Copyright © 1997

The University of Michigan

College of Architecture + Urban Planning
& Michael Sorkin
Editor: Kent Kleinman
Book Design: Caleb Harris Clauset
Production Assistance: Christian Unve rzagt

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Printing: Unive rsity Lithoprinters, Inc.
Typeset in Monotype Baskerville and Linotype DIN
ISBN 0 9614792 9 9

The University of Michigan

College of Architecture + Urban Planning
2000 Bonisteel Boulevard
Ann Arbor, Michigan
48109-2069
USA
Michael Sorkin
Traffic in Democracy
Foreword
Since the inauguration of the Raoul Wallenberg Lecture series at the
College of Architecture and Urban Planning in 1972, exactly twenty-
five years ago, the lecture has been given by a number of distinguished
architects and historians. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner gave the first lecture
followed by such notable scholars as Joseph Rykwert, Spiro Kostof
and Vincent Scully. Distinguished architects and planners, such as
Denise Scott Brown and Daniel Libeskind, have also graced the
podium in honor of Wallenberg. These are no ordinary lectures. In
each case the speaker has risen to the challenge of addressing the
subject of architecture and urban planning as a humane social art.

This year's lecture by architect and scholar Michael Sorkin is no

different. Sorkin addresses the difficult problem of democracy and
planning. It is a topic which would have found favor with Raoul
Wallenberg, I am certain. Raoul Wallenberg, class of 1935, exercised
one of the greatest rights of democracy- the right to speak out
and act. However, he did not exercise this democratic initiative
within a democratic state. Wallenberg spoke out and acted during a
time of war when democracy and the rights of individuals were at
stake. He is credited with saving the lives of countless numbers of
people in Hungary during World War II, individuals whose very
existence was threatened by a regime which wanted to exterminate
Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, communists and others not of the
Nazi's persuasion. It is important for us to remember also that this
regime wanted to destroy democracy itsel£

Our alumnus Raoul Wallenberg has become an international

symbol of the enduring concept that one person can make a
difference in the lives of others. As architects and planners, we
especially must keep that reality ever in mind.

Robert M. Beckley
Dean, College qf Architecture + Urban Planning
Introduction
Any responsible editor will save an author from repetition:
repetition of ideas; repetition of peculiar syntactic structures;
repetition of unusual terms whose force lies in their singularity.
A text read is other than a text written and words uttered in the
flow of oration differ from the same words fixed in print. In
preparing Michael Sorkin's extraordinary 1997 Wallenberg lecture
for the page, a particular word appeared with ill-mannered
frequency. I am not referring to a so-called key word (a term of the
title, for example, not "democracy," not "traffic") nor a term so
essential to the argument that reiteration is inherent to the proj ect
at hand ("propinquity," for example). I mean rather a word that
appears as mere shortage of an alternative, as lack of variety. For
those familiar with Sorkin's exquisite command of the written, this
will seem an unlikely deficit.

The term in question isfantasy. Consider the evidence: "fantasies

of technology as second nature," "fantasies of on-the-fly transfer,"
"Thomas Jefferson's Cartesian fantasy," "the Cartesian fantasy ... "
(again), the "fantasy of collectivity," "that old fantasy of infinity,"
"private fantasy as public right," "fantasies of non-exclusive
neighborhoods," "post-Fordist fantasies." Why not dreams, visions,
imagination, conceit? Severalfontasies, it seemed, could be eliminated
without semantic damage. Or perhaps not.

If, as seems likely, these fontasies are not due to a lack thereof, then
perhaps they are programatically loaded and consequently should
be protected. Perhaps they are strategic, liminal cues that only
become apparent when the aural event is re-viewed, inevitably
slower, as text on the page. Perhaps, in fact, fantasy per se is being
proffered. Jefferson's grid, technology, non-exclusive neighborhoods:
Sorkin links these via a common denominator not because they
are equally desirable or attainable, but because these are most
powerfully understood as mental constructs that lodge themselves
in the imagination, and thus have the potential to change the world.
Fantasy is the shared space of dreams and conceits, delusions and
visions, all vehicles reaching into the future. Privileging wants over
needs, fantasy renders desire transparent, and as such it is arguably
the bedrock of social discourse and action. Believing in the
potential to change the world is one of the originary fantasies:
Raoul Wallenberg's conviction that one individual can do so
was- fortunately for many hundreds- of this kind.

In the following text, Michael Sorkin argues for a physical analog

to democratic political process. Its components are propinquity
and traffic, physical proximity measured by human locomotion
combined with a space consciously configured for safe human
collision. But the argument is laced with another agenda, namely
to make propaganda for the space of fantasy. The repetitious
presence of the term itself is just a tease. Speaking more direcdy
to this point are the images, many more of which accompanied
the lecture as a parallel narrative strand without verbal
commentary. But lest there be any doubt as to the envisioned
endgame, the reader is invited to turn to the last page. There, on
the sly, the fantasy is named:

" ... new neighborhoods and new cities ... "

Kent Kleinman
Associate Prqftssor qf Architecture
Traffic In Democracy
I am deeply honored by the invitation to give a lecture celebrating
Raoul Wallenberg. With amazing courage, Wallenberg saved
thousands not just from death but from transport to a place so
hellish, so radically criminal, as to suggest an end to the history of
human possibilities. Auschwitz is often represented as the omega
of modernity: rationality and universality pushed to the grotesque.
Although this interpretation is too glib, it's not without an element
of truth. Auschwitz was a vast and efficient machine for the
annihilation of unacceptable difference. As a goal, it was utterly
unimaginable bifbre political modernism, before the modern
celebration of rationality and universality. Yet to condemn these
notions unreservedly- without noting the different outcomes
they've had (the democratic revolutions as well as the terror),
without trying to understand when and how they begin to turn
ugly- is to succumb to the same fanaticism one seeks to condemn.

