Rust City Renovation

Rust City Renovation toledo, ohio

Rust City Renovation

a little lord

Rust City Renovation toledo, ohio

Contents

introduction

1

pa rt 1. What Are Cities?

9

1. Street-Level Networks

11

2. Suburban Cities

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37

pa rt 11. Problems & Solutions

3. The Problem is Decline

39

4. Solution 1: Management & Control

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5. Solution 2: Self-Organization

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63

pa rt 111. Self-Designing Cities

6. Art Power

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7. The Old, Weird America

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rust city profile

Toledo, Ohio

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bibliogr a ph y

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The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one. —nassim nicholas taleb Artists don’t solve problems, they invent new ones. —bruce nauman Architecture must create new appetites, new hungers—not solve problems, architecture is too slow to solve problems. —cedric price

Prefatory Note This book is an inquiry. It’s not meant to be authoritative in any way. For better, more complete treatments of these topics, please refer to the sources listed in the bibliography.

Introduction

Rust City Renovation

The root of the American ideal of liberty is the right of every human being to search for and attend to the dictates of conscience. To verify for oneself; to shun blind faith no matter how exalted the pedigree of an authority.1 —jacob needleman

T

...

he so-called “Rust Belt” cities have become a favorite subject for city planners, architects, and business apologists. Places like Cleveland, Detroit, Erie, Flint, Harrisburg, Kalamazoo, Milwaukee, Morgantown, Newark, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Scranton, South Bend, St. Louis, Syracuse, Toledo, and Youngstown regulary attract attention.

This little book examines the problem of economic decline in these former industrial and manufacturing towns, but not from the perspective of potential investors, business leaders, city management, bureaucrats, or government officials. Instead, we will concern ourselves with the residents, citizens, and “multitudes” of these cities.

1

Needleman, Jacob. The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders. New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2003, p. 21

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Both the multitudes and managers of Rust Belt cities agree that the problem is economic decline. Proposed solutions, however, are less easy to agree upon.

The most popular solutions tend to suggest that cities will improve if they provide lifestyle choices and amenities that attract middle-income “creative class.” The working class is encouraged to go back to school. Once the creatives arrive in town, the jobs will come back.2 But factory and manufacturing jobs are gone forever. The jobs of the future are in the production and maintenance of complex, immaterial, service systems.

The problem with the uncritical replacement of factories with algorithms, however, is that we simply replace one type of machine with a more efficient one. In the short term, this benefits anyone who profits from providing an abstract service. But a longer view shows that the more complex the system, the more dependent users become. Dependent users are good 2

Compare to Richard Florida’s Cities and the Creative Class (2005). The book’s publisher describes it like this: “Florida outlines how certain cities succeed in attracting members of the ‘creative class’—the millions of people who work in information-age economic sectors.”

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for business, it may be argued, but they’re bad for civic unity and a healthy body politic.

As philosophers of technology have routinely demonstrated,3 technology can function as either a tool or an apparatus. The difference is in whether the technology “enhances a person’s range of freedom” or whether it employs the user in service to a larger system. As Ivan Illich puts the matter, people are meant to work with their tools, not have tools work for them.

Healthy, growing cities need leadership and employment technologies capable of maximizing our own, human “energy and imagination, rather than more well-programmed energy slaves.”4 The key factors in the renovation of Rust Belt cities, as we will see, are not just more jobs in service to efficient, creative systems. More jobs are certainly needed, but while sheer, basicwage employment is a necessary part of any solution, we may also require something like the following:

3

4

See, for example, “What Is An Apparatus?” in Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. London: Marion Boyars, 1985 (1973), p.10.

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1. an excessive, or supersaturated, democratic process 2. a “cybernetic” self-organization 3. a generative, critical withdrawal What does mean to prescribe an “excessive” democratic participation and collectivity? It means that neighborliness is preferred to the far more common trait of competitiveness. A competitive business context increasingly demands that each participant attempt to exploit his or her difference, niche, or political position in order to gain an advantage. In such a context, an “excessive” democratic participation means working with one’s neighbors in civic unity.

Neighborliness today means risking the possibility that one may be labelled a loser.

The very human need to succeed, or “win,” has come to be seen as not only a right, but a norm.

It’s considered an appropriate, healthy, and economically beneficial check on too much civility and local identity. If your local community is failing, we think, get out!

The Rust Belt is a region of “loser cities.”

These cities represent the last great economic driver in the United States—industrial manufacturing. But, having failed to reinvent our local economies prior to the end of the industrial era, 5

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we’ve fallen behind.

Advocates for post-Fordist economic strategies, represented by investors, business leaders, city management, government officials and service industry bureaucrats, are all important players in the process of Rust Belt renovation.

But this book begins with a belief in cultural leadership-by-example, not leadership by government or management.

We take as our starting point, the critical, generative, or artistic (we won’t say creative) value of the typical resident. This value does not depend on whether factory workers are prepared to re-train, re-educate, or redefine themselves as post-Fordist knowledge workers or immaterial labors, positioned to compete in a global marketplace.

The purpose of this book, instead, is to examine the ways in which left-over members of the industrial-era’s working multitudes are the most important participants in the process of renovation. This is true regardless of their governability, consumer choices, taste metrics, or level of formal education.

The so-called working class, as we think of it, includes anyone who uses their inherent, human energy and imagination in order to generate, create, or produce value. Such a 6

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worker, it should be noted, can come from any socio-economic class. To manage, or simply profit from someone else’s energy and imagination is neither culturally, nor (in the long run) economically beneficial. Economic contributions are necessary, but not sufficient. All boats may rise with simple economic prosperity and quantitative growth, but there is far more value in the production of civic unity, social fabric, cultivated leisure, and civilization.

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part 1

What Are Cities?

Chapter 1 Cities as StreetLevel Networks

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Charles Baudelaire The image of the urban, bohemian artist of 19th Century Paris1 was such a marginal figure, she could be identified with Dante’s hero wandering in a dark forest.

