Richard Sennett
The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life
(1970)
[85]CHAPTER FOUR
═══🙡═══Planning
Purified Cities
THE TERRAIN EXPLORED THUS FAR REVEALS A NEW MAN living in a new community: a secular puritan, afraid of his own powers to explore what he cannot control in ad- vane; a community life whose institutions, notably the family, encourage his puritanism to become a permanent way of life. This new breed of puritan has succeeded in making the social framework of his existence increasingly simpler and more primitive. Yet the brutality of his im- pulses has occurred in the midst of a great flowering of technology and mechanical invention.
The increase of technological complexity in modern society and the decrease of complexity in its social forms have not proceeded on wholely disparate planes. The im- pact of technological processes on community life has come to center on an area that at first glance may seen remote. This realm is a group of assumptions by which
[86]
professional planners conceive and mold cities. Indeed. to make better communal use of the techology that has created abundance, we shall need to reverse certain tech- nological assumptions about building massive cities. These assumptions were first dramatized in Paris a hundred years ago, and are now widespread throughout most of western Europe and the United States. This century of city build- ing has, in Lewis Mumford's phrase, confused a machine- using society with a vision of society as a machine itself. Until the peculiar calculus of efficiency guiding much of city planning is united with a new conception of the humane uses of cities, I am convinced planners will create urban conditions that intensify purity drives and so promote voluntary withdrawal from social partici- pation and the willingness to use violence as a final solu- tion.
Let me be clear at the outset that I am not arguing that we abandon the current technological approach in favor of an opposite group of "human values," because tools are human creations themselves, and not alien in their own right. Indeed, it is now very unfortunate that the critics of present planning assumptions can only follow the vision of Camillo Sitte a century ago; modern critics still dream his dream of a return to some Arcadian, pre- industrial order where the division of labor is muted. The answer to technological problems and rigidities has all too often been an argument for a willful simplicity of urban life, as though men could put their powers to create out of mind. I believe with Lewis Mumford that it is neces- sary to learn to use tools in humane ways, not abandon
[87]
them in order to be humane. The task is to find out what the right social ends are for the vast advances in city- building, in engineering, housing, sanitation, and road construction during the past century.
Baron Haussmann's Dream
City planning by specialists is a recent event in the history of cities. The reason for this is largely that, up to the time of the great industrial cities, urban society was not thought to be a special kind of social order. Earlier social theorists recognized in specific matters many differences between country and town. But even in Renaissance cities, writers like Machiavelli did not believe city society was subject to different rules and had a basically different set, or ordering, of social principles. For example, the special freedom of most pre-industrial city men from serfdom was not taken to bear on the general nature of "freedom in society." The city was not accorded the importance of such a special form; it was viewed instead as a fragment of a larger design. Thus the leaders of urban society were not special men of the city; rather, they were popes like Sixtus V, or monarchs like Louis XIV, who built the last of the imperial cities (for Versailles truly was such a place, not an anti-city as some have called it).
But the economic order that began to coalesce in cities about 150 years ago changed social thinkers' conception
[88]
of cities. What happened was that cities lost their older shape, and so men began to wonder about what was peculiar to them in the first place. For one thing, the technological and capital-forming processes of the in dustrial metropolis were not subject to the kinds of power control that had operated in the cities of the past; the origin of these two processes lay beyond the older regula- tory rules of cities or city states. It would have been mean- ingless for one city government alone to choose railroads over ships as the commerce medium of the city: the balance of trade was not to be controlled so locally. The process of industrial capital formation was in this way different from the capital formation process inspired by voyages of trade and exploration, such as those sponsored in the Renaissance by cities like Venice. Again, the ide logical beliefs of men of John Stuart Mill's generation preached that these new industrial forces would of them- selves operate to the benefit of all men, if only allowed to work unhampered by other political (or emotional, or his- torical) considerations.
Therefore, as industrial cities grew in population and economic importance, they came to be more uncontrolled, and rules of social welfare lost their historical power. We know now the evils of this transformation--the intense poverty, the uncertainty of health and vocation, the un- ending boredom of the physical appearance of these cities; so did the more enlightened men of the nineteenth cen- tury. It is to one such man, Baron Haussmann, that we owe the impetus to urban reform that has come to dominate our own era.
