Framing Places

Mediating Power in Built Form

Kim Dovey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415416344
• eBook ISBN: 9781134718573
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Framing Places is an account of the nexus between place and power, investigating how the built forms of architecture and urban design act as mediators of social practices of power. Explored through a range of theories and case studies, this examination shows how lives are 'framed' within the clusters of rooms, buildings, streets and cities. These silent framings of everyday life also mediate practices of coercion, seduction and authorization as architects and urban designers engage with the articulation of dreams; imagining and constructing a 'better' future in someone's interest.

This second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to include a look at the recent Grollo Tower development in Melbourne and a critique on Euralille, a new quarter development in Northern France. The book draws from a broad range of methodology including:

• analysis of spatial structure
• discourse analysis
• phenomenology.

These approaches are woven together through a series of narratives on specific cities - Berlin, Beijing and Bangkok - and global building types including the corporate tower, shopping mall, domestic house and enclave.

Part I
Frames of Theorization

Chapter 1: Power

Power is one of the splendours of man that is eminently prone to evil.

Ricoeur (1965: 255)

Defining Power

The term ‘power’ is widely used, and misused, in a rather global manner to refer to a variety of different capacities and effects. The danger is that ‘power’ can mean anything and therefore nothing. I want to try to avoid this through a short analysis of ‘power’ as a concept. The term derives from the Latin potere: ‘to be able’ – the capacity to achieve some end. Yet power in human affairs generally involves control ‘over’ others. This distinction between ‘power to’ and ‘power over’, between power as capacity and as a relationship between people, is fundamental to all that follows (Isaac 1992: 47; Pred 1981). Yet the former of these has a certain primacy. According to Rorty (1992: 2) ‘Power is the ability . . . to define and control circumstances and events so that one can influence things to go in the direction of one’s interests’. The ‘capacity’ to imagine, construct and inhabit a better built environment is what we mostly mean by empowerment here. The capacity to appropriate a room, choose a house, walk to a beach or criticize an urban design scheme are all forms of empowerment. When we say that someone is empowered, we mean their capacity to act is increased. Empowerment is linked with ‘autonomy’ and ‘freedom’, both of which imply a ‘libera-tion’ from arbitrary forms of ‘power over’ us. The primacy of power as capacity stems from the fact that power over others has a parasitic relation with power as capacity (Isaac 1992: 41). Power over others is largely driven by the desire to harness the capacities of others to one’s own empowerment. These two forms of power, as capacity and relationship, are reciprocal. Yet power as capacity is both the source and the end of this relation.

In everyday life we tend to notice power over while power to is taken for granted. This creates the illusion that power over is somehow primary – an illusion which suggests an opposition between power and emancipation. Yet emancipation is precisely a form of empowerment, of enhanced capacity. Oppression and liberation are the two sides of the power coin. While the power to is the primary form of power, linked to empowerment, one person’s empowerment can be another’s oppression. And power over others can be used to increase empowerment. To define power primarily in terms of power over others is a category mistake which constructs a zero-sum game wherein every loss in power is another’s gain. There is a fundamentally important materialist sense in which the struggle for resources is a zero-sum game; space is a finite resource and design is often a cake-slicing operation. Yet the exercise of power over can diminish or increase the total power to as resource. In this important sense the practice of power is not a zero-sum game. Power is both positive and negative; it liberates and oppresses. While my attention will focus on the contentious forms of power over, power to remains the primary form. It is this positive and primary notion of power as the human capacity to imagine and create a better built environment that drives the arguments of this book.

Forms of Power 'over'

‘Power over’ is the power of one agent (or group) over another, the power to ensure the compliance of the other with one’s will. There are many concepts which are partially synonymous with power in this regard, and the distinctions between them are important. For my purposes I want to consider some distinctions between force, coercion, manipulation, seduction and authority.¹

‘Force’ is the overt exercise of power which strips the subject of any choice of non-compliance. Typical examples in built form include all kinds of enforced spatial confinement (prisons and institutions of incarceration) and of enforced spatial exclusion (the medieval fortress; the housing enclave; locks, bars and walls). The use of force in built form is common since all walls, doors, fences and security devices which prevent access enforce spatial practice in this rather obvious manner. While force is the most common mediation of power in built form, it is also limited since it can prevent action more easily than it can create it.

