Herramientas de calidad

situated, they occur in cities that materialise and qualify disparities. As this research focuses on housing, the production of space and cities becomes not just a background where inequalities take place, but an integral part of their reproduction. In this section we discuss their spatiality, as the economic, social and political scales of inequality have a territorial and spatial dimension. To do so, this section is organised around three discussions: firstly, a revision of the debates about space, that mainly reviews the repositioning of space claimed by Marxist geographers and thinkers; secondly, a discussion about space and inequality both from a sociological and social justice perspective; and finally, a revision of the notion of the city as a project and the role of housing in it.

The task of unpacking the notions of justice and equity on one side, and space on the other has been central during recent decades from both a philosophical and geographical perspective. These discussions have been grounded on a series of philosophical definitions that have repositioned and redefined the role of space in this discussion. As Foucault expressed it decades ago, historically “[s]pace was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life,

dialectic” (in Soja, 1989:10). This notion of space has been systematically contested over time by different voices, whose main representatives have been authors such as Lefebvre, Soja and Harvey.

Based on a critique of this epistemological position of space, Lefebvre’s work seeks “to expose the actual production of space bringing the various kinds of space and the

modalities of their genesis together within a single theory” (Lefebvre, 1991:16). His work searches for a ‘unitary theory’ able to “construct a theoretical unity between (…) first, the physical – nature, the Cosmos; secondly, the mental, including logical and formal

abstractions; and thirdly, the social. In other words, we are concerned with logico-epistemological space, the space of social practice, the space occupied by sensory phenomena, including products of the imagination such as projects and projections, symbols and utopias” (Lefebvre, 1991:11-12). The ‘trialectical’ approach to space

-55-

introduced by Lefebvre has been extraordinarily influential in the repositioning of the notion of space: “Geographical thinking, Soja argues, was defined by this limiting dualism (first and second space) until the 1990s, when Lefebvre’s work was first translated into English” (Hernández, 2010a:96).

Discussions about the social production of space and its definition have implied a repositioning of the role of space in the understanding of the social, challenging the hegemony of history as the main component of the traditional Marxist dialectic: “The dialectic today no longer clings to historicity and historical time […] To recognize space, to recognize what ‘takes place’ there and what it is used for, is to resume the dialectic”

(Lefebvre, 1976, in Soja, 1989:43).

The centrality of space implies an understanding of the interconnection between the structure of the space and social transformations, as two entities that influence each other. Or, as Harvey puts it, “spatial form and social process are different ways of thinking about the same thing” (1973:26). The inclusion of space as a significant analytical category has been referred to by Harvey as the geographical imagination, a spatial approach to problems, to life and to the social, that enables the individual “to relate to the space he sees around him, and to recognize how transaction between individuals and between organizations are affected by the space that separates them”

(1973:24).

Soja recognises those notions as follows:

The structure of organized space is not a separate structure with its own autonomous laws of construction and transformation, nor is it simply an expression of the class structure emerging from social (and then aspatial?) relations of production. It represents, instead, a dialectically defined component of the general relations of production, relations which are simultaneously social and spatial (Soja, 1989:78).

The interconnection between the social and the spatial inevitably leads one to argue that there is also a connection between space and inequalities. In this respect, and particularly in relation to the interconnection between space and power, Lefebvre discusses the

-56-

Gramscian idea of Hegemony, pointing out: “Is it conceivable that the exercise of hegemony might leave space untouched? Could space be nothing more than the passive locus of social relations, the milieu in which their combination takes on body, or the aggregate of the procedures employed in their removal? The answer must be no”

(Lefebvre, 1991:11).

An important contribution in this direction has been the conceptualisation of the Right to the City (Lefebvre, 1996; Harvey, 2008) that we will discuss later in this chapter, as well as the notion of Spatial Justice developed by Soja. According to Soja, justice “has a consequential geography, a spatial expression that is more than just a background reflection or set of physical attributes to be descriptively mapped”, as “these consequential

geographies are not just the outcome of social and political processes, they are also a dynamic force affecting these processes in significant ways” (Soja, 2010:1-2).

There have also been attempts to explore the relationship between inequalities and space from the discipline of sociology. As noted by Labao et al. in their book ‘The sociology of spatial inequality’, however, this notion has been long overlooked in sociological debate:

Inequality –the study of who gets what and why– has been at the heart of sociology since its inception. However, this simple formula fails to acknowledge that where is also a fundamental component of resource distribution. […]

Sociology has long been concerned with inequality and with the spatial settings in which social life occurs. But these two concerns evolved rather separately through independent subfields, bridged today in limited ways (Lobao et al., 2007:1-2).

The question is, therefore, how space becomes part of the explanation for inequality.

According to Loboa et al. four main points might explain the relationship:

One is to recognize that space intersects with primary social statuses in complex ways (McCall 2001). […] Second, space is seen as channelling inequality processes, sometimes constraining, sometimes amplifying their effects (Clegg 1989; Swanstrom et al. 2002). […] Third, there is recognition that space itself is created through inequality processes. Social relationships are space forming (Soja 1989). […] Finally, spatial and inequality processes can be treated as causally intertwined (2007:10).

-57-

There have also been important contributions to the debate from a social justice

perspective. Susan Fainstein has studied extensively the relationship between social justice and the city, looking for an urban theory of justice (1999, 2010). One of the main contributions of her work lies in the distinction between just processes and just outcomes in city production. According to her, different authors take diverse positions in this

distinction, and although many of them may “share a commitment to building a city that provides social justice and symbolic recognition to all its citizens, they differ on whether such a city is characterized by process or outcome, method or results” (1999:259). While she identifies authors such a Harvey and other Marxist thinkers as being on the outcome side, those who focus on collaborative and communication planning such as Haeley and Young would be on the process side.