Haussmann was a man of modest background but
[89]
grand ideas who directed, at the bidding of Napoleon the Third, the rebuilding of the city of Paris in the 1860's. Paris at this time was a mosaic of the industrial and the pre-industrial orders. New factories were growing rapidly on the outskirts of the city and in certain sections of the inner city as well; but the tangle of small crooked streets and decaying buildings was still the focus for economic activities new and old, with a populace increasingly un- known to the administrative and social-service authorities of the city. Movement within the city itself was very difficult--in 1840 it took an hour and a half to walk on foot between two sections of Paris; the distance can now be navigated on foot in thirty minutes. Especially frightening to the political authorities was the fact there was no way of controlling the workers in case of civil insurrection since the twisted streets were perfect for setting up im- prompt barricades.
Haussmann's means of correcting the wretched hous- ing, the difficult transport, the lack of political control are important to us now because he was the first to look on the solution of these problems as essentially interre lated. What one did with transport could also be a means of dealing with the populace when civil disorders oc- curred; how one removed the dilapidated housing, Hauss- mann believed, was also a way of defining the relations between the social classes.
Haussmann began to cut, through the jumble of streets, great, long, unswervingly straight avenues, avenues that could accommodate an enormous amount of traffic, serve as an easy means of getting troops into riotous sections of the city, and act like river boundaries dividing different
[90]
socioeconomic sections of the city. They were put in rela- tion to the city's institutions along lines first laid down in the great Baroque era of city planning in the sixteen and early seventeenth centuries. These broad avenues connected public monument to public monument; they did not connect one group of people to another with whom they might have social relations. The working man's dis- tricts of Paris thus remained, in the wake of Haussmann's reforms, unconnected to the new centers of industry on the outskirts of town. Again, these new streets often served to put the purely social problems of poverty and petit-bourgeois deprivation out of mind by putting them out of sight behind the beautiful grand boulevards.
Baron Haussmann was, to be sure, a great creator, and his positive accomplishments cannot be ignored. Yet his legacy to the cities of our time, unintended or not, has been a group of assumptions of terrible simplicity.
The first of these is that it is desirable to treat city problems as a whole: this belief rather thoughtlessly as- sumes that because the social, economic, and physical phenomena of a city are interrelated in their functioning, it is a good idea to try to deal with them in a coherent way, so that changes in one realm will inevitably transform other realms of city life in structured paths.
The second assumption is that it is a good idea to plan physical space for predetermined social use; that is, instead of assuming that changes in the social structure of the city should be accomplished first in order to change the physical appearance of the city, Haussmann be- queathed the notion to us that it is somehow better, and
[91]
certainly easier, to change the physical landscape in order to alter the social patterns of the metropolis.
These ideas seem now so routine as to appear self- evident common sense. Yet they are not ineluctable rules, but in fact the product of a peculiar historical response men have made to their own capacity to live with the ma- chines and technological artifacts on which the modern bureaucratic order, whether capitalist or state socialist, is built. This peculiar historical response can best be understood by looking at the transmutation -or better, the intensification-_of Haussmann's beliefs in the major planning movement of this century, the metropolitan- regional planning movement.
The Great Plans
By the beginning of the Second World War, those con- cerned with the organization of cities had, by and large, become ideologues of a peculiar sort. Their dogma was hardly an emotional one, nor an ideal of great intellectual depth, but these deficiencies were more than compensated for by a doglike faith in what has come to be called "metropolitan planning. 99 This planning ideal, which gathered strength in the 1930's-although it was con- tained in germ in the writings of Ebenezer Howard at the turn of the century- proposed to take the assumptions behind Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris one step further: city planners would design coherently the growth of whole
[92]
urban regions, coordinate the physical, economic, and social efforts not only within the jurisdiction of one city, but also in relation to the needs of other cities around it. What was in Haussmann's work an assumption of the desirable power of one part of the urban complex to affect other parts became in the metropolitan planning ideology an ideal of planning the parts from the nature of the whole.
