Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1999.

volume 17, pages 737 760

Governing cities: notes on the spatialisation of virtue

Thomas Osborne
Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, 12 Woodland Road, Bristol BS12 1UQ, England;
e-mail: thomns.osbornc@bri2u1c.uk
Nikolas Rose
Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross,
London SE14 6NW, England; e-mail: n.rosc@gokl.nc.uk
Received 13 July 1998; in revised form 16 April 1999

Abstract. This paper represents a scries of speculations concerning the imagination of (he city as a space
of government, authority, and 'the conduct of conduct*. The authors argue that it is possible to
understand the myriad ways in which various authorities have sought to govern the city through an
interrogation of the scries of means through which the city has been 'diagrammed1 as a space of power,
regulation, ethics, and citizenship. These speculations take a historical but not a historically 'pcriodiscd'
form; the authors consider in turn the diagramming of the city in the ancient Greek world, the
nineteenth-century liberal diagramming of the city, eugenic models of the city, and latter-day ncolibcral
modes of visualising, programming, and governing urban spaces. The aim is neither to'found yet another
theory of spatialisation nor to advance a Foucauldian urban sociology but to gauge the parameters
which have bequeathed us the contemporary city as a governed and ethically saturated space.

In the following notes and reflections, we use the term 'diagram' to try to capture the
different ways in which government has been territorialiscd in an urban form.(1) By
government, we mean something more than the thoughts, policies, tactics, organisa-
tions ... of politicians. In the extended sense that is now becoming familiar, we use the
term government to refer to that plane of thinking and acting concerned with the
authoritative regulation of conduct towards particular objectives (see Rose, 1999b).
Government is not reducible to politics, the economy, or morality: one can never just
read off mentalities or strategies of government from the estage of capitalism' or the
complexity of social organisation. There is always an element of creativity concerning
arts of government; the exercise of government entails the application of thought to
particular conditions and situations. How might one analyse our historical archive of
such kinds of thought? No doubt there are many ways. In what follows, our concern is
not with the history, the sociology, or even the idea of the city, but with the city as a
way of diagramming human existence, human conduct, human subjectivity, human life
itself—diagramming it in the name of government.

Urban diagrammatics
Were the Greeks the first to diagram the city? An image of the Greek city and the Greek
citizen certainly acted as something of a retrospective justification for later—especially
Enlightenment and 19th-century—views of the city. In this Greek diagram, the city
becomes more than just a geographical space, it is a milieu for capturing and shaping
forces (human, spatial, and ideological) proper to a particular stylisation of managing
or governing conduct—the polls. The polis was a spatial milieu of immanence;
(1)
An earlier and longer version of this paper, with a critical commentary by Engin F Isin and a
response by the authors, appeared as part of a working paper in the Urban Studies Programme
at York University, Toronto, Canada. The closing section of the paper, on contemporary men-
talities of the metropolis, was also drawn upon for the argument presented in Rose (1999a).
738 T Osborne, N Rose

a self-sufficient spatialisation of authority, where authority was immanent, it grew out

of the pleasures and attractions of urban associations, interests, friendships, affects,
and passions (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, page 87; see also Finley, 1971). This idea of
the immanent political sociability of the polis has recurred in all city diagrams in 'the
West': the city as having the potential to generate that phenomenon which Immanuel
Kant called the 'unsocial sociability' of men, a space in which sociability is immanent
but antagonistic, and yet in which this antagonistic immanence gravitates towards a
kind of equilibrium, a stable mode of functioning. Such immanence embodies a
tendency to a 'natural government', a self-government not dependent upon calculated
intervention. The idea of urban space is to represent a form of antagonism that in the
long run shapes the tendencies of the political order (Kant, 1991, page 44).(2) And yet,
from the perspective of those who would govern the city, immanence can take a whole
series of less virtuous forms—the vice, the rebellion, the insubordination, the waves of
rumour and disorder, of depravity and idleness that are dysfunctional forms of the 'pure
sociability' immanent in the city. The vicious immanence of the city is a never-ending
incitement to projects of government. Such projects seek to capture the forces immanent
in the city, to identify them, order them, intensify some and weaken others, to retain the
viability of the socialising forces immanent to urban agglomeration whilst civilising
their antagonisms.
To think of these projects of government in terms of diagrams is to suggest an
activity of thought that is as much technical as cognitive, and is not merely ideological
or ideal but functional. Of course, one could be literal about the diagram: there are so
many plans, schemes, drawings, stories, myths, and programmes that simultaneously
problematise actual life in the city and idealise its potentials—if only this or that were
understood, recognised, done, designed, built, demolished, allowed, or forbidden. But
the urban diagrams that concern us are to be discerned within all these actual schema,
immanent in them, perhaps providing their historical a priori: the various abstract
cities which, at different moments, distribute various attempts to understand and inter-
vene into concrete urban space, time, and existence. These diagrams are neither models
nor Weberian ideal-types but operative rationales. Each diagram depicts and projects a
certain 'truth' of the city which underpins an array of attempts to make urban existence
both more like and less like a city—more in that the immanent virtues of the civic will
be intensified, less because the immanent dangers of the city will be pacified. If we are
warranted in suggesting that one can identify, at certain historical moments, a specif-
ically urban 'will to government', this is simply to the extent that government itself has
been animated by a spatial diagram of its objects, its problems, and its means of action
which has taken the city for its shape.
In part, of course, a diagram is a matter of discourse, of the immanent rules of
formation—the regularities and distributions—that allow things to be said and under-
stood about urban existence. This is what Gilles Deleuze terms "a system of light and a
system of language", a way of making things seeable, sayable, and doable (Deleuze,
1988, page 32). But it is more, for such regularities are associated with ways in which
form is given to nondiscursive matter—the subjects who can speak or be spoken about;
the spaces of workshops, factories, barracks, streets. They are lined up with a whole
range of technical devices that, once having been invented, make such associations
possible—sewers, electricity, telegraphs. A will to action is immanent to each diagram;
forces are diagrammed which seek to impose a certain regularity upon a human multi-
plicity "distributing in space, laying out and serialising in time, composing in space-
(2)
Max Weber was also moved by this aspect of city life, ascribing it to a domain of 'non-
legitimate domination', in contrast to the 'legitimate' domination established by determinant
political authorities; charismatics, the State, etc.
Governing cities: notes on the xpatiulisation of virtue 7M)

time and so on .... The diagram is no longer an auditory or visual archive but a map
.... It is an abstract machine. It is defined by its informal functions and matter and in
terms of form makes no distinction between content and expression, a discursive
formation and a non-discursive formation. It is a machine that is almost blind and
mute, even though it makes others see and speak" (1988, page 34). The diagrams of a
society, then, are its virtual maps, maps of the codes immanent in forces and their
relations, the abstract machines comprising hundreds of little points of emergence,
creativity, sodality, or stasis, within which forces are exercised on forces to deduct or
combine them, to compose and recompose them, to divide or to isolate, to churn up
matter and distribute it in new ways: maps of the intensities pulsing through every
relation. But the diagram should not be thought of as an external origin: it is the
formation that is immanent within each concrete assemblage, giving form to their
fluidity, integration to their local and micropolitical powers, a stability and longevity
to that which would otherwise be virtual, potential, fleeting, vanishing, molecular.
And, at the same time, the diagram is constantly decomposing and rccomposing,
fragmenting, splitting into different lines, some of which will fade away, others of which
will stabilise and coalesce into new diagrams. As a result, stasis is a pathological form,
one that requires an excess of force to bind and fix the mobility and creativity
immanent within the city.
We could try to diagnose the diagrams of Greek, Medieval, or Renaissance types
of government in urban terms. But we suggest that the basic components of our
contemporary diagram of the city as a space of government begin to be discernible in
the 19th Century. What is decisive is that from the 19th Century the government of the
city becomes inseparable from the continuous activity of generating truths about the city.
From that time onwards, we suggest, government gets tied to novel practices of truth
that have a spatial character. The Greeks did not tie urban existence to practices of
truth in this way. Or, at least, the immanence of the city took, then, primarily a
political or ethical form, one which was not attached to a specifically urban—spatialis-
ing—will to truth. From the 19th Century, however, the very existence of the city
becomes inseparable from a whole series of initiatives that sought to produce true
knowledges concerning the social fabric of the city. The city's immanence becomes
inseparable from an ongoing—if disparately conceived and realised—labour of seeking
to tell the truth about the city. Urban thought here is technical and practical, not
simply dreams of the city but mundane techniques of gathering, organisation, classifi-
cation, and publication of information. Think, for instance, of social statistics in the
early 19th Century; of the exploration of the 'dark continent' of poverty by all those
urban social explorers in the second half of the 19th century from Friedrich Engels to
Seebohm Rowntree; of the charting of 'community and kinship', from the Chicago
school to Michael Willmott and Peter Young; of the emergence in the 1970s of the
notion of subculture. Or, for example, think of the collection of statistics of crime and
their organisation in police districts that inscribe the city and its topographies and
variations into the administrative imagination fully as much as do the writings of the
more elevated literary figures—such as the Baudelaires or the Benjamins. All these are
aspects of the role of truth and thought specific to the constitution of the modern
urban diagram. Why are they specific? Not because for the first time political thought
is urban—the Greek diagram is evidence enough of this. Rather, because this thought
partakes of something new—a kind of expertise of the city that is not quite philosophi-
cal and not quite political; we might think of it as a savoir of city government.
From the classical era in the West, the city had been invoked as a metaphor for
good (or bad) government. In Late Antiquity, St Augustine's God governed a heavenly-
terrestrial City, the product as much of a political philosophy as it was of a theology
740 T Osborne, N Rose

