The blanket of secrecy that surrounds North Korea and the impenetrability of its politics leaves a pretty long list of, in Donald Rumsfeld’s famous terminology, known unknowns – the things that we know we don’t know. We don’t even know whether he died on a train or at home, or exactly how old Kim Jong-un is, let alone the specifics of the internal maneuvering among the various factions jostling for power and influence in the succession.

Instead, North Korea is perhaps the world’s last remaining ‘black box’, where the domestic politics and decisionmaking process is largely hidden from view, and analysts have only the ‘outputs’ of official statements to pore over or missile test to worry about. (A good many IR theorists, of course, like their boxes to be pretty black, where you can assume away the complicated internal politics and theorize about motivations from actions). This matters, of course, because as uncertain and unknowable as the situation may be, neighbours and interlocutors still have to make their next move. And yet, in a world of drones and the ubiquity of electronic (and therefore more hackable and monitorable) communications, this seems remarkable, to the extent that intelligence studies scholars shrug their shoulders at the extent of these known unknowns as something that not much can be really done about. Indeed, the signs that are discernible may be those of more interest to historians than to the policymaker,  in the words of one analyst:

“The most difficult aspect of assessing whether things are going wrong is that, like our intelligence collection capabilities which did not appear to provide effective warning that Kim Jong-il had passed away in advance of the official announcement, the critical developments that constitute a serious challenge to the Kim Jong-un leadership will also likely be lagging indicators of circumstances that have already changed.”

And let’s not even worry about the unknown unknowns. Like Kim Jong-il’s death, for example.

An Economist piece a couple of weeks ago offers a brief survey of this normative shift:

The world economy has suffered an “ethical breakdown”, where utilitarianism and materialism have run amok; technology and ‘technical’ policy solutions have replaced ethical evaluation and consideration of human dignity. The headline argument of the document, however, comes in what it calls an “Authority over globalization” as a way of serving the common good:

“On the way to building a more fraternal and just human family and, even before that, a new humanism open to transcendence, Blessed John XXIII’s teaching seems especially timely. In the prophetic Encyclical Pacem in Terris of 1963, he observed that the world was heading towards ever greater unification. He then acknowledged the fact that a correspondence was lacking in the human community between the political organization “on a world level and the objective needs of the universal common good”. He also expressed the hope that one day “a true world political authority” would be created.

“In view of the unification of the world engendered by the complex phenomenon of globalization, and of the importance of guaranteeing, in addition to other collective goods, the good of a free, stable world economic and financial system at the service of the real economy, today the teaching of Pacem in Terris appears to be even more vital and worthy of urgent implementation.”

This Authority has been seized on as “world government”, but it’s not world government as a singular, hierarchical Leviathan-esque entity, as the imagination might have it. It’s a distinctly functional proposal – responding to the particular need of unregulated financial and monetary systems, suggesting that this proposal of an Authority only arises because the nature of current challenges lead us to that conclusion. The fundamental problem described in the document is one where the scale of global economic processes is not matched by the political capabilities of regulatory control by nation-states or within existing institutions. 

Seen in this way, it’s perhaps not so novel. As the currently raging European debt crisis illustrates, one solution lies in greater political union among eurozone members, to help the political and the economic to line up together, as Angela Merkel recently argued. And back in 1946, one footnote to the early days of the Cold War was the Baruch Plan – a response to the security threat of nuclear war by centralizing control of atomic weapons by an international authority. Talk of world government has been reinvigorated precisely in response to the global and transnational phenomena of our age, as one recent academic survey illustrates (academic paywall).

As for the content of the Vatican’s analysis, sociologist Peter Berger is pretty dismissive: Were ” its call for world government to be negotiated at the United Nations, this would be a grotesque disaster if it were ever successful. Fortunately, its chances of success are nil,” and that the document’s critique of predatory financial markets reflects “a lingering Catholic animus against the “creative destruction” which Joseph Schumpeter had correctly ascribed to capitalism”.

