Hannah Arendt about the Polis

Hannah Arendt explains her concept of the polis departing from an ancient Greek (Heraclitus, Aristotle) understanding of this term. In The Human Condition (1958) she argues:

"The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. "Wherever you go, you will be a polis": these famous words became not merely the watchword of Greek colonization, they expressed the conviction that action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere. It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.

This space does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them—like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiquity, like the laborer or craftsman prior to the modern age, the jobholder or businessman in our world—do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in it all the time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; "for what appears to all, this we call Being," and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality." [1]

And about the public realm and the space of appearance:

"Power preserves the public realm and the space of appearance,and as such it is also the lifeblood of the human artifice, which, unless it is the scene of action and speech, of the web of human affairs and relationships and the stories engendered by them, lacks its ultimate raison d'etre. Without being talked about by men andwithout housing them, the world would not be a human artifice but a heap of unrelated things to which each isolated individual was at liberty to add one more object; without the human artifice to house them, human affairs would be as floating, as futile and vain, as the wanderings of nomad tribes." [2]

[1 ]Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, (1958) 1998, p. 198, 199.

[2] Ibid, p. 204.

Definition of Architecture

Today I found a very nice definition of architecture by David Harvey in Spaces of Hope (2000):

"The architect has been most deeply enmeshed throughout history in the production and pursuit of utopian ideals (particularly through not solely those spatial form). The architect shapes spaces so as to give them social utility as well as human and aesthetic/symbolic meanings. The architect shapes and preserves long-term social memories and strives to give material form to the longings and desires of individuals and collectivities. The architect struggles to open spaces for new possibilities, for future forms of social lives."

Harvey, David, Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 200.

The favela as a image of counter-modernity?

Daniela Fabricius in: Resisting Representation - The informal Geographies of Rio de Janeiro.

"Even though they are very much a product of modern economies and social transformations, favelas are still associated with an abject, primitive. or regressive form of urban life. Even if Rio's favelas were once visited and celebrated by figures like Le Corbusier and Marintetti, they remained an image of counter-modernity, particular in a country like Brazil, which developed a strong Modernist ethos. Favelas are frequently misunderstood as a transitional urbanism, a phase of urban form as it evolves from a premodern to a modern civilization. The slums that appeared in European cities in the 19th century and gave way to today's modern metropolises are often used as examples to argue this point. But there is no evidence or reason to believe that the informal settlements in the Third World will or should develop as European cities do. Brazilian favelas are over 100 years old and don't necessary become more urbanized with time; sometimes, in fact, "favelization," a planned and newly constructed portion of the city eventually (sometimes in just a few years) becomes a favela."

Slavoj Žižek - Violence

“Violence is usually the arm of the impotent.”

For Slavoj Žižek we have to make a distinction between subjected violence and objected violence.
Objective violence is violence where there is a clear agent – a mobster, a criminal, a terrorizing parent – who did the act of violence. You know the agent of violence. This kind of violence is in the media all the time.
Subjective violence is more invisible and systemic and we do not notice it as violence. This subjected violence is present in the capitalist system, and it is a ‘anonymous violence,’ where there is no clear agent to blame. For example during a economic crisis; it just happens and nobody is responsible.

“I think – that’s the underlying thesis of the book – that, too put it in somewhat bombastic terms, if humanity is to survive, confronting all the crisis we have today, the threat of ecological crisis, the threat of social violence, provoked by new forms of apartheid. One the one hand gated communities, on the other hand people living in excluded areas; slums, favelas and so on. Our next ethical step is to learn, to except to be responsible, even for this objective violence. We say: ‘Sorry, it is objective what can I do [about it]. We are responsible for it.”

Žižek argues that we ‘live in a era where violence is the big taboo.’ Thinks that were seen as tasteless fifteen years ago are now seen as a form of violence. The last decades there has grown a higher sensitivity towards subjected violence. The interesting point is that this sentivity goes hand in hand with  a increase of objected violence and social violence. Žižek states: ‘The paradox for me is that this extreme sensitivity to subjected violence is a very dangerous ideological phenomenon, something which goes hand in hand with social violence.’

Proposal Graduation Project

Sao Paulo grow during the twentieth century into one of the larges metropolises of the world. High-rise buildings shoot up like mushrooms, Sao Paulo became an ‘urban jungle’. However, beside this intensive urban city emerged also an expansive periphery more poorly developed. This periphery mainly came into being through a process of autoconstruction (autoconstrução), the working classes build their own houses because they were not able to participate the formal market. Nowadays almost all the house have sewage system, electricity and water, a significant part of the roads are asphalted. Interesting is that the architect in this process only operates somewhere in the margins.

Exceptional is the building system CEU (Centros Educacionais Unificados), in this project design is deployed in a very strategic and pragmatic way in order to add public services to the periphery. More than forty of these centre’s have been build, all with the same repeating building objects. The centre’s contain among other things: different schools, a cultural centre, a theater, sporting facilities and swimming pools municipal services. The strength of this project is that it within a short period of time, and for a large amount of people, offered access to services that where lacking before. What interests me professionally is that fact that architecture can play a role on the metropolitan scale. An elementary architectonic intervention – sometimes called ‘urban acupuncture’ – can till a certain extent improve the daily life of many people. Standardization makes it possible to create a generic type of architecture; quick to build, cheap and accessible for many. In my graduation project I want to investigate this topic further. So my research questions is as follows:

                Is it possible to develop a typological public space, that is less uniform as the CEU’s and more                 is integrated in the context, without giving up its repetitive and adaptable characteristics.

In relation to this research question I want to examine the following topics:

1. Theoretical Framework: Public space in a city characterized by segregation and fear.
The Brazilian anthropologist Teresa Caldeira writes about Sao Paulo as a ‘City of Walls’; a city where the public space is ‘imploded’. Many inhabitants of Sao Paulo feel imprisoned because of strong fear for violent crime, resulting in an increasing ‘fortification’ of the public space. This causes on the one side of the spectrum the rise of the so called ‘gated community’ or ‘fortified enclave’, while the poor live in favela’s, a contemporary version of the ghetto. However, we have to realize that these two are the extremes, the majority of the people live in between these conditions. I want to examine want the possiblities of public space are in these urban conditions. Is public space – by Hannah Arendt defined as ‘a space of appearance’ – still a realistic in a segregated society? Or do we need to change our strategies as designers?

2. Historical Inspiration: The potentials of the Roman system for the contemporary informal city.
The architecture of the Roman city had a strong typological character. In every city there were comparable public buildings, build with an ‘urban toolbox’. Roman architecture balanced between specific and generic. The different urban components repeated themselves in various places: the enclosed square, the theater, (public space), triumphal arc (monumentality), the arcade (binding element), the basilica (commercial space), the temple (religious space), bathhouses (hygiene and leisure). In many cases these different – more or less standardized - functions where brought together around the forum and resulted in a multifunctional public space. I want if it is possible to design a contemporary toolbox; one that is adaptable to the specific context, but remains generic.

The Fallacy of Physical Determinism - Herbert J. Gans

In the essay Urban Vitality and the Fallacy of Physical Determinism (1968) Hebert J. Gans critizes urban planners, saying that the overestimate their capacity of influencing the life of people through urban planning. This essay in particular criticizes Jane Jacobs famous book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), arguing that see falls in the same trap of as the modernist city planner; her opponents. Gans, who is a sociologist, say that it is not so much the physical form of the city that determines behavior. He argues that rather the cultural codes of a social group determine behavior. The way people use the urban spaces depend on with social or ethnic group they belong to.  The reason why people in a certain neighborhood have a intensive street life and others not, could have been caused by the fact that the house is reserved for the family, and therefore the social life has to take place on the street.[1] So the determiner of the use of space is in itself not physical but sociological. The modernist planners of the city, but also their criticizers like Jane Jacobs are losing themselves in ‘the fallacy of physical determinism,’ which mean that they put too much weight at the physical appearance of space when it comes to sociological phenomena.
Gans writes about the American middle-class who prefers to live in the suburbs and don’t want to live in diverse neighborhoods, the retreat from the working class parts of the city is a very conscious decision, that is not in the first part determined by physical space but by the status they want to represent among their equals. They don’t want to travel by public transport, they want to travel by car, as every middle-class family does. They don’t want to go to the small merchant, they prefer the supermarket where they have more choice and it is much easier to park your car.
I will write more about this interesting sociologist, because I think that the nuances he makes are very still very valid today; especially to prevent to lose ourselves for the trap of the ‘technical fix’, the attitude that social problems are easily solvable by technology.

[1] Herbert J. Gans, Urban Vitality and the Fallacy of Physical Determinism, in: People and Plans: Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions (1968, 1972) Cox & Wyman Inc., London, p. 34,35.

Farewell to Old Amsterdam!

Very beautiful images from Amsterdam shortly after the second world war.

