by Ivan Illich
When I am in Europe with university students today, I use the term ‘commons’ (in German Allmende or Gemeinheit; in Italian gli usi civici), and my listeners immediately think of the eighteenth century. They think of those pastures in England on which each villager kept a few sheep, and they think of the ‘enclosure of the pastures’ which transformed the grassland from commons into a resource on which commercial flocks could be raised. Primarily, however, my students think of the innovation of poverty which came with enclosure: of the absolute impoverishment of the peasants who were driven from the land and into wage-labor, and they think of the commercial enrichment of the lords.
In their immediate reaction, my students think of the rise of a new capitalist order. Facing that painful newness, they forget that enclosure also stands for something more basic. The enclosure of the commons inaugurates a new ecological order. Enclosure did not just physically transfer the control over grasslands from the peasants to the lord. It marked a radical change in the attitudes of society toward the environment. Before, in any juridical system, most of the environment had been considered as commons from which most people could draw most of their sustenance without needing to take recourse to the market. After enclosure the environment became primarily a resource at the service of ‘enterprises’ which, by organizing wage-labor, transformed nature into the goods and services on which the satisfaction of basic needs by consumers depends. This transformation is the blind spot of political economy.
This change of attitudes can be illustrated better if we think about roads rather than about grasslands. What a difference there was between the new and the old parts of Mexico City only 20 years ago. In the old parts of the city the streets were true commons. Some people sat on the road to sell vegetables and charcoal. Others put their chairs on the road to drink coffee or tequila. Others held their meetings on the road to decide on the new headman for the neighborhood or to determine the price of a donkey. Others drove their donkeys through the crowd, walking next to the heavily-laden beast of burden; others sat in the saddle. Children played in the gutter, and people walking could still use the road to get from one place to another.
Such roads were built for people. Like any true commons, the street itself was the result of people living there and making that space livable. The dwellings that lined the roads were not private homes in the modern sense — garages for the overnight deposit of workers. The threshold still separated two living spaces, one intimate and one common. But neither homes in this intimate sense nor streets as commons survived economic development.
In the new sections of Mexico City, streets are no longer for people. They are now roadways for automobiles, for buses, for taxis, cars, and trucks. People are barely tolerated on the streets unless they are on their way to a bus stop. If people now sat down or stopped on the street, they would become obstacles for traffic, and the traffic would be dangerous to them. The road has been degraded from a commons to a simple resource for the circulation of vehicles. People can circulate no more on their own. Traffic has displaced their mobility. They can circulate only when they are strapped down and are moved.
The appropriation of the grassland by the lords was challenged, but the more fundamental transformation of grassland (or of roads) from commons to resource has happened, until recently, without being subjected to criticism. The appropriation of the environment by the few was clearly recognized as an intolerable abuse. By contrast, the even more degrading transformation of people into members of an industrial labor force and into consumers was, until recently, taken for granted. For almost a hundred years many political parties have challenged the accumulation of environmental resources in private hands. However, the issue was argued in terms of the private utilization of these resources, not the extinction of commons. Thus anticapitalist politics so far have bolstered the legitimacy of transforming commons into resources.
Only recently, at the base of society, a new kind of ‘popular intellectual’ is beginning to recognize what has been happening. Enclosure has denied the people the right to that kind of environment on which — throughout all of history — the moral economy of survival depends. Enclosure, once accepted, redefines community. Enclosure undermines the local autonomy of community. Enclosure of the commons is thus as much in the interest of professionals and of state bureaucrats as it is in the interest of capitalists. Enclosure allows the bureaucrat to define local community as impotent to provide for its own survival. People become economic individuals who depend for their survival on commodities that are produced for them. Fundamentally, most citizens’ movements represent a rebellion against this environmentally-induced redefinition of people as consumers.
Minna-san, you wanted to hear me speak on electronics, not grassland and roads. But I am a historian; I wanted to speak first about the pastoral commons as I know them from the past in order then to say something about the present much wider threat to the commons by electronics.
This man who speaks to you was born 55 years ago in Vienna. One month after his birth he was put on a train, and then on a ship and brought to the Island of Brac. Here, in a village on the Dalmatian coast, his grandfather wanted to bless him. My grandfather lived in the house in which his family had lived since the time when Muromachi ruled in Kyoto. Since then on the Dalmatian Coast many rulers had come and gone — the doges of Venice, the sultans of Istanbul, the corsairs of Almissa, the emperors of Austria, and the kings of Yugoslavia. But the many changes in the uniform and language of the governors had altered little in daily life during those 500 years. The very same olive-wood rafters still supported the roof of my grandfather’s house. Water was still gathered from the same stone slabs on the roof. The wine was pressed in the same vats, the fish caught from the same kind of boat, and the oil came from trees planted when Edo was in its youth.
