Michael Sorkin: Traffic in Democracy

Copyright Š 1997 The University of Michigan College of Architecture + Urban Planning & Michael Sorkin

Editor: Kent Kleinman

Book Design: Caleb Harris Clauset Production Assistance: Christian Unve rzagt

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Printing: Unive rsity Lithoprinters, Inc.

Typeset in Monotype Baskerville and Linotype DIN ISBN

0 9614792 9 9

The University of Michigan College of Architecture + Urban Planning 2000

Bonisteel Boulevard

Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-2069 USA

Michael Sorkin Traffic in Democracy

Foreword Since the inauguration of the Raoul Wallenberg Lecture series at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning in 1972, exactly twentyfive years ago, the lecture has been given by a number of distinguished architects and historians. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner gave the first lecture followed by such notable scholars as Joseph Rykwert, Spiro Kostof and Vincent Scully. Distinguished architects and planners, such as Denise Scott Brown and Daniel Libeskind, have also graced the podium in honor of Wallenberg. These are no ordinary lectures. In each case the speaker has risen to the challenge of addressing the subject of architecture and urban planning as a humane social art.

This year's lecture by architect and scholar Michael Sorkin is no different. Sorkin addresses the difficult problem of democracy and planning. It is a topic which would have found favor with Raoul Wallenberg, I am certain. Raoul Wallenberg, class of 1935, exercised one of the greatest rights of democracy- the right to speak out and act. However, he did not exercise this democratic initiative within a democratic state. Wallenberg spoke out and acted during a time of war when democracy and the rights of individuals were at stake. He is credited with saving the lives of countless numbers of people in Hungary during World War II, individuals whose very existence was threatened by a regime which wanted to exterminate Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, communists and others not of the Nazi's persuasion. It is important for us to remember also that this regime wanted to destroy democracy itselÂŁ Our alumnus Raoul Wallenberg has become an international symbol of the enduring concept that one person can make a difference in the lives of others. As architects and planners, we especially must keep that reality ever in mind.

Robert M. Beckley Dean, College qf Architecture + Urban Planning

Introduction Any responsible editor will save an author from repetition: repetition of ideas; repetition of peculiar syntactic structures; repetition of unusual terms whose force lies in their singularity.

A text read is other than a text written and words uttered in the flow of oration differ from the same words fixed in print. In preparing Michael Sorkin's extraordinary 1997 Wallenberg lecture for the page, a particular word appeared with ill-mannered frequency. I am not referring to a so-called key word (a term of the title, for example, not "democracy," not "traffic") nor a term so essential to the argument that reiteration is inherent to the proj ect at hand ("propinquity," for example). I mean rather a word that appears as mere shortage of an alternative, as lack of variety. For those familiar with Sorkin's exquisite command of the written, this will seem an unlikely deficit.

The term in question isfantasy. Consider the evidence: "fantasies of technology as second nature," "fantasies of on-the-fly transfer," "Thomas Jefferson's Cartesian fantasy," "the Cartesian fantasy ... " (again), the "fantasy of collectivity," "that old fantasy of infinity," "private fantasy as public right," "fantasies of non-exclusive neighborhoods," "post-Fordist fantasies." Why not dreams, visions, imagination, conceit? Severalfontasies, it seemed, could be eliminated without semantic damage. Or perhaps not.

If, as seems likely, these fontasies are not due to a lack thereof, then perhaps they are programatically loaded and consequently should be protected. Perhaps they are strategic, liminal cues that only become apparent when the aural event is re-viewed, inevitably slower, as text on the page. Perhaps, in fact, fantasy per se is being proffered. Jefferson's grid, technology, non-exclusive neighborhoods:

Sorkin links these via a common denominator not because they are equally desirable or attainable, but because these are most powerfully understood as mental constructs that lodge themselves in the imagination, and thus have the potential to change the world.

Fantasy is the shared space of dreams and conceits, delusions and visions, all vehicles reaching into the future. Privileging wants over needs, fantasy renders desire transparent, and as such it is arguably the bedrock of social discourse and action. Believing in the potential to change the world is one of the originary fantasies: Raoul Wallenberg's conviction that one individual can do so was- fortunately for many hundreds- of this kind.

In the following text, Michael Sorkin argues for a physical analog to democratic political process. Its components are propinquity and traffic, physical proximity measured by human locomotion combined with a space consciously configured for safe human collision. But the argument is laced with another agenda, namely to make propaganda for the space of fantasy. The repetitious presence of the term itself is just a tease. Speaking more direcdy to this point are the images, many more of which accompanied the lecture as a parallel narrative strand without verbal commentary. But lest there be any doubt as to the envisioned endgame, the reader is invited to turn to the last page. There, on the sly, the fantasy is named:

" ... new neighborhoods and new cities ... " Kent Kleinman Associate Prqftssor qf Architecture

Traffic In Democracy I am deeply honored by the invitation to give a lecture celebrating Raoul Wallenberg. With amazing courage, Wallenberg saved thousands not just from death but from transport to a place so hellish, so radically criminal, as to suggest an end to the history of human possibilities. Auschwitz is often represented as the omega of modernity: rationality and universality pushed to the grotesque.

