17.1 Introduction
As Cass Sunstein (2001) predicted early on in the history of the Internet, the unlimited ability of the user to select the content she consumes has led to polarization, confirmation bias, and the creation of information bubbles, to the great detriment of democracy. At the same time, the new digital environments have created a depressingly bland and tailor-made world, what Han (2017) would call an excess of positivity. At least in the digital world, there seems to be a crisis of public spaces.
In this context, it seems appropriate to re-appropriate the work of Jane Jacobs (1961) who, in 1961, published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a manifesto against the segregating and homogenizing tendencies of mainstream city planning, and in favor of the spontaneity and autonomy of citizens in creating public spaces. Whereas the mainstream city planning of the time created cities to be used for pre-established interactions, minimizing unplanned contacts, Jacobs advocated for promiscuous cities, with many simultaneous uses in which contacts between diverse peoples were made possible by casual public spaces such as sidewalks. Whereas her ideas were revolutionary at the time, they have become common currency for today’s city planners, to the point that they have been “co-opted by real estate developers and politicians” (Goldberger, 2006, p. 126) who use them to give a progressive veneer to large, centrally planned, developments. In order to put Jacob’s ideas to work in our current context, we must acknowledge the emergence of cyberspace as today’s dominant system of proximity (Lévy, 1997). Beyond that, we must go beyond Jacob’s concrete proposals for city planning and uncover the underlying philosophy of her proposals in relation to planning, self-organization and diversity, with the hope of re-radicalizing her thought.
I posit that Jacobs recognizes the power of diversity to create cohesion. It would seem that diversity and cohesion are antagonistic variables and one must choose between either the ordered homogeneity of the platoon or the disordered multiplicity of the carnival. But in the work of Jane Jacobs we can see how social cohesion can be produced in a molecular, rather than molar, fashion: one to one relations of symbiosis can create a cohesive and diverse network (see Bula, 2017, p. 239–257). In this mode of social bonding, the more diverse a community is, the more chances for productive symbiotic relations it has, therefore cohesion and diversity become synergistic variables. This idea of diversity and cohesion can be explained through a reading of the opposition between Spinoza and Descartes. The latter’s orientation towards detailed planning and against emergent properties and self-organization constitute the philosophical underpinning of the kind of urban planning Jane Jacobs opposed.
The term “smart cities” is used to denote cities that make use of data collection and information technology in their management in order to operate more efficiently. I would like to propose a “smarter” use of this term to denote cities that, as a second-order cognitive system, are engineered so as to make smart decisions. To this end, I make use of Page’s (2007) ideas around diverse groups being able to produce smart decisions if adequately connected. For a deterritorialized, self-organizing collective intelligence to emerge, a proper organizational structure must be put in place; to borrow from cybernetician Beer (1994), freedom must be designed; self-organization requires proper planning. The aim of this paper is to outline some ideas and general guidelines aimed at producing sidewalks, both digital and physical, that can become places of promiscuous encounters, foster the appropriation of spaces on the part of citizens, and produce the possibility of emergent collective voices in the political sphere.
17.2 The Planner’s Itch
(…) I spent the whole day shut up in a small room, heated by a stove, in which I could converse with my own thoughts at leisure. Among the first of these was the realization that things made up of different elements and produced by the hands of several master craftsmen are often less perfect than those on which only one person has worked. This is the case with buildings which a single architect has planned and completed, that are usually more beautiful and better designed than those that several architects have tried to patch together, using old walls that had been constructed for other purposes. This is also the case with those ancient cities, that in the beginning were no more than villages and have become, through the passage of time, great conurbations; when compared to orderly towns that an engineer designs without constraints on an empty plain, they are usually so badly laid out that, even though their buildings viewed separately often display as much if not more artistic merit as those of orderly towns, yet if one takes into consideration the way they are disposed, a tall one here, a low one there, and the way they cause the streets to wind and change level, they look more like the product of chance than of the will of men applying their reason. And if one considers further that there have always been officials whose task it was to ensure that the design of private buildings should contribute to the beauty of the town as a whole, it will become clear how difficult it is to carry anything through to completion when working only with what others have produced. (Descartes, 2006, p. 12)
The philosopher, accompanied only by a stove, realizes that the impression of “men applying their reason” is only achieved when a single will animates a project, be it single buildings, or whole towns. If Descartes is to be believed, ugly and haphazard cities such as New York or Paris should be shunned in favor of more cohesive towns such as Brasilia or Canberra! While the architectural beauty that can be found in the latter cities cannot be denied, it must be distinguished from urban beauty, which is a result of the spontaneously emerging harmony between the several uses (and building styles) of a city or city sector (Kohr, 1989, p. 98); and under this heading, messy cities such as New York clearly come out ahead (specially those sectors of the city that have not come under heavy city planning).