For the modern artist as Baudelaire describes her, the artificially produced urban world was so complex, layered with novel signs and meanings, that the labyrinth of city streets replaced the natural world of landscape painting, and the historical events of history painting, as a source for imagination and art.

As a result, the bohemian artist occupied a middle ground—perceived to be both a vagabond, or flaneur, wandering the streets, and an intellectual, interpreting and making sense out of the confusing, rapid technological changes of modern world.

But the Baudelairian artist most familiar today is the updated version described by Walter Benjamin.2

1

2

Baudelaire, Charles, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. London: Phaidon, 1995.

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.

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Walter Benjamin In his essay “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Benjamin describes the shopping arcades, or corridors, of Paris as emblematic of the mysterious, labyrinthine nature of the urban landscape. The arcades, he points out, were the first public spaces to be illuminated by gas lamps.3 Benjamin’s monumental Arcades Project is collection of ideas about the modern world presented the way objects were presented in the streets—collaged, assorted, random, and overwhelmingly numerous.

For Benjamin, the huge system of Parisian streets were a “vascular network of imagination.”4 He understood Baudelaire to be the iconic figure of modern city life, reiterating that the wandering urban artist was like Dante. Baudelaire’s poems, Benjamin wrote, marked “the order of a journey—more exactly, a fourth journey after Dante’s three journeys in Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The poet of

3

4

Benjamin, Walter. The Writer of Modern Life : Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. p. 31.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 901.

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Florence [Dante] lived on in the poet of Paris [Baudelaire].”5 By the early 20th century, however, Benjamin had observed that the Baudelairian artist and flaneur was no longer a person of detached leisure. A highly efficient system of mechanical reproduction had effectively transformed the formerly independent artist and intellectual into a salaried producer of information, news, and advertisements. The production of culture had been replaced, Benjamin observes, by the production of distraction, entertainment and advertising.6 The soulful poet making her way through an open network of city streets, has become a commercial artist occupying the closed system of the department store—taking, as Benjamin puts it, “the concept of being-for-sale itself for a walk.” 7

5 6

7

The Arcades Project, p. 233. Benjamin is quoting Albert Thibaudet’s History of French Literature.

See Susan Buck-Morss and Walter Benjamin. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989, p. 306.

Arcades Project, p. 448, and Buck-Morss, p. 306. See also Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman, and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique. no. 39, pp. 99–140.

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Jane Jacobs.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Modern Library, 1993 (first published in 1961).

Jane Jacobs Jacobs is well-known for championing what she called the humble, but indispensible “selfgovernment functions” of street-neighborhood networks. 8 She is often criticized for encouraging gentrification, calling it “unslumming.”9 In her defense, Jacobs advocated for dense street8 9

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books, 2007, p. 124.

See Jacobs, Death and Life, Chapter 15.

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level networks to be able to retain their original population. Her goal is to minimize population loss. Contemporary theorists like Richard Florida, however, would have older cities and neighborhoods attract new populations of “creative” professionals (see “suburban cities,” below).

Jacobs was lionized in her day for successfully opposing the rational planning methods of Robet Moses. She effectively saved Washington Square Park from Moses’s proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway. This often leads to viewing urban planning according to an oversimple dichotomy opposing “street culture” advocates like Jacobs, to modernists like Moses.

Populism vs. Planning: A Problematic An example of this simplified reading of history can be found in a recent review of the exhibition “Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes,” at the Museum of Modern Art. Writing for New York magazine, Justin Davidson puts the matter succinctly: Le Corbusier’s plans for the city of Paris, Davidson writes, mainly consisted of demolishing “the inconveniently tangled bits between the monuments. Le Corbusier saw himself as a surgeon, ministering to 16

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diseased cities, but what he really craved was a chance to rip out their hearts.” What repelled Le Corbusier about actual cities, Davidson writes “was what most of us now think of as their essence.”10 He means, of course, that the essence of a city is what Jacobs described as street-neighborhood networks.

A more nuanced perspective, of course, will look for the best in modernism’s desire to make a difference, and effect change where possible.11 See, for example, the commonly held perspective that modernist housing projects like PruittIgoe in St. Louis, or Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes were doomed to failure because they 10 11

“Beauty and Demolition: The Twin Legacies of Le Corbusier,” New York June 17, 2013.

The graphic designers Experimental Jetset define modernism with two propositions: “the assumption that we are shaped by our material environment, and the assumption that it is possible, even desireable, for us to shape this material environment.” It was inevitable, they point out, that after the age of modernism, “ we would experience a backlash, almost a regression to pre-modern times (because that’s basically what postmodernism is: a return to the premodern idea that we shouldn’t even aspire to shape our environment).” Experimental Jetset, in Ericson, Magnus.

Iaspis Forum on Design and Critical Practice: The Reader.

Stockholm: Iaspis, 2009, p. 89.

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replaced dense, diverse street-level neighborhoods with high rise buildings surrounded by large, open plazas and green space. This open space, a hallmark of abstract High Modernist ideas, is typified by Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin.

This point of view is further underlined by architectural historian Charles Jencks’s famous description of Pruitt-Igoe’s 1972 demolition as “the death of modernism.”12 The counter-argument is eloquently presented by architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, who points out that housing projects very much like Pruitt-Igoe, Robert Taylor Homes, and Cabrini Green are still flourishing in New York City: “Penn South, with its stolid redbrick, concrete-slab housing stock, is clearly a safe, successful place,” Kimmelman writes.132The primary causes for the failure of these modernist attempts at public housing turns out to be many of the same causes that led to city-wide political unrest in the 1960s and 70s.

12 13

Jencks, Charles. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1984, p. 23.

Kimmelman, Michael. “Two Towers,” New York Times, January 25, 2012. See also Freidrichs, Chad, Brian Woodman, Jaime Freidrichs, Jason Henry, Benjamin Balcom, and Steve Carver. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. New York: First Run Features, 2012.

