Foucault M, Space of security : The example of the Town
Foucault M. (2007[1978]), « Space of security : The example of the Town. Lecture of 11th Hanuary 1978 », political Geography, Vol.26 (1), Elsevier, Londres, pp.48-56
« We could say that sovereignty is exercised within the borders of a territory, discipline is exercised on the bodies of individuals, and security is exercised over a whole population, but this not the point and [Foucault] doesn’t think it holds together. »p.48
“If it is true that sovereignty is basically inscribed and functions within a territory, and that the idea of sovereignty over an unpopulated territory is not only a juridically and politically accepted idea, but one that is absolutely accepted an primary, nevertheless the effective, real, daily operations of the actual exercise of sovereignty point to a certain multiplicity, but one which treated as the multiplicity of subjects, or [as] the multiplicity of a people.” p.48
“Discipline only exists insofar as there is a multiplicity and an end, or an objective or result to be obtained on the basis of this multiplicity. School and military discipline, as well as penal discipline, workshop discipline, worker discipline, are all particular ways of managing and organizing a multiplicity, of fixing its points if implantation, its lateral or horizontal, vertical and pyramidal trajectories, its hierarchy, and so on. The individual is much more a particular way of dividing up the multiplicity for a discipline than the raw material from which it is constructed. Discipline is a mode of individualization of the multiplicities rather than something that construct an edifice of multiple elements on the basis of individuals who are worked on as, first of all, individuals.” p.49
"So sovereignty and discipline as well as security, can only be concerned with multiplicities”p.49
“Problems of space are equally common to all three [sovereignty, discipline and security]” p.49
“in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this gave rise a number of problems linked to the development of administrative states, for which the juridical specificity of the town posed a difficult problem. Second, the growth of trade, and then,, in the eighteenth, urban demography, raised the problem of town’s compression and enclosure within its walls.”p.49
-Town and sovereignty
Le Maître A. (1973[1682]), La métropolitée, ou de l’établissement des villes Capitals, de leur utilité passive et active, de l’union de leurs partie et de leur anatomie, de leur commerce,… B.Bockholt, Amsterdan
“The problem of La Métropolitée is: Must a country have a capital city, and in what ir should consist?” p.49
“The state, he says, actually comprises three elements, three orders, three estates even; the peasants, the artisans, and what he calls the third order, or the third estate, which is, oddly the sovereign and the officers in his service. The state must be like a edifice in relation to these three lements.”p.49
“On the basis of this architectural metaphor, the territory must also comprise foundations, common parts, and noble parts.” p.50
Peasants live, and only them, in the countryside, the artisans and tradesmen in the small town and the sovereign, his officers, and those artisans and tradesmen who are indispensable to the functioning of the court and the sovereign entourage, must live in the capital.
“It must be a geometrical relationship in the sense that a good country is one that, in short, must have the form of a circle, and the capital must be right at the centre ot the cercle”p.50
“The Capital city does not only possess the useful, but also the honor, not only wealth, but also of rank and glory” (Le Maître, 1962,pp.11-12)
The capital must be the ornament of the territory
“(The Capital) will be the political heart giving life and movements to the entire body of the Province” (Le Maître, 1962,p.52)
“But thus must also be a political relationship in that the decrees and laws must be implanted in the territory [in such way] that no tiny corner of the realm escapes this general network of the sovereign’s orders and law.” p.50
“It is necessary that the Prince’s Eye cast its rays over the movement of his people, that he observe their conduct, can note them closely, and that his presence alone keeps vice, disorder, and injustice in check” (Le Maître, 1962,p.69)
“The capital must also have a moral role, and diffuse throughout the territory all that is necessary to command people with regard to their conduct and ways of doing things.
“The capital must give the example of good morals.”p.50
“The Capital, having the greatest consumption, must also be the site of commerce” (Le Maître, 1962,pp.72-73)
“The essential and final cause of the Capital city can only be public Utility, and to this end it must be the must opulent” (Le Maître, 1962,pp.12-13)
The text is interesting because is a definition of town, a reflection on the town, in term of sovereignty.
