National March Against Police Violence Washington DC. Photograph by Ted Eytan, via Flickr

City-States

Permanent Crisis

The American City seems to exist now in a state of permanent crisis. 

That is to say: our cities seem lashed to a self-renewing state of emergency driven by entrenched and multiplying acts of violence. We bear witness to police violence against civilians; civilian aggression towards officers of the peace and, inevitably, mass shootings by radicalized citizens against communities: Las Vegas, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Parkland, Thousand Oaks, Poway and so on and so on. Add to this ongoing acts of seemingly retaliatory public rioting and counter-violence organized by the citizen militias as far afield as Portland and Charlottesville. In this context and we can and should consider the possibility that our cities have become settings for persistent urban confrontations pitting citizens against citizens and civilians against the police, the very branch of local government retained to maintain a civil society.

This crisis may be tied to the rolling back of the idea of the historical American City as a space of free political expression and, more directly, to the dismantling of the project of civil rights and individual freedoms since 9/11. The impact of this crisis on the fields of architecture and urban design remains largely unexamined. 

The City State

The city, Michel de Certeau tells us, might be best understood as operational or functionalist concept founded on the constructing of space “on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties” [1]. These stable properties extend the rationalization of space (urban design let’s say) to the replacement of a “synchronic” and “flattened” structure (a feudal system, for instance) for various urban resistances that might align with the creation of the universal and anonymous subject.  

This subject might be, potentially, substituted for a democratic citizen while the rationalization of space can be understood as an urban scheme (grids, blocks, tracts and communities for instance.) However, in de Certeau’s notion of indeterminable and stubborn resistances we also find the conception of free and democratic assembly and protest, a welcome byproduct of a civil society.

As an administrative construction, however, the city must also be seen as dualistic structure: both an autonomous utopian object (Thomas More) and a correlated political project (Thomas Hobbes). Therefore, the city’s well being always remains liminal, somewhere between a philosophical idea and a political reality, depending largely on the successful coordination of its various managerial mechanisms, physical assets, and populations. The management of the city’s various physical infrastructures (roads, sewers, power, airports, ports, and communication networks) is, then, directly connected to the larger problem of serving its economic goals and providing for its constituents’ well-being. The city, as we understand here, is both an idea (More) and an object (Hobbes), and its protection has been historically tied to the administration of laws, the protection of its citizens, the safe policing of its spaces and boundaries.

Polis/Police

Polis, the Greek notion of the City State, shares an etymological connection to the term Police, linked via the Greek concept of politeia: administration, polity, and citizenship. Polis is connected to the concept of the common good, and to the idea of the commons as both a physically and metaphorically shared space.

In fact city and its police forces emerged in parallel, both formations being directly tied to the Hellenistic ideals granted to the free citizen: the right to free speech, the right to free congregation, and the right to free public exchange. Not coincidentally the Greek city state’s original police force was made up not of freeman but of Scythian slaves.  Perhaps not coincidentally, our own urban civil rights movements have been led— mainly but not exclusively— by the descendants of slaves and often the children and siblings the persecuted diasporas of Europe and Russia.  Indeed the liberal avant- gardes led by Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel are still models for civil rights protest and resistance. To wit civil rights imply or even demand not only freedom from enslavement but also a free civil space, meaning that a city that provides a space for individuals and groups to equally participate in civil life without fear of repression, reprisal or violent threat by its agents and agencies.

Yet if civil and political rights in North America extend to the right to due process and a fair trial, and these functions, managerially, have fallen to law enforcement agencies and the criminal justice system.  Despite this connection to governance and government the citizens rights rarely extend to the Right to the city as described by Henri Lefebvre, in his 1968 book Le Droit à la ville, as the right to: “urban life, to renewed centrality, to places of encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and time uses, enabling the full and complete usage of moments and places” [2].

Thus if the work of maintaining the tenuous and delicate relationship between policing urban populations and administering justice ties physical and lived space to bureaucratic space, then it is in this zone that the Police and police work lies: in the streets of the city, within its communities, and between the lines of the city’s codes, rules, regulations and civil laws. Consequently, without a civil space the very enterprise of city making (politeia) is threatened and without a city (polis) there is no Police, and no need to secure what has been made permanently insecure, and in turn this leaves possibility of another condition, namely civil war.

The American City, Destabilized 

After many organized national protests (notably Ferguson, Cleveland, Baltimore, Dallas and elsewhere) around police-related deaths in communities of color and the killings of police officers that followed in Baltimore in 2015 and Dallas in 2016, the idea of the post-war American city as a stable expression of governmental space seems threatened by the very administrative systems, organizations, and bodies that were established to serve its universal and anonymous subject, the citizen. And, while the public reply to police related deaths has been staged as organized, largely peaceful public resistance, the counter response from a now hyper militarized police force is mutating our cities from spaces of democratic exchange into theaters of intimidation and violent conflict between mostly unarmed individuals, public groups, and heavily armed civil officers.

The conflict could not be more starkly outlined as each week or month another police-related death incites a community to protest, with often very tragic consequences for both the public and the police. Yet, as Michel Foucault submitted, in the modern state “power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government.” Government, Foucault asserts, refers not only “to political structures or to the management of states; rather it designate[s] the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed…not only…the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection, but also modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, which were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people” [3].

In this context the city exists in/as a state of anxiety that originates with the expectation that the application of force, or power, against the notion of citizenry, civil life, and civil rights will continue or extend unabatedly beyond individual incidents.   This, then, the suggests that the American city is moving, terrifyingly, towards the concept of a total Polizeistaat (von Mohl) or Police State.  While this notion runs entirely against the evolution of the American urban situation—from self-liberating 18th century colonial outposts, to emerging 19th century industrial, cultural and economic hubs, to 20th and 21st century cosmopolitan urban/suburban agglomerations.  But it is clear now that our crisis of government has not only enabled a national furor over the deaths of Philando Castile and others to go unanswered but it has exacerbated a crisis of confidence in the very organs of justice that uphold our cities.