‘Coercion’ can be defined as the threat of force to secure compliance and may be construed as a latent kind of force. Coercion is more effective than overt force because it operates under the cover of voluntarism. It gains its power from implied sanctions, which often prevent the subject from ever forming any intention of resistance. When the subject anticipates the exercise of force and acts accordingly, power remains latent. Coercion operates through built form in at least three main ways. The first of these may be termed ‘domination or ‘intimidation’ where the forms of architecture, urban design and spatial behaviour can signify a threat of force. Guards of ‘honour’, military parades and ‘armed response’ signs are overt signifiers of latent force. Public monuments often use the memory of a past use of force by the State to signify such future possibility. Spatial domination through exaggerated scale or dominant location can belittle the human subject as it signifies the power necessary to its production.

Yet there are far more subtle forms of spatial coercion linked to the Latin root coercere, ‘to surround’. For Weinstein organizational control of space is a form of coercion:

Coercion consists in transforming private, communal, group or cultural spaces into organizational spaces in which people perform actions directed towards the fulfilment of another’s plan, or refrain from performing actions subversive of the realization of another’s plan.

(Weinstein 1972: 69)

The built environment frames everyday life by offering certain spaces for programmed action, while closing other possibilities. In a myriad of ways every day we avoid those behaviours and boundaries that we believe will be met with force. Most forms of spatial surveillance and control are coercive in this sense, but to label these forms of spatial control ‘coercion’ is not to imply sinister motives. While spatial coercion may be clear in intentional terms, in practice there is no clear line between necessary and problematic forms of spatial order. ‘Manipulation’ is a form of coercion which operates primarily by keeping the subject ignorant. The exercise of power is made invisible to its subject and the possibility of resistance is thereby removed (Wrong 1979). The subject is ‘framed’ in a situation that may resemble free choice, but there is a concealment of intent. A common example from architecture and urban design occurs when representations of design projects are distorted to produce a form of ‘manipulated consent’ by ignorant participants.

Barnes argues that coercion is a conjunction of knowledge and ignorance wherein the subjects are ‘well aware of the direct connection between their behaviour and possible sanctions, but unaware of the longer range indirect connections by which their (compliant) behaviour . . . helps to constitute and sustain the feedback of coercion and sanctioning that controls them’ (Barnes 1988: 101). The organization of space and time to mediate social interaction – particularly the visibility and invisibility of others – becomes crucial to effective practices of coercion. A fragmented experience of space and time with the loss of a sense of orientation and community can be conducive to coercive control. The ideal subjects of coercive power ‘should live as atoms, wholly in the public realm, under surveillance, but as far as possible without social relationships’ (Barnes 1988: 101).

‘Seduction’ is a practice which manipulates the interests and desires of the subject. This is a sophisticated form of ‘power over’, hinged to constructions of desire and self-identity, with significant implications for the built environment. As Lukes writes:

Is it not the supreme and most insidious exercise of power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as divinely ordained and beneficial?

(Lukes 1974: 24, my emphasis)

My emphases here are intended to link with the manner in which built form shapes perception and cognition. It structures the taken-for-granted spatial order in a manner that we often see as natural and unchangeable. There is nothing necessarily sinister about this – all architecture both constructs and meets certain desires. All architectural representation constructs images of nature and order, shapes imagined futures. Seduction carries the implication that desire has been manipulated and that we indulge such desire against our real interest. Thus the concept of seduction rests upon a distinction between ‘real’ and ‘perceived’ interests. This is a highly problematic distinction since it implies that the subject cannot judge their own interests. From what position can one suggest that another’s pleasure is not in their real interest? It is the condition of architecture and urban form to play upon our desires; the task is to understand rather than to eradicate these seductive capacities.

