The spatial contract

A new politics of provision for an urbanized planet

Alex Schafran, Matthew Noah Smith, Stephen Hall

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526143365
• eBook ISBN: 9781526143389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Housing. Water. Energy. Transport. Food. Education. Health care. These are the core systems which make human life possible in the 21st century. Few of us are truly self-sufficient – we rely on the systems built into our cities and towns of all shapes and sizes in order to survive, let alone thrive.Despite how important these systems are, and how much we rely on them, contemporary politics and mainstream economics in most of the world largely ignore these core systems. Politicians debate what they think will get them elected; economists value what they think drives growth.This book joins the growing chorus of activists, academics and innovators who think that we should be focusing on what matters, on the parts of our economy in which most of us work and upon which all of us depend for survival. We help push this movement along by suggesting a series of concrete steps we can take to build what we call the "Spatial Contract". The spatial contract is a form of social contract that pays attention to a simple fact: in order for humans to be free, we rely on these basic systems that enable us to act. At the heart of the spatial contract is an agreement to channel that action into ensuring these systems are built, maintained and available to all who need them, in big cities and small towns all around the world.

1 Freedom, reliance and the spatial contract

Imagine visiting a crowded marketplace. Are you free to travel through that market? What if there was a law that restricted non-citizens from entering and you were a noncitizen? What if the marketplace had narrow lanes that could not accommodate the wheelchair you use? What if there was an entry fee that you could not afford? What conditions must be met to be free to do something?

In the middle of the twentieth century, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin summarized an account of freedom which he called ‘negative liberty’ (we use the terms ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ interchangeably). Drawing on writings such as Thomas Hobbes’s famous seventeenth-century definition of liberty as ‘the absence of external impediment’, Berlin characterized negative freedom as the freedom one has in virtue of the absence of obstruction imposed by others.¹ For example, if you are locked in a jail cell, then the walls, bars, door and locks, among other things, obstruct your ability to exit the cell. You are not free to leave.

Scholars and activists from across the political spectrum followed Berlin in focusing intensely and at times exclusively on negative freedom as the only form of freedom that matters.² From libertarians, who treat freedom as the foundational value on which all political questions hinge, to human rights activists, who focus on both state repression of minorities and political opponents and the direct application of violence to bodies, the conception of freedom is typically negative freedom. Freedom to many people is thus freedom as an absence.³ Freedom is the absence of unfreedom.⁴ For example, if unfreedom is the presence of an external impediment, like a boulder blocking a path, then freedom is simply the absence of that boulder.

This approach to thinking about freedom is understandable. So many of the obvious sources of people’s suffering have involved the interference of armies, religious institutions, the nobility, state actors, and so on. For example, the freedom to practise religion was for centuries compromised by direct intervention by the Church or by state persecution. It makes sense to treat the presence of ‘negative freedoms’ as a crucial component of freedom.

Yet there is more to the boulder than wishing it wasn’t blocking the path. When a boulder impedes one’s path, when laws forbid behaviour, when one is dominated by another and so must ask their permission to live in any number of ways, what is lost is the ability to lead one’s life in some desired or valued way. What is lost is the capacity to take actions that one wants or values. When someone is unfree, they cannot do what they want. What is compromised by unfreedom, then, is one’s capacity to act. Philosophers use the word ‘agency’ to refer to this capacity to act. External impediments, legal prohibitions, domination and so on are forms of unfreedom because they are ways to limit human agency. So, if loss of freedom is the limitation of human agency, then freedom is human agency. That is, to be free is to be able to act.

Unfortunately, capacities to act do not spring into existence when impediments or restrictions are removed. Other conditions must be met. For example, a law prohibiting walking down the road limits my capacity to walk down the road. Yet regardless of what the law says, if there is no road to walk on, then I cannot walk down the road anyway. When it comes to reliance systems, people are free not only because of an absence of laws or customs or rules or armed guards obstructing them, but because of the presence of a specific reliance system. In order to have the capacity to walk down the road, there needs to be a road.

In this chapter we first expand upon the philosophical foundations of this more material or active understanding of freedom, an understanding that owes the deepest debt to the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and others. We then focus on explaining in more depth what we mean by reliance systems, sketching out their general features, their complexity, their generally co-produced nature and their multi-dimensionality.

We then address the question of how to think about the politics of reliance systems. We briefly touch on other approaches, and then develop an approach based on a modification of social contract thinking. We refer to this as the spatial contract. As a spatial contract, like a social contract, can be both healthy and unhealthy, we end by setting out six principles for producing healthier spatial contracts.

The capabilities approach

Variously rooted in Aristotelian thought about human capacities or Marxist thought about the material conditions of the proletariat, many have developed and defended understandings of freedom not in terms of an absence but instead in terms of the presence of abilities. For example, Karl Marx wrote that ‘“free activity” is for the communists the creative manifestation of life arising from the free development of all abilities’.⁵ He and Engels wrote that to be free ‘in the materialistic sense’ is to be ‘free not through the negative power to avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert true individuality’.⁶ For Marx, the central question of freedom was not ‘what must one avoid to be free’ but instead ‘what abilities must one have to be free?’

Amartya Sen developed a contemporary interpretation of freedom along these lines. Sen began through an interrogation of John Rawls’s views about social justice, and, in particular, what Rawls called social primary goods: income, wealth and the social bases of self-respect.⁷ Sen argued that while these are surely important, they are poor indices of well-being.⁸ According to Sen, there is huge difference between the well-being one enjoys by virtue of being wealthy, and the well-being one enjoys by virtue of not being immobilized by a serious illness. Lacking the ability to move from place to place cannot be directly ‘made up for’ by increasing someone’s income and wealth. Furthermore, people differentially convert resources to actions and to capacities.

