Life Among Urban Planners: Practice, Professionalism, and Expertise in the Making of the City 9780812297164

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Life Among Urban Planners

The CiTy in The TwenTy- FirsT CenTUry eugenie L. Birch and susan M. wachter, series editors A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

LiFe AMong UrBAn PLAnners Practice, Professionalism, and expertise in the Making of the City

Edited by

Jennifer Mack and

Michael herzfeld

U n i v e r s i T y o F P e n n s y LvA n i A P r e s s PhiL AdeLPhiA

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mack, Jennifer, editor. | Herzfeld, Michael, editor. Title: Life among urban planners : practice, professionalism, and expertise in the making of the city / edited by Jennifer Mack and Michael Herzfeld. Other titles: City in the twenty-first century book series. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Series: The city in the twenty-first century | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019052081 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5228-6 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: City planning. | City planning—Social aspects. | City planners. | Urban anthropology. Classification: LCC HT166 .L5266 2020 | DDC 307.1/216—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052081

ConTenTs

Introduction: Living Life Among Planners

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Jennifer Mack

PArT I. SOCIAL AND CULTUrAL CONTExTS Of PLANNINg 1. Shaping Cultural Space: reflections on the Politics and Cosmology of Urbanism

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Michael Herzfeld

2. Why Planners Need Anthropologists

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Margaret Crawford

3. redesigning the republic? Public gardens, Participatory Design, and Citizenship in Immigrant Paris

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Andrew Newman

PArT II. grAND PLANS AND THEIr DISCONTENTS 4. Zoning as Default: The Politics of foreign-Sponsored Urban Planning in Siem reap, Cambodia

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Adèle Esposito Andujar

5. An Anatomy of failure: Planning After the fact in Contemporary Bogotá, Colombia Federico Pérez

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vi

Contents

6. A “Zoning Tombola”: Informal Planning in Niamey, Niger

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Gabriella Körling

7. Breaking the rules, Making the ruler: Syriac Homes and the Limits of Swedish Planning

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Jennifer Mack

PArT III. rESITUATINg A “UNIvErSAL” PrAxIS 8. The Scales of Justice: region, rights, and responsibility in St. Louis, Missouri

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Bruce O’Neill and Kevin Lewis O’Neill

9. Power without the Mustache: Urban Quality as Planning Practice in Post-Industrial Barcelona

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Trevor Goldsmith

10. The games We Play: What Is Participation in Urban Planning? Insights from Warsaw

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Monika Sznel

11. from the real to the virtual: A Swedish Solution for “Universal” Sustainable Development in Hammarby Sjöstad, Stockholm

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Mark Graham and Lissa Nordin

Afterword: The Problem of the Present in Anthropology and Urban Planning

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James Holston

List of Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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inTrodUC Tion

Living Life Among Planners Jennifer Mack

Urban planners project the future of cities. As experts, they draft visions of places and times that do not yet exist, prescribing the tools to be used to achieve those visions. Planners’ choices attempt to direct issues like how a city will merge its public transit and automobile traffic network, how a squatter community can be transformed into the legitimized residents of an area, or how a current demand for thousands of new dwelling units will be met as quickly as possible without engendering negative consequences. While it may appear that the work that planners do is dictated purely by abstract logic, in this volume we argue that they operate largely out of personal, internal, and cultural logics and the everyday demands of particular social and cultural contexts. Today’s planners are frequently tasked with both policy and design assignments, an expansion of their historical role that focused mostly on city form. This has happened even as urban designers—often working in architectural offices rather than for municipalities—have increasingly been given the most high-profile design assignments. In the wake of these concomitant professional expansions and losses for planners, they have nonetheless continued to rely on visual models to explain their work because of their demonstrable power in achieving (often uncritical) political support. Sometimes, the forgotten logics of the modernist past—with its emphasis on the universal—are reassessed as comforting, guiding forces for planners who feel lost in the confusion of more specific demands arising as the “local” has achieved greater prominence in their work. In professional settings from municipal or national governments to private design firms to NgOs, a degree in urban, community, regional, or town planning produces specialists who shape the city in a variety of ways. They

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may restrain patterns of growth and operate with rhythms, time scales, and schedules that extend well into futures both imagined and, at least in some cases, repeated. Defined as experts on urban welfare and development, urban planners work from the “bird’s-eye view” down to the specification of materials to be allowed in new structures to the footprints of the buildings that will occupy new development sites. With the power of planning also come, clearly, opportunities for less heroic activities, such as the displacement of informal settlements or the stigmatization of certain neighborhoods as they are defined to require renovation. Planners often participate in the making of urban tragedies, intentionally or not. With these loaded power structures and practices in mind, we collectively approach “the production of space” (Lefebvre 1974) and spatiality by treating planning as a set of critical cultural acts that are both controversial and, in many cases, contested. Planning—and, as this volume places in focus, planners—can then be considered in relation to the social dynamics of the contexts in which they operate: in the planning office, on construction sites, in sometimes violent confrontations with those at whom they are directed. What roles do planners have in shaping the social dimensions and daily practices of urban life? How do they employ, manipulate, and reshape the expertise assigned to them for that purpose? The essays here critically examine what planners’ persistent commitment to thinking about the future means for the ways in which people live in the present and represent and preserve the past. We are particularly concerned with the social contexts in which planners produce their work, including their cultural values, personal assumptions, social pressures, and beyond. As planners ignore, acknowledge, and describe the transformations of their own professional practice, they adapt it from its initial legitimization as a profession through the development of university curricula and licensing. The planning process is unlike that of many other professions in which practitioners are required to achieve similar forms of official definition. for many of the world’s planners, in fact, the process of professionalization began just a century ago. As planners have contended with the temporal, political, and economic limits of their abilities to act on the city, perceptions of failures have sometimes come from the very communities they have reshaped. The profession has had particular difficulty in contending with the legacy of the many “grand plans” or “master plans” enacted in the name of urban renewal and modernism in the mid-twentieth century. These plans have left their imprint, not only on the cities in question, but also on planning itself. Unlike “power broker”

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robert Moses in New York’s 1960s (Caro 1974), the planners of the 1970s and 1980s found themselves in a depleted professional position with a loss of public trust and support, a stance that continues, in part, into the present. Shaping the city, urban planning professionals use urban analyses, historical trends, and statistical data to draw sometimes-unwarranted conclusions about the demographic and economic directions that will arrive at the places in which they operate. Approaching planners with ethnographic eyes opens up a new perspective on how today’s planners contend with this conundrum.

Planners in the Anthropological Eye The city has recently become the locus of many of the most important themes in contemporary anthropology. While many anthropologists work under the rubric of “urban anthropology,” the authors in this volume prefer to think in terms of an “anthropology of the urban.” In this, we heed Ulf Hannerz’s caution that urban anthropology has been so broadly defined that it is “often taken to include all the studies where the city is the locus rather than the focus” (1980, 3; see also Herzfeld this volume). We instead explore urban space as the physical product of the complex forces that planners both employ and try to control as they act on the city, but also of the social forces acting on the planners themselves, as members of their own (or host) societies. We treat the making of the city as an act of negotiation in a context defined by social and cultural specificities. In this regard, while following on the work of Henri Lefebvre (1974), Michel de Certeau (1984), and others on “the production of space” and on “spatial practice,” we specifically focus on the daily practices and lived environments of the planners themselves as a critical and culturally and historically specific counterweight to planners’ more generalizing aims and claims. Our overall aim in proposing such an “anthropology of the urban”—and especially in focusing attention on the cultural and social dimensions of the planners rather than only of city residents—is to examine relationships among planners, nonplanners, and the city, and to explore how planning may at times involve “seeing like a city,” to paraphrase James Scott (1998). In the case studies presented, the “legibility” (Scott 1998) that planners have often worked to enable travels through various acts of opposition and transformation, all of which raise crucial questions about the omniscience presumed to underlie the planning act. At the same time, the views into

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planning practice that we offer in this volume do not produce a conventional, rigid account of top-down hegemony versus bottom-up resistance. Instead, escaping such facile dualisms, the cases presented here illustrate how planners and nonplanners work in ongoing tension, conflict, and dialogue to make the city together. As planners find the tools with which they were trained to act on the city increasingly in tension with the realities of the everyday worlds in which they operate, this also raises critical questions about the cultures of urban expertise in the planning profession (Mack 2019). Approaching city making from the planners’ perspective allows a unique view into the how these professionals regard their roles in the development of a future society and its spaces. This joins an emerging field of studies of the cultural and social underpinnings of expertise (Boyer 2005 and 2008; Eyal and Buchholz 2010). To examine this topic with the widest possible theoretical implications, we take a global perspective on urban planning and explore practices and politics of professional city making in a wide variety of contexts, including a wide selection of geographical areas from five continents: Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. These studies emphasize that the issues raised around questions of expertise, participation, and the increasing interactions between market and state forces in the development of the city increasingly transcend the specifics of planning laws, regulations, and the history of the discipline in each society. If the city has new symbolic and political weight in the context of economic globalization (Holston and Appadurai 1999), these close and intimate portrayals of the everyday lives of planners offer key insight into how the city interacts with the world.

From the Cosmos to the Problem of the Present Ethnographic perspectives on how planners are operating in and on a wide range of cities around the world allow comparisons among the shaky technocracies from which planners operate, whether they work in Bangkok, Barcelona, Bogotá, Brasília, Chicago, New York, Niamey, Paris, rome, St. Louis, Siem reap, Södertälje, Stockholm, or Warsaw. In these diverse sites, we examine questions of social practice, history, urban form, economy, and the politics of place making, among other topics. Certain planning practices accentuate their specific relationship to a place, while others are to be sold to a global audience as supposedly universal solutions.

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Here, we resituate planning practice through intimate looks at how planners consider, conflict, and collaborate with other actors: politicians, immigrants, developers, landscape enthusiasts, squatters, and dignitaries. We investigate “users” and “experts,” participation, the top-down and the bottom-up, and how the role of planners has been transformed as their right to make and remake the city has been contested. Here the anthropologist sometimes becomes the planner, gentrification and neoliberalism meet urban design, “users” and “residents” are revealed as planners in their own right, and the supposedly generic toolbox that planners use is translated through the many divergent cultures of planning offices and cities the world over. If planning is a practice emphasizing the creation of particular futures, we also consider what this means for the role of historic preservation and its relation to the urban fabric and for the way in which people live in the present. Indeed, planners are frequently asked to conserve the existing urban environment (and its attendant power structures). Such tasks can transform planners into agents for interpretations of history that further empower society’s already most prosperous and privileged members. In Part I of the volume, “Social and Cultural Contexts of Planning,” we present cases involving critical frameworks for planning practice, as professionals increasingly find their strategies from the desktop questioned on the ground. Starting out with this theme of the values that planners and citizens both share and dispute, Michael Herzfeld explores the problem of “efficiency” and the cultural specificity of planning practice in both Bangkok and rome. Planners in these cities often contend with residents’ largely unofficial but powerfully felt cosmological interpretations of space as they shape and reshape plans (cf. Herzfeld 2015 and 2017); they thus discover that they partly share common understandings of space and time with citizens protesting over land rights, zoning, and historic preservation. far from being a merely secular activity at the sole behest of professionals, then, planning for cosmologically loaded cities like these produces complex dialogues over urban futures where even adversaries subscribe (if selectively) to common logics. Also engaging with the ways in which the past infiltrates the present, Margaret Crawford examines historical critiques of modernist planning in the early twentieth century. Decades of self-critical reflection within the planning profession followed, leading to today’s emphasis on participatory and other citizen-oriented methods. from her position as a planning theorist, historian, and educator, she argues that planners still depend on abstract, usually quantitative information, rendering their knowledge about those for whom

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they plan extremely limited and placing many such professionals in highly contradictory situations in their daily work. She argues that anthropology may offer new insights into this opaque professional world, inverting the generic notion of “best practices” currently dominant in planning. Also drawing attention to the ethics and politics of design, Andrew Newman delves into the legacy of the landscape architecture of parks and gardens in Paris, where form has long been congruent with republican notions of citizenship and essentialist ideals of national culture. There, contestations over the management and design of two parks in Paris’s largely West African and Maghrebi districts demonstrate that fraught discussions about garden design, horticulture, and park use include much more than mere technical issues. Instead, these parks provide a spatial articulation of ongoing struggles over citizenship, national belonging, and the definition of frenchness. In Part II of the book, we contend with the increasingly sticky ethics of urban planning, as grand plans and their discontents meet: in person, and often on a daily basis. Adèle Esposito Andujar investigates two “figures” of planners who have worked to reshape Siem reap over different periods. Despite their radical dissimilarities, both used zoning as a means to act on the site in the service of international aid organizations. The projects demonstrate the importance of political support for zoning, since foreign planners’ goals have frequently been usurped or revised when the local government accepted aid but rejected many of the intentions of the plans that came with it. Esposito demonstrates how the apparent hegemony of functional zoning as an imported and seldom-questioned planning tool loses its force as it travels through often-recalcitrant local contexts. In a similar vein, federico Pérez examines the Bogotá Planning Department’s failed attempt to modify the city’s “Territorial Ordering Plan.” By following the daily routines of the planners in charge of the plan’s revision, Pérez considers their struggles to reenvision planning practices and urban realities, as they move from a planning logic aimed at creating futures ex nihilo to a mode of pragmatic planning rooted in the complexities and instabilities of sociopolitical life. Ultimately, this study of “planning failure” makes visible the fragile networks through which policymakers exchange knowledge, build alliances, and negotiate the overlapping realms of technical and political practice. gabriella Körling offers another approach to the social and cultural contexts of planning in her study of informal urban settlements around Niamey, the capital of Niger. There, residents themselves have carried out what might

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otherwise be regarded as the exclusive activities of planning professionals: zoning and land allocation, laying out streets, and providing public services. These residents—despite their operations outside the structures of official expertise—follow planning “norms” like gridiron street plans. Körling shows that it is not informal settlement alone but the differing social status among residents that dictate their fates. These planners (without the title) operate in a context where the state—manifested in investments, infrastructure, and urban plans—is otherwise absent. In my own paper, I explore the limits of planning regulations and deregulations in the Swedish town of Södertälje, arguably the contemporary capital of diasporic Syriac Orthodox Christians. While Syriacs historically resided in standardized apartments in high-rises built in the 1960s and 1970s, I argue that more recent Syriac-dominated neighborhoods of custom-designed, single-family houses have required Swedish planners to relinquish traditional tools for formal control and to rethink strategies of regulation. They also challenge a central tenet of contemporary Swedish planning that assumes that the geographic distribution of immigrants is the best way to “integrate” them. As the boundaries between users and experts are blurred, negotiations about neighborhood aesthetics and rules become new opportunities to debate nationalism, class, and professionalism. In Part III, “resituating a ‘Universal’ Praxis,” we explore how planning draws on tools designed to be transported across municipal and national boundaries but discovers, again and again, that the contingencies of the local require new interpretations. Together, Bruce O’Neill and Kevin O’Neill offer a prescient analysis of the case of St. Louis, Missouri—one of the most violent, racially segregated, and polarized city-regions in the United States—from a moment just before these tensions famously boiled over. They study the failed passage of Proposition M, a ballot measure put forward by city planners to expand the city’s bus and light rail systems further into the suburban region, which suburban residents read as dangerous and voted against. O’Neill and O’Neill argue that this exercise in individual rights (successful as it was) ultimately belies what urban planners in St. Louis understand more generally as “regional responsibility,” where city-regions forcibly embed residents into a series of relationships that cannot be ignored. Trevor goldsmith carries these questions of praxis to Barcelona, where he explores how “quality” became a key term for understanding urban planning success among both professionals and citizens. goldsmith argues that the use of “quality urbanism” in a project to redevelop the working-class

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neighborhood of Trinitat Nova complicated the role of planners, disempowering them and devaluing their role in relation to the politicians for whom they work. rather than having the integrated technical and political power of the past, such planners now operate in the city but lack the authority to make significant decisions. If their plans have power, it stems from political approval gained before planners were involved. Likewise, Monika Sznel worked with an NgO to involve residents in “participatory planning” projects in Poland. She shows how this method— intended to challenge to earlier top-down, modernist planning—ultimately still failed to address residents’ needs and desires. She details her discomfort and dismay as an “applied anthropologist” working with an NgO to recruit residents of working-class neighborhoods to a project that seeks to offer greater opportunities to influence planning practices but finds residents’ ideas co-opted instead. While “participation” is presented as a means for increasing public influence, the use of this approach in Warsaw suggests that participation can also be levied as a tool of neoliberal politics, with highly unpredictable results. Critiques of “citizen participation” under earlier political and economic regimes, in other words, remain relevant today. As Sherry Arnstein argued in 1969, “consultation” with citizens without a mechanism for including their opinions or their participation in later parts of the process is a “sham” and merely a form of “placation” (219 and 220). Universalism is also a key theme in Mark graham and Lissa Nordin’s study of the everyday practices of the planners behind Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm, a neighborhood internationally known for its holistic planning approach to sustainable urban development. Planners attempted to translate solutions developed within the specific setting of Swedish planning praxis and for one local environment into a universally applicable, “virtual” model known as SymbioCity, focusing on technical, noncontextual solutions, such as “eco-cycle” recycling. As politicians and industry request standardized planning solutions for climate change, the Swedish flavor of this generic menu permits entry in a competitive global market. Drawing together the several strands of our collective efforts, James Holston describes the “problem of the present” in both anthropology and urban planning. Anthropology uses ethnographic, comparative, and historical methods designed to problematize present circumstances by focusing on their assumptions and contradictions. He argues that the discipline’s focus on the present means that its practitioners often fail to develop anything approaching true critique, much less suggestions for policy. Conversely, the

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predictive impulses of planners render place their praxis within a seemingly naïve utopianism, even as they often remain seemingly blind to everyday social and cultural life. Centrally, Holston considers how the two disciplines might develop a productive conversation about their own shortcomings and their views of the future.

A New Theory of the City Ultimately, we address the critical practice of urban space production with a particular emphasis on how planners work, how they talk about the city, and how they conceive of their professional and social roles as experts who intentionally—and with a notion that their visions will actually become reality—alter the future of the city. Cities have increasingly become a focus of scholarly interest across a variety of social scientific and humanities disciplines, yet the official act of making them through planning and urban design has received far less attention. Together, we reconsider some of the theories and debates around the process and practice of city making at a time when the social and cultural dimensions of urban conglomerations are at the forefront of interest in fields such as geography, anthropology, sociology, diaspora studies, global studies, and, of course, the design professions and their theorists and historians. We build here on ethnographic studies of the planning process that have been directed at the hubris of planners or that unpack the plights and perils facing their supposed clients (fennell 2015; ghannam 2002; Holston 1989); but we also include the voices of planners as a complement to their plans and the complaints these have provoked. groundbreaking studies have emphasized planning in relation to questions of neoliberalism and gentrification (Herzfeld 2006 and 2009; Low 2003; Zhang 2010); infrastructure (Larkin 2013); and the intersections of planning and temporary uses of public space (Duneier 1999; Stoller 2002). Setha Low (1996, 1999, 2000, 2003, 2017; Low and Smith 2006) has long been a critical mediator of the relationship between the practice of urban planning and its discontents, including gentrification, security and insecurity, and the militarization of urban “public” spaces. Her recent edited volume (Low 2018) shows how widely her vision is now shared among numerous interrelated disciplines, while her own personal commitment to “engaged anthropology” (Low and Merry 2010) continues to drive that vision, meshing with and further inspiring the work of some of the authors represented in this volume. Here, we focus particularly

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on neighborhoods, cities, and regions in connection with acts that are meant to reshape space permanently: a new housing development or tram line, the erasure of inconvenient communities. We contextualize these seemingly localized acts in relation to whole cities through long-term ethnographic research. The volume also complicates typical descriptions of planning as a perfunctory act following strict guidelines about zoning and building permission, speaking to the field of the ethnography of expertise (represented in the seminal work by Dominic Boyer on that topic [e.g. 2005, 2008] and seen, for example, in studies of medical doctors [Petryna 2002], biologists [rabinow 1996], and investment bankers [Ho 2009]). As such studies have amply demonstrated, professional expertise does not render experts uncritical agents of their training. Urban planning, too, is often a much more ambivalent practice than the usual stereotype suggests (Mack 2017, 2019). Ethnographic approaches to planners offer fine-grained views of how practitioners perceive and describe their own experiences of the making of urban form. This also balances the predominant ethnographic focus on people who lack the power to defend themselves against the hegemony of planning by asking more questions about the planners’ own predicaments and dilemmas. While studying planners both “up” (Nader 1969) and “sideways” (Hannerz 1998, 2006), we argue that their practice is a matter of “ambivalence” because cultural and social values are more deeply implicated in what are taken as objective assessments than their authors are sometimes able or willing to realize. The cases also complicate the monolithic picture of planning’s own past, particularly as recounted in the histories of major urban design projects in the United States and Western Europe (Boyer 1983; Choay 1969; Wright 1981) or in works that seek to relate this history to the professionals themselves or to larger global contexts of planning practice (Sanyal 2005). We also develop a dialogue with social histories that examine the transformation of the city through planning (Blackmar and rosenzweig 1992; Harvey 2006; Scobey 2002). With our emphasis on how planners envision plans not yet realized, however, we bring a social analysis of urban form making into the present and the future. Despite the relative youth of the planning profession itself, early and midtwentieth-century planners across the world quickly shared homogenized urban forms and professional practices. These internationalized, mostly modernist standards provided them with a distinct expertise that they then used to insulate and buttress their work when developers, politicians, and everyday people made attempts to resist “grand plans.”

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Today, planners everywhere try—ever more desperately—to follow these predecessors by drawing on techniques, design standards, and priorities that classify their plans as “professional.” In this volume, we specifically offer case studies from across the globe to illustrate that international planning “expertise” is now remodeled, revised, and reinvented as it travels through cities across the world. A dilemma central to this collection is therefore whether all planning is now locally situated rather than—as it once was (at least ostensibly)—more monolithically global. We find some clues in the unexpected identities of “planners”—such as squatters who nonetheless lay out their streets on the gridiron and immigrants who import materials from their homelands but also from international television programs (cf. Watson 2005). We also find that planners themselves recognize a new international mode of practice: to demonstrate (or try to demonstrate) deepened sensitivity to local players and their concerns and to make the outcomes more particularized in the process. Participatory planning, for example, purports to promote engagement and empowerment, but studies of its outcomes find that nonplanner participants are often meant to be “placated” (Arnstein 1969) or “neutralized” (Tahvilzadeh and Kings 2015, 96) instead. As nonplanners enter “invited spaces for participation,” they find both the rules and the outcomes “underpinned by logics and norms framed by politicians and administrators” (Tahvilzadeh and Kings 2015, 95). Often, in other words, the new rhetoric of sensitivity reveals that planners are, regrettably, not always particularly sensitive, and mechanisms for turning opinions and ideas from local residents into concrete actions are mostly lacking. Jean-françois Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (1979), a shift that has sometimes placed professionals operating through ideas of universalism in a difficult new position. As planners move into new modes of practice, they have found it necessary to abandon their own ambitious narratives in the form of grand plans. Across the divergent settings included here, we see that urban planning has shifted from a modernist, standardized practice to a postmodern one that explicitly addresses locality and difference, even if it often does so awkwardly or ineffectively. If European colonial administrators used top-down, modernist planning tools, local planners operating in their own urban contexts draw on their own culturally intimate knowledge (Herzfeld 2015), often facing internal and external struggles about, for example, whether to retain or replace the urban fabric.

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Curiously, some of the central components of the modernist planner’s toolbox have been retained in these processes, and in those that have transformed the physical and professional infrastructures of welfare states (such as urban planning) into tools for neoliberalism’s onward march. One tool in particular recurs globally: zoning, a key tenet of early modernist “functional City” planning that remains exceptionally potent even in the twenty-first century. As an ideal, zoning requires planners to envision the city as a composition of varying functions to be distributed geographically, and “rationally,” so that industrial zones and their pollutants, for example, are separated from domestic ones. But, as many of the chapters demonstrate, fissures appear as local planners interpret zoning and as its supposedly Cartesian principles of separation move locally (rabinow 1989). As planners use other planning tools of more recent vintage—such as their inclusion of civilian actors in “participatory planning,” where their opinions and advice are to be incorporated into the results of the planning process—these tools are also shown to conceal as many operational assumptions. Ordinary people engage with planners but offer views of the city that planners often have difficulty reconciling with their own visions. And even the most recent planning trends—such as smart or resilient cities, sustainability, and form-based codes—adopt new and transformed meaning when members of the public in different contexts appropriate them. Planning practice is shown, in these chapters, to be anything but a universal, international profession. As these classic and contemporary tools and their practitioners travel across local contexts, they are reshaped and made contingent as they meet the expectations and practices of ordinary people using and living in the city. As we explore these conundrums, the scale of anthropology’s inquiry presents a unique perspective on planning that may be unfamiliar even to the planners themselves. Close, ethnographic analyses draw on the intimacy that only long-term immersion can bring, linking to broader theoretical claims about the social and cultural dynamics of urban planning as political and professional practice. We follow planners’ everyday acts of sitting in government offices, drawing up proposals, visiting sites, and enacting the process of getting their plans legitimized in law. Our intimate views illuminate how this work uncomfortably synthesizes other social processes that planners may have little time, interest, or critical distance to consider as they sit at their desks. We find, time and again, that professionals’ interactions with nonplanners— such as neoliberal developers, squatters, immigrants, environmentalist groups and other NgOs, and low-income transit riders—often force them to reconsider

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their approaches. As the plans become realities of one sort or another, in other words, they often depart from the utopian visions that the AutoCAD drawings, 3D renderings, or softly detailed watercolors originally described. As we zoom away from the plans themselves, and the idealized practices for which planners often believe that they are representatives, anthropological approaches to urban planners and to the act of urban planning transport us to a new plane. All too frequently, planning appears to be a globally standardized, technocratic, or even generic practice. Living life among planners— rather than reading their practices solely through official plans, documents, and histories—reveals instead the complicated, emotional, cultural, social, and always human dimensions of their work.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Michael Herzfeld for his tireless commitment to this project over its lengthy lifespan, for his brilliant comments on both this introduction and my chapter, and for his willingness to take a chance on coediting a volume with me, a decision that took place when I was an eager graduate student. It has been a true pleasure to collaborate with him every step of the way. We would both like to thank Peter Agree and all of the authors for their belief in the project and for the considerable leaps of faith that we have asked them to take along the way; Noreen O’Connor-Abel, who stepped into the breach with commendable efficiency; and Kristine Hunt, who skillfully executed the daunting copyediting involved in this project.

Works Cited Arnstein, Sherry. 1969. “A Ladder Of Citizen Participation.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35 (4): 216–24. Blackmar, Elizabeth, and roy rosenzweig. 1992. The Park and The People: A History of Central Park. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Boyer, Christine. 1983. Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Boyer, Dominic. 2005. “The Corporeality of Expertise.” Ethnos 70 (2): 243–66. ———. 2008. “Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts.” Anthropology in Action 15 (2): 38–46. Caro, robert. 1974. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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Choay, françoise. 1969. The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century. New York: george Braziller. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven f. rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press (originally published in french in 1980). Duneier, Mitchell. 1999. Sidewalk. New York: farrar, Straus and giroux. Eyal, gil, and Larissa Buchholz. 2010. “from the Sociology of Intellectuals to the Sociology of Interventions.” Annual Review of Sociology 36: 117–37. fennell, Catherine. 2015. Last Project Standing: Civics and Sympathy in Post-Welfare Chicago. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ghannam, farha. 2002. Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation, and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hannerz, Ulf. 1980. Exploring the City: Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1998. “Other Transnationals: Perspectives gained from Studying Sideways.” Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde 44: 109–23. ———. 2006. “Studying Down, Up, Sideways, Through, Backwards, forwards, Away and at Home: reflections on the field Worries of an Expansive Discipline.” In Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology, ed. Simon Coleman and Peter Collins, 23–42. New York: Berg. Harvey, David. 2006. Paris, Capital of Modernity. New York: routledge. Herzfeld, Michael. 2006. “Spatial Cleansing: Monumental vacuity and the Idea of the West.” Journal of Material Culture 11 (1/2): 127–49. ———. 2009. Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2015. “Practical Piety: Intimate Devotions in Urban Space.” Journal of Religious and Political Practice 1 (1): 22–38. ———. 2017. “The Blight of Beautification: Bangkok and the Pursuit of Class-Based Urban Purity.” Journal of Urban Design 22 (3): 291–307. Ho, Karin. 2009. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Holston, James. 1989. The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holston, James, and Arjun Appadurai. 1999. “Introduction: Cities and Citizenship.” In Cities and Citizenship, ed. James Holston, 1–18. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–43. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991 [1974]. The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Low, Setha M. 1996. “Anthropology of Cities: Imaging and Theorizing the City.” Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 383–409. ———. 1999. Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader. New Brunswick, NJ: rutgers University Press. ———. 2000. On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2003. Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. New York: routledge. ———. 2017. Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place. New York: routledge.

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———, ed. 2018. The Routledge Handbook on Anthropology and the City. New York: routledge. Low, Setha M.,, and Neil Smith, eds. 2006. The Politics of Public Space. New York: routledge. Low, Setha M. and Sally Engle Merry. 2010. “Engaged Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 51 (2): S203–26. Mack, Jennifer. 2017. The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2019. “An Awkward Technocracy: Mosques, Churches, and Urban Planners in Neoliberal Sweden.” American Ethnologist 46 (1): 89–104. Nader, Laura. 1969. “Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives gained from Studying Up.” In Reinventing Anthropology, ed. Dell Hymes, 284–311. New York: Pantheon. Petryna, Adriana. 2002. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. rabinow, Paul. 1989. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1996. Making PCR, A Story of Biotechnology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sanyal, Bishwapriya, ed. 2005. Comparative Planning Cultures. New York: routledge. Scobey, David M. 2002. Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Stoller, Paul. 2002. Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tahvilzadeh, Nazem, and Lisa Kings. 2015. “Under Pressure: Invited Participation Amidst Planning Conflicts.” In Conflict in the City: Contested Urban Spaces and Local Democracy, ed. Enrico gualini, Marco Allegra, and João Morais Mourato, 94–111. Berlin: Jovis verlag. Watson, James L. 2005. “Introduction: Transnationalism, Localization, and fast foods in East Asia.” In Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia, 2nd ed., ed. James L. Watson, 1–38. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wright, gwendolyn. 1981. Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. New York: Pantheon. Zhang, Li. 2010. In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

ChAPTer 1

shaping Cultural space reflections on the Politics and Cosmology of Urbanism Michael herzfeld

In one of the earliest statements on town planning by an anthropologist who did not explicitly claim to be an “urban anthropologist,” Paul rabinow (1989) described the convergence of Cartesian logic with the dualism of a colonial town-planning regime separating a colonized “them” from the colonizing “us.” That logic today informs an ongoing war against settlements dismissively and, in my view, misleadingly designated as “informal” (Huchzermayer and Karam 2006). The result is, all too often, the brutality of eviction, a violent triumph of abstract planning over the materiality of human life. In this chapter,1 I will explore some of the implications of that scenario. I will use fieldwork in two very different cities—rome (Herzfeld 2009) and Bangkok (Herzfeld 2016a)—to explore three propositions. first, the informal-formal dichotomy is an instrument of power relations;2 undermining its privileging of formality allows us to study experts, including planners and bureaucrats, as ordinary mortals with their own cultural and social assumptions and practices. Second, and consequently, such a study should include examination of planners’ “professional intimacy”—a term I offer here as a refraction of the more generic “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 2016b). It entails careful examination of the resemblances and differences between what planning experts design for others and the way they themselves live. What do these experts recognize as sources of intimate collusion, embarrassing when revealed to outsiders but a source of solidarity (and sometimes even of real-time efficiency) within the professional group? Third, by examining residents as active and engaged agents of their own living conditions, as Mack

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(2017) has so spectacularly done, we can gain a comparative perspective; in juxtaposing experts and their clients within a shared frame, we gain a richer understanding of experts’ social role and of the social nature of what they do. Experts, accustomed to monumentalizing both their work and their own personae, often fail to acknowledge how their designs escape their control. While they attempt to fix spatial relations for all eternity, the spaces they design become sites for negotiation, compromise, and even, sometimes, radical change. Insofar as they may occasionally acknowledge that engagement with the experienced realities of their client populations, this dimension of the inquiry converges nicely with the question of professional intimacy. My focus also demands another shift, one that has already been recommended, within the practice of anthropology itself. This consists, in a nutshell, of a disavowal of the idea of an independent area of study called “urban anthropology.” Urban settings often host enormous numbers of recent migrants from the countryside. Many residents therefore lack long-term experience of dealing with specifically urban problems; others, while members of families that take pride in long decades or even centuries of residence, view the social relationships of their local settings as more akin to those of rural communities. A butcher in the Monti sector of the historic core of rome lived in a house occupied by his family since 1704. The social relationships in which his life was embedded looked strikingly like those of a rural village, but he was a proud roman, conscious of the social and historical dynamic that had led to his current sense of place and time. His perspective could be read as an endorsement of Setha Low’s (1996, 384) ever-timely injunction to “view the ‘urban’ as a process rather than as a type or category.” for the butcher, social proximity was essential to urban life. But that has not been the prevailing view of most theorists of urbanism, or indeed in popular English usage; it is certainly not the goal of gated communities. In talking of cities, we may assume a modernist model, in which the process of spatial cleansing—of the disaggregation of social functions so that social, religious, commercial, and political spaces tend toward a high degree of separation (see Herzfeld 2006)—is sufficiently advanced to discourage face-to-face sociality on the street. rome’s residents themselves tend to reinforce the idea that their case is exceptional when they remark that each locality in the city is a paese—a term usually, and misleadingly, translated as “village.” The paese is in fact a nesting-box concept of the kind anthropologists like to call “segmentary” (see, e.g., Karp and Maynard 1983). While this term has usually been applied to tribal political organization, it is characteristic of the

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way in which several societies treat their urban centers as microcosms of a larger polity, and small localities within the cities as microcosms of those cities themselves. Thailand offers another example, with the concentric rings of the mandala-shaped cosmological space as both national polity and local city (see Tambiah 1976, 115). This way of conceptualizing the city suggests that in some societies people pay much less attention to what modern planners would regard as urban functions requiring zoning than they do to modeling the encompassing polity. In that context, clearly, urban-rural distinctions make no sense, since urban space imports representative aspects of rural life in order to claim concentricity with the polity as a whole. Perhaps the separation of urban from rural is little more than the first stage of spatial cleansing—a taxonomic dichotomy that paves the way for more functional discriminations. Whatever the value of such a suggestion, we must not reproduce it in our epistemology. An increasing focus on peri-urban development, moreover, shows a complex intermingling of practices and attitudes once thought to be distinctively urban or distinctively rural (see especially Harms 2011, 2013). Some areas of large cities can seem rural in character or perform a rurality that provides a sense of escape amid the pressures of modern urban life. To take the example of Paris, some encompass, legally or otherwise, the cultivation of gardens and orchards within their confines (e.g., rubino 2007), while immigrants’ use of public gardens may conflict with locally pre-existing ideas about the functions and aesthetics of urban space (see Newman this volume).

Urban Anthropology or the Ethnography of Urban Life? returning, then, to the Italian case, we cannot assume that calling an urban neighborhood a paese simply expresses a romantic yearning for the rural. To the contrary, Italian rural societies have, as Silverman (1975) long ago pointed out, claimed deep links with a civilizational model, civiltà, that took urban life as its unquestioned basis. Is it, then, useful to think in terms of a distinct subfield of urban anthropology? renée Hirschon (1989, 233), in particular, has cogently objected to the idea. In her early work on a section of Piraeus, greece, largely inhabited by refugees from Asia Minor who had arrived with the forced exchange of populations with Turkey in 1924 (e.g., Hirschon and Thakurdesai 1970), Hirschon showed how rural principles of inheritance and property transmission could work against the demands of state and municipal control, so that the

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conditions of construction were less a matter of a specifically urban context than the consequence of an ongoing struggle between two very different modalities, one influenced by severe space restrictions and the other grounded— quite literally!—in long-standing religious and social models of the world (see also du Boulay 2009). While from a legal and planning perspective the residents’ actions typified what some might now call “informal” communities, they responded to a fairly strict set of residence and inheritance rules that rested on centuries of social organization in the refugees’ distant rural homelands. These rules, which would (with some variation) have been familiar to the older urban residents of the region (see Sant Cassia and Bada 2006), are no less formal—and no less susceptible of manipulation—than the zoning regulations so beloved of urban planners. Planners may this find their designs thwarted by residents with very definite ideas of how space should be organized, ideas that do not necessarily originate in city contexts. People also push back at unfamiliar arrangements that clash with their values, as Mack has shown (this volume and 2017). Planners may themselves be suborned, persuaded, or outfoxed by wily construction agents playing to the new dynamics of middle-class consumerism even in nominally socialist societies; such shifts often accompany major changes in the understanding of personhood, but these changes have less to do with the transformation of rural into urban populations than with the increasing pervasiveness of a value system that places the greatest emphasis on visible wealth and encourages ever-greater class differentiation as a result (see Zhang 2010). Conversely, however, planners often also appropriate discourses of citizen engagement for their own purposes, reshaping these as instruments of persuasion in pursuance of their own neoliberal goals (see Sznel this volume). Both processes create ever-wider gaps between the various social classes. At the same time, this increase in social hierarchy does not have the same effects on the physical fabric of cities wherever it occurs. Much depends on preexisting frameworks and cosmologies. In Buddhist contexts, for example, disregard for the specific materiality of religious monuments allows for rich ornamentation but may do nothing to preserve “original” structures (Byrne 2009). Where the acquisition of a “historic” property carries high prestige, however, a great deal of effort is put into recasting refurbished or even totally rebuilt structures as original in some sense; thus, for example, demolished Beijing hutong were replaced by externally very similar buildings with internal modifications to allow for much greater comfort, many serving as boutique hotels that claimed to offer a traditional lifestyle. Simulacra, to use

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Baudrillard’s (1994) term, are not only acceptable; they signify a desired modernity, framing the past as ultimately only recoverable through complicity in collective make-believe. By deliberately destroying the old and then erecting obvious copies to replace it, planners literally incorporate antiquity and tradition into a modernist project that excludes dissident local interpretations. This is especially true of societies with centralized authority that seek to silence awkward contradictions in their self-constitution. A socialist society that promotes private enterprise in the tourism sector, for example, confronts a genuine dilemma: if ordinary residents are displaced to make way for a moneyspinning venture that also showcases national culture, how then should it deal with the conflict between old ideology and new practices, or between the fabric of workers’ dwellings and the desire for architectural modernity? The deliberate traditionalism of Beijing’s response conforms notably well to Lévi-Strauss’s (1964, 24) characterization of myths as “machines for the suppression of time.”

Illegality and Creativity Not all societies entertain such cavalier attitudes to the material remains of earlier ages. In rome, at least one architect assured me that the very beauty of the city sprang from the fact that people there have always dared to build illegally, while very few of the structures thus generated are ever torn down. This is an architectural cosmology of original sin, then, in a double sense: it identifies illegality as the source of a vibrant aesthetic, and it roots that attitude in a religious cosmology that has also generated many of the city’s most famous structures. The story of rome’s urban development shows us the culturally intimate side of a religious doctrine—the persistence and even the monumentalization of illegality by a form of religiosity that acknowledges the imperfection of human morality and its direct relationship with historical time. The architect could demonstrate the point precisely because he knew many instances of systematic violation of the building code—a knowledge that enabled him to take legal action against those whose infractions caused his own clients distress, but that also permitted all the residents, insofar as their means permitted, to modernize and redesign homes originally designed for an earlier and technologically less comfortable era. Planners are fully aware of this dynamic, and willy-nilly participate in it. The systemic rejection of modernity in rome is itself a modernist project, as was Mussolini’s fascist antiquarianism in an earlier time (see, e.g., giardina 2008).

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When the rutelli administration of the city began to introduce more centralized forms of city planning, designed to showcase the ancient monuments while shunning the old image of rome as a semirural backwater, the responses ranged from bored disbelief to real anger at the destruction of the artfully rumpled disorder that many see as the core of rome’s appeal. As the rome example shows, the preservation of original material is no less creative of new realities than the hutong solution. There is a long tradition of such reuse in southern Europe and elsewhere. Indeed, as Amy Papalexandrou (2003, 2010) has demonstrated for the Byzantine reuse of ancient sculptural fragments, in the classical heartlands of Europe veneration of the old has long fueled legitimation of the new. Those who seek to reside in “historic” dwellings amid the ruins of former glory, as in rome, do not want to suffer the indignities of elderly plumbing and crumbling walls. Quite to the contrary, the advertising for such residences is remarkably similar to the tourist literature on the hutong.3 Here, too, is a temporality that modernity seeks to suppress. The celebration of urban mortality in the Eternal City is a contradiction no less distressing to modernist planners than the persistent forms of conflict that accompany it; the city administration sought ways to eliminate discord in the commonest dwelling arrangement in the city, the condominium (Herzfeld 2009, 79 and 198).4 Nor, in this context, is it coincidental that critics of the bureaucratic planners’ approach, notably the academic urban planner Enzo Scandurra (2003, 18; 2006, 10; 2014, 93), insisted instead on the importance of conflict as a regenerative factor in urban life. Bureaucrats tend to deal with planning issues, not as the specific problems that an ethnographic study would usually uncover and that emerge in public debate, but ritualistically and in the most abstract and deliberately anodyne of terms.5 This has a double implication for the preservation of historically important architecture in a city like rome. There is conflict within these venerable houses; there is also conflict about them (and especially about what to do with them in an age of rapid economic change). Planners must make choices about what to preserve and what to replace, and those choices usually recognize that cultural rules that constrain such decisions—rules that only partly spring from the professional experts’ knowledge. Local actors may in fact choose to celebrate conflict—especially if their battles concern the survival of some local social grouping in defiance of a more central plan. Official planners, even though they may share the residents’ cultural background, rarely support such moves. In the cases I describe in this chapter, their concerns have tended to be more homogenizing. They seek to transform any remnants of the past considered

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worthy of preservation into carefully delineated and demarcated monuments that add value to, but do not disrupt, the development of a market-friendly urban setting, one that ideally will create relatively few problems for the municipal administration well into the foreseeable future. Some of the cultural rules in play in this regard reflect global concerns with the preservation of important monuments and artworks. The discourse of world heritage, for example, casts a long shadow, and not always a productive one (Meskell 2018). Even leaving aside the damage that its universalizing pretensions have created, this discourse has not entirely displaced the local, although it may have driven local values underground. globalization does not automatically erase all preexisting knowledge, which is often instead refracted through the social experience and transmitted memories. Such resilience is apparent everywhere. It is not necessarily to be found in the obvious localism conveyed by using certain well-known signs of local and national culture (roof finials in Thailand, neoclassical columns in greece, wooden roof beams with stamped terracotta roof tiles at the end in Korea, and so on), or in the choice of materials to be reused; such choices may reflect, rather, the intentions of planners rather than residents. rather, it is to be found in how and why original materials are reused. Such choices often do reflect economic necessity, as when even in so predominantly Buddhist a community as the one I studied in Bangkok, Pom Mahakan, people saved the material from demolished houses in order to reduce expenses in the building of new structures (Herzfeld 2016a). Now that they have been tragically forced out and their houses have been destroyed, they have conserved some of the original materials in the hope of incorporating them in new structures in one of their new locations—whether as a symbolic link with their past communal existence or simply as a matter of economizing is not entirely clear as of this writing. This may reflect affection for older remains that, like the Byzantine spolia, defy official or “philologically correct” (Palumbo 2003, 305) interpretations and, at the same time, bespeak a concerted opposition to central control over the meaning of communal experience. The urban landscape often shows barely concealed signs of resistance to official doctrine. I have documented the persistence of intimate religious practices, many of them redolent of sinfulness rather than piety, in both rome and Bangkok (Herzfeld 2015). Perhaps a more obvious illustration is that of the “talking statues” of rome, especially the most famous incarnation—a statue, called Pasquino, on which romans affix satirical poems lampooning the government and the church authorities. The statue itself is a third century

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BCE representation of a female deity; its modern, male name apparently dates to the sixteenth century CE, when the practice of affixing satirical verses to it began. The revival of this practice in modern times attests to one of the strongest continuities in local roman culture—a tradition of cynical resistance to authority that hardly accords with either ecclesiastical rule under the papacy or the bureaucratic modernism that characterizes the style of the present-day city administration. The fact that the statue represents a pagan female deity, while salient from the perspective of philological correctness, is as irrelevant to its current popularity as a site of lampoons and cartoons as it was to its very similar use during the renaissance. Yet its continuing popularity, and the care now invested in its protection, also attest to a degree of complaisance on the part of the present-day local authorities as well as to the strong awareness of tradition (including the frequent use of the widely despised roman workingclass dialect in the verses) that is an important component of roman irreverence toward the official bearers of national and municipal power. Pasquino emblematizes what makes rome a fascinating laboratory for the study of modernist planning. In this ancient city, rich with ancient relics incorporated in splendidly diverse ways into the present-day fabric, the precise interpretation of its physical structures cannot be divorced from the population’s resilient irreverence or from residents’ capacity for creative reinvention and reinterpretation. Yet it is also the site of repeated, and unsuccessful, attempts to generate the ultimate master plan (piano regolatore)—a plan that, in all its incarnations, has sought to tame the past and render it subservient to a resolutely modern present. In this, the rome master plans have not been significantly different from those of many other cities. The Bangkok version (bot mae), for example, similarly seen in multiple iterations, must contend with a landscape partly dominated by small communities, temples associated with long-standing markets, and a population increasingly liable to pour into the streets for demonstrations at the first sign of social injustice (see Sopranzetti 2017). Antiquity is both a potential resource and a continuing source of embarrassment, largely because its physical manifestations are only the surface trace of an ideological and political complexity that has historically and socially deep roots, and modernist projects that try to tame it usually end up looking extraordinarily lame and incompetent. One common solution is the erection of monuments to carefully controlled and sanitized versions of tradition. Such monuments are especially typical of newly created states, including many of the predominantly Muslim post-Soviet states. Yet there is a curious paradox about such devices. Urban

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planners who attempt to erect monuments to traditional culture are playing to a national and international audience rather than attending to perceived social necessities. Their strategy is a curious mixture of traditionalism and modernization-speak. On the one hand, they emphasize national tradition as a reason for framing monuments of the past, often physically (with the little fences the Italians call recinti, for example), as set apart from the everyday life of ordinary people today. On the other, they dramatize the control that modernity exercises over its past. The monuments that dot the urban landscape—be they carefully demarcated antiquities or shiny new odes to tradition—are a source of municipal or state income. City bureaucrats often use them to rake in entrance fees and rental payments for cultural events. These are decidedly modernist reworkings of the idea of tradition. Their careful demarcation from the mobility tracks of modern business and science is an expression of the “efficiency” that the authorities seek to deploy as evidence of their access to the modern world. In rome, it was precisely this aspect of the rutelli administration that angered so many critics, including planners such as Paolo Berdini (2000). In Bangkok, the frequent use of enormous billboards to hide unseemly squatter settlements from the eyes of visiting dignitaries—significantly, usually in the context of economic forums such as APEC (see Klima 2002, 40–42)—hides civic failure behind capitalist façades. King and Piyamas (2019) have revisited in architectural terms a phenomenon first articulated by historian Peter Jackson (2004) as “the regime of images,” pointing to how successive layers of deliberate screening hide the increasingly power-driven central planning of the city as well as both the rumblings of dissent and the increasingly desperate

figure 1.1. Three stages in the life of a community’s dreams—Pom Mahakan, 2004. Community members model houses and discuss plans for a revived and viable social space. Photograph by Michael Herzfeld.

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figure 1.2. Three stages in the life of a community’s dreams—Pom Mahakan, 2011. Hopes of survival—community members relax behind a new plan. Photograph by Michael Herzfeld.

plight of poorer citizens—a process of erasure that, violently enacted in the smaller-scale context of the northern city of Khon Kaen, Eli Elinoff (2017) has called “despotic urbanism” and defined as the “weaponization” of the city against its hapless residents. In the case of Pom Mahakan, as I have mentioned, this process has encompassed the community’s total erasure—although the prospect of its reincarnation on a new site, while as yet uncertain, demonstrates extraordinary resilience in the face of bureaucratic fiat and force.6 Such resilience would revive the impressive planning conducted by the community and its supporters and ruthlessly quashed by the authorities. In many countries outside Europe and North America, governmentemployed urban planners often appear to think in engineering rather than

figure 1.3. Three stages in the life of a community’s dreams—Pom Mahakan, 2018. Bourgeois designs: Part of the official vision for Pom Mahakan, displayed in front of the condemned community. Photograph by Michael Herzfeld.

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in architectural or social terms. Indeed, their role is largely that of social engineers. Deliberately or otherwise, they use spatial organization to break old communal and kinship-based patterns of sociality and reformulate individual subjectivities (e.g., Caldeira 2000; Zhang 2010). Even in Europe, however, this is not unusual, stinging scholars such as rome’s Paolo Berdini and Carlo Cellamare (2008) into a critical stance. I therefore find it useful to distinguish between academic planners and bureaucratic planners. We should not overemphasize this distinction; many professionals operate in both modalities, and the overlap in training histories is usually considerable. In practice there is usually considerable interaction between the academic and bureaucratic planners, who frequently share a common educational background and perspectives partially shaped by commonly experienced tensions between technological and social needs. The distinction reminds us, however, that planners inhabit social contexts and must be responsive to these. When we examine the actions of bureaucrats, planners included, we are investigating a social practice, no matter how hard those involved portray it as the outcome of universal logic. Academic planners—and some independent architects—may thus find themselves strongly opposed to the social effects of the official planners. In Bangkok, for example, the Association of Siamese Architects tried to support the Pom Mahakan community by arguing for the conservation of its oldest and finest specimens of domestic architecture, while the activist-scholar Chatri Prakitnonthakan (see, e.g., 2003) had fought long and valiantly for the community’s right to survive in situ and for the benefits that allowing it to do so would bring the city. Another group of planners based in Chulalongkorn University roundly opposed the expulsion of two hundred riverside communities to make way for an ornamental boardwalk, arguing that it would create an environmental as well as a social disaster (see Jintamas 2018). But the bureaucratic planners, protected by an authoritarian government and social system, remain adamant on all but this last project—where perhaps the threat of financial disaster may have proved more persuasive than the fear of social damage.

Power Games and Civic Cosmologies Even in Western countries, those who indulge too richly in the freedom accorded by academic credentials may face severe restrictions. Berdini, for example, lashed out at the rutelli administration’s manipulation of the preparations for the 2000 papal jubilee and the appalling mismanagement that

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accompanied them (Berdini 2000), and paid a heavy price: he was quickly and unceremoniously removed from a project in which he had already invested a considerable amount of time and effort, and for a long time thereafter he was unable to secure contracts for his own firm from the rome municipal authorities. While it is presumably impossible to prove a connection, circumstantial evidence serves, at the very least, to warn other planners of the dangers of too vociferously opposing officialdom. This example nicely illustrates the rift between the two varieties of planning establishment that I have demarcated here. Official planners often find themselves the target of bitter criticism by an academic community of urbanisti who do not share their bureaucratic vision and constraints (for in fairness we must acknowledge both) and whose main objections concern the inability of the bureaucratic planners to deal with the inherent messiness of human life. Yet, as with all bureaucrats, we should recognize that these planners do share cultural assumptions with the people who live in their projects (Herzfeld 1992). Among these, one frequently encountered element, already briefly mentioned, is a relationship between religion and space beyond what one might expect from the official codes of church and state. This “religious intimacy,” with its hints of disreputable undercurrents, is often denied by religious leaders. Even in its more official forms, it may not have much to do with official religious identities or with confessional modalities. In Athens, for example, Yalouri (2001) has very persuasively argued that the deep significance of the ancient Acropolis for local residents who may actually know little ancient history springs from an inchoate sense of the sacredness of a space associated with resistance to the Ottomans (“Turks”) and later, within living memory today, through the raising of a greek flag in defiance of the brutal german occupation during World War II. The appeal of nationalist rhetoric often depends on such appeals to an inchoate sacredness, which is then reinforced by repeated acts of symbolic reclamation. A capital city is by its very designation a symbolic linking of a nation’s populace with a physical location anchored in a cosmological space—an appropriate emblem and rallying point for an ideology, nationalism, that shares many features with religion even when it declares itself to be secular.7 A capital city thus becomes a key space for organizing a populace in terms of a dominant cosmology. In his acclaimed Seeing Like a State (1998), James Scott argues that the state attempts to render people “legible,” although its functionaries are often complicit with local social actors both in furnishing bogus data to the state in order to satisfy its voracious appetite for

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numerological verification and, at the same time, in perpetuating the practices the state claims to be suppressing (see Mathews 2003). Much the same happens in cities, where often it is municipal administrations rather than national governments that exercise surveillance, whether in harmony with national policies or in pursuit of locally more salient alternatives. Planners must know how inaccurate the information they supply the authorities often is; they belong to the same profession as the architects who, even as they accuse others of violating the law, revel in the knowledge that, as one of my roman informants assured me, “abuse of the law is practically a historical tradition.” The back channels that emerge as soon as an official planning project goes into action are those spaces of cultural intimacy where knowing winks and nudges make the seeming rigidity of the law both bearable and manipulable. As the Italian proverb has it, Fatta la legge, si trova l’inganno (“When the law has been made, the way around it [literally “deception”] will be found”). Here I want to revert to a concept I originally developed in thinking about how bureaucracy works: secular theodicy (Herzfeld 1992). If in religious systems people seek explanations of the all-too-evident persistence of imperfection in what is supposedly a divinely ordained world, they also do so in the “new religion” of secular rationalism, where they seek plausible ways of explaining why rationality has not prevailed. The rational frameworks planners seek for their decisions share a common cultural background with what might appear to be irrational responses on the part of the populace—a dynamic that is only obscured by insisting on distinctions between the formal and informal in the study of economies, politics, physical settlements, and, for that matter, religious practices.8 Claiming that a popular response is “informal” suggests that those who pursue it are irresponsible—a blame game that effectively conceals the cultural assumptions shared by both sides. In connecting the formal-informal distinction to the politics of blame and responsibility, I am reverting to a very old theme in social anthropology, one that really emerges with Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic and continues on to such modern classics as Marilyn Strathern’s edited volume, Audit Cultures (2000). When we ask why the granary fell on a specific person’s head at a specific time and are told that it was witchcraft, this is not unlike the response to questions about the efficacy of a bureaucratic procedure—that the system is no better than the flawed people who make it work. In other words, flaws are essential to the survival of a system that cannot, given human normalcy, ever work perfectly.

