The Continuity of Place

Whereas the city was once the basis for architecture, it now seems to have degenerated into a waste product and backdrop. ZUS (Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman)

Twenty years ago, the city was rediscovered, by administrators, by scientists, by architects, by project developers and finally by activists, or to put it a better way, by active city dwellers. Not that no thought was given to the city before the late 1980s, and certainly not that our cities were not radically renovated and altered. What was rediscovered was what makes a city urban. Idealists would call it the essence of the city; pragmatists would talk about the historical specificity of the city – but that is irrelevant here. After all, what makes cities urban is inevitably derived from an ideal type, which itself refers to very specific exemplary situations. The ideal type of an urban lifestyle and culture is that of an open, diverse and concentrated ('dense') lifestyle, which forms the social foundation for contemporary democracy. The rediscovery of the city was, more specifically, renewed attention to typically urban places. The traditional functionalist discourse that had set the tone for decades both in politics and in spatial disciplines such as planning, geography and urbanism gradually made way for a more culturalist discourse in which anthropologists, historians, cultural geographers and philosophers played, and continue to play, an important role. Not surprisingly, this fresh attention to urbanity sometimes resonated with a culturally pessimistic undertone, a lament about the disintegration of a certain kind of urbanity. Five writers were often put forward to feed this cultural pessimism. In historical order, these were philosopher Hannah Arendt, who was cited as the champion of the idea of the polis; philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who in the early 1960s had warned about the decline of typically urban publicness; planning critic Jane Jacobs, who during the same period had warned about bureaucrats and planners who threatened the urban idyll of New York's Greenwich Village; cultural sociologist Richard Sennett, who in the mid-1970s saw the public urban life that had once flourished in cities like London and Paris in the eighteenth century withering under the influence of suburbanization and the 'tyranny of intimacy' emanating from the new mass medium of television; and finally the political scientist Marshall Berman, who saw the vitality of the modern, nineteenth-century city street being murdered by twentieth-century project developers following in the footsteps of Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse.1

It is not very difficult to paint these writers as nostalgists who were glorifying these obsolete forms of urbanity and publicness, from the agora of Ancient Greece via the salons and coffeehouses of the eighteenth century or the boulevards and arcades of the nineteenth. And this was in fact done repeatedly, but at the cost of the realization that these authors were also the forerunners of another rediscovery: that of a trend in political philosophy that had been abandoned, that of republicanism, with its great emphasis on active citizenship.2 In short, with the rediscovery of the urban place and urban publicness, the republican in the form of the active, outspoken citizen and urban dweller was also rediscovered. This rediscovery, however, was mainly an academic phenomenon, limited to intense debates among colleagues in political theory, historiography and philosophy, which found little resonance in the public debate itself. Or it would have to be that in the 1990s such themes as citizenship and the sense of civic responsibility came into vogue again for the first time in decades and were not immediately associated with bigotry or moral censorship. And indeed, this renewed academic interest for republicanism and the renewed public appreciation for 'the citizen' did have something in common, even if the academics emphasized mainly the freedom of the citizen or republican while in the public debate, on the contrary, all sorts of demands were made of the citizen and all manner of gradations of citizenship even emerged. What the academic and the public discourses shared was a defence of the value of citizenship, a value that took on the guise of a virtue, or as philosopher Michel Foucault called it, an ethos. In less spectacular terms: a certain 'lifestyle' or 'way of doing things'.3 

