I'll take a crack at initiating the discussion.
There is clearly a growing interest in the subject of architecture's relationship with promoting social change. Plenty of examples exist. The shortlist for the recent MOMA PS1 included offices whose work aspires to fulfill the needs of social housing and poverty reduction. GSAPP's Buell center organized the upcoming MOMA exhibit around housing issues in sprawling corners of the US. Studio Unite at GSAPP is involved in housing projects in Haiti and Nigeria, while several of us have engaged in similarly socially active projects like Young New Yorkers and Project Intersection. Essentially, humanitarian design is catching hold, perhaps evolving out of the folksy Samual Mockbee-style design-build and embracing the possibility of fulfilling larger-scale ambitions.
The scary thing is we've been down this road before, and there are plenty of examples where the parties involved failed to fully execute their visions. Modernism drifted away from its foundational social ambitions, and Postmodernism promoted a superficial reading and built translation of local heritage, and reduced these historical narratives to clumsy, stylistic tropes. It seems we have even more examples where the architecture or master plan caused more problems than it solved, which is to say they fulfilled their ambitions to construct a piece of architecture that would ideally serve as an "agent" but fell terribly short of all positive expectations.
So what's next? Is resurrecting altruism and social change a good thing or a bad thing? What will architects, urban planners, investors, heads of state, city councilmen, etc. do correctly, and what mistakes will they (we?) make all over again? Taken further, what are the limits of architecture in a world where global capital transgresses the boundaries of the nation-state, thereby tethering seemingly isolated cities to one another? In other words, is the current rapid pace of urbanization and social change happening so fast the the architect is left in the dust? Also, what happened to green architecture? Has this been replaced by something new, shapeless, or even worse - beyond our reach as designers?
I have my own thoughts about what our role should be in these situations, but I'm curious to see what people are currently thinking, especially since we no longer suffocated by the sleep-deprivation-induced-fog of GSAPP.
