“Gee, Officer Krupke”: A close reading in the governmentality literature
In my weekly dispatch not so long ago, I’d mentioned that I’d been reading Mitchell Dean’s Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. This might at first blush seem like an odd choice for summer reading, but you know me: as long as I live, I’ll be immersed in the autodidact’s permanent project of filling in the gaps in my own understanding. The Dean book, if dense, really is superbly lucid. I found it hugely useful, and enjoyed it greatly.
At the time, though, I’d also mentioned a text I’d described as “far and away my favorite in the entire governmentality literature”: a song called “Gee, Officer Krupke,” from the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story. This wasn’t a throwaway joke. As we’ll see, “Krupke” is such a concise, vivid and memorable encapsulation of governmentality theory that it could readily be used as an introduction to this entire line of thought.
But first, for those of you who don’t generally dork out over such things, it’s probably best to spell out just what it is that I, at least, mean when I use the strange word “governmentality.” As Dean explains, this is a way of thinking about the art of state administration that Michel Foucault first presented in a series of lectures given at the Collège de France in the winter of 1977-78. There’s a specific problem Foucault is trying to address in these lectures, which is how power works in the modern, Western liberal democracy — specifically, how can a state guarantee the compliance of citizens who are at least nominally free, and upon whose ability to act freely the entire economic order is in fact predicated?
As Foucault describes it, the ultimate aim of liberal governmentality is the production of subjects who do not require much in the way of active administration, because they administer themselves. Most of us, most of the time, do not literally have a gun to our head, and yet we continue to act in ways that continuously reproduce and legitimate certain conceptions of State power and our own relation to it. Foucault’s project was to ask just how these conceptions came to be, and how we ourselves came to internalize them.
In order to do this, he undertook a genealogy of the successive ways in which power has been seen to work throughout the history of the West, and the conceptions of citizenship, self and subjectivity that corresponded to each of them. Broadly speaking, the main modes of power he identified were sovereignty, which is the naked power to kill or let live, originally founded in the divine right of kings; discipline, which originates in the detailed training and regulation of human bodies and becomes a series of (predominantly spatial) technologies for the production of docile, compliant and useful subjects; and eventually biopolitical govermentality, which is concerned with maximizing State power by optimizing fertility, longevity and other biological processes at the level of entire populations. In his exegesis, Dean is careful to emphasize that though these modes emerged historically, they aren’t strictly speaking periodizations: liberal power will always consist of some admixture of sovereignty, discipline and biopolitics, though the proportions will shift from state to state, and over time within a single polity.
Just to add a layer of nuance and complexity, in the Collège de France lectures Foucault also contrasted the essentially pastoral model of administration inscribed in the Christian tradition (the “shepherd/flock game”) with an earlier, Greco-Roman model of public virtue that he calls the “city/citizen game.” The distinction is between whether individuals are primarily understood as sentient beings with needs and a potential for wellbeing that must be discovered via the development of detailed knowledge, or as citizens, with freedom, rights and obligations that are negotiated through legal and political processes. The former conception implies a burden of care on the part of a benevolent (“welfare”) State, but also the necessity of submission to that State’s fundamentally paternalistic administration; the latter is perhaps better suited to a political community composed of fully autonomous individuals, but lacks any organic commitment to those who are unable to shift for themselves. The one is total in every sense, a vision of the beloved community that yet patronizes its members; the other is atomized, but also liberating. Autonomy, in other words, both giveth and taketh away. (Dean’s framing of the tradeoff is stark: in a notional society of “juridical and civil equals, there are no grounds for a right to assistance but nor are there grounds to issue commands.”)
And all of these complicated and, at times, fundamentally incompatible ways of constructing subjectivity are interwoven in the contemporary governance of the liberal state, as well as in the institutionalized contestation of the right to govern that we think of as party politics. (In fact, we can understand a great deal about policy — from military conscription and abortion law to subsidized public transit for the elderly and proposed limits on the sizes of sugary soft drinks that can be sold — by trying to identify which historical conception of citizenship it’s appealing to.) The necessity of arriving at some kind of modus vivendi on a day-by-day basis means that in practice this unstable hybrid is patched together, but the fault lines remain and they run deep.
As I read it, anyway, those faults re-emerge whenever society encounters a situation it defines as a “problem.” Different modes of institutional expertise are brought to bear, each of which proposes its own way of framing the problem, and therefore the wisest course of action for its resolution — but again, always with a mind toward restoring society to a condition of self-regulation. So-called nudge theory is perhaps the most recent elaboration of this way of thinking, but the tendency has been evident in Western societies for the better part of a century.
And this brings us to “Gee, Officer Krupke,” as sung by Action, Snowboy, Diesel, A-Rab and Baby John — members of a working-class white street gang called the Jets, whose “turf” occupies a few square blocks of New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. The song is about their encounter with the agent of State power they are most familiar with, NYPD patrolman Krupke, and their sarcastic, exhausted explication to him of the various modes of expertise brought to bear on them as living, breathing exemplars of a social problem.
In “Krupke” we’re not quite at biopolitics yet, concerned as it is with the administration of the processes of life at the scale of entire populations, but just about every other element of governmentality theory is given a turn in the lyrics. In fact, the song is so point-by-point compliant with Foucault’s schema that I’ve half convinced myself he had Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics in mind when he first composed his lectures.
Here, I’ll show you what I mean:
ACTION
Deeeeeeaaaaar kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It’s just our bringin’ upke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks.
Golly Moses, natcherly we’re punks!
[First, the problem is named. Urban America in the immediate post-war period will be haunted by the specter of the juvenile delinquent — the JD, the punk, the hood. The JD is, by definition, an adolescent (or more distressingly a post-adolescent) with poor impulse control, mired in anomie, addicted to “kicks,” and therefore unregulable and virtually unemployable. Corrupted by a lumpen culture of comic books and dangerously sexual jukebox singles, this figure and his lifeworld are vividly depicted in Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, amped up to a feverish 11 in Harlan Ellison’s short story collection The Deadly Streets, and of course later parodied by the Ramones.
The problematic of juvenile delinquency and its management will become one of the main obsessions of American mass media and government alike, in the years before the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and the emergence of a putatively “New Left” furnished them with more urgent concerns.]
ACTION AND JETS
Gee Officer Krupke, we’re very upset;
We never had the love that ev’ry child oughta get.
We ain’t no delinquents,
We’re misunderstood.
Deep down inside us there is good!
ACTION
There is good!
ALL
There is good, there is good,
There is untapped good!
Like inside, the worst of us is good!
[Again, as a distinctly liberal art of management, governmentality is concerned with the production of subjects whose behavior does not require detailed administration by the State, because they self-administer. The events of the play will demonstrate that the State clearly still has quite some way to go toward achieving this goal, but the seeds of a nascent social contract are already present in the Jets’ protest that they are good. Far from rejecting the State’s claim to a legitimate interest in their behavior, they here express the desire to be recuperated as usefully contributing members of society.
The Jets further propose that the question of delinquency will be decided on the terrain of the social, a sphere of human activity discovered by the West during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though conditioned by State power and the dynamics of an economy which is itself conceived of as natural and autonomous, the social is properly external to these. The contours of the social can most clearly be discerned at the scale of individual families, hence the Jets’ insistence on the significance of familial dynamics in explaining their failure to conform.]
SNOWBOY (spoken)
That’s a touchin’ good story.
ACTION (spoken)
Lemme tell it to the world!
SNOWBOY
Just tell it to the Judge!
[The extension of governmentality into everyday life requires the deployment of multiple registers of specialized technical expertise, typically the sort of expertise that devises categories or taxonomies of human behavior and assigns people to them; Foucault calls this “power/knowledge.”
