Hostname: page-component-55f67697df-7l9ct Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-05-22T11:41:37.366Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Seeing Like a City: The Dialectic of Modern and Premodern Ways of Seeing in Urban Governance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Mariana Valverde
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Studies of urban governance, as well as the overlapping literature on law and space, have been heavily influenced by critical analyses of how spatial techniques helped constitute modern disciplinary powers and knowledges. The rise of land-use control and land-use planning seem at first sight to be perfect examples of the disciplining of populations through space by the kind of governmental gaze dubbed by Scott (1998) as “seeing like a state.” But a detailed genealogical study that puts the emergence of the notion of “land use” in the broader context of urban governance technologies reveals that modernist techniques of land use planning, such as North American zoning, are more flexible, contradictory, and fragile than critical urbanists assume. Legal tools of premodern origin that target nonquantifiable offensiveness and thus construct an embodied and relational form of urban subjectivity keep reappearing in the present day. When cities attempt to govern conflicts about the use of space through objective rules, these rules often undermine themselves in a dialectical process that results in the return to older notions of offensiveness. This article argues that the dialectical process by which modernist “seeing like a state” techniques give way to older ways of seeing (e.g., the logic of nuisance) plays a central role in the epistemologically hybrid approach to governing space that is here called “seeing like a city.”

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 277 - 312
Copyright
© 2011 Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

The University of Sydney Law School's Distinguished Visitor program provided the first opportunity to present an early version of this article in October 2009, for which I am thankful. Thanks are also due to Nick Blomley, Davina Cooper, and Pat O'Malley for their generous interest in and support for this and related research projects, and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for research funding.