The accommodation of difference is the key project of contemporary

democracy. Politics today is obsessed by the pursuit of private
identity, our own post-Enlightenment backlash. Gone, it seems, is
the famous image of the melting pot, the caldron in which the
diversity of individuals is melted down, "purified," in order to
provide a gold standard of sameness; in the aftermath of national
socialism, any reference to purifYing fires can only have a chilling
effect. But if certain images will have to be permanently excised
from imagination's repertoire, we must be careful not to sacrifice
imagination itself since we still need it to figure the possibilities of
negotiating and mediating conflicts among private individuals.

One of the great casualties of recent "politically correct" attacks

on imagination has been the very image of space. It is as if, in
 lO

reparation for the loss of countless individuals to the destructive

forces of modernism, space itself has been melted into air. And
yet, if the individuality of individuals is to be safeguarded, it will
depend on providing them with a place- a kind of ground. Only
public space can guarantee privacy. This is a matter of logic:
democracy always implies the occupation of a position. Democracy
requires, for its working out, that its citizens occupy positions
which are, if only provisionally, fixed. To conduct democracy's
negotiations, we must speak from a position of identity, we must
be located. Deliberative democracy requires us to be reliably
"in the open" to fully participate.

But space is more than an image or metaphor. I believe that

propinquity- physically being together in space- is itself
necessary for democracy. Agnes Heller calls contemporary politics
the "concretization of the universal value of freedom." The
American understanding of freedom, however, is inscribed in a
false, if historical, dichotomy. We venerate the freedom of the
frontier, the "democratic" right to be left alone. If this
arrangement is not exactly anti-democratic, it's definitely a dodge:
it uses space to attenuate propinquity to the point of irrelevance.
The city, on the other hand, because of its intense exchange, is
the necessary ground for the reconciliation of difference and the
exercise of freedom, including the freedom to shift identities.

I admire the Hanseatic maxim, "city air makes people free,"

which implies to me that freedom cannot be imagined outside
of a structure of interaction with others. Freedom of speech, for
example, necessarily means freedom to address others, to be heard.
One cannot be free alone. The existence of others is so fundamental
to all of our freedoms that it is senseless to contemplate them
outside the notion of community. This is precisely why freedom is
a political issue, an issue proper to the polis. And this is exactly
where city politics lies. Legible in the variety and tractability of
routines of circulation and contact, the currency of propinquity is
exchange, the measure of the city's activity.

The locus classicus of the rational city is the Athenian agora.

Aristotle wrote that the dimensions of an agora should be derived
from the space of a shout, an auditory community with a strictly
measurable dimension. This suggests that a precondition for the
space of democratic governance is the ability to be heard without
mediation. A compact space like the agora- in its physical
convenience- represents an ideal setting for such exchange.
Surrogacy and intermediacy, in contrast, lose signal quality with
 13

each relay, whether via representation, transmission, distance, or

translation. Mediation is the theft of intent: freedom is most
pristine- most free- when we exercise it ourselves.

The architecture of the Athenian agora was both complex and

informal, filled with markers and resistances and institutions of
use: the stoa and the pnyx, shops and baths and taverns. The
agora was.funky, not the kind of centralizing, symmetrical space
that one imagines in classical antiquity. It's still a good model.
The agora described the size of a tractable body politic and
offered the possibility of assembly in a variety of registers,
modalities, and settings. The agora supported both efficient
passage and organized encounters while simultaneously offering
innumerable routes and hence innumerable circumstances for
chance, unstructured, accidental, and serendipitous encounters.

Cities are juxtaposition engines and owe their existence to

complex patterns of human contact. To be either democratic or
creative, a city must, like the agora, offer spaces for both convenient
and accidental encounters. This is not merely a consideration of
delight but intrinsic to the working of democracy. Democracy's
logic is to create a society which is perpetually unstable, always in
becoming, always open to change. A city is an instrument for
setting the odds- a compound of frequency and arrangements-
on the accidental likelihood of crossing paths. If the odds are too
"good" (per the city of complete rationality), the result is excess
predictability. If the odds are too "bad," the result is pure
randomization. Both of these extremes are alienating and
unsatisfactory. Perhaps the greatest task for urban design is the
constant work of finessing this mix.
 14

I want to focus on one specific issue that is crucial to this mix:

traffic, the means of circulating in the city. We judge the good city
by the quality of its public life and the public spaces where such
life takes place; the public spaces of the city are preeminently
spaces of circulation and exchange. But, as the private has become
the mantra of our politics, our public spaces are terribly stressed.
In the newly fashionable politics of communitarianism, the
struggle to "empower" ethnic, gender, and other groups becomes
paramount. As the idea of a general public is increasingly
supplanted by a notion of multiple publics, traditional formulations
of physical consent are under tremendous strain. Symptomatic of
this condition is the headlong privatization in the United States of
the spaces of gathering and collectivity: shopping malls and stadia,
theme parks and entertainment zones, and enclaved communities
where over 30 million of us now live.

