Why re-think the question of urban power? Cities of God, Cit ies of Reason: From

Ritualized to Rationalized Space. Hermeneutics and Urban Form The Role of Space in Urban Hermeneutics From Coded Places to Code/Spaces: The

Material Discourses of Knowing Capitalism Conclusion

Existing definitions of urban power within the critical/radical/historical materialist tradition tend to focus on processes of power or power relations within cities as opposed to the power of cities.

Critical urban theory needs to address the systemic and structurated means by which the power of cities and of urban spaces in general is established, maintained, concentrated or dispersed.

This requires us to see cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic manifestations of the urban not as epiphenomena but as material components of the power/knowledge ensembles that structure existing cityness and which give rise to new urban formations

The relation between discourse and material is not confined to the intellectual task of providing an understanding of material; by acting on our understanding, discourse affects practice (the material). Moreover, discourse is not conducted under rules of free inquiry; it is constructed out of, and constrained by, the very material circumstances that it studies. It is this sense that Foucault tries to capture in the couplet “discourse/practice”; this is also the sense that I wish to communicate through the use of the term “discursive materialism” (Yapa 1996, 710).

Richard Peet claims to unite historical materialism and Foucauldian discourse theory in a materialist poststructuralism’ where

‘[c]lass, ideology, and political intention operate in the discursive construction of landscapes. He goes on to argue that ‘significant discourses’ (such as icons) ‘fulfill the purposes of powerful agents and express the social relations and material contexts creating agents and forming their beliefs and intentions. Landscapes can thus be read as power systems. However, landscapes are not passive spaces patterned by power; landscapes also recreate agents (my emphasis) (Peet 1996, 23).

…architecture begins at the end of the eighteenth century to become involved in problems of population, health and the urban question. Previously, the art of building corresponded to the need to make power, divinity and might manifest. The palace and the church were the great architectural forms, along with the stronghold. Architecture manifested might, the Sovereign, God. Its development was for long centred on these requirements. Then, late in the eighteenth century, new problems emerge: it becomes a question of using the disposition of space for economico-political ends (Michel Foucault , Power/Knowledge, 1980, 148)

What Angel Rama calls ‘the ordered city’ was also a key motif in the colonial subjugation of the Americas,

Largely ignoring the existence of ancient settlements the Americas were seen by the Spanish colonists and missionaries as an urban ‘tabula rasa’—just as Alexander saw Egypt or the Roman Emperors, Carthage.

Freed from the ‘organic’ disorder of the medieval Iberian cities the urban bourgeois men of letters ‘adapted themselves to a frankly rationalizing vision of an urban

future, one that ordained a planned and repetitive urban landscape and also required that its inhabitants be organized to meet increasingly stringent requirements of colonization, administration, commerce, defense, and religion’ (Rama and Chasteen 1996, 1).

…we have to be able to discover [power] in places where it is least visible, where it is most completely misrecognized—and thus, in fact, recognized. For symbolic power is that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it (Pierre Bourdieu, 1991-4).

“To read what was never written.” Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dance. Later the mediating link of a new of a new kind of reading, of runes and hieroglyphs, came into use. It seems fair to suppose that these were the stages by which the mimetic gift, which was once the foundation of occult practices, gained admittance to writing and language (Benjamin 1979, 162-163).

[t]he structure of organized space is not a separate structure with its own autonomous laws of construction and transformation, nor is it simply an expression of the class structure emerging from the social (i.e. aspatial) relations of production. It represents, instead, a dialectically defined component of the general relations of production, relations which are simultaneously social and spatial.(Ed Soja 1980:208)

Trajan’s Column, Rome with part of the Basilica Ulpia

The plinth of Trajan’s column incorporating what was thought to have been the emperor’s mausoleum

Location of Column

Apollodorus’plan for Trajan’s Forum

(Figure 2)

Detail showing ‘the effects of good government on the life of the city’

In this fresco the twins Romulus and Remus are mimetically transplanted to the feet – or the roots (radici) of trecento Siena.

In an astonishing coup de théatre, the wolverine tongue of legitimacy blesses the governmentalist raison d’etat of the Sienese magisterium whose flimsy and ad hoc claims to authority are belied by the rhetorical insistence of its primogeniture in the original and eternal city of Rome

The Allegory of Bad Government (or the Allegory of Tyranny)

This social and spatial dialectic is itself an emergent product of our representations of it, which are also made in the world from that which is also already in the world.

For Baudrillard ‘the structure of the sign is at the very heart of the commodity form [since] the commodity can take on, immediately, the effect of signification (Baudrillard 1981, 146 in Doel 2006, 62).

Thus Baudrillard extends Marx’s chain of values forms, beginning with value itself, and encompassing use-value, exchange-value, and surplus-value to also include sign-value (or sign-exchange-value) which Doel notes exists in an ‘antagonistic relationship to symbolic exchange’ (Doel 2006, 62).

Sumerian clay tablet - some 60-100,000 are thought to have survived the Ur III period (the most prolific) between 2100 and 2000 B.C.

Pantographic punch machine and card designed for the 1890 US census - marked off areas rep demographic categories

Punch cards were the same size as dollar bills

Near identical technology was employed during the 2000 US Presidential elections in many states, including Florida

The coding and recording principles that are to be found in Sumerian clay tablets display many common features with contemporary recording and classification systems (such as commercial geodemographics or market segmentation analysis), and in particular the ability to organize the spatialisation of difference.

This software sorting (Burrows and Gane 2007) is at the heart of a new techno-governmentality of space that in the words of a leading North American geodemographics company will allow companies to ‘conduct data mining projects to uncover behavioural patterns for targeting campaigns’

Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine, 1890

Fruitless searching is as much a part of this as succeeding, and consequently remembrance must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still less that of a report, but must, in the strictest epic and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in ever new places, and in the old ones delve to ever-deeper layers (Walter Benjamin. ‘Berlin Chronicle’, 1979, 314).