Be that as it may, Descartes ideas on city planning are intuitively appealing, and it is important to ask why. We must distinguish between (1) exhaustive planning (which would aim for that which is planned to reflect a single will and reason), (2) planning for self organization (that is, planning aimed at facilitating the spontaneous harmony that comes from the interaction of individual initiatives, under proper conditions), and (3) sloppy planning. Conceptually, exhaustive planning would require the planner to maximally anticipate contingencies, so that any future state of the planned system is accounted for. This means that novelty, for exhaustive planning, is necessarily tantamount to a planning failure: the beautiful art that spontaneously comes to adorn the walls of a city sector must be painted over, even if it is beloved by a community; from the planner’s point of view, graffiti can only be a sign of urban decay, a deviation from the plan (see Hicks, 1994; Cathcart-Keays, 2015). On the other hand, planning for self-organization (e.g, Beer, 1994) expects and fosters novelty. Therefore, in as much as the point of view of exhaustive planning is dominant in a community, planning for self-organization will be viewed as sloppy (and, in as much as novelty is appreciated, e.g. in the form of graffiti, it must be planned for; the planner must, at the very least, be the one to designate where graffiti happens). In these conditions, if the planner does not wish to seem sloppy, and wishes to be recognized and praised for his work, he will tend to adopt the point of view of exhaustive planning, so that his works will seem to reflect “the will of men applying their reason”. The drive to anticipate and control every future state of a system (whether this drive is successful or not), I will call the planner’s itch.
There is a certain philosophical orientation behind the planner’s itch; for the sake of convenience, I will call this orientation control cartesianism. Indeed, many traits of this philosophical orientation are quite visible in the work of Descartes: (1) the drive to work exclusively with data that is taken as certain, (2) the preference for linearly deductive knowledge, and (3) an implicit rejection of emergent properties. In the following section, I wish to contrast these traits in the philosophy of Descartes with an alternative philosophical orientation in the work of a superficially similar philosopher, Baruch Spinoza. His work will provide some conceptual groundwork for an alternative philosophy of planning, which will be presented in sections 17.4 and 17.5.
17.3 Descartes Vs. Spinoza
In many ways, Spinoza is a cartesian philosopher: Descartes was a major philosophical influence in the liberal protestant circles in which Spinoza was active; Spinoza’s only work published in his lifetime and under his own name was an exposition of Descartes; and Spinoza’s philosophy can be viewed as a radicalization and further unfolding of Descartes’ philosophy (see Israel, 2001). However, Spinoza’s work can serve as a counter-example to control cartesianism. Let us examine the three traits outlined above in relation to both thinkers.
The drive to work exclusively with data taken as certain is a key component of Descarte’s method, insisted upon in all three of his major works: The Principles of Philosophy, Meditations on First Philosophy, and the Discourse on the Method (Descartes, 1967): the methodological purpose of cartesian doubt is to guarantee that the philosophers works exclusively with absolutely certain data. This flows into the preference for linearly deductive knowledge: once premises that are deemed certain are established, new knowledge is progressively produced through deduction; these conclusions become new premises for further conclusions, always in such a way that the certainty of the first premises is carried over to new conclusions: cartesian knowledge can be compared to a chain, in that, if just one link fails, the whole becomes useless. In order to achieve this chain of certainty, the cartesian thinker is called to divide complex problems into their simplest parts: the complex whole is then cognitively reconstructed by re-assembling the whole from the parts. This is tantamount to rejecting emerging properties, that is, properties that are present in the whole but not in the parts, because they are the product of the relationships between the parts: for example, whereas the parts of a traffic jam (the cars) move, say, north to south, the traffic jam itself moves south to north (see Resnick, 2000); but this cannot be deduced from what is known about the parts, only from their interaction.
Spinoza, on the other hand, has a more wholistic approach to knowledge (Merçon, 2012), that need not proceed deductively through linked certainties. A good example is Spinoza’s idea of the body: unlike Descartes, Spinoza believes that body and mind are strictly isomorphic, which implies that the body, as such, is capable of operations that are just as complex as the operations of the mind. Spinoza does not specify just in what way the body is complex enough to perform such operations. Rather, Spinoza calls our attention to emergent properties (1981, pp. 54–59) by speaking about how bodies (understood as processes) that are more complex (that is, are composed of more, and more varied kinds of, sub-processes), have more properties, and merely pointing out the complexity of the human body, indicating that it must have many emergent properties that science has yet to discover: “… no one has hitherto determined what the body is capable of” (1981, p. 95). Even though Spinoza presents his work deductively, emulating Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, his arguments function more like a fishing net than a chain: although a few nodes here and there may be broken, the whole can be strong enough to work; and it is in virtue of this whole that the parts make sense: indeed, at certain points in his texts, Spinoza asks the reader to suspend judgment until she has read the whole (e.g, 1981, p. 52). Spinoza’s work, although of cartesian pedigree, displays an orientation quite opposed to control cartesianism.
