The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life by Richard Sennett

Author:Richard Sennett [Sennett, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82608-4
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Published: 2012-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

The “Urban Whole” as a Myth of Purity

Why progressive notions of city planning have taken on this tone has to do, as was suggested at the opening of this book, with what planners feel about the complexity possible in city life. Their impulse has been to give way to that tendency, developed in adolescence, of men to control unknown threats by eliminating the possibility for experiencing surprise. By controlling the frame of what is available for social interaction, the subsequent path of social action is tamed. Social history is replaced by the passive “product” of social planning. Buried in this hunger for preplanning along machinelike lines is the desire to avoid pain, to create a transcendent order of living that is immune to the variety, and so to the inevitable conflict, between men. Let us see why this is so.

The metaphor of metropolitan planning is an expression of the technology by which modern machines are constructed. The parts of machines are different, to be sure, but these differences exist to create a single function; any conflict between the parts, or even the existence of parts working independently of the whole, would defeat the purpose of the machine. There is no reason for pain or confusion in it.

But when this metaphor from technology is used for the structure of urban society, its meaning changes. Here the technological metaphor of city growth defeats the needs for which the whole exists, because these needs reside in the human parts of the social whole, not in some social product apart from social experience. In planning cities on the machine model, an urbanist is trying to “integrate” these needs in a transcendent way, and for the purposes of this integration conflict and pain between the parts of the human city are viewed as bad, as qualities to be eliminated. This is the same spirit as that found in excessive post-revolutionary discipline, or in the flight to hiding in a clean suburb. The actual, immediate experience of man, in all its possible freedom and diversity, is taken to be less important than the creation of a community that is conflict free; the sense of living in the present is violated for an ideal society in which men live in such harmony that one can never imagine them growing in ways that will violate the “correct” interrelations they have with each other.

Thus does the technological imagery of metropolitan planning lead to an adolescent society, as easily as the isolated little suburbs do. It is rare that city planning under this guise should even contemplate, much less encourage, the development of social situations that might lead to communal tension through the encouragement of human differences. Conflict is conceived as a threat to some “better,” conflict-free city life. And when conflict in the cities comes, no conception even exists among the professional planners as to how conflicts can be expressed fully without leading to violence. Because the metropolitan planning persuasion is so naíve in its assumptions of what constitutes

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