Architecture and politics
In these months of intense political activity, it is worth reviewing the work of Josep María Montaner and Zaida Muxi, who under the title "Architecture and Politics. Essay for Alternative Worlds "presents an interesting analysis of this complex relationship.
Urbanism was born and developed as a practical discipline of intervention on the territory, to "order it" in order to organize the operation of the city and access to the collective goods and services of its inhabitants and their users. But it also expressed from its beginnings a vocation of social transformation, to improve the quality of life of the most needy populations, to reduce inequalities.
These ideas of Idelfons Cerdà, one of the founders of Modern urbanism, make us see the political vocation of architecture, a relationship that goes back to the origin of the word: "Politics" derives from the Greek polis; In other words, the city as an orderly group of free and different citizens who self-organize to interact in the world.
"Architecture has a close relationship with human life, therefore it has much to do with political and economic power, with the collective will of the social and the common, the public and the permanence in the future."
Thus begins the introduction to this work of the binomial Muxi-Montaner, which, in short chapters, addresses the history of urbanism, architecture, consumer society, real estate speculation, the problem of housing, traditions critical to Capitalist urbanization, the right to mobility, the environment, the relationship between Urbanism and power, urban feminism, among other topics of current interest.
It is a critical work that reveals how the relationship between politics and architecture has deteriorated, because, on the one hand, it has been based on words and pseudo concepts that obscure reality and justify the territorial outrages; And on the other hand, it has given rise to humanist speeches that exalt the architecture as a singular and gratuitous object, completely dissociated from its social context.
In the foreword, Jordi Borja defines it as a homeopathic book, "for its brevity in the relationship with the multitude of themes and because it allows a reading to small doses" and also warns that it is a text that carries with it a strong analytical load derived from the any more Gum ethics of the authors, of their observations of the effects of the current speculative capitalism and of their conception of the responsibility of the professionals.
It is, in short, a necessary intellectual contribution, which requires not to remain on paper, but to take its ideas into the field of actions to recover the political responsibility of professionals in the planning and construction of modern cities.