Contemporary cities all over the world are in crisis, we are told by international organisations of all kinds, e.g. the United Nations and many NGOs. What is happening to our cities? - what is wrong? - and what could, and should, be done about it? These are the basic questions I will work with in this chapter. I will do so by 'digging' in the theoretical underpinnings of the questions.
Where to start? Many different approaches could be used. One of the more holistic approaches might be useful to start with, because it embraces all the questions. Inspired by Terttu Pakarinen (1994), I have chosen what can be called the sustainable development problematique, or discourse. The sustainable development problematique is often thought of in terms of environmental and ecological problems and humanity's problematic relationship to nature. There are many good reasons for this being so - the environmental and ecological problems are very serious indeed, and without a doubt they represent a genuine and fundamental problematique. That it is a global problematique, invading all aspects of human life, and literally all spheres of the world, is today a proposition held in general esteem. The Brundtland Commission, who talked about sustainability as "Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, 1987), has, with the help of many other global policy makers, succeeded in putting the environmental problems on the 'global agenda'. The seemingly growing consensus about the importance of this problematique has not, however, been accompanied by a consensus about the nature (sic) of this problematique. As Pakarinen (1994) aptly puts it, attempts to "define 'sustainable development' in environmental research have mostly led to theoretically unsustainable results". A major reason for this is that many of the attempts to define and act upon the sustainable development problematique tend to stare themselves blind at the environmental-ecological problems (and 'solutions') per se.
The sustainable development problematique started as a reaction to the ecological crisis in modern society. Here, I will focus more on the crisis in modern society as such, rather than on the ecological crisis and its social movements, of which I know much too little to say anything qualified about it. My point is that the ecocrisis should be seen as a crisis among crises. According to Oscar Negt (1985), we are today facing a structurally new form of crisis, namely an erosion crisis: a process where what hitherto as a matter of course has been mutually connected is falling apart; and a process that involves the whole of society and penetrates all its pores. Nothing is protected from this fundamental problematique, neither institutions, subjective attitudes, value systems, the patterns of upbringing and education, nor political regulation mechanisms or existing forms of professional and industrial bodies. The ecological crisis is therefore 'just' one aspect of the erosion crisis. Other aspects of this crisis are related to the economic and social crises, e.g., the unemployment crisis and the welfare state crisis. As pointed out by Læssøe (1994), the whole point of the erosion crisis is that it is the cultural modernisation process itself which is in crisis. The erosion crisis is thus 'deeper' than the traditional crises, because it mainly comes to the fore underneath the public institutional system, in so far as it affects the subjects in their spiritual and intellectual foundations, and changes the subjects' general manifestations of life, including their work ethic, self-esteem, and their value orientation (Negt, 1985).
The erosion crisis is a result of the double-edged phenomenon of modernity. 'Modernity' can be characterised as a world that cannot be lived in as it was inherited, because it is a world where people can count on nothing, a world where no identity can be recovered (Arendt, 1958); a world where man's collective life agenda falls into decay faster than he can create new life agendas (Kluge, 1973). On the other hand, 'modernity' stands for the development of modern social institutions and their world-wide spread, which have created vastly greater opportunities for human beings to enjoy a secure and rewarding existence than any type of pre-modern system (Giddens, 1990). In modernity, the individual becomes 'free', free from traditions and bonds. Free, in a sense, to make his or her own choices in an indefinite market of possibilities; liberated from the chains of subjective dependence and thereby allowed a much greater degree of individual liberty (Harvey, 1989).
The city, with its "incredible diversity of experiences and stimuli" (Simmel, 1911), its pace, its renewal and innovation, its belief in progress, is a symbol of modernity. The city, remarks de Certeau (1984) "is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity". As Harvey (1989) points out, there is a strong connecting thread from Haussmann's re-shaping of Paris in the 1860s through Ebenezer Howard's 'Garden City' (1898), Daniel Burnham's 'White City' (1893), Garnier's 'Linear industrial city' (1903), Camillo Sitte's and Otto Wagner's transformed fin de siecle Vienna, Le Corbusier's 'City of Tomorrow' and 'Plan Voisin' (1924), Frank Lloyd Wright's 'Broadacre Project' (1935) to the large-scale urban renewal efforts undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s in the 'spirit of high modernism'. They were all, in some way, reactions towards the crisis of urban organisation, impoverishment, and congestion. At the same time, modernism is by many held to define the fundamental nature of our times:
"segregation, specialization, centralization, and an undying dedication to technology. Implicit is its sense of progress and the ideology of materialism. It is systemic to almost all western cultures, beyond national borders, political structure, or cultural values." (Calthorpe, 1993).
The city, as a concept, should not, however, be regarded only as a product of modernity. As Lewis Mumford (1968) pointed out, the essentially cumulative nature of the city means that the most valuable function of the city is as an organ of social memory; namely, its linking up the generations, its bringing into the present both the usable past and the desirable future. He presents what he calls an essential key to sound urban and architectural design:
"It must not merely welcome variety and complexity in all their forms, environmental, social, and personal, but it must also deliberately leave a place for continued rectification, improvement, innovation, and renewal" (p.162).
This very broad 'key' is of course not very instrumental, but I do find it important for the understanding of urban culture and cultural development in the city, which is basically what Mumford is talking about. The idea of a cumulative nature resembles Williams notion of culture and cultural development, and even though Williams does not explicitly talk about the city (in that context), I think his notion of culture is relevant for my analysis.
