In: Metro-millieu economy: ruralitiy as relational gap between inhabiting scales, University of

Belgrade, Forthcomig

Metromilieux and the architecture of new economies

Pieter Versteegh

Abstract

We propose metromilieux as a figure of post-urban habitat. It juxtaposes the urban figure,

materialization of neoliberal economy: the urban figure is based upon the accumulation of goods in
surplus and throughput (import/export), enhancing consumerist behaviour, hence organising a spatial
other at its service, conceptually annexed but excluded in economic, socio-cultural and political terms:
rural space.
In the anthropocene and facing the awareness of a finite habitat, it is necessary to invent ways of
dwelling based upon other economic precepts: It is only through post-growth that we can consider a
post-urban habitat. We hence need to re-examine the inaugural mandate of economy (etymologically:
housekeeping), notably in terms of those values of the oïkos that have been separated by the nomos of
neoliberalism: we situate those in commons: non-tradable goods, labour, services and qualities.
Commons, not material wealth, are the key to dignified life: life providing access to information,
education, meaning, creativity.
Such values are still rooted and existing in rural space - exposed however to the ferocious greed of a
colonialist and indebted urban habitat. What role can architects and spatial planners adopt? The
invention of new figures of habitat, counterbalancing the inevitably performative metropolis and
augmenting a uterine rurality - metromilieux - can help organising these values in equitable ways.
Metromilieux are rhizomatic organisations of space connecting human beings to different
manifestations of nature and other living species, based upon shared commons, operational on various
levels and scales. The need exists, for such figures to arise, to suspend the current architectural
paradigms: the object-house-city on a site, and the mandate of the production of built space, in favour
of the accompaniment of a holistically understood spatial transformation.

metro- (mĕt′rō) or metr-

Uterus [From Greek mētrā, uterus, from mētēr, mētr-, mother; see māter- in Indo-European
roots.]

milieu (ˈmiːljɜː; French miljø)

 An environment; surroundings location, or a setting. [French, from Old French, center : mi,
middle (from Latin medius; see medhyo- in Indo-European roots) + lieu, place (from Latin
locus).]

Locus (lō′kəs)

A locality; a place. A center or focus of great activity or intense concentration: [From Old Latin
stlocus, from Proto-Indo-European *stel- (“to put, place, locate”).]
n. pl. loci (-sī′, -kē, -kī′) Female parts, uterus

1 facing the performative urban

The metropolis is the urban par excellence. Etymologically a mother-city, it is not devoid of
problematic contemporary connotations of size, of polarity, of exemplarity, single unit of global
financial economic and political power. In the anthropocene, facing the growing awareness that
human habitat is a finite one threatened by consumerist lifestyles and the globalised economy it has
engendered, the very predominance of the urban as ultimate figure of human habitat is suspect: the
city is after all the embodiment of neoliberal growth economy. (Versteegh-Guillot).

Historically, the urban fact is based upon the concentrated accumulation of surplus of goods produced
in rural space – whereas the latter is organised by just-in-time production (Woods). The urban figure
thus creates an economic division, a gap organised by the installation of a throughput that is essential
to its survival. On the one hand, cities are dependant on the importation of their basic resources and all
sorts of goods (food, water, energy, clean air, building materials, tools, clothing, furniture, etc), the
urban being the space from which the primary and secondary sectors tend to be excluded. On the other
hand, cities export all kinds of surplus: waste in every imaginable form (polluted water and air,
garbage, rejected goods), and collateral space-consuming phenomena such as different forms of
pendular migration (ubiquity and commuting due to gentrification, to leisure, sports and to resourcing
induced by overly concentrated forms of dwelling rejecting contact with nature). One can say that the
urban figure, by its instalment of throughput, is a form of habitat that structurally organises and
enhances consumerist behaviour: it is the embodiment of neoliberal growth economy, its materialised
human habitat. It is growth-dependant: many cities suffer from a Ponzi-effect: they need new entrants
(new tax paying inhabitants) in order to continue financing their own subsistence (growing
infrastructure cost and debt servicing). Unable to stop growing, of negative internal growth (birth rates
way below 2), they need to attract and also import new inhabitants (Versteegh-Guillot, 2019).

