Sociologisk Arbejdspapir
Nr. 9, 2001
Michael Hviid Jacobsen & Nilesh Chatterjee
The Fall of Public Place
- Sociological Reflections and Observations on a Supermodern American Ghost City
Sociologisk Laboratorium
Aalborg Universitet Kroghstræde 5, 9220 Aalborg Ø Tlf. 96 35 81 05, fax 98 15 75 75, e-mail: [email protected]
Michael Hviid Jacobsen & Nilesh Chatterjee
The Fall of Public Place Sociological Reflections and Observations on a Supermodern American Ghost City
Copyright 2001 Forfatterne og Sociologisk Laboratorium
ISSN: 1399-4514 ISBN: 87-90867-09-2
Sociologiske Arbejdspapirer udgives af Sociologisk Laboratorium, som betegner det faglige miljø omkring sociologiuddannelsen på AAU. Her udgives mindre arbejder fx seminaroplæg, konferencebidrag, udkast til artikler eller kapitler – af medlemmer af miljøet eller af inviterede bidragydere udefra, mhp. formidling og videre befordring af den løbende fagligt-sociologiske aktivitet. Redaktører af serien er professor Jens Tonboe (ansv.) og ph.d.-stipendiat Michael Hviid Jacobsen. Eksemplarer kan bestilles hos Aalborg Centerboghandel, Fibigerstræde 15, 9220 Aalborg Ø, tlf. 96 35 80 71, fax 98 15 28 62, e-mail: [email protected]
2
Michael Hviid Jacobsen & Nilesh Chatterjee
The Fall of Public Place
Sociological Reflections and Observations on a Supermodern American Ghost City
3
4
LIST OF CONTENT 1. Introduction: Towards a Sociology of the City …………………………. 7
2. The Idea of Supermodernity - Novelty or Recycling? …………………. 13
3. The Corrosion of Community …………………………………………… 19
4. Agoraphobia American Style …………………………………………… 28
5. The Pandemonium of Condominiums…………………………………… 33
6. The Quest for an Urban Utopia…………………………………………… 39
7. Car Culture and Compartmentalism ……………………………………. 49
8. Urban Space Wars ………………………………………………………… 59 9. Consumer Culture and the New Bodily Asceticism …………………….. 64
10. The Divinity of Propinquity ………………………………………………. 75
11. The Re-Enchantment of Public Place ……………………………………. 78
12. Conclusion: The Fall of Public Place ……………………………………… 88
List of Neologisms or Unfamiliar Terminology 99 ……………………………….
References
“Whatever else they are, cities are also physical artifacts made by people”. - Witold Rybczynski
5
6 THE FALL OF PUBLIC PLACE - Sociological Reflections and Observations on a Supermodern American Ghost City†
1. Introduction: Towards a Sociology of the City
Strangers always meet foreign places, and especially foreign cities, with conflicting and indeed confusing feelings of promise and excitement, apprehension and disbelief. The mystery and revelation of the new possibilities and the novelty of awe-inspiring experiences ahead combines with the anger over the wasted opportunities and the lack of comprehension for a cultural construction that appears both alien, hostile and peculiar. Most of the stranger‟s interactions with the new city are mediated through the spaces that are public. As Michael Waltzer (1986:470) writes, “Public space is a space we share with strangers, people who aren‟t our relatives, friends or work associates. It is space for politics, religion, commerce, sport; space for peaceful coexistence and impersonal encounter. Its character expresses and also conditions our public life, civic culture, everyday
† This paper is the visible outcome of the cooperation of the two authors while working in Houston during the months of February through April 2000 at the University of Houston, Sociology Department, and the University of Texas, School of Public Health respectively. During the Oslo Summer School of Comparative Social Science in 1998, the two authors met and had the chance to discuss many of the points that later became this monograph on the city. This piece arises from a mutual interest in and dissatisfaction with the architecture, structure, and communality of the particular city of Houston. Thus, the paper is an attempt to present ideas of what the negative consequences of this kind of planning (based solely on economic profits using cultural constructs like freedom of space and movement) are and what is to be done to avoid these. Ultimately, this paper uses Houston as a case in point to argue for the larger transformation taking place in urban space as a result of the rampant evolution of capitalism and our specific social responses to that globalizing influence of capital. The paper is based on informal conversations with informants, a rather unstructured work process and an initially intended practice of cerebral hygiene from which follows that only a minimum of direct references will be made to existing and by now authoritative literature and that many of the observations may appear to be nothing but trivial everyday assumptions or taken-for-granted knowledge. However, certain insights are found in the literature of fields such as the sociology of the city, human geography and urban sociology and the authors through the work process discovered that cerebral hygiene in a field like this is not recommendable if one wishes to communicate knowledge and findings with some connection to prior research. We would like to thank Lori Leonard at the School of Public Health for her time and insightful comments and Paul Smith, Houston native, for letting us bounce some of our ideas. The authors are also grateful to Sociologisk Laboratorium at the University of Aalborg, Denmark for providing the foundation and forum from which the ideas of this paper can circulate and hopefully proliferate.
7 discourse”. Thus, as a newcomer enters a new setting, it is this encounter with the public spaces that evokes different degrees of differing emotions, at times mutually contradictory ones, and is, in some way or the other, simultaneously repelled and attracted by the new place at which he or she arrives. Most succumb to the attractive option of being enchanted by the place they are in, while a few stay disenchanted, keep nurturing the repelling aspects, and keep that critical notion intact. This ambivalence is basic to the human condition in general but is particularly part and parcel of the so-called post-modern condition described by so many prominent scholars and is probably an inescapable feature of both the activities of the mind as well as of the habits of the heart. In the following paper we will, by a conscious nurture of the critical imagination described above, focus on a specific and localised aspect of cultural settings that is a major cause behind this ambivalence, an especially dynamic and fluxing structure, namely the city. The city is in many ways a melting pot between the old and the new, the idyllic atmosphere of the countryside and the urbanity of the metropolis, the past and the future and is thus a very obvious place to investigate if one wants to understand and comment on contemporary social practices and structures either in order to support these or if one has the aspiration to change them. This is particularly true if you are a newcomer with eyes wide open. Michael Waltzer, the political scientist and exponent of communitarian values, rightly contended, that “cities are, like novels and movies, necessarily subject to lay criticisms. So, too, though less gloriously, are the dehumanized wastelands we have created, even in the midst of the city itself” (Waltzer 1986:470). Cities are many things and possess many qualities at one and the same time: it is a place, a set of objects, a set of beliefs, a pattern of exchanges and flows, is both visible and invisible, is a historical and temporal entity, a place of the spectacular and the mundane alike, is the object of urban professions and is an understanding of itself together with many other aspects (Miles et al. 2000). Moreover, the city is also the object of social scientific scrutiny and thus often comes under the critical lenses of sociologists although it has been claimed again and again that social scientists suffer from spatial amnesia.1 In the subsequent parts of this paper, however, the reader will discover that space is of utmost importance in the work of social scientists and will find not merely lay criticisms but equally the utilisation of sociological insights and concepts in order to describe and analyse the feeling of living in a city and what impact urbanity have on people.
1 Jens Tonboe (1993) has shown how important space and discussions about spatial aspects of social reality have been for many schools of sociological thought including positivism, historical materialism, human ecology, German idealism, structural functionalism, neo-positivism, neo- marxism and several others.
8 The city we will be talking about here as an example and illustration of the aforementioned ambivalence is the fourth largest in the U.S.A. in terms of population and is inhabited by approximately two million people (the larger Houston-Galveston area has about four million people), and spans over 617 square miles, and is, compared to European standards, a very big buzzing and pulsating city. Or is this so? It is undoubtedly the fourth largest city in the United States and it is, equally indisputable, the centre of the oil and natural gas industry and energy capital of the world, medical research and technological and aerospace industry. Other factual information are that the median age of the population is 30.4 years and the city where they live encompasses 311 city parks, more than 1700 churches, more than 40 AM and FM radio stations, 15 commercial and public radio stations, and a per capita income of around $28,000. We shall throughout this paper, which offers both a critical angle at Houston as well as contain an introduction to parts of the general terminology of urban sociology, however, not try and look at the factual level of social reality. We will descend below the visible structures and manifestations of the city of Houston and try and look particularly at the content and meaning of the words pulsating and buzzing and whether or not they seem to be apt descriptions of the general functioning of city life in Houston and to what extent they are appropriate phrases to describe the experiences of everyday life of people living here. One of our initial queries concerns the conundrum of how it is possible that a presumably overcrowded space turns into an empty place, how it can be that a big city can present itself as an uninhabitable and indeed uninhabited area. Ada Louise Huxtable wrote about Houston in 1976, of the curious lack of any distinguishing natural topography such as rivers and mountains, or even the lack of local identity, historical and cultural condition that define other cities and provide the visitor with a sense of having arrived somewhere. She wrote: “One might say of Houston that one never gets there. It feels as if one is always on the way, always arriving, always looking for the point where everything comes together.” Arriving in Houston, as either a complete stranger or a semi-stranger who only spends a limited period of time here, was an experience equivalent to that of Franz Kafka‟s young character in his unfinished masterpiece Amerika (1974) who was almost paralysed by the cultural transition on arriving in New York or the equally young traveller in Thomas Mann‟s (1992) The Confessions of Felix Krull who on his journey to Paris suddenly realised the immensity of the world and the vastness of the space available to explore. Perhaps even the emotions and astonishment expressed by German sociologist Max Weber when he first visited the American continent in the beginning of the 20th century is one of the best accounts of how a sociologist feels when encountering entirely new territory. His wife, Marianne Weber, during the same visit referred to the city of Chicago as “a point of crystallization of the
9 American spirit” (Brann 1944:20). In many ways, we have in the following also regarded the city of Houston as a marker of the American way of life and as an expression of some of the main trends that sweep across America and the Western hemisphere in general when it comes to urban planning and the ideas of community and belonging. Experiencing big cities is bound to provoke you deep down inside but will at the same time also present a perfect platform for a sociological study of a life form and a social structure which holds more questions than answers and here we will merely attempt to pose some of the potential questions and estimate some of the possible answers well aware that they will merely be tentative and based on private experiences. The city of Houston was founded in the middle of the 1830‟s and today spreads its inhabited territorial wings over more than 617 square miles. The census is, as we mentioned above, close to four million but the central part of Houston is inhabited by approximately half of this, still significant, amount. These are people who primarily work close to the downtown area but on a daily basis commute from their homes in the suburbs and regions on the outskirts of the city. Therefore the density of the population is not very high as most of Houston‟s inhabited quarters are scattered over a tremendously huge area hereby creating many empty spaces. One of its marks of distinction is its two stalagmite skylines, the downtown area and the Medical Center, which can be seen from far away and which are bound to make most other major American cities envious. Another characteristic of Houston is its abolishment of the old ward2 system that has had a dramatic impact on the structure of the city and also on the people living there and communities constituting the city. However, Houston is not, according to most people here, an excessively planned city, as one might have expected, but more an evolving city, a city that has taken on a life of its own. Architecturally everything in the city of
2 Although today even an educated and interested resident of Houston can only tell you that there previously were located roughly about six wards somewhere in the middle part of the city, but cannot identify their exact location, almost everybody knows that Houston's government is not actually based upon the wards anymore and has not been for a long while. In 1839 the city was divided into four wards when the total area of Houston was nine square miles. The Fifth Ward was added about 25 years later, and in 1876, the Sixth Ward was formed from part of the Fourth Ward. In 1906, the city reorganised, eliminating wards as political units, but people continued using them to identify geographic areas as well as places of belonging. The wards were social markers that made people identify with their own ward as a sign of social status – even though one belonged to one of the poor wards – and the ward created a small community of people within which they could identify and have some sort of social cohesion. The size of Houston in 1906, when the ward system was at its most effective, was only 16 square miles compared with the present size of 617 square miles.
10 Houston looks different – people as well as places - but paradoxically still have the ability to appear exactly the same.
FIGURE 1: THE GENERAL URBAN STRUCTURE OF HOUSTON
Although this is a very simple replication of the general structure of the urban space occupied by Houston, and in many ways is perhaps too simplistic, it nevertheless illustrates how Houston is not a very complex place to get around and the so-called loops, highway system and the thoroughfares cutting into the centre area all combine into creating a predictable and accessible space.
11 The method we utilised in order to obtain first-hand information about Houston by the people inhabiting this strange place was the so-called informal unstructured conversation with a diversity of people working and drinking in bars, people in buses, employees and students at the several universities placed here, people on the street and more formal spokesmen of the institutions of Houston such as public servants and administrators, taxi drivers, people spending their lives in shopping malls, coffee shops, and department stores, and people we met at parties, sports events and academic gatherings. Newspaper articles and TV news were also very informative sources on how Houston is regarded by outsiders as well as the inhabitants themselves. In this way, we cannot justify this study on the grounds of a rigid social scientific method but can only legitimise our way of inquiry as the least capital intensive (though very time consuming and work intensive) and we would term our method a variant of superjournalism3 - a phrase coined by Chicago sociologist Robert Park to designate as journalistic approach to a field of inquiry that was still to some extent informed and guided by the logic of social scientific scrutiny. The two prominent sociologists, Glaser and Strauss, also remarked that "sociological writing on cities, no matter how technical, has never been very different than popular writing" (Glaser & Strauss 1967:174). So in this way the subsequent paper is as much a sociological investigation with a hint of popular culture as it is a piece of scientifically informed journalism with its own armamentarium of informal research techniques, a diversity of reading and a flexibility of structure. Our main ambition was to link history and biography by using the sociological imagination (Mills 1959) and hereby being able to see connections between the micro and the macro, the subjective and the objective, agency and structure, the latent and the manifest. In the sociological imagination, according to radical American scholar C. Wright Mills, also lie the ability to see how very personal troubles were always linked intimately to public issues and how these two domains mutually informed each other (Jacobsen 2000). Connections of this kind are also tied up with notions of how things are evolving and changing and Mills (1959) once also distinguished between respectively social transitions created by thrust and social changes as the outcome of drift. Thrust is what is brought about consciously, and often malfeasantly, by certain sectors of society, specific interest groupings, according to a desired end
3 Concepts highlighted and in italics are either our own inventions or concepts that are central to our analysis of city life in supermodernity. A brief description and explanation of these terms can be found in the list of neologisms and unfamiliar terminology at the end of the paper.
12 product whereas drift is the slow perpetual transformation of society seemingly carried out and orchestrated by no one in particular and with no teleology (Mills 1959). The changes of city life we are going to discuss below will not dogmatically adhere to any of these two separate views on the logic of social transformation but will attempt to see them as interrelating and connected developmental features of our social history and individual biographies. However, we will most likely appear to be biased in favour of the thrust dimension as we are looking into how, presumably, structural factors have turned public place into public space and with which repercussions. Although this separation of space and place might appear trivial and nonsensical, the real life impact of this transformation is very obvious even to the untrained eye. Especially if one considers the city as part of a democracy where public places are helpful in creating and shaping political discourse through public dialogue. Making the city devoid of people has rendered the city devoid of meaning. The narrator in the American groundbreaking stage play The Rocky Horror Show informs us, that human life today is similar to that of ants crawling on the surface of the earth, lost in time, space and meaning. This is a very apt, yet simple, description of how life in the big city is happening to people on an everyday basis. Reclaiming the existing public spaces and reconstituting them as public places so that the city can truly be of the people, for the people and by the people must be put on the political as well as sociological agenda and the subsequent piece of work must be seen of the background of this aspiration.
2. The Idea of Supermodernity - Novelty or Recycling?
Theorising about city life was a common feature among many of the classical sociologists and we find analyses and perspectives of the metropolis, its rise and its consequences, in the works of amongst others Max Weber (1958), Georg Simmel (1971), Lewis Mumford (1961), Walter Benjamin (1978), William Whyte (1956), Richard Sennett (1990), Anselm Strauss (1961) and several members of the Chicago School including naturally the profoundly influential work of Robert E. Park (1952). These people primarily focused on the notion of the transformation of the so-called classical city of the industrial age taking place before their very eyes and the advent of modern city life and how it had been in the offing throughout the industrial era due to changes in production, the rise of capitalism and a subsequent tide of urbanisation. Contemporary discussions, however, within the field of the social sciences nowadays centre around the notions of the transformations from
13 modernity to late modernity, post-modernity and other concepts trying to capture the time in which we live and understand what has gone before it and what will succeed it.4 We have here decided to utilise the notion of supermodernity as a descriptive term covering our current phase of social and particularly urban development, appropriated from the work of French scholar Marc Augé (1995) on the characteristics of the contemporary city, in that we see features that cannot be said to be specifically modern but at the same time are not a transcendence of modernity either and thus do not fit to notions of post-modernity. We wish to denote this kind of city develoment the hybrid city, the city torn between the past and the future, which is a feature particular to the epoch of supermodernity. By supermodernity is meant that the consequences of modernity are at one and the same time present is our time as the continuation as well as a radical break with the past, that the modern co-exists with the post-modern and that there are bits and pieces present of both. This is, as we shall see, very much the case in Houston. The transformation of the city, its form and content, is tightly connected to the winds of change going on in society in general and to the transformation from one kind of society to another, from industrial modernity to post-industrial supermodernity, and eventually from the locally bound to the globally accessible social and public space. Nigel Rapport (1996:359) described the experience of supermodernity in a fashion similar to that most post-modernists would also be able to adhere to: “Supermodernity entails population movements, globalism and non-places; individuals entering and leaving places, alone but one of many”. Many would claim, that these are also the marks of distinction of post-modernity, but the idea of post-modernity has always been divided between post-modernists who in almost exhalted fashion hailed post-modernity as something positive and others claiming that this epoch entailed a negative development. Supermodernity, in our understanding of the recent coining of the term, is not yet tied to any such factional connotation and is more a descriptive term than an evaluation. Supermodernity escapes such routinised affiliation with any of these combating academic camps and can be utilised as a purely analytical and descriptive term which suits our present purposes. The conceptual convenience about utilising the notion of
4 In a forthcoming anthology on modernity, late modernity and post-modernity several authors deal with discussions of the implications of the transformation of the social logic - or social grammar as some would prefer to call it - in Western cultures and how this affects the way societies regard and how they perceive of themselves regarding the judicial, the intellectual, the sexual, the historical and the political level (Carleheden & Jacobsen forthcoming).
14 supermodernity is furthermore that it was first, to our knowledge, used exactly in sociology in connection to changing notions of place within the field which is also the topic of this paper. In this way it is also connected to Edward Soja‟s (2000) notion of the postmetropolis, which is also a descriptive term covering the rise of a new urbanism that entails a transformation of the modern city into a new and unprecedented phase of social development. The notion of the emergence of a new type of space appeared appealing to us in our analysis of Houston since it gave up on the aforementioned trench war and sought out a new way of looking at the world from the spatial perspective and, as Michel Foucault noticed, “the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space” (Foucault 1986:22), which is both reflected in social reality and in our continuing scholarly endeavours to understand this. Thus, as we shall see, supermodernity is neither the direct extension of the logic of modernity, as late and radicalised modernists would claim, nor is it a complete break with modernity‟s assumptions about the world or itself, as the post-modernists would hold to be true. Supermodernity is neither an appreciation of the solidity of place in modernity or stands as evidence of a dissolution of place as in post-modernity. Rather supermodernity refers to a phase of social development in which both modernity and a transcendence of this are simultaneously present, in which the transformation of place and space is a significant indicator of the general transformation of social reality. Marc Augé philosophically noted on the content of supermodernity in this way: “The presence of the past in a present that supersedes it but still lays claim to it” (Augé 1995:75). That is, in short, was characterises supermodernity as an epoch and as a spatial arrangement of social life - the presence of the past in the present in some form that is still, however, transcended by the influences of something new. So what is it, then, that supermodernity imposes on reality that makes it a distinct phase of social development, what is it that makes supermodernity unique as compared to both modernity and post-modernity in this respect? Once again Augé is capable of summing it up in a brief and clarifying sentence: “The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not anthropological places, and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places…Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed” (Augé 1995:78-79). What Augé attempts is presumably to place himself outside both the post-modern camp as well as the orthodoxy of the modernity inherent in the Durkheim-Mauss tradition (Rapport 1996), which is
15 basically what we are also aiming at. So, the mark of distinction of supermodernity is the fact that it does not incorporate in its construction of place the historical background of that particular place and its relation to other similar places and locations and that place therefore becomes devoid of personal meaning and historical content, empty and eventually comes to constitute a non-place.5 Michael Rustin noted this as well by saying that “where „public space‟ formerly had been a social space, belonging to collectivities of various kinds and representing in physical terms distinctive values and identities, it became reduced under capitalism to a nonspace, a mere thoroughfare through which individuals moved in pursuit of their private purposes” (Rustin 1986:486). We suggest to call this developmental feature superurbanisation, as a descriptive term covering the phenomenon when non-places flourish on behalf of public spaces. Although non- places are still physically embedded in the urban areas and have a certain location and territorial boundary, they lack context and meaning. Non-places are thus the negation of place, which is actually a paradoxical and almost nonsensical notion. How can something be a place - which refers to presence - and at the same time be a negation of place, i.e., a non-place - which refers to absence? Apart from existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who equally came from the French scholarly tradition, in his oeuvre on the notions of presence and non-presence, nobody has been able to analyse and philosophise the delicate relationship between presence and absence satisfactorily either in the abstract sense or in the physical understanding. Augé, despite many unnecessary entanglements and excursions in his work, comes close to presenting a comprehensive as well as comprehensible general framework for understanding place and non-place in supermodernity that is of utility to our critical evaluation of Houston as a place and, as we shall see below, also a non-place. Where the transition from pre-modernity was marked by urbanisation and the embedding of space, supermodernity, which we prefer to label our current phase of social development, is on the contrary marked by a reversal of these features in the form of what we shall subsequently term superurbanisation and the emptying of space, the destruction of subjective meaning in spatial arrangements and the promotion of objective structures. The expansion of public space is accompanied
5 Kevin Lynch, in a now classic piece of work in the genre of urban redevelopment with the humorously chosen title What Time is this Place?, argues for the notion advanced here by us that places need to incorporate remnants from the past in order to hold any substantive meaning or cultural depth (Lynch 1972).
16 by the simultaneous shrinking and eventual erosion of public place. The expansion of public space we are currently witnessing is actually merely an expansion of private space and therefore it becomes devoid of public meaning. So the spatial refurbishment, as it were, is not so much a matter of form but a matter of content, or more correctly, the absence of content. Supermodern cities are also places in which people become part of the mass, become anonymous. It is a well-known fact, that a mass society produces conditions detrimental to the well-being of the individuals as has been shown by many prominent scholars such as C. Wright Mills, William Kornhauser and David Riesman. The new supermodern non-places can be contrasted to the Baudelarian places of modernity (Harvey 1996:144), where the former contains no history and are not embedded in localities of memory and the latter is place determined exactly by its location in space as well as in time, geography as well as history. The modernist notion of place was exactly connected to its embedding in the collective memory of people, whereas the supermodernist notion of place is not capable, indeed interested, in such a historical dimension. Place here is not what it used to be or will be in the future but merely what it is right now in time and what function it serves at this particular moment. In a review of Augé‟s book, it was noted that “if modernity implies a progressive evolution, and post-modernity a patchwork of modalities of equal worth, then „supermodernity‟ is characterized…by excess…Supermodernity, in short, entails changes in scale” (Rapport 1996:359). The main changes taking place thus has to deal with space and our understanding as well as utilisation of it, that place, which previously was a marked and limited area, today takes on an immensity of meanings as well as occupies an enormity of space, that the scale of space has changed qualitatively as well as quantitatively. What especially characterises supermodern non-places compared to modern places is therefore not their lack of fixity, as post-modernists would claim, but their lack of ability to create a lasting imagery in the collective remembrance of people, their strict sense of functionality and their almost complete one-dimensionality. We shall return to this below. What, on the other hand, characterises supermodern non-places compared to post-modern hyperspaces is, and this is our contention, that they are still very real and concrete but still extremely empty both of meaning and content. Post-modernists often in a rather fuzzy fashion talk about the new type of places that has emerged as being hyperreal, simulacra or almost surreal hereby referring to a new non-spatial dimension of place. Basically supermodern non-places are spaces that although they still have a spatial dimension nonetheless appear as non-places
17 whereby we meant to suggest, that they have lost their meaning anchored in human interaction, in the deliberate, voluntary and intentional gathering of people that constitute places as opposed to spaces. French philosopher Michel de Certeau called these areas for frequented places, as a description of people interacting and intersecting bodies, a space that turned into place because the people interacting there projected meaning into and onto the setting. Augé paints, perhaps an excessively sinister and bleak, picture of supermodernity when saying that the non- places are multiplying and that we are entering “a world where people are born in the clinic and die in the hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shantytowns threatened with demolition or doomed to festering longevity); where a dense network of means of transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce; a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral” (Augé 1995:78). Thus, non-places breed individualism, the pathological sibling of individuality, whereas places foster a sense of responsibility and belonging in people. There is nothing novel or revolutionary about the analytical separation of place and space, and in this sense unfortunately nothing that we can be credited for, since the notion by now has reached the status of taken-for-granted and common sense knowledge in social theory. According to the by now popularised theory advanced by British sociologist Anthony Giddens, what characterises modernity, and perhaps more accurately late modernity in his terminology, is the separation of space from place (Giddens 1990), a distinction also recognised by Augé (1995:79) who stated that “the term „space‟ is more abstract in itself than the term „place‟, whose usage at least refers to an event (which have taken place), a myth (said to have taken place) or a history (high places)” (Augé 1995:82). Previously, according to Giddens more elaborate theory, place and space were one and the same thing, referred to the same location and could not be distinguished from each other. However, in late modernity, which is the radicalisation of the features of modernity, place is no longer similar to space as the latter is lifted out of its embeddedness both in the time-bound sense and place-governed context: “The development of „empty space‟ may be understood in terms of the separation of „space‟ from „place‟ …‟Place‟ is best conceptualised by means of the idea of a locale…The advent of modernity increasingly tears space away from place by
18 fostering relations between „absent‟ others, locationally distant from any given situation of face-to-face interaction” (Giddens 1990:18). In Houston, space is still located, is still a very physical thing and place has not been transmogrified, as Giddens suggests elsewhere in his writings, or become hyperreal in any post- modernist sense of the word. However, place has turned into non-place and the city of Houston has become a wasteland both in the literal sense of the word as well in its more symbolic respect. It wastes itself as it wastes the lives of people living there. Space here is concrete and made out of concrete, but the novelty is the disappearance of place, that place has been annihilated and eradicated. The political scientist Michael Waltzer (1986) wrote, that we can basically distinguish between two types of spaces which exist on a continuum of possible forms and shapes but which each have their own analytical traits. He terms these respectively single-minded space and open-minded space, where the former denotes almost one-dimensionally planned space that in effect produces planned and predictable behaviour and people acting in a the turmoil of hurry-scurry and stress, and the latter, on the contrary, characterises space which is marked by the unforeseen and unforeseeable, the more intimate and tolerant aspects of reality. Houston is, if we accept this distinction, very close to resembling single-minded space which is equally reminiscent of non-places. We also hold that this understanding of open-minded space comes very close to the notion of public place, as we conceptualise it, and that the promise of open-minded space lies in the fact that it invites people to come together, alleviates loneliness, eliminates prejudice, instigates action and interaction and develops a sense of belonging. How is that possible? Before we turn to some more practical examples of how to achieve this we have to look a bit deeper into the consequences of the existence and advancement of single-minded space in the public sphere.