Although this interpretation is too glib, it's not without an element of truth. Auschwitz was a vast and efficient machine for the annihilation of unacceptable difference. As a goal, it was utterly unimaginable bifbre political modernism, before the modern celebration of rationality and universality. Yet to condemn these notions unreservedly- without noting the different outcomes they've had (the democratic revolutions as well as the terror), without trying to understand when and how they begin to turn ugly- is to succumb to the same fanaticism one seeks to condemn.

The accommodation of difference is the key project of contemporary democracy. Politics today is obsessed by the pursuit of private identity, our own post-Enlightenment backlash. Gone, it seems, is the famous image of the melting pot, the caldron in which the diversity of individuals is melted down, "purified," in order to provide a gold standard of sameness; in the aftermath of national socialism, any reference to purifYing fires can only have a chilling effect. But if certain images will have to be permanently excised from imagination's repertoire, we must be careful not to sacrifice imagination itself since we still need it to figure the possibilities of negotiating and mediating conflicts among private individuals.

One of the great casualties of recent "politically correct" attacks on imagination has been the very image of space. It is as if, in

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reparation for the loss of countless individuals to the destructive forces of modernism, space itself has been melted into air. And yet, if the individuality of individuals is to be safeguarded, it will depend on providing them with a place- a kind of ground. Only public space can guarantee privacy. This is a matter of logic: democracy always implies the occupation of a position. Democracy requires, for its working out, that its citizens occupy positions which are, if only provisionally, fixed. To conduct democracy's negotiations, we must speak from a position of identity, we must be located. Deliberative democracy requires us to be reliably "in the open" to fully participate.

But space is more than an image or metaphor. I believe that propinquity- physically being together in space- is itself necessary for democracy. Agnes Heller calls contemporary politics the "concretization of the universal value of freedom." The American understanding of freedom, however, is inscribed in a false, if historical, dichotomy. We venerate the freedom of the frontier, the "democratic" right to be left alone. If this arrangement is not exactly anti-democratic, it's definitely a dodge: it uses space to attenuate propinquity to the point of irrelevance.

The city, on the other hand, because of its intense exchange, is the necessary ground for the reconciliation of difference and the exercise of freedom, including the freedom to shift identities.

I admire the Hanseatic maxim, "city air makes people free," which implies to me that freedom cannot be imagined outside of a structure of interaction with others. Freedom of speech, for example, necessarily means freedom to address others, to be heard.

One cannot be free alone. The existence of others is so fundamental

to all of our freedoms that it is senseless to contemplate them outside the notion of community. This is precisely why freedom is a political issue, an issue proper to the polis. And this is exactly where city politics lies. Legible in the variety and tractability of routines of circulation and contact, the currency of propinquity is exchange, the measure of the city's activity.

The locus classicus of the rational city is the Athenian agora.

Aristotle wrote that the dimensions of an agora should be derived from the space of a shout, an auditory community with a strictly measurable dimension. This suggests that a precondition for the space of democratic governance is the ability to be heard without mediation. A compact space like the agora- in its physical convenience- represents an ideal setting for such exchange.

Surrogacy and intermediacy, in contrast, lose signal quality with

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each relay, whether via representation, transmission, distance, or translation. Mediation is the theft of intent: freedom is most pristine- most free- when we exercise it ourselves.

The architecture of the Athenian agora was both complex and informal, filled with markers and resistances and institutions of use: the stoa and the pnyx, shops and baths and taverns. The agora was.funky, not the kind of centralizing, symmetrical space that one imagines in classical antiquity. It's still a good model.

The agora described the size of a tractable body politic and offered the possibility of assembly in a variety of registers, modalities, and settings. The agora supported both efficient passage and organized encounters while simultaneously offering innumerable routes and hence innumerable circumstances for chance, unstructured, accidental, and serendipitous encounters.

Cities are juxtaposition engines and owe their existence to complex patterns of human contact. To be either democratic or creative, a city must, like the agora, offer spaces for both convenient and accidental encounters. This is not merely a consideration of delight but intrinsic to the working of democracy. Democracy's logic is to create a society which is perpetually unstable, always in becoming, always open to change. A city is an instrument for setting the odds- a compound of frequency and arrangementson the accidental likelihood of crossing paths. If the odds are too "good" (per the city of complete rationality), the result is excess predictability. If the odds are too "bad," the result is pure randomization. Both of these extremes are alienating and unsatisfactory. Perhaps the greatest task for urban design is the constant work of finessing this mix.

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I want to focus on one specific issue that is crucial to this mix: traffic, the means of circulating in the city. We judge the good city by the quality of its public life and the public spaces where such life takes place; the public spaces of the city are preeminently spaces of circulation and exchange. But, as the private has become the mantra of our politics, our public spaces are terribly stressed.

In the newly fashionable politics of communitarianism, the struggle to "empower" ethnic, gender, and other groups becomes paramount. As the idea of a general public is increasingly supplanted by a notion of multiple publics, traditional formulations of physical consent are under tremendous strain. Symptomatic of this condition is the headlong privatization in the United States of the spaces of gathering and collectivity: shopping malls and stadia, theme parks and entertainment zones, and enclaved communities where over 30 million of us now live.

