Great discussion of a new @WorksInProgMag article showing how post-war architectural ugliness led to a regulatory backlash and consequently contributed to the decline in building we are seeing today.
Most people agree that postwar buildings are uglier than prewar ones. The survey evidence on this is consistent, and the sentiment is so widespread that it has even spawned a conspiracy theory, "Tartaria," whose adherents invent elaborate explanations for why our buildings became so ugly.
But how much should we care?
Many would say we have bigger problems related to housing and to some extent I agree. We're facing a housing crisis that has made homeownership unattainable for young people: just today @jburnmurdoch at @FinancialTimes published new data showing how much harder it is for young people today to attain financial mobility due to increased asset prices. This drives, in my view, real social dysfunction, including a pervasive anxiety and ennui among young people who feel they cannot settle down.
But in this article, @SCP_Hughes makes a convincing case that the two are at least in part connected.
He starts by conceding that ugliness isn't the main driver of ordinary NIMBYism. Local opposition to development is mostly about other things: wanting to avoid disruption caused by construction, loss of green space and light, strain on services or increased traffic. Even beautiful developments like I'On in Charleston or the Duchy of Cornwall's Faversham proposal face fierce local opposition.
But there's a second, underrated mechanism blocking construction, which Hughes calls "NITBY"-ism: Not In That Backyard (as opposed to Not In My Backyard, which is classic NIMBYism). NITBYs don't live near a development, but casually oppose it if they judge that it makes the city uglier. They are motivated by a kind of soft, distant altruism. Individually their interest might be more superficial than that of the more selfishly motivated NIMBYs. But, collectively, in a democracy, they're a powerful political force. NITBYism is the main driving force behind the conservationist movement, which seeks to preserve historic buildings.
And although historic stock is a small share of housing overall, conservationism matters disproportionately economically and socially, because historic buildings are concentrated exactly where housing is most needed: in city centers. Thus, the economic and social cost ends up being far out of proportion to the number of buildings actually protected.
The article does a good job at dismantling standard materialist explanations for why city centers froze in place.
First, conservationism wasn't simply a pretext for selfish NIMBYism. This is shown by the fact that NIMBYs had won their zoning battles decades earlier. Zoning arrived in Germany and Austria-Hungary in the 1890s, Italian cities in the 1900s, Britain in 1909, France in 1919, and the US in the interwar years, with most German and Austrian suburbs density-capped before 1914. Conservation rules only became a real constraint in the 1960s–70s. And conservation's priorities don't match NIMBY interests: it protects city centers, working-class housing, and rural churches, which are places with few or no resident NIMBYs.
Nor was it a response to the sheer scale of postwar destruction, another common explanation. This is simply because the postwar destruction rates were not historically abnormal.
In the post-war era, Britain demolished at least 1.5 million homes in slum clearances: nearly 10% of the housing stock, and roughly 15–20% of the prewar stock, since these were mostly 18th and 19th-century buildings. In the US, nearly half of the 12,000 buildings in the 1933 Historic American Buildings Survey were demolished or mutilated by the mid-1960s.
This might sound like a large number, until you realize that earlier eras did even more destruction. Over half a million people lived in brick-built London around 1700 and only 100–200 of those homes survive. This is a destruction rate of 99.8%, accomplished mostly before WWII. Fewer than 20 pre-1800 buildings survive in New York, and perhaps 50–100 in Boston. Nearly all of these were demolished before WWII, as well. In a sense the post-war era builders were less destructive: they were stopped after demolishing more of the inherited stock, while the Victorians kept going until almost nothing remained of the previous eras.
Yet none of these earlier waves of demolition produced a conservation movement. The most parsimonious explanation, and I think Hughes is right about this, is that until the postwar era people simply assumed that whatever came next would also be beautiful, so they did not feel a need to block it in advance.
The loss of historic buildings in the post-war era bothered people because what rose in the place of old buildings was ugliness, an ugliness which disrupted the soul. At least partially responsible for this ugliness is modernism: an artistic current that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. And once modernism became dominant in the 1950s, people for the first time expected new buildings to be uglier than what they replaced.
Patrick Collison (@patrickc)
What causes stagnation in the built world is one of the key questions of our era.
In this month’s @WorksInProgMag, @SCP_Hughes argues quite convincingly that some of today's housing shortage is downstream of aesthetic choices. In particular, he shows that the abruptly ugly turn of postwar architecture triggered a regulatory backlash in the form of the conservation movement, which in turn stymied construction and development in urban environments across the West:
worksinprogress.co/issue/bea…
It may seem tendentious to flatly declare postwar construction ugly, but survey data is quite consistent on this point. Indeed, the sentiment is so widespread that it has spawned the Tartaria conspiracy theory. While the idea that people didn’t like the modernist construction of the postwar years is not by itself a new finding, Hughes teases out the particulars of the causality and shows how this popular rejection led to ensuing stagnation.
This essay builds on Hughes’s prior work (“The beauty of concrete” and “Cheap ornament and status games”), and is I think an important contribution for anyone who cares about material progress.
Link
Beauty In My Backyard - Works in Progress Magazine
Ugly architecture stops homes getting built.
worksinprogress.co
— https://nitter.net/patrickc/status/2083549643900862956#m