Abstract
Keywords
The recent “global” turn in histories of the built environment that one witnesses in the fields of architectural history, planning history, and urban history in the past few years or so has generated many interesting discussions and debates. 1 These ranged from the theoretical and methodological differences between the broad categories of global, transnational, and earlier world histories, to the place of local in global history. 2 Transnational history seems to be preferred by many historians as it provides a way of understanding complex linkages, networks, and actors across politically bounded territories. Although the nomenclature is transnational, these territories are not limited to nations; they could include pre-national territorial units. Unlike global history, transnational history does not pretend to be comprehensive and might even just be regional or highly selective in scope, depending on the nature of connections explored. And transnational history also avoids the previous tendency in world history to flatten social, cultural, and political differences, particularly of the Global South. When the three books in this review, which represent approaches undertaken by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds—urban sociology, urban history, and architectural history—are read together, a few of these broader historiographical issues in the writing of global history come to the foreground vividly.
The idea of a global or transnational history of the built environment is not a new one. Anthony D. King is one of the earliest researchers to write about the topic from the 1970s, beginning with his book Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power, and Environment (1976). His latest book Writing the Global City: Globalisation, Postcolonialism and the Urban is less of a monograph and more of a collection of essays he wrote and published between 1989 and 2015. The value of this volume lies not so much in its in-depth treatment of a particular subject matter but in how the essays are testimonies from a pioneer in field of global history of the built environment on how the theories and methodologies within the field have changed over these three decades. When taken together, all the essays in the book illustrate such changes very clearly. These shifts are especially well captured in chap. 2, in which King provides a useful overview of the theoretical writings on colonial cities from 1950s to 1980s, foregrounding a number of influential works by scholars such as Robert Redfield and Milton Singer, Janet Abu-Lughod, and Terry McGee that might have been forgotten today.
The book is organized into three parts—namely, “retheorizing the city”: globalization, colonialism, postcolonialism; “methodologies”: case studies in globalization and imperialism; and “defining contemporary and historical cities.” The rather short introductory chapter, unfortunately, does not really clarify on the three-part organization of the book. The titles of the parts, however, might provide some hints. They suggest that the first part focuses on theory, the second part emphasizes on methodologies using case studies, and the third is about definitions. King also briefly notes in his introduction that “[i]n the second half of this book, the empiricist in me has taken over from the theoretician” (p. 5). Despite these hints, any reader hoping to read some of the deep empirical research that King is known for—primarily in his earlier magnum opus The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (1995 [1984])—might be disappointed. Of the essays in the second part, only chap. 8 on vernacular modernism and chap. 12 on colonial grand hotels are case studies with some empirical material. The two essays in the short third part, which presumably belongs to the second half of the book, are entries that King has previously written for academic encyclopedias. Typical of such entries, the two essays on imperial cities and global cities provide overviews of the histories and concepts of the terms in broad brushstrokes rather than dwell on any specific empirical details.
To look for empirical details in this volume would be, however, to miss its main contributions, which are theoretical and methodological in nature. These contributions could be categorized into three main interconnected themes. The first is the cultural turn in the study of the global cities and architecture that King lays out in chaps. 1 and 6. In chap. 1, King argues that the Marxist political economy scholarship on the globalization of cities produced primarily by geographers from the 1970s and 1990s has neglected “‘culture,’ in its old, ‘anthropological’ sense” (p.17) and the related questions of subjectivity and representation. As one of the earliest scholars to draw on Immanuel Wallerstein’s world system theory to write about colonial and global cities and architecture, King later also acknowledges that world system theory has been “principally concerned with the economic and political rather than the cultural” (p. 20).
In response to the above oversight, King focuses on the notion of a world or global city as a cultural space in chap. 4. To see a city as a cultural space is to accept that it is as much “an imagined environment” (p. 54) constructed through various representations as it is a self-evident thing in itself. By emphasizing imaginings and representations, King also argues that there is a need to not just attend to the city as an object of discourse but also attend to the subjects—and their subjectivities—constructing the discourse. As most—if not all—of the world or global cities today were formerly imperial or colonial cities, King also engages with postcolonial theory, which is also the second theme.