(Brown, 1972). Closer to the modern era, the theorists of Polizei extended the metaphor
of the well-governed urban space to the whole national territory (Foucault, 1991,
page 93; Small, 1969). One must govern the territory as one would expect a well-
administered city to be governed. "There is an entire series of Utopias or projects for
governing territory that developed on the premise that a state is like a large city; the
capital is like its main square; the roads are like its streets. A state will be well
organised when a system of policing as tight and efficient as that of the cities extends
over the entire territory.... The model of the city became the matrix for the regulations
that apply to a whole state" (Foucault, 1984, page 242; see also Kendall and Wickham,
1992). But the present is approached on the basis of a double shift. On the one hand, in
the moment when the long-standing tactical problem of the government of cities,
concerned with the suppression of this or that danger, is succeeded by the strategic
dream of a generalised urban governmentality. And, on the other, and perhaps more
importantly, when the city moved from being a metaphor adopted as an illustration of
good government to become the site of a kind of systematic pragmatism, a concrete
milieu of government.

The life of the city: governing the urban milieu

Of course, as any historian knows, in the 19th Century cities are repetitively problematised
in terms of the threats posed by its inability—the inability of their inhabitants—to govern
themselves. In a thousand ways—in novels, paintings, cartoons, newspaper reports,
official enquiries, social statistics, philanthropic projects, and political pamphlets—
the dangerous immanence of the city was portrayed: slums, vice, prostitution, sweated
labour, crime, juvenile delinquency, diseases, decay, squalor, gambling, drunkenness,
want of employment, degeneration, begging, destitution, and homelessness. These
dangers immanent to city life, its immorality and amorality, its streets teeming with
all sectors of society promiscuously intermingled, its dark places and secret spaces out of
the gaze of civility and order—exercise a powerful attraction on the urban imagination.
Historians have spent their lives in these Victorian archives documenting the attempts to
suppress, control—and sometimes to enjoy—these evils; is there anything new to be said?
Perhaps one needs merely to contest the view, most clearly expressed by Michel de
Certeau, that there is an implacable opposition between an urbanising panoptic strat-
egy of power and the ubiquitous contradictory movements, ruses, and tactics that
"counter-balance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power ... with-
out points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are
impossible to administer" (de Certeau, 1984, page 95; see also Donald, 1992). For the
urban diagram that took shape in the 19th Century did not program a monotonous
and relentless attempt to impose discipline and subordination; it was, rather, composed
of a motley of inventive projects intended to make urban existence the site of a certain
regulated and civilised freedom. It is in this sense that we describe them as 'liberal'—
not because of the influence of the philosophers of classical liberalism, but because, at
this diagrammatic level, the city was to be the milieu for the regulation of a carefully
modulated freedom.
As a milieu of liberal government the city becomes a sort of laboratory of conduct.
Its government comes to be seen as essentially problematic, so the city becomes a plane
of indetermination—a dense, opaque, unknown, perhaps ultimately unknowable space;
a domain where the criteria and techniques of good government were no longer self-
evident. The work of Thackrah and Engels, the surveys of Arnott, Kay, and Southwood
Smith in London, and the later investigations of Mearns, Booth, and Rowntree: all the
great empirical excavations of the 19th-century city stem from this point. It seemed
that when the social investigators tramped across the city, they were discovering
Governing cittcn: notes on the Mpatiitli.sution of virtue 74!

.society itself, For society becomes an immanent space, separated from the old deter-
minations of status and territory: its clearest manifestations seem to be in the actual
geographical space of the city Specification of the social field ceases to be a matter of
gatherings of sociability in particular forums (coffee houses, the court* etc) and comes
to be a matter of the territory of lives, habits, and mores of a population. Society has
become gcnerically spatial (Rabinow, 1989, pages 128 129), and the city has become a
privileged milieu (or the empirical exploration of society from the perspective of
government.
The government of urban space now has to be concerned with the security of these
natural processes of society within the unnatural space of the city. In the laboratory of
the city, the immanent 'social' processes of population were intensified and confined:
they could be isolated, scrutinised, documented, and calculated. Hence the city became
the main field of operations for those concerns, which Ian Hacking has summed up
under the label of the 'erosion of determinism': statistical investigations of the imma-
nent regularities of crime, degeneracy, poverty, vice (Hacking, 1990). In the city, one
could observe a sort of vast natural experiment, disclosing that tendency of our social
nature to produce immanent regularities out of the clash of intentions and free wills.
"Thus marriages, births and death do not seem to be subject to any rule by which their
numbers could be calculated in advance, since the free human will has such a great
influence upon them; and yet the annual statistics for them in large countries prove
that they are just as subject to constant natural laws as arc the changes in the weather,
which in themselves arc so inconsistent that their individual occurrence cannot be
determined in advance, but which nevertheless do not fail as a whole to sustain the
growth of plants, the flow of rivers, and other natural functions in a uniform and
uninterrupted course" (Kant, 1991, page 41). This idea of immanence was not destruc-
tive of the will to govern. What was required was action upon those forces that were
immanent to the city; to govern through rather than in spite of individual liberty.
Writers on political history have pointed to the 'silent revolution' in government
during the period from about 1830 to the outbreak of the World War 2. Oliver
MacDonagh argued that in the process of the discovery of evils within the city, the
invention of practices for regulation of urban life, and the emergence of new bureauc-
racies, officials, and authorities a new sort of state was being born (MacDonagh, 1958;
see also Osborne, 1994). Now it is obviously true that there was a growth and pro-
liferation of expertise at this time. There were inspectors of prisons and schools, of
mines and rivers; there were medical officers and colonial administrators; there were
census-takers, statisticians, and engineers. But this complex and heterogeneous array of
experts was rather loosely assembled together and linked in diverse relations with the
formal political apparatus. These officials were joined by a wealth of other experts who
owed their status to their role as freelance philanthropist or journalist or popular
polemicist. Such activities were regarded as not merely compatible with liberal
principles of individual liberty but as key components in the realisation of such a
liberal dream. A new kind of state was born, it is true, but this was neither the sleek
rationalising implement of Jeremy Bentham's dreams nor a 'cold monster' seeking to
dominate and control all that it had power over, infiltrating itself directly into the
corpuscles of a population now increasingly concentrated in towns. On the contrary,
it was a political configuration that was committed, simultaneously, to the principle of
an autonomous public sphere, a set of market relations amongst enterprises, a legal
system based on the principle of the liberty of the individual and the rule of law, and to
the shaping of these public realms so that they embodied the responsibility that was the
sine qua non of liberty. And the privileged site for this complex of relations was the life
of the city.
742 T Osborne, N Rose

We can illustrate this rapidly in relation to three interlinked sets of problems:

morbid bodies, immoral subjects, and dangerous multiplicities.
Morbid bodies
There has long been a corporeal vocabulary of the city—cities as bodies, with their
birth, growth, youth, maturity, sickness and health, decline and death. But if the
medical point of view was important for this understanding of the city, this was not
initially because of an ideological equation of the city with the notion of a bounded,
well-functioning organism. What was at stake was less an understanding of the city as a
physiological organism than an understanding of the city as a singular bodily organ. In
other words, this organic urban metaphor was initially clinical and empirical rather
than biological and functional: the scrupulous collection of individual facts and sin-
gular items of data was to give a clinical 'picture' of a diseased state. Some of the
earliest 'sociological' accounts of the city themselves specifically related to concerns
that were medical in this clinical sense (Higgs, 1991; see also Davison, 1983; Pelling,
1978, page 12). Moreover, medical reason was itself a spatialising and urbanising
science; by the 1830s a discourse on the 'medical climatology' of towns had evolved
into an empirical medical topography concerned with the mapping of disease in
localised spaces (Gilbert, 1958). Paul Rabinow has shown how the cholera epidemic
of the early 1830s in France had prompted medical topographers to map the spaces of
Paris with a view to controlling possible sites of infection in various unhealthy locales of
the city. "A detailed map of each quarter was produced and set within a larger map of the
whole city. Mapping facilitated analysis; the whole city, down to the individual buildings
on a street, was covered by a standardized spatial grid" (Rabinow, 1989, page 36; see
also Delaporte, 1987). In 1839 Ange Guepin, a physician, wrote a comprehensive
Histoire de Nantes, a detailed empirical survey of each of the social classes in the city.
The coupling of city and sickness has, however, been more than a negative one—the 19th
Century sees not only the argument that sickness is a pathology of space that may be
governed away by such means as pure water, sewage, disposal of refuse, and the like, but
also that this is not a merely negative programme for the elimination of sickness by the
regulation of space—of which quarantine and the plague city might be the key images—
but that the task of good government of urban space is actually to promote health.
Edwin Chadwick's proposals for securing public health through supplies of clean
water and a comprehensive system of sewers partook of this aspiration (Osborne, 1996).
Here the town emerges as an ethicohygienic space, a particular way of understanding
problems of disease and ill health and their moral consequences, to be acted upon
spatially. Reciprocally, a particular way of understanding the virtues and vices of the
population in hygienic terms—'town swamps', 'moral miasma'—which themselves come
from a spatial vocabulary of disease—contagion, epidemic, miasma—were hence to be
related to the mapping of the town as a moral topography. The language of illness and
of medicine, and its spatial organisation, became, here, omni-purpose metaphors for
problematising the urban population from the perspective of the threats that it posed
and the ways in which they were to be acted upon. The spatial relation of citizen to
habitat was turned into one that can and should be governed.
The organic metaphor for the city was, in fact, peculiarly appropriate for a liberal
mentality of government, in that it stressed that the urban domain was essentially an
immanent naturalistic domain; one which, left to itself and with the right conditions,
could compose itself as a benign social order. Liberalism was an art of government
that posed itself in terms of maintaining and regulating the 'security' of natural
domains of population (Gordon, 1991). Victorian urban public health and sanitary
Governing cities: notes on the Hputmltsution of virtue 743