“Moreover, it is interesting how, through the grid of sovereignty, a number of specifically urban functions appear as the fundamental problem: economic, moral, and administrative functions”p.51
“Le Maître dreams of connecting the political effectiveness of sovereignty to a spatial distribution.
“What is involved for Le Maître – and this is both an old idea, since it is a matter of sovereignty, and a modern idea, since it involves circulation- is the superposition of thr state of sovereignty, the territorial state, and the commercial state. It involves fastening them together and mutually reinforcing them” p.51
In this period and in this region of Europe, we are in the middle of mercantilism, or rather of Cameralis, that is to say, of the problem pf how to ensure maximum economic development through commerce within a rigid system of sovereignty.
Cameralistics, or cameral science, designates the science of finance and administration that developed from the seventeenth century in the “chambers” of princes, the organs of planning and bureaucratic control that will gradually replace traditional councils. To the cameralists the central problem of science was the problem of state. To them the object of all social theory was to show how the welfare of the state might be secured.
“Le Maître’s problem is how to ensure a well “capitalized” state, that is to say, a state well organized around a capital as the seat of sovereignty and the central point of political and commercial circulation”p.51
“In this text the town-capital is thought in term of relations of sovereignty exercised over a territory”p.51
-Example from new city
Kristinia or Christoania: old name for the capital of Norway, rebaptized by the King Christian IV in 1624 after the fire that destroyed the town.
Gothenburg: Founded by Gustave II Adolphe in 1619, the town was constructed on the model of Dutch cities.
The little town called Richelieu, which was built from scratch on the border of Touraine and Poitou.
In these three cities, the form of the camp is used.
“In the previous case, Le Maître’s La Métropolitée, the layout if the town was basically thought in term of the most general, overall category of the territory. One tired ti think about town through a macrocosm and microcosm ran through the problematic of the relationship between town, sovereignty, and territory. In the case of towns constructed in the form of camp, we can say that the town is not thought of on the basis if the larger territory, but on the basis of a smaller, geometrical figure, which is a king of architectural module, namely the square or rectangle, which is in turn subdivided into other square or rectangles.”p.52
In the case of Richelieu, this module is not merely the application of a principle of symmetry.
“There is an axis of symmetry, but the framed by and functions thank to well-calculeted dissymetries”p.52
The layout made by the central street, which divided the town into two rectangle, is completed by other street, some parallel to and other at right angles to the central street, but at different distances from each other, such that the town is subdivided into rectangles of different sizes. The biggest rectangles are at one end of the town, and the smallest are at the other.
“People must live on the side of the biggest rectangles, where the grid is widest and the road are broad . Conversely , trades, artisans and shops, as well as markets, must be situated where the grid is much tighter.”p.52
“There will be two categories of houses in the residential area where the rectangles are bigger. On the one hand, there are thses overlooking the main thoroughfare, or the street parallel to it, which will be house with a number of floors and attics. On the other hand, the smallest houses with only one floor will be in the streets perpendicular to the main street: difference of social status, of wealth,….”pp.52-53
“We find again the disciplinary treatment of multiplicities in space, that to say, [the] constitutions of an empty, closed space within which artificial multiplicities are to be constructed ans organized according to the triple principle of hierarchy, precise communication of relation of power, and functional effects specific to this distribution, for example, ensuring trade, housing,…”p.53
“Discipline belongs to the order of construction (in the broad sense of construction)”p.53
The case of Nantes where the English model was employed
In the project made by an architect called Rousseau, based on the idea of reconstructing Nantes. We can see that the problem was circulation. For the town to be a perfect agent of circulation it had to have the form of a heart that ensures the circulation if blood.
The projects put forward by Vigné de Vagny, in which there was no question of reconstructing, or impose a symbolic form, in which something precise and concrete was at stake.