Descartes’ main argument proceeds in the same order in all three of his major works: (1) radical doubt, (2) the cogito argument (“I think therefore I am”), (3) proof of the existence of God, (4) possibility of knowledge of the external world. On the other hand, Spinoza’s highly hypertextual writing, in which the reader may read backwards through the branching and diverse elements of the proofs of propositions, to which are added the scholia, which are outside the deductive structure of the text, gives the reader the possibility of reading the work through many paths. This difference can be put in architectural terms. The many-paths structure of Spinoza’s writing has been compared by Rawes (2015) to the architecture of Antonio de Sangallo’s Villa Madama (a renaissance villa in Rome), as opposed to that of a Victorian British house. Whereas in a Victorian British house “passages become corridors that separate work from leisure and patron from servant” (Rawes, 2015, p. 69–70), Italian renaissance architecture such as Villa Madama displays a.
(…) highly perforated and dynamic kind of geometry as its multiple doors in rooms and walls allow for a range of passages through the various living-rooms, vestibules and even (…) water closets (…) the density of routes through the spaces and their multimodal points of access [make] it possible for occupants of all social classes to pass through the same rooms simultaneously from different directions (Rawes, 2015, p. 69).
In a manner analogous to Villa Madama’s multiple passages, “Spinoza’s scholia perforate the boundaries of the classical geometric method because they are outsider voices” (Rawes, 2015, p. 78). In both the scholia and the hypertextual links contained in the proofs, the reader is invited to use the text in her own way, to roam the text in whatever way best fits her intellect. On the other hand, Victorian architecture suggests single, pre-determined, paths for each kind of use of the building, and could, therefore, be compared to Descartes’ writing and to a form of control cartesianism in which the writer traces a single path for the reader to use. We can therefore distinguish between control cartesianism and spinozist multiplicity.
One of the main reasons Jane Jacobs advocates for small city blocks (1961, p. 179–192) is that it allows pedestrians to take multiple paths through and from their destination; this, in turn, makes the streets safer (because pedestrians can escape dangerous situations through side streets), and city life more diverse and fruitful (as pedestrians may visit different businesses or acquaintances making variations on their usual routes). Spinoza’s writing and Jacob’s ideas on city design both advocate for a multiplicity of connections that allow users the choice of multiple pathways between ideas or destinations. In the following section, I will make use of Spinoza’s philosophy to develop the idea of diversity with the aim of fleshing out a philosophical underpinning for Jane Jacob’s ideas on urban planning.
17.4 Diversity
In the following considerations, I will take a path somewhat less travelled. The problem of diversity is often tackled from an abstractly axiological perspective, or from the point of view of human rights (e.g Dietz, 2007). I want to think about what diversity does to a system, considered as a process that strives for viability, for perpetuation over time (see Beer, 1994); and more particularly, what diversity does to cognitive systems (see Page, 2007). In any kind of system, including a city or community, diversity and cohesion are variables in tension (Bula, 2010). When a new element becomes part of a system (e.g, when a newborn arrives in a family, or a soldier in a platoon), some mixture of accommodation and assimilation on the part of the host must take place: either the newcomer must adapt (as happens with the soldier) or the larger system must change in order to accommodate it (as happens with the baby). A new element may certainly demand too much change from a host system: liberal authors such as Benjamin Barber (1992, p. 129) concede that too much diversity in a community may destroy its unity in terms of values and cultural cohesion.
The problem of the possible excesses of accommodation and assimilation is tackled in the philosophy of Spinoza (Zourabichvilli, 2002, p. 58). In Spinoza’s ontology, bodies can form composite bodies that can, in turn, join to form ever more complex composite bodies of higher orders (1981, p. 54–59); this must not be understood as a matter of assembly (say, the joining of Lego play pieces, or of Epicurean atoms), but rather as a matter of processes becoming part of higher order processes. In interaction between humans or communities, this can be understood in terms of producing positive sum games (Bula, 2012): in relationships of cooperation, the several parts, though differentiated, become part of a single system, and come to have coinciding interests; in as much as A and B are part of a higher body, what is good for A is also good for B (see Spinoza, 1981, p. 174; Bula, 2014). Conversely, a community has low cohesion in as much as its parts lack common interests.
