ON SLUMS AND THE PICTURESQUE

Mumbai slum

“Aestheticizing the self-help living conditions of poor people squatting in buildings becomes an attractive option when there is no social housing. And yet even more problematic is that participatory practices attempt to compensate for this situation with strategies that see our increasingly precarious life as something normal, even creative. What these practices seem to prefigure is an ethos in which a forceful normality is restored and, to use Benjamin’s words 'exception has become the rule'” Pier Vittorio Aureli, The theology of tabula rasa: Walter Benjamin and architecture in the age of precarity, in:LOG 27, 2013.

The statement above sums up the political convergence of what Aureli suggests as "less is enough": the rulers turn calamity and the state of despair into a stylistic fashion. To have less is to be more. It is easy to suggest that it is an obvious relation, to comply with the norm and say that architecture must strive to be creative and use less resources, but as Aureli exposes, this does not and will not solve the problem, it will perpetuate the state in which the workers creativity (from where its "power" comes from) are abused from the capitalist status quo to a condition of exploitation.


I bring this issue due to the relevance of the astheticization of poverty, what I want to combat as the naiveté of the architect from its Ivory Tower to give the best solution to the problem, as if ever there was one. Stating that mixed income housing, a respect to traditional dwellings, the glorification of informality, is not the same as attacking the causes of the problem as much as creating a false invisible dome above the problems and calling it a day. Before talking about the right to the city, I suggest we, architects, to understand the dynamics of the economical power more critically, and try to do more than to visit a slum with our expensive cameras and bottles of water. Pity is not an answer. Architecture et révolution. Architecture can be avoided.