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Citizen One Episode 13: We Have Never Been Private

Citizen One Episode 13: We Have Never Been Private

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 In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, author, architect and urban theorist Ioanna Piniara joins me for the first of a two-part conversation spanning European postwar reconstruction, Cold War urbanism, and today’s smart city futures. Her new book, We Have Never Been Private: The Housing Project in Neoliberal Europe (Actar Publishers) challenges the prevailing narrative of privacy as a fundamental right under siege. Instead, Ioanna contends that privacy is a historically constructed spatial and legal fiction—one that has long served as an instrument of neoliberal subject formation, segregation, and accumulation of wealth.In Part 1, we examine two of the three case studies in her book: the Barbican Estate in London and Berlin’s 1980s International Building Exhibition (IBA). Both projects—often lauded for their architectural ambition—emerge under her analysis as mechanisms for reorganizing the city around new forms of social and spatial exclusion. The Barbican’s fortress-like aesthetic, one that has been adored and despised over decades, didn’t just embody Brutalist design—it engineered a new spatial contract for the middle class. The IBA, positioned as a progressive experiment, reveals how even left-liberal planning tools can reproduce segmentation and disparity.The Barbican: A Spatial Contract for the Postwar Middle ClassWe examine how the Barbican’s Brutalist design—often mistaken as an egalitarian gesture of postwar renewal—was in fact a highly coded spatial contract. With over 100 distinct apartment typologies, it enacted class segmentation through spatial form—less about serving functional diversity, more about encoding social hierarchy. Enclosure, density, and inward-facing design consolidated the aesthetic of privatized enclave, while the absence of affordable housing signaled a decisive shift away from social and economic inclusion.Ioanna details how the Barbican turned housing into a device of symbolic capital—projecting stability and distinction for a new professional-managerial class while erasing the working-class presence in central London. The promise of privacy here wasn’t a retreat from capitalism; it was a performance of entitlement inside it.Berlin’s IBA: Critical Reconstruction and the Theatre of ParticipationNext, we shift to West Berlin’s IBA, an exhibition that sought to reconcile the failures of modernist planning with more participatory urbanism. But as Ioanna explains, this was often a performance of inclusivity, not a redistribution of power. While the IBA invited architectural experimentation, it did so within tight ideological boundaries. Participation was procedural rather than structural, aesthetic rather than legal—a gesture without governance teeth.We discuss how the IBA’s “critical reconstruction” became a narrative apparatus—mobilizing memory, identity, and cultural capital to restabilize a city fragmenting under Cold War pressures. Despite its progressive veneer, the project preserved exclusionary dynamics: land remained concentrated, typologies served symbolic functions, and renters were increasingly displaced by speculative ownership.From Welfare Typologies to Data-Driven Urbanism: The Smart City Through a Rearview MirrorThroughout our conversation, we draw connections to contemporary smart city districts—where algorithmic governance and high-tech façades extend the logic of privatized urbanism. Ioanna warns against mistaking data integration for civic openness. From Songdo to NEOM and Masdar City, many of today’s smart city schemes rehearse the same narrative tropes as the Barbican and IBA: the promise of innovation masking systems of control, segmentation, and scarcity.Together, we trace how both historic and futuristic housing models use architecture to encode ideology—through typology, ownership models, and access to privacy. The home, she argues, is not just where we live—it’s where we are made legible to systems of power.Themes Explored in Part 1:* Privacy as legal and spatial construct, not natural right* The production of the “neoliberal subject” through housing typologies* Symbolic capital and its role in architectural authorship* Participation without power as a performative mode of governance* The continuity between welfare-era housing and platform-driven smart cities* Spatial strategies of exclusion, from brutalist enclosure to sensor-based sortingIn Part 2, we’ll look at Ioanna’s third case study of Athens, where overlapping ownership regimes, economic-crisis era redevelopment, and the fragmentation of public authority reveal how legal ambiguity and community cohesion can both obstruct and protect urban life—operating in the legal gray zones where resilience persists beneath visibility.—Subscribe to Citizen One for more episodes at the intersection of design, governance, and the urban futures we’re still trying to ...

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