This new republicanism thereby nestled as a sort of third way between the two dominant political discourses of the twentieth century, that of socialism (social democracy and communism) and that of liberalism (including various conservative parties that in practice differed little from liberalism). Until recently, socialism and liberalism were considered the two main ideological antagonists – the two absolutely opposite interpretations of the Enlightenment ideal of liberty or emancipation. The opposition between liberalism and socialism in fact dominated the global and most national agendas in the twentieth century, in particular the contrast between individual and collective and between market and government, and in a way that concealed the fact that both movements essentially shared a rationalist ideal of social engineering. The liberal ideal of social engineering is grounded in an optimistic faith in the perfectibility of the individual, as long as the individual is given the freedom over his or her person and property, while the socialist ideal of social engineering places every emphasis on the capacity of the state or the government, on behalf of the collective, to distribute national wealth as justly as possible. As the ideological dichotomy of market and government is being artificially maintained, even as by now virtually all socialists have become liberals of a sort while the vast majority of liberals, diehards included, have in practice accepted various forms of government interference and government protectionism, the fact that the actual problem lies in the rationalist ideal of social engineering itself remains invisible. The ethos of the republican provides no solution to this problem (it would result in a third variant of the ideal of social engineering) but it does offer a possible way out, both from the obsolete government-market dilemma and from the trap of social engineering, the trap of the 'extreme make-over' presented by liberal and socialist ideologues time and time again. This way out can be very accurately illustrated by what I referred to above as the problem of the urban place, a place that, certainly in the Netherlands, bears the stamp of more than half a century of government interventions and that has been increasingly subjected to the 'discipline of the market' over the last two decades.

As I indicated above, this rediscovery of the urban place in fact involved a rediscovery of urbanity, in particular understood as urban publicness. We should consider the articulation of this urban publicness the permanent challenge of a modern and pragmatic republicanism that transcends the traditional pseudo-conflict between market and government. Publicness is anything but a simple product, or even a feature, of market operations, nor is it a unilateral function of the way a city is organized. In the last several years, cities and urban places have been increasingly subjected to a discourse that mainly understands (and subsequently reorganizes) these places as places of consumption. In this discourse, the city is understood as a (regional, national or global) stage for the experience economy, and successful urban places as the ideal facilitators of this economy. In the rest of this text I will argue that this discourse of consumption of urban places represents a step forward in comparison to the functionalism that was so characteristic of modernist urbanism and planning, because it provides more room for what I shall call 'the use' of urban places, a perspective that understands urbanity, first and foremost, as a specific way to experience, as opposed to a spatial organizational pattern or a system with certain explicit functions. This step forward, however, is often cancelled out by viewing the consumption of urban places unilaterally as being determined by market operations alone.

This regulation and limitation were particularly expressed in the ideal of a 'compact city', which was also a trend that seemed to break with the modernist doctrine of the separation of functions, in which the purely analytical distinction between the four functions of habitation, work, recreation and traffic was actually translated into a spatial segregation of these functions. Both the increase in scale of the urban area and increased mobility, as well as the increasingly manifest issue of the environment, seemed to confirm the benefit of this separation of functions, and as a result not much of this compact city was actually realized. Arguments in favour of 'densification' (striving for a high building density), of mixing of functions and of a greater role for public transport, which together were supposed to make this compact city possible, in fact increasingly petered out in the face of the reality of the neoliberal policy of the government in the 1980s, in which privatization and deregulation were supposed to reduce the rising costs of the welfare state (that jewel of the ideal of social engineering). And it was precisely at this moment that interest in the urban place and urban publicness, with which I opened this text, revived. As I have already indicated to some extent, this interest, to a not insignificant degree, was a reaction to several decades of centralized urban development and spatial planning, a reaction especially to the unintended side effects of the separation of functions – according to some even a frontal assault on the separation of functions as such. Yet it was certainly more than that. The renewed interest in urbanity and publicness was the product of a rather ambiguous situation, in which divergent processes crisscrossed one another, processes that sometimes reinforced one another and sometimes worked against one another. Within this wave of interest the following processes and tendencies resonated:

• the stubborn continuity of striving towards a compact city;
• a national government in a process of retrenchment, particularly in the domain of spatial planning and public housing;
• the complex of globalization processes (liberalization of the world economy, increased labour migration, the rise of a network of 'global cities')
• the process of 'delocalization' or 'deterritorialization' under the influence of new information and communication media;
• the rise of a global 'experience economy' (mass tourism, global mass media)
• the transformation of nation-states, national identities and national forms of citizenship.