Diversity and cohesion are variables in tension, but they are not mutually exclusive. If cohesion is achieved through homogenization (as happens in a military platoon), diversity is destructive to cohesion; however, cohesion can also be achieved through diversity. The more a body is capable of having many states, the more it can enter into relationships of cooperation with many different bodies (Spinoza, 1981, p. 183). Diverse people (capable of many forms of cooperation) can produce diverse societies that are cohesive but internally differentiated, as opposed to communities that achieve cohesion through homogenization (Bula, 2017, 239–257); Hardt and Negri (2001), following Spinoza, have called the former multitudes and the latter, mere masses.
According to Jane Jacobs (1961), culturally diverse cities are also more prosperous, because different elements bring to them different competences. The prosperity of Spinoza’s native Amsterdam in the seventeenth century is a case in point: it had a lot to do with its receiving Jewish refugees from the Iberian Peninsula (with their connections and abilities for international trade) as well as protestants chased out of France and Belgium (with their manufacturing abilities) (cfr Page, 2007, p. 331). It can be argued that there are also cognitive benefits to diversity: considered as a second order mind, a community benefits from hosting people who think differently (indeed, seventeenth century Amsterdam also enjoyed a philosophical and scientific Golden Age). As Scott Page has shown, for an important class of problems, “diversity trumps ability” (2007, 137). A diverse group, using diverse heuristics, will perform better than a group of experts: this is because experts will tend to use the same heuristics and will therefore find good solutions but tend to get stuck on local optima, whereas a diversity of approaches will have superadditive effects that produce unforeseen innovations (Page, 2007, 157). A good example is Craig Reynolds’ (1987) contribution to the understanding of flocking in birds, which came not from training or experience as a biologist, but from his work in computer animation for Hollywood films.
Diversity does not trump ability in all circumstances; for problems with few local optimal solutions, experts will outdo diverse groups; but for problems with many possible good solutions (say, designing the transportation system of a city, a problem in which good environmental solutions may not be economical, and cost-efficient solutions may not be socially inclusive, etc.), experts are outperformed by diversity (Page, 2007, p. 159–162). Schumacher (2004, p. 121–123) distinguishes between convergent and divergent problems: in the former kind, the more a problem is studied, the more people will come up with the same solution (e.g, Babylonian and Mayan mathematicians came up with the same answers independently); in the latter kind, when problems are tackled by smart and rigorous minds, they come up with different solutions. Examples of divergent problems are questions like “what is a just society?”, “how should we educate our children?” or “how are we to live?”. The idea of a smart city I wish to put forward would delegate a part of city governance to processes of collective cognition, but it is important to distinguish between straightforward technical problems (which are best left to experts), and problems which, by their nature, are best tackled by democratic participation: technocracy, as an epithet, should be used when experts illegitimately take over the solution of this latter kind of problems.
Using these ideas on diversity, In the next section I will give a brief account of Jane Jacob’s ideas on city planning and her understanding of planning for self-organization. In Sect. 17.7, I will outline possible applications of Jacob’s ideas for cyberspace, in order to produce truly smart cities.
17.5 Jane Jacobs Vs. the Planner’s Itch
Working as a journalist for Architectural Forum in the 1950s, and witnessing the effects that large scale urban renewal programs had on poor communities, Jane Jacobs began writing articles and public addresses that took aim at the very foundations of mainstream urban planning: cities are safe, lively and amicable when urban space is used densely (1961, p. 152–177) and diversely (1961, p. 200–221); when city blocks combine many kinds of uses (industrial, commercial, residential) and many real estate prices (which is why aged buildings are so important for city blocks, 1961, p. 187–199). Whereas mainstream urban planners assumed that contact with strangers ought to be minimized, Jacobs posited that city life is enriched by casual contact (1961, p. 56): places of casual contact, such as sidewalks, small convenience stores, or front stoops allow many diverse people (with whom one is not intimate enough to invite into one’s home) to be on “good sidewalk terms” (1961, p. 62). This casual contact produces a basis of trust that makes it possible for city dwellers to feel safe intervening in each other’s lives: scolding children who are misbehaving (because they are recognizable as this or that neighbour’s), intervening when witnessing a crime (because I know I will be backed up by others whom I am familiar with), or keeping each other’s keys and correspondence. Jacob’s ideas have influenced modern city planning, for example, in a concern for permeability (Marazuela et al., 2014, p. 15), or in Jan Gehl’s work on pedestrian-friendly urban planning (e.g, Barnett, 2014).
Reformers have long observed city people loitering on busy corners, hanging around in candy stores and bars, and drinking soda pop on stoops, and have passed judgement, the gist of which is: “This is deplorable! If these people had decent homes and a more private or bosky outdoor place, they wouldn’t be on the street!” (1961, p. 55).
