Giancarlo de Carlo (1919-2005) was a renowned Italian architect active in the Italian anti-fascist resistance and the post-war Italian anarchist movement. He advocated a kind of “participatory architecture" in which the architect works with users and inhabitants in creating plans and designs. He founded the journal, Spazio e Societa (1978-2000), as a global forum for discussing urbanism and the built environment, and the International Laboratory for Architecture and Design (IIAUD, 1974-2004). Toward the end of his life he said that his architecture was impregnated with the anarchist ideal of “active freedom," of accomplishing things “without exploiting our power"(interview with Gregoire Allix, M. De Carlo: “L’architecture du star-system ne parle pas aux gens" [Mr. De Carlo: ‘The architecture of the star-system does not speak to people"), Le Monde, April 27, 2004). The following excerpts, translated by Colin Ward, are taken from an article by de Carlo originally published in the Italian anarchist monthly, Volonta. Ward’s translation appeared in Freedom, the English anarchist paper, in June 1948. For more on de Carlo, see Benedict lucchi, Giancarlo de Carlo (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1992) and John McKean, Giancarlo de Carlo: Layered Places (Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2004).
THE HOUSING PROBLEM ISAT THE ROOT of the crisis of contemporary society... It is enough to go around Italy, visiting towns and villages... seeingthe places where men are born, multiply and die, and the houses they live in, to realize that our whole social body is in a state of decomposition, and that only the most radical and energetic remedies can cure it...
Overcrowding prevents the dwelling from fulfilling its principal function, it ceases to be an environment where fruitful human relationships can unfold, and becomes a dangerous instrument of physical and moral degradation, a vehicle of sickness and death.
The average infant mortality rate in Italy in 1946 was 169 per 1,000, while in France where the housing situation is slightly better, it was 110 per thousand...
At Naples, in an enquiry made between 1935 and 1941, of 8,431 children visited 16.8% were found to be suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, and 11% from non-pulmonary afflictions. In 69% of the cases, the home consisted of a single earth-floored room, in 70% of the cases, the invalid slept in the same room as the family, frequently in the same bed.
At Milan, of 100 families with a T. B. sufferer, 76 live in one or two rooms.
These figures will be enough, since there is no space for more, to show thatthe house of today is a peril to human life. But there is one more important fact to be underlined—the fact that in Italy 33 in every lOO working class dwellings are overcrowded compared with 8 in every 100 middle and upper class houses.
This is nothing new. The homes of the poor today are little different from those of the slaves of the third century B. C. or from those of the plebians in Imperial Rome. It is a phenomenon which coincides with moments of crisis in the will of man, and with the weakening of his resistance to the State.
The weakening of the sense of independence strengthens the authority of the State. The impulse for direct action declines, regimentation and the bureaucratic spirit triumph, education becomes purely quantitative, culture and art are separated from life, life itself is departmentalized and is thinned out into the channels of abstraction. At the same time the town loses its natural function of physical and spiritual regeneration and becomes a malignant organism, persecuting man in his decadence.
The situation today is no new phenomenon but it is worse than ever before, because its effects are more extensive, more dreadful, and, in view of the advances in technique which could be available for us, more absurd. Yet the social organs of today, capitalism and the State, are able to do nothing to resolve this desperate crisis. New materials, new construction processes are of no avail as long as the principles of privilege and authority prevail.
Capitalism is not building, and cannot build, houses for the underprivileged classes because that sort of investment doesn't guarantee a good return... private capital is invested only in upper-class housing and in those types of building that guarantee a good income (blocks of offices, luxury shops, cinemas, etc.), and the poor are forced to find shelter in old and unhygienic buildings, causing still more overcrowding with all its consequences...
The State does nothing, and can do nothing, to alter this situation. For the State is the principle of authority—an abstraction masquerading as something real, and can have no contact with the one concrete reality—man himself, whom it treats and manipulates as though he were just an abstraction.
The home is an organism in direct relationship to man. It is his external environment, his affirmation in space. Thus the home cannot have any relationship to the State that recognizes man not as an individual but as a number, a fraction of some greater number.