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The planning of rome, for example, reflects religious ideas about space, as did its pre-Christian forerunner (rykwert 1976). That, at least, is the official version of the connection. But there is also a culturally intimate version, which reflects the fact that the planners and other bureaucrats concerned with the regulation of the city share with even the most egregious violators of the law a set of ideas about how to work those same religious principles to their own advantage. I have documented elsewhere the role of the doctrine of original sin as a model for legal devices that enable these offenders to avoid punishment for their violations of the zoning and conservation codes (Herzfeld 2009, 2017). The offenders know, as do the bureaucrats who administer the appropriate means of absolution, how the existence of such institutionalized escape systems sustains a capacity to sin against the law; they also know that these devices make city life bearable and even enjoyable. That shared guilty knowledge, in which planners are centrally complicit, presupposes a set of social values that the planners share with those whom they are supposed to serve. The city’s evolving shape is thus not simply a monument to ecclesiastical faith; it may, as the case of rome demonstrates with particular clarity, also be a record of struggles in which that faith compromises with the corrupt and temporal aspects of being ordinary mortals (Herzfeld 2015). Whether such religiosity will persist as illegal neoliberal construction increasingly invades the city is an open and empirical question.9 The cozy arrangements made between builders and the planning bureaucracy are an important part of their shared professional intimacy; they are also a threat to ways of life, and especially to the coexistence (convivenza) of social classes, that have made life in this complex city both manageable and, indeed, intimate for many centuries. residues of that modality share with the harsh new order a recognition that legality is something to be addressed with adroit creativity. Planning from below in the form of makeshift architectural adjustment, while often treated by bureaucrats as a degradation (degrado) of the city, may thus actually provide a possible path to some form of recognizable redemption—as indeed it has done in times past. religions with robust concepts of theodicy provide rich insights into how local people cope with the inevitable flaws in urban life, especially with official assaults against spaces locally held to be sacred. James Taylor’s study of religious practices and urban space in Bangkok (2008) offers a useful explanatory background to the intensification of just such tendencies during the violence that preceded the 2004 coup. The city administration is apparently so secularized that it can contemplate with equanimity the removal of

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venerable trees (or their re-representation as botanical specimens, as has happened at Pom Mahakan) and spirit shrines in the name of rationalizing the use of space and creating an area of “beauty” (khwam suai ngam).10 The drawings that it produces in its master plan not only show trees that are as unlike the old sacred trees as it is possible to be—elegantly trimmed and apparently deciduous trees in place of the gnarled trunks and twisted, exposed roots of a dramatically “Asian” and “Buddhist” vegetation—but also residents who rarely look in the least Thai but have the physical characteristics of Europeans. What is so extraordinary about the entire scenario is that many middleclass Bangkokians attribute this rationalistic, positivistic, and—arguably— sacrilegious stance to Buddhism, rather than to Western influence. That stance is also backed by entrenched literalism in the application of the law to the status of informal settlements (making it conceptually unimaginable, for example, to have people residing in a space designated as a park). And yet the allusions to what has been dubbed “the ambiguous allure of the West” (Harrison and Jackson 2010) continue, perhaps best illustrated by the oftstated goal of turning rachadamnoen Avenue—the main drag leading to the old grand Palace—into the “Champs-Élysées of Asia.” At least there is now no real threat to the few remaining canals; most were removed in a positive orgy of conforming to the presumed esthetic of Western modernity. Western influence works well as an excuse for functional failure, through accusations that Western models cannot possibly illuminate “Asian” realities. Buddhism, by contrast, not only offers appropriate local models of theodicy but actually itself serves as a comprehensive explanation—along with the alleged failure of the bureaucrats to adhere to Buddhist models of morality—for the authoritarian official stance against which residents so often struggle. from the perspective of those who live in these spaces and wish to stay there, the threat of eviction also embodies a pervasive, negative social situation. The threat, so this reasoning goes, represents a failure on the part of a corrupt feudal oligarchy to observe the respect for “Thai people” that the king’s subjects have a right to expect. Indeed, it is the royal framework that defines the entire debate; one can criticize high officials, if not the royal family (here the law of lèse-majesté remains a potent threat), for their failures as both representatives of the ideal order represented by the king and as corrupt and venal parasites on what should be an idealized democratic system—for democracy in Thailand is framed by royal fiat. The explanation of the evident failures of social justice in Thailand, failures that occur despite the presumption of royal protection, are attributable to a long history of contempt by the ruling classes

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for commoners (phrai); this is the operative social theodicy. Moreover, such a theodicy fits well with a more or less Marxist explanation of current inequalities and the lingering effects of Western capitalism and colonialism. Because the city was conceived in terms of sacred space—the mandala with the sacred pillar and the earthly reproduction of Mount Meru in front of the grand Palace—westernization might be thought to entail rejection of that orientation. for some, perhaps it did. As Taylor points out, however, it has not obstructed the frequent recasting of specific localities as sacred spaces in a broadly Buddhist idiom. True, a Eurocentric observer might conclude that these frequent reinventions of Bangkok’s sacredness indexed a non-Western “mentality.” That observer might also dismiss the alleged sacredness of the Athens Acropolis as mere folk survivalism. In reality, such attitudes only represent the self-congratulation of Western rationalism. If we turn again to rome, surely a Western capital if ever there was one, the same persistent sense that a religious logic shapes local understandings and uses of space is not only present but is confirmed in conversation by architects and planners. Indeed, modern rome illustrates with particular clarity the intense (if often tacit) complicity of planners with discontented citizens, a complicity mediated by common experiences of compromise and conflict and by a historically deep model of original sin and penitence (Herzfeld 2009). The constant irruption into regulated space of illegal building practices that are then condoned through an indulgence-like system of retrospective pardons (sanatorie, and specifically the condono edilizio [literally “building pardon”]) produces the glorious messiness that is rome. The resulting sense of arrested decay in the “Eternal City” expresses and reproduces what the religiously derived moral discourse calls both “corruption” and “salvation.” Those who are unwilling to accept the legalistic and bureaucratic renditions of the planner’s craft do recognize its ritualistic underpinnings. An Italian planner who teaches in a technical university but has also served in the planning bureaucracy of Bari commented on the intersection of material incentives and ritualism: I have the impression that the connection between those planners who are operating [in the bureaucracy] and power is an ever more perverse connection . . . [in part because of] the way planners are hired in the public service—always more of them on [short-term] contracts, so that they depend directly on the mayor, or the assessor [a municipal official, equivalent to a minister at the national level of

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government]. . . . Those who, at every level, those civil servants who for the greater good are charged with starting up a plan as a form of consultancy . . . are less and less required to exercise that capacity for a critical perspective . . . for at least . . . setting themselves the objective of building a better future for the inhabitants of a city. . . . That is, if we read the texts associated with the plans, with the master plans, these texts are very often texts that contain ritual analyses or abstract analyses, analyses of general requirements that disguise genuine needs.11 The linkage is clear: “ritual analyses or abstract analyses” are the legalistic devices whereby bureaucratic planners avoid confronting citizens’ real-life situations, especially given a state that both creates extensive bureaucratic make-work while tacitly condoning infractions of the regulations that justify the bureaucrats’ employment in the first place. The apparent separation of the official world from that of ordinary people is a convenient device for legitimizing arrangements—what Italians call “the art of arranging oneself ” (l’arte dell’arrangiarsi)—in which culturally acceptable intimacies both hide behind the “ritual analyses” and make tactical use of their formalism. To the extent that the formalism (a formalism shared by such nonstate organizations as the Mafia) ignores real-life needs, it enables the persistence of practices variously deemed to be corrupt or adaptive but that actually participate in a common cosmology of responsibility and blame. When academic planners, freed from the necessity of invoking formal rules, propose approaches that openly recognize human frailty, they are met with expressions of incredulity by both the bureaucratic planners who in fact operate such compromises in practice and by colleagues from other countries where, at least in theory, the law is more literally applied.12

The Social Context of Reason: Planners as People The implicit chasm that separates the rationality of planning from residents’ social and religious concerns masks considerable common ground, which is consistent with my reluctance to overstate the distinction between bureaucratic and academic planners. While cases vary, the ethnographic task is clear. We must investigate planners, not only in terms of their work habits and formal training, but also as social actors. However much they may reject the

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idea, they are enmeshed in the same system of self-justification, and in the same underlying cosmology, as those to whose irrational desires they oppose an ostensibly universal rationality. That rationality, moreover, is actually a refraction of the same local, contingent, and culturally specific values as those of their clients. In this regard, planners are like all experts and bureaucrats. As I have argued for bureaucrats in general (Herzfeld 1992), state and municipal planners are usually not culturally distant from the citizenry. While their actions may suggest such a separation, their performance of a culturally set-apart expertise itself shows them to be enmeshed in a framework of shared assumptions. Their roles require them to face in two directions simultaneously. On the one hand, they must represent the formalism and legalism of a system that requires at least the appearance of consistency and stability. On the other, they must deal with clients who know as well as they do that the rules cannot work if they are too mechanistically applied; when that happens, the system breaks down, as Scott (1998, 6) has argued in the case of the British “work to rule” idiom of industrial resistance. Unquestionably, significant cultural differences affect how planners exercise their profession. few, for example, contemplate with the Italians’ insouciance the connivances necessary for coexisting with an often absurd bureaucratic system. Some, indeed, never experience the need to do so. But a degree of maneuverability appears to exist almost everywhere. Mack’s Swedish materials (this volume and 2017) show that when immigrants learn a new culture, they also learn how to “work” it. If the Swedish planners were as rigid and conformist as their self-stereotype suggests, the compromises Mack describes—materialized as new idioms of urban construction—would not happen. But they have happened, no less tangibly than the upstart insubordinations of the roman architectural panorama. Planners, like their clients, are human; and the realities they address are messy and incomplete—the conditions that allow real social life to flow through and around the structures that law, planning, and nationalist ideologies invest with such obstinate permanence. The anthropologist’s task, variously illustrated throughout this volume, is to investigate these areas of planners’ professional intimacy in its locally specific cultural forms. Longterm experiential engagement with the practices of planning as well as with the popular responses to it offers a means of understanding why, although planners often appear to be out of tune with those they serve, they are actually

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engaged in a ceaseless negotiation of how to translate the rules of their craft and the laws of their governments into workable arrangements for the housing of the body politic.

Notes 1. I would like to record here my deep appreciation of the pleasure of working with Jennifer Mack on this volume—both for the richly collegial experience of coediting the volume and for her insightful comments on this essay. 2. for a searching treatment of comparable binarism in the study of religion (the treatment of folk and ecclesiastical or doctrinal religion as separate entities), see Stewart 1989. 3. A representative sampling can be found by entering “Beijing hutong hotels” on any reliable search engine. The proliferation of such ventures clearly shows how the redesigning of the city has been exploited by the so-called hospitality industry, with traditionalism framed as comfortable living. On the fate of the palazzo at via degli Ibernesi 23, the old inhabitants’ agonizing struggle for which is documented in my ethnography in detail (Herzfeld 2009, 266–300), see the current advertising for bijou apartments posted at https://www.yelp.com/biz/arthome-at-the -roman-forum-roma, accessed April 28, 2019. Such transformations are not simply the work of an abstract market, but a consequence of the deliberate social refashioning, or gentrification (see Smith 2006; and on rome specifically, Herzfeld 2009, 24 and passim), of a once vibrant working-class neighborhood. 4. See, e.g., http://www.abitarearoma.net/la-festa-dei-vicini-di-casa/. The persistence of such “festivals of neighbors” in several Italian cities speaks to the tensions that infuse social relations in condominiums, but in rome, at least, the invention of the local version was met with a good deal of skepticism, and it seems fair to wonder whether its principal intention might have been the suppression of social discord that threatened to undermine the precipitous increase in real estate values. 5. See below for a specific statement by a local expert about ritualism in Italian town planning. On the regenerative potential of conflict and its relevance to interpreting planners’ active engagement with residents, see now the excellent comparison of Lebanese case studies by ginzarly, farah, and Teller (2019). 6. Soon after the destruction of the community, I was interviewed by a talented and sympathetic journalist. See the interview conducted by Phanthip Theeranet (Phanthip 2019). There remains among many educated Bangkokians a perception that the destruction of this community represents the worst sort of planning from above. 7. On the religious implications of nationalism, see especially Kapferer 1988. Many commentators have remarked on the continuities and revivals of religious and other forms of symbolism in nationalist rhetoric that officially rejects the value system from which it derives that symbolism (see, e.g., Delaney 1995 on Turkey; Leese 2011 on China; Malarney 1996 on vietnam). 8. On settlements, see Huchzermayer and Karam 2006. Stewart’s (1989) trenchant critique of the hegemonic implications of such distinctions in the study of religion, as I have hinted above, is applicable to all these other areas as well.

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9. for an especially despairing but well-documented assessment, see D’Eramo 2017. 10. for a more extended discussion, see Herzfeld 2017. for a comparable but slightly different case, see Harms 2012. 11. This statement was made in the context of a special seminar organized by Dino Borri, of the Planning Department of the Polytechnic University of Bari, in 2009, for the author’s benefit as a point of departure for research on the social dimensions of Italian planning. 12. In my study of rome, I recount the response of french planners to their Italian counterparts’ insistence on the necessity of incorporating the products of illegal construction in new plans to upgrade a segment of the city that had suffered severe decline (Herzfeld 2009, 133). My interlocutor, a distinguished Italian academic town planner and activist, saw the french response as an inability to accept the implicit theodicy of the Italian approach, although his own remarks were couched, revealingly, in the semireligious language of that theodicy (perdonismo, literally “pardonism”) rather than in the analytic terms I have used here.

Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila faria glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Berdini, Paolo. 2000. Il Giubileo senza Città: L’urbanistica italiana negli anni del liberismo. rome: riuniti. Byrne, Denis. 2009. “Archaeology and the fortress of rationality.” In Cosmopolitan Archaeologies, ed. Lynn Meskel, 68–88. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Caldeira, Teresa P. r. 2000. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cellamare, Carlo. 2008. Fare città: Pratiche urbane e storie di luoghi. Milan: Elèuthera. Chatri Prakitnonthakan. 2003. “Pom Mahakan: anurak roe thamlai prawattisat? [Pom Mahakan: Conserving or destroying history]?” Silapawatthanatham (february): 124–35. Delaney, Carole. 1995. “father State, Motherland, and the Birth of Turkey.” In Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, ed. Sylvia Yanagisako and Carole Delaney, 177–99. New York: routledge. D’Eramo, Marco. 2017. “The Not So Eternal City.” New Left Review 106 (July–August): 77–103. du Boulay, Juliet. 2009. Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village. Limni, Evvia, greece: Denise Harvey. Elinoff, Eli. 2017. “Despotic Urbanism in Thailand.” New Mandala 4 (May). www.newmandala .org/despotic-urbanism-thailand. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon. giardina, Andrea. 2008. “O mito fascista da romanidade.” Estudos Avançados 22: 55–76. English translation (“The fascist Myth of romanity”) available online at http://www.scielo.br/pdf /ea/v22n62/en_a05v2262.pdf, downloaded November 26, 2018. ginzarly, Manal, Jihad farah, and Jacques Teller. 2019. “Claiming a role for Controversies in the framing of Local Heritage values.” Habitat International 88. 10.1016/j.habitatint .2019.05.001.

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Harms, Erik. 2011. Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2012. “Beauty as Control in the New Saigon: Eviction, New Urban Zones, and Atomized Dissent in a Southeast Asian City.” American Anthropologist 39: 735–50. ———. 2013. “Eviction Time in the New Saigon: Temporalities of Displacement in the rubble of Development.” Cultural Anthropology 28: 344–68. Harrison, rachel, and Peter Jackson, eds. 2010. The Ambiguous Allure of the West and the Making of Thai Identities. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Herzfeld, Michael. 1992. The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2006. “Spatial Cleansing: Monumental vacuity and the Idea of the West.” Journal of Material Culture 11: 127–49. ———. 2009. Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2015. “Practical Piety: Intimate Devotions in Urban Space.” Journal of Religious and Political Practice 1: 22–38. ———. 2016a. Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2016b. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Societies, and Institutions, 3rd ed. New York: routledge. ———. 2017. “The Blight of Beautification: Bangkok and the Pursuit of Class-Based Urban Purity.” Journal of Urban Design 22: 291–307. Hirschon, renée. 1989. Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus. Oxford: Clarendon. Hirschon, renée, and Thakurdesai. 1970. “Society, Culture and Spatial Organization: An Athens Community.” Ekistics 178: 187–96. Huchzermayer, Marie, and Aly Karam, eds. 2006. Informal Settlements: A Perpetual Challenge? Cape Town: UCT Press. Jackson, Peter. 2004. “The Thai regime of Images.” Sojourn: Social Issues in Southeast Asia 19 (2): 1–39. Jintamas Saksornchai. 2018. “Chao Phraya Boardwalk Plan Dead in the Water: Architects.” Khao Sod English (April 15). http://www.khaosodenglish.com/featured/2018/04/15/chao-phraya -boardwalk-plan-dead-in-the-water-architects/ Kapferer, Bruce. 1988. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Karp, Ivan, and Kent Maynard. 1983. “reading The Nuer.” Current Anthropology 24: 481–503. King, ross, and Piyamas Lertnapakun. 2019. “Ambiguous Heritage and the Place of Tourism: Bangkok’s rattanakosin.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 25: 298–311. Klima, Alan. 2002. The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Leese, Daniel. 2011. Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Religion in the Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1964. Le cru et le cuit. (Mythologiques I.) Paris: Plon. Low, Setha M. 1996. “The Anthropology of Cities: Imagining and Theorizing the City.” Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 383–409.

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Mack, Jennifer. 2017. The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Malarney, Shaun Kingsley. 1996. “The Limits of ‘State functionalism’ and the reconstruction of funeral ritual in Contemporary vietnam.” American Ethnologist 23: 540–60. Mathews, Andrew Salvador. 2003. “Mexican forest History: Ideologies of State Building and resource Use.” Journal of Sustainable Forestry 15: 17–28. Meskell, Lynn. 2018. A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Palumbo, Berardino. 2003. L’UNESCO e il Campanile: Antropologia, politica e beni culturali in Sicilia orientale. rome: Meltemi. Papalexandrou, Amy. 2003. “Memory Tattered and Torn: Spolia in the Heartland of Byzantine Hellenism.” In Archaeologies of Memory, ed. ruth M. van Dyke and Susan E. Alcock, 56–80. Malden, MA: Blackwell. ———. 2010. “On the Shoulders of Hera: Alternative readings of Antiquity in the greek Memoryscape.” In Archaeology in Situ: Sites, Archaeology, and Communities in Greece, ed. Anna Stroulia and Susan Buck Sutton, 53–74. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/rowman & Littlefield. Phanthip Theeranet. 2019. “Khuy Michael Herzfeld (ik khrang) ni khoe khwamphidplad khrang mai [Conversing with Michael Herzfeld (one more time): “This time they’re making a huge mistake!”], Matichon, february 3 (2562): 13–14. https://www.matichon.co.th/prachachuen /interview/news_1347212. rabinow, Paul. 1989. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. rubino, Adalgisa. 2007. “The Allotment gardens of the Ile de france: A Tool for Social Development.” Journal of Mediterranean Ecology 8: 67–75. rykwert, Joseph. 1976. The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sant Cassia, Paul, and Constantina Bada. 2006. The Making of the Modern Greek Family: Marriage and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scandurra, Enzo. 2003. Città morenti e città viventi. rome: Meltemi. ———. 2006. “Presentazione.” In RomaCentro: dal Laboratorio alla Casa della Città, ed. Laboratorio sulle scelte urbanistiche nel I Municipio. rome: Palombi. ———. 2014. “Art and Local Appropriation: A Journey from Tunis to Paris via Istanbul, rome, Jerusalem and Hebron.” In Practices of Reappropriation, ed. Carlo Cellamare and francesca Cognetti, 90–94. rome: Planum. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Silverman, Sydel. 1975. Three Bells of Civilization: The Life of an Italian Hill Town. New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, Neil. 2006. “gentrification generalized: from Local Anomaly to Urban ‘regeneration’ as global Urban Strategy.” In Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, ed. Melissa S. fisher and greg Downey, 191–208. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sopranzetti, Claudio. 2017. Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stewart, Charles. 1989. “Hegemony or rationality? The Position of the Supernatural in Modern greece.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 7: 77–104.

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Strathern, Marilyn, ed. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy. New York: routledge. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1976. World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand Against a Historical Background. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Taylor, James. 2008. Buddhism and Postmodern Imaginings in Thailand: The Religiosity of Urban Space. farnham, UK: Ashgate. Yalouri, Eleana. 2001. The Acropolis: Global Fame, Local Claim. Oxford: Berg. Zhang, Li. 2010. In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

ChAPTer 2

why Planners need Anthropologists Margaret Crawford

On the final day of class, the earnest young planning student leaned across the seminar table to me. His face expressed a discomfort that had grown throughout the semester. My planning history course, unlike much planning education, emphasized the misunderstandings, failures, and unanticipated outcomes of a century of urban planning practice. finally, he blurted out his frustration: “You keep talking about paradox. Paradox is not in the planner’s toolkit!” Yet to attentive observers, such as the authors in this book, the complex realities of planning practices are often paradoxical. They describe situations and outcomes that, although situated in very different urban and political contexts, practicing planners know all too well, but that rarely make their way into the professional literature of planning or the consciousness of many planners. Planners are actors whose practices are filled with gaps: between normative goals and limited agency; between the different layers of national and local governments, the political concerns of elected officials, bureaucratic controls, and the pressures of market forces such as real estate development. The gap between planners and the urban residents for whom they plan is increasingly visible, as the desires and pressures of citizens, voters, organized groups with specific demands, or consumers of both public and private services make more demands. Yet, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each of these planning situations is unsuccessful in its own way, with these forces articulated in highly specific ways. for an urban and planning historian like myself, who studied in and has taught in urban planning programs, these are familiar stories, revealing the multiple contradictions embedded in the planning profession. Having

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conducted research on past and present planning practices in the United States, South China, and Italy, I would argue that their repetition in such different temporal, political, and social contexts is the outcome, not so much of the contemporary situations in which planners find themselves, but of the practice of planning itself. As experts who claim the expertise to organize the modern city, planners are structured by the limits of professionalism and the assumptions embedded in their own professional history as much as by their specific circumstances. Invested in a profession that depends more on rhetoric and representation than on actual achievements, planners themselves are often unaware of this history or these dynamics. Planning school trains aspiring planners to create plans, which are a fundamentally a form of representation. Their teachers, however, neglect to mention that few of these plans are ever fully realized and that most plans are never implemented. But as soon as planners start to work in municipal offices or firms, they quickly realize the boundaries of their practice. At this point, most planners I know have found ways to accept and smooth over the contradictions that shape their profession. Those who cannot usually either turn right, to real estate development or left, to community organizing.

Histories and Theories of Planning As a modern profession urban planning is a recent arrival. Although planning cities is an ancient activity—often traced back to the fifth-century greek, Hippodamus of Miletus, the father of the urban grid—it emerged as a modern profession during the first several decades of the twentieth century (Morris 1994). Different specialists concerned with the city first joined together in the United States and great Britain, then in Western Europe, fashioning a model later followed in the rest of the world. Initially taught through the construction of colonial capitals such as New Delhi or Manila, the process of transmission continues today through continuous educational and professional exchanges. for example, I was surprised to discover that contemporary planning education in China still largely depends on Western texts and models, setting normative goals out of sync with very different urban realities and planning processes. Many Chinese planners and professors, have told me that spending time in US planning programs was become an important professional asset for them, although it is difficult to see how such concepts

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as community participation or New Urbanist design can be easily transferred to the Chinese context. At the beginning of the twentieth century, American planners had a difficult time establishing their professional identities as “experts” in this burgeoning field. Unlike more successful professions, such as engineering and medicine, whose technical expertise was based on the positivist assertions of the natural sciences, or lawyers, whose authority originated in the state, planners had only a tenuous hold on their professional territory. This continues today with planners as the only design profession that does not require licensure. Planning began with a composite identity, drawing on adjacent professions with clearer skills: architects and landscape architects who structured the physical environment, engineers responsible for infrastructure, and lawyers skilled in writing regulation. The single element that held the professional endeavor together was not expertise but its ambitious task: comprehensively organizing the city (Kreuckenberg 1994; Scott 1969).1 To back up their claims to a professional domain, early planners produced comprehensive plans. Aimed at restructuring entire urban regions, these were encyclopedic in nature and based on exhaustive data collection. The Plan of Chicago (1909), still the most famous American urban plan, established this model. Unlike most plans, it is credited to a single author, the architect Daniel Burnham. If Burnham’s vision was central, such a large endeavor was necessarily a collective enterprise. for two years, Burnham’s team collected massive quantities of data, testimony to the emerging profession’s technical expertise.2 However, without the political power or public support to implement them, these plans largely remained aspirational documents (Smith 2006). This established a professional pattern that defined planning through representation rather than through individual planners’ ability to affect reality. Their plans remained pure documents, unsullied by political struggles, the power of urban elites, the interests of the banks and real estate developers responsible for building the city, or the desires of urban residents. In fact the Chicago plan owes much of its fame not to its success in transforming the city but to its widely publicized visionary images of a totally idealized Beaux-Arts Chicago. Burnham clearly understood this, commissioning the well-known architectural renderers Jules guerin and fernand Janin to visualize the plans alongside his text. If many of Burnham’s written proposals address practical concerns such as rationalizing streets and rail traffic, their drawings, if lacking in concrete detail, conveyed a seductive and compelling vision of what the city could become. Pastel birds-eye and perspective views

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depicted a beautiful and coherent cityscape, dominated by a Beaux-Arts civic center and connected by grand Parisian boulevards that extended outward to disappear in the distant prairie. Burnham and his sponsors gave the plan, published as an impressive folio, to the city as a gift. Burnham charged no fees for his years of labor on the plan, a practice he followed in all of his planning work. His successful architectural firm, Burnham and Company, specializing in high-rise office buildings, provided him with a substantial income, allowing him to prepare plans pro bono. His motives were not totally altruistic, for he also believed that if his plans were in essence a gift, his clients would have to give him a freer hand. He was also well aware of the fact that implementing any of the plans would be enormously expensive (Hines 1974, 158). Historian Tom Hines has observed that Burnham’s planning was often ambiguous and contradictory, sometimes progressive and at other times highly conservative, a mixture of idealistic motives and pragmatic adjustments. The plan itself highlights another paradox; realizing the uniform Beaux-Arts buildings depicted in the renderings would entail eliminating Burnham’s own numerous high-rise contributions to the city’s irregular skyline. Burnham himself appears to have been conflicted: In 1896, he claimed “we have skyscrapers enough . . . forgive me my part in this ugliness! Now we want beauty and we want great beauty” (Schaffer 2003, 97). Yet his office continued to design larger and larger skyscrapers until his death in 1912. Burnham understood that popularizing plans to gain public support was necessary to complete the planning process. He turned the completed plan over to the Chicago Plan Commission, a private group, to execute. They hired Walter Moody, a public relations pioneer, to orchestrate a campaign publicizing its benefits. Moody produced a promotional film, sponsored hundreds of talks and lantern slide presentations in multiple languages, mailed a short version of the plan to all Chicago residents who paid more than $25 a month in rents or mortgages, placed articles praising the plan in local and national publications, and ensured that Wacker’s Manual, a summary of the plan, became the assigned textbook for eighth grade civics classes in the city’s public schools (Hines 1974, 108). Its graphics and publicity ensured the plan’s position in planning history up to the present day. The plan, if not its results, continues to exist as a monument of professional achievements, still part of the curriculum in planning schools. In contrast, a far more comprehensive endeavor, the regional Plan of New York (1929) did not achieve a similarly iconic status. Today known largely for its exhaustive data gathering—eight of its ten volumes are devoted

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figure 2.1. view, looking west of the proposed Civic Center Plaza and Building, showing it as the center of the system of arteries of circulation and of the surrounding country. Painted for the Commercial Club of Chicago by Jules guerin, 1908, Commercial Club of Chicago.

to survey results—the plan was partly inspired by and directed by veterans of Chicago’s earlier effort.3 Many well-known planners contributed to the plan, but it lacked a single visionary such as Burnham. Even the sponsor, the regional Plan Association (rPA), seemed generic.4 The plan also lacked a compelling visual identity. Although the rPA hired noted skyscraper delineator Hugh ferriss to depict some elements of the plan with his evocative, atmospheric style, his renderings failed to conjure up a convincing picture of a desirable future (Johnson 1995, 180–85). Other planners, however, went even further than Burnham in defining planning as a primarily representational activity. John Nolen, one of the earliest professional planners, declared that he regarded his plans primarily as publicity to advertise planning itself (Crawford 1990, 152–56). As he wrote, “I look upon such plans as largely propaganda and publicity and do not share the opinions of others that because they did not get carried out or even followed up at the time, they are necessarily an indication of failure. To my mind they are stages in the development of public opinion” (Hancock 1964, 162).

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far more than Burnham, Nolan’s particular talents were for organizing and management. Although he designed few plans himself, he established one of the largest planning practices in the country and a national reputation by using public relations as an essential professional tool. Unlike Burnham, Nolen was not wealthy. Leaving the actual plan making to his office staff, he constantly traveled across the country, covering more than thirty thousand miles and spending at least six months every year away from his office. He was so busy that he interviewed job applicants on the train, meeting them at the station and conducting the interview while traveling. He gave talks to civic groups and met with prominent citizens and city officials in places like reading, Pennsylvania; Madison, Wisconsin; and Montclair, New Jersey, selling them the idea that their city or town needed planning. He also wrote dozens of articles in professional journals, regularly compiled his own articles and reports into books, and produced a town-planning textbook for the National Municipal League (Crawford 1990, 154). All of these planning efforts were privately supported. It was not until the 1930s that newly interventionist national governments in both the US and Europe included planning as a necessary attribute of a modern state and a tool of public policy making. Planners responded by outlining national housing policies, proposing large-scale regional restructuring, and designing new infrastructural systems. Depression and war prevented them from implementing these plans until postwar housing shortages, wartime devastation, and recovering economies produced a genuine need for planners to guide reconstruction and new urban growth in the mid-twentieth century. Modernist concepts of physical planning further emboldened a confident ideology of planning, allowing planners to assert themselves and finally gain control over the built environment. Like Burnham, they thought big, and like him, their plans for the total transformation of the built environment were realized primarily in fragments. However, over the next three decades, they succeeded in eliminating what they saw as substandard and obsolete urban areas, replacing them with large amounts of state-supported housing. They constructed entire new towns, along with a broad range of new civic structures, connected by highways. Their efforts produced urban renewal; public housing and the interstate highway system in the US; new towns and large public housing estates in great Britain, france, and Sweden; along with much privately generated urban development, often constructed along the same principles. In many ways, the Swedish “Million Homes Program” represents the apogee of this approach. Planners devised a comprehensive national

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housing program that constructed a million dwelling units, two-thirds in multifamily housing blocks, using government-approved, standardized templates, between 1965 and 1974 (Mack 2017 and this volume). The scale and complexity and scale of these efforts required the profession to split itself into separate areas of expertise, including transportation, land use, housing and community development, and urban design, each with its own ideals, technical tools, and rationale. The physical result is what James Holston (1989) has called “modernist planning,” exemplified in Brasília. Planning the capital city on a tabula rasa in Brazil’s interior provided planner Lúcio Costa with a rare opportunity to lay out a complete city. Costa’s apparently artistic form, often likened to an airplane or bird in flight, masked its rigorously rationalized organization and separation of urban functions (Holston 1989). Planning theorists—more concerned with process and anxious to align themselves with what they saw as the rigor of the social and physical sciences—described this approach to planning as the rational comprehensive model (faludi 1973; Taylor 1998). This method, intended to be normative, efficient, and generalizable, lays out a series of systematic steps in which expert planners identify clear goals, assemble relevant data, identify all possible options, and then propose ideal outcomes. Typically applied to largescale projects, the rational comprehensive ideal elevated planners to a new level of expertise and legitimacy. Specifically intended to separate planning from politics through its supposedly objective and rational techniques, the method elevated the planner’s expertise to new heights. At the same time, however, other observers noted that this method was highly idealized and that planning in the real world rarely worked in this fashion. In 1956, the political scientist Charles Lindblom identified what he saw as a far more common method of planning, “disjointed incrementalism” or, as he called it “the science of muddling through” (Lindblom 1956, 79). He argued that instead of an overall strategy, planners typically responded to immediate problems as they presented themselves. Planning thus proceeded by the accumulation of many small (and usually unplanned) incremental changes over time rather than through “grand plans.” Each of these models contains temporal implications. As Holston points out, rational comprehensive planning contains a blueprint for the future—a normative, predictive, and prescriptive projection. Disjointed incrementalism, on the other hand, while focusing on the present, in many respects requires planners to look to the past to improve the present—correcting past mistakes, updating existing regulations, responding to recent problems with

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short-term solutions, situations produced by recent circumstances. Without thinking far into the future, planners can work in a mode that is highly contingent and easily adaptable to changing circumstances. Although it is tempting to imagine rational comprehensive planning and disjointed incrementalism as polarities, planners rarely view them as such. Even for modernist planners of the mid-twentieth century, the 1:1 translation of a plan to reality was a rare occurrence, only employed in projects with a high symbolic value, as in capital cities such as Brasília where the absence of previous settlements eliminated resistance to Lucio Costa’s totalizing plan. Often plans looked so far into the future that, by the time the money or political will to implement them materialized, they were out of date or irrelevant. As a result, planning became increasingly embedded in the everyday mechanics of local governments, with planners mandated to produce plans at regular intervals. These plans, rather than outlining visionary futures, were hybrid documents, maintaining much of the existing city, adjusting and correcting for current problems, and adding a few proposals for the near future. To encourage implementation, planners often veer between the two models or, over time, allow one to dissolve into the other. The ambitious Plan of Chicago, for example, was never implemented as envisioned. However, for twenty years after its publication, various bits and pieces of the plan found their way onto the ballot, were funded, and were built. These were either amenities such as lakeside parks or practical infrastructural improvements, while few of the monumental physical features of the plan survived.5 Such methods have a surprising historical precedent: ironically, the massive alteration and restructuring of Paris wrought by Baron Haussmann between 1853 and 1870 (the urban model for Chicago and many subsequent large-scale planning efforts) were not guided by one master plan. Instead, Haussmann implemented successive projects for individual elements and systems, but never assembled them into a comprehensive document (Jordan 1995, 47–49). Even famously discredited policies such as those of urban renewal in the United States and the grands projets on the peripheries of french cities changed over time from the normative to the contingent (Cupers 2014). US planners used urban renewal legislation, first introduced by the federal government in 1949, to carry out comprehensive redevelopment, razing large areas of many cities and then rebuilding with modernist urban design. A notorious example was the West End of Boston, where the city, using federal guidelines and

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funding, condemned an entire neighborhood of narrow streets and tenement houses as “blight.” After bulldozing the site, planners laid out a new neighborhood, made up of superblocks with “tower in the park” apartments (gans 1962).6 Nearby a new modernist city hall arose, designed in the cast concrete “Brutalist” style, surrounded by a vast, empty plaza. Yet, by the mid-1960s, in another Boston neighborhood, the South End, the same policies enabled planners in the city’s redevelopment agency to conserve the existing physical fabric of the city by rehabilitating existing structures and, through selective removal of others, building new housing at the same scale while maintaining the traditional urban grid.

Planners and Their Publics This apparent about-face reflects the questioning of planning that began during the 1960s. visionaries such as Le Corbusier offered compelling images of a new modernist city as early as the 1920s. After World War II, cities began to actually construct these visions, although typically in versions that no longer conveyed the pleasure or beauty that their plans had forecast. By the 1960s, for many observers, their optimism had expired. Books such as Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities attacked the entire premises of twentieth-century planning, which Jacobs called “the radiant garden city,” cleverly collapsing the apparent polarities of Le Corbusier’s high modernist radiant City and Ebenezer Howard’s nostalgic garden City. She inverted these earlier urban values, championing exactly those parts of existing cities that planners had labeled as “blight.” In france, even stronger urban critiques were a key part of the May 1968 revolt, questioning not only the assumptions but also the outcomes of modernist planning. Citizens in many other cities rose up to challenge specific projects with great success, leading to the freeway revolts in San francisco, fights against the redevelopment of central Stockholm, the paralysis of Les Halles redevelopment in Paris, and numerous if more modest campaigns resisting highly localized urban or highway plans that occurred almost everywhere. The widespread rejection of modernist planning severely undermined the confidence of modernist planners and ultimately made the entire profession question its values and legitimacy. forced to acknowledge the social and physical failures of their profession, planners recalibrated their practices without examining their roots.

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This produced an ongoing crisis in the planning profession. Since the citizen revolts of the 1960s, planners have struggled to reacquire legitimacy, particularly against charges of insensitive and authoritarian actions through comprehensive planning. While developing his plan, Daniel Burnham polled social worker Jane Addams, architect frank Lloyd Wright, and other wellknown Chicagoans along with visiting notables such as the Polish statesman and musician Ignacy Jan Paderewski for their opinions, but he had little interest in input from the general public (Hines 1974). Similarly confident, modernist designers assumed that users would conform to their plans. But, as various publics became more vocal, critical, and demanding, planners had to engage with them to ensure that their profession would endure. Planner and theorist Paul Davidoff proposed one of the most radical solutions, urging planners to democratize the planning process. Davidoff (1965) argued that planning activities should occur in public arenas where citizens could examine and debate them. Instead of operating from the top down as agents of municipalities or firms, planners would become advocates for community groups and activist organizations, an approach Davidoff called “advocacy planning.” This model recognized that planners were not neutral experts, furthering the common interests by rational means, as they had previously claimed. But taking on the role of advocate in supporting local communities did not necessarily empower the planners. Instead, they became ventriloquists, simply conveying the message of other social groups who remained passive. In actual practice, however, many community members quickly acquired skills to advocate for their own interests, making the planners redundant. Davidoff ’s ideas, widespread in the 1960s and 1970s, inspired Chester Hartman, a professor of urban planning at Harvard, to create the Urban field Service (UfS). The UfS sent out teams of students and faculty to provide assistance to low-income communities. Even though the graduate School of Design chose not to renew Hartman’s contract, considering him too controversial, his advocacy model lived on in other university planning schools (Hartman 2002). Planners Network, an organization of advocacy planners founded by Hartman, consists largely of planning academics.7 Even its supporters soon realized that advocacy was challenging to practice: the gap in culture and values between the planners and those they served was too large; the work was extremely demanding but offered few rewards. Community groups and nonprofit organizations rarely could afford professional wages (Cenzatti 2000). Davidoff ’s article is still taught in planning schools, but few practicing planners follow the advocacy model. However, its continued presence in

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academia allows planners to claim rhetorically what they failed to achieve in practice, compensating for their lack of efficacy. Such representational successes perpetuate the continuing gap between aspiration and actuality. More mainstream planners addressed the distance between themselves and urban residents through participatory techniques that consulted and sought the approval of those affected by their plans. first mandated by the 1949 Housing Act in the US and then in Western Europe, participation has become a required stage in the planning process. In theory this opens the planning process to citizens’ interests through input and suggestions, but in reality, its narrow focus on already-framed proposals often make it an empty exercise in persuasion. In spite of this, residents have continued to demand a larger voice in decision making. Although many participatory policies were aimed at allowing poor and minorities to have a voice, middle-class residents, who possess the political knowledge and skills to make their opinions count, can easily hijack the process. The case of the Jardins d’Éole in Paris discussed by Newman (this volume) demonstrates both the power and the limitations of “bottom up” action. residents mobilized to demand a new type of public park instead of the industrial use planned for the site. After considerable struggle, their insistence on a park open twenty-four hours a day under neighborhood control was ultimately successful. Yet the activists, middle-class native french residents, do not necessarily represent the neighborhood, which is largely made up of immigrants from West Africa and the Maghreb. Increasingly the balance of power between planning expertise and users’ demands is shifting. But, as this example demonstrates, even defining the different “publics” or citizens involved is far more complicated than this single polarity suggests. Planners have adopted the word stakeholder to distinguish a legitimately involved member of the public, entitled to an opinion, from the self-selected citizens who often dominate community meetings with unwelcome comments. I have observed numerous planning students who were initially committed to listening to local residents turn increasingly cynical after their first few community meetings. Acknowledging that participation is an empty exercise, they are happy to turn this part of the process over to specialist planners who claim expertise in managing the complicated guidelines that govern citizen participation, even though they might have nothing to do with preparing the plan or policy under discussion. Other planners are equally frustrated that the profession’s mandated emphasis on responsiveness has virtually eliminated their ability to produce grand urban visions. I have heard planners

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lament the disappearance of master planners such as robert Moses, who used his power to make over the New York metropolitan area in his image.8 Once reviled, Moses has now become an aspirational symbol of the planner’s lost ability to think big and shape the city (Ballon and Jackson 2008). Much of Moses’s success can be attributed to his ability to control an entire region. Since the 1930s, dismayed by their inability to successfully implement plans at the urban scale, planners have argued for regional planning as the means to actually achieve control over the environment. Since then, planners have promoted innumerable regional concepts and solutions, though rarely with any political basis to support them. Although regional transportation planning has had some success, overall, regional planning has not been politically popular. In spite of this, the planners’ deeply embedded belief in the regional scale, regional consciousness, and even regional responsibility, all staples of their planning educations, does not allow them to understand why residents continue to vote against it.9 rather than critically analyzing both their own assumptions and the political contexts in which regional planning operates, they continue to regard regionalism as an unquestionably positive goal. failure is then explained as the result of citizens’ inability to understand what is good for them. The frequent use of terms such as NIMBY (not in my back yard) or BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything) to characterize opposition to their plans by local residents illustrates the distance between the planner’s ideals and citizen’s concerns. However, planning historians have argued that regional planning, when achieved, has typically been technocratic and nondemocratic. In a nation with strong tradition of local political control answerable to elected representatives, questioning large-scale decision making without democratic accountability should not be surprising, even if it undermines planners’ goals.10 In the case described by Bruce and Kevin O’Neill (this volume), many transportation planners would disagree with the St. Louis planners’ solutions. They insisted on the technical superiority of Metrolink’s fixed rail transit, although bus systems are often cheaper, more flexible, and better suited to the needs of poor residents. Their actions highlight planners’ often-contradictory impulses in dealing with the people for whom they are planning. Although many planners (like those in St. Louis) see themselves as the champion of low-income households, the elderly, and students, along with a generalized “collective good,” low-income groups rarely appear as active participants in public debates over transit. In St. Louis, the planners acted in their interest without consulting them. When middle-class interests conflict with the

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planners’ own beliefs, they often dismiss their objections as the product of fear, a desire for social isolation, and racism. St. Louis transit officials even created their own advocacy group, “Citizens for Modern Transport,” although few citizens appeared to be involved. When low-income citizens do take matters into their own hands, their demands may challenge the planners’ conclusions. Los Angeles activists successfully sued the Metropolitan Transit Authority for racial discrimination after the MTA invested heavily in light rail and commuter rail projects that favored middle-class commuters while shrinking bus service vital to poor and minority riders.11 In this case, equity-minded transportation planners served as expert witnesses supporting the bus riders, pitting planners against planners. In St. Louis, however, the planners’ solution was to “educate” voters using a clever but slightly manipulative public relations campaign to convince them to “think like planners” and recognize their regional responsibilities. Beginning in the 1990s, as national governments lessened their involvement in urban affairs, mayors often replaced planners as the leading figures in the politics of urban change. Instead of being a problem and a hindrance to planning, in some places politics have become the medium through which urban transformation occurs. for example, though the Bogotá plan described by federico Pérez (this volume) failed, observers of urban planning from around the world regard the city itself as a leader in urban innovation. A succession of charismatic and dynamic mayors—Jaime Castro, Antanus Mockus, and Enrique Penalosa—transformed Bogotá and its civic culture, winning political support for megaprojects such as modern transit systems, as well as introducing new kinds of civic engagement and “quality of life” projects such as Ciclovia, a weekly event that closes city streets to cars for pedestrian and bicycle use, that has spread around the world. Unlike the bureaucratic and necessarily technical operations undertaken by the grupo POT, these efforts explicitly operated through the political process, guided by elected officials responsive to urban constituencies. This leaves the planners unmoored, left out of the loop of urban change. But participating in politics can pose other difficulties for planners. In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has also been widely hailed for his expansive urban vision and numerous innovations. An activist mayor, Bloomberg reshaped the city, supporting large-scale redevelopment and sponsoring megaprojects. He encouraged his planning director, Amanda Burden, to rezone 40 percent of the city, fast-tracking luxury housing and office projects along with new parks and public spaces. In the middle of

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battles to implement the mayor’s ambitious agenda, Burden rejected the usual polarities that had structured the city’s debates over urban planning for decades. This pitted robert Moses (big projects, little participation) against Jane Jacobs (human scale, citizen input). Instead, she attempted to combine their competing approaches, claiming that the mayor would “build like Moses with Jacobs in mind” (Larson 2013, 2–3). This highly contradictory statement encapsulated the conflicts Burden faced as a planner. As the mayor’s friend and close associate, she had to support his vision, which largely consisted of large-scale projects and expensive amenities to assure Manhattan’s top position in the hierarchy of global cities. Yet her background was solidly in the Jacobs camp, as a public space and small-scale design advocate. Her attempt to reconcile these disparate aims convinced few of her critics. As rohit Aggarwala, another top Bloomberg planner, responded when asked about another of the mayor’s plans, “The city is full of contradictions, so the plan is too” (Larson 2013, 151). In New York, unlike Bogotá, Bloomberg’s urban politics produced a significant backlash. In spite of an unprecedented twelve-year term, as the mayor left office (taking Burden and other planners with him, many heading for jobs in the private sector), incoming mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to reverse many of his predecessor’s policies. Instead, he vowed to focus on affordable housing and the middle-class, poor, and homeless citizens that Bloomberg had ignored.12

Planners and Anthropologists As all of these examples demonstrate, planners regularly engage in intensely contradictory situations, making it clear that the ability to recognize and work with paradox should be part of both planning education and practice. How can anthropologists help them in this task? Unlike anthropology, planning, as an academic discipline and profession, has not been self-critical. Since the 1960s, anthropology as a discipline has engaged in continual selfexamination, questioning its positivist roots and asking difficult questions about power and knowledge. This led ethnographers to reevaluate their relationships with their interlocutors, to understand better how their assumptions and values shaped and distorted their interactions (Unnithan-Kuman and De Neve 2016). In contrast, during the same period, while there have been many critiques of planning, most have come from adjacent, more disinterested disciplines, such as urban sociology, geography, political science,

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and history rather than from inside the field of planning itself. Part of this is the necessity of action that is built into planning. Since efficacy, not understanding, is the goal, planners rarely examine the assumptions that shape their practices. Yet it turns out that planners, in order to continue as a profession, will have to understand themselves better. This could begin in planning school, by adding critical self-awareness as a key element of the curriculum. But this is only the first step. As James Holston points out, anthropology is a discipline that problematizes present circumstances by focusing on their assumptions and contradictions. These foci then become the starting points, as problems, puzzles, gaps, or even “crimes” for an investigation of the historical forces and factors that structure the current conditions of life. given the multiplicity of gaps that constitute planning, this approach would inevitably unsettle its normativity, forcing planners to acknowledge the contradictions embedded in their practices. finally, planners’ lack of self-awareness and inability to confront contradictions need to be seen as symptoms rather than the cause of their problems. The fundamental, deeply embedded weakness of planners is their persistent and insistent adherence to rationality. In the 1920s Karl Mannheim described the planning enterprise as “rational mastery of the irrational.” And today, planning paradigms ranging from mainstream rational comprehensive approaches to the models that challenge them such as advocacy and equity planning, the Habermasian model of communicative action, and even radical planning are still profoundly rooted in rationalist epistemology. The rationality of mainstream planning is obvious, explicitly anchored in the descriptive and predictive power of technical methodologies. Planners rely on abstract representations, usually based on census data or other quantitative measurements, to describe and analyze urban issues. Set in a problem-solving context, such abstracted knowledge limits the planners’ knowledge and interest in the interests, desires, and lives of the urban residents for whom they plan. More important, however, as the balance of power continues to shift between planners and the urban residents they serve, belief in rationality continues to dominate even the most progressive and inclusive forms of planning.13 for example, in communicative approaches such as those advocated by John forester, the planners themselves, rather than their methods, become the embodiment of rationality. By listening, clarifying, and mediating, they attempt to eliminate communicative distortions that prevent consensus. They act as translators, framing situations and transforming partial and incoherent

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utterances into rational discourse.14 The difference is that planners are willing to transfer their rationality to disenfranchised groups. Thus, rationality is equated with empowerment. To move beyond this and develop better tools of human and cultural understanding, planners can pay attention to the work of urban anthropologists, whose ethnographic methods accept and analyze what appear to be “irrational” beliefs and practices. One example is the fear of crime. This has multiple effects, such as gated communities, surveillance, calls for more policing, and a long list of other urban responses. Planners typically depict the underlying fear of crime in one of two ways. first they understand it literally and empirically, as a problem of a hostile urban environment, to be solved in multiple ways, ranging from redesigning aspects of the city to make it safer, such as the “broken windows” policing of New York Mayor giuliani to feminist marches to “take back the night.”15 Other planners interpret it as a product of irrational and unworthy sentiments, such as racism, class hatred, or excessive anxiety about property and property values. This reading renders these fears unjustifiable, invalid, and therefore dismissible. Anthropologist Teresa Caldeira examines the fear of crime in a far more persuasive way. Based on her fieldwork in Sao Paolo, Brazil, she identifies the fear of crime not as a fact but as a discourse, constructed and circulated in the form of everyday crime stories. These popular narratives transform the “facts” of crime, reorganizing and resignifying them as a way of simplifying and making sense out of changes in the neighborhood, the city, and Brazilian society. Thus the fear of crime and its associated narratives are ways of expressing and explaining other social experiences not necessarily related to crime. Crime supplies a generative symbolism that people use to talk about other things that lack a vocabulary or that are not easy to interpret. These narratives then produce changes in the built environment that symbolically and materially exaggerate enclosures, boundaries, and control. Planners can learn much from ethnographic accounts such as Caldeira’s that reveal the complex symbolic and rhetorical processes that underlie apparently straightforward actions and behavior in cities (2000, 53–89). Such ethnographic methods offer planners powerful tools designed to listen critically and interrogate everyday urban lives through the people who actually live them. Incorporating ethnographic fieldwork into planning practice would allow them to understand, for the first time, the human implications of their spatial practices. Interpretive methods that move beyond literal

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understanding to include broader cultural processes would broaden the scope of their inquiries beyond the rational to include the more complex and profound beliefs and practices that shaping urban life. This could transform the ways that planners themselves understand the city. As Holston suggests, instead of simply imposing normative concepts, they could begin to identify emergent conditions that are rooted in the way people actually live. If planning, as the planner and theorist John friedmann famously said, is putting knowledge into action, ethnographic knowledge would certainly produce new and more successful actions in the urban realm.

Notes 1. for a more critical approach, see fogelsong 1986. 2. Numerous editions of the plan have been published, with the most recent in Moore 2009. for a visual evaluation of the plan, see ross 2013. 3. Edward Bennett and Charles Norton, both of whom became well-known planners (Johnson 1995). The plan’s most enduring contribution was Clarence Perry’s Neighborhood Unit, a very small part of the plans’ overall recommendations. 4. The rPA is often confused with another contemporary planning advocacy group, the regional Planning Association of America, led by Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, and others. The rPAA championed regional decentralization, the exact opposite of the rPA’s plan. 5. Carl Smith estimates that 50 percent of the plan’s proposals had been realized twenty years later. 6. for a more positive assessment, see O’Connor 1995. 7. http://www.plannersnetwork.org, accessed May 25, 2015. 8. Caro (1974) emphasizes Moses’s personal power, but other scholars have challenged this interpretation, suggesting that Moses’s initiatives were in line with the dominant banking and financial interests in the city. See, for example, fitch 1995. 9. Many planning schools, including my own, maintain this claim by including “regional” in their names. 10. for critiques of regional planning see gore 1984; Weaver 1984; and Harvey 1973. for a history of the movement see Teitz 2012. 11. http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/columns/intersections/from-1990s-bus-protests -to-21st-century-bus-rapid-transit-race-class-and-transit-infrastructure-in-t.h, accessed May 15, 2015. 12. See Larson 2013 and Brash 2011 for critical assessments of the Bloomberg administrations. http://www.nyc.gov/html/housing/assets/downloads/pdf/housing_plan.pdf. 13. A recent survey of “emergent” urban planning concepts indicates that this approach has not changed. Discussing issues as disparate as climate change, and bottom-up planning, authors continued to emphasize rationality as the planner’s main contribution. Tigran Hass and Krister Olsson, eds, Emergent Urbanism: Urban Planning and Design in Times of Structural and Systemic Change (Burlington, vT: Ashgate, 2015).

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14. See, for example, forester 1999. It should be noted that forester argues for increased self-awareness for planners, but his entire approach continues to rely on their rational capabilities. 15. The “broken windows” theory of crime was first proposed by James Wilson and george Kelling (1982). It links visible disorder such as broken windows and turnstile jumping with subsequent increases in serious crimes.

Works Cited Ballon, Hilary, and Kenneth H. Jackson, eds. 2008. Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York. New York: Norton. Brash, Julian. 2011. Bloomberg’s New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City. Athens: University of georgia Press. Caldeira, Teresa. 2001. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Caro, robert. 1974. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: vintage. Cenzatti, Marco. 2000. “Leaping Into the Abyss: Planning and Postmodernism.” Critical Planning 7 (Spring): 5–24. Crawford, Margaret. 1990. Building the Workingman’s Paradise. New York: verso. Cupers, Kenny. 2014. The Social Project: Housing Postwar France. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Davidoff, Paul. 1965. “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 31: 331–38. faludi, Andreas. 1973. Planning Theory. New York: Pergamon. fitch, robert. 1995. The Assassination of New York. New York: routledge. fogelsong, robert. 1986. Planning the Capitalist City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. forester, John. 1999. The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory Planning Processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. gans, Herbert. 1962. The Urban Villagers. glencoe, IL: free Press. gore, Charles. 1984. Regions in Question: Space, Development Theory and Regional Policy. London: Methuen. Hancock, John. 1964. John Nolen and the American City Planning Movement: A History of Culture Change and Community Response, 1900–1940. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms. Hartman, Chester. 2002. Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning. New Brunswick, NJ: rutgers University Press. Harvey, David. 1973. Social Justice and the City. Athens: University of georgia Press. Hines, Tom. 1974. Burnham of Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holston, James. 1989. The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, David A. 1995. Planning the Great Metropolis: The 1929 Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs. New York: routledge. Jordan, David. 1995. Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann. New York: free Press. Kreuckenberg, Donald A., ed. 1994. The American Planner. New York: Methuen.

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Larson, Scott. 2013. Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lindblom, Charles. 1956. “The Science of Muddling Through.” Public Administration Review 19: 79–88. Mack, Jennifer. 2017. The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Moore, Charles, ed. 2009. Daniel H. Burnham, Edward Bennett, The Plan of Chicago. Chicago: great Books. Morris, A. E. J. 1994. History of Urban Form. New York: Wiley. O’Connor, Thomas. 1995. Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950–70. Boston: Northeastern University Press. ross, rebecca. 2013. “Picturing the Profession: The view from Above and the Civic Imaginary in Burnham’s Plans.” Journal of Planning History 12 (3): 269–81. Schaffer, Kristen. 2003. Daniel H. Burnham: Visionary Architect and Planner. New York: rizzoli. Scott, Mel. 1969. American City Planning Since 1890. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, Carl. 2006. The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Nigel. 1998. Urban Planning Theory since 1945. New York: Sage. Teitz, Michael. 2012. “regional Development Planning.” In Planning Ideas that Matter: Livability, Territory, Governance and Reflective Practice, ed. Bishwapriya Sanyal, Lawrence vale, and Christina rosan, 127–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Unnithan-Kuman, Maya, and geert De Neve. 2016. “Introduction: Producing fields, Selves, and Anthropology.” In Critical Journeys: The Making of Anthropologists, ed. Maya UnnithanKuman and geert De Neve, 1–16. New York: routledge. Weaver, Clyde. 1984. Regional Development and the Local Community, Planning Process and the Social Context. New York: Wiley. Wilson, James Q., and george L. Kelling. 1982. “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” The Atlantic (March).

ChAPTer 3

redesigning the republic? Public gardens, Participatory design, and Citizenship in immigrant Paris Andrew newman

Throughout Paris’s history, the city’s parks and gardens have played an integral role in maintaining its identity as a national capital and seat of governmental power. Since 2007, when I began conducting ethnographic fieldwork on the design of parks and public gardens,1 I have been struck by the extent to which national politics lurk in the subtext of ostensibly technical discussions related to landscape design and the management of public spaces. Often, I found that residents, planners, and municipal officials judge the success or failure of Paris’s green infrastructure in ways that resonate with fraught debates about the nature of citizenship in france. The architectural designs as well as the management strategies employed to control these spaces are intended to provide access to green space for the broadest possible public, but these sites also reproduce a specific relationship between citizen and state that is specific to france’s republican tradition. In line with other anthropological studies focusing on the simultaneously constitutive relationship between the domains of infrastructure, society, and ecology (Anand 2017; Kleinman 2014; Stoetzer 2018), I have found that the park system and ideas of citizenship shape each other. To be more precise, the relationship between the park system and society (or users) is not dichotomous, rather all are part of joint ecological-infrastructural network tied to Paris’s function as a national capital. In this context, parks materialize changing notions of citizenship and belonging. However, as examples in this

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chapter demonstrate, people inhabit and redesign parks in ways that shape new ideals of citizenship. Public gardens are designed and operated to spatialize a republican ethos (often invoked in the motto: “Liberté, Égalité, fraternité”). In practice, spatializing republican values entails guaranteeing freedom of access for all, and at the same time, ensuring equality by way of stipulating that no citizen utilizes public space in a fashion that interferes with right of another to do so. To accomplish this goal, agencies charged with operating public spaces must clearly and unambiguously define what behavior and forms of usage are legitimately public, and which activities are a threat to said public. In this chapter, I examine how this process unfolded in two parks in a predominately immigrant district of Paris to show how these definitions of the public in france become entangled with debates over who is—or is not—viewed as french. I argue that those involved in the design and management of these relatively small public gardens are at the forefront of reworking profound ideas concerning the relationship between citizen and the state in france. In making this argument, I draw from ethnographic research that I conducted in france since 2007 as well as an analysis of a research report for the City of Paris led by my colleagues and mentors Michèle Jolé and Stéphane Tonnelat (see Jolé, Tonnelat, and Newman 2009). The issues related to design, equity of access, and “publicness” that I encountered in france resonate with longstanding discussions about park usage in other cities (see, e.g., Low 2009). However, france’s republican political tradition influences assumptions and aspirations that guide designs in distinct ways. following John Bowen (2007), I do not reify republicanism as a “culture” but view it as shared set of principles that frequently underlies the conduct and policies of public institutions and agencies. At its heart, republicanism pivots around the idea of abstract universalism: the idea that all humans are created equal and therefore should be afforded equal rights and freedoms in the eyes of the state.2 However, as Mayanthi fernando has put it, this requires citizens to “abstract their particular racial or religious identities in order to be proper, universal citizens” (2014, 36). As a result, political claims rooted in particularism or multiculturalism are delegitimized, resulting in an official policy of color-blindness on the part of public officials (Epstein 2011). The state therefore demands neutrality and public secularism (laïcité) from its citizenry for the ostensible purpose of protecting the public domain from being appropriated by any one group, a threat that is often described as communautarisme (communitarianism, or sectarianism)

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and that has been popularly associated with france’s immigrant populations, in particular, french Muslims. Public agencies are tasked with protecting laïcité from these supposed threats. In the words of John Bowen, they must “instruct and exemplify” (2007, 12) these republican values to the population at large, though in practice, public agencies often reproduce the very differences they seek to erase (Kleinman 2016). Bowen (2007) uses the term “public socializing agent” to describe the role of public schools in this respect, though as Kleinman points out, this is frequently an institutionalized aspiration that can be blatantly contradicted by the reality of everyday operations. In this case, I focus on the City of Paris parks department,3 which has fashioned its role, and aspirations, according to a similarly republican logic. The agency does not simply maintain parks for use by the public; it carefully regulates and instructs the public on the correct forms of conduct in public space. Paris’s park system is intended to operate as a form of civic infrastructure that contributes to the distribution, normalization, and reproduction of publicness, at least in an idealized form. Here, I examine cases where the “breakdown” of this civic infrastructure occurs. These problems are frequently linked to neighborhoods where the parks are located, and the fact residents have been deemed as incompatible with normative ideas of publicness in france.

