PAPER CITIES: VISUAL THINKING

IN URBAN PLANNING
Ola Söderström

We find instead that direct observation, far from being a mere ragpicker, is an explo-
ration by the form-seeking and form-imposing mind, which needs to understand but
cannot unless it casts what it sees into manageable models.
1

recent process of self-examination within geography has engen-

TJL he relatively
dered considerable reflection about how its discourses are constructed.
Calling into question the transparency of representation that this has entailed
has led in turn to a whole series of debates concerning the active role played
by the symbolic mediations of knowledge. The roles of text and visualization, in
particular, have thus been analysed in numerous recent publications. As far as
text is concerned, the influence exerted upon geography by contemporary cul-
tural anthropology is noticeable in the emergence of textuality as a doubly
heuristic category. First, as metaphor, textuality has been used to decode land-
scape ; secondly, as mode of inscription of geographical knowledge, it has func-
tioned as a space in which the scientific rhetoric of our discipline has been
brought into question.2
Analysis of the visual, to which this article refers, has been given rather less
attention, but is today attracting more interest. I begin by sketching out very
roughly the orientations of current research, so as to place my work in its proper
context. In geography, three fields of research have recently made the most

important contributions to our understanding of the role of visual mediations:

the history of cartography, the history of geography, and the debate about post-
modernity.
In cartography, recent work has been distancing itself from traditional evolu-
tionary ideas of cartographic representation to concentrate more on question-
ing its internal structure and its efficacy within the evolution of western thought
or more specifically in relation to specific sociopolitical events. In
geography,
research has been drawing attention to the efficacy of certain modalities of rep-
resentation in geographical reasoning5 or, more specifically, to the role of geo-
graphical visualizations in colonial politics. Lastly, the question of the visual is
250

a central theme in the postmodern debate. Postmodern discourse has related

modern reason to particular cognitive postures which constitute it as a form of

totalitarian and gendered knowledge. Certain postmodern critiques of founda-
tionalism and of the hegemonic pretensions of some scientific discourses have
been linked in recent work to critiques of the claims to a totalizing, disembod-
ied gaze upon the object of analysis. According to this point of view, the gaze
exercises its power by disqualifying the richness and diversity of partial, situated
points of view. In feminist thought, this deconstruction of the visuality of knowl-
edge takes the form of a critique of the voyeurism which characterizes and con-
nects both the distant gaze of the moderns upon nature and the male gaze on
women.77
Without pretending to bring them together, the present article touches on all
three fields, since it deals at once with the role of urban cartography and geo-
graphical discourse in the constitution of urban planning, and because it
attempts to identify several of the crucial stages which have marked the archae-
ology of the totalizing gaze levelled at urban space. This text therefore devel-
ops an argument about visual mediation in a relatively unexplored field: urban
planning.

Visualization in urban planning. ;

..

Urban planning is a practice in which visualizing plays a crucial role. The most
obvious reason for this, of course, is because it is a discipline which very largely
consists of organizing objects in space. The enabling faculty for the realization
of this operation is vision. It is not surprising, then, to find that for one of the
principal pioneers of modern urban planning, Patrick Geddes, the trained eye
was the best instrument of scientific knowledge, whilst graphic representation
remained the most efficient vector for its diffusion. Consulting the theoretical
works devoted to urban planning, however, one notices how little work has been
done that analyses the relations between urban planning and the visual, or that,
more particularly, takes seriously in its full complexity the question of the ways

urban development and the modalities of representation of the city mutually

structure each other.8 It is clear that many texts deal with construction drawings
and notably with the gradual maturing of architectural projects in terms of
graphic practice which entails many different forms of visualization. Scattered
here and there in the literature, one also finds stray theoretical remarks and
aphorisms by certain essayists and philosophers that touch on the visual in urban
planning. It is nevertheless astonishing to discover that this phenomenon - per-
haps because of its very conspicuousness - hasnot inspired either theoretical
critique or practical analysis of the efficacy of urban representations.
There is one possible explanation for this. The situation may very well be
symptomatic of a phenomenon that has become more and more remarked upon
over the last few years: the growing gulf separating the theory of urban
plan-
ning from the practical problems encountered by planners. Urban planning the-
ory has become increasingly complex as it has absorbed categories and concepts
developed by social theory and epistemology. This welcome refinement in
 251

thinking about planning has nevertheless had the unfortunate effect of erasing
practical contingencies from the arena of theoretical discussion. Now, the rela-
tions that link urban theory to the actual practice of urban planners become
exceedingly tenuous once the debate is articulated in terms of abstractly defined
rationalizations or sophisticated and ideal decision-making models. In other
words, urban planning theory seems to have as much trouble getting a clear
idea of the object of its study as traditional epistemology has had in accounting
for how scientific facts are produced in the laboratories of the exact sciences.
One could even say that the former has probably encountered more severe prob-
lems, since urban planning is a form of knowledge whose very essence is prac- .

tical efficacy, so that it has much greater reason to take its concrete aspects into
proper consideration.
This diagnosis echoes a similar conclusion reached some fifteen years ago
within the field of what is now often called Science, Technology and Society
(STS). A series of thinkers more or less acknowledging this umbrella term to
describe their interests gave new life to the sociology of science by arguing pre-
cisely for the need to consider the concrete means of production of scientific
facts.10 The research programme that was set up with this aim in view is there-
fore interested in science in the making, or science in action, 11 as opposed to
the ready-made science, often ideal in its procedures, that traditional episte-
mology tends to describe.l2 The approach proposed by these authors does not,
of course, imply that all theoretical ambitions have to be jettisoned, but rather
seeks to reconstruct a theory of scientific knowledge capable of accounting for
its way of working and its efficacy in contemporary society. Visualization tech-
niques, their mode of inscription and circulation, play an important role within
the frame of this research programme. When scientists are observed at work,
one begins to see how the particular mediations between the researcher and

his/her object of study contribute significantly to the elaboration and commu-

nication of knowledge.3
My aim here is thus to explore the role played by visualization in urban plan-
ning from a perspective related to that of the researchers in the STS field. I
adopt certain of the conceptual and methodological instruments elaborated in
their work on scientific representations. On the other hand, not all of my
research strategies are assimilable to the STS studies. Since the research
described here deals with an area previously unexplored by STS methods of
analysis, it was important to consider the characteristics that distinguish plan-
ning from the experimental sciences. It is also necessary to develop a clear his-
torical analysis of the phenomena being investigated.
The historical investigation is best dealt with as a genealogy of the practices
of urban representation. This is difficult in the narrow space of an article. I
therefore concentrate on identifying a series of essential bifurcations in the
modalities of visualization of urban space, whether they were specifically
designed as instruments of urban planning or not. Urban planning is nowadays
based on a complex visual construction of the city by means of different tech-
niques of representation. Certain are to be found in very different fields of
knowledge and practice (the geometrical plan, for instance); others are tech-
252

niques of representation proper to urban planning (the zoning plan in partic-

ular).
I shall therefore drill three boreholes at crucial points in the history of urban
planning and at its most important sites: the Rome of Leon Battista Alberti and
Pope Nicholas V in the fifteenth century, the Germany of the first planning civil
servants towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the London of the
Victorian slums around the same period. This will allow us to observe at close
quarters the strong link between the construction of an ordinary representa-
tion during the Renaissance and the constitution of urban planning as an
autonomous field of practices. We may then attempt to describe the structuring
role played by visualizations produced ad hoc when urban planning first became
institutionalized in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.
But first, a guide to this journey must be provided in the form of three brief
methodological clarifications. The first two deal with my principles of analysis,
the third with urban plannings historical starting-point.

