by Ivan Illich
The conflict between vernacular and economic values is, however, not limited to the space on the inside of the threshold. It would be a mistake to limit the effects of dwelling to the shaping of the interiors; what lies outside one’s front door is as much shaped by dwelling, albeit in a different way. Inhabited land lies on both sides of the threshold; the threshold is like the pivot of the space that dwelling creates. On this side lies home, and on the other lies the commons: the space that households inhabit is common. It shelters the community as the house shelters its members. Just as no two communities have the same style of dwelling, none can have the same commons. Custom rules who may and who must use the commons, and how and when and where. Just as the home reflects in its shape the rhythm and extent of family life, so the commons are the trace of the commonality. There can be no dwelling without its commons. It takes time for the immigrant to recognize that highways are neither streets nor paths but resources reserved for transportation. I have seen many Puerto Ricans who arrived in New York and needed years to discover that sidewalks were not part of a plaza. All over Europe, to the despair of German bureaucrats, Turks pull their chairs into the street for a chat, for a bet, for some business, to be served coffee and to put up a stall. It takes time to forego the commons, to recognize that traffic is as lethal to business as to gossip outside the doorway. The distinction between private and public space for the modern shelter consumer does not replace but destroys the traditional distinction between the home and the commons articulated by the threshold. However, what housing as a commodity has done to the environment has so far not been recognized by our ecologists. Ecology still acts as a subsidiary or twin to economics. Political ecology will become radical and effective only as it recognizes that the destruction of the commons by their transformation into economic resources is the environmental factor which paralyzes the art of dwelling.
One demonstration of the destruction of commons is the degree to which our world has become uninhabitable. As the number of people increases, paradoxically we render the environment uninhabitable. Just as more people need to dwell, the war against vernacular dwelling has entered its last stage and people are forced to seek housing which is scarce. A generation ago Jane Jacobs effectively argued that in traditional cities the art of dwelling and the aliveness of the commons increase both as cities expand and also as people move closer together. And yet during the last thirty years almost everywhere in the world, powerful means have been employed to rape the local community’s art of dwelling and thereby create an increasingly acute sense of scarce living space.
This housing rape of the commons is no less brutal than the poisoning of water. The invasion of the last enclaves of dwelling space by housing programs is no less obnoxious than the creation of smog. The ever-repeated juristic prejudice in favor of the right to housing, whenever this claim conflicts with the liberty to explore new ways of dwelling, is as repressive as the laws which enforce the lifestyle of the ‘productive human’ couple. However, it needs to be proclaimed. Air, water and alternative ways of cohabitation have found their protectors. Curricula offer them training, and bureaucracies offer them jobs. The liberty to dwell and the protection of a habitable environment for the moment remain the concern of minority citizens’ movements; and even these movements are all too often corrupted by architects who misinterpret their aims.
‘Build-it-yourself’ is thought of as a mere hobby — or as a consolation for shanty-towns. The return to rural life is dubbed romanticism. Inner-city fishponds and chickencoops are regarded as mere games. Neighborhoods that ‘work’ are flooded by highly-paid sociologists until they fail. House-squatting is regarded as civil disobedience, restorative squatting as an outcry for better and more housing. But in the field of housing, as much as in the fields of education, medicine, transportation or burial, those who unplug themselves are no purists. I know a family that herds a few goats in the Appalachians and in the evening plays with a battery-powered computer. I know an illegal occupant who has broken into a walled-up Harlem tenement and sends his daughters to a private school.
Yet neither ridicule nor psychiatric diagnosis will make the unpluggers go away. They have lost the conscience of the Calvinist hippies and grow their own brand of sarcasm and political skill. Their own experience tells them that they enjoy the art of living which they recover by dwelling more than they enjoyed the comfort they left. And increasingly they become more capable of putting into pithy gestures their rejection of the axioms about homo castrensis on which industrial society partly rests.
And there are other considerations which make the recovery of dwelling space seem reasonable today. Modern methods, materials and machines make build-it-yourself ever so much simpler and less tiresome than it was before. Growing unemployment takes the stigma of being asocial away from those who short-circuit the building unions. Increasingly, trained construction workers have to relearn completely their trade to ply it in a form of unemployment which is useful to them and their community. The gross inefficiency of buildings put up in the seventies makes previously unthinkable transformations seem less odious, and even reasonable, to neighbors who would have protested a few years ago. The experience of the Third World converges with the experience in the South Bronx. The president of Mexico, while campaigning for election, stated without ambiguity: the Mexican economy cannot now nor in the future provide housing units for most of its citizens. The only way in which all Mexicans will be agreeably housed will be via provision in laws and of materials that enable each Mexican community to house itself better than ever before.
