Economies of Scale: Paradigms of a Theory in Housing Sites

Abstract

Abstract Architecture is always embedded within a set of economic preconditions that determine value. Yet economics is in itself malleable—it is debated, rather than calculated. This article explores the subjective nature of economy by investigating how architects have historically engaged with the question of “economies of scale” as it has applied to housing sites. While the theory purports that scale—in this case the scale of land for housing—affects economic performance, these effects are mediated by culturally constructed judgements about what is valuable. The article focuses on architectural writings that have advocated for changing the scale at which housing is conceptualised and delivered. It identifies four economic paradigms, historic eras in which emerging economic theories influenced housing: eighteenth-century land “engrossment” and idealised cottage design; nineteenth and twentieth-century industrial expansion and garden cities; Fordism and rationalised land development; and late-twentieth-century liberalism and the atomisation of housing estates. Architecture does not simply follow the dictates of political economy, it rather contributes to it.