Richard Sennett
The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life
(1970)
[137]CHAPTER SIX
═══🙡═══The Good Uses
of the City
IN THE STAGES OF ADOLESCENT GROWTH, MOST YOUNG people seem faced with an imbalance between what they are ready to experience and what they have experienced. This imbalance leads to a shortcut for experience--the creating of imaginary myths of what the world outside is like. Getting to the stages beyond this point in adolescence is now, however, very difficult for most young people. The two stages beyond are the playing out of some vision of coherent, painless life in a social environment responsive to the young person, followed by a change in concern and in the capacity for caring when the complexities of life defeat the painless myths. What happens now is that the patterns of coherence in earlier points of growth either meet no social resistance or are confined to a peculiar limbo. Where modern community life can be said to fail the young is in its inability to lead them into a social
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matrix where they will have to learn to deal with other people. Thus the young, whether they are radical, centrist, or conservative, can pass, and have passed, into physical adulthood with fixed pictures of themselves and a deep fear of exposing those pictures to social tests. Emotion- ally, then, they have failed to become adults.
What I envision is a restructuring of city life so that these adolescent patterns have a challenging social matrix. There are definite and workable means, I believe, by which cities can become human settlements that force these coherence drives to be tested and challenged. These same city structures could confront as well older persons who have regressed to childish or adolescent indifference about the effect of their acts on the people around them.
Cities organized along these lines would not simply be places where the inhabitants encountered dissimilar peo- ple; the critical need is for men to have to deal with the dissimilarities. The outside world has to feel important for the dreams from within to be touched. Thus the first prob- lem in the design of such human communities is how to plug people into each others' lives without making every- one feel the same.
Survival Communities: The Idea
The most direct way to knit people's social lives together is through necessity, by making men need to know about each other in order to survive. What should emerge in
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city life is the occurrence of social relations, and espe- cially relations involving social conflict, through face-to- face encounters. For experiencing the friction of differ- ences and conflicts makes men personally aware of the milieu around their own lives; the need is for men to recognize conflicts, not to try to purify them away in a solidarity myth, in order to survive. A social forum that en- courages the move into adulthood thus first depends on making sure there is no escape from situations of con- frontation and conflict. The city can provide a unique meeting ground for these encounters.
The present use of affluent community life in cities is, as shown earlier, to make it possible for men to hide to- gether from being adults. Building a survival community where men must confront differences around them will require two changes in the structuring of city life. One will be a change in the scope of bureaucratic power in the city; the other will be a change in the concept of order in the planning of the city.
It has become standard in modern governments, though not in modern business, for bureaucracies to become pyra- mids of power, with the most control exercised by a few individuals at the top of the organization and increasingly less control over basic decisions exercised by the many workers below. This pyramid shape is the basis of cen- tralized educational systems such as that of France, or legislative welfare systems like that of the United States. Businesses, on the other hand, are finding that this pyra- mid shape is often counterproductive. General Motors, as Peter Drucker describes it, was one of the early innovators in creating a more complex pattern of bureaucracy, and
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many of the businesses involved in large-scale merger or holding operations also have had to evolve similar new forms.
In the field of urban planning, the pyramid form re- mains endemic, despite some notable attempts to re- structure it in the United States, attempts that have failed prematurely for lack of funds. Yet in order to make cities survival communities, where the affluent as well as the poor will have to deal directly with each other in order to survive, the bureacracies of control in these cities must change their form.
For certain city functions, a pyramid-shaped central organization is necessary for economies of scale. One police dispatch system is more productive than ten, one central department to control fires or to deal with sanitation better than many small ones. The problem with such central organizations is not whether they should exist, but what they should do. People today are imbued with the technological belief that the larger the structure the more inclusive should be its scope, an idea derived again, from the nature of machine productivity; thus it is difficult to accept the idea that a strong central control apparatus can exist in the city and yet do very limited, defined tasks. Part of the difficulty in imagining this curb is that those who traditionally have wanted to limit central authority have wanted the result to be a public power vacuum, so that in the place of public power there is substituted the power of a few individuals who control the private enterprises of the city. Almost all advanced countries, with the exception of the United States, have come
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to understand this fallacy of "decentralization." The removal of central authority, following libertarian lines of the nineteenth century, all too often means the passing of central authority to a few private individuals who cannot be touched by the public at large.
What is needed in order to create cities where people are forced to confront each other is a reconstituting of public power, not a destruction of it. As a rule of change, the situations creating survival encounters would be as follows: there would be no policing, nor any other form of central control, of schooling, zoning, renewal, or city activities that could be performed through common com- munity action, or, even more importantly, through direct, nonviolent conflict in the city itself. This abstract idea comes clearer by examining a second change needed in city structure.
