Friday, November 04, 2005
Modern Architecture and Unrest
I first learned about Le Corbusier in architecture class and was thoroughly underwhelmed. His work was always too sterile for me; I couldn't imagine anyone living, working or worshipping in his designs. Well, it seems that people who have been living in his highrises also feel the same way.
From the Wikipedia entry on LeCorbusier:
... Le Corbusier's views on urban planning have also been largely discredited for encouraging the design of public plazas that are viewed by many as being sterile and divisive of urban space. The public housing projects influenced by his ideas are seen by most as having had the effect of isolating poor communities in monolithic high-rises and breaking the social ties integral to a community's development. One of his most influential critics has been Jane Jacobs, who delivered a scathing critique of Le Corbusier's urban design theories in her seminal work "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." The city of Brasília, currently the capital of Brazil, is a planned city based exclusively on the principles of Le Corbusier. Unfortunately, Brasilia is considered by most urban planners to be a colossal failure. ...
Some of his housing projects in St. Louis and Chicago have also been deemed failures and torn down. Of course, there were bad policies for public housing associated with these failures, but having such a large population density in such sterile, hopeless, non-descript environments can't help the morale of people stuck living there. I have always thought that residents need to take pride in their homes; they need to be able to personalize the space and feel like it is "theirs" in order to feel secure.
The projects in the current area of unrest have been described as "concrete bunkers", but this unrest has been a dormant problem for many years. In an article written in 2002, Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, Theodore Dalrymple describes the interractions between bad crime policy and bad architecture that creates unrest among France's many immigrants (not just Muslims):
... Architecturally, the housing projects sprang from the ideas of Le Corbusier, the Swiss totalitarian architect—and still the untouchable hero of architectural education in France—who believed that a house was a machine for living in, that areas of cities should be entirely separated from one another by their function, and that the straight line and the right angle held the key to wisdom, virtue, beauty, and efficiency. The mulish opposition that met his scheme to pull down the whole of the center of Paris and rebuild it according to his “rational” and “advanced” ideas baffled and frustrated him.
The inhuman, unadorned, hard-edged geometry of these vast housing projects in their unearthly plazas brings to mind Le Corbusier’s chilling and tyrannical words: “The despot is not a man. It is the . . . correct, realistic, exact plan . . . that will provide your solution once the problem has been posed clearly. . . . This plan has been drawn up well away from . . . the cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds.”
But what is the problem to which these housing projects, known as cités, are the solution, conceived by serene and lucid minds like Le Corbusier’s? It is the problem of providing an Habitation de Loyer Modéré—a House at Moderate Rent, shortened to HLM—for the workers, largely immigrant, whom the factories needed during France’s great industrial expansion from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the unemployment rate was 2 percent and cheap labor was much in demand. By the late eighties, however, the demand had evaporated, but the people whose labor had satisfied it had not; and together with their descendants and a constant influx of new hopefuls, they made the provision of cheap housing more necessary than ever.
An apartment in this publicly owned housing is also known as a logement, a lodging, which aptly conveys the social status and degree of political influence of those expected to rent them. The cités are thus social marginalization made concrete: bureaucratically planned from their windows to their roofs, with no history of their own or organic connection to anything that previously existed on their sites, they convey the impression that, in the event of serious trouble, they could be cut off from the rest of the world by switching off the trains and by blockading with a tank or two the highways that pass through them, (usually with a concrete wall on either side), from the rest of France to the better parts of Paris. I recalled the words of an Afrikaner in South Africa, who explained to me the principle according to which only a single road connected black townships to the white cities: once it was sealed off by an armored car, “the blacks can foul only their own nest.” ...
[Emphasis added.]
Thanks to Shared Daily for the link.
Having immigrants live in these places is just a symptom of the general level of distain that is evident in all areas of public policy.