The striking thing about the discussion of this Authority, however, is not so much about the specifics of how it would come about and its immediate chances of success. Instead, it spends some time considering how this Authority would work and look alongside the complementary principle to Catholic social doctrine of subsidiarity, serving as an ever-present guard against mission creep towards a totalizing entity:

“ According to the logic of subsidiarity, the higher Authority offers its subsidium, that is, its aid, only when individual, social or financial actors are intrinsically deficient in capacity, or cannot manage by themselves to do what is required of them. Thanks to the principle of solidarity, a lasting and fruitful relation is built up between global civil society and a world public Authority as States, intermediate bodies, various institutions – including economic and financial ones – and citizens make their decisions with a view to the global common good, which transcends national goods.”

The idea of subsidiarity helps the Authority to constitute one new – but just only one - layer of multilevel global governance, where the scale of solutions are matched to the scale of the problems. States and other intermediate institutions fill in other governance gaps, and the integrity of cultural diversity is protected. 

And so there’s a vision of the world economy with no inherent aversion to the market here. Instead, there’s simply a desire that they should work competitively and openly, but within regulatory parameters to promote and preserve the common good, rather than as an unfettered good in and of itself. This is not less globalisation, as some activists would have it, but more – for if this economic crisis reflects an ethical malaise where the markets triumph over man, then a systemic step-change where the scales are put into balance, and the politics (and with it, the ethics) put back into place, is what is needed.

In two of the options, he writes (emphasis added):

“A cabinet of technocrats
This is the way out favoured by the markets and the Italian centre left: a government filled with specialists who could pass the unpalatable legislation needed to revive Italy‘s flagging economy without having to worry about re-election. It is the solution more commonly associated with the young democracies of the developing world, but it has had success in Italy…

The grand coalition
Otherwise known as a government of national emergency or salvation. This too might be seen as a developing world solution. But with the interest rate on its sovereign bonds heading for the fateful 7% mark and the Milan bourse dipping south, Italy certainly has an emergency and needs salvation. Could its notoriously querulous politicians agree to govern together, though? It would probably need a politician – and a deft one – to run such an administration….”

Should some possible forms of government, because they are “developing world solutions”, be ruled out for European societies? Underpinning this claim is an attitude that posits an essential difference between the Western and non-Western worlds, one which gives the former a unique status as the model for the latter to emulate; the non-Western world is judged in terms of how closely it conforms to the ideals and standards of the Western world, even if these are always only ever imperfectly met in Western liberal democracies themselves.

Not so long ago, towards the end of the 1980s (and still ongoing to this day), international donors and financial institutions championed what became known as ‘good governance’: a demand made conditional to development assistance that recipients of aid had to meet certain standards of governance, emphasizing civil and political rights, such as multiparty elections. A failure of governance was identified by donors and international agencies as the reason why the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s had failed to work: the problem weren’t the economic policies, they were the economies and societies themselves, which had to change, and made more receptive to the paradigm of economic neoliberalism.

Without rehashing this whole history (for that, see Rita Abrahamsen’s Disciplining Democracy), the simple point, made in the current context of Italy and the eurozone’s monetary and political crisis, is the continued construction of “difference” between the West and the rest. For too many commentators, the West is still the best, the end-point of the roughly linear progress of human history, presuming to know – and dictate – how the rest of the world should live. And some types of governance, it seems, are just not good enough.

A specific theme addressed in the main text addresses the question of regulation of financial markets, in a larger context of striving towards “recognizing the primacy of being over having and of ethics over the economy”, emerging with suggestions of a “world political Authority” to manage and regulate processes of globalization.

I’ll return to this idea, and its echoes of world government, later, but there is a fascinating piece of commentary elsewhere in the document, in its concluding section, on one of the fundamental questions of international relations: how to build and sustain international order, and what the rules and principles that govern international life are.

This vision of international order is a breathlessly liberal one, emphasizing global interdependence in its challenges to traditional notions of state sovereignty, and worth quoting at length (emphases added):

“Modern States became structured wholes over time and reinforced sovereignty within their own territory. But social, cultural and political conditions have gradually changed. Their interdependence has grown – so it has become natural to think of an international community that is integrated and increasingly ruled by a shared system – but a worse form of nationalism has lingered on, according to which the State feels it can achieve the good of its own citizens in a self-sufficient way.

