17

Ordonnance, Discipline, Regulation: Sorne

Reflections on Urbanism

P aul Kabinow

Modern urban planning emerged under the aegis of French colonialism between 1900 and 1930. Colonial urban policies were jointly conceived by self-declared professional planners and powerful colonial officials. Both viewed the cities where they worked as social and aesthetic laboratories. The colonies, in particular .Mo­rocco, Vietnam, and Madagascar, offered both groups the opportunity to try out new, large-scale urban planning concepts. They could then test the political effect­iveness of these plans, both in the colonies and eventually, they each hoped, at home. The colonialists sought to use architecture and city planning to demonstrate the cultural superiority of the French, both to the indigenous populations and to the French themselves. Urban design was an integral part of colonial domination, especially after the end of the nineteenth century. It provided one of the means to establish military control, regulate activities, separare populations, and establish a comprehensive order, on both an aesthetic and political leve!.

My recent work has involved exploring the evolution of modern European urban­ism as a self-consciously scientific discipline - armed with sanitation, statistics and sociology. It then places this discipline, which sought to be universal and reformist, within a distinct sociological and political context. As the work has progressed, it has become clear that to understand why the emergence of modern urbanism was an important turning point in the evolution of aesthetic theories - and also the evolution of the social sciences, the growth of modern forms of political power, and the elaboration of specific techniques for relating the three - one had to understand the historically variable links between spatial relations, aesthetics, social science, economics, and politics. Why, after al!, should it be held that the ordering of space, here the necessity for urban planning, was ( 1) important, even essential, and (2) new?

In order to answer these questions, or even to pose them, it has been necessary to retrace the steps by which a particular group of French Beaux-Arts students carne to pose such questions in these very terms. This has entailed a comprehensive inter­pretation of space, power, and social science. Although this challenge is clearly

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beyond my capacities and my intentions, sorne extremely useful and brilliant elem­ents of a response can be found in the work of .Michel Foucault.

Foucault is one of a very few thinkers in modern times who has given concerted attention to space as a problem. In fact, the more I began to look to Foucault's work for aid, the more the centrality of spatial considerations in his work became appar­ent. One only has to think of the famons analysis of Velasquez's Las Meninas 'in which the examination of three hundred years of intellectual history is brilliantly summed up by showing how such a painting was organized, or the discussions of enfermement in the History of Madness, or the discussion of Bentham's Panopticon, to be assured that Foucault has given a lot of considered attention to space.

The strong emphasis on space that one finds in Foucault's work arose in part from a larger philosophic combat he was waging against the philosophy of the subject. This stance has, of course, historical parameters. The destruction of the philosophy of the subject and of consciousness (of phenomenology and existentialism) was carried out by severa.! diverse French thinkers in the 1960s under the banner of structuralism. During this period Foucault sought to elaborare a spatial analysis of discourse as a means of undermining and replacing the philosophies of language, science, and knowledge which remained in the Cartesian tradition. But it was not only the individual subject of Descartes or the Husserlian or Sartrian phenomenol­ogies that were his targets, but also the universal and historical subject of the Hegelian and Marxist tradition. Each of these philosophies of the subject had given questions of temporality a central place. This, in Foucault's reading, was the problem. As he says, "Anyone envisaging the analysis of discourse solely in terms of temporal continuity would inevitably be led to approach and analyse it .like the interna! transformation of an individual consciousness. Which would lead to bis erecting a great collective consciousness as the scene of events. Metaphorising the transformation of discourse in a vocabulary of time necessarily leads to rhe utilisa­tion of the model of individual consciousness with its intrinsic temporality." 1

The deconstruction of the subject (either individual or historical) of conscious­ness and of discourse led Foucault, in The Order of Things and especially in The Archaeology of Knowledge, to attempt a unified analysis of discourse treated as if it were autonomous, rule-governed, discontinuous, and self-produced. The aim was a kind of topology of discursive space viewed as a distribution of mute discourse objects. These mute monuments could be viewed from afar by the archaeologist and their spatial distribution could be plotted.

The attempt to construct such an autonomous archaeology failed and has been duly abandoned. This is not the place to analyze why. In our recent book,2 Burt Dreyfus and I show at length why this project of an autonomization of discourse as a strategy for destroying the philosophy of the subject won't and can't work. Foucault himself agrees and has moved on to another more powerful approach, that of genealogy (although it should be remembered and underlined that he has not jettisoned archaeology, only its most imperialistic claims of autonomy).

