Anarchitecture

S uburban design remains the dominant ideological and practical force in the political economy of place making. Stripped to its essentials suburbanism is the placement of new developments far outside of dense urban cores. Houses are usually sprawling and arrayed in big monocrop fields with thousands of others. Streets are ridiculously wide, and the automobile rules over all. Population density is low. Strip malls, big box stores, and shopping centers are built in and around suburban tracts providing infusions of tax dollars fueling further expansion into the hinterland. All of this works to the detriment of those left in the inner city as state, municipal, and private resources pour out. 

Gentrification is design and development within the city that unabashedly provides housing and infrastructure for a young, wealthy, and mostly white population—the bored sons and daughters of the suburbs who have come back to the city in search of what their parents fled. Although it is often portrayed as an unplanned market process whereby “ghettos” are settled by more affluent households and finally made into nice places to live, the role of big business and government in gentrification is well known. Virtually all successful attempts to gentrify an area must gain needed subsidies and support from city and/or federal government. Equally, this relies on the work of architects and planners in the service of the powerful. 

Gentrification is the darkest side of the suburb. Although it allows city colonizers a lifestyle more ecologically sustainable than the suburbs, it displaces the poor and mostly non-white communities long abandoned by the consumer class (more commonly called the middle class). It causes particular harm to the elderly poor. Right now highly paid place makers are hard at work trying to seize inner city areas in order to convert them into high-rise condos, lofts, corporate offices, and trendy business districts. 

The third major paradigm of elite dominated place shaping, new urbanism, is neither suburban nor crassly gentrifying. New urbanism is a school of thought that touts the positive effects of dense housing, urban life, and mixed-use or mixed-income neighborhoods. It praises the idea of integrating different socio-economic classes and racial or ethic groups into the same places. Its vision of community is a dense cluster of housing, greenspace, sidewalk, and businesses that are well proportioned, centralized, easily accessible, and safe. 

However, it largely fails at these goals because, like suburban-styled development and overt gentrification, it is bound completely by the process of planning from the top down. Designs flow from planners, technocrats, politicians, and financiers at the top. Furthermore, it only redevelops these “mixed-income” communities on top of formerly poor and non-white communities. New urbanist place makers displace these groups in their quest to create supposedly diverse and healthy communities. Never before have they demolished upper-income areas to build “mixed-income” communities. The degree to which they actually succeed in bringing different social classes together in living is questionable, to say nothing of other schisms. 

One high profile example of this sort of planning is River Garden, an urban housing development plus a Wal-Mart supercenter built on top of the demolished St. Thomas housing projects in central New Orleans. (I use it as an example because that whole city is on the verge of being rebuilt and River Garden is the likely template.) The majority of homes in River Garden are priced for “middle class” homebuyers, effectively locking out those who used to live there—the rationale being that it was a “blighted” neighborhood in need of revitalization. The buildings resemble a Hollywood back lot imitation of New Orleans’ architectural styles in bright Caribbean colors. Thus, new urbanism’s solutions to problems that are fundamentally about poverty boils down to more tried and untrue solutions that fetishize aesthetic and spatial fixes to problems grounded in social inequality. 

Anarchitecture 

T here is an alternative process of making place not beholden to the financial interests of a powerful minority or the professional monopoly of planners and architects who work on their behalf. Its defining features include creating useful habitats for human beings and creating a meaningful sense of community, one that extends deeper than the look and feel provided by the façades and embellishments of top-down planning. It’s not a process of imposing form. Rather, it’s a process of collectively creating form and sharing space. One particularly useful name for this decentralized and rebellious form of place making is anarchitecture. 

Anarchitecture shouldn’t be taken as any particular ideological commitment to anarchism. Rather, the prefix “anarch” serves to keep the idea of some sort of anti-capitalist/anti-authoritarian place making as open as possible to various visions and projects and to emphasize that this form of creating place occurs largely beyond (and in spite of) the state. It can be cooperative and quiet or a contentious ruckus of activity. “Anarchitecture” also captures the spontaneity and unpredictability of many collectively built structures outside of the purview of the planning professionals. What already exists in cooperatives, urban farming, guerilla gardening, green building, community development corporations, DIY infrastructure, squatting, protest, small businesses, participatory budgeting, random beautification, small builders, handymen/women, and even basic homeownership is a desire to cultivate use values over exchange values and to do it in a way that not only benefits individual users, but also the community as a whole. 