“First, cutting routes through the town, and streets wide enough to ensure four functions. First, hygiene, ventilation opening up all kinds of pockets where morbid miasmas accumulated in crowed quarters, where dwelling were too densely packed. So there was a hygienic function. Second, ensuring trade within the town. Third, connecting up this network of street to externals roads in such way that goods from outside can arrive or be dispatched, but without giving up the requirements of customs control. And finally, an important problem for town in the eighteenth century was allowing for surveillance, since the suppression if city walls made necessary by economic development meant that one could no longer close towns in the evening or closely supervise daily comings and goings so that the insecurity if the towns was increased by the influx of the floating population of beggars, vagrants, delinquents, criminals, thievesn murderers, and so on, who might come, as everyone knowsn from the county” p.54
“In other words, it was a matter of organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a division between good and bad circulation, and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad”p.54
Vigny’s redevelopment plan involved responding to what is a fairly new and fundamental question of how to integrate possible future developments within a present plan. But the more the town is elongated, the more one loses the benefit of that kind of coherent grid of subdivisions.
The main point is that is no longer any question of construction within an empty or emptied space, like in the case of disciplinary town. Disciple works in an empty, artificial space that is to be completely constructed. Security will rely on a number of material givens. It will, of course work on site with the flows of water, islands, air, and so forth. Thus it works on a given. This given will not be reconstructed to arrive at a point of perfection, as in the disciplinary town. It is a matter of maximizing the positive elements and minimizing what is risky and inconvenient. One will therefore work not only on natural givens, but also on quantities that can be relatively, but never wholly reduced, and, since they can never be nullified, one works on probabilities. These development try to organize elements that are justified by their poly-functionality, like the streets. Therefore all these different functions of the town, some positive and other negative, will have to be built into the plan. The town will not be conceived of planned according to a static perception, a good town plan takes into account precisely what might happen.
“In short, [Foucault] thinks we can speak here of a technique that is basically organized by reference to the problem of security, that is to say, at bottom, to the problem of the series. An indefinite series of mobile elements: Circulation, x number of carts, x number of passers-by, x number of thieves, x number of miasmas, and so on. An indefinite series of events that will occur: so many boats will berth, so many carts will arrive, and so on. An equally an indefinite series of accumulating units: how many inhabitants, how many houses, and so on. [Foucault] thinks the management of these series that, because they are open series can only be controlled by an estimate pf probabilities, is pretty much the essential characteristic od the mechanism of security.”p.55
“To summarize all this, let’s say then that the sovereignty capitalizes a territory, raising the major problem of the seat of government, whereas discipline structures a space and addresses the essential problem of a hierarchical and functional distribution of elements, and security will try to plan a milieu in terms of events or series of events of possible elements, of series that will have to be related within a multivalent and transformable framework.”p.55
“The space in which a series of uncertain elements unfold is roughly what one can call the milieu”p.55
The milieu is a notion that appears with Lamarck, it is a notion that was already employed by Newton and the Newtonians. So the architects, the first town planners of the eighteenth century, did not actually employ the notion of milieu, the technical schema of this notion of milieu, the kind of pragmatic structure which marks it out in advance is present in the way in which the town planners try to reflect and modify urban space.
“The apparatuses of security work, fabricate, organize, and plan a milieu before the notion was formed and isolated.”p.55
The milieu is a set of natural givens and a set of artificial givens, id a certain number of combined, overall effects bearing on all who live in it.