science represented not at all a realisation of liberal philosophy so much as a strategy of

security appropriate to a broadly liberal mentality of government.
Immoral .subjects
In conceptions of the city in the I9th Century there was a clear relationship between,
on the one hand, a 'milieu* of the city, and, on the other, the 'character' of the human
beings that inhabited it. For the well-to-do, there was a constant concern with the ways
in which the effete and artificial life of the city might encourage immoral or loose
habits, vice, inebriety, and a general loosening of the controls exercised by the will
(Donzelot, 1979). But it was the habits and conduct of the less wealthy and the threat
that they posed not to the continuation of a lineage but to the moral order of urban
existence that inspired the intensification of a governmental gam This gaze came to be
directed at the habits of the people—both en masse and differentiated: into men and
women, adults and children; amongst the different trades; in relation to the dangerous
classes; in the documentation of the lives of thieves, street Arabs, prostitutes, and other
infamous types. Observations of these immoral subjects inscribed in a plethora of
pamphlets, programmes, demands, solutions, tracts, scientific investigations, bureau-
cratic documentation, commissions of enquiry, medical reports, and the like focused
upon the dangers that life in towns posed to the moral and physical constitution of
subjects. There seems to be a negative spiral of interaction between milieu and char-
acter. Poor character, which may be inherited from one's forbears, led not only to
conduct and ways of living that degraded ones' surrounding milieu; it also led one to
gravitate towards a certain kind of milieu, which itself has an effect upon character—
an effect which, in turn, might be passed down to future generations through a
weakened constitution, and through the ways in which one rears one's children and
the habits one inculcates into them.
Time exacerbated the evil, for bad habits engendered further bad habits. And the
urban environment might often be seen as a kind of engine of such bad habits, giving
them impetus, exacerbating them, prolonging them, spreading them, "Go to their
dwellings ... in the great majority of cases, the scenes of wretchedness which occur in
the families of the lower classes are the result of intemperate and improvident habits"
(Grant, quoted in Wohl, 1977, page 9). One could put the emphasis upon the reckless
dispositions of the poor, or one could place it at the door of the urban environment.
For George Godwin, the city became, above all, a domain of mostly unsavoury
sensations provoked by an insalubrious environment. The city was a machine for the
production of vile sensations, and as sensations were the means of moral education of
the human being, exposure to vile sensations turned one's morality in a vile direction.
So, in exploring the city, one had to trace the effects of sensations on the cultivation of
moral habits. If the habits of those who live in the city are in large part bad habits, then
it is necessary not so much to act directly upon those habits themselves but to modify
the city so as to induce the right kind of habits. Hence, the need to build what Godwin
termed "social bridges"—dwellings, nurseries, infant reformatories, ragged schools—
that will traverse the "town swamps" that give off such a mire of malevolent sensations
(Godwin, 1972, pages 3, 16). Moral corruption should not take causal priority over the
deficits of socialisation. "The owners of such places say—'People of this sort are
naturally dirty, and it is useless to do anything with them'. We would ask in reply,—
'How is it possible that good habits are to be acquired under such circumstances?'"
(1972, page 7).
Dangerous multiplicities
Some regard the proliferation of expertise and knowledge across the space of the city in
terms of the invention, intensification, and dispersion of novel forms of 'social control':
744 T Osborne, N Rose

registration, classification, enumeration, surveillance, cleansing, directing, nurturing,

administering, arresting, judging, imprisoning (see du Camp, quoted in Donald, 1995,
page 78). The mentalities of urban government in the 19th Century would then be seen
as having ambitions that were almost entirely negative, constraining, and designed to
eliminate moral danger by the marking out of a series of grids of domination. But this
would be to identify only one dimension of these new techniques and the aims that
inspired them. For the ambitions of these strategies were not only to constrain,
discipline, and pacify, but also to create a certain kind of regulated, civilised subjectivity
in the urban population. We see, that is to say, not solely a negative or repressive kind of
activity, the focus upon the identification and elimination of sources of conflict within
the fabric of urban life, but rather the active attempt to fabricate liberty as a matter of
free bodies in the regulated space of the city.
The regularisation of liberty was certainly linked to fears of the mob, the mass, and
riot. This took different forms: London, despite its urban unrest, was not like Paris in
this respect, nor did it call for such a comprehensive replanning in the name of
pacification. If plans for urban reconstruction took a governmental form, this was
more in relation to anxieties about the demoralising effects of urban immigration
especially to the extent that the new town-dwellers congregated in the darkest, densest
regions of the town, hidden from the good influences of urban order, steeped in the
foul moral miasma of the rookeries. The rerouting of major thoroughfares in London
in particular sought to open the most notorious of these dark spaces—"cul-de-sacs
without any outlet other than the entrance" according to one observer (quoted in
Porter, 1994, page 267)—to visibility, to light, and to passage.
Architecture, too, had its governmental aspect, although it would be absurd to reduce
the question of building types to a project of pacification and civilisation, however
significant this may be in the disciplinary architecture of prisons, asylums, reformatories,
and schools. Nonetheless, new rationales for urban existence do merge with the fabric of
public buildings, whether these be hospitals, libraries, or seats of local government. No
longer was the effect of such buildings considered to lie solely, or even mainly, in the
meanings embodied and radiated by their monumental external design. It was the
internal design of the building that was important; they were required not merely to
facilitate the flow of large numbers of persons, but to regulate that flow, to civilise it, to
shape the relations of perception and vision, of contact and distance, amongst those that
are gathered within. In all those large public buildings where persons were brought
together in enclosed spaces—museums, exhibitions, department stores—one sees the
emergence of new programmes for producing modes of public deportment which throw
a web of visibilities and norms over public conduct: something like a calculated
administration of shame, designed to link the ethical capacities of citizens to the ends
of government (Bennett, 1995; Markus, 1993; Rose, 1992).

The body of the urban citizen: governing life itself

In the closing decades of the 19th Century, the living body of the citizen became an
immediate problem for government. The city became problematised in terms of its
own immanent tendencies to engender the degeneration of life within it; immigration
into the towns from the country took those of the most robust, sturdy, and adventurous
disposition, but the consequences of town life—squalor, overcrowding, foul miasma,
vicious moral climate—produced, within only a couple of generations, a population of
weak, tubercular, wanton, inebriate, feckless, and sickly characters. Initially, it appeared
that social and moral factors interacted to produce a kind of downward spiral of corrup-
tion which, in turn, impacted upon the biological attributes of the urban poor—their
constitution—which in turn shaped their morality and character (see Lees, 1987,
Governing cities: notes on the spulisilisutton of virtue 745

