Technocracy, Discipline and the Anti-discipline

The reliance on experts and expertise for governing is said to serve as a fundamental tool for urban problem solving. Critical voices also point out that it is proven to weaken the ties between people and the governing forces. In top-down technocratic approaches, often linked to political ideologies, planners operate as an executive force of the governing authority, imposing spatial order of intricate matrices that foster certain urban behavior. The behavioral patterns constituted by the innumerable operations are then imprinted onto the space as techniques of socio-cultural production. With a variety of actors and circumstances present, the city is not and cannot ever be static. The urban organism is in an operative mode at all times. So who is the navigator (optimizer) of the operations? Those who lay the foundation for operating or those who execute the operations?

Design as a Tool of Discipline

In City of Tomorrow, Le Corbusier notes that perpetual re-establishment of the urban equilibrium is for vital purposes purely ephemeral [1], suggesting a need for an intervention with more abiding results. With his later quote, he proposed that space “under a good organization, [creating] an impression of peace, order and cleanliness, [should] unquestionably teach its inhabitants discipline [2].” In such a case the conception of the new grants the architect a very special position. It means to have a creative role in determining the very essence of the absolute, as not only having to comprehend the spirit of the era but also to initiate the process of change. Those honored to hold such a decisive role have the „most beautiful destiny [...] of exercising the power over society, a true priestly function, and [are] marching forcefully in the van of all the intellectual faculties in the epoch of development“ [3]. ‘Exercise of power over society as a beautiful destiny’ can be considered to be a rather concerning formulation, yet it depicts the core value of the top-down technocratic planning. Such a mindset is still present in today’s planning.

Space and its content, seemingly disorganized but truly an organized complexity, is not possible to reduce to a simple mathematical problem. When it comes to complex systems and their functioning, it is impossible to concentrate all dispersed information, which enables the system to function, and make it calculable. Such a cloud of formation has three fundamental features: it is defined by space and time — it is situated; it is not formally codified — it is tacit; and it changes over time — it is dynamic [4]. Under these conditions it is assumed the city to be rather a living being than a machine for living.

The Issue of Ambiguity

Traditional planning practices adopt a course of action representing certain value systems, which are demonstrated in the way the design concepts are planned. Mobilization of all capacities, their imposition and implementation is then a sensitive act of balancing of the absolute with the practical — the concept, its execution and the establishment of its operative mode. These processes reveal ambiguities and paradoxes of the aspirations to scientifically establish public action as well as show the radical loss of desire to incorporate human capabilities into planning. Human involvement in a form of social production undergoes scrutiny of various rationalization technologies to be ruled out of contribution to the formation of judgements of truth [5]. The problem may stem from primarily relating to the ends and effect rather than technique, with the main limit not being the lack of scientific foundation. Despite the intentions to rationalize and leave out the incalculable (the human behavior), the outcomes reveal insufficiencies in precision, exactness and explicitness of the effects.

The Issue of Neutrality

One of the fundamental tenets of a technocratic approach is also declaring neutrality of decisions to justify the instrumental use of technical expertise. Instrumental reasons as such are not conducive to sustainable progress which usually appears as oversimplification of the causal linkages in urban analysis, leading to oversimplified propositions dominated by technical solutions [6]. Further, any claim of neutrality, according to many critics [7], becomes rather problematic, as the technical experts themselves are aware that they are not being neutral, nor do they acknowledge the limitations of technocratic rationality. These types of distortions, which are discursive and usually political, are connected to specific aspects of the planning process manifested as bypassing of the inconvenient voices [8]. The tasked planning action cannot be prescribed from a position of neutrality, because such a prescription is based on a desired objective [9].

The Issue of (Dis)continuity

The heterogeneity of forces fueling the natural continuity of happenings in the city and referring to the contexts of space and time, are often omitted as well. In intervening in the city, dealing with continuity is a must. If we don’t, we are imposing a destructive force to interrupt the continuity in order to redirect the developments. It means creative destruction or destructive creation, which is an intrusive art of becoming. It still comes with having to accept the transitory aspect as the locus for such a way and the forces against which we are acting.

