Planning for Modernity's Exhaustion

Articulating visions of the city as a rationalized and civilizing system, master plans often constitute visual artifacts made sticky with the affective excesses of top-down modernist imaginaries. As Le Normand shows, these “plans” extended beyond the normally limited visibility of planning documents and maps themselves, as images of modernity circulated through public exhibits and advertisements of domestic modernity; first with moderate depictions of “living within our means” designed to inculcate collectivism, and following the transition to market socialism in 1965, with steadily more luxurious depictions of larger houses.   

Le Normand’s examination of historical documents covering the reconstruction of Belgrade as the dust began to settle from World War II is a case study in contradiction. Urban planners were motivated to materialize conditions of more egalitarian living standards immediately following the war through infrastructural redevelopment (following the Athens Charter, whose primary architect Le Corbusier was tirelessly devoted to the fantasy of capitalism as a force for egalitarianism). For instance, Le Normand notes that New Belgrade is perhaps the only city in the Eastern bloc that had envisions worker’s housing at the center. However, Le Normand argues that, where other scholars attributed the failure of modernist urban planning to materialize egalitarian conditions of better living to an inherently alienating quality in the architectural forms themselves (e.g. towering residential areas, “functional” divisions that instantiate and literally concretize hierarchies, apparatuses designed to render subjects “legible”), Le Normand argues instead that the failure to realize the utopian visions of New Belgrade was a consequence of a loss of support among “decision makers” (pg. xiii). Where Le Normand frequently takes Scott (1998) to task for an overly dichotomous view of the state, Designing Tito’s Capital gives a more mundane and rhizomatic account of modernist imaginaries that appear to simply succumb to exhaustion, that never entirely “get off the ground” as sources of political support and funding frequently fail to materialize.

With the final chapter, I grew increasingly curious as to the extensions of cybernetics theory as a foundation in civilizing technologies. Le Normand suggests that the asymmetrical collaboration with Wayne State U to model more effective and decentralized infrastructural approaches to transportation infrastructure with increasingly dense traffic was primarily “window dressing,” a technological transfer used to firm up political support for an entirely new master plan under a façade of “science.” Anthropologist Michael Fisch (2013) similarly examined the decentralized restructuring of commuter train networks in Japan via cybernetics and systems theories. Amidst rising rates of suicide and suicide-by-train under protracted conditions of socio-economic precarity, Fisch demonstrates the techno-social logics by which engineers deploy cybernetics to construct “smart” train network infrastructures guided by a self-regulating state of “emergence” and able to effectively predict and adjust for delays as a consequence of suicides, to normalize and to regulate the irregularity of suicide (announced over train intercoms as jinshin jiko – delays as a consequence of “[human] body accidents”). Fisch suggests that the “corporealization” of the “smart” train network potentially “encourages the experience of commuter suicides as a necessary and recursive process of metabolic renewal within a totalizing system” (Fisch 2013:340).

Connecting this theme back to Le Normand’s discussion of rogue builders in “Planning Undone” (and recognizing that influence from cybernetics came several years later) I want to consider more deeply how imaginaries of modernity were mobilized in New Belgrade to configure particular modes of “habitation” as systemically incompatible with the materialization of a “modern” city – despite claims to egalitarianism. Is this process of ideological exhaustion something that we feel, after reading the text, like Le Normand feels is in some ways endemic to the process by which “modernity” moves from design to implementation?

Fisch, Michael

2013

Tokyo's Commuter Train Suicides and The Society of Emergence. Cultural Anthropology 28(2): 320–343.