Ckivic City Cahier 5: Designing the Post-Political City and the Insurgent Polis

Civic City Cahier 5 Erik S�ngedouw Designing the PostPolitical City and the Insurgent Polis Bedford Press

A city is no longer comprised only of buildings, streets, squares and parks.

Text and images in public space, branding campaigns, street art, guidance systems, temporary installations and cartographic representations also influence our use, experience and perception of the city, as do signage, urban furnishings, vehicles and the appearance of public facades. The Civic City Cahier series addresses these design practices in light of the escalating crisis of neoliberalism.

Global cities (and their designs in particular) have rested on the paradigm of marketdriven development, and have been interpreted as strategic spaces of neoliberal restructuring. Whilst they are now hit by the crisis of this ideology, the opportunity and necessity to imagine another, more social city has also opened up.

Yet designers continue to hold back criticism

and proposals. However, it is time to redefine the role of design for a social city—and take action.

What is the role of design in the production of urban space? Does it wish to be merely an element in the commodified colonisation of social spaces? Or are design and the visual and physical representations of urban issues themselves the key means by which a Civic City may be created from the ideological ruins of existing urban spaces?

The Civic City Cahier series is also the result of and working material for the ongoing postgraduate and research programme ‘Civic City’ at the Institute for Design Research Design2context at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).

The programme is run by Ruedi Baur, Miguel Robles-Duran, Matthias Görlich and Jesko Fezer.

Civic City Cahier 5 Erik S�ngedouw Designing the PostPolitical City and the Insurgent Polis

Erik S�ngedouw Civic City Cahier 5: Designing the PostPolitical City and the Insurgent Polis Published by Bedford Press Series Editors: Design2context, Jesko Fezer, Matthias Görlich Copy Editor: Matthew Evans Design: Studio Görlich Type Modification: Laqshmi Manolete Pellegrin

© 2011 Bedford Press and the authors.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

The Civic City Cahier series has been initiated

by Institute Design2context, Civic City Program, Zurich University of the Arts.

Designing the Post-Political City and the Insurgent Polis Erik S�ngedouw......................... 5

ISBN 978-1-907414-19-0

Bedford Press AA Publications Ltd. 36 Bedford Square London WC1B 3ES www.bedfordpress.org Bedford Press is an imprint of AA Publications Ltd., which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Architectural Assciation (Inc.) Registered Charity No. 311083 .

Company limited by guarantee. Registered in England No.171402 .

Registered office as above.

Visual Statement........................... 27 Biography..................................... 60

Erik S�ngedouw Designing the PostPolitical City and the Insurgent Polis

Western democracies are only the political facades of economic power.

A facade with colours, banners, endless debates about the sacrosanct democracy. We live in an era where we can discuss everything. With one exception: Democracy. She is there, an acquired dogma. Don’t touch, like a museum display. Elections have become the representation of an absurd comedy, shameful, where the participation of the citizen is very weak, and in which the governments represent the political commissionaires of economic power.

—José Saramago, 2006 There is a shift from the model of the ‘polis’ founded on a centre, that is, a public centre, or ‘agora’, to a new metropolitan spatialisation that is certainly invested in a process of ‘de-politicisation’.

—Agamben, 2006

6

Happy Crisis and Merry Fear (Slogan on Athenian Wall, December 2008) On 6 December 2008, fifteen-year-old Alexis was shot by the police on an Athenian square, an event that triggered weeks of violent urban protests and that cascaded throughout Greece. Less than two years later, on 5 May 2010, three people were killed during riotous protests in Athens in the aftermath of the draconian policy measures that the Greek socialist government had to take under the policing eye of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in order to restore budgetary rigour and to save French and German banks overexposed to Greek sovereign debt paper. On 17 July 2010, Grenoble was set on fire in a clash between rioters and the police. These are some of the recent installments of a sequence of events that saw insurgent architects

7

Happy Crisis and Merry Fear —Athenian Slogan, December 2008

The politics of consensual urban design in its post-political guise, therefore, colonises the political and contributes to a further hollowing out of what, for Rancière and others, constitutes the very horizon of the political as radically heterogeneous and conflicting.

In contrast, proper ‘[p]olitics exists wherever the count of parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of those who have no part’ (Rancière, 1998: 123), and dissensus is the proper name of egalitarian politics: The notion of dissensus thus means the following: politics is comprised of a surplus of subjects that introduce, within the saturated order of the police, a surplus of objects. These subjects do not have the consistency of coherent social groups united by a common property or a common birth, etc.

They exist entirely within the act, and

35

their actions are manifestations of a dissensus; that is, the making contentious of the givens of a particular situation. The subjects of politics make visible that which is not perceivable, that which, under the optics of a given perceptive field, did not possess a raison d’être, that which did not have a name … [This] constitutes the ground for political action: certain subjects that do not count create a common polemical scene where they put into contention the objective status of what is ‘given’ and impose an examination and discussion of those things that were not ‘visible’, that were not accounted for previously (Rancière, 2000: 124–125).

And this of course stands in contrast to the consensual elite-socialist policies that define, organise and suture the present debate and practice:

36

[C]onsensus is thus not another manner of exercising democracy … [It] is the negation of the democratic basis for politics: it desires to have well-identifiable groups with specific interests, aspirations, values and ‘culture’ … Consensualist centrism flourishes with the multiplication of differences and identities.

It nourishes itself with the complexification of the elements that need to be accounted for in a community, with the permanent process of autorepresentation, with all the elements and all their differences: the larger the number of groups and identities that need to be taken into account in society, the greater the need for arbitration. The ‘one’ of consensus nourishes itself with the multiple (Rancière, 2000: 125).

Something similar is at work in the micropolitics of local urban struggles, dispersed resistances and alternative

37

practices that suture the field of urban social movements today. These are the spheres where an urban activism dwells as some form for ‘placebo’-politicalness (Marchart, 2007: 47). This anti-political impulse works through the colonisation of the political by the social through sublimation. It elevates ruptures, disagreements, contestations and fractures that inevitably erupt out of the incomplete saturation of the social world by the police order. For example, the variegated, dispersed and often highly effective (on their own terms) forms of urban activism that emerge within concrete socio-spatial interventions, such as, among others, land-use protests, local pollution problems, road proposals, urban development schemes, airport noise or expansions, the felling of trees or forests, the construction of incinerators, industrial works, etc. … elevates localised communities, particular groups

and/or organisations (like NGOs), etc. … to the level of the political. They become imbued with political significance. The space of the political is thereby ‘reduced to the seeming politicisation of these groups or entities … Here the political is not truly political because of the restricted nature of the constituency’.

(Marchart, 2007: 47). In sum, particular urban conflict is elevated to the status of the political. Rather than politicising, such social colonisation of the political in fact erodes and outflanks the proper political dimension of egalibertarian universalisation. The latter cannot be substituted by a proliferation of identitarian, multiple and ultimately fragmented communities. Moreover, such expressions of protest, which are framed fully within the existing practices and police order (in fact, these protests, as well as their mode of expression, are exactly called into being through

38

39