The Emergence of the Public Garden The visual importance of Paris’s parks and gardens has always extended beyond mere ornamentation. from the emergence of the aristocratic formal garden in the seventeenth century to parks in the present moment, one can trace how the birth and evolution of the “public” garden has gone together with emergence and transformation of the “public” as a social category. gardens designs have long been linked to the display of power, and framing the relationship between sovereign and subject. André Le Nôtre (1613– 1700), the royal gardener-architect who oversaw the design of the gardens at the versailles Palace and the Tuileries in Paris, largely defined the paradigm of the french formal garden along these lines (Adams 1979; Mukerji 1997). During the opulent years of the ancien régime under the reigns of the “Sun King” Louis xIv (1643–1715) and Louis xv (1715–74), the methodical, symmetrical sculpting of hedges and trees using planned sight-lines, fountains, and intricate parterres de broderie was a spatial expression of

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domination; a “miraculous” demonstration of “what nature was made to do” under the command of divine right power (Mukerji 1994, 661). However, a careful attention to perspective also made the garden an “optic order” in which seeing itself “obeys a rule of order and arrangement” presided over by the king (Marin 1988, 191, 192). The garden is not only a display of power; it also creates power over display by naturalizing a regime of seeing, watching, and knowing. By the time of the french revolution (1789–99), the rigid aesthetic of the french formal garden was falling out of fashion in favor of the romantic jardin anglais (English garden). However, the link between gardens, social ordering, and power remained central to Paris’ emergence as the “capital of the nineteenth century,” in the words of Walter Benjamin (1969). The temporary renaming of the Tuileries as the Jardin National after the revolution is highly symbolic in this regard, as it displaced the absolute power of the king with the universal principles of reason underlying the new republic. The post-revolution rise of the “public garden” combined the notion of the aristocratic garden—a topographic landscape created in the image of the regime—with the newly emergent concept of the “public.” The planning and design of new gardens (or many cases, the redesign of pre-revolution gardens) such as the Parc Monceau, Bois de Boulogne, and Parc des Buttes Chaumont were of central importance to georges-Eugène Haussmann’s renovation of Paris (1852–70), undertaken at the behest of Emperor Napoleon III with the goal of rationalizing the flow of goods, capital, and people through the city while symbolically redefining the french capital in the image of an emergent and opulent urban bourgeoisie (Harvey 2003; Hopkins 2015; Sutcliffe 1996). The park system joined other architectural forms of the nineteenth century that actively sought to produce ideal citizens (see Park 2018), rather than merely surveil and define against supposedly dangerous populations. The Bois de Boulogne provides an example of the importance of public gardens to the emergent concept of the citizen in the context of french imperial expansion of the late nineteenth century. formerly a royal hunting reserve, the 2,000-square-acre bois, or forest, was transformed into a gigantic public garden featuring carriage drives and a race course for the wealthy residents of the capital’s western quartiers bourgeois. One of the most popular areas of the Bois de Boulogne during Paris’s belle époque was the Jardin d’Acclimatation. This site was the home of long-running colonial exposition (operating from 1877–1912) where Parisians gazed upon a rotating set of human displays such as Kingdom of Dahomey, Ashanti warriors, and a Sámi family

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(Blanchard et al. 2008; Schneider 1982). This made it a unique site in Paris, where Parisians on a casual stroll through a park could suddenly be made to feel like direct participants in the colonial project and affirm their sense of selfhood in opposition to colonized people on display. In this regard, the public garden was a space where a bizarre inversion of imperial geography held sway: non-Europeans were brought to the metropole to civilize and cultivate a french public consisting of the Parisian middle and upper class. The modern public garden therefore retained, if not heightened, the royal garden’s emphasis on power over seeing, classification, ordering, and a delimited definition of the public and the nation at once. Beginning in the nineteenth century, authority became increasingly vested in linked republican principles of citizenship and civilization. Whether through the display of populations subjugated by the empire in the Bois de Boulogne or the romantic classicism of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, the public gardens were more than mere spaces of idle time and bourgeois flânerie—they were sites that contributed to a civilizing mission directed at the inhabitants of the capital itself.

Citizenship by Design few have articulated the relationship between contemporary republican notions of citizenship and parks more clearly than Pierre Sansot, who describes the ideal public garden as a space of “perfect neutrality . . . that has no mission to spread any belief ” with a pedagogical focus to “teach tolerance, respect, and the love of others” (Sansot 1993, 33). The design of public gardens can be read as enabling a spatial performance of the citizen-state relationship between park users and the parks department. In practice, the department functions as a “public socializing agent” (Bowen 2007) alongside schools and other institutions, but with a distinctly spatial and architecturally oriented approach that mixes pedagogy, surveillance, and coercion. for example, a constitution-like document, the Réglementation Général (general regulations) is posted near most public garden entrances. Some versions of the document explicitly invoke the french republic, though all lay out the rights and responsibilities for users who enter the park. According to the document, a number of practices that are allowed on sidewalks such as bike riding, playing music, and drinking alcoholic beverages are forbidden or carefully circumscribed when one enters a park. Movement and rigorous

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figure 3.1. A list of rules posted at the entrance of a public garden. This example was defaced and then cleaned just enough to render the numerous “articles” legible. Photograph by Andrew Newman.

physical activity (such as ball playing or sports) are also carefully proscribed and limited in public gardens and parks. Such rules establish the public garden’s status as an exceptional kind of public space (compared to the street, for example). The notion of exceptionalism is further embellished in designs that foreground boundary making through the prominent use of gating and fencing, and management practices that carefully ritualize the opening and closing of the parks each day to the public. As a result, when one passes through the gates of a public garden, one enters into a kind of unwritten contract or “citizenship” relationship vis-à-vis the state (in this case, the parks department) in which one gains the right to use the facility on equal terms as others, in exchange for granting the agency a monopoly over the power to define proper modes of publicness, and hence, govern the space.

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All but the smallest Parisian parks feature literal public socializing agents, officially known by the contradictory title of agents d’accueil et de surveillance (AAS, welcoming and surveillance agents). I will refer to them by the colloquial french appellation they often receive: gardiens. Gardiens are uniformed public servants that are traditionally armed only with whistles and two-way radios. It is they who are responsible for ensuring that the public observes the rules and conventions of the public garden. As Tonnelat (2006) has stated (see also Jolé 2005), the gardiens embody the role of the state, guaranteeing that a basic “civism” holds sway through which “everybody complies to a universal code of behavior that makes the park a space accessible to anybody” while simultaneously “watching over and watching after” the public. Gardiens play a central role in surveilling, controlling, and therefore cultivating the public in the space of the garden. Taken together, the “ideal” public garden is an ensemble of elements ranging from design to management that spatially expresses and reproduces a state-citizen relationship that is at the heart of republican ideals. This political dimension of a public garden (and republicanism itself) becomes most visible when this social order is perceived as breaking down, and a new ideal are proposed in its place.

A Tale of Two Gardens: The Square Léon and the Jardins d’Éole Two of Paris’s most contested green spaces are located just a kilometer apart, in Paris’s eighteenth arrondissement. The Square Léon and the Jardins d’Éole have been a source of continued anxiety for the parks department and have also been a focus of ethnographic research by me and by fellow research team members4 since the mid-2000s. In both cases, the parks department’s difficulties have been closely related to the social characteristics of the surrounding district. The eastern portion of the eighteenth arrondissement where the parks are located include the low-income and working-class neighborhoods of the goutte d’Or and La Chapelle, which have been home to immigrants from the Maghreb and West Africa for over half a century. In the areas adjacent to both parks, more than 34 percent of the residents are immigrants, a figure double the Paris average (APUr 2016). The public spaces of the goutte d’Or and La Chapelle are well known for an atmosphere that has been cast as menacing in many media representations that emphasize the supposed

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sectarianism of its diverse inhabitants. As Tariq, an Algerian-born resident of La Chapelle, once characterized the negative perceptions of the neighborhood during an interview:5 “There are some who are shocked by the mix of people here” (emphasis added). Tariq’s choice of words underlined the degree to which public anxieties are directed at the neighborhood, not only because of a mere association with immigrants, but specifically because of an urban experience defined by spontaneous encounters with cultural mixture and heterogeneity. The Square Léon is a public garden defined precisely by such qualities. Though relatively small in comparison to many Parisian parks (1.5 square hectares), it is by far the largest green space in this densely populated area. Studies led by Tonnelat and Jolé during the 2000s6 called attention to the fact that the Square Léon was frequented to a degree that is disproportionate to its relatively small size, giving it a distinctly crowded feel. The vast majority of park users are of West African and Maghrebi origin. In addition to the sheer numbers of individuals who use the park, other signs attesting to the popularity of the space among residents include the diverse age range of users that can be found in the space, varying from children to the elderly. In the eyes of city administrators and staff, the space has been considered troublesome and disorderly at multiple times in its history. Despite the

figure 3.2. The Square Léon. Photograph by Andrew Newman.

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immense numbers of residents who use the park, which could be considered evidence of success, Square Léon is also frequented by two categories of users considered problematic: participants in the neighborhood’s illegal drug economy—both sellers and drug users—as well as groups of West African and Maghrebi youths (typically young men) who spend all day in the park. The drug dealers were a source of worry because of their illegal activities and the fear that they might pose a danger to other residents (cf. Mitchell 1995). The fears surrounding the presence of the young men in public space are far more ambiguous. Ironically, anxieties stemmed from the fact the youth seemed to utilize public space too much for the expectations of the parks department. In contrast to other “ideal” park users, such as parents with children, who visited the park with specific, legible goals in mind and then left, groups of young men distinguished themselves from the public at large in that they were perceived as lingering and inhabiting the space all day, a pattern that correlates with high rates of youth unemployment in Paris. As a result, young men seemed to appropriate the space actively, in effect making it their own space, rather than passively using the park for short periods of time and leaving. When residents who used the park were interviewed by Tonnelat and Jolé, they often spoke positively about the park as a whole, and typically attributed the negative aspects of the park to individual characters or groups within the space (Tonnelat 2006). However, this was not the case for the parks department, who identified groups of users, including drug dealers and youths, as interfering with the access of the broader public as well as their own efforts at social control. In contrast to the residents, this has led a definition of the problem as a spatial one, at the scale of the entire public garden. In an interview7 that I conducted in 2009, a gardien remembered the Square Léon as a “horror” and specifically cited his difficulties with getting young people to leave the park at the end of the day. His authority over the space was directly challenged on a regularly basis, he said. Tonnelat (2006) observed that even the parks department’s horticulturalists, who do not typically interact with the public, disliked working in the Square Léon because of fears that drug dealers would attack anyone who trimmed back the plants; it was said the dealers preferred wild and untended flora in order to conceal illegal drugs. These examples suggest an important conceptual step was made in the parks department staff ’s definition of the problem: drug dealers and youths were threatening because their modes of usage were viewed as appropriating and redefining publicness. Not only did such activity infringe upon other park

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users, the argument went, it challenged the authority of the staff to do their jobs defining publicness at multiple levels. As the case of the youths who resisted giving the park back to the state at the end of the day suggests, people were refusing to cede control of publicness to the state. In a neighborhood widely once termed a sectarian “Babel” by the media (Simon 2007) such behavior amounted to a site-specific form of spatial communitarianism that echoed stereotypes of immigrants’ incompatibility with republican civic culture. Ultimately, the parks department staff perceived themselves as having such a difficult time cultivating the kind of civism and sociability they furnished in other Parisian gardens that many employees (including gardiens) simply abandoned their posts at Square Léon for several long periods out of fear. This relinquishment of official control is notable because residents—despite being candid about their fear of individuals involved in the drug trade— continued to use the park in large numbers. By the mid-2000s, the Square Léon had become synonymous with the notion of a public breakdown in the face of a site-specific form of communitarianism.

Jardins d’Éole: An Inconclusive Experiment? Just a short walk east from the Square Léon, one can find the Jardins d’Éole, a green space completed in 2007, with a design heavily influenced by the parks department’s experience with the former park. If the Square Léon is the spatial manifestation a republican dystopia, the newly built Jardins d’Éole is frequently described as an innovative experiment, a new way forward for Paris’s green spaces, and a possible transformation of the very purpose and ideals behind the public garden itself. These innovations were led by a residents’ mobilization that worked alongside the design team to develop an unorthodox approach to avert the difficulties of the Square Léon. However, an upsurge of drug-related activity in the park since 2010 has led many residents as well as the parks department to question whether Jardins d’Éole has ultimately been a success. During the Jardins d’Éole’s design phase, and after the park opened, most of the participatory process focused on an area called the esplanade. The area is a roughly 150-meter-long, concrete open space meant to avoid to the failure of the Square Léon. It forms the boundary between the park’s grassy interior and a main thoroughfare running along the Jardins d’Éole’s eastern perimeter. The adjoining street has long been an important node in northeast Paris’s

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figure 3.3. Breaking the ramadan fast on the esplanade of the Jardins d’Éole. Photograph by Andrew Newman.

crack cocaine and intravenous drug economy, and it was widely feared that participants in the drug economy would territorialize any proximate public space. The design team’s solution was provocative: for all practical purposes, they preemptively removed the parks department from the space. While the esplanade was formally part of the Jardins d’Éole and therefore technically under the purview of the agency, the design dispensed with fencing in favor of a waist-high wall and a canal moved to the interior of the park. Most important, residents themselves, instead of the parks department staff, would take the lead on managing social activities in the space through a participative regime focused on neighborhood associations. Now residents (or at least, neighborhood association members) would take the staff ’s traditional role of defining the proper public. The effect was to make a significant portion of the park completely open to the public for twenty-four hours a day (a unique situation among Paris parks), even after gardiens had departed for the day. Jane Jacobs’s “eyes on the street” (1961)—the idea everyday residents’ watchful eyes and caretaking are more effective means of social control than outside agents—was invoked as guiding principle to justify the innovation. vigilant citizens (see Newman 2013) would therefore be the ultimate

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authorities over the public garden, especially after dark. This design, which built in residents’ associations to the management of the park, sought to incorporate the grassroots energy that drove the demand for the park into a management strategy, as a form of participative planning. When this plan was first presented, city administrators and some elected officials reacted with “shock,” according to a member of the design team I interviewed,8 and the Square Léon was routinely invoked as a cautionary tale in a series of heated debates that followed. Nevertheless, the design team— which included two sociologists, some neighborhood association members, and the architects—prevailed at first in a drawn-out debate with the parks department over security that one activist described to me as “the last big struggle we had [before the park was completed].”9 In the end, the city administrators relented, but only on the condition that a knee-high foundation for a concrete wall be placed around the esplanade, allowing for the area to be fenced off on short notice. residents would be allowed to test more participation in the control of the space, but the knee-high barrier served as a concrete reminder of the arrangement’s probationary nature, which would prove only temporary. If the participative elements of the Jardins d’Éole succeeded in testing the boundaries of design orthodoxy, it did so by strongly abiding to other republican strictures. While large events coordinated by the neighborhood mobilization represented a demographic cross-section of the neighborhood, the activists who coordinated with the design team were predominately from the neighborhood’s middle-class french population (this arrangement was uncontroversial, given a prevailing emphasis on “color-blindness” in french public agencies). The style and content of the residents’ demands for a public garden conformed to republican ideals by demanding equal treatment and facilities for residents and eschewing identity politics and appeals to non-french cultural identities. In keeping within this framework, distinctiveness and particularity was framed in spatial, not cultural terms, using the neighborhood as a referent. The mobilization for the park was not a plea for multiculturalism— for an Algerian, Senegalese, or Muslim space—or indeed sectarianism. for example, in one flyer for a protest, activists articulated a need for a neighborhood garden that “could give these neighborhoods—and the people who live there—more unity and identity.” The cultural implications of this new “unity” were conveniently left ambiguous. The use of this spatial referent allowed activists to claim unequal, discriminatory treatment without to appealing to any one cultural identity. This color-blind recasting of inequality

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and injustice as spatial, rather than racial or ethnic, deflected delegitimizing accusations of antirepublican ghettoization characterized by “integration in peril” (Mettout 2003). An assimilationist ethic extended even to the identity of the vacant-space-turned-park itself. In a symbolic act of place-based assimilation, the project, which had been dubbed the Parc de la Cour du Maroc (Moroccan Court), was renamed a decidedly sustainable—and grecoroman—label, the Jardins d’Éole (Aeolus’s gardens). Since its opening, the Jardins d’Éole has become crowded and popular. The anxiety of the parks department has not relented, and is now shared by neighborhood residents who often engage in mutual co-surveillance and negotiation over the “proper” uses of the space. Many activists involved in the mobilization to create the park have remained engaged through a new struggle: keeping the esplanade open by “animating” it and promoting a series of activities and events there. In effect, the official surveillance of the parks department has been complemented (if not replaced) by informal monitoring by neighborhood association members who are, more often than not, from the neighborhood’s middle class, french-origin minority. I found that activists were motivated in this work more by fear of the parks department’s potential enclosure of the space than by actual harmful or criminal actions that might occur in the park. Tomi, a resident of french origin and one of the leaders of the original mobilization, has often restated what he told me in an interview:10 “it would only take one complaint” to result in the esplanade being gated, and therefore losing its distinctive character as a “garden for the people of the neighborhood.” As a result, a regular of list of programmed events is held on the esplanade to conjure an idealized public to fill the space, lest it fall under the control of the spectral but continually invoked “delinquents.” Interestingly, this conjured public does not always fall in line with the vision of the public garden as it has been classically imagined. Events vary and include children’s book swaps and puppet shows, hip-hop performances, protests by housing activists, elaborate dinner parties, and mass public feasts marking the breaking of the ramadan fast at nightfall (an event that would violate the secular and temporal restrictions of the traditional public garden and yet raises no eyebrows at the Jardins d’Éole). Activists also employ another form of control: direct and continual negotiations with other residents in the park over “proper” uses that do not interfere with the rights of others (at night, tensions over noise often arise between young people who play loud music and ride scooters on the esplanade and residents who live in nearby buildings).

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Ironically, in the early 2010s, the fears of the activists and the parks department seemed to manifest, but in a more traditionally designed section of the park’s gated interior that is unambiguously under the aegis of public officials. At the park’s northeastern end, there are a series of alleys, surrounded by dense hedges. According to one of architects involved in the project,11 an artificial hill was created that never drained correctly, making for an area that often flooded, and which was avoided by many people. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the illegal drug economy grew more visible here (as well in other public spaces of northeast Paris). Public trafficking and use grew so acute by 2013 that the parks department increased the numbers of gardiens during the closing of the park at sundown, and provided personnel with muzzled german Shepherds to expedite this often-tense task. In the spring of 2013, the parks department closed the Jardins d’Éole for two weeks, primarily so that plants in the isolated sections of the park could be trimmed back to afford better surveillance of interior spaces. Then, in 2015, in an incident unrelated to concerns over illegal drugs, an assault on the esplanade occurred. This incident proved to be last straw for the parks department. The department enclosed the esplanade behind a chain-length fence (leaving two primary entrances for access) and imposing opening and closing hours in line with other parks in Paris. Despite these efforts to lock down the park, it remains unclear who controls the Jardins d’Éole, as the pluralistic space appears to evade the grasp of nearly all who would stake claim to it. Young people still spend the most time in the space by far, especially at night, but my conversations with many young people reveal that they too are anxious over being scrutinized by adults ranging from parents to neighbors to law enforcement (see Newman 2015). On the other hand, many of the influential neighborhood association members, regardless of their class, ethnic background, or gender, feel that the sheer number of the youths in public space makes them an imposing presence, despite the fact that the esplanade has not been the locus of the drug economy. Parks department staff, for their part, refer to the residents’ associations as the authorities over the space. The parks department appears to grant the mostly middle-class, french-origin activists and association members the most legitimacy as a concerned and engaged “public” even though they often do not represent the class and ethnic makeup of the neighborhood at large. In many respects, this arrangement is keeping with the ambiguous politics of many grassroots organizations in the era of neoliberal urbanism. from a democratic perspective, these unelected, middle-class public representatives could be a greater threat to the republican social order then the delinquent

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youth. for the time being, the space’s status as an urban commons hangs in a delicate balance (Newman 2013; Susser 2017). As Paris continues to gentrify (see Clerval 2013) this status could change. The example of the gradually enclosed esplanade, which began half-completed and was subsequently fenced, is a tangible example of the “commoning” practices that expand and are rolled back amid urban change. Some of the most dramatic tensions underlying the publicness of the park practices are linked to processes emanating far beyond france’s borders. In first few years of its operation, the Jardins d’Éole had been a relatively safe place where small groups of refugees from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, and other countries could gather inconspicuously while travelling to and from the nearby railway stations. In the mid-2010s, as the migrant crisis facing Europe intensified, the numbers of refugees and migrants who sought refuge in the park grew into the thousands. This prompted media attention and subsequent efforts by police and public authorities to remove migrants from the park (Le Monde 2016). As a result, what occurred in Jardins d’Éole raised fundamental questions for citizenship and republican universalism: is everyone who occupies public space in Europe entitled to protections and rights afforded to the public, in particular, human rights? Despite the extraordinary scale of the migrant crisis, the contradictory situation by which people can be “in public” despite not being considered a member “of the public” is continuing a theme in Paris’s park politics.

Conclusion Paris’s green spaces have long functioned as part of the political infrastructure supporting successive regimes in france. In the contemporary moment, the parks department operates public gardens as a form of civic infrastructure that reinforces a state/citizen relationship that is a central, if contested, part of the republican political project. The agency seeks to fulfill the obligation of the state to guarantee the rights of all “users” (i.e., citizens) to equal access. The persona of the gardien is an apt embodiment of the agency’s mission: by constantly watching over people in a public setting—and often engaging in pedagogical and disciplinary interventions—gardiens preserve, protect, and foster the very ideals that define publicness itself. At the Square Léon, a surprising development occurred: the gardiens, the very people charged with protecting the sacrosanct publicness of the space,

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fled in the face of threats to their authority. This retreat proved ironic, as many residents of the surrounding neighborhood continued to utilize the Square Léon nonetheless. The difficulties stemmed from the fact the Square Léon was perceived as a place where the “unruly” members of the public—be they actual drug dealers or simply young people who did not want to leave at closing time—sought to redefine the function of the space according to their own needs. It is worth noting that in an era when even halal beef and “burkinis” have provoked moral panics in france, the explicit theme of Islam or public displays of Muslim piety were absent from the controversies over park usage in either park (in the Jardins d’Éole, an organized Eid gathering occurred and was unremarked upon). Nevertheless, a similar logic prevailed: the agency constructed categories of parks users who threatened its monopoly on defining “neutral” public space. In a striking parallel with the Square Léon (albeit with a very different, proactive method), the outcome of the participative process at the Jardins d’Éole entailed the removal of the gardiens from the space. This change, along with the absence and subsequent imposition of gating, signals shifting definitions of the public. In agreeing to the gateless design, the parks department— at the behest of the design team—at first ceded some control of the space (and notions of publicness) to the residents. This represented a willingness of the parks department to retreat from its past approach as a “public socializing agent” (Bowen 2007) in a traditional republican sense. It was, therefore, not only a design response to localized urban conditions but a new way to conceive of the state/citizen relationship in a diverse, multiethnic neighborhood. If this reform of a top-down approach has the potential to be more democratic, it does not do away with the pressing issue of defining the “public,” as the ongoing contestation at the Jardins d’Éole esplanade demonstrates. Indeed, in a neighborhood where many residents are from outside france, middle-class residents whose frenchness is not open to question have informally assumed the role once played by the parks department. The definition of “public” is now negotiated among citizens on the ground, but the inequalities among residents suggest that there is still a great deal of uncertainty as to whose rights will be protected. In all cases, these instances highlight the inadequacy of the “user” category that has been traditionally employed by designers, planners, and social scientists. Both examples show that people constitute parks as they inhabit them. At both the Jardins d’Éole and the Square Léon, people’s everyday uses altered the social milieu, which in turn led to renovations by the parks department.

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Instead of understanding park politics as a dichotomous conflict over usage between public agency and users played out in a park, it is more accurate to envision the park system as made up of varying groups of residents, the parks department, neighborhoods, and at times, transnational networks such as refugees and migrants that stretch far beyond Paris. Power is asymmetrically distributed across the network, but because of its interconnectedness, groups with less access to formal power can and do reshape the park system. These changes can reverberate throughout society, especially when ideals of citizenship and republican forms of belonging are being contested. Thus, park politics in Paris’s eighteenth arrondissement demonstrate the degree to which broad debates over citizenship and national belonging shape the ways that even small urban spaces are designed and managed. At the same time, these issues also highlight the degree that everyday design decisions made by architects and municipal officials entail a rethinking of the basic principles of democratic citizenship. In mobilizing the planner’s gaze— whether they realize it or not—planners, architects, and the residents that take on participatory roles are in essence “seeing like a state” (Scott 1998). Places such as the Square Léon and the Jardins d’Éole serve as a reminder of the promises and dangers associated with that gaze, regardless of who is able to adopt it.

Notes 1. My use of the term “public garden” is a literal translation of jardin public. I use the term because it more precisely distinguishes a public garden as part of a specific tradition of landscape design in france. In keeping with practices of parks department staff and the residents with whom I worked, however, I will use the terms park and public garden interchangeably to refer the Jardins d’Éole and the Square Léon. 2. While this is not the place to engage in a critique of republican citizenship on its own terms, this logic of political belonging has been critiqued for excluding a variety of groups within french society, including Muslim citizens (see Bowen 2007; fernando 2014), Jewish citizens (see Arkin 2013), and the elderly (Keller 2015). 3. Over the course of my research, this agency been known as both the DPJEv (Direction des Parcs Jardins et Espaces verts) and the DEvE (Direction des Espaces verts et de l’Environnement). To avoid confusion, I will call it the parks department. 4. My fieldwork was conducted as part of a research project focused on Paris’s parks and public gardens conducted in concert with Michèle Jolé and Stéphane Tonnelat. The data I use in this chapter is drawn in part from our collaborative work as a research team with the Laboratoire vie Urbaine. 5. Interview, June 25, 2012.

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6. Studies were conducted by the Laboratoire vie Urbaine, see Jolé, Tonnelat, and Newman 2009. 7. Interview, January 27, 2009. 8. Interview, June 25, 2008. 9. Interview, March 15, 2008. 10. Interview, March 15, 2008. 11. Interview, July 18, 2012.

Works Cited Adams, William. H. 1979. The French Garden. New York: george Braziller. Anand, Nihkil. 2017. Hydraulic City: Water and Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. APUr (Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme). 2016. “Les quartiers parisiens de la politique de la ville, contrat de ville 2015–2020, Principales données de l’Observatoire des quartiers prioritaires.” Paris: Maire de Paris. Arkin, Kimberly. 2013. Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Perspecta 12: 163–72. Blanchard, Pascal, Nicolas Bancel, gilles Boëtsch, Eric Derro, Sandrine Lemaire, and Charles forsdick, eds. 2008. Human Zoos. Science and Spectacle in the Age of the Colonial Empires. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Bowen, John. r. 2007. Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Clerval, Anne. 2013. Paris sans le peuple: La gentrification de la capitale. Paris: Éditions la Découverte. Epstein, Beth S. 2011. Collective Terms: Race, Culture, and Community in a State-Planned City in France. New York: Berghahn. fernando, Mayanthi. 2014. The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harvey, David. 2003. Paris: Capital of Modernity. New York: routledge. Hopkins, richard. 2015. Planning the Greenspaces of Nineteenth-Century Paris. Baton rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: random House. Jolé, Michèle. 2005. “veiller, surveiller ou veiller sur? Du gardien de square à l’agent de surveillance specialisé.” Urbanisme 343: 344–46. Jolé, Michèle, Stéphane Tonnelat, and Andrew Newman. 2009. “Le public des jardins de Paris entre observation et action.” report submitted to the City of Paris, Laboratoire vie Urbaine, UMr CNrS LAvUE. Keller, richard. 2015. Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heatwave of 2003. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kleinman, Julie. 2014. “Adventures in Infrastructure: Making an African Hub in Paris.” City and Society 26 (3): 286–307.

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———. 2016. “ ‘All Daughters and Sons of the republic’? Producing Difference in french Education.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22 (2): 261–78. Le Monde. 2016. “Evacuation des migrants qui occupaient les Jardins d’Éole, á Paris.” (June 6). http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2016/06/06/evacuation-des-migrants-qui-occu paient-les-jardins-d-eole-a-paris_4938294_3224.html, accessed October 16, 2017. Low, Setha M. 2009. Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space and Cultural Diversity. Austin: University of Texas Press. Marin, Louis. 1988. Portrait of the King. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mettout, Eric. 2003. “xIxe arrondissment – ça ne marche pas; l’intégration en peril.” L’Express 2703: 45. Mitchell, Don. 1995. “The End of Public Space? People’s Park, Definitions of the Public, and Democracy.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85 (1): 108–33. Mukerji, Chandra. 1994. “The Political Mobilization of Nature in Seventeenth-Century french formal gardens.” Theory and Society 23 (5): 651–77. ——— 1997. Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Newman, Andrew. 2013. “gatekeepers of the Urban Commons? vigilant Citizenship and Neoliberal Space in Multiethnic Paris.” Antipode 45 (4): 947–64. ———. 2015. Landscape of Discontent: Urban Sustainability in Immigrant Paris. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Park, Sun-Young. 2018. Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Sansot, Pierre. 1993. Jardins publics. Paris: Payot. Schneider, William. 1982. An Empire for the Masses: The French Popular Image of Africa, 1870– 1900. Westport, CT: greenwood. Scott, James. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Simon, Catherine. 2007. “Tour de Babel.” Le Monde 22 (May 25). Paris. Stoetzer, Bettina, 2018. “ruderal Ecologies: rethinking Nature, Migration, and the Urban Landscape in Berlin.” Cultural Anthropology 33 (2): 295–323. Susser, Ida, 2017. “Commoning in New York City, Barcelona, and Paris.” Focaal 79 (December): 6–22. Sutcliffe, David. 1996. Paris: An Architectural History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tonnelat, Stéphane. 2006. “Paris’s Parks: Between Public Service and Public Space.” Paper presented at the Society for the Anthropology of North America Conference, Baruch College, New York (April 22).

ChAPTer 4

Zoning as default The Politics of Foreign-sponsored Urban Planning in siem reap, Cambodia Adèle esposito Andujar

Urban Planning and International Assistance “Dealing with the donor is a giuoco delle parti,” a planner serving as an external consultant in a project evaluation for the Angkor archaeological park remarked, evoking the Italian playwright Pirandello to suggest that we must all play our roles in life even when they occasion distress.1 The English translation, The Rules of the Game, introduces new nuance. Similarly, technical assistance in Cambodia has implicit rules; consultants are frequently caught between two cumbersome partners. On the one hand, they must comply with donor agencies’ philosophies and to endorse the attendant official discourses. On the other, they must soften critique to avoid harming the donors’ diplomatic relations with the Cambodian government. Thus, the results of technical consultants’ work reflect not only their best ideas and specialized skills but also various negotiations and adaptations of their knowledge to local sociopolitical conditions (Esposito and fauveaud 2018). This is immediately apparent in urban planning, especially of historic sites. Because of its international celebrity as a heritage site, international aid donors coveted the Angkor region as a source of influence. The Angkor archaeological park is immense, 401km2 wide. It covers the major monumental remains of the ancient Khmer capitals built between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries. Since its listing as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992,

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the park has become the object of many internationally sponsored projects in archaeological conservation and tourism management. Siem reap, a modern provincial town built on a collection of preexisting rural villages, stands at the entrance to the archaeological park. In recent years real estate projects have mushroomed there; the town has become a tourist hub, hosting over two million tourists a year (Esposito 2012, 2017, 2018). The international community regarded urban development near the site as a major threat to conservation and sustainability. International aid groups therefore sponsored nine regulatory urban plans between 1992 and 2011, including two master plans, two land use plans, and three sector projects in the fields of heritage, hydraulics, and transportation infrastructure.2 Drawing on experience in planning and fieldwork in Siem reap and Phnom Penh between 2005 and 2009 and follow-up research in 2013 and 2015, I here examine the evolution of two figures of foreign-sponsored consultants in Cambodian urban planning.3 The first group worked during the 1990s, when the country engaged in national reconstruction following civil war, the Khmer rouge regime (1975–79), and the vietnamese occupation (1979–89). Believing that they enjoy political and social power, these planners have deep local knowledge, operate within a hierarchical administrative structure, and interact with representatives at the highest political levels. The second figure of the planner arrived in Cambodia in the early twentyfirst century. It evinces disenchantment with ambitions of territorial mastery through planning following years of speculative urban growth. Planners of this type act as team members whose common philosophy supersedes individual competencies. They apply international knowledge to a local context they hardly knew beforehand, interacting with local public authorities and leaving to donors the negotiation agreements with higher-level politicians. The passage from the first to the second figure of the planner marks Cambodia’s transition from national reconstruction to a more stable polity. In the process, a neopatrimonial system emerged, featuring “a combination of a modern bureaucracy and personalized patron-client relationships within a traditional system of patrimonialism, with no clear distinction between the public and the private realms” (Un and So 2011:294). National socioeconomic development consolidated the power of these networks, which enjoyed privileged access to economic resources and favored an oligarchic accumulation of wealth (Mikaelien 2008; Springer 2011). Intriguingly, in spite of their many differences, these two figures both resorted to functional zoning to regulate urban development. Zoning is an internationally accredited planning instrument that allocates urban areas to

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specific and self-contained urban functions. A major component of master plans and land use plans, it defines the general rules for future development. Any specific urban regulations, sector plans, and urban projects must supposedly be consistent with general zoning. In Cambodia, the evolution of zoning in this period illuminates the evolution of the foreign-sponsored urban planner’s role. In Siem reap, two comprehensive urban plans reflect this changing role and the concomitant shift of authority from consultants to local counterparts: first, the Plan d’urbanisme de référence (Urban reference Plan, PUr) of the french architectural studio ArTE-Charpentier,4 sponsored by the french Development Agency (AfD); second, the master plan designed by two Japanese engineering firms for the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA 2006). Land use plans and sector plans are consistent with them in measures and approach. According to UNESCO deputy director general for culture Henri Lopes, france’s and Japan’s substantial contributions to UNESCO funds legitimated their prominent role at Angkor (UNESCO 1993, quoted by Peycam 2016). The two countries have dominated the ICC-Angkor (International Coordinating Committee for the Safeguarding and Development of the Historic Site of Angkor) since its establishment, playing a preeminent role in planning for the Angkor region. The diplomatic involvement of france drew on its colonial connection with Cambodia (UNESCO 1993, quoted by Peycam 2016), while the Angkor region figures in Japan’s strategic expansion of influence in Southeast Asia through aid, private investments, and the international circulation of experts.5 reframed within the politics of bilateral assistance, this evolution reflects the changing postcolonial relationships among international donors, foreign consultants, and local Cambodian counterparts. Japan’s emergence as a major diplomatic actor within urban planning similarly is symptomatic of the rise of East-Asian donors in Southeast Asia that contribute to the construction dissemination of new patterns of cultural and professional influence (reilly 2012; Stallings and Kim 2016).

Illusions of Territorial Mastery Cambodia is among Asia’s most aid-dependent countries (Sato et al. 2011). following the Paris Peace Agreements (1991), Cambodia’s political and economic reconstruction relied heavily on international assistance, with almost

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US$13 billion in official development assistance (ODA) between 1991 and 2015, averaging $518 million annually and reaching a maximum of $808 million in 2013.6 High-level international assistance, however, does not necessarily contribute to an intense knowledge transfer. foreign-sponsored consultants are rarely able to inculcate their philosophies and models. Instead, they must follow the strategic route established by Cambodian counterparts (Bayart 2004). Programs sponsored by international assistance are frequently dismissed when they allegedly interfere in national politics, especially in delicate questions of land ownership. Pro-poor measures have been removed from foreign-sponsored projects, for instance, especially when the government allows developers to carry them out (rabé 2009; fauveaud 2015; Esposito 2018). After the departure of international consultants, project scope is sometimes transmogrified to fit the developers’ agenda. Urban planning is an important target for international technical assistance in Cambodia. Urbanization there remains slow (approximately 20 percent) despite a significant annual urban population increase of 4.4 percent. Between 2000 and 2010, the urban population increased from 920,000 to 1.4 million. Urban growth is mainly concentrated in two cities: Phnom Penh, the national capital, with a 2015 population of nearly 2,000,000 in 2015, and Siem reap, whose population was estimated at approximately 230,000 inhabitants in 2010. Consultants in urban development have thus faced a unique situation. Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer rouge killed most Cambodian intellectuals— among them, professionals like urban planners. Eric Huybrechts, who arrived in Phnom Penh at the beginning of the twenty-first century to design a frenchsponsored master plan,7 noted that there was only one Cambodian urban planner then working at the municipality.8 In this situation, foreign urban planners imagined themselves as dei ex machina, who would train local counterparts. Implementation in postconflict Cambodia was no easy task. It often depended on strong links to neopatrimonial networks. Success often relied on leaders—local politicians or consultants—who enjoyed hierarchical relationships with colleagues and collaborators within the implementing authorities. The departure of foreign-sponsored consultants and the political decline of influential individuals sometimes still means that the projects for which they were responsible will not be carried out.9 Planning implementation in Siem reap is also peculiar because the UNESCO listing of Angkor led to the creation of special planning authorities, in

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which international actors are often involved in making key decisions. One year after Angkor was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992, the ICC-Angkor was created in Cambodia by the international heritage community headed by UNESCO. It has been responsible for examining, discussing, and approving foreign-sponsored projects for the region. Donors, consulting teams, and local counterparts now meet biannually in this committee to shape global and trans-sector strategies for heritage conservation, urban development, and territorial management (Peycam 2016). The Authority for Protection and Management of Angkor and the region of Siem reap (APSArA) was similarly created at UNESCO’s behest (1995). Cambodian law also places responsibility for urban development and construction on the established authorities—the national and provincial delegations of the Ministry of Land Management, Urban Planning, and Construction; provincial offices; and district and municipality administrations. Demands for urban plans and building permits for Siem reap therefore typically follow one of two different circuits: they may be approved and developed by national and local authorities or by APSArA. Donors similarly create agreements with APSArA or established Cambodian authorities. This double circuit is symptomatic of the ambiguous status of Siem reap—as a provincial town and as a special place in the World Heritage universe—in national and local political imaginations. functional zoning for the whole Angkor region was among the first programs initiated by ICC-Angkor and implemented by APSArA. UNESCO, together with the Swedish International Development Agency and the United Nations Development Program, cosponsored and expanded multidisciplinary management to cover the whole province (approximately 10,000 km2) (gaulis 2007). Twenty-five foreign and national experts produced a Zoning and Environmental Management Plan (ZEMP 1993, 1994). functional zoning for Siem reap covered not only the town but a much broader territory including the archaeological park of Angkor. Zoning was first introduced in the West as an attempt to order urban agglomerations, which had experienced deep changes during the Industrial revolution. It introduced a “scientific pattern of spatial organization” and an “a-priori framework for urban behavior” (Choay 1969, 98), and invoked principles of hygiene and social progress. It became “one of the hallmarks of modern planning” (rabinow 1989, 226) because it expressed “urban policy into a single, easily interpreted document” (Soderstrom 1996). Widely implemented in colonial contexts, zoning propelled a set of “objectivized norms”

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that contributed to the rise of a worldwide “class of experts” able to master them (Sundaram 2010, 47). Consensus on its validity drew on the concern to develop “liveable” and “modern” cities. In Cambodia, it was first introduced in the colonial period. Plans for Phnom Penh designed by Daniel fabré (1890s) and Ernest Hébrard (1920s) legislated “new patterns of space in response to what they perceived to be the disorder of the capital and its social structure. . . . Ethnic districts, first created in the 1890s, were codified in the 1920s” (Nam 2011, 57). In Siem reap, french colonialists created two separate districts for commercial and administrative purposes, respectively, during the 1920s. These were eventually considered the town’s historic core. In postcolonial times, Siem reap remained small; the Khmer rouge emptied it of its inhabitants, forcing them to live and work in the countryside. Allowed to return at the end of the 1980s, some 30,000 people took shelter there. Zoning organized the archaeological park and the town into a coherent system. The region was divided into five zones: the monumental site (zone 1), the archaeological reserve (zone 2), cultural landscapes (zone 3), places of archaeological or historic interest (zone 4), and a zone for socioeconomic development (zone 5). Zoning articulated two entangled strategies: heritage conservation and tourism-driven urban and territorial development. Cambodian architect vann Molyvann (1926–2017) was among its most influential designers. Molyvann had become the head of the Public Works Department at the time of Norodom Sihanouk.10 He had designed the master plan for Phnom Penh and for the port town Sihanoukville, as well as several landmark buildings. Having recently returned to Cambodia from Switzerland in 1991, he aspired to be the visionary pioneer of postwar urban development. Building on his international consulting experience with various UN agencies, he saw such international planning tools as zoning as easily transposable. He proposed to “bound zones” to develop a “policy for conservation and improvement of the Angkor/Siem reap landscapes, to implement this policy in an efficient and pragmatic way, and to establish the best land use ever” (Molyvann 2003).11 In the early 1990s, Molyvann built up a close partnership with ArTECharpentier, a french urban consultancy whose founder he had known since early postcolonial times. Sponsored by the AfD, ArTE received support from UNESCO and the king of Cambodia to design an Urban reference Plan (PUr) for Siem reap town. Molyvann, while facilitating the french consultants’ work, saw himself as one of its main architects. A planner

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involved in the design of the PUr told me that Molyvann “considered this plan as his own.” Indeed, Molyvann (2008) himself described the plan as reflecting his own ideas. The PUr was developed in the framework of an agreement for “cultural, scientific, and technical cooperation” signed by the AfD and the Cambodian government in 1994 (decree no. 95–816, June 1995). This agreement, accompanied by a funding program, recalled the two countries’ “historical bonds of friendship,” renewing ties with the scholarly tradition of the french School of the far East (Ecole française d’Extrême Orient) that had made Angkor its main site of archaeological investigation since 1907. The agreement fostered not only archaeological restoration and heritage management but also infrastructural construction and urban and territorial planning. Molyvann’s alliance with french planners made him a cultural broker mediating renewed ties in a postcolonial context marked by the internationalization of Angkor as a heritage and tourism site. Thanks to his mastery of diverse cultural systems and sources of knowledge as well as his close relationship with the Cambodian political elite, he was appointed as the president of the Council of Ministries and made responsible for land management and urban planning at the national level. He also became APSArA’s president and director-general. This impressive rise bore witness to his in postconflict political influence and to the personal charisma that made it possible. According to Molyvann (2002), functional zoning could aid in designing Siem reap as a “contemporary city.” Zoning thus structured the PUr for several reasons. first, zoning regulated the distribution and organization of urban and rural activities. Second, it dictated how new buildings and developments might occur. Third, it facilitated the coexistence of heritage conservation and modern developments within a coherent territorial system. Siem reap was organized into four large zones whose boundaries were marked by the cross shape formed by two major axes: National road 6 and Siem reap river. Designated areas were earmarked for agriculture, housing, and tourism. A forest reserve separated the town from its archaeological park, and perimeters for the conservation of cultural landscapes were established along ancient roads and watercourses. The planners who designed the PUr imagined urban zoning as an instrument of authority. The team of architects and urban planners based at the ArTE-Charpentier architectural studio included Cambodian refugees from the Khmer rouge regime who had been hired by Charpentier. Pierre Clément, the team leader, held a PhD in ethnology with a specialization in

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Southeast Asia. viewing Siem reap as malleable territory, they aimed to preserve existing built forms while ambitiously dictating the direction of future transformations; to assemble the entire city into a “larger conceptual unit” (Sundaram 2010); and to regulate urban development for the next twenty years. These “rational” zoning principles were based on seemingly unassailable scientific evidence; geological surveys on land fecundity, drainage systems, and vegetative cover had preceded planning with the goal of allocating the most fertile land to agriculture and protecting forest areas. With such science behind zoning, its measures could only be regarded as legitimate and normative distributions of functions and resources. Cambodian authorities endorsed the top-down approach to planning. Tepp vattho, a french-educated architect and former director of APSArA’s urban department,12 represented local counterparts for the PUr. At the beginning of the 1990s, public officers were undertrained, and the local population was mostly uneducated. She saw these conditions as inimical to collaboration between foreign-sponsored planners and locals. Planners were therefore obliged to prepare plans on their own and to deliver them to national authorities for top-down implementation. The way vattho, a foreign-trained intellectual, described the PUr to me revealed her positive view of the renewal of french influence: it would facilitate the import of international, professional knowledge for national reconstruction.13 She also described Molyvann with the respect due to pioneers: “He was the first one to use the word urbanism in Cambodia after massive killings of the Cambodian intelligentsia by the Khmer rouge,” she told me in 2008. The implementation of zoning nevertheless depended heavily on local urban authorities supposedly charged with enforcing strict controls on land use. Molyvann’s ascendency in the early 1990s and his close acquaintance with then prime minister Prince ranariddh led him to take political support for urban plan’s implementation for granted.14 During the reconstruction period (1991–1998), however, the balance of power was extremely volatile. In 1999 the bipartite government was dismissed, and the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) became the sole ruling party. This diminished Molyvann’s authority. In 2002 a decree from the prime minister’s office forced him out of APSArA (Kimsong and reed 2001). After his departure, the PUr was never officially implemented, nor was it explicitly abandoned. The AfD funded further planning, and the Paris-based groupe 8 detailed a series of urban regulations for each of the PUr’s zones (1999). None was officially approved under Cambodian legal procedure.15 Even so, each time I went to the APSArA’s

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urban department during my fieldwork between 2005 and 2008, I saw the plan clearly displayed on their office wall. The implementation of sector or small-size projects retrieved from the PUr became possible only during the 2000s. APSArA representatives explained that national authorities could more easily accept such projects because they required only limited funding and land. for instance, the idea of preserving the cultural landscape along National road 6 reemerged in a project for linear tree plantings along this axis. The plantings reproduced the urban vegetation lost to large-scale hotel construction. Again, tourist signage along the river that also was to be protected as a cultural landscape provided information about the area’s cultural heritage but did not imply any reshaping of public space or land occupation. Signage did not require major power, and, far from competing with private interests, served them by attracting more tourists. As a necessary prerequisite for zoning implementation, local institutions must have some control over land. first-figure planners assumed that Cambodian institutions would enforce such control. Events belied their hopes: Cambodian institutions endorsed developers’ interests rather than supposed historical connections between france and Cambodia. The scope of zoning consequently underwent drastic change under the second-figure planners’ new master plan.

The Ancillaries of Urban Planning first-figure planners faced institutional fragmentation and underground negotiations that accommodated developers’ real estate speculation. Planning was perceived as merely a constraint on developers’ profits. But planners scaled down their ambitions during the early twenty-first century. They reimagined themselves as ancillary to urban development who, while accepting controversial local politics, nevertheless tried to instill international principles and models. The PUr had been unable to accommodate collective aspirations for rentable real estate development shared by developers and Cambodian political elites with stakes in the sector. The neopatrimonial elites endorsed these aspirations; they saw the construction sector as a major engine for speculative growth, and its regulation as limiting the exponential growth they desired. Local and national authorities gave building permits that violated zoning rules.16

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Privately led construction projects deeply transformed Siem reap’s urban landscape in the space of only a dozen years. from 1992 to 2008, approximately three hundred hotels and guesthouses, three golf courses, various shopping malls, several massive shopping complexes, and a theme park appeared. regular Cambodian authorities treated Siem reap as an ordinary space rather than as the gateway to Angkor. As AfD and french-sponsored planners saw the government and APSArA as their only local counterparts, they failed to acknowledge the effects of the bipartite bureaucratic organization. foreign-sponsored urban planners adapted their role to this new context. Between 2004 and 2006, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) sponsored the “Study on Integrated Master Plan for Sustainable Development of Siem reap/Angkor.” Its authors comprised staff from two Japanese engineering firms specializing in technical assistance to developing countries, Nippon Koei and Kokusai Kogyo. Both were founded in the aftermath of World War II, when Japan was a recipient of humanitarian aid and loans. According to official accounts, Japan overcame the difficulties of postwar national reconstruction only because its development priorities, autonomously defined at the national level, remained independent of donors’ and lenders’ programmatic orientations (Nishigaki and Shimomura 1996). Official Japanese discourse thus emphasizes the importance of “self-help efforts” (Watanabe 2006) and does not try to interfere in development strategies established by recipient countries. Japan therefore mainly provides assistance in technical fields such as infrastructure building (Soderberg 1996). Cambodians respond to such infrastructural projects more positively than to general strategic development projects (Sato et al. 2011). Infrastructure improves the country’s connectivity and serves as a major asset for economic development. In urban environments, infrastructure contributes to the growth of real estate value. They thus serve the interests of developers who, for their part, have little respect for urban regulations. In matters of zoning, the Japanese team’s noninterventionist approach acknowledges the functional separation resulting from fifteen years of privately led development and enables infrastructural development. Thus, several large-scale hotels were built along National road 6 despite its former designation as cultural landscape. JICA zoning identified this road as a major axis of tourist development where further infrastructural development should be encouraged. JICA planners assumed that increasing functional separation would introduce order into what struck them as anarchic development; a boundary drawn around the city established the maximum extension of permissible urban expansion until 2020, and planners argued that Siem

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reap should grow in compact form to make development environmentally sustainable.17 Japanese planners played the humble role of assistants to their Cambodian counterparts, providing technical tools for achieving rapid, tourism-related economic development. By acting thus, they could hope that some of their proposed measures might eventually be realized. In particular, their zoning model could easily be implemented because it continued and strengthened existing tendencies. Like the french, Japanese planners mainly saw zoning as a technical device for regulating urban growth. Their notion of the technical, however, diverged from that of their predecessors. The PUr had adopted measures conceived on the basis of scientific investigations. The JICA master plan instead saw technical planning through zoning as the pragmatic use of boundaries to classify existing built space while simultaneously restraining unsustainable urban expansion. The JICA planners’ philosophy meshed well with the attitude of their Cambodian counterparts. They found common ground in JICA’s disengagement from the elaboration of programmatic socioeconomic strategies and the Cambodian actors’ diffidence toward foreign interference in land management. After completion of the master plan study, JICA regularly appointed consultants working with provincial authorities and APSArA to overcome institutional fragmentation. These consultants were not specialists in Cambodian affairs but had instead spent several years in Cambodia with the aim of persuading locals to accept their methods and knowledge. Some of these consultants were members of JICA’s regular staff; others were senior volunteers. This organization reflected Japan’s aid system, which emphasizes the “person-to-person transfer of skills, technologies, and attitudes” (King and Mcgrath 2004). Even though the JICA master plan was never legally approved, Japanese planners toured Siem reap’s provincial delegations of national Cambodian ministries in hopes of convincing civic officials. This strategy proved at least partially successful; the government had begun to implement almost half of the sector projects by 2010. JICA strategy operated locally through regular communication between Japanese and Cambodian planners. Its realization was, then, less susceptible to the volatility of individualized power, but instead emerged from the regular, meticulous work of urban knowledge transfer. In short, the collaborative relationship had changed drastically since the 1990s. french planners knew the local context well but spent only minimal time in situ because they delivered their plan directly into the hands of local

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counterparts who were supposed to implement it; Japanese planners knew little about Siem reap-Angkor other than what they could learn from the “country reports” regularly published by JICA but were given greater authority over implementation. The functional zoning that the german Development Service designed for the Asia Urbs Program’s land-use plan for the Siem reap District (2007) produced very similar results to those presented in the JICA plan. The german planners’ objective was to respond to the basic needs of the urban population. In so doing, they introduced the ideas and methods of participatory planning.18 Through public consultation, they identified the main problems and weaknesses of the area according to current urban dwellers and proposed pragmatic solutions to improve the efficiency of the urban fabric. Even so, the fact that the german planners endorsed JICA’s recommendations for zoning is revealing: the use of zoning as a planning instrument is not only due to the convergence of the Japanese donor’s and Cambodian counterparts’ programmatic strategies but also reflects a broader evolution of the representations of Siem reap and its future development in the eyes of foreign-sponsored consultants.

Conclusion One image of planners sees them as a source of imagination and genius, offering purveyors of an ideal pattern of territorial development. The second sees planners as subordinate actors whose influence requires compliance with local development requirements. In Cambodia, the evolution of the use of zoning in urban plans reflects how these changes have shaped specific patterns of interaction among planners, donors, and local counterparts. Zoning, once treated as a universal technical tool, became subject to political implications that observers have hitherto underestimated. The implementation of zoning depends on the ability to enforce regulations through power over land, rendering political support essential to its success. In the period under discussion, however, zoning could only serve as a tool of spatial classification. The lack of institutional support resulted in the disintegration of master planning into multiple small projects. Under such conditions, planners could not expect to produce comprehensive urban visions for the future. They could only take a gradualist approach to address both institutional fragmentation and the fragmentation of the urban fabric that multiple privately led projects had produced.

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Cambodian institutions were not receptive to the french planners’ Urban reference Plan and the planning ideas it represented because these diverged from Cambodian elite notions of development fueled by the thirst for growth and wealth. The french plan’s failure shows that Cambodian actors do not behave as passive recipients of foreign aid. They accept aid positively only when it suits their economic priorities. Although this selective attitude suggests a certain emancipation from colonial power, Cambodians are receptive to other forms of influence: JICA’s technocratic approach, in which proposals aim at efficient urban development from the viewpoint of resource management, but also neoliberal forces that favor oligarchic wealth accumulation. In this context of local skepticism, planners lost power to those whose approaches better suited this cultural and political context. At the same time, their ideas enjoyed a more positive reception than had their predecessors. Japanese planners imported standardized urban tools that produced well measured but decontextualized, environmentally sustainable models of urban development, and german planners who introduced participatory models used them, not to retrench planning authority, but to confirm the ideological authority of the Japanese plan. Today, Cambodian planners seek efficient instruments of development rather than concealed meanings and origins. Their view of urban development rarely considers heritage questions. Significantly, the collection of landmark modern buildings left by Molyvann in Phnom Penh faces decay and destruction. His passing on September 28, 2017, silenced a rare visionary conception of the development of Cambodian cities rooted in their ancient past. foreign planners, Asian and European alike, presently act as the tacticians of urban development. They seek to converge their philosophies and expectations with those of their local Cambodian counterparts. Disengaging themselves as much as possible from national political controversies, they accept fragmentation as the unavoidable condition of their work.

Notes 1. Personal communication, March 2015. The informant is an Italian architect with more than twenty-five years of experience in heritage conservation. 2. Namely, ros and Hetreau-Pottier (1993); ArTE-BCEOM (1995); groupe 8 (1999); Tractebel (1997); APSArA-UNESCO (2002); ICEA (2005); JICA (2006); DED (2007); groupe 8 (2011). 3. I was based at the research department IPrAUS, whose former director, Pierre Clément, was a researcher and planner involved in foreign consultancy for Siem reap during the 1990s.