The danger in this politics is, as Gillian Rose points out, that it
"presupposes and fixes a given distribution of identities in a
radically dynamic society." This is the nub of the problem:
while democracy may demand such fixities for the purpose of
its negotiations, it calls for fixity in the service of an aspiration
to fluidity, which is to say to the space of freedom. This is not a
contradiction. The problem of supporting difference without
privilege in an atmosphere of flux is a tremendous challenge
both to democracy and to urbanism. Today, for example, the
architectural media are full of the so-called "new urbanists" who
market the image of a nostalgic architecture as a bridge to a set
of fixed identities which are promoted as yielding the benisons
of "community." The fallacy is a double one: the space can
never yield the practice, and the strategy is clearly exclusionary.
 15

Perhaps even more problematic is the growth of cyburbia, of those

virtual systems which increasingly supplant the physical sites of
human interaction. The Net is often held out as a medium of great
promise for democracy and in many ways it is. The possibility of
instantaneous and free global communication has already had a
dramatic political impact. One need only think of mobilizations
by democratic advocates in Beijing or Chiapas to appreciate the
power and appeal of such connectivity. However, the anxiety about
telecommunications doesn't spring from the power of the Net to
supplement physical styles of participation but in its rise as a
replacement for other modes of interaction. For instance, although
we've heard a great deal about the electronic town hall, every
example I've seen seems to convert democracy to entertainment,
merely offering us an invitation to participate in the spectacle of
someone else being heard. Rather than interaction, the electronic town
hall conduces to passiviry. This marketplace of ideas is precisely
that, an invitation to consume pre-packaged goods.

This is extremely menacing. What happens when neither wealth

nor information nor happiness is exchanged face-to-face, when
communication increasingly takes place by dissolving the space
of action? How much human contact can become obsolete before
the connection collapses? As contemporary strategies of the virtual
compete with historical ideas of location to found the basis of
propinquity, the ontology of the city will be transformed. I do not
worry here about traditional urban centers. The traditional city is
less at risk from virtual space than from its own extent: apractic
places like Mexico City or Cairo have been crushed by a sheer
weight of numbers that no amount of prosperity can ever redress.
The only answer is de-densification. If cyber-technology can
 16

contribute to the contraction and aeration of such dysfunctional

centers, so much the better. But make no mistake: if the body
ceases to be the privileged means of participation in and
enjoyment of urban life, urban life is at an end. The metastasizing
edge city marks the end of place, cyburbia made form. As our
urbanism and culture become more homogeneous, more
compacted, more randomly distributed, motion through will
become the only medium of particularity. In this new universal
urbanism, our path is our only present.

"In democratic politics," Michael Walzer writes, "all destinations

are temporary. No citizen can ever claim to have persuaded his
fellows once and for all." This is both that old spatial metaphor
again and, I think, an argument for motion. What's left out of
this description, however, is the dignity of the set of "temporary"
destinations, many of which endure for lifetimes. Modern culture
is increasingly characterized by suspension in capsules of
intermediacy: in trains, planes, automobiles, and elevators, not
to mention time spent on-line with electronic styles of mobility.
Just as the view from the railway car window forever altered not
simply the landscape but fundamental perceptions of time and
space, so the window of the monitor represents a shift in our
perceptual and psychical relationship to exteriority. Such virtual
travel also embodies a remarkable economy of energy as the
experience of motion is efficiently stripped from actual mobility,
making us all unmoved movers. Mobility becomes the training
ground for immobility as virtual worlds explode and the physical
environment becomes everywhere the same.
 Walter Hudson

The late Walter Hudson, record holder as the world's fattest man,
would seem to be a hero of space, the person who holds the
distinction of having taken up more of it than anyone in history.
Ironically, though, Hudson is also an avatar of spacelessness. So
huge that he could not move, Hudson was confined to his specially
reinforced bed, his contact with the world only electronic. But
Hudson managed- without ever being present- to be incredibly
visible, lavishly attended to by the media who made him a poster
child for America's obsession with the consumption of space.
Hudson represented the flip side of anorexia, perhaps the spatial
neurosis of our age, and lay at the heart of the constructed desires
of a nation. I often think of Hudson's "luxurious" consumption of
space when I see those airline ads for business class travel seats,
images of the immobilized traveler, strapped and wired in, stuffed
like a Strasbourg goose, cruising through never-never land on the
 19

way to a distant place which he or she will be increasingly at

pains to distinguish from the place left twelve hours ago and half
a world away, status and comfort reduced to a consideration of
hot towels and seat pitch.

Certainly, one way to solve the problem of urban circulation is to

eliminate the reasons to move, whether through Walter Hudson
style immobility or through the suppression of difference in the
environment. Thus winnowed, location falls under ever more
intense competition from position, from location emptied of
locality, proximity defined purely through virtual relations. This
kind of malnourished location more and more rules at the expense
of place in a tremendous re-scaling of the urban environment:
post-adjacent propinquity, configured at global scale.

Any account of the physical character of cities begins with the

face-to-face. The city's styles of intensifYing such intercourse set
the scene for a description of urban economy and its politics.
Traffic is the medium of this commerce, the means by which we
physically encounter each other. Of course, no theory of
movement will make a difference if the character and variety of
places between end points of circulation become impoverished.
The relation of public and private is invented through the means
of circulating between them.