“Today all of this seems anachronistic and surreal, and all the nations, great or small, together with their governments, are called to go beyond the “state of nature” which would keep States in a never-ending struggle with one another. Globalization, despite some of its negative aspects, is unifying peoples more and prompting them to move towards a new “rule of law” on the supranational level, supported by a more intense and fruitful collaboration. With dynamics similar to those that put an end in the past to the “anarchical” struggle between rival clans and kingdoms with regard to the creation of national states, today humanity needs to be committed to the transition from a situation of archaic struggles between national entities, to a new model of a more cohesive, polyarchic international society that respects every people’s identity within the multifaceted riches of a single humanity. Such a passage, which is already timidly under way, would ensure the citizens of all countries – regardless of their size or power – peace and security, development, and free, stable and transparent markets…

“So conditions exist for definitively going beyond a ‘Westphalian’ international order in which the States feel the need for cooperation but do not seize the opportunity to integrate their respective sovereignties for the common good of peoples.It is the task of today’s generation to recognize and consciously to accept these new world dynamics for the achievement of a universal common good…

“The birth of a new society and the building of new institutions with a universal vocation and competence are a prerogative and a duty for everyone, with no distinction. What is at stake is the common good of humanity and the future itself…”

In a few short paragraphs, it completely upends the conventional wisdom about how international politics is conducted. For what is being envisioned is nothing less than a radical, wholesale transformation of world politics – a shift to a sort of world society, but one that is fundamentally underpinned by a transformation in the human moral condition as an ethical, normative imperative. In this aspect, this description of the world doesn’t seem too far removed from the liberal peace imagined by Immanuel Kant, where basic relationships among political entities are changed in a more peaceable direction. For Kant, this possibility of ‘perpetual peace’ was the result of the spread of democracy – an ever-expanding zone of peace as the number of democratic republics expands, because of the caution, transparency and respect for individual rights that democracies engender.

The tenor of the document’s authors, however, remind me more of the liberals writing in between the first and second world wars – searching for a way out of senseless war, believing that humans were inherently peaceable, and therefore, that new mechanisms would be needed to realize this possibility, such as the collective security of the League of Nations. The imperative here is different from Kant’s, however: rather than peace being a characteristic inexorably growing out of the type of governance that societies possess, the mechanisms sustaining peaceful relations would have be strived for, a conscious choice a bit like having to climb up to some higher plateau.

It it this second liberal conviction that seems to characterize the Pontifical Council’s thinking – that a post-Westphalian progress must involve a conscious effort, urged onwards to reach a higher plane that transcends – and rejects – the Hobbesian state of nature of international anarchy. It is cosmopolitan all the way down in its recurring emphasis on a larger level of collective identification as to where our loyalties lie – that from clans and kingdoms, we are now states, and from states, we might next be truly global citizens. Perhaps like the interwar liberals, the ethical necessity of global community takes shape against a darkening backdrop of economic recession, threats of beggar-thy-neighbour protectionism and closed borders, and moral confusion at the intersection of economics and human society. In this regard, this model is decidedly different to the Christian pessimism of Reinhold Niebuhr, who saw in man’s moral nature, the tragedy of immoral society, unable to transcend power (and sin), and that struggles for progress may themselves lead to calamity.

In this mix of description and prescription, liberalism and cosmopolitanism, is the promise of reaching the ‘common good’ that infuses Catholic social thought. The hard-nosed student of world politics might be tempted to dismiss it as the stuff of pipe-dreams. But while this is certainly not the world of tomorrow, it is at least a model of the world some years or decades down the road – and in its audacious clarity, will perhaps lay down a marker for the sort of world that we might want, even if it is at the very end of the day.

