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 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.