Part civic, part retail’: UK Jobcentres and the re-branding of the welfare state

The welfare state is a great gatherer. As part of its routine operation, it brings together strangers in large numbers in countless waiting rooms, queues, booths, and corridors. What role does interior architecture play in setting the tone of our encounters with the state, and to what political effect? Rather than building a case for why democracy needs public things, this paper examines how a certain category of things—buildings—participate in making or unmaking democratic publics. It does so through an extended case study, reconstructing with an “ethnographic sensibility” the evolution of the interior architecture of British Jobcentres, from their creation in the early twentieth century to the present. Over that period, Jobcentres were renamed, relocated, refurbished, recolored and rebranded several times over, in a series of attempts to change the institutional atmosphere of the welfare state. By combining archival research with insights from STS, architectural history, and political theory, I critically interrogate this evolution and uncover the political stakes in seemingly innocuous design choices. The paper advances two main lines of thought. It aims to show, first, that architecture is not just a revealing window into changing understandings of citizenship, but an active participant in promoting a different mode of engagement between citizens and the state. It argues, second, that with the agency of architecture comes responsibility: if architecture plays a part in shaping the publics of the administrative state, it acquires by that token responsibility for the kind of publics it brings about. I sketch what this responsibility might consist in, and describe two ways in which the architecture of welfare agencies can fail citizens—by disorienting them as they come in contact with the welfare state, and silencing them should they try to speak back to it.