An Imperative Mood

In a review of the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion, the architect Douglas Murphy wrote on his blog: “Increasingly I see a real hunger for architecture to engage with pressing social matters, especially amongst students, but I also see an innocence about what architecture is actually capable of, and how projects come about in the first place.” He was mainly referring to the discordance between the arbitrary shapes of the exhibited building and the conceptual justification of those shapes. Still, the innocence he referred to can explain recent efforts to shift the practice “toward a new, more just status quo,” as Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman suggest in their new book, Spatializing Justice, which consists of a list of “provocations.” It is, in short, a manifesto dealing with the politics and civic processes occurring in the US-Mexico border. (A second volume, Socializing Architecture: Top-Down/Bottom-Up, expands on the case studies briefly mentioned in the first.) Not quite a monograph, it is, rather, a long stream of prompts with section titles like “Curating the Journey from the Bottom-Up to the Top-Down and Back Again,” “Decolonize Knowledge,” and “Perform Citizenship,” all of which are followed by short paragraphs that attempt, unsuccessfully, to lighten the ominousness of the proposed tasks. The prompts are not ill-intended, but they are, unfortunately, confusingly naive. A clue to their ethos can be found in the acid yellow color of the background used on most pages, which evokes the palette of AMO books from two decades ago, like Mutations and the all-over-the-place, experimental, infographic-ridden publication Content. Both are representative of a time in architectural discourse when the emphasis on hard data and time seemed to coexist with the theoretical justification of extremely ambitious works, such as OMA’s CCTV building. In Spatializing Justice, arrows point from one idea to the next, leaving readers to guess at the exact meaning of enormous concepts like the ones presented in what is called “The Practice Diagram” (“our tool to design the brief and the client—an urban script for engaging the stakeholders and institutions, the political, social and economic processes that are necessary to spatialize justice”): “policy frameworks,” “economic proformas,” and “civic imagination.”

For a book that purportedly questions “the algorithmic regime,” Spatializing Justice reads like a series of frenetic prompts so vague that it is not possible to disagree or agree with any of them. Words with firm meanings like ecology become fuzzy, pluralized as ecologies or turned into a verb: ecologizing. They become a slogan. The brain can only process a handful of these before it goes numb. The book is involuntarily committed to expanding on the depths of architectural activism, the social dimension of the practice, through a wide-eyed restlessness (“We believe that architects and urban designers can be facilitators of a new civic conversation, interlocutors of institutional memory, orchestrators of renewed public priorities, curators of inclusive civic programming, and designers of fresh formal and aesthetic categories that problematize dominant neoliberal agendas in the city that manipulate and monetize relations between the social and the spatial”) that in reality is very costly and very bourgeois. Each of the commands in the book, if carried out, would require such a huge amount of labor that it feels unrealistic. Reading them, I’m reminded of Paul Lafargue’s claim in The Right to Be Lazy that “the proletariat, betraying its instincts, despising its historic mission, has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work. Rude and terrible has been its punishment. All its individual and social woes are born of its passion for work.”

As if the concept of “justice” alone weren’t complicated enough, adding spatial to it creates a labyrinthine, buzzy phrase that, through the veil of architectural practice, feels like a twenty-first century attempt at squaring the circle. The idea of justice in Latin America—a region vastly discussed in Spatial Justice, as well as Dana Cuff’s more recent (and thematically related) Architectures of Spatial Justice—is extremely sociopolitically volatile. Brazil is in an ongoing recalibration of its Lula-led progressive policies after what was labeled a “judiciary coup,” kicked off by now-disgraced judge Sergio Moro and the Lava Jato corruption scandals. Peru continues its seemingly endless streak of ungovernance due to unceasing reformulations of its legal powers. The particularities of what justice means in different world regions, not to mention countries and their respective subdivisions, do not allow for certain aspects of urban behavior to be generalized the way that Dana Cuff suggests when she interprets Los Angeles as “an ideal Petri dish for urban and architectural experimentation because its form resists codification and its population is a microcosm of world cities.”

Cuff, the founder of cityLAB at the University of California, Los Angeles, acknowledges in the book’s introduction that architects alone can’t solve “the entrenched problems of injustice” and then argues that “to take the challenge seriously, architects and planners must give up authorial claims to creativity in favor of collective ones, must destabilize conventional projects and ideas about clients or patrons, must view their labor as generative rather than oriented toward completion, and must leverage the art of architecture for the commons.” Once again naivete appears, this time in the form of an imperative to renounce authorial claims written by an identifiable author. This is not a text taken from the pages of Tiqqun, by which I mean: this is an ISBN-registered book attributed not to an anonymous collective but to an author who works and navigates under academic standards and conventions, who cites the work of other authors and architects in order to discuss even more works by other authors and architects.