“It is an element in which a circular link is produced between effects and causes, since an effect from one point of view will be a cause from another.”p.56
“So it is this phenomenon of circulation of causes and effects that is targeted through the milieu. Finally, the milieu appears as a field if intervention in which, instead of affecting individuals as a set of legal subjects capable of voluntary actions- which would be the case of the sovereignty- and instead of affecting them as a multiplicity of organisms, of bodies capable of per performances, and of required performances- as in discipline- one tries to effect, precisely a population. [Foucault] means a multiplicity of individuals who are fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality within they live. What one tries to reach through this milieu, is precisely the conjunction of a seris of evens produced by there individuals, populations, and groups, and quasi natural events which occur around them;”p.56
Reference
Canguilhen G. (1965), “Le vivant et son milieu”, La Connaissance de la vie, Paris
Foucault, M. (2004), Sécurité, territoire, population: Cours au Collège de France (1977-1978), Seuil, Gallimard, Paris
Perrot, J-C (1975), Genèse d’une ville moderne. Caen au XVIIIe siècle, University de Lille, Lille
Perrot M (1977), « L’inspecteur Bentham», La Panoptique, Belfond,Paris
« We could say that sovereignty is exercised within the borders of a territory, discipline is exercised on the bodies of individuals, and security is exercised over a whole population, but this not the point and [Foucault] doesn’t think it holds together. »p.48
“If it is true that sovereignty is basically inscribed and functions within a territory, and that the idea of sovereignty over an unpopulated territory is not only a juridically and politically accepted idea, but one that is absolutely accepted an primary, nevertheless the effective, real, daily operations of the actual exercise of sovereignty point to a certain multiplicity, but one which treated as the multiplicity of subjects, or [as] the multiplicity of a people.” p.48
“Discipline only exists insofar as there is a multiplicity and an end, or an objective or result to be obtained on the basis of this multiplicity. School and military discipline, as well as penal discipline, workshop discipline, worker discipline, are all particular ways of managing and organizing a multiplicity, of fixing its points if implantation, its lateral or horizontal, vertical and pyramidal trajectories, its hierarchy, and so on. The individual is much more a particular way of dividing up the multiplicity for a discipline than the raw material from which it is constructed. Discipline is a mode of individualization of the multiplicities rather than something that construct an edifice of multiple elements on the basis of individuals who are worked on as, first of all, individuals.” p.49
"So sovereignty and discipline as well as security, can only be concerned with multiplicities”p.49
“Problems of space are equally common to all three [sovereignty, discipline and security]” p.49
“in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this gave rise a number of problems linked to the development of administrative states, for which the juridical specificity of the town posed a difficult problem. Second, the growth of trade, and then,, in the eighteenth, urban demography, raised the problem of town’s compression and enclosure within its walls.”p.49
-Town and sovereignty
Le Maître A. (1973[1682]), La métropolitée, ou de l’établissement des villes Capitals, de leur utilité passive et active, de l’union de leurs partie et de leur anatomie, de leur commerce,… B.Bockholt, Amsterdan
“The problem of La Métropolitée is: Must a country have a capital city, and in what ir should consist?” p.49
“The state, he says, actually comprises three elements, three orders, three estates even; the peasants, the artisans, and what he calls the third order, or the third estate, which is, oddly the sovereign and the officers in his service. The state must be like a edifice in relation to these three lements.”p.49
“On the basis of this architectural metaphor, the territory must also comprise foundations, common parts, and noble parts.” p.50
Peasants live, and only them, in the countryside, the artisans and tradesmen in the small town and the sovereign, his officers, and those artisans and tradesmen who are indispensable to the functioning of the court and the sovereign entourage, must live in the capital.
“It must be a geometrical relationship in the sense that a good country is one that, in short, must have the form of a circle, and the capital must be right at the centre ot the cercle”p.50
“The Capital city does not only possess the useful, but also the honor, not only wealth, but also of rank and glory” (Le Maître, 1962,pp.11-12)
The capital must be the ornament of the territory
“(The Capital) will be the political heart giving life and movements to the entire body of the Province” (Le Maître, 1962,p.52)
“But thus must also be a political relationship in that the decrees and laws must be implanted in the territory [in such way] that no tiny corner of the realm escapes this general network of the sovereign’s orders and law.” p.50
“It is necessary that the Prince’s Eye cast its rays over the movement of his people, that he observe their conduct, can note them closely, and that his presence alone keeps vice, disorder, and injustice in check” (Le Maître, 1962,p.69)
“The capital must also have a moral role, and diffuse throughout the territory all that is necessary to command people with regard to their conduct and ways of doing things.
“The capital must give the example of good morals.”p.50
“The Capital, having the greatest consumption, must also be the site of commerce” (Le Maître, 1962,pp.72-73)
“The essential and final cause of the Capital city can only be public Utility, and to this end it must be the must opulent” (Le Maître, 1962,pp.12-13)
The text is interesting because is a definition of town, a reflection on the town, in term of sovereignty.
“Moreover, it is interesting how, through the grid of sovereignty, a number of specifically urban functions appear as the fundamental problem: economic, moral, and administrative functions”p.51
“Le Maître dreams of connecting the political effectiveness of sovereignty to a spatial distribution.