To make the experience of conflict a maturing one re- quires the destruction of an assumption regnant since the work of Baron Haussmann in Paris, an assumption that the planning of cities should be directed to bring order and clarity to the city as a whole. Instead of this idea, whose basis is found in mechanical ideas of production, the city must be conceived as a social order of parts with- out a coherent, controllable whole form. The planning of functional divisions, of processes, of land use in advance of the habitation of the land should be abolished. Rather, the creation of city spaces should be for varied, change- able use. Areas, for example, that during one period serve as commercial places should be able in another era to serve as living places. The creation of neighborhood areas
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must not mean that the socioeconomic level or activities of the area are frozen by predetermined zoning specifica- tions and the like.
This prohibition on replanned, functional space is im- portant because it permits great diversity to arise in city neighborhoods, and because it permits whatever social en- counters and conflicts exist in the neighborhood to "take hold" in the character of the neighborhood itself. Once replanned city space is removed, the actual use of the space becomes much more important in the lives of its users. For when predetermined use through zoning is eliminated, the character of a neighborhood will depend on the specific bonds and alliances of the people within it; its nature will be determined by social acts and the burden of those acts over time as a community's history. The pre- planned "image" of city neighborhoods would not be de- finable on a planner's map; it would depend on how the individuals of the neighborhood dealt with each other.
Encouraging unzoned urban places, no longer centrally controlled, would thus promote visual and functional dis- order in the city. My belief is that this disorder is better than dead, predetermined planning, which restricts effec- tive social exploration. It is better for men to be makers of historical change than for the functional design of a pre-experiential plan to be "carried out." If the element of history in city places is allowed to re-emerge in this way, if functional dislocation and a jumble of concurrent events and peoples inhabiting common ground is per- mitted, then the desires for purified identity can have a testing ground of the strongest sort. This would occur in the following way.
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Survival Communities: Some Examples
Let us imagine a community free to create its own pat- terns of life, in this case a neighborhood where cheap rents were to be found, thus likely to attract young people. Here also, if the functional divisions that now operate in city life were erased, would be found whites and blacks who were blue-collar laborers, old people living in reduced circumstances, perhaps some immigrant clusters, per- haps a few small shopkeepers. Because the land use had not been rigidly zoned, all kinds of activities appropriate to cheap rents would be found-_some light manufactur- ing, perhaps a brothel or two, many small stores, bars, and inexpensive family restaurants.
The outstanding characteristic of this area, for the young people who move into it, would be the high level of tension and unease between the people living there. It would be a vital place, to be sure--and this is what draws urbanists like Jane Jacobs to it--but a part of the vitality would be a great deal of conflict between dissimilar groups of people. And because metropolitan-wide controls would be lessened, the threat, or the assurance, of police control would be gone, for the police would have the responsibility not of keeping peace in the community by repressing devi- ance but rather of dealing with organized crime or other similar problems.
Precisely because the community was on its own, be- cause the people had to deal with each other in order to survive at all, some kind of uneasy truce between these
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hostile camps, these conflicting interests, would have to be arranged by the people themselves. And the act of par- ticipating in some sort of truce would force people to look at each other, if only to find areas in which some bond. tenuous and unloving as it would be, could be forged.
How would a young person feel in such a place? He would be as much a part of its life as anyone else, since controls apart from the people living there would have been lessened, especially police controls; he couldn't escape the Irish factory workers who hate the "spoiled" kids who go to college, nor the blacks who want no part of adolescent white sympathy. Yet he, and all the people around him, would have only each other; that would be the undeniable fact of life for them all. If the kids were playing records loudly, late at night, no cop would come to make them turn the record player off -the police would no longer see to that kind of thing. If a bar down the street were too noisy for the children of the neighborhood to sleep, the parents would have to squeeze the bar owner themselves, by picketing or informal pressure, for no zoning laws would apply throughout the city. Whatever happens in this city place, whatever shape the community acquires, would occur because of either the direct con- trol or the sufferance of the people there.
Such a community would probably stimulate a young person, and yet scare him, make him want to hide, as it would everyone else, to find some nice, safe, untroubled place. But the very diversity of the neighborhood has built into it the obligation of responsibility; there would be no way to avoid self-destruction in the community other than
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to deal with the people who live around the place. The feeling that "I live here and I count in this community's life" would consist, not of a feeling of companionship, but of a feeling that something must be done in common to make this conflict bearable, to survive together.
Thus the impulse to hide from pain, which is at the heart of the adolescent desire for a purified identity, would have a concrete social matrix, one in which the impulse would become untenable if the person were to survive. It is hard to imagine an eighteen-year-old who suddenly has to do something to make peace with white laborers who don't like college kids and Negroes who don't like whites making a snap decision about what he will do and be in the world; he can't help seeing everything around him, he can't help having to understand differences in other peo- ple whom he may not like, and who may not like him, in order to survive. In such a complex city, a young person must become an active being, a man, and not an abstract thinker discoursing on the evils of society at large. Con- fronted with the need to act, to deal with human differ- ences in order to survive, it seems plausible that the desire for a mythic solidarity would be defeated by this very necessity for survival, this need for enough knowl- edge of disparate people to establish a common truce.
