Engineering and the Architecture of Economic Recovery: TARP, the New Deal, and the Evolving Landscapes of Crisis

Abstract

The New Deal represents a megaengineering project par excellence, which transformed the infrastructure, economy and landscape of the United States for generations. Few cities, towns or National Parks are unmarked by the infrastructural imprints of Great Depression-era construction projects. In this chapter, I reflect on the key features of the economic recovery plans instigated by Presidents Bush and Obama, with particular emphasis on their (dis)continuities with the engineering projects of the New Deal. I suggest that the change in focus from employment and infrastructure (via engineering) associated with the New Deal, to the architecture of financial markets can be understood with reference to the “financialization” of the global economy since the 1970s in ways that have fundamentally reformulated notions of economic crisis and, therefore, recovery. I proceed by suggesting how the engineering of economic recoveries relates to two other megaengineering tropes: the Pyramid (standing in for physically spectacular megaengineering projects) and the cloud (virtual engineering projects). I show that the articulation between the spaces of the plan and the spaces of the laborer are common dimensions of the megaengineering project in general. As with the megaengineering projects of the Pyramid and the cloud, those of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) enroll many millions of people in the processes of meaning making. These recovery plans, and recovery plans past, are busy producing and reproducing lasting imprints, and contested places, in the landscape and the collective imagination of the U.S.