Williams' definition of culture - presented most clearly in The Long Revolution (1961) - consists at first of three general categories (chapter 2). First, "the 'ideal', in which culture is seen as a state or process of human perfection, in terms of certain absolute or universal values"; second, "the 'documentary', in which culture is the body of intellectual and imaginative work, in which, in a detailed way, human thought and experience are variously recorded."; and third, "the 'social' definition, in which culture is a description of a particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour". (p 43) These are all, he argues, important characteristics of culture. He does, however, find the division problematic, because they all refer to each other in complex ways, and he goes on to make a new division (1): First, there is the lived culture of a particular time and place, only fully accessible to those living in that time and place; second, there is the recorded culture, of every kind, from art to the most everyday facts: the culture of a period; and third, there is, as the factor connecting lived culture and period culture, the culture of the selective tradition. Theoretically, a period is recorded; in practice, this record is absorbed into a selective tradition; and both are different from the culture as lived.
This might need further explanation (cf. Milner, 1993): When it is no longer being lived, but in a narrower way survives in its records, the culture of a period can, ideally, be very carefully studied, until we feel that we have reasonably clear ideas of its cultural work, its social character, its general patterns of activity and value, and in part of its structure of feeling. Survival of records are, however, a matter governed not by the period itself, but by the new periods. No matter how many 'time capsules' are stored, there will always be a tremendous loss. Not only were books were burned in Nazi Germany; XXX-files deleted from the Internet by order from the US Senate, along with other such deeds of censorship, but it appears also virtually impossible to keep stock of all records. Not to mention that cultural products often have a natural decay (paper and wood decomposes, a.s.o.). Or, to take the point even further, how should it be possible to get to know a previously lived culture when culture can only be understood fully when lived?
The operation of a selective tradition is characterised by the fact that the selection begins within the period itself; "from the whole body of activities, certain things are selected for value and emphasis" (Williams, 1961, p. 50). The selection mechanism is complex, if not in itself, certainly for the future observer. The things of value and emphasis selected through the mechanism might thus survive, leaving room for future observers to reflect on the organisation of the period as a whole, but there is no way of getting the values and emphases confirmed. The selective tradition creates a general human culture as well as the historical record of a particular society; but also, Williams suggests, at another level, a rejection of considerable areas of what was once a living culture. This is the basics in the concept of the long revolution, his most powerful concept.
"The arts, like other ways of describing and communicating, are learned human skills, which must be known and practised in a community before their great power in conveying experience can be used and developed. Human community grows by the discovery of common meanings and common means of communication. Over an active range, the patterns created by the brain and the patterns materialized by a community continually interact. The individual creative description is part of the general process which creates conventions and institutions, through which the meanings that are valued by the community are shared and made active." (Willliams 1961, p. 38)
Not only do I in Williams find a 'deep' and convincing explanation of the notion of culture, cultural development and cultural practice (creativity), making me understand, somehow, how culture is both continuity (I can read and 'understand' 200+ year old books) and discontinuity (pop group Spice Girls will be forgotten by everybody next year). But also, I see with Williams a direct connection between cultural development, the urban context, and democracy.
The issue of democratic cultural development is related to the resources needed for cultural participation, e.g. access to the means of cultural production, distribution and consumption (Garnham 1992, pp. 2-3, in Raboy et al, 1994). Insofar as cultural development can be defined as the "process by which human beings acquire the individual and collective resources necessary to participate in public life" (Raboy et al, 1994), the issue of cultural development is thus itself a question of democracy. By adopting such a definition, the social and political character of cultural development is emphasised (not that they are missing in Williams' notion).
As both Williams and Raboy, and many others, point out, the issue is complicated by the global spread of the "industrial mode of production, distribution, and reception of symbolic goods" (Raboy et al, 1994):
In the context of an open economy, the tendency to place priority on the development of cultural enterprise, coupled with the generally diminishing role of the state, further highlights the character of this issue as a question of democracy. (Raboy et al, 1994)
The tensions between emancipation and tradition, cultural disembedding and coherence, individualisation and interconnectedness, can, as Asplund (1991) argues, be seen as a tension between 'gemeinschaft' and 'gesellschaft'; sometimes translated into English to 'community' and 'society'. This distinction was enshrined in the jargon of the social sciences more than 100 years ago, by Ferdinand Tönnies in his famous book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft from 1887 (c.f. Asplund 1991; Sennett 1977, 1990). Gemeinschaft represented to him a 'face-to-face' social relationship in a place that was small and socially enclosed, while Gesellschaft was a more exposed, mute exchange.
Originally, gemeinschaft meant 'the full disclosure of feeling to others', but historically it has at the same time come to mean also a 'community of people' (Sennett 1977). In its modern meaning, gemeinschaft (community) thus denotes a special social group in which open emotional relations are possible as opposed to groups in which partial, mechanical, or emotionally indifferent ones prevail.
"The most cherished of contemporary myths is the recurring dream of community" (Sudjic, 1993). But what is this myth really about? Is it, as Sudjic suggests,
"a fantasy that celebrates the corner shop, borrowing a cup of sugar from the neighbours, and all those other unimpeachable suburban virtues that range from motherhood to apple pie"?