In one sense, UNESCO as an organization has been caught in the crossfire: as a legal requirement, the US will be ending financial contributions to the agency, amounting to a not insignificant 22% of its annual budget, invariably affecting its ability to continue its programs over the next year and beyond. For the Palestinians, the practicalities of its new membership seem slight: the ability to apply to have sites in the West Bank listed as World Heritage Sites may be the most notable.

In other international agencies which will surely see similar bids for Palestinian membership in coming weeks and months, the practical consequences may be greater for the Palestinians. But this is, as other cases of state recognition illustrate, about little else other than politics, where the material consequences of such action are downplayed or willfully ignored. In the footsteps of Kosovo and south Sudan in the past year, and as the efforts to recognise the National Transitional Council rebels as Libya’s legitimate government, well ahead of its offensive surge that finally ousted the Gaddafi government, illustrate, recognition is a symbolic gesture, and a political calculation above all else.

Why here, and why now? The very reason for the Palestinian Authority’s ‘recognition’ strategy, which began nearly a year ago with bilateral efforts targeted at developing countries and is now reaching its apogee at the UN and multilateral agencies, lies in its internal battle with Hamas for political legitimacy in the Palestinian territories. The prisoner swap deal just two weeks ago that saw a captured Israeli soldier transferred in exchange for a thousand Palestinian prisoners, has provided a contrasting boost for Hamas, as the two different Palestinian political factions, secular and Islamist, and crucially with different perspectives on the use of violence, attempt to demonstrate their relevance to the Palestinian population. And yet, if the PA’s throw of the diplomatic dice seems futile, it is because in the US, as the 2012 election year ticks closer and closer, Obama’s back is up against the wall in having to placate the Israel lobby at home; having to put its cards on the table, these have turned out to be unequivocally in favour of a highly nationalist Israeli government. Juxtaposed against a largely succesful diplomatic campaign to mobilize a majority of the world’s states around its cause, the Palestinians now hold the cards of the moral high ground, and are actually being seen to do something with it.

In the politics of recognition are attempts to set the boundaries by which new states may be admitted into the ‘international community’ as full members. The 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States is one such attempt to establish what these criteria are, and others attempt to construct their own, seemingly objective, criteria for what statehood really means and should entail: territorial control, economic solvency, functioning governance structures; the list potentially goes on and on. These decisions are, however, ones ultimately mediated by political judgments, such that international recognition may create a legal reality that belies the ‘facts on the ground’. But perhaps thus was it always ever so.

For what seems clear throughout NATO’s campaign, effectively as air force to the Libyan rebels, is the absence of any reservations that their airstrikes and precision-guided missiles would possibly kill Gaddafi in the process. (Perhaps the French pilots who attacked and scattered the final Gaddafi convoy out of Sirte could consider themselves unlucky that they failed to score a direct hit on the man himself):

“Many outside observers were convinced even at the time [in June] that NATO was in fact desperately hoping to kill Qaddafi since it was clear by then — especially during a period when the tide seemed to shift back and forth between Qaddafi’s forces and the rebels — that he would not relinquish power, no matter what offers were made to him in exchange for doing so. Their suspicions were confirmed when a member of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, Congressman Mike Turner (R-Ohio), revealed that he had been told by Admiral Samuel Locklear, the U.S. officer commanding NATO’s Joint Operations Command in Naples, Italy, that NATO forces actually were actively targeting Qaddafi.”

What gives this scene greater salience, and what forms its disturbing element, however, is the ease with which attempts to assassinate individual leaders now seem to be made. Just half a year ago now, US special forces slipped into Pakistan, unannounced to local authorities, and killed Osama bin Laden while raiding his compound, and just a few weeks ago, a senior al-Qaeda operative, Anwar al-Awlaki (and a US citizen) was killed by a strike from a US drone while in Yemen.

Is this now to be standard practice, where judge and executioner are effectively the same, an illustration of the powerful doing what might permits?

Perhaps it already is. Last year, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, presenting a report on the implications of armed drones, criticized US practices, saying that “this strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability is not an entitlement which the United States or other states can have without doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial executions.”

