Perhaps this idea that has been developing in my mind is an offshoot of Hauntology. Not in the sense of failed political movements, but this notion of studying history and seeing a structure of life that no longer exists. I feel that this topic is a tightrope of avoiding pitfalls. For example, when telling architecture professors that I like the aesthetics associated with Victorian-era brick buildings and their response was to tell me that we can’t design buildings like that anymore because we don’t have slavery. That whole level of reasoning is ridiculous, but I think that it is a knee-jerk reaction developed from this incorrect notion that progress is only about looking forward. We also see this with the vintage clothing community using the moniker “vintage fashions, not vintage values.” Regressive cultural movements aren’t the only vintage values though, as those who see these cycles of failed leftist progress can attest to. The monstrous machine that claims that progress should only view ahead and not acknowledge the past is full of knee-jerk reactions instead of actually understanding the past. Currently, it feels like looking to the past for progress to move forward has been ingrained to be an incorrect approach. Anyway, this hopefully functions as a bit of a disclaimer in that developments in medical science and technology that help keep humans from dying and starving are great as well as the advancements in equality for all peoples. What I would like to explore is this notion that if those points of progress could exist alongside a society that has taken a slightly different format.

France in the year 2000 as imagined in 1899 by Jean Marc Cote, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In my travels of living in many cities and towns around the Western world, there is this question that arises when entering a new place : what keeps this place alive ? In Seattle it was obviously tech and in Portland, Maine it was obviously the tourist industry. Branching out from there, things get interestingly a little more complicated. This past year, I have been taking 3-month stints to live in cities in a revolving cast of the cheapest AirBnb options and it has been interesting visiting the former beacons of Industrial Revolution wealth of the UK. Liverpool has a surplus of workforce housing from the Victorian era in the form of terrace houses wrapping all through the city. Glasgow has its tenements from the same era for its workforce housing. Why these Victorian construction booms happened was that the people of the Industrial Revolution flocked to the cities in search of work. Both of these cities have river access to the West coast and thus importing from the Americas. Raw goods would arrive, were unloaded, and then sent to be processed at the factories. The first train between cities in the world was between Liverpool and Manchester and was built upon the debris of packing materials. (Today the train is slower than others because the infill it is built upon can’t support a faster train.) Liverpool received raw cotton and sent it to Manchester to be turned into fabric. Glasgow, on the other hand, received raw metals and the city’s forges glowed at all hours. But these industries don’t exist in these places anymore. So, what do these cities do to stay alive ? Liverpool seems to have created a little pocket of tourism connected to its history with the Beatles to have a tourism industry with music. (I personally loved that when meeting new people that their first question was always “what music do you listen to ?” It is arguable a much better questions than asking about employment.) Glasgow has a collection of distilleries and breweries around town that leaves a hint of hops floating through the air while one walks around. One thing that both of these former Industrial cities have captured upon is education. There are a collection of colleges and universities in each town. (Some of these predate the Industrial Revolution, but not all.) Students need affordable housing and the poorly maintained Victorian housing projects fit with that (plus both cities have their collection of student housing blocks). A problem with students though is that they are transitory. Students rarely learn a trade at these places of education that would keep them in these cities.

The Industrial Revolution has long ended. Now we live in the era of Information. And this is the schism that I want to ponder. Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend who works in tech. They were talking about how they work on developing AI with their goal of ending Capitalism through their contribution to tech. They were saying that as AI creates obsolescence in information jobs that society will need to reassess how to support the populace. (After watching big tech destroy my chosen home of Seattle, there is a hint of schadenfreude with mass layoffs in tech. Of course this is much more complicated than I think the tech workers usually see. Usually, they didn’t see how their arrival to the city caused a mass displacement of the arts and the people who created the imagery of the city that they felt so happy to arrive to work in. It’s one of those situations where the mass of the corporation created harm, but the individuals of that mass were usually left clueless as to the mass’ harm. So, celebrating the harm that the mass is now inflicting towards its own individual is just cruel on my part. And thus why I needed to distance myself from Seattle because I didn’t want to be that person.) In my friend’s vision of a post-Capitalist society due to AI creating a mass of redundant workers, I’m not seeing where these obsolete tech workers are to end up in society. We have built no safety nets for a mass retraining. Of course, AI currently doesn’t do much beyond reorder words. It’s like AI is trying to write a book report but wants to hide that most of it is just direct quotes. Granted, apparently that is what a lot of tech jobs are. My friend who works in tech that I was conversing with lives in a rural area. I think that they had this idea that the obsolete tech workers would search for work in a form of reverse Industrial Revolution where they would leave the cities to return to an agrarian society. Personally, as a self-professed urbanite, I couldn’t see myself doing that. One of the questions that made me an obnoxious student (apparently) in architecture school is posing this idea of : how do we design for a post-Capitalist world ?

