Constructing Community: Configurations of the Social in Contemporary Philosophy and Urbanism

Constructing Community

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Constructing Community Configurations of the Social in Contemporary Philosophy and Urbanism

Brian Elliott

Lexington Books A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

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Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Elliott, Brian, 1969– Constructing community : configurations of the social in contemporary philosophy and urbanism / Brian Elliott. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-3966-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-3968-4 (electronic) 1. Communities. 2. Public spaces. 3. Power (Social sciences) 4. Democracy. I. Title. HM756.E45 2010 307.76—dc22 2010020214

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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For Gabrielle—aurora vesperis

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

xi

PART ONE: THEORIES OF COMMUNITY 1

Habermas and Dialogical Community

3

2

Singular Community

27

3

Dissenting Community

49

PART TWO: URBANISM AND COMMUNITY 4

New Urbanism

77

5

Postmodern Urbanism

105

6

Dialectical Utopianism

131

Bibliography

155

Index

161

About the Author

165

vii

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Acknowledgments

My interest in the built environment goes back some time, but shaping this interest was made possible through various collaborative activities. Working together with Hugh Campbell in architecture, Douglas Smith in French, and Gillian Pye in German, all at University College Dublin, showed the potential of cross-disciplinary initiatives. The framework of Istanbul Fragmented hosted by Istanbul Technical University and directed by Ipek Akpinar gave my appreciation of city planning a more comprehensive scope. My friendship with Ferda Keskin and my graduate teaching in visual and urban studies at Istanbul Bilgi University provided a convivial and fruitful environment to explore issues of urban politics. More recently, getting involved with the work of the Center for Intercultural Organizing, directed by Kayse Jama, allowed me to understand firsthand what constructing community looks like. Finally, the support of my wife, Gabrielle Buvinger-Wild, allowed me to maintain my enthusiasm and faith in the importance of this project. All that is worthwhile here is due to her. The research for this book was made possible by a generous grant awarded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

ix

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Introduction

Appeals to community are to be found everywhere in contemporary discourse, but they rarely amount to more than some vague appeal to an identifiable social group. In many cases it is easy to suspect that the community in question might not even exist as a social reality. We hear appeals to the “global community,” although in reality this designates highly complex groupings of national governmental representatives who rarely agree on policy let alone act in unison. The media speak of the “Muslim” community, while we realize that the estimated 1.2 billion people who ascribe to some form of Islamic faith can hardly be seen as an undifferentiated mass. Like other key terms that abound within our everyday political vocabulary, “community” has a highly ambiguous and problematic meaning. Seminal texts in sociology from the last decades of the nineteenth century were much concerned with community. Among these a study by Ferdinand Tönnies titled Community and Civil Society (in German, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft) exerted considerable influence.1 For Tönnies, the social conditions of preindustrial agrarian life were productive of genuine community. Under such conditions a profound social bond between families extending across generations meant that the individual was deeply embedded in a specific place and group. Industrialization and mass migration to rapidly expanding cities broke up these rural communities and produced the anonymity and instrumentality of urban society. In this new context relationships were based more on contingency and individual choice and lacked the generational continuity of true community. Thus, the birth of the industrial metropolis is seen as the death of genuine community. As many more recent accounts insist, this image of community essentially amounts to nostalgia for an idealized rural idyll and consequent demonization of urban life. With unprecedented concentrations of people within the cities xi

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Introduction

of industrialized nations in the nineteenth century came immense pressure for social and political change. National governments quickly recognized that reshaping the urban fabric was a necessary condition for controlling such pressure. Within a few years of the popular political protests that swept Europe in 1848, Emperor Napoleon III charged the Prefect of Paris, Baron Haussmann, with the task of massive urban renewal to ensure that popular insurrection in the city would remain a thing of the past. While the ostensive reasons given for the destruction of 20,000 older dwelling units and construction of 43,000 new ones were to improve traffic circulation and improve sanitary conditions in the central city, the desire for social and political control was clear enough.2 Haussmann’s urban reconstruction set a pattern of attempted social engineering that professionalized modern urbanism would repeat throughout the twentieth century. Yet all this work rested on an article of faith: environmental determinism or the idea that changes to the physical environment will bring about predictable alterations in social behavior. My task in this book is to offer a critical analysis of the interrelation between community and urbanism in contemporary liberal democracies. This is an immensely complex topic but I will tackle it here within relatively narrow parameters. In the first part of the book I examine influential theories of community that have arisen within European philosophy over the last three decades. In the second part I consider parallel approaches to community within urban theory and practice over the same period. What binds the two parts is a basic assumption, namely that community and place are intimately connected such that the one cannot be adequately understood without the other. While I hope that the accounts of philosophical theories and urbanist practices are informative and engaging, my overall purpose is not to present a neutral survey of contemporary approaches to community. Instead, the underlying intention is to advocate a particular understanding of community, one that turns on collective, grassroots oppositional action. While it draws on certain current theories and practices, the model of community put forward is far from the orthodox position, which favors nonoppositional dialogue between civil society on the one hand and corporate or bureaucratic powers on the other. My argument against this orthodoxy is simple: dominant institutions and agents of power will never work to redress social inequalities and injustice through reasonable dialogue alone. Instead, grassroots organizations need to devise effective forms of nonviolent direct action that are initially local but capable of broader application. Thus I understand community in terms of collective action beyond institutionalized frameworks of discussion. It is no coincidence that the idea of community as dialogue has become an orthodoxy during a period when the “third way,” centrist model of politics3 has successfully argued that there is

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Introduction

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no fundamental conflict between social justice and the workings of the free market. Even now, in the wake of massive handouts of state money to global banking institutions whose actions led directly to widespread home repossessions and unemployment, we witness this orthodoxy reestablishing its aura of unchallengeable commonsense. Nothing demonstrates more clearly the disregard for the basic welfare of liberal democratic citizenry than the blatant attempt to avoid financial regulation while unemployment continues to rise and material conditions for most become increasingly intolerable. By contrast, history shows that real steps toward realizing the goals of social justice were only ever achieved across liberal democracies when concerted grassroots efforts confronted established political powers and obliged them to facilitate progressive social change. My hope in writing this book is that it will make some contribution to continuing this tradition of constructing community as and through dissent.

NOTES 1. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. J. Harris, trans. M. Hollis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2. For an extensive and insightful analysis of Paris in the nineteenth century cf. David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003). 3. The principal theoretical elaboration of this model is found in Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). For a trenchant critique of this model and the Clinton/Blair centrist approach to politics cf. Alex Callinicos, Against the Third Way: An Anti-Capitalist Critique (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).

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Part One

THEORIES OF COMMUNITY

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Chapter One

Habermas and Dialogical Community

The mature work of the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas attempts to bring together insights from a rich diversity of movements and figures in twentieth-century philosophy. The most salient movements are Critical Theory, American pragmatism, hermeneutics, and contemporary analytic philosophy. From the first of these Habermas inherits a concern for social justice and sources of resistance to oppressive political structures and powers. At the same time, drawing from the other three movements, Habermas strives to produce a robust and credible theory of intersubjective knowledge and understanding. A central question that arises out of Habermas’s theory is thus: how are understanding and social justice related? Under the headings “communicative action” and “discourse ethics,” Habermas essentially located the work of social justice and resistance to oppressive power within linguistic understanding. In this first chapter I will argue that Habermas’s theory involves two fundamentally questionable moves. First, the notions of language and dialogue are extended beyond any credible bounds, in such a way that any basic distinction between language and action becomes blurred. Secondly, the significance attached to linguistic understanding leads to a downplaying of important and arguably intrinsic features of understanding that are nonlinguistic in nature, most notable its aesthetic and emotive dimensions. As I will argue throughout this book, the goals of social justice cannot plausibly be achieved exclusively through efforts to reach understanding through rational dialogue. To insist that justice can be attained through rational discourse alone is to ignore the social fact that language is first and foremost a tool of hegemonic powers. As will become clear in the course of this first part of the book, an overvaluation of language is common to both the dialogical and the singular model of community. My basic argument in view of this is the following: the valorization of language or discourse leads to a one-sided and ultimately implausible 3

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Chapter One

understanding of community. My point is not that linguistic practice plays no role in the construction of community, as it manifestly does. Rather, the argument is that the tendency to assimilate all forms of practice to something discursive and linguistic in nature yields an unduly narrow account of community and of social relations more generally. In particular this narrowing has grave consequences for reaching an adequate understanding of practices of political resistance. As we will see, Habermas’s notion of communicative action tends to reduce significantly resources for political contestation and resistance. As many critics have pointed out, communicative action is regulated in general by an imperative of consensus formation. For Habermas, the appropriate means for dealing with political disputes is a form of argumentation that, while inclusive, insists in advance that all participants in a discussion seek convergence of opinion. While this may be a useful manner to resolve issues where significant common ground is already in evidence, it has little relevance where parties to a discussion have widely divergent perspectives on specific matters. There are numerous examples in modern history of marginalized groups that were able to advance a cause only by the use of nonviolent means other than reasoned argument. In general terms my critical point will be that Habermas’s notion of dialogical community offers a merely formal, “managerial” notion of conflict resolution and social cohesion. By this I mean that it looks to resolve disputes through identifying a convergence of interest between conflicting groups. As such, Habermas’s theory is of use in cases where a significant degree of convergence has already occurred. In common with other critics, however, I do not believe that this theory retains much value in cases where profound differences are in evidence. In other words, communicative action assumes a high level of social-political homogeneity and so breaks down in the face of significant social heterogeneity. As a consequence the usefulness of Habermas’s theory for highly pluralistic and diverse contemporary societies is limited. In what follows I will first sketch out the basic features of Habermas’s theory and then set out my critique in more detail.

COMMUNICATIVE ACTION What is widely considered Habermas’s magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action (henceforth TCA), was originally published in two volumes in German in 1981. English translations of the two volumes appeared in 1984 and 1987 respectively. The timing of the work’s appearance in English is significant insofar as it coincides with an intensified intellectual reception of postmodernism and deconstruction. Confrontations between Habermas and various representatives of a broadly construed postmodernist movement

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Habermas and Dialogical Community

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became almost a matter of course in the mid-1980s. The most celebrated instances involve the French thinkers Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard. Although it is the least commented on within academic literature, in chapter three Lyotard’s counter-position to Habermas will be considered in detail. My own concern is not with the confrontation between Habermas and postmodernism insofar as it amounted to an internal academic issue about what is or is not valid theory, genuinely rigorous philosophy, etc. While the debate with Habermas in the 1980s mostly turned on interpretations of modernity, rationality, and the means and aims of theory, the question animating discussion here concerns by contrast the fruitfulness and plausibility of opposed theories of community. As is often the case in such extended theoretical confrontations, what are claimed at the time as significant differences turn out to mask important affinities in retrospect. The task at hand will thus involve attempting to identify which profound differences remain between the various configurations of community considered. In the second volume of TCA Habermas offers a general description of his project that provides a good point of departure. It is worth quoting at length: Up to now we have conceived of action in terms of dealing with situations. The concept of communicative action singles out above all two aspects of this situation management: the teleological aspect of realizing one’s aims (or carrying out one’s plan of action) and the communicative aspect of interpreting a situation and arriving at some agreement. In communicative action participants pursue their plans cooperatively on the basis of a shared definition of the situation. If a shared definition of the situation has first to be negotiated, or if efforts to come to some agreement within the framework of shared situation definitions fail, the attaining of consensus, which is normally a condition for pursuing goals, can itself become an end. In any case, the success achieved by teleological action and the consensus brought about by acts of reaching understanding are criteria for whether a situation has been dealt with successfully or not. . . . It is constitutive for communicative action that participants carry out their plans cooperatively in an action situation defined in common. They seek to avoid two risks: the risk of not coming to some understanding, that is, of disagreement or misunderstanding, and the risk of a plan of action miscarrying, that is, of failure. Averting the former risk is a necessary condition for managing the latter. Participants cannot obtain their goals if they cannot meet the need for mutual understanding called for by the possibilities of acting in the situation—or at least they can no longer attain their goals by way of communicative action.1

Two features of communicative action immediately stand out, namely its cooperative and consensual nature. Furthermore, these two features have a relationship of dependence: cooperation is only possible on the basis of foregoing consensus or agreement on the situation faced. The point is also made that such

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Chapter One

consensus may be either implicitly assumed or explicitly worked out. While the final sentence of the quotation reiterates the dependence of cooperation on consensus it also implies, significantly, that practical goals can be attained by means other than communicative action. One final aspect of this description of communicative action is important to highlight in light of what follows, namely its aversion to the “risk” of misunderstanding. In an important and intrinsic sense Habermas’s model of social practice aims at the elimination of misunderstanding. While this may seem at first glance an admirable and unobjectionable aspect of his theory, recognition that social diversity necessarily brings with it “failures” of mutual understanding may raise doubts as to the plausibility of communicative action. It may be countered that Habermas’s point is simply to insist that effective action requires mutual understanding, for if there is no agreement on what is to be done how can a group set about doing something? As I will go on to argue, however, collective action may in certain cases require consensus on the situation to be tackled, but it need not. Arguably, more spontaneous, less reflective instances of collective action have no need of any implicit or explicit act of consensus. Take the example of a group of theater actors or musicians that are improvising: one person makes a certain move, speech, or sound and another follows in a nonpredictable way, another takes up the development, and so on. Here we undoubtedly have a case of coordinated, “successful” group action, but there is no foregoing agreement beyond the minimal one of each person willingly participating in the practice of improvisation. No doubt it could be objected that agreeing on the general context of action is precisely the case of “consensus” in question. Admittedly, in the example given each participant will have originally learned how to participate appropriately within such a context. But the question remains whether the capacity for spontaneous collective play, of which theatrical or musical improvisation is a fairly sophisticated type, is originally and in all cases subject to a foregoing consensus about the situation of action. I will come back to this point, but for now let us continue to explore the general features of Habermas’s theory. Contrary to the impression given by certain contemporary critics and on occasion by Habermas’s own formulations, the theory of communicative action does not insist that convergence is somehow hardwired within the mechanisms of collective practice. On the contrary, the drive to consensus that regulates communicative action is shown to exist only in opposition to what is termed strategic action. According to Habermas, the communicative versus strategic action opposition is not merely conceptual in nature. Rather, it represents an either-or of actual social practice. He remarks: I do not want to use the terms “strategic” and “communicative” only to designate two analytical aspects under which the same action could be described—on the one hand as a reciprocal influencing of one person by opponents acting in

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Habermas and Dialogical Community

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a purposive-rational manner and, on the other hand, as a process of reaching understanding among members of a lifeworld. Rather, social actions can be distinguished according to whether participants adopt either a success-oriented attitude or one oriented to reaching understanding.2

While here the distinction between communicative and strategic action is explained in terms of different intentional attitudes and expected outcomes, Habermas’s further elaboration highlights rather the cause or motive of action. Accordingly, communicative assent (Zustimmung) is said to be rationally motivated, whereas strategic accord (Übereinstimmung) is subject to nonrational compulsion. As Habermas notes: A communicatively achieved agreement has a rational basis; it cannot by imposed by either party, whether instrumentally through intervention in the situation directly or strategically through influencing the decisions of opponents. Agreement can indeed be objectively attained by force; but what comes to pass manifestly through outside influence or the use of violence cannot count subjectively as agreement. Agreement rests on common convictions.3

The communicative/strategic distinction is maintained in one form or another throughout Habermas’s subsequent texts. The questions and objections to which it gives rise are numerous: can individual and collective agents always tell when they are freely consenting rather than being manipulated or compelled? Isn’t it the case that any actual decision or position reached will involve a combination of both strategic and communicative action? Doesn’t Habermas’s appeal to “rational motivation” imply that there is some universal human faculty of reason that is at play across all possible situations? It will be useful to keep these objections in mind as I develop further a sketch of Habermas’s theory.

THE IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION A feature of communicative action that has been the subject of much discussion is the notion of an ideal speech situation. Habermas freely admits that such a situation can never be realized in practice and operates instead as an “(often counterfactual) presupposition.”4 It is important to bear in mind that the notion of communication in question is really restricted to forms of language that are relevant to issues of validity and truth. Habermas’s theory as a whole rests on the assumption that moral action, insofar as it is governed by social norms, exhibits a strong affinity with practices within specialized domains of knowledge such as the empirical sciences. The affirmation of such an affinity is made at the cost of separating communicative action off

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Chapter One

from two other domains of practice: on the one hand instrumental or strategic action within the area of technical knowledge, and, on the other hand, from what Habermas calls “dramaturgical action” within the arts.5 Habermas thus separates out ethics and science as genuine truth-seeking activities from technology and art that are taken to possess no genuine powers of discovery. It is against this backdrop that Habermas offers the following remark: Only in the theoretical, practical, and explicative discourse do the participants have to start from the (often counterfactual) presupposition that the conditions for an ideal speech situation are satisfied to a sufficient degree of approximation. I shall speak of “discourse” only when the meaning of the problematic validity claim conceptually forces participants to suppose that a rationally motivated agreement could in principle be achieved, whereby the phrase “in principle” expresses the idealizing proviso: if only the argumentation could be conducted openly enough and continued long enough.6

Here what is ideal about communicative action is specified: the openness and longevity of discussion. Further comments from the second volume of TCA make clear that the notion of communicative action implies a potentially infinite and unbounded community of action. This lack of limitation relates to both the potential number of agents and topics involved: [P]articipants in communication encounter one another in a horizon of unrestricted possibilities of mutual understanding. What is represented at the methodological level as hermeneutics’ claim to universality, merely reflects the self-understanding of lay persons who are acting with an orientation to mutual understanding. They have to assume that they could, in principle, arrive at an understanding about anything and everything.7

If the ideal speech situation refers to the openness of communicative action in the sense of being open to tackle any possible topic of contention, there is a further sense of openness involved. This is an attitude of open-mindedness as opposed to one of dogmatism that would consider a particular truth as settled once and for all. Habermas insists that agreements reached through communicative action imply an anti-dogmatic openness to revision: [Communication] does not exclude a fallibilistic consciousness. Members know that they can err, but even a consensus that subsequently proves to be deceptive rests to start with on uncoerced recognition of criticizable validity claims. From the internal perspective of participants of a sociocultural lifeworld, there can be no pseudoconsensus in the sense of convictions brought about by force; in a basically transparent process of reaching understanding—which is transparent for the participants themselves—no force can gain a footing.8

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In fairness to his account as a whole Habermas does identify empathy as a further feature of the ideal speech situation. An empathetic attitude is taken to be a precondition of what is called “the ideal taking of roles,” that is, the ability to see a situation from the point of view of another participant in a discussion. The notion of sympathy or empathy plays a broader role within modern Western philosophy. For example, it is key within Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and more generally within Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy in the mid-eighteenth century. In the twentieth century, Edith Stein’s 1916 investigation On the Problem of Empathy stands out amid other analyses offered around the same time by her teacher Edmund Husserl and by the heterodox phenomenologist Max Scheler. In the text of an interview from 1990 Habermas is careful not to allow his admission of an emotional attitude into the ideal speech situation to challenge or contradict his earlier insistence on the paramount role played by rational motivation: [Testing our moral point of view against all others] would scarcely be possible without that generalized sympathy which becomes sublimated into a capacity for fellow feeling, and points beyond our emotional ties to those closest to us, opening our eyes to “difference.” . . . Of course moral feelings, despite the cognitive function which they fulfil, cannot monopolize the truth. In the last analysis it is moral judgements which span the gap that cannot be filled in with emotions. In the end we must rely on moral insight, if everyone who has a human face is to have a claim to moral protection.9

In the same interview Habermas identifies three specific features of the ideal speech situation: nonexclusion, evidentiality, and noncoercion. Whereas the first and last features appear more strictly moral in nature, the second points back to the fact that communicative action is viewed as something akin to a scientific process of arriving at a position on the basis of the best available evidence. However, this analogy with empirical science raises a problem. The development of modern science can be viewed in general in terms of its departure from the intrinsic conservatism of common sense assumptions. By contrast, the theory of communicative action explicitly draws on the resources of common sense. This is shown by the way Habermas uses the notion of the lifeworld to mean something like a naturally arising social organization. Within any lifeworld, mutual understanding is to be found as an unproblematic background of collective action. To the extent that this is the case, however, there is no need to adopt anything like the experimental attitude to knowledge and truth. I will explore this tension between common sense and scientific understandings of truth in the next section. Before concluding this section it is important to note that Habermas came to acknowledge some problems with the notion of an ideal speech situation.

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Chapter One

In the same 1990 interview he reaffirms his idea of “an unlimited community of communication [unbegrenzte Kommunikations-gemeinschaft].”10 However, while insisting that “the community of communication, unlimited in social space and historical time, is an idea which we can approximate to in actual conditions of argumentation,” Habermas concedes that the formula “ideal speech situation” “can give rise to misunderstanding, because it is too concretistic.”11 By this Habermas seems to mean that the conditions regulating communicative action should not be grasped through envisioning some ideal scenario. To do so would imply something like two worlds of discussion: the imperfect state of actual communication and some potential state of perfection. Habermas wishes to avoid this kind of split between real and ideal communication by insisting that ideal norms in each case regulate actual communication that aims at mutual understanding. Rather than an ideal speech situation, then, it would be more accurate to speak of implied preconditions of genuine communicative action. THE LIFEWORLD In the previous section we encountered the notion of the lifeworld in the sense of the horizon of understanding common to a particular community. Originally the idea of the lifeworld (in German, Lebenswelt) was developed in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in the early decades of the twentieth century. In general terms the phenomenological sense of the lifeworld relates to the structured organization of experience that both precedes and makes possible explicit empirical knowledge and reflective insight. In the second volume of TCA Habermas makes clear that he does not use the term in its technical, phenomenological sense. Instead he embraces what he calls an “everyday concept of the lifeworld”: [It is by means of the lifeworld in its everyday sense] that communicative actors locate and date their utterances in social spaces and historical times. In the communicative practice of everyday life, persons do not only encounter one another in the attitude of participants; they also give narrative presentations of events that take place in the context of their lifeworld. Narration is a specialized form of constative speech that serves to describe sociocultural events and objects. Actors base their narrative presentations on a lay concept of the “world,” in the sense of the everyday world or lifeworld, which defines the totality of states of affairs that can be reported in true stories.12

Habermas’s reference to narration as the form of communicative action within the shared horizon of everyday life is noteworthy. Many initiatives to improve social relations and understanding both within and between communities pro-

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mote opportunities for narration. Being able to tell an individual or collective story, especially where traumatic experiences are related, is widely believed to have therapeutic potential. By linking it with narration Habermas is making clear that a lifeworld, although specific to a social group or community, is not communicatively closed to other communities. Further elaboration clarifies another key feature of the lifeworld, namely its role in social integration: The symbolic structures of the lifeworld are reproduced by way of the continuation of valid knowledge, stabilization of group solidarity, and socialization of responsible actors. The process of reproduction connects up new situations with the existing conditions of the lifeworld; it does this in the semantic dimension of meanings or contents (of the cultural tradition), as well as in the dimensions of social space (or socially integrated groups), and historical time (of successive generations). Corresponding to these processes of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization are the structural components of the lifeworld: culture, society, person.13

If narration, as the form of communicative action intrinsic to the lifeworld, thus serves social integration, it is important to recognize that this process of integration does not happen in an unproblematic manner. If there is widespread acknowledgement of the need to construct situations of narration this suggests that such situations do not always arise as a matter of course. Precisely in cases of heightened tension and conflict the possibilities of narration diminish. Habermas’s configuration of the social as a lifeworld where social integration is achieved through networks of communicative action rests on what he calls “three fictions”: “(a) the autonomy of actors, (b) the independence of culture, and (c) the transparency of communication.”14 Contrary to the impression given by certain critics, however, Habermas explicitly recognizes that the lifeworld of communicative action is only one side of actual community integration. He refers to the other side as system integration, by which he means primarily the bureaucratic power of states and the economic power of markets: In capitalist countries the market is the most important example of a norm-free regulation of cooperative contexts. . . . Thus I have proposed that we distinguish between social integration and system integration: the former attaches to action orientations, while the latter reaches right through them. In one case the action system is integrated through consensus, whether normatively guaranteed or communicatively achieved; in the other case it is integrated through the nonnormative steering of individual decisions not subjectively coordinated.15

What is referred to here as system integration essentially escapes the immediate intuitive grasp of the individuals and communities affected. Whereas social integration through communicative action occurs in a way that is transparent

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to the participants, the economic system operates with a “hidden hand,” to use Adam Smith’s celebrated phrase. It is important to note further that for Habermas the relationship between social and system integration is conflictual. As we shall see in more detail in later chapters, many of Habermas’s critics make their task too easy by neglecting to acknowledge the tension between communicative action and what he calls the “steering media” that produce system integration. As we have seen, Habermas is open about the fact that features of communicative action such as transparency are fictions that relate to social relations only insofar as they viewed from the one-sided perspective internal to a specific lifeworld. Thus, Habermas is not claiming that modern society as a whole can be viewed as a field of unimpeded and transparent communication. Taking up the idea of a “colonization of the lifeworld,” Habermas insists by contrast that social integration is under constant threat from the powerful and pervasive influence of money and power: The transfer of action coordination from language over to steering media means an uncoupling of interaction from lifeworld contexts. Media such as money and power attach to empirical ties; they encode a purposive-rational attitude toward calculable amounts of value and make it possible to exert generalized, strategic influence on the decisions of other participants while bypassing processes of consensus-oriented communication. Inasmuch as they do not merely simplify linguistic communication, but replace it with a symbolic generalization of rewards and punishments, the lifeworld contexts in which processes of reaching understanding are always embedded are devalued in favor of media-steered interactions; the lifeworld is no longer needed for the coordination of action.16

As is clear from this remark, the dynamic tension that exists between communicative and strategic action is closely related to the conflictual relationship between social and system integration. Habermas also recognizes that as capitalism has developed historically, system integration has made ever-greater inroads into lifeworld communication. This is his version of the Marxian idea of reification, according to which social relations are rendered thing-like as a result of the reduction of living labor to its capacity to produce a certain quantity of marketable goods. Habermas also retains a version of the further Marxian idea that capitalism brings about intensified “contradictions” between the organization of production and social relations. Thus he claims that in situations of economic crisis the resources of lifeworld communication are called upon to maintain social equilibrium, thereby bringing about “social pathologies.”17 These various points are summed up succinctly when Habermas remarks: “Between capitalism and democracy there is an indissoluble tension; in them two opposed principles of societal integration compete for primacy.”18

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In the following section Habermas’s move from the dialogical-ethical perspective of communicative action theory to the explicitly political standpoint of his model of “deliberative democracy” will be considered. It is important to note, however, that this move constitutes an extension rather than an abandonment of his earlier theory. That is, communicative action is taken to be the key mechanism of any modern democracy for maintaining a vital civil society. For the purposes of what follows it is also necessary to recognize that Habermas’s concept of communicative action in essence attempts to draw out the common ground between what he takes to be the two basic paradigms of modern Western politics: the “organized labor movement” and the “bourgeois emancipation movements.”19 That shared ground basically comes down to maintenance and protection of a robust public sphere that makes freedom of speech and association a genuine reality. The key question that animates many critiques of Habermas’s theory is whether communicative action can be considered a sufficient condition for vibrant democratic societies. In later sections of this chapter I will consider some of these critiques. Before this can be done, however, a preliminary clarification of Habermas’s sense of deliberative democracy is necessary.

DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY Over a decade after the appearance of TCA Habermas published a further major work titled Between Facts and Norms (henceforth BFN). The basic task of this later study is to consider in detail what follows from the assumption that “in the age of a completely secularized politics, the rule of law cannot be had or maintained without radical democracy.”20 In seeking to trace the internal link between law and democracy Habermas also attempts to address earlier criticism of his recourse to the notion of an ideal speech situation. More specifically, he endeavors to “refute the objection that the theory of communicative action is blind to institutional reality.”21 Drawing out the role that the law plays in social integration allows Habermas to give a more plausible account of how communicative action works in practice. From his earlier work it is clear that such action ideally takes the form of face-to-face exchanges between individuals or groups committed to arriving at consensual agreement. As we saw, however, this can only happen against the backdrop of an extensive consensus that is already in place. Whereas communicative action depends on a commitment to pursue shared agreement that is rational and voluntary, legal constraints work through a combination of assent and compulsion. One of the basic goals of BFN is to make a compelling case for the intrinsic connection between the rule of law and modern democracy. This

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involves demonstrating that legal frameworks are both subject to popular assent and yet sources of legitimate collective constraint. In this way the juridical order can be grasped as the relatively stable manifestation and result of extended communicative action. Whereas TCA laid the foundations for what Habermas went on to call “discourse ethics,” BFN locates itself explicitly within the sphere of politics. Accordingly Habermas now adapts the specified conditions of communicative action to what he calls “deliberative democracy.” Following R. A. Dahl’s Democracy and Its Critics he enumerates five aspects of legitimate democratic deliberation: Such a procedure should guarantee (a) the inclusion of all those affected; (b) equally distributed and effective opportunities to participate in the political process; (c) an equal right to vote on decisions; (d) an equal right to choose topics and, more generally, to control the agenda; and (e) a situation that allows all participants to develop, in the light of sufficient information and good reasons, an articulate understanding of the contested interests and matter in need of regulation.22

Such an account of democratic procedure centers on an observance of rights and opportunities that is a commonplace of contemporary political discourse. While each of the features listed is unobjectionable when stated abstractly and formally, conducting actual deliberation along these lines would obviously encounter something that remains conspicuously absent from the description, namely existing positions of relative power. In the context of political deliberation background influences from such “steering media” as corporations may play a role, but it is arguably the “symbolic capital” (i.e., perceived social standing) of the deliberative agents themselves that mostly proves decisive. This is an important point of criticism and I will return to it. At this point, however, it is necessary to note that Habermas’s notion of deliberative democracy places most stress on the need for a vital civil society made up of a diverse plurality of localized associations. Only insofar as it is sensitive to the concerns of such groups can political decision-making claim to be genuinely democratic in nature: Resonant and autonomous public spheres of this sort must in turn be anchored in the voluntary associations of civil society and embedded in liberal patterns of political culture and socialization; in a word, they depend on a rationalized life-world that meets them halfway. The development of such lifeworld structures can certainly be stimulated, but for the most part they elude legal regulation, administrative control, or political steering. . . . But the conditions lie in lifeworld contexts that limit from within the capacity of associated citizens to organize their common life for themselves. What ultimately enables a legal

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community’s discursive mode of sociation is not simply at the disposition of the members’ will.23

In this remark Habermas appears to be making two distinct points: first, that spontaneously arising civic associations constitute the lifeblood of democratic political culture, and second, that modern democratic societies require organizational structures beyond those provided by such associations. The gap between civic associations and democratic organization is filled by what Habermas calls the “public sphere.” The public sphere, Habermas explains, “refers neither to the functions nor to the contents of everyday communication but to the social space generated in communicative action.”24 Elaborating on his notion of the public space produced by communicative action, Habermas remarks: For the public infrastructure of such assemblies, performances, presentations, and so on, architectural metaphors of structured spaces recommend themselves: we speak of forums, stages, arenas, and the like. These public spheres still cling to the concrete locales where an audience is physically gathered. The more they detach themselves from the public’s physical presence and extend to the virtual presence of scattered readers, listeners, or viewers linked by public media, the clearer becomes the abstraction that enters when the spatial structure of simple interactions is expanded into a public sphere.25

In light of the key concerns of this book this comment on the nature of the public sphere is extremely significant. Its basic meaning seems clear enough: as the conditions of modern society become more complex on account of increasingly extensive communications media, the space of social integration comes to rely less and less on concretely situated locales of face-to-face encounter. It is important to recognize that this account of the modern public sphere is understood as a matter of sociological fact by Habermas. It is not intended as a value judgment, either positive or negative. Due to the highly advanced complexity of communications media that permeate modern societies, communities arising under such conditions may be called imagined in the sense Benedict Anderson uses in his work Imagined Communities. Anderson holds that “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined.”26 The main concern of Anderson’s inquiry is the nation-state as a historical and sociological collective. The nation, he says, “is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”27 Anderson’s analysis of the emergence of modern national communities offers a historical account of precisely the kind of public sphere that Habermas has in mind when speaking of deliberative democracy. An underlying conviction is

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shared by the two theorists, namely the idea that a specific synthesis of language and technology realized in Europe from the early eighteenth century onward brought about the modern public sphere. For Anderson it is the explosion of print media, exemplified by the institution of the daily newspaper, that makes possible the modern configuration of national community: [The ceremony of reading newspapers] is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?28

Although Habermas’s concept of communicative action gives the initial impression that it looks to face-to-face encounters as the ultimate source of social integration and cohesion, deliberative politics is seen as arising through the interaction between spontaneously formed associations within civil society and the formal institutions of national and regional governance. For Habermas, in modern societies, direct face-to-face dialogue must cede the task of social organization to the more abstract institutions of the state: “[T]he communication structures of the public sphere relieve the public of the burden of decision making; the postponed decisions are reserved for the institutionalized political process.”29 This indicates that there is a significant gap between deliberative democracy and the idea of direct democracy. While the deliberative model sees a high degree of political representation as inevitable and desirable, direct democracy calls for extensive popular participation in political decision-making. Habermas’s idea that the lifeworld of a particular community necessarily places limits on “the capacity of associated citizens to organize their common life for themselves,” indicates that other organizational sources are required to construct community. In political terms Habermas favors the model of social democracy that regulated the restructuring of his native West Germany after the Second World War. Accordingly, he looks to institutionalized state structures to perform the vital executive functions of deliberative democracy. He remarks: “[I]t is advisable that the enlarged knowledge base of a planning and supervising administration be shaped by deliberative politics, that is, shaped by the publicly organized contest of opinions between experts and counterexperts and monitored by public opinion.”30 Though it would be a mistake to see Habermas as an uncritical defender of large state bureaucracy, it is evident from such a comment that he is willing to concede only a consultative role to communities at the grassroots level. As we shall see, a major practical

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problem with many governmental and municipal attempts to engage public opinion stems precisely from the fact that popular participation often ends at the consultation stage. In this and later chapters I will argue that genuine political community must involve the power not simply to deliberate but to actually shape a shared environment of action. Without such power the kind of popular deliberation outlined by Habermas risks becoming a tokenistic operation of public relations on the part of state agencies.