Kenneth Frampton: Tectonic Form and Public Appearance

What follows is a summary of a lecture by Kenneth Frampton that he held 28 May 2009 at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. This lecture was titled Tectonic Form and Public Appearance.
Frampton begins his lecture by critizing contemporary architects like Herzog de Meuron. According to Frampton these architects put to much emphasize on the skin, and not so much on the tectonic form and the spatial aspects of the building. What is missing is the ‘space of appearance’, a term derived from Hannah Arendt’s influential work The Human Condition (1958). An example of the space of appearance is the acropolis in ancient Athens. However, we have to realize that architecture is not a preexistence for this space of appearance to come into being. This doesn’t mean that architecture is a powerless instrument in society. Frampton formulates it like this:

‘Architecture can still intervene (…) in the urban fabric in a limited way, as an intervention. And this intervention should guarantee this of public appearance.’

The question is now what the characteristics are of this spaces of appearance and Frampton tries to find examples of them in the architectural history. The first one is intercolumniation as in the we see in the temple at Thebes. The hypostyle is announcing the sacral space. This concept of intercolumniation is omnipresent in historical architecture, Frampton also gives the examples of Schinkel’s Altes Museum where the columns announce the central public space. 
The freestanding column can also be seen as a analogue for the human body in the public space.
The second example is the Greek theater where the body politic could gather and transcendent there everyday life. (The life of necessity or labour as Arendt would call it.) Not only provides the Greek theater a place to make this possible, it also expresses it in its tectonic form, this form is an representation of the absent collective body.

The third example is the stair – in its tectonic form it already represents the motion of the human body. I would say that the stair, and the theater are counter-moulds of the public.
Later Frampton comes to speak about the role of architecture. He thinks that it role is twofold: Presentation and Representation. Presentation is about what is provided, the programmatic elements for the realization of the project. Representation is the constructional elements itself that represent the public, think about the examples of the stair, column. In the absence of public you see the representation of the public.
Frampton pays in this lecture a lot of attention to the architecture of Paulo Mendes da Rocha and shows several of his buildings. This because there is – according to Frampton – a relation between the human body and the constructional elements. (He also shows the faculty building of architecture in São Paulo by Vilanova Artigas.)

The limits of Architecture
Answering the questions of the audience Frampton comes to speak about the MUBE, the museum of Brazilian sculpture in São Paulo by Paulo Mendes da Rocha. (See images bottom of the post.) This building defines a beautiful public space, however, after the construction the site is completely fenced. This ruins the building and especially the public character of the project. Frampton reacts on this particular situation in São Paulo:

‘ (…) at some point architecture has its limits. There is a certain dimension where architecture cannot really come into being. I think because society is so stressed by poverty and by the accompanying violence that come along with the poverty [that] architecture come beside to point in a way. The heroic gesture can still be made but they may not be consummated because society is under to much stress. (…) When we get to such a level of paranoia [this] paranoia makes architecture in a society impossible. I mean, if you think about designing embassies today, you need to have two embassies: you need one that is the kind of representational thing where you don’t mind that somebody puts a bomb in it, and you need another embassy which is a bunker. (…) That kind of paranoia is a killer. It is the opposite of a society of risk.’

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 8. VIOLENCE, THE UNBOUNDED BODY, AND THE DISREGARD OF RIGHTS IN BRAZILIAN DEMOCRACY

The increase of violence during the process of democratization is by Caldeira seen as, what see calls “disjunctive”. Brazil is a political democracy, ‘the civil aspects of citizenship are continuously violated,’ as she expresses in the last chapter of the book. This chapter focuses on “the body,’ as Caldeira approaches this theme from the disrespect for human rights and the campaign for the introduction of death penalty.
The disrespect for human rights comes clear when we look at how the discussion about the rights of prisoners. A very common attitude is than to say that human rights is the same as giving rights to bandits, something that is really not done according to a lot of people. To give an impression of the way the media speaks about human rights, I give the example of the daily radio program of Afanasio Jazadji who is a popular radio star in São Paulo. In April 1984 , the day the National Congress decided to deny the population right to vote the president he said:

‘Some should take all those irredeemable prisoners, put them against the wall and fry them with a blow torch. Or instead throw a bomb in the middle of them: boom!, end of the problem. They have no family, they don’t have anything, they don’t have anything to worry about, they only think about doing evil, and why should we worry about them? …

Those bastards, they consume everything, millions and millions a month. Let us get this money and transform it into hospitals, nurseries, orphanages, asylums, and provide a respectable life for those who really deserve to have this dignity. Now, for those type of people … people? To treat them as people! We’re offending humankind!’

Comparable reactions are made regarding death penalty, and some of the ones Caldeira gives are rather shocking. However, we have to be careful not to judge Brazil as a whole on these populist statements, and we have to keep in mind the violence most people experienced themselves or on their relatives.
When it comes to punishment a lot of people think of ‘punishment as inflicting suffering of the body,’ as a form of ‘physical revenge,’ as Caldeira calls it. ‘The dominant discourse is that of private revenge, as system that uses pain and interventions on the body as a means of creating order.’ [So the problem with public space stands not on its own; it goes much broader in a much wider incline of the border between public and private. JvB]
Something very important Caldeira makes clear deals about child beating: ‘Unable to understand language, children nevertheless are clearly believed to understand pain. Since fear of pain generates obedience, provoking such fear is considered good pedagogy. The marking of the body by pain is perceived as a more forceful statement that mere words can make, and it should be used especially when language and rational arguments would not be understood. In general, the people I interviewed think that children, adolescents, and women are not totally rational (or not always rational), in same way that the poor and obviously, criminals are not. Towards such people the use of violence is necessary; it is a language anyone can understand, which has the power to enforce moral principles and correct social behavior. Pain is understood as a path to knowledge (especially moral knowledge) and reform. Violence is considered to be a language closer to truth.’

Body and rights
‘Clearly, the body is conceived of as the locus of punishment, justice, and example in Brazil. It is conseived by most as a proper site for authority to be asserted through the infliction of pain.’
Caldeira starts to speak about “the unbounded body,” which mean that it ‘has no clear barriers of separation or avoidance; it is a permeable body, open to intervention, on which manipulations by others are not considered problematic. On the other hand, the unbounded body is unprotected by individual rights.’ The main reason for the appearance of the unbounded body is the openly discredited judicial system.
Caldeira gives also different examples of unbounded body that are outside realm of violence. In the fist place the high percentages of cesarean births and sterilizations of women in Brazil. This is seen as a alternative way of birth control, and especially the poor use it. Another medical intervention is the plastic surgery that is very common among Brazilian women in order to become the stereotype Brazilian women. Nonmedical thing Caldeira mentions is the carnival, the ‘occasion for displaying the body and playing with transformations of the body. (…) During Carnival performances people expect to touch and be touched: it is considered in bad taste to repel such interventions because one is out there to play, and the mingling of bodies is the essence of the play. Not only is Carnival a realm for the merging of bodies, their manipulation, and display, but it is also one where the threat of violence and actual violence are always present.’
Having this said, Caldeira derives from Michel Foucault’s theories the standpoint the emerge of a liberal-democracy moves away from bodily punishment to the punishment of the mind. But the progressive abandonment come always simultaneously with a process of democratization. What appears is a “disjunctive democracy” where, as in Brazil’s case, we have very highly developed social rights [think for example about the social movements] but civil rights that are not protected. Important is the relation between the body and civic rights. ‘In Brazilian society, what dominates is the unbounded notion of the body and the individual.’
Caldeira ends the book with a few questions, one of them, maybe even the most important one, about the future of public space. ‘Is there a model that protects people’s bodies and enforces individual rights while maintaining the indeterminacy [Dutch: onbepaaldheid, JvB] of borders that constitutes the democratic public space.’ The task no is, according to Caldeira, to ‘find new ways to democratize public space, renegotiate borders, and respect civil rights.’ Very interesting in my opinion is that Caldeira looks for more flexible borders, because she thinks that flexible borders combined with great inequality, ‘works only in one direction, from dominant to dominated, without any institutional restraints or boundaries. Caldeira gives a hint here in what direction see does think: ‘I advocate more rather than less boundedness for the body, especially when it involves relationships between unequals.’

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 8. THE IMPLOSION OF MODERN PUBLIC LIFE

Caldeira rings in this chapter the alarm bell when it comes to public space: ‘People feel restricted in their movements, afraid, and controlled; they go out less at night, walk less on the street, and avoid the “forbidden zones” that loom larger and larger in every resident’s mental map of the city, especially among the elite. Encounters in the public space become increasingly tense, even violent, because discrimination, and suspicion are the new hallmarks of public life.’ The most important question in this chapter is: ‘how to conceive of the relationships between urban form, politics, and everyday life. These relationships are very complex and usually disjunctive: simultaneous processes with opposite meaning may take place in the same public sphere. São Paulo offers a compelling example of disjunction: its walling process has coincided with the organization of urban social movements, the expansion of citizenship rights for the working classes, and political democratization. (…) Nonetheless, the build environment is not a neutral stage for the unfolding of social relations. The quality of the build environment inevitably influences the quality of the social interaction that take place there. It does not determine them completely; there is always room for diverse and sometimes dubversive appropriations of space and for the organization of siacila actions that counter those shaoed by spatial practices. However, the material space that constitute the stage for public life influence the types of social relations possible on it. (…) Usually it takes organized political action to resist walls or to dismantle patterns of segregation.’

