Interview with Nikos Salingaros on P2P Urbanism (1)

This is the text of an email interview. Nikos has a very strong critique of contemporary architecture and proposes a bottom up approach based on identifying productive patterns.

Q1: We’ve been covering some of your work on a new ‘peer to peer’ urbanism in our blog. Perhaps we can explore this connection further. First of all, do you agree with that assessment of your approach being in line with the peer to peer ethos. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to your current thinking and practice. Finally, could you also what you think of my characterization of your work as neotraditional. What I mean is that premodern and what I would call ‘trans’modern thinking are both concerned with the primacy of value and the immaterial, and that freed from the modernist rejection of all things traditional, we can now have an open mind and freely draw from thousands of years of human experience.

NS: At the basis of my approach (and my team of collaborators on architectural and urban issues) is the empowerment of the individual. That is certainly at the heart of the peer-to-peer ethos. It is also a fundamental reversal of what has been the norm for close to a century; namely the rule of a self-appointed elite to dictate the tastes of the people as far as what living and built environments ought to be like. Generations have been told that they had to live in a certain type of house that was unpleasant to be in, to live in cities with an unpleasant, often inhuman form, and we can go further. Generations have been forced to go against their natural, instinctive responses to an inhuman environment, and to accept it as “modern” and “contemporary”. This has been happening since the 1920s. The end result is massive cognitive dissonance, which confuses a person’s instincts to the point that they are then very easy to manipulate.

Now there are two schools of thought as to how this happened. If you are going to be kind, you can say that well-meaning, nice people with good intentions wanted to build new types of buildings and cities so as to better humanity and create a more just society. If you are going to be harsh, you can claim that those very same people collaborated in a dangerous mass experiment in social engineering, with the goal of creating a submissive consumer class of people who are easily brainwashed. The end result is the same: an inhuman built environment founded upon energy wastage and a neurotic class of people who everyday have to put up with urban and architectural stress. The beneficiaries are the so-called experts who sold all the utopian ideas, and who were well-rewarded for their role, and of course, that section of society that created all this inhuman urban structure.

To get out of this disastrous mode of life — and it is really a philosophy and world view, not an architectural choice — we need to go back to traditional values. Sure, the social revolutions around the First World War rejected tradition precisely at the time these new “experts” were selling their utopian ideas, but that was the key to the manipulation. People were ready to reject everything and adopt a new way of life, and were not paying attention to the possible dangers of being manipulated. If we look back to all the architecture and urbanism of the past 3,000 years, we find human-scale solutions that can be adapted for today’s society. For the moment, the constant attacks from those who accuse us of going back to the past have prevented people in general from appreciating the wealth of solutions available. I’m talking about small-scale, both low and high-technology solutions that break out of the stranglehold of the consumerist society. I’m also talking about satisfying basic human emotional needs, such as a human-scale environment, a healing environment, that we can create with very low cost once we jettison the fashionable or dogmatic architectural “statements”.

The modernists rejected all things traditional, as their basic cult dogma. Thus, they threw out solutions developed over millennia, which can never be substituted by any high-tech images. Some of my friends think this was simply an industry trick to sell all that steel and glass being produced in mass quantities from the new factories. In that view, the Bauhaus was simply a publicity outlet for industrial materials, which is ironic considering how Marxist most of the Bauhausler were. But then, the Left embraced industrialization wholeheartedly, just as fervently as did the consumerist society that was supposedly on the political right. Communist countries erected vast, inhuman buildings and cities, and the same typologies were applied in the capitalist countries. A curious ideological agreement between the two antagonists on the industrialization and dehumanization of human beings!

Peer-to-peer solutions represent the opposite of this dehumanization. I see an attempt to regain value for the individual, and hopefully to enable solutions to evolve outside the controlled industrial system. There is nothing wrong with industry, but I do not condone the massive manipulation of entire populations, and the forced consumption of inhuman building and urban typologies. People will buy industrial products, and will build their houses and cities: what I want to see is a vastly improved range of choices and the ability to make individual decisions. I expect the latest cutting-edge industrial techniques, such as just-in-time production, to play a major role in this revolution. We are now promoting a curious and unexpected combination of tradition with the latest technological possibilities made available by the Internet. I don’t believe that it was even possible to think about implementation before, even a decade ago, but now the whole process of information, coordination, distribution, linkage, and expertise, can take place on the Internet. That’s why I support an open publishing environment so strongly. Information that can change people’s lives, that can change the lives of entire population, must be freely available.

What we have not been able to break through, so far, is the brainwashing. The vast majority of the world’s population is suffering from an inhuman built environment, from inhuman living spaces, from inhuman building surfaces, from inhuman furnishings, and it is putting up with it because of a basic terror. Psychological manipulation has convinced them from birth that to go against the “modern” iconography will mean economic collapse. Those images have become religious in their hold on people’s minds. Just try to suggest to someone that steel and glass may not be the best materials in a desert or polar climate (only to mention the heat losses). But they cannot envision a world without those iconic “glass and steel” qualities, because that image represents “progress” since the 1920s. Slum dwellers make do with waste materials to build their homes, but when they can afford to, they move out into an inhuman house built in “industrial” style, often in an inhumanly designed high-rise, or worse, in a socially dead suburb. That is their ultimate success: they have made it out of the favela and into the inhuman utopian environment, and now they can contribute as a pawn in the global economy.”

1 Comment Interview with Nikos Salingaros on P2P Urbanism (1)

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