Every time that the State has taken upon itself these relationships, the results have been disastrous. We could look back into history in order to demonstrate the truth of this—we could describe the city under the ferocious autocratic States of ancient Egypt, of Imperial Rome, of the French monarchy—but it suffices to think of any Italian town today... public housing is so limited and costs so much that it cannot be occupied by the people for whom it was intended. It is, moreover, ugly and badly built, for it is not constructed for human beings as they really are, but for the abstract men conceived by the State.
Municipal housing means today those squalid barracks that monotonously line the perimeter of our towns, where people are so miserably encaged. They do not solve the housing problem in either quantity or quality, but they are the greatest contribution that the State can make.
The housing problem cannot be solved from above. It is a problem of the people, and it will not be solved, nor even boldly faced, except by the concrete will and action ofthe people themselves, so it will be useful to examine the validity and the limits of the types of direct action for houses that have so far been seen—building co-operatives, illegal occupation of empty houses, and housing strikes.
The building co-operative is certainly an effective means of producing houses at low cost and a valuable experience for the tenants in the forms of collective action. These co-operatives, of which many have arisen since the war, are generally constituted with the object of giving work to a certain number ofbuilding operatives and of putting apartments on the market at a competitive rent compared with the municipal undertakings—made possible because of their more efficient internal organization and by a fairer allocation of the proceeds. But although they are an interesting example of collective action, and certainly solve part of the unemployment problem, they can do little to remedy the basic housing problem, since the primary aim is to provide work, not houses, and since the work is undertaken according to the fluctuations of the competitive market.
The tenants’ co-operatives, which are far less frequently met with, aim at providing housing for a certain number of the homeless: the purchase ofbuildings at current prices and their organization as housing. Ifwe exclude joint ownership (which is not co-operation, but merely a form of divided proprietorship, limited to thewealth-ier, and devoid ofany social significance), this type ofco-operative can only exist with the help of strong external financial aid. And the solution is certainly not, as has been suggested in some quarters, the direct co-operative building ofhouses by the tenants who will eventually occupy them. This may be an educative example of direct action, but it is hardly a practical method and yields very few concrete results. The house of today is costly because of the expense of traditional building methods, which have not been brought up to date by modern productive technics. Direct production on the part of the tenants, generally untrained in building crafts and not given adequate tools and material, usually results in poor workmanship and relatively high costs.
The solution lies in setting up building collectives and tenants’ collectives combined in a communal program of action (while acting in the present social structure), with a joint financial mechanism. We cannot count on the State's financial assistance... or the type of initiative that comes from political action and which sooner or later reveals its pitfalls, tying the co-operatives to the interests of the financiers. For this reason the financing must also be autonomous, arising from local circumstances, based as far as possible on the mutual aid of the members of the collective, contributing in money, in hours of work, in produce, and demanding assistance from those who at present have in their hands the wealth that properly belongs to the community, and forcing the municipalities to provide freely or at low cost the necessary sites and basic construction materials.
Another form of direct action is the illegal occupation of uninhabited dwellings. The most important examples occurred in England, soon after the 1914-18 war and again after the last war, with the “Squatters" movement which has given its name to action of this sort in many lands. “Squatting" in reality, consists not only in the invasion of empty houses or buildings which could be used for housing, but also in the systematic and organized refusal to accept eviction orders issued by the owners, which is another form of “illegal" occupation. In Italy, soon after the war there were widespread outbreaks of “squatting." At Messina, for example... homeless people seized the archbishop's palace where 3,000 rooms were uninhabited despite the desperate needs of the people. Frequent cases have arisen of individual or collective eviction orders being resisted by means of pickets of tenants around the homes.
The housing strike is a method of direct action, complementary in one sense to the last-mentioned. It has not been widely used and, for lack of precedent remains untried, unless one considers the strike for higher wages as a strike for housing —since a large part of the weekly wage goes in rent. In the form of collective refusal to pay rent, the housing strike becomes a great aid to large-scale squatting; in the form of financial coercion of the state, the municipality or the private usurpers of social wealth, it can become a great help to co-operative initiative.
The methods of direct action we have examined, while they are effective as tactics, cannot themselves bring about a definite solution. We need to get right to the root of the problem to find its basic causes and to face them with action on an adequate scale.