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I enjoyed privileged access to planning archives, local authorities, and the professional cultural environment. Even so, locals often considered me more planner than researcher, and enmities among Cambodian authorities, donors, foreign experts, and consultants raised doubts about my status as a researcher based at the french Institute. I also conducted 107 semistructured interviews with international experts, public officials, lawyers, representatives of professional associations, developers and investors, architects and builders, NgO managers, owners and managers of tourist facilities, and travel agents. Extensive analysis of planning documents, Cambodian law, socioeconomic programs, and experts’ reports helped me to reflect on the evolution of the planner and planning ideas for Siem reap. 4. The Urban reference Plan (PUr) is equivalent to a master plan. ArTE-Charpentier benefitted from the assistance of the engineering firm BCEOM (Bureau Central d’Etudes pour les Equipements d’Outre-Mer) in the process of planning design. 5. france and Japan took action through their development agencies, respectively the AfD and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA), which attribute specific projects to national firms through public tender. 6. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.ODA.ALLD.CD?end=2015&locations=KH& start=1991&view=chart, accessed May 11, 2017. 7. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Institute of Development and Urbanism of the region Ile de france provided technical assistance to Phnom Penh Municipality for designing a master plan (rgC and french Embassy in Cambodia 2007). 8. Oral presentation by Eric Huybrechts; seminar organized by the french geographical Society (January 2014). Huybrechts is in charge of international affairs at the Paris/Ile-de-france regional Planning Agency and has extensive urban and regional planning experience in many countries. 9. Personal communications with consultants and public officers conducted between 2008 and 2015. 10. King Norodom Sihanouk led Cambodia to independence (1953), and abdicated in favor of his father to found and lead a political movement, the Sangkum reastr Nyium, which led the country until he was overthrown by the military in 1970. 11. I met vann Molyvann when, at the age of about eighty years old, he embarked on PhD studies at the research department IPrAUS. I listened to an oral presentation by him on his doctoral work on Southeast Asian cities (2008). Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to interview him. 12. Its full name is “Department of Development of Urban Heritage of Siem reap.” 13. As the director of the main local counterpart of the IPrAUS-based research group, Tepp vattho regularly met with groups of architecture students from the Architecture School of ParisBelleville. I attended these meetings, first as a master’s student and later as a teaching assistant. I also interviewed her, and she offered me a guided tour to the several hotels and tourism facilities that she personally owned in Siem reap and Angkor. 14. following the 1993 elections, Cambodia established a bicephalous government headed by Prince ranariddh and Hun Sen. After the 1997 coup, Prince ranariddh was obliged to go into exile. Hun Sen became sole prime minister after the 1998 general elections. 15. According to the 1994 Law on Land Management, Urbanization and Construction, provinces and municipalities design plans for the use of lands and buildings. These plans must first be approved by the subcommittees for land management, urbanization, and construction. Then they must also be approved by the corresponding national committees (art. 9).

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16. Observations are based on extensive analysis of building permits demands submitted to Siem reap’s provincial authorities and interviews with representatives of the cadastral office (2009). 17. Observations are based on the analysis of planning discourses of JICA’s three-volume master plan. 18. Brigit Schindhelm, planner at the german Development Agency (DED) and director of the Asia Urbs project for Siem reap, explained the planning philosophy during a conference at the french School of the far East (December 4, 2007).

Works Cited APSArA-UNESCO. 2002. “Conservation et développement de la région de Siem reap Angkor.” Unpublished report. ArTE-BCEOM. 1995. “Plan d’urbanisme de référence et projets prioritaires. rapport définitif.” Unpublished document. Bayart, Jean-françois. 2004. “Libéralisation économique et violence politique au Cambodge. Les rapports du fASOPO.” http://spire.sciencespo.fr/hdl:/2441/f5vtl5h9a73d5ls97563l15a0, accessed July 3, 2015. Choay, françoise. 1969. The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century. New York: george Braziller. DED and District Master Plan Team. 2007. “Technical report on the final Land-Use Plan for Siem reap District.” Unpublished report. Esposito, Adele. 2012. “Siem reap: processus et enjeux de la fabrication d’une ville touristique.” Péninsule 64 (1): 155–78. ———. 2017. “Siem reap-Angkor. Un héritage menacé à la périphérie du grand site.” In Transitions urbaines en Asie du Sud-Est. De la métropolisation émergente et de ses formes derives, ed. Karine Peyronnie, Charles goldblum, and Bonleuam Sisoulath, 259–82. Paris-Bangkok: IrD-IrASEC Editions. ———. 2018. Urban Development in the Margins of a World Heritage Site: In the Shadows of Angkor. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Esposito, Adele, and gabriel fauveaud. 2018. “The Atomization of Heritage Politics in Postcolonial Cities: The Case of Phnom Penh (Cambodia).” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 37 (4): 670–688. DOI: 10.1177/2399654418790766. fauveaud, gabriel. 2015. La production des espaces urbains à Phnom Penh. Pour une géographie sociale de l’immobilier. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. gaulis, Inès. 2007. “Les leçons d’Angkor: Dix ans de coopération internationale dans la région de Siem reap-Angkor.” Unpublished report. groupe 8. 1999. “Assistance pour la préparation de documents d’urbanisme réglementaires.” Unpublished document. groupe 9. 2011. “Conservation et développement dans la région de Siem reap-Angkor.” Unpublished report. ICEA. 2005. “Etude de faisabilité d’un projet de développement urbain à Siem reap Angkor. rapport de phase 2. version définitive.” Unpublished report. JICA. 2006. “The Study on Integrated Master Plan for Sustainable Development of Siem reap/ Angkor Town in the Kingdom of Cambodia.” Unpublished document.

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Kimsong, Kay, and Matt reed. 2001. “Construction Permits Cited in APSArA firing.” Cambodia Daily (June 9). King, Kenneth, and Simon Mcgrath. 2004. Knowledge for Development? Comparing British, Japanese, Swedish, and World Bank Aid. New York: Zed. Mikaelian, grégory. 2008. “Pour une relecture du jeu politique cambodgien: Le cas du Cambodge de la reconstruction.” In Cambodge contemporain, ed. Alain forest, 141–89. Paris: Les Indes savantes. Molyvann, vann. 2002. “Management of the Angkor Site: National Emblem and World Heritage Site.” Museum International 213–14 (54): 110–16. ———. 2003. Cités khmères modernes. Phnom Penh: reyum Institute. ———. 2008. “Cités du Sud-est asiatique: le passé & le present.” PhD diss., University of Paris 8. Nam, Sylvia. 2011. “Phnom Penh: from the Politics of ruin to the Possibilities of return.” TDSR 23 (1): 55–68. E-publication: http://iaste.berkeley.edu/iaste/wp-content/uploads/2012/07 /23.1-fall-11-Nam.pdf, accessed September 25, 2016. Nishigaki, Akira, and Yasutami Shimomura. 1996. The Economics of Development Assistance: Japan’s ODA in a Symbiotic World. Tokyo: LTCB International Library foundation. Peycam, Philippe. 2016. “The International Coordinating Committee for Angkor: A World Heritage Site as an Arena of Competition, Connivance and State(s) Legitimation.” Sojourn, Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 31 (3): 743–85. rabé, Paul. 2009. “from ‘Squatters’ to Citizens? Slum Dwellers, Developers, Land Sharing and Power in Phnom Penh.” PhD diss., University of Southern California. http://digitallibrary .usc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15799coll127/id/287313, accessed August 20, 2017. rabinow, Paul. 1989. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. reilly, James. 2012. “A Norm-Taker or a Norm-Maker? Chinese Aid in Southeast Asia.” Journal of Contemporary China 21 (73): 71–91. rgC and french Embassy in Cambodia. 2007. Livre blanc du développement et de l’aménagement de Phnom Penh. Diagnostic économique, social et environnemental. Tendances, prospective et orientations. Avant-project de schéma directeur d’urbanisme de Phnom Penh 2020. Rapport final. https://www.iau-idf.fr/fileadmin/NewEtudes/Etude_142/Livre_blanc _du_developpement_et_de_l_amenagement_de_Phnom_Penh_avec_signets.pdf, accessed August 31, 2019. ros, Borath, and Aline Hétreau-Pottier. 1993. “UNESCO Project. Zoning and Environmental Management Plan for the Angkor Area (ZEMP). Urban Development.” Unpublished report. Sato, Jin, Hiroaki Shiga, Takaaki Kobayashi, and Hisahiro Kondoh. 2011. “ ‘Emerging Donors’ from a recipient Perspective: An Institutional Analysis of foreign Aid in Cambodia.” World Development 39 (12): 2091–104. Soderberg, Marie, ed. 1996. The Business of Japanese Foreign Aid: Five Case Studies from Asia. London/New York: routledge. Soderstrom, Ola. 1996. “Paper Cities: visual Thinking in Urban Planning.” Ecumene 3(3): 249–81. Springer, Simon. 2011. “Articulated Neoliberalism: The Specificity of Patronage, Kleptocracy, and violence in Cambodia’s Neoliberalization.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 43: 2554–70. Stallings, Barbara, and Eun Mee Kim. 2016. “Japan, Korea, and China: Styles of ODA in East Asia.” In Japan’s Development Assistance. Foreign Aid and the Post-2015 Agenda, ed. Hiroshi Kato, John Page, and Yasutami Shimomura, 120–34. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Sundaram, ravi. 2010. Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism. New York: routledge. Tractebel. 1997. “Plan directeur des transports de la province de Siem reap, rapport final.” European Commission. Un, Kheang, and Sokbunthoeun So. 2011. “Land rights in Cambodia: How Neopatrimonial Politics restricts Land Policy reforms.” Pacific Affairs 84 (2): 289–308. Watanabe, Toshio. 2006. “How Should Japanese ODA Be viewed? The Importance of Support for Self-Help Efforts.” Asia-Pacific Review 13 (2): 17–26. ZEMP Team. 1993. “Zoning and Environmental Management Plan for Angkor.” Discussion Draft. ———. 1994. “Synthesis report on the Zoning and Environmental Management of Angkor within the Siem reap region.” Unpublished report.

ChAPTer 5

An Anatomy of Failure Planning After the Fact in Contemporary Bogotá, Colombia Federico Pérez

A contentious planning process unfolded intermittently between 2008 and 2011 in Bogotá, Colombia: the revision of the city’s Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial or POT (Territorial Ordering Plan). Established by Colombia’s 1997 Urban reform Law, the POT’s goal was “to guide and manage the physical development of territory and use of land” in cities across the country (Law 388, art. 9). Although many considered this law a victory of urban regulation and redistribution, its implementation has been lethargic and deeply conflicted. Bogotá’s city administration created the city’s first POT in 2000, a different cohort of planners substantially modified it in 2003, and yet another group of experts revised it again in the version that appeared as the 2008–11 project.1 given the many modifications made within a short time and the significant structural instabilities that these constant changes engendered, urban planners increasingly began to question the value of their practice. A veteran bureaucrat once confessed to me in a moment of “professional intimacy” (Herzfeld this volume), “Sometimes it seems that what we do here in the planning department is useless.” Looking down at worn-out plans from the 1970s, he added, “We have always been going in one direction, while the city goes in another!” Many other planners similarly suggested that the idea of a collective and long-term urban vision had succumbed to fractured socialities and transient political interests (see Herzfeld 2009, 88; Mack this volume).

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In 2010, the directors of Bogotá’s departments of finance and planning characterized the latest POT revision as an attempt to make the plan more pragmatic (cf. Healey 2009). The key, the two Ivy League–educated economists explained, was recognizing that the “devil is in the details.” They both emphasized that, despite the progressive current juridical and planning rhetoric, nothing would be accomplished if the everyday uses of planning instruments did not accord with the spirit of the law. for them, moving from legal discourse to urban reality required a deeper understanding of on-the-ground planning practice. In this light, the latest revision of Bogotá’s POT opens a space for the analysis of two crucial themes. first, it calls attention to the limits of progressive juridical reform. As Teresa Caldeira and James Holston note in their analysis of “democratic planning” in São Paulo, “instruments of planning and governmental regulation do not necessarily produce the results their formulators intended” (2005, 411; see also fernandes and Maldonado 2009). Political context and material realities shape the ways in which planning tools are interpreted, mobilized, and implemented. Second, and even more important, the POT revision sheds light on planners’ new efforts to understand, anticipate, and manage such political realities as they accept their own impotence in the context of more traditional forms of professional practice. Planners working on the POT revision deployed multiple strategies to “close” spaces of “discretionary interpretation” and to create conditions for more predictable outcomes. In some cases, planners attempted to resolve power struggles and procedural uncertainties by rewriting the plan. The revision thus addressed urban politics through legal maneuvers (the master plan itself was a decree) and new technical instruments. This resonates with what Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff have called the “judicialization of politics” (2006): the ways in which political life is becoming increasingly “saturated with a culture of legality” and “migrating to the courts” (2006, 26) and, as the POT case shows, to boardrooms and experts’ desks. The revision of the Plan recast political questions as technical issues (see ferguson 1994; Mitchell 2002; Li 2007). In other instances, planning experts relied directly on political work such as alliance building within policy circles and collaborations with academia, media, and citizen organizations. These engagements revealed planners’ critical and reflexive awareness of the limits and contradictions of juridico-technical intervention. for most of them, malfunctions and unintended consequences were unavoidable, and they spent significant time

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devising strategies to anticipate and manage such effects. rather than focusing entirely on technical prescriptions, planners were involved in the art of approximation: striving to bring their plans closer to reality, even if only tentatively and gradually.2 In the end, it was precisely the tension between the technical and the political that brought the revision to a halt during the 2011 mayoral race. This failure, as well as those the revision was supposed to amend, reflected neither bureaucratic dysfunction nor depoliticizing modes of expertise alone (Herzfeld 1992, 70). Breakdown was not external to planning but integral to its technopolitical configurations and practices. An ethnographic examination of the POT’s demise reveals planners’ pragmatic and self-critical orientations as they engage with planning failures through recalibrations and adjustments. At the same time, and despite these reflexive attunements, it calls attention to planners’ recalcitrant modernist sensibilities and their enduring faith in the promise of technical fixes.

Grupo POT: Between Thinking and Doing The grupo POT primarily comprised consultants hired in 2008 specifically for the revision of the plan and a few public servants temporarily assigned to back their efforts. The split between the itinerant consultants and permanent employees was a source of contention, both in the production of planning and in its future implementation. Public officials at the planning department often seemed alienated and to some extent belittled by the presence of external consultants. Meanwhile, outside contract workers had become a vital resource for the planning department, given the overwhelming number of procedures and tasks employees had to confront on a daily basis. These organizational issues reveal fundamental tensions between planning and implementing (planear y tramitar) in at least two respects: on one hand, the excess of bureaucratic procedures in Colombia’s “hyper-legalistic” environment (gutierrez 2001) can entail the abolition of institutional spaces for strategic planning and research; on the other, the discontinuous outsourcing of planning endeavors can generate a widening gap between governmental thinking and doing. In both cases, the disconnect between theory and practice inevitably limits the political and ethical consequences of city planning (fainstein 2010). Navigating and bridging these spaces was one of the main challenges of the grupo POT.

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Diego, an architect in his late thirties who had been working in the grupo POT for a couple of years, described the team’s unique position as “neither totally inside the institution nor really outside of it.” As I worked alongside the grupo POT for several months, I found this “bureaucratic liminality” to be a particularly useful entry point to the inner workings of Bogotá’s planning department and came to rely on planners’ critical observations of daily practices—on their “para-ethnographic insights” (Holmes and Marcus 2005, 237). According to victor Turner, “if liminality is regarded as a time and place of withdrawal from normal modes of social action, it can be seen as potentially a period of scrutinization of the central values and axioms of the culture in which it occurs” (1969, 167). The grupo POT was exemplary of a form of institutional liminality in which consultants uncovered some of the fundamental dynamics operating at the core of the city’s planning bureaucracy. “[La Secretaría de] Planeación,” Diego explained, “can be easily eaten up by the ‘day-to-day’: the trámite, the response to the official letter, the response to the comptroller, the response to the functionary. . . . You see people working up there [on the upper floors of the governmental building] and they’re full of files in many cases.” Diego was not exaggerating. In my several visits to the planning department, I saw how bureaucrats were usually immersed in a tumultuous flow of people, meetings, phone calls, petitions, and documents. Mid- and low-level functionaries spent most of their time in their cubicles carrying out tedious procedures and answering official letters (haciendo oficios). visitors wandered through the department’s hallways looking over the low panel divisions for sympathetic bureaucrats or receptionists behind computer screens and stacks of folios and folders. Opposite the cubicles were the offices of directors and undersecretaries. With floor-to-ceiling walls and doors and window blinds (usually drawn), these high-level officials could more easily avoid the peering eyes of disoriented citizens. When not in their offices, functionaries would ceremoniously file into meeting rooms to engage in extended discussions about bureaucratic conflicts and strategies to overcome procedural gridlocks. As a young planner with a background in private consultancy joked, this reflected the bureaucratic disease of “meetingitis” (reunionitis): “There are meetings for everything, and 80 percent or 90 percent of them never lead to anything.” A morass of redundant procedures and activities ruled everyday life in the planning department, leaving few spaces for critical reflection, comprehensive views, or, ultimately, for planning itself. At a relative distance from the planning department and its spaces of tramitología (“procedurology”) was the grupo POT. The group had been

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figure 5.1. The Secretaría de Planeación and the citizen service center building where the grupo POT’s office was located. Photograph by federico Pérez.

temporarily assigned a vacant office on the mezzanine of a lower building in the governmental complex. The semideserted cubicles and windowless workstations were located above a busy atrium dedicated to citizen services, which was in turn connected by a glass and concrete tunnel to the higher office building of the planning department. Diego and his colleagues would often joke about their improvised and isolated office space, where Internet and phone connections broke down easily and rolls of maps flooded desks and cabinets. “The good thing about not having a direct phone line,” one of them once quipped, “is that we can avoid unnecessary meetings.” Parts of the mezzanine were also treated as forgotten corners, such that an office band rehearsed Christmas carols in December near the grupo POT’s cubicles, vallenato songs were occasionally audible in impromptu birthday celebrations, and temporary health clinics for employees were sometimes installed in unused offices. As the comment about superfluous meetings suggests, this spatial arrangement also had its advantages. This is a point Diego elaborated on in one of our last conversations in early 2012: “I think one of the good things to come out of the workspace is that we were removed from the day-to-day

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figure 5.2. Planner at work in the mezzanine cubicles. Photograph by federico Pérez.

[routines] that take place upstairs. We didn’t have a window, but we had time. We had time to discuss, to debate. The organization of the seats allowed us to unroll a plan on the floor, draw, all that.” Diego emphasized that they were at a “relative distance,” partly because their challenge was to understand the difficulties and contradictions of the department’s daily procedures while establishing channels for feedback on, and appropriation of the Plan among, public officials. This was immediately visible in the group’s regular routines, which involved research and debate in the de facto “think tank” of their mezzanine office and afternoon meetings in the upper floors of the main tower past the glass and concrete tunnel. Most importantly, the group had managed to recruit experienced planners from the department at different times in the revision. “Some of them had time,” Diego explained, “so we were able to pull them towards us.” He then went on to explain the importance of these experienced planners’ knowledge: “[Their perspectives are] useful because when you have that kind of help you learn about what’s going on in the institution, what the daily problem of the institution is, and that you’re making decisions about an issue that will affect the institution. . . . [Being in] the middle ground has a very important advantage, because you’re not totally disconnected but

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you’re also not totally immersed in the daily processing [el tramitar diario] of files and signatures and reference numbers and all that.” In spite of the grupo POT’s attention to the relationship between planear and tramitar, to the interaction between planning and implementing, thinking and doing, most of the planners involved in the process ultimately worried about the transience of their work. In final reflections, Diego made an apprehensive comment about the lack of institutionalization of the modification project: “What does worry [me] is that, after all of this, the institution won’t have a permanent office to monitor [the Plan’s revision and implementation]. So [it ends up being that] some consultants come in and formulate a POT, they debate, come up with a product, and bye-bye. . . . I think there should be an office that is thinking the city, that is sketching it [le esté echando lápiz], discussing, and receiving inputs from someone to debate them.” These concerns were heightened by the impending collapse of the project during the 2011 electoral campaign and its indefinite suspension under the new city administration in January 2012. With most of the group members’ contracts expiring and new planning directors taking office, the fate of the POT project was uncertain: there was nothing that would prevent it from being “forgotten in a drawer” (engavetado), as occurred frequently with other consultancy projects. The eventful trajectory of the POT’s modification project and its uncertain direction under the new city administration evinced the socio-political complexities of planning practice. Beyond the creation of a POT office that would be permanently dedicated to “thinking the city,” as Diego suggested, the enactment of Bogotá’s urban plans required far greater attention to actors, processes, and interactions, as he and other planners also readily admitted. rather than formulating “better” plans—understood here as fixed blueprints of desired realities—the revision and implementation of the POT depended on the elusive alignment of a multiplicity of people, ideas, practices, and artifacts. The main issue then was neither flawed institutions nor incompetent bureaucrats, but rather the creation an operational assemblage of actors and technical instruments within a changing and unwieldy political environment.3 Experts like Diego recognized the broader challenges of translating plans into durable networks and consistent practices, but, in the face of such difficulties, he and other planners continued to fall back on narrow bureaucratic and technical logics. They imagined idealized institutions and technical instruments that would allow them eventually to overcome such practical obstacles.

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Planning After the Fact In their everyday work, planners frequently referred to “lot by lot” (predio a predio) development as one of the key problems of Bogotá’s contemporary urbanism. Andrés, an urban geographer, would often tell me in a matterof-fact tone, “The problem is that Colombians have a very low capacity to associate.” Such concerns resonated with scholarly descriptions of Bogotá as a “fragmented city” (Pergolis 1998). Urban fragmentation entailed not only the abandonment and destruction of public space (cf. Caldeira 2000; Pérez 2010), but also the effects of a deregulated real estate market where economic rationalities ruled over broader sociospatial criteria (Saldarriaga 2000).4 Colombia’s Urban reform Law (Law 388/1997) was a decisive response to the increased deregulation of urban development, most clearly embodied in the city’s previous plan, the market-oriented Acuerdo 6 of 1990. The Urban reform Law represented a paradigm shift towards land policy and financial instruments aimed at producing greater urban equality, sustainability, and productivity (Pinilla 2010). The POT—and its attempt to devise a planning assemblage more in tune with the city’s institutional, sociopolitical, and material realities—was to become the main vehicle for these changes. It represented a move from planning futures ex nihilo to planning post festum.5 The first version of Bogotá’s POT (2000), however, emphasized the “physical dimension of territorial planning” (2000, 345) without mobilizing the more progressive land policy and financial instruments created by the law. The POT’s first revision (2003) made a more explicit attempt to connect planning and land management instruments (instrumentos de planeación y de gestión del suelo). Two related and important tools that the administration has attempted to utilize during the past years are: (1) state capture of land value increments (participación en plusvalías)6 to finance affordable housing and public infrastructure, and (2) comprehensive urban development and renovation through partial plans (plan parcial de desarrollo/renovación urbana). In practice, the participation of the city administration in plusvalías (land value increments) has been exceptionally low. Between 2003 and 2008, the administration anticipated collecting over US$100 million; in the end, it collected less than US$25 million (grupo POT 2009). As Susana, a highlevel department planner, put it: “It’s a small and uncertain collection, and in general what happens is that it doesn’t provide much. Here we have a lot of land value capture processing and it’s an administrative burn out [desgaste administrativo].”

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Under current legislation, plusvalías occur when land values rise because of changes in land use and the increase of building allowances. In theory, the mechanism should successfully regulate land prices and facilitate the redistribution of rents generated by urbanization. In practice, however, the instrument has run into complex technical and political obstacles. The calculation and collection of plusvalías present “countless technical and juridical alternatives” that make its “daily operation” very uncertain (Pinilla 2010, 351). The lack of unified criteria and institutionalized forms of knowledge not only weaken its technical operation but also create spaces of administrative uncertainty and “discretionality” (discrecionalidad) that make the instrument vulnerable to economic and political pressures. Susana offered this insight about the everyday difficulties of plusvalías: “It is interesting and true that the state has to obtain part of the land value increments generated by public urban actions. But when we have such a strange regulation, which nobody understands and for which you almost need . . . I don’t know . . . someone initiated in the subject [un iniciado] to decipher what can be done in each piece of land [en cada predio], that kind of issue becomes very subjective.” The plusvalía mechanism aspires to calculate the incalculable. When an urban project arrives for implementation in the planning department, the planner in charge must study the existing regulations for a particular lot and ensure that the project follows them. In Susana’s words, “[The architect] reviews the previous regulation, the Acuerdo 6, which is an entirely different thing, and then she has to do this project with that regulation. . . . It’s so crazy . . . but it’s the only way to compare regulation to regulation.” Once the “generating fact” (hecho generador) to justify the change—either a larger construction area or a more profitable use—is established, the project is analyzed by the Direction of Urban Economy and finally by expert appraisers hired by the Administrative Unit of Cadastre. If calculating the value of future construction under incompatible regulations is problematic, the evaluation of profitability or economic potentials in relation to different land uses is even more speculative. Once again, the more circuitous the procedure, the more spaces are available to exert pressure through under-the-table negotiations, legal maneuvers, and political agreements. finally, because value increments are calculated through a comparison of urban laws, and the previous regulation in Bogotá was the market-oriented Acuerdo 6, current building allowances are frequently more restrictive. This produces a minusvalía or loss of value, as it were, even in the case of empty lots, because older zoning would have allowed the construction

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of larger areas. This makes it impossible to capture value generated by the majority of the city’s own current construction activity. Similar issues concern the planes parciales, possibly the most representative planning instruments in Colombia’s urban reform laws. Aimed at overcoming the fragmentation of the city’s earlier lot-by-lot urbanism, the plan parcial develops an association of landowners, developers, and the state by creating—contrary to what the name suggests—comprehensive development and redevelopment plans. In contrast to the diffused approach to planning used previously, planes parciales would address the lack of affordable housing, adequate public space, and infrastructure. They would enable “the urbanistic development of a specific area that includes the corresponding road infrastructure, green areas, facilities, and public services” (Pinilla 2010, 353). Moreover, by establishing a scheme for public-private cooperation, such plans were intended to allow a more just distribution of urban costs and returns. rather than state financing for public infrastructure, which ultimately adds value to private properties, the plan parcial assigns a series of charges to the developer to distribute the benefits and increased land rents generated by urban development in a more equitable way. A common complaint about planes parciales is their long processing time, with cases taking up to eight years. Since 2000, forty-five plans have been approved for vacant land destined for urban expansion and six for urban redevelopment; none has yet been implemented. Planners and developers have emphasized the lack of clear requirements and inconsistent procedural rules. Here again, bureaucratic opacity leaves ample room for arbitrariness and individual negotiations.7 given the absence of a specific regulatory framework, the case of redevelopment plans (planes parciales de renovación urbana) is even more dramatic. The relevant procedures, created under very different conditions (i.e., vacant land, few property owners, no infrastructure), have been transposed onto these cases, generating even more contradictions and difficulties. These were Susana’s first impressions of planes parciales when she started working in the planning department after dealing with similar issues in the national Ministry of Housing and Urban Development: “I was very surprised when I got here and I realized that not even the expert team was clear on the procedure or scope or on what the distribution of charges and benefits was [reparto de cargas y beneficios].” She then went on to explain the fractures in the production and transmission of the technical knowledge: “Initially, the [planning department] hired an expert team from the Universidad Nacional

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to process the planes parciales. So no knowledge was accrued here among our experts. Later on, the agreement was dissolved and . . . [a new director of planes parciales] came in and she alone was leading planes parciales with two or three people. The rest of the team didn’t participate and no ‘learned knowledge’ [conocimiento aprendido] remained among the permanent staff.” As Susana detailed how planes parciales traversed the planning department, she emphasized the related technical and administrative problems: “It is often the technocrats who don’t allow an agreement to take place [about how things should be done].” Here she meant the increased “politicization” (politización) of the institution during the past years and the absence of a clear administrative structure with consistent procedures. Not only are planning directors and consultants often at odds with the institution’s official staff, but planners—many appointed through political favors—frequently lack technical competence and are immersed in power struggles. These conflicts are compounded by the private sector’s resistance to development charges and taxation, or what Colombian law calls the “social demands on property” (función social de la propiedad), as well as by developers’ attempts to deploy planning instruments to different ends and, more generally, by the obstacles to collective action. In urban redevelopment projects, for instance, the plan parcial has been used to change land uses, buy out property owners, or simply enhance building potentials, rather than to renovate urban areas designated for comprehensive change. Ultimately, the impact of planes parciales in the city has been extremely limited. With only a few plans implemented in Bogotá’s shrinking expansion areas and one approved redevelopment plan in the “built city” (ciudad construida), most of the city’s urban growth still proceeds on a lot-by-lot basis. By all counts the redevelopment and redensification of the inner city (centro expandido) has intensified during the past years, exerting even more pressure on already scarce infrastructures, amenities, and public spaces.

Edificabilidad: Recontextualizing Planning Practice On the basis of critical assessments of the POT’s plusvalías and planes parciales, the grupo POT set out to design new and more effective tools. Establishing development charges based on floor area ratios, or what planners called edificabilidad, was one important strategy to overcome current technical and sociopolitical limitations. rather than discarding the principles behind the

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plusvalías or planes parciales, they sought to create a new framework. Planners ultimately conceived of edificabilidad as a pragmatic means of contextualizing planning practice that would incorporate existing institutional and urban conditions more explicitly. The planners started by acknowledging how the city was growing and the extent to which planning instruments could regulate and distribute the associated costs and benefits. In this sense, the central issue for the grupo POT was that the city was basically “growing on itself ” (creciendo sobre sí misma). “Bogotá is building its second floor,” was the way in which Javier, an expert in urban regulations and codes, put it. The planning instruments established in the POT, however, had been targeting and regulating the least representative form of urbanization in Bogotá: construction projects on the city’s shrinking stock of vacant land. While the city’s legal expansion onto such properties required associated payments (in the form of paid taxes or land transfers), the rapid reconstruction of existing central districts did not. In fact, the demolition of small structures and houses in the inner city for the construction of taller buildings was the primary way in which Bogotá was growing: upward and on repurposed properties. Critically, such construction also generated increased needs for public infrastructure. “The only [mechanisms] that are contributing [resources or land],” Diego explained, “are development and urban renovation [planes parciales de renovación urbana]. [But this is] the minority [of land being developed]; the majority is in the built city [ciudad consolidada].” A figure that team members often showed in PowerPoint presentations illustrated the point: of the 3.75 million square meters that had been licensed and constructed in Bogotá between 2007 and 2009, 67 percent did not make any kind of monetary or land-based contribution to the city (grupo POT 2009). for the grupo POT, a more equitable and sustainable process of urbanization hinged on the possibility of regulating the growth of the ciudad consolidada. Plusvalías were clearly not effective. They produced mostly procedural difficulties, and, more significantly, often conflicted with legal frameworks. Development charges were intended to emerge from the comparison between old regulations and the new supposedly more generous zoning regulations. But in practice the former often allowed higher densities making it impossible for the administration to obtain part of the increased gains of new developments. The planes parciales de renovación urbana—the other instrument that applied to the ciudad consolidada—had remained effectively blocked over the past twelve years. This model did not consider the financial,

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social, and material conditions under which redevelopment could become feasible. In the 2000 POT, Diego noted, the logic of renovation had been the following: “[As a planner], I mark an area because it is deteriorated, but because I don’t have resources I wait for the private [sector] to come, but they don’t because they’re not interested.” Using up-to-date information on public infrastructure and services as well as on building trends and urban densities, the grupo POT planners devised a system for existing and permitted floor area ratios (edificabilidades) in different areas of the city. They then proposed to charge developers contributions of money or land in exchange for the right to build in ways that exceeded the very coefficients that the team itself considered desirable (in terms of infrastructure and services) in each area. Andrés, the urban geographer in charge of economic analysis and statistics in the grupo POT, explained the proposal to a group of citizens on one occasion: “What we found is that the medians for building coefficients, which are registered in cadastre’s database and are up-todate . . . , were good indicators for allowing lots in different areas to reach that coefficient without paying. We have many lots in the city, a bit idle, that could be developed to that point without paying. . . . So our first bet with edificabilidad is that we’re going to let people reach the median of their block.” When the median was exceeded, what Andrés called the “real planning exercise” began. By this he meant establishing the permitted or projected edificabilidades in different urban zones; the approach would ultimately represent either incentives for or constraints on building and introduce certain obligations for developers. Instead of doing convoluted calculations based on incommensurable building codes or the projected economic profitability of changes to land use, planners would create value by means of a much simpler operation: for every 5.6 square meters built beyond the median coefficient (up to the projected coefficient), the developer would contribute the cost of one square meter. The money thus collected would fund urban projects—infrastructure, amenities, and public space—in each zone. The exact proportion—one for every 5.6—was the result of protracted negotiations between the planning department and the Colombian Chamber of Construction (CAMACOL). These two often antagonistic organizations established this figure to balance the profitability of real estate development with the city’s public needs. Some planners disagreed with the proportion and the scope of the requirements the city imposed on its private real estate sector. “Are we placing too many burdens on developers?” they asked. Others pushed for stronger obligations, viewing the construction sector as traditionally “greedy.”

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The key issue beyond these debates, Andrés explained, was how comprehensively the proposal reenvisioned the administration’s procedures and criteria for establishing the benefits of urbanization and distributing costs: “This new financial resource isn’t really new. When you look at the participation in land value increments [plusvalías] you’ll see that participation also occurs in terms of increased floor area ratios [edificabilidad]. This is an adjustment of the capture method of that greater value [making it less reliant on zoning regulations]. for what purpose? So it can leverage the financing of public projects in the area.” On a spatial register, the grupo POT had identified two “areas of opportunity” or bolsas (pockets), where urban redensification would be explicitly promoted. In other areas, given the conditions of infrastructure, services, and public space, urban development would be restricted. In all cases, new funds would be readily available to cover the costs of the ongoing process of redensification. In more general terms, the “sociospatial strategy,” as the grupo POT called it, intended to reshape the city’s “unbalanced” structure and financial obligations. The scheme aimed to attract investment to the well-serviced and low-density bolsas, while attempting to contain the extraordinarily high densities of the city’s underserviced peripheries. Planners thereby sought both to recognize actual urban dynamics—existing floor area ratios and development patterns—and to create more pragmatic mechanisms to manage and obtain some of the economic value generated by real estate development.

Conclusion In his “autopsy” of the failed project to build a rapid personal transit system in Paris during the 1970s and 1980s, Bruno Latour (1996, 78) argues that “failure and success have to be treated symmetrically.” rather than invoking first causes, this entails following projects as they are debated, transformed, and, at times, translated into a “stabilized state of things” (79). The faltering trajectory of the POT revision shows the extent to which planning projects in Bogotá are far from reaching stability, as well as the backstage innovations and conflicts that would otherwise remain out of sight: from stubborn regulatory frameworks and transient planning knowledges to self-critical and pragmatic modes of expertise. As an exercise in “prototyping” (Corsín-Jiménez 2014), the revision process reveals the ways in which planners incorporated an awareness of failure and uncertainty into their technocratic practice.8 As

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the POT project collapsed in December 2012 and newly elected leftist mayor gustavo Petro took office, the gap between the worlds of planning and politics resurfaced with intensity. for the new network of experts that came into the administration, many of whom were drawn from academia, planning failures were mainly the result of a lack of ideological and political commitment. Paradoxically, for all the grupo POT’s attention to the micropolitics surrounding everyday planning routines, the broader sociopolitical implications of their work were never fully developed. This is something that Andrés noted after the project was suspended. “Nobody wants to be planned,” he told me, “and least of all politicians.” rather than antagonizing or ignoring them, Andrés continued, “[We need a POT] that allows them to play their part. We need to understand [politicians] from [the perspective of] planning as actors, grabbing them through technical [knowledge].” Other team members recognized additional political weaknesses. fernando, one of the public officials in the group, once told me that for him the project had been too “developmentalist” (desarrollista). He was referring to the administration’s promotion of market-driven real estate development. As he put it: “[The administration was] letting the private sector act and not demanding enough as a public sector.” Diego made a similar point when he noted the almost complete absence of a “social housing policy.” During several work meetings Andrés had suggested related problems regarding the edificabilidad proposal. He had pointed out that contributions and investments would be localized and tied to real estate dynamics, leaving little room for redistribution to zones with less construction activity. Although other consultants and planners usually agreed on this point, the difficulty of arriving at alternative strategies and the priority given to development incentives caused the issue to recede into the background. More generally, the proposal’s emphasis on the “redensification” of the inner city, understood primarily as an issue of efficiently promoting and taxing real estate development, betrayed technocratic neutrality. The incoming administration attempted to repoliticize planning with the concept of “revitalization” and its more explicit concern with inclusion and affordability. A stronger critique of the POT revision, however, was that it did not live up to its own pragmatic ambitions. As Javier, the group’s expert in urban law, put it, “The modification recognized problems and had important goals, but when it came to materializing them, it backed down.” The revision had failed to simplify the convoluted patchwork of norms and regulations of previous POTs. furthermore, the central idea of stimulating construction activity as

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much as possible to capture greater rents had been compromised during the revision process. Planners had ultimately capped potential growth and circumscribed it only to a few urban areas. for Javier, the modification was still “modernist urbanism . . . [which assumes] that you can anticipate controllable futures.” for him, the true innovation—a self-regulatory mechanism based on urbanization patterns and financial contributions—had been lost during the process. In the end, in his view, planning had succumbed to its modernist roots. rather than recognizing the “unplannable” nature of urban realities, the POT had reinscribed experts’ faith in the transformative power of technical instruments. Most problematically, the grupo had failed to engage the larger social and political networks in which planning practice was embedded. This ultimately led to the project’s demise. In 2012, contracts expired, and the grupo POT’s consultants left the planning department for positions in other government agencies. The old cubicles of the semiabandoned mezzanine were soon occupied by a new group of experts. Some of the functionaries who had worked in the original revision process, such as Javier, joined the newcomers, helping them navigate the thousands of pages and files that the grupo POT had produced. The modification process under the new Petro administration promised to produce a plan more firmly based on ideals of urban inclusion and sustainability. This much was clear during a public presentation at Bogotá’s Chamber of Commerce in which Javier explained the main goal of the new revision: the promotion of intense processes of densification in the inner city (not only in what the grupo POT had identified as “areas of opportunity”), linked to expansive requirements and contributions of subsidized housing and public space. As Javier clicked through his PowerPoint presentation, traces of the grupo POT’s earlier work were apparent. The proposal, however, was a much more radical rendition of edificabilidad and of the notion of exacting monetary contributions from real estate development. As he concluded the presentation, people in the auditorium were noticeably unsettled. Questions about implementation, the risks of “disorderly” densification, and, most significantly, the potentially negative effects of progressive financial mechanisms on land values filled the room. The contentious debate about the plan only grew as months went by. The City Council finally voted against the proposal in 2013, but Mayor Petro defiantly approved it by decree. This set off an even larger conflict with developers, citizen organizations, political forces, and the national government.

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Lawsuits were brought against the POT, and it was ultimately suspended by court order in 2014. Despite the administration’s vigorous political discourse, planners ultimately resorted to the force of legality to materialize their urban vision. The new iteration of the POT became an attempt to produce urban inclusion by command. And once again, the logic of planning crashed against urban, social, and political realities. If the previous modification project had sidestepped substantial political discussions in favor of a pragmatic recontextualization of planning practices, the latest POT revision seemed to have forgone concerns about implementation “details” by focusing on political rhetoric. In both cases, planners had recognized but not fully engaged the range of actors, practices, and processes involved in planning processes. They had first created technical instruments more attuned to the dynamics of urbanization and later charged them with political force, only to find that such assemblages were incompatible with the broader technopolitical terrain in which they were located. The idea of retooling planning to bring it closer to institutional and urban realities—of planning after the fact—ultimately succumbed to the decontextualized machinations of planning as usual.

Notes 1. The 2012–16 city administration launched a third revision process, which was ultimately unsuccessful; a fourth modification is currently underway. On the transience and mutability of master plans see also Crawford and Herzfeld (both this volume). 2. I am in conversation here with literature that moves beyond critical portrayals of modernist, top-down technocratic knowledge and instead explores the reflexive, contradictory, and recursive dimensions of expert practice. recent examples include scholarship on journalism (Boyer 2013), engineering (Harvey and Knox 2015), design (Murphy 2015), and planning (Mack 2019). 3. In contrast to the ongoing turn to new materialisms and nonhuman agency in anthropology and urban studies (see, e.g., Latour 2007; Mcfarlane 2011), I am more interested here in the dialectical relationship between humans and nonhumans, experts and artifacts. I thus build on recent work that attends to the entanglements between materiality and imagination, things and ideology (Navaro-Yashin 2012; Appadurai 2015; Murphy 2015; Pérez 2016). 4. Such criteria include the just provision of public infrastructure, services, amenities, and affordable housing, among others. 5. I thank Michael Herzfeld for suggesting this term to me (see Bourdieu 1977, 36) 6. According to Martim Smolka of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, “value capture refers to the recovery by the public of the land value increments (unearned income or plusvalías) generated by actions other than the landowner’s direct investments” (2013, 8).

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7. As with many other procedures, the trajectory of planes parciales in the planning department evinces the dialectical relationship between diffused individual actions and accountability through bureaucratic networks and the opening of spaces for individual bureaucratic agency. In this regard, a range of actors exploited the institution’s structural opacity. On bureaucratic structure and individual agency, see Herzfeld 1992 and, more recently, Hull 2012 and gupta 2013. 8. for recent anthropological work on urban uncertainty see e.g., Zeiderman et al. 2015 and Melly 2017.

Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun. 2015. “Mediants, Materiality, Normativity.” Public Culture 27 (2): 221–37. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyer, Dominic. 2013. The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Age. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Caldeira, Teresa. 2000. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Caldeira, Teresa, and James Holston. 2005. “State and Urban Space in Brazil: from Modernist Planning to Democratic Interventions.” In Global Assemblages: Technology, Governmentality, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier, 393–416. Oxford: Blackwell. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 2006. “Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: An Introduction.” In Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, ed. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, 1–57. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Corsín-Jiménez, Alberto. 2014. “Introduction. The Prototype: More Than Many and Less Than One.” Journal of Cultural Economy 7 (4): 381–98. fainstein, Susan S. 2010. The Just City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ferguson, James. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. fernandes, Edésio, and María M. Maldonado. 2009. “Law and Land Policy in Latin America: Shifting Paradigms and Possibilities for Action.” Land Lines (July): 14–19. grupo POT. 2009. Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial, modificación excepcional 2009: Diagnóstico Integrado. Bogotá: Secretaría de Planeación Distrital. gupta, Akhil. 2013. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. gutierrez, francisco. 2001. “The Courtroom and the Bivouac: reflections on Law and violence in Colombia.” Latin American Perspectives 28 (1): 56–72. Harvey, Penny, and Hannah Knox. 2015. Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Healey, Patsy. 2009. “The Pragmatic Tradition in Planning Thought.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 28: 277–92. Herzfeld, Michael. 1992. The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2009. Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Holmes, Douglas r., and george E. Marcus. 2005. “Cultures of Expertise and the Management of globalization: Toward a refunctioning of Ethnography.” In Global Assemblages: Technology, Governmentality, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier, 235–62. Oxford: Blackwell. Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Latour, Bruno. 1996. Aramis, or The Love of Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Li, Tania. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mack, Jennifer. 2019. “An Awkward Technocracy: Mosques, Churches, and Urban Planners in Neoliberal Sweden.” American Ethnologist 46 (1): 89–104. Mcfarlane, Colin. 2011. “Assemblage and Critical Urbanism.” City 15 (2): 204–24. Melly, Caroline. 2017. Bottleneck: Moving, Building, and Belonging in an African City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Murphy, Keith. 2015. Swedish Design: An Ethnography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2012. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pérez, federico. 2010. “Laboratorios de reconstrucción Urbana: Hacia una Antropología de la Política Urbana en Colombia.” Antípoda 10 (January–June): 51–84. ———. 2016. “Excavating Legal Landscapes: Juridical Archaeology and the Politics of Bureaucratic Materiality in Bogotá, Colombia.” Cultural Anthropology 31 (2): 215–43. Pergolis, Juan Carlos. 1998. Bogotá Fragmentada: cultura y espacio urbano a fines del siglo XX. Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores-Universidad Piloto de Colombia. Pinilla, Juan felipe. 2010. “Los avances del proceso de implementación de los instrumentos de la Ley 388 de 1997 en Bogotá.” In Bogotá en el cambio de siglo: promesas y realidades, ed. Samuel Jaramillo. Quito: OLACCHI. Saldarriaga roa, Alberto. 2000. Bogotá Siglo XX: Urbanismo, arquitectura y vida urbana. Bogotá: Departamento Administrativo de Planeación Distrital. Smolka, Martim. 2013. Implementing Value Capture in Latin America: Policies and Tools of Urban Development. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Turner, victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine. Zeiderman, Austin, Sobia Ahmad Kaker, Jonathan Silver, and Astrid Wood. 2015. “Uncertainty and Urban Life.” Public Culture 27 (2): 281–304. Laws and Decrees Agreement 7 of 1979, Bogotá City Council. Agreement 6 of 1990, Bogotá City Council. Law 388 of 1997 (Ley de reforma Urbana), Congress of Colombia. Decree 619 of 2000 (Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial), Bogotá City government. Decree 469 of 2003 (Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial), Bogotá City government. Decree 190 of 2004 (Compilation of decrees 619 and 469), Bogotá City government.

ChAPTer 6

A “Zoning Tombola” informal Planning in niamey, niger gabriella Körling

There is an extensive literature pointing to the failure of traditional or orthodox models of urban planning in many different contexts—especially in the “global South,” which is typically characterized by “rapidly growing and changing urban environments” (Watson 2009, 2263). In an article on urban land development in Maputo in the International Development Planning Review, Eskemose, Jenkins, and Nielsen ask the rhetorical question of who actually “plans” the African city and point to the limited relevance of the “assumption of planning as a state-based activity” in contexts where nonstate actors are equally or even more active than the state in initiating and carrying out “different forms of land-use planning projects” in the city (2015, 332). Watson and Agbola point out that there is a need to rethink both urban planning and the training of planning officials because they are not adapted to the dynamism of cities in Africa. Many such cities are dominated by the informal sector, which necessitates innovative thinking and collaboration with local communities when thinking about what constitutes “planning” (Watson and Agbola 2013). Urban planning in Niamey, the capital of Niger, is faced with exactly these challenges and contradictions. Public investment in social and economic infrastructure and housing development fails to respond to people’s needs and aspirations, especially to own their own homes. Two equal forces are thus at work in shaping the city: the striving of urban inhabitants to afford to build houses and formal, state-initiated urban planning interventions that affect many of the same spaces. The expansion of the capital through the creation

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of new neighborhoods is one illustrative example of this dual dynamic in the making of the city. In fact, urban development in Niamey has been marked by two parallel processes: state-initiated, formal, and large-scale zoning operations (lotissements), whereby rural land on the urban fringe is progressively transformed into urban land, on the one hand, and the informal and small-scale parceling out and sale of land by customary landowners, often carried out in anticipation of public zoning operations, on the other. I label the latter process “informal zoning.” This process has played an important role in urban development and has also enabled urban dwellers of modest means to access much-coveted plots of land. In focusing on informal zoning, I approach urban planning through an exploration of the transformation of the urban fringe “from below.” In this chapter, I compare the trajectories of two neighborhoods formed in large part from the sale of land by customary landowners and situated in the same area on the periphery of Niamey. In addressing the complex relation between (formal) state-led urbanization and (informal) processes of urbanization initiated from below, I thus engage with the growing body of research on this topic: from what Myers terms “alternative forms of planning” (2010) to the “urban design from below” that Mack (2014, 2017, this volume) describes as a process by which nonplanners make radical physical changes, using official planning procedures although unplanned in themselves. This also includes Caldeira’s (2017) comparative analysis of “peripheral urbanization,” which identifies autoconstruction as a pervasive mode of city making in the global South that is rooted in the agency of residents (as residents are “agents of urbanization”). I also relate this research to Holston’s (1991, 2008, this volume) work on the sociopolitical processes that lead to autoconstruction and the emergence of new definitions of citizenship as people struggle for property rights and public services in Brazil. Insecure land rights typically characterize informally zoned neighborhoods, and local mobilizations for public services and amenities help their residents to stake claims to urban land and to inclusion into the wider urban political community (see Körling 2013 for more on this). Here, I argue further that urban dwellers who create their own neighborhoods are actually appropriating the tools and visions of formal planning. While they interact with planners (and local authorities), I analyze how nonplanners transform, structure, and shape urban space through bottom-up processes that, curiously, resemble professional planners’ own activities: the division and demarcation of land plots, the reservation of land for services and roads, the construction of

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houses, and the progressive provision of public and collective services. Even as urban dwellers negotiate with urban planners and local officials, their own actions turn them into planners in their own right, in terms of both these logistical actions and their visions for the future of Niamey.

Urban Development and Planning in Niamey Niamey is situated in southwestern Niger on the bank of the river also called Niger. In the early colonial period, Niamey became an administrative center, despite the fact that the city held neither the political nor economic importance of towns like Zinder in the east or Agadez in the north. Niamey is today home to approximately one million people.1 The urban planning begun during the colonial period mainly sought to accommodate the services of the colonial administration (lodgings for administrators, infrastructure, and sanitation). This planning also structured the growing town by outlining a square grid pattern of streets and land plots that separated European and African neighborhoods and divided the town into zones with different functions (such as administrative, commercial, and so on) (Motcho 2010; Sidikou 1980). During the colonial period, the population of Niamey grew slowly and unevenly. At independence from france, a more sustained urbanization finally kicked off as economic, commercial, and industrial activities developed. The new urban plan was better adapted to the needs of the newly independent state, following the earlier logic of dividing the town into different functions (government services, embassies, commerce and business, military areas, university, and beyond). Significant investments in Niamey were made because of its concentration of much of the new economic and administrative infrastructure for the newly independent nation-state (Sidikou 1980, 55). The uranium boom that lasted from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s allowed for public investments geared towards the modernization of the capital. for example, the construction of roads and administrative buildings and “monumental and prestigious urbanism”—including such markers as the Congress Hall and a luxury hotel (Hôtel gawaye)—created a quartier vitrine on the riverbank that still dominates (Dulucq 1997, 221–22; Seybou 1995). This period of architectural grandeur and relative prosperity was soon over, however, as uranium prices dropped and an economic crisis ensued. Despite the economic downturn, Niamey continued to attract migrants, leading to the growth of the informal sector in housing and employment (gilliard 2005, 78).

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In the literature on postindependence Niamey, many authors point to the absence of a coherent urban planning strategy in the face of rapid population growth and spatial expansion (gilliard 2005; Seybou 1995). An attempt was made by the Ministry of Urbanism in the mid-1980s to coordinate the extension of the city and improve the repartition of its infrastructure through the implementation of an overarching plan for urban development, the SDAU (Schema directeur d’aménagement et d’urbanisme) (Seybou 1995, 39). The objectives of the SDAU were never achieved, however, and the plan was soon obsolete, owing to rapid urban expansion (Motcho 2010, 24). recent years have seen attempts at reforming land policies and implementing new comprehensive urban plans that would include an overarching strategy for urban governance and social and economic development as a component of the national Poverty reduction Strategy. Even so, few of the measures outlined— such as housing access for the poor—have been implemented. In 2011 the government launched an urban renewal project called Niamey Nyala, which means “Niamey la coquette” or “pretty Niamey” in Zarma. Its goal was to turn the capital into a “modern” and “attractive city,” harking back to the large-scale transformations and urban landmarks of the postindependence period. So far, the majority of investments have been made in infrastructure. They include an extended road network, the building of overpasses at key intersections, and the renovation of monuments. The Niamey Nyala program has also been used to justify clearing out street vendors and market stalls in the drive to “modernize” the capital. The tendency to privilege elites in urban policies and investments has thus continued (gilliard 2005; Seybou 1995). In the housing sector, zoning privileges the production of land plots for the middle and upper class and social housing is built for civil servants; both policies leave the poor to find refuge in informal settlements (Motcho and Adamou 2014).

Zoning and the Making of the City rather than adopting a more socially holistic urban planning practice, the colonial tool of progressive zoning has remained the dominant form of urban land management and urban development today (Njoh 2006). In essence, this zoning “consists of transforming the raw material of rural land into urban land” to create dedicated plots for housing, industry and commerce, or public facilities (Belko Maiga 1985, 61). The plots that are thus produced are

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registered and marked out before they are allocated for public use or put up for sale by the urban municipality of Niamey, which is in charge of the distribution and sale of publicly zoned land. Zoning therefore represents a means for regulating the use of space and for controlling the expansion and transformation of the capital, both in terms of the spatial layout and in terms of building codes, regulations, and the registration of land deeds. As Scott (Scott 1998, 53–54) argues, planners strive to overcome “spatial unintelligibility” (a source of political autonomy)—often using straight lines and symmetry—in order to make urban geography legible and cities partially more controllable. So-called spontaneous settlements are perceived as disturbing this order. Straw-thatched houses put up on public land by rural migrants are demolished at regular intervals, and state representatives have been known to argue that those who cannot afford to follow official norms for urban life should return to their villages. Despite these discourses of order, however, public zoning operations are themselves full of contradictions and conflicts (Hagberg and Körling 2016). Moreover, in many cases they do not follow the state’s own norms and regulations. The 1997 urban management policy, which set out to reform urban land management, emphasizes that new zoning projects must be approved at both local (municipality) and national (Ministry of Urbanism) levels and should conform to the urban plan (plan directeur d’urbanisme) in order to ensure a harmonious development of the city. But the pace of zoning operations, especially since the 1990s, has been described as both excessive and uncoordinated, leading to urban sprawl (Issaka 2013). Local authorities have systematized zoning as a way to raise money through the sale of land plots; this has resulted in plots with no services or infrastructure, far from the city center, and inaccessible to the urban poor and to other people of modest means (Motcho 2010, 32). Moreover, many newly created neighborhoods lack even minimal infrastructure in the form of access roads, drainage systems, or water and electricity—the provision of which is stipulated in urban planning regulations. recent years have also seen the rapid proliferation of private zoning projects, following a liberalization of zoning operations that has made it possible for anyone who owns land to apply to zone it. The authorities justified the opening up of zoning to private developers by invoking the high demand for urban land plots; it was also expected that private zoning would promote formal urbanization through the production of registered land plots serviced by road, water, and electricity networks.2 In practice, however, this has accelerated

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land speculation, as private entrepreneurs buy large tracts of land on the urban fringe for the purpose of zoning and land speculation. Widespread, private zoning operations—while producing an unprecedented number of land plots—have paradoxically not solved the housing crisis because they still fail to provide affordable housing options for less affluent urban dwellers. According to one long-serving Niamey urban planning and land management official I interviewed in 2013, zoning operations had already surpassed the extension of the urban agglomeration projected for 2020 by 2007. He said, “Everything has been zoned. . . . Neither the city [the municipality of Niamey] nor the ministry has respected the texts. . . . The state is absent, there has been a laissez-faire.” Moreover, private zoning entrepreneurs have taken ownership and control of a large part of the land available for future urban expansion (Meyer 2018).

Informal Zoning and Urbanization from Below geographer Arouna Sidikou describes the frustration and desperation of aspiring Niamey land (home) owners because of their lack of access to statezoned, municipally sold land (Sidikou 1980, 320). High demand and forms of corruption and speculation have, in effect, limited access to land plots to the rich and/or politically connected (Belko Maiga 1985; Sidikou 1980). Shut out of this official land market, many aspiring land- and homeowners instead turned to a parallel land market. In this “unofficial” market, customary landowners from surrounding villages (including chiefs, members of lineages on whose land the urban agglomeration has expanded, and others using traditional land claims) allocated and eventually started selling their land. These acts have been a critically important urban growth dynamic since formal zoning operations began during the colonial period in the 1950s (Belko Maiga 1985). With urban expansion, village land situated on the urban periphery became increasingly valuable, and customary landowners became increasingly aware of the advantages of parceling out and selling land. for many years, landowners were not compensated when the state seized land, despite the legal provision of compensation in the event of expropriation for urban development, zoning, and “public utility.” for example, Sidikou describes the arbitrariness of compensation given to often-illiterate customary landowners in Niamey unaware of their rights in the two decades following independence (1980, 322).

