition, Harvard
Business Review (November 2014): 65.
I quote Matt Webb, formerly of BERG, with no guarantees
that he said it first.
Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment
(Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2013), 278.
Dave Eggers, The Circle (New York: Penguin, 2013), 126.
Hannah Arendt, The Vita Activa, in: Hannah Arendt and Peter R.
Baehr (eds), The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin, 2003),
212.
Jeffrey Myers (ed.), George Orwell (New York: Routledge, 2002), 25.
Rem Koolhaas interviewed in The Guardian (March 12, 2014).
Dan Hill, We need a Prouv of plumbing, a Rogers of rewiring,
an Utzon of U-values, dezeen (May 1, 2014).
James Bridle, The Cloud, Icon magazine (February 16, 2015).
Keller Easterling, The Action is the Form: Victor Hugos TED Talk
(Moscow: Strelka Press, 2012).

Rana
Dasgupta

Landscape

March is the prettiest month, bringing flawless blooms

to the dour frangipaniswhich are placed artfully
around the compound, in pleasing congruity with the
posted security guards, who wave me on as I drive up to
the house.
The day is done. Evening flowers have come into
their own, and the air tides with scent. Ahead of me,
under a velvet sky, the glass mansion glows like a giant
yellow aquarium.
I park my car according to instructions, and walk
out along the low-lit paths. At every corner a guard
awaits, and directs me to the next. They pass me on, the
guards, one to another, with walkie-talkie confirmations crackling back down the line. I arrive at the house.
The building is like two space stations, one glass
and one stone, crossing over each other. One of them
floats free of the earth, a shining bridge to nowhere, its
underside glinting with landing beacons.
Everything is improbably pristine. The corners are
straight and sharp. No gravel spills from the decorative
channels that border the path.
The guards instruct me to walk through the house
to the swimming pool at the back. They indicate a spotlit passageway. The sliding doors are drawn half across,
blocking one side of the entrance: I set off through the
other, open side anddo I hear the guards warning

53

cries before or after?walk straight into a sheet of plate

glass, so clean and so non-reflective that even though
I have just staggered back from it, even though I have
just bent double, clutching my crumpled nose, I still
cannot tell it is there.
The guards are laughing. One of them runs to assist
the idiot visitor. He advises me to enter the passage not
through the glass but through the doora normal door,
nothing sliding about it. He demonstrates to me how a
door works so that I do not injure myself again.
I pass through the house. A hall sweeps away from
me, done up like a designer hotel. Velvet lampshades in
high-frequency colours hang from the high ceiling.
Designer couches are clustered here and there around
crystal tables. On the walls hang enormous canvasses
painted with the kind of energetic soft porn you see on
posters for DJ dance nights. Lounge music plays from
speakers hidden throughout the building.
I come out on the other side of the house, where
everything is lit by that secret, erotic blue that rises from
private pools at night. I am led to a poolside seat. A glass
is placed in front of me with a sealed bottle of water.
Sir will be with you in a minute.
In a city of euphemisms, this place is called a farmhouse. Nothing is farmed here, of course. But when, in
the 1970s, the Delhi elite began seizing swathes of land to
the south of the city to build private estates, the entire
belt was reserved, according to the regulations, for agricultureand, with a pang of propriety that touched the
names of things even if it could not touch the things
themselves, they called their new mansions farmhouses.
This was especially important since many of the first
farmhouses were built by the very bureaucrats and politicians who had made the regulations, severely correct
individuals for whom irregularities in the names of
things were an offence to the dignity of their office.
In the decades since then, the farmhouses to the
south of Delhi have not only increased in number,
changed hands several times, and ultimately acquired
the legitimacy that accrues to every land grab once
enough time has passed. They have also come to epitomise the lives of the citys rich and well-connected,
whose astonishing parties, car collections, sculpture
gardens and loping Australian wildlife would be inconceivable except in the context of such fantastic estates.
In no other Indian metropolis does the urban elite bask
in such pastoral tranquillity: this is an idiosyncrasy of

the capital. It is striking in fact how Delhis rich, a quintessentially metropolitan set of people, who have made
their money by tirelessly networking in the capitals
many clubs and corridors, eschew the urbane. They do
not, as the rich do in Mumbai or New York, dream of
apartments with sparkling views of the city from which
their fortune derives. They are not drawn to that energy
of streets, sidewalks and bustle which was so heroic a
part of great nineteenth- and twentieth-century cities.
No: the Delhi rich like to wake up looking at empty,
manicured lawns stretching away to walls topped with
barbed wire.
Modern Delhi was born out of the catastrophe of
Indias partition, whose ravages turned its culture towards security and self-reliance. The compounds in
which its richest citizens take refuge from society are
only the most extravagant manifestations of a more
widespread isolationist ethos. Delhi is the pioneer, after
all, of Indias private townships, where life is administered by corporations and surrounded by fences, and
where one is cut away, therefore, from the broad currents of the country. Gurgaon, the Delhi suburb established by real estate giant DLF in the 1990s, is the largest
such township in Asia, and now has imitators all over
the country. An expanse of fields until thirty years ago,
Gurgaons looming apartment blocks and steely towers
now look as if they have emerged from a computer game
set in some super-saturated future. Gurgaon makes no
pretence of being a public space: the great numbers of
the poor who clean and guard its houses and offices, for
instance, cannot live there. To live in Gurgaon is to live
in a housing complex protected from the outside by secu
rity cameras and armed guards, where residents pay corporations to service all their fundamental needs: garbage
collection, water supply and even, in the frequent event
that state-owned electricity fails, electricity generation.
It therefore appeals to a group of people for whom the
corporation has come to seem a far more fertile form of
social organisation than the state, and who seek out
enclaves of efficient, post-public living.
The place where I now sip my bottled water is venerable. For far in excess of a millennium, men and women
have made their lives on the soil where my feet now rest.
From my seat by the pool I can gaze up at the soaring
trunk of the Qutab Minar, the triumphal tower built in
the wake of an ancient conquest of Delhi by central Asian
invaders: massive and serrated, it has punctured eight

54

centuries of evenings like this, the only man-made thing,

even now, to make any claim on these fallow skies.
In this landscaped compound, every attempt has
been made to carpet over the land. But in the nearby
woods and wastelands, by the sides of all the roads hereabout, ornate tombs, palaces and mosques press up from
the obstinate pastand, waiting here in the gathering
night, I sense, even through the hard crust of twentyfirst century cement, ghosts rising from the earth, the
spirits of those who, for hundreds of years, herded cattle,
raised crops, worshipped gods, built settlements, made
song, petitioned rulers, buried their dead. Just here,
where these mute paths now run perfectly level, on this
soil now sealed with emerald lawns.
From the chlorinated depths of the pool rises something else: the recollection of a dream. Eight centuries
ago, a few paces away from here, the sultan Iltutmish lay
sleeping. Suddenly the doors of his slumber burst open
and there before him was the Prophet Mohammad
mounted on the winged steed of Heaven, Buraq. Buraq
looked at the sultan with a face that was sometimes
man, sometimes woman and sometimes horse; the quivering of its mighty wings produced an indomitable gale.
The sultan felt he was being called and, as horse and
rider withdrew, he followed them. When they reached a
certain place, the horse struck the earth with its hoof,
and from the ground spurted a jet of water.
And the chamber of the dream closed again.
In the morning, the sultan went to the place where
he had been led in the dream. When he arrived, he saw
on the ground a signthe imprint of Buraqs mighty
hoofand he gave orders for the digging of a new reservoir. Before long there was built a magnificent lake with
a mosque in the centre, accessible by boat; there were
grand villas all around the waterside, and a vast encamp
ment for all the musicians needed to entertain such an
assemblyand the people gave thanks for their rulers
wise and glorious works.
Iltutmish also constructed a five-storey-deep stepwell nearby, surrounded by colonnaded terraces where
townsfolk could meet and chat by the water. A second
step-well, conceived on an even more lavish scale, was
sunk next to it a couple of centuries later, so that this
place of blistering summers became famous among
travellers for the abundance of its water.
The reason these tanks were so bountiful had to do
with their position. They were situated at the end of the

long and rocky slope that channelled water down from

the Aravalli mountains, the ancient range which gnarls
India from the state of Gujarat almost all the way to the
city of Delhi. In this landscape of brush and dust, more
over, the wells were placed in a forest whose densely
rooted soil did not blow away or silt up the system but
held water like a sponge and even filtered it in the process. For such reasons, these community tanks were full
of water for more than six centuries. As late as the 1960s,
they provided sport to local boys who performed the
startling feat of diving to the bottom to fish out coins.
Now they are just dry craters in the ground, littered
at the bottom with plastic bags and dead pigeons. It is
not just that groundwater levels have plummeted in
these decades of ever more intensive extraction, when
the number of those packed together in this baked place
edges towards the twenty millions. It is also that these
wells depended on a delicate and extensive field of capillary action, which has since been carved up by the super
structure of modern life. The profusion of concrete surfaces prevents water from being absorbed into those
capillaries, which anyway are greatly depleted by the
disappearance of the forests. Industrial drainage systems carry water away from its ancient courses. Tarmac
roads interrupt the age-old seep.
The crackle of such ruptures is barely audible to the
modern ear. These recent impositions are so much a part
of our being that it is difficult for us to appreciate the
greatness of the other, alien, arrangements with which
they have done away. We are programmed to consider
pre-modern engineering infantile, and to treat with
scepticism the phantasmagorical dreams of medieval
emperors. But when you watch women in the contemporary city gathering water for their families from dripping pipelines or from flooded potholes, the majesty of
the dream, and the great works performed in its name,
can impress itself upon you again.
Is it because of this history that it feels so deeply apt
to sit next to this swimming pool? Pools, after all, have
been Delhis salvation for centuries. And in our superstitious epoch when water is faith, not science, when
the old tanks stand dry, their technology forgotten,
when house dwellers have little clue where their water
comes from, when everyone is desperately pumping
from the earth whatever they can while they still can
there is something decadently exquisite about this calm
and pregnant pool.

55

Atlas

57

Reinhold
Martin

Preface:
The Neoliberal
Housing System

The argument of this Atlas is intentionally partial and

simple: that, during the course of an uneven yet decisive
neoliberal turn well under way by the 1970s, housing,
as an architectural, urban, sociopolitical, and economic
process, had transformed internationally in ways that
have profoundly affected how human habitation is
understood and addressed today.
In the announcement for the Wohnungsfrage Academy,1
we defined the global housing system as a universal yet
highly specific, highly differentiated mixture of laws,
politics, investments, activities, objects, proposals, practices, and imaginaries. These are held together (and apart)
by infrastructures of all sortstechnological, financial,
social, institutional, and spatialthat weave into a complex, diffuse, contradictory, but still coherent system.
Here, we add the term neoliberal, as defined along two
intersecting axes. The first, political-economic dimension of neoliberalism has been associated with the
widespread deregulation, privatization, and, as the geo
grapher David Harvey puts it, withdrawal of the state
from many areas of social provision. Neoliberalism,
according to Harvey, seeks to bring all human action
into the domain of the market.2 The second, socio
political (or biopolitical) dimension has been defined by

59

the philosopher Michel Foucault as the transformation

of the modern subject, understood as homo economicus
(or economic man), into human capital, an entre
preneur of himself. Thus, says Foucault, neoliberalism
is less about commodification than about competition:
Not a supermarket society, but an enterprise society.3
In different ways and to different degrees, we can
observe these processes at work in the examples
assembled in this Atlas. Each piece of architecture is
crosscut differently with the vectors of class, gender,
sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, culture, and other historical factors. The specific crosscutting in a neoliberal
setting does not simply reflect economic structures;
rather, it helps to shape them. Equally, our examples
show that the neoliberal turn was not and is not by any
means monolithic or homogeneous. Nor was it or is it
inevitable. The task is therefore twofold: to understand
this turn in greater depth and with greater nuance, and
to respond critically to it. Just as none of the examples
shown here represent answers or solutions to some
predefined problem, our task is less to solve the problem of housing under neoliberalism than it is to redefine
the housing question as such.
The housing question is universal, but only in the
sense that everywhere, it speaks differently to the
challenges that define our times: inequality, ecological
crisis, displacement, refuge, migration, privatization,
exclusion, and more. Something similar can be said
about the examples collected in this Atlas. In each, we
witness concrete responses to a question: How to live,
together? We offer them as a way to pose that same
question today, through architecture but also around it,
underneath it, within it, and beyond it.
Anne Kockelkorn has assembled, framed, and annot
ated this Atlas with great thoughtfulness and care. Below,
she explains its premise in more detail.

2
3

60

One purpose of this Atlas is to offer a point of departure for the

work of the Wohnungsfrage Academy which takes place through
October 22 to 28, 2015, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Intentionally partial, the Atlas is meant to map out a conceptual
framework and a common reference to which the individual
Academy sessions and workshops may react.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 3.
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collge de
France 19781979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), 147, 226.

Anne
Kockelkorn

Introduction:
A Sample Atlas

The present Atlas serves as a starting point to discuss

and think about housing produced and consumed under
a neoliberal economic and political doctrine; it does so
by offering a horizontal and a vertical arrangement of
thirty-three case studies. The succession of these cases
is represented in chronological order following the
implementation of neoliberal housing policies since the
1970s at a global scale and structured roughly according
to the following four decades: beginnings (1970s), postmodern revisions (1980s), new states and networks
(1990mid-2000), global transactions (mid-2000present).
The profile of each case study is based on a simple grid of
categories that allows for quick and simple comparisons
through space and timesuch as site, main actors,
dimension, and type.
Both chronology and profile refer rather to the gaps
between them than to their comprehensiveness. This
is not only due to the aim of the publication, which is
to encourage further debate or to provoke resistance;
the incompleteness of the present compendium closely
relates to its subject. Even if certain categories (such as
financing or location) are aimed at informing the
reader of tangible facts, categories such as value of real

61

estate, the photographic representation, and the historic

classification of the projects also bear witness to their
temporality rather than to an unquestionable stability.
They indicate that we are dealing with temporary constellations that take place in specific geographic, historical,
and political circumstances. It might seem contradictory
to aim at an international comparison of case studies via
a standardized profile while simultaneously accepting
the instability of the subject. In what follows, we would
like to explain why we consider this gap productive and
why we argue for its toleration.
Instable representations
Globally, one can summarize housing as a practice of
dwelling and the production process of a physical object.
On one hand, housing constitutes a social space that
frames and reproduces basic biological functions of the
human body, sociocultural norms, and economical processes such as metabolism and sexuality, social relations,
and real estate value.1 On the other hand, housing designates a site-specific, immobile, and indivisible physical
object produced by social norms and technical means,
which are specific to a certain time and place. This
simultaneity of social space and a continuous creation
process of physical matter is already rather complex. But
what makes housing difficult to graspand which most
frequently is overlookedis the fact that both the
physical object and the practices which constitute it are
doubled by their respective representations and imaginaries, either discursive, collective, or individual. We
dont talk about what is out there, we deal with their
respective representations, and that is what is at stake
here: one of the greatest misunderstandings of everyday
perception and everyday language is the illusion that
these different representations of housing form a natural
entity and describe them as though they were. Yet, the
sum total of the representations of housing consists of
unstable attributions that depend on partial connections between the political economy of housing, its
esthetic and biopolitical discursive formations, as well
as urban developments and their respective mediatic
representations. Especially when signing leases or sales
contracts, it isnt immediately intelligible that representations dont designate the same object, especially if
they happen to be all in line.2 Nevertheless, they exist
independently from each other and, more importantly,
they change with different speed. Their instability or

non-simultaneity increases the more they get instrumentalized in the crossfire of actors interests (state,
communes, investors, building societies, and housing
associations), the more and the faster urban territories
get transformed by the leverage of fictious capital flows,
and the more a project or location is apt to be charged
with ideological meanings or affects.3 This instability of
the representation of the housing productwhich in turn
inflects upon the physical worldis a general feature of
housing under a capitalist economy; but it is intensified
and accelerated under a neoliberal agenda that considers
the economic growth of a perfect market with idealized
homogenous products as an end in itself, and which
confounds traditional liberal claims of achieving social
justice with particular class interests of the richest part
of the population.4
Housing as a commodity: Three contradictions
There is a series of obvious problems and contradictions
which arise if one considers housing as a commodity
alone (let alone a homogenous one) and which raises
legitimate questions why a neoliberal agenda can be
considered at all as meaningful with regards to housing;
one could also ask why most nation-states have followed
this agenda in the housing sector since 1989 with
increasing bias and consequence. These contradictions
derive from the double character of housing within
a capitalist economy as being both a commodity and
a means of production. One of the most decisive contradictions between housing systems and an idealized
neoliberal economy is related to this latent property: the
all-pervasiveness of government intervention in the
housing economybe it through direct or indirect subsidies, tax regulations, or rent control, either with the
goal of enhancing growth or to assure satisfactory
access to housing, or bothrefutes the assumption that
governments shouldnt intervene in a perfect market.
A second contradiction arises with the complexity and
indivisibility of housing as a social practice and a sitespecific object; neither of these characteristics matches
with the concept of a homogenous commodity that is
endlessly divisible and thus apt for the maximalization
of transactions, maximalization of contracts, as well as
a minimization of inter-assessment intervals. The third
contradiction points back to the means of production:
the inherent inequality of the manifold relationships
which constitute the housing market (owner-occupier,

62

owner-financier, occupier-neighbors) as well as the

c omplex entanglements of these relationships (which
are associated both with inadequate information and
market asymmetries) directly contradict the neoliberal
assumption that efficiency and distribution can be
treated as neatly separate objects.5
Territorial disjunction
Globalized capital transactions, nation-state housing
policies, and processes of territoriality, which inscribe
themselves into the urban landscapes, are increasingly
intertwined. To better understand why the ghostly
attributes of the commodity that are projected upon
these landscapes become more and more palpable but
not explicable, it is helpful to briefly consider the definitions of territoriality given by Claude Raffestin.6 The
Swiss geographer introduced the term in the 1990s to
circumscribe the entirety of relations that societies project, establish, and maintain with their own surroundings
and others to fulfill their needs. According to Raffestin,
the physical perceptible landscape (including housing,
which constitutes a major part of these landscapes
alongside infrastructures and agriculture) is relegating
neither to the present nor to a finished object, but is a
product of practices, which subsume the territory in an
ongoing process of territorialization, deterritorialization,
and reterritorialization.7 In 2012, Raffestin observed
that his original definition of territoriality had become
obsolete, since the increasing abstraction and acceleration
of fictious capital flows have not only increased the
power and leverage of imaginaries on the physical world,
but they have also altered the logical sequence of the
emergence and succession of territorialization and reterritorializations.8 Accelerated real estate transactions,
in particular the speculation over debt, have decoupled
the logical connection of imaginary landscapes, territories, and human needs.
This disjunction affects housing and urban landscapes alike. It renders housing more and more difficult
to decipher and it sets it into an urban landscape whose
properties and functions evade the mechanisms of bodily
perceptions; whose relationships between polit
ical,
esthetic, and economic representations cant be decoded
by experience alone. These relatively new housing landscapes appear in particular in the fourth section of this
Atlas; projects such as the GTZ housing intervention in
Ethiopia or the sales transactions of the formerly public

housing stock in Germany raise the impression to be

hold together by stories which have been put out of
reach. This Atlas is not an attempt to replace these stories
or to tell new ones. It aims to dissect the housing system
into analytic categories, to convey simultaneously a
synthetic overview while offering a tangible a ccount
of the inherent contradictions between the trans
national housing system and its guiding neoliberal logics.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all those without whose feedback
and input it would not have been possible to constitute
this compendium in such a short time: Ani Vihervaara,
Banu iek Tl, Daria Bocharnikowa, Elke Beyer, Kaye
Geipel, Kim Frster, Leila Seewang, Sascha Rsler, and
Stphane Dgoutin.
My special thanks for thoughtful reflection and
helpful input goes to: Reinhold Martin about the general
outline of this Atlas; to Alla Vronskaya about late
microrayon planning in the Soviet Union; to Dubravka
Sekuli about the functioning of Yugoslav self-management; to Susanne Schindler about housing subsidies in
the United States; and to Sascha Delz and Vesta Nele
Zareh for their input on the particular conditions and
specificities of the contemporary housing system.