The unlabeled, unfocused, unanticipated activity of loiterers awakens the planner’s itch. On weekdays, an unlicensed empanada vendor stands on the street in front of the building where I live. There forms around him a ring of people with an empanada in one hand and coffee in the other, sometimes skillfully performing the task of applying hot sauce to the empanada with both hands already occupied: there are construction workers, shopkeepers and doormen away from their posts for a few minutes, stylists from the nearby hair salons, and office workers from a large office building around the block. There are many problems with this situation from the point of view of exhaustive planning: the vendor is unlicensed, the people are invading the sidewalk, the neatness of the street is compromised: exhaustive planners would be driven to place the empanada vendor in a commercial, rather than residential, zone; in a closed off venue with tables and chairs, where people can sit in groups. But it is in these kinds of casual encounters that shopkeepers get to know their neighbors and build enough trust to give them informal store credit; where the office worker who needs work done on his home gets a tip on a good contractor from the construction worker; where it is reported that Martha’s son seems to be hanging out with the wrong crowd; and where it is speculated that Manchester United may make the finals of the Champion’s League this year. The empanadas are delicious, but people also come for the casual contact (see Bula, 2017, p. 254). Sidewalks are hubs for transmitting information (Jacobs, 1961, 68–69). The richness of city life can be contrasted to life in the suburbs, in which contact is restricted to those whom I allow into my home and private life: naturally, this will only happen with people that hold views, jobs, and socioeconomic positions similar to my own (Jacobs, 1961, p. 65): suburban life risks becoming autistic (García, 2013).
Whereas it is pleasant to wander around a dense and diverse city, one is more inclined to prefer a car ride to walking for more than a few minutes to get from here to there in a suburb. The distinction between castles and pavilions seems useful: buildings are either closed and secretive, or open, extroverted and inviting to exploration (Holbrook, 2015). To walk for any space of time in a suburb is to go from castle to uninviting castle. The same happens with too-large uses of street frontage, irrespective of the type of use (Jacobs, 1961, p. 234); it is hell to transit the sidewalk along a large shopping mall.
Wandering around dense and diverse cities, one can find small niche businesses that would never be profitable in a suburb. Variety is possible because of variety: small businesses draw from the city’s “variety of cultural opportunities, variety of scenes and (…) great variety in (…) population” (Jacobs, 1961, p. 148). In terms of the philosophy of Spinoza, cities can be conceived as composite bodies made cohesive through a variety of relationships of cooperation: the more internally diverse a city is, the more it can accommodate even more diversity. In practice, however, this positive feedback loop is usually interrupted because diverse areas in a city become fashionable and therefore costly and able to support only high-yield economic uses (Jacobs, 1961, p. 243): Brooklyn goes from an interesting place to explore on foot to gentrified and hipsterized predictability.
Should the fact that certain areas are pleasant to walk around in, whereas others are not, enter into the deliberations of city planners? Such data seems subjective and irrelevant. Indeed, control cartesianism would reject it, for it is neither certain nor deductively derivable from first principles. Urban beauty is an emergent property (see Fromm, 2004, p. 23), that must be distinguished from architectural beauty. Whereas the latter has more to do with such things as a good use of geometrical proportions or the artful integration to immediate surroundings (see, e.g., Weisberg 2011 for a discussion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater), the former can only be seen in the context of a co-evolving community of buildings that interact with each other (and with more ephemeral occurrences such as seasons or weekly markets), that age and gather history, and that behave as members of a living human community rather than as stand-alone pieces of decoration1 (Makower, 2016). Urban beauty arises from the relationship between parts, so that its presence in a whole cannot be additively inferred from its presence in the parts; therefore, it does not fit well with a cartesian approach to knowledge and planning, and can seem a frivolous topic.
As it turns out, according to Leopold Kohr (1989), beauty is an important consideration for such down to earth topics as city traffic. Traffic is not a matter of insufficient roads (Kohr, 1989, p. 48–51) but of people’s desires: if the periphery of the city is dull and lifeless, people will flock downtown and create traffic (Kohr, 1989, p. 82), and more roads will only encourage more crowding: beauty must be decentralized. Kohr is not suggesting that city peripheries be painted in bright colors or garnished here and there with monuments: for a periphery to be attractive, it must have its own magnetic field (Kohr, 1989, p. 62). Indeed, the reason people go to public spaces is because they want to see and meet other people, and be involved in other people’s doings; spaces must be attractive because they compete for people (Walljasper, 2005, p. 22).To be of interest, city sectors must have some degree of political autonomy (Kohr, 1989, p. 82) and be largely self-sufficient, not only in terms of needs (having hospitals and housing both nurses and doctors, etc.; which means that all city sectors must accommodate people of many income levels (Kohr, 1989, p. 106)) but in terms of wants (having their own structures of conviviality such as churches or pubs). Cities ought to be federations of independent, and independently attractive plazas and squares (Kohr, 1989, p. 42–44), which, although harmonizing with the whole, should have their subtle differences and idiosyncrasies (Kohr, 1989, p. 62–63). They must include visible structures that confer identity to a city sector, and these structures must be beautiful, and inspire love towards one’s neighborhood (Kohr, 1989, p. 86). Residential streets must aspire to be more than mere traffic corridors, they must have adequate structures (such as semi-private front yards that facilitate casual contact) so that they become structures where people want to “stay and play” (Gehl, 1978).