The usual domains of this power/knowledge are medicine and public health, psychiatry, economics and law, each of which has a distinct way of conceiving of the human subject and the field of its interactions with other subjects. Are we most usefully thought of as biological bodies with a capacity for organic health or illness (and a vulnerability to contagion), economic actors with material interests, or citizens with rights and obligations under law?
This latter, legal (or, to be properly Foucauldian about it, “juridical”) register of knowledge constitutes a framework of collective agreements for the formal specification and detailed regulation of the permissible limits of human behavior. As certain decisions the Jets make as individuals and as a collective mean that they are perpetually running afoul of these limits, the New York City juvenile justice system is the primary institution of expert knowledge they encounter in their lives, and therefore the first they invoke in their quest for resolution of their delinquent status.]
ACTION
Dear kindly Judge, your Honor,
My parents treat me rough.
With all the marijuana,
They won’t give me a puff.
They didn’t wanna have me,
But somehow I was had.
Leapin’ lizards! That’s why I’m so bad!
[Note the acknowledgement that the individual delinquent may well be the issue of an unplanned pregnancy. By implication, delinquency as a phenomenon can be understood as the consequence of a failure of State policy at multiple levels, i.e. both the failure to integrate a meaningful family-planning curriculum into secondary education, and to distribute or otherwise guarantee access to contraceptives and other necessary resources. This is a presentiment of the quintessential biopolitical concern for scaled management of the processes of life.]
DIESEL (as JUDGE)
Right!
Officer Krupke, you’re really a square;
This boy don’t need a judge, he needs a analyst’s care!
It’s just his neurosis that oughta be curbed.
He’s psychologic’ly disturbed!
[In the first of a series of reframings — or alternately, evasions of responsibility — that will characterize the Jets’ encounters with the bearers of expert knowledge, the Judge finds that the law provides him with inadequate tools to manage delinquency. He rejects the notion, indeed, that this is a collective problem at all, suggesting instead that both the roots of delinquency and effective responses to it can best be discovered by undertaking the treatment of individual psychopathology.
Note that the vowels in both Diesel’s pastiche of the Judge and the Jets’ response should be sounded as a front-rising diphthong, i.e. coibed/distoibed. This is a once-distinct and broadly-recognizable New York City accent that is now rapidly disappearing.]
ACTION
I’m disturbed!
JETS
We’re disturbed, we’re disturbed,
We’re the most disturbed,
Like we’re psychologic’ly disturbed.
DIESEL (spoken, as JUDGE)
Hear ye, hear ye! In the opinion of this court, this child is depraved on account he ain’t had a normal home.
[In speech act theory, this is what is known as a “performative utterance.” That the Judge prefaces his comments with a command to hear and then literally pronounces sentence is what makes it effective. Still more intriguingly to me, the notion that there exist sequences of words so potent that uttering them properly and under the correct conditions is all it takes to do work in the world is at best only quasi-rational. It makes certain kinds of speech — here, legal speech — akin to magickal operations intended to manifest change in accordance with Will.]
ACTION (spoken)
Hey, I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!
DIESEL (as JUDGE)
So take him to a headshrinker!
ACTION (sings)
My father is a bastard,
My ma’s an S.O.B.
My grandpa’s always plastered,
My grandma pushes tea.
My sister wears a mustache,
My brother wears a dress.
Goodness gracious, that’s why I’m a mess!
A-RAB (as PSYCHIATRIST)
Yes!
Officer Krupke, you’re really a slob.
This boy don’t need a doctor, just a good honest job.
Society’s played him a terrible trick,
And sociologic’ly he’s sick!
[The Psychiatrist downplays the significance of multiple traumas in the childhood household — the stigma of illegitimacy; substance abuse, addictive behavior and exposure to the narcoeconomy; and unresolved issues of gender presentation and conformity — arguing instead that delinquency needs to be understood as a symptom of market failure. Only by participating in and usefully contributing to the economy will the former delinquent find himself redeemed.]
ACTION
I am sick!
ALL
We are sick, we are sick,
We are sick, sick, sick,
Like we’re sociologically sick!
A-RAB (as PSYCHIATRIST)
In my opinion, this child don’t need to have his head shrunk at all. Juvenile delinquency is purely a social disease!
ACTION
Hey, I got a social disease!
[A bit of wordplay here: “social disease” is a common 1950s euphemism for sexually-transmitted disease. Action is delighted because the term implies institutional recognition and/or validation of his sexually active status.]
A-RAB (as PSYCHIATRIST)
So take him to a social worker!
[Decisively denying a still-Freudian psychiatry’s applicability to the problem at hand, the analyst recommends instead that the delinquent’s situation be addressed by a case worker specifically tasked by the benevolent welfare State to perform outreach and propose interventions in the city’s economically-deprived communities.]
ACTION
Dear kindly social worker,
They say go earn a buck.
Like be a soda jerker,
Which means like be a schmuck.
It’s not I’m anti-social,
I’m only anti-work.
Gloryosky! That’s why I’m a jerk!
[Though as written, this passage rhymes earn a buck with be a schmuck, it was offensively (if effectively) bowdlerized for Hollywood as make some dough/be a schmo.]
BABY JOHN (as SOCIAL WORKER)
Eek!
Officer Krupke, you’ve done it again.
This boy don’t need a job, he needs a year in the pen!
It ain’t just a question of misunderstood;
Deep down inside him, he’s no good!
[The delinquent, reasonably enough, is starkly dissatisfied with the low-status, entry-level service jobs that are the only ones available to him in the post-industrial economy. The social worker, on the other hand, having gone to all the trouble of gathering information about available positions, is disgusted with this refusal of personal responsibility, and concludes that the delinquent’s problems are so severe that they can only be resolved by his being sentenced to a penitentiary — the paradigmatic disciplinary space.
This brings us full circle: if delinquency can neither be resolved via socioeconomic provision, nor through the psychiatric care of the individual delinquent, juridical sanction may be the only arrow society has in its quiver. The cost of this reframing, however, is that if the delinquent can neither be constructed as an unwell body or a disadvantaged economic actor, he can only be understood as a more-or-less willful transgressor of the social order. Action, of course, sees this clearly, recognizing that…]
ACTION
I’m no good!
ALL
We’re no good, we’re no good!
We’re no earthly good,
Like the best of us is no damn good!
DIESEL (as JUDGE)
The trouble is he’s crazy.
A-RAB (as PSYCHIATRIST)
The trouble is he drinks.
BABY JOHN (as SOCIAL WORKER)
The trouble is he’s lazy.
DIESEL
The trouble is he stinks.
A-RAB
The trouble is he’s growing.
BABY JOHN
The trouble is he’s grown.
ALL, as CHORUS LINE
Krupke, we got troubles of our own!
Gee, Officer Krupke,
We’re down on our knees,
‘Cause no one wants a fella with a social disease.
Gee, Officer Krupke,
What are we to do?
Gee, Officer Krupke,
Krup you!
See what I mean? It’s all in there! One or two other songs from West Side Story are almost as good — my other favorite, “America,” is about postcolonial subjectivity, the subaltern’s daily experience of the metropole and the politics of differential infrastructural development — but “Krupke” really does explain how this particular mode of power works in an incredibly efficient way.
There’s something refreshing, too, in the fact that by mocking the way they’re framed by these successive agents of authority — as alternately unwell bodies to be treated, unfairly deprived economic actors to be restored by gainful employment, and finally as criminals to be disposed of by the State’s corrective apparatus — what the putatively ignorant Jets are really doing is rejecting the State’s right to define them at all. Maybe there is no “problem of juvenile delinquency” after all, they appear to be saying, and on this history at least appears to have borne them out.
