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Discoursive planning and the Ethics of Closeness - Trends in Urban Planning
Dr.Art /Senior Researcher
John Pløger
Norwegian Institute for Urban & Regional Research/ Danish Building & Urban Researchjohn.ploger@nibr.no / jop@by-og-byg.dk
It is important to notice, that people is not parts of a play planners just can move around. We are making urban planning for the citizen’s sake – for the public’s sake. The Scylla and Charybis of urban politics are, that on one side you believe you can plan and regulate for "the good life", and, on the other hand, "social engineering", where you clientize individuals and families" (The Danish Minister of Housing 1996).
The cities are for the sake of people, and not the other way round. Therefore it is important, that politicians forms urban and housing areas give inhabitants a feeling of belonging, civic pride and safety, and to unfold their life and have influence where possible (The Danish Ministry of Housing 1996)
1. Introduction
According to Beauregard & Body-Gendrot (1999:5) "…the turn to ’representation’ in urban theory is centred on urban form with less attention to the presentation of social life in contemporary cities". Contemporary urban politics and planning in general favours a turn to representational space, just confronting a deep planning-political ambivalence: - Urban social space on one side represents increasing segregation, deprivation, and class-division despite welfare policies implemented. On the other side urban governments faces interurban competition that require the proliferation of a successful and attractive representational city and this city do not allow the image of deprivation or decline.
To some degree contemporary Scandinavian planning seems to acknowledge this particular ambivalence, but it seems to be addressed mostly as a rhetorically calling for the just-city and the "we are all responsible" commitment. The drawback of the welfare state in Scandinavia is transformed to a focus on competitive strategies and the needs of competitive urbanites. This politics, as known, sees public and private service, the fantasy city, the economy of consumption, the economies of "sign and space" such as tourism, film-industries, advertising, R&D, and IT-oriented work and innovation (Lash & Urry 1994), as major competitive arena’s.
However, representational spaces is not only vital to competitive urban politics and planning, but is also at the very core to contemporary community projects. Urban regimes here faces the problem, that they no longer experience political preferred common norms and values to be communicated through everyday life interaction and neighbouring within communities, because of such phenomenon’s as the growth of mobility and accelerating kulturelle freisetzung. There is, one could say, a need to revitalise community socialisation processes in order to revitalise the meaningful, orderly and stable community. And at the turn of the millennium we therefore see urban regimes searching for new forms of meaning-producing practices, that can re-install "what have been lost".
The main problem to these forms of urban planning are (1) how to turn cities new competitive representational spaces into meaningful space to all its inhabitants, and (2) how to make societal preferred community discourses effective within socio-economic and socio-cultural more and more diverse neighbourhoods? Urban politics and planning here have do deal with the problem, that cities have become an unstable object of thought, while at the same time representing different things to different people.
The crucial question and answer to these problems is, how is meaning working? This article will argue that one crucial contemporary form of governance – at least to Danish and Norwegian - is the one related to the use of moral and ethical representations such as the commitment towards ones community and its weak-groups, a commitment to solidarity etc. These representations are – as will be outlined - actively spatially staged and word’ed by urban regimes.
The aim of this article is to discuss, that we here may see new forms of spatial governance in its Foucaultian sense arising, and sees new forms of governmentality on how to govern social life prevailing in the wake of the ambivalent situation consisting of both the necessity of prioritising competitive urban planning, while at the same time preventing class-differences to increase to a degree they will produce riots and escalate conflicts between the well-off and social excluded people. These new forms of governance are related to the meaningful community. The article outlines how these ways of constructing significative social spaces and socio-spatial fields of interaction, relies on the spatial dispositive and the ethics of closeness.
11) Wellknown, I guess, from the philosophy of communitarism and the architectural movement New Urbanism. The movement New Urbanism is perhaps those who most explicitly rely their work on "communitarian ideas". To most Danish and Norwegian planners this movement and its philosophy will be either unknown or highly criticised. What commnunitarians now argue about has, however, formes the ideology of Scandinavian planning for 30-40.years. The philosopy of communitarism and New Urbanism are not discussed here. See Pløger (2000, 2001b).
