After the flood: Disaster capitalism and the symbolic restructuring of intellectual space

Abstract

While corporate strategies for fostering innovation seek to benefit from university models of knowledge‐sharing and development, the adoption by universities of managerial models from business has met with more critical reaction from within. ‘Academic capitalism’ has been seen as a contradiction in terms. In the aftermaths of 9/11 and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the American Gulf Coast, investigative journalist Naomi Klein has called attention to the phenomenon of ‘disaster capitalism’. Disaster and conflict, she writes, have become alibis for radical restructuring. Have ‘academic capitalism’ and ‘disaster capitalism’ coincided? This paper examines, as a narrative case study, the events in a university school of architecture involved in post‐disaster reconstruction, with emphasis on the particular characteristics of the design academy. It suggests that the open intellectual and social space of the university was radically re‐engineered as a space of control: that freedom of investigation and exchange that innovative businesses sought to emulate was now itself under threat in the very institution where it had originated. This paper seeks to identify the specific mechanisms of this inversion and their consequences.

Keywords:

• disaster
• restructuring
• architecture
• university/corporate organizational structure

Notes

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the first workshop on Architecture and Social Architecture: Disturbing Notions of Structure in Organizations, sponsored by the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management in Brussels, Belgium, in May 2008. I thank my colleagues at that workshop for their helpful comments and the organizers, Drs. Barbara Allen and Heather Höpfl, for the invaluable opportunity to develop this paper in an interdisciplinary context. I also thank my reviewers for their careful reading and constructive suggestions. In particular, I acknowledge the reviewer who suggested the expansion of this study to a broader scope: in fact, this paper is one of a series constituting a larger study of the ethics of the design disciplines and professions in the reconstruction of New Orleans. A number of the additional topics s/he suggested are being, or will be, addressed in those other essays. Brief passages of this text appeared in my earlier paper, ‘In dark waters’, in the Journal of Architectural Education, September 2006.

2. The Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, for example, in 2007–2008 received a $10‐million donation to establish the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking to train future managers to ‘consider problems as a whole, rather than breaking them down into smaller parts; and creatively resolve tensions without resorting to costly tradeoffs’ (see McGuffin 2008, 36). The centre offers a programme in Business Design Initiatives and sponsors the Rotman Designworks programme on education, research and application. An inclusive ‘architecture’ of decision‐making is proposed, analogically, as a crucial step in integrative thinking. The School’s Dean, Roger Martin and faculty had, by 2008, been widely promoting ‘design thinking’ as the key to innovation. See http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/businessdesign.

3. Ramo (1997, 33) cites Baldridge et al. (1978), observing that ‘stakeholders who assume a bureaucratic metaphor [for academic administration] will expect that the president will be a “hero”, with strong technical (scientific management) skills and the ability to protect and save the institution from threats to its integrity, survival, and mission’.

4. As Klein remarks: ‘[A]fter years spent visiting other disaster zones [other than Baghdad], from post‐tsunami Sri Lanka to post‐Katrina New Orleans, I’ve come to think of these Green Zone/Red Zone worlds as … fast forward versions of what “free market” forces are doing to our societies even in the absence of war’ (2007a, 48). In the case of GCU, the explicit invocation of battle by its administrators can be understood in the organizational terms that Czarniawska‐Joerges (1988) suggests: that the university administration was seeking cultural and reality anchorages in order to enhance the ideological control necessary for the restructuring plan to be accepted.

5. Personal communication with author.

6. This would appear to be an extreme case of what Russell (2007) identifies as a process essential to achieving and maintaining celebrity–academic status. Emery McClure (2007) addresses this issue as it occurs in the context of architectural academia.

7. What should we think of federally funded ‘research’ that, banking on the assumption of objective assessment of the problem and the options, recommends a solution that appears to be, effectively, a product or service that one of the researchers already offers through their private business? If the research were in, for example, the medical field, what would the reaction be?

8. Estimates usually cite a figure of around 100,000 units.

9. For coverage of the protests, legislation and demolitions, see the New Orleans Times‐Picayune, at www.nola.com.

10. Here, it is important to distinguish institutionalized volunteerism from the important and commendable pro bono professional proposals for improved water management and flood resilience in New Orleans. At the scale of urbanism and infrastructure, however, such initiatives still require governmental commitment at several levels in order to be implemented.

11. In baseball, a ‘utility player’ is one who can be assigned to any one of a number of different positions as the coach deems necessary, but without a starring presence.

12. When, in one instance, a class‐wide student protest ensued, the administrator concerned refused to meet with the protestors, claiming that he did ‘not discuss academics [that is, academic matters] with students’.