14-06-24 // CONFLICT AS CONDITION – INTERVIEW WITH EVE BLAU

Left: Destruction: a main street in Bucha, Ukraine, photographed on March 1, 2022 during a pause in fighting.
The city, just northwest of Kyiv, was the site of fierce battles from February 27 through to the end of March. Image by Radio Free Europe
Right: Reconstruction: the same Bucha street during roadworks in May 2023. Image by Radio Free Europe

Bernd Upmeyer spoke with Eve Blau, who is a Professor of the History and Theory of Urban Form and Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Her research engages a range of issues in urban and architectural history and theory, and is concerned with the complex dynamics of urban transformation in the context of rapidly changing sociopolitical conditions. Her particular interest in “instabilities” and “transitions” when it comes to cities and buildings, which are both conditions that typically result from conflicts, made us want to speak with her about “Conflict-driven Urbanism”. The interview took place via Zoom on June 14, 2024.

Instabilities and Transitions

Bernd Upmeyer: Without any doubt we have just entered a new era of conflict. Conflicts are on the rise. Thus, with this new issue of MONU on “Conflict-driven Urbanism” we aim to investigate how conflicts in the past have formed, currently shape, and will in future influence cities and buildings, whether these conflicts are armed or unarmed conflicts. Therefore, we are interested in how conflicts “drive” urbanism, both in a positive and a negative way. What were your first thoughts when we initially approached you to speak with you about “Conflict-driven Urbanism”?
Eve Blau: I was intrigued by the question about “Conflict Urbanism” or “Conflict-driven Urbanism” as a framework, and my first thought was that urbanism is inherently conflict-driven. Processes of urbanization involve a certain amount of violence and destruction. Urban planning and design are always intervening in, and acting on, what is there. Cities are places of power, they are places of representation, and of course, they are also places of contestation, they are contested spaces. I think that is both positive and negative.
Accordingly, conflict is characteristic of cities because of the constant presence of difference, of opposition, contrast, and encounter with the other. I am always reminded of Marx’s and Engels’ famous dictum about the city; that cities are the privileged loci of history, not only places where history is inscribed, but where history is made. To intervene in the city is therefore a political act with material consequences. Planning, as David Harvey argues, is an ideological act of managing conflict. The urban spatial logic of capitalism and the role of planning in that context is to perpetuate the existing order and is directed toward arbitrating conflict in a pluralistic society.
These ideas resonate with my own research which is concerned with the agency of architecture, the ways in which architecture and planning can engage political ideas and intervene in the urban spatial organization of the city. The question that interests me is not only how ideology is manifest in architecture, but how architecture (which is always filled with ideology) can become political in an active way. More particularly, I am concerned with how architecture, through its own codes and practices, can intervene politically in the urban spatial organization of the city.

BU: Your parents, two Austrians, immigrated just before World War II to the US. How has this tremendous conflict, which was World War II, influenced your life and the way you perceive architecture and cities?
EB: That is a complex question. With no clear answer. With regard to my parents, they left Vienna before they were adults. For them it was a place in time, shaped by childhood memories. They gave me a certain kind of access to both the place and time. And that access, I realized retrospectively, did have some influence on my intellectual engagement with the dynamics of transition, conflict, political shift, and how they shape the built environment. But the conditions that most directly influenced how I perceive architecture and cities were the circumstances of my own childhood. I was born in the United States, but grew up in and between Europe and the US. My father was a historian. He was writing the classified history of the end of World War II and the immediate post-war period, which is why we were living in Europe. It was a project of contemporary history, directed toward the future. Living in Germany and traveling throughout Europe I got to know a lot about the experience of destruction, construction, and reconstruction, as well as about the politics of space in conflict. That experience gave me special access to those conditions and their imbricated meanings. Later, when I was studying architectural history at Yale and writing my dissertation I acquired a disciplinary toolkit for critically engaging with those conditions. Of course, that toolkit is itself permanently under construction, or better said, under reconstruction. Because the conditions I am examining are so dynamic and disparate, the research questions that drive my research are constantly changing and I am continuously challenged to develop new methods for analyzing and understanding them…

… the complete interview was published in MONU #37 on the topic of “Conflict-driven Urbanism” on October 14, 2024.

Title: Conflict as Condition
Project: Interview with Eve Blau
Date: June 2024
Type: Commissioned interview
Topic: Conflict-driven Urbanism
Organizer: MONU
Status: Published
Publications: MONU #37, P. 9-16
Interviewer: Bernd Upmeyer