The crucial question however remain, if these hegemonic discourses represent the particular context it concerns, or if they represent urban ways of life and urbanity. The final section suggest a new vocabulary to urban planning, that can incorporate urban mentalities, urban forms of life and life-worlds as some of the most important perspective to urban planning, as a way to come a little bit closer to work from, and not against, the meaningful city.
2
. Governmentality, the spatialised dispositive and the ethics of closenessTo Michel Foucault government
2 is not so much about the law, institutional structures and systems, but of their shaping peoples conduct by working on their normativity, "desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs" (Dean 1999:11). This way the practice of governance is linked to moral and ethics as well as aesthetics, discourses and self-regulation.2) The following is a "free" use of Foucaults concepts. "Free" to the degree, that he didn’t use the concepts on the fields discussed, especially not the following concept "spatial dispositive" (- but see Foucault 1984).
Governmentality is, to Foucault (1991) about "how we think about governing", that is, its forms of thought and involved practices using knowledge about social and cultural products as its base. Institutionally, these conductive practices are developed as regimes of practices or "programmes of the direction and reform of conduct" (Dean 1999:18), and this art of governance need some mechanism, processes and knowledge to work. Here Foucault points out the spatial dispositive and discoursive practices.
The spatial dispositive is what architecture, built environment, and urbanism is about3.A dispositive to Foucault is an ensemble4 of significations, and space and materiality may be part of an ensemble functioning as a dispositive to divide, regulate and order (prescribe) use, interaction and behaviour. Architecture and forming built environments is in fact the construction of socio-spatial fields of action and interaction, where the material structures are presupposed to have meaning, to be significative, and "invite" people to do certain forms of action and co-action (Østerberg 1998). A dispositive works both through the spatial designing of social space and people’s discoursive practices. A spatial dispositive is not deterministic, but a regulative arrangement, that do make a certain mode of operation more reasonable than others. A working spatial dispositive shows itself as certain disposed ways of practice, a regularity, a reasonable kind of interaction shaped by meaningful built environments that are readable according to people’s meaningful cultural schemes.
3) Foucault talks about both material structures such as the prison, but also about discoursive dispositives such as psychiatry and sexual science.
4) Foucault talks about both material structures such as the prison, but also about discoursive dispositives such as psychiatry and sexual science.
It’s this perspective that makes it reasonable to follow Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) congenial perspective, that every urban plan is a concealed program for everyday life. The design of space as a meaningful social space however need to work within shared maps of meaning, cultural schemes, and other local significative discourses (e.g. sex, ethnicitet). This perspective furthermore can make one understanding the meaning of architectures intentional character: - In order to design social space architecture and built environments have to give meaning to people and their actions, way of life and/or cultural schemes. Space and architecture are meaningful, if they disseminate human experiences, norms and values.
This way, a spatial dispositive only functions by intervening into societies hegemonic discourses as well as acknowledging particular regimes of knowledge, cultural schemes and maps of meaning.
To be significative, semioticians would say, architecture and urban space have to function as a discourse. The "city is a discourse" as Roland Barthes (1986) said, it has to be read. Or as Rob Beauregard states, "people decide how to respond on the basis of meanings, not on the basis of facts" (1993:8)5. A (spatial) dispositive need to work significatively through knowledge, through discoursive regimes relying on collective or societal norms, common sense, or ethics6. A spatial dispositive is in other words basically made by discoursive practices, and at the same time establish practices based on social conventions and reason, what is taken for granted, experiences and common social codes. A spatial dispositive in other words depend on discoursive practices and signifying schemes of reason, and in certain constellations the dispositive can form probable social forms and interactions.
5) One statement must be made in order to prevent both a spatial and discoursive determinism: As Beauregard makes clear, "It’s not possible to establish an explicit link between discourses and how people react" (1993:9).
6) Scandinavian architects and architectural theorist are very reluctant to discuss the ethics of architecture and planning.
A socio-spatial dispositive can rely on ethics, and this is particular the case within community planning. The influence of ethics in architectural practice and urban planning is wellknown from architecture. Foucault description of Panopticon gaze leading to self-surveillance and normative self-discipline is exemplary here. Contemporary Scandinavian community planning partly wants to revitalise the ethical community, and here the ethics of closeness is a crucial goal to policy and projects. The design of social proximity through built form is wellknown from the design of "the life between the houses" (Gehl 1987), and design of communities social space is thought of as the spatialisation of proximity in order to form the communities ethic of closeness.
