Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 24: Building Socialist Architecture — with Architects for Social Housing
Speakers: Melissa Roach, Maria Cecilia Saba, Jamie-Leigh Gonzales, Rachel Wong, Am Johal, Geraldine Denning, Simon Elmer
[theme music]
Melissa Roach 0:06
You’re listening to Below the Radar, a knowledge mobilization project recorded out of 312 Main. This podcast is produced by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement.
Maria Cecilia Saba 0:12
Below the Radar brings forward ideas to encourage meaningful exchanges across communities.
Jamie-Leigh Gonzales 0:21
Each episode we interview guests on topics ranging from environmental and social justice, arts, culture, community building, and urban issues. This podcast is recorded on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
[theme music]
Rachel Wong 0:43
Hi, I’m Rachel Wong and today on Below the Radar we are joined by Geraldine Dening and Simon Elmer, together they make up Architects for Social Housing, a community interest company from London, England, that organizes working collectives for individual projects. In this episode, Am Johal talks to the Architects for Social Housing about socialist architecture and why these principles should be pursued in order to combat the housing crisis that we currently face.
[theme music fades]
Am Johal 1:20
Welcome to Below the Radar, we are really excited to have Geraldine Dening and Simon Elmer with us. After nearly five years of operation Architects for Social Housing takes its fellowship with 221A Gallery here in Vancouver, in order to reflect and re-strategize around the civic housing crisis that is afoot in London and other cities in the world and blending down particularly here in the corrupt real estate racket of Vancouver, as I like to say. They are going to be working on a writing project here. Welcome Geraldine and Simon.
Simon Elmer 1:54
Hi.
Geraldine Denning 1:55
Hi, thanks for having us.
Am Johal 1:56
Great, so one of the things that you are going to be talking about is this notion of a socialist architecture. What do you mean by that?
Geraldine Denning 2:06
Good question.
Simon Elmer 2:07
I think that is what we are here to find out in a way and writing about it, we created this phrase. What it isn’t is socialist architecture, so it is not referring to architecture like the same as the GDR in Germany or something behind the iron curtain. It is something that we are trying to promote, we are trying to find out what it is. I guess it comes out of the five years of our practice in London, as architects and also as I guess lobbyists for changes in the housing policy. I guess like a lot of cities the housing situation in London is highly politicized and the very practical and logical solutions, that we design solutions that we come up to the crisis in housing affordability there, have been generally refused and rejected and we have realized through that that we have to engage in changing policy but also in changing practices as well. At the moment, London Housing Policy is based on a bunch of fallacies. Current economic models which really don’t apply to the nature of what is a global housing crisis, the financialization of housing and the kind of resistances to that are based on ideas around human rights, around the ethics of the individual, all of which we found, we have seen are inadequate to offer either resistance or an alternative. So we want to ground this idea of the socialist architecture practice in precisely that, in social practices which embraces the totality of the, to put it formally, the economic, social and environmental dimension of the housing crisis.
Geraldine Denning 3:41
Yes, this is very much about reflection on the work we have been doing in trying to formulate the set of, both ways in which we can practice within the existing capitalist structure, but also hopefully allow those practices which we have kind of identified to inform the changes in that structure. So it is sort of two fold exploration, I suppose, one of which is about trying to encourage better forms of practice, but then at the same time, those practices promoting change, but also the lobbying promoting sort of more policy related change as well. So it is kinda trying to explore those two sides of an architecture practice.
Am Johal 4:21
Clearly there is a built in critique of the profession or the practice of architecture itself. I really love the image that you circulated for one of the talks that are happening while you are here, which it says: why architects wear black? Because they are the morticians of the working class. So, I am wondering If you could talk a little about what you see as the crisis of contemporary architecture or at least your relationship to it.
