Liveability and urban architectures:Mol(ecul)ar biopower and the becoming-lively ofSustainable Communities
Abstract
Contemporary analyses of biopolitics and the governance of ‘life-itself’ have concentrated on molecular processes in domains such as medicine and neuroscience. In this paper, I turn an analytical lens on urban architectures, with a focus upon a particular programme of large-scale house-building in the UK: the Sustainable Communities agenda. I argue first that Sustainable Communities constitute a resonant but qualitatively different attempt to plan for and govern life-itself, particularly encapsulated by the term ‘liveability’. Significantly, according to policy and technical documentation, Sustainable Communities appear to address the future at both molar and molecular levels, and through a focus on obduracy in ordinary, banal, everyday spaces (rather than in exceptional or border architectures). My analysis is, however, interwoven with attention to the ‘becoming-lively’ of urban architectures. Drawing on a large, ethnographic research project,the paper offersthree navigational aids to understanding how professionalised deployments of ‘liveability’ become co-opted into, resisted by, or creatively reinterpreted through, practices of inhabitation by residents of Sustainable Communities.
Keywords
Sustainable urbanism; urban planning; urban geography; geographies of architecture; dissonance; childhood and youth; children’s geographies
I Introduction
Ever since Michel Foucault’s critical interrogation of biopower, there has been gathering interest in the exercise of surveillance, control and design over “life itself” (Foucault, 1978, page 143). Countless studies have considered the implications of the confluence of life, politics and finance in: from genetic manipulation to neuroscience, and from pharmacology to the “customised fabrication of DNA sequences” (Rose, 2007, page 13). Compelled by a desire to both control and allow for (carefully selected) contingencies, there is growing agreement that neoliberal modes of governmentality are underpinned by increased intervention against possible threats to kinds of life that are deemed ‘normal’ (Anderson, 2010).
A foundational concept in studies of life-itself has been a shift from intervention at the ‘molar’ to the ‘molecular’ scale, articulated in Nikolas Rose’s (2007) seminal analysis of contemporary biomedical knowledges. For Rose, the molar constitutes the scale of individual (human) bodies and their perceptible components: “limbs, organs, tissues, flows of blood, hormones” (Rose, 2007, page 11). Rose highlights how, until the later-twentieth century, this “molar body” (Rose, 2007, page 11) was visualised and acted upon by an earlier logic of medical intervention,supporting “the state [...] in measures for preserving and managing the collective health of the population” (Rose, 2007, page 24). Rose contrasts such molar knowledges with the rise of a molecular scopic, increasing in intensity from the late-twentieth century onwards.Whilst Rose (2007, page 33) recognises the “need to be cautious about overstating the novelty of these developments”, he nonetheless locates a shift to the molecular scale of genes, DNA, and a range of technologieswhich visualise such life-components. Thus, the molecularnow represents a pervasive “style of thought” (Rose, 2007, page 4) wherein scientific endeavour, policy making, health interventions, and entire commercial industriesare entangled.More recently, scholars have shown how the politics of life-itself are inveigled variegated anticipatory and preventative logics: from climate change to terrorism to bio-threats (Anderson, 2012, page 32; also Amoore, 2006; Braun, 2007).
These advances notwithstanding, there remain important lacunae in contemporary investigations of the politics oflife-itself. The most significant for this paper relates to professional interventions that have gained less attention thanbiomedicine, terrorism, biosecurity, food, and contingency planning:interventions like architecture, planning and urban design. Perhaps these interventions – henceforth termed ‘urban architectures’ – have not been theorised in biopolitical terms because they seem not to resonate wholly with the tendency tomolecular interventions into life-itself. However,it is argued that certain contemporary large-scale housing schemeshave became increasingly characterisedby practices that hold striking parallels with other contemporary forms of biopower. Like Rose (2007), I urge caution about the novelty of these developments: architects and planners have frequently sought to plan for life-itself, especially in large-scale urban programmes. Yet, neither such previous waves of urban development (such as Garden Cities), nor more contemporary forms, have been subject to biopolitical analyses. Critically, thetwenty-first-century English example used in this paper is an excellent case study because – although resonating with historical state-led urban programmes– it is one of several contemporary contexts wherein urban-architectural professionals have explicitly sought both to articulate and to intensifya focus on life-itself.The focus of this paper will, therefore, be on new urban places in Englandplanned under a large, UK-Government-sanctioned project of house-building: the Sustainable Communities agenda (ODPM, 2003).Sustainable Communities represent an important – but not unique – example of the confluence of urban architectures with politics of life-itself.Principally, this is because of the ways inwhich urban architectural practitionerscombineboth molar and molecular processes in the service of a particular version of life: ‘liveability’.