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The City as a “Vascular Network of Imagination” In the 19th century, the city would have been experienced the way credulous media theorists describe the internet today. Large, complex systems can be experienced as unknowable, expansive, labyrinthine, and mysterious.

A sense of mystery is associated by Freud with a momentary loss of ego, the “restoration of a limitless narcissism,” or “infantile helplessness.” According to Freud, this common human experience is the cause, or source of religious mysticism’s description of an “oceanic feeling,” or oneness with the universe.143An inability to differentiate one’s ego from a nuturing mother can be compared to “losing oneself” in the city.

The City’s Domestic Interiors According to Walter Benjamin, Edgar Allen Poe’s humorous essay “The Philosophy of Furniture,” published in 1840, marks the beginning of the detective story.154It was still relatively 14 15

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, 2005 (1930), p. 47.

See Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 39.

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novel for the common citizen to have access to a domestic living space, distinct from the place of work. For the first time, the inner, psychological life of common, private citizens left traces, or clues, in his or her choice of furnishing and decoration. With his dectective fiction, Benjamin writes, Poe “shows himself to be the first physiognomist of the domestic interior.”

The small, dark, almost claustrophobic rooms of the Victorian era suggested a closed, rigid privacy, and an almost sacred, protective, secluded inwardness.

Le Corbusier According to Le Corbusier, effective participation in the life of the city requires that the city-dweller first seek the interior, isolated self.

The house as a “machine for living” begins to connote a space intended to direct solitary contemplation and self-development.

Flora Samuel’s Le Corbusier in Detail 165 paints a very similar psychological picture of the architect: his “architecture was built around a philosophy of Orphism,” Samuel writes. “Orphism was the belief, derived from

16

Samuel, Flora. Le Corbusier in Detail. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Architectural Press, 2007, p. 3.

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the ideas of Pythagoras and Plato that the cosmos was held together by numbers and that geometry and proportion could be used to achieve harmony with nature.” The architect’s outward-looking interiors preserved the inner life of the citizen while prescribing a method of return, engagement with the life of the surrounding street, suburb, or landscape.

following spread: Demolition of the Pruitt–Igoe housing estate, St. Louis, Missouri, 1972. Architectural historian Charles Jencks called Pruitt-Igoe’s demolition “the death of modernism” (Jencks, Charles. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1984, p. 23).

Photo: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Policy Development and Research.

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Chapter 2 Suburban Cities

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Urbanity . . . is an individual’s cultivated abilty to move herself, and those around her, smoothly through “clogged thoroughfares” and great numbers of people. To be urbane is to be political. It requires constant vigilance, but the effort is rewarded with the creation of energy. A high social metabolism affects the urbane individual and those around her.

Sub-Urbanity Not everyone can tolerate the demands of maintaining a high level of urbanity. The difficulty and effort required creates the need for suburbs. The sub-urban, according to A. Bartlett Giamatti, is a condition that is “neither urban nor rural,” a non-city where energy is “imported, not created; where all decisions are basically private, and existence is nonpolitical.”16 To be suburban is to “live in retirement while still actually at work; it is to have the illusion of otium [leisure] while caught up in negotium [negotiation].” The urban is inclusive, absorptive, social, and civilized, while suburban is exclusive and a-social, or uncivilized.

1

A. Bartlett Giamatti, Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games. New York: Summit Books, 1989, p. 53

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The etymology of the word “civilization” derives from the idea of a body politic in repose, “stretched out throughout the whole of a city.”27 The parts of the whole obtain their proper balance.

The City as Suburb The post-industrial urban core, according to artist Martha Rosler, is a homogenous space drained of the incentives for political engagement. The post-industrial working, “entrepreneurial,” or “creative” class belong to the first generation to have grown up in an almost entirely suburbanized America.38

Richard Florida In 2002, Richard Florida published The Rise of the Creative Class, a book that labeled “creative” anyone who doesn’t work in the old-style, Rust Belt manufacturing sector. If you don’t work in a factory, Florida’s anthropology suggests, you 2 3

Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. What Is Civilization?, and Other Essays. Ipswich, MA: Golgonooza Press, 1989.

Martha Rosler, “Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Part III.” e-flux Journal, Issue 25, May, 2011, p. 4. “As neoliberalism takes hold,” Rosler writes, “even long-standing democratic processes of public decision-making, such as town meetings that obtained in small towns, succumb.”

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are likely a member of the “creative class.”

The creative class works with computers, in the “immaterial labor” force. It needs to be pointed out that these post-industrial “knowledge workers,” are not artists or designers. Florida’s large, inclusive class may include artists and designers, but what one does is not so important to Florida. It’s what one buysthat’s important. Purchasing habits, patterns of consumption, “lifestyle,” and “taste” are the important factors when identifying the “creative” class.

Taste, in the classic, Kantian sense, it should be pointed out, is closely connected to both morality and a highly cultivated subjectivity.49And “the state and polity,” according to Plato, “depend on sound limb and mind, obtained through great study and serious training” (Republic, 7.536.b).

The buying habits of the “creative class,” by 4

For example: “Any taste remains barbaric if its liking requires that charms and emotions be mingled in, let alone if it makes these the standards of approval” (Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987, page 69). See also, “Part 1: Taste,” in Bayley, Stephen.

General Knowledge. London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 2000, p.46; and Bayley, Stephen. Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991.

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way of comparison, are widely shared. These buying habits are uniformly healthy, environmentally sustainable, and otherwise “virtuous.”

The often overlooked fact that taste is no longer cultivated through careful study and training, but virtue can be purchased at a Whole Foods market is satirized in Christian Lander’s books Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions, and Whiter Shades of Pale: The Stuff White People Like, Coast to Coast, from Seattle’s Sweaters to Maine’s Microbrews.

Christian Lander.

Stuff White People Like The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions. New York: Random House, 2008.

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A Farmers’ Market.

Photo by Howard Dickins.