If we return to Fraser’s understanding of social justice as a redistribution and recognition problem, what is interesting regarding Fainstein’s categories is that somehow they correlate with them. A planning or urban design that focuses mainly on a just outcome would have the redistribution question at the centre of it. Likewise, those approaches focused on just processes would be rather centred on questions of recognition. In her words, while the first one understands that in producing a good city “ultimate condition matters more than how it is achieved” (Fainstein, 1999:252), the second one will see the good city as one that “allows the retention of group identities and the explicit recognition of difference” (Fainstein, 1999:260). As with Fraser’s dilemma of the contradictions and complementarities between redistribution and recognition, Fainstein’s ‘Just city’

reflections question to what extent a just process ensures a just outcome, while at the same time examining how a focus on outcomes could reinforce totalising definitions from dominant elites.

As has been discussed, however, quantitative and qualitative inequalities interact in a complex way, as the reduction of quantitative disparities is needed in order to initiate a redistribution process, but decreasing qualitative inequalities is necessary in order to make it sustainable and deeper over time. We argue here that the same logic can be applied regarding the production of cities, particularly in the dichotomy between just outcomes (that involve quantitative redistribution) and just processes (that involve processes

-58-

of recognition and eventually qualitative inequality reductions). In other words, as shown in Figure 2.4, in the production of cities and space a focus on outcomes that contribute to the redistribution of wealth is necessary to initiate a process of decreasing inequality, but if those outcomes are not accompanied by just processes that trigger recognition and qualitative reductions of inequalities in the city, the redistribution achievements will hardly be sustained over time.

Figure 2.4 | Space, the city and inequalities

Source: Author

A final debate introduced here is the idea of the city as a project. Space, as a theoretically meaningful dimension and an analytically key component to understand social process and transformation, puts Cities – as the main political-spatial entity (Hirst, 2005) in which social relations take place – as a central object of design and analysis. Cities cannot be understood as the background where social interactions take place, but as both an agent and a consequence of those interactions. By shaping cities we are shaping societies, and vice versa.

Both from a planning perspective and an architectural theory perspective, the production of cities has in some moments of history been understood as a project, with debates about the outcome/process tension, and in which housing plays a key role. The period of history in which modernist architecture took place is a clear example of this, in which housing design and production was a core element of such construction: “Throughout the world, the heroic days of slum eradication, mass housing and modernist urban planning were characterised by a strong belief in the power of architecture and urbanism

JUST OUTCOMES

-59-

to promote development and to shape social relations” (Fiori and Brandão, 2010:183).

This period, according to the same authors, was followed by anti-design critiques and discourses, opposition that led to a despatialisation of the debate (Fiori, 2014) and “to a growing loss of the city scale and, ultimately, of the city itself” (Fiori and Brandão, 2010:184).

The role of architecture and planning in designing the city project has therefore changed over the years. In the modernist era of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, “architects played a key role through their design of large social-housing blocks into which the poor were relocated” (Hernández, 2011:68), helping on some occasions to render the poor invisible, while on others allowing the construction of social housing close to city centres.

However, according to Hernández, in this city project “the poor were subjected to the values of the elites: if the poor are to live in cities, they should conform to the ways of life of the middle and upper classes and in buildings similar to theirs” (2011:69).

The modernist project was widely disseminated in the construction of post-war Europe, as well as in the developmentalist era that followed radical processes of urbanisation in Latin America. The increase of urban population amplified the pressure for massive production of housing by the state, allowing modernist architecture and conceptions of the city to be displayed, as we will review later in a historical revision. Both in Europe and Latin America, the production of housing embedded in a specific architectural language was essential to the modernist project and the production of cities. According to Kenny Cupers, looking at what he calls ‘the social project’ of housing during those years in France, “[t]he upshift of housing production during the postwar decades was… not just a quantitative shift but a qualitative one. It changes the role of modern architecture at large. […] Never before was an entire generation so aware of how much better off they were than their parents – measured first of all in the social and material realm of everyday life” (Cupers, 2014:xii).

This social and material realm of everyday life referred by Cupers is the crystallisation of the modern project, which finds its materiality in the production of cities through the housing project. As the following decades witnessed the failure and fall of the modernist

-60-

project, design principles behind modern housing estates also withdrew from mainstream ideas, as housing was essential to a social vision that embraced the city as a project. If nowadays we normatively define inequalities reduction as the main object of social policies for the reasons described above, then housing and the city as a project should find a way to build a new social and material realm of everyday life, in which design and space have a role to play in promoting and qualifying equality.

The notion that quantitative and qualitative inequalities are materialised by space, and therefore by housing policies as a city project, implies a call for attention to be paid to housing production, architecture and design. Using Rancière’s work, Boano and Kelling (2013) have elaborated on these ideas. According to them, “Rancière’s spatiality of equality aims to highlight the political dimension of design and architecture, which to date has not been sufficiently elaborated” (Boano and Kelling, 2013:42). Authors such as Murie and Forrest have referred to this relationship between space (particularly housing) and inequality as essential reciprocity, in other words that "housing position is class (labour market) dependent, but housing itself also transforms this class division" (in Aalbers and Christophers, 2014:381).

It is in this context in which housing, defined as a project with impacts at different scales, can play a role in reducing qualitative and quantitative inequalities, qualifying the city and therefore the social and material realm of inequalities in everyday life. Accordingly, the next section discusses the definition of housing, and how a different understanding of it could actually trigger reduction in inequalities.

2.2.3 Redefining the scale and nature of housing as urbanism