Public space, civilization and the self (long)
I go on about this thing we call “public space” quite often — most recently here — but I don’t think I’ve ever furnished you with an argument as to why I think creating, maintaining and actually using it is so important, from either the individual or the collective point of view. So on the eve of publishing a pamphlet that deals with the topic not a little bit, I figured I’d have a go at doing just that. You might want to settle back and pull up your cushions, because like the man says, this is going to go on for awhile.
Public space,
For the past several years, exploring the ways in which we collectively understand and use the common spatial domain has been a primary focus of my design work, as well as my writing. One of the things we set out to do at Urbanscale was use digital cartography to surface and expose all those spaces of the city that are public in name and law, that are yours to use and to enjoy, but which generally remain beneath the threshold of everyday awareness. In New York City specifically, we wanted to use data furnished to the public under the various Local Law provisions to populate a map layer on our Urbanflow kiosks, and eventually personal devices connected to the Urbanflow service, effectively updating Jerold Kayden’s invaluable Privately Owned Public Space (or, for that matter, the Nolli map) for the age of networked informatics.
Discovery turns out to be critical to activating this scattered archipelago of courtyards, plazas and atria as a public amenity. Michael Kimmelman, in his Introduction to Beyond Zuccotti Park (a volume I recommend highly, by the way), emphasizes the idea that no space, however designated in law, can legitimately be described as “public” unless it is routinely occupied and used by members of the entire community, and of course I agree wholeheartedly. But you can’t use something that you don’t know is there. And despite the mandatory signage, to say nothing of longtime activism, advocacy and consciousness-raising on the part of groups like Project for Public Spaces or the Design Trust for Public Space, most New Yorkers seem blissfully unaware that these sites are in fact available to them.
These privately-owned parcels simply aren’t as self-evident as the sidewalks, squares and parks we more often think of as public space. And while some of them are of extremely high quality — Paley Park, for example, which is simply one of my favorite places to sit, read and think in all of New York City — more often they’re neglected, underutilized and unwelcoming, which is something I read as a direct consequence of their low profile. (In fact, their managers tend to rely on this relative obscurity, as well as a fair amount of confusion as to the contours of their rights and obligations, to prevent members of the public from using what is rightfully ours, and therefore contributing to their maintenance burden.)
Why go to the trouble of bringing these spaces to light? And especially why would Urbanscale, as a commercial enterprise, dedicate resources toward doing so? After all, firms like Control Group certainly don’t seem to think that any such thing is in their remit, when developing wayfinding kiosks for the MTA, and the notion that the city is suffused with spaces available for free use is something barely even alluded to in Pentagram’s otherwise-respectable, Legible City-based program of map plinths. Nor do these sites receive any particular attention or distinct graphic treatment in any other widely-used digital map of the city. So why undertake the effort involved in raising them to real-time awareness?
The honest, simple answer is “Because we live here.” That was true when Urbanscale was a “we,” and it remains just as true now that the practice is (but for the occasional collaboration) an “I”: for the most selfish of reasons, I want people to know these spatial amenities are available to and for them, because I benefit when they’re used routinely.
How so? Let’s start with the idea that, like anyone rational, I want the city I live in to be a humane, generous place, one that provides for its citizens and visitors at every level of the Maslovian pyramid. (I happen to believe that I’m better off when everyone around me is receiving the support they need, whether that support be physiological, material, interpersonal or entirely intangible in nature.) And public space in all of its forms is one of the few tools we have that’s capable of speaking to all of these dimensions of need, at least in potential. So it seems to me that there are few more worthwhile things a design practice might do than contributing to awareness, stewardship and use of this resource.
civilization
I’m comfortable going a good deal further than merely arguing that the presence of well-loved and well-used public spaces in a city is a collective good. I conflate that presence more or less directly with civilization itself. My reasons for thinking so are all pretty basic, even obvious, but I find that it sometimes helps to spell these things out explicitly. Consider:
— Civilization means providing for everyone’s basic biological needs, among which are shade and some degree of shelter from the elements; clean potable water; and a safe place to use the toilet, and otherwise conduct the rudiments of bodily hygiene. These provisions need to be widely distributed and available throughout the community, situated in a way that allows them to be utilized without undue surveillance (and certainly without shame), and this can only happen under the conditions of relatively uncontrolled access that public space affords.
The most vulnerable among us have the greatest need for such facilities, of course. They ought to be able to avail themselves of same for pragmatic reasons of public health, but also because being able to clean oneself up helps immeasurably with “presentability” when applying for assistance, or a job, or otherwise moving uncomplicatedly through the bourgeois world. (Speaking from personal experience, it’s hard to gather up the courage to walk into a clinic, a classroom or an office when you know perfectly well that you smell, and that the smell is offensive to the people around you.)
Most fundamentally of all, people should have free and unimpeded access to toilets and hygienic facilities for reasons of self-respect. Mitchell Duneier, in his 1999 book Sidewalk, describes a distinction the unhoused themselves delineate between those who habitually relieve themselves in public and those who, for reasons of pride, make a habit of doing so indoors whenever they are able to do so; I now think of this every time I see anyone but a drunken fratboy peeing in the street. In so many words: nobody should be forced to rely on the contingent goodwill of a friendly shopclerk or McDonald’s manager to take a shit in safety and privacy. The point is that most street people, just like anyone else, want to comport themselves with a modicum of dignity, and will do so if given the slightest chance.
And I should hardly need to point out that while the need for a clean toilet, a sink or similar facilities may be felt most acutely by those among us without a permanent place to call their own, the same need can beset any one of us, at any time. Even if for no other reason than “I just got crapped on by a pigeon, and I need a place to take my shirt off and scrub it down before my next meeting.” In this very direct and very real sense, the provisions we make for the ostensibly lowest among us are the provisions we make for ourselves.
We need to make at least some provision for the basic needs of all, and public space can do this.
— Civilization also means being forced to reckon with the consequences of our collective failure to provide such facilities. Last year, I joined a local group advocating for the pedestrianization of a service road just off Second Avenue near our apartment, and the furnishment of the resulting space with planters and seating. The (eventually successful) opposition to the pedestrianization plan hinged largely on the notion that with Bellevue Hospital and the city’s main homeless shelter/intake center for unaccompanied men in the neighborhood, if the service road were in fact to become a pedestrian plaza that plaza would swiftly come to be overrun by those with nowhere else to be.
Never mind that no one ever offered any empirical support for this scenario. And put to the side, if you can, the understanding that many of those opposing the pedestrian plaza on these grounds were fellow residents of the building complex I live in, and just like me able to avail themselves of the leafy, three-acre garden between our buildings at any time of their choosing. Assume that everything the opponents said was true: that if we successfully created a public amenity in our neighborhood, that amenity would be dominated by the vagrant, the unclean and the unstable.
My response to this is to say, effectively, “So what?” Those human beings, manifestly, exist. There they are. They have needs. As a society, we have made collective choices that result in their being unable to fulfill or even address those needs in the way you or I would as a matter of course. And now we’re going to begrudge them even the ability to sit down and take a load off, when we can do so wherever and whenever we want?
I don’t say any of this cavalierly, and I am under absolutely no illusion that every last person living on the street is an angel, or even particularly safe to be around; New Yorkers, of all people, are acutely aware of the risks of living in close proximity with people whose substance-abuse and mental-health issues have gone untreated, of what’s likely to happen when those issues are allowed to fester to the point that they become life-threatening (or indeed life-ending). But we don’t solve anyone’s problems — neither theirs nor ours nor the region of the Venn diagram where they overlap — by succumbing to self-satisfied NIMBYism, sweeping homeless people out of sight, denying them the basic lineaments of self-care and making tidied-up, fatuous little Potemkin villages of our neighborhoods. So if we don’t want to be confronted by the reality of homeless people sleeping on our public benches, taking up all our public chairs and being visible in the public way, maybe we’d better design public policies that provide them with better options.