“What is involved for Le Maître – and this is both an old idea, since it is a matter of sovereignty, and a modern idea, since it involves circulation- is the superposition of thr state of sovereignty, the territorial state, and the commercial state. It involves fastening them together and mutually reinforcing them” p.51
In this period and in this region of Europe, we are in the middle of mercantilism, or rather of Cameralis, that is to say, of the problem pf how to ensure maximum economic development through commerce within a rigid system of sovereignty.
Cameralistics, or cameral science, designates the science of finance and administration that developed from the seventeenth century in the “chambers” of princes, the organs of planning and bureaucratic control that will gradually replace traditional councils. To the cameralists the central problem of science was the problem of state. To them the object of all social theory was to show how the welfare of the state might be secured.
“Le Maître’s problem is how to ensure a well “capitalized” state, that is to say, a state well organized around a capital as the seat of sovereignty and the central point of political and commercial circulation”p.51
“In this text the town-capital is thought in term of relations of sovereignty exercised over a territory”p.51
-Example from new city
Kristinia or Christoania: old name for the capital of Norway, rebaptized by the King Christian IV in 1624 after the fire that destroyed the town.
Gothenburg: Founded by Gustave II Adolphe in 1619, the town was constructed on the model of Dutch cities.
The little town called Richelieu, which was built from scratch on the border of Touraine and Poitou.
In these three cities, the form of the camp is used.
“In the previous case, Le Maître’s La Métropolitée, the layout if the town was basically thought in term of the most general, overall category of the territory. One tired ti think about town through a macrocosm and microcosm ran through the problematic of the relationship between town, sovereignty, and territory. In the case of towns constructed in the form of camp, we can say that the town is not thought of on the basis if the larger territory, but on the basis of a smaller, geometrical figure, which is a king of architectural module, namely the square or rectangle, which is in turn subdivided into other square or rectangles.”p.52
In the case of Richelieu, this module is not merely the application of a principle of symmetry.
“There is an axis of symmetry, but the framed by and functions thank to well-calculeted dissymetries”p.52
The layout made by the central street, which divided the town into two rectangle, is completed by other street, some parallel to and other at right angles to the central street, but at different distances from each other, such that the town is subdivided into rectangles of different sizes. The biggest rectangles are at one end of the town, and the smallest are at the other.
“People must live on the side of the biggest rectangles, where the grid is widest and the road are broad . Conversely , trades, artisans and shops, as well as markets, must be situated where the grid is much tighter.”p.52
“There will be two categories of houses in the residential area where the rectangles are bigger. On the one hand, there are thses overlooking the main thoroughfare, or the street parallel to it, which will be house with a number of floors and attics. On the other hand, the smallest houses with only one floor will be in the streets perpendicular to the main street: difference of social status, of wealth,….”pp.52-53
“We find again the disciplinary treatment of multiplicities in space, that to say, [the] constitutions of an empty, closed space within which artificial multiplicities are to be constructed ans organized according to the triple principle of hierarchy, precise communication of relation of power, and functional effects specific to this distribution, for example, ensuring trade, housing,…”p.53
“Discipline belongs to the order of construction (in the broad sense of construction)”p.53
The case of Nantes where the English model was employed
In the project made by an architect called Rousseau, based on the idea of reconstructing Nantes. We can see that the problem was circulation. For the town to be a perfect agent of circulation it had to have the form of a heart that ensures the circulation if blood.
The projects put forward by Vigné de Vagny, in which there was no question of reconstructing, or impose a symbolic form, in which something precise and concrete was at stake.
