Archi-shittification.

“Enshittification” is a word that doesn’t sound good.
It’s clumsy, blunt, almost unpleasant.
Maybe that’s precisely why it works: because it names, without ornament, a process we’d rather not look at. Cory Doctorow used it to describe the progressive decay of digital platforms, but its power lies elsewhere: the logic he describes reaches far beyond the internet.

And it turns out to be a surprisingly effective lens to read what’s happening to cities.

When a city gets worse not by mistake, but by design

Enshittification is not an accident. It’s a cycle: first a system provides value to attract users; then it drains that value to satisfy those who fund it; finally it collapses, having consumed everything that kept it alive.

Many cities of the past twenty years seem to follow exactly this trajectory. Not because architects suddenly forgot how to design, or because materials became worse overnight. The real failure happens elsewhere — in the deep transformation of the role of architecture itself.
From social infrastructure to extraction tool.
From public gesture to financial operation.
From mediation between body and space to product.

Urban shittification as a material process

Shittification doesn’t fall from above: it seeps, slowly, through the languages and priorities of design. Cities start to deteriorate when they stop being social organisms — imperfect, conflictual, alive — and turn into glossy products to be placed on the market.

This is the moment when neighbourhoods change their nature.
They do not emerge to generate life, but market value.
First come investors, then KPIs, then polished renderings. And only afterwards — if any room remains — some form of living. The result is a city that works perfectly for capital and terribly for the people who inhabit it.

In this context, public space loses depth. It’s no longer a place of encounter but a backdrop. Clean, orthogonally organized, perfect for photographs, yet incapable of sustaining actual collective life. An aesthetic tailored to investors, not to inhabitants. A beauty that metabolizes nothing, because it responds to no need except that of appearing.

Housing follows the same logic: designed not for the people who will live in it but for those who will buy it as an asset. Smaller homes, more expensive, more standardized. And those who cannot afford them are pushed out — expelled by processes the city calls “regeneration,” which are often nothing but forced redistributions of who gets to live where.

At that point, the city begins to repeat itself, like a corrupted file playing the same track over and over: same materials, same volumes, same languages. A global architectural monoculture that turns every place into a generic elsewhere. It’s not decay — it’s simplification: the minimal, sellable, replicable version of design. Standardization as a response to complexity.

Architects inside the machine

And here a necessary, uncomfortable point emerges: it’s not just the investors’ fault, nor the funds’, nor the planning frameworks designed for yield. A portion of architectural shittification also grows from inside the profession.

Not because architects have become mediocre or careless, but because they have gradually misplaced their ethical backbone. In Italy — and we should say this more often — professional ethics exists, it’s clear, articulated, and explicitly speaks about social responsibility, public interest, civic value.

Yet it is often ignored.
Not challenged — simply forgotten.

Set aside in the name of deadlines, the next commission, internal competition, or the quiet, internalized belief that “the market decides,” and that the architect’s role is to interpret what can be done, not what should be done.

This is how the project loses its political voice and becomes a service. And a service, by definition, never questions the structure that sustains it. Shittification also happens like this: when designers relinquish their critical role and implicitly accept the limits imposed by those who finance. When social responsibility becomes an accessory, not a mandate.

The real core of the problem

The urban shitocene is not made of ugly buildings, but meaningless ones.
Not of decaying neighbourhoods, but of lifeless ones.
Not of incapable architects, but of disarmed — and at times complicit — architects working within a model that reduces dwelling to an economic variable.

A city deteriorates when the human becomes an obstacle.
When vulnerability is something to be erased, not listened to.
When complexity is treated as a design flaw.

Enshittification, applied to cities, is precisely this: the normalization of architecture that does not welcome, does not protect, does not imagine — but simply sells.

And now what?

This is not about romanticizing a past that never existed, nor about demonizing those who invest or build. It’s about recognizing a process — and doing it now, before the city closes itself permanently around a model that treats everyday life as an inconvenience.

Maybe the first step to reverse the trajectory is to recover the political core of the discipline.
To put ethics back at the centre — not as a bureaucratic checklist, but as the grammar of our relationship with space and its inhabitants.

Maybe the shitocene is not just a diagnosis.
Maybe it’s the point from which we start designing again.