3. The Corrosion of Community
The main argument in this paper is that Houston is not a real, understood as traditional, city anymore, but has been transformed into a gargantuan non-place. One could be in Houston as easily as one could be in a huge airport or a complex shopping mall with fancy stores at multiple levels, but one could not live in Houston and feel as a part of the city. Thus, one of the effects of this transformation is the fall of community. Consequently no one ever feels at home because no one is ever at home. Houstonians might as well live in a supermarket or a giant airport –
19 you go, you see, you buy and you always fly. You do not stay. And though Houston is a place that many people call home, it does not possess any of the traditional characteristics of a city that citizens of another city would call home. In short, the first comment that comes to mind when one lands in Houston has been made by Gertrude Stein in the context of another place: There is no there here in Houston. In this piece, we are also interested in exploring the possible pathways by which this conversion of a place into a non-place could have taken place, assuming that Houston did have the characteristics of a place in the past. And one of the pathways or variables that we deem important given the influence of traditional sociology on our professional worldviews is that of community. Our hypothesis is that the corrosion or disappearance of community from the landscape of Houston has rendered this city or place into a wide-open non-place. Thus, we will examine briefly the definitions of community within traditional sociology as well as the phenomena of the corrosion and absence of community. German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies spoke of the transformation from Gemeinschaft (community) to Gesellschaft (association or society) as the one of the main features of the process of modernisation and according to him, although many different interpretations have been offered, the displacement of one phase by the other is marked by a decline of community spirit and of communal ties. Tönnies termed the almost effortlessly lingering communities marked by proximity and stability as communities of inertia (Bauman 1992a:xix). Of course, the next step is to explore the possible reasons for the corrosion or absence of community in Houston and why their inertia was dissolved and throughout this paper we discuss the possible reasons for the disappearance ranging from the structural to the individual and intrapersonal, and the attitudes of people towards the absence or lack of community. Three elements have been considered relevant to the definition of community (Inkeles 1982). A community is said to exist when a set of households is relatively concentrated in a delimited geographical area; when their residents exhibit a substantial degree of integrated social interaction; and have a sense of common membership, of belonging together, which is not based exclusively on ties of consanguinity. Today half of the American population lives in suburban areas and less than a third of them actually live in the city centres (Kasinitz 1995:387) which means that most central areas of the major cities are either demarcated for economic activity and work only or decayed because of the flight of capital and do
20 therefore not qualify for residential quarters. The suburbanisation is probably one of the most conspicuous features of modern American urban transformation and it is true for Houston too. And if it is assumed that as the size of a territory increases, the probability of interaction between two individuals chosen at random decreases, then Houston by virtue of its size of more than 600 square miles and the larger Houston-Galveston area with less than 2 million people within the city when compared with a city like New York or London, and given the lack of a public transport system and total dependence on the personal automobile, brings the probability virtually close to zero. Yet, physical proximity alone does not automatically create a community, and there are transcendent communities that elude the grasp of a common space of residence – thus a community of scholars or musicians would elude this geographically limited definition of community. Another factor in community is a sense of common bond, the sharing of an identity, membership in a group holding some things, physical or spiritual, in common esteem, coupled with the acknowledgement of rights and obligations with reference to all others so identified. In his rethinking of suburbia, professor of politics Peter Dreier (1996:11) concluded, “we need to rethink our old notions of „city‟ and „suburb‟. The stereotype of the affluent lily-white bedroom suburb no longer fits, if it ever did”. Neither the city centre nor the suburbs hold much promise for idyllic Jeffersonian notions about active citizenship, social interaction around the town pond and the flourishing of local community. Yet, it seems that the traditional definition of community fails to completely capture the lack of an essence of community in Houston – a city that we have defined as supermodern.6 The people of Houston do share certain values in common – it is not of color or race, but of the value they place on consumer goods. And they do display a substantial degree of integrated interaction – or else how would they negotiate the check out lines at grocery store, in restaurants, movie houses or while driving on the street. And although there is integrated exchange – the interaction is not determined by the social but by the economic. Ada Louise Huxtable wrote about the dollar dynamism that was rife in this city to the exclusion of any cultural or social dynamism. Thus, a large part of the daily interactions of a Houstonian are mainly of an economic character – which means that people
6 British historian Eric Hobsbawn noted on the use of the concept of community in recent social scientific debates that “never was the word „community‟ used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to find in real life” (Hobsbawn 1994:428).
21 interact but they display utilitarian interactions and not communitarian ones. Yet, the type of community we are advertising here, as it were, is not the traditional modernist notion of community as a homogeneous, exclusive, constraining and restricted membership or adherence to specific principles, which reminds one of the right wing communitarian versions of community or authoritarian notions of togetherness. However, it is also not the post-modern style of free-floating and almost effervescent imagined community we are talking about either but more a sense of belonging that and caring that becomes evident in one‟s actions towards others and in one‟s desire to interact even with strangers. Adna Ferrin Weber, in a 1899 book titled The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century, which was a comprehensive statistical study of cities in the Anglo social science literature wrote: “The most remarkable social phenomenon of the present century is the concentration of population in cities… The tendency towards concentration or agglomeration is all but universal in the Western World?”. He then went on to raise and answer questions related to the phenomenon of urbanization, thus, the book heralded in essence the rise of the public place. Weber was interested in disaggregating the various probable causes of this urban growth and figure out the factors other than mere population growth that caused this concentration of people in cities. One of Weber‟s suppositions was that the industrial revolution with the advent of rail transportation was the transforming agents in the redistribution of population. Simon Kuznets (1966) later confirmed Weber‟s suppositions – the high rates of increase in per capita product accompanied by population growth. Frederic C. Howe (1905) along with Lincoln Steffens also found the modern city to be the epoch of our civilization. They thought the city had created a new society and that it had altered life in all its relations. Society was compared to an organism like the human body – as in many 19th century sociological theories that worshipped and celebrated society - and the city was the head, heart and center of the nervous system. They saw this organism as capable of conscious and concerted action, responsive, ready and intelligent hereby contributing to the formation of definite social and political ideals. The assumption was that the city marked a social watershed and polar distinctions were made between two types of society, traditional and modern, in the attempt to highlight the revolutionary changes that spanned the watershed. Thus, Weber seems to be addressing the question of how and why cities came about in the first place and Howe and Steffens seem to be more interested in the consequences of this unique formation. Thus, one seems to
22 be seeing the city as a physical entity with economic and technological underpinnings; the others see the city at the juxtaposition of two eras of human history and as a conscious, responsive, ready and intelligent entity. But when one arrives in Houston, what does one see? - Definitely not a conscious, responsive, and intelligent entity; rather one sees a city that is merely reacting to the turbulences of the economy and an obvious lack of consciousness. Instead of limiting ourselves to the issues of economics and culture as the two factors that determine the presence or lack of community, we can also look at political and demographic factors. Some research has found that overall sense of community is greater when there is a higher satisfaction with the amount of local participation in the community and higher satisfaction with privacy in the residential setting. Thus, the absence of civic participation in the city is a definite factor that leads to lesser participation in city activities and consequently a lack of sense of community. Other research has found that residents living in larger, higher density and more ethnically diverse cities in a suburban region have a lower overall sense of community and the authors call these evident impacts of urbanisation (Wilson & Baldassare 1996). Houston is very diverse city with respect to ethnicity. The 1990 census reported that almost half of the Houston population was White, while nearly a quarter each were Black and of Hispanic origin respectively and less than 10% were of other ethnicities including Asians. Would the diversity of ethnicity be a factor in the corrosion of the overall sense of community in Houston, although some of these very ethnic groups (especially those of Hispanic origin) are known to have strong communal bonds? The answers are unclear, but it seems that whatever the ethnic origins and underlying traits of any social group, the American motifs of private property, and rugged individualism override all other influences. The Italian economist Achille Loria was one of the first theorists to establish the importance of the gradual decrease in free land as the basic factor in social evolutionary development. Loria‟s essential argument based on his observations of ancient and medieval history was that as long as land was free, there was no division of society into classes nor such restraining forces as morals, law or religion. And with the beginning of the appropriation of land, slavery became the dominant institution. Loria sees each stage in history as the subsequent steps and advancements in the same appropriation process. Thus, the compulsory organisation of labour – serfdom in rural areas and guilds or corporations in the city - were a step in this same process, and when all or most of the land was appropriated capitalism emerged, marked by the institution of free labor. This is
23 also the strand of thought expressed by the Marxist theoretical movement in urban sociology, which is a move away from the urban ecological approach to the study of urban areas. Thus, the main argument of for example Manuel Castells and David Harvey, and perhaps especially Harvey, revolve around the development of cities as a function of capitalism and its use of space (Walton 1993). This line of argument seems to fit into the history of the United States and our observations of the space wars and use of space in the city of Houston. Historically, the growth and development of America is based around the notion of appropriation of land; first from the natives of this continent by the colonizers, and then between the colonizers when they started grabbing land form each other and with the establishment of the notion of private property. Private property as a determinant of societal rules and laws finds the greatest number of adherents in the United States and Houston is no exception. The Texas region is further complicated by the firm belief in the frontier mentality and that every individual has to guard his or her (mostly his) private property. The doctrine of private property and rugged individualism is hyper-accentuated in the social customs and interactions of Houstonians. One manifestation of that mentality is seen on the streets, whereby more trucks – a symbol of the countryside and individualism - are seen in Houston than any other major city in the United States. Thus, in Houston, it would seem that there is a very low level of participation in the community, and a greater obsession with privacy, and consequently we assume that there is very low sense of community. But what are the reasons for this – is it merely the larger social structure, and/or the civic architecture, the car culture or the kind of people who are selected into this city? As Robert Park, Chicago sociologist from the Urban Ecology School of urban sociology, commented: “Once set up, a city is, it seems, a great sorting mechanism which… infallibly selects out of the population as a whole the individuals best suited to live in a particular region or a particular milieu” (Park 1952). This would raise the question: Is Houston merely a different kind of city that attracts a different kind of people, as some would argue? And what can those differences tell us about the kind of city Houston is and also the kind of time we live in and the kinds of spaces we are going to live in the future? As sociologists we are naturally interested in those differences and how they relate to other cities. Houston may be ethnically diverse but definitely not pluralistic. In fact, Houston is a monistic city – that is only one thing has value here and that is the dollar. Houston is a city spread across 617 square miles (1527 sq. km), divided
24 neatly by beltways and Interstate highways, divided and stratified by cost of housing, income and race, but Houston is still tightly controlled by a small group of people. The skin colour of the mayor of Houston may have changed over time, but some things have not changed at all. Houston is very old-worldly with respect to who controls Houston, the women are still very southern and dress conservatively and laugh loudly at a man‟s jokes; a city where the civil rights movement was a damp squib compared to the ferment in other parts of the South. Yet, Houston is also a quintessential American city expressing the same contradictions that this nation does to the world. Houston is politically correct and pays adequate lip service to multiculturalism, it is comfortable and it is clean, yet, Houston never walks away from the beaten path of economic principles. The restaurants and nightclubs are divided completely along ethnic lines. In fact, the only places where races and classes mingle freely or cross each others paths are in the non-places described by Marc Augé – the highways and the shopping malls. Therefore, we call Houston a supermodern city – a city that has gone beyond the modernity of the industrial past but has not become post-modern in the futuristic sense yet. Augé, writing about the lived experience of the structures of supermodernity, claims that, “these subject the individual consciousness to entirely new experiences and ordeals of solitude, directly linked with the appearance and proliferation of non-places… the space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude” (Augé 1995:93). Whether or not this solitude, this solipsistic existence as a homo clausus, is freely chosen or forced upon the individual cannot be easily answered. Cornelius Castoriadis, Turkish-French philosopher, noted to the interviewer in an interview, that “when you at 6 o‟clock stand in a line at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, then this is a overpopulated desert. You are more in the desert than you would be in Sahara – and simultaneously there are four inhabitants pr. square mile” (Castoriadis in Rötzer 1986:47). In this fashion – and perhaps even more so in Houston than at the Place de la Concorde in Paris – people can be close together and still solitary, lonely and apart. Thus, Houston is a city existing on the frontiers and threshold of supermodernity or what we may also call late capitalist consumer culture in the West. It is the craving for consumption that is common to all the people who share residence in this city and it is consumption that is their common and shared identity. The question that we raise is: Can consumption and a love of consumption be a good enough reason or a strong enough common bond to hold people together in a community? Or to frame this problem in a crisper question: Can there exist a
25 community of consumers and if this community of consumers share a space (of a city) – would that common bond and that interaction be shared or even be social? Bauman (1997) was of the impression that consumers, although they have a common desire to consume, nevertheless did not constitute a community, which is an inclusive term, since the so-called flawed consumers were not allowed to participate. The question for scholars and people who are living in and living out supermodernity is: Can consumers ever share or interact meaningfully in a social sense? And if by definition sharing is what constitutes a community, are we condemned to live as hyper-individuals who can only be a part of a floating and indeed flowing network? Thus, we started with the traditional sociologists‟ concerns with fragmenting community in the age of industrialisation and modernity, and we at the start of the next millennium ask whether that fragmentation has been complete, the atomic bonds cut loose and each of us as atoms have split away from the nucleus and are revolving around our individual credit lines in our private cars leading our compartmentalised lives. The study of an urban space or of Houston has led us to a more fundamental question: What is society? Society cannot be understood as a psychic entity independent of individual minds; this conceptual view ascribes reality to mere concepts. But is it equally incorrect to believe that only individuals really exist, and that society is a sum of its individuals? Thus, reality is not only to be found in matter, but also in that which gives matter its form (Timasheff 1967). Therefore, society is also the reciprocal relations between its human elements. Simmel‟s argument was that the social sciences had studied only a few types of reciprocal relations, mainly the economic and the political; and he argued that there were innumerable varieties of interactive relations, including everyday phenomena such as looking at one another, dining together, exchanging letters, helping others and getting help that were not given importance in formulating these theories of society. In our exploration of this urban space called Houston, we have thus far looked at community and its conceptions according to the sociological thought of Tönnies or Durkheim who were mainly concerned with disintegration of a whole, and the effects of industrial changes on the fabric of the social. Thus, their emphasis was on the effects of these changes on social relations. And then at the Marxists who looked at the economic arrangements that led to the changes and to the picture of Houston as we see it today. And at the same time, if one were to make any comments about the nature of Houston, then one has to look at everyday life in
26 Houston. A sum of all these pictures would then make up the complex collage that any city is. Everyday life in Houston is consumed by two things – automobiles and air- conditioners. And although an average American in terms of distance would have traveled at least 30 miles a day, in the hundred-mile city of Houston – it is 100 miles from one end of the city to the other – the total number of miles in a working day week and then for leisure on the weekend would be more if not less than 50 miles a day. Thus, although in a month of 30 days, the average Houstonian would have traveled 1.500 miles and in a year about 18.000 miles, yet, the average Houstonian does not travel very far away from home. Not many have traveled even within the US or away from their home state, let alone being abroad. Thus, the distance traveled is within the same space every day. In that sense despite the technology and the financial ability to be mobile and true world citizens, the territoriality of the Houstonian and the grounding in a certain circumscribed space is very clear. What does this everyday life tell us about Houston? It tells us that people are constantly moving within the city, yet they are not going very far. It is very much the life experience of an everyday person caught in contemporary capitalism. A lot seems to be happening around us, there seems to be a lot of promise, yet we have not progressed much socially and nothing has been delivered yet. Thus, Houston is going around in circles – what causes those circular movements – that seems to be cyclical relationship between economic and cultural factors. To summarize, many critics would argue that it is mainly the economic forces impact on a place to create a non-place, for instance, Wendell Berry (1993) argues in a series of essays that place creates community, but when the place and its natural environment are destroyed - as rural places inevitably are by ruthless economic exploiters who, in effect, live nowhere - then the capacity of community to provide a useful moral context and a restraining mutuality of interests is lost. Houston does seem at first glance to have given in to those economic interests. In fact, the entire process of revitalization of the downtown sector of the city and to bring people back into the city centre to play and not just to work is being done by creating a series of arcades of bars and nightclubs and throwing the homeless people out of the downtown area by passing civic ordnances of recommended civil behaviour. So much for the democratic forces having fought so hard in order to counter the mind-numbing forces of Stalinism during the era of the Cold War. Yet, our explorations of this city revealed that the reasons are not merely structural or socioeconomic, but that the people of Houston seem to enjoy the lack
27 of community. The headline of a report from an article in The Wall Street Journal about the economic boom in Houston in 1997 went: “For Houston, Economic Recovery Has A Big Drawback: Crowding”. And the lead line was: “For residents of this city, economic recovery is bringing with it a rather unpleasant side-effect: people. Lots of them” (Flood 1997). Most people we talked to in Houston did not seem to enjoy being in crowded places. The American myth of my own private space seems to be alive and burning bright in Houston. In fact the interaction in these very bars and nightclubs and public places that are being built by business owners and promoted actively by the elected city officials have a quality of voyeurism about them and a lack of genuine interest in the Other. Our explanation is that one cannot get people, who are raised in suburbs or socialised to think of private space as their holy space, and revere vastness and minimal interaction with each other, into a public space at one time and expect them to create a city. A city cannot be created by a business or a group of businesses. And therein lies the complexity of understanding cities and of urban sociology – cities are artifacts and artificial, but cities in the same breath are also a natural outgrowth of the evolution of the human condition. And although Louis Wirth noted, that “since the city is the product of growth rather than of instantaneous creation, it is to be expected that the influences which it exerts upon the modes of life should not be able to wipe out completely the previously dominant modes of human association” (Wirth 1938:3), it is still our impression that the supermodern city eroded many of the features characteristic to the modern or perhaps even to a greater extent the pre-modern town, that the supermodern city in many ways crushed the familiarity and cosy atmosphere of community, the sense of belonging and the incentive for responsibility. The supermodern city is at one and the same time at the point of the intersection of coincidental encounters, artificial communities and superficial social arrangements.
4. Agoraphobia American Style
Most people suffer from phobias some of the time, and some people suffer from phobias most of the time - this is generally speaking the dichotomy of the healthy and the pathological, the well and the ill. In this sense one should suspect from a trip around the city that the people inhabiting a supermodern American ghost city like Houston to belong to the latter category. One ought to think that people would not suffer from agoraphobia – which is basically a variant of anthropophobia, the
28 fear of other human beings - when surrounded by four million other people but that claustrophobia would more be the predominant suffering.7 However, this is apparently not the case. Agoraphobia is the name given to the mental suffering or disturbance people experience when they are overwhelmed by the vastness of space, when people are afraid of open spaces, public places and open areas and therefore stay in the shade and keep close to the walls if they dare go outside at all. This suffering was probably not present during the pre-modern era, when the open spaces people sought out were not as awe-inspiring as those we face today, when people lived close together and when privacy was an unknown notion even within the four walls constituting home. German sociologist Georg Simmel (1971) was one of the first scholars to contemplate the delicate relationship between individual and society, mental life and the metropolis, and private emotions and concrete architectural structures. Frederick C. Howe had as far back as in 1912 stated that the problem of the city was not a personal but an economic problem (Howe 1912), but Simmel added the personal dimension in his analysis and in his theoretical universe, whose originality and penetrating analyses only recently has been rediscovered properly by contemporary sociologists, and in his theory the urban city was both regarded with pessimism as well as with delight. Although he was unaware of what monstrous concrete structures the future would bring, there is little doubt that Simmel saw the connection between individual psyche and social and architectural structures in a positive light. He was clearly an urbanite in his analysis, and although he appeared to mourn the erosion of village life he still seemed optimistic of what the metropolis would bring. Simmel was simply ignorant of the fact that agoraphobia, especially in an urban settings, could become a social problem for people as well as city life, that estrangement, alienation and reification would become the order of the day. Also Robert E. Park from the Chicago School described the city as a mixture of structural and personal characteristics by saying: “The city [...] is something more than a congeries of individual men and social conveniences – streets, buildings, electric lights, tramways, and telephones etc.; something more, also,
7 The French scholar Michel Maffesoli in his The Time of the Tribes discussed how our society could be analysed from the perspective of how we view others, how sociality could be determined by looking at how anti-social we really are. He wrote: “It is from the idea an era holds of otherness that it is possible to determine the essential form of a given society” and he goes on to develop the notion of elective sociality as a term covering the new trend toward tribal exclusionism and individualisation (Maffesoli 1996:86-90).
29 than a mere constellation of institutions and administrative devices [...] The city is, rather, a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition” (Park 1925:1). More recently the sociologists Berger & Luckmann (1967) in their classic and seminal piece of work in social constructionism spoke of the process whereby the products of human activity comes to appear to them as if they were the objective structures that they did not create themselves. The fact that structures, here understood in the broadest sense of the term, would become alien objects for people, that buildings and spaces would appear coercive of humans, were something even they in their otherwise original piece of work were unable to imagine. When non-places proliferate and hereby cause a simultaneous decline in public places, people tend to develop antisocial attitudes and when places turn into empty spaces and non-places, no wonder people start suffering from agoraphobia. This is fundamentally due to the peculiar quality of non-places: “Non-places are the real measure of our time; one that could be quantified – with the aid of a few conversions between area, volume and distance – by totalling the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called „means of transport‟…the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact with another image of himself” (Augé 1995:79). In this way, non-places erode places potentially utilised by people in order to gather, to interact and to communicate in a face-to-face manner and creates insurmountable barriers and obstacles for human intimacy and proximity. And although the sociologist Mark Granovetter (1973) in a remarkable article proclaimed the strength of weak ties, such ties can only be prevented from dissolving slowly if people actually meet each other. The term agoraphobia naturally refers to the phenomenon of the agora known from the ancient Greek polis as a place where people met in order to settle their financial or political business, a market square for personal involvement and responsibility. The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman recently noted that the agora is the place which is neither private nor public but both at one and the same time, a place that simultaneously consists of the best from both spheres. In other words, the agora refers to the space “where private problems meet in a meaningful way - that is, not just to draw narcissistic pleasures or in search of some therapy through public display, but to seek collectively managed levers powerful enough to
30 lift individuals from their privately suffered misery; the space where such ideas may be born and take shape as the „public good‟, the „just society‟ or „shared values‟” (Bauman 1999:3-4). The distinction between private troubles and public issues, as they were initially formulated by American sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959), deals with the understanding gained from the utilisation of a sociological imagination, that nothing about man‟s existence is socially irrelevant and even his inner feelings and emotions are connected to the larger historical structures of social life. When no place is provided for how to turn private troubles into public issues, personal life becomes a nightmare and politics become irrelevant at best, and misdirected at worst. The agora, however, did not cause agoraphobia or apathy but, on the contrary, allowed people to channel their private troubles into public issues, provided an outlet for emotions and opinions and facilitated an ongoing public debate. The few public spaces one will eventually find in Houston are what George Ritzer (1998) poignantly termed cathedrals of consumption, shopping malls where mammon is the key word and temples where people worship not religious icons but items stuffed on shelves and pay at the cash point alter: “The world of the shopping mall – respecting no boundaries, no longer limited even by the imperative of consumption – has become the world” (Crawford 1992:30) and Zygmunt Bauman, in his most recent publication, called the credo of our consumerist time “divided, we shop” (Bauman 2000:89). Others are merely artificial public places used by imagined communities, as for example when the annual Rodeo Parade takes place downtown, and people in this fashion come together in a staged and spectacular public environment for a very brief period of time. But this is not to celebrate togetherness but to show off the, by now, artificially held American ideals of the local community supporting the city. In this way the spaces have not become desanctified, as Foucault (1986:23) spoke of, but the objects of worship have changed from a religious, emotional or spiritual to a materialistic, entertainment and profit-seeking nature. The usual chain stores dominate the picture, which makes it impossible to say, when you are inside the shopping mall, whether you are in Houston, Oklahoma City, London or even Bombay. Houston is obviously a prosperous city, made this way by the fortunes of the oil industry and the high tech developments taking place here. This prosperity is evident in the streets where shining new cars parade, on the facades of the buildings where you can catch, only, your own reflection in the polished windows and in the art exhibitions in executive corridors of big multinational companies or privately funded public institutions.