The modern ideal of public space and the city life
[Caldeira takes a few social theorist and philosophers to explain her idea of public space. What strikes me is the fact that Caldeira uses only very western European or north American scholars. In this part of the chapter there are no south American scholars. What does this mean for the conception of public space in the Latin American city? JvB]
About Jane Jacobs: ‘When public life is absent, the alternative to sharing too much may be sharing nothing, and suspicion and fear of neighbor are the expected outcomes.’
About Iris Marion Young: she ‘defines city life as “the being together of strangers,” whose ideal is “an openness to unassimilated otherness.” Young tries to sketch an ideal image of the city containing in four main virtues: ‘(1) social differentiation without exclusion; (2) multi-use differentiation of social space; (3) eroticism, understood broadly as “an attraction to the other, the pleasure and excitement of being drawn out of one’s secure routine to encounter the novel, strange, and surprising”; and (4) publicity, which refers to public space as being by definition a place open and accessible to anyone and where one always risks encountering those who are different.’ [Interesting writer… JvB]
Caldeira distinguishes two types of social movement: the fist that emphasizes the sameness of the discriminated group (blacks, gay, women) and second, the fact that “universalism” is often the basis for exclusion and that we should focus on, what Young calls, “difference without exclusion.” This second notion is also comparable with the writings of theorist like Claude Leford, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, and Étienne Balibar. The modern city forces confrontation among strangers. ‘Such spaces [public spaces, JvB] promote interactions among people who are forced to confront each other’s anonymity on the basis of citizenship and therefore to acknowledge and respect each other’s rights.’

Garden city and modernism: the lineage of the fortified enclave
According to Caldeira the rise of the condominium in Brazil and United States has its origin in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City model. This because it had the same idea of living in a green area and it has the principle separated functions. The condominium can also be seen as a variation on Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, that he himself once described as a “vertical garden city”. The condominium follows naturally from modernistic planning, except the walling of the space. [It think this is not true. JvB] What Caldeira is arguing is that in São Paulo the city is build by the bad aspect of modernism, and the good aspects are left aside. This results in a public space that ‘expresses the new intolerance. (…) In the ideal modern city life, “borders are open and undecidable,” suggest Young. Fixed boundaries create nonmodern spaces, an undemocratic space.’ [I do not agree on this. JvB]
The strange relation between democratization and the walls in the city Caldeira reacts as follows: ‘While the political system opened up, the streets were closed, and fear of crime became the talk of the city.’

Street life: Incivility and aggression
Both the rich and the poor neighborhoods are not accessible: Morumbi is a neighborhood for a car, the pavement is bad; the favela has only a few entrances and is not surveyable. Other people privatized their streets by closing them of with gates or other objects.
The systems of security are not only for safety reason but also to ‘discipline’ and to ‘discriminate’. ‘The image of the suspect is made up of stereotypes, and therefore systems of screening discriminate especially against the poor and black people. The entrance guards do not bother people with the right class signs, but they give a hard time to everyone else. (…) In a city in which systems of identification and strategies of security are spreading everywhere, the experience of urban life becomes one of social differences, separations, exclusions, and reminders of the limitations of one’s possibilities in the public space. It is, in reality, a city of walls, the opposite of the boundless public space of the modern ideal city. The rich and the middle classes, more and more try to avoid the street and start to do their shopping in enclosed shopping centers and hypermarkets. The street is also very dangerous because of the traffic. Nobody obeys the traffic regulation.

Experiencing the public
Another interesting disjunction in the process of democratization is has to do with the occupation of former elite space (for example the movie theater) by the poor. ‘With fewer obvious signs of differentiation at hand and with more difficulty in asserting their privileges and codes of behavior in the public space, the upper classes turn instead to systems of indentification. Thus, spaces of controlled circulation (such as shopping centers) come to assure that distinction and separation are still possible in public. Signs of social distance are replaced with material walls.’
In this chapter Caldeira names only two public space that are, in her opinion, exceptional in terms that they have a plural public space. The first one is Ibirapuera Park and Praça da Sé.

Praça da Sé
This central square is extensively discussed because it is a very important public space in São Paulo. It contains tree important landmarks, namely the cathedral, the central subway and the “zero mark” of the city, indicated by a stone on top of a compass engraved on the ground. Teresa Caldeira thinks that the space has become more and more a place for the poor people, because of the homeless people, beggars, street vendors, ect. However, still today we see a lot of business man in suits, but also preachers of different kind of Christian movements, musicians and policeman. According to Caldeira the rich start to avoid Praça da Sé, because of its dominance by the poor. 

But Praça da Sé has also a very political component. During the military dictatorship this was the only place were demonstrations were held, such as on 25 January 1984 when three hundred thousand congregated in Praça da Sé to demand free elections. ‘Demonstrations were moved to Vale do Anhangabaú on only two occasions, when the square was too small for the expected crowd of one million: the last rally for direct elections in April 1984, and the demonstration for the impeachment of President Collor in September 1992. (…) On the one hand, Praça da Sé symbolizes the political reappropriation of public space by the citizens in the transition to democracy. On the other hand, it represents the detoriation of public space, danger, crime, anxieties about downward mobility, and impoverishment of the workers who continue to commuting, working in the informal market, and consuming its cheap products. It symbolizes both the strength and the deterioration of public space and, therefore, the disjunctive character of Brazilian democracy. [Caldeira refers here to a text she wrote together with James Holston called ‘Democracy, Law, and Violence: Disjunctions of Brazilian Citizenship’, published in “Fault Lines of Democracy in Post-transition Latin America”. Zie literatuurlijst voor beschikbaarheid. JvB]


Contradictory public space
Something very interesting in my opinion is the argument Charles Jencks uses. He thinks that we simply should deal with the process of walling the city, architects should find an aesthetic solution for it, referring to Frank O. Gehry. The fences are good because they prevent conflict. A totally different approach towards this problem has Mike Davis, who sees the fencing as a “destruction of public space,” and also as a consequence of postliberal politics (Reagan – Bush). However, Caldeira is more carefull making the link between politics and the ‘implosion of modern public live’, referring to the process of democratization.
Caldeira sees certain similarities between São Paulo and Los Angeles, such as ‘the garden city model, modernist design and city planning, (…) the fortified enclaves and theme parks (…) the intense fear of crime and the production of stereotypes of dangerous others (...) high rates of crime.’
The last part of this chapter is very strong so I quote is completely: 

‘The new urban morphologies of fear give new forms to inequality, keeps groups apart, and inscribe a new sociablity that runs against the ideals of the modern public and democratic freedoms. When some people are denied access to certain areas and when different groups do not interact in public space, then reference to ideals of openness, equality, and freedom as organizing principles for social life are no longer possible, even as fiction. The consequence of the new separateness and restriction of public life are serious: contrary to what Jencks (1993) thinks, defensible architecture and planning may promote confict instead of preventing it, by making explicit the social inequalities and the lack of common ground. In fact, we may argue that the Los Angeles uprising was caused by social segregation rather than by the lack of separation and defenses. If the experiences of separateness expressed in the urban environment become dominant in their societies, people will distance themselves from democracy.’

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p. 297-355.

Centros Educacionais Unificados – CEU

Critique:
[1] Relation to the street or the city fabric is poor
[2] The definition of the public space is a missed opportunity.
[3] No possibility of “appropriation of space”.
[4] To standardized
[5] It does not relate to commercial space.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 7. FORTIFIED ENCLAVES: BUILDING UP WALLS AND CREATING A NEW PRIVATE ORDER

