Our Cities are Tyrannical. What would a Democratic City Look Like?

a concrete (no pun intended) vision of how things could be different

Photo by Coleen Palad on Unsplash

A Twitter follower of mine recently recommended this article to me:

The article is fairly straight-forward: exactly what you would expect from the title.

Most people do not particularly enjoy architecture built during the 20th or 21st centuries.

(It so happens that I do: I quite enjoy certain examples of Brutalism, and am a huge fan of West Coast Modernism. But — well. I am not everyone. If most people are deeply unhappy with their surroundings, that is an issue.)

The article’s core argument is as such:

One of the most infuriating aspects of contemporary architecture is its willful disdain for democracy. When people are polled, they tend to prefer older buildings to postwar buildings; very few postwar buildings make it onto lists of most treasured places. Yet architects are reluctant to build in the styles that people find more beautiful. Why? Well, Peter Eisenman has spoken for a lot of architects in being generally dismissive of democracy, saying that the role of the architect is not to give people what they want, but what they should want if they were intelligent enough to have good taste… …The left, in particular, should eagerly embrace a conception of architecture that is both democratic and sophisticated. Many of the worst parts of contemporary architecture have echoes of the “bad” parts of leftism: the dreariness of the Soviet Union, the dehumanizing tendency to try to impose from above a grand conception of a new social order. They exemplify what James Scott calls “high modernism,” the twisted effort to “rationalize” human beings rather than accept them as they are and build places that suit them and that they like. The good kind of leftism, on the other hand, operates from the bottom up rather than the top down. It helps people create their own places, rather than creating monolithic structures into which they are placed for their own good. It looks far more like a village than a tower block, decentralized and with a strong connection between the makers of a place and the inhabitants of a place. At the moment, the needs or wishes of the people who actually have to use buildings are rarely considered at all. Architecture schools do not actually teach students anything about craft or about emotion; most of the courses are highly mathematical, dedicated to engineering and theories of form rather than to understanding traditional modes of building or understanding what people want out of their buildings. Unless they are an uber-wealthy client, users of buildings rarely have much input into the design process. Students do not get to say what kind of school they would like, office workers do not get to say whether they would prefer to work in a glass tower or in a leafy complex of wifi-enabled wooden pagodas. Some of this may come from the design process itself. Unlike in the age of artisanship, there is today a strong separation between the process of designing and the process of making. Frank Gehry designs his work using CAD software, then someone else has to go out and actually build it. But that rupture means that architecture becomes something imposed upon people. It isn’t participatory, and it doesn’t adapt in response to their needs.

Like far too much of the best of leftism, this marries deep social insight with frustrating economic illiteracy. Rennix and Robinson come so close to the truth! If they simply stopped at “Unless they are an uber-wealthy client, users of buildings rarely have much input into the design process”, they would be 100% correct.

Photo by Jonathan Riley on Unsplash

This ugliness has nothing to do with the design process. It has to do with who owns the land, and who gets to make decisions about which architect is hired — and which of their designs are built.

It’s capitalism, my friends — specifically, ever-increasingly-unequal distributions of property ownership. There are pretty straight-forward ways to make a pretty building —people have been doing it for most of human history. The extremely wealthy — the sort of people who can buy up prime urban real estate and place massive buildings on it — don’t necessarily want to make pretty or functional buildings.

They might.

But, they might just as well want to stand out with an extremely unconventional design from a high-status designer. Because there are only so many ways to make a good-looking building, most unconventional buildings will be unconventionally ugly.

Photo by Lance Anderson on Unsplash

Further, even if they do want to make a nice building, they will run into issues doing so: sitting at the top of a hierarchy inevitably reduces the information that you can get from those on the bottom of that hierarchy. There is not usually a clear channel for the people who actually use these buildings to tell the people paying for them what sort of building they would like — and, they might be disincentivized from trying to tell them what they want in the first place.

Finally: buildings aren’t like many other parts of the market — if an ultra-rich low-info person or corporation has a massive building built, and that building isn’t very good, then that mistake is very unlikely to be corrected — under the current system.

Let’s say that the building is so bad that no one wants to use it, and those people have other options, so the business(s) housed in the buildings go out of business — or they leave. There’s still a massive building there, and whoever buys it next is likely to find that it still isn’t worth it to redevelop it — whatever the costs of keeping an ugly building that no one wants to work in (and therefore having to pay higher wages, to make up for that) or buy stuff in (and therefore having to charge lower prices) are, they’re likely to be less than the costs of redevelopment. If there’s a massive building on prime real estate, there’s going to be a use for it.

Photo by JC Gellidon on Unsplash

But, really, that is the good case. The bad case, the more realistic case, is that wealth is concentrated enough that there aren’t other options — or, the other options are also shitty buildings, for much the same reasons that wealth concentration creates shitty buildings in the first place. If this is the case, if there are no other options, the owner of the ugly building pays no or minimal costs. The costs — the monetary value of the psychic anguish of living in an ugly environment made that way by uncomprehending and uncaring men — are paid solely by the people who are forced to use that building.

Even in the good case, the cost of having an ugly building is at least partially externalized on those who are merely passing by: even if they have no buying or selling to do in that building, they can still be made miserable by its mere presence.

As Rennix and Robinson say:

The environments we surround ourselves with have the power to shape our thoughts and emotions. People trammeled in on all sides by ugliness are often unhappy without even knowing why. If you live in a place where you are cut off from light, and nature, and color, and regular communion with other humans, it is easy to become desperate, lonely, and depressed.

Well — that’s a description of a negative externality. And, of course, the thing to do with a negative externality (at least, within the frame of capitalism and the state) is to tax it.

Photo by Alex Iby on Unsplash

So, what would an ‘ugliness tax’ look like?

What if, once a year, every resident of a municipality got to select one building in that city and force the owner of that building to pay a fine?

The fine could be adjusted based on the income of the owner. Certain buildings could be exempt. Perhaps privately-owned primary residences on the logic that a citizen’s home is her castle — perhaps factories, on the principle that factories are supposed to be ugly and are sequestered in industrial districts anyways.

The expected value of the fine would be proportional to the portion of people who think that their building is the most noxious in the city, and as such would make it worth it for the owners of buildings to attempt to invest in making them beautiful.

If we want beautiful public spaces, we need to incentivize that. If we’re going to identify the issue with cities as being that they are undemocratic, then we need to think about what a democratic city would look like.

I don’t care if you disagree with my proposal — what I’ve done here is lay-out an immediate and achievable idea of how things could be different (beyond the obvious one of radically redoing how our society handles concepts of property, so as to make these concentrations of wealth impossible — i.e., freed market socialism).

If you substitute your own solution, then that is perfectly fine — I will have started the conversation as to how we might improve our public spaces.