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With the rise of democracy in the 1990s, customary landowners began to receive compensation for expropriated land, but many still preferred to sell privately—in anticipation of urban expansion. As one local leader from one of the peri-urban villages around Niamey who worked for the city of Niamey remarked, “The peasants parcel out [land] . . . before the city comes to take it.” Selling land independently guaranteed a level of control over revenue that landowners found lacking in the partial compensation offered during a municipal zoning operation. Belko Maïga has fittingly referred to these practices as a “zoning tombola” (lotissement tombola) thus likening the purchase of land on the “unofficial” land market to playing the lottery (Belko Maïga 1985). Having invested their savings in a piece of land, buyers could risk losing everything and could only hope that they would be granted a land plot or reimbursed once the official or formal zoning reached the area. The sale of land plots by customary landowners has been radically transformative for the development of Niamey. Important parts of the city have thus been produced “from below,” outside—but parallel to—state intervention and zoning plans (cf. Mack 2014, 2017). Wherever they appear, privately created neighborhoods are typically not recognized by the public authorities and are called “informal,” “spontaneous,” or “illegal” settlements. Customary landowners’ efforts to sell their land, however, occupy a gray zone between customary land tenure and urban land regulations. Customary land transactions are recognized by the state. Locally, municipalities regularize customary land transactions by issuing a “customary holding” certificate (détention coutumière) following the presentation of a certificate of sale (certificat de vente)—signed and testified by the village or neighborhood chief—and followed by a field visit that verifies the plot’s location and the payment of an administrative fee. The parceling out of land by customary land owners, however, stands in opposition to urban land regulations that restrict the right to zone as well as the norms and procedures of such operations. This ambivalence was expressed by a municipal official in charge of the registry of land plots who had a long experience of Niamey’s land issues. Emphasizing that in Niger “tradition works,” he went on to explain, “The spontaneous [land sales] is [are] prohibited by the law because we cannot plan the city. . . . They do what they want to do, and afterwards it’s a problem for us. But you know when you have inherited land, we cannot hinder you.” Hamidou, another outspoken urban planner, originated from one of the surrounding peri-urban villages and jokingly described himself as an “urbanist peasant,” a “peasant at heart” who had chosen the wrong career.

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Having been educated in urban planning and development abroad, Hamidou returned to Niger in the 1980s and pursued a career as a civil servant, occupying key posts at the Ministry of Urbanism and in regional directorships around the country. Hamidou was a firm proponent of the defense of village land from urban sprawl and a critic of the abusive use of “public utility” by public authorities to justify the expropriation of land. But he was equally critical of the results of informal zoning operations initiated by customary landowners: “The zoning carried out by peasants . . . it is not good. The peasants do not take any responsibility for the population. . . . They don’t leave space for schools, markets, dispensaries, etc. . . . They coop people up like sardines, they make a maximum number of land plots, they sell them, and then they are off.” In other words, the attitude of the state and local authorities as well as of individual planners to “tombola zoning” is highly ambivalent. This ambivalence is also evident in the fact that the settlements have sometimes been regularized and “restructured;” whereas at other times houses have been destroyed without compensation (Belko Maiga 1985, 190–91; Motcho and Adamou 2014).

Two Settlement Stories Tondigamay and Pays Bas are two neighborhoods located on the eastern outskirts of Niamey in an area dominated by the airport, military barracks, and the city’s only industrial zone. They are reached by taking the Boulevard du 15 Avril (more commonly known as the airport road [route de l’aéroport]), which connects the city center to Niamey’s international airport, Diori Hamani, and continues to the eastern entry point to the capital. Many of the neighborhoods in this area, like the heavily populated Talladjé, have emerged out of the sale of land by customary landowners and have been gradually regularized or formalized. At first glance, Tondigamay and Pays Bas are almost indistinguishable, since they are situated next to each other on what used to be largely undeveloped land (a large stretch of terrain between the airport boulevard and a village by the river). Sold by customary landowners, these areas have—unlike Talladjé—not (yet) been officially recognized. They therefore often appear as blank spaces on official city maps– an apparent break in the urban edifice—and are absent from both statistical surveys and city and state investment plans. Urban residents have filled these apparent blanks by investing in land and building houses and infrastructure.

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figure 6.1. Typical houses in banco in Pays Bas, 2007. Photograph by gabriella Körling.

Pays Bas, located alongside the airport boulevard, is the larger and better known of the two settlements. from the boulevard, only a couple of houses are visible, with the rest of the neighborhood unfolding on ravined terrain below, lending the area its name (Pays Bas means “low country”). given its precarious location, the construction of houses in banco (mudbrick), and the narrow, winding streets, Pays Bas has become the emblematic example of a “spontaneous” or “informal” neighborhood. The only routes for automobile access are two dirt roads that stretch from the boulevard to the neighborhood at its two different ends. On foot, Pays Bas is accessible via a number of different paths. Minibuses that serve as a connection of the neighborhoods to the city center drop off passengers headed to Pays Bas at several different points along the airport boulevard, from where people continue by foot. Neighborhood youth also operate informal motorcycle taxis in the neighborhood because few ordinary taxis would be willing to venture onto its tortuous roads. Despite a growing population, with reportedly 13,000 inhabitants in 2010, until recently Pays Bas had no public services or infrastructure.

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Despite its “spontaneous” designation, Pays Bas’s development includes a long history of settlement, and the majority of its residents are either homeowners who have bought plots from customary landowners or lodgers. Longtime inhabitants describe the transformation of the area from an uninhabited bush into farming fields, and from settlements in thatched huts dispersed in the fields into more permanent settlements and houses in banco. One longterm resident in his late sixties who had grown up in his uncle’s compound in Pays Bas emphasized that, in the past, no one wanted to live there: “They called us ‘the people in the hole.’ No one wanted to come here, yet it’s in Niamey!” With time, however, people realized that land plots and transport were cheap and, in the 1990s (a period of economic and political crisis), started buying land and settling there in large numbers. Building materials were also cheap, as bricks were fabricated in the several onsite quarries. The neighborhood thus attracted lower-level civil servants, guards, factory workers, retirees, low-ranking army staff, drivers, and masons/builders. Today, the population of Pay Bas is made up of both newcomers to the capital and urbanites who moved there from more centrally situated neighborhoods, the latter group enticed by the possibility of buying land or by cheaper rent. Over the past decades, Pays Bas has had a tense relationship with both the local authorities and the state. Local government officials and urban planners believe that the area should never have been used for housing, especially since there is a risk of flooding and landslides. The proximity to the airport is also cited as a risk factor, since airplanes pass directly above the neighborhood on approach. The authorities have also claimed that parts of the land on which people have built houses belong to the state and to the airport authority (Asecna); this is a particular source of contention. The latent conflict over the status of the neighborhood came to a boiling point in September 2006 when two houses built on the plateau next to the boulevard were demolished, an action coordinated by the mayor that led to a confrontation between the police and local youth, of whom several were arrested. In a newspaper interview preceding the demolition, the mayor justified the action in terms of the risks to which the inhabitants were exposed, adding that the construction of the houses along the official airport road, outside any legal structure and without any regard for aesthetics, hindered the modernization of the city (Le Temoin 2006). People in Pays Bas contested descriptions of their neighborhood as illegal and anarchic, arguing that the majority of residents were either landowners or lodgers. The hostile and dismissive attitude of the authorities—visible when

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the mere mention of Pays Bas provoked a shrug and a quick dismissal—stood in clear opposition to the inhabitants’ own investments in the area. residents had at least partly succeeded in consolidating and securing the existence of the neighborhood, and no further attempts had been made to demolish houses. Official attempts to contain the neighborhood had also clearly been unsuccessful, since more houses had been built on the disputed plateau; these were barely hidden behind the larger establishments that formed part of the industrial and commercial zone. As one official at the municipality laconically commented, “Pays Bas is no longer low country but high country.” The other settlement, Tondigamay, emerged more recently and has developed along quite a different trajectory, even though it is located in the same valley. It is separated from that area by a stretch of gardens and a wide dirt road that leads to a public works center built in 1983. Another fairly wide dirt road, at the other end of the neighborhood leads down a slope, following an electricity line, to an open piece of flat land. The area was first settled at the same time as Pays Bas, but, significantly, the sale of land only started in the years just before and after the turn of this century. The customary landowners who sold land in Tondigamay were represented by two brothers who resided there. following the death of their father, the two brothers had moved with their families to the then sparsely settled area in order to take possession of their inherited land in the early 1980s. On settling in Tondigamay, they cultivated the land and kept livestock, among other activities. The older brother, El Hadji Idrissa, retired from his work as a cook and bellboy at the grand Hotel in Niamey in 2004 after thirty-five years of service. The younger, Ousseini, made a living in trade after working as a bartender at the grand Hotel and a warehouse keeper for a transport company. According to one long-time resident, it was the sale of land by one of the brothers that spurred the other inheritors to divide up the land and start to sell it. given that the two brothers lived in the neighborhood, it was mainly they who were in charge of showing the available land plots to prospective buyers, negotiating the price, delimiting the land plots, and delivering the certificates of sale signed by the village chief. They had become key personalities in the neighborhood to whom visitors and potential land buyers were directed. The older brother opened a store and constructed a small building next to his house. His mobile phone number was written on the wall, ensuring that potential clients could easily contact him. In overseeing the sale of land, the brothers also had the ambition of creating their own neighborhood that, like other “tombola neighborhoods,” would eventually be recognized as

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figure 6.2. Some of the first houses built in concrete in Tondigamay, 2008. Photograph by gabriella Körling.

an official neighborhood. One remarked, “We are in search of legitimacy, we want to create our own neighborhood.” Their ambition extended to having the older brother designated as neighborhood chief. When I first visited Tondigamay in 2008, it could have been described as a neighborhood still in the making, characterized by a mix of finished houses, walled-in plots, growing piles of bricks awaiting use, and plots with corrugated iron boundary markers driven into the ground at the four corners and bearing the initials of each owner. In contrast to Pays Bas, fairly wide streets cut through the neighborhood. The construction of houses in cement—and of a two-story house—next to houses in banco revealed that the neighborhood had attracted a mixed and fairly well-off group of residents. The majority in Tondigamay occupied a flat piece of land, and amenities meant for the public works center (a wide dirt road and electricity and water provision) lent the neighborhood a decidedly urban and residential feel. Since 2008, Tondigamay has grown rapidly. The less attractive plots situated on uneven terrain have been sold, and house owners of more modest means have

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moved into the neighborhood. The presence of numerous civil servants, military officers, and even a high-ranking government official seemed to guarantee that the neighborhood would not be threatened with demolition like nearby Pays Bas. residents hoped that their influential and well-connected neighbors would be able to defend themselves, and by extension the whole neighborhood, if a conflict with local or state authorities arose. Significantly, in dividing and parceling out their land, the brothers had attempted to follow formal zoning standards. As one of them said: “We almost made a zoning plan, a master mason made room for streets. . . . We have learned from the example of Pays Bas. We have to do better.” Land was divided into mainly square-shaped plots of different sizes (200 m2, 400 m2, and 600 m2). The younger brother kept a ten-meter measure in the small building in which he received visitors. Each new plot was “measured up,” and markers were driven into the ground at the four corners of the plot. The brothers emphasized that they had reserved land for a school, a health center, and a mosque, infrastructures they saw as essential for the development of the neighborhood.

figure 6.3. Markers indicating the limit of two different land plots, 2008. Photograph by gabriella Körling.

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This spatial or planning strategy had been employed in nearby Talladjé. That urban settlement began to emerge in the 1970s after Sagaizé (a customs agent and descendent of the chieftaincy from the village of Saga) settled on his family’s farming land, initiating what Sidikou describes as one of the largest and most spectacular autourbanization processes ever seen in Niamey (at that time) (Sidikou 1980, 349). The emerging settlement attracted buyers shut out of the formal land market, including many low- and mid-level civil servants (such as police or nurses) and factory workers who worked in the nearby industrial zone; this happened at a time when obtaining a plot through formal channels was difficult (Sidikou 1980, 349–50). Sidikou underlines that the creation of Talladjé resembled “a true town plan, tracing roads susceptible to being maintained after an eventual official zoning operation and where one has anticipated spaces reserved for amenities (schools, health centers, markets, mosques…),” including perpendicular streets between 6 and 10 meters wide (Sidikou 1980, 232). By 1975, between 5,000 and 6,000 people had moved into the neighborhood, ignoring the municipality’s warnings not to build there. Eventually, the residents’ determination led the municipality, in 1979, to concede their right to restructure and regularize the neighborhood. Talladjé had become a reference point for customary landowners and land buyers alike in Tondigamay, as well as in other “tombola neighborhoods.”

Informal Zoning and Visions for the Future In a study of house construction in peri-urban Maputo, Nielsen (2007) points out that informal settlements—seemingly paradoxically—conjure up and seem to reproduce formal urban norms. He describes how people—when official planning has taken a back seat—shape emerging settlements using wide streets and straight lines. These informal “plans” reflect normative images of an urban neighborhood and, intriguingly, appropriate urban norms that government authorities were incapable of realizing on their own. Nielsen also argues that following “prevalent urban norms” and construction aesthetics (plot size, building cement houses, etc.) are means of claiming ownership rights by securing “practical legitimacy” (2011, 411). These observations resonate well with the situation in Niamey, where different generations of tombola neighborhoods have attempted to ensure their future integration and survival by reproducing urban norms—as in the case of Tondigamay, and Talladjé before it. The many informal “planners” acting

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in these evolving neighborhoods have—despite their lack of professional training—traced an immediately recognizable grid-like layout for the streets. furthermore, they have even designated land reserves for public services, despite the fact that they do not represent formal “public” interests. At the same time, such planning has not been available for all neighborhoods or for all residents. Although Pays Bas and Tondigamay had similar origins in their informal zoning by customary landowners, their development and identities quickly diverged. Particularly stark differences came about around residents’ abilities to make claims on urban land for long-term settlement. This seems to confirm that informal neighborhoods are heterogeneous and that the possibilities of “alternative” planning very much depend on each neighborhood’s “historical-geographical roots and social relations with the state” (Myers 2010, 575). Despite a shared predicament of uncertain property rights, residents of Pays Bas and Tondigamay found that their possibilities for making claims on land diverged because of the neighborhoods’ differing physical characteristics, commercial pressures based on the market value of land, and the socioeconomic status of residents. On the one hand, Pays Bas had become known in the capital as the emblematic negative example of an informal, spontaneous neighborhood. Its uneven terrain as well as the relative poverty of residents meant that the possibilities for mimicking urban norms like wide streets and grid plans were more limited. In contrast, the flat land, proximity to a public works center’s existing infrastructure, and number of influential residents in Tondigamay facilitated what greatly resembled a zoned, official residential neighborhood of desirable properties. Even if their present portrayals and future prospects of regularization differ, these neighborhoods both reflect deep individual and collective investments in housing and in the general amelioration of the immediate surroundings. When local and national authorities were unwilling to provide the neighborhoods with basic infrastructure and public services, residents took matters into their own hands, in what became a “zoning tombola.” Having invested their hard-earned savings in land plots and eventually in the construction of houses, residents were loath to stand by and simply wait for the authorities to make up their minds about the future of the settlements, even if the actions they ultimately took carried many risks. More and more houses were built, improvements were made in infrastructure, NgOs were solicited for the creation of water towers, and mosques were built with the help of funds from Qatar and Kuwait. In taking the initiative

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to create infrastructure and in lobbying for public services, residents anticipated future investments and attempted to regularize relations with local and national authorities (Körling 2013). Both Pays Bas and Tondigamay are part and parcel of urbanization or city making from below, fueled by the difficult access to land plots, lands speculation, and the absence of government investments. Against the backdrop of greater Niamey’s development, the two cases are also revelatory of a plurality of how norms travel—even into informal planning—and how opposing norms, logics, and interests in the appropriation, management, and use of urban land create a “lottery” that a neighborhood may ultimately win or lose. While tensions exist, formal state-sponsored planning and informal local zoning, infrastructure planning, and home building are not, in reality, in opposition solely because of their legal status. In making claims to urban land, land sellers and buyers in informal settlements draw on various sources of legitimacy, including settlement history (traditional chieftaincy and customary law), the right to housing, and, last but not least, their ability to conform to urban spatial norms and procedures (Hagberg and Körling 2016; Körling 2013). Working in peri-urban areas in Ouagadougou in neighboring Burkina faso, Hauer, Nielsen, and Niewöhner (2018) have pointed to the power of anticipation and hope in transforming urban landscapes from below as periurban dwellers by building houses and seeking registration at the city hall “bring potential futures into being” (72) through the transformation of the urban landscape. Similarly, in a special journal issue of Focaal on the anthropology of planning and temporality, Abram and Weszkalnys contend that in informal settlements the promise of (formal) “planning is not one of a future landscape made concrete, but of actuality made legal” (2011, 13). In the Niamey neighborhoods I have analyzed, resident-planners have striven toward formalization in their acts to create, maintain, and legitimize their own urban spaces. Their dominant strategies appear to be, not paradoxically, adhering to formal planning’s own norms, and their success or failure in the eyes of the municipality have stemmed more from the lottery of life—giving some residents more status and power—than solely from their ostensibly informal planning and settlement. By co-opting the planners’ tools, these residents seek to protect their neighborhoods from future threats of erasure. In Niamey, moves like informal zoning, gridiron street layouts, and resident mobilization for legitimate public services are all key processes through which urban residents negotiate their right to the future that their own plans envision.

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Notes This chapter is adapted from the article “La matérialite de la reconaissance: Les mobilisations locales pour la fourniture de services publics à Niamey,” published in 2013 in Politique africaine 132. Portions of the chapter were also previously published in my In Search of the State: An Ethnography of Public Service Provision in Urban Niger, Uppsala, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2011. The chapter is based on fourteen months of fieldwork carried out between 2006 and 2008 in Niamey and complemented by shorter fieldwork periods and revisits between 2012 and 2017. 1. Niamey’s population was 1,145,870 in 2009, according to the Institut National de la Statistique-Niger. Source: Annuaire Statistique des Cinquante ans d’Indépendence du Niger, http://www.stat-niger.org/statistique/file/Annuaires_Statistiques/Annuaire_ins_2010/50.pdf 2. See, for instance, the explanation given by the minister for urbanism Abdoulkarim Moussa Bako during a hearing on private zoning operations. Interpellation du Ministre de l’Urbanisme, du Logement et de l’Assainissement a l’Assemblee Nationale, Tamtaminfo, August 8, 2012. See http://www.tamtaminfo.com/interpellation-du-ministre-de-lurbanisme-du-logement -et-de-lassainissement-a-lassemblee-nationale/.

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ChAPTer 7

Breaking the rules, Making the ruler syriac homes and the Limits of swedish Planning Jennifer Mack

The Nordic dream: a house with white trim and a potato garden. Or at least a garage of your own. We are in Lina Hage in Södertälje. This is a place where house dreams have been realized freely—if not without limits. Here, urban planning provisions have not given anyone’s fantasy a flat tire. But has Pandora’s box been opened? A Småland idyll next to a piece of Mediterranean beach. Stone from far away, like the stones tourists bring home from Crete. Columns that recall the distant homeland’s ancient history. I can imagine how the neighbors spend their August evenings. At one house, there’s souvlaki on the grill. At another, it’s fermented herring that’s the rule. This is a lot for the architectural guru to consider.1 for a May 2006 broadcast of his finnish-language road-movie-style television show, Petteri Goes the Wrong Way, host Petteri väänänen traveled by motor home to Södertälje, where he visited the neighborhood of Lina Hage. His observations reflect the range of fascination, awe, esteem, and sometimes disgust with which visitors have reacted to this striking area. The façades, landscaping, materials, and large scale of these homes depart radically from those used in the majority of present-day Swedish neighborhoods of singlefamily homes, where sedate, wood frame structures have long been the rule. Planners, architects, residents, and even passersby have expressed reactions like väänänen’s, inspiring newspaper articles, field trips, and other forms of both positive and negative attention. Over time, the area has become an

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figure 7.1. House under construction in “Hollywood,” 2009. Photograph by Jennifer Mack.

ethnic enclave; today, it is almost exclusively the domain of families from one migrant group, the Syriac Orthodox Christians, often known as assyrier/ syrianer in Swedish. Lina Hage was part of a wave of single-family housing areas planned in Södertälje since the 1990s, reflecting a climate of looser regulations and a larger trend away from multifamily structures. While its homes today are mostly complete, the houses existed in varying states of construction during the area’s first decade; some had been inhabited for years, while others displayed the open wound of a new excavation. Independent homeowner initiative means that fantasies have not been “given a flat tire,” as väänänen says, although resident-designers must ostensibly adhere to local development plans (detaljplaner, sometimes translated as zoning plans or detailed development plans). The regulations of the detaljplan are legally binding if a building permit is sought; they control building heights, materials, and the use of the lot, and their enforcement was quite strict, especially in housing areas. In Lina, however, the rules outlined were unusually flexible.

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This loosening appears to have occurred as planners incorrectly interpreted who would comprise the local market. Here in Lina, Syriacs, rather than the expected middle-class majority Swedes, were the primary purchasers of the plots.2 As stucco-clad, Mediterranean-style homes appeared where planners expected Swedish wooden cottages, the area became locally famous for its innovative architectural forms and received a new nickname of “Hollywood.” Here, to the apparent chagrin of many planners involved in the original project, each house is a unique composition of elements like Doric columns, protective lion statues, and so-called Texas windows. The nickname “Hollywood” speaks to this collage of international influences and design fantasies, as well as to its residents’ wealth. In fact, this local market has unparalleled power because the Syriac group is strong in Södertälje after more than a half-century in residence there. In 1967, 205 Syriacs arrived as refugees to Sweden, and, after a period at a refugee camp, just three families were originally settled in Södertälje. Today, following numerous upheavals and wars, along with family reunifications, many more Syriacs have arrived and made their homes in this town, where they are now estimated to be at least a quarter of its nearly 95,000 residents. But how did Lina become Hollywood? The area’s transformation works against postwar Swedish models of multifamily housing designed to eliminate class differences through standardized dwellings; this highly specific planning mandate used architectural and urban norms developed from copious government research that was thought to have perfected everything from furniture layouts to kitchen cabinets. Today’s planners seem to regard Hollywood’s houses (and often their residents), to follow Mary Douglas, as “matter out of place” (1966, 35). They comprise a threat to their praxis because of their lack of adherence to these accepted paradigms. for these professionals, the unexpected outcome of the plans has served as a cautionary tale about the dangers of providing owners with too much regulatory freedom over forms and materials. This has, in turn, generated a climate of confusion, embarrassment—and even anger—for the planners. One planner in his sixties, Sven,3 described the initial reactions among his colleagues: “There was, like, a tone of horror [in the planning department], and then someone said, ‘They build such gigantic houses.’ And I said, ‘But are they following the plan?’ [My colleague said,] ‘Yes, they are, but . . .’ [So, I said,] ‘They are exploiting the plan. You’re allowed to do that!’ ” Today’s planners seem confused about whether flexibility in planning is their aim or a threat to their practice.

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Meanwhile, for their owners, the very same houses represent physical evidence of a hard-won class journey over five decades in Sweden and the triumphant culmination of a housing career that typically began in modernist, municipally owned rental apartments from the 1960s and 1970s that are considered to be among the country’s least desirable dwellings. As they pour foundations and place their possessions within custom-designed walls, Syriacs also express both their intention of remaining in Sweden and their ascendancy from dependent renters to proud owners. The planners’ feelings of despair about the limits of their professional practice also resonate with deep national anxieties about segregation—often portrayed as one of Sweden’s leading social problems. The construction of luxury enclaves like Hollywood disrupts the easy dichotomies of class and exclusion against which planners have worked since the 1970s. David Ley and others describe the large-scale, ornate “monster houses” that migrants have constructed in Canada and the United States, and Syriac homes in Hollywood have produced a similar “moral panic” for planners (see Ley 1995). The stakes of resident participation in Hollywood question the very terms of equality of the welfare state, disrupting the elements of discrimination that have been built into a planning discourse seemingly wedded to a spatial logic of migrant dispersal. Hollywood has engendered heated dialogues about control, taste, and the limits of urban planning that have required major introspection among planners, especially since Syriacs have designed and commissioned their dream homes through official building-permit processes. In plain view of the planners who are charged to separate them (according to the geographic distribution that integration is said to require), Syriacs have created a suburban ethnic enclave of custom-designed, luxury homes that is neither underprivileged nor socially isolated. As Swedish ideas of physical and social control through planning give way to the influence of new publics prizing hermetic, familial domestic conditions, these residential spaces signal new directions for a Swedish professional-planning practice that, by necessity, must recalibrate its attitudes to migrants’ dispersal and enclosure. Planners of the recent past believed that Swedish majority preferences for form and style could be regulated through the irresistible appeal of cultural codes alone. Today, as these assumptions proved false, they try to find other ways to assert their authority and expertise, even as their Syriac clients find new ways to push back.

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The Social Democratic “People’s Home” The Social Democratic politician Per Albin Hansson, later prime minister, delivered a speech to the second chamber of parliament during a debate on January 18, 1928,4 declaring, “If Swedish society is going to become a good citizen’s home, class differences must be eliminated, social welfare must be developed, economic leveling must occur, the workers must be given a share of economic management, and democracy must be implemented and applied even socially and economically.” As this modernist national project reached its heyday during the boom years of the 1960s, it also took physical shape—primarily through a comprehensive national housing program that constructed one million new dwelling units across the country between 1965 and 1974, known as the Million Program (miljonprogrammet). With a Swedish population of less than eight million people during its construction, this project represented a radically new and pervasive urban environment (see Hall 1991; Hall and vidén 2005; Söderqvist 1999). Critically, this was not “social housing” for the impoverished or socially fragile like that being built in other European countries at the time; it was intended to house an expanded middle class. Through the Million Program, Social Democrats sought to realize their agenda to create “good citizens” for the Swedish state and to reduce socioeconomic class differences (Borgegård and Kemeny 2004). Standardized apartment buildings, dwelling units, and furniture were perfected through state-supported scientific research, from the width of the apartment door to the appliances of shared laundry rooms. given their basis in empirical studies, these norms represented both quality (new industrial technologies revolutionized shopping, housework, and recreation) and equality (formal similarities reinforced residents’ parallel social status) (cf. Hirdman 1989). Apartment blocks embodied the Swedish nation-state in miniature form. Charles Taylor (2004) has described how the public sphere can expand from a mere “moral order” (regulations defined by politicians and implemented by bureaucrats) to a “modern social imaginary” (whereby citizens understand themselves through a sense of national belonging). In the midtwentieth-century Swedish nation, Million Program boosters and designers explicitly used the built environment to expand notions of national belonging, especially as they linked people previously divided along socioeconomic and regional lines. Through this modern social imaginary, forms of “spatial

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governmentality” (Merry 2001) seeped into the collective consciousness through the standardization of dwelling and community spaces. During the economic downturn of the early 1970s, the ambitious dream of a modern society housed in sparkling new towns quickly vanished. Despite the explicit emphasis on egalitarianism, residents with other options moved out. This left empty units in Million Program neighborhoods across the Swedish urban landscape, especially as the specifically modernist design models used came under public attack and were portrayed as “generic” and “inhumane.” Södertälje was particularly hard hit. The Million Program had been heavily used as a tool for facilitating and attracting labor to the town, where an industrial economy demanded housing in order to appeal to workers. This consigned the town to a dire position as the nation’s fortunes changed. As conflicts erupted around the world in the 1970s, however, newcomers arrived to Sweden as refugees and asylum seekers and, in large numbers, moved into partially abandoned Million Program areas. Today, these neighborhoods are linked to their majority of residents with a so-called foreign background,5 while the initiatives behind the program itself are largely presented as failures of public policy and unchecked hubris. The planner Sven described this as a misinterpretation: “You know, you can think what you want about the Million Program and its social engineering, but there was a love in everything they did anyway—it wasn’t done with malice. That was because everyone believed in it and thought they were making enormous improvements.” As the architecture and planning of the Million Program was transformed symbolically from desirable modern urbanism to an ill-conceived disaster, a group of 205 Syriac Orthodox Christians arrived as refugees to Sweden in the spring of 1967. Beneficiaries of a quota program, they were hand-selected in Lebanon. Many of them made their way to Södertälje, and relatives and friends soon followed, especially when further disturbances occurred abroad. Within a decade, this town on the outskirts of Stockholm—with its empty apartments in Million Program neighborhoods that were often only half complete—had drawn thousands of Syriacs to the town today known jocularly as “Mesopotälje.”

The Standard House Single-family homes were in high demand in mid-twentieth-century Sweden, a fact known during the Million Program (as indicated in surveys of

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the population’s desires around housing). Even so, planners considered modernist mid- and high-rises as better facilitators of modern lifestyles and used them more widely to create new neighborhoods. There, standards emphasizing the relationship between quality and equality could be deployed on a grand scale. Even so, 600,000 single-family homes were constructed in Sweden between 1950 and 1980, with a significant increase proportionally during the late 1960s.6 During this period, there was a continuous tradition of passive government support that did not amount to discouragement, despite some claims (Jonsson 1985, 21). In Södertälje in 1974, approximately 3,000 people—the largest number in the history of the town—were waiting in the queue for plots of land to build single-family houses (Berglund 1974). The municipal housing program adopted by the city council to cover the years from 1974 to 1978 placed new housing construction in single-family dwellings at 33 percent of the total (Berglund 1974), even as many of the new dwellings then planned for Lina were projected for multifamily buildings. In the mid-1940s, the Swedish national government agency known as Bostadsstyrelsen (Housing Board), with its staff of architects, developed drawings for “standard houses” (typhus), selling 11,848 drawings between 1950 and 1976 (Jonsson 1985, 53). Beginning in 1968, the agency focused on pattern plans (mönsterplaner), “with the goal of fostering limitations on variation within housing production” (Jonsson 1985, 70). Developers popularized gruppbyggda hus (housing developments, literally “group-built houses”) during the 1960s, using mass-produced units. Single-family houses increased from 25 percent of total new housing in 1970 to 75 percent by 1980 (Hall 1991, 228–29). Yet, despite this apparent rejection of the stereotypical high-rise Million Program unit, there remained significant limits on heterogeneity.7 While the single-family home charged back onto the Swedish urban landscape during this period, an ideological emphasis on a governmentissued average remained. The Swedish modern social imaginary developed a notion of national identity that relied on a positive attitude toward the interventions of the welfare state and the interdependent collective as a composition of discrete individuals (Berggren and Trägårdh 2015; Daun 1996). This social contract required physical uniformity—even in individual family homes. Planners served as stewards of established neighborhood forms; they should encourage consistency and, as one planner told me, “harmony,” not reinvent standards.

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On the Ground or in the Sky? Municipal planners of the 1960s regarded the forested Lina Hage as a prime site for a new neighborhood, considering its plentiful available land. Urban historian göran gelotte writes that municipal ambitions for Lina were initially grand, being predicated on assumptions about Sweden’s infinite economic growth and the success of the multifamily dwelling type: “The future views were great, and one saw a satellite city with its own grand life in the northern part of Södertälje” (1988, 77). Lina was to house 20,000 to 23,000 residents by 1973. Nearby neighborhoods ronna and geneta opened to the “trumpet blasts” of a new Swedish modernity, yet public opinion had, by the early 1970s, instead recast them as naive mistakes representing the grand hubris of postwar social, economic, and physical planning. Concerned citizens, dissenting politicians, and newspaper columnists thus worked ceaselessly against the Lina proposal, citing environmental issues and its grand scale. Debating the public’s desire to live “close to the ground” became a central theme (Länstidningen 1980).8 As elsewhere, the issue increasingly split along party lines, with the leftleaning parties arguing for multifamily housing and the right arguing for single-family houses. On the grounds of consumer choice and touting the romance of the private homestead, minority parties argued against the Social Democratic solutions (e.g., Berglund 1974, 4). In September 1973, the Center Party penned a sharply worded article that argued for reducing the intended population to 6,000–8,000 people and for placing a greater focus on singlefamily houses (Länstidningen 1973). The impasse that ensued illustrated the importance of the single-family home in the new modern social imaginary of the Swedish nation. After many years of conflict and debate, a new plan for the area labeled Södra Lina finally received approval from the City Council in 1979 (Hansson 1979, 3). A collaboration between the municipality’s urban design office (stadsarkitektkontoret) and the firm of Erskine Arkitektkontor AB,9 the drawing included twelve new housing zones, a high school and other community institutions, recreational spaces and parks, a commercial center, and roads for private vehicles, along with bus routes and bus stops, with 850 new dwelling units. While some were small houses (småhus), the vast majority would be row houses (radhus) and L-shaped houses (vinkelhus). After more than a decade of controversy and increasing fears about “grand plans,” “Lina Hage

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was inaugurated in 1983 and, with that, one can say that Telgebostäder’s large interventions were finished for the decade” (gelotte 1988, 78). During the 1990s, increasing attention drifted toward models of a Swedish future that had been discouraged on ideological grounds during the Million Program, especially the single-family house. As planners released the pressure of the long-tightened valve of market interest in individual homesteads in Södertälje, they also assumed that middle-class-majority Swedes would seize upon the new options. Loosened regulations in new housing areas like Lina acknowledged an ongoing consumer demand that pre-dated the Million Program. rather than steering the public toward multifamily housing, new plans would give space for standard houses or the long-held ideal of the Swedish red wooden cottages with white trim: a form of standardization that—unlike the Million Program—was regarded as both desirable and humane. In connection, loosened regulations in new housing areas further undermined the spirit of standardized, modernist grand plans. Yet Lina’s planners either ignored or were unaware of the fact that the public to which these new freedoms of both typology and form were offered had changed. Syriacs found their dreams of home ownership increasingly part of their waking life.

Housing and the New Class Journey By the early 1980s, the Syriacs living in hyresrätter (public rental apartments) in the Södertälje Million Program neighborhoods of ronna, Hovsjö, geneta, and beyond were increasingly established as settled members of the Swedish society, owning businesses, raising children, and affixing their lives to the national space of Sweden. Some members made their fortunes through the ownership of restaurants, cafes, and hair salons in the Stockholm region, and many Syriacs now study to be doctors, lawyers, and academics.10 As they became well established financially and socially, many Syriacs left the stigmatized Million Program areas, rejecting them just as most majority Swedes had done before them. Among Syriacs, such homes are symbolically linked to the poverty of their first years in Sweden. With this pressure to escape, the first Syriacs to move purchased existing single-family homes, which were usually standardized cottages with large yards and mass-produced by housing companies. But they could not create Syriac neighborhoods from standardized, repetitive forms in sites where they were not in the majority. Despite these Syriacs’ symbolically significant move from the Million

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Program, their domestic dreams were still limited in these spaces. This cast new neighborhoods for custom design as new major opportunities. In the early twenty-first century, in fact, plans were drawn for dedicated plots for single-family homes in a new Lina Hage neighborhood: Murverket, the area that eventually became known as “Hollywood” (or “Beverly Hills” or “Lina Hills,” itself a spin on “Beverly Hills”). Although owners were to build the houses individually in this area, majority Swedish planners assumed they would follow the prevailing cultural wisdom of standard house models. Ashur, a thirty-year-old Lina resident, described how an advertisement reflected this supposition: “five years ago, it was in the papers that there would be a new area. They did sketches to show how it might look, but those had nothing to do with the way it turned out. They wanted everyone to have the same house. Exactly the same Swedish standard, red cottages with white window frames. I don’t think they expected that people would build houses like these.” Although owners would build individually on purchased plots, Lina’s houses were expected to follow the pattern of earlier standardized singlefamily areas. Instead, Syriacs building here have used their prosperity to reshape domestic space according to their own specifications. While serving as the purported authors of the plan, the planning professionals involved apparently did not recognize the potential for interpretation that was, in fact, embedded in the regulatory flexibility they themselves had provided. When planners assumed that majority Swedes—well versed in postwar housing norms—would be the buyers, the risks of providing more authority over home designs seemed minimal. Most older Syriacs came from symbiotic village communities of multiple generations of relatives living together in extended-family homes and practicing subsistence agriculture. In contrast, Swedish apartments assumed increasing independence from the family, which many Syriac elders described as unsettling and isolating. Members of the same family have often bought plots close together in Lina, which several residents said had facilitated a new form of the communal life they had left behind in Turkey. Thus, while Million Program planners sought to make rental communities of unrelated Swedish citizens, Syriacs have explicitly bought land to live permanently near the extended family. residents often described how building in Hollywood simultaneously created deeper emotional and physical connections to Sweden, even as, perhaps paradoxically, their dream homes are made with design practices and symbols imported from the Middle East and beyond. As Turkish limestone

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figure 7.2. Custom-designed house in “Hollywood,” 2015. Photograph by Jennifer Mack.

pavement slabs replace the traditional Swedish lawn, and a copy of an ancient Assyrian winged bull statue decorates a doorway, migrants have become residents, simultaneously bound through their houses to the territory of Sweden and to one another. These moves also radically exceed other attempts—coming from the planners themselves—to involve residents in developing and renovating residential areas. Critiques of earlier “top-down” planning have specifically addressed the lack of citizen participation in the planning processes that created Million Program areas. With renovation projects for these same areas in progress across Sweden, planners have recast residents as valuable sources of information about neighborhood function in a process that has come to be known as “citizen dialogue” (medborgardialog) (on participatory planning, see also Sznel, this volume). While these dialogues ostensibly empower residents, they suggest that “citizens” are imagined exclusively as informants— never designers (Arnstein 1969; Tahvilzadeh and Kings 2015). residents remain the beneficiaries of planning. After this dialogue, it is planners who will find solutions to problems like broken benches or a lack of sports fields. Syriac custom homes in places like Lina Hage have taken resident participation in planning to a new tipping point. These projects denote the Syriac group’s new economic prosperity while demonstrating, perhaps, the planners’ own overconfidence in the power of design norms. When they included

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loopholes in detaljplaner that were simultaneously intended to produce specific results, these planners, like those in many other places around the world, seem to have believed their own cultural and aesthetic preferences were irresistible.

His House Is Her Castle In quantitative terms, the detaljplan for Hollywood, which was adopted in 2001, included plots of between 700 and 900 square meters. The rules limited building footprints to 200 square meters, two stories, and coverage of a maximum of 25 percent of the plot. As Astrid, a majority Swedish development engineer (exploateringsingenör) for Södertälje told me, “And, like, that’s it!”11 Several planners said that they had expected large lawns and small houses and were surprised when owners maximized house sizes and heights instead. The detaljplan did not regulate housing materials, and despite the twostory limit on single-family homes, it contained no specific restrictions on building heights. Josef, a Syriac building-permit officer, decried this, saying, “In Lina, there’s a house where they built . . . two stories was the requirement . . . but they made the upper floor extremely high so that it looks like a multifamily house, a three-story building. And we don’t want that.” Since a building’s construction must by law follow its detaljplan, the building permit department had no grounds to deny requests even when they clashed with the planners’ larger vision for the neighborhood and its formal and spatial expression. The diversity of sizes, shapes, and materials used in Hollywood’s homes runs counter to Swedish notions that neighborhoods should be formally coordinated, a continuation of the spirit of the Million Program. One Syriac architect who had been trained abroad declared that the new houses in Lina represented the triumph of taste over what he termed the Swedish desire to stack “one cigarette packet on top of another” and call it housing. Yet many of his counterparts in the municipal planning office labeled the new homes “tasteless palaces.” Imra, a Syriac and interior design student at a prestigious art school, described how one of her classmates had made a trip to Södertälje and then asked her to explain Lina Hage, which she had happened to see. Imra told the story: “She was so funny when she said it! She said, ‘Yeah, but I drove by this neighborhood . . .’ Then she meant Lina Hage because the address

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she mentioned was there. She was like, ‘There were such big . . . such gigantic houses! Are there several families living in those?’ And I told her, ‘No, they’re usually single-family houses.’ And she said, ‘The houses were so huge!’ And I said, ‘That’s how it is in Lina Hage.’ And she said, ‘They were really like castles!’ ” for Imra’s colleague and for many planners, majority Swedish cultural expectations about scale, form, and materials (that Syriac designers also internalize through education) create assumptions about how regulations—no matter how flexible—will be interpreted. When faced with the unexpected results of the plan, these professionals disparagingly label the homes produced as “palaces” or “castles.” from the majority Swedish point of view, the buildings do not fit the mold of traditional single-family homes. Several planners mentioned a major problem: certain owners had shown restraint while others had maximized the amount of house allowed on the site. for instance, the building permit officer Josef described later attempts to control the heights of floors in other neighborhood plans, saying, “I mean, we have imagined that it should be a free architecture, but, on the other hand, we have limited the height so that you can’t build as high as you want like you could in Lina.” As he described it, lessons learned from the permissiveness of Lina Hage have suggested adjustments for regulating future plans. Such professionals still embrace a mandate to encourage the aesthetics of the condoned mid-century standard houses or developments. Likewise, another member of the building permissions department, Lars, explained with ambivalence that Lina Hage’s stylistic mixture represented a planning dilemma: “It’s really exciting. But there’s no harmony. When I came to Södertälje in 2007, I thought, ‘Oh my god, this will be a place where you go on field trips.’ Now other architects have told me, ‘I’m going to take my colleagues to Södertälje and look at these areas because they are so exciting, they are so different, they are so not Swedish.’ But there is no connection between the small, traditional, single-family house, and these big, white, stucco houses. They haven’t found a good way to connect them, but it’s exciting.” for planning professionals like Josef and Lars, then, the neighborhood is both uncomfortably heterogeneous and ambivalently exciting. for them, residents have failed the plan not just by choosing nontraditional, majority Swedish forms but also by refusing to coordinate their designs. In their proactive roles as owners and designers, the Syriac production of Hollywood has completely transformed expectations of migrant participation in planning.

figure 7.3. Detailed development plan (detaljplan) for “Hollywood,” the neighborhood officially known as Murverket in Södertälje. Source: Municipality of Södertälje.

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figure 7.4. House with stonework lawn in Lina Hage, 2011. Photograph by Jennifer Mack.

“From the Ghetto to the Mansion in Five Minutes” As both groups navigate the limits of the plan, questions of nationalism, class, and professionalism become the unwritten subtext of whether two stories can look like three or whether stucco or wood is a more appropriate building material. If mid-twentieth-century planners hoped to erase inequality, their contemporary counterparts see neighborhoods like this as, rather, inscribing difference into the landscape. As Lars told me, “We shouldn’t build special areas for special people. We just don’t do that in Sweden!” But Lina’s transformation into Hollywood shows that distinct homes have emerged with flexible and creative interpretations of deregulated plans. Lars’s statement also echoes a belief deeply embedded in the discourse and forms of the modern social imaginary of the Swedish welfare state, which can certainly be regarded as a noble one: namely, that social disparities could be planned away through the erasure of urban and architectural differences.

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Intriguingly, residents of this neighborhood and others like it are not the needy refugees that popular descriptions of migrants, policy brochures, and governmental research reports portray. As gabriel, a twenty-eight-year-old hairdresser who grew up in the Million Program neighborhood of ronna and now lives in Lina told me, “going from ronna to Lina is like traveling from the ghetto to the mansion in five minutes.” In other words, this class journey is both consciously traveled and intentionally mapped. But the relative wealth of the Syriac community in a Södertälje long defined through its working-class population has also given rise to suspicions about the group. from newspaper articles to xenophobic chat room entries, some suggest that Syriacs earn their money through illegal means on the black market or through criminal networks. On June 17, 2011, for example, a full-page debate article penned by Carin götblad, the Stockholm County police chief at the time, appeared in a leading national newspaper and described official law enforcement against organized crime in Södertälje. Her final line reads, “Anyone living in a palace-like house [palatsliknande hus] with almost no declared income should be required to provide a reasonable explanation for how this is possible.” Likewise, a Södertälje criminal inspector giving a video interview to a Norwegian newspaper in 2015 argued that they were “grotesque fucking houses.” He continued, “A lot of this was built illegally, I promise you. It is so un-Swedish!” for county and municipal representatives and for the critical commentators who discuss these buildings online, the stucco, stained glass, and outdoor monumental staircases of these houses demonstrate the supposed criminality of the city at large, and of the Syriac group in particular. They have not just awakened envy from within or revealed a new mode of property ownership; they have also become visible symbols of a perceived erosion of control over money, property, and laws, as they are also scornfully labeled castles and palaces. Their unique designs and individualized expression represent both an architecture of enclosure and a flagrant disobedience to cultural codes that planners seem to have assumed to be implicit in even the most freely-defined detaljplan. Every time a house is constructed in accordance with a custom design, lending it a unique shape and style, planners read this as a further erosion of their ostensible control. With Syriacs thus portrayed as matter out of place in their very ability to make such a neighborhood, Hollywood and other such areas offer a convenient shorthand for xenophobic interpretations of the group’s increasing economic and social standing in Sweden.

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A Regulation Too Far Wistfully, the Syriac homeowner Ashur said, “Most people like living here because they built their own houses. If you live in another area, you only get to choose your house. You might be happy there for a few years. But here, everyone has built their own house, so they’re satisfied, and they want to stay here a long, long, long time.” Here, official municipal urban planning, which would produce a modern social imaginary through independence from the family and a strict focus on sameness, has collided with a migrant group’s need for private family-focused space that, contrary to Swedish political desires, explicitly and intentionally distinguishes them, stylistically, socially, and geographically. In Hollywood, this has resulted in a hybrid urban landscape defined through stone walls that signal exclusion to outsiders but create a sense of safety and cohesion for home owners. Here, residents whom planners group together under the category “immigrants” have gone well beyond the condoned modes of citizen dialogue and participation in the planning and design of this Swedish city. As one young planner, Magnus, described it, this has led planners to “wring their hands instead” of finding effective new ways to operate in upcoming areas. recently, in fact, planners have tried to reassert themselves as authorities, drafting new local development plans in ways that they assumed would be bulletproof against the shortfalls of Lina’s loose regulations. To the planners’ surprise, even these stricter mechanisms have been subject to new challenges from prospective buyers. for example, Astrid described an attempt to outlaw a building material called Mexi-brick (mexitegel, or sandlime bricks). Promoted during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico and in the early 1970s, Mexi-brick is today considered tacky in majority Swedish circles. But Astrid said, “I heard about an owner who had shaped plaster to look like Mexi-brick. Then we have to ask what the point is. If it still looks like Mexi-brick, then you might as well have Mexi-brick.” Her defeated acceptance of this creative reinterpretation of the rules for materials reflected Astrid’s acknowledgment that most land buyers in Södertälje are now Syriacs. More recently, planners have attempted heavy-handed regulations in one high-profile new development in Södertälje, the neighborhood of glasberga Lake City (glasberga Sjöstad, following on the models of Hammarby Sjöstad analyzed by graham and Nordin, this volume). Interior design student Imra described how the planners involved had tried to regulate it:

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glasberga Lake City was of course planned as a garden City. It was supposed to be only, like, wooden houses, small houses, pitched roofs. It wasn’t supposed to have anything else—definitely not! That’s where I can start to criticize and wonder how you plan a city when you plan in Södertälje? I don’t think they thought it through when they put so many limits on what people can do. They couldn’t sell the land, and people started threatening, “If I don’t get to design my house, then I’m not buying that!” So they were forced to accept it in the end. So, now, now you can build whatever you want in glasberga Lake City when they could have planned it from the beginning, you know, like allowed a greater range of possibilities. Instead, they could have planned from the beginning, “Yes, but you have these alternatives,” so that they could have managed it better from the municipality’s side, and people could have actually had a few opportunities to make choices. You can’t, like, demand that everyone has to have the same house. No one wants that. In Imra’s view, as planners failed to understand the clients with whom they were working, they missed a majority opportunity to shape the neighborhood. They took a hard line, which ultimately resulted in a total loss of control through negotiations and the forced approval of regulatory exceptions, instead of offering a wider range of choices that would have both satisfied buyers’ needs for individual expression and planners’ desires for visual harmony. In this sense, Syriacs are increasingly seen as a powerful new market for housing and plots, and, as such, have become tastemakers for the larger community. As Astrid said, “You have to see what people want, or else we won’t be able to sell the land.” As planners adapt to the desires of Syriacs, whom they did not expect to be wealthy, the participatory role imagined for the “immigrant resident” is transcended. This blurs the boundary between planner and resident. As Imra told me about her own attitude to these developments while moonlighting as a designer for her family construction company: When I drew a house, I thought, “Yeah, well, it needs to be just as good as the other houses.” It needs to work in the neighborhood, I understand that. But, like, according to Swedish tradition, in order to be as good as the others, a house should be almost completely a

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copy, with the same colors and everything. I mean, why? Why does it have to be like that? Obviously, I understand that when it comes to scale that it’s not so nice if there’s a little cottage here and then you have a chateau next to it—that’s not nice. When it comes to scale, they can set whatever limits they want, but when, like, it comes to appearance—what colors you can have, what materials, and so on—they just go, like, all in! You have absolutely no chance to design a house like you actually want to unless you build on completely isolated property. In her view, this situation is untenable, and the results of these plans show that a heavy-handed, authoritarian planning also fails to do the job for which Swedish assumptions about form also clearly missed the mark. Pierre Bourdieu writes, “Part of the inertia of the structures of social space results from the fact that they are inscribed in physical space and cannot be modified except by a work of transplantation, a moving of things and an uprooting or deporting of people” (1999, 124). In Södertälje, such a “work of transplantation” has taken place. In Hollywood and other neighborhoods like glasberga, the dialogue between regulations and desires has, in effect, radically remade the relationship between the planners and the planned. If planners originally saw Syriacs’ innovations as matter out of place, these professionals have increasingly felt themselves at odds with a new climate of home building as they nervously cling to the standard measurements and aesthetics of the past. Nahrin, a housewife in her thirties who had been deeply involved in designing her own house, informed me that her innovations had become a new kind of standard for the Syriac community when she was able to navigate building regulations to develop a house beyond the standard in a neighborhood that pre-dated Hollywood. Her friends and family members asked for tips about how to work around the regulations in their own projects. She explained with laughter, “My house was like a yardstick! Everyone came and measured it! Like the roof, the angle of the roof, the fence, the windows, the heights. Everything that was not the Swedish standard.” As ever more owners break the majority Swedish rules governing prevailing assumptions about everything from aesthetics to ethnic concentrations, they also make new standards, a new kind of ruler from which to measure their own success. At the same time, these homes relocate debates about how to achieve equality in the Swedish built environment beyond the tools used

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in the mid- and late twentieth century, raising new questions about whether inherited planning models and norms align with the actual demands of professional praxis in the today’s Sweden.

Notes The chapter draws on material published in Mack 2017, especially the chapter “greetings from Hollywood! Enclaves and Participation from the ghetto to the Mansion,” 171–209, and is included here by permission of the University of Minnesota Press. for extended discussion of some related themes and further references, see also Mack 2014. I would like to thank my interlocutors in Södertälje for sharing their experiences and visions of the city with me. I am also grateful to the many people who have commented on earlier versions of this paper; although they are too numerous to name, I do want to single out for their long-term support both Michael Herzfeld and Margaret Crawford. 1. All translations from the Swedish are my own. 2. Many writers and academics with parents who migrated (or who migrated themselves) have begun to use the term “majority Swedes,” rather than exclusionary alternatives like “ethnic Swedes” or “native Swedes,” and I follow this lead here. 3. All names used are pseudonyms, and some personal details have been changed to protect interlocutors’ identities. 4. Per Albin Hansson’s “folkhemmet, Medborgarhemmet” speech was delivered to the second chamber of parliament during a preliminary debate held on January 18, 1928. This was four years before Hansson became the prime minister. 5. Until 2003, a “foreign background” was defined as having immigrated or having one parent born outside Sweden. After 2003, the legal definition was either having immigrated personally or having two parents born outside Sweden, according to Statistics Sweden. 6. This contribution has nonetheless been omitted, Jonsson (1985, 17) notes, from many studies of mid- to late-twentieth-century housing, where the emphasis has typically been on multifamily apartment blocks. 7. Jonsson makes a distinction between the early twentieth-century egnahem (owneroccupied house), which was a space for both living and working and was often part of a farmstead, and the later production of what became known as the villa (detached house), which was solely used for dwelling purposes (1985, 12). He then describes a third type, the enfamiljshus (single-family house) (1985, 13). He explains the distinction between the three terms as follows: “The use of both of the terms egnahem and villa is connected to the ideological background described previously, while the term enfamiljshus is intended to serve as a more value-neutral architectural concept, which in itself includes both egna hemmet and villan” (1985, 12–13). The type received other designations in other places, such as in the publication God bostad i småhus (good Housing in Small Houses); here, Kungliga Bostadsstyrelsen refers to “houses in garden,” meaning everything from the single-family home to the rowhouse: “ ‘hus i trädgård’—enfamiljshus, tvåfamiljshus, radhus och kedjehus—det vill säga de för barnfamiljer mest önskvärda bostadstyperna” (1956, 3). 8. This debate article outlines the positions of various members of the Södertälje City Council on the question of whether people only like to live close to the ground.

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9. Erskine’s office had been involved for several years, and had even held meetings with concerned citizens in 1977. for more, see Weyler 1977. 10. One demonstration of this development is presented in the extensive recent contributions of Syriac-Swedish academics to the scholarly literature, many of which focus on the religious and ethnic concerns of the Syriac group in diaspora. for example, dissertations by fuat Deniz (1999) and Önver A. Cetrez (2005) have had a profound impact. 11. “That’s it” was said in English.

Works Cited Arnstein, Sherry r. 1969. “A Ladder Of Citizen Participation.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35 (4): 216–24. Berggren, Henrik, and Lars Trägärdh. 2015. Är svensken människa? gemenskap och oberoende i det moderna Sverige, rev. ed. Stockholm: Norstedts. Berglund, Lorenz. 1974. “Kärvt idag, men. . . . Nästa år blir det lättare att komma över småhus!” Länstidningen (february 8): 4. Borgegård, Lars-Erik, and Jim Kemeny. 2004. “Sweden: High-rise Housing for a Low-Density Country.” In High-Rise Housing in Europe: Current Trends and Future Prospects, ed. richard Turkington, ronald van Kempen, and frank Wassenberg, 31–48. Delft, Netherlands: Delft University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1999. “Site Effects.” In The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst ferguson, 123–29. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cetrez, Önver A. 2005. “Meaning-Making variations in Acculturation and ritualization: A Multi-generational Study of Suroyo Migrants in Sweden.” PhD diss. Uppsala University. Daun, Åke. 1996. Swedish Mentality, trans. Jan Teeland. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Deniz, fuat. 1999. “En minoritets odyssé: upprätthållande och transformation av etnisk identitet i förhållande till moderniseringsprocesser: det assyriska exemplet.” PhD diss., Uppsala University. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: routledge, 1966. gelotte, göran. 1988. Telgebostäder genom fyra årtionden: En krönika om stiftelsens tillkomst och utveckling, 1948–1988. Södertälje: Telgebostäder. Hall, Thomas. 1991. “Urban Planning in Sweden.” In Planning and Urban Growth in the Nordic Countries, ed. Thomas Hall, 167–246. New York: E. and f. N. Spon. Hall, Thomas, and Sonja vidén. 2005. “The Million Homes Programme: A review of the great Swedish Planning Project.” Planning Perspectives 20 (July): 301–28. Hansson, Wolfgang. 1979. “Omarbetat förslag för Södra Lina: Kommunen tog intryck av kritik från de boende,” Länstidningen, June 27: 3. Hirdman, Yvonne. 1989. Att lägga livet tillrätta: Studier i svensk folkhemspolitik. Stockholm: Carlsson Bokförlag. Jonsson, Leif. 1985. Från egnahem till villa: Enfamiljshuset i Sverige 1950–1980. Stockholm: Statens Institut för Byggnadsforskning.

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Kungliga Bostadsstyrelsen. God bostad i småhus. Stockholm: Nordiska Bokhandeln, 1956. Länstidningen. 1973. “Centerpartiet: Planera efter människors behov: Lina-planen måste göras om!” September 11: 5. ———. 1980. “fullmäktige: Oenighet om Lina—Nu är det byggklart,” february 26: 16. Ley, David. 1995. “Between Europe and Asia: The Case of the Missing Sequoias.” Cultural Geographies 2: 185–210. Mack, Jennifer. 2014. “Urban Design from Below: Immigration and the Spatial Practice of Urbanism.” Public Culture 26 (1): 153–85. ———. 2017. The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Merry, Sally Engle. 2001. “Spatial governmentality and the New Urban Social Order: Controlling gender violence through Law.” American Anthropologist 103 (1): 16–29. Söderqvist, Lisbeth. 1999. “rekordår och miljonprogram: flerfamiljshus i stor skala: En fallstudiebaserad undersökning av politik, planläggning och estetik.” PhD diss., Stockholm University. Tahvilzadeh, Nazem, and Lisa Kings. 2015. “Under Pressure: Invited Participation amidst Planning Conflicts.” In Conflict in the City: Contested Urban Spaces and Local Democracy, ed. Enrico gualini, Marco Allegra, and João Morais Mourato, 94–111. Berlin: Jovis verlag gmbH. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weyler, Kerstin. 1977. “varför ska man bygga i Lina egentligen?” Länstidningen, November 9: 4.