We need to face the consequences of our actions, and public space can do this.
— Civilization means acknowledging imperatives beyond the merely commercial. Even putting questions of homelessness to the side, I want to live in a city wise enough to offer its citizens and visitors some respite from the overwhelming pressure toward commercial transaction that otherwise characterizes our shared spaces.
At the most basic level, if a city isn’t furnished with a well-developed fabric of public spaces of different sizes and shapes and types, there is no place to simply be if you are not actively consuming. You never understand quite what this implies — just how stark and uncomfortable an urban environment can be, no matter how well-appointed otherwise — until you visit someplace where such a nightmare endstate is enacted intentionally and literally.
For me personally, it’s an experience I had last year on a visit to Istanbul’s Kanyon mall that comes to mind when I think of what might await us, should the various tendencies toward privatization of the common spatial domain we can currently discern in our own environment go unchecked. Designed by the California-based Jerde Partnership (the same practice responsible for Universal CityWalk, the “parallel urban reality” dissected by Mike Davis in his 1992 pamphlet “Urban Control“), Kanyon offers plenty of places for visitors to sit…not a single one of which is not clearly demarcated as belonging to Illy or EAT or Le Pain Quotidien. God help you if you’ve come to look and see, but not necessarily to buy: you’ll attract nasty glares not merely from security guards, but — like something out of the “militarized subconscious” of Inception — from shoppers themselves, as though they suspect that your desire to sit somewhere and quietly eat the sandwich you’ve packed is in itself a token of being up to no good.
This may be true of malls everywhere, for all I know; I’ll confess that it’s been a good few years since I’ve been inside of one. But it was glaringly obvious at Kanyon, a place which seems to take Rem Koolhaas’s infamous description of shopping as “arguably the last remaining form of public activity” a little too firmly to heart. Its demand that we justify our presence by spending is a tendency that’s only likely to accelerate as Square and similarly “effortless” low-cognitive-load mechanisms for the transaction of value proliferate in the world, and fuse with the ability to throw a virtual geofence around a given locale. The inherent cruelty involved is something that affects us all, whether or not we happen to have the price of a coffee to spare by way of paying a half-hour’s rent on a place to sit.
I want to emphasize that I don’t begrudge the ability of small, independent operators to make a buck. James C. Scott’s Two Cheers for Anarchism helped me articulate the distinction I think needs to be made whenever we discuss commercial activity in public space. It’s the same made in Pattern 87 of A Pattern Language, “Individually Owned Shops”: that between individual, accountable proprietors and those deadening enterprises that operate at national or global scale, and that function mainly to extract value from the local community. (I know it’s the hip thing to hate on the High Line these days, but to my mind it’s a place that gets this mix just about right. The kiosks and food stands feel refreshingly humble and local, and reasonably well-curated. You want an ice-cream sandwich, you get a ice-cream sandwich.) My point isn’t that all commercial activity needs to be purged from public space, but that it must never be allowed to dominate these environments, or drive out ways of using them freely.
We need to develop meaningful ways for people to use the city when they don’t have so much as a penny to their name, and public space can do this.
— Civilization means a place to sit down. I myself happen to think that sitting and watching the city go by is one of the great urban pleasures, ever and always its own perfect justification, and that if we’ve seriously gotten to the point that we need to articulate arguments in defense of this act we’re in a good deal more trouble than even I had ever suspected. But as it happens, there are good functional reasons why cities might want to provide pedestrians with abundant free seating easily accessible from the public way.
Georges Amar, formerly head of foresight for the RATP, reminds us that the sidewalks are a high-throughput mode of conveyance. He likens them to walking subways, and suggests that just as subways have stations, so too ought our pedestrian thoroughfares be well-provisioned with places to stop and rest at regular intervals — again, each complete with shade, toilets, drinking fountains and (I would add) free WiFi. Per the point above about small businesses, further, there’s no reason why each of these nodes can’t support an independently-operated food cart or coffee stand as an adjunct to and enhancer of experience. perhaps as a social focus. platform for impromptu conviviality.
To dip, again, into A Pattern Language, what Amar is proposing corresponds almost precisely with Pattern 82, “Bus Stop”:
Build bus stops so that they form tiny centers of public life. Build them as part of the gateways into neighborhoods, work communities, parts of town. Locate them so that they work together with several other activities, at least a newsstand, maps, outdoor shelter, seats, and in various combinations, corner groceries, smoke shops [!], coffee bar, tree places, special road crossings, public bathrooms, squares…
A city whose walking paths are well-provided with nodes such as these is simply a more merciful place than one that is not. I didn’t really take Amar’s deeper point, though, until I thought carefully about the routes I habitually take when traversing Manhattan on foot. There’s no question he’s on to something: I’ll happily choose a clumsy, meandering path, or even cut a block or two out of my way, if it lets me pass through one of my favorite public spaces, whether it be Union Square, Liz Christy Community Garden, Lincoln Center or the plaza in front of the Seagram Building. I find these places restorative, even without stopping to rest in them — they make the difference between a joyless trudge and a pleasingly punctuated journey. The happy fact is that, for a great many potential journeys one might take through New York City, something like Amar’s network of walkstations already exists.
The lesson I draw from this: the measure we take to enhance one mode of using the city winds up being an investment in others. The same amenity that furnishes one set of users with the necessities of daily survival can afford others the makings of a safer and more pleasant commute. In other words, there’s a multiplicative, synergistic quality to the return we enjoy on whatever interventions we make with an eye toward improving the urban fabric. If nothing else, each place where people can freely sit and watch the life of the city furnishes an additional increment of Jacobian “eyes on the street.”
We need to think of the urban fabric itself as a source of amenity and succor, and public space can do this.
— Civilization means acknowledging imperatives beyond the frankly functional. You can tell a lot about a society’s conception of itself by looking at the standards it insists on (or, alternately, tolerates) in its public accommodations, beyond the rather low bar of simply being fit for purpose. And there’s something profoundly ennobling about the commitment of collective resources to amenities meant for everyone to use and enjoy — neither to overawe, nor to instill a narrow sectarian pride, but to remind everyone using the space that they are a valued member of a meaningful whole.
We’re moving up Maslow’s hierarchy now. It’s not just a matter of production values, but of what those production values communicate. And what public investments like these communicate is that what binds us truly is more important than what separates us; that even the least “important,” most marginal member of our society is entitled to the same experience of belonging as anyone else; and there can be a dignity, even a grandeur in the everyday.
We need to celebrate what we are collectively and together, and public space can do this.
— Civilization means accommodating the needs of profoundly different groups. The other night, we stumbled onto this as we passed by Bryant Park. My initial response was that it was one of the most appalling displays I’d ever seen in New York, that there was something almost fascist about it. That it was not at all light-hearted, spontaneous and captivatingly romantic, as it so obviously ached to be, but exclusionary, pretentious, class-ridden and uptight, just an obscene misuse of a public park. (The event didn’t do itself any favors by stationing private security guards at entrances to the park, there to turn away anyone who wasn’t sufficiently compliant with the all-white theme.)
