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> Le Monde diplomatique, February, 2001.
> http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en/2001/02/16cities
>
> NEW CAPITALISM, NEW ISOLATION
>
> A flexible city of strangers
>
> Once people used to come to the city in search of
> anonymity, diversity and the freedom to meet others.
> Cities were also places of collective struggle and
> solidarity. Now, just as the workplace is affected by a
> new system of flexible working, so the city, too, risks
> losing its charm as businesses and architecture
> become standardised and impersonal.
>
> by RICHARD SENNETT *
>
>
> Cities can be badly-run, crime-infested, dirty, decaying. Yet many people
> think it worth living in even the worst of them. Why? Because cities have
> the potential to make us more complex human beings. A city is a place
> where
> people can learn to live with strangers, to enter into the experiences and
> interests of unfamiliar lives. Sameness stultifies the mind; diversity
> stimulates and expands it.
>
> The city can allow people to develop a richer, more complex sense of
> themselves. They are not just bankers or roadsweepers, Afro-Caribbeans or
> Anglo-Saxons, speakers of English or of Spanish, bourgeois or proletarian:
> they can be some or all of these things, and more. They are not subject to
> a
> fixed scheme of identity. People can develop multiple images of their
> identities, knowing that who they are shifts, depending upon whom they are
> with. That is the power of strangeness: freedom from arbitrary definition
> and identification.
>
> Writer Willa Cather was haunted in small-town America by the fear that her
> lesbianism would be discovered. When she finally arrived in New York's
> Greenwich Village in 1906, she wrote to a friend: "At last, in this
> indecipherable place, I can breathe". In public, city dwellers may don an
> impassive mask, act cool and indifferent to others on the street; but in
> private,they can be aroused by these strange contacts, their certainties
> shaken by the presence of others.
>
> These virtues are not inevitable. One of the big issues in urban life is
> how
> to make the complexities that a city contains interact - so that people
> become truly cosmopolitan - and how to turn crowded streets into places of
> self-knowledge, not fear. The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has
> referred to "the neighbourliness of strangers", a phrase that captures the
> aspiration we should have in designing our cities.
>
> Architects and planners are faced with new challenges. Globalisation has
> transformed production which now allows people to work more flexibly, less
> rigidly and makes them experience the city differently.
>
> In the 19th century the German sociologist Max Weber compared modern
> business organisations to military organisations. Both worked on the
> principle of a pyramid, with the general or boss at the apex and the
> soldiers or workers at the base. The division of labour minimised
> duplication and gave each group of workers at the base a distinct
> function.
> In this way the corporation executive at the apex could determine how the
> assembly line or back office functioned, just as the general could
> strategically command platoons far from his command post. And as the
> division of labour progressed, the need for different kinds of workers
> expanded far more rapidly than the need for more bosses.
>
> In industrial production, Weber's pyramid became embodied in Fordism, a
> kind of military micro-management of a worker's time and effort which a
> few
> experts could dictate from the top. It was graphically illustrated by
> General Motors' Willow Run automobile plant in the United States, a
> mile-long,quarter-mile wide edifice in which raw iron and glass entered at
> one end and a finished car emerged at the other. Only a strict,
> controlling
> work regime could coordinate production on this giant scale. In the white
> collar world, the strict control by corporations like IBM in the 1960s
> mirrored this industrial process.
>
> A generation ago businesses began to revolt against the Weberian pyramid.
> They sought to " de-layer "organisations, to remove levels of bureaucracy
> (using new information technologies in place of bureaucrats) and destroy
> the
> practice of fixed-function work, substituting instead teams which work
> short-term on specific tasks. In this new business strategy, teams compete
> against one another, trying to respond as effectively and quickly as
> possible to goals set by the top. Instead of each person doing his or her
> own particular bit in a defined chain of command, function is duplicated:
> many different teams compete to do the same task fastest and best. The
> corporation can thus respond more quickly to changing market demands.
>
> The apologists for the new world of work claim it is also more democratic
> than the old military-style organisation. But that is not so. The Weberian
> pyramid has been replaced by a circle with a dot in the centre. At the
> centre,a small number of managers make decisions, set tasks, judge
> results;
> the information revolution has given them more instantaneous control over
> the corporation's workings than in the old system, where orders often
> modulated and evolved as they passed down the chain of command. The teams
> working on the periphery of the circle are left free to respond to output
> targets set by the centre, free to devise means of executing tasks in
> competition with one another. But no freer than they ever were to decide
> what those tasks are.
