Governing Cities Notes on the Spatialization of Virtue

8/13/2019 Governing Cities Notes on the Spatialization of Virtue

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EnvironmentandPlanning D:SocietyandSpace 1999. volume 17, pages 737 760

Governing cities: notes on the spatialisation of virtue

Thomas OsborneDepartment of Sociology, University of Bristol, 12 Woodland Road, Bristol BS12 1UQ, England;e-mail: [email protected] RoseDepartment of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross,London SE14 6NW, England; e-mail: [email protected] 13July 1998; in revised form 16 April 1999

Abstract.Thispaper representsa scriesof speculations concerning the imagination ofhecityas aspaceof government, authority, and 'the conduct of conduct*. The authors argue that it is possible tounderstand the myriad ways in which various authorities have sought to govern the city through aninterrogation ofthescries of means through which the city has been'diagrammed1as aspace of power,regulation,ethics,and citizenship.Thesespeculations take a historical but notahistorically 'pcriodiscd'form; the authors consider in turn the diagramming of the city in the ancient Greek world, thenineteenth-century liberal diagramming of the city, eugenic models of the city, and latter-day ncolibcralmodesof visualising, programming,andgoverning urbanspaces.Theaimisneither to'foundyetanothertheory of spatialisation nor to advance a Foucauldian urban sociology but to gauge the parameterswhich have bequeathed us the contemporary city as a governed and ethically saturated space.In the following notes and reflections, we use the term 'diagram' to try to capture thedifferent ways in which government has been territorialiscd in an urban form. (1 ) Bygovernment, we mean something more than the thoughts, policies, tactics, organisa-tions ... of politicians. In the extended sense that is now becoming familiar, we use theterm government to refer to that plane of thinking and acting concerned with theauthoritative regulation of conduct towards particular objectives (see Rose, 1999b).Government is not reducible to politics, the economy, or morality: one can never justread off mentalities or strategies of government from the estage of capitalism' or thecomplexity of social organisation. There is always an element of creativity concerningarts of government; the exercise of government entails the application of thought toparticular conditions and situations. How might one analyse our historical archive ofsuch kinds of thought? No doubt there are many ways. In what follows, our concern isnot with the history, the sociology, or even the idea of the city, but with the city as away of diagramming human existence, human conduct, human subjectivity, human lifeitselfdiagramming it in the name of government.Urban diagrammaticsWere the Gre eks th e first to diagram the city? An image of the G reek city an d th e Gre ekcitizen certainly acted as something of a retrospective justification for laterespeciallyEnlightenment and 19th-centuryviews of the city. In this Greek diagram, the citybecomes more than just a geographical space, it is a milieu for capturing and shapingforces (human, spatial, and ideological) proper to a particular stylisation of managingor governing conductthe polls. The polis was a spatial milieu of immanence;(1)An earlier and longer version ofthispaper, with a critical commentary by Engin F Isin and aresponse by the authors, appeared as part of a working paper in the Urban Studies Programmeat York University, Toronto, Canada. The closing section of the paper, on contemporary men-talities of the metropolis, was also drawn upon for the argument presented in Rose (1999a).
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738 T Osborne, N Rose

a self-sufficient spatialisation of authority, where authority was immanent, it grew outof the pleasures a nd attrac tion s of urb an association s, interests, friendships, affects,and passio ns (Deleu ze a nd G uat ta ri , 1994, page 87; see also Finley, 1971). Th is idea ofthe immanent political sociability of the polis has recurred in all city diagrams in 'theWest ': the city as having the potential to generate that phenomenon which ImmanuelKant called the 'unsocial sociability' of men, a space in which sociability is immanentbut antagonistic, and yet in which this antagonistic immanence gravitates towards akind of equilibrium, a stable mode of functioning. Such immanence embodies atendency to a 'natural government', a self-government not dependent upon calculatedintervention. The idea of urban space is to represent a form of antagonism that in thelong run shapes th e tendenc ies of the political orde r ( K an t, 1991, page 44). (2 ) And yet,from the perspective of those who would govern the city, immanence can take a wholeseries of less virtuous formsthe vice, the rebellion, the insubordination, the waves ofrumour and disorder, of depravity and idleness that are dysfunctional forms of the 'puresociability' immanent in the city. The vicious immanence of the city is a never-endingincitement to projects of government. Such projects seek to capture the forces immanentin the city, to identify them, order them, intensify some and weaken others, to retain theviability of the socialising forces immanent to urban agglomeration whilst civilisingtheir antagonisms.

To think of these projects of government in terms of diagrams is to suggest anactivity of thought that is as much technical as cognitive, and is not merely ideologicalor ideal but functional. Of course, one could be literal about the diagram: there are somany plans, schemes, drawings, stories, myths, and programmes that simultaneouslyproblematise actual life in the city and idealise its potentialsif only this or that wereunderstood, recognised, done, designed, built, demolished, allowed, or forbidden. Butthe urban diagrams that concern us are to be discerned within all these actual schema,imm anent in them , perh aps p roviding their historical a prio ri: the various abstractcities which, at different moments, distribute various attempts to understand and inter-vene into concrete urban space, time, and existence. These diagrams are neither modelsnor Weberian ideal-types but operative rationales. Each diagram depicts and projects acertain 'truth' of the city which underpins an array of attempts to make urban existenceboth more like and less like a citymore in that the immanent virtues of the civic willbe intensified, less because the immanent dangers of the city will be pacified. If we arewarranted in suggesting that one can identify, at certain historical moments, a specif-ically urban 'will to government', this is simply to the extent that government itself hasbeen animated by a spatial diagram of its objects, its problems, and its means of actionwhich has taken the city for its shape.

In part, of course, a diagram is a matter of discourse, of the immanent rules offormationthe regularities and distributionsthat allow things to be said and under-stood about urban existence. This is what Gilles Deleuze terms "a system of light and asystem of language", a way of making things seeable, sayable, and doable (Deleuze,1988, page 32). But it is more, for such regularities are associated with ways in whichform is given to nondiscursive matterthe subjects who can speak or be spoken about;the spaces of workshops, factories, barracks, streets. They are lined up with a wholerange of technical devices that, once having been invented, make such associationspossiblesewers, electricity, telegraphs. A will to action is immanent to each diagram;forces are diagrammed which seek to impose a certain regularity upon a human multi-plicity "distributing in space, laying out and serialising in time, composing in space-(2 ) Max Weber was also moved by this aspect of city life, ascribing it to a domain of 'non-legitimate domination', in contrast to the 'legitimate' domination established by determinantpolitical authorities; charismatics, the State, etc.


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Governing cities: notes on the xpatiulisation of virtue 7M

time and so on ... . The diagram is no longer an auditory or visual archive but a map.... It is an abstract machine. It is defined by its informal functions and matter and interms of form makes no distinction between content and expression, a discursiveformation and a non-discursive formation. It is a machine that is almost blind andmu te, even though it ma kes o ther s see and spe ak " (1988, page 34). T he dia gram s of asociety, then, are its virtual maps, maps of the codes immanent in forces and theirrelations, the abstract machines comprising hundreds of little points of emergence,creativity, sodality, or stasis, within which forces are exercised on forces to deduct orcombine them, to compose and recompose them, to divide or to isolate, to churn upmatter and distribute it in new ways: maps of the intensities pulsing through everyrelation. But the diagram should not be thought of as an external origin: it is theformation that is immanent within each concrete assemblage, giving form to theirfluidity, integration to their local and micropolitical powers, a stability and longevityto that which would otherwise be virtual, potential, fleeting, vanishing, molecular.And, at the same time, the diagram is constantly decomposing and rccomposing,fragme nting, splitting into different lines, som e of which will fade away, others of whichwill stabilise and coalesce into new diagrams. As a result, stasis is a pathological form,one that requires an excess of force to bind and fix the mobility and creativityimmanent within the city.

We could try to diagnose the diagrams of Greek, Medieval, or Renaissance typesof government in urban terms. But we suggest that the basic components of ourcontemporary diagram of the city as a space of government begin to be discernible inthe 19th Century. What is decisive is that from the 19th Century the government of thecity becomes inseparablefrom the continuous activity of generating truths about the city.From that time onwards, we suggest, government gets tied to novel practices of truththat have a spatial character. The Greeks did not tie urban existence to practices oftruth in this way. Or, at least, the immanence of the city took, then, primarily apolitical or ethical form, one which was not attached to a specifically urb an spa tialis -ingwill to truth. From the 19th Century, however, the very existence of the citybecomes inseparable from a whole series of initiatives that sought to produce trueknow ledges conce rning the social fabric of the city. Th e city's imm anen ce become sinseparable from an ongoingif disparately conceived and realisedlabour of seekingto tell the truth about the city. Urban thought here is technical and practical, notsimply dreams of the city but mundane techniques of gathering, organisation, classifi-cation, and publication of information. Think, for instance, of social statistics in theearly 19th Century; of the exploration of the 'dark continent' of poverty by all thoseurban social explorers in the second half of the 19th century from Friedrich Engels toSeebohm Rowntree; of the charting of 'community and kinship', from the Chicagoschool to Michael Willmott and Peter Young; of the emergence in the 1970s of thenotion of subculture. Or, for example, think of the collection of statistics of crime andtheir organisation in police districts that inscribe the city and its topographies andvariations into the administrative imagination fully as much as do the writings of themore elevated literary figuressuch as the Baudelaires or the Benjamins. All these areaspects of the role of truth and thought specific to the constitution of the modernurban diagram. Why are they specific? Not because for the first time political thoughtis urbanthe Greek diagram is evidence enough of this. Rather, because this thoughtpartakes of something newa kind of expertise of the city that is not quite philosophi-cal and not quite political; we might think of it as a savoir of city government.