Fuck the Polis?

“To govern,” Foucault asserts, “is to structure the possible field of action of others.” The construction of the city in relationship to “power would not therefore be sought on the side of violence or of struggle…but rather in the area of the singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government” [4]. When civil administration of the city is replaced by the arbitrary and violent control of urban populations by a militarized police force, then the space for these confrontations must be examined in terms of the degrees to which power is either reaffirmed through the maintenance of stable administrative structures or unleashed through radicalized communal action within those spaces. This is potentially the space in which architecture is territorialized and politicized. Therein lies the challenge to the status of the modern city as a democratic and free space and a challenge to contemporary architecture as a relevant cultural endevor: once the specter of state-sponsored police control has been summoned, we raise the very possibility of totalitarianism and with it the return to idea of the American city as a failed historical project and American architecture as a bankrupt cultural enterprise: registered now as failure in our ability to uphold a safe space for free exchange in our civic places and a failure to imagine architecture beyond its current manifestation as a tech-savvy, lily-gilding joy ride for the one percent.

Topos / Topoi

To the ancient Greeks the very concept of topos referred to both a physical place, like a city, and the idea of the city as a public space for social, philosophical or poetic exchange. Topos was expressly connected space to the notion of free public exchange through topoi (rhetorics). The formation of free public exchange was reinforced by the conception of civic and civil space as a nominally shared or neutral territory, neither private nor official.  Safely securing the region between private zones (commercial or residential) and sanctioned spaces (religious, administrative or military) lies at the heart of the city’s stability, and of the due democratic right to assemble freely. This is one of the key functions of government, specifically of the police, and an important source of the city’s democratic vitality.

The Architect’s Crisis

I did not know then that this is what life is - just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you're swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.” ― Ta-Nehisi Coates [6]

The architectural profession as a whole has accepted its largely self-imposed disconnection from both centers of administrative power and our larger communities.  This condition of acceptance (zen-like or cynical?) is inevitability tied to the demands of late market capitalism and not surprisingly our most successful practitioners have been painted as “...the embodiment of a fully fledged new typology, which responds perfectly to the new zeitgeist…disconnected...completely from angst.” [7]   As it as has been noted elsewhere [5], most North American architects have been largely silent about recent civil unrest, and this is perhaps because contemporary architecture has an uncomfortable if not obvious relationship to power.  For certain, politics invokes in many architects something like a crisis of conscience.  

Reconstruction

In crushing the very resistances and subjects formed within the rationalized spaces of civic and civil life, the very geometry of our civic worlds, unbridled urban and suburban violence by police forces—understood here as the city’s frontline administrative and managerial agents— civilians and organized militia have accelerated the process of dismantling the city as our most visible expression of a free and democratic culture. Yet we architects, stubbornly rooted for decades now in largely self-important insular debates around disciplinary, academic, artistic or technical “challenges and dilemmas” stand silently witness to a crisis beyond the reach of architecture’s current professional, theoretical, formalist or materialist debates and discourses.  Nonetheless, the appropriation of the city as the stage for the violent conflict indirectly implicates architecture and urban design, if only because architects steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the stage they always set for power in the design of the city and its architectural components.

Despite the architect’s anxieties about the political bind she/he finds her/himself in, the profession has been, of late, passively observing the devolution of the city, the very source and subject of the profession’s existence, some might say.  North American architects and urbanists, never entirely functionaries of the state nor players wholly detached from the market, operate today in a nebulous and perilous arena: somewhere between unsuccessfully advocating for the open construction of civic space and ignoring the more obvious manifestations of violent authoritarianism at work in our cities.

This situation defies the profession and the discipline to find a more authentic form of professional expertise that can be applied to the problems of maintaining vital civil spaces that promote democracy and thus architecture’s authentic societal and cultural relevance.  At the heart of this challenge is the true source of the architect’s anxiety: it is that our academic and professional bodies have resisted examining the almost unnamable relationship between urban or architectural forms and the form of our politics.  That is to say: we tend to mostly avoid any conversation around the degree to which geometry and power are intertwined and therefore the degree to which architecture has aided or abetted abuses of power.

If we architects do suffer from a state of professional anxiety around our cultural relevance (but also, more largely, around the entire project of architecture in the modern city) to date there has been very little effective conjecture within our community about how a more engaged role in the life of our cities might be invented to confront or even radically resist what is beginning to seem more and more like state-sanctioned urban violence against a civilian population, paralleled by a domestic cultural and political war being waged against the civic, civil and cosmopolitan culture that forms the core of the modern democratic city.

NOTES

[1] Michel De Certeau.  The Practices of Everyday Life. Trans. S. F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

[2] Henri Lefebvre.  Le droit à la ville.  S. 1 :S.n., 1968, 1.

[3] Michel Foucault.  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York:  Pantheon, 1977, 215.

[4] Michel Foucault. Ibid. 215.

[5] Mimi Zeiger. (2014). “Koolhaas may think we're past the time of manifestos, but that's no reason to play dumb.” DEZEEN, 12 December 2014. Web. 23 Mar 2017. “Architecture as a practice sits at the juncture of hegemonic structures and the community it serves. It's an uncomfortable position and architecture's social agenda is often viewed as a failure when compared to its formalist counterpart.”

[6] Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. Spiegel & Grau, 2008. 220.

[7] Rem Koolhaas on Bjarke Ingalls, Time Magazine, Time 100  April 20, 2016 http://time.com/4301248/bjarke...