Seeing Like a State, Chapter 4

 

Summary of Chapter 4: The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique

This chapter joins into the eternally popular and rewarding practice of bashing Le Corbusier, followed by an appreciation of the work of Jane Jacobs. Visits to Brasília and Chandigarh illustrate the failings of High Modernist city planning. Scott begins with an opening quote from Mumford about Baroque planning not being amenable to change, and so having to be done at one stroke by an despotic ruler. Scott applies the criticism to “the embodiment of high-modernist urban design,” Le Corbusier (103). Most of his plans were never built, because “they typically required a political resolve and financial wherewithal that few political authorities could muster.” When such planned cities were built, they required autocratic state power, just as Mumford predicted.Scott notes:

These urban planners backed by state power are rather like tailors who are not only free to invent whatever suit of clothes they wish but also free to trim the customer so that he fits the measure. (146)

If one were looking for a caricature—a Colonel Blimp, as it were, of modernist urbanism—one could hardly do better than to invent Le Corbusier. (104)

Though some of Le Corbusier’s early creations are actually quite decent, the LeC we are taking issue with is the author of La ville radieuse. “Here as elsewhere, Le Corbusier’s plans were self-consciously immodest.”

No compromise is made with the preexisting city; the new cityscape completely supplants its predecessor. In each case, the new city has striking sculptural properties; it is designed to make a powerful visual impact as a form. That impact, it is worth noting, can be had only from a great distance.

None of the plans makes any reference to the urban history, traditions, or aesthetic tastes of the place in which it is to be located. The cities depicted, however striking, betray no context; in their neutrality, they could be anywhere at all.

Le Corbusier had no patience for the physical environment that centuries of urban living had created. He heaped scorn on the tangle, darkness, and disorder, the crowded and pestilential conditions, of Paris and other European cities at the turn of the century. (106)

Scott notes the romance of the modernist architect and the airplane, illustrated with a lengthy quote from Le C on the “bird’s-eye view” (381n7).

Formal, geometric simplicity and functional efficiency were not two distinct goals to be balanced; on the contrary, formal order was a precondition of efficiency. Le Corbusier set himself the task of inventing the ideal industrial city, in which the ‘general truths’ behind the machine age would be expressed with graphic simplicity. The rigor and unity of this ideal city required that it make as few concessions as possible to the history of existing cities.

Le C had a deep dislike of complexity; he believed that that straight lines and right angles are more rational and “geometric” than organic or rounded forms, but as Scott points out, this is not true. Scott describes Le C’s infamous concept of the “death of the street,” which is linked to the fetishization of zoning, per which each district of the city to have one and only one function.

The logic of this rigid segregation of functions is perfectly clear. It is far easier to plan an urban zone if it has just one purpose. It is far easier to plan the circulation of pedestrians if they do not have to compete with automobiles and trains. It is far easier to plan a forest if its sole purpose is to maximize the yield of furniture-grade timber. When two purposes must be served by a single facility or plan, the trade-offs become nettlesome. When several or many purposes must be considered, the variables that the planner must juggle begin to boggle the mind. (110)

If the only function of roads is to get automobiles from A to B quickly and economically, then one can compare two road plans in terms of relative efficiency. This logic is eminently reasonable inasmuch as this is precisely what we have in mind when we build a road from A to B. Notice, however, that the clarity is achieved by bracketing the many other purposes that we may want roads to serve, such as affording the leisure of a touristic drive, providing aesthetic beauty or visual interest, or enabling the transfer of heavy goods.

In the case of the places that people call home, narrow criteria of efficiency do considerably greater violence to human practice.

...what is going on in the kitchen when someone is cooking for friends who have gathered there is not merely ‘food preparation.’ But the logic of efficient planning from above for large populations requires that each of the values being maximized be sharply specified and that the number of values being maximized simultaneously be sharply restricted-preferably to a single value. The logic of Le Corbusier’s doctrine was to carefully delineate urban space by use and function so that single-purpose planning and standardization were possible. (111)

Le C’s first “principle of urbanism” was “The Plan: Dictator.” “He returned repeatedly to the contrast between the existing city, which is the product of historical chance, and the city of the future, which would be consciously designed from start to finish following scientific principles.” Le C’s city is to be “monocephalic.”

The scientific urban planner is to the design and construction of the city as the entrepreneur-engineer is to the design and construction of the factory. Just as a single brain plans the city and the factory, so a single brain directs its activity—from the factory’s office and from the city’s business center. The hierarchy doesn’t stop there. The city is the brain of the whole society. (112)

Scott compares this view to Plato’s in The Laws (382n28). He also notes the resonance with the career of Walter Christaller, the inventor of central place theory, whose “search for the autocrat who will give him the power to realize his vision” led him to court first the Nazis, then the German Communist Party, in “a classic case of the attempt to impose what had begun as a simplified analytical description of the economics of location” (382-3n29).

