Conflicted Identities

Housing and the Politics of Cultural Representation

Alexandra Staub

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317665557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Nation-states have long used representational architecture to create symbolic identities for public consumption both at home and abroad. Government buildings, major ensembles and urban plans have a visibility that lends them authority, while their repeated portrayals in the media cement their image as icons of a shared national character. Existing in tandem with this official self, however, is a second, often divergent identity, represented by the vast realm of domestic space defined largely by those who occupy it as well as those with a vested interest in its cultural meaning. Using both historical inquiry and visual, spatial and film analysis, this book explores the interaction of these two identities, and its effect on political control, class status, and gender roles.

Conflicted Identities examines the politicization of both public and domestic space, especially in societies undergoing rapid cultural transformation through political, social or economic expansion or restructuring, when cultural identity is being rapidly "modernized", shifted, or realigned to conform to new demands. Using specific examples from a variety of national contexts, the book examines how vernacular housing, legislation, marketing, and media influence a large, but often underexposed domestic culture that runs parallel to a more publicly represented one. As a case in point, the book examines West Germany from the end of World War II to the early 1970s to probe more deeply into the mechanisms of such cultural dichotomy. On a national level, post-war West Germany demonstratively rejected Nazi-era values by rebuilding cities based on interwar modernist tenets, while choosing a decidedly modern and transparent architecture for high-visibility national projects. In the domestic realm, government, media and everyday citizens countered this turn to state-sponsored modernism by embracing traditional architectural aesthetics and housing that encouraged patriarchal family structures.

Written for readers interested in cultural theory, history, and the politics of space as well as those engaged with architecture and the built environment, Conflicted Identities provides an engaging new perspective on power and identity as they relate to architectural settings.

PART 1

Why space is political

1 Space is political

A revolution that does not produce new space has not realized its full potential; indeed it has failed in that it has not changed life itself, but has merely changed ideological superstructures, institutions, or political apparatuses.

(Lefebvre 1991, 54)

Space is power. The exertion of power is embedded in the control of space, and the arrangement of space creates priorities that help establish a context for many other areas of life: whose abilities and work are more valued, and who has better access to social amenities such as clean air and water, health care, education, recreational facilities, efficient transportation, or healthful food. Claims that the arrangement of space is irrelevant only support the position of those who have the power to arrange it. Those who do not are frequently disenfranchised and must live with the results of what others decide.

This book examines how space is culturally formed; yet more than that, it explores the power mechanisms behind the assertion of space. It examines carefully the discontinuities and misalignments between official architecture as presented by those in power, and the system of private, domestic space that is generally the prerogative of common people. The former, created for the representation of a government or a system, is often held up as expressing a nation’s general culture, while the latter, considered private, remains comparatively hidden. In contrasting how these two spaces are constructed and how they interact, the following text explores a way to better understand the spatial complexities of power imbalances and disenfranchisement. Who controls how space will be used, and how space is portrayed to outsiders? Who defines the cultural expression of space, both public and private?

Public and private

In looking at the relationship between space and power, it is useful to start with a view that distinguishes between space the average individual has the least control over, what I call public space, and space the average individual has the most control over, what I call private space. Within Western thought, these two concepts date at least to Roman times, where they were related to property rights, both moveable and immovable.¹ Since I use “public” and “private” as a modifier for spaces, it is useful to begin an exploration of the terms with respect to land usage rights.

In economic and political theory, “public” refers to government property and activities, or the people affected by these.² Public goods are seen as nonrivalrous and nonexclusive, meaning that they may be simultaneously consumed by many and that no one is excluded from their use. Clean air, street lighting, or a public park can be considered public goods.

If public goods are nonrivalrous and nonexclusive, then private goods may be seen as rivalrous and excludable. Use by one person precludes use by another, and use may be restricted. Clothing, food, but also immovable goods such as land are private goods. Private property rights in Western societies generally include the right to control the use of property, benefit from it, transfer or sell it, or exclude others from its use.³

The boundaries between the concepts of “public goods” and “private goods” are not always straightforward; for example private communities (gated communities) provide amenities for common use by a closely defined group of residents.⁴ In such a case, the private community becomes a microcosm of a larger community, and fees paid by members are akin to taxes levied by the larger group. One could say that while the goods are nonrivalrous, they are excludable; that is, although many may use them simultaneously, one must be a member of the group to make use of them.