pages 137- 141; Pick, 1989; Stcdivmn Jones, 1973). The physical capacities of the urban
poor, trapped in overcrowded conditions in the shims, were sinking into a mire of
degeneracy. The minutiae of urban existence came to he charted in these terms. The
dwelling was a prime site of investigation and of government, not merely the domestica-
tion of the emotional and sexual economy of procreation and child-rearing, but the home
as a site for an individualised btopolitics of the urban citizen as a living creature.
This problcmatisation of the vital order of the town could be taken in two inter-
related and overlapping but analytically distinct directions. On the one hand, there was
something like a eugenic diagram: what one saw was not merely deterioration but
degeneration, a progressive weakening of the stock caused not only by the hereditary
transmission of constitutions weakened physically and morally by urban existence, but
also by differential rates of breeding, such that those from the weakest stock bred the
fastest—with their puny offspring protected from the struggle for existence by well-
meaning but misguided philanthropy—just as the more civilised engaged in selfish
practices to limit their procreation. On the other hand, there was the social diagram:
what one saw was a consequence of the conditions of social life, which had their own
laws and regularities of effect upon human beings—and hence could be ameliorated by
acting upon the city to amplify its virtuous social forces and to reduce those which
were damaging or destructive to human health and morality.
It was something like a social diagram that animated the forces that came to focus
upon the issue of urban housing. Engcls, Mayhcw, and other investigators of the
middle decades of the 19th Century had viewed the dwelling as a machinery of human
morality. The dwellings of the poor were condemned not merely because of their
squalor but because of the forms of unconscionable sexual liaison which they fostered
by the promiscuous comingling of husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, cousins, lodgers,
and so forth in the hovels and slums of London and Manchester. By the 1880s, this had
stabilised into a novel question: overcrowding. And urban policy was to become
directed towards a new emphasis on governing through housing. Whereas previous
architectural policy on the poor had related to that apparatus of reformation, the
workhouse (Markus, 1993, pages 141 -145), now the aim came to be that of a civilised
housing for the poor. Mearns, in 1883, had catalogued the sensational aspects of slum-
dwelling in London. Whereas for Godwin the problem had been sanitation rather than
habitation, for Mearns, and the plethora of urban writings that followed from him, the
focus was upon living conditions inside dwellings. Here, the problem is not the open
streets but the interior of dwellings: "In one cellar a sanitary inspector reports finding
a father, mother, three children and four pigs! In another a missionary found a man
with smallpox, his wife just recovering from her eighth confinement, and the children
running about half naked and covered with filth. Here are seven people living in one
underground kitchen, and a little child lying dead in the same room" (Mearns, 1970,
page 5). Instead of the city being understood itself on the model of a kind of organ, or
even organism, the city, as it organised the bare life of human beings and their
proximities and interminglings, now becomes a malign environment for the organism
that is man.
Of course, the fate of the urban poor also provided a plane of reference for the
discourse of degeneration that would be regularised in the form of eugenics. Clearly,
for some proponents of the degeneration thesis, such as Charles Kingsley, what was at
stake was a translation of the external racisms associated with Empire into an internal
racism directed at those within the national population who formed a distinct and lower
race, or who had returned through a combination of inherited stock and immoral
habits to an earlier stage in racial development. But it would be a mistake simply to
associate a political rationality that centred upon the ethical qualities of human beings
746 T Osborne, N Rose

and their amelioration as being somehow the exclusive property of 'reactionary' forces.
In Britain, for example, a quasi-eugenic component was also implicated in the thinking
of New Liberals such as Hobhouse, Robertson, Hobson, and Ritchie (Freeden, 1978,
page 193; see also Jones, 1983). The New Liberals abandoning the ideology of laissez-
faire, recognised, as Hobson put in 1911, "a social property in capital which is held
politic to secure for the public use" (quoted in Freeden, 1978, page 42). It would be the
role of the state to intervene within the processes of capital in order to secure this social
component for the people as a whole. Hence the task of the state becomes "to promote
the mental and moral elevation of the people; the chief end of Government being to
establish not liberty alone, but every other necessary security or rational progress' (Rae
quoted in Freeden, 1978, page 55). One aspect of this—at least as found in some of the
earlier writings in the New Liberalism—was the advocacy of parental prudence as a
corollary of social reform. As Freeden comments, "Robertson repeatedly recommended
the limiting of the birth-rate, which he thought could be attained by state propaganda.
Parental prudence sometimes seemed the only way to ensure a permanent amelioration
of the condition of the working classes .... Eugenics, as Hobson pointed out, merely
extended the question of population to include qualitative and not just quantitative
considerations" (1978, pages 186-187).
What is significant for our current argument, however, is the way in which these
different diagrams—the eugenic and the social—spatialised themselves. For the social
diagram, the city is central. Its forces, its attractions and pulls, its consequences and the
impulses it produces are the site and mode of action of social laws on the human
organism. And the very concentrations of the lives of the urban dwellers in a governable
space of the city offers the chance of remedy. Thus, for example, the Inter-Departmental
Committee on Physical Deterioration, which reported in 1904, rejected the notion that
the race as a whole was unfit or degenerating, and situated the problem firmly in the
specific context of the poor in the slums and the question of overcrowding. Hence, by
virtue of the possibilities opened by this very concentration, the city could still be the
site of a remedy. An apparatus of continuous surveillance could be established in the
city slums; a permanent anthropometric survey, a continuous register of sickness,
medical officers of health in each district, improved food and milk supply, special
schools for retarded children, and so forth. The urban became a valuable field for the
deployment of instruments of government that required direct contacts with the lives of
urban dwellers themselves. Hence the city was no longer an immanent domain to be
regulated through apparatuses of security but the matrix of a permanent and strategic-
ally targeted surveillance of individual bodies and their modes of life.
For the eugenic diagram, on the other hand, the role of the city was almost
accidental—it was merely a space within which natural processes were visible. It is
true that the city imposed features of its own as a particular kind of condensed populous
space. However, in eugenic discourse, these merely facilitate processes that have nothing
intrinsically to do with urban life: the inheritance of particular characteristics. The
forces that characterise degeneration are not intrinsic to city life itself, and the city
simply exacerbates tendencies that are immanent to particular classes such as criminals
or the feeble-minded, rather than immanent to urban life itself. In fact, by the start of
the 20th Century, the eugenic discourse is not specifically urban at all: it alights upon
the urban only contingently. In Britain, the urban is important for 20th-century
eugenics only in so far as it acts as an amplifier of wider tendencies of degradation
by virtue of specific process and tendencies which it concentrates. And in the United
States, the question is less one of the cities themselves, but of their role as magnets
attracting immigration from the southern countries of Europe—a relation between race
and population quality which was never constitutively 'urban' in its texture.
Governing cities: notes on the spntialisntion of virtue 747

The cudncmonic diagram

By the end of the 19th Century a rather different diagram of the city was also
beginning to take shape, which was characterised by planar geometric images of urban
life at some remove from the diagrams of degeneration. This novel diagram invoked the
idea of the city as a space of transparency and perfect administration. The city was to
be reshaped by an enlightened urban administrative imagination, it was to be a space
of happiness and lucidity, it was to become Hooded with a kind of perfect benign light,
Many of these concerns seem Utopian. But this urban diagram was less Utopian than
cudaemonic—w. spatial projection of social happiness. The diagram of the city had
begun to emphasise what urban existence might become.
The eudaemonic city-image is relational, social, and spatial The city becomes a
socio-administrativc domain, with its own proper laws, characteristics, and forms of
life, these being understood as being amenable to a 'social' administration. That is to
say, the city is to be 'planned* in the light of its specifically social character. This is not
merely a governed sociality but an administered one; the city is no longer held to pre-
exist the forms of social administration that give it shape. In this sense, the city has a
kind of 'machinic* function in relation to happiness. The image of the city as a space of
dangerous delights and unbridled passions no doubt still exists at this time, but it is
opposed to another image of the city. This is not as a straight-laced and puritan space,
but as a contented space of immanent organic natural sociability. Yet it is also a
governmental space, in the sense that the construction of this organic social city and
the normal citizen who will inhabit it functions as the regulative ideal of a range of
programmes and initiatives within which the normal citizen is the social citizen of what
the Tudor Walters Report (1918) on public housing called 'healthy social communities'.
A web of socialising technologies begins to be cast across this social space. A network
of expertise seeks to educate and nurture the urban dweller as a citizen of a democracy
in an intrinsically spatial field. Zoning seeks the separation of quarters, functions, and
activities in the name of health and welfare of urban dwellers. Further, this way of
thinking entails attempts to invent spatial technologies of the city as a living organism,
technologies of its social and mental hygiene. We are now potentially in Hygeia itself.
Hence the extraordinary attraction of biological metaphors to describe this kind of
urban function in vitalist terms.
The spatialisation of the eudaemonic city diagram is structured on the basis of a
kind of benign panopticism. Panoptic because the ideal is one of complete transparency
and visibility; but benign because what is at stake here is not so much the paranoiac
structure of the 19th Century reformatory, with its opaque central control tower, but
rather a kind of immanent panopticism, one in which gazes and visibilities are diffused,
local, reciprocal, and towards which the end is not contrition and reform but happiness,
mutuality, solidarity. The city can be an apparatus for constructing social tranquillity
and human happiness out of space itself. Three versions of the eudaemonic city, in spite
of their profound and obvious differences, were paradigmatic by the early part of the
20th Century: the colonial city, the garden city, and the zoned city.
The colonial city
For the colonial city, take the paradigmatic case of Edwin Lutyens's "Anglo-Indian
Rome' at New Delhi from 1913. This was to be a city of great radiating routes, laid
down on the model of a formal geometry, with housing allocated according to hex-
agonal grids divided up by race, rank, and socioeconomic status. "From the Viceroy,
via the Commander-in-Chief, Members of the Executive Council, senior gazetted
officers, gazetted officers, down to superintendents, peons, sweepers and dhobis, a
carefully stratified spatial order was integrated both in terms of physical distance and
748 T Osborne, N Rose