ChAPTer 8

The scales of Justice region, rights, and responsibility in st. Louis, Missouri Bruce o’neill and Kevin Lewis o’neill

Edited volumes have their own temporalities. Fundamental insights can often take years to edit, and over the course of a production timeline, world events can unfold in ways that dramatically change cultural and political conditions that once appeared enduring. This is true of this chapter about St. Louis, Missouri. Researched in 2010 and written in 2011 for a collection published in 2020, this chapter considers the politics of a public transit initiative in St. Louis called Proposition M. Worldwide events have since shifted the political landscape of this otherwise overlooked midwestern city. Read in the present moment, it is readily apparent that this chapter engages life in St. Louis before the events of Ferguson, Missouri, where police shot and killed an eighteen-year-old African American man named Michael Brown in 2014. While we completed this chapter before important Black voices took critical aim at entrenched segregation, the chapter nonetheless works to provide a perspective on how a largely white cohort of planners understood their city before it commanded a global audience. Thus, this chapter is not a definitive piece of social science research but rather something of a photograph taken from a speeding train that was about to jump its tracks.

* * * North American cities, over the last few decades, have become city-regions. These are sprawling networks of business districts, office parks, and suburbs that blur the divide between downtowns and residential counties (Orfield

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2002; Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom 2004; Pastor, Lester, and Scoggins 2009). Public transportation, as one might expect, figures prominently in debates about the development and the management of these new configurations. Planners and civic leaders alike insist that public transportation can bind the productive elements of city-regions into generative networks of commerce (Soja 2000; graham and Marvin 2001). Suburban residents, however, afraid of urban dangers reaching their doorsteps via bus or rail, tend to perceive these efforts as unsafe and understand themselves as having a right to vote down these measures (Low 2006). As a consequence, the space of American cities continues to fragment, as does the quality of public life (Caldeira 2001; Zukin 2008; Davis 2006; Putnam 2001). In response, we assess a different approach to this increasingly familiar conversation. Instead of individual rights structuring debates over public transportation, we glimpse the language of regional responsibility—a sense that city-regions embed residents into a series of relationships that are not chosen but that cannot be ignored. To develop this proposal, we analyze the case of St. Louis, Missouri, one of the most racially segregated and economically polarized city-regions in the United States. rooted in sustained archival work and interviews with city planners, our specific interest is in the failed passage of a transit-oriented development known as Proposition M. This was a controversial effort to expand the city’s bus and light rail systems further into the suburban region. reading the expansion of public transportation as dangerous, suburban residents exercised their individual right to defend themselves (from crime, from corruption, from the city) by voting down the measure. This exercise in individual rights, we argue, further fragments the city-region and ultimately belies an emerging scale of responsibility: the regional. In this chapter, we explore the conceptual resources available to imagine public transportation by way of responsibility (instead of rights) and the regional (instead of the individual). rooted in empirical research, the intent here is not simply to open new lines of inquiry but also new modes of analysis. In what follows, we describe the change in St. Louis from a city to a city-region and note some of the spatial segregations prompted by this transformation. We then link Proposition M to two sets of narratives. The first documents how residents of the suburbs framed Proposition M as threatening. The second listens to a certain set of city planners. Their carefully crafted “counter-public” develops the idea of regional responsibility (Warner 2002). regional responsibility, as these planners approximate and as we conceive of

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it, does not seek to replace the language of rights with one of responsibilities but rather to reframe how St. Louis County residents might think about, and exercise, their rights. The language and logic of regional responsibility, we argue, reveals an alternative perspective from which to view public transportation within a city-region. This is, in the end, an empirically grounded thought experiment that rightly bends towards justice—by foregrounding not just the material but also the ethical interconnections that bind a city-region. Our effort is not unprecedented. There has been a great deal of work in recent years (and in several disciplines) on the topic of social and spatial justice (Marcuse et al. 2009; fainstein 2010; Soja 2010). This conversation shuttles between the language of rights and that of responsibilities. Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city (1996) and Doreen Massey’s geographies of responsibility (2004) provide two helpful points of reference. Lefebvre’s classic argument is that the urban poor create for themselves a right to the city (le droit à la ville) by contributing their labor towards the city’s production. This right, David Harvey adds, is “not merely a right to access what already exists [in the city], but a right to change it after our heart’s desire” (2003, 939). On the theme of responsibility, Massey proposes that the relationality of space points to a politics of connectivity, one that prompts us to “look beyond the gates to the strangers without” (2004, 26). Of analytical importance, however, is that this critical conversation has not yet addressed the question of scale in any sustained way. Where do rights begin? Where do they end? And to whom are citizens responsible—the neighborhood? The city? The region? This chapter initiates a conversation about the scales of justice by addressing the issue of public transportation in today’s sprawling metropolises and by proposing the region as a scale by which to think about responsibility.

The Segregation of St. Louis A division between the city of St. Louis and St. Louis County organizes the space of St. Louis, Missouri. The city served as a powerful manufacturing hub as well as a key site for the intracontinental shipment of goods between 1920 and 1960 (Heathcott 2005). The county, established in 1875 through a famous court ruling that held the separation of suburbs and cities legal for the purposes of property taxes and public schools, became the preferred site for affluent neighborhoods (Orum and Chen 2003). In the last half century, however, a combination of processes, some of them similar to those affecting

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other US cities, significantly altered the social and economic landscape of St. Louis in ways that have intensified the distribution of inequality. New patterns of spatial segregation, both between and within St. Louis City and County, have increased the physical distance between Black residents and white residents as well as rich residents and poor residents (Sandercock and Lyssiotis 2003). four distinct processes guided St. Louis’s transformation into a highly segregated city-region. The first is the respacing of St. Louis’s industry from a concentrated city center to a dispersed network of research clusters. At the turn of the twentieth century, St. Louis was America’s fourth largest city behind New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. St. Louis had a population of 857,000 people, and its downtown business district, positioned along the Mississippi river, was an industrial powerhouse (Sandweiss 2001, 236). Yet, in the early 1900s, the rate of the city’s growth began to decrease. With fears that a shrinking city meant a dying city, leaders in government, business, and urban planning convened in the post–World War II period to revitalize St. Louis. Their solution was the development of a Metropolitan research Corridor (Heathcott and Murphey 2005, 171). Central to this corridor was a spatial division of labor—one that would attract new research and development enterprises to St. Louis to maintain the city’s industrial economy. The plan, at its most basic, was to flood St. Louis County with public and private funds to develop a synergy of science and technology research. Washington University, located on the border of St. Louis City and County, was to become (and did become) a nationally renowned center for science, engineering, and medical research. At the same time, fortune 500 chemical companies Monsanto Company and g. Mallinckrodt & Company relocated their research and development labs to nearby county plots.1 As intended, St. Louis County became the brains of the city-region, creating a cluster of well-paid, middle-class jobs in research and development while also supplying the city (St. Louis’s brawn) with items to produce. The realization of the Metropolitan research Corridor effectively changed the space of production in St. Louis from a city center to a dispersed region. Second, this dispersion resulted in the urbanization of St. Louis’s suburbs. Since 1950, the largest expansion of jobs has occurred on the western border of St. Louis County while the greatest loss of jobs has occurred in the city center. The rapid development of industry in the suburbs encouraged white, middle-class city residents to move from the city to the suburbs. In the 1990s alone, the city center lost approximately 20 percent of its population

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while the western region of St. Louis County gained 20 percent in population (Liu 2004). This redistribution of employment and population caused St. Louis County to become an urban formation in its own right, surpassing the city of St. Louis in both size and economic output. Taken as a whole, St. Louis County has nearly five times as many professional jobs, four times as many office jobs, and over twice as many blue collar positions than the city of St. Louis (U.S. Census Bureau 2005). The county’s current population is now at one million people, which is nearly three times that of the city (U.S. Census Bureau 2012). What has occurred over the last few decades, in other words, is the dispersal of the fordist center-periphery model of urbanization into a sprawling web of urbanization. Third, this new city-region became vulnerable to the effects of deregulated global trade. While St. Louis County produced new demands for industrial production, the city’s factories ultimately did not meet these demands. Instead, county firms produced their wares in the comparatively cheaper regions of the global south. By 1980, the city of St. Louis was in the midst of the very crisis that city planners in 1940 had hoped to avoid. The city’s once generative factories began to close, forcing many to board up once lively city neighborhoods. The city has lost a third of its manufacturing jobs since 1990 and 40 percent of auto-making jobs since 2000 (East-West gateway 2010, 28). The closing of factories and the increased prevalence of urban blight only served to encourage the city’s middle-class tax base to relocate from the city to the county, leaving schools and other public services in disarray (gordon 2009). As a result, economic decline, and all of its social symptoms, pooled in the city while economic prosperity, and all of its benefits, piled in the county. fourth, this patterning of decline produced a spatial mismatch between unemployed persons and new job opportunities, whereby poorer city residents became further dislocated from emerging opportunities in the more generative county. Between 1979 and 1995, for example, the income gap in St. Louis between high and low wage earners grew dramatically as the two groups became increasingly disconnected. This spatial polarization meant (and continues to mean) that high and low income earners live further from one another. Since 1980, for example, persons with an average income above 125 percent of the primary metropolitan statistical area (PMSA) have become further concentrated in St. Louis County. Conversely, those with incomes of 75 percent of the PMSA average have become further concentrated in the city (Liu 2004). This economic segregation mirrors racial segregation. According to the 2010 census, St. Louis is the ninth most segregated city in America (Bradford 2011).

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These trends not only suggest that class and race define St. Louis’s neighborhoods, but also that these divisions define day-to-day interactions. In all, these four processes have transformed St. Louis into a city-region in ways that isolate city residents from economic opportunities in the county. And, this economic isolation has resulted in some very significant concerns for the city as opposed to the county. The private research firm Morgan Quitno Press, for example, ranked St. Louis the most dangerous city in the United States for 2006 (Christie 2006) and 2010 (garrison 2010). for many, this honor did not come as a surprise. St. Louis has remained among the ten most dangerous cities in the United States for years, and with apparent reason. from 2004 to 2005 the city’s murder rate rose 16 percent, compared with 4.8 percent nationally. In 2006, violent crime in the city of St. Louis rose nearly 20 percent, and at the same time, the city’s rate of aggravated assaults with guns rose more than 30 percent (Leonard 2006). And in 2009, St. Louis had the highest crime rate in the nation with 2,070.1 incidences of violent crimes per 100,000 persons, contrasting sharply against the national average of just 429.4 incidences (garrison 2010). St. Louis regularly outpaces the crime statistics of even the most storied of urban areas in the United States, such as the Bronx (NY), Camden (NJ), and Compton (CA), while also reflecting trends felt in other midsized US cities, such as Baltimore (MD), Detroit (MI), and Washington, DC (Andersen 2003). One consistent reaction to this division is that residents of St. Louis County tend to minimize their sense of responsibility for the region by exercising their rights to shield themselves from the perceived risks of the city. Amid the interplay of rights and responsibility, city residents find themselves cut off from opportunities located in the county. One concrete example of this effort is the failed passage of Proposition M.

Proposition M Brought to a vote in 2008, Proposition M requested a half-cent sales tax increase in St. Louis County to expand MetroTransit, the region’s public transportation system. In the broadest of strokes, MetroTransit is composed of two main elements. The first is MetroBus, which is the region’s public bus service. The second is MetroLink, which is the region’s light rail system. While MetroBus is a well-established feature of the St. Louis landscape, MetroLink is less than two decades old and has, throughout its existence, served as a source of contention.

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On the one hand, MetroLink is one of the most successful light rail systems in America, with anywhere between 70,000 and 100,000 daily riders (Watson and Baer 2008). City officials, urban planners, and city residents alike celebrate MetroLink as a tool to connect underemployed city residents to expanding job opportunities throughout the county (reardon 1997, 243). At the time of the vote, MetroLink enjoyed its highest ridership in over thirty years. The agency, in fact, posted a 15.6 percent increase in riders in the first quarter of 2009. This was the third highest increase in the nation, beating the national average of 10.3 percent. The increase in MetroBus in the same period was 4.2 percent, which was more than twice the 2 percent national increase in bus usage (Stauder 2008). MetroTransit, in a word, had been a complete success in attracting users. On the other hand, a number of problems strained public support for public transit. MetroLink, for one, overextended its operating budget, having to cut services in 2001 by 12 percent. MetroLink’s inability to run at something other than a loss only grew in 2006 when an extension of the railway system proved to be $276 million more expensive than planned. This resulted in a lawsuit between the agency and contractors, which ended in November 2007 with the agency owing $2.6 million to the contractors and $21 million in legal expenses (rivas 2009). The language of mismanagement quickly defined MetroLink among county residents. Yet, more pervasive than the language of mismanagement has been what Teresa Caldeira calls the “talk of crime” (2001)—a more pernicious, more amorphous discourse that clouds debates over the relative value of public transportation in the St. Louis region. for many in the county, MetroLink has been read as a vehicle to bring the city’s violent crime into their suburban neighborhoods. MetroLink, the argument goes, does not connect city to county but rather threatens the county with the city’s problems. This is one very real reason why Proposition M was unsuccessful. While the measure would have raised an estimated $80 million per year for MetroLink, costing the average family in St. Louis County $4 per month, Proposition M failed on November 4, 2008, by a small margin. With nearly 510,000 county voters participating, Proposition M failed with a 52 percent to 48 percent tally. This resulted in massive service cuts, agency-wide job losses, and a fare increase (Watson and Baer 2008). It also delivered MetroTransit a $45 million deficit in its operating budget, prompting the president of MetroTransit to proclaim that “region-wide public transit as we know it had ended” (St. Louis PostDispatch 2009).

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Rights County residents tended to frame their opposition to Proposition M as an exercise in individual rights. County residents maintained the right to vote down a measure that they perceived as bringing the city’s problems to county doorsteps. It was an exercise in individual rights that pivoted on an isomorphic relationship between race, crime, and the city. County residents tend to fear the city’s crime, and this fear tends to be racially coded. It is a deeply entrenched fear that is worth reviewing, and examples are not hard to find. Take, for instance, a pair of robberies during the lead up to Proposition M. A group of teenagers from St. Louis City assaulted three county teenagers near a MetroLink station. The group then boarded MetroLink, rode the train a few more stops, and then assaulted a county family. Two County residents ended up hospitalized. In the context of crime statistics, the event was clearly an anomaly. According to Metro’s data, there were a total of 14 robberies and 24 assaults at the system’s 26 Missouri stations during 2007—out of 19 million passenger boardings (St. Louis Post-Dispatch 2008a). Yet, these assaults hit a nerve. Unsolicited reader comments posted to the website of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch provide a window into an otherwise palpable concern that does not linger so much on an analysis of crime trends as on a deeply racialized county fear of city residents (St. Louis Post-Dispatch 2008b). Three comments stand out not because they are particularly evocative but rather because they are emblematic. One warns: Do not delude yourself about this; [the city’s violence] is a black teenage male problem. They are assaulting and killing each other in record numbers throughout the St. Louis area. Malls along the MetroLink routes have seen rises in robberies, thefts and assaults by backpack wearing Black male teenagers. This is not about racism; this is about taking back your neighborhoods and feeling safe going to dinner or the store. A second reads: You’re on the right track when bringing up the question [of race] but it’s a question for a topic far bigger than this article. Their race is not the issue in regards to how best to provide security on the MetroLink unless it is used in the context of racial profiling. for instance, it would be important to know what the race of the thugs is so that the

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police can better identify potential problems when large groups of this race are seen walking around . . . A third reads: I decided I would never enter the lion’s cage at the zoo so why am I riding public transportation when these thugs are worse than a caged lion. At least if the lion attacks it has a valid reason!!!! race does play a part whether we are too afraid to say it or not. Look at the murders in the City and County. Where are they? Predominantly black neighborhoods. I don’t think you need more proof than that to figure out who commits more crime. I would agree that there are social economic reasons for this but I don’t see the black community or the black race doing much to stop it. Historically, this overtly territorialized racism makes sense when one realizes that St. Louis pioneered the formalization of racial segregation in municipal laws and policies. As early as 1914, for example, city planners and civic organizations began creating subdivisions within St. Louis City and County that explicitly barred nonwhites from establishing residency and that established a floor for the value of single-family homes (gordon 2009, 69). As one residential pamphlet from 1915 by the United Welfare Association explained in no uncertain terms, “Before buying a home in an unrestricted locality, a man usually ascertains very nearly just what his interest, taxes, repairs, etc. are going to cost him . . . but there is no present method by which he may determine how much the property will depreciate because of negro invasion” (gordon 2009, 70). Propertied whites interpreted racial and class minorities as threats to their real estate holdings. To manage this threat, public and private stakeholders alike drew upon the same logic used to justify school segregation to frame (and successfully pass) zoning ordinances that determined where different whites and nonwhites could live. The expansion of St. Louis into a city-region was shaped by the politics of segregation. The practice of formal segregation, for example, occurred at a moment of massive expansion in local and national suburbanization through regulatory bodies, such as the Home Owners Loan Commission (HOLC) in 1933 and the federal Housing Administration (fHA) in 1934 (Jackson 1985). As these federally funded bodies provided the means to develop and expand St. Louis City and County throughout the twentieth century, lawmakers and

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private interest groups crafted legislation that established a deeply rooted sense of people’s proper place. By the 1940s, 380 separate agreements, covenants, and ordinances had been established, restricting the racial occupancy of the city’s residential property base (gordon 2009, 72). During the subsequent decades, the city of St. Louis experienced the most dramatic middle-class white flight to the suburbs of any metropolis in the nation and one of the highest rates of residential segregation (Bourgois 1989, 108). Simply put, racial segregation set the tone for residential development and zoning for St. Louis in the twentieth century, and as a result, St. Louis region remains one of the most politically fragmented, racially segregated, and class stratified regions in the United States. racial segregation that once marked city from county now differentiates neighborhoods within the county. Whites and nonwhites in St. Louis County tend to live in different census tracts, limiting to an alarming degree whites’ interaction with nonwhites and vice versa (farley 2002). This segregation becomes further entrenched by the region’s intensely local political geography. The St. Louis Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) comprises a total of 12 counties and 300 municipalities, making St. Louis second in the county for number of units of government per 100,000 persons (East-West gateway 2002). Practically speaking, this means that St. Louis’s tax base is divided in ways that limit the redirection of tax revenues from municipalities with high average household incomes, such as Ladue ($141,720), towards services for municipalities with low average household incomes, such as Wellston ($18,590). As Eric Sandweiss notes, St. Louisans exhibit a sense of isolating themselves to “protect their interests and not those of others” (Sandweiss 2001, 237). Such a history results in a city-region where poverty and inequality get concentrated in ways that produce spatial disconnections (rather than continuity), social distinctions (rather than solidarity), and a region marked by discord (rather than community). This history engenders a deeply racialized fear that ultimately prompted residents to exercise their right to vote down a perceived threat to themselves and their property. In doing so, the rejection of Proposition M effectively excluded already marginalized groups from entering the spaces of economic prosperity, development, and opportunity.

Regional Responsibility “The question of crime is usually spoken about in coded language,” Steve, a middle-aged transportation planner for a regional intergovernmental agency,

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recalled. “I remember being well out in [the suburbs], and I was asked why we would even contemplate brining light rail out [here] when all of those people from the city are going to come out and steal cars out of the mall parking lot or Tvs from their living rooms.” The fragmented context of St. Louis, Steve and other local planners observed discouragingly, made it difficult for county voters to think of themselves as a part of something larger than their neighborhood. It is a parochial way of seeing St. Louis that contributed to Proposition M’s failure and to the drastic cutbacks to public transportation that followed. According to the Saint Louis regional Transit System’s own calculations, the failure of Proposition M eliminated access to Metro services for a full 10 percent of city households earning under $20,000 annually (Metro St. Louis 2008). Additionally, 7.5 percent of transit-dependent households— which are those households that lack access to any other means of transportation—lost access to Metro services (Metro St. Louis 2008). This means that with the failure of Proposition M, 116,600 city households no longer had access to public transportation of any kind (Metro St. Louis 2008). “for many low income workers,” explained Michael, an environment and community planner from the County, “Metro is the means by which they can get from home to work. Without a good transit system, all kinds of low wage workers from the city would get cut out of jobs. And the businesses that rely on low wage workers in the county would get cut out of employees.” The viability not just of certain city neighborhoods but also of the region as a whole, County planners insisted, lies in preserving the infrastructure of public transportation. funding this investment in transit infrastructure, the city and ultimately of the region requires St. Louisans to look beyond the parochial to see like a planner: to see interconnection and interdependence rather than division and autonomy. getting county residents to see like a planner, the planning community insists, was the first step towards cultivating a commitment to the region’s well-being and a responsibility to it. Urban planners found themselves at the forefront of this conversation, this call for what is probably best understood as “regional responsibility.” “To the issue of crime and MetroLink, I say to people—no one is getting to the county that couldn’t already get there,” quipped Mark, a native county resident and an administrator for intergovernmental affairs in St. Louis, adding: “The collective good of people’s work trips and daily lives being made easier is so far greater than any incident that might occur as a result of having mobility for people who may be out there to cause problems. The train increases mobility for persons that don’t have access to a single occupancy

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vehicle, which has become the assumed way of life in this country. And I am talking about zero car households like the elderly and students who may not have access to a car.” rather than crime and fear, seeing like a planner asks county residents to think instead of the community—a diverse collective containing students, the elderly, and workers—and the social good that comes from getting community members where they need to go: to their jobs, their classes, and to the grocery store, for example. To illustrate this point, planners turn to the example of Chesterfield, Missouri. This is the St. Louis region’s second largest city, and it is a major center for office complexes, health care facilities, and suburban housing, as well as retail developments. All of these industries require large quantities of low-wage labor. Yet, Chesterfield itself is a well-to-do community with median household incomes of approximately $100,000. To correct this impasse, Chesterfield relies on public transportation to move low-wage laborers from St. Louis City to the county. Over 150,000 St. Louis residents, for example, commute more than 20 miles from St. Louis City to work in the county, such as the city of Chesterfield. This strategy only works with a regionally minded public transit system that connects city residents to the sprawling space of the county. It is an economically grounded pitch for county residents who otherwise do not give much thought to public transportation. As Mark explained, “Unless you are a regular bus user, you probably never get on a bus in St. Louis. Schedules are long and complicated to read and most people don’t have them. It’s even hard to read online. Also, the service isn’t that consistent or frequent that you would have confidence that you would receive service anytime in the near future if you just stood at a bus stop.” While many city households survive because of public transit, most county residents struggle to read a bus map, much less identify their neighborhood stop. As cutbacks to Proposition M neared, government officials put forward a new proposition to restore the region’s lost transit services. To garner public support and to save public transportation in St. Louis, Citizens for Modern Transit (CMT), an advocacy body for Metro Transit, took to the airwaves with a public education campaign. Its message was simple: Some of us ride it, all of us need it. “The theme of this campaign was to reach out to nonriders,” explained Tom Shrout, the then director of CMT. “We had advertisements featuring a spokesperson from Washington University explaining that Metro is how students get to class. Another advertisement had a hospital administrator saying that transit is how the people who take care of you get to work.” Planners across city and county rallied behind the slogan. “The campaign

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was very good about creating this sense that people hadn’t thought of,” Mark recalled, “just because you don’t use MetroLink directly doesn’t mean you are not benefiting from it indirectly. You are receiving goods and services from people who do use it, and public transit really was important in a way that people didn’t realize.” The campaign was ultimately successful. On April 6, 2010, St. Louis County residents voted by a wide margin to restore MetroBus and MetroLink services to their previous levels. In its effort to close the gap between planning ideals and citizens’ concerns (see Crawford this volume), the CMT campaign ultimately appealed to individual self-interest. It asked county residents to see the many ways their lives are enriched by those who do use public transit; it is how the labor that cleans their houses and pours their lattes gets to work. Yet St. Louis planners and officials also hoped that this recognition of economic interdependence would be a step towards something bigger: a renewed sense of the collective good and one’s responsibility towards it. “If you look at Metrolink riders,” began Steve, “that is the one place in the region where you see a vast mix of people other than going to a baseball game. You see a wide range of racial mix and economic mix—it’s the one place in St. Louis where St. Louisans are face to face with each other in a nonhostile environment or nonpolitical environment.” Mark concurred: “In a mass transit situation you are forced to be together. It’s a different experience than sitting in your car where you don’t have to be around people that are different from you, that think differently or look differently than you. And it’s a communal experience. I’m not saying all of it is positive. But I think it helps people be less isolated, to think socially.” Public transit, planners across the board admitted, could not overcome on its own the region’s deeply entrenched differences. But it provided an invitation to think about St. Louis beyond the individual or the parochial. Instead, public transit invites St. Louisans to think about one’s dependency upon the region, and in turn, one’s responsibility to it.

Conclusion regional responsibility, as planners make clear, is more of a process than an ethos; yet, as an analytic, it can be a resource, a wider moral or ethical position—one that counterbalances a social imaginary that values isolation over interdependence. A range of scholars approximates this unquantifiable quality. There is, for example, Benedict Anderson’s “deep, horizontal

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comradeship” (Anderson 2006, 7); Iris Marion Young’s characterization of the city as pleasurable in that it opens the citizen up to “people we experience as different” (1990, 239); and even Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of unending responsibility in which the self is not asked to simply feed the hungry with “a gift of the heart, but [rather] of bread from one’s mouth, of one’s own mouthful of bread” (1978, 74). Simply put, there are more than enough theoretical analogues to approximate what appears to be missing in present-day St. Louis. Here, this chapter names it regional responsibility—the recognition that city-regions entangle their residents into a series of social relationships that are not chosen but that cannot be ignored. regional responsibility begins with the openness of opportunity implied by the vision of St. Louis planners, and it demands an organic solidarity that infuses residents to care for and about the entire region. This charge can be filled (must be filled, really) by regional responsibility. Planners tell us as much.

Note 1. In 1989, Mallinckrodt was “decentralized” into two separate companies under the umbrella management of Mallinckrodt group Inc. Tyco International purchased Mallinckrodt’s health care business in 2001. That portion of the company has since been named Covidien.

Works Cited Andersen, Hans Skifter. 2003. Urban Sores: On the Interaction Between Segregation, Urban Decay and Deprived Neighbourhoods. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Anderson, Benedict r. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. New York: verso. Bourgois, Philippe. 1989. “If You’re Not Black You’re White: A History of Ethnic relations in St. Louis.” City & Society 3 (2): 106–31. Bradford, Harry. 2011. “America’s 10 Most Segregated Cities.” Huffington Post (July 4). Caldeira, Teresa P. r. 2001. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Christie, Les. 2006. “Top 25: Most Dangerous and Safest Cities.” CNNMoney. https://money.cnn .com/2006/10/30/real_estate/Most_dangerous_cities/index.htm. Davis, Mike. 2006. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: verso. Dreier, Peter, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom. 2004. Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. East-West gateway. 2002. “St. Louis ranks High in Units of Local government—Low in government Expenditures.” St. Louis: East-West gateway.

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———. 2010. “Potential Markets for Workforce Housing: Managing the Journey to Work for Low and Moderate Income Workers.” St. Louis: East-West gateway. fainstein, Susan S. 2010. The Just City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. farley, John. 2002. “racial Housing Segregation in the St. Louis Metropolitan Area.” Edwardsville Journal of Sociology 2. garrison, Chad. 2010. “Back On Top: St. Louis Named Most Dangerous City in 2010.” Riverfront Times (November 22). gordon, Colin. 2009. Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition. London: routledge. Harvey, David. 2003. “The right to the City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27 (4): 939–41. Heathcott, Joseph. 2005. “Modeling the Urban future: Planning, Slums and the Seduction of growth in St. Louis, 1940–50.” Planning Perspectives 20 (4): 369–87. Heathcott, Joseph, and Maire A Murphey. 2005. “Corridors of flight, Zones of renewal; Industry, Planning and Policy in the Making of Metropolitan St. Louis.” Journal of Urban History 31 (2): 151–89. Jackson, Kenneth T. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. Writings on Cities. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Leonard, Christopher. 2006. “St. Louis ranked Most Dangerous City.” USA Today (October 30). Levinas, Emmanuel. 1978. Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Hague: Nijhoff. Liu, Amy. 2004. Toward Regional Competitiveness: Strategies for Greater St. Louis. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy. Low, Setha M. 2006. “How Private Interests Take Over Public Space: Zoning, Taxes, and Incorporation of gated Communities.” In The Politics of Public Space, ed. Setha M. Low and Neil Smith, 81–103. New York: routledge. Marcuse, Peter, James Connolly, Johannes Novy, Ingrid Olivo, Cuz Potter, and Justin Steil. 2009. Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice (Questioning Cities). City 13. New York: routledge. Massey, Doreen. 2004. “geographies of responsibility.” Geografiska Annaler, Series B: Human Geography 86 (1) (March): 5–18. Metro St. Louis. 2008. “Metro Service reduction Planning Update.” St. Louis: Metro Transit. Orfield, Myron. 2002. American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Orum, Anthony M., and xiangming Chen. 2003. The World of Cities: Places in Comparative and Historical Perspective. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Pastor, Manuel, William Lester, and Justin Scoggins. 2009. “Why regions? Why Now? Who Cares?” Journal of Urban Affairs 31 (3): 269–96. Putnam, robert D. 2001. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. reardon, Kenneth. 1997. “State and Local revitalization Efforts in East St. Louis, Illinois.” American Academy of Political and Social Science (May): 235–47. rivas, rebecca. 2009. “Prop A Supporters Work North St. Louis County.” St. Louis: Transportation Equity Network.

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Sandercock, Leonie, and Peter Lyssiotis. 2003. Cosmopolis II : Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century. London: Continuum. Sandweiss, Eric. 2001. St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Soja, Edward W. 2000. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. London: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2010. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stauder, Susan. 2008. “riding on Proposition M.” St. Louis: greater St. Louis Transit Alliance. St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 2008a. “Prop M Is People.” ———. 2008b. “Thursday Editorial: Crime, race and Metrolink.” ———. 2009. “renewed Transit Campaign Will Test of St. Louis values.” US Census Bureau. 2005. “Missouri Census Data Center (MCDC) Demographic Profile 3, St. Louis County, 2000 Census.” Jefferson City. ———. 2012. “St. Louis County, Missouri; St. Louis City, Missouri: Quick facts.” Washington, DC. Warner, Michael. 2002. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14 (1): 49–90. Watson, Jeffrey, and robert Baer. 2008. Annual Report. St. Louis: Bi-State Development Agency of the Missouri-Illinois Metropolitan District. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zukin, Sharon. 2008. “Consuming Authenticity.” Cultural Studies 22 (5) (September): 724–48.

ChAPTer 9

Power without the Mustache Urban Quality as Planning Practice in Postindustrial Barcelona Trevor goldsmith

Power is exercised much more subtly than before. Before it was very easy. Power had a mustache. he was this disgusting guy, and he would say to you, “you disgusting citizen! what are you doing here?” it was easy to see that this man exercised power. Today . . . today it’s more difficult. —niklas, independent architect and president of neighbors in defense of the old Barcelona

The beginning of Barcelona’s equivocal experience with urban planning has a precise date: on July 8, 1860, a royal decree was issued requiring the implementation of civil engineer Ildefons Cerdà’s expansion plan, known as the Eixample. To the helpless consternation of municipal authorities, the royal intervention nullified the outcome of a competition that gave victory to a plan authored by the architect Antoni rovira i Trias.1 foreshadowing what became a persistent chasm between theory and practice as well as the specific and unfortunate fate of Cerdà’s plan—its most salubrious proposals were ignored or subverted—the new urban center envisioned by Cerdà, the Plaça de les glòries Catalanes, remained largely derelict for the next 120 years. The seat of Barcelona’s Municipal Institute of Urbanism (IMU) now overlooks this Plaça, which has been a fitful site of development since the 1990s.

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The accusations of bureaucratic opacity, indifference, and ineptitude inaugurated by the selection of Cerdà’s plan and its dreadful execution have, perhaps not surprisingly, retained their currency. But matters are not so simple, as I was to discover in a conversation with Pilar, a high-level IMU functionary and architect, in her office crowded with files dedicated to urban projects in the city’s most neglected neighborhoods. I then began to realize that the mythic figure of the autocratic and out-of-touch urban planner was an inadequate representation of reality. In the early 1990s, Pilar had championed a project to rectify the Plaça de Lesseps, an infamously botched product of predemocratic municipal planning that had turned the central public space of the middle-class neighborhood of gràcia into a polluted and unusable hump. Her project was killed by the Transportation Department, which was unwilling to block a busy thoroughfare during construction. Nearly ten years later, however, a well-organized grassroots campaign brought a new Transportation Department–sponsored project, which had not addressed the Plaça’s fundamental problems, to a halt. With that plan immobilized, Pilar’s original vision of the new Plaça—a vision that coincided with, but certainly did not create, the grassroots mobilizers’ vision—achieved the final victory over the site’s future. “Citizen intervention, at the end of the day,” Pilar mused, “helped us. . . . I mean, very often grassroots pressure is . . . it’s good for us.” But, she quickly clarified: “Listen, I’m saying this out of the side of my mouth because it’s good for me. But the guy from Transportation, well, if he hears me, he’ll kill me.” Pilar was an able and effective professional, admired by her colleagues and liked by grassroots activists. But she was also a pragmatist. To those who imagine urban planners as unfeeling tyrants, seeing them as cowed pragmatists, mediators, and team members—as people who welcome democratic accountability—may seem either puzzling or disingenuous. Consider Le Corbusier’s 1925 Plan voisin, which sought to extirpate most of central Paris, showing a monumental disregard for the political will and sentimental attachments of city residents. Anthropologists are familiar with James Holston’s (1989) portrait of Lúcio Costa’s Master Plan for Brasília, which envisioned the city from afar and above and was imposed through authoritarian means. If present-day urban planners look more like Pilar and less like Le Corbusier or Costa, then our image of the planner must be updated. In what follows I will present a historically and ethnographically informed portrait of the figure of the contemporary urban planner and a narrative of how and

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why this figure has arisen in a particular time and place—Barcelona—at the turn of the millennium. In Spain, the disempowerment of the urban planner followed the rise to popular and professional dominance of a planning ideology centered on the notion of quality. Quality as a planning philosophy and planning goal is self-evidently problematic. It immediately raises the question, “Quality for whom?” As a word, concept, and aspiration, however, quality pervades the legal underpinnings and daily practice of, and the public pronouncements on, urban planning. Phrases invoking quality (Spanish: calidad, Catalan: qualitat)—be it quality of life, urban quality, or quality urban planning—crop up constantly in architectural manifestos (Bohigas 1985), political platforms (Maragall 1991), oppositional intellectual statements (Castells 1977), planning documents, dialogues between planners and stakeholders, and my own ethnographic interviews. Naturally a broadly shared concern with some hazy notion of quality does not mean that these differently positioned voices necessarily agree on anything at all. Quality is too general a notion to provide a descriptive backing for a specific urban planning paradigm. In matters of urban planning in Barcelona, I have observed that quality primarily means the first-person experience of inhabiting the cityscape. Improving urban quality means improving aspects of the built environment that affect the lives of end users who reside in that environment. The work of sociologist Manuel Castells inspires my understanding of notions of urban quality and quality urbanism. It is not incidental to our present concern that Castells, a theorist of the urban, was a participant in Spanish urban struggles of the 1970s, particularly in Madrid. In these dynamic contexts, he saw the political mobilizations in which he was involved as the sign of a historico-political shift from the city as exchange-value to the city as use-value (Castells 1983, 261 and 319). I accept the validity of this Marxian distinction, but I think it is a worthwhile exercise to clarify it and perhaps bring it up to date. Depending on one’s perspective, a cityscape can have many “users,” which also means that it can have many use-values. The distinction also implies that the urban paradigm emerging in the 1970s (whatever one chooses to call it) was fundamentally incompatible with modern capitalist rationality.2 Yet quality-oriented urbanism often does little to ameliorate historical inequalities rooted in class divisions, a fact that its early theorists frankly admitted.3 Even so, Barcelona’s new urbanism, emphasizing this notion of quality, does contrast markedly with the reality of urban planning under franco’s

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dictatorship. The earlier urbanism was little concerned with the end-users’ quality of life. Quality could be, and was, ignored so long as the resulting cityscape provided a space for the maintenance and reproduction of labor power. I think of this as “productivist” urbanism. It undergirded the burgeoning industrial economy, profited developers, helped sustain and legitimate the dictatorship, and ignored a nonsovereign citizenry. The democratic urbanism of quality, on the other hand, must satisfy political constituents who reside in the same cityscape that is the object of planning. Even so, some constituencies still seem to matter more than others. So, what I am calling “quality urbanism” is neither an absolute nor a homogeneous force, a fact driven home by intellectuals who criticize the city’s “model” of development and the self-satisfied politicians who espouse it.4

The Development of Trinitat Nova: Urban Planning and Urban Quality in Franco-Era Barcelona The rise of quality-centric planning and the subsequent decline of planners’ power is especially vivid in the history of Trinitat Nova, a small workingclass neighborhood on the northeastern edge of Barcelona’s municipal limits. Unusually for Barcelona and for Spain, Trinitat Nova consists entirely of public housing units built during the franco period. But the neighborhood’s cityscape and its inhabitants bear the marks of a history shared with many other working-class communities that found only harsh and unwelcoming accommodation on the edges of the city whose prosperity they created. In the early 2000s, the neighborhood was in the midst of a profound urban transformation, to which I will return in later sections of this essay. The absence of urban quality has in a very real sense defined the Trinitat Nova community. Trinitat Nova exists because, to begin with, its location and topography had made it a marginal and undesirable space: within the city but still not really urban. The site had not been zoned for intensive urban development in the 1953 regional Plan for Barcelona. A significant reason for this exclusion is that the site’s location—far from the commercial center and on the steep slopes of the hills of Collserola—had previously made development difficult and commercially unattractive. The land of Trinitat Nova was thus both readily available and exceptionally cheap for Barcelona. In 1955, aerial photos captured Trinitat Nova at the moment of its inauguration, conducted by franco himself. The state housing agency Syndical

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Housing Works (Obra Sindical del Hogar, OSH) had built one prominent group of housing blocks; they sit in a dusty no-man’s-land formerly occupied by meager vineyards. Between 1953 and 1963, three public housing agencies—OSH, the city’s Municipal Housing Authority (Patronato Municipal de la vivienda, PMv), and another state agency known as the National Housing Institute (Instituto Nacional de la vivienda)—constructed Trinitat Nova’s some 3,300 housing units in the form of multifamily blocks through a series of approximately six interventions. By the mid-1970s, the neighborhood population had reached a zenith of around 20,000 residents. Most were unskilled factory workers who were part of the tide of labor migrants arriving from southern provinces of Spain. These groups swelled the population of metropolitan Barcelona from around 1.5 million in 1950 to 2.7 million in 1970 (Corporación Metropolitana de Barcelona 1976, 9). In spite of being built by state bureaucracies, none of the interventions in Trinitat Nova were made under the auspices of the appropriate planning authority. As with so many Barcelona developments, public and private, the plans for Trinitat Nova were legalized after the fact. In many cases, the designers of the blocks did not even bother to meet municipal building regulations that established minimum standards of “habitability” for new construction. Nonetheless, a legal framework for centralized urban planning did exist in Barcelona. The legally binding regional Plan of 1953 had decreed a system of functional zoning for the city, a system designed to channel the city’s growth efficiently. A national planning law, the Ley del Suelo, was approved in 1956 and provided legal backing for Barcelona’s regional Plan. Neither plan nor law was enforced. By 1970, OSH had built nearly 45,000 housing units within the province of Barcelona (the territorial unit that included most of the metropolitan area), and PMv had added another 18,000 units. As significant as these numbers are, they nonetheless account for only 17 percent of the total of 366,621 units built within the province between 1950 and 1970 (ferrer i Aixalà 1996, 37). That is because private developers were far and away the most important actors in meeting Barcelona’s housing demand. given the lack of lawful planning by public developers, the modus operandi of private developers followed suit. Like public developers, their private counterparts simply ignored planning laws and building regulations and often built on the cheapest available land in the periphery of the city. Housing developments intended for the working class, whether publicly or privately initiated, frequently lacked such basic amenities as paved streets, sidewalks, and functioning sewage systems.

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Also lacking were schools, health clinics, public meeting places, and markets. The apartments themselves were not only very small but also poorly designed and cheaply built. features common to many of these developments include thin walls with little soundproofing, poor insulation, inadequate interior lighting, and deficient exterior drainage. The unchecked urban growth and corruption of this period are generally associated with the figure of Josep Maria de Porcioles i Colomer, appointed mayor of Barcelona in 1957 by franco in person. Porcioles had close ties with developers, landowners, and construction companies. Major residential development could not go forward without his knowledge and consent or, as his adversaries contended, his private financial participation (see Alibés et al. 1973). The period of porciolisme (as the time of Porcioles’s tenure is known) is what produced the stereotype of “power with a mustache,” as Niklas so colorfully calls it. Power in the city was in the hands of a contemptuous and antidemocratic property-holding elite, primarily intent on lining its own pockets at the citizens’ expense. given the severe housing shortage and the massive immigration of the period, Barcelona’s housing market was mercilessly supply driven. Destitute labor migrants faced the choice of “this house” or no house at all. Nonetheless, the conspicuous lack of urban quality even in the freshly inaugurated Trinitat Nova ultimately led to class-based collective action. By 1958, the poor design and construction quality of the PMv blocks, accompanied by maintenance problems that were typically left unresolved, had aroused major discontent. By 1970, the neighborhood had become a powerful force in housing activism, leading the first successful rent strike against the PMv and collaborating with other communities to block the construction of a freeway that would have destroyed their neighborhoods. In fact, poor living conditions, above all in working-class neighborhoods located like Trinitat Nova on the periphery of the city, led to the mobilization of vecinos (neighbors or local residents) all over the city. These residentactivists understood that opposing the prevailing models of urbanism of the time was also a way to oppose the dual tyrannies of capitalism and the franco regime. forming themselves into neighborhood associations, vecinos led what James Holston (this volume and 2008) would certainly recognize as a democratic insurgency, one that thematized end users’ experiences of urban quality and of urban qualities. These movements found strong support among young architects and other university-trained professionals. With the gravitas of these experts to aid them, such collective movements not only

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publicly demanded urban quality improvements but also made sophisticated counterproposals to official plans that held negative quality implications (see CIDUr 1977; fabre and Huertas 1977; Borja, Boix, and Campo 1977). franco’s death in late 1975 began the troubled but ineluctable movement toward democracy for the Spanish state. On the local level, neighborhood associations were loud voices that made a variety of demands during this period, but they were generally accorded a subordinate role in the transition, at least according to conventional historiography (see, e.g., Preston 1986; Tamames 1986: riquer and Culla 1989). In Barcelona, municipal democracy was finally achieved in 1979 with the victory of the Socialists’ Party of Catalonia (Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya, PSC) in free elections. Practically speaking, the return of democracy brought into power some of the very same architects and professionals who had proven so important as technical advisors to neighborhood organizations during conflicts over the definitions and material forms of urban quality. But the movement towards a new notion of urban quality was not only the result of grassroots protests. In fact, a parallel “quality” revolution in planning had happened within the professional institutions of the very actors who would shape the future city. By the early 1960s, young architects and planners who entered municipal planning were generally clandestine dissenters to franco’s regime. They understood themselves to be laying the groundwork for urban planning under democratic institutions. The magnum opus authored by members of this group, the general Metropolitan Plan (Plan general Metropolitano, PgM-76), became law in 1976, three years before the return of democratic municipal rule. The PgM-76 conceived of “the quality of life” and “the quality of urban space” as the most important measures of the success of the planning enterprise. But the planners’ interest in urban quality was motivated by something quite different than the desire to redress class inequities. They felt that the city’s “Calcutta-type densities” lowered quality of life and threatened to drive away businesses and higher-income city dwellers (Corporación Metropolitana de Barcelona 1976, 9–11). They saw lowering density, the plan’s hallmark achievement, as the key to improving quality of life and reversing the prevailing trend. In this plan, improving urban quality also involved the efficient provision of urban services. The availability of green space, transportation, education, and health care hardly seem “qualitative” in the anthropological sense. But these were the areas where real improvements in the experience of the city could be made.5 Moreover, communal services and resources, known as

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equipamiento in the jargon of zoning, all required specific, dedicated urban spaces. One of the PgM-76’s most significant achievements was to set official minimums for the zoning of equipamiento of different orders. Despite these positive aspects, however, conflict with the plan’s underlying technocratic ethos persists to this day. The plan did not create an institutional framework for bringing local citizens’ concerns to bear directly on the planning process, although in this respect it differed little from planning frameworks developed in fully functioning liberal democracies.

Urban Quality in Practice: The Reconstruction of Trinitat Nova In the early years of democracy, quality-oriented planning could still coexist with the aims of powerful autocratic planners who conformed to the modernist stereotype. Under the PSC banner, “the people,” along with the dissident planners who helped them, were now in charge (at least at Barcelona’s City Hall) and could use the power of the state to improve urban quality directly. At least, this was the alibi that planners offered for proceeding with quality improvement projects in the absence of institutional mechanisms for holding them accountable to end users’ own preferences for the cityscape. In the decades following the transition, however, urban planners and the private architects who worked with them underwent a professional transformation. My observations of the reform project in Trinitat Nova demonstrated specifically that contemporary planners are now, generally speaking, pragmatic, apolitical managers of urban projects selected and designed by others. In spite of their relative disempowerment as compared to their predecessors, planners of the contemporary period remain prototypical agents of the state. The ambivalence of their position is reflected by the word técnico (engineer, expert), which everyday citizens often use to refer to them. Técnicos are respected for their professional expertise. Even so, calling planners técnicos is also a means of absolving them of responsibility for unpopular projects. Planners are often the vehicles of bad news, but savvy residents know that the real decision-making authority lies not with the técnico, but with the político (politician), that is, the técnico’s politically appointed boss. Considering that técnicos are understood to be masters of “the numbers,” the planners’ demotion to the status of técnico is a sign of the relegation of quantitative knowledge within the reigning urban quality paradigm.

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regarding themselves as repositories of often-arcane and nonintuitive knowledge, planners frequently complained that they were misunderstood by both residents and the representatives of state agencies. They expressed frustration at residents’ ability to undermine their sound planning ideas—usually because of inept communication and public relations—and complained that they were turned into liars by other institutions that reneged on key design promises. Even so, one should not think of these comfortably middle-class professionals as objects of pity; as Michael Herzfeld acknowledges (this volume), planners are very often well intentioned and aware of the limitations of the institutions within which they work. To understand more fully the complexities and constraints that contemporary planners experience in Barcelona, it is important to offer a portrait of the quality regime in action in the comprehensive redevelopment of Trinitat Nova. By the time of my field research (from 2004 to 2005), Trinitat Nova had changed dramatically—both socially and in terms of urban design—from what it had been at the height of its political relevance in the 1970s. from its 1970 peak of 20,000, the neighborhood’s population had dropped to around 8,000 residents. The basic urban services—such as roads, sidewalks, stoplights—that the neighborhood lacked at its inception were now in place and functional. But the residents were profoundly marked by the struggle (lucha) to achieve these basic amenities. As Susana, a middle-aged, second-generation resident of Trinitat Nova, explained to me in the modest meeting room of the Neighborhood Association: “It’s always been a continual struggle (lucha continua) of all the residents to improve the neighborhood, understand? I remember my father—may he rest in peace—well, the first social center we had, they fought for it (lo lucharon) together with others like them, of their generation.” Awareness of this long-standing struggle was still very much present for all the residents who participated frequently in the Neighborhood Association. Then in the early 1990s, Trinitat suffered its worst blow; it was discovered that structural faults, which were due to poorly made concrete, affected more than 900 apartments built by the PMv. Without prompt intervention, the apartments threatened to collapse. As it turned out, tens of thousands of housing units of the same vintage all over Catalonia and indeed all of Spain were in similarly poor shape. Consequently, Trinitat Nova’s problems fell largely outside of the competency of Barcelona’s City Hall and of IMU. So the Catalan regional government, the generalitat, through the general Administration of Architecture and Housing (Direcció general d’Arquitectura i Habitatge, DgAH) and its sister-institution,

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the Catalan Land Institute (Institut Catala del Sol), took the lead in planning to tear down the old apartments and replace them with new ones. Trinitat Nova had an exceptionally active Neighborhood Association, although not necessarily a highly representative one. The official president, Juan Carlos, and the vice-president, Maria, together with the Urban reform Working group (grupo de remodelación), effectively made decisions for the entire barrio (although the Working group was open to all, weekly attendance fluctuated between ten and twenty vecinos.) After lengthy negotiations and an unprecedented process of participative design in which the association drew upon the knowledge of at least three sets of independent técnicos, it reached an agreement with regional and municipal administrations on a Special Plan for Internal reform (Plan Especial de reforma Interior) for Trinitat Nova. This legally binding document set forth a planning vision for the comprehensive redesign—literally a “reconstruction”—of the neighborhood and stated one primary objective: to improve the “conditions of life” for residents. This overt nod to quality was a standard element in reform plans. In this sense, Trinitat Nova’s early twenty-first-century experience is representative of urban projects across the city and region, which were and are being organized around notions of “urban quality” and “quality of life.” But the generic demand for quality was further particularized in Trinitat Nova as a desire for the sustainability of the revamped neighborhood—a partial consequence of its exceptional circumstances and resources. for the architects and planners in charge of Trinitat Nova, “sustainability” specifically meant minimizing the consumption of resources—primarily building materials, water, and electricity—during the life cycle of the development. The Working group accepted this definition as a starting point, often referring to their new neighborhood as the Eco-barrio. But in the absence of consensus about the standards of ecological building and planning, it is not surprising that active vecinos of Trinitat Nova had a different understanding. for them, “sustainability” had become another way to talk about reducing all of the historical, infrastructural, and cultural deficits that Trinitat Nova had suffered since its conception. Discussing the difficulties that the Trinitat Nova project presented, the technical director of urbanism, Pere, whom I interviewed at IMU, wavered between admiration and exasperation at the Neighborhood Organization’s self-confidence and determination: “[The residents in Trinitat Nova] introduced factors like sustainability, urban quality [calidad urbana] [and said] ‘We want this to be a showcase neighborhood.’ . . . That’s a big difference with respect to other barrios. The majority of them have similar problems, and

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what they want is, ‘Listen, it’s all the same to me. . . . What I want is my home, and tomorrow if possible. And I’m not going to lose a month for this all to be “sustainable.” ’ ” given his career trajectory, one might suppose that Pere would be less surprised by residents’ ability to marshal technical expertise and their desire to advance a symbolic and political—rather than purely practical—goal. As a young professional, Pere had served as a pro bono advisor to a neighborhood association in Barcelona’s dilapidated historic center. The “People’s Plan,” which he helped author in the mid-1970s, had in fact been adopted as the official reform model for the area. By the early 2000s, however, many residents had mobilized against it, both in new organizations such as Neighbors in Defense of the Old Barcelona, as well as through the historic Neighborhood Association of the barrio. At the grassroots level, the urban quality movement had come full circle and was now questioning the very técnicos it had once trusted. It is a relatively open secret that Barcelona’s contemporary planners and architects generally believe that quality goals can best be met when citizens’ voices are excluded. The democratic transition in Spain did not bring with it any commitment to, or mechanisms for, participative planning. In fact, the managerial practices of contemporary planning in Spain presuppose that quality will be the inevitable outcome of the professionalism and financial disinterestedness of planners and architects. Interventions in the cityscape are complicated and rely on private firms to draw up zoning maps, design buildings, and construct them. Contemporary planning in Barcelona outsources as much design work as possible, divides authorship into discrete phases, and creates opportunities for the supposedly rational review of prior outputs. The pretension of the state planning agencies is that every phase of an intervention can be best managed independently of the others through continuous, rational, disinterested vetting by qualified professionals. I call this system of planning and execution of urban reform “distributed design” to offer a shorthand for understanding its decentralized distribution of responsibilities. One of the outcomes—indeed one of the goals—of distributed design is the disempowerment of individual planners. Manuel ruisanchez is a well-regarded private architect who built several housing blocks in the earliest phase of the Trinitat Nova project. He explained to me his strategy for dealing with what is clearly the toughest challenge to distributed design: how to ensure that its aims are not negated or subverted by other actors intervening in later phases of this circuitous process. “I always say . . . it’s got to be vandal-proof architecture. Against the administration, against

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the users, against the contractors, against other architects. That’s the way I think that architecture has to be more and more. You can’t trust that your wishes will become reality right up until the very end. It’s impossible! There are going to be accidents, there are going to be inputs [sic] throughout the process.” ruisanchez’s work is evidence that distributed design can spur planners and architects to achieve their own aims for urban quality. Vecinos had no voice in the design competition that led to his commission. But during revision of the initial project, planners at the DgAH discovered that the northsouth axis demarcated on his original plans was incorrect. realigning the buildings inspired ruisanchez to use an unusual “articulated tower” typology that changed the ecological profile of the buildings and also changed their visual character. ruisanchez’s “antivandal” design philosophy was vindicated in this case. But as a managerial system, distributed design often seems better at creating a paper trail useful for allocating blame when a project fails than at ensuring that planners “live up to” their own quality aims. The boosters for most urban projects—such as government officials and private developers—rest content with the power of distributed design to yield quality improvements. But as the cases of the Trinitat Nova neighborhood and the unusable Plaça Lesseps prove, vigorous mobilization by vecinos can halt major projects. Once vecinos enter the picture, the ambivalent character of planners and their propensity to experience frustration under the new “quality” paradigm become manifest. The root of the planners’ frustration can be traced to a basic dilemma: if “quality urbanism” is about improving the end users’ experiences of inhabiting the cityscape, how can one disagree with the residents about what constitutes a “high-quality” experience? Indeed, Trinitat Nova’s Neighborhood Association articulates an unequivocal commitment to this ideal: “Everyone is an expert in something. The vecinos are experts in living in their neighborhood.” felipe, a functionary and architect, was one of the supervisors of the Trinitat Nova project in its later stages. In the offices of the DgAH, just a few steps from some of the city’s most famous landmarks, he shared with me the difficulty in convincing Trinitat Nova’s residents of the agency’s commitment to sustainability. His resigned conclusion was that technical knowledge mattered less than image: In Spain a half a million housing units are constructed per year. . . . I am certain that not even one percent of the flats know how much energy they consume. Something that [in Trinitat Nova],

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we do know. . . . The thing is that, of course, this doesn’t have any media impact. I was telling the office chief the other day . . . that in addition to being good, it has to look good too, right? We have to find something where I can say “Look! This is sustainable. And it works. We are all satisfied. Now we are going to do it right.” It is hard to ignore the bitterness in these remarks. But felipe was in a unique position to appreciate vecinos’ perspectives. The residents of Trinitat Nova personally liked this reserved, soft-spoken, careful listener. Unlike any other planner I met in Barcelona, felipe was one of them, a “kid from the neighborhood” (hijo del barrio, literally: son of the barrio). His own parents were labor migrants, although they hailed from the northern region of Aragón rather than the more stigmatized southern region of Andalucía. He had himself grown up in a Barcelona suburb. In fact, when I met him, he lived in Badía, an enormous late-franco-era social housing development in Barcelona’s hinterland. felipe showed a rare dedication to communicating with vecinos, who in turn respected him. He often stayed in the city much later than the end of his official working day to attend meetings with vecinos, a practice discontinued by the successor to his post. Trinitat Nova’s neighborhood association wrested numerous design concessions from the DgAH, all of which hinged on the contested meaning of “sustainability.” Their greatest success was in forcing the redesign of a proposed block whose urban qualities its members believed would be less than ideal. The block in dispute—the so-called B block from the second phase of the development—was the largest in the new development, containing 133 apartments. The association believed that the architect’s proposal of an internal courtyard—a standard design far from limited to public housing—compromised energy efficiency. The DgAH disagreed. But after much wrangling, it nonetheless agreed to commission técnicos of the association’s own choosing to arbitrate the dispute. Although the mathematical modeling of the energy efficiency of the design in question was inconclusive, the DgAH’s politically appointed secretary agreed to a costly redesign. The vecinos were ecstatic. Their quality concerns had prevailed. But even though they had legitimate reasons for preferring the new design, the implications of the quality-planning paradigm in contemporary Barcelona are generally less clear. The administration’s capitulation, in spite of the inconclusive quantitative data, clearly shows that an appeal based on the supposed hard logic of numbers no longer inevitably functions as the welfare state’s

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final authorization to act. It does, on the other hand, expose something potentially even more disturbing about the new planning regime: that the decision was entirely subjective and political.