From the classical era in the West, the city had been invoked as a metaphor forgood (or bad) government. In Late Antiquity, St Augustine's God governed a heavenly-terrestrial City, the product as much of a political philosophy as it was of a theology


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(Brown, 1972). Closer to the modern era, the theorists of Polizeiextended the m etap ho rof the well-governed urban space to the whole national territory (Foucault, 1991,page 93; Small, 1969). One m ust govern the territo ry as one w ould expect a w ell-administered city to be governed. "There is an entire series of Utopias or projects forgoverning territory that developed on the premise that a state is like a large city; thecapital is like its main square; the roads are like its streets. A state will be wellorganised when a system of policing as tight and efficient as that of the cities extendsover the entire terr ito ry ... . The model of the city becam e the matrix for the regulationsthat apply to a whole state" (Foucault, 1984, page 242; see also Kendall and Wickham,1992). But the present is approached on the basis of a double shift. On the one hand, inthe moment when the long-standing tactical problem of the government of cities,concerned with the suppression of this or that danger, is succeeded by the strategicdream of a generalised urban governmentality. And, on the other, and perhaps moreimportantly, when the city moved from being a metaphor adopted as an illustration ofgood government to become the site of a kind of systematic pragmatism, a concretemilieu of government.The life of the city governing the urban milieuOf course, as any histo rian know s, in the 19th Ce ntury cities are repetitively prob lem atisedin term s of the threa ts posed by its inabilitythe inability of their inha bita nts to governthemselves. In a thousand waysin novels, paintings, cartoons, newspaper reports,official enquiries, social statistics, philanthropic projects, and political pamphletsthe dangerous immanence of the city was portrayed: slums, vice, prostitution, sweatedlabour, crime, juvenile delinquency, diseases, decay, squalor, gam bling, dru nk enn ess,want of employment, degeneration, begging, destitution, and homelessness. Thesedangers immanent to city life, its immorality and amorality, its streets teeming withall sectors of society promiscuously intermingled, its dark places and secret spaces out ofthe gaze of civility and orderexercise a powerful attraction on the urban imagination.Histo rians have spen t their lives in these Victo rian archives docu me nting the attem pts tosuppress, con trol and sometimes to enjoy these evils; is there any thing new to be said?Perhaps one needs merely to contest the view, most clearly expressed by Michel deCerteau, that there is an implacable opposition between an urbanising panoptic strat-egy of power and the ubiquitous contradictory movements, ruses, and tactics that"counter-balance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power ... with-out points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they areimpossible to administer" (de Certeau, 1984, page 95; see also Donald, 1992). For theurban diagram that took shape in the 19th Century did not program a monotonousand relentless attempt to impose discipline and subordination; it was, rather, composedof a motley of inventive projects intended to make urban existence the site of a certainregulated and civilised freedom. It is in this sense that we describe them as 'liberal'not because of the influence of the philosophers of classical liberalism, but because, atthis diagrammatic level, the city was to be the milieu for the regulation of a carefullymodulated freedom.

As a milieu of liberalgovernment the city becomes a sort of laboratory of conduct.Its government comes to be seen as essentially problematic, so the city becomes a planeof indeterminationa dense, opaque, unknown, perhaps ultimately unknowable space;a domain where the criteria and techniques of good government were no longer self-evident. The work of Thackrah and Engels, the surveys of Arnott, Kay, and SouthwoodSmith in London, and the later investigations of Mearns, Booth, and Rowntree: all thegreat empirical excavations of the 19th-century city stem from this point. It seemedthat when the social investigators tramped across the city, they were discovering


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Governing cittcn: notes on the Mpatiitli.sution of virtue 74

.society itself, For society becomes an immanent space, separated from the old deter-minations of status and territory: its clearest manifestations seem to be in the actualgeographical space of the city Specification of the social field ceases to be a matter ofgatherings of sociability in particular forums (coffee houses, the court* etc) and comesto be a matter of the territory of lives, habits, and mores of a population. Society hasbecom e gcnerically spatial (Rabinow , 1989, pages 128 129), and the city ha s beco m e aprivileged milieu (or the empirical exploration of society from the perspective ofgovernment.The government of urban space now has to be concerned with the security of thesenatural processes of society within the unnatural space of the city. In the laboratory ofthe city, the immanent 'social' processes of population were intensified and confined:they could be isolated, scrutinised, documented, and calculated. Hence the city becamethe main field of operations for those concerns, which Ian Hacking has summed upunder the label of the 'erosion of determinism': statistical investigations of the imma-nent regularities of crime, degeneracy, poverty, vice (Hacking, 1990). In the city, onecould observe a sort of vast natural experiment, disclosing that tendency of our socialnature to produce immanent regularities out of the clash of intentions and free wills."Thus marriages, births and death do not seem to be subject to any rule by which theirnumbers could be calculated in advance, since the free human will has such a greatinfluence upon them; and yet the annual statistics for them in large countries provethat they are just as subject to constant natural laws as arc the changes in the weather,which in themselves arc so inconsistent that their individual occurrence cannot bedetermined in advance, but which nevertheless do not fail as a whole to sustain thegrowth of plants, the flow of rivers, and other natural functions in a uniform andunin terrup ted cours e" (Ka nt, 1991, page 41). Th is idea of imm anence was no t des truc-tive of the will to govern. W hat w as required was action upo n those forces tha t wereimmanent to the city; to govern through rather than in spite of individual liberty.

Writers on political history have pointed to the 'silent revolution' in governmentdur ing the p eriod from abou t 1830 to the o utb rea k of the W orld W ar 2. OliverMacDonagh argued that in the process of the discovery of evils within the city, theinvention of practices for regulation of urban life, and the emergence of new bureauc-racies, officials, and authorities a new sort of state was being born (MacDonagh, 1958;see also Osborne, 1994). Now it is obviously true that there was a growth and pro-liferation of expertise at this time. T he re were inspe ctors of priso ns and schoo ls, ofmines and rivers; there were medical officers and colonial administrators; there werecensus-takers, statisticians, and engineers. But this complex and heterogeneous array ofexperts was rather loosely assembled together and linked in diverse relations with theformal political app aratus. These officials were joine d by a wealth of other ex perts whoowed their status to their role as freelance philanthropist or journalist or popularpolemicist. Such activities were regarded as not merely compatible with liberalprinciples of individual liberty but as key components in the realisation of such aliberal dream. A new kind of state was born, it is true, but this was neither the sleekrationalising implement of Jeremy Bentham's dreams nor a 'cold monster' seeking todominate and control all that it had power over, infiltrating itself directly into thecorpuscles of a population now increasingly concentrated in towns. On the contrary,it was a political configuration that was committed, simultaneously, to the principle ofan autonomous public sphere, a set of market relations amongst enterprises, a legalsystem ba sed on the principle of the liberty of the individual and th e rule of law, and tothe shaping of these public realms so that they embodied the responsibility that was thesine qua non ofliberty. And the privileged site for this complex of relations was the lifeof the city.


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We can illustrate this rapidly in relation to three interlinked sets of problems:morbid bodies, immoral subjects, and dangerous multiplicities.Morbid bodiesThere has long been a corporeal vocabulary of the citycities as bodies, with theirbirth, growth, youth, maturity, sickness and health, decline and death. But if themedical point of view was important for this understanding of the city, this was notinitially because of an ideological equation of the city with the notion of a bounded,well-functioning organism . W ha t w as at stake was less an u nd ersta nd ing of the city as aphysiological organism than an understanding of the city as a singular bodily organ.Inother words, this organic urban metaphor was initially clinical and empirical ratherthan biological and functional: the scrupulous collection of individual facts and sin-gular items of data was to give a clinical 'picture' of a diseased state. Some of theearliest 'sociological' accounts of the city themselves specifically related to concernsthat were medical in this clinical sense (Higgs, 1991; see also Davison, 1983; Pelling,1978, pag e 12). M oreover, m edica l rea son was itself a spatialising and urba nisingscience; by the 1830s a discourse on the 'medical climatology' of towns had evolvedinto an empirical medical topography concerned with the mapping of disease inlocalised spaces (Gilbert, 1958). Paul Rabinow has shown how the cholera epidemicof the early 1830s in France had prompted medical topographers to map the spaces ofParis with a view to controlling possible sites of infection in various unhealthy locales ofthe city. "A detailed ma p of each qu arte r was produced and set within a larger m ap of thewhole city. M app ing facilitated analysis; the whole city, dow n to th e individual bu ildingson a street, was covered by a standardized spatial grid" (Rabinow, 1989, page 36; seealso Delaporte, 1987). In 1839 Ange Guepin, a physician, wrote a comprehensiveHistoire de Nantes, a detailed empirical survey of each of the social classes in the city.The coupling of city and sickness has, however, been more than a negative onethe 19thCentury sees not only the argument that sickness is a pathology of space that may begoverned away by such means as pure water, sewage, disposal of refuse, and the like, butalso tha t this is not a merely negative prog ram m e for the elimin ation of sickness by theregulation of space of which qu aran tine and the plague city migh t be the key imagesbut that the task of good government of urban space is actually to promote health.

