“Mass” Housing in the Social and the Post-Social Worlds: Reading Hannah Arendt’s “Mass Society”

Abstract

In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt predicated her thesis on societal introspection on what she called “mass society” – a population which had rapidly grown, urbanized and atomized, bringing new imperatives for humans to live together in vast numbers and with closer proximities. Throughout, Arendt discusses how shifting boundaries of public and private define our cities and our lives. As her mass society of three billion now approaches eight billion, how has the relationship between public and private – city and household – played out in the staggering population growth of the sixty years since her book? This article will explore how these six decades since the publication of The Human Condition have seen fundamental transformations in the way we understand what we now call housing, its relationship with the city, and its relationship with collective life.

Keywords:

• Arendt
• housing
• population growth
• mass society
• Unité d’Habitation
• Barbican

Notes

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 52.

2. Ibid., 24. Arendt is quoting Werner Jaeger, in: Werner Jaeger, Paidera: The Ideals of Greek Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), III, 111.

3. Arendt, The Human Condition, 28.

4. Ibid., 33.

5. Ibid., 38.

6. Ibid., 254.

7. Peter Baehr, “The ‘Masses’ in Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism,” The Good Society 16, no. 2 (2007): 16.

8. Arendt, The Human Condition, 41.

9. Ibid., 43.

10. Ibid., 43.

11. Ibid., 43.

12. Ibid., 199.

13. Ibid., 136.

14. Kenneth Frampton’s phenomenological reading uses Arendt to call for a tectonic will for “permanence” in architecture – a return to an architecture of “worldliness” from the “worldlessness” of the modern age through its grounding, both physically on the earth and interpretatively within a formal “tradition.” Kenneth Frampton, “Towards an Ontological Architecture: A Philosophical Excursus”, in A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form, ed. Ashley Simone (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2015), 18. Reinhold Martin’s politico-philosophical reading draws on the ideas of the “common” in the work of Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth. Reinhold Martin, “Public and Common(s),” in Mediators: Aesthetics, Politics, and the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 42.

15. Arendt, The Human Condition, 58.

16. Ibid., 314.

17. Samuel Moyn, “Hannah Arendt on the Secular,” New German Critique no. 3 (fall 2008): 71.

18. Ibid., 74.

19. Ibid., 74.

20. Jacques Sbriglio, Le Corbusier: L’Unité d’habitation de Marseilles (Basel, Birkhäuser, 2003), 176. A letter from Le Corbusier to his mother is transcribed.

21. Fondation Le Corbusier. http://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr/corbuweb/morpheus.aspx?sysId=13&IrisObjectId=5234&sysLanguage=en-en&itemPos=58&itemCount=78&sysParentId=64&sysParentName=home. (accessed November 11, 2019).

22. Willy Boesiger, ed., Le Corbusier Oeuvre Complète, vol. 8, 1965–1969 (Zurich: Les Editions d’Architecture Artemis, 1970), 169, cited in Sbriglio, Le Corbusier, 6.

23. Gov.UK. “Live Tables on House Building: New Build Dwellings. Table 209: Permanent Dwellings Completed by Tenure and Country,” 2012, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/live-tables-on-house-building (accessed November 11, 2019). Government statistics show a fall in annual UK new house completions from around 380,000 in 1969/70 to around 152,500 in 2014/15.

24. Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1976), 48.

25. Ibid., 178.

26. Arendt, The Human Condition, 84.

27. Ivan Zaknic, The Final Testament of Pere Corbu: A Translation and Interpretation of Mise au point (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1997), 39. Zaknic refers to Le Corbusier’s statement, toward the end of his life, embittered by the misappropriation of his ideas on housing and urbanism.

28. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1978), 68.

29. Arendt, The Human Condition. Arendt opens the prologue with an account of the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in1957, using it to illustrate the “scientific” will of modern man to escape the imprisonment of nature. In the quotation, she refers to the inscription carved on the funeral obelisk of a Russian Scientist.

30. Arendt, The Human Condition, 255.

31. Ibid., 256.

32. Ibid., 256.

33. Ibid., 257.

34. Margaret Thatcher’s Government introduced the “right to buy” scheme under the Housing Act 1980. It offered council tenants the opportunity to purchase their homes at discounted prices, thus transferring housing stock from public to private ownership.

35. Arendt, The Human Condition, 29–30.

36. Douglas Keay, Interview with Margaret Thatcher. Woman's Own, 10 Downing Street, 1987, Thatcher Archive (THCR 5/2/262): COI transcript.

37. Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1998). Giddens re-evaluates the role of the state in his argument on necessary reforms of centre-left politics more aligned with the forces of global finance.

38. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Episode 1. Directed by Adam Curtis. BBC documentary, 2011. Curtis highlights the global importance of this meeting. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011k45f

39. Kate Barker, The Barker Review of Housing Supply (HMSO, 2004).

40. Kate Barker, Housing: Where's the Plan? (London, London Publishing Partnership, 2014).

41. Les Christie, Special Report, Issue #1: America’s Money Crisis, Foreclosures up a record 81% in 2008, CNN Money.com, January 15, 2009, https://money.cnn.com/2009/01/15/real_estate/millions_in_foreclosure/.

42. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge / London, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. Piketty argues that the twentieth century presents a distorted picture of capitalism, the rate of return on capital having been significantly reduced by two world wars. In the twenty-first century, Piketty argues that the central contradiction of capitalism has returned, and will continue – that is, in a market economy based on private property, the rate of return on capital will always exceed the rate of growth of income and output, thus continually escalating global wealth inequality.

43. Matthew Carmona, “Housing Design Quality – Auditing England.”

https://matthew-carmona.com/2019/06/26/64-housing-design-quality-auditing-england/ (accessed November 11, 2019).

44. Richard Orange, “Stockholm Says no to Apple “Town Square” in its Oldest Park,” Guardian Cities/Guardian.com, Nov 1, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/nov/01/stockholm-apple-town-square-park-kings-garden-kungstradgarden.

45. Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” in Writings on Cities: Henri Lefebvre, eds. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 158.

46. Ibid., 158.

47 Jack Shenker, “Revealed: The Insidious Creep of Pseudo-public Space in London,” Guardian Cities/Guardian.com, Jul 24, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/24/revealed-pseudo-public-space-pops-london-investigation-map.

48. Arendt, The Human Condition, 47–48.

49. Ibid., 38.

50. Ibid., 29.

51. Peter Barber, Project Interrupted (London: The Architecture Foundation, 2018), 50.

52. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, SMLXL (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1995), 516.

53. Arendt, The Human Condition, 322.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Stoane

Andrew Stoane has practiced and taught architecture since 1995 through his Edinburgh practice and various teaching positions throughout the UK. Since 2007 his research has focused on the UK’s housing crisis and the deficiencies of its housebuilding industry. He is currently a lecturer in architecture at University of Dundee, where, among his teaching commitments, he currently partners with Tongji University in a collaborative housing studio based in Shanghai.