In this way a young person could come to feel dis- satisfied with his own powers for making coherent world- and self-pictures. Survival communities could give him a field, resistant to purification by him or by those around him, in which he could act on his desires for secure order and in which these desires would be defeated. 145
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But these survival communities would lead men into adult concerns as well; they would be not merely a cor- rective to adolescence but a field for a richer life beyond it. The reasons for this can be understood by examining why survival communities would not escalate the ex- pressions of social conflict into violence.
Survival Communities and Violence
Since the common pattern in the relations between men is a reversion to the willfully blind selfishness of the child, the materials for conflict are innate to social life. There are few areas in which it should be expected that men would want to work actively together. But, as in any in- timate relationship, there are group relationships that can be sustaining and productive for all concerned as a result of letting conflicts of interests, emotional jealousies, class hatreds, and racial fears express themselves. These con- flicts are after all as much, if not much more, a part of every human being's life as brotherly love, yet we make our children feel these are terrible, guilty secrets that should never see the light of public display. These con- flicts and fears, especially now racial fears, can only be socialized if they are allowed to be expressed and play themselves out. I have never been able to understand how white liberals think they are realists when they tell their children there are no differences between blacks and
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whites but cultural prejudices, as if this meant nothing in the end. It is these cultural differences, exactly, that must be allowed to show themselves in all their crudity and vul- garity among both whites and blacks. Again, if the expe- rience of meaningful conflict were possible in cities, the young would be led to a realization of the blindness of talking about non-negotiable demands, as the more rigid among them do now. It is in the essence of experiences of conflict, when the conflict matters for survival, that men learn to talk to their enemies, learn to see the dimensions of that which they oppose.
It is one of the terrible simplicities of modern city life that we believe the expression of these hostile feelings will lead to violence. Perhaps the reason this belief is so widely held is that it justifies repression of our feelings. and so lets us hide from them, as we assume that once they are out in the open, only chaos can be the result. This is similar to that adolescent metaphor by which guilt over a specific transgression is transformed into a much broader self-definition-_that "I am a sinner" -so that the act or feeling itself can be denied as a reality to be dealt with.
Yet if men do not grow out of this denial, if men con- tinue to believe that hostility between groups should be muted, not encouraged in its social expression, the cities will continue to burn, for nothing exists socially now to mediate hostility, to force people to look beyond their images of threatening outsiders to the actual outsiders themselves. By restructuring the power of city bureauc- racies so that they leave to the hostile groups themselves
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the need to create some truce, in order for chaos to be prevented, hostility can take on more open and less vio- lent forms.
Certainly, this is to gamble with social life itself. Yet it is of the essence of adult lives that chance and chance situations should provide the medium for new insight and a new understanding of discrete, other beings. To assure tranquillity in advance is to revert to a dream of painless immunity, and ultimately, if we are to judge from some social revolutions of our own time, to bring on a totali- tarian rigidity for the sake of the dream.
Releasing conflict between groups in survival commu- nities is not as great a gamble as it might seem. Certain processes, connected with the final stage of transition from adolescence to adulthood, ensure at least some measure of social peace, I believe, because of changes wrought in the individual involved in the web of social conflict between diverse urban groups.
Survival Communities and Adulthood
In any large central city, there remain today many differ- ences in life styles that could be used to distribute conflict, or at least fragment it. Ethnicity, social class, and race are not simple conditions of life, but complex factors that tend to interpenetrate and become diffused. For instance, it is a popular error to suppose that the violence of recent summers in American cities is a "race" " phenomenon, for
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most middle-class blacks are not only uninvolved but also hostile to the Negro militants; however, given the struc- ture of community life and police control in American cities, middle-class blacks and poor blacks never have to deal with each other about their common ties or differ- ences; each can sink back into a comfortable disgust over what the other group does. Yet if they had to confront each other, if the police stopped their blanket repression and gave the segments of the black community the re- sponsibility to control themselves, these hostilities could be expressed, and both groups, in order to survive, would find that they could go no further to achieve their own ends without finding out something about each other. Let us imagine added to this situation a refusal of the police to intervene between any black group and the whites who now feel threatened by them. I believe that, instead of massive violence erupting, the people involved would learn that there is too much complex feeling involved to be taken care of by the burning of stores. When people have to come face to face in order to survive, the death instinct does not prevail; it is only when men are alienated from using their own power, from being real men, that they burn themselves out and invite massive repression from the outside.
In other words, if we could increase the complexity of confrontation and conflict in the city, not polarize it, the aggression, still there, would channel itself into paths that allow at least mutual survival. This, I believe, is not as grim a prospect as it might seem. For when a man fails to achieve coherent ends, when there is too much com- plexity impinging on him for him to advocate something
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"pure and simple," the failure that results leads not to dis- solution of his social resolve, but to exactly that state of mind now open only to a few among those who have ex- perienced revolutionary conflict. As a consequence of this failure, one wants to understand the complexity that de- feated one; the sense of curiosity can be awakened, has to be awakened, if a man is going to know enough in order to survive.
