Architecture, Power, and the Poor | “As a profession, architecture lacks moral position and has become complicit in the neoliberal dispossession of the poor.”—Vivek Rawal

Architecture presents itself as a progressive, enlightened, and socially responsible profession. Architects speak constantly of public good, inclusivity, sustainability, environment, and even community. They often portray themselves as mediators between policies and people through their design. But this is a view through ‘the looking glass’ that bends reality into fantasy. From the standpoint of ordinary people, the reality of what architects do and whom they serve is starkly different and disappointing.

Architecture, as an organized profession, has historically always aligned with dominant structures of political and economic power. In the past, they served kings, feudal lords, and colonial regimes. In the present, they serve capital. This is not merely a matter of some individual architects lacking compassion. The problem is structural.

Architects are not neutral designers of space. They are active collaborators in the conversion of land and shelter into commodities. There is little historical evidence that architects, as a profession or a class, have ever worked in favour of the poor and against political power or capital. Today, the profession’s structure clearly indicates its alliance with power and capital through its education, its practice, its dependence on rich clients, and its integration with planning and real estate. This can be seen clearly in contemporary Indian cities.

In cities like Gurgaon, architectural practice has not merely followed private real estate, but it has actively created for financial benefits, so-called modern urbanism—a landscape of gated communities, luxury apartments, malls, and corporate campuses. In Ahmedabad, from the Sabarmati Riverfront to developer-led housing along SG Highway in western Ahmedabad, architectural practice consistently speaks the language of unlocking land value, return on investment, demand, and supply. All this development reveals that architectural practice functions as part of a real estate ecosystem, not as an independent social profession. Similarly, in the Smart Cities Mission, architects have played a key role in promoting urban beautification and investor-friendly city images, rather than challenging the neglect of informal settlements.

To understand why this matters, let’s look into how housing was historically produced. In the past, ordinary people built their own homes through collective social processes. These processes, though socially rooted, were not free of exploitation. Caste, gender, religion, and social hierarchy shaped access to labour and resources, as well as settlement patterns, determining who could live where. The poor and Dalit’s were excluded. What made a difference was the possibility and opportunity of political consciousness among the poor. Whenever such consciousness developed, people were able to question their conditions, organize collectively, resist displacement, and navigate power relations, even if they did not always succeed.

The kind of political consciousness that enabled the poor to question power and align with collective struggles was missing within the architecture profession. The role of architects concentrated on elite projects: palaces, temples, monuments, colonial buildings, and spaces that symbolized and perpetuated power.

The absence of professional architects was not a deficiency. It was precisely this absence that kept the housing within the domain of community practice, rather than professional control and shaped what we now romanticize as ‘vernacular’ architecture.

Today’s neoliberal era has fundamentally changed this. As capital demands continuous expansion, it requires new markets. Housing for low-income groups and the poor, once outside the purview of such markets, represents a vast, not yet fully tapped opportunity. The social processes through which the poor historically produced housing have been completely disrupted and replaced with market-driven mechanisms. Land and shelter are now financial assets. Planning is reorganised to attract investment, maximise property values, and facilitate real estate speculation. Architectural practice, as is currently organised, enables this transformation. Their language of the public good, inclusion, and liveable conditions makes them ideal mediators for bringing the housing of the poor under market control.

In Mumbai’s proposed redevelopment of Dharavi, corporates may drive profit-focused urban transformation, but architects collaborate and provide it with technical legitimacy, visual aesthetic appeal, and professional expertise.

To justify private capital’s control over housing, existing conditions must be framed, and even shaped, as substandard, inadequate, unhygienic, unliveable, disaster-prone, unsafe, and chaotic. Informal squatter settlements are labelled as scars on the city. Architects and planners provide the technical and aesthetic language that legitimises this narrative. Presenting design as a panacea for transformation, the profession helps formalise and regulate housing through master plans, zoning regulations, building codes, and redevelopment schemes in ways that systematically reduce the agency of the poor.

Housing becomes market-dependent and turns into projects for architects. They mask this role by glorifying “design” as inherently transformative, creating striking forms, stylistic identities, and iconic buildings presented as symbols of development. But these achievements do not challenge the underlying political economy of housing.

A visually attractive redevelopment project that displaces informal residents remains an act of dispossession, an act of violence, regardless of its architectural merit. What was once produced socially must now be accessed through the market.

Architects provide both the technical expertise and the moral justification for this transformation. They claim to be working for the people. Some even advocate for a still larger role for themselves. Despite the progressive rhetoric, the profession remains complicit in the dispossession of the poor.

Property values, returns on investment, and urban image drive planning and design. Slum redevelopment projects, public-private partnerships, and formal affordable housing schemes are frequently designed with significant architectural inputs. Communities in the slums are relocated to peripheral high-rise blocks. They are cut off from livelihoods and social networks. Informal settlements, street economies, and self-built homes are treated as obstacles. So, they need to be removed, not recognised as expressions of living communities. Squatter settlements, symbols of resistance, are to be erased. For the Sabarmati Riverfront Development project, more than 10,000 families were moved to medium-rise apartments 7 to 12 kms away on the periphery of Ahmedabad city, disrupting their livelihoods and community living.

Architects participate by designing the apartment blocks that replace informal neighbourhoods in the name of ‘providing liveable housing’ and ‘designing for informality’. They produce visual renderings that make so-called development look attractive. They convert political decisions into built form, masking them in the language of design excellence and even awarding themselves for it.

Equally troubling is how many of today’s architects have embraced the vocabulary of ‘participation,’ ‘vernacular,’ and ‘sustainability.’ Many architects now claim to work with and for artisans, revive traditional materials, or empower local communities. Yet all of this often results in a more sophisticated form of co-option. Crafts and building traditions that once served collective needs are extracted from their social contexts and repackaged for elite consumption.

Traditional materials and artisanal skills are aestheticised and commodified with arguments of taking the vernacular forward or getting a better bargain for the artisans. Earth, lime, bamboo, and stone are marketed to urban elites as symbols of authenticity and socially responsible ways of building their mansions. Artisans are integrated into supply chains by architects, who, instead of questioning the system, make them part of it and thereby serve power.

Architects increasingly function like market platforms. They sit between artisans and elite consumers, much like Amazon between sellers and buyers, or Uber between drivers and riders. They claim to ‘empower’ artisans with access to wider markets. They claim to give traditional materials contemporary relevance and vernacular knowledge new life. In reality, the power flows the other way. Architects control the interface. They shape the terms of exchange. They extract value while enabling the transaction or engagement. What looks progressive on the surface actually deepens capital’s control.

At present, the profession of architecture lacks moral position. Behind the rhetoric of sustainability, participation, and innovation lies the uncomfortable truth. As a profession, architecture has become complicit in the neoliberal dispossession of the poor.

It does this by hiding capital’s control of the housing process in the language of design and planning, and deflects attention from the process of dispossession. If architects are to have any moral-ethical credibility, they must reflect and confront this reality. A genuinely progressive stance would mean acknowledging and questioning their own role and complicity in turning housing and urban development work into a capital accumulation process for the rich and elite.

It would also mean questioning the political authorities, arguing for community control, and for the right of the poor to shape their own environment, even if that reduces the centrality of their own role. If architects are honestly serious about helping the poor, they must be willing to step back and abandon the fantasy of the architect as the primary agent of transformation.