Land of the Free Forces - Land der freien Kräfte
Patrik Schumacher in conversation with Arno Brandlhuber
Interview published in: ARCH+, Journal for Architectyre and Urbanism – The Property Issue: Ground Control and the Commons, Berlin 2018
At the 2016 World Architecture Festival in Berlin, Patrik Schumacher formulated an eight-point manifesto calling for the retreat of government in all field related to architecture and planning, as well as the abolishment of public spaces and social housing. His speech caused an international outrage by many fellow architects. But Schumacher’s call for radically abolishing building regulations also resonated with many colleagues who increasingly feel the burdens of an over-regulated profession. It’s a populist strategy we often come across these days where politicians feed the latent anxieties and discontent of the populace to achieve a hegemony in the political discourse. Here, Schumacher uses a wide-spread professional yearning for more creative freedom to disseminate political views which are based on a purely entrepreneurial society of anarcho-capitalism. Because of the sympathy by some parts of the profession, people who don’t bother looking at the political implications, we think that it is worth letting Patrik Schumacher present his political ideas in the following interview with Arno Brandlhuber. We have also invited Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió who runs the Architecture Thesis for the Masters of Science in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (CCCP) at Columbia GSAPP, to critically examine these arguments in an accompanying essay.
Patrik Schumacher’s eight points for an anarcho-capitalist architecture
1. Regulate the Planners: Development rights must be the starting point, then tightly define and circumscribe the planners’ scope and legitimate reasons for constraining development rights: access/traffic constraints, infringements of neighbours’ property utilisation (rights of light), historic heritage preservation, pollution limits. Nothing else can be brought to bear – no social engineering agendas!
2. Abolish all land use prescriptions: The market should perhaps also allocate land uses, so that more residences can come in until the right balance with work and entertainment spaces is discovered. Only the market has a chance to calibrate this intricate balance.
3. Stop all vain and unproductive attempts at “milieu protection.”
4. Abolish all prescriptive housing standards: Planners and politicians should also stay away from housing standards in terms of unit sizes, unit mixes, etc. Here too the market has the best chance to discover the most useful, productive and life/prosperity-enhancing mix. The imposition of housing standards protects nobody, they only eliminate choices and thus make all of us poorer. Stop all interventions and distortions of the (residential) real state market. (All subsidised goods are oversupplied and thus partially wasted.)
5. Abolish all forms of social and affordable housing: No more imposition of quota of various types of affordable housing, phase out and privatise all council housing, phase out the housing benefit system (and substitute with monetary support without specific purpose allocation).
6. Abolish all government subsidies for home ownership like Help to Buy: This distorts real housing preferences and biases against mobility.
7. Abolish all forms of rent control and one-fits-all regulation of tenancies: Instead allow for free contracting on tenancy terms and let a thousand flowers bloom.
8. Privatise all streets, squares, public spaces and parks, possibly whole urban districts.
These 8 points constitute a recipe for the creation of the dense, urban fabric that delivers the stimulating urbanity many of us desire and know to be a key condition of further productivity gains within our post-fordist network society.
Interview:
Arno Brandlhuber: You grew up in Bonn and studied in a time, which was characterized by big political changes: the transformation of the consensus-driven Post-war period in West-Germany, nicknamed the Bonn Republic, and the revolutions in eastern Europe that eventually led to the unification of Germany. How do you remember and relate to this period from your nowadays perspectives?
Patrik Schumacher: I grew up around Bonn, surrounded by diplomats in my neighbourhood. Otherwise our youth was not especially politically inspired – it was just normal to be around political institutions. I studied mathematics and philosophy in Bonn, before I went to Stuttgart to study architecture in the early 80s; moving to London in 1987. At that time, I was already politicized becoming increasingly interested in Marxism and the political left. I was working with various Trotskian organizations and became a semi-activist, debating a lot the transformations in eastern Europe, the idea of reforming eastern bloc and market socialism. This was all before the break of the Soviet Union and events that would take place in the GDR.