Simon Elmer 4:51
Yeah, I think when we started off in 2015, it actually was not our idea, it was a group of anarchists who occupied a council estate, which was under threat of demolition. And they went and targeted one of the actual architecture practices, which was designing its redevelopment, which will led to enormous loss of homes for social rent. And we thought that was a good idea. The conversation in the UK, I guess like it is everywhere, it is very one sided, local authorities are not listening, developers certainly are not listening, so we thought architects may, because architects, kind of like doctors, have something like an hippocratic oath, they have a code of practice, which they have to follow. And once upon a time, architects had a social agenda, I think. Certainly in the UK, in the post world period, when a lot of these states were built, when we had the instigation of the welfare state, architects are very much at the heart of that. And the council states they built weren’t simply about blocks of architecture or real estate or house people, they were about a vision of how people can live together, in communities, in cities, and so on and so forth. And we were very eager, one of our agendas is to recover, reclaim the social and political dimension of architecture.
Simon Elmer 6:09
So in the early days, we might do it again actually this year, we went after architects and architecture prizes in particular. Things like the Stirling Prize, which is the biggest prize in the UK, which is meant to be handed out to the architecture which has contributed most to the history of architecture in the UK. And in the early years, they were kind of handing out to appalling structures, one of which was Neo Bankside which was an appalling neoliberal development which builds affordable housing offsite, another one was actually in the estate of demolition program. When we went after them, they got a huge amount of press, because nobody had targeted architects, in the way we did before. Under the first, the architecture profession thought, well this is something interesting. And they kinda liked that, people think we are important, because architects in the UK are very much out of the building industry. I think only two percent of the buildings in the UK are actually designed by architects. But as we began to sort of present alternatives, there was an implicit threat or an explicit threat to the commissions, and there has been a kind of turn against us well, but certainly, calling on architects and practices to reclaim this place, has found an echo.
Geraldine Denning 7:26
And I think as a young architect, growing up, and a lot of my peers, you go through the education system, which is more or less, has some social engagement, you start coming out into commercial practice, which is 98% of practices in the UK is commercial. And there is almost zero social or political content or opportunities within those practices. There is no conversation, no debate, and a lot of my most socially engaged colleagues just got out of the architecture profession altogether. As I thought we become more and more aware of this complicity of the role of architects within what we saw happening to the loss of public land, public facilities, public space, public housing in London in the UK, there was a kind of recognition that what if we are complicit in it, then we have an agency with that. And we can chose, where to place that agency. Part of this is definitely part of our imagination, our vision is to try and engage a change in the architecture profession within architecture education, it’s got to start with education.
Geraldine Denning 8:31
And interestingly a lot of the people that want to come work with us are young architects, who are themselves, at the hard end of the housing crisis. Themselves priced out of the city they are working in, are appalled at the nature of the working conditions some of them are working under, and don’t see any opportunities to get out of that so they are the ones that are coming to us, to offer their time and their expertise, and their knowledge, and their passion and their anger to try to imagine a different future for architects to take a different role in the cities than they are today.
Am Johal 9:07
Inside the architecture profession, depending which country or region you are in, there seems to be a professional practices in order to maintain the designation, there’s various disciplinary methods that can be used to keep people in line, slap them on the hand, etc, so you work within a particular frame, but what are some of those practices that you have seen used in London, or you have come across in your research.
Geraldine Denning 9:34
I mean the codes that we have, so the architect's registration board, is the one who sets the codes of practice, and over the last ten or twenty years, they have become increasingly weak. Not only weak in terms of their teeth, in terms of their actual agency, but in terms of the actual content. I mean I think it is code five, standard five, which used to be addressing, there was an obligation for the architect to have some consideration for the people that were potentially going to use the product of their services, the word “people” have now been removed completely, and now they only have an obligation to the environment. Tracking the codes, tracking the emphasis and the lack of emphasis and the changes of emphasis is really interesting and it reflects, to some extent, the commercialization of the practice that we are seeing. I mean, one of the practices, for example, one of the ones that Simon mentioned, an estate of regeneration scheme at the Aylesbury Estate. The residents on that estate took the regeneration to a formal tribunal out to an inquiry and the council was found to be in contravention of the resident’s human rights. So you would imagen, an architect's practice, that is involved directly with something that is in contravention of human rights, you would think that might trigger something, in terms of the architect's code, but absolutely nothing. Funny enough, or maybe not funny enough, the head of the architecture practice is or was the head of the RIBA [Stirling Price]. The idea that there is any sort of code of conduct that has any real meaning at all has sort of disappeared.