This ethic is closely related to a philosophy of humanity and humanism (Levinas) and the philosophy on "ethical claims" (K.E. Løgstrup)7. The ethic of closeness builds on a dyadic I-You relationship constitutive on face-to-face encounters. The ethic is grounded on human needs and ethical claims to be a moral and ethical subject in the face of the Other. The ethic of closeness claims that foundational ethical values such as responsibility, trust, openness and tolerance, are therefore experiences within the frame of human proximity; the meeting with a close other. Therefore responsibility, which is central to the ethics on closeness as well as the spatial design of New Urbanism, must be understood as an experienced ideality, experiences by meeting the Other as being a responsible and caring other (Vetlesen 1996:8&10). By revitalising old virtues such as closeness, neighbouring (proximity), and responsibility to human needs, it’s possible, as communitarians believe, to reinstall the community as a stable, predictable and safe community.
7) As part of community planning this ethic is combined with Ferdinand Tönnies idea of Gemeinschaft and the philosophy of communitarism (see Pløger 2001a).
This way the ethics of closeness is an ethic needing a space and spatial practices in order to be fulfilled, it needs places to acknowledge the call for an ethical practice produced by the appearance of face-to-face encounters. It’s not only this way one constitute the responsibility towards the general and significant Other, but the way to form a communitarian ethic of closeness in practice. The meeting in space secures the intertwinement of social proximity and producing the ethical commitment towards the Other.
3. Scandinavian community planning practising the spatialised dispositive
The ethics of space is as indicated not in itself a new perspective to urban planning, not even theoretically. Especially suburban functionalism saw space as a medium to signify ethical values such as community, respect, equality, solidarity, and dignity (Lilja 1999). Even the core of architectural practice – the aesthetic – is heavily loaded with ethical implications. Post-modern architecture placed a void between ethics and aesthetics, using the latter as a self-referential medium. Contemporary we face, like the times of functionalism, a new desire to emphasise the significative aesthe-ethical relationship in urban planning (Pløger 2000). Today urban planners again strive to "make the aesthetic of built forms give voice to a situative ethic" (Lilja 2000:178). Architects and planners themselves are reluctant to discuss this matter. The spatialisation of ethics is – as one example - unnoticed, but paramount, within the phenomenology of Christian Norberg-Schulz (1963). The spatialisation of ethics builds on a presupposed spatial dispositive, and it’s exactly this way of thinking that forms Scandinavian community planning at the turn of the millennium.
One main perspective of this spatialisation of ethics is to revitalise community "neighbourhood and neighbouring" ethics (Lilja 1999, Svendsen 2001)8. The suburbs should be planned as close communities (strong ties etc) and one way to spatialise this ethic is to revitalise local centres and citizen houses as meeting places and public places for shopping, recreation, enjoying and joining cultural events. All public spaces surrounding the built environment and everyday life action should "invite to" interaction, spontaneous gatherings, and at the same time allow privacy when needed. These forms of spatial management of everyday life, wellknown from the functionalist era, consist of organising a public space for walking, standing, sitting, listening and talking in car-free, pedestrian areas between the houses. The need for privacy is most often secured by locating a small semi-private lot just outside the buildings main entrance. The public space and the semi-private lot should, according to the architect Jan Gehl, be organised in a way such that it gathers people spontaneously together and thereby integrates people "naturally" in the milieu. The built environment should invite people to a place that is opened up to unlimited possible ways of meeting and gathering (1987:77-160).
8) Urban politics concist of wellknown politicies such as housing programmes (subsidies, urban regeneration), improving living conditions for poor people, tax-politics etc.
"The home", the family, and neighbouring became main perspectives already to the first suburbanisation process beginning in the early 1950’s and its planning ideology. Not just as a functional target, but essentially as a moral issue. First of all suburban milieus and living environments should be based on continuity, stability, social cohesion and transparency, and secondly neighbouring and interaction should produce common values, norms, moral and normativity (in all: "how to behave properly in this place" and "how to treat others") among strangers. The goal was and is, that the individual and the collective should be merged together such as "I cannot say I without saying We" (McBeath & Webb 1997); in other words the political goal was and is to enhance the feeling of the We’ness of communities. Contemporary Scandinavian planning is illustrative to this point.
