City/State: Foucault urbanism & risk
| aut.embargo | No | en_NZ |
| aut.thirdpc.contains | No | en_NZ |
| aut.thirdpc.permission | No | en_NZ |
| aut.thirdpc.removed | No | en_NZ |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Jackson, Mark | |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Bryant, Jan | |
| dc.contributor.author | Hanlen, Mark Alexander James | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-11-30T22:49:47Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2014-11-30T22:49:47Z | |
| dc.date.copyright | 2013 | |
| dc.date.created | 2014 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2013 | |
| dc.date.updated | 2014-11-28T03:37:08Z | |
| dc.description.abstract | The State is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: “I, the State, am the people.” –Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathrustra. The city model already dominates the global markets. With the influence of urban violence and warfare, we might find ourselves back with the political system of the city-state. –Eyal Weizman, “Military Operations as Urban Planning.” The short epigraph from Eyal Weizman is taken from a 2003 publication on the future of the city, Cities Without Citizens. Its editorial opens with a kind of simple or naive questioning that resonates strongly with the thesis of this research: “What is a city? What are the laws or constitution that make a city a city, that prevent it from becoming something else, even as it inevitably undergoes transformation and change?” Of course, Cities Without Citizens is neither simple nor naïve. It is an astute and political series of writings on some of the most pressing concerns of human rights, inflecting profoundly on a question of habitation and the urban. This would be my claim for this thesis as well. Its originality and trajectory trace, principally through the political philosophy of Michel Foucault and many theorists of the urban who have engaged Foucault, what that thinker called a “history of the present.” By this he meant how we trace successive relations of power and knowledge such that what we take to be our present, in its contingency and fragility, violence and happiness, has its governmental reason, its conduct of conduct, and its normative techniques for managing risk and contingency. There is another touchstone by which I could present an overview of the critical concerns of this research. It is the September 2011 issue of the journal, Urban Studies, a special issue on the theme, “Renewing Urban Politics,” edited by Gordon MacLeod and Martin Jones. This issue addresses the panoply of concerns in contemporary understandings of urban planning in contexts that the editors and contributors term post-democratic and post-political governmentalities. Address is given to cities in crisis, in bankruptcy, and to widespread movements from welfare to entrepreneurial urban financing, and ontological considerations as to what now constitutes the urban, particularly in contexts where urbanization can no longer be modeled on those academic and professional frameworks that have grown from Eurocentric and Anglo-American traditions. The question remains how do we plan, design, or construct, which is to say, invent futures? What is proposed here is not an imagining of an other city, a city that responds, with greater utility, to crisis. Rather, what is explored is how the present is constructed. What are the contingencies that affect us now, and how are they contingent in their historicality? Foucault proposes that it is through analyzing these events that we see the various historical moves that determine our present. Genealogy shows the historical dimension to a reason that determines our present and in this shows that our future may be opened otherwise than as we assumed it to be. Key to our understanding of what shapes our cities, as they are now and their possible futures, is not simply or exclusively found in the design philosophies of architects and planners but, rather, in the policy books of bureaucrats. For this task the thesis engages Foucault’s analyses of knowledge, power, governmentality and self, which it argues are particularly advantageous for the analysis of policy and spatialising technologies and practices of the urban. It is through the relatively recent publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France that we gain new insight into his research of the liberal art of government. This is particularly relevant in the context of the current global economic crisis, which revealed its weaknesses most palpably in American housing finance policy, coupled with ‘liberalisation’ or deregulation of the U.S. banking industry. Foucault’s work is central to analyses undertaken in this thesis. However, the thesis utilises theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, in terms of how they have extended Foucault’s research in its appropriations, critiques, and transformations, as well engaging the philosophical works of Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida for their formative engagement with Foucault’s thought. This is particularly the case with respect to critical engagements with two late developments in Foucault’s thinking, on the governmentality of population and on the biopolitical threshold of modernity. What we propose, when aiming at giving definition to the contemporary city, is akin to Foucault’s understanding of conduct, as operational assemblages of practices that articulate other practices, rather than defining the city as a distinct territorial, institutional or governed entity. From this perspective, conduct is central to political practice, while techniques of governmentality seek to manage the conduct of conduct. In his writings on the birth of liberalism, Foucault emphasised the aleatory, the management of risk, contingency and uncertainty at the threshold of the birth of political economy. This thesis engages our contemporary crises of risk management, effected by global deregulation of banking industries, coincident with unprecedented escalation of global surveillance technologies, as a crisis of urbanism, housing and city financing, or the spatialising effects of the built environment, such that risk and uncertainty are recognised as spatial practices. The thesis concludes on the question of calculability and probability as key contemporary questions in urban political theory, making reference to Blanchot, Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida, and the recent work of Elie Ayache and the Foucauldian legal theorist, Pat O’Malley. --- Key to our understanding of what shapes our cities, as they are now and their possible futures, is not simply or exclusively found in the design philosophies of architects and planners but, rather, in the policy books of bureaucrats. For this task City/State: Foucault, Urbanism & Risk engages Michel Foucault’s analyses of knowledge, power, governmentality and self, which it argues are particularly advantageous for the analysis of policy and spatialising technologies and practices of the urban. This is particularly relevant in the context of the current global economic crisis, which revealed its weaknesses most palpably in American housing finance policy, coupled with ‘liberalization’ or deregulation of the U.S. banking industry. The thesis engages, as well, theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, in terms of how they have extended Foucault’s research in its appropriations, critiques, and transformations, as well engaging the philosophical works of Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida for their formative engagement with Foucault’s thought. This is particularly the case with respect to critical engagements with two late developments in Foucault’s thinking, on the governmentality of population and on the biopolitical threshold of modernity. | en_NZ |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10292/8000 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_NZ |
| dc.publisher | Auckland University of Technology | |
| dc.rights.accessrights | OpenAccess | |
| dc.subject | Michel Foucault | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Governmentality | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Urban policy | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Biopolitics | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Design | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Architecture | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Housing | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Critical theory | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Giorgio Agamben | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Antonio Negri | en_NZ |
| dc.title | City/State: Foucault urbanism & risk | en_NZ |
| dc.type | Thesis | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | ||
| thesis.degree.grantor | Auckland University of Technology | |
| thesis.degree.level | Doctoral Theses | |
| thesis.degree.name | Doctor of Philosophy | en_NZ |