Where Does the Future Take Space?

If the original Bauhaus architects and thinkers were here today, would they be focused on this? I think most might say no. Let me argue that yes, they would. Why? Because this is one of the major processes happening across the world: massive expulsions of millions and millions of smallholders from their land. Today’s land and water grabs are one of the major factors repositioning the meaning of urban space and urban building in most of the Global South, even if not quite in Europe. But the pioneering imaginations and concerns of the Bauhaus project would have taken this in sooner or later.

Cities are, ironically perhaps, strategic for both global corporate capital and the powerless. It is probably the modest middle classes and the older type of working classes who have lost ground in these cities, as their work and capacities are increasingly either not necessary for leading sectors or have been replaced by machines and lower-level workers; furthermore, both of these groups have some resources that allow them to consider the housing question in terms of dwelling, rather than as a power space or the only space where you can lay down your body because that is all you have left.

It signals the possibility of a new type of politics, centred in new types of political actors. Cities are complex systems. But they are incomplete systems. These features take on urbanized formats that vary enormously across time and place. In this mix of complexity and incompleteness lies the capacity of cities to outlive far more powerful but formal, closed systems. Thus, many a city has outlived governments, kings monarchies, the leading corporation of an era, and other instances of formal power. Herein also lies the possibility of making in a city – making the urban, the political, the civic, a history. Using this type of definition of a city, I would argue that a growing range of today’s dense built-up terrain, such as a vast privately owned office complex with multiple towers (and guards controlling access) is built density, but it is not about cityness. On the other hand, a working slum can have many of the features of a city, and indeed, some are a type of city – poor but deeply urban.

The last few years have seen an increasingly alarming intervention by powerful actors that reduce buildings to nancial instruments. I think of this as the mining of built-up urban space. At its most acute, it reduces buildings to nancial assets, so that an empty building might be more valuable to its owners or investors than an occupied building. Why? Because an empty building can easily be transformed into “asset backed securities,” a powerful nancial instrument that can generate extraordinary

gains. The “asset” might be any bit of materiality of the building – enabling enormous exibility and options. Furthermore, it can be bought and sold on the global nancial markets far more easily than the actual building.

For now, the more common investment mode is to buy the building and make it work as a building (as of yet). These buildings are easy ways of laundering cash/profits obtained under dubious conditions. This is a long-standing practice across the world.
Here the rise of a very large sector of high-income households and high-profit firms is the most common and visible mode through which a growing share of urban space is now built up as expensive, high-end space. This rapid rise of a fairly large, rich class of urban residents – going well beyond the top one per cent – is altering the urban condition in yet another way. It has raised the value of central city land and surrounding neighborhoods. A whole new global market for buying luxury buildings has developed over the last several years, which has further changed the situation for lower-income and increasingly also middle-class households.

In short, current conditions in global cities, in particular, are creating new structurations of power. This is not just “economic devel-opment”. It goes much deeper and begins to unsettle the deep logics of what we think of as the city, urban space, architecture as a benign event that can add much to the life of urban dwellers (and visitors).

Thus, global cities are also strategic for those without power. It signals the possibility of a new type of politics, centered in new types of political actors. That is one instance of what I seek to capture with the concept of urban capabilities. It is not simply a matter of having or not having power. In the case of the powerless, it is a strategic space because the political goes well beyond routine voting and having to accept corporate utility logics, or the dominance of narratives that strengthen powerful actors. Urban space in powerful cities provides new hybrid bases from which to act.

There is yet another type of hacking of long-time orders that is taking place today. It is the hacking of well-established larger units, notably nationstates, that are beginning to lose the grip on domains where they once had considerable control. This is an important, even if partial and not always desirable change. In “Territory, Authority, Rights” (Princeton University Press, 2008) I identified a vast proliferation of such partial disassemblings and reassemblings that arise from the remix of bits of territory, authority and rights, once all ensconced in national institutional frames.

Centering social justice in building is potentially a powerful vector in urban space. I cannot help but think that at least some of what gave rise to the Bauhaus would have engaged today’s housing challenge along these lines. Building modest housing in highly valued, central urban space becomes speech – political speech. And that means it can be present even if the actual housing project fails, and it can stay alive as project, as possibility, as necessity.

As a complex but incomplete space, the city can bring together multiple very diverse struggles and engender a larger, more encompassing push for a new normative order. It enables people with di erent passions and obsessions to work together. But this is not enough in the current period, especially perhaps in the Westernized part of the globe – which includes much of Latin America and much of Africa. The escalating concentration of power and a certain kind of exhaustion of the social-democratic project that worked quite well in much of Europe is now also in a decaying condition there.