The paper also attends to two further concerns. Firstly,it questions what becomes of Sustainable Communities, after formal planning/construction: how ‘liveability’ mightbecome-lively, through everyday lives lived therein. Several scholars have called for attention to the ways in which ‘ordinary’ subjects might negotiate or resist the ‘expert’ exercise of biopower from below (e.g. Anderson, 2012, Braidotti, 2011). Therefore, this paper is based both upon a critical reading of Sustainable Communitiespolicy documentation and empirical vignettes from a large, ethnographic research project that explored the lives of residents in four new communities. The paper inventoriesthree navigational aidstoarticulate how ‘liveability’ may intersect with residents’ everyday lives – both with specific regard to Sustainable Communities, and as a set of analytical tools for future research into the confluence of urban architectures and politics of life-itself.
Secondly, and herein,the paper offers significant implications for geographical theorisations of architecture. Other than important studies of materiality (Jacobs, 2006) and inhabitation (Lees, 2001), no studies seek to directly interrogate how biopolitical processes are constituted through architectural practices. Thus, section II provides a brief, critical introduction to contemporary geographies of architecture, before introducing the research project and case study communitiesappearing in this paper. Thereafter, section III offers three navigational aids to better conceptualise entanglements of urban-architectural planning/inhabitation.
II Geographies of architecture: analysing Sustainable Communities
This paper focuses upon the constitution of urban architectures through the EnglishSustainable Communities agenda. The term ‘urban architectures’ encompasses a range of materialities, technologies, performances and regulatory frameworks through which urban places are planned, built and inhabited. Conceptually and methodologically, there exist important resonances between the analyses in this paper and recent geographies of architecture. First, it seeks to examine how politics and practices of design interact with inhabitation. Similarly, in Lees’ (2001) call for a critical geography of architecture, earlier approaches to the symbolism and/or iconography of buildings were supplemented with ethnographic methods, designed to witness performances through which a range of actors – including inhabitants – madebuildings meaningful (also Kraftl, 2006, 2009; den Besten et al., 2008 Jacobs and Merriman, 2011). Second, a range of studies has sought to extend Lees’ analyses through attention to the emotions and affects that are designed and felt at buildings (Rose et al., 2010). For instance, Kraftl and Adey (2008) draw on geographical theorisations of affect to examine how particular kinds of atmospheres – rest, homeliness, peace – arebuilt-into and performed at two buildings. Third, important strides have been made in theorising the materialities of built form (Jenkins, 2002; Jacobs, 2006). Thus, Jacobs et al. (2007) demonstrate how particular building technologies (such as windows) are enrolled into the lifecourse of a building – from conception, through inhabitation, through demolition.
Whilst I have reduced geographical scholarship on architecture to a brief, three-fold schema, it is important to note both resonances and dissonances with the approach in this paper. On one hand, the paper draws inspiration from the above studies, clearly drawing out entanglements of design with affective regimes, everyday practices and the particular materialities of stone, water and plant-life. On the other, it deploys these approaches within a novel analytical framework that offers more than another new methodology for studying buildings: namely, an interrogation of biopolitical regimes as these are constituted through architectural design and inhabitation. Specifically, urban architectural practices ‘speak back’ to theorisations of life-itself because of the combination of molar with molecular knowledges.