We too often look at motion as mere technology, saddled with its

myths, stuck between malleability and autonomy. In such fantasies,
technology becomes second nature, a system with its own rules,
raging like Frankenstein's monster, beyond our control. This view
has displaced the preceding myth of technology as universal
 20

panacea which is now viewed with skepticism, part of a more

general rejection of scientistic modernism. Modernist urbanism
fell victim to its enthrallment with technology, adopting as its
own deductive reasoning, social "science," and the mimesis of
tech-forms. When- in reaction to this- cities ceased to be planned
in the old physical sense, the space of such activity was taken over
by what is called "infrastructure," by something underneath,
invisible, in common, agreeable. Planning for traffic was simply
subsumed in this one-dimensional view, becoming the favored
visibility of planning, the thing which could tolerably be seen.

Foregrounding the means of motion in the building of cities has

been a disaster. Part of the difficulty is the relative autonomy of
technology. Science is neither revealed truth nor pure social
construction: we do not always get the technology we either deserve
or desire. As a result, cities have too long been obliged to play
catch-up with existing technologies of transportation, successively
refitting themselves with systems that do not love them, rent by
railway cuttings and freeways, clogged with pollution and lethal
metal. In focusing on technology, the means of motion displaced
the reasons to get together.

The appeal of motion-based urbanism, however, is obvious.

Traffic at once represents a sort of freedom- the freedom of
movement that in engineering language substitutes for human
freedoms like that of association- and also models the economic
relations of the circuit of capital. These correspondences, though,
are more metaphorical than real, never quite able succinctly to
embody the shifting interaction of time, space, and treasure. It is,
however, true that urban motion is the defining mode of urban
 21

connection and the main use for the public spaces of the city. And
it is precisely for reasons of its consequentiality that we must cease
simply to fit the city to existing paradigms of movement and try to
re-imagine questions of circulation from first principles.

Traffic is the relationship between speed and flow. In democratic

traffic, human locomotion becomes not the sole but the privileged
mode, the top of the hierarchy and the crucial measure of speed
and of dimension. Whatever the pleasures of the ride (not
something I consider trivial) it must have a teleology, a sense that
the means serve the end of a decent and desired propinquity. Mere
multiplication of the modes of motion is not enough, particularly
if the rationalization of such means reduces the possibility of
accident. In our culture of flow, the possibilities for global mobility
are gready enhanced: there is no place on the planet we cannot go
by the end of the day. On the other hand, neither urban mobility
nor the fundamental formats of face-to-face encounter have been
effectively increased since Catal Huyuk.

The idea of pleasure in mobility, however, is ancillary to the

principal term of traffic planning, the idea of "flow," a quality
that has by now obtained a quasi-metaphysical status. Like the
circulation of capital, the circulation of traffic is most perfecdy
efficient when it is ceaseless, when it attains the status of a
constant- perpetual motion. But, while stasis is the enemy of a
flowing system of perfect efficiency, it is also indispensable to its
functioning. The node, after all, is the creature of flow, implying
not simply centrality (and therefore directionality) but cessation,
that place where motion stops, enabling transfer to foot, to another
means, to another purpose. Although there is an interesting
 23

sub-history of fantasies of on-the-fly transfer (which is another

story) the notion of flow imposes its own idea of efficiency, which
is to keep going, without stopping, by overcoming impedance
and resisting inertia. The consequences are dramatic. Nodal
architectures subsumed by strategies of flow are predominant in
the American landscape: the strip, the shopping mall, the suburbs,
the edge city, everything.

The example of the car is instructive. In America, the car occupies

a powerful psychical and functional position. Cars are surrogates for
our selves, and our sense of rights has become closely identified with
the rights of the car. Indeed, the car's intimate relation to the lethal
coincides with America's machismo of private interests which is also
reflected in the hysterical resistance to the control of guns. The
mentality of increased capacity which has driven the prodigious
enlargement of America's pavement resonates with the frontier
imperative of continuous territorial expansion, the culture of
conquest. No longer content simply to ply the pavement, the largest
growth sector in the American automobile market is for off-the-road
vehicles and for space-aggrandizing, home-surrogate, mini-vans.

Because the car seeks to maximize both speed and flow, it looks
for a conflict-free environment. In a mixed system, this means that
either traffic must be separated strictly or that hierarchy must be
maintained, that the flows should either not mix or find systems
of giving ground. The traffic light is a means for sorting out such
conflicts. Traffic lights, which are meant to increase the efficient
utility of the street, are designed from the position of the car,
directed primarily at resolving potential conflicts among vehicles.
By any qualitative or quantitative measure, pedestrians are
 Catal Huyuk

inevitably disadvantaged: the space of the car, which predominates,

is always a danger to them, except at those moments when the
car's use of its own space is briefly suspended. The ideal for traffic
should be an easy mingling but we only produce technologies
predicated on separation. In fact, the historic city is the repository
of many of the good answers we require. Ur-town Catal Huyuk,
to cite one such, had no streets at all, a genuinely alternative
system that has demonstrated its vigor through the millennia. The
point is simply this: there are other means of organizing traffic-
the urban binder and the regulator of extent- than a grid of flow
created by a series of bounded territories.