The danger in this politics is, as Gillian Rose points out, that it "presupposes and fixes a given distribution of identities in a radically dynamic society." This is the nub of the problem: while democracy may demand such fixities for the purpose of its negotiations, it calls for fixity in the service of an aspiration to fluidity, which is to say to the space of freedom. This is not a contradiction. The problem of supporting difference without privilege in an atmosphere of flux is a tremendous challenge both to democracy and to urbanism. Today, for example, the architectural media are full of the so-called "new urbanists" who market the image of a nostalgic architecture as a bridge to a set of fixed identities which are promoted as yielding the benisons of "community." The fallacy is a double one: the space can never yield the practice, and the strategy is clearly exclusionary.

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Perhaps even more problematic is the growth of cyburbia, of those virtual systems which increasingly supplant the physical sites of human interaction. The Net is often held out as a medium of great promise for democracy and in many ways it is. The possibility of instantaneous and free global communication has already had a dramatic political impact. One need only think of mobilizations by democratic advocates in Beijing or Chiapas to appreciate the power and appeal of such connectivity. However, the anxiety about telecommunications doesn't spring from the power of the Net to supplement physical styles of participation but in its rise as a replacement for other modes of interaction. For instance, although we've heard a great deal about the electronic town hall, every example I've seen seems to convert democracy to entertainment, merely offering us an invitation to participate in the spectacle of someone else being heard. Rather than interaction, the electronic town hall conduces to passiviry. This marketplace of ideas is precisely that, an invitation to consume pre-packaged goods.

This is extremely menacing. What happens when neither wealth nor information nor happiness is exchanged face-to-face, when communication increasingly takes place by dissolving the space of action? How much human contact can become obsolete before the connection collapses? As contemporary strategies of the virtual compete with historical ideas of location to found the basis of propinquity, the ontology of the city will be transformed. I do not worry here about traditional urban centers. The traditional city is less at risk from virtual space than from its own extent: apractic places like Mexico City or Cairo have been crushed by a sheer weight of numbers that no amount of prosperity can ever redress.

The only answer is de-densification. If cyber-technology can

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contribute to the contraction and aeration of such dysfunctional centers, so much the better. But make no mistake: if the body ceases to be the privileged means of participation in and enjoyment of urban life, urban life is at an end. The metastasizing edge city marks the end of place, cyburbia made form. As our urbanism and culture become more homogeneous, more compacted, more randomly distributed, motion through will become the only medium of particularity. In this new universal urbanism, our path is our only present.

"In democratic politics," Michael Walzer writes, "all destinations are temporary. No citizen can ever claim to have persuaded his fellows once and for all." This is both that old spatial metaphor again and, I think, an argument for motion. What's left out of this description, however, is the dignity of the set of "temporary" destinations, many of which endure for lifetimes. Modern culture is increasingly characterized by suspension in capsules of intermediacy: in trains, planes, automobiles, and elevators, not to mention time spent on-line with electronic styles of mobility.

Just as the view from the railway car window forever altered not simply the landscape but fundamental perceptions of time and space, so the window of the monitor represents a shift in our perceptual and psychical relationship to exteriority. Such virtual travel also embodies a remarkable economy of energy as the experience of motion is efficiently stripped from actual mobility, making us all unmoved movers. Mobility becomes the training ground for immobility as virtual worlds explode and the physical environment becomes everywhere the same.

Walter Hudson

The late Walter Hudson, record holder as the world's fattest man, would seem to be a hero of space, the person who holds the distinction of having taken up more of it than anyone in history.

Ironically, though, Hudson is also an avatar of spacelessness. So huge that he could not move, Hudson was confined to his specially reinforced bed, his contact with the world only electronic. But Hudson managed- without ever being present- to be incredibly visible, lavishly attended to by the media who made him a poster child for America's obsession with the consumption of space.

Hudson represented the flip side of anorexia, perhaps the spatial neurosis of our age, and lay at the heart of the constructed desires of a nation. I often think of Hudson's "luxurious" consumption of space when I see those airline ads for business class travel seats, images of the immobilized traveler, strapped and wired in, stuffed like a Strasbourg goose, cruising through never-never land on the

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way to a distant place which he or she will be increasingly at pains to distinguish from the place left twelve hours ago and half a world away, status and comfort reduced to a consideration of hot towels and seat pitch.

Certainly, one way to solve the problem of urban circulation is to eliminate the reasons to move, whether through Walter Hudson style immobility or through the suppression of difference in the environment. Thus winnowed, location falls under ever more intense competition from position, from location emptied of locality, proximity defined purely through virtual relations. This kind of malnourished location more and more rules at the expense of place in a tremendous re-scaling of the urban environment: post-adjacent propinquity, configured at global scale.

Any account of the physical character of cities begins with the face-to-face. The city's styles of intensifYing such intercourse set the scene for a description of urban economy and its politics.