Le C’s had a typical high modernist faith in “universal scientific truths”; his vision of the Plan as despot has resonances with modern technofetishism.

The wisdom of the plan sweeps away all social obstacles: the elected authorities, the voting public, the constitution, and the legal structure. At the very least, we are in the presence of a dictatorship of the planner; at most, we approach a cult of power and remorselessness that is reminiscent of fascist imagery. (113)

Technocracy, in this instance, is the belief that the human problem of urban design has a unique solution, which an expert can discover and execute. Deciding such technical matters by politics and bargaining would lead to the wrong solution. As there is a single, true answer to the problem of planning the modern city, no compromises are possible.

Believing that his revolutionary urban planning expressed universal scientific truths, Le Corbusier naturally assumed that the public, once they understood this logic, would embrace his plan. The original manifesto of CIAM called for primary school students to be taught the elementary principles of scientific housing: the importance of sunlight and fresh air to health; the rudiments of electricity, heat, lighting, and sound; the right principles of furniture design; and so on. These were matters of science, not of taste; instruction would create, in time, a clientele worthy of the scientific architect. Whereas the scientific forester could, as it were, go right to work on the forest and shape it to his plan, the scientific architect was obliged to first train a new clientele that would ‘freely’ choose the urban life that Le Corbusier had planned for them. (114)

An extended discussion of Brasília (117ff) serves as an example of the design and failings of the High Modernist city. Though not designed by Le C himself, its planners were clearly inspired by his thinking, and there is also a handy book which Scott draws on extensivly (James Holston, (1989) The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília . Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Brasília is in several ways “the negation or transcendance of Brazil” and its culture.

Brasília was designed to eliminate the street and the square as places for public life. Although the elimination of local barrio loyalties and rivalries may not have been planned, they were also a casualty of the new city. (120)

The goal was to replace the public squares and crowded “corridor” streets of traditional Brazilian cities:

the square, as a confluence of streets and a sharply enclosed, framed space, become what Holston aptly calls a ‘public visiting room.’ As a public room, the square is distinguished by its accessibility to all social classes and the great variety of activities it accommodates. Barring state proscriptions, it is a flexible space that enables those who use it to use it for their mutual purposes. The square or the busy street attracts a crowd precisely because it provides an animated scene—a scene in which thousands of unplanned, informal, improvised encounters can take place simultaneously... It goes without saying that the street or the public square, under the right circumstances, could also become the site of public demonstrations and riots directed against the state. (120-1)

Scott inserts a relevant quote from Le C: “Cafes and places of recreation will no longer be the fungus which eats up the pavements of Paris. We must kill the street” (385n60). The massive central square of Brasília is not at all like the human-scale public squares of the past:

If one were to arrange to meet a friend there, it would be rather like trying to meet someone in the middle of the Gobi desert. And if one did meet up with one’s friend, there would be nothing to do. Functional simplification demands that the rationale for the square as a public visiting room be designed out of Brasília. This plaza is a symbolic center for the state; the only activity that goes on around it is the work of the ministries. (121)

The functional division of the city means everyone must drive everywhere, from home, to work, to commercial centers, etc.

One striking result of Brasília’s cityscape is that virtually all the public spaces in the city are officially designated public spaces: the stadium, the theater, the concert hall, the planned restaurants. The smaller, unstructured, informal public spaces—sidewalk cafes, street corners, small parks, neighborhood squares—do not exist. Paradoxically, a great deal of nominally open space characterizes this city, as it does Le Corbusier’s city plans. But that space tends to be ‘dead’ space, as in the Plaza of the Three Powers.

[This is readily confirmed with Google streetview; looking around the wide open spaces in the middle of Brasília, the only people I could find in any of the parks were three guys maintaining shrubbery]

There were definite advantages to beginning with an empty, bulldozed site belonging to the state. At least the problems of land speculation, rent gouging, and property-based inequalities that beset most planners could be circumvented. As with Le Corbusier and Haussmann, there was an emancipating vision here. The best and most current architectural knowledge about sanitation, education, health, and recreation could be made part of the design. Twenty-five square meters of green space per resident reached the UNESCO-designed ideal. (125)

Virtually all the needs of Brasília's future residents were reflected in the plan. It is just that these needs were the same abstract, schematic needs that produced the formulas for Le Corbusier’s plans. Although it was surely a rational, healthy, rather egalitarian, state-created city, its plans made not the slightest concession to the desires, history, and practices of its residents. In some important respects, Brasília is to São Paulo or Rio as scientific forestry is to the unplanned forest. Both plans are highly legible, planned simplifications devised to create an efficient order that can be monitored and directed from above. Both plans, as we shall see, miscarry in comparable respects.

it is almost as if the founders of Brasília, rather than having planned a city, have actually planned to prevent a city. (126)

Residents complain of brasilite, aka Brasília-itis.