This is of course one of the most familiar modern images of unity: it is the basis on which machines are designed and it defines a peculiarly modern concept of "efficiency" in technological and social organization. But, as historians like John Nef have gone to great efforts to show, this image is an assumption about efficiency rather than the nature of efficiency itself. In pre-industrial factory systems, the experience of making a product was more important than a standard image, a clear picture, of the "whole" to be made; those craftsmen conceived, therefore, that to define in advance what a thing should look like would interfere with "efficiency," that is, with the freedom of the craftsmen to exploit his materials and forms during production. In an industrial situation, the product to be made is conceived beforehand, so that the realization of the product, the achievement of the whole, is a passive routine, not an active experience or explora- tion. By envisioning the fruit of labor in advance of labor itself it is therefore possible to plan the production process so that the "parts are determined by the whole, " since the parts of production are thought to have no life of their own, no role other than to work harmoniously toward the creation of a preplanned entity.
[93]
This mentality of production obviously suits, even in- vites, the use of machine tools instead of human labor. Indeed, given this idea, one of the great humane accom- plishments of the technology of the last three decades has been to automate such production devices as the assembly line, where men used to perform labor that was not suited to their capacity to experience newness and variety. Yet when this mentality of production, this image of machine efficiency, becomes transferred to the production of cities, in the designing of social parts from a predetermined, pre- visualized urban whole, the results become inhumane.
In planning done along this line, the planner first deter- mines the projective needs" of an urban area in the present and future, and then proceeds to design the physical and social facilities, the "parts, » to service them. The assumption is that the larger the scale of this process, the more efficient, in the machine sense, the results. In a recent, widely praised collection of essays on planning, the editor concludes, for example:
. . . the amount of area covered by plans should be continually enlarged. There is a distinct need for a national urbanization pattern or locational strategy for the entire United States; moreover, this should be co-ordinated with Canada and Mexico on the con- tinental level.1If such massive coordination were to succeed, the same writer believes, then it would be necessary to preplan all
1 W. Wentworth Eldridge, ed.: Taming Megalopolis (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books; 1967), P. 1158.
[94]
aspects of social and economic life in relation to each other. This "unified approach" entails the following:
Aesthetic and humanistic values and institutions must be in a planned relationship to economic and political values and institutions. Thus all such ac- tivities must be designed as a unit both physically and as social structures. Clearly both the public and the private structures must be meshed.2These are not the words of a mad superman. They are rather a clear statement of the goals of a large and in- fluential segment of the profession that plans modern cities. The ideal is that nothing be out of control. For life to be manipulated on so tight a rein, all manner of diverse activities must be ruled by their lowest common denomi- nators. The result of planning efforts along these lines is that the future environment becomes a function of the planner's vision of it in the present, just as the machine is the product of the machine's designer, and not its fabrica- tor. Thus, the inhabitants of future urban spaces do not possess them of their own making, as for example the people of Jewish ghettos in central Europe gradually possessed the neighborhoods they came to live in. That historical process is replaced by an arbitrary assignment of who is suited to live where.
In the beginning of this book it was shown how the device of "projected needs" was a ruse to avoid facing the unknown in the future. What is peculiarly mechanical about this approach to time is that a majority of the
3 Ibid.
[95]
planners proceeding on these lines conceive of the "needs" of urbanites not in terms of known experience, but rather in terms of the urbanites' place in an order where needs are experienced abstractly, as part of a total function. To the arguments of those displaced by highway-building or urban renewal projects, the planners respond that they work in terms of an urban whole, but this metropolitan region is itself a "community" only as the functioning parts of a machine could be called a "community."
Thus Haussmann's first precept, that the changes in one urban sphere of activity should change other spheres of activity, becomes transmuted into the concept that the significant functioning of the city itself is found in the links between specific activities in the city. It is not what people do or experience in their own lives that counts, but the external relationship of these acts to areas of indirect experience that is the focus. Now, no one could argue with metropolitan planners that these external re- lationships, these interstices, exist and that they do shape certain large relationships in the city. The question is, why adopt them as the important focus? Why single out the fact of their existence as the desirable value? That the functioning of the whole to its peak efficiency is the best means of life for the parts holds in the design of machines, but how can it be justified in the affairs of men? If anything, men should be encouraged to strike out from the paths of easiest resistance in dealing with each other, encouraged to form relationships that have a different pattern and direction from those that have existed before: this is how the phenomenon of history distinguishes men from other kinds of animals.