Edwin Chadwick's proposals for securing public health through supplies of cleanwater and a comprehensive system of sewers partook of this aspiration (Osborne, 1996).Here the town emerges as an ethicohygienic space, a particular way of understandingproblems of disease and ill health and their moral consequences, to be acted uponspatially. Reciprocally, a particular way of understanding the virtues and vices of thepopulation in hygienic terms'town swamps', 'moral miasma'which themselves comefrom a spatial vocabulary of diseasecontagion, epidemic, miasmawere hence to berelated to the mapping of the town as a moral topography. The language of illness andof medicine, and its spatial organisation, became, here, omni-purpose metaphors forproblematising the urban population from the perspective of the threats that it posedand the ways in which they were to be acted upon. The spatial relation of citizen tohabitat was turned into one that can and should be governed.The organic metaphor for the city was, in fact, peculiarly appropriate for a liberalmentality of government, in that it stressed that the urban domain was essentially animmanent naturalistic domain; one which, left to itself and with the right conditions,could compose itself as a benign social order. Liberalism was an art of governmentthat posed itself in terms of maintaining and regulating the 'security' of naturaldom ains of po pula tion (G ord on , 1991). Victorian urba n pu blic health an d sanitary


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Governing cities: notes on the Hputmltsution of virtue 743

science represented not at all a realisation of liberal philosophy so much as a strategy ofsecurity appropriate to a broadly liberal mentality of government.Immoral .subjectsIn conceptions of the city in the I9th Century there was a clear relationship between,on the one han d, a 'milieu* of the city, and , on the o ther, the 'charac ter' of th e h um anbeings that inhabited it. For the well-to-do, there was a constant concern with the waysin which the effete and artificial life of the city might encourage immoral or loosehabits, vice, inebriety, and a general loosening of the controls exercised by the will(Donzelot, 1979). But it was the habits and conduct of the less wealthy and the threatthat they posed not to the continuation of a lineage but to the moral order of urbanexistence that inspired the intensification of a governmental gam This gaze came to bedirected at the habits of the peopleboth en masse and differentiated: into men andwomen, adults and children; amongst the different trades; in relation to the dangerousclasses; in the documentation of the lives of thieves, street Arabs, prostitutes, and otherinfamous types. Observations of these immoral subjects inscribed in a plethora ofpamphlets, programmes, demands, solutions, tracts, scientific investigations, bureau-cratic documentation, commissions of enquiry, medical reports, and the like focusedupon the dangers that life in towns posed to the moral and physical constitution ofsubjects. There seems to be a negative spiral of interaction between milieu and char-acter. Poor character, which may be inherited from one's forbears, led not only toconduct and ways of living that degraded ones' surrounding milieu; it also led one togravitate towards a certain kind of milieu, which itself has an effect upon characteran effect which, in turn, might be passed down to future generations through aweakened constitution, and through the ways in which one rears one's children andthe habits one inculcates into them.Time exacerbated the evil, for bad habits engendered further bad habits. And theurban environment might often be seen as a kind of engine of such bad habits, givingthem impetus, exacerbating them, prolonging them, spreading them, "Go to theirdwellings ... in the great majority of cases, the scenes of wretchedness which occur inthe families of the lower classes are the result of intemperate and improvident habits"(Grant, quoted in Wohl, 1977, page 9). One could put the emphasis upon the recklessdispositions of the poor, or one could place it at the door of the urban environment.For George Godwin, the city became, above all, a domain of mostly unsavourysensations provoked by an insalubrious environment. The city was a machine for theproduction of vile sensations, and as sensations were the means of moral education ofthe human being, exposure to vile sensations turned one's morality in a vile direction.So, in exploring the city, one had to trace the effects of sensations on the cultivation ofmoral habits. If the habits of those who live in the city are in large part bad habits, thenit is necessary not so much to act directly upon those habits themselves but to modifythe city so as to induce the right kind of habits. Hence, the need to build what Godwintermed "social bridges"dwellings, nurseries, infant reformatories, ragged schoolsthat will traverse the "town swamps" that give off such a mire of malevolent sensations(Go dw in, 1972, pages 3, 16). M or al co rrup tion shou ld no t take causal prior ity over thedeficits of socialisation. "The owners of such places say'People of this sort arenatu rally dirty, and it is useless to do a nything with them '. We wou ld ask in reply,'How is it possible that good habits are to be acquired under such circumstances?'"(1972, page 7).Dangerous multiplicitiesSome regard the proliferation of expertise and knowledge across the space of the city interms of the invention, intensification, and dispersion of novel forms of 'social control':


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registration, classification, enumeration, surveillance, cleansing, directing, nurturing,administering, arresting, judging, imprisoning (see du Camp, quoted in Donald, 1995,page 78). Th e menta lities of urb an go vern m ent in the 19th Cen tury w ould the n be seenas having ambitions that were almost entirely negative, constraining, and designed toeliminate moral danger by the marking out of a series of grids of domination. But thiswould be to identify only one dimension of these new techniques and the aims thatinspired them. For the ambitions of these strategies were not only to constrain,discipline, and pacify, but also to create a certain kind of regulated, civilised subjectivityin the u rba n p op ula tion . We see, tha t is to say, no t solely a negative or repressive kind ofactivity, the focus upon the identification and elimination of sources of conflict withinthe fabric of urban life, but rather the active attempt to fabricate liberty as a matter offree bodies in the regulated space of the city.The regularisation of liberty was certainly linked to fears of the mob, the mass, andriot. This took different forms: London, despite its urban unrest, was not like Paris inthis respect, nor did it call for such a comprehensive replanning in the name ofpacification. If plans for urban reconstruction took a governmental form, this wasmore in relation to anxieties about the demoralising effects of urban immigrationespecially to the extent that the new town-dwellers congregated in the darkest, densestregions of the town, hidden from the good influences of urban order, steeped in thefoul moral miasma of the rookeries. The rerouting of major thoroughfares in Londonin particular sought to open the most notorious of these dark spaces"cul-de-sacswithout any outlet other th an the ent ranc e" according to one observer (quoted inPorter, 1994, page 267)to visibility, to light, and to passage.

Architecture, too, had its governmental aspect, although it would be absurd to reducethe question of building types to a project of pacification and civilisation, howeversignificant this m ay be in the disciplinary architec ture of prisons, asylums, reforma tories,and schools. No nethe less, new rationales for urb an existence do merge with the fabric ofpublic buildings, whether these be hospitals, libraries, or seats of local government. Nolonger was the effect of such buildings considered to lie solely, or even mainly, in themeanings embodied and radiated by their monumental external design. It was theinternal design of the building that was important; they were required not merely tofacilitate the flow of large numbers of persons, but to regulate that flow, to civilise it, toshape the relations of perception and vision, of con tact and distance, among st those thatare gathered within. In all those large public buildings where persons were broughttogether in enclosed spacesmuseums, exhibitions, department storesone sees theemergence of new programm es for produc ing m odes of public deportm ent which throwa web of visibilities and norms over public conduct: something like a calculatedadministration of shame, designed to link the ethical capacities of citizens to the endsof government (Bennett, 1995; Markus, 1993; Rose, 1992).The body of the urban citizen governing life itselfIn the closing decades of the 19th Century, the living body of the citizen became animmediate problem for government. The city became problematised in terms of itsown immanent tendencies to engender the degeneration of life within it; immigrationinto the towns from the country took those of the most robust, sturdy, and adventurousdisposition, but the consequences of town lifesqualor, overcrowding, foul miasma,vicious moral climateproduced, within only a couple of generations, a population ofweak, tube rcular, w ant on, inebriate, feckless, and sickly characters. Initially, it ap pea redthat social and moral factors interacted to produce a kind of downward spiral of corrup-tion which, in turn, impacted upon the biological attributes of the urban poortheirconstitutionwhich in turn shaped their morality and character (see Lees, 1987,


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Governing cities: notes on the spulisilisutton of virtue 745

pages 137-141; Pick, 1989; Stcdivmn Jone s, 1973). Th e physical capac ities of the urbanpoor, trapped in overcrowded conditions in the shims, were sinking into a mire ofdegeneracy. The minutiae of urban existence came to he charted in these terms. Thedwelling was a prime site of investigation and of government, not merely the domestica-tion of the emotional and sexual econ om y of procreation an d child-rearing, b ut the homeas a site for an individualised btopolitics of the urban citizen as a living creature.This problcmatisation of the vital order of the town could be taken in two inter-related and overlapping but analytically distinct directions. On the one hand, there wassomething like a eugenic diagram: what one saw was not merely deterioration butdegeneration, a progressive weakening of the stock caused not only by the hereditarytransmission of constitutions weakened physically and morally by urban existence, butalso by differential rates of bre edin g, such that those from the weak est stock bred thefastestwith their puny offspring protected from the struggle for existence by well-meaning but misguided philanthropyjust as the more civilised engaged in selfishpractices to limit their procreation. On the other hand, there was the social diagram:what one saw was a consequence of the conditions of social life, which had their ownlaws and regularities of effect upon human beingsand hence could be ameliorated byacting upon the city to amplify its virtuous social forces and to reduce those whichwere damaging or destructive to human health and morality.

