1,479
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
1 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Hidden Power and Built Form: The Politics Behind the Architecture

      research-article
      Architecture_MPS
      UCL Press

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisher
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Emeritus Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, Avram Noam Chomsky is amongst the world’s most cited living scholars. Lauded as the ‘father’ of modern linguistics and instigator of the ‘cognitive revolution’ he was voted the “world’s top public intellectual” in 2005. He is, however, best known, and at his most controversial, in the fields of political criticism and activism. Perhaps the most prolific author alive today he has engaged with issues ranging from the Vietnam War, US policy in South and Central America, what he calls the ‘US-Palestinian-Israeli problem’, the Spanish Civil War and the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, to name but a few. The scope of his thinking is nothing short of immense.

          Despite this range of subjects, however, one area that Chomsky has not discussed is the built environment. Here, for the first time he is asked to consider the contemporary infrastructure of the United States in the context of his writings, criticism, and thought. In doing so, he discusses the military infrastructure crossing large swathes of the southern United States in the form of the US-Mexican border. He also discusses urban sprawl as a product of what he calls “social engineering”—a project conceived and orchestrated by a sophisticated web of affiliations across the government and the private sector. Caught up in this, he also pinpoints the subprime crisis and the current economic recession as the result of a matrix of forces within which architecture inevitably played a role. In short, he offers his particular perspective on what lies behind some of America’s most conspicuous architectural and infrastructural projects.

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Amps
          Architecture_MPS
          UCL Press
          2050-9006
          12 October 2013
          : 3
          : 1
          : e33001
          Article
          10.14324/111.444.amps.2013v3i3.001
          bd57943a-a599-4543-8dd0-f2970f387ff4
          Copyright © 2013 The Author(s)

          Published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International ( CC BY 4.0). Users are allowed to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially), as long as the authors and the publisher are explicitly identified and properly acknowledged as the original source.

          History
          Page count
          Figures: 1, Pages: 17

          Sociology,Political science,Political & Social philosophy,Urban studies,Architecture,Communication & Media studies

          Comments

          Comment on this article