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Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural Planning History

University of California Press

Cities are plugged into the globe of history like capacitors: they condense and conduct the currents of social time. Their layered surfaces, their coats of painted stucco, their wraps of concrete register the force of these currents both as wear and as narrative. That is, city surfaces tell time and stories. Cities are full of stories in time, some sedimented and catalogued; others spoorlike, vestigial, and dispersed. Their narratives are epic and everyday; they tell of migration and production, law and laughter, revolution and art. Yet, although obvious, their registry is never wholly legible because each foray into the palimpsest of city surfaces reveals only traces of these relations. Once lived as irreducible to one another, they are registered as part of the multiplicity and simultaneity of processes that turn the city into an infinite geometry of superimpositions. Their identities, modes, forms, categories, and types recombine in the gray matter of streets. City narratives are, as a result, both evident and enigmatic. Knowing them is always experimental.

It must have been with extreme exasperation, therefore, that the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck asserted in the mid-1960s that "we know nothing of vast multiplicitywe cannot come to grips with itnot as architects, planners or anybody else. . . . [But] if society has no formhow can architects build its counterform?" (quoted in Frampton 1980: 276-277). This confession of illiteracy is especially striking not only because it abandons the narrative of cities but also because it does so by declaring the dissolution of the social within the disciplines of modem architecture and planning. This declaration is particularly bitter because it signals the end of a century in which modernist doctrine posed the urban questions of our time precisely by advancing planning and architecture as solutions to the social crises of industrial capitalism. At least in its European and Latin American versions, modernism forged what we could call this imaginary

of planning by developing its revolutionary building types and planning conventions as instruments of social change and by conceiving of change in terms of the imagined future embodied in the narratives of its master plans.1

But is van Eyck's inability to find form in societythat is, to read its multiplicitya problem of society as he implies or a consequence of a theoretical position that rejects the redemptive claims and social engagements of modernism? Given the human capacity for narrative, and its ineluctable registry in artifact, I conclude the latter. Moreover, I would argue that van Eyck's consternation is representative of the estrangement of the social in modern architecture and its related modes of planning generally. I suggest that this estrangement is a consequence of a number of theoretical conditions that structure the current production of concepts in these fields about the urban landscape: (1) the rejection of the redemptive power of modernism deriving not only from the perceived failures of its utopian mode but also from the more general dissolution of the idea of the social itself in planning, architecture, government, and social science; (2) the inability of the professions of planning and architecture to move beyond that rejection to develop a new activist social imagination; and (3) the preoccupation in postmodern theory with aesthetic formalism, technologies of communication, and concepts of virtual reality which tends to disembody the social and rematerialize it as commodity images.2 If my conclu-

Van Eyck's conjunction of "architect or planner" suggests a potentially confusing use of terms. I am grateful to John Friedmann for having urged, in a conversation about this essay, that I clarify my own sense of this problem. If we look at the use of the terms planner and planning in the various professions and disciplines that claim them, we see two distinct but, I argue, related meanings. On the one hand, planning is very generally used to refer to urban design, derived in large measure from architectural theory and practice. In this form, the dominant mode of planning in modern times is that developed by CIAM. As I discuss, this model is predicated on an idealist project of alternative futures. On the other hand, since the consolidation of the modern state, planning is also widely used to refer to the application of social science to the management of society. Indeed, some applied social scientists, like Friedmann, who call themselves planners, are deeply critical of modernist urban design and its modes of planning. Very often, however, these two senses of planning share a notion of alternative futures and a reliance on the state that relate them both historically and theoretically. It is this relation that interests me and that permits a broader argument about modernity and planning in its various forms. Thus, I use the CIAM model of urban design as paradigmatic of modernist planning. However, I also consider applied social science as a related version when it is based on a similar ideal of the future.

These concerns receive such extensive discussion in the literature on postmodernism that I cannot comment on them here without being superficial. In addition to the well-known studies of the glorification of consumption in postmodernist theory and description of contemporary society by Jean Baudrillard or Paul Virilio, for example, see the recent (and fun, if not always accurate) work by Celeste Olalquiaga (1992). For a recent attempt to dematerialize the city itself, see Sorkin 1992.

sion is correct, then the problem van Eyck poses is more anthropological than morphological. That is, it is a question of learning to interpret anew what appears to him now thoroughly defamiliarized; in a word, society itself, or, better, aspects of the social that indicate its dynamism.

As I do not believe that "society has no form" or that "we know nothing of vast multiplicity," I want to argue that one of the most urgent problems in planning and architectural theory today is the need to develop a different social imaginationone that is not modernist but that nevertheless reinvents modernism's activist commitments to the invention of society and to the construction of the state. I suggest that the sources of this new imaginary lie not in any specifically architectural or planning production of the city but rather in the development of theory in both fields as an investigation into what I call the spaces of insurgent citizenshipor insurgent spaces of citizenship, which amounts to the same thing. By insurgent, I mean to emphasize the opposition of these spaces of citizenship to the modernist spaces that physically dominate so many cities today. I also use it to emphasize an opposition to the modernist political project that absorbs citizenship into a plan of state building and that, in the process, generates a certain concept and practice of planning itself. At the heart of this modernist political project is the doctrinealso clearly expressed in the tradition of civil or positivist lawthat the state is the only legitimate...