63

7
8

For an approximation of the relation between housing and the

production of bodies, which doesnt fall into the trap of behaviorism,
see the French studies of nineteenth-century housing policies:
Lion Murard and Patrick Zylberman, Le petit travailleur infatigable.
Villes-usines, habitat et intimits au XIX sicle (Paris: Recherches,
1976); Michel Foucault (ed.) et al., Politiques de lhabitat (18001850)
(Paris: CORDA 1977), as well as recent investigations in architecture
and biopolitics: Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Biopolitics and the Emergence
of Modern Architecture (New York: Buell Centre/FoRum Project
and Princeton Architectural Press, 2009); Peter-Paul Bnziger,
Fordistische Krper in der Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts eine
Skizze, Body Politics, 1 (2013).
Further reading about the social implications of the sales contract
in Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy (Malden,
MA/Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), in particular Chapter 4,
A Contract under Duress. Conclusion: The Foundations of Petit
Bourgeois Suffering, 14892.
This reflection bears certain parallels to the different scapes
evoked by Arjun Appadurai, Disjuncture and Difference in
the Global Cultural Economy, in: Modernity at Large: Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996).
See David Harvey: A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005); and Paul Treanor, Neoliberalism: Origins,
Theory, Definition (2005), online: http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.
Treanor/neoliberalism.html (accessed 08/12/2015).
For a more elaborate explanation of these contradictions, see
Christine Whitehead, The Neo-Liberal Legacy to Housing
Research, in: David F. Clapham et al. (eds), The Sage Handbook
of Housing Studies (London: Sage, 2012), 11330, here 11315.
Claude Raffestin, cogense territoriale et territorialit, in:
Frank Auriac and Robert Brunet (eds), Espaces, Jeux et Enjeux (Paris:
Fondation Diderot and Librairie Arthme Fayard, 1986), 17385.
Claude Raffestin, Space, territory, and territoriality, Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space, 30 (2012): 12141, here: 129.
Ibid., 13840.

64

1.
Beginnings
196881

The almost-thirty-year-period of economic growth and

social stability that characterized the postwar era ended,
worldwide, in the 1970s. The suspension of the Bretton
Woods Agreement in 1971 terminated the convertibility
of the US dollar to gold and opened the path of currency
speculation; in tandem with the oil crisis of 1973, these
events acted as catalysts for a fundamental change in
values on both sides of the Iron Curtain and in the devel
oping countries of the southern hemisphere. The pivotal
factor of this shift was the increasing alignment of nation-
state politics to the logics of globalized economies. The
shift also affected the provision of housing: the principle
that the provision of housing should be considered
a fundamental public responsibility requiring a corres
ponding framework of regulations and subsidies was
replaced by a market-based principle of distribution
based on supply and demand.
In Western industrial nations in particular, this
change did not come about overnight. On the contrary,
the emancipatory freedom that opened up from the mid1960s was reinforced by the 1968 revolts and made the
early 1970s seem like an optimistic departure toward an
uncertain future. This freedom arose both at the level of
welfare-state experiments and by means of alternative

65

strategies as well as through projects developed by archi

tects in collaboration with activists and policy-makers.
The little-loved features of modernization, such as ration
alization and technocracy, were considered increasingly
untenable, but the narrative of progressive historical
change based on participation, equalization, and prosperity of a society as a wholethat is, of a society that gauges
itself according to its weakest memberscontinued to
take effect in this decade.
Flexibility
At a time when the building industry in most Western
industrial countries was in its heyday, two national
housing programs, in France and the United States of
America, serve to illustrate how public pressure (media
attention) and financial urgency (a shrinking public
purse) imposed to improve both cost efficiency and the
adaptability of housing production. Despite decisive
administrative differences, both programs, the Plan
Construction in France and Operation Breakthrough in
the US, aimed to establish closer links between largescale housing production and the construction industry
in order to enhance technical innovation.1 Both were set
up in order to optimize the production processes of
heavy prefabrication, carry out construction experiments,
and enhance technical innovation within urban planning and architecture. [ pp. 70, 71, 72] In particular,
the French Plan Construction aimed to break up the
monotony of prefabricated apartment blocks, and to
reconcile collective living with the new models of individual self-realization that were emerging at the time.
The problem with these programs resulted from their
contradictory objectives of improving the quality of what
the construction industry produced and, in the case of
France, the social environments of collective housing
construction, while at the same time reducing costs. In
this way, both programs heralded a transformation of
roles in publicly initiated housing construction: their
various shortcomings served to confirm the attitude
that housing construction was too expensive for govern
ment budgets and that the construction of housing
should be left up to the market.2 In the United States,
this phase of experimentation soon ended; Operation
Breakthrough was terminated in connection with the
1973 moratorium on all federal housing-construction
programs for having failed in its objectives.3 In France,

support from within the administrative apparatus of

the centralized state was too big for state-run housing
construction to be stopped in one go, despite significant
impulses toward economic liberal reform. Although
subsidized mass construction in the housing sector suffered a dramatic collapse in the late 1970s in France as
well, and despite the fact that the neoliberal reforms of
1977 launched a subprime market segment to encourage
home ownership,4 the subsidies of the Plan Construction for the so-called ralisations exprimentales (experimental projects) still continued to co-finance a number
of exemplary buildings, including the star-shaped clusters of apartments by Jean Renaudie in Givors and the
Paris suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine. [ p. 73]
Critique
The housing projects subsidized by the Plan Construction and Operation Breakthrough functioned within
the modes of a technocratic agenda, although the institutions that launched these programs considered them
as valid responses to the criticism against blank-slate
urban renewal and the monotony of large-scale planning. From the end of the 1960s on, critics and publicists
increasingly assailed large-scale public planning as
such;5 and in Central and Eastern Europe, the new postindustrial urban societies discovered both the value
and the investment potential of their existing historical
architectural assets. Mixed functionality and a smaller
scale division of the urban fabric gradually transformed
from activists claims into the new guiding models of
urban planning. However, in the early days of European
post-modernity, under the sway of these two principles,
critical architectural drawings played an important role
as an agent of political change opposed to the establishment, even if only for a short while. Pioneers of this
movement were the counter-projects of the Belgian act
ivist group ARAU associated with Maurice Culot, who,
from 1969, worked to come up with alternatives with
inner-city residents of Brussels who were facing displace
ment through predatory urban renewal. [ p. 78] The
political struggle of this group played out in parallel to
Culots teaching at the architectural faculty of archi
tecture at La Cambre University (ULB). The drawings
made subsequently within the context of academia and
urban activism, rendered the vision for re-activating the
historic urban fabric tangible. Their authors consciously

66

opted for perspectives and axonometrics as a means

to convey the forms as well as the positively connoted
imaginaries and affects related to historic urban morphologies. Thus, the drawings served as agents within a
political struggle while simultaneously anticipating the
historic reconstruction of European inner cities that
would follow in the 1980s.6
Alternatives
Alternative construction programs for housing aimed
at new societal models of property distributionthose
actually put into actionarose only in exceptional
political situations, such as in Titos Yugoslavia or in the
course of Portugals Carnation Revolution.
The state housing construction program in Portugal,
the Servio de Apoio Ambulatrio Local (Local Mobile
Support Service, or SAAL), was a historical exception
inasmuch as the residentsespecially women who were
particularly affected in their everyday lives by the substandard living conditions in Portugalwere given a
say and decision-making powers in the production of
housing. This also happened to be one of the Carnation
Revolutions central demands. Launched in 1974 by the
Ministry for Internal Affairs (MAI) and the Secretary of
State for Housing and Urban Affairs (SEHU), the program
was explicitly set up as an open participatory process
even including the associated legislation, which was
also based on processuality. The program ran for almost
two years until the Conservative election victory of 1976.
Until this time it was supported by the military, and,
among other things, it created the political framework
to launch some of the best-known housing construction
projects of Alvar Siza.7 [ p. 75]
The alternatives in the production of housing
in Yugoslavia, on the other hand, benefited from the
exceptional political situation opened up by Titos third
way. Compared with other Eastern Bloc countries,
Yugoslavias market economy allowed for a high level of
investment in housing,8 and, in contrast to Stalinism,
policies did not aim solely at an equal society and un
alienated work, but also at the dissolution of centralist
structures. Ideally, therefore, the ultimate goal of the
states power was its own withering away; in practice,
the renunciation of the state monopoly came into being
under the form of social property, i.e. through collective
ownership of communal or operational units, produced

and run on the principle of self-management.9 Jobs secured access to housing and rights of permanent tenancy
that was hereditary; but the latitude within Yugoslavian
housing production extended beyond a unique mode of
ownership and occupation. It also comprised formal
experiments in the building of public apartment complexes that bear a number of similarities to late-postwar
modern
ity in Western countries: those innovations
included flexible ground plans, the adaptability of structures to changed living conditions, and a precise urban
layout of buildings to articulate and respond to features
of the urban surroundings. [ p. 74]
Developments
In the housing markets of developing countries, meanwhile, the 1970s already saw the emergence of the global
ization-driven deregulation and restructuring that would
shape urbanization processes worldwide in the 1990s:
city quarters for those living at the minimum subsistence
level and gated communities for the upper class. This
applied particularly to South America. Prototypes of such
two-speed cities are Previ in Lima and Nova Ipanema in
Rio de Janeiro. [ pp. 76, 77] The first gated community
in Rio de Janeiro guaranteed its residents luxurious
shared facilities, such as well-looked-after streets, a
swimming pool and a tennis court, on a beach property.
The development project in Lima, on the other hand,
answered to the question of the minimum subsistence
level on the basis of an international competition for
one-to-two-story house typologies financed by the UN,
and demonstrated the possibility of creating a city with
collective facilities from this minimum. While both saw
personal property as the foundation of urban development, at the same time, they were tailored directly to
the economic and sociocultural capital of their residents.
It should be noted that the pilot projects mentioned
above were created amid the conflicts caused by the neo
liberal turn, and later themselves exploited for its aims:
the success of their potential for innovation became
their downfall, at least in relation to the original intention. As early as the 1980s, for example, the architectural
esthetics of the Brussels counter-projects served precisely
the purpose that they had tried to counter in 1969: the
gentrification of the inner city.10 Block 23 in Belgrade
was privatized after the Socialist Federal Republic of

67

Yugoslavia formerly ended in 1992.11 Construction of

the first phase of lvaro Sizas Boua in Porto began after
the SAAL, which was halted in 1976; the completion of
the project took place in the 2000s under a Conservative
municipal government and the new apartments were
then sold on the open market.12

Anne Kockelkorn

68

The total allotted budget for Frances Plan Construction in 1971

for a period of five years was 360 million FF; this sum financed the
research institute CORDA as well as the open competition PAN
(later named Europan). Between 1972 and 1980, Plan-Construction
also co-funded 418 experimental housing projects via its sub-
program ralisations exprimentales (REX) with an average sum
ranging from c.250,000 FF to c.500,000 FF. See: Lancement
du Plan-Construction, Le Moniteur (May 29, 1971), 2328;
Jean-Pierre Monnet, tat de la construction, construction de
ltat, LArchitecture daujourdhui, 174 (JulyAugust 1974): 29;
E. Labaume et al., REX (ralisations exprimentales): 400 exprimen
tations dans lhabitat (Paris: Plan-Construction, 1981). Operation
Breakthrough was aimed exclusively at the joint venture between
government initiatives and industrial production; it allowed for
the construction of 26,000 housing units on fourteen sites and
cost about US$72 million, about 25 percent of the Housing and
Urban Development (HUD) research and development budget for
the fiscal years 197074. See the Report to the Congress by the
Comptroller General of the United States, Operation Breakthrough:
Lessons Learned about Demonstrating New Technology
( Washington, DC: US Government Accountability Office, 1976),
87 pages, here: p. 1; Roger Biles, A Mormon in Babylon: George
Romney as Secretary of HUD, 19691973, Michigan Historical
Review, 2 (fall 2012): 6389, here 7273, online: http://www.jstor.
org/stable/10.5342/michhistrevi.38.2.0063 (accessed 08/20/2015).
For in-depth analysis of the construction of this attitude, see
Pierre Bourdieu and Rosine Christin, La construction du march,
Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 8182 (March 1990): 6585.
A polylogue about the drastic cuts on public housing subsidies in
the USA, in: Kim Frster, The Housing Prototypes of the Institute
for Architecture and Urban Studies, Candide: Journal for Architectural
Knowledge, 5 (February 2012): 5792.
For use of the term neoliberalism with regards to the reforms
of 1977 in France, see the Lecture No. 8 (March 7, 1979) in: Michel
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collge de France
19781979, tr. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008); on the subprime crisis that followed the zero-capital credit
scheme (PAP) and its consequences for the French New Towns of
the 1980s, see Jean-Louis Violeau and Soline Nivet, Larchitecture
rsidentielle: quarante ans de dbats, in: Clment Orillard and
Antoine Picon (eds), Marne-la-Valle: de la ville nouvelle la ville durable
(Marseille: Editions Parenthses, 2012), 22337, here 22425.
A famous example of this widely spread criticism of governmental
intervention is the essay written collectively by Reyner Banham,
Paus Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price, Non-Plan: An Experiment
in Freedom, New Society, 338 (March 1969).
To follow-up on this argument in greater depth, see Isabelle
Doucet, Counter-projects and the postmodern user, in Kenny
Cupers (ed.), Use Matters. An Alternative History of Architecture
(Abingdon, Oxon/New York: Routledge, 2013), 23347. For a short
general overview of the functioning modes of La Cambre Architecture in the 1970s, see Nan Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1999/1996), 2934. The original
drawings and student project presentations are published in:
Maurice Culot et al., Le bateau dlie: Contributions aux luttes urbaines
et projets opportunistes, La Cambre, 19711975 (Brussels: Ecole
nationale suprieure darchitecture et des arts visuels, 1975); and
Maurice Culot et al., La tour Ferre, projets dans la ville: projets raliss
La Cambre, Bruxelles, de 19751978 (Brussels: Ecole nationale
suprieure darchitecture et des arts visuels, 1978).
For further information about SAAL, see Joo Arriscado Nunes
and Nuno Serra, Decent Housing for the People: Urban Movements and Emancipation in Portugal, South European Society and
Politics, 9, 2 (2004): 4676, on the role of the military, 60. About
the role of SAAL for the construction of Boua, see Brigitte Fleck
and Wilfried Wang, Boua Residents' Association Housing: Porto
197277, 200506 (Tbingen: Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, 2008).
Part of the oral history relating to SAAL is made accessible by
the documentary movie directed by Joo Dias, After Dictatorship.
As Operaes SAAL (Portugal, 2007).

10

11

12

John A. A. Sillince (ed.), Housing Policy in Eastern Europe and the

Soviet Union, in: Housing Policies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 1990), 657, here 22.
Maroje Mrdulja and Vladimir Kuli (eds), Between Utopia and
Pragmatism: Architecture and Urban Planning in the Former
Yugoslavia and the Successor States, in: Unfinished Modernisations:
Between Utopia and Pragmatism (Zagreb: Croatian Architects, Association, 2012): 613, here 7.
See Isabelle Doucet, Brussels: The Soft Regeneration, in: Jaap Jan
Berg et al. (eds), Houses in Transformation, Interventions in European
Gentrification (Rotterdam: nai010 Publishers, 2008), 13043.
On the privatization process in Belgrade, see Dubravka Sekuli,
Glotz Nicht so Romantisch! On Extralegal Space in Belgrade (Maastricht:
Jan van Eyck Academie and Early Works, 2012), online: https://
www.academia.edu/2765027/Glotzt_Nicht_so_Romantisch_On_
Extralegal_Space_in_Belgrade (accessed 08/20/2015).
For an overview of the ambivalent development of Sizas housing
project, see Wilfried Wang, Boua and Public Housing at the
Beginning of the 21st Century, in Fleck et al. (eds), Boua Residents
Association Housing, 6573.

69

1. Beginnings, 196881 FLEXIBILITY

Operation Breakthrough, USA

Axonometric drawing of the crane-stacked housing modules

of the Shelley Systems, 1970

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
14 projects in the United States
on selected sites (out of 22
originally selected)

Scale and impact:

Operation Breakthrough was
a joint governmentindustry
venture to encourage and improve
industrialization in housing
production. Funds were awarded
directly to industrial corporations
who, in turn, hired designers.
It allowed for the construction
of 26,000 units on 14 sites.

Type of housing:
Mainly multi-story modernist
high-rise buildings. The aim
was to attract investment capital
on the scale required to launch
a new high-technology industry.

Planning phase:
196974
Financing:
Department of Housing and
Urban Development (HUD)
Initiator:
George Romney, secretary
of HUD, 196973

Budget:
By the end of 1974, Operation
Breakthrough had cost the Federal
Government about US$72 million,
which is about 25% of the HUD
research and development budget
for fiscal years 197074.

Sources:
1. Roger Biles, A Mormon in
Babylon: George Romney as
Secretary of HUD, 19691973,
Michigan Historical Review, 2
(fall 2012): 6389.
2. Robert McCutcheon, Operation
Breakthrough, in: Andrew T.
Carswell (ed.), The Encyclopedia of
Housing, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage, 2012), 53739, online:
http://knowledge.sagepub.com/
view/housing2ed/n184.xml
(accessed 08/20/2015).
3. Report to the Congress by the
Comptroller General of the United
States: Operation Breakthrough:
Lessons Learned about Demonstrating New Technology (Washington,
DC: US Government Accountability
Office, 1976), 87 pages.
Source collection:
Susanne Schindler

70

1. Beginnings, 196881 FLEXIBILITY

Summit Plaza, Jersey City, New Jersey, USA

Aerial view of Summit Plaza, c.1974

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Summit Plaza in Jersey City,
c.4 miles east of Manhattan

Scale and impact:

480 apartments with public, commercial, and technical facilities,
including 367 parking spaces, a
school, and a central equipment
building for the energy system and
pneumatic trash collection system;
the last two features especially
contributed to the significance of
the project.

Type of housing:
Tiered buildings and towers,
ranging from four to 18 stories;
153 units in the 16-story CAMCI
System Tower; 192 units in the
18-story and eight-story buildings
which were realized with the
Shelley Systems. Of these, 26%
were family-size with three or
more bedrooms.

Cost of construction:
Lump sum for the construction
of the non-residential facilities in
1973: US$2,400,000

Rental system and user profile:

40% of the units had subsidized
rents, 60% were rented at market
rate. After completion in 1974,
demand was high, and almost
300 units were leased in the first
two months. Of these renters,
35% were elderly or retired, 20%
minorities, and 20% Manhattan
commuters.

Planning and construction phase:

196974; non-residential
facilities (commercial buildings
and a school) completed in 1975
Financing:
New Jersey Housing Finance
Agency (NJHFA), a quasi-public
state agency established by
statute in 1967
Prototype site developer:
Establishment of the non-profit
corporation Summit Apartments,
Inc. by the prototype site developer
Volt Information Sciences which
then qualified for loans from the
NJHFA.

Cost of construction for

the apartments:
US$17,200,000, a mortgage loan
over a period of 40 years from
NJHFA to Summit Apartments,
Inc. at 7% interest, the largest loan
the NJHFA had made to date.

Prototype site planner:

David A. Crane
Housing system producers:
CAMCI, Oescon, Shelley

71

Source:
Operation Breakthrough. Phase II,
Prototype Construction and Demon
stration, vol. 4 (Washington, DC:
US Office of Policy Development
and Research, Department of Housing and Urban Development,
c.1974), 194212.
Further reading:
Jersey City Gets a Break, The Jersey
Journal (December 16, 1969).
Source collection:
Susanne Schindler

1. Beginnings, 196881 FLEXIBILITY

Plan Construction and Ralisations Exprimentales, France

Linear growth versus organic growth: Conceptual drawings of the

Modular Housing System Mecanoo B," 1971

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
The majority of subsidized projects
are situated in the regions of
le-de-France, Nord-Pas-de Calais,
and Rhne-Alpes

Scale and impact:

The Plan Construction was a
comprehensive housing and construction subsidy program including architectural competitions
and research programs. REX was
a subsidy program financed by
the Plan Construction, which subsidized 418 projects defined as
experimental (197280).

