Political Theory and Architecture 9781350096592, 9781350103771, 9781350103757

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Political Theory and Architecture

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Is there an Object Oriented Architecture? Engaging Graham Harman, ed. Joseph Bedford Bare Architecture: A Schizoanalysis, Chris L. Smith Space after Deleuze, Arun Saldanha

Political Theory and Architecture EDITED BY Duncan Bell & Bernardo Zacka

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Paperback edition published 2021 Copyright © Duncan Bell, Bernardo Zacka, and Contributors, 2020, 2021 Duncan Bell and Bernardo Zacka have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Simon Goggin Cover image: Boston City Hall (c. 1968) © Boston City Archives All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bell, Duncan, 1976- editor. | Zacka, Bernardo, 1983- editor. Title: Political theory and architecture / edited by Duncan Bell & Bernardo Zacka. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021006824 | ISBN 9781350096592 (hb) | ISBN 9781350250826 (pb) | ISBN 9781350103757 (epdf) | ISBN 9781350103764 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture and society. | Architecture--Political aspects. | Political science. Classification: LCC NA2543.S6 P625 2022 | DDC 720.1/03--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006824 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-9659-2 PB: 978-1-3502-5082-6 ePDF: 978-1-3501-0375-7 eBook: 978-1-3501-0376-4 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents

List of Figures vii List of Contributors viii Acknowledgmentsix Introduction Duncan Bell and Bernardo Zacka

1

PART 1 ARCHITECTURE AND POLITICAL REGIMES 1 What (if Anything) Is “Democratic Architecture”? Jan-Werner Müller

21

2 Fortifications and Democracy in the Ancient Greek World Josiah Ober and Barry Weingast

39

3 Plato’s Magnesia and Costa’s Brasilia Gábor Betegh

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PART 2 ARCHITECTURE AS CONSTITUTIVE OF POLITICAL SPACE 4 What’s in a Balcony? The In-Between as Public Good Bernardo Zacka

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5 Durability and Citizenship: Toward an Arendtian Political Philosophy of Architecture Ronald Beiner

103

6 The Soft Power of Neighbors: Proximity, Scale, and Responses to Violence Nancy L. Rosenblum

121

Contents

PART 3 ARCHITECTURE AS INFRASTRUCTURE: GOVERNMENTALITY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 7 Scripting the City: J. G. Ballard among the Architects Duncan Bell

143

8 Architecture as Government Ali Aslam

165

9 Making Superstar Cities Work: Jane Jacobs in Toronto Margaret Kohn

181

10 Whose Right to the City? Lessons from the Territorial Rights Debate Benjamin Hofmann

197

PART 4 THE POLITICAL AGENCY OF ARCHITECTURE 11 Can Architecture Really Do Nothing? Lefebvre, Bloch, and Jameson on Utopia Nathaniel Coleman

217

12 The Architecture of Political Renewal Mihaela Mihai

235

13 The Modesty of Architecture Randall Lindstrom and Jeff Malpas

255

14 Architecture, Materiality, and Politics: Sensations, Symbols, Situations, and Decors Antoine Picon

277

Epilogue Top-Down/Bottom-Up: Co-Producing the City Fonna Forman

295

Index307

vi

Figures

2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2

4.1 4.2 4.3 12.1 12.2 12.3

13.1

13.2

13.3 13.4 13.5 14.1

14.2

Known walled poleis in the Greek world. King, City, and Elite game. Sketches by Lúcio Costa for the master plan of Brasilia from 1957. Image Brazil State Archives. Magnesia’s Plan, Gábor Betegh. Sketch of the author after Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter. Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 255, fig. 3. The view from inside the apartment: A balcony looking onto other balconies, with the street in between below. A personal arcadia. As if in an amphitheater. Haus des Meeres, by Thomas Ledl (Own work). Energiebunker Wilhelmsburg Südseite, by NordNordWest, Commons by-sa-3.0 de. Energiebunker Wilhelmsburg (vormals Flakturm VI) Ehemalige Geschützstellung, jetzt Verankerung des Gerüsts der Solarthermieanlage by Hinnerk Rümenapf. “The Colossus of Mount Athos in Macedonia,” an interpretation of Dinocrates’s proposal by Johann Bernard Fischer von Erlach, in Entwurff einer Historischen Architectur, 1712. Sketch plan of Monticello, drawn by Jefferson (laid in a letter to J. H. Freeman), showing the villa and its chora, including dependencies (servant and slave quarters), garden, orchard, grove, and various pathways as they existed in 1806. The CCTV Building, Beijing, OMA Architects. Part of the West Bay Business District, Doha, Qatar. Centre Left, Doha Tower; Far Right, Tornado Tower. Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, and the distant West Bay Business District. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, perspectival view of the entrance of the of the Altes Museum in Berlin, from Sammlung architectonischer Entwürfe, 1819–40. Rahul Mehrotra, KMC office building in Hyderabad, India, 2002.

42 48 68

69 82 94 97 244 246

248

256

265 269 271 271

284 285

Contributors

Ali Aslam Assistant Professor of Politics, Mount Holyoke College Duncan Bell Professor of Political Thought and International Relations, and Fellow of Christ’s College, University of Cambridge Ronald Beiner Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto Gábor Betegh Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy, and Fellow of Christ’s College, University of Cambridge Nathaniel Coleman Reader in History and Theory of Architecture, Newcastle University Fonna Forman Associate Professor of Political Science and principal in the political and architectural practice Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman Benjamin Hofmann PhD Student in Political Theory, Princeton University

Jeff Malpas Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Tasmania, and Visiting Distinguished Professor, La Trobe University Mihaela Mihai Senior Lecturer in Political Theory, University of Edinburgh Jan-Werner Müller Professor of Politics, Princeton University Josiah Ober Mitsotakis Professor of Political Science and Classics, Stanford University Antoine Picon G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, Harvard University Nancy L. Rosenblum Senator Joseph Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government, Harvard University

Margaret Kohn Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto

Barry Weingast Ward C. Krebs Family Professor of Political Science, Stanford University

Randall Lindstrom Architect and Adjunct Lecturer, Discipline of Architecture, University of Tasmania

Bernardo Zacka Assistant Professor of Political Science, MIT

Acknowledgments

Duncan Bell would like to thank the following for enlightening discussion on the politics of architecture, and for assistance with this volume: Sarah Fine, Joel Isaac, Max Sternberg, the students in his occasional M.Phil seminar on “Architecture and Political Theory,” and especially, Bernardo Zacka. For stimulating conversations on architecture, Bernardo Zacka is grateful to Nicholas Ray, Oded Na’aman, Abdallah Daher, Jan Mach and Jan Vondrák at Mjölk architekti, and especially to Duncan Bell and Valentina Pugliano. The editors would like to thank Ali Aslam, Margaret Kohn, and Matthew Longo for their valuable feedback, Hannah Woods and Danny Tobin for their excellent research assistance, and Liza Thompson, our editor at Bloomsbury, for her enthusiastic support.

x

Introduction Duncan Bell and Bernardo Zacka

This volume aims to resume a dialogue between political theory and architecture, two fields that have conversed only intermittently. The essays we have assembled begin from the premise that architecture is not merely a backdrop to political life but a political force in its own right. Taken together, they aim to give countenance to that claim and to show how our thinking about politics can be enriched by a closer attention to the built environment. The political significance of architecture can be explored from a variety of disciplinary angles, including architectural theory, geography, urban politics, the anthropology of space, and the sociology of the built environment. While the present volume draws on these literatures, it is firmly rooted in yet another field, political theory. It seeks to capture how contemporary political theorists, whose research does not typically center on architecture, have encountered it in their work, what substantive issues it has raised for them, and how they have sought to approach it from within their own disciplinary traditions. To broaden the range of perspectives further, the political theorists who form the core of this volume are joined by a group of philosophers and architectural theorists with cognate interests. Substantively, our aim is twofold: to demonstrate the salience of a range of political theoretical approaches to the analysis of architecture and to show that architecture deserves a place as an object of study in political theory, alongside laws, policies, institutions, norms, practices, imaginaries, and discourses. Our hope is that political theorists will find in the collection a variety of models for engaging with architecture and that architects will encounter new ways into familiar terrain by seeing their field refracted through the lens of another discipline.

Architecture as a basic social institution For a discipline that prides itself on interrogating the structures that govern social life, contemporary political theory has had surprisingly little to say about the built environment. While references to “public space” and the “public sphere” abound, they tend to be metaphorical, with the first designating the shared world of artifacts and institutions that relate us to one another (Arendt’s “common world”), and the second the discursive platforms in which people discuss matters of common concern (Habermas’s “public sphere”).1

Political Theory and Architecture

This was not always the case. When Plato set out in The Laws to provide a constitution for a new colony, he accorded architecture and urban design a place on a par with other basic social institutions.2 For just as we think that the structure of our laws can channel behavior, express collective values, and foster a public ethos—so too, Plato suggests, does the built environment. In treating the built environment as a foundational element of political life, Plato inaugurated a theme that would reappear episodically throughout the history of political thought. Some of the examples that have most captured the imagination of theorists— the Greek agora, Versailles, the panopticon, the phalanstery, the Zeppelinfeld, the camp, Brasilia—have entered our political lexicon to such an extent that they now stand for something else—for democratic assembly, politics as spectacle, power without coercion, utopian community, totalitarianism, the space of exception, and high modernism. Our wager in this volume is that we might be able to give architecture a new lease in political theory by refocusing on the built environment itself rather than on its associations. That there is a link between the configuration of space and social life has of course long been recognized in the design professions and beyond.3 The built environment shapes what is salient within our visual and auditory field, habituates us to circulate in certain ways, affects who we are likely to encounter as we go about our daily affairs, and imparts meaning to what we do together. It is perhaps no surprise that utopian visions for new societies so often involve a new physical layout—as if a new life would require a new setting to be lived in. Architectural determinism—the idea that the built environment determines social behavior—has long been untenable, especially in light of the failure of so many modernist schemes, but expectations of architecture still run high. Juhani Pallasmaa, the Finnish architect and author of the celebrated book The Eyes of the Skin, entrusts architecture with the task of making us at home in the world. “The essential mental task of buildings,” he writes, “is accommodation and integration.” “They project our human measures and sense of order into the measureless and meaningless space.”4 Alain de Botton, in a popularizing text, is even more sanguine. At stake, he tells us, is nothing less than our identity and edification. “Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places—and on the conviction that it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.”5 If our expectations of architecture have been high, so too have the disappointments been bitter. The promise of the OSA Group, the association of Soviet constructivist architects, to turn buildings into “social condensers” that would engender encounters between disparate social groups and contribute to breaking down social hierarchies may still be alluring. But no one today thinks that a layering of programs and the creation of new building types would be sufficient to achieve that.6 The lived and the built may be connected, but the history of design interventions invites caution. It reminds us that these tissues are “fragile” and “tear easily,” as Richard Sennett puts it,7 and that the connection between them is loose and intricate—so intricate, in fact, 2

Introduction

as to inspire doubt. If architecture has its enthusiasts, so too is it regularly derided as frivolous, ineffective, and epiphenomenal. The truth of course lies somewhere between these two poles—the heroic and the deflated—although where, precisely, is a question on which the various contributors to this volume have their own views. Rather than begin with exalted promises regarding what architecture can do, we would like to start on a more sober note, with three familiar vignettes. We use them to illustrate not so much what architecture can achieve on a political plane—we leave that to individual chapters—but rather how it has been thought to do political work. A. When Winston Churchill famously said of parliamentary chambers that “we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us,” he was voicing a thought that Robespierre had already formulated 150 years earlier. Churchill pronounced these words in 1943, in a speech in favor of restoring the House of Commons, destroyed during the Blitz, to its old form.8 Restoration meant retaining the oblong shape of the room, with benches facing each other and a layout that could comfortably fit only a portion of the members of parliament. Churchill was attached to the architecture of the House because he thought it fostered a valuable style of adversarial debate. For this, he adduced two reasons. Compared to semi-circular layouts in which political stances gradually shade from left to right, a room divided into opposing benches forces parliamentarians to choose sides and makes any crossing of the aisle a momentous occasion. The shortage of seats, moreover, makes the room appear full even when not everyone is present, lending a sense of heightened urgency and liveliness to debates. If Churchill took an interest in architecture because it advanced a particular style of deliberation, Robespierre turned to it to promote a conception of political representation according to which mandated representatives must remain immersed in a process of ongoing exchange with society.9 In an equally famous speech on representative government delivered in 1793, Robespierre judged the admission to parliament of only a few hundred spectators insufficient. He proposed erecting, instead, “a vast and majestic building open to twelve thousand spectators.”10 For Robespierre, merely securing the publicity of proceedings was not enough. What was required was proportionate publicity: representatives had to be surrounded by the immense number of those whom they claim to represent, sensing their presence at all times.11 Only then, before the eyes of the multitude, would “corruption, intrigue, and deceitfulness” be quashed and responsibility flourish.12 For both Churchill and Robespierre, architecture figures as medium that weighs in on its occupants, channeling their behavior and informing the meaning of their actions. B. Only a couple of years before Robespierre’s speech, architecture had featured in a somewhat different guise on the agenda of the French Revolution. Since the built environment is one of the most enduring legacies from the past,

3

Political Theory and Architecture

new political beginnings are moments rife for architectural introspection. At stake, this time, was the conversion of the church of Sainte Geneviève into a monument honoring the grands hommes—the Pantheon.13 A new category of republican figureheads, the grands hommes were neither monarchs nor saints nor even heroes. They were to be immortalized not for spectacular feats of bravery or acumen, but for the resoluteness of their commitment to the common good over the course of their lives. What should a reconverted building in their honor look like? Quatremère de Quincy, the architect charged with the conversion, dismissed outright the idea of a mausoleum, which he thought ill-fitting as a celebration of immortality. He relegated burial places to an underground crypt, clearing the ground floor for sculptures—a genre whose imposing, solid presence, and symbolic association with antiquity were thought to be particularly consonant with the memory of the grands hommes. The architect also walled up the church’s lateral windows, which flooded the space with changing light, and relied instead on indirect lighting entering through the cupola and filtered through ground glass. This created a more even and somber atmosphere befitting contemplation and in tune with the steadiness of character being honored. The end result was neither cemetery, nor church, nor museum: in order to represent itself symbolically, the revolution had to piece together a new architectural type within the remains of an old. C. Let us return to the twentieth century and consider a third manner in which architecture has been thought to produce political effects. In Towards a New Architecture, Le Corbusier famously wrote that “architecture has for its first duty […] that of bringing about a revision of values.”14 While the leading figures of the French Revolution were keen to represent novel values in built form, modernist architects often professed to do just the opposite. They sought to free the built environment from the symbolism that had been embedded in it so as to pave the way for a society less encumbered by its hierarchical and stratified past. Setting aside symbolism was meant to redirect the attention of architects toward the functional requirements of buildings. But slogans aside, the majority of modernist architects like Le Corbusier were no mere functionalists: they were keenly aware that architecture also contributes to orienting us in the social world, signaling differences between people, and providing cues about proper behavior.15 If architectural ornaments could serve as markers of social standing, their removal could, conversely, reduce the salience of social distinctions. One way to promote the value of equality was to render markers of class architecturally illegible, concealing differences in status behind repetitive façades and standardized units.16 With modernist architecture, the surface appearance of buildings became an instrument to transform the prevailing political culture—even if in doing so modernism had not so much superseded symbolism as created its own. 4

Introduction

Architecture as encouraging behavior and imparting meaning to actions; architecture as symbolizing values; architecture as fostering a political ethos—here we have, to go back to Plato, three prima facie reasons for thinking of architecture as a political institution. Add to this the fact that architecture is literally all around us, enveloping us just as much as language, and we have a case for thinking of it as a basic political institution, one that ought to be probed and examined from the vantage point of political theory. Nothing prevents us of course from launching into that investigation with a grain of skepticism. That architecture was thought to have far-reaching effects does not mean that it did, indeed, have them.17 How much does British parliamentary culture owe to the oblong shape of the House of Commons and how much to the rules that govern interparty competition? Among visitors to the Pantheon, how many did in fact catch on to the symbolism? And what is left, today, of the promises of Modernism to change society by changing the built environment? These are perfectly sensible questions to ask. One does not have to believe that architecture is a determining social force to think that it is worth studying in its own right. The built environment—from individual structures through to vast urban complexes—can be designed one way or another, or not at all, and that variation itself makes a difference. How much of a difference? That is a question that political theory as a discipline is ill-equipped to answer conclusively. How to conceptualize that difference, where to start looking for it, and how to understand its potential consequences (a difference for what?)—these are the sorts of questions for which political theory can prove more instructive. It is worth stressing, finally, that to probe the political significance of architecture is not the same as to study the political motivations of architects and their clients, although these could of course be instructive. Our opening vignettes all featured cases in which architecture was intentionally wielded as an instrument to achieve political effects. But just as intended effects can fail to materialize, so too can architecture have political consequences that are not intended. Architecture can acquire a life of its own as it is experienced, utilized, and repurposed by those who inhabit it. What’s more, architects are not always the best placed to interpret the significance of their creations. When Walter Benjamin looked to the arcades of Paris, he saw not just the technical prowess of their designers, but the phantasmagorias of an age, and the rapidity with which capitalism rendered its creations obsolete.18 As a “dialectical image,” the arcades opened a vista onto a deeper subtext that would not have been immediately decipherable to those who wrote it.

Four lines of inquiry While architecture might seem like a natural object of study for contemporary political theory, its presence in the field has remained muted—especially when compared to architectural theory’s ceaseless preoccupation with politics.19 There are of course

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exceptions to this lack of engagement, even prominent ones. We mentioned Walter Benjamin. But several other canonical figures in twentieth-century social and political thought have also paid close attention to the built environment, most notably Henri Lefebvre, the Situationists, Fredric Jameson, and (albeit more briefly) Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and more recently, Bruno Latour.20 Their influence can be discerned in the chapters that follow.21 These seminal interventions, we should hasten to add, have also inspired a number of valuable contributions in contemporary political theory22 and philosophy.23 For the most part, however, these have remained independent efforts and have yet to crystallize into a shared research program. The same can be said about political science, with signal contributions by Harold Laswell, Murray Edelman, James Scott, and especially Charles Goodsell finding resonances in more recent scholarship, without quite spawning a sustained body of work on architecture.24 Given this state of affairs, this volume is less a survey of a well-developed area of research than an attempt to aid in the development of a new one. We have thought it important, as such, to adopt an ecumenical approach. As editors, we could have narrowed the scope of the collection by settling on a precise definition of architecture and politics or by asking contributors to tackle a set of predefined questions. To do so, however, would have been to prejudge which scale of analysis would be most fruitful and which questions worth asking. That might have been a valuable provocation for a more established field of inquiry, but in this case we thought it would be premature to close options down. We have chosen instead to assemble a distinguished cast of contributors drawn from across the landscape of contemporary political theory and to give them the liberty to engage with architecture in the ways they found most promising. Some have opted to work from within the canon of political thought to articulate the role that architecture plays in the writings of major thinkers. Others seek to unearth the political ideologies that underpin the practice of architects or writers concerned with architecture. Others still take as their starting point concrete architectural projects, focusing on the political forces that shape their development, on how they are experienced by users, and on how they condition possibilities for collective action. Without purporting to be exhaustive in coverage, the essays reflect a wide range of the methods and sensibilities that animate contemporary political theory, including the phenomenological, normative, positive, conceptual, critical, and interpretive. In these essays, architecture features in an expansive sense, referring both to the built environment and to the ideas and practices of those who take part in shaping it. While architectural thought and design are at the center of the volume, the contributions all recognize that these must be situated within a broader set of forces—social, economic, cultural, ideological—that play a part in determining what gets built and what meaning is given to it. Most chapters ground and illustrate their discussion with reference to specific sites (buildings, plazas, parks), infrastructural projects (greenways, fortifications, highways), or architectural elements (balconies, ornaments). Since the 6

Introduction

boundary between architecture and urban planning is porous, others go on to explore the connections between buildings, neighborhoods, and cities, engaging in the process with urban sociology and geography. What emerges from this multifaceted engagement with architecture is a collection of essays clustered around four lines of inquiry. These themes were not preplanned, but appeared organically. They give the volume its organization. (1) A first group of essays probe the connection between architecture and political regimes. Does it make sense to speak of regimes as having their own architecture (Müller)? If so, how can we explain such an affinity (Ober & Weingast) and what does it tell us about the values that political elites seek to project (Betegh)? (2) A second cluster of essays propose to think of architecture as constitutive of the social and political realm. They look at how the configuration of space shapes the way in which people are assembled (Zacka), what they hold in common (Beiner), and what bonds tie them to one another (Rosenblum). (3) A third group of essays cast architecture as an infrastructural agent complicit in larger political processes, examining how it is enmeshed in logics of governmentality (Bell; Aslam) and critically appraising how it figures in the political economy of the city (Kohn; Hofmann). (4) A fourth group of essays, finally, examine to what extent we can think of architecture—tributary as it is to power hierarchies and indebted to the logic of capital—as a partially autonomous social force. Can architecture be a vector of emancipation under capitalism (Coleman)? Can it serve as a force for political renewal in the wake of violence (Mihai)? What virtues could serve to guide it (Lindstrom & Malpas)? And where, precisely, does its political agency reside (Picon)?

Overview of the volume Architecture and political regimes The relationship between the built environment and particular types of political regime has been a topic of reflection for centuries.25 Do particular urban configurations celebrate or facilitate authoritarianism, dictatorship, republicanism, or democracy? Can certain styles, types of structures, or building materials express or symbolize political values or principles—glass for democratic transparency, concrete as honest egalitarianism, neoclassicism as monumental celebration? Jan-Werner Müller tackles the vexed relationship between democracy and architecture. Insofar as it enables and constrains human action, he argues, architecture has an irreducible political dimension—“it is deeply connected to the dynamics of association and dissociation; it also renders some things visible and others invisible; it is implicated in the creation of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity.” But its democratic potential is much harder to specify. He examines 7

Political Theory and Architecture

both procedural and substantive arguments, from how planning decisions about the built environment might be made more democratic to questions about the possible political meaning(s) of architectural styles and materials. Although skeptical of inflated claims about the radical democratic potential of architecture, Müller highlights some modest ways in which the built environment can facilitate democratic politics. Following Claude Lefort, among others, he argues that democracy is best understood as institutionalized uncertainty, its procedures and norms generating divergent, unpredictable outcomes. The best that architects and planners can do is to produce public spaces that foster this indeterminacy, reflecting the “open, undetermined character of democracy.” He concludes by offering suggestions for how they might do so. If one were to associate democracy with an architectural element, the wall would be an unlikely choice. Walls appear to signal exclusion and the drawing of boundaries that undercut claims of inclusivity, transparency, and open access. Josiah Ober and Barry Weingast demur. Turning to the ancient Greek world, and utilizing a novel combination of textual analysis, historical reconstruction, and game theory, they seek to explain how the city walls of the ancient world promoted democracy. Taking their cue from a passage in Aristotle’s Politics, they argue that as a heavily fortified city Athens was relatively safe from outside attack, allowing commerce, political institutions, and a dynamic civic life to flourish. Moreover, in contrast to the unwalled Sparta, Athens proved hospitable to outsiders and immigrants. Ober and Weingast argue that although walls did not cause democracy, they were necessary for its longevity, establishing a pattern that persisted, in one form or another, into the republican city-states of early modern Europe. “To whatever degree we suppose that the western tradition is predicated on transmitted Greek culture,” they conclude, it is also “predicated on an initially counter-intuitive relationship between city walls and democracy.” They leave open the question of what this historical analysis might imply for urban politics and democratic theory today. Gábor Betegh draws out the ethical and political ideals underpinning the plan for two ideal cities. First, he turns to Plato, exploring the unbuilt city of Magnesia elaborated in the Laws, the first (surviving) detailed argument in the Western philosophical tradition about how urban design can shape citizens. He contends that, despite the obvious differences, Plato’s account bears a striking resemblance to the principles of urban design found in Le Corbusier’s writings, and especially in Lúcio Costa’s initial plan for Brasilia. He develops three lines of argument. First, that both Plato and the high modernists thought that it was possible to design cities that inculcated certain political ideals, thus fostering a particular kind of citizenship. Second, that there are overlaps in how they critiqued existing urban environments: both thought that the layout of contemporary cities was “a symptom and a supporting cause for the morally corrupt state of institutions and practices.” Political reform thus necessitated architectural innovation. Finally, he challenges the view that Plato was a misguided utopian, arguing instead that his account of the built environment was more subtle and sensitive to lived experience than that of Le Corbusier or Costa. 8

Introduction

Architecture as constitutive of political space The following three chapters explore how architecture helps constitute social and political worlds, investigating the ways that built spaces canalize, limit, and encourage, forms of human interaction and (un)sociability. In Justice and the Politics of Difference, Iris Marion Young suggests that city life, understood as the being together of strangers, is an attractive normative ideal for interpersonal relations in a democratic polity.26 But if the reserved sociability of the city is desirable, what can residential architecture do to bring it about? Bernardo Zacka outlines an answer. Drawing on the work of the Dutch architect and Team 10 cofounder Aldo Van Eyck, he argues that architecture has an important civic role to play in articulating the transition between individual dwellings and the broader city, between interior and exterior, private and public. In the hands of architects, such dualities are not merely conceptual; they represent physical spaces that must be connected through design. Zacka focuses on one architectural element that plays such a connecting role—the balcony—and examines the forms of life it occasions. He argues that as a “space in-between,” it brings people into distinctive patterns of encounter, demarcating a sphere of “reserved sociability” that operates according to its own normative logic. The relationships that occur in such a sphere take place not merely in space, but through space: they arise because of the spatial configurations in which people are placed. Zacka examines why such relationships may be valuable and suggests that they play an important role in mediating the encounter between individuals and the collective: they allow for cities to be at once home and a space of encounter with unassimilated otherness. What transpires from his discussion is an image of architecture not merely as instrumental to the attainment of values or representative of them, but as constitutive of a valuable interpersonal realm. In thinking about the common world that binds us to one another, political theorists and architects alike have drawn inspiration from the wide-ranging philosophical reflections of Hannah Arendt.27 Ronald Beiner begins by observing that the basic categories of Arendt’s political philosophy—worldliness, public space, space of appearances—evoke the built environment, then argues that architecture can serve for Arendt as a mode of politics, helping develop civic consciousness. Beiner maintains in particular that certain kinds of vernacular built environments are conducive to the sustenance of active citizenship. He privileges premodern spaces, cities such as Dubrovnik, Jerusalem, Avignon, and Santiago de Compostela, arguing that architectural modernism often fails to respect or respond appropriately to the cultural traditions and forms of life necessary for nurturing “grounded citizenship”—the “civic experience grounded in shared attachment to a built place that provides an enduring home for members of a political community created over many generations.” Living in “soulless cities,” he claims, “condemns us to being soulless citizens.” Reanimating citizenship thus demands the construction and protection of built environments that “feel like real sites of grounded worldliness.” Beiner concludes with a call for political philosophers to pay more attention to how architecture shapes public aspects of human experience. 9

Political Theory and Architecture

Nancy Rosenblum, meanwhile, draws attention to the normative and political significance of neighbors, identifying the forms of sociability necessary for sustaining the “democracy of everyday life.” The built environment, she argues, plays a central role in shaping neighborhoods and the patterns of social relations within them. Political theorists thus need to pay more attention to “the particulars of place and scale and the configurations of the physical environment” within which neighborly ties crystallize. Neighbors are neither intimate friends nor anonymous members of a large-scale community; they are instead “our environment, the background to our private lives at home,” and as such they are “our landmarks—the human materials from which we construct our mental maps of the lay of the land whose center is home.” It is important to recognize their status and significance. While Rosenblum’s account of neighborly virtues is not a theory of architecture, the moral qualities and challenges it encapsulates cannot be understood in abstraction from the design and placement of residential housing. “The built environment,” Rosenblum contends, “determines the proximity of neighbors, the frequency of contact, and our capacity to affect one another’s quality of life at home.”

Architecture as political infrastructure: governmentality and political economy The next four chapters focus attention on urban infrastructures, examining how the built environment participates in governmentality and in the political economy of the contemporary city, all from different methodological vantage points. Duncan Bell probes what literary sources might tell us about architecture and political life. He does so by discussing the work of the writer J. G. Ballard, who is widely hailed as one of the most penetrating diagnosticians of modern consumer culture. Ballard’s work on the built environment has attracted considerable interest from architects and architectural critics, though as yet little from political theorists. Bell argues that Ballard is best read as emphasizing the pivotal importance of infrastructure in shaping and indexing sociopolitical developments and that his work can be seen as a complex meditation on the interwoven transformation of the built environment and subjectivity in the late twentieth century—a shift between what Bell terms industrial modern and postmodern digital infrastructural regimes. While Ballard is almost invariably seen as a dystopian thinker, this misses the interesting tensions and shifts in his account of architecture. Starting out as a utopian, invested in the radically transformative potential of modernism, he later became increasingly worried about the threat posed by urban developments, and especially mass surveillance and consumerism, to individual liberty and democratic life. Ballard’s provocative work exposes both the utopian potential of modernist architecture and the ways in which the relentless spread of all-enveloping surveillance technologies and practices of spatial enclosure render architecture complicit in anti-democratic, authoritarian politics. 10

Introduction

While Bell turns to literature, Ali Aslam enjoins us to revisit one of the pivotal figures of twentieth-century political thought, Michel Foucault. Aslam opens his chapter by noting the dissolution of classical Hobbesian conceptions of sovereignty under the relentless pressures of global capitalism. He suggests that Foucault’s analysis of governmentality, premised on the circulation of people and goods, offers a more fruitful starting point for making sense of the contemporary urban condition. Aslam argues that architecture and urban design “habituate” subjects. The Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne’s (CIAM) germinal Athens charter, produced under the influence of Le Corbusier, was predicated on a traditional conception of centralized sovereign power, and the cityscapes created in its wake have helped to incubate pernicious forms of governmentality, chiefly through the creation of segregated urban spaces: business districts, commercial zones, residential neighborhoods. This pervasive model of urban planning both requires the circulation of people and encourages the routinized monitoring of populations. It frequently translates into a “set of expectations about activities and persons who fit the norm in such zones,” allowing for the identification and marking of the abnormal, the “out of place.” In response to this logic, Aslam argues for a form of disruptive architecture. In particular, he advocates for the creation of spaces, such as greenways and urban parks, that transect and destabilize functionally segregated zones. These spaces are prefigurative, both enacting and demonstrating the possibilities of forms of sociability essential for a vibrant democratic politics. Margaret Kohn discusses the urban vision of Jane Jacobs, one of the key urbanists of the twentieth century, and argues that it has become an unreliable guide to city planning in light of contemporary developments like gentrification. Jacobs’s The Life and Death of Great American Cities prescribed the development of dynamic streetscapes and neighborhoods, and it continues to inform debate and policymaking to this day.28 Kohn outlines and criticizes some of the key arguments made by Jacobs. Using Toronto as a case study, she suggests that Jacobs’s vision has become a victim of its own success: the communities that have developed on the pattern she advocated are now too expensive for the workers on which their urban vibrancy largely depends. They rely on a “constitutive outside,” composed of peripheral infrastructural zones and “dystopian residential neighborhoods” that house the service workers necessary for their continued operation. Gentrification has undermined the normative ideal of the city that Jacobs endorsed. To address this problem, Kohn discusses ways in which Jacobs’s model can be reworked, inviting us to reconsider, and perhaps rehabilitate, the modernist architectural ensembles to which Jacobs was opposed. Critics of gentrification often appeal to the idea of a “right to the city” to resist the displacement of existing city dwellers by newcomers. That idea—associated in particular with Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey—is one of the few concepts widely used in architectural and urban planning circles that seems to connect up straightforwardly with the concerns and conceptual armory of political theorists.29 Yet as Benjamin Hofmann shows, the idea of a “right to the city” is elusive and open to competing interpretations. Versions of the right to the city have recently been utilized by some political theorists to argue 11

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against gentrification and to provide protections for tenants and homeowners. Working within a liberal analytical framework, Hofmann examines arguments about the possible connection between territorial (occupancy) rights and individual rights to the city. While finding that they have some plausibility, he offers a critique of existing formulations of the right to the city, highlighting how they disadvantage potential migrants to the city in favor of existing occupants. Such arguments encode a status quo bias, serving to reproduce forms of injustice and discrimination. He finishes by sketching some possible ways to expand the notion of a right to the city so that it avoids these pitfalls.

The political agency of architecture Much twentieth-century architecture, and especially high modernism, was avowedly utopian in its claims and ambitions, seeking to forge a brave new world through design and planning.30 Recent decades have witnessed a notable turn against this kind of utopianism.31 Some radical theorists, perhaps most famously Manfredo Tafuri, have gone so far as to suggest that short of a political revolution architecture would be incapable of realizing emancipatory goals, constrained and deformed as it is by the underlying capitalist order.32 Rejecting this deflationary trend, Nathaniel Coleman discusses the utopian potential of architectural design and practice. Utilizing the writings of Fredric Jameson, Ernst Bloch, and Henri Lefebvre, he argues for a form of utopia as method or process. Rather than presenting an ideal blueprint or template, of the kind long articulated by utopian thinkers and architects, this mode of utopianism seeks instead to refocus attention on questions of use and inhabitation, identifying built forms and places that allow individuals and communities to escape the “hollow spaces” of contemporary capitalism. Architects and planners, Coleman contends, need to work against the grain, seeking to undermine existing forms or urban development. Challenging Tafuri’s argument, he insists that the creation of new utopian spaces is both possible and essential to revitalize democracy. Exploring how architecture can be reimagined in the wake of violence, Mihaela Mihai turns to the work of pioneering architectural theorist Lebbeus Woods. Reading him as a political theorist, she argues that architecture can, in certain circumstances, facilitate political renewal. Through the creation of “free spaces” that allow for the interplay of imagination and memory, it can catalyze improvisation that “fructifies” rather than obscures the material and symbolic “scabs” and “scars” that violence inscribes on the body politic. To highlight the way that this can work in practice, Mihai discusses two case studies, the massive Nazi flak towers that still loom over their surroundings in Hamburg and Vienna. She argues that through creative planning and design, these reappropriated structures at once engage a painful history and experiment with visions of the future. While aware of the limits of architecture in dealing with violence and its manifold consequences, Mihai argues that it can play a productive role in enhancing a democratic ethos.

12

Introduction

Randall Lindstrom and Jeff Malpas discuss the virtues necessary for a desirable built environment. They defend the idea of modesty, proposing an ideal of architecture that responds to the call of the situation in which it must intervene. Architecture, on this account, should not be committed to particular styles, or seek to shock and awe through novelty, but should, rather, remain attentive to the demands of particular situations, particular places, and to the voices of those who would be affected by it. Its practitioners should try to devise, with as few preconceptions as possible, a path forward that is informed by tradition but not exhausted by it. Modesty, they argue, encompasses a variety of desirable traits—to keep measure, to set bounds, not through restriction and exclusion but through inclusion and participation. It is likewise, and for similar reasons, a political virtue. Malpas and Lindstrom argue that recognizing boundedness and situational specificity is necessary if we are to create built environments that offer a distinctive sense of place. They are clear that this call for modesty is not a nostalgic rejection of the modern. If executed properly, modern architecture too is capable of being responsive to specific social and environmental situations. Antoine Picon closes the volume by seeking to discern where the political agency of architecture might reside. Skeptical of claims that there is a direct correspondence between design and programmatic outcome—between architectural configuration and regime type—he probes the political valences of symbolic and ornamental features of the built environment. Architecture, on his account, is best seen not as providing a template or vehicle for articulating specific values, principles, or ideals, but rather as a site for the creation of meaningful human action, and as such as a ground for political life. It “deals with the way one can frame collective human action so that it appears meaningful.” Color, texture, surface, volumes, light—the materiality of the built world—shape how “we experience the tangible reality that surrounds us” while simultaneously “enhancing our understanding of ourselves as subjects of this experience.” The political agency of architecture, Picon contends, is expressed in two main ways: first, in the capacity of the fabricated world to catalyze “situations,” moments that can “orient action in certain directions” and, second, through the construction of “immersive environments” that “reinforce the feeling that human action can be meaningful.” Rather than something to be stripped away, as proponents of dogmatic modernism have often argued, the ornamental and symbolic palimpsest of the contemporary city should be recognized as an important source and stimulus of collective meaning making. The volume concludes with an epilogue by Fonna Forman, a political theorist who is also a partner in an architectural practice (Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman). Part intellectual biography, part urban manifesto, Forman’s essay reflects on what political theory can contribute to our thinking about the urban condition, and how it might be transformed in return. She draws inspiration in equal measure from Latin American cities and from the writings of Adam Smith to advocate both a particular kind of normative theorizing—one “grounded” in constructive participation between 13

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the theorist and the theorized—and the importance of informal modes of urbanism and architectural design. Individually, and in combination, the essays in this volume attest to how wide-ranging the exchange between political theory and architecture can be. Far from exhausting the subject, they only scratch the surface. As well as showcasing a rich array of arguments, we hope that the volume serves as inspiration for further reflection and research on this fascinating and important subject.

Notes 1

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), esp. 50–8; Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), esp. sec. II. For an examination of public space along such lines, see Marcel Hénaff and Tracy B. Strong (eds.), Public Space and Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). For a discussion of how physical public space is imagined in different traditions of political thought, see Bernardo Zacka, “What Is Public Space For? Political Imaginaries and Policy Implications,” in The Routledge Handbook of Ethics and Public Policy, Annabelle Lever and Andrei Poama (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 2019), 143–55. 2 Plato, The Laws, ed. Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). See Chapter 3 in this volume, by Gábor Betegh. 3 Susan Fainstein, “Foreword,” in Spatializing Politics, Delia Duong Ba Wendel and Fallon Samuels Aidoo (eds.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2015), vii. 4 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester: Wiley, 2012 [1996]), 12. 5 Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness (London: Penguin, 2007), 13. 6 See the special issue on “The Social Condenser: A Century of Revolution through Architecture, 1917–2017,” The Journal of Architecture 22, no. 3 (2017). 7 Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 16. 8 For a full text of Churchill’s speech and the ensuing debate, see https://api.parliament.uk/ historic-hansard/commons/1943/oct/28/house-of-commons-rebuilding# S5CV0393P0_19431028_HOC_277 (accessed October 1, 2019). 9 Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Bon Gouvernement (Paris: Seuil, 2015), 278. 10 Maximilien de Robespierre, “Sur les Principes de Morale Politique Qui Doivent Guider la Convention Nationale dans l’Administration Intérieure de la République,” in Oeuvres de Robespierre, ed. A. Vermorel (Paris: F. Cournol, 1866), 286. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 This account draws on Mona Ozouf, “Le Panthéon: L’École Normale des Morts,” in Les Lieux de Mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, T. 1 La République (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 139–66. 14 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover, 1986), 227. 15 For a discussion of buildings as communicative devices, see Amos Rapoport, The Meaning of the Built Environment: A Nonverbal Communication Approach (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1990). 14

Introduction

16 James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 56. 17 Indeed architectural theorists are themselves often highly critical or ambivalent about the political potential of architecture. For a classic example, see Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976). 18 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 19 For an introduction to some of the most influential texts in architectural theory of the past 50 years, see Kate Nesbit (ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965–1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996); Michael Hays (ed.), Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). For more recent accounts of the political dimensions of the built environment produced by architectural theorists, see Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Aggregate, Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014); Albena Yaneva, Five Ways to Make Architecture Political. An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 20 See, for example, Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Tom McDonough (ed.), The Situationists and the City: A Reader (London: Verso, 2009); Fredric Jameson, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,” in Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory (London: Verso, 2008), 344–71; Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 141–60; Theodor Adorno, “Functionalism Today,” trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith, Oppositions 17 (1979): 31–41; Jürgen Habermas, “Modern and Postmodern Architecture,” in Habermas, Critical Theory and Public Life, ed. John Forester (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977 [1975]), Pt. 3, ch. 3; Jacques Derrida, “Point de Folie— Maintenant l’Architecture,” trans. Kate Linker, AA Files 12 (1986): 65–75; Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, “Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture,” in Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research, ed. Reto Geiser (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008), 80–9. For a useful collection of seminal writings on architecture by philosophers and cultural theorists, see Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (Abingdon: Routledge, 1997). 21 Yet even in the “continental” tradition, to which many of these authors belong, architecture has mostly remained a minority interest, with more attention paid to the visual arts and music. See Gabriel Rockhill, “The Forgotten Political Art par Excellence: Architecture, Design and the Social Sculpting of the Body Politic,” in The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture, ed. Nadir Lahiji (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 19–34. 22 For examples of political theoretical engagement with architecture and urbanism, see Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Kohn, The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Raymond Geuss, A World without Why (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), ch. 8; Paul Hirst, Space and Power: Politics, War and Architecture (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), ch. 8; Daniel A. Bell and Avner de-Shalit, The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); John Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space: The Physical

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23

24

25 26 27

28

29

16

Sites of Democratic Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Clarissa Rile Hayward, How Americans Make Race: Stories, Institutions, Spaces (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Susan Bickford, “Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship,” Political Theory 28, no. 3 (2000): 355–76; Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Scott Roulier, Shaping American Democracy: Landscapes and Urban Design (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018); Thad Williamson, Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship: The Civic Costs of the American Way of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Susan Fainstein, The Just City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz, “Global Justice at the Municipal Scale: The Case of Medellín, Colombia,” in Institutional Cosmopolitanism, ed. Luis Cabrera (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 189–215. Contemporary philosophers too have taken part in articulating the ethical and political significance of architecture. See, in particular, Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Fred Rush, On Architecture (London: Routledge, 2008). Harold D. Laswell, The Signature of Power: Buildings, Communications, and Policy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1979); Murray Edelman, “Space and the Social Order,” Journal of Architectural Education 32, no. 2 (1978): 2–7; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), ch. 4; Charles T. Goodsell, The Social Meaning of Civic Space: Studying Political Authority through Architecture (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988); Goodsell, The American Statehouse: Interpreting Democracy’s Temples (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001). For more recent works by political scientists that engage closely with architecture, see Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); Alfons Van Marrewijk and Dvora Yanow (eds.), Organizational Spaces: Rematerializing the Workaday World (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2010). Valuable historical context can be found in Harry Mallgrave (ed.), Companions to the History of Architecture, 4 vols. (Oxford: Wiley, 2017). Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), ch. 8. Kenneth Frampton has been central to the appropriation of her work in architectural theory. See, for example, Frampton, “The Status of Man and the Status of His Objects: A Reading of The Human Condition,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn Hill (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979); Frampton, “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism,” Perspecta 20 (1983), 147–62. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1993 [1961]). See also Alice Sparberg Alexiou, Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Peter Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” in Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (eds.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), ch. 1; David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (2008). On Lefebvre, see Lukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

Introduction

30 Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic, 1977); Nathaniel Coleman, Utopias and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2005). Relevant primary sources can be found in Ulrich Conrads (ed.), Programs and Manifestos on 20th Century Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). 31 For political theorists, the best-known critique will most likely be James’s Scott’s discussion of the pathologies of “high modernism” in Brasilia: James Scott, Seeing Like a State, ch. 4. Scott’s discussion relies heavily on Holston, The Modernist City. 32 Manfredo Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” in Architecture Theory Since 1968, ed. Michael Hays, 2–35. See, more broadly, Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia.

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Chapter 1

What (if Anything) Is “Democratic Architecture”? Jan-Werner Müller

Can architecture be democratic? Most people would readily agree that architecture (and, more broadly speaking, the built environment) is bound to be political. As Thomas Jefferson put it, design activity and political thought are indivisible. But what does that mean concretely? In the popular imagination the combination of “architecture” and “politics” is bound to conjure up distinctly undemocratic figures: totalitarian leaders designing monumental edifices and avenues for eternity. And if authoritarians fancy themselves as architects, so a particular logic might go, architects often act like authoritarians: at best they might create something for the people, but not anything meaningfully seen as being of the people and certainly not anything by the people.1 This is especially the case if—as has become commonplace in our public discourse today—“the people” are categorically opposed to “the elites.” As Giancarlo de Carlo once observed drily, “In all epochs, whatever the importance of his role, the architect has been subject to the world view of those in power … As a professional, the architect became a representative of the class in power.” Yet in our day there is also plenty of pious, if not outright kitschy, talk by architects about how their creations will reflect or even reinforce democratic values—even when the actual product happens to be placed in a clearly authoritarian context such as China. We live in an age when cities are marketed for mass tourism with iconic buildings— the famous “Bilbao effect”—and it clearly can seem beneficial if, alongside an icon, one’s firm can deliver an uplifting story about liberty, equality, or whatever it might be that sounds best as part of public relations campaigns which sell cities partly by making visitors feel good about themselves morally and politically. As Bjarke Ingels, the brilliant, ever-enthusiastic Danish architect, who is guaranteed to provide a good story with every building design, once put it (in a way that cannot be called anything but utterly disarming): “I really like this idea that architecture is the art and science of trying to make everybody happy.”2 Who knows whether architecture will ever be able to make everybody happy; what we know for sure is that, by creating forms and spaces, architecture always both coerces and enables: it keeps some out; it allows some to meet and talk under a shelter; it makes us move in certain ways and blocks others. In that sense, it inevitably has a political dimension: it

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is deeply connected to the dynamics of association and dissociation;3 it also renders some things visible and others invisible; it is implicated in the creation of subjectivity and intersubjectivity.4 Yet in what sense, if any, might it be specifically democratic? This chapter sketches ways to think about this question more systematically. It also, in a very tentative manner, suggests some substantive answers as to how architecture, and the built environment more broadly, might be thought of as specifically democratic. Of course, the meaning of democracy itself is not uncontested; I shall not pretend that it is. However, the continuous contestation of the concept of democracy is not an insurmountable obstacle to a meaningful discussion of architecture and democracy, as long as the assumptions about what constitutes democracy are made reasonably clear. Less obviously, bringing architecture and democracy together might have an unexpected benefit: if we give up the notion of just mechanically applying definitions of democracy to architecture and the built environment, and instead try to shuttle back and forth between reflections on architecture and different spaces on the one hand and understandings of democracy on the other, perhaps we will see something about democracy that we just did not see before. To possibly get to that point, I shall first examine what many observers might take to be the most obvious way in which architecture and the built environment could be said to be related to democracy: decisions about architecture and urban spaces (I shall leave aside rural planning in this chapter) should be the outcome of processes that maximize popular participation. After discussing a number of problems with this seemingly straightforward demand, I shall consider the alternative notion that it is really the results of architectural and spatial “production” themselves—not the process—that should be judged more or less democratic. Here a rather crude distinction between representing democracy and facilitating actual democratic practices needs to be put in place. I shall then further distinguish ways in which the built environment might help or hinder particular practices, in the process sowing some doubt as to the pedagogical project of representing democracy before the people. Following the lead of political theorists John Parkinson and Philip Manow, I end with reflections of how spaces inside and outside official buildings in a representative democracy might best be structured to do justice to democracy’s dual nature: the necessarily tension-ridden coexistence of a locus of collective decision making on the one hand and a space for continuous political opinion formation and, more generally, political contestation on the other.

By the people? “Democratic architecture” as process At first sight, the obvious way in which architecture and urban planning could be democratic is by involving as many citizens as possible in the planning process.5 This is of course easily said—but it is exceedingly hard to do. The reasons are not just practical ones along the lines of: how do we get everybody into the same room at the same time or how 22

What (if Anything) Is “Democratic Architecture”?

do we select “representative citizens” from a larger group? For who exactly should be included in the process in the first place is far from clear. A typical candidate for a criterion of who to include is the notion that all those affected by a building decision should have standing to enter the planning process. But just who is to count as affected? And who decides who counts as affected? One would have thought it has to be the inhabitants of a building (or of a neighborhood), or of a city as a whole, or of an entire country, and in some special cases: perhaps nothing less than the world population as such. Let me illustrate this last, initially perhaps absurd-sounding question with one well-known example. Think of the symbolically very charged site “Ground Zero.” 9/11 undoubtedly was an event with global ramifications. But does that make every human being part of the constituency for decisions about sixteen acres in Lower Manhattan? Among political theorists, there is hardly consensus about how to answer this question; there are no agreed criteria for deciding who should count as affected.6 The experience of planning for Ground Zero, for many years undoubtedly the most closely watched piece of land in the world, illustrates the difficulties. There were carefully planned exercises in participation, branded as “Listening to the City,” to involve ordinary New Yorkers through a series of moderated conversations.7 But the relatives of the victims of the terror attacks, not without good reasons, argued that their voices should count for more in the design decisions. Even when it comes to elected officials, questions of standing (and who has authority to decide on standing) are not easily settled. For instance, should Michael Bloomberg, the then mayor of New York City, have had more of a say than the governor of New York State, George Pataki, whose voice was in the end decisive for picking the master planner of the site, the architect Daniel Libeskind? Such questions—about enfranchisement, territoriality, and divisions of competences—are not specific to architecture and urban design challenges, of course. And the fact that, in general, the answers as to who is affected and who is to decide are indeed highly contested does not mean that nothing can be said at all. Two issues might helpfully be distinguished: who has standing and what mechanisms should there be for translating whatever input those with standing wish to offer into binding decisions? Prima facie, public buildings need public discussion. After all, they are paid for by citizens; they inevitably communicate a message about a particular polity; and, in very many, if not all, cases, they are actually to be used by the public. The latter point is obvious in the case of many administrative buildings—think of ones containing social services—but it also applies to highly representative buildings where the public has at least some limited access—think of parliamentary viewing galleries or a place like Congress, where many constituents really want to see their representatives in their offices (and take selfies with them, etc.). For these reasons, it should be relatively uncontroversial that public building projects come with public presentations, the possibility of hearings (and, to be sure, actual listening), and, ultimately, transparent decisions such that decision makers can be held accountable by the public (which in practice means: specific, territorially bounded constituencies).8 23

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Of course, one could argue that elected representatives should simply take the required decisions and that there is no special burden here to make decision-making more open and participatory than is the case with laws in general. The rather obvious counter-argument is that especially symbolically charged buildings and urban spaces— ones that are ultimately about national self-representation—really do concern everyone directly. At the same time, it is harder to argue that special expertise is in any way necessary to enter debates about such self-representations. At least some private buildings and larger private urban spaces need discussion, too: after all, they can change the character of neighborhoods profoundly. Less obviously, they might eventually result in urban patterns—let’s say, highly exclusionary ones— which a wider public might rightly see as being at odds with the democratic commitments of a polity as a whole. Citizens might also come to see such patterns not just as failing to live up to certain political ideals, but also as very concretely rendering certain types of interactions more difficult, or even impossible. Here exclusions could be doubly pernicious: they are an injustice in and of themselves, but they also diminish the quality of a democratic political culture as a whole, since we lose a sense of different parts of the demos. The most disadvantaged become a pure abstraction; as has been shown by many studies, they no longer see democracy as doing anything for them; less obviously, other citizens in effect might cease to see them as important for democracy. Think of the fact that in ancient Athens political discussions took place not just in the ekklesia on the Pnyx, but also in the agora (similar arguments can be made about the Roman forum).9 In the ekklesia, citizens gathered for a directly political purpose, passing decrees, and there was a penalty for failing to attend (the famous red rope that marked democratic slackers). Most accounts affirm that in an assembly with raked seats all eyes were on the speaker (who had to face the sun to ensure maximum visibility of his face), while all those in attendance could also see each other (thus maximizing what has sometimes been called “inter-visibility”).10 In other words, everyone could hear and see the speaker, and everyone could see everyone else’s reactions to the speaker. By contrast, the agora was not dedicated to a single purpose; it simultaneously served as a space for religion, for leisure, and, above all, for economic activities (and, occasionally, specific political tasks, most famously, ostracism). In the agora, people met more by chance, conversations drifted toward politics or not, as the case might have been, and all kinds of people could be passing through. One element of Greek political life was also permanently present though: citizens could peek into the old Bouleiterion, sited on the edge of the agora; in this “Council House” the agenda for the ekklesia was being prepared; citizens could possibly even eavesdrop on the debates.11 The point is that in democratic Athens official political sites for debate and decision making were complemented with spaces where the demos could meet in its diversity. There people came across issues and problems about which they might not otherwise have heard and perhaps directly experience citizens’ and non-citizens’ difficulties. The problem with certain urban patterns today is that such an experience of diversity and, 24

What (if Anything) Is “Democratic Architecture”?

above all, manifest disadvantages, is becoming more difficult, if not impossible.12 For one never sees—let alone talks to—certain kinds of strangers in the polity.13 As Jürgen Habermas once put it, the demos can only appear in the plural;14 there is no such thing as a non-pluralist democracy. The question is how to render that pluralism visible without violating citizens’ legitimate concern not to have their life become constantly politicized, or to feel exposed and put on display somehow. Witness Daniel Libeskind’s pronouncements about his planning for Ground Zero: I think in a democracy we need pluralistic architecture, we need variety. We really need to concentrate on things that are not so obvious, which [at Ground Zero] is public space for people who are not going to be in the towers. I designed it [to be] not just about the buildings. It’s the spaces, what you see when you walk on the street.15 Libeskind—a self-declared “people’s architect”—has always insisted that he wanted to create “a space for people, not just corporations.” But what is a “space for people”? Presumably a space for all kinds of different people (as opposed to a space where the populist—and fascist—fantasy of a fully united and homogeneous people can be made manifest). One of the promises of the modern city has been that one can expect the unexpected. At the same time, one remains free to ignore the unexpected and retreat into the kind of anonymity which a chaotic, rushed city life affords, or, put differently, the indifference or Blasiertheit that Georg Simmel saw as characteristic of the modern metropolis.16 In certain urban environments, especially ones tightly controlled by private security companies, that particular promise is unlikely to be kept. This is not just about the poor and the homeless; in general, in the United States and Britain at least, it has become commonplace for conservatives to lament deep divisions in society and then immediately attribute the causes for such divisions to “culture” or, put more sharply, ongoing “culture wars.” The United States is said to be split between red and blue; people sort themselves into culturally and, thus ultimately, also politically homogenous neighborhoods; they eat, drink, and worship in completely different places and hence increasingly fail to talk to and understand each other.17 Such diagnoses are not empirically wrong, but they leave out the fact that “two nations” might also have been created through very concrete policy decisions such as ones about infrastructure and zoning; they are hardly “cultural” givens.18 More particular concerns about separation and displacement have been extensively rehearsed in the debates on gentrification, where the question of who has standing has proven especially difficult to answer.19 After all, there are good reasons to diagnose something like dispossession if those who have over many years invested care (and, more concretely, physical labor) in a neighborhood are displaced precisely because a neighborhood has turned more attractive due to their “investment.” Then again, it is hard to see why anyone should have a general right to preserve a particular character of a neighborhood, unless one would want to posit something like an entitlement to a 25

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particular cultural experience. While the slogan “right to the city” has been successful around the globe in recent years, the exact contours—and, especially, the justifications— of that right remain yet to be specified more clearly (for one promising attempt, see Benjamin Hofmann’s chapter in this volume). Democracy, as Tocqueville (and many after him) pointed out, is also a regime of sociability where a sense of equality and a certain ease in the way citizens treat each other predominate; patterns of systematic spatial and ultimately social exclusion are likely to damage this kind of regime.20 This can be a consequence of pluralism rendered invisible and impossible to engage with. A decline in democratic moeurs can result from an inability to experience diversity (and even strangeness); one simply does not know how to relate to certain people in an open, relaxed way; or one is inclined to deny them standing because one never meaningfully experiences them as part of the demos. Then there are public buildings for private use—such as the much-maligned social housing projects in the postwar period. Here we find the most obvious candidates for extensive discussions by users about what they actually need, and how existing structures do or do not fulfill certain functions. There have of course been plenty of critiques of modernist planning and housing on the basis of their supposed exclusion of the actual input of those to be housed; moreover, there have been many arguments about how seemingly rational planning can destroy evolved forms of sociability—Jane Jacobs’s are still the most well-known (her favorites “liveliness,” “intensity,” and “diversity” remain desirable characteristics of the urban landscape that also have implications for the democratic sociability discussed further above). Yet the apparent failure of many “projects” was neither inherent in a specific modernist design nor preordained by lack of participation by users. Systematic underfunding, and the fact that social housing reinforced existing lines of segregation,21 had much more to do with spectacular disasters such as Pruitt-Igoe and Cabrini-Green; it just proved convenient to use these disasters to illustrate fully preconceived arguments about modernist architecture (with Charles Jencks being the most well known, but by no means only case) and, less obviously, state-led provision of housing.22 “Participation” is no easy fix. Processes of decision making can easily be manipulated to generate the outcomes in line not only with the interests of bureaucrats but also with those of private developers.23 Furthermore, who is to count as a “user” of social housing in the future is contestable. Unlike with a polity’s collective self-presentation, or the patters of injustice discussed above, it is unclear whether all or particular citizens have standing here. Prima facie, a conventional legitimization of representatives proposing particular sets of housing policies would be preferable here—complemented, however, by a serious effort to take tenants’ demands into account. The problem with much social housing is not the planning process, but the systematic exclusion of the voices of actual residents, as seen most dramatically in the 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster.24 Residents are perfectly capable of organizing and exerting pressure; the failures of public housing are not in the architectural design, but can be found in the characteristics of political 26

What (if Anything) Is “Democratic Architecture”?

systems where their efforts are destined to remain futile. It is well documented that many residents displaced from public housing slated for demolishment actually considered these buildings a proper home. It is also well documented that gentrification of ostensible modernist monsters like the Brutalist Trellick Tower in London—at one point known as “the Tower of Terror”—has somehow made many problems allegedly inherent in the design disappear.25 I shall leave a detailed discussion of these questions for another occasion, but simply want to underline here that in all cases discussed a complete and utter exclusion of public consultation seems impossible to justify. In the instance of highly symbolic buildings— think of new national parliaments—and, to a lesser degree, overall urban patterns and public buildings for private use, there is a case to be made for direct involvement by citizens and for as pluralistic a process as possible.26 Yet the question of standing is controversial in all these instances.

For or before the people? “Democratic architecture” as “product” My discussion of process has already been shading into a consideration of what one might call particular “design products” (including particular urban patterns, for instance, ones associated with gentrification). Since certain urban patterns can so clearly send a message about the legitimacy of inequality and the fact that some citizens just don’t really matter, or because certain urban spaces can make it virtually impossible to experience the diversity of the demos, there is a prima facie argument for public participation. But these points can also be stated differently: what matters is the “product,” perhaps much more than the process, if it can be shown that a process with minimal or even no participation is more likely to yield a product that lives up to appropriate standards of “democratic architecture” (Le Corbusier once remarked that a desire for architectural competitions might be a sign of “democratic cowardice”).27 As Rowan Moore has rightly argued, “There is no absolute correlation between the powers that shape a space and the relationships of power that that space shapes.”28 So what if we just focus on a democratic product (and possibly have to conclude that democratic processes are not even very conducive to generating such products)? Well, what exactly might be a “democratic product” to begin with? One answer is that the “product” plausibly has to represent democratic values. In other words, what we are looking for is a space where citizens recognize their polity over time (and, ultimately, themselves) as subscribing to democratic values. Or, put provocatively: architecture needs to demonstrate to citizens from time to time what’s what politically. Axel Schultes, one of the architects of unified Germany’s new Chancellery in Berlin, quoted Wittgenstein as saying: “Architecture coerces and it glorifies; where there’s nothing to glorify, there can be no architecture.”29 And a US court once invoked the idea 27

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of a “glorification of a form of government through visual enhancement of its public buildings.”30 So the suggestion is simply this: use architecture to glorify democracy. How so? Particular forms or even materials are often said to symbolize such values: glass, for instance, is taken to signify “transparency” (and, by implication, democratic “accountability”).31 Or, put even more crudely, if Hitler’s infamous Wort aus Stein read “dictatorship,” then after 1945 a West German state’s Wort aus Glass was said automatically to spell “democracy.” For a long time, classicism as a style was coded as “revolutionary architecture” as such (which is why the British, when having to rebuild the Houses of Parliament after a fire in the nineteenth century, thought it wise to stick with a Gothic approach). Or think one more time of Libeskind, who, after all, chose the symbolic height of 1,776 feet for what used to be called the “Freedom Tower” (this was Pataki’s choice of name, of course; it was never made official). In sum, here architects put representations of democratic values before the people; their design amounts to a more or less explicitly pedagogical project. There are a number of problems with such a notion of buildings and public spaces somehow representing democratic values or at least gesturing at them. First, on the most basic level, such representations of democratic values are certainly not equally comprehensible. To the innocent observer, it needs to be explained that the tower is 1,776 feet high—and perhaps even what that number is supposed to stand for (and perhaps also that the spire had once meant to be on the edge of the tower’s roof and be a kind of parallel or response to the arm and the torch of the Statue of Liberty). In fact, many well-intentioned attempts to make buildings symbolic will simply not be understood at all or, if the descriptions are understood, will seem impossible to relate to the actual forms. Who can possibly remember that Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the original World Trade Center, thought the twin towers represented “man’s belief in humanity” and “his need for individual dignity”? And, more important, who could possibly give an account how the towers were exactly to communicate dignity and humanity? No doubt, clever, PR-savvy architects will easily come up with uplifting rhetoric and stories about how particular forms supposedly send a message about values. But some stories are so implausible that they will fail to resonate, and for sure they will not be remembered, and pedagogical lessons not remembered are no such lessons at all. There is a further, also rather obvious problem. A symbolic gesture toward democracy (and openness, tolerance, etc.) which actually has a good chance of being understood might easily go together with a denial of actual access and, hence, in the widest sense, participation, by citizens. For instance, it is perfectly nice that Germans can watch their deputies from Norman Foster’s glass dome on the redesigned parliament building in Berlin—they, as the ultimate sovereign, are symbolically elevated above their representatives (the parliament building in Canberra follows a similar logic). But de facto they remain distant spectators—they cannot even hear what is being said in their name; they also cannot appropriate the roof space in any individual manner, in the way that, for instance, people on top of the Oslo Opera might run, cycle, dance, 28

What (if Anything) Is “Democratic Architecture”?

etc. The aspiration to “transparency” (or what some have not hesitated to condemn as “transparency kitsch”32) goes easily together with actual exclusion.33 This is not to say all such architectural gestures must end up as this kind of tokenism. Consider two examples from the new federal government buildings in Berlin that have received much less attention than Foster’s iconic dome. Inside the Bundestag’s plenary, the galleries actually intrude into the semi-circular space. Here, again, the citizens watching are elevated above their representatives, but in way that symbolically makes them not so much spectators as a presence that cannot be ignored—one that might even, to a degree, be uncomfortable for professional politicians. Of course, citizens still have to behave themselves, but the dynamics of the space inside the parliament is clearly different from a traditional theater setting, where citizens get the message that they are mere spectators of the great game of politics. A building with deputies’ offices and committee rooms—the Paul-Löbe-Haus, designed by Stephan Braunfels—features a ground floor that resembles a street. The street as a site of democratic contestation and citizens acting in concert is at least symbolically brought into the official house of the government: ideally, a sobering reminder for professional politicians and administrators that there is more to democratic politics than formal, more or less bureaucratic structures; the decisions of representatives can always be contested. This brings us to a fundamental point: representing (let alone “glorifying”) democracy and facilitating democracy in practice are two very different matters. Of course, the representations of democratic commitments might encourage actual democratic practices. But what critics could in any case dismiss as democratic ornamentation or decoration (“Look! Glass! It’s democracy!”) might also positively distract from noticing the actual absence of democratic practices and, less obviously, the absence of architectural and spatial facilities for such practices. What Rowan Moore has called “overprogrammed buildings” might in fact shrink the space (both literally and figuratively) for citizens to articulate claims or engage in novel political conduct. Representing democracy is not about particular content that needs to be pushed on the people; if anything, it is about the ways in which citizens can relate to different forms of content. A fascist building overwhelms; there is no way for a mere individual to relate to and aesthetically enter it without sensing their insignificance in relation to the collective. By contrast, other buildings—let’s say a Gothic cathedral—allow an individual way in; those beholding the structure might still feel uplifted and at the same time retain a freedom of interpretation; they ascend as part of a differentiated, complex pluralistic whole.34 Perhaps this might have been obvious all along: democracy is unthinkable without rules that are based on and in turn enable freedom and equality, but it does not necessarily produce a particular content (whether particular policies or particular symbolic forms of self-expression), nor does it dictate a specific way in which individual citizens relate to its underlying principles and its particular expressions. Hence, it is highly problematic to define democratic architecture just on account of its “outputs” or “products.” After all, democracy amounts to a form of institutionalized uncertainty.35 An environment 29

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that allows for that uncertainty—as opposed to an overprogrammed one—and thus gives space for the new and unexpected to appear (or, for that matter, existing political commitments to be re-affirmed) is thus prima facie “more democratic.” I devote the rest of this chapter to exploring this thought further.

Facilitating democracy: Collective power, risk, prefiguration, sociability Democracies do not predetermine outcomes (including symbolic self-representations); rather, they enable open-ended processes of popular will-formation (including the will to particular collective self-representations of what a particular democracy stands for). Now, “open-ended process” does not mean “debates without decisions,” as Carl Schmitt was wont to charge. Rather, as already argued earlier in this chapter, democracy has a dual character: it combines a locus of centralized, formal decision making—generally known as parliament—with spaces that allow for continuous opinion formation and the ongoing contestation of collectively binding decisions.36 Both can become sites of debate and even of dramatizing conflicts (in a peaceful manner); Churchill, for instance, held that even inside a parliament there should be a “sense of crowd and urgency” (which also made him argue that “a small chamber and a sense of intimacy are indispensable”). Put differently, every democracy needs both a Pnyx with its ekklesia and an agora (as well as other spaces that might fulfill similar functions)—one place for formal policies and one for informal politics. What happens in the agora is obviously not directly binding—as Christoph Möllers has observed, it has no democratic form.37 Yet it still has democratic meaning. Continuing contestation on squares and streets might lead to a revision of formal decisions—making good on the promise of representative democracy as enabling a politics of second thoughts.38 Those who seek to revise democracy’s binding decisions should be able—here I pick up an image from Habermas—to lay siege to the institutions; they should want to exert pressure (as opposed to actually ending the siege by conquering the institutions).39 It is this particular dynamic of democracy that physical spaces should ideally help to enable, and it is this dynamic that has always been opposed by a certain kind of conservative fearful of the uncontrolled and uncontrollable masses. Just think of Mathew Arnold’s opposition to the common man’s “right to march where he likes, meet where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes.” Or remember Tocqueville’s anxieties that the “form-less” element of democracy might overwhelm democratic forms; he stated categorically that “men living in democratic ages do not readily comprehend the utility of forms” and that “forms become more necessary in proportion as the government becomes more active and powerful, while private persons are becoming more indolent and feeble.” 30

What (if Anything) Is “Democratic Architecture”?

The important distinction here is not between representative and direct (or, as it’s now sometimes put, post-representative) democracy. Most of what people do and say on squares and streets actually makes a claim to representativeness (just remember the slogan of the indignados: no nos representan!—clearly a call for different representation, not the end of the principle of representation as such). Democratic design of physical spaces should literally make room for what the political scientist John Parkinson has called “democratic performance,” enabling citizens to create and communicate their particular political messages.40 However, I differ from Parkinson when it comes to the elements of such democratic performance; let me in the remainder of this chapter spell out what I take the main ones to be. When Democratic Congressman Barney Frank commented, apropos Occupy Wall Street, that he did not understand “why people think that simply being in a physical place does much,”41 an appropriate answer might have been the following: first, it depends on who such “people” are and, especially, on how many of them there are. Civil rights marchers in the United States often evoked the “significance of our numbers,” the sheer “mass” of citizens willing to come out—and, in very many cases, endure hardship— for a cause. This might sound very basic, but, as we recently have been reminded, in discussions about presidential inaugurations, size matters. The ability to make size visible to a wider audience matters even more; in that sense, democratic performance of course also still depends on well-functioning media. And it is hard to think of any substitute—whether in physical space or online, for that matter—of signaling a massive presence other than through large-scale gatherings or movement in large squares and long, wide streets. Second, quite apart from the issue of sheer numbers, being together in physical space can create or, as the case may be, reinforce a sense of collective capacity, a sense of “can-do-together” (after all, one of the original core elements of democracy).42 Talking and ultimately acting with others—and seeing oneself and others as doing as such—is a sui generis experience. Ideally, both plurality and commonality become visible in what Hannah Arendt famously called a “space of appearance”; as Arendt also put it, “being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position. This is the meaning of public life.” Here the kind of democratic sociability on which Tocqueville remarked can become more intense than in day-to-day encounters. Under some circumstances collective presence can mean collective risk. In physical space one puts one’s body on the line or, rather, the street or square. As Susan Bickford has put it, “the public is a place of risk, uncertainty, incompleteness.”43 To be sure, in many democracies the danger is minimal; after all, free speech and free assembly should be guaranteed. Still, one does not have to resort to the clichés of crowd psychology to say that the specific movements and encounters of large numbers of bodies in space are unpredictable even in relatively safe public spaces. Exposing one’s body to possible harm is in itself a meaningful form of communication, quite apart from any more specific messages that one might wish to get across.44 In democracies where basic rights 31

Political Theory and Architecture

are under threat (and, of course, in authoritarian regimes) the risks are much greater, and it is not just the presence of the body that exposes one to risks, but also one’s sheer identifiability (by security cameras, through facial recognition technology, etc.). Third, a shared physical space can become a site of prefigurative politics—practices are tried and tested that might demonstrate to participants and spectators alike that, as the by now somewhat clichéd phrase goes, “a different world is possible.” For instance, theorists of Occupy have put particular emphasis on practices of voluntary cooperation— authentic forms of anarchism, in the eyes of some.45 Or think of Resurrection City, an encampment on the Mall in Washington, DC, that exhibited protestors’ capacity for self-organization and simultaneously served as a staging ground for targeted protests in other parts of the capital.46 Such experiments might again reinforce, or even open up new possibilities for, democratic sociability in the Tocquevillian sense; equality and ease become part of an intense, lived experience. Fourth, public protest can recode the meaning of physical spaces—including ones that had authoritarian connotations or ones that might have been officially democratic, but that remained in fact closed off to public participation (think of the government buildings in Brasilia—officially built for democracy, then used under dictatorship, long perceived as sterile, and finally occupied by citizens—climbing on the top of the buildings—during the dramatic protests of summer 2013). To be sure, such a recoding is hardly ever the direct goal of a protest, but it can be a long-term contribution to changing a political culture. The connotations of a specific space are transformed and—somewhat in line with the issue of representing democracy before the people discussed further above—serve as a reminder of democratic commitments and capacities. I want to finish with some specific suggestions about the spaces surrounding representative institutions in light of the Pnyx-Agora dynamic explored earlier in this essay. Ideally, parliaments should have large, empty spaces on one side, where the people can gather to voice concerns (what is sometimes called “Authorized Assembly Space”—even if that term has slightly Orwellian overtones). These spaces, as Parkinson has underlined, should not be overly landscaped: filling them with trees and benches might make them more pleasant for tourists, but less usable for what Parkinson has called “purposive publics”—publics with a clear political agenda (or, put differently, a desire to besiege democratic institutions in the Habermasian sense). Not quite space without qualities, but space that allows questions to be opened up, messages to be posted, as opposed to just enacting a political program given by one’s surroundings (as in: statues or other forms of representing democracy before the people).47 Witness the US District Court’s ruling on the question whether there could be demonstrations on the Capitol Grounds in Washington, DC: The only governmental interests that the Government has cited which would justify excluding all demonstrations are the “peace,” “serenity,” “majesty,” maintenance of a “park-like setting,” and the “glorification of a form of government through visual enhancement of its public 32

What (if Anything) Is “Democratic Architecture”?

buildings.” Ranged against these “interests” is the right to assemble and to petition for the redress of grievances. The First Amendment in its terms is plain: Congress shall make no law … abridging … the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. The desire of Congress, if such there be, to function in the “serenity” of a “park-like setting” is fundamentally at odds with the principles of the First Amendment, whose “function … under our system of government is to invite dispute,” and which “may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”48 Now, purposive publics are certainly not the same as “the people” themselves, and an assembly in open space should not give rise to fantasies of complete transparency and inter-visibility. “The people” can never fully appear in a democracy, nor can they be fully represented without the possibility of contestation. As Claude Lefort always insisted, the logic of representation in a democracy is very different from that in a monarchy: the king can represent the realm without remainder; but, in a democracy, the place of power remains always empty and contested.49 What parts of the people (never “the people”) can do, though, is, in the American example, “march on Washington.” To make parts of the people visible—especially those excluded or forgotten—is part of the democratic function of public space. Now, presence and visibility are not the same as inclusion, but without the former the latter is very unlikely. What follows? That the avenues need to be clear, and the room needs to be there, to march and assemble, and the spaces in front of institutions cannot legally or physically keep people out.50 To recap: parliaments never fully represent “the people”; neither do citizens gathered in a public space. As said above, only the former can make collectively binding decisions. Demonstrations certainly have democratic meaning, but they do not have a democratic form—to once again pick up the distinction developed by Möllers.51 The German political scientist Philip Manow has suggested that the reflection of representative buildings in a pool (as in “reflecting pool”) can symbolize the fluid, impermanent nature of democratic representation: neither the assembly nor assembled citizens ever fully represent the people without remainder; they are fleeting, and, on occasion, they might seek to disturb or even de-legitimate each other.52 It’s by making that dynamic— inherent in democracy—visible and, hopefully, productive, that architecture and urban design can both symbolically represent and facilitate democracy. This is not to say that democratic action can only take place in such designated spaces; a critic might easily say that “authorized assembly” space is just an insidious attempt to normalize or domesticate protest movements. But the point here is that such spaces signal a democratic state’s understanding of the dual nature of democracy and, more specifically, the legitimacy of ongoing contestation. There are likely always to be

33

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alternatives to engage in action and to bring about space in unexpected ways, including through the creative use of private or at least semi-private spaces: think for instance of how, in the last years of Milošević, citizens of Belgrade went on their balconies when the news started on television and banged pots and pans to drown out the state’s propaganda. As Arendt underlined, “The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be”; she went on to say that “action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost anywhere.” If this is right, then even private space can become the “proper location” for political action—as has been the case with the privately owned Zuccotti Park, which became the major site of Occupy, or even the atrium at Trump Tower, which has been the staging ground for a weekly reading by a protestor. Even fully private space might be repurposed on occasion, as long as the authorities tolerate such illegal occupations. However, these instances of repurposing privately owned public space do not invalidate the point that a state, by creating or, for that matter, not creating public space for contestation is sending a message to its citizens about what matters. From this perspective, it is remarkable that the space in front of London’s City Hall is owned by Kuwait’s sovereign wealth fund (and comes with distinct restrictions on who can engage in what kind of performance in this space).53

Conclusion Public spaces cannot guarantee the constitution of a public sphere. But then again, nothing in democracy can guarantee anything. Democracy is institutionalized uncertainty; its procedures—based on freedom and equality—can produce highly divergent outcomes. Public spaces should ideally reflect this open, undetermined character of democracy: they should not be over-programmed pedagogical spaces where democratic values are represented, but can hardly be practiced. Instead, they should do justice to democracy’s dual character and enable democratic opinion formation alongside, and sometimes against, formal institutions of decision making. Such spaces will never make “the people” visible, but they will afford specific publics to become present and, ideally, succeed in articulating their claims.

Notes 1

34

This essay draws on my “Can Architecture Be Democratic?,” Public Seminar, June 2015, at: www.publicseminar.org/2015/06/can-architecture-be-democratic/. For comments and discussions I am indebted to Duncan Bell, Tobias Hentzer Dausgaard, Martin Düchs,

What (if Anything) Is “Democratic Architecture”?

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15

Martin Jay, Hannelore Kaup, Thomas Kaup, Erika A. Kiss, Philip Manow, Fraser Nelson, David Runciman, and Bernardo Zacka. I also thank the students in my Princeton seminar on “Architecture and Democracy,” who in various ways helped me to think through the issues discussed in this chapter. See also Joan Ockman, “What Is Democratic Architecture? The Public Life of Buildings,” in Dissent 58 (Fall 2011): 65–72. Quoted in Andrew Rice, “Big Deal,” at: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/bjarke-ingels-2world-trade-center-wtc-2/(last accessed May 31, 2017). An understanding of the political as association and dissociation was of course most prominently proposed by Carl Schmitt, but not every such understanding has to come with an authoritarian Schmittian politics. Susan Bickford, “Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship,” Political Theory 28 (2000): 355–76. A classic statement of this position can be found in Giancarlo De Carlo, “Architecture’s Public,” in Architecture and Participation, Peter Blundell Jones et al. (eds.) (London: Routledge, 2005), 3–22. Robert Goodin, “Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 35 (2007): 40–68. For details, see Paul Goldberger’s Up from Zero: Politics, Architecture and the Rebuilding of New York (New York: Random House, 2004). Often such decisions are subject to a free vote in an assembly. This practice is not unproblematic. It seems to suggest that these are “just aesthetic” questions where individuals’ sense of taste can differ (somewhat, but only somewhat analogous to decisions where each deputy is allowed to decide according to their own conscience). But if we take the idea of a connection between architecture and democracy seriously, why should the usual mechanism of deciding along distinct party lines be suspended? Parties can still listen to their members—and deputies—on the question at hand and then prominently present a coherent justification as to why they adopt a particular stance—which in turn makes it much easier for citizens to orient themselves and hold parties accountable. See Jessica Paga, “Architectural Agency and the Old Bouleuterion in Ancient Athens” (on file with author); R. E. Wycherley’s chapter on the agora in his How the Greeks Built Cities (London: Macmillan, 1962), and Marcel Detienne, “Public Space and Political Autonomy in Early Greek Cities,” in Public Space and Democracy, Marcel Hénaff and Tracy Strong (eds.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 41–52. Richard Sennett, Designing Politics: The Limits of Design, at: http://theatrum-mundi.org/ wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Designing-Politics-The-limits-of-design.pdf (last accessed February 21, 2018). I am much indebted to the work of Jessica Paga here. Of course, “experience” is very relative here; I might have seen beggars and panhandlers before they were largely removed from city centers, but it would be a stretch to say that I experienced their concrete difficulties in any meaningful sense. Note the difference here between the actual experience of strangers and representations of otherness or even strangeness purposefully placed in an urban landscape to celebrate multiculturalism, as for instance in Bjarke Ingels’s “Superwedge” in Copenhagen. Jürgen Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskustheorie des Rechts und des Demokratischen Rechtsstaats (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 607. https://www.fastcodesign.com/3036773/slicker-city/freedom-tower-architect-daniellibeskind-ground-zero-is-very-very-close-to-my-o (last accessed May 30, 2017). This thought might point to something like an elective affinity between postmodernist

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16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31

32 33

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architecture and democracy as pluralism would appear to define them both. Pluralism in representations can of course easily go together with exclusions and radical reductions of pluralism in who gets to enter or even just relate to buildings and spaces. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” trans. H.H. Gerth with C. Wright Mills, in Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, ed. Richard Sennett (Englewood: Prentice Hall, 1969). Bill Bishop, The Big Sort (New York: Mariner, 2009). I am indebted to Kim Lane Scheppele for discussions on this point. See, above all, Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” in his Writings on Cities, trans and eds. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” in his Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2013); Neil Smith, “Toward a Theory of Gentrification,” in The Gentrification Reader, Loretta Lees et al. (eds.) (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 85–98. Sarah Schindler, “Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation through the Built Environment,” Yale Law Journal 124 (2014–15): 1934–2024. See, for instance, Gautreaux et al. vs. Chicago Housing Authority. Chad Freidrichs’s documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. Witness, for instance, the story of London’s Heygate Estate: http://heygatewashome.org/ (last accessed March 21, 2018). I leave aside here the case of private buildings with explicitly designated public uses— “privately owned public space,” although I have a few remarks on this controversial issue in the last section of this essay. It probably also helped that it was declared a Grade II* listed building. Libeskind at one point called the process leading up to the construction of the new World Trade Center complex “the most democratic in the world.” See Libeskind, “Learning from the World Trade Center Wrangles,” Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2013, at: http:// online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303914304579191962680304586. Martin Filler, Makers of Modern Architecture, II (New York: New York Review Collections, 2013). Rowan Moore, Why We Build (London: Picador, 2013), 199. “Nur Fragmente,” at: http://cicero.de/salon/nur-fragmente/37702 (last accessed May 30, 2017). U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia—342 F. Supp. 575 (D.D.C. 1972) May 9, 1972 (the idea was invoked, however, as insufficient grounds for restricting the right to free assembly). Michael Wise, Capital Dilemma: Germany’s Search for a New Architecture of Democracy (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998); Deborah Ascher Barnstone, The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany (New York: Routledge, 2005). What Ascher Barnstone calls “transparency ideology” is called into question not least by the fact that clearly authoritarian regimes have also been perfectly capable of building—and normatively justifying—glass buildings; think of Terragni’s Casa del Fascio in Como. Terragni explicitly claimed that “Fascism is a house of glass into which everyone should be able to look.” The Casa del Fascio was renamed Casa del Popolo after the war. Philip Manow, “Demokratie und Architektur,” Merkur 69 (2015): 45–52. There is a separate question why transparency should be seen as a democratic value in the first place. Democracy depends on a complex regime of visibility and invisibility; efforts to make everything transparent will only ensure that some discussions and decisions will be relocated into new venues affording obscurity and protection from

What (if Anything) Is “Democratic Architecture”?

“the eyes of the people.” Transparency is at best instrumental; it is not a first-order political value such as liberty or equality. 34 See also J. C. Berendzen, “Institutional Design and Public Space: Hegel, Architecture, and Democracy,” Journal of Social Philosophy 39 (2008): 291–307. 35 This thought is indebted to the seminal work of Hans Kelsen, Claude Lefort, and Adam Przeworksi. 36 Of course, normatively, this point is neither here nor there on issues of substance: Charlottesville was also about public contestation. 37 Christoph Möllers, Demokratie: Zumutungen und Versprechen (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2008), 33–4. 38 Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 39 Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung. 40 John Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space: The Physical Sites of Democratic Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 41 Michael Guerriero, “Barney Frank’s Opinions,” The New Yorker, December 9, 2011, at: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-political-scene-barneys-frank-opinions (last accessed May 31, 2017). 42 Josiah Ober, “The Original Meaning of Democracy,” Constellations 15 (2008), 3–9. 43 Bickford, “Constructing Inequality,” 357. 44 Judith Butler describes this as “a concerted bodily enactment, a plural form of performativity.” See Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 8. 45 Above all, David Graeber, The Democracy Project (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2013). 46 Tali Hatuka, “The Challenge of Distance in Designing Civil Protest: The Case of Resurrection City in the Washington Mall and the Occupy Movement in Zuccotti Park,” Planning Perspectives 31 (2016): 253–82. 47 Note the observation by Reinier de Graaf: “Public space—and I challenge anyone to come up with a better definition—is space accessible to all, subject only to common law. The immediate implication of that definition is that public space is a product of the law and not of architecture or urban planning. Public space—even successful public space—has nothing to do with either”; he concludes that “a product of the law, true public space allowed for an arena to oppose the same law.” See de Graaf, Four Walls and a Roof (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 119, 121. 48 U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia—342 F. Supp. 575 (D.D.C. 1972), May 9, 1972. 49 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1957] 1997). 50 In this sense Axel Schultes was also right so strongly, and for political reasons, to lament the fact that his and Charlotte Frank’s plans for the new government buildings in Berlin were never fully implemented: what has been sorely missing is the Civic Forum that they had envisaged in front of the Chancellery. 51 Möllers, Demokratie, 33–4. 52 Manow, “Demokratie und Architektur.” 53 “‘It’s really shocking’: UK cities refusing to reveal extent of pseudo-public space,” at: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/sep/26/its-really-shocking-uk-cities-refusing-toreveal-extent-of-pseudo-public-space (last accessed March 18, 2018).

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Chapter 2

Fortifications and Democracy in the Ancient Greek World Josiah Ober and Barry Weingast

Introduction: Democratic walls? How much has democracy to do with the development of urban architecture in the ancient Greek world?1 Jessica Paga, who has analyzed the impact of the emergence of democracy on the architectural development of the classical Greek city-state of Athens in detail, makes a strong argument that the answer is “a great deal.”2 Paga, in common with other classical archeologists and architectural historians who have addressed the question of democracy and architecture, focuses primarily on intramural civic and sacred buildings and spaces. In this chapter we take a step back to look at a category of architecture that (so we will argue) helped sustain democracy (if not liberal democracy3) across the Greek world in the late- and postclassical periods, that is, the massive stone and brick fortifications that framed urban spaces. We will make what we suppose is a counterintuitive claim: in late-classical and Hellenistic Greek antiquity, big investments by city-states (Greek poleis) in military architecture (especially monumental city walls and outworks, but also fortified villages, garrison forts, watchtowers in the countryside) were closely related to the spread of democracy across the ecology of city-states and contributed materially to the stability of democracy within those states. In this chapter we look only at the Greek evidence, but with an eye toward what we suppose might be a wider phenomenon. The general relationship between walled cities and the emergence and persistence of more or less citizen-centered forms of politics is a larger question of which the ancient Greek case is only one particular instance.4 It is implausible that there is any direct causal relationship between walling a city and the emergence of democracy. Yet roughly similar political and economic dynamics could, we suppose, produce certain regularities in social outcomes (albeit at a high level of abstraction) among premodern societies that both developed civic institutions and built walled cities despite marked cultural and technological differences among those societies. Testing that hypothesis goes far beyond what we can attempt here, but it would, we believe, be a fruitful area for future research.