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David Brooks In a book published in 2000, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks coined the word “Bobos,” a portmanteau made up of “bourgeois” and “bohemian.”510 Brooks’s idea is that the bohemian’s idealism has ben neutralized by the free market. As a result, normal middle class bourgeois consumers buy according to a lifestyle modelled on the taste-profile of a “virtuous” hippie, but without the ideological, world-beating belief system. Brooks contrasts the consumer of the twenty-first century to the era of the robber baron, when consumers prefered conspicuous, wasteful consumption.

These patterns of consumption are the reason Richard Florida’s “creative” class prefer urban centers full of farmers’ markets and other “virtuous” lifestyle options.

Neoliberalism & the Suburban City Political economist Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) describes the moment when modern market economies became irremediably tied up and confused with local and 5

David Brooks. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

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national governments.

The familiar attitude summarized in the phrase, “it’s not personal, it’s only business,” characterizes what Polyani calls “market society.” For centuries it was understood that money was both social and political. Once specialists had separated the technical study of politics from the study of economics, however, the two fields were reintegrated in problematic ways.611 Competition has come to take precedence over all other kind of human interaction.

The term neoliberal, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, suggests a “modified form of traditional liberalism.” Older notions of liberty are altered according to a “belief in free market capitalism and the rights of the individual.” In practice, an emphasis on “the rights of the individual” and the competition intrinsic to free market capitalism has gone a long way toward eroding the traditional civic virtues of social unity and shared responsibility, in favor 6

Karl Polyani: “Most of the confusion existing in monetary theory was due to the separation of politics and economics, this outstanding characteristic of market society” from The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001 (1944), p. 204.

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of a libertarian-style individualism.

Neoliberalism is characterized by government policies that privatize responsibility for maintaining a minimum standard of well-being for its citizens. Market-controlled agencies take on the function of providing social safety. Systems and inflexible standards are employed to govern public education.

By way of contrast, the traditional democratic principle of “liberty for all” was understood to be the state’s primary task. Each citizen, in order to participate in a democratic system, must be provided with enough safety, education, and well-being to exercise his or her conscience. Conscience here being understood to mean the opportunity and ability to empirically test governmental dictates, policies, and legislation, in order to provide the “consent of the governed.”

President Woodrow Wilson provides an early example of a neoliberal approach to public education: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific

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difficult manual tasks” 712

Margaret Thatcher Margaret Thatcher famously said “There is no such thing as society.” This is another example of the neoliberal preference for the rights of the individual over the whole. Liberty is not to extended to all, Thatcher suggests. We should no longer look for an inclusive, absorptive, social, and civilized organization of the body politic.

Instead, there is only a “living tapestry of men and women and people, and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves.” 813

Neoliberal Employment Neoliberal, post-industrial employers shift as much economic risk as possible to their work7

8

From an address to The New York City High School Teachers Association, January 9, 1909, quoted by John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2009, p. xx.

From an interview by Douglas Key, in Woman’s Own magazine, September 23, 1987. Source: Margaret Thatcher Foundation, accessed at: margaretthatcher. org/document/106689

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ers. Retirement benefits and long-term job security are no longer part of the social contract.

Without pensions, civil servants and hourly wage workers must learn to perform complex accounting tasks in order to save for retirement.

Individuals are expected to bear the financial burdens imposed by recessions.

Employment is increasingly provided on a freelance, independent contractor basis. Euphemistically described collectively as the “creative class, knowledge workers, or immaterial labor” the post-industrial service-industry worker is tasked with the production of the informational and cultural “content” of immaterial—largely digital—commodities.

Public Services in the Suburban, Neoliberal City Service commodities are not the same as services per se—public or otherwise. As Ivan Illich has demonstrated,914the provision of a service commodity is most often implemented by a highly efficient system. As system administrators, however, human service providers are no longer allowed to act out of personal concern or 9

See Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

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conscience. In fact, the efficient implementation of the system requires that the human administrator perform his or her task at a calculated distance.

As a result, there is an increasing risk to the social fabric of any given city or community.

Service providers are no longer congenial family, friends and neighbors, but cold, antiseptic professionals.

Service commodities are produced according to a “post-Fordist” model that also characterizes the production of immaterial, creative, and cultural goods. When information and entertainment is produced as a commodity, it’s marketed as an experience. Like a service economy, the experience economy attempts to monetize and capitalize on every possible social interaction and cultural exchange in a consumer’s daily life. As a result, previously public parks and museums, mail services, news, and public information are governed by business interests. In a neoliberal context, cultural value and good-neighborliness is modified, if not entirely replaced by, a profit motive. Immaterial, creative, and so-called cultural commodities pose a potential risk to the social fabric of a given city or community.

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part 11

Problems & Solutions

Chapter 3 The Problem Is Decline

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Post-Industrial Economic Decline Is a Problem Economic decline is clearly a problem in cities where manufacturing was previously the primary industry. But is this a problem that demands a “solution”? Conventional wisdom rushes to what appears to be a solution: “more jobs.”

More jobs will be a key indicator that the problem has been ameliorated, but jobs are not a solution per se.

We would like to propose that skepticism is the best response to anyone proposing a simple “solution” to the problem of a city’s economic decline. More than economic “solutions,” we need good ideas. Cultural shifts, and big, epoch-defining transitions require culturally magnetizing ideas generated, or co-evolved, by a wide base of participants in a given city.

The Rust Belt: Problem or Idea?

“True problems,” according to Gilles Deleuze, “are Ideas, and these ideas do not disappear with their solutions, since they are the indispensable condition without which no solution would ever exist.”15 15

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 169.

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The economic and cultural decline of a Rust Belt city is a highly complex problem. Such complexity requires a “dialectical,”16 systems-level, or “cybernetic” solution.

The term “cybernetics” is most aptly applied to only the most complex systems. No amount of measure, calculation, or estimation will affect them in predictable ways; these systems are perpetually counterintuitive, and are amenable only to the most subjectively qualified applications of design. Many participants are required to propose, test, and refine a large number of ideas.