Type of housing:
Tiered housing cluster typologies
in the early 1970s (colloquially
called prolifrants), complemented
by solar houses and postmodernist
housing typologies in the late
1970s.

Program duration:
1971to date; the Plan Construction (Plan Urbanisme Construction
Architecture (PUCA) since 1998,
still operative); 197280: ralisations
exprimentales (REX)
Financing:
Ministre du Transport et de
lquipement
Main actors:
Paul Delouvrier, President of the
Plan Construction and Elctricit
de France (EdF) in 1971; Robert
Lion, Director of Construction
within the Ministre de lquipe
ment and permanent chief secre
tary of the Plan Construction
(196974)

Budget:
Allotted budget for the Plan Construction as a whole in 1971 for
a period of five years: 360 million
FF (c.US$62,350,000 in 1990).
Average subsidy per project by
REX was in the range of around
500,000 FF until 1979, and dropped
to an average of 250,000 FF in
1980.

Ownership system:
Rental social housing and/or
accession sociale (social ownership), enhanced through sub
sidized mortgages.

72

Sources:
1. Marie-Anne Belin et al., REX
(ralisations exprimentales): 400
exprimentations dans lhabitat (Paris:
ditions du Moniteur, 1981).
2. Lancement du Plan-Construction, Le Moniteur (May 29, 1971),
2328.
3. Jean-Pierre Monnet, tat de la
construction, construction de ltat,
LArchitecture daujourdhui, 174
(JulyAugust 1974): 29.
Further reading:
1. Joseph Abram and Daniel Gross,
Bilan des ralisations exprimentales
en matire de technologie nouvelle.
Plan Construction 19711975 (Paris:
Impr. centrale commerciale, 1983).
2. Anne Kockelkorn, Wuchernde
Wohnarchitektur. Die franzsischen
Prolifrants der 1970er Jahre als
staatliches Experiment, ARCH+,
203 (2011): 3741.
3. Christian Moley, Linnovation
architecturale dans la production du
logement social (Paris: Ministre
de lenvironnement et du cadre de
vie, 1979).

1. Beginnings, 196881 FLEXIBILITY

Ensemble Danielle Casanova, Ivry-sur-Seine, France

Aerial view of the Danielle Casanova ensemble

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Avenue Danielle Casanova, Rue
du Dr. Esquirol, Ivry-sur-Seine,
c.2 km south of inner city Paris,
connected to the city via the metro
line 7

Scale and impact:

Construction of the new town
center of Ivry-sur-Seine comprises
c.37 acres and 1,300 dwellings,
of which Renaudie designed the
Jean Hachette new town center
(40 flats integrated with shopping
mall, the town hall of Ivry-surSeine, and a public library), and the
housing ensembles Jean-Baptiste
Clment and Danielle Casanova
(c.140 housing units). In particular,
the Jean Hachette ensemble earned
Jean Renaudies international
recognition.

Type of housing:
Different types of flats and maison
ettes based on a triangular geo
metry stacked one upon another to
form tiered star-shaped pyramids.

Planning and construction phase:

196388; planning and construction of Ivry new town center;
196979: Ensemble Danielle
Casanova
Financing and client:
Commune of Ivry, acting via its
Public Housing Society (OPHLM)
de la Ville dIvry-sur-Seine; loan
by ralisations experimentales allocated in 1979

Ownership system:
Rental social housing (Danielle
Casanova); other housing projects
of the Ivry new town center
development also contain privately
owned apartments.

Sources:
1. Franoise Moiroux, La rno
vation du centre dIvry-sur-Seine
(19631988), AMC, 154 (2005):
9298.
2. My terrace, in front of my house,
over yours: Jean Hachette Complex,
Jean Renaudie, in: Aurora Fernndez
Per et al., 10 Stories of Collective
Housing: Graphical Analysis of Inspiring
Masterpieces (Vitoria-Gasteiz: a+t
architecture publishers, 2013),
42279.
3. Irne Scalbert, Ivry-sur-Seine
town centre, AA files, 23 (London:
Architectural Association, 1992),
4448.
Further reading:
1. Bndicte Chaljub, Les uvres
des architectes Jean Renaudie et
Rene Gailhoustet, 19581998.
Thorie et pratique, unpublished
Diss. (Paris: Universit Paris 8,
Vincennes-Saint-Denis, 2007).
2. Irne Scalbert, A Right to Difference:
The Architecture of Jean Renaudie
(London: Architectural Association,
2004).

Architect:
Jean Renaudie in collaboration
with Rene Gailhoustet

73

1. Beginnings, 196881 ALTERNATIVES

Block 23, New Belgrade, Yugoslavia

Block 23, panoramic view from the north

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
New Belgrade, left bank of the
River Sava opposite the historic
city center

Scale and impact:

2,342 apartments with elementary
school, kindergarten, and recreation and community centers. The
design of the block and its faades
rate as examples of Yugoslavian
concrete baroque and are con
sidered to be of the highest design
quality and best spatial organiz
ation of New Belgrade.

Type of housing:
Four 20-story apartment highrises with vertical and horizontal
faade partitions, two longitudinal
ten-story condominiums (c.280
meters) and a meandering typology,
fragmented into horseshoe-shaped
segments. The towers were conceived with an open plan of approx.
60-m2 apartments with circular
communication around the basic
core (living and dining area),
adaptable to changing needs.

Planning and construction phase:

1968 (anonymous public com
petition) 1974 (completion);
privati zation in 1992
Financing:
Construction Department for
Housing of the Federal Secretariat
for National Defense Developer:
Institute for the Testing of
Materials (IMS)
Client:
State Secretariat for
Affairs of National Defense
(DSND), City Housing Company
of Belgrade

Ownership system:
Societal property provided by
the State Secretariat of National
Defense to army personnel, distributed and managed following
the modes of Yugoslavian selfmanagement; privatized in 1992.

Architect:
Boidar Jankovi, Branislav
Karadi, Aleksandar Stjepanovi
(OSNOVA) and IMS

Sources:
Block 23, in: Maroje Mrdulja
and Vladimir Kuli (eds), Unfinished
Modernisations: Between Utopia
and Pragmatism (Zagreb: Croatian
Architects Association, 2012),
30203.
Further reading:
1. Ivan Kucina and Milica Topalovi,
From Planned to Unplanned City:
New Belgrades Transformations,
in: M. Mrdulja and V. Kuli (eds),
Unfinished Modernisations (2012),
15673.
2. Brigitte Le Normand, The House
That Socialism Built: Reform, Consumption and Inequality in Postwar
Yugoslavia, in: Paulina Bren and
Mary Neuburger (eds), Communism
Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War
Eastern Europe (Oxford: Tavistock
Publications, 2012), 35173.
3. Dubravka Sekuli, Glotz Nicht so
Romantisch! On Extralegal Space in
Belgrade (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck
Academie and Early Works, 2012).
Source collection:
Dubravka Sekuli and
Banu iek Tl

Contractor:
GP Ratko Mitrovi, a societally
owned construction company

74

1. Beginnings, 196881 ALTERNATIVES

Boua Residents Association Housing, Porto, Portugal

lvaro Siza, Boua, Porto, aerial view of first phase, 1976

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Between Rua Boavista and Lapa
metro station (in operation since
2002), parish of Ceidofeita, c.2 km
north of the historic city center

Scale:
Forty dwellings completed in
1977; completion of 130 units
in 2006

Type of housing:
Maisonette housing in comb structure referring to the Portuguese
inner city ilha (island); maisonette
at ground-level 80 m2; upper
maisonette 74 m2

Planning and construction

phases:
197277; 200506
Financing and client:
Fundo de Fomenta da Habitao
(both construction phases);
the Servio de Apoio Ambulatrio
Local (Local Mobile Support
Service, or SAAL), financing
and mediation process 197476

Impact:
In terms of scale, morphological
unity, unit size, and modernist
iconography the project is one of
the grandest housing schemes
of the SAAL program in the 1970s.
Since completion of the second
phase in 200506, it functions
as a successful inner-city housing
development.

Major changes after renovation

in 200506:
Addition of car park with
128 spaces
Ownership system:
Rented social housing of the forty
units built in 1977; the 130 units
completed in 2006 were sold on
the open market.

Sources:
1. Joo Arriscado Nunes and Nuno
Serra, Decent Housing for the
People: Urban Movements and
Emancipation in Portugal, South
European Society and Politics, 9, 2
(2004): 4676.
2. Wilfried Wang, Boua Residents
Association Housing: Porto, Portugal,
197377, Architecture and Urbanism,
12, 123 (1980): 5764.
3. Wilfried Wang, Boua and Public
Housing at the Beginning of the
21st Century, in: Brigitte Fleck
et al., Boua Residents Association
Housing: Porto 197277, 200506
(Tbingen: Ernst Wasmuth Verlag,
2008), 6573.
Further reading:
1. Ensemble dhabitations SAAL,
Boua, Porto 197377, Architecture
dAujourdhui, 211 (October 1980):
4651.
2. Joo Dias, After Dictatorship.
As Operaes SAAL, documentary
movie (Portugal, 2007).

Architect:
lvaro Siza

75

1. Beginnings, 196881 DEVELOPMENTS

Previ, Lima, Peru

Overview of the completed project, 1976

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
8 km north of Lima city center
close to the Pan-American
Highway

Scale and impact:

467 Earthquake-resistant lowcost houses with community
facilities; the initial project aimed
at 1,500 units. A major reference
for site and service projects
worldwide.

Type of housing:
High-density, low-rise development with courtyard houses
for low-income families (2,800
5,800 PEH per month, approx.
US$65US$134 in 1970), which
is adaptable over time to accommodate the changing needs of
users. The built-up area ranges
from between 60 m2 and 120 m2.

Planning and construction phase:

196667: Submission and approval
of United Nations application;
1969: international competition;
197085: construction
Financing and client:
UN Development Program (tech
nical assistance and competition);
Banco de la Vivienda, owned by
the Peruvian Government
(construction and building site).
Architects:
Competition open to Peruvian
architects, 13 international teams
invited: Herbert Ohl, Atelier 5,
Kiyonori Kikutake, Fumihiko Maki,
Noriaki Kurokawa, and others.

Cost of construction:
c.78,000c.164,000 Sol (PEH)
(c.US$1,800c.US$3,800), 15
20% of which is used for land and
services

Ownership system:
Owner-occupied houses purchased
by families via low-interest loans
with repayment periods of up to
20 years, calculated at 2025% of
monthly income.
Mortgage credits:
Savings & Loans Associations
in Peru

76

Sources:
1. Fernando Garca-Huidobro et al.,
Time Builds! The Experimental Hous
ing Project (PREVI), Lima: genesis and
outcome (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili,
2008).
2. Previ/Lima: Low Cost Housing
Project, Architectural Design, 40
(April 1970), 187205.
3. Tomeu Ramis, What is Previ?,
Digital Architectural Papers, 9
(April 7, 2012), online: http://
www.architecturalpapers.ch/index.
php?ID=91 (accessed 07/22/15).
4. The UN Experimental Housing
Project, Lima, Peru (PREVI), online: http://www.grahamfoundation.
org/grantees/4838-the-unexperimental-housing-project-limaperu-previ (accessed 07/22/15).
Source collection:
Banu iek Tl

1. Beginnings, 196881 DEVELOPMENTS

Nova Ipanema, Barra da Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Beach view of Barra da Tijuca, c.1997

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Barra da Tijuca, c.22 km east of
Copacabana beach

Scale and impact:

First gated community in Barra
da Tijuca on a site of 160 km2
with luxurious collective facilities
(swimming pool, tennis court, etc.).
Pilot project for Rio de Janeiro
and other Brazilian cities.

Type of housing:
Eight 18-story tower blocks,
c.100 single-family houses

Planning and construction phase:

197074 (planning phase),
followed by approx. five years
of realization

Ownership system:
Private ownership of dwellings,
collective facilities included

Source:
Eckhart Ribbeck, Leben wie im
Club Mediterrane. Nova Ipanema
in Barra da Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro,
Brasilien, in: Tilman Harlander
et al. (eds), Soziale Mischung in der
Stadt: Case Studies Wohnungspolitik
in Europa Historische Analyse
(Stuttgart: Krmer, 2012), 13441.
Further reading:
1. Michael Janoschka and Alex
Borsdorf, Condominios fechados and
barrios privados: The rise of private
residential neighbourhoods in
Latin America, in: Georg Glasze
et al. (eds), Private Cities: Global
and Local Perspectives (London/New
York: Routledge, 2006), 92108.
2. Eckhart Ribbeck and Miki Tahara,
Vom Appartementhaus zum
Luxusghetto, Stadtbauwelt, 134
(1997): 138089.

Financing and client:

Private developer
Urban planning:
Lcio Costa

77

1. Beginnings, 196881 CRITIQUE

Counter-projects, Brussels, Belgium

Project for the reconstruction of the city center of Brussels by

Sfik Birkiye, Gilbert Busieau, Patrice Neirinck (Studio of M. Culot and
A. Jacqmain), 1978: view from the exit of Brussels central station

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Brussels city center

Scale and impact:

c.110 projects developed during
the first and second wave of
students (197175 and 197578),
disseminated through books,
magazines (AAM Bulletin), and
exhibitions (AA, London, 1976).

Type of housing:
Pre-modernist urban housing
typologies for lower middle-class
inhabitants

Main dates:
196579: Directorship of Robert
Delevoy at the cole Nationale
Suprieure dArchitecture et
des Arts Visuels de La Cambre;
196979 lectureship of Maurice
Culot at La Cambre
Cross-financing:
Ministry of National Education via
salaries and atelier infrastructure

Sources:
1. Robert-L. Delevoy et al.,
La Cambre, 19281978 (Bruxelles:
Editions des Archives dArchitec
ture Moderne, 1979).
2. Isabelle Doucet, Counter-projects
and the postmodern user, in: Kenny
Cupers (ed.), Use Matters: An Altern
ative History of Architecture (Abingdon,
Oxon/New York: Routledge, 2013),
23347.
3. Nan Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism
(New York, 1999/1996), 2934.
Further reading:
Andr Barey (ed.), Dclaration de
Bruxelles: propos sur la reconstruction
de la ville Europenne (Brussels:
ditions des AAM, 1980).

Project initiators:
Bateau dlie, a group of students
and teachers at La Cambre
around Maurice Culot; Atelier de
Recherche et dAction Urbaines
(ARAU), an urban activist group;
Archives dArchitecture Moderne
(AAM), a non-profit organization
co-founded by Maurice Culot
and Robert Delevoy.

78

2.
Postmodernist
Revisions
198189
In 1980, the Presence of the Past, the first Architecture
Biennale in Venice, marked the beginning of the short
decade of architectural post-modernity, which lasted
until the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was also the decade of
neoliberal reforms under Margaret Thatcher (197990),
Ronald Reagan (198189), and Helmut Kohl (198298),
who pressed ahead with the privatization of public enter
prises and assets and deregulation of the markets. As far
as housing was concerned, one of the fundamental global
principles of this decade was to mobilize the income and
savings of the middle class for a form of urban development that was increasingly based on the laws of the
private real estate market. But this took place in industrialized nations in completely different ways, both
economically and with regard to urban planning: while
Western Europe and the United States gradually rediscovered the inner city as a residential location for cosmo
politan elites, and Great Britain provided a model by
initiating the first big drive toward privatization of p
ublic
housing with the Right to Buy program, the E
astern
Bloc states continued to produce prefab housing for
state-owned rental accommodation to offset the still-
to-be remedied housing shortage of the postwar era. In
Singapore, in contrast, extremely dense public housing

79

a hybrid of state planning and private propertyevolved

into the unquestioned model for living and city planning in successfully expanding market economies.

it further apart from Berlin was the make-up of the

group commissioning the project and its openly stated
aim. While the IBA projects were contracted out after
calling for tenders from private and publicly owned
Kritische Rekonstruktion and New Urbanism
building developers, according to the principles of soft
Making inner-city living attractive for the middle classes
management, and were carried out under IBA requirewas one of the stated aims of the Internationale Bauaus ments governing social housing, Seaside, where buildstellung (International Architecture ExhibitionIBA) of
ing commenced in 1981, was a single investors experi197987, financed by the West Berlin Senate, which
ment. Its most important argument was the measur
commissioned some 12,000 new and renovated apart- ability of urban quality and its guaranteed producibility
ments with an investment value of 2.3 billion Deutsch- using a catalogue of urban forms. The architects, Andrs
marks.1 The guiding principle for the IBAs urban plan- Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, used urban codes
ning, Kritische Rekonstruktion (Critical Reconstruction), to establish the city ground plan, the orientation of
in combination with Behutsame Stadterneuerung (Gentle
streets and pedestrian paths, the size of front gardens
urban renewal), meant primarily the rehabilitation of
and the appearance of faades. Thus, the architects were
historical city patterns: that is, the urban corridor street
guaranteeing their clients both the socio-spatial quality
and perimeter block development. Small-scale develop- of a street space regulated in this way, as well as an
ment and the clear distinction between public, semi- assured appreciation in the value of the buildings that
public, and private spaces were considered the maxims
lined it.4
here, and the administration operated on the basis of
The comparison between IBA and Seaside illusthe existing smaller scale property and plot subdivision
trates the transformation of postmodern architectural
in order to put them into practiceunlike the urban re- esthetics in the Western industrial nations: born of a
newal of the 1960s and 1970s, which needed land re- leftist, alternative political motivation, they developed
allocation in order to implement large-scale planning.2 during the course of globalization in the 1980s to beNevertheless, the criticism inherent in the Kritische
come a set of formal rules; and, in the case of Seaside,
Rekonstruktion does not pertain to calling into question
into a manual for developers that made future real esthe status quo, but contents itself with the development
tate profits calculable using the arguments of environof existing urban forms and property relationships. mental psychology. [ p. 90]
Gentrification and displacement processes were supported rather than questioned by the up-valuation of
Socialist Postmodernism
properties and larger apartments for fewer residents. In the Eastern Bloc, and especially in the Soviet Union,
A clear example of this was Block 70 in Kreuzbergs
the term postmodernism has to be considered with cauLuisenstadt quarter, whose population shrank from
tion in regards to the mass housing production of the
1,894 to 995, altogether by 47 percent between 1975 and
1980s. Expressive ornamental and sculptural design
1989; however, in the same period, the proportion of
strategies were at that time limited to public buildings.
foreign residents sank by 88 percent and the number of And yet thirty years earlier, the residential high-rises of
businesses by 75 percent.3 [ p. 85]
the Stalinist period were already quite in line with the
A small-scale and small-grain city ground plan is
Western formalist exuberance of the 1980s. An outstandalso one of the main fundamental principles of New
ing example is the thirty-two-story Kotelnicheskaya
Urbanism in the USA. Seaside, a development from the
Embankment Building completed in 1952 and destined
early 1980s originally containing 300 houses with shops
for the elites, which combined luxurious facilities with
and restaurants, is one of its best-known pioneer pro- neo-Roman arches and neo-Gothic finishes.
jects, not least because it featured as the location for the
If in the 1980s, industrial mass-housing projects
movie The Truman Show of 1998. In principle, Seaside
were still carried out on the basis of just a few protowas also about taking up pre-modern urban structures
types, this was mainly the result of necessity: even
and appearances once more, although with a different
though more apartments per person were being built in
urban typology than that of the European city. What set
the Eastern Bloc than in the West around 1983 (seven