I was electrified by the changes in Germany. I was actually accidentally in Berlin when the wall opened and I saw the eastern Europeans stream in. I had been going over to East Berlin a few months earlier to purchase my full Marx and Engels works.
After being in London for a while I came back to Berlin as I was really fascinated by the changes and dynamism in the new Republic. I lived there for two years and by that time, I was still very left oriented.
AB: The ruptures in the late 80s and early 90s were a stark contrast to the reformist ideal of the 70s. It is unthinkable today but almost all political parties, from left to right, agreed in principle that there need to be some form of real estate reform to cope with the housing problem and the increasingly commodified urban development. Among others, Hans-Jochen Vogel, a leading politician of the Social Democrats, stated that land should not be privatized as it cannot be reproduced and should therefore be treated as a public resource, comparable to air and water.
PS: I would have agreed with this argument during my left period, but in the mean time I have gathered very different views. I do think that land is not a finite resource; we are not using most of the earth’s surface and it’s always a question of homesteading, taking in, elaborating, investing in, and building up the land and its uses. That’s an initiative and an effort, and it will only happen in a decent way if it’s being properly incentivized with strategic intelligence and sustained investment. I would suspect this could only be done sufficiently by private owners and private investors. I think that the commodification of land was a great accelerator historically. When land could be bought and sold, cities were flourishing and growing. Land was unlocked — used and reused.
AB: Could an accelerated property development, that is free for speculations, be progressive?
PS: I expect from property owners and investors to see the potential of a site, to be very creative and forward looking and who therefore work best without too much planning constraints. That’s the view of an optimistic progressive. I expect the ownership markets to be driving innovation. And in fact I am sympathetic to some of the new left currencies coming out of philosophy into politics—such as accelerationism. I’m an accelerationist, and overall still rather on the left than on the right, although I consider this compass to be broken. I consider productivity and progress the main driver—getting the barriers, restrictions, guarantees and crutches out of the way to let us move forward much quicker.
AB: You talk about the necessity of a productive society with little limitation. Still, property defines social order and our understanding of what society is. How do you imagine the social order in a market of free forces?
PS: My defence of private property rests on the idea that this is a fundamental universal aspect of the human social order. Which also brings architecture into play. The social order needs to cling onto, work and evolve through spatial order. The definition of property rights needs incentives hooked onto it in order to accelerate. The standard of human nature is not fixed, it is instead an open ended and evolving project. I’m excited by this. I am all about risk taking in a way. I want to be around in twenty, thirty years and see something different – new dynamics. That’s why I am frustrated by the stagnation, which is coming from all the guarantees. The idea to safeguard everything, to not allow individual initiatives. There’s this philosophy of over-politicizing everything so that we have to hold hands before anything can move forward, we have to all agree. But this is slowing us down.
When it comes to ideas like the universal basic income, it’s a double-edged sword. On the libertarian side you see somebody like Milton Friedman who proposed similar ideas, his were about substituting a current welfare system that is overly bureaucratized. It’s a rationing system where individual decisions about income, are taken away and everybody is infantilized. Relative to that, you would have individual empowerment and responsibility regarding this basic allocation. Thus, you would try to work on it and top it up. To that extent, as a substitute and improvement over the welfare allocation system, I am very much in line with the new-new left.
But I would even like to take these restraints away and let us all be set free and self-responsible. And have charitable private initiatives to catch those who can’t flourish in a more open and free society, rather than having universal income. I see the risk there, although I prefer it to the welfare system. I see the risk of this getting entrenched, increasing, and taking somehow the initiative out of too many people who might choose to take, what I would argue to be a “poisoned chalice” of that easy option, to relax back and let others charge forward. I want everybody to be on the edge and charging forward.
AB: On the one hand you rigorously defend private initiative and ownership, on the other hand you are against the idea that people have buy their property. How comes that you are against one of the most momentous legislations by Margaret Thatcher, the “right to buy”, which pushed for the privatization of social housing in Great Britain?