16

“Problems are always dialectical. This is whay , whenever the dialectic ‘forgets’ its intimate relation with Ideas in the form of problems, whenever it is content to trace problems from propositions, it loses its true power . . . substituting for the ideal objectivity of the problematic a simple confrontation between opposing, contrary or contradictory, propositions” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 164).

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Chapter 4 Solution 1: Management & Control

Rust City Renovation Panopticon, drawn by Willey Reveley, 1791. From The Works of Jeremy Bentham, volume IV, “The Panopticon Penitentiary System, and the Penal Colonization System.”

O

ne common “solution” to the problem, or idea, of economic decline is effective management. But a city, as we have seen, is not a simple organization. It’s a very complex a system. Treating the city with a simple problem/solution model may even produce what some designers describe as “tragic” results. Tragic because “every solution only brings forth more problems (and besides, we all know there is no such thing as one perfect solution).”117

1

Compare to “Experimental Jetset: Interview with

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Michel Foucault on the Management of Urban Space Prior to the eighteenth century, governments thought of their territory as natural, given, and in many ways self-governing. A territory was understood to be partly made up of “wilderness.”

Nature, it was understood, included wild, mysterious, unknowable expanses: fields, forests, mountain ranges, rivers, lakes, diverse flora, and fauna. One’s territory man also include an occasional city.

The city of the ancient, medieval, and early modern world was an unusual, exceptional place of rare privilege. By the eighteenth century, however, the urban center had become the model for the rational process of governing, policing, and controlling a nation.

As Michel Foucault puts it, “From the eighteenth century on, every discussion of politics as the art of the government of men necessarily includes a chapter or a series of chapters on urbanism, on collective facilities, on hygiene, and on private architecture. Such chapters are not found in the discussions of the art of government of the sixteenth century. The model of the Lucienne Roberts, 2005,” in Coles, Alex. Design and Art. London: Whitechapel, 2007, p. 100.

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city became the matrix for the regulations that apply to a whole state.”218

Biopolitics and Govern-Mentality Once urban space had been conceptualized as a mechanism of control, government became a pervasive govern-mentality. The perception of human subjects also changed from being natural sources of unknowable potential, to resources to be controlled and managed.

Foucault uses the term “biopower,” or “biopolitics” to describe the systematic control of human subjects by means of a government that extends beyond a subject’s political agency, to include his or her entire substance, or being.

In a series of lectures entitled “Society Must Be Defended,” Foucault describes biopolitics as a new “technology of power” emerging in the second half of the eighteenth century. “Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies,” he writes, “the new disciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being.”319 2 3

Foucault, Michel, and James D. Faubion. Power. New York: New Press, 2000, pp. 349–351.

Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended” Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975-76. New York: Picador, 2003, p. 242.

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The City as a Tame Wilderness Prior to the shift from natural to rational (or cultural) space as the model for order and civilization, a ruler could think of a territory as including mystery and wonder. Parts of one’s kingdom may be better left uncontrolled and “wild.” These wild areas contribute to the perpetual generative qualities of a flourishing, healthy ecosystem. Similarly, subjects and citizens may include “dangerous individuals” and “infamous men” as part of a diverse, ultimately healthy populace.

“Throughout the Middle Ages and classical Antiquity,” Foucault writes, “we find a multitude of treatises presented as ‘advice to the prince,” concerning his proper conduct, the exerise of power, the means of securing the acceptance and respect of his subjects, the love of God and so on.” But “from the middle of the sixteenth century, there develops and flourishes a notable series of political treatises that are no longer exactly ‘advice to the prince,’ and not yet treatises of political science, but instead are presented as works on the ‘art of government.’”

Government becomes, in the earliest modern period, a broadly applied term of design, or as Foucault puts it “a general problem.”

This era marks the beginning of the idea that 47

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one must govern oneself, and that the purpose of Catholic and Protestant pastoral doctrine should be concerned with the government of “souls and lives.” And finally, education, the “great problematic of pedagogy” is concieved as the government, or control, of children.420 Modern governmentality leads to the need to extend “control over the realtions of human beings, and their environment, the milieu in which they live.”521

Architectures of Managed Time According to Georg Lukács, the closely measured “punch card” time of industrial labor turned the clock into a “continuum filled with quantifiable things.”622Time is fixed in such a system. It becomes a kind of space occupied by work, travel, entertainment, and so forth.

In 1945, René Guénon observed that the classical Hindu calendar expresses a similar principle. “Time,” he writes, “is itself subject to a progressive contraction, appearing in the 4 5 6

Foucault, Power, p. 201.

“Society Must Be Defended,” p. 244.

Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialects. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000 (1971), p. 90 (quoted in Rosler, “Creative Class, Part I,” p.14, n.1).

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René Guénon (1886–1951), Oriental Metaphysics. Madras and New York: Hanuman Books (published by Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente), 1989.

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proportionate shortening of the four Yugas [roughly eras], with all that this implies, not excepting the corresponding diminution in the length of human life. It is sometimes said, doubtless without any understanding of the real reason, that today people live faster than in the past, and this is literally true.”

If carried to its extreme limit, the contraction of time would in the end reduce it to a single instant, and then duration would really have ceased to exist. Thus it is that ‘time the devourer ends by devouring itself,’ in such a way that, at the end of the world, there will be no more time.723 —rene guenon

7

Guénon, René. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972, pp. 159–160.

Compare to Kwinter, Sanford. Architectures of Time.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

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Chapter 5 Solution 2: Self-Organization

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Jobs Are Obsolete The most commonly proposed solution for the problem of post-industrial economic decline is “jobs.”

Jobs will lead to revitalization, we think.

