LONDON.- Architecture and Anarchism documents and illustrates 60 projects, past and present, that key into a libertarian ethos and desire for diverse self-organized ways of building. They are what this book calls ‘anarchist’ architecture – forms of design and building motivated by the core values of autonomy, voluntary association, mutual aid, and self-organization through direct democracy. The projects highlight the stark gap between the authoritarian way in which the built environment is generally governed and the aesthetic liberation that is vital to a full human flourishing in cities. They show how authoritarianism can sometimes be held at bay by differing kinds of libertarian politics. Taken as a whole, they are meant as an inspiration to build less uniformly, more inclusively and more freely.

Anarchist values are evident in projects that grow out of romantic notions of escape – from isolated cabins to intentional communities. Yet, in contrast, they also manifest in direct action – occupations or protests that produce micro-counter-communities. Artists also produce anarchist architecture – intimations of much freer forms of building cut loose from the demands of moneyed clients; so do architects and planners who want to involve users in a process normally restricted to an elite few. Others also imagine new social realities through speculative proposals. Finally, building without authority is, for some, a necessity – the thousands of migrants denied their right to become citizens, even as they have to live somewhere; or the unhoused of otherwise affluent cities forced to build improvised homes for themselves.

This book explores the links between these continually developing ideas and expressions from the 1960s up to the present day. The result is to significantly broaden existing ideas about what might constitute anarchism in architecture and also to argue strongly for its nurturing in the built environment. Understood in this way, anarchism offers a powerful way of reconceptualising architecture as an emancipatory, inclusive, ecological and egalitarian practice.

Paul Dobraszczyk is a teaching fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. He is the author of Future Cities: Architecture & the Imagination (2019); The Dead City: Urban Ruins & the Spectacle of Decay (2017); Iron, Ornament & Architecture in Victorian Britain (2014); London’s Sewer (2014); and Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London’s Victorian Sewers (2009); amongst others.