The resources required for a growing child to be able to play, for example, are different from those required for a full-grown adult to play, and the resources required for an ill growing child to be able to play are different from those required for a healthy child. Sen generalizes this point to cover limitations on converting resources to capabilities due to social forces, environmental factors and so on. Women in most societies, for example, remain hampered by sexism even if they gain income and wealth.⁹

These reflections drive Sen to conclude that we cannot de-link freedom from well-being, which is what Rawls and those following him did.¹⁰ We should instead try to understand well-being at least partially in terms of freedom.¹¹ We should accept as a starting point, for example, that being healthy is better than being ill.

Sen’s approach has come to be called the capabilities approach.¹² This approach defines a person’s freedom as their ‘capability set’, or the set of actions a person can perform in their life. For example, if you walk to your car, then drive that car to the airport, buy a ticket to fly to another city, and then board that plane and fly to that other city, then one’s capability set includes, among many other things, the ability to walk, the ability to drive a car, the ability to drive to the airport, the ability to buy something, the ability to board a plane and so on. Whether someone takes advantage of these capabilities is up to that person. What is important is that people can choose whether to realize a capability at all. In that respect, they are free.¹³

A person’s capability set is not fixed only by what they are legally permitted to do. Sen emphasizes that ‘personal characteristics and social arrangements’ are crucial, too.¹⁴ Factors such as income and wealth, as well as other resources such as access to technology, are necessary for freedom. But at a certain point, more income or new technologies do not appreciably expand a person’s capability set. The marginal increase in capabilities drops to zero. In this way, we have a means of making sense of when adding or removing resources from a person’s life makes them freer or not.¹⁵

This reveals that freedom understood in terms of capabilities is more comprehensive than the negative freedom approach. The threat to capabilities that a disabling injury poses cannot be characterized exclusively in terms of external impediments or state domination or employment restrictions. Even if the state positively affirms the right to live as the disabled person prefers, and even if no one stands in the way of that person’s desires, the disabled person’s hope to live in a world that accommodates her condition remains unfulfilled.¹⁶

Sen’s approach was extended by Martha Nussbaum, who, like Sen, judged the morally basic consideration to be the lives that we can live: ‘the key question to ask, when comparing societies and assessing them for their decency or justice, is, “What is each person able to do and to be?”’¹⁷ This approach, Nussbaum says, ‘is focused on choice or freedom, holding that the crucial good societies should be promoting for their people is a set of opportunities, or substantial freedoms, which people then may or may not exercise in action: the choice is theirs’.¹⁸

The capabilities approach also provides a new way of thinking about unfreedoms. Unfreedoms can be seen as socially produced ‘incapabilities’. If some social force makes women incapable of participating fully in the economy, that is an unfreedom. And if some social force makes people incapable of expressing certain political views, then that is also an unfreedom.¹⁹ Unfreedoms are eliminated not merely by removing whatever social conditions produce the incapability but by producing the capability itself. This attention to the production of capacities is central to our account of the spatial contract.

From capabilities to reliance systems

Nussbaum and Sen treat the capacity to act – agency – as an essentially corporeal phenomenon. Actions are realized entirely in the human body. This helps to explain why they focus on corporeal limitations to capability: physical disabilities requiring persons to be in wheelchairs, differing protein needs between adults and children, differing needs of the nonpregnant and the pregnant, threats to physical health posed by malaria and other diseases, and so on.

Capabilities in this view are a limited set grounded in conceptions of what a human body can do.²⁰ Their understanding of capabilities is thus rooted in the bodily ideal of ‘being adequately nourished, being in good health, avoiding escapable morbidity and premature mortality, etc., to more complex achievements such as being happy, having self-respect, taking part in the life of the community, and so on’.²¹ What justice requires, on this view, are policies supporting the body and conditioning the environment to fit that body, however it is manifested, where the aim is to ensure that these capabilities are realized in the body. Nussbaum and Sen therefore emphasize broad policies such as building up and expanding public health programmes, policing violence in interpersonal relationships and expanding education as the aim of any acceptable capabilities approach to justice.²²

Yet neither Sen nor Nussbaum ask about human agency itself.²³ What is human agency? Answering this question tells even more about what freedom is than the formal characterization of freedom as a capability.

Let’s return then to the road, to the question raised earlier: what is it to be free to walk down the road? Most people would agree that this requires at least being free legally and socially, and Sen and Nussbaum have helped make us sensitive to the fact that we must also be physically capable of doing so, in the sense that our bodies need to be able to walk down the road. Yet to truly understand what makes someone free to walk down the road, we need to start paying a lot more attention to the road.

The road – or whatever surface it is on which a person moves, whether on foot or in a wheelchair or through whatever mode of transport – must be produced and maintained. To be truly useful, it must be connected to other roads and pathways, to homes and businesses and places people need to go. The seemingly simple capacity of being able to walk down the road requires more than laws (or the absence of laws) and a certain bodily condition. It also requires, at the very least, road-s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Freedom, reliance and the spatial contract
• 2 Seeing like a system
• 3 Seeing like a settlement
• 4 Reliance and exploitation
• Conclusion: building a healthy spatial contract
• Index