The Urban World as Design
Increasingly, we live in an environment of our own making. This environment is what Aicher (1994, p. 179) calls the âworld as designâ âa âsecond worldâ over the natural oneâcomprising of skyscrapers, bridges, power stations, landfills, and many other artificial systems that make up the built environment today. For at least more than half of the present global population, this âworld as design â is also thoroughly urban. According to one key estimate, the urban population is projected to increase to roughly six billion by 2050 (OECD, 2015, p. 11). This means that by 2050, nearly two-thirds of the global population, or at least 2.4 billion more people, will be living in cities (Goldhagen, 2017). In turn, existing cities are anticipated to rapidly densify or expand, and new cities will have to be built to accommodate this projected urban population. Urbanization, on a planetary scale, appears unrelenting for the immediate future. In turn, the human condition is set to become the urban condition (Amin, 2006, p. 1012).
While the environmental, social, and political challenges of urbanization are receiving due attention by different researchers from the various disciplines, however, the ethical and moral implications of a rapidly urbanizing world have largely been neglected. How does urbanization or the urban process create new ethical categories, shape new moral identities and relations, and lead to consequences that are morally significant? Or in other words, how does the urban shape the ethicalâand in what ways? On this, cities have been said to reflect and shape their inhabitantsâ values and outlooks in various ways (Bell & De-Shalit, 2011). This idea of moral identities as civic ethosâthe spirit, sentiment, or norms of a people or community dwelling within certain geographical or spatial boundariesâwas especially salient in Thucydidesâs âMelian dialogue â, which revealed what could happen in a conflict between two different cities (i.e., Melos and Athens) shaped by radically different moral identities (Glover, 2012).
But this perspective on civic ethos does not explain the many ethical quandaries that are drawn out by design in the city. For instance, Sorkin (1999, p. 3) describes how, even for a seemingly innocuous design decision to prioritize traffic flow over pedestrians for one part of the city, ethical relations have to be considered and weighed, for example, between the rights of ambulances and strollers, and the pedestrianâs rights of way and place. Even in this ordinary decision to prioritize traffic flow at the expense of certain pedestrian rights, profound ethical questions are raised on whose good ought to be privileged, and for what reasons. Furthermore, many repercussions follow from this design decision. For example, by prioritizing traffic flow, the time allotted for crossing a traffic junction has to be decreased, which in turn alters the pace of the pedestrianâs urban experience. And certain roads invariably have to become quasi-motorways within an interconnected roadway system to conserve optimal traffic flow. This is usually followed by a system-wide removal of more pedestrian crossings and street furniture catered to the pedestrianâsetting into motion a gradual but complex spatial and material transformation of urban spaces. In this way, the original decision to prioritize traffic flow at one point in the city has now implicated a far larger transformation of the streetscape and the urban experience, which is likely to leave in its wake, worsening pollution and the increased risk of road traffic accidents. Taken altogether, an innocuous design decision has snowballed into a new moral reality, which in turn is likely to beg further design interventions fraught with their own moral risks and dilemmas .
Compounding these moral realities brought about by design , the city is fast becoming a source, if not also the primary context of new ethical issues and problems. Consider a paradigmatic example from the Smart City discourse. âSmart chipsâ are present in all kinds of access cards used in the cityâfor instance, the public transportation card, the customer loyalty card, or the credit card to name just threeâto enhance convenience in everyday life. But when their respective data are integrated and sieved by robust algorithms, they also offer a detailed profile of behavioral patterns and personal movements of the card user (Graham, 2011). This prospect not only raises the new ethical question on how a data-driven urbanism can violate personal privacy through undue data surveillance and geo-surveillance (Kitchin, 2016), but it can also lead to the new moral perplexity of intelligent technologies, when sieving through these data, to âknow enoughâ of a userâs preferences to ânudge â and change this individualâs behavior in ways that are not conscious to informed consent (Yates, 2017). And because Smart technologies harness only specific sources of data, important social groups in the city are often unintentionally excluded (Glasmeier & Christopherson, 2015)âif only because they are neither consumers nor producers affiliated to certain patterns of technological usage in their urban lives. In parallel, other groups are specifically targeted because they qualify for the formation of certain urban enclaves (Graham, 2011, p. 125). Smart technologies, which were introduced to streamline everyday life, are now not only burdened with many new moral perplexities, but appear to have also hardened differences and worsened inequality in the city.
And in the Anthropocene increasingly characterized by an uneven form of planetary urbanization (Brenner, 2013a), the world is also being inequitably shaped from the perspective of the city. A vast and interconnected network of urban mobilities and activities skews the extraction and consumption of resources toward the city, which irreversibly impoverishes many other geographies and the biosphere in this process. Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016, p. 7) suggest that the sum of these anthropogenic impacts has greatly reduced the eco-services provided to humanity by the biosphere: services such as pollination, carbon capture, erosion protection, and the regulation of water quality and quantity among many others. For this reason, design is expected to play an increasingly larger roleâfor instance, in fortifying the coastline with landscape architecture that double-functions as climate change adaptation, and all the way to drastic geo-engineering ventures of some formâin order to compensate for these weakening eco-services. But because of a rapidly urbanizing world, these design interventions are unlikely to be distant from cities. To tackle any one of these issues then at any scale in the urban context, layered with many overlapping and contesting complex systems, is a âwicked problemâ (Rittel & Webber, 1973)âone that is equally fraught with many moral pitfalls and risks.
For example, green spaces are often created in cities as a direct way to simultaneously improve urban sustainability and environmental justice. But even here, Checker (2011, p. 211) notices a âpernicious paradoxâ in the making. New green spaces offer an indisputable public good to everyone in the cityâespecially salient as a form of environmental justice to residents in low-income neighborhoods whose access to these spaces has historically been limited. However, arriving in the wake of these green spaces is a form of environmental gentrification (Checker, 2011), which tends to favor redevelopments that would cater to a more affluent demographic in the city that subsequently result in the eviction and displacement of the original residents in these neighborhoods. How then should one contend with the paradoxical realities of these green spaces, when they tend to bring about benefits and losses at the same timeâand unevenly to different residents in the city?
It is in this way where environmental justice (i.e., offering green amenities to the residents who need them most) is simultaneously accompanied by the risks of gentrification and the threats of eviction that this dilemma shifts from urban studies into the domain of ethics . However, there is a gap. Even when the moral significance of this dilemma has long been known, there is neither a specific ethics tailored to understand the peculiar dilemmas of the city, nor are any further ethical issues and problems accompanying such dilemmas well charted or well understood. And because of the historical neglect of the cityâs ethical dimensions, these ethical issues and problems remain unrecognized. In view of the rapid pace of urbanization today, the moral stakesâwhich are always better clarified and defined through the ethical lens, but which are also always accompanied by significant practical stakesâhave become too high and precarious to stay ignored any longer.
In view of this knowledge gap, this book is then a projective foray into reinvigorating thinking on the ethical dimensions of the city, which is here referred to as urban ethics . Specifically, through the lens of six emerging urban conditionsânamely, precarity , propinquity , conflict , serendipity , fear, and the urban commons âthis book attempts to answer the following key questions: How does the city, manifested differently through each of these conditions, shape the ethical? And conversely, how can the examinatio...