The distinction between use value and exchange value that distinguishes professional architecture from anarchitecture is rather simple. The capitalist political-economy of making places is powered by the buying, selling, and making of real estate in order to make money. This is exchange value. Use values are those social things that capital will not necessarily provide for. Indeed the normal operation of capital overruns and destroys many use values. Capital demolishes low-income apartments to build gentrified high-rises. It strips forests and destroys watersheds in order to stamp new suburbs on top of former fields or forests. Out of this fundamental conflict between real human needs and the products of the market (products that can never fully provide a place to make our lives) arises anarchitecture. 

As a perspective on things, anarchitecture recognizes that landscapes can be disempowering or isolating (indeed many of them are purposefully designed to be this way), but it doesn’t let us off the hook: we can’t claim of any place that “there is no there there,” as Gertrude Stein famously said of her estranged hometown. Whatever is there, or is not, is our responsibility. It’s up to us to make it if it doesn’t yet exist or to deconstruct it if the professionals have imposed it on us. Free floating capital seeking to maximize profit can only build the same homogeneous, interchangeable units of land with familiar buildings decorated with numbing logos. 

Three Examples 

T here are numerous examples of anarchitecture in practice. Three facets of anarchitecture give the concept more clarity—(1) urban farming, (2) infrastructure creation, and (3)  disruption of top-down planning. 

Urban farming—including community gardens, backyard plots, and guerilla gardens—is an example of anarchitectural place making because it challenges so many of the dominant forms of space-time organization under capitalism. In the first instance, it challenges industrialized large-scale agriculture as the best model for food production. Urban farms are always smaller than the mega-farms that dominate food production and, because they can fill spaces, such as backyards, empty lots, parks, and greenways, they decentralize production. This allows urban farmers to utilize more sustainable techniques thereby causing less harm to the land and the people who ultimately eat the food. This means that crops must be acclimated to the local climate or microclimates and that seasonal variations in production determine variations in what people can eat. This contrasts with industrial agriculture where food is grown in large, remote monocrop plantations, treated after harvest to prevent spoiling, and then shipped an average of 1,500 miles to the consumer. 

Urban farms also challenge dominant notions about the “best uses” of space within cities. According to capitalist economics, real estate should be developed according to whatever use is most profitable. Under these assumptions, inner-city agriculture is incredibly inefficient at capitalizing on land values and therefore should be replaced with more intensive projects like high-rise buildings, condos, or factories. 

Urban farms range in sizes from large multi-acre sites to small patches alongside roads and railroad tracks. Many are legal, some are not. By far the most common form of urban agriculture is simple backyard gardening. Individuals and families that take it upon themselves to produce a portion of their own food are practicing a fundamentally subversive means of production in our society. Community gardens, often formed in partnership with city government or through non-profit organizations, are much more organized than guerilla gardens or home landscaping, but still represent a challenge to the dominant forms of centralized food production and landscape creation. In the southern California city I live in, I have seen everything from community gardens with dozens of members, to small milpas and gardens around homes, and even the rogue efforts of guerilla landscapers who have established clusters of avocado and loquat trees in formerly desolate patches of dirt which years down the line bear rich clusters of fruit free for anyone to pick. Urban agriculture and landscaping can change local ecologies for the better and challenge corporate control over food and land uses. 

Another form of anarchitecture widely practiced involves the creation of infrastructure. Infrastructure is anything that facilitates movement, connectivity, and communication. It is the roads, wires, bridges, and pipelines that connect homes, workplaces, schools, parks, prisons, farms, and factories. Rather than allowing government or private developers to plan and build these most social of projects, many have taken it upon themselves. This form of anarchitecture is most prevalent in societies without strict zoning codes or the means to enforce the dominance of centrally planned infrastructure as the only system of connectivity. In large portions of the global south whole community water systems are fashioned in this manner, as are roads and walls. In many cities residents and squatters have taken to tapping the official power grid and wiring elaborate electricity systems.