DEMOCRACY AND INCLUSION As we have seen, on both the ethical and the political level, communicative action cites inclusion as a condition of legitimate deliberation and decisionmaking. In Habermas’s sense inclusion relates to all those affected by the matter to be decided upon. Obviously, the scale of inclusion will vary according to the scope of the issue concerned. The very notion of inclusion tends to involve identifying specific “communities” as affected parties. For example, deliberations on local policing might recognize a need for consultation with recognized leaders of certain ethnic minority groups. While broadly supportive of Habermas’s theory of communicative action and his vision of deliberative democracy, Iris Marion Young worries that the emphasis on consensus can lead in practice to exclusion of certain groups’ concerns: Too strong a commitment to consensus as a common good can incline some or all to advocate removing difficult issues from discussion for the sake of agreement and preservation of the common good. Sometimes these difficult issues matter deeply to one group because they perceive themselves as suffering a basic injustice, but they are sources of deep disagreement because others in the society perceive rectifying the alleged injustice as coming at too great a cost to them.31

Taking what is arguably a more empirical and realistic approach to political deliberation than Habermas, Young draws an important distinction between external and internal exclusion.32 External exclusion simply involves leaving affected groups and individuals outside decision-making processes and bodies. As such, it is, as Young notes, the form of exclusion that receives most practical and theoretical attention. Internal exclusion is more subtle and by its very nature less conspicuous. Such exclusion occurs when certain affected parties are admitted to forums of deliberation but their claims and contributions are either ignored or not granted equal respect to those of other speakers. As mentioned earlier, such internal exclusion often occurs due to inequalities of symbolic capital or social status. While communicative action clearly entails an obligation to lessen or eliminate external exclusion, its idealizing tendency induces

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blindness to internal exclusion. In other words, communicative action simply assumes that all affected parties will be recognized as competent deliberative agents. Accordingly, once admitted to a deliberative forum, all parties are assumed to generate agreement to the extent that they advance arguments that convince others in virtue of their rational and reasonable content. In common with other critics, Young objects to this restriction of legitimate deliberation to dispassionate, rational argumentation. Even if we assume an ideal case where problems of external exclusion are eliminated, such a restriction will generate internal exclusion in situations where speakers are perceived as arguing in a nonrational manner. Taking the diversity of modern pluralistic societies seriously, Young argues, obliges us to extend the bounds of legitimate deliberation to include impassioned and rhetorical modes of speech: Thus we rely on rhetoric to construct and respond to the many particular and diverse publics appearing in modern mass democracies. Some who describe deliberative democracy give a misleading picture of a process in which the whole polity is present to itself as a single public discussing its problems and coming to decisions. Modern mass democracies are necessarily decentred, however, composed of overlapping and interacting publics distanced in space and time. Some publics are organized around marginalized social positions; others are interest groups or publics sharing particular values or culture. . . . In so far as the many sub-publics in a large and free society themselves sometimes must communicate with one another to solve problems or resolve conflict, however, rhetoric aims to help translate across them.33

It is important to note that Young is not opposing rhetoric to communicative action here but making a case for inclusion of both within a plausible account of deliberative democracy. As we shall see in the next chapter, other critics view rhetorical speech as an intrinsic aspect of political discourse that Habermas’s model is unable to acknowledge. The common ground of such critical positions relates to Habermas’s insistence that legitimate discourse aims at not just partial and local but rather universal agreement. In his account of discourse ethics from 1983 Habermas characterizes the universality of valid norms as follows: “All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects [the norm’s] general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities of regulation).”34 In BFN Habermas attempts to establish common ground between the liberal and republican theories of democracy (established by Kant and Rousseau respectively) by reaffirming his commitment to the universalizability principle in the context of deliberative democracy: [I]f discourses . . . are the site where a rational will can take shape, then the legitimacy of law ultimately depends on a communicative arrangement: as par-

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ticipants in rational discourses, consociates under law must be able to examine whether a contested norm meets with, or could meet with, the agreement of all those possibly affected.35

Precisely because Habermas’s defense of universal validity in ethics and politics has provoked fierce debate since the early 1980s, it is important to note that he is arguing in favor of procedural as opposed to substantive universality. In other words, his concern is for universal rules governing legitimate discussion and deliberation and not for a universally shared viewpoint within any community of discourse. The common critical point made against Habermas that he assumes rigid social homogeneity as a condition of communicative action must be treated with caution and subject to qualification. As we have seen, Habermas is quite aware of the diversity of democratic civil society and he seeks to defend this diversity from the homogenizing affects of “colonization” by money and power. Nevertheless, the doubt remains as to whether Habermas’s insistence on universalizable norms of public discourse does not place undue restrictions on “legitimate” decision-making. A first step in confronting this doubt can be made by endorsing Young’s idea of facilitating local publics: Political communication in mass democratic societies hardly ever consists in all the people affected by an issue assembling together in a single forum to discuss it. Instead, political debate is widely dispersed in space and time, and takes place within and between many smaller publics. By a “local public” I mean a collective of persons allied within the wider polity with respect to particular interests, opinions, and/or social positions.36

Young’s idea of local publics and her approach to deliberative democracy more generally are motivated by her concern for historical instances of grave social injustice and marginalization. In such cases deliberative democracy regulated by the principle of universal rationality or reasonableness would not have proved effective in bringing the concerns of oppressed and marginalized communities onto the political agenda in the first place. Taking racial and gender discrimination as significant areas of popular political concern, for example, it is clear that attempts to achieve social justice could not have come about through Habermas’s strictly defined mechanism of communicative action. This is because the oppressed groups would be excluded from the outset as insufficiently “rational” discursive agents. Being excluded from the official processes of political decision-making obliges oppressed individuals and groups to seek other avenues of expression such as public rallies, protests, and forms of direct action. In her earlier work Justice and the Politics of Difference (henceforth JPD) Young suggests that Habermas’s appeal to universality indicates that he subscribes to what she calls the “idealist fiction” of political impartiality. She identifies specific forms of oppression generated by this fiction:

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Widespread commitment to the ideal of impartiality serves at least three ideological functions. It supports the idea of the neutral state, which in turn provides some ground for the redistributive paradigm of justice. It legitimates bureaucratic authority and hierarchical decisionmaking processes, defusing calls for democratic decisionmaking. And finally, it reinforces oppression by hypostatizing the point of view of privileged groups into a universal position. Instead of impartiality, I argue, we should seek fairness, in a context of heterogeneity and partial discourse.37

Simplifying Young’s critique we might say that the principle of universalizability implies a notion of impartial judgment, which in turn supports the oppressive ideology of political paternalism. Principled opposition to such paternalism would take the form of local community self-determination. Young herself opposes self-determination to domination and defines it positively as the ability “to participate in determining one’s action and the conditions of one’s action.”38 If one thinks of what Young calls here the conditions of action as significantly involving the physical environment or space within which an individual or group acts, then political self-determination can be grasped as the ability of a community to shape its own context of action. In the final section of this chapter I will offer some preliminary comments on what the political project of constructing community in this sense might mean. In so doing the positive and credible aspects of Habermas’s notions of communicative action and deliberative democracy can be brought together under the title “communicative power.”

COMMUNICATIVE POWER AND PLACE Following Hannah Arendt’s theory of democratic politics that sees democratic community as arising out of a vibrant sphere of open public discourse, Habermas attempts to integrate a certain notion of power into his conception of deliberative democracy. Such power, according to Habermas, is generated by the cooperative interrelation between civil society and democratic state institutions subject to the rule of law. Here the law is understood as making possible the transformation of communicative action into legitimate political power: The concept of the political in its full sense also includes the use of administrative power within the political system, as well as the competition for access to that system. This leads me to propose that we view law as the medium through which communicative power is translated into administrative power. For the transformation of communicative power into administrative has the function of an empowerment within the framework of statutory authorization.39

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As we have seen, Habermas sees political legitimacy as arising out of communicative interaction between spontaneously arising groups within civil society and state institutions of democratic decision-making. While he clearly views grassroots initiatives as vital for official political deliberation, Habermas thinks that the genuine ability of localized communities for selforganization is strictly limited. While it is incontestable that the material conditions of developed democratic societies bring about highly mediated social relations, I think that Habermas is wrong to place severe restrictions on the potential for localized self-organization within democratic societies. One of the basic claims that I wish to advance in this book is that any credible account of community must acknowledge the pivotal significance of a community’s empirical situation and location. The fact that Habermas’s social theory offers an account of ideal conditions of communication that abstracts from the concrete site of community is a significant shortcoming of his approach. Rather than simply rejecting Habermas’s notion of dialogical community out of hand, however, I will attempt to salvage aspects of it to produce a more credible and arguably more realistic account of community. I will attempt this by bringing in Iris Marion Young’s examination of social relations under contemporary urban conditions. In a chapter of her JPD, “City Life and Difference,” Young critiques the model of community endorsed by what is called communitarianism. In a manner that echoes the critical position of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben considered in the next chapter, Young asserts that communitarians propose an ideal of community that “denies and represses social difference.”40 She further claims that the communitarian view privileges face-to-face encounters as the paradigmatic case of authentic social relations. While she is sympathetic to the communitarian critique of liberal individualism, Young thinks it is a mistake to see the alternative in the form of local community autonomy. In the context of city life she maintains that such a configuration of community is neither realistic not desirable. Inspired by Richard Sennett’s influential study The Fall of Public Man, Young goes so far as to assert a basic opposition between the model of local autonomous community and the modern urban condition. “Appeals to community are usually antiurban,”41 she remarks. Young identifies four features or “virtues” of what she calls a “normative ideal of city life”: (a) social differentiation without exclusion, (b) variety of social groups, (c) eroticism in the sense of exposure and attraction to surprising encounters, and (d) publicity in terms of public space open to all.42 The final feature highlights the key role played by public space in the maintenance of a vibrant culture of collective democratic expression and communicative power. Young notes:

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Politics, the critical activity of raising issues and deciding how institutional and social relations should be organized, crucially depends on the existence of spaces and forums to which everyone has access. In such public spaces people encounter other people, meanings, expressions, issues, which they may not understand or with which they do not identify. The force of public demonstrations, for example, often consists in bringing to people who pass through the public spaces those issues, demands, and people they might otherwise avoid. As a normative ideal city life provides public places and forums where anyone can speak and anyone can listen.43

While Young concedes that her ideal of urban life may appear “laughably utopian” in the face of actual urban conditions of increasing segregation, crime, and neglect, she insists that it is useful for envisioning the positive potential of city life to address issues of social justice. Young further advocates robust municipal and regional urban planning informed by a vibrant and pluralistic public sphere. She sees these two elements of democratic society as mutually supportive: municipal bureaucracies construct spaces of public urban encounter and expression, while urban communicative power works to determine institutional decision-making. While regional urban planning is taken to be an effective means to counteract oppression and marginalization, Young is adamant that deepening localized community autonomy would not advance the goals of social justice: Greater local autonomy would be likely to produce even more exaggerated forms of the inequalities than current decentralization produces: the concentration of needy people in those locales that provide the more extensive social and welfare services, putting an increased burden on them which their productive and resource base cannot meet, while other municipalities turn their backs on what they do not consider their problem.44

In other words, Young thinks that local community autonomy would reinforce and extend urban marginalization by lessening the opportunity and necessity of inter-communal encounter. In this she shares Habermas’s concern that a political program of intensified decentralization would undermine the social solidarity afforded by the democratic constitutional state. Young thus echoes Habermas’s contention that the resources of any local community for organizing itself at the grassroots level are limited. Developments in Western democracies over recent decades amply illustrate the negative social impact of reducing or removing governmental resources from marginalized urban communities. Against this backdrop simply leaving such communities to organize themselves without state and municipal intervention would constitute a dereliction of collective responsibility for social justice and material equality. The recent history of municipal urban planning shows, however, that institutional intervention tends to benefit disproportionately those communities

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which are already materially and socially privileged. To point to just one such instance, David Harvey shows how municipal urban policy in Baltimore, Maryland in the 1980s and 1990s involved huge sums of public money being diverted into private development projects while impoverished communities witnessed increased segregation and deterioration of the urban fabric.45 In her more recent book, Inclusion and Democracy, Young tackles directly the issue of urban exclusion, which in the context of U.S. cities often takes the form of ingrained racial segregation. While she acknowledges the role economic inequality plays in urban segregation, Young’s primary concern here as in her earlier book is with communicative inequality. As a consequence, both the undesirable effects and the remedy of segregation are conceived in terms of a more or less vibrant sphere of public discussion. While the notion of “differentiated solidarity” that Young advocates appears to concede more positive social potential to local community self-organization, her broader vision of democratic political community still centers on the task of constructing and maintaining a space of open public discussion: A public space . . . is one to which anyone has access, a space of openness and exposure. The physical open spaces of public streets, squares, plazas, and parks are what I have in mind with the term embodied public space. . . . [Such spaces] importantly contribute to democratic inclusion because they bring differently positioned strangers into one another’s presence; they make concrete the fact that people of differing tastes, interests, needs, and life circumstances dwell together in a city or region.46

While it is difficult to find fault with this vision of urban social space as an idealized abstraction, as with Habermas’s notion of the ideal speech situation the question arises: what does it tell us about the reality of contemporary social conditions? When Young holds that segregation “reduces the living communication differently situated economic groups have,”47 again the statement is unobjectionable. Still, it can be asked: why highlight “living communication” as the key index of social justice? Though Young’s approach is both theoretically nuanced and arguably more sensitive to empirical conditions, ultimately her conception of social justice shares with Habermas an idealizing theoretical bias that tends to reduce political action to institutionalized communication. Both Young and Habermas attempt to sketch a model of deliberative democracy that avoids perceived weaknesses in traditionally opposed configurations of democratic society offered by the state-welfare and liberal individualist models respectively. In so doing they seek to reaffirm the liberties of civil society against state oppression while insisting that state institutions represent the public good in opposition to the vested interests of money and power. The one form of autonomy neither is willing to recognize as desirable in its own right is that of local community. This is curious. For Habermas

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it is simply unrealistic to think that highly mediated contemporary societies could be capable of self-organization; for Young, all projects of local organization will necessarily regress into dogmatic self-enclosure and exclusion. My own view, by contrast, is that localized community self-organization is not only possible but is currently a growing reality across liberal democratic societies. Contemporary urban communities in particular are demonstrating in practice rather than theory that significant social and political projects can be conceived and realized without lapsing into malignant and exclusionary identity politics. While such communities are both envisaged and maintained through genuine communicative action, their significance and impact is primarily due to their ability to construct the conditions of their own action. Thus, while the idea of dialogical community identifies a necessary condition for community construction, taken in isolation it produces a one-sided and inadequate account. Turning in the next chapter to theories of political community that emphasize difference and singularity rather than identity and universality will allow this inadequacy to be better framed and analyzed. But only when we look beyond such theoretical oppositions can a well-rounded configuration of community be attained. This involves recognizing that the construction of community does not begin and end with acts of communication. Just as importantly, genuine community must be grasped as self-organizing in the sense of determining the environment of its own realization and development. Only when constructing community involves shaping the environment of collective life can it be said to be truly democratic. Configuring democracy on the model of communicative action, by contrast, reduces the struggle for social justice to a claim to have a place at the negotiating table. This will not suffice, however, for the simple reason that in actual political discussion the terms of debate tend to be set in advance to favor vested interests and powers. As we shall see in the next two chapters, genuine communicative power requires recognizing the power of different communities to invent and maintain their own means of expression. Only when such freedom of expression entails freedom to construct the space of community will the long shadow of political paternalism be dispelled. NOTES 1. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 126–27. 2. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume One: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 286.

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3. Habermas, Communicative Action I, 287. 4. Habermas, Communicative Action I, 42. 5. Habermas, Communicative Action I, 334. Habermas offers the following account of dramaturgical or expressive action: “Dramaturgical actions embody a knowledge of the agent’s own subjectivity. . . . Expressive knowledge can be explicated in terms of those values that underlie need interpretations, the interpretations of desires and emotional attitudes. Value standards are dependent in turn on innovations in the domain of evaluative expressions. These are reflected in an exemplary manner in works of art” (Communicative Action I, 334). The connections made here between expressive speech acts, emotional attitudes, and art clarify how Habermas consciously separates off the sphere of communicative action from emotive and aesthetic expression. In an insightful and important essay on Walter Benjamin from 1972, Habermas appears more willing to concede social and political relevance, albeit of a strictly mediated kind, to artistic expression. In connection with Benjamin’s idea of redeeming the injustices endured by the oppressed in the past through the construction of “dialectical images” Habermas remarks: “I of course think that a differentiated concept of progress opens a perspective that does not simply obstruct courage but can make political action more sure of hitting its mark, for under historical circumstances that prohibit the thought of revolution and give one reason to expect revolutionary progress of long duration, the idea of the revolution as the process of forming a new subjectivity must also be transformed. Benjamin’s conservative-revolutionary hermeneutics, which deciphers the history of culture with a view to rescuing it for the upheaval, may point out one path to take” (Habermas, “Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique,” in Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. F. Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 129–63). It is clear that, by the time The Theory of Communicative Action appeared, this was not a path Habermas had chosen to take. As the confrontation with poststructuralist thinkers deepened in the 1980s, Habermas’ criticized what he saw as Jacques Derrida’s attempt to erase the essential difference between poetic (“world-disclosive”) and communicative (“problem-solving”) language. While he makes clear his opposition to such “leveling,” Habermas does acknowledge “the special status that both philosophy and literary criticism, each in its own way, assume as mediators between expert cultures and the everyday world” (cf. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987, 207). The constitutive role that the aesthetic dimension plays in the construction of community is expressly acknowledged in the work of Jacques Rancière, and this can be seen as an important marker of the distance between the dialogical and the dissenting models of community. A precursor of Rancière’s position is to be found in the late work of the Critical Theorist, Herbert Marcuse (cf. An Essay on Liberation, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, 23–48). 6. Habermas, Communicative Action I, 42. 7. Habermas, Communicative Action II, 149–50. 8. Habermas, Communicative Action II, 150. 9. Jürgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas, ed. Peter Dews (New York / London: Verso, 1992), 269–70. 10. Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, 252. 11. Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, 260.

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12. Habermas, Communicative Action II, 136. 13. Habermas, Communicative Action II, 137–38. 14. Habermas, Communicative Action II, 149. 15. Habermas, Communicative Action II, 150. 16. Habermas, Communicative Action II, 183. 17. Habermas, Communicative Action II, 385–86. 18. Habermas, Communicative Action II, 345. 19. Habermas, Communicative Action II, 344. 20. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1996), xlii. 21. Habermas, Facts and Norms, xl. 22. Habermas, Facts and Norms, 315. 23. Habermas, Facts and Norms, 359. 24. Habermas, Facts and Norms, 360. 25. Habermas, Facts and Norms, 361. 26. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London / New York: Verso, 2006), 6. 27. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6. 28. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 35. 29. Habermas, Facts and Norms, 362. 30. Habermas, Facts and Norms, 351. 31. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 44. 32. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 55. 33. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 69. 34. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1990), 65. 35. Habermas, Facts and Norms, 103–4. 36. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 73. 37. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 112. 38. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 32. 39. Habermas, Facts and Norms, 150. 40. Young, Justice, 227. For a concise and influential account of the communitarian position see Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Society (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). 41. Young, Justice, 236. 42. Young, Justice, 238–41. 43. Young, Justice, 240. 44. Young, Justice, 250. 45. See David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 133–56. 46. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 213–14. 47. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 214.

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Chapter Two

Singular Community

In the previous chapter I considered Habermas’s conception of community in the context of his theories of communicative action and deliberative democracy. Following Young’s line of criticism, I argued that the notion of dialogical community was inadequate for two principal reasons. First, it neglects issues of what Young calls internal exclusion, whereby individuals and groups are granted less legitimacy in a context of discussion as a result of perceived inferior social status or mode of address. Secondly, the need for concrete places of shared discussion and social expression is downplayed within Habermas’s model of community. In the face of Young’s insistence that dialogical community needs to be more sensitive to issues of social difference and diversity, the idea of singular community considered in this chapter would appear to offer a more credible model. This latter model grasps community as something that precedes any effort to achieve rational agreement through argumentation and discussion. It also holds that it is a mistake to think of community in terms of shared identity. Instead, community should be understood as something more fundamental than any acknowledged commonalities. As such, the singular configuration of community appears to go beyond Habermas’s theory in precisely the manner called for by Young. That is, it offers a social theory in line with the concerns of the “politics of difference.” In this chapter I will consider the work of two influential and highly regarded contemporary European philosophers, Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, insofar as they outline closely allied theories of community. The intellectual-historical background that informs the work of these contemporary European thinkers is complex and I will not attempt any comprehensive reconstruction of it here. It is worthwhile noting, however, that they are key figures of much broader attempt to reinterpret the Marxian tradition of social theory in the aftermath of twentieth-century European totalitarianism. 27

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The writings of Nancy and Agamben have been influential across different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences in recent decades and they provide a useful counterpoint to the more mainstream and dominant theories of liberal politics that abound within academic literature. It is in that spirit that I approach their work here. The model of singular community provides useful resources for addressing some of the shortcomings of the theory of dialogical community outlined in the previous chapter. To arrive at a credible and satisfying account of community, however, it will be necessary in chapter three to go beyond both models.

INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY Nancy’s work The Inoperative Community from 1986 begins with the dramatic assertion that the key phenomenon of modernity is “the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.”1 The term “conflagration” is chosen deliberately in order to evoke the image of bodies burnt in the name of the Nazi genocide. In this way Nancy makes clear to the reader from the outset that his understanding of community is situated against the backdrop of historical catastrophe. Contrary to initial impressions, however, as Nancy’s analysis develops it becomes clear that he does not view community as something lost. In fact, he is only too aware that the tendency to grasp community as something like a lost idyll preceding the mass industrialization and urbanization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a key motif of much modern culture and theory. For Nancy it is important to resist this nostalgic attitude toward community, as such nostalgia is implicated in the nationalist politics of modernity. As he remarks: “Until this day history has been thought on the basis of a lost community—one to be regained or reconstituted.”2 This tendency to see community as something lost and to be recaptured constitutes what Nancy thinks of as the idea of community as work or project. Against this tendency he insists: “A community is not a project of fusion, or in some general way a productive or operative project—nor is it a project at all.”3 For Nancy, community is fundamentally misunderstood when it is taken as something to be produced through purposive collective action. At first glance this seems a highly counterintuitive claim and begs the question: what, other than collective action, gives rise to and maintains human community? Nancy’s answer to this question is both startling and simple: nothing preceding community causes community, as community is the original situation of all human existence. The mistake of modern theory and practice alike for Nancy is to assume that there must be in each case some event or project that founds community. Such projects, from the modest level

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of local urbanism to the grandiose plans of “nation building,” always assert an initial lack of community. One way to understand Nancy’s counterposition is to see him as denying that there can ever be a radical absence of community. In other words, community is not constructed by dialogue or any other means for the simple reason that it must be in place before any act of construction can begin. Nancy’s idea that community cannot be produced and is thus “inoperable” draws on two key sources. The first of these is Marxism. As with Habermas in The Theory of Communicative Action, Nancy is writing as a leftist thinker during a protracted crisis in Marxist theory and politics. The final collapse of the Soviet Union was merely a matter of several years away when he published The Inoperative Community, and Nancy’s approach to political philosophy is heavily influenced by the sense that the communist alternative configuration of society had run its course. This exhaustion of communism, however, by no means signifies that its basic concern for social justice has been satisfied. Quite to the contrary, Nancy echoes Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase from 1960 that proclaimed communism as “the unsurpassable horizon of our time,” when he notes that totalitarianism constitutes “the general horizon of our time, encompassing both democracies and their fragile juridical parapets.”4 Nancy feels that one significant reason why the communist alternative failed relates back to its definition of the human as a productive being. In The 1844 Manuscripts, for example, Marx asserts that “the social character is the general character of the whole [revolutionary] movement: just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him.”5 In this early text the idea that society is something produced by collective work already assumes central significance for Marx. Drawing to a significant degree on Hegel’s analysis of work or labor as human transformation of the material environment, Marx makes the social nature of humanity a function of productive capacity and action. This is just one side of a dialectical relationship, however, the other being that process whereby the material environment determines specific social formations and relations. The key thing for Nancy is that in Marxism society and community are derived from production. Once this premise is granted it is a relatively easy step to the further contention that a more just society can similarly be realized through altered relations of production. For Marxism, revolutionary politics takes the form of a collective project to overcome social alienation. Nancy’s underlying objection to such a project is that it covers over the profound sense in which community is always at work and can never, even in the most abject of conditions, be totally destroyed. In fact, Nancy’s critique of what he takes to be communism’s false image of human existence as something produced has a much broader extension and relates to all varieties of communitarianism. He asserts:

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[There is no communist or communitarian opposition] that has not been or is not still profoundly subjugated to the goal of a human community, that is, to the goal of achieving a community of beings producing in essence their own essence as their work, and furthermore producing precisely this essence as community.6

As we shall see, however, while critiquing his image of community in terms of production, both Nancy and Agamben wish to reaffirm Marx’s concern for social justice. Here they attempt to identify a notion of a future community that would be just in the sense of existing beyond all notions of a historical project to be realized by a particular social, ethnic, or national group. This is the idea of a “community to come” that will be tackled later in this chapter. While Marx’s account of the origins of social structure is a key focus of critique, Nancy’s positive conception of community cannot be adequately understood without addressing a further, arguably more fundamental influence. This is the work of the twentieth-century philosopher, Martin Heidegger. As is evident throughout the writings of both Nancy and Agamben, Heidegger represents a key reference point. At first glance this is curious, given that Heidegger was notoriously reticent to draw social and political conclusions from his work throughout the fifty years of his active career as an academic philosopher. It is all the more striking in view of the fact that the only notable exception to this reticence was Heidegger’s explicit alignment of his thinking with German National Socialism in the 1930s. A question that lies at the heart of all so-called “left Heideggerianism” is whether that explicit alignment expressed an inherent political tendency of Heidegger’s thought. In overtly positioning their own configurations of the social within the context of Heidegger’s thinking, both Nancy and Agamben imply a negative response to this question. I will return to this issue toward the end of this chapter. For now it is a question of understanding in more precise terms what the idea of singular community takes from Heidegger.

SINGULARITY In his magnum opus from 1927, Being and Time, Heidegger sets out to do nothing less than offer a radically new philosophical account of human existence. According to Heidegger the key dimension of human existence and understanding, as the title of his work suggests, is time. Whereas we commonly think of time in terms of a shared measurement of events, Heidegger’s concern is for what phenomenology calls “lived time.” Lived time is time from a first-person perspective, the time within which immediate experience

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and everyday life take place. Though such time is, according to Heidegger, always understood on some level within human existence, it very rarely comes to view as an object of attention and concern as such. For this reason theory and science, Heidegger argues, have failed to give an account of lived time and have instead merely formalized what he calls “clock time” and passed this off as the true phenomenon. As a consequence Heidegger sees his basic task as bringing about a “destruction” of the traditional theory of time in order to reveal a more original dimension of experience. In the opening sections of Being and Time Heidegger gives an initial indication of the basic features of existence. One such feature is what is he calls “mineness” (in German, Jemeinigkeit). This feature of existence is closely related to another, whose German term sounds similar and offers similar difficulties of translation. The term Heidegger uses in this case is Jeweiligkeit, which has the basic meaning of “in each separate case” and contains a root element (the German word Weile) that corresponds to English “while” in the sense of an indeterminate period of time. Though this is not the place for detailed examination of the interpretations of Heidegger offered by Nancy and Agamben, it is important to note that there are close affinities between Heidegger’s notion of Jeweiligkeit and the idea of singularity employed by the later thinkers. Assuming such an affinity, singular community can be initially understood to involve the experience of shared historical time. So understood, singular community includes the following features: an experience of time’s all-inclusiveness and inescapability; a fundamental sense of time as mortality or what Heidegger calls “finitude”; finally, and perhaps most significantly, an understanding of time as collective destiny. While it is crucial to acknowledge the significance of Heidegger for the notion of singular community it would be a mistake to understand Nancy and Agamben as merely repeating Heidegger’s analysis of existence. For while they attempt to think through certain elements of Heideggerian thought it can equally be said that they strive to extend it to areas where Heidegger remained conspicuously silent. Most importantly for the present context, Being and Time has virtually nothing to say about collective existence. What little it does say is nevertheless crucially important for understanding the idea of community shared by Nancy and Agamben. In the closing sections of Being and Time Heidegger proposes a notion of collective or communal historical existence (or “Dasein” in Heidegger’s German usage) under the title “destiny”: [Dasein’s] historizing is a co-historizing and is determinate for it as destiny. This is how we designate the historizing of the community, of a people. Destiny is not something that puts itself together out of individual fates. . . . Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our being with one another in the same world

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and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities. Only in communicating and in struggling does the power of destiny become free. Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its ‘generation’ goes to make up the full authentic historizing of Dasein.7

The notion of collective existence as destiny remains underdeveloped by Heidegger in his early work. It can be followed through to his encounter with Nazism in the 1930s, but that cannot be my concern here. What is of direct relevance is the very fact that Heidegger characterizes community as something essentially beyond the control of those involved. In basic terms, Heidegger’s account of existence in Being and Time is regulated by two fundamental and complementary concepts: projection (which Nancy connects with “work”) and what is called thrownness or facticity. Whereas projection relates to the future projects that singular existence concerns itself with, “thrownness” denotes that side of existence which escapes both individual and collective control. Thrownness refers above all to the fact that each of us is powerless with respect to our condition of mortality. In view of this we might say that singular community in Heidegger stands for a collective effort to confront the destiny of death. Nancy echoes this understanding when he remarks: “Death is indissociable from community, for it is through death that the community reveals itself—and reciprocally.”8 In all his texts from the late 1970s on, Giorgio Agamben also demonstrates a significant debt to the work of Heidegger. His more recent work has close affinities with that of Nancy and similarly centers on the notion of singularity. In The Coming Community from 1990 Agamben initially tackles the concept of the singular as it was analyzed in medieval scholastic philosophy via the notion of quodlibet ens (“whatever being”). For Agamben this seemingly abstract concept holds the key to breaking down the opposition between the individual and universal that continues to regulate political and social thought. He remarks: The Whatever in question here relates to singularity not in its indifference with respect to a common property (to a concept, for example: being red, being French, being Muslim), but only in its being such as it is. Singularity is thus freed from the false dilemma that obliges knowledge to choose between the ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility of the universal. . . . In this conception, suchand-such being is reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims)—and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself.9

This passage makes clear a further criticism of Marxian thinking, namely its configuration of the social in terms of class membership. While Marx’s notion of the proletariat as the class that embodies the possible end of all class distinc-

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tions can be understood to point toward something like the idea of singularity in question, Agamben insists against this that “today we would have to say that there are no longer social classes, but just a single planetary petty bourgeoisie, in which all the old social classes are dissolved.”10 This claim may appear rather facile and manifestly false if it is taken to mean that the current global situation is one of universal property ownership. More charitably, we can understand Agamben as following a well-established line of poststructuralist criticism of Marx in insisting that the idea of a majority industrial working class as a potential vehicle of radical social change has no credible contemporary currency. In agreement with Nancy, Agamben insists that singularity must be understood in stark opposition to any form of social identity, be it that of the individual, group, or class: “Whatever is the figure of pure singularity. Whatever singularity has no identity, it is not determinate with respect to a concept, but neither is it simply indeterminate; rather it is determined only through its relation to an idea, that is, to the totality of its possibilities.”11 Two key problems emerge when the concept of singularity proposed by Nancy and Agamben is initially confronted: first, it remains indeterminate and largely characterized in terms of what it is not; second, it seems to undermine resources for political action and resistance through collective action. Further consideration reveals that for both thinkers a response to these problems is proposed through bringing to light the role language plays in constituting community. Given that singularity stands in stark opposition to identity, it follows that language within singular community cannot be seen as essentially productive of identity. Instead, language must be viewed as resisting the tendency toward social identification. Although the idea of language as resistance seems to indicate a basic affinity with Habermas, we will see that in fact the idea of singular community cannot be readily reconciled with the notion of dialogic community discussed in the previous chapter.

THE LANGUAGE OF SINGULARITY The third chapter of Nancy’s The Inoperative Community is titled “Literary Communism” and comes closest to offering an explicit account of the relationship between singular community and language. In the previous chapter I referred briefly to the postmodernist critique of Habermas. There are two central points raised by this critique of immediate relevance to the present discussion, one that relates to the idea of historical development according to rational progress and another relating to the notion that the concerns of social justice can be best served by instituting contexts for dialogical consensusformation. Both those sympathetic to Habermas’s project and those opposed

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to it claim that it asserts too close a tie between consensus and social justice. Iris Marion Young, as we saw, insists that the social conditions of liberal democracy mean that imposing any imperative for consensus will lead to unjust exclusions and to bolstering dominant social groups and identities. She further believes that Habermas conceives of political and social discourse in too rationalistic a manner, excluding thereby impassioned and rhetorical forms of address as invalid. In making this criticism Young is not fundamentally questioning the idea that dialogue is a key factor in producing social cohesion and furthering social justice, she is simply pleading for a more generous understanding of what dialogue can legitimately involve. Nancy, by contrast, wants to break with any model of language understood as rational argumentation and agreement. In making this move he claims that the real challenge in linking language and social justice resides in moving beyond any model of linguistic intersubjectivity. He calls this move “interrupting the myth” of dialogue: There is a myth of the dialogue: it is the myth of the “intersubjective” and the intrapolitical foundation of logos and its unitary truth. And there is also the interruption of this myth: the dialogue is no longer to be heard except as communication of the incommunicable singularity/community. I no longer (no longer essentially) hear in it what the other wants to say to me, but I hear in it that the other, or some other (de l’autre) speaks and that there is an essential archi-articulation of the voice and of voices, which constitutes the being in common itself.12

This quite different sense of dialogue, which Nancy goes on to call simply “facing the other,” is understood to have no content or message that might be conveyed from one speaker to another. In a word, there is no negotiation of mutual understanding in singular dialogue. Here Nancy shows himself to be a direct inheritor of the poststructuralist understanding that seeks to sever the connection between language and the intentions of a linguistic subject or agent. A key tenet of this understanding is that language is not to be grasped as a neutral tool through which subjects achieve understanding or bring about a change in other subjects or the material world. Beyond this rejection of the instrumental understanding of language, however, the idea of an ethics of writing emerges that directly challenges Habermas’s notion of discourse ethics. In line with this idea Nancy insists that dialogue is intrinsic to singular community despite the fact that for him dialogue has neither task nor function. He further follows Jacques Derrida’s lead in insisting that language and dialogue should be not be grasped according to the paradigm of the present voice—whether interiorized or externalized—but instead as a silent recognition that others are present. What is at stake here is a sense of acknowledg-

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ment or recognition of the irreducibility of each speaker to any set of explicit identifying characteristics. If acts of identification are taken to be the basic function of language, then all linguistic practice will entail violence and injustice from the perspective of singular community. Nancy, however, wishes to retain the resources of language but insists that language as writing can offer a configuration of the social that suspends and interrupts all symbolic violence through identification. This writing constitutes what Nancy calls “literary communism,” which, he says: defines neither a politics, nor a writing, for it refers, on the contrary, to that which resists any definition or program, be these political, aesthetic, or philosophical. But it cannot be accommodated within every “politics” or within every “writing.” It signals a bias in favor of the “literary communist” resistance that precedes us rather than our inventing it—that precedes us from the depths of community.13

The communism that Nancy here equates with writing stands in direct opposition to any model of community based on mutual understanding, such as the one proposed by Habermas. Nancy makes this point unmistakable when he remarks that “we understand only that there is no common understanding of community, that sharing does not constitute an understanding . . . that it does not constitute a knowledge, and that it gives no one, including community itself, mastery over being-in-common.”14 Agamben agrees with two key contentions found in Nancy’s writings: first, that language is key to attaining an adequate account of community, and, second, that the predominant notion of language as a tool of understanding, knowledge, and consensus must be rejected. In The Coming Community Agamben claims that what Guy Debord famously called the “society of the spectacle” in the 1960s points toward a certain destruction of language. He notes: It is clear that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity or linguistic being of language. This means that a fuller Marxian analysis should deal with the fact that capitalism . . . was directed . . . principally toward the alienation of language itself, of the very linguistic and communicative nature of humans, of that logos which one of Heraclitus’s fragments identified as the Common. The extreme form of the expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is, the politics we live in.15

Here Agamben makes clear that for him, as for Nancy, the capitalist configuration of the social centered on production brings about the dissolution of singular community through the destruction of language. The imperative of capitalist development, Agamben contends, “drives the nations of the earth towards

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a single common destiny [which] is the alienation from linguistic being, the uprooting of all peoples from their vital dwelling in language.”16 Agamben’s earlier work from the late 1970s and earlier 1980s already centers on this idea of the destruction of community through the destruction of language. Here Agamben’s interpretation of the German Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin exerts a decisive influence. For instance, in his work Infancy and History from 1978 Agamben takes up Benjamin’s notion of the “destruction of experience” set out in the latter’s 1933 essay “The Storyteller.” Agamben’s analysis echoes Benjamin’s essay, when he remarks: “Modern man makes his way home in the evening wearied by the jumble of events, but however entertaining or tedious, unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them will have become experience.”17 As Agamben’s analysis unfolds, the connection between this destruction of experience and language becomes clearer. Here Agamben grasps the notion of “infancy” literally, that is, as an initial state of speechlessness. The key point for Agamben is that this speechlessness or silence remains essential to the mature speaking adult, such that silence is the ground and condition of all acts of speech. Maintaining a link with this state of infant silence is what, according to Agamben, makes experience possible: “In terms of human infancy, experience is the simple difference between the human and the linguistic. The individual as not already speaking, as having been and still being an infant—this is experience.”18 The implication is that the tendency to see language and linguistic capacity solely as a means for achieving mutual understanding actually results in a key element being covered over. For Agamben the fundamental thing is to grasp language not in terms of something actually conveyed or produced but rather as a pure potentiality of “communication.” In his more recent work Agamben reaffirms the connection between community and language without content. Thus in an essay from 1995 titled “The Face” Agamben remarks: If what human beings had to communicate to each other were always and only something, there would never be politics properly speaking, but only exchange and conflict, signals and answers. But because what human beings have to communicate to each other is above all pure communicability (that is, language), politics then arises as the communicative emptiness in which the human face emerges as such.19

Here Agamben is working with a notion of “pure language” derived from one of Benjamin’s early essays.20 This idea of language without content that, as Agamben says, communicates language or communicability as such, is not readily comprehensible. This is hardly surprising given that a basic indeterminacy is asserted as intrinsic to this idea of language. What can be said with some certainty, however, is that Agamben follows Benjamin’s lead in con-

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necting “pure language” with social justice and historical redemption. This brings us to an idea of political messianism that is closely connected with what Agamben calls the “community to come.” Taking up Derrida’s idea of deferred presence, the notion of the community to come insists that, rather than a project to be realized, community is something that holds people together precisely in virtue of the fact that it can never become something like a finished product. Speaking formally, one might say that singular community is more like a process than an object, feature, or stable condition. This notion of the community to come will be considered in more detail in the final section of this chapter. Having followed the idea of singular community in Nancy and Agamben thus far, it may be objected that such an idea offers an extremely vague and dissatisfying account of community. What, if anything, can this idea illuminate in relation to actual historical or contemporary communities and their various struggles for social justice? Though many valid objections can be made against the theory of dialogical community, its basic characteristics are at least readily identifiable. In the case of singular community, by contrast, Nancy and Agamben seem to offer little more than a list of what it is not. To some extent such criticism is justified. It is necessary to recognize, however, that the models of dialogical and singular community are responses to quite different questions. Whereas Habermas is primarily concerned to show how social cohesion under the conditions of modern liberal democracy is embedded in mechanisms of linguistic exchange, the idea of singular community seeks to account for social existence at a deeper level. That is, it strives to indicate what makes any social organization at all possible. In this way the model of singular community offers something like a social ontology or an account of what it is to be social in any case. Even if this distinction is granted, however, one may remain dissatisfied with the paradigm of singular community. In my view, although the idea of singular community succeeds in drawing attention to aspects of the social underplayed in Habermasian dialogical community, its indeterminacy constitutes a major shortcoming. In the next section I will explore this issue with respect to the specific problem of community and space. My basic contention will be that Nancy and Agamben fail to offer a plausible account of how place and space are crucially involved in any actual instance of community.