Geographical studies of architecture have represented one inspiration for the research project upon which this paper is based[1]. The project was a large, four-year, interdisciplinary research effort. It focussed upon four new communities in the Milton Keynes-South Midlands Growth Area, located between London and Birmingham, itself one of four Growth Areas in which the New Labour Government sought to concentrate large-scale house-building after 2000. Given that the Sustainable Communities plan involved commitment to hundreds of thousands of new homes in southern England, it was striking that, when the project began, little was known about experiences of their residents. The project therefore aimed to examine everyday lives, mobilities and senses of citizenship amongst residents living in such communities, but particularly young people aged 9-16. An ethnographic approach was adopted, underpinned by six months of participant observation at each community. Across the four communities, researchers also undertook detailed, directed qualitative research with 175 young people, professional stakeholders, and family groups. In brief, that research comprised: 311 semi-structured interviews with young people (each interviewed up to four times); 22 ‘community walks’ (walks directed by young people), 32 semi-structured interviews with professional stakeholders; a ‘GPS’ week, whereby 90 young people carried a GPS device, which recorded their movements, and took part in subsequent interviews about their mobilities; participatory community workshops, involving adult and child residents and a range of policymakers and practitioners (see Kraftl and Horton, 2007, for fuller details). All interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed and collated with observational fieldnotes before thematic analysis in NVivo[2].
Given that this paper seeks to offer several “navigational aids” (Lee and Motzkau, 2011, page 8) for interrogating biopolitics in and of Sustainable Communities, it cannot do justice to the large qualitative dataset produced by the project. Thus, the paper proceeds through critical discussion of relevant policy documents, and through a series of indicative quotations and observations from two of the four case study communities. The analysis is led by key biopolitical concerns evident in policy documents, but then follows through how some of these concerns are experienced, enlivened or negotiated by residents. The two communities included in the analysis for this paper have been chosen because, whilst of comparable size, they represent both different incarnations of Sustainable Communities policy, and contrasting expressions of life-as-‘liveability’.
The first community – Hettonbury[3] – is a so-called ‘sustainable urban extension’, which will comprise approximately 1,000 new homes. It is located on the periphery of a large South Midlands town, on a formerly undeveloped floodplain. It has been vaunted as an exemplar for the Sustainable Communities agenda, precisely because ofits meticulous, holistic planning processesand objectives. Hettonbury was built to deal with several future problems: climate change and resource depletion, where “most housing developments fail to deliver high standards of energy efficiency and sustainability” (Energy Saving Trust, 2006, page 2[4]); the embedding of sustainable principles “in conventional forms of housing that could meet the expectations of prospective homebuyers” (Energy Saving Trust, 2006, page 2); enormous pressure for housing in the South Midlands; the threat of one-in-a-hundred year flood-events; desire for a mixture of housing tenures (owner-occupied, rental and Local Authority-controlled) that would foster social cohesion. Hettonbury is notable for the ‘Enquiry by Design’ (EbD) approach that was used. This led to a complex constellation of stakeholders (local communities, Local Authorities, private developers, planning and design professionals, Housing Associations) being involved in an iterative consultation lasting several years prior to building commencement[5]. Thereafter, this complexity was transferred into a meticulous, “clear and demanding design code which left potential developers in no doubt of their obligations” (Energy Saving Trust, 2006, page 2). The design code specified tremendous detail about the variety of housing styles, the syntax of public streets/squares, green-spaces, the distance of houses from the street, and much more besides.
Also comprising 1,000 new homes, the second community – Romsworth – bears many superficial similarities with Hettonbury. However, it differs in three respects. First, it is a stand-alone settlement, built on former farming land five miles from the nearest town. Second, whilst homes meet minimum UK environmental standards, few feature the environmental technologies at Hettonbury. Third, and most significantly, the history of Romsworth’s planning is quite different. The village site was sold by a local landowner on the premise that a ‘community’ would be built. Thus, when the land was sold to subsequent developers, this imperative had to be incorporated into Romsworth’s layout, green spaces, and facilities. In this last respect, the plan has been successful – unusually for the UK, for what effectively a large village, it houses a surgery and dentist, several shops, a school, a playground, a community centre, and a cafe. In terms of Romsworth’surban architecture, the effect is less obvious (Plate 1): superficially, it looks like a neo-traditional village.
