The Architecture of the City (in the Age of its Financial Reproducibility)

Author: Pedro Levi Bismarck
Year: 2024 (essay; originally a 2019 colloquium presentation)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/bismarck-2024-architecture-of-the-city-financial-reproducibility.md

Summary

Bismarck argues that financial neoliberalism has shattered the conditions of the "social-democratic city" that defined urban life since the Second World War, producing a "becoming-finance of life" in which the metropolis is a machinery for multiplying financial capital through rent and debt. He tracks the privatization of architecture itself — the shift from the architect-as-liberal-professional (the homme de lettres of the state-planned city) to the architect-as-entrepreneur of the neoliberal metropolis — and frames the discipline's real conflict as one between project and object. The "architectural object," a self-referential, non-referential entity floating in the "stream of money," functions as an "apparatus for the making of the indebted man." He ends by proposing to "disinvent" the object and think the production of a commons of the city.

Key Claims

• Neoliberalism as financialization: the accumulation of capital is made outside traditional productive processes, "above all via rent and debt" (echoing Carlo Vercellone: "Profits become rent!"). Lazzarato's "debt economy": the "right to buy meant the right to be indebted"; Proudhon's "La finance, c'est le vol!" (Finance is theft!).
• The end of the social-democratic city: neoliberalism breaks the link among its three elements — political organization (welfare state/Keynesianism), production (Fordism), and territorial configuration (nation-state). The state shifted from regulator/planner (the "stato-piano") to "consummate agent of market interests."
• The metropolis as financial machinery: the city is the place of production rather than the factory; "the life of citizens is entirely absorbed into the mechanism of production." The metropolis is "an integrated and organized spatial structure aimed at enhancing the apparatuses of surplus extraction via debt and rent."
• Becoming-finance of life: "Life is capital and capital is life. The metropolis is, thus, the becoming-finance of life: man in the era of its financial reproducibility." Gentrification and touristification (Porto as "a brand") multiply value through branding and marketing; the housing financial system converts "housing-as-social-right" into "housing-as-eternal-debt," leaving buildings unoccupied in speculation zones — "la dialectique de l'absurde."
• The privatized architect: the social-democratic city produced the architect-as-liberal-professional (technician + intellectual + homme de lettres, a humanist public mediator, e.g. Aldo van Eyck). Neoliberalism reduces architecture "to the realm of the profession"; the architect-as-entrepreneur is "the full realization of the architect-as-nihilist" — branding, marketing, and networking replace public and theoretical debate.
• Project vs. object: the real conflict is not theory vs. practice but between the project (which organized practice and public knowledge in the social-democratic city) and the architectural object — a self-referential, "non-referential" (Olgiati) private piece that belongs to the city "only on the condition of remaining outside of it," included through its own exclusion. As a "machine-à-privatizer," it converts property into asset and functions as "the fundamental apparatus for the making of the indebted man."
• Disinventing the object / the commons: neither the privatized object nor the "public rhetorical form of the project" (e.g. the Public without Rhetoric Lisbon Cruise Terminal criticised for aestheticizing scale-destroying cruise tourism) offers a way out. Bismarck proposes to "disinvent the object" (Manoel de Barros) and defend "the commons of the city"; with Virilio: "Losing the city, we lose everything. Finding the city once more, we will gain everything."

Connections

Concepts: Indebted Man · Neoliberal Metropolis · Architectural Object · Critical Architecture · The Commons · Ideology · Star Architecture
Authors: Pedro Levi Bismarck · Manfredo Tafuri · Peter Eisenman
Debates: Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: Changes are Coming (Eisenman interview) · Architecture, Critique, Ideology

Direct Quotes

"Life is capital and capital is life. The metropolis is, thus, the becoming-finance of life: man in the era of its financial reproducibility."

"Profits become rent!" (Carlo Vercellone, as quoted)

"The architectural object is the fundamental apparatus for the making of the indebted man."

"[T]he financialization of the city thus corresponds to the financialization of the form of life of the neoliberal subject."

"[A]s a machine-à-privatizer, the architectural object converts property into asset, extends the space of domestic and social reproduction throughout the city and, simultaneously, inscribes it as a fundamental unity of endless financial expansion."

"Losing the city, we lose everything. Finding the city once more, we will gain everything." (Paul Virilio, as quoted)

Open Questions

• Can the "project" be salvaged in a financialized context, or does its "public rhetorical form" inevitably reproduce the very status quo it criticizes (echoing Foster/Bahtsetzis on critique's captivity)?
• Are "the commons of the city" and "disinventing" actionable programs, or primarily a critical/resistant posture?