But will they? 124Douglas Rushkoff points out that “we’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. Our problem is not that we need to produce more stuff, it’s that we have a shortage of ways for people to work, proving that they deserve the stuff we already produce, and produce with unprecidented efficiency.”225

The Creative Class Is Not the Solution Second-tier cities, Martha Rosler argues, are made moderately more livable when city managers implement strategies to make their towns more attractive to the creative economy’s administrative class.326The most these city’s can hope for, however, is a moderate reversal of 1 2 3

See Ivan Illich, The Right to Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies. London: Marian Boyars, 1978.

Rushkoff, Douglass. “Are Jobs Obsolete?” cnn. com/2011/opinion, September 7, 2011.

Rosler, “Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Part III,” e-flux Journal #25, May 2011.

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decline. Growth requires more dynamic ideas.

A Proposed Solution, or Idea Cybernetic control, as opposed to governmental control, allows for self-organizing systems to learn, co-evolve, and “become.”

The word cybernetics is most aptly applied to only the most complex systems. No amount of measure, calculation, or estimation will affect them; these systems are perpetually counterintuitive, and are amenable only to the most subjectively qualified applications of design.

Design by located subjects, playing at not-knowing depends upon networks of mutually interacting, co-evolving parts—what we might call an “architecture of manufactured sympathies.” Such “sympathetic” design must be distinguished from simpler applications of “empathetic” design employing “objective” ethnographic research. Sympathetic design, as it is being used here, has more in common with the “fabricated truths” or “applied fictions.”

The Situationist International (SI) Graphic designer Veronique Vienne describes being educated in the mode of the Situationist International. She and her Paris classmates were told to spend all day in the street, observ-

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Post-utopian cultural production: Loggins and Messina, Full Sail, Columbia, 1973. And failed utopia: David Crosby, If I Could Only Remember My Name, Atlantic Records, 1971.

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ing the micro-level interactions between pedestrians and other forms of life in the streets.427 The SI doctrine of psychogeography is part of a “unitary urbanism.” This unitary urbanism emphasizes the immediate subjective experience, or ambience, associated with a specific location and time.528The SI use of the urban environment involves two central concepts: 1. dérive, or “urban drift” resembles the practice of the 19th century flaneur 2. and détournment, or turning the conventions of consumerism, advertising, and sales against themselves. Détournment is the direct predecessor of contemporary “culture jamming.”

Yacht Rock and the TAZ Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson) is the author of the influential text The Temporary Autonomous Zone.629“Because the State is concerned 4 5

6

Vienne, Veronique, and Jamie Reynolds. Something to Be Desired. New York: Graphis, 2001.

Compare to Wark, McKenzie. 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. p. 11.

Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson), The Temporary Autonomous Zone. New York: Autonomedia, 1991 (1985).

Quoted in Claire Tancons, “Occupy Wall Street:

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primarily with Simulation rather than substance,” Wilson writes, “the TAZ can ‘occupy’ these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace.”

Wilson describes the TAZ as an example of ontological anarchy, a pirate utopias, or “islands in the network.”

“Yacht rock” 730is the genre that developed when hippies like David Crosby found their idealistic values co-opted by a corporate business and culture industry.

It is a form of hermetic coding. By hiding the message, and withdrawing from the market, a cultural artifact is allowed to create its own public, independent of prevailing market forces. The artist can then co-opt the business person’s attitude of an “earned” lifestyle of leisure by appropriating the appearance of conspicuous consumption.

Traditional Liberal Values According to political philosopher John Gray,

7

Carnival Against Capital? Carnivalesque as Protest Sensibility,” e-flux Journal #30, December 2011.

See, for example “The Birth of the Uncool: Yacht Rock and Libidinal Subversion” by J. Temperance, in The New Inquiry, September 4, 2012. Accessed at thenewinquiry.com

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the type of anti-totalitarian democracy we are most familiar with in the United States is informed by four classic liberal values: 1. Individualism preserves each citizen’s right to dissent from “the pressures of social collectivism.” Ethics, in other words, begins and ends with the individual citizen’s freewill participation in the democratic process.

The individual must not be compelled to act in a manner that violates her conscience.

2. Egalitarianism, or equality, refers to the belief that “all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

3. Meliorism, the belief in progress, is a little controversial. Enlightenment thinkers like the founders, believed that divine revelation required the participation of human reason.

When reason is employed, we “progress” in our ability to comprehend the underlying design of the world. The theory has always had its detractors, however. Most familiar among them is Rousseau, who believed in the “example of savages.” 831 8

See Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A Discourse on Inequality, in Rousseau and Donald A. Cress. Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

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4. Universalism suggests that general, rationally determined truths such as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is true for the entire human race, despite particular, local, and governmental differences.

Basic Political Writings. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987, p. 65: “The example of savages . . . seems to confirm that the human race had been made to remain in [this state] always.�

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john gray. Liberalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

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part 111

SelfDesigning Cities

Chapter 6 Art Power

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Art Power Art imagines utopia by working outside professional boundaries. Deprofessionalizing one’s practice utopianizes it. The work becomes critical of the professional. If the topos, or place, is taken to be a city, profession, or marketplace (the place of negotiation), then the eu-topos, or “good place,” is perpetually somewhere outside the city. It exists in the imagination, in language, in art, and in experimentation.

The Question Is: Does this imagined, experimental place make an actual difference in the real world? If so, that’s powerful.

The problem with “utopian” ways of thinking, as that word is usually understood, is that most attempts to imagine such a “good place” only result in failure when practically implemented.

Practical utopian experiments and communes were common in the 19th and 20th centuries. The failure of many such experiments made the important critical thinking behind all utopian ideas look foolish. Plato’s philosopher kings, Augustine’s City of God, Thomas More’s Utopia, Andreae’s Christianopolis, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and the writing of Fourier, Marx, and any number of others have become difficult to take seriously.

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But attempts to implement utopian ideas don’t need to be wholecloth communal experiments. Such experiments could just as well be contingent, provisional, and partial; temporary and imaginative, but no less agonistic, disruptive, and real.

The correct use for utopian, philosophical, and artistic ideas, it could be argued, is to temporarily and theoretically leave the context of the city—the place of business, negotiation, buying, and selling (topos, in Greek)—in order to imagine a better place (a eu-topos), or more desirable way of life.

