Notes on Urbanality of Evil

Without doubt built-environment professionals intend to do good, never malice or absolute evil. Yet, their intents often result in sadness for those implicated in the mechanisms of the development industry. This could include displaced persons and even the built-environment professionals themselves.

 

Yet, despite the possibility for built-environment professionals to be disadvantaged by development, the professionals collectively (and as a profession) continues their work. The profession itself largely functions on needing “change” to validate itself. In turn, this need is validated by a belief that insofar as the profession in acting in good faith (abiding the regulatory bodies’ bylaws and as well State laws), which usually entails acting on the behalf of others for their betterment, then the “act” of designing itself, and subsequently the results must be also inherently good.

 

It is the profession and professionals’ belief that they are doing good that also finds them at odds with protests against developments creating unaffordability and despair. The built-environment professional often wonders, “why can’t they (e.g. those protesters) see it from the point of view of good change?” The professional, when responding to queries about how developments may hamper the lives of others, often respond with official statements. The response is often the same sentences and content that had caused the protesters to protest. Herein lies the question as to why often professionals and the profession itself often see any change as good change.

 

It might be worthwhile for teachers and students of the built-environment to question why professionals and the profession itself often frame any change as good change. Is it because only if the professional produces change (e.g. a building, a set of policy that will set about change, etc.) that monetary remuneration is received? Or, can this belief be related to, or formed by, the particular ideological and political forces that constitute the profession/professionals’ subjectivity? And, can these particular ideological and political forces be themselves formed by something even more fundamental, such as what philosopher Baruch Spinoza calls “Passive Affects”. For Spinoza, passive affects are affective (and not strictly effective) forces that can make one feel “happy” but also incapacitates one’s ability to think differently and critically, and more importantly, decreases one’s capacities to create. For example, one may relate to the sense of achievement (a certain happiness) when one produces a workable architectura model that can meet the proforma needs. Likewise, the happiness a policy-planner may get when they write a by-law or neighbourhood plan that ,exemplifies all the “good” policies as were outlined in another official document. This passive affect may also illicit this non-creative/non-critical “happiness” when a professional respond to protests with official statements, for the official statements themselves have become order words for the good.

 

Proposal to advance this study:

• Examination on how seemingly public-conscious by-laws and design guidelines can become counterproductive; in turn, hamper the capacities of people and communities (and even professionals themselves) to become creative and critical.
• Examination on how the work processes (and physical and virtual workplace) of built-environment professionals produce passive affects (those uncreative bouts of happiness).

 

Preliminary readings:

• Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York: Viking Press, 1963
• Asad Haider, “Why Do People Fight for Their Servitude as If It Were Their Salvation?” in Verso Books Blog, https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/blogs/news/3844-why-do-people-fight-for-their-servitude-as-if-it-were-their-salvation (Accessed: 2023-06-06)
• Jason Read, “Fighting for Subjection as if it was Rebellion: Spinoza and Servitude Today” in Unemployed Negativity http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2021/08/fighting-for-subjection-as-if-it-was.html (Accessed: 2023-06-06)