Script Approaches to Space and
Environment
Lectures
Lecture 1: The Sphinx in the City (The Industrial City, 19th century) →City
of Fear
• Prostitution, Bad hygiene, bad living conditions, way too many people in city
too few places to live, theft, alcoholism, illness, homelessness, people extremely
immobile because couldn’t afford commuting
• “Professions (like nations) keep their shape by molding their members’
(citizens’) understanding of the past, causing them to forget those events that do
not accord with a righteous image, while keeping alive those memories that do.”
~Sandercock, 1998
• Planners are always privileged people→Problem that these people look on the
city from a bird-eyes-view without seeing the whole of society/the whole city
• As a planner you have the power of shaping a whole environment
• In cities during the industrial revolution many people worked in their homes
→Increase in home-work
• Mass migration to cities during industrial revolution→Not enough space
• People living in cities weren’t able to afford moving somewhere else
• Increase of home-work
• Poverty→widespread use of low-paid, casual work and home-work
• Inability to move (compounded by language & cultural barriers)→People stuck
in their communities
• Incompetent and corrupt local government
• Bad hygienic conditions, dirt→illnesses, diseases
Jacob Riis (inventor of flash) →Photographer who got forward the need of
urban planning
• Urban planning is a tool to imposition a particular kind of moral and social order
• City was seen as a space of fear
→Fear of dirt and unhygienic living conditions
→Fear of disease (city men as ‘biologically unfit’
→Fear of disorder
→Fear of women in public space
• Segregation came naturally but was also policy
• After Booth Survey (1898) map making became popular in Europe→Mapping
where different classes of people in Britain live
• Booth Survey lead to progressive housing legislation that tried to get rid of
problem areas
→Local Government Act (1888), creates new, democratically elected body
London County council
→1890 housing of the Working Classes Act: Provides for redevelopment of
large areas with compulsory purchase guarantee for building working-class
, lodging-housing
→Opens ways for progressive local authorities to take control with borrowing
powers enabling the acquisition of land beyond boundaries of existing boroughs
• The Dumbell Tenement→A room per family with communal court area for
socializing
→didn’t work. Bad hygienic conditions, no air condition…
→→Example of good intention going wrong because privileged planners
planned FOR others
• Hull House (Jane Addams)
→Integration of immigrants from Italian, German, Jewish, Bohemian by living
together
→Example of power of planner
• Call for ‘planning from below’ that takes people actually living in the spaces
into account
• Planning was a lot about hygiene
→Used to rationalize massive destruction
→Mask patriarchal control over women’s bodies in city
, Lecture 2: Social Utopian & Anarchist Geographer/Planners
• De Klinker: Political Café, housing, Bar, Office Space
→Political space→Organize more anarchist principles→Anti-fascism, Anti-
racism, Anti-sexism, etc.
→Discussion, library, artist collective, film café, migrant solidarity…
→Horizontally organized, anti-hierarchy
→Only voluntary work
• The center for gender, sexuality and activism→Based at university→group that
wants to act without hierarchies within a university that is pretty based on
hierarchy
→At Boston University
→Non-hierarchism, rules like anti-sexism, anti-racism, etc.
→still has a board
• Utopia (Greek): ou-topos= ‘no place’ or ‘nowhere’, eu-topos= ‘a good place’
• University/City are factories that produce human capital
→also build utopias
→also create critical thinking
Planning as a Social Mobilization
• Encompassing three major oppositional movements of 19th century
• Emerging in France & England (c. 1820)
• Perspective of victims of industrialization and critique of “industrialism”
→Anti-industrialization
• Objective: political practice of “human liberation” (roots in Enlightenment
social emancipation)→Planning has power to change things in society
Social Utopianism
• Possibilities of a secular life in small communities apart from State
• Money-free economy based on exchange of L time
• Influence of social & physical environment on human character
• Importance for human development of balance between industrial and
agricultural pursuits (‘fields & factories’)
• Free reign given to passionate nature of human beings as 1st break with rational
Benthamite tradition
• Role of play in education and learning
• Community thinking, no money needed
Anarchism
• World based on reciprocal exchange
• Use of federative principle in joining larger units of associated labor
• Self-managing communes
• Regional communities based on landscape & cultural traditions
• Suspicion of all hierarchical relations (i.e., State)
• Virtues of spontaneity as opposed to administered life
• Mutualism and cooperation as alternative to competition