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The Obligation to Self-Design As Boris Groys puts it: “Joseph Beuys said that everyone had the right to see him- or herself as an artist. What was then understood as a right has now become an obligation.”132Marcel Duchamp suggested that everyday objects can be art. Beuys extended the argument to suggest that every person should be an artist; he hoped that the world would be improved through an overcoming of the false dichotomy between art and life.233 Ananda Coomaraswamy’s often-quoted dictum puts it this way: “the artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special

1 2

Groys, Boris. “The Obligation to Self-Design,” in Going Public. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010, p. 36.

“Every human being is an artist,” Beuys famously said, “who—from his state of freedom—the position of freedom that he experience at firsthand—learns to determine the other positions in the total artwork of the future social order. Self-determination and participation in the cultural sphere (freedom); in the structuring of laws (democracy); and in the sphere of economics (socialism). Self-administration and decentralization (threefold structure) occurs: free democratic socialism.” Quoted in Tisdall, Caroline. Joseph Beuys. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1979, p. 48.

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kind of artist.”334Every action, Coomaraswamy is suggesting, is capable of expressing an intrinsic potential for beauty, harmony, perfection, and even divinity.

Today, however, everyone is obliged to be an artist in this sense. The post-industrial worker must design a flexible, open-ended career for themselves. Employment being less and less secure, it is expected that workers will re-train, change jobs, and move to new locations multiple times over the span of a career. Traditionally only the artist was familiar with this need to be self-determined, self-created, and “burdened by freedom.” Artists benefit by being familiar with such a condition, but they also give up a the corner on a special knowledge.

The aesthetic has become an everyday language. We are inundated with images, and we are all obliged to make use of them. “We can no longer speak of disinterested contemplation when it is a matter of self-manifestation, self-design, and self-positioning in the aesthetic field,” Groys writes. “Once people had an interest in how their souls appeared to God; today they 3

Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish. The Door in the Sky. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 130, n. 65.

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have an interest in how [they] appear to their political surroundings.�435

4

Groys, Boris. Going Public. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010, p. 36.

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Chapter 7 Design & Democracy: The Old, Weird America

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Civic Self-Organization “The root of the American ideal of liberty,” according to Jacob Needleman, “is the right of every human being to search for and attend to the dictates of conscience. To verify [everything] for oneself; to shun blind faith no matter how exalted the pedigree of an authority.”136

Contingent, Provisional Utopias Nineteenth Century experiments in communal living include Brook Farm, Fruitlands, New Harmony, Indiana, the Oneida Community, Oberlin Colony, and The Icarians.

More successful experiments that may be loosely considered utopian, include the Shakers and the Amish.

According to Gilbert Seldes, the evangelicalism of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) is the source of American utopianism. “By making [conversion and] salvation the single end of man, by insisting that it was wholly God’s work, and at the same time accepting the physical signs of personal communication with the Holy Spirit, Ewards broke down the wall surround-

1

Needleman, Jacob. The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders. New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2003, p. 21

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ing the ministry, and cleared the way for cults, which he utterly abominated. He had overreached himself.”237 The Old, Weird America Harry Smith’s anthology of folk music collected recordings from the 1920s, all of which preserve a largely unrecorded history of 19th century folk culture. Greil Marcus describes the anthology as a “repertory of the past.” It “made the familiar strange,” Marcus writes, “the never known into the forgotten, and the forgotten into a collective memory.”338 City street-level neighborhood networks and rural utopian experiments in pre-industrial America were self-organized. Such communities and social experiments were designed by citizen residents, not managerial governments.

2

3

Seldes, Gilbert. The Stammering Century. New York: New York Review Books, 2012, p. 28. Seldes points to Edwards’s “Beauty of the World” (1725) as most representative of Edwards’s mysticism: “This hard man who condemned humanity to Hell was a poet. The merciless logician was a mystic and experienced the mystic’s ecstacy.”

Marcus, Greil. “The Old, Weird America,” in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways/Sony Music Special Products, 1997.

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ralph waldo emerson:

“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” (Familiar Letters, “To Harrison Blake, May 20, 1860).

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The old, weird America, it’s worth noting, was not determined by anything like today’s false binaries: big government liberal vs. conservative business concerns and entrepreneurial cultures. Both of today’s political options are distinctly authoritarian. The eccentric, optimistic, self-determined communities of the 19th century were clearly anti-authoritarian.

Democratic Self-Determination Freedom from tyrannies of all kinds, along with sufficient leisure to develop a conscience is the “American dream.” Without a conscience—a clear sense of individual identity; a self—participation in a democratic system of government by the people is impossible.

Jacob Needleman: “Conscience is inborn, but we can and must work to ‘strengthen’ it— that is, to allow it to be heard. Such thoughts cannot but remind us of the age-old teaching that it is obedience to conscience that constitutes true human happiness and freedom.”439

4

Jacob Needleman, in “Two Dreams of America,” New York: John Wiley & Sons, and Kalamazoo, MI: Fetzer Institute, 2003. p. 16.

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The Social, Urbane Function of the Artist and Designer A.K. Coomaraswamy: “When Plato lays it down that the arts shall ‘care for the bodies and souls of your citizens,’ and that only things that are sane and free, and not any shameful things unbecoming free men, are to be made, it is as much as to say that the artist in whatever material must be a free man; not meaning thereby an “emancipated artist” in the vulgar sense of one having no obligation or commitment of any kind, but a man emancipated from the despotism of the salesman.

Affective Production, Distribution, and Employment Affective resistance, ontological anarchy, pirate utopias, islands in the network, and temporary autonomous zones: by hiding an image, message, or idea from commercial networks, and withdrawing it from the market, a cultural artifact is allowed to create its own public, independent of prevailing market forces. The image is allowed to find its own path rather than predetermining how it is to be received, marketed, and promoted. In this way the image or idea reserves for itself the power and meaning usually transferred to its commercial effectiveness.