[96]
The "Urban Whole" as a Myth of Purity
Why progressive notions of city planning have taken on this tone has to do, as was suggested at the opening of this book, with what planners feel about the complexity possible in city life. Their impulse has been to give way to that tendency, developed in adolescence, of men to control unknown threats by eliminating the possibility for experiencing surprise. By controlling the frame of what is available for social interaction, the subsequent path of social action is tamed. Social history is replaced by the passive "product" of social planning. Buried in this hunger for preplanning along machinelike lines is the desire to avoid pain, to create a transcendent order of living that is immune to the variety, and so to the inevitable conflict, between men. Let us see why this is so.
The metaphor of metropolitan planning is an expres- sion of the technology by which modern machines are constructed. The parts of machines are different, to be sure, but these differences exist to create a single function; any conflict between the parts, or even the existence of parts working independently of the whole, would defeat the purpose of the machine. There is no reason for pain or confusion in it.
But when this metaphor from technology is used for the structure of urban society, its meaning changes. Here the technological metaphor of city growth defeats the needs for which the whole exists, because these needs reside in the human parts of the social whole, not in
[97]
some social product apart from social experience. In plan- ning cities on the machine model, an urbanist is trying to "integrate" these needs in a transcendent way, and for the purposes of this integration conflict and pain between the parts of the human city are viewed as bad, as qualities to be eliminated. This is the same spirit as that found in excessive post-revolutionary discipline, or in the flight to hiding in a clean suburb. The actual, immediate ex- perience of man, in all its possible freedom and diversity, is taken to be less important than the creation of a com- munity that is conflict free; the sense of living in the pres ent is violated for an ideal society in which men live in such harmony that one can never imagine them growing in ways that will violate the "correct" interrelations they have with each other.
Thus does the technological imagery of metropolitan planning lead to an adolescent society, as easily as the isolated little suburbs do. It is rare that city planning under this guise should even contemplate, much less encourage, the development of social situations that might lead to communal tension through the encouragement of human differences. Conflict is conceived as a threat to some "better, conflict-free city life. And when conflict in the cities comes, no conception even exists among the professional planners as to how conflicts can be expressed fully without leading to violence. Because the metro- politan planning persuasion is so naïve in its assumptions of what constitutes the good city, because it is an ex- pression of adolescent refusal to deal with the world in all its complexity and pain, the escalation of urban con- flict into violence must inevitably result, for the planners
[98]
are not really concerned with mediating actual human behavior or providing fields of unpredictable interaction. The essence of the purification mechanism is a fear of losing control. Real disorder is a problem, planners think. best left to politicians and the like. Planners' sights are on that urban "whole" instead; they are dreaming of a beauti- ful city that exists somewhere other than in the present, a beautiful city where people fit together in peace and har- mony, a city so beautiful in fact, that ghetto people, Irish cops, aristocratic WASPS, hippies, students, clerks, and bookkeepers will close their eyes to what they cannot abide in each other, to the painful facts of their difference, and settle down to common happiness.
There is a hidden dimension to this metropolitan ideal In the communities organized around coherence Tocque- ville viewed, the effect of forming a communal image of solidarity was to free the individuals of the community from the need to confront and interact with each other directly. In the idealization of coherence made by the pro- fessional planners of cities, there occurs a similar dis- engagement. From the vantage point of leadership in city affairs, however, this disengagement leads to a failure in effectiveness, an impotence to achieve what the planners want for themselves. The very nature of the technological metaphor involved in holistic planning creates this im- potence. For machines do not change their output by spontaneous changes in their parts, except to break down. When a machine's parts wear down, which is their "form of experience" in time, the machine cannot operate. But the essence of human development is that growth occurs when old routines break down, when old parts are no
[99]
longer enough for the needs of the new organism. This same kind of change, in a larger sphere, creates the phenomenon of history in a culture.