The second reason for this attention to space is historical and analytic. On the analytic leve!, space could be used as one of severa] tools to locate and identify the relations of knowledge and power. Space therefore provided the genealogist with a leve! of analysis "that enables one to grasp precisely the points at which discourses are transformed in, through and on the basis of relations of power."3

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The object was not to construct a theory of space. Justas Foucault was not and is not attempting to construct a general theory of power, he is not, I think, trying to construct a general theory of space which has somehow been suppressed from the corpus of philosophy. In both instances, he is, I think, looking to develop what he calls an analytics. That is to say, to isolate a group of historical characteristics which permit us to see how in a particular situation these components have provided a grid of intelligibility which enabled those engaged in action to proceed in a way that seemed intelligible to them; to make sense of how these practices and intentions ha ve gone beyond the conscious intentions of the historical actors, but nonetheless still ha ve a signification, the famous "intentionality without a subject" to which Foucault alindes in The History of Sexuality; and finally to enable us today to pick out these historically given but alterable elements which have made us what we are, without positing any laws of history or of consciousness, an inherent logic, a determinism, an essentiality, or a conscious design to those combinations.

Just as Foucault has dramatically increased our awareness of bodies and of the importance of the relations of knowledge and power in Western civilization, he has also raised the problem of the centrality of space - not as an ontological issue, but as a political and an analytic one.

If one regards the scholarly and intellectual treatment of the history of urban planning in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is strangely apparent that when questions of power are treated at ali, it is almost entirely in one of two ways: either in terms of capital cities and their monuments, that is, the organization of space as essentially an aesthetic issue; or - and on the left this is the dominant mode - the analysis of space and power as ownership of property and control of institutions in a disciplinary mode. How segregation of populations, classes, or races evolved is read as a plot of this or that group. There is a fixation on a stale alternative between architecture and urbanism as purely aesthetic creation and hence benign, and as motivated appropriation and hence malignant.

Without denying the importance of formal traditions of architecture or the obvious centrality of speculation in any way, Foucault's approach opens up a much more fertile and complex ground which enables us to take more fully into account the disciplinary components in, say, Haussman's urbanism or the Beaux Arts' glorification and symbolization of state power, to understand them not as preformed and static elements, but as themselves part of a shifting field of power and knowledge in which we can see the gradual self-formation of a class, a nation or a civilization which is crossed in innumerable ways by power but which, to a surpris­ingly large extent, remains to be analyzed.

There are two specifications to be made here. First, Foucault is absolutely not maintaining, as has sometimes been alleged, that architectural form by itself carries with it an inherent political significance or function. Rather, he maintains only that spatial localizations, and particularly certain architectural projects, have been part of political strategies at certain historical moments: "Architecture begins at the end of the eighteenth century to become involved in problems of population, health, and the urban question .... [It] becomes a question of using the disposition of space for economico-political ends."4 (More of this in a moment.)

Second, Foucault is not trying to discover or construct ideal types of spatial deployments of power. Weber's ideal type is a device which retrospectively brings

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together a variety of historical considerations, so as to highlight the "essence" of the historical object being studied, for example, Calvinism, capitalism, or world!y asceticism. It is the ideal type which brings disparate phenomena into a meaningful model from which the historian can explain them. Foucault maintains that his approach differs in that he is interested in isolating "explicit programs," like the Panopticon, which functioned as actual programs of action and reform. There is nothing hidden about them; they are not invented by the historian to bring together an interpretation. Hence, as he told a group of French historians: "Discipline is not the expression of an ideal type (that of the disciplined man); it is the generalization and the connection of different techniques which are themselves responses to local objectives (apprenticeship in school, the formation of troops capable of handling rifles)."5 At the same time these explicit programs were never directly and com­pletely realized in institutions. This is not because reality never totally imitates an ideal, but rather because there were counter-programs, local conflicts, and other strategies which were perfectly analyzable, even if they were finally distinct from the initial program. Foucault's effort as genealogist is to stay as much as possible on the surface of things, to avoid recourse to ideal significations, ideal types or essences.

So, if philosophically the emphasis on space was used as a device for combating the centrality of the subject and of temporality, historicopolitically this analysis led to the conclusion that at a certain period of our history, read genealogically, space and architecture became central components in the localization and operation, the micro-politics, of a specific form of power in the West.

I now want to shift to a brief outline of the main components of this schema for relating space, power, knowledge and history.

