Noam Chomsky on the Politics of the Built Environment in the United States

* Article: Hidden Power and Built Form: The Politics Behind the Architecture. Interview article with Noam Chomsky by Graham Cairns. Architecture MPS, Vol. 3, No. 3.

URL = http://architecturemps.com/full-text-3/ [1]

Description

Despite this range of subjects, however, one area that Chomsky has not discussed is the built environment. Here, for the first time he is asked to consider the contemporary infrastructure of the United States in the context of his writings, criticism, and thought. In doing so, he discusses the military infrastructure crossing large swathes of the southern United States in the form of the US-Mexican border. He also discusses urban sprawl as a product of what he calls “social engineering” — a project conceived and orchestrated by a sophisticated web of affiliations across the government and the private sector. Caught up in this, he also pinpoints the subprime crisis and the current economic recession as the result of a matrix of forces within which architecture inevitably played a role. In short, he offers his particular perspective on what lies behind some of America’s most conspicuous architectural and infrastructural projects.

Excerpt

"The origins of suburbia reveal an attempt to take over a fairly efficient mass-transportation system in parts of California — the electric railways in Los Angeles and the like — and destroy them so as to shift energy use to fossil fuels and increase consumer demand for rubber, automobiles and trucks and so on. It was a literal conspiracy. It went to court. The courts fined the corporations $5000, or something like that, probably equivalent to the cost of their victory dinner...."

"It is simply not true that suburbia is a product of the market, or market forces, or people’s ‘uninfluenced’ desires. It is the result of a deliberate social engineering program — led from the center. It is totally political in that sense. ... It didn’t emerge spontaneously — a magical product of the market. It was engineered for a specific range of interests." (http://architecturemps.com/full-text-3/)