80

apartments per thousand in the COMECON countries

compared to five in Western Europe), the shortage there
was bigger as well, as the acute lack of housing of the
postwar era had never really been remedied.5 In combination with the persistent after-effects of the oil crisis
in the Eastern Bloc, this led to a rethinking on the part
of the state, i.e. to similar processes of shifting costs to
the end-consumer as in Western countries, if under
completely different conditions. Here, it was more a
matter of introducing financial instruments such as
cost-compliant rents and loans in the first place:6 up to
the collapse of communism, the majority of housing in
Eastern Bloc states was either state-owned public housing stock or publicly owned co-operatives,7 and their
residents spent merely between two to five percent of
their average income on rent.8
However, concerning the esthetics of industrialized
mass housing production, the 1980s are the period of the
greatest formal variety, as the third generation of proto
types launched in the middle of the decade allowed for
greater adaptability to existing contexts and new archi
tectural elements such as juts and recesses or arched
windows in the building facades,9 even if variation of
forms and production processes represented a higher
risk regarding costs and organization.10 Yet many of
these new features are not really new; even if orthodox
churches and mosaic motifs on gable facadessuch as
in the Aksai-Zhetysu Microdistrict in the former Kazakh
Soviet Socialist Republicseem a rather striking peculi
arity at first sight, impressive and inventive contextual
adaptations of Soviet modernity had taken place in the
USSR since the 1950s. [ pp. 86, 87]
East Asia Public Housing
The clearest antithesis to the neoliberal tenet, according
to which state interventions into housing production are
incompatible with a free market, was represented by the
housing policies of the city-states of Singapore and Hong
Kong. A 1988 study led by Manuel Castells put forward
the theory that the market economies of Hong Kong and
Singapore were able to expand as rapidly as they did, not
despite, but because of, their high share of public housing:11 in Hong Kong in 1986, this share was around 45
percent, and in Singapore in 1990, around 87 percent.12
In both countries, high-rise apartment blocks in densely
settled housing estates are the most widely accepted
form of housing. Particularly Singapore broke with

Western models of public housing. On the one hand, the

basic modernist urban principles of high-density settlements surrounded by a freely flowing green environment
were not called into question; on the other hand, the economic model used here was state-subsidized condominiums for nuclear families within a completely regulated
market. This holistic societal model was implemented by
the state-run construction authority HDB, which, then as
now, functioned as a bank and housing enterprise in one,
automatically deducting the housing loan installments
from employees salaries and feeding them into the public
coffers. However, the statistics, which show the proportion of the population living in HDB-administered apartments growing from 67 to 87 percent in the 1980s,13
should be viewed with reservation. The right to public
housing in Singapore only applies to registered citizens;
foreign workers, who made up around a third of the popu
lation in the 2000s, are not included in official statistics.
Public housing here is an instrument with which the
state shapes society, i.e. a city of property-owners made
up of nuclear families living in 6080-m2 (646861 sq-ft)
high-rise apartments, but which does not provide any
universal constitutional right to housing. [ pp. 88, 89]
The sharp contrasts between the housing projects
of the 1980s from Germany, the USA, Singapore, and the
Soviet Union presented here, shift the focus of the familiar
narrative of postmodernity: away from the quest for a
valid assessment of esthetic form toward a concentration
on the increasing decoupling of esthetics, forms of urban
planning, and territorial position. This decoupling makes
it increasingly necessary to assess a residential area
simultaneously in relation to the environment and the
time: that is, in relation to the geographical position, the
value of property, and a specific historical configuration
resulting from a national housing policythree factors,
of which at least the last two can change very quickly.
Anne Kockelkorn

81

Wolfgang Nagel, Preface, in: Internationale Bauausstellung (ed.),

1987: Projektbersicht, 3rd edition (Berlin: Senatsverwaltung fr
Bau- und Wohnungswesen; STERN, Gesellschaft der behutsamen
Stadterneuerung mbH, 1991), 3, statistics on the units, 40001.
2
Gnter Schlusche, Die Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin. Eine
Bilanz (Berlin: Technische Universitt Berlin, Arbeitshefte des
Instituts fr Stadt- und Regionalplanung, 1997), 9697.
3
Internationale Bauausstellung (ed.), Projektbersicht. Berlin 1987,
27879.
4
William Lennertz, Town Making Fundamentals, in: Andrs
Duany and Elizabet Plater-Zyberck (eds), Towns and Town-Making
Principles (New York: Rizzoli, 2006), 2124; Laurie Volk and
Todd Zimmerman, Seasides Influence on New Housing, in:
Andrs Duany, Views of Seaside: Commentaries and Observations
on a City of Ideas (New York: Rizzoli, 2008), 15760.
5
On the EastWest comparison, see John A. A. Sillince (ed.), Housing
Policy in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in: Housing Policies
in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge,
1990), on the estimation of housing shortage, 17.
6 Ibid., 479.
7
If one adds up all state-owned housing stock as well as collectively
owned housing by companies or trade unions in 1990, the GDR
had 59 percent of publicly owned housing, the Russian Federation
71 percent, Poland 55 percent, and the Czech Republic 56 percent.
For the GDR, see: Die Wohnungspolitik der DDR und in den neuen
Bundeslndern, in: Uwe Andersen and Wichard Woyke (eds),
Handwrterbuch des politischen Systems der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
(Heidelberg: Springer VS, 2013), online: http://www.bpb.de/nachschlagen/lexika/handwoerterbuch-politisches-system/202215/
wohnungspolitik (accessed 08/22/2015). For the other Eastern
Bloc countries, see: Christine Whitehead and Kathleen Scanlon
(eds), Social Housing in Europe (London: LSE, 2007), 16768, online:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/geographyAndEnvironment/research/
london/pdf/SocialHousingInEurope.pdf (accessed 08/24/2015).
In the urban Soviet Union, state-owned housing increased to
79 percent, and if one includes co-ops and other public institutions
like trade unions, it reached 85 percent. See Raymond J. Struyk
(ed.), Economic Restructuring of the Former Soviet Bloc (Washington,
DC: Urban Institute Press, 1996), 264.
8
According to Peter Malpass, Privatisation of Housing: Implications
for Well-Being, in: Susan J. Smith (ed.), International Encyclopedia
of Housing and Home (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2012), 430, housing
rents in the Eastern Bloc were about 2 percent of average income;
according to Sillince (ed.), Housing Policies in Eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union, 43, rents were in the range of between 2 and
5 percent of the average family income. In urban China, rents in
publicly owned housing were less than 1 percent of the average
family income. See: L Junhua et al. (eds), Modern Urban Housing in
China: 18402000 (Munich: Prestel, 2001), 258.
9
See Philipp Meuser, Ten Parameters for a Typology of Mass
Housing, in: Philipp Meuser and Dimitrij Zadorin, Towards a Typology
of Soviet Mass Housing: Prefabrication in the USSR (Berlin: DOM
publishers, 2015), 10162, here 14143.
10 See Yuri Grigoriev (Chief Architect of Minsk, 197486):
Struggling for a flexible typology (Interview by Bart Goldhoorn)
Project Russia, 25 (2002): 2024.
11 Manuel Castells et al., Economic Development and Housing Policy
in the Asian Pacific Rim: A Comparative Study of Hong Kong, Singapore,
and Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (Berkeley: UC Berkeley,
Institute of Urban and Regional Development, 1988), online:
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/1fh7t14f (accessed 08/21/2015).
12 Statistics relating to public housing in Hong Kong: ibid., 9. For
statistics relating to Singapore, see Zhu Xiao Di et al., Three
Models of Public Housing in the 20th Century: Cases in the U.S.,
China and Singapore, in: Edward P. Hammond and Alex D. Noyes,
Housing: Socioeconomic, Availability, and Development Issues
(New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2009) 144, 26.
13 Ibid.

82

2. Postmodernist Revisions, 198189 CRITICAL RECONSTRUCTION

Antigone, Montpellier, France

Antigone, view of the central axis from the place du Nombre dor
eastwards towards the River Lez, 2008

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
The project is adjacent to the historic city center of Montpellier;
articulated by the shopping mall
called Polygone, it extends for
1 km eastwards to the banks of
the River Lez.

Scale and impact:

The place du Nombre dor, completed
in 1985, comprises 288 units.
The whole Antigone development
includes c.4,000 dwelling units,
20,000 m2 of commercial space,
office space, the LanguedocRoussillon regional government
headquarters, various city and
other government offices, res
taurants and cafes, housing for
students and artists, schools,
sports facilities, and underground
parking.

Type of housing:
The urban project consists of the
1 km-long axis with a sequence
of public squares of different size
and shape; the axis and the blocks
adjacent to it are lined by fouror seven-story perimeter block
buildings which constitute either
secondary squares or courtyards.

Planning and
construction phases:
Planning 197981,
construction 19822000
Commissioner:
Town council of Montpellier
presided over by socialist Mayor
Georges Frches (19792004)
Architect:
Ricardo BofillTaller de Arquitectura for the site master
planthe place du Nombre dor,
the Echelles de la Ville building,
and renovation of the banks
of the River Lez

Construction system:
Bton architectonique, that
is, the further development of
prefabricated concrete panels to
compose neoclassical building
faades; in the case of Antigone,
the architects combined factory
prefabrication and panels
shuttered on site.
Ownership system:
Subsidized and non-subsidized
housing

83

Sources:
1. Antigone by Ricardo Bofill
Taller de Arquitectura, online:
http://www.ricardobofill.com/
EN/672/PROJECTS/La-PlaceDu-Nombre-Dor-html
(accessed 08/26/2015).
2. Bartomeu Cruells, Ricardo Bofill:
Works and Projects (Barcelona:
Gilli, 1992), 3643, 23437.
3. Project summary on Housing
Prototypes.Org, online: http://
www.housingprototypes.org/project?
File_No=FRA010 (accessed
08/26/2015).
4. Yukio Futagawa (ed.), Ricardo
Bofill. Taller de Arquitectura
(New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 15767.

2. Postmodernist Revisions, 198189 CRITICAL RECONSTRUCTION

IBA Innenstadt als Wohnort

(Inner-city as a place for living), Berlin, Germany

Official site plan of IBA constructions, 1987

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Tegel, southern Tiergartenviertel,
southern Friedrichstadt,
Luisenstadt, Kreuzberg SO 36

Type of housing:
Reinvention or reconstruction
of perimeter block housing
typologies

Planning and construction phase:

197988, the official end of the
IBA; but many projects were only
completed in the 1990s.

Scale and impact:

c.7,700 renovated apartments
(urban renewal), c.5,000 newly
constructed apartments (Stand:
1990); role model for future
IBAs in Germany (IBA Emscher
Park (198999), IBA HamburgWilhelmsburg (200613), and
other German IBAs.

Financing:
Berlin Senate via the
Bauausstellung Berlin mbH
Clients: Bauausstellung Berlin
mbH, public and private
housing companies

Budget:
Public budget allocated from
the Berlin Senate to the IBA:
85 million DM; total sum
invested in construction work:
approx. 3.4 billion DM

Source:
Wolfgang Nagel, Preface, in:
Internationale Bauausstellung (ed.),
1987: Projektbersicht, 3rd edition
(Berlin: Senatsverwaltung fr
Bau- und Wohnungswesen; STERN,
Gesellschaft der behutsamen
Stadterneuerung mbH, 1991), 3;
statistics on units, ibid., 40001.
Further reading:
1. Harald Bodenschatz and Cordelia
Polinna, Learning from IBA Die IBA
1987 in Berlin (Berlin: Senatsverwaltung fur Stadtentwicklung,
2010), online: http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/staedtebau/
baukultur/iba/download/Learning
_from_IBA.pdf (accessed 07/15/
2015).
2. Lore Ditzenet et al. (eds.), Inter
national Building Exhibition Berlin
1987 (Tokyo: A+U Publishing Co,
1987).
3. Gnter Schlusche, Die Internation
ale Bauausstellung Berlin. Eine Bilanz
(Berlin: TU, University Bibliothek,
1997).

Urban planner and coordinator:

Hardt-Waltherr Hmer
(Behutsame Stadterneuerung),
Josef Paul Kleihues (Kritische
Rekonstruktion)

84

2. Postmodernist Revisions, 198189 CRITICAL RECONSTRUCTION

IBA Luisenstadt Block 70, Berlin, Germany

Torhaus by Hinrich and Inken Baller on Fraenkelufer with

renovated building faades on right and left, c.1987

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Kohlfurter Strae, Admiralstrae,
Fraenkelufer, Erkelenzdamm in
Kreuzberg

Scale and impact:

New construction of two Tor
huser, a corner building and a
firewall construction (total 87
apartments); renovation of approx.
200 apartments, 30 apartments
realized as a self-help project;
Berlin tourist attraction in the
1980s and 1990s.

Type of housing:
Perimeter block collective
housing with maisonettes in
the new constructions

Planning and construction phase:

197985
Financing:
New constructions: backed up by
the Berlin municipality, to cover
the gap between the cost rent and
subsized rents; urban renewal of
old buildings: Berlin Senate
Client:
Gemeinntzige Siedlungs- und
Wohnungsbaugesellschaft Berlin
(GSW), community housing,
owned by Land Berlin 19242004
(today GSW Immobilien AG)
owned 15 lots; Land Berlin: four
lots; private investors: seven lots.

Cost of constuction:
For new constructions by Hinrich
and Inken Baller: 30.1 million DM

Ownership system:
According to the 1. Frderungs
weg of Land Berlin, subsidized
Sozialmiete (housing rent) was
guaranteed for 15 years, followed
by further supplementary funding
after that deadline. GSW still
owns the new constructions by
Hinrich and Inken Baller; other
urban renewal buildings in
Block 70, initially owned by the
housing association, were sold on
the open market in the 2000s.

Architect:
Baller/Baller, Pasch, GKK, Archi
tektengruppe Wassertorplatz,
client representatives

85

Source:
Internationale Bauausstellung (ed.),
1987: Projektbersicht, 3rd edition
(Berlin: Senatsverwaltung fr Bauund Wohnungswesen; STERN,
Gesellschaft der behutsamen Stadt
erneuerung mbH, 1991), 27879.
Further reading:
Simone Bogner, Block 70: Eckhaus,
Torhuser, Brandwandbebauung,
in: Institut fr Stadt und Regional
planung der Technischen Universitt
Berlin (ed.), Forschungsinitiative IBA
87, online: http://f-iba.de/block70-eckhaus-torhaeuser-brandwandbebauung (accessed 07/15/2015).

2. Postmodernist Revisions, 198189 SOCIALIST POSTMODERNISM

Severomurinsky Housing Complex, Leningrad, Soviet Union

Street view of the Severomurinsky Building, c.2010

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Prosveshcheniya Avenue 87,
c.18 km northeast of Leningrad
city center

Scale and impact:

If in the 1980s, industrial masshousing projects were still carried
out on the basis of just a few
prototypes, this was mainly the
result of necessity: even though
more apartments per person were
being built in the Eastern Bloc
than in the West around 1983
(seven apartments per thousand
in the COMECON countries
compared to five in Western
Europe), the shortage there was
bigger as well, as the acute lack
of housing of the postwar era
had never really been remedied.

Type of housing and

construction type:
High-rise housing with a doublestory basement for collective
and commercial facilities which
stretches out for almost 350 meters
along a busy transport axis. Brick
constructions such as this one
were quite common; they followed
the plastic expressivity of the
early 1970s and allowed for contextual adaptation, in this case,
the adaption of the faade and
ground plan protect against noise
from the street.

Planning and construction phase:

198283
Financing:
Public
Architect:
V.N. Sokolov

86

Source:
Citywalls, a collectively con
stituted website dedicated to the
architecture of St. Petersburg
online: http://www.citywalls.ru/
house15165.html (accessed
08/26/2015).
Further reading:
1. John A. A. Sillince (ed.), Housing
Policies in Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union (Abingdon, Oxon:
Routledge, 1990).
2. Raymond J. Struyk (ed.), Economic
Restructuring of the Former Soviet Bloc
(Washington, DC: Urban Institute
Press, 1996).

2. Postmodernist Revisions, 198189 SOCIALIST POSTMODERNISM

Microrayon Aksai-Zhetysu, Alma-Ata, Kazakh SSR

Gable faades of Aksai-Zhetysu Microdistrict, Almaty

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
pr. Abaja, ul. Ulugbeka

Impact:
The third generation of prototypes (see Meuser 2015) launched
in the middle of the decade allowed for greater adaptability to
existing contexts and new architectural elements such as juts and
recesses or arched windows in
the building facades. Yet many of
these new features are not really
new; impressive and inventive
contextual adaptations of Soviet
modernity had taken place in the
USSR since the 1950s.

Type of housing and

construction type:
Nine-story residential buildings
with historic mosaic motives on
gable faades

Planning and construction phase:

From 1980 onwards
Financing:
Public

87

Source:
Philipp Meuser, Ten Parameters
for a Typology of Mass Housing,
in: Philipp Meuser and Dimitrij
Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Soviet
Mass Housing: Prefabrication in
the USSR 19551991 (Berlin:
DOM publishers, 2015), 10162.
Further reading:
1. Richard Anderson, Russia: Modern
Architectures in History (London: Re
aktion Books, 2015, forthcoming).
2. Philipp Meuser, Die sthetik der
Platte. Wohnungsbau in der Sowjetunion zwischen Stalin und Glasnost
(Berlin: DOM publishers, 2015).
3. Architekturzentrum Wien Az W
(ed.), Soviet Modernism 19551991:
Unknown History (Zurich: Park
Books, 2012).

2. Postmodernist Revisions, 198189 EAST ASIA PUBLIC HOUSING

Siu Hong Court, Hong Kong

Siu Hong Court 2: Siu Hong Court garden landscape design

with pond, 2009

Unit plans for marketing purposes by the Hong Kong housing

authority (HDB), 2015, here: Siu Ping House, Block N

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
2-22 Siu Hong Road, Tuen Mun
district, about 32 km west of
Kowloon Peninsula, located next
to two hospitals and the Hong
Kong MTR Light Rail terminus
Completion Date: First phase:
1982; second phase 1985

Scale and impact:

20 residential buildings and 4,676
housing units; the largest Home
Ownership Scheme (HOS) estate
in Hong Kong in the 1980s.
Awarded the Silver Medal by the
Hong Kong Institute of Architects
in 1985.

Type of housing:
High-rise housing for middle-class
families with 4362 m per unit

Financing and client:

Hong Kong Housing Committee
Architect: Allan McDonald

Ownership system:
The HOS of the Hong Kong Housing Committee, introduced in
1976, aimed to gain space for tenants on the housing waiting list.
Citizens below a certain income
ceiling are able to purchase the
properties at lower than market
price. An instant success, the
HOS attained 10% of the total
public housing sector in Hong
Kong until 1986. Yet the majority
of the 2.4 million people covered
by the Housing and Development
Board (HDB)-supply still lived
in rented apartments (total population: 5.4 million in 1986).

Sources:
1. Manuel Castells et al., Economic
Development and Housing Policy in
the Asian Pacific Rim: A Comparative
Study of Hong Kong, Singapore,
And Shenzhen Special Economic Zone
(Berkeley, CA: Institute of Urban
and Regional Development, University of California, 1988), 10, online:
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/
1fh7t14f (accessed 07/24/2015).
2. Hong Kong Housing Authority
official website, online: https://
www.housingauthority.gov.hk/
en/public-housing/index.html
(accessed 7/27/2015).
3. Midland Realty, online: http://
proptx.midland.com.hk/cs/detail_
layer.jsp?cs=y&stockId=NT169512
(accessed 07/16/2015).
4. Siu Hong Court, Wikipedia,
online: https://zh.wikipedia.org/
wiki/ (accessed 07/27/2015).
Source collection:
Yan Liang

88

2. Postmodernist Revisions, 198189 EAST ASIA PUBLIC HOUSING

Block 207, Bukit Batok New Town, Singapore

Faade detail of Block 207, 2015

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Block 207, Bukit Batok Street 21,
Bukit Batok New Town, c.16 km
west of downtown Singapore
or 45 mins by public transport

Scale and impact:

Bukit Batok New Towns approx.
32,000 housing units cover an
area of 291 hectares; block 297
comprises a total of 120 units

Type of housing:
High-rise housing of 72 threeroom apartments (73 m2) and
48 four-room apartments (104 m2)

Planning and construction phase:

Construction of Bukit Batok
New Town began in the early
1980s; estimated completion
date of the block is 1983

Ownership system:
Individually owned flats with
99-year leases, according to the
regular HDB tenure contract.