This has a great influence on urban’s capacity to function as a political agora. Even socialist and
ecologist politics adopt neoliberal growth necessary for the survival of cities. One can thus observe an
overall shift of urban politics to the right. Urban space hence loses its role as a political space, and
rural space starts to occupy a central role in contemporary political debates. One can mention in this
context the yellow vests movement in France, the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump as
president of the U.S. In general, politics that are today discarded as those of retarded and badly

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educated rural populations should be analysed with respect to urban’s incapacity to assume a balanced
political role. Knowing that rural space can traditionally be said to have a stronger territorialising
dimension than the urban, one can understand the emergence of growth-critical, left and extreme right
political debates, especially when the feeling exists among rural dwellers that their preoccupations are
no longer present in the predominantly urban political spheres.

Indeed, by committing to neoliberalist growth economy, the urban dwelling figure has annexed all
other space, nature, and the entire biosphere as its economic, political and socio-cultural sub-system.
Rural space has been reduced to a resource landscape for urban use within metropolitan/global
economical growth purposes: a space providing consumables and energy, housing, leisure and holiday
resorts, as well as a depository of pollution, waste and rejected goods and materials. Sometimes the
urban figure is inclusive and embraces rural space: at such times it exercises self-given ‘rights’ to
consume and to absorb rural resources and values. Sometimes it is exclusive and disconnects itself
from rural space, for instance by organising statistics and narratives allowing to construct and
maintain urban claims of low space-consumption, of high financial-economic added value, of
advanced technology, of socio-cultural and political superiority, or when refusing social
responsibilities like hosting endangered populations: refugees, homeless, undesired nomads. The
urban figure carefully organises its own performativity. In its ultimate form, the metropolis, it tends to
substitute itself to the welfare state in an unprecedented demographic, economic and political
neoliberal growth race.

Urban representations of its superiority as an advanced economic, technological, cultural and

intellectual human habitat are not only unfounded, and its discourses hence often demagogic: urban
dwelling modes and behaviour are colonialist (Crettaz 2000). Urban space, organising its own
discourse of performativity, encompasses ‘other’ space for its own use. It is therefore also by
definition humanity’s most parasitic habitat: a parasite, from παρά (besides) and σιτος (food), is «an
organism that lives on or in another organism, deriving benefit from living on or in that other
organism, while not contributing towards that other organism sufficiently to cover the cost to that
other organism» (Versteegh 2017).

Just like other colonialisms, while the urban multiplies claims of economic and political superiority, it
has on the contrary contracted a substantial economic debt relative to rural territories (Bonnet 2019),
and a non lesser political one: debts reflecting centuries of unrestrained exploitation.

2 the inaugural mandate of economics: oïkos, nomos, commons.

Initiatives to improve urban environments as equitable habitats show that the anthropocene, through
an increasing awareness of ethical and ecological order is leading to a shift of human life values.
These initiatives are very welcome: urban agriculture, urban greenery, local production, waste
recycling, green energy production, ways of living attempting to reduce consumerist behaviour are
undoubtedly improving the urban ecologic footprint. Other urban reactions to the anthropocene
awareness are less valuable, even counter-productive: electric cars pollute as much as clean diesel
vehicles, be it elsewhere. Their massive introduction not only induces an acceleration of vehicle