Consider Los Angeles, the end of the road of the spatial city and
the prototype of the edge city. Los Angeles- and cities like it- seek
to create a consistent culture of the particle, in which ostensibly
egalitarian relationships of property are matched with appropriate
circulation. The experiment conducted with the use of cars in
 25

Los Angeles- not just the dominant but the virtually exclusive
mode of motion- updates Thomas Jefferson's Cartesian fantasy
of American space. The grid- which like the melting pot offers
equality achieved through the surrender of difference in space,
or rather by the reduction of the arena of difference to a rigidly
circumscribed territory- functions only if there is an even
distribution of use, or if it runs like "clock work," no caesura,
no surcease, and if there are no intersections. This was Jefferson's
fundamental error: he saw the grid as only the aggregated surfaces
of an infinite number of squares, their boundaries immaterial,
pure edge. The frontier was everywhere.

The Los Angeles grid, however, combines both territories and

interstices, each square producing not simply its own surface but
also four extra-territorial intersections which it is obliged to share
and which become the motive basis for the active relations of the
implied democracy. The conundrum arises because an intersection
is both a deterrent to flow and a necessity for contact. Democracy
implies the need continually to give ground to the other. As a
practical matter, the system only works at very low loads where the
possibilities of conflict are extremely reduced. As anyone who has
driven the Los Angeles grid late at night knows, the freedom with
which public space is encountered as almost purely private can be
exhilarating. At higher densities, though, contact becomes impediment.

In cities like Los Angeles, the loading on the grid is thrown into
disequilibrium by the inequalities of use that culture imposes on
the system. Zoning by class and function, as well as the extremely
uneven distribution of energy and motion over the diurnal cycle,
distorts the stable, static, relationships that support the Cartesian
 27

fantasy: ThomasJefferson never imagined the rush hour. The

planning history of Los Angeles is one of successive failed panaceas
for this problem. Coordinated traffic signals are one strategy for
introducing hierarchy, shifting blocks of traffic around the gridded
zones in trains of space. Urban expansion is another, but such
growth, that old hankering after the open frontier, reaches its limits
in Los Angeles, the edge of the continent. Another solution is to
introduce the next order of physical gridding: the freeway.

Freeways are a symptom of both the spatial and temporal

disequilibrium of real life, an attempt to impose a technological fix
on a conceptual difficulty. Like traffic lights, they try to solve the
difficulty from the position of the car. Freeways- like other
concentrating means of motion- try to reconcile the actual nodality
of the system with the dream of a continuous fabric of equalized
relationships. In this sense, Los Angeles traffic effectively reflects the
condition of American democracy in which dynamism flows from
the conflict between an egalitarian model of social relations and a
rapidly expanding system of privileges ultimately at odds with it.

Because the undergirding model does not work at the scale the city
has now achieved, Los Angeles must be viewed as a transitional form,
lying between the traditional city of centrality and the burgeoning
condition of pure interstice which electronic technologies- with
their suppression of literal motion- enable. Los Angeles is seminal
in the invention of this city of the interstice, with its primitive
dream of placelessness as paradise, of going with the flow in an
endless, ubiquitous, summer. Los Angeles is also a cautionary tale
about how the city will disappear: not with its physical obliteration
but with its transformation into the continuous texture of the
 28

not-city which, performing what remains of the function of the

city, finally covers the earth.

America's national book of virtues situates our autonomy in

property, in the literal possession of space. On the frontier, the
quality of space lies in its boundlessness. In a system of generous
dimensions- the mile square grid, for example- our privacy can
be both elective and absolute. After all, if our neighbor is always
invisible, our domain will appear infinite. This is crucial: as
suggested earlier, American polity is not founded on the fantasy
of collectivity but on the right to be left alone. The current fight
over immigration is symptomatic, again reflecting anxiety over the
loss of space and the excess visibility of the other. Where Alberti
familiarly conceived the city as a magnified house, the American
house summarizes the nation, the family isolated in its dominion
of space. Such a vision is re-read back onto the body of the city,
whether in the mathematical conversion of territory to value
(delineate and conquer!) or, more darkly, in the strategies of
enclaving and exclusion that dominate so much of our
contemporary place-making.

It's no coincidence that Disneyland first occurred in- or rather

near- Los Angeles and there's no question that Disneyland
represents a model "solution" to the problem of Los Angeles.
Disneyland forsakes the grid in favor of the node, located at a
place which exists only at the conjunction of freeways. It might be
argued that this simply raises the idea of the grid to a higher level
still. But again, the system has a quality of intermediacy. After all,
the freeway grid is predicated on the prior existence of nodes
and lacks the geometric rigor of its Jeffersonian counterpart,
 29

reversing its priority of dispersal by searching out the intersection,

seeking concentrations. Disneyland also invokes the next order
of grid making, or rather intersection making, by its conceptual
understanding of geographical and cultural space. In its
juxtapositions of simulated versions of different historical and
cultural moments, Disneyland signals the possibility of departure
from traditional strategies of time and space- of location- and
therefore harbingers in the territory of the physical the sorts of
possibilities now everywhere actualized by strategies of the virtual.