The problem regarding justice in relation to territory is not authorial claims. The fundamental problem of charging architectural practice with participating in the execution of justice is that, while a world that is less unequal might be the ultimate goal for many activists and even some architects, there is still an elephant in the room. Not all architects feel the need for justice, much less to take part in its impartment. It is overwhelming enough to pay mind to what the discipline demands, that when someone argues for taking on more obligations, I often feel the only ones left with the energy required for architecture to move to greener pastures are personalities who enjoy plenty of legroom and have little understanding of how extra work depletes the will and energy of most workers.

These invitations to architects to participate in the imparting of spatial justice sometimes feels like arm-twisting: an insistence that, regardless of the monetary precariousness affecting the profession’s salaries, architects should, as Cuff suggests, “work pro bono, renouncing financial remuneration for some cause.” To clarify, volunteer labor is necessary for any cause, but these particular calls for altruism feel especially bleak when there’s currently so much ongoing organizing about fair wages in the profession, demonstrated by, for example, the emergence of Architectural Workers United.

Many of the ideas in Cuff’s book seem like regurgitations of the observations made by Justin McGuirk in his 2014 book Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture, whose showing-off of “vibrant open spaces” in the works throughout the region feels less like an attempt at actual research into legitimate practices of community organizing and more like an amusement ride whose rails were set by certain local figures with political influence (a mayor, an operator, a secretary of something) so that foreign press and academics could gawk at pretty pictures. Its first chapter describes one of cityLAB’s first attempts at impacting LA: “For the first seven years of our Backyard Homes initiative, we tried to modify the existing ADU law by working with the Los Angeles City Council so that more homeowners could build legal units.” All the talk of justice is useless without actual attempts at disrupting terrible public policies, but when the prototype meant to demonstrate the legislation’s viability—in this case, an uninviting structure called a BIHOME—is so deeply detached from any notion of domesticity, i.e., the very problem it purports to solve, it renders moot all the serious talk about policy.

Regarding the reception of the proposal, Cuff explains that “conventional, project-driven architectural firms did not see secondary units as a plausible market for services, although highly regarded firms like Pritzker Prize–winning Morphosis Architects had designed and published secondary units over garages on alleyways. From the beginning, I argued a reverse set of stakes was at hand and that these stakes were significant.” Suddenly I wonder where the call for abandoning authorial claims went. A later chapter mentions “that design expositions and exhibitions can embody a form of architectural activism with impacts on the discipline and the public.” I’m not so sure. Design expositions are a goal in themselves and the actual housing prototypes a residue of this type of practice: less concerned with fulfilling community needs than with showcasing the altruism of their sponsoring organization.

Some of the initiatives from the now-defunct decentralized organization (the Lab, as it is referred to in the book) struck me as an excuse for repackaging what were already organic processes in city life. No decentralized organization, no “urban laboratory” or think tank, was actually needed to achieve some of these goals. The late Mike Davis referred to this problem in his 2000 book Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City: “While there is much abstract talk in planning and architectural schools about the need to ‘reurbanize’ American cities, there is little recognition that Latino and Asian immigrants are already doing so on an epic scale. Perhaps the time is ripe (as Latinos locally move from minority to majority politics) to tropicalize the national vision of ‘the city on the hill.’”

In the book’s conclusion, Cuff mentions that “the legacy of associating aesthetic production with privilege is ready for subversion.” She continues, “Can architecture embody principles of spatial justice? The answer: Not without a systemic transformation of its relationship to the public, to capital, and to privilege.” It is hard to envision this transformation when some of the authors of these initiatives, like “activist-scholar” Gabriella Gómez Mont (member of the Gómez Mont Mexican conservative political dynasty) and Carlos Zedillo (son of Mexico’s ex-president Ernesto Zedillo), are presented as ordinary folk. No doubt these are ambitious and hardworking professionals, but all the talk about “center[ing] those voices that have been silenced and those spaces that have been erased, to make the world we all want to live in” feels naive if the person providing the “hard data” on a project’s success is its creator.

We could overlook this elision if we took the volume to be an academic collection of so-called success stories. But what would the use of that be? These case studies, specially the ones examined in Cuff’s book, are neatly gift-wrapped by figures who have the energy, the workforce, the resources, and the privilege to present these stories. Their actual impact seems an afterthought; the point is the intellectual work—and the attendant academic appointments, salaries, and tenure—that their compilation into a book justifies. Their status as success stories is practically guaranteed; it has been engineered. Many of these projects and ideas—like the Peatoniños project in Mexico City, which co-opted and rebranded the tradition of fiestas de pueblo—have long since disappeared. There exist less expensive, more understated, more successful urban tactics—like senderos seguros, for example, an approach that roughly consists of increasing the number of lamp posts so that, quite simply, sidewalks are safer. Is that justice? I don’t think Cruz, Forman, or Cuff would have the answer.