I was reading The New York Times Style Magazine (Fall 2009) at the Central Branch of the Hamilton Public Library and came across this definition of “communitecture”:

communitecture: an idea of building and design that places the common good over egocentricity; an antidote to starchitecture, as in: “Don’t get me wrong—I love my new Jean Nouvel condo. But what this city really needs is more communitecture like the High Line.”
—Alix Browne and Pilar Vilodas.

The ideas this raised for me included the notion that we might consider the citizenship of our buildings. At the risk of being too anthropomorphic, our built spaces are like people in the sense that they are not neutral in their social participation. They speak through their form and function. They may help to build our communities, contributing to the human interactions and exchanges that form our social fabric. They may also make those interactions more difficult, impair our conversations, complicate our buying and selling, and fragment our neighbourhoods.

I’m a wannabe architect and have long thought about what we build—at all scales. Our technologies, in all their manifestations from grading papers to manufacturing I-beams, are participants in society. I am part of rethinking our social architecture and the role that physical spaces play in that process must not be underestimated. We need to wrestle with the tensions of what comes first—we build as an expression of who we are or we have become who we are in part because of what we have built. These factors are active in varying degrees in all that we do.

It would be interesting, as citizens rather than professionals, to contemplate an informal audit of our city/neighbourhood/office/house to consider what role the design of those spaces plays in our lives. It may be that the social fabric we intend to re-weave cannot be done well if we don’t consider the built spaces that we all move in and through. Is your house a good citizen? Does your office undermine vital human interactions? Is your school a community champion (the building, not the institution) or does it deepen existing problems?

What do you think about the citizenship of our buildings?