31 However, this is only one side of the coin and not a very representative one either. The ethnic communities and neighbourhoods – some of the few places where the agora still thrives to some extent - are marked, not by prosperity, but by an appalling upsurge in poverty and deprivation, where people descend below the level of human decency in order to survive yet another day in this paradise of the few. The suburbanisation of poverty is not an unusual policy in American society but is more the order of the day and it has a tremendous impact on the structure of interaction in Houston, as we mentioned above: the way people avoid each other fearing that the Other (the generic notion of those other than yourself) belongs to the category of social outcast who poses a potential danger, that people do not seek out the public spaces due to agoraphobia and hereby turn them into public places, and that solidarity and reciprocity is, in the best case scenario, a minimal occurrence and, in the worst case scenario, a completely absent notion. People stick to themselves, and in this way are contributing to the lack of human interaction and in the emptying of place. It may at this point seem a fair question to ask, how do you in fact empty place? Basically, our understanding is that in order to empty place, you first and foremost have to empty it of people. But even before this is possible, even before the place is really empty in the physical sense of the word, place has symbolically and emotionally lost any significance and relevance to the lives of people, any meaning and any value, it has successfully been turned from a place into a non-place, from a public place into a public space. As phenomenological sociologists have taught us, we tend to take reality for granted, not questioning the nature of the world surrounding us anymore. This is basic to the human condition. However, when we stop questioning our everyday existence and the structures surrounding it the danger lurks that we also forfeit the chance actively to alter the circumstances of our lives. Agoraphobia means that we take the world for granted, that we take it at face value, that we stop questioning it and stick to ourselves and our own sort socially as well as physically, that we see the potentially crowded and lively place as an empty and scaring space. We might term this phenomenon for fortified privacy whereby is meant the fact, that people voluntarily incarcerate themselves and consciously admit themselves to the sanctuary of loneliness in their houses or their offices. The fact that people want a sanctuary into which they can retreat after a long days work or in the quest for intimacy and a shelter from the immensity of the troubles facing the world is quite understandable and allegedly only a basic human necessity. That we all need a place of our own where we emotionally as well as physically can refuel, as it were,
32 and prepare ourselves for yet another day in the hectic turmoil of cannot surprise. However, the escapist pathology arises when this sanctuary is turned from an open and potentially publicly accessible space into a closed, fortified and guarded area where strangers are refused entrance and where you will need to certify your intentions, status and credentials in order to be allowed in, when home is transformed into an impenetrable iron-cage.
5. The Pandemonium of Condominiums
One of the major consequences of the aforementioned suburbanisation tendency is the fact that neighbourhoods internally intend to become very homogeneous and exclusive, that people of certain income, ethnic or religious groupings, isolate themselves from others. Furthermore that people only seek out their own sort when moving to Houston or changing addresses within the city. Cultural segmentation and ethnic and racial segregation have not, although in official WASP ideology it may appear so to the untrained eye, been eliminated. The cultural, socio-economic, ethnic and religious segmentation is very spatially obvious and the division of the city into pockets of Jews, Asians, white working class, Afro-Americans, Chicanos, white upper-middle class, Hispanics etc. is striking. In this fashion Houston is a modular city, as it were, which means that it is composed of components that are spatially put together in a way that keeps people of diverse origins and traditions apart and separate them. There is no such thing as a coherent fabric of the city, but only a patchwork of diverse cultural legacies, religious traditions and economic statuses cut through by the bayous, the arteries of Houston, and the mixing of the somewhat overlapping neighbourhoods of the less fortunate or otherwise marginalised groups. Internally in these restricted areas, and particularly in those inhabited by the relatively well off people, another divisional feature becomes vividly apparent, namely the condominiums. As such condominiums refer to nothing apart from an apartment or a flat and are as such not more exclusive or isolationist as other types of housing forms and they are a normal feature of many American as well as Continental European cities where they are referred to as respectively residential areas, Villenviertel, housing arrangements or quartiers residentiel. However, when these condominiums are planned into the most minimal of details, when they are erected as solidified structures and constitute entire condominium areas, as those one can witness all over Houston, they turn into non-
33 places that do not generate interaction or facilitate the unplanned encounters of people. FIGURE 2: AN ANYTICAL SEPARATION OF THE ANATOMY OF SPACE
PRIVATE SPACE PUBLIC SPACE
ONTOLOGY INDIVIDUALITY COLLECTIVITY
GEOGRAPHY PROXIMITY DISTANCE
EMOTION INITIMACY FORMALITY
CONSCIOUSNESS SLUMBER WIDE-AWAKENESS
POSTURE ATTENTIVE DISINTERESTED
ATTITUDE APATHY VIGILANCE
ENGAGEMENT SPORADIC FOCUSED
ACTIVITY LEISURE WORK
ATMOSHERE COSINESS CLINICAL
34
The condominium areas thrive due to people‟s desire to have their own private spatial slot in life, their very own private property - although it may only be a rented one with a high mortgage. These are indeed the American style privet hedge Fascists, as a Danish term tries to capture the attitude of those who believe that anything private is good and anything public is a violation of privacy and individualism, the Mrs. Hyacinths‟ of the American condominiums. The figure above illustrates how we normally conceive of the difference between public and private spheres in a few key terms and how this, we will suggest, is culturally determined and an outcome of the general individualisation process in Western societies, a process that leads to demands for ever more elbow room, increased privacy and an inclination not to share space with others or only specially invited others. We construe private space as a place where we will feel at home, safe and in control and simultaneously oppose this to public space which supposedly represent all the qualities that are undesirable and potentially avoidable. According to the underlying assumptions of this figure, we have the shared understanding in Western cultures, and most certainly in American society, that public place is clinical and cold whereas the private sphere is marked by a sense of belonging and of a homely atmosphere. Richard Sennett (1974) called the realms of public and private the molecules of society and he saw them as complementary realms and not as alternatives. Hannah Arendt in the marvellous book The Human Condition showed how public space unfolds and engenders the social and she noted that there are two vital features of public spaces: First, that everything that goes on in public will be heard, seen by or will be accessible to everybody. In this way one could claim that the public universe is potentially a good place for the alleviation of injustice and inequality. Second, that the public world is a social world that we share with others which makes it distinguishable from the private world that is only our own (Arendt 1958:50-52). Therefore the public universe is where sociality is created and maintained and where we are constituted as social and political beings. The separation of the public and the private, however, and their mutual independence from each other has had severe and detrimental consequences for the utilisation of the publicly available areas and has led to a rapid decline in participation in public issues. This, however, ought not to be the case and public space, as it has been shown in many areas, can be turned from an empty and deserted space into a lively and pleasant place where people speak their voice and as a place which is “open to all enfranchised members of the community. This notion is vital to modern politics” (Kasinitz 1995:273). One of the reasons behind
35 the lack of action, political or pure leisure, in public space stems from the fact, that the modernist ideal of the planned urban space took into consideration that it has to be easily controllable and organised. Such an environment is not conducive to, and does not provide the optimal foundation for, informal gatherings and disorganised human interaction. So the problem with the rise of the aforementioned condominiums arise only when they are moulded and shaped after radical notions of the ordered and surveilled space and combines with so-called urban fears (Bauman 1998a) that spurs anxiety and suspicion, as we shall return to below,8 when the condominiums are turned into so-called apartment communities. For example the urban planning ideas of the French city planner Georges-Eugene Hausmann, who contended that homogenisation of urban space was preferable to disorganisation and that a planned city would also breed a planned and integrated social life. By this homogenisation he meant the rational planning of the city in order to be able to control it, to make the urban area subject to a detailed plan of spaciousness and technical design that would allow administrators to overlook the city like a mineature playground for experiments and alterations (Kasinitz 1995:14). This was the sort of functionalist planning obsessions that would eventually foster isolated units and closed condominium areas. These condominium areas appear almost all over Houston as spots marked by absence, restriction and exclusion: Impenetrable and inaccessible no-go areas that from the outside appear more like army barracks than family residences. The condominium areas are supposed to protect and guard the private lives going on behind the fences and make sure that meddlesome snoopers, Peeping Toms or other potentially unwelcome intruders are kept at arms‟, actually more correctly two-feet brick wall thick, distance. Thus privacy both has a material and a non-material side to it, as it were, and can be illustrated as either a very abstract notion of privacy as a voluntary solitude and a desire to be left alone or by the very concrete notion of privacy, what we termed fortified privacy above, as a territorial aspect of peoples‟ lives; the fact that people want physically to have a space of their own, their private property, where nobody else can enter without permission or
8 One could argue, as have been done by many sociologists interested in urban planning, that areas of people belonging to the same group will tend to build community and have a high level of interaction going on between them. However, this kind of isolated and exclusionary community-building and self-affirming group affiliation is not, in our understanding, a real community. Community, in order to be a real one, has to be naturally felt and inclusive to be deserving of that – ironically - exclusive notion.
36 electronic access card. In the condominium areas both these notions of privacy mutually reinforce each other and create a mental as well as physical brick wall around the isolated lives unfolding here - lives that are as empty as the non-places in which they unfold. In this way it both keeps strangers and outsiders out but simultaneously keeps insiders in. No Trespassing or Keep Away – Private Property, or Surveillance and Patrolling on this Property signs decorate the lawns and the fences to these apartment areas and potential intruders are met by armed security personnel, barking dogs or the suspicious eye peeping from behind clinically white Venetian blinds looking for potential prowlers or other prying people. The usual suspects are the paedophiles, petty thieves, ethnic minorities, winos, drug addicts etc. This tendency to physically sequester yourself from the company of others is, however, not only in regard to private housing. At almost every single public space you will encounter security guards, bouncers and ushers who are supposed to induce a sense of security in people by their very presence but who, on the contrary, lead to what can best be termed Unsicherheit, the German notion encompassing both a lack of safety, security and certainty (Bauman 1999:6). Of this trilogy of modern and post-modern concerns, Bauman writes: “There is little one can do individually or collectively to fight off uncertainty: wherever its roots may lie, they are beyond one‟s reach. But to make things worse. One cannot be quite sure where they are sunk in the first place. Personal safety – this is another mattter. One can do something about it. One can take care of one‟s body, keep it fit, diet and jog, avoid poisonous food and cigarette smoke. One can take care of one‟s home, stuffing it with state-of-the-art locks and burglar alarms. Something can be done about the safety of the neighbourhood, patrolling the streets on the watch for suspicious, because strange, faces [...] one can pin down and tie down, arrest and lock up the criminals who threaten one‟s body and possessions” (Bauman 1998b:152). In this delicate way, the quest for safety and security and certainty link well both to the notion of the pandemonium of controlled condominiums, as we are discussing here, as well as to the notion of the consumer society and the rise of a new inner-worldly asceticism, which we will touch upon later. The patrolling security and police cars in the streets are more ubiquitous than occasional and the attempt to show that law and order prevails in this way defeats its own purpose. In the public spaces of Houston, both downtown areas as well as in private housing arrangements, suspicion lurks that people at best either have no business to be where they are, or at worst have ill intentions and criminal
37 tendencies. People greet you any place you might bump into them, the pavement, the bus stop, in the few remaining parks and in parking lots - not necessarily out of courtesy or politeness - but presumably more out of suspicion and fear; they want to be able as quickly as possible to determine whether to run or to feel secure, whether to call the police or to indulge in trivial conversation with you, a conversation as empty as the place you are standing. In this way, the verbal access rituals, as a paraphrase of Erving Goffman‟s notion, of hello, howdy or how are you are used for strategic reasons as a way to disarm the potentially dangerous stranger. Disarming is a strategic way of neutralising people who potentially will threaten you and a way of relegating them to the category of semi-strangers; a category we reserve for people who are neither too close or too far away from us since both, proximity and distance, potentially carry the seeds of the dangerous. Conversation analysts several decades ago pointed to the shear ritual and symbolic character of openings of this kind, but they did not pay attention to the virtually disarming effect. To disarm the stranger thus becomes one of the ways with which to greet others whose intentions you are uncertain and insecure about and the end result is that engagement in meaningful and lasting relationships is an exception to the rule of avoidance and mutual suspicion. This unfortunate development made Bauman (1998a:47) conclude, that “contemporary fears, the typically „urban fears‟ unlike those fears which once led to the construction of cities, focus on the „enemy inside‟. This kind of fear prompts less concern with the integrity and fortitude of the city as a whole…as it does with the isolation and fortification of one‟s own homestead inside the city”. The urban fears that sweeps across the city in this way becomes a deeply rooted anxiety concerning others and their intentions leading eventually to agoraphobia and fortified privacy in condominiums and apartment communities. So can these condominiums promise community, one may wonder, and can they really create a sense of belonging and solidarity? Bauman elsewhere revealed that “scared loners without a community will go on searching for a community without fears, and those in charge of the inhospitable public space will go on promising it. The snag is, though, that the only communities which the loners may hope to build and the managers of public space can seriously and responsibly offer are ones constructed of fear, suspicion and hate. Somewhere along the line, friendship and solidarity, once upon a time major community-building materials, become too flimsy, too rickety or too watery for the purpose” (Bauman 1999:14). So what we are confronted with is a vicious cycle in which the fear of strangers lead to ever more
38 security measures and devices which in turn spark off new anxieties and suspicions. This has to do with urban planning, the modernist ideal of the homogeneous city and the rise of non-places in supermodernity, the emptying of space and the lack of interaction. Let us for a short instance go back in history to the modernist ideal of public space.
6. The Quest for an Urban Utopia
We have already previously noted, that Houston is not a thoroughly planned city and that the place does not qualify as an extreme example of the planning obsession that accompanied the rise of many major cities all over the Western hemisphere throughout the ear of modernity. However, many of the traits of the modern city that makes it prone to planning endeavours are also today present in Houston although it is, as we mentioned earlier, an evolving and not a planned city. The attempt to create urban planning in order to obtain social stability and also an aesthetic pleasure is far from a novel idea: “If it is true that we, the moderns, think of order as a matter of design, this does not mean that before modernity the world was complacent about designing, and expected the order to come and stay on its own and unassisted” (Bauman 1990:6). It at least goes as far back as the great empires in ancient times where notions of the grandeur of the city often lead to spectacular monumentalism and exquisite architectural endeavours. But it was not until the industrial revolution and the advent of the age of modernity that the obsession with town planning, the ideal city and the urban utopia really culminated. As J. D. Porteous noted, following the line of reasoning of Sir Thomas More over more than four centuries ago, utopia literally means no place,9 a place that does not exist and which is dissolved as a utopia at the very moment that one finally arrives at it. What characterises utopias are basically their unattainability and their ideally contemplated structure - what is also termed eutopias. They have as their foci imaginarii that which is impossible to construct and realise, that which cannot be enacted but only thought of. Utopias of whatever kind and nature “have a similar
9 Although no place and non-place may sound similar there is, according to our interpretation, a difference. Non-places refer to the nothingness of reality, to the absence of human beings and a lack of meaning prescribed to such places. No places, such utopias, on the other hand, refer to mental constructions about the future that most certainly both encompasses the possibility of people coming together as well as places that have a meaning attached to them. Where no places hold the promise of something, non-places hold no, and keep no, promises apart from the promise of loneliness and solitude.
39 goal, that of manipulating inhabitants of their utopia into a state of harmony, happiness and social and ecological equilibrium” (Porteous 1977:344). Utopias, therefore, although they are closely connected to space and the organisation of this in a particularly harmonious manner, refer to something apart from what they really are, to some promise that will never be realised. Michel Foucault informed us, that “utopias are sites with no real place” (Foucault 1986:24), whereby he meant that utopias are not real places, not even non-places, but mental images of how things could be, and “they represent society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces” (Foucault 1986:24) in quite the same way that sociological ideal types are not accurate descriptions of how things or social phenomena really are. People looking to create an urban utopia have been and are many and their ambitions and aspirations generally were to homogenise the city and its population and to perfect the otherwise imperfect and to sublimise the mundane character of quotidian existence. The initial ideas of modern city planning with its focus on regularity and uniformity were carried out in France in the middle of the 18th century by people like Morelly and Haussman (who apart from planning cities for the living also took a keen interest in planning the cities of the dead) and other prominent figures (Bauman 1998a:36). From this region it flourished and spread to other parts of the European continent and especially the new urban areas of Germany, Italy and England and eventually also started to inform the ideas of American urban planners and social scientists alike. One just have to take a careful look at Friedrich Engels‟ description of the changing internal pattern of English industrial cities in his analysis of the condition of the working classes there to see how the attempts to rationalise, segmentise and compartmentalise were heavily informed by political agendas and socio-economic impulses aiming at divisions of the population. One of those who took these utopian notions very literally and whose ideas of organised urban space were taken to the extreme was French architect and urban planner Charles-Edourad Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier‟s social utopianism which combined with urban planning turned into a nightmare of obsessive detailed planning in his futurist ideal of The Radiant City which any visitor to, for example, Bucarest in Romania will witness; a place where the modernist notions of grand city plans were carried out by Nicolai Ceaucescu during his reign of terror. Le Corbusier‟s ideas can in a compressed fashion be summarised as an attempt to create ridig, but still very imaginative, guidelines for metropolitan town planning from the most grand
40 scale down to the most minimal of details and one of his major contributions, as the figure below illustrates, was the idea of dividing the city into distinct grids which with almost mathematical precision separated the different areas of the radiant city.
FIGURE 3: URBAN UTOPIAS AND THE NOTION OF ZONAL GRIDS
Appropriated from Robert Fishman (1977). This was Le Corbusier‟s understanding of The Radiant City as a place marked by regularity, symmetry, predictability and logical structure obtained by dividing space into a grid system that should form the pattern for any kind of urban development. This image shares a great similarity with Bauman‟s (1990) description of the gardening state of modernity in which perfect order prevails and in which ambivalence is eliminated – or thought to be. Instead of constructing a gardening state as a natural garden, Houston, however, is an unnatural space of metal, concrete and asphalt.
41 Philip Kasinitz (1995:88) noted on the vision of Le Corbusier “Yet if Corbusier‟s dream of the rational city proved entirely too easy for both state and corporate bureaucrats to replicate on a brutal and dehumanizing scale, it must also be remembered that he and many of his contemporaries had a vision, not only of what cities should look like, but how the technological achievements of the modern age could be used to change people‟s lives for the better”. Unfortunately, as we have aimed to investigate here, the vision of improvements for people and their lives did not necessarily come true in plans of this sort and to many people the construction of the metropolis in the shade of sparkling utopian ideals offered as much despair as it offered prospect. Le Corbusier‟s idea of la ville radieuse (the radiant city) as the incarnation and embodiment of the perfectly planned city did more often than not, as for example in the Pubjabian capital of Chandigrath, cause to opposite effects than those desired. According to him the radiant city should be moulded after a big heliocentric master plan with the centre of the city symbolising the sun from which the rest of the city raditated and from this urban core life would also radiate and activity and interaction prosper. As Bronislaw Braczko, contemplating the ideal utopian city of Sevariade of the Enlightenment, noted - a city with many similarities to the aforementioned radiant city: “The city strikes the visitor with perfect regularity. The streets are wide and so straight that one has the impression that they were laid out with a ruler and all open on spacious plazas in the middle in which are fountains and public buildings also of a uniform size and shape…There is nothing chaotic in (this) city: everywhere a perfect and striking order reigns” (Baczko 1989:225). Baczko goes on to say, that one of the reasons behind this perfect atmosphere that is prevailing in the city is the fact that all undesirable human elements – the ill, the handicapped and the criminals – have all been evicted from the city and that one will see nothing unfortunate when loitering around the aesthetically and logically beauty of the urban structure. As Bauman (1998a) points out, one of the few who actually tried to take Le Corbusier‟s plan literally was Oscar Niemeyer in his attempt to built the new capital og Brasil, the city of Brasilia, from scratch according to some plan dictateur. The case of agoraphobic is very evident in Brasilia but this is not the only spot where such a suffering becomes obvious and one can look to the case of housing area in St. Louis that was so unliveable that it had to be demolished. These are but a few examples of the planning obsession and were, however, not unique and equally unsuccessful attempts were also evident in the English new towns such as Milton Keynes, Telford and Peterborough. The idea about creating new towns is
42 really not new at all and goes back at least to the 1880‟s when, particularly in France and England, due to the demands of industry, the rise of capitalism and the ideas of coherent nations, new and functional town units were to replace the old and disorganised towns.10 Town planning often borrowed ideas and inspiration from utopian theories and visions in literary fiction and this has continued, to some extent, to be the case even today. In this kind of literature, science fiction or otherwise out of this world descriptions, as in novels like Lanark by Alasdair Gray (1969) or the so-called superhuman ecumenopolis of Doxiades (1968), we see vivid examples of excessively planned and structured spatial utopias. Although real life places fortunately do not often imitate these grand and all-encompassing spatial schemas supplied by the world of fiction, the attempts to construct and erect gigantic urban structures still made an impact on how city space has been cultivated and subjected to rules of predictability, homogeneity and perfectability. This made Serge Boutourline comment that “the dominant situation in modern life is individuals living in a setting which was not built for them” (Boutourline 1970:498).11
10 It is possible to distinguish three phases in the creation of so-called new towns, three distinct periods in which this planning obsession became evident. The first phase was at the end of the 19th century when attempts were made in order to create places where people could enjoy the benefits of both the countryside and town life at the same time and was a reaction to the expansion of the great cities of Europe. This first phase was accompanied by a second phase of urban planning throughout the years immediately following the reconstruction of Europe after World War II and also took place in many major American cities where residential areas on the outskirts of the city centres were planned. The third phase of new towns appeared throughout the 1990‟s and was focused on placing these new areas close to major transportation lines and at strategically significant points from the perspective of capitalism (Fujita Research Report 1998). Thus town planning, and the idea that urban areas must be cultivated in order to function optimally, is not history but is still an issue that politicians and administrators struggle with. Quite often with no clue whatsoever what the consequences may well be to the well-being of people living there. Heartless urban planning is not only about expropriations of land but equally important is also the factor that if you create new town areas you cannot just provide the form but also have to take into account the content. A fourth phase of urban planning in the beginning of this new millennium will have to keep this in mind.
11 Although some modern cities certainly were constructed after the principle of homogeneity, the vast majority of urban districts were, as Anselm Strauss informed us, founded upon and characterised by a sense of heterogeneity: “The city is a mosaic of worlds…Diversity is celebrated for it gives rise to cosmopolitanism. The very multiplicity of populations permits and fosters worldliness” (Strauss 1968:6). Perhaps exactly due to the natural heterogeneity of the city, an artificial homogeneity had to be forced upon it and the city culture had to be subjected to political agendas that did not accept diversity and otherness. Diversity may have given rise to the
43 Although our description so far may have given the impression that urban administrators of Houston intentionally have tried to follow the rules of the radiant city and the perfectly planned urban space, this city, however, is not an example of how a wanna-be utopia turned out to be a dystopia (a bad place) but how a potentially vital place turned into a virtual non-place. Houston has turned out to a vast space of non-places, which in itself is paradoxical, but not a non-place like in the literal sense of meaning a utopia. Houston is in this fashion clearly a post- Corbursier product, a city whose territorial homogenisation, logical infrastructure and predictable space is not the outcome of an excessive planning activity but has emerged gradually throughout the century and especially throughout the last twenty years due to the fortunes of the companies and the ambitions of the politicians here. The new supermodern non-places are therefore not utopias as the modernist urban spaces strived to be, but more aptly described as so-called heterotopias. Foucault described such places from five principles governing their spatial as well as symbolic characteristics and particularly the fifth of these is very informative in this connection. He said that “in general, the heterotopic sites is not freely accessible like a public place…To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures” (Foucault 1986:26). In real public places you can enter freely and leave whenever you feel like it, but in heterotopic non-places your entrance feels to be forced upon you, seems compulsory and still appears exclusive. We discussed this above when talking about what we termed the pandemonium of condominiums, how these kept people inside while keeping certain suspect individuals out, how they were a symbol of the rise of non-places and how their spread over the urban area was due to the rise of urban fears about marginalised groups and how best to limit their access to private as well as public spaces. In Houston, as in Baczko‟s description of Sevariade above, the poor, the black and other groups struck by misfortune, have been removed from the radiant city centre and suburbanised into the intermediary zone between the city centre and the WASP areas on the outskirts of Houston, in the old wards where the ramshackle sheds are inhabited by human beings and not animals. Michel Foucault (1986) termed a certain kind of spatial region for crisis heterotopias as places where people in one way or the other were in a state of crisis. The urban neighbourhoods of the marginalised may very well be described as crisis heterotopias. He claimed
cosmopolitanism of the city but today this cosmopolitanism, it appears, gives as much rise to new forms of ghettoisation and spatial segmentation.