>
> In the Weberian pyramid of bureaucracy, rewards came for doing your job as
> best you could. In the dotted circle, rewards come to teams winning over
> other teams. The economist Robert Frank calls it the winner-take-all
> organisation; sheer effort no longer produces reward. This bureaucratic
> reformulation, Frank argues, contributes to the great inequalities of pay
> and perks in flexible organisations.
>
> No long term
>
> The mantra of the flexible work-place is "no long term". Career paths have
> been replaced by jobs which consist of specific and limited tasks; when
> the
> task ends, the job is often over. In the high-tech sector in Silicon
> Valley,
> California, the average length of employment is now about eight
> months.People constantly change their working associates: modern
> management
> theory has it that the "shelf life" of a team ought to be at most a year.
>
> This pattern does not dominate the work-place at present. Rather, it
> represents a leading edge of change, what businesses ought to become:
> no-one is going to start a new organisation based on the principle of
> permanent jobs. The flexible organisation does not promote loyalty or
> fraternity any more than it promotes democracy. It is hard to feel
> committed
> to a corporation which has no defined character, hard to act loyally to an
> unstable institution which shows no loyalties to you. Business leaders are
> now finding that lack of commitment translates into poor productivity and
> to
> an unwillingness to keep corporate secrets.
>
> The lack of fraternity that comes from "no long term" is rather more
> subtle.
> Task-work puts people under enormous stress; and recriminations among
> losing
> teams mark the final stages of working together. Again, trust of an
> informal
> sort takes time to develop; you have to get to know people. And the
> experience of being only temporarily in an organisation prompts people to
> keep loose, not to get involved, since you are going to exit soon.
>
> Besides, this lack of mutual engagement is one of the reasons it is so
> hard
> for trade unions to organise workers in flexible industries or businesses
> as
> in Silicon Valley; the sense of fraternity as a shared fate, a durable set
> of common interests, has been weakened. Socially, the short-term regime
> produces a paradox. People work intensely, under great pressure, but their
> relations to others remain curiously superficial. This is not a world in
> which getting deeply involved with other people makes much sense in the
> long
> run.
>
> Flexible capitalism has precisely the same effects on the city as it does
> on
> the workplace itself: superficial, short-term relations at work,
> superficial
> and disengaged relations in the city. It appears in three forms. The most
> self-evident is physical attachment to the city. Rates of geographic
> mobility are very high for flexible workers. Temps are the single
> fastest-growing sector of the labour market. Temporary nurses, for
> example,
> are eight times more likely to move house in a two-year period than are
> single-employer nurses. In the higher reaches of the economy, executives
> frequently moved as much in the past as they do in the present. But the
> movements were different in kind; they remained within the groove of a
> company, and the company defined their "place", the turf of their lives,
> no
> matter where they were on the map. It is just that thread which the new
> work-place breaks. Some specialists in urban studies have argued that, for
> this elite, style of life in the city matters more than
> their jobs, with certain zones - gentrified, filled with sleek restaurants
> and specialised services - replacing the corporation as an anchor.
>
> Skin architecture
>
> The second expression of the new capitalism is the standardisation of the
> environment. A few years ago, on a tour of New York's Chanin Building, an
> art-deco palace with elaborate offices and splendid public spaces, the
> head
> of a large, new-economy corporation remarked: "It would never suit us.
> People might become too attached to their offices. They might think they
> belong here."
>
> The flexible office is not meant to be a place where you nestle in. The
> office architecture of flexible firms requires a physical environment
> which
> can be quickly reconfigured - at the extreme, the "office" can become just
> a
> computer terminal. The neutrality of new buildings also results from their
> global currency as investment units; for someone in Manila easily to buy
> or
> sell 100,000 square feet of office space in London, the space itself needs
> the uniformity and transparency of money. This is why the style elements
> of
> new-economy buildings become what US architectural critic Ada Louise
> Huxtable calls "skin architecture": the surface of the building dolled-up
> with design, its innards ever
> more neutral, standard, and capable of instant refiguration.
>
> Alongside skin architecture, we have the standardisation of public
> consumption - a global network of shops selling the same commodities in
> the
> same kinds of spaces whether they are located in Manila, Mexico City or
> London. It is hard to become attached to a particular Gap or Banana
> Republic; standardisation breeds indifference. Put it another way. The
> problem of institutional loyalties in the work-place - now beginning to
> sober up managers once blindly enthusiastic about endless corporate
> re-engineering - finds its parallel in the urban public realm of
> consumption. Attachment and engagement with specific places is dispelled
> under the aegis of this new regime. Cities cease to offer the strange, the
> unexpected or the arousing. Equally, the accumulation of shared history,
> and
> so of collective memory, diminishes in these neutral public spaces.
> Standardised consumption attacks local meanings in the same way the new
> work-place attacks ingrown, shared histories among workers.