In the context of this book, the terms “public” and “private” will be used in a fairly limited way. First, I call “public” space that which has been built by governments,⁵ which may simultaneously be used by many and which is not restricted: streets and squares, parks, and government buildings and government-owned buildings. Yet what about buildings under private ownership but designed to be accessible to the public – restaurants and cafes, office buildings, cinemas, and shopping malls, among other spaces that make up the world of commerce? They are not true “public” spaces, since they are commissioned and owned by individuals or corporations and not by any government entity. Yet even in a highly privatized economy where the government builds very little, it continues to make decisions that will affect how spaces are shaped, sometimes by declining to make a choice. Thus, the government has a decided hand in creating these pseudo-public spaces, especially in the case of corporate dominance, by declining to regulate their creation. The spaces created through private capital, moreover, often emulate public spaces; an example is privately owned shopping malls whose spaces emulate streets and squares. Although under private ownership, they appear to be open to all.

This blurred line between public and private in the case of pseudo-public spaces has a long history. Although societies going back to ancient times have had different systems of land ownership, in Britain and Europe the shift in land-use patterns began with the privatization of agricultural land in the eighteenth century, in which land that had previously been available for common use was privatized and access restricted. This understandably led to debates on the natural rights of the population to “common land,” debates that continue to the present day regarding access to waterfronts, rivers, roadways, or seemingly open spaces such as spaces of recreation, including shopping centers.⁶ With the privatization of such spaces, physical access is no longer determined based on the user’s needs, but rather on the owner’s desires. In the case of the café, movie theater, or shopping center, it is the visitor’s intent to purchase or consume products offered in such spaces that grant access to them, allowing most users to forget that they are, in fact, not true public spaces. Because such spaces are shaped by two factors, an economic elite that creates such spaces, and a government that regulates them to various extents through zoning laws, for the purpose of this study, they will be considered a special type of public space.

My use of the term “private space” is also derived from economic theory, in that use by one person precludes use by another, and use may be restricted. While there may be a range of such spaces, such as office cubicles or automobiles, I focus on domestic space, the space of the family unit, where one sleeps, eats, keeps one’s possessions, and undertakes what in Marxist terms would be called reproductive (as opposed to productive) activities. In most cultures domestic space is the most personal and most controlled type of private space. Strictly speaking, I do not regard legal ownership; rather, I use the term “private space” for what a person feels to be his or her space to use and control or exclude others from its use. Thus, a person renting a dwelling, while not able to transfer or sell it, is still able to control both access to and much of what happens within it. In socialist societies, for example, although the government owned almost all dwellings, people still had keys to their flats and called the spaces “their” home.

The question of who actually determines the spatial and cultural expression of the private realm brings up the important topic of agency. A central premise of this work is that the organization of public space is the prerogative of those with the most power, while private (domestic) space remains a domain where those people who are discounted on the basis of class, gender, ethnicity, or religion can potentially have their say. Yet as we will see, even the private is permeable to outside influence and can become a space of persuasive control on the part of outsiders.

Space and spatial

The concept of “space” and “spatial” must also be defined. In writings on spatial theory, the word “space” is often modified: material space, metaphorical space, liminal space, personal space, social space, or psychic spaces are but a few examples.⁷ The use of space as a modifier, used in terms such as spatial culture, spatial patterns, spatial symbolism, spatial language, spatial organization, and spatial expression is less common. Space as a modifier implies space used as a tool, or process, towards understanding another term. “Spatial culture” thus implies space used to express culture, “spatial patterns” are patterns created through the arrangement of space, and so on.

