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 The Routledge Companion
to Architecture and
Social Engagement

Socially engaged architecture is a broad and emerging architectural genre that promises to redefine
architecture from a market-driven profession to a mix of social business, altruism, and activism
that intends to eradicate poverty, resolve social construct exclusion, and an egalitarian global
society. The Routledge Companion to Socially Engaged Architecture offers a critical enquiry of socially AuQ1
engaged architecture’s current context characterized by socio-economic inequity, climate change,
war, increasing global poverty, microfinance, the evolving notion of professionalism, the changing
conception of public, and finally the growing academic interest in re-visioning the social role of
architecture. Organized around case studies from the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, the United
Kingdom, South Africa, Rwanda, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Nepal, Pakistan, Iran, Thailand, Germany,
Australia, Taiwan, and Japan, the book documents the most important recent developments in the
field. By examining diverse working methods and philosophies of socially engaged architecture,
the book shows how socially engaged architecture is entangled in the global politics of poverty,
reconstruction of the public sphere, changing role of the state, charity, and neoliberal urbanism. The
book presents debates around the issue of whether architecture actually empowers the participators
and alleviates socio-economic exclusion or if it instead indirectly sustains an exploitive capitalism.
Bringing together a range of theories and case studies, this companion offers a platform to facilitate
future lines of inquiry in education, research, and practice.

Farhan Karim is an assistant professor at the University of Kansas and the author of Modernism of
Austerity: Designing an Ideal Home for the Poor. His current research focuses on the involvement of
Euro-American architects in Pakistan (1947–1971). His research has been supported by the Graham
Foundation, Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Aga Khan Fellowship, Mellon-Volkswagen
Fellowship, and Australian Leadership Award.

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 The Routledge Companion
to Architecture and
Social Engagement

Edited by Farhan Karim

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 First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of Farhan Karim to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the
authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and
are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
[CIP data]
ISBN: 978-1-138-88969-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-71269-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

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 Contents

List of Figures ix
List of Contributors xiii
Notes on Contributors xvi
Foreword xxvi
Jeremy Till
Acknowledgements xxix
Preface: Monumentality and Insurgency xxx
Arvind Rajagopal
Introduction: Architecture and Social Engagement xxxiii
Farhan Karim
Postscript: How and When Was Architecture Socially Engaged? xxxviii
Simon Sadler

PART I
Engagement as Discourse 1

1 What If . . . or Toward a Progressive Understanding of Socially

Engaged Architecture 3
Tatjana Schneider

2 Understanding Social Engagement in Architecture: Toward

Situated-Embodied and Critical Accounts 14
Isabelle Doucet

3 Toward an Architecture of the Public Good 27

Tom Spector

4 Radical Democracy and Spatial Practices 37

Tahl Kaminer

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 Contents

PART II
Targets of Engagement 47

5 Retracing the Emergence of a Human Settlements Approach:

Designing in, From and With Contexts of Development 49
Viviana d’Auria

6 The United Nations and Self-Help Housing in the Tropics 64

Nancy Kwak

7 Tracing the History of Socially Engaged Architecture: School

Building as Development Aid in Postcolonial Sub-Saharan Africa 71
Kim De Raedt

8 The Opera Village Africa: Christoph Schlingensief and His Social Sculpture 87
Susanne Bauer

9 Seeking Appropriate Methods: The Role of Public-Interest

Design Advocacy in the High Himalaya 102
Carey Clouse

PART III
Structures of Engagement 115

10 Reconceiving Professionalism in the Twenty-First Century 117

Nils Gore

11 The Aga Khan Award for Architecture and Social Engagement

via the Built Environment 126
Mehreen Chida-Razvi and Mohammad Gharipour

12 Sale Ends Soon: Epistemological Alternatives to Flying Architects 143

Ijlal Muzaffar

13 Creating the Environment for Social Engagement: The Experience

of Venezuela 155
Carlos Reimers

PART IV
Subjects of Engagement 167

14 Housing for Spatial Justice: Building Alliances Between Women

Architects and Users 169
Ipek Türeli

vi

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 Contents

15 Children’s Engagement in Design: Reflections From Research and Practice 186

Matluba Khan

16 The Garden of Liberation: Emptiness and Engagement at

Suan Mokkh, Chaiya 201
Lawrence Chua

17 The Darker Side of Social Engagement 215

Yutaka Sho

PART V
Tectonics of Engagement 231

18 A Comparative History of Live Projects Within the United States

and the UK: Key Characteristics and Contemporary Implications 233
Harriet Harriss

19 The Do-It-Your(Self ): The Construction of Social Identity Through DIY

Architecture and Urbanism 243
Cathy Smith

20 Building the Unseen: A Shift to a Socially Engaged Architecture Education 257

R. Todd Ferry

PART VI
Environmental Engagement 269

21 Umdenken Umschwenken: Environmental Engagement

and Swiss Architecture 271
Kim Förster

22 Material Participation and the Architecture of Domestic Autonomy 289

Lee Stickells

23 Salvage Salvation: Counterculture Trash as a Cultural Resource 306

Greg Castillo

PART VII
Mapping Engagement 323

24 Marginality, Urban Conflict and the Pursuit of Social Engagement

in Latin American Cities 325
Felipe Hernández

vii

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 Contents

25 Understanding Public Interest Design: A Conceptual Taxonomy 337

Joongsub Kim

26 Architecture Before 3.11: Unspoken Social Architecture During

the Blank 25 Years of Japan 350
Tamotsu Ito

27 The Reciprocity Between Architects and Social Change: Taiwan

Experience After the 1990s 366
Chun-Hsiung Wang

28 Transforming the Spatial Legacies of Colonialism and Apartheid:

Participatory Practice and Design Agency in Southern Africa 380
Iain Low

PART VIII
Engagement in Emergency 397

29 What We Can Learn From Refugees 399

Thomas Fisher

30 Displacement, Labor and Incarceration: A Mid-Twentieth-Century

Genealogy of Camps 413
Anoma Pieris

31 Are Architects the Last People Needed in Disaster Reconstruction? 429

Mojgan Taheri Tafti and David O’Brien

32 Architecture Without Borders? The Globalization of Humanitarian

Architecture Culture 441
Shawhin Roudbari

Index 449

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 Contributors

Viviana d’Auria Isabelle Doucet

Assistant Professor in International Urbanism Senior Lecturer
at the Department of Architecture, School of Environment, Education
KU Leuven, Belgium and Development
The University of Manchester
Susanne Bauer
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, R. Todd Ferry
Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, Brazil Research Associate and Faculty Fellow,
Center for Public Interest Design
Greg Castillo Portland State University
Associate Professor of Architecture,
College of Environmental Design Thomas Fisher
University of California Berkeley Professor, Director of the Minnesota
Design Center, and Dayton Hudson Chair
Mehreen Chida-Razvi in Urban Design
Research Associate in the Department of University of Minnesota
the History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS,
the University of London in London.
Kim Förster
Assistant Editor of the International Journal
Associate Director of Research
of Islamic Architecture
Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA),
Montréal
Lawrence Chua
Assistant Professor
School of Architecture Mohammad Gharipour
Syracuse University Associate Professor
School of Architecture and Planning
Carey Clouse Morgan State University
Assistant Professor of Architecture
and Landscape Architecture Nils Gore
School of Landscape Architecture Professor
and Regional Planning School or Architecture and Design
University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Kansas

Kim De Raedt Harriet Harriss

Assistant Academic Stuff Senior Tutor
Department of Architecture and Urban Planning Interior Design
University of Ghent Royal College of Art, London

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 Contributors

Felipe Hernández David O’Brien

Senior University Lecturer Senior Lecturer
Fellow of King’s College Faculty of Architecture, Building
Director of Studies for Christ’s College and Planning
and King’s College The University of Melbourne

Tamotsu Ito Anoma Pieris

Adjunct Faculty Associate Professor
University of Columbia Faculty of Architecture, Building
and Planning
Tahl Kaminer The University of Melbourne
Senior Lecturer in Architectural Design
and Theory Arvind Rajagopal
School for Architecture and Landscape Professor
Architecture Media, Culture and Communication
The University of Edinburgh New York University

Farhan Karim Carlos Reimers

Assistant Professor, School of Architecture Assistant Professor
and Design School of Architecture and Urban Planning
The University of Kansas The Catholic University of America

Matluba Khan Shawhin Roudbari

Assistant Professor Assistant Professor
Bangladesh University of Architecture Program in Environmental Design
and Technology University of Colorado Boulder

Joongsub Kim Simon Sadler

Professor Professor of Design
College of Architecture and Design University of California Davis, Arts
Lawrence Technological University, Southfield
Tatjana Schneider
Nancy Kwak Senior Lecturer
Associate Professor School of Architecture
Department of History The University of Sheffield
University of California San Diego
Yutaka Sho
Iain Low Assistant Professor
School of Architecture, Planning School of Architecture
and Geomatics Syracuse University
University of Cape Town, South Africa
Cathy Smith
Ijlal Muzaffar Senior Lecturer
Assistant Professor School of Architecture and
History of Art + Visual Culture Built Environment
Rhode Island School of Design The University of Newcastle

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 Contributors

Tom Spector Jeremy Till

Professor Professor and Pro Vice-Chancellor
School of Architecture University of the Arts, London,
Oklahoma State University Central Saint Martins

Lee Stickells Ipek Türeli

Associate Professor Assistant Professor and Canada Research
Faculty of Architecture, Design Chair in Architecture of Spatial Justice
and Planning School of Architecture
The University of Sydney McGill University

Mojgan Taheri Tafti Chun-Hsiung Wang

Assistant Professor Professor
Faculty of Urban Planning Department of Architecture
University of Tehran University of Shih Chien University

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 Notes on Contributors

Viviana d’Auria is Assistant Professor in International Urbanism at the Department of Architec-

ture, KU Leuven (Belgium), and NWO Rubicon research fellow at the Department of Geogra-
phy, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands).
Her dissertation, titled ‘Developing Urbanism in Development: Five Episodes in the Making of the
Volta River Project (1945–1976)’, explored the epistemological contribution of development aid
to the discipline of urbanism through the lens of a large-scale river basin development project in
sub-Saharan Africa’s first independent country. Exploring ‘practiced’ and ‘lived-in’ architecture is an
integral part of her research within a more general interest in the transcultural construction of cities
and their contested spaces. She is co-editor of Water Urbanisms (SUN, 2008) and Human Settlements:
Formulations and (re)Calibrations (SUN Academia, 2010). Viviana is also an active participant in the
Network-Association of European Researchers on Urbanisation in the South (N-AERUS) and
teaches core courses for the Master of Architecture and Human Settlements and Master of Urbanism
and Strategic Planning (Dept. of Architecture, KU Leuven).

Susanne Bauer received her diploma in architecture from the University of Applied Sciences Augs-
burg in Germany, a Master of Arts in Histories and Theories of Architecture from the Architectural
Association in London, and a PhD from The London Consortium, where she undertook research on
the color white in modern architecture. She was Visiting Scholar at the Graduate School of Archi-
tecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York, Visiting Scholar at the
Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and Postdoctoral Scholar at the Faculty of Architec-
ture and Urbanism and Design at the Federal University of Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, Brazil, where
she received a scholarship from the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior
(CAPES). She practiced architecture in Germany, the UK, and the United States and developed
research discourses on modern architecture.

