Although the administration of large socio-technical systems such as cities is a complex undertaking, it does not happen by some magical or hidden force that is beyond our comprehension. The tendency of people to throw up their arms in the face of complexity because things are just too complex to fully grasp hides beneath it a more dubious intent: that we shouldn't try to structurally or historically understand the development of cities because we may find a set of political and economic decisions that undermine the ideals and values we have come to champion. James Scott's chapter entitled "Cities, People, and Language" maps a clear relationships between city planning, demography and the standardization of language across specific political domains. All this is said to be done with the clear purpose of administrative control. Scott charts the emergence of what we could call rationo-technocratic urban planning. We might argue that this planning was an attempt to impose an "overall abstract form" onto the seemingly disorderly medieval city. I say seemingly because as Scott notes, "The fact that the layout of the city, having developed without any overall design, lacks a consistent geometric logic does not mean that it was at all confusing to its inhabitants." It may have been confusing to outsiders, but that is simply because local knowledge of the city remained an insular phenomenon learned through the daily experience of an urban terrain. You know your neighborhood and all the little pathways to navigate it because you grew up there. This fact, Scott argues, is important to the maintenance of local political autonomy.
In order to restrict localized power, state authorities took it upon themselves to develop the means for standardizing city planning to help organize to administer to large urban spaces. Policing a predictable grid is much easier than trying to navigate through winding, narrow streets, especially in the face of a political insurrection. For me this is the most interesting fact about modern urban planning, which Scott exemplifies in Haussmann's redesigning of Paris in the 19th-century. Large boulevards were not created so much for efficient traffic flow as it was a means of quickly moving the military to different points in the city in order to put down insurrection.
City planning is not, of course, simply for the purpose of controlling rebellions. A mapped grid of property throughout a city is also ideal for real estate trading and speculation. And tied to any set of economic transactions there is a legal-judicial system that helps control and administer their smoothness. If we're talking about massive amounts of economic activity as we naturally will be in the context of a city, then we will need to make sure that the people involved in those transactions are equally identifiable and controllable. Naming practices, standardized language and traffic patterns are three methods of administration that Scott focuses on and for good reason. From these we get complex demographic information and neat flows of people and goods throughout cities. These functions are ultimately an extension of privilege, which is why planners are so comfortable taking a god's-eye view of large-scale projects. The vantage-point pretends at control over everything that one can map.
We can tell this administrative story well, but what doesn't get done (even though Scott recognizes its existence) is a description of the practices of resistance that take place both before and after state and private planning projects. And if resistance is not there, or if it is extremely marginalized, then what are the reasons for this? Perhaps the lack of coverage of resistant praxis is due to its anti-administrative nature: it doesn't want to be tracked down and compartmentalized. Perhaps a demography of resistance is ultimately paradoxical in nature; perhaps it is something known only from within the local, daily experience of it.
this was super helpful!!
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