ABSTRACT
The environment that humans construct for habitation has always been more than mere utility. From the beginning, groups have invested their domiciles and cities with meanings, making their built structures symbolic of their beliefs and values. And although the built environment may express a shared worldview, just as often it inscribes into space the divisions and inequalities of the social structure. For example, Pierre Bourdieu (1990: 271-83) argues that the spatial structure of the Kabylian house unconsciously embodies the gendered division of labor of the Berber community, thus facilitating an early apprenticeship in and acceptance of the unequal roles of men and women. And Chandra Mukerji (1997) convincingly asserts that the famous gardens of Versailles symbolically displayed the ability of the emerging absolutist state in France to impose its power on the landscape and create a sovereign territory of order and control. It is only with the rise of modern capitalist societies, however, that the artifacts of the
built environment take on another status beyond either utility or symbol-that of the commodity. The usefulness of buildings and infrastructure in meeting material needs makes them an important part of the economy of every society. But only with the advent of capitalism is this economic utility confounded with and eventually dominated by the built environment as a commodity-a product to be sold on the market for profit. In capitalist societies, then, the built environment has a hybrid character, shaped by both money-making and meaning-making. The design of buildings and cities has for centuries been considered an art-architecture-with aesthetic rules autonomous from considerations of economic utility or profit. Yet in capitalist economies the construction industry also participates in the real estate market, in which developers and investors are driven by economic profits. To be built, a building must be not only aesthetically pleasing and meaningful in the culture but also profitable enough to attract capital. These imperatives of meaning-making and money-making may sometimes conflict, as
is illustrated by the controversies over rebuilding the World Trade Center site in the aftermath of 9/11. Most New Yorkers and other Americans wanted the Ground Zero site to contain a memorial, the most meaning-laden type of structure. But the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the land, and the leaseholder of the destroyed World Trade Center, Larry Silverman, also insisted on building as much
rent-producing space as was destroyed. Bowing to the public’s symbolic need for remembrance, the Port Authority sponsored an architectural competition for the design of Ground Zero that mandated a memorial. The competition was won by Daniel Libeskind, whose design memorialized victims with a void at the center of the site. Silverman, however, hired his own architect to produce a design that maximized rent, not remembrance. A protracted battle over the final design ensued between the two parties, representing the conflicting demands of money and meaning on the built environment (Goldberger 2004). Once having recognized these two distinct and potentially contradictory social forces
shaping the built environment in most modern societies, sociologists-especially cultural sociologists-must specify their interaction. Is one more powerful than the other? If so, under what conditions? Are their effects on the environment independent or interactive? And at what level are these effects generated and experienced-at the macro level of national economics and politics, the meso level of institutions and organizations, or the micro level of individuals and small groups? Current scholarship on the built environment answers these questions in different ways, some of which are more informative than others.