Brazil is not the only country with a lot of condominiums, in the USA it is also a quit common phenomenon. Nevertheless, there are some differences. In the USA the condominiums are not so often gated compared to Brazil, only twenty percent of them. In São Paulo the condominium are still more urban than suburban. [A tendency that is probably changing right know. I don’t have hard proof for it but when I see all these parcels on google earth it is plausible that the suburban condominium becomes more popular. I have to look at it. JvB] Another aspect that is different from the USA is that the houses are not patterned because the elite sees patterned houses as something for the working class. The house is a expression of you personality and needs a ‘individualized appearance.’ ‘Condominiums are never called “communities,” and they are never advertised as a type of housing that could enhance the value of doing things together. In fact, residents seem to resent deeply this idea of community.’
The famous condominium Alphaville ‘covered an urbanized area of 13 square kilometer and had a fixed population of around twenty thousand inhabitants. Its office center housed 360 enterprises, and commercial area had 600 enterprises. On average, 75,000 non residents passed through it daily. In 1989, 55.4 percent of the tax revenues of the city of Barueri came from Alphaville. Security is one of the main elements in its advertising and an obsession of all involved with it. Each residential area, office center, and commercial center hires its own security force to maintain internal order, and there is a common security force to take care of the public spaces (the avenues and even the highway connecting to São Paulo).
The condominiums provide all possible services you can image, like nannies, hairdresser, gardening, libraries, shops, ect. These services are done by poor people who often live in favelas close by. ‘The upper class fear contact and contamination by the poor, but they conitinue to depend on their low-class servants.
A lot of problems inside the condominium are caused by the children of the people who live there. They vandalize collective equipment, use drugs and drive without license. Especially the car accidents are a problem. Between March 1989 and January 1991, the police registered 646 car accidents occurred inside the residential areas, that is, inside the walls and on the private streets to which only residents and their visitors have access. The majority of accidents were caused by teenagers, the majority of victims were either children or teenagers playing in the streets (only one of the people who died was over eighteen).’
The problems with children in Alphaville is thought to be solved by ‘more love and attention, stronger families, and more controle. (…) To discuss the question in terms of public order or public responsibility is unheard-of. [This reminds me of what Hannah Arendt argues about the household and the political. JvB]
Teresa Caldeira sees the privatization of the public space as a new phenomenon. Brazilian society has always been unequal but the creation of private islands has grown stronger. Very interesting is that see things that the retreat of the elite from the public sphere is actually a retreat form the process of democratization. The reason for this is because the working classes, ‘through their social movements, were for the first time participating effectively in political life. There is a parallel to make with the US where the ‘flight to the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s and to gated communities in the 1990s may be related to the expansion of citizenship rights of the black population and the incorporation into American society of an increased number of immigrants. In Europe, the increase of racism and of new patterns of segregation seem to be similarly associated with the expansion of citizenship rights to immigrants.
By giving a lot of examples of advertisement Caldeira shows that the concept of the condominium and the feeling of being unsafe is really something that is exploited by the real estate market.
People living in a closed and secured place do not see this as a negative thing. They also see their way of living as a form of ‘freedom’. [I think this is a very strange contradictory thing. JvB] ‘Interestingly, the people (…) never use arguments of privacy, individuality, or intimacy to justify their preferences. Morumbi residents seem to fear the spread of evil more than they value individualism.’ However, for the people who live in houses in Moóca this seems to be different. ‘The transformation of the house in a prison adds to the feeling of restriction and loss associated with the economic crisis and anguish about the social decay. The closed door is a strong metaphor.
But, the walls, fences, bars have also another function: “aesthetics of security”, as Caldeira calls it. The elements of security have become symbols of status. Security has also become part of the design of the house. ‘By the early 1990s the new “architecture of security” was making its way into the newspaper articles. This architecture creates explicit means of keeping away undesirables, especially the homeless.’

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p. 256-296.

About Gated Communities and Inequality: Santana do Parnaíba

Santana do Parnaíba is a suburban neighborhood in the northwest of São Paulo. It has a fast growing population and the highest average income of the whole metropolitan region: 9.8MS.
Theresa Caldeira writes as follows about it:
‘Santana do Parnaíba exemplifies what one might call a new suburbanization of São Paulo. Its growth has been neither the traditional expansion of the poor and industrial areas nor the American suburban outgrowth of the 1950s and 1960s, but a new type of suburbanization of the 1980s and 1990s that brings together residence and tertiary activities. Santana do Parnaíba has not had the same economic performance as its adjacent municipalities, Barueri and Cajamar, but it shows more clearly how the area is becoming a new middle- and upper-class enclave. It was the municipality with the highest annual rate of population growth in the 1980s (12.79 percent) and the highest income. Ninety percent of the population increase during the 1980s was due to migration, and it had the highest percentage of growth due to migreation in the metropolitan region: 245 percent. The immigrants were mainly wealthy residents. As the rich settle into areas that have been rural and extremely poor, they create situations of dramatic social inequality, attested to by the fact that the GINI coefficient in Santana do Parnaíba is 0.7102, the highest if the metropolitan region.’ [1]
Caldeira adds in a footnote:
‘In 1980, only 1.5 percent of the economically active population of Santana do Parnaíba made more than 20 MS, whereas 53.7 percent made less than 2 MS. (…) The GINI coefficient for the city of São Paulo is 0.5857 and for the metropolitan region 0.5748.’ [2]

[1] Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p. 253.
[2] Ibid., p. 409, 410.

Interim Set-up Research

Introduction: The absence of public architecture in the autoconstructed city of São Paulo

A very brief history of São Paulo: The rise of a tropical metropolis.

Center – Periphery: a dual city

Violence, Fear and Segregation: building a fortress.

Democratization and Citizenship: the ambiguous project

Public Space: a theoretical enquiry

Architecture and its Limits

São Paulo: The appearance of the dual city

Summary from:
Luiz Recamán, ‘High-speed urbanization’ in: Elisabetta Andreoli, Adrian Forty (ed.), Brazil’s Modern Architecture, Phaidon Press Limited, London, 2004, p. 134-138.

Luiz Recamán has been an architect since 1983. Having gained a PhD in Philosophy, he now teaches Aesthetics at the São Carlos School of Engineering of the University of São Paulo (USP) and has published articles in various journals.

The process of segregation finds its origin in the abolishment of slavery, according to Luiz Recamán. The former slaves were of no use anymore to the landowners, and in there eyes also unsuited for paid employment. These people started to move to the city hoping to find work there. At the same moment however the Brazilian government actively encourage people in Europe to come to Brazil to do the jobs that has been done by the slaves. The black population had therefore no official role in society and also no place to live. Form this was the moment that the illegal settlement at the periphery of the city started to appear. Although these settlements were illegal, they were tolerated. Luiz Recamán sees this as the birth of the ‘dual society, in which pre-modern social relations, inherited from the colonial structure, were updated but not fundamentally changed, to fulfill new roles in modernization.’ Poor people from the periphery became the small service providers of the rich. The autoconstructed neighborhoods in the periphery never became official parts of the city and therefore lacked public services.
While at the moment the Brazils population as a whole is decreasing, the number of people who started to live in a favela grew. In São Paulo there was a growth of 4,6 percent - in the district of Guarulhos they grew with the enormous amount of 112 percent. The migration to the autoconstructed periphery during the 90s coincided with the implosion of the rental marked. ‘Between 1994 and 1998, the number of families living in favelas in the city of São Paulo grew with 47 percent. ‘The ‘Map of Social Exclusion’, which indicates differences in the quality of life in São Paulo’s districts, shows an emptying of the regulated, legal areas of the city towards the unregulated outskirts. Between 1991 and 1996 there was an increase of 470,000 inhabitants in the 53 districts where the quality of life was deemed to have worsened, while within the 37 districts where the quality of life had improved, there was a decrease of 260,000 inhabitants.
Luiz Recamán distinguishes two different dynamics that caused the contemporary spatial and social layout of the city: ‘economic gain and social segregation.’
In the centre of São Paulo there are at the moment a lot of empty buildings. The reason is that a lot of business, shopping, luxery housing culture and leisure has moved to the south-west of the city where the land is cheaper. Investment produces higher rates of return here than in the city center. [A consequence of this that the empty buildings in the center are squatted by the poor, a phenomenon that is called cortiços in Brazil. The precarious situation people live in are grinding; in many case families live in very small spaces, sharing sanitary facilities with a lot of people. These people pay a lot of rent and have no rights at all because the occupation is in many cases illegal. JvB]
‘At the same time, increasing violence, the result of a massive degree of social exclusion, pushes the wealthy inside their homes.’ Recamán sees the deterioration of the public spaces as a result of the overvaluation of the private sphere. Another aspect in this is that the private investors are not interested in public space.

[The other chapter can also be interesting: they are all written by Brazilian scholars.]

