Citizenship, Democracy and Belonging in Suburban Britain by David Jeevendrampillai

Author:David Jeevendrampillai [Jeevendrampillai, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781800080539
Google: -qVHEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: UCL Press
Published: 2021-10-12T04:26:03+00:00

Conclusions

The work of the ASP, whilst it has been operating under objective and rational rubrics, has been analysed here as a social project that foregrounds the management of people and place in the name of the common good. The ASP, as a social project, is deeply tied to histories of state mapping and governance. In order to maintain its coherence, it must ensure clarity and consistency in its methodological approach. The establishment of epistemological hegemony, which decides what information counts, results in exclusions such as the dismissal of Seething ‘facts’ as facts. These exclusions are seen as inherent to the process of making data commensurate and making and using it rationally and objectively.

This chapter has outlined how the ASP goes about making its social project through making better places. Central to its practice is the objective and reasoned production of knowledge that transforms the suburb ‘on the ground’ into a visualisation. This visualisation allows the ASP to understand the suburb as a network of relations and as a phenomenon produced through ‘generative rules’. The ASP produces and reads these visualisations in order to understand how particular forms of value may be encouraged by managing the built environment in a particular way. It passes this knowledge on to urban planners and policy makers, who in turn influence how suburban built environments are managed.

This process produces the ‘expert’ as a rational subject. ASP team members carefully manage their personal relationships with the data and each other in order to maintain a cool, rational, objective approach. However, the production of expert knowledge necessarily involves corporeal ways of relating to the work, from feeling boundaries to eyeballing data. Being expert is a lived and felt subjectivity which involves the disciplining of the self in order to contribute effectively to a social project of late liberalism. This social project works through objective, rational and democratic procedures of knowledge production through scales, from the local to the national, and firmly establishes the state as a governor of place.

Returning to the ‘moment’ of the ASP’s refusal to moderate the Seething story, we can now understand this as a moral act. It seeks to uphold the social project of the ASP. By excluding unclear or untraceable information from the map (such as the ‘fact’ that a mountain was destroyed by a giant in the area), the ASP maintains clear, transferable data throughout its data set. The ASP team needed to be able to account for and explain all data. It is this knowledge that is fundamental to their position as experts and to the ability of their knowledge to move through the domains of policy makers and urban planners. However, expertise was fundamentally antithetical to the social project of the Seethingers. They, as we shall see in the next chapter, use stupidity to ensure that no one person can be an expert.

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