44 that these places were gradually disappearing and were replaced by heterotopias of deviation in which people were placed due to their deviance from the norm of society. We, however, still contend that crisis heterotopias are very much present within the city but in a spatially different way than earlier and that a certain sense of human crisis is prevalent in these areas – crises borne out of financial despair and social isolation. So we have order living next door to disorder, prosperity being the neighbour of poverty, crisis heterotopias evolving close to the utopias of those fortunate and well off. Bauman noted on the reason for the simultaneous co- existence of both order and chaos in the modern mind, which we modify to fit discussions of space: “Order is what is not chaos; chaos is what is not orderly. Order and chaos are modern twins” (Bauman 1990:4). From this logic follows not an acceptance of chaos but an attempt at eliminating it through a ghettoisation of several of the ethnic communities, communities marked by chaos and all the other aspects that cannot be incorporated in the image of the perfect city. The Germans throughout the Nazi era spoke of überfremdung as the term covering the fact that too many foreign minorities would spoil the entire picture of the totality of the nation, just as too many visible poor people would spoil the immaculate image of Sevariade. This has given rise to so-called diaspora of which Stanley Tambiah (2000) writes, that one of the social or demographic landmarks of the era of globalisation, and thus supermodernity, is the enormous transnational movements of people for various reasons: the search of employment in the more prosperous industrialised or industrialising countries as guest workers or as immigrants, and as a result of forced displacements of peoples owing to civil wars and the pogroms of ethnic cleansing and genocide (Tambiah 2000:163). Thus, there is an intensification in the creation of diverse diaspora populations in many locations, who are engaged in complex interpersonal and intercultural relationships with both their host societies and their societies of origin (Tambiah 2000:470). Rather than being de- territorialised, Tambiah sees them as experiencing and living in dual locations and manifesting a dual consciousness. In recent decades, the single largest stream of migrants into the United States has been the Spanish speaking Mexicans from across the southern border. The labels Chicano, Hispanic, Latino, as well as Black, are recently coined American ethnic terms. Not counting migrant workers and illegal aliens, who form the major undocumented workforce for the construction and agriculture industry of Houston, Dallas and the state of Texas, there were about 17 million Mexican born people living in the U.S.A., constituting 28% of the
45 foreign born population. A large percentage live in California and Texas (Tambiah 2000:185). Tambiah goes on to identify three broad types of migrant incorporation that also serve as yardsticks of the plurality of a society: assimilation, exclusion, and integration. A fourth category would be multiculturalism which intersects with integration but highlights issues relating to the recognition of difference within plural societies while holding them together as viable polities. Houston would like to think of itself as multicultural, and many a middle class educated professional would tell you so. But our observation is the obverse. Houston is a society that excludes. The largest diasphora in Houston is constituted by the recent documented and sometimes undocumented immigrants from Mexico or Central America. These people live invisible lives. They are the cleaners, sweepers, janitors, gardeners and construction workers. They keep the city running and clean and working, yet, no one is really aware of them. Not even a professor at the school of public health would be able to tell you the janitor‟s name or identify them if they saw them outside of the workplace – this is, of course, an indicator of how we generally have become more estranged from each other but equally, and perhaps more important, how we have created certain groups og invisible people in the midst of the hurry- scurry of everyday life. Yet, when they walk into their offices in the morning - the trash is gone, the floors are clean, and the sewage is working, or the broken wall has been fixed. In this connection it may be illustrative to allude to the story by French writer Francois Gargantua and Pantagruel who in his story identified a whole group of individuals who kept society running but never saw the light of day. Houston has its own diaspora of such people and this diaspora, which is also unfamiliar with English, is then forced into a life of poverty within the U.SA. They work in the farms and on the roads - put the food on the table of all Americans and keep the roads paved so they can drive the cars, yet, live in constant fear of deportation. They hide in fear, yet, they have nothing to fear. This is the new slavery of the era of globalisation where the juxtaposition of development and underdevelopment have put the existence of entire people's in jeopardy, where they do anything to survive including risk being shot by the border patrol, and yet hide in shame despite working hard for a living. This is the legacy of the era of globalisation in a city such as Houston. The diaspora, who come to cities such as Houston, come in search of the promise of modernity, and live in the impersonal ghettoes of supermodernity, driving their broken down used cars along the highways constantly looking for the fulfilment of that promise only to find the promise of the good life fade in the horizon of daily struggles and deprivation. As
46 Andre Glucksmann‟s reading of the Rabelais‟ epic suggests: “Such is the fable of Theleme. It gives the essence of all the political theories that have flourished in our day. We desport ourselves among masters, as tenants of a master who is himself absent. We are fed, clothed, and laundered by workers who also are absent. Rabeleis is careful to mention that the workers responsible for food and clothing live outside Theleme”. And Glucksmann continues: “Whether one is Ricardian, Keynesian, Marxist, Weberian, Smithlike, Rabelaisian, or even Hitlerite, one is not unaware that present-day societies derive their wealth from the labour they „organize‟” (Gluckmann 1980:14). In Houston labour, or what could aptly be termed dirty work, is performed on a daily basis by an increasing minority of the population while the others lean back on the highway and speeding ever faster towards the promised land of prosperity and security. In Houston it is very apparent that the city and those responsible for regulating its spatial structures have not been able to incorporate and integrate the growing amount of foreigners either in their mental understanding of these minorities or in their spatial arrangements,12 and we have seen the appearance of what we would term horizontal ghettoisation. Horizontal ghettoisation is when large areas of the city is occupied by poor districts as opposed to vertical ghettoisation which is when the poor are placed together in tower blocks or limited to small areas close to the city centre as in the traditional European model of ghettoisation. An interesting exploration of this urban tendency can be found in what Robert Fishman (1990) termed megalopolis unbound where he explores the suburbanising consequences on the poor and the fact that they become increasingly spatially separated from the middle-class areas and that they experience a hitherto unprecedented sort of isolation. The benefits of the idea of the modern utopian city seems to befall those who already have and has detrimental consequences on the have-nots, and urbanisation understood as superurbanisation and the rise of non-places in our time can only be ascribed to attempts to diminish or even eliminate the initial problems
12 Reknowned French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1999) noted, that previously in modernity maps tended to be exact descriptions of landscapes and a detailed mirroring of geographical reality but that today, in what we term supermodernity, landscapes instead tend to imitate maps. This is the so-called precession of simulacra in which “the territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it [...] it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map” (Baudrillard 1999:327). The consequence of this is that instead of allowing reality to represent itself, we force a certain conception, a structured image, upon reality and hereby colonising the real with the artificially desired.
47 associated with the modern city. Moreover it is instrumental in creating a façade society aimed at segregating and distancing people from each other, and in a very physical manner seeking to make sure that the facades remain impenetrable and neat while what is going on behind them and away from them will not be publicly recognised. Frederic Jameson (1991) noticed this in his analysis of the Westin Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles where the modernist – what Jameson, however, termed post-modern - architecture was so complete as to make the entire building appear total, all-absorbing and grotesque. In the façade society, therefore, people, and especially people who are different from one another, do not engage in social activities that are inclusive but only exclusive and they do not invite nor instigate others to participate or be active - the facades of the buildings are imitated by the facades of people. This creates a social void in the middle of the urban areas where people do not even know their own neighbours and have not interest in what is going on in their local community. When buildings take on a life of their own, the lives of the people living in them or crawling around them like ants on the surface the earth, is about to become altered. In 1990 Houston, together with three other areas in the United States, was honoured with the Urban Enrichment Award, given for the dedication to the cultivation of public parks, open spaces, housing and downtown developments - the true modernist ideals. When you confront people here with that fact they are flabbergasted and speechless and stare at you in absolute disbelief. According to them the only urban planning they have witnessed have been the artificial attempts to construct public spaces that have been turned out to be empty spots where they would rather like to have accessible and lively parks areas and plazas which can be used by the public in general.13 No one said it more poetically than Pink Floyd in
13 The park serves many functions, as Andrew Mattson and Stephen Duncombe (1992) reported in their sociological study of life in the Tompkins Square Park and its renovation and recultivation in New York in the early 1990‟s. The park is a public place and offers the flaneur in the park the options of being either alone or part of the park environment. We often envisage parks as places where you cannot escape the curiosity and gaze of others and therefore it is important that a park, as a public place, also offers the opportunity of being alone: “Many people come to the park to sit by themselves on the benches spread throughout the park, reading, enjoying the outdoors, and watching the world pass by. Sitting slightly apart from other people, in the quieter areas of the park, these people maintain a certain social and physical distance from the activities around them – close enough perhaps to watch but not to interact” (Mattson & Duncombe 1992:131). Thus parks are not public places where you necessarily will have to be asphyxiated by the sense of sociality but also a place where you can recuperate and enjoy
48 their famous album The Wall when they portrayed our society as one in which we erect walls between ourselves and the rest of the world and how we previously used to fill the empty spaces but now leave them empty and deserted. This is perhaps the cost of superurbanisation, but we suggest that the price is too high for urban development and that a notion of revitalisation of non-places must be on top of the political agenda in years to come. Erving Goffman once noted, in an elaboration of his field of study as an interaction order, that we as sociologists need to look at where the action is in order to understand society, whereby he meant a place constituted by “a field for fateful dramatic action, a plane of being, an engine of meaning, a world in itself, different from all other worlds” (Goffman 1961:26), that interaction takes place in public spheres accessible to the public, utilised by the public, and constituted by the presence of the public. But what happens when the place where the action is disappears? Today in the supermodern city action and interaction merely takes place in the few residues of the once so important and prominent agora and market square, and visions about how it could be have almost vanished. Foucault, in an extraordinarily visionary sentence, captured the essence of the transformation of societies in which places and some kind of mystique prevail and those in which non-places and emptiness is a dominant feature: “In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates” (Foucault 1986:27). This metaphor about means of transportation and their impact on social and spatial structure leads us on to exactly a part of civilisation in which boats have disappeared and cars have taken over, where dreams have dried up and disillusion resides.
7. Car Culture and Compartmentalism
Houston is a city that eludes one‟s grasp - both in an intellectual and physical sense. When one is walking on the streets of the city that seems to be curiously absent of sidewalks, everything seems out of reach. And if one happens to be in a car, which one is whenever one steps out14 on the streets of the city, everything in the landscape around seems to be whizzing by. Nothing and no one ever waits for
yourself without reference to the responsibility to others. Real public places offer both options without forcing one conception or one frame of action upon people. 14 Stepping out is a phrase that lacks meaning in the city of Houston. No one steps out – one pushes the gas pedal when one goes out. And we may suggest to the Houston language academy that they coin the term gas-pedaling out as an alternative.
49 you. They are all passing by, rather hurtling by, and are impossible to grasp or hold. The city thus becomes an elusive and abstract city, difficult to hold and to feel. Jane Jacobs‟ observation on the function of sidewalks is important to highlight the curious lack of urban culture that exists in this city. She noted that “a sidewalk is by itself nothing. It is an abstraction… Sidewalks, their bordering uses, and their users, are active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism in cities” (Jacobs in Kasnitz 1995:111). Sidewalks are where most of the other big cities live out their daily lives. London, New York, Rotterdam, Athens, Mumbai, Hong Kong among other major metropolitan centers testify to this quite unabashedly. Sidewalks are where people navigate the mass of others out there, avoid each other, and also bump into each other, where the pedestrian is elevated to the level of the human by virtue of interacting or having the opportunity of potential interaction with others, where strangers turn into non-strangers and where occasional encounters have the ability to be transformed into fleeting or lasting relationships. This possibility of potential interaction also provides the person in the city with the option to engage with others, something we will discuss in greater detail in a later section, and as Latham (1999) quoting Deleuze and Guattari (1988) noted: “Potential space may be pictured as being simultaneously a transformer and an accelerator of desire, a space which the self is constantly assembling, disassembling, and re-assembling as it encounters and engages with the world around it”. Thus, Houston, by virtue of its reliance on the car and its destruction of a sidewalk or walking culture, provides its citizens with a lack of togetherness with other people and marks the absence of possibilities and absence of potential interaction. Although it is still only a possibility and possibly never realised, yet, it is this possibility of possibilities that makes a public place interesting and fills it with hope. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, it is not what Houston gives you but what it takes away from you – the poetry arising from possibility that makes the city worthy of interrogation. The absence of this possibility of presence leads to a sense of emptiness that is defining of human existence in this city, and in a curious way also defining of existence in America. Le Corbusier, the French architect, whose contribution to urban planning we discussed above, stated that “we must kill the streets” (Le Corbusier in Walzer 1986:473) whereby he meant that although the streets may serve a function in connection to logistics, they did not serve any social purpose and were places marked by disorder. And he would have been proud of Houston that has done likewise – made the street a dead place – dead not because it lacks structures, but
50 because it is without humans. This complete lack of an urban culture in Houston, in the sense of the absence of public places and crowds and of walking, takes away the possibility of potential interaction. It is this possibility of multiple possibilities arising from those interactions that makes city life interesting and has been the theme of many a novel and movie. What an urban place does, although it also creates a sense of anonymity, is that it provides a constant source of possibility or possibilities for the self. Thus, the self can then shape itself or renew itself in those possibilities: an exchanged glance, a smile, a furtive look, a push or a shove, a friendly gesture – all of these and the other unaccounted and unconscious interactions that take place within the city renew the human spirit. Although urban spaces can dehumanise, the also re-humanise by virtue of the possibilities they provide to their residents in such crowded public places. Public places, thus become the only human element of an otherwise mechanical existence. Houston, on the other hand, deprives its citizens of that re-humanising element by taking away the possibility of possibilities. By ensuring the complete adoption of the car and the adaptation of the human to the car, Houston has de-humanized its inhabitants, because it has now replaced what could have been an urban culture with what can be termed a car culture.15 A city mothers you by smothering you; it takes you back to the womb with its crowded and difficult to negotiate public spaces. Houston, on the other hand, leaves you in wide open spaces with a feeling of abandonment – the citizen of this city feels like a child left alone in the flat wheat fields with nothing and no one to hold on to. And at the level of the street, the only thing that you see is a blur – the blur of the cars whizzing by and not a human soul in sight. Ada Louise Huxtable in an article titled Deep in the Heart of Nowhere (1976) was struck by the degree to which the automobile had invaded the average Houstonian‟s daily life, and described Houston as freeway city, strip city, mobility city. The strip referring to the strip malls strewn all over, separate shops housed in a one floor building that usually border the streets and highways. These strip malls have huge parking lots because they want to attract the customer who is usually driving by. And despite all the space in Texas and in Houston, which has also been called a one-hundred mile city by Deyan Sudjic, almost 100 miles from one end of the city to the other, the car owners are always worrying about parking space. Thus, for a shop or restaurant to
15 In a newly published book edited by Daniel Miller (2001) several contributions deal with the car culture aspect and how it is prevalent in certain social settings and cultures. For example, road rage in the Western world is described as well as cabs driving in both the U.S.A. and Africa.
51 attract customers, they have to show that they have enough parking spaces available. One of the residents we talked to called the city a giant big parking lot. The antagonism towards pedestrians is obvious in Houston – you literally speaking have to run for your life when you cross the street – even at zebra crossings. And the parsimonious space allotted sidewalks show the hostile attitude towards pedestrians and people who want to make their way without a car. For a man walking on the street or on the sidewalk or waiting at a bus stop, the wide-open space between the sidewalk and the nearest building can be a source of psychological panic, in the agoraphobia it creates. For instance, in general American news media create a sense of panic among its viewers by disproportionately highlighting the crime in its streets. Thus, for the average American exposed to the daily local news, the street comes to represent a source of clear and ever-present danger. Thus, the average Houstonian is plain panicky about the street and about walking. Being inside the car and locking the door of the car is a common enough practice in the city of Houston, including ensuring that the car doors are locked at when the car stops at a traffic light. Thus, the car becomes a mobile extension of the private property – the little house on the prairie that is built on my land and is my private property. That is where I am safe and that is where I blast off the head of any intruder with my collection of guns. On top of that layer of fear about the street, there is this sense of empty space and parking lots between the self and the shopping mall. Thus, the two factors combine to create a veritable sense of panic about being alone on the street or at a bus-stop, where the council have now placed emergency points that will induce a sense of security for those standing alone. What if you were attacked and cried for help, no one could even help you, the cars on one side would just whiz by, and the shopping malls are too far away. This causes more retreat and drives the Houstonian further away from the street – either into their automobiles, into the air-conditioned shopping malls or into their homes in front of their television set. Thus, the city‟s dedication to the car or the car‟s influence on the city and its citizens is partly explained by the size of the city, the civic architecture, the manner in which the city is structured, partly to the fear of being on the streets which are considered dangerous, and a sense of personal freedom and identity. A multitude of factors come together to create a situation within Houston whereby the car becomes the mode by which the humans in Houston know each other and themselves. The car is not merely an extension of the body anymore but replaces the soul. Thus, the influence of this machine dehumanises the average Houstonian and he or she in
52 turn starts manifesting what we have termed automobile behaviour. Houstonians do not question the how‟s and why‟s of becoming a car but in their eagerness to adapt and not be left out of the race that every American is running (no one knows where), the Houstonian adapts to the automobile behaviour. In a Social Darwinist society of supermodernity, the strong are the ones with the bigger and stronger cars. Not only do people live their lives hidden behind these stationary facades called condos or houses, but they also move around in equally small compartmentalised boxes called cars. We have to realise, as did Michael Rustin (1986:494), what “a new determination to limit the damage of the car can do to our way of life, while not neglecting its convenience”. Houston has, most certainly, become a convenient city for people to live in and this convenience stems directly from the rise of the non-places and the rise of the car culture. The car has been determining of many aspects of American life in general. Car-making, together with the goods and services associated with it – the production and refining of oil, the building of petrol stations, hotels and motels, and highway construction – has been at the heart of postwar Western development, especially the United States. Womack et al. (1990) reported that the car industry directly employs about one in ten of all manufacturing workers in France and Japan, and one in twenty in Britain and United States, and the related industries and services employ many millions more. The United States used to be the largest producer of cars in the world, but in the 1980s it was overtaken by Japan, and a quarter of the domestic sales in the US is comprised of Japanese cars (Giddens 1993). But nowhere else is it so evident than in the 4th largest city of the U.S.A. The car has determined and continues to influence the planning and construction in the city. Houston‟s road system, which is shown in the map in Figure 1, has also been an important influence on the landscape, providing a determined economic and social partitioning of the city and spawning aggressive commercial development along its flanks (Webb 1999). Webb describes Houston in the same way as Reyner Banham did to the Los Angeles freeways as “a single comprehensible place, a coherent state of mind, a complete way of life, a fourth ecology”. The Houston highways were built during the general freeway mania that spread across the United States during the Eisenhower administration. And Webb (1999) tells the story of how the spreading network of freeways disrupted many people‟ lives in Houston, including the chief administrative planner, whose parents‟ home was one of those uprooted by the Interstate 45 that cuts Houston diagonally from the North to the South. As the freeways spread in concentric and radial lines (see Figure 1)
53 outward from the city center, the city grew in an even density urban sprawl. Webb (1999) finds that much of Houston‟s urban experience occurs in a maladroit space between two points of view – one, the view from the road looking outward; the other the view from the fringe looking at the road. He says, “It‟s a space mediated by little buildings with big signs. And the freeways are its amusement park rides”. And he then quotes David Green, the poet of the English design group Archigram: Out on the highway, it‟s God burgers, sex burgers, hamburgers. You just ride along and need. And the search goes on for the building that looks perfect at any speed (Webb 1990). And this has not been merely having an effect on the economy and the social patterns of interaction. Social patterns and interactions are not an out-there kind of phenomena and do not have a separate existence from the humans who play parts in those patterns and interactions. Humans and social patterns and interactions they engender live in a plastic space of mutuality. They reflect and influence each other. Thus, our central thesis in this part of this academic novella is that the people of Houston have not only adapted to the car culture but the car culture in turn has transformed the people into cars themselves. That is the people have now adopted the same behaviours as the behaviours of the cars they drive and what we have termed car or automobile behaviour. The people of Houston interact with each other as if they were cars passing by each other on a highway or a busy street. According to some authors, the problem of motion has invaded modern experience, posing a formidable challenge to concepts of order that belonged to an earlier, slower scale of existence (Kepes 1965). Webb (1999) finds Houston‟s stability attacked by time and motion. “It is a city”, he says, “formed in a series of conjunctive episodes that hold their relationships for relatively brief periods. Buildings come and go. Businesses come and go. Displacements of traditional patterns of stability and urban rituals have become the norm. Time has become a prime variable in determining the genius loci”. What we find is that this problem of time and motion has not only enveloped Houston, but also invaded the average Houstonian. Houstonians, who exhibit car-like behaviour or automobile behaviour, are in perpetual motion and experience and express a perpetual shortage of time. Robert Fishman (1990) said on our time-obsessed culture, that nowadays “families create their own 'cities' out of the destinations they can reach (usually travelling by car) in a reasonable length of time. Indeed, distance in the new cities is generally measured in terms of time rather than blocks or miles” (Fishman 1990:38). Car culture is based on time and the minimalisation of time cost.
54
FIGURE 4: CAR CULTURE AND CITY CREATION
Appropriated from Robert Fishman (1977). Although this sketch is more than eighty years old, and belongs to Le Corbusier‟s collection of ideas of urban utopias, it is almost a mirror image of the way in which Houston looks today with highways leading into the heart of the city and a busy and endless stream of traffic.
What we mean by automobile behaviour is different. We are not attributing human like feelings and motivations to inanimate objects, but attributing car-like behaviours to humans. And it is not meant as a mere mechanistic explanation of human conduct in this city. We will clarify what is meant by automobile behaviour and then demonstrate how this is true for the majority of residents in this city – especially the ones that have assimilated. But more importantly, what we want to highlight is that adopting car behaviours renders human action impossible. Whenever a group of people imitate and mimic the behaviour of mechanical objects, they lose the ability for human action. One of the members of the Frankfurt School‟s first generation, Herbert Marcuse, put it succinctly when stating,
55 something which is almost ancient wisdom today, that “people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanization which ties the individual to his society has changed, and societal control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced” (Marcuse 1964:9). We differentiate between behaviour and action in the classical sociological sense. Behaviour is a response to a stimulus whereas action provides for the possibility of the use of agency. Therefore, the consequence of adopting this car behaviour is an absence of the residents‟ personal and political engagement with the city. This leads to a cycle where car behaviour is reinforced and this weakens the personal and political engagement further leading to a state of complete disengagement with the city (seen as other) and a complete enchantment with one‟s self rather than the social. Houstonians may lack in many social attributes – but one they definitely have no lack of is self-absorption. What is automobile behaviour? The behaviour of a car or automobile is self- explanatory - something that moves automatically. An automobile is only being true to its self when it is mobile. That is an automobile by definition is only useful if it is moving. Thus, it fulfills the terms of its creation. Just like cars come into physical contact with each other only at a traffic light or when they collide, the only time people stop to say hello to each other is when a traffic light on the course of their daily routine forces them to stop such as waiting for an elevator. Even then there is a curious disinterest in the other person. Just like it would be rude to peer into someone else‟s car when it has stopped at a traffic light, people think it impolite to peer into the other person‟s existence. So there is a strange quiet that follows the initial burst of how are you doing? John Cage said that an accident on a freeway is only an opportunity for people to meet each other. That is perhaps the only time people talk other than at work meetings and at singles bars. But then in both of the above it is a pure business transaction that brings them together. Everyone in Houston is always in motion – always moving – never pausing for a moment of reflection. There is no loitering, no sauntering, and no walking without purpose. Can a car ever do that – stop and start and peer through the window of a shop full of oddities? No, if it did, it would stop traffic and block the free flow of the highway. Thus, the average Houstonian is just one car of two million that ceases to stop and runs endlessly. Why it keeps running and where it‟s going – these are not questions to be asked or answered, because there is simply no chance for reflection – that would lead to an accident. In essence then, when one lands in
56 Houston, or for that matter in the U.S.A, for the first time, what strikes the eye are the huge highways and the cars speeding endlessly on those highways. That metaphor of cars on a highway holds true for the average American too. Every American wants to get on to the fast track of capitalism – they want to be on the highway and they want to speed to some place – not their destination because they have no idea of what the destination is, but just speed along. Move on has become a cliché in the average American break-up between partners too. Yet, despite all this movement, which many may think of as healthy, there is only stagnation. As we pointed out in the section on Corrosion of Community, the average Houstonian moves within a limited radius or a circumscribed area only, thus, going around in circles, in the grind of the daily life in a capitalist society. Houston is a prototypical American city that is built for the car. The parking lots of the city stores are not tucked away behind the stores, but placed in front of them so they can catch the roving and speeding eye of a car. The eye of a person that is walking on the street is physiologically different from the person who is inside a car because the eye inside a car has to perform a lot more functions, is under a lot more stress and therefore cannot catch the minute details. Therefore, the urban designer has to place huge signs or vast open parking lots to attract the car owner. But the effect that it has when one is on the street is that of emptiness, a curious distancing of the structures of the city from the inhabitant. Thus, instead of the city crowding around the individual, making them feel entrapped and curiously protected at the same time; the effect that a prototypical city like Houston has is quite the opposite. The city is not a womb anymore, but makes the inhabitant feel like an abandoned child with a vast world to reckon with. Thus, Houston and a prototypical city in America does not mother because it does not want to smother. And that is what good cities do best; their worst and best traits arise from their crowding the inhabitant in enclosed spaces. But space is what the Houstonian and average American craves for; ironically in a country that has a lot more space per citizen that most others in Europe, Asia, or Latin America. Yet, space seems to be the catchword in most car advertisements; especially the SUV‟s (Sports Utility Vehicles) that are popular in Houston (although one Houston resident said they are going out of fashion everywhere else and so the manufacturers are pushing them onto places like Houston where fads take some time to catch on). Get more space inside your car for the same price scream the ads. But why would you need more space in a car, of all places? Because Americans live their lives inside a car. A car means much more to the American than to anybody else in the world. Because the
57 car is probably what made America, with the homesteaders relying on their waggons the supermodern Americans rely on their automobile, and has also become its unmaking as a human society. The car, most abstract of all inventions, is only meant to be an automobile, carry you from one place to another, reduce the time spent in traveling distances. But because of the car the prototypical American city keeps expanding forever. Ring after ring of developments are added beyond the circular highways that go around the city. But America is an abstract culture, said Gertrude Stein. And an abstract culture always seeks material things in order to ground itself. The link between the abstractness of their lives and the material that they seek is epitomised by the car. The car that was invented as a device to bridge distances in shorter time, a replacement for the horse-drawn carriage soon became a symbol of material wealth. But the car is no longer just a symbol of reality. The symbol has acquired its own reality, become a simulacrum in Baudrillard‟s terms, and replaced the reality of human existence, as the other continents know it. That it is impossible to survive in Houston without a car even for the basic necessities of life. If Houston ever encountered a Blade Runneresque situation, even the have-nots would be coming out of their underground holes in cars. A prototypical American city has created its own meaning of what it means to be in a city which is quite unlike what you would experience in any other city of the world. This leads us to question the very definition of a city: what is a city and which one is the real city – the city of Paris, Rotterdam, Hong Kong, Liverpool or the city of Houston? The emphasis on cars and their valorization to the point of worship leading to a curious car culture is one more of a series of observations that leads us to argue that the supermodern city (Houston is an exemplary case) has eroded and demolished many of the features characteristic to the modern city or premodern town, which could lead to the argument that Houston and other cities of supermodernity are in many ways different and almost incomparable with the cites we know or knew. Thus, everyone in Houston seems to be in perpetual motion – even when not in a car. No one stops to talk or greet unless there is a structural obstacle such as an elevator. Even foods are served in cafeterias or drive through restaurants. Drive through eating, drive by shootings. Americans are born in a drive through universe and are finally disposed of in a drive through funeral parlour and in-between the whole act of eating has been converted to one where there is no pause but constant motion. Americans are afraid of pause because pause and stillness resemble death and as Gertrude Stein said: Americans do not die, they are killed. Thus, the whole
58 adoption of the car behaviour is explanatory of the fear of death and also aids and abets the consumer lifestyle – where the purpose is to consume – frenzied consumption as if not consuming would lead to death. The car in a prototypical American city becomes a mobile home – people shave, apply make-up, make out, eat, read, create mobile offices, and listen to self-development audiotapes in their cars. The car is the only space where people medicate. The ultimate compartment – where people can be in what is perceived as a public place – the road, and yet maintain their little compartment, a little private space that gets larger with every new model released from a Ford factory, and not be bothered with other humans or human interaction. The car becomes a concrete – a physical manifestation of the compartmentalism that has pervaded all aspects of life in supermodernity. But can one truly be reflective inside a car while one is driving? If one really could, then one could also be drunk while driving because alcohol in many cases leads to some reflection too. And if drinking and driving do not go together then reflection or meditation and driving do not either. Therefore, it is a fake reflection that is being sold in some car advertisements on American TV that proclaim driving time being the only time that one has for oneself – it is your own personal quality time – they shout. The tragedy is that no one shouts back; they are too busy driving – paying attention to the other speeding cars on the road, each one trying to cut into the faster lane.
