The Geography of Bureaucracy

photo courtesy of Dave Shove-Brown

The playground at Lincoln Park is locked shut.  Barriers warn cyclists off the Capital Crescent Trail. The GW memorial trail, the Anacostia River walk, the C&O Canal path are all closed due to the government shutdown.  Monuments and memorials, designed to be literally and metaphorically open, are jury-rigged with bike racks to prevent us the people from experiencing the better angels of our history. (Why is it always bike racks?  What giant warehouse do the overlords haul them out of?  Can’t we use them for their intended purpose?) For us urbanists this is a rare—please, let it remain rare—exposure of the myriad invisible jurisdictional boundaries that shape the experiential landscape.  We get to see the true nature of the geography of bureaucracy. Oh joy.

Most discussions about the construction and livability of cities centers on the problematic of public and private space.  We weigh in on the differences among the Occupy encampments in POPS—privately owned public spaces-- versus true public space.  We worry about pseudo-public spaces such as shopping malls and privatized streets.  We look for and celebrate alternatives in “third places” and DIY urbanism.  We assert our right to the city. The bright line we thought we saw between public and private has prevented our seeing the lines within public space.  Now the prism of the federal lockout has refracted the monolithic public into a spectrum of different publics and it’s an unsettling sight.   There’s city public and there’s federal public.  Even city public cowers under the shadow of federal public; we citizens of the District of Columbia don’t even have voting voice in this lockout.  Connections are severed, paths blocked, daily rituals upended. Our powerlessness is exposed.

The very fabric of the city, uniquely woven from Cartesian grid and cross-cutting diagonals knotted at green circles and squares, tells its story of bureaucratic layers.  In the abstract, places like Lincoln Park and Dupont Circle are nodes, intermittent points where the two street systems of the city join. In reality, each is a neighborhood center and beloved public place. They appear to be city parks, but they're not.  Few of the city's defining green spaces actually belong to the city and its citizens.  We just get to use them when the Park Service says we can. De jure, they are federal spaces; de facto, they are city places.  

The change in words is intentional:  space is abstract, but place is real. Our public landscapes are inextricably woven together, not only at the custodial level of whose trash cans are next to whose benches, or the managerial level of what behavior is and is not allowed, but truly at the quotidian level of our everyday lives. Like the inhabitants of one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, our buildings and places are strung together with different strings according to the character of our relationships:  one string connects a family to its playground, the parents to the workplace, the child to her friend’s house, and so on.  We only notice that web when some of the strings get cut.

Ideology is the apprehension of reality at a distance. (I’m not sure who said that; it may have been the Italian architecture theorist Manfredo Tafuri. I should track it down, but scholarship is the first casualty of blogging.) That distance makes decision-making so much easier, because one can’t really see the fine-grained consequences. The ideologues can pat themselves on the back for passing their own self-defined purity tests; meanwhile reality itself is remarkably indifferent. Architects and planners have learned over the years that attempts to design and implement ideal cities inevitably fail because reality will always win.  Remember that the word “utopia” really means “no place.”  All building, all place-making is political in that it has to involve compromise.  I tell my students that all space is political; now I see that all politics is spatial.