Duncan Bell - Political Theory and Architecture

Political Theory and Architecture

Political Theory and Architecture

EDITED BY

Duncan Bell & Bernardo Zacka

ALSO AVAILABLE AT BLOOMSBURY

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Bare Architecture: A Schizoanalysis, Chris L. Smith

Space after Deleuze, Arun Saldanha

Ethics Under Capital: MacIntyre, Communication, and the Culture Wars, Jason Hannan

Politics in the Times of Indignation: The Crisis of Representative Democracy, Daniel Innerarity

Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture, Hlne Frichot

Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces, Gernot Bhme (ed. and trans. Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul)

Architecture in Abjection: Bodies, Spaces and Their Relations, Zuzana Kovar

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First published in Great Britain 2020

Copyright Duncan Bell, Bernardo Zacka, and Contributors, 2020

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Cover image: Boston City Hall (c. 1968) Boston City Archives

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Ali Aslam

Assistant Professor of Politics, Mount Holyoke College

Duncan Bell

Professor of Political Thought and International Relations, and Fellow of Christs College, University of Cambridge

Ronald Beiner

Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto

Gbor Betegh

Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy, and Fellow of Christs College, University of Cambridge

Nathaniel Coleman

Reader in History and Theory of Architecture, Newcastle University

Fonna Forman

Associate Professor of Political Science and principal in the political and architectural practice Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman

Benjamin Hofmann

PhD Student in Political Theory, Princeton University

Margaret Kohn

Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto

Randall Lindstrom

Architect and Adjunct Lecturer, Discipline of Architecture, University of Tasmania

Jeff Malpas

Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Tasmania, and Visiting Distinguished Professor, La Trobe University

Mihaela Mihai

Senior Lecturer in Political Theory, University of Edinburgh

Jan-Werner Mller

Professor of Politics, Princeton University

Josiah Ober

Mitsotakis Professor of Political Science and Classics, Stanford University

Antoine Picon

G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, Harvard University

Nancy L. Rosenblum

Senator Joseph Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government, Harvard University

Barry Weingast

Ward C. Krebs Family Professor of Political Science, Stanford University

Bernardo Zacka

Assistant Professor of Political Science, MIT

Duncan Bell would like to thank the following for enlightening discussion on the politics of architecture, and for assistance with this volume: Sarah Fine, Joel Isaac, Max Sternberg, the students in his occasional M.Phil seminar on Architecture and Political Theory, and especially, Bernardo Zacka.

For stimulating conversations on architecture, Bernardo Zacka is grateful to Nicholas Ray, Oded Naaman, Abdallah Daher, Jan Mach and Jan Vondrk at Mjlk architekti, and especially to Duncan Bell and Valentina Pugliano.

The editors would like to thank Ali Aslam, Margaret Kohn, and Matthew Longo for their valuable feedback, Hannah Woods and Danny Tobin for their excellent research assistance, and Liza Thompson, our editor at Bloomsbury, for her enthusiastic support.

Duncan Bell and Bernardo Zacka

This volume aims to resume a dialogue between political theory and architecture, two fields that have conversed only intermittently. The essays we have assembled begin from the premise that architecture is not merely a backdrop to political life but a political force in its own right. Taken together, they aim to give countenance to that claim and to show how our thinking about politics can be enriched by a closer attention to the built environment.

The political significance of architecture can be explored from a variety of disciplinary angles, including architectural theory, geography, urban politics, the anthropology of space, and the sociology of the built environment. While the present volume draws on these literatures, it is firmly rooted in yet another field, political theory. It seeks to capture how contemporary political theorists, whose research does not typically center on architecture, have encountered it in their work, what substantive issues it has raised for them, and how they have sought to approach it from within their own disciplinary traditions. To broaden the range of perspectives further, the political theorists who form the core of this volume are joined by a group of philosophers and architectural theorists with cognate interests.

Substantively, our aim is twofold: to demonstrate the salience of a range of political theoretical approaches to the analysis of architecture and to show that architecture deserves a place as an object of study in political theory, alongside laws, policies, institutions, norms, practices, imaginaries, and discourses. Our hope is that political theorists will find in the collection a variety of models for engaging with architecture and that architects will encounter new ways into familiar terrain by seeing their field refracted through the lens of another discipline.

Architecture as a basic social institution

For a discipline that prides itself on interrogating the structures that govern social life, contemporary political theory has had surprisingly little to say about the built environment. While references to public space and the public sphere abound, they tend to be metaphorical, with the first designating the shared world of artifacts and institutions that relate us to one another (Arendts common world), and the second the discursive platforms in which people discuss matters of common concern (Habermass public sphere).

For just as we think that the structure of our laws can channel behavior, express collective values, and foster a public ethosso too, Plato suggests, does the built environment.