One hears that history has ended. The worst fear now is that after
history comes Disneyland. The easy reversibility of history is one of
the lessons Disneyland absorbs from Los Angeles. As an expressive
system, Los Angeles offers a strategy of hemmed latitude. The
image of an infinity of tiny lots, each with its homes-of-the-stars
fantasy of predigested self-expression, remakes the city in the image
of television. Television seeks to achieve the parity of bits, a rump
democracy of meaning. Here's an image of real post-modern
Jeffersonianism, emulated at Disney with its patronage of superstar
architects whose work is interleaved with the anonymous but
indistinguishable constructions of the Imagineers. In such a
recombinant system, we are no more surprised to find Robert Stern
next to Frank Gehry next to Space Mountain than we are to find
Barney next to Mother Theresa next to OJ. on TV. As culture is
reduced to entertainment and work is transformed into leisure,
citizenship becomes lifestyle.

Disneyland, however, is foremost a playground of mobility, its

entertainments largely those of pleasured motion. And, there is
something to be learned here. It seems undeniable that for all of
 31

its depredations, all of its regimentation, surveillance, and control,

part of what we experience as enjoyable at Disneyland is the
passage through an environment of urban density in which both
the physical texture and the means of circulation are not simply
entertaining but stand in invigorating contrast to the dysfunctional
versions back home. One extracts from Disneyland a shred of
hope, the persuasive example that pedestrianism coupled with
short distance collective transport systems can be both efficient
and fun, can thrive in the midst of an environment completely
otherwise constituted, and that the space of flow, sufficiently
decelerated, can become the space of exchange. But ultimately
only if we're not just passing through.

Democratic traffic favors choice over flow. To manage this

deceleration, cities need supply-side transport management
strategies. This will not necessarily be easy. The culture~nursed
on advertising round the clock~makes a fetish of demand, the
whole system thriving on spurious need. What goes unrecognized
is that the vociferous insistence on these demands is the sign not
of the autonomy of our desires, but of their silencing: these
demands only reveal how thoroughly entrapped we have become
in someone else's entrepreneurial dream. To begin again will
mean reconsidering the place of the body in democracy. For the
most part, democracy does not traffic in bodies. It is theorized
instead in terms of disincorporation: the beheading of the
monarch; the emptying out of the central place of power; the
establishment of body-blind tribunals of public justice; and so on.
Yet it is absurd to take this disincorporation literally, as the mere
excision of the physical body from democratic space, for it is
rather a radical clearing of old notions of the body and an
 32

invitation to invent it anew. Depending on the nerve with which

we pursue this reinvention and reprivatization, the consequences
could be tremendous.

Growth, too, invites reinvention. In the urban context, it has too

long been understood as equivalent to expansion, that old fantasy
of infinity based on the endless capacity of land to absorb value
(like the right of all Americans to grow infinitely rich on their
parcels) and on the ephemerality of that value when the city moves
speculatively on. Whatever one thinks of the dynamism and the
aesthetic of cities so produced- and this comes from someone
who adores New York- the sheer waste of energy is idiotic.
Clearly, we need a far more ecological growth model, based not
on expansion but on elaboration and, ultimately, on limits. The
frontier mentality, which uses the idea of an unlimited horizon to
manipulate value within the edge is surely obsolete.

What kind of a city would accommodate elaboration and change,

magnify the possibilities of interaction and accident, without
the imperatives of continuous growth and with a radically
sustainable character? What would the democratic instance of
such a city be like?

Imagine a city of rampant plurality in which lifestyle is elective

and fluid. Here, city lifestyle will have ceased to have any direct
relationship to class, becoming a profusion of accessible private
choices, not just the city of consumption in which every choice
seems to turn us into Marie Antoinette. I don't mean to
romanticize this position, but I believe that this flow of choices
was part of what Raoul Wallenberg was fighting for, the idea
 34

that private fantasy is a public right, that one of the stable qualities
of democracy is flux.

But how is all this difference to be housed? If not by abstraction,

how should the city be divided? In the age of identity politics,
what is the meaning of the ghetto? Is it possible to produce
non-exclusionary differences within cities? While we think of the
ghetto as a prison, we also know it has great dynamism, an energy
bred of common experience, tempered by mutual adversity and
festivity. The ghetto begs the boundary and boundaries are zones
where we can best observe the morphology of difference. In a city
dedicated to free circulation, how is it possible to construct the
boundaries that will make variety both legible and accessible while
at the same time producing a non-coercive cohesion?

The alternative to the ghetto is the neighborhood. Neighborhoods

are the centers of urban life, the logical increment of both local
democracy and of environmental accountability. Physically,
neighborhoods are about producing difference without onus,
based on non-exclusionary fantasies. This is not simply
sentimentality. A neighborhood is a shared space, offering the
ground for consensual formulation both of the physical character
of that ground and of its use. One must, of course, be wary of
the fallacy of thinking that form is the source of community-
an historical and abiding delusion among architects. Equally, it's
necessary to be wary of the very idea of "community" which
has historically been used as a principal of exclusion, as a hedge
against the unexpected and unfamiliar. De Toqueville was
prescient in identifYing the potential of local communities as
a source of tyranny.
 35

The key to sharing is the dimensioned character of this construct.

Dimension determines tractability by describing the physical
grounds for accessibility, the body I time calculus of interaction.
Beyond, in its determined finitude, the neighborhood provides the
grounds for its own comprehensibility. By embodying a particular
scale and density, the neighborhood acquires a lexical vector, a
sum of parts to be learned and negotiated. Choreography,
however private, requires a stage.