Simon Elmer 11:26
Also, outside of the codes and the restrictions, the biggest means of keeping people in line is during a housing situation. If you are a young architect and you just graduated, you are going to work for a big practice. Because we live in what Thatcher actually called a homeowner democracy; there are no rent caps, private rental market is absolutely absurd, the housing policy is actually to demolish what social housing there is, council housing and social housing, there is a very limited amount of housing provision for someone like a young architect. So the fact that they are financially tied to these practices and the projects they are doing keeps them in line. And this is really why we are insisting on this idea of the socialist architecture as a form of practice. The Royal Institute of British Architects, when we started sort of targeting them and raising this issue, which strangely really hadn’t been raised in the architecture profession about estate demolition, they responded with a text called: “The ethics of the estate regeneration”. Regeneration means anything but that, it is demolition and redevelopment, and ultimately it is down to the individual ethics of the architect. Now if you are a junior architect, and you are working with someone like HD Design who work on the Aylesbury Estate regeneration, you’ve got rent to pay, you’ve got enormous student debt, you are kept in line by your own personal financial relation to the crisis of housing affordability. So your limitations, your agency within that is very limited. And as Geraldine said, most of the young architects that come and work with us, a lot of them labour for free because they are so appalled but also so restricted as practitioners by what they can do within the current market, architectural market, the profession.
Am Johal 13:21
Margaret Thatcher, interesting you should mention her. We just know her as Maggie Thatcher [laughs]. There is a strong legacy of social housing in the UK, but there have also been really long periods of this neoliberalism and pulling back of support around the development of new social housing and also in privatizing what was there, and I wonder how you would characterize some of the discussions happening in London right now.
Geraldine Denning 13:51
Well, I think to some extent, the questions about social housing aren’t all new, and when we look back to the earliest forms of social housing wich was coming out potentially of some form of what was called slum clearances and what we were seeing happening it is celebrated a lot of these estates and the projects that came out, you would see happening under those particular circumstances was that a very small percentage of the people that live in the original communities were able to afford to come and move in to the new estates, so that even embedded in some of the earliest forms of social housing was already embedded a form of social cleansing. And I think what we see now it’s a different form but actually is the same practices that are happening every time a so call regeneration, the same language is being used around slum clearance: overcrowding, the poverty of construction, the quality of the architecture, all of the same arguments were actually used in the 20’s, in the 30’s, in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s and now being applied to current housing state. So the conversations are not necessarily new, they are slightly different in the form they take, but I think the ultimate narrative is actually quite a continuous one.
Simon Elmer 15:09
I mean, what is going on particularly in London because of the land values or the potential land values, but across England, Wales and the UK is a form of enclosure, we have a long history in the UK of land enclosure, which kinda goes back hundreds of years, thousands of years.
Am Johal 15:26
We know a bit about it because it was brought over here in a colonial sense [laughs].
Simon Elmer 15:29
And really the estates demolition program is another form of enclosure, privatization of land, privatization of housing provision. This golden age, as we look back on it now, in the post war period, where enormous amounts of homes [council housing we call it, you call it social housing] was provided. I think we had, in 1979, the year Thatcher got in, something like 42% of the population of the UK lived in council housing. It is a huge amount of people. It is now about 7% and there is about another 8% which are in housing association properties, which is something in between, and a lot of which stock transfer from council housing. So the crisis of housing affordability is not merely an economic phenomenon, it is also an ideological one. At the moment developers, politicians, think tanks, academics, anyone who’s got anything to gain from the housing crisis, are working very hard to characterize this post war period as a blip within the great triumph of capitalism. And to argue that the only, and definitely the most successful form of housing provision is the market, which goes against everything that history tells us. There has always been a housing crisis, it’s endemic to capitalism.
Simon Elmer 15:29
If you go to read Friedrich Engels in 1872, he talks about the housing crisis. Capitalism needs a housing crisis, there needs to be a market niche if you like. Council housing does one thing, it does a number of things, one of the things, it houses people, but what it does, it threatens the profits of developers. In the UK, we don’t really have much of an industry left, we are a service economy, and most of our wealth [something like three and a half times our GDP] is in our property market and nothing could be allowed to threaten that. Things like rent caps, you’ve got them in Vancouver, you’ve got them in Berlin, you’ve got them in different cities, they don’t really work. They do a little bit, they don’t really work.