This is how the adult's kind of care, independent of some painless order in which he is safe, comes into being. It is a caring based on the curiosity and commitment to the immediate, impinging social world rather than an otherworldly love or an urge toward purity. The French psychologist Georges Lapassade has said that adulthood is a stage in which pleasure and pain are no longer separable, because the individual is engaged by choice in situations without an end, situations that are "unachieved." It is exactly the character of these survival communities to create "unachieved" situations that have no clear form or definition in advance of the experience of social inter- action. By willfully making the question of social survival depend on the confused impure actions men take, these adult capacities to care and to wonder about the unknown will be generated. By a fundamental paradox of psycho- social development, the primitive questions of intergroup survival must resurface for a more civilized and mature life to exist.
The question may be posed as to what is particularly "urban" about such communities of survival. What role does the city as a special human settlement play in this communal movement to adulthood?
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Survival Communities as Cities
The structural conditions under which survival commu- nites could work are, first, those of heavy population density and, second, those of multiple contact points. Both of these structures are brought to a high point in urban settlements.
The first of these conditions seems readily apparent. If people are to deal with an environment too complex to control, a small village or a suburb, with its intimacy and isolation, will hardly suffice. There needs to be an enor- mous number of people packed together for a truly un- controllable environment to exist. But what if this mass simply acted as a little group enlarged? It is here that the real promise of city life begins, for as the number of peo- ple concentrated together in one place grows very large, the quality of human relations changes.
This appears more obvious than it is. In fact, those writers of the past two decades who have confused a "mass-culture" society with an increasingly urban one have ignored the fact that cities of the postwar era have become less dense and their population dispersed over a wide area even as the numbers in the megalopolis, as Jean Gottman calls it, have increased. There are definite reasons why a massive, dense city society is opposed to a mass-culture society.
The first of these is the possibility, indeed the encour- agement, of deviance in urban places. The first great American urban sociologist, Robert Park, wrote of the
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dense cities of his time that exactly because so many peo- ple were packed together it was hard for central agencies of control like the police to see all those who were differ- ent, or to control them through coercive means. Num- bers provided, he said, a kind of screen for deviations or idiosyncrasies; a man will not be noticed or forced into a community-wide mold with anything like the pressure found in a small town or suburb. Researches since Park's time bear this idea out in many ways. It is known that sexual deviations are much more easily expressed in dense urban areas than in the careful watching of the suburb or small town. Historically, deviant subcultures, be they bohemian, ethnic, or, today, youth and student, survive much longer in dense urban areas than in sparsely populated, easily controlled areas.
The second reason large dense communities are freed from the controls inherent in small ones concerns the instability of their populations. Jane Jacobs and other popular writers are greatly at fault for looking at the dense ethnic inner-city areas as traditionally stable places where people got to know their neighbors through years and years of common association. Historically and demographically this has not been true. There has been and is a great deal of movement from place to place within dense cities and between them. The warm associations Jacobs found are due to factors other than population stability. (I do not wish to quarrel with the ethical values she sees in dense city places; she simply ascribes them to the wrong factual base.)
The effect of this population movement in cities, so much greater than the intra-communal movement found
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in suburbs, is to destroy the power of tight-knit structures or local rules on the citizenry. The popular stereotype of Italian or Jewish urban communities as closed and im- penetrable is flawed, because the people in them are con- tinually moving around. That kind of tightness more likely occurs in the white, middle-class suburb, for the rate of household movement is lesser there when compared to the second generation in any of the inner-city groups.
Large numbers of people living densely packed together thus provides the medium of diversity and instability necessary for these survival communities to operate. But one may object that this instability makes it impossible for people to be able to face each other, to become involved with those around them. It is impossible as long as we understand coming together in community action along the old lines of common endeavor and a sharing of simi- larity. But the kinds of contacts that once existed in these ethnic ghettos suggest how direct, face-to-face associa- tions might actually be encouraged under conditions of instability and diversity.
In the old ghetto order, multiple contact points with diverse people and groups in the city were necessary, since none of the institutions in that era of scarcity had the power to be self-sustaining. By removing centralized bureaucracies of social control and by eliminating pre- planning with restrictive zoning, the same effect could be reproduced today; the intimate institutions of city life would not be able to be self-sustaining, and the individual or family would have to look beyond their own borders in order to survive. Decentralization, as the idea is used here, would have the effect of necessitating multiple social
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contacts for survival, without leading to community co. hesion.
This process can be illustrated as follows. Let us sup pose that a city university were deprived of its special zoning and centralized controls. Like Columbia, Harvard or the University of Chicago, its students and faculty would live in a heterogeneous area with many hostile non- university people intermixed among the school population. But unlike these three schools, the city university we en- vision would not possess the power of eminent domain, nor police protection for students as well as faculty, and would be forbidden to use its money for coherent territorial acquisition. I believe such an arrangement would force a communal confrontation of the diverse elements that ne- cessitate exploration of the "otherness" of all sides. An attempt would have to be made to survive together in the midst of great tension through finding out something about each other. In this way people would begin to think beyond the convenient fictions of the "administration," the "student movement." or the "community." When men and women must deal with each other as people, in a commu- nity where there is no overriding control to ensure sur- vival, the flight into abstraction becomes unreal. The com- plexities of conducting a community life together are going to make the generalized pictures disfunctional, be- cause concrete men and women simply will not act in the predictable ways generalized pictures would indicate. Acting on the level of mythic "we" and "they, there is No contact between the concrete beings who must work out some arrangements in order to survive each day. If power were decentralized in this way, a multiple chain of con-
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tacts, between people living in the same block, or working in the same area, would be necessary. Since the people would be diverse, the web of affiliation for sheer survival would become particularized, not abstracted into "'us" against the outside.