Greg Castillo is Associate Professor at the College of Environmental Design at the University of
California, Berkeley, and Research Associate at the United States Studies Centre at the University of
Sydney, Australia. He has received grants and fellowships from the German Fulbright Fund, the Getty
Research Institute, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Ford Foundation. His publications
on Cold War design politics and practices include a monograph, Cold War on the Home Front: The
Soft Power of Midcentury Design (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and essays in Cold War Modern:
Art and Design in a Divided World, 1945–1975 (Victoria & Albert Museum, 2008) and The Politics of
the Kitchen in the Cold War (MIT Press, 2008). While continuing to investigate European interwar
and postwar design, he is currently also researching San Francisco Bay Area counterculture design
and has contributed essays on the topic to the online journal Places and the exhibition catalogue
Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (Walker Art Center, 2015).

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 Notes on Contributors

Mehreen Chida-Razvi is a research associate in the Department of the History of Art and Archaeol-
ogy at SOAS, the University of London in London, England, and an assistant editor of the Interna-
tional Journal of Islamic Architecture. She obtained her first MA degree in the History of Art from the
Courtauld Institute of Art, while her second MA and PhD in the History of Art and Archaeology
were undertaken at SOAS. She has been the recipient of several research and travel grants, including
the Opler Grant for Membership for Emerging Scholars from the Society of Architectural Histo-
rians, research and travel grants from the Barakat Trust, and the Nehru Trust-V&A India Travel
Grant. Her publications include: ‘A Sultan Before the Padshah? Questioning the Identification of the
Turbaned Figure in Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaykh to Kings’, in Art, Trade and Culture in the Near East
and India: From the Fatimids to the Mughals, eds. A. Ohta, M. Rogers, R. Wade Haddon (The Ginko
Library, 2016); ‘Where Is ‘The Greatest City in the East’?: The Mughal City of Lahore in European
Travel Accounts Between 1556 and 1648’, in The City in the Muslim World: Depictions by Western
Travel Writers, eds. M. Gharipour and N. Ozlu (Routledge, 2015); and ‘The Perception of Reception:
The Importance of Sir Thomas Roe at the Mughal Court of Jahangir’, Journal of World History 25
(2–3) ( June/September 2014): 263–284. She has further authored numerous entries for encyclope-
dic resources, including Islam: A Worldwide Encyclopaedia, Sahapedia: An Online Encyclopedia of Indian
Culture and Heritage, the Archnet.org Timeline, and the Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE.

Lawrence Chua is a historian of the global modern built environment with an emphasis on Asian
architecture and urban culture. He is an assistant professor at the School of Architecture, Syracuse
University, and was most recently a fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies in Leiden and
the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg. His writing
has appeared in the Journal of Urban History, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, and Senses and
Society. He received his PhD in the History of Architecture and Urban Development from Cornell
University in 2012.

Carey Clouse is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst. She holds a post-professional degree (SMArchS) in Architecture and
Urbanism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BArch from the University of
Oregon. In addition to teaching, she is co-partner of Crookedworks, an award-winning architecture
firm. She served as a 2014–2016 Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Scholar in India.

Kim De Raedt graduated in 2010 as a civil engineer–architect. Between 2010 and 2017, she was a
research and teaching assistant at Ghent University, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning.
She recently finished a PhD project dealing with architectural production in postcolonial Africa
(1960–1980). More particularly, her research focused on educational buildings realized through
international development aid. Studying school architecture in Africa through this specific lens
allowed her to frame the production of buildings in the so-called era of development within its wider
political and economic context. This helps one to better understand the current (re-)emergence
of ‘socially engaged architectures’ in Africa and beyond. Besides regular contributions to interna-
tional conferences, workshops, and symposia, Kim is the author or co-author of several publications
in scientific journals and books. Between 2010 and 2014, she was also part of the COST-Action
‘European Architecture Beyond Europe’, financed by the European Community. After finishing her
PhD in October 2017, Kim switched to architectural practice, in order to operationalize part of her
expertise gained during her academic trajectory and give it a new, contemporary dimension.

Isabelle Doucet is Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on the
relationship between (urban) politics, aesthetics, and social responsibility in architecture, which she

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 Notes on Contributors

examines through both historical and contemporary cases. She is the author of The Practice Turn in
Architecture: Brussels After 1968 (Ashgate, 2015), and co-editor, with Nel Janssens, of Transdisciplinary
Knowledge Production in Architecture and Urbanism (Springer, 2011). Her current research centers on
countercultural architectures in 1970s Belgium. Isabelle is currently also a researcher for the Mellon
Multidisciplinary Research Project called ‘Architecture and/for the Environment’, coordinated by
the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

R. Todd Ferry is Associate Director and Senior Research Associate at the Center for Public Interest
Design (CPID) within the Portland State University School of Architecture. He holds a Bachelor
of Arts degree in Philosophy from the University of Georgia and a Master of Architecture from the
University of Texas at Austin. Before pursuing architecture, Todd worked for over a decade in the
nonprofit field, including founding KIU ART, a service-learning organization working with a small
community in Mwanza, Tanzania, to build classrooms and exchange ideas. His current work inves-
tigates how social needs can be addressed by architecture in underserved communities and he seeks
to develop new tools and models of engagement to aid in this effort. Recent projects at the CPID
include the design of a sustainable community center in Inner Mongolia, China; a collaboration with
the Portland Opera to create a mobile opera stage to bring the arts to more communities; an initiative
to provide new visions for addressing homelessness in Portland through design; and a consultancy
with the Sacramento Area Council of Governments to identify design and investment strategies to
benefit disadvantaged neighborhoods. This work is incorporated into his teaching in architecture
design studios, courses on design thinking for social innovation, public interest design seminars, and
design-build initiatives. Many of these courses are part of the university’s Graduate Certificate in
Public Interest Design, which he coordinates. Other research interests for which he has been awarded
travel fellowships include the architecture of Rudolf Steiner in Dornach, Switzerland, the evolution
of museum typology in Oxford, England, and contemporary interpretations of the Spomenik Monu-
ments of the former Yugoslavia. Ferry is Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Sustainable Solutions and
Director of the Architecture Summer Immersion Program at Portland State University.

Thomas Fisher is a professor in the School of Architecture, the Dayton Hudson Chair in Urban
Design at the University of Minnesota, and the Director of the Metropolitan Design Center at the
College of Design. He was recognized in 2005 as the fifth most published writer about architecture
in the United States and has been recognized four times as a top design educator by the journal
Design Intelligence. He has written nine books, over 50 book chapters or introductions, and over 400
articles in professional journals and major publications. His newest book, published in May by the
University of Minnesota Press, is entitled Designing Our Way to a Better World.

Kim Förster is an architectural historian and works as Associate Director for Research at the Canadian
Centre for Architecture, Montreal. Having studied English and American studies, geography, and ped-
agogy, he holds a PhD in Architecture from ETH Zurich, where from 2013 to 2015 he taught in the
doctoral program at the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture. He has published in archi-
tectural magazines and journals, such as Arch+, Architectural Histories, Archithese, Bauwelt, Clog, Places,
Project, werk, and bauen + wohnen, and was co-editor of An Architektur. He has collaborated on several
publications with the practice common room and is currently guest editor of Candide. His manuscript
on the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (New York, 1967–1985) is forthcoming.

Mohammad Gharipour is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning at Mor-
gan State University in Baltimore, USA. He obtained his master’s degree in Architecture from the
University of Tehran and his PhD in Architecture and Landscape History from Georgia Institute
of Technology, USA. He has received several grants and awards, including the Hamad Bin Khalifa

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 Notes on Contributors

Fellowship in Islamic Art, the Spiro Kostof Fellowship Award from the Society of Architectural
Historians, and the National Endowment in Humanities Faculty Award. Gharipour has published
several books, including the following: Bazaar in the Islamic City (American University of Cairo
Press, 2012), Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in Poetry, Arts and History (I.B. Tauris, 2013),
Calligraphy and Architecture in the Muslim World (co-edited with Irvin Schick, Edinburgh University
Press, 2013), Sacred Precincts: The Religious Architecture of Non-Muslim Communities Across the Islamic
World (Brill, 2014), The City in the Muslim World: Depictions by Western Travelers (co-edited with Nilay
Ozlu, Routledge, 2015), Historiography of Persian Architecture (Taylor and Francis, 2015), Contemporary
Urban Landscapes of the Middle East (Routledge, 2016), and Synagogues of the Islamic World (Edinburgh
University Press, 2017). Gharipour is the director and founding editor of the International Journal of
Islamic Architecture.

Nils Gore is a licensed architect and an associate professor in the Architecture Department at the
University of Kansas, where he focuses on community-engaged scholarship through completion of
student design/build projects in the public realm. His work has won numerous design awards, has
been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Batture: Amnesiascope, Cityscape and the Journal
of Architectural and Planning Research and has been presented in numerous public lectures and schol-
arly presentations. He is a graduate of Kansas State University and the Harvard Graduate School
of Design, and has taught at the Boston Architectural Center, Mississippi State University and the
University of Kansas.

Harriet Harriss (RIBA, FRSA) is a qualified architect and leads the research program in Architec-
ture at the Royal College of Art, London. Her teaching, research, and writing are largely focused
upon pioneering new pedagogic models for design education as captured in Radical Pedagogies:
Architectural Education & the British Tradition (2015). Her 2016 publication, A Gendered Profession,
asserts the need for widening participation as a means to ensure the profession remains as diverse as
the society it seeks to serve. Dr. Harriss has won various awards for teaching excellence, including a
Brookes Teaching Fellowship, a Higher Education Internationalisation Award, a Churchill Fellow-
ship and two Santander awards. Before joining the RCA, she led the MArchD in Architecture at
Oxford Brookes and was appointed Principal Lecturer of Student Experience. She was most recently
awarded a Clore Fellowship (2016–2017) and elected to the European Association of Architectural
Education (EAAE) Council in the summer of 2017. Dr. Harriss was recently appointed to the UK
Department for Education construction industry panel, and is currently working on a book that
explores women’s leadership in architectural academia.

Felipe Hernández is an architect and codirector of the M.Phil. in Architecture and Urban Studies. AuQ3
He teaches architectural and urban design, while giving courses and seminars in the theory and his-
tory of architecture and urbanism. Felipe has worked and published extensively on Latin America
and other areas in the developing world, including Africa and South East Asia. Felipe is also Chair of
Cities South of Cancer (CSC), an interdisciplinary research group whose members work on a wide
variety of urban issues in Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. CSC collaborates
with academic institutions in the United States, Latin America, and Indonesia. The group also offers
internships and summer courses abroad, and operates as consultant to governmental, nongovern-
mental, and private organizations involved in urban research and development in cities around the
world. Felipe is the author of Bhabha for Architects (Routledge, 2010) and Beyond Modernist Masters:
Contemporary Architecture in Latin America (Birkhauser, 2009). He is also co-editor of Rethinking the
Informal City: Critical Perspectives From Latin America (Berghahn, 2009) as well as Transculturation: Cities,
Spaces and Architectures in Latin America (Rodopi, 2005). He is currently co-editing a second volume
on Latin American informal settlements for Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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 Notes on Contributors

Tamotsu Ito is a first-class registered architect and a managing architect in Japan, currently based in
Zurich and Tokyo, the founder of Tamotsu Ito Architecture Office. He received his post-professional
master’s degree in Architecture in 2016 from Harvard University Graduate School of Design with
the Letter of Commendation, and his bachelor’s degree in Engineering from the Department of
Architecture at the University of Tokyo in 2008. His built/completed projects both in Japan and
the United States range from furniture design and residential design to public architecture, some of
which have been featured in several architectural magazines and web articles, such as Shinkenchiku
and a+t magazine. During his studies at Harvard GSD, he completed transformable furniture and
held its construction workshop for a suburban community in Long Island, New York, as a part of
the design studio instructed by Daniel D’Oca. He also fundraised and design-built a teahouse instal-
lation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, advised by Mark Mulligan, using locally available materials. He
is currently Design + Research Assistant, Chair of Prof. Momoyo Kaijima at ETH Zurich, where he
teaches design studios and diplomas, and is engaged in ongoing research projects.

