Seeing Like a City: The Dialectic of Modern and Premodern Ways of Seeing in Urban Governance

Abstract

Studies of urban governance, as well as the overlapping literature on law and space, have been heavily influenced by critical analyses of how spatial techniques helped constitute modern disciplinary powers and knowledges. The rise of land‐use control and land‐use planning seem at first sight to be perfect examples of the disciplining of populations through space by the kind of governmental gaze dubbed by Scott (1998) as “seeing like a state.” But a detailed genealogical study that puts the emergence of the notion of “land use” in the broader context of urban governance technologies reveals that modernist techniques of land use planning, such as North American zoning, are more flexible, contradictory, and fragile than critical urbanists assume. Legal tools of premodern origin that target nonquantifiable offensiveness and thus construct an embodied and relational form of urban subjectivity keep reappearing in the present day. When cities attempt to govern conflicts about the use of space through objective rules, these rules often undermine themselves in a dialectical process that results in the return to older notions of offensiveness. This article argues that the dialectical process by which modernist “seeing like a state” techniques give way to older ways of seeing (e.g., the logic of nuisance) plays a central role in the epistemologically hybrid approach to governing space that is here called “seeing like a city.”

Behave or be banned? Banning orders and selective exclusion from public space

“…Finally, I will give a response to normative issues concerning the extent to which the changes in security management lead to a specific use of urban space and in which way this is accompanied by the denial of access to large parts of cities to certain groups. In this way, this article contributes to the growing literature on 'policing space' in Western countries (e.g., [7,15,16]). …”

Physical exercise, health, and post-socialist landscapes—recreational running in Sofia, Bulgaria

“…Therefore, landscape plays an important part in people instigating and maintaining exercise. As such, urban landscapes are more than a static backdrop animated solely by human action, they are a complex assemblage of practices, techniques, and technologies, which are shaped by physical, social, cultural, and political processes (Valverde, 2011).…”

Governing customers? Integrating customer focus and compliance in the urban governance context

“…As existing studies of urban compliance have shown (e.g. Valverde, 2011Valverde, , 2012, city governments play an important role in shaping and regulating contemporary forms of 'urbanism': the everyday ways of living that define urban areas (McCann, 2016). Like other public services with compliance functions, city councils rationalise their compliance activities by claiming that they are necessary to advancing or protecting the interests of collective subjects, whether that be 'the public', 'the city' or smaller scale 'communities' (Valverde, 2011).…”

“…The reason for this is that nuisance is a fundamentally relational problem, in that a person or their conduct is only considered a nuisance if it disturbs, annoys or bothers other people who subsequently seek redress from urban authorities (Cooper, 2002). As Valverde (2011) explains, given the density and diversity of modern cities, such disturbance are a characteristic feature of urban life and thus a routine problem for city governments. In her study of urban governance in Toronto, Valverde (2012) shows how city officials are called upon to govern a range behaviours that are deemed a nuisance because they do not accord of the moral and aesthetic preferences of the cultural mainstream.…”

“…Valverde, 2011Valverde, , 2012, city governments play an important role in shaping and regulating contemporary forms of 'urbanism': the everyday ways of living that define urban areas (McCann, 2016). Like other public services with compliance functions, city councils rationalise their compliance activities by claiming that they are necessary to advancing or protecting the interests of collective subjects, whether that be 'the public', 'the city' or smaller scale 'communities' (Valverde, 2011). Given the prima facie tensions between customer focus and the collectivist orientations and coercive practices of public services with compliance functions, it is important to understand how the governance of urbanism by city councils is affected by such reforms.…”