4. A necessary return of ethical planning - urban politics confronting problems on social sustainability
This new perspectives on the design of social space could be seen as a critique of earlier architectural practices only departing from an asthe-ethic "logic"9, and a turn to more confidence of representational spaces in urban politics and planning. However, the aesthetic-ethical meaning dispositives have, as said, have for a long time been of outmost importance to planning practice, and yet seldom discussed. Functionalism is an obvious example of this point as well as crime-preventing planning. During the 1980’s European politics faced problems of social sustainability in cities, and partly using the politics of fear10, Scandinavian governments used the public anxiety about this problem to legitimate and revitalise a political return to the spatial dispositive. The problems defined were:
– Problems of integration especially related to the weak groups of society and ethnic groups.– Problems of segregation on socio-economic and cultural grounds (that is ethnic grounds). The consequence is a concentration of social problems in specific urban areas (low cost and low standard of housing). A central cause is that public authorities in Norway and Denmark have appr. 25% of public-utility housing stock at their disposal for social clients, and this escalates the geographical and spatial concentration of social problems to specific urban areas.
– Problems of social integration within communities, where some registrated problems are loneliness, isolation and a lack of local social networks.
– A feeling of loss of safety due to the increase of criminal behaviour, increasing violence and threathfull behaviour especially from deviant youth groups and addicted people.
9) A modified aestheticisism more precisely related to the Kantian notion of the aesthetic as directorial or anweisen to the ethic is, however, still a major discourse in Scandinavian planning (see Pløger 2000).
10) Fear of crime, fear of public space, fear of segregation, fear of anomie, fear of the ethnic stranger, fear of social deviance etc. in neighbourghoods.
The proposed solutions to these problems are of course manifold, comprising both cultural, socio-welfare, and ethnic initiatives. Some of most preferred local initiatives however seems to be the implementation of socio-spatial initiatives such as (Pløger 2001b):
– Integration processes through community activities and local networks.– Social caring processes such as neighbouring.
– Improved housing conditions, making local jobs for low educated citizen’s etc – together often named as "solidarity initiatives".
– Culture or/and citizen’s houses as local meeting places.
– "Culture to communities" projects.
– Community integrative projects directed towards its ethnic groups, refugees and immigrants.
– Community projects directed towards its weak groups, children and youths.
These initiatives of course mime the ideology of social reformism based on prophylactic reason so crucial to Scandinavian welfare planning. Prophylactic planning has moved from seeing the problems as a matter of systemic dysfunctionality (unemployment, extreme degree of divorce and single households etc), towards contemporary focusing on the possibility of using the spatial organisation and social design of everyday life and communities as the main solution to solve social problems by enforcing the significance of committed local networks and shared space.
5. The new reason of urban planning - the ethics of closeness and its problems
Even though Scandinavian governments recognises that cities socio-cultural diversity and cultural pluralism now has grown into communities everyday life even within the cultural homogeneous Scandinavian societies, the governments didn’t start to see communities as places made of this "natural" social and cultural diversity. The policy making was directed towards the civil society:
.. in terms of life-world, associations and [as a] civil society, by means of which a community typically would be associated by nearness, visibility improving a feeling of community and common identity (Bang & Dyrhberg 1998:59).
The term life-world would in reality be fairly unknown to most planners. However, the authors want to notice, how values, life-style or community ethics in fact during the 1980-90s seems to be more to the core of policy-making, planning theories, and planning practice. If the goal is to frame a life-world planning – including values, experiences, everyday life habits and discourses etc – planning must consider the social diversity every neighbourhood and community represent. Politicians and planners in other words have to consider, as Zygmunt Bauman says, that a community may be more "a postulate rather than a fact of life" (Brent 1997:73). Communities must in principal be considered as "communities without unity" (Corlett 1989) constituted by the following characteristic:
– Community is multi-dimensional, not reducible to a unitary phenomenon.– Exclusion and splitting, rather than union is constitutive of community.
– The splitting is not simple insider/outsider division, but is internal to community.
– Conflict is inherent within community as a concept, so community is always am ambivalent practice (Brent 1997:73).