Several of these processes overlap, but each represents real problems, or 'challenges', as they are called in neoliberal jargon, that are primarily reflected in the dynamics of urban reality. The most manifest and far-reaching consequence of this mishmash of process is the decline of the socially engineered city as a national political project, which was expressed, among other things, in the reception accorded to the final, fifth National Policy Document on Spatial Planning: it was considered obsolete before the ink was even dry . ..

An implicit part of the ideal of the social engineering of liberal and socialist theories and ideologies is the assumption that everyday social existence, in and of itself, is an inert and passive quantity, and that science (the accumulation of knowledge) and politics (the rational exercise of power) are the active forces that bring about historical change and therefore can be held responsible for the legitimacy of this change. Benjamin, Lefebvre and De Certeau were the first to show that the meaning of a new technology, a new insight or a new political measure is not contained in the internal rationality of that technology, that insight or that measure, but is determined to a significant degree by the use made of it in everyday life. That use, in other words, remains outside the internal logic of the technology or measure in question. Or, conversely: the meaning of a new technology depends to a large extent on the way in which users of this technology 'appropriate' it. Yet in this very appropriation the user of the new technology simultaneously transforms his or her own perceptual environment. This insight is ideally suited to shed new – if rather stroboscopic – light on the use of the city.

The use of the city has emphatically extricated itself from the suffocating embrace of national social engineering and has become, more than ever, the object or work domain of a global distribution of images, messages and information. Imagination as such represents a new force in social existence: 'fantasy is now a social practice; it enters, in a host of ways, into the fabrication of social lives for many people in many societies.'7 This is according to Arjun Appadurai, who with this aims to point out that the urban place or urban publicness features more than three dimensions: it is also fashioned by the fourth dimension of delocalized media space that has gradually taken on global forms. Thanks to this 'fourth dimension' the urban place and the public space acquire a supranational or transnational dynamic, which is not only supported by the global network of new and newer media, but is also reflected in that public space itself. It becomes visible in the way in which international fashion trends define the streetscape of cities, but also in a hodgepodge of clothing styles, languages and customs introduced by labour migrants or asylum seekers. The transnational character of urban publicness is also reflected in the distribution of international retail and restaurant chains and in a shadow economy, again supported by migrants, and finally by international show architecture inspired by 'city branding'. Latin American writers such as Martín-Barbero and García Canclini consider the transnationalization of the public sphere and of citizenship as the political dimension of the success of neoliberal economic globalization, the earliest and sharpest effects of which were felt in Latin America, with its weak nation-states: they describe transnationalization as a complex and contradictory narrative that was primarily developed by private, commercial mass media, especially television. García Canclini: 'Men and women increasingly feel that many of the questions proper to citizenship – where do I belong, what rights accrue to me, how can I get information, who represents my interests? – are being answered in the private realm of commodity consumption and the mass media more than in the abstract rules of democracy or collective participation in public spaces.'8

