Kieran Long: And next, to take us into the interval there’s John Goodbun… Jon, oh your title, of course, ‘Reimagining the possibility of planning or how to become an urban ecologist’.
Jon Goodbun: Okay well thanks. I’m based at the University of Westminster where I teach and where I’ve recently submitted a PhD and when I was approached by Kieran and Jen I sort of said well maybe say something about the future of architecture and the future of the University
...and I thought well that’s not too difficult because in many ways, right now, under this Government and under this economy, there is no future for architecture or for the University.
But, you know, can’t quite get away with that so we need to think well what kind of claims can we make upon the future and actually to do that we need to have a bit of a sober assessment of where we are now…
…and, roughly speaking, where we are now is the age of neoliberalism. It’s going to get slightly boring for a moment, but essentially we’re talking about a period that started in the late 60s, marked by the defeat of the Student and Workers’ Movement, then, the abandonment of the gold standard and Bretton Woods in ’71. The enormous privatisation of the production of money, we could talk for ages about that…
And most singularly a wage freeze, real wages have not risen since the early 1970s. Now that’s been made up, obscured, by a massive increase in credit and debt given out to people. So this is the broad framework within which we’re working.
This is then paralleled with a political project, broadly referred to as a Chicago School, three core points to that project; the privatisation of public assets, deregulation of the financial sector and cuts to Government services. If this all sounds vaguely familiar it should do, it’s been rolled out at various times around the world…
…we’re confronting it at the moment and, broadly speaking it makes no sense whatsoever economically, it allows a few people to get extremely rich and it’s just laid out always under the skies of unavoidable emergency measures.
Oh of course there’s a series of narratives which obscure what’s actually going on, one of the most important is debt. If you haven’t seen these two films ‘Money as Debt’ One and Two, absolutely do see them, you can watch them online for free, more or less. A whole bunch of websites you really should look at, things like New Economics Foundation, David Harvey. If people tell you we need to do something about debt, just tell them to shut the fuck up from me, it’s absolute bullshit. Money, the way in which we create it, is as debt.
One of the things I’ve been very interested actually is the way social media are beginning to help to unpick some of the stuff going on here, I can’t always achieve a mastery of the form, but the image will come…you know, do chase up these leads.
And another important narrative, obscuring narrative, is the story of growth and of course one of the worst things that can happen is, you know, worse than the recession we’re in at the moment, would be business back to normal. And, you know, it would be absolutely ecologically catastrophic.
Another massive narrative of neoliberalism is free markets, they claim to be in favour of free markets, they’re in favour of nothing of the sort. We’re now looking at a global economy which is actually a series of planned economies on a scale that the old Soviet Union couldn’t have dreamed of. A series of planned economies run by these corporations, run by some of the people we were looking at earlier.
And so we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation today. On the one hand the very concept of planning, at an urban level but more broadly, has never been weaker. At the same time what’s in stake in planning, which is the planet in itself and our social systems, you know, have never needed a great idea of planning.
So what I’m sort of suggesting to you today is that we need to reimagine the very project of planning and its role in taking us towards post capitalist scenarios. And actually architecture and the University both have important roles to play in this, potentially. But actually to understand the kind of roles we need to play we actually need to save a term which has been having a bit of bad press recently, and that’s autopoiesis.
And what I don’t mean is our friend Patrick’s book in the corner, or not entirely anyway, but it’s a phenomenally important concept, so I just want to say something briefly about it. It was developed in systems biology to basically explain how organisms are able to constitute themselves in relationship to an environment.
In such a way that they’re autonomous, but their autonomy derives from their interrelation to the environment. Fantastically paradoxical, you know, a properly dialectical concept. Their autonomy derives from their interdependence with their environments. Now why is this useful to [unintelligible 05:00], well basically the concept of autopoiesis as Schumacher has attempted as well…
…you know, can be used to think abut other kinds of systems and in all kinds of important ways we can think about the architectural knowledge and the University as an autopoietic systems. Now what’s at stake in that kind of claim, why is it interesting to say that? Well the point is that an autopoietic system as an entirely different narrative.
So claiming that architecture or claiming that University autopoietic systems means that they can exist outside of the logic, or can articulate just a completely different logic to that of our dominant economic system and this is phenomenally important. And so this suggests new forms of architectural knowledge and these are the kinds of things that seem to me to be the most interesting things emerging.
New forms of spatial agency, new forms of design activism. In all kinds of strange ways, I think paradoxically, we might be in a period where building is one of the least interesting things that architectural knowledge can do. But actually beginning to understand how cities were, things like the Centre for Urban Pedagogy, these are very interesting initiatives.
Universities too, as autonomous spaces, on the one hand they’re currently being dismantled and commodified by this Government, but globally. We see terms like ‘creativity’ and ‘knowledge’ being replaced by ‘innovation’ and ‘skills’ and generally, you know, being put at the mercy or put at the service of neoliberal networks.
But actually David Harvey has made a very interesting point saying ‘well if we need to replace the story of growth with something else, if ecologically we can’t sustain growth, we don’t want to revert to a static situation, we need a more interesting concept of growth’.
And maybe that’s something like human development and maybe then in that situation, actually, Universities need to become the centre of a different kind of economy, articulating an entirely different narrative and it’s actually the seizure of narratives that both architecture and Universities have got a stake in the future for.
Kieran Long: Thanks Jon, thanks very much, a lot in that, I particularly liked a big red cross through a Patrick Schumacher book on several slides, that’s really hammering it home. We’re going to have really a very short break and enough time for some of you to get a drink, if you can’t get one down here there’s another bar upstairs, ten minutes and we’ll be back. See you in ten minutes
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