Abstract
Michael Osman’s Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America is a pleasure to read, conveying captivating historical tales of the emergence of regulatory technologies. His straightforward prose almost camouflages the astonishing alchemy described: compressed ammonia, for example, is transformed into a chilly time machine, keeping food in stasis for periods long enough to transform it, in turn, into a commodity viable for a speculative market. Who could have thought that regulation could be so interesting? If any community would instinctively respond to this question in the affirmative, it would be urban planning. While the book comes out of the disciplines of architectural history and science and technology studies, it is one that I would recommend for planners of all stripes. Situated in similar terrain as Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon (1992) and The Code of the City by Eran Ben-Joseph (2005), Modernism’s Visible Hand paints a rich and emplaced picture of the origins of regulation without any of the ungrounded theoretical speculation or impenetrable language that too often diminishes such scholarly work from architecture and planning. Moreover, its insights into the regulatory systems of modernity provide critical context for how we understand and frame our work as planners.
The book takes its title from historian Alfred Chandler’s argument that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market has since been replaced by the “visible hand” of corporate managers who wield regulatory power. It is organized into a series of “episodes in the history of regulation” which ensures that its conclusions are grounded in specific examples that cover some breadth but also that the book does not crumble from the weight of being comprehensive. The arguments hold up without a need for a totalizing history and theory of regulation. The first two chapters focus on specific technologies which allowed for the regulation of temperature: first, of home interiors with the development of the thermostat and, second, of food and perishables with the cold storage warehouse. Osman deftly picks up on the wide-ranging impacts—ranging from questions of gender and domesticity to food safety and public health—of what we might otherwise assume to be relatively insignificant technologies. The final three chapters focus on representational systems of regulatory control which give insight into how ideas of regulation are constructed in the social imaginary. These include scientific tools for understanding ecological balance, Taylorist devices for planning labor in factories and corporations, and, in a final chapter that will hit close to home for any formerly or currently practicing architect, the bureaucratic management systems of the architectural office.
Apart from a pair of footnotes, there are few references to Cronon’s work, but it is hard not to hear echoes of Nature’s Metropolis when we read that “installing a system for thermostatic control would make the family’s expenditure on heat into a predictable expense in the management of household finances” (37). It is a revolutionary transmogrification that we now take for granted, so similar to Cronon’s description of the transformation of time into something predictable with the technological development of the rail system. Or, in another delicious morsel, we discover the origin of the now ubiquitous sell-by date stamped onto food items in the 1914 Uniform Cold Storage Act. The law itself was a regulatory response to “uniform receipts” which transformed perishable goods in cold storage into abstract commodities tradable in speculative markets. Regulated commodities are not supposed to spoil! As Osman describes, Until cold storage had become a utility, food was either fresh or spoiled. . . . The nationally regulated cold storage system required that representatives of the industry disassociate the concept of freshness from a commodity’s origin, replacing its natural life with its preserved value. (79)
It is a tale that bears close relation to Cronon’s description of grain elevators, transforming a specific harvest into a generic, tradable commodity. These are regulatory transmutations that helped birth the abstraction of modern life, from the uniform receipt, to grain futures, to money itself.
While the book’s emphasis is on the technologies and sociotechnical systems that can be found within the architecture of the city rather than the city itself, it nevertheless provides a handful of revelatory observations into urban history and theory. We enjoy new insight into one of the most circulated images on urban theory, Burgess’ concentric ring diagram. Osman links its representational mode and conceptual structure to larger discussions at the time regarding an ecological understanding of the earth, networked environments with interspecies interactions, and zoologist Victor Ernest Shelford’s interest in the regulatory behaviors of animals. Although we might have been loosely aware of the diagram’s link to a then-emergent field of “human ecology,” Osman notes that Shelford actually saw sociology writ large as a subfield of ecology: he “saw human associations as an extension of other animal aggregations,” and thought, for example, that “they could be compared to ecological studies of bivalve mollusks” (122). This nineteenth century dressing down of any anthropocentric presumption came long before we saw ourselves as a fragile blue dot in 1968’s Earthrise and is an especially useful reminder today in the face of catastrophic climate change.
Elsewhere in the book, infrastructure geeks will enjoy reading about the brief moment when coldness nearly became a standard urban utility alongside gas, water, and electricity. The novelty and rarity of refrigeration machines around the turn of the century led to an infrastructural design which saw fit to lay a six-mile-long network of cooled brine pipes throughout Boston’s market district, cooling several dispersed cold storage buildings from one centralized compressor. And, to control this infrastructural feat, there was also the invention of the “thermaphone,” a kind of telephone switchboard for reading dozens of far-flung temperature-sensitive coils from a centralized location, allowing a god-like manager to control vast sums of refrigerated square footage.
Throughout these urban narratives, I think of Ben-Joseph’s exploration of urban design and development standards and their impact on landscape and infrastructure. Where Ben-Joseph’s history is a practical one, geared toward critiquing the status quo of urban planning regulation, Osman’s approach situates regulation more broadly, almost as a mindset or script of modernity. We may, at first blush, disagree with the importance of the often obscure or strange historical moments upon which he focuses his attention, but this denaturalization of the historical past and its impact on our present helps us destabilize, in turn, the very idea of regulation itself. As planners, our desire for control, for predictability, for the minimization of risk has often led to precisely the kind of drastic interventions in the landscape, typically at the greatest expense to those who can least afford it, that Ben-Joseph critiques. But while Ben-Joseph might pragmatically propose an alternative plan, Osman seems to suggest that regulation itself is worth rethinking.
If I had to identify a weakness of the book, it might be the volume’s lack of engagement with markers of identity—race, ethnicity, class, gender—which are themselves intertwined with the regulatory policies of modernity. Osman seems somewhat reticent to add much in the way of a contemporary critique of gender, despite the fact that he provides strong evidence for one, connecting the regulatory principles of the thermostat and “the mechanics of industrial production to the biological reproduction of a household” (43). He remains content to point toward “feminist scholarship by such historians as Dolores Hayden and others.” Elsewhere, opportunities for a critical eye toward socioeconomic status, capital, and labor, and race also go unmined. For example, Osman’s exploration of how the Taylorist principle of “brainwork” was managed through forms of representation powerfully connects to a number of contemporary debates around labor, ranging from the so-called “creative city” to questions of immaterial labor. It may be because of Osman’s committed historiographical approach, refusing to speculate about anything apart from that which is undeniably clear based on the evidence before him. The book, because of this approach, remains situated in the past tense.
Nevertheless, Modernism’s Visible Hand remains useful reading for planners. Osman’s voice, distinct from that of the typical planner, sheds needed light on our discipline, itself a product of a culture that has often assumed (in what is likely the most poetically scathing language in the book) “the whiggish teleology of modernization” (188). We might translate his critique of architectural histories that focus on the form and style of master architects and master works to planning histories that emphasize the normative ideals of master planning theorists and practitioners. Instead, the most revealing insight can be found in the banal technological details which we take for granted, the idiosyncratic products of history, like modernity’s regulatory structures, for which few want to take credit. Behind the smart city, there is TCP/IP; beneath the TOD, there is nominal track gauge; before planning, there is regulation.