I like this guy: Bruce Mau

Very nice project by Bruce Mau: An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth.
I especially like #2: Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

Architects, Politics and the Compromise during Brazilian Dictatorship

Fragement from On Architectural Linguistics (1974) that explains Lina Bo Bardi's opinion about the realtion between architecture and politics:

I am preparing a talk for the congress of the Brazilian Industrial Design Association, where I've been invited to opnen the event. The argument is as follows: noting can be done, there is no valid operation beyond that of a well-defined political structure. A political structure that is founded on social justice. Otherwise industrial design becomes styling at the service of the evident organizations, and architecture too (architecture "in itself" doesn't exist) becomes a gratuitous exercise. Of course this is an extreme argument, there are middle roads. But they are always roads of exessive compromise, which "compromise" the results. Operative praxis depents essentially on a political structure." [1]

I want to know more about the Brazilian political situation of that particular time. In 1974, a year after the oil crisis, Brazil faced serious economic problems, however, it was also the year that Ernesto Geisel became president. He is now seen as a more moderate persident, allowing allowed exiled citizens to return, restoring habeas corpus, repealed the extraordinary powers decreed by the Fifth Institutional Act. The Fith Institutional Act 'gave the president the power to dismiss the National Congress, strip politicians of their offices of power, and institutionalize repressive methods of rule.'[2] This law was installed by former president Arthur da Costa e Silva in 1968, after massive protest that broke out because of the death of a student in a confrontation with the police.
Lina Bo Bardi, who faced the war in Italy when see was young, and grow up in a fascist, militaristic Italy ruled by Mussolini must have been very disappointed to see the political development in Brazil during the 60s and 70s. Another aspect to take in consideration is the fact that Bo Bardi, like many influential architects at that time such as Vilanova Artigas, Oscar Niemeyer, Sérgio Ferra and Ridrigo Lefèvre were confirmed communist. Bo Bardi was already involved in the Italian communist party during the war in Italy. Architects like Sérgio Ferra and Ridrigo Lefèvre even spent a year in prison because of terrorist actions. [3] Despite the fact that I understand the attitude of the intellectuals at that time, it had a rather negative consequence. The result was that they were never really involved in significant public projects, like large social housing projects or buildings for the government. This becomes especially clear when we go through the build work of Vilanova Artigas, that contains dozens of avant-garde villa’s for the elite, showing only a few public buildings and social housing projects. However, it is unjust to simply blame the architect for this, probably the lack of commissions due to the bad investment climate plays an important role. At the same time I think that with the uncompromising attitude (like Bo Bardi proclaims in the quote above, or the involvement in terrorist actions) the architects put themselves out of action, having no influence in the public realm.
I have to admit that I am not sure about the accusing I am doing here. Probably the critical attitude was much more justified than I can overseen from my comfortable position in “Paradise Holland”.

[1] Lina Bo Bardi, 'Architectural Linguistics' (1974), 2G: Lina Bo Bardi: Build work, no. 23,24, 2002, p.220.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artur_da_Costa_e_Silva
[3] Richard J. Williams, Brazil: Modern architectures in history, Reaction Books, (2009) London, p.182.

Sonsbeek pavilion: a soft wall

Aldo van Eycks Sonsbeek pavilion is a very powerful spatial organization because of its capacity of specifying space and providing possibilities at the same time. It can be seen as a continues space, despite the limitations. The walls do not separate but they divide, they order instead of segregate. They provide rather than delimitate. These walls make you wander, they do not enclose you; these walls paradoxically ‘open up’ a spatial arrangement. What we have here is not a solid wall, but a soft wall.

Stereotyping Brazil

The Dutch quality newspaper Trouw reported two messages about Brazil last Saterday. The first one was titled: ”also the garbage man should just drive through the favela”, about the lacking of public services in São Paulo’s favelas, the other one reported that Rio de Janeiro is the happiest city in the world, according to research done by business magazine Forbes.
Interesting is that both reports are about stereotyping in different way: in the case of the favela about segregation between the favela and the rest of the city. These neighborhoods are stigmatized my the media, says sociologist and UN-reporter Raquel Rolnik. ‘In the favela happen a thousand things. But the reports about these neighborhoods are always about the violence. Because of this the impression emerges that it is correct to eliminate everybody.’ Police violence is a big problem in Brazil.
The other report, about Rio de Janeiro as the most happy city in the world, is also based on meaningless stereotypes. The main reason why people consider Rio as the most happy city is because of its carnaval: ‘it’s a classic image people have of Rio, and it’s an image of happiness’, says Simon Anholt, researcher for the fourth biggest market research company: GfK Custom Research North America. In this message no single word about violence, favelas, street people. Maybe you just forget about all these aspects if you sell statics for potential consumers. And if you have to sell newspapers: good news is no news.

Wesites Rio de Janeiro

http://www.globalenvision.org/2009/06/25/rio-de-janeiro-deforestation-plan
ook goed om te checken is Carlos Luis Toledo, deze architect werkt in Rocihna aan projecten in de favela

Docu about favela Dona Martha in Rio de Janeiro

'Cocaine: Leo and Ze' (2004) documentary about a favela in Rio that has to deal with a lot of drugs related crime. The movie is directed by the British filmmaker Agnus MacQueen. The favela where the movie whas shot is named Dona Martha and is one of the favela's that is walled recently by the by Rio's authorities.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0845974/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/06/brazil-rio-slum-barrier

http://observers.france24.com/en/content/20090608-rio-shantytowns-walled-eco-borders-favelas

sketch (under construction)

The urban toolbox - elements that can go along with the wall, possible to implement in my different places.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 6. SAO PAULO, THREE PATTERNS OF SPATIAL SEGREGATION

Caldeira distinguishes three different types of urban segregation: 1. -1940, ‘different social groups packed into a small urban area and segregated by type of housing. 2. 1940-1980, segregation by ‘great distances: the middle and upper classes concentrated in central and well-equipped neighborhoods and the poor exiled into the hinterland. 3. Since 1980, poor and rich are living closer again in terms of distance, however, now they ‘are separated by walls and technologies of security, and they tend not to circulate or interact in common areas. Caldeira see the fortification of the city as a threat for the modern city, undermining the principles of the modern city such as free circulation and openness.
Important statement Caldeira makes is that in São Paulo the ‘public space no longer relates to the modern ideals of commonality and universality. Instead, it promotes separateness and the idea that social groups should live in homogeneous enclaves, isolated from those who are perceived as different. Consequently, the new pattern of spatial segregation grounds a new type of public sphere that accentuates class differences and strategies of separation.’

The concentrated city of early industrialization 1890-1940
During this period of time the rich and the poor originally lived together, however, to rich more and more started to move to more homogeneous areas such as Campos Elísios and Avenida Paulista. The main reason for this was the fear for epidemics, comparable with the fear for crime nowadays. There were all kind of initiatives to ‘open the city’ as Hausmann had done in Paris, to provide free circulation, wide streets, hygiene and social control. ‘The first laws on construction and zoning were passed in the mid-1910s, and the most important pieces of urban legislation and intervention come in the late 1920s. The execution of the so-called Plano Avenidas (plan of avenues) that started in the beginning of the 20th century was one of the first originators of spatial segregation: the prices of rents started to increase and the working classes were driven out of the center to the periphery. Another reason why the poor working class started to move to the periphery was because of the lack of affordable houses to rent. The rapid process of urbanization caused a high rents, a simple consequence of supply and demand. The government of Vargas tried to stop the rising rental prices by freezing the rents at the level of December 1941. Initially this had to last only for two years, however it was renewed unit 1964. ‘In São Paulo the immediate consequence was a tightening of the rental market, as fewer residence were build. This trend accelerated the departure of the working classes to the periphery, where the could find cheap (and irregular) land on which to build their own houses. (…) In the new arrangement, poor and rich lived apart: distance, economic growth, and political repression allowed a peculiar inattention to one another.’

Center-Periphery: The dispersed city
‘The new model of urbanization is usually called the center-periphery model, and it dominated São Paulo’s development since the 1940s. It has four principal characteristics.
1.) Lower population density: form 110 inhabitants per hectare to 53 in 1963.
2.) segregation of social classes: Rich live in legal, well-equipped neighborhoods, poor in autoconstructed, precarious, mostly illegal periphery.
3.) Home ownership became the general rule for both rich and poor.
4.) Transportation depends on roads, busses for the working classes and automobiles for the middle and upper classes.
The major cause of the rapid urbanization of the periphery was the launching of a public bus system at the end of the 1930s to make the area accessible for the working classes. Many of these bus systems were owned by private investors who also where selling the parcels in the periphery. ‘Speculators developed a multitude of illegal and irregular practices aimed at maximizing profits, from outright fraud to failure to provide basic urban services or minimum lot dimensions required by law.’ Another aspect is that many workers build their houses without registrating them, this results in an illegal construction on a legal parcel. The result is that now 65% of the population of the city lives in houses that are illegal. Autoconstruction has become the main form of working-class housing.
Caldeira continues to explain the immense vertical orientation of São Paulo, something that started especially after the 1960s when the apartment building became the main type of residence for the middle and upper classes. ‘Until the late 1950s, the construction of high-rise was relatively incontrolled by the city. From 1957 on, however, municipal laws aimed at controlling the expansion of construction in the city affected, in particular, the building of high-rises. The laws had two main effects.’ They excluded the poor from buying an apartment, and it directed the high-rise out of downtown, where the prices of the lots where cheaper. Another reason for the middle-class to move in these apartment buildings is because they were financed by the BNH and SFH, [see book for meaning, JvB] - systems that were originally meant to finance houses for the poor – were now only used to finance the apartment buildings of middle-classes.