PS: I’m a defender of private property but I don’t want the government to interfere and subsidize certain choices, respectively encourage people to purchase their residences as permanent owned homes. That’s not what I mean by private property.
There should be free choices unbiased by subsidies. That’s why I am critical about Margaret Thatcher’s “right to buy”. Giving away collectively owned property is like giving away social housing and pushing it into private hands—that’s unfair and unsustainable. What I consider as free choice is the possibility to choose, as an individual, to not own any apartment or piece of land, but having landlords who are renting out property and curating it for more nomadic populations. We have to be more mobile—that would be my pitch on that front. I think there’s too much home ownership. It immobilizes society. I think we should be cut loose as cosmopolitan citizens.
AB: The German constitution stipulates that property comes with constraints (Eigentum verpflichtet), which means that, on the one hand, property is a tool you are free to use and on the other hand it comes along with certain obligations for society and the common good. What’s your take on this constitutional principle?
PS: In a free market system the owners of production means, including land, will only stay in charge as long as they utilize the resources for the best, including market interests. This means, validation from consumer side and sorting out through the profit-loss system, if they squander, waste, or misuse these resources. Thus, I think that in a true capitalist society we would see more fluidity and shifting ownerships. There would be entrepreneurs who deliver thrive and those who waste resources, disappear and maybe remerge as employees, no longer holding these properties.
Property ownership isn’t something entrenched, it is rather a chance for entrepreneurs. And if others see more potential, they can come in, bid these resources and bring them to an even more flourishing use. That represents a dynamic and fluid system.
AB: This fluid system without moral implications seems to be a world that would better be organized by algorithms. You work a lot with algorithms in your own praxis. Can you imagine a world that’s not just physically defined by algorithms but also legally, such as in terms of property rights? An antihuman world—you use the word antihuman in a very positive reading—where the questions of who is in charge of resources, like land, and for how long, who has the best chances and the highest potential are answered by algorithms?
PS: I think this is part of becoming superhuman. So, my antihuman is going against what you also find in architecture. Namely, that people would like to see a traditional surrounding they like, something small scale, warm and cosy, surrounded by nature and genuine materials. All this, we should forget about and let operators try out different sensibilities: high density, hyper density, etc. We are living in an era of high urban concentration, being part of the post-Fordist network society. In a way, the city becomes a super brain that continuously designs and redesigns the systems and products for reprogramming the robots, which are now taking over the labour. They are more and more becoming part of our design processes. People worry about AI taking over professional jobs and intelligence. I’m not afraid of it — I welcome it. So I’m very much interested in becoming this kind of cyborg, AI infused, new ecology, semi-organic, semi-silicone-based human. And for that we need freedom in terms of entrepreneurship and the allocation of resources and properties, such as land.
AB: What are the consequences for this celebration of entrepreneurship? We are facing a situation, not only in Berlin, where the square meter prices are increasing because the land prices are rising. The profit you can make with a project is already accounted in the land, which means that the architecture always stays the same. This is a systematic problem we are facing the last five to ten years, if not longer. There is no progress because of land speculation. Could we think of a better way of land ownership besides the aforementioned concept of the free market? A conceptual difference between property and land speculation, where the profit is generated already in the beginning of the value chain?
PS: I think there are problems, I would not attribute them to the free market but to the constrained market. Land values are rising in London and other cities because we are living in an era of urban concentration. If everybody wants to squeeze into central locations, resources become precious and they need to be allocated carefully. In that process market mechanisms aren’t playing a significant role. The sky-high prices are becoming a constraint and problem, but I think they have a lot to do with supply restrictions coming from the government itself: restricting higher densities, land use and unit sizes—implementing milieu protections.
Supply restrictions lead to rising prices. Getting planning commissions for competing sub-centres and new locations within the city takes too long. This exaggerates what I would expect to be a secular temporary rise of land use prices, but not the sky-high acceleration of prices, which is really detrimental. Nevertheless, I think it comes from political barriers and not from inherent market forces.
