Copyright © 1997 The University of Michigan Coll ege of Architecture + Urban Planning & Michael Sorkin Editor: Kent Kleinman Book Design: Caleb Harris Clauset Production Assistance: Christian Unve rzagt Printed and bound in th e United States of America. Printing: University Lithoprinters, In c. Typeset in Monotype Baskerville and Linotype DIN ISBN 0 9614792 9 9 The University of Michigan College of Architecture + Urban Planning 2000 Bonisteel Boulevard Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-2069 USA Michael Sorkin Traffic in Democracy Foreword Since the inauguration of the Raoul Wallenberg Lecture series at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning in 1972, exactly twenty­ five years ago, the lecture has been given by a number of distinguished architects and historians. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner gave the first lecture followed by such notable scholars as Joseph Rykwert, Spiro Kostof and Vincent Scully. Distinguished architects and planners, such as Denise Scott Brown and Daniel Libeskind, have also graced the podium in honor of Wallenberg. These are no ordinary lectures. In each case the speaker has risen to the challenge of addressing the subject of architecture and urban planning as a humane social art. This year's lecture by architect and scholar Michael Sorkin is no different. Sorkin addresses the difficult problem of democracy and planning. It is a topic which would have found favor with Raoul Wallenberg, I am certain. Raoul Wallenberg, class of 1935, exercised one of the greatest rights of democracy- the right to speak out and act. However, he did not exercise this democratic initiative within a democratic state. Wallenberg spoke out and acted during a time of war when democracy and the rights of individuals were at stake. He is credited with saving the lives of countless numbers of people in Hungary during World War II, individuals whose very existence was threatened by a regime which wanted to exterminate Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, communists and others not of the Nazi's persuasion. It is important for us to remember also that this regime wanted to destroy democracy itsel£ Our alumnus Raoul Wallenberg has become an international symbol of the enduring concept that one person can make a difference in the lives of others. As architects and planners, we especially must keep that reality ever in mind. Robert M. Beckley Dean, College qf Architecture + Urban Planning Introduction Any responsible editor will save an author from repetition: repetition of ideas; repetition of peculiar syntactic structures; repetition of unusual terms whose force lies in their singularity. A text read is other than a text written and words uttered in the flow of oration differ from the same words fixed in print. In preparing Michael Sorkin's extraordinary 1997 Wallenberg lecture for the page, a particular word appeared with ill-mannered frequency. I am not referring to a so-called key word (a term of the title, for example, not "democracy," not "traffic") nor a term so essential to the argument that reiteration is inherent to the project at hand ("propinquity," for example). I mean rather a word that appears as mere shortage of an alternative, as lack of variety. For those familiar with Sorkin's exquisite command of the written, this will seem an unlikely deficit. The term in question isfantasy. Consider the evidence: "fantasies of technology as second nature," "fantasies of on-the-fly transfer," "Thomas Jefferson's Cartesian fantasy," "the Cartesian fantasy ... " (again), the "fantasy of collectivity," "that old fantasy of infinity," "private fantasy as public right," "fantasies of non-exclusive neighborhoods," "post-Fordist fantasies." Why not dreams, visions, imagination, conceit? Severalfontasies, it seemed, could be eliminated without semantic damage. Or perhaps not. If, as seems likely, these fontasies are not due to a lack thereof, then perhaps they are programatically loaded and consequently should be protected. Perhaps they are strategic, liminal cues that only become apparent when the aural event is re-viewed, inevitably slower, as text on the page. Perhaps, in fact, fantasy per se is being proffered. Jefferson's grid, technology, non-exclusive neighborhoods: Sorkin links these via a common denominator not because they are equally desirable or attainable, but because these are most powerfully understood as mental constructs that lodge themselves in the imagination, and thus have the potential to change the world. Fantasy is the shared space of dreams and conceits, delusions and visions, all vehicles reaching into the future. Privileging wants over needs, fantasy renders desire transparent, and as such it is arguably the bedrock of social discourse and action. Believing in the potential to change the world is one of the originary fantasies: Raoul Wallenberg's conviction that one individual can do so was- fortunately for many hundreds- of this kind. In the following text, Michael Sorkin argues for a physical analog to democratic political process. Its components are