It was something like a social diagram that animated the forces that came to focusupon the issue of urban housing. Engcls, Mayhcw, and other investigators of themiddle decades of the 19th Century had viewed the dwelling as a machinery of humanmorality. The dwellings of the poor were condemned not merely because of theirsqualor but because of the forms of unconscionable sexual liaison which they fosteredby the promiscuous comingling of husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, cousins, lodgers,and so forth in the hovels and slums of London and Manchester. By the 1880s, this hadstabilised into a novel question: overcrowding. And urban policy was to becomedirected tow ards a new emp hasis o n governing through ho using . W hereas previousarchitectural policy on the poor had related to that apparatus of reformation, thewo rkhou se ( M arku s, 1993, pages 141 -145), now the aim came to be that of a civilisedhousing for the poor. M earn s, in 1883, had catalogued the sensational aspects of slum-dwelling in London. Whereas for Godwin the problem had been sanitation rather thanhabitation, for Mearns, and the plethora of urban writings that followed from him, thefocus was upon living conditions inside dwellings. Here, the problem is not the openstreets but the interior of dwellings: "In one cellar a sanitary inspector reports findinga father, moth er, three children and four pigs In anothe r a missionary found a ma nwith smallpox , his wife just reco vering from her eighth confinem ent, and the childrenrunning about half naked and covered with filth. Here are seven people living in oneunderground kitchen, and a little child lying dead in the same room" (Mearns, 1970,page 5). Instead of the city being understood itself on the model of a kind of organ, oreven organism, the city, as it organised the bare life of human beings and theirproximities and interminglings, now becomes a malign environment for the organismthat is man.

Of course, the fate of the urban poor also provided a plane of reference for thediscourse of degeneration that would be regularised in the form of eugenics. Clearly,for some proponents of the degeneration thesis, such as Charles Kingsley, what was atstake was a translation of the external racisms associated with Empire into an internalracism directed at those within the natio nal pop ulation w ho form ed a distinct and lowerrace, or who had returned through a combination of inherited stock and immoralhabits to an earlier stage in racial development. But it would be a mistake simply toassociate a political rationality that centred upon the ethical qualities of human beings


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746 T Osborne,NRose

and their am elioration asbeing somehow theexclusive prop ertyof 'reactionary' forces.In Britain,forexample,a quasi-eugenic componentwasalso im plicatedin the thinkingof New Liberals such as Hobhouse, Robertson, Hobson, and Ritchie (Freeden,1978,page 193;see also Jones, 1983).The New Liberals abandoning the ideology of laissez-faire, recognised, as Hobson put in 1911, a social property in capital which is heldpoliticto securefor thepublicuse (quoted inFreeden, 1978, pa ge42). It wouldbe theroleofthe stateto intervene withintheprocessesofcapitalinordertosecure this socialcomponentfor thepeopleas awhole. Hen ce thetaskofthe state becom es to promotethe mental and moral elevation of the people; the chief end of Government being toestablishnot liberty alone,but every other necessary securityor rational progress '(Raequoted inFreeden, 1978, page55). Oneaspectof thisat leastasfound insomeof theearlier writings in the NewLiberal ismwas the advocacy of parental prudence as acorollaryofsocial reform.AsFreeden com me nts, "R obertso n repeatedly recomm endedthe limitingof thebirth-rate, whichhe thought couldbe attained by state propaganda.Parental prudence sometimes seemedtheonlyway toensurea permanent ameliorationof the condit ion of the working classes .... Eugenics, as Hobson pointed out, merelyextended the question of populat ion to include qualitative and not ju st quantitativecon sider ation s" (1978, pages 18 6-1 87) .W h a t is significant for our current argument, however, is the way in which thesedifferent diagramsthe eugenicand the socialspatialised themselves.For the socialdiagram, thecityiscentral.Itsforces,itsattractionsandpulls,itsconsequencesand theimpulses it produces are the site and m o d e of action of social laws on the humanorganism.And thevery concentrations ofthe livesofthe urb an dwellersin agovernablespaceof the city offers thechanceofremedy.Thus,forexample,the Inter-DepartmentalCommittee on Physical Deterioration, which reported in 1904,rejected the notion thatthe race as a wholewasunfit or degenerating, and situated the problem firmly in thespecific contextof thepoor in the slumsand the question of overcrowding. Hence,byvirtueof the possibilities opened by this very concentration, the city could stillbe thesite of a remedy. An apparatus of continuous surveillance could be established in thecity slums; a permanent anthropometric survey, a continuous register of sickness,medical officers of health in each district, improved food and milk supply, specialschools for retarded children, and so forth.The urban became avaluable field for thedeploymentofinstruments ofgovern men t th at required direct contacts withthelivesofurban dwellers themselves. Hence the citywas no longer an immanent domain to beregulated through apparatuses of securitybut thematrix of ape rmanent and strategic-ally targeted surveillance of individual bodies and their modes of life.

For the eugenic diagram, on the other hand, the role of the city was almostaccidentalit was merely a space within which natural processes were visible. It istrue thatthecity im posed features ofitsown as aparticular kindofcondensed populousspace. However,in eugenic discourse, these merely facilitate processes that have nothingintrinsically to do with urban life: the inheritance of particular characteristics. Theforces that characterise degeneration are not intrinsic to city life itself, and the citysimply exacerbates tendencies thatareimmanenttoparticular classes suchascriminalsor the feeble-minded, rather than immanent tourban life itself. In fact,by the startofthe 20th Century, the eugenic discourseis not specifically urbanat all: it alights uponthe urban only contingently. In Britain, the urban is important for 20th-centuryeugenics only in so far as it acts as an amplifier of wider tendencies of degradationby virtue of specific process and tendencies which it concentrates.And in the UnitedStates, the question is less one of the cities themselves, but of their role as magnetsattracting immigration from the southern countriesofEuro pe a relation between raceand population quality whichwas never constitutively 'urban' in its texture.


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Governing cities: notes on the spntialisntion of virtue 747

The cudncmonic diagramBy the end of the 19th Century a rather different diagram of the city was alsobeginning to take shape, which was characterised by planar geometric images of urbanlife at some remove from the diagrams of degeneration. This novel diagram invoked theidea of the city as a space of transparency and perfect administration. The city was tobe reshaped by an enlightened urban administrative imagination, it was to be a spaceof happiness and lucidity, it was to become Hooded with a kind of perfect benign light,Many of these concerns seem Utopian. But this urban diagram was less Utopian thancudaemonicw.spa tial projection of social happ iness. Th e diag ram of the city hadbegun to emphasise what urban existence might become.The eudaemonic city-image is relational, social, and spatial The city becomes asocio-administrativc domain, with its own proper laws, characteristics, and forms oflife, these being understood as being amenable to a 'social' administration. That is tosay, the city is to be 'planned* in the light of its specifically social character. This is notmerely a governed sociality but an administered one; the city is no longer held to pre-exist the forms of social administration that give it shape. In this sense, the city has akind of 'machinic* function in relation to happiness. The image of the city as a space ofdangerous delights and unbridled passions no doubt still exists at this time, but it isopposed to a no the r image of the city. This is not as a straight-laced and p uritan space,but as a contented space of immanent organic natural sociability. Yet it is also agovernmental space, in the sense that the construction of this organic social city andthe normal citizen who will inhabit it functions as the regulative ideal of a range ofprogrammes and initiatives within which the normal citizen is the social citizen of whatthe Tudor Walters Re po rt (1918) on public housing called 'hea lthy social com mu nities '.A web of socialising technologies begins to be cast across this social space. A networkof expertise seeks to educate and nurture the urban dweller as a citizen of a democracyin an intrinsically spatial field. Zoning seeks the separation of quarters, functions, andactivities in the name of health and welfare of urban dwellers. Further, this way ofthinking entails attempts to invent spatial technologies of the city as a living organism,technologies of its social a nd me ntal hygiene. We are now p otentia lly in Hygeia itself.Hence the extraordinary attraction of biological metaphors to describe this kind ofurban function in vitalist terms.