8. Urban Space Wars
In the city of Houston, as in many other major cities all around the globe, a virtual space war is currently taking place between on the one hand the cramps of the crumbling countryside and the social and interactional awareness connected to this and, on the other hand, the more urbanising and impersonal forces of continued land expropriation and urban planning. The virtual character of this war does not, however, refer to some abstract computerised terminological conceptualisation of a cyber universe in which battles of the mind take place, but to the very brutal fact that a cold war is lingering between the people and the city, on the one hand, and internally between the different groups of people, on the other hand. Let us initially turn to the first declaration of war between the people and the city. As we mentioned above, supermodernity entails the existence, indeed persistence, of ambivalence both on the structural level as well as on the individual, an ambivalence, as Bauman taught us, which lingers as a remnant from modernity: “If
59 modernity is about the production of order, then ambivalence is the waste of modernity” (Bauman 1990:15). The outcome of ambivalence is the perpetual quest for order and in the city of modernity, ambivalence was believed to be subjected to elimination by the construction of architectural logic, mathematical grids and the perfectly planned and organised place, as we touched upon previously. One can either admire the ordered and predictable nature of this kind of space or despise it, and one can either find it aesthetically stimulating or repulsive depending on one‟s personal preferences and attitudes. This is part and parcel of the ambivalence we described at the beginning of this paper, an ambivalence that cannot be eliminated and an ambivalence of the mind that is turned into an ambivalence of space. This ambivalence is in supermodernity transformed into alienation when people no longer see the aesthetics of planned space, start to cultivate the repulsive aspects and when space seems empty and without promise. Sociologists Wohl and Strauss remarked that one of the reasons for dissatisfaction among people living in the city and perhaps one of the causes for the development of an alienated attitude is that people cannot survey the entire city, when the urban structure has expanded beyond human reach, as it were, and become a monstrous entity that people find it difficult – indeed impossible – to get an overview of (Wohl & Strauss 1958). A similar understanding is revealed by Kevin Lynch (1960) who noted that the alienated city, a place where people feel alienated from the urban structure, is one in which people are incapable of mapping in their minds the structure of the city and their own position within it. This is the end product of a process in which the concrete buildings they themselves have built as a product of their efforts takes on an external life of their own, and appear as objectified structures, and as something that cannot be wished away, when the city almost becomes a ghost town of facades, empty plazas in which the only living soul you will see is your own reflection in the glass fronts of the skyscrapers, when the city becomes reified, and when people appear as strangers in the midst of their own surroundings, when public spaces become eerie and empty, and not crowded and lively. To these people, who both admire the supermodern city as well as are plagued by the corrosion of intimacy, the city of Houston must look frighteningly similar to the Babel Tower contemplated by Russian architect Vladimir Tatlin in which the logical becomes illogical, the penetrable impenetrable, the beautiful becomes distorted, the simple turns complex and the transparent opaque. Due to its lack of coherence and proportion, Tatlin‟s idea never saw the light of day (Liedman 1997), and neither do the people who hurriedly pass the skyscrapers that shield against the
60 sun in the centres of Houston. Houston therefore appears as a one-dimensional city, in that the facades, a façade society like the one recently depicted in the Peter Weir motion picture The Truman Show, that make up the physical atmosphere are the same all over the place. The problem with one-dimensional cities is that fact that they breed one-dimensional human beings. One-dimensional man, Herbert Marcuse (1964) taught us, is one-dimensional within himself due to the capitalist mode of production and the consumerist lifestyle and is thus automatically creating an equally one-dimensional outer reality. If this space within man, the mind and the intelligence can become multi-dimensional, so will the social reality in which he acts: “Now it is precisely this new consciousness, this „space within‟, the space for transcending the historical practice, which is being barred by a society in which subjects as well as objects constitute instrumentalities in a whole that has its raison d‟être in the accomplishments of its overpowering productivity. Its supreme promise is an ever-more comfortable life for an ever-growing number of people who, in the strict sense, cannot imagine a qualitatively different universe of discourse or action” (Marcuse 1964:23). This self-satisfied, self-sufficient and self- absorbed attitude of people, supposedly created by a logic of productivity and profit, materialistic comsumption and a worshipping of worldly goods, is not conducive for community or interaction. In a place like Houston we are not merely faced with one-dimensional men but also but equally with men without qualities.16 In a world marked by personal distance, structural compactness, and intensity of life, people turn into what C. Wright Mills once humorously termed cheerful robots. Apart from this war between people and the city, also a state of war against nature also prevails in Houston and the few green areas within the precincts of the central area of the city has either been turned into gigantic parking lots, golf courses or new building sites. This has meant, that potential places for human
16 The notion of men without qualities might sound like a very post-modern phenomenon with similarities to the fragmented self or the multiple identities but actually the term is derived from Robert Musil‟s (1993) by now classic novel titled Mann Ohne Eigenschaften, the man without qualities, and has clear modernist connotations. This man, personified in the life of Ulrich, is a person whose abilities are of no particular value anymore, whose qualities are useless and who finds himself in an alienated and estranged position when confronted with the world. Musil actually also made an interesting observation of city life and human life by saying that “cities can be recognised by their pace just as people can by their walk” (Musil 1993:3). This is a good reference to our notions of walking culture verses car culture as well as the idea of the hyperactive supermodern city.
61 interaction has been expropriated by the forces of urban development and progress and turned into ever new non-places. The second declaration of war exists between the people of Houston, and the aforementioned ambivalence therefore also survives on the level of identity and identification between people in the distinction between us and them, we and the Others. Zygmunt Bauman (1992b:131), following Claude Levi-Strauss, differentiated between anthropoemic and anthropophaegic cultures where the latter denotes cultures that can incorporate, eat and obtain new and different people whereas the former denotes cultures that do not have this ability but instead expell, vomit and dispose of alien elements. City life has primarily been known for its integrative asepcts but there is also a darker side to this as when Marshall Berman noted that “cities and metropolitan areas have frequently acted as magnets for many people whom they couldn‟t – or in any case didn‟t – assimilate. The people left out become residents of shantytowns, squatters in abandoned buildings, sleepers in the subways or the streets, dealers in illegal and dangerous commodities, victims and perpetrators of violence, potential recruits for mobs, cults, the underworld…” (Berman 1986:480). Houston is clearly a so-called anthropophaegic city with the ability to incorporate outsiders, water them down and homogenise them, but in order to do so it assimilates and pacifies agency and streamlines people so that they will fit into the ordered space of Houston. However, in the city also anthropoemic features are evident that leads to segregating and sequestrating tendencies. The urban space war rages with special ferocity in the downtown area which can best be described as a transit space, a shift region between the two parties in the war – the have and the have-nots. At daytime the suits reign but after dark and the afternoon rush hour the city is taken over by hoards of downtrodden outcasts, hoodlums, the poor, the destitute, the winos and the criminals, those who spend their lives in the gutters of the non-places of supermodernity. This space war is not limited to the city centre but, as we have already seen, also spills over into the suburban areas where constant insecurity is the order of the day. Instead of going out, people lock themselves up in penitentiary style architecture in the condominiums and even write out the pay check to the guardians of this voluntary imprisonment or stay in their mobile homes of their car and speeding on the freeway in order to escape the imaginary enemy in the city. The trade-off between freedom and security has supposedly turned out to the benefit of the latter, as we are now living in, what sociologist Frank Furedi (1997), termed a culture of fear, a society that due to its enormous investments in security
62 and safety now, paradoxically, feel more vulnerable and insecure than ever. Marshall Berman in his wonderful yet today mainly neglected piece of work All that is Solid Melts into Air (1982) noted on the segregating tendencies in modernist architecture, which we believe is taken to extremes in supermodern urban planning, that they tended to create “a modernized version of pastoral: a spatially and socially segmented world – people here, traffic there; work here, homes there: rich here, poor there; barriers of grass and concrete in between” (Berman 1982). Bauman was not creating a nightmare vision but was very close to a description of reality when claiming that “watched neighbourhoods, closely surveilled public spaces with selective admission, heavily armed guards at the gate and electronically operated doors – are all now aimed against the unwanted co- citizens, rather than foreign armies or highway robbers, marauders and other largely unknown dangers lying in ambush on the other side of the city gates” (Bauman 1998a:48). The policy rather seems to be to tear down an old community in order to erect a new shining skyscraper or an empty parking lot ten times the size of a football field in its place with no sense of human belonging, no history, and no effect except for uprooting people and places. Mike Davis (1992) noted on what he termed Fortress Los Angeles, a notion applicable to many other American cities, that “the defence of luxury has given birth to an arsenal of security systems and an obsession with the policing of social boundaries through architecture. The militarization of city life is increasingly visible everywhere” (Davis 1992:174), and also Anthony Giddens (1990) made us aware, that one of the pivotal features of modernity and also late modernity, and to an even greater extent supermodernity, is the rise of surveillance and supervision of citizens by the authorities (Lyon 1994). But actually what happens is more likely a sort of self-supervision and self-surveillance. The obsession with security has as an unfortunate side effect that it criminalises the citizenry. In order to be where you are or to be heading where you want to go, you need a legal errand, an acceptable purpose, a good excuse or an authorised license or you will be considered an intruder and a trespasser. This in turn means that most people are uncomfortable outside their home, their car or their office space. The space war in Houston therefore, as we have seen, has many different levels which are both of a mental as well as physical character and which both reinforce the tendency of people to stick to themselves or their kind, to stay away from public areas and to refrain from contributing to the revitalisation of public place. Let us for a while turn to some
63 other aspects that stem from this almost introvert and inner-worldly attitude of Houstonians.
9. Consumer Culture and the New Bodily Asceticism
Max Weber noted that what happened during the shift from pre-modernity to modernity was that the secluded life of the monastery came to encompass the entire society, that we saw the rise of a lifestyle dedicated to abstinence and a voluntary Spartan existence. Do we still live in the monastery of modernity? Supposedly not since “the ethos of consumption has penetrated every sphere of our lives. As culture, leisure, sex, politics, and even death turn into commodities, consumption increasingly constructs the way we see the world”, writes Margaret Crawford (1992:11). She quotes William Leiss, who has pointed out that the best measure of social consciousness today is the Index of Consumer Sentiment, which identifies willingness to spend and tells us about how optimistic the future of the world is – a future that extends only into the next fiscal year. Thus, it is clear that in today‟s world of supermodernity, consumption hierarchies, where commodities define lifestyle, furnish indications of status more visible than economic relationships of class positions. Status is easy to read since the necessary information has already been [inter]nationally distributed through advertising (Crawford 1992). Jean Baudrillard (1988) in his essay Consumer Society finds consumerism to represent a fundamental mutation in the ecology of the human species. He writes: “Today, we are everywhere surrounded by the remarkable conspicuousness of consumption and affluence, established by the multiplication of objects, services, and material goods… Strictly speaking, men of wealth are no longer surrounded by other human beings, as they have been in the past, but by objects… As the wolf-child becomes wolf by living among them, so are we becoming functional. We are living the period of the objects: that is, we live by their rhythm, according to their incessant cycles. Today, it is we who are observing their birth, fulfillment, and death; whereas in previous civilizations, it was the object, instrument, and perennial monument that survived the generations of men” (Baudrillard, 1988:29). As Thomas Maschio (2000) writes after extensive work on American middle- class consumerism, and also having worked in Papua New Guinea, American consumers have almost millenarian expectations about what products can do for their lives. Western societies, especially in the U.S.A., have ritualised consumption to the point that it has become a culturally central phenomenon for their lives.
64 Maschio writes that “developing an anthropology of American consumer culture involves developing an understanding of materialist desire: what it is, what it does to human beings, and the part it plays in the character of American lives… Individuals can aspire to new status through consumption, thus making their desire into a new way of becoming. The product is the form for different manifestations of desire, the vehicle for engaging, satisfying, exploring, and creating further desires. For Americans, „successful‟ products are empty, they encompass a space of possibility. It is this possibility about life, status, achievement, beauty, youth, athleticism, self mastery, physical prowess, speed, safety, comfort, sex, intoxication, taste, food, scent, home and love that consumers desire to make their own, through the medium of the product. The product is made by the consumer into an ally in this [constant] contest to realize a more idealized vision of the self” (Maschio 2000:7- 8). At the heart of consumerism, then, lie not the products, but the fulfillment of values such as individualism and freedom. Robert Bellah has termed this self improvement through economic initiative as expressive individualism satisfying the desire or individual distinction. Maschio finds that the key American values that fuel American consumer desire are the values of democracy and egalitarianism and not the academic belief that consumerism is primarily about the establishment of inequality. America, according to Maschio, is characterized by a democratisation of desire and sees consumer culture as a platform for self-expression and self- affirmation. Maschio, according to us, conflates the values of capitalism with those of democracy and seems myopic in his vision of democracy. If, as Maschio says, Americans feel they are being democratic when they purchase six different types of breakfast cereal because each member has his or her own cereal preference, then there is either something amiss in American democracy today or in Maschio‟s analysis. Yet, Maschio‟s observations despite being attempts at valorizing consumer culture and feeling good about consumerism have some usefulness for our argument. Maschio does not point to the route through which this distinctiveness is sought apart from the fact that it goes via the sameness of products. Everyone wants to wear a Gap khaki trouser or a Nike shoe in order to express their individuality. The contradiction between all of us desiring the same type of product while trying to fashion our unique identities leads to the unique tension within consumer culture, and leads to an unending cycle of desiring more – a constant state of searching for satisfaction. The signs or symbols a person uses as a means of identifying themselves as different from others has to be understood by the very others this person is trying to differentiate himself from. Thus, there has to
65 be a sameness of signs and symbols. This marks the age of consumerism. We all wear the same clothes and understand the same system of signs, and yet we are distinct and free to choose what kind of sameness we want for ourselves. But, in order to do that we have to have a shared community – and that shared community exists and is displaced and dispersed into the airwaves and virtual spaces of the media – in flashes of electrons that hit our eyes and reconfigure our neural circuits – not one word spoken with another person, speaking in the language of [corporate] logos. Glucksmann writes, “we are free together. Therefore, only the group is free”, and inspired by Rabelais‟ book Gargantua and Pantagruel continues: “Making use of this liberty, they most laudably rivaled each other in all of them doing what they saw pleased one. If one man or woman said: Let us drink, they all drank. If one said: Let us play, they all played. And if it was: let us go and amuse ourselves in the fields, they all went there. This society seems doomed to repeat ad infinitum its own birth. Communication takes place only in the imperative, as though the original leader was able to yield the initiative only to new little leaders, found at random, on the spur of the moment, all equally good, and good enough only to be leaders for an instant. The Thelemites are already Panurge‟s sheep, before the latter appear in the story” (Glucksmann 1980:12). Yet, Maschio‟s arguments for a Dionysian worldview of life versus an Apollonian one are not recent in sociological literature; they are part of the continuing debate about the mental maps of individuals or of a culture versus the material conditions of existence of a society. Max Weber pointed out that it is common for a tension or contradiction to exist between religious demands and humankind‟s material needs, and the particular way in which such a tension is resolved is crucial to the history of that society or an entire civilization. Weber‟s classic work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1904-1905) demonstrates this interrelationship and interdependence of ideational and material factors in history, especially with respect to the development and growth of capitalist society. According to Weber, the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century had a dramatic impact on the development of the West because many Protestant sects imposed an ascetic and methodical lifestyle on their members, which helped transform them into the modern individual. He described two major modes of religious experience – asceticism and mysticism – ways of escape that are open to all individuals in all societies. Asceticism, according to Weber, suggests that individuals selflessly apply themselves to a mission, turning their backs form the rewards and pleasures of the world. They thrive on the mere performance of a
66 task – all feeling and sensuality is denied, and a rigorous pattern of righteous self- discipline followed instead. Weber used the examples of early protestant sects to discuss the significance of such social action. Mysticism as a worldview, on the other hand, derives not from self-mastery but from states of consciousness. Thus, as we sit in the supermodern city of Houston in the year 2000, we can draw distinctions between the producer culture of early capitalism with the consumer culture of late capitalism. As Hobbs (1997:140) writes: “What defines consumer culture is not the purchase and use of goods, however, but the constellation of values that delineate the meaning of consumption. Consumer culture contrasts with the older producer culture in the conception of the economy and the individual. Scarcity defined the economy of the producer culture: hard work, thrift, self-denial, and deferred gratification defined the internal qualities of the individual. In consumer culture, however, abundance characterized the economy. Adherent of the new value system emphasized leisure, spending and self-fulfillment. In an economy of abundance, people believed that gratification need not be deferred: one could have everything immediately… individual qualities such as being liked or striving to develop an attractive personality replaced the inner-directed, producer culture emphasis on having a strong moral character”. Weber‟s metaphor of the iron cage of modern, rational, bureaucratic instrumentalism is classic in studies of transformation of society and of modernity; and he suggested that charismatic movements by virtue of their irrationality and emotionalism often allow individuals to escape form that cage. Would he have agreed that consumerism provides such an escape to the citizens of this stage of late capitalism and of supermodernity? Thorstein Veblen was one of the first theorists to point out that the real purpose of capitalism is consumption (he termed it conspicuous consumption), and that it works insidiously through the spread of consciousness, and he did more than anyone to turn the study of capitalism from production and power to consumerism and culture. Yet, Veblen‟s image of the good life is not based on the ideal of happiness but on that of work, and contrasts the new consumption with the sacredness of work. While Veblen criticizes the waste, luxury, and irrationality of the leisure class and celebrates values of work, utility and industry, Theodor Adorno, on the other hand, defended the values of leisure, happiness, and freedom from utility (Adorno 1967; Kellner 1994:75). These values of work and industry are fundamental values of the capitalist economic system, and he therefore criticises Veblen as failing to provide a critical examination of capitalism itself. Adorno defends the values of happiness against ascetic attacks, but also insists that
67 true happiness can be envisaged only in a new social order (Kellner 1994:77). Yet, perhaps, if Adorno had been alive today, he might have seen it differently, because the very nature of the capitalist enterprise seems to have changed from an emphasis on frugality to an emphasis on waste and excess – would Adorno have valorized excess and waste as a proper criticism of capitalism? In this late stage of capitalism we are in a consumer mode rather than a producer mode. And Galbraith has been instrumental in highlighting this aspect of the evolution of capitalism. Galbraith (1967) argues that the basic problem of contemporary capitalism is not the contradiction between maximization of profit and the rationalization of production but a contradiction between virtually unlimited productivity and the need to dispose of the product. Thus, the system is not only interested in controlling the mechanism of production, but also the demand for the product at the level of the consumer. Galbraith terms this the revised sequence in contrast to the accepted sequence where the consumer is supposed to have control and reflects through the free mechanism of the market what is needed and what is not. On the contrary, consumer society sees the creation of an unlimited number of wants and needs and appeals directly to desire as discussed earlier. Thus, the shift from a market economy to a consumer culture. How does this then link to the discussion of urban space and the city? How has the city been instrumental in promoting this culture of consumerism? What is the impact of supermodernity and the evolution of the non- places on the rise of this insatiable consumer for whom, as Bauman (1998) notes only desire desires desire and nothing can ever be enough? Although Max Weber (1958:68) distinguished between the producer city and the consumer city based on his separation on the economic potential and function of the city, Georg Simmel highlighted the link between consumerism and the city. Both Simmel‟s and Veblen‟s work mark a shift of attention in sociology from economistic to social definitions of class. And both made their observations in cities. Thus, urbanization and the growth of cities and consumerism has had a major impact on classical sociological thinking. Simmel argued, based on his observations of Berlin in the late nineteenth century, that the modern city is not a spatial entity with sociological consequences, but a sociological entity that is formed spatially. Robert Bocock (1994) finds connections between the development of the city and the emergence of consumer society in the writings of Georg Simmel. Modern consumerism, Bocock quotes Simmel, in part, results from the new way of life in the metropolis, the city and the suburbs, for this gives rise to a new kind of individual who is anxious. As Simmel expressed it: “…to preserve
68 the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces” and, thus, to avoid “being leveled down and worn out by a social- technological mechanism” – the metropolis. Thus, Simmel clearly delineates the difference between space and place and suggests that the modern city is first and foremost a place. Simmel also argued that the metropolitan individual is very different from the type Max Weber analyzed in his work on Calvinism, who would not spend foolishly on relatively trivial items of clothing or adornment. Rather the person in the big city consumes in order to articulate a sense of identity, of who they wish to be taken to be (Bocock 1994). Veblen found that what distinguished pecuniary from productive capitalism was that the symbolic pageant of invidious comparison replaced every other kind of human relation. Thus, identity in the city grew along with invidious comparisons. In the context of Houston, or other American cities, where the focus is on the criminal activity and not the inequality that underpins majority of the criminal activities; the shopping mall is not only a place where consumers satisfy the insatiable self, but is has also become a safe haven - a refuge from the crisis of the city street. The mall is perhaps the only public place left in Houston. As Crawford (1992) points out, Houston‟s major shopping mall The Galleria has achieved a reputation as a safe and benevolent place for singles to meet, and for mall-walkers - senior citizens and heart patients seeking a safe place to exercise. Yet, a shopping mall can never be a public place – it is in fact the archetypal non-place that we discussed earlier. So where early discussions at the beginning of the 19th century centred around the theories about the city and consumption by Weber, Simmel and Veblen, the 1920s to 1940s saw how scholars from the Chicago School such as Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, Louis Wirth sought to develop the so-called ecological approach to urban analysis and the notion of urbanism as a way of life (Park 1952; Wirth 1938), which were for many years the chief basis of theory and research in urban sociology (Giddens 1993). Yet, more recent writings about the city, especially by authors such as David Harvey and Manuel Castells, have stressed that urbanism is not an autonomous process, but has to be analysed in relation to major patterns of political and economic change. Harvey emphasizes that urbanism is but one aspect of the created environment brought about by the spread of industrial capitalism. In modern urbanism, space is continually restructured and the process is determined by where large firms choose to place their factories, research and development centers; the controls which governments operate over land and industrial production; and the activities of private investors. In contrast to the Chicago school,
69 Castells sees the city not only as a distinct location - the urban area - but as an integral part of the processes of collective consumption, which in turn are an inherent part of industrial capitalism. The physical shape of cities is thus a product of both market forces and the power of government. Castells‟ main argument was that urban sociology had no real or concrete object because urban referred only vaguely to things not rural rather than to some specific phenomenon. He saw urban sociology (or ideology) as being concerned with certain activities such as how social groups formed communities, created a subculture, and avoided anomie, none of them intrinsically urban. Castells saw a unity in urban phenomena and it lay in the connection between spatial relations and the process of collective consumption (the consumption of nondivisible goods such as air quality or public transportation, which had been previously called public goods and saw the sociology of collective consumption as a scientific undertaking rather than urban sociology itself (Walton 1993). Peter Saunders (1981) finds the history of urban sociology to be the history of a search for a sociological phenomenon the source of which may be located in the physical entity of the city. Thus, the recent writings about urban space seem to hark back to Simmels‟ observation that the city is a sociological entity that is formed spatially, and they also try and connect the processes of capitalism (in the writings of Harvey), and that of collective consumption (in the writings of Castells) and the entire process of consumerism in general – the consumerism that has been identified as the defining quality of our times. This phenomena of collective consumption and hyper-consumerism is accentuated in Houston – where there is no public spaces – and people compare each other at every level starting with the cars they drive. The car, as we saw earlier, no longer remains a vehicle to transport oneself from one place to another, but from one social status to another. The individuality and freedom is expressed through the car, and when the car then transports the individual from one state of being to another, the car becomes one of the many products that stimulate the Weberian mystical experience in Houstonians. Thus, what happens in a supermodern city is a little different from the observations of Veblen and Simmel in the modern cities. The city does not remain a city but is converted into one huge shopping mall. But is mysticism the worldview of the Houstonian – the escape route from the double barred cage of late capitalism and supermodernity? Not completely since there seems to be another route, and we term this the new bodily asceticism, whereby the consuming citizen constantly subjects the body to exercise
70 or denies the body food items and anything that is pleasurable to the taste buds and fetishizes diet drinks. Thus, in a society that follows Weberian mysticism as an individual coping strategy and people get increasingly trapped into the illusory cage of supermodernity. Entrapped by the luxury of the product, there seems to be a new style of adaptation and that has nothing to do with escape, but with entrenching oneself further in this consumerism cage - throwing oneself headlong into the sea of the shopping mall. And the practice of bodily asceticism in the public sphere demonstrates the strength of one‟s resolve to stay on inside this cage. There is no attempt or even thought given to releasing oneself from this cage. Instead when asked whether they want to release themselves, the consumer gives you that same glazed look that they have while shopping and ask you: Why? What else is there? The practice of the new bodily asceticism is but an attempt to demonstrate their willingness and their good intent as consuming citizens, that they are not so-called flawed consumers (Bauman 1997). What else then is this new bodily asceticism? The predominant survival strategy in Houston, as in many other parts of the U.S.A., is health and fitness lifestyle, as Bauman noted several years ago (Bauman 1992c). Thus, all across America people are running – they are running so they can keep their hearts healthy – or so they will tell you at first. When pushed further, they will say that they are preventing death. According to Bauman the logic goes like this: “Death is omnipotent and invincible; but none of the specific cases of death is [...] There are so many causes of death; given enough time, one can name them all. If I defeat, escape or cheat twenty among them, twenty less will be left to defeat me. I can do nothing to defy mortality. But I can do quite a lot to avoid a blood clot or a lung cancer. I can stop eating eggs, refrain from smoking, do physical exercise, keep my weight down; I can do so many other things [...] Fighting death is meaningless. But fighting the „causes‟ of dying turns into the meaning of life” (Bauman 1992c:5-7). And as Gertrude stein said: Americans do not die – they are killed. Yet, all the exercising is not just about death. We see a deeper layer underneath the fitness revolution. Crawford (1992) finds that the process of shopping – a quintessential act of consumer society - begins even before the shopper enters the mall. The consumer is already primed by the barrage of messages in the commercialised contemporary social environment. The average American, she quotes, has seen 350.000 television commercials before the age of twenty, and the shopper arrives in the mall with a confused set of wants. She goes on by stating:“Mentally „trying on‟ products teaches shoppers not only what they
71 want and what they can buy, but also what they don‟t have, and what therefore they need. Armed with this knowledge, shoppers can not only realize what they are but also imagine what they might become. Identity is momentarily stabilized even while the image of a future identity begins to take shape, but the endless variation of objects means that satisfaction always remains out of reach”. Thus, at one level is this constant state of dissatisfaction or the unending search for satisfaction even with one‟s own body image or with health. Thus, there is a constant feeling that there are better things out there or a better state of health. This psychological state of being in a consumerist supermodern society is termed by us as fatalistic optimism. In this state individuals are always optimistic that they will find a better product – a better shirt, a better shoe, a better TV, a better state of health, or a better partner, a better soul mate only if they keep looking – keep shopping. This state has so pervaded the arena of relationships that the divorce rates in a consumer society rates are among the highest in recent human history – and yet these same people are remarrying within minutes of their last divorce. Thus, the individual almost knows before they have even paid for the product or soul mate they picked off the shelf that they are going to dispose of it very soon. And yet they are optimistic in a truly fatalistic sense. This fatalistic optimism is only one of the contributory factors to the fitness and health strategy. At another level is the social nature of consumption. Baudrillard (1988:46) argues that the “isolated consumer is the carefully maintained illusion of the ideological discourse on consumption. Consumers are mutually implicated, despite themselves, in a general system of exchange and in the production of coded values… consumption is a system of meaning, like language, or like the kinship system in primitive societies”. Thus, the consumers who live in a supermodern city talk to each other all the time although they are not really vocalising a single syllable. Thus, one could spend the entire day in a city like Houston (supermodern and extremely consumerist), not talking to a single human, and yet have communicated a multitude of messages through the systematic codes designed by the corporations on the backs of our shirts, or the hoods of our cars. The same silent code holds true for the average Houstonian while running through the streets or in a park as part of their daily dose of exercise and fitness. What are these silent exercisers communicating to each other, and not through the brand of running shoes or jogging suits they wear, but through the act of exercising itself? They are demonstrating that they are fulfilling their obligations and duties as citizens of a consumer society. A consumer society is by definition also an individualistic society that runs on debt. We stretch
72 Crawford‟s (1992) argument that shopping starts even before the person reaches the mall. We argue that consumerism starts even before the consumer is born in a consumer society because every citizen in this country is entitled to a debt form the credit card companies (Ritzer 1995). Even before they are born, they have already been assigned a certain amount of dollars that they can spend. They do not have to go through an intensive scrutiny for a loan – they are loaned money even before they ask. But there is no free lunch in America as the common aphorism goes, and so there is no free money. This entitlement comes at a price and that price is the price of having to repay all that debt that they got even through they did not ask for it or at least demonstrate the intent to. Thus, the consumer has to do two things: first, they have to ensure that they repay at least the interest, if not the entire amount, every month; and second, they have to demonstrate to their fellow consumers that they do not intend to live off them – that they intend to live long and work hard enough so that they can repay all that unasked for debt that they incurred just by being born. Thus, while consumers in this society indulge in excess shopping and waste when it comes to products or even relationships, they exhibit intense frugality when it comes to the body. The body is punished, self-regimented in the Foucauldian sense of the term, denied certain kinds of food, pushed and pulled in a thousand different directions by the fitness machines and experts in order to stay fit and healthy and consuming. Thus, the idea is to practice the new bodily asceticism while being extremely hedonistic in terms of consumption. The intense antipathy that consumers in this society demonstrate towards their fellow consumers who do not exercise, do not take care of their health is not merely because this society has a fear of death. No, it is mainly because that lack of exercise, the indulgence in and of the body in a decadent sense, that slothfulness, and disrespect to the fitness strategy shows dishonorable intentions with respect to repaying that debt. It shows that this person lacks the mindset of bodily asceticism that is needed in order to continue fulfilling the insatiable needs of consumption. Thus, consumers live today by borrowing from the future. Thus, I pay for a car that I need to get around the city of Houston today without a single contribution to the world of work, without anything that I have given to the world. I am buying a car on money borrowed from the future – my future potential to earn, stay employed, and therefore, the importance of health and fitness. I have to show the required keenness to stay fit because then I demonstrate good intent to be a good citizen and pay of all that I have borrowed from the future. Therefore I cannot be sick or die early or do unhealthy things because then I would be duping all my
73 fellow consumers who have borrowed from the future too. In fact not only does a consumer society like America borrow money and resources from the future, the new fairy tales for children are also space games and futuristic battles on distant planets in the video games. There are no more Grimm‟s tales, but stories from Star Wars. In fact, the Star Wars corporation went so far as to create a sequel that actually went back into the past of the character that was from some distant future. What happens when a culture or society increasingly borrows from the future instead of the past? What does that do to the culture – to history as we know it and how does it affect individuals? Instead of showing off one‟s family genealogy and connections as in kinship societies or merit as in a modern society to borrow for goods we need today, one has to display one‟s jogging suits and start running and exercising. All this running in public spaces such as parks or sidewalks does not allow for a moment of pause or conversation between people; instead they exchange the silent codes of fitting into the fitness strategy of consumer culture. And in a strange metaphorical twist, the average Houstonian mimics the citizen of supermodernity who keeps running but goes nowhere. As Andre Glucksmann (1980) compares the contemporary world to the Thelemites from Rabelais‟ fable of Gargantua and Pantagruel: “They live in the present: like the past, the future turns out to be abolished”. And while jogging the average Houstonian thinks about “what kind of breakfast cereal will I buy this morning?”. And with the swipe of a credit card seals the fate of democracy forever. One may rightly wonder what consumer culture has to do with urban structure, what fashion has to do with architecture, what the relationship is between the aforementioned Dionysian lifestyle and the emptying of space? Joanne Finkelstein wrote in a memorable article: “Fashion has an architectonic dimension; it can structure the physical world in a material way by defining what is pleasing, say, in the design of houses, cars, restaurants, and works of art, and it can shape the interior world of the individual by establishing thresholds of sentiments that classify what is repugnant and appealing in certain ideas, practices and desires. As such, fashions regulate public conduct as well as shaping private sensibilities” (Finkelstein 1994:283). Thus, the private life of the individual – choice, sentiments, desires and ambitions – combine via actions and interactions to the physical and exterior world and these two simultaneously mould each other. The new bodily asceticism and the rise of consumerism is therefore heavily linked to the emptying of space, hyperindividuality and the rise of the supermodern American ghost city.