Chaps. 3, 5, 7, and 9 deal with the theme of postcolonial theory and criticism. Chap. 3 is a review essay that looks at an emerging body of scholarship on colonial architecture and urbanism from the late 1980s and early 1990s that were influenced by the early work on postcolonial criticism produced by leading exponents such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha. King argues that postcolonial criticism provided “some protective footwear for authors now stepping cautiously into this epistemological minefield” of writing about colonial spaces. Reviewing books—now regarded as classics in the field—such as Paul Rabinow’s French Modern (1989), Thomas Metcalf’s An Imperial Vision (1989), and Gwendolyn Wright’s The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (1991), King notes that the best of these books draws from intertextual approaches of postcolonial criticism and Michel Foucault to raise important questions critiquing western knowledge and power, and the politics of colonial architecture and urbanism. Chap. 7 is another review essay. In it, King looks at a number of books published in the second half of the 1990s and early 2000s. Besides the difference in publication dates—when compared to books reviewed in chap. 3—King also focuses specifically on books and journal articles on the architecture of former colonial cities written by what he called “indigenous scholars from one-time colonised society” (p. 92), who King feels are more likely to have better grasp of local languages and local sources. Furthermore, these indigenous scholars do not just critique colonial power structure, the best scholarship that they produce show how indigenous populations in colonial societies negotiated with the dominating power structure and coproduced the colonial built environment in their own ways. Such discussions of “methodological revisionism” brought by postcolonial criticism on architecture and urban studies continue in chaps. 5 and 9.
Given the emphasis on local languages and sources, it is perhaps unsurprising that many of the books written by indigenous scholars each focus on only one city. While King clearly values their contribution to the scholarship on colonial cities and imperialism in general, one is not sure how King reconciles their deep-rooted localness with the expansive globality that forms the third theme of the book. In chaps. 10 and 11, King builds on his prior works on world and global histories of the built environment with the assumption that “the nation-state is not the most appropriate unit of social analysis to examine many phenomena in the modern world” (p. 4). This conundrum of how to delve deeply into the local, which is an approach shaped by the aforementioned cultural turn and postcolonial theory and criticism, while also going beyond a single locality is perhaps one that the other two books being reviewed are trying to address. Both of these books are definitely not confining the geographical unit of their analyses to the nation-state. Although they deal not so much with colonial histories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but with new American global hegemony in the second half of the twentieth century, the historiographical issues that they have to grapple with intersect with a few of those King raises in his book.
Nancy H. Kwak’s A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid traces the history of how “elements of the American homeownership ideal had become commonly accepted wisdom across the world” (p. 7) by the 21st century. Although taken for granted today, Kwak argues that “there was nothing natural or inevitable” (p. 8) about everyone wanting to own their own house. Kwak examines in great empirical richness how mass homeownership was actively promoted by American advisors around the world after World War II for ideological reasons that fueled the expansion of global capitalism. While she notes that American advisors did not or could not implement their ideas wholesale as local implementations depended on processes of negotiation that led to variations from place to place, Kwak also highlights how homeownership was linked to an interconnected set of ideals and practices about democracy, capitalism, affluence, and security that “had the potential to satisfy wide-ranging political needs” (p. 3) and thus had mass appeal across the world. As such, Kwak’s account differs from earlier global histories of the built environment, such as those informed by world system theory, in that it is not a metanarrative that flattens historical complexities to serve the need of theory building. 3
Besides the introduction and a short conclusion, the book is organized around six long and detailed chapters. In chap. 1, Kwak examines the rise of the American model of homeownership in the 1940s within the United States. She shows how the Americans shifted from learning from and collaborating with the Europeans in their thinking about housing issues in the pre-World-War-II era to rejecting the European public housing model in the postwar era and asserting the superiority of their model of homeownership. Shaped by the antisocialist housing sentiments of the Republican Congress in the 1940s and influenced by business interests that were worried at being sidelined by any large-scale government housing program, the American model was based on providing government assistance not in the form of provision of public housing but through tax relief and bolstering government-backed mortgages to support homeownership. The belief in the superiority of the American model of mass ownership among politicians and housing advisers led to its subsequent export through the U.S. international aid program.