It is certainly a celebration of some unimpeachable virtue, of something that is thought of as good. But what?
According to Foucault the ideal of community can be traced back to Jean Jacques Rousseau. As a reaction to his experience of the urban public of the eighteenth century, Rousseau developed a political philosophy based on the ideal of community. In this philosophy, Foucault (1980, p. 152) argues, Rousseau dreams of:
"... a transparent society, visible and legible in each of its parts, the dream of there no longer existing any zones of darkness, zones established by the privileges of royal power or the prerogative of some corporation, zones of disorder. It was the dream that each individual, whatever position he occupied, might be able to see the whole of society, that men's hearts should communicate, their vision be unobstructed by obstacles, and that the opinion of all reign over each" (my emphasis).
Rousseau was "the theorist par excellence of participation" (Pateman, 1970). Rousseau's entire political theory hinges on the individual participation of each citizen in political decision making, and in his theory participation is very much more than a protective adjunct to a set of institutional arrangements. Participation also has a psychological effect on the participants, ensuring a continuing interrelationship between the workings of institutions and the psychological capabilities of individuals interacting within them. The political idea is one of citizenship - the Rousseauist dream. In this dream, we have a society where all people are aware of existing opportunities for effective participation in decision making, they believe participation is worth-while, and they participate actively in a society that holds that collective decisions should be binding. In this society, the role of participation is exactly that men, not law, should rule, and therefore that men are to be ruled by the logic of the operation of the political situation that they themselves have created and that this situation was such that the possibility of the rule of individual men is 'automatically' precluded (Pateman, 1970).
"If man is essentially a learning, creating and communicating being, the only social organisation adequate to his nature is a participatory democracy, in which all of us, as unique individuals, learn, communicate and control. Any lesser, restrictive system is simply wasteful of our true resources; in wasting individuals, by shutting them out from effective participation, it is damaging our true common process" (Williams 1965, p. 118)
Theory of participatory democracy is based on the argument that participation fosters human development, enhances a sense of political efficacy, reduces a sense of estrangement from power centres, nurtures a concern for collective problems and contributes to the formation of an active and knowledgeable citizenry capable of taking an active interest in governmental and managerial affairs. The theory is an attempt to resolve the antithesis between individuality and sociality:
"The theory of participatory democracy is built round the central assertion that individuals and their institutions cannot be considered in isolation from one another. The existence of representative institutions at national level is not sufficient for democracy; for maximum participation by all the people at that level socialisation, or 'social training', for democracy must take place in other spheres in order that the necessary individual attitudes and psychological qualities can be developed. This development takes place through the process of participation itself".(Pateman 1970, p. 42)
The major function of participation in the theory of participatory democracy is, according to Pateman, an educative one, educative 'in the very widest sense', including both the psychological aspect and the development of democratic skills and procedures. The educative function is important, even if it is not very clear. It is not only showing that participation is indeed central to the democratic perspective, it also emphasises the social and cultural aspect; that democracy does not consist institutions alone.
Compared to liberalism and elitism, the Rousseauist dream provides a deeper understanding of the nature of participation, namely one which emphasises that participation is about democratising us, the human beings, and not 'just' society, or as H. Koch (1947) puts it:
"Even if we succeed in implementing both political and economic democratisation of society, we would not have come much further if we could not democratise man". (my translation)
The idea is laudable, even 'obvious', but it has some theoretical consequences which need to be analysed. In my opinion, it becomes necessary to develop a normative integration of the notion of participation and the general politics of the human condition. On this matter I think Hannah Arendt has got some answers worthwhile considering. By distinguishing human action, praxis, from human fabrication, poiesis, and by linking it (praxis) to freedom, happiness and plurality, and by showing its connection to speech and remembrance, Arendt articulates a conception of politics in which questions of meaning, identity and value can be addressed in a pertinent manner (d'Entréves, 1989). Thus human praxis is judged by its ability to disclose the identity of the agent, i.e., to actualise the agent's capacity for freedom and to endow his or her existence with meaning (Arendt, 1958). Essentially, human action is a mode of human togetherness based on equality and solidarity.
[N]o one could be called happy without his share in public happiness ... no one could be called free without his experience in public freedom, and ... no one could be called either happy or free without participating, and having a share, in public power (Arendt, 1965 p. 255)
Participation should be understood as political action, praxis, in which individuals relate to society. Participation, then, is a process of 'giving birth'. We are searching for bearings: "What kind of world am I creating by my actions, and would I want to live in it were someone else creating it?" (Hansen, 1995). It is necessary to develop a sociological imagination, where each individual's life agenda anew and in a new way can ally itself with a collective life agenda - so that the antithesis between individuality and sociality will dissolve. It is a question of learning processes that combine critical perception of the existing circumstances and perspectives for emancipative development with an experimental development and acquisition of new social and cultural forms of living and working under more emancipative circumstances.
Participation is a widely used notion. It is used in many social contexts, from working life and technological development over urban and regional planning to general politics and everyday situations. In 1970, Pateman pointed out that the (over)use had tended to mean that "any precise, meaningful content has almost disappeared" from the notion (Pateman 1970, pp. 1-7, 67-70). Today, the notion is perhaps even 'weaker', and is neither progressive, provocative, nor deviant to talk about it. Participation is becoming ever more 'housetrained' in all aspects of politics and society - even management theories and philosophies pay lip service to it. As several critics have pointed out (e.g. Kraft, 1991), the contemporary management concern about workers involvement and participation in industry preoccupies itself with some rather limited forms of participation, which in Pateman's terminology would be called pseudoparticipation (Pateman 1970, p. 69f), which is basically participation without democracy.