Am Johal 17:36
Here it is percentage increases.
Simon Elmer 17:39
The only, the most efficient, the best way to reduce rental prices and house prices is to provide an alternative which is state funded and state built. That is the only way to address it. So there is an enormous, huge campaign, ideological campaign, which everyone bought into. And unfortunately the architecture profession that marketized housing provision is the only way forward.
Geraldine Denning 18:08
Part of that campaign is also the myths around housing and they are so well ingrained, one of the ones being the myths of supply and demand. Somehow if you provide more, even if those things are homes for market sale, that eventually that will trickle down, and will even out the so-called “bubble”. We just know that is not true. That has never proven to be the case. Interestingly we are seeing that the opposite is true. The more you build, actually, that pushes prices up. There is a phrase which is related to, there is a piece of research done in the 70’s around motorways, which is called “Induced demand”. So the idea was, “we need to build bigger motor ways to reduce the traffic”, what we actually saw happening was we built bigger roads and the traffic increases. That is exactly what we are seeing happening here in housing. And I think that goes against all the things we are told, these very basic principles of marketization and capitalism. Part of what we are also trying to do is to understand the truth behind these myths and to try to expose these core myths, because until you expose those core myths, you are never going to be able to address the problem. But there is no interest in exposing them to the people who are in the media industry, are also those people that are profiting from the so-called “crisis”.
Simon Elmer 19:29
I think also that goes back to one of the reasons we are here in Vancouver. We have spoken, we have gone to different conferences to talk to people about the crisis of housing affordability in New York, in Toronto, in Paris, in Barcelona, in Berlin, in London, in Melbourne, in Sidney, in cities across the world. And in London it is always about local conditions. London is too low, we need to raise the housing density, or we need to expand beyond its borders. The origins of the crisis is always attributed to particular situations, but in fact all these cities across the world have very, very different situations, different land typologies, different landscape, even different economies in a way, but they all share the same housing crisis. And the origins of that is the situation of global capital, the nature of financialization of housing as a commodity and this is common globally. And that is why economic models like supply and demand have got absolutely no descriptive purchase on the nature of the financialization of housing and how marketized housing can offset that. That is why it is interesting for us to come to Vancouver and look at a completely different city, very different history and see you’ve still got the same housing crisis, you’ve still got hundreds of thousand people living on the streets right next to huge upmarket, I presume largely empty or not occupied by the people around them, residential developments.
Am Johal 20:54
We had Samuel Stein here recently talking about his book, Gentrification and the Real Estate State, and it is not just capital itself but also the kind of policies that are put in place by planning and zoning and these type of things that exacerbated. For a very long time in Vancouver we didn’t have limits to donations at the civic level. So you could cut a check for a million dollars, if you wanted to. So the kind of the regulatory capture of the planning process by development interest was very much at play and we had big global events that very much supported tourism and development, so Expo 86 is a big one and the 2010 Olympics of course added and exacerbated existing development paths. So very interesting to hear you talk about these different places, because there’s been some recent taxation methods to slow down the flow of capital, we have also had the phenomenon of money laundering as well, so there is an active public inquiry under way.
Am Johal 21:59
One of the things I wanted to talk about, you have a critique of this notion to “the right to the city” and people like Henri Lafavre have written about, there was a well known article by David Harvey in the New Left Review, but then it really got picked up by the kind of NGO sector, the human rights sector circulated it in various ways with different definitions, and it has been used by activist here locally as well. I am wondering if you can talk a little about what you perceived as a critique of this notion of “the right to the city”.
Simon Elmer 22:33
I think human rights are a set of principles which don’t take into account how they are implemented as practices. They rely on a legal framework to defend people’s human rights or to insist on these rights, to the right to housing or something. But the legal framework, we’ve seen this again and again, is subject to both economic and political pressures, which always overcome the human rights. There’s lots of examples of that which are on site here, certainly in the UK, but around the place. I also think human rights are, I always use this Kafka story, “Before the Law,” the man who sits before the law his whole life to gain access to the law, and then he dies and he says to the gatekeeper, “why is it that nobody else came along to gain access to the law?” and the gatekeeper says “because this doorway was made for you and now I am going to shut it”. And I think this is a good metaphor for what human rights are. It is something that we sit before, waiting for them to be enacted. It’s not a failure of human rights to account for how they are implemented, how principles are turned into practice, I think it’s their role.
