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Biopower, Planning, and the Living City

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Biopower, Planning, and the Living City Timothy Ivison London Consortium Birkbeck College University of London Thesis Supervisor: Mark Cousins DEVELOPMENTALITY: BIOPOWER, PLANNING, AND THE LIVING CITY Fig. 1: Pipers model of the Olympic Park, Stratford, East London. Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Humanities and Cultural Studies: May, 2016 1 Declaration I, Timothy Ivison, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, it is clearly indicated in the thesis. Signature: ___________________________________________ 2 Abstract Our contemporary understanding of the modern city relies on a widely held consensus that its existence is the inevitable and natural outcome of economic and industrial growth. We take the city to be a habitat proper to modern civilisation, as well as an indexical measurement and representation of its development. Following this, the practice of town planning enters as a providential and cultivating force, guiding and articulating a scientific adjustment of the disorder created by industrial urbanisation, in the direction of an ordered and governable environment. This narrative forms the basis for what I will call the ‘developmentality’ of town planning. This thesis is a comprehensive critique and re-examination of the historical concepts of planning and urbanisation from the standpoint of ‘developmentality’. The thesis takes a critical approach to the history of British urbanisation, going against the grain of conventional planning histories, which tend to emphasise a liberal narrative of teleological progression and achievement, with clear institutional and juridical markers. On the contrary, the following thesis argues for a new epistemology of town planning that emphasises the extent to which it has been a discourse on the very biological nature of the modern city and the biopolitical governance of its spaces. The thesis argues that this biopolitical condition of urbanism in Britain can be retraced to the sanitary reform movement of the mid- nineteenth century, where an increasingly urgent notion of public health became the rationale for an expanded administrative, engineering, and architectural programme. Elaborated in the Garden Cities and Regional Planning movements of latter decades, biological doctrines are reiterated time and again as the rationale for myriad regulatory interventions and positivist planning theories. By the turn of the twentieth century, town planning not only insists on a therapeutic intervention into the pathological spaces of the city, it also projects a new image of the city: one planned and organised around the urban as a vector of health. In the elaboration of this programme, planning not only attends to the problem of growth, it also remakes the city in the image of an organic system and recasts the city dweller as an embedded subject within a holistic and technologically serviced milieu. The biological premise and hygienic project of planning extends from the very notion of the normal and the pathological city, through to the infrastructural logic of urbanism as an endless propagation of the prosthetics of modern habitation. Through a series of critical analyses, the thesis will argue for a new reading of the history of town planning, one in which its very locus and legitimacy is to be found in the urban spatialisation of biological concepts. 3 Acknowledgments The institution of the London Consortium and the scholarly ambition that it came to represent has been an important inspiration for this thesis. The possibility that it still might exist, as an idea expressed by its students is the only reason I have resolved to finish. I would like to thank my colleagues Nathaniel Budzinski, Kasper Opstrup, Lauren Wright, Noam Leshem, Lina Hakim, Maitreyi Maheswari, Ross Adams, Christopher Gonzales Crane, Pedro Castelo, and Tom Vandeputte for their support and inspiration from the very beginning. A number of people in and around the London Consortium have helped this thesis along its tortuous and winding way. Barry Curtis has been a reliable presence and has made many helpful points as a seminar leader, as well as a reader for my upgrade panel. Charles Rice gave me the opportunity to present parts of this material in his course ‘Designing Life’ at Kingston University, and also provided excellent advice at my upgrade. I should also thank Matthew Gandy for his patience as an early second supervisor. Ben Cranfield has been exceptionally accommodating and helpful as the Director of the Humanities and Cultural Studies department at Birkbeck and I would also like to thank Renée Olivel for her guidance in the final stretch. The Architectural Association, the AA Library, and the AA Bookshop have provided a geographic centre to the memory theatre that this thesis exists within. A number of people at the AA adopted me into their institution, including Charlotte Newman, Wayne Daly, Zak Kyes, Vanessa Norwood, and Brett Steele. My colleagues at the AA