Still, Scandinavian urban community planning policy is about to plan for stable, social orderly, and predictable communities, and not multidimensional communities (Pløger 1999, 2001a,b). Despite of many years of research criticising community politics and planning in both Denmark and Norway two national projects – the "Urban Regeneration" project in Denmark (1993 - ) and the "Environmental City Project" in Norway (1992-2000) – departure from a political belief, that cities destroy classical community values such as intimate relationships and caring, and forces secondary and anonymous social relationships among the citizens to prevail. The goals of these projects are:
– To prevent social exclusion, loneliness and isolation.– To establish a stable core of inhabitants.
– To improve the solidarity among the inhabitants.
– To have more families living in the area as a way to have more stable, social cohesive and continual social milieus.
– To reduce the high proportion of resettlement in order to recreate stable living environments (Pløger 2001b).
The "how" of achieving these goals are twofold: (1) On one side it is a matter of improving the natural environment (traffic reduction) and physical environments (built environment, architecture), improve the urban qualities of suburban areas including its cultural and shopping opportunities, and improvement of housing quality. (2) And on the other side, and contemporary more significant, there is the spatialisation of everyday life by improving the spatial conditions for gathering, meeting, and talking informally. The vision is to revitalise the ethical demand wellknown from the first spirit of suburbanisation, which I have described as the ethic of closeness, as a way to install an ontological security within neighbourhoods.
Local projects and social initiatives such as theatre, cultural events, elderly-clubs, multicultural workshops, and other citizen houses activities should shape community’s value-schemes and norms, and shape a feeling of commitment and responsibility towards communities. This way of shaping an ethics of closeness should enhance social caring, solidarity, neighbours helping each other, and building on "common interests natural harmony" and improved local democracy. Furthermore there are established "local history groups", and museums in order to develop common values and norms using traditions inherited from "common" history and culture.11
11) Often discoursively staged by historical exhibitions, local museums, theather, oral and written local history (Pløger 2001b).
The ethics of closeness is also believed to be essential in order to feel oneself ontological secure. Ontological security demands stable and predictable communities, local emphatically networks, a dominance of a common sittlichkeit, closeness through proximity, and the absence of threats and conflicts. This ontological security should be settled by getting citizens involved in local activities, local networks, and in other ways makes all things happen visible and predictable within the community.
6. The coalescing of social and spatial planning
When Henri Lefebvre claims, that in every urban plan conceal a program for everyday life, this is the case in Scandinavia, already recognisable as part of the functionalist heritage. In a Norwegian journal Byggekunst (The Art of Building) 1952, it is stated:
Architects form our surroundings. He must arouse humans needs, learn them to see and getting them out of their sentimental habits. He must accept, understand and use the working methods of science, and fighting against the subjective exhibitionism in architecture (here McKenzie 1982:54).
Architecture should form people’s maps of meaning and cultural schemes building architecture and spatial planning on scientific, objective knowledge. Of course several critics have been made against this way of thinking, and one may notice, how the last sentence could be read as a plea for a more democratic architecture, an architecture for "all" (as some says: "a human scale").
Urban planning in Norway and Denmark has as said – at least since the 1950s – been a matter of spatial arranging for making inclusive and caring communities led by ideas about human needs for having a "good life" building on the need for closeness, proximity, caring, sociability, friendship, belonging, strong social bonds, predictability, secure milieu, "home is my castle", family, localism, equality, collective orientation, functional places. The coalescing of the spatial and the social is from politicians, architects and planners perspective thought of as based on the working of the spatial dispositives such as space functionality, spatial formed interaction, organised activities, informal gathering, place identity enhancing the significance of spatial collective symbols, and making inclusive forms of everyday life practices through spatial arrangements. In other words, urban planning still approach the social from a spatial perspective, or what is called an environmentalism saying, "it’s possible to design the social by forming space" (Albertsen 1993:181).
The outcome of the ensemble of spatial dispositives should be a social milieu grounded at the following characteristics.
Figure The content of the ethic of closeness
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What will Scandinavian urban and community planning attain? The ethic of closeness – an ethic-moral community
Ontological safety
Quasi-primary relationships12 |
Defined goals – Local commitment (neighbour-like). – Homogeneity of values and norms. – Stable housing environments, predictable everyday lives. – Urban communities as intimate and yet consisting of forms of secondary relationships.– Inhabitants seek sociability, social relations and collective interaction. – Mutuality, not reciprocallity. – Value homogeneity. |
12) This is of course Herbert Gans wellknown concept (Gans 1995) .