Tahl Kaminer is Senior Lecturer in Architectural Design and Theory at the Edinburgh School of
Architecture and Landscape Architecture (University of Edinburgh). He has published the mono-
graphs Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation: The Reproduction of Post-Fordism in Late-Twentieth- Century
Architecture (2011) and The Efficacy of Architecture: Political Contestation and Agency (2017), both with
Routledge, and co-edited the volumes Houses in Transformation (NAi, 2008), Urban Asymmetries (010,
2011) and Critical Tools (Lettre Voilee, 2012). Tahl is a co-founder of the academic journal Footprint
and co-edited three of its issues: ‘Transdisciplinary’ (issue 1); ‘Defying the Avant-Garde Logic: Archi-
tecture, Populism, and Mass Culture’ (issue 8), and ‘The Participatory Turn’ (issue 13). He completed
a PhD at TU Delft.

Farhan Karim is an assistant professor in the School of Architecture and Design at the University of
Kansas. He received a PhD in the History of Architecture from the University of Sydney, Australia.
His forthcoming book, Modernism of Austerity: Designing Ideal Home for the Poor (University of Pitts-
burgh Press, 2018), focuses on the discursive development of housing for the urban poor and the
emerging industrial workers in postcolonial India. His current research studies how the collaboration
between Euro-American grants agencies and Ayub Khan’s authoritative regime cultivated a unique
form of architectural modernism in postcolonial Pakistan (1947–1971). His articles and reviews have
appeared in Fabrication, Planning Perspectives, Journal of Cultural Studies of Asia, International Journal
of Islamic Studies, and Architectural Theory Review. His research has been supported by the Graham
Foundation, Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Aga Khan Center for Muslim Architecture
at MIT, a Volkswagen fellowship, Australian Leadership Award, and various research funds from the
University of Kansas.

Matluba Khan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture, Bangladesh University of

Engineering and Technology. Dr. Khan received a PhD in Landscape Architecture from the Univer-
sity of Edinburgh, UK, in July 2017. Her PhD research project included co-design and development
of a schoolyard in a government primary school in Bangladesh with children, teachers, and the com-
munity and investigated the influence of schoolyard design on children’s learning, motivation, and
play. Dr. Khan received numerous awards for her research work, including the ASLA Honor Award
2017 (Student Community Services Category), EDRA Great Places Award 2016 (Place Design Cat-
egory), EDRA best student paper and overall best paper award (2014), and winner of Falling Walls
Lab Edinburgh 2014. She was selected as the Scottish Graduate School’s first ever Thinker in Resi-
dence to work on her research in Deveron Arts in Scotland. She co-devised an Innovative Learning
Week event titled ‘Play+Design=Learning’, where children designed the open yard at the heart of
Edinburgh College of Art, which won the Best Community Event Award in 2016.

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 Notes on Contributors

Joongsub Kim, PhD, AIA, AICP, Professor at Lawrence Technological University, directs its Detroit
Studio (an off-campus, community-based design facility) and Master of Urban Design Program.
After graduating from MIT and the University of Michigan, he focused on public interest design,
and has received an ACSA/AIAS New Faculty Teaching Award; a Boston Society of Architects
National Research Grant; an ACSA Collaborative Practice Award citation; a Graham Foundation
Advanced Studies Grant; an NCARB Integration of Practice and Education National Grant; an AIA
Michigan President’s Award; and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Knight
Foundation. His work has been published in Urban Design International, Journal of Urban Design, Places,
Environment & Behavior, Open House International, IN_BO, Architectural Record, and Architect.

Nancy Kwak is an associate professor of history at UC San Diego. Her book A World of Homeowners:
American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid (University of Chicago Press, 2015) tells the history of
American development aid after World War II. In the book, she argues American advisers urged
countries around the world to embrace a peculiarly American model of homeownership, with mixed
results. She is now pursuing a new project on informality in American cities in the twentieth century.

Iain Low is a professor at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where he convenes postgraduate
programs in architecture. He was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and visiting
scholar at the American Academy in Rome. His research interest is in space and transformation and
the socio-spatiality of the post-apartheid city and its emerging typo-morphologies. As a practitioner
he was Project Architect for the World Bank/GoL, where he researched and designed schools for
the Training for Self Reliance Project throughout Lesotho, and has designed an award-winning
reinstallation of Iziko SA Museum’s San Rock Art in Cape Town. His essays have appeared in
AD|Architectural Design and the Journal of South African Architecture, and most recently he published
a chapter in Representation & Spatial Practices in Urban South Africa. He is editor of the Digest of South
African Architecture and the Digest of African Architecture.

Ijlal Muzaffar is an assistant professor of Modern Architectural History at the Rhode Island School
of Design. He received his PhD from MIT in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture
and Art. He also holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton University and a BA in Mathemat-
ics and Physics from the University of Punjab. His work has appeared in edited volumes, biennale
catalogues, and peer-reviewed journals, like Grey Room, Future Anterior, and Aggregate, an architec-
tural history research collaborative and publishing platform, of which he is also a founding member.
He is currently working on a book titled The Periphery Within: Modern Architecture and the Making of
the Third World, which looks at how modern architects and planners played a critical role in shaping
the discourse on Third World development and its associated structures of power after the Second
World War.

David O’Brien is a lecturer at Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne. He

practiced as an architect before joining the Melbourne School of Design. He has since worked in
community development projects with Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, Western
Australia, and Queensland and internationally in Papua New Guinea and Thailand. He coordinates
the award-winning Bower Studio projects to consult, design, and build community infrastructure
projects alongside community groups, government agencies, aid workers, industry partners, engi-
neers, and sociologists.

Anoma Pieris is an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning. She is an
architectural historian by training with a specialist focus on South and Southeast Asian architecture.
Her interdisciplinary approach draws on history, anthropology, and geography with an additional

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 Notes on Contributors

interest in gender studies. Her publications include Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The
Trouser Under the Cloth (Routledge 2012) and Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History
of Singapore’s Plural Society (University of Hawaii Press 2009). Anoma is co-author with Janet McGaw
of Assembling the Centre: Architecture for Indigenous Cultures: Australia and Beyond (Routledge 2014).

Arvind Rajagopal is a professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, and an
affiliate faculty in the Department of Sociology, and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis,
at New York University. His book Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the
Public in India (Cambridge, 2001) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize from the Asso-
ciation of Asian Studies in 2003. Recent edited publications include Media and Utopia, edited with
Anupama Rao (Routledge 2016) and The Indian Public Sphere (Oxford 2009). Recent articles include
‘The Emergency and the New Indian Middle Class’ in Modern Asian Studies (2011) and ‘Special
Political Zone’ on the anti-Muslim violence in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in South Asian Multidisciplinary
Academic Journal from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociale, Paris (2011). His latest book
is under contract with Duke University Press, on a global genealogy of media theory. In 2010–2011,
he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
In 2016–2017 he was a senior EURIAS fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

Carlos Reimers is an expert on residential environments, including minimal and emergency hous-
ing, affordable and low-cost housing, multifamily residential planning and design, and incremental
and informal housing in North America, Latin America, and Asia. His practice includes residential
(collective and multifamily), commercial, and corporate architecture. He has been a technical con-
sultant on social and low-income housing for the Inter-American Development Bank and has served
as senior housing advisor to many NGOs and low-income community organizations. His research
interests include urban planning and design, open architecture and sustainability in housing, collec-
tive and multifamily residential planning, design and production, the future of the city, sustainable
alternatives to conventional urban development, and the influence of modernism in Latin American
social housing. Before joining CUArch in 2010, he taught at the University of Texas at Arlington,
Texas A&M University, and Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, where he was Chair of the School
of Architecture between 1997 and 2001. Reimers received a PhD from Texas A&M University, a
Master of Science in Urban Studies and Planning from MIT, a Master of Architecture from McGill
University, and a Bachelor of Architecture Professional Degree from Simon Bolivar University.

Shawhin Roudbari studies ways design professionals around the world shape their political and pro-
fessional power. In doing so, he brings transnational perspectives to ways architects, planners, and
civil engineers (as professionals engaged in the design and planning of our cities) tackle social and
environmental injustice. He employs qualitative and ethnographic methods in his studies of political
and community engagement. Shawhin is currently leading two federally funded projects: the first is
an investigation of ways dissent is absorbed from the fringe into the mainstream of the design profes-
sions and the second is a critical inquiry into the ethics of university-based community engagement
work. Shawhin is Assistant Professor in the Program in Environmental Design at the University of
Colorado Boulder. He completed his PhD in Architecture at the University of California Berkeley.
He has master’s degrees in Architecture and in Civil and Environmental Engineering and worked as
a professional engineer for five years before pursuing his graduate research in architecture.

Simon Sadler teaches the history and theory of architecture, design, and urbanism at the University
of California, Davis, where he is a professor in the Department of Design. His research examines ide-
ologies of design since the mid-twentieth century, especially the roles proposed for design in political,

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 Notes on Contributors

cultural, and economic transformation. His publications include Archigram: Architecture Without Archi-
tecture (MIT Press, 2005); Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture
and Urbanism (Architectural Press, 2000, co-editor, Jonathan Hughes); The Situationist City (MIT
Press, 1998); and numerous articles, chapters, and essays about American and European countercul-
ture (see https://ucdavis.academia.edu/SimonSadler).

Tatjana Schneider is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield. She
received her architectural education in Germany and Scotland. She has worked in architectural
practice in Germany and was a founder member of the workers’ cooperative Glasgow Letters on
Architecture and Space (G.L.A.S.) and the Sheffield-based research center AGENCY. She currently
also holds the post of Professor for History and Theory of the City at Hafencity University, Ham-
burg. Tatjana’s work is concerned with the social and economic mechanisms of the production of
the space. She understands architecture as a collaborative, empowering, and essentially political disci-
pline. This focus takes various expressions: sometimes, it is formulated visually or in written form as
critique against normative intellectual and pedagogical tendencies; in other instances, it is expressed
through direct spatial interventions; and, occasionally, it takes activist dimensions. The main funded
research projects she has been working on over the past years include ‘m-NAP’ (with M. Edwards),
‘Flexible Housing’ (with J. Till), ‘Spatial Agency’ (with J. Till), and ‘Right to Build’ (with A. Parvin,
D. Saxby of 00:/ architecture, and C. Cerulli).

