ARCHITECTURE

work, including the now-defunct Architecture for Humanity,
The One Percent, or The Institute for Public Architecture,
among others, are all premised on improving
design for those with a social and non-profit mission. But
the system’s underlying structures of ownership or profit
are rarely challenged, not least due to how the work of
these organizations is largely funded: through tax-deductible
donations by financial institutions or corporations; or
through grants by foundations, by definition non-profit
and tax-exempt entities that promote specific missions.
An upside of the proliferation of non-governmental organizations,
of course, is a variety of approaches, and the
liberty to pursue different options at multiple scales. The
downside is a duplication of decentralized efforts, increased
difficulty to implement larger projects, and, often,
a lack of long-term planning and accountability.
These kinds of non-profit entities emerged in
the late 1960s, and two of the most important that remain
to this day share the acronym CDC: community design
centers and community development corporations. The
first aimed at providing design services to constituencies
that otherwise have little access to them, the second to
promote equitable human and physical development in
neighborhoods suffering from disinvestment. The first
became increasingly affiliated with university programs
for institutional backing. The second increasingly found
themselves with a double mandate: attracting tax-incentivized
investment for housing development on the one
hand, while preventing displacement caused by the rising
real estate values that result in their now improving neighborhoods
on the other. Since CDCs frequently lack the expertise
to take on development, they are prone to partner
with larger for-profit developers. “Community” has thus
often become a fig leaf for its purported opposite: corporate
investment in affordable housing whose price restriction
is limited. 43 Development models intended to produce
housing beyond the market in perpetuity—through community
land trusts (CLTs) or limited-equity cooperatives,
for instance—even if they have succeeded quite successfully
in the past, are being implemented and supported today
only at small scales [See HH: 1932, 1957, 1969, 1975]. 44
Identifying a directly causal relationship between
design and inequality is a dubious undertaking. And
yet design remains one of the most effective ways to make
socio-economic inequities viscerally and immediately intelligible.
In recent history, these linkages between architecture
and inequality have either been made manifest in a
principally negative tone (for instance, in public housing),
or via small, tactically positive responses (for example,
through CLTs). What we seem to have forgotten is to look
at the underlying structure, called real estate development,
which has also been designed. Inequality, architecture,
and real estate development are intimately connected,
each unable to exist without the others. Over the years,
this fraught comingling has allowed real estate development,
perhaps the least questioned of the three actors, to
achieve statistical, discursive, and artistic dominance.
This artful hegemony is designed. For designers
to affect it, they must first apprehend it, recognizing
their role in its perpetuation and coming to terms with
the necessary, uncomfortable contradictions therein. In
this recognition—working to reimagine the terms through
which architecture both illuminates and engages with the
world, in a proportionally scaled response to real estate
development’s own planetary machinations—architects
will necessarily confront seemingly intractable challenges
[See HH: 1937]. This intractability is present, once again,
by design, since real estate has come not simply to artfully
manage the architectural imagination; but rather to govern
it—with all the enforcement measures that implies.
The response therefore, within and without architecture,
will always be principally political in nature.
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