In a lecture given at the College de France in 1978, Foucault presented an analysis of three urban plans as a means of schematizing the interrelations of space and power during the Classical Age. The separation of these three schemes of space and power is not, of course, absolute, either temporally or conceptually. Although ali three regimes can be isolated historically, they are important because they still function in modified ways today. In fact, from the Classical Age forward, a complex interplay has been established between them. But, because the story is being told genealogically from the present, it is the most recent scheme, the bio-power - that regime of power in which political intervention takes place at the leve! of the species as a natural and historical population to be known and controlled - which provides the grid of interpretation for the other two, the disciplinary and the sovereign. For it is the growth and spread of bio-power which has become Foucault's subject matter, while spatial plans are a means for analyzing the tactics employed in that spread. Consequently, the investment of the other regimes and technologies of power into a larger, more complex, and differentiated apparatus of power is read within the grid of intelligibility provided by bio-power.

Let us therefore look briefly at the relations of space and power in these three schemes. In the sovereign regime of power, the basic spatial urút is the territory, which must be supervised and given a harmonious order such that ali relations of science, the arts, the law, industry, and commerce, as well as agriculture, fall under

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the benevolent government of the sovereign and serve to increase bis glory. In the disciplinary technology of power, the problem is the control and distribution of bodies and individuals in a spatial ordering whereby tbey can be made to function in such a manner that efficiency, docility, and hierarchy are simultaneously achieved. Finally, under tbe technologies of bio-power, power is exercised on a population existing in a specific milieu wbich is both natural and historical. The components of both the population and the milieu must be known empirically so that the specific historical, demographic, ecological, and social forces whicb compase the population and the milieu can be systematically regulated and made to flourish.

Tbree urban projects demonstrate the relative simultaneity of these different spatial-political concerns in the Classical Age. The example of a treatise entitled La Métropolitee, 6 written in 1682 by Alexandre Le 1v1aitre, a French Protestant engineer working for the Prussians, presents tbe spatial dimensions of power under the regime of a sovereign. Le 1v1aitre's tapie was the capital. In the capital, the sovereign, bis administration, and tbe necessary artisans must be given a space wbich perfectly represents and aids the workings of power. This demanded not only a perfect ordering of the capital city itself but also a correct placement of the ca pita! within the territory over which the sovereign ruled. Hence, in good Classical terms (which Foucault has analyzed at length archaeologically in Les Mots et les choses) tbe most adequate representation of that which is being represented, here sovereign power, should have the form of that which it is seeking to represent. Consequently and logically, Le Maitre proposed a symmetrical geometrical plan far the spatial ordering of tbe entire territory. It follows tbat the capital should be located at the geographical center. And, for the capital to be most perfectly placed at the center, the ideal kingdom should have the form of a circle. In this scheme, the symbolic joins tbe aesthetic and they are both representations of the political.

By placing the capital at the geometric center of his territory, the sovereign would be in a perfect position to oversee and regulate the correct relations of science, the arts, and trade throughout the realm. Ali that moved in the kingdom must pass through this center. Thus there is a perfect superposition of commerce, politics, and space in Le Maitre's utopian plan.

Richelieu, one of a number of planned cities undertaken in France during the Classical Age, provides an example of a disciplinary ordering of space. 7 We are al! familiar with disciplinary space, altbough we usually associate it witb the spatial ordering found in factories, workshops, schools, prisons, and hospitals. A more complex and total ordering of groups, but a highly functionally specific one, can be found in the army camp and its Roman predecessors. It is therefore both interesting and somewhat unexpected to uncover an even more functionally com­plex disci plinary arder of space in a less obviously controlled and disciplined setting. But Foucault's point was, after al!, precisely tbe way in which disciplinary tecbnolo­gies invested numerous institutions and could expand witbout being too highly visible.

The organization of Richelieu was based on a preconceived plan for an entire city, one tbat flowed from well-articulated interests. We find in this project not a

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representation of an ideal situation, but a concrete project meant to function in a historically and geographically specific context. Discipline involved an ongoing control, a response to a particular set of needs, nota timeless or utopian representa­tion. Its space was not envisioned as the capital or a larger territory, nor as a pre-existent town which had to be reordered. Rather, Richelieu was conceived as a self-enclosed space within which a hierarchical, visible and functional order could be established. It was also planned as a geometric figure this time not a circle but a double rectangle. The whole town was plotted onto a graphic space composed of larger and smaller rectangles. The largest streets, appropriately where the most prestigious, powerful, and wealthy people lived, were located at the center of the city along its main axis. The smaller and more peripheral streets were to be inhabited by those occupied with commerce and artisanal trades.

Architecture also hada precise role in the laying out of distinctions and functions. Two major categories of houses were constructed in such a manner as to make differences in power perfectly recognizable. On the main axis stood the largest and most imposing houses (a sort of linear Place des Vosges), whose size and decoration were strictly controlled to create a harmonious visual and social order. On the smaller streets, perpendicular to the main axis, were proportionally smaller and less luxurious houses. A church and a market were erected on two grand places at each end of the main avenue.