This way Scandinavian urban community planning these years try to make "new homes for old values" (Gans 1995) still based on the presupposition that communities works best if they are made of "the harmony of interests" (Young 1995). In other words, the strategy is to re-establish community co-operation, co-acting, and networks; in order to empower communities’ self-regulative and self-governing processes (Pløger 2001:69). The belief is simply, as stated by Sennett, "the more people interact, the more they will share a common identity" (Sennett 1999:133).
7. Discoursive planning – or how to implement meaning to communities
The spatial dispositive is not alone physical or material, but according to Foucault just as well discoursive. The effect of the spatial dispositive is matter of a "reading" of space and therefore an understanding of spatial significatives or representations (Pløger 2001a,b). This is one reason why discoursive planning becomes more and more important to urban planning, and to the normativisation processes within communities. Institutional designed discoursive practices not only focus on shaping the meaning of communities by presenting its spatial meaning, but should lead to a stronger feeling of belonging to place by enhancing the meaning and sense of place. The ability to read living milieus and communities spatial meaning – and in doing this, being able to read its historical, architectural, socio-cultural significant symbols – is of outmost importance in a time marked by mobile individuals and therefore living with no longtermed experience in place or no life-course "connection" to the place where one now live. This means most inhabitants not knowing local history, habits and tacit knowledge on informal manners (neither as experiences nor narrative), that nevertheless always influence everyday life social interaction and communication.
If one look at the cases they are part of these kinds of political concerns. But if we evaluate the projects in "objective" terms (budgets, prioritised projects etc), they seem to have concentrated on spatial planning such as physical regeneration (housing renewal and regeneration), aesthetic planning, housing renewal and housing politics (subsidies etc). This is also the impression politicians and planners want to make, denying they are working from a normative and disciplinarian planning perspective.
There is however, as said, always a normative and disciplinarian agenda at play at once we are talking about community planning. Spatial planning is about designing the social field of action, of designed space that can work as being directorial towards making local networks and social bonds, or by establishing inclusive action by designing formal organised meeting places and activities.
Paul Rabinow makes clear from his study "on the archaeology of late modernity", that spatial planning and building is about the relationship between "norms and forms of the social environment" (1989, 1994). The constitutive phase of modern urban planning back 18.century developed as a form of techno-cosmopolitianism, where art and science were tools in "the operationalization of history, society, and culture" applied to producing "specific customs, cultures, countries". More precisely:
The art or urban planning and of a healthy modern society lies precisely in the orchestration of the general and the particular (1994:402).
This way of thinking is the raison d’etre of modern planning too, still working on zoning the everyday life practices as well as domestication of everyday life. Science can help to objectify a "universal subject" and its needs, capacities, and norms. Urbanism, building on scientific knowledge, then is a matter of giving an urban form to the political wanted standardised living and a predictable everyday life and social spaces. This socio-technological environment is the precedent discourse to the coming of the 19.century middling modernism that gives a crucial role to the administrative apparatus’ in the management of social life.
As both Rabinow and several other authors make clear, this turn makes it’s crucial to notice how discoursive planning becomes vital to modern forms of planning (Beauregard 1993, 1996; Boyer 1998). Planing is world making, as Raphaël Fischler (1996) says. It is the production of different forms of urban and community representations that is at the core to discoursive planning. Planners inscribe their discourses "through practices of representation" using spatial planning, maps, texts, and face-to-face communication. What is the target of discoursive planning are the meaning of space, its social and material symbols and different kind of texts, and how to make it affecting the social world of reflection, perceiving, and practices.
I have argued elsewhere (Pløger 2001b) that the political and administrative discoursive representation of communities changed during the second half of the twentieth century. From 1950 to the 1980s Scandinavian planning was dominated by a "factual" socio-material mapping (of living conditions, housing standards, and preservational architecture), but now we see the dominance of socio-cultural mappings using life-form surveys, registration of local history, aesthetic research, place analysis, and local cultural studies. Whereas the former mapping was directed towards politicians and municipal administrations to legitimate urban policy-making, the latter is directed first and foremost towards local citizens in order to give them "historical anchors", "roots", and "identity".