Considering this criticism of rising land values in our cities, there is another potential concept one could look at, coming from Henry George. It says that if you have accidentally owned a site and other people invest around, your land value rises accidentally without having done anything for it—these are windfalls, unearned.
The Georgist idea is that you have a tax on these windfalls, which would be the only taxation in an otherwise libertarian system. There would not be any other income or corporate taxes, but also no markets based on land. So, if you tax corporate incomes, you’re actually dis-incentivizing production and investment. Georgists are arguing that the taxation of land, as you are taxing the windfalls, is not dis-incentivizing. It’s an interesting proposal, which is certainly far more radical and libertarian than our system now. It’s an idea of leasing and land tax where there’s only one arena that is constrained, where resources are held back and drawn for the benefit of the public.
AB: At the 2016 World Architecture Festival (WAF), you suggested that whole neighbourhoods and districts should be privatized. Still, we are facing a situation nowadays where the costs for public needs, like streets and infrastructure, are covered by the communities, whereas the profits of these investments remain in private hand. How would you see the balance between private and public investment?
PS: I’m still considering the Georgist idea; going back to more libertarian proposals like those I pushed at the World Architecture Festival, with the privatization of everything. This would overcome the fact that public resources are being invested in streets, squares and infrastructure, whereas the benefit is reaped by private properties, which locate themselves next to this. Political processes try and let private developers contribute to these public investments. But there remains a question: we have public investments and private beneficiaries, which are accidentally getting these windfalls. And I would say this should be overcome if all the public zones are equally privately managed. It doesn’t mean that they are exclusively closed down—I wouldn’t expect that—but I would expect it to allow a richer diversity to the public, which would all need to have the same restrictive law and order policing. So that it’s not only safe for middle aged couples, or the standard family. There could be much more diversity of cultures and rules attached to different types of streets, squares or parks, like the variety you find in restaurants, bars, cafes or clubs. There’s a whole variety catering to a diverse, included public with many different options, and I see the same potential for public spaces.
They would maybe not be all equally inclusive, which I think is an illusion anyway. Which space is ever an all-inclusive space? They would be for different publics.
AB: You are basically working in the “valuable centres” of the world. Does your concept works everywhere? What about, let’s say, the run-down suburbs somewhere in the middle of America?
PS: I am thinking of the aforementioned milieu protection, where the government aims at keeping certain populations, certain zones, certain milieus and protects them from the market pressure. I am sceptical because we are treating certain cultures like reservations to be protected, or zoos where local tourists can enjoy the flavour of the working-class district and anachronism. How about those regions that are now the rustbelt, which are now less dynamic? Is it a good idea to subsidize, to keep these communities locked in?
First of all, I think the whole suburbanization process of the twentieth century was not something the market would have delivered in the same way. It was hugely subsidized by the state through investments in infrastructure—roads, railways and electricity routes all the way to the suburbs—which is something we might now regret that we have spread out so far. This wouldn’t have happened if there was a market allocation of resources. Now we can keep subsidizing these zones. We perpetuate that mistake. If these spaces are unsustainable, maybe it’s a good idea if people move to the city centres, or even to other countries. I think we are locking in a lot of intelligent people. Maybe they should move to China or from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, instead of being left behind. So again, let these wastelands go to waste, or let entrepreneurs take over. Like those in Detroit now, with artist endorsements, where dirt cheap space brings new initiatives and projects. That’s dynamism, that is not subsidized. It’s a lifeline that draws resources from elsewhere. It is self-generated, unlike the subsidizing and freezing of everything. We need to get the government out of that process.
AB: In your market-driven project, would everything be unprotected?
PS: Yes, otherwise you only perpetuate the waste of resources.
AB: What do you do with people who, for whatever reason, don’t deliver productivity? How would you deal with this part of society? Or do you assume they’d just disappear according to your highly entrepreneurial concept of society that seems to be some kind of Social Darwinism?