A major form of anarchitectural infrastructure in the United States includes footpaths and bike paths that appear wherever centrally planned transportation infrastructure is inadequate, boring, or divisive. It might be easy to dismiss a footpath established through an empty lot or alongside a highway as anything like “infrastructure,” especially because it takes virtually zero capital to construct. If, however, we think about the kind of investment that people make in a certain pathway simply by traveling on it frequently enough to demarcate its boundaries, to compact the dirt, and even to repair its flooded or eroded areas, we start to get a sense of how much human energy actually can go into what appears to be nothing more than a casual trail. 

These types of pathways facilitate movement not sanctioned or planned for by the authorities. The elaborate ways that the U.S. Mexico border is dissected by trails is an example. These pathways undermine the official infrastructure of the border, providing passage for those being exploited and oppressed in no small way by the official infrastructure. The homeless and itinerant have created vast infrastructures to traverse cities and suburbs outside of the surveillance of authorities and the scorn of others. Migrant and immigrant laborers have also cut diagonals through the official infrastructure of roadways and sidewalks as a means of connecting their workplaces, homes, and places of socialization. As a general rule, the more a society persecutes and pretends away the subalterns it exploits, the more they will take it upon themselves to build the structures and infrastructure necessary to make their lives and to fight toward a better future. 

A third example of anarchitecture can be found anywhere local communities disrupt the top-down planning process that produces urban sprawl, gentrification, or other losses of community in the pursuit of profit. Every major U.S. city has seen movements challenge the architectural prerogatives of the power elite. From the 1940s through the 1960s one major goal of these movements was to oppose the negative (and oftentimes discriminatory) impact of the federal highway-building boom that threatened to cut cities into shreds. What tended to happen was that federal funds and expertise would be channeled through local political regimes that would inevitably map highways through non-white and poor districts. Those in the crosshairs of the asphalt layers seldom stood idly by while their homes were paved over. Many of these battles were lost and the multi-lane monsters were built through once thriving neighborhoods, but many were won, thus sustaining community cohesion and economic vitality instead of sacrificing them to the supposed progress of autotopia. 

The urban renewal programs that exploded on the U.S. inner-city in this same era were opposed with even more effort. It was during this time that cities first secured massive federal grants specifically to rebuild themselves. After receiving federal grants, cities would proceed by exercising the laws of eminent domain to forcibly remove residents from their homes and neighborhoods. They demolished millions of lower-income housing units, as well as many thousands of small businesses, and sold the land to wealthy developers who usually built luxury apartments, condos, sports arenas, and convention centers, among other projects for profit. 

Neighborhood activists opposed this most fervently. Their main contention was a political-economic one: why spend our collective resources on projects that clearly benefit the few at the expense of the majority? Why destroy “slum” housing, replacing it with fewer units of higher prices? Where would the people go? Residents and activists were always quick to question the assumptions on which renewal operated—that blighted neighborhoods were better off demolished, and that there is a spatial and aesthetic fix to problems of urban poverty. They were right to connect the decline of inner cities with the rise of suburban America. They were right to refute the idea that their communities were terrible places filled with crime and despair. They countered that their communities were vibrant, if troubled, but they were theirs and they would not give them up without a fight. Many fights were won. 

Disruption of the top-down planning process is anarchitecture in practice. Whenever those who will be most affected by a proposal enjoin the process, whether it is welcomed by those who drafted the original plans or resisted tooth and nail, it shapes the outcome in a more equitable way. When the professionals try to impose plans on communities that are widely perceived as harmful and not in the interest of the community as a whole, the outcomes can be several. The professional place shapers can ignore, repress, and impose their form on the community; they can alter the design so that it incorporates some of the demands of the community; or they can abandon the project entirely. The first outcome has been a common one. The second two solutions are the results of anarchitecture in action: the building of place and space in spite of capital. 

The promise of anarchitecture—the decentralized making of place by and for the community—is an activity that continually challenges the ability of the powerful to reshape our cityscapes and countrysides as they see fit. Anarchitecture can be a defense of place, but also an imaginative way of shaping it. It can be a reaction to the destructive power of real estate capitalism and our political system. It can also be a proactive undertaking—spontaneous, unpredictable—a window into a different world where place might be more than a means to accumulating wealth and power. It might be a reason unto itself.