My grandfather had received news twice a month. The news now arrived by steamer in three days; formerly, by sloop, it had taken five days to arrive. When I was born, for the people who lived off the main routes, history still flowed slowly, imperceptibly. Most of the environment was in the commons. People lived in houses they had built; moved on streets that had been trampled by the feet of their animals; were autonomous in the procurement and disposal of their water; could depend on their own voices when they wanted to speak up. All this changed with my arrival in Brac.
On the same boat on which I arrived in 1926, the first loudspeaker was landed on the island. Few people there had ever heard of such a thing. Up to that day, all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices. Henceforth this would change. Henceforth the access to the microphone would determine whose voice shall be magnified. Silence now ceased to be in the commons; it became a resource for which loudspeakers compete. Language itself was transformed thereby from a local commons into a national resource for communication. As enclosure by the lords increased national productivity by denying the individual peasant to keep a few sheep, so the encroachment of the loudspeaker destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you are silenced.
I hope that the parallel now becomes clear. Just as the commons of space are vulnerable and can be destroyed by the motorization of traffic, so the commons of speech are vulnerable and can easily be destroyed by the encroachment of modern means of communication.
The issue which I propose for discussion should therefore be clear: how to counter the encroachment of new, electronic devices and systems upon commons that are more subtle and more intimate to our being than either grassland or roads — commons that are at least as valuable as silence. Silence, according to Western and Eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.
Such a transformation of the environment from a commons to a productive resour
ce constitutes the most fundamental form of environmental degradation. This degradation has a long history, which coincides with the history of capitalism but can in no way just be reduced to it. Unfortunately, the importance of this transformation has been overlooked or belittled by political ecology so far. It needs to be recognized if we are to organize defense movements for what remains of the commons. This defense constitutes the crucial public task for political action during the eighties. The task must be undertaken urgently because commons can exist without police, but resources cannot. Just as traffic, computers call for police, and for ever more of them, and in ever more subtle forms.
By definition, resources call for defense by police. Once they are defended, their recovery as commons becomes increasingly difficult. This is a special reason for urgency.
Dwelling
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Address to the Royal Institute of British Architects York, U.K., July 1984. (Celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects)
To dwell is human. Wild beasts have nests, cattle have stables, carriages fit into sheds, and there are garages for automobiles. Only humans can dwell. To dwell is an art. Every spider is born with a compulsion to weave a web particular to its kind. Spiders, like all animals, are programmed by their genes. The human is the only animal who is an artist, and the art of dwelling is part of the art of living. A house is neither nest nor garage.
Most languages use living in the sense of dwelling. To put the question, ‘where do you live?’ is to ask for the place where your daily existence gives shape to the world. Just tell me how you dwell and I will tell you who you are. This equation of dwelling and living goes back to times when the world was still habitable and humans were in-habitants. To dwell then meant to inhabit one’s own traces, to let daily life write the webs and knots of one’s biography into the landscape. This writing could be etched into stone by successive generations or sketched anew for each rainy season with a few reeds and leaves. Man’s habitable traces were as ephemeral as their inhabitants. Dwellings were never completed before occupancy, in contrast to the contemporary commodity, which decays from the day it is ready to use. A tent had to be mended daily, it had to be put up, stretched, pulled down. A homestead waxes and wanes with the state of its members: you can often discern from a distant slope whether the children are married, whether the old ones have already died. Building goes on from lifetime to lifetime; rituals mark its prominent stages: generations might have passed since the laying of the cornerstone until the cutting of the rafters. Nor is the quarter of a town ever completed; right into the eighteenth century the residents of popular quarters defended their own art of dwelling by rioting against the improvements that architects tried to foist on them. Dwelling is part of that moral economy which E.P. Thompson has so well described. It succumbed to the king’s avenues, which in the name of order, cleanliness, security and decorum tore up the neighborhoods. It succumbed to the police which in the nineteenth century named streets and numbered houses. It succumbed to the professionals who introduced sewers and controls. It was almost extinguished by welfare, which exalted the right of each citizen to his own garage and TV.
Dwelling is an activity that lies beyond the reach of the architect not only because it is a popular art; not only because it goes on and on in waves that escape his control; not only because it is of a tender complexity outside of the horizon of mere biologists and system analysts; but above all because no two communities dwell alike. Habit and habitat say almost the same. Each vernacular architecture (to use the anthropologist’s term) is as unique as vernacular speech. The art of living in its entirety — that is, the art of loving and dreaming, of suffering and dying — makes each lifestyle unique. And therefore this art is much too complex to be taught by the methods of a Comenius or Pestalozzi, by a schoolmaster or by TV. It is an art which can only be picked up. Each person becomes a vernacular builder and a vernacular speaker by growing up, by moving from one initiation to the next in becoming either a male or a female inhabitant. Therefore the Cartesian, three-dimensional, homogeneous space into which the architect builds, and the vernacular space which dwelling brings into existence, constitute different classes of space. Architects can do nothing but build. Vernacular dwellers generate the axioms of the spaces they inhabit.