Traffic is the medium of this commerce, the means by which we physically encounter each other. Of course, no theory of movement will make a difference if the character and variety of places between end points of circulation become impoverished.

The relation of public and private is invented through the means of circulating between them.

We too often look at motion as mere technology, saddled with its myths, stuck between malleability and autonomy. In such fantasies, technology becomes second nature, a system with its own rules, raging like Frankenstein's monster, beyond our control. This view has displaced the preceding myth of technology as universal

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panacea which is now viewed with skepticism, part of a more general rejection of scientistic modernism. Modernist urbanism fell victim to its enthrallment with technology, adopting as its own deductive reasoning, social "science," and the mimesis of tech-forms. When- in reaction to this- cities ceased to be planned in the old physical sense, the space of such activity was taken over by what is called "infrastructure," by something underneath, invisible, in common, agreeable. Planning for traffic was simply subsumed in this one-dimensional view, becoming the favored visibility of planning, the thing which could tolerably be seen.

Foregrounding the means of motion in the building of cities has been a disaster. Part of the difficulty is the relative autonomy of technology. Science is neither revealed truth nor pure social construction: we do not always get the technology we either deserve or desire. As a result, cities have too long been obliged to play catch-up with existing technologies of transportation, successively refitting themselves with systems that do not love them, rent by railway cuttings and freeways, clogged with pollution and lethal metal. In focusing on technology, the means of motion displaced the reasons to get together.

The appeal of motion-based urbanism, however, is obvious.

Traffic at once represents a sort of freedom- the freedom of movement that in engineering language substitutes for human freedoms like that of association- and also models the economic relations of the circuit of capital. These correspondences, though, are more metaphorical than real, never quite able succinctly to embody the shifting interaction of time, space, and treasure. It is, however, true that urban motion is the defining mode of urban

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connection and the main use for the public spaces of the city. And it is precisely for reasons of its consequentiality that we must cease simply to fit the city to existing paradigms of movement and try to re-imagine questions of circulation from first principles.

Traffic is the relationship between speed and flow. In democratic traffic, human locomotion becomes not the sole but the privileged mode, the top of the hierarchy and the crucial measure of speed and of dimension. Whatever the pleasures of the ride (not something I consider trivial) it must have a teleology, a sense that the means serve the end of a decent and desired propinquity. Mere multiplication of the modes of motion is not enough, particularly if the rationalization of such means reduces the possibility of accident. In our culture of flow, the possibilities for global mobility are gready enhanced: there is no place on the planet we cannot go by the end of the day. On the other hand, neither urban mobility nor the fundamental formats of face-to-face encounter have been effectively increased since Catal Huyuk.

The idea of pleasure in mobility, however, is ancillary to the principal term of traffic planning, the idea of "flow," a quality that has by now obtained a quasi-metaphysical status. Like the circulation of capital, the circulation of traffic is most perfecdy efficient when it is ceaseless, when it attains the status of a constant- perpetual motion. But, while stasis is the enemy of a flowing system of perfect efficiency, it is also indispensable to its functioning. The node, after all, is the creature of flow, implying not simply centrality (and therefore directionality) but cessation, that place where motion stops, enabling transfer to foot, to another means, to another purpose. Although there is an interesting

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sub-history of fantasies of on-the-fly transfer (which is another story) the notion of flow imposes its own idea of efficiency, which is to keep going, without stopping, by overcoming impedance and resisting inertia. The consequences are dramatic. Nodal architectures subsumed by strategies of flow are predominant in the American landscape: the strip, the shopping mall, the suburbs, the edge city, everything.

The example of the car is instructive. In America, the car occupies a powerful psychical and functional position. Cars are surrogates for our selves, and our sense of rights has become closely identified with the rights of the car. Indeed, the car's intimate relation to the lethal coincides with America's machismo of private interests which is also reflected in the hysterical resistance to the control of guns. The mentality of increased capacity which has driven the prodigious enlargement of America's pavement resonates with the frontier imperative of continuous territorial expansion, the culture of conquest. No longer content simply to ply the pavement, the largest growth sector in the American automobile market is for off-the-road vehicles and for space-aggrandizing, home-surrogate, mini-vans.

Because the car seeks to maximize both speed and flow, it looks for a conflict-free environment. In a mixed system, this means that either traffic must be separated strictly or that hierarchy must be maintained, that the flows should either not mix or find systems of giving ground. The traffic light is a means for sorting out such conflicts. Traffic lights, which are meant to increase the efficient utility of the street, are designed from the position of the car, directed primarily at resolving potential conflicts among vehicles.

By any qualitative or quantitative measure, pedestrians are

Catal Huyuk

inevitably disadvantaged: the space of the car, which predominates, is always a danger to them, except at those moments when the car's use of its own space is briefly suspended. The ideal for traffic should be an easy mingling but we only produce technologies predicated on separation. In fact, the historic city is the repository of many of the good answers we require. Ur-town Catal Huyuk, to cite one such, had no streets at all, a genuinely alternative system that has demonstrated its vigor through the millennia. The point is simply this: there are other means of organizing trafficthe urban binder and the regulator of extent- than a grid of flow created by a series of bounded territories.