>
> The third expression of the new capitalism is less visible to the eye.
> High-pressure, flexible work profoundly disorients family life. The
> familiar
> press images - neglected children, adult stress, geographic uprooting - do
> not quite get to the heart of this disorientation. It is rather that the
> codes of conduct which rule the modern work world would shatter families
> if
> taken home from the office: don't commit, don't get involved, think
> short-term. The assertion of "family values" by the public and politicians
> has a more than right-wing resonance; it is a reaction, often inchoate but
> strongly felt, of the threats to family solidarity in the new economy. The
> prominent American social critic Christopher Lasch drew the image of the
> family as a "haven in a heartless world". That image takes on a particular
> urgency when work becomes at once more unpredictable and more demanding of
> adult time. One result of this conflict, by now well-documented in regard
> to
> middle-aged employees, is that adults withdraw from civic participation in
> the struggle to solidify and organise family life; the civic becomes yet
> another demand on time and energies in short supply at home.
>
> The 'passive beloved'
>
> That leads to one of the effects of globalisation on cities. The new
> global
> elite,operating in cities like New York, London and Chicago, avoids the
> urban political realm. It wants to operate in the city but not rule it; it
> composes a regime of power without responsibility.
>
> In Chicago in 1925, for example, political and economic power went hand in
> hand. Presidents of the city's top 80 corporations sat on 142 hospital
> boards,accounted for 70% of the trustees of colleges and universities. Tax
> revenues from 18 national corporations in Chicago formed 23% of the city's
> municipal budget. By contrast, in New York now, few chief executives of
> global firms are trustees of its educational institutions and none sit on
> the boards of its hospitals. And it has been well documented how footloose
> multinational companies like Rupert Murdoch's News Corp manage largely to
> avoid paying taxes, local or national.
>
> The reason for this change is that the global economy is not rooted in the
> city in the sense of depending on control of the city as a whole. It is
> instead an island economy, literally so within the island of Manhattan in
> New York, architecturally so in places like Canary Wharf in London, which
> resemble the imperial compounds of an earlier era. As sociologists John
> Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells have shown, this global wealth does not
> trickle down or spread out very far beyond the global enclave.
>
> Indeed, the politics of the global enclave cultivates a kind of
> indifference
> to the city which Marcel Proust, in an entirely different context, called
> the "passive beloved" phenomenon. Threatening to leave, go anywhere in the
> world, the global firm is given enormous tax breaks to stay - a profitable
> seduction made possible by the firm appearing indifferent to the places
> where it touches down. In other words globalisation poses a problem of
> citizenship in cities as well as
> nations. Cities can't tap into the wealth of these corporations, and the
> corporations take little responsibility for their own presence in the
> city.
> The threat of absence, of leaving, makes possible this avoidance of
> responsibility; and we lack the political mechanisms to make unstable,
> flexible institutions contribute fairly for the privileges they enjoy in
> the
> city.
>
> All this has an impact on urban civil society which rests on a compromise
> based on mutual dissociation. That means the truce of leaving one another
> alone, the peace of mutual indifference. This is one reason why, on the
> positive side, the modern city is like an accordion easily able to expand
> to
> accommodate new waves of migrants - the pockets of difference are sealed.
> On
> the negative side, mutual accommodation through dissociation spells the
> end
> of citizenship practices - which mean understanding divergent interests -
> as
> well as a loss of simple human curiosity about other people.
>
> At the same time, the flexibility of the modern workplace creates a sense
> of
> incompleteness. Flexible time is serial - you do one project, then another
> unrelated one - rather than cumulative. But there is no sense that,
> because
> something is missing in your own life, you should turn outward to others,
> toward that "neighbourliness of strangers".
>
> That suggests something about the art of making better cities today. We
> need
> to overlay different activities in the same space, as family activity once
> overlay working space. The incompleteness of capitalist time returns us to
> the issue which marked the very emergence of the industrial city. A city
> which broke apart the domus - that spatial relation which had, before the
> coming of industrial capitalism, combined family, work, ceremonial public
> spaces and more informal social spaces. Today, we need to repair the
> collectivity of space to combat the serial time of modern labour.
>
> * Professor of sociology at the London School of Economics
>
>
>
____________________________________________
Dr. Duncan Fuller
Division of Geography and Environmental Management
Lipman Building
University of Northumbria at Newcastle
Newcastle upon Tyne
UK

Tel (Direct): (0191) 2273753
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'Beyond the Academy?  Critical geographies in Action'
University of Northumbria at Newcastle
12-14 September 2001

Conference website - http://gem.unn.ac.uk/conferences/beyond.html