Abstract
This chapter attempts to articulate a novel approach to thinking about urban politics and urban public policy. Building on the observation that all action requires reliance, the chapter argues that elements of the urban environment function as what we call reliance structures. These are the structures that allow agents to realize their intentions as actions. That is, reliance structures are constitutive features of the capacity for action, that is, for agency. The chapter then argues that the urban can be understood as a network of reliance structures. It follows that the urban partially constitutes human agency—agential capacities are partially constituted by urban reliance systems. This is meant to be a substantive diagnostic tool for making sense of the ways that urban public policy can produce and reproduce forms of human agency and, ultimately, the way that the urban partially determines human freedom.
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Notes
- 1.
From Moisei Ginzburg, Sovremennaya Arkhitektura 4–5 (1927) translated by Ross Wolfe, “Dom Narkomfin in Moscow 1929.” The Charnel House. https://thecharnelhouse.org/2013/10/05/dom-narkomfin-in-moscow-1929/ (retrieved November 20, 2017).
- 2.
For a detailed case study supporting this claim, but in this case focusing not on communist norms but instead supposedly liberal norms, see James C. Scott’s discussion of Brasilia, in James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 117–132.
- 3.
This work has begun in legal scholarship. See, for example, Neal Kumar Katyal, “Architecture as Crime Control,” Yale Law Journal 111 (2002), 1039–1139; Lee Tien, “Architectural Regulation and the Evolution of Social Norms,” Yale Journal of Law and Technology 7 (2004–2005), 1–22; Sarah Schindler, “Architectural Exclusion, Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of the Built Environment,” Yale Law Journal 124, no. 6 (2014–2015), 1934–2024.
- 4.
Jonathan Wolff, Ethics and Public Policy: A Philosophical Inquiry (New York City, Routledge, 2011); and Andrew Cohen, Philosophy, Ethics, and Public Policy (New York City, Routledge, 2015).
- 5.
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New York City, Penguin, 2008). There is a chapter on school choice, but it does not contextualize that issue within a broader analysis of urban policy.
- 6.
Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2016).
- 7.
See Bryan G. Norton, Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005), and citations contained therein (especially Chaps. 7 and 8).
- 8.
Sharon Meagher, Philosophy and the City (Albany, SUNY Press, 2008). An important exception includes (but is not limited) to Susan Bickford, “Constructing Inequality, City Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship” (210–218). Representative chapters by contemporary Anglophone philosophers such as Iris Marion Young’s “City Life as a Normative Ideal” (163–174) and Andrew Light’s “Elegy for a Garden” (291–297) are excellent, but perhaps are dissatisfying when cast against more sophisticated philosophically informed work on public policy, such as the texts cited above.
- 9.
See, for example, Shane Epting, “The Moral Dimensions of Infrastructure,” Science and Engineering Ethics 22 (2016), 435.
- 10.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1961); Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press, 2003); David Harvey, Social Justice and the City, Revised Edition (Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press, 2009); Edward Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
- 11.
Susan Fainstein, The Just City (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2010); Warren Magnusson, Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City (New York City, Routledge, 2011).
- 12.
Robert Caro, The Master Builder (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), p. 319.
- 13.
Thomas J. Campanella, “How Low Did He Go?” Citylab, accessed Sunday December 17, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/07/how-low-did-he-go/533019/.
- 14.
But architects, legal theorists, and new media theorists do not do this. Respectively, see, for example, Lawrence J. Vale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992); Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York City, Basic Books, 1999); Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2004). See also the citations in note 3.
- 15.
For more on effective rights, see G.A. Cohen, “Are Disadvantaged Workers Who Take Hazardous Jobs Forced to Take Hazardous Jobs?” in G.A. Cohen, History, Labour, and Freedom (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988), 239–54.
- 16.
Katyal, “Architecture as Crime Control,” 1042, and Schindler, “Architectural Exclusion, Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of the Built Environment,” 1975–1988, provide many further examples.
- 17.
Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (1980), 121.
- 18.
In general, see the essays collected in G.L. Albrecht, ed., Handbook of Disability Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publications, 2001), and especially David Wasserman, “Philosophical Issues in the Definition and Social Response to Disability,” infra. pp. 219–251, and Shelly Tremain “On The Government of Disability,” Social Theory and Practice 27 (2001), 617. More generally, see Elizabeth Anderson, “What is the Point of Equality?” 109 Ethics (1999), 287.
- 19.
See, for example, Daniel M. Abramson, Obsolescence: An Architectural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
- 20.
For more on this, see Abramson, Obsolescence, Chap. 2, for a discussion of how the concept of obsolescence was developed and then deployed as purely technical, but actually must properly be understood to be deeply political.
- 21.
A related point here is that the technologies available for producing a rights-realizing environment are not dictated by nonpolitical, that is, purely ‘technical’, considerations. Rather, the process by which a right is realized in the environment is itself a political process, and, crucially, the character of that process determines the material character of the right in question. For more, see Andrew Feenberg “Subversive Rationalization, Technology, Power and Democracy,” Inquiry 35 nos. 3–4 (Sept./Dec. 1992), 301.
