This book will view American democracy through the lenses of various landscapes (wilderness and agrarian) and built environments, both urban and suburban. There are many reasons for taking this approach. For one, studying landscapes and cityscapes reveals aspects of democratic theory that are often marginalized. A traditional rationale for democracy is that it helps people come to terms with political authority—providing mechanisms both to legitimize (via elections) and to limit (via constitutionally enumerated rights) the exercise of power. This is what David Held refers to as the “protective” justification for democracy . There are also, Held maintains, “developmental” dimensions to democracy; the idea here is that citizen participation in decision-making, in shaping community outcomes, is an important avenue for self-realization (Held 2006, 35). No doubt the protective and developmental aspects of democracy are critical; however, most inhabitants of democracies spend only a fraction of their time voting or expressing concerns at a city council meeting, bringing a lawsuit against the government for a civil rights violation or campaigning for some political office. Instead, they are socializing with friends, raising families, and earning a living. Theorizing democracy by leaning on urban design, it is argued, shifts the focus from what are commonly regarded as political activities to the social dimension of democracy; that is, it seeks to understand how a substantive commitment to democracy can or should influence the “lived reality” of citizens—explores important concepts like civic formation, social equality, and integration.
What we discover when we attend to the theme of land and cityscapes in the writings of the authors discussed in this book are thought-provoking arguments about why certain natural or built environments produce conditions that are conducive to (or, alternatively, unfavorable toward) democracy. Put differently, the architects and urban planners featured in this book, as well as our representative landscape advocates, Jefferson (agrarianism) and Thoreau (wilderness), carefully bundle sets of character traits with distinct spatial arrangements, competing to demonstrate that their unique combination of traits and spatial designs is most consistent with and best supports a democratic political culture. As a result, these molders of the built environment and their design strategies foreground important lines of inquiry regarding the social dimension of democracy. A brief sample of questions would be: Do citizens trust one another? Are they inclined to cooperate with one another? Are public benefits and burdens shared equally? Are the patterns of wealth and property ownership marked by relative equality or inequality? Are citizens segregated by race and class? As one might expect, since the architects and urban planners featured in this study are not clones of one another, they interpret the social conditions of America quite differently—leading them to prioritize some of the above questions over others, to ignore some questions altogether, and to design their projects accordingly.
If emphasizing landscape and urban planning broadens our understanding of democracy, it is partly a function of inviting new participants into the conversation or, better said, carefully and critically listening to a long-standing conversation that has been conducted by the designers of America’s built spaces. If one consults anthologies on American political thought, Jefferson is a central figure, while Thoreau often plays a minor, supporting role. However, one is unlikely to find excerpts from Frederick Law Olmsted , Frank Lloyd Wright , Robert Moses , and the New Urbanists. Yet many of these individuals spent prodigious amounts of time thinking and writing about the prospects for and the critical needs of American democracy. Some of them profoundly influenced the democratic processes and institutions that determine how resources are distributed and how public works are constructed. It stands to reason that, since architects, planners and heads of public authorities actually design and build the spaces where people live, what they think about democracy is important, for, as we will see, these spaces may facilitate or misshape democratic life.
Beyond enriching our understanding of the American democratic tradition in the ways just mentioned, a final reason for featuring landscapes and cityscapes is that this approach has normative purchase. Specifically, it is asserted that studying the physical embodiments of various democratic theories—that is, the built environments with which these theories are often associated—enables us to assess, at least to some degree, their strengths and weaknesses. For example, this project claims that strains of democratic thought that are the most “individualistic”—that is, those tied to suburbanization and certain forms of modernism —are deficient because they undermine the civic (even ecological ) foundations necessary for human community. By contrast, it will be contended that republican or civic-minded theories and their built spaces—that is, Olmsted’s landscape designs or New Urbanism—are generally more likely to promote human flourishing. Nonetheless, these civically oriented models can also, unless carefully and wisely planned, give rise to their own problems and contradictions. Overall, this book advances the claim that civic traditions and their associated urban designs strike a better balance: they are better able to accommodate individuality than the individual models are able to develop basic civic practices and values. Significantly, the civic models also tend to be more cognizant of the need to protect natural assets.
