Cities, Power and Knowledge: A Discursive Materialist Approach to Rethinking the Urban Question. Simon Parker, Department of Politics, University of York, UK.Association of American Geographers Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts, 16 April 2008. Session:‘New Directions in Urban Theory: Theoretical Groundings

2.  Why re-think the question of urban power?
 Cities of God, Cities of Reason: From
Ritualized to Rationalized Space.
 Hermeneutics and Urban Form
 The Role of Space in Urban Hermeneutics
 From Coded Places to Code/Spaces: The
Material Discourses of Knowing Capitalism
 Conclusion

3.  Existing definitions of urban power within the
critical/radical/historical materialist tradition tend to
focus on processes of power or power relations within
cities as opposed to the power of cities.
 Critical urban theory needs to address the systemic
and structurated means by which the power of cities
and of urban spaces in general is established,
maintained, concentrated or dispersed.
 This requires us to see cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic
manifestations of the urban not as epiphenomena but
as material components of the power/knowledge
ensembles that structure existing cityness and which
give rise to new urban formations

4.  The relation between discourse and material is not
confined to the intellectual task of providing an
understanding of material; by acting on our
understanding, discourse affects practice (the
material). Moreover, discourse is not conducted
under rules of free inquiry; it is constructed out of,
and constrained by, the very material
circumstances that it studies. It is this sense that
Foucault tries to capture in the couplet
“discourse/practice”; this is also the sense that I
wish to communicate through the use of the term
“discursive materialism” (Yapa 1996, 710).

5.  Richard Peet claims to unite historical materialism
and Foucauldian discourse theory in a materialist
poststructuralism’ where
 ‘[c]lass, ideology, and political intention operate in
the discursive construction of landscapes. He goes
on to argue that ‘significant discourses’ (such as
icons) ‘fulfill the purposes of powerful agents and
express the social relations and material contexts
creating agents and forming their beliefs and
intentions. Landscapes can thus be read as power
systems. However, landscapes are not passive
spaces patterned by power; landscapes also
recreate agents (my emphasis) (Peet 1996, 23).

6.  …architecture begins at the end of the eighteenth
century to become involved in problems of population,
health and the urban question. Previously, the art of
building corresponded to the need to make power,
divinity and might manifest. The palace and the church
were the great architectural forms, along with the
stronghold. Architecture manifested might, the
Sovereign, God. Its development was for long centred on
these requirements. Then, late in the eighteenth
century, new problems emerge: it becomes a question
of using the disposition of space for economico-political
ends (Michel Foucault , Power/Knowledge, 1980, 148)

7.  What Angel Rama calls ‘the ordered city’ was also a key motif
in the colonial subjugation of the Americas,
 Largely ignoring the existence of ancient settlements the
Americas were seen by the Spanish colonists and
missionaries as an urban ‘tabula rasa’—just as Alexander
saw Egypt or the Roman Emperors, Carthage.
 Freed from the ‘organic’ disorder of the medieval Iberian
cities the urban bourgeois men of letters
 ‘adapted themselves to a frankly rationalizing vision of an urban
future, one that ordained a planned and repetitive urban
landscape and also required that its inhabitants be organized to
meet increasingly stringent requirements of colonization,
administration, commerce, defense, and religion’ (Rama and
Chasteen 1996, 1).

8.  …we have to be able to discover [power] in
places where it is least visible, where it is most
completely misrecognized—and thus, in fact,
recognized. For symbolic power is that invisible
power which can be exercised only with the
complicity of those who do not want to know
that they are subject to it or even that they
themselves exercise it (Pierre Bourdieu, 1991-
4).

9.  “To read what was never written.” Such reading
is the most ancient: reading before all
languages, from the entrails, the stars, or
dance. Later the mediating link of a new of a
new kind of reading, of runes and hieroglyphs,
came into use. It seems fair to suppose that
these were the stages by which the mimetic
gift, which was once the foundation of occult
practices, gained admittance to writing and
language (Benjamin 1979, 162-163).

10.  [t]he structure of organized space is not a
separate structure with its own autonomous
laws of construction and transformation, nor is
it simply an expression of the class structure
emerging from the social (i.e. aspatial) relations
of production. It represents, instead, a
dialectically defined component of the general
relations of production, relations which are
simultaneously social and spatial.(Ed Soja
1980:208)

11. Trajan’s Column,
Rome with part of the
Basilica Ulpia

12. The plinth of
Trajan’s
column
incorporating
what was
thought to
have been
the emperor’s
mausoleum

13. Location
of Column
Apollodorus’
plan for
Trajan’s
Forum
(Figure 2)

14. Detail showing ‘the effects of good government on the life of
the city’

16.  In this fresco the twins Romulus and Remus are
mimetically transplanted to the feet – or the roots
(radici) of trecento Siena.
 In an astonishing coup de théatre, the wolverine
tongue of legitimacy blesses the governmentalist
raison d’etat of the Sienese magisterium whose
flimsy and ad hoc claims to authority are belied by
the rhetorical insistence of its primogeniture in the
original and eternal city of Rome

17. The Allegory of Bad
Government (or the
Allegory of Tyranny)

18. This social and spatial dialectic is itself an
emergent product of our representations of it,
which are also made in the world from that
which is also already in the world.
For Baudrillard ‘the structure of the sign is at
the very heart of the commodity form [since]
the commodity can take on, immediately, the
effect of signification (Baudrillard 1981, 146 in
Doel 2006, 62).

19.  Thus Baudrillard extends Marx’s chain of
values forms, beginning with value itself, and
encompassing use-value, exchange-value, and
surplus-value to also include sign-value (or
sign-exchange-value) which Doel notes exists in
an ‘antagonistic relationship to symbolic
exchange’ (Doel 2006, 62).

20. Sumerian clay tablet - some 60-100,000 are thought to have survived the Ur
III period (the most prolific) between 2100 and 2000 B.C.
Pantographic punch machine and card designed for the 1890 US census -
marked off areas rep demographic categories
Punch cards were the same size as dollar bills
Near identical technology was employed during the 2000 US Presidential
elections in many states, including Florida

21.  The coding and recording principles that are to be found
in Sumerian clay tablets display many common features
with contemporary recording and classification systems
(such as commercial geodemographics or market
segmentation analysis), and in particular the ability to
organize the spatialisation of difference.
 This software sorting (Burrows and Gane 2007) is at the
heart of a new techno-governmentality of space that in
the words of a leading North American
geodemographics company will allow companies to
‘conduct data mining projects to uncover behavioural
patterns for targeting campaigns’

22. Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine, 1890

24. Fruitless searching is as much a part of this as
succeeding, and consequently remembrance must
not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still
less that of a report, but must, in the strictest epic
and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in ever
new places, and in the old ones delve to ever-
deeper layers (Walter Benjamin. ‘Berlin Chronicle’,
1979, 314).