The efficacy of visualizations

Representations of the city are considered here for their performative charac-
ter. What interests me in representations is the actual work that they do. They
are not the passive repository of an exterior planning process, but one of the

key sites of urbanism in the making. They process reality according to a sys-
tem of procedures comprising selection, schematization, and synthesis.14 If we need
to take styles of visualization seriously, it is because they are forms and crystal-
lizations of the thought of urban planners as they go about their work by means
of these procedures.
Such procedures assure what I shall call the internal efficacy of representation,
which enables one to pass from one complex reality to its simplified figuration.
I qualify this as internal to distinguish it from the external efficacy of representa-
tion, which describes what one might call the administration of proof. This sec-
ond case raises the question of the confidence to be placed in vision and in the
persuasive power of representations15 - in other words, the capacity for certain
representations to win over public opinion.
In the field of urban planning, this external efficacy is particularly obvious
insofar as the production of visualizations is an extremely complex task, con-
fined for the most part to professionals. In such a context, a planners project
contains in itself its own persuasive force: it demonstrates savoir faire and seri-
ousness, or, at least, knowledge of the elementary rules of architectural drawing
or model-making. Simply pointing things out (here is the town, thats where
the site will be, here is such-and-such a zone, etc., here, for instance, you can
see quite clearly that...), on a document that presents all the external
signs
of expertise, is often sufficient to persuade non-professionals of the legitimacy
of the planning policies. In other words, the simple fact of being in possession
of a code of representation of the town common to an exclusive group of pro-
fessionals is enough to guarantee the projects seriousness. 16
The external efficacy of any visualization is therefore intrinsically linked to its
 253
internal efficacy, especially when what is at stake is communication outside the
circle of professionals. It is therefore impossible to separate the technical pro-
cedures that govern the way representations are conceived from the social uses
to which those representations are put in the outside world. It is, on the con-

trary, necessary to observe the interrelation between these two forms of efficacy
in visualization occurring in the planners different practical activities.7
The principles outlined above guide the genealogical analysis which follows,
and will be used to attempt in concluding to give some overall meaning to the
procedures which have contributed to the make-up of the planners laboratory
and its essential tools.

Visualizations as immutable mobiles

If we take seriously the instruments used by a discipline to apprehend its object,
we are necessarily called upon to understand in what ways urban planning has
progressively elaborated forms of visual mediation capable of scaling down built
space, existing or to be created, so that it can be easily moved and handled.
What is at issue here is what Bruno Latour calls immutable mobiles, that is to say,
representations which can be detached from the place (or object) which they
represent, whilst remaining immutable so that they may be moved in any direc-
tion without distortion, loss or additional corruption .18 Scientific cartography
and linear perspective are techniques of elaboration of such immutable mobiles.
The appeal of this notion lies in the fact that it helps to identify three aspects
of representation that are fundamental for an historical analysis: its progressive
stabilization; the aspects of the object which it selects; and the operations that
it authorizes. The notion of the immutable mobile, then allows a complex and
critical understanding of the transformations of simulated space created by plan-
ners to give themselves the means of manipulating their object, or, to use
Latours terminology, of acting at a distance upon that object. This is one of
the central notions, then, when attempting to grasp the main stages of con-
struction of the urban planners laboratory. 19
In this respect, my argument is inspired by work done in the anthropology of
science and technology, while maintaining a certain distance. The ethnography
of the laboratory which constitutes one of the fields principal forms of analy-
sis does effectively raise the question of the historicity of the practices and instru-
ments which it gives one the opportunity to observe.2 In attempting to trace
the development of the instruments and practices of urban planners in
genealogical terms, this research tries to provide the necessary keys for inter-
pretation of ethnographic work by unpacking the sedimented histories that such
instruments and practices contain.

Constitution of urban planning

It has been traditionally supposed that the history of urban planning began dur-
ing the second half of the nineteenth century, when the discipline started to
become institutionalized and professionalized, with accompanying claims to sci-
entific status. The points of departure for this reading of the history of the field
254
are Baron Haussmans policies in Paris, the first manuals of German urban plan-
ning produced by Baumeister and Stubben, or Ildefonso Cerdas Teoria general
de la urbanizacion. Franoise Choay offers a different interpretation, arguing that
the nineteenth century cannot be seen to constitute a true beginning. She
insists rather upon the inaugural role played by Albertis De Re Aedificatoria
( 1485) .21 Albertis treatise is effectively the first text to consider construction
(edification is a term used by Alberti to cover both architecture and urban
planning) in terms of an autonomous field to which rational method is to be
applied.
It is this second reading which I shall take up, concentrating, unlike Choay,
more on practices and material representations than on texts. This approach to
the principal stages characterizing the constitution of the range of instruments
peculiar to urban planning will distance us from certain canonical passages in
the history of urban planning which, like any history, contains its own accepted
hagiography as well as its dark ages and ages of enlightenment. I hope to prove
how useful it might be to skip some of the admired statues in the museum of
urban planning and to brush down others which have been gathering dust in
the cellars. In terms of the point of view which interests me, the work of the
German civil servants and Charles Booths social inquiries have considerably
greater importance than Howards garden-cities (which introduced no major
innovation in terms of representation) or the four functions of the Athens
Charter (already defined fifty years earlier by Baumeister) . , .
The first section of this article deals essentially with the relationship between
the stabilization of representation and the historical constitution of urban plan-
ning, as well as with the gradual emergence of standard representations of the
city. The point at issue will therefore be an inaugural moment when the effi-
cacy of the representation is particularly clear.
~ z

Stabilizing representation, totalizing the city: the

geometrical plan as immutable mobile
Modernity begins when the real space of the world becomes a stage, and when this
stage, mastered by a stage manager, turns inside out like a glove or simple geomet-
rical line-drawing to the eye and collapses into the utopia of a knowing, interior, inti-
mate subject. This black hole swallows up the whole world.22