Bookshop, Luz Hincapie, Emma Capps, and Raluca Grada, each helped me find levity and friendship along the way. I would also like to thank the Senate House Library for its Geography and Urban Planning collections, as well as for its private study carrels, which provided me with a glimpse of the wood-panelled coffin that I imagine I will one day be buried inside. This thesis would not have been possible without the patience and insights of Mark Cousins, whose voice will no doubt be legible in my most combative assertions and controversial claims. Mark has always pushed me to unearth novelty, to challenge orthodoxy, to be caustic, and occasionally offensive, all with comic timing. I am still learning. On a deeply personal level I would like to thank my parents for their trust and support, Nick Lucking for always staying in touch, and especially Julia Tcharfas for her incredible love, patience, and friendship. 4 Table of Contents Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 4 1. Developmentality 8 I. Introduction 8 II. Historiography and Method 11 Reformist Histories 12 Utopia 17 Towards Developmentality 21 III. Chapter Plan 23 2. Biopower and the Spaces of Developmentality 29 I. Introduction 29 II. Biopower and Biopolitics 31 Anatomopolitics 33 Biopolitics 35 Biopower and Medicine 37 Biopower and the City 38 III. The Spatialisation of the Milieu 45 Spaces and Classes 46 The Spaces of Population 50 IV. Biopower and the City, After Foucault 53 3. The Health of Towns 56 I. Introduction 56 II. Cities and Growth 57 The Problem, Not the Fact of Growth 58 Population Statistics 65 The Normal and the Pathological 75 III. Location: Pathogenesis 79 Miasma and Milieu 84 Conclusion 89 4. The Serviced Environment 91 I. Introduction 91 II. The Jurisdictions of Health 92 The Body at Work and at Rest 98 III. Sewerage 101 Utility and Utilitarianism 105 IV. Housing and Urbanism 111 Bylaw Housing 113 Conclusion 120 5 5. Technology of Health 122 I. Introduction 122 II. The City as Invention and Experiment 124 The Problem of Growth, Restated 125 Utopia 127 The City as Factory, Colony, or Garden 128 Development and Trusteeship 129 Formal and Social 133 III. The Garden City as Organisational System 138 City, Country, and Garden City 139 The Space Between People 141 Circulation 145 IV. Problems in the Closed System 146 Finance as Design 148 6. The Natural Habitat of Man 154 I. Introduction 154 II. The City in the Region 157 Valley Section 161 The City in the Environment 163 Conurbations 167 The Natural History of Urbanisation 169 III. The Production of Outlook 173 Planetary Urbanisation 174 Exhibiting the World 176 Conclusion 183 7. Conclusion 185 I. Developmentality Restated 185 Deveopmentality and Biopower 185 Spatialisations 186 II. Developmentality and the Science of Life 190 Function and Representation 190 The Urban Observatory 191 Complexity 194 Crowd Control 197 Life 200 Bibliography 203 6 List of Figures Fig. 1: Pipers model of the Olympic Park, Stratford, East London. 1 Fig. 2: Extract from Pugin’s Contrasts (1836), showing a ‘modern poor 60 house’ in the panopticon style. Fig. 3: Bill of Mortality from August 15-22, 1665. 67 Fig. 4: The Sun, fire mark 61780 (Museum of London). 70 Fig. 5: Seal of the Statistical Society of London. 73 Fig. 6: Snow’s map of Soho, showing the concentration of cholera 83 deaths around the Broad Street water pump (1855, British Library collection). Fig. 7: An 1832 cartoon showing London Board of Health inspectors 85 searching for the ‘cholera morbus’ (Wellcome Library, London). Fig. 8: London County Council ‘Main Drainage’ map of London 110 showing the extent of the county sewerage network as of 1930. Fig. 9: ‘The By-law Method of Development.’ from Raymond Unwin’s 114 Nothing Gained By Overcrowding! (1912) Fig. 10: Ebenezer Howard’s Three Magnets diagram from To-Morrow: 140 A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898). Fig. 11: Ebenezer Howard’s radial ‘Group of Slumless Smokeless 142 Cities’ diagram from To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898). Fig. 12: The Valley Section diagram. 162 Fig. 13: Arthur Ling and D.K. Johnson, ‘London: Social & Functional 168 Analysis’ map from the County of London Plan (1943). Fig. 14: The Outlook Tower, from Cities in Evolution (1915). 178 Fig. 15: Illustration of Elisée Reclus’ proposal for 1900 Universal 179 Exposition by Louis Bonnier. 7 1. DEVELOPMENTALITY I. Introduction Our understanding of the urban condition is dominated by a discourse on growth and development. Both terms are imported from biology, and as such, they suggest the characteristics of biological life: the urban is understood to possess the specialised functions of both an organism and an ecosystem, a framework within which the city seeks a teleological form of replication, combination, and ‘evolution’. Architects and planners routinely describe urbanisation as the complex and inevitable outcome of these natural forces – the production of a habitat proper to modern civilisation, as well as an indexical measurement and representation of its development.
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