There is something ambiguous about the notion of participation. Like most other notions, it has several meanings. A simple semantic elucidation might be appropriate. The notion of participation has (at least) two distinct interpretations: To take part and to share in. At first sight these two interpretations seem to be contradictory. W. Lafferty (1983, p. 31) points out that 'to take part' points towards individual attachment and biased engagement, whereas 'to share in' points towards collective action and cooperative activity. He argues, however, that participation denotes a link between one party's interests and a collective action aiming at a common interest. This synthesis, he continues,
"[H]as a meaning that is fundamentally humane in the sense of bringing together a personal, subjective aspect and a collective, objectifying aspect in a process that constitutes humanity's actionworld. ... To participate without accepting a community aspect is being a parasite or, if you want, an opportunist, while participating in such a way that one totally loses oneself in the community is being a symbiont (someone living in symbiosis) or a collectivist. It is the intervowen balance between the I and the Community that gives participation its essential meaning ... a combination of personal engagement and community minded and dependent responsibility." (Lafferty 1983, p. 31, my translation.)
Participation is a difficult notion. As we saw, it has several elements of meaning, elements which at a first glance appear to be contradictory, if not antagonistic. But these contradictory terms are not the same as 'poles' (i.e., a 'to take part' pole and a 'to share in ' pole). In general, thinking in polarities can be dangerous: It can reduce the dialectic to a simple dualism, where notions become bipartite (or 'polypartite' if advanced). This is exactly what happened to the notion of participation during the rise of welfare capitalist liberal democracy. Thus lacking normative integration the notion of participation has for long been subjected to 'a battle on two flanks of a barrier which is in fact a bridge' (Lafferty 1983, p. 32). The 'bridge' is to think the whole dialectics of participation into one 'system'. To put is simpler: In social terms, Lafferty attempts to 'dialecticise' the notion of participation, and this is useful for the analysis of democratic practice, even 'undemocratic'; if there is too big a difference between those who take part (in decision making) and those who share in (do the actual work involved), problems in democratic terms can easily occur. On the other hand, if there is an identity between the two, problems also occur (c.f. the community critique, later). The dialectic perspective gives no solution to this paradox; it is an analytical tool, that can perhaps foster a deeper understanding of the complexity involved in the concept of participation.
Within critical political philosophy, participation is regarded directly as an aspect of democracy: democracy cannot be thought of without participation. This is obviously the argument in the theory of participatory democracy. But not in welfare capitalist liberal democratic theory and society. The societal context in which participation takes place (or does not take place) will have to be analysed in order to reflect upon the normative foundation of participatory democracy, and understood not just as it appears in its present form, at this particular stage in history, but in a much more essential way - in the context of democracy itself. The discursive mediation of the notion of participation in the history of political philosophical thinking about democracy will need to be examined further.
In the history of Western democracies we do not actually find democracy itself in the centre of societal development. Western democracy was introduced after the concept of 'liberty of choice' in society and politics, after the 'competitive society and politics', and after the society and politics of 'market economy' (Macpherson 1966). The 'rise' of Western democracy was of course a very important historical development, but even more important was the establishment of Capitalism. As Macpherson (1966, p. 12) reminds us, 'liberal democracy can only be found in states where the economic system is built entirely or mainly on capitalist activities.' The development of Western democracy was overshadowed by both capitalism and liberalism, and in this development it 'was the liberal state being democratised, and, in the process democracy was liberalised.' (ibid., p. 13).
A major characteristic of the early Western liberalism (protective democracy (Held 1987)) is the idea of the separation of state from civil society. Especially nineteenth-century Utilitarianism, as proposed by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, advocated the idea that the state was to have the role of umpire or referee while individuals pursued, in civil society, and, according to the rules of economic competition and free exchange, their own interests and their selfishness. With a state that ensured the conditions necessary for individuals to act according to their individual interests, without risk of arbitrary political interference, participation became a matter of economic transactions rather than a matter of social interaction and cooperation. To the Utilitarians, there could or should not exist such things as collective interests. The individual was to be 'free', free to do what he wished, free from others' interests.
Jeremy Bentham (and James Mill) developed in the early nineteenth-century 'the founding model of democracy for a modern industrial society'. In his Constitutional Code, Bentham wrote: "A democracy ... has for its characteristic object and effect ... securing its members against oppression and depredation at the hands of those functionaries which it employs for its defence" (quoted in Held, 1987). Bentham believed wholeheartedly in the 'felicific calculus' of pleasures and pains, and acted on the assurance that quantities of happiness can be exactly calculated, with the 'exhaustive method of classification'. His belief is, according to Warnock (1962), in effect a denial of the relevance of differences between one sort of person and another - everyone is measured on the same scale. The 'exhaustive method of classification' became a social theory, where sociality is reduced to being individuals' individuality summed up. Utilitarianism can thus be characterised by its construction of the already mentioned antithesis between individuality and sociality.
Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure-
Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure.
Such pleasures seek if private be thy end:
If it be public, wide let them extend.
Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view:
If pains must come, let them extend to few
(Bentham, the 1822 edition of Introduction)
The antithesis between individuality and sociality is also apparent in the 20th century version of liberalism, Elitism, advocated by J. Schumpeter. Elitism differs from classical liberal individualism in its view of politics as an arena for the conflicting interests of groups in a society, rather than for the representation of the choices of individuals, each of whom pursues his or her separate interests. Elitism sees democracy as a functional system in which an equilibrium among conflicting groups is established by means of the mechanism of periodic elections. This electoral procedure is understood as a competition among the elites for political power which is achieved by gaining the support of various groups or coalitions of such groups, rather than as an expression of the popular will.
Elitism eschews any notion of a common good as anything more than a political myth, and denigrates representation and participation in politics as at best instrumentalities for the election of elites and at worst as a threat to social stability (Gould, 1988). A societal system with strong leadership as its prime 'virtue' is based on distrust of what should be in the very centre of the system, the people. In its worst form, strong leadership is dictatorship.
That "democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political, legislative and administrative, decisions", is Schumpeter's (1943) influential (re)definition of the notion of democracy. Democratic theory in his view is not a theory of means and ends, because democracy is not an ideal in itself. It is, according to Schumpeter, expected to further other ideals, for example justice.
By doing so, the whole 'agenda' is moved away from some of the real, 'deep' problems in democracy; somehow the whole fundament has become unspoken of, as if we already knew what democracy really is. Elitist theories not only leave untouched the inequalities outside the political sphere, but introduce these inequalities as systemic features of the competition for political power among conflicting groups (Gould, 1988). This social ontology, so characteristic of modern liberalism, has no place for a concept of social groups (Young 1990, p. 228). Roughly speaking, liberalism takes groups to be no more than temporary aggregates of individuals bound together only by their individual self-interests, which they pursue instrumentally through the group. In thus reducing social cooperation to the vector-sum of individual self-interests, liberalism fails to resolve the antithesis between individuality and sociality (Gould 1988, p. 10). In fact, liberalism does not even try to resolve this antithesis, it acknowledges it.
An important societal development in the Western world after 1945 has been the altered role of the capitalist state, a state which actively intervenes in all economic, political and ideological relations in society (Poulantzas 1978, p. 113). Many theories (and theorists) of state have analysed the capitalist state and politics in capitalist societies. Post-war European marxist theories of the capitalist state have found difficulties in substantiating a critique of the political forces in the actual mode of production, and hence of the general development of productive forces in capitalist society. Today it seems necessary for a critical theory of state and society to build upon a strong theoretical framework for a critique of the very basic legitimisation processes of the capitalist productive forces (Jessop 1982, p.63-76).
C.B. Macpherson's (1978) critique of Western democracies is concerned with the underlying justifying theory of Western democracies, i.e. their normative foundation, or, in his words: their maximising claims. The Western democracies are characterised by a claim to maximise individual 'utility'; and also, as a consequence of the first, by a claim to maximise individual 'power'. The maximising claim is rooted in Utilitarianism political theory of man as consumer, consumer of utilities, desirer. It is a maximising claim in the sense that it claims that the liberal democratic society, by instituting a wider freedom of individual choice than does any non-liberal society, maximises individual satisfactions or utilities. The claim is not only that it maximises the aggregate of satisfaction, but that it does so equitably: that it maximises the satisfactions to which, on some concept of equity, each individual is entitled. This, Macpherson says, is basically an idea of man as "essentially a bundle of appetites demanding satisfaction", or simply, a utility maximiser (see also Taylor 1985). We see manifestations of the maximising claims throughout modern history; with Taylorism/Fordism as perhaps the most important example. Also, neoclassical economists have developed sophisticated schemes for reducing all intentional action to a matter of maximising a utility function in which the utility of all conceivable goods can be quantified and compared (Young 1990, p. 24).
Bentham, the ultimate 'utility maximiser', produced not only a very instrumental approach to the 'pleasure and pains' of the human condition. Based on the instrumental approach, he created the idea of the Panopticon, the socio-optical architecture, a "technology of power designated to solve the problems of surveillance" (Foucault, 1980). As a model for a social system, Panopticon was based on a technical/instrumental idea of an 'all-seeing' power, the dominating, overseeing gaze in the centre.
Bentham poses the problem of visibility, but thinks of a 'one-way'-visibility organised entirely around the control base, the gaze. What he therefore 'invented' was a formula of 'power through transparency', and 'subjection by illumination' (Foucault, 1980). The Benthamite idea of transparency is in normative terms complementary to Rousseau's idea of a 'transparent society', in that both ideas express a relationship between the 'comrade' and the 'overseer', but doing so with opposite normative orientation: Bentham arguing that 'each comrade becomes an overseer', and Rousseau arguing vice versa. There is, apparently, an asymmetry between the concepts of 'power through transparency' and 'emancipation through transparency'. The term 'transparency' is not only ambiguous, it is ambivalent. On the one hand, transparency has to do with power structures and the exercise of power, and can, as in the case of Panopticon, be a threat to the individual integrity and autonomy, but it can also function as a means for shaping the individual's own life agenda if the transparency (and therefore the power) is 'possessed' by the individual. On the other hand, transparency has to do with mutual intersubjective transcendence and relations of mutuality and reciprocity, making sharing between individuals possible.