SPACES OF COMMUNITY In the final section of the previous chapter I looked at the relationship between communicative power and place. Iris Marion Young’s insistence on the importance of public space for articulating group concerns was considered in light of Habermas’s comparative lack of concern for actual sites of

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effective communicative action. A basic contention of this book is that space and place are essential to the existence and understanding of community. More precisely, the claim is that community cannot be accounted for in the absence of a genuine place of collective action. Place and collective action are abstractions when taken in isolation, but together they constitute the essential elements of any satisfying and credible model of community. From this it follows that any approach to community that neglects the issue of space suffers from a serious shortcoming. In view of the scope and concerns of this book it can be said, in general terms, that theory tends to accentuate action in isolation from space, whereas urbanism and architecture are predisposed to view space in the absence of spontaneous collective action on the part of inhabitants. As was shown, Habermas’s notion of the ideal speech situation indicates that space is not given its due in his account of dialogical community. The theory of singular community, by contrast, strives to resist an understanding that turns on collective action and agency. What happens to place and space within this model? Insofar as the idea of singular community is closely allied to writing and literature it might be assumed that space remains of little significance to it. Indeed, there is a marked suspicion of attempts to link community and space in the sense of an identified territory or place of action. In light of the underlying shared concern of Nancy and Agamben to remain mindful of the more recent failings of identity politics, this suspicion is hardly surprising. To take only the most obvious example of German National Socialism, the mythical notion of a national territory and historical homeland constitutes a key motif of Nazi politics. Almost inevitably, national and ethnic disputes involve appeals to a territory belonging to a certain group or people as part of a putative historical destiny. The linkage between ethnically based nationalism and claims to national territory no doubt lies behind Nancy’s following remark, where he indicates that the process of modern urbanization has undermined the connection between community and some proper place of inhabitation: In place of communion there is no place, no site, no temple or altar for community. Exposure takes place everywhere, in all places, for it is the exposure of all and of each, in his solitude, to not being alone ( . . . in our great metropolises, where more and more different “communities” exist side by side, intersect, pass each other by and intermingle, the exposure to not being alone, the risk of face-to-face encounter, is constantly becoming more diverse and more unpredictable . . . ).21

It is important not to misunderstand Nancy’s denial of any proper place of community as indicating some kind of nostalgic regret. Rather, the sense of exposure he speaks of is taken to be the positive and genuine experience of community as such. As the previous quote indicates, Nancy contends that

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the contemporary state of social life under the conditions of mass urbanization should not be understood with respect to proper places assigned to certain communities. One can easily identify good grounds for such a contention. Any rigorous attempt to constitute community in practice according to localization tends to have one of two results: either social difference is suppressed through enforced assimilation to an official norm, or such difference is made visible through spatial segregation. As neither homogenization nor segregation is in line with a genuine concern for social justice, the obvious response seems to be to sever community from any notion of proper place. In an important article from 1992 titled “La Comparution / The Compearance,” Nancy explicitly links the Marxian paradigm of productive community with the traditional notion of the polis as a place of collective activity. It is from this perspective that he critiques Marx’s model of politics as collective praxis within the “polis”: [The “realization” of politics is for Marx] the polis, coextensive to the whole of the real life of the community. But this coextension can be understood in two ways. Either the polis is in the end the same as the sum or the combinatorial of all the [human] activities . . . or that which is here called “polis” represents something that does not let itself be confused with any combination of activities.22

Once divorced from any sense of the site of collective activity, Nancy concedes, the polis can come to stand for the space of singular community, that is, a sense of the “in-common” that precedes any actual social activity. In this sense only is Nancy willing to see the polis as a place of what he calls “compearance,” namely the appearing together that is constitutive of human existence as such. At the same time, Nancy insists that “polis no longer signifies the ‘city’ except in a historical fashion.”23 This shifting of the site of community away from the city is shared with Agamben. In his best-known work, Homo Sacer from 1995, Agamben claims that the historical paradigm of the social has shifted from the city to the camp. At the centre of Agamben’s analysis in Homo Sacer stands the following contention with respect to the Nazi death camps: “[We must] regard the camp not as a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past but in some way as the hidden matrix and nomos [law] of the political space in which we are still living.”24 The immediate source of this contention is Benjamin’s resonant remark: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”25 Benjamin’s remark is written in the year of his death (1940) and directed explicitly at those “opponents of fascism” who wonder how the political situation realised by Nazism could still be possible in the twentieth century. A similar intention motivates Agamben’s notion of the camp and his efforts to account for such contemporary global phenomena of mass suffering as enforced migration and

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displacement. In basic terms, for Agamben the camp is the site of what he calls “bare life,” that is, human life stripped of the social identity and judicial protection accorded those who are acknowledged as citizens of a sovereign nation-state. Agamben contends: The growing dissociation of birth (bare life) and the nation-state is the new fact of politics of our day, and what we call camp is this disjunction. . . . The camp is the fourth, inseparable element that has now added itself to—and so broken—the old trinity composed of the state, nation (birth), and land.26

What Agamben proposes in Homo Sacer is in essence a correlation between a widely acknowledged social phenomenon—actual statelessness—and something like a generative schema—camp. Presumably, in proposing this correlation Agamben is adhering to the poststructuralist tenet (one shared by earlier thinkers such as Heidegger and Benjamin) that causal explanation is inadmissible within philosophical-historical analysis. Thus, the argument is not that the paradigm of the camp in any way materially determines or causes bare life in the form of statelessness to exist. Nevertheless the notion of camp appears to be offered by Agamben as something more than a mere conceptual framework or heuristic device. Instead, it seems that Agamben grasps the idea of the camp as a destiny in the sense that Heidegger uses this term when speaking of the historical status of a people or community. Accordingly, through his understanding of camp as some kind of modern political destiny Agamben brings space and community together but at a certain price. Agamben’s analysis risks running afoul of what the theory of singular community is precisely trying to avoid, namely reaffirming the totalitarian understanding of community in terms of a fatalistic connection between a particular form of social organization and a specific schema of place. In this sense Nancy’s attempt to escape the myth of community would be counteracted by Agamben’s sense of the camp as community’s space. In a recent article Philippe Mesnard has taken Agamben’s analysis of the Nazi death camps in Homo Sacer to task for failing to acknowledge the historical complexity of these sites of oppression. In essence Mesnard accuses Agamben of mystifying the social reality of the camps by abstracting them from their concrete historical context: By striving to locate in “the camp” what he calls the “very paradigm of political space,” Agamben erects an insurmountable frontier around concentration camps which become, in fact, isolated from their surrounding society, and turns them into an exclusive “outside.” Consequently, Agamben fails to envisage the global system which surrounds the camps, and included numerous social and economic interfaces present in the entire territory of the Third Reich.27

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Mesnard elaborates on his criticism by claiming that Agamben’s treatment of the camps is symptomatic of his broader approach to politics as regulated by “the exclusive sign of a paradigmatic absolute” and amounting to a “radical vision of politics” he sees as shared by Nancy.28 He also contends that Agamben “radicalizes Heidegger’s ontology” by positing what he calls an “essentialist monocausalism.”29 Finally, Mesnard offers a important explication of what Agamben’s inheritance of the Heideggerian perspective amounts to when he insists: “A theory of passivity cannot dispense with a theory of action, unless it openly advocates a mystical posture, which Agamben’s thought does not.”30 Agamben’s reception of Benjamin’s messianism suggests, however, that mystical accents are evident within his approach to community, namely in his appeal to an indeterminate “coming community.” Indeed, one might contend that any approach to oppression that proclaims a form of resistance without determinate material means amounts to a de facto mysticism. We are thus confronted with a crucial question: does the model of singular community, in playing down both collective activity and the enabling potential of concrete (as opposed to generalized and schematic) place, yield anything other than an indeterminate sense of shared passivity? In other words, does singular community offer any credible resources for resisting oppressive power and contributing to social justice? The following section confronts this question directly.

RESISTANCE AND THE “COMMUNITY TO COME” In The Inoperative Community Nancy makes an explicit connection between singular community and resistance: Community is, in a sense, resistance itself: namely, resistance to immanence. Consequently, community is transcendence: but “transcendence,” which no longer has any “sacred” meaning, signifying precisely a resistance to immanence (resistance to the communion of everyone or to the exclusive passion of one or several: to all the forms and all the violences of subjectivity).31

Everything turns here on the “in a sense” qualification. Nancy, as we saw, states that the figure of community constituting “the general horizon of our time” is none other than immanentism or totalitarianism. This contention is shared by Agamben. It follows that singular community must be understood in some emphatic sense, that is, as community in opposition to how community is generally understood and realized. This recourse to a sense of community exclusively determined in negative ways demonstrates once again a close affinity with Heidegger’s mode of thinking. A logic of negation is employed

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by Nancy’s whenever he evokes community in an emphatic sense. Thus he speaks of “[C]ommunity ‘as such’: that is to say, neither substance nor accident nor subject nor object nor communion nor combination.”32 Having reduced out from Marxian communism all concrete diagnoses and injunctions Nancy retains only the vaguest appeal to radical change, an appeal that arguably leaves out all specific means identified by Marx with respect to historical social struggle: [C]ommunism is the paradoxical sign which at once signals the end of the whole world and the transition into another. . . . Another world will have opened itself in the new stricture—albeit obscure—of community. Between the two there will have been nothing—nothing but the pale, derisory, fleeting evasion of a “civilization of the individual” (or of the “person”), liberal without liberation, humane without the means of wresting man from man to expose him to “that of which the foundation does not reside within him,” as Schelling put it.33

This passage amply illustrates a certain troubling reduction of Marxian communism to an indeterminate messianism. While Nancy would insist that he is simply interpreting communism in a manner that allows us to see its political promise shorn of its productivist bias, without a materially and historically grounded theory of praxis, Marx’s social theory is left without credible means for tackling concrete cases of oppression and injustice. Recalling the previous section, the inadequacies of Nancy’s analysis can perhaps best be summed up by saying that he attempts to reconfigure community in the absence of any concrete historical determination of place, where place is understood as the material context of praxis. In my view the notion of singular community is profoundly characterized by what has been called “radical passivity.” In a book bearing that title Thomas Carl Wall identifies what is to be understood by this notion: We are arguing that the point to which each thinker we examine leads us is the point of communicativity as such, insofar as this point is itself an interruption of communication. That is to say, communicativity pulverizes discourse. It gives nothing to be thought; it gives no message to which we might listen but, in effect, says: there is (il y a).34

This explanation of radical passivity in terms of the incommunicable source of all acts of communication and common existence makes clear once again the negative logic underlying the approach to community shared by Nancy and Agamben. I have suggested that this approach fails to provide any basis for effective opposition to oppression. However, once the implications of the figure of radical passivity are made explicit, a much more damning potential critique begins to emerge, namely that this figure readily lends itself to the

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ideological support of oppressive power itself. According to this critique the schema of bare life that regulates the thought of Nancy and Agamben alike starts to look like a philosophical elaboration of the central wish symbol of totalitarian oppression. In his exploration of “the common,” Antonio Negri subjects Agamben’s thinking of community to precisely this line of criticism. His summary of where the notion of radical passivity leads is striking in its lapidary formulation: “This thinking of the common, in the anxiety of the awaiting of the other (as in Levinas), results in mysticism.”35 The text of an interview with Negri in the year following the publication of Empire levels perhaps the gravest accusation at the figure of bare life or radical powerlessness that stands at the heart of Homo Sacer: From a logical standpoint, it is possible to think all this: the naked bodies of the people in the camps, for example, can lead precisely in this direction. But this is also the point at which this concept turns into ideology: to conceive of the relation between power and life in such a way actually ends up bolstering and reinforcing ideology. Agamben, in effect, is saying that such is the nature of power: in the final instance, power reduces each and every human being to such a state of powerlessness.36

For Negri and Michael Hardt in Empire the lesson of totalitarianism is not that it may be resisted from some indeterminate situation of radical powerlessness but rather that the oppression itself was a reaction to the manifested power of productive cooperation. They remark: Through their monstrosities of reducing human beings to minimal naked life, fascism and Nazism tried in vain to destroy the enormous power that naked life could become and to expunge the form in which the new powers of productive cooperation of the multitude are accumulated. One might say in line with this idea that the reactionary deliriums of fascism and Nazism were unleashed when capital discovered that social cooperation was no longer the result of the investment of capital but rather an autonomous power, the a priori of every act of production.37

Another way of expressing this criticism is to say simply that power works as a differential, that is, always in terms of more or less power accruing to particular individuals or collectives in relation to others. It follows from this that absolute power is a fascist delirium precisely because it is empirically impossible. But equally, absolute powerlessness must be seen as an ideological fiction, a fiction particularly useful to institutions of oppressive power. Despite the appeal to an ethics of singularity beyond any traditional ethics of identity or exclusion, Nancy speaks of injustice as absolute.38 Such absolutizing of suffering is closely connected to its decontextualization which,

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whether intended or not, has recourse to a figure of absolute powerlessness that is empirically speaking impossible. Again, such recourse actually renders philosophical discourse incapable of addressing suffering in the singular and leads inexorably to a manner of speaking that is tokenistic and emblematic, as when Nancy refers to “a body of hunger; a tortured body; a broken will; an emptied look; a mass war grave; a ridiculous, frustrated condition; and also the dereliction of the suburbs, the wandering of migrants.”39 Whatever the intentions of such a description, it is hard not to see in it a grotesquely simplified allegory of contemporary reality. Returning to Mesnard’s critique, he identifies in Agamben a similar tendency to recapitulate the visual clichés of suffering rather than draw out the complexities and contradictions of the historical site of the camp: Concentration camps were characterized by generalized terror, rather than absolute terror, but they were also complex systems of power strata linked to others by “grey areas.” . . . Agamben’s “muselmann” [the figure of absolute bare life in the camps] . . . acts as a screen and becomes one of these phenomena whereby reality is reified into its own representation.40

The point of this criticism, I take it, is not to downplay the historical significance of the Nazi camps but rather to insist that the model of radical passivity that regulates Agamben’s analysis merely succeeds in mystifying rather than illuminating these singular sites of suffering. A further point is that made by Negri, namely that this model actually strengthens the ideology of oppressive power through its suggestion that resistance is somehow to be found within the very condition of absolute powerlessness. Once suffering and injustice are grasped as phenomena that are necessarily locally situated and produced by concrete inequalities of power (rather than through an abstract opposition of absolute power and powerlessness), resistance to oppressive power can similarly be understood in terms of concretely situated productive counterpractices. If this means that resistance to oppression looks like a project or work of some kind, then this is simply a reflection of how movements of resistance actually arise and organize themselves. As a consequence, resistance cannot be adequately understood apart from any instances of “work” in the sense of cooperative praxis. The injunction against work or project that characterizes the approach to community shared by Agamben and Nancy rests on the assumption that all appeal to production reinforces the traditional understanding of commonality in terms of exclusive identity. But if work in general denotes transformative action with respect to the material situation of human life, social transformation cannot be plausibly grasped in the complete absence of work. Accordingly, the attempt to grasp social transformation as something brought about not through material practices but rather through the interces-

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sion of an indeterminate shift in destiny amounts to ideological mystification and can lead only to collective despair.

BETWEEN DIALOGICAL AND SINGULAR COMMUNITY The previous section focused on some serious shortcomings of the theory of singular community put forward by Nancy and Agamben. This critique may give the impression that there is little or nothing positive to salvage in the model of singular community, but that is not what I want ultimately to suggest. It is important to recognize that, within contemporary philosophy, Nancy and Agamben offer one of the most sophisticated, resonant, and fruitful models of community. As such it contains invaluable resources for articulating widespread contemporary concerns about identity politics. In many ways the model of singular community directly inherits Marx’s vision of a future social life freed from class divisions and conflicts. More specifically, Agamben’s recent work offers an analysis and critique of the central tendency of contemporary politics to create segregated spaces for refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants more generally. His idea of the paradigm of the camp thus constitutes a significant and compelling extension of Foucault’s earlier work on places of discipline and punishment. The key problem with the model of singular community, as I see it, is its insistence on viewing community in the absence of collective action. This problem is underscored by a certain move toward a messianic understanding of social redemption, which for both thinkers is closely connected to a notion of language as pure communicability. As indicated in the introduction, the two parts of this book are organized dialectically. This means that the first two chapters stand in a relation of opposition that is to some extent overcome in the final third chapter. The advantage of this overall structure is that theories and practices of community can be critiqued without being rejected as false. In making the transition to the theory of dissenting community it is thus important to indicate explicitly which features of the models already considered are to be retained. In Habermas’s approach it is the idea of noninstitutionalized community organization that is of most value. Although it was shown that both Habermas and Young were only willing to concede limited possibilities of localized social organization, nevertheless their general position promotes community pluralism and self-determination. Their further opposition to political paternalism and centralization is vital to the positive account of constructing community that will be developed in part two of this book. In the case of singular community, Nancy and Agamben can be understood to radicalize Habermas’s

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opposition to social homogenization. They insist that community should be grasped at the level of bare existence, and thus prior to all specific forms of social organization. However, whereas Habermas outlines a particular means of constructing community (communicative action), singular community insists that in any situation community already exists. The obvious objection to this is that all genuine questions and problems of community relate not to its mere existence but to its specific quality and character. For contemporary inhabitants of a deindustrialized midwestern city in the United States, for example, it would hardly address issues of social justice to say that, despite all material deprivations, they still possessed community at a profound level. To respond in this way would be more likely to look facile and callous than deeply insightful and responsible. Dialogical and singular community can also be contrasted in the following way: the former offers a mechanism for socially just communication through criteria of inclusion, whereas the latter insists that all individuals must in some sense be included in community from the outset in order for anything like Habermasian communication to be possible. Finally, it can simply be said that the theory of singular community rejects the very idea of community construction. For Nancy and Agamben, this idea lies at the heart equally of the tradition of utopian socialism and of the dystopian realities of twentieth-century totalitarianism. In turning in the following chapter to the theory of dissenting community I intend to bring together Habermas’s notion of generating community through collective action and the idea of resistance to be found in Nancy and Agamben. Focusing on the work of the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière, I will argue that community within liberal democracies should be understood in terms of explicit or implicit opposition to institutionalized hegemonic powers. While Habermas recognizes to some degree this opposition of community to established political and economic power, he looks to parallel institutions of organized discourse to defend specific communities against such power. However, recent history and contemporary reality demonstrate that, when invited to become “dialogue partners” in official decision-making, local communities are more often pitted against each other or simply brought in to do lip service to the idea of public participation. In an important sense, then, a credible model of constructing community will need to account for an essential element of resistance to prevailing powers. The model of singular community hints at such resistance but remains vague on how it might articulate itself in concrete cases. In the following chapter I will attempt to incorporate into the model of dissenting community the idea of what Henri Lefebvre and others have called “the right to the city.” In essence this involves an extension of what is usually understood as basic human rights to include the material freedom to use and codetermine the nature of

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public space. The argument behind this claim is simple: without the genuine right of a public to play a role in shaping its shared material environment, all other rights lack a concrete basis. For example, if the right to proclaim certain political views in the form of spontaneous public demonstration is denied, any claim to possess freedom of speech and conscience is liable to degenerate into something merely formal and empty. In the absence of public space as a forum for collective action human, civil rights are in effect limited to the private sphere or, in the extreme case, to individual conscience. For social justice to be a political reality, therefore, spaces of public dissent must be created and defended from the desire of official, hegemonic power to limit or remove them. The theoretical model that accords with this idea will be explored in the next chapter.

NOTES 1. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor and trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 1. 2. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 9. 3. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 15. 4. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 3. 5. Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), 85. 6. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 2. 7. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), 436 8. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 14. 9. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Micheal Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1–2. 10. Agamben, Coming Community, 63. 11. Agamben, Coming Community, 67. 12. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 76. 13. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 81. 14. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 69. 15. Agamben, Coming Community, 80. 16. Agamben, Coming Community, 83. 17. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron, (London / New York: Verso, 2007), 16. 18. Agamben, Infancy and History, 58. 19. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 96. 20. Cf. Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 62–74.

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21. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 143–44. 22. Jean-Luc Nancy, “La Comparution / The Compearance: From the Existence of ‘Communism’ to the Community of ‘Existence,’” trans. Tracy B. Strong, in Political Theory 20, No. 3 (August 1992): 371–98, 388. 23. Nancy, “La Comparution,” 390. 24. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 166. 25. Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 200), 392. 26. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 175–76. 27. Philippe Mesnard, “The Political Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Evaluation,” trans. Cyrille Guiat, in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5, No. 1 (Summer 2004): 139–57, 148–49. 28. Mesnard, “Political Philosophy,” 149. 29. Mesnard, “Political Philosophy,” 154. 30. Mesnard, “Political Philosophy,” 155. 31. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 35s. 32. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 377–78. 33. Nancy, “La Comparution,” 377. 34. Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben (New York: SUNY Press, 1999), 9–10. 35. Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York / London: Continuum, 2003), 192. 36. Antonio Negri (Interview with Cesare Casarino), “It’s a Powerful Life: A Conversation on Contemporary Philosophy,” Cultural Critique 57 (Spring 2004): 151–83, 174. 37. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 366. 38. Nancy, “La Comparution,” 391. 39. Nancy, “La Comparution,” 392. 40. Mesnard, “Political Philosophy,” 151.

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Chapter Three

Dissenting Community

The theories of dialogical and singular community represent what I would like to call configurations of the social. By this I mean that they offer a complex image of what society is or should be. As with most such images they exhibit a certain synthesis of descriptive and prescriptive elements. The notion of configuration implies that social organization is never something merely natural or given, but instead shaped by collective action and other causes over time. Social configuration is neither individual nor for the most part conscious. For Habermas configuration happens at the level of the lifeworld, whereas Nancy and Agamben view it as something that accompanies human existence under any conditions. What is common to these positions is the idea that social configuration provides the background for collective action and understanding. At the same time it is important to recognize that configuration is itself an activity: each individual is initiated into a certain schema of social life through a gradual process of socialization. As with a natural language, there is no particular agent or group of agents identifiable as the ultimate source of a specific social configuration. This lack of determinate source can give the impression that there is something inexplicable or mysterious about the origins of social organization. Many seminal sociological and anthropological studies from the early twentieth century appealed to some sense of the sacred when explaining the original structure of community. As we have seen, Agamben retains this connection between community and the sacred. According to his account, the political construction of segregated areas where the rule of law is suspended brands contemporary community as “sacred” in the sense of being at the mercy of state institutional power. Habermas, by contrast, seeks to demystify social configuration by situating it within a lifeworld that is primarily articulated by communicative action. As shown, communicative action is a socially transparent enterprise of collective 49

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rational dialogue. Habermas thus invites us to grasp social configuration as a thoroughly comprehensible process of reaching mutual understanding. At the same time he concedes that areas of opacity enter into communicative action as a result of the influence of the steering media of power and money. Both dialogical and singular configurations of community involve a notion of intrinsic resistance. This takes the form of opposition to bureaucratic and financial power in the former model, and to totalizing identity-based forms of the social in the latter. Dialogical community offers a notion of social justice predicated on communicative inclusion regulated by state institutions, whereas singular community pursues justice largely in opposition to the state. In this chapter and throughout the book more generally I wish to combine these two understandings and propose an idea of community resistance predicated on localized self-organization. While neither model of community considered explicitly rules out this idea, the communicative approach places definite restrictions on it and singular community harbors a degree of suspicion toward it. In my view the dialogical model unduly restricts community construction in two key ways: first, by insisting on rational discourse or argumentation as the sole source of legitimate decision-making, and second, by underestimating both the capacity for local self-determination and the degree to which official institutions are swayed by external, “non-rational” forces. These shortcomings indicate a basic neglect of how established power relations predetermine decision-making processes. The widely experienced and reported grassroots disenchantment with political institutions within mature liberal democracies can in large part be traced back to recognition of how these institutions are influenced by power and wealth to the detriment of any credible popular rule. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the devolution of power away from a single national parliament in the case of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland came in response to political discontent. At the same time, however, the UK government has sought to bolster the sense of loyalty to British national identity by insisting that applicants for naturalization attend citizenship classes. In this way it is hoped that the values and notions assumed to be held by native citizens will be absorbed through an explicit process of inculcation. Yet it is not difficult to recognize the fear of social disintegration that motivates such programs. These fears, constantly reiterated by politicians and media commentators alike, can result in giving a veneer of respectability to more virulent forms of xenophobia. Furthermore, what underlies such state-sponsored attempts to construct community is a simple assumption, namely that state institutions are the ultimate source of social legitimacy. In their different ways both dialogical and singular community challenge this assumption. In the former it is argued that the legitimacy of state law and regulation rests upon genuine mechanisms of popular assent. If state bureau-

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cracy remains impervious to popular opinion and sentiment then it loses its democratic legitimacy. Singular community takes a more radical stance. It insists that state power will always work toward establishing an exclusionary national identity and mission. It is not difficult to come up with examples of how the name of liberal democracy has been invoked by powerful states in recent decades in order to justify grave instances of domestic and international injustice. In such cases the idea of democratic society and its unquestionable moral superiority are assumed in an entirely uncritical manner. It is striking that such abuses of the notion of democracy almost invariably characterize it as something to be defended from threats rather than in terms of positive tasks relating to social justice. Again, recent events have made us all too aware of the extent to which this stance can justify erosion of traditional democratic civil liberties for the supposed sake of defending the state from hostile powers. In the concluding chapter of the first part of this book I turn to a further stream of recent social philosophy that directly challenges uncritical and oppressive misuses of liberal democracy. Initially I consider the work of Jean-François Lyotard and his idea of the “differend.” More recently, Jacques Rancière has extended and refined Lyotard’s line of thought by insisting that democratic political culture is necessarily one of opposition and disagreement between rival factions and stances. Over the same period Chantal Mouffe has elaborated her own version of politics as “agonistics” within Anglophone academia. There is a clear line of development evident throughout the work of these thinkers over the last thirty years. What I wish to add to the discussion is the idea that such a notion of democratic politics and society requires more concrete consideration of local organization and place. If something like genuinely democratic community or “radical democracy” is to be possible, two basic conditions must be met: first, there must be articulate and effective local communities, and second, there must be places where such communities can determine their own context of action and present themselves to others. As indicated in the previous chapter, most theory concerns itself with the former condition to the relative neglect of the latter. In the final sections of this chapter I take up the idea of a “right to the city” first formulated by the French urban theorist and activist Henri Lefebvre in the 1960s and recently adapted by the critical urban sociologist David Harvey. The notion of the right to the city holds that genuine democracy must entail a popular right to shape and use public space. This is contentious for the obvious reason that other agencies, largely those of local government, claim that the use of public space is subject to their ultimate or exclusive control. As will be set out in detail in the second part of this book, there has been a distinct tendency within liberal democracies over recent decades to restrict public access to ostensively public space. Often lying behind this process is

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some instance of the innocuously termed “public-private” partnership. A current case that illustrates a typical process has arisen in Portland, Oregon. The stadium of the city’s baseball team, the Portland Beavers, is to be redesigned and enlarged to enable its future use as a soccer venue. A previous reconstruction of the stadium involved the city selling bonds to finance the project. Although that investment has yet to pay for itself, the City of Portland recently agreed to invest a large amount of urban renewal money to partly finance the redevelopment of the site. This decision was reached as the municipal budget was under extraordinary pressure and in the immediate wake of significant layoffs of public employees. In the course of the decision-making there was the familiar scenario of high-flying private financiers exerting pressure on public officials to bypass or truncate proper processes of public consultation. Public concerns at the use of public finances were summarily brushed aside or countered by the insistence that the project will create jobs. Whether the huge sums of municipal and urban renewal money called for will generate a net gain in jobs relative to other possible schemes is not a question readily raised by either the private or city government backers of the plan. The notion of dissenting community examined in this chapter seeks to offer a credible social model that makes effective opposition to such sidelining of public participation an essential part of any genuine democracy. In outlining this model I wish to counter the common suspicion that grassroots democracy is either unfeasible or undesirable or both. Dissenting community appeals to Habermas’s call for the maintenance of a vibrant civil society but rejects his idea of universal rules of rational decision-making. In opposition to Mouffe I will argue that dissent implies local determination and profound diversity within civil society, not merely a plurality of political parties or geopolitical positions. To a great extent I grasp dissenting community in terms of a desirable shift from how liberal democracies look today, with their large state bureaucracies and diminishing civil liberties. I believe that this balance has to change, so that more power is given to democratic society at the local level and less is ceded to or seized by regional and national government. While my stance undoubtedly has a utopian dimension, at the same time I believe it follows distinct tendencies evident in contemporary liberal democracies. In part two I will examine such tendencies in detail and in so doing attempt to demonstrate the viability of the model of dissenting community through concrete contemporary examples.

LYOTARD AND THE “DIFFEREND” Although his intellectual and political activities stretch back to the 1950s Jean-François Lyotard is primarily known as the author of The Postmodern

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Condition that originally appeared in 1979. This controversial work, subtitled “A Report on Knowledge,” attempted to characterize how postindustrial democratic society was developing in the face of an expected explosion in information technology. Three decades on we are now in a position to appraise many of Lyotard’s predictions concerning the development of the “knowledge society.” For our more limited purposes the focus here will be on Lyotard’s key contention that postmodern community will be increasingly characterized by a combination of social heterogeneity and local determinism. Early on in The Postmodern Condition Lyotard takes Habermas’s theory of communicative action to task for essentially promoting a functionalist understanding of society that erodes resistance to bureaucratic and market oppression. “The ideology of communicational ‘transparency,’” he contends, “goes hand in hand with the commercialization of knowledge.”1 In direct opposition to Habermas’s theory of communication Lyotard proposes two methodological principles: first, that “to speak is to fight,” and second, that “the observable social bond is composed of language ‘moves.’”2 Lyotard’s notion of the language “move” indicates that linguistic action intrinsically involves opposition to established positions. This means that genuine communicative action is taken to be essentially transformative or “strategic” in Habermas’s terms. Lyotard remarks: These “moves” [within a language game] necessarily provoke “countermoves”—and everyone knows that a countermove that is merely reactional is not a “good” move. Reactional countermoves are no more than programmed effects in the opponent’s strategy; they play into his hands and thus have no effect on the balance of power. This is why it is important to increase displacement in the games, and even to disorient it, in such a way as to make an unexpected “move” (a new statement).3

Whereas Habermas’s theory sees communication as regulated by a desire to reach a position of consensual stasis, Lyotard views dialogue as a process of continuous disequilibrium. Lyotard appeals to a certain understanding of scientific inquiry to back up his view. According to Thomas Kuhn’s celebrated idea of “paradigm shifts,” advances in science come about when a dominant theory is supplanted in a revolutionary rather than incremental manner. The key example is the shift in theoretical physics from a Newtonian mechanical model to an Einsteinian quantum framework. What this brings about is a case of radical incommensurability, that is, untranslatability of the old language of physics into the new. In a parallel manner Lyotard rejects Habermas’s assumption that all meaningful discourse is regulated by one set of rules of legitimacy. To presuppose universal rules of discourse is, he argues, to preclude the possibility of radical innovation or change. Considered from a political perspective such a position is not merely conservative it is “terrorist”:

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By terror I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him. He is silenced or consents, not because he has been refuted, but because his ability to participate has been threatened (there are many ways to prevent someone from playing).4

It is this notion of being excluded through silence or enforced consent that Lyotard takes up again in his later publication The Differend. The idea of the “differend” refers to instances of dispute where opposed parties have no common language to express their respective claims. In such cases, Lyotard argues, we are confronted with radical heterogeneity or incommensurability. While it may be objected that such cases are exceptional, Lyotard insists that incommensurability characterizes all discourse to varying degrees. From this perspective, any theory of communication (such as that proposed by Habermas) that proposes universal rules of exchange fundamentally fails to understand how meaning is in practice restricted to local determination. Lyotard explicitly places his account of the differend in the context of a court of law: I would like to call a differend the case where the plaintiff is divested of means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim. . . . A case of differend between two parties takes place when the “regulation” of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom. For example, contracts and agreements between economic partners do not prevent—on the contrary, they presuppose—that the laborer or his or her representative has had and will have to speak of his or her work as though it were the temporary cession of a commodity, the “service”, which he or she putatively owns.5

In common with Nancy and Agamben, Lyotard has a manifest Marxian orientation and here Marx’s idea of the ruling class generating the ruling ideas is clearly echoed. In the example used there is an obvious implication that the worker is obliged to accept the employer’s terms of negotiation, not on account of any superior argumentative or discursive power but rather due to a manifest power imbalance in the relationship. Of course, the Marxian rejoinder is that a genuine community of workers would generate power enough to overwhelm any confederation of employers. In common with Nancy and Agamben, however, Lyotard rejects Marx’s notion of the revolutionary potential of an organized proletariat within industrialized society. More straightforwardly, we might say that Lyotard is simply interested in describing how discourse actually functions under the conditions of contemporary liberal democracy. In this context, he insists, weaker parties will suffer injustice not because of any lack of argumentative skill, but because their mode of expression is not recognized as legitimate. Looking back to chapter one, the differend would thus be a case of what Young calls “internal exclusion,”

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that is, being admitted into a negotiation context but excluded from within this context on formal grounds (for not speaking the right kind of language, speaking in an improper manner, etc.). In the concluding, explicitly political section of The Differend Lyotard focuses on what he calls different “genres” of discourse: narrative and deliberation. In view of his definition of the postmodern condition as “incredulity toward grand narratives,” it comes as no surprise that he sees contemporary social conditions in terms of the predominance of deliberative discourse. It is important to distinguish Lyotard’s sense of deliberation here from that at work within the theory of deliberative democracy following Habermas. Lyotard understands deliberation in a “critical” sense, that is, he grasps it as making visible radical differences between narratives. Whereas narrative is taken to be exclusive to a specific concrete community and thus closed off to other communities, deliberation articulates the differences that separate narratives. Simply expressed, narrative generates social identity, deliberation social heterogeneity. Lyotard insists that differences between narrative identities generate litigations rather than differends: The universalization of narrative instances cannot be done without conflict. Traditions are mutually opaque. Contact between two communities is immediately a conflict, since the names and the narratives of one community are exclusive of the names and narratives of the other. . . . [This does not represent] a differend, since we have the same genre of discourse on each side: narration. It is thus a litigation over the name of times, places, and persons, over the senses and referents attached to those names.6

As is clear from Lyotard’s further remarks, what he has in mind here are disputes between narratives of national community. Such disputes are classic examples of contested social identities. Lyotard’s point seems to be that narratives of national identity cannot, by definition, be shared. To this it might be objected that history demonstrates a movement from more particular to more universal narratives of community. For example, the project of a fully integrated European Union represents the overcoming of national differences and a further step along the way toward an actual cosmopolitan government and community. To this Lyotard objects: “Internationalism cannot overcome national worlds because it cannot channel short, popular narratives into epics, it remains ‘abstract.’”7 Whatever the merits of Lyotard’s position on something like a credible international community, his key point is that a differend is generated not when one narrative identity stands opposed to another, but when the “idea of freedom” is opposed to the “narratives of legitimation.” Following Kant, Lyotard takes freedom to be an “idea of reason” that regulates human action

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but can never appear as a real object of human experience. A narrative of legitimation, such as the one offered by Habermas for example, assumes by contrast that any socially valid notion or position can be measured against all others. But this idea of a common measure, Lyotard insists, in effect destroys the human desire for emancipation and social justice by following the logic of commercial exchange. According to this logic everything must have a determinate price, and, if it does not, it can have no social value. The implication is that Habermasian communication theory merely succeeds in further assimilating social struggles to the terms of economic efficiency. In this sense Habermas is offering nothing more than ideological support to already powerful market imperatives: Thus, the economic genre of capital in no way requires the deliberative political concatenation, which admits the heterogeneity of genres of discourse. To the contrary, it requires the suppression of that heterogeneity. It only tolerates it to the degree that the social bond is not (yet) entirely assimilated to the economic phrase alone. . . . If this is one day the case, political institutions will be superfluous, as national narratives and traditions already are.8

What is striking about the confrontation between Lyotard and Habermas is the fact that from quite similar premises they draw strictly opposed conclusions. For Habermas agrees with Lyotard on the point that the powers of bureaucracy and the market threaten social values and justice. In Habermasian terms such power opposes strategic action to the communicative action of rational discourse. Habermas, like Lyotard, appeals to freedom to distinguish properly social action as opposed to strategic coercion. But the key difference resides in how freedom and hence social justice are conceived. For Habermas, communicative action regulated by universally valid rules of rational discourse offers the means for attaining social justice, whereas Lyotard insists that justice will often require precisely the invention of a new “idiom” to attest to a specific historical injustice. Here Lyotard’s principle of postmodern “local determinism” becomes clearer. To do justice to a case of suffering, the wrong done to a victim calls for the creation of new “moves” in a “language game” or, most radically, a new language game. Consideration of other texts from the same period (the early to mid-1980s) make clear that Lyotard took the artistic avant-garde as exemplary for the creation of new idioms. As with scientific paradigm shifts, Lyotard understands the avant-garde as an effort to question constantly the terms of artistic production and reception. Thus the central question for the avant-garde does not concern the production of novel works of art but rather new ways of approaching art as such. The discontinuity that characterized the intense experimentation in European art from the 1910s to the 1930s is understood by

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Lyotard to indicate a mode of action oriented toward the unpredictable. This has political consequences insofar as it breaks the spell of social continuity produced by capitalist production. For whereas such production imagines a future of ever-expanding production and market saturation, avant-garde art interrupts serial production and gives rise to the question: what, if anything, will succeed this? In other words, Lyotard takes modern art as a paradigm of social discontinuity, experimentalism, and utopianism. In turning in the next section to the work of Jacques Rancière, this bridging of politics and aesthetics and its connection with the model of dissenting community will be spelled out more explicitly.