The home does not merely consist of four walls, it is also space, light, sunlight, and external environment. It is not only this, it entails also the school, medical services, green space, room for the children to play, facilities for rest, pastimes, culture—in other words, amenities, facilities for work, production, exchange—the means of economic life. The home, in fact, extends into the community. When the home is healthy it is an efficient instrument for man’s social purposes, and fits harmoniously into the texture of a healthy community.
The contemporary town is not merely an unhealthy community—it is not a community at all—it is a physical agglomeration of isolated buildings and people. Even if a widespread squatters’ movement and an enormous increase in house construction were to house all the population to the standard now enjoyed by the rich, the result would be the same, because the city in capitalist civilization is inefficient and within its framework the home cannot be healthy.
The sickness of the home coincides with that of the city.
The origin of this malady, since the disintegration of the medieval community, is the abdication of the principle of man in favour of the principle of authority, the subordination of concrete facts to abstractions and the elevation of abstraction to the world of realities—Man’s loss ofthe ability to give adequate social expression to his collective life.
The result today is a devitalized and decayed social body. It is inefficient from the human point ofview because it reduces man to a state of life without relations with his fellows, with nature, with collective productive processes—a life hermetically sealed with asphalt and stone. It is inefficient from the functional point of view because instead of being the active centre ofthe surrounding region, it has become a parasitical body absorbing nourishment from the region for its costly bureaucratic and unproductive structure.
Urban planning conceived as a technical means of saving the present social structure, of damning up the pressing realities of life, is a dangerous delusion.
But conceived in a different way, as the manifestation of communal collaboration, it becomes the endeavour to liberate the true existence of man, the attempt to establish a harmonious connection between nature, industry and all human activities, and it is far more than a question of traffic, means of transport or the aesthetics of building.
For this reason the attitude we adopt tothe new fact of urban planning is decisive.
It is possible to adopt a hostile attitude: “The plan must necessarily emanate from authority, therefore it can only be detrimental. The changes in social life cannot follow the plan—the plan will be consequent on the new way oflife.” Or an attitude of participation could be adopted: ‘‘The plan is the opportunity of ‘liquidating’ our present social order by changing its direction, and this changed aim is the necessary preliminary for a revolutionary social structure.”
The first attitude is based on two main arguments. Firstly, that authority cannot be a liberating agent—perfectly true; secondly, that man can do nothing until he is free—a mistaken view. Man cannot be liberated, he must liberate himself, and any progress towards that liberation can only be the conscious expression ofhis own will. The investigation of the full extent of the problems of region, city and home, is such an activity. To find out the nature of the problems and to prepare their solution is a concrete example of direct action, taking away the powers of authority and giving them back to men. The attitude of hostility that really means “waiting for the revolution to do it” does not take into account the fact that the social revolution will be accomplished by clear heads, not by sick and stunted people unable to think of the future because of the problems of the present. It forgets that the revolution begins in the elimination of these evils so as to create the necessary conditions of a free society.
Urban planning can become a revolutionary weapon ifwe succeed in rescuing it from the blind monopoly of authority and making it a communal organ of research and investigation into the real problems of social life. These problems are numerous and urgently need a solution.
In the region, private property has arbitrarily divided arable land, and not only destroyed the emotional and functional relationships between men and the soil, but has put obstacles in the way of all the vital interests of the community. The problems of production, exchange, transport, communications, and of services—creation of industries, diffusion of culture, construction of roads and bridges—all these are in the hands of privileged minorities or of the state, which have neither the interest nor the skill to solve them.
In the town, the congestion and stratification of the inhabitants has destroyed or spoiled all aspects of individual and social life. Schools are unhealthy and overcrowded, medical services insufficient, traffic chaotic and dangerous, and the green belt absorbed by land speculators.
In the house, man is degraded to an animal level. Deprived of light, air, sun and grass, ofcontact with nature and with his fellows, he loses his independence and his capacity for social life. He becomes docile, obedient, amenable to discipline—and to war.
The situation can be reversed. If we develop a profound knowledge and understanding of local problems, and work out the technical means of solving them, and then vigilantly and actively see that these plans are put into effect—then town and country planning can be made a most effective instrument of collective direct action.
World History
