https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0571-9714
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Abstract
Architecture is always embedded within a set of economic preconditions that determine value. Yet economics is in itself malleable—it is debated, rather than calculated. This article explores the subjective nature of economy by investigating how architects have historically engaged with the question of “economies of scale” as it has applied to housing sites. While the theory purports that scale—in this case the scale of land for housing—affects economic performance, these effects are mediated by culturally constructed judgements about what is valuable. The article focuses on architectural writings that have advocated for changing the scale at which housing is conceptualised and delivered. It identifies four economic paradigms, historic eras in which emerging economic theories influenced housing: eighteenth-century land “engrossment” and idealised cottage design; nineteenth and twentieth-century industrial expansion and garden cities; Fordism and rationalised land development; and late-twentieth-century liberalism and the atomisation of housing estates. Architecture does not simply follow the dictates of political economy, it rather contributes to it.
Acknowledgment
Special thanks to Martino Tattara for his feedback on this paper.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
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8 Arthur Young, Political Arithmetic (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967; orig. 1774), 288.
9 Arthur Young, Travels in France During the Years 1787, 1788, 1789, ed. Matilda Betham-Edwards (London: G. Bell, 1906; orig. 1792), 112.
10 Nathaniel Kent, Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property (London: J. Dodsley, 1775), 206.
11 Kent, Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property, 230.
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13 Wood, A Series of Plans, 6–7.
14 Daniel Maudlin, “Habitations of the Labourer: Improvement, Reform and the Neoclassical Cottage in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of Design History 23, no. 1 (2010): 720.
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16 Gary Fields, Enclosures: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 25.
17 Raymond Unwin, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding! How the Garden City Type of Development May Benefit Both Owner and Occupier (London: Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, 1912).
18 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Glasgow ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976; orig. 1776), 14–17.
19 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1885), 125.
20 Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997), bk. 4, ch. 8–11.
21 Mazzucato, The Value of Everything, 57–74.
22 Marshall, Principles of Economics, 150.
23 Alfred Marshall, “The Housing of the London Poor: Where to House Them,” Contemporary Review 45 (1884): 224–31.
24 Marshall, Principles of Economics, 442.
25 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1902), 102. Its first edition was To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1898).
26 Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, 25.
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39 CIAM, “Declaration of La Sarraz,” 110–11.
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44 Gropius, “Houses, Walk-ups or High-Rise Apartment Blocks?” 114.
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54 Martino Tattara, “From the Cell to the Territory: The ‘Disurbanist’ Project of the OSA Group,” in Housing and the City, ed. Katharina Borsi, Didem Ekici, Jonathan Hale and Nick Haynes (London: Routledge, 2022), 79–93.
55 Richard Stites, Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 196.
56 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961); Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (London: Macmillan, 1973).
57 Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: George Routledge, 1944), 10–23.
58 Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 351–52.
59 Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), ix.
60 Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, 145–47.
61 Anthony Fontenot, Non-Design: Architecture, Liberalism and the Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 136–68.
62 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 120.
63 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 186.
64 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 235.
65 Newman, Defensible Space, 1.
66 Newman, Defensible Space, 8.
67 Newman, Defensible Space, 170.
68 Newman, Defensible Space, 13.
69 For an overview of the criticisms lodged at Coleman, see Jane M. Jacobs and Loretta Lees, “Defensible Space on the Move: Revisiting the Urban Geography of Alice Coleman,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 5 (2013): 1559–83.
70 Mazzucato, The Value of Everything, 270.
71 Mazzucato, The Value of Everything, 92–94.
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Jesse Honsa
Jesse Honsa is a PhD candidate at KU Leuven. He has practiced as an architect with firms in Istanbul, Rotterdam, Zürich and New York City, focusing on large-scale housing and urbanism. He holds degrees from The Berlage at TU Delft and the Rhode Island School of Design. His PhD project, entitled “Economies of Scale” is supervised by Martino Tattara and considers how the scale of organisations and projects can influence housing practices.