Yutaka Sho is an associate professor of architecture at Syracuse University in New York, and a
partner at GA Collaborative, a nonprofit design and advocacy firm. Her investigations focus on
roles of architecture in the international development industry and post-conflict reconciliation. In
Rwanda GAC is constructing self-build homes while training the end users in construction skills.
In 2014 GAC’s Masoro Village Project received the EDRA Great Places Award. Currently GAC is
working with Kate Spade & Co. on six new buildings at Masoro Health Center. Sho is the recipient
of 2012 Arnold Brunner Grant from the American Institute of Architects New York chapter and
2007 Deborah Norden Fund research grant from the Architectural League of New York. Sho holds
bachelor’s degrees in Landscape Architecture and Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design and
a master’s degree in Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Cathy Smith is an Australian architect, interior designer, and academic. With professional and
research qualifications and experience in architecture and interior design along with a PhD in
Architectural Theory and History (USyd), Cathy operates at the theory-practice nexus. She is the
inaugural Turnbull Foundation Women in the Built Environment scholar at the University of New
South Wales (2018–2020) and a recipient of a Richard Rogers fellowship and residency, Harvard
University Graduate School of Design (fall 2018), focusing on property guardianship in London.
As an academic, she has taught in the subject areas of design, history and theory, and construction
at several Australian universities, including the University of Newcastle (current), the University of
Queensland, and the Queensland University of Technology. Her scholarly research of DIY architec-
ture and DIY urbanism appears in a number of international journals, including Australian Feminist
Studies, Architectural Histories, Interstices, Architectural Theory Review, and IDEA.

Tom Spector is a professor of architecture at Oklahoma State University. He received his PhD from
the University of California, Berkeley, and his professional degree from Georgia Tech and is a life
fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University. He holds architectural licenses in both Georgia and
California. He is the author of The Ethical Architect: The Dilemma of Contemporary Practice and more
recently co-author of How Architects Write. He has published in such diverse journals as Harvard

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 Notes on Contributors

Design Magazine, Environmental Ethics, Contemporary Pragmatism, Journal of Aesthetic Education, and
Building Research and Information. He is the managing editor of the journal Architecture Philosophy.
In recent years he has been working on the concept of the public good as the ethical basis for the
architecture profession.

Lee Stickells is an associate professor in Architecture at the University of Sydney. His research is
characterized by an interest in the potential for architecture to shape other ways of living, particu-
larly its projection as a means to reconsider the terms of social life—of how we live together. It is
focused on developing histories that connect experimental architectural and design strategies with
environmental, political, technological, and social transformations. Lee co-edited The Right to the
City (2011) and has contributed to anthologies, including The Handbook of Interior Architecture and
Design (2013), Beyond Utopia (2012), Trash Culture (2010), and Heterotopia and the City (2009). His
essays have appeared in journals such as ARQ: Architectural Research Quarterly and Fabrications. Lee is
currently an editorial committee member of the journal Architectural Theory Review and a SAHANZ
Editorial Board member.

Mojgan Taheri Tafti is an assistant professor at the University of Tehran, Faculty of Urban Planning.
She holds a PhD from Melbourne School of Design, at the University of Melbourne. Mojgan has
worked in a number of teaching, research, and operational roles in post-disaster reconstruction and
housing projects for disadvantaged households in different countries, including a postdoctoral fel-
lowship at Melbourne Social Equity Institute. Her main research interests are housing policy analysis
in the context of post-disaster reconstruction, inequality, and vulnerability.

Jeremy Till is an architect, educator, and writer. He is Pro Vice-Chancellor at University of the Arts
London and Head of Central Saint Martins, widely considered one of the world’s leading centers for
art and design education. His extensive written work includes the books Flexible Housing, Architec-
ture Depends, and Spatial Agency, all three of which won the prestigious RIBA President’s Award for
Research. His teaching and research concentrate on the social and political aspects of architecture
and spatial production. As an architect, he worked with Sarah Wigglesworth Architects on their pio-
neering building, 9 Stock Orchard Street, winner of many awards, including the RIBA Sustainability
Prize. He curated the UK Pavilion at the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale and also at the 2013
Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.

Ipek Türeli is Canada Research Chair and Assistant Professor of Architecture at McGill University.
She holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of California Berkeley. Her published work
focuses on visualizations of the city in photography, film, exhibitions, theme parks, and museums. She
has been awarded several grants and fellowships for this work, by the Graham Foundation, the Mid-
dle East Research Competition, the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University,
and the Aga Khan Fellowship at MIT. She is the co-editor of Orienting Istanbul (2010) and Istanbul
Nereye? (2011), guest editor of International Journal of Islamic Architecture’s special issue ‘Streets of Pro-
test’ (March 2013), and the author of Istanbul, Open City (2017). Dr. Türeli’s current research spans
the full range of social engagement in the profession, from the longer history of humanitarian archi-
tecture, such as that of religious missionaries, to more recent efforts by contemporary designers to
contribute to social movements, and is supported by FQRSC, SSHRC, and CRC.

Chun-Hsiung Wang is Associate Professor in the Architecture Department of Shih Chien Univer-
sity and President of Alliance for Architectural Modernity, Taiwan. He has worked on the architec-
tural and urban histories of modern Taiwan and their relationship with the neighboring regions with

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 Notes on Contributors

a focus on development after World War II. He is the former editor of Taiwan Architecture Magazine
and the author of Architecture x Regionalism: 10 Architects (2016, with Sheng-Fong Lin and Wei-Jen
Wang), Taipei Unveiled (2013, with Shu Chang), Romantic Realty: Exhibition of Postwar Lanyang Archi-
tecture (2011, with Tseng-Yung Wang), and Rustic and Poetic: An Emerging Generation of Architecture
in Postwar Taiwan (2008, with Ming-Song Shyu). Now he is in charge of Making Places: Fieldoffice
Exhibition, touring in Europe with Juhani Pallasmaa and editing the first monograph of Fieldoffice.

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 Foreword
Jeremy Till

To talk of socially engaged architecture is surely to talk of a given. All architecture is socially engaged.
Period. Architecture is nothing without the engagement of everyone involved in its production and
occupation—designers, collaborators, participants and users—and this engagement is by definition
social because it depends upon human interaction. One might imagine therefore that the history of
architecture as process and product would be told through the story of these human interactions,
and how they play out spatially. Yet the very existence of this book suggests that narratives of human
life are overlooked in the official histories of architecture, and so there is a need to bring them to
the surface. Indeed, it may be argued that socially engaged architecture is an irritant to the dominant
discourses of architecture and, as such, something that needs to be suppressed.
The reasons for this suppression are recounted through the pages of this book. First is that the
history of architecture is predominately told though the history of its products as formal and aes-
thetic devices. While the production of these buildings at any one time is influenced by the social
construction of taste, such external forces are generally discounted in order to promote a smooth,
unfettered narrative of the succession of architectural forms. The second reason for the suppression
of the social arises out of the first—namely, that in the concentration on the products of architec-
ture, the processes are left largely under-described. These processes, both in what comes before the
building and what comes after in terms of occupation, inevitably involve others, and this multiplicity
gets in the way of the myth that the architecture is the manifestation of individual genius. The third
reason—well, I could go on and on about the various reasons for the suppression of the social. I and
many others have made the arguments elsewhere. More important is to make the argument as to why
such a suppression is unacceptable, which is why this book is important and timely.
The main issue is that in the presumed sidestepping of the social, architecture also sidesteps the
political. Architecture becomes, in contemporary parlance, post-political. This is an all too conveni-
ent position for the profession to take, because it suggests that architecture is in some way a neutral
act of formal production, neutral that is to the contestations of the political world. But in giving up
any pretence to the political, architecture also gives up any sense of political agency. It thus leaves
itself exposed and available to other controlling forces, most notably those of the neo-liberal market.
Many of the essays in this book make the point that architecture has abandoned itself to the market,
and with this has become complicit in the machinations and exploitations of the market. Worse than
this, it has capitulated to the political forces that present themselves as post-political, most clearly
those of the Trump regime and Brexit campaign. One only has to look at the disgraceful statement
of support for President Trump released by the American Institute of Architects on the day after the
election to see quite how compliant the profession has become to the axes of power.
Most of the essays in this book were written before Trump’s election in 2016, but this astound-
ing political event, and that of Brexit in the United Kingdom, gives added urgency to the tenets of
the essays, and suggests that the arguments be extended from social engagement to a more explicit

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political activism. Although these political conditions emerged in the west, they are already having
profound consequences on the rest of the world. In the face of such extreme global politics, architec-
ture’s post-political turn looks like an abrogation of any broader societal responsibility.
The normal response to a call for architecture to rediscover its social, and with it political, purpose
is that architects should not take sides in the political debate. This was the reason given by the RIBA
for not committing to one side in the Brexit referendum, when all the evidence pointed to remain-
ing in the European Union as being of clear benefit to the profession. The pretence that architecture
is in some way neutral in respect to political positions superficially relieves the profession of any need
for engagement. Decisions are determined by the short-term demands of the client, who now too
often is simply the agent of the market, and architecture is reduced to the reification of the processes
of capital. But of course every mark made on a computer screen describes in one way or another
a social relation. This book is a call for a realignment in the way that we understand the marks and
voices of architecture as part of a broader social project. Instead of seeing a plan, section or elevation
as set of compositional devices, they should always be interpreted in the context of how they will
construct social and spatial relations.
However, before a mark is made, the first necessity for the socially engaged architect is to engage
all the voices associated with a project, and to do so in a manner that respects the different forms of
knowledge that everyone brings to the table. This implies that what is at the core of socially engaged
architecture is empathy—a human quality that has been squeezed out by the divisive and binary
rhetoric of current politics. Empathy can be used productively, not just in a personal capacity but also
in a professional one, when the relationship with others becomes a matter of mutual understanding
and not of expert imposition.
In turn, the development of an empathetic approach to architecture suggests a recalibration of
the values and processes of architectural education. This book has a number of inspiring examples of
how educators are reaching out beyond the internalized systems of the academy. Sadly, however, such
expansive pedagogic practices remain the exception rather than the norm. Architectural education
inevitably edits down the social context of any project: rushed site visits, often abstract briefs with
no clear user or client to engage with, and compressed timescales all mitigate against development of
the skills required for socially engaged architecture. In addition, the standardized diet of juries, long
nights and isolation from other disciplines further consolidates the de-socialization of architecture
students as they are admitted into the rituals of the tribe. A move toward a more socially engaged
practice therefore needs a distinct shift in the processes, projects and ethos of architectural education.
My sense is that this shift is being increasingly demanded by students, but resisted by staff, who feel
comfortable in the execution of known systems of power.
The second shift required is within the professional institutions. Initially these were set up as
definers, defenders and developers of architectural knowledge, in order to define the discipline in
distinction to others and to amateurs. With this attachment to knowledge comes an ethical respon-
sibility, in so much as knowledge is never neutral, particularly when, as with architecture, it is played
out in a social field. However, all the evidence suggests that professional bodies have more or less
suspended their ethical stance, aside from very token nods to diversity, inclusivity and sustainability.
It is too great a burden to expect individual professionals to always formulate their own ethical
response to each condition. But it is a role that professional bodies can and should assume through
the formulation of new ethical codes. This will come only through the democratic engagement
of their members, and from a collective will to acknowledge the human, social and environmental
consequences of architectural production.
A third necessity to establish socially engaged practice is to believe that such practices are
possible—to have hope. In the current political and economic landscape it is hard to summon up
alternatives; hope is being squeezed. Capitalism’s brilliant subterfuge is to present itself as the sole
possible mode of operation. The lack of ability or opportunity to think outside of the pervasive
economic system limits considerations of social alternatives, and with it spatial alternatives. The
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dominance of market-led imperatives in architecture means social exchanges are defined by eco-
nomic value rather than human value. But right now, as capitalism struggles to adjust from crisis
to crisis, we have to allow the invention of alternatives, and acknowledge that there are other value
systems beyond those of monetary gain. There is always the potential, indeed necessity, for architects
to contribute to the imagining and constructing of such alternatives, because they find their shape
through spatial interventions. In this light, socially engaged architecture becomes much more than
a subset of architectural practice. Rather, it contributes to a wider debate as to how to escape the
democratic deficit and how to imagine new ways of living.