Kwak explores the U.S. influence on housing in Taiwan, Burma, and Korea through its aid program in chap. 2. Conceived as a part of its larger international development aid, as articulated in Harry Truman’s Point Four program, the housing aid program consisted mainly of the United States sending housing experts to provide technical know-how. The U.S. housing aid policies were shaped by broader anticommunist goals of the 1940s and 1950s. They were designed to inspire capitalist values, that is, “a desire to improve one’s own shelter through personal effort rather than through government handouts or foreign, often American, aid” (p. 51). As such, one of the favored methods of American housing experts was aided self-help housing that assisted others to house themselves so as to jumpstart larger socioeconomic development processes. Even then, there were different types of aided self-help housing schemes in these three countries, and Kwak argues that their success depended on not just the effort of individuals but the amount of housing aid received. The latter, in turn, was again contingent on the anticommunist considerations of the U.S. government. As Taiwan was at war with the communists in China, its self-help housing schemes received more aid than those in Burma. As a result, Kwak shows that the Taiwanese self-help housing schemes for the dock workers in Keelung and Kaohsiung were much more successful than the Burmese low-cost incremental aluminum roof program. In the case of Korea, which received significant amount of U.S. housing aid due to its strategic and military importance during the Cold War, Kwak use the case of the local rejection of earthen block housing built based on U.S. advice and with U.S. aid to illustrate “the power of local players in refashioning American housing aid to suit local needs” (p. 74).
In chap. 3, Kwak turns her attention to U.S. influence on housing programs in newly decolonized countries in Southeast Asia, specifically the Philippines and Singapore. Kwak notices how the strong ideological positions of U.S. housing experts were “wrapped in . . . a neutral language of development” (p. 88) so as to distance themselves from any appearance of political intervention. The neutrality of their advocacy of homeownership and self-help was further articulated through the anodyne medium of “tropical research” with the use of U.S.-aided self-help housing program for agricultural workers in Puerto Rico as a model for the other tropical territories in the decolonizing regions of the world. This model was, however, rejected in both the Philippines and Singapore. In the Philippines, the government made institutional changes fashioned after the American Federal Housing Administration to reform the mortgage financing structure to promote homeownership among the upper- and middle-income consumers. However, a large percentage of the population that belonged to the lower income group was excluded, and the Filipino government did not provide any subsidized low-cost housing solution for the poor. In Singapore, the tropical model was rejected alongside the larger American housing model by the postindependence government. Kwak even argues that Singapore housing program “makes for a particularly compelling case study of failed American housing diplomacy” (p. 120). Not only was homeownership promoted explicitly within the public housing system, government officials working for the state housing authority who went on study trips to the United States sponsored by U.S. institutions explicitly rejected the American housing model due to what they perceived as its policy of ghettoization and segregation.
In chap. 4, Kwak shifts her attention from Southeast Asia to Latin America. In it, she explores private U.S. ventures into building houses during the 1960s and early 1970s that were insured by the housing investment guaranty system that the U.S. government provided. Through Willard Garvey’s ventures in Peru, Kwak shows that U.S. private investors followed their government’s foreign relations interests in Latin America after the Castro-led communist revolution in Cuba. Although U.S. government housing aid was intended to defuse the communist threat in Latin America by investing in mass housing, private investors like Garvey chose to build middle-class suburban housing projects in Lima, Peru, that only a small fraction of metropolitan residents could afford as middle-class housing projects were deemed far more profitable and less risky than low-income ones. However, the housing guaranty’s faulty delineation of risk led to very high default rates in the overseas housing schemes, with 38.2% for Latin America alone in 1972. That contributed to a policy shift in 1973, when the USAID issued a new Shelter Sector Policy that focused on low-income housing. This shift led the USAID to work with the World Bank to address questions of shelter in the developing world that Kwak details in chap. 6.