The Renaissance, as we know, constitutes the beginning of a new regime in the

history of
representation. From the thirteenth century on, we see a develop-
ment from conventional, formulaic representations towards a form of repre-
sentation that enables recognition of specific features of the figured urban
space. 2 This shift is linked to the gradual, and geographically irregular, disso-
lution of a medieval, neo-Platonic aesthetic privileging the inward gaze and dis-
trusting external appearances. It led in the domain of urban representation to
the production of less stereotypical representations of cities.24 This process was
characterized by a crucial threshold constituted by the (re-) invention of linear
 255

perspective, whose effects, of course, were to be felt far outside the domain of
representation of the city.25 These facts are well known. What interests me is
another technique of representation which, as we shall see, had an even greater
impact on the development and the very constitution of urban planning as an
autonomous practice.
Perspective is effectively unequal to the tasks of the urban planner as an instru-
ment of visualization, since it limits the apprehension of the city to the purely
human gaze. It does, of course, produce a rationalization of what is seen; nev-
ertheless, it can only with difficulty produce a technically usable representation
which is not a partial vision of its object. In this domain, a decisive step was
taken, some time after Filippo Brunelleschis experiments in perspective, by
Leon Battista Alberti. Albertis De re aedificatoria was the first architectural trea-
tise since antiquity, first published in 1485, but presented in manuscript form
to Pope Nicholas V in 1452. The treatise describes a rational method, a body of
rules governing the art of construction of anything from a house to a whole
city. It has as such been considered as the true beginning of what would become
urban planning in the nineteenth century.26
Although Alberti codified perspective and theorized painting in De pictura, his
architectural treatise has no illustrations and does not discuss the representa-
tion of the whole city. In another, much briefer text, however, he does propose
an ingenious method for transcribing a city onto paper. This method is a cru-
cial step in the development of urban planning. It occurs in Descriptio Urbis
Romae, written probably around 1445. Albertis emblem was a winged eye, and
we shall see in our analysis of this method that there is no more appropriate

image.27
The (re-)invention of planimetry
Rather than being a text in the ordinary sense of the word, Descriptio Urbis Romae
is more of a list of instructions concerning instruments and transcription meth-
ods. The final product, a plan of Rome, is not represented, but it can be recon-
structed if we follow the authors instructions carefully. Descriptio contains a table
with the coordinates of several important features of the city, whether they be
natural or man-made: the city walls, the Tiber, the city gates as well as 35 pub-
lic buildings, with the Capitol as reference-point at the centre of the city plan.
To construct the plan of Rome with these coordinates, Alberti explains that we
need to use a disc, called a horizon, divided into 48 degrees, each degree itself
divided into four minutes. This enables us to transcribe onto a sheet of paper
the angular measures he has made. The next step is to use a ruler divided into
50 degrees so as to transpose accurately the distances of any feature from the
Capitol.
This method enables one to construct a geometrical plan, following princi-
ples which were to prove to be at the origin of modern planimetry in the six-
teenth century.2 To understand Albertis method correctly, one needs to consult
another text, Ludi matematici, in which he explains how to effect the measure-
ments contained in Descriptio. This text was written to amuse a friend who was
 256

in prison, and in it Alberti describes the basic

principles of triangulation which
enabled him to construct the first global plan of Rome to be
produced since
classical times, and one which remained unrivalled until Leonardo Bufalinis
city
plan in 1531.29
Alberti in Descriptio, then, (re-) invented the geometrical
plan which constitutes
what we now commonly take to be a city plan. Albertis
plan in some ways
marked the end of the evolution in planimetry from the ideal to the
specific,
referred to above. Though its circular form may still suggest a
cosmogonical
content, its visualization-constitutive interest&dquo;&dquo; is nevertheless concerned with
the physical materiality of the city and no longer with its symbolic
meaning. The
existing physical features of the city and their respective positions are what inter-
est Alberti and not, as in medieval emblematic
figuration, the revelation of the
terrestrial presence of the divine order.
Albertis plan therefore signals the emergence of new
aspirations in repre-
sentation, though it remains, nonetheless, a very summary plan of Rome, geo-
metrical and not ichnographic. An ichnographic
plan respects metrical distances
between features making up the city, their respective sizes and orientation. The

Figure 1 - Modern reconstitution of Vagnettis

plan of Rome, based on the data and
instructions given by Alberti converted to modern measurements (from L. Vagnetti,
Descriptio) .
 257

buildings figuring on it are represented in ground plan and not in elevation or

perspective. Albertis method, as we have seen, cannot be used to construct an
ichnographic plan, since the location of buildings is only indicated by dots. This
is why certain commentators consider Descriptio to be a decisive and not a defin-
itive step towards the production of such a plan. The first truly ichnographic
plan seems to have been Leonardo da Vincis celebrated 1503 plan of Imola.31
Leonardo must have used some form of transit equipped with a compass to be
able to include the ground plans of the buildings on his city plan. 32
Although Alberti may not have formulated all the basic principles of modern
planimetry, his plan nevertheless marks the beginning of the production of a
new system of visualizing urban space. The extraordinary number of ichno-

graphic plans in the sixteenth century is witness to this, proof of the rapid dif-
fusion of these new techniques.33
This technique of representation had a clearly identifiable practical function,
since it was so closely linked to urban planning. After Alberti, first the geomet-
rical then the ichnographic plan were specifically used for this purpose. The
Descriptio was produced within the context of Albertis collaboration in the
Roman reconstruction programme under Pope Nicholas V ( 1447-55) . There is,
then, a perfect historical coincidence between the new visualization technique
and what can be considered as the beginning of organized, concerted urban
planning in the Renaissance.34
The most important of the five components of Nicholas Vs programme con-
cerned an entire quarter of the city. It involved the reconstruction of Borgo
Leonino, situated between the Vatican and the castle of S. Angelo. This is prob-
ably the first time in the Renaissance that detailed planning on such a scale was

Figure 2 - Plan of Imola by Leonardo da Vinci (?) (1503) (from J. A. Pinto, Origins).
258

attempted, that is to say a project on a truly urban scale, and it is more than
likely that Alberti contributed to the project principally by supplying represen-
tational techniques. 15 But it was not only the sheer scale of the planning inter-
vention that was innovative, but also the fact that the principal characteristic of
Nicholas Vs programme was the use of urban form as an instrument of social
engineering. The physical substance of the city of Rome became as a result at
once a metaphor and an instrument of power, serving to guide citizens in their

spiritual as well as urban activities. For this purpose, a precise and totalizing rep-
resentation was indispensable.
Summing up the importance of this Albertian moment in the fabrication of
the urban planners laboratory, what need to be stressed are the intellectual and
cognitive possibilities opened up by modern planimetry, that is, its efficacy. It
authorizes indifference as to the maker of the representation. As Alberti says in
the opening sentences of his text, such a plan could be worked out by anybody
of average intelligence. The author becomes interchangeable, the representa-
tion no longer varying according to the painters artistic skills. Albertis plan
therefore marks the beginning of the stabilization of representation of the city.
Similarly, the representation no longer needs to be inscribed within a narrative.
It no longer refers outside itself to a text which will furnish its meaning.
Visualization is self-sufficient, containing within itself the terms of its own sig-
nification. Also, the plan renders space homogeneous by erasing differences.
Henceforth, the sacred and profane, the natural and cultural coexist within the
same representation, whereas beforehand the city had either been a simple

graphic convention or metonymically epitomized by enclosure and monument.

