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.

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.