This artificial, closed, and orderly space visibly articulates a type of power which both made a hierarchy operational and ensured an efficient circulation of goods and power. A series of individuals were fixed in a larger order. By their very location, they contributed to a larger set of Richelieu's own aims - for the town itself, as well as for his personal ambitions.

Richelieu was indeed built, a planned town for severa! thousand inhabitants, as Foucault indicates; moreover, the Cardinal's real aim in having this town con­structed alongside bis new grandiose chatean was to use it as a means of keeping his closest counselors and courtiers under a strict surveillance. Each courtier, arrived or aspiring, was informed that he had the privilege of paying for one of the large and expensive houses on the main avenue where Richelieu's architect was designing residences under the Cardinal's orders. Hence, it was the upper classes for whom this disciplinary space was primarily designed.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault had given us an interpretation of disciplinary technology as a strategic implantation of a set of devices for the implementation and expansion of a normalizing power essentially applied to the working classes and sub­proletariat. Richelieu offers a somewhat different reading of disciplinary technology as one of the elements in the self-construction and auto-regulation of the middle and upper classes. It pro vides a good example of how a technology of power operates not simply as a device of domination and exploitation, but as a formative process whereby ali those enmeshed in its space are involved in its operation. A hierarchical ordering of classes was certainly intended in the way the town was planned. But, in this instance, disciplinary ordering of space was applied primarily to the fixing and surveillance of the rulers, under conditions of luxury and privilege.

Yet, although ali of the expensive residences were constructed and sold, almost no one moved into them. The town of Richelieu was, in fact, too far from the court and the capital. Instead, in the following years, the artisans who had built the town,

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small-scale shopkeepers and servants eventually appropriated the houses in a kind of carnivalesque reversa! of power, and the town became a modest success, although clearly not the kind of success Richelieu had originally envisioned.

Nantes in the eighteenth century illustrates the role of space within a framework of bio-power, 8 Nantes was not a royal city, nor can it be read as an example of disciplinary space, although there were attempts to introduce both types of spatial/ political organization. There was a certain amount of Baroque glorification of the state in a few monuments and their surrounding squares, but this never amounted to much. There was also a proposal far a grid-like development of the main island in the Loire adjoining the old city, but this never passed beyond the architect's draw­ings. Rather, the city of Nantes went its own way. A wave of prosperity brought on by the growth of trade with America, particularly the traffic in cloth and slaves, stimulated commerce in the first part of the eighteenth century. Growth, circulation, and trade rather than glory, harmony, or hierarchical arder became the central planning concerns of the architects and burghers of Nantes.

These goals too generated particular urban plans. One of the first attempts to reanímate the central city was drawn up by an architect named Rousseau. This Rousseau designed a new quarter in the shape of a heart: clearly, in this age of correct representations, the most appropriate farm to stimulate health and a vigor­ous circulation of goods, people, and air through the congested valves of the medieval city. Hélas, Rousseau's plan also never got farther than the drawing board, although it <lid receive sorne praise and the principies it embodied were incorporated by other city designers.

A series of rather less eiegant plans were to guide the actual development of Nantes. First, a series of percées, or widened streets far heav.ier traffic, were cut through the older medieval lanes. The interior street network and the main commer­cial activities of the town could thereby be connected far a more extended network of circulation, both within the city and to outlying areas. For the growth of the city was clearly tied to a wider commercial world than that of Nantes itself. The city was not conceived as a self-enclosed, geometrically representable unir. Rather, its future prosperity depended on the vital, regulated flow of goods, people, and air, within the city itself and far beyond its boundaries. While this system of circulation increased activity, it also provided a means far the effective surveillance and control of such activity. Taxes could be collected, health measures enforced, movements of popula­tion controlled, al! in such a manner as to maximize the beneficia] effects and minimize the nefarious ones.

The problem far the architects of Nantes was thus how to make operational a space that would promote a regular and vigorous circulation. This was not simply a question of extending or perfecting an administrative cadréage of equal units following a fixed plan, but rather a differentiation of space according to its specific functions and particularities. In this scheme, space was not taken as a neutral medium to be ordered ex nihilo, as was the case in Richelieu. Rather - and here the specific components of bio-power enter in - space was continually analyzed and manipulated as something to be known and used. It had to be considered in its

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empirical relation to a specific site; to the demographic, commercial, and social characteristics of the already existing population; and, most importantly, to the potential future development of those diverse human and geographical particular­ities, now understood as resources to be known, regulated, and maximized. Hence, while the solution to the problem of how to increase the health and prosperity of Nantes might well draw on general principies applicable elsewhere, the solution itself had to be resolutely particular.