“First, cutting routes through the town, and streets wide enough to ensure four functions. First, hygiene, ventilation opening up all kinds of pockets where morbid miasmas accumulated in crowed quarters, where dwelling were too densely packed. So there was a hygienic function. Second, ensuring trade within the town. Third, connecting up this network of street to externals roads in such way that goods from outside can arrive or be dispatched, but without giving up the requirements of customs control. And finally, an important problem for town in the eighteenth century was allowing for surveillance, since the suppression if city walls made necessary by economic development meant that one could no longer close towns in the evening or closely supervise daily comings and goings so that the insecurity if the towns was increased by the influx of the floating population of beggars, vagrants, delinquents, criminals, thievesn murderers, and so on, who might come, as everyone knowsn from the county” p.54
“In other words, it was a matter of organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a division between good and bad circulation, and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad”p.54
Vigny’s redevelopment plan involved responding to what is a fairly new and fundamental question of how to integrate possible future developments within a present plan. But the more the town is elongated, the more one loses the benefit of that kind of coherent grid of subdivisions.
The main point is that is no longer any question of construction within an empty or emptied space, like in the case of disciplinary town. Disciple works in an empty, artificial space that is to be completely constructed. Security will rely on a number of material givens. It will, of course work on site with the flows of water, islands, air, and so forth. Thus it works on a given. This given will not be reconstructed to arrive at a point of perfection, as in the disciplinary town. It is a matter of maximizing the positive elements and minimizing what is risky and inconvenient. One will therefore work not only on natural givens, but also on quantities that can be relatively, but never wholly reduced, and, since they can never be nullified, one works on probabilities. These development try to organize elements that are justified by their poly-functionality, like the streets. Therefore all these different functions of the town, some positive and other negative, will have to be built into the plan. The town will not be conceived of planned according to a static perception, a good town plan takes into account precisely what might happen.
“In short, [Foucault] thinks we can speak here of a technique that is basically organized by reference to the problem of security, that is to say, at bottom, to the problem of the series. An indefinite series of mobile elements: Circulation, x number of carts, x number of passers-by, x number of thieves, x number of miasmas, and so on. An indefinite series of events that will occur: so many boats will berth, so many carts will arrive, and so on. An equally an indefinite series of accumulating units: how many inhabitants, how many houses, and so on. [Foucault] thinks the management of these series that, because they are open series can only be controlled by an estimate pf probabilities, is pretty much the essential characteristic od the mechanism of security.”p.55
“To summarize all this, let’s say then that the sovereignty capitalizes a territory, raising the major problem of the seat of government, whereas discipline structures a space and addresses the essential problem of a hierarchical and functional distribution of elements, and security will try to plan a milieu in terms of events or series of events of possible elements, of series that will have to be related within a multivalent and transformable framework.”p.55
“The space in which a series of uncertain elements unfold is roughly what one can call the milieu”p.55
The milieu is a notion that appears with Lamarck, it is a notion that was already employed by Newton and the Newtonians. So the architects, the first town planners of the eighteenth century, did not actually employ the notion of milieu, the technical schema of this notion of milieu, the kind of pragmatic structure which marks it out in advance is present in the way in which the town planners try to reflect and modify urban space.
“The apparatuses of security work, fabricate, organize, and plan a milieu before the notion was formed and isolated.”p.55
The milieu is a set of natural givens and a set of artificial givens, id a certain number of combined, overall effects bearing on all who live in it.
“It is an element in which a circular link is produced between effects and causes, since an effect from one point of view will be a cause from another.”p.56
“So it is this phenomenon of circulation of causes and effects that is targeted through the milieu. Finally, the milieu appears as a field if intervention in which, instead of affecting individuals as a set of legal subjects capable of voluntary actions- which would be the case of the sovereignty- and instead of affecting them as a multiplicity of organisms, of bodies capable of per performances, and of required performances- as in discipline- one tries to effect, precisely a population. [Foucault] means a multiplicity of individuals who are fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality within they live. What one tries to reach through this milieu, is precisely the conjunction of a seris of evens produced by there individuals, populations, and groups, and quasi natural events which occur around them;”p.56
Reference
Canguilhen G. (1965), “Le vivant et son milieu”, La Connaissance de la vie, Paris
Foucault, M. (2004), Sécurité, territoire, population: Cours au Collège de France (1977-1978), Seuil, Gallimard, Paris
Perrot, J-C (1975), Genèse d’une ville moderne. Caen au XVIIIe siècle, University de Lille, Lille
Perrot M (1977), « L’inspecteur Bentham», La Panoptique, Belfond,Paris
Publicité