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 Preface
Monumentality and Insurgency

Arvind Rajagopal

Monumentality as Social Engagement

Sigfried Gideon has contrasted the creation of exquisite public squares and other spaces for collec-
tive life built by eighteenth-century architects with the very different situation of architecture in the
nineteenth century. There was a radical break in the nineteenth century because of what he calls the
Napoleonic influence. Although Napoleon Bonaparte sought to spread the message of the French
Revolution across Europe, the style of the previous ruling class became the garb of legitimacy.
The result was pseudo-monumentality, celebrating symbols no longer held in collective esteem.
The feudal order was no more; society now made it possible for individuals to shape their own
lives more than ever before. But the ways in which they imagined their lives could be completely
at odds with the built spaces they navigated and the public symbols they engaged with. “Napoleon
represents the model that gave the nineteenth century its form: the self-made man who became
inwardly uncertain,” Gideon writes.1 From then to now, Gideon writes in his 1944 essay, pseudo-
monumentality has become the rule in architecture observed by all governments.
However, monumentality is an eternal need, Gideon writes. Monuments visibly join the here
and now with the hereafter. They give visible form to a people’s desire for belonging, and become a
symbol of their convictions. The “demand for monumentality cannot, in the long run, be suppressed.
It will find an outlet at all costs,” he writes.2
If not unfashionable, the theme certainly sounds old-fashioned, and the language of symbols itself
appears dated, like a kind of primitive media theory. The idea that architecture could be in tune with
its times is a challenging one. Many of the monuments we still prize emerged in deeply hierarchical
societies, for example. If monuments are exemplary spaces, their symbolism is not continuous with
social order but exists on a different plane. Moreover, in an age over-saturated with symbolic produc-
tion, how can we distinguish the truly monumental from so many other claimants to be the real thing?
Gideon’s essay is valuable because it suggests that architecture can bring inner and outer life together,
or nurture our sense of place in a world while shielding us from the elements. It is thus relevant for
socially engaged architecture in different contexts. These are themes that, for example, Heidegger dis-
AuQ5 cusses in his well-known essay, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” Language is the first layer of human
dwelling, Heidegger observes. We inhabit the world as we shelter in a dwelling. It is not only with
brick, stone and wood but first of all with words that we build and dwell, in habitations that accom-
modate our embodied ways of being, our habitus, which we become habituated to and cease to notice.
The German Bauen, for building, originally means to dwell. This reminds us of the essential
meaning of a building, and if it feels distant to us, that is a loss which we should overcome; it still

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calls to us, Heidegger writes. I am reminded that in Hindi and in Urdu, this intimate connection of
the meanings of building and dwelling is easily accessible, but mainly for the poor. The connection
between basti, which today identifies the makeshift structures where the poor live, and basna, to settle,
inhabit or dwell, is well known; basti thus connotes fragility and ephemerality. The rich may dwell in
homes designated as buildings or flats, names without poetry or resonance, but their occupants can
dwell in more secure ways than the poor, for whom every invocation of home has the echo of their
degraded and precarious condition.
Heidegger asks us to heed the primal call of language, and pay attention to meanings that dwell
silently beneath the surfaces of words we use. But desensitizing ourselves to those silent meanings
also protects us from a reality too brutal to confront continuously. Similarly, if Gideon presumes
the need for a kind of fluidity or transparency between private, social and public spaces, we should
reflect on its implications. When he envisions monuments that communicate people’s inner aspi-
rations and at the same time orient them toward a kind of harmony with each other, that is both AuQ6
desirable and difficult. He offers an ideal of architecture as a communicational sublime, aligning
human motives and needs toward a positive sense of collectivity. But where collective spaces are
damaged or dysfunctional, barriers will exist—they are needed. Communication became a mid-
twentieth-century ideal that inspired intellectuals across the arts and sciences. But without its com-
panion concept control, unrealistic conceptions arose about its possibilities. It’s fair to say that the
infatuation with communication, as if the ideal was sufficient to solve problems by itself, is over, at
least for the moment.
With our increasing awareness of the threats of surveillance and the loss of rights to privacy, we
should remember that total surveillance was also the demand of political absolutism. The Enlight-
enment philosophes forgot this battle with absolutism once they had won their battle for political
representation and for transparent rule.3 Today those earlier battles against the ancien regime are worth
remembering because they have to be restaged, albeit against different and greater powers. For exam-
ple, Enlightenment victories such as citizens’ rights to due process are repudiated by elected govern-
ments as democracy turns illiberal in many countries. Not full transparency but ways to salvage spaces
for sociality become the new challenge, when the built form itself can become a weapon against the
majority of its occupants.

Political Monumentality
No discussion of architectural monumentality is complete without political monumentality, which
is the tacit counterpoint of Gideon’s essay. It might seem from his words that one can substitute for
the other if architects intervene appropriately. The disconnect between pseudo-monumentality and
the inner uncertainty of modern life was concealed by declaring that real belonging came from
collective grandeur, and could be sublimated in war. If architects could build real spaces of rich and
meaningful social interaction, the political monumentality that enthralled large portions of the world
might not arise, Gideon implies. Architects had overlooked the emotional needs of the masses in
their focus on addressing more obvious utilitarian functions. Hence they had ignored our failure to
occupy the vastness of the world with others, leaving a void to be filled.
This void was of the imagination as well as of built form, and it was social as well as political.
The twentieth century’s most prominent solutions were of warring political monumentalities, of
Communism and Capitalism, each insistent that it had found the unique answer. Each sought mass
upliftment on a scale never before attempted in history, but with the end of that conflict, mass uplift-
ment as a collective task for the foreseeable future is on the defensive. The interregnum of national
socialism scaled up political monumentality to the point of implosion: the people could not, it turned
out, be collectively sacrificed at the altar of their collective beliefs, monuments or leaders. The lesson
was that neither architectural nor political monumentality could organically reflect people’s beliefs

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and values, much less promise salvation on earth. To adopt the language of Susan Buck-Morss, the
end of the twentieth century marked the passing of mass utopia in both East and West.4
Architects today work in an age where all-embracing visions for the masses appear in the past.
Far from being renewed today, those older visions are discredited in favor of more embattled and
exclusive political programs. In fact we seem to be entering a period defending rather than celebrat-
ing collective values, demanding battlements and not monuments.
It’s worth pausing to reflect on the shift this represents, from a time not long ago when the
structures built for post offices and railway stations could elevate the spirit as if they were cathedrals,
embracing crowds, suggesting always that there was room for more, displaying art and expertise that
could exhilarate. These still exist, and where they have not been redesigned and repurposed, they
retain their power to uplift. But capital today flows toward airports and malls, where the masses dis-
perse rather than congregate, and where the discreetly competitive charms of affluence undermine
the more elemental pleasure of belonging in a crowd.

Insurgent Architecture
If architecture today encloses public space and guards against its turning into a collective symbol, or a
space for collective uses, the crowd in turn has its ways of repurposing built form, conferring public
functions upon available objects through insurgent forms of occupation:

The street itself is thereby manifest as a well-worn interior: as living space of the collective, for
true collectives as such inhabit the street. The collective is an eternally awake, eternally agitated
being that—in the space between the building fronts—lives, experiences, understands, invents as
much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls. For it, for this collective, . . .
[w]alls with their “Post No Bills” are its writing desk, newspaper stands its libraries, display win-
dows its glazed inaccessible armoires, mailboxes its bronzes, benches its bedroom furniture, and
the cafe terrace is the balcony from which it looks down on its household.5

Meanwhile large populations, far from being accommodated in built space, may be abandoned
to the open, relegated to the refugee camp or the urban slum. The challenge for socially engaged
architecture is how to address this “extrusion” and exhibition of remaindered lives. Families fleeing
civil war, migrants undertaking dangerous journeys across borders, poor people living in shantytowns
AuQ7 subject to demolition raids for their illegal presence, though they may have nowhere else to go. In an
age that raises monuments to capital rather than to the collective itself, and that erects exquisite built
spaces alongside de facto exhibitions of those who have lost the right to shelter, we may have to seek
an insurgent architecture. This volume is an effort in that direction.

Notes
1 Sigfried Gideon, “The Need for a New Monumentality,” in S. Gideon, Architecture You and Me: The Diary of
a Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1958), 29.
2 Ibid., 28.
3 Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1998), 39. Of course the fact of governance inherently implies a limit to transparency; it is this
limit where absolute or sovereign power still reigns, in the domain of the deep or secret state, and that has
become more prominent today.
4 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2002).
5 Walter Benjamin, “First Sketches,” in The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 828.

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 Introduction
Architecture and Social Engagement

Farhan Karim

Architecture and Social Engagement

Very few of us would agree that a socially unengaged architecture is possible. One could convinc-
ingly argue that the Megalithic temples at Hagar Qim in Malta, third millennium BCE, and the
Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, 2570 BCE, were not built merely to appease the gods or to please tyrants.
Rather, these were shared spaces that opened up new possibilities for engaging the multitudes of
society, either by igniting a collective spiritual experience in the mysterious enclaves of the temples
at Hagar Qim or by nurturing a sense of camaraderie through the collective participation of the
people of Old Kingdom Egypt in the gigantic, larger-than-life construction process of the pyramid
at Giza. So, if architecture from its very beginnings, as it is presented in any standard survey textbook,
works in close collaboration with society, then why would it be important now to coin a new term,
“socially engaged architecture,” and to form a new theoretical position, as we do in this book? And
why it is important now to consider social engagement as a subject of investigation? We can answer
this question with an argument that society as a precondition for the production of architecture
needs little or no investigation, but that society as an essential part of architectural discourse, as in the
concept of socially engaged architecture, demands close attention because this discourse has not been
a prior basis of the discipline. Rather, the concept has been culturally and politically constructed and
has evolved over time through various media and representational tools, such as exhibitions and vari-
ous kinds of print and web publications (see Chapters 1, 2, and 3).
The term “social engagement” immediately points to an asymmetrical power relationship in
which trained professionals exchange knowledge with untrained populations. Despite this concept’s
association with an asymmetrical power relationship, a substantial number of contemporary archi-
tects believe that professional engagement with society would help to mitigate many pressing issues
in today’s world. With this hope in mind, architects across the globe are now working to redefine
architecture from a market-driven profession to a profession informed by a complex mix of praxis,
altruism, and activism, one that intends to eradicate poverty, resolve social exclusion, and construct an
egalitarian global society. Socially engaged architecture proposes to equate design with activism and
calls for an entrepreneurial model of the profession that would break it away from the conventional
model of the architect-commissioner dyad. The discourse of social engagement offers to shift archi-
tecture’s professional obligation from fulfilling idiosyncratic demands of individual clients to working
toward the common causes of the public good. Social engagement represents optimism both prag-
matically, by proposing to expand the scope of the discipline in the context of resource scarcity, and
morally, by refuting the apolitical premise of architecture.

