Peter Kropotkin and Colin Ward Two ideas of ecological urbanism Jere Kuzmanić prof. José Luis Oyon The thesis is dedicated to David Graeber, who died on the 2nd of September, 2020. To his greatness in proving that anarchism is worth intellectual endeavour in the 21st century, as both, academically relevant and widely respected. Goodspeed David! Thank you for the Debt. Máster Universitario en Intervención Sostenible en el Medio Construido MISMEC Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura del Vallès Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya 2019/2020 TFM - Trabajo Final de Máster (defended-September 2020) Alumni: Jere Kuzmanić [email protected] Mentor: prof. José Luis Oyon [email protected] The photo on the cover is made during the eviction of XM squat Bologna, Italy Photo by: Michele Lapini, http://www.michelelapini.net/ The thesis is written and defended in English Peter Kropotkin and Colin Ward; two ideas of ecological urbanism The thesis recapitulates the works of two anarchists, Peter Kropotkin and Colin Ward seeking the continuous thread of development of ecological urbanism as a political and spatial concept. As geographer and architect both imagined, wrote and inspired practices of production of space deeply rooted in ecology and spirit of self-organization. The literature review of primary and secondary resources will entangle the relationship between Kropotkin’s (proto)ecological geography with Colin Ward’s post-war self-management in urbanism. Both conceptions emerging from direct action, mutual aid and cooperation they will be presented through a comparison of their writings and the correlating the examples they inspired (Spanish anti- authoritarianist planning councils, 50s squatters movement, self-help housing communities etc. ) Their similarities and underlying values maintain the idea of an under-presented model of ecological urbanism that could be of significant relevance nowadays (i.e. in the context of urban degrowth, cooperative housing movement, etc.). Keywords: Ecological urbanism, Peter Kropotkin, Colin Ward, history of urbanism, urbanism from below, city-countryside integration, self-organization in urban planning Content 1 Introduction 1.1 What is environmental in anarchist approaches to space? 1.2 ‘The anarchist thread‘ in ecological urbanism(s) – Historical overview 1.3 Two visions of ecological urbanism 1.3.1 Summary of the key lines of comparison 1.3.2 On the continuation of ideas - Comparison of key concepts 2 Kropotkin 2.1 Perodicals and Mutual Aid 2.2 The Conquest of Bread 2.3 Fields, factories and workshops 3 Ward 3.1 Anarchist approach to housing: Housing: An Anarchist approach (1974), Tenants Take Over (1972), Talking Houses (1990) 3.2 An anarchist approach to environment: The Child in the Country (1988), The Child In The City (1978), Talking to architects (1996) 3.3 An anarchist approach to urban planning: Welcome, Thinner City (1989), Do-It- Yourself New Town (1976) 4 The Dialogue 5 Bibilography Two ideas of ecological urbanism “When Franco and his fascist generals attacked the newly elected Republic in July 1936, thousands of industrial workers and peasants responded with militias and also with a massive collectivization of land, factories, transportation systems, and public services. Collectivization encompassed more than one-half of the total land area of Republican Spain, affecting the lives of nearly eight million people. Large cities like Barcelona were transformed into federations of neighborhoods, while in many parts of the Republican held countryside, new irrigation systems and well-organized federations of communes allowed peasants to bring new land under cultivation, expanding and diversifying production. Social landscapes accommodated new educational, cultural, and health facilities. Massive regional exchange networks formed by federations of collectives starting at the local level and working their way up to districts and provinces, linked cities with the countryside for the purposes of distribution and consumption, extending transportation and health services into areas that had never been serviced before. A revolution, which began by creating more communal and egalitarian relationships among people, resulted in the creation of highly efficient and environmentally sensitive new spatial formations.” (Breitbait, 2009) 8 1 Introduction 1.1 What is environmental in anarchist approaches to space? In the 1930s, during the Spanish Republic, the revolution led by industrial workers and peasants was controlling the land on which 8 million people lived, worked and were fed at the time. This large scale social experiment inspired by anarchist ideas had its environmental implications. These implications are well summarized by Breitbart (2009) who concluded that the Republic did not impose on villages and neighbourhoods to become self-sufficient entities, neither in terms of goods and trade, neither in food, housing and other essential provisions. Instead, the councils anticipated a developed and complex spatial relations framed by the economy of everyday consumption and production that propelled regional exchange and local cooperation. In these relationships the city became interrelated with the rural towns and villages, large scale collectivization attempted to integrate industrial and agricultural production. At the same time, the peasant and citizen are seen as active subjects of the integration – both contributing to progress with their manual and intellectual labour in gardens, workshops and local councils. This historical example is one of many everyday lived practices in which environment, politics and urbanism converged into an alternative experience in (re)production of space as inherent to Nature. These experiences are part of the history of ecological urbanism that continuously seeks to oppose expanding urbanization with holistic and integrated visions of human and non-human life embedded in sustainable urban processes. Many of these experiences were inspired, observed and documented within the community of anarchist geographers and urbanists. Until now not that many dialogues on ecological urbanism took into consideration the history of anarchist inputs to the idea. This particular work attempts to bring two points in this direction: a) ‘conscious practices of anarchism’ (as Malatesta defines the history of anarchism) share a common environmental approach and b) there is a continuous thread of decentralist inputs to ecological urbanism that flows between the pre- and post- World War Two period. Both points aim to illustrate the from-below approaches to ecological urbanism as methodologically and practically relevant for the future of the field. Methodology The works of two prominent figures of anarchism and (urban) geography, Peter Kropotkin and Colin Ward are compared to build the argument presented in the previous chapter. Instead of entering the complex study of historical practices or attempting to give an overview of anarchism shaped work on ecological urbanism, the thesis uses the observations of two giants of decentralist thought and their observations on people´s relation to the environment. One geographer and one architect, dedicated significant volumes of work and time to observing the practices of production of urban space, describing and speculating about them from the anarchist perspective. The methodological hypothesis is that literature written by both authors is sufficiently intertwined to be read as a) time-wise continuous thread of socio-political thought on ecological urbanism and are b) material that inspired concrete practices relevant to an ecological urbanism. 9 Two ideas of ecological urbanism These two figures have a pivotal role, not in defining what ‘anarchist’ means in the context of ecological urbanism or how anarchist paradigms relate to ‘environment’, since, as Ferretti (2019) recognizes, there is no just one uniform ‘anarchist’ approach to anything, including space and ecology. Instead, their work interconnects the lived experiences, utopian speculations and critiques of the State and capitalism and as a result, is fixing together a distinct reading of (urban) space. These two authors also connect two centuries of what we call ‘modern’ anarchism, the same period in which the urbanism increasingly acknowledged the urgencies of negative environmental impact – to which it responded with a quest for the ecological urbanism and rethinking the (urban) economy around resource management (Springer, 2013)⁠. The temporal coincidence of the two movement makes the distinct anarchist vision for ecological urbanism worth considering. It is interesting to consider how - mutual aid, cooperation, do-it-yourself and direct action ethics, and non-hierarchical emancipatory tools – work when incorporated in the framework of urban planning. The thesis uses primary sources from both authors, their books, articles in periodicals and secondary researches of interpretation as sources for qualitative comparison of two authors and their contribution to this discussion. The comparison of the literature extracts on the first level similarities in their conceptions and observations concerning the ecological urbanism. On the second level method draws the differences between the authors and contextualises them. The third level uses the literature review to relate conceptual work by authors to cases in which it was put in practice and examples to which they refer. The presentation of results takes the form of printable publication. It is based on three parts: 1) Introduction