Political Theory and Architecture

If the claim that fortification walls, intended to enable insiders to exclude unwanted others from a defined space, promoted democracy seems counterintuitive, it is because in antiquity, as in modernity, democracy was strongly associated with opening access to institutions, to trade, and to culture. Fortifications are intended to deny access— at least to certain persons under certain conditions. In modernity walls are associated with political orders predicated on limiting access (to spaces, institutions, rights). The construction of the infamous Berlin Wall in 1961, for example, was undertaken by an autocratic state, determined to limit movement by its own subjects. Tearing down the Berlin Wall in 1989 was, alternatively, associated with opening access and with democratization. Modern states with democratic constitutions do sometimes invest heavily in fortifications intended to limit access. Examples include the massive walls (sometimes euphemistically referred to as “fences”) built by the United States on its border with Mexico and by Israel on its border with Palestinian communities. Fortifications may or may not be justifiable as measures necessary for modern states to promote national security, but wall building is quite unlikely to be cited by political theorists as an example of a state’s open-access or democratic policies. We will return to the question of democracy and modern security walls in the final section of this chapter. In sections 2–4 we will show that there was a positive correlation between late-classical and Hellenistic Greek fortifications and democracy. We seek to explain, by use of a simple model, how that correlation arose from a positive reciprocal relationship between the demands of security and the incentives of elite and non-elite citizens of Greek city-states. In section 5 we demonstrate that the model tracks the historical record, as understood by recent scholarship in the field of ancient history, tolerably well.

Walls and regimes in the ancient Greek city-state ecology The relationship between walls and democracy developed against the background conditions for emergence and development of the Greek city-states. We focus here on the age from Plato and Aristotle to the Roman takeover of the Greek cities, that is, roughly the fourth through second centuries bce. The Greek city-state ecology in the early and mid-fourth centuries was characterized by a great many independent or semiindependent states—some 1,100 states, according to a comprehensive recent study,5 with a total population of some 8–9 million persons.6 While all ancient city-states are tiny by modern nation-state norms, the Greek states ranged widely in size, from states with a population of a few thousands to those with a population of up to a quarter million, with territories ranging from a little over a dozen square kilometers up to several thousand square kilometers. Competition among the city-states was intense. That competition, along with the emergence of legal regimes 40

Fortifications and Democracy in the Ancient Greek World

that encouraged substantial investment by individuals in human capital, resulted in a remarkable economic and cultural efflorescence: The Greek world saw strikingly high levels of both intensive (per capita) and extensive (demographic) growth in the half millennium from 800 to 500 bce.7 But inter-state competition was also potentially deadly (viz., the Peloponnesian War of 431–404), and the Greek states faced external threats from predatory empires (viz., the Persian Wars of 490–478). On the frontiers of the Greek world, and especially in the regions around the Black Sea, Greek cities confronted raids by (while also trading actively with) nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples.8 Failure against local Greek rivals, external imperialists, or nomadic raiders could, and fairly often did, mean destruction of urban infrastructure or even state death (extermination, enslavement, or forced migration of the population). Among the typical Greek responses to endemic security threats were: (1) developing forms of social organization that promoted effective mobilization of soldiers and (2) construction of fortifications aimed at defending cities and rural populations. The preference for strong city walls was not universal: Sparta, famously, remained unwalled in classical antiquity, on the principle that “our fighting men are our walls.” Some Greek political theorists, notably Plato in the Laws (6.778d-e), argued against walling the ideal city on the moral grounds that brave men ought willingly to fight their enemies in the open field. Walling a city was not a casual decision. In any premodern society, even one that was as relatively prosperous as ancient Greece, the construction, maintenance, and manning of fortification walls amounted to a huge cost. Frederiksen is surely right to say that “city walls belong to the category of public architecture and must have constituted the most expensive and laborious undertaking for the communities that built them.”9 Yet the no-wall option seems to have become less attractive over time. As Frederiksen’s collection of evidence of dates of city walls demonstrates, fortifications had come to be an important feature in the pubic architecture of a number of major Greek city-states by the early fifth century bce. By the late-classical and Hellenistic periods, Greek city walls had become, on the average, much more substantial (increasingly built of stone, rather than mud-brick), much more architecturally developed (towers, crenellations, indented trace), and in many cases they were augmented with outworks and elaborate systems of rural defense (forts, watchtowers, pass-control walls).10 Figure 2.1 shows the growth in the number of known (to modern scholarship) fortified poleis in the Greek world, from 900 to 323 bce. Even given the incomplete state of our information, it is safe to say that by 323 bce, most major Greek cities were walled, and the trend continued into the third and second centuries. Meanwhile, a range of regime types was possible for a given Greek polis, canonically: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. The distinction between oligarchy and democracy, for the Greeks, was a matter of what part of the native adult free male population enjoyed both full protection of civil law and substantial participation rights (i.e., the chance to vote in a citizen assembly, sit on a jury, serve as a magistrate). In a Greek democracy, most native adult free males had both civil and participation rights; in an 41

Political Theory and Architecture

Figure 2.1  Known walled poleis in the Greek world. Source data: Rune Frederiksen, Greek City Walls of the Archaic Period, 900–480 BC (Oxford University Press USA, 2011); except for -323: Mogens Herman Hansen and Thomas Heine Neilsen, An inventory of archaic and classical poleis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

oligarchy only a fraction (generally a small fraction) had meaningful participation rights, although many, perhaps most, other residents would have had a more or less extensive package of civil rights.11 Athens is, for us as for many ancient Greek writers, the model Greek democracy. But many poleis lacking various of Athens’ signature institutions were regarded by the Greeks as democracies, because enough native males had enough participation rights for the state to count as democratic by Greek standards.12 As with fortifications, there was substantial change in regime prevalence over time. Tyranny was fairly rare after the early fifth century (with the notable exception of the city-states of Greek Sicily, where tyranny, and uprisings against tyrants, remained prevalent). When we compare known instances of democracy and oligarchy in the fifth and fourth centuries, it is clear that democracy was ascendant. By the end of the fourth century, perhaps half or more of all poleis were democracies.13 In the Hellenistic period (from roughly 323 to 146 bce) democracy increasingly became the standard form of government for Greek poleis.14 Measured by “extent of the authority of the demos over all relevant public affairs,”15 most Hellenistic cities may not have been not as democratic as was classical Athens.

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But recent scholarship has tended to view Hellenistic cities as “real” Greek democracies, rather than narrow oligarchies parading under the name democracy. Among the key features of the Hellenistic Greek cities that track relevant features of classical Athens are the very substantial contribution of elites to public goods (including fortification projects) and the apparent eagerness of those elites to have their contributions recognized by the rest of the citizenry, in the form of civic honors (including inscriptions describing the fortification-building process16). Although contributions were not in the form of direct taxes on income, it is fair to say that Greek democracies tended to tax the wealthy more heavily than did oligarchies, in ways that pushed back against extreme social inequality.17 While residents of Greek states favored democracy for any number of reasons, it seems probable that more poleis chose to invest more heavily in bigger and better fortifications specifically in an adaptive response to an evolving security threat: lateclassical and early Hellenistic advances in warfare and siege craft.18 The question is how that adaptive choice about fortifications related to the choices of elites and non-elites in respect to regime type: Why, first, would changing security threats not only lead to bigger investments in military architecture, but also be positively correlated with more democracy? Does the security threat/wall-building and democracy correlation point to a causal relationship? If a causal relationship exists, which way does the causal arrow point: from democracy to wall building, or from wall building to democracy? We will argue that a recursive relationship exists between walls and democracy, such that more democratic states were better able to secure resources for wall building, and also more able to defend walls against security threats to the city that also threatened democracy. Moreover, walls and democracy are recursively related for the following reason. Elites believed that building walls and sustaining democracy were important for their own security against threats of appropriation (or worse) by external forces. This belief implied that elites were more likely to pay taxes and otherwise cooperate with the democratic regime, and less likely to seek to subvert it. Non-elite democratic citizens were less likely to tax elites at an extortionate rate and more likely to grant elites desirable honors, if elites were seen as their partners in maintaining a secure and democratic community.

Aristotle on fortifications in a changing world Writing in the later fourth century, the philosopher Aristotle, in book 7 of the Politics, sets out what he regarded as a practical (as opposed to utopian) plan for a “best practically achievable polis.” He calls this the “polis of our prayers”—it is the form of community that he supposes a virtuous person, one who cares appropriately about human flourishing (his own and that of his fellow citizens), ought to hope for and to work to bring about. Most of Aristotle’s discussion in book 7 concerns social, political, and educational institutions. His polis, although in important ways intended to be aristocratic (political authority is to be distributed on the basis of virtue), is also democratic in the Greek sense: All native free

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males in the polis of our prayers turn out to be citizens, who possess both legal rights and participation rights, in the sense of “ruling and being ruled over in turns.”19 Aristotle assumes that the polis of our prayers will exist in an environment of potential conflict. He is concerned to ensure that all citizens had the right motivation (including ownership of real estate in security-sensitive border zones) and the right training, civic and military, so as to ensure full mobilization of competent soldiers in time of war. But, unlike Plato, Aristotle specifically advocates for walls to be built around the central city of his polis of our prayers, and moreover he urges that architecturally advanced fortification walls be defended by the best available military technology and by citizens familiar with that technology: As regards walls, those [i.e. Plato] who aver that cities which pretend to valor should not have them hold too old-fashioned a view—and that though they see that the cities that indulge in that form of vanity are refuted by experience. … [because] the superior numbers of the attackers may be too much for the human valor of a small force [fighting in the open field, against an invasion], if the city is to survive and not to suffer disaster or insult [in the case of an invasion that cannot be defeated in the field], the securest fortification of walls must be deemed to be the most warlike, particularly in view of the inventions that have now been made in the direction of precision with missiles and artillery for sieges. … not only must walls be put round a city, but also attention must be paid to them in order that they may be suitable … in respect of military requirements, especially the new devices recently invented. For just as the attackers of a city are concerned to study the means by which they can gain the advantage, so also for the defenders some devices have already been invented and others they must discover and think out; for [potential aggressors] do not even start attempting to attack those who are well prepared (ἀρχὴν γὰρ οὐδ᾽ ἐπιχειροῦσιν ἐπιτίθεσθαι τοῖς εὖ παρεσκευασμένοις). Politics 7.1330b-1331a—emphasis added Aristotle was writing the Politics in the third quarter of the fourth century, a time of great changes in the Greek world. Most saliently, by the last third of the fourth century the citystate ecology had relatively few fully independent city-states: Macedonian kingdoms, first under King Philip II, then under Alexander III (the Great) and his successors, came to exercise a form of hegemony over many, although not all, of the Greek poleis. The Macedonian kingdoms were not open access political orders, but rather—as with so many empires—tended to be predatory, rent-seeking, imperialistic states. Surprisingly, however, the rents extracted by the Macedonian kings from the Greek citystates of the mainland, Aegean, and western Anatolia were relatively low. Moreover, the Macedonian kings interfered in local affairs much less than might be expected. While many notable exceptions can be cited, for the most part the kings left the poleis within their realms with a surprisingly high level of local independence. As we have seen, many of the Hellenistic city-states were democracies. Various features of “democratic urban 44

Fortifications and Democracy in the Ancient Greek World

architecture” familiar from classical Athens became more prevalent in the Hellenistic poleis. Meanwhile, a highly refined performative language of mutual accommodation was developed, which helped kings and Greek cities to commit to a mutually beneficial equilibrium. In some ways, therefore, life in a Hellenistic Greek polis continued much as it had before the Macedonian takeover—including inter-polis wars and very considerable resources being spent on city fortification.20 Per above, the standard regime for the Greek poleis in the period of Macedonian domination was a form of democracy, supported financially by high levels of contribution by local urban elites. This is also initially surprising: Why would elites in so many Greek cities in the late-classical and Hellenistic periods have agreed to more democratic (and higher tax) forms of government? The answer to that question is certainly complex. Alexander III may initially have promoted democracy for the Anatolian Greek cities, in part because his opponent, the King of Persia, had favored oligarchy and because Alexander sought to distinguish Macedonian from Persian hegemony. Alexander may also have believed that democracy would reduce conflict within and among the Greek cities; a peaceful Anatolian littoral would enable him to focus on the big prize of conquering the rest of the Persian empire. Democracy was subsequently stabilized in the Hellenistic city-states by the introduction of robust democratic institutions, including laws that promoted common knowledge, pushed against pluralistic ignorance, and lowered the democratic “revolutionary threshold” in the face of oligarchic challenges—thereby making such challenges less likely.21 The phenomenon of “Hellenistic democracy” remains striking, however, and finding an additional reason for elites to cooperate with citizen masses (at high expense to themselves) is hardly otiose. The four features of the late-classical/Hellenistic Greek world that we have sketched above—more investment in fortification by city-states, more democratic city-states, lowerthan-expected levels of rent extraction by hegemonic rulers, and local elite cooperation with democratic regimes—are, we believe, related. The key to their relationship can be found in the italicized passage of Aristotle’s Politics, cited above: “[Potential aggressors] do not even start attempting to attack those who are well prepared.” Aristotle is sometimes criticized for being excessively “polis-centric”—for failing to attend to the great changes that were afoot when he was writing the Politics. One of us has argued elsewhere,22 however, that Aristotle’s “best practical polis” was designed with the emergent world of Macedonian hegemony very much in mind. This argument has an important implication for the presumptively well-prepared polis, with its up-to-date fortifications, artillery, and well-motivated defenders: we may suppose that prominent among the unnamed aggressors who will not “even start attempting to attack” is a potentially predatory Macedonian king. It is plausible that a Macedonian king, even one with the resources of a Philip II or an Alexander III, might “not even start attempting to attack” a well-defended city because sieges of well-fortified Greek cities were extremely expensive undertakings, and kings could not always expect to be successful when they chose to besiege major Greek cities. 45

Political Theory and Architecture

Philip, Alexander, and the successors put a great deal of energy into developing technology (torsion catapults, siege towers) and strategies of siegecraft. Their sieges, when attempted, were indeed often successful. Yet these sieges included some spectacular failures: Just at the time that Aristotle was writing the Politics, Philip failed to capture the major cities of Byzantion and Perinthos after major sieges in 340 bce. A short generation later (and after Aristotle’s death), Demetrius “Besieger of Cities” failed to take Rhodes in 305. Examples could be multiplied. Moreover, even a successful siege was likely to be very costly—tying up a great deal of manpower and resources for extended periods of time. Alexander’s famous siege of Tyre, a prominent Phoenician city-state, took 7 months. The problem, from the point of view of the potential besieger, was that the Greek cities, when they were brought under Macedonian hegemonic authority, were already well fortified and well defended, and there were a great many of them. If, absent provocation, a king attacked cities within the geographic area he claimed to rule in an obviously predatory manner, the rest of the fortified cities in his realm lost their incentive to cooperate in the future with him. They might, instead, refuse to pay taxes and, worse, might coordinate with other cities in resistance. They might also seek an alliance with a rival king, as did the city of Rhodes, which received substantial aid from King Ptolemy I, Macedonian ruler of Egypt, when confronted by Demetrius’ attack in 305 bce. Given these conditions, a king had good reason, on the face of it, not to “even start attempting to attack” a well-fortified, well-defended city if he believed that he could gain the revenue he needed otherwise. We suggest that Aristotle realized this. But, more saliently, the Hellenistic kings certainly knew it and the residents of the fortified Greek cities within their realms knew it; and each side knew that the other knew it, and so on. That is to say, the king’s disincentive to attack, if a city were well fortified and well defended, was a matter of common knowledge.23 In the model set out below, we explain several results: why a well-fortified city was more likely to be well defended if it was a democratic city; why a hypothetical elite member of a democratic city faced with siege would not be likely to see that as an opportunity to seek to subvert the democracy despite the opportunity to do so; and why a king, confronted with this situation, would be more likely to negotiate a moderate tax rate than to pursue an attack that, if successful, would allow him to tax at extortionate rates.

Modeling choices: King, city, elite game Our reconstruction in the previous section of who knew what as a matter of common knowledge allows us to set up a simple game played by a king, a democratic city, and an elite resident of that city. The game we sketch in this section assumes rationality: each player is assumed to have preferences that have an ordinal ranking (A>B>C) and that order is transitive (i.e. if A>B and B>C, then A>C). Players’ preferences are based on expected utility maximizing (their choices are determined by the goal of gaining the

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outcome that delivers the player most utility, taking probabilities into account where relevant). Utility, here, is defined simply in material terms of getting or keeping wealth and honors. The decisions are made by stylized players who make their choices (moves in the game) under conditions of incomplete but symmetric information, that is, the outcome of the “lottery” that decides, in the case of an attack, whether the attack will succeed cannot be known with certainty in advance. But all players have the same level of knowledge about the lottery—that is, their beliefs about the likelihood of the attack succeeding are identical and common knowledge. Other than the lottery, players are assumed to have complete information. The game is obviously an abstraction from the much messier real world of ancient Greek politics and decision making, where many actors interact, decisions are not formally rational, and information is often asymmetric. But, as the application of game theory to the problem of why wars are ever fought has shown,24 formalization may be useful insofar as it offers a framework for explaining puzzling phenomena. In our case, the puzzles are the counterintuitive correlation between more democracy and more investment in military architecture, the relatively low rents demanded from Greek cities by the very powerful Hellenistic kings, and the acceptance of democracy by Greek elites who paid relatively high taxes under democratic regimes. In this game the three players are the King (K), the walled, democratic City-state (C), and an Elite citizen of that state (E). For purposes of simplification, we assume that the City-state is independent (i.e., not currently paying taxes to K) at the outset of the game.25 The King moves first, deciding either to threaten the City with attack (demanding that the City submit and thus pay high rents, in the form of taxes, as the price of peace), or alternatively to negotiate a relatively low-rent agreement (Q) with the City; Q is assumed to be lower than the rent level that the King could demand if the City submitted unconditionally. If K chooses to negotiate a low rent agreement, the game ends and the outcome is Q. If K chooses to threaten, C (i.e., the democratic majority of the currently democratic city) decides whether to resist or submit. If C decides to submit, the game ends, and the outcome is that C and E pay high rents to K. If C decides to resist (or, more plausibly, if C had formulated a general policy of “resistance if and when threatened” in advance of K’s decision), then E must choose either to support the existing democracy or to subvert the democracy, transforming the City’s regime into an oligarchy. If E chooses not to support democracy, K now decides whether to carry through on his threat, or to back down. If K attacks, then with probability p´, K’s attack succeeds and with probability 1 − p´ the now-oligarchic City, without the support of the democratic masses, beats back K’s attack. If E instead chooses to support democracy, K again decides whether to carry through on his threat or to back down. If K attacks, then with probability p < p´, the attack succeeds and with probability 1 − p > 1 − p´, the democratic City (elites and democratic masses working together) beats back the attack. Each player’s choices are determined by expected payoffs for each outcome. The payoffs for each player for each possible outcome are listed below and in Table 2.1. The extensive form of the game is illustrated as a decision tree in Figure 2.2. 47

Political Theory and Architecture

Table 2.1  Payoffs to King, City, and Elite King (K) S AO N AD BD BO

C submits K attacks C not democratic Negotiate K attacks C democratic K backs down C democratic K backs down C not democratic

9 6 >2/ p (the probability that K’s attack succeeds if C is democratic) because the oligarchic city has fewer well-motivated defenders. Here p´ is set at 0.8, which yields an expected payoff to K of 6. C’s payoff is −10. Because C is not democratic, E’s payoff is identical to that of C. BD or BO: K backs down. K receives a payoff of −2, because he receives no rents from C and loses in reputation, although he does not face revolts in other cities, insofar as his forces are intact. C receives a payoff of 5, being spared payment of taxes, and gaining somewhat in reputation, but not having the spoils of victory. E’s payoff is, as usual, 2 points lower than that of C, if C is democratic.

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We calculate the equilibrium of this game through the usual method of backward induction. At the penultimate node of the game, K must decide whether to attack or to back down. Given the payoffs under the assumed conditions of the lottery, he will choose to attack over backing down. At one node back, E must decide between democracy and nondemocracy. All other things being equal, E prefers (low tax) oligarchy to (high tax) democracy. But because K’s attack is less likely to succeed if C is democratic, E prefers AD to AO, so E chooses democracy. Backing up a node, C must decide whether to resist K’s threats or to submit. Because C prefers AD to S, C chooses to resist. Finally, at the first node of the game, K must choose between Q, the relatively low negotiated rent, or threaten the city in an effort to gain higher rents. K knows that if he chooses to threaten the city, the city will resist and will remain democratic, leading to the lottery AD. Given their common assumptions about the outcome of the lottery, K knows that C and E will offer Q higher than his expected payoff in the lottery (i.e., above his reserve price), so he chooses to negotiate: N, which is the game’s equilibrium. The solution to the game depends on the expected payoff-based preferences (both their ordinal rank and their cardinal intensity) of the players (Table 2.2). Those payoffs include each player’s expectations about the outcome of the lottery and their shared belief that the king’s attack has a higher probability of failing if the walled city is democratic. The reasons for that belief are not mysterious: Aristotle had pointed out in the Politics that democracy was in general more stable than oligarchy;28 recent work by historians of Greek antiquity has helped to show why that was true.29 Democracy, both ancient30 and modern,31 has been correlated with success at war as a result of higher mobilization rates and higher morale among soldiers. High mobilization rates have been correlated, for modern democracies, with more progressive tax rates and that correlation can be explained by the assumption that citizen masses believe that, in times of high mobilization, elites ought to pay more.32 Elites evidently agree, insofar as democracies are not overthrown during or in the aftermath of periods of high mobilization.

Reality tracking In addition to explaining the puzzles noted above, several implications of the game appear to track historical reality. First, as Aristotle saw quite clearly, if we change the second player in the game from well-walled City to unwalled City, the regime becomes irrelevant. The King can threaten with confidence because if the unwalled City’s forces face the King in the open field, they will certainly lose. Since that is also (as Aristotle points out) a matter of common knowledge, the unwalled City will submit. So, under the conditions pertaining in the late-classical/Hellenistic world, democracy is strongly related to fortifications: insofar as the conditions modeled in the game are relevant for

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elite choices, and insofar as elite choices determine democratic stability, it is only when there are fortifications in place that democracy is stably sustained. The elite submits to democracy because an expanded and well-motivated citizenry improves the probability that the polis will survive an attack by the King, that is, p < p´. The game as currently formulated does not include the original decision to build city walls (or to rebuild an outmoded wall to a higher standard). In order to address the question of how making the choice to wall the city might change the picture, we could begin the game at an earlier point in time, with the city as yet unwalled (or poorly walled). We might then posit a democratic City that chooses whether or not to propose building a wall, to be paid for in large part by taxing the elite. In the case that the proposal is made, an Elite must choose whether or not to support that proposal. Presumably, the Elite’s decision to pay for the wall involves the condition that the rise in the expected value of the stronger wall relative to the weaker wall exceeds the known taxes it must provide to build the wall. Alternatively, we could imagine the city as being ruled by an oligarchy, so the game starts with the Elite choosing to build a wall or not, in recognition that construction will be costly and is likely to lead to a regime change in favor of democracy. The assumption of either version of this extended game is that not walling the city will lead to the outcome of Submit. The equilibrium outcome of either version of an extended game would depend on whether the payoffs to the Elite in the event of not walling are better or worse than the Submit payoff. Democracy is not directly caused by fortifications, but, according to the logic of the game, fortifications are a necessary condition for democracy (insofar as sustaining democracy is a matter of elite choice). On the other side, insofar as fortifications are ineffectual without defenders, and democracy increases the effectuality of defenders (1 − p > 1 − p´), then having democracy makes the choice to invest in fortifications (i.e., to pay taxes to support fortified defenses) a rational one for the Elite. Defense of walls required a lot of reliable men: well trained (in the use of catapults and projectile weapons, capable of deploying effectively, etc.) and not treasonous. This means, in the first instance, the defenders should be citizens rather than mercenaries, and the citizens should have good reason to support the current regime (emphasized by Aeneas Tacticus, Poliorcetica, a mid-fourth century bce writer on defense of cities). Thus, an implicit implication of the game is that democracy implies a non-marginal increase in the probability of deterrence (1 − p > 1 − p´) over an oligarchy, and the difference must be large. Absent this effect, the logic of the game implies that the Elite would prefer oligarchy to democracy. Next, the payoffs change when the probability of the King succeeding in his attack changes: the higher (or lower) the probability that the King’s attack will succeed, the higher (or lower) the negotiated tax rate Q (K’s rents) will be. This means that, unless K and C can credibly commit to disarmament (we assume they cannot), King and City each have an incentive to continue investing in siegecraft and defensive military architecture, respectively. The democratic citizens of the City (who, in the game, prefer democracy to oligarchy because they receive distributive benefits from taxing the elite) also have 51

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an incentive to continue to mobilize and to train for city defense. These conditions are manifest in the history of Hellenistic military developments, as noted above. Third, the game yields a series of comparative static results. For example, if the spread between 1 − p with payoff AD and 1 − p´ with payoff AO (the probability that the attack will fail depending on whether the city is democratic or not) is changed, then the payoffs to elites will change as well. If the spread is decreased significantly (e.g., if the democratic citizens refuse to train or mobilize), then Elite will prefer AO to AD and so will choose to subvert the democracy. Likewise if the spread between City’s payoffs and Elite’s payoffs (in the game set at 2) is increased significantly (e.g., if the democratic masses increase Elite’s tax burden or decrease Elite’s honors), E will once again prefer AO to AD and so will choose to subvert the democracy. Since we assume that the mass of citizens prefer that the democracy not be subverted, they have a strong incentive to continue to train and mobilize, to exercise restraint in setting the tax rate on the elites, and to continue to offer honors to the elites. Masses and elites thus have good reason to stay in communication regarding expectations and duties. In fact, a sophisticated discourse of reciprocal gratitude developed between elites and masses in democratic Greek cities and elites were taxed at rates they generally found tolerable and were offered substantial honors.33 Fourth, the probability of the King’s success, even when the city is democratic, remains substantial (p > 1 − p). The likelihood that, were the King to threaten, the threat would be real and that his siege would succeed, means that the city must expect to pay some rents (Q) to the King. As we have seen, as the likelihood of King’s attack increases, so too, as a general rule, do his expected rents (i.e., p and Q are positively correlated, although the strength of that correlation will vary with other factors). The negotiations are, in sum, real negotiations—each side has something to gain and something to lose. Yet, under plausible scenarios for the probability of attack success, there is an equilibrium without fighting that all can agree to. The idea that a solution exists that can be agreed upon is the background condition against which developed the performative language of King–City communication that has been explored in detail by Ma.34 The background condition is not adequate fully to explain the performative language or its effects, but the background is the enabling condition of the language. Fifth, we have assumed in setting up the game that the information relevant to forming expectations about the result of the lottery is symmetrical and thus that all players make the same calculations of probabilities. But this assumption will not always hold in the real world.35 The City or the King may make a mistake in estimating probabilities (perhaps by overestimating its own strength) or may possess information that the other side does not have (e.g., a secret advance in siege technology or military architecture), leading to differing expectations about the probable outcome of the lottery. As the estimates of probabilities become increasingly divergent, the equilibrium solution of “negotiate” is destabilized. The likelihood that the King will attack increases: either because he rates his chances of success higher than does the City, or because the City, overrating its own chances of foiling the attack, offers a tax rate that is below the King’s reserve price (i.e., 52

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his calculated value of the lottery). Mistakes are potentially very costly to either side. Both King and City therefore have strong incentives to keep lines of communication open and to share information. This situation is, once again, manifest in the diplomatic language studied by Ma.36 Sixth, and finally, although the negotiated rent level Q is not the first choice of any of the players, that equilibrium solution arguably had positive effects on economic growth—perhaps more positive than any given player’s first choice would have had. Although we do not yet have good data for measuring Greek economic growth after 323 bce, it seems likely that the surprisingly robust growth (by premodern standards) of the Greek economy in the previous half-millennium was sustained, at least in some parts of the Greek world, in the Hellenistic period. Various possible explanations can be provided for continued growth: the first reflects Adam Smith’s principal reason for economic growth, an expanding division of labor.37 Thus, the greater Greek world expanded in size and complexity as a result of Macedonian military power, and this increased the potential payoff to Greek cities from specialization and exploitation of relative advantages in production and distribution of goods. Counterfactually, however, had the Hellenistic Kings taxed the Greek cities at the high “Submission” rate, the underlying conditions that had (as argued in Ober38) produced the classical efflorescence—vigorous competition between relatively wealthy cities in the context of social orders that encouraged individual and collective investments in human capital— would have come to an end. The Hellenistic kings were often willing to forego the uncertain prospect of longterm gains for readily achieved short-term payoffs.39 By lowering the likelihood of a short-term payoff to the King, the conjunction of fortifications and democracy pushed back against that tendency, leading to a certain level of restraint in coercive rent extraction. Restrained rent extraction helped to create the conditions that sustained a vibrant economy and thereby enabled the Greek world to continue to make substantial cultural advances. That was the Greek culture taken up by the Romans, when they took over the Greek world in the course of the second and first centuries bce. Roman siege capacity was of a different order from anything the Greeks had developed, so a somewhat different game was played in the Greek world after Rome replaced the Hellenistic Macedonian dynasts as imperial hegemon. The question of what happened to the world of Greek fortifications and democracy in the face of the Roman takeover must be the subject of another paper. Nonetheless, we observe that the game in this chapter could be used to analyze the same question about the Roman world; to do so, we would have to rely on a different set of assumptions reflecting the reality of Roman military power.40 Suffice it to say here that democracy did not fare very well under the Romans, at least in the long run. The architecture of Greek cities was substantially transformed in the Roman era in ways that might reasonably be regarded as fundamentally nondemocratic.41 Yet the Greek culture that was taken up by the Romans was, eventually and in fragmentary 53

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form, passed along to us via the essential intermediary of the Hellenistic world of cities and kings. To whatever degree we suppose that the Western tradition is predicated on transmitted Greek culture, it is, therefore, also predicated on an initially counterintuitive relationship between city walls and democracy.

Modern security walls and democracy Whether the underlying dynamics of that relationship hold in other historical cases in which we find a coincidence between high investments in city fortifications and the emergence and persistence of citizen-centered political institutions (whether or not those institutions are properly understood as democratic or liberal) is a subject for future research. In the meantime, the Greek case complicates the association of massive walls with anti-democratic regimes, an association that might seem to be implied by the Berlin Wall. Of course, the primary purpose of the Berlin Wall was preventing dissatisfied citizens from leaving the state, rather than securing citizens against a credible external threat. The walls erected by the Greek poleis might seem to be more closely related to the security walls erected by Israel and the United States, as noted in the introduction. Allowing, for the sake of the argument, the debatable proposition that a meaningful security threat exists that the Israeli and American walls could help control, we might ask whether objections to the walls are rightly thought of as originating in commitments arising from democracy or liberalism. Democracy, as collective selfgovernment by citizens, and liberal democracy—which adds the moral commitments of individual autonomy, human rights, social justice, and religious tolerance, while potentially reducing civic participation—are often conflated in contemporary political and moral theories. But, as Duncan Bell has demonstrated, “liberal democracy” is a recent coinage.42 One of us has argued that basic democracy and liberal democracy are not identical and that a coherent theory of nonliberal (as opposed to anti-liberal) democracy arrives at conclusions that differ in some ways from dominant versions of liberal democratic theory.43 If it could be shown that wall building is not detrimental to the well functioning of self-government by citizens, it could be argued (again, based on the debatable premise of a real and substantial increase in security) that wall building by a modern state is unobjectionable from the point of view of a theory of democracy, even if (as seems prima facie likely) it is objectionable on liberal grounds. Might we go one step further, by asking whether a positive and reciprocal relationship exists between (nonliberal) democracy and security walls in modernity, as we have argued that there was in late-classical and Hellenistic Greek antiquity? Leaving aside the vexed question of whether democracy (or liberal democracy) requires (or permits) constraints on the free movement of persons across state borders,44 the argument might hang on the conditions under which elites will support a democratic order, by refraining from subverting it and by paying progressive taxes to defend it. 54

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We have suggested that Greek elites supported democracy because without mass mobilization by non-elites, the elites (and their city-state) were more vulnerable to external threats. As noted above, recent work by Scheve and Stasavage has shown that mass mobilization in time of large-scale war is a primary reason that democratic citizens demand, and elites accept, more progressive taxation. The validity of that general argument has been demonstrated by Walter Scheidel.45 The result of mass military mobilization is lower in-country (as opposed to between-country) material inequality, which may be thought of as inherently good for democracy. The question then becomes: What is the relationship between modern security walls, mobilization of citizens, and taxation of wealth elites? Supposing (ex hypothesi) that security is enhanced by walls built by modern states, is enhanced security predicated on a mobilized population of democratic citizens ready and willing to defend the walls and on the willingness of elites to pay for them? In the Israel case, the democratic state does require near-universal military conscription of citizens and imposes quite a steeply progressive tax on income. So, while much more work would need to be done to prove the point one way or another, it is possible that the Israel case could support a hypothesis of a positive relationship between basic democracy and walls in modernity, mirroring in some relevant particulars the ancient Greek case. In contrast, the US case seems, on the face of it, not to provide support for that hypothesis. The United States does not currently conscript its citizens for military service. There are c. 21,000 agents in the US Border Patrol, which may sound like a lot.46 But they represent a tiny fraction of the citizen body when compared with the mobilization of Greek citizens in time of invasion, or the mass mobilizations studied by Scheve, Stasavage, and Scheidel. Meanwhile, the repeated (and repeatedly debunked) claim by then-candidate and now-President Donald Trump, that an “impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful, southern border wall” will be paid for by Mexico, rather than by US taxpayers, underlines the decoupling of proposals for building new security walls with the willingness of democratic elites to pay for them.47 The United States retains sovereign authority to control movement across its borders. But arguments for the value of American border walls in enforcing that authority ought not be predicated on the salutary relationship between fortifications, democratic citizenship, and progressive taxation that we observe in Hellenistic Greece.

Notes 1

2

Based on a paper written for the Colloquium on Architecture and Democracy, Princeton University, February 2014. Our thanks to John Ma for discussion of Hellenistic politics and society. Sections 3–5 are adapted from Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), Appendix 2. Jessica Paga, “Architectural Agency and the Construction of Athenian Democracy,” PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 2012. 55

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3

Josiah Ober, Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 4 For the wider historical frame, see, for example, James Tracy, City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), sections I and II; O. H. Creighton and Robert Higham, Medieval Town Walls: An Archaeology and Social History of Urban Defence (Stroud: Tempus, 2005). 5 Mogens Herman Hansen and Thomas Heine Neilsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 6 Mogens Herman Hansen, “An Update on the Shotgun Method,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 48 (2008): 259–86. Cf. Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, ch. 2. 7 Ian Morris, “Economic Growth in Ancient Greece,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 160, no. 4 (2004): 709–42; Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. 8 The concept of efflorescence, a more or less sustained period of premodern economic and cultural growth, is developed by Jack Goldstone, “Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History,” Journal of World History 13 (2002): 323–89. 9 Rune Frederiksen, Greek City Walls of the Archaic Period, 900–480 BC (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1. 10 Frederiksen (Greek City Walls, 111) counts 121 poleis with evidence of having had fortifications by 480 bce. Per Figure 2.1, by 323 bce the count (based on Hansen and Nielsen, Inventory) is 537. On Greek fortifications and their historical development, see Franz Georg Maier, Griechische Mauerbauinschriften (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1959); Frederick Elliott Winter, Greek Fortifications (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971); Josiah Ober, “Hoplites and Obstacles,” in Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience, ed. Victor D. Hanson (London: Routledge, 1991), 173–96; A. W. McNicoll, Hellenistic Fortifications from the Aegean to the Euphrates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); John McKCamp, “Walls and the Polis,” in Polis and Politics, P. Flensted-Jensen, T. H. Nielsen, and L. Rubinstein (eds.) (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2000), 41–57. More recent work is surveyed by Rune Frederiksen et al., Focus on Fortifications: New Research on Fortifications in the Ancient Mediterranean and the Near East (Oxford: Oxbow, 2016). 11 Matthew Simonton, Classical Greek Oligarchy: A Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 12 Eric W. Robinson, Democracy beyond Athens: Popular Government in the Greek Classical Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 13 David Teegarden, Death to Tyrants! Ancient Greek Democracy and the Struggle against Tyranny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 14 Philippe Gauthier, “Les cités hellénistiques,” in The Ancient Greek City-State, Historiskfilosofiske Meddelelser; 67, ed. Mogens Herman Hansen (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1993), 211–31; Volker Grieb, Hellenistische Demokratie. Politische Organisation und Struktur in freien griechischen Poleis nach Alexander dem Grossen (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007); John Ma, “Review of Mann and Scholz ‘Demokratie’ im Hellenismus,” Sehepunkte. Rezensionsjournal für Geschichtswissenschaften 13 (2013). 15 Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 292–3. 16 Maier, Griechische Mauerbauinschriften. 17 Carl Hampus Lyttkens, Economic Analysis of Institutional Change in Ancient Greece: Politics, Taxation and Rational Behaviour (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012); Ober, Demopolis.

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18 Eric William Marsden, Greek and Roman Artillery: Historical Development (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969); Duncan B. Campbell, “Ancient Catapults: Some Hypotheses Reexamined,” Hesperia 80 (2011): 677–700; Frederiksen, Greek City Walls, 94. 19 Josiah Ober, “Aristotle’s Natural Democracy,” in Aristotle’s Politics: Critical Essays, Richard Kraut and S. Skultety (eds.) (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 223– 43; Ober, “Nature, History, and Aristotle’s Best Possible Regime,” in Aristotle’s “Politics”: A Critical Guide, T. Lockwood and T. Samaras (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 224–243. 20 For the distinction between the rent-seeking “natural state” and the “open access order,” see Douglass Cecil North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). On the Hellenistic kings as large-scale robbers, out to extract as much as they could from their territories, see M. M. Austin, “Hellenistic Kings, War, and the Economy,” Classical Quarterly 36, no. 2 (1986): 450–66. The best studies of the relations between Hellenistic kings and Greek states, and the language of negotiation are John Ma, Antiochos III and the Cities of Western Asia Minor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Ma, “Seleukids and Speech-Act Theory: Performative Utterances, Legitimacy and Negotiations in the World of the Maccabees,” Scripta Classica Israelica 19 (2000): 71–112; Ma, “Peer Polity Interaction in the Hellenistic Age,” Past and Present 180, no. 1 (2003): 9–39. 21 Teegarden, Death to Tyrants! 22 Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), ch. 7. 23 On which, see Michael Suk-Young Chwe, Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 24 James Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49, no. 3 (1995): 379–414. 25 If instead we assumed the game concerned a City-state facing an attack by a King to whom it was currently paying taxes, a similar result would follow, barring some implausible assumptions about the current tax rate. 26 The negotiations between the splendidly walled Anatolian city of Herakleia under Latmos with Zeuxis, the envoy of King Antiochus III, provide an example: Ma, Antiochos III, 169–70, 185–6, 198–9. 27 Herodotus 1.164, 6.46–7 for early examples; cf. Frederiksen, Greek City Walls, 45 with n. 56. 28 Ober, “Aristotle’s Natural Democracy”; and “Nature, History, and Aristotle’s Best Possible Regime.” 29 Simonton, Classical Greek Oligarchy; Teegarden, Death to Tyrants! 30 Walter Schiedel, “Military Commitments and Political Bargaining in Ancient Greece,” Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics (2005). 31 Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stamm, Democracies at War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 32 Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage, “Democracy, War, and Wealth. Lessons from Two Centuries of Inheritance Taxation,” American Political Science Review 106 (2012): 81–102; Scheve and Stasavage, Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 33 Ma, “Review of Mann and Scholz”; Marc Domingo Gygax, Benefaction and Rewards in the Ancient Greek City: The Origins of Euergetism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

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34 Ma, Antiochos III. 35 Cf. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations.” 36 Ma, Antiochos III. 37 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund [1776] 1981), Book I. 38 Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. 39 Austin, “Hellenistic Kings.” 40 On the Roman policy of defortification of Greek towns, see Frederiksen, Greek City Walls, 1 n. 6; 45–6. 41 R. E. Wycherley, How the Greeks Built Cities (London: Macmillan, 1962). 42 Duncan Bell, “What Is liberalism?” Political Theory 42, no. 6 (2014): 682–715. 43 Ober, Demopolis. 44 On which, see, for example, Anna Stilz, “Nations, States, and Territory,” Ethics 121 (2011): 572–601. 45 Scheve and Stasavage, Taxing the Rich and “Democracy, war, and wealth Walter Scheidel. The Grant Levelen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).” 46 https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/along-us-borders/overview (accessed July 10, 2017). 47 Candidate Trump’s border wall proposal and claim that Mexico would pay for it: http:// www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37243269. President Trump publicly repeated that claim on July 7, 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/07/trump-mexicoborder-wall-pena-nieto-g20-summit (accessed July 10, 2017).

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Chapter 3

Plato’s Magnesia and Costa’s Brasilia Gábor Betegh

Imagining the city in three dimensions Plato’s best-known reflections on how to imagine a well, or indeed optimally, functioning city are of course contained in the Republic. But as he indicates in some of his later works, he is well aware that the account given in that dialogue does not cover all the relevant aspects. For instance, in the Timaeus, after having summarized the fundamental features of the social and educational systems of the Republic, Socrates expresses his desire to see the city “in motion,” how it interacts with other cities, in peace and especially in war (Tim. 19b–c). The answer to this request comes from his friend Critias, in the form of an imaginative narrative, the famous story of the war between Athens and Atlantis. Yet, there are still other ways to complement the account of the Republic: we can imagine the well-functioning city not only in time and motion, but also in space. Or, to transform Socrates’s analogy, we can try to make the two-dimensional static image into a three-dimensional model. Indeed, in the Timaeus and its immediate sequel the Critias, we already hear about the way in which ancient Athens was set out in space by Athena, and Atlantis by Poseidon, before both cities got eradicated in a natural cataclysm. We will have an opportunity to return to these divine urbanists and the cities they designed. However, from our present perspective, another late Platonic dialogue, the Laws, is considerably more significant. The interlocutors of that dialogue use the three-dimensional model analogy themselves and say that their task is to imagine the city as if someone was creating a wax model of all the buildings, “the country and the town, with the houses at the centre and round the edge” (Laws 745e–746a). Yet, this will be crucial for our discussion, they immediately add that this “wax model” will not simply represent an empty settlement, but will include all the citizens as well. In this way, Plato’s Laws is the first surviving detailed discussion of a planned city that examines how the built environment and the inhabitants interact with each other. Magnesia, the imagined city of the Laws, is obviously not the only or the earliest planned city in Antiquity. Various newly founded Greek colonies around the Mediterranean Basin can also be called planned cities, and there were earlier instances in the Eastern Empires, such as Ecbatana in Persia, described in some detail by Herodotus (1.98). Unlike these cities, Plato’s Magnesia was never realized and most probably was never

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meant to be. What is important about Magnesia, however, is that it can teach us about the principles and conception motivating urban planning choices in much more detail than any other ancient Greek text. In this chapter, I would like to compare Plato’s discussion with some modernist projects, taking Brasilia as my main comparandum. The idea I would like to explore is that Plato’s urbanistic principles resemble in significant respects the modernist project as set out in Le Corbusier’s writings, and even more specifically in Lúcio Costa’s Pilot Plan for Brasilia. There are of course numerous and important dis-analogies, starting with the fact that one was an imaginative thought experiment for a small-sized Greek independent city-state consisting of 5,040 households, whereas the other was designed at a breakneck pace to become the capital of a twentieth-century democratic country with a population of 60 million. But I hope to show that the comparison can nevertheless illuminate crucial aspects of both projects. As I will argue, the most remarkable points of contact reside in the ways in which designers of planned cities can try to foster certain political and societal ideals, and mold the life and values of citizens through urbanism. Closely connected to this, I will try to show that the urban designs of Magnesia and Brasilia are both best understood as conscious critiques of the prevalent layout and urbanistic features of their respective contemporary cities. Both Plato and the modernists held the layout of contemporary cities as both a symptom and a supporting cause for the morally corrupt state of institutions and practices. Social criticism, a proposal for reform, and radical innovations in urban design thus go hand in hand in both Magnesia and Brasilia. More provocatively, I wish to maintain that despite being famously—or infamously—a utopian political philosopher, Plato had a more nuanced and dynamic conception of the interaction between the city and its inhabitants than the planners of Brasilia. In designing Magnesia, Plato carefully tried to avoid some of the pitfalls that made Brasilia a controversial and often criticized social and urban project. I want to claim that Plato’s thought experiment is, in important respects, more realistic and shows more sensitivity to human nature than the modernist project.

The city and the new ethic According to the dramatic setting of the Laws, three elderly gentlemen are taking a long walk on the island of Crete and discuss how to fulfill the task the city of Cnossos entrusted to Cleinias, the Cretan member of the trio. The task at hand is to found Magnesia, a new city or colony, apoikia, to be inhabited by settlers coming from all over Greece (Laws 702b4–c9). Cleinias’s original assignment apparently only consisted in drafting the nomoi— the constitution and the legal and institutional framework—of Magnesia. However, the Athenian member of the party, who immediately takes the lead in the discussion,

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understands this task as including also the spatial and architectural planning of the city. Indeed, the Athenian makes clear that in designing the city, urban planning has priority over important aspects of the legal and institutional framework. For instance, the regulation of family and the corresponding marriage laws are notoriously crucial elements in organizing the community in both the Republic and the Laws. However, after hearing the task, the Athenian explains: It looks as if our entire building programme needs thinking about pretty much from scratch, our city being new and as yet unbuilt. How is it all to be laid out, particularly when it comes to temples and city walls? Building comes before marriage, Cleinias. […] In real life, we will do building before marriage, god willing, and only then—on top of all that sort of thing— will we finish it off with marriage. For the present, let’s just give a brief description of the kind of buildings we need. (778b-c)1 Accordingly, the Athenian and his two friends discuss at length the spatial layout, urban design, and architectural features of the new settlement, and they come back to these questions over and over again throughout the entire dialogue. In the Laws, as opposed to the Republic, urban design has become part and parcel of how to imagine a wellfunctioning city. There are of course different ways to proceed when one sets out to plan a new settlement. One can start by studying the existing needs, life style, and typical activities of the would-be inhabitants and then design a city which best serves, or even fosters, those existing needs and activities. Or, one can have a specific purpose and function in mind. For instance in a period of intense warfare, the planners can take as their primary goal the creation of a city which is the most functional from a military point of view and is the best for purposes of defense. There are numerous examples of this from Medieval times, when towns had to be rebuilt after Magyars and other peoples destroyed old settlements. Or, the concept of a planned city can be governed by purely geometrical or even magical or astrological considerations, as for instance in the case of the ideal city of Sforzinda, designed by the Renaissance architect Filarete. Or such considerations can be combined, as we see in the case of the late Renaissance planned town of Palmanova. The first striking similarity between the Athenian visitor’s plan for Magnesia and Costa’s plan for Brasilia is that they did not simply intend to create a functional city, which serves as well as possible the needs, lifestyle, and typical activities of their contemporaries. Nor were their designs motivated by purely aesthetic, geometrical, or military considerations. Costa’s plan, just as the Athenian visitor’s, was instead primarily motivated by political, ethical, and ideological considerations. As well known, Costa’s primary inspiration was Le Corbusier’s urban ideals as set out in The Radiant City, which Costa called “the sacred book of architecture.”2 Here is a little excerpt from the final part of The Radiant City, the section called “Total Planning,” which can give us a taste of this approach: 61

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The only possible road is that of enthusiasm. Postulating the existence of a modern consciousness and awakening that consciousness in mankind. Solidarity, courage and order. A modern ethic. … A new ethic has arisen to oppose the filth in which we are still being kept imprisoned by a dying status quo … Let us soak ourselves in this idea: total city planning for the good and dignity of all. And to you, idlers, the pleasure-seekers and the liars, you in your niches, conservatives and robbers, I say: tomorrow will see the necessary task accomplished. We meanwhile, stubbornly and tenderly, will continue to make Plans.’3 The list of “solidarity, courage and order,” as the main components of the “modern ethic,” corresponds remarkably to the guiding concepts of Plato’s own project. The emphasis on solidarity closely echoes Plato’s notion of political philia, which we can be translated as friendship or camaraderie—or quite simply as solidarity.4 In his late political philosophy, Plato realizes that the principal challenge for the statesman is to avoid stasis, the disruptive, and self-reinforcing antagonism and polarization between groups of citizens. Philia, as the affective bond and main cohesive force among all members of society, is the antidote against stasis. Hence, it is the primary task of the political leader to induce and maintain philia in the citizen body. We will see how, according to the Athenian of the Laws, urban design, as well as communal work on the built environment, is a prime means to achieve philia in the city. Then, we will shortly see that fostering courage, the second item on Le Corbusier’s list, is central for Plato’s city planning. And of course, order, the third element in the list, is at the heart of Plato’s political philosophy; stasis is precisely the disruption of order. The similarities continue in the identification of the principal enemies of the “new ethic.” The pleasure seekers and those who are motivated by greed, pleonexia, and seek undue material advantage—Le Corbusier’s “robbers”—are Plato’s main enemies. Indeed, Plato expresses time and again in his late dialogues that the principal source of stasis is pleonexia. Total city planning, as described in Le Corbusier’s manifestos, and expressed in Costa’s Pilot Plan, was the primary instrument to awaken and reinforce this “modern ethic”—a means to fashion and shape the way inhabitants of the city live their lives according to a distinctive political vision based on “solidarity, courage, and order.” Similarly, in the Laws, planning the city is also integral to the awakening and fostering of Plato’s own “modern ethic,” based on philia and courage, avoiding, as far as possible, pleonexia and stasis. Brasilia and Magnesia were designed primarily to instill and maintain a coherent new system of values, gravitating around social cohesion, induced in new settlers arriving from different parts of Brazil and Greece, from largely different cultural and economic backgrounds. According to their designers, these cities were to transform their inhabitants, their prior ways of life and priorities, in order to create a cohesive community based on shared values.

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Outlines As the Athenian clarifies early in the dialogue, what they can offer during their walk are only the bare outlines of the legal and institutional system, and only a blueprint for the city’s design. Such a blueprint should nonetheless fix the basic principles and set the conceptual, spatial, and geometrical guidelines for a comprehensive urban plan. In this respect, too, Plato’s plans for Magnesia are comparable to Costa’s Pilot Plan. Costa, as he explains in the preamble to the brief concept study which accompanies the fifteen sketches of his submission, only wanted to present the bare outlines and a concept. As he writes, he did not “even mean to continue working out the idea offered in this report, save perhaps as a consultant.”5 Indeed, Costa’s submission was so sketchy that the member of the jury who represented the Brazilian Institute of Architects didn’t even deem it worthy of consideration and wanted to have it disqualified. However, others, and most importantly, William Holford, the British member of the jury—about whom I will have more to say later—were captivated by the power and simplicity of Costa’s plan. In his final report, after having praised the thoroughness and detail of the plans of the runner up, M.M.M. Roberto, Holford wrote that “everything about [Roberto’s designs] was worthy of admiration, except its main objective. It was not an Idea for a capital city.” Whereas “the submission of Lúcio Costa—continues Holford—was at the opposite extreme.” “Here was an Idea and the skeleton of a metropolitan form.” This Idea—with a capital “I”—is just as sketchy as Plato’s Pilot Plan for Magnesia, but no less ideologically charged, and no less firm in fixing the principles and framework for the entire city to be built. Their sketchiness notwithstanding, the Pilot Plans of both the Athenian and Costa are instances of “total planning” in Le Corbusier’s sense. One of the main questions in both cases is how rigid these outlines are, and how much room is left for inhabitants to shape the city into their own image within the framework set by the planner. As critics have repeatedly pointed out, one of the main problems of Brasilia stems from the inflexibility of the pattern imposed by the original plan. And here comes one of the first differences. The main administrative functionaries of Magnesia, the Keepers of the Laws, are required not only to fill in the architectural details—as Oscar Niemeyer did for Brasilia—but, importantly, also to introduce modifications, generation after generation, in view of their lived experience.

Political power So where does one start planning a new city? Of course, by identifying its location. As the case of Brasilia attests, however, this choice is not often left to the planner. According to one version of the founding legend of the city, the Italian Catholic priest, Don Bosco, had the vision, during a train journey through the Central Plateau, that a 63

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city should be erected in the middle of that vast expanse of empty land. When Juscelino Kubitschek made the construction of a new capital the central theme of his presidential campaign in 1955, he could already rely on such foundation myths. But his choice of location was not religiously motivated. His aim was to create a hub, fairly centrally located, for the cultural and economic development of the entire country. Brasilia was supposed to function as a center connecting the more and less developed parts of the country. The location for the capital was thus fixed by Kubitschek’s political and economic considerations before Costa could set to work.6 This raises the issue of the relationship between the planner and the political power that enables the planner to carry out total planning. Clearly, Costa was only able to come up with, and then realize, the total planning of Brasilia because the construction of the new capital was a central element of Kubitschek’s political agenda. The idea of building a new capital from scratch faced strong opposition and criticism; the plan could only go forward because Kubitschek had the requisite political power and authority. Not surprisingly, this question also comes up in the Laws. The Athenian makes clear that even if the preambles in the legal system will serve to persuade and gain the consent of citizens, the lawgiver needs the will and support of someone with the requisite political power. When asked what he needs in the first place to realize his plans, his answer will be: “Give me a city under a tyrant. Let the tyrant be young, with a retentive memory, quick on the uptake, courageous, and with an innate nobility of character” (Laws 709e–710a). In this regard, I find the dedication of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City extremely appropriate and telling: “This work is dedicated to AUTHORITY.” Le Corbusier knew perfectly well that the first and foremost precondition of total planning is authority, political and otherwise. Incidentally, the lawgiver’s request for a young tyrant is also reminiscent of the somewhat unsettling plea of Frank Gehry in a recent interview published in Foreign Policy: “Democracy, obviously, is something we don’t want to give up, but it does create chaos. … In cities, that means people build whatever they want. I think the best thing is to have a benevolent dictator—who has taste!”7 But notably, what matters for Plato are the intellectual qualities and “innate nobility” of the character of the tyrant, whereas Gehry, who is busy with projects in Abu Dhabi and hopes to have commissions in China, only requires good taste. I have referred to this case also to highlight a further point, crucial for the success of the city: the level of integration between the political and the urbanistic project. As Reinier de Graaf has suggested,8 Gehry (and he is not the only one) might primarily be concerned with obtaining, instrumentally and opportunistically, the backing of the politician; there is no need for an alignment of political goals between the planner and the political authority enabling the realization of the plan. This is also the impression that one often gets from Le Corbusier’s writings. The architect can “awaken the modern consciousness” and ethic, and make his PLANS (in capital letters) on his own, as long as he has the backing of the requisite political authority. Brasilia, I think, is particularly interesting in this sense as well. Although Kubitschek and Costa shared the same leftist, 64

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progressivist political views, Costa’s more specific egalitarian aims—to which I shall return soon—were not part of Kubitschek’s liberal economic political project. It is very telling, indeed striking, that Niemeyer said in an interview that he and Kubitschek had never spoken about politics. At the other end of the scale, the urban project for Plato only makes sense when fully integrated within an overarching political and social project. The legislator is the urbanist. And, in the Platonic framework, what the legislator needs is not simply the consent and backing of the young tyrant. The young tyrant must also have the requisite intellectual and moral qualities to fully understand and embrace the political and ethical ideals of the lawgiver-urbanist. What is more, the urban project can only have the desired effect on citizens if the legislator-urbanist has obtained their agreement. The legislator has to persuade and convince the citizens not only about the validity and advantages of the legal and institutional systems of the city, but also that urban planning is an important aspect of that overarching project.9 It seems to me that the twentieth-century modernist project in many cases failed precisely because it foisted itself on inhabitants instead of seeking to garner their support.

The hierarchy of values Let’s return to the question of the location of the city. As opposed to Costa, the founders of Magnesia have more latitude in determining the exact location of the new settlement within an unoccupied region of Crete. And in fact it is from the considerations that go into identifying the most suitable location for Magnesia that we can learn a great deal about the principles that govern the Athenian visitor’s urban project. Sure enough, as in the case of Brasilia, the centrality of the location comes into the picture here as well—although, as we will soon learn, for very different reasons. Yet, the Athenian’s first reaction is to request detailed information about the geographical features of the region: is it on the seaside or inland, does it have harbors, does it grow all types of produce, does it have neighbors, is its land plain or mountainous, does it have sufficient timber, and is the timber good for building ships (704a–705c)? At this point, one might think that the Athenian is just like those Athenian politicians about whom Socrates complains in the Gorgias. As Socrates says in that dialogue, these people have made Athens swollen by focusing on “harbours and dockyards and walls and tribute and rubbish of that kind, without a thought for moderation or justice” (519a trans. Griffith). But of course, our Athenian is not at all like that. Already in book 1, he expresses the principle according to which the true, single aim of the legislator ought to be to cater for the full good of the citizens (630d–632d). As he explains, the full good of the citizens is composed of a hierarchy of goods. Current legislators and statesmen concentrate on what in reality are the lesser goods, such as health, fine looks, and bodily strength. But what they prioritize most of—as we have just seen in the Gorgias—are

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wealth and economic growth, which, as the Athenian visitor argues, ought to be instead at the very bottom of the hierarchy. Or, these politicians simply focus on military functions and walls. Yet, these goods are in fact subservient to the more important, divine goods at the upper part of the hierarchy: wisdom, moderation, justice, and courage. The true politician and legislator ought to concentrate on those (Laws 631c–d; 650b). It soon turns out that the Athenian’s motivation for asking about the geography of the city is the exact opposite of that of the politicians criticized by Socrates. Being close to the sea, and especially having good harbors, is disadvantageous insofar as it encourages intensive commerce and extensive interactions with other cities (704d–705a). Fortunately, as it turns out, the region in which Magnesia is to be built does not offer good timber for shipbuilding. Moreover, it is good that the soil is fertile and produces everything the city needs, so the city can be self-sustaining—yet, luckily, the soil is not too fertile, so it will not yield so much that people would start producing for export. Economic growth, ease of transportation on sea and land, commerce and communication with neighboring and far away cities are precisely what the Athenian wants to minimize. The hierarchy of goods is the determinant factor already at this stage: that location is the best for the city which fosters the highest virtues—moderation, as opposed to economic growth leading to pleonexia, greed, and insatiable desire. And here is a further example, now from the built environment of the city. As we have already seen in the quote from the Gorgias, previous and contemporary Athenians ascribed great importance to city walls. By contrast, the Athenian argues that Magnesia ought not have walls at all (778e–779a).10 His reasons for this radical proposal are as follows. First, a little earlier he proposed that the young, and especially the so-called Land Wardens, regularly perform construction and maintenance work for the city, including building gymnasia for themselves, and baths and other recreational facilities for the elderly. Contributing to the built environment together and for each other is crucial for the purposes of bonding among peers and for enhancing cross-generational care and responsibility. (Incidentally, I find the aging Plato expressing how such gestures from the young mean more for the old than any treatment by doctors, one of the most touching passages of the Laws.) Having a hand in the built environment together and for each other is thus a major factor in creating and maintaining philia, social cohesion among citizens. By contrast, the recognition of the importance of communal contribution to the development and embellishment of the city is almost completely missing from Le Corbusier’s urban projects and has no trace in Costa’s plans. An important element in these common building projects in Magnesia is the construction and maintenance of defense trenches. But of course the young citizens entrusted with the task of digging trenches would easily come to the conclusion that this exercise is completely useless if the city had a system of protective walls and fortifications, which—one would think—are more efficient for military purposes. So why dig and maintain the trenches year after year instead of having steady walls? The Athenian has an answer. It is much better not to have walls, precisely because a wellbuilt system of walls gives a false sense of security to the citizens, lulls their vigilance, 66

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and “introduce[s] a certain softness into the souls of the inhabitants” (778e). We see here as well how the hierarchy of goods proposed by the Athenian becomes operative in city planning and reverses the priorities of contemporary politicians and city planners. The walls would protect material goods and improve security. But once again, concern for the virtues of the soul of the inhabitants and fostering their courage and solidarity trumps all these other considerations. Not unreasonably, Aristotle found the idea of the wall-less city a piece of impractical doctrinaire idealism. As he points out in the Politics (7.11 1330b32–1331a18), city planning that prioritizes virtue over function might not always yield the best solution.11

Blueprints By now, we have identified the location of the city and fixed the principles which will govern such decisions as whether or not the city will be surrounded by walls. Once all that has been decided comes the actual distribution of space. Costa’s Pilot Plan describes the first steps in outlining the city with remarkable clarity, simplicity, and elegance. He writes: And now let us see how the plan was born, outlined and developed to its present conclusion. It was born of that initial gesture which anyone would make when pointing to a given place, or taking possession of it: the drawing of two axes crossing each other at right angles, in the sign of the Cross. This sign was then adapted to the topography, the natural drainage of the land, and the best possible orientation: the extremities of one axial line were curved so as to make the sign fit into the equilateral triangle which outlines the area to be urbanised.12 The plan thus starts with the gesture of defining a center, marked by the crossing of the two bended axes and the boundaries by the sides of the equilateral triangle (see Figure 3.1). We soon also get a justification for the use of this particular shape: The highlights in the outline plan of the city are the public buildings which house the Fundamental Powers. These are three, and they are autonomous: therefore the equilateral–triangle—associated with the earliest architecture in the world—is the elementary frame best suited to express them. The general outline of the city is thus a reflection of a basic political principle. The central crossing and the equilateral triangle are then further developed, through the introduction of another symbolically charged image, that of an aircraft, the symbol of the machine and of progress, the stamp of the modernist urbanist. And, voilà, we get the iconic shape of Brasilia. With these few lines, the city has its center, identifying the place of the fundamental public buildings, and also a definite shape, fixing the boundaries of

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Figure 3.1  Sketches by Lúcio Costa for the master plan of Brasilia from 1957. Image Brazil State Archives. the city. The combination of geometrical simplicity, religious and political symbolism makes the plan the most natural possible. One can hardly blame William Holford for finding the bare and simple obviousness of Costa’s plan, the immediate expression of an Idea, captivating and even irresistible. Geometrical simplicity; fixing the center and the limit; focusing on axes that divide the surface into symmetrical areas; and imbuing all of this with religious and political symbolism. I would like to maintain that precisely these fundamental features of Costa’s plan characterize the Athenian’s blueprint for Magnesia as well. According to the Athenian’s plan, Magnesia forms a circle, divided into twelve sections (Figure 3.2). At the center, highlighted by the crossing of the six diameters, we find the acropolis and the main public buildings. It is surrounded by the concentric 68

Plato’s Magnesia and Costa’s Brasilia

Figure 3.2  Magnesia’s Plan, Gábor Betegh. Sketch of the author after Pierre VidalNaquet, The Black Hunter. Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 255, fig. 3.

circles of the urban area and encircled by the twelve villages. In a sense, what is the Cross for Costa is the circle for Plato. Plato in his late dialogues such as the Timaeus, but even more importantly in the Laws itself, connects the geometrical perfection of the circle with the divine, and in particular with the manifestation of the divine in the cosmos. The reference to the cosmic is reinforced by the division into twelve segments.13 And the circle reappears in the design of the twelve villages, expressing the thought that each village is a microcosmos and a micropolis. Furthermore, both the cross and the circle naturally define a privileged point: the intersection in the case of the cross (as Costa duly emphasizes) and the center in the case of the circle. In both cases, the geometrically privileged point will serve to house functions of critical importance to the community as whole. Note also that although both designs start from basic geometrical shapes, both designers hasten to point out that the actual plan should not simply be imposed on the terrain, but ought to take into account its geological features.14 Both designs, moreover, fix the limits of the city. The equilateral triangle but even more so the contours of the airplane are such that the city cannot grow out of it without cancelling the original 69

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plan. Similarly, even in the absence of a protective wall marking the limits of the city, the urban surface of Magnesia is set by the outer circle. In particular, the plan makes it clear that none of the twelve tribes can extend its territory without disrupting the unity of the city. None of the slices can grow on its own without disrupting the perfection of the circle. And the system proposed by the Athenian ensures, by integrated economic and institutional provisions, limiting export and import, that there will be no further expansion of the city as a whole, neither in territory, nor in population, as any such growth would jeopardize the stability of the community. In the case of Brasilia, at least in the early years, the problem was not so much the expansion of the city because of its economic growth. Rather, the clear contours of the design resulted in a sharp distinction between inside and outside, reinforcing— rather than reducing—economic and social divisions. As many early critics of Brasilia pointed out, there was no place inside the well-ordered city for the poor— indeed not even for the very construction workers who built the city. This resulted in a proliferation of satellite cities, shanty-towns, which were basically unplanned and disorganized agglomerations of wooden shacks, protruding from the neat and clear design of the aircraft.15 Now, the circle might seem to be an intuitively compelling shape for a city— and we find a number of circular planned cities in various cultures before and after Plato. For near-contemporary examples, just think of the Garden City movement or Canberra—incidentally designed by the very same William Holford, who so enthusiastically endorsed Costa’s Pilot Plan. Yet, it turns out that circular cities were not any more common in Classical Greece than aircraft-shaped cities in the twentieth century. Indeed, the only other reference I have found, apart from Plato, to a circular city in Classical Greece is in Aristophanes’s Birds—where it is depicted as something that belongs in the realm of absurdities, something that only a crazy scientist, like Meton, with no regard to reality, could come up with (999–1008). Plato’s circular city is an emphatic affirmation that such a city could, and indeed should, be built, and not only because of its geometrical features, and its theological and cosmic resonances, but also on account of the societal implications that, as we shall see, such a design can bring. In fact, Plato in the Timaeus-Critias had already experimented with circular cities. According to Critias’s account, both prehistoric Athens and the capital of Atlantis were composed of concentric circles. In view of the strong connection between the circle and the divine, this is just what we would expect, insofar as both cities were founded by gods: Athens by Athena and Atlantis by Poseidon. Naturally, Poseidon’s city is closely connected to the sea and had an intricate system of harbors. It also had all the natural resources in great abundance. In view of what we have seen in the Gorgias and the Laws, it will not come as a surprise that Atlantis gets “swollen” by extensive seafaring and commerce, instilling greed and imperial aspirations in its leaders and citizens, which ultimately led to the city’s downfall. The comparison with the spatial organization of prehistoric Athens is no less illuminating. Athena’s Athens, in 70

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accordance with the principles set out in the Republic, was based on the strict separation of classes. This division in turn was duly reflected in the spatial organization of the city. It was composed of concentric, clearly separated circles, so that the guardians live in the center, occupying the acropolis, surrounded by walls, whereas the lower classes lived toward the periphery.16 As soon as Plato gives up on the idea of the strict separation of classes in the Laws and puts the emphasis on cohesion rather than division, he also introduces a spatial arrangement which fosters mingling and shared spaces and, as we shall shortly see, the equal distribution of property.

Traditional cities and grid designs The radical design choices of Brasilia and Magnesia are expressions of no less radical criticisms of their respective contemporary cities, both old traditional cities and new developments, and the values they were supposed to manifest and foster. First, traditional cities. Modernist urban planning, as it is expressed most clearly in Le Corbusier’s theoretical and programmatic writings, defines itself in opposition to the urban life of overcrowded, congested, chaotic, unhealthy cities, where, moreover, social inequalities are put into sharp relief by the extreme polarization of housing conditions and where such inequalities are propelled further by the property market and speculation. Crucially, in designing Brasilia, Costa adapted Le Corbusier’s criticism of Paris and other European cities to the Brazilian context. Costa’s Pilot Plan is a criticism and negation not only of the overpopulation and chaotic traffic of Rio and Sao Paolo, but also of their expression and fostering of social inequalities.17 As to Magnesia, we have already seen that the hierarchy of virtues used as a yard stick in design choices is an explicit critical reaction to the urban principles castigated by Socrates in the Gorgias. Yet the criticism is more extensive and not only touches on questions such as whether there should be walls and how close the city should be to the sea, but also on the overall spatial arrangement of the city. In a way, this is closely reminiscent of the modernist critique, insofar as traditional Greek cities gave free rein to architectural display of economic and social differences. Just as important, they lacked clear spatial organization. Here is how Lewis Mumford described traditional Greek cities in his classic book The City in History: Nothing that could be called a coherent street system characterised the residential district of these early towns. … The lanes would be wide enough perhaps for a man with a donkey or a market basket; but one had to know one’s quarter in order to find one’s way about it.18 As opposed to this, Magnesia, just as the modernist city, was designed with a clear, transparent plan, with easy access to all parts of the city, and, as we shall shortly see, leaving little room for the display of social and economic differences.

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However, apart from overpopulated traditional cities, Le Corbusier’s modernism had another target: the grid design of Manhattan. Le Corbusier hated Manhattan possibly even more than traditional European cities. As Rem Koolhaas puts it in his Delirious New York, the Radiant City is Le Corbusier’s failed attempt to create an anti-Manhattan.19 Now, the Manhattan grid displays a conspicuous resemblance to another type of Greek planned city, the so-called Hippodamian grid design. Indeed, insofar as Le Corbusier’s modernist city plan is an anti-Manhattan grid, Plato’s Magnesia is an antiHippodiamian design. Aristotle in the Politics ascribes the invention of this type of orthogonal urban planning to the fifth-century Hippodamus of Miletus, who redesigned his native Miletus and gave a new city plan to the Piraeus (Politics 2.8 1267b28-1268a15; 7.11 1330b24). Archeologists, however, agree that the orthogonal grid had already been widespread in Near Eastern cities and was the favored design of Greek colonies at least from the seventh century bce.20 We can only guess what the motivation behind these orthogonal designs was; as Aristotle says, such arrangements of houses are seemly and, more importantly, convenient (Politics 7.11 1330b24-25). However, in the case of Manhattan, we have the Commissioners’ Plan from 1811, describing the considerations that led to the adoption of the grid. And these are pretty simple: it is “the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in”—construction price and, just as in Aristotle’s description of the Hippodamian design, convenience.21 Quite evidently, the principles governing the Commissioners’ decisions are the exact opposite of the hierarchy of values that ought to govern the design of Magnesia. However, Plato’s motivations for the negation of the Hippodamian orthogonal plan must have been even more complex. First, there is the geometrical, or indeed, metaphysical, and theological superiority of the circle over the straight line—a cornerstone of Plato’s value-laden geometry. Yet, the contrasting geometrical properties have important urban ramifications as well. The orthogonal plan does not have intrinsic limits. The straight lines composing the street system can run into infinity in either directions if they are not bounded by the coastline, or other geographical features, or the wall raised by the citizens.22 The proximity of the sea, in the case of Miletus, the Piraeus, or Manhattan fosters commerce and growth, whereas the straight lines of the grid don’t set any intrinsic limits to this growth. Just as important, the orthogonal grid does not have a natural center either—Greek orthogonal city designs did not have the two principal axes of Roman cities. One might argue that having no center could be the geometrical expression of a democratic constitution. However, even a democratic city has centers of communal life: political, religious, and commercial. In the Hippodamian city, there are no geometrically privileged points which could naturally serve as the centers of the community. As we have seen, both the Athenian visitor and Costa start from the opposite direction: they first define the center—which can serve as the hub of communal life—and delimit the boundaries of the city, and everything else comes after that. 72

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Equality and fair distribution The orthogonal design has a further geometrical feature with important ramifications for the life of the community: each allotment has the same surface area. Or, in the case of the Manhattan grid, to quote again Koolhaas, “all the blocks are the same; their equivalence invalidates at once all the systems of articulation and differentiations that have guided the design of traditional cities.”23 The grid design, ancient or modern, expresses a certain conception of fairness based on the equality of the surface areas of the allotments. The superficial observer might think that this is in fact the fairest possible distribution for a new settlement. But that is far from being the case. As the saying goes, and as any property agent can tell you, “location is everything.” For instance, the properties closer to the centers of civic, cultural, and political life tend to have greater value. Or, in the case of agricultural allotments, one piece of land might be rocky and hard to cultivate, whereas another one of equal surface could be fertile, yielding much more to harvest. As Garland rightly remarks in his discussion of the distribution of allotments in newly founded Greek colonies: “The likelihood of factious disagreement breaking out at this juncture must have been considerable, particularly since the allotments could hardly have been identical in quality, even if they were identical in size.”24 This kind of “factious disagreement,” leading to stasis, is, as we have seen, precisely what Plato considered to be the main threat to the stability of the city. This flaw of the orthogonal design must therefore be corrected in order to protect the basic value of solidarity. It is not surprising, then, that the question of fair distribution of land appears at more than one level in the description of Magnesia. The city is first distributed into twelve “tribes” and then into twelve times 420 households. The circular area of the city must therefore be distributed evenly into twelve segments and then each segment into the required number of plots. These smaller communities composing the city offer an obvious comparison with Costa’s superquadras. It is a fundamental feature of both Magnesia and Brasilia that although the shared communal, political, and religious institutions are located in the center of the city, the city is also divided into smaller units—something which is, once again, missing from grid designs. In both Magnesia and Brasilia, these communities are planned to be equal to one another. These segments of the city are, moreover, to a considerable extent self-contained. In a way, in both Brasilia and Magnesia they reproduce at a smaller scale the main functions of the city: just as the superquadras have their own commercial centers, sport clubs, and churches, so the twelve segments of Magnesia have their own agoras, gymnasia, magistrates, and shrines. Indeed, even the respective populations of these smaller communities are comparable: one Magnesian tribe has 420 households, whereas a typical superquadra would house fewer than 600 families. Now there is a marked attempt to make the superquadras equal, if not architecturally identical. But factors such as difference in distance from the main political and

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commercial center, as well as certain architectural features which went beyond Costa’s original plans, reintroduced a considerable level of inequality. For instance, the location and relative distance from the central institutions and other privileged points of interest, such as the lake, became a source of difference in market value and consequently reinforced social stratification. In designing Magnesia, the Athenian demonstrates a considerably more nuanced approach to guaranteeing equality through urban planning. He does so, first, by factoring in the quality of the land: the areas of the twelve segments and the allotments of households within the segments are not equal. The better plots are smaller, and the less fertile bigger. Second, he also takes into account the position of individual allotments relative to the center. Each household will receive an allotment in the urban area and one in the agricultural area. Those whose urban plot is closer to the center will have their agricultural plot toward the periphery and vice versa (Laws 745c–d). The Athenian realizes that if equality, promoting and upholding social cohesion and solidarity, should be valued among all else in the life of the community, the legislatorurbanist should consider the inherent features of the terrain and therefore ought not apply geometrical principles mechanically. The optimal spatial organization of the city is thus a combination of pure geometrical considerations and due attention paid to the inherent lack of homogeneity in the natural environment. This attention to the natural features of the terrain is in stark contrast with the Hippodamian grid, which is mechanically imposed on the land. Similarly with Manhattan, the grid of which, to quote Koolhaas again, claims “the superiority of mental construction over reality,” so that “[t]he plotting of its streets and blocks announces that the subjugation, if not obliteration, of nature is its true ambition.”25 It is remarkable to see that once again, it is Plato who refuses to impose a pure mental construction and “to subjugate and obliterate nature.” Just as it is remarkable to see that he leaves more room for differences and variation among the twelve segments and allotments than Costa did with the regimented rows of superquadras. The Athenian is moreover not oblivious to the fact that the new settlers, coming not only from different parts of Greece, but also from very different economic backgrounds, might not be happy with the egalitarianism of the city, as it is manifested also in the spatial arrangement. This is the point where he comes up with the analogy of the wax model that I started this discussion with: All these suggestions we have been making are never going to hit upon precisely the conditions in which the whole plan can be put into effect exactly as described—men who will tolerate a whole lifetime of fixed and modest limits to property (…) and doing without gold and the other things which the lawgiver, on the basis of the argument so far, is obviously going to have to add to this list. And then there’s his description of the country and the town, with the houses at the centre and round the edge—it all sounds pretty much like a dream, or like someone making little wax models of a city and its citizens. (Laws 745e–746a)

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The Athenian thus expresses some reservations as to how feasible it will be to convince the citizens of Magnesia about the advantages of the political and economic project, and, closely related to that, about the advantages of the radical novelty of the urban planning. There is ample evidence that the political views of Le Corbusier, Niemeyer, and Costa, expressed in Le Corbusier’s “modern ethic,” were more idealistic, based on a strong belief in a constant and rapid progress toward a more egalitarian society.26 And as we have seen, they were equally convinced that architecture and urbanism are instruments of primary importance in fostering and speeding up social progress, justice, and equality—even if the politicians they were working for did not share those convictions. Despite the intentions of those who imagined its spatial layout and buildings, Brasilia has not become an egalitarian community, and it is questionable whether Costa’s design even helped to reduce inequality. Even if socioeconomical differences are less clearly visible in Brasilia than in Rio or Sao Paolo, this has only been achieved by pushing poverty out of the borders of the city into satellite cities—jettisoning the poor from the aircraft as it were. Although most of my friends who live in Brasilia find much to like in the city, many sociologists, urban theoreticians, and Brazilians consider it to be a failure. Interestingly, the customary criticism of Brasilia closely resembles Mumford’s critique of Plato’s urban project: Plato undervalued the vital stimuli and challenges of growth: variety, disorder, conflict, tension, weakness, and even temporary failure. Each of these, if it does not harden into a fixed pattern, may produce a far more desirable community than any mode of conformity, whether that conformity be imposed by the philistine executives of a modern government agency or business corporation aided by electronic computers, or the greatest thinker and writer that Athens had helped to produce.27 We can of course never have first-hand experience of what it would have been like to live in Plato’s Magnesia. But we do have Brasilia. And it seems to me that from the problems and success of Brasilia, from how its inhabitants arriving from different parts of the country and of the world at large, shaped the city, let themselves and their lifestyles shaped by it, mostly against but at least to some extent also in line with Costa’s intentions, how they got attached to it, and how they made it their own—from all this, I think, we might get at least a faint glimpse of how Magnesia would have fared as a real living city. Despite all the criticisms leveled against Brasilia, many of its inhabitants, no matter whether they are natives of the city or were born in Sao Paolo or even Milan, find much to like about it. Insofar as the Athenian visitor had a more nuanced conception of fairness and equality and how they are expressed in the distribution of space and recognized the importance of directly involving citizens in developing, maintaining, and embellishing their city—it stands to reason to think that Magnesia might have fared even better. 75

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Notes 1 All translations of the Laws are by Griffith, with occasional modifications. 2 Costa, Sobre Arquitetura (Porto Allegre: CEUA, 1962), 202. 3 Le Corbusier, The Radiant City (New York: Orion, 1964), 364. 4 On this topic, see most recently Frisbee Sheffield, “Love in the City: Eros and Philia in Plato’s Laws” (forthcoming). 5 Costa, “Prizewinning Report on Brasilia” (1957), in William Holford, “Brasília: A New Capital for Brazil,” Architectural Review 122 (1957): 394–402; James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 64f. 6 On fixing the location of Brasilia, see Holston, Modernist City, 15–20. 7 “Epiphanies from Frank Gehry,” Foreign Policy, June 24, 2013. 8 de Graaf 2017: Part V. 9 On the question of persuasion and coercion in the Laws, see esp. Christopher Bobonich, “Persuasion, Compulsion and Freedom in Plato’s Laws,” The Classical Quarterly 41, no. 2 (1991): 365–88; R. F. Stalley, “Persuasion in Plato’s laws,” History of Political Thought 15, no. 2 (1994): 157–77; André Laks, Médiation Et Coercition: Pour Une Lecture Des Lois de Platon (Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2005). 10 For an extensive discussion of the importance of city walls in antiquity, see Ober and Weingast, in this volume. Their discussion highlights the radical nature of Plato’s proposal of having a city without walls. 11 Cf. Ober and Weingast, in this volume. 12 Costa, “Prizewinning Report.” 13 Cf. 771b: “Our grand total is divisible by twelve, and so is the number of persons in a tribe (420) and in each case this subdivision must be regarded as holy, a gift of God, corresponding to the months of the year and the revolution of the universe.” On the connection between twelve, the cosmic and the theological, see also 828c: “The law will provide for twelve festivals in honour of the twelve gods who give their names to the individual tribes. Every month the citizens should sacrifice to each of these gods and arrange chorus performances and cultural and gymnastic contests, varied according to the deity concerned and appropriate to the changing seasons of the year.” On the cosmic significance of the number twelve, see also Phaedo 11ob (the spherical earth composed of twelve segments); Phaedrus 246e–247a (the heavenly procession of the twelve gods, marking the twelve sections of the heavens); Timaeus 55c (the demiurge used the dodecahedron to create the shape of the universe). 14 Note however that the differences in the terrain do not really matter for the regular system of superquadras in Brasilia, whereas, as we shall see in the last section, the geological features of the terrain will be an important consideration for the division of Magnesia in twelve sections, and then in the further division into plots of lands to be distributed into individual households. For Costa’s reflections on the importance of taking into account of the climate of Brazil, see Lúcio Costa, “Razôes da nova arquitetura” [1930], Arte em Revista 4 (1980): 15–23. 15 Cf. F. G., “Crisis in Brasilia,” Ekistics 14 (1962): 143. 16 Critias 111e–1122 and 114d–117e; cf. Pierre Lévêque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Cleisthenes the Athenian (New York City: Humanities Press, 1996), 89–90. 17 Holston, Modernist City, 23–30. 18 Lewis Mumford, The City in History (San Diego: Harcourt, 1961), 163.

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19 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli, 2014 [1994]), 255. 20 Cf., for example, Emanuele Greco, “Greek Colonisation in Southern Italy: A Methodological Essay,” in Greek Colonisation (Leiden: Brill, 2006), ed. Gocha Tsetskhladze, 182, on the archaic grid design of Selinus. For an earlier, but comprehensive study of orthogonal town planning in antiquity, see Ferdinando Castagnoli, Orthogonal Town Planning in Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). Alfred Burns, “Hippodamus and the Planned City,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, 25, no. 4 (1976), 414–28, argues that this is not the correct reading of Aristotle’s text. 21 The Commissioners’ Plan (1811) (parts). 22 Cf. Lévêque and Vidal-Naquet, Cleisthenes, 83. 23 Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 20. 24 Robert Garland, Wandering Greeks: The Ancient Greek Diaspora from the Age of Homer to the Death of Alexander the Great (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 47. 25 Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 20. 26 It is worth quoting Niemeyer’s essay which bears the title “Ce qui manque à notre architecture”: “Cependant, nous avons le sentiment que le monde maintenant marche dans cette direction. La différence des classes s’amoindrit et les hommes commencent à s’entendre et à se rapprocher en vue des problèmes relatifs au bien-être collectif.” Niemeyer, “Ce qui manque à notre architecture,” Revue de Rio (1946): 12. 27 Mumford, City, 178.

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Chapter 4

What’s in a Balcony? The In-Between as Public Good Bernardo Zacka

The honking started shortly before noon. Tentative at first, it grew more assertive and accusatory, gaining in depth and intensity, before losing all semblance of rhythm. Funneled through three wide single-pane glass doors, caught between deep concrete slabs and reverberated, the commotion on the street morphed into a sonic assault in the third-floor apartment where I lived. James Marston Fitch once observed that buildings are not sealed containers, but like wombs, porous membranes that filter and modulate the play of environmental forces.1 My building, in the working-class and predominantly Christian neighborhood of Ain El Remmaneh on the outskirts of Beirut, had embraced porosity wholeheartedly, but largely dispensed with filtering. The apartment felt less like a womb than an echo chamber for the street below. Unconcerned at first, then amused, intrigued, and eventually irritated, I stepped through the glass doors onto the balcony and out to a familiar scene. The noise came from the green Toyota of my fifth-floor neighbor, Wajih. His assigned parking spot, though clearly marked, had once again been occupied by someone else. The honking was intended to shame the culprit into removing the vehicle. From being rightfully indignant, however, my neighbor was himself rapidly becoming a cause for indignation. His car blocked one of the street’s two lanes and, stretching now on both sides of it, the traffic had come to a standstill. Stranded drivers were turning to their own honks to urge him forward. In the street below, a familiar cast of characters were observing the scene and had begun to take part in it. The owner of “Maxicar,” the car accessory shop across the street, was imploring Wajih to find an alternate spot, while Elie, the mechanic, had reared his head from his underground garage, perhaps to make sure that the offending vehicle did not belong to one of his customers. Abdallah, the greengrocer, looked on impassively. In front of me and above, along the modernist façades across the street, the balconies had filled up too (Figure 4.1). Leaning on the metal balustrades, pacing to and fro, or peering from behind the claustras, they were all there: the mustachioed septuagenarian from the second floor, in his trademark shorts and sleeveless white

Political Theory and Architecture

Figure 4.1  The view from inside the apartment: A balcony looking onto other balconies, with the street in between below. undershirt; the young (and possibly single?) mother from the third floor above him, holding her baby, her attention split between the street and a conversation she was carrying with someone inside; the elderly lady from the fourth, in a long robe with a towel wrapped around the head, watering her plants and sending furtive glances in my direction; and all the way on top, the bearded young man from the fifth (a student? an office worker?), looking down, a plate in hand. Here we all were—people whose lives unfolded before me, but with whom I had rarely exchanged more than a distant greeting—brought together, as if in an amphitheater, by the spectacle below. The honking had become a happening.