In other words, quality, hierarchy, and difference are replaced by quantity, posi-
tion, and measure.
Finally - and here we see the radical difference between planimetry and per-
spective - Albertian plans totalize urban space. We find representations corre-
sponding no longer to individual visual experience, but to the net product of
multiple points of view. By choosing the same point of view and by closing one
eye, one can reconstruct the vision of the Battistero or the Palazzo della Signoria
as painted by Brunelleschi during his celebrated sojourn in Florence. Active

interchange between representation and its referent is still possible with per-
spective. This is no longer the case with the geometrical, ichnographic plan.
Nobody could see Albertis Rome except in the plan he had constructed. As a
consequence, Albertian visualization created a new object, the city, insofar as it
opened up a new field of visibility, 36 visualizing what had been invisible till that
time.
The city had, of course, existed as a political entity before Alberti. Modern
planimetry nevertheless had the effect of expanding consciousness of its physi-
cal reality. This new space of representation simultaneously opened up a new
space of action: urban space. 37 Situated within the same simulated space, scaled
down so as to be readily assimilable at a glance, forms that had hitherto belonged
to incommensurable categories could now be apprehended by the mind and
could therefore be manipulated as parts of a whole. In this sense, one can say
that modern urban planning finds the grounds of its possibility just as much in
 259

this new mode of visualization as in particular political and cultural transfor-

mations.

From oblique to zenithal gaze: code naturalization

The fact that today the ichnographic plan is so taken for granted and is so dom-
inant a form of representation tends to obscure its specific characteristics, and
in particular the selection procedures that it operates within the urban space as
a whole. If the procedures for producing an ichnographic plan were known from
the sixteenth century on, they nevertheless remained marginal for a long time
and were used exclusively for technical purposes (military, planning, adminis-
trative), as, generally speaking, up to the eighteenth century birds-eye views
were preferred and were easier to produce. This mode of visualization, which
in the beginning was designed for planning purposes, only very slowly became
the standard way of representing a city as a whole. To understand properly the
specific characteristics of this stabilized representation of the city - mobile but
immutable - we need to compare it with its rival.
The birds-eye view was for several centuries, quantitatively speaking, the dom-
inant form, and one of the most impressive examples in terms of scale (135 x
282 cm) , richness of detail, and artistic skill is probably the 1500 view of Venice
by Jacopo de Barbaric As with Albertis plan, Jacopos view presupposes an
astonishing level of abstraction, since no single point of view could possibly fur-
nish anything approaching the overview provided by the Venetian painter-
engraver.39 The bird who views the scene has the eyesight of a bird of prey, for
not only does it contemplate the city from on high, but it also scrutinizes the
architecture and layout of the canals down to the minutest detail. Just like the
plan of Rome, this spectacular view of Venice totalizes a plural experience, con-
centrating into one gaze a multiplicity of particular visions of the city.
Nevertheless, these two forms of visualization are the result of different pro-

Figure 3 - View of Venice by Jacopo de Barbari (1500) (from J. Elliott, The city in maps:
urban mapping to 1900, London, British Library, 1987; reproduced by courtesy of the
Trustees of the British Museum).
260

duction procedures and differing visualization-constitutive interests. Jacopos

view was probably not used for purposes of urban administration, but in order
to celebrate the greatness and reputation of the city. The view therefore includes
information concerning the geographical situation of the city (the surrounding
area is represented), its economic activity (numerous ships are shown along the

waterways), and the wealth and architectural history of the city. It prefigures
modern tourist maps, which do little to respect proportion, specifically aiming
at staging and highlighting certain privileged forms and signalling the route of

guided tours round the sights and main monuments.4o

In other words, what is important about the Renaissance moment in the his-
tory of urban visualizations is that it constitutes the origin of specialization in
production: on the one hand, geometrical plans were being produced designed
for an elite circle of specialists and decision-makers (in particular the urban
planners) and on the other, perspective views were being produced for the pub-
lic at large. These two modes of representation were governed by different
procedures for the encoding of urban space. What I have termed internal effi-
cacy was therefore different in each case. But we need to continue with the
comparison in order to grasp the respective internal efficacy of the two
representational techniques, that is to say, the differing procedures of selec-
tion/schematization/synthesis that they put into play.
This comparison has been made by F. Farinelli,41 who bases his study on an
analysis of a sequence of representations of the city of Ferrara produced between
the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. The representations are interesting in
that they allow one to observe, in terms of the same object, the gradual change
through time from perspective view to geometrical plan. Farinelli interprets this
change in terms of a movement from situated representation - that is to say,
one which admits its own point of view and its selective and partial nature - to
a representation which erases the traces of its own mode of production by claim-

ing to exhaust the reality to which it refers. Situated representation, according

to Farinelli, serves as a vehicle for a discourse on the city (its history, its regional
relations, and so on) which advertises itself as such, whilst geometrical repre-
sentation claims to be a mimetic double of the represented city.42
This naturalization of the representation, which can also be seen in small-
scale cartography, is a paradoxical process, since it entails a sudden shift of the
gaze from the horizontal and oblique, in the case of perspective, to the vertical
and consequently much less natural viewpoint of the geometrical plan. If the
horizontal gaze places itself at the level of the citizen and authorizes empathy,
the zenithal gaze literally places itself at an abstract level, since the viewer must
abstract or extract him- or herself from everyday, ordinary experience of urban
space in order to understand it. It is a gaze which also enables the viewer to
conceive in abstract terms the particular measurable characteristics of the citi-
zens of the city, such as the density of the population, their earning power, or
their state of health.
It is through the agency of the zenithal gaze, therefore, that one can repre-
sent a town in the form of zones characterized by standards of living, classes of

population, differing crime rates. In other words, the geometrical plan is a pre-
 261