The Environment City Gamle Oslo project is illustrative on this point, embracing several types of discoursive mapping, which both verbalise and visualise the neighbourhood Gamle Oslo as a place-identity and community (the figure is from Pløger 2001b).
Forms of discoursive mapping within the ECGO project
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Form of discoursive mapping |
Content |
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Socio-material and socio-spatial mapping |
Living conditions, housing standard, infrastructure. |
|
Mapping significant local histories |
Oral and written local history, which can work as a means of creating a historically grounded place-identity. |
|
Mapping significant local culture |
Registration of a community "way of life" and related cultural activities. These are activities that create a common cultural fabric with which inhabitants can identify, by means of theatre, exhibitions, and local festivals. Questionnaires, registration of activities, and observation are used. |
|
The identification of a built environment's socio-cultural and aesthetic values |
Local architecture, landscape, and built environment. This is done by way of professional "place analysis". Work on the aestheticization of everyday life surroundings (landscape, public places, nature), using the attractiveness as a way of making a social distinction to other places, partly done by local residents associations and partly by professional "place analysis". |
|
Identifying local "maps of meaning" |
Mapping of everyday values and beliefs among local people. Most often professional questionnaires, but also students doing some minor qualitative research. |
Pragmatically speaking, some of these discourses could be seen as a matter of gathering administrative or political information about citizens, upon which to base decisions about action. The weakness of planning has for a long time been limited contextual information, especially about the local population when it comes to socio-cultural characteristics and modes of life. The case reveals a discoursive practice directed towards understanding the everydayness of everyday life or lifeworld on a primarily quantitative basis in order to know the best common denominator to produce a number of possible meaningful community identifications.
In other words, the figure shows discoursive mappings that are wording and figuring the significant meaning of place and the staging of its possible reading. The different discourses are used rhetorically to frame a certain meaning of place telling and mapping its history, culture, architecture, and registrations of local maps of meaning. Together these five discourses frame an identity-politics, where the main target is the production of a sense of belonging to place by producing both a common neighbourhood, and a particular community, public discourse on the social significance of communities particular representational spaces.
8. New ways, a new vocabulary, a new discourse for urban planning?
The concept life-style nowadays seems wellknown to most urban politicians and planners, and part of the contemporary planing-political vocabulary. The concept is related to socio-cultural particularity and contexualised diversity made by the pluralism of cultures and value-schemes, ways of living and distinctive consumption. But one thing is to acknowledge this phenomenon; another is how to cope with this reality. One major planning-political problem is that the concept only is understood in its statistical visibility (consumption patterns, housing preferences, leisure life profiles etc), that means to understand the complexity of life-worlds. A life-world is in itself:
… comprises (1) conditions of life, that constitute (2) a number of tendencies shaping the unfolding of life, and these are conducive towards the development of (3) specific cultural forms of life (Henning Bech 1999:13).
What is important, as we know from Georg Simmel (1981,1996), is to acknowledge that the city itself is a particular condition to people’s everyday life and life-world. It is from being situated within and experiencing from an urban context, that urban inhabitants form their potentialities for a reflexive and cognitive mapping of themselves as urban citizens. This means that urban politics and planning must realise that contextuality supersedes ideas about a priori, ontological or generalised concepts such as life-style.
In the city distance, atmosphere, feeling, existence, the stranger and strangeness, and the gaze can mean as much to make the urban life-world meaningful as expected from life-course, traditions, and schemes of signification. People can and do change value-schemes, habits, norms and moral, and cultural preferences during their course of life, change of context and life-world. In other words, one has according to Henning Bech to "respect the multifarious and fleeting complexity of life" (1999:21) in order to understand the complexity of urban life-worlds. The unfolding of urban life is happening within the dialectic of life-world conditions (value setting) and urban conditions (spatial experiences, social forms, the stranger and strangeness). Urban life is certainly a meeting between surfaces (Henning Bech), but caught up of real-and-imagined representations that make urban life reasonable, dangerous and/or enjoyable to its people.
