here is another moralizing attack on ZHA - more political correctness to be combated ... i post me response here too: I wonder who one could still work for by your standards? You don’t live in the real world. You think it immoral to build a stadium in Qatar because its expensive relative to the poverty levels in the middle east. If we can’t build in Qatar for the reason you give, I guess we can’t build in the US either, considering that poverty and destitution (and very little social equity) exist there. You call Qatar a repressive political regime (although you are too timid to explicitly name them) … and we have also been criticized for working in China and Azerbaijan. By the way we also have been working in Mubarak’s Egypt. Should we have abstained from all this and abstain in the future? To leave them brewing in isolation? Yes, isolation would result if this boycott would be generalized according to your criteria? That is always the unspoken implication: withdraw from these jobs. I applaud the journalists who point towards problems like construction health and safety, if it is excessive. But, again any such figures need to be put into perspective. Health and safety becomes more of a priority the higher the generalized standard of living has risen. Our current health and safety regimes are rather recent and continue to improve. If you have witnessed the roads of India you realize the relative value of health and safety. And: all valuations are relative. Yes, if we close our eyes and dream of a better world we would like everybody to be taken care of as well as we are able to take care of ourselves. But this abstract dream cannot be a yardstick for condemnations, boycotts, regime changes etc. What about Zaha’s statement about the government’s responsibility for overseeing construction health and safety? What is wrong with this? It’s first of all the contractor’s duty and then the government’s duty of supervision. But I need to explain a bit more about (deliberate?) misrepresentation of the situation out of which a supposedly cruel, incriminating headline was snatched. First of all the Guardian’s article headline - Zaha Hadid defends Qatar World Cup role following migrant worker deaths – is misleading as no such “defense” was articulated. The second misrepresentation is the implication that workers have died on our construction site. However, this construction site does not exist. Construction has not yet started! What is the Guardian who publishes such headlines expecting from Zaha Hadid? The public condemnation of our client? Or even the withdrawal of our design? Is the Guardian boycotting all reporting on the world cup? Once more about “repressive regimes”. First of all it is an ahistorical, utterly (and tragically) misleading fallacy to measure and judge these developing countries by our standards which were still openly violated only 2 generations ago (and are still violated today) even in the most advanced countries like the US. This fallacy leads to the doctrine that “regime change” can leap frog these countries to become like “us”. There can be no shortcut for the ardent long process of building the institutions of civil society, and democratic governmental checks and balances with the attending ethos that we have come to expect as global best practice. And yet, the difficulty of building and maintaining these institutions and checks and balances is evident with all the corruption scandal s that keep coming to light in the advanced economies too. And also, at this point we should not forget the severe human rights and international law violations committed by US government agencies in recent years. Does this imply that we cannot work for the US government or public sector? I believe our projects in China, Azerbaijan, Qatar etc. make a progressive contribution to the development of these countries in comparison to the boycott strategy implicitly recommended by our dreamy moralists. I guess the only clean hands that can moralize and lecture us from their cushy and safe armchairs with a squeaky clean conscience are academics like you. The problem is that the fallacies you pander and spread are doing more damage than good in the world. A final thought about expensive public buildings in poor countries: I believe that such public buildings can be uplifting and have utility for the general population (including the poor) much in advance to the benefit that would be delivered if such a sum would be distributed to the poor directly. This insight hit me when I was in Isfahan. Here the splendid public monuments with their plazas and gardens make for beautiful spaces for family gatherings and meals. The relatively small public monumental core of Isfahan is surrounded by a ring of very poor shanty town dwellings and workshops etc., and it is the poor who enjoy the luxury of these beautiful public spaces on weekends. I feel the investment in this civic infrastructure was worth its while many times over while the small hand outs that would have been available to everybody in case of distributing the money would have dissipated within a week. (You might argue that other social investments could have been made instead. However, the track record of (usually foreign aid financed) social investments is discouraging, because for these investments to make a difference much more in terms of institutional preconditions is required than is available in poor countries. ) architecturefarm.wordpress/2014/03/24/patrik-schumachers-biennale-rant/#comment-955
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 05:38:51 +0000