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In 2004, the Lebanese Parliament passed a new construction law allowing for a more compact exploitation of space in the capital, Beirut. Friendly to real estate developers, the law facilitated the construction of high rises and contributed, in a roundabout way, to a 20 percent increase in the Total Exploitation Ratio—the maximum constructible surface per plot. The law achieved this feat by legalizing the enclosure of balconies behind glass curtain walls. In several districts of the city, the new law merely recognized a change that had long taken place because of rising costs of living, religious and sociocultural mores—the sealing of balconies behind thick, permanently drawn curtains to create an additional room or provide added privacy. The only novelty was that curtains could now be replaced with glass. But the law had a more noticeable effect in other districts of the city, like Ain El Remmaneh, where balconies had traditionally been open and outward facing, accelerating their transformation into inward-looking spaces that function as extensions of the living room. This change has been registered in new development, with balconies no longer protruding from the building envelope but encased in it, so as to facilitate their future enclosure. This chapter is an attempt to articulate what might be lost to the city if balconies were to continue turning inwards. What’s in a balcony? And why should public policy take notice? My answer to these questions passes through contemporary political theory and an episode in the history of modern architecture. In brief, I will argue that balconies are valuable because they support a reserved form of sociability on which vibrant city life depends, drawing people together, yet maintaining them at a distance at which they can remain strangers. More specifically, balconies assemble people who live within proximity, and who may not wish to become intimate, around a common world of events, experiences, and issues. In conjunction with the street, they help constitute a public of strangers. Seen in this light, I hope to show that balconies are not just private amenities, but a matter of common concern—indeed, a public good of sorts. My argument is inspired by a short essay on city life by Iris Marion Young. In it, Young suggests that city life, understood as the being together of strangers, offers an attractive vision for social relations in a democratic polity.2 Young finds in the city’s vibrancy and diversity, and in the appreciation it fosters for side-by-side difference, a compelling alternative to the atomism of liberal individualism and the togetherness of communitarianism. But if city life is to serve as a guiding model for social life in plural societies, what can residential architecture, which typically operates at a more modest scale—that of the building—do to bring it about? Drawing on the work of the Dutch architect and Team 10 member Aldo Van Eyck, I suggest that architecture has an important civic role to play in articulating the transition between individual dwellings and the broader city, between interior and exterior, private and public. In the hands of architects, such dualities are not merely conceptual; they represent physical spaces and scales that must be connected through design. I focus on balconies because they are emblematic of a family of intermediary spaces—along 83

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with porches, stoops, courtyards, terraces, and lobbies—that do the connecting, and I examine the forms of life they occasion.3 I argue that these “spaces in-between” contribute to the social life of the city by bringing people into distinctive patterns of encounter. The relationships they foster take place not merely in space but through space: they arise because of the spatial configurations in which people are placed and derive their logic from these configurations. By putting “spaces in-between” at the center of our thinking about the built environment, we come to see public and private space not as mutually exclusive, but as mutually constitutive, with residential architecture providing the physical and psychological counterform to the adjoining public space. On a methodological front, the following pages are an exercise in connecting micro- and macro-scales of analysis—an architectural element and the social life of the city—that are the subject of different scholarly literatures in the fields of architecture and urban studies. I attempt to bring them into conversation and to show why the space of their encounter is of interest to political theory. I should stress that this essay probes the contribution of balconies to the social life of the city in a particular urban, socioeconomic, and cultural context. I will specify what that context is and why it is relevant as I go along. The chapter is structured as follows. I begin by describing the reserved sociability that balconies foster, then turn to Young and Jane Jacobs to explain why such sociability ought to be a matter of common concern. With the help of Aldo Van Eyck and Team 10, I examine how residential architecture might contribute to fostering reserved sociability, uncovering three design principles that shed light on how, precisely, balconies activate social life. Equipped with a better understanding of how balconies contribute to the city, I return to the 2004 law and offer a critical appraisal of the reasons that were offered on its behalf.

Balconies and reserved sociability A balcony is a cantilevered platform that projects from one’s dwelling into the outside.4 Unlike a “street in the sky”—an elevated walkway that runs along the flank of a building connecting apartments—a balcony is cellular and private. It does not aim to replace the street, but to complement it. It is, in many ways, the quintessential liminal space: a strip of private property suspended over public space. On a balcony, one is outside, yet at home; exposed, yet secluded. This ambivalence is registered in Ain El Remmaneh by the use of a distinctive sartorial register. The balcony is the domain of the nightgown and the undershirt: items not too immodest to be worn in public, but too revealing for the street. The modern balcony made its entrance in early nineteenth-century Paris and soon offered an ideal vantage point for the rising bourgeoisie to contemplate the boulevards

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opened up by Haussmann.5 Balconies were initially made of two rigid cantilevers supporting a horizontal platform. They expanded considerably in size in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the advent of reinforced concrete, which allowed them to be made of a single cantilevered slab. With a width comfortably reaching 1.5–2 m, balconies went from the narrow standing balustrades depicted by the French impressionist painter Caillebotte to platforms large enough to accommodate multiple people at once, along with chairs, tables, and other accessories. Over the course of the twentieth century, balconies became particularly popular around the Mediterranean basin, where a mild climate made them usable all year long. Following the success of the sanatorium, they also came to be seen as having public health benefits, providing “light and air” for the masses.6 In Lebanon, they are strongly incentivized by a construction law that treats them as “bonus spaces” that can be deducted from the maximal constructible surface per plot (the total exploitation ratio (TER)), so long as their area does not exceed 20 percent of the TER and 25 percent of any floor plate.7 As an intermediary space straddling the inside and outside, the private and public, the balcony supports a distinctive type of sociability I will call “reserved.” Its contiguity with the private dwelling facilitates access to city life just as easily as it enables withdrawal from it. Its elevation allows residents to observe what happens on the street, while remaining at a distance. In Ain El Remmaneh, where most buildings are five or six stories high, the balcony is close enough to greet someone down below, but just too far to hold a conversation; close enough to witness a dispute over parking and call for restraint, far enough not to have to get personally involved in disentangling the participants. It is a place from which one can witness what happens in the street without committing oneself to having witnessed it. Balconies offer alibis: up there, at a distance, one is allowed to have an unfocused gaze and an undiscerning ear. Balconies place people in situations where they can see and hear one another. This form of exposure is more limited than the personal, face-to-face encounters one has in shops or on the streets. And yet Jan Gehl, the urban designer widely credited for the transformation of Copenhagen into a vibrant pedestrian-friendly city, reminds us that it is precisely these more modest and distant forms of exposure—the “seeing and hearing” kind—that are crucial to fostering a vibrant city experience.8 The presence of such relationships, when they exist in sufficiently great numbers, can be aesthetically gratifying and itself become a draw. Balconies, of course, cannot by themselves generate a sense of happening—for that, they are tributary to the character of the neighborhood. And as Margaret Kohn reminds us in her contribution to this volume, such character depends less on architecture than on factors such as affordable housing, zoning, and proximity to transport, parks, and commerce. Still, while balconies cannot initiate city life, they can intensify what is already there. The experience of seeing and hearing from a balcony is distinctive in two ways: it involves a state of leisurely contemplation and offers company without intimacy. 85

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Balconies differ from other zones of contact within the city—like subways, markets, or sidewalks—in that they invite a contemplative outlook. On a balcony, one can afford to be amused or entertained by the chaotic plenitude of the city, because one can consume it at will and at a remove. In Beirut, moreover, balconies giving onto the street are not typically spaces of work, where one is absorbed in pressing activities, but of leisure. One ventures there primarily to do one thing: loiter. In this, front-facing balconies differ from rear-facing balconies giving onto courtyards or parking lots, which are typically sites of gendered labor, often performed by migrant domestic workers. These balconies too serve a social function, but for a different public, one that I hope to explore on a different occasion. Michael Walzer offers a distinction that nicely captures the leisurely quality of (frontfacing) balconies. He invites us to differentiate between two types of spaces: singleminded spaces, designed with one thing in mind, which we tend to enter in a hurry, and open-minded spaces, used by people who do different things and are “prepared to tolerate, even take an interest in, things they don’t do.”9 Walzer insists on talking about open-mindedness rather than open-purpose to underscore the fact that the look and feel of a space can play a part in shaping not just what we do, but also our attitudes and dispositions. As he puts it: “It’s not only that space serves certain purposes known in advance by its users, but also that its design and character stimulate (or repress) certain qualities of attention, interest, forbearance, and receptivity.”10 What spatial characteristics, then, contribute to the balcony’s open-mindedness? Three come to mind. First, balconies offer an unobstructed view over a range of activities, enabling eyes and ears to wander freely. In this regard, they are similar to benches at the edge of a square. Balconies share a second attribute with such benches. Since they are both placed at the edge of the space they overlook, one’s back is, so to speak, protected: one can abandon oneself to contemplation without having to worry about being accosted or watched from behind. Unlike benches, however, balconies remove the potential awkwardness involved in observing others by allowing for an asymmetrical gaze. This, their third distinctive characteristic, is due to a combination of physiological facts—our downward field of vision is more extensive than our upward field of vision, and when walking, our axis of vision tends to be tilted downward by an average of 10 degrees.11 In ordinary circumstances, then, people on balconies can watch pedestrians on the street without being in their field of vision. One can look closely at others because the setup ensures they are unlikely to look back. Besides facilitating leisurely contemplation, balconies also offer company without intimacy. To appreciate the particular breed of sociability they foster, we must begin by noticing that seeing and hearing relationships are of two types. We can see and hear people, like Abdallah or Wajih, with whom we have independent relationships, as customers or neighbors; but we can also see and hear people, like those on the balconies across the street, whom we only know in that capacity—as “the people on the balconies across the street.” The first type of relationship occurs merely in space; the second occurs through space. Most of our relationships occur in space. When we meet our 86

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family, friends, neighbors, or fellow club members, we meet them somewhere. But some relationships occur only through space—they exist for no other reason, and involve no other bond, than the spatial arrangement in which we are placed. These relationships would not have existed had our buildings been designed otherwise. As architectural elements, balconies perform an intricate operation: they put us in touch through space with occupants of buildings across the street, whom we do not know, while isolating us from the people we do know—the neighbors who inhabit our building, and whose balconies are either stacked above ours, or cut off from it by a partition wall. Balconies bring us into visual proximity with those who are socially distant and preclude contact with those who are socially proximate. It is because of this, perhaps, that they are places of relative freedom rather than panopticons—that people feel comfortable wearing items they would not wear on the street, or that they do not feel the need to hide their loitering behind a screen of activity. The genius of the balcony is to offer company without intimacy—not the tight, warm, but potentially suffocating sociability of a village, but the sociability of a city. The people about whom we know the most, those we can observe all day, are those we are least likely to speak to. They remain strangers. In this respect, balconies function a bit like cafés and have the same kind of draw. Regulars keep each other silent company, looking out onto the street, absorbed in their own thoughts. They may, as the French novelist Huysmans put it, greet one other furtively or inquire about someone’s prolonged absence, but they are otherwise careful to maintain boundaries and to pre-emptively disarm their neighbors’ solicitousness.12 Balconies like cafés offer a lukewarm sociability that can be intrinsically valuable, providing a welcome break from the solitude of home, the overbearing closeness of family, and the purposiveness of associational life.

City life and “contact” What I have said so far goes some way toward explaining the appeal of balconies, though not quite yet why public policy should take notice. After all, the state is no purveyor of cafés, however gratifying or enjoyable they may be13—so why should it be concerned with balconies and the reserved sociability they foster? To begin answering that question, I want to step back from balconies for a moment and turn to the work of Iris Marion Young and Jane Jacobs. From them, I derive the idea that reserved sociability is not just a welcome addition to city life, but a crucial ingredient to its success. I will try to suggest, moreover, that balconies along with other “spaces in between” have an important role to play in supporting such sociability. Young opens her suggestive essay on city life with an epigraph from Jacobs: The tolerance, the room for great differences among neighbors—differences that often go far deeper than differences in color—which are possible and 87

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normal in intensely urban life, but which are so foreign to suburbs and pseudosuburbs, are possible and normal only when streets of great cities have built-in equipment allowing strangers to dwell in peace together on civilized but essentially dignified and reserved terms.14 The first half of this quote relays one of the founding observations of urban sociology— that the city differs from other types of settlements by making possible great diversity within proximity.15 In a city, we are surrounded by people who are unlike us and we take their presence by our side in residential buildings, squares, sidewalks, and shops for given. Young invites us to see in this casual acceptance of diversity, when it does materialize, something worth contemplating and appreciating and proposes to build from it a normative ideal for social relations within a democratic polity.16 Young describes this ideal as a form of “openness to unassimilated difference”—a way of being together that takes proximate diversity as an established and valuable fact of life—and offers it as an alternative to both liberal individualism and communitarianism. Young finds both liberalism and communitarianism guilty of trying to collapse social difference into homogeneity. Liberalism makes abstraction of our specific forms of life and elevates us all into a kind of empty and generic universalism; communitarianism presumes that we can comprehend one another because we belong to shared communities of meanings and ends. In city life, however, we accept that those around us are different and do not care or pretend to fully comprehend them. They remain strangers and we find, in this opacity, a source of stimulation and enrichment. Young spends much of her essay fleshing out this ideal of city life. Yet despite the conditional statement contained in the second half of Jacobs’s quote, Young says very little about what the city must be like—what “built-in equipment” it must have—if it is to foster the kind of city life she describes. What is it about the city—or about some cities, or parts of cities—that prepares us to accept the presence of strangers in the vicinity of home? Jane Jacobs’s discussion of “contact” in The Death and Life of Great American Cities provides the beginnings of an answer.17 Contact is the term Jacobs uses to refer to the arm’s length sociability that one can see on display in urban public spaces, such as sidewalks and parks. It is a form of sociability that remains noncommittal or, to use the term I have chosen, “reserved,” for it takes place between “people who do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion and in most cases do not care to know each other in that fashion.”18 While Jacobs focuses primarily on the street, “contact” is also a fitting term to describe the seeing and hearing relationships occasioned by balconies. Jacobs’s central insight is that “city life”—the lively and diverse intermingling of strangers—can only occur when cities manage to foster “contact” on these terms: when they succeed in bringing people together without forcing them to be too close.19 In Jacobs’s own words, “A good city street neighborhood achieves a marvel of balance between its people’s determination to have essential privacy and their simultaneous

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wishes for differing degrees of contact.”20 On Jacobs’s account, then, a vibrant city must strike a balance between privacy and sociability; it must make it possible for people to dwell together on essentially reserved terms. Both too little and too much contact can disrupt this equilibrium. Too little contact means withdrawal from public space and into the private realm— the plight often associated with suburbs or large housing projects.21 In order to guard against this, cities must be able to draw people out. This is why Jacobs insists on the importance of districts that involve a mixture of primary uses. When people share the same streets to go to work, to head back home, or to shop, as they do in Ain El Remmaneh, their intermingling is guaranteed to occur as a byproduct of such activities. In time, this intermingling may itself become a draw, attracting other people and businesses that cater to those brought around by the primary uses. Jacobs singles out the role played by shopkeepers—like Abdallah, the greengrocer—whose job brings them in touch with many residents and who serve as informal social hubs that can facilitate contact between them. But cities must also guard against fostering too much contact. Jacobs observes that whenever people are forced to choose between interacting with others on intimate terms and not interacting at all, many opt for the latter. City dwellers are loath to expose themselves to the social scrutiny and intrusions on privacy that come with intimate familiarity. She also remarks that when people are placed in close proximity, they tend to become more watchful of those who surround them and less tolerant of diversity.22 Too much contact can turn zones of the city into cliquish communities. In Jacobs’s descriptions of city life, privacy and publicity are not opposed to one another, but exist in symbiosis: public life is all the more likely to occur the easier it is to retreat from it. The key to vibrancy, on such an understanding of city dynamics, lies not in expanding the public sphere and contracting the private one, but in preserving the distinctiveness of the two, while facilitating the transitions between them. Cities that succeed in achieving this feat can live up to their potential—that of offering, as alternative to atomism and community, an enriching exposure to difference within proximity. Yet if everyday “contact” is so critical to the urban experience, one may wonder whether and how architecture—understood here in a narrow sense, as the design of buildings—can play a part in fostering it. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs had a lot to say about how architecture could go wrong, but not much about how it could go right. She presented her book as an “attack on current city planning” and saved some of her harshest words for the ideas of Le Corbusier, as they were developed and disseminated through the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Jacobs fiercely criticized the functionalism of the Radiant City, with its strict spatial separation of dwelling, work, recreation, and transportation. She lamented the use of high rises, which achieve high densities while liberating up to 95 percent of the ground surface for vast areas of grass, thus loosening the urban fabric beyond recognition. Similarly, she took issue with the reduction in the number of streets so as to facilitate 89

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the flow of automobiles. These changes, she thought, isolated city dwellers from one another, killed the street where they would casually mingle, and forced them into an unhealthy choice between too much contact—in areas exclusively designated for that purpose—and too little. As against these ideas, the planning principles that Jacobs recommended—mixed-use districts, high ground coverage areas, short blocks with frequent streets—were primarily urbanistic in character. Thus the question remains: in addition to these measures, what distinctive contribution, if any, can residential architecture make in inducing city life? Years before the publication of Jacobs’s seminal book, such questions had already been taken up by a group of architects who emerged from within CIAM and whose ideas eventually precipitated its demise. They banded together under the name “Team 10.”

Team 10 and the “in-between” Team 10 consisted of a small and eclectic group of young architects who started meeting in the early 1950s. The core members of the group—Alison and Peter Smithson (UK), Jaap Bakema and Aldo Van Eyck (Netherlands), Georges Candilis (France), Shadrach Woods (United States), and Giancarlo de Carlo (Italy)—would become some of the most influential figures in European postwar architecture.23 Like Jacobs, they were united in their opposition to the functionalism of CIAM. Team 10’s critique had the appearance of being internal to functionalism. They faulted functionalism for not being sufficiently responsive to people’s need for belonging. “Belonging,” Alison and Peter Smithson wrote in 1953, “is a basic emotional need […]. From belonging—identity—comes the enriching sense of neighborliness. The short narrow street of the slum succeeds where spacious redevelopment frequently fails.”24 The Smithsons seemed to be calling for an enlargement of functional thinking to incorporate a need that had not yet been met. What lent depth to their critique, however, is that attending to a socio-psychological need like “belonging” cannot be achieved simply by adding one more function to those already recognized in the Athens Charter.25 In order to understand what it is that makes a street feel like home and a district like a neighborhood, one has to trade the bird’s eye perspective of the urban planner for the more situated and embodied standpoint of the user of space. The problem with the functionalism of CIAM is not that it exhibited too narrow an understanding of the needs of city dwellers, but that functional thinking itself was ill-adapted to apprehending the experiential dimensions of city life. As an alternative to thinking about the city as a set of functions to be fulfilled, the Smithsons proposed to think of it in more phenomenological terms, as a series of scales to be articulated.26 The “Urban Re-Identification” grid they presented at CIAM IX in 1953 replaced the categories of Dwelling, Work, Recreation, and Transportation with those of House, Street, District, and City.27 As Jacobs would observe a decade

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later, the relationship between the house and the street, so central to city life, was not a primary concern of the Modern Movement. In the early decades of the twentieth century, architects still thought, by and large, of the exterior of the house as defined primarily by nature—by light, air, and sun.28 For the members of Team 10, however, it was not nature, but the city that now formed the counterpart of interior, private space.29 The dwelling had to be returned to its urban context, and it was the responsibility of architecture, as they saw it, to articulate the relationship between the two. This led them to deflate the dichotomy that CIAM had established between architecture and urbanism. It also inspired the Smithsons to propose a reconciliation of mass housing with the street by incorporating into their designs “streets in the sky,” which were meant to reproduce the sociability of the street just outside one’s doorstep. It is in this intellectual context that Aldo Van Eyck elaborated the notion of the threshold, as a way to designate physical spaces—such as courtyards, lobbies, terraces, porches—that connect various spatial and psychological registers within the city. Van Eyck thought of such spaces as forming an in-between realm, mediating the encounter between distinct orders, such as the house and the street, sharing characteristics with each, without dissolving into either. A threshold, he wrote, should make us aware “of what is significant on either side,” while “mitigating the anxiety than an abrupt transition” might cause.30 One of the problems of modern architecture, according to Van Eyck, is that it had neglected, and sometimes even erased, such intermediary spaces. It had thus set up contrasts that were too stark between opposing polarities—the individual, on the one hand, the collective on the other; the private here, the public there. Van Eyck invited his audience at the last CIAM Congress in 1959 to consider the world of the house and that of the street, “with me inside and you outside and vice-versa.” He spoke of “Two worlds clashing, no transition. The individual on one side, the collective on the other. It’s terrifying.” “Between the two,” he continued, “society in general throws lots of barriers, whilst architects in particular are so poor in spirit they provide doors 2in thick and 6ft high; flat surfaces in a flat surface […]. Just think of it: 2in.—or 1/4in. if it is in glass—between such fantastic phenomena—hair-raising, brutal—like a guillotine.”31 By using the image of the guillotine, Van Eyck wanted to stress that the realities on both sides of the door were often so far apart, and the transition between them so abrupt, that the experience of crossing was unnecessarily unnerving: one was not so much accompanied from one place to the next as thrown into it. The way to make the street more inviting, according to Van Eyck, was not to blur the distinction between private and public, individual and collective. These “twin phenomena,” as he called them, were essentially linked, and the capacity to move back and forth between them, personally enriching. The task of architecture, rather, was to facilitate the transition between them by creating intermediary spaces that would lead us more gradually from one place to the next. Van Eyck proposed to do this, concretely, by stretching out the door, giving it width and volume, and transforming it into a place in its own right to frame our coming 91

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and going. He exemplified this approach in his most famous project, the Amsterdam Orphanage, which was completed in 1960.32 In that building, the transition between inside and outside is articulated through a system of semi-enclosed courtyards that delay one’s entrance and departure. The courtyards are open to the sky but, with the exception of a side opening that leads to the external perimeter of the site, are otherwise enveloped on all four sides by the building, and look into it through transparent glass panels. The continuity between inside and outside is further accentuated by the prolongation of external paving materials into the building and the use of complex color arrangements that draw the eye across boundaries.33 Importantly, Van Eyck did not see thresholds merely as sites of passage, but also as places of dwelling in their own right. Such spaces are appealing, he thought, because they capture something fundamental about our psychological inclinations. When confronted with a choice between “twin phenomena” like individual/collective, open/closed, large/ small, unity/diversity, order/chaos, our reaction is often one of ambivalence: we want to linger at the boundary, sampling a bit of both. In this in-between realm, we feel at home and are inclined to stop and loiter. Architecture should recognize this fact, Van Eyck says, and “frame our desire to tarry, make places where we can do so.”34 As spaces to pass through and loiter in, thresholds have the potential to activate and intensify urban sociability—a promise that Van Eyck identified, but that he did not himself document at any length. By easing transitions between inside and outside, they serve to support the noncommittal form of “contact” that Jacobs considered central to urban vitality. They draw people out naturally to the street and provide them with an equally easy retreat back in. By inviting loitering, they help engender a web of social relations that may otherwise not exist, bringing people that live within proximity into recurring patterns of encounter, thereby creating a valuable social buffer between the privacy of the home and the anonymity of the city. Across the work of Van Eyck, his students, and collaborators, one can discern at least three design strategies to bring in-between spaces to life. I propose to call them incompleteness, residual ambiguity, and openness to contingency. Incompleteness consists in under-designing in-between spaces, leaving them to be finished and customized by residents. Since such spaces are typically in view of others, they are a privileged terrain for the “presentation of the self.”35 Leaving them incomplete invites residents to enter into a kind of performative or theatrical relationship to others. Residual ambiguity involves under-specifying the boundaries and ownership of inbetween spaces. This draws residents into a latent form of conflict, negotiation, and compromise regarding the proper appearance of such spaces and competing claims to control.36 Openness to contingency means, finally, that in-between spaces should provide residents with vantage points from which to appreciate the various events or occasions that punctuate the routine of everyday life. Van Eyck reminds us of how an episodic event like snow can turn the city upside down, with automobiles brought to a standstill and children taking over, the functional garb of the city transformed into one gigantic 92

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playground.37 The in-between should not shield us from such contingencies, but invite us to partake in them as co-participants or co-witnesses. Van Eyck and his circle sought to scale up these ideas about the in-between into a design paradigm for mass housing at the scale of the city. While the results were mixed— with many projects failing to work as intended—the attempt is nonetheless instructive, not least because it left a mark on later architectural discourse and imagination. “Configurative discipline,” as it came to be called, sought to replace the additive model of urban planning—with houses stacked next to one another—with a more imbricated one, which involved the repetition of the same motif at different scales.38 Behind this belief in structural homology was a vision initially formulated by Alberti and Palladio and later rediscovered by Van Eyck: that a “house must be like a small city, a city like a large house.” As in the North African Casbah, from which Van Eyck and his circle drew inspiration, buildings were to be interlocked through a system of terraces, paths, and courtyards, with every counterform becoming a principal form in its own right.39 The resulting body of work came to be known as Dutch Structuralism. It placed public space at the center of the city, but conceived of it as occupying the interstices left by the surrounding residential units. This was public space as in-between space, without the traditional markers of publicity, such as the figure-ground positioning of the church or the open space of the plaza.40 The Dutch members of Team 10 were never quite as sanguine about the powers of architecture as their predecessors in the Modern Movement. They did not believe that architecture could reshape the social order by itself, only that it had an important role to play in reflecting and supporting certain forms of social life. Ultimately, Team 10’s architectural legacy may have failed to live up even to this more modest aspiration, with critics claiming that it had, perhaps unwittingly, fallen prey to the same formalism and architectural hubris as its predecessors.41 But if Team 10 did not provide us with a blueprint to resolve that great problem of modern architecture, “housing for the greater number,” it did however leave us with a rich conceptual language through which to look at the built environment and at the relationship between the dwelling and the city.

A balcony over the city Using the work of Team 10 as an interpretive lens, we can now return to balconies and examine more precisely how they activate city life. I want to look in particular at how balconies instantiate the three design strategies described above—incompleteness, residual ambiguity, and openness to contingency—even though such principles may have been foreign to their conception. Most city dwellers live in apartments they did not design, embedded in façades they cannot alter. In a city like Beirut, balconies, along with windows, are the only spaces in public view that architects leave incomplete, for residents to particularize and make

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theirs. As such, they offer a rare opportunity to leave a trace or make a statement in an otherwise anonymous urban fabric. This is why some scholars have described them as “micro-political” showcases.42 People carve out their personal arcadia and place it in view of others (Figure 4.2). Since the fixed-feature elements of architecture—walls, ceilings, floors—are rarely modified, it is the semifixed-feature elements—the ones that can be purchased, moved, and altered—that take on particular importance as a way to invest balconies with meaning.43 Furniture is chosen and displayed; curtains are installed; decorative ornaments are hung on the walls; a birdcage is suspended; plants are arranged and meticulously watered—and everything is kept clean, in a Sisyphean battle against the dust. The balcony is every person’s vitrine onto the street. Repeated tens of thousands of times throughout the urban fabric, these small acts of appropriation enliven the façades and provide an outlet for creative expression. It is easy to overlook the democratic symbolism of this phenomenon and to forget how recent it is. For most of their existence, balconies were the purview of the elite, serving, from Italian city-states down to Mussolini at the Palazzo Venezia, as pulpits from which leaders, framed by a monumental façade, could address the crowd. It is only in the twentieth century, with the spread of modern social housing, that the prerogative to see from above and, more importantly perhaps, the right to have one’s presence registered on the façade were extended to all.44

Figure 4.2  A personal arcadia. 94

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Balconies are not just incomplete in decor. Like stages, they lie dormant until brought to life by people. In this respect, they incite both ordinary virtues and ordinary vices: besides the polite gestures of recognition and the loose sense of community they foster, they also invite voyeurism and gossip.45 They throw the harsh light of publicity on everyday life. Family disputes, love affairs, losses in temper become a matter of common interest. In the vicinity of balconies, one is always performing. Yet unlike the more specialized settings—such as salons, pubs, and parks—that serve as a privileged terrain for Richard Sennett’s “public man”46 and his theatrical displays of self, balconies are literally at one’s doorstep, and there are limits to how much even the most disciplined among us can control our self-presentation at all times. They are, as such, windows onto performances both staged and spontaneous. By serving as stages and vitrines onto the outside world, balconies enable citizens to both observe and partake in the chaotic plenitude of the city—at its best, a Whitmanesque spectacle of diversity that affords aesthetic gratification and that motivates our attachment to a place. A spectacle that also exposes us to lifestyles different from our own, at times seducing us and tempting us to experiment with new identities.47 In addition to being access points to the city, balconies are also turfs to be defended. Their status as private spaces in public view is ambiguous, leaving proper norms of conduct to be negotiated. Jacobs ascribed the “marvel of balance” between sociability and privacy in Greenwich Village, in part, to the restraint and tactfulness of shopkeepers. What she failed to mention, however, is that such norms do not emerge spontaneously, but are more often than not the fragile outcome of a protracted and painstaking process of conflict and compromise. In Ain El Remmaneh, countering the unwelcome and insistent gaze of those across the street calls for a defensive architecture involving curtains. Living without curtains, as I discovered at my peril one summer, was like living in an aquarium, with people peering from all sides. This was especially true at night, when the darkness rendered those on the opposite façades practically invisible, their presence only betrayed, every so often, by the brightly lit tip of a cigarette. Unlike other districts of the city, such as the predominantly Shi’a areas of Dahiyeh, where curtains are installed as an opaque membrane that entirely encloses the balcony, curtains in Ain El Remmaneh are typically used to control levels of exposure. This is done via a two-pronged system of curtains: an internal one, to cut the balcony off from the rest of the apartment, and an external one, to shield it from the street. By sliding these two curtains and adjusting their alignment, one can carve a space with a view onto the street screened from unwanted attention. Better still, by picking the proper blinds, or selecting the right fabric, one might be able to look at those across the street while precluding them from looking back—a quest for unreciprocated voyeurism that would, were it not for the development of an etiquette, leave all parties immured behind the lattice-like panels of a Mashrabiya. Daily conflicts and confusions about proper conduct; gazes a bit too long to be innocent; curtains drawn furiously; greetings not returned; norms crystallizing, 95

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breached, then reappearing in a different guise—simmering tensions of this sort are tedious and unnerving. And yet, they force us to come to terms with others who live around us, and whose preferences and manners differ from ours. Some commentators, like Sennett, have seen in such forms of everyday conflict a kind of school of citizenship for plural societies.48 With the impersonality of city life leading all too easily to mutual ignorance and indifference, a certain measure of conflict, designed into the urban fabric through residual ambiguity, can serve as a healthy irritant—forcing people to contend with one another and teaching them to cope with conflict and disagreement, the very stuff of democratic pluralism, in a civil manner. The forms of contact occasioned through latent conflict complement those that arise from seeing and hearing others in the street below. Democratic theorists typically welcome interpersonal contact of this sort, especially among people who might otherwise be invisible to one another, and not just because it can lead to a safer environment through the multiplication of “eyes on the street.” “Weak ties,” in Mark Granovetter’s parlance, can also serve as a source of information, exposing us to other groups within the city only tenuously related to our more intimate social network.49 Being aware of their presence alongside us does not guarantee that we will take their perspective and concerns into consideration, much less that we will be positively inclined toward them—but it is a precondition for either of these things.50 Balconies, finally, are places open to contingency, where people gather to witness events in common. I initially described them as amphitheaters, a function that one of their ancestors, the opera box, still plays quite literally (Figure 4.3). One is drawn to the balcony by events that happen outside, as I was by the neighbor’s incessant honking. Balconies put us, along with our neighbors, before matters of common concern—a power outage, a shortage of parking, a confrontation about sidewalk rights. In conjunction with the street, which triggers the relevant occasions, they help assemble publics around issues. This is a function that deserves more attention than it has received in contemporary political thought. Political theory, of course, has had plenty to say about how a public that is already gathered should go about making decisions about issues of common concern. But as Bruno Latour points out, it has been less forthcoming about the “res” in Res Publica—the things or matters of concern that gather a public around them.51 An “object-oriented” study of democracy, of the kind he calls for, would place the specific issues around which we gather and the ways they bring us together at the center of inquiry. Balconies are significant, in this regard, because they transform residential buildings into a public in potentia. Whether it’s insufficient parking, power outages, political rallies, the smell of putrefying garbage, or a cockroach infestation—when we’re out on balconies, witnessing these things along with others, we learn about them; we also know that others know (for we can see them looking); and we know they know we know (for they can see us too); and so on. Here architecture fosters not just knowledge about a “res,” but common knowledge.52 It helps constitute what Hannah Arendt refers to as 96

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Figure 4.3  As if in an amphitheater. 97

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a “common world” that relates us to those who live nearby, a necessary condition for joint action of any kind.53 Benches at the edge, vitrines onto the public, turfs to be defended, and places to gather: balconies may be nominally private, but they are just as much a continuation of the public realm up in the air. In Beirut, the street is not a planar surface, but a threedimensional one: it folds up perpendicularly at the edges, and runs along the façades, on the balconies. It is, literally, immersive. The Smithsons sought to reconcile the vibrancy of the city with the provision of mass housing by bringing the streets up to the sky. In Beirut, balconies have instead brought buildings down to the street.

Conclusion Beirut is a city that suffers from a chronic shortage of open public space—squares, parks, and sidewalks are undersupplied or obstructed. And yet, it is a city that is unquestionably alive, one that fosters the kind of daily encounters with strangers that Young considers to be a staple of vibrant city life. Some of these encounters are welcome; others, like the episode with which I opened the chapter, less so. But they happen, both, with reliable frequency, drawing people out and forcing them to apprehend one another and the city of which they are part. Many of these encounters take place in and around home and are encouraged by a porous residential architecture that multiplies lookout points onto the street and that transforms the very ordinariness of city life into a spectacle worth watching and partaking in.54 What broader lessons might we learn from a city like Beirut and its balconies? The first, perhaps, is that the vitality of cities may have to do less with the provision of public space per se than with the proper articulation of the relationship between private and public space. This can happen through the creation of in-between spaces, like balconies, where one can loiter, in the company of others, in and around home. This gives residential architecture an important civic role, as offering the counterform to the adjoining public space—that of the street—and as being involved, with it, in the creation of everyday happenings that draw people out. The study of balconies in Beirut also underscores the extent to which architecture contributes to shaping the nature of interpersonal relations within the city. Architecture does this not only by making some people visible and others not, but also by orchestrating the settings, frequency, and frame of mind with which we encounter those who live and work around us—by creating, as it were, the situations in which we come together.55 This involves mediating our exposure to our fellow citizens, and sometimes bringing into being relations that would otherwise not exist. Those who sit on balconies opposite ours, or who walk the street down below, are neither neighbors, nor strangers, nor quite acquaintances, but something else.56 They are familiar presences brought into “contact” with us by the surrounding architecture. Our lives touch without becoming entangled.

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The case of Beirut should remind us, finally, that while residential architecture has an important role to play in mediating the relationship between private and public, it cannot do so alone. Whether or not the promises of the “in-between” are met in any particular district or city will depend on the character of the urban fabric, on the culture of the neighborhood, and its socioeconomic makeup. Take the buildings of Ain El Remmaneh. Make them much taller, and balconies become disconnected from the street; make the street much wider, and those on opposite façades are no longer within seeing and hearing distance; make the streets much narrower, and enclosing balconies becomes the only way to secure a modicum of privacy; change the economic and sociocultural background of the inhabitants, and you may end up with enclosure too, for different reasons. The list could go on. Just as the effects of architecture depend on external circumstances, so too can such circumstances affect the shape of architecture. In Beirut, two factors in particular were critical to the popularity of balconies: a demand for external space to take advantage of the climate and a favorable construction law. Over the past 20 or 30 years, however, the growing popularity and affordability of air conditioning units have enabled Beirutis to control climate inside their apartments all year long. Balconies—along with claustras, brises-soleil, and other elements of “passive architecture”—are no longer necessary to provide respite from the summer heat, and with this, their appeal has diminished, at least for now.57 The growing pressure on existing real estate has also prompted the Lebanese parliament to amend the construction law in 2004, permitting the enclosure of balconies with transparent curtain walls. This clause has left its mark on new development in the city, with balconies now frequently conceived and marketed as inward-looking spaces. Interestingly, the contribution of balconies to the social life of the city appears not to have featured at all in the parliamentary debates that preceded the adoption of the law.58 Parliamentarians justified the legalization of curtain walls by claiming that they were simply enacting what their constituents wanted—more internal space, climate control, less exposure to noise and pollution. They adduced no empirical evidence to back these claims. Even had they been correct on factual grounds, however, their policy inference would still have been unwarranted. For if the analysis I have presented in the previous pages is sound, balconies are not just a private amenity, but a public good of sorts: as city dwellers, we all benefit from the social life they foster, even though we may, in isolation, each prefer to enclose our own. It is for this reason that public regulation might have been called for: not to prevent people from getting what they want or need, but to help avert a collective outcome resulting from such wants or needs—a thinning of the social fabric of the city—that they might, upon reflection, have preferred to avoid. Acknowledging the public value of balconies would have led to a more informed debate. We might have still concluded, on balance, that they were no longer worthy of legal protection given the other interests at stake. Yet at the very least, we would have had the prescience to dispense with them less casually. 99

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Notes 1

For helpful comments on previous iterations of this chapter, I would like to thank participants in the Stanford Center for Ethics postdoc workshop, as well as Duncan Bell, Brian Coyne, Lindsey Chambers, Abdallah Daher, Prithvi Datta, Ted Lechterman, Gianni Longo, Rich Nielsen, Nicholas Ray, Yolande Zacka and especially Valentina Pugliano, to whom I also owe the photographs that appear here. James Marston Fitch, “The Aesthetics of Function,” in People and Buildings, ed. Robert Gutman (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009 [1972]), 9–10. 2 Iris Marion Young, “City Life and Difference,” in Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 226–56. 3 In the American context, porches and stoops have received more attention than balconies. The Congress for the New Urbanism, for instance, has described the “American front porch” as “an icon of the house’s relationship to the outside world of the street and neighborhood.” See Mark M. Schimmenti, “Twenty Six,” in Charter of the New Urbanism (New York: McGraw Hill, 1999), 169. 4 Balconies differ from their cousins, terraces (because they are cantilevered), and viewing platforms (because they are attached to dwellings). See “Balcony,” in Elements of Architecture, ed. Rem Koolhaas (Venice: Marsilio, 2014), 816–18. 5 See ibid., 848–51. 6 Ibid., 854–63. 7 See Marieke Krijnen, “Facilitating Real Estate Development in Beirut: A Peculiar Case of Neoliberal Public Policy” (American University of Beirut, 2010), 61. 8 Jan Gehl, Life between Buildings: Using Public Space, trans. Jo Koch (Washington: Island Press, 2011), 15–30. 9 Michael Walzer, “Pleasure & Costs of Urbanity,” Dissent 1986, 470. 10 Ibid., 471. 11 Gehl, Life between Buildings, 63. 12 See Joris-Karl Huysmans, Les Habitués De Café (Paris: Editions Sillage, 2015). 13 Or to be more precise: even if states or cities do encourage establishments like cafés, it is typically not just on the grounds that they are gratifying or enjoyable. 14 Jane Jacobs, Cited in Young, “City Life and Difference,” 226. 15 See, for instance, Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, ed. Richard Sennett (New York: Appleton, Century, Crofts, 1969). 16 Young is of course not claiming that cities always exhibit a casual acceptance of diversity, a view that would be especially absurd in light of Beirut’s violent past. 17 Jane Jacobs, “The Uses of Sidewalks: Contact,” in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). 18 Ibid., 55. 19 Richard Sennett makes a similar point in a discussion of open-floor office plans. “People are more sociable,” he writes, “the more they have some tangible barriers between them […]. Human beings need to have some distance from intimate observation by others in order to feel sociable. Increase intimate contact and you decrease sociability.” Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London: Faber and Faber, 1986 [1977]), 15. 20 Jacobs, “The Uses of Sidewalks: Contact,” 59. 21 But for a different take on suburbs, see Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967).

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22 Jacobs illustrates this point with the example of a sidewalk park in Baltimore, located on a quiet residential street with little traffic and no stores in proximity. Because of the absence of nearby amenities, those who use the park find themselves obliged to impose upon their acquaintances who reside on the street “to warm up in the winter, to make telephone calls, to take their children in emergencies to the bathroom.” Anticipating such intimacy, residents become more watchful of visitors to the park and more reluctant to tolerate people who are “unlike them,” because they might have to let them into their homes. When people from different “income or color or educational background” visit the park, they and their children are “rudely and pointedly ostracized.” See Jacobs, “The Uses of Sidewalks: Contact,” 62–4. 23 See Max Risselada and Dirk van den Heuvel (eds.), Team 10, 1953–8: In Search of a Utopia of the Present (Rotterdam: NAi, 2005), 11. 24 Cited in Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 271. 25 Le Corbusier, La Charte D’Athenes (Editions de Minuit, 1957). 26 Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 272. 27 For a discussion of the grid, see Roy Kozlovsky, “Urban Play: Intimate Space and Postwar Subjectivity,” in Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City, Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton, and Marina Lathouri (eds.) (London: Routledge, 2009), 198–201. 28 Karin Jaschke, “City Is House and House Is City: Aldo Van Eyck, Piet Blom and the Architecture of Homecoming,” in Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City, Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton, and Marina Lathouri (eds.) (London: Routledge, 2009), 175. 29 Ibid., 176. 30 Aldo Van Eyck, The Child, the City and the Artist (Amsterdam: SUN, 2008 [1962]), 60–3. 31 Cited in Alison Smithson, Team 10 Primer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 96. 32 See Francis Strauven, Aldo Van Eyck’s Orphanage: A Modern Monument (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1996). 33 See Ali Aslam, “Building the Good Life: Architecture and Politics” (Duke University, 2010), 235. 34 Ibid., 62. 35 See Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Anchor books (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959). 36 Herman Hertzberger, a colleague and collaborator of Van Eyck, writes: “In this area between public and private, individual and collective claims can overlap, and resulting conflicts must be resolved in mutual agreement. It is here that every inhabitant plays the roles that express what sort of person he wants to be, and therefore how he wants others to see him.” Herman Hertzberger, Lessons for Students in Architecture (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2005), 41. See also the discussion in Aslam, “Building the Good Life,” 244–6. 37 Aldo Van Eyck, Collected Articles and Other Writings, 1947–1998 (Amsterdam: SUN, 2008), 108–10. 38 See, for instance, “Steps towards a Configurative Discipline,” in ibid., 327–44. 39 Jaschke, “City Is House and House Is City,” 187. 40 Jaschke writes: “In these projects, public space was deemed highly significant, but it relied only marginally on traditional symbolic indicators of civic meaning.” Ibid., 191. 41 See ibid.; Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 272–3. 42 “Balcony,” 952–3. 43 Amos Rapoport, The Meaning of the Built Environment: A Nonverbal Communication Approach (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 89–96.

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44 Tom Avermaete, “The Impossibility of a Universal Balcony: Mutations of a Modern Element across the Mediterranean,” in Elements of Architecture, ed. Rem Koolhaas (Venice: Marsilio, 2014), 915. 45 See, for example, Alexander Cowan, “Seeing Is Believing: Urban Gossip and the Balcony in Early Modern Venice,” Gender & History 23, no. 3 (2011): 231–248. Also see Nancy Rosenblum’s chapter in this volume. 46 See Sennett, The Fall of Public Man. 47 On the notion of a “spectacle of diversity” and its relation to liberalism and democratic theory, see Nancy L. Rosenblum, Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 118–21. 48 Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 137–98. 49 On the importance of weak ties for social cohesion, see Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 1 (1973): 1360–80. The significance of weak ties and the idea that effective collective action can occur in neighborhoods even in the absence of strong ties has more recently been defended by Robert J. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 149–78. 50 See Susan Bickford, “Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship,” Political Theory 28, no. 3 (2000), 355–76. For a more skeptical assessment, see Clarissa Rile Hayward, “Binding Problems, Boundary Problems: The Trouble with ‘Democratic Citizenship’,” in Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances, Seyla Benhabib, Ian Shapiro, and Danilo Petranovich (eds.) (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 181–205. 51 Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 14–17. 52 See Michael Suk-Young Chwe, Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 53 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 50–8. 54 With its porous architecture, Beirut is reminiscent of Naples as described by Walter Benjamin. See Walter Benjamin, “Naples,” in Reflections, Peter Demetz (ed.) (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 163–73. 55 See Antoine Picon’s chapter in this volume. 56 It would be interesting to reconstruct the normative principles and exemplars that govern our relations to “the people on the balconies across the street.” This would amount to developing and further refining the work that Nancy Rosenblum has recently started, by distinguishing between various shades of neighbors. See Nancy L. Rosenblum’s chapter in this volume and her book, Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 57 Passive architecture may make a comeback as we contend more seriously with global warming. 58 See Hisham Ashkar, “Lebanon 2004 Construction Law: Inside the Parliamentary Debates” (Civil Society Knowledge Center, Lebanon Support, 2014).

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Chapter 5

Durability and Citizenship: Toward an Arendtian Political Philosophy of Architecture Ronald Beiner

Can politics educate us to a compelling sense of citizenship or civic attachment? And if it can’t, what can? Now I don’t want to rush too quickly to a categorically negative answer to the first question—after all, I’ve invested much of my career in trying to find encouraging reasons for coming up with a positive answer. But what we encounter in the reality of contemporary political life certainly gives us enough cause for concern that we should want to have ready a possible “fall-back answer,” if I can put it that way. Hence the second question: If politics can’t educate us to citizenship, what can? In this chapter, I’d like to explore architecture as a possible answer. In particular, I’d like to draw some thoughts from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and develop them in a direction that she never did, although I think many people concerned with the human relevance of architecture intuit the possibility of such an account when they read her book. What kind of thoughts do I have in mind? Arendt says little about architecture in her book, yet the conceptual pillars of her political philosophy are implicitly oriented to the very notion of what it means to inhabit a humanly built environment: “public world,” “public space,” “space of appearances.” The function of the political in Arendt’s provocative depiction of it is to make available a space for the concerted sharing of a public world, and in particular emphasizing the meaning-bestowing possibilities of civic agency. Arendt is in that sense above all a theorist of “worldliness,” and she privileges possibilities of civic agency as constituting the shared world that defines us as (fully) human. But the vision of authentic worldliness or public togetherness that she attempts to sketch in her work is already inscribed in the built environment, quite apart from the “words and deeds” enacted in the political sphere—or so it would seem. Much of what she seeks under the rubric of “worldliness” is available from architecture, provided that one thinks about architecture in a suitably Arendtian way. The purpose of the reflections that follow will be to see how far one can get in pursuing that line of thought.

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Arendt as a gateway to reflection on the civic relevance of architecture We can set the inquiry in motion by asking the following question concerning Arendt’s political philosophy: If Arendt sees “public space” as the central category of her political philosophy, why is she so determined to make politics the decisive vehicle and standard of public space, rather than public space in a more literal sense, i.e., architecture? But perhaps this is a misstatement of what is being suggested in this chapter. Perhaps what’s at stake is not architecture as a substitute for politics but rather, architecture as a mode of politics.1 However, in order for that to be a plausible suggestion, we would probably be required to reconceive our conventional ideas about the point and purpose of politics itself. I’ll come back to that suggestion at the very end of this chapter. In recent decades an extensive literature has arisen, at the intersection of Rawlsian and Habermasian political theory, on the notion of “public reason.” While both the Arendtian notion of public space and the Rawlsian/Habermasian notion of public reason share an appeal to “publicity,” I think public reason is in some sense less important for citizenship than Arendt’s notion of “public space.” Public reason, at least as it operates in Rawls’s later thought, primarily refers to the appropriate considerations relevant to the discourse of political and juridical elites with respect to the constitutional structure of the political order.2 Public space, on the other hand, is in principle relevant to all citizens. Therefore, although I concede that there are significant affinities between Arendt and the theorists preoccupied with public reason, I think that there’s something to be said for maintaining allegiance to her notion of the public realm (at least in some version). The basic idea I want to argue for is this: the fundamental categories of Arendt’s political philosophy, such as worldliness and public space or “space of appearances,” are architectural ones (one can see this in how certain architectural theorists and even practitioners respond to her work). Hence, precisely where one encounters limits in trying to apply her political philosophy to politics, one can perhaps redeem her political philosophy by applying it to architecture. For this purpose, let me present a very brief summary of Arendt’s political philosophy. The core problem of Arendt’s political philosophy is the problem of mortality—the question of how to stabilize a meaningful existence for mortal creatures who come on the scene and then in fairly short order depart again. Arendt has really a dual response to this problem. The first response is the construction of a “worldly artifice” that provides a durable site for our “comings and goings” as mortal creatures. Nature, on Arendt’s account, is a scene of unstabilizable flux, defined by a cycle of life that produces merely in order to consume and hence keep itself alive. If this biological cycle, bound to the necessities of life, leaves nothing that isn’t consumed by the life process, it obviously can’t yield the kind of lasting home or dwelling-place required by human beings as the intrinsically fugitive creatures that we are.3 Fabricating a world therefore stabilizes 104

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our existence in a way that life and nature never can. She calls this “reification,” in a positive sense.4 As Arendt puts it, this durable world, “a non-mortal home for mortal beings,” offers “a premonition of immortality … something immortal achieved by mortal hands.”5 This core problem in Arendt’s thinking is captured nicely by the Canadian artist, Alex Colville: “Life is characterized by its lack of permanence. Art, I think, tries to compensate for this. Art tries to be permanent, tries to extract from the transitory, that which is durably meaningful.”6 That this sort of immortalizing function is implicit in architecture as the creation of a lasting habitat and a more durable context for human activities is not a surprise; but Arendt didn’t stop here in developing her idea. She also wanted to draw a kind of immortality out of the fact that human beings, as political creatures, speak and act—they enact deeds, and these deeds are narrated in stories that outlive the deeds themselves. One might say that Arendt’s ultimate theoretical project was to experiment with the thought that collective action could function as a kind of “art” in Colville’s sense (as the quest for durable meaning extracted from what is transitory). The basic idea is that once we have erected a tangible “world” of durable things that gives us an immortal or less mortal place for our doings as human beings, we can enact words and deeds in this space that will achieve, in effect, a second, higherorder immortality. Hence the supremely high existential ranking of politics articulated in Arendt’s work. Can politics live up to this exalted existential purpose? I’m not sure that it can.7 But in any case, there’s something misleading about distinguishing as sharply as Arendt does between the kind of immortality achieved in the fabrication of a durable world and that achieved in the enacting of memorable words and deeds. Arendt’s “official” view is that architecture is pre-political: “Before men began to act, a definite space had to be secured and a structure built where all subsequent actions could take place, the space being the public realm of the polis.”8 There are four other references to architecture in The Human Condition, the first three of which celebrate architecture as a “public art” and a “liberal art,” whereas the fourth reference relates the Greek view of the inferiority of all crafts, including architecture, in relation to genuine praxis.9 According to Kojin Karatani, this latter Greek view was typified by Plato, notwithstanding the fact that Plato made fundamental appeal to architecture as a privileged image of philosophy.10 “Plato disdained both architecture and the real-life architect.”11 In that sense, one could say that in her last-cited reference to architecture, Arendt shares more with Plato than she herself desires, since the broader argument of The Human Condition is intended to be thoroughly anti-Platonic. In any case, what’s properly political according to what I’ve called Arendt’s official view is simply the talking and acting that unfolds in a public space. If, for instance, we construct a parliament, what is political are the speeches that get delivered in this place or space of appearances, not the place itself. But one starts to rethink this conception as one reflects more seriously on the central concept of Arendt’s political philosophy: public space. In fact, one could even ask whether it is really a political concept at all. 105

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It’s not about rule. It’s not about power (although she has important things to say about power). It’s not about justice, or about the distribution of goods and resources. It’s about how things look, and how the experience of collective togetherness is organized by how things look. That is, what’s at stake here is actually very close to what’s at stake in architecture (or an important part of what’s at stake in architecture). Arendt herself acknowledges this in an interesting discussion in a famous 1964 interview. She starts by observing that a central problem of the modern world is: Nobody cares any longer what the world looks like. INTERVIEWER: “World” understood always as the space in which politics can originate. ARENDT: I comprehend it now in a much larger sense, as the space in which things become public, as the space in which one lives and which must look presentable. In which art appears, of course. In which all kinds of things appear.12 I would be inclined to say that the notion offered in this re-statement, that public space isn’t exhausted by politics (or that there is a kind of broader sense of politics at stake in public space), is already anticipated in The Human Condition itself, whether Arendt intended this or not.13 As I interpret Arendt’s final reflections on “judging,” her project to base an answer to the problem of mortality on the imperishable meaning of what political agents enact through speaking and acting doesn’t really work since the self-enacted stories of historical praxis still require art (poetry, historiography) in order to fashion them as memorable and therefore durable sites of meaning. One can pose a second challenge: Isn’t this whole way of thinking about politics just a mode of political romanticism, since it requires investments of creative energy on the part of ordinary citizens that we know, sociologically, modern societies are poorly equipped to supply? This is such a familiar criticism of Arendt that it seems rather crass to repeat it, yet if we are to take seriously Arendt’s claims on behalf of political life to the full extent of their philosophical ambition, it is an inescapable question. When one looks at the pathetic rates of political participation, or even of voting, in contemporary democratic society, one can’t help but feel powerfully disenchanted about the relevance of Arendtian themes of action and citizenship. One starts to wonder, therefore, whether thinking about “public space” in a literal rather than metaphorical sense might provide a somewhat less utopian focus for these Arendtian concerns; hence the appeal of putting less emphasis, philosophically, on “action” and more emphasis on “public space” (and therefore architecture) as a response to the existential problem that defines Arendt’s project. Given the emphasis that Arendt puts on the notion of a durable world (and on the erosion of durability as a crucial basis for her critique of modernity), it seems a bit puzzling that architecture, precisely with its worldly enduringness, doesn’t loom larger in her argument than it does. The answer to this puzzle, I think, lies in her conception of political action as oriented toward ephemeral eruptions of agency without precedent. In 106

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Arendt’s account of politics there is actually an important tension between the temporal open-endedness and indeterminacy of action, and the givenness and determinacy of the worldly space in which action unfolds. Or rather, we need the stability of the latter precisely in order to provide a durable setting for the spontaneous “happenings” of the former. The key to interpreting Arendt’s privileging of action over its location—the privileging of action over the architecturally built world where action transpires—is that for Arendt, politics is fundamentally about freedom. This is why the tension is inevitably resolved in favor of action’s spontaneity and open-endedness. Giving more emphasis to the civic dimension of architecture than Arendt herself actually gave it allows us simultaneously to emphasize the need for what is stable over what is unstable in our experience of citizenship. In other words, we need to address the paradox that although Arendt was unwaveringly preoccupied with how modernity undermines the sense of a stable and durable world that we need in order to give meaning to our mortal existence, her own concept of action (and therefore of civicness) seemed almost to relish civic action in its most fleeting and least stable aspect (which she construed as an entailment of its freedom/spontaneity). Arendt tended toward a romantic celebration of “episodic” citizenship (similar to Sheldon Wolin’s idea of “fugitive democracy”),14 and therefore—in her writings subsequent to Origins of Totalitarianism—slighted citizenship as a stable identity or a stable political status.15 If what truly matters are the spontaneous happenings that play out on the public stage, the stage itself is as it were instrumentalized in relation to what transpires on it (as, for instance, Wenceslas Square in Prague served as a site for grand citizenship in 1989). Conversely, the idea that we’re trying out in this chapter is the notion of citizenship as constituted by a sense of built civic space. Hence, in contrast with Arendt, who puts the main emphasis on public space as a setting for eruptions of freedom, I would put the primary emphasis on public space as a public good, and as a stable horizon of civic experience. Arendt’s political philosophy is emphatically anti-teleological, and her concept of public space reflects this. Arendt, in the manner of a twentieth-century Tocqueville, was preoccupied by the prospect of modern life as an enforcer of dreary sameness, and so she was correspondingly preoccupied with miraculous possibilities of spontaneity and novelty. She famously coined the term “natality” to express this sense of human beings as capable of giving birth to something unique and unpredictable.16 On her view, we need public spaces where what is unique, spontaneous, and novel can appear before everyone, and thereby vindicate its reality. To be sure, any human life worth living must allow a place for what is novel, but novelty alone is not a sufficient standard for a viable civic life. In other words, a political philosophy of architecture must be concerned not only with public spaces as settings for freedom, but also with public spaces as themselves instantiating the provision for human needs—spaces that gather us together rather than isolate us, spaces that uplift us rather than crush the spirit, spaces that enhance our sense of civicness rather than reinforce our fixation on our own private purposes. To use a term that naturally suggests itself when one tries to capture Arendt’s idea of worldliness, we need stable worldly 107

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furniture that helps give us the sense that we are rooted in something that is permanent or that at least feels permanent.17 It’s worth mentioning that reconceiving Arendt’s philosophy such that it is transformed from a celebration of civic agency at its best to a celebration of built space at its best helps counteract some key weaknesses of her theorizing while retaining its notable strengths. Of course, as thus reconceived, Arendt’s theorizing retains its full power as a critique of privatization or critique of subjectivism. But because she’s committed to the idea of politics centered on the notion of appearances qua appearances, she puts heavy emphasis on the aspect of display or performativity, and correspondingly little or no emphasis on the ends or teleology of politics. That account is hard to square with the phenomenology of political life as we actually live it, where we necessarily care about the quality of ends secured by political agency: these ends constitutively define politics as politics, at least as we normally experience it. As I’ve put the point in another context, the natural tendency of Arendt’s distinctive way of thinking about politics qua performance in a public space is to privilege how a figure like Barack Obama looks or sounds as a performative agent while slighting what he achieves as a political actor.18 That problem becomes less salient when architecture itself, the “look” of the public world in which we situate ourselves, assumes the burden of defining public space. Here, space of appearances really is the essence of what is at issue, whereas in politics it’s a metaphor for a domain of human activity that we expect to be primarily concerned with the securing of definite human ends.

Modernity/critique of modernity Taken with sufficient seriousness, the concept of civic architecture generates a shattering critique of modernity (entirely in the spirit of Hannah Arendt), for one could argue that virtually nothing in modern architecture meets the standard of enduringness set by great old-European spaces, such as the Place de l’Horloge and Place du Palais des Papes in Avignon, the old walled city of Santiago de Compostela, and the old city of Dubrovnik—or, to mention a non-European example, the San Angel district of Mexico City. Or on a grander scale: Istanbul, with its defining mosques, straddling Europe and Asia. Or Lucca: Hobbes famously sneered at the civic pride of the citizens of Lucca in having inscribed “on [their] Turrets … in great characters … the word LIBERTAS.”19 But when one actually stands in the magnificent central piazza of Lucca, one has to ask: Who is discredited? The citizens of Lucca with their dreams of republican liberty? Or Hobbes himself, with his stark insensitivity to the power of the public space that these proud citizens built? These examples set a superlatively high standard for civic architecture. But it must be emphasized that it is not a utopian standard—because these cities actually exist!

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The examples I have cited are fairly arbitrary, in the sense that they are cities I happen to have visited at some point in my life and which made a strong impression on me. Let me mention one interesting aspect of several of these cities, namely, the fact that they are, or were, walled cities. Josiah Ober and Barry Weingast, in their contribution to this volume, highlight the question of intrinsic relations that might hold between, as they put it, “walling a city” and “citizen-centered forms of politics.” Although the issues that preoccupy Ober and Weingast in their chapter are quite different from those that concern me in this one, the very question of civic walls and their possible political significance moves one to ask whether, historically, the gathering of a public of citizens within walls contributed significantly to the constitution of a democratic space. One might worry that the sense of citizenship fostered by walled cities is premised on exclusion.20 True. But as is fairly obvious, the civic effect of these walled cities is very different today than it was when the city within the same walls constituted the total city. The walls that currently separate the Old City of Jerusalem from modern Jerusalem, old Avignon from modern Avignon, old Lucca from modern Lucca, and old Santiago de Compostela from modern Santiago de Compostela do not enforce a division between insiders and outsiders (citizens and non-citizens). Rather, today those walls represent a tangible boundary between modernity (the modern city outside the walls) and pre-modernity (the old city within the walls), including the modes of architecture characteristic of each. This delineation or underscoring of the premodern city gives that city an emphatic presence that the unwalled city lacks. One feels as if one were entering a space of premodernity within modernity, with its own distinctive magic. (Of course, one can imagine the same boundary even in the absence of a wall: consider Old Delhi and New Delhi.21) These are obviously just speculations on my part, but my hunch is that my attraction to walled cities is not entirely fortuitous or idiosyncratic. Naturally, I don’t rule out as a matter of principle that architecture can be both emphatically modern and also citizenship-promoting or citizenship-enhancing; but I do think that there are non-contingent reasons why the kind of account I’m sketching privileges non-modern or premodern architecture. Let me mention here the contrast commonly drawn by theorists of architecture between modernist architecture and “vernacular” architecture. Vernacular architecture indeed strikes me as a crucial category for capturing the dimension of civic presence that interests me, and the “vernacularness” of the cities I have mentioned as exemplary public spaces is certainly integral to what prompts me to see them as exemplary. And what serves to draw citizens into an experience of civicness cannot be performed by the designing of discrete buildings; the vernacular quality of civic environment will inhere in an ensemble of buildings in a consistent or coherent style. Maybe modernist architecture can inhere in a single exemplary building; I doubt that this would be possible in the case of vernacular architecture, since it is the ensemble of buildings that renders the vernacular vernacular. This distinction is relevant, I believe, to the potential of architecture to build civic attachment. The Frank Gehry “Fred and Ginger” in Prague (the Dancing House) obviously has a singularity that the characteristic vernacular architecture of Prague doesn’t. That doesn’t mean that 109

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citizens of Prague can’t take civic pride in the Gehry building: it is a stunning work, after all. But it can’t, in its singularity, constitute an overarching civic environment in the way that vernacular architecture can. The distinction between modernist architecture and vernacular architecture is effective because it makes the point that modernist architecture in its essence is anti-vernacular, and that this poses a problem for modernity as such. Admittedly, it can be somewhat tricky to pin down the distinction between the vernacular and the modernist with precision, because sometimes modernism has become the vernacular. Or because sometimes the vernacular isn’t beautiful or interesting enough to summon meaningful attachment, either to itself or to the civic community. Obviously, vernacularness doesn’t automatically guarantee civicness. One cannot know whether vernacular architecture is rising to the relevant standard without looking at particular examples in their civic power or lack thereof. There are no universal rules to be followed in creating a civicizing architecture. One must simply seek out evocative particulars. (And this requirement for reflective judgment—judgment concerning particulars irreducible to pre-given rules—applies, I would say, not just to vernacularness as a guide to meaningful or meaning-generating architecture, but to any alternative criterion one might think to suggest.) What I’m trying to get at with the appeal to the vernacular is simply the idea of an architecture with real, culturally grounded character, as opposed to the characterless and cultureless appearance of modernist architecture at its worst. Over against the idea of citizenship as “episodic” or “fugitive,” what is at stake here is a conception of grounded citizenship—civic experience grounded in shared attachment to a built place that provides an enduring home for members of a political community extended over many generations. This conception of citizenship defined by a relationship to shared architecture can reawaken the etymological Ur-meaning of “political” as referring to life in a real polis. Modernity per se is fundamentally anti-political in this sense: again, virtually nothing in modern experience (including architecture) allows us to think in centuries. One might consider in this context Nietzsche’s root-andbranch critique of modernity in Twilight of the Idols—a critique of modernity that is ferociously illiberal yet nonetheless captures essential aspects of modern experience. “One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: precisely this is called ‘freedom.’”22 Or this important quote from The Gay Science: “Who still dares to undertake works that would require millennia to complete?”23 In a commentary on Nietzsche in my book on Civil Religion, I put the key point as follows: [Nietzsche sees modernity] as defined by a woeful incapacity to will something truly grand, or at least non-ephemeral. Nietzsche’s judgment is not easy to refute. Can one imagine any modern society producing anything remotely comparable to medieval cathedrals or ancient Indian temples? I can think of only one modern counter-example: Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia. However, even if Gaudí shows that modernity is capable of producing the equivalent of medieval cathedrals, this certainly doesn’t show that secular modernity is capable of producing such a thing.24 110

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This surely goes a long way towards explaining why Nietzsche the diehard atheist is nonetheless highly resistant to embracing modern secularity.25 If the Arendtian critique of modernity as applied to architecture draws us into the territory of the Nietzschean critique of the modern world, it also (for overlapping reasons) situates us within the zone of the Heideggerian critique, and this too relates to architecture in its broadest cultural implications. Nietzsche’s hysterical reaction to modernity and the experience of cultural void he imputes to it is easily matched by Heidegger’s no less hysterical anti-modernism and his closely akin diagnosis of cultural nihilism.26 Martin Woessner’s very instructive and illuminating essay, “Ethics, Technology, and Memory: Heidegger and American Architecture,” provides an especially helpful account of how Heidegger’s critique of modernity found its way into the theory and practice of architecture in the United States.27 One expression of modernity has been the rise of architectural modernism, and the (legitimate) backlash against modernism has in turn raised far-reaching questions about what might be deficient or humanly unsatisfying in modernity—nicely encapsulated by Woessner in the phrase, “the crisis of dwelling.”28 And once one goes looking for powerful critics of modernity, one is hardly likely to find any who exceed Heidegger in their radicalism. Of particular relevance is Heidegger’s 1951 lecture, “Building Dwelling Thinking.”29 Woessner traces the impact of Heidegger on a range of influential theorists and practitioners, including a couple (viz., Libeskind and Frampton) cited elsewhere in this chapter. He seeks to document “how American architectural thought has been reshaped by Heidegger” while highlighting the manifold “paradoxes at the heart of his reception among architects.”30 Let me mention the most obvious of these paradoxes: architecture, virtually by definition, is essentially oriented to the urban whereas Heidegger’s thought is essentially an apotheosis of the rural or the pastoral, hence the anti-urban. Critics of modernism were fundamentally looking for more humanistic approaches to architecture whereas for Heidegger, “humanism” is a key part of the problem encapsulated in modernity (that is, in Heidegger’s view, it isn’t possible to overcome modernity without overcoming humanism). As Woessner points out, “Heidegger was marshaled as an ethical voice amidst a chorus of engineers and technocrats,”31 whereas Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” makes clear that in his view the whole tradition of Western ethical reflection since Aristotle is shallow in relation to the true ontological problem of ethos understood as identical to the problem of abode or dwelling. For Heidegger, it’s not a question of reflecting on dwelling in the light of ethical concerns; rather, he interprets ethics in effect through the prism of authentic dwelling.32 Heidegger at the same time makes clear that he views only Heraclitus and Hölderlin as equal to this problem in its full depth. The fact is: Heidegger regards genuine dwelling as impossible in a modernity whose very essence is defined by “homelessness.”33 Woessner himself understands Heidegger’s thought far too well not to be sensitive to the profoundly reactionary sub text of Heidegger’s philosophy; he sees very clearly indeed the morally and politically problematic aspects of Heidegger’s rhetoric that gets missed by architects and architectural critics eager to appropriate that rhetoric for their own purposes.34 111

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Appealing to Heidegger as a cudgel with which to bash the least attractive features of modernity (including modern architecture at its worst) is fine. But surely having our experience of contemporary architecture—or any architecture—be judged according to the standard of what defines authentic dwelling for Black Forest peasants would constitute an intellectual and civic cul-de-sac. Ultimately, we need to discover a mode of “dwelling” that is neither slavishly and dehumanizingly modern nor crudely and indiscriminately anti-modern. As Karsten Harries, a philosopher of architecture steeped in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, rightly says: “Only if we succeed in substituting for the kind of dwelling that built Heidegger’s farmhouse one genuinely of this age do we have a chance of arriving at an understanding of building that is not anachronistic.”35 Harries is equally right to say that “dwell,” as deployed by Heidegger, is “a word heavy with nostalgia.”36 Notwithstanding the paradoxes, one can see why Heidegger’s pastoral rhetoric might inspire avant-garde urbanists reacting against crass modernism, but as Woessner implies throughout his essay, even architects have a responsibility to be properly aware of the nature of the philosophical sources that they’re appropriating: the problem is not Heidegger’s pastoralism but something far more ominous.37 Naturally, it’s possible to accuse Arendt, too, of being naïve in her appropriation of Heidegger, for it goes without saying that The Human Condition is no less an appropriation of characteristic Heideggerian themes of worldliness, “thinghood,” dwelling, and the response to existential homelessness.38

Architecture as a mode of citizenship Does the immortalizing architecture of cities like Avignon, Santiago de Compostela, and Dubrovnik make its citizens better citizens, in the sense of improving rates of voting and other forms of political participation? Again, this has the effect of instrumentalizing our relationship to civic architecture, whereas the idea of a relationship to architecture as a mode of citizenship is intended to be constitutive of a certain experience of citizenship. Can modern architecture be as effective as the centuries-old architecture of European cities in building a civic home, while simultaneously being true to itself as modern? Of course it can. But those responsible for such architecture (which in the final reckoning means all of us) must first be aware of the civic purposes that are at stake here, and must come to an understanding of architecture as the deliberate expression of civic identity rather than as just serving purposes other than those that define us as citizens. Purely with respect to the quality of architecture, the reconstructed Jewish Quarter of old Jerusalem offers one possible example of a successful bridging of the ancient and the modern. Clearly, the focus here is not on the architectural properties of any one building in isolation, but rather on an ensemble of buildings as the site of civic space, or more likely, on the community as a whole as a locus of civic-architectural experience. It’s in this sense that one relates to architecture not as the aesthetic spectator of particular products of architectural virtuosity, but something closer to the relation

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between a citizen and his/her polis. If the effect of an ensemble of architectural creation is not the constitution of some kind of polis, at least ideally, then the idea of architecture as a source of “citizenship” is a hollow one.39 It may start to look as if the project here is a recreation of the polis within modernity. If this means recreating the polis throughout the modern world, then surely this is a hopeless project. But there is no reason in principle why architecture cannot, at least in localized instances, give us intimations of a modern version of the polis. This by itself will not revolutionize the cultural and political reality of the modern world, but if we are given even intimations of a lived world outside the stale horizons of modernity, that will itself be a towering achievement. If we can build cities that are genuinely livable and genuinely civic, we will have begun to enter a realm that is not “post-modern” in the phony sense in which that term is currently used, but, one would like to hope, postmodern in a more genuine sense—in the sense that the modern world will have begun to become a different kind of world. My only aim in this essay is to begin sketching a research agenda. But it is a research agenda that would richly repay the effort expended in its pursuit. I think political philosophers should attend to architecture with a view to how it vindicates (or ought to vindicate) the public dimension of human experience. To be sure, some important political philosophers have indeed reflected on architecture as a mode of social experience—for example, Adorno,40 Habermas,41 Albrecht Wellmer,42 and Raymond Geuss.43 Moreover, some architects and architectural theorists have sought to appropriate the categories of political philosophers in pursuit of their own concerns—for instance, the appropriations of Arendt’s theorizing by Kenneth Frampton and George Baird.44 But my hunch (a hunch clearly shared by the editors of this volume) is that much more can be done in this direction—or rather, in both directions: from political philosophy to architecture, and from architecture to political philosophy. The research agenda I have in mind here is of course not empirical but normative: not what architecture is or has been, but what architecture ought to be in order to fulfill its mission (the mission I am assigning it!) of drawing members of the society into a stronger, more emphatic identification with what’s public, and thereby transforming them into better, more civic-minded citizens.45 Is this whole discussion just more Arendtian romanticism? Perhaps. But there’s one crucial difference between citizenship enacted through political participation, and citizenship expressed in the habitation of shared spaces. Citizenship conceived in terms of political participation is merely optional in the sense that any citizen can opt either to participate or not to participate. Citizenship conceived in terms of public spaces is not optional, in the sense that we have to live in a public world that has some kind of shape, some kind of look—either drawing us together in some kind of animating experience, or failing to do so, but either way, shaping our experience together. This is a point that has been made by my University of Toronto colleague, Mark Kingwell. Borrowing Arthur Danto’s idea that architectural beauty should be subsumed under a “third realm” of beauty, namely, “the realm of application, where beauty is neither natural (sunsets and fields) nor purely artistic (the so-called fine arts),” Kingwell writes: 113

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It is fair to say, given that this realm also includes fashion, advertising, design, cosmetics, interior decoration and much of everyday visual culture, that it is a far more significant feature of urban life than the other two combined—in volume certainly but also, we might say, politically. In the third realm, beauty is always political because it addresses, in some manner, how to live … [I]t is in this realm that urbanites realize whatever remains of the old Platonic connection between beauty and justice: occupying their public spaces to negotiate the daily business of being citizens together.46 One gets a similar idea in Daniel Libeskind’s thoughts about the civic relevance of architecture: Architecture costs a lot of money. It costs a lot of effort. It influences every single person who is on the street. So I believe it has to be addressing every citizen and has to be a stage for life in the full sense of the word.47 This is what Libeskind refers to as “the cultural, civic nature of what we [architects] do.” The ultimate meaning of citizenship is that we are given a compelling sense that public things matter. Obviously, people can become cynical about politics and politicians, and this corrupts their sense of what’s public. But it’s hard to see how people can become cynical about architecture that actually works in drawing us all into a sense of what’s public. If one thinks of politics as, so to speak, “instrumental” in relation to developing a public consciousness, then (and this is the thought that I’m playing with here) architecture (or successful architecture) may be a more reliable source of this public consciousness than politics. Well, what happens if people react to architecture just as so many of our fellowcitizens react to the more directly political ways of expressing our citizenship—with a shrug of indifference (or simply lack of taste, lack of a feel for good architecture)? Naturally, there’s no real answer to this, nor any guarantee against this civic (or anticivic) outcome. Still, architects and those who commission architecture ought to comport themselves as if what’s at stake is enhanced versus degraded citizenship. Whether people do or don’t fully exercise their civic capacities, we must certainly treat them as potential citizens, and make every effort to provide them with a public world that encourages and bolsters civic identity. Citizenship, after all, is not just a consumer preference, but a function of ways of experiencing the world that get objectively “reified” in the structure of our social life, and that are already geared toward civic identity, or (more likely) serve to discourage it.48 Kenneth Frampton judges contemporary architecture by high Arendtian standards, and deems much of it a failure in relation to those standards: Elevated on freeways or pedestrian decks or alternatively sequestered behind security fences, we are caused to traverse large areas of abstract, inaccessible urban space that can be neither appropriated nor adequately maintained. In a similar way we are confronted by piazzas whose hypothetical public status is vitiated by the vacuousness of the context or alternatively we 114

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are conducted down streets evacuated of all public life by the circulatory demands of traffic. We pass across thresholds whose public-representative nature has been suppressed or we enter foyers which have been arranged or lit in such a manner as to defeat the act of public promenade.49 How can people be expected to develop civic consciousness if they are bred within a built environment that says nothing to them, or insofar as it says something, communicates a civic void? It seems to be largely taken for granted within modern politics that the controlling purpose of political life revolves around the economic destiny of a given society, and the crucial measure of political achievement consists in prospects of material betterment for individuals bound together in a shared economy. The Left and the Right tend to agree that management of the economy is the principal issue; they simply disagree on which policies will best promote progress, prosperity, and the alleviation of poverty and other social ills.50 Hannah Arendt developed her political philosophy in order to challenge those assumptions. If “public space” is what a good politics is supposed to supply, then what is at stake in our political existence surpasses the waxing and waning of our interests as economic creatures. Consider Geuss’s suggestion that architectural objects are “more political than the products of the other arts” by virtue of constituting “an opaque, solid, intransigent, three-dimensional part of the public fabric of a city.”51 “[A] building was historically an archetypically inert but persistent structure … once it was up, it was just there, and could be expected to stay there, if it was properly built, for a very long time”52; hence the politics of architecture consists in the fact that it involves the authoritative structuring of space that persists significantly over time. Politics is (or should be) a space of meaning. Living in soulless cities condemns us to being soulless citizens. On this (modified) Arendtian view, reinjecting higher meaning into citizenship might go hand in hand with building cities and spaces that would feel like real sites of grounded worldliness. People can feel themselves to be citizens among citizens only if they inhabit a world intended to build civic consciousness; and if what has been suggested in these reflections has some plausibility, architecture ought to be making a substantial contribution to this possibility of responding to the world in a civic mode.53

Notes 1

A similar suggestion is offered by Randall Lindstrom and Jeff Malpas in their chapter in this volume: “architecture is already political … Architecture itself appears as a mode of political action.” Raymond Geuss aptly points out that politics is etymologically present in the very word architecture, since the Greek etymology incorporates the directly political term arche, as it figures in words like monarchy and oligarchy. Relatedly, he reminds us that Aristotle uses the idea of architecture (the superintending of subordinate arts by a “master” builder) to characterize politics per se on the very first page of the Nicomachean Ethics. Raymond Geuss, A World without Why (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 146.

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2

John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 212–54. See especially what Rawls writes on 231: “the supreme court … serves as the exemplar of public reason.” 3 An echo of this Arendtian conception is present in Martin Filler’s “Tales of Three Cities” http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/06/18/photographing-paris-london-new-york-talesof-three-cities/ where he discusses Paris Changing: Revisiting Eugène Atget’s Paris by Christopher Rauschenberg in relation to the theme of whether great cities are or are not subject to “constant architecture flux.” The project pursued in Rauschenberg’s book was to replicate, at the end of the twentieth century, classic architectural photos of Paris taken by Atget in the first three decades of that century, juxtaposing Atget’s photos with his own (much later) versions of the same scenes. Filler writes: “Most remarkable about the seventy-six pairings … is how few of them betray the passage of time. The greatest differences are most noticeable in park settings, where trees and hedges reveal the inexorable cycles of nature.” Hence the parallel to the Arendtian thesis: nature is in flux whereas humanly fabricated worldliness is (or can be) stable. But as Filler himself emphasizes, this is not a fact about architecture as such; it is, he thinks, specific to Paris: London and New York, by comparison, exhibit far more architectural flux. And even if a particular building qua architectural object survives the flux of history, does its political meaning remain constant? Elena Cirkovic offers an interesting argument, with respect to the Sarajevo Town Hall, that what is signified politically by the “same” building varies dramatically with the succession of regimes: from the nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian Empire, to socialist Yugoslavia, to contemporary Bosnia. See Cirkovic, “Architecture of Sovereignty,” Law and Critique 27, no. 1 (2016): 23–44, esp. 33–6. 4 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 139–44. 5 Ibid., 168. 6 Mark A. Cheetham, Alex Colville: The Observer Observed (Toronto: ECW Press, 1994), 59. Cheetham’s book reveals that Colville read and was influenced by Arendt: see especially 120–1. 7 See Ronald Beiner, Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Ch. 1. 8 Arendt, The Human Condition, 194–5. 9 Ibid., 39, 91, 128, 157. 10 Karsten Harries has pointed out that appeal to architecture as an image of the philosophical enterprise runs through the whole philosophical tradition, at least up until postmodernism and its appeal to “deconstruction” as a counter-image: see The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 10–11, 340–1, and 343–5. 11 Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, ed. Michael Speaks, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 6. Cf. 126: “Plato admired the architect as a metaphor, but despised the architect as a man because the actual architect and architecture are fully exposed to contingency.” 12 Hannah Arendt, “‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” in Arendt, Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 20. 13 Evidence for this claim is provided by the fact that, as it appears to me, Chapter 4 of The Human Condition (on “Work”) is intellectually more powerful than Chapter 5 (on “Action”), or offers a more central account of Arendt's philosophical concerns. 14 See Sheldon Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” Constellations 1, no. 1 (1994), 11–25. The advantage of an episodic conception of civic agency like Arendt’s is that it seems to

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allow one to sustain hope even in contexts where the prospects for civic engagement look quite grim. 15 For a discussion of countervailing tendencies in Arendt’s political thought, see Jeremy Waldron, “Arendt’s Constitutional Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 201–19. 16 Arendt, The Human Condition, 8–9, 176–8, and 246–7. 17 Of course, the notion of architecture as offering the stable “furniture” of a public world has the odd consequence of referring us back to the private domain. Yet furniture in the literal sense fulfills an analogous function within the household—namely, it constitutes a “private public space,” if that doesn’t sound too paradoxical, where an otherwise flux-ridden individual existence is stabilized and made to feel enduring. The analogy can probably go in both directions: architecture constitutes the “furniture” of our public world, and furniture provides the “architecture” of our private lived space. (This conception doesn’t really work in French, since meuble carries the implication of something “movable,” as opposed to the immeuble, which is “immovable,” in which les meubles reside.) 18 See note 7. 19 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 149. 20 The Berlin Wall, referred to by Ober and Weingast as an extreme case of enforcing separation between insiders and outsiders, of course did the opposite: not excluding outsiders but imprisoning insiders. There was nothing civic-minded about that walled city! 21 It should be noted: Old Delhi, founded in 1638 as Shahjahanabad, was originally a walled city. 22 The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 543. 23 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 216. 24 Ronald Beiner, Civil Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 392. In my commentaries on Nietzsche and Heidegger in Civil Religion, I have tried to appreciate the intellectual radicalism of these two anti-modern thinkers without failing to face up to just how profoundly illiberal their philosophies are. I have more recently gone quite a bit further in pursuing that kind of reading of Nietzsche and Heidegger in Ronald Beiner, Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 25 See in particular what Nietzsche says regarding the “receding waters of religion,” “the stagnant pools” of culture left behind by this ebbing of religion, and the grave failure of the educated classes to provide a suitable “haven” or refuge amidst the cultural crisis: Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 198. The text makes clear that he sees “turbulent secularization” as cause for lament, not celebration. His response to the modern city is of a piece with his general stance toward modernity. Nietzsche viewed them as sites of noise, clutter, meaningless bustle and commotion, spiritual emptiness, and herd-like mediocrity. 26 Heidegger describes the modern West as “this moribund pseudo-civilization”: “The SelfAssertion of the German University,” in The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 38. That’s exactly Nietzsche’s view. 27 Martin Woessner, Heidegger in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Ch. 8. 28 Ibid., 253. 29 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 145–61.

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30 Woessner, Heidegger in America, 233. 31 Ibid., 235. 32 Ibid., 251. Cf. Beiner, Dangerous Minds, 102–3. 33 “Letter on Humanism,” in Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 217–18. 34 Exactly the same is true of Karsten Harries, as we discuss in the next paragraph. 35 Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, 168. Harries puts the point more sharply on 166: “the failure of Heidegger’s disastrous attempt to reappropriate the archaic in the modern age speaks to the threat of idolatry.” 36 Ibid., 11. 37 For an indispensable discussion of what is most troubling in Heidegger’s thinking (including the themes that figure prominently in “Building Dwelling Thinking”), see Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). Of course, it’s not my purpose to claim that everyone influenced or inspired by “Building Dwelling Thinking” is locked into the same pinched horizons—Black Forest horizons— that obsess Heidegger. 38 Still, in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 181, Arendt did have the good sense to point out that Heidegger’s appeal to “mythologizing and muddled concepts like ‘folk’ and ‘earth’ … can only lead us out of philosophy and into some kind of nature-oriented superstition.” 39 To my untutored architectural eye, one sees something quite similar in some of the images collected in a volume entitled After the Masters—namely, buildings that are visually powerful, strongly related to more traditional (vernacular) Indian architecture, yet recognizably modern. That is, to what I hope is my citizen’s eye. Obviously, if architecture is to have civic relevance, it will have this relevance not to people with architectural (or critical) expertise—either as practitioners or as theoreticians or as critics of architecture. Rather, they will be civic participants or lay “consumers,” inhabiting a field of visual/civic experience, open to its citizenship-enhancing potential and attuned to the groundedness and durability it embodies. The theorizing of architecture can try to articulate this experience, but it will be articulating something in which amateurs or laypersons, not professionals or experts, partake. See Vikram Bhatt and Peter Scriver, After the Masters: Contemporary Indian Architecture (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 1990). 40 Theodor W. Adorno, “Functionalism Today,” Oppositions 17 (1979), 31–41. 41 Jürgen Habermas, “Modern and Postmodern Architecture,” in Critical Theory and Public Life, ed. John Forester (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 317–29. 42 Albrecht Wellmer, “Architecture and Territory,” in Endgames: The Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 269–88. 43 Raymond Geuss, “Politics and Architecture,” in Geuss, A World without Why, 144–62. See Glen Newey’s commentary in “A World without Why: A Review,” European Journal of Political Theory 15, no. 2 (2016), 244–5, in which he applauds a reflection on politics and architecture as a welcome way of “avoid[ing] one of the main vices of the justice-factory school of political philosophy, namely its boringness, which stems in part from its general lack of political or cultural hinterland.” Well put! 44 Kenneth Frampton, “The Status of Man and the Status of His Objects: A Reading of The Human Condition,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 101–30; George Baird, The Space of Appearance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 45 Patriotism here signifies a feeling of meaningful attachment to place with civicizing effects (i.e., effects that heighten one’s sense of being a citizen among citizens). For instance,

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46 47

48 49

50

51 52

53

see James Traub, “Public Building,” New York Times Magazine, September 7, 2003, for an interesting discussion of architecture and citizenship in the context of the 9/11 crisis in New York. Traub argues that notwithstanding the fact that “New Yorkers will never be Florentines—we have more transitory things than buildings on our minds,” 9/11 brought people back to an awareness that architecture is a key locus of civic consciousness: “The kind of meaning that can be expressed through architecture, and the making of places, comes to the fore at moments of profound civic feeling.” Mark Kingwell, “The $195-Million Scribble,” Toronto Life, June 2004, 75. Cf. Wellmer, “Architecture and Territory,” 288: “The aesthetic, practical, and political aspects of architecture are indissolubly linked with each other.” Alan Freeman, “‘I’m Not Flavour of the Week’” [Interview with Daniel Libeskind], Globe and Mail, Saturday, October 5, 2002, F3. Cf. Daniel Libeskind as quoted in Don Gillmor, “The Libeskind Effect,” The Walrus, February/March 2004, 62: “The public and political realm … is synonymous with architecture.” For some relevant discussion see Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” in The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Frampton, “The Status of Man and the Status of his Objects,” 118. For some examples that illustrate this analysis, see 129, n. 34. For reflections in a similar vein on the topic of “dead public space,” see Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 12–16. Of course, this consensus is repudiated by the currently resurgent radical right, for which the most salient issues concern identity and culture. All the more reason then to move in the direction of a way of thinking about politics oriented toward cultural substance without founding it on fear and xenophobia. Geuss, “Politics and Architecture,” 151. Ibid., 156. On June 24, 2016, I attended an interesting talk by Philippe Trétiack at University of Toronto’s Hart House which developed a kind of counter-thesis to the argument I’ve tried to sketch in this chapter with respect to the theme of the durability vs. non-durability of architecture. Trétiack put a lot of emphasis on la Maison Jaune in Beirut, a building notable not only for its stunning beauty but also for both housing snipers and being a perennial target of rival snipers during the Lebanese Civil War. One can view a fascinating online documentary concerning la Maison Jeune, entitled “Au temps des snipers,” at the following YouTube site: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJJd410COYA. In this case we had a structure that was not “inert but persistent,” but on the contrary relentlessly eroded, punctured, and penetrated. For Trétiack, this seems to be an intriguing image of architecture as fragility or vulnerability rather than durability. Relatedly, he said that he was fascinated by the way children, and often their parents, are naturally attracted to building sand castles at the beach. Why invest effort in building something so fragile and so fugitive? Can we think of architecture in ways that emphasize its vulnerability rather than its capacity to stand fast? Indeed, he asked, should we perhaps associate architecture not with the sand castles but with the sea that washes them away? Trétiack didn’t really provide answers, but they are thought-provoking questions, ones that are obviously highly pertinent to the theme that I’m pondering in this chapter. This chapter is a revised and expanded version of an article entitled “Our Relationship to Architecture as a Mode of Shared Citizenship: Some Arendtian Thoughts,” originally published in Technē: Research in Philosophy and Technology 9, no. 1 (2005), 56–67.