What is here proposed is enormous: the unplugging of a nation from the worldwide market in housing units. I do not believe that a Third World country can do this. As long as a country considers itself underdeveloped, it takes its models from the North, be this the capitalist or the socialist cheek. I cannot believe that such a country could really unplug itself, as a nation. Too much power accrues to any government from the ideology of man ‘billeted’ by nature. The utopia of nation building and housing construction are closely linked in the thinking of all élites I know, especially in the Third World. I believe that liberty to dwell, and the provision of the instruments — legal and material — to make this choice feasible, must be recognized first in the countries that are ‘developed.’ Here the unplugger can argue with much more conviction and precision why he places this liberty above the entitlement to a garage. Let him then look to Mexico to learn what adobe can do.
And the arguments that place the recovery of vernacular power to dwell over the impotent claims to personal storage are on the increase. As we have seen, they are consistent with the direction the ecological movement takes when it does get out from under the wings of the economy, the science of scarce values. They are consistent with a new radical analysis of technology that opposes the enrolment of people as volunteers in the building industry and modern tools adopted by people to remedy their defective ability to dwell. But more important than these is the argument that has not yet been properly formulated, but that I read into many of the concrete initiatives that I have observed.
Space fit to bear the marks of life is as basic for suvival as clean water and fresh air. Human beings simply do not fit into garages, no matter how splendidly furnished with showers and energy-saving devices. Homes and garages are just not the same sort of space. Homes are neither the human nests to which sociobiologists would reduce them, nor shelves on which people cannot survive regardless of how well they are cushioned. Garages are storage spaces for objects that circulate through the homogeneous space of commodities; nests are shaped and occupied by animals whose instincts tie them to their territory. Humans dwell. They have inhabited the Earth in a thousand different ways and copied from each other the forms of their dwellings. What had determined for millenia the changing character of the dwelling space was not instinct and genes but culture, experience and thought. Both territory and dwelling space are, admittedly, three-dimensional in character, but as to t
heir meaning, they are not spaces of the same kind — no more than dwelling space and garages. None of the sciences that we now have can properly grasp this variety of topologies — neither sociology, nor anthropology, nor can history as now mostly undertaken abandon the central perspective in which the differences that count disappear. I do believe that the disciplined opposition of human experience under the reign of vernacular values, and under the regime of scarcity, is a first step toward clarifying this difference — which counts. And without the recovery of a language in which this difference can be stated, the refusal to identify with the model of ‘billeted man’ and the search for new vernacular dwelling space cannot become politically effective.
And so, when the act of dwelling becomes a subject of politics, it comes inevitably to a parting of the ways. On the one side there will be concern for the ‘housing package’ — how to entitle everyone to get their share of built cubage, well situated and well equipped. On this side the packaging of the poor with their housing unit will become a growth sector for social workers when there is no more money left for the architects. On the other side there will be concern for the right of a community to form and accommodate itself according to its ability and art. In the pursuit of this goal it will appear to many in the North that the fragmenting of the habitat and the loss of traditions has caused the right to a dwellable habitat to be forfeited. Young people who insist on housing themselves will look with envy Southwards, where space and tradition are still alive.
This budding envy of the underdeveloped must be cured with courage and reflection. But in the Third World survival itself depends on the correct balance between a right to ‘build-it-yourself and the right to possess a piece of land and some things such as one’s own roof rafters.
The Message of Bapu’s Hut
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Inaugural Speech Sevagram Ashram Pratishthan Sevagram, Wardha. January 1978
This morning, while I was sitting in this hut where Mahatma Gandhi lived, I was trying to absorb the spirit of its concept and imbibe in me its message. There are two things about the hut which have impressed me greatly. One is its spiritual aspect and the other is the aspect of its amenities. I was trying to understand Gandhi’s point of view in regard to making the hut. I very much liked its simplicity, beauty and neatness. The hut proclaims the principle of love and equality with everybody. Since the house which has been provided for me in Mexico is in many ways like this hut, I could understand its spirit. Here I found that the hut has seven kinds of place. As you enter, there is a place where you put down your shoes and prepare yourself physically and mentally to go into the hut. Then comes the central room which is big enough to accommodate a large family. Today, at four in the morning, when I was sitting there for prayer, four people sat along with me, by supporting themselves on one wall, and on the other side there was also enough room for as many people again, if they sat close together. This room is where everybody can go and join others. The third space is where Gandhi himself sat and worked. There are two more rooms — one for the guests and the other for the sick. There is an open verandah and also a commodious bathroom. All of these places have a very organic relationship.