The recipe for high-modernist urban planning, while it may have created formal order and functional segregation, did so at the cost of a sensorily impoverished and monotonous environment—an environment that inevitably took its toll on the spirits of its residents.

Holston asked a class of nine-year- old children, most of whom lived in superquadra, to draw a picture of ‘home.’ Not one drew an apartment building of any kind. All drew, instead, a traditional freestanding house with windows, a central door, and a pitched roof. (127)

The disorienting quality of Brasília is exacerbated by architectural repetition and uniformity. Here is a case where what seems like rationality and legibility to those working in administration and urban services seems like mystifying disorder for the ordinary residents who must navigate the city.

Scott turns to some of the unplanned elements which in the end shaped Brasília otherwise than it had been planned; particularly the role of the army of “candango” workers/squatters who built the city, who organize and get political power. In the end there are both rich and poor unplanned Brasílias, alongside the planned areas.

The unplanned Brasílias—that of the rich and that of the poor—were not merely a footnote or an accident; one could say that the cost of this kind of order and legibility at the center of the plan virtually required that it be sustained by an unplanned Brasília at the margins. The two Brasílias were not just different; they were symbiotic. (130)

This is because it was the political necessities of building Brasília in an autocratic manner, that, ironically, required some influence to be ceded to these competing power bases.

How successful was Brasília as a high-modernist, utopian space? If we judge it by the degree to which it departs from cities in older, urban Brazil, then its success was considerable. If we judge it by its capacity either to transform the rest of Brazil or to inspire a love of the new way of life, then its success was minimal. The real Brasília, as opposed to the hypothetical Brasília in the planning documents, was greatly marked by resistance, subversion, and political calculation.

Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, treated on pages 130-2, reveals essentially all the same problems. The rest of the chapter focuses on the trenchant critique of high modernist planning offered by Jane Jacobs (132ff). In contrast to Le C, Jacobs gives a bottom-up view starting from the street level experience of pedestrians; she will “argue from close daily observation at street level rather than stipulating human wishes from above” (140).

A formative insight in Jacobs’s argument is that there is no necessary correspondence between the tidy look of geometric order on one hand and systems that effectively meet daily needs on the other. Why should we expect, she asks, that well-functioning built environments or social arrangements will satisfy purely visual notions of order and regularity? (133)

A fundamental mistake that urban planners made, Jacobs claims, was to infer functional order from the duplication and regimentation of building forms: that is, from purely visual order. Most complex systems, on the contrary, do not display a surface regularity; their order must be sought at a deeper level.

Scott characterizes Jacobs as a “functionalist” in contrast to Le C’s aesthetic approach. Jacobs writes on the true sources of social order, e.g., “eyes on the street.” S adds in a footnote:

It is important to specify that Jacobs’s point about ‘eyes on the street’ assumes a rudimentary level of community feeling. If the eyes on the street are hostile to some or all members of the community, as Talja Potters has reminded me, public security is not enhanced. (386n85)

[To this could be added the question, of course, security for whom? There might be some “functionalist” assumptions about “order” to be unpacked here].

The process is powerfully cumulative. The more animated and busier the street, the more interesting it is to watch and observe; all these unpaid observers who have some familiarity with the neighborhood provide willing, informed surveillance. (135)

People in Jacobs’ city are on “sidewalk terms” with each other (136). S notes in a footnote how many of Jacobs’ examples involve “the fast-disappearing and much maligned petite bourgeoisie” (386n86) [a clue to one of Scott’s differences from Marxism].

The web of familiarity and acquaintanceship enabled a host of crucial but often invisible public amenities. A person didn’t think twice about asking someone to hold one’s seat at the theater, to watch a child while one goes to the restroom, or to keep an eye on a bike while one ducks into a deli to buy a sandwich.

The agents of this order are all nonspecialists whose main business is something else. There are no formal public or voluntary organizations of urban order here—no police, no private guards or neighborhood watch, no formal meetings or officeholders. Instead, the order is embedded in the logic of daily practice. What’s more, Jacobs argues, the formal public institutions of order function successfully only when they are undergirded by this rich, informal public life. An urban space where the police are the sole agents of order is a very dangerous place. (136)

Diversity, cross-use, and complexity (both social and architectural) are Jacobs’s watchwords. The mingling of residences with shopping areas and workplaces makes a neighborhood more interesting, more convenient, and more desirable—qualities that draw the foot traffic that in turn makes the streets relatively safe. (136-7)