If we understand the use of modern urban places as the spatial reflection of public life – and therefore as the basis for the functioning of modern democracies – this trans­ nationalization of the way in which citizenship takes shape necessitates a reformulation of the meaning and the nature of modern urbanity. It no longer makes sense to view urban publicness as an autonomous sphere of disinterested intellectual and cultural exchange and confrontation, explicitly separate from the private sphere, and citizenship as something separate from (cultural) consumption that maintains a unilateral relationship with the national state and politics. For several decades now, the use of the city has been the work of a new, hybrid subject, the consumer-citizen, whose political and cultural attitudes and behaviours are explicitly influenced by the global technological reproduction of the popular imagination. In essence, this new condition or urban publicness reaffirms the traditional 'republican' analyses à la Arendt, Habermas or Sennett, which speak of a 'contamination' of public action by private interests (Arendt), of the monopolization of the public domain by multinational cartels (Habermas) or of the 'intimization' of the substance of the public sphere (Sennett). The analyses of such writers as García Canclini or Appadurai corroborate similar processes, but they offer an alternative diagnosis. What they, in a certain sense, make implicitly – and sometimes explicitly – visible is that the negative judgment expressed by Arendt, Habermas and Sennett about the state of publicness comes out of a unilateral interpretation of what I have heretofore called 'the use of urban places' or 'the use of the public domain'. This unilateralism is to a significant degree the product of an ahistorical magnification or reification of the model situations that form the background to their ideal type of publicness. Distance and deliberation are the crucial concepts that form the core of the public sphere for Sennett and Habermas, respectively. Sennett saw distance as the core of the theatrical character of the early-bourgeois public life in the coffeehouses, a distance that was required in that period of history in order to exclude, as it were, during the encounter in the coffeehouse, the actual social (class and urban) differences among individuals, but also their then highly significant religious differences. In the public sphere, in other words, one plays a role, for the duration of the encounter or confrontation, because all too significant social or ideological differences would already be too much of a burden for public life. This seems to confuse the general form of urban publicness with its historically specific content. The fact that public life, requires playing a role, a certain theatricality, which would be perceived as disruptive in the private domain, does not mean that this role is expected to avoid contents that would be crucial in the private sphere. This was a crucial code for the eighteenth-century public sphere, but in a society in which class differences and religious convictions play a less decisive role, such a code loses its significance. The Gay Parade that takes place annually on and along Amsterdam's canals is a good example: an extremely theatrical event and an example of public action par excellence, and at the same time, in terms of content, a display of extremely private, even intimate preferences, practices and attitudes. In the same way, Habermas's identification of public action and of the public space with deliberation suffers from the magnification of an early-bourgeois culture of civilized salon conversations in which erudition was the quintessential social standard. The contemporary, transnational use of the city as a quintessential form of public action, in part shaped by global mass media, can no longer be judged in terms of distance or deliberation alone.

As a phenomenology of today's citizenship and of contemporary collective life in an urban environment, Van Oenen presents a whole series of persuasive examples of this 'interpassivity', examples that, without exception, make it crystal-clear to us that the self-aware and outspoken citizenship that was traditionally associated with public life in democratic societies is definitively a thing of the past. Van Oenen provides no clear explanation, however, of this interpassivity. References to the mediatization of our lives and to the flexibilization of the labour process place Van Oenen's interpassivity in the line of the traditional Marxist doctrine of alienation, but the whole idea of the outsourcing of involvement also alludes, unintentionally, to concepts like simulacrum and hyperreality, used by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard to come to grips with a social reality mediatized in a multitude of ways. And indeed, what Van Oenen and Baudrillard share is not the explanatory power of their arguments, but the evocative and robust magnification of diverse crucial dimensions of our everyday habitat. In that sense, the notion of 'interpassivity' is a brilliant invention. It expresses and represents our everyday experience as consumer-citizens who, through various media, feel extremely connected to the tribulations of the world – in fact feel compelled to feel connected, which in a certain sense is a reaffirmation of a traditional republican virtue – yet at the same instant 'outsources' that involvement to others, to a charitable organization, a media event or a 'campaign' in which the consumer-citizen need not participate in person, because this 'campaign' has already been organized and stage-managed.

Interpassivity and mega-involvement: wonderful terms that perfectly express the fate of the contemporary urban dweller and citizen. They raise significant doubts about the potential for resistance that Hardt and Negri, or Lesage presume of the citizen and about any excessively optimistic vision of the social engineering of society, but in no way do they refute the possibility of expressing and if necessary dramatizing the continuity of a local imagination, or the dream of a very specific, very particular urbanity. Interpassive citizens indeed hardly look like the dreamed subjects of modernity Habermas had in mind, but we should not blame citizens for that. If we had a complaint, it would be directed at the endless revival performance of the stage play of social engineering, this time less aimed at the social-democratic champions of the welfare state but rather at the neoliberal champions of the win-win situation, of the unbridled flexibility of human beings as factors in an otherwise unpredictable and global economic success story. There is little to counter that story – only the continuity of our own urban place, and that is indeed constantly under pressure and at risk.