Planning and Politics
Featured Neo-liberal Planning in Practice - Use Value or Exchange Value?: A Post-Marxian Examination of Auckland’s Housing Affordability Issue View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maqsood Rezayee
The changes in urban planning under the money of neoliberalism have had an important impact on planning. From the post-Marxian point of view, the profound impact of changes in planning policies under neoliberalism is the main inherent contradiction of capitalism: exchange value replaces use value. The main aim of housing provision in capitalist societies is to obtain exchange value rather than to provide use value. Due to the dominant role of exchange value in the housing provision, access to affordable housing for an increasing segment of the population has become more difficult. In this research, I attempt to demonstrate that the preeminent role of exchange value in Auckland's housing provision is the main cause of housing affordability issues. In doing so, I have drawn on the post-Marxian approach and utilised insights from David Harvey's theory of use and exchange value. By adopting a discursive interpretation of Harvey’s ‘theory of use and exchange value,’ this study demonstrated that the shift to neoliberal planning policies and the subsequent reforms in housing policy perpetuated the housing affordability issue in Auckland. This study found that under neoliberal planning policies, exchange value maximisation has become the primary objective of housing provision in Auckland. This exchange value consideration, the speculative nature of housing construction, and the focus on generating surplus value have contributed to the increasing unaffordability of housing in Auckland.
Contentious Architecture: The Spatial Triad as Political Mobilization View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Barry Ballinger
Decades after the post-structuralist, Marxist, and postmodernist critiques of power, architects continue to play a role in assimilating and, sometimes, marginalizing the population through a mode of spatial production that contributes to climate change, structural racism, income inequality, social isolation, and numerous other complex societal issues. Urban theorists such as philosopher Henri Lefebvre, urban geographer Edward Soja, architect and theorist Christopher Alexander, and sociologist Asef Bayat explain how governments and powerful individuals use architects to shape spaces that reproduce economic and social hegemony. Alexander calls this mode of production System-B, which continues to dominate through disciplinary power. However, Alexander also defines another mode of production, System-A, which allows people to participate in the production of space and thus gain their right to the city. This research compares Lefebvre’s concept of the spatial triad—lived space, spatial practice, and conceived space—to Alexander’s modes of spatial production to situate them within theories of contentious politics. By synthesizing this knowledge with Christopher Alexander’s conception of System-A, architects can create an ethical framework that includes the end-user in the production of space, recognizes the importance of shared identity, prioritizes adaptation, uses appropriate materials and adaptive reuse, reimagines the profession’s relationship with finance, and defines strategies for appropriating space. This framework would empower architects to become a social nonmovement and actively help the working class gain their right to the city. Through this transformation, architects can shift their role from being agents of repression within System-B to catalysts for positive change within System-A.
Development-Driven Displacement as an Asocial Urban Form: Comprehending Development without Displacement in an Age of Gentrification View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael H. Turk
Should development-driven displacement be regarded as an asocial urban form? Cast alternately, does the notion of development without displacement constitute an illusory juxtaposition of conflicting possibilities in the current or recent urban environment? 'Development without Displacement' represents an adaptation of Lefebvre's notion of a 'right to the city'. Yet community engagement and activism, even when community benefits are explicitly agreed upon, appear to result only in marginal inroads into the gentrifying changes development ushers in, whether one looks to community struggles over the future of the city in the United States from Oakland, California, to Somerville, Massachusetts. Does the history of housing policies in Vienna, Austria, offer a significant counterpoint? In the era of Red Vienna Otto Bauer's description of an 'Austrian Revolution', which entailed the radical revaluation of financial assets, including real property, underlay an economic transformation that made progressive housing policies possible. At the same time, the primacy of the Social Democratic Workers' Party in Vienna in the 1920s led to a reformist emphasis upon rent regulation and the construction of social housing. Highly controversial in the interwar period, these policies were late accepted as the norm and embraced as successful, even exemplary. In the United States the interests of developers typically assume primacy in the urban environment, rendering affordability a distant goal at best, so that community activists are involved in rearguard actions. By contrast, Vienna's case stands out as a model, essentially because it placed housing rather than development as its primary goal.