In this respect, perhaps a comparison of the Obama administration’s security policies to the methods of al-Qaeda doesn’t seem completely ludicrous:

“Under Barack Obama, US policy has in some ways aped al-Qaida, showing a reciprocal lack of respect for sovereign borders and international law when “legitimate” targets present themselves for elimination. This unpromulgated Obama doctrine appears to apply equally to Pakistan-Afghanistan, Libya and the Horn of Africa.”

In Libya, Gaddafi may not have died directly from a NATO munition, but it doesn’t seem to be for want of trying. But what if he did die from a NATO airstrike? Perhaps, recent events suggest, it is something that modern society might not find terribly problematic. As an editorial from Jesuit publication America observed in May after bin Laden’s death:

“The United States, which not so long ago condemned the targeted killing by Israelis of alleged terrorists, appears to have no qualms about itself calling down strikes against those regarded as hostile parties. In authorizing assassination attempts against suspected terrorist leaders, the United States is adopting the methods it finds so reprehensible in terrorist organizations.”

The rather lonely Liberation Monument - Memento Park, Budapest

Rescued from the wrecking ball and scrapheap, the park’s statues are organized into three figure-8 loops, this ‘infinity’ representation giving each sequence an ‘endless parade of…’ (liberation monuments, workers movements, etc.) label. I can’t quite decide if this is a nice little arty concept, or clever BS.

Heroic Soviet Workers - Memento Park, Budapest

Far from where they were originally installed and no longer serving a civic purpose, being brought to this park illustrates the politics of public art and the narratives of history represented therein. Understandably and unsurprisingly, in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, new popularly-elected governments sought to erase past markers and monuments of the Communist era, replacing Soviet heroes with those of resistance fighters and pre-Communist leaders. The same is true of many decolonized countries, where changing road names and introducing new events to commemorate are as much efforts at sweeping away the old system as they are of nation-building and forging a new narrative of a country’s past and future.

Lenin, circa 2011 - Memento Park, Budapest

Once upon a time, not so long ago, these statues and busts that would have looked down over Budapest’s hills and squares, representing a particular vision of society, the good life and models of emulation. What seems remarkable about the park, then, is its attempt to provide a reminder of the values and norms of that age, when the typical thing for the champions of any new system is to attempt to eradicate – sometimes brutally – all vestiges and symbols of the old.

For in our historical narratives lie claims to political legitimacy, and what these narratives contain shape the standards by which political life is judged. A resurgence in Communist nostalgia in Russia; contestation over the content of Japanese school textbooks about wartime atrocities; heady exhortations to the glory days of Britain bestriding the world – appeals to ‘history’, and the stirrings of collective identity and who ‘we’ are, mandate or limit particular courses of action, whether in foreign policy or otherwise.

In the process of removing these artifacts from public Budapest – one that is still ongoing – the contrast of their reorganization in the admission-fee statue park is a glimpse of one interpretation of history, written by those triumphant at one point in time, while a different interpretation is being forged today. Public space, whether in architecture or art, always contains the fingerprints of different generations and their values and claims to power, but which often requires a little bit of an archaeological trovel to unearth the different layers of history. The accumulation of this one collection of monuments relegated from the public eye presents this transition from one layer to another so much more vividly.

But what would it take to achieve that one-worldness? In a recent article for the Third World Quarterly journal* (academic paywall), Tom Weiss and Martin Burke suggest ways in which climate change might lead to a more global level of identification – how collective identity might shift from the national to the global as a reaction to the threats and implications of a changing climate. As their introduction outlines:

“Our objective is to explore the dynamics of change that might catapult international society to a more cosmopolitan level of ‘world society’, characterised by greater collective identification at both the state and individual levels, in dealing with security threats resulting from dramatic alterations to the globe’s climate. Rather than business-as-usual at global gatherings in Copenhagen and Cancun, is it possible that collective identification might encourage security communities in regions where cooperation is currently weak?

