This seasons’ Masters of Intervention series culminated in the last lecture hosted by Yale sterling professor James C. Scott. The lecture focused on his recent research on the hill people of Zomia in South East Asia. Scott presented the argument that the practice of living dispersed and mobilised, which historically was all coded as being barbaric and uncivilized, is in fact a conscious, political choice to distance people from the state. He believes, for example, that in relation to what he calls ‘escape agriculture’ and ‘escape social structures’ many people purposely moved away from literate texts to oral traditions and non text because it was more plastic and more flexible. You can view the lecture in full length right here.
Since our own research is mostly focused on issues in the city, Partizan Publiks’ finest Joost Janmaat and Christian Ernsten made use of the opportunity to pulse James C. Scott on several urban issues as well. Here are some excerpts of the interview taken right before the lecture. The full account will be published in Volume Issue 21.
In Seeing like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999), Yale Professor James C. Scott analysed the attempts of central governments to force legibility on their subjects through standardization. As a result, he argued, local knowledge, metis, was lost. Scott argues that in order for schemes to improve the human condition to succeed, they must take into account local conditions and vernacular knowledge. The critical gravity of his writing in conjuction with the extremely convincing failure of the highmodernist schemes in Brasilia, the Bijlmer or the Soviet Union made Scott by default into an expert of the failures of urban standardization. His current research focuses on the Zomia, stateless hill peoples in South East Asia. In the light of this study, we raised the question, is there a viable alternative for standardization and systematic control for running a society? Is it possible to life together with a group larger than two, without all the mean tricks as described in Seeing like a state?
James C. Scott: There was an experiment, a social movement pattern in Bangkok, very small scale, which used standard materials. They took squatters who lived nearby in a neighbourhood. They would persuade the city to give them a small plot of land for 6 – 10 families. These families would then design their own complex assisted by people with architectural knowledge, AND they would build it themselves. They would be given material, within a budget, but the squatters would actually build it themselves. Interestingly, they would not know who was getting what part of the house until it was all done, and then they drew lots. It was collective property, and it had common spaces. In the end, the materials were standard and mass-produced, but they had a great deal of freedom in designing their own house. The objective of this project was that at the end of this process, they had a community that worked on it for a year or two, which had a public space that they defended. It was a way of building a kind of urban political base. By the end they had a community that new how to organize their work. What I would ask to any urban building: what kind of people does it create in the process?
Secondly, every people have a kind of vernacular architecture that they have powerful traditions of association and affection for. I was in Berlin for a year and an architectural historian took me to a kind of Bauhaus Siedlung, which was built in the thirties in Bauhaus style. The national-socialist had, in competition with Bauhaus, build a row of working class houses across the park. The Bauhaus building was a block – they had figured out how many square feet people needed, the water and the playground. Yet, tt was as if these people had no taste, no tradition, and no preferences. The building was functional in a beautiful way. The Nazi houses though had fake chimneys! They had all the references to what home, Heimat and a house meant to Germans, and of course they preferred that.
Thus, the second question I would have about new styles of urban housing is what relationship it has to the vernacular traditions and the people that do the building. The objection I have to housing project as part of the high modernist urban planning schemes is that the appreciation of buildings as a sculpture takes precedence. Yet, nobody ever experiences the city like that, except when you are in a helicopter.
Joost Janmaat: As Le Corbusier said: ‘My designs are best appreciated from afar’.
JS: That’s right. I’m sure there’s software available right now, with which one can take someone through a ground level experience, as people move, in order to experience the speed of movement and change from a ground level on.
Filed under: Maakbaarheid in de Grote Stad, Masters of Intervention, Press, Teaching, Theory , James C. Scott, TSS, Volume, Zomia
