Thus far, the deliberative tradition has remained decidedly humanist. Its address to power is based on empowering communities, building social voice, intermediating between diverse interests, and organizing for agonistic engagement between stakeholders. The ambition is to rehumanize the city by returning authority and control to the citizens and residents of a city; to ensure that decision-makers are not allowed to fall into rule-based, depersonalized, or
centralized governance of urban life. The full spectrum of urban affairs, from civil defense and waste or traffic management to economic planning, cultural management, and housing
allocation, is expected to be subjected to democratic audit, measured for human consequence,
and placed under the scrutiny of the city’s many communities.
It is hard to disagree with much of this, not only because it makes democratic sense, but also because much damage – to those without rights, power, or means – has been done as a
consequence of centralized planning. The unfortunate legacy of urban monoculture
(consumption only, production only, spectacle only, gentrification) – sprawl, erosion of the commons, social and spatial marginalization of the poor or minorities, heavy policing of difference and dissent, ejection of migrants and itinerants – might have been avoided without such planning. The question I wish to pose, instead, is whether the humanism of deliberative thinking is able to deliver its ambition, whether the unspoken assumption that it is
conscious/deliberating human actors – in and beyond the city – who make and unmake urban social life is valid. It is a question that goes to the heart of the determinants of social life – including human rationality, behavior, and culture – in a city. My argument is that urban material culture, that is, the entanglements of humans and non-humans that make up social practice and associational life, profoundly affects urban possibility. Conscious deliberations form a small part of an urban society supported by, and made through, a “pre-cognitive” and
“trans-human” environment that brings into play many actants and structuring rhythms.
Nigel Thrift and I (2002) have argued that cities might be thought of as machinic entities;
engines of order, repetition, and innovation (sparked by the clash of elements and bodies) that drive the urban experience, including what humans make of themselves, others, and their environment. The urban environment is a meshwork of steel, concrete, natural life, wires, wheels, digital codes, and humans placed in close proximity and it is the rhythms of the juxtapositions and associations – coming together in symbolic projections, cultural routines, institutional practices, regulatory norms, physical flows, technological regimes, experience of the landscape, software systems – that surge through the human experience. The machinic rhythms of the city, I would argue, blend together the human and the urban condition, making people subjects of a specific kind, with their demeanor and outlook (compared to that of humans in other time-spaces) formed by their inhabitation of the urban environment and, most importantly, its inhabitation in them, fixed through these rhythms. Such material ordering of urban being is by no means confined to local inputs, but includes others of various spatial composition and provenance that form part of the spatially dispersed meshwork in which cities exist as nodes regulated from many directions (e.g., government bureaucracies, internet traffic, weather systems, commodity chains).
The precise details of such ordering are far from fully understood. However, some of the behavioral pushes, in our times of experiencing the city of extreme urban global exposure and hybridization, might include an adaptability to multiple sensory, technological, and
environmental inputs, an ability to inhabit many time-spaces of dwelling, meaning, and
community, and to cohabit with significant others that include non-humans, and a requirement to negotiate a world fully revealed, with all its risks and opportunities, delights and
disenchantments. Urban planners, including deliberative planners, can hardly be described as unaware of the city’s material environment. If anything, a central professional imperative is to manage social life through interventions in the city’s physical, technological, and natural environment (e.g., zoning regulations, infrastructure projects, land and building planning
decisions, policies towards housing, public space, and the economy, urban landscape and architecture projects). My point, instead, is that the material environment tends to be treated as an exogenous factor serving or affecting human practice, rather than as an intrinsic component of human being in the city, threaded into the social conscious and unconscious (Amin and Thrift 2012).
This difference is vividly revealed in the treatment of the role of public space in urban civic culture. Humanist planning (deliberative or other) has long looked for ways of enhancing civic behavior by altering the terms of human interaction in public space. Typically, interventions have ranged from facilitating leisurely circulation and mingling in open spaces such as parks, squares, shopping malls, and marinas, to planning for social diversity and interaction in neighborhoods, housing estates, and schools. In recent times of urban social fracture and fragmentation, it has been hoped that schemes such as pedestrianized streets, well-managed parks, open-air events, community gardens, and mixed housing schemes can help to rebuild a sense of the shared commons, civic responsibility, and social recognition out of a combination of public appreciation of the shared spaces and enhanced contact between people from diverse backgrounds. The quality of play among strangers is considered to be the key to civic
becoming. Outcomes on the ground, however, as a rich archive of research on public spaces confirms, have been mixed – social indifference or hostility towards the stranger in some instances, self-interest or resigned tolerance in others, or glimmers of recognition in yet others.