Counter-paradigms

A thorough examination of the rational model in relation to neutrality, explicitness and adaptiveness capable of preserving urban continuity reveals a dimension of adversarial paradigms. These host microbe-like operations proliferating through the technocratic structures, deflecting their functioning by means of multitude of tactics articulated in the details of everyday life. The creative procedures that are exercised by the groups or individuals, who are caught in the nets of discipline and pushed to their ideal limits can be understood as a network of anti-discipline [10]. They are mostly unrecognized and/or they represent the anti-order of counter-order as a reactionary practice. These counter-realms are developed through counter-practices, gradually transforming into visual qualities.

The utilization of the urban space by everyday rituals, re-use and function of the memory despite the authority — the extensions of the weighty apparatus — consist of almost orchestral combinations of logical elements (temporalization, injunction, etc.) which are determined by the circumstances and conjectural demand. These activities are performed by the majority, yet on the margins. They are unsigned and the actors unrecognized discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of technocratic rationality. In technocratically constructed space, new trajectories and paths are subordinated to the paradigmatic orders of spaces that are neither determined nor captured by the system. Since they are not statistically investigated, they are not a subject to classification or calculation and refer to their own category. Yet they suggest a movement and thus an inscription into space.

Behavioral operations each lay down a law itself, establishing a degree of plurality of choices how these operations are performed. These modes of usage multiply with the extension of acculturation phenomena [11]. Though, in the environments constructed in such a manner, the multitude of individual interventions are visible. They are not (usually) recognized as a space-creator, rather they are seen as either intrusive amateur interventions or accidents resulting from thoughtless actions. They are not considered important for urban design, yet they are evaluated and criticized. They are visible and invisible at the same time. They remain within the prescribed syntaxes of the paradigmatic organizations of space, they are heterogenous to them and represent different operating preferences. The organic spatial morphology contains information about these forces. The future scenarios can thus be constructed by the ability to read these practices (and the ability to recognize the knowledge behind them) because they constitute one’s own power to create and claim their own space within the technocratic paradigm. Such a paradigm has thus been a reason for the counter-forces to emerge in the first place.

Effects of the Anti-discipline

Technocratic spatial models subjected to foreign forces resulting into appropriation of the space, it produces important effects [12]:

1. The triumph of place over time — acquired advantages that are capitalized to prepare future expansions, thus give a claim a certain degree of independence and the variability of circumstances.

2. Mastery of place through sight — through panoptic practice, when the foreign forces are transformed into objects that can be observed and measured, they are included within a scope of vision. To be able to see is also being able to predict and run ahead of time by reading the space.

3) Creation of readable spaces — defining the power of knowledge by the ability to transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces. Recognition of strategy stemming from a specific type of knowledge that is sustained and determined by the own power to create and claim one’s own place.

Has architecture has become too important to be left to architects [13]? Perhaps not (yet). But proposing an iterative and interactive planning process is where the development of urban practice is taking us. The oppressive distinction between the user and the designer should be blurred. Designer’s role is not to identify the needs of the user for them, but instead with them, which also increases the set of complex variables which would never be considered by the procedural tactics based on purely scientific methods of cyclical alternating between observation, evaluation and proposition [14]. The relations between the data should not be differentiated between the technical and the other forms of knowledge, but a continuous tension between the polarities — vastly different from banal participatory practices and technocratic planning models.

References:

[1], [2], [10] Harvey, David (1991). The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change; Willey-Blackwell.

[3], [11], [12] De Certeau, Michel (1984). The practice of Everyday Life, University of California Berkeley Press.

[4] Moroni, S. (2014) Two Different Theories of Two Distinct Spontaneous Phenomena: Orders of Actions and Evolution of Institutions in Hayek, Cosmos + Taxis 1(2).

[5] Palermo, P.C.; Ponzini, D. (2014). Place-making and Urban Development: New Challenges for Contemporary Planning and Design, Routledge, London.

[6] Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, New York.

[7], [8] Forester, J. (1980). Critical Theory and Planning Practice. Journal of American Planning Association 46(3).

[9] Davidoff, P. (1965). Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning, Journal of American Planning Association 3(4).

[13], [14] De Carlo, G. (2005). Architecture’s Public, In: Architecture and Participation. Spon Press, London.