Download Give Place a Chance: Reply to Gans

Give Place a Chance: Reply to Gans
Thomas F. Gieryn∗
Indiana University
Herb Gans and I know a little about propinquity. When I was a graduate student at
Columbia in the 1970s, he and I lived in the same apartment building on Riverside Drive,
and occasionally we met by chance in the elevator and sometimes exchanged pleasantries.
Those accidental meetings, much to my regret now, were the sum total of my contacts with
Professor Gans. I chose to study the sociology of science instead of urban sociology—and
I still do—which is why Gans and I approach the problems of space and place from rather
different directions. It might be illuminating to sort out those differences.
To condense four decades of vigorous debate into a single paragraph: the sociology of
science has had trouble with “reality.” Once upon a time, sociologists thought that the
effects of “the social” (political or economic interests, power, face-sheet attributes, discursive forms, etc.) on scientists’ legitimate beliefs about the natural world were limited
to the institutional contexts for problem choice, data collection, experimentation, publication, funding, or peer review. The content of what would become scientific truth was
determined by the given reality of the natural world; social factors just introduced error or
governed the pace at which nature revealed its secrets. Then came revolution number one:
scientific truth became a social construction, and the race was on to show how the content
of scientific claims was substantially (completely?) affected by power, interests, discourse,
and all the other causes that sociologists consider their métier. The “natural world” itself
dissolved into so many representations or accounts, and reality became the upshot of persuasion and negotiation (losing its force as a cause of belief). Then came revolution number
two, inspired by the slow realization that it didn’t make sense to leave reality out of truth
making. But “nature” was brought back in not as antipode to “the social” (as it was in the
beginning) but as part of it. Nowadays, especially for those held in the sway of actor network theory (Latour, 1987; Law and Hassard, 1999), social things and natural things have
autonomous force in shaping scientists’ beliefs and practices. “Given reality” has an effect
on the content of claims and theories, but only as that stuff is suspended in vast networks of
circulation, along with people, meanings, political interests, economic power, and too many
other things to list. All of this—what once was naively parsed out as natural and social—
interdefines itself, which implies that neither nonhuman physical reality nor human social
reality can be privileged as an explanation or cause of what scientists believe or write.
Forgive the detour (cf. Lynch, 1993, chs. 2–3). In his orientation to space and
place, Gans gets stuck somewhere after the first revolution. He preserves an ontological break between material stuff and social stuff (purposes, powers, or institutions) by first
∗ Correspondence
should be addressed to Thomas Gieryn, Department of Sociology, Ballantine 754, Indiana
University, Bloomington, IN 47405. E-mail: [email protected].
City & Community 1:4 December 2002
C American Sociological Association, 1307 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20005-4701
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creating a presocial domain that he labels “natural space.” “Spatial sociology” then becomes the study of what people do to natural space: human use makes natural space into
place. In explanations of behavior patterns or social change, then, the human use of physical surrounds overwhelms the effects of the material substrate. Gans writes: “my intent is
to show that the users and uses involved determine what happens to the natural or social
space, and that its effects on them is brought about by social agents and their actions.
Consequently, the direct effects of space on society are limited.” Neither natural space nor
“social space” (i.e., natural space that has been worked on, somehow, by people) has “total
and direct causal power” (Gans, 2002, p. 325) He gives plenty of examples: residential land
use is structured by class hierarchies and racial exclusion; land value is determined by markets and politics; the mere availability of public spaces does not guarantee participatory
democracy; neighborhoods have no effect on anything other than through public agencies
located there or residents’ reality constructions; the causal effects of “natural space” are
most visible in the destruction brought on by a volcano.
What’s my beef? If Gans’s position were teleported into the sociology of science, it would
be identified as unbridled social constructivism, and probably pilloried as relativism or
idealism. Ironically, he might be labeled a “social determinist,” which (I think) shares all of
the same reductionistic flaws of the “spatial determinism” that Gans criticizes at the start
of his essay. For him, the materialities of both “space” and “nature” are ascribed lesser
explanatory weight in sociological explanation, which centers instead on what people do
to those things. To my mind, Gans needs a second revolution, one that respects the agentic
capacity of material realities (natural or built, volcanoes or street-grids) and acknowledges
that outcomes (beliefs about nature, behavior patterns, social change) are substantially and
autonomously caused by this “stuff.” At least for sociologists of science, the era of human
or social omnipotence is over. “Posthumanist sociology” (Pickering, 1995) redistributes
agency among diverse causal powers—human, material, social, ideational. What would it
mean for urban sociologists to adopt such a stance?