Conclusion In the preceding pages, I have argued that urban planning in Barcelona is ideologically and institutionally oriented toward quality, understood as the improvement of the firsthand experience of inhabiting the cityscape. This new quality orientation is an integral part of what has triggered the planner’s relative disempowerment, and contrasts with the experience of their political bosses. My portrait of contemporary planning in Barcelona also suggests that the modernist vision of planning has been superseded. franco’s traditionalist Spain never embraced the modernist aesthetic of the early twentieth century. But the 1953 plan for Barcelona shared with modernism a naïve view in the power of the planning ideal itself, in planning’s ability to dispose of people as if they were things, and in planning’s uncontested dominance in a complicated world of interlocking private interests. Quality urbanism is postmodernist in the most literal sense. It is the dominant paradigm of planning after Spain’s own experience of modernism, and it has renounced modernism’s god’s-eye-view largely because of modernism’s failure to achieve its own aims. On the face of it, it is hard to fathom how qualitative concerns can become pivotal to the decision making of a deeply bureaucratized state apparatus, where decision making is supposed to be rational and “without regard for persons,” as Weber so sharply puts it (1978, 975). But this problem is more apparent than real. The achievement of a good or “high” quality of life in the city ultimately does involve subjective judgment. But many of the qualities that affect urban living—a balance in population density, low pollution, ease of the use of transportation—are neither subjective nor in much dispute. rational decision making based on quantitative data is, in these areas, not at odds with qualitative concerns.6 To the contrary, the ability to marshal and present such data is the sine qua non for having quality decisions adjudicated in one’s favor. According to foucault’s (1991) famous formulation of governmentality, the modern state is bound—historically, existentially, and practically—to techniques of knowledge based on counting and quantifying, the natural domain of trained experts or “technicians.” As foucault points out, quantification is essential to understanding modern economic phenomena, the

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rational management of which is the modern state’s chief concern. In this formulation, experts—even quantification itself—appear to stand on the side of the state, and subjects’ contingent inability to engage in experts’ quantitative discourse puts them at a perpetual disadvantage. In modern European welfare states, however, the relevance of this particular modality of “seeing like a state” (Scott 1998) has been significantly diminished. Critically, the social division of technical expertise is not as sharp as it once was. Trinitat Nova’s residents did not themselves have formal technical expertise in architecture or urban planning, but they obtained it over time through publicity and mobilization. This sometimes happened on a pro bono basis, but it has often relied on state funding. But the relative democratization of technical expertise puts into ever-sharper relief the subordination of the técnicos, with their quantitative expertise, to the subjective exercise of state power. It is not that numbers have ceased to matter. But now there can no longer be any doubt that politics always matters more. Power has indeed lost its mustache. Perhaps it stands out less in the crowd, but its lower profile belies its importance and masks its subjective character. This explains the chagrin of some of the técnicos at the energy consultancy Aiguasol, which had conducted the energy efficiency modeling that preceded Trinitat Nova’s greatest triumph over the state—the redesign of the massive B block. These planners were politically sympathetic with the vecinos, but as one of them explained, “I mean, our studies don’t say anything. That is, they give the numbers. Our studies don’t say that one thing is better than another.” There was in fact a historical moment when, for better or worse, the técnicos and the políticos were the same people. But the moment has long passed. As Maria, the vice-president of Trinitat Nova’s Neighborhood Association, remarked with her characteristic incisiveness: “The técnicos, when we get to the técnicos, it’s because the político has already said yes.”

Notes All translations are my own. Unless otherwise noted, they are from Castilian Spanish, not Catalan. I would like to extend special thanks to the Neighborhood Association of Trinitat Nova for welcoming me during my field research from 2004 to 2005. The research on which this chapter is based was supported by a grant from the fulbright Scholarship Program. 1. See Domingo 1973. 2. As a partisan intellectual, Castells (1977) believed that mobilization around the city as a use-value cut across traditional class boundaries and could reconcile democracy with socialism.

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3. The authors of Barcelona’s still-current general Metropolitan Plan of 1976 bluntly remarked: “[The Plan] is a project for a viable Barcelona, ambitious in some respects . . . simply modest in others. Many sectors of the area might continue to be very poorly off for years within the perspective of the Plan” (Corporación Metropolitana de Barcelona 1976, 55). 4. See Delgado 2010, Unió Temporal d’Escribes 2004, and von Heeren 2002. 5. recent anthropological investigation of “infrastructure” (Anand, gupta, and Appel 2018) demonstrates how politically charged and culturally creative such apparently mundane urban elements can be. 6. Chumley (2013) rigorously demonstrates how qualitative judgments can be subjected to a “quantifying regime” whose output is fully amenable to bureaucratic rationality.

Works Cited Alibés, Josep M., Manuel J. Campo, Eugeni giral, Josep M. Huertas, rafael Pradas, and Salvador Tarragó. 1973. La Barcelona de Porcioles. Barcelona: Editorial Laia. Anand, Nikhil, Akhil gupta, and Hannah Appel, eds. 2018. The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bohigas, Oriol. 1985. La reconstrucció de Barcelona. Barcelona: Edicions 62. Borja, Jordi, ricard Boix, and Marçal Tarragó. 1977. Por una política municipal democrática. Barcelona: Centre d’Estudis d’Urbanisme. Castells, Manuel. 1977. Ciudad, democracia y socialismo: La experiencia de las asociaciones de vecinos de Madrid. Madrid: Siglo veintiuno Editores. ———. 1983. The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chumley, Lily. 2013. “Evaluation regimes and the Qualia of Quality.” Anthropological Theory 13 (1/2): 169–83. CIDUr [Centro de Investigación y Documentación Urbana y rural]. 1977. Las asociaciones de vecinos en la encrucijada: El movimiento ciudadano en 1976–77. Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre. Corporación Metropolitana de Barcelona. 1976. Plan General Metropolitano de Ordenación Urbana de la Entidad Municipal Metropolitana de Barcelona. Barcelona: Corporación Metropolitana de Barcelona. Delgado, Manuel. 2010. La ciudad mentirosa: Fraude y miseria del “modelo Barcelona.” Barcelona: Libros de la Catarata. Domingo, Miguel. 1973. “Consideraciones sobre el Plan Cerdà.” Construcción Arquitectura Urbanismo 19: 80–89. foucault, Michel. 1991. “governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. graham Burchell, Colin gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. fabre, Jaume, and Josep Maria Huertas. 1977. Tots els barris de Barcelona. 7 vols. Barcelona: Edicions 62. ferrer i Aixalà, Amador. 1996. Els polígons de Barcelona: L’habitatge massiu i la formació de l’àrea metropolitana. Barcelona: Edicions UPC. Holston, James. 1989. The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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———. 2008. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Maragall, Pasqual. 1991. Barcelona: La ciutat retrobada. Barcelona: Edicions 62. Preston, Paul. 1986. The Triumph of Democracy in Spain. New York: Methuen. riquer, Borja de, and Joan B. Culla. 1989. El franquisme i la transició democrática: 1939–1988. Barcelona: Edicions 62. Scott, James. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tamames, ramón. 1986. Historia de España: La Republica, La era de Franco. Madrid: Aleanza. Unió Temporal d’Escribes. 2004. Barcelona, marca registrada: Un model per desarmar. Barcelona: virus Editorial. von Heeren, Stefanie. 2002. La remodelación de Ciutat Vella: Un análisis crítica del modelo Barcelona. Barcelona: veïns en Defensa de la Barcelona vella. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

ChAPTer 10

The games we Play what is Participation in Urban Planning? insights from warsaw Monika sznel

Over the past decade, “participatory planning” (planowanie partycypacyjne) has become a popular term among Polish urban planners and architects disillusioned with modernist, top-down models. It has also attracted middle-class citizens demanding greater inclusion in planning. These developments reflect worldwide trends, as decisions made authoritatively behind a planner’s desk no longer seem credible as they generate unnecessary spatial conflicts and hurt ordinary people. Participatory planning is especially meant to address these critiques. The Polish experience reflects the same pattern of enthusiasm and disillusionment that Arnstein (1969) noted early in the development of a similar rhetoric in the United States and that a recent themed section of the International Journal of Heritage Studies (see De Cesari and Dimova 2018 [2019]) tracked across a broadening pool of Western European and other states with variable traditions of democratic experimentation. In the Polish case, we can follow the concept of participatory planning over time as it moves from socialism to neoliberalism, exposing both similarities and differences between these politico-economic systems. Polish participatory planning, then, has over time paradoxically created new power imbalances and injustices while also maintaining existing neoliberal political and economic structures. Introduced in its most recent form in the late 1990s, it was designed to mesh with the public policies of the democratic state.1 Since the accession of formerly socialist Eastern European countries to the European

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Union in 2004, moreover, it became institutionalized within EU-financed urban and social regeneration programs. As a result, participation became another box to be ticked to get funds, and this changed its character and let to the disillusionments to be described in the pages ahead. Polish citizens had assumed that participatory planning could offer revolutionary alternatives. The concept originated in the 1960s, when urban forms expressing post–World War II desires for economic and urban growth began to attract criticism. In this sense, participation was, and is, ostensibly about increasing democracy—that is, including people not ordinarily involved in planning processes. This is a call for planning “with” instead of planning “for” people, and exposes power structures, the political implications of aesthetics (see Mack this volume), and the production of knowledge that planning involves (De Carlo 2005). Yet the term participatory planning is semantically vague and may be easily compromised as a “brand” for politicians seeking election or expropriated by real-estate developers. This kind of political branding mirrors the new populism of the Left, while developers expound a free-market approach (Sillitoe 2002, 3). Today, participatory planning is even listed among international principles for urban sustainability.2 Urban planners concerned with the ecological footprint, social inequality, reducing resource consumption, and technological progress have enthusiastically adopted it. National governments in Europe have made public participation a crucial part of planning process, following the New Charter of Athens (ECTP 2003), which laments the decline of locallevel democracy—and points criticism specifically toward urban planning. Nonetheless, in practice very little thought is given to what participation actually means. While participation thus emerges as a current political buzzword, ethnographic insights show how participation really operates on a local level. A close examination of two participatory planning processes in Warsaw illustrates some of its problems and potentials.

Urban Planning: Too Important to Be Left to Planners? In applied anthropology, participation is a methodological tool, and one that distinguishes anthropologists from other social scientists. Even the obvious limitations of the model of participant observation can be helpful in understanding what goes wrong when housing activists similarly invoke the idea of participatory politics. In both cases, reality rarely lives up to the ideal. Why is

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there such a yawning gap between theory and practice? What can planning and anthropology tell us about the limitations and problems of each other’s invocation of participation? Ethnographic methods combining participation, observation, and other interactions with people have been adopted and transformed to some degree by such fields as applied anthropology. Paul Sillitoe points out that anthropology, selectively appropriated by new approaches in development, cannot escape its harmful past in applied work if it is to defend itself against those whose misuse of allegedly ethnography-inspired methods (such as rapid rural appraisal or participatory rural appraisal) might discredit its real potential (2002, 2–3). Politically driven projects for participatory development mainly seek short-term results and cost effectiveness (Sillitoe 2002, 14–15). Urban planning has adopted this new trend, but planners usually view such public involvement as a remedy for the authoritative, functional, and sociotechnical modernist planning inscribed in the original Athens Charter of 1943. That document emerged from the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), led by Swiss architect Le Corbusier, and aimed to use planning (especially zoning) to create more efficient, rational, and hygienic cities. During the postwar period, both national and local departments of planning seeking efficient recovery for destroyed cities followed the tenets of the charter, which—despite its claims to be scientific—emerged from what was in fact a complete absence of empirical research (rubin 2009). Its exponents assumed that its underlying bourgeois value structures were both universal and culture-free. The resulting understanding of “public good” ignored people’s needs and preferences. The original Athens Charter foresaw no public involvement in urban planning, space management, or implementation. As nonexperts, urban dwellers were excluded from urban development and treated as passive, unscientific recipients of top-down concepts of equality and democracy. They could be educated by a rationally designed architecture, which “is the key to everything” (Le Corbusier 1973, 104). The charter was based on universalist ideas about human nature, needs, and preferences that would be either cured or programmed by well-planned cities (see Le Corbusier 1973; rubin 2009). The name “participation” was co-opted in the “New Charter of Athens” (ECTP 2003), which specifically questioned the validity of top-down approaches in planning and demonstrating that participatory planning was now widely used. This breakthrough is consistent with earlier documents on

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urban sustainability such as Agenda 21, launched in rio de Janeiro (1992), or the Aalborg Charter set at the Copenhagen Conference (1994). All these documents underscored citizen participation as crucial in defining urban projects for sustainable development. A significant qualitative change is the shift in responsibility: what had previously been ascribed only to national and local governments was now viewed as diffused among multiple stakeholders. It took such new forms as participatory budgeting and small-scale participatory planning projects. In 2012, I sought to explore the latter by joining the Warsaw-based NgO Odblokuj,3 whose collaborative work in participatory planning with inhabitants of the Praga district had been extensive. This is, however, not a romantic story of democracy through participation in a so-called developing country, where citizens proactively contribute and engage in inclusive processes of planning. Indeed, as a group of Italian critical urbanists has emphasized (see Cellamare 2018; Maranghi 2014, 175; Scandurra 2014, 93), current planning ideology has confused public good with a carefully engineered “consensus” that ignores the productive role of genuine debate and even conflict in favor of neoliberal models of expertise. Here again, the Polish experience can shed valuable light on such emergent expropriation—of the language of participation as much as of the land itself—over time and across ideological regimes. Thus, like these Italian urban scholars but from the specific vantage point of the Polish experience, I challenge the increasingly common assumption that participation as currently practiced necessarily produces a democratic understanding of the common good. Like Scandurra in particular, I especially argue that participation in urban planning necessarily entails conflict. It requires negotiations with different and often contradictory understandings and practices mirroring contemporary power structures. My ethnographic study of an NgO conducting participation with the residents of the Praga district it sought to include discloses why its members ultimately ended up playing within the conventions of modernist urban planning rather than playing creatively with them.

Searching for Lost Places The Praga4 neighborhood, consisting of tenements mostly built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is located on the right bank of the vistula river. It is perceived as a run-down, blighted area with the highest levels of

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unemployment in the city and alarming crime statistics, and its residents are stigmatized as anachronistic and unappealing. Nevertheless, officials have identified Praga as worth preserving as a living museum of the city’s industrial past.5 Both residents and enthusiasts say that Praga is the only “authentic” district architecturally and culturally displaying Warsaw’s true genius loci. After the 1989 collapse of the Eastern Bloc, major investment in business districts and skyscrapers, new private housing, big shopping malls, restaurants, and cultural sites was taking place mainly in left-bank Warsaw, just opposite Praga. The cross-river contrast that emerged as a result reflected the radical differences in the public perception of these two adjacent areas. Such tangible disparities can be traced back to the nineteenth century. In 1862 the Saint Petersburg–Warsaw railway was opened as the first means of fast and long-distance transportation in Congress Poland, the independent Polish kingdom that had been forcibly integrated into russia from 1831 on. The railway started from New Praga. Its owner, Ksawery Konopacki, had made his fortune out of the area’s rising land value. Two years later, in 1864, the russian authorities announced the emancipation of peasants, and migrations to Praga accelerated, quickly doubling the population and producing a housing shortage. Private investment created unsanitary tenement houses built tightly together and to more traditional-style houses that the peasant immigrants had constructed. Poor working conditions in the numerous factories that spread over Praga, Powiśle, and Wola—the main industrial districts of the times—created an unpleasant landscape in the eyes of the authorities, a landscape marred by dirt, ugliness, congestion, and disorder, with a resulting increase in disease and premature mortality (Cegielski 1968, 20–25).6 Modern architecture seemed to offer a means of erasing such unhealthy conditions in rapidly growing cities. The Warsaw Society of Hygiene opened in 1898; Władysław Dobrzyński, a doctor, strongly advocated the foundation of “garden cities” in Ebenezer Howard’s idiom, as a way of blending industrial production with green suburban space. Socialist activists Teodor Toeplitz and Edward Abramowski were pioneers of the Polish cooperative housing movement that incorporated modern architectural solutions: unified, bright, multifamily residential units intertwined with greenery and spatially separated from the factories. On the basis of their views, the Warsaw Housing Cooperative established in 1921 laid the foundations for mass public housing after 1945. Despite the relatively late establishment of the urban planning profession in Poland (only in 1913 and 1918 were urban planning faculties inaugurated

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in Lviv and Warsaw), experts were given broad authority over the city from the beginning of the twentieth century. Modernism emphasized the “removal of people from decisions as layers of bureaucracy and specialist procedures compel experts to intervene between the user and the building” (Jones, Petrescu, and Till 2005, xiii). Higher education, elite values, and resulting new forms of official knowledge were henceforward often at odds with the social values and needs of the people for whom cities were planned. Le Corbusier saw urban residents as generalized and unified “little people.” He was convinced that only professional architectural knowledge could improve the relationship between people and their surroundings (Jędruch 2012). Poland became independent in 1918, after 123 years of partition and dependence upon three neighboring empires. A rapid process of state building ensued. In 1934 Stefan Starzyński, nominated as president of Warsaw, gained respect among urban planners and architects by supporting processes of beautification and functionalization. The aim was to turn the city into a “European metropolis.”7 He approved plans that patterned the city after London and included a representational district named after Józef Piłsudski,8 with monumental public facilities in the city center. Planners would zone the remaining territory for housing, green belts, and industrial districts (Nowakowski 2013, 52–56) without regard to existing quarters. These processes were financed by loans backed by the state (Trybuś 2012). These modernist plans included nationalist content and affected numerous communities in Praga and Powiśle, where peasants coming to Warsaw after 1864 had settled.9 In the second half of the nineteenth century, despite lively discussions, the “informal” settlements of the working poor were given little attention. Praga and Powiśle largely consisted of wooden houses because there were then no legal restrictions. Both areas resembled rural settlements and were organized accordingly (Koleżak 1901), although they were interspersed with privately owned tenement houses where workers could rent space. Powiśle was modernized before Praga; this resulted in mass resettlement, while citizens of the new upper class moved into new apartments. World War II interrupted Starzyński and his municipal subordinates in the final realization of their master plan, “Warsaw of the future.” Praga, unlike the left bank, was not destroyed during World War II,10 so it became the first postwar housing area for workers and previous inhabitants. In 1945 the Bierut Decree on deserted and abandoned property was implemented, and all of the land within the city’s borders came under public ownership. The aim was to facilitate the city’s reconstruction. Most of major investments in

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the 1950s as well as after 1989 took place on the other side of the river, while Praga declined even further. As a living metaphor for Poland’s class divisions, Praga offered a voyage back in time. It inspired film director roman Polański to choose Praga as the site for his movie The Pianist, set during World War II in Warsaw.11 This history of investment-disinvestment patterns shares many features with contemporary strategies of officially “neutral” or “value-free” urban regeneration programs that actually promote gentrification. As Smith writes, the “language of gentrification tells the truth about the class shift involved in regeneration of the city, it has become a dirty word to developers, politicians, and financiers” (Smith 2006, 207). Urban planning and architecture are deeply intertwined with policy, culture, residents’ local knowledge, responsibility for maintenance, property relations, and other contextual factors.

What Is Local Knowledge? Experiments with Participation Developers expect participation to reveal local knowledge, helping them gain access to economically viable land. This attitude, however, alarmingly implies that local knowledge sits passively awaiting discovery and exploitation, a steady resource imprinted timelessly in people’s minds despite the historical, economic, and cultural realities of change. Odblokuj comprises architects, designers, and sociologists who view architecture as a form of activism combining cross-disciplinary professional expertise with knowledge about the daily habits of local people.12 I will focus here on some case studies that illustrate the most recurrent problems that its emphasis on “participation” uncovered. On równa Street,13 street-workers operating in the district knew members of the local communities well and were convinced of their strong local identity and sociality, and they initiated one project on that basis. Inhabitants frequently demanded investment and improvement and had signed many petitions, but their efforts had been ignored or rejected by the local municipality. Because of long-term disinvestment, many houses lacked central heating and toilets. residents described how their own attempts to improve infrastructure or to modernize their flats were delayed or impeded because they were not granted official permission to proceed. Legally, the municipality or a private owner had sole responsibility for such actions.14

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In May 2012, a demonstration protested these inhumane living conditions. Organized by housing activists from the Committee for Tenant Protection (Komitet Obrony Lokatorów), the demonstrators collaborated with tenants to display the despair and anger of the latter to the municipality, often by disrupting official meetings through acts of civil disobedience. Chanting and displaying banners saying “Out of Praga,” they put a doll representing the vice mayor into a wheelbarrow and then symbolically dismissed her.15 The tenants’ movement is still active, although it lacks political legitimacy in the eyes of official decision makers. One organization, the Chamber of Social Justice (Kancelaria Sprawiedliwości Społecznej), blocks evictions and provides legal advice in the face of evictions triggered by financial hardship or (re)privatization. On March 1 every year since 2011, demonstrations have commemorated the tenant movement’s most recognized activist, Jolanta Brzeska; she was found buried in a local forest after months of struggle over her flat, which had been repossessed by its previous owners.16 Although not directly addressed by members of Odblokuj, who focused only on backyards and their surroundings, housing was always the most controversial subject in local politics, and it became impossible to ignore its social dimensions in planning projects that were touted as participatory. The majority of Odblokuj members were architects who had some international experience and had heard about or personally knew practitioners in other participatory programs in various European locations. This was mirrored in their proposed methodology. Although we introduced ourselves to residents from równa Street and were accompanied by street-workers whom they already knew, their first reactions were typically anxious; they worried that we were municipal employees and architects who had come to take measurements. They were particularly suspicious because they were aware of evictions occurring elsewhere in the neighborhood. Later, we heard stories about old people who had been forced to leave their tenement flats by the legal owners.17 The reimposition of private property rights affects many people who had received public housing after World War II. returning the property to prewar owners, or their inheritors, is now framed in terms of historical and social justice. Yet inhabitants do not share the authorities’ view of their living space as empty space unaffected by postwar habitation. People who had once been beneficiaries of the previous political system are now symbolically and materially deprived of their right to inhabit the city center and find themselves facing eviction. When we arrived at równa Street, we spent the first couple of days sitting on a bench next to the mosaic that children from the tenement had designed

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and created. This space symbolized local pride and served as a semiprivate space allowing communication with strangers like us. Our appearance on the site forced the subject of upscale real estate development and land reprivatization to the fore. We became recipients of personal stories, as people tried to situate themselves in historical grand narratives and official discourses about what is just, necessary, and politically correct. Such choices about historical self-presentation reveal that “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 2016) whereby a complex relationship emerges between collective self-presentation to outsiders and self-identity performed and embedded within the community—an identity that, when revealed, sometimes results in shame or embarrassment. for Odblokuj, these narratives illustrated the complexities of the reprivatization issue. residents could not understand how flats once given to them by the state could now be taken away, and the rationale for reprivatization struck them as both strange and unjust. Their visions of history and social justice diverged sharply from official understandings, especially as personal investment had intensified their attachment to these homes. Participation could help to reveal these conflicting representations of what “private” and “public” meant to locals. The contemporary Polish state links the “public” to exterior facilities, while seeing housing and employment as “private” matters. This could be compared to the binary oppositions embraced in modernist architectural discourse.18 In the eyes of residents, however, the “public” is understood as a broader phenomenon that should provide jobs and housing and is the state’s responsibility. Accordingly, the free market is seen as subordinate to the state, which should be blamed for a precarious job market and the unstable housing situation. Odblokuj’s participatory planning process revealed that Praga residents’ identity was grounded in strong local ties, a proactive attitude toward the community, the importance of family, and neighborhood relations. This process came into direct conflict with official narratives derived through statistical data, as is illustrated in the fate of a small garden that we incorporated into the final vision of a new backyard. When we appeared in the neighborhood, women from some of the tenements became alarmed and suspicious. They also took part in the final rearrangements as they situated themselves as expert gardeners in the area. Similarly, soon after we initiated planning, residents took over the responsibility for arranging meetings and making sure that the majority of residents would participate. for residents, this appeared similar to democratic

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elections, meaning that all concerned should be able to raise their voices and be heard. Not only did the elderly ladies living next to the plots maintain them; their neighbors also helped. Even though most urban planning is future oriented, in this case traces of the lived past quickly became a central theme. During weekend gatherings, residents brought pictures from the 1970s and 1980s to explain how they imagined the neighborhood: full of flowers, children, “just as it used to be.” A prewar wooden house (regarded as informal and therefore disposable) was demolished in the 1970s but had given the yard its shape. The individual elements of the project were included in the boxes corresponding to symbolic home’s rooms, and a mural placed on the adjacent wall continued the already-existing mosaic. There was a place for children to play, a local garden run by elders, and benches and tables to gossip or chat with neighbors. People involved in the planning decided to fence in the area to impede potential drunkards from intruding, as had previously happened; again with security in mind, neighbors agreed to organize an informal neighborhood watch.

Let’s Participate! Warsaw’s Carnival of Participation “Participation” has become a political watchword of twenty-first-century Europe. It gained particular attention in Eastern Europe, where citizens of “young democracies” were finally given the opportunity to influence political life. The past few years have seen a participatory flood—especially in bigger cities and mostly initiated by local NgOs. But participation loses its power when institutionalized or simply included as a required project component. Dismay over this is reflected in a popular joke among NgO activists: “You open your fridge, and here it is: Participation!” In Warsaw, the term has often been a synonym for acquiescence in official policies and planning, as it has been in many of the cases cited in the introductory section of this essay.19 Someone else, possibly an “expert,” has already made the decisions, and “participation” romanticizes a fabricated consensus. As Markus Miessen writes, “participation becomes a mode of buoyancyproduction, a societal sedative, not in terms of the potential decisions that the populus [sic] can make, but in withdrawing the ground from which they can actively critique the actions of the decision-maker and representative” (2010, 44). This recalls Abu-Lughod’s (1990) critique of resistance, often presented as a collective act of insubordination but actually a diagnostic of power.

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The representation of participation as value-free and voluntary obscures the role of conflict in real participation and constricts the grassroots power of people forcibly integrated into a wider national economy, as has happened in Poland since 1989. Odblokuj’s grassroots undertakings in Praga were a breakthrough in Warsaw; no other NgO was using participatory planning.20 Local authorities soon recognized it as fresh approach to problems in “neglected” and “blighted” Praga. But this rendition, despite the best of intentions, may instead have engendered a false or at least misleading version of the concept. Markus Miessen describes a practice where one group of people uses another to exclude negotiations about a status quo; they seek confirmation for their own existing consensus. This is the violence of participation (Miessen 2010), where the message being sent to various receivers is as follows: we are heading in the only correct direction, and we just need to make some adjustments among those who do not already follow us. In 2012 Odblokuj was invited to take part in the “Block of flats, tenements, backyards—the districts became alive!” program (Blok, podwórko, kamienice—ożywiły się dzielnice!), which was mainly financed by the EU. It concerned 535 residents of three districts of right-bank Warsaw (Targówek, North Praga, and South Praga). The residents were alleged to include: •

• •

passive inhabitants of blighted areas, incapable of initiating projects for the common good, characterized by a lack of neighborhood relations, and the progressive decline of local identity; young parents, including pregnant women, single parents, and youngsters who had discontinued elementary education; other subjects in danger of social exclusion, including alcoholics and the disabled.

Moreover, more than 50% of beneficiaries are youths in their teens and twenties, including youngsters in danger of social exclusion. [emphasis in original]21 Members of Odblokuj expressed shock that such misrepresentations could be found both on the official program website and on posters intended to inform the presumed beneficiaries. In this case, we did not have an opportunity to be invited into the discussion by the communities because the participants had already been selected by the authorities.22

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This incident exemplifies official attitudes. Local people are said to be passive, unreliable, and unable to think in terms of common interest, and the picture is compounded by stereotypes of unemployment, alcoholism, delinquency, and teenage pregnancy. In short, the authorities blame the residents themselves. They thus stigmatize a run-down district without accounting for such evident structural causes as the lack of investment in affordable housing or the provision of new jobs. Individual residents’ stories often did not align with official discourses about unemployment. After the economic transformation and the realization of a “shock therapy” program (known as the Balcerowicz Plan), many people lost their jobs when state factories were gradually closed or privatized. On the threshold of a new, neoliberal rhetoric of growth and labor discipline (Dunn 2004), such residents were seen as without skills, education, or competence. Moreover, they lacked the new language of neoliberalism, with its rhetoric of self-management, self-responsibility, life-long learning, and flexibility (gershon 2011; Molé 2010). Odblokuj was widely seen as embodiment of the “new”—something that was both despised and desired. We were often called “Warszawka,” a common word play with Warsaw that combines the sarcasm and anger that some Poles feel toward those perceived to have benefited from the socioeconomic transformation. This antipathy was understandable, considering how another NgO that had worked in the neighborhood had proposed creating a smartphone app to map the upgraded backyards—to a population most of whose members could not even afford a smartphone. Instead, the app was designed to cater to left-bank Warsaw inhabitants interested in guided walks in Praga, a form of entertainment that enabled them to treat residents as part of living museum or a zoo. In the same spirit, the future Museum of Warsaw Praga is expected to become the most important tourist attraction in this area, located in “revitalized historical premises.” Ignoring contemporary Praga altogether, the museum will focus on archives of spoken history and explanations of dying professions. The consumption of a “local,” a “past,” and the “other”—all stimulated by the media—join the nostalgic longing for authentic experience typical of contemporary urban culture. Sharon Zukin (2010) claims that this cultural taste takes spatial form in loft-living “cappuccino culture,” and that it is manifested in increasing numbers of museums, art galleries, and cultural festivals. renovated historical working-class quarters alone are enough to satisfy a hunger

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for authenticity, while those who have hitherto lived there are treated as useless or unwelcome. Not surprisingly, inhabitants from Brzeska Street resisted Odblokuj’s attempts to engage them in the project. residents assumed we were municipal employees and asked why we paid attention to the backyards but not to the tenements themselves. In the residents’ eyes, we were no different from those who came to take pictures of “Praga folklore.” good intentions notwithstanding, I could not escape a feeling of having violated an important boundary. But NgOs and local community members agreed that we should at least join forces to solve the biggest problem, the potential danger posed by alcoholics and junkies coming from outside the area. In the brick wall surrounding the backyard, there were two big holes. Owing to limited funds, we decided to plug them with already available materials such as used tires and empty bottles, partly matted with concrete and soil.23 We also put new sand in the sandbox, organized a little pitch, and added some plants. Convinced that we had found locally produced, sustainable solutions that incorporated recycling and creative waste-management, we were all very proud of what we had done and decided to celebrate with a barbecue. The event attracted the attention of local authorities, who came to monitor the participatory planning program.24 The authorities raised concerns about every single element of our work. The wall had to be demolished because it was “dangerous” and did not meet the requirements of the building code. The sandbox had to be emptied because the administration did not have funds and time to maintain it in the future. The plants were an “irrational” addition because they would need to be watered and water is expensive. Inhabitants nevertheless fought for their goals, and our advocacy played a significant role. finally, after months of discussion, petitions, and media attention, we succeeded in putting an end to official opposition. Later, I spoke with an architect and resident of Praga who had collaborated with Odblokuj but was not involved in this particular project. She said: Sure, I am aware that at some point I am a gentrifier, but on the other hand I think that gentrification cannot be stopped. It might be navigated, moderated, limited. . . . Now this process intensifies because of private developers and some naive NgOs as well. But when we speak in terms of so-called revitalization or regeneration in Praga, there are a lot of empty spaces, so we should implement the

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idea of having public housing, private housing, cooperative housing, and therefore to have a chance that it won’t be just a district for the wealthy. Still, there is this tendency in Warsaw that there is less and less social housing for people with low incomes. Officials say: “We have enough of them in the city center.” But in fact, even if they build on the outskirts, there are too few of them, and a diversified housing and social mix cannot be obtained within the city. Indeed, carefully “planned” gentrification does not have to be harmful to people living in old tenements. What is at stake here is a distinction between a gentrification that is designed to enrich real-estate speculators and a navigated gentrification that engages and may also actively benefit residents on the other, in some cases allowing them to avert eviction.25 In the latter process—unfortunately all too rare in recent experience—officials would seek a viable balance between affordable housing able to sustain existing communities (and their own electoral base!) and private ownership (which would ensure new sources of revenue for the municipality). These calculations, however, can also be subverted, and this explains why authorities so often ignore the real social problems. The dangers faced by local communities—gentrification, economic hardship, alcoholism, and drug addiction—too frequently hold less importance for them than does the provision of documentary “proof ” for the EU that 535 people have been “revitalized” and have learned to understand the importance of respecting the “common good” and “neighborhood relations.” The municipal and EU authorities had no interest in local understandings and representations of neighborhood-level cultural categories. Their stance conflicts directly with a key aim of participatory planning: to be “for” instead of “with” people, It will only generate adjustments to the building code, itself once culturally produced as the official language of urban planning.

The Politics of Participation By comparing two cases of participatory planning, I have tried to disclose the principal difference between them. The first was truly bottom-up, initiated by locals; the latter became a political device for maintaining the status quo through a superficial illusion of participation. I have focused on Praga because of its inhabitants’ alleged failings, which corresponded in official eyes

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to the condition of their homes. Officials, operating within a neoliberal vision (see gershon 2011), lamented the residents’ supposed inability to take responsibility for themselves and took the dilapidated buildings as evidence of a betrayal of the Enlightenment values of civic humanism and rationality (see gupta and ferguson 1992; Olwig and Hastrup 1997). Current understandings of civil society in Poland rely more on economic notions of a market-based society than on a political vision. We see this, for example, in descriptions of the “Block of flats, tenements, backyards—the districts became alive!” program. from the outset, people of meager means were identified as needing better organization and more responsibility. gaining these traits could improve their living conditions, allowing them to be more attractive potential employees and, ultimately, beneficiaries of a city-planning model intended for self-designed, improvable subjects. The contemporary revival of Polish civil society seeks to resuscitate the 1980s anticommunist opposition, while the concept of the self-governing republic coined at that time has now been displaced by neoliberal discourse. Participatory planning negotiates with the prevailing, neoliberal views of subjects and civil society, attempting to privilege the diversity of epistemologies that constitute local knowledge. Even if project participants are confronted with legal building codes that appeal to those who have professional knowledge, the distinction between expert and user knowledge is political. This was clear in the projects I have described. Once our approach to planning was mistakenly recognized a way of maintaining order, the ideal of participation seemed compromised, constrained by a fixed structure of planning. I initially believed that participation within city planning could help to strengthen deliberative democracy. My experiences with Odblokuj and my research on participation made me more skeptical. I now place these observations within a more critical, engaged (rather than applied) anthropology, which Herzfeld describes as scholarship offering insights into the dilemmas that our interlocutors face, rather than seeking immediate intervention (2010, 265). By examining participatory planning in the specific context of Warsaw, I have shown that participation has been made part of modern city planning within a neoliberal system and that this co-optation has forced it to support that system. Even though members of various NgOs, architects, and urban planners may believe that there are many different scripts rather than one rigid planning doctrine, they are nonetheless trapped in the language of participatory planning thus conceived. romantic convictions that “doing” plans

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in collaboration with their addressees will allow room for social change and enable direct democracy blinds well-intentioned actors to the realities of official control. Participation is now a tool of political legitimization that forces participants to follow it with no respect for their local knowledge. Yet local knowledge is not only local in itself, but for itself (Appadurai 1995, 210); it is localized both temporally and spatially among certain people and cannot be taken for granted. A solution worked out for one place and one time does not necessarily have to be adaptable everywhere, as much modernist and contemporary city planning assumes. People, spaces, and knowledge change through time. Preserving specific solutions leaves no room for change. Preservation, in this sense, is political. Engaged anthropological inquiry and participatory planning have in common the intention of opening up and releasing into active use the often discomfiting knowledge of those who hitherto could not speak. What they have to say illuminates internal, socially produced, spatial representations of culture. If we truly want participation to become a democratic process that enables people to speak for themselves, we should start asking questions such as “why” (which defamiliarizes grand urban strategies taken for granted) instead of “how” (which imposes functional—that is modernist—questions on the practice of planning). Simultaneously, this approach entails accepting that the legitimacy and credibility of urban planning should not be gained by those who set the rules of the game called “city,” but by those who are forced to play it.

Notes 1. I do not claim there was no citizen involvement in urban planning during the People’s republic of Poland (1945–1989), but instead try to capture the moment when the term was introduced into political discourse. Interestingly, in the former regime, public participation, mainly understood as public unpaid work czyn społeczny), was a popular political tool oriented toward strengthening social bonds and raising people’s sense of responsibility for common public space through physical tasks such as gardening, building roads and parks, and maintaining new settlements. 2. These may be found in Agenda 21, launched in rio de Janeiro during the UN Conference on Environment and Development (chapter “Promoting Sustainable Human Settlement Development”), 1992, and the Aalborg Charter adopted during the first European Conference on sustainable Cities and Towns, 1994. 3. Their full name was the Association for the Improvement of the Odblokuj Housing Milieu. The NgO’s name is a play on the Polish words blok (block of flats) and blokować (to

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block something); its main goal was to challenge the general view that living in a block of flats (which were mainly built during People’s republic of Poland) must be a never-ending struggle. Members of Odblokuj shared the conviction that architecture and design should help in solving urban conflicts over physical surroundings and among people living in these. 4. Nowadays, Praga is considered to cover the vast territory of right-bank Warsaw. Historically, it consisted of three administrative units: Old Praga, New Praga, and Szmulowizna. I use the name assigned by many residents of Warsaw to the territory on the other side of left-bank Warsaw, but the participatory planning projects to which I contributed took place within Old Praga and New Praga. 5. In 2006, the municipal authorities decided to create the Museum of Warsaw Praga; no other Warsaw museum is devoted to a whole district. 6. During the revolution in Congress Poland (1905–7) combined forces of peasants and workers initiated armed struggle against the russian government, claiming the right to better working and living conditions. Their uprising made the appalling conditions of their lives much more visible to the official eye. 7. That was the first mention of “metropolis” in Polish urban-planning discourse. Of greek origin, it means “a mother state or city” and combines form of “mother” and “polis” with correspondence to language of kinship and public sphere—both phenomena are important while speaking of the nation-state in the modern era because they appeal to an “imagined community” of citizens (Anderson 1991). 8. Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935) was one of the most influential Polish politicians in the beginning of the twentieth century. He was responsible for the creation of the Second republic of Poland (1918–1939) and was the leader of the Polish Socialists’ Party and Sanacja, an authoritarian movement. 9. The first master plan for Warsaw, the regulation Plan (Plan regulacyjny), was evaluated by Western urban planners to ensure its consistency with the latest European urban models. Another one, functional Warsaw (Warszawa funkcjonalna) was accepted by CIAM. The legitimization of plans was therefore a matter of expert knowledge rather than of citizens’ approval. 10. During World War II and the Warsaw Uprising (1944), this part of the city was not the main target of german troops, as most of the representative buildings, urban infrastructure, and new apartments were situated on the other side of vistula river, in the modernist part of the city. 11. In an interview conducted during the 2002 Cannes film festival, Polański claims: “There is however a district named Praga, on the right bank of the river vistula, which was not completely destroyed. I lived through the bombing of Warsaw. I stayed there for a while and remember the city looking like today’s Praga district: gray streets, heavy traffic, buildings from the turn of the century. That’s why we constructed our sets there.” http://www.filmscouts.com /scripts/interview.cfm?file=3012, accessed March 3, 2014. 12. I was a volunteer in their “reNEWAL” (odNOWA, 2010–12) and “Yellow Line” (Żółta Linia, 2011–13) projects and collaborated with some inhabitants in Praga. The projects were supported by the Stefan Batory foundation within the framework of the “Democracy in Action” Program (its main goal is “to increase participation of citizens and nongovernmental organizations in public life and promote the attitude of civic responsibility for the quality of Polish democracy”) and Warsaw Municipality. See http://www.odblokuj.org/, accessed March 3, 2014. 13. Although I provide real street names in the following paragraphs, I omit the exact addresses of our collaborators to protect their privacy.

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14. Since 1989 and the invalidation of the Bierut Decree there has been no legal act to resolve the problem of reprivatization. In theory, therefore, every prewar building in Warsaw could be given back to prewar owners, their descendants, or people who had meanwhile bought the right to the property, even if now occupied by public institutions such as hospitals or schools. 15. See the video recording of the event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEbK8w Ngmg8, accessed March 3, 2014. 16. The circumstances of her death were never clarified. No one was accused of her murder, in part because the investigation did not rule out the possibility of suicide. 17. Some speculators buy property rights from prewar owners (or their descendants) with the goal of “revitalizing” the buildings and flats they comprise, and then sell them as luxurious apartments; this is widely envisioned as a part of the urban regeneration program. It typically happens in Poland’s bigger cities, but is still unrecognized as criminal by local and national authorities because there is no comprehensive legislation to address the issue. Consequently, individual compensation claims flood the courts with increasing frequency. Only in 2013 was the first suit against land speculators brought in another city, Poznań. 18. Architects from Odblokuj could be easily characterized as embodying this relation, precisely because the frontier between public and private was embraced in the buildings’ exteriors. A self-identified architecture activist would typically attempt to improve living conditions for the public at large. 19. The Warsaw-based municipal department called Center for Public Dialogue (Centrum Komunikacji Społecznej) is the leading body in public consultations (konsultacje społeczne), which most of the time has an already planned agenda and specific timetable for participatory planning. residents are asked to share their opinions with public servants in an advisory role, yet the final decision making is with the authorities. for more details (in Polish), see their website: www.konsultacje.um.warszawa.pl, accessed March 3, 2014. 20. There were many different programs for participation, but no others concerned neighborhood planning by collaborating with residents in the management of their physical surroundings. 21. See for original text: http://europa.um.warszawa.pl/projekty-miejskie/blok-podworko -kamienice-ozywily-sie-dzielnice. 22. After the program ended, I discovered that the local municipality had, a few weeks before the official announcements, published an open call on its website for areas that would eventually partake in the program. Individuals, residential communities, local NgOs, or authorities could identify the backyards to be improved and revitalized. Nevertheless, most of the people with whom we were doing participatory planning had never been informed about such a possibility, and we were the first people to introduce them to it through our project. 23. In another backyard that participated in the program, alcoholics were also considered to be one of the problems recognized during participatory planning. Although the physical surroundings were different to some extent and the area was more “open,” the architect working with residents first proposed removing one element that from his point of view was aesthetically unpleasant, namely, the “Drunkards’ Corner.” People taking part in the planning process were against this idea because they believed they could control drunkards’ behavior and actions by keeping them visible in a single place. 24. Participatory planning makes the planning process more visible, and therefore shows how chaotic, biased, and unregulated it can be. The district-level authorities who came to investigate what we were doing had no idea about the program launched by the municipality. We had

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to get essential permissions and documentation on our own, since there was no support from city-level authorities. 25. See, for example, Herzfeld’s (2017) discussion of “self-gentrification.”

Works Cited Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1990. “The romance of resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women.” American Ethnologist 17 (1): 41–55. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. New York: verso. Appadurai, Arjun. 1995. “The Production of Locality.” In Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, ed. richard fardon, 208–29. New York: routledge. Arnstein, Sherry r. 1969. “A Ladder of Citizen Participation.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35: 216–24. Cegielski, Jerzy. 1968. Stosunki mieszkaniowe w Warszawie w latach 1864–1964. Warsaw: Arkady. Cellamare, Carlo. 2018. Cities and Self-Organization. https://ojs.uniroma1.it/index.php/TU /article/download/14298/14017, accessed April 28, 2019. De Carlo, giancarlo. 2005. “Architecture’s Public.” In Architecture and Participation, ed. Peter Blundell Jones, Jeremy Till, and Doina Petrescu, 3–22. New York: routledge. De Cesari, Chiara, and rozita Dimova. 2018 [print edition forthcoming 2019]. “Heritage, gentrification, Participation: remaking Urban Landscapes in the Name of Culture and Historic Preservation.” International Journal of Heritage Studies. Dunn, Elizabeth C. 2004. Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. European Council of Town Planners (ECTP). 2003. The New Charter of Athens 2003. The European Council of Town Planners’ Vision for Cities in the 21st Century. florence: Alinea Editrice. gershon, Ilona. 2011. “Neoliberal Agency.” Current Anthropology 52 (4): 537–55. gupta, Akhil, and James ferguson. 1992. “Beyond Culture: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference.” Cultural Anthropology 7 (1): 6–23. Herzfeld, Michael. 2010. “Engagement, gentrification, and the Neoliberal Hijacking of History.” Current Anthropology 51 (S2): 259–67. ———. 2016. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Societies, and Institutions. New York: routledge. ———. 2017. “Playing for/with Time: Tourism and Heritage in greece and Thailand.” In Tourism and Gentrification in Contemporary Metropolises, ed. Maria gravari-Barbas and Sandra guinand, 233–52. New York: routledge. Jędruch, Dorota. 2012. “Ludzie jako ludziki. Obraz uźytkownika w teorii architektury.” Autoportret 2 (37): 35–41. Jones, Peter Blundell, Doina Petrescu, and Jeremy Till. “Introduction.” Architecture and Participation, ed. Peter Blundell Jones, Jeremy Till, and Doina Petrescu, xiii–xvii. New York: routledge. Koleżak, Władysław. 1901. Powiśle Warszawy: przeszłość, teraźniejszość i przyszłość Powiśla. Warsaw: Księgarnia nakładowa Saturnina Sikorskiego.

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Le Corbusier. 1973. The Athens Charter. New York. grossman. Maranghi, Elena. 2014. “Is It All About Neoliberalism? Exploring the Notions of ‘Public’ and ‘Common’ as references for grassroots Organizations. Insights from Milan.” In Practices of Reappropriation, ed. Carlo Cellamare and francesca Cognetti, 173–79. rome: Planum. Miessen, Markus. 2010. The Nightmare of Participation (Cross-Bench Praxis as a Mode of Criticality). New York: Sternberg. Molé, Noelle J. 2010. “Precarious Subjects: Anticipating Neoliberalism in Northern Italy’s Workplace.” American Anthropologist 112 (1): 38–53. Nowakowski, Maciej. 2013. Sto lat planowania przestrzeni polskich miast (1910–2010). Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa. Olwig, Karen fog, and Kirsten Hastrup, eds. 1997. Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object. New York: routledge. rubin, Eli. 2009. “The Athens Charter.” Themenportal Europäische geschichte, http://www .europa.clio-online.de/site/lang__en/ItemID__372/mid__11428/40208214/default.aspx, accessed April 18, 2014. Scandurra, Enzo. 2014. “Art and Local Appropriation: A Journey from Tunis to Paris via Istanbul, rome, Jerusalem, and Hebron.” In Practices of Reappropriation, ed. Carlo Cellamare and francesca Cognetti, 90–94. rome: Planum. Sillitoe, Paul. 2002. “Participant Observation to Participatory Development: Making Anthropology Work.” In Participating in Development: Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge, ed. Alan Bicker, Johan Pottier, and Paul Sillitoe, 1–23. New York: routledge. Smith, Neil. 2006. “gentrification generalized: from Local Anomaly to Urban ‘regeneration’ as global Urban Strategy.” In Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, ed. Melissa S. fisher and greg Downey, 191–208. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Trybuś, Jarosław. 2012. Warszawa niezaistniała. Warsaw: fundacja Bęc Zmiana. Zukin, Sharon. 2010. Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

ChAPTer 11

From the real to the virtual A swedish solution for “Universal” sustainable development in hammarby sjöstad, stockholm Mark graham and Lissa nordin

The urban district of Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm is one of the world’s best-known examples of urban sustainable development, famous for its cross-sectoral, holistic approach to planning and its eco-cycle model for the recycling of water and waste, known as the Hammarby Model.1 This chapter tells two interrelated but nonetheless distinct stories of how Hammarby Sjöstad came to be.2 The first story is that of the real, which here does not denote a naïve belief in access to an unmediated truth, but refers to the manifold of practices that went into the planning of Hammarby Sjöstad out of which partial representations are forged, including this chapter. It is a story of planning as a complicated process made up of multiple actors with sometimes different agendas, of compromises, mistakes, conflicting visions, political pressures, and on occasion of the people who live or work in the results of urban planning, the residents of Hammarby Sjöstad. It is also a story of the histories behind actors and of the political economy in which they operate. The second story is one of virtualization. It is a story of how the planning process and its results become progressively “mediated,” and the consequences of this. It is the story of competition between countries to sell urban sustainable solutions in a growing global market, a story that tells of the refinement and abstraction of the planning process and its products into a saleable concept that occludes the messiness of planning in practice

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The framing of these stories in terms of the real and virtualization is indebted to and adapts Baudrillard’s “orders of simulation” (Baudrillard 1985). In particular, his first three orders are relevant. They are the order of the counterfeit (which is here glossed as a “fake,” theatrical backdrop or celebrity image), the second order of industrial or serial reproduction, and the third order of a code or model that generates rather than represents a reality. The fourth, fractal phase, is taken up toward the end of the chapter. Baudrillard’s simulacra are often understood as implying a chronological succession, but they can and do coexist and overlap. In what follows there is in fact a degree of chronological priority between them so they are presented separately for reasons of clarity. first, we turn to the real planning history and ongoing development of Hammarby Sjöstad.

The Real Story of Hammarby Sjöstad The district of Hammarby Sjöstad is a brownfield3 development just south of Stockholm’s inner city, and when completed in 2020 it will offer 11,000 housing units and be home to 25,000 people with a daytime population of 30,000. It is planned as an extension of Stockholm’s inner city with a similar aesthetic and street layout. A proposal to transform the area into a new urban district emerged in the early 1990s under the direction of planning architect Jan-Inghe Hagström. He is a central figure in the history of Hammarby Sjöstad, and we return to him later. The proposal received added impetus when, in 1996, Stockholm applied to host the 2004 Olympic games and decided to build the Olympic village in an old industrial area. The application enjoyed wide political support over party lines. A special project organization under the direct control of city politicians was granted funds with which to purchase land and take control of the entire process. Based on the demands for an environmental profile from the International Olympic Committee, Stockholm chose to promote Hammarby Sjöstad as one of the world’s most environmentally adapted urban construction projects. In 1996, Stockholm City drew up an environmental program specifically for Hammarby Sjöstad. The program focused on system-based solutions to become “twice as good” compared to other similar developments, that is to say, use half as much electricity, energy and water (Pandis and Brandt 2009, 32–33). The program also formulated a vision of Hammarby Sjöstad as a

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cutting-edge development at the international forefront of sustainable development (Stadsbyggnadskontoret 1996). To achieve the overarching goal of an eco-cycle approach, the project produced the so-called Hammarby Model in 1996. In effect, it is an infrastructural solution that connects district heating, sewage system, biogas production, and refuse collection into one system based on traditional Swedish municipal techniques and system expertise. In 1997, the 2004 Olympics were awarded to Athens, but the plans for Hammarby Sjöstad were so advanced that Stockholm City continued with its ambition to build a new sustainable, urban waterfront development. gone, however, was much of the political consensus that had surrounded the Olympics project, and Hammarby Sjöstad became an arena for debates in urban planning ideology and housing policies in the decade that followed (Hallemar 2010). In the first instance this involved the demands for a “city-like” (stadsmässigt) district from the new center-right alliance in City Hall, (which came to power in 2006). Its demands reflected how views about urban development had changed during the previous decade and had increasingly come to extol the perceived advantages of a densely built city of urban quarters and a vibrant city life (Tunström 2009).4 Planning architect Jan-Inghe Hagström’s original plan was found to be “too little inner city and too much suburb” by the city planning office, and had to be revised and made more “urban.” City politicians also decided to change the designation of “lanes” (gränder) into “streets” (gator) (Hallemar 2010, 39). The area was not only to be environmentally sustainable; it was also to be a sustainable “city-like” development and above all not resemble a suburb. Ideas surrounding the advantages of a densely built, lively inner city were shared by both politicians and many of the residents in Hammarby Sjöstad we spoke with, who contrasted it not with the oft-discussed Million Programme areas (see Mack this volume) but with the functionally divided, quiet, green Stockholm suburbs of the 1940s and 1950s which they considered “rural” and less urban or “city-like.” As one male resident put it: “Here I really feel that I live in a city. There are people on the streets, restaurants, and places where I can buy what I want, and of course there is water and parks, but it’s still more like a city here than where I lived before, and that’s what appeals.”5 These opinions reflect the shift during recent decades within Swedish planning in general that has favored the inner cities and city centers: a city of urban quarters rather than neighborhoods, a mixture of functions instead of their separation, market solutions and deregulation instead of political control and bureaucracy (ramberg 2005, 166–68).

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There were economic considerations too: the new apartments had to sell, and a “suburban” label is less attractive on the Stockholm housing market. As Mats Egelius, an architect with one of the larger architectural firms involved in the design of Hammarby Sjöstad, explains: “They [politicians, developers, and architects] all understood that if we create a city life, with shops, people on the streets, and small cafés the prices would be higher. They all understood that if they all worked together and managed to create a real inner-city feeling they would be able to sell their flats more expensively.” By this he meant at the much higher prices commanded by apartments only a couple of hundred meters away on the other side of Hammarby Lake, which divides the area from central Stockholm proper.