‘Authority’ is a form of ‘power over’ which is integrated with the institutional structures of society such as the state, church, private corporation, school and family. Authority is marked by the absence of argument; it relies on an unquestioned recognition and compliance. When we are stopped by the police for speeding we may argue about the speed, but if the trappings of authority are evident (the police car and uniform) we do not argue the right to enforce it. In a likewise manner we may dispute government regulations but we often do so across a counter framed by the architecture of a State authority. Based on socially acknowledged rights and obligations, authority is the most pervasive, reliable, productive and stable form of power. It embodies the power to circumvent argument and to frame the terms of reference of any discussion. Yet authority rests upon a base of ‘legitimation’ (Arendt 1986: 65). We recognize authority as legitimate because it is seen to serve a larger interest; in the case of the State this is the public interest.

The perception of legitimacy is fragile; it often needs both the trappings of authority and the coercive threat of force – if the ‘right’ of authority doesn’t work then it is backed by the ‘might’ of force. Conversely, legitimation is one of the means by which might is transformed into right (Wrong 1979); the inefficient exercise of force is transformed into unquestioned authority. The key linkage to built form here is that authority becomes stabilized and legitimated through its symbols. These trappings of authority are important forms of legitimation that become crucial to the exercise of authority (Olsen 1993: 33). The symbols of authority are institutionally embedded from the family house to the corporate tower and the public buildings or urban designs of the State. Rituals, ceremonies and symbolic displays are often a means by which State authority is reproduced under the cover of diplomacy. Such ritual displays have a contradictory capacity to affirm violence and wealth as the base of power at the same time as they affirm friendship and solidarity (Barnes 1988). Buildings and urban designs are often integrated with such rituals and ceremonies. For the State, as Kertzer (1988) suggests, symbolic ritual is much more than window dressing since the nation-state is invisible and its authority would evaporate without the imagery of legitimation. Symbolic ritual enables the collapsing of disparate meanings into a form of political solidarity in the absence of consensus. Rituals of legitimation are powerful because one can’t argue with them – they are the way things are done, the way the ‘real’ is constructed. Geertz puts it well:

No matter how democratically the members of the elite are chosen . . . they justify their existence and order their actions in terms of a collection of stories, ceremonies, insignia, formalities and appurtenances . . . that mark the center as center and give what goes on there its aura of being not merely important but in some odd fashion connected with the way the world is built.

(Geertz 1985: 15)

While it is important to distinguish between these different forms of power, such practices rarely appear in isolation. The most problematic buildings and urban designs are often a complex mix of seduction, authority and coercion. And the exercise of power can slide from one form to another, thereby masking itself. It is generally in the interest of those in power to hide conflict, and in the interest of the subject to expose it. A large part of the struggle over power is the struggle to make its operations visible, to bring it into a domain where its legitimacy can be tested. As Foucault (1980: 86) argues: ‘power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms’. The struggle to make power visible has to deal with the fact that the exercise of power is slippery and ever-changing. Power naturalizes and camouflages itself, chameleon-like, within its context. In this regard built form often operates as metaphor, wherein it simultaneously represents and masks its associations with power. A metaphor is a figure of discourse where one thing is represented as if it is, and yet simultaneously is not, another. And the power of metaphor is linked to its subtlety; it is most powerful when least literal (Ball 1992). A building form may suggest a metaphoric ‘mountain’ yet to spell this out can undercut the metaphoric power. Metaphor has the capacity to seduce and legitimate simultaneously while masking these very practices.

Imagination plays a key role in the discourse of power since empowerment implies a capacity to perceive one’s real interests and connect them reliably to an imagined future. As Rorty (1992: 13) argues, ‘Imagination is the key to power . . . it determines the direction of desires’. If we cannot imagine a better world we cannot support it; as Machiavelli put it, the public ‘do not truly believe in anything new until they have actual experience of it’ (quoted in Wrong 1979: 121). This hints at a crucial role for architects and urban designers as imaginative agents. The capacity to stimulate desire and to enlarge the public imagination can be crucial to the discourses of power. There are also hints here about the role of critique; while there can be no simple decoding of the meanings of built form, critical thinking can enable new interpretations of urban and architectural images. Awareness of the ways power is mediated by built form enables us to change the way it is practised.

