The Spirit of Authoritarian Architecture, and How Localism Fixes it.
'Scientific Management' spreads to the built environment; Jane Jacobs fights back. Reviewing Seeing like a State Chapter 4 - The High Modernist City
How to Change the World is a weekly blog about reversing American decline. I will (1) study successful models of governance throughout history, primarily in the West, (2) highlight what’s going wrong leading to institutional decline or ‘political decay’, and (3) present models of democratic innovation that could lead us into a prosperous, peaceful and abundant 21st century.
This is part 3 in a series exploring ideas in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. You can find Part 1 and Part 2 here. Thanks for reading.
“There is no ambiguity to Le Corbusier's view of how authority relations should be ordered: hierarchy prevails in every direction. At the apex of the pyramid, however, is not a capricious autocrat but rather a modern philosopher-king who applies the truths of scientific understanding for the well-being of all.”
Last week I wrote about the birth of ‘scientific management’ in government. It began with applying the logic of industrialization to state governance. It came to full flower with the Communist experiments of the 20th century and survives today mostly in Progressive movements. Think about scientific management as ‘expert rule.’ The idea is not just that experts should be listened to and given special consideration. This should be the case in every developed country. No, in scientific management, experts feel so far above the masses that they have to do the decision-making.
Today we will talk about scientific management in concrete terms, namely, how it’s practitioners envisioned the redesign of whole cities in a ‘logical,’ brutalist, top-down mold. I went into this chapter not seeing much of a connection between architecture and authoritarianism. I used to walk by brutalist architecture and think to myself: what strange demonic force gave birth to that? All I knew was that it made me as an individual feel small, disempowered and oppressed, and this all felt intentional.
I now understand it is a manifestation of Authoritarian High-Modernist thought.
Let’s first look at architects and urban planners Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer. Both were High-Modernists that designed city-scale plans for utopias so imposing and orderly that they hoped to transform their very populations into more rational beings.
Le Corbusier
“The Le Corbusian city was designed, first and foremost, as a workshop for production. Human needs, in this context, were scientifically stipulated by the planner. Nowhere did he admit that the subjects for whom he was planning might have something valuable to say on this matter or that their needs might be plural rather than singular. Such was his concern with efficiency that he treated shopping and meal preparation as nuisances that would be discharged by central services like those offered by well-run hotels.”
One of Le Corbusier’s most famous projects was a planned redesign of a massive swath of central Paris created in 1925, called Plan Voisin. Praise God it never materialized. But it was taken very seriously at the time. Imagine standing in a Paris street and thinking that it needed to look more like the above.
His largest built project is Chandigarh, the capital city of Punjab in India. Most of the government buildings and housing in the city were designed by a team headed by Le Corbusier.
“The scientific architect was obliged to first train a new clientele that would "freely" choose the urban life that Le Corbusier had planned for them.”
It’s interesting in the first place that these architects, just like the bureaucratic High-Modernist managers in the last post, also label themselves “scientific.” Presumably because when one wants to coerce the masses into something unnatural, it’s helpful to pretend to be a representative of ‘science,’ rather than an eccentric with unnatural ideas.
All of that cement, all of those boxes trigger a feeling of almost horrendous smallness in the observer. Due to High-Modernist’s obsession with hierarchy, this was by design. It was recently revealed in Le Corbusier’s private letters that he was a fascist anti-semite. Here’s a fine quote of his:
“we are in the hands of a victor…Hitler could crown his life with a magnificent feat: the clean up of Europe.” - Le Corbusier
Unsurprising that he creates public buildings that make pedestrians feel like inmates.
Oscar Neimeyer
Oscar Neimeyer planned the entire city of Brasilia from a drawing table. It was to be a modernist utopia. He was also an acolyte of Le Corbusier’s but instead of being a fascist sympathizer, he was a Communist.
From the perspective of the planners of a utopian city, whose goal is more to change the world than to accommodate it, however, the shock and disorientation occasioned by life in Brasilia may be part of its didactic purpose. A city that merely pandered to existing tastes and habits would not be doing its utopian job.
Brasilia is impressive in its scale and grandeur, and I can’t help but respect the amount of sweat and passion that went into it. It is a marvel. But it is also utterly unaccommodating to the individual resident. It is defined by massive monuments, huge cement plazas and broad boulevards. It specifically does not have homey street corners where neighbors run into each other, a comfortable pedestrian culture, or the kind of organic, emergent design we see in cities built, in a sense, collectively by their inhabitants. It is central planning incarnate.
Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs, a native New Yorker, represented an opposing view.
“Compared to uniformity, diversity is always more difficult to design, build, and control.”
While Jacobs acknowledged the need for city planning, she knew that it could never be the planners that gave the city life. She understood the emergent complexity of cities, and that it could never be replicated by the work of a distant expert, no matter how talented.
“Jacobs's analysis is notable for its attention to the micro-sociology of public order. The agents of this order are all nonspecialists whose main business is something else.”
Jacobs saw that the vibrancy and hospitality of a city is made up of a diversity of people going about their own business: someone watching your bike as you run into the bodega, a woman at the bus stop holding another’s baby, chance encounters may seem trivial
But the sum is not trivial at all. The sum of each casual, public contact at a local level — most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone — is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need. The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street. Is cultivation cannot be institutionalized. - Jacobs
Jacobs knew that what made cities livable and desirable was an inherently a bottom-up phenomenon.
"The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop, insofar as public policy and action can do so, cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas, and opportunities to flourish." - Jacobs
The theme of centralization and decentralization continues to come around through my studies of government. The High-Modernists were hierarchical and therefore centralized in the extreme. The two examples above also happened to be political radicals. Jacobs embodies a decentralized approach. Let communities make decisions for themselves, acknowledge that they are emergent and evolving, responding to their own needs. Whereas the High-Modernists saw residents as subservient to society, embodied as the city, Jacobs saw that the built environment is merely a stage for the real drama of life.
Matt Harder runs the public engagement firm Civic Trust, where he helps cities strengthen their civic environment by helping residents, civic organizations, and local government work together to create public projects. Follow him on Twitter.