“Tourist” architecture?

By reading a recent post from a rather slyly named website called “adamsmith.org – Europe’s favourite think tank website”, Rod Dreher has argued that one of the reasons for the rebellions that have been taking place in London over the past few months is that modern architecture in the Enriched World has been designed by socialist planners rather than people. The result is that the Enriched World’s population lives almost exclusively in inhuman environments which are exclusively focused on the short-term material wants and give no room for emotional or spiritual development.

Dreher says that people like Jonathan Hale in The Old Way of Seeing say that architects formerly understood “natural” patterns of community that governments pressurised to provide for a working class that would otherwise have voted in outright Marxists. These governments provided what Stephen Masty describes as:

“populated by large groups of unsupervised children and teenagers, where peer socialisation can occur between them without the influence of adults.”

I can see how such housing systems, typified even in Unenriched Australia by the old housing estates – which look older than they are – leads to people wanting to socialise without any supervision from older people. This is a problem I had as a child: my peers bullied me for bad behaviour which I with hindsight realise I could do little or nothing to correct. The influence of adults would have helped schoolboys realise that they had to work together to

However, my experience of housing in the Enriched World from living in Germany in the Australian summer of 2006/2007 gives an interesting impression: that in fact the growth of mass tourism may be what creates the kind of architecture that people like Dreher are so deploring. For one thing, far more than even Hans Hoppe admits in a brief e-mail I had with him some time ago, tourism in the Enriched World is more often than not a source of extremely selfish and present-oriented attitudes. This is epitomised by the ultra-macho adventure sports that dominate the economies of what before industrialisation were cultures of marianismo where land was used seasonally to provide food and not inhabited during the very cold mountain winters. The tourist apartments I lived in whilst in Germany remind me a lot more of these Italian apartments (from Naples) that any residential architecture I have seen in the Enriched World or the densely populated tropical city of Singapore. Tourism grew extremely rapidly in Europe and Japan during the 1950s and 1960s as a response, perhaps, to the demands of their working classes for more wealth.

Tourist houses will inevitably have a “temporary”, extremely “trendy” feel about them because they serve to house one or a few people for very short periods – and as I said what they seek is a very short thrill of less long-term value that the kind of cultural study I have taken of the evolution of the Enriched World, which looks more deeply at the psyche of these people today as traditional cultural studies biased towards either the past or the desires of conservative ruling classes. The short-term nature of the interaction between tourists and locals who over time have in many places become almost totally dependent upon tourist income undoubtedly shapes the culture of tourism-based Enriched World cities. It is hard to see how this can lead to anything other than an ultra-materialistic culture totally focused upon wealth and money.

As Human Events says:

No. 270 of 365

Ask how come, if liberals are so keen on equality and fairness, they're so much more money-grubbing than conservatives.

According to both the World Values Survey and the General Social Survey, left wingers are more likely to rate "high income" as an important factor in choosing a job, more likely to say "after good health, money is the most important thing," and agree with the statement "there are no right or wrong ways to make money." This was confirmed by Doug Urbanski, former business manager of libtard documentary-maker Michael Moore, who said: “He is more money obsessed than anyone I have known — and that’s saying a lot.”

If liberalism can lead to an obsession with money, it is likely to have worked the other way round in Enriched World cities ever since the Industrial Revolution. Seeing money, as much as mere poverty, has led the working classes of the Enriched World to advocate bigger and bigger government without looking at what motivates them.