Financing, client, architect

and contractor:
Housing and Development
Board (HDB) of Singapore

Source:
This data was collected in the
context of the research project
Cultures of Climatisation in South
east Asia, in: Sascha Roesler (ed.),
Natural Ventilation, Revisited.
Pioneering a New Climatisation Culture
(Singapore: ETH-Future Cities
Laboratory, September 2015).
Further reading:
1. Official homepage of the HDB,
online: http://www.hdb.gov.sg
(accessed 08/15/2015).
2. Online forum for the sale of
HDB flats, online: www.h88.com.sg
(accessed 08/15/2015).
3. Private online archive of HDB
flat typologies, online: http://www.
teoalida.com (accessed 08/15/2015).
4. Aline K. Wong and Stephen H. K.
Yeh (eds), Housing a Nation: 25 Years
of Public Housing in Singapore (Singapore: Maruzen Asia for the Housing
& Development Board, 1985).
Source collection:
Ani Vihervaara

89

2. Postmodernist Revisions, 198189 NEW URBANISM

Seaside, Florida, USA

Aerial view of Seaside in 1994

Aerial close-up of Seaside, n.d.

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Seaside, Florida, USA

Scale and impact:

88-acre community (324,000 m),
consisting of 300 homes, 12 restaurants, and 41 shops. A prototype
for traditional neighborhood
planning, serving as a role model
for other New Urbanism develop
ments, in particular HOPE VI.
Seaside featured as the location
for the movie The Truman Show
(Peter Weir, USA, 1998).

Type of housing:
Fine-grained mix of housing
types labeled as traditional
neighborhood planning

Planning and construction phase:

1981 (beginning of construction)
mid-1990s (completion of downtown Seaside)
Financing and client:
Robert S. Davis. Seaside was built
with a debt-free financial structure
Architects:
Andrs Duany and Elizabeth
Plater-Zyberk (Duany PlaterZyberk & Company DPZ)

Ownership system:
Private

Real estate value:

Property values increased tenfold at Seaside between 1981
and 1991 (properties sold for
c.US$15,000 in 1981) and today
cost c.US$1 million.

Sources:
1. Andrs Duany and Elizabeth
Plater-Zyberk, The town of Seaside, The Princeton Journal, Thematic
Studies in Architecture, Landscape,
2 (1985): 4450.
2. William Lennertz, Town Making
Fundamentals, in: Andrs Duany
and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberck (eds),
Towns and Town-Making Principles
(New York: Rizzoli, 2006), 2124.
3. Jennifer Parker, Seaside, about
the community and the building of
the Seaside Research Portal, online:
https://seaside.library.nd.edu/essays/
the-community-and-building-theportal (accessed 07/22/2015).
4. Laurie Volk and Todd Zimmerman,
Seasides Influence on New Housing, in: Andrs Duany et al., Views
of Seaside: Commentaries and Observations on a City of Ideas (New York:
Rizzoli, 2008) 15760.
Further reading:
Stphane Degoutin, Prisonniers
volontaires du rve amricain (Paris:
ditions de la Villette, 2006).

90

3.
New States
and Networks
19892004
The collapse of the Eastern Bloc from 1989 caused
massive political upheavals that concretely led to huge
migrant movements after the dissolution of the Soviet
Union from 1991,1 and indirectly resulted in the Yugoslav
Wars. New state structures arose not just in Eastern
Europe and Asia; the way existing governments saw
themselves changed in the West, too. In Great Britain
and the United States, leftist parties that consolidated
the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s gave the deregulated
financial market precedence over industrial production.
In all post-communist countries and in China, the privat
ization of existing public housing was a major step
towards stabilizing new systems of government, a kind
of shock absorber that conveyed economic and political
security in uncertain times.2 In the other BRICS nations
Brazil, India, and South Africatoo, private ownership
prevailed as the dominant housing model, and at the
start of the 2000s, France, Hong Kong, Singapore, and
Japan followed the example of the United States by
trading both office buildings and housing on the stock
market through real estate investment trusts.
These processes made the status of housing as a
product the global norm, and thus produced new conventions with regard to the question of how housing

91

was provided and consumed. Contrary to the postulate

that private ownership raises the general level of prosperity in a society and improves the social mix, however,
the people who profited the most from the deregulated
real estate market were those with the most money and
privileges. The increasingly visible polarization of prosperity in the urban environment changed the character
of social conflicts: class conflicts became urban conflicts.
This change dates back to the beginning of the 1980s,
just like the affirmation of a market-based distribution
of housing in the industrialized countries of the West,
but it becomes topical both in the global media and
urban policies from the beginning of the 1990s onwards.
One example for this change is the mediatic attention of
the riots in Vaulx-en-Vlin in France in 1990 and in Los
Angeles in 1992.3
Privatization
Privatization, the formation of new economic elites and
the resulting urban transformations in South Africa,
Russia, and China during the course of the 1990s had
one thing in common: the fundamental structures of
existing patterns of segregationdividing white from
black, party elites from normal citizens, urban residents
from rural populationswere retained; but rather than
political categories, it was now economic differences
that created the lines of division in these societies and
which inscribed themselves on the territory more visibly
and more clearly than before. The extreme example of
this was in South Africa: where the gated community
became widely accepted as the way to live for the uppermiddle class, and where the principles of separation
extended to the world of shopping and work as well.4 In
Russia, the gated community appears as a residential
model for new oligarchies from the mid-1990s, above all
in and around Moscow.5 Here, the Monolith Residence
that lies about 50 km (31 miles) west of the capitaland
which on the one hand exemplifies the new standard of
the elites, their desire to live among their own kind; and
on the other, the ambition of their architect, Mikhail
Belov, to serially produce the perfect copy of the Renaissance villais the exception. [ pp. 98, 99]
The counter-example to this model of urban isolation was the mass-residential estate Brilliant City on the
Suzhou River in Shanghai. Its thirty-six high-rise towers
and some 20,000 apartments for the upper-middle class
illustrated that mass living in an open-park landscape

could function as a luxury model for urban elites that

fulfilled all the requirements of comfort, central location,
and investment opportunity. After the gradual establish
ment of a private real estate market in China in the
course of the 1990s, the project was completed between
1999 and 2004. Within this time frame, the national
mortgage sector increased almost tenfold from 1.7 to 11.3
percent of GDP, whereas the average real estate index of
Shanghai tripled between 2001 and 2005.6 [ p. 96]
Centralized States
The modernist concept of living in high-rises in the green
city centertogether with the narrative of progress that
is associated with itwas not limited to China: the new
town Ekbatan in Tehran is another case where modernist residential estates, i.e. dense living in multi-story
buildings, surrounded by green space and ready-made
infrastructure, function as a location for the middle class.
However, contrary to the private residential compounds in Shanghai, Ekbatan is a publicly accessible
area; furthermore, it is an urban planning model from
the 1970s that is replicated and taken up for further construction in the 1990s. Ekbatan was co-planned and
constructed by European and United States engineers
and companies in the 1970s at which time it was the
largest housing project in Asia. After nationalization in
1979, the building management organization that had
been running the complex during the IranIraq war
changed its status in 1992 and started to act as a developer and real estate agency. This change in status and
the continuation of a modernist urban model exemplifies
the actions taken by centralized states to both initiate
and regulate a real estate sector via state-owned subsidi
aries that function like private developers within a regulated framework. The combination of urban planning,
market economy, and economic regulation bore similarities to the Singaporean state-run construction authority
HDB-model, where the introduction of a regulated sector
of the real estate market, in tandem with a high-density
model of high-rise housing, was both a means to trigger
sustainable economic growth as well as providing the
life choices of a social model. [ pp. 100, 101]

New Urbanism 2.0

Housing as a system expresses social and power relation
ships, but the differences in the examples already cited

92

serve to illustrate that these naturalized relationships

are not natural. This becomes ever clearer when confronted with the subsidized urban and societal model of
the United States home ownership and revitalization
program: Homeownership Opportunities for People
Everywhereor HOPE VIfollowed the rules of New
Urbanism and Oscar Newmans defensible space theory,
that is, a combination of home ownership and traditional
neighborhood patterns.7 HOPE VI was the United States
largest public housing initiative between 1993 and 2010;
the government assigned a total budget of US$6.7 billion
for 262 revitalization grants and issued 287 grants for
the demolition of 57,000 severely distressed public
housing units. While HOPE VI receives a mostly positive
evaluation in general project reviews, individual case
studies present a different picture: for example, James
Hanlons investigation of Park DuValle in Louisville
shows that in this case much less private co-financing
was involved than generally assumed. The geographer
concludes that the previous modernist housing project
was not only replaced by a different form of urban design,
but also by a different resident structure: i.e., by a wellsituated middle classfinanced to the tune of twothirds by the public purse.8 [ pp. 102, 103]

for the least-loved populations on this planet; their presence constituted a risk to the national security of industrial nations and their entry into these countries had to
be prevented at any cost.10 The new political dimension
to this extra-national governance necessitated new forms
of esthetic representation, of which the paper-tube constructions for a refugee camp in Rwanda by Shigeru Ban
architects, later the winner of the Pritzker Prize, is an
example. The intelligent design of the shelter helped
remedy an acute humanitarian emergency; however,
it also legitimated the UNHCRs methods of targeted
cultural and public relations work. It illustrated how
housing, particularly at the critical point of statelessness, remains integrated in a globalized network of
territorial and power relationships. [ p. 95]
Anne Kockelkorn

Emergency Housing
The power relationships of the housing system extend
beyond sociocultural norms and economic processes;
their direct impacts on the basic biological functions of
the human body are nowhere more obvious than in the
case of the refugee shelter. The global upheavals and
violent conflicts of the 1990s have conferred greater
political importance to this section of the housing system,
which has grown in parallel with the scope of NGOs
and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR). By the end of the decade, 22.23 million people
were considered as being of concern to the UNHCR as
refugees, asylum seekers, or returnees to their original
place of residence. In this decade, the globalized refugee
policy underwent a decisive change; moving away from
offering asylum abroad, they now moved toward providing humanitarian engagement in the countries of
origin.9 While the UNHCR explained in 2000 how and
why local on-site administration had gained greater
importance, a decade later, urban researchers including
Eyal Weizman and Michael Agier described this new
humanitarianism as an impersonal form of management

93

10

According to the UNHCR, nine million people found themselves

on the move after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, see UNHCR,
The State of the Worlds Refugees 2000: Fifty Years of Humanitarian
Action (Geneva: UNHCR, January 1, 2000), 9, online:
http://www.unhcr.org/3ebf9bb87.html (accessed 08/01/2015).
For a concise and short introduction about privatization processes,
see Peter Malpass, Privatisation of Housing: Implications for
Well-Being, in Susan J. Smith (ed.), International Encyclopedia
of Housing and Home (Amsterdam: Elsevier 2012), 42732.
On privatization in the Eastern bloc, see Raymond J. Struyk (ed.),
Economic Restructuring of the Former Soviet Bloc (Washington, DC:
Urban Institute Press, 1996), 2032. Most of the countries
in transition sold 7595 percent of their public-housing stock
to sitting tenants, see Christine Whitehead and Kathleen Scanlon
(eds), Social Housing in Europe (London: LSE, 2007), 166.
See Jacques Donzelot, La nouvelle question urbaine, Esprit,
11 (November 1999): 87114. The same author took up the core
argumentation of the essay just cited after the urban riots in
France in November 2005: see Jacques Donzelot, Quand la ville
se dfait. Quelle politique face la crise des banlieues? (Paris: Seuil, 2006).
David Harvey, Uneven Geographical Developments, in: Harvey,
A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), 87119; on South Africa 116. Relating to his argument
on the impact of neoliberal policies on South Africa, Harvey cites
Patrick Bond, Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in
South Africa (London: Pluto Press, 2000).
Sebastian Lentz, More gates, less community? Guarded housing
in Russia, in: Georg Glasze et al. (eds), Private Cities: Global and
Local Perspectives (London, New York: Routledge, 2006), 20621.
The introduction of a real estate market in China dates back to
1984, but the most important changes in the legal system took
place after 1992. For a general introduction to high-rise urbanization in Shanghai, see Florian Urban, High-Rise Shanghai, in:
Urban, Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing (Abingdon,
Oxon/New York: Routledge, 2012) 14568; on the growth of
the mortgage market, see: Yongheng Deng and Peng Fei, Mortgage
Market, Character and Trends: China, in: Susan J. Smith (ed.),
International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home (Amsterdam: Elsevier,
2012), 42233; on the development of the real estate market in
Shanghai, see: Fulong Wu, Housing and the State in China, in:
Smith (ed.), ibid., 32329.
See Oscar Newman, Creating Defensible Space (Washington: US
Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Policy
Development and Research, 1996), online: http://www.huduser.org/
publications/pdf/def.pdf (accessed 07/29/2015). For the concept
of New Urbanism, see p. 82.
In Park DuValle, the leverage ratio for every HOPE VI dollar in
other public and private funds is $10.87; yet, the total leverage
ratio for every dollar in public funds towards private investment
is not higher than $0.58 if one takes into account also the ulti
mate cost of the Low Income Housing Tax Credits equity by the
US treasury. See James Hanlon, Success by design: HOPE VI,
new urbanism, and the neoliberal transformation of public housing
in the United States, Environment and Planning A, 42, 1 (2010):
8098, here 8587.
The organization became involved in situations of ongoing armed
conflict and started working side by side with UN peacekeepers
and other multinational military forces to a greater extent than
ever before. Cited from UNHCR, The State of the Worlds Refugees
2000, 9. The strategy of the safe haven (the local intervention
close to the site of conflict) is explained by the case of the Iraqi
Kurds to whom Turkey refused asylum after their rebellion against
Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the First Gulf War.
Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence
from Arendt to Gaza (London: Verso, 2012), 5262; Michel Agier,
Managing the Undesirables (Wiley, 2010).

94

3. New States and Networks, 19892004 EMERGENCY HOUSING

Paper-tube Emergency Shelters for the

Gihembe Refugee Camp near Byumba, Rwanda

Construction of paper-tube shelters by volunteers, 1999

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
4.2 km south of Byumba,
northern Rwanda

Scale:
50 dwellings

Type of housing:
Shelters of approx. 9 m2

Number of people living in

Gihembe in February 2015:
74,151

Ownership system:
Refugee shelters provided by
the UNHCR

Planning and construction phase:

February 1999
Financing and client:
United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR)
Architect:
Shigeru Ban and Keina Ishioka;
executed on-site by volunteers

Budget:
Unkown, for the shelters from
1999. Comprehensive needs of
the UNHCR for all five Rwandan
refugee camps in 2015 estimated
at US$42.2 million; contributions
and pledges received by February
2015: US$2.6 million.

Sources:
1. Aspen Art Museum (ed), Shigeru
Ban: Humanitarian Architecture
(New York: DAP Distributed Art
Publishers, 2014), 11121.
2. UNHCR, Factsheet Rwanda,
(Geneva: UNHCR, Febuary 2015),
online: http://www.unhcr.org/524d
86a69.html (accessed 07/15/2015).
Further reading:
Eyal Weizman, The Least of
All Possible Evils: Humanitarian
Violence from Arendt to Gaza
(London: Verso, 2012), 5262.

95

3. New States and Networks, 19892004 BRICS PRIVATIZATION

Brilliant City, Shanghai, China

Brilliant City 1 (Zhng Yun Ling Wn Chng):

Brilliant City, Phase IV, c.2010

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Hengfeng Road (east),
New Shanghai Railway Station
(northeast), Suzhou River (south),
Putuo District, Shanghai

Scale and impact:

1.6 million m2 built-up area,
36 residential buildings (height:
100 meters), 20,000 housing
units, 35,800 inhabitants (2004
estimations)
One of the most homogenous
ensembles of mass-produced
residential upscale apartments
in Shanghai, succeeding the
clearance of mixed low-rise
neighborhoods, lilongs, or slums.

Type of housing:
High-rise apartments ranging
from 75.31 m2 to 172.66 m2
per unit

Planning and construction phases:

19992004 (completion of Phase 1
in 1999; Phase 2 in 2000; Phase 3
in 2003; Phase 4 in 2004)

Financing:
Three joint investors: COSCO
Property Group Ltd, COSCO
Development Co. Ltd, and COSCO
Liangwan Property Co. Ltd

Ownership system:
Individually owned by uppermiddle class households with
a 70-year lease under Chinas
current property legislation.

Cost of construction:
around 6.66 billion (0.95 billion
at rate of 7.1)

Developer:
Shanghai COSCO Liangwan
Property Development Co. Ltd

Sources:
1. East China Architecture
Design and Research Institute,
The Creation of Brilliant City,
Shanghai, China 20022005,
World Architecture, 3 (2006): 9498.
2. Florian Urban, Tower and Slab:
Histories of global mass housing
(Abingdon, Oxon/New York:
Routledge, 2012), 14568.
3. Shanghai COSCO Brilliant
City Copywriting, MBAlib, online
(Chinese): http://doc.mbalib.com/
view/47153a35b754ef1b7c2592e7c
f68e802.html (accessed 07/19/2015).
4. Sina Housing, online:
http://data.house.sina.com.cn/
sh4211/xinxi/?wt_source=data9_
dh2_lpxx (accessed 07/19/2015).
Further reading:
Fulong Wu: Housing and the State
in China, in: Susan J. Smith, Inter
national Encyclopedia of Housing and
Home (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2012),
32329.

Architect:
East China Architecture
Design and Research Institute
Landscape design:
EDAW
Contractor:
COSCO Construction Group

96

3. New States and Networks, 19892004 BRICS PRIVATIZATION

Hamilton Court, Gurgaon, New Delhi, India

Faade, ground-floor plan, and typical floor plan of DLF Hamilton Court,
Gurgaon, India, c.2005

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
DLF City, Phase V, Sector 26A,
Gurgaon, Haryana

Scale and impact:

Gurgaon, also labeled Millenium
City, houses global capitalist firms
and multinational corporations.
It consists mainly of private developments such as DLF City, one
of the largest privately developed
townships in India. According
to Martin and Baxi (2007), in
mid-2004, Hafeez Contractor had
designed more than 4 million sq ft
of residential space, 2.5 million
sq ft of commercial space, and half
a million sq ft of retail space for the
DLF group, most of it at Gurgaon.

Type of housing:
According to Manohar (2006) DLF
Hamilton Court, a 24-story luxury
high-rise building, is the first
residential building designed by
Hafeez Contractor for DLF. The
total built-up area is 74,500 sq ft,
containing 260 apartments,
with a double-story basement for
parking. In reply to his critics
Hafeez describes his architectural
eclecticism as simply a response
to the aspirations of the consumer
and the market context.

Planning and construction phase:

Mid-1970s: development of DLF
City begins; 2001: construction
work of Hamilton court ends.
Financing and client:
DLF Limited (Delhi Land &
Finance), founded in 1946, today,
is one of the largest commercial
real estate developers in India.
According to the DLF website,
residential developments cater to
three market segments: Super
Luxury, Luxury, and Premium.

Ownership system:
Private

Architect and contractor:

Hafeez Contractor, founded 1982,
today, is one of the biggest and
most influential architectural
firms in India.

97

Sources:
1. DLF Hamilton court on Emporis.
com, online: http://www.emporis.
com/buildings/130270/dlf-hamilton-court-gurgaon-india (accessed
08/29/2015).
2. Homepage of DLF, online: http://
www.dlf.in/dlf/wcm/connect/dlfcorporate/home/about-us/overview
(accessed 08/29/2015).
3. Homepage of Architect Hafeez
Contractor, online: http://www.
hafeezcontractor.com (accessed
08/29/2015).
4. Rohan Kalyan, Fragmentation
by Design. Architecture, Finance and
Identity, Grey Room, 44 (Summer
2011): 2653.
5. Prathima Manohar, Architect
Hafeez Contractor: Selected Works
19822006 (Mumbai: Spenta
Multimedia, 2006), 7, 13437.
6. Reinhold Martin and Kadambari
Baxi, Multi-National City: Architecture
Itineraries (New York: Actar, 2007),
11315, size of developments, 113.

3. New States and Networks, 19892004 BRICS PRIVATIZATION

Enclosed Neighborhoods in Johannesburg, South Africa

Enclosed Neighborhoods in the Eastern Metropolitan

Local Council area of Johannesburg, 2000

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
In 2003, the South African
provinces with the highest
percentage of enclosed neighborhoods and security estates were
Gauteng, Western Cape, and
Limpopo Province, the first two
being also the most urbanized
provinces of South Africa. Both
types of gated communities
occur most frequently in the
peripheral and inner suburbs of
cities.