74 10. The Divinity of Propinquity
We have now looked at how supermodernity heavily influences the type of behaviour expressed by the people living in it and at supermodernity‟s impact on the people living in urban settings. We will now turn more profoundly to a discussion of the impact of supermodernity, not on the individual, but on community and culture. J. D. Porteous quotes Yi-Fu Tuan for noting, that where man to some degree is liberated from the accumulated cultural baggage of his past and lacks concern for the future, as in supermodernity as we described it above as the temporal intersection of past influences and future anticipations - especially when it comes to spatial planning - he may be regarded as an organism potentially strong subject to both biological needs and environmental dictates (Porteous 1977:135). Above we discussed both the environmental dictates in the form of the subjection of human freedom to spatial arrangements such as the rise of non-places and we also touched upon how man‟s biological needs had turned into a compulsory consumptionism, as we discussed under the heading of the new bodily asceticism. As we have demonstrated on several occasions above, Houston is not a city marked by a high level of human interaction in public sphere and whenever one can witness it comes either in the form of the fitness strategy or the car culture. But this kind of interaction is, however, mainly restricted to private quarters and to a limited range of people and if it goes on in public it has the quality of the fleeting, the momentary and the compulsory. As already Edward T. Hall (1966) noted in his spectacular study of the importance of spatial aspects in human interaction, personal proximity is not one of the marks of distinction of Westernised cultures. In his so-called proxemics, the study of the spatial distances in man, he differentiated between certain intimate spheres characteristic to different cultures and separated between intimate distance, personal distance, social distance and public distance all of which contained a far and a close dimension. To Caucasians, such as Americans and Western Europeans, these distances mean something more than merely closeness and distance and is guided by a logic of prescribed ways that is different from other cultures. For example the intimate sphere is reserved only for initiated or invited people. Hall goes on to say that particularly in a time like ours do these spheres become increasingly important: “Like gravity, the influence of two bodies on each other is inversely proportional not only to the square of the distance but possibly even the cube of the distance between them. When stress increases,
75 sensitivity to crowding rises – people get more on edge – so that more and more space is required and less and less is available” (Hall 1966:122). The spatial requirements of people in the Western world are thus relatively high, if we accept that the threshold for stress is being moved day by day, and public distance – what Hall concludes is approximately twelwe feet or more between people – becomes the norm for human interaction. We need our own private space even when we are in a public area that is normally a place marked by human interaction and the momentary encounter. So the divinity of propinquity is certainly not an apt descriptive term for behaviour in public places in a non-place like Houston. Some actually seem to think that the main problem in Houston is not the lack of public places and their contact with people but the contrary – too many public areas filled to the brim with ever more people. Journalist Mary Flood recently noted in the Wall Street Journal, that due to the economic boom in Houston throughout the 1990‟s a big new problem has emerged – crowding: “For residents of this city, economic recovery is bringing with it a rather unpleasant side effect: people. Lots of them” (Flood 1997). Apart from a ironic smirk at the postulate contained in these lines, one is also left wondering, how it is possible that a supposedly crowded city can be completely empty and deserted? Flood goes on to say, that “a robust economy has sneaked up on Texas‟ biggest city, and a lot of residents don‟t like what the boom has done to their lifestyles. There are longer lines at grocery stores, movies sell out faster, the waiting lists at restaurants are larger, and the traffic at certain infamous coke points is worse than ever”. In short, there are too many people living in Houston appears to be her conclusion, based on interviews with a wide range of Texans. However, it is only when separated by the metal and glass of a chassis of a car on the freeway, when queuing in the shopping mall, or when sitting at the bar in a half empty restaurant, that inter-human propinquity appears acceptable. Bauman (1998a:48) noted that it is “not togetherness, but avoidance and separation [that] have become major survival strategies in the contemporary megalopolis. No more the question of loving or hating your neighbour. Keeping the neighbours at arm‟s length would take care of the dilemma and make the choice unnecessary”. And J. D. Porteous (1977:184) noticed, that we can differentiate between respectively adaptive areas and integrative areas. The former denotes areas that in many ways facilitate human movement and which either hinders or aids humanly directed activities. Examples of this type of area could of course be the streets, the home or the work place. The other type, the integrative areas, are places that in one way or
76 the other are focused on bringing people together, either voluntarily or in a coerced manner, and which deals with the connection between environment and human groupings. The two urban centres of Houston, downtown and the Medical Center, are both typical integrative areas which have turned into adaptive areas and they are thus increasingly becoming both devoid of social interaction simply for the reason that they consist of skyscrapers which do not invite people to actually come together. Although Le Corbusier once exclaimed that “the skyscrapers of New York are too small” (Le Corbusier in Kasinitz 1995:104), we would hold that those of Houston are too big for the purpose of human interaction. Marc Augé noted, that “when individuals come together, they engender the social and organize places” (Augé 1995:111). This becomes increasingly difficult when spatial structures are not designed for the purpose of bringing people together but instead keeping them apart, when the infrastructure of the urban district is prioritised to the development of leisure areas and when profit margins count for more in planning than human comfort, when integrative areas are being turned into adaptive spaces with no content. It is, as have also been contended by Rapport (1996), when individuals come together that the social is engendered and the social fabric is being vowed, and that it is in the recursiveness of social activity and interaction that social institutions and the social order as such is maintained. Non-places cannot fulfil the social function of places in this respect. This brings us back to the initial discussion of place versus non-place. Marc Augé recently remarked, that “if place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place” (Augé 1995:77). Non- places are empty spaces, emotionally but not physically as people may momentarily be present. Moreover, non-places are spots marked by an absence of history and by a cultural baggage. Furthermore they are spots on the landscape marked by indifference instead of concern, disinterestedness instead of attention, self-absorption instead of sociality and, as Augé also correctly noticed, new urban developments fail to offer what he terms spaces for living (Augé 1995:66), and instead keep outpouring new non-place areas which may be inhabitable og functional but are nevertheless useless for commitment and community. When integrative areas are transformed into adaptive ones, the outcome necessarily is a constant through flow of people but no human stasis in which long term responsibility and sense of togetherness can develop. Personal proximity and spatial vicinity is, however, difficult to obtain when people live compartmentalised
77 lives, as we indicated above. So what can be done in order to rectify this? How can the non-places be revitalised and re-invigorated so that it will accommodate people and their aspirations and urges to come together and create a public and social place? This will be the topic for our penultimate discussion before trying to sum up the perspectives offered here.
11. The Re-Enchantment of Public Place
It is our contention that people are the heart of city life, and a city without citizens who participate in the decisions that shape it becomes a mere chaos of structures, streets, and squares, as is also observed by Murray Boochkin in a book titled The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (Boochkin 1987). This shapeless blob or pulp, Boochkin continues, resulting from the collection of the products of urbanisation - office towers, research parks, subdivisions, and seemingly endless strips of used car lots, discount water beds, Midas Muffler shops and 7-Elevens, which could also be an accurate description of Houston, makes up a new category, neither country nor city, and their proliferation poses a bigger threat to humanity than mere geographic sprawl: the devastating dehumanising of city life and a destructing of community. In this book, Boochkin mainly discusses the history of the rise and fall of the city-state as an arena of citizen participation, calls for systems of local participation that are democratic and co-operative, and claims that it is about time that America builds on its legacy of good civic life. At the heart of our discussion of the fall of public place in a city like Houston and its conversion to public place, is a fear that the rapid transformation of places to non-places could also be a threat to the idea of democracy, that we all in the Western world value and valorise. Thus, from the fall of public place or the rise of non-place in geographic and cultural areas that are called cities for various reasons discussed above, from the disappearance of community to the effects of a globalising economy for which place is no longer important, there is a direct threat to the idea of participation and participatory democracy. The idea of participatory democracy runs back to Rousseau in the French tradition, John Dewey in America, and Benjamin Barber has in recent years also written about this issue. Thus, this monographic paper about Houston is also to be read from the standpoint of its location in the largest democracy in the world. And this commentary is not only a thick sociological description but also a critical commentary on urban life and its political
78 implications. In the American tradition it is pragmatic philosopher John Dewey who wrote the most about participation and community and its implications for democracy. Dewey saw a very important role for community in the maintenance and sustenance of democracy, and in fact equated a strong sense of community with a viable and thriving democracy: “Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself. It is an ideal in the only intelligible sense of an ideal, namely, the tendency and movement of something which exists carried to its final limit, viewed as completed, perfected. Since things do not attain such fulfillment, but are in actuality distracted and interfered with, democracy in this sense is not a fact and never will be. But neither in this sense is there or has there ever been anything which is a community in its full measure, a community unalloyed by alien elements. The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of a democracy. Only when we start from a community as a fact, grasp the fact in thought so as to clarify and enhance its constituent elements, can we reach an idea of democracy which is not utopian. Fraternity, liberty and equality isolated from communal life are hopeless abstractions” (Dewey 1927:148). Dewey also made a clear distinction between democracy as a social idea and political democracy as a system of government. He saw the two as connected and that the idea remained barren and empty unless incarnated in human relationships. He wrote, and we again quote him at length: “The idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the state even at its best. Democracy is not the state and to be realized it must affect all modes of human association, the family, school, industry, religion. And even as far as political arrangements are concerned, governmental institutions are but a mechanism for securing to an idea channels of effective operation. The old saying that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy is not apt if it means that that the evils may be remedied by introducing more machinery of the same kind as that which already exists, or be refining and perfecting that machinery. But the phrase may also indicate the need of returning to the idea itself, of clarifying and deepening our apprehension of it, and of employing our sense of its meaning to criticize and remake its political manifestations”. Dewey also valorised the local by calling it the ultimate universal, and as near an absolute as exists. He continued by writing that “we lie, as Emerson said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its
79 medium”. He recognised that America had the physical tools of communication as never before, and warned that the thoughts and aspirations congruous with them were not being communicated, and hence were not common. Without such communication, he thought that the public would remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than its substance: “… till the Great Society is converted to a Great Community, the public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community. Our Babel is not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols without which shared experience is impossible”. Thus, this is the very shared experiences that we discussed in the section above called The Corrosion of Community, and is obviously lacking or absent in the city of Houston. How can this participation be brought about? This participation can only become reality, can only be brought about if we re-energise the citizens, which can be done by boosting or bringing about their engagement with and within the city. Benjamin Barber (1984) writing in Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age advocates that “unmediated self-government by an engaged citizenry” and suggests the creation of new public spaces in which participation and community are mutually reinforcing. He presents a full-fledged program and route map in order to reach that avowed goal. Yet, what he does not spell out, is that this engagement with the city is also linked to the enchantment of the people with their cities. It seems that public places do not hold an enchantment for the people of Houston anymore. As the article in The Wall Street Journal described in an earlier section showed, the people of Houston were wary and afraid of the effects of economic recovery, which meant that more people would be crowding the public spaces. Houstonians, most of all, need to be re-enchanted with their own surroundings and environs, to create a re-enchanted public place. Nothing much can be done to change the geography of the city. And much has been done to counter the climate – the city consumes the most energy among all other big cities in America because of the unlimited air-conditioning of all its public buildings and private dwellings. The city tries to deny its existence in a subtropical region by keeping temperatures inside buildings or inside their cars at less than 20 degrees Celsius in the middle of summer when the temperature on the streets is around 35 degrees Celsius. So the onus of re-enchanting the dwellers of this non-place falls on the shoulders of the civic authorities, the artists and intellectuals. The artists and intellectuals are virtually non-existent in a city that was described by Ada Louise Huxtable as being economically dynamic but culturally and socially impoverished.
80 And the civic fathers (literally) are content with the way things are because it does not threaten their political control on this city. Thus, it seems that Houston is placed in a Catch-22 situation - from the book of the same title by Joseph Heller – according to which the very people it is looking up to in order to change their circumstances are either absent or unwilling to change it because they are reaping the rewards of the status quo. And not any Houstonian is willing to believe that there is a threat to their democracy by their very style of existence. We do vote at times and we have fair and free elections, is their retort. Yet, they forget that Rousseau, the philosophical patron of the democratic movement, mocked the English in Du Contrat Social, by contending that the English people “is free only during the election of Members of Parliament; as soon as the Members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing”. In a scathing criticism of representative democracy (as we practice it today), he argued that once the right to self- government is transferred to someone else, even if that person is deemed to be a representative of the people, the people are no longer free. And the problem faced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau two centuries ago is now faced by the people who are thinking about democracy in America, if the state of affairs in their cities continue to decline the same way as is happening in Houston: If the sovereignty belongs inalienably to the people, and not to some elected members of Congress or Parliament, then the problem is, how do the people retain it and exercise it? (Arblaster 1994). And so Houstonians continue to play the victim instead of taking charge of their circumstances, which is especially ironic in a country that sells fierce individualism abroad, while a group of people in their fourth largest city continue to shrug their shoulders and ask: What else is there? This peculiar condition of existence in the post-industrial age in western societies is what we term optimistic fatalism. This optimistic fatalism is inherent even in mate-seeking behaviour in a nation that follows the dictum of serial monogamy very strictly. It is very evident instatements such as: There is a perfect mate for me out there despite having gone through 5000 potential mates and not finding anything right with them. This optimistic fatalism is the cultural fuel that keeps the engines of capitalism running – it is also the theme behind books with titles such as The End of History, The End of Ideology etc. A feeling of what else is there is the ideal in this stage of consumer capitalism, because if there is nothing else better than this state of existence, then all I can hope to do best is to keep the cycle running, to keep running on the treadmill like a mouse in a laboratory, keep buying, keep driving to work, keep driving back home,
81 and keep buying more. Thus, the fall of public place by the conversion of cities to non-places, as in the case of Houston, go through two interrelated pathways of economic or cultural such as corrosion of community, which not only leads to the deterioration or destruction of the social (which stimulates sociologists to react), but also threatens the very fabric of democracy - participation. It leads to a disengagement from the surroundings and a disenchantment with anything social or public. Yet, society changes and even its brightest brains proved wrong. For instance, it was self-evident to Plato - as to Rousseau later - that a genuine state could hardly be larger than the number of persons capable of personal acquaintance with one another (Dewey 1927:114). And yet, technology of communication changed all that, the mass media was a major factor in the circulation of information, ideas and opinions and generated interaction beyond face-to-face interaction. In fact, it has been said that the community has shifted from the market square to the living rooms and now sits in front of the television sets. And at the cost of severe criticism at the hands of a postmodern critic or a right-wing supporter of the new economics or a Internet fanatic from Silicon Valley - both an entrepreneur and a technologist (the most dangerous combination of all in human history like Bill Gates) - who would immediately label us Cassandras and argue, that what we do not recognise is the formation of a new form of existence in the history of the human, of the individual or of human communities, and of human organisations, of the State. We would counter that with the central argument from Michael Sandel‟s book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, that liberals who based their political theory on the supremacy of the individual rights were presupposing an individual who existed prior to his/her country, community and family, and was someone whose political and moral choices were completely free of the encumbrances and entrapments of human loyalties. Sandel‟s question was: Where could one find such people? (Sullivan 1996). In a more recent book titled Democracy‟s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, Sandel talks about the growing discontent and argues for bringing back what he terms civic republicanism as a solution and the use of this term is close to, or almost the same as, the arguments of the so-called communitarianism, that argued that citizens far from being individuals who existed prior to their state or their society were products or creations of their political and socio-cultural environment. These citizens had loyalties that made their choices complicated or not choices at all, and that their rights should give way before the goods their society aspired to. And as Sullivan (1996) critiques Sandels‟ arguments
82 by stating that although he reminds us of a citizenship that elevates without repressing, “his failure is to pretend that this citizenship can be blithely resurrected, that law can still impose what society must now aspire to”. In this paper, we espouse neither a liberal nor a communitarian solution to the unique problem of non-place that Houston faces. In fact, providing a solution is not the expressed intent of this paper, and one of the authors has argues elsewhere that a critical mind does not stop at positing a solution to every problem, but recognises the fact that even every solution has its problem (Chatterjee 2000). Instead, we choose to raise these issues, bring them to the fore, despite the discomfort it may cause many of our friends and colleagues who continue to live in Houston and similar cities. We choose to be polemical on purpose. The entire debate of communitarianism and liberalism in terms of how to lead our civic lives is framed within the context of a democracy as defined more than a hundred years ago. We believe that the nature of changes in the economy – the globalisation of production and consumption, the rise of the mass media, the information highway and the internet, the rise of the supermodern city, the decline of family life and the consequent corrosion of community, as the founders of democracy knew it, threatens the very existence of democracy as we know it. Maybe these changes are all for the best as some of the Francis Fukuyama followers would say, but like Voltaire, we disagree with that dictum and prefer instead to write an academic Candide for the City for the new millennium, and to mock the new age of self- imposed unenlightenment or, as some authors have called it in an American context, the dumbing and/or numbing of America. Based on our many the observations and conversations in Houston, and assuming that these changes are occurring in other cities around the world, we create a typology to understand individuals as well as groups of individuals and nations based on their engagement and enchantment with their environs. We propose a unique admixture of enchantment and engagement that will lead individuals and groups to counter the forces that threaten to disrupt their very way of living. This 2 x 2 table uses the dichotomous division of the concepts of engagement and enchantment to put forward our notion of civic engagement and action in the context of cities like Houston or community action in this age and time of supermodernity. Although a very used and abused word in contemporary sociology is that of re-enchantment, which by now has so many meanings and is almost becoming very obsolete, we nevertheless stick by it by modifying it. Therefore, instead of looking only at re-enchantment, we propose that we assess the
83 enchantment or lack of the same of the people of a city with their environs. Thus, in the table we place the dichotomous categories of engagement and disengagement in the rows and the categories of enchantment or disenchantment in the columns. Every city, by which we mean the inhabitants or group of people living in that city, can then be placed within one of the boxes in this typology. Placing people in a box does not necessarily predict the course of action the people will take, nor is it an attempt to predict the future or write an inevitable history of a group. The framing of oneself or one‟s group only helps to make an assessment of one‟s location within the two axes of engagement and enchantment, and thus provide a general map for the types of actions and measures required to reach the intended goal of galvanising the community in order to keep the democracy alive.