The spatialisation of the eudaemonic city diagram is structured on the basis of akind of benign pan optic ism . Pano ptic because the ideal is one of complete transp aren cyand visibility; but benign because what is at stake here is not so much the paranoiacstructure of the 19th Century reformatory, with its opaque central control tower, butrather a kind of im m an en t pan opticism, one in which gazes and visibilities are diffused,local, reciprocal, and towards which the end is not contrition and reform but happiness,mutuality, solidarity. The city can be an apparatus for constructing social tranquillityand hum an happiness out of spaceitself.Thre e versions of the eu daem onic city, in spiteof their profound and obvious differences, were paradigmatic by the early part of the20th Century: the colonial city, the garden city, and the zoned city.The colonial cityFor the colonial city, take the paradigmatic case of Edwin Lutyens's "Anglo-IndianR om e' at New D elh i from 1913. This was to be a city of gre at rad iating ro ute s, laiddown on the model of a formal geometry, with housing allocated according to hex-agonal grids divided up by race, rank, and socioeconomic status. "From the Viceroy,via the Com mander-in-Chief, M embers of the Executive Cou ncil, senior gazettedofficers, gazetted officers, down to superintendents, peons, sweepers and dhobis, acarefully stratified spatial order was integrated both in terms of physical distance and


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spatial division, to the social structure of the city" (King quoted in Hall, 1988,page 188). In short, a city which rendered a social structure on the ground accordingto entirely abstract principles; a city which is a machine for producing the social fieldrather than just a spatial milieu for already immanent social processes (Bose, 1974).The garden cityThe garden city, too, was designed to be a kind of social machine rendered into spatialprinciples. Although Ebenezer Howard's garden-city vision (in Garden Cities of Tomor-row,1902) was on ly realised in a tiny nu m be r of ins tan ces (classically Letchw orth in1903 and Welwyn Garden City in 1920), as a diagram of urban governmentality it hada lasting effectnot least on the suburbanisation of interwar planning. Howard was asocial (and economic) visionary rather than an urban planner; his idea was for a formof urban existence that was to be effectively a third way between capitalism andsocialism. His polycentric vision of what he called the 'social city' entailed the estab-lishmen t of a central city of aro un d 30 000 peo ple (c onn ected u p to other satellite so cialcities by various radial connections), surrounded by a green belt of farms, reforma-tories, mental hospitals, homes for epileptics and inebriates, and so forth. This city wasto be run on associationalist lines, with citizens responsible for establishing their ownservices, pension funds, etc, without large-scale state intervention. Howard's vision, ifoutlandish, w as not merely a Utopian one in the sense of those entirely im agin ary citiesthat inhabit the pages of science fiction and the brain of Richard Rogers; rather, hiswork was directed towards producing a kind of blueprint for a spatial machine thatwould render and regulate human sociality towards particulargovernmentalends.The garden city is itselfthrough its spatial organisationintended to amelioratesocial relations; Howard's 'peaceful path to social revolution' entailed the contentionthat an appropriate style of urban environment could in itself achieve what othershoped from political and economic revolution (see Fishman, 1973).The zoned cityLast, consider the zoned city, as illustrated by Daniel Burnham's Chicago Plan of 1909;much of it actually built by 1925. Bu rnh am 's aim , after an e arthquake and a fire ha drazed much of the city, was, as he put it, "to restore to the city a lost visual andaesthetic harmony, thereby creating the physical prerequisite for the emergence of aharmonious social order". Burnham's topographic model was Haussman's Paris, buthis objective was the spatial invention of happiness; "We float by lawns, where villas,swan-like, rest upon their terraces, and where white balustrades and wood-nymphs arejust visible in the gloaming. The evening comes, with myriad coloured lights twinklingthrough air perfumed with water-lilies, and N atu re enfolds us, like happy children " (seeM oore, 1921, page 111). A nd as the Chicago Plan Co m m ission summ arised the inten-tions behind the plan, "Orderliness is one of the best investments a city can make, butthe appeal of the Chicago Plan is by no means entirely a commercial appeal. It is ahuman appeal, a moral appeal, an appeal to make Chicago better, not for the moneythat is in it, but for the sake of the higher mental, moral and physical people that aperfectly a rran ge d city will produ ce " (M oore, 1921, pa ge 115).

Although Burnham's original plans for Chicago had made little reference to zoning,his radiating grid system enabled a zoning policy to be adopted almost as a naturalconsequence of the spatial design of the city. In this context, the sociologists of theChicago School were able to use the spatial infrastructure of the city as a kind ofbackdrop or precondition for an understanding of the moral morphology of the city asa whole; positing that the spatial zoning of the city had a corollary in a kind of moralzoning of neighbourhoods. "The city plan, for example ... fixes in a general way thelocation and character of the city's constructions and imposes an orderly arrangement,


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Governing cities: notes on the nputitilisation of virtue 749

within the city area, upon the buildings which are erected by private initiative as wellas by public authority. Within the limitations prescribed, however, the inevitable pro-cesses of human nature proceed to give these regions and these buildings a characterwhich it is less easy to co ntr ol" (Pa rk, 1967, page 5). The unit of this spon tane ity wa sthe neighbourhood and the task of the sociologist was to monitor the threats to anintegrated neighbourhood sentiment: "it is important to know what arc the forceswhich tend to break up the tensions, interests and sentiments which give neighbour-hoods their individual character. In general these may be said to be anything that tendsto render the population unstable, to divide and concentrate attentions upon widelyseparated objects of interest" (1967, page 8; see also Burgess, 1967). Unlike the zonedinfrastructure, these moral neighbourhoods are in an unstable equilibriumthe task ofthe sociologist comes to be to restore their homogeneity, to allow the realignment ofspatial and moral zones, to return the city to its promise of happiness.Diagramming the contemporary cityNo doubt the work of the Chicago School will scarcely prove to have been the lastmodel of urban reasoning to have problematised the city in a sociological kind of away. Nevertheless, contemporary ways of imagining urban spatialisation, though cer-tainly concerned with issues of sociality and community, hardly seem typically to takesuch a sociological form; and today, in any case, it is not really the sociologistsoreven their relatives, the geographers and town plannerswho can lay any exclusiveclaim to be our contem porary d iagram mc rs of urban virtue. W hat, then , are the m orecurrent models of diagramming the city?The prevalancc of cybernetic metaphors in contemporary thought may provide aclue to contem porary diagrams of governm ent/3) Information, communication, net-works, linkages, nodes, relays, the risks to particular dynamics of turbulence fromwithout, and flaws and glitches from within, which require a perpetual vigilance toerror, a strategy of 'work around* and 'botches', of configu ring a nd reconfigu ring,flexibility, multiplicity, speed, virtuality, simulation. Whereas social-control theoryviews control as being the result of an exterior determination over a given domainwhere specific unwanted phenomena are to be prevented, mastered, or dominated, inthe cybe rnetic sense in which G illes Deleuz e uses the not ion , contro l is a kin d ofimmanent problematic of metastability. Control is the never-finished work of regula-tion which operates to bring deviations from system requirements back into line. Inplace of discontinuous 'enclosed' institutions such as the school, the factory, or theprison, in societies of control each plane or apparatus of life itself imposes a continu-ous modulation of risk, feedback, and equilibrium; any enclosed zone of Anteriority'seems to exist only as a moment constantly affected by a permanent and infinite yetceaselessly mutating and recombining exterior. In one sense, the city itself is a casualtyof this discourse of control in that control operates in relation to a plane of immanencethat is coterminous with the connections amongst all information systems and ele-ments connected into networks regardless of their spatial specificity. Yet, again, andprecisely for this reason, the city has been a privileged site for the problematisation ofcontrol in that, within these broiling, rolling, mutating, branching, and reconnectingflows of speed and information, it marks out a concrete field of localisation andconcentration where the exercise of government appears potentially possible.(3) N or be rt W einer observes of the te rm cybern etics the following, "Un til recently, there wa s n oexisting word for this complex of ideas, and in order to embrace the whole field by a single term,I felt constrained to invent one. Hence 'Cybernetics', which I derived from the Greek wordKubernetes or 'steersman', the same Greek word from which we eventually derive our word'governor'" (Weiner, 1989, page 15).


