I wrote something else before, some inane and half-formed thoughts, on some similar subjects, here. I just read it again but I won't give myself too hard a time. It was okay.
I'm currently doing my Masters in Social Policy, it's a masters of research so I'll be doing a pretty empirically heavy dissertation, and people keep on asking me what I'm planning on doing. I am part-time so I have a while to decide yet, but I get a bit embarrassed that thus far I have been mostly unable to give a proper answer. Instead I tend to give evasive answers saying I am planning on doing something to do with urban theory, or perhaps intergenerational inequality, and hope that they don't ask any more questions about it.
It is actually true that I am interested in both of these things. However, particularly with the former, I was until recently operating purely on my own non-academic gleanings and preconceptions on teh subject, and had not yet delved into any scholarship on the matter. Now, with urban theory, this has changed. Over the last couple of days I read Urban Theory and the Urban Experience, a book by one of my lecturers from my first degree in PPE, also at York.
I don't want to say anything good about it because I've met the writer and I don't feel nearly academically confident enough to attempt to formally evaluate it. So instead I am going to hide my true thoughts beneath a thin veil of apparent insincerity in the hopes that I won't get found out. It was pretty cool.
When I am looking into a new subject, what I tend to try to do is to read a couple of books, without trying too hard to take amazing notes or anything, to just expose myself to the subject and get my head around the particular langauge that that stuff is discussed with. A lot of it is to do with surnames. To take an obvious example, any reference to Marx in a social science work is clearly about a lot more than just a dude. It's about schools of thought and stuff, lasting influence, the historically contingent shape of the discipline today, a whole penumbra of shared and not so shared meanings. I'm saying there's a whole load of context to get your head around. But as it is with Marx, so too with the Chicago School (who I guess I did know some things about), and Jane Jacobs, and Lefebvre, and any other name you should happen to choose. So the language is not just about unfamiliar German words and -isms, but also for me about the figures and their associated thoughts. That's what I was up to with reading this book, but as is often then case with books I got a lot more out of it than I was expecting.
I found myself thinking a lot about the city and social control. Like about how the sum of little actions, like individuals sitting on planning committees or somesuch thing, can lead to horrible segregation. There's a writer called Phillip Ball who wrote a book called Critical Mass, which was about how the social and physical sciences learn from each other and provide analogies for each other. Being far more at home with the natural sciences I found it helpful in ordering my thoughts. I found myself thinking a lot in the book about how the sums of individual actions aggregate into patterns of inequality, oppression and control. The decayed city centre is a direct result of the flight of some to suburbia, and a second example would look rhetorically good here but I didn't think of one so I wrote this instead.
This essence on reflexivity, of the interdependence inherent in the city, has always been one of the things most fascinating to me, and I find myself looking for the levers in these systems. I look for ways to align the incentives so that individuals act in socially desirable ways of their own free will, without compulsion. In doing so I prove myself a true disciple of my discipline, social policy, while immediately lamenting the ease with which I slip into such a technocratic role.
Even though I obsess on planning and policy, and crave the opportunity to make grand plans and reshape the urban environment around me, I at the same time recoil from such a desire. It is just another instance of social control, of transplanting agency from individuals and communities into some form of central power base. The manganimous response to the problems perceived around result in an unreflective desire to intervene with little consideration of personal autonomy. In considering this I located something that I had spent a long time searching for: the origin of my discomort with my adopted subject.
One of the strengths of the book, and probably the reason my thoughts followed these threads, was the way in which the narrative managed to discuss urban ills without a presumption that the solutions to these were technocratic. A radical vibe resonated through the text, rarely overt but always present, and I wanted, really wanted, to engage with the issues in question as a proud part of the public sphere, not in a privleged policy partnership.
To weave together the two apparently distinct thoughts I have had on this issue, I consider the aggregated effects of an assemblage of urban experts actively engaging in the issues to the exclusion of the urbanites. Has an honest desire to understand and improve come at the cost of the public sphere? Would a second question located here be pleasing to the eye? I can but ponder.
The above were just some things I was thinking about while reading the book. The idea that has grabbed me the hardest is that of the "right to the city". The city as a public good, one which can be more or less public, and more or less good. As to what I'm going to do my dissertation on, still no idea.