All locality begins with the body, the primary means of urban
measurement and understanding. Neighborhoods are bound to the
body, both by increasing "human scale" and by acknowledging the
body's constraints. Good neighborhoods are thus meaningfully
physical, configuring the blend of the social and the dimensional.
The art of the urbanist is in nurturing the mix both within and
among neighborhoods by providing enabling physical differences
and apt legibility. Scale becomes a crucial enabler of educated
consent by assuring that the subject matter of urbanity remains
legible to its citizens. Locality is the ground of a neighborhood's
authenticity. Authenticity has a democratic valence: it implies both
consent and time. Democracy needs time, the space of deliberation
which a neighborhood acquires by the slow accretion of lived-lives
and physical variation.

Like any other part of the city, the neighborhood is a means of

harmonizing the speeds of the market and the civic by defending
the long wave. The market thrives on rapid speed, providing the
city with the froth of renewal, and accelerating both the accidental
and the centrifugal forces of dispersal. Its danger is in its corrosive
effects, its willingness to manipulate decay. Its metaphor is the
 36

exquisite corpse. The civic is slower, more deliberate, and tends

to concentrate and to bind. The civic metaphor is scissors, stone,
paper, the game of hierarchies and clear preferences. The forms
of cities emerge from the dialectic of these two rates.

Good neighborhoods must possesses autonomy: neighborhoods are

economic. Such autonomy introduces the neighborhood into a
system of reciprocities which parallel the enabling reciprocities
of local polity. It is logical to ask of a neighborhood, or a city,
whether it can depend on itself, whether it provides jobs, schools,
services, access, entertainment and clean air. This is not simply
to establish a sense of parity with other places but to measure a
neighborhood's internal viability. For example, the solution to the
traffic problem is perhaps radically to disconnect locality from
larger systems which, on balance, ill serve it. Indeed, for many
places, the only way to come to terms with the hegemony of the
automotive system is to secede from it. In inner city areas, starved
for useful public space and clotted with traffic, the most logical
and effective step is to reduce the area actually available to the
car. Roadways constitute the major portion of the commonly
maintained public realm in cities; in some American downtowns
the area given over to motor traffic in one form or another reaches
as much as 70 percent and more. Cars have been given a gigantic
franchise on the use of this space for both circulation and storage.

Recendy, working on a plan for a New York neighborhood, we

wondered what minimum intervention would begin to recapture the
order of the neighborhood from motor traffic, to promote a radical
greening, and to reinforce new patterns of relative self-sufficiency.
The answer, we decided, was to plant a tree in an intersection.
 East New York II

We anticipated several consequences. The space devoted to the

automobile would be reduced and the instant creation of four
dead-end streets would certainly have a calming effect on traffic.
The tree in the street would oblige traffic to find collateral means
of circulation. Finally, we anticipated that street-life, with its sparse
commerce attenuated into useless, center-crushing linearity, would
be concentrated in a series of locally scaled commercial and social
centers that would restore legibility, convenience, and conviviality to
a place ragged and over-large, inaccessible for its failures of "where."

The neighborhood- measured by people on foot- is the building

block of the city. Like the city in the world context, the ability of
neighborhoods to act autonomously must be enhanced. It seems
reasonable to ask: does a neighborhood produce sufficient oxygen,
water, energy, thermal modulation, waste management, and so on?
Such environmental interrogations enable neighborhoods to find
their particularity in relation to the environment. If cities and their
neighborhoods are to continue to establish authentic bases for their
distinctiveness, such a considered response to both their cultural and
 39

their bio-regional particulars is crucial. This interaction, orchestrated

at the level of neighborhoods, will surely provide a rich system for
accumulating difference and variety genuinely based on a genius loci.

Edges are again critical zones of potential mutation. They will be

the laboratories of fresh possibilities. Subjectivity needs the fixed
and the fluid and these are clearest at the margin. To be more
psychoanalytic, the sense of boundary is developmentally seminal.
A meaningful sense of exteriority is a key to the confirmation of
both private and collective subjectivities. The mutating seams at
the margins will be bulwarks against the argument for a single form
of the city and against the idea that invention and memory are on
a course of mutual annihilation. Their resistance will be to a choice
restricted to nostalgia or the tabula rasa, Disneyland or urban renewal.

Finally, I want to return to questions of mobility because the culture

of encapsulation- the neo-nomadism of the electronic hearth and
home-couples with consumer strategies of individuation to shape
expectations of domicile and public space, and of the connection
between them. Likewise, the dramatic revision of expectations in
the realm of work powerfully reconfigures the possibilities of the
city. As America ships increasing amounts of its industrial
production to low wage countries abroad and focuses its energies
on technology and service, the paradigm of employment- though
not yet the fact- devolves more and more on the idea of the home
as workplace. Of course, this idea will not exactly be fresh to the
billions of women who have, over the years, been obliged to work
uncompensated in such environments. Now, though, such a notion
has become the ultimate post-Fordist fantasy for all of us.
 41

However, contained within this possibility is a better prospect.

If the working environment becomes discretionary; and if brute
mass production gives way to more flexible craft, skills, and
information-intensive modes; and if transport technology is
diversified to provide both more bespoke and attractive means
of human mobility and more efficient movement of things; and
if a far more self-sufficent version of sustainability is instituted
which seeks to contain commercial traffic within localities, then
the contours of a new relationship to the city begin to emerge.
Indeed, enhanced connectivity to serve the movement of things
might conceivably stabilize and enhance the relations of people.