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Chapter 6

The Soft Power of Neighbors: Proximity, Scale, and Responses to Violence Nancy L. Rosenblum

The high-rise building in J. G. Ballard’s novel of that name is a contemporary ship of fools.1 Instead of the classic ship at sea or island occupied by stranded, un-parented children, domination, subjugation, and predatory violence occur among neighbors. Ordinary offenses and trivial disputes provoke vandalism and vile confrontations. The edifice shapes the action. When residents on the upper floors try to cordon themselves off from the “shiftless” tenants’ floors below, these neighbors organize a punitive expedition by elevator and wreak havoc in the penthouse. Revenge escalates into murderousness: first the killing of neighbors’ pets, then the brutal assassination of neighbors themselves. Some residents form tribal alliances for mutual protection, but these vestiges of social organization break down. Aggression becomes random. Surviving tenants are on their own. Having withdrawn from the external world, no one thinks to appeal to outside authorities. The high rise is a war-torn, closed-in dystopia that emerges from a fantastic exaggeration of the mundane conflicts that always afflict neighbors living in close proximity to one another. Among neighbors everywhere, proximity is cause and occasion for arguments, slights, and acts of aggression, ordinary offenses and sometimes extraordinary cruelty. Some neighborhoods exhibit dystopian elements: random and organized violence, a pervasive atmosphere of fear and mistrust, and the inefficacy or indifference of lawful authorities who fail to insure safety. My subject is the patterns of neighbors’ response when life around home is degraded in this way, and I focus on one response that is a familiar part of our ordinary give and take. “How are you?,” a gesture and a nod, are normal under most circumstances, but they are not always routine or banal. Under extreme conditions they signal more than vague recognition, nominal friendliness, and an invitation to minimal reciprocity. More, these simple gestures communicate that we will do our neighbor no harm, that we recognize our mutual vulnerability, our shared reality. Under mistrust-creating conditions they are assurances of our disposition to live and let live, and in these situations demonstrations

Political Theory and Architecture

of the disposition to live and let live can be positively life altering. Think of it as the soft power of neighbors. It is exercised in direct personal encounters around home. Neighbors are our environment, the background to our private lives at home. They are our landmarks—the human materials from which we construct our mental maps of the lay of the land whose center is home. We don’t assign neighbor status to everyone in an officially designated community; we don’t define our neighbors by police precincts, census tracts, school districts, mail carrier routes, or the historic and aesthetic contours of the place where we live. For neighbor is a matter of both location and personal knowledge, of recognition. These are not chance encounters. Neighbors are not friends or intimates, but they are not perfect strangers either. The domain is nearby and small scale. The built environment determines the proximity of neighbors, the frequency of contact, and our capacity to affect one another’s quality of life at home. There is a spatial logic to neighbor relations, especially so, I argue, when it comes to violence. It is not hard to understand why the contours of space around home—nearness and scale—shape our experience as witnesses to violence and our responses. Put simply, opportunities for acting on the injunction to live and let live are amplified in a built environment where neighbors live close by. In high-rise public housing buildings, in urban neighborhoods marked by low-rise tenement buildings or carved up row houses with stoops (like those in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights), contact is regular and inescapable. Neighbors pass in hallways, meet at mailboxes at the entryway, and see one another on the front steps, the sidewalk outside, or the bus stop down the block. The spatial character of the place where we live—nearness and direct personal contact among neighbors—affects the meaning, value, and the impact of the moral imperative to live and let live. In this context, clearly, cultural declarations of the wholesale “death of distance” are overstated. I don’t prescribe ideal architectural or environmental designs for housing, as if some arrangements are more conducive to creating and giving scope to the ethic of good neighbor than others. The ethos of good neighbor is actual and realized not ideal, and neither are the contexts in which we exhibit neighborly virtues. On the contrary—they are called up precisely because neighbors in every kind of setting exhibit ordinary and extraordinary vices and perpetrate ordinary and extraordinary offenses. My concern in this essay is unsafe residential environments and neighbors’ responses to violence where they live. No physical arrangement insures social peace and security; the conditions for reducing violence as a regular occurrence have to do with deep and usually longstanding problems of social division—class, race, and ethnicity, with economic stress, with policing policies and a host of other public policies all beyond the scope of this essay. Architecture is not a determining factor. That said, distance and boundaries are limiting conditions for the exercise of the norms of good neighbor. The soft power of neighbors I identify depends on proximity. Rural settings where homes are remote from one another and suburban areas where houses are far apart and sequestered on large lots—any arrangement in which neighbors have little or no contact day to day—do not call upon live and let live as an element of 122

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good neighbor. As will become clear, neighbors’ responses to violence require regular encounters around home. The settings can be suburban or urban, and encounters can occur on the street or in building stairwells, but they must be regular enough and predictable enough that neighbors recognize one another as people who live nearby, that they appreciate and signal their mutual vulnerability, and that they have ongoing opportunities for reciprocity. I use neighbor in spatial terms and not as shorthand for general decency in every social interaction. A standard thesis in democratic theory sees neighbors differently—not in terms of the day-to-day ethos of good neighbor but in civic terms. The neighborhood is presented as the premier site of political education. An insistent effort to cast neighbors as the building blocks of democracy is Mary Parker Follett’s Progressive faith in “the homely realities of the neighborhood meeting.” “People should organize themselves into neighborhood groups to express their daily life, to bring to the surface the needs, desires and aspirations of that life, that these needs should become the substance of politics, and that these neighborhood groups should become the recognized political unit.”2 Of course, some neighbors do exhibit a civic spirit. They join neighborhood associations, demonstrate, protest, support candidates for local office, and run for office themselves to improve local services or to radically alter the policies and officials that fail to make the world around home tolerable, safe, or just. In the United States, many people who respond to social media calls for action by Black Lives Matter, for example, suffer or witness crime and police brutality on the streets where they live.3 Nothing in my theory of the soft power of neighbors in response to violence around home is meant to detract from organized political action in public arenas some distance from home. Yet even activists who occupy the public square go home at night, and that zone of neighbor relations—personal and inescapable—is separate in space and scale from sites of public political activity. Neighbors occupy a distinct physical sphere that is also an ethical sphere.4 If we consider neighbors without regard to their proximity to one another, or if we consider them solely in terms of civic engagement in public spaces, the regulative idea of good neighbor and the moral resources neighbors have to respond to violence and mistrust are lost to view. What I am calling the soft power of neighbors is part of my larger theory of the democracy of everyday life.5 It is not a theory of architecture but it is a political theory sensitive to the built environment—to the scale and placement of residential edifices, to nearness of home to the homes of neighbors we encounter day to day. The democracy of everyday life plays out at the level of apartments, porches, entries, and balconies. There is a spatial logic to much of political theory—above all the attention paid to the location and contours of public spaces—their capacity to contain and support political organization, deliberation, and “talking to strangers” as a way of broadening citizen interaction.6 But the standard emphasis on public spaces offers only a partial perspective on democratic encounters, one that ignores the deep-rooted norms of everyday life. The importance of the physical sites of domestic life and direct personal contact there is less 123

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studied than association in public life. But they are critical, because attentiveness to proximity, place, and scale allows us to see what is too often missed: the distinct ethic and soft power of good neighbors.

Taking offense Before turning to conditions of violence and pervasive mistrust, consider ordinary vices and ordinary offenses. Once we understand what makes being a neighbor challenging everywhere and all the time, and once we assess our repertoire of responses to mundane offenses, we can appreciate it when they are sustained under extreme conditions and begin to see the rudiments of good neighbor as an achievement. The unique power neighbors hold over one another is explained in one word: they affect us where we live, at home. We are uniquely vulnerable at home because of the depth and intensity of our interests in private life, and our expectation of control over life behind the door. And at home, if we live in close proximity to our neighbors, retreat is impossible. We suffer relentlessly barking dogs, blaring televisions, incessant quarrels, an excess of domestic odors. Sounds that startle us at night and disturb our sleep. Snooping and interfering. Wounding reputation. Typically encounters with neighbors call on a minimum of reciprocity—even if it is eye contact and “hello.” Reciprocity, face-to-face and open-ended, is our foothold. This domain of give and take covers a virtually unlimited universe of interactions, from a nod to the unasked for favor. Moreover, reciprocity is largely discretionary, and the terms and time frame of reciprocity are seldom articulated. When is a return of a favor on the calendar? What to do about unwanted offers? It is up to us whether we invite, return, refuse, stint, or delay. Put simply, no other sustained interaction except friendship floats so free of the institutions, structure, rules, and processes, the shared purposes and agreed-on outcomes that define roles and shape relations in every other setting. The particulars of reciprocity are often uncertain when it comes to good turns and daunting when it comes to responding to an offense. We recognize the psychological logic that makes negative reciprocity difficult (as an Oxford University Press (OED) entry quaintly puts it) to “repress all appetite of our neighbour’s hurt.”7 We think we accurately discern hostility and injury. In our own minds we are innocent of inviting bad behavior. We calculate rough equivalence in our payback. Or we fantasize spiteful revenge. What do we do, actually? When it comes to neighbors who have forgotten the fundamental house rules of existence, most of us exercise restraint most the time. We are selectively inattentive to doors left ajar, neighbors who park their car “temporarily” in our assigned spot, disturbances caused by unsupervised children. We don’t acknowledge slights or inconveniences even if we detect a whiff of malice. We make allowances

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and resist the impulse to magnify slights. After all, we acknowledge these offending neighbors as decent folk overall and don’t want to be like the woman next door who calls out every misstep, real or imagined; perpetually aggrieved, she excites perpetual conflict. But other times indignation impels us to speak out—moral anger aroused by a neighbor exercising the power inherent in proximity to degrade our quality of life at home. We report reprehensible conduct to others down the hall, and they judge the reliability of our reports. For the victims, it is not enough that neighbors sympathetically affirm “the son of a bitch should have it coming to him.” We want them to make our business their own. We recruit them to join in speaking out against the offender. Here proximity clearly matters: people down the block are less likely to be concerned about the noise bully than neighbors living in the building who hear the racket, observe our distress, and imagine that they may be assaulted by a noise bully themselves. No one should have to endure capricious cruelty, willfully imposed distress, and neighbors are often moved to join the victim in speaking out. Direct, personal confrontation is the resistance available to us. Think of us as “Lockeans” defending against the arbitrary despot next door. Lacking articulated rules, authoritative interpreters, and designated enforcers, we neighbors name the offense, blame the offender, claim the support of others nearby, decide on action, and enforce our judgment. In that moment we are self-governing. We enact this element of what I call the democracy of everyday life. True, neighbors live in the shadow of the law: zoning ordinances, property law, landlord–tenant contracts, association covenants, the unlovely law of torts, and criminal law as well. When our neighbor’s fence encroaches on our yard, or blight fouls the area, or harassing confrontations cause distress, we translate offenses into actionable grounds for complaint. Neighbors report to housing authorities, show up at the Development Review Board hearing, call the police. We expect for every wrong a remedy. But the law is not seamless. All sorts of insults and injuries hold no interest for authorities; the offense is not a crime and does not rise to the threshold of the tort of nuisance. The New York City apartment house manager who uses drones to search for unregistered air conditioners violated no rule.8 Besides, appeals to authority are complicated and costly. In the shadow of law, yes, but there is always a remainder beyond legally cognizable offenses. For the most part we neighbors are on our own. And on our own, we assess neighbors all the time, not just for specific offenses but also for local fit. We regard those who deviate from “what anyone would do here” as nihilists of local etiquette, and we assume the role of compliance officers. We monitor and reproach, interfere, instruct, admonish, condemn, and broadcast our judgments in ways that public officials should not and distant strangers do not, but neighbors often do. In disturbing cases, our view of a neighbor is colored by prejudice, and we characterize his conduct in ways that are overtly stigmatizing. Again, except for remoteness—long 125

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distances between homes sheltered on large tracts of property or behind walls—which do not allow for regular contact among neighbors—just about any configuration of living spaces in relation to one another becomes a site of monitoring and interfering aimed at compliance with local norms. Planners and developers design and build living arrangements dedicated to warding off perceived deviation and degradation of life around home: gated communities, homeowner’s associations, cooperative housing, bounded and defensive architectural configurations. They hold out the promise of eliminating an array of conflicts arising from dissimilarity and mismatched expectations among neighbors. In many cases these arrangements are regulated by covenants and contracts with provisions for enforcing uniformity and resolving conflicts that arise.9 These architectural and environmental configurations may succeed in attracting residents who enjoy a degree of social and economic similarity and compatible lifestyles; they may through selection and private policing create physically secure environments, but no arrangement immunizes neighbors from ordinary vices and ordinary offenses, and no terms of association guarantee relief when offenses occur. In all this, the spatial setting and contours of residential edifices matter. The situation of apartments and the direction of windows and porches of detached houses, the thinness of walls, the acoustics, the placement of garbage chutes and dumpsters, the clustering of mailboxes all increase opportunities for giving and taking offense. Physical configurations also affect what we know about our neighbors (see, for instance, the discussion of balconies in Bernardo Zacka’s chapter in this volume). It is not just urban buildings that afford sight and hearing. Depending on the orientation of homes, suburban neighbors too have rooms with a view. Most neighbors most of the time have some “cognitive access,” some “epistemic opportunity.” Strictly speaking, minding our own business is often impossible. Whether we are passive even unwilling recipients of information or eager receptors, we learn things about the goings on nearby or next door—neighbors’ habits, emotional states and intimacies, illness or marriage, employment or being laid off. We have an opportunity to observe their garbage, hear their children’s incautious conversations. We know details of their lives that don’t necessarily count as intimate or the stuff of confidences, but things they don’t expect to be exposed to view much less to become a matter for neighbors’ collective attention. Physical arrangements pose moral challenges for privacy, and the question is less what we know than what we do with what we know, or think we know. Do we exploit the accident of proximity? Do we broadcast our neighbor’s exhibitionistic displays of nudity or noxious disarray? Or do we take no overt notice and perform selective unacknowledgment? Proximity gives rise to the familiar practices in response to ordinary offenses I’ve described—reciprocity, prudent “unacknowledgment” of some disturbances, rallying and speaking out against the arrant noise bully, monitoring neighbors’ adherence to local knowledge. These responses are sturdy but not invulnerable. They can be casualties of chronically assaultive conditions when neighbors create and people nearby must live with violence and diffuse mistrust. 126

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Violent neighbors Isabel Wilkerson writes about 83-year-old Ida Mae Gladney who lived in a second-floor apartment in Chicago. “A man is selling drugs out of a trash can. She can see, plain as day, where he puts them and how he gets them out of the trash can for the white customers in their SUVs.” These drug-dealing neighbors favor Ida Mae and call her “Grandma.” They warn her when not to come out “because we don’t know what time we gon’ start shootin.”10 This particle of protectiveness reflects the arrogance that comes with power to wreak havoc and willingness to act recklessly—the “accidental” shooting of children caught in the crossfire was not intended. For neighbors there is the added damage of knowing that these agents of destruction are living among them, are known to them, and are willing to ravage the quality of life (even their own lives) at home. “Police sirens everyday” is the opening line of Spike Lee’s film Chi-raq.11 When lines of conflict are drawn by organized gangs or members of hostile ethnic or racial groups, the lay of the land becomes a divided society with neighbors like rival nations. Random mayhem too is a stress on ordinary encounters. It is helter-skelter to the many gentle people living among others who are not on the field of play, who are out of bounds. Perhaps there are safe havens—a local church or school—but life on the street, at the bus stop, in the apartment hallway, the front yard, the living room whose windows face the street is perilous. People try to stay out of sightlines and out of trouble. Outside they walk hurriedly, averting their gaze. Residents know that most people living nearby are not dangerous, but local knowledge does not allay simmering anxiety or enable trustworthy neighbors to carry on ordinary business with one another undisturbed. Vaclav Havel observed that mistrust induces “universal irritability, servility, perpetual defensiveness, backbiting, nervousness, and an ever smoldering compensatory contentiousness.”12 Mistrust inhibits ordinary reciprocity, and it inhibits neighbors from monitoring common spaces, reporting offenses, confronting delinquents, intervening on behalf of one another, rallying and speaking out. Sociologists find that disorder and neighbors’ comparative lack of interaction are self-reinforcing and result in the demise of “shared expectations for social control.”13 Studies document the conditions (low-income, segregated, often minority neighborhoods) that are most likely to expose neighbors to chronic mayhem and danger.14 Physical defacement of the built environment is the backdrop for unpredictable, if not, dangerous people—derelicts, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, the mentally disturbed—and for vandalism and arson, harassment, intimidation, theft, and muggings and killings. Violence, including gang violence, exists in suburbs and rural areas where neighbors are spread out. But the effects are more concentrated in dense urban neighborhoods. Violence is witnessed by more people. The victims and survivors are familiar faces. For the same reason, I argue, certain resources of repair are available just because neighbors recognize one another from their encounters day to day.

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Three responses: Vigilance, numbness, reticence How do people living in close proximity, who recognize one another as neighbors, respond to violence and mistrust? When Rosa Parks was mugged in Detroit, “her neighbors found the culprits and subjected them to harsh punishment.”15 We know that under degraded conditions, we don’t always rely on a division of labor between authorities and residents. Neighbors sometimes deputize themselves to retaliate and defend. At best a neighborhood watch is civic spirited, but self-defense is often a perverse version of the touted “capacity for collective civic action.” It is the provocative pose of enforcers driven by distorted perceptions of social disintegration and danger. Menacing themselves, these neighbors exacerbate fear and mistrust. The slide from vigilance into vigilantism should make us wary of these protectors. Consider George Zimmerman, the infamous Florida man who wantonly killed the black teenager Trayvon Martin whom he saw as a dangerous interloper on the block. Vigilance is not all vigilantism. Jane Jacobs commended urban sidewalks in continuous use “both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers.”16 Neighbors look out for vandalism, trespassing, burglary.17 Often enough benefits flow from watchful neighbors who speak out. A standard social science thesis has it that minding our neighbors’ business with an eye to shared expectations of order generates trust and enables cooperation.18 Eyes on the street has its dark underside, too, though. Any disturbance, indeed any behavior that seems out of place, deviating from what anyone would do here, may define “suspicious activity.”19 New York City’s program “If you see something, say something” is an open invitation of this kind: “So if you see something you know shouldn’t be there—or someone’s behavior that doesn’t seem quite right—say something. Because only you know what’s supposed to be in your everyday.”20 We know that vigilance invites reporting and confrontation based on prejudice or grievance.21 When authorities encourage neighbors to report suspicious activity, grievance meets opportunity. A standard observation is that whenever officials “use” civilians to collect information, civilians “use” political officials to settle private conflicts. Neighbors are driven by petty intrigue and personal animus, greed, envy, disputes over rent, the chance to finally avenge an offense. Jan Gross called this “the institutionalization of resentment.” In another account of neighbor violence, the business “was franchised, as it were, to local individuals, who used their power to pursue their private interests and settle scores.”22 “Spite informers” captures it. There is more to the dark underside of vigilance. Watchful neighbors monitoring deviation from local norms are also liable to produce self-defensive behavior in their targets: submissive postures, cautious movements, careful words, exaggerated demonstrations of law-abidingness, and loyalty to ward off aggravating contacts with authorities and suspicious neighbors.

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At the other pole of response from vigilance is detachment. Mistrust runs so deep and physical danger comes so close that people are frozen in place. It is not just the elderly who are trapped in their homes. People inhabit a closed-in, closed-down physical and emotional terrain. Fear inhibits what we can call practical reasoning. It eliminates as felt possibilities the standard ways of protecting the quality of life at home.23 Habits of observing, speaking up, rallying, reporting belong to another place. There is no reasoning forward. Neighbors are numb. The psychological structure of immobilization is not perfectly rigid; it can be opened out, for one thing by a neighbor’s solicitousness and repeated assurances, and I turn to that dynamic in the next section. First, however, consider a response to violence rooted in mistrust of authorities and a sense of injustice. Officials’ failure to provide basic order and security, fairly, does not mean that coercive authority is absent. “Acquaintance with the state as a disciplinary force comes early,”24 Elijah Anderson tells us, and he reports surveillance, stops, questioning, and arrests directed at young black men especially “with crushing force.” This takes place on the street or in the alley or stairwell of buildings, in plain view of neighbors. Being vulnerable to violent neighbors is intolerable, but so is being treated with contempt and cooperating with a legal system disfigured by racial profiling and brutality and the perverse practices of criminal justice.25 Neighbors do not confront and may not actively protect the drug dealer next door, but they are loath to deliver him up to the cycle of arrest, imprisonment, unemployment, and re-incarceration.26 They are doubly betrayed by vicious neighbors and a government that leaves them effectively stateless.27 Reticence rooted in experience of injustice is quite different from the numbness of neighbors who are fearfully closed down. This response to violence and mistrust is expressive, alert, self-conscious, and meaningful. Still, the field of possibility is limited. There are no positive prescriptions here. And the terms are set by others—by violent neighbors and mistrusted authorities. Nothing in my survey of these responses to violence—self-deputization and vigilance, numbing, and reticence rooted in injustice—is meant to depreciate political organization among neighbors. But again, by considering neighbors solely in terms of civic engagement, as political theorists do, we overlook the distinct regulative ideal of a good neighbor and the exercise of soft power in the face of violence and mistrust.

The soft power of neighbors Neighbors who deputize themselves and police the block, or who are numb and frozen in place, or who keep what they know to themselves to avoid what feels like complicity in injustice do not exhaust patterns of responses. The soft power of neighbors is distinct. It consists of the injunction to live and let live. It is not a high art. Simply, in a gesture (a nod, eye contact, a wave) or word (“nice day”) or small act of assistance we acknowledge

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our standing as neighbors, regular presences. We do this pretty much unthinkingly under ordinary circumstances day to day, but under extreme conditions these offerings are deliberate and have added meaning. We signal that we are safe with one another and will not disturb, threaten, injure, or exploit one another. We do not debase our neighbor or efface her by looking through her. We decline to erect walls, to refuse to deal. “How are you today?,” a quick assist climbing a stair or navigating a curb, says that I am not oblivious to how you are. Apparently minimal, live and let live carries a load of meaning. It is fully attentive and communicative. We are paying attention. We are extending ourselves. We offer assurances. We acknowledge our mutual vulnerability. The contrasting disposition is to assume a menacing or blank demeanor. We pretend neighbors are invisible, beneath notice. Avoidance too is communicative and has consequences. The “contact hypothesis,” which says that simple interactions have cumulative beneficial effects, is aborted. There is no learning. No accommodation. No appreciation of shared reality. No imagination or empathy. No willing opportunities— none—to “practice interaction on terms of equality”—that is, on the limited but morally significant terms of equality as neighbors and decent folk.28 Neighbors who exercise the soft power that comes with proximity and familiarity grasp the damage that aversive, menacing demeanor wreaks on quotidian life. They grasp the damage done by numbed withdrawal. They are not heedless or insulated from their neighbors’ situation and the sources of their misery, and they are aware of what they do to exacerbate it and the simple actions they could take to relieve it. They see themselves as agents and know what they have to do. In the words of Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall”: “I have come after them and made repair.” Live and let live is a creative response to an environment of violence and mistrust because it opens the field of possibility. Two things are happening. First, we find new meaning in the colloquialism “live and let live.” The phrase sometimes implies a shrug of indifference, or a caution against meddling, or de facto coexistence, but not here. The imperative contains a notion of excellence—“good neighbor.” We comprehend the significance for our neighbor, as for us all, of the quality of life around home. Under conditions of violence and mistrust, ordinary gestures are a residual of normalcy, an assurance. Live and let live contains a hope that things need not be as they are. Its practical significance is to enable neighbors to “exist within open-ended situations.”29 The disposition to live and let live also entails internal adjustment. We find in ourselves—or we recover—another way of interacting. Live and let live demands a certain discipline because our overtures open us to rebuff; especially under conditions of mistrust our gesture may not be reciprocated. So we call up resilience, willingness to understand the value of these encounters, competence to do so, and the hope that numbness and walls are penetrable. Acknowledging one another as neighbors and decent folk affects inner life as well as the quality of the day. The poet Robert Frost put it this way in “Mending Wall”: “And going home/From company means coming to our senses.” 130

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Acting on the disposition to live and let live may not mitigate fear and mistrust. It can become a casualty of hostile situations, effectively muted. Mistrust may be so diffuse, hostility and danger may be so apparent, and ignorance or misreading of one another’s intentions so thorough that neighbors’ capacity to communicate the intent to live and let live is stunted. They turn to aggressive self-deputizing or, mostly, they are frozen in place. Where neighbors do signal live and let live to address as they can the degradation of the domain around home, we should recognize it as an achievement. The significance of coming home and “coming to our senses” has been noticed before. It is what Pope Francis described as “an integral ecology” made up of “simple daily gestures which break with the logic of violence.”30 Like the old teacher in Vasily Grossman’s story who in the face of atrocity still asked, “How are you feeling today?”31, neighbors invite this iota of give and take. No public, collective action, the soft power of neighbors is available to us on our own and is amplified and spread by reciprocity. The soft power of neighbors has a zone of its own, then: the buildings and streets around home. This moral dynamic has a scale of its own as well; it arises from the spatial closeness of residences and density of residents that make encounters unavoidable and put neighbors in regular, direct personal contact. Recognition of neighbors as decent folk, acknowledgment of mutual insecurity and distress, and motivation and opportunity to offer assurances are all iterative.

Crown Heights What does the soft power of neighbors look like? In the many studies of events in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, we see the accident of proximity—unlike people living together—and the soft power of neighbors played out. A racially mixed area, Hasidic Jews, long-time resident African Americans, and Haitian immigrants resided interspersed on blocks and in buildings. The scale of buildings and the constant foot traffic on the street (for commerce and because religious observance required Jewish residents to walk to synagogues) insured that however limited their personal interactions, neighbors were familiar faces. These people lived intermixed with one another; they were spatially but not socially integrated. Despite proximity, neighbors mapped the terrain around home differently. In the minds of Jewish residents their Crown Heights was restricted to an area marked off by Eastern Parkway to the north, Lefferts Avenue to the south, Nostrand Avenue to the west, and Rochester Avenue to the east; for them, this portion constituted the whole of Crown Heights. We see the contours of a Hasidic woman’s mental map when she asserts: “It’s not really a Black neighborhood here at all. They have nothing to do with us.” It helps us grasp the power of imagined geography to know that the Lubavitch made up only about 6 percent of the official Crown Heights population overall and only about 20 percent of the population of “their” designated Crown Heights, that African Americans, predominantly Caribbean immigrants, made up 80 percent, and that Crown

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Heights was an unusually integrated residential area. Corrected, the woman adjusts her boundary, “Yeah but not these six blocks. Here it’s really just Jewish.”32 Even there, her neighborhood was “really just Jewish” not on account of its demographic makeup or the day-to-day presence of others, the sightings and encounters, but because of the synagogue, baths, kosher grocers, and so on that tracked her life at home. The laws of religious life dictated her imagined geography. “They have nothing to do with us” reflected her map of the lay of the land and depended on willful unacknowledgment. For Caribbean immigrants too Crown Heights was special; it was the center of West Indian life in the United States. Other African-American residents interpreted the lay of the land through historical legacies of segregation and discrimination. Indeed, the Lubavitch were not the only ones to define this space in terms of biblical history: black Hebrew Israelites saw themselves as the true descendants of the patriarch Jacob. “In a neighborhood populated by chosen peoples in exile—by descendants of immigrants, refugees, and slaves …”33 imagined geography was built up out of the past as well as the present. This changed as a result of episodes of violence, which caused many residents to map the lay of the land differently and to recognize one another as neighbors and decent folk. In 1991, a young black boy, Gavin Cato, was killed by the motorcade of the Lubavitch Rebbe, and hours later, apparently in retaliation, Yankel Rosenbaum was fatally stabbed by a black teenager. After 3 days of riots, police finally arrived to restore order. Events in Crown Heights became a Rorschach for pundits who activated every stereotype and memory of historic oppression. The boy Gavin Cato was cast as a martyr in the struggle for racial justice, and the Reverend Al Sharpton linked “diamond merchants” in Crown Heights and Tel Aviv to the apartheid regime in South Africa. Jewish commentators described Rosenbaum’s murder as an antisemitic hate crime and the riots as a repetition of “Kristallnacht.”34 Anna Deveare Smith constructed her play “Fires in the Mirror” from interviews of Crown Heights residents. She calls it “A Search for American Character,” and so it is. Some political activists and religious spokespersons angrily underscored divides. Others joined city officials in organizing arenas for dialogue designed to encourage mutual respect and commitment to the principle of toleration. Most Crown Heights residents spurned these supervised events. But individually and spontaneously many resisted vilification and tried to temper mistrust. They enacted the injunction to live and let live. A Hasidic woman put it this way: Do you know that the Blacks who came here to riot were not my neighbors? … the people in this community want exactly what I want out of life. They want to live in nice homes …. They wanna live a nice quiet life … The people who came here to riot were brought here by this famous Reverend Al Sharpton … My Black neighbors? I mean, I spoke with them. They were hiding in their houses just like I was.35 By invoking “my black neighbors” this woman avows a connection. She does this despite the fact that the earlier mental maps Hasidic Jews and African Americans 132

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drew of Crown Heights diverged, and in her imagined geography the Lubavitchers’s neighborhood was a separate, sacred domain, the headquarters of the worldwide Lubavitch movement, “the center of the world.”36 Now this woman acknowledges the black families living nearby as neighbors. She is aware of commonalities beginning with but not restricted to mutual vulnerability. They share a reality. They share a point of view. (“They wanna live a nice quiet life.”) She acknowledges their equality qua neighbors as decent folk. She takes on what Angela Davis described at the time as “the responsibility of learning.” Reflecting on her own experience, she insisted that immersion in her community of black radicals is not enough; we need not only the anchor of solidarity with our own but a rope “long enough to allow us to … understand and learn.”37 In just this way the Hasidic woman recalibrates “who is my neighbor?” and assumes responsibility for the quality of encounters. Another woman gives the mindset of good neighbor expression when she says: “I don’t love my neighbors.” “I don’t know my Black neighbors. There’s one lady on President Street—Claire—I adore her. She’s my girlfriend’s next-door-neighbor. I’ve had a manicure done in her house, and we sit and kibbitz … But I don’t know them. I told you we don’t mingle socially.”38 Consider her phrases in turn: what she rejects and what she affirms. “I don’t love my neighbors” dismisses the severe Old Testament commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” It is as if she has reflected on its enormity (and psychological impossibility) summed by Kierkegaard who wrote: “Let us not … forget its originality—that it did not arise in any human being’s heart.” In saying “I don’t know my Black neighbors” the woman dismisses intimate knowledge. She does not pretend to know their thoughts and feelings; their history is not hers. It is enough, she says, to recognize that they have experiences and ideas similar to hers. That is already a significant moral achievement.39 “We don’t mingle” falls short of social integration. In the same spirit a black activist in the neighborhood asserts: “I have no reason to be eager for the coming together of our people.” A rabbi insists: “My goal is not to give a message that we plan to work things out by integrating our two things.”40 Simply (or not so simply), Crown Heights neighbors indicate that they will live and let live just as they are, however alien and discomfiting. They admit the similarities of their situation around home and—beyond that—they deliberately, purposively recognize one another as neighbors and decent folk. Not everyone offers this assurance. Here is one woman’s reaction on hearing the complaint from black residents “that their Hasidic neighbors aren’t so neighborly, that they rush around unconcerned with others, without making eye contact or saying hello.” “We’re just as rude to each other,” she says, disingenuously and offers this justification: the morning, afternoon, and evening prayers have “a time-frame, Shabbos has a time-frame … And that’s why Jews are always rushing … the fallout is that people … consider us insular, they consider us snotty … but that’s just ignorance.41 133

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She is aware of misaligned expectations but is indifferent to being misunderstood and makes no effort to avoid giving offense. She washes her hands of these neighbors. Crown Heights is one example of neighbors’ responses to violence and mistrust. Not always but often enough, simple gestures of recognition and concern color day-to-day encounters. Crown Heights shows, too, that the opportunity to acknowledge neighbors as decent folk is supported by features of the built environment, for our experience of the people who live nearby arises from regular encounters, from “epistemic opportunity” over time. Crown Heights shows, too, that neighbors’ soft power is not some abstract ideal. It is a resource known, accessible, contained already in quotidian give and take. The injunction to live and let live is our practicable moral response to violent and mistrust-creating situations that is in our own hands. To moral philosophers committed to more demanding expressions of mutual respect and principled toleration, live and let live is a poor thing. For political theorists the soft power of neighbors falls short because it does not lead directly to organized political action—to the sort of community dialogue New York City officials offered and most Crown Heights residents declined to join. To disparage live and let live is a mistake, however. Certainly to neighbors faced with similar strains, who fail to give and receive signals that they are safe among people they recognize as decent folk, it is positively aspirational.

Moral decency and the soft power of neighbors The press of images and voices from across the world carried to us by the media tempts us to understate the significance of place and the proximity of neighbors. Events like war and global climate change cast us as metaphorical neighbors in crisis. We become accustomed to hearing “neighbor” used as a homely synonym for universal moral decency. It is easy to depreciate the significance of actual, un-metaphorical neighbors. But actual neighbors occupy a distinct ethical sphere that is also a distinct spatial sphere. “Neighbor”—someone who lives nearby and with whom we have regular encounters— has moral resonance of its own. We know from historical testimony and from literature that the experience of violence and mistrust is incomparable when it is neighbors who hold our lives in their hands. It is a kind of extreme just because it occurs at home. Similarly, not just any face has the power to offer recognition and assurances when everyday life is deranged, only this familiar one. There is a distinct quality, call it a moral temper, when it is neighbors who participate in atrocity, or applaud the violence, or turn away. The transgression has specific added meaning. We hear it in this cri de coeur: Was it inevitable that the Jews, looking their last on this world as they rode in the death trains speeding … to Treblinka or other places of slaughter, should have had to witness the indifference or even joy on the faces of their neighbors?42 134

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Violations suffered at the hands of neighbors who we thought we knew and who knew us produce special shock and misery. There are too many examples. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the US government forced Japanese Americans on the west coast to leave their homes and imprisoned them in internment camps. Neighbors vandalized and set fire to Japanese property. They profited from the forced sale or abandonment of small businesses, farms, machinery, personal property, homes. Judged by material consequences, betrayal by neighbors and strangers may be equivalent. But the experience has a distinct tenor. In memoirs and interviews many years later, Japanese italicize the word, indicating incredulity, underscoring pain. “Neighbors swooped down like scavengers.”43 “People, neighbors, came and stole pipes, hoses, windows, light fixtures, floorboards—everything.”44 There is also a distinct moral temper when it is neighbors who assist or just stubbornly continue the modest interactions that acknowledge one another as decent folk. “Every human gesture or act of generosity across the tribal barriers may lodge in someone’s memory,” Jonathan Glover reminds us.45 Testimonies to the impact of the quotidian word or gesture are stirring. They make for climactic moments in fiction: take Martin Amis’s recreation of an encounter between a Jewish Sonderkommando and the wife of the Auschwitz Commandant—neighbors in an extermination camp. The voice here is the prisoner’s: One morning I am in the lane passing the Kommandant’s garden, and I see Frau Doll setting off for school with her daughters. She looks in my direction and she says something quite extraordinary to me. And I recoil from it as if I have smoke in my eyes. Five minutes later, standing bent behind the main guardroom, I am able to shed tears for the first time … “Guten Tag,” she says.46 Good neighbor entails moral decency—that universal imperative that applies to everyone, everywhere—at the same time that it is a specific, additional layer of moral identity that resists the radical rupture of life at home and has reparative force. That helps explain why in every kind of appalling situation rescuers insist that what they did was not extraordinary altruism but “what anyone would do” and often describe themselves as “good neighbors” whether or not the people they saved lived nearby. The ready association to neighbor in violent situations is not hard to decipher: it casts rescue as reclamation of the ordinary; it evokes and reasserts expectations of normality; it resonates with life around home. My point is that under mistrust-producing, atrocityproducing situations the valence of good neighbor works in two directions. It translates extraordinary assistance into “what anyone would do,” and it assigns ordinary encounters among neighbors extraordinary personal significance. It gives moral stature to what I have called the soft power of neighbors. The thread of good neighbor joins the mundane and the extreme. In saying that neighbors occupy a distinct, small-scale physical zone that is also an ethical one, something else is going on of personal and theoretical importance. What I 135

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have called the soft power of neighbors has the character of a democratic excellence. Direct personal encounters on the scale of the building or block have a democratic ethos. It gives neighbor “added value” beyond the general notion of neighborliness as friendliness and helpfulness, humanity, and moral decency. In part, this democratic ethos is a matter of rough parity in the terms of reciprocity— beginning with our modest give and take, our “good day and how are you.” We are attentive to the presence of rough equivalence in our mundane give and take, in responding to neighbors’ favors and offenses, and in the assurances we offer (and hope to receive) when we live and let live. In part, too, the democratic ethos is a matter of who counts as my neighbor in the dance of give and take. Within the bounds of proximity to home and modest personal interactions, the answer to “who is my neighbor?” is comparatively inclusive and egalitarian. It encompasses neighbors generally and acknowledges neighbors generally as decent folk.47 Decent folk gathers in the qualities we consider when we size up the people next door to decide whether we will open ourselves to willing encounters. It reflects a sensible, good enough assessment that they are trustworthy for the purposes of ordinary give and take. They will do no harm, take our elementary interests into account, and be available for rudimentary reciprocity. It requires a certain frame of mind to see neighbors in this morally significant but limited light. Pushing further, the democratic ethos of neighbors as decent folk signifies equality, but equality in just this one respect—as a neighbor. For neighbors this entails disregard for a host of social categories and markers: disregard for our neighbors’ origin, social status, class, work, religion, ethnicity, and aspirationally at least race. Reciprocity among decent folk around home doesn’t demand being color-blind or indifferent to inequalities or hierarchies everywhere and overall. Nothing so absurd is at issue. (After all, the profusion of sectarian identities and social and economic inequalities is the stuff of political life.) Simply, decent folk is a concrete assessment of neighbors personally and individually in light of our history of encounters. We decline to approach neighbors as representatives or symbols. We do this, often enough, in the face of our own snobbery, prejudice, and initial personal discomfort and across lines of division. Or we try. Neighbor as decent folk is a fighting creed. The democracy of everyday life among neighbors has “no identifiable author, no apparent date of origin, no certainty of attention from historians.”48 Yet it is deeply rooted. Think of the democracy of everyday life as the substrate of democracy—its earthy material. It shapes expectations, disposition, demeanor, and our repertoire of daily encounters. That makes the character of encounters among neighbors an index of political catastrophe. When violence and mistrust degrade existence around home so that everyday life is horribly deranged, democracy is disfigured in a deeper way than exclusively political measures allow us to see. By insisting that the repertoire of give and take we enact as neighbors under ordinary conditions and try to enact in extremis have a content and a zone of their own—proximity to home—I’m making a larger point about political theory. After we 136

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take account—as political theorists do—of organized political life, work, membership groups, social circles, friends and family, there is this unstudied remainder. We will be unable to see the democracy of everyday life at all without attending to the particulars of place and scale and the configurations of the physical environment of the zone in which we live and go about our business. Political theorists would do well to absorb something central to the work of other social scientists and humanists: put simply, that we live the many facets of our complex lives and social relations in a plurality of spheres that have distinct norms, institutional structures, and physical environments. We are many-sided personalities for whom shifting involvements among spheres is not only a fact of life in our society but also a condition for moral development and change. For compensation in one domain for the deficits and deprivations suffered in others. For experimentation and individuality. Navigating relations with neighbors is one integral facet of the moral uses of pluralism in ordinary times and under extreme conditions. If we disregard proximity and the scale of life around home, if we represent neighbor relations as political life writ small, we cannot appreciate the meaning and value neighbors have for us personally and for democracy.

Notes 1 2

J. G. Ballard, High-Rise (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). Mary Parker Follett, The New State (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1998), 222, 201, 192. For contemporary examples, see Harry Boyte, The Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980) and Gerald Frug, “The City as a Legal Concept,” Harvard Law Review 93, no. 6 (1980): 1057–154. 3 John Eligon, “Emboldened by Protests, Black Lives Matter Activists Move from Street to Ballot”: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/us/emboldened-by-protest. 4 I owe this formulation and other helpful suggestions to Bernardo Zacka. 5 Nancy L. Rosenblum, Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016) and Nancy L. Rosenblum, Membership and Morals: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 6 Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 7 OED Online. Quotation from David Calderwood The History of Kirk of Scotland, ed. Thomas Thomson, 1st ed., 1842–1849 (8 vols.). Edinburgh: Woodrow Society quoted in “neighbour|neighbor, n. and adj.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2019, www. oed.com/view/Entry/125923 (accessed August 19, 2019). 8 Ronda Kaysen, “When Neighbors Tangle Online”: www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/ realestate/when-neighbors-tangle-online. 9 See sections on homeowner associations and other legal arrangements in Rosenblum, Membership and Morals. 10 Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, cited in “The Uprooted: Chronicling the Great Migration,” review by Jill Lapore, The New Yorker, September 6, 2010, 80. 137

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11 I leave aside domestic violence in the home. My theme is neighbors’ fear and resources for protection and reparation. 12 Vaclav Havel, “An Anatomy of Reticence,” in Living in Truth (London: Faber, 1986), 171. 13 Sociologists speak holistically of “neighborhood effects,” meaning that persistent perceptions of disorder and neighbors’ comparative lack of interaction are self-reinforcing. Together they impede a sense of collective efficacy defined as “social cohesion combined with shared expectations for social control.” Robert J. Sampson, The Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 27, 146–7. 14 Charles Blow, “Gun Control and White Terror”: www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/opinion/ gun-control-and-white=terror. 15 http://bradplumer.tumblr.com/post/3702831859/even-rosa-parks-got-mugged-in-detroit-her. 16 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992). 17 The “defensible space” theory of combatting crime commended territorial arrangements that gave residents a sense of control. It has been superseded by other accounts of the conditions of trust. On vigilance in the present context of terrorism, see Janet Chan, “The New Lateral Surveillance and a Culture of Suspicion,” Sociology of Crime, Law, and Deviance 10 (2008): 223–39, 227. 18 Urban sociology’s studies of “neighborhood effects” demonstrate that when conditions inhibit trust among neighbors, collective action from the most informal “speaking out” to civic engagement is depressed, along with individuals’ sense of political efficacy. Sampson, Great American City; Robert Sampson, Stephen Raudenbush, and Felton Earls, “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy,” Science 277 (August 1997): 918–24. 19 A study of the policing program “If you See Something, Say Something” used focus groups and household telephone surveys, “Improving the Public’s Awareness and Reporting of Suspicious Activity,” FEMA P-903/February 2012. 20 https://www.dhs.gov/see-something-say-something. 21 Donald Trump was blunt: “We’re going to be so tough, we are going to be so smart and so vigilant, and we’re going to get it so that people turn in people when they know there’s something going on.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/07/04/ trumps-white-supremacist-tweets-arent-the-problem-theyre-a-symptom-of-theproblem/?utm_term=.b3dcdc78ba7d. 22 “Institutionalization of Resentment,” in Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, ed. Jan Gross (New York: Penguin, 2002), 4; Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 14. 23 Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls, “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime,” 919. “Even when personal ties are strong … daily experiences with uncertainty, danger, and economic dependency are likely to reduce expectations for taking effective collective action.” Sampson, 186. 24 Elijah Anderson, Streetwise, cited in Darryl Pinckney, “Invisible Black America,” New York Review of Books, March 10, 2011: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/ mar/10/invisible-black-america/. 25 Among these injustices: “stiff penalties for minor parole violations, felon disenfranchisement laws, and general harassment.” Pinckney, “Invisible Black America,” 33.

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26 When it comes to violent crime, neighbors do speak out, like two mothers who turned in their sons, suspects in a recent gang rape in Brownsville. Gina Bellafante, “Brownsville’s Broken Windows,” The New York Times, Sunday, January 17, 2016, 7. 27 Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein, The Cost of Rights (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 205. 28 Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 124. 29 Amos Oz, How to Cure a Fanatic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 66. 30 Pope Francis, Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality: “On Care for Our Common Home,” 139–40. 31 Vasily Grossman, “The Old Teacher,” in The Road (London: Maclehose, 2010), 112, 114. 32 Henry Goldschmidt, Race and Religion among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 18, 95. 33 Ibid., 89, 76–7, 204, 14. 34 Ibid., 67, 52. See too Edward Shapiro, Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2006); Jan Feldman, Lubavitchers as Citizens (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 35 Goldschmidt, Race and Religion, 81–2; Feldman, Lubavitchers as Citizens, 54–8. 36 Goldschmidt, Race and Religion, 109–10. 37 Anna Deveare Smith, “Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities,” Dramatists Play Service, Inc. 1993 (1997): 44, 43. 38 Cited in Goldschmidt, Race and Religion, 193, 194, 119. 39 Michael Walzer interpreting Martin Buber in The Company of Critics (New York: Basic, 2002), 68. 40 Smith, “Fires in the Mirror,” 112, 115. 41 Goldschmidt, Race and Religion, 193–4. 42 Emanuel Ringelblum, cited in Anthony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic, “Introduction” to Anthony Polonsky and Emanuel Ringelblum, editors. The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 4. 43 Yuri Tateishi, cited in Lawson Fusao Inada, ed., Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese Internment Experience (Berkeley: Heyday, 2000), xix. 44 Patrick S. Hayashi, “Pictures from Camp” cited in Erica Harth, ed. Last Witnesses: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 141. 45 Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Yale University Press, 1999), 151. 46 Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest (New York: Knopf, 2014), 136. 47 The phrase appears often in settler, immigrant, and suburban narratives where neighbor relations turn out to be a persistent theme. 48 Robert Ellickson, Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 185. Yet it is deeply rooted. The American story was one of neighbors from the start: neighbor relations with its democratic ethos came first historically, political development and legally enshrined democratic principles came later.

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Chapter 7

Scripting the City: J. G. Ballard among the Architects Duncan Bell

Introduction Concrete, steel, glass. Motorways, car parks, skyscrapers, airports, hotels. Abandoned cities, inundated suburbs, gated communities, drained swimming pools. The fiction of J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) is studded with totemic images of the built environment, their repetition marking a set of preoccupations that persisted through a 50-year writing career. Widely hailed as one of the most penetrating investigators of Western consumer society, his work has exercised a potent influence on avant garde music, literature, and the visual arts.1 It has also drawn sustained interest from literary and cultural theorists, as well as scholars of architecture. High Rise (1975), in particular, has long been regarded as an “iconic piece of writing about the nature of metropolitan urbanity.”2 In 2007–8 Nic Clear and Simon Kennedy taught a module on Ballard at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Entitled “Crash: Architectures of the Near Future,” the course description opened: His understanding of architecture, and architects, and his prophetic visions make Ballard one of the most important figures in the literary articulation of architectural issues and concerns. From the description of futuristic houses that empathise with their inhabitants, to the bleak characterisation of gated communities consumed by sex, drugs and violence, Ballard’s world is highly prescient and ruthlessly unsentimental.3 Geoff Manaugh even claims that architects can learn more from Ballard than from Le Corbusier.4 Yet pinning down exactly what he has to teach presents a challenge. A former medical student, Ballard adopted the persona of a “scientific investigator,” generating hypotheses to explain aspects of the human condition.5 His literary laboratory was furnished with a remarkable battery of instruments which he utilized to dissect the world, aiming to identify the unconscious motive forces that sustained existing orders and propelled social change—the “secret engines that keep us moving.”6 This required the application of Freud’s distinction between the “latent and manifest content of the dream, between the apparent and the real,” to the “external world of

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so-called reality.”7 Nothing could be taken for granted, as given. His oeuvre can be read as an insistent search for the latent, for the deviant logics that buttressed the phenomenal world. An exponent of the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” Ballard tried to show how we entrap ourselves, creating forms of life that leave us open to subjection, domination, and alienation, often without realizing it. Wielding the tools of his rogue science, he interrogated the sociopolitical consequences of an ever-expanding repertoire of information technologies—television, computers, surveillance cameras, video, the internet, virtual reality, artificial intelligence. Unlike most political thinkers, he was alive to the importance of architecture in structuring human action and desire. The “sort of architectural spaces we inhabit,” he once observed, “are enormously important—they are powerful. If every member of the human race were to vanish, our successors from another planet could reconstitute the psychology of this planet from its architecture.”8 But in Ballard’s writings the relationship between politics and architecture is often elusive. He viewed everyday politics as epiphenomenal, a product of deeper social and cultural forces. These forces were themselves shaped by the interpenetration of technology and psychology. Architecture was one such technology, both an index and engine of social change. “Patterns of urban life are constantly shifting,” he wrote, “and constitute a script that we all have to perform. We’re allowed a certain freedom to improvise, but our roles are written by the city.”9 What were those roles, and who penned the script? Drawing on his extensive archive of interviews and essays, as well as his fictional writings, this chapter seeks to shed light on Ballard’s architectural vision, while contributing to scholarship on political theory and literature. Although speculative writers rarely develop systematic theoretical arguments, they can open up imaginative vistas, push ideas to their limits, and furnish new vocabularies to help make sense of the world. Compelling readers to see things afresh, they serve as a powerful creative resource for moral and political reflection, not least by challenging existing modes of apprehending, imagining, and thinking. Ballard’s writings perform all of these roles and more. In the opening section I chart his shifting, conflicted account of architectural modernism. Part II traces his ideas about the interwoven transformation of the built environment and subjectivity, focusing in particular on the transition between what I will call the modernist industrial and the postmodern digital infrastructural regimes. Part III explores the role of “enclosure” in Ballard’s writings, including his critique of the urbanist ideology of “defensible space,” while the final section discusses how two of his late novels, Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes (2000), stage the dangers posed by ubiquitous surveillance and social regimentation.

Infrastructural regimes Ballard recognized the pivotal importance of the assemblage of spatial objects, information systems, and operating protocols that structure the contemporary world. “Infrastructure space,” Keller Easterling writes, is a “complex matrix harbouring all 144

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kinds of social habits, cultural values, economies, and technologies.” “Far from hidden,” she continues, it is “now the overt point of contact and access between us all—the rules governing the space of everyday life.”10 Political choices and moral values are secreted in its design and operation. Political theorists have been slow to grasp the importance of such spaces for understanding contemporary power relations and vectors of authority. Ballard was a prose poet of infrastructure space. At the heart of his analysis was an account of the continuities, ruptures, and tensions between two infrastructural regimes—the modernist industrial and the postmodern digital. Each regime was marked by its own shifting constellation of material objects, subjectivities, architectural styles, and aesthetic sensibilities. These regimes were themselves expressions of underlying technical developments. During the closing decades of the twentieth century the world spawned by the industrial revolution transmuted into a nascent information society. “[W]e are at the climactic end of one huge age of technology which began with the Industrial Revolution and which lasted for about 200 years,” he told an interviewer in 1979. “We’re also at the beginning of a second, possibly even greater revolution, brought about by advances in computers and by the development of information-processing devices of incredible sophistication.”11 These regimes were aligned with (though not reducible to) different phases of capitalism: the mid-twentieth-century industrial variant was Fordist; the digital age was broadly neoliberal. This momentous shift could be captured through metaphor. Ballard once contrasted the two ages in terms of their paradigmatic prosthetic extensions—the industrial epoch was characterized by the “artificial muscles” of the factory, the information age by the “artificial brains” of the computer.12 Elsewhere he distinguished automobility and computation. “If I were asked to condense the whole of the present century into one mental picture,” he was fond of saying, “I would pick a familiar everyday sight: a man in a motorcar, driving along a concrete highway to some unknown destination.”13 Traversing a vast anonymous highway system, the car was a better symbolic representation of the second half of the century than any of the other great transport technologies of the industrial regime—the railway, the airplane, even the Apollo space rocket.14 The image, he intoned in the voiceover for Crash, a 1971 BBC film, “sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape.” The highway was where the twentieth century achieved its “highest expression.” The implications for the human condition were profound. “Have we reached a point now in the 70s where we only make sense in terms of these huge technological systems? I think so myself.”15 By the end of the century, however, the new infrastructural regime spawned its own total metaphor: a person sitting transfixed by a computer screen. The gap between the two images indexed a revolution. Modernism was the characteristic architectural style of the industrial regime. Ballard returned frequently to the topic, his views shifting over time from wholehearted 145

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enthusiasm to a heavily qualified, even reluctant, endorsement. During the 1960s and 1970s Ballard extolled the aesthetics of brutalism and in particular concrete megastructures. Commentators were wrong to see motorways, overpasses, and car parks as ugly, he told an interviewer in 1974. “Most are structures of great beauty,” each embracing the “aesthetic standards of modern sculpture.”16 His (in)famous novel Crash (1973) is, in part, a rhapsodic hymn to the sensuous allure of concrete. Ballard was especially fond of the Westway in London. Started in 1970, it was intended to form part of London Ringways, a bold scheme to encircle the city with high-speed motorways that was abandoned in 1973. The Westway is one of three incomplete sections. It played a starring role in Concrete Island and Crash. In 2006 Ballard penned an encomium, equating speed, concrete, and the welcome arrival of modernity. “Rising above the crowded nineteenth-century squares and grim stucco terraces,” the Westway was a massive concrete motion-sculpture … an heroically isolated fragment of the modern city London might once have become. Corbusier remarked that a city built for speed is a city built for success, but the Westway, like Ankor Wat, is a stone dream that will never awake. As you hurtle along this concrete deck you briefly join the twentieth century, and become a citizen of a virtual city-state borne on a rush of radial tyres.17 In common with the ideologists of modernism, Ballard thought that concrete was both beautiful and the most appropriate material for use in industrial societies. Again citing Le Corbusier, he argued that “handled intelligently it’s much more a 20th century material than, say, wood or brick.”18 To regress to the materials and styles that defined earlier ages was an act of egregious nostalgia. “I detest postmodern architecture in any form whatsoever,” he grumbled in 1995. “We were driven by this terrible disease of nostalgia, and postmodernism is a gift to nostalgia and re-affirms that we don’t have a future.”19 Modernism was a material expression of progress, a visible sign of belief in the future— such optimism, he thought, was essential for sustaining a dynamic society. Ballard frequently singled out the Venturi and Scott-Brown extension to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square for condemnation. “I was appalled by the exterior of the Sainsbury Wing … It’s the sort of kitsch exhibition architecture that belongs in Disneyland.”20 His favorite building was Michael Manser’s stark modernist Heathrow Hilton. “It’s part spaceage hangar and part high-tech medical centre. It’s clearly a machine, and the spirit of Le Corbusier lives on in its minimal functionalism.”21 This was intended as a compliment. Modernism had promised an emancipated future. “Housing schemes, factories and office blocks designed by modernist architects were clear-headed and geometric, suggesting clean and unembellished lives for the people inside them.”22 This was architecture as embodied egalitarianism, displacing the symbolic hierarchies of older styles. Classical columns, pediments and pilasters defined a hierarchical order. Power and authority were separated from the common street by huge flights of steps that we were forced to climb on our way to law courts, parliaments 146

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and town halls. Gothic ornament, with all its spikes and barbs, expressed pain, Christ’s crown of thorns and agony on the cross. The Gothic expressed our guilt, pointing to a heaven we could never reach. The Baroque was a defensive fantasy, architecture as aristocratic playpen, a set of conjuring tricks to ward off the Age of Reason.23 But for Ballard modernism was defined more by its circulatory systems and communications networks than its individual spatial objects or aesthetic claims. Its most resonant built structures were motorways, junctions, flyovers, airports, multistorey car parks. “It may well be that these vast concrete intersections are the most important monuments of our urban civilization, the twentieth century’s equivalent of the pyramids.”24 This was the infrastructural metabolism of the postwar order. Janus-faced, it both signaled progress and contained a darker set of possibilities. The industrial regime was exuberantly dynamic, pulsing with speed, noise, and the heady promise of sex and violence. Both Crash and Concrete Island can be read as poetic investigations of modernist space. Shifting the angle of vision, they offer two variants of the infrastructural gaze. Concrete Island provides epiphanic glimpses of the motorway system, an immersive multisensory experience of the “concrete landscape” viewed from a fixed point within it.25 Crash selects a different optic, chasing the characters in their spectral expeditions around a “nexus of concrete and steel,” an “elaborately signalled landscape of traffic indicators and feeder roads, status and consumer goods.”26 Enda Duffy reads it as an experiment in navigating the pleasures of speed. Ballard’s achievement, she concludes, was to “evoke a new imagination of lived space, neither ‘place’ nor ‘nonplace’, and certainly neither home nor heterotopia, but one whose anonymity reaches a feverish intensity.”27 Writing with hallucinatory precision of the sense of awe catalyzed by immense socio-technical systems, he articulated the infrastructural sublime. The industrial regime was increasingly overlain with and interpenetrated by new information technologies, above all computer networks. It spawned an emergent digital regime. They could coexist in the same urban ecology—indeed Ballard’s writings of the 1970s comb this superimposition for meaning—but as the millennium loomed the differences between them became ever-more apparent. As befitting its fragmented, heterogeneous, partially de-materialized form, the digital regime lacked a stable architectural identity. Its most representative style is postmodernism, the architecture that Ballard hated above all others, but it was ecumenical in its built form.28 In Ballard’s later novels, dedicated to charting the pathologies of this world, the architecture is a lurid cocktail of mimetic vernacular, kitsch neoclassicism, the bastardized offspring of British High-Tech, replica Art Deco, the sleek anonymity of late International Style—modernism stripped of its emancipatory intent—and even a dash of biomorphic parametricism. The kaleidoscopic mix is deliberate and wholly fitting. The difference between the two regimes was marked by a transformation of visibility. In the industrial variant aesthetic ideology and political intent were externalized, rendered intelligible to citizens. The egalitarian political promise of modernism was inscribed and (in principle) visually represented in its characteristic structures. The digital regime, 147

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by contrast, was distinguished by its “invisible technology” and “invisible information channels”—algorithms, operating protocols, data flows, the ocean of pixelated images recorded by CCTV cameras.29 The fugitive politics were encoded in cyborg networks. External appearance mattered far less than the internal wiring. Thus, the narrator of Millennium People (2003) imagines the phantasmagoric digital order of the City of London as a “stream of coded voltages sluicing thorough the concealed conduits under the foreign exchange floors.”30 In an essay written a decade earlier, Ballard remarked on plans for a new complex in the South of France. “Here, at the newly named Antibesles-Pins, will arise the first ‘intelligent city’ of the Riviera. Outwardly, the pitched roofs supported by dainty classical columns, the pedestrian piazzas and thematic gardens suggest something to calm the fears of our uneasy heir to the throne, but behind the elegant façades everything moves with the speed of an electron.”31 The supine exterior was a convenient mask. The conjunction of “theme-park” postmodernism and integrated computer systems was the latest iteration of the algorithmic order. Ballard returned to its secret engines in Super-Cannes (2000). The character of cities and the people who inhabited them was changing. The late industrial city—product of modernist planning and the welfare state—had remade the traditional European conception of urban space. “The old notion of the city designed around the dream of free civic interaction, with the evening strolls along the ramblas, street festivals, pedestrianised areas where people can rediscover the pleasures of a Renaissance city—all that’s been abandoned now.”32 The postwar urban order was creating new forms of sociability: the way in which the traditional togetherness of the village is giving way to the inbuilt loneliness of the new high rises, or the peculiar fact that people nowadays like to be together not in the odd-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It’s a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it’s the togetherness of modern technology.33 The modernist city was itself soon to be supplanted by a neoliberal one, marked by an acceleration of many of the social and technological developments of its immediate predecessor. Ballard’s writings of the 1990s and 2000 addressed, among other things, the intensified assault on public space, relentless privatization, the proliferation of surveillance systems, and untrammeled consumerism, developments that had turned cities “into extended video arcades, with competing levels of unreality laid down like the strata of an electrographic troy.”34 The distance—social, political, technological, aesthetic—traveled between High Rise (1975) and Kingdom Come (2006) was enormous. As Ballard realized, the political effects of this urban transformation are deeply problematic. Politics is enacted in specific spaces and places, and the configuration of the material and symbolic environment influences the quality of quotidian democratic life. The erasure of authentic public space minimizes the physical locations available 148

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for unforced sociability, contestation, and protest; zoning policies lead to de facto segregation along racial and class lines; and socioeconomic inequalities are deepened and reproduced, weakening the material basis for realizing social and political rights.35 For Ballard, architecture was no passive receptacle of human activity. Infrastructural complexes acted on the humans who built and inhabited them. “While we do not typically think of static objects and volumes in urban space as having agency,” Easterling argues, “infrastructural space is doing something. Like an operating system, the medium of infrastructural space makes certain things possible and other things impossible.”36 It both enables and constrains. But the two regimes embodied different agentic powers. The industrial regime was characterized by inert agency—the built environment acted on people in assorted ways: channeling, encouraging, facilitating or disrupting social interaction, and (in a typical Ballardian twist) provoking desires and fears, even psychopathologies. This is the world of High Rise: the brute facticity of the building helps to mold the lifeworld of its inhabitants. In Ballard’s most radical formulation, architecture could serve as a projection screen for consciousness. When annotating the Atrocity Exhibition, for example, he wrote that throughout the book “the nervous systems of the characters have been externalised as part of the reversal of the interior and exterior worlds. Highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as if they were elements in a malfunctioning central nervous system” (AE, 76).37 But even as the external world becomes indistinguishable from mental states, the infrastructure itself does not actively respond to human consciousness and will; it serves as an imaginative extension of it. Remaining passive, the built environment is written on by the humans who inhabit it. Digital infrastructure embodies a form of interactive agency. Modifying the script—writing back—it is composed of what N. Katherine Hayles calls “cognitive assemblages,” ensembles of humans and machines that perform the “functions identified with cognition—flexibly attending to new situations, incorporating this knowledge into adaptive strategies, and evolving through experience to create new strategies and kinds of response.”38 Such infrastructure re-acts. Ballard had long experimented with this kind of agency. His early Vermillion Sands short stories, written between 1956 and 1970, imagined a far future world dominated by leisure. Exquisitely sensitive to the wishes and movements of their inhabitants, houses change form to accommodate them.39 Current models are rather more prosaic, but no less revolutionary. In one of Hayles’s examples, we see the overlay of infrastructural regimes that Ballard charted.40 Collating information from thousands of sensors and cameras, the Automated Traffic and Surveillance and Control (ATSAC) system in Los Angeles, constructed between 1984 and 2012, coordinates traffic flows across the megalopolis. It is “intelligent, adaptive, and evolutionary; capable of modifying its own operations.”41 ATSAC exemplifies the transition between infrastructural regimes, new “smart” technologies superimposed on older concrete motion-sculptures to fashion a cyborg system. The former was the world of Crash; the latter (as we shall see) of Super-Cannes. The shift has deep political implications. Ballard feared the insidious consequences of ever more intrusive 149

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surveillance and security systems, describing plans for an automated congestion scheme in London as “[h]undreds of spy cameras, an army of wardens, a computerised surveillance system out of Alphaville—in short, an Orwellian nightmare come true, but disguised as a public service.” Such systems eroded human freedom and undergirded the “soft” totalitarianism he saw emerging around him. “As the informational networks and feedback loops connecting us and our devices proliferate and deepen,” Hayles cautions, “we can no longer afford the illusion that consciousness steers our ships.” Invisible technologies order the world, making and remaking humans and the built environment. “We need to recognize that when we design, implement, and extend technical cognitive systems, we are partially designing ourselves.”42 Much of Ballard’s late fiction was an attempt to grapple with the possible implications of this post-human world. The script had changed, and so had we.

Suburbanizing the soul: The ontology of enclosure What roles does the city write? Ballard was fascinated by the politics and psychology of enclosure—of what people (might) do and what they (might) become when confined by particular spaces. Enclosure assumes different forms, but most of his examples are “spatial products”: “repeatable formulas for space.”43 These include business parks, housing complexes, holiday resorts, and suburbs. For Ballard, such sites offered prophetic glimpses into possible futures inscribed in the present. Vermillion Sands, whose “spiritual home” lay somewhere “between Arizona and Ipanema Beach,” had been Ballard’s earliest sustained engagement with a distinct spatial product. In his travels to France and Spain during the 1960s and 1970s he detected the contours of a leisure society to-come.44 “If one goes to the Mediterranean coast in the summer,” he said, “one sees the future there already. Half of Europe finds itself in this linear city that runs from Gibraltar to Athens. A city that’s three thousand miles long and a hundred meters wide.”45 It heralded a post-national geography, sovereign boundaries overridden by an immense conurbation hugging the sea, “a billion balconies facing the sun.”46 Vermillion Sands was, he told an interviewer in 1976, how the suburbs in Europe and North America might look in 200 years: “exurbia, a kind of countryclub, which will be largely the product of advanced technologies.”47 He embraced this future—“Vermillion Sands is a place I would be happy to live.”48 References to the linear city recur throughout his writings. In Concrete Island, for example, we hear of La Grande Motte in southern France, with “its hard, affectless architecture” and “stylized concrete surfaces.”49 Reflecting on the series in the early 2000s, Ballard observed that it was a “vision of the leisure society that we were about to enter, though for some reason we stopped and turned away at the door. Music by Brian Eno, metal foil architecture by Frank Gehry, dreams by Sigmund Freud, decor by Paul Delvaux. Many parts of the Thames Valley are close in spirit to Vermillion Sands, without the inhabitants realising

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it.”50 The stories are an early expression of Ballardian urbanism, interrogating the intersection of technology, architecture, and the human condition. His most influential exploration of enclosure, High Rise, is often read as an intervention into debates over the failings of welfare state modernism and brutalism. Thus Stephen Graham and Lucy Hewitt suggest that it addressed “the social implications of high-rise residential building and its material failure.”51 Graham also argues that High Rise belongs to a genre of “vertical noir,” the rendering of dystopian “verticalised scifi cityscapes” structured by inequality and oppression.52 Such readings miss much of what is distinctive about Ballard’s vision. Unlike other examples of vertical noir—The Sleeper Awakes, Metropolis, Blade Runner, Neuromancer—Ballard’s story dissects the social dynamics of the affluent middle classes, not conventional capitalist exploitation.53 High Rise is set in a bespoke complex designed by a star architect, Anthony Royal (often thought to be modeled on Erno Goldfinger). The poor and huddled masses are absent. The complex has more in common with the Barbican, built between 1965 and 1975, than with the cheap system-built towers blocks studding the cityscapes of postwar Britain.54 In High Rise, as in Crash and Concrete Island, Ballard was testing hypotheses. He was seeking to “visualize how human beings will behave in changed circumstances,” how new technologies were reshaping what it meant to be human.55 “The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century,” he wrote in the preface to the French edition of Crash, “has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.”56 Ballard analyzed what emergent technological landscapes were doing to people and places. In particular, he identified the development of a “new class” of individuals, composed of those employed in the plethora of managerial and technical jobs created by consumer society. “I was interested,” he told an interviewer in 1976, “in studying this new class and wondering what would happen if it came under extreme internal stress.”57 His main writings of that decade are explorations of novel forms of subjectivity. This class is defined by a disembedding of social relations—new communities were, Ballard repeatedly argued, “abstract,” mediated, and constructed through communications technologies, rather than traditional forms of geographical association and social identity.58 Its members exhibited a novel cognitive and emotional disposition: the “death of affect”—the “transcendence of affection and the emotions” that were the “main achievements of technology.”59 This was intensified as the ultra-violence of the 1960s, from the spectacular death of Kennedy to Vietnam, was injected into public consciousness by ubiquitous media technologies, to the point where “real sympathy began to leak away and only sensation was left.”60 The consequences were profound. “A new type of person is emerging,” he predicted, “a neutral, affectless, emotionless character who doesn’t mind the intrusion into his life of data processing outfits, credit registers and so on, and in fact welcomes it because it provides a sense of togetherness—maybe all the togetherness that people need.”61 This “new type” was a product of the omnipresent media landscape that “we inhabit and the way in which 151

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our lives are completely dominated and structured by communications systems.” This didn’t mean, he continued, that people “aren’t capable of responding on a sort of human and emotional level,” but rather that “they are not given that much opportunity, certainly as groups, except when there is some sort of disaster.”62 Vertical living was an important experimental subject: “skyscrapers have always attracted me. The life there seems … very abstract.”63 High Rise dissects some possible implications of this phenomenon.64 The vertical city helps to incubate the death of affect: “A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere” (HR, 36). But tower blocks were symptom not cause. The brutalist aesthetic was neither incidental nor integral to Ballard’s analysis. Brutalism was itself an expression of the new technological age, a style (Ballard thought) fit for the abstract personality. “Part of its appeal,” says Laing, the main character of the novel, “lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence” (HR, 25). Moreover, the psycho-social dynamics and political repercussions that Ballard elaborated were perceptible across the “overlit realm” of consumer society. They were not reducible to exposed concrete structures. One of the great strengths of High Rise is its acknowledgment of both horror and desire. “I was trying to point out,” Ballard explained, “that people discover there’s some dubious pleasures of life tapped by advanced technology. They canalise and tame and make tolerable perverse impulses that in previous societies would’ve been nipped in the bud. Modern technology makes possible the expression of guilt-free psychopathology—I really feel we’re moving towards that.”65 The novel is ultimately ambivalent about the value of such developments. This is reflected in Laing’s conversion from skeptical observer to true believer in the liberatory potential of the tower. The most explicit sociological critique in the text is delivered by Richard Wilder, a man who Ballard elsewhere notes is (like Royal) wholly out of tune with the dynamics of the building.66 “All the evidence accumulated over several decades cast a critical light on the high-rise as a viable social structure, but cost-effectiveness in the area of public housing and high profitability in the private sector kept pushing these vertical townships into the sky against the real needs of their occupants” (HR, 52). Are we to accept Wilder’s critique at face value or regard it as evidence of his failure to understand the true nature of his surroundings? Ambivalence is likewise reflected in Ballard’s attitude toward the death of affect. Alert to its dangers, he nevertheless celebrated some of its possible implications, especially the expansion of the human imagination. The question of violence is also left unresolved. Would conflict have spatialized, spreading outwards as the other four towers in the complex filled with accountants, lawyers, and film producers? Would the inhabitants band together to fight them for control over the new urban domain? The gated community, not the tower block, is the paradigmatic spatial product of the digital infrastructural regime. From the 1980s onwards, Ballard investigated these opaque spaces. “What I’m interested in is an emerging psychology where people … are 152

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willing to sacrifice a large number of the stresses and strains that are part of the price one pays for an active and lively and rich cultural mix.”67 Civil and political liberties— and space for creativity and imagination—were curtailed by the tenuous quest for total security. The residential complexes springing up across the Mediterranean littoral were, he worried, a “microcosm of the future that’s waiting for us all,” a world in which people were increasingly isolated from one another and the foundations of social cohesion were corroded.68 “It’s a sign that something is deeply wrong with the societies that have evolved at the end of the twentieth century … people aren’t moving into gated communities simply to avoid the muggers and housebreakers, they’re moving into gated communities to get away from other people.”69 The death of affect had found its perfect built form. Urban planners, Ballard complained in 1996, “want to reassure the prospective buyer that what you’re getting is security: tele-surveillance, direct links to police stations, private security forces and isolation.” This is what Steven Flusty terms “jittery space”—space that is impossible to use unobserved due to active monitoring, whether through electronic surveillance or the presence of security agents.70 The main casualty is the sense of community on which a flourishing civil society depends. “The interaction on a person-to-person basis that leads to clubs and groups, the pursuit of pastimes that make up a national culture, etc., are lost. People are sitting behind their triple-alarmed locks and retreating inwards. These are places where time has stopped. And that’s a dangerous state of affairs. Change is essential.”71 The novella Running Wild (1988) is a meditation on the psychosocial dynamics of gating.72 The story unfolds in Pangbourne, a wealthy micro-estate located 30 miles from London, one of the numerous commuter developments constructed during the 1980s. “Secure behind their high walls and surveillance cameras, these estates in effect constitute a chain of closed communities whose lifelines run directly along the M4 to the offices and consulting rooms, restaurants and private clinics of central London.” Alienated from their surroundings, they form oases of sinister tranquilly. “Here, even the drifting leaves look as if they have too much freedom” (RW, 7). Desperate to escape a stultifying community, the children living in Pangbourne—inmates of “a warm, friendly, junior Alcatraz” (RW, 40)—murder the adults and flee. “In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom” (RW, 84). Ballard identifies another variant of the death of affect. It is technologically enabled social regimentation, rather than the mediascape neutralizing human emotional responses, that does the work. Bringing together several themes that pervaded his writings of the 1990s and 2000s—the dangers of conformity and social engineering, the suffocation of imagination, the advent of surveillance society—the political intent was clear to attentive readers. Kathryn Cramer, an American novelist, went as far as (over) stating that Running Wild “may well be remembered as one of the major political novels of our time.”73 Ballard had once imagined Vermillion Sands as an alluring future: “The suburbs are at last coming into their own. The skies are larger, the air more generous, the clock less urgent.”74 But from the 1970s onwards he stressed the dangers posed by the spread of uniform, sterile suburbs. The future, he commented in 1984, will look like a suburb of 153

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Dusseldorf, a “strange and chilling” consumer paradise, with “not a leaf out of place.”75 Just as the Mediterranean had been slowly colonized by a new transversal linear city dedicated to leisure, so the cities of the Euro-Atlantic world were increasingly becoming adjuncts to suburban sprawl. “As people get more affluent they want a bit of space, middle management people. All over the world you can see it, from Johannesburg to Helsinki.” This was much more worrying than the proliferation of vertical cities. It’s far more dangerous here than in the huge interurban tower blocks. Driving through the suburbs of Germany in the seventies I could see it. Everything is controlled. Even a drifting leaf looks out of place. In the high rises people live on top of each other, sparks fly. They are driven inwards and they dream. Once you move to the suburbs, time stops. People measure their lives by consumer goods, the dreams money can buy. I think that’s more dangerous. People have no loyalties anymore.76 While the relentless spread of the suburbs characterized both infrastructural regimes, there were differences between them. The new suburbs, for example, were laced with surveillance technologies, and many of the wealthiest inhabitants were barricaded behind security gates patrolled by private contractors. The numbing stillness worried him. “My fear is that the exercise of the imagination, an intensely private act, may die out. People may live in an eventless world, where nothing will ever occur.”77 This retreat inwards foreshadowed the death of vibrant community and the creation of an “airless monoculture that threatens to entomb us.”78 The twentieth century ended, he declaimed, “with its dream in ruins. The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died for ever. … The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like a plague” (S-C, 263). This both mirrored and reproduced the passivity of Western populations. “Tyranny becomes docile and subservient, and a soft totalitarianism prevails, as obsequious as a wine waiter. Nothing is allowed to distress and unsettle us. The politics of the playgroup rule.”79 This was the theme of his last novel, Kingdom Come, set in and around a shopping center in southern England—a location ripe for the emergence of new forms of fascism. “The suburbs dream of violence, asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares which will wake them into a more passionate world.”80 The election of Donald Trump was an archetypal Ballardian event. In 1972 Oscar Newman published Defensible Space: People and Design in the Violent City. Focusing on the concrete ecology of the American inner city, he argued that certain kinds of urban planning, and tower blocks in particular, facilitated crime and antisocial behaviors. Architects should create spaces that residents could defend against transgression and disorder, thus instilling a sense of pride in community. Spatial enclosure and heightened surveillance were essential. The idea traveled across the Atlantic, chiefly through the advocacy of geographer Alice Coleman, becoming a staple theme in the Thatcher government’s program of urban regeneration.81 It is likely that Ballard read the book, or knew of its argument, before he wrote High Rise. “I did 154

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research before sitting down to write,” he told an interviewer. “For example, in cities, the degree of criminality is affected by liberty of movement: it’s higher in cul-de-sacs. And high-rises are culs-de-sac: two thousand people jammed together in the air.”82 Ballard’s reflections on urbanism, from the 1970s onwards, returned frequently to the implications of “defensible space.” But even if he accepted Newman’s diagnosis—and this is far from clear—he thoroughly rejected the prescribed solutions. Indeed he was skeptical of all attempts to use planning as a form of social engineering. While well intentioned, such efforts were problematic expressions of the pervasive modern idea that “science, sensibly applied to social problems, will solve most of them, and that we can all live in a kind of Corbusier world where tensions are defused by enlightened social legislation.” Falsified by history, this “predictive mythology” was premised on a delusion: “Something like Corbusier’s radiant city seems much too regimented.” Instead, he argued, “we seem to need a certain element of street level chaos in our lives. We aren’t as enlightened as we’d like to be.”83 Toward the end of his life, Ballard revisited the legacy of architectural modernism. His views on its political potency had shifted. The uncanny concrete megaliths of the Atlantic Wall prompted him, as it had Paul Virilio, to contemplate the symbolism of ruins. “Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.”84 Coated in graffiti, smelling of urine, partially submerged by the encroaching landscape—as if in homage to his earliest apocalyptic novels—the structures reminded him of something closer to home: “run-down tower blocks and motorway exit ramps, pedestrian underpasses sprung from the drawing boards of enlightened planners who would never have to live in or near them, and who were careful never to stray too far from their Georgian squares in the heart of heritage London.” A recurrent complaint of critics of modernism, this admission signaled a retreat from his earlier welcome embrace. “I realised,” Ballard mused, “I was exploring a set of concrete tombs whose dark ghosts haunted the brutalist architecture so popular in Britain in the 1950s.” The utopian energies and sublime selfconfidence of modernism had been killed off by war and its own internal contradictions. Its attempt “to build a better world with the aid of science and technology now seems almost heroic.” He worried that it was perhaps the last utopia, “now that we are well aware that all utopias have their dark side.” The very thing that defined the self-image of modernism, and that Ballard himself found so appealing, condemned it to failure. It was too rationalistic. While proclaiming that he would still love to see all of London recast in modernist style, he now admitted what he had once denied: the critics of modernism might have been right about human desire. “I know that most people, myself included, find it difficult to be clear-eyed at all times and rise to the demands of a pure and unadorned geometry.” Human beings, he mused, “haven’t perhaps evolved sufficiently to be able to enjoy living in high-rise tower blocks.”85 All of us have our dreams to reassure us. Architecture is a stage set where we need to be at ease in order to perform. Fearing ourselves, we need our illusions to protect us, even if the protection takes the form of finials and 155

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cartouches, Corinthian columns and acanthus leaves. Modernism lacked mystery and emotion, was a little too frank about the limits of human nature and never prepared us for our eventual end. Alien to death and to love, Manser’s hotel was incapable of nourishing memory or feeling. “Within this remarkable building one feels no emotions and could never fall in love, or need to. The National Gallery or the Louvre are the complete opposite, and people there are always falling in love.”86 Ballard now distinguished his own preferences for reordering the world from those he thought would actually work given existing social, psychological, and political conditions. His earlier acclamation of modernism was now heavily qualified. Ballard was never explicit about his preferred form of urbanism. However, it is possible to delineate an outline sketch from his critique of existing practices. The Ballardian city would be anarchic, grounded in the pleasures of unexpected encounters, the creativity of the contingent, and the accidental. It would be defined by suspicion of authority, rigidity, and oppressive order, while valuing dissensus and individual freedom. Government intervention and regulation would play little role. It is, in short, a libertarian form of urbanism. Brilliantly prescient and insightful as they were, Ballard’s writings of the 1970s and 1980s can be criticized for celebrating a form of urbanism that was compatible, whether intentionally or not, with the neoliberal assault on public space and the social democratic welfare state. This was to change. His later work switched tack, responding to the degeneration of the urban condition and in particular the assault on public space, although his work was also marked by a strain of political fatalism. Professing admiration for Mike Davis’s Dead Cities, he suggested that Davis was nevertheless still trapped in an industrial imaginary, “too nostalgic for an idealised America dominated by clean rivers and civic responsibility.” He had not come to terms with the urban revolution of the late twentieth century, with cities defined by “unrestricted urban sprawl, the decentred metropolis, a transient airport culture, gated communities and an absence of traditional civic pride.” It was too late to reject this new order: “[T]he problem facing planners and architects is how to accept and make the most of this.”87

The linear city: Two hypotheses Ballard’s last four novels—Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People, and Kingdom Come—are a sustained meditation on the spatial engines of neoliberalism. They bring together his long-standing concerns with infrastructural space and the ontology of enclosure. Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes explore two contrasting hypotheses about societies and their architectural forms. They trace two possible fates for the managerial-professional class that had gestated in the postwar years, one interrogating the future of a universal leisure society, the other a society shaped around 156

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to the high-tech knowledge economy. Both are set in and around the Mediterranean “linear city.” Cocaine Nights is located principally in Estrella de Mar, a bustling resort near Marbella. Purpose built in the 1970s, it is populated largely by ex-patriot British professionals and has a rich associational life—all drama groups, art film clubs, and competitive sport. Super-Cannes unfolds in a gleaming business/science complex nestled in the hills above Cannes, a setting inspired by Sophia-Antipolis, a science park north of Antibes-les-Pins.88 It houses a multinational cast of research scientists and corporate executives, members of the transnational capitalist elite. “The lavish brochure enthused over a vision of glass and titanium straight from the drawing boards of Richard Neutra and Frank Gehry, but softened by landscaped parks and artificial lakes, a humane version of Le Corbusier’s radiant city” (S-C, 5). First impressions are positive. Estrella de Mar is a haven of relaxation, while EdenOlympia appears as a utopia of knowledge. Both incubate sociability. Estrella de Mar has animated its legion of retirees, replicating: the halcyon county town England of the mythical 1930s, brought back to life and moved south into the sun. Here there were no gangs of bored teenagers, no deracinated suburbs where neighbours scarcely knew each other and their only civic loyalties were to the nearest hypermarket and DIY store. As everyone never tired of saying, Estrella de Mar was a true community, with schools for the French and British children, a thriving Anglican church and a local council of elected members which met at the Club Nautico. However modestly, a happier twentieth century had rediscovered itself in this corner of the Costa del Sol. (CN, 66) Eden-Olympia, meanwhile, catalyzes civic pride and a sense of “togetherness” (S-C, 184). Wilder Penrose, the psychologist who ventriloquizes Ballard’s diagnosis, boasts that its inhabitants were “setting out the blueprint for an infinitely more enlightened community” (S-C, 264–5). “When I came here,” he tells Paul, the narrator, “I thought Eden-Olympia was the anteroom to paradise. A beautiful garden city, everything town planners have been working towards for centuries. All the old urban nightmares had been dispelled at a stroke” (S-C, 254). Unlike Estrella de Mar, this was an “intelligent” complex, its buildings embedded in a digital matrix that endlessly circulated information about health, entertainment, security and business, a cognitive assemblage fit for the brave new internet of things. The architecture was restrained, “late modernist in the most minimal and self-effacing way, a machine above all for thinking in” (S-C, 191). Estrella de Mar and Eden-Olympia are presented as (alternative) visions of the future. In Cocaine Nights, one of the characters predicts that “[e]verywhere will look like this soon” (CN, 23), while another opines that “[o]ur governments are preparing for a future without work … Leisure societies lie ahead of us, like those you see on this coast. People will still work—or rather, some people will work, but only for a decade of their lives. They will retire in their late thirties, with fifty years of idleness in front of them” (CN, 180). Eden-Olympia is referred to as the “face of the future.” “Already,” Penrose 157

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predicts, “there are hundreds of business and science parks around the world. Most of us—or at least, most professional people—are going to spend our entire working lives in them” (S-C, 254). Both complexes form quasi-sovereign polities, largely divested of state control. The local authorities leave the populations to govern themselves. Estrella de Mar is run by a residents committee that oversees a volunteer police force, while Eden-Olympia acts as para-state, employing its own private security forces. In such environments, the public dies two deaths. First, public authority is neutralized as the state is supplanted by multinational corporations. Democratic accountability is replaced by elusive corporate power. And second, unruly public space is substituted by manicured, securitized spaces guarded by private contractors. The physical sites of democratic politics are eliminated.89 These complexes are repeatedly contrasted with the entropic linear city colonizing the rest of the Costa del Sol. Time and memory are central categories in Ballard’s imaginative rendering of these worlds. “Steeped in sun and sundowners, wandering the golf greens by day and dozing in front of their satellite television in the evening,” the residents of the linear city “lived in an eventless world” (CN, 33). Driving through this bleached landscape, Charles, the narrator of Cocaine Nights, records the features of this silent world: the memory-erasing white architecture; the enforced leisure that fossilized the nervous system; … the apparent absence of any social structure; the timelessness of a world beyond boredom, with no past, no future and diminishing present. Perhaps this is what a leisure dominated future would resemble? Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm, where entropic drift calmed the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools. (CN 34–5) The endless apartment complexes stood like “blocks of time that had crystallized beside the road. Here on the Costa del Sol nothing would ever happen again, and the people of the pueblos were already the ghosts of themselves” (CN, 75). The architecture in both, in particular Eden-Olympia, is atemporal. Penrose tells Paul: “You’re our village historian. Eden-Olympia has its corporate past, stored away in all those disks and annual reports, but it has no vernacular history” (S-C, 172). In Cocaine Nights, the murder that stands at the heart of the book is ultimately presented as an attempt to create a collective memory, a form of shared guilt to bind the community together. Both stories probe the ontology of enclosure. In Estrella de Mar “[r]azor glass topped almost every wall, and security cameras maintained their endless vigil over garages and front doors” (CN, 135). “Townscapes are changing,” one of the characters, Crawford, lectures the narrator. “The open-plan city belongs to the past—no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more Left banks and Latin quarters. We’re moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and shutting off their nervous systems” (CN, 219). He describes a neighboring resort, the Residencia Costasol, as “a fortified medieval city,” where an “illicit thought never disturbs the peace” (CN, 212–3). This 158

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was defensible space “raised to an almost planetary intensity—security guards telesurveillance, no entrance except through the main gates, the whole complex closed to outsiders. It’s a grim thought, but you’re looking at the future” (CN 210). Eden-Olympia is a more advanced spatial product, with bespoke “human systems” designed by a Swiss consultancy firm (S-C, 212). Roles and rules of conduct are encoded in the cognitive assemblage. “The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems” (S-C, 255). Everything was “designed around an obsession with crime” (S-C, 212). As the novels unfurl, the deviant logics at play are exposed. We discover that until recently Estrella de Mar shared the paralysis afflicting the rest of the Costa del Sol. The leisure society had turned inwards. Until the arrival of its own savior, the psychologist Penrose, Eden-Olympia had been coming apart at the seams. The cause was not debilitating inertia but the religion of work. All business parks suffer from the same “defect,” Wilder tells Paul. “Work dominated life in Eden-Olympia, and drives out everything else. The dream of a leisure society was the great twentieth century delusion. Work is the new leisure. Talented and ambitious people work harder than they had ever done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfilment through work. … The last thing they want is recreation” (S-C, 254). Relentless work triggered a range of physical and psychic disorders in the executives and destroyed the bonds of community necessary for a social organization to function. This was the apogee of the death of affect. We’re breeding a new race of deracinated people, internal exiles without human ties but with enormous power. It’s this new class that runs our planet. To be successful enough to work at Eden-Olympia calls for rare qualities of self-restraint and intelligence. These are people who won’t admit to any weakness and won’t allow themselves to fail (S-C, 256). The leisure and work societies are plagued by boredom—the “new type” of human that Ballard discerned was struggling to cope with the lifeworlds of late capitalism. In both novels, as well as Millennium People and Kingdom Come, he explores the hypothesis that transgression is necessary to animate new forms of community. Estrella de Mar had been woken from its slumber by a charismatic psychopat—“this small-time healer moving like a mendicant preacher down the coasts of the dead” (S-C, 246)—spreading a religion of assault, arson, drug use, sexual violence, and murder. Sanger, a psychologist, comments on his methods. But how do you energize people, give them a sense of community? A world lying on its back is vulnerable to any cunning predator. Politics are a pastime for a professional caste and fail to excite the rest of us. Religious belief demands a vast effort of imaginative and emotional commitments, difficult to master if you’re still groggy from last night’s sleeping pill. Only one thing is left which can rouse people, threaten them directly and force them to act together … Crime, and transgressive behaviour—by which I mean all activities that aren’t necessarily illegal, but provoke us and tap our 159

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need for strong emotion, quicken the nervous system and jump the synapses deadened by lack and inaction. (CN, 180) A similar process is at work in Eden-Olympia. Penrose, it turns out, has been coordinating racist attacks on migrant communities, a paedophile ring, drug smuggling operations, and the creation of fascist gangs poised to launch a race war along the coast. “The cure sounds drastic,” he argues, “but the malaise is far more crippling. An inability to rest the mind, to find time for reflection and recreation. Small doses of insanity are the only solution. Their own psychopathy is all that can rescue these people” (S-C, 251). Madness is the only freedom. Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes are provocative thought-experiments extrapolating (potentially) conflicting trends inscribed in the present—worlds dedicated to high-tech work or to leisure. Ballard tests them in exaggerated forms, seeking the latent forces that reveal the inner truth about each. Once again, we glimpse his preferred anarchic vision. While violence is one response to the rigidity of the environment, Halder, a disaffected security guard in Eden-Olympia, seeks to disrupt the menacing sterility of the complex. There are “things Eden-Olympia can’t cope with,” he remarks: “the key that breaks in the lock, the toilet that backs up … [t]he everyday world where the human race still lives. It never arrived at Eden-Olympia” (S-C, 378). Halder and his allies embark on a furtive campaign of low-level vandalism. Insisting on the unruliness of human life, this is quotidian transgression as resistance. It brings to mind Easterling’s proposal— indebted to James Scott—for a counter-politics of infrastructural space. “An unorthodox auxiliary entertains techniques that are less heroic, less automatically oppositional, more effective, and sneakier—techniques like gossip, rumour, gift-giving, compliance, mimicry, comedy, remote control, meaninglessness, misdirection, distraction, hacking, and entrepreneurialism.”90 But is it enough?