Proximity and walls in the 1980s and 1990s
Caldeira see three basic factors for the tranquility between center and periphery in the way it emerged in the 70s. In the first place because the rich only encountered only a few central areas. Second, between the 50s and 70s there was the believe that economic growth would change the differences. And third, the repression of the military government that ‘banished political organization and public dissent.’ It was because of the reorganization of trade unions that the people in the periphery started to reorganize themselves; contrary to what the political elite expected. They thought that their house ownership would keep them outside the political arena, however, the opposite happened. They started to organize themselves in order to improve the quality of life in their neighborhoods.
On page 231 and 232 Caldeira gives one of the most important descriptions of the city saying:

‘São Paulo today is a more complex metropolitan region that cannot be mapped out by simple opposition of center-rich versus periphery-poor. It is no longer a city providing conditions for inattention to class differences, but rather a city of walls, with a population obsessed by security and social discrimination.’

This process started in the 80s and 90s, a moment when the way of living of both rich and poor started to change. This had various reasons. In the first place there was a growing tendency among the rich to leave the center and settle in gated communities in the northwest and southern part of the city, where first only the poor lived. ‘At the same time autoconstruction on the periphery has become a less viable alternative for the working poor because of the impoverishment caused by the economic crisis of the 1980s, the improvements in the urban infrastructure in the periphery, and the legalization of land resulting from the pressure of social movements and action by local governments. In other words, while the incomes went down, the periphery improved and became more expensive.’ This is the moment when the cortiços started to appear, and when the favelas start to grow. The process of walling the city because of the increase of violent crime exacerbated the process of segregation and suspicion.
The improved situation of the periphery had enormous consequences for the quality of live. A good indicator is infant mortality: ‘it dropped from 50.62 per 1,000 live births in 1980 to 26.03 in 1991. In São Miguel Paulista, one of its poorest districts, where Jardim das Camélias is located, the infant mortality dropped from 134 in 1975 to 80.46 in 1980 and 27.29 in 1994.’
‘The social movements influenced the action of the local administration not only in creating public services and urban infrastructure but also in transforming the legal status of the periphery. One of the main demands of the social movements was the legalization of properties on the periphery. Social movements forced the municipal governments to offers amnesties to illegal developers, making it possible to regularize their lots and bring them into the formal property market. The Lehman Law in 1979 made it easier to prosecute real estate developers selling land without the infrastructure required by law.’ The negative aspect of this was that the prices of the lots started to rise because of two reasons: first the lots were legal now, which made them more valuable on the market. The second reason for the price-rice was because of the improved infrastructure. The consequence of this was that the poor people had to move to the fringes of the city and start to build new neighborhoods again. Another option is to move in a cortiços, with the advantage of living more close to the city center.
Something else happened to the market of apartment buildings. In 1986 the BNH ended and the inflation started to rise again. Without the BNH financing and the high inflation it was for the middle classes very difficult to buy one of these apartments. What happened with the production of appartement buildings is what ‘some analysts call an “elitization”’ of the apartment market. This changes after the successful control of the inflation after Plano Real, and the possibilities for lifelong financing. It is at this period of time that the closed condominium starts to become a popular place to live in for the middle and upper-classes.

In Morumbi you need a car for everything: to buy bread, to bring your children to school, to go to the supermarket. In many place there even no sidewalks. The rest of the infrastructure is also very bad. However, the inhabitants of Morumbi want to pay this price in order to feel save.
The reason why many closed condominiums start to appear in the originally poor southeastern border of this city is because the land is cheap over there, so investors can make their investments more profitable.
[I made a separated post about the gated communities in Santana do Parnaíba, because if found it that much bizarre that it needed a special post. To read more about it click here. JvB]
According to Caldeira the urban transformations as occurred in contemporary São Paulo are caused by several processes at the same time. She mentions them as follows: ‘the reversal in demographic growth; the economic recession, deindustrialization, and expansion of tertiary activities; the improverishment of the working classes; the displacement of part of the middle and upper classes from the center; and the widespread fear of crime (…).’ The GINI coefficient ‘increased from 0.516 in 1981 to 0.586 in 1991.’

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p. 213-255.

Misdaad en Straf: Ad Verbrugge

Dit artikel bevat een bespreking van het essay “Zinloos” geweld: Misdaad en straf in een tijd van cultuurverlies, (2004) geschreven door de Nederlandse filosoof Ad Verbrugge. [1] Hoewel ik Verbrugge soms een wat moraliserende of conservatieve toon vind hebben bied zijn essay goede argumenten in relatie tot het onderwerp publiek domein en de rechtsstaat. Ook laat het zien wat de relatie is tussen vrijheid en gemeenschapszin. Verbrugge is er onder andere van overtuigd dat zonder gemeenschapszin het rechtssysteem haar betekenis verliest.

Ad Verbrugge begint zijn essay met een intelligente definitie van vrijheid waarin gemeenschap een belangrijke rol speelt: ‘het [is] van belang te beseffen dat eenieder van ons pas werkelijk vrij kan zijn, doordat hij leeft in de werkelijkheid van een zedelijke gemeenschap waarin die vrijheid als een recht van iedereen wordt erkend. Dat ik niet louter in naam, maar in werkelijkheid beschik over mijn eigen lichaam en mijn eigendom en ook bescherming daarvan geniet, heb ik niet aan mezelf te danken, maar aan de gegeven werkelijkheid van een levende gemeenschap waarin mij dit recht is geschonken en waarin ik omgekeerd de plicht heb dit recht op me te nemen en anderen te doen toekomen, om dit recht aldus werkelijk te laten zijn. In een toestand van rechteloosheid of slavernij is deze vrijheid niet gerealiseerd en beschikt iemand dus ook niet werkelijk over zichzelf of zijn bezit als een algemeen erkend en dus geldend richt binnen de gemeenschap.’
Verbrugge benadruk dat de straf die een misdadiger krijgt wanneer hij de wet overtreed niet louter genoegdoening van het slachtoffer en is uiteindelijk ook niet het motief voor de strafmaat. ‘De misdadiger heeft immers niet alleen een misdaad begaan jegens het slachtoffer, hij heeft ook een misdaad begaan jegens de gemeenschap waarin de persoon – en dus ook hijzelf en het slachtoffer – dergelijke rechten en waarden hebben gekregen.’ De straf is echter ook bedoelt om ‘de werkelijkheid van het recht’ uit te drukken. Het is de belichaming van de wil van de gemeenschap, gerepresenteerd door de uitspraak van de rechter. Verbrugge benadrukt dat de straf niet in de eerste plaats een verzoening is tussen slachtoffer en dader, maar ‘uitgaande van deze gedachtegang verzoent het slachtoffer zich dus primair met de gemeenschap’. Dit omdat het slachtoffer ‘door de handeling van de misdadiger [is] genegeerd in de werkelijkheid van zijn vrijheid.’ Dit werkt twee kanten op, ook voor de misdadiger, hij heeft zich namelijk door zijn misdaad ‘afgezonderd van de gemeenschap’ en is daardoor dus niet vrij meer. Het is juist door de straf dat hij zich weer als vrij mens in de samenleving kan bewegen. ‘In ieder geval moet duidelijk zijn dat het straffende recht als uitgangspunt niet de vergelding van het gevoelde leed van het slachtoffer of morele verbetering van de dader heeft. Dergelijke fenomenen zijn hoogstens bijverschijnselen van zijn eigenlijke betekenis, namelijk dat het straffende recht de werkelijkheid is van de algemene wil van een gemeenschap, zoals die in het recht is uitgedrukt. Zonder straf is het recht niet werkelijk en blijven de waarden van de gemeenschap iets abstracts-vrijblijvends, iets dat slechts in gedachten bestaat.’ Het bestaan van een rechtvaardig rechtssysteem wil volgens Verbrugge nog niet zeggen dat mensen werkelijk in vrijheid kunnen leven. Volgens hem is ‘iedere misdaad tegen de persoon een misdaad tegen de mensenrechten.’ Dat betekend dat er dan ook niet zo veel verschillen zijn tussen ‘totalitaire regimes’ en de ‘gewelddadige getto’.
Absolute vrijheid is volgens Verbrugge geen vrijheid. De ‘verabsolutering van de individuele vrijheid’ leidt uiteindelijk tot asocialiteit. ‘Wanneer (…) radicale individualisering overal om zich heen grijpt, desintegreert de gemeenschap die de voorwaarde is voor iemands werkelijke vrijheid. In het ontstaan van levenssferen waaruit het gemeenschapsgevoel verdwenen is, wordt ook het recht – als uitdrukking van de algemene wil van een gemeenschap – abstracts: iets dat niet meer werkelijk wordt geleefd, maar nog slechts als een juridische ‘spelregel’ bestaat. Een scherpe conclusie is dan ook: ‘individualisering tendeert naar een asociale samenleving, een ethos dat zich onder andere manifesteert in geweld. [Het publieke leven is dus van groot belang, ook voor het in stand houden van het rechtssysteem. Dat kan mijn conclusie zijn van deze opmerkingen van Verbrugge. Juist de publieke ruimte kan een fysieke representatie zijn van het gemeenschapsgevoel. Wanneer er geen gemeenschapsgevoel meer is in de maatschappij zal ook het straffen weinig zin hebben. Dit helemaal het geval wanneer we kijken naar clanmatige organisaties of gangs. Dit soort organisaties opereren buiten de gemeenschap en hebben vaak hun eigen regels en mores. Misdaad wordt dus niet gezien als misdaad tegen de gemeenschap maar tegen iets dat ‘daarbuiten’ zich afspeelt. Straf is nu geen noodzakelijke afzondering uit de maatschappij om rehabilitatie mogelijk te maken maar in de ogen van de misdadiger een betekenisloze daad – om de eenvoudige rede dat de misdadiger geen deel uit maakte van de gemeenschap. In een gesegregeerde samenleving is het onmogelijk om met straf ‘de werkelijkheid van de wet’ uit te drukken. Simpelweg omdat zowel dader als slachtoffer geen deel meer uitmaken van de maatschappij. Straf verwordt nu tot louter vergeling. Het wegvallen van gemeenschap maakt het recht inhoudloos.
Het gebrek aan gemeenschap wijdt Verbrugge in eerste instantie aan het wegvallen van het gezin als stabiele factor en het aanleren van het ‘sociale’. De afwezigheid van volwassen rolmodellen zorgt er voor dat het kind niemand meer heeft om zich aan te spiegelen. ‘Reeds Aristoteles heeft duidelijk gemaakt dat de mens slechts door goede opvoeding en gewenning tot de deugd als zijn hoogste zelfontplooiing kan komen.’
Concluderend kunnen we zeggen dat het vertrouwen in het rechtssysteem het gevolg is van de afbrokkelingen van gemeenschapszin. Alleen in een maatschappij die ‘samenleeft’, kan misdaad ook als zodanig worden opgevat, anders blijft het een private zaak tussen dader en slachtoffer. Misdaad kan alleen dan publiek worden wanneer er een algemeen vertrouwen is in de rechtsstaat. Alleen op die manier krijgt straf haar betekenis en dient het als middel tot rehabilitatie om terug te keren in de maatschappij. Een samenleving die volledig gesegregeerd is, waar het leven zich afspeelt in geprivatiseerde ‘security bubbles’ daar wordt ook het vertrouwen in de rechtsstaat uitgehold.

