Professor Bernardo Zacka, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

For most of those who interact with it, the state is a place. It is somewhere we go to do something, or somewhere we are summoned to have something done to us. The way that place looks and feels prepares us for the interaction to come. It evokes associations with other settings that help us situate the occasion and give it meaning. It puts us in a certain mood or mindset, before so much as a word has been uttered. 

These simple facts have not escaped the attention of scholars of the welfare state, but they have not held it either. Most remark in passing on the glum atmosphere of welfare offices, but only as a prelude to describing the human drama that unfolds in them. What can we learn by looking more closely at the bland and generic spaces in which welfare agencies greet us? Architecture will not change public policy, and no amount of interior design will make a trip to the welfare office a pleasurable experience. But what can architecture do? How can it participate in repairing or in undermining the relationship between citizens and the state? And what does this tell us more broadly about what we should demand of an interface between state and society at a time when the bureaucratic encounter is migrating online?

Bio

Bernardo Zacka (MIT) is a political theorist with an interest in ethnographic methods. His research focuses on how citizens ordinarily encounter the state. His first book, When the State Meets the Street, probes the everyday moral life of frontline public service workers. He is currently working on a second book project on the architecture of welfare offices.