That was my initial response, and truth be told, it was my second one as well. But then I reconsidered a bit. No, Dîner en Blanc is not an ideal use of this public resource. No, it’s not acceptable for a private event to control access to a space maintained for the benefit of all. Yes, there are troubling aspects to it — not least of which is that the dinner struck me as being an all-white event in more ways than one. But it’s one night a year. I can find Dîner en Blanc not at all to my liking — in point of fact, entirely grotesque — but so long as it doesn’t persistently interfere with anyone else’s ability to use Bryant Park I can’t find particular fault with it. (And, in fact, as a traveling spectacle it’s highly doubtful it would impact the same neighborhood two years running.) At very worst, it’s sufficiently localized that anyone who finds it distasteful can avoid it, which is more than can be said for SantaCon.
Ideally, though, different groups would be able to pursue their multiple uses of a space simultaneously and non-exclusively, interpenetrating like strollers, joggers, runners and cyclists all using a path together. The benefit of doing things this way is that it more directly teaches us to accommodate one another’s needs, in a way that merely alternating in time does not. At a time when our city has never been more heterogeneous, and when the “interautistic” tendencies of foam-phase social interaction make it ever harder for us to read, understand or empathize with one another, the kinds of encounter and exchange we generally experience in public space furnish us with a crucial tutorial in getting along.
This applies to public spaces at the smallest of scales, as well. I believe that something was lost, for example, when Barcelona began to phase out its public benches a few years ago, in favor of appealingly designed but single-place seating; certainly, park benches were the site of some of my own first negotiations with strangers over contested space. Shared spatial arrangements such as this teach us the rudiments of being a citizen and an urban self — and sites in which young people can practice urbanity are even more necessary when contemporary technology otherwise allocates us into what Jane Jacobs, in another context, once described as “decontaminated sortings.”
We need to learn the comfort with oneself that allows us to accommodate the needs of others, and public space can do this.
— Finally, civilization means supporting the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition for the redress of grievances. If there’s anything the past few years have taught us, in object lessons from Tahrir Square, the Plaça de Catalunya and Zuccotti Park to the Place Émile-Gamelin and Taksim Square, it is the enduring symbolic power of physically occupying public space, even in our putatively mediated age. We seem to have arrived at a renewed understanding that no political gesture is quite as resonant as the act of coming together in shared space, to join our voices and the presence of our bodies.
I can’t meaningfully discuss what happened with 15-M in Spain, or the various protests and uprisings of the Arab Spring, because I wasn’t anything but a distant observer of those events. But I can speak, a little, to what happened in New York City, and I can tell you that some of the most exciting, empowering interactions I’ve ever participated in happened in Zuccotti Park and Foley and Union Squares in the fall of 2011. Whether or not it was effective in bringing about the precise change desired, the consensus now seems to be that Occupy Wall Street was responsible for the prominence income inequality retained as an issue throughout the 2012 Presidential campaign; for all the good it seems to have done over the long term, it definitely forced the Obama campaign to shore up its bona fides on the left. Among that subset of my friends, anyway, who believe that constitutional democracy is something other than a shuck and a con, just about everyone is disappointed with the Obama Administration, and to a degree that surprises me I share their sense of disillusionment…but I continue to believe that everything we face would have been much, much worse under a Romney Administration.
While only a fool would try to draw a direct connection between Zuccotti Park and, say, the 50% reduction in health insurance costs New Yorkers now stand to benefit from, the events of 2011 are a potent reminder that democracy is something that still happens in public. And the experience of Occupy benefitted New York in other, less obvious ways, as well: as I’ve noted elsewhere, it was precisely the connections and networks that formed in these spaces that laid the groundwork for the city’s single most effective response to Hurricane Sandy.
Both by happenstance and design, our city furnishes us with a network of spaces in which the rights of free speech and assembly cannot be abrogated. The particular ways in which we pursue and enact those rights are continually in the process of being constructed, renegotiated and challenged, but the act of doing so places us in a tradition that extends from the first beginnings of our nation — and beyond that, from the very roots of democratic practice itself.
We need to negotiate the terms under which we pursue our individual destinies within the overarching framework of common purpose, and public space almost alone can do this.
…and the self (a personal coda)
I think it’s clear by now what I mean when I use the rather loaded word “civilization,” and why I make the perhaps curious linkage between this quality and the various modes of land use we collectively describe as “public space.”
But none of the above really explains why this particular platform for social interaction is so important to me personally, why I’ve chosen to dedicate my practice to it, or why I try to spend as much time as humanly possible in the parks, community gardens and plazas of New York City. Maybe I can approach an answer sideways, by putting it in one final axiom: Civilization means that each citizen has the right to grow and to become who they are, and it also means that the city is designed and structured in a way that helps them do so.
I’ll try to explain this as best I can. Anybody still reading who doesn’t care about the particulars of my own history, or finds this sort of detail distasteful, is more than welcome to skip forward to that bit with the bullet points at the end. (I won’t be offended, I promise.)
Sometimes in life, we’re attracted to some endeavor not because we have any particular talent for it, but precisely because it represents a weakness. And so it is with me and the city.
I am a fairly shy person. I grew up physically ungifted: weak, clumsy, unbeautiful, inelegant. I’m saddled with the kind of voice (and manner of speaking) that just seems to set some people’s teeth on edge, the moment I open my mouth. I don’t do well in crowds. I haven’t, historically, had the courage to acknowledge the essential personhood of the others around me, preferring a succession of armored or dismissive poses to the complexity and challenge of engaging them as fully human individuals. It was just more comfortable that way. Of course my entire life is one episode after another of me throwing myself into circumstances in which I wasn’t comfortable, which you can read if so inclined as a desperate attempt to make myself whole by main force, but the fact remains: I preferred life inside my armor. And the seeming wisdom of this was reinscribed by the things I experienced when I first ventured into the American cities of the 1970s, one of which I describe in the video linked here.
But I wanted more. I wanted to venture beyond the safety and sterility of my containment. I wanted to stop dismissing people out of hand. I wanted to feel comfortable anywhere — and for the people I met, reading that comfort, to feel comfortable around me. I wanted to stop sacrificing friends, lovers and opportunities to the fulminating assholeism that goes hand-in-hand with a certain kind of insecurity. And the only thing that seemed to get me even the tiniest bit closer to any of that was being out in the city, on the sidewalks, in the parks, or anywhere else I could test my ability to coexist with others undefended, unarmored and vulnerable. These were relatively safe spaces in which I could practice the art of not constructing everyone else around me as a potential threat to my self-esteem — as something that had to be preëmptively taken down a notch or two — and just letting them be what and who they were.
So all of that stuff in Sennett, about the encounter with implacable urban diversity as an indispensable part of coming to maturity? You better believe I read that very personally. If I am anything but entirely broken as I write this, it’s because the effort it took to manage the experience of urban complexity and difference annealed me. Far too late in life, but thankfully while there was still plenty time for me to enjoy it, my city taught me to be a human being.
Were the others I encountered still, occasionally, obnoxious, self-absorbed, entitled or manifestly interested in making my life more difficult? Of course they were. I’ve already said: this is New York. But by and large, I found truth in the rather anodyne notion that people mostly just want to get along. And so a virtuous cycle kicked in: the degree to which I dropped my character armor was that to which the city began to open itself before me.
I do not deny that there is a strong element of privilege in this, and of course it didn’t hurt that New York has become very much safer over the time period I’m describing. But to this day, part of the great pleasure I take from the public places of my city is in noting how very small the voice of panic and flight has become in me when I spend time in them. It’s still there, and it will almost certainly never go away entirely. It’s generally overmastered, though, by the joy I take in simply being with my people, the people of my New York.
We need desperately to become whole, some of us, and public space can do this.
In practice
Assuming you find any or all of the above convincing, what can you do to act on it?
