Abstract
Science and Technology Studies (STS), initiated in the 1960s, is a sociological study of science and examines how scientific advances are socially shaped. Integrating insights from the humanities and social sciences, it emphasizes the social processes through which scientific and technical knowledge is created, evaluated, and utilized. It considers as misleading those representations of reality that neatly split subject from object, technologies and humans, and the material from the social. Rather, these categories are seen by STS scholars as emergent and mutually constituting. In The Radicals’ City, co-authors Brand and Fregonese demonstrate the usefulness of STS for studying cities characterized by deep political and ideological fractures. They interrogate the premise that the built environment of cities not only reflects social phenomenon but also that the physical environment “has a degree of agency and should be understood as some kind of actor” (p. 128). While not adhering to material determinism, the authors instead suggest that “the materiality of the city is one of many factors that that co-shape our social reality” (p. 128). Using a STS lens, the city’s built environment is both a mirror and mediator of social processes. In cities hosting antagonistic communities, the built environment—including anything from street layouts, buildings, parks, walls and fences, benches, flags and other symbols, and surveillance infrastructure—reflects the tension and polarization of these cities, but also constantly influences the daily lives of its inhabitants (in terms of where they feel safe to shop, walk, recreate, commute) and can change perceptions, shaping and intensifying stereotypes about the ethnic “other” in the city.
The Radicals’ City is a fascinating exposition on the urban environment as a social–material artifact. It contains an astonishing 115 color photographs taken by the authors that illustrate myriad kinds of divisions—physical and psychological—in the four case study cities of Belfast, Beirut, Berlin, and Amsterdam. The meaning of each photograph in the context of the book’s theoretical lens is clearly described, integrating visual and textual material effectively. Field research constituting 92 person-days and 90 semi-structured interviews is the main source of data. In addition to the four case study city chapters, there is a useful theoretical chapter, a chapter and epilogue dedicated to what it means for planning practice and policy (including how social cohesion and integration is connectable to the Prevent programmatic component of United Kingdom’s counter-terrorism strategy), plus a chapter that presents the transcripts of four interviews with investigators who have done field research in polarized cities (note to reader—I am one of those interviewed). All in all, the book usefully exploits several different formats to communicate its content and argument.
The book examines two cities (Belfast and Beirut) where there are clear inter-group differences owing to ethno-nationalist disagreements; here, the term “polarization” is used to describe situations where two or more groups are each pushing away from each other and thus increasing relative distance. In the Belfast case, amid the informative analysis of peace-lines, defensive architecture, and murals, there is an illuminating discussion of the Stewartstown Road Regeneration Project, which points to how the city could be managed in the future to increase sectarian co-existence. Built on a peace-line separating Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods, the newly built structure accommodating commercial and community offices creates shared space by utilizing two mono-sectarian entrances connected by a common corridor on the main floor and the use of architecture and symbols that are non-sectarian. This case shows the intricacies involved in project design that will be needed to transform the city from rigid sectarian territoriality to one not of improbable integration but rather more plausible functional co-existence as a starting point toward normalization. The Beirut case, meanwhile, illuminates the difficulties of making this transition to post-sectarian urbanity. The massive rebuilding of the central city district by a private corporation after the 1975–1990 Civil War, intent as it was on not allowing sectarian territoriality to emerge, has been criticized for creating a sterile and exclusive separateness from the rest of the city. And, notwithstanding these neutralization efforts, encroachment by sectarian interests (in the form of new mosques, memorials, and political posters) for the purposes of re-territorializing the district has still occurred. The occupation of Beirut’s central district space in the form of opposing political encampments in 2006 provides an interesting foreshadowing of the use of central urban space in the Arab Spring 4 years later.
In the other two cities explored in The Radicals’ City (focusing on far-right extremists in Berlin and the Muslim immigrant communities in Amsterdam), the term “radicalization” is more often used by the authors, describing cases where one group only is doing the pushing away (or perceived to be doing the pushing away). The use of Berlin and Amsterdam in this way expands coverage to beyond those cities that are deeply contested politically. This allows the investigators to give us fascinating examples of Berlin’s far-right coded symbols deeply embedded in neighborhood materiality and how cultural differences between Dutch and immigrant communities in Amsterdam become manifest on residential facades and streets. At the same time, however, combining “polarized” cities with cities of “radicalization” introduces some conceptual ambiguity which the authors themselves struggle with at several points. For example, if the native Dutch react to immigrants in ways that further isolate the foreign born, does one-sided radicalization become two-sided polarization? Along these lines, I find the title of the book unfortunate because it does not clearly convey what I have found in Belfast and Beirut—situations where there is not a single group pushing away from the mainstream, but rather at least two groups contesting central notions of political control and sovereignty. Beyond conceptual ambiguity, one must ask whether efforts to facilitate interaction and tolerance should be similar in a city with a marginalized “other” amidst a dominant culture as in a politically contested city having no cultural hegemon. Dissimilarities across the case study cities in terms of the types of antagonisms remind us of the need for caution in generalizing from one city to another.