I am less interested here in explaining this variety than in asking whether the achievements (and disappointments) of urban public culture can be traced to inter-human dynamics in a city’s public spaces. I have argued elsewhere that even when public spaces resonate with civic energy and mutual regard, for example, in the busy street, the noisy market, the multicultural festival, the well-used library, they do so because of largely pre-cognitive practices of human habitation of these spaces, experienced as negotiations of “situated surplus” rather than
encounters between friendly/unfriendly strangers (Amin 2008). My claim is that the situation itself – characterized by many bodies and things placed in close juxtaposition, many
temporalities, fixities and flows tangled together, many rhythms and repetitions of use, many visible and hidden patterns of ordering, many domestications of time, orientation, and flow, many framings of architecture, infrastructure, and landscape – profoundly shapes human
conduct, including the balance between civic and non-civic behavior and belief. Accordingly, practices of recognition of the commons, curiosity for others, or civic responsibility may have more to do with the disciplines of presence and regulation in a plural space and with the everyday negotiation of ordered multiplicity (human and non-human) than has been hitherto recognized. The rhythms themselves of “throwntogetherness” (Massey 2005) might be at work in producing social affects such as sensing the crowd as safe, diversity as unthreatening, the commons as provisioning, individual claim as provisional and partial, and public presence as being among rather than with others.
In this reading of civic culture, the ways in which humans are entangled in the material culture of public space, in the rhythms of a given landscape, come to the fore. If this thesis has some merit, what are its implications for deliberative/humanist planning? I think it shows up the limitations of, and possibilities beyond, a focus on human deliberation and recognition as the
staple of urban citizenship. It forces us to consider, for example, how the aesthetic of public space, manifest on billboards, public art, symbolic projections (e.g., advertising slogans and political manifestos), architectural style, landscape design, and so on, works upon public culture. Many a lament – often exaggerated – is heard about the manipulations of public culture by the spectacles of capitalism, fomenting consumerism, materialist escape, flight from the present, selfishness, and greed. But why not consider the possibility of alternative projections that work on the side of civic regard and living with difference or for the commons? This might involve experiments with public art and drama to expose the excesses of commodity fetishism, or visualizations – on the sides of buildings, through public performances – of the everyday multicultural city, the public goods that everyone benefits from, the hidden infrastructures that support collective wellbeing.
The hidden infrastructures – the elaborate technologies that regulate public space, from traffic flow systems to surveillance technologies and network cables – are centrally implicated in the formation of urban public culture. Some of the connections are recognized, so for example, humanist planning is quick to condemn the excesses of urban surveillance and control and keen to rebalance the relationship between rule by technological or bureaucratic systems and urban governance through extensive public deliberation. It would be odd indeed to fault this concern in our times of excessive, unaccountable, and often unnecessary public surveillance, ritually targeting the vulnerable and defenseless. Yet, it is also interesting that humanist planning does not recognize how the “technological unconscious” (Thrift 2005) contributes to urban civic culture in positive ways, by keeping things on the move, ensuring rapid recovery from urban breakdown or disaster, making public spaces safe and intelligible, holding the complex urban system together, facilitating communication across time and space, supplying the basics of life and communal existence, and so on. This silent machinery of regulation is more than just that. It also shapes collective understanding of the well-functioning and livable city, everyday
expectation in public life, the possibilities on offer in a given urban environment, and more. At most times, these social perceptions are latent and barely acknowledged, but in times of
infrastructural collapse or threat, they can come to the fore as the consequences of urban malfunction become all too clear.
Deliberative planning can do much in building public awareness of the technological
unconscious that supports social wellbeing, urban democracy, and civic culture. These are two examples of possibility beyond the canons of deliberative planning, and in just one sphere of urban life. No doubt there are other possibilities, but the point is clear. Liberated from an idea of the good city as the product of closer ties between strangers, new openings involving the material culture of the city become immediately available for practical consideration.