Before Kwak deals with USAID’s collaboration with the World Bank, she looks at how U.S. government officials experimented with the applications of internationally tested housing techniques within the United States in chap. 5. In response to civil rights struggles and attendant questions of racial equality in the 1960s, U.S. government began to address the related issue of fair housing ownership. Government officials started to apply ideas of aided self-help that were already tested overseas for meeting the basic housing needs of the discriminated and deprived minorities in the United States. These included aided self-help housing experiments first for Native Americans in their reservations, and then for inner-city impoverished communities. On top of these self-help programs, successive waves of politicians also promoted low-income homeownership between 1960s and 2000s. One of the ways of achieving higher homeownership rates was by lowering mortgage underwriting and risk-assessment standards that eventually led to the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008.
In chap. 6, Kwak discusses the role of the World Bank, the world’s largest funders of housing aid globally. She shows how the World Bank became involved in supporting low-income shelter needs from 1972 in part due to its then president Robert McNamara’s concern with urban poverty. In its lending program, the World Bank contributed to the further expansion of homeownership around the world by insisting on it as a preferred tenure type. This insistence extended to giving free titles to low-income homeowners in its slum upgrading and sites-and-services lending schemes. Kwak illustrates the complex manners in which this policy operated in practice by returning to Southeast Asia and exploring the cases of slum upgrading in the informal settlements of Jakarta and Surabaya, Indonesia, and Tondo, Manila. Considered by the Bank as success stories, these cases were the exception rather than the norm. In most other cases of aided self-help and upgrading projects, the Bank encountered various difficulties—not the least that of cost recovery—which prompted the bank to reevaluate its strategy. It eventually led to the Bank adopting a new housing strategy that focused on using private-sector development and market-based housing finance from the 1980s.
On the whole, this book is a deep and detailed history of America’s promotion of homeownership around the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Its compelling narratives are based on Kwak’s extensive and meticulous research in multiple archives. These are not limited to the already vast collections of the U.S.-based international institutions such as the World Bank, United Nations, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller Foundation, but also include archives in Britain, Singapore, and the Philippines. 4 This might be one of the reasons behind Kwak’s very nuanced narratives on how America’s promotion of homeownership was received by different sociopolitical groups in various parts of the world and translated into diverse, and often diverging, housing policies and practices. By drawing on different archival sources and reading them very carefully, Kwak avoids any potential pitfalls of reproducing a U.S.-centric account and thus achieve the rare feat of writing a global history with the sensitivity to local peculiarities and agencies of historians who work on far more limited geography, that is, those we typically characterize as local historians. Through exploring transnational linkages and networks that connect institutions and actors from different sites, Kwak’s narratives succeed at the extraordinary achievement of bringing “microhistories into conversation with global histories” that scholars like Swati Chattopadhyay urge us to do. 5
Felicity Scott’s Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counter-insurgency is another transnational history of the built environment told in relation to American influences in the postwar period—in this case, focusing on the 1960s and 1970s. Like Kwak, Scott takes the United States as a point of departure, exploring how the global superpower sought to influence the developing world economically and politically through foreign aid, military intervention, and the shaping of techniques of environmental governance. Similar to A World of Homeowners, Outlaw Territories is also a history of the present. If the former is about the history of the global promotion of homeownership leading to the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008, the latter is about the history of environmental management prior to the global ascendency of the discourse of sustainable development in the 1990s and 2000s. I personally find Scott’s book to be even more satisfying because it combines detailed and nuanced historical accounts with sophisticated theorizing.
Using Foucauldian theories, Scott argues that global environmental management emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a part of global dispositif in response to environmental catastrophes and population explosions. She shows that this global dipositif was evident in the proliferation of “outlaw territories”—such as refugee camps, arenas of civil wars, occupied territories, and squatter settlements—or “residues of structural inequality and environmental injustice” (p. 15) during that period. Rather than see these outlaw territories as zones and states of exception, Scott thought-provocatively argues that there was an ambiguously reciprocal relationship between the outlaw or illegal and the legal, or what Buckminster Fuller called “weaponry arts” and “livingry arts.” The outlaw was normalized or generalized with “ongoing militarization of the everyday milieu under the rubric of security” (p. 12).
