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AbstractArchitecture 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.Keywords: EconomicsplanningFordismlandmass housingcapitalism AcknowledgmentSpecial thanks to Martino Tattara for his feedback on this paper.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (London: Penguin, 1981), bk. 1, part 3.2 Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (London: Allen Lane, 2018), 6–15.3 Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies (New York: Penguin Books, 2017), 60.4 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), ch. 26.5 David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 144.6 Alan Colquhoun, “The Superblock,” in Essays in Architectural Criticism: Modern Architecture and Historical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 83–103.7 Ameer Ali and Herb Thompson, “The Schumpeterian Gap and Muslim Economic Thought,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics 10 (1999): 31–49.8 Arthur Young, Political Arithmetic (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967; orig. 1774), 288.9 Arthur Young, Travels in France During the Years 1787, 1788, 1789, ed. Matilda Betham-Edwards (London: G. Bell, 1906; orig. 1792), 112.10 Nathaniel Kent, Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property (London: J. Dodsley, 1775), 206.11 Kent, Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property, 230.12 John Wood the Younger, A Series of Plans for Cottages of Habitations of the Labourer, 2nd ed. (London: J. Taylor, 1806), 3.13 Wood, A Series of Plans, 6–7.14 Daniel Maudlin, “Habitations of the Labourer: Improvement, Reform and the Neoclassical Cottage in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of Design History 23, no. 1 (2010): 720.15 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 26.16 Gary Fields, Enclosures: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 25.17 Raymond Unwin, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding! How the Garden City Type of Development May Benefit Both Owner and Occupier (London: Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, 1912).18 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Glasgow ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976; orig. 1776), 14–17.19 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1885), 125.20 Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997), bk. 4, ch. 8–11.21 Mazzucato, The Value of Everything, 57–74.22 Marshall, Principles of Economics, 150.23 Alfred Marshall, “The Housing of the London Poor: Where to House Them,” Contemporary Review 45 (1884): 224–31.24 Marshall, Principles of Economics, 442.25 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1902), 102. Its first edition was To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1898).26 Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, 25.27 Jean-Yves Tizzy, “Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Idea and the Ideology of Industrialism,” Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 87 (2018), https://journals.openedition.org/cve/3605.28 Unwin, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding!, 16.29 Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice: an introduction to the art of designing cities and suburbs (London: T. Fischer Unwin, 1909).30 Unwin, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding!, 3.31 Unwin, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding!, 3.32 Ronald H. Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4, no. 16 (1937): 386–405.33 Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism” (orig. 1934), in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 303.34 Jean-Louis Cohen, Building a new New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), 97–184.35 See Charles S. Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 2 (1970): 27–61.36 Frederick W. Taylor, “A Hearing before the Special Committee of the House of Representatives, January 1912,” Bulletin of the Taylor Society 11, nos 3–4 (1926): 104.37 Giorgio Ciucci, “The Invention of the Modern Movement,” trans. Stephen Sartarelli, Oppositions 24 (1981): 68–91.38 CIAM, “Declaration of La Sarraz,” in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads, trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 109–13.39 CIAM, “Declaration of La Sarraz,” 110–11.40 Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and its Planning, 8th ed., trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover, 1987, orig. 1929), 301.41 Le Corbusier, “Le parcellement du sol des villes,” Rationelle Bebauungsweisen: Ergebnisse des 3. Internationalen Kongresses für Neues Bauen (Frankfurt: Englert & Schlosser, 1931), 48–57.42 Walter Gropius, “Flach-, Mittle- oder Hochbau?” in CIAM III: Rationelle Bebauungsweisen (Frankfurt: Verlag Englert & Schlosser, 1931). Translated as “Houses, Walk-ups or High-rise Apartment Blocks?” Scope of Total Architecture (New York: Collier Books, 1943), 103–15.43 Herbert Boehm and Eugen Kaufmann, “Untersuchung der Gesamtbaukosten zwei- bis zwölfgeschlossiger Bauweisen,” in CIAM III: Rationelle Bebauungsweisen (Frankfurt: Verlag Englert & Schlosser, 1931), 13–23.44 Gropius, “Houses, Walk-ups or High-Rise Apartment Blocks?” 114.45 Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, trans. Eric Dluhosch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001; orig. 1932), 301.46 Karl Marx, "Estranged Labour" in Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm.47 Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, trans. Emile Burns (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1947), 184, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/anti_duhring.pdf.48 Mark Harrison, “The Soviet Economy in the 1920s and 1930s,” Capital and Class 2, no. 2 (1978): 78–94.49 Moisei Ginzburg, Dwelling: Five Years Work on the Problem of Inhabitation (London: Fontanka Publications, 2017; orig. 1934), 152.50 Mikail Aleksandrovich Okhitovich, “Zametki po teorii rasseleniia,” Sovremennaja Arkhitektura 1–2 (1930): 7–16; published in English as “The New Settlement Pattern” in The Horizonal Metropolis: The Anthology, ed. Martina Barcelloni Corte and Paola Viganò (Cham: Springer, 2022), 149–70.51 Okhitovich, “K Probleme goroda,” Sovremennaja Arkhitektura 4, no 4 (1929): 130–34; quoted in English in Cohen, Building a new New World, 249.52 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (New York: Penguin, 1985; orig. 1848), 105.53 Mikhail Barshch and Moisei Ginzburg, “Magnitogorsk,” Sovremennaja Arkhitektura 1–2 (1930): 24–25.54 Martino Tattara, “From the Cell to the Territory: The ‘Disurbanist’ Project of the OSA Group,” in Housing and the City, ed. Katharina Borsi, Didem Ekici, Jonathan Hale and Nick Haynes (London: Routledge, 2022), 79–93.55 Richard Stites, Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 196.56 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961); Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (London: Macmillan, 1973).57 Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: George Routledge, 1944), 10–23.58 Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 351–52.59 Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), ix.60 Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, 145–47.61 Anthony Fontenot, Non-Design: Architecture, Liberalism and the Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 136–68.62 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 120.63 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 186.64 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 235.65 Newman, Defensible Space, 1.66 Newman, Defensible Space, 8.67 Newman, Defensible Space, 170.68 Newman, Defensible Space, 13.69 For an overview of the criticisms lodged at Coleman, see Jane M. Jacobs and Loretta Lees, “Defensible Space on the Move: Revisiting the Urban Geography of Alice Coleman,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 5 (2013): 1559–83.70 Mazzucato, The Value of Everything, 270.71 Mazzucato, The Value of Everything, 92–94.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the PhD Grant from KU Leuven. Notes on contributorsJesse HonsaJesse Honsa is a PhD candidate at KU Leuven. He has practiced as an architect with firms in Istanbul, Rotterdam, Zürich and New York City, focusing on large-scale housing and urbanism. He holds degrees from The Berlage at TU Delft and the Rhode Island School of Design. His PhD project, entitled “Economies of Scale” is supervised by Martino Tattara and considers how the scale of organisations and projects can influence housing practices.