If the sameness of use is shown candidly for what it is-sameness-it looks monotonous. Superficially, this monotony might be thought of as a sort of order, however dull. But esthetically, unfortunately also carries with it a deep disorder: the disorder of conveying no direction. In places stamped with the monotony and repetition of sameness you move, but in moving you seem to have gotten nowhere. North is the same as south, or east as west. Sometimes north, south, east and west are all alike, as they are when you stand within the grounds of a large project. It takes differences-many differences cropping up in different directions to keep us oriented. Scenes of thoroughgoing sameness lack these natural announcements of direction and movement, or are scantly furnished with them, and so they are deeply confusing. This is a kind of chaos. (Jacobs, 1961, p. 223–224).
The chaos of sameness is sometimes remedied by imposing superficial architectural differences on same-use structures: this is what Jacobs calls “googie architecture” (1961, p. 224): “hot dog stands shaped like hot dogs, ice-cream stands in the shape of ice-cream cones” or gherkin shaped office buildings in London’s financial district. Such exhibitionist architecture cannot mask the underlying monotony of single-use city sectors, nor can it create urban beauty: what is interesting about cities is the diversity of human endeavors (1961, p. 229). This goes to the heart of Jacob’s criticism of mainstream urban planning: people are interested in other people (1961, p. 70). We seek casual contact, we hang out around front stoops, candy stores and empanada carts because we want to see “what’s up”.
This is no trivial point. Planning that minimizes casual contact assumes that people want to formulate plans and then follow them, and that they do not want to be distracted; that they wish for conclusions to derive from premises in an uninterrupted manner. This reflects a neglect of passivity, inherited from the philosophical modernity of which Descartes is a paradigmatic example. The fact is that passivity and interruption is essential to human life (see Innerarity, 2001): many important things in our lives (such as love, or the development of a strong commitment to a cause) happen in spite of our plans, because we got sidetracked. Such chance occurrences are certainly not the product of “the will of men applying their reason”, and yet can be central to a human life. Examples abound: from every “meet-cute” story of chance encounters that resulted in lifelong partnerships, to a life-changing book found casually in a discount bin, to the story of Paul the Apostle, whose will was interrupted by a bolt of lightning. Human life is enriched through diversity and chance.
The importance of chance encounters does not diminish the importance of planning: life-enriching self-organization is the product of planning. Once we abandon the idea that order is exclusively the product of exhaustive planning, of the will of men applying their reason, we can see that diversity appears given certain conditions:
So long as we are content to believe that city diversity represents accident and chaos, of course its erratic generation appears to represent a mystery.
However, the conditions that generate city diversity are quite easy to discover by observing places in which diversity flourishes and studying the economic reasons why it can flourish in these places. Although the results are intricate, and the ingredients producing them may vary enormously, this complexity is based on tangible economic relationships which, in principle, are much simpler than the intricate urban mixtures they make possible. (Jacobs, 1961, p. 150).
Jacobs goes on to enumerate a fairly simple recipe: mixed primary uses, small city blocks, buildings of different age and price, and dense concentrations of people (1961, p. 150). The aim of planning is to sow the seeds of self-organization:
(…) most city diversity is the creation of incredible numbers of different people and different private organizations, with vastly differing ideas and purposes, planning and contriving outside the formal framework of public action. The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop-insofar as public policy and action can do so-cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas and opportunities to flourish, along with the flourishing of the public enterprises (1961, p. 241).
Planning for self-organization, designing freedom, is a matter of variety management: control should be distributed throughout a system so that the needs of the system can be met (Beer, 1994). A self-organizing community does not form a random landscape of relationships; rather (through the trust generated by small city blocks, alternative pedestrian routes, sidewalks and front stoops, etc.), public characters (such as storekeepers or bartenders) spontaneously emerge and act as organizing hubs: they transmit news and initiatives that are of interest to the neighborhood, and put people that have mutual interests in contact with each other (Jacobs, 1961, p. 68–69). These main, general-purpose, public characters make it possible for more specialized public characters to emerge: this is the case of Jane Jacobs herself, who, after organizing a petition against a roadway in New York’s Greenwich Village became known “through the grapevine” as the neighborhood’s “petition person”, and went on to help in many other initiatives (1961, p. 70).