In fact, just such a mutual adjustment process occurred in New York's much maligned school district IS. 201. During the few weeks that this project had to operate on its own, conditions within the affected schools were re- markably nonviolent between Jewish white teachers, black teachers, and their black, Puerto Rican, and poor white students. Paths of real accommodation were beginning to emerge. Once the strike forced a we-they confrontation with a central authority--the teacher's union--the level of violence and the easy images of "us and them" behind violent encounters again became dominant.
Multiple contacts necessitated by dense, decentralized social conditions, such as those occurring within this school district, illustrate a process well thought out in Lewis Coser's The Functions of Social Conflict. This is the binding power of face-to-face tension and conflict , as opposed to the destructive power of conflict between bureaucratic institutions . For the experience of expressing hostility or simply an alternative to the acts or the feelings of someone else creates a certain kind of mutual commitment . People are dealing with each other, willing to express themselves, rather than storing up their grievances in private, where the character of their enemies and themselves becomes black-and-white clear . Multiple points of contact with different elements in a city diffuse hostility to the point where an individual will despair of defining
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some safe, secure attributes of his own identity and social space. This sense of failure is precisely the point at which he begins to become an adult and to feel that his identity instead turns on his very power to reach out and explore.
In these dense, diverse communities, the process of making multiple contacts for survival would burst the boundaries of thinking couched in homogeneous small- group terms. Since urban space would not be preplanned into separate units, as it now is, but would be free for all manner of incursions and combinations, the neat cate- gories of spatial experience in cities, such as home, school, work, shopping, parks, and playgrounds, could not be maintained. They would come to interpenetrate, as Jane Jacobs observed in the dense inner-city community of New York where she lived, or as Robert Park once ob- served in Chicago. However, now such interpenetration would not just be part of the local color of the ethnic working class but a part of the life of more affluent people as well. Men would find in the places where they worked community problems and community experiences, as well as community conflicts, not limited to the sphere of their own small jobs, just as the region where a man lived would not be immune to a diverse circle of influences and modes of life. If an increased density in the planning of cities was connected to a limiting of cen- tral bureaucratic authority, spheres of multiple contact like this in the opportunities for city-wide action would emerge, as would the necessity to act in a direct and per- sonal way.
The kind of urban community life I have in mind has specific as well as general guidelines. What I should like 156
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to explore now is the techniques by which this kind of community life might actually be realized in the future planning of cities.
Some Suggestions for Action
It might seem that the tone of this essay would preclude a discussion of planning: isn't an uncontrolled environ- ment innately an unplanned one? Yet I disagree with some community thinkers who believe that diverse com- munities can arise naturally and spontaneously, once "the system" is destroyed. I believe diverse communities do not arise spontaneously, nor are spontaneously maintained but instead have to be created and urged into being. Let me try to show from the critical perspectives of this book why this is so.
The suburbanization and increasing organization of city spaces into functional compartments is not a process arbitrarily imposed on city people but one responsive to their human desires, the desires to hide from pain and disorder. The idea that the "people" are straining at the bit against the "system" ' is much too naïve, requires that all these dark elements of fear and cowardice in the proc- ess of growing be denied. More realistically, the people and the system are in conspiracy with each other to estab lish a comfortable slavery to the known and the routine.
Furthermore, the social dimensions of affluence in city life show themselves easily put to the service of such vol-
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untary slavery. For affluence weakens the need for sharing of scarce goods and services, and lends each man the power to buy or control the survival necessities for his everyday activities .
Given this disposition, both in the development of men and in the immediate past history of city communities, there seems to be little reason to think that creating a power vacuum, by simply abolishing the present "system," is going to lead to a millennial flowering. People have an innate impulse to recapitulate under different names the slaveries they have known in the past. This is what revo- lutionary thinkers like Fanon have understood so well and what the "community revolutionaries" have yet to learn. Some positive directions toward change are neces- sary.
The first of these directions is to increase the visible density of urban areas. Unfortunately, high-density living space is now planned only along the lines of a suburban model. The large housing projects, like Lefrak City in New York, have all their functions neatly prelabeled and separ ated, so that although many people live together they sel- dom come into unknown, unplanned contact. If these parts were jumbled together, the density of these housing proj- ects would serve a social purpose. This can be done in a number of ways.
