Designing Disorder. Richard Sennett
Labour unions protected seniority for long-serving labourers and pensions rewarded such service. Organising labour in long units of time meant that a corporation would generally follow a clear internal structure: people would climb up or down fixed job ladders, knowing exactly where they stepped. Despite cyclical blips of unemployment, labour time was predictable and, in that sense, orderly.
Today’s workers experience much shorter labour time because of a reconfiguration based on power. Firms are now oriented to short-term share price rather than long-term profit. This shift speeds up and shortens labour time, as the firm requires different skills and restructures groups of workers in pursuit of short-term recognition by global investors. Flux within organisations kicks away people’s career ladders. Workers shift from task to task without an overarching narrative of where they are going. Young employees can expect to work for at least a dozen employers – or in the ‘gig’ economy, to work from month to month selling themselves to whomever will contract for their services.
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Today’s labouring servant is thus set adrift. This is where Hegel enters the picture. How can servants demand recognition of their needs, their presence, from the master? And what does this tell us about the kind of cities in which we live?
Flexible capitalism unfolds now in a rigid city. The city has become an iron cage – one that imprisons disoriented, labouring animals. There are several reasons for this paradox. The first is the withering of mixed spaces and their replacement with more homogenised districts. This process of sorting and segregating went on throughout the last century but has sped up since the early ’80s.
In the nineteenth century, the wealthy centres of London, New York and Paris were necessarily mixed because they contained a huge live-in servant population. These districts were also filled with small shops – butchers, cobblers, ironmongers – whose specialised commerce maintained affluent households. Servants and shopkeepers in turn had their own local supports, in pubs and cheap restaurants, close to where they worked. London’s Mayfair or the Upper East Side thus registered in censuses before World War I as diverse places in a particular way: they mixed the elite and the satellite working class.
Missing from the centre, however, were the middle and lower-middle classes, and the industrial labourers who were spread out in the city. From the 1870s, the middle and ‘respectable’ working classes established colonies in new suburbs, while the industrial proletariat was often condemned to live in degraded conditions near factories. Still, outer city territories were amorphous; they were mostly new housing developments that arose in erratic fashion. Whether respectable or miserable, all of these places had mixed local economies, just as in the centre. Near-in suburbs before the Great War were more like small towns than the dormitory-suburbs that sprang up after World War II.
The twentieth-century city was marked by relentless homogenisation. In the centre, the departure of live-in domestic servants meant that mews houses in London and top-floor flats in Paris became new kinds of luxury spaces. Haussmann had dreamed of remaking Paris in the mid-nineteenth century to create elegant, affluent spaces where the ugly underside of the city did not appear; a century later his wish began to be fulfilled. Outside the elegant zone, large developers came to dominate the financing and construction of housing at urban edges and in the suburbs; for these firms, homogeneous projects were much more commercially attractive than mixed-use and mixed-user ones.
Above all, the twentieth century saw the reign of zoning laws far more detailed and draconian than the rather loose standards of the nineteenth century. The history of zoning law is boring, but it has largely shaped the modern city. Written law takes aim at ambiguity. Increasingly in the decades after World War II, planners hunted down informal, abandoned or amorphous spaces.
In New York, in particular, planners’ prescriptive writing was seldom based on inductive experience of the city; their prescriptions were deductively formulated, with the division of labour as a model for the division of space: separate places for shopping, schooling, housing. New York is urbanistically distinctive because of the street-walls formed by contiguous tall buildings. These street-walls enable complexity of use and users at street level; they were replaced during the postwar years whenever possible by set-back, isolated buildings with few or no activities at street level.
This process of caging – separating – different uses, places and people has accelerated under flexible capitalism. The more the city has been sorted into different silos, the more the issues of lordship and bondage become visible and physical. The ‘lord’ becomes a rule or plan designating the precise use of each space, including who belongs there. The ‘bondsman’ is still a human being, one who submits to the rules of a space, using it as it is meant to be used; the bondsman knows, moreover, where she belongs and where she doesn’t. In New York today, the ‘lord’ of Hudson Yards is its highly articulated and regulated public space; the ‘bondsman’ are the men and women who use it exactly as planned. Moreover, few poor Latinos and African Americans will be found here; they know they don’t belong here.
Hegel’s early logic of civil society – as noted, different than his later, more statist views – is that the bondsmen set themselves free in the end by a show of indifference to the rules – say, by colonising bits of the outdoor public space in Hudson Yards for political purposes. Rather than debate planning regulations, they will speak a language to justify themselves which revolves around the need for face-to-face contact, or, more abstractly, invokes Lefevbre’s right to the city. An asymmetry results; lord and bondsman are speaking at cross purposes; thanks to this disordering, the bondsman has set her or himself free – free of the lord’s setting the terms of control.
By this same logic, Constant saw the creation of a civil society. In a good civil society, discourse is not resolved into a single set of issues for the lord and against the bondsman seeking recognition. Due to that very lack of resolution, people find spaces of freedom: they are no longer positioned, defined.
A city can make tangible this kind of civil society. The density and diverse population of a city spawns multiple scenes for civil society, so long as these spaces are not fixed in form and function. Our argument here is that the DNA for these unresolved, liberating spaces can, however, be designed.
The Closed System and the Brittle City
The cities everyone wants to live in should be clean and safe, possess efficient public services, be supported by a dynamic economy, provide cultural stimulation, and also do their best to heal society’s divisions of race, class and ethnicity. These are not the cities we live in.
Cities fail on all these counts due to government policy, irreparable social ills, and economic forces beyond local control. In these ways, each city is not its own master. Still, something has gone wrong – radically wrong – in our conception of what a city itself should be. Imagining the good city became ever more difficult as planning become legalistic and bureaucratic after World War II – Paris in 1960 had a far thicker rulebook than it did in 1870. This presents a paradox.
Today’s planner has an arsenal of technological tools – from lighting to bridging and tunnelling to materials for buildings – which urbanists even a hundred years ago could not begin to imagine: we have more resources to use than in the past, but we don’t use these resources very creatively.
This paradox can be traced to one big fault: the overdetermination of both the city’s visual forms and its social functions. The technologies which make possible experimentation have been subordinated to a regime of power which wants order and control; in the grip of rigid images and precise delineations, the urban imagination lost its vitality. Now, nearly a century on, with even greater technical abilities, we need to loosen up the city; we need to imagine an open city in which experimentation is possible, one which is friendly to informality, one which is open.
A portent of the paralysed imagination about cities appeared in Le Corbusier’s ‘Plan Voisin’ in the mid-1920s for