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Transcript
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 341 CITY & COMMUNITY 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 342 GIVE PLACE A CHANCE 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. 343