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But is it a dilemma if socially engaged architecture, which operates within an asymmetric power
relationship, aspires to promise social justice? This is a difficult question to answer because profes-
sionals, educators, curators, and academics all have contested views on social engagement. The work-
ing methods and sociopolitical contexts of contemporary architects who are considered socially
engaged are so vast and diverse that it would be a mistake to reduce this complexity to a single
term. But still the conceptualization does exist, and it is thriving through various efforts, as we
see in numerous books, conferences, exhibitions, awards, and academic programs that present some
modes of architectural practice as socially engaged and some others as not (see Chapters 7 and 12).
These propositions—both socially engaged and unengaged—nevertheless are fraught with many
theoretical challenges and trigger debates about architecture’s relationship with the public, with
humanitarianism, and with social change, and they revisit the justification of architects as political
agents and representatives of the public (see Chapter 3, 6, and 12). In addressing these challenges,
architects across the globe have devised tactics that have varied considerably, depending on the eco-
nomic, political, and cultural context of the country (see Chapters 24–28). While the goals are same,
the methods vary significantly. Against this context we may ask, if social engagement as a topic of
investigation is indefinite and pluralist, and has so many loose ends, then how can we even create a
common platform to discuss this topic? This book tries to answer this question from the following
four perspectives.

Four Perspectives on Social Engagement in Architecture

The first perspective is that, instead of considering socially engaged architecture as a binary opposite
of socially unengaged architecture (or market-driven architecture), the book studies the use, scope, and
limitation of engagement as a theoretical tool kit and calls for a critical investigation of how differ-
ent forms of spatial knowledge are being produced and exchanged among various stakeholders (see
Chapters 1, 6, and 17). Instead of creating a binary opposition, the book studies social engagement as
a result of historical process in which market-driven and insurgent architectures are not only entan-
gled within a broader economic and political structure but also informed and shaped by each other.
For instance, socially engaged architecture’s methodological focus on interdisciplinary practices (see
Chapters 2 and 10) could be read vis-à-vis avant-garde conviction in bringing sociopolitical eman-
cipation through disciplinary autonomy (see Chapters 21–23). But both approaches were borne of
grappling with capitalist forces. Socially engaged architects advocate for working directly with the
community, often in collaboration with philanthropic organizations and nongovernmental organiza-
tions and often by bypassing the state authority manifested through local public administration. In
a way, socially engaged architecture’s main role as being a representative of community portrays an
ideal neoliberal world in which the state would have very limited control over the perceived com-
munity. Socially engaged architecture prefers to work piecemeal and shows disliking for any grand
master plan for radical social change, as the basic concept of engaged practice has emerged from the
loss of faith in large organizations—both on the Right and on the Left (see the postscript). However,
the social engagement position apparently stands in opposition to the avant-garde, which advocates
for a radical withdrawal from normative social systems by creating a mental shock that upsets estab-
lished norms. Social engagement criticizes this position by arguing that critical distance from society
makes architecture vulnerable to neoliberal forces, thereby making architecture a tool for commercial
spectacle. In summary, the book understands social engagement as part of the historical process and
not as a novel category or as a drastically different way of doing architecture.
The second perspective is that the book studies socially engaged architecture not only as pragmatic
responses to economic and technical problems but also as a way to understand the spatial experiences
of marginal subjectivities, such as those of women, children, ethnic groups, refugees, immigrants, and
displaced populations (see Chapters 14–16 and 29–32). This book recognizes that if we study social

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engagement exclusively as a problem-solving tool, we will overlook the lived experiences of diverse
groups of marginalized populations who are central to such projects. Exclusion of subjectivity means
the exclusion of issues regarding gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, and above all the
lived experience of the participants. And by excluding the issue of subjectivity, we reduce socially
engaged architecture to a discourse on “now and here.” This exclusive view flattens architecture from
a complex spatial experience of diverse subjectivities to a random combination of sporadic and intui-
tive actions for fixing problems at hand. This book shows that it is not enough to identify the target
population as “low-income” or “disenfranchised” or “marginal community” because the poor are not
an abstract amalgamation of demographic data and spending capacity; they are living communities
and individuals having diverse contexts and subjective experiences. This book also contends that
recognition of this subjectivity in our dealing with social engagement helps us explain the structural
base of inequality, and it provides a mechanism for forming the political agency of architecture.
The third perspective is that socially engaged architecture is studied as part of the development of
global capitalism and not as exclusive efforts aimed at creating spaces outside of capitalism. The essays
of this book investigate how the development of capitalism creates a financial context and sociopo-
litical need for the engaged practice. Without establishing this relationship between the politics and
spread of global capitalism, it is difficult to establish a knowledge base about social engagement in
architecture. Especially in case of the work of Euro-American professionals in developing nations,
if we study the projects only from the architects’ experience and their vantage points, then in most
cases we would conjure up images in which western experts are trying to build romantic spaces
that are liberated from capitalist apparatus and the exploitation of modernization (see Chapters 7
and 8). This book suggests that it is important to contextualize socially engaged architecture aimed
at mitigating poverty within the political factors of poverty and the economic issues of landowner-
ship because, without this insight, social engagement would be flattened to a question of techniques.
However, the book also presents examples in which the rhetoric of socially engaged architecture was
intentionally used to transform political problems into technical questions, thus hiding the realpolitik.
Social engagement is often used as an alibi for facilitating a global flow of politics, and thus poverty
is eventually reduced to a problem that could be solved through organized technology—for example,
through socially engaged architecture. While the solution of global “poverty” requires global political
negotiation, socially engaged architecture offers only an exclusive technical solution to the problem
(see Chapters 6, 7, and 12). In order to shed new light on this issue, the essays in this book investigate
the contemporary transnational practice of social engagement by looking at its historical forma-
tion within global capitalism (see Chapters 5,11, 24, and 32) and shows that the instrumental use of
architecture by Cold War diplomacy to preempt Third World poverty and to avoid the specter of
communism has taken a very complex form in the recent decades of prolonged economic austerity,
resource scarcity, and neoliberal globalization. The book observes that contemporary architects want
to counter the economic problems of the developing world through the creation of artistically driven
and engaged spaces, thereby bringing economics into confrontation with culture. Or, in other words,
economics is being equated to culture, and vice versa.
The fourth perspective is that, instead of judging the success and failure of socially engaged archi-
tecture in bringing actual social change, the book studies the role of socially engaged architecture in
forming public discourse and the methods and agendas of socially engaged architecture for work-
ing with public institutions. The book considers social engagement not as the total solution for a
social problem but as the provider of evolving models for how change could be brought in through
political institutions. Socially engaged architecture is indeed a tactic for establishing communication
among stakeholders. Architecture is considered a mechanism for displaying and communicating
ideology, and thus it contributes to the formation of critical public discourse. From this regard, if
we consider socially engaged architecture primarily as the creator and facilitator of public discourse,
then we may consider social engagement to be a network of signs and metaphors of social change;

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architecture plays its role by creating a matrix of symbols, narrations, and subnarrations similar to
those in the cinema or theater that induce a sense of change and feelings of empowerment in the
audience. Implicit in the staging or screening of empowerment through architecture is the optimism
that the actual actions would be performed or replicated in the real world by live human institutions.
The strength of socially engaged architecture lies in the power of that subconscious sign that could
be reinterpreted and eventually appropriated for different situations. From this perspective the book
observes that socially engaged architecture and the institutions that support and promote it are creat-
ing an architectural idea, if not architecture as an idea, and thus it challenges the very notion of archi-
tecture being the remedy for every possible sociopolitical evil. In this depiction, architecture may or
may not offer actual changes, but it always constructs a discourse for future possibilities. However, it
provides only a fragment of a contingent possibility and an allusion. In this regard, it is important for
the socially engaged architecture to unveil the concealed production process and also to exhibit the
demonstration of the construction process. The demonstration is aimed at creating a total immersive
experience both for the professionals and students who are involved in the construction process
and for the users (see Chapters 18–19). This immersive experience, formed by opening up the
hidden tectonics of architecture (see Chapter 19) and through the articulated material setting (see
Chapters 21–24), would create, as believed by the socially engaged architects, a new kind of public
awareness that would instigate everyday action (e.g., altering consumer behavior and lifestyle) rather
than a public investment in time or physical presence for political action in the conventional sense.
These essays study the role of architecture as a catalyst or mediator that facilitates the creation of the
public sphere through an opinion-building mechanism. In summary, the book studies how socially
engaged architecture facilitates the organization and formation of public discourse and creates politi-
cally engaged spaces in which material fabric and spatial articulation provoke users to act politically
and recombine and rearrange their environment.
Taken together, the essays in this book demonstrate how the concept of social engagement has
been entangled in the global politics of poverty, the reconstruction of the public sphere, the chang-
ing role of the state, charity, neoliberal urbanism, and—above all—the transformation of the modern
avant-garde, which engages in a ceaseless grappling to negotiate between the architect’s role as a
social agent and the discipline’s exclusive aesthetic implications. These essays look critically at the
context of socially engaged architecture: economic austerity, climate change, war, foreclosure, increas-
ing global poverty, microfinance, the evolving notions of professionalism, the changing conception of
the public, social businesses based on nongovernmental organizations, and, finally, the growing aca-
demic interest in revisioning and sustaining utopia—architecture as a means of radical social change.

Structure of This Book

The essays are organized into eight themes. The opening section, “Engagement as Discourse,” dis-
cusses how architects and designers consider and perceive the potential and limits of the public
sphere, the reciprocal relationship between citizens and professionals, and community and society
in their work. This section investigates and surveys why it is important for the discipline to review
the individual client–based model, to emphasize the abstract concept of collective society as a cli-
ent, and to evaluate the benefits these changes could bring to the discipline. The main questions of
this section thus could be summarized as, can architecture and planning contribute to constructing
and sustaining a new discourse of the public sphere in a true sense? The second section, “Targets of
Engagement,” discusses how resource scarcity, poverty, and socioeconomic exclusion set the bound-
ary conditions for design and how socially engaged architecture responds to those conditions. A core
issue of this investigation is to understand how financial, ecological, and humanitarian crises set new
targets for architecture.