requisite of the thematic urban cartography which would develop towards the
end of the nineteenth century, as we shall see. The shift to the geometrical plan
for this reason represents a crucial step along the road leading to the develop-
ment of Victorian social statistics, since the urban zones constituted by the
zenithal point of view could then form the subject of procedures of census,
measure, and comparison. I return to this topic below.
What I emphasize in particular here is that this historical moment in urban
representation saw the beginning of a naturalization of the code which now
dominates urban visualizations. The geometrical, or, to be more precise, the
ichnographic, plan became the natural and non-problematic means of inscrib-
ing the object which it is urban plannings task to manipulate. This was a very
gradual process, of course, and one needs to be careful not to confuse the rep-
resentations of an elite with those of a society as a whole, and moreover not to
think that this process was a rapid one.43 Whatever its speed, however, this
process, initiated in the Renaissance, is crucial to my argument, since it helped
to produce the confusion between the space of the particular representation
and real space, a confusion which is so often found in modern urban planning.44
This instrument also constitutes a key element in the urban planners labo-
ratory, because it functioned as a matrix for the creation of other instruments
which were later to become normative. I shall show how another fundamental
instrument of modern urban planning, the zoning plan, was the natural exten-
sion of the ichnographic plan. Zoning does not restrict itself to selecting the
basic structure within the overall complex of representable urban phenomena,
as the ichnographic plan does, but goes further, stabilizing the evolution of this
structure in time by determining the regulations controlling land use.45

NIy second borehole into the genealogy of the practices associated with urban
representations takes place in the nineteenth century, during the institutional-
ization of urban planning. For it is at this time that the principal instruments
of urban planning were defined, in relation to the now standard representation
which is the ichnographic plan.

The visual order of the civil servants

The perspective taken in this study emphasizes the role played by more obscure
characters and practices than conventionally dealt with in planning history. Late
nineteenth-century urban planning in Germany is an example. Less spectacular
than the exalted manifestos of utopian planners, German urban planning has
tended to be overshadowed. The urban planning of the civil servants, so called
because it was the product of men for the most part employed in municipal
administration formulating laws, rules, and manuals, nevertheless played a foun-
dational role in the codifying of urban planning in many countries.
This influence was not, of course, felt everywhere immediately. In most cases,
one has to wait until the 1920s and 1930s, when the evident drawbacks of lais-

sez faire economics forced countries to develop their urban planning systems.
The Second World War slowed down the process of institutionalization of these
practices, which began to develop again after 1945. Nevertheless it is still the
262

end of the nineteenth century which constitutes the fundamental period dur-
ing which new modern instruments, and in particular new techniques of visu-
alization, were developed and adopted by many countries.
The German experience spread abroad through different channels. The man-
uals produced after 1870 in Germany were very widely distributed there, and in
England and the United States through translation. Furthermore, the confer-
ences and international exhibitions on urban planning which were organized
from the 1890s onwards devoted a great deal of space to Germany. The drafters
of the manuals and German laws on the subject were invited as guests of hon-
our, and research trips to Germany became an indispensable part of the train-
ing of foreign urban planners before the First World War.4s
These pioneer experiments were the product of a search for a practical answer
to the problems facing the large German cities at that time. In the context of
an increasingly dense urban population, social tensions and worsening sanitary

conditions, the German cities developed a pragmatic form of urban planning,

thinking of the city as an organic whole which needed to be made to work more
efficiently. One of the main instigators of this form of urban planning, both in
terms of action (he was urban planner for the town of Karlsruhe) and in terms
of discourse production, was the engineer Reinhard Baumeister, born in 1838
and author in 1876 of the first high-circulation urban planning manual,
Stadterrueiterungen in technischer, baupolizeilicher und wirtschaftlicher Beziehung. This
manual inspired the production of texts close to the practice of urban planning,
and became the touchstone for works produced by his successors. Above all, it
describes what would constitute the essential instruments and practices of urban
planning up to the present day.47

T he principles of the master plan

Having first argued on a general level for the development of urban planning
in order to deal with the harmful effects of urbanization, Baumeister, towards
the end of the first chapter of his manual, proposes to resort to a plan of urban
expansion. This consisted of a master plan designed to organize future urban
space. It was a question of ensuring the stability and proper functioning of a
city conceived of in terms of a living organism in order to deal with the prob-
lems it faced: overpopulation in certain districts, problems of traffic and hygiene,
social unrest. The most efficient way of doing this in the eyes of the German
urban planners consisted in monitoring land values in order to have sectors of
the city specialize in functional and social terms, and to guarantee the durabil-
ity of such specialization. Baumeister therefore sets out what a master plan con-
sists of, with a view to maintaining urban order and permitting investors to
anticipate future developments.48
Nevertheless, he immediately warns readers against making the master plan
too rigid and inflexible; urban development cannot be planned with too much
precision, and therefore it is counterproductive to wish to freeze it within a
totally predetermined frame. The plan ought to restrict itself to providing the
general directives necessary to the cohesion of the urban organism. The more
 263

precise directives should be the subject of local plans whose temporal horizon
is more limited. This dual relationship within the plan, between general prin-
ciples and more local and temporary measures, is one of the most universal
organizational characteristics of urban planning, it still very often governs the
functioning of urban planning today. It is this dual relationship in particular
that makes the urban planning of civil servants still totally contemporary.
The master plan as conceived by the German pioneers was complemented by
the second basic feature of urban planning, the building regulation. But the heart
of the plan of action, the pivot linking the two elements to each other, is the
zoning plan. The zoning plan was admittedly not originally conceived as form-
ing part of the master plan, but it very quickly became the key document, its
clearest and most efficient part. One of its main characteristics was that it allowed
one to comprehend in one glance the whole of the city in an administrative

project. One no longer needed to carry out operations at the level of the more
or less important sites, with interventions spotted all over the map like a leop-

ards skin. The urban territory could now be incorporated under regulations
applying to homogeneous and adjacent sectors. Zoning was therefore an instru-
ment that not only made an overall grasp of the city possible, which is what the

ichnographic plan already allowed, but also facilitated total regulation of that
city.
Aspatial processing device of a new kind, the zoning plan, also represented
a temporal processing device. With it, urban planning entered a new era, trans-
forming the city into a logical and predictable structure.49 The zoning plan
allowed the reduction of uncertainty as to the future of the city, since it chan-
nelled the evolution of the different sectors that it identified according to
explicit constraints. It became possible to predict with a reasonable degree of
precision several years, even decades in advance, what would turn out to be the
morphological and functional characteristics of a determined area. The zoning
plan was therefore a synthetic processing unit within urban planning, insofar as
it condensed three factors into a single document: space (the plan of a city or
agglomeration), time (it prescribed the regulations governing future develop-
ment), and the law (its effect was defined by the measures characteristic of each
zone contained in the building regulation).
The extraordinary historical success of zoning was due to the fact that, as a
procedure, it permitted investors to anticipate the future of a zone and to guar-
antee a certain their investments. 50 Success was also due to its sim-
return on

plicity : merely boundaries, defining coloured or cross-hatched areas on a

city
plan. I shall concentrate upon this simplicity terms of visualization and the
in
effects of such a procedure, to facilitate an understanding of the interrelation
between the internal and external efficacy of this form of representation.

