The City and Its People

This paper reflects on the way contemporary cities challenge conventional notions of legitimate authority, especially its focus on order and rationality. Political philosophers have long framed their work as providing plans, designs, and frameworks for creating new institutions or reforming existing ones. This language implies an analogy between philosophers and architects and planners. In Ancient Greece, there was an explicit connection between architects, philosophical insight, and political authority, as seen in Plato’s writings, for example. Architectural models persisted into the Enlightenment, such as in the work of Immanuel Kant, who draws on metaphors of planning and engineering to justify his critical philosophy, including its ethical and moral elements. Today, explicit invocations of the architect or planner are less common, but contemporary political philosophy is replete with references to designs and plans, and talk of foundations and grounds. To critically explore this powerful dynamic, I turn to influential modern architects and city planners, including Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, and Robert Moses, to analyse their utopian designs for the modern city. This examination reveals a top-down model, which leads to a troubling tendency to resent the people such work is for, especially when the people fail to conform to, or oppose, the rational order constructed by the architect. This insight does not require us to abandon architectural metaphors, nor the desire to provide standards of legitimate authority. Instead, I argue, it should encourage us to consider alternative bottom-up models that draw from the experiences of urban life. Using the work of Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett, and Marwa Al-Sabouni, I suggest an alternative architectural model expressing care and concern for the city and its people. This democratic alternative is committed to preserving individual and collective freedom, balancing their competing demands to ensure political authority respects the pluralism inherent to city living, as diverse individuals and groups navigate common spaces.