To put the matter more concretely: today plans or "master guides" are made for whole metropolitan regions. Planners try to guide the history of their cities' future according to predetermined, specified lines; some parts of the plan when realized evolve historically to conflict with the others; it is then thought that the plan has failed. The "whole" has fallen apart, for it is not conceived of being able to grow in unknown ways. Growth, in massive planning, is instead conceived along mechanical lines as the realization of an initial vision. This has been the inner contradiction that has crippled the very act of planning for large cities; there is no provision for the fact of history, for the unintended, for the contradictory, for the un- known.
In his penetrating and unfairly neglected book The Last Landscape, William H. Whyte has shown the im- potence of planners working along these lines in their attempts to structure the Washington, D.C., urban region. The planners imposed an ideal image of urban growth on the city that the facts of city history are now violating; new residential and commercial growth is occurring in areas where the planners had not expected the city to grow; the central city is renewing itself in ways not originally anticipated. The response of the planners, as Whyte shows, has not been to try to understand the new changes and learn from them, but rather to cry for greater policing powers to enforce what they originally envisioned Failing to get these powers, there has now developed a
[100]
resigned passivity among the original planners: what can they do if they cannot be "in control"? Precisely because the massive planning ideal is resistant in its intentions to the idea of history in a city's life, the planners are bound always in the end to be out of control. In this way, there has developed, internally, a vacuum in professional leader- ship in cities.
An obvious, painfully obvious, result of this vacuum is what has happened in large cities of America and western Europe in the planning of highways. Here, certainly, the funds and governmental power to plan, through Port and Interstate authorities, have not been absent; if anything, these programs in American cities have had almost tyran- nical power in enforcing their ideas. Yet they have failed, not for lack of technological expertise, but because they have not had the power to be adaptive over the course of time: no provisions have been made for the interaction of traffic design in cities with the changing character of the inner city itself. The planners did not envision an environ- ment different from what was conceived in the "planning stages"; but, as the roads were built, more people decided to use their cars and there were more people with cars to use. And so the traffic jams remain as bad as they were before the new highways were built, only on a more massive scale. The fault here is not that the planners failed to be omniscient, but that they presumed themselves omniscient before they built, and so made no provisions for considering change and evolution in their designs, or even whether their original ideas were worth pursuing, in the course of realizing the large-scale and long-term plans.
Humanists often despair before what they imagine to
[101]
be the unconquerable power of technological forces. But technological patterns, like anything that grows out of a specific historical situation, have controlling power over only the forces related to their own growth. Since the growth of machine technology was not generated by social forces directly related to urban social structure, its re- imposition on the city is bound to lead to the kind of breakdowns we are now experiencing in transportation, public and publicly directed rehousing, and the like. In the shaping of cities, the technological metaphor is not practical; it simply doesn't work.
As for the human "parts" involved, the writings of such urbanists as Charles Abrams, Jane Jacobs, Marc Fried, and Herbert Gans have by now made us painfully aware of how much is destroyed in the lives of real people for the sake of realizing some abstract plan of development or renewal.
Fried, for example, in his superb essay "Grieving for a Lost Home" has documented the feeling of sudden empti- ness among a group of ordinary city dwellers who were moved from a decayed area slated for urban renewal into clean, modern, preplanned housing elsewhere in the city. Suddenly people who had developed neighborly contacts day-to-day associations and loyalties, found themselves scattered and alone like refugees, as a result of change made "for their own good." The planners' response to this kind of complaint has been that any social change involves dislocation to someone. True enough, but then who would the planners point to as the ultimate recipients of the changes they propose? Certainly not the suburbanites- what they want, and get, is insulation from the urban
[102]
region as a totality; again, the results of a wide range of recent research on lower middle-class and lower-class peo- ple who have been shifted from their old living areas into the new, replanned communities reveal this same "griev- ing" Fried has depicted. The studies hardly indicate a wild enthusiasm on the part of ordinary city dwellers for their new place in the grand scheme.