• Learn about the legal status of public space in your municipality, particularly as regards the full measure of rights you enjoy there. Share that knowledge with others.
• Read everything you can get your hands on. I recommend this book as a useful overview of a few threads of contemporary praxis, but there are thousands of others. (Not all of these will be directly and entirely relevant, but they’re all worth reading.)
• Tease out the commonalities between contemporary forms of public–space activism, whether that activism takes place under the banner of “tactical urbanism,” as part of a longer-standing and more explicitly oppositional tradition, or entirely spontaneously. Work toward building bonds, alliances or coalitions between the individuals and communities involved.
• Engage in that activism yourself, in whatever way feels most natural and appropriate to you. In New York alone, there are literally hundreds of organizations dedicated to these and related issues, from 596 Acres and the Green Guerrillas to the Center for Urban Pedagogy and Transportation Alternatives. Honestly, if you can’t find a group or space convenient to your neighborhood and aligned with your inclinations, you’re probably not looking hard enough. (If community gardens are your particular thing, this is a great resource.)
• Wherever possible, design networked or digital maps, tools, environments and interfaces to surface and highlight available public spaces, and the connections between them and the communities they serve.
• Recover older traditions having to do with the shared use of spatial resources, of which there are far too many to list here. (Some of my favorites: the semi-annual day of neighborhood self-care the Norwegians call the Dugnad, and the shelters called bothies in the Scottish and Irish traditions.) And reflect for a moment on what’s implied by that “far too many to list here”: there happen to be so many distinctive local traditions along these lines because those provisions were recognized as inalienable right throughout most of recorded history, just about everywhere in the West. It’s everything represented by Kanyon and its equivalents that’s anomalous.
• Take in a talk. In New York, the Institute for Public Knowledge regularly hosts high-quality lectures and discussions on everything from public toilets to the design of mobility for democracy. If talking over a meal is more your speed, the Design Trust for Public Space throws regular potluck picnics in public spaces throughout the five boroughs.
• Finally: be a public person. If we make the road by walking, we make the city by citying. You know I believe that civilization depends on it. Be generous, be safe, have fun, and let me know what you discover.
Dread questions
A brief interview for the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, to accompany their publication of my article “Fear in the bones and the right to the city.”
***
In your work, you write about you and your girlfriend having the “choice to live downtown,” which intrinsically means accepting certain risks and physical dangers in your life. Do you think there is attraction in danger, since you choose this?
I’m sure for some privileged people, there is attraction to danger for its own sake — some fondness for the endocrine rush someone experiences when they deliberately place themselves in situations that pose imminent threat to life and limb. The key, though, in such circumstances, is that it’s always supposed to be a manageable situation. And “manageable” is not the very first word that springs to mind when I’m asked to describe Avenue B in 1986.
And anyway, that’s not what I moved to the East Village for. I moved there simply because it was a neighborhood that was both convenient to my school and cheap enough for me to afford living with my girlfriend. Another way of framing this is to note that whatever danger there may have been for me in those blocks, it was the fruit of some other, underlying circumstance, and that circumstance also produced other conditions which happened to be desirable — in this case, cheap rent, personal and artistic freedom, and the company of other people who were also engaged in the project of reinventing themselves. And those qualities were rare and special enough that it was worth taking on whatever level of risk I faced. But, again: for me, as for a decent percentage of the people around me, that was a choice I got to make. Other people living on our block were never asked to rank neighborhoods they might move to in order of lifestyle preferences.
With regard to the present “age of technological acceleration,” digital developments can provide necessary information, as you notice, to deal with fear. How do you consider the rapid development of digital, online relations/communities, or, in your terms “networks of weak ties”? In other words: is the growing digitalisation of interpersonal contact the new form of “weak ties,” or does it endanger them?
Well, look: urbanists from Jane Jacobs to Richard Sennett to Gregory Smithsimon have observed that public space is necessarily a space of negotiation — negotiation for limited spatial resources, with people who have different goals, ends, intentions and values than we ourselves happen to hold. As it happens, this is true even in something as simple as sharing the space of a sidewalk, when we use it to get between points A and B: we pay close attention to the ways in which other people indicate they intend to use the space, as they do our own, and all of us make constant, swift, subtle adjustments to our own speed and trajectory to keep things flowing. It’s a process that sociologist Lyn Lofland calls “cooperative motility,” and the carrying capacity of our pedestrian mobility infrastructure turns out to be entirely dependent on it.
But what happens when seventy, eighty percent of the people using the sidewalk aren’t really psychically or emotionally present to it? When they’re texting someone, or chatting with them via a Bluetooth headset, or looking up an address on Google Maps? They fail to attend to other users of the space, they have a much harder time performing the little dance of minute accelerations, retards and course corrections that cooperative motility requires, and everyone suffers as a result. The flow of the entire sidewalk bunches up, knots up, slows down. You can see this happen every single day on the streets of Manhattan, or, I’d wager, any other big city.
And part of what I’m arguing is that an analogous process is taking place in our interpersonal relations. To some degree, because our networked social media give us the option of surrounding ourselves with people who are demographically and psychologically similar to ourselves, we appear to be forgetting how to coexist peaceably with those who are not. The tendency is, if anything, toward stronger ties with a network of people who have more in common with us, which is the opposite of the scenario Granovetter described. And this is a problem, because maintaining functioning democracy in a heterogeneous society absolutely requires that we, again, negotiate with those with whom we share nothing at all but an address.
Furthermore, as Sennett and others have long argued, it’s clear that the necessity of engaging in that negotiation is extraordinarily good for us. It’s how we grow as citizens and citydwellers, it’s how we become who we are. We need risk and contestation not because they’re glamorous, or because we get a frisson of temporary, egotistical satisfaction from surmounting them, but because they’re vital to the project of becoming fully human. And that’s something that I’d prefer to see reflected more often and with more sensitivity in the design of networked information systems.
To me, your work reads implicitly as a plea for solidarity, against the highly individualized modern Western society in a way, since the essence of coping best with fear and danger is building relations with each other as co-inhabitants of the city. Would you consider it a plea of that kind?
Yes. Absolutely yes.
Fear in the bones and the right to the city, or: The Monster at the End of the Block
A piece I was commissioned to write earlier this year for the catalogue for Juha van ‘t Zelfde’s exhibition Dread: The Dizziness of Freedom, opening at De Hallen Harlem in the Netherlands on 06 September 2013. I hope you enjoy it. (You can find out more about the show and the catalogue here, or purchase it direct from the publishers.)
When I was 18, I moved in with my first real girlfriend, to a draughty ground-floor apartment on East 7th Street between Avenues B and C. This was the winter of 1986-87, a time at which the edges of Manhattan Island (or, for that matter, its core) hadn’t yet been subjected to the concerted pacification campaigns of the Giuliani years. The act of choosing to live downtown, if you were among those for whom it was a choice, still meant accepting some level of risk and physical danger into your life. This was especially true in the neighborhood where I lived, in Alphabet City, where a common rule of thumb had it that A stood for adventurous, B for brave, C for crazy and D for dead.
And it was true, or felt true. Those were the days in which crack cocaine and the 9mm semiautomatic handgun first came to prominence in the psychic life of New York City, the years of the Guardian Angels, “subway vigilante” Bernie Goetz and of Michael Griffith being hounded to his death in Howard Beach. The tension was just something we lived with — more of a constant thrumming note in the background than anything else, though it occasionally crescendoed to apocalyptic-feeling levels. (Early one morning, my girlfriend and I woke to an unusual sensation of heat in our ordinarily-freezing room; it was the five-storey squat in the block behind us, whose backyard butted up against ours, burning to the ground — in fact, being watched as it did so, by the evidently unperturbed personnel of the Fire Department and the HPD, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development.)