The discussion above tends to presume that the exercise of ‘power over’ is largely transparent to its agents. Yet for Nietzsche much of what we call civilized life is really a cover for an all-consuming ‘will to power’ (Nietzsche 1968). From this view, which is also rather Machiavellian (Ng 1980), all forms of legitimation are masks for the individual ‘will’. Because the naked ‘will to power’ cannot be legitimized as an end in itself, either self-deceit or hypocrisy is necessary to the effective pursuit of power (Wrong 1979). Self-deceit is easily the most efficient of the two, generally taking the form of a belief that one’s pursuit of power is really a form of public service. Such self-deceit is what Orwell (1954: 171) called ‘doublethink’. A key secret to the success of the Party in 1984 was the capacity to hold contradictory beliefs, to deliberately service one agenda while justifying it with another. From a psychological viewpoint Greenwald (1980) argues that the ego operates rather like a totalitarian information control strategy, servicing itself with propaganda in order to maintain control.

The issue of self-deceit has considerable importance for aesthetic discourse. The Nietzschean view is that the aesthetic impulse is founded in the repression of the will to power; art fills the void left by such repression (Eagleton 1990: 238). From this view aesthetic experience may be understood as a tension between the hedonistic urge towards the intoxications of power (the Dionysian) and the need to dress such experience in a civilizing façade of purity and order (the Apollonian). Freud posits a similar tension between the ‘pleasure principle’ and the ‘reality principle’; the pleasure-seeking ‘id’ is in secret collusion with the forces of social order in the ‘superego’ (Eagleton 1990: 263).

The nexus between self-aggrandizement and the public interest is particularly complex in public buildings and urban schemes which can serve at once to legitimize authority, reinforce a sense of community, gratify the political or architectural will, turn a profit and reinforce self-deceit. Many interests intersect in the production of built form and they are difficult to unravel. When confronted with arguments about damage to the public interest, architects are often genuinely offended and deny the importance of political, commercial or personal imperatives.

Self-deceit is a necessary condition to a large range of practices of power and it also afflicts the subjects of oppression. Subjection to unjust authority is inherently distasteful and there is some comfort in the belief that such authority is legitimate (Wrong 1979: 121). For the powerless to resist authority means the exposure of conflict, raising the risk of further marginalization and repression (Airaksinen 1992: 117). To remain docile and invisible is a safer choice but it is also a form of co-operation which is nourished by self-deceit. This issue is exemplified by the relative invisibility of impoverished ‘informal’ settlements that house the underclass in so many cities. The visibility of such settlements operates as a counter-image to the state’s claims to legitimacy, democracy and social order. The exposure of such radical inequality exposes residents to the potential loss of home and community. And there can be comfort in the belief in leadership – images of corrupt and tyrannical leaders can take pride of place on the walls of slum dwellings.

Those with and without power both have a need for legitimation, but such needs are in a curious inverse relation. The need for legitimation increases as power becomes totalizing; as Wrong (1979: 111) puts it, the ‘more absolute the power, the greater the need to believe that the power holder observes self-imposed restraints’. Institutional authority with high levels of legitimation and security has less need for the trappings of power. Thus authority relies on legitimating symbols in proportion to the vulnerability of that authority. This is precisely why monarchies, dictatorships and military states are so full of monuments, parades and ritual strutting – the demand for legitimation exceeds that in a democracy. And these forms of legitimation service the self-deceit of powerful and powerless alike.

There is a complex dialectic whereby overt expressions of power in s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Frames of Theorization
• Part II: Centres of Power
• Part III: Global Types
• Part IV: Localities
• Afterword
• Notes
• References
• Index