Simon Elmer 23:43
And that’s why we oppose in many ways the idea of the socialist architects practise to the purely principles of human rights. Human rights are great, as principles, but they don’t do anything and I actually think they take up, I don’t think this, I know this, particularly in London. I recently wrote a paper about a whole range of housing campaigns which appealed to various forms of human rights, various housing rights as well: rights to transfer, rights to management, and ultimately they all get up and eventually the high court says no. Why? Because they are under the political and economical pressures to do so. It is not only not worked, it’s taken up a huge amount of peoples’ energy and money as well. Now they have to crowdfund for lawyers and so forth and they could be doing a whole lot more. I think that is the function of human rights under capitalism, it’s a kinda facade of accountability, of democracy, of liberalism, that sort of stuff. Human rights are great when there is a lot of fat on the skewer. That sounded like a phrase, just made it up there. We are not, we are on lean times at the moment. Liberalism is going out the window, the middle class is getting, they are getting, Engles says anytime people talk about the housing crisis is when it affects the middle classes. We are in lean times and human rights are inadequate as a model of social justice but certainly of affordable and secure housing provision.
Geraldine Denning 25:05
Yeah, I mean it is great as an idea, without the legal framework to support them it’s just words and you can shout those words as much as you like but unless you have a way of engaging them in policy then they are meaningless. You can say you have a right to housing but what does it mean? It doesn’t actually mean anything. So I suppose if there is a campaign to make those human rights into policy, then that sounds like a great idea. But it is not good enough just to shout that we have a right to housing. Well you might have it but we don’t really have it, because the right is not enshrined in law. It has to be enshrined in law to give it any validity. That goes back to the question of the Canadian Housing Act which has come out, which I heard that it was about enshrining potentially those things in legislation, but when you look for it, is there any actual legislation there which can follow through? Certainly in the UK there isn’t any that actually follows through in terms of the broader picture of a right to housing.
Simon Elmer 26:09
I think we still have got quite a lot of faith in the state. There is a way to think about the state as simply being an administrative body of capitalism, but the state is still very powerful. A lot of policy, things like “the right to buy”, which is a terrible policy invented by Maggie Thatcher, which was meant to be getting people to empower themselves, take possession of their own homes. Actually 40% of the homes bought through “the right to buy” subsidized by the state, are now owned by private landlords, who are now often renting them back to council to address the housing problem. Things like Airbnb, which is a great idea, which has created huge housing problems across the world. I imagine in Vancouver as well, certainly in the UK possible in. It is actually a good idea, we use it, it is been abused because it has not been properly legislated.
Simon Elmer 26:59
The word socialism, which we use proudly, twenty years ago, ten years ago maybe in the UK if you used that word, you would get locked up, not literally, but you know it was not a word you could use, or you were a “mad leftist”. That word is coming back in, and I think it’s important that we don’t wait for this “over the horizon revolution”, or even a social democrat government to get it, let alone a socialist government. There is always a referral of agency to an infinitely deferred future. We know because we have been doing it for five years, under very difficult neoliberal conditions of policy and economics and finance that it is possible to practice socialist architecture. And it is not just architecture, you can do it in all sorts of forms of practice, in law, you can do it as activists, as housing activists, as residents and so long. And I think it is important to understand, to believe, to know, to work out how to not defer socialism to the future, but to make it something about your contemporary practice under the conditions of capitalism. And I think human rights is not about that, it is an amelioration of capitalism. We want to change it from below, if you like. And housing is a good place to start.