propinquity and traffic, physical proximity measured by human locomotion combined with a space consciously configured for safe human collision. But the argument is laced with another agenda, namely to make propaganda for the space of fantasy. The repetitious presence of the term itself is just a tease. Speaking more direcdy to this point are the images, many more of which accompanied the lecture as a parallel narrative strand without verbal commentary. But lest there be any doubt as to the envisioned endgame, the reader is invited to turn to the last page. There, on the sly, the fantasy is named: " ... new neighborhoods and new cities ... " Kent Kleinman Associate Prqftssor qf Architecture Traffic In Democracy I am deeply honored by the invitation to give a lecture celebrating Raoul Wallenberg. With amazing courage, Wallenberg saved thousands not just from death but from transport to a place so hellish, so radically criminal, as to suggest an end to the history of human possibilities. Auschwitz is often represented as the omega of modernity: rationality and universality pushed to the grotesque. Although this interpretation is too glib, it's not without an element of truth. Auschwitz was a vast and efficient machine for the annihilation of unacceptable difference. As a goal, it was utterly unimaginable bifbre political modernism, before the modern celebration of rationality and universality. Yet to condemn these notions unreservedly- without noting the different outcomes they've had (the democratic revolutions as well as the terror), without trying to understand when and how they begin to turn ugly- is to succumb to the same fanaticism one seeks to condemn. The accommodation of difference is the key project of contemporary democracy. Politics today is obsessed by the pursuit of private identity, our own post-Enlightenment backlash. Gone, it seems, is the famous image of the melting pot, the caldron in which the diversity of individuals is melted down, "purified," in order to provide a gold standard of sameness; in the aftermath of national socialism, any reference to purifYing fires can only have a chilling effect. But if certain images will have to be permanently excised from imagination's repertoire, we must be careful not to sacrifice imagination itself since we still need it to figure the possibilities of negotiating and mediating conflicts among private individuals. One of the great casualties of recent "politically correct" attacks on imagination has been the very image of space. It is as if, in lO reparation for the loss of countless individuals to the destructive forces of modernism, space itself has been melted into air. And yet, if the individuality of individuals is to be safeguarded, it will depend on providing them with a place- a kind of ground. Only public space can guarantee privacy. This is a matter of logic: democracy always implies the occupation of a position. Democracy requires, for its working out, that its citizens occupy positions which are, if only provisionally, fixed. To conduct democracy's negotiations, we must speak from a position of identity, we must be located. Deliberative democracy requires us to be reliably "in the open" to fully participate. But space is more than an image or metaphor. I believe that propinquity- physically being together in space- is itself necessary for democracy. Agnes Heller calls contemporary politics the "concretization of the universal value of freedom." The American understanding of freedom, however, is inscribed in a false, if historical, dichotomy. We venerate the freedom of the frontier, the "democratic" right to be left alone. If this arrangement is not exactly anti-democratic, it's definitely a dodge: it uses space to attenuate propinquity to the point of irrelevance. The city, on the other hand, because of its intense exchange, is the necessary ground for the reconciliation of difference and the exercise of freedom, including the freedom to shift identities. I admire the Hanseatic maxim, "city air makes people free," which implies to me that freedom cannot be imagined outside of a structure of interaction with others. Freedom of speech, for example, necessarily means freedom to address others, to be heard. One cannot be free alone. The existence of others is so fundamental to all of our freedoms that it is senseless to contemplate them outside the notion of community. This is precisely why freedom is a political issue, an issue proper to the polis. And this is exactly where city politics lies. Legible in the variety and tractability of routines of circulation and contact, the currency of propinquity is exchange, the measure of the city's activity. The locus classicus of the rational city is the Athenian agora. Aristotle wrote that the dimensions of an agora should be derived from the space of a shout, an auditory community with a strictly measurable dimension. This suggests that a precondition for the space of democratic governance is the ability to be heard without mediation. A compact space like the agora- in its physical convenience- represents an ideal setting for such exchange.