Notes 1

2 3 4 5

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Valuable accounts of Ballard’s work include: Roger Luckhurst, “The Angle between Two Walls”: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997); Andrej Gasiorek, J. G. Ballard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). For Ballard’s creative milieu, see David Brittan, Eduardo Paolozzi at New Worlds: Science Fiction and Art in the Sixties (London: Savoy, 2011). Lucy Hewitt and Stephen Graham, “Vertical Cities: Representations of Urban Verticality in 20th-Century Science Fiction Literature,” Urban Studies 52, no. 5 (2015): 928. A film, directed by Ben Wheatley, appeared in 2016. “Architectures of the Near Future: An Interview with Nic Clear” (2008): http://www. ballardian.com/near-future-nic-clear-interview. Manaugh, quoted in Jeanette Baxter and Rowland Wymer, “Introduction,” in J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions, Baxter and Wymer (eds.) (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 4. Ballard, “Against Entropy” (1984), in Ballard, Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews: 1967–2008, Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara (eds.) (London: 4th Estate, 2012), 208.

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6

Ballard, “All We’ve Got Left Is Our Psychopathology” (2003), Extreme Metaphors, 397. See also Jeanette Baxter, J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship (London: Routledge, 2009). 7 Ballard, “Introduction” (1995), Crash, vi. On Ballard’s idiosyncratic use of psychological categories, see Samuel Francis, The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard (London: Continuum, 2011). 8 Andrea Juno and V. Vale (eds.), Re/Search: J. G. Ballard, 8/9 (San Francisco: Re/Search, 1984), 44. 9 Ballard, “Nothing Is Real, Everything Is Fake” (2003), in Ballard, Extreme Metaphors, 392. 10 Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014), 239, 11 11 Ballard, “The Space Age Is Over” (1979), Extreme Metaphors, 127. See also Ballard, “Against Entropy,” 201. 12 Ballard, “The Space Age Is Over,” 123–4. 13 Ballard, “The Car, the Future” (Drive, 1971), User’s Guide, 262; Ballard, “The Space Age Is Over,” 126. 14 For Ballard, space flight depended on nineteenth-century technology. Its anachronistic character was one reason why the space program disappeared from public consciousness so quickly: The Atrocity Exhibition: Annotated (London: Harper, 2006 [1990]), 75. 15 Ballard, “Crash!,” Directed by Harley Cockliss (1971), Voiceover Transcription, http://www.ballardian.com/crash-voiceover-transcription-1971. 16 Ballard, “How to Face Doomsday without Really Trying” (1974), Extreme Metaphors, 65. 17 Ballard, “The Westway,” in London: City of Disappearances, Iain Sinclair (ed.) (London: Penguin, 2006), 497. On concrete “motion-sculptures,” see also Ballard, “How to Face Doomsday,” 65; Ballard, “Shepperton Past and Present” (Guardian, 1994), in Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (London: Flamingo, 1997), 183. 18 Ballard, “How to Face Doomsday,” 66. 19 Ballard, quoted in “The House That Jencks Built,” Modern Review 20 (April–May 1995): 31. 20 Ballard, “My Choice,” Daily Telegraph (July 13, 1991), xix. For uncharacteristic praise of postmodernist architecture (in the United States), see Ballard, “More Stories about Buildings and Mood,” Science Fiction Eye (1988): http://jgballard.ca/media/1988_jan_ science_fiction_eye_magazine.html. 21 Ballard, “My Choice,” xix; Ballard, “The House That Jencks Built,” 31. 22 Ballard, “A Handful of Dust,” The Guardian, March 20, 2006. 23 Ibid. 24 Ballard, “The Car, the Future” (Drive, 1971), User’s Guide, 263. 25 Ballard, Concrete Island (London: 4th Estate, 2014 [1974]), 63. 26 Ballard, “Introduction” (1995), Crash (London: 4th Estate, 2016 [1973]), 86. 27 Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 248–61. 28 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke, 1989); Habermas, “Modern and Postmodern Architecture” in Habermas, Critical Theory and Public Life, ed. John Forester (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 29 Ballard, Atrocity Exhibition, 75; “Psychoanalyst of the Information Age” (1985), in The J.G. Ballard Book, ed. Rick McGrath (Toronto: Terminal Press, 2013), 12. 30 Ballard, Millennium People (London: 4th Estate, 2003), 177. 31 Ballard, “In the Voyeur’s Gaze” (Guardian, 1989), User’s Guide, 65.

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32 “Surrealist of Suburbia,” Telegraph Magazine, September 14, 1996. http://www.jgballard. ca/media/1996_the_telegraph.html. 33 Ballard, “The Space Age Is Over,” 122. 34 Ballard, “The Last Real Innocents” (The New York Times, 1991), User’s Guide, 82. 35 Margaret Kohn, Brave New Neighbourhoods: The Privatization of Public Space (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004); Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001). 36 Easterling, Extrastatecraft, 13–14. See also Annabel Jane Wharton, Architectural Agents: The Delusional, Abusive, Addictive Lives of Buildings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Foucault, “Space, Knowledge and Power” [1982], in Essential Works, III, ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 2001). 37 See also Ballard, Concrete Island, 68–71. 38 N. Katherine Hayles, “Cognitive Assemblages: Technical Agency and Human Interactions,” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 1 (2016): 33. 39 Laura Colombino argues plausibly that the stories were influenced by Archigram’s experimental architectural work of the 1960s: Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature (London: Routledge, 2013), 24–62. 40 Hayles, “Cognitive Assemblages,” 36. 41 Ballard, “Nothing Is Real,” 390–1. 42 Hayles, “Cognitive Assemblages,” 55. 43 Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 44 Ballard, “Preface,” Vermillion Sands (London: Vintage, 2016 [1971]), 7. He also cited Palm Springs as inspiration: “Sculptors Who Carve the Clouds,” The Independent, October 24, 1992. 45 Ballard, “It Would Be a Mistake to Write about the Future” (1976), Extreme Metaphors, 103. See also Ballard, Atrocity Exhibition, 99–100. Ballard visited the linear city nearly every year: Beatrice Ballard, “Miracle Father,” in Deep Ends, ed. Rick McGrath (Toronto: Terminal Press, 2014), 10. 46 Ballard, Cocaine Nights (London: Flamingo, 1997 [1996]), 180. 47 “An Interview with J. G. Ballard” in J. G. Ballard: The First Twenty Years, James Goddard and David Pringle (eds.) (London: Bran’s Head, 1976), 23. Italics in original. 48 Ballard, Vermillion Sands, 8. 49 Ballard, Concrete Island, 65. 50 “Pure Imagination” (Literary Review, 2001): http://www.jgballard.ca/media/2001_literary_ review.html. 51 Hewitt and Graham, “Vertical Cities,” 929. 52 Stephen Graham, “Vertical Noir,” City 20, no. 3 (2016): 390. 53 See also Owen Hatherley, “Crimes of the Retro-Future: Historicising J. G. Ballard and Ben Wheatley’s High Rise,” Critical Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2016): 70–5. 54 Ballard cited two incidents that germinated High Rise. The first took place in an expensive London residential complex in Red Lion Square in the early 1960s; the second occurred on the Costa Brava. “J. G. Ballard” (1978), Extreme Metaphors, 107, 108. Neither had much to do with the crisis of British social housing. 55 “J. G. Ballard,” Writers in Conversation with Christopher Bigsby, Vol 1 (EAS Publishing, 2000): http://www.jgballard.ca/media/2000_writers_in_conversation_with_christopher_ bigsby.html 56 Ballard, Crash, v.

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57 “Future Perfect,” Streetlife Magazine 1, no. 8 (1976): http://www.jgballard.ca/media/1976_ feb7_streetlife_magazine.html. 58 Ballard, interview with Philippe Hupp (1975), Extreme Metaphors, 79. 59 Ballard, “Against Entropy,” 205. 60 Ballard, Miracles of Life, 208. On the “death of affect”—an idea which influenced Baudrillard, among others—see Gasiorek, Ballard, 67–70, 94–7. 61 Ballard, “Future Perfect.” 62 “Psych-Fi,” Rick Slaughter Interview with Ballard, 21.C Magazine (Spring 1992): http:// www.jgballard.ca/media/1992_21c.html. 63 Ballard, interview with Philippe Hupp, 79. 64 Ballard, High Rise (London: 4th Estate, 2014 [1975]). 65 “J. G. Ballard,” 107. 66 Ballard, “Future Perfect.” 67 Ballard, “Kafka with Unlimited Chicken Kiev” (1996), Extreme Metaphors, 322. 68 Ballard, “Kafka,” 321. 69 “Grave New World,” Ballard interview, BBC Radio 3 (November 11, 1998): http://www. jgballard.ca/media/1998_nov11_BBC3_radio.html. 70 Flusty, De-Coca-Colonization: Making the Globe from the Inside Out (London: Routledge, 2005), 70–1. 71 “Surrealist of Suburbia.” 72 Ballard, Running Wild (London: 4th Estate, 2014 [1988]). 73 Cramer, “Raising Utopians,” New York Review of Science Fiction 18 (February 1990): 13. 74 Ballard, Vermillion Sands, 7. 75 Juno and Vale (eds.), Re/Search: J. G. Ballard, 14–15. 76 “Visions of Dystopia” (The Face, 1988): http://www.jgballard.ca/media/1988_april_the_ face_magazine.html. 77 Ballard, “A Tale of Time and the River” (Time, 1988): http://www.jgballard.ca/media/ 1988_april25_time_magazine.html. 78 Ballard, “Sticking to His Guns” (Guardian, 1993), User’s Guide, 134. 79 Ballard, “Reading the Signs” (2004), Extreme Metaphors, 410. 80 Ballard, Kingdom Come (London: 4th Estate, 2014 [2006]), 3. 81 Jane Jacobs and Loretta Lees, “Defensible Space on the Move: Revisiting the Urban Geography of Alice Coleman,” Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 5 (2013): 1559–83. Ballard, Cocaine Nights (201) (mis)attributes the idea to “Goldfinger.” 82 “Interview with J. G. Ballard,” 80. 83 Ballard, “Grave New World.” 84 Ballard, “A Handful of Dust.” Ballard wrote in his annotations for the Atrocity Exhibition (15) that he had compulsively photographed the vast structures. 85 Ballard, “Grave New World.” 86 Ballard, “Nothing Is Real.” 87 Ibid., 390. 88 Ballard, “Author’s Note,” in Super-Cannes (London: 4th Estate, 2014 [2000]), vii. 89 On the city as a source of value, see Margaret Kohn, The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 90 Easterling, Extrastatecraft, 213.

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Chapter 8

Architecture as Government Ali Aslam

It is telling that Foucault refers to the ancient world in reflecting upon the relationship between architecture and government. The ancient link between architecture and politics was observed by Aristotle, who refers directly to Hippodamus, planner of Athens’ Piraeus district.1 The word architecture is a composition of two Greek terms, archē and technē, that can be translated as power and knowledge and which imply that architecture, as both a profession and the built environment, has political consequences for shaping societies.2 It is perhaps then not coincidental that Hobbes compares the task of the sovereign to that of the stone mason who must cleave the rough edges of individual rocks in order to make them fit together in the wall he is building. In this metaphor for sovereignty, Hobbes identifies architecture as a practice that joins the individual desire for sovereignty and self-preservation to state sovereignty.3 Yet the Hobbesian description of sovereignty seems impossibly antiquated in a world characterized by the circulation of capital, persons, trade, weapons, disease, and pollution. Sovereign power possesses neither the power nor the knowledge, at either the level of state or subjects, that Hobbes imagines. Calls to close the border, to erect barriers and fences, reflect a desire to hold onto what sovereignty remains.4 But how do we understand architecture’s role in habituating subjects under conditions characterized by circulation? Put differently, how do architecture and the built environment matter in a political era defined by movement? And to the extent that the backlash against such movement has been marked by xenophobic and anti-democratic impulses, how can architecture and architects design spaces that introduce and invite the possibility of countercurrents—thoughts and actions that reflect human freedom in a multitude of forms that were at the heart of Foucault’s concerns about the restrictive influence of normative discourses and practices. I have chosen the term countercurrents rather than the word counterconducts, which Foucault often uses to refer to non-normative actions, in order to highlight the mental circulations that inform and are informed by these bodily practices. To answer these questions, this essay examines the links among architecture, sovereignty, and government by turning to Michel Foucault’s late lectures on governmentality. Governmentality is Foucault’s term for the form of power and governing rationality associated with neoliberalism. Unlike panoptic power, which

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encloses and makes subjects completely visible in order to instill in them a disciplinary logic, governmentality begins with the principle of movement.5 According to Foucault, governmentality originates in the moment when city walls opened to increased trade, thanks to improved roads and transportation technologies. As the distances between cities effectively shrank and the circulation of goods, persons, and illness grew, the management of these circulations became the cornerstone of state power. In particular, the task of sovereign power was to adapt to conditions of movement and circulation. State authorities turned to and developed the science of statistical calculation to manage and minimize risk. Governmentality represents the means by which this state logic was extended to subjects, who also had to take on the responsibility of calculating risk.6 My claim is that the precepts of modern architecture and urbanism spelled out in Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne’s (CIAM’s) Athens Charter play an important role in habituating subjects to such a responsibility. Though in the hands of Le Corbusier, CIAM often referred to, courted, and assumed the model of centralized sovereign power,7 the one dimensionality of the spaces it proposed helped instill a probabilistic logic among subjects that is the defining mark of governmentality. To be more precise, physical circulations in and out of functionally segregated business districts, residential neighborhoods, and commercial areas, translated into a set of expectations about activities and persons who fit the norm in such zones. Such expectations call on the calculation of probabilities and risk that are central to the logic of governmentality and security, making it possible for individuals to dismiss others as “out of place.” I conclude with an argument for greenways, urban parks, and routes that cut across and through segregated zones of the city, introducing new patterns of physical and mental circulation. By interrupting the logic of security and calculation, I suggest that greenways prefigure the modes of relationality, neighborliness, and counterconducts among citizens that are required for larger political movements to take root, although I caution over interpreting how transformative such spaces and the habits they inaugurate, taken alone, can be.

A dream of sovereignty In Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott identifies the work of Le Corbusier as an example of state efforts to make society legible. Like Hobbes’s Leviathan, who seeks to name and define key concepts and ideas in order to stabilize and govern them, Scott finds evidence of a similar instinct in modern statecraft to know and exert power over its subjects and territory. Such practices included producing maps, introducing street grids, standardizing land tenure, registries of product and persons that radically simplified the complexity of social practices and geography so that they could be more easily monitored and controlled by state authorities. Scott argues that these were not simply techniques for representing reality, though. He observes, “Rather, they were maps that,

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when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade.”8 Despite being well intentioned, Scott notes how such social engineering schemes frequently resulted in failures that had disastrous consequences for local populations and ecologies. These failures were born out of a misguided faith in scientific and technological progress that Scott calls High Modernism. Even if High Modernists like Le Corbusier were not members of government, their ideas found and, crucially, required patrons in state authorities if they were to be realized. From his discussion of building production processes and techniques to his hostility toward local practices and traditions, Le Corbusier spoke in the language of sovereign state power that wished to know and rule from the center. He aspired to make architecture and, by extension, the city and politics predictable and controllable. He presented the choice starkly in his 1923 book Vers une architecture (translated and published in English as Towards a New Architecture in 1927) as one between architecture and revolution.9 He argued that the adoption of CIAM’s architectural design and urban planning principles would improve daily living and working conditions and therefore diminish the causes of social unrest. Radical simplification at every level—from design, to construction, to use—was key to overcoming uncertainty. In language that echoes Hobbes’s preference for uniformly shaped stones and uniformly habituated subjects, Le Corbusier argued, for example, that architecture had to shed its association with natural materials, “which are infinitely variable in composition” (and therefore more difficult to work with) and instead move toward standardization and manufacturing.10 Pre-cast structural members would replace those fashioned on site. These elements would be manufactured off-site and transported by truck, where they would be assembled by unskilled labor working under the supervision of technical experts, reducing construction time from years to months.11 Industrialization would yield an architectural process more regular, predictable, and desirable to state authorities concerned with planning and budgeting. In short, architecture, according to Le Corbusier, had to conform to the “Economic law [which] unavoidably governs our acts and our thoughts.”12 Yet Le Corbusier’s insistence on aesthetic clarity and simplification did not simply reflect his desire to bring architecture and building techniques in line with economic efficiency. CIAM’s functional segregation of the city into four zones for work, leisure, residential use, and transit also made the population of the city more governable. Dividing the city by use had the consequence of normalizing behaviors and activities within and across those zones. Radical spatial simplifications meant those circulating in those zones became less heterogeneous and more uniform: workers in the central business district only had a reason to be there during working hours. The one dimensionality of this kind of spatial planning can be witnessed by visiting a city’s central business district in the evening or over the weekend, when offices and restaurants that are only open to serve office workers lunch are closed and streets are emptied of activity and persons.13 Likewise, to visit the suburban housing tract during the weekday is to discover that it is missing working-age adults, minus those who are caretakers to the very young and elderly. 167

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Although CIAM’s design principles were extremely influential, they were never fully realized outside a few select cities. Even in planned capitals like Brasília and Chandigarh that were imagined tabula rasa, apart from and against local populations and where efforts were made to preserve the purity of the original design by restricting development and even entry of delivery vehicles to certain times of day, local populations and traditions found ways into the city. The aspirations of sovereign power to independently specify the use and purpose of the city and zones within it were thwarted by local populations who insinuated themselves into its spaces. In Brasília, James Holston details the efforts of state authorities to preserve the integrity of the city plan by incorporating the autonomously constructed settlements that sprung up at its edges.14 Holston observes how, at the individual level, these formerly excluded residents were more closely yoked to state sovereignty as a result.15 Holston’s claim resonates with other scholarly reflections on the link between state and individual sovereignty. State and individual sovereignties form a reinforcing circuit, mirroring one another.16 Just as state sovereignty connotes the ability to act independently and without influence, to control one’s borders and make decisions about the appropriateness of activities within them without consultation, individuals comprehend their own sovereignty in similar terms. In fact, it is the promise of individual autonomy and freedom that establishes the legitimacy of the modern democratic state. It is also what increasingly licenses the exercise of what Locke called the sovereign’s prerogative power. Locke defines prerogative power as the ability of the sovereign to take actions against the popular will in the name of preserving the state.17 Today, prerogative power takes the form of executive orders and the transfer of more decision-making to unelected bodies and authorities by the state, in the name of preserving what remains of its sovereign powers. The challenges to state sovereignty are felt by its subjects as greater vulnerability to economic and political shifts that originate beyond the control of state authority, in actions of powerful multinational corporations and rival states, for instance, but also refugees fleeing violence at home and viruses that spread rapidly and indifferently to national boundaries. The efforts to respond to emergencies occasioned by unpredictable movements of capital, persons, and disease have taken two paths. The first path has been to shore up what sovereign power remains within the grasp of the state by making it more concentrated and actionable. Sheldon Wolin describes this approach as centripetal power because it intensifies power in centralized bodies by shedding off those functions that can be privatized while also trying to insulate those bodies that remain from structures of accountability. Such measures drain the state of democratic energies, de-vitalizing citizens who are reduced to the role of by standers.18 The second response is born partly out of the frustration citizens have with having been cast off. It has been to insist on the older model of sovereignty even as its conditions of possibility are eroding. This takes the form of populist movements that call for closed borders, restrictions on immigration, policies to promote economic nationalism such as tariffs and protective measures, and sometimes hostility to cultural and religious 168

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difference. Such movements implicitly imagine sovereignty in Hobbesian terms— unilateral control over a uniform population—even if this ideal has only existed as a fiction.19 Together these approaches act on both dimensions of sovereignty to shore up what remains of it. They wish to make the population more legible and uniform on the one side, and more efficient and actionable on the other. These changes to the conditions of sovereignty today and the unsatisfactory character of the two responses to those changes—either fatalistic acceptance of neoliberal governance or xenophobic populism—beg for a democratic alternative. While that alternative will emerge out of the efforts of social movements working within and across borders, their viability depends in large and small ways upon disrupting the norms and habits of mind that sustain the current political order. To initiate democratic change will require new patterns of physical and mental circulation that introduce countercurrents to the orders of sovereign power and knowledge in place today. The sources of these countercurrents will be diverse and other scholars have begun to outline how they can and are emerging from within interactions between consumers and food chains,20 the university’s role in educating citizens,21 and the repayment of debt obligations that fuel the system of global financial capital.22 Here my focus is on how architecture and architects, including urban planners, can contribute to these countercurrents. While acknowledging that how bodies habitually move in space only forms one part of how subjects understand sovereignty, I nonetheless wish to suggest that architecture could reclaim its responsibility for shaping the appearance and experience of the public on behalf of a democratic politics. Architects and their built spaces could thus form part of the democratic counterelite that Wolin and others have recently invoked in their writings.23 In the final part of this essay, I hone in on the countercirculations that so-called greenways, or linear urban parks that cut across urban districts, invite citizens to create. In particular, I argue that they stimulate new forms of neighborliness and relationality by introducing new circuits of physical movement across racially, economically, and functionally segmented zones. To appreciate the significance of these countercurrents, however, one must first understand how subjects are habituated to understand individual sovereignty through movement. For this, I examine Michel Foucault’s lectures on the concept of governmentality.

Circulation and governmentality Foucault explains that governmentality has its origins in the period when the boundary walls surrounding medieval cities came down and the networks of roads between them multiplied. The resulting increase in circulation of persons, commerce, and ideas posed new regulatory challenges for the sovereign.24 Architecture and urban planning began appearing in handbooks on governing at this time.25 As Foucault explains, the goal of

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town planners is to design and achieve a milieu, that is, “a certain number of combined, overall effects bearing on all who live in it. It is an element in which a circular link is produced between effects and causes … one tries to affect, precisely a population. I mean a multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality within which they live.”26 Planners do this through the use of statistical probabilities to calculate, for instance, the ideal width of a roadway and traffic flows at a particular time of day, just as public health officials use these techniques to forecast rates of disease transmission. Governmentality is a productive “biopolitical power” (or simply “bio-power”) that finds expression in reflexive practices of external and internal circulation. Bio-power emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and refers to “control over relations between the human race, or human beings insofar they are a species, insofar are living beings, and their environment, the milieu in which they live. This includes the direct effects of the geographical, climatic, or hydrographic environment.”27 Examples of biopolitical power involve manipulating the environment for the purpose of promoting life, such as the practice of draining swamps to prevent the spread of mosquito-borne diseases. Governmentality represents the mutually reinforcing collection of “discourses, institutions, architectural practices, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative efforts, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions,”28 that shape the disposition of the modern subject. The ensemble of knowledge that comprises governmentality gains traction in the individual because, like measures taken to control the spread of disease, they are intended to help individuals live life to its fullest, which is why Foucault calls them by the term bio-power. Populations, not individuals, are the targets of disease prevention efforts. Unlike the disciplinary techniques embodied in the panopticon that are directed at individuals, biopolitics correspond to conditions of de centralized sovereignty. Under these new permissive conditions of circulation and mobility, static modes of control are impossible. Management of disease within a population does not eliminate disease altogether. Rather, management of disease within a population implies assessing phenomena that are unpredictable within a single individual to establish baseline levels of incidence in order to devise techniques for keeping the transmission of disease within acceptable levels.29 The instrument that drives the evaluation of these techniques is statistical probability. Statistical forecasts and measurements correspond to a new form of sovereign rule that “lets things happen” within a population and comes to exist along disciplinary modes of power.30 Nonetheless, techniques for managing risk across a population influence the disposition of individual subjects. In the case of disease prevention, the state must enlist its subjects to take responsibility for managing its spread by incorporating habits that safeguard their individual health. Subjects adopt an outlook and accompanying set of norms and disciplinary practices with the intention of improving their security and chances of self-preservation. This self-scrutiny explains why a lengthy discussion of Hellenistic and early Christian practices of self-governance is grouped with Foucault’s 170

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examination of governmentality and why he refers to security and governmentality interchangeably. These practices of self-governance cover not only the individual’s relationship to herself but also her responses to others insofar as she must be aware of her responses to external stimuli. As Foucault explains, in much of the Stoic literature on governing the self there is an emphasis upon closely monitoring how these external matters affect one’s constitution. For this reason, there is great attention given to one’s response to the food and news consumed each day with the hopes of keeping oneself in a state of equilibrium.31 Governmentality represents the alignment of techniques of self-governance with the regime of state power under these new conditions of freedom. Foucault sees the asymmetric relationship of exchange operative in the pastoral relationship as a conceptual antecedent to the modern challenge of governing subjects at a distance. To underscore the links among architectural design, individual behavior, and the imperatives of state power, Foucault emphasizes that these same statistical calculations are at work in Machiavelli’s Prince. Just as Aristotle examined the external and internal sources of instability for each type of regime, an exercise which required an assessment of the physical aspects of the territory and the resources it can support, Machiavelli counsels how to guard against the possibility of inter-state competition, internal riot, and sedition by knowing when to behave like a lion, from a position of strength, and when, instead, to act cunningly like a fox. Governmentality brings these techniques of self-evaluation to the individual alongside the state and makes them operate together. Statistics, Foucault notes, allow leaders to make a more precise count of their total resources. Statistical analysis of yearly harvest yields, for example, sharpened the ability to predict future grain and food production, thus bringing political economy more closely in line with the state’s defensive calculations. As an individual political rationality, governmentality means that individuals start making similarly defensive calculations about their own safety and economic productivity. Examining American neoliberalism, especially Gary Becker’s Investment in Human Capital (1971), Foucault notes that human capital represents a shift in which the individual comes to view her activities in terms of potential rewards and penalties on her investments.32 Law, which bases penalty on the probability of infraction, gets the apparatus of security started.33 Foucault indicates that urban planning’s historically close alignment with public health campaigns was meant to facilitate these kinds of calculations about one’s security and economic potential (since the latter fluctuates with the former). Take the example of the move from open to covered sewers. In the same way that sites like the sanatorium designated normal and abnormal, the work of urban planners established a sharp visual contrast between healthy and unhealthy, safe and unsafe, orderly and disorderly parts of the city, speeding the individual’s shorthand calculation of his or her security. This feedback loop among visual order and governmentality is at the heart of George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s influential broken-windows policing strategy. Kelling 171

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and Wilson argue that in addition to fearing violent crime, citizens are frightened of disorderly persons and conduct, such as panhandling, drunkenness, rowdy or noisy youth, addicts, prostitutes, and the mentally ill, in public places. The authors call for policing these forms of disorder because they believe that they invite more serious forms of crime by signaling that “no one cares” about order in the community. Such “untended” behavior “leads to the breakdown of community controls,” meaning more windows will be broken and disorder and crime will increase. They warn that a community can quickly spiral as residents and others modify their behavior to avoid risk, leaving the community “vulnerable to criminal invasion.” The task of broken-windows policing is to preserve the sense of safety and public order in a community by averting descent into visual disorder.34 Kelling and Wilson argue that visual order provides individuals with cues about their safety and security. Rationally calculating individuals are expected to avoid unhealthy, unsafe, and disorderly parts of the city in order to preserve their own security. Yet in cities that have adopted broken-windows policing, efforts to preserve visual order have targeted poorer and minority communities. This reveals the racialized aspect of sovereignty. The 2014 arrest of Eric Garner for illegally selling loose cigarettes is an example of the New York Police Department’s adoption of broken windows and the closely related stop-and-frisk policies. The latter allows officers to stop, question, and search the body of someone if they believe that there is a reasonable suspicion that a crime has occurred or will occur. In practice, these tactics were directed toward Black and Brown males. In 2011, 91 percent of all stop-and-frisk incidents involved persons of color, nearly half of which were classified as “furtive movements,” a category that allows officers who may feel uncomfortable in the communities of color they patrol wide discretion to detain and investigate individuals on the street. In 2014, a federal judge determined the policy violated the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure and called for the department to revise its use of the policy.35 Sovereignty, in other words, is experienced differentially across race. Foucault refers to this experience as political death. Political death does not simply refer only to actual killing, but also to indirect forms of murder that mean the expulsion, rejection, or exclusion of individuals from the larger political community. Subjects who experience political death are at once present but unseen and ignored by the larger population. Their paradoxical status of being visible but unseen lies in their relationship to “truth.” In Foucault’s lexicon, what we hold to be “truth” represents a certain socially constructed epistemic order that is modulated and contested by power relations. “Truth” corresponds to what is looked upon as “natural” in any human relationship. Foucault’s genealogical works on madness and sexuality were designed to illuminate the contingent formation of psychic and sexual “abnormalities,” first in medical science and then in more popular discourse. Foucault indicates that “truth” is positioned within a hierarchical order, never separated from what it is positioned against. This means that power is always present in these relationships, working to enforce or challenge the status of any regime of truth. Foucault describes his studies of madness, disease, punishment, sexuality, and governmentality in terms of the power and knowledge that establishes, enforces, and contests a “regime of truth.” 172

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A regime of truth is what generates a norm and expectations of the norm across members of a population. Those who are rendered “false,” thanks to the regime of truth that the population subscribes to and upholds, are those who suffer political death. Foucault wishes to “show how the couplings of a set of practices and a regime of truth form an apparatus (dispositif) of knowledge-power that effectively marks out in reality that which does not exist and legitimately submits it to the division between true and false.”36 The role of architectural design in producing such truths is subtle and complex, but my suggestion is that the emphasis on functional segregation and stark visual order in Le Corbusier’s work help mark off normal and abnormal. The one-dimensional purpose of urban zones, combined with the ability to quickly survey and determine what or who is out of place, encourages patterns of circulation and calculation in line with the preservation of individual security. Not only does the desire to preserve individual safety and sovereignty increase the attachment to state sovereignty and the measures necessary to preserve it, such as racial profiling and policing, but it also reinforces certain truths about the nature of sovereignty and for whom it is primarily reserved. These truths are tacitly learned and reproduced in “a state of distraction,” Walter Benjamin’s term for describing how architecture is collectively “consumed” through habitual patterns of mental and physical circulation.37 Under the laissez-faire conditions of liberalism and now neoliberalism, there are no restrictions on movement or freedom of association. There may be urban zones that are to be avoided because they are perceived as dangerous, but political death is not locked to territory. The persons who experience political death do so as they circulate. Architecture and urban planning affect individuals and populations, by normalizing the functions of particular spaces and, correspondingly, expectations about behavior and individuals within those spaces. Because circulation is guided by a regard for security, individuals anticipate the behaviors and interactions they will encounter on a day-to-day basis in familiar spaces. These quotidian interactions tend to affirm the truth individuals hold rather than unsettle them. On those occasions where a jarring truth is spoken, it is figuratively and almost literally out of place. That unsettling truth must struggle against the accumulated weight of mental habits. For all these sobering observations, Foucault’s writing on architecture and on practices of self-cultivation nevertheless suggests possibilities for changing the process of subject formation. I turn to greenways in the next section in order to explore how sovereignty and architecture may be reconceived.

Countercurrents Greenways are linear, multiuse parks that connect isolated patches of urban space, creating corridors for the movement of wildlife species, non-motorized transportation, in addition to sites for memorials, murals and mosaics, gardening, and recreation. They

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often incorporate informal routes used by both animals and humans along the borders of private property, decommissioned rail lines, de industrialized waterfront sites, found in and across residential areas, commercial and industrial districts. Frequently, greenways are the product of grassroots initiatives that reflect diverse constituencies seeking to make use of what is seen as “waste” land because it cannot be put to productive use. Jack Ahern emphasizes that greenways are almost always linear and complement existing planning designs rather than replace them.38 He contextualizes greenways as reactions to the centralized model of modern planning that fragmented the urban landscape. In contrast to the totalizing vision of the likes of Le Corbusier, Ahern describes greenways as more “modest in their ambition.”39 Although the literature on greenways in the field of urban planning tends to focus on their environmental and recreational benefits, some scholars have also investigated their expressive and aesthetic dimensions. Annaliese Bischoff, for instance, finds that many forms of cultural expression have taken root along greenways across the United States, including memorials that commemorate historical events and communities; murals, mosaics, and art work that tell the stories of communities that greenways wend and wind their way through; and community gardens that are an outgrowth of the patriotic First World War emergency gardens and, later, the Second World War victory gardens. Bischoff emphasizes that greenways are host to a multiplicity of different uses and users in excess of recreational users, who walk, bike, and ski its length. She cites activist Anna Lusk, who in 1981 spearheaded the creation of a greenway in Stowe, Vermont, distinguished the forms of relationality and sociality among greenway users from those in other public spaces. According to Lusk, greenway users exhibit more friendliness and trust toward one another as measured by their smiles and greetings.40 While there is no way to measure the accuracy of Lusk’s claim, there is something suggestive about the alternative routes that greenways inaugurate that may help invite countercurrents among citizens. Greenways do offer a different experience of the public than those public spaces zoned in the modern urban grid: because greenways route across and through segmented and functionalized urban districts, they offer users scenic experiences of the city and its residents. By definition, greenways are interstitial because they connect zones and associated conducts that are separate from one another. They are threshold spaces which allow different conducts to mingle, overlap, and interact, thereby disrupting the norms and probabilities that the legibility and visual order of rigid spatial functionalism facilitate. In Foucault’s terms, greenways might be characterized as heterotopias, areas that are set apart from everyday norms and tempos. Foucault imagines “heterotopias” in which it is possible to think different truths about our relationships with others as well as with ourselves. Dismissing the promise of an untroubled utopia as a region of fantastic fables that literally has no place in the world, Foucault calls heterotopias ambivalent countersites that can support practices that are in opposition to mainstream society. Heterotopic counter-practices contest regimes of truth by producing different understandings, use, and relationships to what already exists. Foucault claims that heterotopias can disturb normative discourses and practices. 174

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Referring to regimes of truth, he writes, heterotopias can “desiccate speech, stops words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source.”41 These alternative relations have the potential to initiate reconfigurations of power and knowledge. Foucault imagines that the self’s relationship to the self will change, that is, the internal circulation of an individual’s thoughts will change as a result of the external stimulus found in these new circulatory spaces. He writes that under these conditions, “The practice of the self links up with social practice or, if you like, the formation of a relationship of the self to the self quite clearly connects up with the relationship of self the Other.”42 Such circulatory spaces are planning elements that can bring individuals into the relationships of attentiveness that precede the receptive practices of the self to which Foucault refers. Starting with a new relationship to the self and then others, Foucault suggests that new circulatory patterns can yield different understandings of self, place, and power. Danielle S. Allen ends her book on civic friendship, Talking to Strangers, with a reflection on the design of public spaces. She notes that urban design affects whether or not citizens feel safe enough to address one another. While concerns for safety and security figure into whether or not citizens feel confident enough to trust others in these spaces, Allen focuses on the pleasure public spaces can offer. Specifically, she refers to the pleasure humans experience in the company of others and the wonder it inspires and she specifies a range of practices that balance individual concerns for security with extending the “benefit of the doubt” to others.43 But the task of civic friendship, Allen observes, requires contexts for citizens to interact with each other and that these contexts are imaginatively and spatially bounded by physical barriers to circulation. She writes, What my neighbors and I typically recognize as our own neighborhood is in fact separated from the other part of our polis by freeways, major traffic arteries, train tracks, one large cemetery, and empty parks. Soon I learn, too, with a little historical research, that these boundaries were carefully considered by an earlier mayor, Richard J. Daley, to keep Chicago neighborhoods racially segregated. My own university helped construct these boundaries.44 Allen concludes by calling on her university and its faculty, students, and staff to model civic friendship in its interactions with its neighbors through its investment and policing policies and by co-sponsoring citizen forums where community members can discuss their welfare and future together. The citizens’ forums that Allen imagines are the catalysts for the broader set of countercurrents she believes that new patterns of movement across neighborhood boundaries will inaugurate. Within these forums, citizens are given the space to listen and be heard and it is from these discussions, Allen implies, that they will actively determine what kind of community they are and wish to become. To sponsor these forums, Allen appeals to the sovereignty of the university, acknowledging that its 175

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concentration of knowledge and power must be loosened and shared among strangers if the possibility of democratic citizenship is to be encouraged. She suggests the risks that citizens take together within these spaces will ultimately change the shape and feel of the world they inhabit. Writing in a different key, Romand Coles traces efforts to inaugurate “an alternative politics of circulation based on attentive movements” among grassroots organizers in Flagstaff, Arizona.45 These efforts involved co-creating new routes across the city to connect the university community to local schools and neighborhoods in “action research teams” designed to address local needs for ecologically sustainable patterns of consumption through community gardens, energy use, and recreational spaces, among others. The work of action teams begins with envisioning conducts and material flows that are resistant to contemporary forms of governmentality. Coles emphasizes that these local political engagements generate new movements within and across the landscape and its inhabitants, both human and non-human. He tracks how these emergent flows anticipate and make possible shifts in state policies and status quo patterns of circulation. Several lessons for thinking about the potential role of architectural design in redirecting external and internal patterns of circulation emerge from these accounts. First, how citizens inhabit spaces together in relationships of attentiveness can work against habits of calculation and the concerns for security internalized and practiced as subjects move through the functionally segregated modern city grid. At the same time, spaces like greenways that invite citizens to develop new patterns of movement and contact with others are themselves inadequate to the task of shaping these new habits of body and mind. Simply put, these designs and the inventive modes of conduct they make possible are overshadowed by the dominant norms and modes of comportment that modern capitalist subjects have acquired through habit. In a book of essays entitled Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison observes that historically gardens were designed as places meant to draw attention to appearances and this is why gardens are frequently invoked in literature as the site of visions and contemplation. Unlike artworks that are creatures of the human imagination, gardens draw attention to the connections viewers have to the animate and cosmic environment. As Harrison puts, “Such inclusion makes you more—and less—than an aesthetic observer.”46 He notes that the garden’s discrete borders generate this feeling of inclusion. Even when these borders are porous, as they frequently are, they set the garden space apart from the larger world; the experience of silence and seclusion from the larger world is measured in relationship to the surrounding bustle and movement. Later, he laments, “even though there are plenty of gardens in the world, we live in an essentially gardenless era.”47 What he means is that modern subjects are so immersed in the accelerated rhythms of capitalism that their vision has been transformed. Because human vision is linked to our modes of being, it represents only one way of seeing. Harrison explains: What our vision sees (and just as important, what it doesn’t see) is determined by historically unfolding frameworks that preorganize or predispose the

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empirical reach of our perception. We live in an age, then, whose dominant perceptual framework makes it increasingly difficult to see what is right in front of us, leaving a great portion of the visible world out of the picture, as it were, even as it draws to the eye a plethora of pulsing images.48 Harrison’s conclusion overreaches not just because it privileges vision over other modes of sense perception but also because his claim homogenizes the forms of power and knowledge that organize modernity and modern subjects. Still, his observation should caution us against overestimating what architectural design and spaces can do to facilitate counterconducts and flows. The forms of contact, greeting, and even appearance greenways make possible may be substantively different from the routinized patterns and norms that characterize functionally segregated urban zones. While greenways may be more open and hospitable to chance encounters and unexpected moments of mutuality and attentiveness because they have no specified “use,” Harrison suggests that our patterns of seeing and not seeing may override the signals that we might receive in these interactions. That is, subjects may continue to experience the invisibility that characterizes political death within these spaces as they do outside of them. Even heterotopias may not fully evade the grid of governmentality, a point that Foucault acknowledges in the context of his larger analysis of power as fluid and contested but one that seems to fade into the background in his description of heterotopias. Both Allen and Coles highlight the significance of active forms of attentiveness and receptivity in initiating countercurrents. For each, citizens gather with purpose and intentionality to examine who they are and who they wish to become. Whether in the civic forums that Allen suggests or in the meetings of action research teams in Flagstaff, citizens must actively cultivate the new habits and dispositions they wish to see take root in the world. In other words, Foucault’s heterotopias might initially involve only different ways of intentionally inhabiting shared spaces together. These ordinary spaces likely do not have the interstitial, scenic, and circulatory character of greenways, but Allen and Coles suggest active efforts to initiate alternative currents can nonetheless begin the process of transforming their significance. Coles more than Allen, however, implies that bodily movement and the cross-pollination of conversation across sites within Flagstaff are necessary to produce countercurrents capable of vying with the intensity of flows and currents that link the sovereign self to the state through shared concerns for security. These counterconducts can prefigure and gather support for local and state actions to create spaces that encourage and extend those counterconducts, but the spaces, even once achieved, cannot in themselves sustain or enlarge them. Without the actively organized efforts and initiatives of common work undertaken by democratic citizens that have often pushed for the creation of greenways, for instance, those resources will be colonized by dominant norms and orders. Insofar as these efforts involve activating idle and passive citizens in order to claim decision-making powers, they should be understood as efforts to democratize state sovereignty. At its core, democratizing sovereignty depends on citizens learning to

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acknowledge the sacrifices at the heart of sovereignty. Historically and today, these sacrifices have been born by indigenous communities and other communities of color.49 Democratizing sovereignty begins with nurturing habits of mutual vulnerability that work against the image of sovereign self that is patterned into being through movement and the ways of seeing and not seeing associated with governmentality.50 It is the reproduction of the sovereign self that animates desires for the individual and national forms of sovereignty amid conditions of waning sovereignty. Today desires for sovereignty are increasingly expressed in nondemocratic forms: either in xenophobic nationalist movements that attempt to purify the body politic and strengthen the borders of the state or in neoliberal efforts to isolate decision-making bodies from public pressure to strengthen their actionable powers. Democratizing sovereignty represents a third alternative to these options. In these local movements, citizens are recasting the meaning of the terms of power and knowledge that constitute the word and practice of architecture, shifting it from something linked to the concentration of power and expertise that animated Le Corbusier, to one that is democratized and embodied in the hands and common work of ordinary citizens. This alternative concept of architecture calls on definitions of archē and technē not as rule and scientific knowledge, but in terms of initiation and tacit knowledge among citizens engaged in democratic world making.51 This alternative understanding of architecture as world making is less about the spaces we design and more about the ways we actively inhabit them together. Such practices bring forth new patterns of circulations that root citizens differently in the world, both individually and collectively, while also altering the routes that at the same time bring them together and keep them apart.

Notes 1 Aristotle, Politics, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), Book II, 1267b. 2 Ali Aslam, “Building the Good Life,” Doctoral dissertation, Duke University (2010). 3 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin, 1985), Part 1, Ch. 15, 209. 4 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone, 2010). 5 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995). 6 For a discussion of governmentality as a form of political rationality, see Wendy Brown, Edgework (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 37–59. 7 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 113–14. 8 Ibid., 3. 9 Le Corbusier believed the solution to the challenge of political unrest was architectural order. He described architecture as an act of compositional willpower: “To create architecture is to put in order.” See Antoine Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover, 1991), 69–70. 10 Ibid., 232.

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11 Ibid., 236–7. 12 Ibid., 227. 13 Mixed-use districts are at the heart of Jane Jacob’s argument about what creates vibrant cities and explains her embrace of the visual disorder that drove Le Corbusier mad. See Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992), 222–40. 14 James Holston, The Modernist City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 257–88. 15 James Holston, “Autoconstruction in Working-Class Brazil,” Cultural Anthropology 6, no. 4 (1991): 447–65. 16 For a discussion of this circuit linking individual and state sovereignty, see Ali Aslam, Ordinary Democracy: Sovereignty and Citizenship beyond the Neoliberal Impasse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 55–6. 17 John Locke, Two Treatise of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Book II, Ch. 14, 374–9. 18 Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 585–7. 19 For a discussion of these claims to sovereignty, see Aslam, Ordinary Democracy, 158–63. 20 Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 40–64. 21 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone, 2015), 175–200. 22 Aslam, Ordinary Democracy, 128–57. 23 Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 291. 24 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007), 12–13. 25 In an interview, Foucault clarifies an earlier remark about when architecture takes on this political color. Here is Foucault: I did not say that discourses upon architecture did not exist before the eighteenth century. Nor do I mean to say that the discussions of architecture before the eighteenth century lacked any political dimension or significance. What I wish to point out is that from the eighteenth century on, every discussion of politics as the art of the government of men necessarily includes a chapter or a series of chapters on urbanism, on collective facilities, on hygiene, and on private architecture. Such chapters are not found in the discussions of the art of government of the sixteenth century. This change is perhaps not in the reflections of architects upon architecture, but it is quite clearly seen in the reflections of political men. (Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 240). 26 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 21. 27 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2007), 245. 28 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 194. 29 As Foucault explains, biopolitics is “therefore not a taking of the individual at the level of individuality but, on the contrary, of using overall mechanisms and acting in such a way to achieve overall states of equilibrium or regularity; it is, in a word, a matter of controlling life and the biological process of man-as-species and of ensuring that they are not disciplined, but regularized.” Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 247. 30 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 249. 31 Foucault, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1988), 157–64.

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32 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave, 2008), 220–5. 33 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 219. 34 George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, “Broken Windows,” The Atlantic, March 1982: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/ (accessed June 20, 2017). 35 Ken Auletta, “Fixing Broken Windows,” The New Yorker, September 7, 2015: http://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/fixing-broken-windows (accessed June 20, 2017). 36 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 18–19. 37 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arend, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 240. 38 Jack Ahern, “Greenways as a Planning Strategy,” Landscape and Urban Planning 33 (1995): 133–55. 39 Ahern, “Greenways,” 134. 40 Annaliese Bischoff, “Greenways as Vehicles for Expression,” Landscape and Urban Planning 33 (1995): 317–25. 41 Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1994), xviii. 42 Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave, 2001), 155. 43 Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 167. 44 Allen, Talking to Strangers, 173–4. 45 Romand Coles, Visionary Pragmatism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 23. 46 Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 56. 47 Harrison, Gardens, 114. 48 Harrison, Gardens, 116. 49 For a discussion of these sacrifices and their relationship to sovereignty, see Allen, Talking to Strangers, 37–8. 50 For a discussion of sacrifice and democratizing sovereignty within citizens’ movements, see Aslam, Ordinary Democracy, 1–26. 51 For a glimpse into what this world making looks and feels like, see Ella Myers’s discussion of the care for worldly things in Worldly Ethics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 85–110.

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CHAPTER 9

Making Superstar Cities Work: Jane Jacobs in Toronto Margaret Kohn

It is hard to overstate Jane Jacobs’s influence on architecture and urban planning. Fifty-five years after the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, her seminal book has become the canonical work of urban theory.1 It is still widely read and has transformed planning practice. Her once heterodox ideas and principles have become the orthodox formula for creating urbanity: mixed-use neighborhoods; architectural diversity and neighborhood continuity; sidewalks and walkability; and small-scale economic vitality. Her account of vibrant, successful neighborhoods seems neither anachronistic nor nostalgic. It still captures much of what makes my own neighborhood in Toronto so appealing: the diversity of people, activities, shops, and visual styles that knit a place together by balancing privacy and sociability. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities Jane Jacobs explained what makes cities and neighborhoods work. The real estate market has shown that consumers agree with her assessment. Her favorite neighborhoods—Greenwich Village in New York, the Annex in Toronto, and the North End in Boston—have been transformed into some of the most expensive areas in North America. Large numbers of affluent professionals have recognized the appeal of dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods but, by buying into this ideal, they are undermining a key dimension: diversity. In my own gentrifying neighborhood, many of the shopkeepers don’t live nearby. A typical example is the Bangladeshi immigrant who used to run the corner store. He lived 20 kilometers away in Mississauga and told me that he almost never saw his children. Shopkeepers commute in from the remote but less expensive inner suburbs, the very places that were built on the principles Jacobs abhorred: slab and concrete towers surrounded by grass and adjacent to arterial roads linked to strip malls.2 On closer examination, it seems that the lively streetscape of a downtown neighborhood depends on its constitutive outside, not only on the logistics/warehouse/shipping districts of the periphery,3 but also on the aesthetically dystopian residential neighborhoods that serve as bedroom communities of service sector workers.4 This chapter advances a materialist critique of Jacobs’s urban theory. Jacobs brilliantly described the links between social practice and built form but under-appreciated the structural factors that foster the formation of urbane neighborhoods and ensure access to

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them. This critique echoes concerns raised by some of Jacobs’s contemporaries. According to Herbert Gans, Jacobs’s account of urban vitality rested on the “physical fallacy”: the view that buildings and streets shape human behavior.5 This is an issue at the heart of this volume, the relationship between architecture and political theory. Some architectural theorists emphasize that the built environment can foster dispositions and facilitate encounters that strengthen the practices of citizenship: open-mindedness (see Zacka, this volume), neighborliness (see Rosenblum, this volume), and community. Others read buildings as signs or texts that can reveal ideology and power.6 Gans argued that the built environment does not produce urban vitality; he thought that the neighborhoods described by Jacobs were animated by working-class culture rather than sidewalks and building styles. Gans reminded his readers that correlation does not imply causation. This chapter takes up this question by distinguishing between the built environment (design) and the social practice (vitality, urbanity) and asking how these relate to social justice. Jacobs wrote very little about gentrification. Her major work was published in 1961. The threat to urban life came from suburbanization and “urban renewal” rather than gentrification.7 But Jacobs was concerned about inclusion and displacement, the normative issues that underpin discussions of gentrification. She wrote about “unslumming,” neighborhood continuity, and the need for subsidized housing. She was attentive to the relationship between social class and social space as well as the connections between economic structures and physical ones. Nevertheless, I will argue that her approach needs to be reconsidered. A theory that emphasizes social justice rather than design is better suited to the new challenges facing cities. Jacobs was right about the enduring appeal of urbane neighborhoods, but wrong to assume that equity and urbanity naturally reinforced one another. With the clarity of hindsight, we can see that both Gans and Jacobs were wrong. The vitality of gentrified neighborhoods shows that the publicness of working-class culture8 is not the only source of lively street life. Bohemian and creative-class culture, consumerism, and tourism can also produce vibrant neighborhoods and when this happens, socioeconomic diversity and inclusion become detached from urbanity. When we look at “great” American cities from the perspective of social justice, a distinctive problem emerges: the urban commons is becoming inaccessible to all but the most affluent.9 The planning principles that Jacobs promoted are not suited to solving this problem, and may even exacerbate the affordability crisis. In this chapter, I draw on the examples from Toronto to explain why we need to revisit some of the approaches she rejected—modernism, planning, and utopianism—and ask whether a new synthesis is possible.

Design, diversity, and density Jacobs’s urban theory was influenced by her experiences of living in New York City in the 1950s and her work as a writer for Architectural Forum. Some of her key insights focus on design, but her approach to design, however, was not narrowly aesthetic. 182

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Jacobs connected the design of physical space to social processes and outcomes. For example, she emphasized that short blocks foster social and economic integration by facilitating the circulation of people.10 She favored a variety of architectural styles, not only because visual variety is pleasing but also because buildings from different periods command different rents, which fosters socioeconomic diversity. She objected to Le Corbusier’s tower in a park because she thought that the open space did not have enough visual variety or interest to attract users. The towers are made up of isolating private apartments linked by shared spaces like stairwells and elevators that do not foster multiple uses and, since they are not suited to informal surveillance, they also tend to be unsafe. Modernist towers in a park are not the only architectural forms that weaken the social fabric, according to Jacobs. They are emblematic of a broader category that she called “border vacuums”: derelict areas adjacent to spaces that are not inviting, such as malls, freeways, or even university campuses. What is to be done to combat the ravages of modernist planning? The opposite of “border vacuums” is what she called “seams”: places that link physical space, activities, and people together. Jacobs suggests that one way to transform border vacuums into seams is by placing bridging features at the border between two types of spaces. As Bernardo Zacka points out in “What’s in a Balcony: The In-Between as Public Good,” Aldo van Eyck and Team 10 emphasized something similar: the importance of thresholds, which both distinguish and connect different types of physical spaces. Jacobs suggested that landscape architects could connect Central Park to adjacent neighborhoods by siting enticing features such as playgrounds, carrousels, or ice rinks near the street entrances. This would encourage more users to cross the border between the park and the neighborhood, making the park into a more engaging and inviting place. Even something as simple as visibility can contribute to this integrative function. For example, she suggested that the urban waterfront would draw more people if, rather than barriers such as walls, there were openings which allowed other users to observe even the decidedly unglamorous activities of a working container port. Jacobs keenly observed, diagnosed, and critiqued the urban theory and practice of her day and treated the link between commercial/spatial variety and socioeconomic diversity as a natural law. In the last thirty years, however, real estate developers have been quite successful at uncoupling aesthetic and socioeconomic diversity. Excellent students of the Jacobs-inspired revolution in planning, new urbanists such as Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk designed neighborhoods with higher densities, visual variety, walkable commercial districts, and attractive “seams” linking the parts together.11 Celebration, Florida, the Disney town, is the most famous, perhaps notorious, example of this approach to planning, but the underlying principles have been widely employed in the design of upscale suburban neighborhoods.12 These ersatz neighborhoods employ the semiotics of urbanism, while still relying on a number of fundamentally suburban features such as dependence on the automobile and separation of work and residence. This line of critique is quite familiar to urbanists and critical geographers, and therefore I focus on a distinct yet related question—whether the old 183

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urbanism is coming to resemble the new urbanist simulacra.13 Henri Lefebvre can help answer this question.14 Lefebvre was an extremely prolific French scholar, who developed a distinctive approach to critical and social theory. I draw on his influential work on the right to the city, particularly his critique of the city as ideology.15 According to Lefebvre the city we imagine when we use that term has two historical roots: the city of classical antiquity and the pre-industrial city. The paradigmatic space of the classical city is the agora, the place where the citizens assembled in person to deliberate about collective life. Structural changes in the scale of territory and the social organization of labor have completely undermined the material basis of this city, yet the image of democracy, citizenship deliberation, and rationality remains potent. In The Right to the City Lefebvre introduced the concept of centralité to describe the distinctive features of urban neighborhoods: proximity, encounter, play, sociability, variety, and use-value. These features are quite similar to the ones described and celebrated by Jane Jacobs, but Lefebvre also notes the Janus-face of centralité—the way that it functions ideologically to mystify inequality. According to Lefebvre, the city endures as an aesthetically pleasing form, but one that is empty of content because the material conditions and social praxis that underpinned it have been destroyed. Industrialization radically changed the city. Some industries located in peripheral areas because power (coal, water) was accessible. Other industries did the same thing because they wanted to break or circumvent the power of urban guilds and craft unions. While Lefebvre’s analysis focused on European cities, something similar happened in North America. The construction of highways unleashed centrifugal tendencies and left an older part of town with the physical characteristic of “urbanity” or “centrality” surrounded by a vast network of varied zones of industrial production, circulation, slum housing, and new suburban residential areas. This set the stage for the transformation of the urban as a form of social practice to the city as ideology. According to Lefebvre, the historical nucleus of the old city plays a new role not as a site of encounter and festival—as it did in medieval times—but as a site of consumption.16 Lefebvre emphasizes that the authentic, historical city—and not just the simulacra—has the ideological function of disguising the transformation of the urban itself. Historical preservationists try to protect the image of centrality while ignoring the structural forces that sustain or destroy centrality.17 How does this analysis relate to Jacobs’s approach? Unlike the New Urbanists, Jacobs was not trying to preserve the image of centralité while ignoring the structural forces that were destroying it. She was writing about a specific time and place—great American cities in the late 1950 and early 1960s—and, in that period, the processes that Lefebvre observed in Paris were not as advanced in North America. On the contrary, anti-urbanism was a dominant ideology and slum clearance and suburbanization were reconfiguring the newly emerging urban regions.18 By criticizing urban renewal and highlighting the destruction of poor and working-class neighborhoods, she was trying to preserve the social forces that she thought sustained authentic centralité. 184

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Nevertheless, the design focus on “seams” and “liveliness” provided a blueprint for how to create the atmosphere of centralité without paying attention to the things that would preserve socioeconomic diversity and access to the urban core. As real estate investors learned, the formula of historic buildings + bohemian atmosphere + lively commerce + nightlife = profit. Jane Jacobs was right about the formula but wrong about the social effects. She thought the gentrification would be beneficial to all residents. According to Jacobs, “Even those who remain poorest in an unslumming slum are gainers from the process of unslumming—and therefore they make the city a gainer too.”19 “Unslumming”—her term for gentrification—has not caught on and empirical research has cast doubt on the claim that the benefits of neighborhood change are shared by rich and poor alike. Once gentrification begins, very few of the poor and working-class people are able to remain. Due to exclusion and displacement, poorer residents do not benefit from the improvements to the neighborhood. For example, in their study of gentrification in Canada, Alan Walks and Maraanan showed that many partially gentrified neighborhoods do consolidate into high-income neighborhoods and one typical example of this process is the Annex. The neighborhood where Jacobs lived in Toronto is now completely gentrified.20 Jacobs thought that “unslumming” did not necessarily mean that poor people would have to be displaced in order to make room for the upper class. Instead, she emphasized that “unslumming” could happen through self-diversification. She thought that neighborhoods could be transformed from “slums” into mixed-income neighborhoods when long-time residents improved their economic situation but chose to stay. She juxtaposed two strategies for unslumming: encouraging middle-class suburbanites to return to the inner city and providing tools such as mortgage financing that enabled long-time residents to improve their neighborhoods. Jacobs clearly preferred the latter because it benefited current residents. Jacobs was not indifferent to structural factors, yet her focus on design, and her embeddedness in a distinctive time and place, made it difficult for her to adequately analyze broader structural forces. Lefebvre’s approach better captures the challenges facing “great” cities today.21 Jacobs insightfully described her own era, but her principles should not be treated as timeless truths. Take for example her claim that “old buildings are less expensive than new ones.”22 This empirical claim served as the foundation for her view that a mix of old (cheaper) and new (more expensive) buildings could preserve economic diversity in historic neighborhoods. Writing in a period when urban land values were falling due to suburban development, she thought that the cost of new construction, rather than the cost of land, determined the price of housing. Today, however, the scarcity of urban land has driven up prices and older homes often command higher prices than newer construction. For example, a “Victorian” in San Francisco or a unit in a “pre-war” building in New York City costs more than an equivalent sized unit in a postwar building. New construction often uses lower-quality materials and less labor-intensive building techniques and, under these circumstances, new construction is more affordable. This 185

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illustration is emblematic of a broader concern, which is the assumption that smallscale market forces, if unimpeded by misguided government intervention, will be selfcorrecting and able to sustain livable neighborhoods.

The paradox of “unslumming” The main point of The Death and Life of Great American Cities was to highlight the four conditions that generate city diversity. In addition to a mix of older and newer buildings, Jacobs thought that neighborhoods should have multiple functions, short blocks, and a dense concentration of people. These conditions do indeed generate a certain kind of urban vitality, but they do not guarantee socioeconomic diversity and, over time, they may even undermine such diversity.23 They undermine diversity by generating demand for living space in a neighborhood while doing little to increase supply. Moreover, throughout the book, Jacobs criticizes the type of urban development that has provided most of the affordable units that still exist in “great” North American cities today. These affordable units are located in modernist towers and not in traditional historic neighborhoods, which are now filled with refurbished and astronomically priced brownstones. Jacobs criticized the modernist, concrete slab buildings and the “tower in a park” design that was promoted by Le Corbusier and imitated all over the world.24 Jacobs recognized that density generates the street life and commercial variety that make neighborhoods work, but she preferred a certain type of density: the density of Greenwich Village (smaller scale buildings that cover most of the lot) rather than high-rise buildings surrounded by open space. Jacobs correctly pointed out that both low-rise and high-rise neighborhoods can support high population densities, but she neglected to mention that low-rise neighborhoods often achieve density through crowding (multiple families living in one home). According to her own account, a decrease in the population density of a neighborhood is evidence of “unslumming” and this is a good sign because it means that each family can afford more space. In other words, at the level of the housing unit, high density (crowding) is harmful to the people who must experience it. At the level of the neighborhood, however, density is positive because it is the demographic condition that facilitates vitality and its attendant social benefits. Taken together, these two points generate an unacknowledged tension, but even if the housing stock does manage to balance the needs for adequate private space and social density, there is another related concern. Unslumming decreases the total amount of housing available. As families become more affluent—or the middle classes move in—they transform multifamily dwellings back into single-family homes and renters are forced to look for other accommodation or leave the neighborhood. The main way to accommodate renters and maintain density is the one she rejected: highrise rental buildings.

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It is not surprising that this was not a major concern in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Jacobs began writing at a time when the supply of housing was increasing. Gentrification was not yet a major concern. City dwellers were moving to the suburbs, which decreased the demand for—and the price of—urban real estate. The factors pulling the white middle classes into the suburbs (red lining, disinvestment, mortgage incentives, and block busting)25 also decreased pressure on rents and property values in the city. It might seem unfair to fault Jacobs for failing to anticipate structural changes whose impact would only be fully felt decades later, but her neighborhood-centric and quasi-libertarian approach was also subject to criticism in her own day. Lewis Mumford famously mocked what he described as “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies for Urban Cancer.”26 Mumford argued that Jacobs focused on the street-level dynamics of neighborhoods but ignored the larger structural forces that profoundly determined the livability of cities.27 According to Mumford, city planners had made mistakes but had also had considerable success at designing neighborhoods and building new dwellings that improved the quality of life for the poorest residents. He also emphasized that public institutions and spaces such as libraries, churches, parks, and schools could be effective ways to build community. He worried that Jacobs’s romantic anti-statism could make it harder to recognize and critique the deleterious effects of market forces. Jacobs’s critique of modernist planning had the beneficial effect of preserving historic neighborhoods, but the unintended consequence was to decrease the supply of housing in the central areas of great North American cities. In the discipline of economics, there is a strong consensus that land-use regulation, which limits the construction of new housing, makes housing less affordable. The theoretical story is straightforward—supply and demand—but new, more sophisticated forms of data analysis have made it possible to support this theory with strong empirical evidence.28 On the left, there has long been concern about “exclusionary zoning”: typically this term describes suburban land-use regulations that mandate large lot sizes and minimum setbacks while forbidding the construction of multi-family dwellings.29 Together these regulations guarantee that housing prices are high, and local residents prefer these rules because they protect property values, limit crowding, and attract a homogenous, affluent population. Until recently, less attention has been paid to the way that something similar has happened in cities. Zoning and land-use regulation have made it difficult to build new housing and the single-family homes that predominate in many older cities have turned into a scarce and exclusive luxury good.30 Much like suburbanites, affluent urbanites mobilize against in-fill projects. The result is that new high-rise residential buildings are built in less mobilized and less affluent neighborhoods, often located in the inner suburbs or adjacent to abandoned industrial lands. In Toronto, this social and spatial sorting is well documented, thanks to David Hulchanski’s report The Three Cities in Toronto.31 The report shows that from 1970 to 2005, the portion of middle-income neighborhoods in Toronto declined from 66 percent to 29 percent. Middle-income neighborhoods are ones where the mean income is 187

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between 20 percent below and 20 percent above the average for the census metropolitan area. The percentage of poor neighborhoods dramatically increased in that same period, but most of the poor neighborhoods are located in the peripheral neighborhoods of North York, Etobicoke, and Scarborough. These inner suburbs were incorporated into metro Toronto in 1998. Hulchanski and his collaborators described the poor inner suburbs as “The Third City.” In the Third City, 61 percent of the residents are immigrants.32 The Third City is also where most of the high-rise rental buildings are located. There are 1,200 rental high-rise buildings in Toronto and they contain over 280,000 apartments. Most were built in the period from the 1950s to the early 1980s. Sited in clusters of four or more, they are often surrounded by grass and located near arterial roads with strip malls. In the Third City, there are more renters than there are in the rest of the city and 50 percent of renters live in high-rise towers, as opposed to 30 percent of renters in the central city.33 These neighborhoods seem dystopian to someone who is viewing them with “Jacobian” lenses. Many of the towers were built cheaply and the buildings are showing their age. Metal balconies have rusted and a mud-red color is visible under flaking paint. The buildings are set back from wide, fast arterial roads lined with strip malls that are interspersed with one-story, concrete box stores of various sizes. There are no “seams”; the structures are surrounded by vast parking lots that create visual and spatial barriers. The strip malls give the impression of dissonance more than diversity and the green spaces surrounding the towers appear abandoned. Yet this dystopian portrait is a superficial, outsider’s perspective. Residents are drawn to these neighborhoods because of affordability but also because of community, convenience, and space.34 Compared to downtown, the commercial rents in the strip malls are reasonable and they are filled with flourishing local businesses that specialize in products that appeal to the immigrant groups that live nearby. Some of my students who live in the area say that they like the greenery. The green space may seem empty during the long, cold months and during the working day, but on summer evenings, children ride bikes and play soccer on the lawns and paths that connect the high-rise buildings. The green spaces are sheltered from traffic and a parent or sibling can keep watch from a bench or a balcony. To an outsider, the balconies may look like unkempt spaces used to store junk, but, as Bernardo Zacka reminds us in his contribution to this volume, they are actually functional, multiuse spaces that make it easier to link the worlds of inside and outside. The tower and slab neighborhoods have their own rhythm and sociability. It does not look like a ballet and the stage is not a beautiful urban theater. The street life is not as dense, but this is due to structural factors and not only architectural ones. The people living in these buildings have to rely on poor public transit connections to get to work, which adds hours to their commute back home from the historic core, where they are employed at the charming boutiques that sustain the urbane atmosphere of downtown. The “First City” of Hulchanski’s report is the one that Jane Jacobs lived in. It includes the tony neighborhoods of Rosedale, Forest Hills, and Leaside but also “unslummed” 188

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neighborhoods like the Annex. The first and the third city are different worlds, but they are connected structurally, politically, and ideologically. They are neither fully separate nor are they equal. Using the example of Toronto, we can see how the urban reform project inspired by Jacobs had the unintended consequence of exacerbating inequality.

Jacobs’s Toronto Jane Jacobs moved to Toronto in 1967 to ensure that her sons would not be drafted to fight in the war in Vietnam. In Toronto, she is remembered for her leadership of a campaign against the Spadina expressway, a highway that would have bisected the city, destroying a historic neighborhood near the University of Toronto. She also supported the successful re-development of the St. Lawrence neighborhood, which was transformed into a mixed-income, diverse community sited on a conventional street grid.35 Jacobs was an active part of the reform movement that her book inspired. In Toronto this movement was led by John Sewell, a community organizer who became an Alderman and eventually the Mayor of Toronto. Sewell got his start in politics by fighting against the type of urban renewal that Jacobs opposed in her writing and activism. Large real estate developers were using block busting techniques to assemble large parcels in order to build high-rise housing projects and malls in the downtown core.36 Sewell organized local residents in the centrally located Don Mount and Trefann neighborhoods and helped the residents challenge the destruction of these historic but low-income, inner-city neighborhoods. Sewell and Jacobs were part of a reform movement that promoted historical preservation and opposed high-rise development.37 They called for a city controlled by neighborhoods rather than big developers. In 1973, reformers gained a majority of seats on the City Council and began work on a new comprehensive urban plan. Given the complexity of this task, and the fear that developers would try to fast-track new projects before the new rules were adopted, the City Council passed an interim measure, a “Holding Bylaw” that prohibited the construction of new buildings over forty-five feet (about four stories) in the downtown.38 This by-law was rejected by the Ontario Municipal Board and the provincial government, but, two years latter, a new Central Area Plan was approved that was based on the planning principles that Jacobs advocated in Death and Life of Great American Cities. New buildings would be sited on the street rather than adjacent to parks and plazas, and mixed use, walkability, and transit would be encouraged. The height of buildings in residential neighborhoods was restricted, and there were density bonuses for historic preservation, and incentives for higher density development in the inner suburbs.39 This background makes it possible to see the political and structural connections between the neighborhoods characterized by centralité and the high-rise rental neighborhoods of the inner suburbs. The development of the latter made the “unslumming”

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and preservation of the historic center possible. There is considerable variation among cities—the inner suburbs of San Francisco did not allow the construction of high-rise rental buildings in the same way that Toronto did—but it is not a pattern unique to Toronto. The slab and concrete towers that ring most European cities follow a similar pattern. There was a structural rationale for increasing residential density in the inner suburbs. More buildings were needed to house a growing population and land was less expensive on the periphery. As Saskia Sassen pointed out, the flourishing global city depends on the existence of low-wage service workers and these workers must live somewhere.40 There was also a political connection between neighborhood preservation in the core and neighborhood change in the periphery. Developers would accept the limits that prevented them from building high-rises in historic residential neighborhoods if they could build low-density subdivisions on farmland and high-rise towers at the edge of the city. The ideological connection is also important. Lefebvre pointed out that the centralité of historic neighborhoods disguises the fact that the material conditions that sustained the classical and medieval city have disappeared. The theory and practice of neighborhood preservation, which we see in Jacobs’s writing and Sewell’s activism, does something similar. It focuses our attention on the symptoms not the cause. During the period of progressive reform, when battles to preserve neighborhoods were fought and won, rising income inequality accelerated and became a powerful centrifugal force that transformed city regions. At the same time, inequality became less visible to elites because of spatial segregation. The reformers were not indifferent to these structural changes. They promoted rent control and investment in public housing, initiatives that made a real difference in the lives of low-income people living in cities, but the genuine concern with equity was submerged under a more potent and enduring discourse that emphasized the ugliness and social dysfunction of public housing projects. The contempt that centralists express for the inner suburbs is a consequence of this discourse. Contempt for the ugliness of high-rise housing projects and strip malls has become a socially acceptable way of expressing contempt for the poor and unsophisticated.

Dufferin Grove Park Before the Toronto reformers gained power in the early 1970s, the city had encouraged high-rise development near transit corridors such as the Bloor-Danforth subway.41 The legacy of this era is visible in the architecture of the city. Throughout Toronto, there are pockets of modernist “tower in a park” projects in close proximity to historic neighborhoods. Most of these are market-rate rental housing, and they are some of the pockets of relatively affordable housing in a gentrifying city. Looking at these hybrid neighborhoods can tell us something about what makes neighborhoods and cities work, but the lesson is not exactly the same one taught by Jacobs over fifty years ago. Dufferin Grove is one of these hybrid places. It is an eclectic neighborhood with million-dollar Edwardian homes adjacent to high-rise slab-and-block rental towers. It 190

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is located next to a large shopping mall that is anchored by a Walmart. Dufferin Grove Park faces the mall, but there is no “seam” connecting them, only a large, ugly parking lot. In the 1950s and 1960s, suburbanization led to disinvestment in the older downtown neighborhoods in Toronto. Working-class Portuguese immigrants settled in the area and divided the large homes into apartments and rooming houses. In the early 1960s, a development company demolished fifty homes and built Dover Square, a complex composed of three 16–20-story apartment towers. This project was possible because of zoning rules that encouraged the construction of high-density housing near the subway. In the late 1960s, neighborhood residents opposed the construction of additional highrises, in part because they feared that it would spur gentrification. This prediction turned out to be wrong. Gentrification has transformed the area, but the apartments in the highrises are the units that are now affordable to lower-middle-class workers and immigrant families. Some houses now sell for over two million dollars and the rental stock in the neighborhood is decreasing as dual-income professional couples turn multi-unit dwellings back into large, single-family homes. The physical environment does not meet Jacobs’s design standards, but yet it is a flourishing neighborhood. An important reason for its success is Dufferin Grove Park. This is also surprising. Jacobs was skeptical of city planners’ obsession with parks and green space. She noted that parks further depress unattractive neighborhoods for they “exaggerate the dullness, the danger, the emptiness.”42 According to Jacobs, the vitality of a park is mostly due to the physical arrangement of the adjacent neighborhood43 and the site of Dufferin Grove Park does not make it an obvious candidate for success. It is large (14 acres). There are houses on the south and the east sides of the park, but the west side is a busy road and across the road is the parking lot of the shopping mall. A Catholic school and a high-rise tower are located on the north side. Kids call Dufferin Grove “the shoveling park.” For younger kids, the shovels are the defining feature. These are full-sized shovels with a heft that could cause serious injury if wielded as a weapon, which make them an uncommon sight in contemporary, safetyfocused parks. The shovels are used to build trenches, riverbeds, dams, and fortifications in a huge pile of sandy dirt. This is no typical sandbox. It is a vast area with mid-sized and six-foot-long logs that can be used for building bridges and tee-pees and a water tap that creates a significant stream running through the site. There are no supervisors. It is a “create-your-own-adventure” playground. The sand was one of the items introduced into the park in the 1990s after the neighboring Dufferin Mall donated $20,000 to placate neighborhood concerns about expansion of the mall. These funds helped pay for a basketball court, a garden, and some renovations to the skating rink. The park was considered dangerous and neighborhood residents wanted to change this reputation by transforming it back into a genuine community space. The Friends of Dufferin Grove Park, an informal volunteer group, rejected the methods that had been used to reclaim a number of parks in American cities. The transformation of the park was not carried out with the help of private fundraising, corporate management, strict rules of conduct, and police enforcement. 191

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Instead, the strategy focused on fostering community engagement, inclusivity, and a sharing economy. One example of this approach was the introduction of fire pits. For low- and mid-income city dwellers without access to a recreational property, there are few opportunities for campfires. Campfires also bring people, including families, into the park at night when the park would have otherwise been fairly empty and used for illicit activity. It was intended as a way to make the park safer without strict rules and overbearing policing. It was a kind of very informal social control that could be described as “eyes on the park.” The campfire program was not a form of exclusion or privatization. Permits were required but the fee was a suggested donation intended to cover the cost of fire safety training. The rules stated that anyone in the park must be allowed to join the campfire. A similar principle of sharing/non-exclusion animated other programs. In 2003, Friday night community suppers started; prepared by volunteers and featuring produce from the gardens, these suppers are also “pay what you can.” Revenue is used to fund park programming, ensuring it is free for everyone. There is increasing class polarization in the neighborhood, but the park is a place where these worlds come together or at least flourish side by side. There is hippie subculture (puppet shows! Arts in the park!), a farmers’ market, pick-up basketball, pick-up hockey, skateboarding, family picnics, gardening club, free yoga, storytelling, and one of the few ice rinks that offer rental skates at a low cost. Dover Square, the high-rise rental complex, also functions better than one might expect. On summer evenings, the space between the three buildings is filled with children playing. Some kids ride their bikes on the paths and others play soccer on the grass. Some adults walk dogs and others sit on the benches chatting, watching the children, or reading a newspaper. The area is free of traffic and at least some of the children are allowed to play without direct supervision of a parent. Perhaps this is due to the fact that a mother or father can step out on the balcony and easily check to make sure that nothing is wrong. Dufferin Grove shows that successful neighborhoods can take different forms. Less essential than the length of city blocks is the cost of rent. The siting of buildings on the street is important, but, from a social justice perspective, it is less important than the construction of reasonably priced dwellings that can accommodate the people who want to share the social, cultural, and economic wealth of the city. Using a social justice framework, we can go beyond the question “what makes a neighborhood work” and ask “what does it mean to work?” and “for whom”? In Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs did not foreground these questions because she assumed that diversity, accessibility, and urbanity were naturally intertwined. Urbane neighborhoods are among the goods that cities produce, but they are not the only goods. Flourishing cities have the population density and infrastructure to support a variety of forms of employment and enjoyment; they are fertile soil for public and private institutions such as mosques and museums, ethnic districts and entertainment districts, hospitals, and homeless shelters. A normative approach focuses on equitable access to the urban commonwealth and then asks how design features may facilitate or undermine such access. 192

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Conclusion Jacobs believed in social justice, but her anti-statism made it difficult for her to imagine that government could advance this goal, which left her with a powerful critique but few viable ideas about how to combat inequality and exclusion in cities.44 The Jacobian approach should be brought back into conversation with the utopian one that she dismissed. We should read her work but also look back at some forgotten alternatives. One such alternative is the work of the German architect Bruno Taut,45 who embraced everything that Jacobs hated. He was the consulting architect of the German Garden City Society and celebrated the garden city’s rational structure, its efficiency, its connection to nature, and its transformative potential.46 He wrote a pamphlet celebrating the end of cities and published Die Stadtkrone, a manifesto with sketches of a crystal temple that was meant to connect the people (Volk) with its spiritual potential.47 Yet he was also a radical and a social democrat, who played a leading role in the massive building projects of Weimar-era Berlin. In the 1920s he built over 10,000 units of public and cooperative housing, including the famous Hufeisensiedlung (Horseshoe Development). Combining garden city elements with modernism, he built projects that integrated low-rise apartment buildings and three-story row houses, often with balconies or allotment gardens.48 Using new production processes and simplified designs enlivened by the creative use of color, he was able to build low-cost while including high-quality amenities like private bathrooms and hot water. These projects, which have been recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site, remind us that what Jacobs called “cataclysmic money” is not necessarily bad for cities. The Dufferin Grove neighborhood was not produced by a coherent plan but in its hybridity I see echoes of both Taut and Jacobs: mass housing as a priority for progressives and urban vitality as a kind of social glue. Dufferin Grove Park demonstrates that the things that Jacobs correctly identified as critical to city life—safety, convivality, diversity—can be achieved in different ways. Instead of focusing on design, we should focus on the values that animate the built the environment and sustain social practices. The culture of the park is important, but it would not matter if there were no affordable places to live nearby. We need an urban theory that incorporates both the large and the small: the dynamism of neighborhoods and the theories of social justice and policies that make the city accessible.

Notes 1 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992). 2 Douglas Young and Roger Keil, “Locating the Urban In-between: Tracking the Urban Politics of Infrastructure in Toronto,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 5 (September 2014): 1589–608.

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3

Thomas Sieverts, Cities without Cities: An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003). 4 Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 5 Herbert J. Gans, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs,” Commentary Magazine, February 1962, accessed January 13, 2017, https://www. commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-death-life-of-great-american-cities-by-jane-jacobs/. 6 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 2006). 7 Christopher Klemek, “Dead or Alive at Fifty? Reading Jane Jacobs on Her Golden Anniversary,” Dissent 58, no. 2 (2011): 74–9. 8 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). 9 Margaret Kohn, The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 10 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 178. 11 Neil Smith, “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy,” Antipode 34, no. 3 (2002): 427–50; Emily Talen, “Sense of Community and Neighbourhood Form: An Assessment of the Social Doctrine of New Urbanism,” Urban Studies 36, no. 8 (1999): 1361–79. 12 Keally McBride, Collective Dreams: Political Imagination and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011). 13 Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, 1st ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1st ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992); Mark Purcell, “Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City,” Journal of Urban Affairs 36, no. 1 (February 2014): 141–54; Stuart Elden, “Politics, Philosophy, Geography: Henri Lefebvre in Recent Anglo-American Scholarship,” Antipode 33, no. 5 (2001): 809–25; Stefan Kipfer, Parastou Saberi, and Thorben Wieditz, “Henri Lefebvre Debates and Controversies,” Progress in Human Geography 37, no. 1 (February 1, 2013): 115–34. 14 Michael Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). 15 Warren Magnusson, Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City by Warren Magnusson (New York: Routledge, 2011). 16 Lefebvre, Writings on Cities. 17 Ibid. 18 Steven Conn, Americans against the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014). 19 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 282. 20 John David Hulchanski and others, The Three Cities within Toronto: Income Polarization among Toronto’s Neighbourhoods, 1970–2005 (Cities Centre, University of Toronto, 2010), http://neighbourhoodchange.ca/2011/05/12/research-paper-one/. 21 Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer, and Todd Sinai, “Superstar Cities,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 5, no. 4 (2013): 167–99. 22 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 189. 23 Gary Bridge, Tim Butler, and Loretta Lees, Mixed Communities: Gentrification by Stealth? (Bristol: Policy Press, 2013).