PS: Well, how are we treating human resources that seem less productive, or seem to find it harder to catch on and be thrilled with the new productive potentials? I think everybody is productive and that entrepreneurs really go out and find these human resources. But we live in this strange situation where we are also creating this disability. I think the welfare state with its guarantees and its minimum wage restrictions is cutting off career potential. It produces a lot of discouragement, as we have this poison chalice to offer, where everyone will always be looked after anyway. I think it’s very tempting. It’s nearly irresistible for somebody who is, for one reason or another, not well positioned, be taken care of rather than finding that niche. In the contemporary world, with the internet and so many new companies roaming the scene and finding new workers—people who can work from home, who can do all sorts of things—I think there is no reason to presume that there’s somebody inherently unproductive. The market will find these resources and create useful mechanisms to make this happen. But at the same time, yes, there is disability and tragedy and there will be plenty of non-governmental organizations and charities who would have a lot of resources to help them, in a much more humane and tailored way than the state.
I also expect NGOs and charities to come forth. My imagination is not only about private enterprise in terms of profit, but also private non-for-profit initiatives, which at the moment are held back by the immense amount of resources being drawn back into the state bureaucracy. If you look back at the nineteenth century you realise that, even though the world was much poorer, a much larger percentage of people’s incomes was given in charitable donations and communal contributions, without coercion of a state.
In the nineteenth century, we had a lot of charity and when it comes to social security and insurance, we had flourishing local, regional, and national pre-welfare state systems. With social community provisions, which have been eradicated through bureaucracy. In the end, it didn’t do as well. I think we have learned that the existence of the welfare state actually makes society less productive, which is very tough to swallow. When welfare was introduced and ramped up in the fifties and sixties, there was a sense that, what was left of poverty, would be eradicated. This never happened. So maybe we have to step back and confess that we made a huge historical mistake. How can we overcome that collectively and politically? It might take a lot of political will and a long-term project to get out of a situation, where we have larger parts of the populations feeling somewhat disconnected and even becoming brutalized.
AB: It sounds like a political campaign! In your speech at the 2016 WAF in Berlin, you also formulated an eight-point manifesto which was rebuked by many, even the mayor of London replied to it in a newspaper article. Assuming you would consider a shift into politics, what would these eight points be? Your program? Historically, there were mainly right-winged architects who went into politics. How would you act as a politician?
PS: This conversation becomes very political. The more I am getting into the topic of property—which is of course a very political topic—I can imagine becoming more political. I started becoming politicized after the 2008 crash and its following debt crisis. Then, the Arab Spring and its repercussions caused a lot of our work in the Middle East to stop. The world has become much more volatile and our business potentials have been stunted and compromised. The movement of parametricism has been derailed to some extent through all these processes.
I’m still an architect, and we as architects get close to mayors, to city building, nation building. I identify with cities, countries, as well as leaders and entrepreneurs. So, the question can be posed: Could I become a politician and what would I do? How would one interact in politics today? I think there’s a polarization, for example in all the online discussions. And as an architect you see the big picture, you see how things interact and integrate. I find it a fascinating form of engagement, but it doesn’t mean I will give up my professional life. I wear a different hat while I’m working within existing political and economic frameworks. I love to speculate about what’s possible and what we could create. Of course, I have an interest in a radical libertarian discourse but if one was to step into an arena, one would do that gradually, step by step. Roll back the state. Open up degrees of freedom. Turn to employers, to communities, to individuals to be self-employed and self-contracting. There’s no guarantee that what one theorizes, would come to pass or would flourish. But I think it’s worth trying new avenues and taking some risk for more degrees of freedom. That’s what my message would be in the political domain. And I’m agitating that from within the urban and planning arena.
This is what we are confronting right now: the restrictions, where we seem to be unable to do creative work in a city; where everything is totally prescribed. The land use, the total volume of buildings, the unit mix, the unit size. There’s nothing left for us to really challenge on how social relations should be structured and ordered. Architecture and spatial arrangements are very important elements in the evolution of society. And if we freeze it, we will be freezing human progress. That becomes, at a certain point, a political issue.
Transkript and Edit: Michaela Friedberg, Olaf Grawert, Annalena Morra