I feel that if rich people come to this hut, they might be making fun of it. But from the point of view of a simple Indian, I do not see why there should be a house bigger than this. This house is made of wood and mud. In its making, it is not the machine, but the hands of man which have worked. I call it a hut, but it is really a home. There is a difference between a house and a home. A house is where man keeps his luggage and furniture. It is meant more for the security and convenience of the furniture than of the man himself. In Delhi, where I had been put up, is a house where there are many conveniences. The building is constructed from the point of view of these conveniences. It is made of cement and bricks and is like a box where the furniture and other conveniences can fit in well. We must understand that all furniture and other articles that we go on collecting in our lives will never give us inner strength. These are, so to say, the crutches of a cripple. The more of such conveniences we have, the more our dependence on them increases and our life gets restricted. On the contrary, the kind of furniture I find in Gandhi’s hut is of a different order, and there is very little cause for being dependent on it. A house fitted with all kinds of conveniences shows that we have become weak. The more we lose the power to live, the greater we depend upon the goods we acquire. It is like our depending upon hospitals for the health of people and upon schools for the education of our children. Unfortunately, both hospitals and schools are not an index of the health or the intelligence of a nation. Actually, the number of hospitals is indicative of the ill health of people and schools of their ignorance. Similarly, the multiplicity of facilities in living minimizes the expression of creativity in human life.
Unfortunately, the paradox of the situation is that those who have more such conveniences are regarded as superior. Is it not an immoral society where illness is accorded high status and ignorance more consideration? While sitting in Gandhi’s hut I was grieved to ponder over this perversity. I have come to the conclusion that it is wrong to think of industrial civilization as a road leading toward the development of man. It has been proved that for our economic development, greater and bigger machines of production and larger and larger numbers of engineers, doctors and professors are literally supernumery.
Those who would want to have a place bigger than this hut where Gandhi lived are poor in mind, body and life style. I pity them. They have surrendered themselves and their animate selves to an inanimate structure. In the process they have lost the elasticity of their body and the vitality of their life. They have little relationship with nature and closeness with their fellowmen.
When I ask the planners of the day why they do not understand the simple approach Gandhi taught us, they say that Gandhi’s way is very difficult, and that people will not be able to follow it. But the reality of the situation is that since Gandhi’s principles do not tolerate the presence of any middleman or that of a centralized system, the planners and managers and politicians feel left out. How is it that such a simple principle of truth and non-violence is not being understood? Is it because people feel that untruth and violence will take them to the desired objective? No. This is not so. The common man fully understands that right means will take him to the right end. It is only the people who have some vested interest who refuse to understand it. The rich do not want to understand. By ‘rich’ I mean those who have conveniences of life which are not available to everybody in common. There are the ‘rich’ in living, eating, and getting about; and their modes of consumption are such that they have been blinded to truth. It is to the blind that Gandhi becomes a difficult proposition to understand and assimilate. They are the ones to whom simplicity does not make any sense. Their circumstances unfortunately do not allow them to see the truth. Their lives have become too complicated to enable them to get out of the trap they are in. Fortunately, for the largest number of people, there is neither so much of wealth that they become immune to the truth of simplicity, nor are they in such penury that they lack the capacity to understand. Even if the rich see the truth they refuse to abide by it. It is because they have lost contact with the soul of this country.
It should be very clear that the dignity of man is possible only in a self-sufficient society and that it suffers as one moves toward progressive industrialization. This hut connotes the pleasures that are possible through being at par with society. Here, self-sufficiency is the keynote. We must understand that the unnecessary articles and goods which a man possesses reduce his power to imbibe happiness from the surroundings. Therefore, Gandhi repeatedly said that productivity should be kept within the limits of wants. Today’s mode of production is such that it finds no limit and goes on increasing, uninhibited. All these we have been tolerating so far, but the time has come when man must understand that by depending more and more on machines he is moving toward his own destruction. Th
e civilized world, whether it is China or America, has begun to understand that if we want to progress, this is not the way. Man should realize that for the good of the individual as well as of society, it is best that people keep for themselves only as much as is sufficient for their immediate needs. We have to find a method by which this thinking finds expression in changing the values of today’s world. This change cannot be brought about by the pressure of governments or through centralized institutions. A climate of public opinion has to be created to make people understand that which constitutes the basic society. Today the man with a motor car thinks himself superior to the man with a bicycle, though when we look at it from the point of view of the common norm, it is the bicycle which is the vehicle of the masses. The cycle, therefore, must be given the prime importance and all the planning in roads and transport should be done on the basis of the bicycle, whereas the motor car should get secondary place. The situation, however, is the reverse and all plans are made for the benefit of the motor car giving second place to the bicycle. Common man’s requirements are thus disregarded in comparison with those of the higher-ups. This hut of Gandhi’s demonstrates to the world how the dignity of the common man can be brought up. It is also a symbol of the happiness that we can derive from practising the principles of simplicity, service and truthfulness. I hope that in the conference that you are going to hold on Techniques for the Third World Poor, you will try to keep this message before you.
Disvalue