Whose Habitat? Housing and the Dilemma of Architectural Production, c.1976

Abstract

In October 2016 the United Nations held its third Habitat conference, in Quito, Ecuador, with the intent to promote a “New Urban Agenda.” Habitat III: Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, took place forty years after the first Habitat Conference on Human Settlements, in Vancouver in 1976.1 Between 1976 and 2016, with the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., the world formally emerged from the Cold War, and along with it the refor¬mulation of the First, Second and Third Worlds. The subsequent breakdown of state control in some areas formerly ruled by Communist governments produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former Yugoslavia. But in Central and Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War ushered in an era of economic growth and an increase in the number of liberal democracies. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan and Syria, new forms of independence brought state failure. It is now evident how the globalization of the Cold War era created the foundations for most of today’s key international conflicts.2 Yet at Habitat III, in 2016, it was acknowledged that one-third of the world’s population still suffered from inadequate living conditions, making the imperative of Habitat 1976 ever urgent. In response to the recent release of the digital archive of all three U.N. Habitat con¬ferences, this article reexamines the global conversations on human settlements at the first Habitat.3 By attending to the genealogies of ideas, definitions, geographies and identities, it revisits the moment when architects were in alignment with proponents of a comprehensive governmental approach to issues of human settlement. Crucially, it contends that the ideas behind Habitat offer a microcosm of the overlapping dualities produced in the dominant discourses of architectural modernism, ones that continue to be reproduced today.