These two aspects of transparency have major implications for participatory democratic theory. The former implies that participation should be seen as a "process in which individuals take part in decision making in the institutions, programs, and environments that affect them" (Heller et al, 1984). The latter implies that participation should be seen as a process in which individuals confront one another and adjust their wants and desires, thus creating "a common ordering of individual needs and wants into a single vision of the future in which all can share" (Barber, 1984), and thus "sharing the shell of 'outlook' and perception" (Sennett, 1977). Both these understandings of the notion of participation are important, and together they form a normative concept of participation. Lafferty (1983) argues that there should be three distinct categories of a normative notion of participation:
participation as power and influence,
participation as externalisation and dialogue, and
participation as learning and consciousness raising.
The notion of participation should embrace all these categories.
The concept of transparency is by Sandel (1982) held to be the meaning and goal of community, and he uses the concept 'sharing of constitutive self-understanding' to denote what defines community. Community, he argues, is constituted "in so far as our constitutive self-understandings comprehend a wider subject than the individual alone, whether a family or tribe or city or class or people". What marks such a community is "not merely a spirit of benevolence, or the prevalence of communitarian values, or even certain 'shared final ends' alone, but a common vocabulary of discourse and a background of implicit practices and understandings within which the opacity of the participants is reduced if never finally dissolved". If opacity fades away, community deepens. The ideal of community is one of the transparency of subjects to one another, and in community "people cease to be other, opaque, not understood, and instead become mutually sympathetic, understanding one another as they understand themselves, fused" (Young, 1990). The ideal of community thus expresses an urge to unity, the unity of subjects with one another, a longing for harmony among persons, for consensus and mutual understanding. Sennett (1977) points out, that what is distinctive about the modern gemeinschaft community is that the fantasy people share is that "they have the same impulse life, the same motivational structure".
Whether expressed as shared subjectivity or common consciousness or as relations of mutuality and reciprocity, the ideal of community "denies, devalues, or represses the ontological difference of subjects, and seeks to dissolve social inexhaustibility into the comfort of a self-enclosed whole" (Young 1990, my emphasis). The ontological difference, or basic asymmetry, within and between subjects, brought out by Hegel and deepened by Sartre (Young, 1990), means that persons necessarily transcend one another because "subjectivity is negativity" - the regard for the other is always objectifying and the other never sees the world from 'my' perspective. In denying the ontological difference:
"... modern gemeinschaft is a state of feeling 'bigger' than action. The only action the community undertakes are those of emotional housekeeping, purifying the community of those who really don't belong because they don't feel as the others do. The community cannot take in, absorb, and enlarge itself from the outside because then it will become impure. Thus a collective personality comes to be set against the very essence of sociability-exchange and a psychological community becomes at war with societal complexity" (Sennett 1977, p.311)
The narrower the scope of community, the more destructive does the experience of fraternal feeling become. Thus, fraternity as a normative ideal, turns into fratricide:
"Outsiders, unknowns, unlikes become creatures to be shunned; the personality traits the community shares become ever more exclusive; the very act of sharing becomes ever more centered upon decisions about who can belong and who cannot." (Sennett 1977, p. 265-66)
In urban life people interact with others who are strangers to them. As Simmel (1911, 1969) pointed out, the meaning of the term 'stranger' changed with the coming of modernity. In pre-modern cultures, where local communities were the basis of a wider social organisation, the 'stranger' referred to a 'whole person' - someone who comes from the outside and who is potentially suspect. In modern societies, and especially in many urban settings, by contrast, we do not characteristically interact with strangers as 'whole people' in the same way (Giddens, 1990). Instead, we interact, in our urban everyday life, with strangers in more anonymous, neutral ways. Simmel talked about the 'blasé attitude' of modern urban life, where people relate to 'faceless' others via the cold and heartless calculus of the necessary money exchanges and the economic rationality, which leads to overstimulation. As a consequence, "the eye sees differences to which it reacts with indifference" (Sennett, 1990). Modern urban design, Sennett (1990) argues, tends to "wall off the differences between people, assuming that these differences are more likely to be mutually threatening than mutually stimulating". This, I think, is an essential point for understanding the modern urban context and its state of democracy.
Walling off differences leads to a politics of exclusion. Such politics are not sustainable. Instead we need to formulate policies where freedom leads to group differentiation, to the formation of affinity groups, but where this social and spatial differentiation of groups is without exclusion. That is the politics of difference (Young 1990).
"We need to see differences on the streets or in other people neither as threats nor as sentimental invitations, rather as necessary visions. They are necessary for us to learn how to navigate life with balance, both individually and collectively." (Sennett 1990, p. xiii)
Difference should denote a side-by-side particularity neither reducible to identity nor completely other (Young, 1990). We should not think of social groups as existing in relations of inclusion and exclusion; rather they overlap and intermingle without becoming homogeneous. The politics of difference is a normative ideal of city life. As a normative concept, city life means a form of social relations we could call the being together of strangers (Young 1990). Social relations based on strangehood is the quintessence of urbanity, and urbanity is the social condition under which strangers can co-exist (Sennett, 1994).