[1] Ad Verbrugge, “Zinloos geweld: Misdaad en straf in een tijd van cultuurverlies, in: Tijd van onbehagen: Filosofische essays over een cultuur op drift, 2004, pp 11-41.

Fragmenten uit: HET BELANG VAN HANNAH ARENDT - Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (under construction)

In het boek Het belang van Hannah Arendt [1], geschreven door Elisabeth Young-Bruehl – bekend van haar uitgebreide Arendt biografie - vond ik een aantal interessante toelichtingen op citaten uit het werk van Arendt. Zo schrijft zij onder andere over het boek Man in Dark Times (1968) het volgende:

‘Er is sprake van duisternis als de openbaarheid, de lichte ruimte tussen mensen, de publieke ruimte waar mensen zich kunnen uitspreken, wordt geschuwd of gemeden; duisternis staat vijandig tegenover het publieke domein, tegenover de politiek. “De geschiedenis kent vele donkere tijden waarin het publieke domein verduisterd werd en de wereld zo onbetrouwbaar was geworden dat de mensen niet meer van de politiek verwachtten dan dat er rekening gehouden werd met hun primaire levensbehoeften en persoonlijke vrijheid.” Mensen die de wereld hebben afgeschreven, die denken dat ze zichzelf erbuiten kunnen plaatsen zonder zich openbaar te maken in het publieke domein, maar alleen onder vrienden blijven of zich beperken tot activiteiten in afzondering, begrijpen niet dat “primaire levensbehoeften en persoonlijke vrijheid” [2] betekenisloos worden als ze nagestreefd worden zonder de bekommernis voor de rest van het mensdom.’

Dit citaat laat nog eens het belang zien dat Arendt schonk aan het publieke domein, iets dat op zeer vergelijkbare wijze naar voren komt in ‘The Human Condition’ (1958).

Hoofdstuk 2: The Human Condition en het belang van handelen
Young-Bruehl noemt in haar commentaar op de ‘The Human Condition’ een ‘inleiding over hoe we de res publica, de publieke zaak, moeten herkennen, evalueren en beschermen (…)’
Om het werk van Arendt goed te kunnen plaatsen is het van belang om term ‘politiek’ toe te lichten. Cruciaal is dat er twee soorten van denken bestaan over politiek. ‘Aan de ene kant kun je politiek zien als regeren, als een vorm van overheersing (een, een paar of veel), wat dreiging met of gebruik van geweld mogelijk maakt. Maar aan de andere kant kun je, net als Arendt, over politiek denken als de organisatie of de constitutie van de macht de mensen hebben wanneer ze samenkomen als sprekende en handelende mensen. Hier ligt haar nadruk op het beschermen van de macht van mensen door een regering die het volk vertegenwoordigt: potestas in populo.’
Interessant is het onderscheid tussen macht en geweld dat door Arendt gemaakt wordt. Om dit te kunnen begrijpen moet eerst het principe van het ‘handelen’ (action) uitgelegd worden. Handelen hangt niet af ‘van georganiseerde of wettelijke gecreëerde ruimten, maar gewoon van mensen die samenkomen om woorden en daden met elkaar te delen: “de onbetrouwbare en slechts tijdelijke overeenkomst van vele wensen en bedoelingen”. Dit samenkomen van handelende personen noemde Arendt macht, een macht die zij nadrukkelijk onderscheidde van individuele kracht (onafhankelijkheid) en van instrumenteel geweld of dwang.’ (p.91) Arendt ‘meende dat mensen hun toevlucht tot geweld nemen wanneer ze geen macht hebben of die kwijt zijn’.

Het boek geeft een goede uitleg over Arendts afkeer van de term ‘maatschappij’ in het Engels vertaald met ‘society’. Ik heb hiervoor een lang citaat nodig uit het boek:

‘Arendt had in The Human Condition gesteld dat er in de posttotalitaire wereld een ‘consumptiemaatschappij’ of een ‘technologische maatschappij’ of een ‘arbeidende maatschappij’ – ze gebruikte die drie termen in verschillende contexten – aan het ontstaan was, wat uniek was in de geschiedenis. Het woord maatschappij verwees voor haar naar een modern domein van de Industriele Revolutie, privé nog publiek, maar in een ongekende overvloed aan goederen en technieken om meer goederen te maken, inclusief destructieve goederen. Deze maatschappij (…) ontwikkelde zich op een paradoxale manier: door technologische vooruitgang, met name de automatisering, werden veel arbeiders verlost van de slopende, geestdodende vormen van arbeid die karakterestiek waren voor de Industriele Revolutie, maar daarbij waren ze nog niet verlost van het arbeidsethos. Ze kregen door die bevrijding evenmin de mogelijkheid zich bezig te houden met hogere vormen van denken en oordelen, waardoor ze opnieuw opgeleid zouden moeten worden, opgetild zouden moeten worden uit de massamaatschappij van degene die geen mogelijkheid hadden zich te onderscheiden, te openbaren wie ze waren. In tegendeel, de meeste mensen in een consumptiemaatschappij beschouwen zichzelf als arbeiders, die gewoon een baan hebben, zelfs vakmensen en degene die zich bezighouden met handelen of denkactiviteiten. Ze ‘verdienen de kost’ en voorzien naar eigen idee in hun noodzakelijke behoeften (ook al zijn de ‘noodzakelijkheden’ op geen enkele manier noodzakelijk om te leven). Mensen die ‘de kost verdienen’ kunnen zich, in de woorden van Arendt, niet in vrijheid onderscheiden of echt nadenken over wat ze aan het doen zijn; ze doen slechts hun werk. Een bureaucratie is een goede omgeving om een gedachteloos iemand te worden, maar iedere baan is daarvoor geschikt zolang degene die die baan heeft alleen maar gewoon zijn werk doet.’ p.151, 152.

[Ik moest bij dit citaat denken aan American Beauty, prachtig geregisseerd door Sam Mendes. Onderschat wordt zeker Alan Ball, de schrijver van memorabele dialogen en monologen zoals deze:

Lester Burnham: Both my wife and my daughter think I am this gigantic loser. And they are right. I have lost something. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but I know I didn’t always feel this… sedated. But you know what? It’s never too late to get it back. [3]]

[1] Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Het belang van Hannah Arendt, Amsterdam, Uitgeverij Atlas, 2007. oorspronkelijk: Why Arendt Matters, Yale University Press, 2006.
[2] Hannah Arendt, Man in Dark Times, 1968.
[3] Sam Mendes, Alan Ball, American Beauty, 2000.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 5: POLICE VIOLENCE UNDER DEMOCRACY

[Chapter 5 focuses on police violence. Something I don’t understand is the issue that the Brazilian people on the one hand support the ‘tough’ police and sometimes even want to have a stronger police, on the other hand they consider the police as being corrupt, cowardly, dangerous and even stupid. The attitude seems to be ambivalent. The following interview comes from a men (22) from Jardim das Camélias, (Poor working-class periphery).]