However it may have swollen, crested and then receded from day to day, the predominant emotion I remember from those years is fear. I was afraid of cops. I was afraid of skinheads. I was afraid of the pack of Puerto Rican kids who used to tool through the neighborhood on BMX bikes, hassling Chinese-restaurant deliverymen and the occasional unwary NYU student. I was afraid of the ubiquitous Missing Foundation graffiti that confronted you on every block, the shadowy band’s sigil of an upside-down martini glass enormous in ashy black Krylon on every second building front, bracketed by the legends PURGE and THE PARTY’S OVER.
Most of all, though, I was afraid of the Avenue C end of my own block. In fact, I’d rarely wander any further east than the bodega directly across the street from our apartment, which, but for a few cans of Goya beans, dusty bricks of Bustelo and cartons of island-grade bug spray, never seemed to have much on the shelves. (My housemates and I were certain it was a front for a crack-dealing operation.) It was as if some vast and only semi-permeable membrane had been stretched across the roadway, a thickening of the dread in the air to the point that it was physically difficult to pass through; in all the time I lived on East 7th, I only once recall walking the few blocks to the river. The cold grey light of that single occasion remains hypernaturally vivid in memory, which is what happens when what ought to be uncomplicated everyday experience is etched in the neurons by a jittery endocrine surge.
Like most of the people I knew, I armored myself against the streets in a drag of Schott biker jacket and chain-wrapped combat boots. It was, for the most part, sufficient. I was able to convince myself that I looked tough enough to constitute a disincentive to anyone inclined to hassle me — in fact, my armoring may well have contributed to others’ discomfort more than it alleviated any of my own. But I also made a concerted effort to perform everything the leather jacket and boots implied, as if along with my clothes I had to strap on a set to the shoulders and a walking gait capable of warding off the various bad but never quite fully-imagined things that might happen to me.
In time, all of this taught me something valuable about the nature of life in cities. When fear is an everyday thing, it becomes a habit that settles into the bones. It conditions the hours at which you leave the house, the routes you take, the way you hold your body, the things you carry. And utterly groundless though the great majority of my worries may have been — however precious and pearl-clutching it was for this bourgeois kid to quail at circumstances the overwhelming majority of my neighbors confronted every damn day of their lives, without even the option of picking up stakes and moving to a less fraught neighborhood — I could no longer pretend that the city was in any sense a safe theater of operations for me. Or, by extension, for anyone else.
And that was the crucial insight. It may have been the first time in my life I fully and directly understood the calculus some enormous percentage of people living in every city on Earth are forced to perform every time they walk out the front door. For not a small number of us, the mere act of walking out onto the street is an act that brings us face to face with our own precarity, and not merely the economic precarity we’ve all gotten used to in these austere days, but the deeper contingency of our very being in the world. Under conditions like this, the need to perform the most basic daily operations — shopping for groceries, say, or doing the laundry — becomes something that must be weighed against the risk of being mocked, harassed, mugged, beaten, or worse.
This calculus, unsurprisingly, weighs disproportionately on the elderly, on immigrants, on the homeless, on those who are by fate or choice visibly different than the majority population of a neighborhood, and above all on women of all backgrounds and descriptions. The right simply to be in public, secure in one’s bodily integrity, is and can never be taken for granted by anyone who belongs to any of these groups. And though a great many things have changed in the world since I managed to connect the dots and figure this all out for myself in the winter of 1986, the reality of fear is sadly not among them.
When people live this way, their access to the city’s nominal opportunities is radically curtailed. All of the urban amenities that might exist — not just in theory, on paper, or in principle but actually exist — are simply not present for them in quite the same way as they would be to someone who didn’t have to account for the perception of threat. The landscape is permeated by invisible gradients, boundaries and lines of force, and you disregard these only at your own peril.
If you yourself are an immigrant, of course, or disabled, or queer, or fat, you understand all of this immediately, implicitly, without needing to have it explained. It’s only a revelation to those who are lucky enough never to have felt the burden of any such fear — and such people tend to get prickly and defensive when the subject is raised, as though their interlocutor means to park sole and exclusive blame for this set of circumstances at their feet. Mention any of these facts in polite company, however diffidently, and you can surely expect to be accused of indulging yourself in the worst and most hyperbolic sort of left-wing rhetoric. Even to utter the word “privilege” is to chance having yourself dismissed as a hectoring scold.
And so I learned to talk not of the moral dimensions of this failure, but of its practical implications.
My understanding of the cost of fear starts with my reading of American sociologist Mark Granovetter’s landmark paper of 1973, “The Strength of Weak Ties.” “Weak Ties” concerns the diffusion of information in social networks; Granovetter’s thesis is essentially that we learn the most from people we know the least — more precisely, that because we generally share a very wide range of beliefs and assumptions with those we’re closest to, we tend to receive truly novel information from people to whom we’re only loosely affiliated.
A big city, of course, ought to be wonderful at generating just the kinds of weak ties Granovetter’s paper described. The encounters that take place while waiting at a bus stop, over the counter of a deli, the happenstance conversation with the next person in line at the supermarket — these are, at least potentially, hinges between entirely different ways of life, and moments at which information might pass through the membrane. But these are precisely the opportunities that drop off when fear is the order of the day, for reasons that are both physical and psychic.
The first is a matter of simple availability: you obviously can’t contribute to, or derive benefit from, a milieu you’re not in in the first place. The second has to do with your receptivity, your openness to the unpredictable. Divining the intentions of those with whom we’re unfamiliar, personally or culturally, is hard work. When you’re always on alert — pre-emptively cringing from the violence you assume and believe is headed your way eventually, from one or another direction — it’s exhausting to submit every chance encounter to an on-the-spot risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis. It’s safer, and certainly easier, not to drop your guard. And so we stay in our comfort zone, and default to engaging people with whom we’re already more or less similar.
Which is to say that I was denied learning anything from the people down the end of my block of East 7th, and they from me. I don’t want to get sentimental about this and suggest that we need have been best friends, sending choruses of “Kumbaya” pealing into the air of the Lower East Side and so on. But neither was that what Granovetter was getting at. All that is necessary for information to flow is simply exchange.
In this regard, I don’t even think “exchange” means anything particularly declarative. I mean the casual intelligence that two or more people cannot help but impart to one another simply by virtue of being copresent: the way we do, or do not, respond to the utterance of a well-known name. The expressions that cross our countenance upon hearing certain words or ideas, before we master our facial musculature. The way someone holds a bag, a phone, or a newspaper; the pocket in which they keep their wallet; the particular style with which they address the task of locomotion. All of these things are, at least in potential, the makings of urban savoir faire.
There’s a way of quantifying what is lost when we withdraw from the possibility of such exchanges: Metcalfe’s law. This is a notion drawn from the theory of telecommunications, which states that the value of a network rises as the square of the number of connected nodes. The very first telephone, in other words, is entirely worthless: what of value could you possibly do with it? But it leaps in value the moment a second telephone is brought into existence. The number of potential connections, and the aggregate value of the network as a whole, expand geometrically with each additional phone that is added to it. What does this terribly abstract framing of things imply for city life? It means that every one of us who connects to the network of possibilities that is any great city benefits from it — benefits more, in fact, the bigger and further-flung that network is — but that the network’s power, capability and value are tremendously enhanced by the fact of our connection. And to a very great degree, we connect to any such urban network physically, by being bodily present in it and to it.