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24 Florian Urban, Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York: Dover, 1985). 25 Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, revised ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 26 Lewis Mumford, “The Sky Line: Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies for Urban Cancer,” New Yorker 38, no. 41 (1962): 148–79; James G. Mellon, “Visions of the Livable City: Reflections on the Jacobs–Mumford Debate,” Ethics Place and Environment 12, no. 1 (2009): 35–48. 27 Mumford, “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies for Urban Cancer,” 171. 28 Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, “The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability” (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2002), http://www.nber. org/papers/w8835.pdf; Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin Books, 2012); Anthony Downs, Growth Management and Affordable Housing: Do They Conflict? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004). Some papers emphasize that the relationship between land-use regulation and housing prices varies. See John M. Quigley and Larry A. Rosenthal, “The Effects of Land Use Regulation on the Price of Housing: What Do We Know? What Can We Learn?,” Cityscape, 2005, 69–137. 29 Richard F. Babcock and Fred P. Bosselman, Exclusionary Zoning; Land Use Regulation and Housing in the 1970s (New York: Praeger, 1973); Douglas S. Massey et al., Climbing Mount Laurel: The Struggle for Affordable Housing and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 30 James C. Clingermayer, “Heresthetics and Happenstance: Intentional and Unintentional Exclusionary Impacts of the Zoning Decision-Making Process,” Urban Studies 41, no. 2 (2004): 377–88; John Mangin, “New Exclusionary Zoning, The,” Stanford Law & Policy Review 25 (2014): 91. 31 Hulchanski, The Three Cities within Toronto. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Richard Harris, “Using Toronto to Explore Three Urban Stereotypes, and Vice Versa,” Environment and Planning A 47, 2015: 30–49. 35 Christopher Klemek, “From Political Outsider to Power Broker in Two ‘Great American Cities’,” Journal of Urban History 34, no. 2 (2008): 309–32, doi: 10.1177/0096144207308669. 36 John Sewell, How We Changed Toronto: The inside Story of Twelve Creative, Tumultuous Years in Civic Life, 1969–1980 (Toronto: Lorimer, 2015). 37 The term “reform” has been controversial, because this coalition included progressive and conservative forces. See Jon Caulfield, “‘Reform’ as a Chaotic Concept: The Case of Toronto,” Urban History Review/Revue D’histoire Urbaine, 1988, 107–11. See also Warren Magnusson and Andrew Sancton, City Politics in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983). 38 Sewell, How We Changed Toronto, 144. 39 Sewell, How We Changed Toronto, 157. 40 Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy (New York: Sage, 2011); Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 41 Jon Caulfield, City Form and Everyday Life: Toronto’s Gentrification and Critical Social Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 42 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 111.

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43 Ibid., 96. 44 Klemek, “Dead or Alive at Fifty?” 45 Sabine Hake, Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); Andreas Huyssen, “The Voids of Berlin,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (1997): 57–81. 46 Iain Boyd Whyte, Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 47 Matthias Schirren, Bruno Taut: Alpine Architecture: A Utopia by Matthias Schirren (Munich and London: Prestel Publishing, 2004). 48 Winfried Brenne, Bruno Taut: Master of Colourful Architecture in Berlin (Berlin: Deutscher Werkbund, 2008).

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Chapter 10

Whose Right to the City? Lessons from the Territorial Rights Debate Benjamin Hofmann

Ever since Henri Lefebvre coined the notion of a “right to the city” urban scholars have tried to apply it to increasingly contentious debates about gentrification and the shifting urban landscape. Despite its ubiquitous use, the “right to the city” has only recently gained attention within the domain of political theory. Since Lefebvre precisely rejected the theory of rights favored by mainstream liberal theorists, this relative neglect may not be all that surprising.1 The present chapter is not intended as an interpretation of his own theory, but aims to provide a set of concepts and arguments that may be helpful in thinking about the “right to the city.” It is motivated in part by a tendency in recent interventions on the topic to draw heavily on an analogy between the right to the city, or individuals’ occupancy rights more broadly, and territorial rights as ascribed to larger collectives, such as nations, states, and peoples.2 Because of a long-standing concern with the latter, political philosophy is seen as well equipped to intervene in debates that similarly invoke spatially located rights: about gentrification; the rights of tenants and homeowners; the planning, provision, and use of public spaces; and urban migration. Indeed, some of the most influential thinkers in the liberal tradition, including Hugo Grotius, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant, included occupancy and the possession of land among the starting points of their political and legal theories. More recently interest in territorial and occupancy rights has been renewed in the context of urgent political (and academic) debates about immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and group rights.3 In the following I draw on some of these contemporary resources to argue that while the occupancy rights/territorial rights analogy suggests a plausible justification for the right to the city, its purchase is limited. In particular it is unable to account for the occupancy rights of prospective (urban) migrants, including their right to the city. I begin with a brief survey of the “right to the city” and discuss the justification of territorial rights most commonly imported into accounts of urban occupancy rights, namely, the idea that agents have rights to a particular space insofar as their life plans and cultural practices are located there (the argument from embeddedness). I then show that this argument can only explain the occupancy rights of current city dwellers. This is both normatively unappealing in that it simply sanctions the existing distribution of people

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across space and of limited theoretical use, because it fails to explain (or counter) the claim to the city invoked by newcomers. I suggest a number of possible justifications for their right to the city: an argument from justice, the right to have occupancy rights, and an argument from fair play. These arguments suggest a more expansive account of the right to the city, one that belongs to both current and prospective urban dwellers.

What is the right to the city? Despite an abundance of literature on the subject, the precise nature of the so-called “right to the city” remains hard to pinpoint. A neutral account is unlikely to be forthcoming; like all rights, the right to the city is subject to ongoing political contestation. As David Harvey observes, “The right to the city is an empty signifier [and] everything depends on who gets to fill it with meaning.”4 In fact Henri Lefebvre, who coined and championed the term, favored a similarly broad definition. He writes: The right to the city cannot be conceived of as a simple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life. It does not matter whether the urban fabric encloses the countryside and what survives of peasant life, as long as the “urban”, place of encounter, priority of use value, inscription in space of a time promoted to the rank of a supreme resource among all resources, finds its morphological base and its practico-material realization.5 A number of elements stand out in Lefebvre’s definition. First is his rejection of a more minimal theory of the right to the city, according to which it entitles holders to visit rather than establish permanent residency or occupancy in urban spaces. This contrasts with a still-influential conception of cosmopolitan right—often ascribed to Kant—as a universal claim to visit, as well as attempt contact and commerce with other nations and peoples, but not a full-fledged right to settle.6 Instead, and second, the right to the city is to be understood as a right to what Lefebvre calls “urban life.” It is more than a mere right to occupy urban space; rather, it entitles individuals to a whole range of associated activities, opportunities, and experiences. Third is the suggestion that this right derives, among other things, from the nature of urban space as a “supreme resource.” Fourth is his characterization of the city as “place of encounter,” an idea that resonates with an influential vision of the city—associated with Jane Jacobs—as a place that, because it makes encountering others inevitable, is uniquely positioned to create unity and trust among a diverse population. A final point concerns the group of right-bearers. While applying to the “whole society” of which it requires large-scale structural reforms, the right to the city is a right “firstly of all those who inhabit [it].”7 (I later argue against this restriction.) Granting some initial plausibility to the very notion of a right to the city—as I believe we should—Lefebvre’s rendition has much to recommend it. It acknowledges

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that the modern city provides the unique backdrop and necessary precondition for the pursuit of a whole range of life paths but leaves open the precise manner it may take on that role. It is both politically relevant and philosophically open textured. Today, however, the “right to the city” has taken on a life of its own. Lefebvre’s original definition has been channeled into diverse realms, ranging from ever more specialized urban scholarship to the rhetoric of community activists, establishment columnists, and office seekers. In that process the dual nature of the right as entailing both a claim to benefit from the city and to play an active role in its creation has been brought to the forefront. As one of its advocates, the anthropologist and geographer David Harvey puts it, the right to the city “is not merely a right of access to what the property speculators and state planners define, but an active right to make the city different, to shape it more in accord with our heart’s desire, and to re-make ourselves thereby in a different image.”8 That undertaking connects the urban struggle for control with a larger rejection of modern economic relations; the right to the city is a mere “way-station on the road” to “overthrow[ing] the whole capitalist system of perpetual accumulation, along with its associated structures of exploitative class and state power.”9 David Purcell echoes this insistence that the right to the city be understood as requiring changes to the entire political and economic structure: Lefebvre’s right to the city is an argument for profoundly reworking both the social relations of capitalism and the current structure of liberal-democratic citizenship. His right to the city is not a suggestion for reform, nor does it envision a fragmented, tactical, or piecemeal resistance. It amounts instead to a call for a radical restructuring of social, political, and economic relations, both in the city and beyond.10 While I am sympathetic to the idea that such drastic alterations will ultimately be required, I do not explore the kinds of reform that the right to the city might call for. I tackle instead two other questions: what justifies the right to the city and whose right it is. I argue both that the right extends to non-urban occupants and that it isn’t enjoyed in equal measure by existing urban dwellers.

Theorizing territorial rights Philosophy’s preoccupation with territorial rights goes back at least as far as early natural law theory, and has been revitalized by a recent wave of scholarship. These contemporary works are centrally concerned with the question of what (if anything) justifies governments’ claim to political authority over a particular territory. Importantly, that question is at least conceptually distinct from a more general one about the very possibility of legitimate government. Political legitimacy alone may establish a general duty to obey the law (given certain conditions) but fails to explain the moral significance

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of membership in a specific political community. Philosopher A. John Simmons refers to the view that membership in fact bears such significance as the particularity assumption; Anna Stilz, who defends a version of it, explains: “I am not constrained to obey or to support every just state, or to support, as a matter of preference, the most just state [but] to obey and support my own state, as long as it is sufficiently just.”11 While the particularity assumption pertains to political legitimacy and obligation—why is it that I ought to obey this but not some other state’s laws?—it seeps into related discussions about territorial rights. The analogy is intuitive: territorial claims are always to a particular territory. The question, at least as it is being put by territorial rights theorists, is what grounds some groups’ rights to a specific parcel of the earth.12 Competing territorial rights theories diverge on a number of core questions. Following Ypi’s survey of the field, we can broadly distinguish them along three criteria. First, the agents to whom they ascribe such rights, i.e., individuals, groups, or both. Second, their justificatory direction, that is whether they are centrally concerned with the historical, the present, or the possible relationship between agents and territory. Whereas the first class emphasizes “past interaction between the agents controlling the land and the land itself,”13 present-oriented theories reject the relevance of context and tradition and instead advocate objective criteria, which—if they are met—entitle “collective institutions to exercise rights over territory.”14 Future-directed theories “emphasize the need for an inclusive justification both across space and across time.”15 The final distinction looks at the kinds of reasons eligible to justify territorial rights. The candidates Ypi suggests are acquisition (roughly, whether a state came to “own” its territory according to a set of criteria borrowed from theories of property rights); attachment (whether the life of the agent or agents occupying a territory is bound up with it in some relevant way), and legitimacy (whether “political institutions established by collective agents are able to perform desired political functions”).16 Ypi’s taxonomy captures most palatable contemporary theories but is not exhaustive: for example, earlier generations of theorists appealed to standards like the physical compatibility between a people and their territory, nativist mythologies, or divine rights. While the comparison between territorial rights and urban occupancy rights has considerable intuitive appeal and—as Kohn and Huber and Wolkenstein lucidly demonstrate—survives analytic scrutiny somewhat intact, two important disanalogies are worth keeping in mind from the outset. First, whether grounded in appeals to individual or collective rights, territorial rights are usually invoked by relatively welldefined groups. By nation-states to defend their sovereign authority over a particular territory, exercised both against current residents, obliged to follow its laws, norms, and customs, and—as a right to exclude—against would-be newcomers, and by national, cultural, or ethnic groups wanting to challenge current rule. Groups that claim a right to the city, by contrast, are frequently much looser and lack stable membership. Second, unlike territorial rights the right to the city isn’t usually taken to amount to an exclusive, or sovereign, right to control or occupy a territory.17 200

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The most prominent import from the territorial rights debate into theories about (urban) occupancy rights is the idea that the latter are justified in light of the ways, in which individuals’ lives are enmeshed with a territory—what Ypi calls “attachment.” Anna Stilz explains, “Occupancy is rooted in the role that geographical space plays in individuals’ most important projects and relationships. Many of our comprehensive goals require us to form expectations about a permanent place of residence.”18 The pursuit of these “projects and relationships” is bound up with a particular space; both Kohn and Huber and Wolkenstein pick up Stilz’s coinage of “located life plans” to describe them. This emphasis leads to a thesis about the moral relevance of spatial embeddedness, roughly the view that an agent’s claim to occupy (and govern) a particular territory is justified in light of the distinct relationship they have with that territory but not with others. Margaret Moore, while eschewing the label of occupancy rights for individuals’ claims, defends the particularity of “residency rights”—“to reside in the place you are currently in”—along similar lines: “People form relations and attachments with others in a particular place; our individual plans and pursuits depend on a stable background framework, and this is provided by security of place.”19 Other ways of spelling out embeddedness are available. In contrast with the Rawlsian-liberal emphasis on a neutral and widely shared interest in pursuing our conception of the good, irrespective of its content, nationalists emphasize the cultural and personal significance of attachment to particular places. Nationalist arguments usually veer toward collectivism: whether or not you ever come to imbue the spaces, the territory, you are accustomed to with meaning, what is of concern is the fact that they play an important role for the cultural or national group of which you are a member. Hence David Miller, one of the most outspoken philosophical defenders of nationalism writes: “The case for having rights over the relevant territory is then straightforward: it gives members of the nation continuing access to places that are especially significant to them, and it allows choices to be made over how these sites are to be protected and managed.”20 While nationalism drops liberals’ emphasis on individuals as well as its claim to neutrality between conceptions of the good that agents may pursue in a given territory, it shares the idea that occupancy rights, while exercised in the present, emerge historically. Agents, individual or collective, count as embedded in places they have previously occupied, thus enabling the creation of life plans or cultural narratives located there. Without getting lost in the details of territorial rights theories, we can note a number of features of embeddedness that will be relevant to the right to the city. First, embeddedness entails a rights claim whenever the significance or meaning that a territory holds for some people derives from the actual role it plays in sustaining their present and future life plans and pursuits. Hence I use “embeddedness” rather than attachment: while subjective, the value and import that a space holds for the agent in question have to be rooted in their actual involvement with it. The globetrotter who falls in love with the green pastures of New Zealand (and whose newfound attachment may even surpass that to her native land) does not thereby earn the right to occupy that territory. The 201

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second point is related. Territorial rights do not require that agents are conscious of, or able to articulate, the ways in which their lives are spatially embedded. They may fail to appreciate, or even deny, the extent to which they depend on the stable backdrop before which they do the things that matter to them. Third, the passing of time can render occupancy claims rightful. Whether or not agents initially have title to be in a particular territory, the mere fact of their continued presence, during which their plans and pursuits become increasingly located, can gradually entitle them. This possibility, according to which a past injustice (for instance the fact that a territory was stolen or colonized by force) fades out over time, has long plagued liberal defenders of territorial rights, as they try to reckon with their own nations’ history of colonialism, ghettoization, forced expulsion, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. (Moral individualism comes in handy here: in a popular evasion, the wrongfulness of forceful acquisition of a territory is claimed to disappear with the generation directly and personally responsible for it, and—perhaps— the direct beneficiaries of injustice immediately succeeding them.) Last, occupancy rights generated by embeddedness are not restricted to localities that are on the whole more beneficial to their occupants. Our life plans attach to the spaces we inhabit, even if we would be better off elsewhere. Individuals of course needn’t exercise the occupancy claims they enjoy and may choose to relocate voluntarily. At the same time to insist that only embeddedness in an environment that is conducive to an agent’s interests or wellbeing according to some outside standard yields occupancy rights might add insult to injury. While it may not always be most efficient to discharge our obligations of justice to improve others’ quality of life in the location they are in, their occupancy rights may give us reason to do so.21

Embeddedness and the city Until recent years, individuals’ occupancy rights have received surprisingly little philosophical attention outside the confines of the territorial rights debate. Despite wide agreement on the importance of citizens’ right to free movement within the boundaries of their state, and much disagreement about the conditions under which they have a claim to immigrate elsewhere, the question whether and when they may be liable to displacement from their places of residence, work, and community has been relatively neglected. This is despite the fact that much of the opposition to gentrification has either explicitly rallied around the “right to the city,” or at least assumed something like a “right to stay put.” This is the right thought to render the displacement and/or disempowerment of locals in neighborhoods subject to what is euphemistically called “urban renewal” wrongful. But gentrification is just one pressing political issue in which occupancy rights are at stake. Related problems include the forced eviction of tenants in poor urban areas and elsewhere; resurgent homelessness; suburban foreclosures in the wake of the Great Recession; the frequent and often unpredictable movement of prison

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inmates between facilities, including ones far away from their local communities; and the plight suffered by children in a foster care system long past its breaking point, unable to provide stable and permanent residence at a time when it is most needed. In light of these pressing issues, systematic treatments of individuals’ occupancy rights are both overdue and welcome. The two I rely on in the following, by Kohn and Huber and Wolkenstein, explicitly draw on territorial rights theories to explain the rights of urban dwellers in conditions of rapid economic and social change. (Only Kohn makes her case under the banner of the “right to the city.” Huber and Wolkenstein, who come to similar conclusions, frame the problem as one of occupancy rights more generally.) According to both accounts, a version of the embeddedness argument applies to urban dwellers. Because their life plans are locally bound to the city (or neighborhood), in which they reside, work, socialize, and so forth they enjoy a right to remain there. Referencing Stilz’s idea of located life plans, Huber and Wolkenstein hold that “residents should be thought to have a plan-based right to remain in the neighborhood where their social, cultural, and economic practices are located.”22 Gentrification, then, is morally fraught insofar as it violates “city dwellers’ occupancy rights” thus construed.23 In a similar vein, Kohn urges us to think about the wrong of displacement through the lens of occupancy rather than property rights “because urban forms of displacement such as gentrification and slum clearance affect people who are not private property owners.”24 Drawing on Stilz and Moore in particular, she holds that the major harm constituted by such displacement lies in the “disruption of spatially embedded plans.”25 But displacement is not the only way in which gentrification may cause such a disruption. Huber and Wolkenstein distinguish two categories of potentially adverse effects: transformation and expulsion. Echoing Kohn’s earlier argument, they conclude that urban dwellers’ occupancy rights only “ground a right against expulsion, thus protecting against the most extreme effect of gentrification processes” but don’t endow them with a veto-right against the cultural, social, or economic transformation of their neighborhoods.26 So long as “urban governance [is] more democratic and inclusive” occupancy rights don’t guard against transformation.27 Gentrification is a beast best tamed, not eliminated: mandated caps on rent increases, for instance, can mitigate the “displacement of current residents” to the point where “the composition of the neighborhood still changes, but […] does so gradually as residents move for a range of different reasons and are replaced with more affluent newcomers.”28 The analogy these theories suggest is intuitive: if located life plans can ground the territorial rights of states, nations, and other collective agents—protecting them and their members from coercive expulsion—they might similarly explain individuals’ claims against displacement from their local communities. Existing theories remain vague, however, on the exact kind of located, or embedded, life plans that yield occupancy rights. Hence they tend to lump together two ways, in which persons’ spatial embeddedness may be seen as morally relevant. The first—let’s call it direct embeddedness—has to do with the fact that our personal, social, and economic lives tend to be closely bound up with the space we inhabit. 203

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The mundane routines that give structure to our days, our memories and identities, as well as the personal relationships we inhabit are inextricably tied up with the schools, places of worship, streets, market squares, subway stations, sports fields, parks, and businesses that provide the physical background for our lives. All too frequently we may be unaware of the significance these places hold in our lives until they are transformed, become inaccessible or altogether disappear. But in a sense that is the point: it is only because we can take them for granted that they are able to facilitate the ever-changing goals we pursue. The ability to continuously occupy and navigate the same space without having to fear displacement or the sudden cultural or social transformation of our locale provides a baseline of stability in an otherwise unpredictable (and often hostile) physical world. The second type is best described as indirect, or communal, or embeddedness. Much of our involvement with physical spaces occurs through a socially (and psychologically) prior attachment to a particular community. These function as a kind of proxy in tying us to physical spaces. Victims of gentrification, for instance, suffer both the loss of a space, with which their own lives had been tied up, and that of a community of particular significance to their lives. That loss can cost livelihoods, and even be fatal for the most vulnerable, i.e., those who are only able to meet their most basic needs through the help of their neighbors and extended social networks (with increasingly thinly spread welfare provisions to fall back on). What is salient here is not our immediate relationship with a space, but the fact that the community on which we rely in planning and executing our lives depends in turn on the space it is embedded in. Gentrification doesn’t merely expel communities that otherwise remain intact, but erodes their very structure, practices, and agency.

What is valuable about embeddedness? But what makes our located life plans, and hence the spaces in which they are embedded, worth protecting? The territorial rights literature suggests at least two values that are directly at stake: our ability (a) to live a life we value, and (b) to do so autonomously. It also, at least implicitly, relies on another value, namely, (c) independence. The first kind of argument draws on an influential line of thought in contemporary liberalism, prominently defended by John Rawls, which assigns moral primacy to those goods that individuals with otherwise divergent conceptions of the good life require to enact them.29 We have an interest in spatial stability because “many of our comprehensive goals require us to form expectations about a permanent place of residence.”30 Hence “the interest in the ability to establish locationally stable commitments is […] not an idiosyncratic taste but is of value to people with a very wide range of conceptions of the good.”31 On this view the principle that grounds occupancy rights is prior to the particular rights we actually hold. Importantly, the thought is not that we can lay claim to a space simply because it is necessary in the pursuit of our goals, but rather that those

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are the kinds of pursuits eligible to engender particularized rights. The problem with expulsion is not that it foils our plans, but that it foils plans that we had a prior right to enact. Occupancy rights, like territorial rights, are particularized: they entitle bearers to a specific locale, or at most to a certain kind of space (i.e., space, in which they are able to continue with their plans). Insofar as the economic or religious practices of our culture are bound up with the space we inhabit, for example, through the agricultural methods we inherited or sites we consider sacred, others are obliged to respect them. But that is not tantamount to the claim that they had an obligation to enable us to engage in certain kinds of farming or endow locales with religious meaning to begin with. Here the analogy with property rights is instructive: Dominant theories of acquisition hold that the principle that grounds property rights (e.g., that we earn rights to objects we mix our labor with, add value to, or implicate in our plans in some relevant way) only yields particularized rights in light of our actual practices. Assuming rightful acquisition, you ought to respect my right to the chair in my office, even if you were under no obligation to make sure that I ended up with that chair or, perhaps, with any chair, at all. Another value threatened by territorial expulsion (in the case of colonialism) as well as skyrocketing city rents (in the case of gentrification) is autonomy. As Stilz explains, removal from the space, in which you are embedded, “jeopardizes your authorship over your life.”32 Here the theoretical proximity between occupancy rights (to stay in a place, or to come back to it) and freedom of movement (to go where you please, to stay there) is most apparent. Both are valuable because they entitle people to live a life that is meaningfully their own, free from interference by others. Whereas the first argument emphasized the ways in which we implicate territory in our pursuit of the good, the argument from autonomy highlights the fact that territorial stability is often crucial for our ability to self-determine our lives to begin with. To appreciate the value of autonomy, and the attendant wrong of coercion (including coerced expulsion) we needn’t ask on what basis someone is living their life or what values they seek to instantiate.33 According to the first view, embeddedness is valuable because it allows us to pursue our notion of the good life. Per the second because it permits us to determine the course of our lives, free from coercion and interference. A final argument holds that occupancy rights derived from embedded life plans ensure a shared good, namely, our mutual independence. While independence is less frequently invoked by theorists of territorial rights, it suggests a plausible alternative in explaining why others’ life plans, which from our vantage point may seem arbitrary and unilateral, should be thought to ground occupancy rights.34 It provides a third lens on the value of embeddedness: the stable and predictable availability of the means we require in the pursuit of our plans ensures our independence insofar as the success of our plans doesn’t depend on others’ choices or goodwill. Public roads are paradigmatic. They reliably and predictably allow us to pursue variegated ends. I may take the same street to walk to work from my apartment that you cross on your way to the supermarket. What’s more both of us are free to implicate the same road in new pursuits, say to show around a friend who is visiting, without having to rely on (or even coordinate with) one another. At least in their 205

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ideal, roads like other public spaces are both egalitarian (because they are accessible to all) and realize mutual independence (because we can rely on them in pursuing our plans irrespective of what others may do). Seen in this light, rather than tying us down, occupancy rights have a liberating effect.

A right to remain? Per the argument above, we enjoy occupancy rights insofar as our ability to live a life that is valuable (to us), autonomous, and independent is inextricably tied to the place in which we do live it. This implies that there is nothing distinct about the rights held by city dwellers. Spatial embeddedness, direct or indirect, is a necessary condition for a more general kind of claim, something like a “right to remain.” This underlying principle is simply that persons have a right to remain in any space, in which their lives are embedded in some relevant way. Two things are worth mentioning. First, the right to remain needn’t be conclusive. We might say that, under the right circumstances, individuals have a pro tanto right to remain in (or return to) the space, in which they are (or were) embedded. Countervailing reasons, including other agents’ spatial rights may prevail, but the rights of current or former occupants provide at least one important consideration in adjudicating disputes about displacement and transformation. Second, we have said very little so far about the appropriate scale of the right to remain: Does it protect individuals’ ability to remain in the apartment, street, neighborhood, city, or state they are currently located in? As Kohn notes, territorial rights theorists like Moore don’t view “eviction or displacement from public housing [as] a violation of the right to occupancy, because this right is meant to protect access to collective, social, and institutional spaces—to a situated way of life—rather than to a particular place.”35 This right to remain goes hand in hand with freedom of movement. National boundaries demarcate the realm in which you are free to move as you please—forcibly confining you to a particular space within that territory or coercing you to leave would violate your spatially embedded rights. On the view I sketched above, however, individuals can “earn” occupancy rights to spaces smaller than their state’s territory. I leave open the question how these play out in practice, for instance whether your occupancy rights are violated when rent increases force you to move to a smaller apartment on the same block or only when you have to leave the neighborhood altogether. Drawing those lines will crucially depend on how we conceive the normatively relevant kind of embeddedness. For example, if we think that our life plans yield occupancy rights to the extent that they are enmeshed with a community that is in turn tied up in a particular space (indirect embeddedness) we might conclude that having to relocate from their current home does not violate someone’s occupancy rights so long as local alternatives are available to them. Details aside, the standard view suggests that occupancy rights increase with the size of the

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space or community in question: your claim to remain in your current residence may be more easily outweighed, but your concurrent right to stay in your neighborhood less so. There are very few exceptions to your right to remain within your state’s territory and, finally, your right to some space is indefeasible.

Who has a right to (remain in) the city? On the above view, little is added by the fact that the right under consideration is to the city: urbanites’ right to remain is part of a larger class of occupancy rights derived from the fact that our lives are spatially embedded. In fact, the right to the city may best be thought of as a catch-all for a set of even more highly particularized occupancy claims, for example, “Avi’s right to stay in Los Angeles” or “Sandra’s right to rent in Crown Heights” and so on. As such, this kind of approach is normatively unappealing: it enshrines the current division of individuals and communities across space while sacrificing the rights of non-urban others. At the same time it side-steps an otherwise nagging worry: What if there isn’t anything peculiarly and generalizably good about life in the city? Defenders of “urban renewal” are sometimes tempted to claim that victims of expulsion are able to achieve similar or even higher standards of living elsewhere. Embeddedness moots that sort of retort: your right to remain anchors you in a place independently of its comparative benefits. This insensitivity is welcome insofar as there is very real disagreement about the (actual and potential) benefits of life in the city. From the “hell on earth” Engels saw in the working-class quarters of Manchester, to identifying Jacob’s belief in the modern city’s potential to be a “fantastically dynamic place”; from the Greek agora to the Charter of Athens, to the slums of Mumbai— the nature of the city has proven elusive and fickle.36 In addition, the argument from embeddedness captures an important intuition about occupancy rights (as well as territorial and property rights), namely, that history matters. Your right to remain in a space ought to be at least partially contingent on your previous relationship with it. It also lends credibility to the kinds of arguments made by critics of gentrification: it can explain the grave moral wrong constituted by the (coercive) removal of persons from their city or their neighborhood. What is objectionable about such displacement is that it erodes our ability to conduct our lives in a way that is valuable (to us), autonomous, and independent. The “right to the city” constitutes more than a mere appeal to protect some abstract identity or a useful but dispensable phrase in the pursuit of larger and more all-encompassing upheaval. Instead it refers to all the very concrete, and morally meaningful, ways in which cities are tied up in the lives of their residents. If everyone has a right to remain, then urbanites must have a right to the city. The obvious problem with this sort of view is that it restricts the group of eligible claimants to those who are already urban occupants. While it succeeds in explaining the moral wrong committed through the displacement of current city dwellers, it

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implausibly entails that only the latter enjoy such a right to begin with. If we understand the right to the city solely as one instantiation of a larger class of occupancy rights that entitle us to (continue to) reside in the place with which our life plans have historically become intertwined, the only bearers of that right can be current urban dwellers and those who have recently been displaced. My sense is that the embeddedness argument errs too heavily on the side of history. Any theory that merely sanctions the status quo should give us reason to pause, even where it happens to align with our intuitions about particularly salient examples (as embeddedness does in the case of the expulsion of current urbanites as their neighborhoods gentrify). While, in the current public discourse, the question who has the right to move to the city (or a particular neighborhood) is usually raised in the context of gentrification, the history of urban migration is also one of poverty and economic necessity. Take the case of Delhi where, in Richard Sennett’s description, “the mass of poor people streaming into cities occupied empty land to which they had no legal right; by one estimate 40 per cent of new urbanites in the year 2000 squatted, building cinderblock or cardboard shacks.”37 These newcomers lacked both the legal right, and— according to embeddedness—any moral claim to take up residence. Like the workers of Engels’s Manchester—where “no cleanliness, no convenience, and consequently no comfortable family [was] possible”—they were driven to the city by economic necessity and in the context of exploitative class structures.38 Should we evaluate them by the same standard as the middle-class and upper-class creatives and professionals streaming into Oakland and Brooklyn?

Concluding thoughts: Do non-urban occupants have a right to the city? I now suggest three lines of argument that seem promising in showing that the right to the city extends to at least some current non-urban dwellers: (i) that, insofar as city life does carry unique benefits, access to them should be distributed fairly (the argument from justice); (ii) that all persons enjoy a right to spatially embedded lives (the right to have occupancy rights); (iii) that those who contribute to creating the benefits of urban life have a particular claim to benefit from them (the argument from fair play). These are far from conclusive and mainly serve to highlight avenues for future research. I noted earlier that one of the upsides of defending the right to the city by appealing to embeddedness is that it relieves those who claim it of the pressure to prove that they wouldn’t be better off elsewhere. Dismissing locals’ complaints about gentrification by pointing out that their pre-gentrified neighborhoods weren’t worth living in to begin with, is both patronizing and fails to appreciate the particularity of local attachments. It may well be true that the same resident could have enjoyed a higher quality of life had they started out in a different part of town. But the counterfactual misses the mark: the 208

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point is that they didn’t—their life is embedded wherever they happened to live it. (This doesn’t rule out obligations to compensate comparatively worse-off individuals, it just suggests that we better fix the neighborhood they are in than urge them to move.) There is a long tradition of thought according to which cities bear at least the potential for unique freedom and opportunities. Consider Jacob’s description of city life: In real life barbarians (and peasants) are the least free of men—bound by tradition, ridden by caste, fettered by superstitions, riddled by suspicion and foreboding of whatever is strange. ‘City air makes free,’ was the medieval saying, when city air literally did make free the runaway serf. City air still makes free the runaways from company towns, from plantations, from factory farms, from subsistence farms, from migrant picker routs, from mining villages, from one-class suburbs.39 According to Jacobs, cities enable individuals to break free from the constraints of their local cultures, communities, and hierarchies. Reality is, of course, more complicated than Jacobs’s vision of what the city could be. But if Jacobs is right, if cities do liberate, we should wonder if, and on what grounds, we can deny outsiders access to them. This line of argument allows us to explain the uniqueness of the spatial rights to the city that embeddedness had denied. Embeddedness treats spatially bound up life plans as the generic or neutral primary good in the Rawlsian sense explained earlier: different kinds of life plans, in which individuals pursue what is good and valuable to them, will become entangled with the spaces, in which they occur. On that approach, urban dwellers’ right to the city appears justifiable so long as the occupancy rights of non-urban others are similarly upheld and respected. The argument from justice, on the other hand, suggests that urban life as such is the primary good to be distributed. Again, that angle will only persuade those who are committed to the notion that city life does bring with it a distinct kind of freedom (or freedoms). Cities provide opportunities for self-development, growth, and self-realization, but those opportunities are open-ended. Hence the right to reside in them should be subject to distributive concerns. The right to the city has usually been asserted by current inhabitants against prospective newcomers. While this makes sense in the context of gentrification, in which the entry of new residents to a city or neighborhood leads to the expulsion of locals or otherwise impinges on their ability to carry on with their spatially embedded lives, we should be wary about generalizing the contrast (between locals who enjoy occupancy rights to a space and newcomers who don’t). The above argument suggested one reason why prospective migrants to the city might be thought to have occupancy rights to a place in which they are not currently embedded, namely, the freedoms (and other goods) associated with urbanity. That kind of approach is unlikely to sway those who view its premise—that there are such goods unique to the city—as contentious. A second, but related, argument can do without it and highlights the need to differentiate between different groups of urban migrants. It agrees with the embeddedness argument that the ability to spatially anchor one’s life— 209

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to have a place of stable and meaningful occupancy—constitutes a unique and human good and that doing so in fact generates particularized occupancy rights. At the same time it recognizes that this good is denied to a great number of citizens, including many non-urban dwellers. Echoing Arendt, we might think of this as a kind of right to have (occupancy) rights. Recall her observation: We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation.40 Writing in 1951, she skewered the Enlightenment belief in the transformative power of abstract moral principles. Lofty declarations about the “rights of man” are empty phrases for those who lack membership in a legal–political order able to acknowledge their moral personhood, and so their humanity. A similar dissonance is apparent in contemporary debates about individuals’ occupancy rights. On the one hand the principle invoked in defending the rights of current occupants (against urban newcomers, but also—more broadly—against refugees seeking to settle on European territory) is universal in character. Everyone, so the argument goes, can earn spatial rights according to some underlying principle (say embeddedness). On the other hand, occupancy rights are often leveled precisely against those who lack stable territorial attachments for reasons entirely out of their control. To those whose homes have been vanished by civil wars, who flee persecution, hunger, and violence a “right to remain” is as insulting as it is useless. If such a right gives us a reason to respect the occupancy rights of those who currently do occupy a territory, it also calls on us to enable those who don’t to permanently (re)settle and thus earn particularized occupancy claims of their own. Insofar as we fail to do so, it may plausible to think that persons who currently lack the privilege of stable occupancy, have a stronger claim to choose where to settle, including in the city, than those who do. Such an account can better capture the difference between the occupancy claims asserted, say, by high-income gentrifiers on one hand and the refugees who have joined major European cities in recent years. It is important to bear in mind that the (still general) occupancy rights of newcomers may clash with the (already particularized) occupancy rights of current residents. A lot more will have to be said about how to balance the occupancy claims of current residents against newcomers’ “right to have rights” but it may be helpful to distinguish three cases. (i) One in which locals have strong rights to their place of occupancy (grounded in embeddedness) and prospective newcomers have similar rights to their current place of occupancy, also grounded in embeddedness. Here newcomers’ claim to the city is the weakest. Contrast that with the case, in which locals have strong rights to their place of occupancy and prospective newcomers lack particularized occupancy rights of their own. Here we may further distinguish cases (ii) in which newcomers have meaningful alternatives for settling down and (iii) those in which they don’t. Only in the former case 210

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the (comparative) extent to which their migration to one place over another will disrupt the lives of current residents might be a permissible consideration. Arguably, refugees in Europe fall in the third category, as do domestic migrants in countries where economic conditions in the countryside make it impossible for them to even earn a living. They enjoy strong claims to settle in the city without meeting the standard put forward by embeddedness. A last line of thought takes its cue from the ways in which socioeconomic differences factor in the urban–rural divide. In his famous indictment of 1840s English society, Engels describes the segregation of Manchester along classes: “By unconscious tacit agreement, as well as with outspoken conscious determination, the working-people’s quarters are sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved for the middleclass; or, if this does not succeed, they are concealed with the cloak of charity.”41 In a similar vein David Harvey ties the right to the city to capitalist relations of production (and power): “The struggle for the right to the city is against the powers of capital that ruthlessly feed upon and extract rents from the common life that others have produced.”42 But even those who don’t share their revolutionary zeal should agree that things are amiss, in a situation in which urban amenities and privileges are sustained by the manpower of people themselves denied access to them (see Margaret Kohn’s chapter in this volume). In political philosophy this instinct is sometimes expressed through the principle of fair play: “When a number of persons conduct any joint enterprise according to rules and thus restrict their liberty, those who have submitted to these restrictions when required have a right to similar submission from those who have benefited by their submission.”43 A plausible case could be made that prospective urban migrants have a right to the city so long as current dwellers are free-riding on their economic and social contributions. A similar reasoning extends to many current, especially poor and minority, urbanites. While filing the industries that prop up urban comforts—food service, public transportation, ride sharing services, construction—they continue to be denied the right to stable residency. Gentrification was salt on that wound: by displacing locals and refashioning their neighborhoods, high-earning newcomers erode the very cultural and social diversity that drew them to the city to begin with.

Notes 1

2

Acknowledgments: I thank Jan-Werner Müller and Bernardo Zacka for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Margaret Kohn, The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 178. Also see Mark Purcell, “Excavating Lefebvre: The Right to the City and Its Urban Politics of the Inhabitant,” GeoJournal 58 (2002): 99–108. See especially Kohn, Urban Commonwealth; Jakob Huber and Fabio Wolkenstein, “Gentrification and Occupancy Rights,” Politics, Philosophy, Economics 17, no. 4 (2018): 378–97.

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3

Lea Ypi, “Territorial Rights and Exclusion,” Philosophy Compass 8, no. 3 (2013): 241–53; Anna Stilz, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Margaret Moore, A Political Theory of Territory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), A. John Simmons, “On the Territorial Rights of States,” Philosophical Issues 11, no. 1 (2010): 300–26 for some prominent examples. 4 David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), xv. 5 Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. and ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebs (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 45. 6 Kant speaks of “the right of citizens of the world to try to establish community with all and, to this end, to visit all regions of the earth” The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1797] 1996), 6: 353. But the nature of his cosmopolitanism is contested; see, for instance, Pauline Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Wolfgang Kersting, Wohlgeordnete Freiheit: Immanuel Kants Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993). 7 Lefebvre, cited in Purcell, 102. 8 David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27, no. 4 (2003): 941. 9 Harvey, Rebel Cities, xviii. 10 Purcell, “Excavating Lefebvre,” 101. 11 Stilz, Liberal Loyalty, 6. 12 Most theories of territorial rights, and of political legitimacy, don’t share Simmons’s Lockean justification of particularity; Stilz, for instance, develops a Kantian liberal account, whereas communitarians and nationalists tend to emphasize the alignment between a territory’s political institutions and its local history, culture, and practices. Despite their deep philosophical differences, they converge on particularity. 13 Ypi, “Territorial Rights,” 242. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Keep in mind though that the two intersect in interesting ways. If a state holds legitimate territorial sovereignty, the right to the city will have to be exercised in light of it. At the extreme, this means that it can’t ground cities’ secessions from a territory. More relevantly it entails that the right to the city then has to be exercised from within existing political and legal institutions. On the other hand, if following Lefebvre and Harvey, we were to deny the legitimacy of existing political (and social and economic) relations, the right to the city may serve to ground a much grander revolutionary critique. 18 Stilz, Liberal Loyalty, 353. 19 Moore, A Political Theory of Territory, 37–8. 20 Miller, On Nationality, 219. Emphasis added. Also see Ypi, “Territorial Rights,” 247. At least within the confines of professional philosophy, contemporary nationalist have mostly let go of the view mentioned earlier, according to which this sort of attachment is due to the particular compatibility between their own physical or psychological make-up and the space they occupy, although it appears to be making a dangerous political come-back. 21 I thank Bernardo Zacka for pressing me on this point.

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22 Huber and Wolkenstein, “Gentrification,” 7. 23 Ibid., 2. 24 Kohn, Urban Commonwealth, 63. 25 Ibid. 26 Huber and Wolkenstein “Gentrification,” 7. 27 Ibid., 14. 28 Kohn, Urban Commonwealth, 73. 29 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1971] 1999). 30 Stilz, Liberal Loyalty, 353. 31 Ibid., 355. 32 Ibid., 354. 33 Kohn is rightly skeptical whether coherent, non-circular, concepts of coercion and autonomy are even available, and how applicable they may be to urban occupancy rights. To address the question in depth would exceed the scope of this chapter, but I agree that autonomy, along with the other two values surveyed in this section, is unlikely to yield a fully satisfactory account of urban occupancy rights. Kohn, Urban Commonwealth, 66. 34 A resurgent interest in independence was triggered by Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). For a thorough defense of independence as an alternative to Rawlsian liberalism, see Japa Pallikkathayil, “Resisting Rawlsian Political Liberalism,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 45, no. 4 (2017): 413–26. Also see A. J. Julius, Reconstruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022/forthcoming), and Louis-Philippe Hodgson, “Kant on the Right to Freedom: A Defense,” Ethics 120, no. 4 (2010): 781–819. The independence literature features frequent examples of encounters in public spaces, e.g., on roads and sidewalks, parks, supermarkets, and so on. 35 Kohn, Urban Commonwealth, 71–2. 36 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. Victor Kiernan (London: Penguin, [1892] 1987); Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1992), 14. 37 Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City (New York: Macmillan, 2018), 97. 38 Engels, Working Class, 243–4. 39 Jacobs, Death and Life, 444. Emphasis added. 40 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, [1951] 1958), 296–7. 41 Engels, Working Class. 42 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 78–9. 43 H. L. A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights?” The Philosophical Review 64, no. 2 (1955): 175–91.

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Chapter 11

Can Architecture Really Do Nothing? Lefebvre, Bloch, and Jameson on Utopia Nathaniel Coleman

In this chapter, Utopia is understood as a method or process—rather than as a blueprint for desired futures, or their physical settings. Conceptualized in this way, Utopia reveals how architecture could escape the hollow space of capitalist production enforced by the building industry—a predicament Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson, and Ernst Bloch have considered. Accordingly, their views are central to the argument developed in what follows, as are Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on space. Utopia construed as method shifts architecture’s emphasis from concerns with exchange (real estate investment and development; building as product; object; or image) to considerations of use and inhabitation (beyond reductive techno-scientific conceptions of functionalism). As method, Utopia structures modes of research that investigate which places are best for the real people who will use them.1 By emphasizing bodily experience(s) at individual and social levels, questions of use are the core of utopian methodologies. Exchange focuses on consumable images, making representation dominant and emphasizing the eyes. Utopia as method helps architects to shift their horizons enough to reveal the seemingly impossible as possible. Cultivating utopian capacities provides architects with tools to subvert the deforming economic and commercial limitations imposed on the built environment by developers and planners. Examination of architecture alienated from social concerns undergirds the formulation of tentative propositions for what might constitute political buildings. The sense of the “political” developed in this chapter refers to political architecture (individual structures and complexes) that contributes to intensifying tensions, or contradictions, between the empirical and the revolutionary, to reveal prospects for reconciling the two, suggested by desires for better ways of being that utopian imaginaries articulate. Jameson outlines the two key senses of the political as the “empirical” and the “revolutionary.”2 According to him, the dominant conception of “politics” is empirical, made up of specialized local activity identified with government and elections, and with “people in power and their techniques [for carrying out] specific tasks.” His second sense of “political” is revolutionary: “politics in the global sense, of the founding and transformation, the

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conservation and revolutionizing, of society as a whole, of the collective, of what organizes human relationships generally and enables or sponsors, or limits and maims, human possibilities.”3 The putative oppositions between “reality” and “fantasy,” “pragmatism” and “idealism,” or the “worldly” and the “utopian” that Jameson introduces to distinguish the “empirical” from the “revolutionary” sharpen awareness of the tensions between apparent opposites. His aims are, however, dialectical rather than dualistic. Because contemporary visionary, or neo-avant-garde, architects do not engage the dialectical forcefully enough, their propositions slide from “realpolitik” to “utopian”—repackaging capitulation to capitalism as revolution. In Jameson’s schema, accentuating the tension between the two poles is necessary, because neither of these “two very different dimensions […] can be sacrificed without serious damage to thought and experience, [they cannot] be simply synthesized or unified either.”4 Consequently, the “empirical” and the “revolutionary” are interdependent, while maintaining their separateness conserves the generative tension created by their proximity, to produce a jarring, though productive, unity: These two dimensions acquire an essentially allegorical relationship to each other, which runs in both directions. Thus the empirical institutions and situations of the city stand as allegories of the invisible substance of society as a whole; while the very concept that citizens are able to form of society as a whole becomes allegorical of their empirical possibilities, their constraints and restrictions or, on the other hand, their new potentialities and future openings.5 Although at times involuted, Jameson’s prose mirrors the complexity of the ideas he introduces. In the interrelationship outlined above, the utopian nests within the mundane: the “empirical” hides “new potentialities” within it, while the “revolutionary” conceals concrete utopian projects. Not only does Utopia require the disappointments and banalities of prevalent bureaucratic and managerial conceptions of politics, it also depends on them to maintain its position of “front,” in Bloch’s sense of being “full of propensity towards something, tendency towards something, latency of something.”6 The sense of the “political” emphasized here is aligned with radical critique and transformation. And even if unsuccessful, attempted realization is asserted as preferable to retreat from practice. Disengagement for the sake of purity, or out of despair, as with paper architecture, construes textual or visual representations as final. By rendering inhabitation irrelevant because construction is conceived of as a matter of building, rather than of architecture, paper architecture is exempted from the inevitable compromises of construction and subsequent bodily experience through time. Inevitably, the immateriality of paper architecture amounts to surrender, whereas buildings provide settings for material experimentation. Seductive, even beautiful, as images, drawings reproduce the logic of exchange. Visualization presupposes the gaze, which desires, or acquires, without the physicality of touch; it is abstract, promising intangible possession, independent of material encounters. Lefebvre touches upon how vision (de)forms experience: 218

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The predominance of visualization […] serves to conceal repetitiveness. People look, and take sight, take seeing, for life itself. We build on the basis of papers and plans. We buy on the basis of images. Sight and seeing, which in the Western tradition once epitomized intelligibility, have turned into a trap: the means whereby, in social space, diversity may be simulated and a travesty of enlightenment and intelligibility ensconced under the sign of transparency.7 Two factors work against recapturing the political potential of architecture: First, the discipline renounced Utopia some decades ago in an attempt to dissociate architecture from the failures of modernist architecture and urbanism. Second, visual and textual representations have come to dominate professional and disciplinary transactions. Free of the burdens of a progressive social project and preoccupied with buildings as well-packaged consumable fetish objects, the abstract holds sway over the concrete, emphasizing image over experience, which contributes to making architecture a handmaiden of the limited ambitions of the post-Utopian managerialism that pervades institutions, businesses, and politics. Nevertheless, even today, buildings are occasionally constructed where utopian transformation is thinkable. Above all else, marketplace demands for newness produce an impasse in which novel appearances of repackaging are misconstrued as substantive difference. Despite repackaging exercises, reproduction prevails. Determined by bureaucratic rationality, consumer culture, professional education, architectural practice, and the building industry, architects’ field of operations are limited to “the logic of visualization.”8 Although consumption accentuates the New, Theodor W. Adorno reveals the confusion in this: “The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself: That is what everything new suffers from. What takes itself to be utopia remains the negation of what exists and is obedient to it.”9 Because illusions of achievement defeat desires for alternatives, longing, rather than fulfillment—paradoxes rather than resolution—is proposed as the motive force and content of a political architecture. Thus, “by providing semblance and consolation,” examples of buildings that support the argument advanced here risk betraying Utopia and desires for the new.10 Nevertheless, as Adorno observes, “art must be and wants to be utopia, and the more utopia is blocked by the real functional order, the more this is true; yet at the same time art may not be utopia in order not to betray it […].” Despite professional culture requiring assertions of the New achieved, Adorno argues: “If the utopia of art were fulfilled, it would be art’s temporal end.”11 Accordingly, the antinomy between desire and necessary unfulfillment provides the argumentative arc of this chapter.

Political architecture and the centrality of use Although promising, isolated examples of buildings organized around “use” rather than “exchange” are largely exceptions to the rule that a renewed architecture will only emerge out of new social forms, just as Bloch and Tafuri believed, which makes a 219

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political architecture seem an impossibility. In Bloch’s words: “Only the beginnings of a different society will make true architecture possible again.”12 In the event, architecture’s renewal must wait until after the revolution. As a product of dominant (social, political, economic) conditions, architecture has little choice but to embrace its weak position, leaving it unable to influence much of anything. Arguably, this enervated condition took decisive shape in the 1960s and has largely dominated architectural education, theory, and practice since the 1970s, revealing resignation and imagined autonomy as ill equipped to produce settings more amenable for everyday life than orthodox modernism could. “Visionary,” “alternative,” and “revolutionary” claims are least convincing in architectural works of the so-called neo-avant-garde, most of which reproduce the economic and productive realities of the dominant system by surfing the tides of neoliberal globalization. The ostensibly radical dimension of such work amounts to recasting hyper-conformity as a supposedly subversive tactic for overloading the system, by intensifying its contradictions in the belief that they will become glaringly obvious, thereby bringing them to the point of crumbling. Examples of this include the theoretical and built work of Rem Koolhaas, with his Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Existing conditions are accentuated in constructing myths of destabilization to obscure simple reproduction of what is in an extreme form. OMA’s high-rise mixed-use Der Rotterdam project (1997–2013), for example, seamlessly maps onto the boom and bust cycles of real estate investment and development. It is characterized by apparent intensification of land use but reproduces the logic of most large-scale projects: almost all activities are internalized without appreciably contributing to urban life, beyond providing a novel form, or image, best consumed from a distance. Although Koolhaas rejects the supposedly naïvely optimistic utopianisms of earlier modernists, including Aldo van Eyck, his preference for image and removal of a strong social project are the most obvious differences.13 In opposition to Koolhaas, the social dimension of architecture was the countercultural source of van Eyck’s buildings. He countered purely technical functionalism with what he described as emotional functionalism to produce an augmented architectural modernity. For van Eyck, the burden of use is a field of deepening spatial, social, and emotional complexities—not an obstacle to expression. For many of the most visible architects working today, including Koolhaas, van Eyck’s work is anachronistic. Instead, so-called neo-avant-garde architects are fully committed to the neoliberal project, Patrik Schumacher, successor to Zaha Hadid, for example.14 Lefebvre charts routes through the impasse outlined above, imploring: “‘Change life!’ ‘Change society!’ These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space. […] To change life, […] we must first change space.”15 His inversion of expectations, according to which life and society change space, returns the task of situating better ways of being to architects. He captures the seriousness of the task in asserting: “I repeat there is a politics of space because space is political.”16 Though more equivocal on the matter than Lefebvre, Jameson concedes that “the idea of Utopian space, the Utopian building, or even the Utopian city plan, dies hard; for it alone can 220

Can Architecture Really Do Nothing? Lefebvre, Bloch, and Jameson on Utopia

embody the political aspiration for radical change and transfiguration.” For him, Utopia is mostly critical negation of what is, as opposed to Lefebvre’s affirmation of historic Mediterranean towns as generative models for (a future) “concrete utopia.” Still, like Lefebvre, Jameson locates utopian possibility in everyday life: Perhaps we can see whether any of the new forms we have imagined might secretly correspond to new modes of life emerging even partially. Perhaps indeed we might start to do this at the existential level, at the level of daily life, asking ourselves whether we can think of spaces that demand new kinds or types of living that demand new kinds of space.17 More so than Jameson, Lefebvre offers architects promising methods for overcoming the ideological “crisis of architecture” (as Tafuri put it) by recollecting the sources of architectural significance in the everyday and in use. Tafuri’s insights are useful right up to the dead-end of his pessimistic claim that the present is a prison house: Indeed, the crisis of modern architecture is not the result of “tiredness” or “dissipation.” It is rather a crisis of the ideological function of architecture. The “fall” of modern art is the final testimony of bourgeois ambiguity, torn between “positive” objectives and the pitiless self-exploration of its own objective commercialization. No “salvation” is any longer to be found within it: neither wandering restlessly in labyrinths of images so multivalent they end in muteness, nor enclosed in the stubborn silence of geometry content with its own perfection.18 According to Jameson, “Tafuri’s is a peculiarly frustrating position that we would at least like to try to transcend,” because it pronounces that nothing can be changed “until we are in a position to change everything.” According to Jameson, for Tafuri we are “necessarily locked into our own system, so that even our fantasies of change reflect its internal logic, rather than our genuine discovery of something else, something radically different or other.”19 Inevitably, Lefebvre’s sustained inquiries into space, his more optimistic utopianism and his actual collaborations with architects, prove more useful. Although he describes himself as a “meteorologist” rather than “the cause of the storm,” Lefebvre’s writing is propositional, emphasizing action and articulating possible practices, whereas Jameson concentrates on explication (or diagnosis).20 Even if Jameson helps to transcend Tafuri and Lefebvre suggests more helpful methods, it would be premature to describe a building where political action takes shape and good legislation is occasionally forged as political architecture in a revolutionary sense, even if clearly political in an empirical sense: The political relationship of works of [architecture] to the societies they reside in can be determined according to the difference between replication (reproduction of the logic of that society) and opposition (the attempt to establish the elements of a Utopian space radically different from the one in which we reside).21 221

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While Jameson argues that achieving radical architecture is unlikely, Lefebvre introduces practical approaches for dealing with apparent total closure, with a method organized around confounding attempts to produce systems. His metatheoretical approach engaged in cracking open theoretical problems beyond the limitations of apparent coherence. As such, his method entails undermining method as its own reward. The crack perhaps best captures the character of Lefebvre’s method. For him, representations of totality are either fictional, or effects intended to conserve fragile conditions with displays of power or permanence. Lefebvre did not believe any condition is either eternal, or inevitable, which means that radical transformation need not wait for history, or be total. In this sense, Lefebvre’s revolutionary utopian approach was pragmatic, entailing concrete testing on the ground and tolerance of incremental change. It also takes advantage of previously identified cracks in conditions (objects or systems) of apparent total closure. Although projected forward (to a time after capitalist spatial practices), imagined future change begins in the past (before present conditions took hold). Lefebvre outlined this as “starting from that present, working our way back to the past and then retracing our steps,” which he described as the most promising method for understanding “the preconditions and processes involved” in “the genesis of the present.”22 According to him, this approach makes it possible to “become progressively more dialectical without posing a threat to logic and consistency.”23 Although present conditions could be analyzed, deeper understanding of their genesis, and thereby identification of workable alternatives, depends on identifying moments of relative rupture, concentrating on what changed in a given crucial period and how that transformation was mediated. In every instance, specificity and expansiveness are required to make links “with lived experience, with practice, and with a radical critique.” Equally, “scepticism towards all specialist dogmas, and notably towards the methods—the operational (or supposedly operational) concepts—used by particular specializations” is necessary to produce non-reductionist analyses—aligned with future imaginaries of alternative social spaces.24 Crucially, Lefebvre argues: The science of space should therefore be viewed as a science of use, whereas the specialized sciences known as social sciences […] partake of exchange, and aspire to be sciences of exchange—that is, of communication and of the communicable. In this capacity, the science of space would concern itself with the material, sensory and natural realms, though with regard to nature its emphasis would be on what we have been calling a ‘second nature’: the city, urban life.25 Confounding method and breaking through the “carefully drawn property lines” of specialists are necessary for avoiding reductionism: a precondition for dealing with the ineffability of the “material, sensory and natural realms” of urban life.26 Otherwise, the “truly essential” that inevitably “gets through the ‘grid’” of limited analyses will be missed, along with the “real or possible acts” that take place in social space.27 222

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Lefebvre described his effort to construct a permeable method supple enough to account for social space—thereby contributing to its future creation—as a metaphilosophy, “grounded in philosophy but” that opens it “up to the ‘real’ and the possible”:28 The task of metaphilosophy is to uncover the characteristics of the philosophy that used to be, its language and its goals, to demonstrate their limitations and to transcend them. Nothing of the old philosophical quest will be abolished in the process—neither its categories, nor its basic themes, nor the set of problems with which it concerned itself.29 Lefebvre asserts that “philosophy proper came to a halt when faced with contradictions that it had called forth but could not resolve”—in particular the split of space “into intelligible […] and unintelligible.” Because they constitute the “speculative, contemplative and systematizing” content of the “philosophical attitude,” Lefebvre argues that philosophy “cannot surmount these splits and separations,” largely because it is “cut off from social practice and active political criticism.” He believes, “Western philosophy has betrayed the body,” which is why recuperation of concrete physical experience is central to his project.30 Just as Western metaphysics imagined an existence after the body, Lefebvre imagines a mode of thinking after philosophy and Western metaphysics that recovers physique from abstraction. Rhythmanalysis is the method he developed for achieving this. It analyzes everyday life by concentrating on temporal rhythms in the three dimensions of urban space, architecture, and the city, rather than on the linearity of clockwork time: The whole of (social) space proceeds from the body […]. The genesis of a far-away order can be accounted for only on the basis of the order that is nearest to us—namely, the order of the body. Within the body itself, spatially considered, the successive levels constituted by the senses (from the sense of smell to sight, treated as different within a differentiated field) prefigure the layers of social space and their interconnections. The passive body (the senses) and the active body (labour) converge in space.31 Here, the tension between use and exchange developed through opposition between visualization and bodily experience, abstract and the concrete, and disembodied theory and practice is sharpened.32 According to Lefebvre, new spaces for newly disalienated social life depend on the rhythmanalytical method to determine their contours and to make them imaginable (again): The analysis of rhythms must serve the necessary and inevitable restoration of the total body. This is what makes ‘rhythm analysis’ so important. It also explains why such an approach calls for more than a methodology or a string of theoretical concepts, more than a system all of whose requirements have been satisfied.33

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Space: Abstract and concrete Although “space” in English is usually contrasted to “place,” with the former thought of as abstract and the latter as concrete, in other times and places “space” also referred to “the making of a certain extent,” “a period of time, distance, or interval” as well as to “an area,” including “distance, or stretch of time,” which suggests that “space” and “place” were once synonymous. Accordingly, the idea of space as abstract, infinitely extensible, and interchangeable is relatively recent and may serve an ideological purpose. According to Lefebvre: Capitalism and neo-capitalism have produced an abstract space that is a reflection of the world of business on both a national and international level, as well as the power of money and the politique of the state. This abstract space depends on vast networks of banks, businesses, and great centers of production. There also is the spatial intervention of highways, airports, and information networks. In this space, the cradle of accumulation, the place of richness, the subject of history, the center of historical space—in other words, the city—has exploded.34 In opposition to abstract space, specificity is the most significant characteristic of utopian space. Concreteness (the practical and social diversity of everyday life) is distinguished from abstractness (of homogeneous globalized neoliberal spaces, where social and architectural difference is suppressed). According to Lefebvre, “abstract spaces” threaten to spread “across the planet” to ultimately erase “all spatial differences,” including “those that come from nature and history as well as those that come from the body, ages, sexes, and ethnicities.”35

Architecture as structuring space Architecture shapes and structures space, mostly producing it in the image of the cultural dominant. While the discipline and popular media prefer to see production in terms of architects’ supposed sovereignty, Lefebvre alerts us to it as multi-determined, including by the ideological constellations laying claim to any building’s existence. According to him, “there is an ideology of space” because it is “a social product,” despite conventional characterizations of space as “given as a whole in its objectivity.”36 The crucial difference between architects who represent “difference” and those who provide structures for its emergence turns on distinctions between conceptions of “space as neutral,” or as “homogeneous,” and senses of it as “a historical product,” characterized by concentration on its contents, “users”—the real embodied individual people and communities that inhabit produced spaces.37 Apparent difference, however, is frequently a matter of novel forms or images alone, rather than by reconceptualizations of “use.” 224

Can Architecture Really Do Nothing? Lefebvre, Bloch, and Jameson on Utopia

Foster + Partners Sage (1997–2004) in Gateshead, England, and Enric Miralles’s Scottish Parliament (1999–2004) in Edinburgh, provide opposing examples. The former images difference, while the latter provides settings for its possibility. The architects of both buildings might acknowledge space as produced, but the Sage emphasizes “exchange,” in relation to city branding and culture-led regeneration, whereas the Scottish Parliament concentrates on “use.” Both structures may function well and be recognizable, but the Sage is “abstract” and “neutral,” and conceived of as “product,” while the Scottish Parliament is a “work” that is concrete and specific, presented for open appropriation, inhabitation, and use in developing alternative social and political processes. According to Lefebvre, “whereas a work has something irreplaceable and unique about it, a product can be reproduced exactly, and is in fact the result of repetitive acts and gestures.”38 As “a product,” the Sage harmonizes with the spatial practices of the cultural dominant. As “a work,” the Scottish Parliament—although inescapably caught up within the same processes as the Sage—is a more or less explicit attempt to subvert these according to its own critical aims, under the star of Utopia.39 Most architects have something to say about “context”—natural or constructed—but when “exchange” dominates, it is primarily conceived of as image, or as predetermined form, which is either accommodated or rejected. When “use” is emphasized, space is encountered as having “been fashioned and molded from historical and natural elements, but in a political way.” Such awareness brings with it acknowledgment of space as “political and ideological,” and as “a product literally populated with ideologies.”40 Here again, the Sage and the Scottish Parliament are helpful: the first has landed, while the second cultivates its natural, historical, political, and ideological context. While both sorts of architecture may benefit from awareness that “space […] is a social [as well as] a historical product,” the fullness of this knowledge—even at a preconscious level—distinguishes an empirically political architecture from a politically revolutionary architecture of difference.41 Dialectical rather than absolute, the oppositions introduced above are presented to encourage working within the tensions they produce.

Public space While Jameson outlines several reasons why a political architecture is unlikely, desires for settings of difference that structure alternative possibilities are enduring. For David Harvey architectural settings are central to political activities. He explains that openended social processes (political activity) require spatial closure (architectural settings) to take shape and unfold, with the achievements of utopian speculation a positive influence on configurations of both. For Harvey, the interrelationship between spatial “closure” and open-ended “social processes” establishes a form of “dialectical utopianism,” in which space and time are interdependent. The open-ended “both/and” condition of social processes develops temporally, whereas the “either/or” condition of closure is

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defined spatially. He asserts that each provides corrective counterbalances to problematic aspects of the other: the indeterminateness of social process in productive tension with the fixity of spatial closure, and vice versa.42 Harvey’s dialectical relationship between space, time, and social processes recollects Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis.43 Even if the creation of “a new space” is “the precondition of a new life,” for new spaces to emerge, alternative modes of production must take shape in tandem with transforming spatial practices as their precondition, while the entire process is dependent on Utopia.44 Space is key: “A revolution that does not produce a new space has not realized its full potential; indeed it has failed in that it has not changed life itself, but has merely changed ideological superstructures, institutions or political apparatuses.” Because space is the carrier of dominant ideologies, substantive change depends on its transformation. In our epoch, “abstract space” dominates, tending “towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities.” Inevitably, “a new space cannot be born (produced), unless it accentuates differences.”45 The spatial and performative logic of the shopping mall is the key example of abstract space, providing the model for almost all building types: institutional, governmental, commercial—from libraries and hospitals, to airports, schools and museums, to city centers. The spatial logic of shopping malls is an instrument through which capitalist spatial practices subjugate nearly all settings of life. Always connected so-called smartphones extend mall space into every crevice, all the time. Anesthetized to the eradication of any space not dedicated to consumption, the elimination of social space is a matter of—largely unacknowledged—urgency: Capitalist and neo-capitalist space is a space of quantification and growing homogeneity, a commodified space where all the elements are exchangeable and thus interchangeable; a police space in which the state tolerates no resistance and no obstacles. Economic space and political space thus converge toward the elimination of all differences.46 If dominant space converges “toward the elimination of all differences,” Lefebvre believed that “socialist space will be a space of differences.”47 Simply put, “a space of differences” accommodates a range of social diversity that abstract spaces of capitalist production inevitably exclude. As introduced earlier, the pre-capitalist spatial intricacies of traditional Mediterranean urbanism provided Lefebvre with sure models for spaces of difference, but are intended as radically generative critiques of capitalist spatial practices, rather than as directive.

Future imaginaries For space to be political in the revolutionary sense developed by Jameson, it would need to structure future possibilities that are not simply extensions of the present but rather articulate “better ways of being.” Although set in the immediate present, or imagined 226

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as inhabiting some historical past, the long duration of projects, from conception to construction, ensures that radical building may be normalized by the time it is inhabited. Architectural or urban projects historicize the present from the outset by “flashingforward” to the futurity of their realization. However, the dystopian tendencies of much twentieth- and twenty-first-century architecture and urbanism derive from disregarding this future orientation as simply an accident of production. Works that actually interrogate the utopian political imaginary and potential contents of a “future-as-past,” by devising scenarios of “future-histories” (difference, renewal, alternative possibilities achieved), provide more durable settings for possible political action. Associated with this, the research dimension of Utopia is largely absent from architects’ working methods. Questions about which places are best, or how inferior present conditions might be surpassed by superior future ones, are not usually pressing for architects. While conventional practices are hard-pressed to consider these issues because of artistic, intellectual, and economic constraints, so-called auteur practices ignore them as obstacles to expression. Schumacher’s conception of architecture as a closed system is an extreme example of this: “A mark of the self-referential closure of architecture is that design decisions are tightly knit to their kind and only obliquely/indirectly, i.e. en bloc, refer to external demands and circumstances. […]. Political, legal or financial concerns are not immediately architectural concerns.”48 Ignasi de Solà-Morales offers another example with his recollection that there was a “sense of disillusion experienced by many upon seeing [an Aldo] Rossi building constructed on an actual site and from concrete materials,” because “the process revealed in his drawings” is what interested him; “the construction of the building is” no more than “an episode in an architectonic discourse understood as autonomous and thus indifferent to construction or use.”49 Affirming this, Peter Eisenman asserts: The lasting debate is between architecture as a conceptual, cultural and intellectual enterprise, and architecture as a phenomenological enterprise— that is, the experience of the subject in architecture, the experience of materiality […] and so on. […] I’m not interested in […] the details or the grain of wood on one side or the colour of the material on the surface […]. I couldn’t care less.50 The prevalence of formalism is a historical condition, which makes it unsurprising that architecture would struggle to manifest a credible politically transformative dimension, even if it was not of little interest to most architects. As Bloch argues, architecture is “far more [a social creation] than the other arts,” which precludes its flourishing in what he calls “the late capitalist hollow space.”51 Embedded within prevailing conditions of production and consumption, architecture infrequently embodies the “anticipatory illumination” of Utopia Bloch identified in almost every other form of expression. However, the gaps between the possible futures of buildings and the authorial present of architects inextricably bind architecture to Utopia, although the lack of critical testing and research to identify the shortcomings of the present largely deprives buildings of their utopian potential. In contradistinction to 227

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Left pessimism, and Right triumphalism, Lefebvre asserted that the “system” ultimately does not have “a legitimate claim to immortality” because it is neither as “closed,” nor as “complete” as “systematizers” believe. Mostly, it “utterly lacks” the “cohesiveness” they would like to “bestow […] upon a totality which is in fact totally open—so open, indeed, that it must rely on violence to endure.”52 If apparent systemic totality is no more ironclad than any other attempt to organize reality, horizons of utopian hope and possibility open up in opposition to myths that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than alternatives to capitalism. If disengagement and fear are not the only options, credibly counter-hegemonic spaces must be conceivable. As Harvey argues, because the personal is political, and the political personal, changing oneself is interlinked to changing the world, which makes spaces for changing the social order dependent on individual and social processes, and cultivation of a utopian consciousness.53 But to build, architects must conform to the inextricable bond between the construction industry and business—the world as it is—in a way other artists need not, which is why Jameson—echoing Bloch—argues Utopia (political potential) mostly eludes architecture: How then could a building establish itself as critical and put its context in negative or critical perspective? The perplexity of our political reflections on architecture finds itself concentrated in this question: since architecture becomes being itself, how can the negative find any place in it? In the other arts, again, the negative is lodged in the very medium and the material.54 Paradoxically, the concrete material reality of constructed buildings, entailing multiple levels of collaboration, and commitments of vast sums of money, makes architecture an instrument of the cultural dominant—as a being of it—rendering the autonomy of negation illusory. If the “negative” is, as Jameson asserts, “lodged in the very medium and the material” of other arts, architecture is mostly pure affirmation (“being itself”): materially and experientially concrete. And yet, architects’ aspirations for transformation and difference endures, no matter how easily broken by tensions between utopian desire and economic reality. Reconciling hopes for “radical change” with architecture’s capture by the building industry usually results in either surrender to the dominant system, or escape into fantasy, which are both readily consumable. Following Jameson’s conception of transformative utopian politics as critiquing the present through positive negation of existing conditions, architecture becomes political when revolutionary. But only Utopia makes substantive negation imaginable, by giving what is missing a concrete form, no matter how fleeting.

The otherness of a political architecture Utopia is variously associated with “hope,” with “the education of desire,” and with “the desire for a different, better way of being.”55 As conceptualized here, Utopia’s radical otherness is construed as counter-hegemonic; enunciating imaginaries not subjugated 228

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to dominant cultural—economic, political, or aesthetic—authority. Recovering architecture’s utopian vocation for producing counter-hegemonic sites depends on cultivation of its social and political imaginaries. However, being ensnared within the webs that make construction possible limits architecture’s capacities for opening up horizons at the boundaries of the possible.56 While pessimism about architecture might seem conclusive, the task of rendering the possible-impossible of a utopian architecture imaginable and constructible falls to the discipline itself; beginning with subverting modes of production in design offices and on building sites, that in turn would transform practices. But present ideological and technical limits on the possibilities of a political architecture will prevail so long as academic and professional culture maintains a negatively dismissive and defensive relationship to Utopia. Only stubborn resistance to consumption and the capture of everything within the panoptic sweep of the system holds out the prospect of a political architecture of utopian negation. However, defining the contours of this “possible-impossible” architecture begins in the negative by outlining what it is not. Kenneth Frampton does something of this sort in describing “a pluralist architecture that is categorically opposed to the stylistic, hegemonic spectacularity of the neo-liberal worldview, that is to say the  falsely sensational and superficial aestheticism of our time.” According to him, the “ever-changing fashionable emphasis on the decorative or minimalist envelope” robs “architecture of […] its […] time-honoured mandate to organize and orchestrate the space of public appearance in a culturally significant manner.”57 No matter how compelling Frampton’s schema is, Utopia is missing from his plan for recuperating the loss of architecture’s “mandate.” In describing superlative conditions out of step with dominant trends, Frampton outlines a “not yet”; the anticipatory illumination of a possible future condition, all but unattainable now, and unthinkable without Utopia. During the interminable wait for a culturally transformative revolution, even socalled critical practices hold out little hope of liberating architecture from entrapment within “the hollow space” of capitalism. Inevitably, the putatively alternative spaces of critical architecture illuminate little more than futility. Keen observer of the neo-avantgarde, K. Michael Hays ascribes architecture’s political superficiality to “a reluctance to treat in any specific way mass cultural and ideological formations,” which translates into works rarely evincing “the differentiated spaces one might ask of an architecture against hegemony.” In his estimation “contemporary projects have, for the most part, remained remarkably silent on specific questions of power, […] and the actual experiences of subjects in contemporary society.” Inevitably so, when “promises of destabilization […] and differentiated spaces remain apolitical because unparticularized and ahistorical,” as “a symptom of the […] prevalent cynicism about architecture’s reforming and communicative powers, and of the general confusion about what […] critically conscious architects […] should be doing.”58 Confusion about architecture’s vocation might suggest that beating a total retreat from the field of material realization and concrete practice is the only road to autonomy—confirmed by the abstract utopian 229

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pleasures of “paper architecture” (“whose domain is the gallery, the journal, and the jewelry boutique”).59 However, as Jameson observes, paper architecture offers only compensatory semblances of dissent, or utopian praxis; while remaining entrapped within “the world system,” paper architecture […] reflects both the attempt and the impossibility of doing this. That is, if it’s only in imaginary space that one can project some alternative, then this says something about real space and real possibilities. Given the force of the world system today, it becomes harder and harder to imagine this alternative, or utopian, space concretely.60 Although the negation (of practice) and pleasures (of being free) promised by paper architecture might make its claims to autonomy credible, Jameson suggests that such visionary activities do little more than maintain what Tafuri called false “hopes in design.”61 Rejecting Utopia deprives architecture of a crucial source of critical consciousness by obscuring questions about the shape concrete spaces of difference might actually take. Arguably, convincingly counter-hegemonic architecture is inconceivable without Utopia, but authorial intent is only one component of what makes a building politically transformative. The primary source is the work itself, deciphered, mostly preconsciously, through bodily experience. Although utopian architecture is above all else a form of hope, rather than a predictive method; reflecting on what it is not uncovers traces of what it could be, identifiable in a limited number of works, mostly only in parts. While Lefebvre makes some suggestions about how to construe Utopia as method, development of the topic is relatively new, emerging as necessary after 1991, when the claim that “there is no alternative” to capitalism, to the free market, or to neoliberalism took on the character of natural law. As Jameson observes, in these times, “utopian” comes “to be a code word on the left for socialism or communism,” mirroring its earlier, and persisting, association “on the right […] with ‘totalitarianism’ or, in effect, with Stalinism.”62 As construed here, “Utopia” is code for commitment to progressive transformation and stubborn adherence to its possibility. Within Utopian Studies, utopia as method is crucial for imagining practices at the edges. Sociologist Ruth Levitas, who concentrates on social exclusion, offers a definition of Utopia as method that provides architects with a good place to begin: Utopia as method is not and cannot be blueprint. Utopian envisioning is necessarily provisional, reflexive and dialogic. […]. The utopian alternative is to think where we might want to get to and what routes are open to us. But if we know that our hopes for the future are indicative projections of what might be, we know too that these are always coloured by the conditions of generation.63 No matter how much architects might believe this already suffuses their design ethos, the expectations of professional education, the burdens of professional registration, and marketplace demands quickly transform it into a self-serving myth, rather than a substantive claim, no matter how well meaning.64 Moreover, whereas Utopia as method, 230

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in the way Levitas construes it, suggests preoccupation with “we” (the social), architects tend to concentrate on “I” (the individual), whether the “I” of imagined artistic creation (the architect), or the “I” of the client, or (external demands) of the developer, or even the “I” of some idealized universal “user,” so generalized as to become a largely meaningless abstraction of individuals and communities. If architects engage Utopia as method, the tension produced between it and the realities of the discipline and production is potentially productive. But defining what utopian architecture is is problematic; risking either descending into matters of taste or doing violence to the concept by instrumentalizing it. Utopia’s unattainability, and prohibitions on its representation, presents additional problems.65 Nevertheless, four buildings with discernible utopian qualities do come to mind. Chronologically, Carlo Scarpa’s Museo di Castelvecchio (1957–64; 1968–9; 1973–5) in Verona is a unique setting of disalienation that confounds temporal splits between ancient and modern, and between tradition and innovation, through a mode of spatial organization emplotted across discontinuous fields of experience and forms. Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum (1989–2001) in Berlin is an unexpected manifestation of hope and continuity against catastrophe. The utopian content of the building is discernible in the tension between authorial intent and bodily experience. Nothing could be more unlikely than such a building in its specific location—the unlikelihood of which becomes more pronounced with each passing year. Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s American Folk Art Museum (1998–2001, demolished 2014) in New York was a visionary building actually constructed in Midtown Manhattan on a street dominated by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and corporate architecture. It was decisively out of step with both. Best known for its striking metal façade, its interior arrangement came closer than almost any other constructed building to realizing the spatial and social implications of Giovanni Battista Piranessi’s Carceri suite of etchings, as a critique of modernity, which has had a profound influence on the design and theory of architecture since publication of the Second State in 1761. The Folk Art building was always a significant risk, which makes its demise unsurprising, especially because unassimilable to the expansion imperatives of MoMA. Most significant, however, is that it ever existed at all. Lastly, Miralles’s Scottish Parliament, introduced earlier, confounds expectations of a building dedicated to national identity and governance by establishing an anticipatory illumination of a better nation, which dares inhabitants to live up to its challenge.

Something missing If, as Levitas argues, “[t]he utopian alternative is to think where we might want to get to and what routes are open to us,” the quest must begin with absence as a gnawing presence, bound up with nagging feelings that something is not quite right. But how

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could things be better? According to Bloch, the object of Utopia is “something missing”; its goal is identification of the missing something and setting about to fulfill it. Utopia is also the method for accomplishing this. As Bloch observes, “the essential function of utopia is a critique of what is present.”66 As both a mode for critiquing the present and the ultimate aim of that critique—to imagine things otherwise, and to work toward realization—Utopia is a “process” rather than a “picture” (or a blueprint), as it is so often construed in architecture. Utopia thus refers to desired outcomes rather than to the prescription of specific results, even if those may be its aim. As such, Bloch prohibits depictions of Utopias. Even if achievement is as impossible as representation, Utopia is not only about what is not, or what it is against. According to Bloch, “every criticism of imperfection, incompleteness, intolerance, and impatience already with doubt presupposes the conception of, and longing for a possible perfection.”67 He identifies both the criticism of imperfect existing conditions and the adjunct longing for perfect ones with “hope”, as the source of all transformative political engagement. But as Bloch reminds us, because hope risks always ending in tears, it cannot be disentangled from the possibility of disappointment: Hope is the opposite of security. It is the opposite of naïve optimism. The category of danger is always in it. This hope is not confidence … […]. If it could not be disappointed, it would not be hope. […]. Otherwise it would be cast in a picture. […]. [H]ope is critical and can be disappointed. […] Hope is surrounded by dangers, it is the consciousness of danger and at the same time the determined negation of that which continually makes the opposite of the hoped-for object possible. […]. There would not be any process at all if there were not something that should not be so.68

Notes 1

Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City, in Henri Lefebvre: Writings on Cities, trans. E. Kofman and E. Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, [1968] 1996), 150. 2 Fredric Jameson, “Is Space Political?,” in Anyplace, ed. C. Davidson (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995), 191–205. 3 Ibid., 191, 192. 4 Ibid., 192. 5 Ibid., 192–3. 6 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1954] 1995), I, 18. 7 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, [1974] 1991), 75–8. 8 Ibid., 41, 96, 98, 127, 286. 9 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, [1970] 1997), 32. 10 Ibid.

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11 Ibid. 12 Bloch, “Building in Empty Spaces,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. J. Zipes and F. Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1959] 1988), 190. 13 For more on Koolhaas and Aldo van Eyck, see Nathaniel Coleman, “Bergerweeshuis Orphanage: Aldo van Eyck,” in The Companions to the History of Architecture, trans. D. Leatherbarrow and A. Eisenschmidt (Oxford: Wiley, 2017), IV, Ch. 31; Coleman, Lefebvre for Architects (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015); Coleman, Utopias and Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge 2005). 14 For more on this, see Coleman, “The Myth of Autonomy,” Architecture Philosophy 1, no. 2 (2015), 157–78. 15 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 59, 190. 16 Lefebvre, “Reflections on the Politics of Space” (1970), in Lefebvre, State, Space, World: Selected Essays, Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden (eds.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 167–84 (174). 17 Jameson, “Is Space Political?,” 196–7. 18 Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1973] 1976), 181. 19 Jameson, “Is Space Political?,” 195–6, 202. 20 Lefebvre, “Reflections,” 181. 21 Jameson, “Is Space Political?,” 196. 22 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 66. 23 Ibid., 67. 24 Ibid., 268, 368. 25 Ibid., 368. 26 Ibid., 108, 368. 27 Ibid., 160, 144. 28 Ibid., 368. 29 Ibid., 405. 30 Ibid., 405, 406, 407. 31 Ibid., 405. 32 Ibid., 406. 33 Ibid., 405. 34 Lefebvre, “Space: Social Product and Use Value,” trans. J.W. Frieberg, in Lefebvre, State, Space, World, 187. 35 Ibid., 188–9. 36 Ibid., 188. 37 Lefebvre, “Reflections,” 171. 38 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 70. 39 Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review 25 (2004): 35–54. 40 Lefebvre, “Reflections,” 170–1. 41 Ibid., 171. 42 David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 182–96. 43 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004). See also, Coleman, Lefebvre for Architects, 91–123. 44 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 306. 45 Ibid., 52, 54. 46 Lefebvre, “Space,” 192. 47 Ibid. 48 Patrik Schumacher, “The Autopoeisis of Architecture,” in LATENT UTOPIAS— Experiments within Contemporary Architecture (Vienna: Springer, 2002). Available online 233

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at: http://www.patrikschumacher.com/Texts/Autopoeisis.htm (accessed August 2, 2018). For discussion of other examples, see Coleman, “The Myth of Autonomy”; Coleman, Materials and Meaning in Architecture: Essays on the Bodily Experience of Buildings (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 49 Ignasi de Solà-Morales, “From Autonomy to Untimeliness” (1991), in Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture, trans. Graham Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 77. 50 Peter Eisenman, Iman Ansari, “Interview: Peter Eisenman,” The Architectural Review 26 (2013). Available online at: https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/interview-petereisenman/8646893.article. (accessed August 2, 2018). 51 Bloch, “Building in Empty Spaces” (1959), in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. J. Zipes and F. Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 189–90. 52 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 11. 53 Harvey, Spaces of Hope. 54 Jameson, “Is Space Political?” 196. 55 See Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1954–9] 1995); Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Oxford: Peter Lang, [1990] 2009), 200, 209. 56 Bloch, “Building in Empty Spaces,” 190. 57 Kenneth Frampton, “Towards an Agonistic Architecture,” Domus 972 (September 2013). Available online at: http://www.domusweb.it/en/op-ed/2013/10/03/_towards_an_agonistic_ architecture.html (accessed January 30, 2017). 58 K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 283, 286–7. 59 Ibid., 286. 60 Fredric Jameson and Michael Speaks, “Envelopes and Enclaves: The Space of Post-Civil Society (An Architectural Conversation),” Assemblage 17 (April 1992): 37. 61 Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 182. 62 Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” 35. 63 Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method, The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 218–19. 64 For relevant discussion of architectural education, see Nathaniel Coleman, “Utopic Pedagogies: Alternatives to Degenerate Architecture,” Utopian Studies 23, no. 2 (2012): 314–54; Coleman, “The Limits of Professional Architectural Education,” The Journal of Art & Design Education 29, no. 2 (2010): 200–12. See also Coleman, Lefebvre for Architects; and Coleman, Utopias and Architecture. 65 For an extended discussion of the projects introduced here and what constitutes a utopian architecture, see Coleman, Materials and Meaning in Architecture; Coleman, Lefebvre for Architects; Coleman, Utopias and Architecture. 66 Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno, “Something’s Missing” (1964), in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 12. 67 Ibid., 16. 68 Ibid., 16–17.

