ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on three key moments in the discussion of scarcity and economics: 1792 with Malthus, 1932 with Lionel Robbins and 1972 with the Club of Rome. Scarcity was a time-bound phenomenon in which cycles of seasons, weather and wars led to particular forms of lack. It is entangled with economics, which in turn entangles architecture, and so in the age of scarcity one needs to understand the operations of scarcity in order to understand the potential operations of architecture. Scarcity was indeed experienced in terms of dearth, but as a localised, temporal and contingent condition it was very different from the essentialist formulations of scarcity that arose out of modernity. Malthus thus gives his construction of scarcity a hard edge, one apparently based on reality, and this grants it both authority and objectivity. After Malthus, scarcity is accepted as an unavoidable fact, and one that has a profound effect on what became known as neoclassical economics.