Scale:
The CSIR survey cited below
reports about 500 illegal road
closures in Johannesburg in 2003.
(p. 26); according to Jrgens and
Gnad (2002), the Eastern Metropolitan Local Council reported
that more than 360 roads were
subject to blocks in 2000 (p. 341).
Security Villages are not included
in that count.

Gated community typology:

Enclosed neighborhoods refer to
already-existing neighborhoods
that are fenced in or walled off
with a limited number of entrances.
Public roads are blocked off to
through-traffic with barriers or
metal fences.

Expansion outline:
The first plots of land protected
by a walled perimeter were on sale
in the mid-1980s. The demand
for security villages increased
significantly after the democratic
elections in 1994.

Origin:
In 2003, South Africa had the
fourth highest income-disparity
coefficient in the world (0.58).
The inequality in the distribution
of wealth is generally considered
to be the main reason for high
levels of crime and the reactive
responses to it, such as the gated
community.

Security villages:
New private developments
are mainly provided by a single
developer. Roads are private,
maintained usually by a private
contractor. Security villages
include also residential golf
estates, residential town-house
complexes, secure office parks,
and high-rise apartment blocks.

98

Sources:
1. Karina Landman et al., A National
Survey of Gated communities in South
Africa (Pretoria: CSIR Building and
Construction Technology, 2003),
2, 67, 13, 16, 23, 26, online: http://
www.csir.co.za/Built_environment/
Planning_support_systems/gatedcomsa/docs/Nat_survey_gated_
com_SA.pdf (accessed 08/29/2015).
2. Ulrich Jrgens and Martin Gnad,
Gated communities in South Africa:
Experiences from Johannesburg,
Environment and Planning B: Planning
and Design, 29 (2002): 33753, here
34041.
Further reading:
Patrick Bond, Elite Transition: From
Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South
Africa (London: Pluto Press, 2000).

3. New States and Networks, 19892004 BRICS PRIVATIZATION

Country Village Monolith Residence, Moscow, Russia

View from villa portico to its opposite across the street, 2007

Lake view of Monolith Residence with orthodox church, 2007

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Istrinsky Raion, Derevnia Voronino
(Istra region, Voronino village),
c.50 km west of Moscow.

Scale:
c.120 villas

Ownership system:
Individually owned private
property

Completion date:
2004
General contractor:
PSO-13 (Proektno-Stroitelnoe
Obedinenie-13/Design Construction Bureau-13), a company special
ized in financing and building
gated communities around Moscow.

Sources:
1. Contractor PSO, online:
http://www.pso13.ru (accessed
07/15/2015).
2. Alexy Muratov, Country Village
Residence Monolith, Project Russia,
38 (September 15, 2005).
3. Monolith Residence, online:
http://archi.ru/projects/world/
735/zagorodnyi-poselok-rezidenciimonolit (accessed 07/15/2015).
Further reading:
Sebastian Lentz, More gates, less
community? Guarded housing
in Russia, in: George Glasze et al.,
Private Cities. Global and local
perspectives (London/New York:
Routledge, 2006), 20621.

Architect:
Mikhail Belov

Source indicator:
Alla Vronskaya

99

3. New States and Networks, 19892004 CENTRALIZED STATES

Block 330, Sembawang, Singapore

Urban ensemble of Block 330, 2015

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Block 330, Sembawang Close,
Sembawang, c.25 km north
of downtown Singapore and
one hour by public transport.

Scale and impact:

Sembawang New Town has
approx. 18,000 housing units
over an area of 317 hectares.
Block 330 has 150 units: 75 fourroom apartments and 75 fiveroom apartments.

Type of housing:
High-rise four-room (100 m2)
or five-room apartments
(115120 m2)

Planning and construction phase:

Construction of Sembawang
New Town began in the late 1990s
with an estimated completion
date of 1999.

Ownership system:
Individually owned flats with
a 99-year lease according to the
regular HDB tenure contract.

Financing, client, architect

and contractor:
Housing and Development Board
(HDB) of Singapore

Source:
Data collected as part of the research
project: Cultures of Climatisation
in Southeast Asia, in: Sascha
Roesler (ed.), Natural Ventilation,
Revisited: Pioneering a New Climatisa
tion Culture (Singapore: ETH Future
Cities Laboratory, September 2015).
Further reading:
1. Forum for the sale of HDB flats,
online: http://www.h88.com.sg
(accessed 08/15/2015).
2. Official homepage of HDB,
online: http://www.hdb.gov.sg
(accessed 08/15/2015).
3. Private archive of HDB flat typo
logies, online: http://www.teoalida.
com (accessed 08/15/2015).
4. Aline Kan Wong and Stephen
Hua Kuo Yeh (eds), Housing a Nation:
25 Years of Public Housing in Singapore
(Singapore: Maruzen Asia for the
Housing & Development Board,
1985).
Source collection:
Ani Vihervaara

100

3. New States and Networks, 19892004 CENTRALIZED STATES

Shahrak-e Ekbatan, Tehran, Iran

A group of Ekbatans rollerbladers congregate near Block 7,

phase II, c.2014

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
2 km north of Mehrabad Inter
national Airport

Scale:
15,593 residential units over an
area of 2,208,570 m2, housing
over 70,000 residents

Type of housing:
Large-scale housing blocks and
apartment slabs (up to 15 stories),
constructed in three phases. Phase I
and phase III are single-floor;
phase II is built mostly in duplex,
with hall and kitchen on the first
floor and other rooms on the upper
floor. In all three phases, there are
one-, two-, three-, and four-room
apartments, ranging from 50 m2
to 240 m2.

Planning and construction phases:

First phase 197579; construction
work restarted in 1992; the
planning of Ekbatan II started
in the 2000s
Financing and client:
Tehran Redevelopment Corporation
(first phase, private); Ekbatan
Renovation and Development
Company (post-1979, publicly
owned); ERDC became a stateowned company, managing development, construction, marketing,
and sales from 1992 onward.

Impact:
Ekbatan was the largest housing
project in Asia in the 1970s.
Today it is still the largest housing
project in Tehran, providing
schools, shopping, and leisure
facilities, as well as green public
spaces atypical for Tehran.

Ownership system:
Private and rental, all administered by ERDC

Architect, phase I:
Rahman Golzar and Jordan
Gruzen (now IBI Group, Gruzen
Samton, USA)
Contractor, phase I:
DIC, Underhill (USA), Starrett
and Eken S.A. (CH); French,
German, and Italian contractors
and engineers

Sources:
1. Ekbatan Renovation and Development Company, online: http://www.
ekbatan.ir/en (accessed 04/08/2015).
2. IBI Group, Gruzen Samton,
online: http://gruzensamton.com
(accessed 08/04/2015).
3. IranUS Claims Tribunal, DIC of
Delaware et al. v. Tehran Redevelopment
Corp., YCA 1986, online:
http://tldb.uni-koeln.de/php/pub_
show_document.php?page=pub_
show_document.php&pubdocid=
230300&pubwithtoc=ja&pubwith
meta=ja&pubmarkid=907000
(accessed 04/08/2015).
Further reading:
1. Ali Javan Forouzande and Ghasem
Motallebi, The role of open spaces in
neighborhood attachment (case study
on Ekbatan town in Tehran Metro
polis), International Journal of Archi
tecture and Urban Development, 2, 1
(2012): 1120.
2. Wouter Vanstiphout, The Saddest
City in the World, The New Town
(March 2, 2006), online: http://www.
thenewtown.nl/article.php?id_article=71 (accessed 08/04/2015).
Source collection:
Vesta Nele Zareh

101

3. New States and Networks, 19892004 NEW URBANISM 2.0

HOPE VI, USA

Urban Codes of the Town of Seaside, October 1987

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
United States
(nationwide program)

Scale and impact:

A total of 262 revitalization grants
between 1993 and 2010; a total
of 287 grants for the demolition of
57,000 severely distressed public
housing units.

Type of housing:
Design based on the principles
of New Urbanism and Oscar
Newmans defensible space theory,
commonly labeled traditional
neighborhood patterns: mixeduse and dense historicist lowrise architectural morphologies,
street-facing housing, shopping,
and parks accessible via footpaths
and sidewalks.

Program Duration:
19932010, launched in the same
year as formation of the Congress
for New Urbanism (CNU) and
publication of the Charter for
New Urbanism.
Financing:
United States Department of
Housing and Urban Development
(HUD), seeking to promote mixedfinance partnerships.

Budget:
US$6.7 billion for all HOPE VI
grant schemes between 1993 and
2010; approx. US$6.2 billion in
revitalization grants.

Client:
Housing organizations and local
government officials in tandem
with private contractors
Main initiator:
Henri Cisneros, tenth Secretary
of the HUD, 199397 (Clinton
administration)

Sources:
1. HUD, About HOPE VI, online:
http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/
HUD?src=/program_offices/public_indian_housing/programs/ph/
hope6/about (accessed 07/29/2015).
2. HUD Revitalization Grants,
online: http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/program_offices/
public_indian_housing/programs/
ph/hope6/grants/revitalization
(accessed 07/29/2015).
Further reading:
1. Henry G. Cisneros and Lora
Engdahl, From Despair to Hope: Hope
VI and the New Promise of Public Hous
ing in Americas Cities (Washington:
Brookings Institution, 2009).
2. Reinhold Martin, Jacob Moore
and Susanne Schindler (eds.), The Art
of Inequality: Architecture, Housing,
and Real Estate. A Provisional Report
(New York: The Temple Hoyne Buell
Center for the Study of American
Architecture, 2015).
Source collection:
Susanne Schindler

Influential architects and

town planners:
Andrs Duany and Elizabet
Plater-Zyberg, Oscar Newman
(among others)

102

3. New States and Networks, 19892004 NEW URBANISM 2.0

HOPE VI: Park DuValle, Louisville, USA

Street view of Park DuValle, Louisville, c.2010

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Park DuValle neighborhood,
4.5 km southwest of downtown
Louisville, Kentucky

Scale and impact:

1,100 units for about 3,000
residents in 2008

Type of housing:
Town houses and apartments
set out in a close-knit vernacular
style with porch.

Planning and construction phase:

19932003
Financing and client:
Revitalization financed by public
housing resources (HUD and
Housing Authority Louisville);
Community Development Block
Grant (CDBG) funds provided
by the City of Louisville; investor
capital including the equity of
Low Income Housing Tax Credits
(LIHTC).

Budget:
US$237 million for the whole
development; US$113.5 million
total public financing (HUD,
Housing Authority of Louisville,
State of Kentucky, and Jefferson
County and City of Louisville),
including US$20 million for
HOPE VI, allocated in 1996;
approx. US$124 million private
financing (Private mortgage
debt, homebuyer equity, program
income including land sales, and
LIHTC financing).

Ownership system:
Individually owned
Real estate value:
Median sale price in 2002:
US$143,424, close to the
upper-quartile value of homes:
US$155,633, according to the
US Census Bureau in 2003.

Sources:
1. Community Builders, Inc.,
The villages of Park DuValle,
online: http://www.thevillagesatparkduvalle.com (accessed
07/29/2015).
2. James Hanlon, Success by
design: HOPE VI, new urbanism,
and the neoliberal transformation
of public housing in the United
States, Environment and Planning A,
42, 1 (2010): 8098, here 8687.
3. Louisville Metro Housing
Authority, Park DuValle Revitalization, online: http://www.lmha1.org/
hope_vi/park_duvalle_revitalization.php (accessed 07/29/2015).
Further reading:
Oscar Newman, Creating Defensible
Space (Washington: US Department
of Housing and Urban Development
Office of Policy Development and
Research, 1996), online: http://www.
huduser.org/publications/pdf/def.
pdf (accessed 07/29/2015).
Source collection:
Susanne Schindler

103

4.
Global
Transactions
200215
The main parameters for the progressive deregulation of
the financial markets and their increasingly close interconnection with urban development via the mortgage
credit market were established at the start of the 2000s,
at least in the United States. In the decade to come, the
consequences of this policy gradually took effect. In
the USA, the combination of high-risk financial trans
actions and precarious loans led to the banking crisis of
2008a crisis that destroyed several trillions of dollars
of wealth and millions of jobs, expropriated millions of
homeowners, and unleashed a global recession. The b
asic
principle, according to which speculation with high-risk
financial products disconnects itself from territorial
processes while at the same time having an ever-
increasing influence on them, is now not just characteristic of the United States, even though it provides the
most egregious example. The principle is also evident at
work in processes such as the sale of state housing in
Germany, or the construction of new Chinese cities in
African countries. At the same time, deregulation should
not be confused with the absence of state intervention
in the market; indeed, it is made possible in the first
place by state institutions that, by introducing new
laws, naturalize the premises of economic growth on

105

the one hand and, on the other, legitimate the transfer of

the costs incurred for huge private profits to the public
domain.
Entrepreneurialism
The main steps toward creating links between real
estate speculation and the finance industry were taken
by the Clinton administration (19932001). In the mid1990s, it relaxed the restrictions on checking the creditworthiness of borrowers, legalized the formation of
gigantic financial conglomerates such as Citigroup in
1998 with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), and in
2000 approved the Commodity Futures Modernization
Act, which, by deregulating the trade with financial
derivativesincluding products such as credit default
swapstriggered the financial crisis.1 The Bush adminis
tration (200109) continued with these policies, for
example, with the American Dream Downpayment Act
of 2003, whose aim was to create 5.5 million new minority
owner-occupiers from 2003 to 2010, and which encouraged the federal loan and mortgage institutions Fanny
Mae and Freddy Mac to underwrite subprime loans for
the first time.2 The consequences were impressive: from
2000 to 2004, the number of mortgages issued per year
quadrupled, reaching a peak in 2006; from 1996 to 2006,
property prices doubled, and the subprime sector grew
from US$70 billion to US$600 billion in the same
period.3
The increasing instability of the finance industry and
its projection onto territorial processes can be explained
by the high leverage of the debt economy, where even
slight changes within the value of the original asset
cause both dramatic gains and losses, as well as by the
proliferation of financial products and the infinitesimal
acceleration of transactions without a corresponding
growth in the actually existent wares. This economic
system cancels out the principle of cross-liability and the
direct, or sometimes even personal, relationship between
debtor and creditor. Individual installment payments of a
mortgage now flow into a seemingly endless succession
of contract and sales deals, whereas investment banks
achieve their profits not only by the multiple resales of
mortgages or insurances, but also by simultaneously selling a product and speculating on its decline in value. The
millionfold foreclosure of properties from 2007 and
the subsequent bank collapse of 2008 meant not only a

gigantic destruction of the monetary and intrinsic values

of pension-fund investors, the depreciation of properties,
and the destruction of homeowners life visions.4 It also
illustrated a new dimension to the acceleration of upvaluation and decline in the value of urban territories;
and it located the most important sociopolitical figure of
neoliberalismthat of the entrepreneurat both ends
of the chain of financial transactions. Paul Treanor
defines this entrepreneur as a person whose profession
it is to respond to market forces and therefore changes
activities in accordance with the market: We are here
for the market, and you should compete.5 Bankers who
are motivated amid the competitive finance industry
to indulge in evermore precarious deals and whose huge
bonuses are calculated according to the size of the profits
they make per financial transaction (and not according
to the social and political consequences of their actions)
embody this figure just as much as small-scale investors
who optimize themselves, their property, and their living
conditions, adapt them to the commandments of competition, profit maximization, and personal responsibility,
and have to bear the consequences in case of failure.
Friedrich Engels analysis, which postulates that the
combination of credit market and real estate market
compels the weakest members of society to pay loan
installments on properties that can be worth less after
repayment of the loan than at the time of purchase, has
lost none of its validity. [ pp. 110, 111]
The principle of entrepreneurialism now pervades
all sectors of society to such a fundamental degree that
it even crops up in socially engaged projects that seem
at first glance to have little to do with business. For
example, the split-house solution offered by the architectural office ELEMENTAL, which provides half
a prefabricated house leaving the owner to customize the final solution. The growable structures of
ELEMENTAL do provide the basis for successful selfhelp projects, but the half-completed house also conveys
a clear message to homeowners that they should improve both themselves and their houses by means of
credit and through the discipline of work. [ p. 109]
Public Neoliberalism
The close interweaving of public policies, the real estate
market, and economization of territory can be illustrated
by the sale of the public housing stock in Germany and

106

the regulation of rapid and sustained urban growth in

China, which, despite obvious differences in the initial
socioeconomic setting, are both initiated by the public
sector to assure political stability and enhance economic
growth.
In selling the social housing stock, large and medium-
sized German cities handed over an important lever for
directing urban development.6 The municipalities aimed
to use the sale not only to relieve themselves of debt but
also to retain their ability to take direct political action,
as these cuts affecting urban policy were, in the shortterm, easier to bear than in the health- or social care
sectors. Privatization did not benefit the public sector,
however. It happened mostly through the en-bloc sale of
public housing to globally operating special funds for
institutional investors such as Cerberus, Oaktree Capital
Management, Fortress, and Terra Firma, and was
accompanied by the profit expectations of private equity
business, which can rise to around 20 percent. These
profits resulted partly from the mispricing of the purchased company by the seller (that is, the mispricing of
housing construction companies by the municipalities
that owned them), and partly from cost optimization of
the companywhich means, to put it more concretely,
by reducing maintenance costs, raising rents, tenant
specialization, and finally, by quick resale, flotation, or
both. The consequence for the social environment is
economic segregation, as social integration and profit
expectations cannot be reconciled.7 [ p. 112]
The Chinese new planned citiessuch as New Ordos
in Inner Mongoliasimilarly bear witness to the initiative taken by the public sector in bringing together the
real estate industry and urban development, even if, here,
the starting point of the situation is that of gigantic
migration processes and continuous economic growth.
The construction of New Ordos was driven by the discovery of coal deposits there and the practice followed
by Chinese entrepreneurs of beginning projects only
after the properties have been sold.8 Although the city
was practically empty for several years (in 2013, less
than 70,000 of the planned 300,000 residents lived
here), it cannot be described as a ghost town. The value
of the properties remains as long as the purchase of
a property stays lucrative for the beneficiaries of the
modernization process and as long as one can reckon
with the progress of the Chinese urbanization process.