RANCIÈRE AND THE POLITICS OF DISAGREEMENT While the contemporary French thinker Jacques Rancière insists that his approach is distinct from that outlined in Lyotard’s earlier work, the affinities are striking. Above all, Rancière is concerned with drawing out a radically participatory politics from the modern tradition of democracy. He challenges thinkers such as Habermas who insist on the need for widespread institutional mediation between the public and official decision-making by contending that any democracy worthy of the name must strive for genuine rule of the people. To a great extent, however, Rancière agrees with Nancy and Agamben that credible collective action cannot be ascribed to readily identifiable groups or communities. Following Lyotard’s critique of Habermas’s notion of rational legitimation, Rancière insists that genuine democracy precludes the possibility of deciding once and for all who is entitled to determine legitimate decision-making. In his work Disagreement from 1995 Rancière echoes Lyotard’s earlier account of the differend when trying to account for what might be called the deep structure of democratic discourse: The problem is knowing whether the subjects who count in the interlocution “are” or “are not,” whether they are speaking or just making a noise. It is knowing whether there is a case for seeing the object they designate as the visible object of the conflict. It is knowing whether the common language in which they are exposing a wrong is indeed a common language. The quarrel has nothing to do with more or less transparent or opaque linguistic contents; it has to do with consideration of speaking beings as such.9

Rancière’s basic argument is that democratic politics is fundamentally distorted and misunderstood within the framework of rational deliberation aiming at consensus. In light of the tendency of liberal democratic political parties over the last decade and a half to adopt this framework in the form of

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supposedly non-oppositional “third way” politics, Rancière insists that what is at work here is not democracy but what he calls “postdemocracy.” Contending that the program of postdemocracy aims at effacing all traces of genuine popular rule in favor of a bureaucratic institutionalization of decisionmaking, Rancière claims that it constitutes an attempt to reduce democratic politics to what he calls provocatively the “police.” He remarks: Postdemocracy is the government practice and conceptual legitimization of a democracy after the demos, a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount, and dispute of the people and is thereby reducible to the sole interplay of state mechanisms and combinations of social energies and interests. . . . This is the actual meaning of what is called consensus democracy.10

By contrast, democracy properly understood “sets up communities of a very specific kind, polemical communities that undermine the very opposition of the two logics—the police logic of the distribution of places and the political logic of the egalitarian act.”11 Despite the polemical rejection of consensus theory it is striking how Rancière to a great extent agrees with Habermas’s analysis of the chief danger faced by liberal democracy, namely a reductive rationalization of democratic decision-making. As we found when considering Lyotard, however, agreeing on a diagnosis does not imply agreement on a credible response. Habermas in effect stakes everything on the prospect of refining universally valid criteria for legitimate democratic decision-making. As he thinks institutional mediation necessarily accompanies social complexity, it follows that the space granted to direct community determination at the grassroots level must diminish as liberal democracies develop. Rancière argues that such a move violates the basic goal of democratic politics, namely attaining greater social justice in the form of material and symbolic equality. For him the egalitarian core of democracy can be fostered “only through a forcing, that is, the instituting of a quarrel that challenges the incorporated, perceptible evidence of an inegalitarian logic.”12 This leads to a definition of democratic politics and community that reverses Habermas’s appeal to the criterion of rational legitimacy: Democracy, then, is the specific power of those who have no common title to exercise power, except that of not being entitled to its exercise. Democracy is the disrupting of all logics that purport to found domination on some entitlement to dominate. There are many such logics, but through various mediations they can be reduced to two: those of birth and wealth.13

So understood democratic community is essentially opposed to all forms of material and symbolic privilege. While the principle of egalitarianism certainly carries with it a form of political utopianism, it is important to

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recognize that Rancière does not envisage any kind of end point along the lines of the postrevolutionary state assumed by traditional Marxism. Instead democracy entails a constant struggle against established power and rule. In this light the model of dissenting community common to Lyotard and Rancière attempts to grasp democratic society from the perspective of those lacking institutional power. As such it has evident affinities with the attempts of Marxism and Critical Theory to challenge the official narrative of political history and view it from the perspective of the oppressed. At the same time, the idea of dissenting community seems to be open to the obvious criticism that it offers no criteria for determining legitimate rule. Following such a model in practice would only, it could be argued, lead to social fragmentation and political anarchy. I think that this fear is misplaced and that, in fact, the history of liberal democracy shows that it is indicative of the kind of paternalism that was urged time and again against measures which subsequently became celebrated as milestones in democratic social progress. A further point can be urged against the charge of anarchy. Popular resistance and dissent are necessary in democratic societies precisely because certain individuals and groups tend to consolidate their relative power advantages. While traditional democratic divisions of power provide some safeguard against hegemony within the workings of local and national government, state and party politics as a whole make their own claims to exclusive democratic legitimacy. Drawing on the tradition of collective civil disobedience and popular challenges to state power, Rancière’s configuration of community accords a basic right of dissent to liberal democratic societies. In an interview from 2000, the popular agency implied by dissenting community is described as follows: The demos is not the glorious, imaginary body that is heir to the sacrificial royal body. It’s not the body of the people. It’s the abstract assemblage of “ordinary people,” who have no individual title to govern. It is the pure addition of “chance” that comes to revoke all ideas of legitimate domination, all notions of “virtue” destining a special category of people to govern. Democracy is the paradoxical government of those who do not embody any title for governing the community. So the double body of the people is the difference that separates a political subject from any empirical part of the social body.14

This account of dissenting community shares the same concerns about identity politics that characterize the model of singular community outlined in the previous chapter. At the same time, however, I think it offers a more plausible theory of democratic resistance. On the one hand, it maintains a crucial link between community and collective practice and, on the other hand, it acknowledges that communities always face the challenge of opposing specific

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established powers. As is clear from the quote above, Rancière rejects the logic of sacrifice and victimization that characterizes in particular Agamben’s version of singular community. In my view this is crucial, as it leaves the way open to grasping resistance not as a merely reactive stance but rather as a collective determination of the positive material conditions of everyday life.

MOUFFE AND DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITY Chantal Mouffe has developed a political theory that exhibits many affinities with the model of dissenting community common to Lyotard and Rancière. In numerous studies Mouffe has articulated a radical and detailed critique of Habermasian deliberative democracy for an Anglophone audience. In recent decades, Mouffe argues, party politics across liberal democracies has adopted a consensus model that has gradually replaced or significantly mitigated the traditional rivalry between right- and left-wing camps. Whereas many theoretical commentators in the liberal tradition have celebrated this development as a move toward more effective political decision-making, Mouffe contends that the very core of what she calls “the political” has been lost along the way. In common with other thinkers such as Nancy and Rancière, Mouffe recognizes a distinction between “politics” (understood as particular policy making and actions of political agencies) and “the political” (understood as the deep social structure that makes political action possible). Just as Rancière sees the drift toward the middle ground as a sign that politics has been reduced to “the police” (that is, bureaucratic management), Mouffe argues that appeals to consensus politics indicate an abandonment of “the traditional struggle of the left for equality.”15 She remarks: [A]gainst the two dominant models of democratic politics, the “aggregative” one that reduces it to the negotiation of interests and the “deliberative” or “dialogic” one which believes that decisions on matters of common concern should result from free and unconstrained public deliberation of all, I have proposed to envisage democratic politics as a form of “agonistic pluralism” in order to stress that, in modern democratic politics, the crucial problem is how to transform antagonism into agonism. In my view the aim of democratic politics should be to provide the framework through which conflicts can take the form of an agonistic confrontation among adversaries.16

Mouffe justifies in part her advocacy of “agonistic pluralism” through insisting that the political culture of liberal democracy “requires the creation of collective identities around clearly differentiated positions as well as the possibility to choose between real alternatives.”17 She contends that the eclipse of

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recognizably distinct party political positions frustrates the basic need within democratic culture for genuine opposition. As traditional party allegiances recede, she argues, more extreme forms of identity-based politics emerge as something like a repressed underside of consensus politics. In this way, the successes of far-right parties in Europe over the last two decades, for example, can be explained. Although in most cases such electoral successes have either been mitigated through the formation of alliances with more mainstream parties, or subject to exclusion on constitutional grounds, Mouffe’s argument is that they arise as a result of a more generalized suppression of party-political opposition within liberal democracies. Complementing this claim is the idea that genuine democratic society requires “identification with democratic values.”18 This appeal to identification is a significant marker of distance between Mouffe and the other advocates of dissenting community considered. Lyotard and Rancière explicitly insist that democratic pluralism makes all forms of social identity and political agency problematic. In this they are in line with the idea of singular community that rejects the notion that community must be predicated on shared identity. While Mouffe echoes Lyotard’s account of postmodern democratic society in terms of its unlimited plurality of different “language games,” she invokes the further Wittgensteinian notion of “form of life” (in German, Lebensform) to account for a shared democratic culture. Approaching democracy in this way gives rise to Mouffe’s central concern for ways to inculcate a sense of democratic citizenship. She notes: Democratic individuals can only be made possible by multiplying the institutions, the discourses, the forms of life that foster identification with democratic values. . . . On the other side, deprived of the possibility of identifying with valuable conceptions of citizenship, many people are increasingly searching for other forms of collective identification, which can very often put into jeopardy the civic bond that should unite a democratic political association. The growth of various religious, moral and ethnic fundamentalisms is, in my view, the direct consequence of the democratic deficit which characterizes most liberaldemocratic societies.19

Despite her polemical stance toward Habermas and deliberative democracy more generally, Mouffe’s insistence on the key role played by identification with democratic values and views indicates a distinct affinity with the idea of “constitutional patriotism” advocated by Habermas in his more recent work. In The Inclusion of the Other from 1996 Habermas makes the following comment: Only a national consciousness, crystallized around the notion of a common ancestry, language, and history, only the consciousness of belonging to “the same”

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people, makes subjects into citizens of a single political community—into members who can feel responsible for one another. The nation or the Volksgeist, the unique spirit of the people—the first truly modern form of collective identity—provided the cultural basis for the constitutional state.20

While recognizing in this manner the historical origins of the modern nationstate, Habermas insists that the contemporary concern to preserve social and cultural pluralism means that it is necessary precisely to not look upon democracy as constituting a certain “form of life.” Instead, Habermas argues, a national constitution must remain strictly neutral toward cultural difference. A central problem for both Habermas and Mouffe is where to draw the line between democratic difference and nondemocratic difference, that is, forms of political diversity that legitimately make up a vibrant social and cultural democratic milieu and those groups, views, and actions that threaten to undermine the core values and institutions of liberal democracy. In attempting to draw this line Habermas has more credible theoretical resources to draw upon, namely his theory of communicative action that offers explicit criteria for fair discussion and decision-making. Mouffe’s rejection of the Habermasian model means that she denies herself any appeal to such criteria of argumentative inclusion. Thus, while she insists that democratic citizenship involves conflict between adversaries “who recognize the positions of others in the contest as legitimate ones,”21 Mouffe offers no explicit means for determining what constitutes “legitimacy” here. Again, while Mouffe seeks above all to defend pluralism within democratic society, she concedes that “some limits need to be put to the kind of confrontation which is going to be seen as legitimate in the public sphere.”22 Merely insisting, as she does, that these limits are political rather than moral or rational in nature fails to offer any significant clarification and her argument appears at best vague and at worst circular. Failure to determine criteria of legitimacy within democratic debate leaves Mouffe’s appeal to a shared democratic political culture effectively without content. The problem with Mouffe’s version of dissenting community, in my view, is that it assumes democratic society must be united around common values but insists that no rational grounds can be given for the adoption (or refusal) of these values. As a recent critique puts it: Although we may wish to expose an immanent contradiction between liberal democracy’s professed goals and its actual practice, we still need some form of justification of these goals, otherwise we succumb to a logic that suggests we adhere to the values of any society we happen to be brought up in—liberal democracy for the liberal democrats, fascism for the fascists, communism for the communists, and so on.23

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In this light, Rancière’s contention that democracy entails the constant renegotiation of what “legitimate” democratic rule entails seems more credible and consistent. In effect, Rancière is saying that democratic community is formed and reformed through the permanent contestation of official rule. Those members of democratic society who are directly involved in such opposition have nothing in common among themselves other than the common “enemy” of official rule. Mouffe, by contrast, tends to identify democratic society with the diversity of official democratic institutions and parties, and her basic concern is to ensure that such parties offer genuinely opposed views about desirable public policy. In so identifying democracy with party politics Mouffe again defines a position that is ultimately closer to Habermas than Lyotard or Rancière. Whereas the latter provide a model of democratic politics that emphasizes the potential of civil society to contest official norms and actions, Mouffe and Habermas are clearly concerned with maintaining democratic diversity within “legitimate” bounds. In a more recent elaboration of her position this concern for curbing certain challenges to official versions of liberal democracy becomes strikingly evident: A democratic society requires the allegiance of its citizens to a set of shared ethico-political principles, usually spelled out in a constitution or embodied in a legal framework, and it cannot allow the coexistence of conflicting principles of legitimacy in its midst. To believe that, in the name of pluralism, some category of immigrants should be granted an exception is, I submit, a mistake which indicates a lack of understanding of the role of the political in the symbolic ordering of social relations.24

Here Mouffe offers a clear endorsement of Habermas’s idea of constitutional patriotism, namely the notion that a democratic political community can only exist in virtue of some implicit or explicit consent to act according to a national constitution or nationally mandated judicial framework. While Habermas argues in Between Facts and Norms that individual liberty and the rule of law are mutually implicating and reinforcing, Mouffe’s contention at the beginning of The Democratic Paradox is that the connection between liberty and law is not necessary but “only a contingent historical articulation.”25 When she warns in her later work that the “enforced universalization of the Western model [of democracy]”26 can only lead to more resistance on the part of oppressed nonWestern societies, one would expect this to entail a certain skepticism toward national constitutions and the rule of law within politically dominant liberal democratic states. On the contrary, however, the extended quote cited above appears to echo the kind of unreflective defense of Western liberal democracy that has become second nature to political representatives of powerful

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democratic states. Invoking the fear of an ethnic minority group pleading for special treatment or conditions engages in precisely the kind of xenophobic rhetoric for which right-wing parties and groups are properly criticized. Mouffe’s insistence that genuine democratic community entails a shared understanding of a certain way of life means that her version of dissenting community hinges ultimately on collective identity. While Mouffe’s explicit motivation is the defense of democratic pluralism, this concern appears to counteract the proclaimed need for an egalitarian principle. Rancière, by contrast, holds fast to such a principle in his formulation of the “democratic scandal,” namely that “there will never be, under the name of politics, a single principle of community, legitimating acts of governors based on laws inherent to the coming together of human communities.”27 By drawing a line between democracy and nondemocracy but offering no criteria or procedures for such a distinction Mouffe naturalizes and reifies democratic community. Her account of disagreement and negotiation within democracy does not differ materially from that of Habermas and his followers on the descriptive level. At the same time, however, it lacks the prescriptive dimension that makes the Habermasian position credible as a nondogmatic and inclusive procedural configuration of democratic community. In effect, Mouffe grants superior political legitimacy to state institutions relative to individuals and groups operating at a grassroots level, but outlines no mechanisms that would establish this legitimacy. She thereby seems to ascribe a basic benevolence to the institutional workings of democratic politics. However, such an assumption flies in the face of widely acknowledged and documented oppressive uses of state power within contemporary liberal democracies. Dissenting community in Mouffe can thus be characterized by two key moves: first, thinking of democracy as a particular form of life; second, seeing national party politics as the only legitimate means of organizing and framing democratic dissent. As indicated, these two points are at odds with the model of dissenting community shared by Lyotard and Rancière. I consider this model both more desirable and radical in nature. It is more desirable, as it holds out the prospect of genuine social change through localized community efforts. So understood dissenting community would not simply allow for the “tolerance” of existing cultural and social differences, but also give rise to the active creation of materially different collective modes of existence. This model of community is also more radical for the simple reason that it resists the paternalistic tendency of state institutions to determine what is best for a national, regional, or local population. While traditional liberalism seeks to defend civil society’s freedom from state interference, its view of liberal democratic society focuses on individual liberty rather than on material contexts of collective action. In the following, final sections of this chapter I will take up

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the idea of the “right to the city” in order to offer a more concrete image of what the collective action of dissenting community might look like. Talk of rights is the cornerstone of liberalism, and this is often complemented by the notion of the rule of law central to the republican tradition. In what follows, however, the right to the city is not understood as something ceded or guaranteed to civil society by nation states whether singly or in union, but rather as a material power of localized community self-determination won by dissent from national, regional, and municipal democratic government. In exploring the idea of the right to the city, certain conclusions will be drawn from the discussion of differing models of community and bridges built in anticipation of the consideration of urbanism in part two of this book. THE RIGHT TO THE CITY Today Lefebvre is chiefly known for his 1974 publication The Production of Space. On the eve of the series of strikes and popular protests that swept across Europe in 1968 Lefebvre formulated an urban manifesto titled Le droit à la ville (“The Right to the City”). This notion has in recent years experienced something of a renaissance within more left-leaning critical urban sociology and has even been taken up in a recent report compiled under the auspices of UNESCO.28 In a book taking its title and inspiration from Lefebvre’s 1968 text, Don Mitchell begins by reformulating Lefebvre’s original concern: The question that drives this book is the question of who has the right to the city and its public spaces. How is that right determined—both in law and on the streets themselves? How is it policed, legitimized, or undermined? And how does that right—limited as it usually is, contested as it must be—give form to social justice (or its absence) in the city?29

Lefebvre’s original text articulates the idea of a right to the city in terms of collective participation. In a recent article Mark Purcell gives the following account of Lefebvre’s basic position in The Right to the City: The right to the city imagines inhabitants to have two main rights: (1) the right to appropriate urban space; and (2) the right to participate centrally in the production of urban space. In advocating the right to appropriate urban space, Lefebvre is not referring to private ownership so much as he referring to the right of inhabitants to “full and complete usage” of the urban space in the course of their everyday lives.30

It is the notion of a right to produce urban space collectively that concerns me most directly in this study. While the complementary idea of usage is also

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significant, it is insufficient in my view for constructing a compelling image of urban community. In fact, a tendency to view inhabitants as primarily users of local amenities and services implies a certain passivity in relation to the urban environment. Such a stance is convenient to institutionalized urbanism and government, who may then unproblematically present themselves as service “providers.” From this point it is then a short step to assuming, with little or no official consultation, what urban communities need. Let me at this point recall Young’s two aspects of social justice: selfdevelopment and self-determination. The second of these is said to consist in “being able to participate in determining one’s action and the condition of one’s action; its contrary is domination.”31 If it is assumed that concrete material and social circumstances always involve certain forces and institutions that strive for domination, self-determination must take the form of resistance to domination. That is, social justice must be grasped as a function of struggle. Young, following the spirit if not the letter of Habermas’s dialogical model, conceives of this struggle as happening exclusively within institutional frameworks. As made clear in chapter one, Young views attempts to achieve social justice at a more spontaneous, grassroots level as motivated by an image of community that is “wildly utopian” and “anti-urban”32 in character. While I am sympathetic to Young’s notion of city life as “the being together of strangers,” in my view she fails to appreciate the degree to which the strangeness in question is often a manifestation of profound social alienation. Again, while Young is right to insist on the need for genuine public space to make democratic politics possible, she fetishizes difference when she speaks of the erotic attraction that is experienced in chance urban encounters.33 Recent research within critical urban geography has accentuated, in contrast, how urban populations within liberal democracies have become increasingly segregated along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines.34 Segregation implies precisely that there is pronounced social difference without places of genuine interaction. Widespread municipal support for gentrification and the erosion of generally accessible public space strongly suggest that Young’s characterization of social justice in terms of “the institutional conditions for promoting selfdevelopment and self-determination”35 is inadequate. To look for a credible model, I contend, we must admit a more profound sense of community self-determination than Young is willing to concede. In his 1970 publication The Urban Revolution Lefebvre offers an account of the urban condition that turns on the idea of political contestation and struggle. Following a wide-ranging study of the material and conceptual history of city culture, Lefebvre arrives at the following determination of what is at stake:

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[T]here is nothing harmonious about the urban as form and reality, for it incorporates conflict, including class conflict. What is more, it can only be conceptualized in opposition to segregation, which attempts to resolve conflicts by separating elements in space. . . . We could therefore define the urban as a place where conflicts are expressed, reversing the separation of places where expression disappears, where silence reigns, where the signs of separation are established.36

When Lefebvre speaks here of “expression” he means primarily collective acts of protest, rather than something resembling Habermasian dialogue. In naming expression as the basic feature of the urban condition he also does not mean action that occurs within institutional or governmental frameworks. Quite to the contrary, he insists: [T]he incompatibility between the state and the urban is radical in nature. The state can only prevent the urban from taking shape. The state has to control the urban phenomenon, not to bring it to fruition, but to retard its development, to push it in the direction of institutions that extend to society as a whole, through exchange and market, the types of organization and management found in business.37

Here we encounter again one of the central features of Agamben’s account of singular community, namely its opposition in principle to the model of political community promoted by the nation-state. In most cases of urban development within contemporary liberal democracies municipal government is the principal mediating agency. If governmental institutions can be viewed as basically detrimental to the cause of social justice, then their virtual monopoly in determining urban development must be seen as worthy of urgent critical attention. The essential point here is that institutional agencies operate according to imperatives that are precisely not in the genuine interests of an egalitarian model of social justice. Given this, dissenting community’s primary object of resistance can be nothing other than the combined powers of market capitalism and governmental bureaucracy. The latest attempt to reconfigure Lefebvre’s approach to urban politics has been made by the critical urban sociologist David Harvey. Referring to prominent cases of governmental land seizures in economically developing and developed nations, Harvey identifies a combination of dispossession and displacement that lies “at the heart of urbanization under capitalism.”38 He also points out that the quality of urban life has “become a commodity, as has the city itself, in a world where consumerism, tourism, cultural and knowledge-based industries have become major aspects of the urban political economy.”39 The upshot of this domination of city planning and development by business interests and their government allies is that the right to the city is “restricted in most cases to a small and economic elite who are in a position

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to shape cities more and more after their own desires.”40 For our purposes here the question is how the model of dissenting community holds out the prospect of challenging such domination. As I have suggested, a credible account of community needs to combine two key things: first, clear criteria of democratic inclusion, and second, a robust notion of collective activity and self-determination. While the paradigm of dialogical community offers important clues in relation to inclusion, dissenting community, draws out the positive potential of the need to resist institutional and governmental domination highlighted in Agamben’s notion of singularity. In order to map out my own position in more detail I return again to Young’s account of urban social justice.

URBAN COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE In Inclusion and Democracy it is clear that Young has mitigated her harsh critique of the very notion of community put forward in her earlier study Justice and the Politics of Difference. Whereas the earlier text tended to view urban life and community as effectively mutually exclusive, in her later work she proposes an ideal of what she calls “differentiated solidarity.” While assuming “respect and mutual obligation,” differentiated solidarity “aims to balance values of generalized inclusion and respect with more particularist and local affirmation and expression.”41 While Young acknowledges that in many contexts “solidarity” might be used interchangeably with “community,” she proposes a sense of solidarity that entails social distance and the lack of any “unifying fellow feeling.” In the absence of such positive commonality she gives the following account of what constitutes “the moral basis” of solidarity: It is that people live together. They are together in a locale or region, whether they like it or not. Because they are together, they are all affected by and relate to the geographical and atmospheric environment, and the structural consequences of the fact that they all move in and around this region in distinct and relatively unco-ordinated paths and local interactions.42

What strikes me about this description of solidarity is twofold: first, that it makes no reference to activity, but only to collective passivity (being “affected by”); and second, that it offers a curiously neutral image of what it means to “live together,” suggesting that social solidarity consists in nothing more than merely moving around some demarcated geographical area. Unwittingly, Young does not in fact offer here a compelling picture of solidarity but in fact its opposite, social alienation. This is all the more curious, given that Young’s explicit concern within the chapter of her work under consider-

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ation is to offer a model of urban living that would be effective in overcoming residential segregation. While her diagnosis of the causes and effects of segregation is compelling, her resistance to any form of community that goes beyond what she calls an “openness to unassimilated otherness” renders her proposed antidote to segregation unconvincing. What Young seems to rule out in principle is the potential for a welldefined urban community to act in solidarity with others. Young’s idea of solidarity really turns on a cognitive-ethical attitude, namely mutual respect. In this she shares what might be called the liberal prejudice of Habermasian discourse theory that tends to replace political action with ethical stances. When tackling the concrete issues of urban segregation it is certainly important to consider mental attitudes between separated groups, but it is surely at least equally important to deal with the material and symbolic actions that reproduce separation in the first place and propose credible modes of active resistance. In fairness to Young, she does tackle the issues of rent control and affordable housing. But the real question, in my view, is how such measures to promote social justice are to be brought about. It is Young’s answer to this question that I find least convincing. As indicated by her account of solidarity, Young is thinking of urban life at the regional rather than national level. Here “regional” refers to a city together with its extensive metropolitan area, in addition to possible common climactic, ecological, and economic determinants. Most importantly, on the political level the regional model “calls for participatory decision-making institutions at this local level which are deeper than those that now exist in many cities and towns.” Young continues: The model constitutes these local governments as autonomous in the sense that their citizens through their political institutions have the right to decide the form and policies of social services including schools, within the limits of equal respect and non-discrimination by them. . . . Regional government creates intergovernmental institutions of local government co-operation to render service provision high quality and efficient across a region and access to services offered in one locale should not be restricted to residents in one locale.43

Once again, the problem here is not with the principles but with the practice. Young insists that regional governance should be subject to a principle of popular participation, but how will this be carried out in practice? It is helpful to recall here Rancière’s account of democracy as a social order where political legitimacy is constantly subject to dispute. On this understanding pursuing social justice necessarily involves opposition to official powers, which in this case means municipal government. The key point here is that democratic participation is not credibly thought of as some unproblematic translation of popular will into institutional action. On the contrary, it is clear

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that institutions tend to frame and interpret popular input in ways that suit their own functional imperatives. If, as Rancière contends, democracy supplies no stores of common sense on how social and political conditions are to be determined, then it follows that actual political action can only take place through constant struggle and contestation. On these terms simply assuming the benevolence of state and regional government with respect to their nominally represented publics is naïve in the extreme. Young concludes her account of regional democracy by recognizing that, as a matter of fact, “metropolitan governments are even more likely to reduce democratic participation and accountability.”44 She therefore makes an important concession to the idea of dissenting community by acknowledging that the cause of social justice will only be advanced to the extent that “the political pressures of organized citizens” are brought to bear on regional government. In making this move Young tacitly admits that the internal tendencies of government institutions are actually opposed to genuine democratic determination of social conditions. Despite this, her ingrained opposition to community self-organization prevents her from viewing any solutions that would not be ultimately provided by governmental institutions. This resistance to community self-determination stems from Young’s underlying sympathy with Habermas’s model that sees social justice as arising out of the establishment of institutionalized criteria for inclusive and fair dialogue. As dissenting community highlights, the problem with such an approach is that it presumes a neutral starting point that takes no account of given positions of relative power. On the level of concrete political practice, therefore, Young’s approach is purely aspirational. In the face of manifest imbalances of power between democratic government and progressive social groups within civil society, merely setting out universally valid criteria of discussion can only strengthen the status quo. The question is thus twofold: first, on what terms can government and civil society enter into genuine communication, and, second, how can civil society stage its dissent from governmental policy and action? As recent events and research have shown, the shift of liberal democratic party politics over the last two decades toward a centrist consensus has brought with it an increasingly symbiotic relationship between government and business. While dialogical community acknowledges the dangers of money and power, it operates on a level of generalization that renders its approach unconvincing as a means for tackling systemic domination and oppression. The model of singular community offers a profound critique of any configuration of the social according to collective identity. In doing this, however, any account of collective agency is also left behind. The third approach considered here, dissenting community, offers a more promising

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approach. It maintains the critique of any universalizing theory of political action, but at the same time offers a convincing case of how excluded and marginalized groups can resist through reconfiguring the very terms of debate and action. Without this ability to “invent new idioms,” as Lyotard refers to it, any disempowered group would be forced to negotiate on terms set by oppressive agencies. Historical instances demonstrate, that the construction and successful deployment of models of social organization that offer alternatives to those promoted by dominant powers is key to advancing the cause of social justice. Harvey recognizes this when he remarks: The question of justice falls squarely into the middle of the tension between particularity and universalism and does it in such a way as to make it impossible (politically as well as theoretically and empirically) to remain securely lodged at either end of that polarity. The effect is, to put it mildly, deeply curious. Justice appears to be a foundational concept that is quite indispensable in the regulation of human affairs. . . . Yet the foundational concept is held to have no foundation save as an arbitrary effect of arbitrary power in particular places and times.45

Rather than attempting any further elaboration of my theoretical approach here, in the second part of this study I will adhere to Harvey’s further proposal that it is most effective to consider social justice within actual historical and exemplary contexts of urban life. Accordingly, part two further analyzes the three models of community identified in the contexts of recent influential approaches to urban planning and development. Here I initially tackle the “New Urbanism” that came to prominence in the 1980s. New Urbanism, I argue, can be viewed to a great extent as the dialogical model of community converted into an architectural and planning mode of practice. As such it carries with it many of the key problems and inadequacies of that configuration of the social. The chapters of part two are paired with those of part one: New Urbanism corresponding to dialogical community, postmodern urbanism to singular community, and dissenting community to “dialectical utopianism” (a notion developed by Harvey). It is thus in the final chapter that I attempt to sketch a positive account of how social justice could be realized in practice within the cities and towns we live in today.

NOTES 1. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984), 5. 2. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 10–11.

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3. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 16. 4. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 63–64. 5. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1988), 9–10. 6. Lyotard, The Differend, 157. 7. Lyotard, The Differend, 161. 8. Lyotard, The Differend, 178. 9. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999), 50. 10. Rancière, Disagreement, 102. 11. Rancière, Disagreement, 100. 12. Jacques Rancière, “Introducing Disagreement,” trans. Steven Corcoran, Angelaki 9, no. 3 (December 2004): 3–9, 5. 13. Rancière, “Introducing Disagreement,” 5–6. 14. Jacques Rancière, “Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic Disagreement,” (Interview with Solange Guénoun and James H. Kavanagh), trans. Roxanne Lapidus, SubStance 92, no. 2 (2000): 3-24, 19. 15. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, (London / New York: Verso 2000), 6. 16. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 117. 17. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 117. 18. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 70. 19. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 96. 20. Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, eds. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1998), 113. 21. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 74. 22. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 93. 23. Jules Townshend, “Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemonic Project: The Story So Far.” Political Studies 52 (2004): 269–88, 282. 24. Chantall Mouffe, On the Political (Routledge: London / New York: 2005), 122–23. 25. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 3. 26. Mouffe, On the Political, 87. 27. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steven Corcoran (Verso: London / New York: 2005), 52. 28. Alison Brown and Annali Kristiansen, “Urban Policies and the Right to the City: Rights, Responsibilities and Citizenship,” http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ images/0017/001780/178090e.pdf (March 2009). 29. Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: The Guilford Press, 2003), 4. 30. Mark Purcell, “Citizenship and the Right to the Global City: Reimagining the Capitalist World Order,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27, no. 3 (2003): 564–90, 577. 31. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 32. 32. Young, Justice, 233, 236.

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33. Young, Justice, 239–40. 34. Cf. Loïs Wacquant, Urban Outcasts (London / New York: Verso), 2008. 35. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 33. 36. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bonnono, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 175–76. 37. Lefebvre, Urban Revolution, 180 (translation slightly modified). 38. David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (September– October 2008): 23–40, 34. 39. Harvey, “Right to the City,” 31. 40. Harvey, “Right to the City,” 38. 41. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 221. 42. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 222. 43. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 233. 44. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 235. 45. Harvey, David, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 332.

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Part Two

URBANISM AND COMMUNITY

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Chapter Four

New Urbanism

In the first part of this book three distinct theoretical approaches to community were analyzed in detail. The model of dissenting community was put forward as a theory combining the strengths of dialogical and singular community and offering the best framework for understanding local democratic practices of resistance and social justice. The second part of this book is an attempt to draw out the theoretical models of community considered by situating them within the context of contemporary urbanism. This move has a straightforward rationale, namely that the experience of community is intimately tied to particular forms of organization of a shared environment. Whether made explicit or not, theories of community favor certain kinds of spatial arrangement and such arrangement constitutes a concrete mode of political organization. While philosophy and urbanism are rarely brought together in this way, a case could easily be made that the tradition of Western philosophy has offered a highly spatialized politics from the beginning. After all, the founding text of the tradition, Plato’s Republic, is nothing if not the sketch of an ideal urban community. But the history of philosophy is not my concern here. Instead, I will explore three prominent approaches to urbanism that have shaped discussion and policy across liberal democracies in recent decades. As already indicated, the following three chapters represent a further attempt to analyze the models of dialogical, singular, and dissenting community, this time from the more concrete perspective of urban planning. Bringing the organization of urban space into our discussion of community helps to spell out in more vivid terms the political consequences of the theoretical models considered in part one. This chapter discusses an influential contemporary movement known as New Urbanism. As we shall see, New Urbanism exhibits many features that ally it with the dialogical theory of community. Its strengths and weaknesses 77

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are also similar in nature to those of Habermasian communication theory and deliberative politics. More surprisingly and controversially, New Urbanism also retains many traits of earlier modernist urbanism, in particular a faith in the socially efficacious nature of urban design. After setting out the central shortcomings of New Urbanism in this chapter, the following chapter will consider postmodern urbanism. Here concern for singularity, metaphor, and context characterize the understanding of urban experience. Problems parallel to those identified in the analysis of singular community arise in connection with postmodern urbanism. Most importantly, such urbanism offers no obvious context or means for collective grassroots resistance to oppressive power. Accordingly, the book ends with a chapter setting out an approach to urbanism that attempts to bring together the potential for collective action promised by New Urbanism with the sensitivity to singularity and difference of postmodern urbanism. Here I take up Harvey’s notion of “dialectical utopianism” as a model of urbanism that hinges on the basic idea that the built environment and collective life are mutually determining. While this idea taken in isolation may not seem particularly novel, it goes a long way in dispelling many of the inadequacies and dead ends that are generated by other theoretical and practical approaches to community. Finally, in order to provide a common thread and empirical grounding for the various analyses of this chapter I will focus on the example of urban planning and architecture in Portland, Oregon. Portland has been widely recognized as an exemplary model of sustainable planning since the creation of its Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) in 1979. More recently the city has become a national and international flagship for Transit Oriented Development and Smart Growth. As we shall see, Portland’s approach to municipal and regional planning has been directly influenced by New Urbanism. A recent “visioning” project conducted by the city, however, reveals some of the democratic shortcomings of the approach to planning adopted. The problem is one encountered and considered already in the first part of this book, namely that of genuinely democratic participation. While the polemical writings of New Urbanist protagonists suggest that this movement makes a clean break with earlier modernist models of urbanism, a basic assumption of the intellectual superiority of the urban designer remains central to the planning process within New Urbanism. It will also become apparent that there is a considerable gap between the stated intent of New Urbanism to foster social diversity and the actual results of New Urbanist developments. While the leading figures of the movement insist that it possesses no inherent political ideology, a growing tendency to appeal to free-market mechanisms renders this claim highly questionable. Ultimately, a certain essentialism seems to underpin the New Urbanist model of community, despite claims that it is pragmatically

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oriented and sensitive to specific contexts. Accordingly, further resources for an approach to urbanism that makes local determination and genuine social diversity credible must be gleaned from postmodernist sensitivity to singularity on the one hand and the paradigm of dialectical utopianism on the other. Only in the latter case is a robust balance between environmental determinism and the claims of social justice made credible and possible.