spatial division, to the social structure of the city" (King quoted in Hall, 1988,
page 188). In short, a city which rendered a social structure on the ground according
to entirely abstract principles; a city which is a machine for producing the social field
rather than just a spatial milieu for already immanent social processes (Bose, 1974).
The garden city
The garden city, too, was designed to be a kind of social machine rendered into spatial
principles. Although Ebenezer Howard's garden-city vision (in Garden Cities of Tomor-
row, 1902) was only realised in a tiny number of instances (classically Letchworth in
1903 and Welwyn Garden City in 1920), as a diagram of urban governmentality it had
a lasting effect—not least on the suburbanisation of interwar planning. Howard was a
social (and economic) visionary rather than an urban planner; his idea was for a form
of urban existence that was to be effectively a third way between capitalism and
socialism. His polycentric vision of what he called the 'social city' entailed the estab-
lishment of a central city of around 30 000 people (connected up to other satellite social
cities by various radial connections), surrounded by a green belt of farms, reforma-
tories, mental hospitals, homes for epileptics and inebriates, and so forth. This city was
to be run on associationalist lines, with citizens responsible for establishing their own
services, pension funds, etc, without large-scale state intervention. Howard's vision, if
outlandish, was not merely a Utopian one in the sense of those entirely imaginary cities
that inhabit the pages of science fiction and the brain of Richard Rogers; rather, his
work was directed towards producing a kind of blueprint for a spatial machine that
would render and regulate human sociality towards particular—governmental—ends.
The garden city is itself—through its spatial organisation—intended to ameliorate
social relations; Howard's 'peaceful path to social revolution' entailed the contention
that an appropriate style of urban environment could in itself achieve what others
hoped from political and economic revolution (see Fishman, 1973).
The zoned city
Last, consider the zoned city, as illustrated by Daniel Burnham's Chicago Plan of 1909;
much of it actually built by 1925. Burnham's aim, after an earthquake and a fire had
razed much of the city, was, as he put it, "to restore to the city a lost visual and
aesthetic harmony, thereby creating the physical prerequisite for the emergence of a
harmonious social order". Burnham's topographic model was Haussman's Paris, but
his objective was the spatial invention of happiness; "We float by lawns, where villas,
swan-like, rest upon their terraces, and where white balustrades and wood-nymphs are
just visible in the gloaming. The evening comes, with myriad coloured lights twinkling
through air perfumed with water-lilies, and Nature enfolds us, like happy children" (see
Moore, 1921, page 111). And as the Chicago Plan Commission summarised the inten-
tions behind the plan, "Orderliness is one of the best investments a city can make, but
the appeal of the Chicago Plan is by no means entirely a commercial appeal. It is a
human appeal, a moral appeal, an appeal to make Chicago better, not for the money
that is in it, but for the sake of the higher mental, moral and physical people that a
perfectly arranged city will produce" (Moore, 1921, page 115).
Although Burnham's original plans for Chicago had made little reference to zoning,
his radiating grid system enabled a zoning policy to be adopted almost as a natural
consequence of the spatial design of the city. In this context, the sociologists of the
Chicago School were able to use the spatial infrastructure of the city as a kind of
backdrop or precondition for an understanding of the moral morphology of the city as
a whole; positing that the spatial zoning of the city had a corollary in a kind of moral
zoning of neighbourhoods. "The city plan, for example ... fixes in a general way the
location and character of the city's constructions and imposes an orderly arrangement,
Governing cities: notes on the nputitilisation of virtue 749

within the city area, upon the buildings which are erected by private initiative as well
as by public authority. Within the limitations prescribed, however, the inevitable pro-
cesses of human nature proceed to give these regions and these buildings a character
which it is less easy to control" (Park, 1967, page 5). The unit of this spontaneity was
the neighbourhood and the task of the sociologist was to monitor the threats to an
integrated neighbourhood sentiment: "it is important to know what arc the forces
which tend to break up the tensions, interests and sentiments which give neighbour-
hoods their individual character. In general these may be said to be anything that tends
to render the population unstable, to divide and concentrate attentions upon widely
separated objects of interest" (1967, page 8; see also Burgess, 1967). Unlike the zoned
infrastructure, these moral neighbourhoods are in an unstable equilibrium—the task of
the sociologist comes to be to restore their homogeneity, to allow the realignment of
spatial and moral zones, to return the city to its promise of happiness.

Diagramming the contemporary city

No doubt the work of the Chicago School will scarcely prove to have been the last
model of urban reasoning to have problematised the city in a sociological kind of a
way. Nevertheless, contemporary ways of imagining urban spatialisation, though cer-
tainly concerned with issues of sociality and community, hardly seem typically to take
such a sociological form; and today, in any case, it is not really the sociologists—or
even their relatives, the geographers and town planners—who can lay any exclusive
claim to be our contemporary diagrammcrs of urban virtue. What, then, are the more
current models of diagramming the city?
The prevalancc of cybernetic metaphors in contemporary thought may provide a
clue to contemporary diagrams of government/ 3 ) Information, communication, net-
works, linkages, nodes, relays, the risks to particular dynamics of turbulence from
without, and flaws and glitches from within, which require a perpetual vigilance to
error, a strategy of 'work around* and 'botches', of configuring and reconfiguring,
flexibility, multiplicity, speed, virtuality, simulation. Whereas social-control theory
views control as being the result of an exterior determination over a given domain
where specific unwanted phenomena are to be prevented, mastered, or dominated, in
the cybernetic sense in which Gilles Deleuze uses the notion, control is a kind of
immanent problematic of metastability. Control is the never-finished work of regula-
tion which operates to bring deviations from system requirements back into line. In
place of discontinuous 'enclosed' institutions such as the school, the factory, or the
prison, in societies of control each plane or apparatus of life itself imposes a continu-
ous modulation of risk, feedback, and equilibrium; any enclosed zone of Anteriority'
seems to exist only as a moment constantly affected by a permanent and infinite yet
ceaselessly mutating and recombining exterior. In one sense, the city itself is a casualty
of this discourse of control in that control operates in relation to a plane of immanence
that is coterminous with the connections amongst all information systems and ele-
ments connected into networks regardless of their spatial specificity. Yet, again, and
precisely for this reason, the city has been a privileged site for the problematisation of
control in that, within these broiling, rolling, mutating, branching, and reconnecting
flows of speed and information, it marks out a concrete field of localisation and
concentration where the exercise of government appears potentially possible.

(3) Norbert Weiner observes of the term cybernetics the following, "Until recently, there was no
existing word for this complex of ideas, and in order to embrace the whole field by a single term,
I felt constrained to invent one. Hence 'Cybernetics', which I derived from the Greek word
Kubernetes or 'steersman', the same Greek word from which we eventually derive our word
'governor'" (Weiner, 1989, page 15).
750 T Osborne, N Rose

For our own purposes, the cybernetic metaphor is symptomatic of a certain way of
imagining cities, government, and spaces in the present. We do not live in cybernetic
societies, but in societies that are increasingly understood and governed by means of a
kind of cybernetic style of thought. In such a cybernetics of the city, intellectual
technologies and forms of expertise are not added into the urban 'after the fact', a
city as it were existing and then requiring modulation, amelioration, and optimisation.
Rather they are designed into the space, time, and serialisation of existence itself, into
the very fabric of life in the city—the flows are inescapably lines composed in part of
elements of knowledge and competence. During the 19th Century urban authorities—
statistical societies, doctors, public health officials, architects, engineers, and the like—
shaped a certain way of problematising the city and invented diverse technical forms
that were to intervene into the life of the city. But now new techniques are to allow life
in the city to be governed in a new way: telematics and informatics; computerised
models of flows of power, water, traffic; new designs of buildings and streets that
embody securitisation within them; networks of financial obligation which are essen-
tially flows of information through the setting of budgets and the monitoring of
accounts; the proliferation of audit as a link between activity and standards via a set
of mobile norms operating in the medium of information flows; the multiple linkages
both vertical and horizontal brought into being by the contractualisation of every
relation between humans, whether one of authority (doctors and patients) or of affec-
tions (domestic partners, parents and children), or the multiplication of sites of dispute
resolution via legal and paralegal mechanisms.
This is a matter of subjectivity as well as of authority. Cybernetics itself presupposes
a particular kind of culture of the self. Weiner states that: "To live effectively is to live
with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of
man's inner life, even as they belong to his life in society" (1950, page 18). The individual
becomes a kind of field of control. But in a sense this is an open field without specific
contents. In these new modes of control, it is desirable to refrain as far as possible from
imposing moral codes upon individuals 'from above'. One should, instead, establish the
general imperative of an ethical relation to self which must be activated and enacted at
every moment when a subject is to exert his or her capacities as such—to shop, to travel,
to enter or leave a building, etc. In other words, the fabrication of the self is not a once-
and-for-all matter, accomplished in family or school, nor does it rely on exterior
transcendental sources: it is continuously maintained in the very act of participation
in the networks of existence. If the city is a useful milieu for these processes of self-
fabrication, this is insofar as it is within the city that the networks of association form
that will shape and stabilise this relation of the self to itself and to others.
'Advanced' liberal cities
In Britain and the United States in the 1980s it became fashionable to interpret the
new strategies that were emerging for governing cities in terms of 'neoliberalism'. But
subsequent events have shown that these shifts in the rationalities and technologies of
government cannot be understood in terms of the temporary dominance of a particular
political ideology. What we are seeing here is a much more general transformation
in ways of thinking about government and seeking to enact an 'advanced' form of
liberalism. These new urban governmentalities are liberal not simply in that they stress
the importance of political rule respecting the boundaries of certain zones that are
outwith its reach: markets, communities, private life. Rather, they are liberal in that they
reawaken and revitalise the scepticism of classical liberalism of the 19th Century over
the capacity of political action, informed by political reason and political calculation, to
act so as to bring about the good of individuals, populations, and the nation at large.
Governing citicn; notes on the spatialisation of virtue 751