The contemporary consumer of residence space lives topologically in another world. The coordinates of residential space within which he locates himself are the only world of which he has had experience. He finds it impossible to believe that the cattle-herding Peul and the cliff-hanging Dogon and the fishing Songhai and the tilling Bobo live in heterogeneous spaces that fit into the very same landscape, as seen by most ecologists. For the modern resident a mile is a mile, and after each mile comes another, because the world has no center. For the dweller the center of the world is the place where he lives, and ten miles up the river might be much closer than one mile into the desert. According to many anthropologists, the dweller’s culture distorts his vision. In fact, it determines the characteristics of the space he inhabits.
The resident has lost much of his power to dwell. The necessity to sleep under a roof for him has been transmogrified into a culturally defined need. The liberty to dwell has become insignificant for him. He needs the right to claim a certain number of square feet in built-up space. He treasures entitlements to deliveries and the skills to use them. The art of living for him is forfeited: he has no need for the art of dwelling because he needs an apartment; just as he has no need for the art of suffering because he counts on medical assistance and has probably never thought about the art of dying.
The resident lives in a world that has been made. He can no more beat his path on the highway than he can make a hole in a wall. He goes through life without leaving a trace. The marks he leaves are considered dents — wear and tear. What he does leave behind him will be removed as garbage. From commons for dwelling the environment has been redefined as a resource for the production of garages for people, commodities and cars. Housing provides cubicles in which residents are housed. Such housing is planned, built and equipped for them. To be allowed to dwell minimally in one’s own housing constitutes a special privilege: only the rich may move a door or drive a nail into a wall. Thus the vernacular space of dwelling is replaced by the homogeneous space of the garage. Settlements look the same from Taiwan to Ohio and from Lima to Peking. Everywhere you find the same garage for the human — shelves to store the work-force overnight, handy for the means of its transportation. Inhabitants dwelling in spaces they fashion have been replaced by residents sheltered in buildings produced for them, duly registered as consumers of housing protected by the Tenants’ or the Credit Receivers’ Act.
To be put up in most societies is a sign of misery: the orphan is taken in, the pilgrim put up, the condemned man imprisoned, the slave locked up overnight and the soldier — but only since the eighteenth century — billeted in barracks. Before that even the army had to provide its own dwelling by camping. Industrial society is the only one which attempts to make every citizen into a resident who must be sheltered and thus is absolved from the duty of that social and communitary activity that I call dwelling. Those who insist now on their liberty to dwell on their own are either very well off or treated as deviants. This is true both for those whom so-called ‘development’ has not yet untaught the desire to dwell, and for the unpluggers who seek new forms of dwelling that would make the industrial landscape inhabitable — at least in its cracks and weak spots.
Both the non-modernized and the post-modern oppose society’s ban on spatial self-assertion, and will have to reckon with the police intervening against the nuisance they create. They will be branded as intruders, illegal occupants, anarchists and nuisances, depending on the circumstance under which they assert their liberty to dwell: as Indians who break in and settle on fallow land in Lima; as favellados in Rio de Janeiro, who return to squat on the hillside from which they have just been driven — after 40 yea
rs’ occupancy — by the police; as students who dare to convert ruins in Berlin’s Kreuzberg into their dwelling; as Puerto Ricans who force their way back into the walled-up and burnt buildings of the South Bronx. They will all be removed, not so much because of the damage they do to the owner of the site, or because they threaten the health or peace of their neighbors, but because of the challenge to the social axiom that defines a citizen as a unit in need of a standard garage.
Both the Indian tribe that moves down from the Andes into the suburbs of Lima and the Chicago neighborhood council that unplugs itself from the city housing authority challenge the now-prevalent model of the citizen as homo castrensis, billeted man. But with their challenges, the newcomer and the breakaway provoke opposite reactions. The Indios can be treated like pagans who must be educated into an appreciation of the state’s maternal care for their shelter. The unplugger is much more dangerous: he gives testimony to the castrating effects of the city’s maternal embrace. Unlike the pagan, this kind of heretic challenges the axiom of civic religion which underlies all current ideologies which on the surface are in opposition. According to this axiom, the citizen as homo castrensis needs the commodity called ‘shelter’; his right to shelter is written into the law. This right the unplugger does not oppose, but he does object to the concrete conditions under which the right to shelter is in conflict with the liberty to dwell. And for the unplugger this liberty, when in conflict, is presumed to be of greater value than the commodity of shelter, which by definition is scarce.