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Chapter 12

The Architecture of Political Renewal Mihaela Mihai

Introduction The architectural tissue of many contemporary communities is scarred. Highly mediatized, bombed, or burnt down, residential, commercial, or administrative buildings in Aleppo, Sarajevo, or Baghdad stand in for the complex violence of war in international publics’ imagination. Ruins are often used as evidence in public debates, but also international legal processes.1 Yet examining ruins need not be the only way of tracing the relationship between architecture and violence. Focusing on destruction renders us blind to the ways in which architectural constructions can be deployed to inflict political violence, more or less directly.2 Such constructions include military and defense installations (the Atlantic Wall or the Berlin Wall), colonial buildings (slave fortresses like Elmina Castle or Cape Coast Castle), large-scale monumental structures that misrepresent certain groups (Valle de Los Caídos or the Voortrekker Monument), and even whole cities built to create “a new man”—Bucharest’s systemic reinvention after the 1977 earthquake a case in point. This chapter moves away from the type of buildings that capture scholars’ imagination in history and cultural studies, namely, public monuments, mausoleums, statues, cemeteries, and other quintessentially symbolic buildings.3 While recognizing the weight of symbolic constructions and sites, I focus instead on the challenge of redesigning and resignifying a broader category of buildings that played an integral part in the geography of political violence and that cannot be reduced to symbolic functions. Once the community no longer identifies with the violent political project these constructions were associated with, they become scars on its architectural tissue, reminders of a shameful past, but also, I argue, resources for imagining a different future. In what follows I propose a set of ideas about how we could architecturally deal with scars in a way that valorizes them for broader processes of political renewal. The general questions motivating this chapter are: How can architecture contribute to processes of collective memory production in ways that feed both the hope in the possibility of a different future and the imagination necessary to outline it, without thereby erasing the violent past? What kind of spaces—symbolic and material—can we open for the flourishing of political visions for the future? By “symbolic” here I am referring to the discursive meanings associated with certain ways of organizing built

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space, while the term “material” covers the actual physical distribution of space through architectural interventions. To answer these questions, I propose to read architectural theory as political theory. Architects have often engaged with philosophical thought, searching for concepts and critical frameworks for their practice. Here I reverse this relationship and propose to read Lebbeus Woods’s contribution to architectural theory as critical political theory. I suggest it supplies us with fresh theoretical tools for problematizing the political temporality of renewal and by foregrounding architecture’s role within in. In dialogue with Woods, I strive to articulate a set of conceptual tools for thinking about the architecture that scars cities worldwide and their role in processes of transformation. The first section proposes an account of architecture’s agency that deflects overenthusiastic, unreflective celebrations of architecture’s ability to shape behavior. Instead, I argue that architecture serves as the infrastructure—simultaneously material and symbolic—of political memory. Moreover, it can also provide sources of meaning and physical spaces for collective practices of imagining and exploring a democratic future. The second section introduces Lebbeus Woods’s reflections on architectural scabs and scars and on how they can be transformed into democratically productive spaces through architectural interventions.4 While recognizing Woods’s contribution, I go beyond his focus on ruins to include other constructions associated with violent orders. The third section introduces two buildings that mark the skyline of two European cities—Hamburg and Vienna. The anti-aircraft Flak Towers in Esterházy Park and on Neuhöfer Strasse exemplify the architectural approach to scars advocated here, one that bridges the gap between a past of violence and an uncertain future of freedom. As massive military installations, the towers were an integral part of the Second World War’s devastating violence. It is perhaps because of their sheer size, location, and indestructibility that they forced communities to think about their possible reinvention, giving architects an opportunity to reimagine them as spaces of renewal. Converting them to include spaces of memory but not reducing them to memorialization, the Flaks lend themselves to various uses by visitors and inhabitants: green energy production, education, leisure, and sport. Refusing to read them as templates, I outline a possible way of rethinking architecture’s role in the wake of violence.

The agency of architecture What can architecture do in the wake of political violence? How can we deal with architectural scars, i.e. constructions marked by or used for violent purposes? This section reflects on the power of architectural form to provide propitious space for two interrelated processes: dealing with a painful past while simultaneously experimenting with visions of the future. I argue architecture can support—though not ensure— political renewal to the extent that it provides spaces for the productive interplay between political memory and the imagination. Architecture can serve as the midwife of political and social regeneration on condition that it facilitates the play of political 236

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improvisation, valorizing—rather than obscuring—the scars that mark the body politic, symbolically and materially. The relationship between architecture and the political constitutes a fertile object of inquiry. Simultaneously dependent on, and potentially transformative of politics, architecture “is of its nature assertive—it proposes a certain way of doing things, of bringing together or separating activities—and this will either create an order that affronts or one that enhances the quality of life.”5 Buildings influence and reflect individuals and communities symbolically, emotionally and sensorially, playing a major part in both collective identity and individuals’ sense of place.6 As Susan Bickford poignantly put it, “The built environment also constructs intersubjectivity.”7 Because of this power, and especially because of generally shared beliefs about its fixity and endurance,8 architecture has often been instrumentalized for sociopolitical engineering. Buildings attest to various political regimes’ desire to imprint a certain vision of the “We” on the country’s landscape and, more importantly, on the memory and bodies of their citizens. Because of the symbolic weight they can bear—weight that is exterior to architecture and is imposed on it—they are often targeted with violence: in being associated with an order, a “people,” or a vision of the good they are vulnerable to the violence that aims to destroy that order, “people,” or vision.9 While inviting certain ways of living and behaving, architecture never determines lives and behaviors unequivocally: “The relationship between the social and the spatial is never a direct one. There are strong limits to it, occasioned in part by the value of abstraction in architectural design that permits the same place to have multiple meanings and prevents any single meaning from becoming definitive.”10 The limited grip buildings have on people—dependent on the stability of a symbolic order predominant at a certain time and place—makes possible various ways of modifying and inhabiting them, ways that subvert, re-inscribe, and reinvent the built environment for new times, new relationships, and new political visions, without thereby necessarily erasing completely the traces of the past. The looseness of the relationship between architecture and politics cannot, however, be exclusively explained by reference to discourse. Architecture influences the sensorial experience of its inhabitants, facilitating or discouraging certain ways of moving and meeting in space. And yet, like its symbolic power, its physical capacity to influence behavior is limited and variable: “Architecture … has no kind of magic by which men can be redeemed or society transformed.”11 Buildings enjoy various degrees of malleability, a function of both their public signification and physical distribution of space: re-purposing faces different opportunities and obstacles depending on this double malleability. I examine how these two dimensions of architecture’s limited agency—symbolic and material—can be harnessed to foster political practices of imaginative political renewal in spaces that bear the marks of violence. Throughout, however, this is compatible with a rejection of unreflective or celebratory hope in the power of architecture. For a sense of hope to flourish in communities with a history of political violence, it requires spaces where imagination can delineate visions of a future-yet-unwritten, where new political relationships can be forged, and a political sense of feeling “at 237

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home” can grow again. However, political renewal does not happen in a vacuum: it remains anchored in the past. Visions of the future will of necessity be informed by past experiences, including experiences of violence and oppression: political memory provides the imagination with an anchorage and sources of meaning. The account of the imagination presupposed here is active: it is something individuals do, building on past experiences and memories. Keightley and Pickering vividly articulate this important insight.12 Imagination helps us make a coherent sense of our fragmented past and of our sense of ourselves as individuals who are members of social groups. Social frameworks of meaning influence how we remember and make coherent sense of our past via the imagination. This process is not, however, unidirectional: individuals’ reinterpreting their experience using social codes also contributes—through variable appropriations—new meanings to the social doxa. Remembering is a creative process, individually and collectively. Memories of the past are reinvented and adjusted to the necessities of the present. The past anchors a group in the face of the uncertain future, while the imagination experiments with new ways of practicing old virtues. In the wake of political violence, the first challenge is to reflect on how we could open a shared discursive space to contested and competing narratives about the past, the present, and the future. Architecture can serve as an armature, both symbolical and physical, for the interplay between memory and imagination in collective processes of creative, but no less contested, political renewal. The physical and symbolic parameters of scarred space influence how a community deals with their past in view of delineating a more hopeful future. Given architecture’s capacity to facilitate relationships and visions, it can be mobilized to serve as an infrastructure for plural voices, kaleidoscopic visions, and inclusive relations to emerge, thus contributing to the possibility of democratic politics. The mnemonic imagination works spatially and materially in more or less productive directions, depending on the malleability of the built environment, on the one hand, and the type of actors occupying it, on the other. In other words, the imaginative quest for new political visions and new forms of political association partially depends on the availability, physical shape, and symbolic baggage of the spaces within which individuals can innovate conceptually, feel emotionally safe, and sensorially build a “home” together. But under what conditions and how can the mnemonic imagination work productively within the scars? To answer this question, I now turn to the work of an architect who made post-catastrophic reconstruction the focus of his work: Lebbeus Woods.

Scars and the mnemonic imagination: A sketch for an alternative future Refusing to see architecture as merely a backdrop for action, Woods assumes the built environment’s participation in our ever-changing social lives.13 In a social world marred by injustices and exclusions, Woods sees crises—war, capitalist oppression, natural 238

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disasters—simultaneously as catastrophes and opportunities for working on a painful history in view of fostering an egalitarian future. His writings on radical reconstruction provide a vision of how we might integrate a difficult past, without erasing or disguising it: a healthy preservation of scars of all kinds, an honest acceptance of what has happened, and a lucid reckoning with the need to start afresh. This vision is underpinned by a belief that architecture “pulls people together” and is “formative of a community, of its continual making.”14 Because of this power, architects must place “far greater emphasis on architecture’s responsibility for and role in political and social changes, and therefore on the architect’s personal reflectivity, research and responsibility.”15 Architecture’s role is that of a facilitator, a provocateur, and a helper: it can enable or obstruct, but it cannot—and should not aim to—determine “architects of the spaces within the walls do not make predictive designs. Rather, they produce visual evocations that, however precise and detailed, are intended only as heuristic aids, guides that will stimulate transformations by others.”16 “War” is understood by Woods generically to cover a variety of forms of destruction, from military violence, to natural disaster and capitalist erosion.17 War brings about the need—and the opportunity—to conceive of space in new ways, but also to build and inhabit it differently. In other words, new forms of subjectification and practices of living must develop, since war changes mental landscapes, bringing about the loss of the familiar, the predictable, the reassuring, the routinized. Architects will thus have to invent new physical spaces and modalities of constructing—technically but also ethically—so as to invite “new ways of moving or resting in space, new and always transforming relationships between both people and things.”18 In acknowledging the relationality and materiality of sharing a world, Woods gets us closer to understanding what it means to renew it politically and, implicitly, what it takes to cultivate political hope. However, Woods does not overvalue the power of the architectural form. It is up to those individuals who find themselves in the newly molded places to reinvent their relationships in ways that neither fully erase the past nor remain captive to it. He translates architecturally a rejection of the nostalgic uses of memory: restoration of the built environment that preceded the war is “a folly that not only denies the postwar conditions, but impedes the emergence of an urban fabric and way of life based on them.”19 Simultaneously, he rejects the idea of expunging the memories of loss and tragedy. History and its loss cannot be denied, vulnerability and failures must be accepted and used imaginatively to create a present in which the remembered meets the hoped for: Now there is no choice but to invent something new, which nevertheless must begin with the damaged old, a new that neither mimics what has been lost nor forgets the losing, a new that begins today, in the moment of loss’s most acute self-reflection.20 Renewal requires conceptual extension and reinvention—a process that, as we shall see, necessarily presupposes the interplay of memory and the imagination. Woods’s value 239

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for my argument lies in the fact that he pays heed to the material armature that might creatively bring these faculties together. But how exactly does architecture serve as enabler of renewal? “New ways of thinking, living and shaping space” can emerge from the combined effect of the tears created by explosions and fires, on the one hand, and the structures the architect injects in the spaces emerging between tears, on the other.21 Tears are unique in shape and history; their very existence can prompt conceptual and narrative, but also material– sensorial improvisation. Rejecting cosmetic uses of architecture, Woods introduces the concepts of scab and scar. Scabs refer to a first layer of architectural engagement with tears, whereas scars fuse “the new and the old, reconciling, coalescing them, without compromising either one in the name of some contextual form of unity.”22 Accepting the scar as something that is and cannot be undone amounts to taking responsibility for the past, for its losses and tragedies, but also a precondition for the possibility of a future that can grow from the torn tissue. Scars anchor and feed the imagination in ways that enable its creative encounter with memory. Therefore, the architect “must love history for the forms of hope it offers, but must also clear the air, even by the suspect means of transforming the sacred remnants of the past into disposable remnants for the future.”23 The future cannot be disconnected from history. However, history provides hope only with a frame, conceptual, and material resources, and not with fully fledged answers. The structures inserted between scars and scabs contain freespaces, which can no longer be occupied by old ways of living and thinking: They are, in fact, difficult to occupy, and require inventiveness in order to become habitable. They are not predesigned, predetermined, predictable or predictive … rather, they offer a dense matrix of new conditions as an armature for living as fully as possible in the present, for living experimentally.24 New meanings depend on improvisation within free spaces, and this involves the creative use of the imagination in common with others. It also requires individuals to collectively assume responsibility for the future. Woods argues for spaces where old hierarchies are replaced by heterarchical—egalitarian—relations between free individuals, committed to resuscitating the community though a joint effort: “Freespace has no function that can be identified in advance, but only a set of potentials for occupation arising from material conditions.”25 The material conditions, however, are not merely material: they also bear the traces of the symbolic order that brought them into being. Woods is committed to equality as an ordering principle for he believes that only the inhabitants of freespaces—driven by compassion and comradeship, ingenuity, and inventiveness—can build new knowledges that take root in the interstitial spaces between scars and scabs. Architecture stimulates unconventional activities, practices of discovery, and a confrontation with freedom. There is only one precondition: freespaces can stimulate radical hope to the extent that responsibility and power are shared collaboratively. 240

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While modest in its power, architecture is not, however, neutral: it aims to create spaces free of predetermined purposes and meaning, simultaneously inviting people to relate to each other as equals and urging them to remain anchored in scabs and scars—both symbolic and material. For Woods, architecture should aim to facilitate the development of a new sense of community from the alienation and isolation brought about by violence: civic cooperation is the only basis for reinvention and architecture can capture and sustain the new social “flows and floods.”26 Woods rejects grand visions, unified masterplans, and pre-packaged blueprints for common life as they exclude free improvisation by ordinary citizens who work and dream together. He writes: “Architects, in this sense, do not dictate a final product, but provide precise models and clear principles that the community can interpret and develop in built form with great subtlety.”27 Uncertainty is the preeminent feature of renewal. Radical architecture is one in which one does not yet know how to behave. Several metaphors capture the dynamism, the imaginative force and courage necessary for individuals to celebrate the unknown and create a world of freedom and flourishing after violence: it is the “itinerant,” the “Gypsies,” those who belong to “circuses” who can take up the task of renewal. The itinerant possess qualities that the static, the sentimental and the pathetic do not: they embrace the uncertainty characterizing new beginnings and experiment with scabs, scars and freespaces, constructing new values and new spaces within the existential remnants of war. Accepting and working with uncertainty is difficult; it requires eccentricity and a gusto for self-invention, spontaneity, and play.28 While Woods’s language embraces ambiguity, oscillating between the metaphorical and the literal, he makes it very clear that it is only through a head-on, creative confrontation with both the past’s symbolic weight and its materiality that hope can flourish again. The symbolic and the material are loosely—yet indisputably—connected, and they both affect visions, emotions, and individuals’ sense of a place, falling short of determining them. It is the very looseness of the connection between the symbolic and the material that makes it possible for the mnemonic imagination to open new horizons. Concepts like scars, scabs, and freespaces capture the indissoluble relationship between memory and the imagination, between meaning and materiality. Political hope in the possibility of new ways of organizing one’s community can flourish in freespaces where people can meet on an equal footing and together take responsibility for the uncertain future. While Woods’s project helps conceptualize more precisely architecture’s relation to the mnemonic imagination, I develop his claims in two directions. First, while the architect starts with an account of war that seems to accommodate an idea of scar as the result of construction, his reconstruction plans focus on destroyed architecture—by natural phenomena such as earthquakes (San Francisco), war (Sarajevo), and capitalist erosion (Havana). His scars emerge as the result of tearing, of explosions, fires, collapse—not of building. I acknowledge the significance of ruins but seek to expand the concept of scar to purposefully built architecture that participated in political violence. Focusing on ruins renders us blind to this other association between architecture and violence. As Herscher and Iyer Siddiqi write: “‘Spatial violence’ … may be understood not as something 241

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inflicted on architecture from the outside, but something that architecture inflicts even as it follows its own practices and protocols.”29 In focusing on ruins, Woods risks embracing the standard view, according to which architecture is a repository of memory and culture, targeted by external violence, obscuring how violence can be internal to architecture and how cultures of violence are embedded architecturally.30 Most evidently, torture centers, forced labor, or internment camps or military installations constitute the armature of political violence. The buildings introduced as case studies here have been built using enslaved labor, by a violent order, for belligerent purposes. Located within the fabric of cities, they too, I argue, constitute scars that need addressing architecturally. Second, a note on the agents of renewal. Those who can make the best of the freespaces the architect opens up do not come fully formed as “itinerant,” “Gypsy,”31 “circus people.” Woods tells us that collective reinvention is facilitated by an unfamiliar architecture which one does not yet know how to inhabit, but one which fosters equality. Therefore, courage and a shared appetite for conceptual, relational, and sensorial experimentation are necessary ingredients for efficacious efforts to catalyze political renewal. Yet while individuals’ prior experiences and existing dispositions will necessarily play a role, their improvisational practices will also respond and be shaped by entering the unfamiliar architecture together. Instead of thinking about courage and the appetite for experimentation as fully formed and preexisting the experience of freespaces, we need to acknowledge their potential stimulation and transformation through that very experience. Intuitively, transforming a building physically and symbolically triggers a change in how those inhabiting it conceive of it, but also of themselves as its inhabitants and users. Those who occupy freespaces might thus become more experimental, more courageous, more inventive because they do not know yet how to live in the freespace. Therefore, to fully account for architecture’s (however modest) force it is thus necessary to see processes of subjectification as open-ended and at least partially shaped by the material environment. The following section introduces two examples that give some concreteness to the ideas sketched above about the relationship between architecture, memory, imagination, and renewal. The buildings analyzed below, I argue, come closest to approximating our theoretical proposal in practice. They uncomfortably occupy rather prominent locations within public space. The tension between their very material existence and the meaning attached to them, on the one hand, and the democratic communities around them provided an opportunity to intervene architecturally in search of a different future that does not, however, repudiate the shameful past.

The towers During the Second World War, Germany built several Flak Towers (Fliegerabwehrkanonentürme)—massive, reinforced concrete structures used as platforms for anti-aircraft weaponry and ammunition storage. Berlin, Hamburg,

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and Vienna were chosen as sites, due to their strategic value. Designed by Friedrich Tamms, they were built by enslaved laborers. The Arenbergpark tower in Vienna— currently an art depot for the Museum of Applied Arts—still bears graffiti by its constructors, containing information about their nationality, working conditions, and despair. All towers were equipped with roof turrets for mounting heavy artillery.32 They were also meant to showcase the might of the German war machine and reassure civilians regarding the British bombing campaigns. They were built in what has been considered a neo-Romantic style, with hints of medievalism.33 Hitler had planned to have them covered in marble after the war, to give them a monumental function: the names of all German soldiers killed in battle would have been carved on the exterior walls.34 During the war, however, they were used exclusively for defense purposes: rather ineffectively against Allied air attacks,35 but also for stowing various goods, including artworks. They served as shelters during bombing raids: equipped to be self-sufficient, they could house thousands of civilians for extensive periods of time.36 Some of them incorporated fully functioning hospitals: the Berlin Zoo Flak Tower had ninety-five beds and two operating theaters.37 After the war, many could not be demolished without risk to the neighboring buildings. Consequently, they continue to dot urban landscapes today. I discuss two Flak Towers: one in Vienna’s Esterházy Park and another in Hamburg, on Neuhöfer Strasse. Both are scars on the face of postwar cities, into which architects have injected freespaces where memory and imagination come together to draw the contours of the future, while acknowledging the conceptual, emotional, and sensorial losses their own participation in the past war brought about. However, I do not intervene in debates over architectural conservation or memorialization.38 Nor am I motivated by pragmatic concerns about building re-use. The towers are discussed with a view to pointing out how architecture might play a role—however limited—in facilitating the type of interplay between memory and the imagination that can feed a community’s renewal. The Flak Tower in Vienna’s Esterházy Park, one of the eight surviving towers in Europe, houses a large aquarium that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors yearly. Initially owned by the city, it is now the property of a non-profit organization. Until recently, it was generously subsidized by the city of Vienna.39 In 1998, the Austrian Alpine Club installed a 47-meter-tall climbing wall, affixing 4000 mountaineering grips and footholds on the outside of the tower.40 A café and an impressive viewing platform are located on the eleventh floor (Figure 12.1). The attempts to simultaneously reinvent the building while recognizing its dark memory are dated post-1988, the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss, a year of turbulent reckoning with Austria’s participation in the Shoah, punctuated by the Waldheim affair and the scandal around Thomas Bernhard’s Heldenplatz.41 These were all private initiatives, mainly by scientists, artists, and charities42—the “Gypsy,” “migrants,” and “circus” people that Woods celebrates—who take on the task of opening and inhabiting the freespace within the scar. 243

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Figure 12.1  Haus des Meeres, by Thomas Ledl (Own work). [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

The aquarium, climbing wall and café capture the imagination, allowing various appropriations by the visitors. Yet these future-oriented adaptations are anchored in the memory of the war. The very resilience of the tower makes it a stable reminder of the violence of the past, physically and discursively. A giant text box has been placed on top of the old Command Tower, proclaiming conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner’s message: “Smashed to Pieces … In the Still of the Night.” While the artwork hints at the tower’s original function, it remains sufficiently ambiguous to allow for a variety of interpretations. Hoisted on a tower remarkable for its invulnerability, the installation was initially meant to be temporarily exhibited during the Wiener Festwochen in 1991. However, due to public support, the installation became permanent. Dislocating the foundational myth that Austria had been Hitler’s first victim rather than its welcoming 244

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partner—the stairwell between the sixth and tenth floors hosts an exhibition entitled “Remembering Inside,” documenting the dark history of the tower. Another exhibition about the use of the towers in the Third Reich was initiated in 2009, benefiting from historian Marcello LaSperanza’s efforts to prevent any glorification of their technological qualities. The gravel at the bottom of the shark tank—one of the largest in Europe—is made of rubble from the refurbishment works. While various artists and organizations proposed to cover the façade of the tower (by draping, paneling or painting it), it has kept its original finish, as testimony to its past, both visually and kinesthetically.43 Thus, contrary to public intellectuals’ fears, as new ways of moving in the building, of inhabiting and appropriating it were invented in the last few decades, no elision of memory has happened. The insertion of new spaces within this architectural scar invites—without guaranteeing—a responsible dynamic between memory and the imagination. Climbing the tower on the exterior changes how one physically moves in relation to the building. Moreover, this is more than just a practical recuperation for public use of an indestructible structure: it suggests the need to work through and own—without ever fully mastering—an inescapable history of violence. While some have worried about the Alpine Club’s historically problematic anti-Semitic stance during the war,44 and the strong association between Austrian identity and the Alps,45 I argue that the nationalist subtext is neutralized, first, by its remaining unpaneled, and hence obviously not a mountain, but a war construction. The reference to the Alps is recuperated architecturally through a discourse of health and fitness that is not racialized. Second, on the inside, the public navigates among the various fish tanks in search of knowledge about the natural world, yet permanently reminded of the initial use of the building through the historical exhibit. The café on the top floor offers visitors a view over the city, while the art installation keeps reminding them that the searchlights of German heavy artillery had been searching the sky for enemy planes, to be “smashed in the still of the night.” Thus, a new space of meaning, one in which visitors encounter each other as equals, has opened interstitially within the scar. The architectural imagination is anchored in the past—for memory provides it with a variety of elements on which it can build, without thereby remaining its hostage. Memorialization projects are inserted between spaces dedicated to activities unrelated to war and violence, thus inviting a complex, multilayered experience. The tower confronts visitors symbolically and materially with the memory of past suffering, but also with reinvented references to symbols of Austrian identity, such as the Alps, technological capacity, and progress. The sources memory provides for the imagination are both related to the lifeworld that engendered and was destroyed by the war and the war itself as generative of new meanings. Simultaneously, however, it summons their imagination to find a way of navigating and inhabiting it in new ways, that go beyond its former, destructive use. The second Flak Tower is situated in Wilhelmsburg, Hamburg. Built in 1943, it too served as a platform for anti-aircraft artillery and sheltering civilians, although those defined as “undesirable” by the Nazi regime were refused refuge inside during bombing 245

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raids. It also housed a military hospital. After the war, the British tried to demolish it: six of its floors collapsed as the result of a controlled explosion.46 The attempt to obliterate the scar from the city’s landscape failed due to the resilience of the construction’s shell, but also because of worries regarding the potentially destructive effect of any further explosions on the neighboring residential areas. For the next four decades, only some of its areas were intermittently used, the structure gradually falling into disrepair. By the end of the twentieth century, the costs of demolishing it were estimated at between 5 and 12 million euro.47 In 2001, however, the tower was legally protected: its testifying to Germany’s role in the Second World War, but also to the Allies’ demilitarization efforts (as reflected in their dynamiting of the Tower) qualified it for preservation. In 2010, its conversion into a green power plant began, with great success. Consultation sessions with local residents and their representatives was a main feature of the process. The renovation was financed through the European Union’s Regional Development Fund and the Free Hanseatic City of Hamburg. As part of a greater development plan meant to provide the Elbe islands with renewable energy, the Flak Tower generates energy from the sun, biogas, wood chips, and waste heat from a nearby factory. It can, on its own, supply most of the homes in the district with heat and

Figure 12.2  Energiebunker Wilhelmsburg Südseite, by NordNordWest, Commons bysa-3.0 de. [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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electricity. It also feeds renewable power into the general electricity grid. The interior of the tower is occupied by a large heat reservoir of 2000 cubic meters, while its roof and sidewalls are covered in solar panels (Figure 12.2). Like the Viennese tower, it also features a café that boasts views of the city. A platform formerly used for smaller guns has been transformed into a panoramic viewing terrace. Recycled plastic chairs—the product of an activists’ program entitled “Social Plastic,”48 led by artist Gherhardt Bär and involving local pupils—can be found in the areas accessible to visitors. The Energiebunker was integrated in the International Building Exhibition.49 It received three awards for its imaginative reinvention of the war construction: the European prize for solar energy, “Solarpreis” 2013, the TGA Award in 2014, and an honorable mention by the Architectural Award “BDA Hamburg Architektur Preis” in 2014. The makeover of the building itself, as well as its integration into a local energy grid, is part of a much larger environmentally sustainable plan for the city.50 This second tower highlights how the architectural imagination hoped to provide new sources for a collective reflection on identity. From a structure built to serve as part of a war machine, the architects suggested its reinvention as a producer and receptacle of clean light and heat for an entire neighborhood. In their white paper, the designers explain their vision for the tower as connecting the past with a future,51 as a means to repurpose a protected building for the next generation. The concept behind the refurbishing of the building focuses on the sustainability and local devolution of energy production. A hope for an alternative future is projected onto the building, encouraging similar reactions from the users. This is a vision where environmental sustainability—and not war—is the main concern and focus of technological innovation. The value of technological capacity is attached to a new vision of the future. In this sense, the structure attempts to materialize an alternative vision of technological modernity. Emblematically, one of the roof openings through which the flak artillery was pointed at the sky is currently used for the metal pillars supporting the photovoltaic cell panels that cover the building (see Figure 12.3). As such, it is meant to inspire a radical hope in the possibility of a future where communities can balance energy needs against the protection of the environment. And yet, this vision and hope in a different future is moored in the unsavory history of the building. Unprecedented in its nature, the project raised important technical challenges, some of which could not be overcome without compromising the imperative of preservation. Paradoxically, it is because of these compromises that the architects were forced to avoid what Woods might call a nostalgic relationship to the past. While the main structure was preserved, it had to be reinforced with pillars and supporting walls, necessary for making the building safe again. The space inside was reconfigured to make room for the energy plant’s installations, but also for the public spaces. On the outside, the metal skeleton that supports the solar panels does not affect the general perspective of the building: it remains, in its monstrosity, as dominant as ever over the immediate neighborhood. By 2010 the façade had suffered so much damage that it could not be preserved in its entirety. Most of the shell was covered with rough, gunned concrete in order not to obscure its former violent use. Original observation windows 247

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Figure 12.3 Energiebunker Wilhelmsburg (vormals Flakturm VI) Ehemalige Geschützstellung, jetzt Verankerung des Gerüsts der Solarthermieanlage by Hinnerk Rümenapf. [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

and some sections of the original façade are visible at various places, including on the viewing platform, as scars upon the scar.52 Moreover, throughout the renovation, a public, interactive program of events entitled “Klotz im Park” (“Monstrosity in the Park”) was organized by the Wilhelmsburg and Hafen History Workshops. Through public events and discussions with members of the public, it collated and preserved memories that intersected with the history of the Flak Tower. Pupils from a neighboring school met and interviewed survivors who were children during the war.53 Some of the data collected is integrated in the bunker’s permanent exhibition, which currently occupies twenty different areas in the tower. It traces its history, from artillery platform, to ruin and rebirth. Both Flak Towers illuminate how architecture can simultaneously preserve memory through scars, anchoring the imagination and allowing for the insertion of new freespaces where inhabitants could potentially learn to think and move differently, and especially to hope and improvise. Architecture proposes a reinvention and adjustment of old, tainted values—Alpine identity, technological prowess, progress—to new needs, aspirations and realities. War buildings are reconfigured in an attempt to render them supportive of peaceful purposes: sustainability and learning, sport, public health, and art. 248

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In embracing new orders of meaning and changing the distribution of space inside, the bunkers can be read as innovative ways of integrating a shameful past in the landscape of the city, expressions of an effort to stimulate new relations and senses of place. The two towers can be interpreted as instantiations of political renewal processes which, while grounded in an acknowledged history, reach out into a different future, without any guarantee of a sustainable success.

Conclusion “All architecture functions as potential stimulus for movement, real or imagined. A building is an incitement to action, a stage for movement and interaction. It is one partner in a dialogue with the body.”54 I have argued that architecture can play a role in sustaining political renewal and hope in the possibility of a different future in the wake of political violence. It constitutes an element of the physical and symbolic infrastructure that can either enable or stifle new visions, relations, and a new sense of place. Under certain conditions, it anchors improvisation trough the scabs and scars of the past, while simultaneously integrating them into freespaces of freedom and uncertainty. Before concluding, I address several potential objections. First, one might wonder about this proposal’s scope of applicability: ethically speaking, what buildings lend themselves to such interventions, and which buildings do not? I have not aimed to articulate a formula that could be applied across the board to all architectural scars. Of course, it is very difficult to draw a clear line between the buildings that ethically require to be “frozen” as purely commemorative sites—the Nazi extermination camps being the most evident example—and those that could ethically allow for the architectural interventions I have proposed. Which buildings can support architectural intervention will ultimately be a matter of political decision-making, hopefully one that is inclusive of the ethically relevant voices—victims’, survivors’, and their descendants’. To the extent that such a decision supports architectural work on the scar, I hope to have provided some conceptual tools and programmatic ideas about how we can prop political renewal and practices of freedom architecturally. Second, is the past understood here merely as tragedy and loss? The answer to this question must necessarily be contextual. The past constrains how we can imagine the future, as our imagination never starts from scratch. According to Woods, the scar is composed of both old and new tissues. The Flak Towers repurpose ideas of progress and technological development for a different, peaceful future. However, these ideas cannot always be neatly separated from political violence itself as the other source of meaning for the imagination. Moreover, in some contexts past orders of meaning engendered violence, in others they were destroyed by external forces. Which concepts, ideas, references, relationships, and structures are recoverable for a future of peace and democracy is a function of their conceptual malleability and compatibility with values

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of equality and freedom. Imagination will work with meanings created by reconfiguring elements of lost worlds, as well as meanings generated by violence itself. Third, a critic could plausibly point out that our account of egalitarian occupations is naïve in that it disregards architecture’s positioning in hierarchical systems of patronage, ideology, and capitalist production. While acknowledging that architecture—as any other system of knowledge—is part of power constellations, I have pointed out what architecture can do and has sometimes done. To overly cynical and deterministic accounts of architecture’s servility to ideological and consumerist imperatives, I oppose examples of how freedom can—and has been—architecturally invited. Moreover, in discussing the loose and limited connections between the symbolic and the material, I hope to have demystified simplistic understandings of the relationship between dominant orders of meaning and the built environment, thus opening the way for imaginative resignification and re-invention of scars of all kinds. Lastly, one could argue that the argument introduced here is overly optimistic in that it assumes individuals’ willingness and capacity to imaginatively occupy them. In the wake of violence, hatred and distrust will most likely characterize social relationships. At best, agonistic encounters, contestation, and negotiation will dominate in the freespace. There is an ineliminable risk, however, that the political visions inserted in freespaces might result in new forms of violence, intentionally or inadvertently.55 However, I have emphasized that architecture can invite and facilitate, but not determine action. I have argued against an image of the architect as a demiurge and I acknowledge the risks associated to any program centered on freedom and improvisation. Architecture’s invitation needs to be met half way through by individuals committed to living together freely and equally. Even under propitious circumstances, the risk cannot be eliminated: unintended consequences, inescapably related to freedom, might undermine the inhabitants’ vision. But that is something the architect—as well as the political theorist—needs to resign herself to.

Notes 1

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Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2017 Critical Theory Conference, Czech Academy of Sciences, and the 2018 meeting of APSA—I thank all participants for their suggestions. Special thanks are owed to Duncan Bell who invited me to write on this topic in the first place and to Tahl Kaminer, who provided extensive comments. Bernardo Zacka, Mathias Thaler, Hugo van der Merwe, Lawrie Balfour, Lukas Slothuus, Maša Mrovlje, Louis Fletcher, Nadim Khoury, Gisli Vogler all made productive suggestions. An earlier, longer and slightly different version of this chapter was published as “Architectural Transitional Justice? Political Renewal within the Scars of a Violent Past,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 12, no. 3 (2018), 515–36. For a critical account the use of ruins as evidence, see Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (New York: Zone, 2017).

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2

Herscher proposes that architectural construction can inflict symbolic, economic, or political violence thorough its enactment of a certain political vision. Andrew Herscher, “Warchitecture,” Assemblage 41 (2000): 31; Andrew Herscher, Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Andrew Herscher and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “Spatial Violence,” Architectural Theory Review 19, no. 3 (2014): 269–77; Andrew Herscher, “Warchitectural Theory,” Journal of Architectural Education 61, no. 3 (2008): 35–43. 3 Sanford Levinson, Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Duncan Bell, “Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Memory,” Constellations 15, no. 1 (2008): 148–66; Annie Coombes, History after Apartheid (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Cynthia Kros, “Rhodes Must Fall: Archives and Counter-Archives,” Critical Arts 29 (2015): 150. 4 I am aware that Woods’s drawings never materialized in built form. I see accounts that focus exclusively on an architect’s built output as unnecessarily impoverishing our understanding of architecture as institutionalized practice. 5 Colin St John Wilson, Architectural Reflections: Studies in the Philosophy and Practice of Architecture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 25. 6 Robert Yudell, “Body Movement,” in Body, Memory, and Architecture, ed. Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 57–76. 7 Susan Bickford, “Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship,” Political Theory 28, no. 3 (2000): 355–76. 8 Levinson, Written in Stone; Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion, 2007). 9 For analyses of cultural cleansing targeting architecture, see Bevan, The Destruction of Memory. Herscher argues that often this symbolic meaning is attached to architecture by its attackers, that it does not preexist their being targeted. See Andrew Herscher, “In Ruins: Architecture, Memory, Countermemory,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 73, no. 4 (2014): 464–9; Herscher, “Warchitectural Theory.” 10 Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity (London: Yale University Press, 2008), 9. 11 For a classic on architectural determinism’s falsity, see Maurice Broady, “Social Theory in Architectural Design,” Arena 81, no. 898 (1966): 149–54. 12 Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering, The Mnemonic Imagination Remembering as Creative Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012). 13 Rod Henmi discusses Woods’s drawings and models in a retrospective exhibition: “Lebbeus Woods: Constructing Worlds,” Journal of Architectural Education 67 (2013): 331–2. 14 Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), 19. 15 Ibid., 22. 16 Woods, 13. Woods famously proclaimed that “the architect as a controlling figure is a tyranny that is over.” Cited in Jack Self, “Rendering Speculations, London, UK,” Architectural Review 228 (2010): 94–5. 17 Woods, Radical Reconstruction, 25. 18 Ibid., 13. 19 Ibid., 15. The post-Second World War restoration of Warsaw’s Old Town or that of Dresden’s Cathedral reflect architectural nostalgia. 20 Ibid., 27.

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21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 16. 23 Ibid., 29. 24 Ibid., 16. 25 Ibid., 26. 26 Ibid., 29. 27 One might read this as the leader’s return in another guise. However, the architect trusts the task of reinvention to the community’s members, no vision is imposed on them. If we can at all speak of Wood’s utopianism, his is a modest, grounded, democratic, and open-ended utopia. 28 See also his “Wild City,” Architectural Design 69, no. 7/8 (1999): 70–3. 29 Herscher and Iyer Siddiqi, “Spatial Violence,” 269. 30 This is Woods’s term. 31 For an ambitious version of this argument, see Herscher, “Warchitectural Theory,” 39. 32 Michael Foedrowitz, The Flak Towers in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna, 1940–1950 (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 1998). For a general discussion of bunkers in warfare, especially the Atlantic Wall, see Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009). 33 Steven Zaloga, Defense of the Third Reich 1941–45 (Botley: Osprey, 2012). 34 Robin Stummer, “Secret History,” The Statesman, 2008. 35 For a military analysis, see Edward Westermann, Flak: German Anti-Aircraft Defenses, 1914–1945 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001). 36 J. E. Kaufmann, H. W. Kaufmann, and Robert Jurga, Fortress Third Reich: German Fortifications and Defense Systems in World War II (Cambridge: DaCapo, 2003). 37 Foedrowitz, The Flak Towers, 7. 38 Using scars exclusively for memorialization forecloses improvisation and experimentation by fixing meaning. Thus Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial, Ground Zero and the German Reichstag are not freespaces, as proposed here. 39 For the management structure, see Artware Multimedia GmbH, “HAUS Des MEERES Allgemeine Informationen,” accessed November 27, 2017, https://www.haus-des-meeres. at/Allgemein-Info.htm. 40 Shane Peterson, “Projection Spaces: Manifestations of the Alpine in the Reception of the Austrian ‘Heimatfilm Echo Der Berge’ and of the Vienna Flak Towers,” Austrian Studies 18 (2010): 124–40. 41 For a discussion of 1988’s impact on Austrian identity, see Mihaela Mihai, “Denouncing Historical ‘Misfortunes’: From Passive Injustice to Reflective Spectatorship,” Political Theory 42 (2014): 443–67. 42 Peterson, “Projection Spaces,” 138. 43 Ibid. 44 Bruce Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 45 The debate opposes those who worry about the deletion of history through parasitic architecture and those who fear the entrenchment of nationalist identity. Peterson, “Projection Spaces,” 136–7. 46 For the technical details, I rely on IBA Hamburg, “Whitepaper Energiebunker” (Hamburg, 2014), accessed November 27, 2017, http://www.iba-hamburg.de/en/iba-hamburg-gmbh/ service/downloads/medien/liste/gefiltert/medien-kategorie/15/project/energy-bunker.html. 47 Ibid.

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48 See “Home—Social Plastics,” accessed November 27, 2017, http://socialplastics.com/ index. 49 For an account of the ideological future-orientedness of International Building Exhibitions as planning strategies and their commitment to theoretical-practical experimentation see Jan Gerbitz, Karla Müller, and Katharina Jacob, “Implementation Plan: Hamburg, Wilhelmsburg” (Hamburg: IBA Hamburg GmbH, December 2014), accessed November 27, 2017, http://urbantransform.eu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/07/D4.2-Hamburg.pdf. 50 For a discussion of the greater vision to which the Tower belonged see Sabina Kuc, “Hamburg 2013 – The Way of Creating New Landscape,” GSTF Journal of Engineering Technology (JET) 4, no. 1 (2016): 39–45 and Gerbitz, Müller, and Jacob, “Implementation Plan.” 51 IBA Hamburg, “Whitepaper Energiebunker.” 52 For pictures of the old façade and observation windows see ibid., 36–7. 53 Geschichtswerkstatt Wilhelmsburg and Hafen, “Klotz Im Park - Die Bunkerumwandlung 2009–2013,” Geschichtswerkstatt-Wilhelmsburgs Webseite!, accessed November 27, 2017, http://www.geschichtswerkstatt-wilhelmsburg.de/bunker/klotz-im-park/. 54 Yudell, “Body Movement,” 59. 55 For the nefarious effects of the Wilhelmsburg project, see Peter Birke, Florian Hohenstatt, and Moritz Rinn, “Gentrification, Social Action and ‘Role-Playing’: Experiences Garnered on the Outskirts of Hamburg,” International Journal of Action Research 11 (2015): 195–227.

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Chapter 13

The Modesty of Architecture Randall Lindstrom and Jeff Malpas

I. Politics and architecture are, in large part, known by their legacies. Among architecture’s oldest legacies is that presented by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio and his book De Architectura (known today as The Ten Books on Architecture)—a work that is not, however, merely architectural. Indeed, its writing was specifically designed to support a political legacy as well. With deference, Vitruvius addressed the book to the Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus, declaring his intent “to deliver down to posterity, as a memorial,” an account of the “many edifices” and “magnificent works” that were to Caesar’s credit.1 Although the book is perhaps best known for positing the architectural trinity of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas (or firmness, commodity, and delight, according to seventeenth-century translator Henry Wotton), it is a story from the introduction to Book II that is particularly pertinent here. A parable of architecture and politics, set in a book dedicated to the same pursuits, it tells of another architect and another great ruler—Dinocrates and Alexander of Macedon—but, as with all parables, its significance goes beyond surface meaning.2 Desperate for Alexander’s attention, and achieving no success through courtly intermediaries, Dinocrates decided to make a more direct approach. Anointing his body with oil, and taking up the garb of Hercules—naked, but for lion skin cape, poplar crown, and club—he proceeded to a public tribunal at which Alexander was presiding.3 As intended, the architect’s appearance drew such excited curiosity that Alexander soon demanded to know the identity of this human spectacle. Announcing himself as “a Macedonian architect who suggests schemes and designs worthy your royal renown,” Dinocrates made his pitch, proposing “to form Mount Athos into the statue of a man holding a spacious city in his left hand, and in his right a huge cup, into which shall be collected all the streams of the mountain, which shall thence be poured into the sea” (see Figure 13.1). Although impressed by such a grand proposition, Alexander exercised restraint, inquired further into the nature of the site, and measured his response. He declared that “as an infant is nourished by the milk of its mother, depending thereon for its progress to maturity, so a city depends on the fertility of the country surrounding it for its riches, its strength in population, and not less for its defence against an enemy.”4 Then, he pointed out that the Mount Athos site was lacking in exactly that respect. Notwithstanding the proposal’s appeal, and even its likely buildability, Alexander concluded that its realization would incur only criticism and reproach; that it was, therefore, “impolitic.”5

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Figure 13.1 “The Colossus of Mount Athos in Macedonia,” an interpretation of Dinocrates’s proposal by Johann Bernard Fischer von Erlach, in Entwurff einer Historischen Architectur, 1712. For six centuries, Vitruvius’s apparently simple story has attracted commentary and critique, precisely because it is anything but simple. We invoke it, here, in order to examine an aspect of the story that seems generally overlooked—the particular way in which a notion of “modesty” appears in the encounter of architect and ruler. Modesty is, of course, already at issue in Vitruvius’s positioning of his work with respect to Caesar, as well as in his standing as a devoted subject. In this story, however, modesty is more than a feature of personal comportment, showing itself, instead, as central to the very practice of architecture. It is the modesty of architecture, as it appears in Vitruvius and is discovered elsewhere, that provides the focus of this discussion, but, in exploring the modesty of architecture, the relation of architecture and politics—as well as a certain “modest” conception of the political itself—is also illuminated.

II. Although Vitruvius’s text is in Latin, the context of his story is Greek, possibly deriving from a Greek original.6 That allows a more specific formulation of the problem presented by Dinocrates’s proposal, and thereby offers greater insight into the connection of 256

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architecture and politics. From a Greek perspective, it can be said that the inadequacy of the Mount Athos site lay foremost in the fact that it lacked the support and sustenance of a surrounding countryside—what the Greeks referred to as chora (χώρα). Alexander’s analogy of the infant drawing sustenance from its mother reinforces the idea that it is indeed the idea of chora that is at issue here (echoing elements of Plato’s philosophical use of chora as the womb or matrix of becoming7). When chora is translated into English as “place,” which is certainly proper, it can further be said that the proposed city—or, the polis, the site of the political (including both city and state)—was actually without place, improperly placed, or even out-of-place. Vitruvius’s story thus suggests that architecture must take account of a set of issues that must also be taken account of in politics—the issues of sustaining a city and its citizenry. But that suggestion leads to a still deeper one. If they are to accord with their own place, then architecture and politics must themselves attend to place, or chora; to that which enables, shapes, and supports all that appears within it.8 Furthermore, since, both from within and in response to place, architecture shapes the materialized spaces in which politics emerges and is practiced—i.e., since it shapes the polis and human life in the polis—so architecture is already political. More than mere expression, architecture itself appears as a mode of political action. And, since politics shapes life in the polis and occurs in the materiality that such life shapes, so politics is, in one sense, already architectural. Architecture, then, is the material practice that shapes and reflects the material practice that is also politics. Both practices constantly and materially reshape place, even as place and its reshaping make and sustain the possibility of those practices. Essentially tied to bound, or limit, place is that bounded openness in and from which possibility arises.9 In the absence of bound, there can be no openness, and therefore no possibility. Place can be responded to by recognizing and embracing it, but also by overlooking, resisting, even forgetting it. Alexander could have agreed to Dinocrates’s proposal for Mount Athos and ordered its construction; both men thus failing to attend to the bounds of place, and thereby failing to see what was—or, rather, was not— possible. Evidence of such failure would likely have attracted the criticism and reproach that Alexander foresaw, primarily owing to the extraordinary efforts that would have been required to build, maintain, and sustain the city—efforts that would have drained and weakened other parts of the Alexandrian polity, and, in the larger scheme of things, proven unsustainable. The underlying claim concerning the relation of place and possibility at issue here, and exemplified in the Vitruvian example, is ontological; essentially expressing the Aristotelian notion that to be is to be somewhere,10 and to be somewhere is to be open and opened to a set of singular possibilities. This plays out in the concrete interrelatedness of what is with the place in which it is, whereby every thing— natural or man-made, building or artifact, plant or animal or human being—affects and is affected by that which surrounds it. Ideas like these are common in contemporary environmentalism, but Vitruvius’s story offers a more ancient sense of the way things depend for their very being on their places, such that when things are out of place—out of accord with, or disruptive of, their place—things decline, disintegrate, and die. Such 257

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deleterious outcomes can be postponed or hidden, but not forever. The forgetfulness of place demonstrated in Dinocrates’s proposal for a city without a proper chora would, if realized, likely have seen such a city endure for only a short time; its architectural and political legacies coming down to us as little more than ruins. How, then, should the forgetfulness of place—or its remembrance—be understood? Although he does not invoke the idea of “place,” as we have here, architect and critic Giancarlo De Carlo takes up the Vitruvian story in the mid-twentieth century and offers a simple but profound answer: Dinocrates’s proposal is “immodest.”11 Therein he introduces a notion of modesty that is not a matter of humility or self-withdrawal, but one that draws on the term’s etymology: the pre-Latin root med- means to measure or take appropriate measure, the Latin modus means proper measure, and the English modest, in use since the 1560s, means to keep due measure.12 De Carlo thus takes Dinocrates’s proposal to be at fault because of its failure to keep proper measure. To be modest in an original and basic sense—which also involves both being moderate and actively moderating—is to recognize, and to allow to things, that which is proper (appropriate) to them. Accordingly, it can be said that to be modest is to give to things their proper places, and, if the forgetfulness of place can be seen as essentially immodest or immoderate, then its remembrance is surely found in the modest or moderate. Rulers, especially those such as Alexander (or Caesar Augustus), are not usually thought of as modest or moderate. Yet, in the Vitruvian story, it is Alexander who exemplifies such virtue—but not only in his refusal of the Mount Athos project. In the conclusion to the tale of Dinocrates and Alexander, the architect is taken into the service of the king and eventually given the task of designing a new city, not in Greece, but in Egypt. Significantly, the site of this new city—Alexandria—is described by Vitruvius in terms that sharply differentiate it from Mount Athos: “at the same time naturally strong, the centre of the commerce of the country, a land abounding with corn, and having those facilities of transport which the Nile afforded.”13 It is a site that gives to the city a place appropriate to it—that gives to the polis its chora. The lesson that Vitruvius offers, which is surely intended not only for architects but also for rulers (and so for all involved in politics), is that a successful polity, whether understood in terms of the built form of the city or the organizational structure of its citizenry and government, is essentially dependent on the bounds within which it is realized. Failure to accord with those bounds can lead to disaster, but to remain within them, and to be cognizant of them, is to allow for greatness—a greatness that Alexandria itself exemplified. Modesty, here understood as recognition of and attentive responsiveness to place and bound, can thus be seen as a virtue of architecture and politics. The Vitruvian story shows the importance of such virtue in both practices, but it does so in a way that especially connects modesty to a central concern of architecture, namely, place or, more prosaically, “site.” This is a connection between modesty and place that goes deeper than any mere play on the idea of modesty as attending to “one’s place,” or to “the place of things”—as if place were only a metaphor rather than indicative of a connection to place as such. Returning to the Greek context, in which 258

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the notion of chora appears, modesty and moderation are denoted by terms such as metaxu and metron, but also metriopatheó, kosmios, and sophrosyne. These all carry similar connotations to those evident in the Latin—that which remains measured, is balanced or harmonious, is indeed within proper bounds, that which lies “between”— and direct us back to ideas that connect with place and the spatial in a way that cannot be assumed to be merely metaphorical. More broadly, one might say that the very idea of measure already invokes notions that cannot be thought other than in terms of the openness—the “interval” or “between”—of place.14 On that basis, modesty is more than just one architectural virtue among others. Modesty must be essential to architecture, just as architecture is essentially concerned with place and the recognition of and attentive response to place, it is therefore concerned with bound and limit. Vitruvius’s story is especially interesting and ironic in this regard, since, although the modesty that it thematizes is exemplified by reference to the architectural, it is the ruler—not the architect—who draws attention to this modesty or the lack of it. At the same time, it is by that reference to the architectural (and so to the character of the city-state and its place) that the modesty of the political (and so of the polis, as both city-state and rulers) is also brought forth.

III. Modesty, and moderation, was a continuing theme of ancient thinking—in Vitruvius and elsewhere—and has remained relevant ever since; not least in the democratic context that serves as a backdrop for much (though certainly not all) contemporary architecture and politics. Writing just after the Second World War, Albert Camus argues for democracy as “an exercise in modesty,” seeing modesty, and therefore the commitment to democracy, as following directly from a recognition of ignorance, risk, and the need to consult with others.15 This emphasis on modesty connects with the theme of moderation and limit that operates elsewhere in Camus’s thinking (and reflects his closeness to elements of Greek thought),16 even as it also evokes a strong sense of the placed, and so finite, character of human life. Moreover, just as, in Vitruvius’s story, the city depends on the place that surrounds and bounds it, so too, in Camus, does human life depend, in its very character as human (given over to both joy and sorrow), on the bounds within which it is lived—here, on this earth, beneath this sky, before this sea, amidst these faces, in this very place.17 Thus, the modesty that Camus describes (like that seen in ancient sources) stands opposed to the winner-take-all, zero-sum game that “modern” democracy has increasingly become. Such modesty calls for a politics, even a democratic politics, that cannot reduce to mere majoritorianism and thereby disregard or disengage with the interests and concerns of the minority; that refuses to privilege, in absolute fashion, any one policy or political position over others and, instead, insists on recognition of the full spectrum of a situation’s “voices” and “forces” (where “situation” is used to refer to the

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complex interplay of elements that belong to a certain place or being-placed); and that unconditionally rejects the “violence” of authoritative peremptoriness, domination, or oppression.18 A modest democracy, according to Camus, “can’t be based on a political philosophy that pretends to know and regulate everything.”19 Since a modest politics is a politics that recognizes and responds to the placed and bounded character of human life and action—which also means its plurality, difference, and finitude—so it must also be a politics committed to inclusivity and participation. A modest politics is one which, in the manner of its social and political ordering, allows a place for every one and every talent, even if not every one and every talent in every role. It does so, not only through universal opportunities for participation, but also through universal responsibilities for the working-out of what is called for by any specific place and in any particular situation. Importantly, it is the entirety of the place and situation that must be allowed to make that call; a principle too often ignored or resisted in democratic practice. A modest politics allows all, in the singularity of their being-placed, to attend to the bounds or limits of their place and, thereby, to the possibilities they present. Yet modesty in politics does not suggest any “easy” way forward, nor any lack of challenge. What modesty actually requires is a steadfast refusal of the need for “victory,”20 of the need to overpower or overcome the situation, of the need for absolute control. This does not imply acquiescence or quietism, but, rather, is a matter of resisting the tendency to ignore, overlook, or attempt to overpower a situation’s bounds; resisting the desire (as commonplace as it is contradictory) to determine one’s own bounds, one’s own place, one’s own limits; resisting the longing to be other than what we are, to escape from our own placedness, to be free from our own finitude. The only path available to us is the path that lies before us—the path on which we already find ourselves. Modesty, in this respect, is profoundly “practical” and deeply “realistic.” Like a modest politics, a modest architecture also involves radical inclusivity. In architecture, moderation can enable diverse and plural bounds (both inanimate and animate) to be identified, comprehended, and meditatively considered; ensure that situational voices and forces are not granted undue dominance merely for their blatancy; and hold open further possibilities, even after an architectural response is realized. It neither presupposes nor favors any aesthetic, atmospheric, or performative architectural expression, and therefore includes the possibility of all—according to the situation’s call. In so doing, it obviates stylistic discourse and insists that a work of architecture neither originate nor rest in a category of design but, instead, be of its place, unconcerned about any ascriptions that may ensue. Such situational integrity moreover implies that architecture itself has an opportunity and responsibility to engage with all of the emplaced participants—those already of the situation, already part of the dynamism of place—not merely those with the necessary power. Indeed, all who experience architecture are, by virtue of their experiencing alone, participants in the ongoing event of architectural design. In that sense, all architecture belongs to everyone, if not through ownership or occupancy and use, then, at least, through sensory consumption, even when involuntary. Arguably, each element of the built environment thus carries some 260

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responsibility for the experiential well-being of all those who experience it. However, other than legislated minimum standards of health, safety, and welfare (rarely involving aesthetics and atmospherics), this is an obligation that one is largely free to ignore. And when buildings ignore that obligation, they stand as material evidence of immodesty; the manifestation of the forgetting of place on the part of any or all of those responsible for the realization of such buildings. Regardless of what may be particular contributions to the ordering of the built environment, buildings can fail to give sufficiently of themselves—i.e., they can be designed and constructed in a manner that restricts their “sacrifice”—to the greater ordering of human life.21 It is that failing of architecture to its participants that modesty, or a modest architecture, stands to avert. But, what of the participants’ responsibilities to architecture and the potential therein afforded? If participation is viewed broadly and taken seriously, its very definition comes under question. Indeed, as De Carlo argues (along with others), the relationship among those who would shape the built environment should see all accorded “creative and decisional equivalence,” such that, notwithstanding differing roles and contributions, everyone is accorded a degree of architectural involvement, and “every architectural event—regardless of who conceives it and carries it out—is considered architecture.”22 Of course, much of the built environment is already produced without those designated as professional architects, but architectural authority (creative and otherwise) is largely a product of, and constituted within, entrenched hierarchies of money and power. Yet in an architecture that is genuinely modest, architectural authority and respect must derive, not from the mere having of status or power, but from the readiness to moderate—to facilitate the listening-to and meditative consideration of all that comprises a particular situation. Consequently, architectural authority will not necessarily come to rest with those who belong to the ranks of the conventionally accepted “elite.” Emerging from the situation itself, and out of the “situational community,” such authority will more likely devolve upon (rather than being taken by) those who participate in that situation, who belong to that community. If architecture is a part of the response for which a place or situation calls, then the response cannot be architecture of just any kind but, rather, must be of just such a kind that answers to the entirety of the situation, including, of course, its human constituents—although how that is to be understood in practice depends on each situation’s dynamic. The determinate character of any specific architectural proposal— whether ultimately considered significant or insignificant, extravagant or restrained, confrontational or comforting—must derive from the situation that it addresses, not merely from the “fancy” of those who produce it. Importantly, this does not diminish the role of “imagination” in the working-out of a situation’s call but amplifies it. Imagination—what, in sharp contrast to fancy, Coleridge called “the living power and prime agent of all human perception”23—is essential to any critical engagement with a situation; essential to the sort of attentiveness at issue here. Indeed, what may be said to distinguish “imagination” from mere “fancy” is the way in which it engages with the possibilities of a situation and a world, rather than in any mere play of abstraction. 261

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It is through such imaginative engagement that an architectural response can itself become a part of the situation’s own complex interrelatedness. Any lesser response risks architectural autism, or even disturbance. It may seem that the argument for situational recognition and response merely advocates what many architects already claim for their work; namely, a sensitivity to “context.” Context, however, is a highly generic concept, and one that, if taken to refer to ideas of place and bound (and one might argue that this is where the notion of context finds its proper ground), does so in a derivative fashion, in a way that also allows those notions of place and bound to be overlooked. Context may refer back to notions of place, but it need not always do so. It is often a mere pretext for the privileging of the subjective preferences and prejudices of the architect—and often in a way that masks their subjective character. Sometimes “situation” can be put to similar use, but at least that term stands in a more direct and obvious relation to the notion of “site,” and thereby of “place” and “being-placed.” It also, prima facie, invokes that which ought to go beyond the subjective. Within architectural discourse, however, context does not usually carry the sort of ontological connotations discussed here. Indeed, it often refers to little more than the “setting” or “background” to the architectural project itself. By contrast, in the “modest” account explored here, place and, with it, situation do not constitute merely the passive setting to architectural projects but are, more properly, the active determinant and driver of them. In the latter respect, attending to place and situation must be seen as a responding to rather than an imposing upon. Not to be forgetful or dismissive of place and situation requires heightened and non-selective awareness; a fervent search for, and workingout of, a situation’s bounds or limits; a willingness to allow the richness of the situation to be effective and affecting. Here, mere “contextualism” will almost always fall short. Tadao Ando, for example, suggests that “when one stands on an empty site, one can sometimes hear the land voice a need for a building,”24 but, despite appearances of a “situational call,” such a view of context remains quite narrow, restricted to the project site and the characteristics imbued in it, with even its invocation of “the land” remaining strangely abstracted. Moreover, because they often lack any deeper grounding, claims such as Ando’s are open to skeptical rebuttal. Thus, New Zealand architect Christopher Kelly, a protégé of Renzo Piano, can declare: “Architects … pretend that the site speaks to them, or something like that, but, in actual fact, it’s their own wilfulness that’s driving the project.”25 Kelly could be seen to affirm our own comment, above, concerning the way in which the appeal to context can easily serve to conceal an architect’s privileging of their own prejudices or, equally, to excuse architectural willfulness. The language of context alone does little to offer a way out of this impasse, since it carries no necessary implication of anything by which architectural practice might itself be bound or limited. Modesty might well lead us to the consideration of context, but context alone cannot lead us back to modesty, nor back to the rich complexity of place.

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If modesty in architecture were indeed taken to equate with a contextualist approach, then it might also be thought to equate with the movement promulgated by Kenneth Frampton as “Critical Regionalism”26—and that, too, is an ambiguity deserving clarification. Critical Regionalism can rightly be seen as proposing a more “modest” form of architecture than that of preceding movements. Moreover, Frampton gives an important role to the notion, if not of modesty, then certainly of place, when he implicates the role of Modernism and Postmodernism in Western society’s “all but total incapacity to create place,” and when he expresses a fear that “we might have eliminated, once and for all, the possibility of ever being anywhere.”27 His manifesto on Critical Regionalism eschews formal fancies in favor of an opening-up to place and, at least by implication, to the plurality of places, which, in their interrelatedness, constitute a region—or one could say, chora.28 That opening-up is, in effect, an acceptance of boundedness—of limits and, so, possibility—which predictably liberates architectural thinking. Yet, despite these and other parallels, Critical Regionalism has little to say about the character of place itself, or the sense of modesty it calls for. In fact, Critical Regionalism can easily become restrictive and conservative, lacking deeper examination of the terms on which it implicitly draws, and often appearing to be a compromise between the extremes of architectural parochialism and universalism. Much the same is true of other contemporary architectural approaches and manifestos in which pretensions to modesty can conceal larger and more encompassing ambitions. Perhaps the very idea of the manifesto—of a generalized philosophy that can determine practice—is problematic; an argument supported by Camus when he insists that true (which is to say, modest) democracy “does not defend abstract ideas or a brilliant philosophy.”29 A modest architecture, like a modest politics, is always more attuned to place and situation than to the abstractness of prior theorization.

IV. Modesty demands active engagement and a willingness to consult and negotiate—the latter, not in the sense associated with a bargain, contract, or “deal,” but, rather, with a committed working-out and working-through what is genuinely at issue. Accordingly, it also requires aspiration and inspiration (both connected to imagination). Yet no aspect of modesty can be imposed on, but must come out of—and so be attuned to—the place or situation to which we are already given over. Such giving over brings affectivity and vulnerability with it. Indeed, it is because our own being is bound up with the places and situations to which we respond that we cannot but respond, whether for better or worse. Camus makes this point evident in his analysis of the modesty of democracy: because we know that we do not know, we depend on what we do not control and must consult with others if we are to act effectively. That is the basis for democracy and for its modesty. Such is no mere deficit, since this involvement, vulnerability, and dependence is also what gives

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substance and content to our lives. To live a human life is to live a life that is placed, and so bounded, but therefore also vulnerable, and this is, in fact, the real ground out of which human value and significance comes. Only what can be lost can properly be the focus of value or concern. Thus, only from within our being-placed, from within our situation, can we come to grasp or understand that place, that situation, or even place or situation as such. Here, modesty implies the lack of any absolute or transcendent viewpoint, and the occurrence of all of our acting and deciding—whether architectural or political or of any other sort—within the bounds of our place and on the terms that it affords. A site for encounter with just such emplaced modesty can be found at Monticello, the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century estate of architect and democrat Thomas Jefferson. “Architecture,” he declared, “is my delight, and putting up and pulling down one of my favorite amusements.”30 Indeed, Monticello was Jefferson’s ongoing architectural experiment, in which he modified a complex of sites and buildings and, arguably, did so through moderation; that is, through a modest architecture. The latter is perhaps not immediately apparent when considering Monticello’s centerpiece neoclassical Italian villa, which served as the Jefferson family home (and not only connects Jefferson to the work of Andrea Palladio, but also to Vitruvius31). By the standards of this discourse, the villa’s design may well be viewed as immodest, or out-of-place, perched atop a 260-meter peak in rural Virginia, but, in Jefferson’s day, re-presentation of classical form was very much of its time and, it might therefore be said, of its place; a phenomenon to which Jefferson contributed significantly. More to the point, Monticello transcended its Palladian villa. It was, in fact, a kind of polis amidst a chora; a complex and contingent situation of geography, people, buildings, and therefore politics—embodying, not least, the conundrum of slavery—in a largely self-sufficient environment. Like all situations, its possibilities were given in the bounds that belonged to it—bounds deriving from tradition, realized in its unfolding evolution, and constantly in the process of negotiation. As sites and buildings were modified in response to the situation, the situation was modified in turn, and so gave rise to further response and modification. Here was made evident the very life of the place: a place whose identity and character manifested in its dynamic unfolding rather than in any single instance of its occurrence. So it was that Jefferson’s negotiation of Monticello, and with it the unfolding of Monticello itself, carried on for more than forty years (see Figure 13.2). In its architecture, Monticello can be seen as a materialization of Jefferson’s politics, driven by the revolutionary spirit through which he moderated and modified his world views, and with which he navigated the political situations of his day. His ongoing schemes for modifying Monticello were paralleled by others for “tearing down and building up” the democratic experiment that he had done so much to help found: the fledgling United States. Like his architectural schemes, these political interventions also included the potential for disruption, but productively so. Indeed, as Hannah Arendt suggests, they should not be construed as placing “settled procedures” and “persistent rebelliousness” in opposition, and therefore as presenting the specter of a democracy in constant flux, wildly ricocheting between the two. That sort of dichotomous 264

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Figure 13.2  Sketch plan of Monticello, drawn by Jefferson (laid in a letter to J. H. Freeman), showing the villa and its chora, including dependencies (servant and slave quarters), garden, orchard, grove, and various pathways as they existed in 1806. (Bienecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University).

portrayal misses the point that democracy, at its best, is “simultaneously continuous and innovative”32; able to concurrently negotiate the bounds that define each situation’s tradition and necessary evolution; able to be at once vulnerable and ambitious; to be “disruptive” but also integrative. When Eugenio d’Ors posits that “whatever is not tradition is plagiarism,”33 he underscores the fact that attentiveness to bounds is essential to continuity and innovation. Innovation that has no regard for bounds (that is not grounded in an evolving tradition) is little more than a calculative and quantitative search for different concepts, which, particularly when pursued merely for the sake of variety, actually favors the production of sameness: the imitative, the unoriginal, the plagiaristic. It is, instead, a commitment to bounds that allows innovation to be a meditative and qualitative search for different uses of concepts,34 and thereby fosters originality as part of an evolving tradition. Thus, a simultaneously continuous and 265

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innovative democracy manifests a modest politics, which, in response to the situations it encounters, is always ready to modify policy and polis but also to self-modify; in effect, a double concretization of modesty. Accordingly, it follows that a modest politics would serve, and be well served by, a modest architecture of like qualities. What Monticello illustrates is that a modest politics and a modest architecture involve a constant and continuous striving to be and remain “modern”—a term, like modesty, moderation, and modification, derived from the Latin, modus and modo. Modern means to be “of-the-time” or “of the now,” which is to say in the “middle” or the “between” of past and future—no less ahead of the times than behind them. Moreover, in being “of the time,” the modern is not to be taken merely as that which is “à la mode,” in the sense of style or fashion or, worse, of trend, fad, or brand. To be modern, to indeed be “of the time,” is already to be of-the-place, since time is not apart from place but an aspect of it, as space is also.35 In this sense, to not be modern is to stand in a way that is dis-jointed, dis-connected, dis-integrated—a failure to be in accord with the situation. It is situational negotiation that modernises, or gives rise to the modern. Indeed, the Jeffersonian vision of “tearing down and building up,” of simultaneously moderating tradition and evolution, is, in effect, a plea for a constantly-modernizing, or modest, democratic politics—and architecture. The sense of the modern at issue here, which is connected directly with the notion of modesty, is one that also reflects the character of place itself. Just as place is not apart from time or space, so place cannot be understood merely as a “container” in which things are held in stasis. Stasis involves no openness, gives no room to things, allows no space for appearance, whereas place is both an opening and openness. Places are, of course, subject to change, but, more importantly, they are that in and out of which change itself emerges. Every event, every happening, is thus also a taking-place. For this reason, any genuine recognizing of and responding to place is a constant and continuing activity—never complete or completed. Accordingly, the modern must be understood as always attuned to place, as itself a form of responsiveness to place—which also means that the modern is oriented to both the past and the future, to both the traditional and the new. This is no less relevant for architecture than for politics. Both are at their best when they are simultaneously continuous and innovative, traditional and evolutionary; when they are attuned and responsive to place and situation. It is thus that truly modern architecture—not necessarily Modernist architecture—is both modest and identical with the architecture of place. Such architecture involves productive “disruption” of the Jeffersonian kind, but that, too, is a mark of its modesty.

V. It is commonplace to find the contemporary world characterized in terms that emphasize not boundedness but, rather, that which evades bounds, exceeds limits, transcends place. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contemporary rhetorics and imaginaries

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associated with digital technology, and with globalized media and commerce.36 Moreover, where bound or limit—or indeed “measure”—are attended to at all, it is almost always in terms of quantity and number. It would appear that the only real bounds recognized in the contemporary world are those that can be given numerical form, and those are almost always bounds that we look to overcome. This is especially clear in the monetization of measure and limit, whereby everything is reduced to a single form of commensuration, with all differences erased by the universality of monetized value and the single language of price and income. Moreover, since number has no intrinsic limit of its own, there is no limit to monetary accumulation, no limit to wealth—or debt— in purely monetary terms. Georg Simmel argues that money, as purely quantitative, destroys form and, thereby, the differentiation of one thing from another.37 A world in which money dominates is thus a world without modesty or moderation, absent anything to serve as a proper measure—no “between”—only addition and subtraction, profit or loss. Concern over money and the connection of that concern to modesty are, of course, nothing new. In Book I of his treatise, preceding the Mount Athos tale, Vitruvius instructs architects to become knowledgeable in matters of “moral philosophy,” or ethics, so as to “avoid arrogance.” Such knowledge, he argues, can “prevent avarice gaining an ascendency” and, hence, redirect one’s attention, away from “filling his coffers” and “grasping everything in the shape of gain,” toward the “dignity” achieved through “manners and a good character.”38 But well before Vitruvius, and extending beyond the behavior of architects, Plato linked the issues of modesty and money, or wealth creation, to the location of cities—and, so, to place and situation. In the Laws, he argues that proximity to the sea—and, so, to the trade and exchange of money that accompany sea ports—is incompatible with the attainment of virtue, and thereby implicates the immodesty, or lack of moderation, that comes with the pursuit and acquisition of wealth.39 This reflects Plato’s more general argument, echoed in Simmel, that money becomes a source of immodesty when its own measure goes unattended; when the bounds established by its function—the servicing of need—are overlooked, ignored, or resisted.40 Among the contemporary human constructs that emblemize, and indeed embody, the dangers that threaten, here, is the architecture of corporate capitalism; that grounded in the privatized culture of aggressive competition, hegemony, and globalized avarice; — that which gives rise to the sardonic mantra, “form follows profit.”41 Such is not, however, limited to the world of private enterprise. Governments, even “democratic” governments, both liberal and “illiberal,”42 now project themselves into the world in similar ways. Even the polis now appears in the form of “iconic” buildings, competing in a world of “city brands.” The skylines of metropolises the world over—those such as Beijing, Dubai, Doha, London—offer ample evidence of the phenomenon at issue here: an architecture in which international as well as intercorporate one-upmanship is unabashedly immodest, and where, as architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales describes it, “architecture is diluted into … the techniques of advertising, or arguments of state.”43 267

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Whether in regard to corporations or governments or other entities, architecture is attracted to, and complicit with, those whose power is essential to architecture’s sustenance. Lamenting this condition (even before its currently heightened state), De Carlo observes that those in power, whether corporate or state, and the myriad of “consultants” who support them—not least, architects—cannot necessarily be presumed to be either highly principled or sympathetic to their constituencies. They are often “the expert exploiters of floor space, the manipulators of building codes, the cultural legitimators of the sack of the city and the territory, organised by financiers, politicians and bureaucrats”44—and susceptible to “the vacuum of a reassuring lack of commitment,”45 which is little other than a lack of moderation. Notwithstanding popular valorization, much of the consequently emergent architecture appears to be a product of what Guy Debord calls “spectacle,” or, more precisely, “capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.”46 The triumph of spectacle is thus evidence of a failure to attend to bounds and keep their measure. Ironically, it is the architecture of such a world of spectacle—that of the immodest and supposedly boundless—that is often held up as embodying the values of democracy and freedom. Yet, as Hal Foster suggests, there is a sense in which this sort of architecture is more “oppressive” than democratic. Foster notes the tendency for such work to arise “out of ‘the cultural logic’ of advanced capitalism, in terms of its language of risk-taking and spectacle-effects.” Furthermore, the invocation of democratic-sounding notions, such as artistic “freedom” and “individuality,” actually exposes the work to be that of privileged clients and their architects, realized in largely private and exclusive design events (ironically including works designed to accommodate public events). The outcomes are seldom sites of democratic participation, or “civic engagement,” but those of “spectacular spectatorship, of touristic awe.”47 Exactly this sort of immodesty has become a political issue in China. For several decades, China’s political “modernization” has been reflected in its embrace of—and, some might say, clutching for—a largely superficial kind of “modern” architecture. Major Chinese cities, like others worldwide, have become trophy cabinets in which to display the country’s prowess at luring signature architects and capturing their architecture, and perhaps to suggest a greater alignment with capitalism and democracy than is officially the case. Their grounding in the supposedly new and novel, which is actually more of an un-groundedness, is strategically prioritized over their placedness, with bounds regularly overlooked, ignored, or resisted. Commenting on his CCTV Building, in Beijing, architect Rem Koolhaas seems to confirm a sort of disregard for place when he declares that his design “could never have been conceived by the Chinese”48 (see Figure 13.3). Responding to such betrayals, the Chinese government issued, in early 2016, new urban planning guidelines prohibiting “bizarre architecture,” particularly that seen as “oversized, xenocentric, weird.” These prohibitions attempt to redress what President Xi Jinping condemns as “a lack of cultural confidence and some city officials’ distorted attitudes about political achievements.”49 Notwithstanding 268

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Figure 13.3  The CCTV Building, Beijing, OMA Architects. (Photo: Justin Emery).

its relatively non-democratic context, there is something of the democratic in this bid, which envisages the innovative and modern being achieved, not through constant spectacle, but through everyday attentiveness to the real and specific (though always contingent and indeterminate) bounds of real and specific places. It is, in effect, a plea— albeit, in this case, more of an edict—to regain a sense of modesty. A similar plea arises in the Qatari capital of Doha, though expressed by way of alternative example rather public policy. Not (yet) as large or brash as neighboring Dubai, Doha is nevertheless a strong contender in the race toward architectural spectacle (and sameness) that newfound wealth allows and political rivalry encourages. In its new central business district (West Bay), the competing high-rises that attempt to address “context” often do so tokenistically: an Islamic dome, here, an Islamic arch, there. The 269

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Tornado Tower (2008) eschews such clichés but, then, like most of the world’s towers, achieves its identity through little other than the manipulation of form and curtainwall, producing what appears as an out-of-place concave inversion of The Gherkin (2003), Norman Foster’s distinctly shaped London high-rise (itself arguably out-of-place). Efforts of greater sophistication fare no better. Jean Nouvel’s Doha Tower (2012), with a more literal likeness to The Gherkin, acknowledges context with an elaborate brise soleil (sun screen) of Islamic geometric design overlaying its entire façade. But, despite the screen’s refinement, the skyscraper beneath remains trapped by its typology; the very need for a protective screen belying the merit of a polis of (largely glass) towers in a desert chora. Some might argue that these and other examples are not evidence of incongruity but, rather, of “modest” attempts to respond to a ruptured situation—one transformed into a different reality by the discovery of oil and consequent production of wealth—with buildings that are in total rupture with their situation.50 That, however, suggests that an attentive architectural response to a ruptured situation can be found purely in the emblemization of the rupture, when, in fact, rupture remains only one aspect of a situation that still includes a complexity of other bounds—not least, those defining tradition and evolution—which, modesty would assert, must be attended to if a proper response is to be worked-out. To privilege the rupture is to engage in the same selective attentiveness, or situational resistance, that modesty itself necessarily resists, and to thereby preclude a full and truly innovative realization of the situation’s possibility (see Figure 13.4). Emerging notably from such tensions, Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art, by I. M. Pei, offers contrasting evidence of modesty’s potential.51 This project is another made possible by the region’s so-called rupture—whereby museums and skyscrapers alike are now tools of the international competition for prestige and appearances of power—but it negotiates its situation with significant commitment, at once marking the rupture and attending to manifold other bounds. Although not a high-rise, the museum is nonetheless monumental, making clear that a modest architecture has nothing to do with scale or the materialization of humility, nor with styles or manifestos. Rather, it is a matter of attitude and approach—the keeping of due measure—on the part of those who shape the polis, and in what is shaped. Modesty and moderation might be seen to begin with Pei’s refusal to participate in the design competition intended to determine the museum’s architect; a process that inherently restricts attentiveness to the situation taken as a whole. Yet it is after the abandonment of that process (and its “winner”), and after Pei is handed the commission, that situational attentiveness becomes most apparent. Resisting any quest for forms or motifs and, instead, actively “listening” to the situation, Pei is presented with its rich and complex interrelatedness, including that of religion with culture, society, politics, and architecture; of severity with sunlight, shadow, color, and surface; of site with city, state, region, and world; and of each of these with the others and still more. The response to these bounds of place defies stylistic categorization and materializes as an “island-building,” integrating with the larger region through a kind of separation and, thereby, becoming an unquestionably modern part of its situation without 270

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Figure 13.4  Part of the West Bay Business District, Doha, Qatar. Centre Left, Doha Tower; Far Right, Tornado Tower. (Photo: Justin Emery).

Figure 13.5  Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, and the distant West Bay Business District. (Photo: Justin Emery).

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being part of its situation’s “modern” sameness (see Figure 13.5). Notwithstanding the imperfections that are inevitable in all buildings, the museum exemplifies much of what might be expected of a modest architecture.52

VI. The Chinese and Qatari examples reveal, very clearly, contemporary capitalism’s fetishization of boundlessness—its obsession with a form of freedom understood as the overstepping, even the abolition, of limit. However, this fetishization, this obsession, is based on a delusion, since freedom does not itself stand apart from all boundedness but is always a freedom within bounds—as possibility is always a possibility within limits. Drawing back from the excesses of the contemporary world, a more modest architecture and politics would necessarily refocus on their own boundedness, their own limited possibility, their own placedness. In fact, there is no alternative. An immodest architecture, like an immodest politics, lacks an understanding of itself, is blind to its own character and, so, in spite of its illusions of grandeur and control, inevitably effects its own demise, like Dinocrates’s Mount Athos project. As Camus might have put it, such an architecture and such a politics, in failing to attend to Nemesis (“the goddess of measure and not of revenge”53), submit themselves to the retribution that follows from such disregard. Moreover, if democracy is indeed, as Camus argues, “an exercise in modesty,” then it is only by drawing back from contemporary excesses that the truly democratic can emerge. A modest politics, associated with the democratic, would be one that arises out of the recognition of its own bounds and encompasses both continuity and innovation, tradition and evolution—a politics in which, as Ulrich Beck describes it, “the principles of precaution and reversibility” conjoin with the “contrary, unsuspected, and incompatible.”54 Taken on their own, the former lacks innovation, while the latter lacks grounding, so neither is properly modern, nor capable of producing a genuinely modern polis. Regaining a sense of modesty means regaining a politics and architecture that are no longer the embodiments of capital-as-spectacle (or spectacle-as-capital55) and no longer drawn to the one-upmanship and opportunism of that which is only superficially modern. Regaining a sense of modesty thus also means regaining a genuine sense of modernity, of being within bounds, of being in-place. Vitruvius’s story of architect and ruler takes the relation between architecture and politics as one of its themes. It does not, however, merely connect architecture and politics as if they were two separate practices. Instead, it emphasizes their interconnectedness through the way in which both stand in relation to the same virtue—a virtue that, in the story, is exemplified by the way in which a city relates to its place. Although Vitruvius provides, in the course of his Ten Books, a detailed set of studies and principles for architectural practice, those must all be read against the background of his more basic

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tale. Vitruvius details the tools and techniques, the forms and motifs, available to the architect, or at least to the architect of classical times, but there is no single rule or principle that tells the architect how to address the place—and this is as it should be, since, if we are to be truly modest, in architecture or in politics, it is to the place that we must look, not to any rule or principle under which the place can be brought. This is the modesty of architecture, a modesty that can also be applied to politics—to seek measure in the place, not merely in ourselves.

Notes 1

M. Vitruvius Pollio, The Architecture of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, in Ten Books, trans. J. Gwilt (London: Priestley and Weale, 1826), 1–2. This is the earliest English translation of the work, which was itself addressed to the British monarch of the day, with the translator declaring: “The Writings of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio have long been distinguished by the especial patronage of Sovereigns. That of George the Fourth is now added to those of Augustus, the Medici, Francis the First, and Lewis the Fourteenth” (vii). 2 See the recounting and analysis of the story in I. K. McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 95–102. 3 As McEwen points out (ibid.), in taking on the appearance of Hercules, Dinocrates was also echoing Alexander’s own close association with the heroic figure. 4 Vitruvius Pollio, The Architecture of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, 34–5. 5 Ibid., 35. “Impolitic” is Gwilt’s translation for the Latin term, inprobandam, which Vitruvius attributes to Alexander in his final assessment of the proposal. 6 Vitruvius is the earliest extant version of the story, and the immediate source is not Greek, but probably in the work of the Latin author Marcus Tarentius Varro, specifically his Hebdomades vel de imaginibus (see McEwen, Vitruvius, 95.). The story is also retold in Plutarch, though there the architect is named as Stasicrates—see Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, trans. B. Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919), 7. 7 Plato, Timaeus, 49a-51b. 8 Alberto Pérez-Gómez refers to chora as “the ‘region’ of that which exists.” See A. PérezGómez and S. Parcell (eds.), Chora 1: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1994), 9. 9 The connection between place and bound goes back to Plato and Aristotle—see the discussion in J. Malpas, “Five Theses on Place (and Some Associated Remarks): A Reply to Peter Gratton,” Il Cannocchiale 1 (2016). 10 Aristotle, Physics Iv, 208a27. 11 G. De Carlo, “On Modesty in Architecture: A Seminary at La Tourette,” Spazio e Societa (Space & Society): International Journal of Architecture and Environmental Design 18, no. 76 (1996): 43. 12 See, for instance, the entry for “modest” in the Oxford English Dictionary. 13 Vitruvius Pollio, The Architecture of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, 35. 14 Malpas, “Five Theses on Place.” 15 A. Camus, “Democracy Is an Exercise in Modesty,” Sartre Studies International 7 (2001): 13, trans. A. van den Hoven, 1948. 16 See, for instance, “Helen’s Exile,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays (New York: Knopf, [1955] 1968), 148–53. 273

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17 See, for instance, “Nuptials at Tipasa,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays (New York: Knopf, 1968), 65–72. 18 This idea connects with Hannah Arendt’s claim that politics, or at least any productive politics, always stands opposed to violence—see Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1970); and The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). 19 Camus, “Democracy Is an Exercise in Modesty,” 13. 20 This is a notion explored in D. S. Carroll, Victory over Victory: An Essay Studying Our Personal and Cultural Compulsion in Pursuit of Victory, Its Costs, and Its Alternatives of Arrogance or Modesty (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corporation, 2011). 21 This line of thinking is taken up in a mid-nineteenth-century architectural treatise: E. L. Garbett, Rudimentary Treatise on the Principles of Design in Architecture as Deducible from Nature and Exemplified in the Works of the Greek and Gothic Architects (London: John Weale, 1850), 13. 22 G. De Carlo, “Architecture’s Public,” in Architecture and Participation, ed. P. B. Jones, D. Petrescu, and J. Till (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 13. 23 S. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (Auckland: The Floating Press, [1817] 2009), 236–7. 24 J. Baek, Nothingness: Tadao Ando’s Christian Sacred Space (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 128. 25 C. Kelly, during an interview for D. Cornish, “Oriental,” in The Art of the Architect (New Zealand: Television New Zealand, 2014). In the same interview, Kelly recalls Renzo Piano’s reference to architecture being a “contaminated art,” suggesting that, unlike some of the fine arts, architecture must deal with contaminants: practicalities and other participants including clients, building officials, builders, financiers, etc. Implicit is the longing for fewer bounds or limits in architecture, which is actually a longing for fewer opportunities, less possibility. 26 K. Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in Postmodern Culture, ed. H. Foster (London: Pluto, 1985). Although Frampton is widely associated with Critical Regionalism, due to his particular treatment of the idea, the term was coined and explored by theorists Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lafaivre in A. Tzonis and L. Lafaivre, “The Grid and the Pathway: An Introduction to the Work of Dimitris and Suzana Antonakakis,” Architecture in Greece 15 (1981). 27 K. Frampton, “On Reading Heidegger,” Oppositions 4 (1975): n.p. 28 See note 8. 29 Camus, “Democracy Is an Exercise in Modesty,” 14. 30 B. L. Rayner, Sketches of the Life, Writings, and Opinions of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Francis and Boardman, 1832), 524. 31 Just as Jefferson was significantly influenced by Andrea Palladio, Palladio had, of course, been influenced by Vitruvius. Furthermore, Jefferson’s personal library included not only works by and about Palladio but also the French translation of Vitruvius’s architectural treatise—Les dix livres d’architecture de Vitruve, by Claude Perrault—suggesting that Jefferson may well have known the tale of Dinocrates and Alexander. See J. Gilreath and D. L. Wilson (eds.), Thomas Jefferson’s Library: A Catalog with the Entries in His Own Order (Clark, NJ: Lawbrook Exchange, 2008), 108. 32 This line of Arendtian thinking is discussed by Patchen Markell in R. Berkowitz, J. Katz, and T. Keenan (eds.), Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 100–1. 33 J. R. Resina, “Noucentisme,” in The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, ed. D. T. Gies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 535.