This will grow within the next years: between 2014 and
2020, according to the National New-Type Urbanization
Plan, one hundred million rural migrants will receive
urban citizen rights and be permanently installed in new
cities for an estimated cost of US$6.8 trillion.9 [ p. 113]
Technical Assistance
The last section of this Atlas presents large-scale transnational housing projects in Africa that are emblematic
of the intercontinental trade in knowledge, loans, and
building commissions. They are the Kilamba Kiaxi
(Kilamba New City), built by Chinese banks and companies in the south of Angolas capital Luanda, and the
housing program in Ethiopias capital Addis Ababa initiated by the local authorities and the German Technical
Cooperation (GTZ). These examples render the character
of the territorial commodities and their contrast to
housing conceived and lived as a social space extremely
apparent; the disproportionality and nakedness of the
emerging urban landscapes make tangible the alter
ations within the logical sequence of the emergence
and succession of territorialization and reterritorial
izations.10 To produce these housing commodities, the
donor countries sell their know-how to the recipient
nations which in exchange receive an urban product
that, although based on expert knowledge, makes use
of this expertise only in relation to the absolute control
of the processes. Thus, failing to respond in the least to
the context, implementation is without any regard to
existing local conditions. The so-called Angola Model,
which is produced only within Chinese cycles of commissioning and capitaleven on siteis now a standard
term in the African urban discourse.11
The dimensions here are large-scale: for the 20,000
apartments of Phase I in Kilamba, US$3.5 billion were
given to Chinese banks and companies by the Angolan
state; for the 170,000 apartments in Addis Ababa, the
Ethiopian government invested the equivalent of around
136 million up to 2010, parts of which were paid to
GTZ International Services (GTZ IS)the operational
department of GTZfor planning and construction of
the first project phase, and to other local collaborating
firms involved in both initial and ongoing implementation. The complete abstraction from context, both with
regard to esthetics and urban planning, which is evident
even in photographic depictions of these projects, results

107

from the serial repetition of simplistic forms at all levels

of urban design: the construction volume, the faade,
the ground plans, and the urban spaces. The resulting
impression of inappropriate dimensions reminds one
more of stage-sets or early video games than of a type of
housing construction targeting real users, and which is
explicable only if one is aware of the market mechanisms
and constellations of interest behind it. As a product,
these urban landscapes only have anything to do with
local need inasmuch as both projects were accompanied
by official initiatives to relieve substantial housing
shortages on the one hand, and modernize precarious
living conditions on the other hand. Ultimately, both
cases have served to introduce national mortgage m
arkets,
whose products target the emerging upper class (Luanda)
and the upcoming middle class (Addis Ababa), rather than
low-income groups and the urban poor. [ pp. 114, 115]
The intent here is not to deny that rented apartments in
Berlin, housing developments in Florida, and new Chinese cities on the continent of Africa offer their residents different urban and societal models, outlooks, and
everyday routines. However, this distracts attention
from the root of the matter. Despite their distinct differences, all the projects presented here have one decisive
thing in common: the status of their users. These are
primarily function carriers of a financial product that
only has anything to do with needs, affects, or social
norms when such things correspond to the economic
logic of the product. The bodies and desires of the users
are subordinate to the financial product in a manner
that is unambiguous and unmistakableor, in cases
when they do not correspond to the economic logic of
the products, simply absent. This is the point at which
to begin reflecting on contemporary housing and its
possible alternatives.
Anne Kockelkorn

For the comprehensive overview of the making and consequences

of the 2008 global financial crisis, see the Financial Crisis Inquiry
Commission, The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (Washington:
Authenticated US Government Information, 2011), online: http://
www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/ GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf (accessed
08/20/2015).
2 Peter King, Financial Deregulation, in: Susan J. Smith (ed.),
International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home (Amsterdam: Elsevier,
2012), 17680, here 178.
3 See The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, 70, 87.
4 About the scale of foreclosures in the USA, see Center for Responsible
Lending (CRL) (ed.), Lost Ground, 2011: Disparities in Mortgage Lending
and Foreclosures, 14, online: http://www.responsiblelending. org/
mortgage-lending/research-analysis/Lost- Ground-2011.pdf
(accessed 08/16/2015). According to estimates by CRL, in 2009,
the costs per foreclosure amount to $27,000 for a city, $10,000 for
a neighborhood, and $7,200 for a family. Psychologists report more
alcohol problems, and an increase in domestic violence and anxiety
disorders. See also Lucy M. Delgadillo, Mortgage Default: Well-Being
in the United States, in: Smith, International E
ncyclopedia of Housing
and Home, 35863.
5 Paul Treanor, Neoliberalism: Origins, Theory, Definition, in:
Treanor, Neoliberalism: Origins, Theory, Definition (2005), online:
http:// web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism.html
(accessed 08/12/2015).
6
On a national level in Germany, the share of public housing among
the total housing stock sank by only 8 percent to 6 percent between
2000 and 2008; in cities, however, the quota of public housing was
significantly higher. Berlin has privatized 200,000 apartments and
its quota of public housing dropped from 30 percent at the beginning
of the 1990s to 15 percent in 2008. Manuel B. Aalbers and Andrej
Holm, Privatising social housing in Europe: The case of Amsterdam
and Berlin, in: Katja Adelhof et al. (eds), Urban Trends in Berlin and
Amsterdam (Berlin: Geographisches Institut der Humboldt-Universitt,
2008), 1223; and Anne Kockelkorn, Von Hllenhunden und
Festungen, Ware Wohnung: Stadtbauwelt, 173, 7: (2007): 2029.
7 See the blog on tenant protests regarding GSW apartments,
online: http://gsw23.blogsport.eu (accessed 08/19/2015).
8 For more on the practice of the presale on the Chinese mortgage
market, see Yongheng Deng and Peng Fei, Mortgage Market,
Character and Trends: China, in: Smith (ed.), International Encyclopedia
of Housing and Home, 42233, here 430.
9
National New-Type Urbanization Plan (20142020), issued by the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State
Council on March 16, 2014. Josh Rudolph, Can Chinas Ambitious
New Urbanization Plan Succeed?, China Digital Times (March 26, 2014),
online: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/03/can-chinasambitiousnew-urbanization-plan-succeed/ (accessed 08/19/2015).
10 See Raffestin, Space, territory, and territoriality, 12141,
and the Atlas introduction.
11 The Chinese CITIC Group grants loans to the Angolan state, which
are in their turn backed by oil sales of the State of Angola to the China
International United Petroleum and Chemicals Company Limited
(UNIPEC), the trading subsidiary of the China Petroleum & Chemical
Corporation (Sinopec). The loans, however, are only granted if all
contracts go to Chinese companies and the revenue cycle is 100 percent contained within state-owned companies and institutions. The
oil is not used directly as repayment, but as security. See South African
Institute for International Affairs (SAIA), Policy Briefing No. 88, by
David Benazeraf and Ana Alves, Oil for Housing: Chinese-built New
Towns in Angola (Danish International Development Agency: Global
Powers and Africa Programme, 2014), online: http://www.saiia.org.
za/policy-briefings/oil-forhousing- chinese-built-new-towns-in-
angola (accessed 08/15/2015). For more explanations of the control
mechanisms of GTZ (now GIZ) with regard to Ethiopia, see Sascha
Delz: Cooperation at Eye Level: From Linear Development to Versatile
Contingency, in: Spaces of Change, Future Cities Laboratory (Zurich: ETH
Future Cities Laboratory, 2014), online: http://www.researchgate.
net/publication/272433622_Cooperation_at_Eye_Level_-_ From_
Linear_Development_to_Versatile_Contingency (accessed 08/26/15).

108

4. Global Transactions, 200215 SELF-HELP 2.0

ELEMENTAL in Lo Espejo, Santiago, Chile

ELEMENTAL housing in Lo Espejo, construction phase, 2007

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Juan Francisco Gonzlez 9461,
Lo Espejo, c.10 km southwest of
Santiago city center

Scale and impact:

30 units on 1,568-m site, with
childcare and job-training facilities provided by the two NGOs.
The latters intention is to support
residents with job applications
and thus to increase income; the
families applied for new subsidies
for the construction of their
expansion project and solicited
the contractor to stay longer to
add new rooms.

Type of housing:
Duplex house with a ground-floor
unit and a two-story maisonette,
both are expandable via the
backyard or patio; initial area:
3637 m, final area: 6068 m.

Planning and construction phase:

200607
Financing and client:
The ministry of housing and
the communal government of
Lo Espejo in partnership with
two NGOs, Un Techo Para Chile
(A Roof for Chile) and Un Sueo
por cumplir (Unrealized Dream)
Architect:
Alejandro Aravena, Gonzalo
Arteaga, Fernando GarcaHuidobro (ELEMENTAL)
Contractor:
Simonetti Constructora S.A.

Ownership system:
Private ownership of individual
households; eligibility for mortgages was determined according
to the amount of individual
savings.

Sources:
1. Conjunto Lo Espejo, online:
http://www.scielo.cl/pdf/arq/n69/
art04.pdf (accessed 07/22/15).
2. Lo Espejo, online: http://
divisare.com/projects/280780ELEMENTAL-Alejandro-AravenaLo-Espejo (accessed 07/22/15).
3. Lo Espejo, online: http://www.
elementalchile.cl/proyecto/loespejo (accessed 07/22/15).
4. Un sueo por cumplir, online:
http://www.territoriochile.cl/1516/
article-78069.html (accessed
07/22/15).
Source collection:
Banu iek Tl

Cost of construction:
11 Unidad de Fomento (UF) per m2
(US$488 per m2)

109

4. Global Transactions, 200215 ENTREPRENEURIALISM

Rotonda West, Charlotte County, Florida, USA

STERLING RIDGE III Florida, Rotonda West, Charlotte County, Florida

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Near the sea, West Charlotte
County, Florida

Scale and impact:

The site of 30 km2 contains a built
infrastructure for 8,000 plots and
about 5,000 completed houses in
2015. The site was severely hit by
the financial crisis in 2008 with
around a quarter of homes either
still in shell construction or affected
by foreclosure. The foreclosure rate
on all types of loans of the Federal
State of Florida was 5.9% by the
end of 2008, foreclosure rates on
subprime loans on a national scale
were at 10.7%.

Type of housing:
Single-family houses and villas
arranged around a circular
street pattern

Planning and construction phase:

First projects date back to the
1960s, construction started in the
1990s. By 2000, the land was
developed, but only three-quarters
of the structures built.
Financing and client:
Cavanagh Communities
Corporation, founded 1970
Management:
Rotonda West is an unincorpor
ated, deed-restricted community
managed by the Rotonda West
Association, Inc. (RWA), one of
the largest mandatory propertyowners associations in Florida.

Ownership system:
Projected as a site of individually
owned houses, foreclosed units
are now owned by banks

Real estate value:

Today median property prices
for foreclosed homes range from
c.US$120,000, with variations
of US$100,000US$500,000
(as at 08/05/2015)

Sources:
1. City Data Forum Blog, Tough
Times for Rotunda West, Anyone
Live There?, online: http://www.citydata.com/forum/florida/339295tough-times-rotunda-west-anyonelive.html (accessed 08/04/2015).
2. Lucy M. Delgadillo, Mortgage
Default: Well-Being in the United
States, in: Susan J. Smith, Inter
national Encyclopedia of Housing and
Home (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2012),
35863, 360.
3. Homepage, the Rotonda West
Association, Inc., online: http://
www.rotondawest.org (accessed
08/04/2015).
4. Rotonda West foreclosures,
online: http://www.realtytrac.com/
mapsearch/fl/rotonda-west-fore
closures.html/p-7?sortbyfield=
price,dec (accessed 08/05/2015).
Source collection:
Vesta Nele Zareh

110

4. Global Transactions, 200215 ENTREPRENEURIALISM

Minha Casa, Minha Vida, Brazil

MCMV housing in Eunpolis, Bahia

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Various locations in several
Brazilian cities that responded
to the program

Scale and impact:

First stage: one million homes;
second stage: two million homes

Type of housing:
Mainly small single-family houses,
but also some multi-family homes,
apartment blocks, and apartment
slabs

Planning and construction phase:

First-stage launch 2009;
second-stage launch 2010
Financing and client:
The public bank of Brazil, the
Caixa Econmica Federal, provides
initial financing, which is subsequently leveraging the investment
of small-scale and larger investors
that then sell the final housing
product to the user. Dummy corporations pretending to be part
of the program collecting foreign
investments, provoked a media
scandal.

Cost of construction:
The government budget for the
program was R$39 billion
(15.5 billion) in 2010 and
R$40.1 billion (17.3 billion)
in 2011

Ownership system:
The program is aimed at individual
ownership with 1.6 million homes
intended for families earning up
to three times the monthly minimum wage (R$545); one million
homes allocated to families earning
threesix times that; the remaining 400,000 homes for families
earning between six and ten times
the monthly minimum wage.

Sources:
1. Episode: Minha Casa, Minha
Vida, 2009, House Housing: An un
timely history of architecture and real
estate, online: http://house-housing.
com/#2009-Brazilian-Government-Launches-Minha-CasaMinha-VidaWorld-Bank-Endorsesthe-Program-While-Urging-aGreater-Role-for-the-Private-Sector
(accessed 08/05/2015).
2. Homepage, Minha Casa, Minha
Vida http://www.myhousemylife
brazil.com (accessed 08/05/2015).
3. Wikipedia on false claims of the
EcoHouse Group, online: https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EcoHouse_
Group (accessed 08/05/2015).
Further reading:
P. N. Neto, et al., Housing Policy:
A Critical Analysis on the Brazilian
Experience, Comunicao e Meio
Ambiente, 5, 3 (December 2012):
6576.
Source collection:
Vesta Nele Zareh

111

4. Global Transactions, 200215 PUBLIC NEOLIBERALISM

Waldsiedlung Zehlendorf Onkel Toms Htte, Berlin, Germany

Bruno Taut, Wilskistrae after completion in the 1930s

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Argentinische Allee and
Wilskistrae in Zehlendorf

Scale and impact:

738 single-family terrace houses
and 1,108 apartments in multifloor residential buildings. Although among German Modernisms most celebrated sites, the
Siedlung (settlement) is not on
UNESCOs World Heritage list.

Type of housing:
Modernist rows of housing;
2-room apartments in the multistory buildings; 34-roomflats in the terrace houses.

Planning and construction:

192632; piecemeal renovation
process began in 2006
Financing and client:
The non-profit savings and construction corporation Gehag was
founded in 1924 and privatized
in 1998. In 2005, it was sold to
Oaktree Capital Management
and HSH Nordbank. In 2007, the
Deutsche Wohnen AG bought
the majority interest of Gehag
and in 2014 the Berlin GSW.
With 146,800 units, Deutsche
Wohnen AG is currently the
second largest housing company
in Germany after Deutsche
Annington.

Growth pattern:
Rents for apartments owned
by Gehag increased by c.30% after
renovation; the average rent increase of Deutsche Wohnen AG
in Berlin in 2014 was 4.6%. After
buying Berlin GSW, in the same
year, Deutsche Wohnen AGs net
proceeds rose by 74%, reaching
45.5 million.

Ownership system:
The terrace houses of the Wald
siedlung were sold to individuals;
the multi-story buildings designed
by Bruno Taut belong to Gehag
alias Deutsche Wohnen AG.

Sources:
1. Gewinn verdoppelt. Deutsche
Wohnen profitiert von GSW-bernahme, Handelsblatt (May 14, 2014),
online: http://www.handelsblatt.
com/unternehmen/dienstleister/
gewinn-verdoppelt-deutschewohnen-profitiert-von-gswuebernahme/9890560.html
(accessed 08/01/2015).
2. Roland Kirchbach, Wenn der
Investor klingelt, Die Zeit, 2 (2006),
online: http://www.zeit.de/2006/
02/Wohnungen_Head (accessed
07/23/2015).
3. Reiner Wild, Der Modernisierungszug stockt, Mietermagazin,
4 (2006), online: http://www.berlinermieterverein.de/magazin/online/
mm0406/040611a.htm (accessed
07/23/2015).
Further reading:
Sabina Uffer, The Uneven Development of Berlins Housing Provision,
unpublished PhD thesis (London:
LSE, 2011). See also introduction 4,
note 6.

Architects:
Bruno Taut, Hugo Hring, Otto
Salvisberg

Source collection:
Vesta Nele Zareh

112

4. Global Transactions, 200215 PUBLIC NEOLIBERALISM

Kangbashi New Area, Ordos City, Inner Mongolia, China

Apartments for sale on the outskirts of Kangbashi, Ordos

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Kangbashi is a subdivision of the
Chinese city of Ordos, situated
c.30 km southwest of the administrative center Dongsheng.

Scale:
Planned for 300,000aiming
at one million inhabitants;
in 2013, the city had less than
70,000 permanent residents.

Planning and construction phase:

Planning started in 2000;
construction began in 2004
and is still ongoing

Impact:
Kangbashi, planned by the public
sector, is among the largest new
towns to figure prominently in
reports on Chinese ghost towns.
However, it is likely that the city
will attract inhabitants in the
near future as China continues
to undergo massive urbanization
affecting a couple of 100 million
people.

Type of housing:
The main typology is the multistory apartment tower, but
there are also villas, single- and
multi-family houses, and apartment slabs. Ordos 100, a project
of 100 villas of 1,000 m2, based
upon a master plan by Herzog
& de Meuron and Ai Weiei,
remains unrealized to date (2015).

Financing and client:

The municipal government of
Ordos established a development
company to manage the project,
which was then executed by a
variety of public and private partners: Sheng Da Group, Lian Bans
Group, and Elison Resources
Group

Ownership system:
Most of the apartments are sold
by the construction companies to
private owners, mostly wealthy
Chinese. The city served as an object
of investment and speculation.

Cost of construction:
c.US$161 billion from public
funds to pay for public buildings,
facilities, and infrastructure

Sources:
1. Adrian Brown, Chinas Empty
Cities, SBS Dateline (September 10,
2013), online: https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=V3XfpYxHKCo
(accessed 08/04/2015).
2. Adam James Smith and Song
Ting, The Land of Many Palaces, documentary movie (USA/China, 2014).
3. Jody Rosen, The Colossal
Strangeness of Chinas Most Excellent Tourist City, The New York
Times magazine (March 6, 2015),
online: http://tmagazine.blogs.
nytimes.com/2015/03/06/ordoschina-tourist-city/?_r=0 (accessed
08/04/2015).
Further Reading:
Tom Miller, Chinas Urban Billion
(London: Zed Books, 2012).
Source collection:
Vesta Nele Zareh

113

4. Global Transactions, 200215 TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE

Kilamba Kiaxi (Kilamba New City), Phase I, Luanda, Angola

Kilamba Kiaxi, May 2011

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
Kilamba New City, c.30 km south
of Luanda city center

Scale (2012):
710 Blocks, 20,000 apartments,
on a 5-km2 site.

Planning and construction phase:

2004: First business contacts;
2008: beginning of construction
work; 2012: completion of phase I

Cost of construction (2012):

Estimated at c.US$3.5 billion
in 2012

Type of housing:
Three building types (five-,
eight-, or 11-story) and three
apartment types (two, three,
or four bedrooms)

Financing:
Industrial and Commercial Bank
of China Ltd (ICBC) backed by
oil sales of the state of Angola to
Unipec, the trading subsidiary
of the Chinese oil firm Sinopec.
Contractor:
Citic Construction, a subsidiary
of the Chiness state-owned CITIC
group (China International Trust
and Investment Corp.)

Impact:
Kilamba is the biggest Chinese
new-town development in Africa.
The chinese construction sector
on the African continent is
growing rapidly. According to
the SAIA Policy Briefing No. 88
(2014), in 2012, contracts of
chinese construction companies
amounted to US$40 billion,
an increase of 45% since 2009.

Ownership system:
Individually sold apartments via
upfront payment or a mortgage
system over 1520 years. Prices
in the range of US$70,000 for a
two-bed apartment (US$350 per
month to rent) to US$180,000 for
a four-bed apartment (US$900
per month to rent). This is lower
than central Luanda, but only 20%
of Luandas population can afford
to live in Kilamba.

Marketing and management:

Brokerage firm Delta Imobiliria
and oil company Sonagol

114

Sources:
1. Johannes Dieterich, Angolas
chinesischer Albtraum, Basler
Zeitung (November 4, 2012), online:
http://bazonline.ch/leben/reisen/
Angolas-chinesischer-Albtraum/
story/23792729 (accessed
07/15/2015).
2. Louise Redvers, Angolas
Chinese-built ghost town, BBC
News (July 3, 2012), online: http://
www.bbc.com/news/world-africa18646243 (accessed 07/15/2015).
3. South African Institute for International Affairs (SAIA), Policy
Briefing No. 88, by David Benazeraf
and Ana Alves, Oil for Housing:
Chinese-built New Towns in Angola
(Danish International Development
Agency: Global Powers and Africa
Programme, 2014), online: http://
www.saiia.org.za/policy-briefings/
oil-for-housing-chinese-built-newtowns-in-angola (accessed
08/15/2015).

4. Global Transactions, 200215 TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE

Public Housing Schemes, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Gerji II site, 2011

WHERE, WHEN, WHO

DIMENSIONS

TYPE

Location:
120150 sites in Addis Ababa

Scale and impact:

AAGHP and IHDP combined as
of 2010/11: approx. 170,000
apartments. The smallest sites
comprise two housing blocks, the
largest over 600. Together, AAGHP
and IHDP represent the largest
housing-construction program
undertaken in Ethiopia to date.
Follow-up housing construction
is ongoing.

Ownership system:
Individual home-ownership:
subsidized mortgages (issued
by CBE)

Planning and construction phases:

Addis Ababa Grand Housing
Program (AAGHP): 2002/042006;
Integrated Housing Development
Program (IHDP): 200610
Financing:
Government of Ethiopia/
Commercial Bank of Ethiopia
(CBE)
Contractors:
Deutsche Gesellschaft fr Tech
nische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ),
providing technical assistance
(construction technology, pre
paration of IHDP) from 1999 to
2006; GTZ IS implementing the
first 10,000 units 200406;
MH E
ngineering, planning the
first 120 sites in collaboration with
GTZ IS; small and medium enter
prises (SMEs) as subcontractors

Budget:
The Ethiopian government
a llocates capital for housing
construction by issuing bonds to
the state-owned Commercial
Bank of Ethiopia (CBE): approx.
3 billion Birr (136 million)
as of 2010.