High-rise buildings should be thought of, Frank Lloyd Wright once said, as vertical streets. Instead of putting all the common meeting places on the ground or on the top stories, the public places should be distributed throughout the buildings. Wright's "Mile-High City" con- tained some of these ideas in embryo.
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But a more direct and perhaps more practical way of establishing visible density in cities has already been de- veloped historically. In the great squares of such cities as Paris or Florence, unlike those of London, the arrange- ment of townhouses around a common space provided a superb mingling ground for the residents. The density of these areas, as portrayed in Arnold Zucker's Town and Square was very high, even in modern terms. We do know, for example, that townhouse blocks with spacious quarters have been designed to provide a density almost approaching that of the high-rise towers which are iso- lated on their plots of land, the open space walled by chain-link fencing. In contrast, the square surrounded by townhouses makes human density count socially. Such density permits the expression of personal deviation or idiosyncrasy in a milieu where there are too many people thrown together to discipline everyone to the same norm The visible density of such places, if past patterns are a guide, increases the mobility and flow of the population.
This mixing together of dense numbers of people re- quires in its turn a second direction of change: a con- certed effort to effect socioeconomic integration of living, working, and recreational spaces. In the United States, this would extend to trying to push integration racially. Since this idea is anathema to sectors of both the Left and the Right, I should spell out first how it is practicable, and second why it is absolutely necessary to restore a truly civilized city life.
In the rebuilding of Paris by Baron Haussmann, socio- economic integration of housing units was in some cases attempted. The new apartment units contained the rich,
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the middle class, and the poor. As David Pinckney points out in his book on the subject, the rich occupied the lower floors, the middle classes the middle floors, and the poor the roof garrets. The system worked for a long time, and contributed, Pinckney points, to the sense of diversity and vitality in central-city Paris. Since Haussmann's time, only sporadic and halfhearted efforts have been made to continue this form of residential building. In the United States, there have been a few such attempts within gov- ernment housing, but the mixing of rich and middle class or middle class and poor has always been radically weighted at one end or the other, and the actual apart- ment groups kept separate socioeconomically. Real estate interests have said over and again that in private apart- ments or housing developments this homogeneity is a necessity imposed on the builder, because people feel un- comfortable unless they know that their neighbors are mostly like themselves.
True enough, but the point is that it would be better in the end if they did feel uncomfortable, and began to ex- perience a sense of dislocation in their lives. If it takes government money to assist in this socioeconomic mix- ing, then the money ought to be spent. Again, the spontaneous character of people's desires is no guide to social virtue . The government has subsidized some integration, but hardly enough, and hardly in the kind of living space where people would have to come to terms with each other's presence.
Certain U.S. planners have objected that this mixing of classes, which would result in the mixing of races as well. has brought only unbearable racial conflict, and is inhu-
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mane to enforce when both sides don't want it. The public housing projects these people point to certainly have been miserable failures. But this is a very biased picture. The sociologist Thomas Pettigrew has estimated that there are a large number of communities in the United States outside the South that are integrated house by house rather than with a Negro "sector, and that at least passable relations have been achieved. There are also, despite the current stereotype of anti-black feeling among white workers, a large number of inner-city communities that are racially integrated areas containing white working class and black working class. The levels of violence, as measured by the incidence of high school violence and the like, is lower in these communities than in either homogeneously white or black working-class neighborhoods. There is tension to be sure, but it isn't escalated to violence. The difficulty is that as long as people keep thinking of the majority of blacks as unemployed misfits and the white working class as authoritarian haters, this comfortable sense of the im- possibility of racial integration can be maintained.
A more serious challenge to the practicality of racial integration in cities is that offered by such writers as Norman Podhoretz. In his essay "My Negro Problem, and Ours" Podhoretz describes the strong anti-Negro feeling of Jews, and the anti-Semitic feeling of blacks, in an in- tegrated situation where both groups are enmeshed in poverty. It may be that, for blacks and whites in poverty, socioeconomic integration of housing and schools would be only an inhuman and brutalizing experience, being thrust among those who have made it or are about to rise. However, all the popular stereotypes treating "the urban
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problem" as essentially one of poverty ignore the fact that the majority of urban blacks are not destitute but are working class and lower middle class. They, like their white working-class compeers, have been dealt out of the qualitative opportunities wealthier people in the city can have. Once one gets above the poverty line, racial inte- gration is practicable, and has, in the cases where it has been permitted to take hold, proved to be a viable com- munity structure. It is also, I would argue, qualitatively necessary, for the same reasons that socioeconomic in- tegration is.
It is the mixing of such diverse elements that provides the materials for the "Otherness" ' of visibly different life styles in a city; these materials of otherness are exactly what men need to learn about in order to become adults. Unfortunately, now these diverse city groups are each drawn into themselves, nursing their anger against the others without forums of expression. By bringing them together, we will increase the conflicts expressed and de- crease the possibility of an eventual explosion of violence.