For many years, the academic discourse discounted space as a viable lens through which to examine and explain social and cultural phenomena. Raymond Williams’s encyclopedia of social and cultural Keywords, first published in 1976, does not contain the term; only in 2005, with the publication of Tony Bennett, Lawence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris’s New Keywords do we find the term included. Here we find that in the late middle ages, the term “space” was used to mean “time” (as in “in the space of ten minutes”), a usage that only changed with the beginning of privatization of land in the late fifteenth century. By the nineteenth century, that is with an increased shift to modern, capitalist, societies, the term was generally understood in the physical sense, and as something that could be “owned.”⁸ Yet despite the increased preoccupation with space in the economic sense (private vs. public space), including a race between superpowers to lay claim to outer space (one imagines the image of an American astronaut symbolically planting the U.S. flag on the surface on the moon), the academic discourse of the nineteenth throughout much of the twentieth century largely focused on time, rather than space, as the lens through which to examine and understand social phenomena.

Edward Soja, leaning on two essays by Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography” (1980) and “Of Other Spaces” (1986), has pointedly called the nineteenth century an “era of rising historicism and the parallel submergence of space in critical social thought.”⁹ Simply put, time and history (seen as events) became the dominant markers in an academic discussion of society and its influencing factors, devaluing space and the discourse of spatial analysis.¹⁰ Events were (and often still are) categorized according to when they occurred, with those happening concurrently providing context and explanation for how particular incidents came to unfold. Until fairly recently, there was far less focus on how space influences such phenomena.

There is ample evidence, however, that space as a topic has achieved resurgence. The range of disciplines in which space has been explored theoretically has risen, and this variety helps explain why the concept has been approached in such very different ways. In architecture, space has been regarded as a tool towards producing meaning (as opposed to merely constructing a building). As early as 1923 Le Corbusier, one of the major theorists among the 1920s avant-garde, wrote: “The elements of architecture are light and shade, walls and space” (emphasis mine).¹¹ This statement begins to see space not merely as an object or construct, but as a semantic tool, joined with other elements to create architectural idiom.

Space is more than a creative tool, however; architecture, being a field with a broad range of inquiry, has joined with the social sciences in exploring how people use space. Social theory (outside of architecture) has only recently turned to spatial critique; a pioneer was Friedrich Engels, who in the mid-nineteenth century touched on the spatial conditions endured by the English working class.¹² With the rise of quantifiable methods in the field of urban planning, space has been considered territorially, as something to be measured and mapped, or else qualitatively, as the material environment of social groups. In the early twentieth century and up to the 1970s, architects and planners, leaning on social theory, tended to regard space as deterministically influencing social phenomena, leading to attempts at social engineering through architecture (especially housing) and urban design. Oscar Newman’s 1973 book on Defensible Space, in which he advocates crime prevention through urban design, is a notable example of this approach.¹³

Since the 1990s, space has increasingly become a topic of thought and exploration, with spatial metaphors in social and cultural theory more common. Architects continue to refer to architectural and urban “spaces” in both an aesthetic and a social sense. Within architecture, the concept of phenomenology, often leaning on Heidegger’s 1951 essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” has examined space as a conscious experience of the phenomena associated with it, and of these phenomena’s (and thus space’s) meaning and significance for the individual.¹⁴

In the fields of philosophy and geography, questions about space have often centered on if it should be understood as some sort of neutral reality or as a social construct, with more recent theorists arguing for a multiplicity of spatial constructs that exist simultaneously. Henri Lefebvre has contributed greatly to the philosophical theorization of socio-spatial relations, analyzing the perceived space of everyday social life (le perçu); the conceptualized space of planners and urbanists (le conçu); and representational or imagined space that uses systems of nonverbal symbols (le vecu) in an attempt to overcome what he sees as the duality of physical space (the perception of nature as a neutral reality) and mental space (theoretical concepts of space).¹⁵ Lefebvre argues that space is a product of society and that every society and fragments within a society produce their own conceptions of space, which allow for multiple social spaces...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• PART 1 Why space is political
• PART 2 The West German example, 1945–68
• PART 3 Conclusion
• References
• Index