Type of housing:
Three to five-story housing blocks
with apartments varying from
22 m2 to 50 m2 (studio, one-bed,
two-bed, and three-bed units).
Small and medium sites are situ
ated mostly within Addis Ababa
center and past extension zones,
large sites are mainly located in
the newly developing peripheries
of the city (east, west, and south).

Cost of construction per m2:

900 Birr/85 (2004); 1500
Birr/80 (2010)

Sources:
1. Condominium Housing in Ethiopia:
The Integrated Housing Development
Programme (Nairobi: UN-Habitat,
2011).
2. Integrated Housing Development
Program: Management Manual
(Ethiopia: AAHDP/GTZ/
MH Engineering, 2006).
3. Technical Manual, Volume II
(Ethiopia: Addis Ababa Housing
Development Project Office
(AAHDPO)/GTZ/MH Engineering,
2005).
Further reading:
Sascha Delz, Development Co
operation at all Costs: How Global
Actors and Concepts Influence
Urban and Rural Transformation:
Case Studies from Ethiopia,
unpublished PhD thesis (Zurich:
ETH Zurich, upcoming, 2015).
Source collection:
Sascha Delz

115

Sources /
References
1. Beginnings,
196881

2. Postmodernist
Revisions, 198189

FLEXIBILITY

ALTERNATIVES

CRITICAL RECONSTRUCTION

EAST ASIA PUBLIC HOUSING

[p. 70]
Operation Breakthrough, USA
Published in: Progressive
Architecture, 4 (1970): 126.

[p. 74]
Block 23, New Belgrade,
Yugoslavia
Photo Wolfgang Thaler (2009),
published in: V. Kuli et al.,
Modernism In-between: The Mediatory
Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia
(2012), 139.

[p. 83]
Antigone, Montpellier, France
Photo Wolfgang Staudt,
Wikimedia, online: https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Montpellier_Antigone_
(2404900471).jpg (accessed
08/26/2015).

[p. 75]
Boua Residents Association
Housing, Porto, Portugal
Photo lvaro Siza, published in:
B. Fleck and W. Wang (eds.), Boua
Residents Association Housing: Porto
197277, 200506 (2008), 26.

[p. 84]
IBA Innenstadt als Wohnort
(Inner-city as a place for living),
Berlin, Germany
Published in: Internationale
Bauausstellung (ed.), Berlin 1987:
Projekt bersicht (1991), folded
plan on rear side of back cover.

[p. 88]
Siu Hong Court, Hong Kong
Wikimedia, online: https://
zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/#/
media/File:Siu_Hong_Estate_
Pond_200908.jpg (accessed
07/22/2015) (L), Hong Kong
housing authority (HDB), online:
https://www.housingauthority.gov.
hk/hdw/content/static/file/b5/
residential/plans/siuhongcourt_
bN.pdf (accessed 08/26/2015) (R).

DEVELOPMENTS

[p. 85]
IBA Luisenstadt Block 70,
Berlin, Germany
Published in: Internationale
Bauausstellung (ed.), Berlin 1987:
Projektbersicht (1991), 279.

[p. 71]
Summit Plaza, Jersey City,
New Jersey , USA
Published in: US Department of
Housing and Urban Development,
Washington, DC, Operation
Breakthrough. Phase II, Prototype
Construction and Demonstration,
vol. 4 (c.1974), 21.
[p. 72]
Plan Construction and Ralisations
Exprimentales, France
Centre de recherche darchitecture
modulaire de Paris (CRAM) and
Plan Construction, Toulouse
La Terrasse, ralisation exprimentale de 203 logements (information
brochure), c.1971, Archives
Dpartementales du Val dOise
-1083 W6.
[p. 73]
Ensemble Danielle Casanova,
Ivry-sur-Seine, France
Photo: Fonds Vera Cardot et Pierre
Joly, Centre Georges Pompidou,
Bibliothque Kandinsky, published
in: I. Scalbert, A right to difference:
the architecture of Jean Renaudie
(2004), S. 63.

[p. 76]
Previ, Lima, Peru
Photo Peter Land, online: http://
archleague.org/2015/04/latinamerican-incrementalism-fromprevi-to-the-present/ (accessed
07/24/15).
[p. 77]
Nova Ipanema, Barra da Tijuca,
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Photo Philipp Meuser, published
in: E. Ribbeck and M. Tahara,
Vom Appartementhaus zum LuxusGhetto, in: Stadtbauwelt, 24 (1997),
1389.

CRITIQUE
[p. 78]
Counter-projects, Brussels,
Belgium
Archives dArchitecture
Moderne, Bruxelles. Published in:
R.-L. Delevoy et al., La Cambre,
19281978 (1979), 406.

SOCIALIST POSTMODERNISM
[p. 86]
Severomurinsky Housing
Complex, Leningrad, Soviet Union
Photo Citywalls.ru,
St. Petersburg, online:
http://www.citywalls.ru/
house15165.html
(accessed 08/27/2015).
[p. 87]
Microrayon Aksai-Zhetysu,
Alma-Ata, Kazakh SSR
Photo Philipp Meuser, published
in: P. Meuser and D. Zadorin, Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass
Housing. Prefabrication in the USSR
19551991 (2015), 87.

116

[p. 89]
Block 207, Bukit Batok New Town,
Singapore
Photo Ani Vihervaara, 2015.

NEW URBANISM
[p. 90]
Seaside, Florida, USA
Photo Alex S. MacLean /
Landslides Aerial Photography
(www.landslides.com).

3. New States and

Networks, 19892004

4. Global Transactions,
200215

EMERGENCY HOUSING

SELF-HELP 2.0

TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE

[p. 99]
Country Village Monolith
Residence, Moscow, Russia
Photo Mikhail Belov, online:
http://archi.ru/projects/russia/
735/zagorodnyi-poselok-rezidenciimonolit (accessed 08/29/2015).

[p. 109]
ELEMENTAL in Lo Espejo,
Santiago, Chile
Photo ELEMENTAL, online:
http://www.elementalchile.cl/
en/proyecto/lo-espejo-3
(accessed 07/22/15).

CENTRALIZED STATES

ENTREPRENEURIALISM

[p. 114]
Kilamba Kiaxi (Kilamba New City),
Phase I, Luanda, Angola
Santa Martha - Kilamba Kiaxe at
Panoramio. Licence CC BY-SA 3.0,
Wikimedia Commons, online:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/
wiki/Category:Kilamba?uselang
=de#/media/File:Kilamba_
Kiaxi_-_May_2011_(3).jpg
(accessed 07/15/2015).

[p. 100]
Block 330, Sembawang, Singapore
Photo Ani Vihervaara, 2015.

[p. 110]
Rotonda West, Charlotte County,
Florida, USA
Photo Christoph Gielen, online:
http://www.uncubemagazine.com/
blog/11845293 (accessed
08/23/2015).

[p. 95]
Paper-tube Emergency Shelters
for the Gihembe Refugee Camp
near Byumba, Rwanda
Photo Shigeru Ban Architects,
published in: Aspen Art Museum
(ed.), Shigeru Ban: Humanitarian
architecture (2014), 122.

BRICS PRIVATIZATION
[p. 96]
Brilliant City, Shanghai, China
Photo Florian Urban.
[p. 97]
Hamilton Court, Gurgaon,
New Delhi, India
Published in: P. Manohar,
Architect Hafeez Contractor: Selected
Works 19822006 (2006), 137 (L),
136 (R).
[p. 98]
Enclosed Neighborhoods in
Johannesburg, South Africa,
Published in: U. Jrgens and
M. Gnad, Gated communities
in South Africa: Experiences from
Johannesburg, Environment and
Planning B: Planning and Design, 29
(2002), 343. Source: K. Landmann,
The urban future: enclosed neighbourhoods?," paper presented to
the Urban Futures Conference
Johannesburg, July 1014, 2000.

[p. 101]
Shahrak-e Ekbatan, Tehran, Iran
Photo Khashayar Sharifaee,
published in: A tour of Tehran
by Neighbourhood: Ekbatan in
pictures, The Guardian (August 18,
2014), online: http://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/
gallery/2014/aug/18/tehran-iranneighbourhoods-ekbatan (accessed
08/04/2014).

[p. 115]
Public Housing Schemes,
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Photo Sascha Delz, 2012.

[p. 111]
Minha Casa, Minha Vida, Brazil
Photo Manu Dias/SECOM,
online: http://thecityfixbrasil.com/
2014/10/12/o-desafio-deintegrar-o-minha-casa-minhavida-as-cidades (accessed
08/05/2015).

NEW URBANISM 2.0

PUBLIC NEOLIBERALISM
[p. 102]
HOPE VI, USA
Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company
(DPZ), online: http://blacksheepbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/
2011/01/Form-Based-Zoning1.
pdf (accessed 07/24/15).
[p. 103]
HOPE VI: Park DuValle,
Louisville, USA
Photo Quadrant, online:
http://bettercities.net/images/
9907/park-duvalle (accessed
07/22/2015).

[p. 112]
Waldsiedlung Zehlendorf
Onkel Toms Htte, Berlin, Germany
Akademie der Knste, Berlin,
Arthur-Kster-Sammlung,
Ks-164, photo: Arthur Kster,
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.
[p. 113]
Kangbashi New Area, Ordos City,
Inner Mongolia, China
Photo Adam James Smith
and Song Ting.

117

Should, despite intensive research,

a copyright holder not have been
consulted, then legitimate claims
will be compensated within
the terms of the usual agreements.
Please contact info@hkw.de.

Contributors

Rana Dasgupta was born in Canterbury, England, and

studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. In 2001, he moved to Delhi to write.
His first novel, Tokyo Cancelled, appeared in 2005 and
was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Solo
(2009) won the Commonwealth Writers Prize. In 2014,
he published Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century
Delhi, a non-fiction account of the stupendous changes
engulfing his adopted city as a result of globalization.
Dasgupta is Modern Culture and Media Visiting
Lecturer at Brown University, Rhode Island.
Mariana Fix is a lecturer at the Institute of Economics
at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP),
and author of Parceiros da Excluso (Boitempo Editorial,
2001) and So Paulo, Cidade Global (Boitempo Editorial,
2007). She holds a PhD in economics from the University of Campinas (2012), a Masters in Sociology from
the University of So Paulo (2003), and a professional
degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of So Paulo (1996). Mariana was a visiting research
scholar at the City University of New Yorks (CUNY)
Graduate Center as an Urban Studies Foundation fellow
(November 2012March 2013). She is a member of the

Housing and Human Settlements Laboratory at the

School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University
of So Paulo, and has been working with Right to the
City organizations for several years.
Andrew Herscher is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan with appointments at the Taubman
College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Department of the History of Art, and Department of Slavic
Languages and Literatures. His work explores modern
and contemporary spatial politics, concentrating on
architectural and urban formations of political violence,
humanitarian and human rights issues, resistance and
dissent, and collective memory and identity. He is the
author of Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the
Kosovo Conflict (Stanford University Press, 2010) and The
Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (University of Michigan
Press, 2012) and is currently completing books on the
politics of monuments inand after the breakup of
Yugoslavia and the project of urban decline in Detroit.
Sandi Hilal is an architect and researcher. She headed the
United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for
Palestine Refugees in the Near East Camp Improvement

118

Program in the West Bank (200814). She is the founding

member and co-director of DAAR, an architectural
office as well as an artistic residency program that combines conceptual speculations and architectural interventions. Alongside research and practice, Sandi Hilal is
engaged in critical pedagogy, she is the founding member
of Campus in Camps an experimental educational
program in Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Bethlehem. Hilal
is a co-author of the book Architecture after Revolution
(Sternberg, 2014), and has co-curated various research
projects on the contemporary urban condition such as
Border Devices (200207) with Multiplicity, and
Stateless Nation with Alessandro Petti (200207).
Anne Kockelkorn is an architectural historian and urban
researcher. Her work focuses on the discourse, representation, and production of large-scale housing in France
during and after the neoliberal reforms of 1977. She
studied architecture at the cole Nationale Suprieure
dArchitecture de Paris-Belleville and the Kunsthoch
schule Berlin-Weiensee and since 2009 she has been a
lecturer and researcher at the chairs for architectural
history, theory, and sociology at the Department of
Architecture at ETH Zurich. Since 2013 she is co-editor
of CandideJournal for Architectural Knowledge.
David Madden is an urban sociologist and an Assistant
Professor in Sociology and the Cities Programme at the
London School of Economics. His teaching and research
is focused on urban studies and social theory. He has
conducted qualitative, ethnographic, and historical research in New York, London, and elsewhere, examining
housing and especially public housing, public space,
neighborhood change, the politics of urban development, planetary urbanization, urban theory, and other
topics. He is currently finishing a book co-authored
with Peter Marcuse on housing politics, and working on
another project that examines public housing and urban
restructuring in New York and London. David Madden
has previously taught at Columbia University, New York
University, and Bard College. He holds a PhD from
Columbia University and is a member of the editorial
board of the journal CITY.
Reinhold Martin is Professor of Architecture in the
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, where he directs the

Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American

Architecture. He is a member of Columbias Institute for
Comparative Literature and Society as well as the Committee on Global Thought. Martin is a founding co-editor
of the journal Grey Room and has published widely on
the history and theory of modern and contemporary
a rchitecture. He is the author of The Organizational
Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (MIT
Press, 2003), and Utopias Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minnesota, 2010), as well as the coauthor, with Kadambari Baxi, of Multi-National City:
Architectural Itineraries (Actar, 2007). In 2012, Martin
co-curated with Barry Bergdoll Foreclosed: Rehousing the
American Dream, at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, for which he and Bergdoll also co-edited the exhib
ition catalogue. Currently, Martin is working on two
books: a history of the nineteenth-century American
university as a media complex, and a study of the contemporary city at the intersection of esthetics and politics.
Justin McGuirk is a writer and curator based in London.
He is the chief curator at the Design Museum and the
head of the Master program Design Curating & Writing
at the Design Academy Eindhoven. He has been the
director of Strelka Press, the design critic for The Guardian,
and the editor of Icon magazine. His book Radical Cities:
Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture (2014)
is published by Verso.
AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist with particular interest in emerging forms of collective life across cities of the
so-called Global South. He works across a range of
academic, administrative, research, policy-making, advocacy, and organizational contexts. Simone is presently
Research Professor at the Max Planck Institute for the
Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity; Visiting Professor
of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London;
and Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at the African
Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. Key publications include: In Whose Image: Political Islam and Urban
Practices in Sudan (University of Chicago Press, 1994); For
the City Yet to Come: Urban Change in Four African Cities
(Duke University Press, 2004); City Life from Jakarta to
Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (Routledge, 2009); and
Jakarta: Drawing the City Near (University of Minnesota
Press, 2014).

119

The series Wohnungsfrage is edited by Jesko Fezer,

Christian Hiller, Nikolaus Hirsch, Wilfried Kuehn,
Hila Peleg.
Editing: Stefan Aue, Jesko Fezer, Martin Hager,
Christian Hiller, Nikolaus Hirsch, Anne Kockelkorn,
Reinhold Martin
Editorial Assistance: Alexandra Nehmer,
Franziska Janetzky, Michaela Richter
Translations of the introductions to
the Atlas chapters: Tim Jones
Copy-editing and Proofreading:
Mandi Gomez, April Lamm
Graphic Design: Studio Matthias Grlich
Lithography: Felix Scheu
Typefaces: Eesti Display, Sectra (Grilli Type)
Printing: PgeDruck, Leipzig
Binding: Buchbinderei Mnch, Leipzig
Published by:
Spector Books
Harkortstrae 10, D-04107 Leipzig
www.spectorbooks.com
Distribution:
Germany, Austria: GVA, Gemeinsame Verlagsauslieferung
Gttingen GmbH & Co. KG, www.gva-verlage.de
Switzerland: AVA Verlagsauslieferung AG, www.ava.ch
France, Belgium: Interart Paris, www.interart.fr
UK: Central Books Ltd, www.centralbooks.com
USA, Canada: RAM Publications+Distribution Inc.,
www.rampub.com
Australia, New Zealand: Perimeter Distribution,
www.perimeterdistribution.com

Wohnungsfrage Team:
Concept and Program: Jesko Fezer,
Nikolaus Hirsch, Wilfried Kuehn, Hila Peleg
Project Leader: Annette Bhagwati, Zdravka Bajovic
Research and Publications: Christian Hiller
Research and Project Coordination Exhibition:
Zdravka Bajovic
Project Coordination Exhibition: Jessica Pez
Project Coordination Academy: Stefan Aue
Assistant to the Project Leader: Dunja Sallan
Project Assistance: Franziska Janetzky,
Ben Mohai, Alexandra Nehmer
Production Management: Thomas Burkhard
Intern: Deborah Avanzato
Wohnungsfrage takes place as part of the
HKW project 100 Years of Now.
hkw.de/now
Haus der Kulturen der Welt is a division of
Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin GmbH (KBB).
Director: Bernd Scherer
General Manager: Charlotte Sieben
Chair of the Advisory Board:
Staatsministerin Prof. Monika Grtters MdB
Haus der Kulturen der Welt is funded by

Credits:
Justin McGuirk, Honeywell, I'm Home! The Internet of
Things and the New Domestic Landscape. First published
in: Architecture as Intangible Infrastructure (guest-edited by
Nikolaus Hirsch), e-flux journal #64 (4/2015)
Rana Dasgupta, extract from CAPITAL: THE ERUPTION OF
DEHLI by Rana Dasgupta. Copyright Rana Dasgupta 2014.
Used by permission of Canongate Books, Edinburgh (UK);
Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Random House LLC; and The Wylie
Agency (UK) Limited.
2015 the editors, authors, artists,
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and Spector Books

Printed in Germany
First edition
ISBN 978-3-959050-48-7

120

This volume appears in the series Wohnungsfrage, which explores the possibilities of social
and self-determined housing. The series presents
new commentaries on re-publications of seminal
historical works, topical case studies from across
the world, and publications by urban political
initiatives, architects, and artists participating in
the exhibition project Wohnungsfrage.
Volumes:
Martin Wagner, Das wachsende Haus; Hannes
Meyer, Co-op Interieur; Friedrich Engels,
Zur Wohnungsfrage; Kollektiv fr sozialistisches
Bauen, Proletarische Bauausstellung; International
Case Studies; Amie Siegel, Love Letters;
Kotti & Co + Estudio Teddy Cruz + Forman;
Stille Strae 10 + Assemble; Kolabs + Atelier
Bow-Wow; Dogma + Realism Working Group;
Wohnungsfrage Ausstellungsfhrer / Exhibition
Guide
The publication series is part of the exhibition
project Wohnungsfrage (October 23 to
December 14, 2015), conceived by Jesko Fezer,
Nikolaus Hirsch, Wilfried Kuehn, and Hila Peleg
for Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
www.hkw.de/wohnungsfrage

Essays

Atlas

3
David J. Madden
Spatial Projects: The Politics of Neighborhood
in New York City

59
Reinhold Martin
Preface: The Neoliberal Housing System

13
Mariana Fix
The Real Estate Circuit and (the Right to)
the City: Notes on the Housing Question in Brazil
23
AbdouMaliq Simone
Housing Systems as Environments of Practice
and Information
31
Sandi Hilal
Roofless

61
Anne Kockelkorn
Introduction: A Sample Atlas
65
1. Beginnings, 196881
79
2. Postmodernist Revisions, 198189
91
3. New States and Networks, 19892004
105
4. Global Transactions, 200215

39
Andrew Herscher
Blight, Spatial Racism, and the Demolition
of the Housing Question in Detroit
47
Justin McGuirk
Honeywell, Im Home! The Internet of Things
and the New Domestic Landscape
53
Rana Dasgupta
Landscape

Printed in Germany
First edition
ISBN 978-3-959050-48-7

Spector Books