Because it emphasizes the physical as socially and politically created and posits that what we do in cities has larger societal repercussions pertaining to inter-group tolerance and co-existence, STS applied to cities provides a useful tool for bridging the gap that often exists between high-end diplomatic political considerations and the micro-scale dimensions of urban life. While national peace-making focuses on the apportionment and structuring of political power and representation, it is within the neighborhoods, streets, and public spaces of cities where there is the negotiation over, and clarification of, abstract concepts such as democracy, fairness, and tolerance. Debates over proposed projects and discussion of physical place provide opportunities to anchor and negotiate dissonant meanings in a conflict society; indeed, there are few opportunities outside debates over urban life where these antagonistic impulses take such concrete forms in need of pragmatic negotiation. Peace-building in cities seeks not the well-publicized handshakes of national political elites, but rather the more mundane, yet ultimately more meaningful, handshakes and smiles of ethnically diverse urban neighbors as they confront each other in their daily interactions. In thinking about urban peace-building, the mutual entangling and constituting of the material and the social put forth by STS grants urban and political science investigators an expansive area for exploration that lies between material determinism (physical > social), on the one hand, and unfettered agency (social > physical), on the other. In investigating systems as complex and multi-faceted as cities penetrated by ethnic, political, and ideological polarization, such a multi-dimensional analytical approach seems both warranted and of considerable value. Brand and Fregonese show us the fruits of using this conceptualization of cities and the built environment.
Among the books written about ethnic and political conflict in cities, The Radicals’ City is the most sustained effort at examining the territorial micro-sovereignties, street discourses, and material and psychological rigidities that embed themselves amid such contestation. Because of this, it will have considerable value to architects, urban designers, planners, and engineers working at the project, neighborhood, and street levels. Charlesworth’s (2006) Architects Without Frontiers and Ellin’s (2006) Integral Urbanism come to mind as excellent complements to The Radicals’ City in terms of helping us come to terms with how we as urban professionals might effectively intervene in difficult urban settings traumatized by conflict and disruption.
What do studies of politically polarized (Belfast, Beirut) and socially fractured (Berlin, Amsterdam) cities tell us in terms of planning theory? The authors assert that the STS perspective of the city and built environment as socio-material phenomena may help us fill in gaps found in several related literatures—writings on war cities that neglect the role of city-building before and after overt conflict, socio-political literature on conflict that de-emphasizes materiality, and the built environment literature that avoids cases of extreme political contestation. This claim by the authors of STS’ utility will need further empirical work to test its validity; to the extent that STS encourages the bridging across of academic perspectives in understanding cities, it will be of significant worth. A clearer conclusion is that The Radicals’ City contributes to planning academic and practice communities in an important way that at first may not be appreciated. In Nordstrom’s (1997) A Different Kind of War Story, she observes that what we relegate to the margins of lived experience and theory often speaks most fundamentally to core aspects of human experience. In some respects, the examples in The Radicals’ City may be said to be extreme cases of division unrepresentative of contemporary urbanity. In my opinion, just the opposite is true. Far from being extraneous to the theory of urban life and planning practice, these cities and how they deal with inter-group relations are central to debates about urbanism, democracy, and cultural diversity. Fundamental truths about the close connections between urbanism, the built environment, and political power become clearer in these difficult urban circumstances as inter-group antagonisms assume visible, raw, and potentially explosive forms. Lessons from the case study cities in this book have wide relevance in today’s urban world. Indeed, the ethnic fracturing of many cities in North America and Western Europe owing to changing demographics, cultural radicalization, and migration creates situations of “public interest” fragility and cleavage similar to this book’s case studies. Numerous cities across the globe are addressing and negotiating in incremental and evolutionary ways the great challenges of inter-group co-existence, tolerance, and multinational democracy that have been thrust upon this book’s four cases because of potent political, nationalistic, and radicalizing pressures.