All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
modifications to our own behavior: anxiety about leaving the house, willingness to permit prying into our private information, suspicion of people who somehow look “wrong,” or demands for accelerated police action. Internalizing the means of our own repression, we risk allowing fanatics to turn us into totalitarians.
In his book The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault describes the response of a town in the Middle Ages to an outbreak of the plague. Lacking modern medical knowledge, the town—on a signal from the authorities—adopted a state of hyper-orderliness, making personal movements geometrical and activities clockwork. This superposition of an apparently rational style of urban behavior was meant as an antidote to the evil and irrationality of the disease. Needless to say, it was not effective, although—in a typically post hoc propter hoc argument—the eventual waning of the plague could be attributed to the only course of action actually taken.
And this will be our delusion, too, if we acquiesce in the reimagination of our cities as battlegrounds, rushing to superimpose military order in a place that requires very different styles of discipline, hierarchy, and choice. We have all suffered the new inconveniences of the main focus of current security efforts: the air transport corridor. The time in line waiting to pass through detectors, the force of interrogators asking us whether someone has given us something to carry on the plane, the large numbers of armed personnel, the endless thresholds at which we are scanned, and our progress through space mapped step-by-step have all become part of the background of our lives. Making this process convenient by making it invisible is not something we should participate in uncritically. We may want to glide from the concourse to the gate, but I, for one, want to know when I am being electronically patted down and to whom this information is being conveyed. Given the genuine risks that we do face, however, the question becomes whether there is any meeting ground between the need for precautions and the ongoing project of urban amelioration—the construction of cities that are humane, democratic, and sustainable.
I think there are several potential points of convergence between these concerns, places where energy might be focused to make our cities both more comfortably secure and more comfortably free, a kind of “peace dividend” from a number of the measures we are likely to take based strictly on questions of security. We can begin by extracting questions of safety and security from a narrow focus on terror. So many more of us die falling down stairs or in automobile accidents than in wars or terror attacks that a little perspective is necessary, a realistic sense of proportion about the sites and organization of investment. The risk of being struck down crossing the street by an SUV is far higher than the worst bin Laden can do. I don’t mean to be glib, but it is important to understand that the fear-mongering of the moment is based on a set of fundamentally political agendas.
How, then, to depoliticize the idea of safety, or rather, how to democratize it? To begin with the most obvious point, the project of making cities and buildings safer must encompass needed improvements to security from other risks. Clearly, reinforcing buildings against seismic hazards also brings greater safety from other sorts of externally induced structural traumas. Perhaps even more important is the dramatic improvement of fire safety. Many of the lives lost in the World Trade Center disaster might have been saved with better fire-abatement systems, with increased means of egress, with better internal communication, with careful attention to the presence of toxic and flammable materials. These are steps that need to be taken on an urgent basis, especially in tall buildings.
If September 11 can serve as a goad for us to address the threats mounted to buildings, this is to the good. However, even here we hazard a kind of parochialization of risk. Building safety must also encompass the effects of architecture on climate, the health-related effects of “sick building syndrome,” the damage to resources in remote locations, the flat-out toxicity of many of the materials with which we build, the dangers of the building process, and the insecurities engendered by the massive consumption of energy by buildings (itself one of the reasons for the current rush to war). A national policy based on securing the means to continue the cycle of hyper-consumption has enormous and unfaced planetary and political consequences. Building security goes way beyond metal detectors and security guards.
One of the striking scenes in New York City following September 11 was a dramatic rearrangement in the movement of traffic, when access via bridges and tunnels was limited. Emergency vehicles were able to flow without impediment. Streets were preternaturally quiet. Pedestrians were predominant. Car-pooling was enforced. In the process of rethinking the city after 9/11, managing systems of movement is perhaps our central opportunity to create a synergy between security and urbanity. In New York, we have a chance to dramatically pedestrianize downtown, using Ground Zero as a point of dissemination for the network. This local greening might be accompanied by a large-scale reduction in private vehicles in the city as a whole, and the replacement of no-longer-required road space with parks, bikeways, and other public amenities. The moment is also ripe for a more rational system of goods distribution and delivery. Both security and urbanity would benefit from more rigorous management of city traffic: greater efficiency in delivering milk might have an ancillary benefit in greater inefficiency in delivering bombs.
Indeed, a general increase in architectural and urban “inefficiency” could have many positive effects. A multiplication of routes and a mix of scales would humanize cities that are too straightforward and homogeneous. Structural overdesign and redundancy could increase both safety and complexity. An architecture more integrated with the earth around it would enhance thermal performance, environmental continuity and variety of use. The sort of bottom-line inefficiency represented by European-style regulations that limit the dimensions of office floor plates to guarantee workers access to light and air would create buildings that are psychically and physically both safer and friendlier.
As Jane Jacobs has observed, strong neighborhoods are safe neighborhoods. Her theory suggested local spatial supervision based not on centralized means of surveillance but on the extension of the idea of neighborliness. Although anonymity is a prized value in city life, it is one among many, and there are styles of violation of our privacy that are more and less civic. The grandmother leaning out of the window keeping an eye on the street is a radically different phenomenon than M-16-toting guardsmen manning checkpoints downtown. It is not liberal sentimentality to suggest that building strong neighborhoods, neighborhoods with complex nets of relationship and interdependency, is an intrinsically superior style of security to CCTV on every corner. Our personal participation in the security of our cities and neighborhoods should grow from a sense of decorum, not fear.
By extension, we are now presented with an opportunity to rethink the nature of business and commercial concentrations within individual cities. The same technologies that allow corporate headquarters and call centers to grow on greenfield sites far from the pleasures and conveniences of town also allow us to adopt a policy of local decentralization based not simply on security from terror, but on the convenience of building sustainable communities—places in which living, working, education, culture, recreation (all the components of the good urban life) can be planned comprehensively: metropolitanization rather than globalization. In terms of the real economic development of New York City, for example, it would seem far more productive to apply the massive capital that is about to be squandered on unnecessary offices downtown to the reconstruction of the Bronx Hub or 125th Street.
The key to our security is neither the construction of new fortifications nor a willingness to progressively surrender our shrinking rights of privacy to the tender mercies of the national security state. Our best defense against terror lies in the strength of our democratic institutions and of our human character: armament is not a substitute for a culture of compassion and generosity. The horrible events of 9/11 are not a call to arms, but to justice, to increase the peace. Good cities, the manufactories of our civilization, are a bulwark.
2002
14
A Brief for Reconstruction
1. People must be free to gather. Uncoerced assembly is democracy expressed in space.
2. A wide range of rites and rituals of remembrance must be accommodated.
3. The need of survivors of the tragedy to come together must be served.
4. The site must be understood as a single