FIGURE 5: THE MENTAL MATRIX OF THE CITY
ENCHANTED DISENCHANTED
ENGAGED 1 2
DISENGAGED 3 4
Before we go on to understand cities or the peoples of cities across the world based on this typology, a point of clarification is in order. This typology is an ideal- typical construction in the Weberian sense of that term, and therefore it may be difficult to place the cities of the world in one box alone without using the principle of Procrustes‟ bed. That is the people of cities, especially big and diverse cities, have differing opinions. Not only that, but ideas about the city also vary with class and race, and at times gender. Therefore, we do not mean to disregard and ignore those opinions that do not fit into our framework, nor do we intend to stretch the ideas ad attitudes of people to fit the length and breadth of our boxes. Yet, at the same time this exercise is not very difficult to carry out in provincial cities where the people may often express similar opinions, and the citizenry of Houston,
84 despite its size and character, exhibits predominantly provincial behaviour with respect to the kinds of opinions people hold about their city or the kinds of attitudes that people have to their city. Thus, a city, or rather the majority of its inhabitants, could be placed in one of the four boxes, lending itself to variations of enchantment/disenchantment and engagement/disengagement with their city. An example of a city that could fall into Box 1 – enchanted and engaged - could be Paris. Now this is our view as outside observers, and the people of Paris may express differing opinions. But this categorisation of Paris may also be summed up by Gertrude Stein when she wrote, that “it is not what Paris gives you, but what it does not take away from you”. Houston, on the other hand falls into Box 3 since it seems to be highly enchanted with itself. Although it is one of the most boring and unchallenging cities for an outside observer, and not many air travellers passing through the city spend more than one night in the city, Houstonians tend to concur that there could be nothing better and usually shrug their shoulders to the tune of “What else is there?”. Yet, in a curious way, despite the enchantment, Houstonians seem to be totally disengaged from their city. Thus, being enchanted and disengaged is a type of false consciousness that makes the people extremely non- critical of their conditions of existence and about their surroundings and lulls them into inaction. On the other hand, Box 4 would be cities in the old Soviet bloc or some of the Eastern European cities such as Bucarest or larger cities in Latin America such as Brasilia. And given the awareness of multiple (post-modern) realities, the ideal state for a city would be Box 2, where the citizens are disenchanted, but engaged with their community and city. That would be a critical state of being or existence in a city or community, where the pluralities of today‟s existence are manifest to the inhabitants, but at the same time, they are engaged in the process of participation and democracy. Thus, it can be derived from a city‟s placement in Box 2 that the people are involved in a process and conceive of space and time (at the juxtaposition of which their city is placed) as transformable. Thus, they prevent the dangerous fallacy that Houstonians lapse into – that the conditions of their city are not given, that the structures are mutable and that humans act rather than merely behave in response to stimuli such as it is thought in the concept of behaviour. So what does the abstractness and lack of community in Houston, along with the compartmentalism that fosters this disengagement, forebode for this city? We do not want to make any predictions, but based on the lack of occupation of public spaces or the non-place character of the city and the non-critical view of the city by
85 its inhabitants, who see the city as a given rather than variable, we do not foresee a very active citizenry. However, in order not entirely to de-qualify the potential power of human agency, there must be room somewhere to change things. Where can this be? The place – as described by Augé - has inevitably event or myth associated with it. Thus, one of the places where Houston may start to reinvigorate itself is to start creating those common myths, to create a sense of history and a sense of romance about itself. But in order to do that it has to stop destroying buildings even before they are lived in. Like the American song goes, “…in a restless world where love has ended before it has begun…”, so does Houston destroy its landmarks. One of the attempts has been to revitalise the downtown area, but even that has been done with economics in mind rather than a real feeling about the social and the cultural life of this city. And therefore, a revitalisation that attracts only the young and not so young pretentious suburban professionals is not bound to provide the fulcrum for the change. A walk through downtown on a Saturday morning or night will immediately reveal the class based nature of this revitalisation movement. In fact, one of the Houstonians we talked to said that all these not so young and well-off suburbanites were coming to live inside the city because they wanted to meet potential mates. In a time of high divorce rates and serial monogamy and the lack of places to meet people in the suburbs or the problems with drinking and driving on a Saturday night have led to the massive influx of these semi-professionals into the city area that were traditionally occupied only by the poor. And the whole revitalisation movement is only boosting the resources of the rich developers and city fathers, while the poor, it is feared, will soon be driven out of the city. It would be ironic that the sex drive of these wealthier young adults with disposable income is immediately encashed by the capitalist, and as the flight of capital turns its wings back in the direction of the city, the poor and disenfranchised have to make way for the thrustings of the middle-class men and women in bars and bedrooms. This would also echo in the words of Edward T. Hall, whom we also referred to above, who in ingenious fashion noted more than a quarter of a century ago that “within the United States urban renewal and the many crimes against humanity that are committed in its name usually demonstrate total ignorance of how to create congenial environments for the diverse populations that are pouring into our cities” (Hall 1966:122). Another term that has sneaked its way into contemporary urban planning as a remedy for the impoverishment of place is that of planned community. Planning community is the same as trying to plan the weather or planning the outcome of
86 throwing a dice. And as the outcome of such endeavours appears to be we rather futile and coincidental, we distance ourselves form such strategies very clearly. Any such social engineering measures are doomed to fail, and fail miserably in the case of community planning and organisation. Thus, one cannot plan a community, especially if one wants it to be functional. But, what can be done is to instil in people a sense of community and instead to place more emphasis on creating the structural conditions that will enable people to practice this sense of community. The public place we would like to picture as the model, from which others can derive inspiration, is a place where people interact, and in which an intentional and voluntary presence of people is similar to that envisaged by Hannah Arendt in her notion of the öffentliche Raum, as a forum and platform for political action, as a place where people intentionally meet in order to act and deliberate in concert, where ideas are turned into action, and in turn, interaction. Yet, is it even realistic to assume that such a forum can exist in Houston or in a time and place when people are happier to call each other on the cellular phone instead of vis-a-vis conversation, or exchange emails instead of glances. Thus, are we falling prey to our own critiques of Houston as being the exemplar of car culture and compartmentalism, and so where would that fulcrum of change lie? In a time when more people are turning to the Internet as a forum for civic exchange and interaction, we strongly believe that technology will not provide any solutions to these human problems. So the question we are left with, then, is where to find that point or place because, as Laclau and Mouffe (1985) would say, that would be assuming that the social is sutured at some point from which it is possible to fix the meaning of any event independently of any articulatory practice, and thus providing us in Houston - the space city - with that platform that will allow the lift- off of the social. That is a question we leave to our readers too, as we have only suggested some possible directions, but we are incapable, as the urban planners of Houston, of providing an easy solution. It may also be well to remember Richard Sennett‟s (1977) notion of destructive Gemeinschaft – where he pointed out that although community has been valorised all around, one cannot forget its repressive and consequently destructive potential, that community in fact can be repressive and disintegrating. Maybe there have to be multiple points and levels at which we need to act and maybe we might even have to remind ourselves that in the history of the human, every solution ends up being a problem at some time or the other (Chatterjee 2000). What this amounts to is to recognise that the city is more than a collection of buildings, streets and
87 squares and that these have a heavy impact on human behaviour. The city is, indeed, a moral entity and this was noted already back in the middle of the 19th century by Edwin Chapin who wrote: “The city is something more than an assemblage of buildings or a multitude of people; something more than a market or a dwelling-place [...] deeper than all, it has a „moral‟ significance” (Chapin 1853:12). It is ancient wisdom that the city comprises both inorganic matter, such as the concrete structures, as well as organic matter, such as human beings. Only if the intricate relationship between these two is recognised can we hope to solve the problems facing the city.
12. Conclusion: The Fall of Public Place
“Houston, we've got a problem”. This was a cryptic message from the astronauts on board the spaceship Apollo 13 en route to the moon. In a strange way, this epigrammatic line captures the problems that Houston is facing as a city. It has crashed and rather to our eyes, the eyes of strangers, there is no city. The spaceship of unhindered economic growth that was supposed to have taken Houstonians to the promised utopia of modernity has not done that – it has led them into the isolating loneliness and tragic realism of supermodernity instead. The project called Houston (if ever there was one in a communal and social sense) has been demolished twenty times over by the builders and land developers who wanted to make a quick buck, and the people of Houston, the residents who have not reacted. At first glance, outside observers like us could speculate that the people have not noticed what has happened. But that hypothesis is falsified quickly when one talks to Houstonians. They have noticed. So we go on to the next hypothesis, which is that they do not care. That is falsified too – not completely, but to a large degree. People so seem to know and feel like something should be done. Not do something about it themselves, but that something should be done about it. And this brings us to the final hypothesis - an observation about the psychological state of existence in supermodernity - an observation that needs to be verified in the context of other cities. And the observation is that (by virtue of having studied the case of a supermodern city called Houston): A group of people living under the conditions of supermodernity are as hapless or helpless when it comes to action and to using agency as individuals living under conditions of pre-modernity. In crude psychological jargon, the locus of control of the supermodern individual as well as the pre-modern individual is external rather than internal. That is that both believe
88 that things and events are out of their sphere of control. In a sense, then, supermodernity is very realistic. It highlights the illusions created by the brief period of modernity - that the world is completely in the control of the individual. Yet, this realism only extends half way. Thus, the modern notion of exploiting nature and other people for making our own lives easier is not challenged at all; yet the notion of making the world a better place and the principles of social justice and egalitarianism have also been erased form the social landscape. And once again, the rise of this notion of uncontrollability of technology in the social worldview only helps late capitalism entrench itself further. To explain this point further, the pre- modern individual was helpless with respect to the forces of nature, while the supermodern individual is helpless in front of the juggernaut of technology. Thus, the supermodern individual, when faced with another technological innovation, shrugs the shoulders and works harder in order to buy and support that innovation. Never once asking: Why is this technological innovation required – how is it going to help me? Thus, technological innovations and constant changes only cloak the interests of the sellers and the market. The supermodern individual, then, is in a worse plight than the pre-modern individual because now they are supporting the rise of the profit-making class, and not complaining at all, mainly because they perceive themselves as winners too. We have also described in an earlier section how the psychological state of being in a consumer supermodern society is very close to fatalistic optimism. Yet, this total lack of alienation also takes away the prospect of any revolution. Thus, change seems to be the farthest from people‟s minds, and therefore the prospects for a revitalised Houston, with the vital force emanating form the people rather than the businesses seems extremely remote. That Houston is completely subject to the forces of capital and its lack of any loyalty to history or to pride17 is well illustrated by an example cited by Strom (2000). In the late 1930s, twenty-four leading citizens of Houston were polled by Architectural Record (along with fifteen other American communities) as to which among the recently constructed buildings in the city were their favourites. They named eight buildings in the Houston area. Strom (2000) says that although the choice of respondents may seem skewed, yet, the buildings that these people named also happened to win some architectural recognition at the time of their construction. And they also proved to be lasting for in the six decades following
17 Ironically, one of the slogans for the city was Houston Proud. The question to be raised is, of course, proud of what?
89 that poll, these buildings had become fixtures in the Houston cityscape. Then, in the period 1998-99, three of those eight buildings were demolished as part of the redevelopment of the downtown area. Strom call these demolitions part of Houston‟s need to reinvent itself at the expense of its past and finds the destruction of Houston‟ heritage to have marked its one hundred year history, and says that to even those Houstonians who have never moved out of the city, the pace of the city‟s change can be quite overwhelming. As Ada Louise Huxtable (1976) wrote, “what Houston possesses to an exceptional degree is an extraordinary vitality. One wishes that it had a larger conceptual reach, that social and cultural and human patterns were as well understood as dollar dynamism”. Thus, theorists from Simmel and Veblen to Castells and Harvey have connected the city to capitalist processes and collective consumption. Yet, Houston is a classic case of the city becoming commodity. The city is for sale, and becomes the fabric or the resource that is subject to the capitalist processes of making and unmaking and remaking only if it serves a profit function – or else the city is ignored. The city and its neighbourhoods are developed and redeveloped only if it is profitable for the developer. Historical buildings and institutions are destroyed and converted into amusement parks or better still, shopping malls, without as much of a pause for a prayer. Thus, the problem is not with the profit making but with the total lack of reverence for anything else but that profit. History, culture, society are peripheral to this profit-making project and yet, it is history, culture and the social that are probably of more value to human interactions and growth than pure profit. Unfortunately the vital force of capitalism is not vital enough to create and maintain human society. In the larger view – what may be seen as profitable to the bank balance in the short term may not be profitable to the human project. Houston is a place – much rather a non-place – that is living testimony to the consequences of following the profit at all costs project as a paradigm for urban development. In the foregoing we have, by virtue of presenting an argument, occasionally painted a rather distorted and subjective picture of Houston. We started out by noting that cities, like novels, are open to criticism both by academics and lay people. In one of the first comprehensive books dealing with American city life Anselm Strauss, one of the major theorists in this specific area, remarked, “books about cities are always partisan. They always betray, when they are not frankly portraying, their authors‟ feelings about particular cities, or indeed about cities in general” (Strauss 1961:vii). We, like anybody else arriving in a non-place like Houston, were filled with both admiration as well as disgust at the sight of the
90 skyscrapers reaching into the sky, the vast open spaces, the spider‟s web of long straight streets, the entire infrastructure of an urban area stretching further than the horizon. But, as already William Whyte (1956) discovered, wide streets and high fences are detrimental to human interaction. In Houston the car culture unfolding in the wide streets and the high fences of residential areas such as the condominium complexes are hindrances to human interaction. We are, as we noted in the beginning of this paper, strangers or semi-strangers in Houston, who in a detached and hopefully somewhat objective fashion have tried to understand the decline of the social in this city, the fall of public place and the lack of human interaction. Although we have relied on Augé‟s conceptualisation of places and non-places throughout this paper, he is mistaken when he draws conclusions about strangers and non-places. He said, that there exists a “paradox of non-place: a foreigner lost in a country he does not know (a „passing stranger‟) can feel at home there only in the anonymity of motorways, service stations, big stores or hotel chains” (Augé 1995:106). It is our experience, that exactly strangers, like ourselves, do not find these non-places familiar and pleasant but, contrariwise, empty and deserted. Another phenomenon that has a negative impact on the sense of community is the cult of individualism that makes every man the maker of his own destiny and which permeates every single aspect of public life. This cult is also reflected in architecture where every fountain, public or private building even of modest size, street, sports arena, almost any humble hotdog stand is named after some demised local entrepreneur. This vicarious immortalisation and memorialisation marks the city, especially the inner city area, and makes most people believe that the American dream of fame and prosperity can eventually also come to them as an epiphany from above. But the brutal facts show that this is reserved only the few chosen and lucky ones. For most the American dream of prosperity and immortality turns into a nightmare. We have so far discussed extensively the so-called non-places of supermodernity and how they are devoid of, what we would term, meaningful social interaction. So one is entitled to ask, what places would be able to contain meaningful social interaction and thus create as public place? So-called piazzas or public squares are what we are in desperate need of, the type of market square intimacy as is found, as Berman (1986:479) informs us, for example at the Plaza Mayor in Madrid or other traditional public places. What is the most important aspect of public places as opposed to non-places is the fact that the former are egalitarian, they impose a sense of equality on the people meeting there, on the
91 sidewalk, in the park with a picnic basket, waiting for the same bus at the bus stop, sitting in the plaza and looking at the doves. Public places, the real ones, are places in which distinctions are eradicated. One way of reclaiming public places will be to return them to their natural outlook, to once again accept that things do not have to be streamlined or straight, but that crooked and disorganised space also holds promises. This means giving up on the modernist ideal of homogenised and controlled space. Fred Siegel (1992:45), in a reference to New York, noted, that “the crisis of public space is a result in large measure of the city's well-meaning attempt to make the crooked straight”. If we accept that public places are often chaotic and unpredictable we are heading in the right direction. Living in times marked by the impact of supermodernity is a lonely experience, full of despair and agony on the one hand. On the other hand, it also holds the key to collective rejoice, the possibility to make the most of the new options open through the demise of tradition, the reinvention of rituals and the crumbling of convention. This happens via the recognition of choice and the freedom to choose. Living in supermodernity is marked by experiences of both the fragility of social reality as well as its solidity. It contains the promise that things can be altered while also inducing a certain element of inertia into social transformation, making people feel incapable of making a difference. It is indeed, to put it metaphorically, impossible to make an omelet without breaking eggs but it should be possible to construct a metropolis without atomising people. The socially secluded daydreamer becomes the stereotype of people living in the supermodern urban structures of Houston, the lonely individual to whom the world seems meaningless and empty. Pico Iyer (1993) gave some examples of so-called Lonely Places on the surface of the planet, however without mentioning Houston. Such places, he noted, bred loneliness and “while some are born to isolation, some have isolation thrust upon them…Lonely Places are not just isolated places, for loneliness is a state of mind…Lonely Places are defined, in fact, by their relation to the things they miss…There will never be a shortage of Lonely Places, any more than there will ever be of lonely people” (Iyer 1993:5-10). So the Eleanor Rigby‟s of the Lonely Places are not merely lonely because they are living in a non-place that creates loneliness but also because they themselves radiate this emotion and thus contribute to continuation of non-places, social emptiness and mental loneliness. Zygmunt Bauman spoke of varieties in forms of togetherness and primarily differentiated three forms (Bauman 1995). The first and most intimate form is being-for other people in which we are willing to sacrifice ourselves for the
92 well-being of the other, often anonymous, person. This is not a viable option in a world marked by distance, selfishness and suspicion. The second variant is being- with other people in which a certain amount of intimacy is still present and in which we orient ourselves towards others. This is not possible, when the people we could choose to be-with are not present in the empty non-places of supermodernity. The last option is being-aside others, where we are not interested in their presence or otherwise in their existence as human beings in a shared physical world and therefore our encounters with them never transform themselves into anything beyond the episodic and uncommitted. This is indeed the stereotypical attitude of the socially secluded daydreamer who really desires being-for or being-with but ends up with the diluted version of human interaction, being-aside, where seclusion is paramount. It is important to notice, that we are actually talking about seclusion, which to a certain extent is voluntary, and not exclusion, which is forced upon you. But both seclusion and exclusion lead to isolation, which was described by Richard Sennett in his masterpiece The Fall of Public Man from which we have derived our own title. He noted that isolation has many aspects: “First, it means that the inhabitants or workers in an urban high-density structure are inhibited from feeling any relationship to the milieu in which that structure is set. Second, it means that as one can isolate oneself, in a private automobile, for freedom of movement, one ceases to believe one‟s surroundings have any meaning save as a means towards the end of one‟s own motion. There is a third, rather more brutal sense of social isolation in public places, an isolation directly produced by one‟s visibility to others” (Sennett 1974:15). The socially secluded daydreamer feels the self-perpetuating impact of all three dimensions of isolation and is thus more severely isolated because this isolation is voluntary and socially acceptable. It is a contradiction in terms, but not in reality, that social isolation is socially acceptable. Marc Augé, in a very apt sentence, depicts the daily experience of this socially secluded daydreamer, who has to keep the dream of a better place alive in order to be able to survive the monotonous daily doldrums. His way of describing this daydreamer is by referring to the customer in a supermarket, another non-place, who “wanders around in silence, reads labels, weighs fruit and vegetables on a machine that gives the price along with the weight, then hands his credit card to a young woman as silent as himself - anyway, not very chatty - who runs each article past the sensor of a decoding machine before checking the validity of the customer's credit card” (Augé 1995:99). Just reading this sentence is, if possible, as boring as the
93 experiences in the life spent at the supermodern non-place of the aforementioned customer. Behind the notion of the socially secluded daydreamer lies another notion of the dissolution of the collectivity. When the collectivity no longer is regarded as a legitimate and desirable formation in which to develop one‟s own identity and when community ideals are becoming increasingly obsolete new and more shallow notions of belonging develop. The idea of imagined communities, which was originally coined by the political scientist Benedict Anderson, was elaborated by Bauman and presented within the framework of a sense of belonging. Bauman wrote: “Having no other (and above all no objectified, supra-individual) anchors except the affections of their „members‟, imagined communities exist solely through their manifestations: through occasional spectacular outbursts of togetherness (demonstrations, marches, festivals, riots) – sudden materializations of the idea, all the more effective and convincing for blatantly violating the routine of quotidianity” (Bauman 1992a:xix). As this quotation suggests, we are witnessing an unprecedented hollowness, self-interest based (or at least a very exclusively oriented) and time limited character of human action and interaction in supermodernity. As we mentioned above, community can be a very oppressive and containing mechanism not allowing people the freedom of expression or action. It is, in our understanding of the term community, not advisable to try and manufacture community, to plan and artificially create it. On the other hand, it is not recommendable either, artificially to corrode and do away with the possibilities for people of coming together. We have been informed by many of the Houstonians we have spoken to declare that they agree with the fact that places have been eroded and non-places have arisen. However, few seem to stick to the notion of a replacement of place, whereby they mean that the places have moved to somewhere else than where they used to be, have moved to the outskirts of the city or even completely left the city. As Jessie Bernard noted on the almost pathological obsession with community: “We have given so much attention to the Gemeinschaft paradigm not because it proved useful for empirical research but because it has exerted enormous influence on people‟s imagination. We cannot understand the uneasiness evident at the onset of the last third of the century unless we recognize the pull of the Gemeinschaft mystique. Gemeinscahft is still the dream for millions of people, reflecting a deep longing. That Gemeinschaft in the loving sense is only a fantasy in no way detracts from its appeal” (Bernard 1973:106-107). We do not as much fear
94 what futurist Michael Hager (1997:39) termed urban strangulation, the fact that overpopulated cities will asphyxiate from the presence of too many people, but, on the contrary, that cities will become empty boxes dying from the lack of human interaction in public places. Today it seems as if everything containing the word public in it seems absent in Houston: Public transportation, public sector, public space, public life etc. This can account for the parsimonious use of public place by administrators as well as people alike. When planning coincides with the harsh realities of the evolving city, the outcome is destined to be catastrophic and complex – people staying away from the planned new places as well as those that have grown old and outdated only allowing them to move around between the non- places that are growing day-by-day in size and importance. The demands of the supermodern urban area create and impose ever-new expectations in people, a promise that the city cannot keep. All the immigrants and people from different parts of the country who arrive in Houston have this dream of modernity in their eyes and all of them then fall in line on the highways; no single person can slow down because that would cause a crash, and thus these little compartments speed along on the rivers of petroleum waiting for the oil wells to dry up. Until then, the Houstonian will keep driving. Thus, supermodernity drives at full speed on the highways of modernity towards the promises of modernity - a bright future, of Utopia. Houston is, thus, an archetypal supermodern city. The archetypes of modernity are drawn from a time in the future rather than in the past. Yet, supermodernity is also aware that these promises will never be fulfilled because the destination of modernity is one that can never be reached – a utopia and nothing else. But supermodernity, instead of braking, hurtles towards that unattainable destination. The realization only makes it speed up rather than slow down. The reader must keep in mind that most of the ideas presented here have been of a contentious nature, and that our primary aim has been to show how a specific large American city due to its lack of public place is incapable of inducing some sense of meaning and community into the inhabitants and thus appear as a empty and reified Potemkin façade with no interior intestines of human interaction and sense of belonging. We have tried to illustrate how a spatial vacuum, even within the fourth largest city in the U.S.A., creates a social void, how community has become an anachronism in this densely populated area and in this way we have
95 aspired, as it were, to save the city from itself. Through our endless conversations with the people inhabiting this strange empty public area was the fact that particularly the people who had lived here for their entire life or at least most of their adult life were positive about the way life progressed in Houston and utterly defended the way the city had developed. Those who were most sceptical were primarily people staying here only for a short period of time, people coming from abroad or people who had lived here for a relatively short period of time. This is not surprising. What is, however, rather peculiar is that while many of the people being generally positive in their evaluations of Houston, they were still painfully aware that something was wrong. Yet they appeared to accept the fact that the city like a gigantic iron cage somehow seemed to constrain them, conforming them, seemed to demand obedience of them, and altogether coerced them into accepting that this is the way life necessarily must be lived with no alternatives and no hope of redemption, spatially or psychologically. The social theorist Manuel Castells (1977), who in recent years have reached the status of social prognosticator, warned us a couple of decades ago not to see the current problems facing urban areas as a direct extension of the problems facing society in general or to equate these with each other although he, in his Marxist framework, still believed that they were connected in some subtle way.18 The presentation may have been overtly lurid and pessimistic but at the same time it is extremely important to realise that if nothing is done, nothing will change. To many loyal citizens of Houston, what we have painted here will seem a distorted picture of reality and many will not be able to recognise the city we have here attempted to describe. We can say that what we argue here could be easily construed as falling into the realm of the traditional. That we are holding on to models that are from the past, and some critics make take us to task for not freeing our minds of the baggage of modernity or even pre-modernity. But that is exactly our point. Human history is not written from scratch on a clean slate – it is more likely written on a palimpsest
18 Castells, in a later work, noted that resistance to the tyranny of space is a possibility and that space is not an independent entity but is reproduced by the power structures of society: “Space is not a „reflection of society, it is society [...] Therefore, spatial forms, at least on our planet, will be produced, as all other objects are, by human action [...] From time to time, social movements will arise to challenge the meaning of spatial structure and therefore attempt new functions and new forms” (Castells 1983:4). There has, just for the record, appeared some changes in Castells‟ conceptualisation of space and its relevance for sociological theorising with the recent publication of his trilogy The Information Age which is discussed very accessibly and constructively by Ole Jensen (1999).
96 where there are still left over traces of previous discourses on the board on which history is being written. We are also aware of the many problems associated with traditionalism. For instance, Berman (1986) reminds us that although the Plaza Mayor may seem and feel like the Platonic ideal of open-minded public space, yet it has a grisly past. The space was not created for the type of free mingling and open democracy that we have discussed so far; what this place was made for, above all, was the auto-da-fe; a ceremony for torturing and killing people, and terrorizing the populace, with all the splendour that Spanish baroque imagination could mobilize. The square was designed as an arena for public spectacle that would dramatize the power and glory of an inquisitorial church and absolutist state (Berman, 1986; 479). In a similar vein, Robbins (1993), writing in his edited book The Phantom Public Sphere, quotes Walter Lippman (1925) who finds the public in its ideal sense of engaged citizenry participating in the process of democracy as being contrary to all possible fact. Robbins questions whether the appearance of the public in historical narratives is something of a conjuring trick. He asks, “For whom was the city once more public than now? Was it ever open to the scrutiny and participation, let alone under the control of the majority? Was there ever a time when intellectuals were really authorized to speak to the people as a whole about the interest of the people as a whole? If so, where were the workers, the women, the lesbians, the gay men, the African-Americans? (Robbins 1993:viii). He goes on to argue that the historical efforts to pinpoint some moment of prior possession of publicness are as vain as Lippman‟s search for the “sovereign and omnipotent citizen”, and they uncover in Stanley Aronowitz‟s phrase, a “mythic town square in the sky” for which hard evidence is not proposed, nor even sought. Therefore, at best we can say that we are writing in the tradition of critical traditionalism.19 The great analyst of our times Saskia Sassen in a recently published article on the future of an urban sociology that apparantly had become increasingly irrelevant posed the question: “Can urban sociology seize the moment
19 It is, however, also important to be critical of one‟s own critical traditionalism. The notion of the good old days may not seem to hold water and may in fact be nothing but a sociological stooge. Daniel Monti expressed his dissatisfaction with those “social philosophers and scientists [who] have found contemporary American cities to be sinkholes of civic indifference or, at times, even of depravity” (Monti 1999:378). Our critical traditionalism rests on the assumption that only through constructive criticism in which an alternative to the present day situation is proposed can reality be changed and our understanding of contemporary practices, customs, mores and behaviour be enhanced.