In this section, I have presented Jane Jacob’s ideas on urban planning in the framework of some general ideas about planning and diversity. In the following, I wish to apply this “philosophy of sidewalks” to a new and dominant space in human existence: cyberspace. Here too, there are problems of homogeneity and lack of diversity. The three main concepts I wish to apply are sidewalks (understood as places for causal contact, in which people with convergent interests might meet), technocracy (understood as putting problems that ought to be resolved in democratic fashion exclusively into the hands of experts), and planning for self-organization, as distinct from exhaustive planning. I wish to re-purpose the term “smart city” to refer to cities that are cognitively diverse and self-organizing, so I must begin with a critique of the use that the term is usually given.
17.6 Smart Cities
Smart cities, as they are usually understood, are cities that maximize the efficiency of basic services through massive data collection on citizen behavior and public-private partnerships. Monzon, who defends the concept, defines a smart city as “an integrated system in which human and social capital interact, using technology-based solutions. It aims to efficiently achieve sustainable and resilient development and a high quality of life on the basis of a multistakeholder, municipality based partnership” (2015, p. 20); smart city proponents insist on a holistic approach that takes into account social, economic and environmental needs.
The idea of smart cities has been criticized because it treats the citizen as a passive consumer of the city: “It constructs an urban subject active only to the extent that he or she shoulders responsibilities the public sector has withdrawn from, and is otherwise fundamentally passive” (Greenfield, 2017, p. 25). Critics see “smart cities” as a way for large technology companies to market new technologies and gain a foothold on the public sector (Borkowska & Osborne, 2018, p. 357). Organizing agency is left to the managers of the smart city; which results in a poverty of experience: “Consider that ‘optimised’ urban management tends to create epistemic and experiential bubbles, acting to prospectively eliminate the daily frictions that force us to confront the other (…)” (Greenfield, 2017, p. 25). Greenfield suggests replacing the data probes of current smart cities with more opportunities for active citizen participation, so that managers hear from the citizens (rather than infer from their uses of city resources), what kind of city they want to inhabit: for example, exercises in which, through interviews of inhabitants, maps of city sectors are created that reflect “narratives of place” (Greenfield, 2017, p. 20).
The conceptual problem with smart cities goes deeper. If a city is seen as a bundle of consumer services (e.g roads, internet access, utilities, etc), and citizen participation is reduced to demand for these services (which can be tracked through information technologies in order to make supply more efficient), the political aspect of citizenship is stripped away. This is technocracy, as defined in Sect. 17.5: the divergent problem of city is folded under the rubric of efficiency, and made invisible. According to Fernandez-Güell et al., the technology-centered focus of smart cities runs the risk of assuming an oversimplified notion of what a city is; therefore “we should turn around the tech discourse and locate technology as a transversal supportive element of the whole urban functional system” (2016, p. 64). It seems desirable to maintain a political function for cities at a time where the political legitimacy of the nation state is waning: there may be “something irreducible and nontransferable, necessary but not quite sufficient, about the city’s public street and square for the realization of a meaningfully democratic citizenship” (Holston & Appadurai, 1996, p. 202). The executive power of cities (closer to the people than that of nation states and unhobbled by matters of sovereignty), has shown great potential for inter-city cooperation aimed at tackling global problems such as the proliferation of illegal guns, or climate change (Barber, 2013, p. 6).
The productive density and diversity of cities can make them powerful hubs for democracy. As outlined in the previous section, such self-organization requires certain conditions that can be planned for. First, a re-definition: a city is smart in as much as its citizens are connected in such a way that cohesive and inclusive processes of second order cognition are possible, and can amplify the power of citizens to direct their own lives. Notice (1) that the term “smart city” is now on a sliding scale; rather than a brand of city management, it becomes a concept by which any city can be evaluated in terms of second order cognition; (2) that efficiency in the use of resources and delivery of services is not a part of a smart city’s essence, but that a smart city would have efficient services as a side effect of citizen empowerment; (3) that, in principle, the definition neither precludes nor implies heavy use of information technologies. How technologies are used is much more important.
Information technology is often used to empower predatory capitalism or authoritarian states through massive data collection (Mulgan, 2013, p. 147); even participatory platforms such as social media can be hijacked to benefit the interests of a few, to the detriment of democracy (e.g Alcott & Gentzkow, 2017). On the other hand, IT is not a necessary condition for second-order cognition:
In India, the Shodh Yatra organized by the HoneyBee Network uses walking as a tool for change. In 1 week, walkers (farmers, scientists, and researchers) travel hundreds of kilometers across rural India to unearth, share, and disseminate solutions to local issues including conservation, organic farming and biodiversity as well as health and nutrition. During the day, walkers pass through farming land- usually accompanied by local farmers and laborers who discuss and reflect on their farming practices. In the evening, walkers stay in villages and hold meetings with local residents to share insights and knowledge of innovations from other parts of India (Mulgan, 2013, p. 143).
