005 ON THINKING Cities - as if people mattered
from "Subjectivities in Investigations of the Urban" (segment 1)
To a large degree, this post joins the dots, continuing discussions which the opening three have touched and had to leave open. In order not to retell my own work, I will proceed with a segment of Subjectivities in Investigations of the Urban: the Scream, the Mirror, the Shadow, one of the nine books produced within the probably most important and most inspiring project that I have ever undertaken – Measuring the non-Measurable – Mn’M. Due to its length and complexity, that essay will be split in stand-alone segments which will, as in the original, add up to an Mn’M whole (Mn’M books were published by flick Studio, Tokyo).
Mn’M was conducted at Keio, the oldest and one of the most famous universities in Japan, within its reputable Faculty of Science and Technology and Department of System Design Engineering, where my international, interdisciplinary research laboratory co+labo.radović (all in small letters!) operated in the period 2009-21.
In Japan, architecture and urban design are commonly taught within schools of science and technology. Placing co+labo within a veritable centre of excellence in those fields posed some fascinating challenges, to both sides. My laboratory has (with a small “r”) explicitly focused on the idea(l)s of eco-urbanity and Radical realism, on the ways in which spaces get conceived, perceived and lived in diverse environmental and cultural contexts. Truly cross-cultural co+labo, with stranger, gaijin at its helm, was unusual for Japanese academia. Our mission was to bring new questions in, to provoke the self-confident host giant, in order to point at the possibility of different entries, agendas and angles of investigation in research. Precisely Andrew Linde’s “stupid questions”.
Faculty of Science and Technology was a difficult, yet truly inspirational, agonistic context for those efforts. The quality of Mn’M was built upon dramatic interdisciplinary potential of that organisation. With its three international symposia, numerous workshops, excursions and countless presentations globally, Measuring the non-Measurable team sought ways to challenge the dominant, progressist approaches to research, in line with de Certeau’s quest to force theory to recognise its limits.
In simplest terms, our primary focus was at two constellations of urban phenomena which resist quantification – culture and sustainability. Mn’M encouraged debates about urban quality (as if we were able to define it), by challenging the very idea of measurability. In Mn’M “measuring” was only a shorthand for all efforts to capture and represent quality in a solely “scientific” way. Participants from ten cities in Asia, Europe and Australia have joined forces to challenge unsustainable schism between “measurable” and “non-measurable”, “textual” and “numerical” in the urban, and to address its untamed totality, Lefebvrian oeuvre.
So, let’s ... Mn’M!
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Our realities are objective, material, concrete projections of society, of societal values onto the ground.
Our realities are subjective, personal, intimate realms of one, of two, of the (very) few.
Objective and subjective realms coexist, they are only seemingly separate. We tend to separate them, to simplify and reduce reality in order to satisfy our need to comprehend or even just to survive, but that does not make the conditions which we shape and which shape us any simpler.
Urban condition is human, thus conflictual, thus political, potentially – human(e).
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We will now address subjectivities, the objective condition of our being in the world.
ONE TECHNICAL NOTE - the subtitles below were customised for desktop viewing; my apologies if at your mobile device they appear too small. D.
In Subjectivities in investigation of the urban we have put forward one simple, but contentions issue, namely the need for non-reductive approach to investigations of the urban. It was deliberately polemological, in hope to, in the tradition of Michel de Certeau, “force theory to recognise its own limits” (Highmore, 2006).
While urban analysis seeks objectivity, in reality that quality often stays elusive. Although many aspects of making and living cities critically rely on both natural and social sciences, the complexity of the urban is never reducible to the scientific thinking only. Reaching the very core of human condition, the existential nature of cities often defies analytical rigour and logic. Nevertheless, immense urban complexity needs careful planning, responsible design and sensitive management. That demands constant dialectisation of various knowledges (Haraway, 1991). In order to make itself useful, much of the thinking has to be simplified and pragmatically instrumentalised, so that it can address the real goals within the real, strict time-frames. The success of many necessary, pragmatic actions critically relies upon reliable, objective, scientifically accurate methods and databases, the best that rigorous urban research, planning and design-research are capable of providing. That is true for all sorts of dimensions of urban functioning, which need responsible planning, design, development and management, to ensure optimal performance of complex urban systems.
The problem arises when that same logic gets applied to the fragile and lively socio-cultural fabric which makes the very essence of the urban. In simplest terms, when applying techno-scientific logic to Lefebvrian oeuvre, we easily end up with practices which could dwarf the darkest of Orwellian fears. The paradigms which support such thinking indeed tend to be totalitarian, and thus genuinely unable to comprehend that there are the spheres of human and urban reality where it would be not only unnecessary, but where it is directly counterproductive and dangerous to be simply “efficient” and “useful”. Within the world of booming techno-optimism, that question needs to be urgently addressed, and addressing it makes the core of our pledge for non-reductive approach to the urban. We need flexible and robust, composite approaches capable of addressing, with equal relevance, competence and confidence, both measurable and non-measurable, numerical and textual (Radović, 2012, 2013, 2013a) dimensions of urban phenomena and variety of their dynamic interactions. Communicating the resulting knowledges is as important as those knowledges themselves, for the ultimate aim is to empower the bottom-up energies and support recognition of countless, layered subjective realities - all of which matter.
Another dimension of this issue should not be forgotten. The ruling paradigm is not based only on benevolent, but misplaced technocratic desire for efficiency. As hinted above, there is also a strong undercurrent of totalitarian political will which stimulates such management, design, planning practices and, most dangerously, there is a corresponding reductivist and instrumentalised thinking about the urban. The desired outcome of such thinking and its application is precisely the reduction of the urban, in response to an explicit intention to tame the innate, potentially explosive social intensities which only dense, complex urban environments can generate. A bewildering fascination with innovation, and seemingly unlimited support for creating the (brave) new (world) and, in particular, for producing highly controllable, parallel, virtual and addictive realities transforms the agora into the panopticon – at the global scale.
Without further dwelling on the socio-political aspects of academic discourse (which we have covered in previous books of Mn’M edition), here we only summarise that: (1) there is an evident support for research which emphasizes measurable, quantifiable aspects of urban quality; (2) such trends come from the fact that global power brokers worship a single bottom line; and that (3) urban research, seeking legitimization, credibility and funds from such sources of power, all too often presents itself as capable of identifying and establishing the unshakeable facts, to measure and to “prove”. Their results better reflect the realities and demands of the dominant power than actual socio-cultural conditions on the ground. In return, the simplified and instrumentalised worldviews which they support simplify and instrumentalise the world. That was never as obvious as it is today, when the mere 0,01% of world population, literally the richest 85 individuals across the globe, share a combined wealth equal to the possessions of the poorest 3.5 billion of the world's population (Oxfam, 2014). As the gap between the elites and population, the majority of which is urban, widens dramatically, one side arguably receives some very measurable benefits, while the vast majority ends up with the glaringly non-measurable misery. That is not accidental. Globalisation, as we know it today, was designed to efficiently concentrate power and wealth, while the multiplicity and diversity of human realities remain bewilderingly complex and hopelessly powerless. Urban research plays active role in producing such realities.
The main focus of this book is at the very point in which the need for a well-founded, all-inclusive, non-reductionist thinking about the urban clashes with efficiency of the reductionist approaches of contemporary, “spectacular” (Debord, 1998) urbanism. The aim is to point at some dimensions of the urban which get routinely pushed aside, by bringing them (back) into the practices of thinking, feeling, planning, designing, making, managing and living cities – as if people mattered (Schumacher, 1973).