PLATE 1: ROMSWORTH VILLAGE, INCLUDING ‘LOCAL’ HOUSING STYLE AND PUBLIC GREENSPACE (LEFT)
Whilst unique in some respects, Hettonbury and Romsworth bear clear similarities with other planned communities, built both in previous historical epochs and other contemporary geographical contexts (from Garden Cities to postmodern urbanism). To repeat: paralleling Rose’s (2007) observation for the medical sciences, there is a long history of attending to concepts such as sociability in urban architectural professions (e.g. Hall and Ward, 1998). Whilst there is not space to rehearse the history of large-scale town-planning, the paper’s conclusion nevertheless stresses some of these resonances. However, the aim of the remainder of the paper is to demonstrate how Sustainable Communities – in their design and inhabitation – offer a particularly important, if not more intense, set of navigational aids for understanding the conflation of urban architecture with contemporary efforts to govern life-itself.In particular, the following analyses are concerned with the explicit naming of particular forms of life (as ‘liveability’), the dense complexity of contemporary masterplanning processes, and attentiveness to facets of life that have come to characterise contemporary biopolitics in other domains – specifically, molecularised technologies and regimes of affect.
III Sustainable Communities and mol(ecul)arbiopolitics
The UK New Labour Government of 1997-2010 engaged in several large-scale, purportedly transformative capital projects. Raco (2005, page 333) argues these projects represented “holistic” spatial strategies whereby “local economic, social, political and environmental problems [were] tackled simultaneously”. Thus, as part of a programme for the renaissance of Britain’s urban places(Lees, 2003), the Sustainable Communities Plan sought simultaneously:
•“to accommodate the new homes we need by 2021 […];
• to encourage people to remain and move back into urban areas […];
•to tackle the poor quality of life and lack of opportunity in certain urban areas as a matter of social justice […];
• to strengthen the factors in all urban areas which will enhance their economic success […];
• to make sustainable urban living practical, affordable and attractive” (ODPM, 2000, p.37).
The earlier Urban Task Force Report (Rogers et al., 1999), which formed an inspiration for the Plan, articulated an early link between such holism and questions of ‘life-itself’:
“[a] key message [...] was that urban neighbourhoods should be vital, safe and beautiful places to live. This is not just a matter of aesthetics, but of economics. As cities compete with each other [...] their credentials as attractive, vibrant homes are major sellingpoints. (Rogers, 1999, page 5, emphases added)
Encompassing economics, safety, community, social integration, place-making, aesthetics (and far more) it is the holism of this agenda that is key.Itarticulates – even if it does not necessarily deliver – a “qualitative increase in our capacities to engineer our vitality, our development” (Rose, 2007, page 4), through an attempt to subject all knowable elements of urban lifeto intervention and capitalisation.This agenda is couched in the language of ‘life-itself’: of ‘vibrancy’, ‘vitality’ (in the above quotation) and, importantly, as noted in the next section, ‘liveability’. At this general level,the Task Force report can be understoodasa fairly typical example of the articulation of life-processes that constitutesboth molar and molecular formsbiopower.Indeed, the clear economic objectives (and associated emphasis upon private capital or PFI in financing Sustainable Communities) reinforce a sense of what Rose (2007, page 31) calls “the capitalization of vitality”, through the increasingly “path-dependent” nature of professional, governmental and business worlds.Yet most critical commentators would (rightly) point out that these processes seem at most to denote an intensification of the focus upon life-itself, rather than a “step-change” (Rose, 2007, page 4). Nonetheless, whilst Sustainable Communities may appear to offer relatively little novelty in terms of urban planning, there are important resonances and dissonances in what they (and similar programmes) offer to theorisations of life-itself. Clearly, this claim requires more detailed examination of Sustainable Communities and, especially, the concept of ‘liveability’. Therefore, the rest of this section outlines three navigational aids through which the conflation of urban architectures and the politics of life-itself might be understood: resonance; obduracy; dissonance.