But we need also to look very closely at large scale processes; a

purely inductive model does not automatically become the leader
when deduction is overthrown. Traffic and ecology are the
relevant models, traffic because it attempts to comprehend urban
form in a spirit of both tractability and perfectability (however
benighted its agendas), and ecology for its complexity, its vision of
the dialectic of homeostasis and change, and its identification of
the urban as the extension and not the antithesis of nature.

As architects, we hesitate to think at necessary scales, taking refuge

in the idea that traditional structures of understanding are too
limited to comprehend the urban. Scarred by the failure of
modernist urbanism and its emaciated universalism, we deny the
real scale of the problem, disdain the idea of the masterplan as
too riddled with the fraught history of mastery. Architects are too
much embracing an implicit politics of disengagement, abandoning
the field to those ready to produce general answers, the avatars of
bigness and smallness who have in common the production of
 42

sameness. We've become phobic about thinking of cities as physical

as well as social constructions. And we suffer from tremendous
poverty of both vision and will in the making of cities. D ominant
models for innovation are unsatifactory, consisting of go-with-the-flow
neo-suburbanism, fingers-crossed laissez-faire, tepid riffs on the
garden city, retreaded modernism, and Disneyland.

Cities do evolve and, like all species, they reach a form of completion.
Sustainability and taste- and democratic urbanity requires the
consent of taste- will signal this conclusion. The process will be
long: meaning requires depth and depth requires time. The city is
not a tree but it is, in many ways, a forest. A forest at climax has
achieved a condition of homeostasis, a steady state. And such
climax forests, like the vanished redwoods out west, have a form.
Cities, neighborhoods, and architectures at climax- think of
Venice, Prague, Fez, or Osaka- are much the same. Their
dynamic segues from large-scale tasks to internal adjustment and
renewal, a kind of steady state. New neighborhoods and new cities,
based on the intimate particulars of culture, history, bio-region,
site, choice, invention and accident, can also find their differences.

Michael Sorkin
April, 1997
 Raoul Wallenberg lecture
The Raoul Wallenberg Lecture was initiated in 1971 by Sol King,
a former classmate of Wallenberg's. An endowment was
established in 1976 for an an nual lecture to be offered in R aoul 's
honor on the theme of architecture as a humane social art.
The following distinguished architects a nd historians have been
invited to present the Wallenberg lectures to the College of
Architecture + Urban Planning at the U niversity of Michigan:

1972 Sir Nikolaus Pevsne r

1973 Eric Larabee
1975 Reyner Banham
1976 Rudolf Arnheim
1978 J acob B. Bakema
1979 J ames Marston Fitch
1981 Carl Levin
1983 Edmund Bacon
1984 Charles Correa
1985 Grady Clay
1987 Joseph Rykwert
1988 Spiro Kostof
1989 J. Max Bond, Jr.
1990 Elizabeth Hollander
1991 Joseph Esherick
1992 Denise Scott Brown
1993 J ames lngo Freed
1994 Jorge Silvetti
1995 Daniel Libeskind
1996 Vincent Scully
1997 Michael Sorkin
 45

Raoul Wallenberg Scholarship

The Raoul Wallenberg Scholarship is awarded through
a design competition which is held annually for
undergraduates in their final year of study in the
College of Architecture + Urban Planning
at the University of Michigan. The following
students have been awarded the scholarship:

John DeGraaf 1988

Matthew Petrie 1989
Elizabeth Govan 1990
Paul Warner 1991
Dallas Felder 1992
Eric Romano 1993
Charles Yoo 1994
Matthew Johnson 1995
Jo Polowczuk 1996
Joseph Rom 1997
 46

Michael Sorkin Studio

Principal Michael Sorkin
Partner Andrei Vovk
Associate Yukiko Yokoo
Emeritus Peter Kormer

Collaborators Matthew Muller

Silva Ajemian
Patrick Clifford
Zingg
Dominik Schwarzer
Jeffrey Johnson

Color Plates
P. 8 Neurasia, South Asia, 1995
P. 12 Weed, Arizona, 1994
P. 18 Visselhovede, Germany, 1997
P. 22 Visselhovede, Germany, 1997
P. 26 Neurasia, South Asia, 1995
P. 30 Neurasia, South Asia, 1995
P. 33 Shroom Housing, 1994
P. 38 Berlin Spree Bogen, 1993
P. 40 Weed, Arizona, 1994
 47

Acknowledgments
The College qf Architecture and Urban Planning is gratefol for the generous
support for the Raoul Wallenberg Scholarship and Lecture which has been
provided by alumni and friends, and the Benard L. Maas Foundation.
The College would like to thank Michael Sorkin for the considerable time
and energy which he has so generous(y given to make this publication
possible, and Yukiko Yokoo for her assistance with the project images.

On April 24, 1997, the Raoul Wallenberg Commemorative stamp

was dedicated at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at
100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, in Washington D. C. The stamp, first
issued in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has stirred controversy as it is the policy
qf the United States Postal Service to on(y issue stamps qf the deceased.
Rumors persist to this day concerning the Jo.te qf Raoul Wallenberg.

CREDITS PP
Courtesy of the American School of Classical Studies, Princeton, New Jersey II
Photograph from the New York Times 17
Based on drawing by Grace Huxtable 24
All other images courtesy Michael Sorkin