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34 This is a notion discussed more fully in Berkowitz, Katz, and Keenan, Thinking in Dark Times, 101. 35 Malpas, “Five Theses on Place.” 36 Architecturally, it is also evident in the way in which new technological innovations in design often seem to override other considerations. New forms of design, new architectural geometries, and new engineering possibilities constantly emerge and are taken up, often, it seems, for no other reason than that they are there. Such an obsession with innovation merely for the sake of innovation alone is scarcely conducive to the recognition of and responsiveness to bound or modesty. 37 G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. T. Bottomore and D. Frisby (London: Routledge, 1978), 272. 38 Vitruvius Pollio, The Architecture of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, 5–6. 39 Plato, Laws, 705a–05b. 40 See the discussion of this in D. C. Schindler, “Why Socrates Didn’t Charge: Plato and the Metaphysics of Money,” Communio: International Catholic Review 36 (2009): 394–426. See also M. Hénaff, The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy, trans. J. L. Morhange (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). 41 The classic architectural mantra coined by Louis Sullivan—“form follows function”—is thus rephrased by contemporary architect Richard Rogers. See M. Douglas, “Rogers, Richard,” in Encyclopedia of Contemporary British Culture, ed. P. Childs and M. Storry (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 460. 42 The term “illiberal democracy” has been applied—though not always with consistency—to a variety of countries in which there may be varying degrees of “democratization,” perhaps including elections (even free and fair elections), but not necessarily the extent of freedom and civil liberties expected in “liberal democracies.” Examples are wide ranging: Russia, China, and many nations of the Middle East, Asia, and South America, but also European countries such as Hungary and Poland, with some also citing Singapore. 43 I. de Solà-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture, ed. S. Whiting, trans. G. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 112–13. The author notes, however, that such dissolution “leads into a new process of refounding architecture as the renewed experience of certain basic data of conduct and perception”—perhaps a “modest” architecture. 44 G. De Carlo and O. Bouman, “Architecture Is Too Important to Leave to the Architects: A Conversation with Giancarlo De Carlo,” in The Invisible in Architecture, ed. O. Bouman and R. van Toorn (London: Academy Editions, 1994), 382; and De Carlo, “Architecture’s Public,” 7. 45 G. De Carlo, “Architecture’s Public,” 13. 46 G. Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, MI: Black and Red, 1983), para. 165 and 34, respectively. 47 H. Foster, Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 40–1. Foster’s argument draws on the work of art historian Meyer Schapiro. 48 P. Fraioli, “The Invention and Reinvention of the City: An Interview with Rem Koolhaas,” Journal of International Affairs 65, no. 2 (2012): 117. Nonetheless, by including a Chinese architect on his team and, later, collaborating with a Chinese architectural firm (after winning the design competition), Koolhaas suggests that the building can be seen to emerge “from the local situation.” 49 S. Johnson, “China Looks to Ban Bizarre Architecture,” ArchitectureAU: News (2016), http://architectureau.com/articles/china-looks-to-ban-bizarre-architecture/ (last accessed October 1, 2019).

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50 The authors are grateful to the editors for raising the possibility of such an argument and thereby prompting this discussion. 51 The undertaking and development of this project is well documented in numerous periodicals, but most comprehensively in P. Jodidio and L. Lammerhuber, Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar (Berlin: Prestel Verlag, 2008); and also in the film documentary, B. Landin and S. van Wagenen, “Learning from Light: The Vision of I. M. Pei” (USA 2009). 52 Preliminary assessments suggest that Jean Nouvel’s National Museum of Qatar may offer Doha another major example of a modest architecture. It has already been likened to a “desert rose,” appearing “to grow out of the ground and be one with it”; a description, which, if accurate, holds the promise of emplaced modesty. See, for example, P. Loar, “National Museum of Qatar: Ateliers Jean Nouvel,” arcspace.com (March 29, 2010), http:// www.arcspace.com/features/ateliers-jean-nouvel-/national-museum-of-qatar/. 53 Camus, “Helen’s Exile,” 149. 54 U. Beck, “The Reinvention of Politics,” in Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 33. Beck sees this condition as exemplifying a “new modesty” in a “new modernity.” 55 Foster notes that contemporary architects and architecture have made it possible to invert Debord, so as to say that “spectacle” is now “an image accumulated to the point where it becomes capital.” See Foster, Design and Crime, 41.

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Architecture, Materiality, and Politics: Sensations, Symbols, Situations, and Decors Antoine Picon

The sensory and the symbolic How architecture is political is a much-debated question related to a series of broad interrogations regarding the way artifacts interact with humans. Until recently, the most common type of answer to this question appeared as a combination of two main lines of argument. First, buildings orient, and in several instances, even force human behavior in ways that prove clearly political. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison layout, which submits inmates to the gaze of an invisible watchman located in a central surveillance room, exemplifies this type of agency of the built environment. Second and certainly not least, architecture reinforces the prevailing political order by expressing its core values through means ranging from compositional principles to ornamental vocabulary. As an extreme, but revealing case of this second type of political character, one finds Albert Speer’s monuments, which were designed in order to convey the ascendency of the Nazi regime on the German people. Practical agency and symbolic expression: these two types of responses of architecture to political agendas coexist generally. The palace of Versailles served for instance the French absolute monarchy in a very concrete manner, through its overall spatial organization, by enforcing court rituals, as well as through its carefully staged décor that glorified the king’s deeds. It is worth noting that the political relevance of architecture may be intentional, like in Speer’s production and the palace of Versailles, or involuntary. Indeed, buildings may be determined by a political and social context without the conscious recognition of their designers. This is actually the most common case. Most of the time architects endorse political values and promote politically loaded practices without realizing it. Just like architecture is generally received by the public “in a state of distraction,” as Walter Benjamin put it famously, its conception is often inadvertently political.1 In the past decade, a series of critiques have been raised against these received interpretations of the relations between architecture and politics. To begin with,

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architectural realizations prove often more ambiguous than what their interpreters suppose. This is true of numerous other built objects, of infrastructures in particular, the political impact of which is generally less straightforward than what it may seem at first. There is perhaps no better example of this ambiguity than the impact of the notorious overpasses built by Robert Moses on the Long Island Parkway leading to Jones Beach, one of his major realizations. Whereas American political scientist Langdon Winner had assumed in a much publicized analysis, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, that these bridges were designed with a low height in order to prevent poor people and blacks to access the recreation area because their buses could not get under their arches, recent scholarship has shown that the case is actually far from evident.2 Ambiguities appear even more pronounced when dealing with buildings, which obey a much broader set of purposes and accommodate a wider range of practices. The connections that theorists and historians of architecture tend to establish between the recourse to certain compositional and ornamental principles and political agendas are even more equivocal. In the 1930s, the quest for a new classical monumentality characterized for instance regimes as different as the Soviets, Nazi Germany, and the American New Deal. After the Second World War, the spread of modernism ignored, as for it, the Iron Curtain division. In the light of these historical examples, the claim made by the Italian theorist, historian and critic, Bruno Zevi, in his 1973 essay The Modern Language of Architecture, that modern architecture, with its emphasis on asymmetry and even dissonance, is intrinsically more democratic than its Renaissance, Baroque, or Neoclassical counterparts, which give an almost absolute privilege to symmetry, appears wholly unfounded.3 One may, as a consequence, question the very possibility of an authentically democratic architecture. Can architecture contribute to democracy beyond expressing in a relatively generic manner values such as a concern for human dignity? We will return to this crucial interrogation toward the end of this article. Given the previous shortcomings, proponents of Michel Callon and Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, such as University of Manchester professor Albena Yaneva, have proposed to depart from the traditional analyses of the relations between architecture and politics.4 According to them, politics is no longer to be defined in the usual sense of interactions between governments, politicians, parties, trade unions, and social movements, but rather as a more global interplay that encompasses not only relations between humans but also the complex set of alliances and oppositions that they form with all sorts of non-human entities, from natural phenomena and beings to artifacts and social constructs. Placed within such an enlarged frame, architects, and buildings appear no longer as the only focus of the study. They are to be analyzed within complex networks of actors that produce political effects. From such a perspective, politics does not impact architecture from outside, as a preexisting sphere that exerts an influence on the built environment. It appears as a co-production between a multiplicity of actors among which one finds designers, users, buildings techniques, architectural styles as well as many other protagonists. 278

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A similar departure from the traditional analyses of the relations between architecture and politics has been advocated by the various affiliates of the Aggregate approach to the history of architecture and urban design. Instead of “actors” members of the Aggregate movement prefer to invoke “agencies” but their aim is also to relocate architecture within a complex network of factors that contribute to the production of politics, or rather “governmentality” a notion borrowed from Michel Foucault.5 Whereas the analyses of buildings and urban projects that they conduct are not always that different in practice from traditional studies, the ambition of these recent trends is to disentangle oneself from a history that gave a privilege excessive in their eyes to designers and their realizations. By the same token, artistic intentionality tends to become a secondary problem, just like the degree of autonomy that the architectural discipline may actually possess when trying to address social and political issues. The question of how architects can be political as designers, and not only as skilled navigators on an ocean of often contradictory factors, is no longer raised as such. In other words, what architecture can achieve by itself, not in complete isolation of course, but as a discipline endowed with partly autonomous objectives and tools, is not really raised. This oblivion appears all the more paradoxical given that architectural design has never been invested with so many expectations regarding its political, social, and economic effects. In the eyes of various urban constituencies, from mayors to real-estate developers, architecture is supposed to contribute to a better urban life, to make cities both more attractive and sustainable. This background explains the development of socalled “star architecture” with its trail of signature museums, high-rises, shopping malls, and airport terminals perceived as embodiments of a bright future. Following the success of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, most cities dream of buildings that can crystallize their hopes and give visibility to their strategies. In parallel, and often in relation with this first objective, sustainable projects attract a lot of attention today, an attention that extends far beyond their actual impact on the metabolism of cities, as if, there again, architecture was particularly apt to convey essential aspects of the urban future. What can architecture achieve as a discipline? This concern explains our interest in two dimensions that are generally neglected by proponents of Actor-Network Theory or Aggregate-like approaches to the history of architecture. The first are the sensations that stem from the direct encounter with buildings. The experience of surface and volume, of space, texture, light, and color exert an influence on us that often presents political resonances beyond the individual character of the sensations thus aroused. From one individual to another, one does not feel exactly the same confronted to buildings, but the architectural resources that they mobilize tend to generate certain sensations and affects that are related to the way we think and act collectively. Take, for instance, the feelings conveyed by elementary sequences such as doors, staircases, or windows, or the impression produced by changes in levels of illuminations or by effects of opacity or transparency. 279

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These sensations and affects tend to function at a level that may appear as almost primitive, in any case as anterior to the use of language. Think of the impression of authority conveyed by an elevated podium; the sense of physical and moral domination that it provides to whoever is standing on it seems to be rooted in experiences that predate most complex expressions of human civilization, beginning with speech and writing, as if the various hominids that came before us had felt something similar simply by standing on a rock to stare at their fellow creatures. At the opposite end of the architectural spectrum, one finds symbolic intentions that have often been conveyed through complex ornamental systems. Because of their sophistication and their dependence upon myths, histories of past events and representations of natural and artificial patterns and objects, from rustication to geometric figures, and from tree leaves to human tools and instruments, these symbolic intentions and the ornamental systems that used to express them, at least until the rejection of ornament by modernist architecture, appear clearly as posterior to language. Besides affects, the symbolic and the ornamental will constitute another dimension that I will explore in the quest for a renewed way to study the relation between architecture, envisaged as a partly autonomous discipline, and politics. Ornament has returned today under the influence of digital technology and a new longing for the pleasure it provides to the eye and mind.6 Paradoxically, this return has not generated a renewed interest among designers in the question of the symbolic in architecture, as if buildings could be ornamental without trying to convey any sort of meaning.7 I will argue here that the symbolic dimension is unavoidable in architecture, especially when one tries to address the issue of how architecture can be political. But this does not mean that one has to focus on the alleged correspondence between certain architectural resources such as composition and style and political agendas. Again, there is no univocal relation between them. Nor does such a return to the symbolic imply resurrecting the postmodern assimilation of ornament to language. Indeed, architectural ornaments are not comparable to words, nor decors to well-formed texts. As we will see, they convey a longing for linguistic expression at the same time that they contribute to express the irreducibility of architecture to language through the role played by texture, color, and other material attributes in their constitution. In the theory and history of architecture, the couple formed by the sensory and the symbolic has been usually mobilized by proponents of the phenomenological approach. They feature prominently in the work of one of the pioneers of this approach, Norwegian theorist and historian Christian Norberg-Schulz, as well as in the essays of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa or the studies of Ancient and early modern architecture of British historian Joseph Rykwert.8 Here, the association of these seemingly opposite terms is however envisaged in a different light. Instead of referring to an immutable physical world as well as to a human nature impervious to change, the sensory is envisaged as partly dependent upon historical factors such as the science, technology, social organization, and systems of belief that prevail at a given moment in time. The primitive character that we attribute to it is to a large extent an illusion. In 280

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such a light, the sensory appears as a cultural construct just like the symbolic. The two are actually co-constructed in close relation to the simultaneous interpretation of what constitutes the physical world and what characterizes the human as opposed to it. Just like the sensory and the symbolic, the non-human and the human are co-constructed. In the later part of this chapter, I will introduce the concept of materiality to designate one of the key results of this co-construction. Materiality, I will argue, is not given once and for all. It appears rather as the historically determined system of relations that both sets apart and relates, since they are co-constructed, the non-human and the human.9 At a given moment in time, materiality is both about the way we experience the tangible reality that surrounds us, from materials to light, and about our understanding of ourselves as subjects of this experience. In architecture, materiality contributes to the articulation of the sensory and the symbolic. As such, I will argue, it plays an essential role in imparting architectural design with political relevance, and this beyond deterministic readings of architectural agency, whether this agency is understood in practical or symbolic terms. Approaching the relation of architecture and politics from this perspective implies expanding the sphere of the political beyond the definitions usually retained by political science. Rather than the agendas promoted by social movements and organized parties, architecture deals with the way one can frame collective human action so that it appears as meaningful. This framing mobilizes resources ranging from the capacity of surfaces, volumes, lights, and colors to create sensations and affects to the power of ornament to give pleasure and suggest significations. The latter aspect must not be underestimated. As historian of art Oleg Grabar once put it: “The more profound truth of architecture in general, that it is always at the service of man and has no greater purpose than to adorn his manifold activities, something as simple and prosaic as eating or listening to a lecture and something as glorious as worshiping God or contemplating a work of art.”10 From the sensory to the ornamental, the true political agency of architecture has to do with two interrelated aspects. The first has to do with its capacity to generate situations that constitute incentives to orient action in certain directions. Such orientation should not however be confused with the deterministic effects traditionally attached to architectural organization by theorists, historians and critics when trying to assess how architecture can be political. It works best through indirect hints, through the suggestions of possible collective meaning, rather than through the creation of definite constraints or the straightforward affirmation of certain values. Inseparable from the generation of situations, one finds the power of architecture to create immersive environments that reinforce the feeling that human action can be meaningful. This is where ornament used to play a key role until its modernist demise. Beyond its explicit symbolic meaning, it constituted decors that enabled men and women to live in a world made commensurable with their fragile existence, a world that occupied an intermediary place between the immanence of nature and the transcendence of the divine, as Renaissance humanists Leon Battista Alberti or Daniele Barbaro suggested in their writings.11 281

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This political agency is inseparable from the materiality of architecture, that is, the specific ways in which the architectural discipline contributes to the co-construction of the non-human and the human through sensations as well as symbols, by the generation of situations and by the creation of decors. Such agency has more to do with making human action meaningful than with channeling it so that it meets with preexisting political agendas. What architecture does best is to invest human behavior with gravity—a notion where the physical meets with the symbolic. Humans have still to decide in which direction this gravity may lead them. Contrary to Galileo’s law of fall, the experience of architecture is always multifaceted, open-ended, and ultimately ambiguous.

From sensations to situations The fundamental effectiveness of architecture lies in its capacity to organize matter in ways that provoke sensations and generate affects that can be widely shared. A large part of those sensations and affects are created by means specific to the discipline such as the definition of an outside and an inside, the play on scale and dimensions, the contrast between light and shadow, opacity and transparency, to name only a few. Architecture can also contribute to focus attention on specific areas—think of the pivotal role of the stage in theaters. The spatial resources of the discipline are usually mobilized in close connection with some key qualities of the materials it employs, from brick to concrete, and from wood to steel. Smoothness or roughness, grain, texture, and color constitute an integral part of architectural effects. These effects are seldom univocal. They are usually obtained by combining determinations that may seem mutually exclusive. In Le Corbusier’s work, the notions of outside and inside are both affirmed and challenged through their unlikely blend, just like the distinction between light and shadow is often blurred. To the astonishment of the visitor, opposed characteristics merge. As historian of architecture Eve Blau has observed in an insightful article, architectural transparency is often obtained, as for it, by playing on degrees of opacity12. In order to make them more effective, architecture transforms its basic operations into complex moves, it thickens its plot, so to say, in ways that appear somewhat paradoxical. In addition to their inner complexity, architectural means and effects are often related to external factors such as urban locations or landscapes that give to buildings their full power. At this level also, paradoxes abound, beginning with the capacity of architecture to be contextual through the seeming rejection of its immediate surroundings. Following the phenomenologists, it is tempting to attribute to architectural sensations and affects immutable biological roots. After all, animals are sensitive to certain spatial effects, beginning with sharp contrasts in dimensions and light, as ethologist Temple Grandin has convincingly argued in books such as Animals in Translation.13 Contemporary neurosciences tend to confirm this point of view. Some

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of the sensations and affects induced by spatial organization are definitely hardwired. From this perspective, the traditional assumption made by architectural theorists and philosophers that there is a primitive component at work in architecture, a component pointing toward the beginning of mankind appears plausible. Hegel was perhaps right in placing architecture at the dawn of the arts in his Aesthetics. Going further, there seems to be something as powerful as the first impressions of childhood in the sensations and affects produced by architecture. This perspective is however misleading insofar that it tends to assimilate aspects as different as the animal-like, the primitive and the childlike, an assimilation that has led in the past to all kinds of prejudiced discourses regarding for instance the proximity of non-Western societies and cultures to an alleged primitive and animal-like condition. Above all, one should recognize that most architectural effects are not reducible to mere biological phenomena. Indeed, they are made complex in ways that bear the mark of society and culture. The manner in which Le Corbusier blurs the distinction between the outside and the inside in projects like the 1954 Mill Owners’ Association Building in Ahmedabad, India, or the 1953 Casa Curutchet in La Plata, Argentina, is typical of a certain moment in the development of architectural modernism, a moment that is in its turn representative of a broader Postwar cultural context. Even more evident is the difference in the interpretation of transparency between a mediaeval masterpiece like the Parisian Holy Chapel and Mies van der Rohe’s 1956 Crown Hall in Chicago. The former relies on stained glass to impart light with an almost supernatural character, while the latter mobilizes a more limited, seemingly objective, set of resources, beginning with the contrast between translucency and transparency proper. The fact that architectural sensations and affects are to a large extent social constructs appears even more evident if one pays attention to the way they are usually combined within larger ensembles that tend to propose perceptive and emotional itineraries, thus making possible what Le Corbusier calls the “architectural promenade.”14 The concrete experience of architecture is rarely static. It unfolds in time as much as in space, a time saturated with cultural content, beginning with the tempos characteristic of a given society. There is, for instance, a strong link between the modernist conception of the architectural promenade and the mechanical and cinematic tempo of the twentieth century, just like mediaeval churches were meant for rhythms associated with a deeply religious vision and experience of the world.15 We will return to this issue for it represents an important component of architectural agency. Now the biological dimension must not be neglected. It acts as a counterpoint to the ambition of culture to be overly constraining. Conversely, cultural content emancipates the subject in contact with the building from pure animal impulses. As a result, leaving aside extreme cases like Bentham’s Panopticon, architectural creations offer usually a mix of constraint and leeway. They appear as built situations inviting humans to act in certain directions. Speaking of situations, how not to be reminded of the Situationists and their interpretation of situations as constructs characterized by ambiances and a range of 283

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possible and at the same time surprising and even disruptive events that could unfold?16 Less ambitious perhaps than the Situationists and their desire to plan for the unexpected, architecture stages humans in certain ways, leaving them the possibility to write the play, to decide which events will happen, who will be talking and who will remain silent, who will enter and who will exit, whether there will be a happy or a dramatic ending. Architecture defines a situation or a stage, that is a built configuration within which what is said and done matters. It provides an overall atmosphere, it gives some scenic indications, but the plot remains undecided. At its best, when it creates the proper atmosphere, the discipline appears as the “ennobler of human relationships,” as German Neoclassical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel famously put it.17 One of Schinkel’s bestknown engravings in his collection of architectural designs shows a series of micro events made possible by the specific arrangement of the second-floor entrance to the 1828 Altes Museum in Berlin (see Figure 14.1). A young man is commenting to a child—his younger brother or son—on the meaning of one of the paintings that adorn this space. Two friends are walking along arm in arm, discussing. All these visitors have taken to get there a staircase that has led them literally from shadow to light, thus preparing them to the proper appreciation of the works on display. The architecture

Figure 14.1  Karl Friedrich Schinkel, perspectival view of the entrance of the of the Altes Museum in Berlin, from Sammlung architectonischer Entwürfe, 1819–40. 284

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insistently suggests that art needs an effort to be approached, and that its significance must be shared though exchanges. In the distance, beyond the peristyle columns, we glimpse the city, the Prussian capital, whose cultural vocation the museum is designed to stimulate. The situation or the stage is undoubtedly political without superfluous spatial and ornamental pathos. It serves, for sure, the ambitions of the Prussian state, but its message extends beyond the latter’s quest for cultural legitimacy. Often discrete, such staging is not to be confused with passivity. For architecture does indeed intervene through its capacity to close and open, to separate and unite, to lead from shadow to light, to make invisible or visible. All these operations can be political. Take invisibility versus visibility: it constitutes a means of action as powerful as to enclose or to open. An office building realized in 2012 by the architect Rahul Mehrotra for the city of Hyderabad in southern India offers a brilliant demonstration of this power (see Figure 14.2). The building uses a glass façade doubled by a vertical garden to create a visual relationship between strata of Indian society that usually ignore each other: the professional employees of a high-tech business that belongs to the higher castes, and the near-untouchables who take care of watering and trimming the plants along the façade. Even if the building’s various users are free to continue ignoring each other, architecture acquires a political significance through this sort of project, without falling into ideological demonstration. Chicago-based architect Jeanne Gang has been also working on the issue of mutual visibility in projects like her Aqua Tower, where

Figure 14.2  Rahul Mehrotra, KMC office building in Hyderabad, India, 2002. 285

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inhabitants can see each other from one balcony to another. There the challenge is not so much caste and class divide than the tendency of our society to promote anonymity and indifference. Perhaps the fashionable term “agency” should be reserved for this type of action: the creation of situations that can either reinforce or disrupt the usual dividing lines in society, starting with effects of visual and social distancing that make some people invisible to others. It could be also useful to mobilize at this stage the notion of “aesthetic regime” proposed by French philosopher Jacques Rancière to better approach what architecture ultimately does, namely, to reinforce or to the contrary reorganize “the distribution of the sensible,” who and what can be seen and by whom in a given society18. Architectural agency, its capacity to generate situations includes also the tempos that govern its assemblages of effects in relation to the prevailing rhythms of life. From Roland Barthes to Gilles Deleuze, and from Marc Bloch to Jean-Claude Schmitt, philosophers and historians, not to mention anthropologists, sociologists, and economists, have insisted on the political dimension of social rhythms.19 The various ways collective time is organized, from production to worship, are indeed political insofar that they are constitutive of social relations. The mediaeval social order was, for instance, inseparable from the rhythms imposed by religion on individuals, monastic communities, guilds, and cities. The development of industrial societies was as for it inseparable from the new tempo imposed by mechanization. Chains of architectural sensations and affects contribute to these rhythms in specific ways. Romanesque and Gothic architecture was related to the social rhythms of the Middle Ages. In the 1920s and 1930s, Le Corbusier’s desire to make architecture commensurable with the new speed of a mechanized society was more authentically political than his various attempts to seduce authoritarian regimes or their democratic counterparts.

Ornament and décor For a very long time, ornamentation represented one of the most evident means through which architecture was connected to political questions. Ornaments displayed status, authority, and wealth. They expressed the actual rank and/or the social aspirations of buildings owners. Above all, they conveyed messages, thus participating to the communication strategy of empires, monarchies, aristocratic families, churches, religious orders, corporations, and guilds. Architectural ornaments were symbolic, and symbols often presented a political character.20 This symbolic dimension was among the reasons that motivated modernist architects to get rid of traditional ornamentation. Indeed, they were trying to transform the architectural discipline into a more autonomous practice owing nothing to external resources, such as mythology, history, astronomy, physics, and the natural sciences. In less than a generation, the ancient gods, allegorical and historical figures, evocations of

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the cosmos, and representations of plants and animals on which architecture had long drawn upon disappeared from façades and interiors. Sensations and affects were given precedence upon symbolic resources that now appeared as unjustifiable prostheses. Interestingly, the contemporary return of ornament has not led to a re-acceptance of the symbolic in architecture. The shortcomings of the postmodern episode of the 1970s and 1980s, its unsuccessful attempts to resurrect symbolism and to treat ornament as a language have acted as dire warnings. As a consequence, the ornamental is usually presented by today’s theorists and practitioners as non-symbolic, belonging exclusively to the realm of sensation and affect. Such a position is more disputable than it may seem insofar as the symbolic thus repressed often comes back under unexpected guises.21 Above all, it is based on a misunderstanding of the true nature of ornaments in the architectural tradition that prevailed until the dawn of modernity and of the real extent of what they were supposed to achieve. Despite what a superficial glance may suggest, ornaments were not meant as static elements of a vocabulary comparable to words aligned in a dictionary. They did not assemble in well-formed sentences and paragraphs. As for their symbolic content, explicit, often allegorical messages represented only a fraction of it. In a good work of architecture, ornaments were not static elements distributed like signs on a sheet of paper. They appeared rather as markers in the process that enabled construction to become architectural, a process in many respects comparable to what is called today emergence.22 For a building to reveal itself as architectural was synonymous with a dynamic unfolding that mobilized ornaments to acquire visibility. This dynamic dimension explained the recurring analogy between architecture and music. It inspired the Greek myth of Amphion assembling stones by the sheer power of its lyre. Reverberating on ornaments, such dimension could also be traced in the analogy made by the Ancients and their Renaissance and Baroque followers between the orders of columns and the proportions of the human body. The Doric and the Ionic columns were not imitating respectively male and female bodies in a static manner; they were rather a becoming like male and female, the beginning of a process of differentiation. From such a perspective, the main function of ornament was not to deliver explicit messages. Even if Greek temples or Baroque churches were covered with statues, friezes, and low reliefs depicting mythological, religious, or historical scenes, ornaments were primarily meant to reveal the underlying order that made architecture possible. For that purpose, taken together, the ornaments of building constituted a decor. At this stage, it is worth remembering that the Latin word for ornament, ornamentum, shared a common origin with the verb ordino, meaning to organize, to order.23 Ornament was about ordering, a lesson that was not lost on the Viennese historian of art Ernst Hans Gombrich who entitled his major study of ornamentation The Sense of Order.24 I have chosen here to call decor the overall order produced by the coordination of ornaments, a convenient term provided that one leaves aside the connotation of arbitrariness or even fakeness that is often associated with it. Etymology proves itself once more to be instructive. Decor presents an evident connection with decorum, that 287

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is, the way in which one should behave according to the circumstances. This relation suggests that traditional decor used to contribute, along with spatial effects, to the construction of architectural situations. It placed human action within an ordered frame that gave it both meaning and an orientation. The responsibility of the plot was left to the actors, but the stage was set and the play could start. The symbolic content was more present with ornament and decor than with other architectural resources and effects. But one must there again proceed with caution in examining how the symbolic and the impression of meaningfulness that it created were actually conveyed. Again, mythological stories and historical episodes, allegories, and emblems were only part of what enabled decor to contribute to the creation of a stage on which human actions mattered. Here also, one has to envisage the question from a dynamic perspective. Like traditional ornament, decor and its meaning must be understood as a process, a becoming meaningful rather than a once-and-for-all assigned signification. This dynamic character implies that the most profound signification of ornamented architecture, its true symbolic power was never fully disclosed. It remained partly shrouded in mystery, like these episodes of our childhood that we perceive as meaningful without fully realizing what they imply. Architecture used to evoke ideas of foundation not only because of the seemingly animal-like character of some of the sensations it aroused but also because of the persistent mystery that surrounded its symbolic content. Contrary to the famous analogy drawn by Victor Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris, architecture never really operated like a text; it was a décor.25 Even more than instructive, monuments were supposed to be inspiring. For the inhabitants of European mediaeval cities, the signification of the ornamented façades of their cathedrals went far beyond the actual meaning of the illustrated scenes sculpted in stone. They spoke of common belief and hope past the learned discourse of the clerics versed in the Old and New Testaments that guided the hand of craftsmen. Beyond the details of religious and political agendas, architectural decor was able to convey emotions and values that reinforced the hold of these agendas on the people. This is how Versailles’s abundant ornamentation should be understood, past the ingenious allegories devised by the artists serving the Sun King. The exact meaning of these allegories was actually lost on many visitors of the palace, on the common men and women in particular, who did not have a sufficient stock of theological and literary knowledge to appreciate the subtle references they made to Christian dogma and GrecoRoman mythology spread over the Great Apartments walls and ceilings. Versailles nevertheless functioned as an efficient decor that added to the solemnity of the rituals of the monarchy and justified its pretentions to rule in an absolute manner. Did we ever get rid of decor? Despite the modernist ban on ornament, the decorative dimension never totally lost its hold upon architecture. In modernist architecture, objects, furniture, textured and colored walls often played the role imparted to ornament until the dawn of the twentieth century.26 There is no architectural situation without something like a decor that extends the sheer power of surfaces, volumes, and lights. With the 288

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return of the ornamental today, this complementarity between situation and decor is becoming again evident. What is however less understandable is the refusal by so many designers to acknowledge the unavoidably symbolic aspect of their production. This refusal is at least as problematic as its opposite, the acceptance of heavily ideological ornaments and decors at times when nobody thought to challenge the necessity for architecture to convey meaning, throughout the nineteenth century for instance, when allegories of churches, nations, institutions, as well as of their virtues, multiplied outside and inside public buildings. In many cases, such denial corresponds to an assent in disguise, an approval of the way the world is currently run, with its ruthless capitalistic principles and its increasing inequality between people. Star architecture, as well as the various neo-avant-gardes that strive to achieve recognition in its wake, are accepting a political and social order in which competition, be it economic or artistic, has become the almost exclusive guideline. In other words, the temptation displayed by a large part of contemporary architecture to be an objective marker of the condition in which it is produced must be challenged insofar as it denies the very possibility of critical thinking and the perspective of an alternative to boundless capitalism (on that theme, see the chapter by Lindstrom and Malpas in this volume).

A politics of materiality Architecture orders matter to create situations and their related decors. This fundamental ambition of the discipline may be also apprehended as an attempt to investigate how the physical world can present a human relevance, how parts of it can be designed to constitute a stage for human actions. For that purpose, architecture explores the possible relations between material effects and human sensations and affects, as well as the possibility for matter to be arranged in such a way that it can convey meaning. From this perspective, architecture appears as a contribution to the co-construction of the physical world and the human subject. Indeed, its starting point is what we know about and what we can do with the physical world, what is the current state of knowledge about matter and the laws that govern its behavior, what type of experience we can promote through the arrangement of built masses, the play on light and shadow, textures, and colors. The physical world, the realm of tangible phenomena particularly, is not given once and for all. It appears partly as a cultural construct that owes to the current state of science and technology as well as to a perceptive education influenced by values and beliefs. To quote British-born historian of art Michael Baxandall, “living in a culture, growing up and learning to survive in it, involves us in a special perceptive training.”27 Take our relation to light and shadow, past some fundamental biological determinations, it is permeated by culture as writer Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s famous 1933 essay, In Praise of Shadows, has convincingly argued in the Japanese case.

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Through sensations and affects, the perception of tangible phenomena tells us also something fundamental about who we are, or rather about the way we understand ourselves at a certain moment in time and in a given culture, for this understanding is also to a large extent a social construct. Even more telling is the capacity of matter to be assembled, sculpted, carved, or cast in ways that convey a symbolic meaning. It is as if matter was animated, as if it received a life that echoes ours. Through animation, ornament, and decor contribute to make matter expressive beyond the sensations and affects it induces in us.28 There is an intimate connection between the way we perceive, explore, and make sense of the physical world, and the manner in which we understand ourselves. Tangible objects and phenomena appear as exterior to us, but their perception is inseparable from the movement of constitution of subjectivity as both related to the world and distinct from it. There is perhaps no more striking an allegory of this simultaneous movement than the story portrayed by the philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, the leader of the Sensualist school in Enlightenment France, in his Traité des sensations, Treatise on the Sensations, of 1754. There, he describes a statue endowed with intelligence but deprived of the ability to feel. By successively investing it with a sense of smell, hearing, taste, sight, and finally touch, the philosopher evokes its gradual awakening to the world of sensations and ideas. Each sense brings its own set of discoveries, but the real tipping point is when the statue acquires the sense of touch and thus discovers the existence of obstacles beyond itself that put up a resistance to it, and when it realizes at the same time that it possesses a body that interacts with them. The impenetrability of matter finally gives it access to true consciousness: an awareness of itself as an entity that is at once linked to the world and distinct from it. I have chosen to call materiality the experience of tangible objects and phenomena envisaged in close connection with the constitution of subjectivity. Ultimately, architecture is about materiality, a key consequence of the co-construction of the non-human and the human, of the material world and the human self. The discipline unremittingly explores the relations between various arrangements of solids and voids, lights and shadows, and the sensations, affects and symbols that arise in contact with them. Implicitly, it proposes an interpretation of subjectivity related to these sensations, affects, and symbols. Materiality is political since it is inseparable from a certain vision of what it means to be human, a vision tested through the design of architectural situations and decors. Although other practices, from painting and sculpture to the culinary art have to do with the issue of the tangible and its relation to subjectivity, architecture occupies a special position insofar as we inhabit it. To inhabit means precisely to lead one’s life and structure one’s subjectivity in direct relation with tangible elements such as floors, walls, doors, and windows. An alternative history of architecture organized along the various interpretations of materiality that have developed over time becomes possible. Such history enables to reinterpret well-known episodes, such as the Renaissance. For Renaissance architecture is inseparable from a shift in the understanding of the tangible world, a world perceived 290

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as fundamentally ordered, proportioned, and measurable, hence the possibility to represent it in plan, elevation, and perspective.29 This evolution is also linked to the new interpretation of the subject proposed by humanism. Perspectival representation appears as a key expression of the co-construction of the material world as measurable and subjectivity as profoundly in accordance with this ordered, proportioned, and measurable character, since it refers itself to the visual experience of a subject who is able to grasp the distances and relative sizes of things.30 Measure, order, and proportion: these fundamental features of the new materiality that Renaissance architecture contributes to explore through its regular compositions, which appeal to the perspectival perception of the humanist subject, present evident connections with the rise of the political ideal of rational government. Good government becomes synonymous with the determination of the proper balance between constituencies and their respective forces, a rational conception formulated among others by Niccolo Machiavelli. The politics of Renaissance architecture, as expressed through its investigation of a new form of materiality, thus extends beyond its role as servant of the specific ambitions of popes, bishops, kings, and other rulers. The politics of materiality is of course not limited to these major periods of transition. It expresses itself at multiple other moments, through the attempts made by designers to inflect the codes that prevail in the society in which they live. Such a perspective enables us to throw a more accurate light on the contribution of architects like Albert Speer to totalitarian regimes. Beyond the effects produced by their Neoclassical compositions and their symbolic use of eagles and swastikas, Speer’s buildings appear as proposals regarding the relations between the material world and human subjectivity. They enroll concrete and stone, light and darkness, in a complex game meant to exalt the raw forces of a telluric nature miraculously aligned with cutting-edge militaristic technology. This game is designed to elevate certain subjects, the Führer, the Nazi high dignitaries, key groups, from elite troops to German athletes, while belittling other subjects, beginning with the common people in isolation who must experience at the same time the formidable power of the party and their own insignificance. Techniques such as the dimensions given to certain architectural elements relative to those of the human body are mobilized for this purpose just like the decorative power of Nazi ornaments. From this standpoint, the rejection of modernist architecture by first-half-of-thetwentieth-century totalitarian regimes, leaving aside famous and rare exceptions such as Guiseppe Terragni’s 1936 Casa del Fascio in Como, Italy, becomes easier to understand. For totalitarian regimes such as German Nazism or Italian Fascism, the materiality of architecture was inseparable from the project to exalt certain individuals and groups, while belittling all the others. Despite their recurring reference to a mythical and supposedly inclusive People, these regimes mobilized the discipline to assert differences in dignity between humans. While not necessarily egalitarian—Le Corbusier for instance was very far from this position—modernist architects had the ambition to treat everyone with equal dignity. Nothing is more telling in that respect than the Gardener’s House of Villa Savoye. Modest in size, the house was designed by 291

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Le Corbusier with the same concern for architectural elegance as the Villa intended for wealthy clients31. Treating everyone with equal dignity, despite their social standing, was a key modernist concern, a concern that is still today inspiring projects like Rahul Mehrotra’s Hyderabad office building. Is it possible for architecture to go further down the road leading to democratic ideals than to treat everyone with equal dignity? In other words, how to create scenes and decors that may orient human action in an authentically democratic direction? Architects have been trying to address this challenge for the past two centuries. To house democratic parliaments, they have reinvented the Greco-Roman hemicycle. They have also proposed all sorts of ornaments to convey the sovereignty of the people and the dignity of the Res Publica. Places like the National Mall in Washington bear testimony of their ingenuity. But is this necessarily the right direction to take? It is worth noting at this stage that the UK, one of the oldest democracies in Europe, has remained faithful to the mediaeval spatial organization of parliaments instead of adopting the Greco-Roman hemicycle. Architecture may certainly facilitate the exercise of democracy, but it does not determine its form rigorously. At its most efficient, it orients rather than prescribes. Is it even desirable to orient behaviors with the secret desire to regulate them? It is worth remembering that democracy feeds upon a fundamental indetermination, which is synonymous with ideals of freedom and spontaneous behavior making possible unforeseen events. Contrasting with authoritarian types of political regimes, democracy is characterized by an unusually high level of open-endedness. Can an architect design for what should always preserve, at least in principle, the possibility of the radically unexpected? As noted earlier, this question haunted the Situationists, leading one of them, Dutch artist Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys, to his labyrinthine New Babylon, a city planned for the unplannable, a collection of situations allowing for every possible bifurcation.32 New Babylon proved ultimately a failure, albeit a magnificent one. To aspire to the creation of a genuinely democratic architecture constitutes perhaps a theoretical and practical impossibility, an impossibility which could prove in addition anti-democratic, just like these contemporary projects for the smart city, which pretend to nudge, but actually try to moderate and even control the free expression and initiatives of citizens.33 Beyond democratic values, it is striking to observe the ambiguity of the relation between architecture and political ideals. Utopia offers a striking expression of this ambiguity. Indeed, one cannot but be struck by the relative lack of precision of the grand architectural schemes suggested by utopian thinkers, such as Charles Fourier, as a spatial solution to some of the problems plaguing, according to them, existing societies. Fourier’s Phalanstery, this form of collective housing reminiscent of Versailles while announcing key features of twentieth-century social programs, remains, for instance, surprisingly vague. It offers a flickering image rather than stable contours. Conversely, many allegedly utopian architects, from Claude-Nicolas Ledoux to Le Corbusier, show themselves imprecise, to say the least, when evoking the political and social order of the future. In short, architecture is perhaps unable to be truly utopian, just like it cannot be genuinely democratic.34 292

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But we need at the same time architecture for democracy to take place in a very literal sense. Without spaces where bodies and not only ideas can meet, without built situations and decors facilitating these encounters, democracy would remain an abstraction. From this perspective, Oleg Grabar’s remark that “the more profound truth of architecture in general, that it is always at the service of man and has no greater purpose than to adorn his manifold activities” sounds both as a warning and as an encouragement. Architectural adornment acts as a mediation between the material and the symbolic dimensions of human activities. There is perhaps no genuinely democratic architecture, but architecture should be mobilized to adorn democracy, to reveal its most profound meaning, beyond words and constitutions, vote procedures and parliamentary regulations. Rather than trying to manipulate humans, architecture’s ultimate role is to guarantee that their actions, whatever they are, possess a signification.

Notes 1 Benjamin, Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), III, 101–33. 2 Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (1980): 121–36. For a critique of Winner’s argument, see, for instance, Steve Woolgar and Geoff Cooper, “Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence? Moses’ Bridges, Winner’s Bridges and Other Urban Legends in S&TS,” Social Studies of Science 29, no. 3 (1999): 433–49. 3 Bruno Zevi, The Modern Language of Architecture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, [1973] 1978). 4 Albena Yaneva, Five Ways to Make Architecture Political: An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 5 Aggregate, Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). 6 Antoine Picon, Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (Chichester: Wiley, 2013). 7 This position is expressed, for instance, in Farshid Moussavi and Michael Kubo, The Function of Ornament (Actar: Barcelona, 2006). See also Jesse Reiser and Nakano Umemoto, Atlas of Novel Tectonics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006). 8 See, for instance, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Meaning in Western Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1975); Juhani Pallasmaa, The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture (Chichester: Wiley, 2009); Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). 9 For more developments on this question see Antoine Picon, La Matérialité de l’Architecture (Marseilles: Parenthèses, 2018). 10 Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 193. 11 Pierre Caye, Empire et Décor: L’Architecture et la Question de la Technique à l’Age Humaniste et Classique (Paris: Vrin, 1999).

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12 Eve Blau, “Transparency and the Irreconcilable Contradictions of Modernity,” Praxis no. 9 (2007): 50–9. 13 Temple Grandin, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005). 14 On this key notion, see, for instance, Flora Samuel, Le Corbusier and the Architectural Promenade (Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2010). 15 Jean-Claude Schmitt, Les Rythmes au Moyen Age (Paris: Gallimard, 2016). 16 Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Mark Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (Rotterdam: Center for Contemporary Art/010, 1998). 17 Barry Bergdoll, Karl Friedrich Schinkel: An Architecture for Prussia (New York: Rizzoli, 1994), 9. 18 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004). 19 An overview of the authors who have engaged this question can be found at the beginning of Jean-Claude Schmitt, op. cit. 20 For more on these topics, see Picon, op. cit. 21 Cf. Robert Levit, “Contemporary ‘Ornament’: The Return of the Symbolic Repressed,” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 28 (Spring/Summer 2008): 70–85. 22 On emergence, see, for instance, Michael Weinstock, The Architecture of Emergence: The Evolution of Form in Nature and Civilisation (Chichester: Wiley, 2010). 23 Pierre Gros, “La Notion d’Ornamentum de Vitruve à Alberti,” Perspective: La Revue de l’INHA, 2010–11, no. 1 (2011): 130–6. 24 Ernst Hans Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979). 25 Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, [1831] 1998), 289 in particular. 26 Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (London: Yale University Press, 2012). 27 Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (London: Yale University Press, 1985), 107. 28 On the notion of animation see Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 29 See, for instance, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). 30 Carl Havelange, De l’Œil et du Monde: Une Histoire du Regard au Seuil de la Modernité (Paris: Fayard, 1998). 31 Despite the polemics that developed on the occasion of the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Le Corbusier’s death, fueled by books such as François Chaslin, Un Corbusier (Paris: Le Seuil, 2015), it is by the same token difficult to interpret the work of the architect as an expression of Fascist convictions. Le Corbusier himself declared that he was not Fascist. We have addressed this polemic in Antoine Picon, “Au Secours! Le Corbusier Revient, ou de la Difficulté d’Etre Post-moderne”; “Help ! Le Corbusier Is Back, or, the Difficulty of Being Postmodern,” Le Visiteur, no. 21 (November 2015): 163–74, 312–17; Picon, “Le Projet, la Violence et l’Histoire: A Propos de la Mise en Accusation de Le Corbusier,” D’Architectures, no. 241 (December 2015–January 2016): 24–7. 32 See Mark Wigley, op. cit. 33 Cf. Antoine Picon, Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (Chichester: Wiley, 2015). 34 For more on this question see Antoine Picon, “Notes on Utopia, the City, and Architecture,” Grey Room, no. 68 (Summer 2017): 94–105.

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Top-Down/Bottom-Up: Co-Producing the City Fonna Forman

Political theorists do not typically reflect on the spatial conditions of our normative claims about power, justice, equality, rights, freedom, and agency. Nor do we consider the urban manifestation of conflict among these concepts. We regularly ask: Why or why not? By whom, for whom and when? But we rarely ask: Where?1 In the twentyfirst century “where” is increasingly becoming the city, especially the informal sectors of the city as the planet continues to urbanize. Rapid urbanization in an era of neoliberal growth has turned the twenty-first-century city into a site of dramatic contrasts and proximities—unprecedented wealth and consumption bordering explosive territories of poverty growing faster than the urban cores they surround. The city is the definitive laboratory for co-existence, a rich and contested field where the contradictions between power and justice, between wealth and poverty, and between private and public are physicalized; and where the stark realities of urban injustice today for so many people demand a new political theory.

A critical spatial practice at the US–Mexico border I live and work at the border between San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico—the busiest international land crossing in the Western hemisphere. The San Diego–Tijuana border region is a microcosm of the conflicts and deprivations that globalization has inflicted on the world’s most vulnerable people: poverty, climate change, accelerating migration, labor exploitation, human trafficking, gender violence, explosive urbanization, privatization, and so on. It is a zone of dramatic asymmetries between rich and poor, and presently the main site of arrival for Central Americans seeking political asylum, a lightning rod for American nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Here, geopolitics is intensely local. Fear of deportation has produced unprecedented anxiety in the immigrant neighborhoods of San Diego county. Men and women who have lived, worked, and contributed in countless ways to their communities in the United States over decades are terrorized by threats of the proverbial “knock at the door.” There are countless stories

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of egregious human rights violations, mass sweeps, entry and seizure without warrant, extra-legal deportation, detention of minors in adult facilities, and the forced separation of migrant children from their parents. In this radical context the prototypes for Trump’s beautiful wall built in our city last year physicalize national hatred for our neighbors. With my partner, urbanist and architect Teddy Cruz, I have been leading a variety of urban and environmental projects in this region that link municipalities, universities, and grassroots organizations on both sides of the border wall. We are committed to telling a very different story about urban life in this region. Our work reimagines the border as a tissue of social and spatial ecologies, documenting the often invisible flows and circulations that define this territory and shape the transgressive, hybrid practices and identities of the people who inhabit it.2 Our research has always been motivated by the positive impact of immigrants on the city. Their ingenious strategies of adaptation in conditions of scarcity have inspired our urban vision. Our research-based political and architectural practice is an unconventional partnership between a political theorist and an architect. Blurring the boundary between theory and practice, our work merges architecture and urbanism, political theory and urban policy, visual arts and public culture. Our creative output takes many shapes: critical research, urban and architectural design, cultural exhibition and performance, consultancy at various institutional scales, cross-border civic engagement, and spatial intervention in the city (public space, social housing, green infrastructure, and environmental conservancy). Most of our work today is housed in the Center on Global Justice at the University of California San Diego, which I founded in 2010 to facilitate cross-sector campus research on poverty and community-based development. We discovered enthusiastic support across the campus because our founding narrative jived with ubiquitous trends in university culture—“internationalizing” the curriculum, forging “interdisciplinary synergies,” “experiential undergraduate education,” and so on. But we soon challenged the idea that “global” means something “out there,” with a more rooted orientation to human struggle that always takes place somewhere, in some local place. Our “global” center thus became a vehicle for deep commitment to the border neighborhoods that sit just a few miles from our campus. We also quickly scrapped the vertical academic tropes of “service” and “applied research” that place the university in a privileged position as the bearer of all resources and knowledges, and “the community” below as a passive recipient without agency, or a mere subject of data gathering. University research is infused with assumptions that we know more, that only we are trained, that only we have languages to communicate complex ideas and practices, and the tools to solve the world’s problems. Epistemic navel gazing is particularly harmful when it makes claims about people who are marginalized, excluded, dispossessed, exploited, and oppressed. If we claim even implicitly to be advancing justice, fairness, equity, etc. on their behalf, we inflict double harm by assuming that our concepts hold meaning for them. For this reason we have committed to “grounding” our normative claims about the city through horizontal 296

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practices of engagement where researchers and neighborhood residents assemble as partners to share knowledges, learn from each other, and co-produce new projects in the city.3 We think a lot about the biases and pathologies of urban institutional culture. For a while we worked inside the municipality of San Diego. In 2012 we were summoned by the Mayor to design and lead an urban lab in his office. Our official name when we received our first budget from City Council was the Incubator for Civic Imagination, which we modeled after the municipal urban think tank in Medellín, Colombia, led by our friend, architect Alejandro Echeverri, during Sergio Fajardo’s mayoral administration (the one that produced so many transformative urban interventions in that city in the early 2000s). But San Diego politics eventually dumbed our name down, and we became the Civic Innovation Lab. We experimented with civic engagement and public space as strategies of equitable growth in San Diego’s urban neighborhoods. Beholden to no city department, and no private agenda, we designed a nimble thinkand-do-tank that could expedite the best ideas through the byzantine tangle of city bureaucracy. We were also tasked with framing a new era of cross-border regional thinking with our counterparts in Tijuana. Municipal creativity is typically aligned with mayoral personalities, however, and our urban experiment was doomed to be short-lived!4 Fortunately we had the foresight to run our project grants through the campus, which propelled the next stage of our urban and cross-border work at the Center.

Adam Smith and urban commonwealth; or socializing Adam Smith This epilogue is an opportunity to reflect on my evolution as a political theorist who has embarked on a critical spatial practice. Family history had something to do with it. My great-grandfather Abe Kaiman arrived to the United States from Poland in the early 1920s and made his way to Milwaukee, Wisconsin where I was born and raised. He was determined to live in Milwaukee because in 1910 the city had elected America’s first socialist mayor, Emil Seidler. Fueled by rust-belt labor, Seidler committed to a new urban agenda of “public enterprise”—improved public works, public health, public schools, public parks, public libraries, public transportation, public vocational training, and public natatoria. For the next five decades Milwaukee became a model of honest, frugal government and public urbanization, committed to the common good and the well-being of the laboring class. Milwaukee embraced the vision of a “Cooperative Commonwealth” rooted in education and reform. As a young man, my great-grandfather was captivated, and soon became involved in Der Arbeiter Ring (the Jewish Workmen’s Circle) an immigrant labor movement that provided social services and unemployment relief to immigrants adapting to life in America. Over time, he opened a small shop that 297

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sold tires and motor oil; but family lore has it that he was very bad at business, and that the shop was little more than a front for the meetings that convened over many decades in its back rooms. When Grandpa Abe died I was beneficiary of his prized possession: a photo of him taken in 1926 at the funeral of Eugene Debs (wearing Debs’s overcoat!). I was still small, but I remember his worry that other immigrant groups in America were not finding the same successes that his children did. I’ve always felt connected with urban public activism. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, this manifested as a deep curiosity about Adam Smith, and how to reconcile the capitalist reading of his Wealth of Nations, with the social and ethical fabric of his less well-known treatise, the Theory of Moral Sentiments. I discovered that much of his thought had gone missing over two-and-a-half centuries in the ideological battles over capitalism. Over time, this curiosity mushroomed into decades of research devoted to socializing Adam Smith, recuperating his legacy in support of a more public agenda.5 Smith was remarkably localist and anti-cosmopolitan in his ethics, and he thought deeply about public well-being, public goods, public infrastructure, and public culture in the newly industrializing cities of Europe.6 A strident eighteenth-century critic of empire and slavery, Smith condemned the state for colluding with evil, but his views on the state were not ideological as interpreters of the invisible hand, left and right, would have us believe. The statesman played an essential role in Smith’s system, balancing public and private considerations, investing strategically and judiciously in public goods, particularly when the market is not incentivized to do so. Smith devoted an entire section of the Wealth of Nations, the longest section, to elaborating public provisions, progressive taxation, and taxation on luxury goods, subjects he speculated would become increasingly relevant as states would grow in population and wealth, and as domestic challenges would become more complex. Smith was increasingly alarmed, for example, by the conditions of the working poor in early industrial capitalism, and he spent dozens of pages in the Wealth of Nations elaborating the virtues of public education, essential to countering the dehumanizing effects of factory work and cultivating a civic consciousness among the working classes. Workers and consumers needed to be citizens too. I have always seen my Smith scholarship as an act of critical repossession, positioning the words of the father against his errant children. Mobilizing a more complex Adam Smith in current debates about public and private goods subverts assumptions that austerity, and the privatization of every dimension of our lives, is a classical liberal inheritance. There is huge rhetorical satisfaction deploying Smith for these purposes, rather than a likelier comrade like Rousseau or Marx, because he demonstrates how far neoliberalism has strayed from the roots of classical economic thought, how narrow its account of “economic man” and distorted its solutions to the crises of late modernity have become. How urgent today when the misappropriation of Smith in our ever-privatizing and globalizing “climatic regime,” as Bruno Latour calls it, is so treacherous.7 298

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The informal public Soon after tenure, my public Adam Smith started itching to get into the world. In 2009, Amartya Sen had elevated Smith as a central figure in his The Idea of Justice, and this prompted me to convene an international conference at UC San Diego, anchored in a conversation between Sen and Elinor Ostrom on the abstraction of global justice theory, and the need to “get local.”8 The energy around this conference solidified campus support for the new Center on Global Justice. My growing aspiration to localize the global quickly urbanized when I met Teddy Cruz, sort of like “going down” to the city with the Tijuana Socrates to see what I could learn. What first brought Teddy and me together was our shared interest in informality. As a scholar of Smith, I was always drawn to the unintended, the emergent and the unplanned; inspired by unexpected genius and the endogenous springs of bottom-up collective action. As an architect, Teddy had emerged as a critic in his field, rejecting its obsession with form and aesthetics-for-aesthetics-sake, and its neglect of the social, economic, and political vectors that constitute urban space. He is well known in international design circles for his work in the immigrant communities that flank the US–Mexico border. From diverse vantages, thus, we were both inspired by the bottom-up resilience and ingenuity of people who inhabit the periphery in conditions of scarcity—how they assemble housing and infrastructure, markets of exchange, governance practices, and general strategies of collective survival.9 For both of us “informal” was not an aesthetic category or style but a praxis, referring to the social, political, economic, and spatial processes that emerge extra-officially from the bottom-up to address the urgent needs of immigrant or displaced populations in the absence of formal support. These informal dynamics have intensified in recent years with the rapid urbanization of the world’s population, pouring into cities at a rate of 32 million people each year, escaping political instability, violence, poverty, and the disproportionate impacts of climate change.10 Although some like to stress that relative poverty across the world is decreasing, that moving to cities makes human life better, that all boats float higher (and Asia is obviously the model), this is not a satisfying ethical response to radical urban asymmetry everywhere. Global cities, with all their wealth, are proving incapable of responding to today’s most urgent urban challenges: inclusion, sustainability, and explosive informality. Although we are driven by a deep commitment to urban justice, we engage informal environments not as sites of pity or charity, or as sites of institutional alienation, neglect, and exploitation—which of course they are—but as vibrant laboratories for reimagining the city. Peripheral communities are intensely active urban agents who challenge the dominant models of growth that have excluded them. At the margins of cities everywhere, an alternative model of urban growth is being shaped stealthfully from the bottom-up, often below the radar of the formal institutions that govern urban development.

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In our own region, for example, border neighborhoods devise ingenious urban practices that transgress imposed political and economic forces, pointing to other ways of inhabiting and constructing city. In the last decades as the wall has continued to harden, neighborhoods on both sides of the border have negotiated scarcity and public alienation by constructing alternative urbanisms of resilience and adaptation from the bottom-up. Informal settlements in Tijuana build themselves by repurposing urban waste from San Diego, and transform incrementally through time from emergency dwellings to permanent homes. When the small pink postwar houses in the older suburban rings of southern California are replaced and upsized, they are recycled in the slums of Tijuana. Speculators move entire houses across the border on flat-bed trucks, where they are put on top of steel frames, leaving the first floor open to be infilled informally through time with a small business or additional housing space. San Diego’s urban (de)construction debris also makes its way across the border—framing, joists, connectors, ply-wood, aluminum windows. Recycled garage doors become the new skins of emergency housing. Recycled rubber tires are adapted into functional retaining walls that reduce erosion and housing slippage on steep canyon hillsides. Informal urban development in Tijuana is a story of “second hand” urbanization. As Mexican populations travel north in search for new opportunities, they bring the habits of urban retrofit and adaptation along with them. An informal business is plugged into a garage or shed; an illegal granny flat is built in the backyard to support an extended family. These informal economies and patterns of density have fundamentally altered the fabric of America’s immigrant neighborhoods. To visualize this impact, we have designed lyrical maps that compare evolving land-use patterns in San Diego and Tijuana. San Diego to the north has been comprised historically of large blocks of exclusionary zoning—residential, retail, and so on—maximizing space with minimum complexity. Tijuana, on the other hand, is highly pixilated with dense and compacted mixed-uses— minimizing space with maximum complexity. Over time, this “confetti” of alternative uses has been seeping into the largeness of southern California, transforming the large with the small, altering the urban monoculture of San Diego’s suburban neighborhoods with more sustainable and inclusive land uses. Our interest in informal process is aligned with our view of the role of architecture in constructing the city today. We have been critical of the autonomous, self-referential language of the architectural field, articulating the city formally as a collection of discrete buildings existing above a neutral speculative platform shaped by the forces of the market. Instead, we see architecture as a relational system that navigates complex historical, cultural, social, economic, and political forces in the city, generating a more complex framework for urbanization itself. Inspired by urban theorist Stan Allen’s idea of “infrastructural urbanism,” we investigate informal systems that are shaped not a priori by a designer freezing concept into shape, but that evolve incrementally through time.11 Buildings in slums perform as anticipatory scaffolds, negotiating with topography, time, resources and boundaries, transforming as human needs and capacities evolve. A house might begin with a pad and a frame. As resources emerge, so follow spaces; a second 300

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floor might evolve, threaded into the first. Habitation leads, spaces follow, nothing is wasted, everything is useful. This is why the exterior assemblage of informal houses resembles the interiors, as the aesthetic of the house is not determined by the resolution of an architectural object but reflects the memory of its own evolution. Although we investigate the informal as a set of procedures, we also find the ingenious bricolage of informal urbanization quite beautiful. Informal urban practices are often disregarded by planners as ugly, the thing to avoid, to protect oneself from, to zone away from sight, to whitewash or clear, certainly nothing one would want to embrace, or emulate or learn from. Through our work we challenge these biases, advancing informal neighborhoods less as sites of blight and need and more as sites of local productivity with important lessons for the “formal city.” While we condemn the economic forces that marginalize people into slums, we believe that the most compelling practices of inclusive urbanization are emerging from within these peripheral sites of scarcity. The self-built logics; the ingenious practices of structural retrofit, adaptation, and resiliency that transgress formal political and economic constraints; the vibrancy of informal market dynamics; the solidarity of communities confronting scarcity—demonstrate other ways of constructing the city, and challenge the hegemonic neoliberal paradigm of urban development today. Take the case of Gustavo Banda Aceves, a charismatic activist and religious leader in the Alacrán Canyon, an informal settlement at the periphery of Tijuana adjacent to the borderwall. In the last years, he and his wife Zaida Guillen have built emergency housing to shelter hundreds of Haitian refugees after the U.S. and the City of Tijuana turned their back on them. Banda Aceves’s project speaks a local urban language: what began in 2016 as a few small structures built with his own hands, and the hands of the immigrants he houses, has incrementally evolved into a full-on ecology of housing units and public spaces threaded into what seems like impossible canyon topography, ready to receive new arrivals by the hundreds and to absorb a variety of community uses and social support programs. In the last months, the so-called “caravan” has begun to arrive in Banda Aceves’s village. He opens his doors to all, he says, because Central Americans, Mexicans, and Haitians are all part of the same humanity. We find the creative negotiation of space, time, and materials, driven by necessity infinitely compelling. Instead of seeing the city as a collection of discrete objects driven by market forces, informal practices present an infrastructural model of spatial development. The ultimate goal of our work is to translate these informal procedures so that they can “trickle up” to inspire a more inclusive metropolitan vision. We believe public investment should subsidize spatial ingenuity, reinterpreting informal urbanization as a mechanism for more inclusive urban growth. We believe urban zoning should be reconceived as a generative force to anticipate local economy and activity, and respond to emergent social and economic necessities. Zoning should not penalize alternative densities and transitional uses. We believe that housing affordability should be reimagined through the hidden value of community sweat equity and participation. Finally, we believe urban infrastructure should be reconceived as a hybrid, flexible, 301

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and resilient framework for social integration. Just as climate change is forcing us to reimagine the city as a more porous and resilient urban ecology, accelerating migration demands urban infrastructure that anticipates inclusion and integration. Urban infrastructure must be understood as more than freeways, bridges, or other singular-use urban systems. Infrastructure must be able to absorb the migratory effects of climate change, poverty, and political instability. We see ourselves as urban curators, mediators of knowledge from the bottom-up to the top-down and back again. But we have also been very careful not to capitulate unwittingly to the logics of privatization and send a message that these environments are capable of “going it alone,” without public support. For the moment, Banda Aceves relies on the goodwill of fellow citizens to achieve what he has. He has no formal institutional support of any kind. Much of what we do is advocate for intelligent support mechanisms that fortify the agency of those who inhabit and build the informal and marginalized sectors of the city. We partner closely with border neighborhoods to imagine design possibilities through their everyday practices, assemble resources, and navigate pathways as they build their own housing, their own infrastructure and public spaces. Our partnerships have been generative in this sense: the social capital, economic power, and design and programmatic capacity of the university become leverage for our community partners as they develop their own work, without having to travel the conventional path of surrendering their neighborhoods to private developers. To support these long-term design partnerships across the border region, we are codeveloping physical spaces for collaborative work. The UCSD Community Stations are a network of public spaces located in neighborhoods on both sides of the wall.12 Each is a robust partnership between the campus and an embedded grassroots organization, designed, funded, built, programmed, and maintained collaboratively. In each case, we have transformed vacant and neglected sites and spaces into civic classrooms. The spatial manifestation of each Community Station therefore varies, reflecting the specificity of its location, the partners involved, and the serendipitous opportunities that opened over time. For example, our UCSD/CASA Community Station, located in the border neighborhood San Ysdiro, California lives inside a renovated 1920s church and an adjacent purpose-built outdoor cultural pavilion. Together these structures anchor a small-scale mixed-use affordable housing project. Another station, the UCSD/ EarthLab takes the shape of a modular environmental design lab, embedded in an outdoor pedagogic garden. The UCSD/DIVINA Community Station, located in an informal settlement of 85,000 people on the periphery of Tijuana, reflects the informal spatial development patterns of the neighborhoods that surround it. It manifests as a layered scaffold, infilled through time with spaces and programming as needs emerge and resources become available. And finally our newest station, the UCSD/ALACRAN Community Station, is a migrant housing project with Banda Aceves, programmed with economic, cultural, social and educational programming that moves the model of emergency housing from one of hospitality to one of inclusion. 302

Epilogue

While the Community Stations are physically diverse, all operate as a platform of knowledge exchange where diverse urban knowledges and capacities across sectors convene to increase public knowledge and community capacity for political and environmental action, and to co-develop long-term urban projects. The Community Stations are richly programmed for dialogue, urban pedagogy, participatory design, participatory climate action, cultural production, collaborative research, and youth mentorship, all curated collaboratively between community and university. From the base of the Community Stations, we have designed and co-produced dozens of spatial interventions across the region in the last years—public spaces, social housing, community centers, outdoor learning facilities, energy infrastructure, green infrastructure, and at this moment, a binational environmental easement/conservancy to protect a precious cross-border estuary from waste and sediment flows, accelerated by new borderwall infrastructure.13

Latin American civic inspiration Our urban vision for the US–Mexico border region has been inspired by a twentiethcentury lineage of participatory urbanization in Latin America, led by mayors who committed to rethinking the city from the periphery, and working across sectors to invest in the ingenuity of the marginalized. In our lab, we research municipalities that have “co-produced” the city with the bottom-up, from Porto Alegre and Curitiba, Brazil to Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia. We have been documenting these cases in close collaboration and dialogue with the key political and civic actors who led them.14 What makes this tradition distinctive is a commitment to urban intervention at three scales— into the normative, the institutional, and the spatial. (1). Normative intervention manifested as an investment in civic culture, designing strategies of urban pedagogy to stimulate civic engagement, increase public knowledge, rouse a sense of urban dignity and collective ownership of the city, and ultimately generate more imaginative civic thinking. Here there are strong influences of Brazilian educator and philosopher, Paulo Freire, and his “critical pedagogy” for reclaiming the humanity of the colonized.15 (2). Institutional intervention consisted in transforming municipal bureaucracy into a more efficient, transparent and collaborative system. In Bogotá and Medellín, for example, the municipalities became urban think tanks facilitated by urban curators who mediated transversal cooperation across sectors. (3). Spatial intervention in these cities meant prioritizing cross-sector investment in public works of the very highest quality and architectural merit in the poorest and most marginalized zones of the city (transportation, utility infrastructure, housing, libraries, schools), and privileging public space as a site for constructing civic commitment through cultural action (looping back into the normative). I don’t want to seem utopian elevating these cities as ideals; they still have many challenges today—cyclical poverty, inequality, unemployment, violence. And like

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cities everywhere, they continue to develop asymmetrically, driven by private logics, with rings of poverty and informality surrounding exclusive enclaves of wealth. But at moments in their recent history, they demonstrated a unique model of public investment and redistribution, whose foundation was a creative project of mediating the top-down and the bottom-up. These moments of Latin American civic imagination represent a compelling alternative to the dominant model of austerity and neoliberal urban growth across the world today.

Adam Smith redux As a scholar of Adam Smith, this civic tradition made me wonder about Smith’s legacy in Latin America. His influence is typically associated with neoliberalismo, the importation of Chicago school economics (by the so-called “Chicago Boys”) and the structural adjustment schemes of the 1980s and 1990s, which frequently involved collusion between states, international development banks and multinational corporations, and ended by divesting local people, typically extremely vulnerable people, of their public rights over natural resources like metals and water. This produced alternating eruptions of radical resistance and tyrannical repression across the continent. Cold-war anxieties in the 1970s produced sinister alliances between American presidents and dictators like Pinochet in Chile and Rios Mont in Guatemala, who reduced all social resistance to communism, whether located in indigenous communities or university classrooms, and carried out genocide in the name of freedom. I don’t believe Adam Smith would ever have supported structural adjustment across Latin America, and the collusion of state and corporate interests. He would never, ever, have tolerated the crimes that were inflicted by tyrannical governments against local people in the name of economic growth, and the decimation of their small-scale economies and ways of life. In this light, there seems to be an alternative twentieth-century Smithian legacy in Latin America, rooted in the bottom-up agency of the marginalized. Here I have found great intellectual companionship in the work of Albert Hirschman. The author of The Passions and the Interests (where Smith figured prominently) spent many years in Latin America as a young man, particularly in Colombia. In 1954 he was appointed by the IBRD/World Bank as an economic advisor to Colombia’s National Planning Council. He quickly became exasperated with grand development planning, which he saw as reductionist, decontextualized, and hyper-linear in its obsession with balanced growth. Hirschman was drawn to the bottom-up and the unplanned, and his inclination was always to contextualize economic thinking in the “interaction effects” between politics, culture, social structures, and economics. So he quit his bank job and spent the next years traveling across Colombia to understand how development actually worked, observing the practices of economic agents themselves. As a Smithian, he was

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drawn to the scrappy, incremental, bottom-up reform projects, animated by the sweat, ingenuity, and creative collective adaptability of people living in conditions of poverty. Years later Hirschman would publish Getting ahead Collectively, an exploration of the Latin American grassroots collective action projects that had so inspired him.16 He was particularly interested in the role of “intermediate organizations” that facilitate interface between top-down institutions and communities in poverty. This, I believe, is the Smithian lineage that worked its way into Latin American cities like Bogotá and Medellín that have so inspired our work at the US–Mexico border. In each case, civic actors situated themselves squarely in this intermediate space to mobilize latent bottom-up capacities and knowledges across the city. I never imaged that my urban work at the border would lead me back to Adam Smith and a renewed project of critical repossession—that I would discover in Latin America a rich twentiethcentury battleground for Smith’s legacy, between public and private. Like many political theorists I have always felt a solidaristic affinity with those who struggle against injustice, but I never saw myself as an activist, and I never conceived the reception or impact of my work in public terms. That political theory might broaden who it engages, how it knows, and who it ultimately benefits, is an interesting set of propositions. The idea of integrating a more ethnographic sensibility into political theory, to open ourselves to fieldwork (or the fieldwork of our social science colleagues)— would seem to be essential to this more engaged or activist possibility. We are already uniquely skilled at navigating diverse theoretical knowledges and arguments—we do this in our critical and analytical work all the time. What I have learned while doing increasingly grounded work is that political theorists can co-produce knowledge with communities, weaving our unique capacities and experiences together into a richer account of struggle, that may actually help to improve conditions for people, while empirically grounding our normative claims. This more activist and solidaristic practice of political theory can become generative of better arguments not only for academic audiences, but for citizens and policymakers too.

Notes 1

There are notable exceptions: Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (London: Yale University Press, 2013); Benjamin Barber, Cool Cities: Urban Sovereignty and the Fix for Global Warming (London: Yale University Press, 2017); Daniel A. Bell and Avner de-Shalit, The Spirit of Cities Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Avner de-Shalit, Cities and Immigration: Political and Moral Dilemmas in the New Era of Migration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Susan Fainstein, The Just City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Clarissa Hayward, Justice and the American Metropolis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Margaret Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space (London: Routledge, 2004); Kohn, The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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2

Explored in our forthcoming book: The Political Equator: Unwalling Citizenship (London: Verso). See also Cruz and Forman, “Un-Walling Citizenship,” Avery Review 21 (2017): 98–109. 3 An approach to normative argumentation shared by Brooke Acklerly, Luis Cabrera, Fonna Forman, Genevieve Fuji-Johnson, Chris Tenove, and Antje Weiner in our working paper “Grounded Normative Theory: Political Theorizing with Those Who Struggle.” For similar impulses see Lisa Herzog and Bernardo Zacka, “Fieldwork in Political Theory: Five Arguments for an Ethnographic Sensibility,” British Journal of Political Science Vol 49, no. 2 (2019): 763-84. 4 “One Mayors Downfall Killed the Design Project That Could’ve Changed Everything: Public Interest Design’s Wild Ride into City Hall” Next City, February 23, 2015. 5 Fonna Forman, Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 6 Fonna Forman, “Adam Smith and a New Public Imagination,” in Are Markets Moral?, ed. Steven Kautz et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 167–88. 7 Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity, 2018). 8 Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap, 2009). The conference papers are published in Fonna Forman and Gerry Mackie (eds.), Amartya Sen and the Idea of Justice: Interdisciplinary Engagements, in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 16/2 (Taylor & Francis 2013). 9 A theme explored in our forthcoming book: Top-Down/Bottom-Up: The Political and Architectural Practice of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman (Berlin: Hatje Cantz). 10 A significant area of my research today has focused on the disproportionate impact of climate change on the bottom three billion. Fonna Forman and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, “Climate Change, Mass Migration and Sustainability: A Probabilistic Case for Urgent Action,” in Humanitarianism and Mass Migration, ed. Marcelo Suarez-Orozco (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 43–59; Forman, “Rethinking Climate Justice: Practical Ethics in Urgent Times,” in Health of People, Health of Planet: Problems and Solutions, ed. Wael Al-Delaimy, Veerabhadran Ramanathan and Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo (New York: Springer, forthcoming 2020). 11 Stan Allen, Points and Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). 12 For more on the Community Stations, see http://gjustice.ucsd.edu/ucsd-communitystations/ (last accessed October 1, 2019). 13 The subject of our installation MEXUS: Geographies of Interdependence in the US Pavilion at La Biennale Architettura de Venezia 2018. 14 Forman and Cruz, “Latin America and a New Political Leadership: Experimental Acts of Co-Existence,” in Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, ed. Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson and Dominic Wilsdon (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 71–90; Forman, “Social Norms and the Cross-Border Citizen: From Adam Smith to Antanas Mockus,” in Cultural Agents Reloaded: The Legacy of Antanas Mockus, ed. Caro Tognato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 333–56; Forman and Cruz, “Global Justice at the Municipal Scale: The Case of Medellín, Colombia,” in Institutional Cosmopolitanism, ed. Luis Cabrera (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 189–215. 15 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970). 16 Albert Hirschman, Getting ahead Collectively: Grassroots Experiences in Latin America (Oxford: Pergamon, 1984)

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Index

A Aceves, Gustavo Banda 301–2 Actor Network Theory 278–9. See also Latour, Bruno Adorno, Theodor 6, 113, 219 Agency, architectural 7, 12–14, 149–50, 217–53, 255–94 inert agency 149 interactive agency 149–50 Aggregate, group 279 Ahern, Jack 174 Alberti, Leon Batista 93, 281 Alexander of Macedon 44–6, 255–6 Allen, Danielle S. 175, 177 Allen, Stan 300 Amis, Martin 135 Ando, Tadao 262 Architectural determinism 2 Arendt, Hannah 1, 9, 31, 34, 96–8, 103–19, 210, 264, 274 n.18 Aristophanes 69 Aristotle 8, 40, 43–6, 50, 67, 72, 111, 115 n.1, 165, 171 Arnold, Mathew 30 Athens, ancient 8, 24–5, 39–43, 45, 59, 65, 70–2, 75, 165 Athens Charter 11, 90, 166 Authorized Assembly Space 32–3 B Baird, George 113 Bakema, Jaap 90 Ballard, J.G. 10, 121, 143–63 Bär, Gherhardt 247 Barbaro, Daniele 281 Barnstone, Ascher 36 n.31 Baroque architecture 147, 278, 287 Barthes, Roland 286 Bartlett School of Architecture 143 Baxandall, Michael 289 Beck, Ulrich 272 Becker, Gary 171 Bell, Duncan 54

Benjamin, Walter 5, 6, 102 n.54, 173, 277 Bentham, Jeremy 277, 283 Berlin Wall 40, 54, 117 n.20, 235 Bickford, Susan 31, 237 Bilbao effect 21, 279 Bischoff, Annaliese 174 Black Lives Matter, movement 123 Blau, Eve 282 Bloch, Ernst 12, 217–34 Bloch, Marc 286 Bloomberg, Michael 23 Bouleiterion 24 Brasilia 2, 8, 32, 59–77 Braunfels, Stephan 29 Broken-window policing 171–2 Brutalism, architectural 27, 145–7, 151–2, 155 C Cabrini-Green 26 Caillebotte, Gustave 85 Callon, Michael 278 Camus, Albert 259–60, 263, 272 Candilis, Georges 90 Casa del Fascio 36 n.31, 291 Celebration (Florida) 183 Churchill, Winston 3, 30 Cirkovic, Elena 116 n.3 Clear, Nic 143 Coleman, Alice 154–5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 261 Coles, Romand 176–7 Colombino, Laura 162 n.39 Colville, Alex 105 Communitarianism 83–4, 88 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 290 Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) 11, 89–92, 166–8 Congress for the New Urbanism 100 n.3 Costa, Lúcio 8, 59–77 Cramer, Kathryn 153 Critical pedagogy 303 Critical Regionalism 263, 274 n.26 Cruz, Teddy 13, 296, 299

Index

D Danto, Arthur 113 D’Ors, Eugenio 264 Davis, Angela 133 Davis, Mike 156 De Botton, Alain 2 De Carlo, Giancarlo 21, 90, 258, 261, 268 De Graaf, Reiner 37 n.47, 64 Debord, Guy 267 Debs, Eugene 298 Defensible space 138 n.17, 144, 154–5, 158–9 Deleuze, Gilles 286 Delvaux, Paul 150 Derrida, Jacques 6 Dinocrates 255–8, 272 Duany, Andres 183 Duffy, Enda 147 Dutch Structuralism 93 Dystopia 10, 11, 121, 151, 181, 188, 227 E Easterling, Keller 144–5, 149, 160 Echeverri, Alejandro 297 Edelman, Murray 6 Eisenman, Peter 227 Engels, Friedrich 207, 211 Eno, Brian 150 F Fajardo, Sergio 297 Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averlino) 61 Filler, Martin 116 n.3 Fitch, James Marston 81 Flak Towers (Nazi) 235–53 Flusty, Steven 153 Follett, Mary Parker 123 Foster, Hal 267, 276 n.55 Foster, Norman 28–9, 225, 270 Foucault, Michel 6, 11, 165–80, 279 Fourier, Charles 292 Frampton, Kenneth 16 n.27, 111, 113, 114–15, 229, 263, 274 n.26 Frank, Barney 31 Fredericksen, Rune 41 Freedom Tower (New York) 28 Freire, Paulo 303 Freud, Sigmund 143–4, 150 Frost, Robert 130

308

G Gang, Jeanne 285–6 Gans, Herbert 182 Garden City movement 69, 193 Garland, Robert 73 Garner, Eric 172 Gehl, Jan 85 Gehry, Frank 64, 109–10, 150, 157, 279 Gentrification 11–12, 25, 27, 181–97, 202–5, 207–9, 211 Geuss, Raymond 113, 115 Global justice theory 295–306 Glover, Jonathan 135 Goldfinger, Erno 151 Gombrich, Ernst Hans 287 Goodsell, Charles 6 Governmentality 7, 10–12, 165–80, 279 Grabar, Oleg 281, 293 Graham, Stephen 151 Grandin, Temple 282–3 Granovetter, Mark 96 Greenways 6, 11, 165–80 Grenfell Tower (London) 26 Grossman, Vasily 131 Grotius, Hugo 197 Ground Zero 23, 252 n.38 Guillen, Zaida 301 H Habermas, Jürgen 1, 6, 25, 30, 32, 104, 113 Hadid, Zaha 220 Harris, Karsten 112, 116 n.10 Harrison, Robert Pogue 176–7 Harvey, David 11, 198–9, 211, 212 n.17, 225–6, 228 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène (Baron Haussmann) 85 Havel, Vaclav 127 Hayles, N. Katherine 149–50 Hays, Michael 229 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 283 Heidegger, Martin 6, 111–12 Heraclitus 111 Herodotus 59 Herscher, Andrew 241–2, 251 n.2, 251 n.9 Hertzberger, Herman 101 n.36 Heterotopia 147, 174–5 Hewitt, Lucy 151 Hippodamus 72, 74, 165

Index

Hirschman, Albert 304–5 Historical injustice 235–53 Hitler, Adolf 28, 244, 291 Hobbes, Thomas 11, 108, 165, 166–7, 169 Hölderlin, Friedrich 111 Holford, William 63, 68, 69 Holston, James 168 Huber, Jakob 200–1, 203 Hugo, Victor 288 Hulchanski, David 187–8 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 87 I Informality, urban 14, 299–301 Infrastructural space 149, 160 Infrastructural sublime 147 Infrastructural urbanism 300–1 Ingels, Bjarke 21 J Jacobs, Jane 11, 26, 84, 87–90, 92, 95, 101 n.22, 128, 179 n.13, 181–96, 198, 209 Jameson, Frederic 6, 12, 217–34 Jefferson, Thomas 21, 264–5 Jencks, Charles 26 Jewish Workman’s Circle 297–8 Jinping, Xi 268 K Kaiman, Abe 297, 298 Kant, Immanuel 212 n.6 Karatani, Kojin 105 Keightley, Emily 238 Kelling, George L. 171–2 Kelly, Christopher 262 Kennedy, Simon 143 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye 133 Kingwell, Mark 113–14 Kitsch 21, 29, 146–7 Kohn, Margaret 85, 200–3, 206, 211, 213 n.33 Koolhaas, Rem 72–4, 220, 268 Kubitschek, Juscelino 64–5 L LaSperanza, Marcello 244 Laswell, Harold 6 Latour, Bruno 6, 96, 278, 298 Le Corbusier 4, 8, 11, 27, 60–4, 71–2, 75, 89, 143, 146, 155, 157, 166–8, 173–4,

178, 179 n.13, 183, 186, 282, 283, 286, 291–2, 294 n.31 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas 292 Lee, Spike 127 Lefebvre, Henri 6, 11, 12, 184–5, 190, 197–213, 217–34 Lefort, Claude 8, 33 Levitas, Ruth 230–1 Libeskind, Daniel 23, 25, 28, 36 n.26, 111, 114, 231 Lindstrom, Randall 289 Locke, John 168, 212 n.12 Lusk, Anna 174 M Machiavelli, Niccolò 171, 291 Magnesia (Plato) 8, 59–77, 267 Malpas, Jeff 289 Manaugh, Geoff 143 Manow, Philip 22, 33 Manser, Michael 146, 156 Marx, Karl 298 Mehrotra, Rahul 285, 292 Miller, David 201 Milošević, Slobodan 33 Miralles, Enric 225 Modesty, as architectural virtue 255–76 Möllers, Christoph 30, 33 Mont, Rios 304 Moore, Margaret 201–2, 206 Moore, Rowan 27, 29 Moses, Robert 278 Mumford, Lewis 71, 75, 187 N Neimeyer, Oscar 63, 65, 75, 77 n.26 Neoclassical, architecture 7, 264, 278, 291 Neoliberalism 145, 148, 156–60, 165–6, 169–71, 173, 178, 220, 224, 230, 295, 298, 304–5 Neutra, Richard 157 Newman, Oscar 154–5 Nietzsche, Friedrich 110–11 Nieuwenhuys, Constant Anton 292 Norbert-Schulz, Christian 280 Nouvel, Jean 270, 276 n.52 O Obama, Barack 108 Ober, Josiah 109

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Index

Q Quincy, Quatremère de 4

Scheve, Kenneth 55 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 284 Schmitt, Carl 30, 35 n.3 Schmitt, Jean-Claude 286 Schultes, Axel 27, 37 n.50 Schumacher, Patrik 227 Scott, James 6, 160, 166–7 Scott-Brown, Denise 146 Seidler, Emil 297 Sen, Amartya 299 Sennett, Richard 2–3, 95, 96, 100 n.19, 208 Sewell, John 188 Sharpton, Reverend Al 132 Siddiqi, Anooradha Iyer 241–2 Simmel, Georg 25, 267 Simmons, A. John 200, 212 n.12 Situationists 6, 283–4, 292. See also Debord, Guy Smith, Adam 13–14, 53, 297–9, 304–5 Smith, Anna Deveare 132 Smithson, Alison 90–1, 98 Smithson, Peter 90–1, 98 Social Condensers 2 Socrates 59, 65, 66, 71 Solà-Morales, Ignasi de 267–8 Spatial violence 241–2 Speer, Albert 277, 291 Stasavage, David 55 Stilz, Anna 200–2, 205, 212 n.12 Sullivan, Louis 275 n.41

R Rancière, Jacques 286 Rawls, John 104, 201, 204, 209 Renaissance, Architecture 61, 148, 278, 281, 287, 290–1 Rights, to the City 184–5, 197–213 Territorial 197–213 Roberto, M. M. M. 63 Robespierre, Maximilien 3–4 Rosenblum, Nancy 102 n.56, 182 Rossi, Aldo 227 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 298 Rykwert, Joseph 280

T Tacticus, Aeneas 51 Tafuri, Manfredo 12, 217, 219, 221, 230 Tamms, Friedrich 242 Tanizaki, Jun’ichiro 289 Taut, Bruno 193 Team 10 9, 83–4, 90–3, 183 Terragni, Giuseppe 36 n.31, 291 Thatcher, Margaret 154 Tocqueville, Alexis de 26, 30 Trétiack, Philippe 119 n.52 Trump, Donald 33, 55, 138 n.21, 296 Tsien, Billie 231

S Sassen, Saskia 190 Scarpa, Carlo 231 Scheidel, Walter 55

U Utopia 2, 8, 10, 12, 43, 106, 108, 155, 157, 174, 182, 193, 217–34, 292. See also Heterotopia; Dystopia

Occupy Wall Street 31, 32 Ornamentation, architectural 4, 7, 13, 29, 94, 256–77 OSA Group 2 Ostrom, Elinor 299 P Paga, Jessica 39 Palladio, Andrea 93, 264 Pallasmaa, Juhani 2, 280 Panopticon 2, 87, 165–6, 170, 277, 283 Pantheon 4 Parametricism 147 Parkinson, John 22, 31, 32 Pataki, George 23, 28 Pei, I. M. 270–1 Pérez-Gómez, Alberto 273 n.8 Piano, Renzo 262, 274 n.25 Pickering, Michael 238 Pinochet, Augusto 304 Piranessi, Giovanni Battista 231 Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth 183 Plato 2, 5, 8, 40, 41, 44, 59–77, 105 Pope Francis 131 Pruitt-Igoe 26 Purcell, David 198

310

Index

V Van der Rohe, Mies 283 Van Eyck, Aldo 9, 83–4, 90–3, 183, 220 Varro, Marcus Tarentius 273 n.6 Venturi, Robert 146 Vernacular Architecture 9, 109–10, 147, 158 Virilio, Paul 155 Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio) 255, 256–8, 264, 267, 272–3 W Walks, Alan 185 Walzer, Michael 86 Weiner, Lawrence 244 Weingast, Barry 109 Wellner, Albrecht 113 Williams, Tod 231 Wilson, James Q. 171–2

Winner, Langdon 278 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 27 Woessner, Martin 111 Wolin, Sheldon 107, 168 Wolkenstein, Fabio 200–1 Woods, Lebbeus 12, 235–53 Woods, Shadrach 90 Wotton, Henry 255 Y Yamasaki, Minoru 28 Yaneva, Albena 278 Young, Iris Marion 9, 83, 87–90, 98 Ypi, Lea 200–1 Z Zacka, Bernardo 126, 182–3, 188 Zevi, Bruno 278

311

312

313

314

315

316

317

318