References

References

Adams, Thomas, (1916) Report of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Commission of Conservation. Government of Canada, Ottawa.Google Scholar
Baldwin, Peter (1999) Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850–1930. Springfield: Univ. of Ohio Press.Google Scholar
Benedickson, Jamie (2007) The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage. Vancouver: Univ. of British Columbia Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ben-Joseph, Eran (2005) Standards and the Hidden Language of Place Making. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Blomley, Nicholas (2010) Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blomley, Nicholas, et al., eds. (2001) The Legal Geographies Reader. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Bockrath, Joseph (2009) “Pornoshops or Similar Places Disseminating Obscene Materials as Nuisance,” 58 American Law Reports 1134.Google Scholar
Boyer, M. Christine (1983) Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Brenner, Joel Franklin (1974) “Nuisance Law and the Industrial Revolution,” 3 J. of Legal Studies 403–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brinkley, Douglas (2009) The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America. New York: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
Caro, Robert (1974) The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Cooper, Davina (2002) “Far Beyond ‘the Early Morning Crowing of a Farmyard Cock’: Revisiting the Place of Nuisance Within Legal and Political Discourse,” 11 Social and Legal Studies 5–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Certeau, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.Google Scholar
Deegan, Mary Jo (1988) Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.Google Scholar
Dennis, Richard (2008) Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space 1840–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Dubber, Markus, & Valverde, Mariana, eds. (2006) The New Police Science: The Police Power in Domestic and International Governance. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischler, Raphael (1998a) “Toward a Genealogy of Planning: Zoning and the Welfare state,” 13 Planning Perspectives 389–410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischler, Raphael (1998b) “The Metropolitan Dimension of Early Zoning: Revisiting the 1916 New York City Ordinance,” 64 American Planning Association J. 170–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ford, Richard T. (1999) “Law's Territory: A History of jurisdiction,” 97 Michigan Law Rev. 843–930.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (2004) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France 1977–78. New York: Palgrave/Picador.Google Scholar
Frug, Gerald (1999) City Making: Building Communities Without Building Walls. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Garland, David (2001) The Culture of Control. New York: Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ghertner, D. Asher (2010) “Calculating Without Numbers: Aesthetic Governmentality in Delhi slums,” 39 Economy and Society 185–217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haar, Charles, & Kayden, Jerold, eds. (1989) Zoning and the American Dream: Promises Still to Keep. Washington, DC: American Institute of Planners.Google Scholar
Hall, Peter (2002) Cities of Tomorrow, 2d ed. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hartog, Hendrik (1985) “Pigs and Positivism,” Wisconsin Law Rev. 899–935.Google Scholar
Harvey, David [1973](2006) Social Justice and the City. Reprint ed. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Hasson, Shlomo, & Ley, David (1994) Neighbourhood Organizations and the Welfare State. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Hoyt, Homer (1939) The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities. Washington, DC: Federal Housing Administration.Google Scholar
Hull House Maps and Papers (1895) Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell.Google Scholar
Isenberg, Alison (2004) Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People who Made it. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacob, Christian (2006) The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography Throughout History. Trans. by Tom Conley. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Joyce, Patrick (2003) Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the City. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Keating, Ann D. (1988) Building Chicago: Suburban Developers and the Creation of a Divided Metropolis. Columbus: Ohio Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Kruse, Devin, & Sugrue, Thomas, eds. (2006) The New Suburban History. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Labbe, Ronald, & Lurie, Jonathan (2003) The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction and the Fourteenth Amendment. New Orleans: Univ. of Louisiana Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri (1991) The Social Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Light, Jennifer (2009) The Nature of the Cities: Ecological Visions and the American Urban Professions, 1920–1960. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia, & Ehrenteucht, Renia (2009) Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation Oover Public Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Makielski, S. J. (1966) The Politics of Zoning: The New York Experience. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Massey, Doreen (2005) For Space. London: Sage.Google Scholar
McLaren, John P. S. (1972) “The Common Law of Nuisance in the Age of Environmental crisis,” 10 Osgoode Hall Law J. 505–61.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Don (2003) The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: The Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Moore, Peter (1979) “Zoning and Planning: The Toronto Experience,” in A. Artibise & G. Stelter, eds., The Usable Urban Past. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Novak, William (1996) The People's Welfare: The Police Power. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
O'Malley, Pat, & Hutchinson, Steve (2007) “A Genealogy of Fire Prevention,” in Brannigan, G. & Pavlich, G., eds., Governance and Regulation in Social Life: Essays in Honour of WG Carson. London: Cavendish.Google Scholar
Park, Robert, et al. (1952) The City. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Peterson, Jon (2003) The Birth of City Planning in the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Platt, Harold (2005) Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Poovey, Mary (1995) Making a Social Body. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Porter, Keith (1995) Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Rabinow, Paul (1989) French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Ramsay, Peter (2008) “Vulnerability, Sovereignty, and Police Power in the ASBO,” in Dubber, M. & Valverde, M., eds., Police and the Liberal state. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Reich, Charles (1964) “The New Property,” 73 Yale Law J. 733–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Revell, Keith (2003) Building Gotham: Civic Culture and Public Policy in New York City 1898–1938. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rodgers, Daniel (1990) Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Roper, Laura Wood (1973) Frederick Law Olmsted: A Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Rose, Nikolas (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Nikolas, & Miller, Peter (1992) “Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government,” 43 British J. of Sociology 173–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Nikolas, & Valverde, Mariana (1998) “Governed by Law?,” 7 Social and Legal Studies 569–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sassen, Saskia (2006) Territory, Authority, Rights. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Scott, James (1998) Seeing Like a State. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Sennett, Richard (1970) The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Simpson, Michael (1985) Thomas Adams and the Modern Planning Movement: Britain, Canada and the United States. London: Mansell.Google Scholar
Smith, Carl (2006) The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valverde, Mariana (2003a) “Police Science, British Style: Pub Licensing and Knowledges of Urban Disorder,” 32 Economy and Society 234–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valverde, Mariana (2003b) Law's Dream of a Common Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Valverde, Mariana (2005) “Authorizing the Production of Urban Moral Order: Appellate Courts and Their Knowledge Games,” 39 Law & Society Rev. 419–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valverde, Mariana (2009) “Jurisdiction and Scale: Legal ‘Technicalities’ as Resources for Theory,” 18 Social and Legal Studies 139–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Alexander (1989) The Culture of Nature. Toronto: Between the Lines.Google Scholar
Wightman, J. (1998) “Nuisance - The Environmental Tort? Hunter v Canary Wharf in the House of Lords,” 61 Modern Law Rev. 870–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Cases Cited

Montreal (city) v. 2952-1366 Quebec Inc [2005] 3 S.C.R. 141.Google Scholar
Ottawa (city) v. Freidman, OCJ 1998 Case no. 13880.Google Scholar
Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Rambler Realty Co. 272 US 365 (1926) 375.Google Scholar