Division from on high

I referred earlier to the ichnographic plan and the naturalization that this par-
ticular technique of representation of cities underwent after the sixteenth cen-
tury. When Baumeister, who was the first modern codifier of zoning, outlined
264
his idea of the zoning plan, he had in his mind a city scaled down to a plan of
this type. He looks down upon the city with the eagle eye of the zenithal view-
point, and sets his bearings according to the points of the compass:
We should also not forget to mention the fact that the luxury apartments in the main
part of the city are situated in the west end of the city. This phenomenon may be
explained scientifically by the fact that this western position is healthier for the houses.
The smoke and smog produced by the city are in fact dispersed into the higher strata
of the atmosphere by the easterly wind when the barometer is high; when the wind
comes from the west and the barometer is low, the smoke and smog are carried
towards the east end and towards the lower strata of the atmosphere: in both cases
the west end is free of their influence.... But we should not base our plans for the
expansion of the city on barometers, but rather on the local conditions of the land,
in order to deal with the real needs. If both reasons lead to the same result, that is
all to the good: the industrial zones would then be built preferably in the east and
the residential houses in the west. To sum up, we have three zonal subdivisions in the
great metropolis of the future. The real commercial city as the heart of the city, the
industrial zones (possibly including the wholesale trade as well), and the residential
zones. 51
This first modern expression of zoning is the outcome of reasoning applied to
plans. The inventor of this new instrument, which was to become such an impor-
tant element in the urban planners laboratory, conceived it inferentially on the
basis of analysis of city plans and the location of different activities. In other
words - and this was one of the arguments that would be used to legitimize zon-
ing - Baumeister recognized in this immutable mobile, the city plan, certain
consistent features that were historically constituted and on the basis of this
observation elaborated an instrument of managing urban development that was
designed to meet future requirements.
It is essentially from this moment on that it seems to me legitimate to speak
of a laboratory designed for the practices of urban planners, since processes
begin to come into operation in the field from this time that are similar to those
which pertain in scientific laboratories. It becomes apparent that Baumeisters
reasoning as it develops is based on three key elements: an examination of a
form of inscription of the world (or of an object) which recognizably has the
capacity to capture that world in objective terms, that is, the modern city plan;
a combination of a series of such inscriptions; and a simp),ification/schematiza-
tion of the information furnished by the observation of th.is combination within
a new form of representation, the zoning plan.52
Research carried out in the anthropology of science and technology has
pointed to the fundamental characteristics of laboratory activity in precisely the
same procedures. It would be unwise to push the analogy too far, since there

are important differences between an urban planning department or office and

a pure science laboratory, principally in terms of objectives and final product.

Nevertheless, the analogy makes it possible to pinpoint the importance in urban

planning of inscriptions and of procedures that base their reasoning upon such
inscriptions, which rework, simplify, and interpret them.
The professional activities of Baumeister and his colleagues at the turn of the
 265

century created the possibility of continued development of the initial idea into
an instrument of urban planning and therefore encouraged laboratory prac-
tice in the discipline. With the support of Franz Adickes, mayor of Frankfurt,
Baumeister effectively transformed his theory into practice, then into standard
practice, since it was he who would be the principal artisan of urban planning
laws in Germany. The city of Frankfurt thus adopted in 1891 a new plan con-
sisting of a plan of concentric zones (Bauzonenpl,an) in terms of the building
regulations ( Zonenbauordnung) and planning for zones of different density
strictly in accordance with the rationale of ground rent. The same year the town
of Altona adopted a plan which included the same type of instrument; the next
year Berlin followed suit, and a few years later, Cologne, Essen, and other cities.

Di f f usion of the principle of zoning ..

This first phase in the development of zoning was followed by a second, lasting
from 1905 until the First World War, characterized by the definition of a greater
number of zones and by the implementation of Baumeisters original idea, that
is, a functional form of zoning that divided the city into the mosaic of different
land uses that can be observed in present-day zoning plans.53 Practically all
German cities were provided with similar plans by 1914 demonstrating how very
rapid the diffusion of this innovation was.54 Then, in 1916, zoning, as a term,
came into use when applied to New York. By 1921, 76 cities in the United States
had zoning plans and regulations. In 1926, this had risen to 564 and ten years
later to 1,322.55

Institutionalized from 1926 on in the United States, the year when the
Supreme Court made known its decision concerning its constitutionality, zon-
ing had entered urban planning law in Holland in 1901, in Sweden in 1907,
and in England in 1909; it then spread nearly everywhere in the world during
the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, in 1933, modern architecture gave its seal of
approval, in the Athens Charter, by officially recognizing zoning as the primary,
central task of urban planning. Within fifty years, zoning had practically become
synonymous with urban planning. Breaking with previous regulations which had
been principally concerned with alignments, the functional division of the city
as representable on a plan became the very substance of contemporary urban

planning whose objective would thenceforth be to manage the functioning and

development of the urban organism.
These developments were characterized by the promotion of zoning to the
status of a rational and scientific instrument. Consciously conceived as the means
of reformist policy in its original German version, zoning became a means of
ensuring the future location of objective urban functions. The political and ide-
ological content, therefore, tended gradually to be glossed over by a procedure
that appeared to be neutral because it was simple, a procedure that thenceforth
became normative. Very rapidly diffused through the channels of the interna-
tional network set up by urban planning professionals, it became naturalized
almost as quickly. The graphic character of zoning was one of the principal rea-
sons why this naturalization occurred so quickly, since it made the principles
266

governing the use of the land accessible at a glance. Synthesizing urban policy
into a single, easily interpreted document, the zoning plan rapidly became a
dominant form as a pure technical tool, which explains its extraordinary exter-
nal efficacy. The zoning plan claims, or rather demonstrates the claim, that these
are the functional, constructive characteristics of the different parts of the city
and this is the appropriate way to plan for their development in order to guar-
antee the optimal functioning of the city as a whole.
One should note here that, as part of the same movement, the plan estab-
lished itself as a central notion in urban planning; and it is interesting to observe
that its definition after 1920 had changed to mean what can be expressed in graphic
terms. 56 What resisted graphic treatment would be slowly pushed into the back-
ground, so that the diffusion of zoning therefore corresponded to the elabora-
tion of a form of urban planning which essentially depended upon visualizations.
This does not mean that urban planning was limited to dealing only with the
visible forms of the city, but it does mean that the elements dealt with by urban
planning would be taken into account all the more readily if they could be visu-
alized. The passage through graphic representation became a condition of entry
into the urban planners laboratory. Furthermore, it enabled the development

Figure 4 - Zoning in its primitive form: the zoning plan of Cologne according to build-
ing regulations (1901) (from Mancuso, Vicende).
 267

of reasoning specific to urban planning, which would not have had the same
efficacy without the use of this form of mediation.
Visualizing the non-visible, making reasoning and policies easier to grasp:
these are the issues I will be dealing with in studying the development of urban
social cartography in Great Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. This
third and last borehole in my analysis will thus attempt to show how urban plan-
ning was constructed in close association with the social sciences and in partic-
ular with social statistics.