“…We have moved from a Hobbesian world in which states are ‘enemies’ to what Hedley Bull dubbed an ‘international society’ of states as ‘rivals’ with rules. In our lifetimes can we move towards a more cosmopolitan world society of ‘friendly’ states capable of establishing limited regional or global authority to deal with the consequences of climate change? Our answer is a tentative ‘yes’.”

Their fundamental point is the suggestion that the perception of a common fate from climate change will trigger the evolution of collective identity towards the global scale. Cooperation for functional reasons, over time, also transforms the nature of who the ‘other’ is and will enable international politics to move beyond the “anarchy of rivals” to that of friends. The possibilities of world society depend, in their analysis, on:

“Three ongoing social processes may engender increased collective identity among states, with clear consequences for effective international public policy and institution building in the face of climate change. They are increasing structural similarity among states arising from legitimisation of membership norms; the perception of a common fate stemming from climate change, necessitating collaboration and co-ordination at the regional or global levels; and the continuing spread of common values among members of global civil society and transnational networks of epistemic communities working on climate change.”

It’s an essay that is essentially taking stock of the last century of world politics, and presents a fascinating scenario to contemplate. But in the loopy way that my mind connects dots, my caution and pessimism to this scenario stems from the parallels between climate catastrophe so powerful that it does indeed create the perception of a common fate, to the (admittedly unlikely) prospect of a zombie apocalypse.

I posed the following question to a recent class that I taught: how would international relations change in the event of a zombie uprising? By far the strongest and most vehemently argued response was something similar to the process that Weiss and Burke outline: in the face of a common threat, the unit of collective identity becomes ‘humanity’ as a whole, and there would be a worldwide mobilization to counter the threat. Very much, perhaps, like Independence Day (but with zombies rather than aliens).

It’s the intuitive reaction – but I have Dan Drezner’s Theories of International Politics and Zombies to thank for injecting some academic reservations to this prospect. These are familiar themes around the challenges of effective and sustained cooperation: responding to the ‘common threat’ is likely to invoke distributional conflict, about how the costs and benefits of action are unevenly distributed; action has to take into consideration free-riding problems in providing the public good; the powerful would use the threat as justification for expansion of their realm of action; societies would have to be convinced that restrictions on civil liberties (zombies) or economically difficult transitions (climate change) would be worth it; bureaucracies would still be subject to dysfunction and organizational inefficiencies, and the coordination problems at the global scale that we’re already familiar with would still remain.

To be fair, Drezner isn’t all doom and gloom; he recognizes the (constructivist) possibility of a “Kantian pluralistic counter-zombie security community in which governments share sovereignty and resources to combat the undead menace…the existential peril posed by zombies could be the exogeneous shock needed to break down nationalistic divides and advance the creation of a world state”, which is the idea underpinning the Weiss and Burke argument.

But where this seems plausible for a zombie apocalypse, where this seems less so for climate change is the same reason why the Weiss and Burke suggestion seems less plausible to me – that the key thing about climate change in this regard is that the ‘other’ is, in fact, ‘us’. The possibilities of collectively identifying as a world society, of a global ‘we’, seem ultimately limited by the fact that it is other humans, whose patterns of overconsumption ultimately lie behind rising emissions and crossing prospective tipping points. For while the catastrophes of climate change may appear to be exogeneous to human activity and behaviour, unlike zombies, they are in fact endogeneous – where the causes are deeply internal to how we live, as a society.

*Thomas G. Weiss and Martin J. Burke, 2011, “Legitimacy, Identity and Climate Change: moving from international to world society”, Third World Quarterly, 32(6), pp.1057-1072.

It wasn’t the replacement of street names with numbers that was disconcerting, but the uniform regularity of it all, with each block virtually identical, thus providing an instant sense of distance and location. 110th Street? You know immediately that that’s far from 14th Street. Equally disorienting were the clear views down each street, traffic light colours gently blinking away – but the symmetry of the towering skyscrapers receding into…nothing. No Arc de Triomphe or St. Peter’s Basilica marks their end, instead seeming like a technical lesson in perspective drawing out of an art class where the lines recede into infinity.

