The Architecture of Change

Building a Better World

Jerilou Hammett, Maggie Wrigley, Jerilou Hammett, Maggie Wrigley

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780826353863
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The Architecture of Change: Building a Better World is a collection of articles that demonstrates the power of the human spirit to transform the environments in which we live. This inspiring book profiles people who refused to accept that things couldn't change, who saw the possibility of making something better, and didn't esitate to act.

Breaking down the stereotypes surrounding "socially engaged architecture, " this book shows who can actually impact the lives of communities. Like Bernard Rudofsky's seminal Architecture Without Architects, it explores communal architecture produced not by specialists but by people, drawing on their common lives and experiences, who have a unique insight into their particular needs and environments. These unsung heroes are teachers and artists, immigrants and activists, grandmothers in the projects, students and planners, architects and residents of some of our poorest places. Running through their stories is a constant theme of social justice as an underlying principle of the built environment. This book is about opening one's eyes to new ways of interpreting the world, and how to go about changing it.

JERILOU HAMMETT AND KINGSLEY HAMMETT

DOUG YOUNG

A CRITICAL URBANIST LOOKS AT THE GLOBAL CITY

In 1975 Doug Young fulfilled a boyhood dream and graduated from the University of Toronto with a bachelor’s degree in architecture. In those days the program, born in the 1960s, was open ended, student centered, and very exciting, something hard to imagine at big institutions today. But his first day at his first job was one of the most depressing days of his life and was nothing like what he imagined architecture to be. A few years later he drifted away from architecture and into urban planning, first for the city of Toronto, then for a nonprofit housing organization, and finally as a teacher.

Today Young teaches urban studies and planning at York University, is finishing his PhD, and is working at the City Institute, a recently established research center at York where people in all the different departments doing urban-related studies can connect with each other. He’s also a member of Planning Action, a radical group of architects, planners, and concerned citizens that believes that planning has more to do with the retention and preservation of traditional neighborhoods (and their residents) than with rubber-stamping expensive development projects. In a conversation from his base at York University, Young shared with Jerilou and Kingsley Hammett the journey he has taken from neophyte architect to radical planner and critical urbanist.

DESIGNER/BUILDER: How did your disillusionment with traditional architecture unfold?

DOUG YOUNG: The first day on the job I was given a plan for a piece of property out in the suburbs and was told I had a free hand to lay out a development. I came up with what I thought was a very clever arrangement of streets with a mix of houses for wealthy people and houses for poor people. At the end of the day I showed it to my boss, who said very nicely, “This is not how development takes place.” Mixing housing for different income groups was not going to happen and the street plan was too unusual. There was a template to follow that I wasn’t aware of and if you were going to do that kind of work you had to follow the template. I remember going home absolutely devastated. All those years I had dreamed of being an architect and it all came down to satisfying some market idea of what housing should be like. As I worked for other architects I became increasingly disenchanted.

I remember being struck as an undergraduate by the remarks a guest lecturer in architecture once made. He said of all the graduates of architecture programs about one-third of them go on to really embrace architecture and have their own practices. One-third go on to something else related, like maybe planning. And one-third become fodder in giant offices. I felt like part of the fodder, given tiny, boring, minute tasks. I worked for small offices with neurotic relationships among the staff and the boss. I found it very unpleasant. Some projects were more interesting than others. One firm did social housing, and that was kind of fun, except as the junior I think the most exciting thing I was given was to come up with some decorative brickwork for this apartment building.

I was getting sick of what appeared to me to be the role of architects in facilitating how cities got built and what they looked like. I have an architect friend who worked for a practice where the partner once asked him to come into his office and said, “I really want you to spend a long time designing this big building. I want you to spend a whole day on it.” And I think that’s pretty typical. It’s just product.

So I left the last firm that I worked for and did a bit of freelance work with a friend. Six months later I was hired by the City of Toronto planning department to be a kind of architectural support to the other people who were trained as planners. It had dawned on them that here were planners reviewing projects and architectural drawings and they had no idea how to even read a drawing, making it very difficult to comment and negotiate. I was lucky in that it was 1979, the tail end of the most progressive era in municipal planning in Toronto that had been instituted in the early 1970s. The city was very much into having neighborhood satellite offices away from city hall and citizens involved in the planning process. In the city that was then about 700,000 people, at one point there were thirteen satellite planning offices outside of city hall. That was one office for every 50,000 to 60,000 people. When I arrived there were five. Now, in the city, which is about 2.6 million, there are a total of four. In the early days, they were all engaged in coming up with new official neighborhood plans, and they truly believed they should be out there talking to people who lived in those districts and having them be almost equal partners in determining what was good planning.