Visualizing the invisible city

Whilst civil servants in Germany set out meticulously to imagine the instruments
and institutions of contemporary urban planning, the simultaneous develop-
ment of this form of social planning in England took place in a more inflam-
matory atmosphere. In Germany, the civil servants were trying to deal with
problems of demographic growth and increased social tension. In England, the
pauperization of large sectors of the population, highly precarious housing con-
ditions, disastrous sanitary conditions, and increased crime rates in the large
cities made the management of urban development an extremely sensitive issue,
the subject of a political debate with, in the front line, reformist movements
such as the Fabian Society.57 The Victorian slums, which were in the gradual
process of being assessed, were therefore to act as a catalyst.
British urban planning thus grew out of social concerns of great urgency, but
they were also the result of the convergence between these concerns and the
opening up of new fields of visibility in the nineteenth century. Patrick Geddes
(1854-1932) is an emblematic figure of this convergence. Trained as a biolo-
gist, this Scottish academic was one of the great proselytes and constructors of
the networks of the growing discipline.58 An ardent anarchist, he became the
instigator in Edinburgh and elsewhere of work in the field, done in collabora-
tion with and destined for the most disadvantaged sectors of the population. He
was also a visual obsessive, inveterately oculocentric, who attempted (and this

explains his interest in geography) to scale the whole world down to graphic
form.59 This ambition culminated in the Index Museum project, an enormous
graphic encyclopaedia, the ultimate and all-embracing form of the total museum
which he tried to make a reality, without much success, by making the 1900 Paris
World Fair permanent. His camera obscura in the heart of the old town of
Edinburgh is now a tourist attraction, still allowing a panoptical view of the city.
Although most of his undertakings were by no means successful, Geddes bore
witness to the establishment of new forms of knowledge and social management
towards the end of the nineteenth century. He developed, and argued in favour
of, the use of statistics and cartography within the framework of regional and
urban planning, notably in his numerous reformulations of the survey, an indis-
pensable first step in any development policy.50 These techniques created the
possibility of new means of gazing at the city.
268

T he opening up o f new fields o f visibility ...&dquo;

England indeed witnessed during the second half of the nineteenth century
the development of an urban cartography which increased the perception
and visibility of urban space. Technical innovations meant that one could
have at ones disposal a pocket-sized urban atlas in book form with a street
index, notably Collins Illustrated Atlas of the city of London published in 1854,
which was the first pocket map designed to be used in the street.61 These new
instruments of knowledge of the urban world helped impose a rational order
on a world which had many dark zones: disreputable, ill-frequented districts

making up vast unknown territories within the large cities. They thus par-
ticipated in the increased visibility of the city, and in particular in highlight-
ing the social differences that the analysis of the slums made it possible to
measure.
The living conditions of the poorer classes and above all the inaction of the
authorities - when compared notably with the great Haussmannian public works
in Paris - became more evident as a result. These various developments -
reformist political movements, cartographic representations of the city, social
inquiries, urban planning as the authorities response to the social problems -
came together in the famous inquiries carried out by Charles Booth in London
from 1886 on. These inquiries mark an important new threshold both in the
history of social policy and in the perfecting of the instruments making up the
urban planners laboratory.62 -

~_

, .>

Booth and social cartography

Booth, who started as a merchant and shipowner before devoting himself to

sociology, was the author of the first social inquiries based on a precise taxon-
omy of social categories. He was also the first to produce social maps covering
the entirety of an urban space.63 His inquiries lasted a total of seventeen years,
and were first concentrated upon the East End, the most deprived area of
London, before extending over the whole of the city. His objective was to pro-
vide a scientific study of the living conditions of the London population in order
to put an end to the doom-laden pictures and emotive descriptions produced
at the time on the subject of the deprived areas.64 He did not want to fall into
the trap of melodramatizing or of impressionism. He therefore decided to refuse
to use any data for which he could not provide quantitative values. In more pre-
cise terms, Booth wanted to establish the numerical relation which poverty, mis-
ery and depravity bear to regular earnings and comparative comfort, and to
describe the general conditions under which each class lives.6 This data was
collected by school inspectors, who would then write up their inspection notes.
For Booth, the publication of the data collected in this way represented a cru-
cial instrument for. the encouragement of the development of social reform.
The inquiry was therefore seen as a necessary preliminary step before real action
could be taken, and for this reason had to be presented with every possible guar-
antee of rigour.
.In his publications, Booth consequently insists several times on the scientific
 269

nature of his work and to this end works out an entire rhetoric of objectivity.
For example, he compares his work to a photographic snapshot of the situation
(fixing the facts upon my negative), the acme of neutrality at the time, and
describes preceding work on the East End as diametrically opposed to his own
(this curtain we have tried to lift ) .66 This objective gaze on the London slums
was
highly efficient, since it led to a neutralization of the moralizing discourse
on
poverty and was at the origin, as he wished it to be, of scientific social poli-
cies.67
The approach adopted by Booth to attain his objective was based first on the
creation of a statistical classification of social categories ranging from A, the low-
est class, to H, the upper middle class. He therefore created, from the notes
taken in the field by the inspectors, a taxonomy distinguishing between differ-
ent sectors in the social spectrum. 61 It is on this basis that he was able to pro-
duce the figure of 300,000 poor (classes A-D) in the East End69 and of 1,300,000
for the city as a whole - nearly a third of the total population at the time. The
impact of the figures on the public was enormous, and was reinforced by the
poverty maps which were included in the volumes of results dealing firstly with
the East End and then, a few years later, with the whole city.
These maps show the distribution of the seven classes of the population (G
and H are grouped together) according to a graphic semiology which drama-
tizes the visual effect: class A (Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal) is represented
in black, B in dark blue, G-H in yellow. What the maps do is, of course, to effect
a move from social to spatial logic: a particular class, when translated into car-

tographic terms, becomes a building, a block of houses, a street, an entire city

zone. In a certain sense, then, what one finds is a division of labour between

the geographer or field ethnologist and the study-based cartographer typical of

seventeenth- or eighteenth-century cartography. The former takes notes in the
field, whilst the latter synthesizes the information in the form of graphic rep-
resentations.

