2020- expected 2024
Liberty, Security, Suburbia
Nagy Makhlouf

Advisors: Prof. Dieter Dietz, Dr. Prof. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
Dissertation Defense: planned in Fall 2024

Since World War One, the U.S. government has promoted single-family housing as an instrument of liberalism. Liberal thought is based on the assumption that governmental action is legitimate only insofar as it increases national wealth through the economic liberty of the population, and as it secures this liberty with financial and legal frameworks. In this context, architecture is an interface between the government and the governed, between laissez-faire and regulations, and between financial risk and opportunity. Government’s interventions in the delicate balance between liberty and security have been a constant subject of debates regarding how legitimate these interventions are, and what are their benefits and beneficiaries. In this regard, the history of single-family housing is one of the ambiguities and crises of liberalism. Indeed, single-family housing has depended on heavy governmental policies and controls. It has been the symptom of an uneconomic resource allocation that mainly benefits the building and banking industries, while threatening the financial security of large social groups. 

Our research investigates how urban planning, understood as the organization of design, finance, and regulation, served as a critical instrument for governments to manage the crises of liberalism; the government's role in urban planning helps us understand the existence and paradoxes of single-family housing. Several architects cooperated with governmental institutions and argued for expanding the relationship between liberty and security in the daily lives of communities, women, children, etc. They developed a scientific approach to urban planning with protocols, diagrams, and statistics that ground the feasibility and relevance of their projects. The State mostly distorted this approach by defining home building standards and facilitating subsidizing home credit access to identify housing as a store of economic value and investment. We argue that this policy is essentially bound to the country's central banking system, the Federal Reserve (the Fed), which fuels the unprecedented debt growth relative to homeownership and helps to understand the growth of construction of newly built units and size despite shrinking households.

We build our analysis through the lenses of the 'neoliberal' schools of Vienna and Chicago. These schools of thought have influenced architects who promote a "free market urbanism” adapted to market and industrial constraints, criticize laissez-faire in design, and intend to practice architecture as a science through computation-based automation. In contrast with the resulting standardization of design practices and perpetuation of forms of social subordination, we argue that computational tools provide under-explored potential in pursuing the attempts to imagine new and grounded relationships between liberty and security.mit theshattering posit that construction can never be sustainable, how to respond to housing needs? This studio intenasjdflajsdlfjalsdfds to face the music.

|1| Image Credit: Margaret Thatcher's Right to Buy, PA.  PA Archive. Press Association Images, 1980