NEW URBANISM: ORIGINS AND BASIC IDEAS The movement of New Urbanism arose in the early 1980s and had developed a fully fledged platform by the mid-1990s. At its third congress in 1996 the movement issued a charter that proclaims its basic values and goals. The first paragraph sets the general tone: “The Congress for the New Urbanism views divestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.”1 The charter stresses the idea that urban design is essentially an activity of constructing community. The tone of the charter also strongly implies that the task at hand is the reconstruction of a sense of community that has somehow been lost: “We are committed to reestablishing the relationship between the art of building and the making of community, through citizen-based participatory planning and design.”2 As we shall see, New Urbanism has been subject to much criticism for what many commentators view as a variety of environmental determinism. Such critics insist that the New Urbanist formula—fix the built environment and the community will be restored—is simplistic and contradicted by historical examples. Certain passages of the charter, however, suggest that New Urbanism endorses a more dialectical understanding of the relationship between urban design and social development. For example, it states: “We recognize that physical solutions by themselves will not solve social and economic problems, but neither can economic vitality, community stability, and environmental health be sustained without a coherent and supportive physical framework.”3 On the basis of such comments New Urbanism seems to be making the fairly minimal claim that changing the built environment is just one feature of constructing community. Urban design would then be a necessary but not sufficient condition for viable community. As will become apparent, however, this apparent modesty of ambition is not easily reconciled with the actual practice and writings of the central figures of New Urbanism. By common consent the key spokesperson and representative of New Urbanism is Andrés Duany. Together with his wife, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk,

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Duany operates the architectural firm DPZ, which has undertaken some of the most ambitious and high-profile New Urbanist developments to date. The earliest example of such developments was the construction of Seaside on the Florida coast beginning in 1983. Seaside was built as a prototype of “Traditional Neighborhood Development” (TND) at a time when New Urbanism was commonly known as “Neotraditionalism.” In the most recent extensive account of their work and program, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, Duany and Plater-Zyberk insist that Neotraditionalism is “nonideological to its core.”4 The absence of any ideological tendency, they insist, allies their approach to urban design with common sense: The commonsense nature of the New Urbanism bodes well for its future. The fact that it was not invented, but selected and adapted from existing models, dramatically distinguishes it from the concepts of total replacement that preceded it. It took many years and many failures for planners and architects to reach this point, but so many new inventions have fared so badly that designers have been forced to put some new faith in human experience.5

The other prominent practitioner and proponent of New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, echoes this verdict in relation to earlier urbanist projects, deeming modern architecture “a complete and utter failure” aesthetically, socially, and environmentally.6 Calthorpe remarks: “The idea that you bring history back into architecture is fine. I think it’s very healthy. More often than not, history links a community together and we need every shred of common linkage we have.”7 One key early source of New Urbanism’s program to reconstruct community is Jane Jacobs’s celebrated study The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Originally published in 1961, Jacobs’s work is an impassioned protest against the then-dominant practices of urban renewal under the guise of inner city “slum clearance.” Focusing primarily on New York, Jacobs examined urban development in the United States at a time when the flight from the urban core and the dominance of the car-centered suburban lifestyle was beginning its long and essentially uninterrupted period of dominance. In the introduction to her work Jacobs singles out Le Corbusier as the key proponent of the modernist form of urbanism. For Jacobs such urbanism basically embodies an antipathy toward community and promotes a ruthlessly individualized vision of urban life: Le Corbusier was planning not only a physical environment. He was planning for a social Utopia too. Le Corbusier’s Utopia was a condition of what he called maximum individual liberty, by which he seems to have meant not liberty to do anything much, but liberty from ordinary responsibility. In his Radiant City nobody, presumably, was going to have to be his brother’s keeper any more.

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Nobody was going to have to struggle with plans of his own. Nobody was going to be tied down.8

The most disturbing and destructive aspect of modernist urbanism for Jacobs is its desire to recreate the urban fabric in its totality. Such a desire demonstrates an insensitivity to historical context and, more importantly, to the social ecology of the individuals and groups that inhabit specific neighborhoods within the city. As Jacobs spells out in the final chapter of her work, “The Kind of Problem a City Is,” this tendency toward total reconstruction rests on a basic misunderstanding of the nature of the urban environment. For Jacobs the city is a complex organism and planning interventions that hope to be truly supportive of urban community must work with this complexity and resist the temptation to impose inflexible, monolithic solutions: Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity, like the life sciences. . . . Cities, again like the life sciences, do not exhibit one problem in organized complexity, which if understood explains all. They can be analyzed into many such problems or segments which, as in the case of the life sciences, are also related to one another. The variables are many, but they are not helter-skelter; they are “interrelated into an organic whole.”9

This approach to the city as an organic whole stresses another aspect of the opposition to modernism that is adopted by New Urbanism. Modernist urbanism understands the urban environment in terms of functional separations. Accordingly, areas of residence are to be separated from areas of manufacturing and bureaucracy, and individual dwellings are to be separated from arteries for traffic circulation. While there were more pressing concerns for public health relating to industrial activity in the cities of the wealthiest countries prior to the 1960s, the shift to a largely deindustrialized, servicebased economy meant that such worries could be balanced by other factors conducive to vibrant urban life. Jacobs stresses the need for both vibrant neighborhood commerce and lively streets frequented and viewed by neighborhood residents. This recognition of the street as quite literally the lifeblood of the urban environment is central to the approach of New Urbanism, which has developed highly detailed plans and codes to provide street patterns that enhance a sense of community. According to Jacobs there are four key features of the urban environment that directly contribute to social vibrancy and diversity: mixed use, short blocks, mixed age, and concentration. In combination these features basically generate reasons for people to go to a certain street or locale and opportunities for encountering others at that location. The influence of this simple list of key urban design characteristics is evident throughout the work of the New

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Urbanists. For example, in Suburban Nation Duany and Plater-Zyberk offer a similar inventory of the traits of desirable urban streets: meaningful destinations, safety, comfort, and interest. But whereas Jacobs stresses that the existence of such features is conducive to vibrant urban community but is not a magic formula for its creation, New Urbanism adopts a more strident tone: To begin with the obvious, community cannot form in the absence of communal space, without places for people to get together to talk. Just as it is difficult to imagine the concept of the family independent of the home, it is near-impossible to imagine community independent of the town square or the local pub. . . . In the absence of walkable public places—streets, squares, and parks, the public realm— people of diverse ages, races, and beliefs are unlikely to meet and talk. Those who believe that Internet web sites and chat rooms are effective substitutes vastly underestimate the distinction between a computer monitor and the human body.10

This remark comes from a chapter tellingly titled “The Physical Creation of Society.” As noted, the Charter of New Urbanism concedes that urban design is not a panacea for the problems of contemporary social and economic life, but the tone of such passages as the one just cited suggest a more comprehensive claim. New Urbanism in many ways retains the core belief of modernist urbanism that design alone can create community. Such a belief might be called the key dogma of traditional urbanism and amounts to a robust form of environmental determinism. As indicated in many places, I consider such determinism both unrealistic and undesirable. It is unrealistic on account of the catalogue of failures ascribable to urban planning, and it is undesirable due to the fact that it offers an image of society that accords little or no significance to localized collective action. As it operates within New Urbanism and elsewhere environmental determinism acts as a justification for the supposed superior intellectual ability of urban designers. Expert knowledge is invoked as grounds for political, social, and even ethical superiority. From this position any attempt at popular community involvement is apt to become a mere public relations exercise. This concern will be addressed in detail toward the end of this chapter. Before turning to the political and social consequences of New Urbanism, however, further clarification of the precise nature and aspirations of its model of urban community is needed.

THE TRADITIONAL NEIGHBORHOOD DEVELOPMENT (TND) AND THE PUBLIC REALM As is evident from the last quotation, Duany and Plater-Zyberk emphasize the crucial role played by public space in the construction of community. This

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offers an obvious initial affinity with the paradigm of dialogical community. A central concern of Habermas’s social theory, as we saw, is the preservation of robust civil society and grassroots organization in the face of threats from corporate and governmental power. Young’s work goes a step further and highlights the need for physical public space as essential to a credible model of deliberative democracy. Her idea of public space accentuates its ability to allow spontaneous encounters between different types of people. Young explicitly endorses the position of Richard Sennett in his celebrated work The Fall of Public Man. Originally published in 1977, Sennett’s study offers an extensive critique of what Peter Calthorpe calls “communities of interest.” Such communities are groups of people brought together on account of certain basic affinities of perspective or sensibility. They exist wherever people share a sense of having common feelings and ideas about how best to live. For Sennett this kind of affective community is fundamentally negative as it tends to exclude whoever is perceived as basically different to the group: “Community feeling formed by the sharing of impulses has the special role of reinforcing the fear of the unknown, converting claustrophobia into an ethical principle.”11 Most importantly for the present discussion, this model of community is at odds with any approach to urban life that strives to make enhancement of social diversity a key goal. Writing in the mid-1970s, Sennett sees a growing tendency for increased separation within the city between different urban groups founded on a sense of exclusive identity. Such a tendency, he argues, threatens to make the social life of cities fundamentally “uncivilized”: The city is the instrument of impersonal life, the mold in which diversity and complexity of persons, interests, and tastes become available as social experience. The fear of impersonality is breaking that mold. . . . It is the very fear of impersonal life, the very value put upon intimate contact, which makes the notion of a civilized existence, in which people are comfortable with a diversity of experience, and indeed find nourishment in it, a possibility only for the rich and well-bred. In this sense, the absorption in intimate affairs is the mark of an uncivilized society. 12

As we saw, for Young, genuine social diversity is dependent on the existence of viable public space. She defines public space as a place “to which anyone has access, a space of openness and exposure,” and says she has in mind public streets, squares, plazas, and parks as prominent examples of “embodied public space.”13 In practice, however, appearance in and use of such public space is dependent on an array of social factors. Typically, a certain group will consider itself to have greater legitimacy or ownership with respect to a specific public place. Deliberative democracy and New Urbanism share the

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belief that negotiations of competing claims to common resources can be conducted in a fair and transparent manner. In fact, they both tend to give the impression that the existence or creation of a common place of encounter is sufficient for social conflict to be overcome and pragmatic consensus to be established. Accordingly, Duany and Plater-Zyberk appeal to the material environment as something that should be viewed in an unproblematic way as a basic common good. But this appeal to commonality barely conceals an understanding of social diversity as something to be compensated for or somehow corrected: Citizens can begin by understanding how much their environment affects—or, in fact, generates—their quality of life. Once this relationship is recognized, it becomes obvious how we can best serve our own needs by improving our physical surroundings. In an increasingly diverse nation, in which our social, intellectual, and spiritual realities can be as varied as our genealogy, the physical world is the one thing we truly share. All the more important, then, that we work on it together.14

One of the basic tenets of the Traditional Neighborhood Development, pioneered in Seaside and later in the Kentlands project within the commuter belt of Washington D.C., is the creation of distinctive civic and public buildings. Such buildings might include a community center or the local post office. The charter declares: “Civic buildings and public gathering places require important sites to reinforce community identity and the culture of democracy. They deserve distinctive form, because their role is different from that of other buildings and places that constitute the fabric of the city.”15 The accent here is on the task of design to provide “the physical definition of streets and public spaces as places of shared use.”16 This emphasis on spatial definition is basic to the TND, as is the call to reestablish a sense of hierarchy between public and private space. Both of these features again indicate an affinity with Habermasian communication theory, which sees community as arising out of convergence on matters of common concern and the ability of public dialogue to transcend individual concerns and perspectives. Put most simply, New Urbanism and communicative action theory share a model of community that rests on the identification of unproblematic common goods. Although New Urbanism in practice is forced to confront empirical inequality and injustice in more direct ways, it nevertheless tends to dismiss systemic economic and social factors as merely contingent elements to be overcome by good design. While New Urbanism appeals to a model of urban life that can often seem anything but socially progressive, it is important to acknowledge that many aspects of the TND have become accepted within both the design community and municipal government across the United States and beyond as the best

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option for urban growth models. While the creation of denser urban or suburban developments with greater mixture of use, better public facilities, and improved access to public transit have met with much public enthusiasm, the fact remains that many New Urbanist projects are situated away from the very urban areas that are said to have undergone an erosion of community in recent decades. Anthony Flint, in his study of urban planning and the problem of sprawl in the United States, draws attention to the fact that the average home price at Seaside rose from $65,000 to around $1 million between 1983 and 2002. He reports Duany’s response to this trend: “Yes, they are expensive. They are outrageously expensive. That’s why there needs to be more of them. . . . It’s a matter of supply and demand. People are desperate to live in places like Kentlands, as an alternative to lifeless, mindless, frustrating sprawl”.17 Duany has tended to focus his attention on the building and zoning codes that facilitate suburban sprawl in the United States, rather than on the economic, social, and political conditions that gave rise to the exodus of the middle class from American cities from the 1950s on. While the popularity of his developments with those who can afford to live in them is not in question, the pretensions of the TND as a viable model for enhancing urban life and the public sphere across the economic and social spectrum are highly questionable. Contrary to the insistence that New Urbanism is politically neutral and allied only with common sense, there is ample evidence to suggest that it has profound affinities with the kind of free-market, center-left politics that predominated in the 1990s. This is telling, as the “third way” politics of Clinton in the United States and Blair in the United Kingdom has been aligned with the model of consensual, dialogical community propounded by Habermas.18 Flint notes: “The movement gained credibility during the Clinton administration when Henry Cisneros, head of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, embraced New Urbanism in the redevelopment of failed public housing towers, a program known as Hope VI.”19 Thus far our discussion yields a mixed picture. On the one hand, New Urbanism advances changes to planning which have proven to be genuinely conducive to community cohesion. Creating public space and insisting on the need for a neighborhood to have a recognizable center, as well as providing for improved coherence of streetscapes, are all factors that make for better urban life. On the other hand, appealing to free-market mechanisms to ensure that such urban design is made available to all is not credible. As both proponents and critics acknowledge, when measured against the criterion of social justice and inclusion the best that can be said about New Urbanism is that it is yet to prove its point. As we saw, the charter of New Urbanism makes explicit reference to the need to address “increasing separation by race and income.” Yet the verdict of an array of studies into the social effects of

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TNDs is that they have exacerbated rather than ameliorated such separation. Certainly, the early projects of New Urbanism were largely aimed at those strata of the American middle-class who had reliable earnings above the national average. Many in fact bought properties as second homes to avail of the pleasant natural setting. As Vincent Scully remarks in relation to Seaside and Windsor, another coastal TND in Florida: So the rich, who can choose, choose community, or at least its image. How much more must the poor, who must depend upon it for their lives, want community? If Seaside and the others cannot in the end offer viable models for that, they will remain entirely beautiful but rather sad. Perhaps they will in fact do so, because human beings are moved to act by symbols, and the symbol is there.20

THE TRANSIT ORIENTED DEVELOPMENT AND REGIONAL PLANNING Along with the notion of the TND put forward by Duany and Plater-Zyberk, the another key idea of New Urbanism is Peter Calthorpe’s Transit Oriented Development (TOD). As Calthorpe explains in The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream from 1993, his early work focused on environmental and sustainability issues relating to planning. What was missing, he says, was sufficient concern for urban form and design. As the introduction to his 1993 study makes clear, Calthorpe’s distinctive contribution to New Urbanism is an effort to bring together environmental and social sustainability: This book is about the ecology of communities. Not about the ecology of natural systems—but about how the ecological principles of diversity, interdependence, scale, and decentralization can play a role in our concept of suburb, city, and region. It is about communities more diverse and integrated in use and population; more walkable and human-scaled; communities which openly acknowledge and formalize the decentralization at work in our times. These principles stand in stark contrast to a world dominated by specialization, segregation, lack of scale, and centralization.21

The notion of community ecology suggests that urban design should be understood as an exercise promoting physical conditions in which social diversity is able to flourish. Whereas the plans of DPZ have tended to involve the creation of relatively isolated suburban developments modeled on traditional American villages, Calthorpe’s projects tend to be conceived from the perspective of the greater metropolitan area or region. Although the scale used

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may differ, however, the same issue of environmental determinism is clearly at stake for Calthorpe. He remarks: Social integration, economic efficiency, political equity, and environmental sustainability are the imperatives which order my thinking about the form of community. Each of these imperatives has causes and implications beyond the physical form of community, but community form remains a central expression of and reinforcement to the underlying culture.22

As we have seen, promotion of social diversity is an explicit goal of community planning within New Urbanism. In the case of TNDs, however, the assumption that market mechanisms based on increased supply would make such developments readily available to people from all socioeconomic groups has so far proven false. In a later work Calthorpe distinguishes between what he calls “communities of interest” and “communities of place.”23 To a greater degree than Duany and Plater-Zyberk, Calthorpe acknowledges that the organization of political decision-making plays a central role in determining the quality of contemporary urban community. In line with the notion of urban community as a kind of social ecosystem, Calthorpe believes that a basic problem afflicting contemporary urban planning is an excessively centralized bureaucracy that remains insensitive to local needs and concerns. To avoid the twin dangers of intractable central government and localized NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) tendencies, Calthorpe proposes organization at an intermediate level: Part of our inability to come out of our special-interest cocoons and address the massive changes in our time is that our politics operate at the wrong scale. Frustration with centralized public programs has reached a watershed, while local action seems unable to deal with many of our most challenging problems. We are stranded between national solutions too generic, bureaucratic, and large, and local solutions too isolated, anemic, and reactionary. No wonder people become cynical and detached. We live simultaneously at the regional and neighborhood scale but lack a political structure to take advantage of their opportunities.24

As the title of Calthorpe and Fulton’s most recent extensive study—The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl—indicates, the preferred scale for urban planning is the region. The immediate reason for tackling planning at the regional scale stems from the fact that most of the U.S. population is found in urban clusters on the eastern and western seaboards, which typically take the form of interconnected metropolitan areas. Calthorpe adopts the metaphor of the network to convey how community operates at the regional level. He also likens the urban network to the Internet and insists that a common language is necessary to the success of regional organization and

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planning. “The region’s common ground,” he remarks, “can be built from its open space systems and its cultural diversity, from its physical beauty and its economic character.”25 In his earlier study Calthorpe says that regional planning should “shape the overall distribution of development, coordinate transit and circulation, balance jobs and housing in an economic fashion, administer regional pollution controls, and set limits to protect open space resources.”26 It is against this backdrop of regional planning that the TOD is proposed. In addition to the regional scale, the basic features of the TOD are: availability of public transit, walkability, mixed housing forms and prices, conservation of natural habitats, focus on public spaces, and concentration of development in existing neighborhoods along transit corridors. Calthorpe brings these features together to offer a general description of the TOD: “Defined by a comfortable walking distance, the TOD is made up of a core commercial area, with civic and transit uses integrated, and a flexible program of housing, jobs, and public space surrounding it. The densities and mix of these primary uses, though controlled by certain minimums, is determined by the specifics of each site and economy.”27 Calthorpe does not claim any originality for the notion of the TOD and insists that the principles underlying this vision of planning “are simply a return to the timeless goals of urbanism, in its best sense.”28 The central question in the present context is whether this restoration of traditional planning has actually been effective in overcoming the insularity ascribed to “communities of interest” and created genuinely diverse, vibrant social contexts.

THE TOD IN PRACTICE: THE CASE OF PORTLAND, OREGON Portland, Oregon, has enjoyed a reputation as one of the most livable U.S. cities since the 1960s. This reputation was given a planning dimension in 1979 with the establishment of Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary (UGB), following sustained efforts by Oregon Governor Tom McCall that led to the creation of an Oregon UGB in 1973. While the early 1980s witnessed a decline in economic activity and population growth, by the early 1990s anticipated pressures on the UGB had led Portland Metro to initiate its plan called Region 2040. This plan was significantly determined by two factors: opposition to a proposed new highway in the western suburbs of Portland led by an advocacy group called 1000 Friends of Oregon and the state of Oregon’s Transportation Planning Rule. The latter mandated towns and cities of more than 25,000 people to reorient transportation policy to include more pedestrian friendly and mass transit options. Between 1991 and 1997 1000

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Friends initiated a project called Making the Land Use, Transportation, Air Quality Connection (LUTRAQ) in order to propose a viable alternative to the proposed bypass development. The group called on Calthorpe to advise and help draw up an alternative plan, and a detailed account of his involvement is given in The Regional City. He notes of the project in Portland: [T]he vision was to create interconnected neighborhoods and districts designed for the pedestrian as well as the car. Portland had many older, highly valued “streetcar neighborhoods” that possessed the qualities of TOD. The LUTRAQ alternative proposed three types of TODs, each walkable and mixed use but at varying densities, given different locations.29

The LUTRAQ study hinged on the creation and gradual expansion of a lightrail system. In its initial phase this involved constructing a rail line from downtown through the western Portland suburbs of Beaverton and Hillsboro, where the overall population underwent a fivefold increase in the 1980s (in both cases from around 10,000 to 50,000). According to Calthorpe, the LUTRAQ alternative performed better than the bypass proposal by every measure: proportion of nonautomobile trips, levels of congestion, air pollution, greenhouse gases, and energy consumption.30 Since its initial phase was completed the light-rail system has become a highly visible feature of Portland’s urban landscape. A further line running through inner north Portland is widely assumed to have brought with it significant urban regeneration and enhanced property values. Among the urban design case studies detailed by Calthorpe is one relating to Orenco, a village of 200 inhabitants at the time of the study in the early 1990s. Orenco lies at the heart of Portland’s “Silicon Forest,” along the line of the light-rail between the populous suburban centers of Beaverton and Hillsboro (Fig. 4.1). As Calthorpe notes, Orenco was in effect a new development rather than a redevelopment project and “represented the challenge of turning a simple single-use zone into a mixed-use neighborhood.”31 The eventual construction of Orenco Station as a TOD offers some illuminating insights into how the community ideals of New Urbanism fare in practice. A study led by Bruce Podobnik at Portland’s Lewis and Clark College between 2000 and 2002 involved resident surveys at Orenco Station and two other neighborhoods in inner Northeast and Southwest Portland. Interviewing in each case hundreds of households the results of the study reveal a mixed verdict on the actual achievements of the TOD. On the positive side, survey data show that improved access to public transit had lead to increased transit use, with around 70 percent of those interviewed saying they chose this option of transportation more often than they did in their previous neighborhood. However, this improvement needs to be seen in perspective. In terms of

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overall rates of transportation mode, around 66 percent of Northeast Portland residents and around 71 percent of Southwest Portland inhabitants reported using a car, truck, or motorcycle, compared to around 75 percent at Orenco Station. Podobnik therefore concludes that “adult residents of Orenco Station are not more likely to rely on mass transit for their regular commute than adult residents in either of the other two comparison communities.”32 The other key measure examined by the study relates to the reported sense of community cohesion. Here the Orenco Station development appeared to fare somewhat better. Responses to questions relating to neighborhood friendliness, sense of community, and participation in formal and informal community groups reveal higher levels of satisfaction and involvement than those recorded in the other two neighborhoods. On the issue of the perceived sense of community, for example, 78 percent of respondents from Orenco Station said they felt there was an improvement over their previous neighborhood, as contrasted with 46 percent in Northeast Portland and 31 percent in Southwest Portland. Podobnik takes these results to provide sufficient evidence for concluding that Orenco Station has succeeding in achieving the key New Urbanist goal of community building. He remarks: My research demonstrates that Orenco Station has succeeded in fostering an unusually high level of social cohesion within the community. Moreover, the extremely high satisfaction ratings given by Orenco residents to their community’s physical design suggests that high-density, multi-use developments are quite capable of competing in a market place dominated by more traditional, diffuse suburban neighborhoods. . . . Overall, this study lends support to the assertion that new urbanist communities can foster more socially and environmentally sustainable lifestyles within American cities.33

However, while residents at Orenco praised the sense of community cohesion, Podobnik points out that this may have been attained at the cost of social diversity. Noting that the initial demographic profile of the development “provided an almost ideal breeding-ground for the emergence of exclusionary attitudes,” he concedes that “the setting was right for the development of a strong usversus-them mentality within the new urbanist community.”34 The survey revealed that 65 percent of Orenco residents were happy with ethnic diversity levels although at the time the neighborhood was 95 percent white. Another significant finding was the fact that 62 percent of those surveyed were either explicitly opposed to the construction of more affordable housing or expressed reservations about it. Confronted with such attitudes Podobnik concludes: “Overall, it is becoming increasingly clear that a key area of monitoring is the extent to which strong bonds of solidarity generated within new urbanist neighborhoods can translate into exclusionary attitudes towards non-residents.”35

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When I visited Orenco Station one Saturday morning in June 2009 my experience offered further informal evidence to back up Podobnik’s findings. Immediately adjacent to the light-rail station was an undeveloped, extensive raised plot surrounded by three-story condos. After two blocks one arrives at the village “center,” in this case a six-lane road lined with the development’s commercial units (Fig. 4.2). Beyond the main intersection one arrives at “Central Park,” a large, rather stark and, when I was there, all but deserted amenity (Fig. 4.3). Surrounding and beyond the park are single-residence two-story houses that to a great extent conform to the typical New Urbanist building code: traditional designs, mostly with front porches, and garages behind or to the side, accessible via separate alleyways (Fig. 4.4). Talking to a local man in his late 20s who happened to be walking by I asked him what he thought of the neighborhood. He said it was a perfect place for a young family: quite, with plenty of green spaces and solid property values. When I asked him how he got around he said he didn’t consider public transit a good option for family trips and relied exclusively on private transportation. On my way back to the light-rail I stopped to ask a man in his early 20s what he thought about the neighborhood. He told me he didn’t actually live there, but found the “cookie-cutter” houses and general feel of the location far less attractive that the option of living in one of Portland’s vibrant inner-city neighborhoods. These casual impressions gleaned from my trip to Orenco Station underscore both the findings of Podobnik’s study and a more general critique to be found in the literature on New Urbanism. While many features of New Urbanist design are acknowledged as a significant improvement over the formerly dominant modernist urbanism that fostered sprawl from the 1950s on, the fact that much New Urbanist work has been done on previously undeveloped “Greenfield” sites means that any social equity potential of the new approach to urban design has remained largely untapped. The question is whether the tendency for New Urbanist practice to produce socially homogeneous, unrepresentative suburban enclaves is merely a contingent outcome that will be corrected over time or something more intrinsic. I suspect that the latter is the case and, as with Habermas’s theory of communicative action, a formally attractive ethical stance is profoundly compromised by a disinclination to tackle the actual mechanisms of power and vested interest. Again, as with Habermasian deliberative democracy, the problem lies with the idea that institutionalized procedures of negotiation will somehow by themselves produce greater empirical equity and social justice. In reality, as economic developments in the most affluent countries have shown over the last few decades of free-market-oriented politics, those sections of the population enjoying higher levels of material and social capital

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Figure 4.1. Orenco Station near Portland, Oregon. Residential buildings with parkland. Photo by author.

Figure 4.2. Orenco Station. Central street with retail units. Photo by author.

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Figure 4.3. Orenco Station. Central Park. Photo by author.

Figure 4.4. Orenco Station. Traditional homes with garage access via back alleys. Photo by author.

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tend to consolidate their advantage. Thanks to the creation of a climate of political consensus across liberal democracies according to which progressive, redistributive taxation is universally condemned by the political class and popular media, governmental approaches to social justice are restricted to formal innovations focused on improving the apparent efficiency of bureaucratic functioning. In this context, the explicitly “nonideological,” freemarket approach of New Urbanism has proven attractive to government in the United States, presumably because it accords with the underlying political consensus. In the remaining sections of this chapter I examine in more detail some of the key points of criticism leveled at New Urbanism in light of its model of community.

CRITIQUE OF THE NEW URBANIST MODEL OF COMMUNITY David Harvey, whose notion of dialectical utopianism provides the focus for the final chapter of this book, offers a short but incisive appraisal of New Urbanism. The gist of Harvey’s critique is that New Urbanism is fundamentally nothing new in relation to the modernist paradigm it claims to replace. He contends that what is crucially retained is the notion that design or what he calls “spatial form” is capable of directly producing certain social characteristics and processes. In this chapter I have referred to this position as environmental determinism. In common with Harvey I oppose to such determinism the notion of a dialectical or mutually determining relationship between the material environment and social life. We have seen that key documents of New Urbanism make gestures in the direction of a dialectical understanding, though it nevertheless remains attached to the idea in both theory and practice that design directly determines community. In the following chapter further details of the crisis that befell modernist urbanism will show the extent to which a deep skepticism with respect to the urban designer’s agency stood at the center of the emergence of postmodernism within the architectural community. Fundamentally, Harvey believes that New Urbanism offers a compensatory ideology of democratic community in the absence of any model of transformative practice. Aligning New Urbanism with the communitarian theory that gained prominence in the 1990s through the work of Amitai Etzioni, Harvey sums up his criticism in the following way: The darker side of this communitarianism remains unstated: from the very earliest phases of mass urbanization through industrialization, “the spirit of community” has been held as an antidote to any threat of social disorder, class war, and revolutionary violence. “Community” has ever been one of the key sites of social control and surveillance, bordering on overt social repression. Well-

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founded communities often exclude, define themselves against others, erect all kinds of keep-out signs (if not tangible walls).36

In part Harvey is here echoing concerns relating to social exclusion within community formation voiced by Sennett and repeated by Young. At the same time, however, Harvey recognizes the positive potential for progressive political struggle that can be generated by constructing community when “coupled with the politics of place.”37 This idea of a politics of place centers on grassroots struggle and was touched upon in chapter three in connection with Lefebvre’s notion of the right to the city. A recent collection of essays edited by Tigran Haas titled New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future offers a useful survey of the current state of debate surrounding the movement. Emily Talen, for example, raises a concern that has often featured in critiques of New Urbanism—the creation of affordable housing. Talen singles out affordability as the most important social issue relating to urban design and insists that the New Urbanists’ disinclination to tackle politic issues directly means that their projects are bound to be “palatable to a conservative constituency.”38 She sums up her criticism thus: “Politically conservative developers are welcomed with fanfare [by New Urbanists] while policy activists working from the left are nonpresent.”39 In a similar vein Jill Grant, who has published an extensive study of the movement,40 complains that “New Urbanist projects rarely reflect the class or ethnic diversity of the wider society.”41 Claiming that New Urbanist developments have gained market success at the cost of social equity, Grant remains open but skeptical toward the pretensions of New Urbanism to be able to enhance genuine social diversity: The challenge of building affordable, diverse, and inclusive communities demands much more than good urban form. Mix is a necessary but not sufficient condition for achieving good community. Social integration requires concerted action to create opportunities and accommodation for all community members. These ambitions may be beyond the ability of designers to deliver through good planning.42

Grant’s critical position strongly suggests that the promise of New Urbanism with respect to social justice can be made a reality only by combining features such as accessibility to public transit and finer grained urban networks with genuine grassroots agency and political clout. Only through this combination will community conditions be truly democratic and genuine social diversity fostered. In practice New Urbanism has mainly sought to recapture the legitimacy of design agency within the planning process, rather than find new means of community self-determination through local empowerment. This is not to deny that a certain commitment to public consultation is present

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within the theory and practice of New Urbanism. But such consultation is “design-led,” meaning that urban designers present selected “stakeholders” with pre-given parameters and models of choice. It is highly questionable whether such a process constitutes genuine public participation at all. If it does not then, in this respect, New Urbanism will have failed to improve on its modernist predecessors, who sought in their own way means of involving the public in construction and design. In the following section of this chapter I examine the charrette system of design consultation favored by New Urbanists. This examination reveals some telling parallels with the Habermasian model of communication and deliberation.

THE CHARRETTE AND PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT IN NEW URBANISM The charrette has been employed in many cases of New Urbanist planning and development in order to achieve broad consensus among recognized stakeholders in a planning and design process. As a planning methodology the charrette has been granted canonical status as defined and disseminated by the National Charrette Institute (NCI) based, presumably not by chance, in Portland, Oregon. The NCI defines its charrette model as “a designedbased, accelerated, collaborative product management system for all aspects of community planning including sustainable community plans, regional/ comprehensive plans, transportation/infrastructure plans, and development plans.”43 The NCI-endorsed charrette involves three phases—a preparatory phase, design charrette proper, and implementation phase—and it is stressed that all three stages are indispensable to a successful process. In particular, the NCI underscores the need to maintain effective stakeholder involvement at the implementation stage in order that broad-based support for decisions persists beyond the consultation period. The benefits of the charrette as a decision-making tool are said to be its efficiency in terms of time and money, greater chances of implementation, and promotion of trust between citizens and government. The NCI puts forward highly detailed prescriptions in connection with the charrette process, including specifications that it should take place over a four- to seven-day period and involve three feedback loops, ensuring that the plan constantly evolves. In many ways the formalization of the charrette under the auspices of the NCI is one of the most obvious indications of how New Urbanism is regulated at the deepest level by something akin to Habermasian communication theory. The charrette is precisely an attempt to put the consensus theory of deliberation and “procedural rationality” into action. To be fair to Habermas,

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his theory of communicative action actually assumes that consensus arises as a spontaneously occurring background of everyday communication. In this way consensus is more an unconscious condition of understanding within the lifeworld than a result of consciously constructed frameworks of negotiation such as the charrette. Nevertheless the affinity is striking. In an article that considers public participation in planning processes in the UK, Tim Richardson and Stephen Connelly note the influence of the “communicative turn” spearheaded by the work of Habermas in the 1980s.44 They see the Habermasinspired paradigm of “rational planning” as characterized by political pluralism, communicative rationality, the centrality of the planner, and the achievement of unforced consensus.45 Their assessment of communicative planning is ultimately critical, though they do not reject it outright. Accordingly, in place of what they consider the ideal consensus endorsed by Habermas, they propose “pragmatic consensus” as a more credible and salutary goal within the planning process. The danger of pursuing the former, they insist, is that any attempt at public participation becomes “blind to local power outside of communication . . . and therefore to the influence of power on policy development, the possibility of distortion of the policy process, and even more fundamentally therefore to the possibility of empowerment.”46 The implication of this criticism of the consensus model of planning and, by extension, the charrette method, is that it is insufficiently sensitive to expressions and changes of relative power within the context of negotiation. As noted in chapter one, Habermas views communicative action on the one hand and strategic action involving power and influence on the other as mutually exclusive. While he has come under sustained criticism for advancing such an opposition on a theoretical level, the question in the present context is whether the communicative approach can nevertheless prove useful for fostering genuine community involvement in planning and urban design in practice. In an article from 2002 that surveys the state of debate concerning New Urbanism, Cliff Ellis remarks: “The charrette method may not be perfect, but when executed properly and followed up with other citizen participation methods it can produce outcomes that are both fair and of high quality. The goal is a proper balance of professional expertise and community input.”47 A more recent study, however, suggests that this balance may often favor the professional designers at the expense of the directly affected community. Sophie Bond and Michelle Thompson-Fawcett carried out extensive interviews with people involved in the Wanaka 2020 visioning process in New Zealand in 2002. Their interviews with various stakeholders including local community representatives and government officials revealed widespread discontent with the extent to which the New Urbanist perspective ruled out alternative approaches. They remark: “The use of a single canon and set of principles

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excludes other perspectives and alternative visions of places and spaces that may be equally sustainable. Those who are not persuaded by New Urbanist rhetoric do not have the opportunity to envision or consider other forms of sustainable urbanism.”48 They trace this exclusion of other options within the visioning process back to an inherent tendency of the design-led charrette method to prioritize the expert knowledge of design consultants: “Certainly, the design emphasis reveals a rational and instrumental belief in the role of the expert in producing design solutions, given a specific set of information.”49 They sum up their findings as follows: Certain characteristics of the charrette process are inherent—the design emphasis, the guiding urbanist principles, the intense timeframe and the rigorous testing of different proposals through multidisciplinary collaboration . . . While there is no question that the charrette is design-focused, and it is accepted that this is a strength, it is suggested the claim that it is a method of “citizen-based participation and design” may overemphasize its participatory capabilities.50

In the final chapter of this book I consider in detail a more recent visioning exercise carried out in Portland, Oregon, between 2005 and 2007. In this case a much more community-led methodology was used. This meant that the process required more time and resources but the sense of grassroots involvement in shaping the eventual vision was much greater than seems to have been the case in Wanaka. But even in this case, as I will show, the painstaking exercise of community inclusion was to a significant degree subsequently undermined by government bodies and design agencies asserting dominance at the implementation stage. Returning to the charrette, we should recall that one of its professed merits is efficiency in terms of time and resources. Accordingly, the charrette is meant to work by gathering a representative cross-section of affected parties together with urban designers and other sources of technical knowledge. This is in line with one the requirements set out within Habermasian discourse ethics, which insists that all legitimate decisions be reached under conditions where everyone significantly affected by the outcome is included in discussion. The mere presence of interested parties, however, is not enough—they must be afforded genuine opportunities to voice their concerns. As noted by Young, there is further scope for exclusion within a forum of discussion according to the level of legitimacy accorded to certain modes of address. As a consequence, dispassionate, analytical discourse tends to be seen as more worthy of attention than emotive, rhetorical, or personalized interventions. The question is whether the charrette is an effective means of realizing the explicitly stated goal of New Urbanism to promote community involvement and social diversity in urban planning. The movement’s ostensive desire to transform urbanism into “community design” hinges in great part on its ability

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to canvass and implement public input effectively. While the study of Wanaka 2020 revealed widespread dissatisfaction with a visioning process led by designers, Richardson and Connelly suggest that what lies behind such shortcomings is the deeper-rooted disinclination of communicative rationality to grapple with the reality of local power structures. As we know through everyday experience, contentious issues are rarely if ever discussed on a level playing field. Typically institutional and wider societal attributes accord each speaker more or less “symbolic capital” and thus legitimacy in the context of discussion. If the parallel between Habermas’s theory and New Urbanist practice I am advancing is justified, then it would be reasonable to assume that similar problems arise in the context of the New Urbanist charrette as were identified in connection with the theory of communicative action. Certainly, both profess a concern for social inclusion and democratic pluralism. For New Urbanism this is shown through the tendency to insist that the movement is not against sprawl as such, but simply wants unfair systemic advantages given to the suburban sprawl option removed. Once planning codes are reformed to reestablish parity, New Urbanists argue, a more sustainable and livable urban environment will naturally ensue. Flint reports a comment made by Duany: “We’re going to drive the market—the percentages are so high for people who want to live this way, we don’t have to force anyone to do it. We just have to be allowed to do it.”51 As is apparent, this is akin to Habermas’s central claim that, once the distortions of strategic and instrumental thinking are removed, any rational discussion will arrive at unforced consensus or truth for the affected group. However, as Bent Flyvbjerg remarks in his study Rationality and Power in connection with Habermas’s theory of rational communication: Rationality is context-dependent, the context often being power. Rationality is penetrated by power, and it becomes meaningless, or misleading—for politicians, administrators, and researchers alike—to operate with a concept of rationality in which power is absent. This holds true for substantive as well as communicative rationality. Communication is more typically characterized by nonrational rhetoric and maintenance of interests than by freedom from domination and consensus seeking.52

In this light it appears that, without significant modifications, the charrette methodology favored by New Urbanism is no more credible an approach to democratic inclusion in practice than Habermas’s model of communicative action in theory. Crucially, what they share is a disinclination to acknowledge the way localized networks of power determine the search for a transparent and fair process of consensus building. This is compounded by a tendency in both cases to assume uncritically a certain paradigm of rational discussion. In the case of the New Urbanist charrette it is clear than designers are regarded as

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repositories of expert knowledge, whose intellectual and technical superiority with respect to the broader public entitles them to lead and steer the process of discussion. In Calthorpe’s words: “[In regional planning] the public at large is educated in regard to what choices they have and what the trade-offs are for those choices. More often than not, the public has an opportunity to learn about and consider choices that it didn’t know it had.”53 Such comments indicate that, far from a being the departure from the earlier modernist paradigm indicated by the name, New Urbanism in fact reasserts the modernist presumption of the rational superiority of the planner relative to the public affected. As Bond and Thompson-Fawcett insist: “[Local government] leaders consciously need to avoid reinforcing the local hegemony, and instead pay particular regard to difference in their community.”54 Adopting the charrette method of public consultation may use up less public resources, but its efficacy in advancing the goals of genuine public participation and social diversity is far from proven.

