A good friend of mine, Bill Millard (known professionally as William B. Millard, Ph.D.), works as a freelance writer, often contributing architecture reviews for online periodicals. A few years ago, he told me that he had been invited to write an essay for a collection on the interplay of violence and architecture. Bill’s chapter was to focus on the problem of suburban sprawl, a topic he is currently writing about at length. I became intrigued with the concept of the book and I found myself reading some essays on a British architecture school Web page further led me to an interest in the philosophic writers on the problems of modern society. But my initial toe-dipping in this new pool left me with a new, yet uncertain, optimism. Here was a discipline—architecture, and related topics such as city planning, etc.—that offered very real solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems. If cities and suburbs are better built, this could be a path for at least some alleviation of the suffering of those with less means and an enhancement in the quality of life for all.

In 2011, the book appeared with Bill’s essay. Edited by Bechir Kenzari, an Associate Professor of Architecture at the United Arab Emirates University, Architecture and Violence is a collection of 10 works by different authors. Some of the essays are stronger than the others, but on the whole, I found the book a fascinating read presenting some important ideas. My deepest disappointment was in the lack of an overall immediacy on approaching contemporary problems surrounding the premise that there is a violent component inherent in architecture. When I asked Dr. Kenzari about this through email, he reminded me that the book, as stated upfront in the introduction, made no attempt to treat the question in “any exhaustive way; nor is there an intention to construct or apply any definite theory.” He also said that “I don’t think there is any truly objective non-reference from which an interpretation of violence and its relation to architecture can begin.”

I told Dr. Kenzari that I felt the strongest chapters in Architecture and Violence were his own, Bill Millard’s, and the chapter by Nadir Lahiji. Lahiji’s essay, “Must Architecture be Defended…The Critique of Violence and Autoimmunity” reminded me that buildings begin with an idea and that the underlying philosophical and practical approaches in society on the subject contribute to create what will eventually be a finished and very real structure. I found great immediacy in Lahiji’s analysis of critique apropos architecture. He writes, “once architecture allies itself with the reason of mediatized digital culture, infatuated with image and its enjoyment, it loses its self-protection and its publicness. The more architecture builds images, the more it violates the principles of the critique, the more it becomes autoimmune against the same forces from which it is supposed to protect itself.” These ideas, based on theories postulated by the late French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, remind me of the vitality of philosophical discourse. Anyone who derides modern philosophy as just “so many words” should realize there are great thinkers tackling the very real underlying issues that contribute to the general malaise of today’s world. Read, for instance, the interview with Derrida in the book Philosophy in a Time of Terror, which Lahiji references.

Bill Millard’s essay takes the New Jersey suburban-based lifestyle depicted of mobsters on the television show The Sopranos as a metaphor for the seemingly quiet, yet poisonous violence found in suburban life and its dependence on the socially and environmentally destructive automobile. Bill’s essay had the most statistics and facts of any in the book, and I felt the book could have used a bit more of this exacting approach. Bill brilliantly describes the many underlying factors that led to the Newark riots in the 1960s, caused by poor urban planning and highway construction, among many things. He also discusses the riots’ subsequent effect on the flight of the more affluent base to the suburbs, thus creating many of the conditions and problems now facing the poorer cities. Later in his chapter, Bill describes the Cold War mentality that gave rise to the primacy of the car, noting that “taking a step closer to the military meaning of mobilization, and considering the policy choices and informational campaigns that were necessary to sell the automotive age to Americans, it does not unduly stretch one’s metaphoric capacity to interpret automobilization as an act of class warfare, waged from above.”

When I interviewed Bill via email, I told him that although I agreed with his analyses, I had moved from Queens to the suburbs of New Jersey to insure the safety of my young daughter and to see that she would receive an education of higher quality in the suburban school systems as compared to that of the public schools of New York City. He replied that he understood my motives, and that “less admirable motives like “white flight” had brought others to the poorly planned suburbs. On the issue of safety, he said, “especially since street-crime rates in NYC and other cities have been dropping since the early 1990s, the best way to protect a kid is to keep him or her away from the big bad car.” Bill also wrote to me that “the better-run cities, to the extent they can afford it, are all upgrading their parks and greening their streets in recent years, recognizing that the quality of life has a lot to do with our innate biophilia as well as all the other reasons for greener buildings and infrastructure, so the suburbs’ advantages in the foliage-and-recreation realm are arguably on the decline as well.”

I asked Dr. Kenzari if the terrible problems facing cities can be reversed given today’s political and economic climate. I also asked about the future of the problems created by the suburbs. He replied: “…it is possible to argue that the terrible problems facing cities can perhaps be reversed, but only via the shifting of roles at the non-architectural level.” He added that “today, everything about architecture is problematic, from its mission to its relation to society. One would have thought that the decades of (modernist/rationalist) critical and design elaborations would trigger an increased confidence in the power of architects to positively affect the world, including the suburbs. This has not taken place, however. What appeared at first as an expansion of architectural consciousness turned out to be its reduction. A new process has formed, instead, whereby the progressive categories that once guided the avant-garde came to be either diluted, criticized or simply instrumentalized. Hence the roots of the suburban problem. From an architectural perspective, therefore, the future of the suburbs will primarily depend on non-architectural decisions. But although architecture cannot dispense the solace it once promised, it still can play a role in highlighting the hegemonic forces dominating suburban life itself however. Rather than promising a not-yet harmony, it can expose the deficiencies of the existing suburbia, thus preparing the ground for other actors to take the right decisions, if at all.”

When I asked Bill Millard if there was hope in solving some of these problems, he said, “…I have to be optimistic, at least in some highly contingent and guarded way, that the US is capable of improving both its built environment and the cultural patterns that affect its environmental impact. Since we need to change certain things, we’d do well to convince ourselves that they really are changeable—a bit like William James deciding his first deliberate act of free will is to embrace the doctrine of free will.”