Consider Los Angeles, the end of the road of the spatial city and the prototype of the edge city. Los Angeles- and cities like it- seek to create a consistent culture of the particle, in which ostensibly egalitarian relationships of property are matched with appropriate circulation. The experiment conducted with the use of cars in

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Los Angeles- not just the dominant but the virtually exclusive mode of motion- updates Thomas Jefferson's Cartesian fantasy of American space. The grid- which like the melting pot offers equality achieved through the surrender of difference in space, or rather by the reduction of the arena of difference to a rigidly circumscribed territory- functions only if there is an even distribution of use, or if it runs like "clock work," no caesura, no surcease, and if there are no intersections. This was Jefferson's fundamental error: he saw the grid as only the aggregated surfaces of an infinite number of squares, their boundaries immaterial, pure edge. The frontier was everywhere.

The Los Angeles grid, however, combines both territories and interstices, each square producing not simply its own surface but also four extra-territorial intersections which it is obliged to share and which become the motive basis for the active relations of the implied democracy. The conundrum arises because an intersection is both a deterrent to flow and a necessity for contact. Democracy implies the need continually to give ground to the other. As a practical matter, the system only works at very low loads where the possibilities of conflict are extremely reduced. As anyone who has driven the Los Angeles grid late at night knows, the freedom with which public space is encountered as almost purely private can be exhilarating. At higher densities, though, contact becomes impediment.

In cities like Los Angeles, the loading on the grid is thrown into disequilibrium by the inequalities of use that culture imposes on the system. Zoning by class and function, as well as the extremely uneven distribution of energy and motion over the diurnal cycle, distorts the stable, static, relationships that support the Cartesian

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fantasy: ThomasJefferson never imagined the rush hour. The planning history of Los Angeles is one of successive failed panaceas for this problem. Coordinated traffic signals are one strategy for introducing hierarchy, shifting blocks of traffic around the gridded zones in trains of space. Urban expansion is another, but such growth, that old hankering after the open frontier, reaches its limits in Los Angeles, the edge of the continent. Another solution is to introduce the next order of physical gridding: the freeway.

Freeways are a symptom of both the spatial and temporal disequilibrium of real life, an attempt to impose a technological fix on a conceptual difficulty. Like traffic lights, they try to solve the difficulty from the position of the car. Freeways- like other concentrating means of motion- try to reconcile the actual nodality of the system with the dream of a continuous fabric of equalized relationships. In this sense, Los Angeles traffic effectively reflects the condition of American democracy in which dynamism flows from the conflict between an egalitarian model of social relations and a rapidly expanding system of privileges ultimately at odds with it.

Because the undergirding model does not work at the scale the city has now achieved, Los Angeles must be viewed as a transitional form, lying between the traditional city of centrality and the burgeoning condition of pure interstice which electronic technologies- with their suppression of literal motion- enable. Los Angeles is seminal in the invention of this city of the interstice, with its primitive dream of placelessness as paradise, of going with the flow in an endless, ubiquitous, summer. Los Angeles is also a cautionary tale about how the city will disappear: not with its physical obliteration but with its transformation into the continuous texture of the

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not-city which, performing what remains of the function of the city, finally covers the earth.

America's national book of virtues situates our autonomy in property, in the literal possession of space. On the frontier, the quality of space lies in its boundlessness. In a system of generous dimensions- the mile square grid, for example- our privacy can be both elective and absolute. After all, if our neighbor is always invisible, our domain will appear infinite. This is crucial: as suggested earlier, American polity is not founded on the fantasy of collectivity but on the right to be left alone. The current fight over immigration is symptomatic, again reflecting anxiety over the loss of space and the excess visibility of the other. Where Alberti familiarly conceived the city as a magnified house, the American house summarizes the nation, the family isolated in its dominion of space. Such a vision is re-read back onto the body of the city, whether in the mathematical conversion of territory to value (delineate and conquer!) or, more darkly, in the strategies of enclaving and exclusion that dominate so much of our contemporary place-making.

It's no coincidence that Disneyland first occurred in- or rather near- Los Angeles and there's no question that Disneyland represents a model "solution" to the problem of Los Angeles.

Disneyland forsakes the grid in favor of the node, located at a place which exists only at the conjunction of freeways. It might be argued that this simply raises the idea of the grid to a higher level still. But again, the system has a quality of intermediacy. After all, the freeway grid is predicated on the prior existence of nodes and lacks the geometric rigor of its Jeffersonian counterpart,

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reversing its priority of dispersal by searching out the intersection, seeking concentrations. Disneyland also invokes the next order of grid making, or rather intersection making, by its conceptual understanding of geographical and cultural space. In its juxtapositions of simulated versions of different historical and cultural moments, Disneyland signals the possibility of departure from traditional strategies of time and space- of location- and therefore harbingers in the territory of the physical the sorts of possibilities now everywhere actualized by strategies of the virtual.