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replacement in mainly urban areas, exporting the polluting ones to remote areas: the needed energy
supply cannot be absorbed within current capacities of electrical energy production – let alone
renewable ones. Inordinate energy and climate regulations for housing provoke a precocious
replacement of existing patrimony raising the use of grey energy and leading to a proliferation of
technologically immature products, hence to an accelerated obsolescence. 0-energy housing
productions are often inhabitable thermos. Taxing pollution is a (perverted) way of ‘buying’ the right
to pollute, and to include common goods such as clean air as a neoliberal sub-system. The reduction
of climate questions to the sole factor of carbon emission leads to inordinate behaviour and false
conclusions, from limitations of wood heating to the devaluation of organic food production due to its
larger carbon footprint (forgetting criteria like its contribution to biodiversity, the improvement of
soil, the slowing down of water). Unsurprisingly, climate catastrophism is being exploited by
industrial lobbies. And unsurprisingly, the urban response to the Anthropocene awareness is one that
enhances its own performativity, absorbing bio-economics as a neoliberal drive for reorganised
growth, persisting in colonialist behaviour relative to other habitats. It annexes natural resources that
were previously considered infinite – commons, as tradable goods: clean air, water, can then be
bought, privatised, included in the economic growth system, no longer accessible for all. French
economist Geneviève Azam calls this the bio-economics of the Anthropocene as the age of Man: It
departs from the idea that Mankind, aware of its influence on a finite habitat, can manage nature by
including it in its economic growth system. According to Azam, this is a dangerous track, since it
intrinsically leads to a potential privatisation of nature – restricted access to common goods for some
groups of human beings in favour of other ones. Azam pleads for a different bio-economic system:
one of the Anthropocene as the age of limits, an economic system of resilience compatible with the
vulnerability of societies, of human beings and of ecosystems: that of an inventive renouncement
(Azam 2019). It is not so much our influence on climate that endangers our existence on earth. Earth
is not in danger, and will expose us to climate changes of multiple orders of the one currently at stake,
in which we do not have the slightest influence – but which we have the intelligence and resilience to
cope with. What is at stake here is more the very question of consumerist behaviour, of throughput, of
the limitless consumption of goods and commons on the one hand and the limitless rejections on the
other. Consumerist behaviour, while being the main engine of pollution and carbon emission, is a
living mode that alters humanity in the sense that, by devaluating the inherent – disposable - material
and immaterial qualities of the object, of the other, represses values of care, of solidarity, of social
engagement, of common sense. Consumerist behaviour, indispensible for maintaining neoliberal
growth, destabilizes the human psyche.

Hence the important question is not so much how to include anthropocene values within global
economy and its predominant urban figure, but one of the invention of new economic and dwelling
systems and figures, departing from the value-shift that is operational today: of post-urban and post-
growth nature.

For this reason we propose to analyse economy’s inaugural mandate: that, present in its etymology of
nomos: to name and to manage, the oïkos: the house, the family, the societal unit. Similarly to the
ancient Greek separation of man’s and woman’s spaces within the house, economy, through nomos,

4
has organised the urban as a privileged space separated from rural territory. This initial divide was one
of equilibrium and equivalence.

The oïkos, in its general acceptation, is the total set of goods and beings attached to a specific habitat
and place of production. The understanding of goods and beings in the anthropocene is subject to
change: mankind, aware of the finiteness of its habitat, of the irreversible effects of its activity on
natural environment, is no longer standing outside of nature. Economic values shift as well: notions of
ecological balance and biodiversity become central, resources are no longer infinite, oceans and air no
longer eternally cleaning receptacles of waste and pollution. The pressure of economic greed on
common goods (like air and water), and its attempts to turn them into tradable ones, lead to an
intensified appreciation and a broader understanding of commons. Commons are shared assets that do
not exist without care: their value depends on the extent to which communities care for them – or on
the extent to which they generate caring communities. They are not limited to material resources but
include social, cultural, political aspects, as well as affect. The finite condition of human habitat
induces a shift of values: from culture to nature, from growth to balance, from private and public
ownership to commons, from production and consumerism to care. Hence in human activity - let us
call it labour -, services that are traditionally considered non-tradable acquire value that they are
devoid of in current economic paradigms. What kind of new economics arise from these shifting
human values? When oïkos/nomos, housekeeping is put in the centre of economics?

3 housekeeping

Housekeeping: the performance of tasks relative to the maintenance of the household, also (however
dangerous it is to say so today) traditionally the domain of the feminine, could be defined as that
labour that has no financial-economic value in globalised neoliberal society. As a value, it is
completely absent from its main indicator, the GNP. It is true that feminism and the evolution towards
equal treatment for men and women, have gradually led to the absorption of such tasks by the current
economic system: however, this concerns only those aspects of housekeeping that can be isolated as
quantifiable tasks (cleaning, cooking, baby-sitting, child care, educating, nursery, elderly homes, …,
dog-walking) They tend to be divided in different sub-tasks and outsourced. However, the more this
happens, the clearer it becomes that those parts of housekeeping that are absorbed as tradable service
are very remote from the essential value of housekeeping: let us say a holistic phenomenon of care
driven by shared, soft, qualities – sympathy, mutual support, solidarity, - qualities dependant on affect,
on desire, on shared feelings of communal belonging and rootedness, extending into an equally
common and shared desire for an improved future of dignified life. Caretaking is central in the
household: it is this notion that organises the flow of production, of goods and of resources, and not
the other way around.

