Globalisation and architecture: the challenges of globalisation are relentlessly shaping architecture's relationship with society and culture

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2008 by Robert Adam

Architecture has only a small part to play in the affairs of man. It does, nonetheless, bring together much that is important for society at large: shelter, social function, technology, art, economics, politics, science and more. Consequently, architecture can be a mirror to society. Since the early twentieth century, architects have sought to link design symbolically to express a particular analysis of society and its future direction. This analysis has often been technological, but it has also been spiritual, psychological and even cosmological. But this view can be reversed; society can be made a mirror to architecture. We can understand architecture as a natural reflection of what is current socially, politically and economically.

A series of social, political and economic changes that affect everything from the operation of nations to everyday life come under the collective title of 'globalisation'. Often considered just to be the domination of the world by global corporations, the phenomenon of globalisation goes much further than this. It is summarised by Jurgen Habermas: 'By "globalisation" is meant the cumulative processes of a worldwide expansion of trade and production, commodity and financial markets, fashions, the media and computer programs, news and communications networks, transportation systems and flows of migration, the risks engendered by large-scale technology, environmental damage and epidemics, as well as organised crime and terrorism'. (1) Globalisation may now have its own global band of protestors but it is generally acknowledged that, save a major catastrophe, 'the intensification of worldwide social relations in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa' (2) is unavoidable and increasing.

Imperialism, internationalism and other forms of interchange between cultures and economies has been taking place for millennia, but globalisation is different in effect, depth and breadth.

At the end of the Second World War, experience of the depression and the holocaust convinced the dominant Western powers that the world economy and the welfare of humanity could no longer be left to the vagaries of nation states. The Bretton-Woods agreement, which led to the creation of the IMF and the World Bank, and the establishment of the United Nations and the Declaration of Human Rights, put in place the institutional framework for a global economy and a global political philosophy between 1944 and 1948. This was the foundation of globalisation and both events were based on Western or Enlightenment principles. The idea of the free market could be traced to Adam Smith. Globally enforced individual rights over and above the community or nation state fulfilled Condorcet's aspirations for the equality of man and Immanuel Kant's ideal of world government.

These principles could not be realised at a global level until the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989. The IMF's imposition of a free market system on an exhausted Russian economy (3) was followed by the voluntary liberalisation of the Indian and Chinese economies (although not the Chinese political system) in the early '90s. This free market was a north-Atlantic economic system evangelically promoted by the USA (and often politically linked to American-style liberal democracy or 'freedom'). As a consequence, globalisation can appear to be a form of American imperialism. In the short term this seems to be the effect. But the ideology is that of liberalisation, rather than imperial protection and control, and the true liberaliser must acknowledge the possibility of a loss of control over what has been liberalised.

Globalisation is a new world order. We do not know its outcome or have a full picture of its nature as we are only in its earliest stages. Some commentators consider it to be 'high-modernity' (4) and the realisation of the ideals of the Enlightenment, while others believe it to be a new phenomenon of equal but different significance to the Enlightenment. (5) At this stage, however, it is clearly a Western world order, dominated by north-Atlantic culture, and the most evident outcome has been the spread of north-Atlantic products and corporations. The effect is described by Helena Norberg-Hodge: 'Western consumer conformity is descending on the less industrialised parts of the world like an avalanche. "Development" brings tourism, Western films and products and, more recently, satellite television to the remotest corners of the Earth. All provide overwhelming images of luxury and power. Adverts and action films give the impression that everyone in the West is rich, beautiful and brave, and leads a life filled with excitement and glamour ... [A]dvertisers make it clear that Westernized fashion accessories equal sophistication and "cool". In diverse "developing" nations around the world, people are induced to meet their needs not through their community or local economy, but by trying to "buy in" to the global market.' (6) Put more succinctly by Theodore Levitt, 'everywhere everything gets more and more like everything else as the world's preference structure is relentlessly homogenized'. (7)