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750 T Osborne,NRose

Forour ownpurposes,thecybernetic m etaphor issymptom atic of acertainway ofimagining cities, government, and spaces in the present.We do not live in cyberneticsocieties,but in societies that areincreasingly und erstood andgovernedbymeansof akind of cybernetic style of thought . In such a cybernetics of the city, intellectualtechnologies and forms of expertise are not added into the urban 'after the fact', acityas it were existingand then requiring modulation, amelioration, and optimisation.Rather theyare designed into the space, time,andserialisation ofexistenceitself, intothe very fabric oflife in the citythe flows are inescapably lines composed inpar tofelements ofknowledge and competence. Duringthe 19thCen tury urb an authoritiesstatistical societies, doctors, public health officials, architects, engineers,and thelikeshaped a certainway ofproblem atising the city and invented diverse technical formsthat wereto intervene intothelife of the city.But now newtechniquesare to allow lifein the city to be governed in a new way: telematics and informatics; computerisedmodels of flows of power, water, traffic; new designs of buildings and streets thatembody securitisation within them; networks of financial obligation which are essen-tially flows of information through the setting of budgets and the monitoring ofaccounts; thep roliferation of audit as a link between activity and s tandardsvia a setof mobile norms operating in themedium of information flows; the multiple linkagesboth vertical and horizontal brought into being by the contractualisation of everyrelation between humans, whetherone of authority (doctors andpatients) or of affec-tions (domestic partners, parents andchildren),or them ultiplication ofsitesofdisputeresolutionvia legaland paralegal mechanisms.

Thisis amatterofsub jectivityaswellas of authority. Cybernetics itself presupposesa particular kind ofcultureof the self.W einer states tha t: To live effectively is to livewith adequate information. Thus, communication andcontrol belongto theessenceofman's inner life, evenasthey belongto hislifeinsociety" (1950, page 18).Theindividualbecomes a kind offield ofcontrol.But in a sense thisis an open field without specificcontents.Inthesenewmodesofcontrol,it isdesirabletorefrainas far aspossible fromimposing moral codes upon individuals 'from above'.Oneshou ld, instea d, establishthegeneral imperativeof anethical relation to self which mustbeactivated andenactedatevery moment whenasubjectis toexerthis or hercapacitiesassuch to shop,totravel,to enterorleaveabuilding,etc. In other words,thefabrication ofthe self isnot aonce-and-for-all matter, accomplished in family or school, nor does it rely on exteriortranscendental sources: it is continuously maintained in thevery act of participationin thenetworks of existence. If the city is a useful milieu for these processes of self-fabrication, this isinsofaras it iswithin the city that thenetworks of association formthat will shape and stabilise this relationof the selfto itselfand to others.'Advanced' liberal citiesIn Britain and the United States in the 1980s it became fashionable to interpret thenew strategies that were emerging for governing cities in terms of 'neoliberalism'.Butsubsequent events have shown that these shifts in therationalities andtechnologiesofgovernment cannotbeunderstoodintermsofthe temp orary dom inanceof ap articularpolitical ideology. What we are seeing here is a much more general transformationin ways of thinking about government and seeking to enact an 'advanced' form ofliberalism. T hesenewurb an governm entalities areliberalnotsimplyin that they stressthe importance of political rule respecting the boundaries of certain zones that areoutwithitsreach: ma rkets, com mu nities, private life. Ra ther, theyareliberalintha t theyreawaken and revitalise the scepticism ofclassical liberalismof the 19th Century overthe capacityofpolitical a ction, informed bypolitical reaso nandpolitical calculation,toactso as to bring about thegood of individuals, pop ulations,and thenat ion at large.


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Governing citicn; notes on the spatialisation of virtue 751

This is not a recipe for political inaction. Like their classical and social liberalpredecessors, the advanced forms of liberalism that took shape in the last decadesof the 20th Century, in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States,and the United Kingdomand which were exported elsewhere by such organisationsas the World Bank and the IM F did not p reach policies of political w ithdrawaland abstentionism. It is true that they attacked *big government': bloated bureaucra-cies and civil services; complacent and patronising professionals; the fostering oftutelage and dependency; the belief that the state could maximise economic, social,and individual well-being through policies of *tax and spend'. But they did not demanda return to the minimalist 'night-watchman' state imagined by the neolibcral gurus ofthe 1970s and 1980s. Rather, they sought a new role for the political apparatus asmerely one partner in government, facilitating, enabling, stimulating, shaping, andinciting the self-governing activities of a multitude of dispersed entitiesassociations,firms, communities, individualswho would take onto themselves many of the powersand responsibilities previously annexed by *the state'.The characteristics of contemporary strategics for 'reinventing government' arefamiliar: downsizing the state, decentralising decisionmaking, devolving power to inter-mediate bodies such as trusts or associations, privatising many functions previouslypart of the state machinery and opening them up to commercial pressures and businessstyles of management, introducing managerialism and competitive pressures into theresidual state apparatus, displacing the substantive knowledge of the welfare profes-sionals by knowledges of examination, scrutiny, and review undertaken by accountantsand consultants. In relation to urban politics, these have entailed something of anassault on the old democratic enclaves of local government, now represented as hide-bound by bureaucracy and riddled with nepotism. The tendency is to bypass thetraditional democratic mechanisms of the periodic vote for an elected representativewith all manner of newer democratic techniquesconsultations, surveys, opinion polls,citizen ju rie s, focus groups, teledemocracy, and the like. Fu nct ions of 'dem ocr atic ' localgovernmentfrom street cleaning to urban regenerationhave been devolved to amultiplicity of private firms or public - private partn ership s. This simultaneously plura -lises the agencies and entities involved in governing, involves regulation through thetechniques of the 'new public management', and transforms political control, which nowoperates 'at a distance' through setting budgets, targets, standards, and objectives, alloverseen by the ubiquitous techniques of monitoring and audit. These strategies thusinvolve 'autonomisation' plus 'responsibilisation'. They multiply the agencies of govern-ment whilst enwrapping them within new forms of control. The autonomy of politicalactors is to be shaped and used to govern more economically and more effectively. Thisis though t to require a reduction in the scope of direct m anag em ent of hum an affairs bystate-organised programmes and technologies of relation, and an increase in the extentto which the government of diverse domains is enacted by the decisions and choices ofrelatively autonomous entitieswhether these are firms, organisations such as hospi-tals, professionals such as doctors, community bodies and associations, or individualsthemselvesin the light of their own assessment of their interests, needs, and desires,and the ways in which they may be advan ced in a particu lar environm ent of rewa rds andsanctions.Contemporary games of urban citizenshipThese 'advanced' liberal strategies conceive of citizens, individually and collectively, asideally and potentially 'active' in their own government. The logics of the market, inwhich econo mic agents are viewed as calculating ac tors striving to realise and actua lisethemselves through their choices in a lifeworld, according to the information that they


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have at their disposal, are generalised to areas previously thought immuneto all thedecisions individuals and groups take about their lives, in relation to the education oftheir children, the disposal of their income for housing or for pleasure, the investmentof their energies in law-abiding enterprise or in crime, and indeed their choices aboutwho should govern them an d how. These new forms of gov ernm ent through freedommultiply the points at which the citizen has to play his or her part in the games thatgovern them. But, inescapably, they also multiply the junctures where these games areopened up to uncertainty and risk, and to contestation and redirection.The multiple projects of contemporary urban government work with presupposi-tions about urban citizenship in terms of activity and obligation, entrepreneurship andallegiance, in which rights in the city are as much about duties as they are aboutentitlements. Each tries to govern through a certain kind of citizenship game. Each,by virtue of its dependence on an active practice of citizenship, opens the possibilitiesfor a certain agonism. This political agonism is not a traditional politics of the party,the programme, the strategy for the organised transformation of society, or the claimto be able to implement a programme of better government. Rather, these minorpractices of citizen formation are linked to a politics of the minor, of cramped spaces,of action on the here and now, of attempts to reshape what is possible in specificspaces of immediate action, which may connect up and destabilise larger circuits ofpower. Strategies of governing throug h citizenship are inescapab ly op en and modifiablebecause what they demand of citizens may be refused, or reversed and redirected as ademand from citizens for a modification of the games that govern them, and throughwhich they are supposed to govern themselves. Four brief examplesof health, of risk,of enterprise, of pleasu re m ay clarify this a rgum ent.Healthy citiesThe city has long been imagined in terms of sickness and health. But in recent decades,a new image of the healthy city has em erged: the city as a ne two rk of living practices ofwell-being. This is not a matter of imposing some rational, sterile, planned diagram ofsanitary existence. Rather, the aim is to configure the forces immanent to urban life, toshape the ecology of the city in order to maximise the processes that would enhancethe well-being of its inhabitants individually and in their 'communities', and to mini-mise those that would threaten them. All aspects of urban life are now understood asfactors that can be mobilised in the name of a norm ofw ell-being:health now appears,simultaneously, as a maximisation of the values of community, public safety, economicdevelopment, and family life. Roads, traffic and pollution, zoning, the design ofbuildings and open spaces, the organisation of shopping locales, and other elementsof 'urban design' are to be suffused with this 'ecological' concern for health. Further,the activities of health professionals, in addition to media, local politicians, tradesunions, educationalists, representatives of nongovernmental organisations, local com-munity 'grassroots' organisations, and others are brought into an alliance that wouldperceive and act upon all aspects of urban existencejobs, housing, environment,public safety, diet, transportnot just to ward off sickness but to promote well-being.In the name of well-being, urban communities are to be empowered such that theycollectively and individually are made responsible for their own healthiness. In otherwords, health is not simply a value in its own right, but rather a resource within awhole spiral of positive values that can be made to breed and spread in the urbanecology. In this vision of urban health, the very idea of disease in the city has beentransformed. It is no longer imagined in epidemic formthe invasion of the urbanmilieu by cholera or typhus putting its inhabitants at risk of infection. Rather, disease,and ill health more generally, is imagined in terms of activities (diet and coronary heart