One hears that history has ended. The worst fear now is that after history comes Disneyland. The easy reversibility of history is one of the lessons Disneyland absorbs from Los Angeles. As an expressive system, Los Angeles offers a strategy of hemmed latitude. The image of an infinity of tiny lots, each with its homes-of-the-stars fantasy of predigested self-expression, remakes the city in the image of television. Television seeks to achieve the parity of bits, a rump democracy of meaning. Here's an image of real post-modern Jeffersonianism, emulated at Disney with its patronage of superstar architects whose work is interleaved with the anonymous but indistinguishable constructions of the Imagineers. In such a recombinant system, we are no more surprised to find Robert Stern next to Frank Gehry next to Space Mountain than we are to find Barney next to Mother Theresa next to OJ. on TV. As culture is reduced to entertainment and work is transformed into leisure, citizenship becomes lifestyle.

Disneyland, however, is foremost a playground of mobility, its entertainments largely those of pleasured motion. And, there is something to be learned here. It seems undeniable that for all of

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its depredations, all of its regimentation, surveillance, and control, part of what we experience as enjoyable at Disneyland is the passage through an environment of urban density in which both the physical texture and the means of circulation are not simply entertaining but stand in invigorating contrast to the dysfunctional versions back home. One extracts from Disneyland a shred of hope, the persuasive example that pedestrianism coupled with short distance collective transport systems can be both efficient and fun, can thrive in the midst of an environment completely otherwise constituted, and that the space of flow, sufficiently decelerated, can become the space of exchange. But ultimately only if we're not just passing through.

Democratic traffic favors choice over flow. To manage this deceleration, cities need supply-side transport management strategies. This will not necessarily be easy. The culture~nursed on advertising round the clock~makes a fetish of demand, the whole system thriving on spurious need. What goes unrecognized is that the vociferous insistence on these demands is the sign not of the autonomy of our desires, but of their silencing: these demands only reveal how thoroughly entrapped we have become in someone else's entrepreneurial dream. To begin again will mean reconsidering the place of the body in democracy. For the most part, democracy does not traffic in bodies. It is theorized instead in terms of disincorporation: the beheading of the monarch; the emptying out of the central place of power; the establishment of body-blind tribunals of public justice; and so on.

Yet it is absurd to take this disincorporation literally, as the mere excision of the physical body from democratic space, for it is rather a radical clearing of old notions of the body and an

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invitation to invent it anew. Depending on the nerve with which we pursue this reinvention and reprivatization, the consequences could be tremendous.

Growth, too, invites reinvention. In the urban context, it has too long been understood as equivalent to expansion, that old fantasy of infinity based on the endless capacity of land to absorb value (like the right of all Americans to grow infinitely rich on their parcels) and on the ephemerality of that value when the city moves speculatively on. Whatever one thinks of the dynamism and the aesthetic of cities so produced- and this comes from someone who adores New York- the sheer waste of energy is idiotic.

Clearly, we need a far more ecological growth model, based not on expansion but on elaboration and, ultimately, on limits. The frontier mentality, which uses the idea of an unlimited horizon to manipulate value within the edge is surely obsolete.

What kind of a city would accommodate elaboration and change, magnify the possibilities of interaction and accident, without the imperatives of continuous growth and with a radically sustainable character? What would the democratic instance of such a city be like?

Imagine a city of rampant plurality in which lifestyle is elective and fluid. Here, city lifestyle will have ceased to have any direct relationship to class, becoming a profusion of accessible private choices, not just the city of consumption in which every choice seems to turn us into Marie Antoinette. I don't mean to romanticize this position, but I believe that this flow of choices was part of what Raoul Wallenberg was fighting for, the idea

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that private fantasy is a public right, that one of the stable qualities of democracy is flux.

But how is all this difference to be housed? If not by abstraction, how should the city be divided? In the age of identity politics, what is the meaning of the ghetto? Is it possible to produce non-exclusionary differences within cities? While we think of the ghetto as a prison, we also know it has great dynamism, an energy bred of common experience, tempered by mutual adversity and festivity. The ghetto begs the boundary and boundaries are zones where we can best observe the morphology of difference. In a city dedicated to free circulation, how is it possible to construct the boundaries that will make variety both legible and accessible while at the same time producing a non-coercive cohesion?

The alternative to the ghetto is the neighborhood. Neighborhoods are the centers of urban life, the logical increment of both local democracy and of environmental accountability. Physically, neighborhoods are about producing difference without onus, based on non-exclusionary fantasies. This is not simply sentimentality. A neighborhood is a shared space, offering the ground for consensual formulation both of the physical character of that ground and of its use. One must, of course, be wary of the fallacy of thinking that form is the source of communityan historical and abiding delusion among architects. Equally, it's necessary to be wary of the very idea of "community" which has historically been used as a principal of exclusion, as a hedge against the unexpected and unfamiliar. De Toqueville was prescient in identifYing the potential of local communities as a source of tyranny.

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The key to sharing is the dimensioned character of this construct.

Dimension determines tractability by describing the physical grounds for accessibility, the body I time calculus of interaction.

Beyond, in its determined finitude, the neighborhood provides the grounds for its own comprehensibility. By embodying a particular scale and density, the neighborhood acquires a lexical vector, a sum of parts to be learned and negotiated. Choreography, however private, requires a stage.