The economic power of cities comes from their connexity, the conditions they supply for extended cooperation (Mulgan, 2013, p. 204). If this cooperation is to extend to democratic decision making, to becoming a smart city as I define it, a first condition is that cities, and neighborhoods within cities, have true political power. Without it, exercises in grassroots democracy will be as specious and half-hearted as exercises in high school student government. A devolution of power from central governments to cities, and from cities to neighborhoods is necessary for grassroots democracy: people will not give their time and commitment unless they can exercise some tangible measure of power. Interest in citizen participation correlates with how effective this participation can be (e.g, Adler & Blake, 1990, on Portland’s citizen participation programme for land planning).
A second condition is to realize that massive participatory democracies are indeed possible, that there is, in principle, no size limit to the polis. Two fields of knowledge must be combined: information technology and cybernetics (the science of variety management, Beer, 1994); sheer computing power, however large, will not do unless communications are structured in such a way that citizens’ input is not attenuated, averaged away. Whenever there has been a political will towards massive participation, methods for it have been developed: in Chile, with rudimentary 1970s technologies, such cybernetic tools of participation were in the process of being implemented when the military coup cut short the country’s brief socialist experiment (Medina, 2014). The Occupy movement developed the very low-tech “people’s microphone” as well as “hand-signaling techniques to coordinate decision-making processes among large groups” (Greenfield, 2017, p. 24); and veterans of the movement developed the Loomio app, which allows activists to propose courses of action and discuss them asynchronously, in recognition that face to face meetings are not always possible (Greenfield, 2017, p. 24). The key is to change the focus from technology to cognition: a smart city is one that is arranged in such a way that it collectively makes smart decisions. On this count, Glasgow’s commitment to become a “learning city” (in which not only citizens undergo continuing education, but the city as such discusses itself and consciously forges an identity and a way forward) seems promising, although the city has a long way to go towards true social inclusion (see Borkowska & Osborne, 2018). City managers that are serious about democracy should both experiment with platforms for digital democracy and recognize the legitimacy of experiments undertaken spontaneously by citizens, in as much as they are effective and inclusive.
Finally, physical spaces, “sidewalks”, must be available for reclamation. Smart cities are fostered by the creation of promiscuous public spaces in which citizens can converge around common problems and interests, and empower each other: city planners cannot cause this convergence, but they can give it a chance, planning for self-organization. Regardless of urban planning philosophy, unused spaces in a city are clearly detrimental to city life: abandoned buildings and unused fields are a sign and a cause of urban blight. Citizen initiatives have turned these abandoned spaces into vegetable gardens and social centers in cities such as Brooklyn and Berlin: Madrid’s Campo de Cebada, an abandoned commercial development site, has been turned into a site of community meetings, cultural events such as film screenings and concerts, and also hosts swimming, skating and tai-chi sessions (Greenfield, 2017, p. 20–21). The management of such spaces for many uses presents a challenge for the community: if a common good such as Campo de Cebada is to subsist, neighbors must step out of their social bubbles to meet and come to agreement with each other, and organize. This management of commons presents concrete problems around common goods, and can get citizens to talk to each other, and to practice politics outside of the polarized and ideological realm of national politics. It is easier to reason and compromise on a schedule for the use of a common space than it is to do so on Brexit; and practice on the former can produce a better performance on the latter. The job of city management is to produce a viable legal and administrative framework for such reclamation projects. If the market has spurned a piece of land, let citizen action experiment in new uses for it (Greenfield, 2017, p. 22).
I have outlined three conditions for smart cities: (1) devolution of political power to cities and neighborhoods, (2) recognition of the possibility and legitimacy of experiments in massive participatory democracy and, (3) a framework that makes it possible for communities to reclaim and manage unused urban spaces. All three conditions involve trust in the communities’ capabilities to self-organize, and therefore go against the planner’s itch, and imply a shift in the mindset underlying traditional, cartesian, urban planning.
17.7 Concluding Remarks
At bottom, what Jane Jacobs proposed was a new attitude towards the unforeseen. The spontaneity generated by diversity interacting with diversity can either be welcomed or seen as a failure of planning. If we see our communities and cities as functioning well, perhaps novelty can be shunned; but if we see them as in need of change, we must work towards designing communities that are capable of generating novelty and change (see Bula, 2015). This implies changing a mindset that I have called control cartesianism and that, in my opinion, is deeply ingrained in western thought, and has informed political thinking beyond urban planning.