Consider racial exclusion, an example suggested by Gans in passing. Imagine a society
whose powers are committed to the systematic segregation of a racial minority and the
denial of all rights and opportunities to the subordinate group (it might be South Africa
under apartheid, or parts of the American South in the 19th century or maybe beyond).
How might those people in power sustain racial exclusion? Many means are available:
control impressionable minds by indoctrinating all people to believe in the legitimacy of
racial exclusion; post reminder signs at separate drinking fountains; use police or courts
to impose force on those who transgress laws that segregate and exclude; build geographically distanced homelands for the excluded racial minority and restrict transit to places
inhabited by the privileged. How would Gans explain life in this sad society? All four
means to achieve racial exclusion (socialization, symbolic communication, force, and geography/architecture) might be reduced to their common root cause: political will and the
power to impose racism. Differences among the four means would be minimized and, I
suppose, be treated as “intervening causal variables” (Gans, 2002, p. 325). By Gans’s logic,
the physical materiality, the location, and the architecture of the segregated territories
would have only a small residual effect on life in this society, once the politics of racial
domination are taken into account.
I demur. To my mind, the lesson, the cop, the sign, and the segregated residential
townships are so distinctive in how they put prejudice into action that they are entitled
to be called “causes” in their own right. Unlike those other three means to effect racial
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exclusion, “building-in” residential segregation exerts its nefarious mission in a less obvious
way, as it routinizes the fabric of everyday life so thoroughly that it becomes difficult for
people to imagine how it could be otherwise (cf. Gieryn, 2002). Buildings, neighborhoods,
cities, and regions—their bricks and mortar, now—don’t need to provide explicit and visible
reminders of what is allowed or not; they demand conformity via the drag of distance or
the impenetrability of walls, although they can never guarantee it; insurrections happen,
and maybe these too are materially shaped by architecture and geography (Zhao, 1998).
I end with a happier hypothetical society, one committed in principle to tolerance and diversity, inclusive political participation, sustainable technologies, and increased economic
as well as legal justice. Gans might see built environments as “intervening” along the path
to these noble ends; I see them instead as constitutive (along with salutary governance
structures, legal processes, workplace organization, and so forth). Let a hundred causes
blossom! Banish determinisms (both architectural and social). Gans’s last-minute trashing of New Urbanism is fully consistent with his 1960s trashing of “urban renewal” and
Jane Jacobs—all are species of “the fallacy of physical determinism” (Gans, 1968, ch. 3).
Surely, New Urbanism is no panacea and its accomplishments to date probably deserve
at least half the criticism heaped upon it. But what exactly is wrong with New Urbanism, or urban renewal, or Jane Jacobs, for that matter? Their errors lie in the details of
their assumptions: clear-cutting old neighborhoods to make way for anomic highrises is
bad sociology, just as our happier hypothetical society will probably not be brought into
existence through tony resorts like Seaside or Disney panopticons like Celebration. The
assumptions must be changed, but the theory is worth saving: better societies through
better planning and building (for starters: open up the design process to more inclusive
constituencies and stakeholders). To follow Gans is to risk throwing the baby out with the
bath water.
References
Gans, H. J. 1968. “Urban Vitality and the Fallacy of Physical Determinism,” in H. Gans, ed., People and Plans,
pp. 25–33. New York: Basic Books.
Gans, H. J. 2002. “The Sociology of Space: A Use-Centered View,” City & Community 1(4), 325–335.
Gieryn, T. F. 2002. “What Buildings Do,” Theory and Society, 31, 35–74.
Latour, B. 1987. Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Law, J., and Hassard, J. (eds.). 1999. Actor Network Theory and After. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Lynch, M. 1993. Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pickering, A. 1995. The Mangle of Practice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Zhao, D. 1998. “Ecologies of Social Movements: Student Mobilization During the 1989 Prodemocracy Movement
in Beijing,” American Journal of Sociology, 103, 1493–1529.
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