Before we proceed, however, more needs to be said about the multilayered concept of democracy and the aspects of it that will be most important for this study. Furthermore, the meaning of “landscape ” and “built environment,” as well as the philosophical foundations of a spatially oriented social theory, needs some explanation.
Democracy: Justification, Implementation, and Social Content
Defined narrowly, democracy is a method of decision-making that prescribes that people who are subject to public laws and policies should have some influence in shaping them. This definition alone, however, leaves many questions unanswered. First, why should people have a voice in formulating law and policy? And second, how much influence should people have in public decision-making in order for the process to “count” as being democratic?
In regard to the first or “why democracy” question, many political philosophers argue that citizen consent is the true ground of authority; governments can stake a claim to legitimacy solely on this basis. John Locke maintains, for instance, that since humans are naturally free and equal, no person has an inherent right to subjugate another; instead, legitimate authority can only be derived from a person’s consent (Locke 1986, 54–55). Similarly, Kant suggests only a republic, a regime in which all laws could be affirmed (even if not, in fact, actually made) by its citizens, respects the innate freedom of persons (Kant 1991, 65). In both cases what is being claimed is that only a democratic form of decision-making safeguards human freedom and dignity. David Held calls this the “protective ” justification for democracy and notes that protective theorists of democracy “stress its [democracy’s] instrumental importance for the protection of citizens’ aims and objectives, i.e. their personal liberty” (Held 2006, 35). Besides the protective justification, Held observes that there is also a “developmental” defense of democracy, one which emphasizes the “intrinsic value of participation for the development of citizens as human beings” (35). Developmental democracy , like its protective cousin, can take both liberal and republican forms; John Stuart Mill’s Representative Government (Mill 1972) is a good example of a liberal developmental theory, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (Rousseau 1988), an example of a republican developmental theory.
According to democratic theorists, then, democracy is superior to other regime forms for at least two basic reasons—the protection it affords to individuals and because of the human capacities it helps to develop. The second question raised above is slightly different. It takes for granted that democracy is a political good but wonders how it can be implemented in practice, especially in large, modern, heterogeneous states. Indeed, the American experiment departed radically from previous republics in that it explicitly embraced the notion that democracy, contrary to conventional wisdom, had to encompass a large territory. In Federalist 10, Madison famously argues that an “extended” or enlarged republic would accommodate a multitude of factions, thereby preventing any one faction from oppressing others, solving the vexing problem of majority tyranny that had plagued the relatively small ancient republics (Madison 2005, 48–54).
Answers to the question of implementation, it turns out, fall along a continuum: at one end we find theories that attempt to redeem the participatory promise of democracy and at the other end we find theories that emphasize the crucial role of elites. In the next few pages, we will describe some of the key positions along this continuum. The participatory end is associated with contemporary theorists such as Carole Pateman (1970) and Ben Barber (2004). Both are unwilling to forfeit the value of participation’s “moral instruction,” that is, as Mill describes it, the challenge to “to weigh interests not [one’s] own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another rule than [one’s] private partialities; to apply, at every turn, principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the common good” (Mill 1972, 233). Participatory democrats contend that their convictions are not naïve. They are aware the Athenian Assembly during the time of Pericles is not an appropriate model for modern nation states with citizens who number in the millions. Instead, Pateman and others call for broadening our definition of political participation beyond office holding and voting. Contemporary participation needs to take place in “many spheres” of society; specifically, Pateman advocates for the democratization of economic life, of the workplace (1970, 21).
If participatory theorists desire to broaden our understanding of democracy, deliberative democrats, close cousins of the participatory theorists, want to deepen it. What makes deliberation distinctive, argue Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson , is the requirement that participants not only voice their opinions and concerns but that they provide reasons for the claims they advance. Thus, Gutmann and Thompson define deliberative democracy as “a form of government in which free and equal citizens (and their representatives) justify decisions in a process in which they give one another reasons that are mutually acceptable and generally accessible ” (Gutmann and Thompson 2004, 7). Anothe...