It has been said over and over by black community organizers that integration attempts only fragment fur- ther the sense of selfhood and self-dignity of ghetto resi- dents. This may be true below the lines of poverty. But for the large segment of the urban black population that has become or is becoming middle class, I am convinced that this cultural insularity will lead in the end to the same kind of dullness and routine experienced by white ethnic groups that have become both prosperous and self. enclosed. Class and wealth do make a difference in peo- ple's lives. What we need to find are community forms
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that are affirmative and growth-producing for men freed from the boundaries of poverty, and such communities seem to me possible only when diverse and ineradicably different kinds of people are thrown together and forced to deal with each other for mutual survival.
It may be that ethnic and racial differences would eventually be weakened in such communities. The point is that concord would not therefore be reached; the in- evitable disruptions caused by regression to childhood selfishness would still be present. But in dense, visibly di- verse communities where people would have to deal with each other, these regressions would provide a constant starting point for conflict and conciliation. The racial, ethnic, and economic shadings that now exist in city life are places to begin in forming communities where this confrontation occurs.
Diversifying the community through such integration raises the third, and most important, direction of replan- ning cities for such adult growth: the removal of central bureaucracies from their present directive power.
The closest that community workers in the last decades came to a theory of community control was the belief that functions carried on in city hall ought to be "decentral- ized," turned over to local community groups. When this kind of decentralization has been practiced, which is rarely, and is limited to the black ghetto, it has produced some results. Hostile white school or government admin- istrators have been replaced by less hostile black admin- istrators. In a very few cases, the change actually meant the man on the street could begin to grapple with the en- vironment around him and worry about changing it. But
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the problem with this view of decentralization, especially where it applies to the broader, nonpoverty society outside the ghetto, is that no changes of power in essence are in- volved. In other words, localism doesn't bring a change in the seat of power, so that the individual has to act for himself. Suburbs, after all, are decentralized, local units of power, and yet the only community-control exercises at this level which grip the inhabitants are acts of repress ing deviates: i.e., fights about open housing, gerrymander- ing of school districts, and the like.
Really "decentralized" power, so that the individual has to deal with those around him, in a milieu of diversity, involves a change in the essence of communal control, that is, in the refusal to regulate conflict. For example, police control of much civil disorder ought to be sharply curbed; the responsibility for making peace in neighborhood affairs ought to fall to the people involved . Because men are now so innocent and unskilled in the expression of conflict, they can only view these disorders as spiraling into violence. Until they learn through experience that the handling of conflict is something they have to deal with, something that cannot be passed on to police, this polarization and escalation of conflict into violence will be the only end they can frame for themselves. This is as true of those who expect police reprisals against them- selves, like the small group of militant students, as those who call in the police "on their side.
In a less extreme dimension, the spending of money for neighborhood schools or civic improvements is meaning. less when the neighborhood school or committee is merely spending money along lines sent down from a central
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authority. How and why the money is to be spent needs to be the responsibility of the people who will feel its impact. In the first case, central authority is retained under the guise of "decentralization"; in the second case the nature of the power truly changes.
We also need to explore how a centralized state appa- ratus can be made compatible with decentralized ends. There is no reason why centralized resources, like taxes, fire and police services, health and welfare benefits, have to be destroyed in order to decentralize power in essence. The community leaders who advocate this make a mis- take: it is not the existence of centralized structures which is per se the evil, but the machinelike uses to which these structures are so easily directed. Conceivably through so- cial experiment we can learn how to distribute centralized resources to create decentralized, uncontrolled social situ- ations. The essence of bureaucracies, Simmel wrote, is the use to which they are put; these impersonal structures are corrupting only when they are taken as ends in them- selves, when the processes by which they work most effi- ciently are taken to be an image of how society itself ought to function. By breaking this machine image, and removing from massive bureaucracies the power to regu- late conflict, we may be able to invent new activities for them in which they help create diversity and disorder rather than stifle it.
These suggestions for a greater density, diversity, and power relations in city communities would create in gen- eral a high level of tension. They would not create a stifling sense of localism, of "urban villages" in Herbert Gans's term; instead, they would create a sense of the
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need to deal with shifting combinations of people and shifting issues over the course of time in order to keep daily life ongoing. I don't imagine any sort of joyous com- munion in these encounters but rather a feeling of need- ing to keep in touch, a feeling of having to be involved in a social world.
A disordered, unstable, direct social life of this kind would lead to structural changes in the city itself as well as to the individuals in the social milieu.
New City Institutions
Cities made disorderly along these lines produce at least three kinds of institutional change. First, there would be a radical broadening of people active as the city's planners and leaders. Second, political "image" or per- sonality would become a less important factor in choos- ing elected officials. Third, and most importantly, the phenomenon of family intensity would be greatly weak- ened.
