LECTURE - Space, power & everyday life

So far we've looked at how cities are defined, and in whose interests. Now we're going to focus on how cities organise social difference and interaction, or how power plays out in spatial terms.

Madanipour looks at how exclusion is always already a socio-spatial phenomenon. Defining exclusion in terms of lack of access to employment, lack of political representation and marginalisation from cultural symbols, meanings, discourses and rituals, he reminds us that the worst kind of exclusion combines all three. These forms of exclusion, he argues, tend to be spatially concentrated in places like the inner-city or peripheral areas.

"In the past, this spatiality of social exclusion has led to attempts to dismantle such pockets of deprivation without necessarily dismantling the causes of deprivation or the forces bringing them together in particular enclaves... [resulting in] attempts to despatialize social exclusion."

In order to demonstrate the spatiality of social exclusion, Madanipour cites national boundaries as well as neighbourhoods. In the case of nations we have political boundaries, and in the case of neighbourhoods we have property boundaries, and in terms of management or governance, both nations and neighbourhooods are regarded as mutually exclusive, if inter-related, areas. In other words, the "spatiality of social exclusion is constructed through the physical organization of space as well as through the social control of space".

Zukin addresses the privatisation and commercialisation of public space in New York City by focussing on the creation of collective identity as a function of the symbolic economy:

"Building a city depends on how people combine the traditional economic factors of land, labor, and capital. But it also depends on how they manipulate symbolic languages of exclusion and entitlement... What is new about the symbolic economy since the 1970s is its symbiosis of image and product, the scope and scale of selling images on a national and even a global level, and the role of the symbolic economy in speaking for, or representing, the city... The symbolic economy unifies material practices of finance, labor, art, performance, and design... Developing the city's symbolic economy involves recycling workers, sorting people in housing markets, luring investment, and negotiating political claims for public goods and ethnic promotion."

By equating the city with cultural production, Zukin essentially positions the city as brand, and then evaluates the consequences of turning public space into brand(ed) space. Central Park, Bryant Park and the Hudson River Park, she argues, are more private than public if we consider how they are funded and governed. She outlines the history and implicit values associated with privatisation or restoration of public space. Separate, quiet, attractive and safe, these public parks offer rather precise defintions of which public they serve. Zukin characterises New York's public parks as the "visual and spatial representations of a middle-class public culture", deliberately constructed and maintained to be "equated with a return to civility" and attempting "to reclaim public space from the sense of menace that drives shoppers, and eventually store owners and citizens, to the suburbs".

She concludes by noting that each section of the city gets a "different form of visual consumption catering to a different constituency... In general, however, their vision of public space derives from commercial culture." In this process of social stratification we may find what she calls the "politics of everyday fear" - which then forces us to ask "who will occupy the image of the city?" and "how do we connect what we experience in public space with ideologies and rhetorics of public culture?"

We'll return to the question of public space in later classes, but for now Zukin questions who gets to do what, when and where, in our cities - and keeps us oriented towards issues of space and power.

Davis offers a view of Los Angeles that draws on points raised by both Madanipour and Zukin - especially the politics of fear and the organisation of difference. In this short excerpt he sees residential and commercial security undermining any "residual hopes for urban reform and social integration".

"In cities like Los Angeles, on the bad edge of postmodernity, one observes an unprecedented tendency to merge urban design, architecture and the police apparatus into a single, comprehensive security effort..."

[See also Military Operations as Urban Planning by Phillip Misselwitz and Eyal Weizman and War as Architecture by Tom Vanderbilt.]

"[But] 'security' has less to do with personal safety than with the degree of personal insulation, in residential, work, consumption and travel environments, from 'unsavory' groups and individuals, even crowds in general... [and] the universal and ineluctable consequence of this crusade to secure the city is the destruction of accessible public space... The 'fortress effect' emerges, not as an inadvertent failure of design, but as deliberate socio-spatial strategy."

Davis claims that urban (re)development in L.A. reproduces "spatial apartheid" and further entrenches inaccessibility - or the spatial and social separation of old and new, poor and rich. He fears that much urban gentrification leads to not just the "killing of the street" but also the "killing of the crowd" as ethic diversity becomes almost impossible in these spaces of [white] "middle-class work, consumption and recreation".

If we bring these questions and concerns home, so to speak, do you see any evidence of this in your neighbourhoods? How does socio-spatial exclusion work in Ottawa? If we understand the problem to be both spatial and social, what are some ways of building more inclusive cities?

Readings

Sharon Zukin, "Whose Culture? Whose City?" from The Cultures of Cities (library info)

Ali Madanipour, "Social Exclusion and Space" from Social Exclusion in European Cities

Mike Davis, "Fortress L.A." from City of Quartz (library info)

See also:

Out of place : homeless mobilizations, subcities, and contested landscapes by Talmadge Wright (library)

Behind the gates : life, security, and the pursuit of happiness in fortress America by Setha Low (library)

Geographies of Exclusion by David Sibley (library info)

Tearing down the streets : adventures in urban anarchy by Jeff Ferrell (library)

Inclusion and Exclusion in European Societies edited by Martin Kohli & Alison Woodward

Spaces of Social Exclusion by Jamie Gough, Aram Eisenschitz & Rosemary Sales (forthcoming)