Planning in Practice

Hammarby is known for its “holistic” approach to planning based on a collective and cross-sectoral planning organization that was set up at the start of the building project during the Olympic application and has been held up ever since by those involved as an innovative and superior form of planning, one that represents their particular brand of planning professionalism. Under the direction of a project leader, representatives for the municipal council departments, construction and development companies, architects, and consultants were gathered together into a group. Stockholm City provided the project organization with economic support and an office of its own. The collective organization was expected to improve the effectiveness of the project and provide a platform for the implementation of the environmental program. In this respect, it is an example of “new spatial planning” (rather than conventional land use planning), which is characterized by collaborative vision, the overseeing and implementation of development by a diverse range of actors, and a more holistic approach in pursuit of living, working, transport, and recreation that are compatible with sustainable development (Haughton et al. 2010). The wide range of demands sustainable development places on planners virtually necessitates the kind of cross-sectoral approach found in Hammarby Sjöstad. Yet its tight internal organization did not render the group immune to external pressures, especially after the center-right coalition took over power at city hall in 2006. As we have seen, politicians intervened repeatedly, among other ways by insisting on a greater density of buildings, more parking spaces for residents, and the insistence on a “city-like” development. The project

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witnessed several changes of direction because of this. Neither was the project organization entirely successful in its collaboration with the developers and construction companies. Because the environmental program was added after the general plan for the development was finalized and the environmental recommendations were not binding, the area failed to meet its energy goals (Pandis and Brandt 2009, 2). According to the civil servants and planners we spoke with, the collective organization was something new for Stockholm and Sweden and something that is now marketed as holistic planning. However, according to Olle Cyrén, the project manager for the entire development, it was not always viewed favorably by colleagues at the planning office who saw the project group as an exclusive cadre. He explained: We are to some extent an isolated unit, and a lot of others in the city think that we are pampered. We have a reputation for doing whatever we like, but that’s not really true! We don’t have any cooperation with [other major projects in Stockholm]. It’s a shame. It’s as if they think we are going to turn up like a gang of ants and take over everything if we get the chance. Maybe we ought to get involved and contribute with our experience from the way we work here. But you are never a prophet at home. Paradoxically, what everyone involved calls a unique project organization and planning process that has attracted considerable attention in Sweden and internationally was viewed askance by others within the ranks of Stockholm city planners. The collective organization notwithstanding, planning in Hammarby Sjöstad is associated with one man above all others: planning architect Jan-Inghe Hagström, who was responsible for drawing up detailed plans in the early 1990s for what became Hammarby Sjöstad and was deeply involved in the development until his sudden death in 2005. (He has a square named after him in Hammarby Sjöstad.) His idea was to create a quality assurance program of his own for the whole of Hammarby Sjöstad, housing area by housing area, down to details like the color of the facades and the height of the windows, which resulted in an aesthetic and architectural style that permeates the entire area and which was effectively decided on almost ten years before it was implemented. A charismatic and strong-willed man, used to getting his way, Jan-Inghe Hagström appears as an almost mythical figure in the creation story surrounding Hammarby Sjöstad and its planning process, and as the real

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force behind the project despite all the emphasis on a collective organization. His influence, even after his death, was tangible among other members of the planning organization. Lars fränne, head of planning in Stockholm, referred to him as “the father of Hammarby Sjöstad,” and architect Stellan fryxell said of him, “He had been the most important person for the project and the visionary for the urban design.” On one occasion, during a visit to the project planning office, Olle Cyrén took down a picture from the wall in which were framed the criteria for success Hagström had created for Hammarby Sjöstad and which are still used internally by the organization.6 So despite all the concessions and changes made in response to the demands of politicians and builders, the planning group still felt that they were implementing his vision. It is worth considering for a moment what opportunity Jan Inghe Hagström, a planner with a capital P, actually had to realize his vision of Hammarby Sjöstad. It is clear from what others said that he was unhappy with the plan that was eventually adopted after considerable “interference” with his original conception. What is also clear is that it was in spite of Hagström that Hammarby Sjöstad took the form it did, including the dense grid of straight, car-friendly streets advocated by the “city like” ideal (Hagström wanted fewer streets, not more of them) (Askergren 2009, 12–19). This leads to the question: Who is the planner here? It is possible, as architectural writer Mikael Askergren formulates the issue, that Hammarby Sjöstad signifies the end of the architect’s dominance over city planning in Sweden. When Hagström lost his absolute control over Hammarby Sjöstad’s final form, it was not because of political conflicts within Stockholm’s department of urban development but because architects in general had lost legitimacy as city planners. Hagström’s enforced abdication as a city planning architect with total discretion illustrates “the end of the planning architect’s century” in Sweden (Askergren 2009, 17). But it was not only politicians who “interfered” with Hagström’s vision; the residents of Hammarby Sjöstad did not live up to the expectations of planners either. Although the area was planned for a mixed population that included families with small children, the assumption was that the majority of residents would be middle-aged, empty-nesters from the suburbs who wanted to move to the city, a fairly affluent category of people (Pandis and Brandt 2009, 30). At the time this turned out to be mistaken. Sjöstaden had a young population compared with the rest of Stockholm and the country as a whole: 65 percent were between 25 and 64, and the great majority was between 30 and 40 years old. It had a larger than average proportion of children, which resulted in a shortage of preschool places and of primary schools. residents are highly educated, earn above-average salaries, and have a lower

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than average unemployment rate.7 for the most part residents belong to the white middle classes and can afford the accommodation available in Hammarby Sjöstad, which was never going to be cheap, located as it is so close to the inner city. After a slow start, housing prices rose sharply, and the rents for apartments are also high by Stockholm standards. As noted earlier, commercial considerations were important from the start, and the relationship between planners and residents was framed by politicians as one between planners and the customers who could afford to live there The first residents quickly began to demand parking spaces. The no cars goal was abandoned in combination with center-right political demands that residents must have their cars and more indoor garage spaces than originally planned were built. Significantly, estate agents in the area removed any reference to the environment in their advertising, for fear that it would discourage potential buyers. One estate agent, Monika, who worked for one of the three largest developers, described her experience: “I remember that some potential buyers had gotten the idea, don’t ask me where, that they had to live extra green lives if they moved here. It obviously didn’t appeal. Some even thought you had to sign a green contract! A lot of people here want to be kind to the environment, but they don’t like to be associated with ardent environmental zealots (miljönisse).” Although the development is promoted as a sustainable one, residents give little indication of being willing to make major changes to their lifestyles, even though, as Monika noted, they professed and still profess to be environmentally aware. Nonetheless, they were favorable targets for the ecological modernization doctrine that underlies much of Swedish government policy in the area of sustainable development.

ecological Modernization

In March 1996, the same year as the environmental goals for Hammarby Sjöstad were drawn up, the soon-to-be (and now former) Swedish prime minister, göran Persson, proclaimed that Sweden was to be a “driving force and a front runner in endeavors to create ecologically sustainable development” (Lundqvist 2004). In his speech, Persson envisaged what he termed a “green People’s Home” (see Mack this volume on the People’s Home) in which technical solutions meet the challenges posed by global warming without demanding radical changes in lifestyles. The aim of the Hammarby Model is precisely to meet this challenge. As part of this initiative, and with an eye

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to the export market, the government promised 6.2 billion kronor to local initiatives based on eco-cycle solutions; the Hammarby Model is one very influential example that received financing. The subsequent governments in Sweden largely share the same basic premises of ecological modernization as their social-democratic predecessor but have placed more emphasis on market solutions. They also emphasize the importance of spatial planning for sustainable development: There have always been visions of the good society of the future. As human activities have become more complex and ever-larger numbers of people have to share the space available, the role of spatial planning has become increasingly important. One of the most important tasks in this connection is to adopt a holistic approach and not focus on the physical environment alone. The important thing is to plan for community care, safety, security, infrastructure, industry and employment, natural resources, housing, amenities and a good living environment, while informing the citizens so that they feel involved. (Ministry of the Environment 2002) According to one of the original planning goals for Hammarby Sjöstad, “Solutions are to be adapted to the needs of residents and promote social community and ecological responsibility. The involvement and needs of residents must be utilized and influence the design of the area.” Yet in the revised goals of 2006 we read: “Solutions are to be adapted to the needs of residents and promote social community and ecological responsibility. The involvement and needs of residents must be utilized and taken note of.” This is a subtle but significant change from “utilizing” and “influencing” to “noting.” The 2006 government simply wanted citizens to “feel” involved in the planning process. In this respect planning moves from actual to virtual involvement. We return to the theme of the virtual later. Whereas previous Swedish planning visions in the 1940s envisaged an ideal citizen and had democratic ambitions, the current vision, even if it extols community, implies a process of depoliticization: citizens “feel” involved but are not. Dobson (2003) argues that in liberal democracies citizenship is predominantly a relationship between citizens and the state, and that the state works to satisfy the demands of capitalist business, which means that radical challenges to economic growth are not forthcoming. Public opinion in Sweden largely reflects this relationship: everyone is in favor of environmental

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protection and sustainability, but not if it disturbs the goals of continued economic growth or demands radical reduction in standards of living. Ecological modernization promises to strike a balance between growth and sustainability (Hajer 1997). Critics accuse it of concealing conflicts and portraying the threat of global warming as amenable to technical not political solutions and divorced from questions of power (Hajer 1997; Anshelm 2002). It was not difficult to find a faith in technical solutions among the planners of Hammarby Sjöstad. One planning consultant commented: “You could say that people don’t change as fast as technology, people are a bit sluggish. . . . You need to synchronize things a bit better, people’s development, technical development, construction materials and the like.” Yet the rhetoric surrounding active environmental citizens persists. for example, promotional advertising for the conference “Building Sustainability, Stockholm 2010,” which was held on October 19 and 20, 2010 (Stockholm’s year as the European green Capital), claims inaccurately that Hammarby Sjöstad provides “Brilliant opportunities for its citizens to take an active part in eco-friendly living” (emphasis added).

“hammarby sjöstad 2.0”

Yet there are also signs of a return of the repressed in the latest development of Hammarby Sjöstad, namely, its progeny the new urban sustainable development Stockholm royal Seaport (Norra Djurgårdsstaden),8 which is explicitly referred to by the development manager as “Hammarby Sjostad 2.0” and also aims to become a “world-class city district” at the forefront of urban sustainable development. Whereas consultation with residents in Hammarby Sjöstad was minimal and attention to lifestyles almost nonexistent, planners and politicians promised to make them central to the seaport development. The demands they intended to make on residents included charging individuals for their garbage, providing them with a travel plan to their places of work to minimize energy use, and encouraging them to exercise and to use the carpool rather than drive their own vehicles (Dagens Nyheter, November 9, 2010). (The carpool strategy was tried and largely failed in Hammarby Sjöstad.) Yet when the plans to activate citizens were published in a national newspaper, the reactions from readers were largely negative. Comments included: “gDr Sweden in all its glory, and from a center-right Stockholm council!” and “All we need is a smoking ban, and we have germany ca. 1936,” signed “1984” (Dagens Nyheter, November 10, 2011).

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Although hardly representative of Stockholm’s residents’ attitudes in general, these comments point nonetheless to a dislike of what are perceived to be paternalistic forms of planning, especially when they involve consumption and lifestyle, a degree of interference that is out of step with the neoliberal nuances of the then center-right government. Perhaps they even provide support for the planning approach adopted in Hammarby Sjöstad, one that hides its tracks within infrastructural solutions that are not immediately obvious. In fact, many residents in Hammarby Sjöstad know very little or nothing at all about the Hammarby Model despite the efforts by glashusEtt, the local environment information center. Nor are they expected to do so. It is worth pausing for a moment to take stock before turning to the virtualization of Hammarby Sjöstad. An ambition to be the best, to be commercially successful, to develop integrated and holistic planning and technical approaches that unite and satisfy different interests, the creation of sustainable urban districts, and Swedish ecological modernization—these are some of the themes that emerge in the real story of Hammarby Sjöstad. They exist in a context of changing political demands and the displacement of the earlier social-democratic emphasis on communities and neighborhoods found in the original environmental goals for Hammarby Sjöstad, as well as the emphasis on economic gains (always present but less prominent previously) within the neoliberal discourses favored by the subsequent governments. It is this shift— from the environmental to the economic—that becomes increasingly visible with the virtualization of Hammarby Sjöstad to which we now turn.

Virtualization simulation one: The (Painful) Birth of a Celebrity welcome to hammarby sjöstad! you have moved to a world-famous area and, of course, we hope that you will be happy here. how did it become world famous? Quite simply because the environment is such a large part of its construction and planning.

These are the words in the informational leaflet that greeted new residents in Hammarby Sjöstad, courtesy of the information center glashusEtt. Since the early days, Hammarby Sjöstad has attracted media attention, first in Sweden and then increasingly abroad. The coverage has not been uniformly positive.

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When the first residents started to move in, much of the attention was very negative. The result was what planners and residents alike considered to be a caricature of the area. Much of the initial publicity was in connection with the housing expos Bo01 and Bo02. Admiration for the new housing developments in Stockholm and in Malmö in the south of Sweden was mixed with envy and the accusation that these were developments for wealthy people. graffiti sprayed on the walls in Hammarby Sjöstad advised readers to “Kill the rich!” Some of the first apartment blocks were affected by mildew because of carelessness on the part of builders and by a number of construction faults, including toilets attached so high on the walls that when people sat on them, their feet dangled in the air. Neither were the energy goals met. In part this was because the environmental goals were adopted in 1996 after most of the work on the design of the area was finalized. But in addition both the politicians and developers wanted to build flats that would sell, and that meant large rooms, plentiful light, water views, and large windows (Pandis and Brandt 2009, 32–33). People living on the opposite side of the canal often call the canal side of Sickla Canal Street an aquarium. The initial sale of apartments was slow, and for a time people referred to Hammarby Sjöstad as “Hammarby ghost Town” (Hammarbyspökstad). Yet despite some of the initial bad press, by and large Hammarby Sjöstad is now presented in a positive light in media reports, especially in connection with the marketing of Swedish environmental technology. Although glashusEtt’s main goal was initially to provide information for residents, its main function up until its closure in 2017 was to take care of the foreign visitors to the area, who wanted to learn more about the Hammarby Model. A map of the world at glashusEtt was covered with almost 400 pins, each one indicating the origin of visitors. Between 2002 and 2013, Hammarby Sjöstad attracted over 100,000 visitors from Sweden and abroad. It featured very prominently in Stockholm’s successful bid for the European green Capital of 2010 (Beretta 2014). for example, 85 percent of the images in a CNN news report on the green Capital featured Hammarby Sjöstad. It has also become a useful vehicle with which to be associated for companies wishing to sell green technology. In short, Hammarby Sjöstad has become a sustainable celebrity and is increasingly portrayed in a positive light as an “improved” version of itself. However, celebrity status involves risks. It attracts admiration and emulation, but also invites critical scrutiny and attempts to expose faults and

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shortcomings. It can lead to disappointment when its feet of clay (or concrete in this case) are exposed. foreign visitors to Hammarby Sjöstad were not always impressed by what they found. One British visitor commented that anyone could aerate the water in the taps to cut down on use. A Dutch woman wondered where all the teenagers were going to meet and socialize. Some Irish visitors bemoaned the expense of the housing and the implications for social diversity. Others were even more critical. At a symposium on Hammarby Sjöstad’s environmental profile held at the royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm on November 10, 2008, which we attended as experts, one participant from SWECO (a consultancy service in the field of engineering, environmental technology, and architecture) who worked on the planning of the Hammarby Model during its early stages and then on its transformation into the SymbioCity concept (more on this later) likened Hammarby Sjöstad caustically to a “Potemkin backdrop” whose environmental goals failed to live up to the image of the area and whose technology was nothing but old tried and tested municipal solutions. for him, Hammarby Sjöstad’s image is a fake. Celebrity is also part of an industry (gamson 1994; Turner 2004) that demands rapid change, novelty, and spectacle. The industry here is the everincreasing market for sustainable solutions to climate changes, peopled by companies selling green technologies of all kinds, governments attempting to outdo each other as the greenest of the green, and the thousands of professionals—planners, politicians, developers, consultants, builders and so on—now traveling around the world to view developments like Hammarby Sjöstad and attend conferences, business fairs, and the like. The competition always to be the frontrunner can have consequences. for example, aspects of an original development like Hammarby Sjöstad are not fully explored by planners and developers before they are abandoned or the attention of visitors and media moves on. Hammarby Sjöstad is already starting to feel the effects. As early as November 20, 2010, a full twelve years before the completion date for the entire development, Joakim Larsson, the chairperson of the Development Administration (Exploateringskontoret) that coordinates the Stockholm royal Seaport, declared that “Hammarby Sjöstad has meant a lot for the City’s [Stockholm’s] reputation and has really had an international impact, but is now almost old news” (Dagens Nyheter, November 9, 2010). There is reason to believe that the relevance of celebrity status for sustainable urban developments will increase due to growing media interest,

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the growing number of international competitions focused on sustainable development, and the promotion by national and regional governments of sustainable urban solutions. The result is an “eco-scape” (cf. Appadurai 1996) of internationally prominent sustainable urban developments—such as freiburg and Kronsberg in germany, BedZed and greenwich Millennium village in London, Masdar in Abu Dhabi, Dongtan Eco-City in China, and Hammarby Sjöstad—that attract media attention and policy tourists on their grand Tour of “must see” urban developments.

simulation Two: reproducing the Model

Whereas the first order of simulation is a representation that is still recognizably Hammarby Sjöstad, even if it is something of a caricature, the second order involves its replication in bricks and mortar and the growing emphasis on selling the Hammarby Model. Hammarby Sjöstad’s brief in the environmental program for the development was to be “a national and international role model and source of inspiration for ecological planning building and housing,” and “always be in the international frontline for sustainable development of dense urban city environments.” Despite these explicit goals, many of those involved in Hammarby Sjöstad’s construction felt that both Stockholm City and Sweden’s National Board of Trade had been slow to recognize the potential of the area. This is no longer the case, and there are intensive efforts by business development authorities to promote Hammarby Sjöstad. Their ambition is to see the Hammarby Model reproduced across the globe, with adjustments for local context but nonetheless recognizable as the Hammarby Model. As we have already seen, the latest Swedish sustainable urban development, the new Stockholm royal Seaport, is referred to by some of those working on it as “Hammarby Sjöstad 2.0,” but the level of ambition is greater than this. A report from the government’s Delegation for Sustainable Cities (Delegationen för hållbara städer 2010) that summarizes the answers received from Swedish embassies on the subject of sustainable urban developments and environmental technical exports repeatedly refers to the international influence of Hammarby Sjöstad, not least in China (Hult 2013). Swedish newspapers report that Hammarby Sjöstad is the model for several large-scale Chinese sustainable city projects (Svenska Dagbladet, January 27, 2011). for

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example the ecological city district of Caofeidian in Tangshan will be home to 500,000 people.9 But reproduction refers not only to the physical facts of urban development inspired at least in part by Hammarby Sjöstad but also to the reproduction of the concept of the model. One actor that was quick to appreciate the potential of the area was the British company Design for Homes (www.designforhomes.org), which arranges visits for foreign planners and developers. Among other things it produced the promotional DvD, Hammarby Sjöstad: A Model for Green Living? (2008), which includes interviews with several of the leading planners and architects. All emphasize the virtues of the development, and there is even an endorsement by the British ambassador to Sweden. The strengths of its holistic integrated planning receive special emphasis. One of the leading planners states: “What you can learn from Hammarby Sjöstad—and of course the environmental program is an important part and can be used in other areas in Stockholm, Sweden, and the world, and it has also been used in other countries—but it’s the town planning process and the project management actually and all the decisions we have [taken], with the approval of politicians of course.” There is very little indication of compromises and conflicts, which is hardly surprising in what is an advertisement for the development, and note too how the environment has become parenthetical. The DvD also presents the residents in a particular light: “The area is very nice to live in. You have water nearby; you can easily cycle to the inner city in ten minutes. And the children love it. Someone has thought about everything. Everything is planned! And that is very nice for us, in our daily life with our child, it’s excellent.” The ringing endorsement from this couple of the comprehensive planning is very unlike the mocking and irritated tone of the newspaper readers when confronted with the plans for the royal Seaport mentioned earlier. The DvD is in English but has subtitles in french, Spanish, and, not surprisingly, Mandarin. The model also figures in articles and books on sustainable urban developments, and in planning readers for university students, which largely reproduce the official version of the model and planning process (e.g., Wheeler and Beatley 2009, 409–10). Yet this second order of simulation is still tied to a clear referent and spatial location that relies on a steady stream of visitors, receptions, and PowerPoint presentations in Hammarby Sjöstad, and now in the new Stockholm royal Seaport. The next order of simulation goes a long way toward cutting the representational and spatial cord.

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simulation Three: The Model goes global

In 2002, Hammarby Sjöstad was translated into the “Sustainable City Concept” by SWECO for the World Summit of Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. This concept comprises a toolbox for the diagnosis of current situation, specification of objectives, and planning strategies. The Sustainable City Concept was developed further into “SymbioCity: sustainability by Sweden” (symbiocity.se), which has been administered by the Swedish Trade Council since 2008. SymbioCity promotes holistic, sustainable urban development by exploiting “synergies” in urban functions. It provides “Swedish expertise [and] offers support and knowledge to help you to create your plan towards a more sustainable city.” According to the website, it is “the future of urban development.” Above all it is about selling Swedish environmental techniques and system expertise. To this end it brokers more than seven hundred Swedish companies within the building technology industry. SymbioCity claims to be a universally applicable system solution for sustainable urban development: “SymbioCity is a scalable concept, applicable almost anywhere in the world. region, city, district, building or household? Depending on your needs and resources you can use the SymbioCity approach at different scales. SymbioCity adapts to your unique situation!” (Swedish Trade Council 2010, 15).10 These claims amount to a fractal form of planning in which a pattern or structure repeats itself at different levels of scale. Anthropological attention to fractals (e.g., Mosko and Damon 2005) has not paid much attention to how they resonate with globalization and neoliberal diffusion in their capacity to reproduce themselves and in doing so infuse local and global levels of interconnectedness with the same basic form—one that, moreover, has an innate tendency to keep on replicating itself and spreading ever wider. SymbioCity appears ideal for the global commercial ambitions of governments and companies hoping to sell and distribute their versions of sustainable development as widely as possible. SymbioCity’s website allowed the prospective buyer to take part in SymbioCity Scenarios, a game in which the mayor of a city of 300,000 people must solve a number of challenges, including air and water pollution, traffic chaos, energy production, and urban sprawl. The graphics include a number of “multicultural” images (very improbable in one and the same city) of British police controlling a crowd, and traffic jams and slums from Asia, Africa, and possibly Latin America to give the impression of a universal yet placeless city of diversity.

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In effect what we see in SymbioCity is an example of an “immutable combinable mobile” (Latour 1987). Immutable mobiles are objects, representations, and processes that are apparently applicable anywhere. They do not need to adapt in any radical manner to local circumstances. Immutable mobiles subsume lower orders of phenomena under a higher order integration, whether a concept or meta-description. This is precisely what SymbioCity has done. The lower order descriptions and models, like the Hammarby Model, are translated into a higher order, rendering them more mobile and combinable, and also marketable. SymbioCity provides the planning solutions to almost any problem, if we are to believe the rhetoric. Immutable mobiles also have a power dimension to them; they enable forms of control at a distance. In this case in the form of Swedish export success as the Hammarby Model, now in the guise of SymbioCity, is rolled out across the world.

Conclusions Stockholm may have failed in its bid to host the 2004 Olympic games, but it immediately went on to become part of other global competitions centered on the marketing of sustainable urban solutions. To this end Hammarby Sjöstad has gone through several transformations that have culminated in the seductive graphics and universal claims of SymbioCity. Influenced by the optimism of Sweden’s ecological modernization, Hammarby Sjöstad projects a strikingly modernist faith in the power of planning and technology in tandem to solve global challenges. This optimism is perhaps utopian, but urban planning has been influenced by utopian visions since its inception (Hall 2002; see also robertson 1984). Perhaps planning in the current context demands utopian “modernist” solutions if the products and visions are to persuade and succeed in a competitive global market. Like capitalism, science, and politics, planning, it seems, also spreads as it promises to fulfill universal dreams and solve universal problems. As Anna Tsing writes: “The universal offers us the chance to participate in the global stream of humanity. We can’t turn it down” (2005, 1). (We could also add that it allows us to sell to it.) The tension we have noted between the placeless scenarios and the universal claims of SymbioCity and its references to the historical and cultural specifics of Sweden exist for a good reason. The profits generated for Swedish companies by SymbioCity ought preferably to arrive in the bank accounts of Swedish companies and eventually the Swedish Inland revenue.

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Jan-Inghe’s Hagström’s vision remains the local creation myth, and his criteria for success the mythic charter for Hammarby Sjöstad that still exercises an influence over local planners from its frame on the wall. By contrast, SymbioCity is another kind of myth identified by Lévi-Strauss (1968), one in which local mythic structure is a reflection of universal mind that reveals itself in myths that are seemingly unrelated and distant in time and space. This too is an appealing scenario for planners of a universal bent. Whether it appeals to the people for whom they plan is the subject of another story.

Notes 1. See hammarbysjostad.se. 2. The fieldwork on which this article is based was carried out between 2007 and 2009. Most of the major planning decisions were made several years before the project commenced. The account presented here is based on interviews with many of those who were involved in the planning process, participant observation, and interviews with residents as well as official documentation and media coverage of the area. 3. Brownfield refers to a formerly industrial or commercial area that is redeveloped, often after contaminated ground is cleaned, as was the case in Hammarby Sjöstad. 4. It therefore displays elements of New Urbanism in its approach to city planning (see grant 2006). 5. All translations from the Swedish are those of the authors. 6. The criteria are City-like (Stadsmässig), Adapted to the environment (Miljöanpassad), Innovative (Innovativ), Economic, (Ekonomisk), Accessible (Lättillgänglig), Attractive (Attraktiv), and Keeping to schedule (Tempoinriktad). 7. http://www.usk.stockholm.se/tabellverktyg/tv.aspx?projekt=omradesfakta&omrade=1440 8. stockholmroyalseaport.com 9. for some of the difficulties involved in this process of policy translation between Sweden and China, see Williams 2017. 10. On the evolution of SymbioCity see Mejía-Dugand 2016.

Works Cited Anshelm, Jonas. 2002. “Det gröna folkhemmet—striden om den ekologiska moderniseringen av Sverige.” In Naturen som brytpunkt: om miljöfrågans mystifieringar, konflikter och motsägelser, ed. Johan Hedrén, 34–61. Eslöv: Brutus Östlings Symposion. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Askergren, Mikael, 2009. “Ett Stockholm vid historiens slut.” Arkitekturtidskriften Kritik 6 (June 26). Analys förlag. Baudrillard, Jean. 1985. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Beretta, Ilaria. 2014. “Becoming a European green Capital: A Way Towards Sustainability?” In From Sustainable to Resilient Cities: Global Concerns and Urban Efforts (research in Urban Sociology 14), ed. William g. Holt, 315–38. Bingley, UK: Emerald group. Dagens Nyheter. 2008. “Hotade träslag i nya bostäder.” (June 9). ———. 2010. “Press på boende om sund livstil.” (November 9). ———. 2011. “Läsare skeptiska till miljövänlig bovision” (November 10). Delegationen för hållbara städer. 2010. Sammanställning av svaren från ambassaderna angående delegationens förfrågan om rapportering om hållbar stadsutveckling och relaterad miljöteknik. Stockholm: Miljödepartementet. Dobson, Andrew. 2003. Citizenship and the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. gamson, Joshua. 1994. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press. grant, Jill. 2006. Planning the Good Community: New Urbanism in Theory and Practice. New York: routledge. Hajer, Maarten A. 1997. The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernisation and the Policy Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, Peter. 2002. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, 3rd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Hallemar, Dan. 2010. “Hammarby Sjöstad. Så byggdes Sjöstaden.” Arkitektur 5: 36–43. Haughton, graham, Phil Allmendinger, David Counsell, and geoff vigar, eds. 2010. The New Spatial Planning: Territorial Management with Soft Spaces and Fuzzy Boundaries. New York: routledge. Hult, Anna. 2013. “Swedish Production of Sustainable Urban Imaginaries in China.” Journal of Urban Technology 20 (1): 77–94. Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1968. Structural Anthropology. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Lundqvist, Lennart. 2004. “greening the People’s Home: The formative Power of Sustainable Development Discourses in Swedish Housing.” Urban Studies 41 (7): 1283–301. Mejía-Dugand, Santiago. 2016. “The Evolution of Sweden’s Urban Sustainability Marketing Tool. A Comparative Study of Two Major International Events.” Journal of Urban Technology 23 (2): 65–80. Ministry of the Environment. 2002. A Summary of Government Communication 2001/2: 172. Sweden’s National Strategy for Sustainable Development 2002. Stockholm: Ministry of the Environment. Mosko, Mark S., and fred Damon, eds. 2005. On the Order of Chaos: Social Anthropology and the Science of Chaos. New York: Berghahn. Pandis Iverot, Sofie, and Nils Brandt. 2009. Utvärdering av Hammarby Sjöstads miljöprofileringvilka erfarenheter ska tas med till nya stadsutvecklingsprojekt i Stockholm? Stockholm: Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan. ramberg, Klas. 2005. “Stadsplanering och stadsliv.” In Planeringens utmaningar och tillämpningar, ed. gunnel forsberg, 165–74. Uppsala: Uppsala Publishing House AB. robertson, Alexander foster. 1984. People and the State: An Anthropology of Planned Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stadsbyggnadskontoret. 1996. Hammarby Sjöstad: Miljöprogram. Stockholm: Stadsbyggnadskontoret.

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Swedish Trade Council. 2010. Take a Deeper Look. The Holistic Approach to Sustainable Urban Development. SymbioCity: Sustainability by Sweden. Stockholm: Swedish Trade Council. Tsing, Anna. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tunström, Moa. 2009. På spaning efter den goda staden. Om konstruktioner av ideal och problem i svensk stadsbyggnadsdiskussion. Örebro: Örebro Studies in Human geography 4. Turner, graeme. 2004. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage. Wheeler, Stephen M., and Timothy Beatley, eds. 2009. The Sustainable Development Reader. New York: routledge. Williams, Joanna. 2017. “Lost in Translation: Translating Low Carbon Experiments into New Spatial Contexts viewed through the Mobile-Transitions Lens.” Journal of Cleaner Production 169 (December 15): 191–203.

AF Terword

The Problem of the Present in Anthropology and Urban Planning James holston

Both anthropology and urban planning are, fundamentally, investigations of the present. However, they are of different sorts. I would like to examine some of the differences and suggest some possible dialogues. Let me begin with a reflection on anthropology. I think it would be plausible to say that anthropology—and here I refer to sociocultural anthropology—is an investigation both of the structures of the present and of the contingencies that render the present inhabitable. Anthropology uses a combination of ethnographic, comparative, and historical methods to conduct this investigation. At its best, in my view, this anthropological practice aims to problematize present circumstances by focusing on their assumptions and contradictions—evident in what people say and do and primarily evident in the gaps between the two. The kind of anthropology I am talking about construes these foci as starting points, as problems, puzzles, gaps, even “crimes” in the Baudelairian sense, for an investigation of the genealogical forces and factors of historical transformation that structure the present as an insurgence of the past, a structure that conditions how we live—both opening and limiting possibilities. This organization of daily life is robust precisely because we mostly take it for granted. Historically developed, it generally arrives in the present, so to speak, unannounced. Yet this robust everyday life is also fragile because it is produced at the intersection of many historical formulations that are often in conflict. Such intersections constitute the contingencies of the present, that is, unstable organizations, traces, and lines of the past that make the present a patchwork of multilayered and superimposed possibilities. Anthropological

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research makes these contingencies visible. It shows them operating at the sites in which we inhabit the mostly taken-for-granted present—our walk to work, daily consumption, and home life as much as our understandings of property and rights. This kind of showing gives people a different view of their lives, renders strange what they assume to be familiar. This rendering indicates two great powers of anthropology as a disciplined production of critical knowledge: it defamiliarizes and potentially unsettles the way people live and, in showing the lived present as a superimposition of possibilities, it indicates emergent conditions—that is, possibilities for social change and creativity— that are rooted in people’s practice rather than in utopian speculation. Urban planning (and urban design) also investigates the inhabitations of the present. Unlike anthropology, however, it generally strives to become normative, predictive, and prescriptive of the present, shaping it, plan by plan, becoming the structure of the present. Moreover, whether in the form of modernist planning or participatory planning, it is a structuring based on a prior script that becomes imposed on the present as two-dimensional plans take on three-dimensional substance. In that process, planning is necessarily utopian. Whoever planned an urban environment for degradation, for conflict? As normative structure and script, however, planning often fails to deal with the inevitable contingencies of living, with the multiple forces and factors that are always unmaking and remaking actually lived lives. for this particular failure, anthropology, as an investigation of contingency, might have something important to say to planning. Yet, at the same time, we must also ask what planning as a production of an imagined present has to say to anthropology. Too often anthropologists who want to engage urban planners fail to learn the language of planning (or urban design or architecture), and so fail in one of their own discipline’s fundamental commitments to its subject—a failure of learning that does not happen to the same degree when anthropology engages other kinds of professional practice such as law, finance, or science. Without learning the language of urban planning, it becomes far more difficult for anthropologists to collaborate with planners, to be taken seriously by planners in their professional practice, to understand their point of view—even when people in the planning and architectural fields reach out for an anthropological perspective, as in the case of John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski’s (1999) work on “everyday urbanism.” Without learning the language, it becomes difficult as well for anthropology to incorporate within its field of study the problems of norm, prediction, design, and explanation with which planners have to grapple.

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But let us first consider what anthropology can say to what has probably been the dominant kind of urban planning practice and that I would call modernist: this mode attempts to overcome the contingency of experience by totalizing it, that is, by fixing the present as a totally conceived plan based on an imagined future. This kind of planning is always already preserved by the very completeness of the plans themselves, conceived as “master plans” that often have a statute-like character as a set of instructions. The case of Brasília, for example, in which Costa’s master plan actually became law with the inauguration of the capital, is only an extreme of a general characteristic of planning to aspire to legislation.1 An anthropological critique of this kind of planning is not that it aspires to establish norms—the norm of a more egalitarian society as in Brasília’s case. To deny that dream is also to conceal or encourage a more totalitarian control of the present. The anthropological critique is rather that this totalized planning does not admit or develop productively the paradoxes of its imagined future. Instead, it attempts to be a plan without contradiction, without conflict. It assumes a rational domination of the future in which its totalizing plan dissolves any conflict between the imagined and the existing society in the imposed coherence of its order. This assumption is both arrogant and false. It fails to include as constituent elements of planning the conflict, ambiguity, and indeterminacy characteristic of actual social life. Moreover, it fails to consider the unintended and the unexpected as part of the model. Such assumptions are common to master plan solutions generally and not only to those in urban planning. Their basic feature is that they attempt to fix the future—or the past, as in historical preservation—by appealing to precedents that negate the value of present circumstance, of “everyday urbanism” (Chase, Crawford, and Kaliski 1999). The crucial question for us to consider, therefore, is how to include the ethnographic present in planning, that is, the possibilities for change encountered in existing social conditions. Not all master plans negate the present as a means to get to the imagined future (or past) of planning. A powerful counterexample is the US Constitution—which is important for anthropologists to engage as a master plan, given the ways in which contemporary right-wing judicial activists and the Tea Party movement press it into use. The Constitution is certainly a master plan and certainly modern in proposing a system of national government “in order to form a more perfect union.” Yet its great strength is precisely that its provisions are imprecise and incomplete—the arguments of “original intent” by right-wing judicial activists notwithstanding. Moreover, the Constitution

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is distrustful of the very institutions of government it creates. As a blueprint, it does not try to legislate the future. rather, its seven original articles and twenty-seven amendments embody a few guiding principles—for example, federalism, separation of powers, due process, and checks and balances—that not only channel conflict into mediating institutions but also protect against possible abuses of the governmental powers they create. Above all, they establish a trust that future generations of citizens—even “original intenters”— have the ability and the right to make their own histories by interpreting what the master plan means in light of their own experience and conviction. The US Constitution has, therefore, two kinds of planning projects: state building and citizenship building. The key point for our discussion is that the latter is conditioned by the former but not reducible to it, because the Constitution secures for citizens a real measure of insurgence against the state. On the one hand, it designs a state with the minimum conditions necessary to institutionalize both order and conflict. On the other hand, it guarantees the necessary conditions for social mobilization as a means to include the unintended and the unforeseeable as possible sources of new constitutional interpretation. This frame of complementary perspectives offers an important suggestion for thinking about a new production of the city. If modernist planning relies on and builds up the state, then its necessary counteragent is a mode of planning that addresses the formations of insurgent citizenship. Planning theory needs to be grounded in these antagonistic complements, both based on ethnographic and not utopian possibility: on one side, the project of statedirected futures that can be transformative but that is always a product of specific politics; and, on the other, the project of engaging planners with the insurgent forms of the social that often derive from and transform the first project but that are in important ways heterogeneous and outside the state. These insurgent forms are found both in organized grassroots mobilizations and in everyday practices that, in different ways, empower, parody, derail, or subvert state agendas. They are found, in other words, in struggles over what it means to be a member of the modern state—which is why I refer to them with the term citizenship. Membership in the state has never been a static identity, given the dynamics of global migrations and national ambitions. Citizenship changes as new members emerge to advance their claims, expanding its realm, and as new forms of segregation and violence counter these advances, eroding it. The sites of insurgent citizenship are found at the intersection of these processes of expansion and erosion.2

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These sites vary with time and place. Today, in many cities, they include the realm of the homeless, networks of “illegal” immigration, autoconstructed peripheries in which the poor build their own homes in precarious material and legal conditions, ganglands, fortified condominiums, employee-owned factories, squatter settlements, suburban migrant labor camps, sweatshops, and the zones of the so-called new racism. They are sites of insurgence because they introduce into the city new identities and practices that disturb established histories. These new identities and the disturbances they provoke may be of any social group, elite or subaltern. Their study views the city as not merely the container of this process but as its subject as well—a space of emergent identities and their social organization. It concentrates on practices that engage the problematic nature of belonging to society. It privileges such disturbances, emergences, and engagements because it is at the fault lines of these processes that we perceive the dynamism of society. This perception is quite different, however, from a sociological accretion of data, and its register includes the litter and not only the monuments of urban experience. This dynamism and its perception are the theoretical objectives of a planning linked to insurgent forms of the social. It differs from the modernist objectives of planning because it aims to understand society as a continual reinvention of the social, in the present. Anthropology suggests that planners need to look for the emergent forms of the social and their repression that indicate this invention. They are not hard to find in the wake of this century’s important processes of change. The new spaces of belonging, membership, and repression that result are especially the product of the compaction and reterritorialization in cities of so many new residents with histories, cultures, and demands that disrupt the normative and assumed categories of social life. This disruption is the source of insurgent citizenship and the object of a planning theory that includes the ethnographic present in its constitution. Such an approach to planning will generate a new theorization to account for the kind of production of cities that has dominated global urbanization for the last seventy years: I refer to peripheral urbanization. The anthropological reconstruction of the trope of “peripheries” unsettles dominant formulations in urban theory that have as their reference the type of urbanization that has shaped the history of large capitalist cities in the North Atlantic. In these formulations, the use of “peripheries” generally disqualifies spaces, residents (citizens and immigrants), and modes of urbanization. Today, however, “peripheries” signifies the production of most of the urban spaces around the world. The anthropological study of these peripheries uses the term to create

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a problem-space that allows us to call attention to these other logics of the production of the urban and their political potentialities. for example, in this paradigm shift, “peripheries” stands for the production of the urban in different temporalities. By that I mean that these are not spaces already made, spaces to be consumed as finished products first and inhabited later. rather, peripheries are spaces in the making, never quite done, always being altered, expanded, and elaborated upon. They are also spaces that frequently unsettle official logics—for example, those of legal property, formal labor, colonial dominance, state regulation, and market capitalism. Thus cities urbanized through peripheral formations are usually marked by significant spatial and social inequality. Yet, because of their constant incompletion and remaking, these are cities of multiple formations of inequality, and categories such as formal and regulated are always shifting and unstable. These urban spaces also create distinct urban practices and institutions, with distinctive forms of everydayness, practices of sociability, circulation, and connectivity. This anthropological decentering of North Atlantic urban theory also demonstrates that these peripheral productions of urban space generate new modes of politics through practices that produce new kinds of citizens, claims, and contestations. These new modes of politics are not primarily centered either on the universe of labor—work, factory life, and unions—or on that of political parties as in classic North Atlantic social theory. rather, they are centered on the production of urban space itself—primarily residential urban space—and its qualities, deficiencies, forms, and practices. In many parts of the world, urban social movements and neighborhood associations have been the organizational focus of these claims, but in the last years NgOs and cultural and artistic movements have also been important. Moreover, the concept of a right to the city has emerged as a focus of civic organization and a counterpoint to national citizenship in many cities with significant populations of marginalized citizens and immigrants. In sum, an anthropology of urban planning would emphasize a mode of planning and design based on contingency itself, on planning the ethnographically possible. Contingency planning works with plans that are always incomplete. It includes improvisation and experiment as a means of dealing with the uncertainty of present conditions. Its means are suggested by present possibilities for an alternative future, not by an imagined and already scripted future. It is a mode of planning based on imperfect knowledge, incomplete control, and lack of resources, which incorporates ongoing conflict and contradiction as constitutive elements. In this sense, the anthropology of urban

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planning has a significant insurgent aspect that emphasizes the constitutive roles of conflict and ambiguity in shaping the multiplicity of contemporary everyday urban life. In a second sense, this heterogeneity works against the modernist absorption of citizenship into a project of state building, providing alternative possible sources for the development of new kinds of practices and narratives about belonging to and participating in the city. This “working against” defines what I called an insurgent citizenship; and its spatial mode, an insurgent urbanism. This insurgence is important to the project of rethinking the social in planning because it reveals a realm of the possible that is rooted in the heterogeneity of lived experience, which is to say, not in utopian futures but in the assemblage of the ethnographic present that anthropology investigates.

Notes 1. See my discussion in Holston 1989. 2. for further discussion of this concept, see Holston 2008.

Works Cited Chase, John, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski, eds. 1999. Everyday Urbanism. New York: Monacelli. Holston, James. 1989. The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2008. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

ConTriBUTors

Margaret Crawford, University of California, Berkeley Margaret Crawford is a professor of architecture at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the evolution, uses, and meanings of urban space. She is the author of Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns and editor of The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment and Daily Urban Life; Everyday Urbanism; and Urbanization in China: Collected Classics.  She has published numerous articles on shopping malls, public space, and other issues in the American and Chinese built environment. Adèle Esposito Andujar, CNRS, Research Department IRASEC and AUSser Adèle Esposito Andujar was trained as an architect and urban planner. She is a researcher at the french National Center for Scientific research (CNrS). She is currently attached to the research Institute for Contemporary Southeast Asia (IrASEC, Bangkok). She is also associated to the research unit UMr AUSser (Paris). Her research deals with the development of secondary cities in Southeast Asia. She focuses on the contemporary uses of cultural heritage and processes of urban internationalization triggered by transnational and regional cooperation programs. Trevor Goldsmith, Independent Scholar Trevor goldsmith holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Chicago. He has held teaching positions at the University of virginia and the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include urban design, political mobilization, and performativity. Mark Graham, Stockholm University Mark graham is the head of and professor in the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. His recent publications include

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Contributors

Anthropological Explorations in Queer Theory (routledge, 2014) and Bureaucracy, Integration and Suspicion in the Welfare State (routledge, 2018). He is coeditor in chief of Ethnos. His research interests traverse the fields of gender and sexuality, refugee studies, material culture and consumption, organizational studies, and sustainable urban development and planning. Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University Michael Herzfeld is the Ernest E. Monrad research Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University; holds visiting appointments at Leiden University, Shanghai International Studies University, and the University of Melbourne; and is affiliated with Thammasat University (Bangkok) and “La Sapienza” University (rome).  Author of eleven books and producer of two ethnographic films, he has conducted field research in greece, Italy, and Thailand. His research interests include the politics of knowledge, urban conflict, nationalism and its refractions, and the critical analysis of heritage dynamics. James Holston, University of California, Berkeley James Holston is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the founding director of the Social Apps Lab at CITrIS and former codirector of global Metropolitan Studies. He is a political anthropologist whose work focuses on the city as a strategic site for the emergence and erosion of new citizenships, popular sovereignties, and democratic innovations. His books include The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília, Cities and Citizenship, and Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Modernity and Citizenship in Brazil,  and his software projects include AppCivist.org and DengueChat.org, which engage people in direct democracy, participatory budgeting, and community-based arbovirus vector control. Gabriella Körling, Stockholm University gabriella Körling is a researcher in the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. Her research interests include the anthropology of the state, infrastructure, urban anthropology, politics, and decentralization. Her dissertation, In Search of the State: An Ethnography of Public Service Provision in Urban Niger (Uppsala University, 2011), addressed the everyday construction of the state in urban Niger.

Contributors

245

Jennifer Mack, KTH Royal Institute of Technology Jennifer Mack is an associate professor in the School of Architecture, KTH royal Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), which received the 2018 SfAA/AAA Margaret Mead Award, and she is coeditor of Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects (Actar, 2019). Using interdisciplinary methods from anthropology and the history and theory of architecture, her research links social change to the built environment. Andrew Newman, Wayne State University Andrew Newman is an associate professor of anthropology at Wayne State University. His work focuses on the urban built environment, infrastructure, and social movements. He is the author of Landscape of Discontent: Urban Sustainability in Immigrant Paris  (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) and a coeditor of A People’s Atlas of Detroit (Wayne State University Press, 2020). Lissa Nordin, Formas Lissa Nordin is a senior analyst at formas, a Swedish research council for sustainable development. She is the author of Man ska ju vara två: män och kärlekslängtan i glesbygd (Natur & Kultur, 2007). Bruce O’Neill, Saint Louis University Bruce O’Neill is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Saint Louis University. He is the author of The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order (Duke University Press, 2017). His research interests include contemporary urbanism, infrastructure, and inequality, with a focus on Eastern Europe. Kevin Lewis O’Neill, University of Toronto Kevin Lewis O’Neill is the director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies and a professor in the Department for the Study of religion, University of Toronto. His work focuses on the moral dimensions of contemporary political practice in Latin America. O’Neill has written a trilogy on the politics of Pentecostalism in guatemala City—City of God (University of California Press, 2010), Secure the Soul (University of California Press, 2015), and Hunted (University of Chicago Press, August 2019).

246

Contributors

Federico Pérez, Portland State University federico Pérez is an assistant professor of urban anthropology in the Honors College at Portland State University. He teaches courses on Latin American urbanism and is currently writing a book on security and urban renewal plans in downtown Bogotá. Monika Sznel, Independent Scholar Monika Sznel, who was trained in anthropology at the University of Warsaw, has been a housing rights activist with the Odblokuj Association. She currently works as a Ux researcher and volunteers with the Open Cages European Organization.

inde x

Aalborg Charter, 199 Activism: architecture as, 203; -ists, 29, 38n12, 51, 52, 54, 72–74, 180, 184, 197–98, 200, 203, 205, 213n18; judicial (right-wing), 237; socialist, 200 Agenda 21, 199 Angkor, 83, 85–89, 92, 94, 96 anthropology, 116n3, 194, 198, 230, 235–37, 239–41; applied, 197–98; and compared to engaged, 210–11; of planning, 134, of the urban 2; urban, 3 antiquities, 23, 26–27, 30, 34 APSArA (Authority for Protection and Management of Angkor and the region of Siem reap), 87, 89–93 Architects, 23, 29, 31, 34, 44, 51, 63, 72, 74, 75, 77, 85, 88–90, 95n1, 96n3, 103, 108, 137, 143, 148, 149, 179–81, 184–86, 188–91, 193, 196, 198, 201–3, 208, 210, 213n18, 213n23, 217, 219–221, 229; Association of Siamese Architects, 29 Arnstein, Sherry, 8, 11, 147, 196 assimilationism, 72–73 assistance, international. See international aid assyrier/syrianer, 138 Athens, Charter of, 198; New Charter of, 197 autoconstruction, 120 Balcerowicz Plan, 207 Bangkok, 4, 5, 19–38. See also Pom Mahakan Barcelona, 179–94

Bari, 34, 38n11 Baudrillard, Jean, 22–23, 217 Beijing, 22, 23; beautification, 33, 201 Berdini, Paolo, 29–30 Bloomberg, Michael, 54–55, 58n12 Bogotá, planning, 4, 6, 54, 55, 100–117 Bostadsstyrelsen, 143, 157 Bourdieu, Pierre, 116n5, 156 Boyer, Dominic, 10 Brasília, 4, 48, 49, 180, 237 brokerage, cultural, 89 brownfield development, 217 Buddhism, 22, 25, 33, 34 Burden, Amanda, 54–55 bureaucracy, 24, 27, 29, 30, 32, 35, 36, 103, 106, 109, 117n7, 180, 183, 192, 194 Burnham, Daniel, 44–45, 47, 51 Caldeira, Teresa, 57, 101, 120, 169 Cambodians, 83–97 Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), 90 capitalism, 27, 34, 181, 184, 223, 231, 239, 240 Castells, Manuel, 181, 193n2 celebrity, 217, 225–27 Chatri Prakitnonthakan, 29 citizen: concepts of shaped by park system, 61–62, 65 Citizens for Modern Transit, 174 citizenship, 5–8, 22, 34–36, 42, 52–55, 61–77, 77n2, 120, 141, 145, 180, 199, 205, 211n1, 238; dialog, 147, 154; insurgent, 238–39, 241; revolts by, 51; universal, 62, 75

248 ciudad consolidada (built city), 110–11 civil society, 210 civiltà, 21 class and class conflict, 7, 8, 22, 33, 37n3, 37n5, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 65, 67, 74, 122, 139–40, 152–53, 166, 168, 171, 172, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 193–94n2, 196, 202 colonialism, 11, 19, 34, 43, 64–65, 85, 87–88, 95, 121–22, 124, 240. See also postcolonial conflict. See class; space conservation, 29, 32, 84, 87, 88, 89, 95n1 Constitution (United States), 237–38 consultants, 83, 85–87, 93, 94, 96, 102. See also expert contingency, planning and, 236, 237, 240–41 convivenza, 32 Costa, Lúcio, 180, 237 Davidoff, Paul, 51 decay, 34, 95 de Certeau, Michel, 3 defamiliarization, 236 degrado, 32 densification, 110, 113–15 deregulation and fragmentation, 107, 109–10 design, 184, 187–91; distributed, 189, 190; participative: 188 detaljplan, 139, 148, 150–51, 153 development, urban, 84, 86, 90, 91, 95, 96 disjointed incrementalism, 48, 49 donors, 83–85, 87, 92, 94, 95–96n3 Douglas, Mary, 139 ecology and ecological concerns, 61, 188, 190, 191, 228, 229; modernization, 222–25, 231 eco-scape, 228 edificabilidad (floor area ratio regulations), 111–14

index Elinoff, Eli, 28 Empire (french), 65 equality and inequality, 34, 62, 72–73, 76, 107, 140–41, 143, 156, 181, 197, 198, 240 Erskine, ralph, 144, 158 European green Capital, 224, 226 “European metropolis,” 201 European Union, accession of formerly socialist states to, 196–97 everyday life, 235–36 eviction, 19, 33, 37n3, 203, 209 experts, expertise, 1–2, 4–5, 7, 9–11, 184, 186, 189, 190, 192, 193. See also professionals expropriation, 124, 126 failure, 102, 113–14 foucault, Michel, 192 formalism, formality, informality, 19, 22, 31, 35; informal sector, 119, 121; informal planning, 132–34; “informal zoning,” 120, 126, 133, 134; planning by nonplanners 120–21; and settlements, 33, 122, 125, 132–34 fractals, 217, 230 france, 85–91, 96. See also Paris french Development Agency (AfD), 85, 97 french revolution, 64 future, 121, 133, 134, 237, 238 gardens: and history of 63–65; public, 61–83; and regulation of behavior in, 65–66 gentrification, 5, 9, 37n3, 202, 208, 209; self-, 214n25 german Development Service, 94 governmentality, 192; spatial, 141–42 Hagström, Jan-Inghe, 217, 220 Hammarby Model, 218, 222–28 Hammarby Sjöstad (Stockholm), 216–32 Hannerz, Ulf, 3 Haussmann, georges-Eugène, 64

index heritage, 25, 83, 84, 87–89, 91, 95. See also conservation; UNESCO; World Heritage Hirschon, renée, 21–22 Holston, James, 8, 9, 48, 56, 58, 101, 120, 180, 184 Hyresrätter, 145 illegality, 23, 31, 32, 34, 38n12 immigration, 67; and assimilationism, 72–73 immutable mobiles, 231 infrastructure, 7, 9, 12, 44, 47, 49, 61, 84, 89, 92, 107, 109–13, 116n4, 119, 121, 122m 123, 126, 127, 131, 133, 134, 173, 188, 194n5, 202, 212n10, 218, 223, 225; civic, 63, 75 institutional knowledge, 108–10 international aid, 6, 83, 85, 86, 92, 96 intimacy: cultural, professional, and religious, 19–20, 23, 30–32, 36, 100, 204 Jacobs, Jane, 50, 55, 71 Japan, 85, 91–94, 96; Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA), 85, 92, 96 Jardin d’Acclimatation, 64 Jardins d’Éole, 70 Khmer rouge, 84, 86, 88–90 land: market, 124, 125, 132; landowners, customary, 124–26, 129; use, planning of, 84, 85, 94 Latour, Bruno, 113, 231 Lebanon, 37n5, 142 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneretgris), 50, 180, 198 Lefebvre, Henri, 2–3, 165 Le Nôtre, André, 64 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 22, 232 Lina Hage, Södertälje, 137–38, 144, 146–49, 153 lotissement, 120 Low, Setha M., 9, 20, 164 Lyotard, Jean-françois, 11

249 Mack, Jennifer, 19–20, 36 mandala, 21 Mannheim, Karl, 56 medborgardialog, 147 Merry, Sally Engle, 141–42 Million Program (miljonprogram), 141–43, 145–48, 153 modernism, modernist logic, 2, 20, 23, 33, 102, 115, 192, 196, 210, 212n10, 236–38, 264 Molyvann (vann), 88–90, 95, 96 mönsterplaner. See plan Moses, robert, 3, 53, 55, 58n8 nationalism, 37, 37n7 neoliberalism, 5, 8, 9, 12, 22, 32, 196, 199, 207, 209, 210, 225, 230 neighborhood association, 184, 185, 187, 190, 191, 193 Niamey, urban development of, 121–22 Nolen, John, 45–47 norms, 7, 11, 139, 141, 146–47, 157; urban, 132; urban spatial, 134 Odblokuj, 199, 202, 203, 206–8, 210–212, 212n3, 213n18 office spaces, 104–5 Olympic games 217–19, 231 paese, 20 Paris, 61–77 parks: compared to public gardens, 77n1; Department of (Paris), 61, 63, 68–69, 73, 77n3; and staff of, 67, 70, 75 participation, 5, 8, 11–12, 52, 71–73, 76–77, 147, 155, 197, 198, 199, 212n12 Pasquino, 25–26 Phnom Penh, 84, 86, 88, 95, 96 Piraeus, 21–22 plans: 88–91; of Chicago, 44–46, 49, 58; grand, 2, 6, 10, 11; master, 2, 26, 84–86, 88, 91–93, 96, 97, 212n9, 237, 238; partial (planes parciales), 109; pattern (mönsterplaner), 143, 146; regional, of New York, 45–46, 58

250 planners 180–82, 185–93 planning, 236, 240; advocacy, 51; assemblage, 106–7, 116; ethnography and, 57–58; holistic, 8, 122, 216, 219, 220, 223, 225, 229, 230; instruments, 107, 109–10; and insurgent forms of the social, 239, 241; land use, 84, 85, 94; language of, 236; participatory, 5, 8, 11–12, 52, 147, 155, 196–214; politics of, 106, 115–16; rational comprehensive, 48, 49, 56; regionalism and, 53, 56; top-down, 4–5, 8, 11, 147; urban, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 94, 95; utopian, 236; vs. implementing, 102, 106. See also contingency plusvalía (value capture), 108 Poland, 196–214 Pom Mahakan, 24, 27–28, 33 postcoloniality, 85, 88, 89 power, 90, 93, 94, 101, 110, 134, 179, 182, 184, 186, 193, 196 practice, 2 Praga (district of Warsaw), 199–210, 212n4 pragmatism, 101–2, 111, 113–14 present, 8; ethnographic, 237, 239; in anthropology, 235–36, 240–41; in historic preservation, 237; in urban planning 236, 240 procedures, 103 production of space, 2 professionals, professionalism, 2, 7, 11, 152, 180, 181, 184–87, 189. See also expert qualitative data and methods, 185, 192, 194 quality of life, 181, 182, 185, 188, 192 quantitative data and methods, 185, 192, 194 rabinow, Paul, 19 rationality, rationalism, 12, 31, 34–36, 56–58, 59n14, 90, 107, 181, 189, 192, 193, 194n6, 198, 208, 210, 237. See also planning recontextualization, 110–11, 116 redistribution, 208, 100, 108, 114 refugees, 75, 139, 142, 153 religion, 30, 32, 34, 37n2, 37n7

index responsibilities, 31, 35, 87, 202, 204, 210, 211n1, 126, 168, 176; civic, 212n12; ecological, 223; regional, 7, 53, 54, 164, 165, 168, 172–76; rights and, 65, 164–65, 168; self-, 207, 210 revitalization, 114, 166, 207, 208, 209, 213n17, 213n22 ritualism, 24, 35 rome, 4, 5, 19–38 ronna, Södertälje, 144–45, 153 rurality, 21–22, 218 St. Louis, 54 Scott, James C., 3, 30–31, 36 secularism, 62–63 segmentation, 20–21 self-critical awareness, 101–2, 113 settlement story, Pays Bas, 127–29; and Tondigamay 129–31 Siem reap, 83–90, 92–97. See also APSArA Sillitoe, Paul, 198 simulacra, 22–23, 217; and simulation, orders of, 217, 225, 228–30 single-family homes 7, 137–38, 142–46, 148–49, 157 socialism, 22, 23, 185, 193–94n2, 196, 200, 212n8 Södertälje,137–58 Southeast Asia, 85, 90, 95 space, public: contestation of, 67–69, 73–76; spatial practice, 3; governmentality, 141–42 Square Léon, 67–70 standards and standardization, 7–8, 11, 13, 142–43, 145–46, 149, 156 Starzyński, Stefan, 201 state: citizens’ relations with, 62, 65, 67, 75–76, 223, 238; state-building, 238 Stockholm, 216–31 Stockholm royal Seaport, 224, 227–29, 232 sustainable development and sustainability, 8, 12, 84, 92, 93, 95, 197, 216–19, 222–24, 228–30 Sweden, 36, 137–58, 220–26, 229–31

index SymbioCity, 227, 230–32 Syriac Orthodox Christians, 7, 138–40, 142, 145–49, 153–58 Taylor, Charles, 141 técnicos, 186, 188, 189, 191, 193 technocracy, 110, 113, 114, 116n2 technopolitics, 101–2, 116 Territorial Ordering Plan (Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial—POT), 100–101, 107 theodicy, secular, 31, 34, 38n12 Trinitat Nova, 184–93 uncertainty, 101, 106–8, 113, 117n8 UNESCO, 83, 85, 87, 88 urban anthropology. See anthropology urban: commons, 75; design, 70–73, 76–77; renewal, 2, 47, 49–50, 122

251 Urban field Service, 51 urbanization, 86, 96; “from below,” 120, 134; peripheral, 239–40 utopia, 231, 236 väänänen, Petteri, 137 virtualization, 216–17, 225 Warsaw, 4, 8, 196–214 welfare state, 12, 140, 143, 152, 191–93 World Heritage site designation, 83, 87 Yalouri, Eleana, 30 youth, 69–70, 74–75, 127, 128, 206 zoning, 32, 83–95, 122–24; “informal,” 120, 126, 133, 134; private, 123; “tombola,” 125–26, 133 Zukin, Sharon, 207

ACKnowLedgMenTs

We, the coeditors of this volume, wish to acknowledge with profound gratitude the patience, wisdom, and expert guidance of Peter Agree, for many years the University of Pennsylvania Press’s remarkable anthropology editor; Noreen O’Connor-Abel, for whose efficient engagement with our project we are immensely grateful; the constructive and insightful observations of the anonymous readers; the exemplary forbearance and responsiveness as well as the high professional standards and conceptual originality of our contributors; the hard work of the production team, including Zoe Kovacs, copyeditor Kristine Hunt, and Nicholle robertson; and the multifaceted inspiration of students, colleagues, family members, and friends, too numerous to name individually. We have greatly enjoyed the experience of working on this project together despite the geographical distance between us, and we hope that planners everywhere will now, after reading this book, wake up to the fact that they are now a legitimate population for serious anthropological investigation.