Kenny Cupers

Governing through nature: camps and youth movements in interwar Germany and the United States

Focusing on youth camp development in Germany and the United States during the interwar period, this article argues not only that such camps played a crucial role in the ways in which national societies dealt with their youth, but also that their history forces us to rethink relations between place-making, nationhood, and modern governing. First, the article addresses the historiography of youth movements in relation to current debates about spatiality, nationalism, and governmentality. The main part of the article examines organized camps, in particular by the German Bünde, the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth), and the American Boy Scouts, focusing on their transition from relatively spontaneous activities of particular social movements, to objects of professional design, national-scale planning and intricate management in the interwar period. This development demonstrates how in the seemingly trivial activity of camping, nationalism is interwoven with the project of conducting youth through contact with nature. Despite divergent contexts and political ideologies, youth camp development in this period constituted a set of practices in which the natural environment was deployed to improve the nations youth, and to eventually reproduce them as governable subjects.

Where Is the Social Project

In the last decade, a range of participatory and activist practices have emerged as the self-proclaimed inheritors of architecture’s social project. From Architecture for Humanity’s aid in poor and disaster-stricken regions to temporary urban interventions, many of these initiatives transcend conventional definitions of architecture.1 A new generation of architects, designers, and urbanists are turning down office jobs to build shelters in Burma, reclaim the streets of Sevilla, guerrilla-garden in London, or study the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Privileging activism, informality, and alterity over what is perceived as a dominant architectural culture of tired formalism and celebrity obsessions, such practices expand design from the manipulation of form and material to the development of procedures and the creation of models of engagement.2 Despite their potential for change, many critics remain skeptical about the ultimate results and repercussions of these initiatives. Those policing the disciplinary boundaries of architecture have been most readily dismissive of what they consider to be social work and not architecture. Perhaps the most conspicuous challenge to such disciplinary rejection has been the 2010 MoMA exhibition Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement.3 With projects that include low-cost housing, community facilities, school building, access to public transportation, and the renovation of existing social housing, the exhibition claimed novelty for a socially relevant form of architectural practice. While this direction is far from unprecedented in the history of twentieth-century architecture, it is indeed rare in MoMA’s curatorial tradition.4 Yet, despite the symbolic importance and the galvanizing effect of such exhibitions, contemporary architectural culture seems to be increasingly fragmented by a fundamental fault line: that between architecture as social process and architecture as formal object. On which side of this split can we locate the social project of architecture today? Is it a matter of devising social procedures or designing novel forms? How can new imaginaries be produced, through projection or activism? Can architects, if they wish to be socially responsible, remain designers or should they instead become social workers, as some practitioners continue to claim? These questions are hardly new. And I think they will remain a tempest in a teapot unless we can devise a more precise way to evaluate the effects of these new projects on their larger social and political context. To do so, we need an analytical lens other than that conventionally trained on architectural projects. Such a change in perspective is well under way, not only in the field of architecture but in many humanities and social science disciplines. The following three propositions suggest how such shifting approaches might help us rethink the social project of contemporary architecture.

Human Territoriality and the Downfall of Public Housing

This article examines theories of human territoriality and their historical role in the demise of public housing in Western Europe and North America between the 1960s and the 1980s. The neglect and privatization of the public housing stock and the withdrawal of the state in direct provision in this period are often subsumed under the category of neoliberalism. This article unpacks this narrative by focusing on the intersection between architecture and social science. It argues that the neoliberalization of housing not only constitutes a transformation of housing economics, from public to private funding, or design, from highrise blocks in large estates to semidetached or detached individual dwellings; it also constitutes an epistemological turn, which revolves around the shift from “habitat” to “human territoriality.”

Bodenständigkeit: the environmental epistemology of modernism

Focussing on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century imperial Germany, this article examines how environmental thinking shaped the development of modern architecture and urban planning. The environment took on an acute importance in the rapidly industrialising and colonising Empire, prompting a wide range of projects, from landscape conservation and the design of garden suburbs to pioneering soil research and colonial planning. What made these diverging scientific, political and design undertakings understandable as environmental projects is the notion of Bodenständigkeit—the quality of something rooted in, or uniquely appropriate to, the soil on which it stands. This idea was more than just the symptom of a romantic or anti-modern mind set; it was part and parcel of a novel environmental way of thinking, prompting discussions about the future and conservation of urban and natural landscapes, the form of new buildings and settlements, and the methods of domestic and overseas colonisation. Bodenständigkeit, this article argues, is not only a primary category of early environmental conservation but the first version of an environmental determinism that would come to structure twentieth-century modernism at large.

Mapping and Making Community in the Postwar European City

This article examines how midcentury European sociologists, planners, and architects mapped the existing city to build future communities. The neighborhood unit concept spread globally in the first half of the twentieth century. In Europe, its deployment was supported not just by modernist planning principles but by sociological abstractions of community life. Current scholarship emphasizes how these modernist principles were contested by sociologists. The present article demonstrates instead that sociological mapping was instrumental in making the concept of community legible and operable in the postwar European city. During the 1940s, mapping social relationships in urban space was increasingly thought to reveal “authentic” community life in working-class urban neighborhoods, which previously were dismissed as chaotic and promiscuous. Such new sociological mapping shaped, if often only implicitly, the planning and design of modern housing estates and New Towns across Europe and thus connected representations of bottom–up, grassroots communities to an essentially top–down planning apparatus.