Noam Chomsky reminds us that ever since the early years of Fordism, working class considered
waged labour to be like slavery: selling labour was like selling one-self – hence a form of prostitution,
disturbing the traditional value of craftsmanship, where labour was secondary to the creation of a
product of quality. One would sell the product, not labour, maintaining one’s own value as a free

5
human being. Working class, he narrates, did not aspire material wealth but a free dignified life –
dignified meaning a life providing access to meaning, creativity, education, information, allowing to
take rational decisions. During the last century financial economic value has shifted from the useful
and perennial product or service to obsoleteness and mere advertising value, the final stroke to the
destruction of the free human individual. Fordism and consumerism, Chomsky analyses, lead to
uninformed populations devoted to superficial values taking irrational decisions - a political goal
useful for maintaining a democracy regulated by one group of people keeping the other group out of
their hair, to which tremendous economic investments in advertising and political campaigning are
devoted (Chomsky 2019).

In housekeeping, productivity is motivated by a desire for dignified life, not by material wealth, and
dignified life is organised by care. Care, to put it bluntly, relates to quality as productivity relates to
quantity. Were we at this point to discuss the underlying meaning of such human values within the
realm of gendered life, it would take us undoubtedly to considerations of the ways western society,
and with it global economy, has preferred empowerment through fatherhood over maieutics and
motherhood, the first rooted in performativity of endless production, the second in care and the
acknowledgement of the cycles, strengths and weaknesses of birth, nature and life. Current economic
precepts prefer productive over caring performativity – or evacuates care as non-productive,
neglecting this aspect of life that occupies a very central position in the anthropocene awareness.
Equal rights dynamics tend to prorogue this: instead of adapting the economic system to housekeeping
values (for instance by remunerating non-outsourced activity) the accent is put on drawing its
(traditionally female) actors into existing (traditionally male) professions and, as mentioned above, on
transforming housekeeping into production oriented activity.

In the anthropocène awareness, housekeeping, the etymologic origin of economy, is central. The
invention or emergence of economic paradigms compatible with its values – nature, commons, care –,
a new kind of economy, is at stake today.:

4 farming: rurality and the roots of nature, commons and care.

Similarly to the repression of fundamental values of housekeeping in globalised economics, rural

agricultural and peasant activity may be said to be that activity that does not comply to globalised
economic basic paradigms: it is in many ways prevented from following free trade principles. The
primary economic sector is also the one that embodies the failure of neoliberal economy’s most
fundamental paradigm. Agriculture has been made entirely dependent upon subvention and regulation
structures that maintain this disconnection possible - a stranglehold of global economic politics over
the reality of rural economy. Were that done, like in other (hard) sciences), using constants, this
would not be a problem: constants do not participate in the scientific experiment (practice), but allow
scientific systems to be fully operational according to some observed value-difference. On the
contrary, subvention and regulations are continuously adapted variables used in order to maintain and
structure agricultural practice as marginally acceptable within existing economic paradigms. Global
economy’s performativity depends upon a systematic weakening of agriculture and peasantry.

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Not only is this a continuously disturbing factor for the self-regulation of agriculture. The very notion
of subvention is constructing the false believe that agricultural activity is failing to meet efficiency –
whereas in reality the urban debt and the inadequacy of the predominant current economic system are
at stake: a functioning scheme close to perversion and harassment. Peasant populations and farmers
suffer from this phenomenon that forges a pejorative representation of their activity. This negative
representation is amplified, since the emergence of anthropocene awareness, by critique addressed to
farmers and peasants held responsible for the generalised instalment of polluting intensive and
industrial cultures, whereas these were in fact dictated by political economic, industrial and
commercial lobbies and regulations. Peasant culture, the urban dweller tries to convince us, does not
exist anymore – and wherever it still remains, it is synonymous to cultural inferiority relative to the
urban.