It is not enough for city planners to argue that they provide the technological materials for social life and that the responsibility for how the materials are used rests with the people in the city. This argument is one that natural scientists have come to treat with great suspicion among themselves. The contemporary scientific com- munity in the last decades has come to see that nothing invented by man can be divorced from human use; there are no humanly ' "neutral" acts of creation or invention, no matter how detached or objective the scientist feels in his work. This is the lesson the planning community now needs to learn: it must take responsibility for its acts in a historical, unpredictable society rather than in a dream world of harmony and predetermined order.
To make modern cities serve human needs, we shall have to change the way in which city planners work. Instead of planning for some abstract urban whole, planners are going to have to work for the concrete parts of the city, the different classes, ethnic groups, and races it contains. And the work they do for these people cannot be laying out their future; the people will have no chance to mature unless they do that for themselves, unless they are actively involved in shaping their social lives. But because the needs of life are not shapeless, because there
[103]
is a substance of growth, and not an aimless wandering, planners can provide the social materials by which men in communities can come to civilize themselves.
This is a more complex notion than it might appear at first. Unlike many community workers who think of them-selves as New Left, I cannot believe that whatever a community does by itself is per se good because it was self-instituted ; people can want to be vicious together, like the German Nazis, or the groups of white crackers who terrorized Negroes in the old South. The impulse to create a communal order of a repressive kind rises naturally out of men's lives. But, out of the same complex desires for a mythic community solidarity, men can never become good simply by following the good orders or good plan of someone else; the first chapters of this book showed why that is so, I hope, from a psychological point of view. In between aimless wandering of communal life and the authoritarian direction of the community stands a middle way, which is not a compromise between the two ex- tremes, but an entirely new approach. This new kind of city planning could create the materials human beings need, from the world outside themselves, to grow out of those peculiar modes of retreating from new and unknown experience learned on the eve of adulthood.
PART TWO
═══🙡═══A New Anarchism
[107]Introduction to Part Two
It is hard to think about urban social change that is not addressed to poverty. Yet the purification patterns sketched so far show a deep and convoluted sickness in the community life of city dwellers who are not poor. This is an emotional poverty rather than material poverty, and it is voluntary. In that fact lie both a reason and a hope for change.
In the writings of Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown there is a pessimism, an undercurrent of despair about the social consequences of abundance. The traits of community life that Marcuse and Brown describe are in some ways similar to the picture I have drawn: a "one- dimensionality, as Marcuse calls it, in what men have made of their lives. And yet my thinking diverges sharply from Marcuse's in that this emotional poverty I take to be "caused" by something basic to the growing process of the human being himself: abundance in urban com- munity life has only made it possible for this deep-down passion for slavery to express itself. It is too easy to lay the root of such troubles at the impersonal, mechanical schemes that have created the economic frame, the abundance of the age. What the past decades have taught us is not how rotten abundance as such is, but how rotten are the uses to which it is put.
If change in the social uses of abundance is to occur, the psychological forces of adult life need to be balanced in a new way. To make good use of affluence, we must
[108]
create a set of social situations that will weaken, as a man matures, the desire for controlled, purified experience. Perhaps I have more faith than Marcuse that a change can occur, since the origin of these communal ills seems to me to spring from a freeze or arrest in the development of most men, now, in the problems of their adolescence. For there is a possible adulthood that lies beyond this adolescence. If that adulthood were brought into being, then, I believe, the slaveries to which affluent community life is now subject could end, and the abundance used to enrich man's freedom.
The terms of this possible adulthood may already be evident: a life with other people in which men learn to tolerate painful ambiguity and uncertainty. To counter the desire for slavery that grows strong in adolescence, men must subsequently grow to need the unknown, to feel incomplete without a certain anarchy in their lives, to learn, as Denis de Rougemont says, to love the "otherness" around them.
This may seem far from the experiences of social life men now have in cities, yet I believe the city will play a vital role in encouraging a move into this new adulthood. For if the multiple points of social contact once character izing the city can be reawakened under terms appropriate to affluence, then some channels for experiencing diversity and disorder will again be open to men. The great promise of city life is a new kind of confusion possible within its borders, an anarchy that will not destroy men, but make them richer and more mature.