NEW URBANISM AND COMMUNITY Whatever its shortcomings New Urbanism deserves more theoretical attention in view of its pervasive contemporary influence. That influence is particularly pronounced in the United States and the United Kingdom, although other examples could be cited to demonstrate that key elements of New Urbanism have become something of a global currency at this point. Like all resonant movements certain aspects of the New Urbanist ideology have become naturalized common sense. Accordingly, few people will express opposition to urban redevelopment that aims to “retrofit” older buildings and mix in pedestrianfriendly street structures and aesthetically pleasing public spaces. But the question I have attempted to broach in this chapter is essentially social rather than technical in nature, namely, what kind of community does New Urbanism seek to construct? In approaching this question I have measured New Urbanism against the aspiration of its own charter, which speaks of combating “separation by race and income” by means of “citizen-based participatory planning and design.” What has emerged, however, is that New Urbanist developments have if anything exacerbated such separation by building ex-urban enclaves of economic and ethnic homogeneity. With its embrace of the charrette method of consultation this failure to foster social diversity has been compounded by a reassertion of the intellectual superiority of “community designers.” As I argued in part one and will elaborate on in the following two chapters, community can never be adequately grasped either in theory or practice in the absence of local grassroots political struggle. History at the local level readily reveals that urbanist intervention has predominantly taken the form of institutional agen-

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cies changing the built environment in ways that were at best indifferent to the genuine concerns of local populations. This has been the case for two simple reasons: either it was a question of exploiting economic potential (for example, in cases of gentrification), or of meeting concerns of social unrest (as has happened following successive waves of urban disturbance in the United States and Europe over the last four decades). While it may be tempting to hope that more benign and enlightened public policy might work against this legacy of urban planning, I believe that the current climate of political pragmatism that predominates across liberal democracies means that this hope is unwarranted. Instead, as I will argue in the final chapter, genuine community building must come from winning adequate resources for local self-determination through opposing the inherent tendency of government and corporate powers to accumulate rather than disperse capital. If, as the abiding ideology of free-market capitalism insists, individuals are naturally inventive in meeting their own needs through exploiting environmental potential, then communities should be afforded the freedom to shape their own material setting collectively. As it is, the profession of city planning from the time of Haussmann in mid-nineteenth-century Paris to the present day has largely sought to impose urban visions on inhabitants. As with many historical efforts at progressive grassroots action, the key today lies in seizing the pervasive official rhetoric of public participation and finding ways to make governmental policy at a local level truly accountable. This can only come about, I believe, through open nonviolent confrontation between grassroots organizations and government, rather than accepting the facile belief that public and governmental interests, when subject to rational analysis and negotiation, will automatically coincide. In practice, of course, such confrontation requires the construction of coalitions that succeed in identifying genuine concerns common to different groups. To this extent a certain manner of pragmatic consensus is in fact needed at the grassroots level. Whether such consensus can be formed without grassroots organization replicating the structures of dominance that characterize the relationship between democratic government and their constituents is a key question for any model of radical democracy. In the following two chapters I explore this question further within the context of contemporary urbanism. NOTES 1. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2000), 260. Among its representatives the movement is known as the New Urbanism. I avoid this rather presumptive use of the definite article.

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2. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation, 261. 3. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation, 260. 4. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation, 259. 5. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation, 260. 6. Scott London, “The City of Tomorrow: An Interview with Peter Calthorpe,” scottlondon.com/interviews/calthorpe.html (Fall 2002). 7. London, “City of Tomorrow.” 8. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Modern Library, 1993), 31. 9. Jacobs, Death and Life, 564–65. 10. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation, 60. 11. Richard Sennet, The Fall of Public Man (London / New York: Penguin, 2002), 310. 12. Sennett, Fall, 339–40. 13. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 213–14. 14. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation, 240–41. 15. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation, 265. 16. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation, 264. 17. Anthony Flint, This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 63–64. 18. Cf. Mouffe, On the Political, 35–63. 19. Flint, This Land, 68. 20. Vincent Scully, “The Architecture of Community,” in Peter Katz, ed., The New Urbanism: Toward Architecture of Community (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 221–30, 230. 21. Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 9. 22. Calthorpe, American Metropolis, 11. 23. Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001), 3–4. 24. Calthorpe and Fulton, Regional City, 4. 25. Calthorpe and Fulton, Regional City, 6. 26. Calthorpe, American Metropolis, 51. 27. Calthorpe, American Metropolis, 42. 28. Calthorpe, American Metropolis, 43. 29. Calthorpe and Fulton, Regional City, 110. 30. Calthorpe and Fulton, Regional City, 113. 31. Calthorpe and Fulton, Regional City, 119. 32. Bruce Podobnik, “The Social and Environmental Achievements of New Urbanism: Evidence from Orenco Station,” http://legacy.lclark.edu/~podobnik/ orenco02.pdf (7 Nov. 2002), 10. 33. Podobnik, “Achievements,” 1. 34. Podobnik, “Achievements,” 11. 35. Podobnik, “Achievements,” 12.

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36. David Harvey, “The New Urbanism and the Communitarian Trap,” Harvard Design Magazine no. 1 (Winter/Spring 1997), http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/ publications/hdm/back/1harvey.pdf, 3. 37. Harvey, “The New Urbanism,” 3. 38. Emily Talen, “The Unbearable Lightness of New Urbanism,” in Tigran Haas, ed., New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future (New York: Rizzoli, 2008), 77–79, 78. 39. Talen, “Unbearable Lightness,” 79. 40. Cf. Jill Grant, Planning the Good Community: New Urbanism in Theory and Practice (London / New York: Routledge, 2006). 41. Jill Grant, “The Challenges of Achieving Social Objectives,” in Haas, New Urbanism, 80–85, 85. 42. Grant, “Challenges,” 85. 43. National Charrette Institute, http://www.charretteinstitute.org/charrette.html. 44. Tim Richardson and Stephen Connelly, “Reinventing Public Participation: Planning in the Age of Consensus,” in Peter Blundell Jones, Doina Petrescu, and Jeremy Till, eds., Architecture and Participation (New York: Spon Press, 2005), 77–104. 45. Richardson and Connelly, “Reinventing,” 83. 46. Richardson and Connelly, “Reinventing,” 84. 47. Cliff Ellis, “The New Urbanism: Critiques and Rebuttals,” Journal of Urban Design 7, no. 3 (October 2002): 263–93, 281. 48. Sophie Bond and Michelle Thompson-Fawcett, “Public Participation and New Urbanism: A Conflicting Agenda?” Planning Theory and Practice 8, no. 4 (2007): 449–72, 463. 49. Bond and Thompson-Fawcett, “Public Participation,” 456. 50. Bond and Thompson-Fawcett, “Public Participation,” 468. 51. Flint, This Land, 76. 52. Bent Flyvbjerg, Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 227. 53. Calthorpe, Regional City, 114. 54. Bond and Thompson-Fawcett, “Public Participation,” 469.

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Chapter Five

Postmodern Urbanism

The idea of the postmodern has been in circulation since the 1940s but first became a more general cultural focus in the 1980s. As with modernism, my approach to postmodernism is restricted to its immediate relevance for the relationship between urbanism and community. Even within urban theory, however, there is a wealth of material that I will not engage with here. Ideas such as the multiplicity or deferral of meaning (derived from literary theory) and collage (derived within the visual arts), which are often taken as key markers of postmodern urbanism, will not be considered. In line with the overall structure of this book I will instead confine my discussion to one salient function or aspiration of postmodern urbanism, namely that it seeks to heighten our awareness of the singularity of place. It can easily be objected that such an approach offers too limited a perspective on postmodern urbanism. While I am aware that this is a valid objection it is equally true that there is no comprehensive agreement on what such urbanism essentially entails. Current assessments of postmodern urbanism confirm this impression by including a wide and often bewildering variety of architectural and urbanist movements from New Urbanism to Deconstructivism. For my purposes here I wish to accentuate the contrast between postmodern urbanism and New Urbanism. In my view postmodern urbanism is best understood as an attempt to draw out the social and historical layerings that attach to any urban site. As shown, New Urbanism also appeals to history but looks for the underlying robustness and repeatability of traditional urban forms. By contrast, postmodern urbanism more often highlights what is singular and incomparable in the historical urban artifact. While New Urbanism, as we saw in the previous chapter, largely retains the modernist faith in the ability of environmental change to overcome social pathologies, postmodern urbanism indicates an alternative form of therapy, in the form of 105

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a collective historical catharsis. Rather than striving to elevate and improve everyday life, the postmodernist approach aims to grant a certain dignity to the mundane. Viewed from a postmodern perspective, therefore, urbanism should not and cannot be about constructing or producing community from scratch, but rather about offering material contexts in which communal ties and history can be collectively marked. The aspiration is that, through such commemorative markers, urbanism will be transformed from an assertion of dominant power to an empowerment of democratic inclusion. The main problem with such a perspective on the practical level, as we will see, is that it tends to dissipate the material means of resistance to oppressive power. Without such means the concern for social justice cannot lead to real change. Thus, as was shown in chapter two, the appeal to singularity ultimately leaves grassroots community without adequate resources of dissent. In the absence of such resources postmodern urbanism amounts to an assertion of singularity and difference at the expense of genuine community and solidarity.

THE EVERYDAY ENVIRONMENT AND POPULIST URBANISM Following the structure and approach of this book, postmodern urbanism will be considered here insofar as it is aligned with the model of singular community examined in chapter two. Before postmodernism became an explicit and pervasive tendency of theory within literature and the human sciences in the 1980s, it arose as a countermovement in architecture and urbanism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One text above all is recognized as the seminal work of postmodern architecture and urbanism, namely Learning from Las Vegas coauthored by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Steven Izenour and originally published in 1972. Based on a series of study trips and design studios, this work celebrates the unplanned vitality of an urban landscape devoted to ephemeral pleasure that stands in stark opposition to the paradigm of orthodox modernist urbanism. The underlying claim advanced is that Las Vegas represents a genuinely inclusive manner of urban composition: But the order of the Strip includes; it includes at all levels, from the mixture of seemingly incongruous land uses to the mixture of seemingly incongruous advertising media. . . . It is not an order dominated by the expert and made easy for the eye. The moving eye in the moving body must work to pick out and interpret a variety of changing, juxtaposed orders.1

Learning from Las Vegas presents the shift away from modernism as a transition from formalism to symbolism. The emergence of modernist architecture in Europe in the 1920s involved a sustained polemic against the use of or-

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namental and figurative elements. In a move that becomes a recurrent motif across many texts and works, postmodern architecture and urbanism are said to involve a reassertion of the need for symbols to constitute a genuinely collective materialized language. In the words of Learning from Las Vegas: When it cast out eclecticism, Modern architecture submerged symbolism. Instead it promoted expressionism, concentrating on the expression of architectural elements themselves: on the expression of structure and function. It suggested, through the image of the building, reformist-progressive social and industrial aims that it could seldom achieve in reality. By limiting itself to strident articulations of the pure architectural elements of space, structure, and program, Modern architecture’s expression has become dry expressionism, empty and boring—and in the end irresponsible.2

This critique of modernist urbanism had already been advanced in Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture from 1966. Here the underlying emphasis on populism is already in evidence, in the form of an inclusive “both-and” logic directly opposed to the “either-or” of modernist formalism. Somewhat surprising, however, is Venturi’s choice of T. S. Eliot as a key intellectual inspiration for his notion of “the difficult whole” architecture and urbanism should strive to attain. After all, Eliot is a canonical representative of high modernism and not renowned for his passionate embrace of exuberant popular culture. What Venturi seems to find in Eliot, however, is a notion of cultural holism that includes rather than rejects the reality of fragmentation. As the title of Venturi’s text suggests, the key task in architecture and urbanism is maintaining complex and contradictory material parts within a relation of dialectical tension. This alone would be sufficient to distinguish postmodern urbanism clearly from New Urbanism with its drive toward urbanistic congruity and equilibrium.

COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND SINGULAR PLACE It is important to acknowledge that, unlike New Urbanism, postmodern urbanism did not arise as a conscious movement. There is no postmodern urbanist manifesto issued by a core group of practitioners. This makes the task of identifying the figure of community implied by such urbanism considerably more difficult. In line with my connection of postmodern urbanism and the idea of singular community, however, a preoccupation with place and collective memory emerges as key. In the same year that marked the publication of Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture another important early document of the move away from architectural modernism

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appeared in Europe. In The Architecture of the City, Aldo Rossi, in common with Venturi, asserts a kind of popular urban spirit against certain tendencies of modernist urbanism. Rather than focus on any spontaneous mixing of styles, however, Rossi underscores the importance of the traditional European city as an embodiment and repository of collective history and memory. He notes: “One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is the locus of the collective memory.”3 A significant aspect of the urban locus and its power to contain collective memory is, according to Rossi, the specific natural setting chosen for a city. Accordingly, a central task in the study and practice of architecture and urbanism is taken to be an appreciation of the relationship between human behavior and the natural environment, or between psychology and ecology. Whereas the embrace of industrial technology in modernist architecture and urbanism looks to the economies of scale afforded by the serial production of building materials to bring about a comprehensive social transformation, Rossi seeks to recapture a sense of the uniqueness of the city considered as a supreme work of art. Accordingly, he focuses on what he calls the “singularity” of the “urban artifact,” by which he means the individual building as well as the city as a whole. Ultimately, urban singularity arises out of a complex conjunction of natural setting, civic events, and collective memories. So conceived, the city as singular place becomes a vast urban monument: [The outlines of the concept of locus] delineate the singularity of monuments, of the city, and of buildings, and thus the concept of singularity itself and its limits, where it begins and ends. They trace the relation of architecture to its location—the place of art—and there its connections to, and the precise articulation of, the locus itself as a singular artifact determined by its space and time, by its topographical dimensions and its form, by its succession of ancient and recent events, by its memory.4

To the extent that the natural location is seen as essential to the founding and continued vitality of the urban environment, the singularity of the city is derived from what is already there prior to construction. This can nevertheless be seen as a dialectical process, whereby the natural environment and urban construction mutually determine each other. Underlying Rossi’s text is a heightened sense of the precariousness of urban integrity and continuity. The clear implication is that the global tendency of modernist urbanism to erase and rebuild the urban context on a massive scale is destructive of architecture’s crucial ability to maintain social continuity across generations. As modernist architects gradually succeeded in directing urbanism away from a concern with figurative styles and toward the largely functional tasks of

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engineering, it also brought architecture into close proximity to modern technological production. This meant, among other things, that urbanism came to be increasingly subject to the imperatives of mass production and commodity obsolescence. In other words, cities were to be built more economically through the use of standardized materials and totally rebuilt at regular intervals. While a leading figure such as Le Corbusier never renounced the idea that architecture was a high art striving to convey spiritual meaning, modernist urbanism came to mean in practice urban renewal schemes that favored such things as efficient traffic circulation over the continuity of fragile urban communities. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, local organized opposition to urban renewal had arisen across liberal democracies. What was at stake in these early struggles could be characterized as the right of urban communities to determine the environment that contained their own singular, collective history. In Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, David Harvey reflects on the role the appeal to the singularity of place has played in many cases of localized struggle. While remaining alert to the warnings of Sennett and Young that defense of local communities can often degenerate into exclusionary affirmations of identity, Harvey recognizes the importance of a sense of place through reference to the cultural theorist Raymond Williams and his notion of “militant particularism”: Ideals forged out of the affirmative experience of solidarities in one place get generalized and universalized as a working model of a new form of society that will benefit all of humanity. That is what [Raymond] Williams means by “militant particularism” and he sees it as deeply ingrained into the history of progressive socialism.5

For Harvey the key thing is the transfer of local struggle to some more generalized political opposition movement. In the absence of any generalizing tendency the defense of singular place risks degenerating into regressive parochialism, that is, into forms of collective practice that merely seek to assert forms of identity in isolation from the surrounding social and material environment. In words that echo Habermas’s social theory, Harvey notes that the increased penetration of technological rationality into the contemporary lifeworld gives rise to “resistances that increasingly focus on alternative constructions of place (understood in the broadest sense of that word). The search for an authentic sense of community and of an authentic relation to nature among many radical and ecological movements is the cutting edge of exactly such a sensibility.”6 Harvey is certainly correct in asserting that the notion of place has come to occupy an ever more central place within liberal democratic politics at every

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level. Given that the social ideology common to liberal democracies involves an imperative to view oneself as a unique, singular individual, it seems natural that we should seek out and foster singular places of collective inhabitation. The immediate obstacle encountered by such a desire for singular place is that it is no less subject to the mechanisms of commodification than anything else. Accordingly, a glance at the urban futures projected by any number of contemporary cities will demonstrate a desire to highlight and create “iconic,” “signature” buildings and structures. Part of the present Comprehensive Plan for Portland, Oregon, for example, stresses that the city has yet to exploit the iconic potential of its bridges (a popular name of the city is “Bridgetown”). Enhancing the visibility of current bridge structures or constructing new bridges is thus seen as vital for the national and international image of the city. That such an approach to urbanism conforms to a key strategy of product placement that accentuates and fetishizes uniqueness is clear. It is thus important to remain conscious of how easily appeals to the singularity of place can play into the hands of municipal government and corporate business eager to promote an attractive image of a city without genuine concern for social justice and equality. This does not mean that the effort to acknowledge and accentuate the singularity of place is without potentially progressive consequences, just that those who support this effort should be under no illusions about the ever-present possibility of its being co-opted and reconfigured by dominant institutions of power. When Robert Stern claimed in 1976 that the challenge confronted by any postmodernist urbanism was that of “recapturing the affection of architecture’s very disaffected constituency, the public,”7 few would have questioned the sentiment. But if the source of this very disaffection was to a great extent the high-handedness of architects, urbanists, and municipal planning authorities, the solution presumably called for some kind of shift in the power balance in favor of urban communities at the grassroots level. While the idea of an inclusive, pluralistic approach to the urban environment seems attractive in theory, in practice the eventual reality of postmodern urbanism was quite different.

POSTMODERN URBANISM IN PRACTICE It is important to stress that postmodern urbanism remained largely an aspirational program for the best part of a decade after the publication of Learning from Las Vegas. In that work an appeal to construct postmodern “ugly and ordinary” architecture opposed to the “heroic and original” works of modernism carried with it, as we have seen, an appeal to a pluralistic and inclusive idea of community. Like early proponents of architectural modern-

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ism, advocates of postmodern architecture proclaimed that the architectural profession was out of step with the popular spirit of the time. It is clear that, in its early stages, postmodern urbanism involved a passionate defense of everyday culture that resonated with broader social changes. Learning from Las Vegas marked a significant attempt to recognize that the contemporary built environment was not something either to be shaped according to professional architecture’s austere principles or simply condemned as so much aesthetically worthless detritus. But such a move contained from the outset a telling ambiguity between acknowledging the existence of the material environment created by untrammeled commodification and affirming it. In succeeding decades, as it developed into a recognizable approach to urban planning, postmodern urbanism encountered significant corporate and municipal acceptance but widespread popular disaffection. In the wake of a prolonged period of theoretical existence, postmodern urbanism came out in the first half of the 1980s as an unambiguous and pivotal champion of corporate culture. While Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building, constructed in Manhattan and completed in 1984, canonized postmodernism as a key corporate style, Michael Graves’s Portland Building (Fig. 5.1) from the same year marked the conspicuous entry of postmodern architecture into the civic realm. Commissioned by the city of Portland, the novelty of the decorative features that adorn the exterior of the Portland Building certainly make it stand out amid the surrounding, mostly bland modernist structures (Fig. 5.2). As Graves himself notes, external decoration is considered essential for conveying the symbolic meaning of the public structure: “A significant architecture must incorporate both internal and external expressions. The external language, which engages inventions of culture at large, is rooted in a figurative, associational and anthropomorphic attitude.”8 The description of the Portland Building offered by Graves highlights its sensitivity to context as well as its civic significance: The Portland Building was a design-build competition sponsored by the city of Portland, Oregon. Located on a 200-foot square downtown block, the building will house the city’s municipal offices. This particular site offers a rich and special setting characterized by the adjacent City Hall and County Courthouse buildings on two sides, and the public transit mall and the park on the other two sides. The design of the building addresses the public nature of both the urban context and the internal program. In order to reinforce the building’s associative or mimetic qualities, the facades are organized in a classical three-part division of base, middle or body, and attic or head.9

The emergence of Grave’s design as favored by those who judged the architectural competition certainly did not lead to swift public acceptance, but rather

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popular discontent that Portland was to become a testing ground for postmodern experimentation. Nevertheless, Portland’s mayor at the time, Frank Invancie, boldly claimed that the building would become the city’s Eiffel Tower, heralding the rebirth of a city that had been badly hit by economic recession in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Noting its ironic if not ominous year of completion (1984), Brian Libby sums up popular reception of the Portland Building: Unfortunately for Michael Graves, the building has, despite its iconic status, been largely panned in the two decades since it was completed—not just by the critics of postmodernism but also by ordinary Portlanders. Gloomy, cramped office spaces have made it unpopular with tenants. Government employees there call in sick more often than those working in other buildings. Cracks have appeared in upper floors, requiring new bracing.10

Although the structure offers iconoclastic gestures and a degree of stylistic singularity, as noted the Portland Building has remained disliked by city workers and Portland inhabitants more generally. Reports in local newspapers indicate that those who work in the building often complain of lack of light (the Pacific Northwest is not known for sunny winter months) and questions have been raised about the quality of materials used.11

Figure 5.1. Michael Graves, The Portland Building. Photo by author.

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Figure 5.2. The Portland Building. Decorative Features. Photo by author.

While the public outcry against the building could be seen as parochial or conservative on the part of Portlanders, the more likely cause of the reaction is a keen sense that such architectural gestures make a poor substitute for political action that is effective in addressing issues of genuinely popular concern. Even on the immediate aesthetic level, Graves’s building gives a fortress-like impression that suggests a desire on the part of municipal authorities to keep the public out rather than invite them in (Fig. 5.3). It is instructive to compare the controversy surrounding the Portland Building with the protracted struggle to create Pioneer Square around the same time (Fig. 5.4). In the latter case opponents of an open public space in the center of Portland’s downtown insisted that it would quickly become a magnate for undesirable, antisocial behavior. At the same time, a group of municipal politicians lead by the same Mayor Invancie argued that the project would have negative economic as well as social consequences. Ultimately it was a grassroots initiative called Friends of Pioneer Square that salvaged the project by raising $750,000 through a paving-stone sponsoring scheme. The contrast between the Portland Building and Pioneer Square is stark and telling. While the former was city led and opposed at the grassroots level, the latter garnered much popular support despite municipal efforts to

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Figure 5.3. The Portland Building with City Hall in the Foreground. Photo by author.

Figure 5.4. Pioneer Square. Portland, Oregon. Photo by author.

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derail the proposal. An example such as the Portland Building makes clear that postmodern urbanism in practice did not follow through on its inclusive and populist rhetoric. As Nan Ellin remarks with respect to the work of such architects as Johnson and Graves: “Keen to exploit the power symbolism, corporate clients have commissioned ‘star’ architects to design buildings which confer status and corporate recognition and which help to ‘sell’ their corporate identity by providing a colorful package for it as a commercial artist would do for other products.”12 Such an appraisal strongly suggests that the aspiration of postmodern urbanism to facilitate a socially inclusive built environment remains far from being borne out in practice. Instead, structures such as the Portland Building materially and symbolically represent intensified separation between community at the grassroots level and institutionalized power. Such a situation raises concerns graver than those connected to developments in New Urbanism, insofar as the corporate sympathies of postmodern architects often amounted in practice to the direct takeover of public urban space. If, as many commentators suggest, postmodern urbanism has played a significant role in facilitating the dominance of corporate and municipal power over public space, then such urbanism must be seen as opposed in principal to anything resembling grassroots, self-determining community.

THE POLITICS OF POSTMODERN URBANISM Surveying postmodernism at the end of the 1980s Mary McLeod notes that the radical gestures of earlier theory had not been fulfilled in actual practice. In agreement with other commentators, she charts a rapid decline of the oppositional stance of the 1970s into a wholesale capitulation to hegemonic economic and bureaucratic forces in the following decade: A passivity vis-à-vis economic and political power has continued to be one of the major reasons for the leftists’ unease with postmodern architecture. . . . With amazing rapidity, postmodernism became the new corporate style . . . postmodernism began to flourish in the boom economy of the early 1980s. Architects seemed to stop writing and theorizing; most reacted hungrily to the opportunities to build.13

In the context of a conference attended by architects and leading intellectuals associated with postmodernism (including Lyotard and Derrida) held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1985, Kenneth Frampton anticipated McLeod’s point. “By the early 80s,” he remarked, “it was clear to me that, as far as the American architectural establishment was concerned,

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a reactionary cultural operation was consciously under way and had been in the offing, ever since Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.”14 Echoing a common criticism of New Urbanism considered in the pervious chapter, Frampton castigates postmodernism in architecture for its superficiality and indifference to genuine social concerns: There is a marked tendency, in American postmodernist architecture in particular, to reduce architecture to surface images—to a kind of gratuitous and supposedly reassuring mise en scène, to a scenography oriented towards marketability, social control and towards an optimization of building production and consumption.15

Accusing postmodern urbanism of generating social control through the embrace of productive efficiency basically amounts to the claim that, from a social perspective, the actual operation of postmodernism within the urban context marks no significant change over the earlier modernist approach. Indeed, one could go further and insist that, despite its populist rhetoric, postmodern urbanism actually constitutes an abandonment of any genuine concern to improve the urban environment in socially progressive ways. But how did the desire, widely expressed in the 1960s and 1970s, to reconnect the public with architecture and urbanism become transformed into the crass corporate orientation of the 1980s? One obvious reason, mentioned by McLeod and others, is the turnaround in economic conditions following the recession period induced by the oil crisis in the second half of the 1970s. Viewed in terms of national politics, the early 1980s also witnessed the transfer of power in both the United States and the United Kingdom to market-oriented conservative parties and leaders. Hence the title of McLeod’s article, which clearly implies a significant accommodation of architecture and urbanism to the overtly political conjuncture. As Fredric Jameson remarks in the introduction to his key study on postmodernism: Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship. It will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flowering of the new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multinational business, whose expansion and development is strictly contemporaneous with it.16

Insofar as postmodern urbanism is closely connected to a concern for singularity and heterogeneity, however, we can assume that it also seeks to defend the idea of irreducible otherness. While this is already an extremely difficult notion to grasp on an abstract level, how such an idea could be given material form within urbanism appears even more problematic. In part one I consid-

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ered Young’s politics of difference and in particular her understanding of urban public space as a context in which openness to “unassimilated otherness” might be encountered. In response to Young’s approach I objected that she idealizes public space, insofar as any actual physical environment always carries social features that attract or repel certain individuals and groups. While Young attempts to bring together Habermas’s concern for rational communication with more radical philosophies of otherness, the postmodern appreciation of community as singular remains deeply suspicious of all attempts to grasp the social in terms of communicative dialogue. It generally sees in such attempts an effort to destroy difference and reassert homogeneous identity based on a supposedly universally valid rationality. The difficulty that arises out of this defense of singularity on the practical level, however, is that certain group identities have to be established, provisionally at least, in order for collective action of any kind to be possible. When the two seminal strands of postmodern urbanism are recalled, the political implications in both cases appear overwhelmingly negative: Rossi’s notion of singular place can easily degenerate into reactionary localism and Venturi’s populism can be readily transformed into socially damaging commercialism. As ever, Harvey sums all this up with great precision and insight: Postmodernism has us accepting the reifications and partitionings, actually celebrating the activity of masking and cover-up, all the fetishisms of locality, place, or social grouping, while denying that kind of meta-theory which can grasp the political-economic processes (money flows, international divisions of labour, financial markets, and the like) that are becoming ever more universalizing in their depth, intensity, reach and power over daily life.17

In other words, as argued in chapter two, the theory of singularity when translated into social practice offers no means of opposing oppressive power and supporting progressive resistance. While the original impetus toward local self-determination that characterized early opposition to municipal urban renewal schemes in the late 1950s and early 1960s was salutary, postmodernist architecture and urbanism as practiced since the 1980s have seemed intent on reasserting the professional power of “urban designers” through an intimate alliance with municipal and corporate bureaucracies. Such a situation does not generate, as promised by Venturi, an urbanism for the people, but at best urbanism practiced by benign paternal authority. More often, however, postmodern urbanism has been explicitly opposed to the manifest interests of local communities. As was illustrated in the previous chapter and will be expanded upon in the next, the problem is ultimately one of the power difference that exists between communities at the grassroots level on the one hand, and municipal and corporate institutions on the other. What the 1980s

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witnessed was an attempt on the part of municipal and national governments to regain the initiative they lost in the wake of efforts to assert local grassroots self-determination in previous decades. This attempt involved forming a close alliance with the corporate sphere, giving rise to the “public-private partnerships” that now characterize almost all major urban projects handled by local or national governments. While involving large amounts of public financing such as funds set aside for urban renewal, collaboration between municipalities and private business necessarily renders many decisions and details relating to urban development inaccessible or at best opaque to the wider public. Every major city across liberal democratic countries has a tale to tell of such ventures that ignore or sideline popular input, run significantly over budget, and fail to fulfill their promised role within the local neighborhood. This situation is expressed well by Micheal Dear in his article “Postmodernism and Planning”: The postmodern city is a deliberate mutation engendered by a bureaucratic state and a corporate civil society. Both spheres are driven by economic return, in fiscal or in profit terms. The postmodern city has become a mutant money machine, driven by the twin engines of (state) penetration and (corporate) commodification.18

If this description is accurate then it is fair to say that postmodern urbanism’s concern for singularity in theory has by no means translated into modes of practice that genuinely promote equality and social justice. Indeed, postmodern urbanism in practice has actually made social division more acute by failing to offer resources for popular resistance to the combined forces of state bureaucracy and corporate strategy. In line with this view, it is curious and noteworthy that the founding text of such an urban model, Learning from Las Vegas, remains silent about the obvious commercial reasons for the studied city’s existence. The very practice and habits of gambling offer readymade metaphors for the social pathologies induced by commodity capitalism: the lottery of social status, the irrational hope that—against the odds—one can prevail over others through a random process, the ecologically unsustainable nature of an isolated desert city. To the extent that postmodernism rejects earlier critical cultural theory that claimed to distinguish, in the spirit of Marx, the mere ideology supportive of social practices from the actual deeds of social actors and institutions, it removes a valuable source of resistance to the realities of commercial exploitation and advanced commodification. According to Jameson, the difficulty of adopting a plausible critical position in theory and practice is intimately tied to the reality of the postmodern condition itself. But it is precisely in the area of the built environment, he argues, that one can come to develop models of resistance to the social and political effects of postmodernity.

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DISORIENTATION AND SEPARATION IN THE POSTMODERN CITY Lyotard, whose notion of the differend was considered in the discussion of dissenting community in chapter three, is principally known for his 1979 work The Postmodern Condition. As already noted, Lyotard specifically targets Habermas’s theory of dialogical community and denounces it as socially regressive and reactionary. In close connection with his own theory of language in terms of dissent rather than consent, Lyotard advances an account of the postmodern that centers on what he calls “incredulity toward metanarratives” and “local determinism.”19 These two features of the postmodern stem from a more general sense that any claim to universality is out of step with the everyday realities of “late capitalist” society. The subtitle of Lyotard’s study is “A Report on Knowledge,” and he initially claims that postmodern knowledge “refines our sensibility to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable.”20 This virtue of a heightened appreciation of difference and singularity is, as we saw, a key claim made by early proponents of postmodern urbanism. But recognizing the reality of heterogeneity and plurality within postmodernity in no way entails making a positive judgment about it. Maurice Culot and Leon Krier make this point quite clear when they uncompromisingly remark: There is thus nothing to be “learned from Las Vegas,” except that it constitutes a widespread operation of trivialization, a cynical attempt to recuperate and accommodate the leftovers of the greatest of all cannibalistic feasts, a desperate attempt to give the profession of architecture a final justification of its bad conscience: to make believe in its social utility despite its lack of project.21

Krier, who later become a key mentor both to early New Urbanism and to Prince Charles in his attempts to revive the traditional urban structures of the English village in the UK, represents what ultimately became a neoconservative rejection of postmodernism in architecture. The critique of postmodern urbanism by leftist cultural theorists has been both more involved and nuanced. In “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology”22 Jameson initially poses the question whether it makes sense to speak of space as ideological. Rejecting the idea that architecture can carry political values in any immediate way, Jameson nevertheless follows Henri Lefebvre in asserting the progressive social value of utopian architectural and urbanist schemes. While he is willing in this article from 1982 to view postmodernism as representing an aesthetic that is original and genuine distinct from that of high modernism, by the time his extensive study Postmodernism was published almost a decade later his approach had become decidedly more critical. Here, in addition to the claim that

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postmodernism represents an abolition of the modernist dichotomy of high and low culture, Jameson characterizes the postmodern in terms of a profound absence of historical consciousness. Postmodern theory is accordingly caught up in a deeply conflicted or at worst contradictory task, namely “to take the temperature of the age without instruments and in a situation in which we are not even sure there is so coherent a thing as an ‘age,’ or zeitgeist or ‘system’ or ‘current situation,’ any longer.”23 Jameson views his own theory of postmodernism as an effort not merely to add more descriptive details to what was by then already a confusing amalgam of ideas, but rather to suggest how a certain concept of the postmodern can allow for a critical position with regard to the social reality of postmodernity. In his own words: If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable. At any rate, this has been the political spirit in which the following analysis was devised: to project some conception of a new systematic cultural norm and its reproduction in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today.24

Following Foucault’s lead Jameson takes the period referred to as “late capitalism” to be marked by the dominance of space, as opposed to the prevalence of time taken to be the main reference point during modernism. In opposition to earlier celebrations of the vibrancy of the postmodern urban environment, Jameson speaks of “the complacent eclecticism of postmodern architecture”25 and remarks that the postmodern city “has deteriorated or disintegrated to a degree surely still inconceivable in the early years of the twentieth century.”26 He then proceeds to outline the underlying claim of his study: I am proposing the notion that we are here in the presence of something like a mutation in built space itself. My implication is that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution; that there has been a mutation of the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject.27

Jameson then offers a description of the postmodern experience of space in relation to the Bonaventure Building designed and developed by John Portman in Los Angeles. According to Jameson’s account, this building strives toward the status of a total environment: cutting itself off from its surroundings through the use of mirrored windows, possessing inconspicuous rather than monumental entrances from the adjacent streets, and disorienting the pedestrian who moves about inside the structure. The overall character ascribed to the postmodern experience of space is disorientation or bewilderment: the building does not

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allow itself to be “read” by the observer, but rather induces movements in the human body that remain largely without reason or structure for the mind. For Jameson, the effect of what he calls “postmodern hyperspace” reflects an “incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.”28 Above all he stresses that his description should not be understood as one “reading” of the building among others, but rather indicates a truly historic shift in the way space is experienced: “[W]hat we have been calling postmodern (or multinational) space is not merely a cultural ideology or fantasy but has genuine historical (and socioeconomic) reality as a third great original expansion of capitalism around the globe.”29 Jameson’s idea that certain changes have occurred within the material environment that have as yet not been matched by social and cognitive transformations is something familiar to students of Marx. Following the lead of Critical Theory, Jameson is simply carrying this idea over into the “superstructural” sphere of cultural production. However, as noted, Jameson does not simply invite his readers to revel in the disorienting effects of the postmodern space. Instead, he seeks to find methods for dispelling such effects by experiencing them in a modified manner. His account of this goes by the name of “cognitive mapping,” and, as the name suggests, the point is to find a means for recovering a shared sense of direction under the cultural conditions of postmodernity. Cognitive mapping involves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing [the space of multinational capital], in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.30

Within his lengthy considerations in the conclusion of his work Jameson concedes that cognitive mapping (a notion first proposed in at article from 1984) “was in reality nothing but a code word for ‘class consciousness’—only it proposed the need for class consciousness of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind, while it also inflected the account in the direction of that new spatiality implicit in the postmodern.”31 In other words, in the spirit of Walter Benjamin, Jameson attempts to retrieve politically redemptive potential from the preeminent material sites of contemporary global capitalism. But is this attempt at theoretical alchemy—transforming the base matter of the postmodern environment into the gold of progressive political consciousness—ultimately credible?