In reality, rural habitat exists and largely remains rooted in values that the anthropocene awareness re-
activates. Whereas urban space is one of disconnection from nature, aspiring for cultural and
transhumanist superiority, even aiming at immortality, rurality is the space always remaining rooted in
nature, in earth, weather, seasons and life-cycles. Whereas the urban crystallizes space into private
and public parts, rurality organises commons, in different layers, at different scales. Whereas the
urban outsources care as distinct productive services, care is still fluidly organised as a common value
in rural space. Whereas the urban is the space of excess, rurality is a space of just-in-time production.
The rural awareness of growth, through its earthly rooting, is that of delicate balanced cycles in which
diversity, birth, life and death represent only a small part, subject to carefully prepared fertile soils,
adequate weather conditions, humidity, light and shadows, crop rotation, fallow-land and biodiversity,
the interaction of different components and actors of flora and fauna. Rural values are rooted in
nature, commons and care. These are often discarded as romantic – we are, however, not idealising
them but merely pointing out their relevance within the shifting anthropocene values.

Some of these values remain repressed by the urban dweller: moral economy (Scott), aspects of
nature, wilderness and rural activity perceived as ugly, dirty, dangerous, earth, soil, undesired animal
and plant life, scents, sounds, bodily engagement, life-cycles (birth-life-death), slow life, weather and
climate, vernacular knowledge and ways of doing / learning, low tech craftsmanship: in the eyes of
the urban dweller, rural space is supposed to be a clean aesthetic leisure landscape for the pleasure of
expanded urban dwelling.

Many other rural values are the subject to greed of urban society - appropriated and deflected in order
to service growth and throughput: food production, carefully managed natural, material and energetic
resources, and recycling are evident ones.

The farm is an intergenerational space of inseparable care and productivity. A peasant farmer’s
‘career’ starts being a kid helping in the household, taking care of elderly, feeding animals, helping on
the land outside schooltime, learning and injecting new ideas, taking over main business
responsibility, educating youngsters, turning over responsibilities, taking care of grand-children,
giving advise rooted in experience. His/her activity is multi-disciplinary: farming, veterinary care,
mechanics, management, education, administration. Farming itself is highly adaptive, incorporating an
indispensible attention to weather conditions, climate, seasons, crops rotations, soil fertility, birth,

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growth and decay cycles. The farmer is not a loner: family members occupy different responsible
roles in time and evolve in paralel, the farm’s organisation is a multiple actor self-organizing device.
In the farm, concepts of money, salary, capital, revenue, profit have less meaning 1: it is but one
common means supporting a multidimensional coalescing organisation. It is not the farmer who earns
wages, but the constellation of actors. In the farm, like in the household of old traditions, the purse is a
common one – not rarely in ‘mother’s hands.

Whereas the farm may seem and old-fashioned relic of past society, it contains in fact highly
contemporary management values – recalling that the words manage and the French ménage
(household) share the same root : project based organisation, project-based learning, resource-
recycling, knowledge sharing, job sharing, multi-tasking, life-long learning, intergenerational
flowteams are phenomena without which the peasant farm cannot subsist.

In a society of rising economic uncertainty and renewed contracts with nature, contemporary rural
space is a scenery of innovation, creativity, emerging new lifestyles and economic activity often
unfoundedly appropriated as urban (Versteegh-Guillot 2019).