For it follows that if the aim was to increase, make prosper, encourage, and maximize the current functioning and future growth of Nantes, starting with what was already there, then the need for a precise knowledge of the state of such matters as the geology, geography, demography, the market, the dispositions and possibilities of the inhabitants' trades, the conditions of hygiene, dangers of infection from abroad, and so on, was evident. Ali of these constantly changing conditions had to be known in precise detail in order to plan for the population of the city. Moreover this knowledge was not static, for it had to be projected in time in order to plan for development.

The combination of empirical social studies a11d calculated efforts to pla11 for future needs became the task of a particular spatial inscription of power and knowledge. Indeed, the "knowledge" side was so highly developed by the early nineteenth century that a local doctor named Ange Guépin could produce a historical sociology ofNantes which ran to fifteen hundred pages, detailing every aspect of the city's social life and its historical development, and then in innumerable other publications the good doctor could outline what he saw as the healthiest and most efficient manner for Nantes to evolve, guided by the principles of social hygiene. 9 Empirical, statistical, and historical sociology thus began in France long before Durkheim.

The "power" aspect was also surprisingly clear: a shift in focus from the state itself and well estabiished institutions of power toward the industrial and commercial classes themselves, with their particular conceptions of growth and effectiveness. While certain steps in Nantes's urban transformation, such as the grand percées through and around the medieval fabric, were easily agreed upon, the local mer­chants debated among themselves where the port facilities on the Loire should be expanded and who should pay for this development. The thorniest issue for them was how to combine speculative development of housing with a centralized control of the city's services and projected needs. These issues, of course, raised the question of who was responsible for these complex spatial decisions, their financing and their implementation. The sources indicare that, instead of the state or even a single powerful administrative official directing the planning, the most successful aspects of the urban development of Nantes were carried out by individual capitalists, who were given quarters to develop, or by groups of investors, whose common interest was the most efficient and profitable development of particular activities such as the port facilities.

We can point to an important dislocation here. There is no longer a direct relationship between the operation of political power and its spatial representation. In fact, as the example of Nantes indicares, it was no longer the state which was directly responsible for the planning of space. This is not to say that spatial organiza­tion and its planning and control lost their importance; in fact, one could argue that, if anything, the centrality of the manipulation, remodeling, and control of spatial

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decisions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have taken on a degree of importance and, indeed, a visibility previously unparalleled. Everything from genetic engineering to the coordination of world-wide economic relations, to the reworking of the entire ecosphere involves critica! spatial dimensions. However, space has lost its privileged role as a medium through which these changes can be represented. The organization of territory, of routes of communication, of whole cities, and so on, now follows another set of considerations in which the economy and society provide the guidelines and imperatives. The problem has shifted from the correct ordering of space to the regulation of a milieu: how, given a series of elements in a multivalent and transformable cadre, to bring them together such that, in all likelihood, they will prosper in an orderly, efficient, and coherent way.

This brings me back to the spatial, political, and social problems posed by my group of early-twentieth-century French urbanists. Given more time, it could be argued that tf1roughout the course of the nineteenth century, spatial considerations per se (that is, the teaching at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts or the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaus­sées), political considerations (the dramatic changes of regime in nineteenth-century France as well as the steady consolidation of the Napoleonic administrative system), and social science considerations (the emergence of detailed studies about working conditions, health, marginal and dangerous groups, economic science, geographical studies, anthropology, and so on), a!though crossing each other in innumerable ways, did not ha ve, nor did they seem to feel the need for, a common practica! or conceptual linkage. The examples of the railroads or campaigns for electrification, the construc­tion of the road network, or the Haussmanization of the cities all indica te the fact that power, social science knowledge, and spatial planning were hardly dissociated. But it was only towards the end of the century that a need was felt to articulare them into a common framework. Partially under the spur of the defeat of 1870 and the Commune, Frenchmen concerned with such issues began to look abroad, and they found in Germany and England the beginnings of a new discipline, urbanism, which sought to combine the planning of space with political control based on a scientific under­standing of society. It was to be a long time indeed before any comprehensive urban planning was done in France - really not until after the Second World War. But in the interim a good deal of discourse about the need for it was generated, andan impressive amount of experimentation in urban design, which combined political, social, and cultural factors, was carried out in the colonies. In that spatial/political experimen­tation is to be found, I believe, the emergence of a new attempt to articulate space, power, and knowledge.

NOTES

1 "Questions on Geography" in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings by Michel Foucault, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 69-70.