All locality begins with the body, the primary means of urban measurement and understanding. Neighborhoods are bound to the body, both by increasing "human scale" and by acknowledging the body's constraints. Good neighborhoods are thus meaningfully physical, configuring the blend of the social and the dimensional.

The art of the urbanist is in nurturing the mix both within and among neighborhoods by providing enabling physical differences and apt legibility. Scale becomes a crucial enabler of educated consent by assuring that the subject matter of urbanity remains legible to its citizens. Locality is the ground of a neighborhood's authenticity. Authenticity has a democratic valence: it implies both consent and time. Democracy needs time, the space of deliberation which a neighborhood acquires by the slow accretion of lived-lives and physical variation.

Like any other part of the city, the neighborhood is a means of harmonizing the speeds of the market and the civic by defending the long wave. The market thrives on rapid speed, providing the city with the froth of renewal, and accelerating both the accidental and the centrifugal forces of dispersal. Its danger is in its corrosive effects, its willingness to manipulate decay. Its metaphor is the

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exquisite corpse. The civic is slower, more deliberate, and tends to concentrate and to bind. The civic metaphor is scissors, stone, paper, the game of hierarchies and clear preferences. The forms of cities emerge from the dialectic of these two rates.

Good neighborhoods must possesses autonomy: neighborhoods are economic. Such autonomy introduces the neighborhood into a system of reciprocities which parallel the enabling reciprocities of local polity. It is logical to ask of a neighborhood, or a city, whether it can depend on itself, whether it provides jobs, schools, services, access, entertainment and clean air. This is not simply to establish a sense of parity with other places but to measure a neighborhood's internal viability. For example, the solution to the traffic problem is perhaps radically to disconnect locality from larger systems which, on balance, ill serve it. Indeed, for many places, the only way to come to terms with the hegemony of the automotive system is to secede from it. In inner city areas, starved for useful public space and clotted with traffic, the most logical and effective step is to reduce the area actually available to the car. Roadways constitute the major portion of the commonly maintained public realm in cities; in some American downtowns the area given over to motor traffic in one form or another reaches as much as 70 percent and more. Cars have been given a gigantic franchise on the use of this space for both circulation and storage.

Recendy, working on a plan for a New York neighborhood, we wondered what minimum intervention would begin to recapture the order of the neighborhood from motor traffic, to promote a radical greening, and to reinforce new patterns of relative self-sufficiency.

The answer, we decided, was to plant a tree in an intersection.

East New York II

We anticipated several consequences. The space devoted to the automobile would be reduced and the instant creation of four dead-end streets would certainly have a calming effect on traffic.

The tree in the street would oblige traffic to find collateral means of circulation. Finally, we anticipated that street-life, with its sparse commerce attenuated into useless, center-crushing linearity, would be concentrated in a series of locally scaled commercial and social centers that would restore legibility, convenience, and conviviality to a place ragged and over-large, inaccessible for its failures of "where."

The neighborhood- measured by people on foot- is the building block of the city. Like the city in the world context, the ability of neighborhoods to act autonomously must be enhanced. It seems reasonable to ask: does a neighborhood produce sufficient oxygen, water, energy, thermal modulation, waste management, and so on?

Such environmental interrogations enable neighborhoods to find their particularity in relation to the environment. If cities and their neighborhoods are to continue to establish authentic bases for their distinctiveness, such a considered response to both their cultural and

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their bio-regional particulars is crucial. This interaction, orchestrated at the level of neighborhoods, will surely provide a rich system for accumulating difference and variety genuinely based on a genius loci.

Edges are again critical zones of potential mutation. They will be the laboratories of fresh possibilities. Subjectivity needs the fixed and the fluid and these are clearest at the margin. To be more psychoanalytic, the sense of boundary is developmentally seminal.

A meaningful sense of exteriority is a key to the confirmation of both private and collective subjectivities. The mutating seams at the margins will be bulwarks against the argument for a single form of the city and against the idea that invention and memory are on a course of mutual annihilation. Their resistance will be to a choice restricted to nostalgia or the tabula rasa, Disneyland or urban renewal.

Finally, I want to return to questions of mobility because the culture of encapsulation- the neo-nomadism of the electronic hearth and home-couples with consumer strategies of individuation to shape expectations of domicile and public space, and of the connection between them. Likewise, the dramatic revision of expectations in the realm of work powerfully reconfigures the possibilities of the city. As America ships increasing amounts of its industrial production to low wage countries abroad and focuses its energies on technology and service, the paradigm of employment- though not yet the fact- devolves more and more on the idea of the home as workplace. Of course, this idea will not exactly be fresh to the billions of women who have, over the years, been obliged to work uncompensated in such environments. Now, though, such a notion has become the ultimate post-Fordist fantasy for all of us.

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However, contained within this possibility is a better prospect.

If the working environment becomes discretionary; and if brute mass production gives way to more flexible craft, skills, and information-intensive modes; and if transport technology is diversified to provide both more bespoke and attractive means of human mobility and more efficient movement of things; and if a far more self-sufficent version of sustainability is instituted which seeks to contain commercial traffic within localities, then the contours of a new relationship to the city begin to emerge.