To discuss the global dispositif of environmental and population management, Scott also attends to different aspects of the built environment from the other two books. She argues the new emerging political technologies created not just larger geographical engagement (i.e., global) and broader conception of the clients (i.e., humanity), they also brought forth new objects and practices of architecture that requires her to step outside conventional institutions and discourses of architectural history. In the eight chapters, Scott examines both novel and conventional subjects of architectural history.
In chap. 1, Scott reads the rather well-known Ford Foundation building in New York City designed by Kevin Roche in new ways. Although she shares David Gissen’s interpretation of the building’s air-conditioned, glass-enclosed atrium with an indoor garden as a form of socioenvironmental risk management in response to the urban crisis in many American cities at that time, Scott also situates the building in the broader global context in relation to the Foundation’s support of the U.S. government development programs and efforts in promoting capitalism. 6 In face of the institution’s anxieties about global socioenvironmental instabilities, the building served as a secure environment and communicated a reassuring image of stability. From the establishment architecture of Kevin Roche, Scott next turns her attention to the antiestablishment commune of the Open Land Movement in chap. 2. She shows how the commune challenged state regulatory apparatus and rejected conventional building practices through “voluntary primitivism” influenced by vernacular and self-build structures.
Both chaps. 3 and 4 focus on the events around the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm. In chap. 3, Scott examines how the establishment—that is, the diplomats, politicians, and scientists—and the antiestablishment, such as the hippies and radicals, the government officials, and the NGO representatives, intermingled and formed an alliance at the Conference. Supported by the conceptual narrative of planetary interconnectedness developed by Barbara Ward and René Dubos in Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet (1971), and the concept of “Spaceship Earth” put forward earlier by Ward and Buckminster Fuller, the alliance was able to forge a consensus to address the global ecological crisis that purportedly overcome East–West and North–South divides. Choreographed by Maurice Strong, the secretary general of the conference, and supported by Stuart Brand and Hog Farm from the American countercultural movement that was transported to Stockholm, this consensus was based on a “politics no, environment yes” resource management approach that strategically ignored the politics of certain socioenvironmental realities.
In chap. 4, Scott uses the debate between the environmental justice advocates as lead by Barry Commoner, and the neo-Malthusians as led by Paul Ehrlich at the conference as an entry point into the contrasting perspectives of the environmental crisis. On one hand, Commoner and the Oi Committee International he led saw the environmental crisis as inseparable from the problems of poverty, racial injustice, and the ecocides that the U.S. military was waging in Vietnam, thus going beyond how it was framed in Ward and Dubos’s Only One Earth to engage with socioenvironmental justice. On the other, Ehrlich and the neo-Malthusian computer modelers that produced the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth ignored issues of socioeconomic justice and focused only on population and the scarcity of resources. While the latter could be seen as aligning with the “politics no, environment yes” resource management approach that Strong was trying to forge, the former challenged the depoliticized nature of that approach. From the debate, Scott examines two architectural contributions that could be seen as responses to the issues foregrounded. The first is arcology, a combination of architecture and ecology coined by Paolo Soleri, who presented at the Environmental Forum of the Conference. Scott argues that behind the guise of a cutting-edge aesthetics of alterity in arcology is a socially and political conservative approach to the environmental crisis. It represents a “creative approach to capitalism” (p. 207) that provided a solution to the limits to growth that Strong and allies sought by allowing population to grow while also pacifying it. In comparison, the Alternative Technology put forward by the PowWow, a Stockholm based collaborative that participated in the Conference, is seen by Scott as representing “the most precise critiques of the apparatus sought by Strong and his allies” (p. 209). Unlike arcology, Alternative Technology sought to operate outside the existing exploitative capitalist system by transforming the means and relations of production.