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Governing cities: notes on the spatialisalion of virtue 753

disease, smoking and lung cancer, obesity and all manner of threats to health) andrelationships (unsafe sex and HIV, rave parties and drugs). We no longer have the sickon the one side of a division, the healthy on the oth er we are all, actua lly orpotentially, sick, and health is not a state to be striven for only when one falls ill, itis something to be maintained by what we do at every moment of our everyday lives.Threats to well-being are immanent to the life of the active individual: they result froma breakdown of controls on conduct, from the failure to develop a healthy lifestyle, toeat properly, to manage stress. But threats to well-being also inhere in the relations ofindividuals to their environment, which can exacerbate or minimise the risks, notmerely because of the levels of pathogensphysical and psychological- circulatingwithin it, but also because of the styles of living which arc promoted within particularcommunities.The healthy citizen exercises active self-responsibility in a health-conscious com-munity. This is not only because one can only be responsible on the condition that onepossesses the good health to exercise one's responsibility, but also because the healthfield has itself become an arena of responsibiiisation.Thc domain of health has becomea novel and paradigmatic kind of civic space, where the exercise of a popular ascetics ofself-control will be implanted and augmented through a community politics of healthyliving, by stress clinics and exercise centres, by healthy diets in factory canteens, andlocal health-promotion campaigns. The imperative of health thus becomes a significr ofa widercivic, governmentalobligation of citizenship in a responsible community.The healthy city is not a city of minimal disease and social contentment, it is an activeorganic striving for its own maximisation against all that which would threaten itincluding the threats that it secretes as part of its very existence. But as the individualaspirations of citizens to their own health arc enhanced, their complaints, disaffections,and demands achieve a new significance and new points of application and leveragewithin the practices that seek to govern their conduct in the name of health.Risky citiesSince the 19th Century, the criminal diameter of urban space has been charted by thepolice forces of each nation through the collection, classification, and presentation ofthe statistics of crime. Perhaps this always gave rise to an image of the city in terms ofzones of danger and safety, and a way of living in the city informed by a perceptionof the relative riskiness of particular zones. Riskiness, of course, was not merely anegative value: risk-taking in the city is a matter not only of an awareness of hazards ofassault and robbery, but also of an active pursuit of the prospects of excitement, sexualgratification, debauchery, license, gambling, and the like. But our current image of thecriminogenic city governmentalises risk as a spatialisation of thought and intervention.Using techniques pioneered by the commercial demands of insurance and based oninformatics and postcode mapping, this spatialisation is now at the molecular level ofurban existence. The contemporary city is thus visualised as a distribution of risks: oneof those maps with coloured overlays where each layer marks out a particular breed ofriskinessof street crime, of sexual assault, of burglary, of car theft, of beggars andmarginal persons, of single-parent families and ethnic minorities. Unlike the moraltopographies of urban space developed in the mid-19th-Century, the contemporaryurban topography of risk indicates less a concrete statistic attached to a locale, morea factor calculated through the amalgamation of a concatenation of 'indicators' toeach of which may be attached a certain probability of a less than optimal outcomeof an activityshopping, parking a car, buying a house, walking to the shops. Riskis thus as much a feature of spatialisation itself as it is of the particular 'characteristics'of people that inhabit certain zones. It is to be governed through the continual


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754 T Osborne,NRose

monitoring and assessment ofrisk in relation to urban spaceandplace,and the activeadoption ofstrategies of risk reduction by authorities, communities, and individuals.One visionfor urban risk-reductionisanimatedby thedreamof a newseparationofthe virtuousand thevicious,a new andclear spatialisationofdang er into safe zone sandrisk zones. Fictional representations of urban life capture this well:the so-called 'BladeRunner' scenario in which a division is attemptedand always threatenedbetweenthe safe spaces of civilityin certain secured zones, policed buildings, civilised com-munities with their broad boulevards, watered gardens, elegant interiors,and thelikeand the space lying outside thelimits of these secure spaces, full of threat, chaos,anddanger but also excitement, seduction, glamour, glitter, drugs, sex, and 'real life': the'glop', the 'sprawl'. This fictional representation is imitated in real life in a defensivespatialisation that has cometo shape city space: shopping malls and shopping centreswith theirown internal security systems guarded at their perimeters andmonitoredbyclosed-circuit TV; 'contractual' communities with walls around them and entrancescontrolled by security guards, as in the so-called gated communities that have arisenfrom Istanbul to Islington. Mike Davis isrightin onerespect to regard these develop-mentsasentailingthedeathofthe city:forwhat wouldbemarkedbysuch developmentswouldbe thedeathof aparticular k indof liberaldreamofthe cityas anopen, civilised,and civilising habitat for the existence of free citizens (seeDavis,1988,page87).

Hence, it is not surprising that this image of government of risk through spatialseparation is increasingly coming under challengebyanother, in which securityis notthought of in absolute terms. In this image, therecan be no inherently safe locales oractivities and, in addition, there must be no 'no-go' zones where law-abiding citizenswillnot venture andwhere the innocent are effectively held hostage by criminal anti-citizens. Risk reduction is to form part of the moral responsibility of urban citizensthemselves. This brings into alignment a whole array of discrepant issues within asingle programmable domainfrom domestic violence to street crime, from burglaryto car theft, from routes for travel to arrangements for children's play areas. SaferCities initiatives, Neighbourhood Watch, and other Community Safety Programmeswork by enrolling citizens in the practices of crime reduction: planning our travellingarrangements, securing our homes and property, instrumentalising our daily activitiesin the name of our own security, guided by police, community safety officers, and ahostofothe r novel expertsofrisk.But they also seekto reawaken in citizens theirownmoral responsibilities to thepolicing ofconduct, in particular, through the popularityof such notions as 'zero tolerance'and the 'broken windows thesis 'the argument thattoleration of minor breaches of civility sows the seeds of a more dangerous andinsidious criminal culture.

Thisnewimageofcitizenship mustbeunderstood inrelationto that which opposesit, a kind of anticitizen that is the constant enticement, and threat, to the project ofcitizenshipitself. Theemergenceof the notions of exclusion to characterise thosewhopreviously constituted the social problem group defines these noncitizens or anticiti-zensnot in terms of substantive characteristics but in relational terms; that is, it is aquestion of their distance from the circuits of inclusion into virtuous citizenship.The'excluded' might make it into citizenship, if theycan onlybe connectedup to the rightnetworks ofcomm unityand the requisite channels of enterprise. Exclusion isimaginedin a spatial form, in the form of excluded and marginal spaces within the urbanfabric itself, enclosures where the lines of virtuous inclusion have somehow comedisconnected and fail to flow. Not so much a ghetto, more a precise localisation ofthe marginal given the nameof an estate, a housing project, an urban enclave: Spital-fields, Broadwater Farm. In these enclaves, the links of citizenship and communityhave turned against themselves, and all those things which would connect individuals


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Governing cities: notes on the spatialisation of virtue 755

into the netwo rks of inclusion have instead produced negative feedback family life,welfare solidarity, and state education are all seen as machines for disconnection ratherthan for connection. Hence the need to reawaken in these zones the dormant moralenergies of those who exist within them: in neighbourhood-based schemes for thereclamation of the streets from drug dealers and prostitutes; in estate-based schemesfor regeneration which target the antisocial, name and shame them, refuse to beterrorised by their immoral and criminal conduct, and so forth. Once more, govern-ment of risk is to proliferate at a molecular level through the enrolment of thecapacities and commitments immanent to citizens themselves.Cities of enterpriseIn contrast to the classical liberal diagram, the economic salience of the 'advanced'liberal city has ceased to be thought of simply in terms of a space or a milieu: it isa node within pathways of mobility, a matrix of (lows, a point o( connection andrebranching of lines of activity which connect persons, processes, and things. No doubtmercantilism, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism were always matters of Howsover distance and concentrations in space: cities as economic concentrations of rawmaterials, labour power, wealth, a local market; trade routes, exports, imports, com-petition, and so forth as economic networks into which each was integrated to agreater or lesser degree. But the contemporary images of globalisation and localisationspatialise economic activity in new ways. A growing literature argues that the route toeconomic success lies in the establishment of entrepreneurial localities, with fluid andflexible internal economic arrangements dependent upon physical proximity, whichcompete with one another on a world market. The idea of a 'local economy' informseconomic policy at the regional level and, increasingly, within urban government itselfAs the boundaries and unity of national economies are thought to be breached by flowsof goods, money, information, expertise, profit, labour, and, around global networks,'local economies1are und erstood as almo st the only geograph ical zo nes where capital,labour, raw materials, and expertise can be captured and acted upon. Perhaps moresignificantly, their novelty lies in the relations established between previously nomadicforces, in the attempt to connect up the restless energy of the entrepreneur with morethan simply the pursuit of maximum profit. The relation of capital to the urban shouldbe more than that of a raiding party with its prey: it should take a stake in the shapingand destiny of the urban itself, in the reshaping of its decayed Docklands and aban-doned factories into shopping malls and waterfronts, in the rebuilding of its concreteand windswept wastelands into shopping malls and markets, in the reconstruction of itsestates so that they shift from spaces for the residential storage of labourers en masseand in maximum density into communities of homes that activate the dreams ofpossession and self-improvement necessary to bind the energies of young men andwomen into the regimes of civility.

