Red Flags and Green Bills: A May Day Dispatch from American Architecture

Content advisory: this piece references an act of sexual assault.

The American citymaking professions – architecture, design, planning and landscape architecture - operate largely on a patronage model. In the Euro-American tradition this has been true since the 1700s, when the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was established in Paris as a tool for the projection of the French monarchy’s power. Right next door in Germany, a more technically-oriented profession evolved to serve the needs of an industrializing empire tied together by roads, bridges and rail. England combined both traditions, as did the Americans, whose early professionalized identity descended directly from the Palladian tomes of the plantation-owning political leader who raped Sally Hemings.

Today, in the republic sketched out by enslaving lovers of freedom, the wealthy and corporations have replaced monarchies as architecture’s primary patrons. Now as then, the capital which drives patronage are derived from labor exploitation, namely the enslavement of Africans racialized as Black - a barbaric practice which enriched such ‘Enlightened’ empires as France, Germany, Denmark, Portugal, Norway, the Netherlands, England and the United States.

As the industrial era advanced into the era of fossil-fueled resource extraction, labor exploitation enabled evolved into environmental exploitation, a condition epitomized by the oil refineries which sprouted from former Mississippi River plantations gone to seed in south Louisiana.

The condition of labor in ‘free’ nations like the United States today must be considered in the light of neo-enslaving practices such as sharecropping, Jim Crow apartheid, mass incarceration and prison labor, as well as the conditions of intimidation through which business owners have extracted labor from Mexican and Central American immigrants for decades. All these means of exploitation create the profits with which patrons pay for architecture.

All this begs the question: If we didn’t have massive wealth inequality created through the exploitation of labor and our natural environment, what would architects even do?

Perhaps the most immediately answer can be found where democratic-socialist, socialist and communist political-economic regimes, rather than solely neoliberal capitalist ones, have shaped the built environment. Norway, the United Kingdom and South Africa have all in different ways demonstrated a commitment to the concept of housing as a human right with extensive government-developed social housing projects. Germany, Cuba and China have expended significant architectural energy on ‘palaces for the people’, public places and spaces designed for mass use and enjoyment. And public infrastructure, like Moscow’s world-famous subway system, developed under non-capitalist political conditions goes above and beyond the reluctantly administered mass transit systems common in American cities.

In America, it has long been tradition to follow any discussion of socialism or communism with a disclaimer about the necessity of avoiding an authoritarian, undemocratic system, or a fascist dictatorship complete with concentration camps, gulags and ethnic cleansing.

But doesn’t the leadership of President Trump, like Reagan and Nixon before him, have us far down that road already?

Arguably, the United States has long been a fascist nation in its dealings with people racialized as Black, whose very presence in this country stems from their labor in the concentration camps known as plantations where people host their weddings. Prisons like Mississippi’s Parchman Farm and California’s Soledad State Prison have been used for generations to intimidate and cordon off political dissidents, and yet most of American society has deemed this completely permissible. And in our dealings with Latinx, Chinese, Japanese and Indigenous people, on whose ‘cleansing’ from the landscape this settler colonialist nation is fundamentally premised, all these injustices are vastly multiplied.

Architects, designers, planners and landscape architects have long been implicated in these practices. Urban renewal – in James Baldwin’s phrase, ‘Negro removal’ - in all its various iterations was yet another form of ethnic cleansing. ‘Blight removal’, as Justin Garrett Moore so eloquently writes, is another attempt at the same. And let’s not spare Jane Jacobs: white ‘eyes on the street’ uneducated on the dangers of implicit bias call police, or in George Zimmerman’s case, take ‘their’ neighborhood’s ‘cleansing’ into their own hands.

Ironically, actual democracy – not the White supremacist capitalist imperialist cisheteropatriarchy in which we live – would create a system in which all Americans are fairly represented through equitable apportionment of political representation, wealth and the power which flows from both. Thus would be created the political, social and economic conditions for a profession not premised in patronage.

And such redistribution, it turns out, is as American as your grandmother’s apple pie. Her mother bought that pie dish with funds from her father’s labor on a stunning new Art Deco post office. This project was a part of the original New Deal, the collective name for packages of legislation passed during the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt.

New Deal programs were created in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, a crisis of capitalist accumulation much like the 2008 financial crisis. From big cities to small towns, federal funding enhanced the built environment and civic infrastructure nationwide. Due to the Jim Crow apartheid system which ruled the nation at the time, funds were distributed in ways which reinforced rather than dismantled racial hierarchies.

A Green New Deal such as that supported by the American Institute of Architects, if premised on conditions of racial, gender and economic justice and equity, would be an opportunity to both address the looming threat of environmental catastrophe and to revive the American tradition of great publicly funded architecture, development, design and landscapes.

If you desire to deconstruct, rather than continually reproduce, the White supremacist capitalist imperialist cisheteropatriarchy through your professional practice, advocacy and activism for a Green New Deal is a professional imperative.

The environmental and moral unsustainability of the patronage model will soon catch up to its economic viability. We should not wait until that happens to challenge it. Our professional future – and your grandchildren’s – depends on it.