What are the conditions of this diversity? That a district have mixed primary uses, Jacobs suggests, is the most vital factor. Streets and blocks should be short in order to avoid creating long barriers to pedestrians and commerce. Buildings should ideally be of greatly varying age and condition, thereby making possible different rental terms and the varied uses that accompany them. Each of these conditions, not surprisingly, violates one or more of the working assumptions of orthodox urban planners of the day: single-use districts, long streets, and architectural uniformity. (137)

“The very jumble of activities, buildings, and people—the apparent disorder that offended the aesthetic eye of the planner—was for Jacobs the sign of dynamic vitality.” Scott adds what he considers a “larger argument” to Jacobs’ case for cross-use and diversity:

Like the diverse old-growth forest, a richly differentiated neighborhood with many kinds of shops, entertainment centers, services, housing options, and public spaces is, virtually by definition, a more resilient and durable neighborhood. Economically, the diversity of its commercial ‘bets’ (everything from funeral parlors and public services to grocery stores and bars) makes it less vulnerable to economic downturns. At the same time its diversity provides many opportunities for economic growth in upturns. Like monocropped forests, single-purpose districts, although they may initially catch a boom, are especially susceptible to stress. The diverse neighborhood is more sustainable. (138)

Scott avers that Jacobs contributes a “woman’s eye,” more attentive and insightful than male colleagues of the time, allowing “her realization that a great deal of human activity (including, by all means, work) is pursued for a wide range of goals and satisfactions” (139). She characterizes “authoritarian planning as urban taxidermy” (139ff). A note explores links between Jacobs and anarchist precursors such as Goodman:

The echoes of such influential anarchist thinkers as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin reverberate in this passage. I do not know whether Jacobs intended these resonances, which may have come from the work of Paul Goodman. But what is missing is a recognition that, in the absence of state-based urban planning, large commercial and speculative interests are transforming the urban landscape every day. The effect of her argument is to ‘naturalize’ the unplanned city by treating it as the consequence of thousands of small and notionally equal acts. (387n99)

Scott discusses how urban planning parallels “optimum control theory” in forest planning, providing an example of planning for a shopping center’s catchment zone. “Rigid, single-use zoning is, then, not just an aesthetic measure. It is an indispensable aid to scientific planning, and it can also be used to transform formulas posing as observations into self-fulfilling prophesies” (141).

If the planning authority does not need to make concessions to popular desires, the one-size-fits-all solution is likely to prevail. (142)

The historic diversity of the city—the source of its value and magnetism—is an unplanned creation of many hands and long historical practice. Most cities are the outcome, the vector sum, of innumerable small acts bearing no discernible overall intention.

He quotes Jacobs to the above effect, and adds:

Le Corbusier would have agreed with this description of the existing city, and it was precisely what appalled him. It was just this cacophony of intentions that was responsible for the clutter, ugliness, disorder, and inefficiencies of the unplanned city.

They each have influenced different schools of thought in urban planning:

Whereas Le Corbusier’s planner is concerned with the overall form of the cityscape and its efficiency in moving people from point to point, Jacobs’s planner consciously makes room for the unexpected, small, informal, and even nonproductive human activities that constitute the vitality of the ‘lived city.’ (143)

Jacobs is also more aware of other urban processes: ecology, market effects, gentrification.

The nature of the city was flux and change; a successful neighborhood could not be frozen and preserved by the planners. A city that was extensively planned would inevitably diminish much of the diversity that is the hallmark of great towns. The best a planner can hope for is to modestly enhance rather than impede the development of urban complexity.

Scott approves of Jacobs’ (and later de Certeau’s) analogy of urban change with linguistic change, then in a footnote takes issue with Hayek’s similar claim to the self-organization of markets:

The problem that I see with this analogy is that the market in the modern sense is not synonymous with ‘spontaneous social order,’ but rather had to be imposed by a coercive state in the nineteenth century, as Karl Polanyi has convincingly shown. Hayek’s description of the development of common law is, I believe, somewhat closer to the mark. In any event, city, market, and common law are all creators of historical power relations that are neither ‘natural’ nor creative of ‘spontaneous social order.’ In her telling critique of planning, Jacobs is frequently tempted to naturalize the unplanned city rather as Hayek naturalizes the market. (388n106)

Like planned languages, planned cities need to be let loose to the transformative power of users: “Only time and the work of millions of its residents can turn these thin cities into thick cities” (144).

He discusses Jacobs’ laudable and prescient opposition to slum clearance, then notes more recent criticisms of Jacobs, but insists that “she has put her finger on the central flaws of hubris in high-modernist urban planning” (145). These flaws are, 1) “the presumption that planners can safely make most of the predictions about the future that their schemes require;” 2) the complex ways in which healthy neighborhoods and communities form cannot be reducible to formulae.