‘Many times, when there is a robbery, the neighbors say. “it was that one, that one.”But the police say, “We haven’t caught him in the act, so we don’t arrest him,” and they go away. And what happens? The guy wants vengeance and goes around killing a lot of people, as it happens today. When a crime happens on the street, the population doesn’t collaborate with the police because of that… It’s the fear of vengeance (…). If I see a robber killing someone, I won’t want to know anything about it. I’ll pretend I haven’t seen anything. If the police ask me, I’ll say, “I haven’t seen anything.”

‘They [the workers, JvB] are paralyzed between the fear of the police, fear of criminal’s vengeance and, (..) a belief that the justice system is unable to provide justice.

SECURITY AS PRIVATE MATTER
The rise of private security is seen as one of the basics of urban segregation, that in Brazil started during the military dictatorship. Security was privatized in order to drive back the large amount of bank robberies. Caldeira distinguishes three different types of guards active in the city.
First the official guards. To become an official guard in you have to finish a 120 hour course, provide by a private enterprise. After that the private guards are allowed to ‘carry .32- or .38-caliber guns, but only while they are at their posts. The guns are owned by the companies and not by the guards. (…) The owners of private enterprises realize the increasing desirability of their services and the potential for expansion in a deeply unequal society afraid of high crime rates and unable to count on its police forces.’ In Brazil there is a rising tendency to see the private security sector as something for the rich and the middle-classes, and the public sector as something for the poor. José Luiz Fernandes, president of the national association of private security enterprises (Abrevis) has said: “Leave the civil and the military police for the less favored, according to the law – which does not work!”
The second segment in the security market is the so called ‘organic security’. The people that work in this industry have formal labor contracts but are registered under other occupational categories. A lot of shopping centers, offices complexes, condominiums, ect, rely on this type of security. ‘Approximately 50 percent of private security services in the state of São Paulo are provided by organic security.
The third type is the illegal ‘clandestine security’ market, most of the people that work there are either policeman or ex-policeman. Despite the fact that it is forbidden by law a lot of policeman do combine the ‘private’ and ‘public’ job, in many cases they use their police weapons. Some of the enterprises closed by the federal police were run by ex-policeman involved with the Esquadrão da Morte or other vigilante groups. The costs to hire these kind of security guards are lower than the guards from the formal market. Also in this segment is used by condominiums.

The phenomenon of the justiceiros is a typical example of the vague border between public and private and the relativity of the sovereignty of the state when it comes to law and justice. The justiceiros ‘literally “justice makers,” are groups of men who kill people they consider to be criminals, especially on the periphery.’ In many cases this is the only access the poor have, when it comes to justice. Also for example shopkeepers use the power of the justiceiros in order to keep the neighborhood save from criminals.
‘With the spread of private security, the discrimination against the poor by “security” forces becomes twofold. On the one hand, the poor continue to live, work, and shop in fortified enclaves, using private security services to keep the poor and all “undesirables” away, the poor will be victims of new forms of surveillance, control, disrespect, and humiliation.’
Caldeira is convinced that the role of private security is a reason for the increase of violence because crime is removed from the judiciary system. Especially the judiciary system is very effective because it makes ‘vengeance from a private into a public matter. She uses the arguments given by the French social scientist René Girard quoting him from his book Violence and the Sacred (1977): “Our judicial system (…) serves to deflect the menace of vengeance. The system does not suppress vengeance; rather, it effectibely limits it to a single act of reprisal, enacted by a sovereign specializing in this particular function. The decisions of the judiciary are invariably presented as the final word on vengeance.” It is the judiciaries lack of authority, and therefore also a lack of credibility that the cycle of violence still exists. The violent police makes a this even worse.
Caldeira doesn’t want to make the easy conclusion that the cycle of violence has a direct relation to poverty. Although she states that ‘most of the elements that have generated the current cycle of violence have a socioeconomic basis,’ and that ‘poverty and inequality (…) are crusial to explaining some of the inequalities’ and ‘the spread of violence,’ to Caldeira it is in the first place the incapacity of the institutions that are the main raison for the cycle of violence.

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p. 158-210.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 4. THE POLICE - A LONG HISTORY OF ABUSES

This chapter deals about the history of the Brazilian police and its dark history. Caldeira writes about the many bad things that the police did. To illustrate the police violence I give some numbers: ‘in 1991 the military police killed 1140 people in the state São Paulo during “confrontations with criminals”; in 1992, that number was 1470. This includes 111 prisoners massacred inside the Casa de Dentação, São Paulo’s largest prison.’ 87.5 percent of these killings occurred in the city of São Paulo and its metropolitan region. To compare: in 1992 the Los Angeles police killed 25 civillians in confrontation, New York police killed 24 civilians. Respectively 2.1 percent of the number of deaths in LA and 1.2 percent of the deaths in NY. [For my projects the extensive details Caldeira gives about this subject are not so interesting. JvB]

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p138-157.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 3. THE INCREASE OF VIOLENT CRIME

‘The increase of violent crime is the result of a complex cycle that involves such factors as the violent pattern of reaction of the police; disbelieve in the justice system as a public and legitimate mediator of conflict and provider of just reprisal; private and violent responses to crime; resistance to democratization; and the population’s feeble perception of individual rights and its support for violent forms of chastisement [Dutch: tuchtiging, JvB].’
‘The majority of occurrences of larceny [Dutch: diefstal, JvB], robbery, and physical abuse, then, are not reported to the police. People either do not trust the police to deal with conflicts and crime, or they fear them because of their well-known brutality. Similarly, the justice system is perceived as ineffective by the majority of the population.’ In the southeast region of Brazil, 50.71 percent did not used the justice system after they were involved in a conflict.
Torture is something that is applied very often by the civil policemen, especially for the poorer suspects. The rich sometimes pay the police to find the people who robbed them, contrary to the poor who are neglected when they are being robbed. The upper-class also sometimes pay the police to torture the suspects.
Caldeira want to make clear that the statistics reporting crime are not so reliable. This because of the corrupt police, but also because the people do not report all of the things that happen to them. Another reason why the statistics are not accurate is because of the different branches in the organization of the police apparatus.
‘Increases in violence have been lower in the center, where the wealthier population lives, than in the outskirts, where the majority of the population is poor. (…) the rates of crimes against property are highest in the upper- and middle-class neighborhoods, whereas the rates of homicide are highest in the poorest districts of the city.’ (…) A recent study (…) showed that the districts with the highest incidence of homicide had a bad quality of life and a predominance of low-income families. (…) the districts with the highest murder rates were mostly very poor’ or lived in deteriorating central districts of the town. ‘The lowest rates were among middle- or upper-class districts in central areas.’ However, the districts with the highest robbery rates where also the wealthy and central districts. The increasing amount people that is in possession of a gun (legal and illegal) is significantly increasing. Caldeira sees this a sign that people ‘increasingly taking the task of defense in their own hands. Also the increasing trade in drugs is followed by more violence, ‘however, such claims are difficult to confirm because of the lack of concrete information.’
In order to understand they way crime works in a city like São Paulo Caldeira uses the following explanations:

1.) ‘crime is related to factors such as urbanization, migration, poverty, industrialization, and illiteracy.’
2.) ‘it is connected to the performance and characteristics of the institutions in charge of order: primarily the police, but also courts, prisons, and legislation.’
3.) ‘cultural elements such as the dominant conceptions about the spread of evil and the role of authority, and the conceptions about the manipulable body.’
4.) ‘the widespread adoption of illegal and private measures to combat criminality.’
5.) ‘policies concerning public security and patterns of police performance: the violent action of the state’ makes the situation only worse instead of controlling it.

The problems with criminality are not easily solvable with more investment in public security. The expansion of investment that started in 1984 did not effect the increase of crime and violence. We should also take in consideration that the ‘delegitimating of the judiciary system as a mediator of conflicts and [the] privatizing the process of vengeance’ only makes violence and crime worse.
Caldeira about the relation between poverty and crime: ‘The association of poverty and crime is always the first to come to people’s minds in discussion about violence. Moreover, all data indicate that violent crime is unevenly distributed and affects the poor especially. However, inequality and poverty have always marked Brazilian society, and it is hard to argue that they alone explain recent increases in violent criminality. Further, this argument often misrepresents violent criminality by allowing the view that poverty and inequality lead to poor people’s criminality. In reality, if inequality is an important factor it is not because poverty correlates directly with criminality, but rather because it reproduces the victimization and criminalization of the poor, the disregard of their rights, and their lack of access to justice.’ (p. 137) Also the behavior of the police is one of the reasons according to Caldeira, not so much their number of officers or their equipment. [My own experience close to the school was also very frightening. JvB]

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, 105-137.