In chaps. 5 and 6, Scott discusses issues raised by events at the Conference on Human Settlements, also known as Habitat I, held in 1976 at Vancouver. Through Buckminster Fuller’s proposal of World Game and his installation of Now House at the Conference, Scott examines in chap. 5 how issues of settlement and unsettlement, and possession and dispossession in relation to territory, sovereignty, and population were debated and managed by the United Nations as technical matters and architectural expertise at the Conference. She also shows how the case of the Palestinians and the pro-Palestinian activism challenged the rendering technical of these issues. Self-help housing, as advocated by Barbara Ward and embraced by the World Bank, was another strategy put forward to address unsettlement. The strategy is examined in chap. 6 through the case of the International Design Competition for the Urban Environment of Developing Countries, which was held to coincide with Habitat I. Designed to both celebrate informal housing as the contemporary urban vernacular and retool architects’ expertise for self-help housing, the site for the Competition was at Dagat-Dagatan, a relocation site for the squatters at Tondo, Manila. The Competition was complicit with the Marcos regime’s forced dispossession and displacement of the urban poor from Tondo. The relocation from Tondo was also supported by the World Bank, at that time led by Robert McNamara who saw development and the promotion of productive employment—or the further expansion of global capitalism—as the right response to poverty.
Scott turns her attention from United Nations Conferences to architecture and urban research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in chaps. 7 and 8. By looking first at the establishment of the Urban Systems Laboratory and then the Architecture Machine Group (ArcMac) at the MIT, Scott explores the rise of computer-based research and shows that it represents the transfer of the system approach first developed in MIT’s research in defense and space programs to the problems of the cities. In applying such an approach to urban problems, she notes that cities were seen primarily as urban information systems and understood simply “as computational parameters with quantitative, rather than historical or political values” (p. 382). Scott also argues that the history of computers in architecture and urbanism is not just one of representation and form-making but one of “new modalities of environmental management and control . . . within emergent paradigms of governmentality haunted by the Cold War and the rise of the Third World and refracted domestically with the threat of civil unrest” (p. 381). She would further emphasize this point through her examination of the research carried out by ArcMac in chap. 8. She focuses in particular on Movie Map, a landmark in “virtual space” designed to “facilitate surrogate travel” (p. 411) and strengthen “way finding competence” (p. 390) for the U.S. military that funded it. Scott shows that this important technology that shaped subsequent acquisition of spatial knowledge and spatial cognition was developed in response to the highly controversial Operation Thunderbolt undertaken by the Israel Defense Forces in Entebbe Airport, Uganda, in 1976. Born of what Scott regards as Israel’s “selective disregard of sovereignty and human life” (p. 422), she argues that Movie Map is a technology that serves “the interests of the violence and inequity at work in contemporary geopolitical transformations” (p. 428).
By linking the emergence of planetary environmental concerns in the 1960s and 1970s with the broader issues of territorial violence, resource insecurity, and sociopolitical inequity, Scott’s book also casts a new critical light on the many precepts and concepts of mainstream environmental sustainability that we have taken for granted in the past few decades. These range from popular concepts such as one planet and spaceship earth, to purportedly neutral technical tools such as computer simulation and projection of resource consumption and environmental impact. If there is an obvious takeaway from the book, it is that mainstream environmental sustainability was carefully constructed as a technical matter of resource management to elide over sociopolitical issues of justice and equity. This is not something presented upfront, but it is perhaps all the more powerful because of that as the process of following the complex narratives that Scott carefully and beautifully weaves together in the book is an immensely enjoyable one.
After reading two very accomplished transnational histories of the built environment, the historian of primarily Asia in me cannot help but ask: what would transnational histories of the built environment look like if they are based on different geographies, beyond those centered on the United States? Where are the archives that one could excavate to find materials for such histories? What would be the language skills and other resources—primarily funding and time—that one might need to write such histories? What is the academic research culture outside of major North American research universities that both Kwak and Scott are based that would support such endeavors?