5 metromilieux

Facing a professional and disciplinary context suffering from an urban lock-in, awkwardly continuing
to praise the urban as the future of human habitats, it is necessary to invent post-urban figures for
dwelling. Such figures, reaching back to the initial divide of economy, must encompass values that it
has repressed: post-urban is therefore by essence post-growth, but also alter-rural. It is not about a
nostalgic return to nature or Eden, but a step forward towards new equilibria for human ways of
dwelling. We have proposed the notion of metromilieux in order to create an alternative to the
metropolitan drift. “A metromilieu is an environment that, faced with neoliberal dogma and the
implied metropolitan corollary fact of polarity and centrality, occupies a balanced space in a
diversified global economic structure. It is invested with a milder and less homogeneous corporality,
both a network of diverse and fragmented densities and a rhizome of entrenched places and localities
of variable scales and economies, that is perpetually attentive to the care that all the individuals and
common goods that are part of it need” (Versteegh-Guillot 2019). The term metromilieu, by is
pleonastic character, emphasizes its etymological meaning of a motherly, uterine space or
environment. It opposes the predatory polarity of the metropolis competing for global productive
power and suggests a smoother connectedness of assemblages (Woods 2019) – always umbilically
related to earth as a complex finite motherly state of precarious nature sustained by collaboration and
surrounded by care. It is an environment that assembles locally rooted, bottom-up phenomena of
resilience operational at different scales, giving them meaning within a new global economic construct
- searching global compatibility without giving away to global neoliberal growth economy.
Metromilieux may very well arise in urban areas,- but their preferred soil is rural. They are alterRural.

1
« A certain confusion of production and consumption, of family and workforce, creates an economy of subsistence and of
surplus where concepts of salary, capital, revenue, profit have less meaning”.

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A metromilieu is necessarily one where commons are central. Commons are assets that do not exist
without care : their value depends upon the extend to which communities of beings care about them –
or to which they can generate caring communities.

In rural space such commons emerge : cultural, ecological, economical, social commons are shared by
different communities, sometimes locally rooted, sometimes translocal - connected to similar places,
to towns, cities or metropolis, sometimes lead by urban dwellers leaving their habitat seeking other
values. Rural entrepreneurship is highly various and innovative in kind : organic agriculture,
educational initiatives, music festivals, recycling businesses, social integration initiatives and many
others, including and not to forget high-tech production (Bouba-Olga …).

Such entrepreneurships have something else in common : they mostly struggle to exist, seeking to find
different ways of connecting to tough economic realities : product monopolies, lack of financial
means, marginal to critical mass relative to economic standards, but also top-down regulations,
lobbies and beliefs rooted in urban culture. They often subsist thanks to competence and knowledge
sharing, barter systems, and volunteerism.

Barter systems are common in peasant rurality. Volunteerism groups all activity evacuated by
economics as secondary to the essence of neoliberal society – it has low financial counter-value. It is
however more than marginal: officially estimated at 8% of worked hours and 5% of the GIP in
Switzerland, it is in reality operational at much larger scales when including household activity. In
rural society revenue and profit have other meaning – so have barter systems and volunteerism: they
participate in a more holistic economic organisation.

Carried by forces of resilience, metromilieux are fertile for invention and innovation. Reducing
logistics, administrative and managerial cost, connecting to local values and competences, they
generate bottom-up organisations engaging in territorial networks at different scales. They tacitly
acknowledge the essential role of care.

6 Architecture

New forms of human habitat emerge, surrounding initiatives and entrepreneurships of different order.
What is architecture’s role in this struggle?

To many among us, the role of the architect is to produce high quality living space – this role remains
central – be it not corollary to the production of buildings.

Architecture is living an almost fusional relationship with the urban, and in many ways has adopted
neoliberalist paradigms. The need for current architectural knowledge and skills will beyond doubt
remain necessary within this context.

However, architects should also be educated to contribute to he anthropocene value-shifts of living,

and architectural practice submitted to thorough critique – a much more difficult task. For architecture
as well, a return to the essence of the oikos, beyond the dwelling machinery that it has become fond
of, is at stake. Many fruitful initiatives exist, notably programmes investigating renewed participative
and social architectural practices, but much is left to do.

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The house, ‘la machine à habiter’, and the city are mirrored images. The 1926 Frankfort Kitchen, by
Margarete Shütte-Lihotzky perfectly illustrates the way in which modern architecture has divided the
house into primary and secondary spaces: serviced and service spaces. Living spaces have emerged
from this division as privileged, masculine, ‘cultivated’ space, relative to repressed secondary service
spaces: the kitchen, the bathroom, – spaces of the feminine, reduced to their minutely dimensioned
functional efficiency and supposedly remaining ever clean. Initially acclaimed by feminists for its
contribution to easing women’s tasks, the Frankfort Kitchen has rapidly become the symbol of a sexist
repression: before, spaces for cooking, socialising, resting, cleaning, reading, relaxing, sleeping,
washing, production and reproduction were shared or intertwined in various ways. Modern
architecture has operated a divide in ‘houseness’ that finds a clear echo in the division of land in urban
and rural spaces: on the one hand, the city, a privileged cultivated space, a machinery for inhabiting
earth that organises and confines rural space, neatly cleaned of its undesirable beings and aspects, and
at its service on the other hand.

