Architecture and Economics

Although the title of this entry is suitably broad, I want to look at a very specific economic situation - extreme poverty. There has been, in recent years, a growing interest amongst architects in the formal and social properties of slums (favela, barrio, etc). The first academic interest in the subject roughly coincides with Mike Davis's brilliant book Planet of Slums (2006). This is an encyclopedic survey and discussion of slums the world over and I recommend it most highly to anyone who isn't an architecture student! If you are an architecture student, avoid this book as if your (professional) life depends on it because it does. If you read this book you will immediately leave architecture school (because it is completely irrelevant, bourgeois, and decadent) and find yourself in Caracas, or Manilla, or Cairo working for free - a total failure.

A Google search (terms "architecture slums") returned 1 600 000 hits, including titles like Learning from Lagos and Slums: The Architecture Vernacular of Swelling Cities. While I find my colleagues' interest in slums and their evolution (slightly) heart-warming, in my experience, there is an essential aspect of the creation and maintenance of slums that has been completely ignored.

According to International Business Times, the five largest slums in the world are Neza-Chalco-Itza (Mexico City), Orangi Town (Karachi, Pakistan), Dharavi (Mumbai, India), Khayelitsha (Cape Town, South Africa),  and Kibera (Nairobi, Kenya). They add, "Rounding out a list of the 10 biggest slums would include communities in Bogota, Colombia; Baghdad, Iraq, Venezuela, and Ghana."

These places have some things in common. Mexico was caught in a debt trap after the Volcker Shock and restructured by fiat of the IMF. Pakistan is in default on loans from the IMF and is undergoing restructuring. The IMF's own website proclaims;

"In recent years, the Fund has provided India with technical assistance in a number of areas, including the development of the government securities market, foreign exchange market reform, public expenditure management, tax and customs administration." - in other words, restructuring.

South Africa's neo-liberal restructuring (and IMF loans) are well documented. In fact, research any of these countries (with the notable exception of Iraq) using search terms "country IMF" and you'll find they have all been aggressively restructured. Iraq, of course, got the most aggressive restructuring of any country in recent memory but it was handled by the US Air Force and Marines (and then by Imperial Overlord Paul Bremer).

Slums are not naturally occurring phenomena. They are created by economic decisions. Yes, it is true that conditions of general exploitation of some of these countries necessarily resulted in extreme poverty. But in most cases, the exploitation was recent and deliberate - done by the IMF and World Bank to create a business friendly climate. It is also interesting to note how this restructuring has resulted in extreme riches for a few in each country.

Carlos "Slim" Helu became the world's second richest person after Mexico privatized its television networks. The largest private house in the world is currently under construction in Mumbai. As Jean Baptiste Aristide said, before he was deposed by the US and kidnapped by the French, "Wealth creates poverty."

Architects cannot morally study conditions of extreme poverty without some consideration of how the condition of such poverty was created. It is no longer sufficient to assume poverty is a part of the human condition, natural, and unavoidable. This is not only morally unacceptable, it is academically questionable. It is reasonable to assume poverty created by concerted government actions will have a different social and formal representation than poverty created by natural disaster, war, or other means.

It seems strange to me that architects are doing this kind of research (connecting system of government to architectural form) already. Theorist have no problem identifying fascist or communist architecture. There is extensive theoretical work on the major projects of FDR's New Deal. I think the time is here for a theory of neo-liberal architecture and, unfortunately, I think the place to look for it is in the world's slums.