Indeed, enhanced connectivity to serve the movement of things might conceivably stabilize and enhance the relations of people.

But we need also to look very closely at large scale processes; a purely inductive model does not automatically become the leader when deduction is overthrown. Traffic and ecology are the relevant models, traffic because it attempts to comprehend urban form in a spirit of both tractability and perfectability (however benighted its agendas), and ecology for its complexity, its vision of the dialectic of homeostasis and change, and its identification of the urban as the extension and not the antithesis of nature.

As architects, we hesitate to think at necessary scales, taking refuge in the idea that traditional structures of understanding are too limited to comprehend the urban. Scarred by the failure of modernist urbanism and its emaciated universalism, we deny the real scale of the problem, disdain the idea of the masterplan as too riddled with the fraught history of mastery. Architects are too much embracing an implicit politics of disengagement, abandoning the field to those ready to produce general answers, the avatars of bigness and smallness who have in common the production of

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sameness. We've become phobic about thinking of cities as physical as well as social constructions. And we suffer from tremendous poverty of both vision and will in the making of cities. D ominant models for innovation are unsatifactory, consisting of go-with-the-flow neo-suburbanism, fingers-crossed laissez-faire, tepid riffs on the garden city, retreaded modernism, and Disneyland.

Cities do evolve and, like all species, they reach a form of completion.

Sustainability and taste- and democratic urbanity requires the consent of taste- will signal this conclusion. The process will be long: meaning requires depth and depth requires time. The city is not a tree but it is, in many ways, a forest. A forest at climax has achieved a condition of homeostasis, a steady state. And such climax forests, like the vanished redwoods out west, have a form.

Cities, neighborhoods, and architectures at climax- think of Venice, Prague, Fez, or Osaka- are much the same. Their dynamic segues from large-scale tasks to internal adjustment and renewal, a kind of steady state. New neighborhoods and new cities, based on the intimate particulars of culture, history, bio-region, site, choice, invention and accident, can also find their differences.

Michael Sorkin April, 1997

Raoul Wallenberg lecture The Raoul Wallenberg Lecture was initiated in 1971 by Sol King, a former classmate of Wallenberg's. An endowment was established in 1976 for an an nual lecture to be offered in R aoul 's honor on the theme of architecture as a humane social art.

The following distinguished architects a nd historians have been invited to present the Wallenberg lectures to the College of Architecture + Urban Planning at the U niversity of Michigan:

1972 1973 1975 1976 1978 1979 1981 1983 1984 1985 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997

Sir Nikolaus Pevsne r Eric Larabee Reyner Banham Rudolf Arnheim J acob B. Bakema J ames Marston Fitch Carl Levin Edmund Bacon Charles Correa Grady Clay Joseph Rykwert Spiro Kostof J. Max Bond, Jr. Elizabeth Hollander Joseph Esherick Denise Scott Brown J ames lngo Freed Jorge Silvetti Daniel Libeskind Vincent Scully Michael Sorkin

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Raoul Wallenberg Scholarship The Raoul Wallenberg Scholarship is awarded through a design competition which is held annually for undergraduates in their final year of study in the College of Architecture + Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. The following students have been awarded the scholarship:

John DeGraaf Matthew Petrie Elizabeth Govan Paul Warner Dallas Felder Eric Romano Charles Yoo Matthew Johnson Jo Polowczuk Joseph Rom

1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997

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Michael Sorkin Studio Principal Partner Associate Emeritus

Michael Sorkin Andrei Vovk Yukiko Yokoo Peter Kormer

Collaborators Matthew Muller Silva Ajemian Patrick Clifford Zingg Dominik Schwarzer Jeffrey Johnson

Color Plates 8 12 18 22 26 30 33 38 40

P. P.

P. P.

P. P. P. P. P.

Neurasia, South Asia, 1995 Weed, Arizona, 1994 Visselhovede, Germany, 1997 Visselhovede, Germany, 1997 Neurasia, South Asia, 1995 Neurasia, South Asia, 1995 Shroom Housing, 1994 Berlin Spree Bogen, 1993 Weed, Arizona, 1994

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Acknowledgments The College qf Architecture and Urban Planning is gratefol for the generous support for the Raoul Wallenberg Scholarship and Lecture which has been provided by alumni and friends, and the Benard L. Maas Foundation.

The College would like to thank Michael Sorkin for the considerable time and energy which he has so generous(y given to make this publication possible, and Yukiko Yokoo for her assistance with the project images.

On April 24, 1997, the Raoul Wallenberg Commemorative stamp was dedicated at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, in Washington D. C. The stamp, first issued in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has stirred controversy as it is the policy qf the United States Postal Service to on(y issue stamps qf the deceased.

Rumors persist to this day concerning the Jo.te qf Raoul Wallenberg.

CREDITS PP

Courtesy of the American School of Classical Studies, Princeton, New Jersey II Photograph from the New York Times 17 Based on drawing by Grace Huxtable 24 All other images courtesy Michael Sorkin