Capitalism | EPFL Graph Search

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. In a market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, or ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets. Economists, historians, political economists, and sociologists have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include laissez-faire or free-market capitalism, anarcho-capitalism, state capitalism and welfare capitalism. Different forms of capitalism feature varying degrees of free markets, public

Architecture, environnement et artefact total : la ville selon Reyner Banham et Oswald Mathias Ungers

Thibaut Jean Bernard Pierron

When looking at the city and the land, current architectural practices face a double limitation. On the one hand, the discipline is asked to react to its own specter: the body of authoritarian spatial devices based on a questionable tradition of which the history is well established. All the usual rules that perpetuate themselves in the name of "the good settlement, one relevant and responsive to any human context" [K. Lynch, 1981]. On the other hand, architecture, as a positive and effective strength, is called upon to demonstrate its ability to resist the most evident threat weighting on the land: can architecture - its knowledge and means - contribute to counter territorial consequences of pervasive and expansive logic of advanced capitalism? In taking up this double-task for the city, is architecture then left with only two lasting dead-ends: the dissolution of its lore within a larger ensemble of social practices or the seclusion of the last parcels of its prerogatives, those that can still be rescued? In order to trace an "other" path, our research simultaneously examines the routes taken on both sides of the Atlantic by two figures of the architecture of the second half of the 20th Century: British historian and critic Reyner Banham (1922-1988) and German architect and theoretician Oswald Mathias Ungers (1926-2007). At first sight, such a choice raises two questions: that of the dissimilitude of their respective work and that of the distance which seems to separate their positions within the intellectual field of their time. One of the goals of our research is to draw closer different modes of comprehending the city and the land. Both protagonists used a wide range of tools available - those of the architectural discipline understood as a set of practices and a collected knowledge - to render, in particular, the state of the world, of the western land, of the city and what it became. The main goal of our research is then to track a possible common ground for their positions about the city, which are contemporary to one another and regarded as being differing. Our parallel study of the works on the city of R. Banham and O. M. Ungers must lead to an actualization of our understanding of a set of trails already opened and to seize the consequences on a historiographical, theoretical and practical level. Therefore, our research tends to verify the existence of such common ground in measuring the proximity of the urban and territorial conception in their work, focusing on an interval starting at the beginning of the 1960s to the end of the 1970s. To achieve it, we formulate three hypotheses regarding the themes at the basis of their convergence: the recognition of the emergence of a new condition of the western land; the will to oppose to urbanism and planning different methods; and the definition of a critical equipment based on images.

EPFL2021

Manor Lessons: Commons Revisited

Harry Gugger, Amy Faith Perkins

Our contemporary condition, governed by the abstract apparatus of the capitalist market, demands a critical reading of the distribution, ownership, and use of common resources, especially on an island that has experienced a long history of privatization stemming from enclosure. Manor Lessons, the third investigation into what laba has termed “environmental objects,” looks at how the manor house can be used as a testing ground to reassess Britain’s complex and ongoing relationship to the countryside. As the most rural region of one of the more densely populated countries in Europe, the South West of England reflects all the absurdities of a globalized country under pressure to develop economically, physically, and environmentally. Highly protected landscapes, both natural and composed, sit as the backdrop to historic seats of political power, while sites of intense production are neatly concealed behind natural veils. This publication asks what lessons can be learned from the multi-layered history of the Manorial System, whose forgotten feudalistic origins were once rooted in the idea of the land not as private property but as common ground.

Park Books2021

Radical urban movements and the participatory city

Luca Giovanni Pattaroni, Mischa-Sébastien Piraud

This paper is based on an interdisciplinary study – mixing sociology, anthropology, urban planning and architecture - of 40 years of urban struggles in a small neighborhood of Geneva called Les Grottes. In the 70’s, Les Grottes was the place of birth of Geneva’s squatter’s movement which was initiated in opposition to a modernist rehabilitation project implying its almost complete destruction. Over the years the neighborhood has been the place of many local conflicts around the use of public spaces and/or buildings along many institutional innovations. The urban movements it fostered (squatters and neighborhood’s associations) have contributed to the spatial and institutional transformation not only of the neighborhood but of the entire city. They were part of the larger shift toward the ideology of the “sustainable urban development” and its ambiguous articulation with the “new spirit of capitalism”. We focus our analysis on the shift from an anti-capitalist contestation framed in a social class discourse (urban movements of the 70’s and 80’s) to a participatory and contractual handling of local conflicts (participation around a « contrat de quartier » initiated in 2010). This shift can be seen as a form of depolitization process in two ways. First, the « contrat de quartier » implies a strict spatial delimitation along a managerial approach of the « urban problems » publicly addressed. This narrow frame reduces the possibility of expanding the critic to larger entities and processes (as implied for example in the more radical anti-capitalist critics inspired by Marxism) (Boltanski, On critique, 2011). Secondly, the participatory management and renovation of the neighborhood implies a systematic recourse to the various technical and juridical normative frames. This lead to a certain form of « governement through the norms » (Thévenot) wich reduces specific forms of enacted critic of capitalism expressed through alternative spatial settings and « auto-organization » of everyday life. Nevetheless, autonoums actors and associations still play the game at the margin, participating at the same time to the institutionalized frame while developing projects and critics which open new alternatives.

2013