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The focus of the third section, “Structures of Engagement,” is on the ways in which formal and
informal institutional structures—such as academic programs in universities, academic and commer-
cial publishers, awarding and granting agencies, and professional associations—disseminate knowledge
about social engagement. This section argues that it is important for us to understand not only how
knowledge is produced, who produces that knowledge, for what purpose, and under what context
but also, and just as importantly, how that knowledge is managed through translocal and transcultural
structures. The diffusion and dissemination of knowledge are essential for understanding how society
eventually appropriates, accepts, and interprets knowledge about social engagement. The fourth sec-
tion, “Subjects of Engagement,” discusses spatial tactics of social engagement that attempts to include
racial, political, and gender populations that have historically been excluded in the decision-making
process. This section argues that such practices, using the idea of social engagement, are aimed at
not only creating economic emancipation but also recognizing marginal subjectivities and devising
a new kind of citizenship. The fifth section, “Tectonics of Engagement,” demonstrates how do-it-
yourself projects, live projects, and design-build projects in academia and in professional architectural
firms help to form a new mode of civic engagement and a new definition of citizenship. This section
shows that the visibility of the construction process and the people attached to that process plays an
important role in how society values space as political tool.
The sixth section, “Environmental Engagement,” looks at the manifold relationships among com-
munity, the built environment, and nature and how socially engaged architecture transfers nature and
climate from being abstract ideas into operative tools. This section contends that a critical inquiry
is required to understand the politics of co-relating nature with disenfranchised communities. The
seventh section, “Mapping Engagement,” asserts the need for a critical method to survey the diverse
approaches of socially engaged architecture across the globe. Mapping and surveying are an essential
part of creating a sense of the diverse ideas about social engagement in different countries. Essays
in this section argue that the surveying of socially engaged architecture must be done in historical,
political, and cultural contexts. Despite the methodological differences in different regions, this sec-
tion shows that architecture’s turn toward the social and public good marks a common moment of
architecture’s self-reflection—a moment of exit from purist ego, an exit from the comfort zone of the
conventional professional model, and, finally, an exit from the trajectory of its self-acclaimed journey
to an alternative future. The last section, “Engagement in Emergency,” examines the politics and
working methodology of post-disaster settlements, refugee housing, ghettoes for illegal immigrants,
shelters for war refugees, and the like. The section’s central focus is to investigate to what extent
architecture can contribute to, and learn from, the issues regarding emergency and humanitarian
crises.

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 Postscript
How and When Was Architecture
Socially Engaged?

Simon Sadler

A social historian of architecture would argue (rightly, I think) that architecture is inevitably a social
art. So in enquiring after social engagement, we are trying to isolate purposeful traditions of using
architecture for drawing a greater number of people into political life, and better implementing
architectural knowledge for the common good, even if that means de-emphasizing innovations in
form and style. With this more targeted definition of social engagement, is it possible to map the
architecture of social engagement?
The subject is so vast that it might be best to start with a conjectural outline, one in which
architectures of social engagement shift tack much as the organization and ambitions of society
itself change. Perhaps socially engaged architectures are the tools, tactics or diagrams through
which we can observe the unfolding of a schematic history of modernizing societies, organized
initially top-down (through noble power), then more laterally (through social contracts), and then
bottom-up (from “the people”). This active construction of society has been necessarily some-
thing more ambitious than vernacular architecture, which, for all its qualities, posits no overt col-
lective social innovation. Indeed, social engagement is so ambitious as to resemble a dream-image
of architecture, which we can quickly recount before flagging some of the problems it still faces
in current practice.

Flattening
Let’s first consider the top-down design of social engagement. In one of the founding documents of
both philosophy and utopian design, the ideal city imagined by Plato c. 380 BCE would have been
rigorously planned, physically and politically, as a mode of statecraft to guarantee the greater good.
More pragmatically, Roman urbanism offered a program of temples, viaducts, forums, markets, agora
and entertainments, the better to sustain quality of life, shared belief and myth, and civics. Statecraft-
by-design is renewed in the European Renaissance, seen in the Parisian urbanism of Henri IV in
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to recall but one example, a keynote for civilizing
design through to Baron Haussmann’s Paris in the nineteenth century.
But the “soft” top-down autocracy of glittering civic centers and high-tech infrastructure, though
still promoted by today’s “starchitecture” and “smart cities,” is becoming unconvincing as a mode
of social engagement for those contemporary architects most committed to the principle of social
betterment. This is likely due to the long, slow “flattening” of ideal social organization. For example,

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Christianity and Islam brought the divine closer to ordinary individuals, with a corresponding inti-
macy in pastoral provision through the hospitals and schools of mosques and monasteries. Here, too,
was an origin of “community,” surely a key concept for a history of social engagement. In his pio-
neering sociology, Ferdinand Tönnies explained in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
how social groupings maintain their feelings of togetherness through Gemeinschaft (community).
Romanticism further suggested the existence of a binding “life-force,” a concept inherited by John
Ruskin and William Morris from Friedrich Schiller, and eventually passed to the twentieth-century
avant-garde.1
“Community” acquired an affective aesthetics through devices like bounded spaces—the court-
yards, cloisters, quadrangles and village greens of the Middle Ages became the Garden Cities and
social housing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the Settlement Houses
(like Toynbee Hall in London, 1884), the German siedlung (like Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner’s
1925–1933 Berlin Horseshoe Estate) and the more sensitive examples of welfare state design by
members of Team X, such as Aldo van Eyck. The new urbanism of the 1980s shifted the sensibility
toward private market provision. A sense of community was affected through the revival of fraternal
labor practices and mutualism from the arts and crafts movement on—Walter Gropius chose to name
his 1945 office The Architects’ Collaborative—and in the reconsideration of the architect-client rela-
tionship through participatory architecture, exemplified in the work of Ralph Erskine in England, or
the socialist Portuguese government’s SAAL (Local Ambulatory Support Service) experiment in the
mid-1970s. Fusing space and practice, community gardens have been one of the most pervasive and
benign forms of engagement since the 1970s (the New York City Parks Department, for example,
launched a community gardening division, GreenThumb, in 1978).
A second “flattening” of ideal social organization was termed by Tönnies as that of Gesellschaft—
“society.” As the Garden City and Team X’s projects might be to Gemeinschaft, the nineteenth-
century wide streets programs of Europe’s congested cities and the tower blocks in the 1960s might
be to Gesellschaft. If “community” is nostalgic for intimacy, “society” impersonally scales up, as its
individual members surrender some independence to pursue the betterment of all as the best means
to pursue their own interests, bound less by some organic identity than by social contract (identified
in the seventeenth century by Thomas Hobbes, the initial inspiration for Tönnies’s studies).
Some compromise between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft can be detected in the architecture of
the Scandinavian welfare state and in the Progressivist architecture advocated in the United States
from the 1920s on by Catherine Bauer, Lewis Mumford and others, seeking to combine the imper-
sonal efficiencies of planning with intimacies of scale and contact with nature. Progressive urban
planning led by “strong mayors” has revived something of a Gesellschaft spirit in the early twenty-
first century—Enrique Peñalosa’s investments in Bogotá, Colombia, are one key example. But the
high-water mark of social architecture probably remains the functionalism advocated by the Dessau
Bauhaus during 1926–1933 and, prior to its dissolution into Team X, by CIAM (Congrès Inter-
nationaux d’Architecture Moderne, founded 1928), the better (it was argued, most famously by Le
Corbusier) to deliver the benefits of scientific progress to the greater number, through the building
by central government of expert-planned cities, schools, universities, hospitals and, above all, housing.

Postmodern Architectural Social Engagement

The postmodern turn since the 1960s against this long, modernizing legacy of urban beautifica-
tion and hygiene stemming from the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment and Hegelianism has
been well documented. With that turn, hastened by pressure from 1960s countercultures, came an
increasing interest in the social and political dimensions of architectural practice, including among
practitioners themselves. But much beyond its celebrated attacks on the most bureaucratic Gesellschaft
architecture—the criticism led out by the 1961 publication of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of

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 Postscript

Great American Cities of Robert Moses’s plans for New York and of the housing project of Pruitt-
Igoe in St. Louis, and the eruption of Parisian protests in 1968 from the austerely planned campus of
Nanterre University, and so forth—the precise contours of a postmodern architectural social engage-
ment remain surprisingly undefined. It might be, though, possible to make some general observations
about postmodern architectural social engagement, which is, for all its lack of definition, a burgeon-
ing field.
The old architectural social engagement of nobility and social contracts could be visualized and
planned in advance—through drawings, diagrams and quantification—and that option of a broad,
civic social engagement was influentially sustained from the late 1960s on in the postmodern urban-
ism of Italian Tendenza, its hefty piazzas, arcades, blocks and towers a “memory” of collectivity in a
fragmented political economy and built environment. But, mostly, postmodern architectural social
engagement veers away from this traditional practice of design, and toward activism, pragmatism and
praxis, in so far as it prefers action, in real space, in the now, engaging actors immediately, without its
instigators presuming to program the future on behalf of others. Of innumerable possible case studies
of this since the 1960s, we could stay in Italy to recall its “radical architecture” around the studios of
Archizoom, Superstudio, Gruppo Strum and Gruppo 9999.
Postmodern architectural social engagement tends to reinvent welfare state and progressivist
engagement as pure practice, still pursuing the fruits of community and society, but with minimal
dependency on the apparatuses of communal and social authority (organized religion, states, corpora-
tions, political parties and the like). Dissensus is recognized as an inevitability that can be creatively
channeled rather than artificially (and violently) homogenized. The 1969 participation of architects
from the College of Environmental Design (the erstwhile center for Catherine Bauer’s social vision) in
the anarchic People’s Park a few blocks away in Berkeley could be taken as a founding gesture of this
tendency. Embedded among other social actors as participants, advocates and consultants, architects
supposedly rescinded their visionary, vanguard role. Pursuing instead actually existing change rather
than the symbolism to which even such redoubtable designers of social engagement as the Russian
constructivists of the 1920s had to resort (revived still more symbolically in postmodern deconstruc-
tivism), the supersession of vanguardism supposedly put paid to modernism. Or did it? It could also be
the case that as an instigator of social engagement without the state—without, even, a clear political
mandate—the postmodern architecture of social engagement has been astonishingly vanguard.
In practice, though, the pursuit of pro bono supplements to ordinary professional design practice
became close to rote, part and parcel of architectural education since the 1960s (the design-build ini-
tiatives of Yale, under the deanship of Charles Moore, were one origin). This “outsourcing” of “the
social” to an architectural “voluntary sector” seems at once deeply compatible with the monetarist
and neoliberal “rollbacks” of progressivist and welfare state social provisions, and a noble reminder of
social possibility and obligation crudely ground under by the instatement of the market as the sole
arbiter of value.

Tactics of Contemporary Architectural Social Engagement

By way of initiating a mental map of the tactics of contemporary architectural social engagement,
we might very briefly recall some of its most iconic recent examples. Largely nongovernmental, and
questioning of architecture’s purpose as a social art, these examples can claim lineage to the reigni-
tion of the discipline’s “conscience” in the 1960s and 1970s, ever more reflexive to the neoliberal
“rollbacks” of progressivist and welfare state social provisions, as though architecture itself survives as
a benefactor, still attendant to community and social need.
At Quinta Monroy, Chile, 2016 Pritzker Prize laureate Alejandro Aravena and his studio, Ele-
mental, settled squatters in permanent, legal, community-oriented housing in 2003 that has since
been completed by the occupants. This we might use as an illustration of a self-help approach, which

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historically drew upon 1960s architectural studies of Latin American squatter settlements (barriadas)
by John Turner, by the 1965–1974 PREVI experiment (Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda) in
Lima, Peru, in the Habitat programs started by the United Nations in 1978 after a series of confer-
ences, and in the fieldwork of NGOs.
Brad Pitt’s 2007 “Make It Right” project is a prominent instance of another strategy, which
we might call philanthropic voluntarism. Pitt conscripted “starchitects” like Frank Gehry, Morphosis
and MVRDV to build sustainable contemporary homes in the predominantly African American
district wiped out in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina overcame inadequate infrastructure
in 2005. Elsewhere in the American South, Rural Studio, founded in Alabama in 1993, assigns
design-build teams of students to create ultra-low-cost houses and community structures for the
rural poor, often with salvaged materials, so that the new structures join up social engagement with
that other political keynote of contemporary design, sustainability (Make It Right uses extensive
solar energy).
Since 2005 city streets have “reclaimed,” through an annual meter-feeding Parking Day, by “par-
klet” public space created from parking lanes and parking spaces, a tactic (now spread worldwide)
initiated in San Francisco in 2005 by architectural practice Rebar. It is a mode of what has become
known as tactical urbanism, institutionalizing the spontaneous diversion of public space from func-
tional circulation to creative amenity. Once a proposition of avant-gardes like situationism, and a
familiar sight of the revolutionary occupations of the 1960s, this “hacking” of event-space can be logged
as a further strategy of postmodern architectural social engagement—of an “expanded architecture”
that follows the lead of other “expanded” media of the 1960s and 1970s in the making of sites, rather
than the reproduction of existing media. It reads space, infrastructure and capital as a ready-made
waiting to be redirected.
There are surely more strategies of postmodern social engagement we could describe, but for
the moment we can close the account with one more, in which we find markets and consumption
revisited as media of social engagement. The resurgence in the last four decades of farmers markets
recalls a Jeffersonian ideal (especially in North America) of agrarian markets, outside of corporate
control. Serving as renewed market squares—with their deep ancestry, via piazzas, to the forum and
agora—farmers markets model an ideal of (literally) grassroots change, especially when coupled with
urban farming.