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In the same way, cities may be allowed to emerge from the rusting ruins of industry by pursuing ideas first, and then commerce. Jobs may be allowed to follow real local demand.

Affective exchanges differ from effective, commercial exchanges in the same way that giving a gift to a loved one differs from offering that same loved one a product at a reduced price.

Cities based on competition will never coelesce or cohere as substantially as those built on gifts, courtesy, generosity, sacrifice, and manners.

The root of the American ideal of liberty is the right of every human being to search for and attend to the dictates of conscience. To verify for oneself; to shun blind faith no matter how exalted the pedigree of an authority.540—jacob needleman

5

Needleman, Jacob. The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders. New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2003, p. 21

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a rust cit y profile

Toledo Ohio

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toledo glass pavillion,

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue

Nishizawa / SANAA, 2006. Photo by Adam C. Nelson.

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The Early Days As early as 1680, French trading posts operated in the Toledo area. It was settled in 1845, once the Miami and Erie Canals were built.

As railroads made trade more efficient, glass manufacturing, brewing, and carriage making industries were established. Factory work drew a large immigrant population, and Toledo became the fourth largest city in Ohio by the end of the 19th century.

Toledo’s Heyday: the 20th Century Several large Works Progress Administration projects were undertaken during the Great Depression. Out of work citizens were employed to build large parts of the Toledo Art Museum, the University of Toledo, and the Toledo Zoo, aquarium, and amphitheater.

As in many other American cities during the second half of the 2oth century, large portions of the city’s population moved from downtown Toledo to the suburbs.

Toledo Today: The 21st Century Since 2000, downtown Toledo has built a baseball stadium for the minor league Mudhens, a multi-purpose hockey arena, and the Toledo 81

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Museum of Art added the Glass Pavillion, designed by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA).

In 2010, the population of Toledo, Ohio, was 287,208.

Noteworthy Residents Baseball hall-of-fame catcher Roger Bresneahan, pianist Art Tatum, experimental filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos, artist Joseph Kosuth, and Gloria Steinem were all born in Toledo.

Important History: The 1935 Auto-Lite Strike The Toledo Auto-Lite strike was a strike by members of the American Federation of Labor against the Electric Auto-Lite company, manufacturer of parts, equipment, and accessories used in automobiles. The strike lasted from April 12 to June 3, 1934.

Considered one of the most important events in the history of organized labor,141the strike is especially noteworthy because it escalated into a five-day battle between thousands of striking workers and several hundred mem1

See Korth, Philip A, and Margaret R. Beegle. I Remember Like Today: The Auto-Lite Strike of 1934. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1988.

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the battle of toledo, 1934. Newspaper clipping (top) from the Labor History Archive Records, Department of History, University of Toledo Archives, and (below) Auto-Lite strike photo from the Toledo Blade.

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bers of the National Guard. Two strikers died in the fighting and hundreds were injured.142

Golden Rule Jones Samuel M. “Golden Rule” Jones (1846–1904) was a factory owner and Progressive Era Mayor of Toledo. As a business owner, he implemented an eight-hour work day, paid a living wage, and posted only one rule on the factory floor: “The rule that governs this factory: Therefore whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.”

As Mayor, he implemented an eight-hour day for city workers; opened public schools, parks, and playgrounds; and replaced the heavy clubs carried by the police with smaller “walking sticks.”243

1

2

“The Electric Auto-Lite Company,” Lehman Brothers Collection, Contemporary Business Archives, Baker Library, Harvard Business School; accessed at: library.hbs.edu/hc/lehman/chrono.html?company=the_ electric_auto_lite_company Jones, Marnie. Holy Toledo: Religion and Politics in the Life of “Golden Rule” Jones. Lawrence: University Press of Kentucky, 1998, p. 121.

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Bayley, Stephen. Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991.

Benjamin, Walter. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.

Beuys, Joseph. Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man: Writings and Interviews with the Artist. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.

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Brooks, David. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Buck-Morss, Susan, and Walter Benjamin. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.

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Coles, Alex. Design and Art. London: Whitechapel, 2007.

Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. What Is Civilization? And Other Essays. Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Edwards, Jonathan, “Beauty of the World,” in Edwards, Jonathan, John Edwin Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema. A Jonathan Edwards Reader. New Haven, Conn: Yale Nota Bene, 2003.

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Florida, Richard. Cities and the Creative Class.

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Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended” Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975-76. New York: Picador, 2003 Foucault, Michel, and James D. Faubion. Power.

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Freidrichs, Chad, Brian Woodman, Jaime Freidrichs, Jason Henry, Benjamin Balcom, and Steve Carver. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. DVD, New York: First Run Features, 2012.

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Groys, Boris. Art Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, p. 55.

Guénon, René. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972.

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1st edition, April 2013.

2nd edition, August 2013.

3rd edition, March 2014. Š Are Not Books & Publications Wheaton, Illinois 60187 arenotbooks.com The Little Lords are small-format artists’ books published by Are Not Books & Publications As artists, not authorities, we are intellectually curious and thoroughly critical, but with no aspiration or pretense to anything like expertise or authority. Indeed, our goal is to remain anonymous, and to acquire no reputation.

This print-on-demand edition was not copyedited or proofread. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright.

Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

rust cit y renovation

T

he so-called “Rust Belt” cities have become a favorite subject for city planners, architects, and business apologists.

This book examines the problem of economic decline in these former industrial and manufacturing towns, but not from the perspective of potential investors, business leaders, city management, bureaucrats, or government officials.

Instead, we will concern ourselves with the residents and citizens of these cities.

Rust City Renovation is organized around a preference for liberty over jobs, and an “excessive” democratic participation — co-evolution and collectivity outside the bounds of governability, manipulation, and control. ...

the little lords are small-format artists’ books published by the Are Not Studio—a group of artists, writers, and designers who work together in groups of two or three.