This is not a recipe for political inaction. Like their classical and social liberal
predecessors, the advanced forms of liberalism that took shape in the last decades
of the 20th Century, in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States,
and the United Kingdom—and which were exported elsewhere by such organisations
as the World Bank and the IMF—did not preach policies of political withdrawal
and abstentionism. It is true that they attacked *big government': bloated bureaucra-
cies and civil services; complacent and patronising professionals; the fostering of
tutelage and dependency; the belief that the state could maximise economic, social,
and individual well-being through policies of *tax and spend'. But they did not demand
a return to the minimalist 'night-watchman' state imagined by the neolibcral gurus of
the 1970s and 1980s. Rather, they sought a new role for the political apparatus as
merely one partner in government, facilitating, enabling, stimulating, shaping, and
inciting the self-governing activities of a multitude of dispersed entities—associations,
firms, communities, individuals—who would take onto themselves many of the powers
and responsibilities previously annexed by *the state'.
The characteristics of contemporary strategics for 'reinventing government' are
familiar: downsizing the state, decentralising decisionmaking, devolving power to inter-
mediate bodies such as trusts or associations, privatising many functions previously
part of the state machinery and opening them up to commercial pressures and business
styles of management, introducing managerialism and competitive pressures into the
residual state apparatus, displacing the substantive knowledge of the welfare profes-
sionals by knowledges of examination, scrutiny, and review undertaken by accountants
and consultants. In relation to urban politics, these have entailed something of an
assault on the old democratic enclaves of local government, now represented as hide-
bound by bureaucracy and riddled with nepotism. The tendency is to bypass the
traditional democratic mechanisms of the periodic vote for an elected representative
with all manner of newer democratic techniques—consultations, surveys, opinion polls,
citizen juries, focus groups, teledemocracy, and the like. Functions of 'democratic' local
government—from street cleaning to urban regeneration—have been devolved to a
multiplicity of private firms or public - private partnerships. This simultaneously plura-
lises the agencies and entities involved in governing, involves regulation through the
techniques of the 'new public management', and transforms political control, which now
operates 'at a distance' through setting budgets, targets, standards, and objectives, all
overseen by the ubiquitous techniques of monitoring and audit. These strategies thus
involve 'autonomisation' plus 'responsibilisation'. They multiply the agencies of govern-
ment whilst enwrapping them within new forms of control. The autonomy of political
actors is to be shaped and used to govern more economically and more effectively. This
is thought to require a reduction in the scope of direct management of human affairs by
state-organised programmes and technologies of relation, and an increase in the extent
to which the government of diverse domains is enacted by the decisions and choices of
relatively autonomous entities—whether these are firms, organisations such as hospi-
tals, professionals such as doctors, community bodies and associations, or individuals
themselves—in the light of their own assessment of their interests, needs, and desires,
and the ways in which they may be advanced in a particular environment of rewards and
sanctions.
Contemporary games of urban citizenship
These 'advanced' liberal strategies conceive of citizens, individually and collectively, as
ideally and potentially 'active' in their own government. The logics of the market, in
which economic agents are viewed as calculating actors striving to realise and actualise
themselves through their choices in a lifeworld, according to the information that they
752 T Osborne, N Rose

have at their disposal, are generalised to areas previously thought immune—to all the
decisions individuals and groups take about their lives, in relation to the education of
their children, the disposal of their income for housing or for pleasure, the investment
of their energies in law-abiding enterprise or in crime, and indeed their choices about
who should govern them and how. These new forms of government through freedom
multiply the points at which the citizen has to play his or her part in the games that
govern them. But, inescapably, they also multiply the junctures where these games are
opened up to uncertainty and risk, and to contestation and redirection.
The multiple projects of contemporary urban government work with presupposi-
tions about urban citizenship in terms of activity and obligation, entrepreneurship and
allegiance, in which rights in the city are as much about duties as they are about
entitlements. Each tries to govern through a certain kind of citizenship game. Each,
by virtue of its dependence on an active practice of citizenship, opens the possibilities
for a certain agonism. This political agonism is not a traditional politics of the party,
the programme, the strategy for the organised transformation of society, or the claim
to be able to implement a programme of better government. Rather, these minor
practices of citizen formation are linked to a politics of the minor, of cramped spaces,
of action on the here and now, of attempts to reshape what is possible in specific
spaces of immediate action, which may connect up and destabilise larger circuits of
power. Strategies of governing through citizenship are inescapably open and modifiable
because what they demand of citizens may be refused, or reversed and redirected as a
demand from citizens for a modification of the games that govern them, and through
which they are supposed to govern themselves. Four brief examples—of health, of risk,
of enterprise, of pleasure—may clarify this argument.
Healthy cities
The city has long been imagined in terms of sickness and health. But in recent decades,
a new image of the healthy city has emerged: the city as a network of living practices of
well-being. This is not a matter of imposing some rational, sterile, planned diagram of
sanitary existence. Rather, the aim is to configure the forces immanent to urban life, to
shape the ecology of the city in order to maximise the processes that would enhance
the well-being of its inhabitants individually and in their 'communities', and to mini-
mise those that would threaten them. All aspects of urban life are now understood as
factors that can be mobilised in the name of a norm of well-being: health now appears,
simultaneously, as a maximisation of the values of community, public safety, economic
development, and family life. Roads, traffic and pollution, zoning, the design of
buildings and open spaces, the organisation of shopping locales, and other elements
of 'urban design' are to be suffused with this 'ecological' concern for health. Further,
the activities of health professionals, in addition to media, local politicians, trades
unions, educationalists, representatives of nongovernmental organisations, local com-
munity 'grassroots' organisations, and others are brought into an alliance that would
perceive and act upon all aspects of urban existence—jobs, housing, environment,
public safety, diet, transport—not just to ward off sickness but to promote well-being.
In the name of well-being, urban communities are to be empowered such that they
collectively and individually are made responsible for their own healthiness. In other
words, health is not simply a value in its own right, but rather a resource within a
whole spiral of positive values that can be made to breed and spread in the urban
ecology. In this vision of urban health, the very idea of disease in the city has been
transformed. It is no longer imagined in epidemic form—the invasion of the urban
milieu by cholera or typhus putting its inhabitants at risk of infection. Rather, disease,
and ill health more generally, is imagined in terms of activities (diet and coronary heart
Governing cities: notes on the spatialisalion of virtue 753

disease, smoking and lung cancer, obesity and all manner of threats to health) and
relationships (unsafe sex and HIV, rave parties and drugs). We no longer have the sick
on the one side of a division, the healthy on the other we are all, actually or
potentially, sick, and health is not a state to be striven for only when one falls ill, it
is something to be maintained by what we do at every moment of our everyday lives.
Threats to well-being are immanent to the life of the active individual: they result from
a breakdown of controls on conduct, from the failure to develop a healthy lifestyle, to
eat properly, to manage stress. But threats to well-being also inhere in the relations of
individuals to their environment, which can exacerbate or minimise the risks, not
merely because of the levels of pathogens—physical and psychological- circulating
within it, but also because of the styles of living which arc promoted within particular
communities.
The healthy citizen exercises active self-responsibility in a health-conscious com-
munity. This is not only because one can only be responsible on the condition that one
possesses the good health to exercise one's responsibility, but also because the health
field has itself become an arena of responsibiiisation.Thc domain of health has become
a novel and paradigmatic kind of civic space, where the exercise of a popular ascetics of
self-control will be implanted and augmented through a community politics of healthy
living, by stress clinics and exercise centres, by healthy diets in factory canteens, and
local health-promotion campaigns. The imperative of health thus becomes a significr of
a wider—civic, governmental—obligation of citizenship in a responsible community.
The healthy city is not a city of minimal disease and social contentment, it is an active
organic striving for its own maximisation against all that which would threaten it
including the threats that it secretes as part of its very existence. But as the individual
aspirations of citizens to their own health arc enhanced, their complaints, disaffections,
and demands achieve a new significance and new points of application and leverage
within the practices that seek to govern their conduct in the name of health.
Risky cities
Since the 19th Century, the criminal diameter of urban space has been charted by the
police forces of each nation through the collection, classification, and presentation of
the statistics of crime. Perhaps this always gave rise to an image of the city in terms of
zones of danger and safety, and a way of living in the city informed by a perception
of the relative riskiness of particular zones. Riskiness, of course, was not merely a
negative value: risk-taking in the city is a matter not only of an awareness of hazards of
assault and robbery, but also of an active pursuit of the prospects of excitement, sexual
gratification, debauchery, license, gambling, and the like. But our current image of the
criminogenic city governmentalises risk as a spatialisation of thought and intervention.
Using techniques pioneered by the commercial demands of insurance and based on
informatics and postcode mapping, this spatialisation is now at the molecular level of
urban existence. The contemporary city is thus visualised as a distribution of risks: one
of those maps with coloured overlays where each layer marks out a particular breed of
riskiness—of street crime, of sexual assault, of burglary, of car theft, of beggars and
marginal persons, of single-parent families and ethnic minorities. Unlike the moral
topographies of urban space developed in the mid-19th-Century, the contemporary
urban topography of risk indicates less a concrete statistic attached to a locale, more
a factor calculated through the amalgamation of a concatenation of 'indicators' to
each of which may be attached a certain probability of a less than optimal outcome
of an activity—shopping, parking a car, buying a house, walking to the shops. Risk
is thus as much a feature of spatialisation itself as it is of the particular 'characteristics'
of people that inhabit certain zones. It is to be governed through the continual
754 T Osborne, N Rose