Looking South down Fifth Avenue

The explanation came by chance in the terrific The Works: Anatomy of a City, explaining how the city’s infrastructure functions and its design: in 1811, two hundred years ago, city commissioners approved a masterplan for Manhattan’s future development, the city up until that point confined to what is now lower Manhattan, with the result being the same grid layout that bewilders me today. From the commissioners’ report:

“That one of the first objects which claimed their attention was the form and manner in which the business should be conducted; that is to say, whether they should confine themselves to rectilinear and rectangular streets, or whether they should adopt some of those supposed improvements by circles, ovals, and stars, which certainly embellish a plan, whatever may be their effect as to convenience and utility. In considering that subject they could not but bear in mind that a city is to be composed principally of the habitations of men, and that straight-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in. The effect of these plain and simple reflections was decisive….

“…To the better understanding of the map, it will be proper to recollect, in examining it, that the term avenue is applied to all those streets which run in a northerly direction parallel to each other. These are one hundred feet wide, and such of them as can be extended as far north as the village of Harlem are numbered (beginning with the most eastern, which passes from the west of Bellevue Hospital to the east of Harlem Church) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12.”

As a NY Times piece earlier this year on the plan’s anniversary noted, its legacy is notable as much for the grand vision itself, as it is for the fact that it has persisted over the city’s rapid development in the past two centuries:

“What I found absolutely remarkable,” said Hilary Ballon, an urban studies professor at New York University and curator of a future exhibition on the grid for the Museum of the City of New York, “was how the city had a commitment to executing this vision, which required a pretty significant transformation in how the city worked — a greater degree of governmental authority, changes in the taxation system to fund this road building, and a multigenerational commitment to its implementation.”

The Manhattan Street Plan of 1811

In the clear lines of Manhattan’s streets is the result of a particular vision of what social life should look like: orderly and organised, rational and rigorous. It is perhaps the city planner’s dream – as anthropologist James C. Scott richly illustrates in Seeing Like a State, governments elites across space and time have sought to streamline and rationalize diverse ways of living into a narrower set of possibilities, ones that can be monitored, and ultimately controlled by state authorities. (It is an urge for neatness and straight lines that anyone who has played SimCity well knows – suddenly, the real-life model for the game’s recommended 6×6 grid in which to zone land and bound by streets appears before my eyes).

Such efforts – whether in urban planning, the consolidation of a common language, agricultural schemes, and so on, as Scott discusses – are efforts at legibility, trying to turn a great mass of people and livelihoods into something comprehendable by governing authorities. There is nothing ‘natural’ about Manhattan’s grid layout, which instead treats the island as a blank sheet of paper, largely ignoring topography, exisiting communities and ultimately, seeking to construct a new social reality without much regard for whatever might have been there before. Against the uniform city blocks, Broadway’s diagonal path across the island seems almost aesthetically violent. For in the straight, uncompromising lines of urban grid layouts lies a confidence in top-down social engineering: a better life lies in a strict adherence to a Plan, designed by experts to be economically efficient, spatially functional and in such a utilitarian achievement, constituting a marker of human rationality and ‘progress’.

A recent story in the Times illustrates in a different way, the quest of governing authorities to count and monitor all that goes on – because if you can count it, you can change it. For Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s mayor, progress is measured by change in some 478 indicators, all of which presumably have their own plan or strategy intended to drive improvement in the numbers.

“And since becoming mayor nearly a decade ago, he has minutely quantified virtually every detail of his government, from the number of mentally ill inmates in city jails to the days left in his current term. A video screen at City Hall regularly updates the progress of dozens of agencies in meeting their goals.

Scott’s book is a litany of the many failures of such plans and attempts at social engineering and creating Utopia here on Earth (the subtitle is How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed). So perhaps the surprising thing about the Manhattan urban grid is that is seems to work (I’ve been here two weeks; maybe actual residents will think differently). But if the linear city structure of Manhattan represents a successful imposition of order onto an urban population, the persistence of this plan contrasts with another high-profile attempt at urban grand designs somewhere else in the world – part II follows, sometime next week.