The separation of service space within the house as secondary and feminine, and the similar
separation of rural space as secondary (re)production and service space, home to suspect wilderness
and nature as sexuality, a womb, an original space of engendering but also of original sin, is highly
significant. The return to the oïkos, the organisation of the ancient greek house can be a valuable lead
to what it may mean to deconstruct this divide. The oïkos’ rich and egalitarian division into the andron
and the gyneceum, the subtle way in which common spaces intertwine, and the presence of an
exterior as an inner part in each of them inform us about other ways to co-inhabit earth. Metropoles
and metromilieux can live an intertwined life of equivalence, without the claim of predominance or
superiority of the one above the other, and respectful of their mutual values, differences – and debts.

Without further developing this incursion within gender studies (it will find a particular place in our
follow-up research), we wish to focus on values that this inaugural division uncovers, and their
implications for different architecture and economics.

It implies a critique of several strongly rooted architectural precepts, departing from the evident lead
that the ancient paradigm of the house on a site, an interior separating itself from an exterior, extended
on the territorial scale to that of the city within a landscape of lost rurality, needs to be deconstructed,
and that a new paradigm needs to be constructed from a holistic, a broad interdisciplinary field.

The anthropocene leads to a different awareness of the role of architecture, one of organising natural
and built lived-in space, involving human and other beings. The ideal of the production of buildings
that is central to architectural schools and profession today is obsolete in this thought. Examples show
evidence that this production hardly has a role in emerging ways of inhabiting rural space. The Role
of the architect shifts from that of conceiver / producer of buildings, of objects to be consumed,
delivered and thrown into the world, to one of maïeutics, the accompaniment of births and life of
human habitats, within complex time patterns.

The traditional separation of scales: that of the house and of the city, of the architect and (urban)
spatial planner falters: human dwelling territorialises and deterritorialises in various assemblages and
scale-relationships, continuously seeking rootedness and connectivity.

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The figure of the urban needs to be deconstructed, suspended and contained, whereas that of the
village seems more fertile: this is not one of exclusion nor of throughput, but one of carefully
balanced relationship between a dense concentration of inhabitants and a holistically understood
locally rooted environment.

Architecture, in this world of innovation, cannot stick to its traditional role of service provider for the
production of built space. Many rural and urban initiatives have already produced their specific ways
of inhabiting before the question of the traditional architectural mandate arises. And worse: traditional
architectural approaches may endanger them when inscribing the production of space within urban,
economic, and other prerogatives hardly leaving any room for this kind of innovation.

A renewed architectural entrepreneurship, other ways of producing habitat are needed, and may
emerge from questions induced by the figure of metromilieux:

About the link between entrepreneurship and communities: what kind of entrepreneurships can one
enhance in rural settings? How are they rooted? Which territorial scales do they engage in? Who are
involved in them? Which (local) competences and (low-) techs are required, where can we find them,
how can we combine them? What kind of communities do they forge?

About commons: entrepreneurships are opportunities to create local value, new locally rooted
habitats: how do these habitats manage their ecological balance? How can we prevent them from
becoming urban – that is, inducing throughput and growth? How can they create and enhance local
commons?

About economy: what kind of economics do they generate or need? Which new values emerge? In
which ways can common values and care be acknowledged in terms of added value?

About method: what can the role of the architect be in such settings? Which tools does he need? What
kind of scenario’s are helpful?

Architecture’s strength lies in its ability to invent future ways of living – not to build buildings.
Initiatives and local entrepreneurship engaging commons and care can help us invent a new
architectural practice.

PV

Bibiography

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ouvertes.fr/hal-01724699.Chomsky 2019

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VERSTEEGH, Pieter, « Post-urbain : d’économie, de politiques et d’écologie », dans D’ARIENZO,

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& VERSTEEGH Pieter, Economic transition and new ruralities, Towards “métro-milieux ?
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