The Political Economy of Contemporary Architectural

Social Engagement
The revanchist and vanguard social engagement of these four strategies is symptomatic of a loss of
faith in large-scale organization that has overtaken the left and right alike since the 1960s—at once
a response to, and abetting of, the withdrawal of states and corporations from their historic modern
role of social management.
The macroeconomic background story to this is that of the turn from Keynesianism to neoliberalism—
of counter-cyclical investments by the state in housing, say, become protest at the gentrification of
market-rate housing. Simultaneously, constituencies supportive of socialist and centrist safety nets
have been encouraged to believe in entrepreneurialism, be it via the medium of the market, or the
social enterprise of community activism, or by informal networks carried by information technology.
Several generations of architects have been encouraged to turn away from governance by an impres-
sive intellectual skepticism spread dizzyingly across the political and philosophical spectrum—from
the classical liberalism of Friedrich von Hayek to the activism of Jane Jacobs and the design meth-
ods of Horst Rittel; from the neo-Marxism of Henri Lefebvre and Manfredo Tafuri to the post-
structuralism of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; from the constructionism of
Bruno Latour to the political and aesthetic philosophy of Jacques Rancière.

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The challenge for architectural social engagement became to forge social bonds without resort-
ing to control. Though postmodern social engagement in part reacted against the far left of 1960s
counterculture, there is in it the specter of a revived anarchism—of a conviction that we, the people,
know how to organize and cooperate, a conviction that had been ground under and made invisible
by the very planning to which anarchism contributed (at its inception, by Patrick Geddes). The
capacity to organize and cooperate had been superseded by corporate and state technocracy, it was
widely assumed in the 1960s, prompting a gloomy, post-1968 despair at the capacity of architecture
to bring change, assuming architecture was only ever scripted by the perpetual upheaval of capitalist
development—its gestures in effect safely contained by grids and networks of the city and, below
that, by the capitalist economic base, over which architecture had little control beyond the capacity
of architects to affect social-democratic governmental policy through land use and housing design.2
In the last half-century, though, the beguiling architectural alternative to a conventional parlia-
mentary and bureaucratic politics that would produce drawings, diagrams and quantification has
been (we might argue) a politics by milieu—that is, by the live making of preferred situations (houses
for the dispossessed, social space instead of traffic, productive land instead of wasteland etc.) that
activate new coalitions and redirect resources. In positing architecture as politics, the relevance of
the architectural discipline is revived, and though its power may never again be as extensive as it was
when directing urban projects wholesale, its moral authority is deepened, revealing space as action-
able by all, and architecture as praxis, not the imposition of hegemony.
The architectural discipline can therefore inculcate an ideology in its shirtsleeved students (if
less so in its pressed-shirt practitioners servicing neoliberal growth) that architecture does good, and
that the discipline’s revived compassion recalls the origins of social engagement in religion and
communitarianism. The ingress of theories of political autonomy (notably from the 1970s Italian
extra-parliamentary left) simultaneously put the design discipline somewhere near the forefront of
contemporary political theory, a trajectory peaking with architectural sympathies for the Arab Spring
in 2010–2011, with the 2011 Occupy movement, with the 2013 protests in Turkey and Brazil, with
the movements in the urban squares of Greece and Spain, and with the application of architectural
methods to the critical study of the security apparatus in sites such as Israel.

Political Limits to Architectural Social Engagement

Nonetheless, it is probably politically most realistic to pursue an architecture of political engagement—
not as political engagement. That’s to say, postmodern architectural social engagement is likely bet-
ter when positioned as an instrument of a larger politics, just as architecture was an instrument of
the politics of social contracts and noble power earlier in history. To focus wholly on architecture-
as-change may well shore up the identity of the discipline, even as the definition of architecture
expands, yet history is also in the making all around architecture—an architectural parti likely will
not outflank a political party. This is because the contexts in which architecture operates produce
huge challenges for social engagement: the diminutive scale of its impact, and the difficulty of
riding, or outflanking, a capitalist political-economic system that resists any definition of social
justice (i.e., of the fair and just relation between the individual and society) that cannot be met
through markets.
Regarding impact, for instance, many residents of Hale County, Alabama, have been given shelter
by Rural Studio, and parklets have served as placeholders for expanded sidewalks in San Francisco.
But the footprint of these architectures remains nonetheless limited. These commendable archi-
tectures of social responsibility have to be limited to those few and tiny sites where architects can
provide free or reduced-rate labor (sometimes building as well as designing) with charitable ben-
efactors. They operate at a radically different physical and economic scale to the built environment
at large, and usually avoid the key cost of building, which is high-value land. That this might be a

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limitation inherent to pragmatic micro-engagement was deftly recognized and then flipped by the
title of the 2010 Museum of Modern Art show promising Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures
of Social Engagement, which implied some deep local effect, or an impact that might be multiplied
through repetition by others (e.g., through the Architecture for Humanity charity, now the Open
Architecture Collaborative). But these architectures are largely unsupported by the political and eco-
nomic forces driving socially uneven and inequitable development in the first place (Make It Right
seems unlikely to seed the recovery of the Lower Ninth Ward, and like Rural Studio, it must in the
meantime manage a racial asymmetry with its clients while remaining vigilant about paternalistic
and colonial roles). And where an expanded social engagement architecture uses social media, the
architect must first ensure near-universal access—but how?
Indeed, one problem for a convincing architecture of social engagement is to offer properly
“counter-hegemonic” alternatives when “social engagement,” in its varying definitions, is a white-
hot commodity: the standard sociological definition of social engagement is an individual’s degree of
participation in a community or society, which almost elides with the social media design paradigm
of Silicon Valley that is mostly committed to the expansion of capitalism, with probably uneven
effects across race and class, and with an increasingly distorting effect on politics much-analyzed fol-
lowing the 2016 U.S. election.
Architectures of social engagement are then particularly likely to find themselves along the fault
line of “criticality” and “post-criticality” in architecture. Even Occupy, one of the most convincing
hosts for architectural criticality (as it ruptured business-as-usual in favor of its “mic check” delibera-
tions on collective issues), is questioned in retrospect for the ease with which some of its tech-savvy
participants moved across roles into highly remunerated jobs in tech and finance. In this, social
engagement is akin to the pragmatist progressivism of the early twentieth century. Because culture,
politics and action are indeed fluid, and must be acted on from within, prior to any future utopian
realignment, many architectures of social engagement try to be fastidiously apolitical, or politically
coy, or post-political, allowing them to maintain institutional support and avoid official censure, but
at the cost of avoiding direct engagement in the unequal political and economic structures. Most
regrettably, it could abet those structures—this has been the concern of observers linking urban liv-
ability, renewed through tactical urbanism, with gentrification, and of critics who associate humani-
tarian architecture with the maintenance of statelessness and neoliberal economic restructuring.

What Next for Architectural Social Engagement?

Social engagement must then stay abreast of the changing historical contexts that it aspires to modify.
If, up to 2016, the bugbear of social engagement architects was the social, economic, racial and
climatic inequality and unsustainability of globalized neoliberal growth (e.g., how to ameliorate
the shortage of affordable housing in global cities), as of 2016 social engagement architecture must
face, in numerous regions, the far-right, neo-nationalist answer to those very same questions. That
postmodern architectural social engagement had left some practitioners ideologically unprepared for
this latest political reality was suggested in the statement issued by a small U.S. practice in defense
of its submission to the Trump Administration’s 2017 Request for Proposals (RFP) for a wall built
between the United States and Mexico: “Given our tools as architects, what can we, as practition-
ers, do to redirect the conversation to a more humane and aesthetically aware border infrastructure,
material and otherwise?”3
The answer to this question surely is not to cooperate with the proposal, even “critically.” Naïve
pragmatism risks appeasing political forces likely hostile to the social flattening and humanism of
architectural social engagement, feigning political neutrality even as the enemies of humanistic archi-
tectural engagement learn how to argue architecturally—“I think the wall is a noble and wonderful
project to enforce the integrity of our country” counters one respondent to a journalist’s dismay that

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architects would submit to the RFP for the Border Wall.4 One of the perils of Tönnies’s Gemein-
schaft (community) was that community necessarily excludes, and it can moreover be appropriated
by nationalism. The slippage was illustrated by a 2017 “Irrigation Wall” proposal for desalination
infrastructure, a winning entry for a competition to reconceptualize the wall.5 It was a clever enough
idea and execution and yet, without apparent irony, the winning competition entry separated agri-
cultural workers by high mesh fencing, and 1960s-style collage techniques pasted in picnickers at a
farmers market. The possibility of mass resistance to a border wall was presented already parceled out.
To the degree that a right-drifting politics can be met in the near term by architectural social
engagement, it will likely be through insisting on core services (the money-saving loss of clean
water to Flint, Michigan, in 2014 was an astonishing reminder of the fragility of our social contract),
migrant and refugee sanctuary and, beyond that, through expanded architectures of coalition and
communication. The more architecturally enjoyable practices of social interaction can be restored,
stronger, as soon as everyone can safely take part. But it might in the meantime be necessary to prin-
cipally approach social engagement collectively, not architecturally.

Notes
1 See Adrian Forty, “‘Dead or Alive’—Describing ‘the Social,’” in Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern
Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 103.
2 For a comprehensive recent survey of architectural practices of resistance, see Tahl Kaminer, The Efficacy of
Architecture: Political Contestation and Agency (London: Routledge, 2017).
3 Jake Matatyaou and Kyle Hovenkotter ( June/July), quoted in Antonio Pacheco, “These Architects Want to
Critically Engage With Trump’s Border Wall,” The Architect’s Newspaper, March 3, 2017, https://archpaper.
com/2017/03/junejuly-border-wall/ (accessed 3/31/17).
4 Steve Gaines, comment dated 3/3/17, to Pacheco, “These Architects Want to Critically Engage With
Trump’s Border Wall.”
5 See Gautier Piechotta and Wu Di (Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture, Paris), “Irrigation Wall” concept, winner of
a competition by the Third Mind Foundation to reconceptualize the U.S./Mexico border wall, 2017, http://
buildingtheborderwall.com/second-wall-of-america (accessed 3/31/17).

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