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In his account of postmodernism Harvey, also writing from the position of cultural Marxism, puts in question Jameson’s basic claim that there is a wholesale break within postmodernism from its modernist precursor. Harvey insists that representatives of postmodernism stake their claim to novelty by caricaturing modernism and, rather ironically, playing down the pluralism of the modern movement. More particularly, Harvey notes how “modernists found a way to control and contain an explosive capitalist condition.” He goes on: “They were effective, for example, in the organization of urban life and the capacity to build space in such a way as to contain the intersecting processes that have made for a rapid urban change in twentieth-century capitalism.”32 Harvey sees essentially two faces of postmodernism: one that stems from the radical theory of such thinkers as Derrida and Lyotard, and another, gaining prominence in the 1980s, that “seeks a shameless accommodation with the market” and ultimately amounts to a “reactionary conservatism.”33 As we have seen, the trajectories of key representatives of postmodern urbanism demonstrate a transition from the former to the latter. Instead of looking for redemptive potential in postmodern urbanism like Jameson, Harvey sees the practical results of postmodernism as unambiguously negative and regressive. He makes his point unmistakably clear: Worst of all, while it opens up a radical prospect by acknowledging the authenticity of other voices, postmodernist thinking immediately shuts off those other voices from access to more universal sources of power by ghettoizing them within an opaque otherness, the specificity of this or that language game. It thereby disempowers those voices (of women, ethnic and racial minorities, colonized peoples, the unemployed, youth, etc.) in a world of lop-sided power relations. The language game of a cabal of international bankers may be impenetrable to us, but that does not put it on a par with the equally impenetrable language of inner-city blacks from the standpoint of power relations.34

The underlying complaint against postmodern urbanism is thus that, rather than helping to unmask mechanisms of social separation and provide resources for resisting them, in theory and practice it actually heightens a sense of collective alienation and powerlessness. Most importantly, the postmodern politics of difference undermines any sense of collective identity needed to make group action genuinely effective in changing material conditions. In the final analysis the response to postmodernism by Jameson and Harvey poses the same basic problem: how can progressive collective action effectively resist the intensified social oppression and injustice evident within the postmodern city?

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URBANISM AND UTOPIAN DESIRE In their work since the 1980s a remarkable instance of common ground has become apparent between Jameson and Harvey. This commonality takes the form of an appeal to renew a utopian spirit within progressive political thought. Although evidence of interest in the idea of utopia is to be found already in Jameson’s Postmodernism and earlier works, his most recent major study makes it the centerpiece. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions from 2005 is divided into two main parts, the first devoted to more directly theoretical concerns and the second analyzing classic texts of twentieth-century science fiction. In the first chapter Jameson makes an important distinction between utopia as program and utopia as impulse. The former, also called “systemic utopianism” includes revolutionary political programs and practices, projections of new spatial totalities, and “those self-conscious Utopian secessions from the social order which are the so-called intentional communities.”35 The utopian impulse, by contrast, relates to “political and social theory, for example, even when—especially when—it aims at realism and at the eschewal of everything Utopian; piecemeal social democratic and ‘liberal’ reforms as well, when they are merely allegorical of a wholesale transformation of the social totality.”36 Interestingly, Jameson places the individual building in the latter category and comprehensive city planning in the former, remaining thereby in line with his earlier analysis of the ideological function of the postmodern Bonaventure Building. Jameson sees the utopian impulse—those cultural artifacts where utopianism and ideological distortion are most intimately intertwined—as the most pervasive (though largely unconscious) form of utopia in late capitalist society. Despite his Marxian perspective, Jameson does not side in any straightforward way with utopia as program and its concern for social totality. The stated reason for his misgivings in relation to systemic utopianism is that “it is a mistake to approach Utopias with positive expectations, as though they offered visions of happy worlds, spaces of fulfillment and cooperation.”37 This leads Jameson to ally progressive politics with a spirit of utopia that stresses the openness of the future rather than definite material means to reach a desired social reconfiguration. In the present context the key point is that Jameson’s sense of the utopian bears a close resemblance to the notion of indeterminate radical change that lies at the center of the idea of singular community in Nancy and Agamben. Accordingly one can say that Jameson attempts to bring Marxian revolutionary politics in line with the notion of singularity developed by Nancy and Agamben. This seems to me a mistake and one that is perhaps most materially evident in architecture and urbanism.

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For when Jameson speaks of what he calls “Utopian form” as challenging the status quo “by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering us a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break,”38 he has recourse to the same discourse of indeterminate otherness and transformation that characterizes the theory of singular community. No matter how devoid of organized progressive politics contemporary liberal democracies may appear, it can only promote domination to reduce the utopian heritage of revolutionary socialism to mere indeterminate “interruption.” The real power of political utopianism stems, by contrast, from its ability to offer a credible, intelligible, and desirable picture of future society and pointing to the currently available means to realize it. Admittedly, what remains difficult about all utopian political frameworks is the prior formation of collective agency as a crucial part of the material means needed to bring about change. This gives rise to the following question: in a state of universal alienation how can a collective agency emerge that will restore community more generally? In other words, the absence of genuine political community requires that such community already exist in order to bring about the desired social transformation. For his part Jameson is aware of this key practical problem and approaches it by acknowledging the utopian character of all transformative social action. Bearing in mind what Jameson says about the identity of cognitive mapping and class consciousness in Postmodernism, it is worthwhile noting what he had written a decade earlier in the conclusion of The Political Unconscious: The preceding analysis entitles us to conclude that all class consciousness of whatever type is Utopian insofar as it expresses the unity of a collectivity; yet it must be added that this proposition is an allegorical one. The achieved collectivity or organic group of whatever kind—oppressors fully as much as oppressed—is Utopian not in itself, but only insofar as all such collectivities are themselves figures for the ultimate concrete collective life of an achieved Utopian or classless society.39

In my view, here Jameson is indicating an intrinsic connection between genuine community and utopian projection. He speaks of “figure” and his meaning is closely allied to what I called “configuration” in part one. The common notion is that community is never something natural or determined, though neither does it exist on some ideal level separated from any actual material setting. More than philosophical theories of community, models of urbanism reflect this combination of vision and reality that makes up any configuration of the social. What Jameson is alluding to in the previous quotation is the sense in which any model of social transformation is made possible by means of “a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing,”

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as he would put it in Postmodernism. While for Jameson the task is one of decoding and so subverting the oppressive nature of postmodern space, the configuration of that very space is equally utopian insofar as it projects a possible future city completely shaped by the dominant powers of corporate capitalism.

SINGULARITY AND THE LIMITS OF URBANISM What, then, could be left to say about the progressive potential of urbanism in the wake of postmodernism? Perhaps the notion of singularity can, after all, be useful in helping to dispel the paradox in which utopian political praxis seems to be tied up. Harvey rehabilitates political utopianism in a manner that is more directly useful for my attempt here to set out a credible account of progressive urban community. As we have seen, Harvey takes up the notion of “militant particularism” developed by Raymond Williams. This notion bears a certain resemblance to what the architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton called “critical regionalism.” As Frampton explained at the ICA conference in 1985: [B]y critical regionalism I do not mean any kind of specific style, nor of course do I have in mind any form of hypothetical vernacular revival, nor any kind of unreflected so-called spontaneous grassroots culture. Instead, I wish to employ this term in order to evoke a real and hypothetical condition in which a critical culture of architecture is consciously cultivated in a particular place, in express opposition to the cultural domination of hegemonic power. It is, in theory at least, the critical culture, which while it does not reject the thrust of modernization, nonetheless resists being totally absorbed and consumed by it.40

Frampton remains vague about what this would actually look like as a practical approach to urban development, though he makes clear that it would be quite distinct from New Urbanism’s neotraditionalism or postmodernism’s free variation of historical styles. As Lyotard notes in a response to Frampton and is evident in the analysis of the previous chapter, the idea of the region emerges here to challenge modernism’s program of universalism. As well as suggesting ecological boundaries, the notion of the region figures in much contemporary urban thinking and practice in the United States and elsewhere, and is central to Calthorpe’s transit-centered version of New Urbanism. On an imaginative level it is evident that regions can prove attractive for utopian projections, as in Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia that envisages the secession of the Pacific Northwest from the rest of the United States and its transformation into a radically ecological and egalitarian society. However, it seems more credible

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to identify the individual city or even the urban neighborhood as the key scale of resistance in the manner indicated by Frampton. Exactly how place can act as a means of resistance to oppressive power is something that will be considered in more detail in the following chapter. For now, I wish to conclude this analysis of postmodern urbanism by following Harvey one more step along the line of his argument for political utopianism. In Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference Harvey’s extensive and varied analysis is preoccupied with the following question: “how is it that ‘the partial and the local’—spatiality (in some guise or other)—is now so frequently appealed to as the locus of residual forces that can exercise real power over the trajectory of social change?”41 He goes on to outline a position that will later be called dialectical utopianism: Material practices transform the spaces of experience from which all knowledge of spatiality is derived. Theses transformative material practices in part accord with discursive maps and plans (and are therefore expressing both social relations and power) but they are also manifestations of symbolic meanings, mythologies, desires. The spatialities produced through material practices (be they frameworks for living, for communication, for work, for symbolic activities and rituals, for enjoyment) also constitute the material framework within which social relations, power structures, and discursive practices unfold.42

The basic dialectic here is between social and spatial practice. In other words, social action shapes places and places shape social action in a reciprocal loop. Accordingly, any attempt to accord political action to one without the other will constitute an abstraction. As I have remarked several times, practitioners within architecture and urbanism tend to see what Harvey calls “spatial form” as an exclusive social determinant. We saw this dogma clearly at work in the environmental determinism of New Urbanism, but it is also apparent in the celebrations of “inclusive architecture” by postmodernist architects. On the other hand, social theory tends to view transformative practice largely in isolation from concrete place. A key premise of my whole approach here is that social action and place need to be viewed together. While this seems simple enough as an abstract principle, difficulties arise once we begin to consider how this might work in concrete situations. As we have seen, constructing local community can easily produce exclusionary attitudes that are anything but socially progressive. At the opposite extreme, however, appealing to a liberal democratic cosmopolitan spirit glosses over the material and symbolic inequalities that characterize contemporary society. Thus, Harvey’s question arises: how to make place a site of effective struggle for social justice? In part an adequate response to this question involves what Harvey calls the production of “secret mappings of otherwise intractable processes and events by appeal to a certain imaginary.”43 At the same

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time, however, Harvey cautions that such mappings, insofar as they are derived from aesthetic theory, require a conversion to “discourse,” which explicitly confronts the workings of powerful social institutions. Based on the evidence brought together in this chapter, postmodern urbanism with its appeal to singular place fails to constitute a credible discourse in this sense. For that reason it remains in effect an ideological elaboration of the status quo rather than offering any realistic strategies to challenge the current balance of power. Nevertheless, I think Harvey is right to suggest that postmodernism represented a necessary challenge to modernism’s strident internationalism and universalism. Early on at least it attempted to continue the spontaneous opposition to the practices of modernist urbanism that had broken up and alienated so many urban communities in the 1950s and 1960s. Insofar as postmodern urbanism more generally is motivated by the effort to bring together social plurality and spatial singularity it genuinely reflects the reality of a postindustrial society that is no longer easily divided into opposed classes. According to Harvey, the experience of contemporary urban life is generated by a continuous, difficult intersection of local and global dimensions: [W]e live in a world of universal tension between sensuous and interpersonal relations (including those of domination and repression) in place (with intense awareness of the environmental qualities of that place) and another dimension of awareness in which we more or less recognize the material and social connection between us and the millions of other people who have, for example, a direct and indirect role in putting our breakfast on the table.44

Whether architecture and urbanism can be used as means to approach or express this basic tension is the question broached in this part of the book. The answer that has emerged thus far strongly suggests that these areas of cultural practice are not sufficient to do this. In a lecture given at the opening of an exhibition on architecture in 1981 Habermas pointed out the key symptom of utopian urbanism’s failure to address the issues of social justice: “to this day it has not been possible to integrate social housing projects and factories into the city. The urban agglomerations have outgrown the old concept of the city to which we gave our hearts; that is not the failure of modern architecture, or of any architecture at all.”45 Diagnosing the condition of postmodern urbanism as arising from “compensatory needs” expressive of a neoconservatism that is content to leave social conditions unchanged, Habermas claims that the resources of architecture and urbanism have simply been overtaken by the mechanisms of advanced global capitalism: The utopia of a preconceived form of life, on which in an earlier period the sketches of Owen and Fourier had been based, could not be brought to life.

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And this was due not only to a hopeless underestimation of the complexity and changeability of modern lifeworlds but also to the fact that modernized societies with their systemic interrelationships extend beyond the dimensions of a lifeworld that could be measured by a planner’s imagination. The current manifestation of a crisis of modern architecture derives less from a crisis in architecture than from the fact that architecture voluntarily allowed itself to become overburdened.46

I find myself in agreement with this assessment insofar as it is directed toward postmodernism in architecture and urbanism. But the key issue stems more specifically from the pronounced formalism of certain approaches to the urban environment in the twentieth century. Habermas is right to insist that the social complexity of contemporary urban life is not amenable to any one program of urban form, but he is wrong to dismiss all utopian urban practice informed by “alternative mappings” of the material environment. To trace social formation and thus community back to mechanisms of rational dialogue in an exclusive manner is precisely to leave out of account the more visionary and imaginative processes that are necessary for significant social change of any kind. As argued in chapter three, the struggle to make social justice a material reality requires above all collective practices of dissent, not institutions that promote reasonable consent. While neither New Urbanism nor postmodern urbanism have proven to be convincing resources for the achievement of social justice, they at least serve as a reminder that shaping the urban environment cannot be a matter of indifference to this achievement. In the final chapter of this book I sketch a positive model of urban and social transformation in accord with Harvey’s notion of dialectical utopianism. What this model attempts to show in some detail is how the idea of dissenting community might look in practice. NOTES 1. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2001), 52–53. 2. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning, 101–3. 3. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2002),130. 4. Rossi, Architecture, 107. 5. David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 32. 6. Harvey, Justice, Nature, 302. 7. Robert Stern, “Gray Architecture as Post-Modernism, or, Up and Down from Orthodoxy,” in Architecture Theory since 1968, 242–45, 243. 8. Carol Vogel Nichols, ed., Michael Graves: Buildings and Projects 1966–1981 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985), 11.

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9. Nichols, Buildings, 195. 10. Brian Libby, “Reevaluating Postmodernism,” Architecture Week, http://www. ArchitectureWeek.com/2002/0605/culture_1-1.html (5 June 2002). 11. See, for example, Jeanie Senior, “What’s Not to Love about the Skyline? A Lot, It Seems,” Portland Tribune, http://portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story _id=30852 (15 June 2005). 12. Nan Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 251. 13. Mary McLeod, “Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism,” in Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968, 680–702; 685. 14. Kenneth Frampton, “Some Reflections on Postmodernism and Architecture,” in Lisa Appignanesi, ed., Postmodernism: ICA Documents (London: Free Association Books, 1989), 75–87, 76. 15. Frampton, “Reflections,” 86–87. 16. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism (London / New York: Verso, 1996), 5. 17. Harvey, “The Condition of Postmodernity,” in Spaces of Postmodernism, eds., Micheal J. Dear and Stephen Flusty (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2002), 169–76, 172. 18. Michael Dear, “Postmodernism and Planning,” in Dear and Flusty, Spaces of Postmodernism, 162–69, 167. 19. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984), xxiv. 20. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, xxiv. 21. Maurice Culot and Leon Krier, “The Only Path for Architecture,” in Hays, Architecture Theory, 350–55, 353. 22. Fredric Jameson, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,” in Hays, Architecture Theory, 440–61. 23. Jameson, Postmodernism, xi. 24. Jameson, Postmodernism, 6. 25. Jameson, Postmodernism, 18. 26. Jameson, Postmodernism, 33. 27. Jameson, Postmodernism, 38. 28. Jameson, Postmodernism, 44. 29. Jameson, Postmodernism, 49. 30. Jameson, Postmodernism, 54. 31. Jameson, Postmodernism, 417–18. 32. Harvey, “Condition of Postmodernity,” 171. 33. Harvey, “Condition of Postmodernity,” 172. 34. Harvey, “Condition of Postmodernity,” 172–73. 35. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), 3. 36. Jameson, Archaeologies, 3–4. 37. Jameson, Archaeologies, 12. 38. Jameson, Archaeologies, 232. 39. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (New York / London: Routledge, 2002), 281.

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40. Frampton, “Reflections,” 78. 41. Harvey, Justice, Nature, 109. 42. Harvey, Justice, Nature, 112. 43. Harvey, Justice, Nature, 112. 44. Harvey, Justice, Nature, 315–16. 45. Jürgen Habermas, “Modern and Postmodern Architecture,” in Hays, Architecture Theory, 416–26, 424. 46. Habermas, “Modern and Postmodern Architecture,” 423.

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Dialectical Utopianism

THE IDEA OF DIALECTICAL UTOPIANISM In the previous two chapters the social configurations behind New Urbanism and postmodern urbanism were analyzed and critiqued. In keeping with the general method and concerns of this book, my intention was not simply to reject these varieties of urbanism but rather to show that certain aspects of them offer valuable clues for arriving at an appreciation of the urban environment and an approach to urban practice that furthers the goals of social justice. While New Urbanism’s charter calls for more local determinism and efforts to address systemic urban inequality and disadvantage, its relationship to political and corporate institutions means that in practice its egalitarian aspirations are gravely compromised or simply given up. For its part, a key strength of postmodernist urbanism is that it promotes sensitivity to local differences and can thus be aligned to some extent with the pluralist politics of inclusion advocated by Young. In truth though, the postmodern approach never produced a model of urbanism capable of resisting oppressive uses of power. Despite an attractive ideology of inclusion and populism, in practice postmodern urbanism led to little more than individual examples of corporate and civic architecture that rarely achieved the original goal of reconnecting professional architects and urbanists with liberal democratic civil society. In the final chapter of this book I offer a positive sketch of how certain urban practices can aid the struggle for social justice. What I advance here follows the model of dissenting community outlined in chapter three. There I brought together Rancière’s idea of democratic politics as permanent struggle about who has the right to rule with Lefevbre’s notion of the right to the city. In this chapter I return to these ideas in an attempt to adapt them to a general 131

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approach to urban practice inspired by Harvey’s analysis of contemporary cities. Such an approach is useful in combating the naïve environmental determinism that characterizes New Urbanism in particular and professional urbanism more generally. Thus, while it is true that collective behavior can be modified through changing the built environment, changes to this environment themselves result from collective projects and desires. Modernist urbanism and New Urbanism are motivated by a common drive to standardize or normalize urban behavior. The oppositional political stance of dialectical utopianism, by contrast, seeks to challenge such standardization and create spaces where alternative, more progressive forms of grassroots community organization can emerge. The question I tackle in this chapter is thus: what would the theory of dissenting community look like as urban practice? I give my answer to this question the title “dialectical utopianism” in the sense proposed by David Harvey. In Spaces of Hope Harvey introduces this notion in the following way: The task is then to define an alternative, not in terms of some static spatial form or even some perfected emancipatory process. The task is to pull together a spatiotemporal utopianism—a dialectical utopianism—that is rooted in our present possibilities at the same time as it points towards different trajectories for human uneven geographical developments.1

As noted in the previous chapter, Harvey’s variety of utopianism differs from that advocated by Jameson precisely in its appeal to practices “rooted in our present possibilities.” Harvey also explicitly rejects the postmodernist logic of “both-and” and insists that a dialectical approach to urban practice must resolutely confront the “either-or” of collective decision-making. Harvey and Jameson are nevertheless united in a belief that progressive politics cannot exist without some sense of utopianism. After all, to believe that society must change in profound and systemic ways requires some collective sense of how things could be radically different. As representatives of the Marxian tradition both Harvey and Jameson are committed to challenging the neoliberal orthodoxy that has established itself across liberal democracies in the last three decades. According to this orthodoxy, repeated countless times across mass media every day, there is no intrinsic conflict between progressive politics and the dictates of the capitalist market. The basic either-or in question for dialectical utopianism is: giving corporate capitalism free rein or making material changes that will advance the goals of social justice. For progressive change to be possible it is necessary to devise forms of collective practice to bring about such changes. While the next section offers a theoretical model of such practice, subsequent sections consider that model in the context of concrete movements and situations.

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COMMUNITY IN ACTION In part one I repeatedly claimed that the theories of dialogical and singular community unduly restrict the sense of collective action considered constitutive of social configuration. In both cases this tendency takes the form of rendering action ultimately linguistic in nature. Thus, when Young complains that Habermas’s theory of communicative action is unrealistic, she simply pleads for a broader notion of what constitutes legitimate communication rather than challenging the very restriction of action to modes of communication. A common criticism of Habermas’s theory is that it is unrealistic, insofar as it expects consensus between rival parties to discussion to emerge in a way that excludes the workings of oppressive power and coercion. While this criticism is relevant and warranted it does not really get to the heart of the problem, namely that linguistic practice is only a certain limited sphere of human action. If one reflects on how key historical moments of political progress have occurred in modern liberal democracies, it is not plausible to think of them as merely the result of linguistic acts or transformations. While constitutions and declarations are naturally looked at as significant documents of political change, the acts of material and social transformation that preceded and succeeded them should not be forgotten or sidelined. No doubt the rights-based nature of liberal democratic institutions of justice has played a large part in this tendency to substitute the word for the deed of social change. Certainly, as long as social justice remains a purely theoretical or procedural question, this ideological distortion has a good chance of remaining unchallenged. As soon as actual material conditions within the urban environment become the focus, however, this illusion is more likely to be dispelled. For no amount of dialogue or redefinition can in itself alter the inequalities manifest in contemporary cities across liberal democracies: phenomena such as disparities in social services and public school provision to different inner-city neighborhoods, gentrification caused by untrammeled real estate speculation, and the influence of corporate business lobbyists and middle-class homeowner associations on municipal urban policy and funding. As argued in part one, the question of social justice cannot be restricted to a concern for who participates in an apparently fair and open public discussion. In reality mere conversational participation in no way guarantees fairness. A key implication that follows from this is that a credible model of community centered on the concern for social justice must break out of the restriction of social action to communicative action. In order for fair discussion to arise in liberal democracies, unjust inequalities of material power and privilege must first be tackled. It is at this point—before communicative action can begin in earnest—that genuine collective praxis occurs.

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In his Critique of Dialectical Reason Jean-Paul Sartre developed a detailed theory of social action within a broadly Marxian framework. In this work Sartre draws a distinction between what he calls the “series” on the one hand and the “fused group” on the other. In simple terms, the series is a random collection of individuals lacking any unifying project or reason for being together. Sartre’s main example is of people waiting for a bus: each person is essentially interchangeable with any other and, beyond a certain background understanding of latent rivalry, there is no connecting thread that binds the individuals. In the fused group, by contrast, each individual as such suspends his or her individuality in the name of a common action and goal. In this case, rather than a random collection of persons we encounter a group unified through a shared sense of purpose. As an exemplification of the fused group Sartre offers a description of the events surrounding the storming of the Bastille as a key collective act of the French Revolution. The choice of this example bears out one of Sartre’s central points vis-à-vis the fused group, namely that it is a short-lived, intense state of collective practice. A key feature of the fused group underscored by Sartre is the dissolution of the more usual sense of acting as an individualized self. In the fused group: I could not take the group as a community-subject of which I am the object (the means, for example). . . . I come to the group as its group activity, and I constitute it as an activity in so far as the group comes to me as my group activity, as my own group existence. The characteristic of the tension of interiority between the group (apart from me) and myself inside it is that in reciprocity we are simultaneously both quasi-object and quasi-subject, for and through each other.2

Sartre thinks of the series and fused group as mutually exclusive. In fact, the latter can only arise through the suspension of the former. He also identifies the fused group with community in an explicit way: “The reality of the praxis of a (fused) group depends on the liquidation . . . of the serial, both in everyone and by everyone in everyone, and its replacement by community.”3 My main reason for turning to Sartre’s idea of the fused group is that it offers an appreciation of community not in terms of common thought, belief, or conviction (as in the dialogical model), but rather as common action. Such an appreciation, I contend, is more relevant and fruitful for an inquiry concerned with realizing the goals of social justice under the conditions of contemporary urban life. That is, the theory of the fused group is a model of community that centers on transformative material rather than linguistic action. While it appeals to a sense of spontaneous collective freedom, Sartre’s model of community does not neglect the realities of acting within a context of pre-given restrictions. In other words, the idea of the fused group offers a genuinely dialectical theory of community.

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On a purely theoretical level many objections can be raised against Sartre’s model of community. First, it has recourse to many questionable dualisms: the fused group is said to constitute as “internal” social relation, whereas the series takes the form of an “external” relation of indifference; everyday cooperative activities are dramatically distinguished from explosive, revolutionary action; and urban life is said to give rise naturally to the isolation of the series as opposed to the intimacy and immediacy of the fused group. Bearing these points in mind, Jameson is no doubt correct to insist that Sartre’s distinction between the series and fused group is far from original and, in fact, follows the well-worn path of Tönnies’s celebrated differentiation of Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (civil society) from the end of the nineteenth century. A second point of potential criticism relates to the very notion of fusion as a key trait of genuine community. As we saw in chapter two, the model of singular community unreservedly rejects the idea of community as fusion or fused identity and in fact grasps fusion as the key characteristic of totalitarian configurations of the social. While there is some justification for this suspicion the theory of singular community goes too far and removes the basis for any credible account of collective action. Indeed, according to the model of singular community such action becomes in itself suspect along with any notion of constructing community through social praxis. Finally, a theorist such as Habermas would be apt to insist that Sartre’s theory of community remains attached to a notion of everyday life as somehow degraded, as something to be overcome through a radical transition to truly revolutionary group action. From a Habermasian perspective the model of community proposed by Sartre is naïve insofar as it sees social transformation as arising out of spontaneous group action operating beyond objectively distinguished institutions of decision-making within liberal democracies. In other words, the key shortcoming of Sartre’s theory of action would be its failure to recognize the high level of social and political complexity and differentiation confronted by any group dedicated to social change under contemporary conditions. While there is some truth to all these objections, I nevertheless believe that Sartre’s notion of the fused group is useful for constructing a convincing model of community. In light of the concern for social and political pluralism that lies at the heart of efforts to realize social justice, it is certainly difficult to accept Sartre’s idea that effective social action requires a “liquidation” of otherness and the constitution of collective agency as homogeneous. Yet, all that Sartre seems to mean by this is that community exists only in and through common identity of purpose. It does not follow from this that Sartre’s sense of community involves the existence of a sort of collective substantial identity, that is, an immersion of individuals into a constructed and sanctified

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collective entity such as the nation-state. In the face of the historical specter of totalitarianism it is important to distinguish the collective action necessary for any significant social change from the collective passivity involved in the perpetuation of a repressive national regime. Only in the absence of totalitarian rule is actual community possible as a form of self-determination through collective social action. The best that can be achieved under extremely repressive conditions are acts that represent symbolically the permanent possibility of community. The core of intuitive truth that lies at the heart of Sartre’s model of community is that transformative social action involves the temporary suspension of those differences of purpose that typically distinguish individuals under the conditions of liberal democracy and often generate relations of mutual competitiveness. This is a difficult truth, insofar as such differences are intimately caught up in the process whereby each person identifies herself in any social context. In Marxian terms this is the central problem of identifying a revolutionary class that would bring about social transformation. While Marx remained attached to the idea that such a class would of necessity be universal in nature, the material conditions of contemporary social democracies call for more localized construction of community.

GUERRILLA GARDENING AS SOCIAL ACTION In chapter three I cited Henri Lefebvre’s idea of the modern city as the preeminent site of social conflict. In the context of challenges to the dialogical model of community I also had recourse to Rancière’s view of democracy as a form of political organization that involves a constant struggle over what constitutes legitimate rule. Putting these two ideas together and considering them in relation to a theory of community centered on collective action and social justice, I now turn to some contemporary movements and initiatives that serve as powerful examples of how such community might look in practice. In chapter three I also drew particular attention to Young’s notion of self-determination and interpreted this as equivalent to Lefebvre’s idea that any “right to the city” must entail a community’s practical right to shape or produce its own material environment. While professional urbanism throughout the twentieth century made various gestures in acknowledgment of such a right, the balance of evidence clearly indicates that institutionalized urbanism has been far from democratic in the sense in question. Of course, individual cases of urban policy and development have to be placed on a spectrum of positions insofar as they afford more or less popular participation. It is also true that the advocacy planning movement that emerged across liberal democracies in the late 1960s and early 1970s marked something of a high

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point in such efforts at local participation. Subsequent developments, by contrast, have largely involved a retreat from genuine popular involvement and a consolidation of bureaucratic decision-making. Despite this turn of events there are many present signs that grassroots initiatives of different kinds are attempting to make something like a right to the city a material reality, whether in cooperation with or independently of municipal authorities. The concrete initiatives considered in this and following sections offer examples of dialectical utopianism insofar as they are attempts to materially reconfigure the urban environment in ways that go against the grain of neoliberalism. That is, on often very local and modest scales, they contest the dominant and often oppressive shaping of cities by municipal and corporate powers. Most importantly, they do this principally not by instigating dialogue with other “stakeholders,” but rather through forging communities centered on dissenting material practices. The first recent initiative I would like to consider is guerrilla gardening. A quick survey of websites dedicated to this movement reveals that it is presently thriving across many liberal democracies, most notably in the United Kingdom and North America. Richard Reynolds, who has also published a book outlining the goals and tactics involved in the practice, manages an important website dedicated to this movement.4 The first two of twelve guerrilla gardening actions enumerated on the website involve identifying empty and disused patches of public space and setting up an evening or nighttime date to convene with friends to carry out clandestine gardening activity. The secretive nature of the practice is an integral part of guerrilla gardening, insofar as it is carried out largely in defiance of municipal or private neglect and indifference. Central to many groups is also the use of “seed bombs”: parcels of seeds compacted with soil that can be thrown into inaccessible plots of land and left to germinate. The history of the movement is generally traced back to the Green Guerilla group that started up in the Lower East Side of New York in 1973. The website of the group (greenguerillas.org), which is now an official nonprofit organization that helps coordinate activities in over 600 community gardens, describes the early efforts as follows: The Green Guerillas tapped the time, talent, and energy of their members. They took on projects as varied and interesting as the city itself—they threw seed “green-aids” over the fences of vacant lots, installed window boxes, planted flowers in tree pits—and helped people transform city-owned vacant lots into community gardens that serve as botanic gardens, vest pocket parks, urban farms, and as expressions of art, ecology, and culture.5

While it is significant to note that the movement began during a period when official urbanism was under sustained attack arising out of popular discontent

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across liberal democracies, its resonance today is certainly intensified by a clear trend toward individual and collective food cultivation and small-scale urban farming. Although guerrilla gardening can involve explicitly politicized action, what is generally called community gardening is arguably the movement’s most socially conspicuous and significant result to date. Community gardening fulfils a variety of tasks intimately connected to social justice: it helps consolidate neighborhoods often subject to systemic municipal neglect; it brings individuals of different races and ethnicities together in the context of collaborative activity; and it provides fresh, nutritious food to families that might otherwise struggle to meet weekly grocery bills. At the same time, however, community gardening can prove to be little more than a further symptom of the inequality and separation that arises out of gentrification, when more economically and socially privileged incomers make temporary use of plots left vacant as a result of earlier urban decline. As with any group formation, a particular instance of community gardening can either facilitate social diversity and equality or constitute an exclusionary appropriation of space within an urban neighborhood. What can be positively claimed for community gardening in most cases, however, is that it puts some brake on excessive urban redevelopment and provides a visible space of community activity. In a manner similar to organized squatting it sends out a clear message that local communities can find good uses for places that are left vacant or neglected by municipal authorities or private owners. Finally, guerrilla gardening as a political practice makes evident certain grey areas that exist between legal and illegal community activity. While many guerrilla gardening activities are technically illegal insofar as they involve the use of land that is not owned by the groups in question, municipal authorities will often turn a blind eye as long as no obvious safety issues or overt challenges to property privileges arise. At the same time, such tolerance can be seen as implied consent to infringe property rights, thus raising the possibility of more radical challenges to such a central aspect of capitalist social organization. Don Mitchell’s account of the events surrounding People’s Park in Berkeley, California, in the late 1960s and early 1970s clearly shows that guerrilla gardening can take the form of a much more pronounced political struggle. Following the University of Berkeley’s demolition of a group of buildings deemed a center for countercultural subversion, the empty lot that resulted fulfilled the minimal role of providing extra parking spaces near the campus for almost two years. In April 1969 around 3,000 people converged on the site to convert it into People’s Park. The group accomplished the transformation of a barren parking lot into verdant parkland over a single weekend. The subsequent reaction by the university chancellor ordering the area to be fenced off and constantly protected by local police eventually led to

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prolonged riots and confrontations with police and security forces. This followed accusations by a certain Governor Reagan claiming that the creators of People’s Park were in fact well-armed subversives and orders authorizing the use of tear gas and other extreme anti-protest tactics. As an important antecedent of the guerrilla gardening movement, the struggle in Berkeley amply demonstrates that in cases where the private ownership and usage of urban land is actively contested by grassroots groups, the full force of a municipal authority’s power can be turned against the putative source of democratic legitimacy—the people themselves. Guerrilla gardening, most especially when it becomes self-consciously part of a broader political struggle, is a contemporary instance of social reconfiguration in accord with Lefebvre’s original idea of a right to the city. In opposition to both contemporary urban design in New Urbanism and the reality of corporate-funded postmodern urbanism, this movement strives to transform the city into what Lefebvre envisaged—a popular work or oeuvre. Such localized, grassroots reworking of the city stands opposed to both the environmental determinism assumed by most official urbanism and the ideology of iconic singularity central to postmodern approaches to the urban environment. As the growth of guerrilla gardening over the last four decades shows, each struggle is local and unique and yet the practices of dissent deployed are capable of modified repetition within new contexts. In this way the movement also satisfies the description of “militant particularism,” insofar as it constitutes a local struggle capable of generalization. Finally, guerrilla gardening can be described as utopian in the sense that it is guided by and seeks to realize a different city for a different way of life. Amid all the present political rhetoric surrounding the notion of sustainability, it also points toward a way of organizing local production and consumption that could be freed from the drive toward surplus and waste that characterizes current globalization.

