URBAN ARCHITECTURE AND THE SOCIAL ORDER
9 December 1949

[…]1 The question of beauty with regard to a town or city is a problem that concerns the field of aesthetics. When we talk about the beauty of a town, we are not really referring to the merely formal beauty of the buildings or structures involved, and nor indeed are we referring to what is traditionally called the ‘expression’ involved in poetry or music. For there is a specific sense in which the beauty of a town – if I may employ philosophical concepts here – occupies a kind of intermediate position in between the beauty of nature and the beauty which belongs to art. In other words, it is certainly not the case that some expressly developed intention, some definite idea lying behind a town, as it were, is what decides its beauty. On the contrary, the beauty that speaks to us in a town, in an ancient town such as Bamberg or Rothenburg for example, is a remarkable interrelationship of particular forms and organic development on the one hand and a certain trace of the historical on the other – which then turns into a kind of expression which addresses us. The expression that belongs to a town lies in what has been; it speaks to us out of the present as history, as that which has come to pass.

I believe that any consideration regarding the beauty of a town that tried to focus exclusively on just one of these moments, on the moment of artistic beauty on one side or on the distinctive moment of historical beauty on the other, would actually fail to do justice to the phenomenon itself. This whole way of considering a town as a thing of artistic beauty belongs to an extremely late phase of historical development. For it emerged from the sort of reform movements that started in Britain in the nineteenth century with thinkers such as Ruskin and William Morris and that represented a reaction to industrialization.2 In the German context, these aspirations led towards Jugendstil and to the idea of an expressly planned sort of beauty in urban architecture – a particularly fine example of which is of course familiar to you here in Darmstadt on account of the artist colony that was based here.3

This conception of a town or city in terms of artistic beauty actually presupposes4 that the historical element of the beautiful in urban architecture no longer survives as such but had become effectively free-floating or independent. The beauty of a town is now something that has to be fashioned or produced rather than something that takes shape in the interplay between the different elements. The problem that arises here is already a specifically social problem. For it points back to the situation of bourgeois society in which the bourgeoisie, in accordance with its economic principle of unlimited and unfettered enterprise capitalism, effectively unleashed a wave of uncontrolled building and construction, even though it was also well aware of the devastation and destruction which is produced in the process. Thus it attempts, in terms of its own assumptions and on its own terrain, to heal this disastrous and socially generated result by purely aesthetic means. There is no doubt that it is a social problem whether a particular social order is capable of healing the formations or deformations which are typically associated with it by reflecting upon them and pursuing aesthetic speculations in this regard. You will all be well aware that the artistic movement of the ‘New Objectivity’, understood in the broadest sense, strongly developed that concern with independent beauty – a beauty valued purely on its own terms and for its own sake – that had already found expression in architecture. In truth this involves the question whether a form of society for which the dissolution of every traditional style is inevitable is capable in turn of freely and deliberately creating another style beyond its former historical role.

You can already see from this initial example that questions of urban architecture and development are inextricably connected with the particular sphere of society within which they transpire. But I believe that the perspective I would describe as ‘municipal’ in the broadest sense is just as inadequate as the purely aesthetic perspective, and this not only because it is partial and neglects the internal relations and structure of society itself to focus solely on more limited problems such as the composition of a given group, the particular professional needs involved in urban development, the statistics related to population, and things of that sort. But that is not really the problem here. For I believe – and this is surely a problem that you encounter all the time in the context of your own work, although as a social theorist I should probably mention it specifically – that the municipal perspective is almost inevitably equivalent to a basically administrative point of view. And such a view essentially seems to imply that urban development is regarded by the specialist as a problem to be solved from above, by those authorized to do so through the social division of labour, although the people for whom the building projects are destined have relatively little to say in the matter. It is debatable of course how far those for whom such things were undertaken ever had as much to say as might appear from a romantic view of things. Indeed, this was almost certainly not the case. Yet I would almost say that the municipal approach turns the people it deals with into objects rather than allowing them to become subjects. Once again this reflects a basic aspect of society, for our society is constituted in such a way that the human beings who belong to it can exercise very little control over their fate and cannot freely determine their own existence for themselves. To an enormous degree they are dependent on objective social structures that consign them to this or that position and no other, on structures that they must obey or accommodate themselves to. If I may be so bold, speaking as a philosopher, as to express one demand here, it would be this: to recognize that one of the most important tasks for those responsible for urban development is not to absolutize their own situation but to acknowledge the relationship I have attempted to outline. They should always try not to see the user or occupier simply as an object to be moved to this or that place, as someone for whom the building or amenity in question has to be provided, but must actually yield to the higher insight of those providing it. The most important concern must be to think about the human beings themselves here. In other words, when we are talking about the reconstruction of towns and cities, we must not fall victim to the widespread and reified view that human beings are the objects of institutions but, rather, acknowledge that institutions exist for the sake of human beings.

At this point, however, I would like to dispel any suspicion of naivety on my part. I know as well as any of you that such a demand is far easier made than done. I know as well as you that, if one simply let everyone go ahead and build however they liked, this would not only produce terrible results but probably lead to completely impractical things as well. But there is a difference here, rather like that we can observe in the field of medicine. You can go into countless clinics where you will feel that you are really objects as far as the clinic is concerned, that you are there for the clinic rather than the other way round. In a well-run clinic, on the other hand, you will notice how the patient is not dealt with in an abstract manner but is treated much more concretely as an individual human being. How the things I have talked about are possible, whether it would be a good idea to have advisers drawn from the general population to participate in plans for urban reconstruction, I am not in a position to judge. I can well imagine that working with advisers of this kind would not be particularly easy or gratifying. But I can also imagine, where really human concerns need to be considered rather than the more technical architectural issues, that such constant contact with the people affected would be far more beneficial than simply inserting them into preconceived plans and projects.

Thus I hope you will now have a fair idea of what I have tried to outline and present for you. My intention is twofold: I would like to offer you a few examples for the interaction of urban architecture and society that strike me as historically instructive and then, in some brief final remarks, draw a couple of conclusions in relation to the contemporary situation.

First, on the issue of urban architecture as a historical question. The principal example I want to mention, though it is less an example than something that embodies the entire problem at issue, is the distinction that you are all familiar with from the literature, namely that between things that are supposed to have arisen spontaneously and things that have arisen in an expressly planned or deliberate way. I have already had an opportunity to exchange a few words about this question with Prof. Gruber,5 and I am pleased that he has confirmed my own suspicion that, even in the case of the medieval town or city, things were probably not nearly as spontaneous as people have imagined. In reality it seems likely that all or at least an overwhelmingly large number of towns did not grow up as organically as it might initially appear but, in some sense, reflected a kind of plan. Be that as it may, I believe that this distinction in relation to the spontaneous emergence of towns expresses a social...