The Brazilian dystopian sci-fi series 3% imagines a future where selection for a life of luxury (as opposed to one of squalor for the 97%) is based on a supposedly meritocratic ‘Process’ taken by twenty year-olds each year. The Process reminded me of taking exams and going to job interviews, with the Krypton Factor and the Hunger Games thrown into the mix. The desperation to succeed, with all that meant for a relatively easy life, is certainly reminiscent of the pressure young people are put under to find their place in society. Thankfully some of the more sadistic and potentially fatal elements of the Process are not typically part of the process of getting qualifications and a job in contemporary society.

But I was less interested in what might be seen as a commentary on our shared ‘belief’ in the system that ends up with a few having lives of privilege and many not. It was the architecture that fascinated me. The Wikipedia page on 3% says the location for filming scenes depicting the Process are at a stadium in São Paolo called Neo Química Arena. The Process is brutal — it seems amazing the eponymous 3% who make it through don’t spend the rest of their supposedly privileged lives needing therapy for PTSD. What I found interesting was how believable it was that such a Process could take place in the building depicted.

I doubt there are many buildings that have not, at some point or another, been the scenes of one or more acts of violence or dehumanization. But clearly, to me at least, some buildings provide a context in which such things are more plausible. There’s more to it than that, however. While any house, even ones depicted on chocolate boxes, could be places where domestic abuse happens, only certain buildings get the special status of being places where systemic dehumanization occurs: where people are given identification numbers, and are measured, assessed, quantified, and traded off against each other. To me, rightly or wrongly, such buildings are scrupulously tidy, with glass, concrete and steel much in evidence. There are long corridors, big spaces, high ceilings, and the audible ‘clop-clop’ of power-dressed women strutting about in high-heels.

Does architecture beget violence? At the risk of tripping myself up over Godwin’s Law, Nazis (and fascists generally) had distinctive architectural styles, as indeed did Stalinists. Minimally, it’s supportable that architecture and politics are not orthogonal. Space can be used to manipulate your feelings. Maybe large spaces make you feel smaller. Often you have to be careful what you say in such spaces because the sound carries so well. These diminish your ego that bit more — you restrain yourself; who knows whether that might be just enough to topple you over into docility? Perhaps tidy spaces make you anxious about your humanity — the shed skin, hair, snot, burst spots, sweat, farts and earwax you cannot help but leave in a trail behind you everywhere you go. And you adopt behaviours and routines that diminish that anxiety in response; behaviours you would not otherwise have done. The design of the space has made you do that. The architect has controlled you without ever having met you.

Interestingly, however, research by Stephan Trüby reported in an Archinect article points out that right-wing extremists often like remote rural areas, where they can enclose themselves away from the multicultural complexity of urban life. The same article also cites a study by Neeraj Bhatia correlating population density with support for Hilary Clinton in the 2016 US election, and lack thereof with support for Donald Trump. Indeed, in the UK, the results of general elections when depicted on a map often look like a sea of blue (the colour of the Conservative Party) in rural constituencies with a few dots of red (the colour of the Labour Party) in urban areas, even when Labour wins.

Are we then to infer that rural scenery — forests, meadows, marshes, mountains, bogs, lakes, hills, rivers, beaches and fields — somehow inspire right-wing sentiments? Is God a Tory? Nature can make you feel small, but not in a way that is dehumanizing, I think. At least the ‘trail’ I referred to before that you leave behind you is welcomed in natural environments as something will feed on your detritus. I suspect other factors are at play in why rural areas have more right-wing politics. But then, can I sustain the argument that buildings can turn us into compliant little fascists?

Before rushing to the conclusion that violence is everywhere, regardless of space, and besides observing that the emotions and feelings natural environments inspire in us should not automatically be seen as ‘good’, it’s worth asking about the alternative. If we can design spaces that make us violent, can we design spaces that make us peaceful? From a quick search of the internet, it seems this question has been the subject of a conference in 2019, and an initiative in California, with an interesting leaflet articulating some of the ways people are psychologically affected by space, and the potential for them to be discriminatory. Interestingly, that leaflet suggests that views of nature reduce stress and anxiety, making people less inclined to violence.

With apologies to those who are right-leaning politically, as I regret to say I cannot dissociate violence, dehumanization and environmental destruction with such views, it then seems all the more remarkable that those in rural areas would be more rather than less Conservative. I can understand a desire to conserve (with a small ‘c’) the nature that surrounds them every day, and perhaps the fear is that ‘others’ will destroy the nature they hold dear. Another view would be that insofar as such people are lords and masters of all they survey (even if that is just a large garden), they have lost all sense of anything other than themselves. Besides, rural areas are not all natural landscapes; instead (in the UK at least) they are mostly industrial. Nature is no less subdued by insecticides, artificial fertilizers, fungicides, weed killers, muirburn, ploughs and chainsaws than it is by concrete and tarmac. In that sense, rural is just another kind of urban — urban with different materials — and we should ask the same questions about the effects these environments have on our psyche that we do of architects and the environments they design.