There are, of course, different versions of this new economic localism. It can havea left-wing, corporatist formulation as in some arguments on the governmentalrequirements and interagency relations necessary to promote the interaction, trust,cooperation, and mutual obligation necessary for flexible specialisation. Or it canhave an entrepreneurial form, where the city is an entity to be made entrepreneurialin and through acting upon the enterprising capacities of different 'partners' or 'stake-holders', stimulating their competitiveness, their rivalry, their capacity to meet thechallenge of economic modernisation in a harsh ecology full of pacific tigers and othervoracious beasts in an economic struggle for the survival of the fittest in which cities,rather than nations, are the key actors. It is in these terms that it has now been possibleto render the city as an economic subject, not a favourable geographical location on


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coast, river, or trade routes, nor as a milieu within which some prosper and some striveand all benefit from their enterprise, but as itself an economic actor in the worldeconomy of cities, such that one can talk about the remarkable revival of Glasgow,the decline of Sunderland, the reawakening of Baltimore: in each case what is decliningor reviving is a kind of ethico-economic character of enterprise imbuing a city as awhole by virtue of the motivation, the sense of pride and competitiveness, the installa-tion of a relentless rivalry between cities and regions mobilised by means of theenterprise of each and of all (see King, 1990; Knox and Taylor, 1995; Sassen, 1991).The urban economy, here, has a kind of quasi-organic life of its own; it can be inhealth, decline, or recovery, it can be regenerated by calculated means of intervention,it is in competition with other 'local economies', it must therefore have its ownpeculiarities and advantages that will provide it with a niche within this competitiveecology of local economiesits labour force, its transportation systems, its rates oflocal tax and subsidy, its skill levels, and so onin order to attract inward investmentand the like. Increasingly, and perhaps surprisingly, economic regeneration at this locallevel is itself understood in terms of new games of citizenship. On the one hand, this isa matter of entrepreneurship, of acting upon the dependency culture fostered in theheart of industrial urban decline, the lack of entrepreneurship which is the legacy of anage of mass factory employment now past. But on the other hand, it is a matter ofrecreating communities of obligation and allegiance within these zones. The recentupsurge of interest in trust relations as a condition of economic health, the communi-tarian emphasis upon civic commitment as a key factor in economic development, theargu m ents of social capital theor ists th at very local features of mo ral relations (networks,norms, trust, and so forth) facilitate coordination and cooperation, minimise transactioncosts, serve as vital sources of economic information, and so onall these makeeconomic regeneration a matter of local economic citizenship. The immanent productivecapacities of the city are to be released by action up on the subjects an d ag ents who m akeup its eco nom y A whole range of initiatives for econom ic regeneration have taken shape,which operate through action on the culture of enterprise within cities, and seeksimultaneously to maximise the enterprise of these constituents of the labour forcenow thought of in terms of their location and residence and to maximise the relationsof obligation which they feel to others, not in a society or a nation, but in a localised andparticular network of commitment, allegiance, and reciprocal responsibility.Cities of pleasureFrom at least the 19th Century, the city has been represented, in literature and indocumentary descriptions, as promoting a certain type of mentality and sociality as aconsequence of the kinds of pleasures and stimulations that it offers. These analyseshave usually had a negative tone, one modulated according to whether the target wasthe urban enervation of the civilised or the urban degradation of the sensibilities of theuncivilised. For the latter, the pleasures of the citynotably those of alcohol, vice,gambling, prostitution, and the likeare repetitively implicated in the productionof certain degenerate characters: Baudelaire's rag-pickers, Mayhew's costermongers,Booth's forgotten classes, Engels's proletariatin short, misbegotten peoples whohave little in common beyond their poverty, exclusion, and the territory they inhabit,and little to lose but their misery. The city becomes a site for investigation of the urbanfactors tha t generate these strange, un derclasses or nonclasses; like 'darkest Africa', thesights and sensations of the dark continent of the urban poor are to be narratedby intrep id explorers (see Stallybrass and W hite, 1986). The u rba n repo rtage of the19th Century sought to capture these forms of debased subjectivity secreted by theurban.


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Governing cities: noteson thespatialisationofvirtue 757

This exploration also represented, for itsproponents*a kind ofwork upon the self,a search for sensation which was made possible by urban existence itself: this is whythe urban explorers are so often to be seen taking a walk. Hence the other side ofurban sociality which is so often written about: the city as the place where thepleasures may be generated, for good or for ill, by the ever-present possibility of thechance encounter with the unknown. In one version of this argument, the civilityproduced by the city is itself a kind of alienated sociality. Urban existence sunderssocial bondsand replaces themby a massof impersonal relations; thecityis the placewhere there are masses in close, almost paranoiac, contiguity yet where interpersonalrelations are cold and artificial. And, at the same time, the city subjects the humanpsyche to shocks, sensations, impressions, and experiences that arc overwhelming;simultaneously exciting and enervating the character of the urban dweller, producinga particular urban mentalityThecitymay be ageneratorof delightsno doubt alwaysspecific togender and to rank and wealthbut these delights aredangerous not onlyin the sense that the pleasure they generate isamplified by the frisson of danger, butalso because of the damage they inescapably threaten to those who enjoy them forthereis no pleasure that docs not carry a cost (Walkowitz, 1992).

In another versionmade popular from Walter Benjamin to the contemporarypostmodern romances of the urbanflaneur andflaneuse, of department stores, shop-ping malls,and the'public sphere'the dangersof thecityare the inevitable other sideof itsvery civility For thecity appears the unique generator of civilised pleasures thatmakeup andsustain thevery civilised subjects c apa bleof enjoying them.Thecivilised,quintessential^ civic pleasure of the bohemian promenade, of public life and theencounterof one with another in the civilised spaces of the city centre street with itswindow displays, itspubs and clubs, itsmuseums and galleries.Yet, at the same time,these civilised pleasuresareheightenedby their proximityto the transgrcssive pleasure,in which the city is uniquely capable of generating a range of excitements that escapethe governmental dream of a purified, hygienic, moral space inhabited by a well-regulated population. Here one finds the imagesof the opaque, excessive, ungovernedcity: a fecund, heterogeneous, spontaneous, dangerous, promiscuous warren of *otherspaces' where pleasure is spiced with danger, where desire can run free in alleyways,tenements, clubs, bars, theatres, music halls,and gambling dens (seeDonald, 1995).

But these conflicting practices ofpleasure havenotevaded thenetworksof capturethat filiate the advanced liberal city: transgression is itself to be brought back intoline and offered up as a package of commodified co ntentm ent. The city of pleasurecelebrated in poetry, novels, films,and systematised in social theoryhas itself beenfedinto the programmatic imagination, in an alliance between city politics and commer-cial imperatives.Amu lt itude ofprojects, inalmost allmajor cities, seekto reshapethereal city according to this image of pleasure, not least in order to enter into thecompetitive market forurb an tourism. Inthese programm es andprojects,theimageofurban spaceasprovidingam ultitudeof spontaneous encounters,ofsudden glimpsesofarchitectural odditiesandesoteric markets, of bus tlingyetsafe public spaces, this ur ba nexperience seenby itscelebrantsasarisingout of the intersection andaccumulationofthousandsofspontaneous historiesandschemes,has been transformed into calculated,rationalised,andrepetitive prog ramm esfor reshaping waterfronts, dockland areas, sitesof old buildings, palaces, warehouses, piers, vegetable markets,and thelike into tou ristattractions. Urban theme parks, each more hyperreal than real. Disused wharvesbecome craft mark ets. Victorian structures that acco mm odate d carcasses of sheepand cowson theirway to butchers, sacks ofpotatoes andcauliflower on theirway tocornershops are now filled with trendy boutiques and cafes. Sectors of space onceoccupied, for specifiable economicand other reasons,bypeople of Chinese extraction


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become 'Chinatown', proclaimed by street signs with elaborate and publicly fundedfestivals to m ark th e star t of the Chinese Year of a part icu lar anim al. Each 'conse rvationarea', each 'heritage trail ' is populated not by the spontaneous movements of the urbaninhabitants, but by those transported by tour coaches, clutching guidebooks, videocameras, and p

Governing Cities Notes on the Spatialization of Virtue

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