I was also lucky in that I became attached to this small group of very interesting people who were pretty much all politically on the left. That was part of the era as well. This new batch of planners had come out of the universities in the early 1970s having been exposed as students to what was a neo-Marxist kind of radical critique of traditional methods and ideas about planning.

DESIGNER/BUILDER: Can you talk about what this philosophy looked like, this critique?

DOUG YOUNG: Planning had been considered a rational science where planning experts knew everything about everything in a city and made wise decisions. Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, some planning activists and theorists began to critique this view. People in the streets in the 1960s in the United States and Canada knew that that approach to planning had not delivered the good city it had promised. There still were lots of problems. People in their neighborhoods and some planners started to understand that planning is not a science. It is political; it is contested. And there are different ways of knowing a city and different ways of thinking about planning.

So I went to work with this group of planners. It was very exciting and I had fun. I thought what I was doing was good work. I was working in the public sector for the benefit of the people of Toronto. I thought I could help produce a better city. But even though we saw ourselves as working with the people and for the people, we still were technocrats who just gave professional expert advice to politicians who would decide on things. I remember one councilor called those of us who would be working in his part of the city down to his office and said, “I want to make it very clear. This is my ward. I don’t want any of you to think that you’re some kind of advocate planner stirring things up out there. This is my part of the city, and what happens here will be what I want to happen here.” Another time I went to a public meeting with a councilor who, as we walked in, turned to me and asked, “What do I think about this project?”

So I became increasingly frustrated with my inability to actually effect any kind of real change. I would produce reports that went nowhere, or I would give advice to developers. A developer would come in with a proposal. I would look at the drawings and say, “I think you should make these changes.” He would go away and do them, and then I thought, okay, what I’ve really just done is made it easier for this guy to sell these apartments or to rent this space. I’ve just helped him make more money. I became really troubled again by this role of merely being a support to private-sector development. And even though I was now operating from the public sector, I was just reacting to these developments that came in through the door, but couldn’t on my own initiate what I thought would be something good for the city. So I decided in 1984 to take some time out. I went to England to study planning, thinking I really wanted a deeper, theoretical understanding of what planning’s role is or could be in a capitalist society.

DESIGNER/BUILDER: Why did you go to England?

DOUG YOUNG: I was really eager to have an experience outside of Canada. It was a choice between MIT and the Architectural Association (AA) in London. I decided to go to another continent. The AA was founded in the 1840s in the spirit of independent thinking. It’s generally known as an important school of architecture, and at the time it also had a very small graduate planning program. It was taught entirely by extremely radical critics of planning and critics of capitalism. It was a brilliant, wonderful experience.

DESIGNER/BUILDER: What did you come away with?

DOUG YOUNG: A very clear, radicalized understanding of the role of planning in a capitalist society. I saw that the state’s role is to assist in accumulation and legitimation to help capitalists continue to thrive. It does things like establish a legal system and a banking system so that the capitalist system in general doesn’t dissolve into total chaos. It enforces contracts and it sets rules about banking, etc. It also gets involved in planning cities where capitalists operate. A Marxist would say this is a system that is inherently unequal, coercive, and hierarchical. It’s a system that treats a lot of people very poorly. And so planning, in supporting this system, also treats people very differently; it assists in the enrichment of some people and the impoverishment of others.

The legitimation function of government is to make people think that even though the system is inherently unequal in the distribution of benefits across society, it’s not such a bad life after all and maybe one day they, too, will be able to move out to the suburbs to a new house. Government occasionally makes concessions to poor and working-class people. It will open a daycare center in a poor neighborhood or call public meetings to discuss planning proposals, giving people the illusion that their voice matters in the planning process.

DESIGNER/BUILDER: What did you do after you got your planning degree?

DOUG YOUNG: When I came back, I made the mistake of going back to my old job. I’d taken a leave of absence rather than quitting, because I think I was just afraid. But I was even more frustrated now because I was this radicalized planner. Yet how could I speak those words of a radical planning critique within the bureaucracy of a huge planning department? It was very difficult. I more or less kept it all inside me. But when I reviewed a planning application, I was very explicit in my own mind about who would win and who would lose, who was going to benefit if this was approved, and how could we possibly change this to benefit different people or more people?

DESIGNER/BUILDER: Were you able to make a difference?

DOUG YOUNG: In one neighborhood I worked on an issue where builders had illegally created tiny apartment units that were known locally as bachelorettes. A studio apartment in Toronto is called a bachelor apartment and these were even smaller. Typically somebody got a building permit to put an addition onto an old house and create a rooming house with maybe thirty rooms. In a rooming house you could either have a bathroom or a kitchen attached to your room, but not both. They would generally show drawings with the bathroom and then sneak in a little kitchen. There were also questions of bribes. The result was a neighborhood with many buildings comprised of 150-, 200-square-foot apartment units, with no parking, with no amenity space within the building for tenants, etc. Somehow the situation had to be legalized, but I felt that whatever we did we should not punish the tenants, who could not afford to live anywhere else. My view was there are many people in our society who cannot afford even the cheapest product that is legally produced on the housing market. Either they get help from government, live in illegally created substandard housing, or live on the street. It’s not their fault. So I tried to develop a policy that would guarantee at least a minimum standard of quality housing but do minimum damage to the living situation of the tenants.