The politics of difference is a challenge to democratic theory and practice. Liberal theory gives prominence to gesellschaftliche social relations, whereas participatory democratic theory gives prominence to gemeinschaftliche social relations. The challenge is to focus on the importance - no, the necessity - of finding a third way between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, and that is exactly what the politics of difference does. The politics of difference insist on a strong concept of participation. The notion of participation should embrace not only the categories of influence, dialogue, and learning (these categories are necessary), but also a fourth category. This fourth category might be called 'participation as exposure', because it is through "exposure to others, we might learn how to weigh what is important and what is not" (Sennett, 1990).
The concept of exposure is not simple. Sennett relates the concept to the figure of the stranger and strangeness, and his urban theory relates the 'stranger' to urban complexity and the way we imagine cities, or with Lefebvre's term, 'representations of space' (Diken, 1995). Sennett defines the city itself "as a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet" (Sennett, 1986). Zygmunt Bauman says that at all city life "is carried on by strangers among strangers" (1995). Long before them, as Sennett notes, Aristotle seems to have been on to the same idea: apparently he wrote that a city "is composed of different kinds of men; similar people cannot bring a city into existence" (Sennett, 1994). The city is a playground for the expression of cultural diversity, and the exposure of cultures to one another. Urban life is indeed more and more about 'enjoying' strangeness and strangers - you go to Japanese restaurants and English Pubs in Copenhagen, to take just one example. People have become flâneurs or 'post-tourists' (Urry, 1990) in urban cultures of the late 20th century. Strangers, or some of them, are desirable; however, it seems as if some are 'more strangers than others' (Diken, 1995).
Sennett develops the concept of 'the neutral city' (1991), where 'terror and doubts' of outer life (public life, or 'the world of strangers') are isolated out by 'zoning', that is, by functional separation of parts of social life and urban areas from each other, or in other words, by turning heterogeneous places full of life into homogeneous spaces (c.f. Diken, 1995). Barriers against 'others' sterilises social space and "assures people that nothing disturbing or demanding is happening 'out there'. You build neutrality in order to legitimate withdrawal" (Sennett, 1991, p. 65). Diken shows, with Bauman, how the figure of the stranger is an ambivalent one and argues that this may be so because s/he, the stranger, is both inside and outside, opposing the very opposition of us and them, which in turn relativises the familiarity of 'us' and shows that boundary-lines are imaginary (Bauman, in Diken, 1995). Therefore "it becomes 'relevant' whether he is a friend or a foe... If we press upon him the friend/enemy opposition, he would come out simultaneously under- and over-determined. And thus, by proxy, he would expose the failing of the opposition itself. He is a constant threat to the worlds of order" (ibid.); that is 'the fear of ambivalence' of the strangers. Modern urban planning is "a war declared on strangers" in which reducing the element of surprise and unpredictability in the conduct of strangers seems to be the main rule (Bauman, 1995).
Sennett sees this split into oppositions as something modern culture suffers from. It is a divide between "subjective experience and worldly experience, self and city" (ibid., xii). The modern fear of exposure is a direct result of this split, or wall, as Sennett calls it.
Some, or all, of the traditional virtues of democratic thinking have to be revised, if we are to take the idea of politics of difference seriously (which I think we should, to be sure). It means that we have to rethink the meaning of local strategies. The concept 'local strategies' is often used to promote an ideal of strong communities, and focuses solely on gemeinschaftlich social relations, preferably between non-strangers. As a result, local strategies in urban planning have had a tendency to put emphasis on rather small social 'units', where people (almost) know each other, for example in a block of flats. In many ways, local strategies can be regarded as a synonym for rather enclosed forms of community building, as some kind of withdrawal from the city, from the gesellschaftliche streets to the gemeinschaftliche backyards. As a counter reaction to the 'decaying city', such strategies might seem appropriate, because many of the problems here are caused by a 'deficiency' of gemeinschaftliche social relations in the city (in terms of isolation, fragmentation, ostracisation). While recognising the need for strategies towards these problems, I do not regard strategies at this - very local - level as necessarily the best solution. A strategy for democratic cultural development and sustainable urban development should not only find a third way between gesellschaft and gemeinschaft, but also a third way between global and local strategies.
The issue of the public sphere is at the heart of many reconceptualisations of democracy, and is perhaps a good place to look for this third way.
Hannah Arendt (1958) argues that the public sphere is the place where light comes from, namely the light thrown on things when they take place in public. In a lecture called Man in Dark Times (1959), she argues that modernity has created a darkening or obscuring of the light from the public sphere (probably referring to Heidegger), and the withdrawal of the general public (citizens) from the public world (also a central point in Ziehe's work), based on the "well-founded anger that makes you hoarse", anger, or wrath, towards a system that does not listen. Hannah Arendt's critique of modern culture is related to Sennett's, Negt's, Ziehe's and (other) branches of critical theory, such as the works of Walter Benjamin and T. W. Adorno, in that the theme is common: the decline of community, of human solidarity, of plurality. Arendt develops the theme through her analysis of the collapse of worldliness and the accompanying erosion of individual and collective memory (Hansen, 1993). Modernity is freedom from politics rather than freedom to take part and make praxis; Homo Faber instead of Vita Activa.
Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1974) regard the public sphere as a form of organisation of collective societal experience, hereby connecting the notion of public sphere to social learning processes and cultural experience making. Negt and Kluge use the notion of an oppositional public sphere, specifically that of the proletariat. They shifted the terrain of the notion of the public sphere from an "historico-transcendental idealization of the Enlightenment to a plurality and heterotopia of discourses" (Hansen, introduction in Negt/Kluge, 1993). This crucial change in the notion of the public sphere assumes its full significance when it is seen in relation to liberal democracy. The great ideological fiction of liberalism is to reduce the public sphere to existing democratic institutions, or even, with the help of 'welfare theory' - as in Denmark - to reduce the very notion of the public to denote the public authorities (in Danish: 'det offentlige'). Negt and Kluge, in contrast, decentralise and multiply the public sphere, and imagine counter-public spheres, and generally aim at building a theory of how to change the existing institutions.
Although both Arendt and Negt/Kluge have some interesting theoretical ideas about the public sphere as a concept, I think their conceptions lack a spatial dimension as well as contextuality with regard to spaces of politics. For this, I will turn to other sources, which I think complete, not compete with, their concepts.
"Contemporary social relations seem to be devoid of a basic level of interactive practice which, in the past, was the matrix of democratizing politics: loci such as the agora, the New England town hall, the village Church, the coffee house, the tavern, the public square, a convenient barn, a union hall, a park, a factory lunchroom, and even a street corner. Many of these places remain but no longer serve as organizing centers for political discussion and action." (Poster, 1995)
As I will return to in next chapter, I see some opportunities for raising this 'level of interactive practice', not least by using the new information and communication technologies. The level might, however, become even lower:
"It appears that the media, especially television but also other forms of electronic communication isolate citizens from one another and substitute themselves for older spaces of politics." (Poster, 1995)
John Hartley seems to argue that the media are the public sphere: "Television, popular newspapers, magazines and photography, the popular media of the modern period, are the public domain, the place where and the means by which the public is created and has its being" (quoted in Poster). Also Paul Virilio is on to such an idea: "Avenues and public venues from now on are eclipsed by the screen, by electronic displays, in a preview of the 'vision machines' just around the corner" (ibid.). This leads Poster to argue that 'public' tends more and more to slide into 'publicity' as 'character' is replaced by 'image', and that changes must be examined "without nostalgia and the retrospective glance of modernist politics and theory". In the next chapter, I shall return to Poster's arguments.
In my opinion, the media is a public sphere, not the public sphere. The spatial dimension of 'public sphere' is not abstract, nor is it expressed only in these 'popular media'. Although these media indeed are very influential spaces of politics, others exist. The plurality and heterotopia of discourses which Negt/Kluge refer to as public sphere are not just different channels on the television, but also 'real' spaces and places where people meet, and make their 'collective societal' (cultural) experiences, with or without the influence of the popular media. In Belgrade in 1996, it was the streets, and the internet, that became "the public sphere" when a set of more or less "counter public spheres" were established(2).
Ray Oldenberg has written about the 'great good place' (Turkle, 1995). "The local bar, the bistro, the coffee shop - all places where members of a community can gather for easy company, conversation, and a sense of belonging - are considered to be the heart of individual social integration and community vitality." (Turkle, 1995). In Turkle's view, we today see a resurgence of coffee bars and bistros, "but most of them do not serve, much less recreate, coherent communities and, as a result, the odor of nostalgia often seems as strong as the espresso." Oldenberg also argued that people need a 'third place' away from their home - the 'first place' - and away from their place of work - the 'second place.' Third places are characterised by their location on 'neutral ground,' a 'leveling' tendency where social and economic standings and physical characteristics are largely unimportant, and as a place where "conversation is the main activity".
Oldenberg's places ('great good'/'third) are not necessarily, but often, public places.
"For a variety of reasons, life is easier in a community blessed with a substantial stock of social capital". The quote is from Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital (1995), one of the most debated papers in recent American political science. 'Social capital' refers to features of social organisation such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit; 'social capital' is an analogy to 'conventional capital', i.e., physical capital (economic values) and human capital (tools and training that enhance individual productivity). Unlike conventional capital, social capital is a public good, Putnam writes. Like other public goods - from clean air to safe streets - social capital tends, he says, to be under-provided by private agents. Thus social capital will often be a by-product of other social activities, and not a 'production process', an activity, in itself:
"Social capital typically consists in ties, norms, and trust transferable from one social setting to another. Members of Florentine choral societies participate because they like to sing, not because their participation strengthens the Tuscan social fabric. But it does." (Putnam 1993)
Social connections and civic engagement pervasively influence our public life, as well as our private prospects. Networks of civic engagement foster 'sturdy norms of generalized reciprocity' and the 'emergence of social trust'; the networks facilitate coordination and communication, amplify reputations, and thus allow dilemmas of collective action to be resolved.
Notes
1. In a later book, the three dimensions are again changed, but I find the lived-recorded-selective division clearer: (1) ... a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, ... (2) a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group or humanity in general, ... (3) the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity (Williams, 1976, p. 80).
2. The "democracy-movement" in Serbia (including the students movements) has a history with strong relations to the fight for "free", independent, media, as well as for other "democratic rights". In this context it is interesting to note that the new media technologies, and information and communication technologies, played an important role in the development. Local radio stations, as well as partisan as well as non-partisan actors of various kinds, broad- or "netcasted" radio, news, music, videos, photos, etc., on the internet. Dutch, and other, netactivists and netmovement supported the Serb net-action, see URL: http://www.gotzespace.dk/cyberserbia for my private contribution to the fight for democracy in Serbia.