97 and once again produce path-breaking scholarship that will give us some of the analytic tools for understanding the broader social transformation under way?” (Sassen 2000:143-144). We regard the contribution at hand as an attempt to evaluate the social dimensions of city life, its causes and consequences and as an initial attempt at developing analytic tools for the analysis of the connection between urban planning and social transformation. The primary purpose of the paper has been to show the relationship between how quantitative changes in the city – urban expansion, population rise, infrastructural alterations and changes in mobility – have had an immense impact on the qualitative aspects of human life – ideas of belonging, behavioural patterns, personal belief systems and forms of interaction. We initiated this paper with a quotation by Witold Rybczynski that stated that cities, whatever else they may be, are physical artefacts created by people. This also holds the promise, that people will be able to alter these cities and re-create the places instead of constructing ever new non-places. We are not subscribing to the naïve belief that either agency or structure will be capable, indeed interested, in changing the current conditions and in this respect this paper has not offered any solutions or policies to be followed. Contrariwise, this paper has been a cry for help, not asking for help from politicians or the powerful, but pointing out to the people of Houston, directing their attention to the many mundane and everyday issues that they have lost the capacity to recognize because of their everydayness quality. Isn‟t that the function of academia or even of a writer? To not only see new things with familiar eyes, but more importantly to enable our society to see the familiar with a new perspective. As John Steinbeck said in his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech in 1962: “The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement”. We want the people of Houston to open their eyes, and recognize that: “Houston, we‟ve got a problem, and maybe we may not be able to do something about it as individuals, but if we look around and combine our strengths - together we can do something about it !”. There are many individuals and institutions in Houston who have those special skills required to turn the city around. And maybe once the „social‟ comes alive, may be then Houston can get the identity it has always craved. Maybe the next time that a social critic encounters the city, they can truly Expect the Unexpected.1 We will end this monograph about the problems
98 confronting the city and its inhabitants with a quotation from the Italian writer Italo Calvino who in his book Invisible Cities noted that there are two options facing those who are inhabiting a space that is a meaningless inferno, a non-place: “There are two ways to escape the suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space” (Calvino 1974:165). Our advise to the Houstonians, and people elsewhere suffering from the expansion of non-places, will be to choose the second strategy and stick to it.
List of Neologisms or Unfamiliar Terminology
Below we have tried to sum up definitions of those terms we have either appropriated from others or entirely invented ourselves. These concepts give a good description of supermodernity and its consequences for city life. In the text these terms are marked by the utilisation of both highlighting and italics.
Academic novella refers a style of writing that is both of a unique length and of a unique style that combines the literary, super-journalism of Robert Park and conventional sociological styles.
Car behaviour, obviously, refers to the behaviour of a car or an automobile. What is its behaviour in response to the stimuli it receives? What the car is supposed to do when the ignition is switched on, or switched off, or when it comes face to face with another car. The reactions of the driver controlling the car are contiguous with the reactions of the car. That is the driver is now not seen as separate from the care (s)he is driving but as an intimate part of it. The driver does not dictate what the car must do, but in a very strange, and unexplainable, way the car dictates what the driver must do and in fact does.
20 Expect the Unexpected is the official slogan for the city of Houston. We would rather suggest that this is altered to Expect Nothing. To expect something without being willing to contribute is similar of hoping to improve the environment without being willing to act ecologically. Action speak louder than words and interaction is still the primary source if one is to expect the unexpected. Locking oneself up in a private pandemonium of the car or condominium will not allow one to escape the iron cage of loneliness and isloation.
99 Car culture is the term we reserve for a kind of cultural obsession with private transportation or the car that exceeds the actual need for this kind of technology. The car is the sacred cow of American society – and just like the cow in Ancient Hindu society was revered because of the multiple functions and needs it fulfilled, the car has been elevated to the same heights of reverence and is worshipped in the culture.
Compartmentalism refers to the lives of people in supermodern cities and how these people are presumably more comfortable, safe and secure when living compartmentalised lives. Compartmentalism is the notion we give to lives spent in boxes such as cars, offices, condominiums etc.
Facade society is a description of a society in which everything seems merely to be facades, forms without content; where superficiality prevails and depth is only shallow and skin-deep. Facades refer as much to buildings as to people and façade society also means that every façade looks similar and that one would have no chance of, or interest in, distinguishing one from another. The trinity of the façade society is thus uniformity, conformity and anonymity and in the façade society superficiality and artificiality prevail.
Fatalistic optimism is the psychological state of being in a consumeristic supermodern society. In this state individuals are always optimistic that they will find a better product – a better shirt, a better shoe, a better TV, a better state of health, or a better partner, a better soul mate only if they keep looking and keep shopping. This state has even pervaded the arena of relationships (captured by Anthony Giddens‟ notion of the pure relationship) that the divorce rates in a consumer society are among the highest in recent human history – and yet these same people are remarrying within minutes of their last divorce. Thus, the individual almost knows before they have even paid for the product or soul mate they picked off the shelf that they are going to dispose of it very soon. Yet, they are very optimistic that they will find that perfect product or partner that will meet all their needs, and so they keep shopping and keep searching never to reach that point of satisfaction and also being cognizant of it at a deeper level. Thus, the optimism about this search or this seeking is almost fatalistic, but it is this optimism that keeps the engines of consumerism running.
100 Fortified privacy has to be contrasted with the normal notion of privacy which means that you sometimes needs to be alone in order to recuperate physically and mentally from the hazards of work life and that you every now and then has to leave the arena of the social in order to focus on yourself and your own needs. The fortified privacy, on the other hand, is very much an encaged, or more properly an encaging, experience where people voluntarily lock themselves up in their houses and condominiums. Fortified privacy stems from fear and anxiety about very concrete phenomena such as high crime rates and hazards to your health in a big city as well as imaginary states of mind such as agoraphobia and so-called panic anxiety which the experts connect to a fear of other people and crowded places.
Horizontal ghettoisation is the opposite of the traditional European type of vertical ghettos which primarily appeared in small tightly knit areas close to the city centres where ethnic minorities and economically disadvantaged groups lived and created small communities. Horizontal ghettoisation is perhaps more of an American phenomenon, which means that instead of the vertical ghettoisation mentioned before, the new ghettos are suburbanised and spread over a larger geographical area of the city and occupy increasingly large areas. As dark spots on the map, these horizontal ghettos in many ways become small havens in an otherwise public sphere dominated by non-places, become community enhancing neighbourhoods where, however, the community is rather exclusive (for the poor only) as it is also the case with an opposite connotation in the upper-class WASP communities. Hybrid city is a descriptive term covering the urban space of supermodernity in which we find relics both from the planning obsessed past of modernity whilst also witnessing a transformation away from this type of planned space toward the rise of non-places in the shape of a cornucopia of shopping malls, streets, parking lots and transit areas. Especially the rise of the shopping mall is evident in Houston, and the consequences of this shelf life of shopping mallers in the new non-places has been noted by Margaret Crawford (1992:17-18), who noted that these malls are “turning the shopper into a passive spectator, an isolated individual, a face in the department-store crowd, silently contemplating merchandise”. The hybrid city thus symbolises as well as represents values that belong to the past of modernity as well as ideals of the supermodern present and future.
101 Imagined communities was originally a term coined by Benedict Anderson in connection to his classic study of nationalism and belonging but here we suggest the term to refer to the new type of communities arising in supermodernity due to the simultaneous advancement of non-places. Imagined communities are not real communities, as it were, and are neither very deeply felt nor very lasting in commitment. The advent of the imagined communities is loosely tied to the demise of participation in formal organisation and the general lack of involvement in community building activities.
Meaningful social interaction is the kind of interaction that is rendered meaningful in the construction and maintenance of a social community or collectivity, interaction that is purposefully oriented toward other people and their actions. Max Weber defined the object of sociological analysis social action by which he meant activities that were directed towards others and thus rendered purposeful and meaningful to those carrying them out as well as ascribed a meaning by the observing sociologist. Meaningful social interaction follows the same line of reasoning and the two main characteristics of meaningful social interaction are first, that it is meaningful, and second, not surprisingly, that it is social. This kind of interaction is founded in the understanding of human beings as fundamentally social (as well as political) creatures who by their interaction constitute society and hereby reproduce and affirm the social order or try to alter this.
New bodily asceticism is the term we reserve for the curious phenomenon one can observe in supermodernity where people at one and the same time are consumers with a desire to consume evermore new products while, at the very same time, they refrain from many this-worldly goods, they regiment their own bodies and stay fit. Consumerism paradoxically goes hand in hand with the body that appears as if it does not consume or only consumes in the biological sense as a healthy metabolism that keeps people from gaining weight and looking slack.
Non-place is the term ascribed to places which do not contain anything that seems meaningful or substantive but which falls back only upon its own functionality. Non-places are for example airports, shopping malls, streets, parking lots, spectacular and impersonal sports arenas, public squares emptied of history and options. The characteristic of the human interaction that goes on in non-places is normally that it tends to be of a very time-limited and focused kind and people do
102 not invest energy in the other people that occupy these spaces. Non-places produce conformity of action and lack of interaction.
One-dimensional city is our descriptive term for a city in which life has no deeper meaning, in which actions as well structures take on a one-dimensional character and impose itself on the lives of the people living there. One-dimensionality is closely related to the façade society mentioned above and from this follows a hollowness of life, a superficiality of interaction and a shallowness of intimacy.
Potential interaction refers to the existence of the possibility of interaction that in turn determines construction and reconstruction of oneself. Should I walk down this street today? Should I walk purposefully or just saunter? Should I walk into this store? Should I have a coffee and watch other people walk by? Who are these people and what are their stories? Should I bump into this person? Should I be rude or pleasant today? Should I be myself today or someone completely different? This possibility of potential interaction in turn multiplies possibilities and increases the number of possibilities at the disposal of a person. This in turn acts on the psyche and effects on desire and construction of the self. Thus, a walking culture allows for the closer interaction between people, where they can see each other‟s faces, and also see the innumerable stories behind those faces that make up the grand human narrative. Thus, connecting each individual to the other through their interconnected, disjointed or even disconnected stories. Potential interaction is, of course, closely related to the aforementioned meaningful social interaction.
Re-enchanted public place refers to a revitalisation, as it were, of the empty spaces and non-places of urban areas. Since we are not attempting to give too many answers to the questions facing the supermodern city we do still believe, however, that ways in which to re-enchant city life consist of creating recreational areas, giving the parks back to the majority of the people in the city (and not only to the golf fanatics),21 by allowing architectonic expression and imagination to develop without referring to straight lines and concrete structures, by reintroducing the sidewalk, by reinvigorating the few and apparently dead public places and plazas
21 In Scandinavia one can actually encounter some of the most public of public parks such as Vigeland Parken in Oslo or Kongens Have in Copenhagen. Here, although these are also planned and cultivated spaces, people still have the opportunity and possibility of meeting and these places are humming with atmosphere, activity and interaction.
103 with activities, and by reconstructing the ancient shopping culture where shops are accessible all over the city (and especially in the centre) and not limited to shopping mall areas where interaction is not the end but merely a means to the end of consumption.
Socially secluded daydreamer is equivalent to a Simmelian type of person and refers to the self-imposed isolation of the individual in the age of supermodernity. The socially secluded daydreamer is not entirely indifferent to sociality and social interaction but does not, however, have the energy and the ability to stay in contact with either strangers or acquaintances for more than a fleeting moment. The socially secluded daydreamer is the dream of individuality taken to its nightmare extremes of individualism and solipcism.
Suburbanisation refers to the fact, that today a considerable amount of Americans live in suburban areas or secluded spots at the outskirts of city life marked by condominiums and housing arrangements in which the desire to construct or erect an exclusive community is prevalent. Hereby the activities of the centre of the city, traditionally the heart of interaction and commerce, has been replaced (indeed misplaced) and been emptied of content. Every urban planner is taught that a city without a centre is doomed to wither away in the long run and therefore the superurbanising effects of the centreless city is that the city will gradually fall apart, will become increasingly compartmentalised and that the sense of belonging to a city will disappear.
Superjournalism was originally a term utilised by Robert Park as a description of the kind of social diagnosis that lingered between social scientific investigation and journalistic reporting. In our interpretation of superjournalism we see it as the re- emergence of the critical reporter who with a certain value-orientation and polemical ballast produce knowledge about the functions and structures of society and, with a notion from C. Wright Mills, tries to debunk taken-for-granted information about social reality and keeps a critical distance to official ideology. The purpose of superjournalism is not to revolutionise society but to show how things could be under different circumstances.
104 Supermodernity is the descriptive term for the current phase of social development when it comes particularly to the spatial arrangements that we have constructed and which we move around in. It is primarily characterised by its hybrid nature in which both elements of modernity and post-modernity, in which the old and the anticipated co-exist and are simultaneously are present. It still hails the modernist ideal of architectural logic and planned space as well as the post-modernist ideal of making something out of place that is not necessarily bound to any authoritative logic or dogmatic interpretation of planning. The supermodern city is caught betwixt and between the planned and the evolving, the centralising and the disintegrating, the utopian and the dystopian.
Superurbanisation is the term we would use to designate when the process of urban planning has reached a point at which no one seems responsible for the course anymore and when development is out of control, when urbanisation is taken to extremes in an effort to recreate a replica of some mental image of the perfectly modernised and organised city while every planning attempt appear to be in vain as the city has taken on a life of its own. In the superurbanised city of supermodernity, modularity and the policy of divide and rule prevails which means that the city is fragmented and not a coherent whole. The superurbanised city has lost its meaning for its inhabitants as a point of reference and does not instil a sense of belonging in the people living there.
Walking culture is what is seen in cities or urban areas that permit people to walk – one would find this in most European cities and cities of Asia and Africa like Hong Kong or Bombay. This is contrasted with car culture – that develops in an urban space that encourages the use of a car for mundane acts like mailing a letter, buying groceries, or even driving to the gate of an apartment complex in order to catch the shuttle bus from the gate.
105 References
Adorno, Theodore (1967): Prisms. London: Neville Spearman. Arblaster, Anthony (1994): Democracy, 2nd Edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arendt, Hannah (1958): The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Augé, Marc (1995): Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Baczko, Bronislaw (1989): Utopian Lights: The Evolution of the Idea of Progress. New York: Paragon House. Barber, Benjamin. (1984): Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Baudrillard, Jean (1988): Selected Writings (edited and with an introduction by Mark Poster). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Baudrillard, Jean (1999): “The Precession of Simulacra”, in Elliott, Anthony (ed.): The Blackwell Reader in Contemporary Social Theory. London: Blackwell. Bauman, Zygmunt (1990): Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (1992a): Intimations of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (1992b): Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (1992c): “Survival as a Social Construct”. Theory, Culture & Society, 9:1-36. Bauman, Zygmunt (1995): Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (1997): “The Strangers of the Consumer Era”, in Postmodernity and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (1998a): Globalization - The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (1998b): “Death as Industry”. Telos: 113:150-156. Bauman, Zygmunt (1999): In Search of Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (2000): Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benjamin, Walter (1978): “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century”, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company. Berger, Peter L. & Thomas Luckmann (1967): The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press. Berman, Marshall (1982): All that is Solid Melts into Air. New York: Simon & Schuster. Berman, Marshall (1986): “Take it to the Streets – Conflict and Community in Public Space”. Dissent, Fall:476-485.
106 Bernard, Jessie (1973): The Sociology of Community. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company. Berry, Brian J. L. (1973): The Human Consequences of Urbanization: Divergent Paths in the Urban Experience of the Twentieth Century. New York: St. Martin‟s Press. Berry, Wendell (1993): Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays. New York: Pantheon. Bocock, Robert (1994): “The Emergence of Consumer Society”, in The Polity Reader in Cultural Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boochkin, Murray (1987): The Rise of Urbanization and The Decline of Citizenship. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Boutourline, Serge (1970): “The Concept of Environmental Management”, in Proshansky, H. M. et al.: Environmental Psychology: Man and His Physical Setting. New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston. Brann, Henry W. (1944): “Max Weber and the United States”. South Western Social Science Quarterly, June:18-30. Calvino, Italo (1974): Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt Brace. Carleheden, Mikael & Michael H. Jacobsen (forthcoming): The Transformation of Modernity – Aspects of the Past, Present and Future of an Epoch. London: Ashgate. Castells, Manuel (1975): “Is there an Urban Sociology?”, in Pickvance, Chris G. (ed.): Urban Sociology: Critical Essays. New York: St. Martin‟s Press. Castells, Manuel (1977): The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach. London: Edward Arnold. Castells, Manuel (1983): The City and the Grass Roots. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press. Chapin, Edwin (1853): Moral Aspects of City Life. New York: Henry Lyon. Chatterjee, Nilesh (2000): “Every Solution has a Problem”. International Journal of Disability and Rehabilitation, forthcoming in 2000. Crawford, Margaret (1992): “The World in a Shopping Mall”, in Sorkin, Michael (ed.): Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. New York: Hill & Wand. Davis, Mike (1992): “Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space”, in Sorkin, Michael (ed.): Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. New York: Hill & Wand. Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari (1988): A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athena. Dewey, John (1954)[1927]: The Public and its Problems. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press and Ohio University Press.
107 Doxiades, Konstantinos A. (1968): Eksitics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements. London: Hutchinson. Dreier, Peter (1996): “The Struggle for Our Cities”. Social Policy, 26 (4):9-23. Finkelstein, Joanne (1994): “Fashion, Taste and Eating Out”, in The Polity Reader in Cultural Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fishman, Robert (1977): Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. New York: Basic Books. Fishman, Robert (1990): “Megalopolis Unbound”. The Wilson Quarterly, Winter:25-48. Flood, Mary (1997): “For Houston, Economic Recovery has a Big Drawback: Crowding”. Wall Street Journal, July 2nd. Foucault, Michel (1986): “Of Other Places”. Diacritics, 16 (1):22-27. Fujita Research Report (1998): The English New Towns. Fujita Research Report No. 025, 1998. Furedi, Frank (1997): Culture of Fear: Risk and the Morality of Low Expectation. London: Cassell. Galbraith, John K. (1967): The New Industrial State. New York: Signet. Giddens, Anthony (1990): The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, Anthony (1993): Sociology, 2nd Edition. Cambridge: Polity Press. Glaser, Barney G. & Anselm L. Strauss (1967): The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Glucksmann, André (1980): The Master Thinkers. New York: Harper & Row. Goffman, Erving (1961): Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrild Company Inc. Granovetter, Mark (1973): “The Strength of Weak Ties”. American Journal of Sociology, 78 (6):1360-1380. Gray, Alasdair (1969): Lanark: A Life in Four Books. London: Picador. Hager, Michael (1997): “The Nonstop City – And Other Heretical Notions About Time”. The Futurist, 31 (3):39-42. Hall, Edward T. (1966): The Hidden Dimension. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Hannerz, Ulf (1980): Exploring the City: Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press. Harvey, David (1985): Consciousness and the Urban Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Harvey, David (1996): “Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity”. Capital & Class, 60:144-145. Hobbs, Stuart D. (1997): The End of the American Avant Garde. New York: New York University Press.
108 Hobsbawn, Eric (1994): The Age of Extremes. London: Michael Jospeh. Howe, Frederick C. (1905): The City: The Hope of Democracy. London: Charles Scribner‟s Sons. Howe, Frederick C. (1912): “The City as a Socializing Agency - The Physical Basis of the City: The City Plan”. American Journal of Sociology, 17 (5):590-601. Huxtable, Ada Louise (1976): “Deep in the Heart of Nowhere”. New York Times, February 15th. Inkeles, Alex (1982): What is Sociology? An Introduction to the Discipline and Profession. New Delhi: Prentice-Hall. Iyer, Pico (1993): Falling Off the Map – Some Lonely Places of the World. New York: Vintage Books. Jacobsen, Michael H. (2000): “The Prodigious Provocateur”. Sociologisk Arbejdspapir, 2 (7). Jameson, Frederic (1991): Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New York: Verso. Jensen, Ole B. (2000): “Castells og rummet- en tematisk læsning af The Information Age”. Sociologisk Arbejdspapir, 2 (5). Kafka, Franz (1992)[1974]: Amerika. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Kasinitz, Philip (ed.)(1995): Metropolis - Center and Symbol of Our Times. New York: New York University Press. Kellner, Douglas (1994): “Critical Theory and Consumer Society”, in The Polity Reader in Cultural Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kepes, Gyorgy (ed.)(1965): The Nature and Art of Motion. New York: G. Braziller. Kuznets, Simon (1966): Modern Economic Growth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe (1985): Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Latham, Alan (1999): “Powers of Engagement: On Being Engaged, Being Indifferent, and Urban Life. Area, 31 (2):161-168. Liedman, Sven-Eric (1997): I skuggen av fremtiden: modernitetens idehistoria. Stockholm: Alfred Bonniers Forlag. Lippmann, Walter (1927): The Phantom Public. New York: Macmillan. Loria, Achille (1886): Economic Foundations of Society. London: S. Sonnenschein and Co. Lynch, Kevin (1960): Image of the City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Lynch, Kevin (1972): What Time is this Place? Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Lyon, David (1994): Electronic Eye: The Rise of the Surveillance Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Maffesoli, Michel (1996): The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. London: Sage Publications. Mann, Thomas (1992): The Confessions of Felix Krull. New York: Vintage Books.
109 Marcuse, Herbert (1964): One-Dimensional Man. London: Routledge. Maschio, Thomas (2000): “The Culture of Desire”. Anthropology News, April: 7-8. Mattson, Andrew O. & Stephen R. Duncombe (1992): “Public Space, Private Place: The Contested Terrain of Tompkins Square Park”. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 37:129-161. Miles, Malcolm et al. (2000): The City Cultures Reader. London: Routledge. Miller, Daniel (ed.)(2001): Car Cultures. London: Berg Publishers. Mills, Charles Wright (1959): The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Monti, Daniel (1999): The American City: A Social and Cultural History. London: Blackwell. Mumford, Lewis (1961): The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Musil, Robert (1993): Man Without Qualities (Mann Ohne Eigenschaften). London: Minerva. Park, Robert E. (1925): The City. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Park, Robert E. (1952): Human Communities: The City and Human Ecology. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. Porteous, J. Douglas (1977): Environment and Behaviour: Planning and Everyday Urban Life. Reading, Mass.:Addison-Wesley. Rabelais, François (1990): Gargantua and Pantagruel. New York: Norton. Rapport, Nigel (1996): “Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity”. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2 (2). Ritzer, George (1995): Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit Card Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Ritzer, George (1998): Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption. Pine Forge Press. Robbins, Bruce (ed.)(1993): The Phantom Public Sphere. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rustin, Michael (1986): “The Fall and Rise of Public Space”. Dissent, Fall:486-494. Rötzer, Florian (1986): Samtaler med franske filosoffer. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Sandel, Michael (1982): Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sassen, Saskia (2000): “New Frontiers Facing Urban Sociology at the Millenium”. British Journal of Sociology, 51 (1):143-159. Saunders Peter (1981): Social Theory and the Urban Question. London: Hutchinson. Sennett, Richard (1974): The Fall of Public Man. London: Faber and Faber. Sennett, Richard (1977): “Destructive Gemeinschaft”, in Birnbaum, Norman (ed.): Beyond the Crisis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
110 Sennett, Richard (1990): The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. New York: Knopf. Siegel, Fred (1992): “Reclaiming Our Public Spaces”. The City Journal, 2 (2):35-45. Simmel, Georg (1908): Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Simmel, Georg (1971): “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, in Levine, Donald (ed.): On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Soja, Edward W. (2000): Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell. Strauss, Anselm L. (1961): Images of the American City. New York: Free Press. Strauss, Anselm L. (ed.)(1968): The American City – A Sourcebook of Urban Imagery. Chicago: Aldine de Gruyter. Strom, Steven (2000): “Lost Houston: Images from a Century of Erasure”. Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston, 46 (21):21-29. Sudjic, Deyan (1992): The One Hundred Mile City. Orlando: Harcourt-Brace and Company. Sullivan, Andrew (1996): “Alternative Politics”. The New York Times, May 19th. Tambiah, Stanley (2000): “Transnational Movements, Diasphora, and Multiple Modernities”. Daedalus, 29 (1):163-194. Timasheff, Nicholas (1967): Sociological Theory: Its Nature and Growth. New York: Random House. Tonboe, Jens C. (1993): Rummets sociologi: kritik af teoretiseringen af den materielle omverdens betydning i den sociologiske og den kulturgeografiske tradition. København: Akademisk Forlag. Veblen, Thorstein (1934): The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: The Modern Library. Walton, John (1993): “Urban Sociology: The Contribution and Limits of Political Economy”. Annual Review of Sociology, 19:301-320. Waltzer, Michael (1986): “Pleasures and Costs of Urbanity”. Dissent, Fall:470-475. Webb, Bruce (1999): “The Name Game: What‟s in a Name? For Houston a Chance to Explain Itself”. Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston. 46:16-20. Weber, Adna Ferrin (1899): The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Macmillan. Weber, Max (1958): The City. New York: Free Press. Weber, Max (1904-05)[1958]: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner and Sons. Whyte, William F. (1956): The Organization Man. New York: Doubleday.
111 Wilson, G. & Mark Baldassare (1996): “Overall „Sense of Community” in a Suburban Region – The Effects of Localism, Privacy and Urbanization”. Environment and Behaviour, 28, (1):27-43. Wirth, Louis (1938): “Urbanism as a Way of Life”. American Journal of Sociology, 44 (1):1-24. Wohl, R. Richard & Anselm L. Strauss (1958): “Symbolic Representation and the Urban Milieu”. American Journal of Sociology, 63 (5):523-532. Womack, James P. et al. (1990): The Machine that Changed the World. New York: Rawson. Ziehe, Thomas (1989): Ambivalenser og mangfoldighed. Copenhagen: Politisk Revy.
112 The Fall of Public Place
Sociological Reflections and Observations on a Supermodern American Ghost City
ABSTRACT In this paper the two authors investigate the often rather abstract notions of place and space within sociology and try to specify them with special reference to the city of Houston, Texas and its current condition. Through a conceptual and theoretical reworking of different understandings, classic as well as new, of space and place, the authors try to point to the decline of public place and the rise of so-called non-places as one of the major marks of distinction of our contemporary age as one, we suggest, should be denoted supermodernity in which we witness the disappearance of urban interaction and social activity. One of the most devastating consequences of this development is that genuine and lasting human interaction is becoming increasingly absent and that the sense of belonging and of community is suffering tremendously. Community plays an important part in the transformation of places to non-places, either speeding up the process by mediating it in a way or becoming the first sociological entity to be affected when the transformation is completed. The notions of solidarity, mutual understanding and sociality that are adversely affected when people are incapable of interacting with each other and when access to and supply of public places is limited, in turn opens up the discussion of democracy itself. The authors point to the problems associated with super-urbanisation as seen in the context of an American city like Houston, and suggest a new terminology in which to capture the unfolding of these phenomena. The authors end by asking what are some of the possible escape routes out of the gridlock of the state of non-community and non-democracy (as we understand those terms) arising out of the creation of conglomerations of non-places in supermodernity?
ISSN: 1399-4514 ISBN: 87-90867-09-2 Tryk: Uni.Print, Aalborg Universitet
113