We decided to identify those units that were below the Ontario Building Code, which I think for a studio apartment is 275 square feet. When people actually moved out and units became vacant, we then could combine units to create bigger ones that met the standards. In this way we would gradually upgrade the housing, we would not evict anyone, and we would minimize the upward creep of the rental costs by keeping units very small. In the end we would get legalized housing of at least minimum standard with as few people as possible de-housed. I felt good about that.

But I came to realize I was a tiny bureaucrat in this huge organization. My day-to-day power was to decide which file in my in-basket would go to the top. If an ordinary citizen came in to see me to talk about how to put an addition of one room on the back of his house, I could give him a lot of my time and be very helpful. I realized that one power I had was knowledge of the system. I could actually read the zoning bylaws and understand them, make them comprehensible to an ordinary person, and help him get through the system.

But I also realized that this was no way to have any impact on the city in which I live. So I contacted a nonprofit organization called the Cooperative Housing Federation of Toronto (CHFT), which in those days developed nonprofit housing co-ops and also provided support services to those they had helped build as well as others. I just called them and said, “I would like to work for you people.”

I quit my job as a city planner in 1989 and went to work as a project manager at CHFT. They somehow thought, “Oh great! We have a planner. He’ll cut through all the red tape in the planning process that we have to go through with all of our projects.” The late 1980s was a period of really generous financial support from the province and from the federal government for nonprofit housing. It was very stressful work because I had to deal with private-sector builders, private-sector banks, and bureaucrats in the provincial Ministry of Housing. But at the end of the process, I saw people move into their affordable housing units, and it was wonderful. It brought together my interests in planning, architecture, housing, and public policy. It had been a long journey from that first day on the job as an architect, but I reached a point where I was pretty happy with what I was doing.

Over a period of seven years I was responsible for something like 1,000 units of nonprofit housing being developed. In seven years as a planner, what did I produce? A lot of reports. In five years on the job as an architect, what did I produce? Some buildings that I’m not really thrilled to think that I had a hand in. In seven years with CHFT I produced housing for probably 2,500 people, housing that will probably last a hundred years. So it’s like 250,000 person years of housing. And I’m really happy about that, not in any way to brag about it, but just in terms of having made or helped create material impacts on the lives of ordinary people.

But in 1995 a radically right-wing provincial government was elected in Ontario. Within a week they announced they were canceling all funding for new social housing construction. Subsidized housing so contravened their ideology that the private market should provide housing and that it’s the individual’s responsibility to take care of themselves, to house themselves. They should not look to government. It was not government’s business to provide housing. So a year later I was out of a job.

Today I see an absolute crisis in housing affordability in Ontario. Twenty years ago, homelessness was not an enormous problem. Now you kind of step over homeless people. I live in a very middle-class neighborhood in the center of the city, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Sidewalk Living Rooms
• People’s Grocery Gets Rolling Through West Oakland
• Hip-Hop High Gives Dropouts a Second Chance
• Power to the People: Little Village Hunger Strike Yields New High School
• The Cure for Homelessness is Housing
• Writings on the Healing Walls
• Disguise: Going Undercover to Experience Life as an Elder
• Design/Build Program Broadens Experience
• One Dc
• The Village of Arts and Humanities: An Interview with Lily Yeh
• A School as Big as New York City
• Interfaith Community Building Group
• Voices of Opposition
• Power of the Purse
• Bullet Space: Home as an act of Resistance
• Let us Now Praise the Women of Wentworth
• Doug Young: A Critical Urbanist Looks at the Global City
• Whose History is it, Anyway?
• Putting a Face on Hunger
• Barefoot Artists
• Home is Where the House is: Rebuilding Communities by Building Houses
• Baltimore Block Builder: Reclaiming the Inner City One Street at a Time
• From an Acorn New Communities Grow
• Radical Builders in the Bronx
• Chicago Museum to Feature the History of Public Housing
• Rosie’s Girls Show What Girl Power is About
• Behind the Blue Suit
• Marking the Places that Matter
• Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities: An Interview with Fredda Vladeck
• Healing Community Through Play
• Self-Help Housing
• It Takes a Community to Raise a Family
• Community Without Walls Builds Community Among Seniors
• The Evolution of Universal Design
• The Best Little Trailer House in Kansas
• Am I Old Yet?
• Acknowledgments