monitoring and assessment of risk in relation to urban space and place, and the active
adoption of strategies of risk reduction by authorities, communities, and individuals.
One vision for urban risk-reduction is animated by the dream of a new separation of
the virtuous and the vicious, a new and clear spatialisation of danger into safe zones and
risk zones. Fictional representations of urban life capture this well: the so-called 'Blade
Runner' scenario in which a division is attempted—and always threatened—between
the safe spaces of civility—in certain secured zones, policed buildings, civilised com-
munities with their broad boulevards, watered gardens, elegant interiors, and the like—
and the space lying outside the limits of these secure spaces, full of threat, chaos, and
danger but also excitement, seduction, glamour, glitter, drugs, sex, and 'real life': the
'glop', the 'sprawl'. This fictional representation is imitated in real life in a defensive
spatialisation that has come to shape city space: shopping malls and shopping centres
with their own internal security systems guarded at their perimeters and monitored by
closed-circuit TV; 'contractual' communities with walls around them and entrances
controlled by security guards, as in the so-called gated communities that have arisen
from Istanbul to Islington. Mike Davis is right in one respect to regard these develop-
ments as entailing the death of the city: for what would be marked by such developments
would be the death of a particular kind of liberal dream of the city as an open, civilised,
and civilising habitat for the existence of free citizens (see Davis, 1988, page 87).
Hence, it is not surprising that this image of government of risk through spatial
separation is increasingly coming under challenge by another, in which security is not
thought of in absolute terms. In this image, there can be no inherently safe locales or
activities and, in addition, there must be no 'no-go' zones where law-abiding citizens
will not venture and where the innocent are effectively held hostage by criminal anti-
citizens. Risk reduction is to form part of the moral responsibility of urban citizens
themselves. This brings into alignment a whole array of discrepant issues within a
single programmable domain—from domestic violence to street crime, from burglary
to car theft, from routes for travel to arrangements for children's play areas. Safer
Cities initiatives, Neighbourhood Watch, and other Community Safety Programmes
work by enrolling citizens in the practices of crime reduction: planning our travelling
arrangements, securing our homes and property, instrumentalising our daily activities
in the name of our own security, guided by police, community safety officers, and a
host of other novel experts of risk. But they also seek to reawaken in citizens their own
moral responsibilities to the policing of conduct, in particular, through the popularity
of such notions as 'zero tolerance' and the 'broken windows thesis'—the argument that
toleration of minor breaches of civility sows the seeds of a more dangerous and
insidious criminal culture.
This new image of citizenship must be understood in relation to that which opposes
it, a kind of anticitizen that is the constant enticement, and threat, to the project of
citizenship itself. The emergence of the notions of exclusion to characterise those who
previously constituted the social problem group defines these noncitizens or anticiti-
zens not in terms of substantive characteristics but in relational terms; that is, it is a
question of their distance from the circuits of inclusion into virtuous citizenship. The
'excluded' might make it into citizenship, if they can only be connected up to the right
networks of community and the requisite channels of enterprise. Exclusion is imagined
in a spatial form, in the form of excluded and marginal spaces within the urban
fabric itself, enclosures where the lines of virtuous inclusion have somehow come
disconnected and fail to flow. Not so much a ghetto, more a precise localisation of
the marginal given the name of an estate, a housing project, an urban enclave: Spital-
fields, Broadwater Farm. In these enclaves, the links of citizenship and community
have turned against themselves, and all those things which would connect individuals
Governing cities: notes on the spatialisation of virtue 755

into the networks of inclusion have instead produced negative feedback family life,
welfare solidarity, and state education are all seen as machines for disconnection rather
than for connection. Hence the need to reawaken in these zones the dormant moral
energies of those who exist within them: in neighbourhood-based schemes for the
reclamation of the streets from drug dealers and prostitutes; in estate-based schemes
for regeneration which target the antisocial, name and shame them, refuse to be
terrorised by their immoral and criminal conduct, and so forth. Once more, govern-
ment of risk is to proliferate at a molecular level through the enrolment of the
capacities and commitments immanent to citizens themselves.
Cities of enterprise
In contrast to the classical liberal diagram, the economic salience of the 'advanced'
liberal city has ceased to be thought of simply in terms of a space or a milieu: it is
a node within pathways of mobility, a matrix of (lows, a point o( connection and
rebranching of lines of activity which connect persons, processes, and things. No doubt
mercantilism, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism were always matters of Hows
over distance and concentrations in space: cities as economic concentrations of raw
materials, labour power, wealth, a local market; trade routes, exports, imports, com-
petition, and so forth as economic networks into which each was integrated to a
greater or lesser degree. But the contemporary images of globalisation and localisation
spatialise economic activity in new ways. A growing literature argues that the route to
economic success lies in the establishment of entrepreneurial localities, with fluid and
flexible internal economic arrangements dependent upon physical proximity, which
compete with one another on a world market. The idea of a 'local economy' informs
economic policy at the regional level and, increasingly, within urban government itself
As the boundaries and unity of national economies are thought to be breached by flows
of goods, money, information, expertise, profit, labour, and, around global networks,
'local economies1 are understood as almost the only geographical zones where capital,
labour, raw materials, and expertise can be captured and acted upon. Perhaps more
significantly, their novelty lies in the relations established between previously nomadic
forces, in the attempt to connect up the restless energy of the entrepreneur with more
than simply the pursuit of maximum profit. The relation of capital to the urban should
be more than that of a raiding party with its prey: it should take a stake in the shaping
and destiny of the urban itself, in the reshaping of its decayed Docklands and aban-
doned factories into shopping malls and waterfronts, in the rebuilding of its concrete
and windswept wastelands into shopping malls and markets, in the reconstruction of its
estates so that they shift from spaces for the residential storage of labourers en masse
and in maximum density into communities of homes that activate the dreams of
possession and self-improvement necessary to bind the energies of young men and
women into the regimes of civility.
There are, of course, different versions of this new economic localism. It can have
a left-wing, corporatist formulation as in some arguments on the governmental
requirements and interagency relations necessary to promote the interaction, trust,
cooperation, and mutual obligation necessary for flexible specialisation. Or it can
have an entrepreneurial form, where the city is an entity to be made entrepreneurial
in and through acting upon the enterprising capacities of different 'partners' or 'stake-
holders', stimulating their competitiveness, their rivalry, their capacity to meet the
challenge of economic modernisation in a harsh ecology full of pacific tigers and other
voracious beasts in an economic struggle for the survival of the fittest in which cities,
rather than nations, are the key actors. It is in these terms that it has now been possible
to render the city as an economic subject, not a favourable geographical location on
756 T Osborne, N Rose

coast, river, or trade routes, nor as a milieu within which some prosper and some strive
and all benefit from their enterprise, but as itself an economic actor in the world
economy of cities, such that one can talk about the remarkable revival of Glasgow,
the decline of Sunderland, the reawakening of Baltimore: in each case what is declining
or reviving is a kind of ethico-economic character of enterprise imbuing a city as a
whole by virtue of the motivation, the sense of pride and competitiveness, the installa-
tion of a relentless rivalry between cities and regions mobilised by means of the
enterprise of each and of all (see King, 1990; Knox and Taylor, 1995; Sassen, 1991).
The urban economy, here, has a kind of quasi-organic life of its own; it can be in
health, decline, or recovery, it can be regenerated by calculated means of intervention,
it is in competition with other 'local economies', it must therefore have its own
peculiarities and advantages that will provide it with a niche within this competitive
ecology of local economies—its labour force, its transportation systems, its rates of
local tax and subsidy, its skill levels, and so on—in order to attract inward investment
and the like. Increasingly, and perhaps surprisingly, economic regeneration at this local
level is itself understood in terms of new games of citizenship. On the one hand, this is
a matter of entrepreneurship, of acting upon the dependency culture fostered in the
heart of industrial urban decline, the lack of entrepreneurship which is the legacy of an
age of mass factory employment now past. But on the other hand, it is a matter of
recreating communities of obligation and allegiance within these zones. The recent
upsurge of interest in trust relations as a condition of economic health, the communi-
tarian emphasis upon civic commitment as a key factor in economic development, the
arguments of social capital theorists that very local features of moral relations (networks,
norms, trust, and so forth) facilitate coordination and cooperation, minimise transaction
costs, serve as vital sources of economic information, and so on—all these make
economic regeneration a matter of local economic citizenship. The immanent productive
capacities of the city are to be released by action upon the subjects and agents who make
up its economy A whole range of initiatives for economic regeneration have taken shape,
which operate through action on the culture of enterprise within cities, and seek
simultaneously to maximise the enterprise of these constituents of the labour force
now thought of in terms of their location and residence and to maximise the relations
of obligation which they feel to others, not in a society or a nation, but in a localised and
particular network of commitment, allegiance, and reciprocal responsibility.
Cities of pleasure
From at least the 19th Century, the city has been represented, in literature and in
documentary descriptions, as promoting a certain type of mentality and sociality as a
consequence of the kinds of pleasures and stimulations that it offers. These analyses
have usually had a negative tone, one modulated according to whether the target was
the urban enervation of the civilised or the urban degradation of the sensibilities of the
uncivilised. For the latter, the pleasures of the city—notably those of alcohol, vice,
gambling, prostitution, and the like—are repetitively implicated in the production
of certain degenerate characters: Baudelaire's rag-pickers, Mayhew's costermongers,
Booth's forgotten classes, Engels's proletariat—in short, misbegotten peoples who
have little in common beyond their poverty, exclusion, and the territory they inhabit,
and little to lose but their misery. The city becomes a site for investigation of the urban
factors that generate these strange, underclasses or nonclasses; like 'darkest Africa', the
sights and sensations of the dark continent of the urban poor are to be narrated
by intrepid explorers (see Stallybrass and White, 1986). The urban reportage of the
19th Century sought to capture these forms of debased subjectivity secreted by the
urban.
Governing cities: notes on the spatialisation of virtue 757