The first two of these changes are fairly apparent. The "experts" on planning would become people who know something about the problems besetting peculiar places in the city at given moments in time, rather than men drawing maps of the new metropolitan "whole" in a central office. The experts would qualify by virtue of their experience in a community and their capacity to act effectively in its terms. This doesn't mean, as was so naïvely thought in many of the community development programs of the
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1960's, that a man is an expert on a particular place sim- ply because he lives there. It does mean that the old pro- fessional boundaries are broken down, and people with particular talents for dealing with special situations, talents developed out of experience as well as out of prior training, can put them to use. The filtering out of these effective people now occurs because the aims of planning are for an abstract whole supposedly encompassing all the particularities. For example, a real estate man who knows a lot about the conditions in a small sector of a large city, but is no expert on the whole city, is much less likely to be consulted by city hall than an executive in a large firm who thinks in the urban-wide, abstract terms of property- balancing, metropolitan-wide growth, and the like. The latter has much more economic power, to be sure, but his social effectiveness and usefulness can actually be much less than the smaller man who deals in specific commu- nity terms.
In other words, the feeling of being socially important in the life of a city spreads to the degree that unity in the planning of cities is weakened. More people are engaged, but they will produce conflicting results that will not add up to a satisfying picture of the urban whole.
The political results will be uncomfortable for those imbued with the notion of "progressive" • urban reform. The product of such decentralization will be political ma- chines; this was the case when urban power was badly fragmented at the turn of the century, and I believe it will become the case again. Yet there is no need to recapitulate the personal graft involved in that era. What will emerge is an evaluation of political leaders in terms of how much
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they can respond to and "deliver" to diverse communities and groups. Moynihan has wisely observed that charis- matic "image" leaders appeal to people who are relatively passive in city affairs. When people become active, they begin evaluating political power in terms of effective net- works, because they have defined for themselves their needs or their desires in terms of action. Most of the old machine politicians were distinctly lacking in beautiful clothes and clean-cut expressions, but they were respon- sive to concrete problems put in this way.
The idea is repellent, perhaps, because of the kinds of machine-politician leaders at work today. But they have oppressive power precisely because they have captured the centralized bureaucracies for their own ends. By frag menting the power of these bureaucracies, politicians of the stripe of the present mayor of Chicago would be forced back into a more modest, less dictational mold: uncharis- matic, sensing that their power lies in how well they dis- tribute the goods of the state. City politicians would be- come "middlemen" rather than beautiful leaders; they would be successful to the extent that they channel the revenues and coercive power of the state down to the level where it could be used as materials for communities en- gaged in formulating the rules of their own survival.
This may seem utopian, but it is much less dangerous than the utopia invoked now every election day, when one is told to vote for the cleansing savior, the charismatic leader who will restore order and decency. Decentraliza- tion is dismissed as visionary by the very people who vote, not out of interest or conviction, but out of longing for the
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pure leader who will "save" them and the city, state, or country.
The family would be the most deeply affected by cities reorganized along these lines. Dense, disorderly cities would challenge the capacity of family groups to act as intensive shelters, as shields from diversity. For the whole thrust of these urban places will be to create a feeling of need in the individual that he has to get involved in situ- ations outside the little routines of his daily life in order to survive with the people around him. The illusion that the family is a predictable microcosm of the larger society will be difficult to maintain under such conditions, for new problems will always be entering the circle of a man's survival concerns. The illusion that all family members are equals in experiential understanding will be equally difficult to support. In such an environment, it will be obvious to the adults not only that they are being pulled into different experiences from their children, but also that the children will inevitably be moving in different circles of experience from them. Generational tensions are, to be sure, unbridgeable events in the life cycle, but the degree of pain and feeling of desertion they entail depends on the social milieu as much as on the individuals involved. In a society where men could actually experi- ence constant social change in their own lives, the inevi- table dislocations involved in the change of generations could be borne with more grace.
The more the primacy of the family is challenged by multiple points of social contact, the stronger the family will become. This strength will occur not as a resistance
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to the outside but as the very result of being limited by a complex outer world. Affluent urban families, as I have tried to show, experience peculiar dislocations because they are burdened with too much. These families are twisted because men look to them for rules about a great diversity of social activities, activities that do not naturally take place within the home. Were these excess pressures removed, by the necessity for looking elsewhere to assure the ongoing survival of one's social life, the family group would become a more satisfying arena of its own. For example, marriages now occur for the majority of urban affluent couples in the United States on or before the age of legal adulthood. It is only a minority who give them- selves a breathing space between emergence from their past family lives into new family responsibilities. Were cities constructed so that the young person was being pulled in a number of directions as he emerged into adult- hood, drawn into different areas of interest and concern, perhaps the desire to wait a while before settling down would be kindled. In other words, people might begin to learn to wait until they were formed adults, with some free experience of their own, before committing them- selves to another person. Alfred Adler once expressed this as learning to be alone in order to have the strength to be together. Learning to be alone does not occur in isolation; an environment like the dense disorderly city could pro- mote it and make it feel a positive achievement.
By providing a wide network of social contact that the people of a city must use in order to survive, the polariza- tion of intimacy in the home circle and the impersonal functional tasks in the world beyond might be erased. The
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conflicts of this city society would provide a web of con- frontations whose character and personnel, unlike the family group, would be constantly in flux. This sounds as though anarchy is being brought into the city as a positive principle; that is exactly what I intend, but anarchy of a form not envisioned by the anarchist writers of the past.