Geraldine Denning 28:19
I mean that goes back to one of our early slogans which is “architecture is always political”, the t-shirt that I am wearing today. And this was about instilling, not just among architects, but also in a whole kind of housing movement, I think in a way, to think about the practices that you operate on a daily basis. It is not about waiting every four years to vote in the next guy that is going to be same as the last guy with a different name. But it is about understanding that everything you do is political, certainly within the architecture kind of industry, the building industry. I think that recognition is part of this idea of a socialist architecture, being aware of the decisions that you make, the relationships that you have, the people that you are working with, the way in which you work, all of that stuff is political and I think there is this is shying away from it, because it is a dirty word. Politics is definitely a dirty thing, with a capital P, but it has to be recognized in order to put things to change.
Am Johal 29:21
So you are going to be in Vancouver on this residency this month, can you tell me a little bit about the writing project that you are working on.
Simon Elmer 29:29
We had a contact with 221A just a few months before we set up in 2015 and we stayed in contact. They very generously offered this kind of fellowship which entailed a residency here for a month. For a long time we have been so busy, we were running on this travelator, we have been waiting for a long time to have a chance for, particularly the two of us to sit down together and reflect on what we are doing. And we are on the process of producing the draft of a book called “The socialist architecture” and it has lots of subtitles like “under capitalism” or “for a socialist architecture asks these questions”, and we are writing as we are here, over the month of our residency.
Simon Elmer 30:16
And the residency is going to be punctuated by these four workshops which we are holding at 221A. And they are going to be looking at different contexts, themes, strategies, within what we understand as socialist architecture to be. So the first one we’ll be holding this afternoon, is the social. The second one is on the environmental. The third one is on the economic. And the forth one on the political. So we are going to be talking to people, listening to people about, within these kind of frameworks, and hopefully at the end of it, we are going to come up with a book.
Simon Elmer 30:50
And the book itself, it’s not going to be an academic book, it is not going to be describing the horrors of the housing crisis, and trying to analyzing it. It is going to be offering practical advice. It is going to have some sort of theoretical basis about the necessity for a socialist architecture, it will have a critique of human rights , obviously a critique of neoliberal housing policy, but it will also be a very practical book in which, first of all it would be a de-mystifier on housing terminology and policies and stuff. We do an enormous amount of advisory work with residents groups, who contact us and say “can you help us with this” a lot of it it’s simply decoding the language with them. But the key part of it is a set of questions, in a way, which residents can ask of the various agents who are trying to evict them or demolish their homes, or offer them new housing and so on. But also questions for architects, asks of themselves, of their clients, and so on and so forth. And ultimately for politicians, councilors, and policymakers, like if you really are interested in finding some alternative to what is quite clearly a disastrous neoliberal housing policy what sort of questions should you be asking. So that’s kind of how we understand it.
Geraldine Denning 32:12
I think what’s important, when we are looking at the whole process, the development process, there are many, many agents that are part of that process. So I think what we have been tried to do is to really expand the series of interrogations into the whole process and all of those agents and the roles they take in which, the client would be one, the residents would be an agent of that process, the lawyer would be an agent of that process, the architect, everybody involved in the construction of the projects, and I think that the idea is that each person, each agent of that process would find themselves within this book. And we would be able to understand, well ok, if this is my role, how can I engage with this process in a different way. We always get people coming along asking “what can I do.” Architects ask: “what can I do,” planners ask: “what can I do,” politicians, and everybody, there is always a thing that somebody can do and part of it is also looking at the role of culture. For artists, asking me, “what can I do,” filmmakers, “what can I do?” There is absolutely something that you can do. So I think the idea is to try to paint a picture of this landscape, this sort of development landscape, so that everybody can identify a role for themselves within that. Can I teach you what can you do? There are ways in which you can engage in a process in a really positive way. Part of that is about educating people into what that process is, and it is about how you can engage with that process with the skill and the position that you have and try to improve it and change it.
Am Johal 33:52
Geraldine, Simon, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
Geraldine Denning 33:55
Thank you very much.
[theme music]
Rachel Wong 34:04
Thank you to Geraldine Denning and Simon Elmer from Architects for Social Housing for joining us on this week’s episode. You can learn more about their work and practice at: architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk. You can also check out the research that they’re doing with 221A on their website, 221a.ca. We've left links to both of these sites in our episode description below. A big thank you to our production team, which includes myself as well as Maria Cecilia Saba, to Davis Steele for our theme music and to you for tuning in. We'll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
[theme music fades]