This exploration also represented, for its proponents* a kind of work upon the self,
a search for sensation which was made possible by urban existence itself: this is why
the urban explorers are so often to be seen taking a walk. Hence the other side of
urban sociality which is so often written about: the city as the place where the
pleasures may be generated, for good or for ill, by the ever-present possibility of the
chance encounter with the unknown. In one version of this argument, the civility
produced by the city is itself a kind of alienated sociality. Urban existence sunders
social bonds and replaces them by a mass of impersonal relations; the city is the place
where there are masses in close, almost paranoiac, contiguity yet where interpersonal
relations are cold and artificial. And, at the same time, the city subjects the human
psyche to shocks, sensations, impressions, and experiences that arc overwhelming;
simultaneously exciting and enervating the character of the urban dweller, producing
a particular urban mentality The city may be a generator of delights—no doubt always
specific to gender and to rank and wealth—but these delights are dangerous not only
in the sense that the pleasure they generate is amplified by the frisson of danger, but
also because of the damage they inescapably threaten to those who enjoy them—for
there is no pleasure that docs not carry a cost (Walkowitz, 1992).
In another version—made popular from Walter Benjamin to the contemporary
postmodern romances of the urban flaneur and flaneuse, of department stores, shop-
ping malls, and the 'public sphere'—the dangers of the city are the inevitable other side
of its very civility For the city appears the unique generator of civilised pleasures that
make up and sustain the very civilised subjects capable of enjoying them. The civilised,
quintessential^ civic pleasure of the bohemian promenade, of public life and the
encounter of one with another in the civilised spaces of the city centre street with its
window displays, its pubs and clubs, its museums and galleries. Yet, at the same time,
these civilised pleasures are heightened by their proximity to the transgrcssive pleasure,
in which the city is uniquely capable of generating a range of excitements that escape
the governmental dream of a purified, hygienic, moral space inhabited by a well-
regulated population. Here one finds the images of the opaque, excessive, ungoverned
city: a fecund, heterogeneous, spontaneous, dangerous, promiscuous warren of *other
spaces' where pleasure is spiced with danger, where desire can run free in alleyways,
tenements, clubs, bars, theatres, music halls, and gambling dens (see Donald, 1995).
But these conflicting practices of pleasure have not evaded the networks of capture
that filiate the advanced liberal city: transgression is itself to be brought back into
line and offered up as a package of commodified contentment. The city of pleasure
celebrated in poetry, novels, films, and systematised in social theory has itself been fed
into the programmatic imagination, in an alliance between city politics and commer-
cial imperatives. A multitude of projects, in almost all major cities, seek to reshape the
real city according to this image of pleasure, not least in order to enter into the
competitive market for urban tourism. In these programmes and projects, the image of
urban space as providing a multitude of spontaneous encounters, of sudden glimpses of
architectural oddities and esoteric markets, of bustling yet safe public spaces, this urban
experience seen by its celebrants as arising out of the intersection and accumulation of
thousands of spontaneous histories and schemes, has been transformed into calculated,
rationalised, and repetitive programmes for reshaping waterfronts, dockland areas, sites
of old buildings, palaces, warehouses, piers, vegetable markets, and the like into tourist
attractions. Urban theme parks, each more hyperreal than real. Disused wharves
become craft markets. Victorian structures that accommodated carcasses of sheep
and cows on their way to butchers, sacks of potatoes and cauliflower on their way to
cornershops are now filled with trendy boutiques and cafes. Sectors of space once
occupied, for specifiable economic and other reasons, by people of Chinese extraction
758 T Osborne, N Rose

become 'Chinatown', proclaimed by street signs with elaborate and publicly funded
festivals to mark the start of the Chinese Year of a particular animal. Each 'conservation
area', each 'heritage trail' is populated not by the spontaneous movements of the urban
inhabitants, but by those transported by tour coaches, clutching guidebooks, video
cameras, and postcards. The city becomes not so much a complex of dangerous and
compelling spaces of promises and gratifications, but a series of packaged zones of
enjoyment, managed by an alliance of urban planners, entrepreneurs, local politicians,
and quasi-governmental 'regeneration' agencies. But here, once more, urban inhabi-
tants, required to play their part in these games of heritage, not only exploit them
commercially through all sorts of tourist dependent enterprises, but also promote their
own microcultures of bohemian, gay, or alternative lifestyles, and make their own
demands for the rerouting of traffic, the refurbishment of buildings, the mitigation of
taxes, and much more in the name of the unique qualities of pleasure offered by their
particular habitat.

Conclusion
Actually existing cities are complex multiplicities of interests, antagonisms, flows of
capital, spatial constructions, moral topographies, forms of authority, and ethical
stylisations. But however one might want to analyse these multiplicities, we have
suggested that, immanent within all attempts to govern existence in urban form, one
can diagnose the diagrams that give consistency—though by no means homogeneity—
to their elements. A diagrammatics of urbanism attends to this plane—be this the
domain of security in liberalism, the sociospatial topographies of the eudaemonic
city, or the virtual plane of control in advanced liberalism (many others could be added).
To speak of diagrams is to try to individuate the regularities that are giving form to the
multitude of local, fluid, fleeting endeavours, strategems, and tactics that characterise
the forces seeking to govern this or that aspect of urban existence. But it is also to point
to the constant mobility of such diagrams, which are nothing more than the regularities
immanent in their instantiations—they are internally agonistic, continually fragment-
ing, splitting off new configurations of forces, generating new potential diagrams, some
of which will stabilise, while others decompose. The innovative character of liberal
diagrams of urban government has lain in their reluctance to fix the city, their recogni-
tion that urban stasis is the enemy of good government, that to govern the city is not to
immobilise its energies but to harness them in the interests of each and of all.
What is decisive about each diagram of the city are the particular lines of force
each diagram imagines between the virtuous and vicious forces—relations of time and
space, forms of life, individual and collective subjectivities—immanent to the city. For
we have suggested that, from at least the 19th Century to today, these diagrams, over
and above their differences, have given form to the city as an autonomous, irreducible
domain that is both governable and acts counter to government, that is both naturally,
self-governing and requires constant intervention. Hence the life of the city, and life in
the city have been the target of a series of strategies of governmentalisation that have
sought to preserve this immanence as a resource of power; to convert the unsociable
sociability of the city to the ends of government whilst preserving the apparently
spontaneous undetermined character of the city itself. It is in this context that one
can re-pose the problem of the persistent ungovernability of the city. The city's ungov-
ernability is not exterior to the urban diagram as it exists at any one time. Indeed, it is
part of the very character of the city—that it is a domain of unsociable sociability—
that it should be, in a sense, ungovernable; or rather that its governability should arise
out of its spontaneous, ungoverned features. In fact, each diagram presupposes the
forms of ungovernability that will preoccupy and disturb it; indeed, the work of
Governing cities: notes on the sputialisation of virtue 759

diagnosis is a kind of reconstruction of the problem spaces to which particular urban

diagrams provide different answers. The liberal diagram presupposes the insanitary
city; the eugenic diagram presttpposes the degenerating city; the eudaeinonic diagram
presupposes the city of deviant, antisocial subcultures; and so on, The forces of
ungovernability are not, then, to be romanticised as being somehow outside the urban
diagram altogether. On the contrary, urban governmentality uses the insidious ungov-
ernability of the city as a resource and an inspiration, The city, as a domain of
immanence, thus remains an open-ended provocation to government.
Acknowledgements. Our thanks to Engin Isin for his kindness and help, and to two referees from
this journal for their invaluable comments.
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