And that’s why it matters, concretely and in terms the hardest-knuckled quant can respect, whenever someone is prevented from full participation in the city by the gnawing sense that they are a target. I am convinced that every such event is a double loss, doubly felt. Because Metcalfe’s law has an inverse, too. Every person that huddles behind a triple-locked door — or who does make it onto the public way, but only as a timid presence, tuning out everything but the mission at hand — does not simply shut out the city and its possibilities. They represent a corresponding, exponential loss to the city. Not only is the person deprived of the things the city can do for them, in other words, but the city is deprived of the perspectives, skills and capabilities they might have offered the collectivity. You don’t need to acknowledge a moral dimension, or find the language of privilege and exclusion particularly resonant, to understand why this is an outcome we might wish to prevent.
And if weak links do, counterintuitively, turn out to be the thing that binds the whole city together as any kind of psychologically recognizable entity, we’re actually indulging much more damage than we think in allowing these conditions to persist. Or at least that’s what seems to be implied by my reading of Metcalfe and Granovetter: if what you want is to disrupt a city’s overall social cohesion — and limit its ability to conduct novel and potentially vital information from one community to another — there’s nothing more effective you can do than sunder the weak links.
By contrast, though, what if you’re interested in improving the city’s ability to benefit its citizens, and benefit from them in turn? There’s a potential point of intervention at the threshold of public and private, whenever people are faced with the choice of fully committing themselves to the public way or remaining in an environment they perceive as offering them shelter. What might outweigh fear, at such a moment? Awareness of the actual conditions someone might confront, and of the resources they may be able to draw upon in doing so. Confidence in their own capability. Bonds of solidarity — the idea that whatever threats do exist in the world, no one is forced to face them alone. In a word: information.
There’s nothing information can do about that fear per se, especially once it’s set itself up in the body. Not being the kind of thing that can be refuted, it remains beyond the reach of mere facts. But practical informational tools can and do give people the strength to act and to be in public regardless of their fear.
For example, some women I know use Google’s StreetView on a regular basis to scan the neighborhood around destinations that are unfamiliar to them, especially if they’re planning to arrive there after the fall of dark. They use the service ahead of time to determine points of particular vulnerability, and plan routes with more lighting, population, and activity. It gives them a sense that they’re more in control, and that often turns out to be just enough to coax someone out the door.
Or consider a mobile application called Stop and Frisk Watch, developed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and translated into Spanish by a group called Make the Road New York. “Stop and Frisk” is a policy instituted by the New York City Police Department; in theory, it permits a police officer who has reasonable suspicion to believe that a person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime, to stop and question that person, and search them for any weapons they may be carrying. In practice, the NYPD’s own records show that nearly nine out of every ten of the more than four million New Yorkers subjected to such street interrogations since 2002 — the overwhelming majority of whom were black or Latino — have been completely innocent.
If you are young, male, and black or Latino, in other words, you have a nontrivial chance of being stopped by the police every time you step out of doors, and if you think that doesn’t contribute to people’s sense that their very personhood is being called into question, you’ve never met a New York City police officer. By giving those subjected to the policy a way to record and report their experiences, Stop and Frisk Watch helps them resist, even a little, the sense that power in the world is exclusively arrayed against them and there’s no recourse or succor to be found anywhere.
What’s at stake in both cases is the basic right to be in public. To be sure, constraints on this right are experienced in different ways by different populations, and to varying degrees from one individual to another. But what so many of these abrogations all have in common as a ground note is the experience of bodily dread. And if we’re to take “Weak Ties” and Metcalfe’s law as our guides, this dread, when surrendered to, quite literally undoes the bonds which make any city what it is — weakens its resilience, hampers its ability to convey vital information from one neighborhood, district or community to another, and corrodes its own ability to respond effectively at moments of crisis.
It’s precisely Granovetter’s weak links, in fact, that turn out to furnish cities with an unusual and highly desirable property: that of getting stronger under stress. This is the quality Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “antifragility.” You may find Taleb fatuous; I certainly do. But antifragility is a terrifically important idea. When a city is confronted with some sudden external shock — a Blitz, a Fukushima, a Sandy — it’s the tenuous relations that get activated, the nodding acquaintances that are based on very little more than recognizing a person from one or two prior encounters. It’s these, and not the stronger bonds of affiliation and existing affinity, that wind up furnishing the grounds of cooperation under the most difficult circumstances, and that can in turn make the difference between a community’s survival and its disappearance. And these are the relations that never come into being when we let fear shut us in, off or down.
Any means of which we can avail ourselves, therefore, that dispels our fear, and does so without adding to the burden anybody else is forced to shoulder, is something that can only strengthen our cities, our selves, and their ability to mutually reinforce one another. And this is something that we all ought to agree is desirable, whether or not we ourselves are moved by the moral dimension of dread’s persistence.
Stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly and jittery redux: On design interventions intended to make space inhospitable
From Mitchell Duneier’s Sidewalk, 1999. The context is a discussion of various physical interventions that have been made in the fabric of New York City’s Pennsylvania Station:
On a walk through the station with [director of “homeless outreach” Richard] Rubel and the photographer Ovie Carter one summer day in 1997…I found it essentially bare of unhoused people. I told Rubel of my interest in the station as a place that had once sustained the lives of unhoused people, and asked if he could point out changes that had been made so that it would be less inviting as a habitat where subsistence elements could be found in one place. He pointed out a variety of design elements of the station which had been transformed, helping to illustrate aspects of the physical structure that had formerly enabled it to serve as a habitat.
He took us to a closet near the Seventh Avenue entrance. “We routinely had panhandlers gathering here, and you could see this closet area where that heavy bracket is, that was a niche.”
“What do you mean by ‘a niche’?”
“This spot right over here was where a panhandler would stand. So my philosophy is, you don’t create nooks and corners. You draw people out into the open, so that your police officers and your cameras have a clean line of sight [emphasis added], so people can’t hide either to sleep or to panhandle.”
Next he brought us to a retail operation with a square corner. “Someone here can sleep and be protected by this line of sight. A space like this serves nobody’s purpose [emphasis added]. So if their gate closes, and somebody sleeps on the floor over here, they are lying undetected. So what you try to do is have people construct their building lines straight out, so you have a straight line of sight with no areas that people can hide behind.”
Next he brought us to what he called a “dead area.” “I find this staircase provides limited use to the station. Amtrak does not physically own this lobby area. We own the staircase and the ledge here. One of the problems that we have in the station is a multi-agency situation where people know what the fringe areas are, the gray areas, that are less than policed. So they serve as focal points for the homeless population. We used to see people sleeping on this brick ledge every night. I told them I wanted a barrier that would prevent people from sleeping on both sides of this ledge. This is an example fo turning something around to get the desired effect.”
“Another situation we had was around the fringes of the taxi roadway. We had these niches that were open. The Madison Square Garden customers that come down from the games would look down and see a community of people living there, as well as refuse that they leave behind.” He installed a fencing project to keep the homeless from going behind corners, drawing them out into the open [emphasis added]. “And again,” said Rubel, “the problem has gone away.”
This logic, of course, is immanent in the design of a great deal of contemporary public urban space, but you rarely find it expressed quite as explicitly as it is here. Compare, as well, Jacobs (1961) on the importance to vibrant street life (and particularly of children’s opportunities for play) of an irregular building line at the sidewalk edge.
Further to notes on a diagram of Occupy Sandy
Yes, enumerate the carriage parts — still not a carriage.
When you begin making decisions and cutting it up rules and names appear
And once names appear you should know when to stop.
– Tao te Ching, tr. M. LaFargue. (For the record, I prefer the Stephen Mitchell translation, but this seemed more pointedly relevant to the work at hand.)
Adam Greenfield's Speedbird 
Being discussed now