Governing cities, governing citizens

The city, for at least two centuries, has been both a problem for government and a permanent incitement to government. Modem cities are not so much entities but more like accidental agglomerations of forces, sedimented layers and fractures overlaid through time and space, seeping out at the edges, impossible to reduce to any single principle or determination except that illusion of unity and stability conferred by the proper name. Hence it is not surprising that the recurrent visions of the administered city have always been quickened by a sense of crisis, of the nefarious activities and mobile associations within urbanized territories that elude knowledge and escape regulation. For the first half of the twentieth century, the government of urban existence in the face of such anxieties was always inspired, explicitly or implicitly, by a utopian dream: a dream of the perfect rational city planned in such a way as to maximize the efficiency, tranquillity, order and happiness of its inhabitants while minimizing crime, disorder, vice, squalor, ill health and the like. This implicit utopianism that took the city as a whole as its object has largely been abandoned. Rather than ‘planning the city’, today, there appears to have been a pluralization of the problematizations of life that take an urban form, and a pluralization of the ways in which programmes have been designed to address them. These seek new ways of harnessing the forces immanent within urban existence: they dream of a city that would almost govern itself.