SOCIAL JUSTICE AND MUNICIPAL POWER: THE CASE OF PORTLAND 2030 Lefebvre’s original essay on the right to the city was written shortly before the massive popular protests that broke out across Europe and beyond in the spring and summer of 1968. In comparison to such times the explicit militancy of a contemporary grassroots movement such as guerrilla gardening is muted at best. Community garden initiatives are much more likely to seek accommodation or cooperation with municipal and corporate powers rather than overt confrontation. Such a desire for reconciliation is indicative of a general political climate across liberal democracies in accord with the Habermasian model of

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dialogical community. Many advocates and practitioners of guerrilla gardening would argue that changing municipal ordinances that govern permissible land use is key if the movement is to make more profound changes to the way local communities shape their own material environment. In other words, systemic and structural change brought about by municipal government is seen as a necessary precondition for realizing community self-determination. In this section I consider a genuine and wide-ranging municipal initiative in Portland, Oregon to involve citizens at the grassroots level in shaping the future of their city. Initiated by Tom Potter, mayor of Portland between 2004 and 2008, Portland 2030 took the form of a visioning exercise along the lines set out in chapter four. As we saw there, such exercises typically attempt to arrive at a unified picture of how citizens would like their city to look several decades into the future. The approach can be more or less visionary, depending of whether the data to be collected are primarily quantitative or qualitative in nature. While quantitative data gathering and collation involves less of a drain on time and human resources, qualitative data collection has the advantage of indicating more nuanced and finely grained alternative futures. Shortly after taking office Mayor Potter announced his intention to launch the visioning project and the planning process for community consultation ensued between December 2005 and April 2006. Public engagement occurred in two phases, the first from April through September 2006 and a second between January and April 2007. On the basis of responses to standardized questions given by over 17,000 residents, condensed reports were published in two documents in October 2007 and February 2008. It is worth stressing at the outset that Portland 2030 is to date one of the most ambitious and extensive visioning exercises carried out in the United States or elsewhere. In the spring of 2009 the initiative was distinguished by winning the American Planning Association Award for Public Outreach. The municipal framework for organizing the visioning process was known as visionPDX. It should be noted that visionPDX was particularly successful in reaching out to underrepresented groups within the city. Such work laid the foundations for a number of important grassroots coalitions in Portland that have since become effective and visible advocates for various social justice causes. The initial statement of intent given in the October 2007 Community Engagement Report describes visionPDX as a “city-initiated, community-led project developed to create a new vision for Portland, both for its municipal government and for the community at large.”6 As we shall see, the phrase “city-initiated, community-led” is key to the stated intention of the exercise as well as to its political credibility. As the report also notes, results of the visioning process were meant to feed directly into the Portland Plan, the urban planning strategy that will guide decision-making by Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustain-

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ability through the next two decades. The initiative clearly intends a high level of continuous public involvement in actual urban development in the city for the foreseeable future. In fact, the report boldly aligns itself with the notion of “community governance,” according to which “ownership of community problems, solutions and opportunities . . . rests with the entire community.”7 The mode of operation adopted for public engagement involved the identification of “trusted community-based organizations and leaders to leverage existing relationships.”8 Some sixteen social justice and minority groups were questioned about how they saw the impact of their activities on their immediate community and what separated them from other community organizations and municipal authorities. In addition, interviews were conducted with a further twenty “key strategic partners and stakeholders,” including neighborhood and local business associations. The report makes clear that the goal of directly involving grassroots groups was to mitigate common mistrust of municipal government and a suspicion that the city’s invitation to community involvement would not generate tangible results. By building relationships of trust with grassroots organizations, visionPDX laid solid foundations for a much more effective general outreach exercise. Conversely, the danger involved in this method was that the credibility of these organizations might be compromised if the city of Portland eventually failed to follow community wishes at the implementation stage. The Portland 2030 document released in February 2008 organized the results of survey responses into five key areas: building, economy, environment, learning, and society.9 It also identified topics that demonstrated broad consensus and brought these together as “Portland’s values” relating to community connectedness and distinctiveness, equity and accessibility, sustainability, accountability, diversity, creativity, and safety. It is worthwhile noting that this effort to identify common values across a huge variety of responses indicates that a certain consensus understanding of community was assumed by the visioning exercise. While it may seem pragmatically justified to make such an assumption, earlier discussion of genuine problems with the dialogical model of community should be borne in mind with respect to the visionPDX process. As the consideration of the Wanaka 2020 visioning process in chapter four showed, public consultation driven by a presumption of underlying consensus naturally favors established and powerful participants over other groups and individuals who possess less symbolic capital within a discussion. To be fair, the Portland 2030 document does acknowledge that responses also identified areas of disagreement, where “more conversation and problem-solving” were needed to arrive at a clear line of progress. However, understanding disagreement as a merely temporary social phenomenon that can be overcome by further discussion only serves to confirm

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the dialogical bias at work. The alternative model of dissenting community I seek to defend in this chapter holds, on the contrary, that disagreement is in fact the central and permanent feature of any democratic society. This follows from the simple and basic premise put forward by Rancière concerning the nature of democracy, namely that it is a form of political organization whereby the source of legitimate rule is constantly contested. According to this understanding, in a democracy it is precisely the nature of “popular rule” that remains permanently subject to contestation. From this it follows that any municipal power or community organization operating under democratic conditions is involved in an unremitting struggle to gain or retain recognized political legitimacy. In order in ensure that the Portland 2030 exercise represented a genuine expression of views across a socially diverse spectrum, a voluntary “Vision into Action” (VIA) Committee was formed largely through an open application process. As the Portland 2030 document states, those forming the committee “were asked to serve as individuals rather than representing particular organizations or perspectives.”10 The request to transcend individual commitment to particular groups and causes once again indicates that something like the Habermasian ideal speech situation was aimed at. As we saw, the problem with such an assumption is that it tends to produce artificial agreement around topics that in reality involve hard choices between alternative approaches and actions. A group within the VIA Committee produced a set of four survey questions that were deliberately open-ended rather than limited in terms of possible responses. These questions asked respondents to give details relating to what they valued most about Portland, immediately desired changes, how the city would ideally look in twenty years time, and how such a situation might be achieved. In accord with the idea of community governance that seeks to shift the initiative away from municipal bureaucracy to grassroots self-organization, the document stressed that the questions were formulated “to get the broad view of people’s values and concerns and then later determine how the City and its partners could address them.”11 When considering both visionPDX reports as a whole it is clear that to a great extent the VIA Committee sought to reverse the original order of priority. Whereas the initiative stemmed from the mayor and city council, the engagement process attempted to convert it into a community-based and “owned” project. To a great extent this seems to have been successful, especially with respect to underrepresented ethnic minority and immigrant groups. The VIA Committee and subsequently formed coalition were also successful in convincing the city council to fund an annual grant scheme of $200,000 to $250,000. Between 2006 and 2009 these funds were disbursed to many social justice and minority groups on a competitive basis. In this way, this visionPDX initiative

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had immediate positive effects for many of the groups identified in the community engagement process as being left out of official networks of support. Despite the real achievements of VIA in gaining credible grassroots input into the municipal initiative, local media tended to take a more skeptical or overtly critical line on the visioning exercise. The generally implied line of criticism was that visionPDX was heavy on vision and light on action. To a certain extent at least, this impression was a symptom of a broader media representation of Mayor Potter as insufficiently pragmatic in his approach to municipal policy. An article in the freely distributed Portland Tribune, for example, expressed concern over the fact that $1.2 million of city money had been spent in producing nothing better than a “vague utopia that everyone wants.”12 The Oregonian, a broadly distributed local newspaper, ran a story at the end of Potter’s term of office (December 2008) that devoted space to the Portland 2030 process. The article characterizes visionPDX as one of Potter’s many well-meaning but politically naïve initiatives, “a more-than-$1 million survey of what people want from government, [that] seems more symbolic than substantive.”13 It further insists that such surveys are predestined to become so many neglected dusty files and that the 17,000 citizens interviewed fell well short of Potter’s ambition to reach at least 100,000 Portlanders. Such media appraisal is in fact highly tendentious and fails to appreciate the real gains made by grassroots organization in the city as a direct result of the visionPDX process. Following a well-established tendency of mainstream media to focus on personalities at the expense of substantive policies, Portland’s local newspapers portrayed the visioning exercise as Mayor Potter’s private utopia rather than focusing on the real needs of politically underrepresented groups identified by and in part incorporated into VIA. In the face of significant budget cuts, the city of Portland made the decision in the spring of 2009 to remove all structural and grant funding allocated to VIA. There was no public consultation involved in this decision and the newly created Bureau of Planning and Sustainability failed to offer any official justification for the move. This made for a somewhat melancholy, though in part defiant, celebration of VIA grant recipients I attended in May 2009. The event was held in City Hall in the presence of Mayor Sam Adams and three city commissioners, who spoke of hard but necessary cuts and how the visionPDX process was now evolving into its implementation stage. The clear implication was that, in the minds of the city council, the Portland Plan no longer required direct input from the grassroots networks that had been formed at a result of the visioning exercise. Thus, as far as municipal decision-making is concerned, the $2 million of public money spent and thousands of hours of volunteer time dedicated to framing, eliciting, and analyzing Portland’s community vision have ultimately produced the dusty shelf of files many feared would mark the

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end of the exercise. The argument offered by the Portland City Council that VIA had always been a transitional body is belied by the fact that the stated intent of Portland 2030 was to ensure community input at the consultation and implementation stages. The latest iteration of the Portland Plan issued by the Bureau of Planning in October 2008 states that the urban planning stage will extend through 2011. Portland City Council’s talk of a transition turned out to be inadvertently accurate. Shortly after the decision was made to remove municipal funding the Regional Research Institute at Portland State University agreed to act as VIA’s fiscal sponsor. It is quite possible that severing direct ties with municipal government will actually allow the VIA coalition a more credible position from which to challenge and influence city decisions relating to social justice and equality. Whatever its institutional context, however, the political significance of Portland 2030 will ultimately be decided not by the existence of a database but rather by collective grassroots action to address issues raised in VIA’s reports. As things currently stand the very existence of the Portland Plan is in question insofar as drastic cutbacks have been made at the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. Since Mayor Adams came to power the focus of urban renewal and development has shifted to large corporate projects such as the creation of a professional soccer stadium and construction of a large conference hotel. Such a shift is always attractive to elected officials who wish to gain a reputation for “getting things done.” No elaborate conspiracy theory is required to see how diverting public money to essentially private construction projects will endear municipal leaders to the business community and win support from local media for putatively creating jobs. While it certainly helped to promote ties between underrepresented grassroots organizations, the Portland 2030 initiative also demonstrated the fragility and limitedness of efforts to bring about significant social change through local or national government. In my view, a basic lesson to be learned from visioning exercises is that the struggle for social justice must be initiated and maintained by grassroots groups themselves. Given the fact that large corporations operating within liberal democracies have massive resources at their disposal to influence government decision-making at every level, grassroots organizations have to consolidate and demonstrate their social and cultural capital in order to garner popular support sufficient to counteract the socially regressive tendencies of corporate power. This requires that these organizations view their relations with government bureaucracy as largely antagonistic in nature. Concessions must be won from government through hard campaigning that publicly demonstrates the need for specific changes to meet concerns for social justice. As current events on the national political stage in the United States amply show, even modest and deeply compromised reform in such ar-

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eas as health provision and ecological protection will be subject to concerted and vitriolic counterattack from an alliance of business interests, conservation media, and reactionary community organizations. In such a context, simply expecting government bureaucracy to decide in favor of progressive change is a sure path to inaction and despair.

RECLAIM THE STREETS AS URBAN DISSENT The model of dissenting community I am proposing in this final chapter follows the approach to urban politics put forward by Henri Lefebvre. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Lefebvre was closely associated with the artistic-political collective called the Situationist International (SI). In the first few years following its inception in 1957 the SI was closely involved in direct action against urban renewal projects across Europe that often centered on an attempt to facilitate high-speed traffic circulation at the expense of neighborhood integrity. Around the time of the founding of the Amsterdam chapter of the SI in 1958, for example, that city was faced with proposals to fill in most of the historic canals and introduce a network of highways into the urban fabric. Popular pressure to retain the pedestrian friendliness of the environment eventually succeeded in making municipal authorities step back from such plans. The situationist approach to the city initially involved the creation of “psychogeographical” mappings of the urban environment. Such mappings were meant to suggest how the orientation of everyday life toward its urban setting could be fundamentally transformed from a functional to an experimental or playful mode of experience. The best-known written production of the SI, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle from 1967, speaks of official environmental planning and urbanism as a concerted effort to create a consistent physical setting for universal passive consumption: The capitalist production system has unified space, breaking down the boundaries between one society and the next. This unification is also a process, at once extensive and intension, of trivialization. Just as the accumulation of commodities mass-produced for the abstract space of the market inevitably shattered all regional and legal barriers . . . so too it was bound to dissipate the independence and quality of places. The power to homogenize is the heavy artillery that has battered down all Chinese walls.14

The preceding chapters made clear that, despite manifest and profound differences, New Urbanism and postmodern urbanism share a concern for the “independence and quality of places.” While the former channeled this concern into a narrow and ultimately socially regressive set of practices of urban

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development, the latter failed to transform its critique of modernist urbanism into a set of alternative, truly progressive practices. As shown, the backlash against modernism as articulated by these two movements has in fact resulted in an even greater degree of complicity between urban development and rapacious market-driven forces. The situationists, by contrast, did devise forms of collective urban practice that confronted the mechanisms of commodity capitalism. These were principally the dérive or experimental urban drifting and detournement or subversive hijacking of clichéd media images, artworks, and texts. Situationist tactics and the underlying polemic against mass passivity are much in evidence in the contemporary Reclaim the Streets movement. As with guerrilla gardening, Reclaim the Streets (RTS) is a thriving global movement across liberal democracies that can be traced back to foundational localized events. In this case the catalytic context was a protest camp set up to oppose an extension of the M3 motorway in Twyford Down, southern England. Protesters remained at the site from December 1991 through the following December. Eventually they were removed by private security guards and the section of the highway was completed, despite outstanding questions concerning its legality within the framework of environmental protection laws in the United Kingdom and European Union. The Twyford Down protest was the longest collective action staged against road construction in UK history and marked the beginning of broader opposition to the then-Conservative government’s “Roads for Prosperity” policy, a strategy that promised “the biggest road-building programme since the Romans.” Whether one took this aspiration for Hitlerian hubris or Monty-Pontyesque absurdity, the most immediately palpable effect was organized grassroots political action on a level that had been not seen since in the UK since the National Union of Mineworkers had opposed mass pit closures in the mid-1980s. While the initial road construction protests out of which the movement grew were prolonged oppositional actions launched in response to official policy decisions, by the mid-1990s the activities of RTS had taken the form of spontaneous urban carnivals where traffic would be stopped and vibrant street life allowed to break out for a limited period. Such events have occurred on a regular basis since then across many liberal democracies, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. As the UK website for RTS relates, this temporary conversion of everyday boredom and control into urban festival has a pointedly political purpose: It’s about reclaiming the streets as public inclusive space from the private exclusive use of the car. But we believe in this as a broader principle, taking back those things which have been enclosed within capitalist circulation and returning them to collective use as a commons. . . . Ultimately it is in the streets that power must be dissolved: for the streets where daily life is endured, suffered

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and eroded, and where power is confronted and fought, must be turned into the domain where daily life is enjoyed, created and nourished.15

The resonances with the counter-urbanism of the SI are obvious. Especially in its early years at the end of the 1950s the situationist mission was essentially concerned with an urbanism of pleasure. Just as the situationist dérive sought to undo the collective functional response to the urban environment, the RTS event is an attempt to subvert normal collective behavior in the city. Although active opposition to cars is the immediate purpose of RTS, beyond such opposition lies the positive task of transforming the functional road into the living street: “The road is mechanical, linear movement epitomised by the car. The street, at best, is a living place of human movement and social intercourse, of freedom and spontaneity.”16 The RTS website also makes clear that the movement’s broader task is one of placing community before commodity through the creation of genuine public space. The following statement is a virtual paraphrase of the earlier passage taken from The Society of the Spectacle: The privatisation of public space in the form of the car continues the erosion of neighbourhood and community that defines the metropolis. Road schemes, business “parks,” shopping developments—all add to the disintegration of community and the flattening of a locality. Everywhere becomes the same as everywhere else. Community becomes commodity—a shopping village, sedated and under constant surveillance. The desire for community is then fulfilled elsewhere, through spectacle, sold to us in simulated form. A TV soap “street” or “square” mimicking the arena that concrete and capitalism are destroying. The real street, in this scenario, is sterile. A place to move through not to be in. It exists only as an aid to somewhere else—through a shop window, billboard or petrol tank.17

Finally, the movement explicitly endorses the practice of nonviolent direct action, again in accord with the SI’s privileging of concrete urban interventions over any elaboration of social or political theory. As with situationist militancy, it is a question of overcoming mass apathy and acquiescence through collective action, rather than attempting to reformulate the terms of debate between civil society and bureaucratic power: RTS is about encouraging more people to take part in direct action. Everyone knows the destruction which roads and cars are causing, yet the politicians still take no notice. Hardly surprising—they only care about staying in power and maintaining their “authority” over the majority of people. Direct action is about destroying that power and authority, and people taking responsibility for themselves. Direct action is not just a tactic; it is an end in itself. It is about enabling

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people to unite as individuals with a common aim, to change things directly by their own actions.18

In the context of the United States RTS came to prominence in November 1999 when a celebratory group occupied Times Square after setting up a decoy for local police in Union Square. In Dialectical Urbanism Andy Merrifield refers to the RTS movement as “neo-situationist” and relates how the “zero tolerance” urban policy of the major of New York at the time, Rudy Giuliani, ensured that the RTS revelers were driven away by law enforcement officers within an hour of occupying the square.19 Merrifield also makes a direct link between the RTS movement and protests at the World Trade Organization in Seattle at the end of the same month. As in the United Kingdom where initial protests against road building crystallized into a more radical movement in reaction to the passing of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act in 1994, events in the United States five years later were provoked in large part by increasingly repressive bureaucratic control of urban space. That such oppositional direct action should occur primarily in the large cities of liberal democracies is to be expected insofar as these are the places where multinational corporations and government bureaucracies are most in evidence. As Merrifield remarks: “Cities are now the nerve centers of globalization and of globalizing capital, and equally play a crucial ideological and political role within this system.”20 What distinguishes RTS from both guerrilla gardening and municipal visioning exercises is that it takes the form of an open confrontation with corporate and government power. Contrary to what the UK website of RTS claims, such confrontation will never eliminate power. The best it can hope to do is reconfigure power relations in such a way that certain ingrained inequalities are gradually undermined. The strength of a movement like RTS is that it makes collective opposition to bureaucratic urban control public and demonstrates in deeds rather than words that another way of urban life is possible. Ultimately, as with Sartre’s fused group, the carnival must end and everyday productive life recommence. As with the traditional festival, however, the short-lived overturning of normal life serves as a reminder that differences of power and social standing are always subject to the assent of citizens. In my view, the value of the situationist-inspired RTS movement is that it publicly demonstrates an alternative mode of urban life through collective action. It thus goes beyond consensual approaches, whether practical in nature (community gardening) or dialogical (visioning). Throughout liberal democracies right now there are clear signs that many individuals and groups are devising ways that challenge the established patterns of behavior engendered by commodity capitalism. The well-canvassed disinterest in official politics evident across liberal democracies does not necessarily entail disenchantment with local political action. To the contrary, the wealth of current initiatives points

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to a more mature and progressive form of democracy that is geared toward local self-determination. Taken as a whole, such actions and movements are indicative of a contemporary spirit of urban utopianism.

DIALECTICAL UTOPIANISM AND CONSTRUCTING COMMUNITY In the course of the twentieth century utopianism in various guises elicited extreme enthusiasm and repugnance. Of all arenas in which modernist utopianism had brought about change it was arguably within the urban environment that the most fervent opposition rose up against it from the late 1950s on. A further half-century on we now confront a situation in which the majority of the global population lives in an urban context. Of course this context differs hugely in different parts of the world. For all the visible signs of material deprivation evident in the cities of developed countries, one does not—not yet at least—encounter the massive sprawling shantytowns typical of almost every large conurbation in the developing world. In this book I have focused exclusively on social configurations projected by theory and practice originating in and largely intended for relatively affluent liberal democracies. Within such a limited context I have attempted to show that dominant approaches to community exhibit serious shortcomings and limitations. The model of dialogical community, while it has much potential for pragmatic and local application, excludes what I would call the utopian aspect of organized collective life. In doing this it takes for granted and naturalizes what is in fact the dominant social utopia of contemporary liberal democracies—incremental and consensual progress. For its part singular community rejects the very idea of construction, taking the social bond as something given before all action and dialogue. At the same time it attempts to substitute the idea of gradual reform and progress with a vague appeal to sudden radical social transformation. As I have argued, this indeterminate notion of change is neither intellectually credible nor practically useful. Bringing some of the more fruitful and cogent aspects of these two models of community together with important supplementary elements, I have elaborated the idea of dissenting community in theory and practice in order to point toward an approach to contemporary urban life that is both visionary and practically relevant. In alignment with the recent work of Harvey I characterize this approach to community as dialectical utopianism. In the context of his discussion of dialectical utopianism Harvey proposes that any actual community be understood as “an enclosed space (irrespective of scale or even frontier definitions) within which a certain well-defined system of

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rules prevails.”21 Constructing community, he notes, involves producing such a rule-governed space. The ever-present possibility of overturning social norms, however, means that “communities are rarely stable for long.” While Harvey is opposed to Benedict Anderson’s notion that community is essentially a collective imaginary construct, he holds that utopianism is useful for considering alternative sets of rules that might govern social organization. Convinced that local communities of interest inevitably degenerate into exclusionary social formations, Harvey holds that the key to progressive community action lies in its ability to attach to a broader task of opposition to oppressive power. In a passage already cited in part he remarks: [T]he re-making and re-imagining of “community” will work in progressive directions only if it is connected en route to a more generalized radical insurgent politics. That means that a radical project (however defined) must exist. The rule-making that ever constitutes community must be set against the rulebreaking that makes for revolutionary transformations.22

Harvey, as noted above, proposes a utopianism of social process rather than one of spatial form. This in no way entails, however, that he considers models of the built environment as a matter of indifference for progressive politics. On the contrary, he is acutely aware of how the physical environment frames social action. He paraphrases Marx’s famous remark: “we can always aspire to make our own historical geography but never under historical and geographical conditions of our own choosing.”23 This statement indicates that a truly material utopianism begins with social conditions as they are and takes these conditions as a datum against which to measure how things might or should be. For Harvey, to understand social change dialectically is to relate the particular to the universal and vice versa. Dialectical utopianism thus signifies both a way of relating local community concerns to a broader struggle against oppression and inequality and an embedding of the concern for social justice in an effort to reshape the immediate material environment. Without the movement toward universalization, community action will be unable to address more profound and systemic causes of injustice. But this does not mean that dissenting community simply folds back into the kind of universality intended by the model of dialogical community. In the case of dialectical utopianism universality does not stem from rules relating to consensus formation, but rather from “the moment of political judgement, commitment, and material praxis.”24 In other words, such utopianism relates to the manner in which instances of collective action take on meaning beyond their immediate context. Community gardening and RTS activities have clearly demonstrated that alternative ways of shaping the urban environment can quickly become

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exemplary, spawning broader movements for change through their imaginative hold rather than via any process of rational persuasion. Such networks of progressive action are contemporary instances of Sartre’s fused group—communities in deed rather than word. In the final chapter of Spaces of Hope Harvey elaborates on what he identifies as the figure of the “insurgent architect,” a form of agency that aims to shape the urban environment according to the notion of dialectical utopianism. Surprisingly for a committed Marxist, Harvey looks to the UN Declaration of Human Rights as a key historical document that might be reformulated to create something like a manifesto of dialectical utopianism. With reference to Article 14 of the declaration he sets out what he calls the “right to the production of space.” Such a right would coincide with Lefebvre’s original notion of a right to the city that stands at the heart of the idea of dissenting community, in this case framed in a global context. Harvey describes it as follows: If, for example, labor had the same right of mobility as capital, if political persecution could be resisted (as the affluent and privileged have proven) by geographical movement, and if individuals and collectivities had the right to change their locations at will, then the kind of world we live in would change dramatically. But the production of space means more than merely the ability to circulate within a pre-ordained spatially structured world. It also means the right to reconstruct spatial relations (territorial forms, communicative capacities, and rules) in ways that turn space from an absolute framework of action into a more malleable relative and relational aspect of social life.25

Here the intimate connection between the ability of a community to shape its own material environment and the broader task of achieving social justice is brought into sharp focus. While potential instances of the former are without number, the key question is whether they might all be regulated by a common goal of opposing oppressive power and combating inequality. As I have attempted to show in this chapter and throughout this book, traditional liberal rights to association, expression, and conscience are insufficient to constitute material freedom in the absence of a right to place. In an obvious and immediate sense, the social organization generated by capitalist production rests ultimately on the appropriation of land and real estate. As researchers such as Harvey have demonstrated so powerfully in recent decades, the gradual displacement of large-scale industrial production by service, culture, and entertainment industries across liberal democracies has made the managing and promotion of cities a central preoccupation of governmental and corporate powers. Such a shift was already recognized by the situationists, who by 1960 were already speaking of a total reshaping of the modern city according to the

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logic of commodification. As both research and everyday experience readily show, in recent decades traditional urban public spaces have become increasingly subject to direct national, municipal, or corporate control. In the name of safer streets and neighborhoods and the control of putatively subversive forces, official urban reorganization has inexorably eroded the actual public practice of the freedoms of association. At the same time, governments in many liberal democracies have moved to curtail such freedoms through new legal statutes. Whether it is the right to strike or the right to publicly protest, the increasingly strident message of hegemonic power has been the same: public space is closed to all public activities other than those sanctioned by government and business. In the face of such a situation it is tempting to agree with Agamben’s stark assessment that we are in fact living through something equivalent to a permanent state of emergency, a kind of international martial law. While the idea of dissenting community does recognize something akin to Agamben’s idea of a profound opposition between governmental control and genuine social existence, it locates redemptive potential in the permanent possibility of alternative collective practices. Collective grassroots self-determination can come neither through mere reasonable dialogue nor through appeal to indeterminate change. The one can lead only to complicity with oppressive power and the other to collective quietism and despair. The alternative proposed here—dissenting community—is an attempt to be realistic about the necessity of struggling against established power while insisting that effective opposition requires well-designed forms of counter-practice sensitive to local conditions. Such an idea remains true to the utopian slogan that another world is possible but insists on keeping such utopianism firmly located within the present conditions of urban life. If another world is possible then this can only come about through collective transformation that starts at a local level and then captures a broader collective imagination. Localized dissent will only construct genuine community if it can find a public place capable of demonstrating its wider significance. Such places are not given, they are made.

NOTES 1. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 196. 2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (Volume One) (London / New York: Verso, 2004), 373. 3. Sartre, Critique, 387. 4. Cf. http://www.guerrillagardening.org. 5. Cf. http://greenguerillas.org/GG_ourprograms.php#helpingcommunity. 6. City of Portland / visionPDX, Community Engagement Report, October 2007, http://visionpdx.com/reading/engagement_report.php, 6.

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7. Community Engagement Report, 6. 8. Community Engagement Report, 12. 9. City of Portland / visionPDX, Portland 2030: A Vision for the Future, http:// visionpdx.com/downloads/final% 20vision%20document_Feb.pdf (Feb. 2008), 13 ff. 10. Portland 2030, 41. 11. Portland 2030, 43. 12. Jim Redden, “VisionPDX Dreams Still Fuzzy,” Portland Tribune, portland tribune.com/news/story.php?story_id =118488977243620800 (20 June 2007). 13. Anna Griffin, “Mayor Tom Potter: Symbolism vs. Substance,” Oregonian, oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/anna_griffin/index.ssf/2008/12/mayor_tom_potter _symbolism_vs.html (19 Dec. 2008). 14. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 120. 15. Reclaim the Streets UK website, http://rts.gn.apc.org/prop10.htm, http://rts .gn.apc. org/ideas.htm. 16. Reclaim the Streets UK, http://rts.gn.apc.org/prop04.htm. 17. Reclaim the Streets UK, http://rts.gn.apc.org/prop05.htm. 18. Reclaim the Streets UK, http://rts.gn.apc.org/evol.htm. 19. Andy Merrifield, Dialectical Urbanism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 128–29. 20. Merrifield, Urbanism, 12. 21. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 239. 22. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 240. 23. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 254. 24. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 248. 25. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 251.

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Index

Adams, Sam (Portland mayor), 143–44 advocacy planning, 136–37 Agamben, Giorgio, 21, 27–28, 30–33, 35–46, 49, 54, 57, 60, 67–68, 123, 152; The Coming Community, 32, 35; Homo Sacer, 39–40, 43 affordable housing, 69, 90, 95 Anderson, Benedict, 15–16, 150 Arendt, Hannah, 20 Benjamin, Walter, 25n5, 36, 39, 41, 121 Bond Sophie, 97–100 Callenbach, Ernest, 125 Calthorpe, Peter, 80, 83, 86–89, 100, 125 charrette, 96–100 Cisneros, Henry, 85 civil society, xi–xii, 14, 16, 20–1, 23, 52, 64–65, 70, 135, 147 Clinton, Bill, 85 collective action, xii, 6, 9, 28, 33, 38, 45–47, 49, 57, 64–65, 78, 82, 117, 122, 133, 135–36, 146–48, 150 collective memory, 107–8 communism, 29, 33, 35, 42, 62 communitarianism, 21, 29, 94 community: dialogical, 4, 21, 24, 27–28, 30–35, 37–42, 45–46, 49–51, 59–61,

67, 70–71, 77–106–107, 123–124, 133, 135, 149–150; dissenting, 45–46, 52, 57–65, 67–68, 70–71, 77, 119, 128, 131–32, 142, 145, 149–52; gardening, 138, 148, 150; Gemeinschaft (Tönnies), xi, 135; imagined, 15–16; intentional, 123; of interest, 83, 87; singular, 27–28, 30, 45–47, 50–51, 67, 71, 77, 106, 133; utopian, 124–125, 149–51 configuration, 21, 23–24, 27, 29, 30, 32, 35, 49–50, 59, 64, 70–71, 123–25, 131, 133, 135, 149 Connelly, Stephen, 97, 99 consensus, 4–6, 8, 11–13, 17, 33–35, 57–58, 60–1, 70, 84, 94, 96–97, 99, 101, 133, 141, 150 Culot, Maurice, 119 Dahl, R. A., 14 Dear, Michael, 118 Debord, Guy, 35, 145 Deconstructivism, 105 democracy, 12–20, 24, 34, 37, 51–52, 54, 57–64, 69–70, 84, 101, 136, 142, 149; deliberative democracy, 14–20, 23, 27, 55, 61, 83, 91; direct democracy, 17–20; postdemocracy, 58; radical democracy, 13, 51, 101

161

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162

Index

Derrida, Jacques, 5, 25n5, 34, 37, 115, 122 direct action, xii, 19, 145, 147–48 diversity, 6, 18–19, 27, 52, 62–63, 78–79, 81, 83–84, 86–88, 90, 95, 98, 100, 138, 141 Duany, Andrés, 79, 82, 84–87, 89 egalitarianism, 58 Eliot, T. S., 107 Ellin, Nan, 115 Ellis, Cliff, 97 environmental determinism, xii, 79, 82, 87, 94, 126, 132, 139 Etzioni, Amitai, 26n40, 94 exclusion, 17–18, 21, 23–24, 27, 34, 43, 54, 61, 90, 95, 98, 109, 126, 150 expressionism, 107 Flint, Anthony, 85, 99 Flyvbjerg, Bent, 99 Foucault, Michel, 5, 45, 120 Fourier, Charles, 127 Frampton, Kenneth, 125–26; critical regionalism, 125 gentrification, 66, 101, 133, 138 Giuliani, Rudy, 148 globalization, 148 Grant, Jill, 95 Graves, Michael, 111–15 guerrilla gardening, 136–39, 148; Green Guerillas, 137 Habermas, Jürgen, 3–24, 27, 45–46, 49, 53, 56, 58, 61–62, 66, 70, 83, 91, 96–97, 99, 109, 117, 119, 127–28, 133, 135; Between Facts and Norms (BFN), 13, 18, 63; communicative action, 24, 49–50, 56, 84, 91, 97, 99, 133; discourse ethics, 14, 98; ideal speech situation, 7–10, 13; public sphere, 15–16; steering media, 14; strategic action, 6–8, 53, 56, 97; system integration, 11–12; The

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Theory of Communicative Action (TCA), 4–5, 10, 13, 29 Hardt, Michael, 43 Harvey, David, 23, 26n45, 51, 67, 71, 78, 94–95, 109, 117, 121–22, 125– 28, 132, 149–51 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, xii, 101 Hegel, Georg Friedrich-Wilhelm, 29 Heidegger, Martin, 10, 30, 41; Being and Time, 30–2; destiny, 31–32, 45 Hope VI, 85 Husserl, Edmund, 9–10 inclusion, 17–20, 46, 50, 61–62, 68, 85, 98–99, 106, 131 the insurgent architect, 151 Ivancie, Frank (Portland mayor), 112–13 Izenour, Steven, 106 Jacobs, Jane, 80 Jameson, Fredric, 116, 118, 119–25, 132, 135; cognitive mapping, 121 Johnson, Philip, 111, 115 Kant, Immanuel, 18, 55 Krier, Leon, 119 Kuhn, Thomas, 53 language, 33–37 law, 13–14, 18–20 Learning from Las Vegas, 106–7, 110–11, 118 Le Corbusier, 80, 109 Lefebvre, Henri, 46, 51, 65–67, 95, 119, 136, 139, 145, 151; The Right to the City, 46, 51, 65, 68, 95, 131, 136–37, 139–140 Libby, Brian, 112 Lifeworld (Lebenswelt), 9, 10–14, 109, 128 LUTRAQ (Making the Land Use, Transportation, Air Quality Connection), 89

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Index

Lyotard, Jean-François, 5, 51-60, 63–64, 71, 115, 119, 122, 125; The Differend, 54–56; The Postmodern Condition, 52–54 Marcuse, Herbert, 25n5 Marx, Karl, 29, 32, 39, 42, 45, 54, 118, 121, 136, 150 McCall, Tom, 88 McLeod, Mary, 115–16 the media, 16, 143 Merrifield, Andy, 148 Mesnard, Philippe, 40–41, 44 militant particularism, 109, 125, 139 Mitchell, Don, 65, 138 modernism, 81, 105–7, 110, 119–120, 122, 125, 127, 146 modernist urbanism, 78, 80–82, 91, 94, 96, 100, 105–9, 111, 116, 120, 122, 127, 132, 146 Mouffe, Chantal, 51–52, 60–64 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 21, 27–35, 37–46, 49, 54, 57, 60, 123; The Inoperative Community, 28–29, 33, 41 narration, 10–11 National Charrette Institute (NCI), 96 National Socialism (Nazism), 30, 32, 38, 43–44 Negri, Antonio, 43–44 neoliberalism, 137 neotraditionalism, 80, 125 New Urbanism, 77–103, 105, 115–16, 119, 125, 128, 131, 139, 145; the Congress for, 79; Kentlands, 84–85; Seaside, 80, 84–86; Windsor, 86 NIMBY (“not in my back yard”), 87 Orenco Station, 89–93, 92–93 Owen, Robert, 127 passivity, 41–44, 66, 68, 115, 136, 146 People’s Park (Berkeley, CA), 138–39 Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth, 79, 82, 84, 86–87

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Plato, 77 Podobnik, Bruce, 89–90 Portland, Oregon, 78, 88–94, 96, 11015, 140–45; Pioneer Square, 113–15, 114; Portland 2030, 140–45; Portland Building, 111–15, 112–14; Portland Plan, 140, 143–44 Portman, John, 120 postmodernism, 5, 79, 94, 106, 117, 120– 25; urbanism, 71, 78, 105–6, 111–12, 115–19, 121–22, 125, 127–28 Potter, Tom (Portland mayor), 140–45 power, xii, 3, 11–12, 14, 17, 19, 23, 117, 123, 126, 131, 147–48, 150, 152; communicative power, 20–22, 24 Prince Charles, 119 public-private partnership, 118, 144 public space, 21–23, 47, 51, 82, 84–85, 88, 115, 117, 152 public transit, 88, 95 Purcell, Mark, 65 Rancière, Jacques, 25n5, 46, 51, 57–60, 63–64, 69–70, 131, 136, 142 Reagan, Ronald, 139 Reclaim the Streets (RTS), 146–50 region, 87, 125 resistance, 3–4, 33, 35, 41, 44, 46, 50, 53, 59–60, 66–67, 69–70, 77–78, 106, 109, 117–18, 126 Reynolds, Richard, 137 Richardson, Tim, 97–99 Rossi Aldo, 108, 117 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 18 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 29, 134–36, 148, 150 Scheler, Max, 9 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 42 Scott-Brown, Denise, 106 Scully, Vincent, 86 segregation, 23, 66–67, 69, 86 self-determination, 20, 45, 66, 136, 140 Sennett, Richard, 21, 83, 95, 109 singularity, 31–34, 78–79, 105–6, 108– 10, 116–17, 119, 123, 125, 139

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Index

Situationist International, 145, 147, 151 smart growth, 78 social justice, xiii, 22–24, 29–30, 34, 37, 39, 46, 50, 58, 65–71, 79, 85, 94–95, 126–45, 150–52 socialism, 109, 124 solidarity, 68, 109 sprawl, 79, 85, 87, 99 Stein, Edith, 9 Stern, Robert, 110 sustainability, 86–87, 139, 141 symbolic capital, 14, 99 symbolism, 106–7 Talen, Emily, 95 Thompson-Fawcett, Michelle, 97–100 Tönnies, Ferdinand, xi totalitarianism, 29, 43, 46, 135–36 Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND), 80, 84, 87 Transit Oriented Development (TOD), 78, 85, 86, 88–94

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universality, 18–20, 24, 71, 119, 150 urban design, 79, 86, 94 urban farming, 137–38 Urban Growth Boundary (UGB), 78, 88 urban planning, 22, 98, 111 utopianism, 57–58, 123–25; dialectical utopianism, 78–79, 94, 126, 128, 131–53 Venturi, Robert, 106–7, 116–17 Vision into Action (VIA), 142–45 visionPDX, 140–45 Wall, Thomas Carl, 42 Wanaka 2020 (New Zealand), 97, 99, 141 Williams, Raymond, 109, 125 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 61 Young, Iris Marion, 17–24, 27, 34, 37, 45, 54, 66, 68–70, 83, 95, 98, 109, 117, 131, 133, 136; Inclusion and Democracy, 17–20, 23; Justice and the Politics of Difference, 19–22

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About the Author

Brian Elliott, born in Chester, England, studied philosophy and languages at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the University of Freiburg in Germany. From 2000 to 2008 he taught philosophy at University College Dublin. Since 2008 he has lived in Oregon and currently teaches at Oregon State University. His latest book, Benjamin for Architects, explores the writings of the German Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin in relation to modern art, architecture, and urbanism. Based in Portland, Oregon, he runs a “Philosophy Café” in Powell’s Bookstore and is involved with various local nonprofit organizations working on the connections between community and urban development.

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