We don’t have the infrastructure for a mass populace of unskilled workers from the cities migrating to rural areas to become farmers. Nor should we. Cities are the most sustainable form of human development and we should focus on community development with proximity. If the cities were to empty out due to people becoming farmers it would be a mess. (Now, if we were to start establishing small urban farms to supplement a city’s food consumption and fix big AG’s monoculture problem, those are other issues.) The Industrial Revolution sent people away from the farms because they were replaced by tools (and also immigrant labour that frequently blurs the line between employment and economic slavery). These tools are something that are going to continue to exist. Something that could potentially return from our historic past and provide employment for tech workers after tech is an industry of artisans.

This is where I ponder if this is a form of Hauntology. When traveling around the world, I like to visit antique shops. It is in these shops that I can find elements of a past where places would make items specific to their region. The Industrialists outsourced labour for the development of goods to where they could get cheaper labour (again, that line of employment and economic slavery blurs), but what if we could have an industry of making things again ? Think about when furniture stores were connected to furniture makers and not just furniture assemblers putting together flat-pack furniture. The problem is that artisans are expensive. It’s cheaper to have goods made around the world in questionable settings by people who are paid a fraction of what it would take to have as a living wage in a Western city. Early 20th C art movements like the Arts and Crafts movement and Art Nouveau attempted to explore this idea of artisan goods. Their goal was to make quality goods for the people through artisan cottage factories, but regretfully, they struggled to make goods that all social classes could afford. It seems like there is still an artisan good that can found to be unique among individual cities. These are craft breweries. But society needs more than just artisan beer. Another “artisan” business that has begun multiplying in cities are electronic repair shops. Their multiplication is due to the Right to Repair. The Right to Repair is legislation pressuring companies to remove restrictions from being able to repair goods, as well as improving the quality of goods, so they can be repaired. (In an electronics-filled present, perhaps we could see region specific repair modifications. For example, a damaged laptop casing being replaced with an inlaid regional wood with carved elements by a local artist.)

Liverpool, England. Are phone screen repair shops electronic artisans ?

Again, artisans aren’t economically viable, but arguably they will be necessary for a post-Capitalist world. Recycling facilities to maintain a collection of materials and artisans to make the goods for people. A circular economy established locally. Where I see contemporary design failing in these ideas is that a city is an organism comprised of many parts. Return on Investment, economic viability, parking minimums of buildings, and more have resulted in the size of buildings becoming massive. With this larger size, they also tend to become dysfunctional microcosms of buildings pretending to be cities on their own. The apartment complex with a private gym, movie theater, private bar, etc instead of the building being a portion of a city that provides geographic proximity to these amenities intended for the public. Modern people role playing as royalty. While living as on-site building maintenance for a new luxury apartment complex I found that I was frequently the only one using a few of the amenities. The lounge area, comprised of four different large televisions, made it so I never had to get a television for my own apartment. I wonder if this notion of wanting all these semi-private amenities in a building is connected to a larger arcing idea that Western art focuses on the subject while Eastern art focuses on the composition of the whole. For example, my American architecture school focused on every building trying to solve the plights of humanity, instead of realizing that it is the interaction with the whole that would make a better solution. These old urban Victorian buildings that maintain the life of the city with their housing above and commercial below also have all those amenities found in the massive apartment complex. These amenities are provided in the commercial spaces throughout the neighborhood. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for April 04, 1995

The notion of workshops within a city format is not a new concept through. These have existed probably since cities first started forming. So, what if we designed for them ? What if encouraging artisans could be seen as a sustainability movement for the autonomy of cities ?

I have found some inspiring artisan spaces while staying in Glasgow, Scotland. There are sections of raised train tracks that run through town. Some of these tracks have been decommissioned, but some are still frequently used by trains passing by. To physically support these trains running above, some sections were built of brick using arches. The openings between arches work well to have a small space in the city that would otherwise be undesirable due to noise and traffic. Some are storage spaces, some are workshops, and some of tiny cafés with walls, gates, or storefronts being installed to seal the space. Another artisan space that has evolved in Glasgow is that in the courtyard area of some tenements there were former carriage houses and stables. Since cars and public transit have replaced horses these small buildings have been converted into small shops, pottery studios, maker spaces, tea houses, and even yoga studios.

Osborne Street in Glasgow, Scotland. A decommissioned rail line creating artisan spaces.

One of my favorite places of seeing this developed is Nantes, France. Nantes, like Liverpool and Glasgow, is a former port city of industry with a river connection to the ocean. Nantes ran into problems with its ocean connection though. Silt from the Loire River would build up and inhibit the city’s ocean connection. Dredging of the river would continue for hundreds of years before they realized that maintaining their port city status was too challenging and decided to focus on something else. So, they gave over the ship-building warehouses to an artist collective. These artisans then started building large interactive sculptures. While this functions as a means of tourism, it feels as though that is a side effect from empowering the artisans of the city to create art for the city.

Les Machines d’Ile, Nantes. The elephant that walks around a shoots water from its trunk was one of their earlier creations.

Again, how does one design for such spaces ? It seems that the best space is the one that already exists and has solid bones for future creation. Tearing down the old ship-building warehouses in Nantes and building riverfront properties or glass towers of business probably would have been a more economical option at the time, but the city has been revitalized with art and artisans instead. What I also hope is that developments like this establish a framework for positive development in a post-Capitalist world. Buildings don’t need to be cities, but they should be a functioning portion to the city as a whole.