- 22.
Bryan Goebel, “Divided by a Highway, East Palo Alto Looks To Reconnect Its West Side,” Streetsblog SF, accessed Dec 17, 2017, http://perma.cc/B8C2-LGHP.
- 23.
The tradition of the economic analysis of the law employs this approach. See Ronald Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost,” Journal of Law and Economics, 3 (1960), 1–44; Guido Calabresi, The Cost of Accidents (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1970); Guido Calabresi and Douglas Melamed, “Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability, One View of the Cathedral,” Harvard Law Review 85 (1972), 1089–1128; and very generally Richard Posner, Economic Analysis of Law, 1st Edition (Boston, Little Brown, 1973). For discussions of the economic analysis of the criminal law, in particular, see the classic Gary S. Becker, “Crime and Punishment, An Economic Approach,” Journal of Political Economy 76, no. 2 (Mar. – Apr. 1968), 169–217; and the slightly more recent Richard A. Posner, “An Economic Theory of the Criminal Law,” Columbia Law Review 85, no. 6 (October 1985), 1193–1231.
- 24.
For extensive arguments along these lines, see Jules Coleman, Risks and Wrongs (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1992), Arthur Ripstein, Equality, Responsibility, and the Law (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Arthur Ripstein, Private Wrongs (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2016).
- 25.
In particular, the move toward thinking in terms of justice, which is a deontic concept, is in no small part due to the influence of John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap 1971).
- 26.
For one contemporary canonical account of this phenomenon, see H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 2nd Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), especially Chaps. 5 and 6. See also Brian Skyrms, Evolution and the Social Contract, 2nd Edition (New York City: Oxford University Press, 2014).
- 27.
Donald Davidson, “Agency,” in Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, Clarendon Press 1980), 59.
- 28.
Davidson, “Agency,” 61.
- 29.
Joel Feinberg, “Action and Responsibility,” in Feinberg, Doing and Deserving (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1970), 119–151.
- 30.
R. A. Duff, Intention, Agency, and Criminal Liability: Philosophy of Action and the Criminal Law (Oxford, Blackwell, 1990), 84. Notice that Duff’s claim that “we may disagree” about the proper description of my intentional action is ambiguous between it being permissible to disagree and it being merely a fact that people happen to disagree. Duff demurs on resolving this ambiguity since he merely needs the existence of disagreement, permissible or not, to motivate the claim that one function of the law (and in particular the criminal law and the law of torts) is to settle the question of what the proper description of intentional action is.
- 31.
For more, see my “Surfaces and Boundaries” (on file with author) and Anton Ford, “The Province of Human Agency,” Noûs doi:10.1111/nous.12178.
- 32.
Phenomenologically, tools often come to seem to be extensions of our bodies. The iconic statement is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith (NYC, Routledge Classics, 2002), 175–176.
- 33.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (NYC: W.W. Norton [1930] 1962), 42. For the extension of this point to architecture, see Mark Wigley, “The Disciplining of Architecture,” 15 Assemblage (1991), 6–29, 8.
- 34.
For a biological take on the relationship between environment and agency, see Kim Sterelny, “Minds: Extended or Scaffolded?” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9, no. 4 (2010), 465–481.
- 35.
Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (NYC, Routledge, 1992), 157. The passage Seltzer is commenting on is from Henry Ford, My Life and Work (NYC, Doubleday, 1923), 108.
- 36.
One common activity of the state on the municipal level, then, is the policing of reliance structures so that they support only certain activities.
- 37.
The concept of foundational reliance structures is built on Stephen Hall and Alex Schafran’s concept of the foundational urban system. See Stephen Hall and Alex Schafran, “From Foundational Economics and the Grounded City to Foundational Urban Systems,” Foundational Economy Working Paper, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK, May 2017. https://foundationaleconomycom.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/2foundational-urban-systems-for-mundane-economy-3-0213.pdf.
- 38.
Jim Dwyer, “Pushing New Yorkers Beyond the End of the Line,” New York Times, November 28, 2017.
- 39.
Jeremy Waldron, “Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom,” UCLA Law Review 39 (1991–1992), 295, 315.
- 40.
On the public policy supporting financialization of housing, see Raquel Rolnik, “Late Neoliberalism: The Financialization of Homeownership and Housing Rights,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no 3 (May 2013), 1058–1066. See also Manuel B. Albers, The Financialization of Housing (Oxford: Routledge, 2016).
- 41.
For more on the threat that financialization poses to multiple forms of life, see David J. Madden and Peter Marcuse, In Defense of Housing (London: Verso, 2016).
- 42.
I thank Alex Schafran and Stephen Hall for extended discussions of the material in this chapter.
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Smith, M.N. (2018). Reliance Structures: How Urban Public Policy Shapes Human Agency. In: Boonin, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93907-0_60
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