Building, Dwelling, Acting‪.‬

Our urban surroundings cannot help but reflect the kind of society we live in, and affect profoundly the mental architecture of our consciousness as citizens. The agora of Athens certainly was more than just a place to stroll about and make observations about the weather. The magnificent broad avenues of many European cities represent more than simply grandeur and civic optimism -- they also made it easier for mounted cavalry to rout a disobedient mass of citizens. And the kind of urban world we build for ourselves today will determine whether we have the civic vocabulary to be more than just a society of consumers -- whether we have room amidst our shopping malls and expressways to squeeze in the occasional agora. IN what follows, I want to raise some issues concerning the political implications of the built environment, in particular the way structures of civic and domestic space interact to influence the character of individuals as citizens. These remarks began life as an intervention concerning the ethics of a particular profession, architecture, under conditions of globalization; but soon the lines of argument took a turn -- natural-seeming, to me anyway -- away from the rather limited concerns of professional conduct, indeed away from ethical theory in the narrow sense, into a more contextual and activist direction.(1) The issues of appropriate professional practice quickly acquire, to my mind, a crucial political dimension. In a sense, therefore, the following is merely an extended illustration of the Aristotelian dictum (minus the Aristotelian naturalism and certainty) that ethics and politics are intimately related subjects, both concerned with how to live well together, how to flourish as humans -- and that such a project always includes, centrally, issues of place making.