Difference and diversity must therefore be the first point of departure to urban policy and planning. A "normative ideal of city life", as Iris Marion Young (1995) calls it, should furthermore build upon such prioritised concepts as transience, mental mobility, particularity and transformation, because they describe sine qua non’s to urban life. But urban planning cannot neglect the mundane way of life, the habits, and the repetitive life which characterise particular phases of life, for instance when you have children or become immobile. This is in fact the kind of life most people live as working people and with some forms of social obligations towards relatives. What must be important in order to develop a new vocabulary for a millennium urban planning, is to remember both the planning for "the everydayness of the everyday" (Lefebvre 1986) as well as to stress the need to focus on urbanity; the way of life, the meaning, the cultural schemes and the ethics, that is the particular product of living and experiencing the city. A modest suggestion to a new vocabulary follows in the figure.
Figure Urban typologies for a new urban housing planning
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Urban way-of-life typologies |
Expectations to living environment and the neighbourhood |
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The Functional Everyday life Communitarism – the committed community – Elderly – Immobile, 24 hours inhabitants – "Neighbourhood fathers" – Political activists – Ghettos The Dionysian urban way of life – Urban Single – Urban elderly mobile (no kids and no social obligations) – Career oriented people (DINK’s, SINK’s, Yippies etc) – Lifestyle oriented people |
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Work related living. – Families with children expect public institutions near-by, safety etc. – Elderly expects caring and support. – Community activities. – Locale organisations. – Local committed participation – Housing with individual quality (architectural, interior,
place). |
To Friderich Nietzsche Dionysos was a metaphor for the "wild, orgiastic, the ecstatic and form-destructive" way of life (Erslev Andersen 1985:38), but here the concept refer to the pleasurable, juissance, hedonism, the pleasure of flaneurism, and the aesthetic gaze expropriation of urban space. The concept calls for individuality as dominant to urban ways of life and its meaningfulness. The obstacles towards living a Dionysian life can be spatial, namely when it isn’t possible to live an urban way of life within the neighbourhood (the missing of urban public life qualities such as cafés, shopping areas, culture, and the possibility of being a stranger), or social when it’s not legitimate to live as individuality within the neighbourhood (prejudices, informal control, traditionalism and conservatism).
The Dionysian urban way of life enjoys the aesthetic gaze’s expropriation of urban space, the stranger and the strangers position, the Flaneurian practice, and mental and physical mobility. This is ways of practices that are immanent to the social forms of cities and of urbanity.
9. Conclusion
The new forms of urban governmentality related to contemporary community planning mainly represent a regressive, nostalgic and a conservative ideology and vision about a return to ethical sameness producing homogeneous communities. Now, admitted, formulated rhetorical within the unavoidable frame of a cultural pluralism. But instead of planning with respect to socio-cultural difference and diversity, the governments try to implement the ethics of closeness and proximity as an ethical claim to communitarians. This should make the community of difference liveable, inclusive and disciplinarian, if not respected. The ethics should prevent conflicts by shaping communities building on tolerance and caring for each other, no matter ethnic or social position. A community of different values and norms, but tolerant and caring, still has, it’s said, to be grounded at societies hegemonic cultural schemes – ethnocentrism, collectivism, sameness, believing in the state and bureaucracy, "the law of Jante" 13- as the way to secure the development of a predictable and safe living environment. One basic social a priori to this goal, is – politicians and planners think – an ethical and normative stable and cohesive population longing for the performance of the ethic of closeness, reciprocity, simultaneity, and proximity. This is a community ethic known from Tönnies to communitarism. This ethic is not comparable to an urban ethic as Young delineates it, where conflictuality, ambivalence, the need to live with strangers and as strangers to each other, and the need to accept there are things you don’t understand, but has to live with, grounds an urban ethic of difference.
13) Jante: "a person being afraid of being different". People are afraid of being conspicious, different and individualised.
One important aspect of this article has been to suggest the need for a new planning vocabulary that could underscore the city as a particular form of lived life, as a place for particular experiences and particular life-worlds and social forms. The urban way of life, experiences, urbanites forms of social spacing (ethically, aesthetically and reasonably), and people’s course of life, all contribute to frame the meaning of urban life to each and everyone, and here the aesthetic gaze and a Dionysian attitude seems more and more important to most citizens.
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Workshop 5 |