The social map and the basic units o f curative urban

planning
The move from social to spatial logic did not, however, constitute a perfect trans-
lation which left the representation exactly as it had been found. On the con-
trary, it transformed it: it added and subtracted information. In the context of
this study, efficacy of representation in urban planning has its origins in these
transformations.
It is possible in fact to discover within Booths inquiries themselves how dif-
ferent modalities of representation of urban space actually shape that space. The
discursive description leads on the one hand to the containment of the embod-
ied, empathetic and moral narrative of the inspectors, as in the following pas-
sage :
In the other room on the ground floor lived poor old Mrs. Berry, a widow, paralyzed
so as to be almost speechless. Still she pushed a barrow and sold mussels in the street,
270

and would sometimes be out many hours and travel many miles to take a few pence.
At other times she would do better. A quiet and contented woman, who kept her
room tidy, and although Irish was anxious to pay her rent.7

Mrs Berry is described here as an old handicapped widow, working hard for
meagre pay and an honest woman, though Irish. There is space in this descrip-
tion for the registering of subtle differences just as much as there is for the air-
ing of particular prejudices.
Once the form of inscription is changed, though, and one turns to the map,
where do we find Mrs Berry? She lived at 22 Shelton Street in central London.
Shelton Street is a black street, classified A. In other words, in the cartographic
representation, the good widow known personally by the school inspector is sub-
sumed into the class of vicious, semi-criminal no-hopers against which one must
wage a war without mercy.71
Clearly and importantly, the social map therefore made it possible to reason
about the city in terms of homogeneous spatial units. This reasoning is essen-
tial for urban planning: it could not in fact have developed in the context of
the complexity provided by discourse, that is to say, a context which distinguishes
between different inhabitants of the same building and which distinguishes
between the same persons objective poverty, say, and their honesty. Urban plan-
ning needs uniform data on sufficiently widespread urban zones, otherwise it
soon becomes as paralysed and speechless as the widow of Shelton Street.
Booths social cartography provided - just like the zoning plan, but with
greater precision and with other purposes - the instrument of this homoge-
nization whilst still preserving very high efficacy, since it remained sufficiently
detailed. The basic scale of the map used, that of the Ordnance Survey, made

Figure 5 - Descriptive map of London poverty, north-western sheet (from Booth, Life
and labour in London v, 1902).
 271

it possible to distinguish, if need

be, the location of different classes within the
same residential block of houses. The precision of the representation was there-
fore of a very high order: it pinpointed, as Topalov puts it, the &dquo;seedbeds&dquo; of
vice for the pickaxe of the demolition men.72 It thus isolated the basic homo-
geneous elements with which British urban planning would be dealing in the
early decades of the twentieth century: the slums. The slums seemed to take on
greater shape and form in the representation than in the inspections of the
sites.
This is not to say that social cartography was the only reason underlying the
development of curative urban planning. Nevertheless, it might be useful to con-
clude here by showing that it did encourage two central tendencies in contem-
porary urban planning. The first tendency is precisely this medical concept of
urban development.

Social cartography and the therapeutic paradigm

To think of urban development in terms of curative intervention designed to
heal society of its ills is not a nineteenth-century innovation. The historian of
urban planning Francoise Choay73 in fact dates it back to Thomas Mores Utopia
(1516), which founded one of the two principal forms of urban planning the-
ory : the therapeutic paradigm, which begins with a diagnosis of the illness in order
subsequently to offer a definitive solution by way of a total restructuring of the
urban form. This paradigm was developed and refined during the eighteenth
century by isolating particular intervention zones characterized by their
unhealthiness. What this involved was no longer making a clean sweep of the
urban past in order to create a definitive and perfect organization, but working
with what already existed and devising the most efficient solutions for the man-
agement of probable future changes in the urban context.74 The basic premiss
underlying this form of intervention is the notion of milieu - a term explic-
itly used in the nineteenth century - which acted as a system of reasoning
enabling one to identify the diseased, sensitive, or unhealthy sectors which
demanded priority treatment through urban planning therapy. This notion ren-
dered it possible to link the living conditions of a population (standards of
health, crime rate, alcoholism) to natural and physical data. Milieu was consid-
ered as exercising particular influences upon its inhabitants, and therefore cre-
ated a logical loop between effects and causes.75
It was clearly during the nineteenth century, with the development of envi-
ronmentalism and Darwinism, that this mode of reasoning really came into its
own, exercising an obvious influence on urban planning. The epistemic context
which was particular to the end of the nineteenth century led to the superim-
position of deviant behaviour upon particular urban sectors (characterized, for
example, by density, bad ventilation, and humidity). This superimposition took
the form of theories which in the long term influenced the perception of urban
problems: the theory of miasmas and pathogenic environments. In this frame-
work, what occurred, particularly in Victorian England, was the division of labour
between the social sciences responsible for drawing up a moral geography of
272

the city and the hygienists, who argued for curative urban planning interven-
tions.76
In this context, it becomes easier to understand the extraordinary efficacy of
Booths inquiry and in particular of the cartography of its results. Moral geog-
raphy, which until then had been the subject of partial and unsystematized obser-
vations, found in the map a (graphic) space which synthesized and organized
it. The social map gave the totalizing vision necessary for the existence of urban
planning and the precise location of sites that was needed for the targeted, ratio-
nal functioning of its therapeutic action. In this sense, the invention of social
cartography made a significant contribution to formulating the mission of urban
planning. The therapeutic paradigm was linked to the clinical gaze which this
form of visualization made it possible to impose upon urban space.
The second of the tendencies which seems to me to have been reinforced by
this adjunct to urban plannings range of instruments is the development of the
culture of the expert and its correlative: the devaluation of everyday experience
of the city.

Socialcartography and the legitimacy of the urban

planning gaze
Booth, as we have seen, devalues ordinary perception of urban space (engaged,
emotional, and distorted) at the same time as he uses arguments which aim at
establishing the neutrality and truth of his own representation of the living con-
ditions of the London population. What is interesting in this argumentative strat-
egy is that it tended to displace the contract of visual trust that the observer
established with urban space: it was no longer in the immediate vision of the
street or square that one could put ones trust, but in the mediated vision offered

by graphic inscription. It was not the gaze that the ordinary citizen could direct
upon the districts of London which would reveal the truth about these areas,
but the observation of the social map of those same districts. The ordinary gaze
only gave access to the particular case, by definition unrepresentative of the
whole, whilst the map could give a vision based on the aggregate (i.e. of homoge-
nous areas) which would spare one the useless emotions and doom-laden pes-
simism aroused by cases which were certainly dramatic, but which were in reality
marginal.
In other words, one had to pass by way of graphic mediation and by way of

this specialist instrument, worked out after many years of hard work, in order
to gain access to the truth about the city and to be able therefore to make judge-
ments about future needs in urban development. Immediate, routine experi-
ence of urban space and of the life spent within it found itself discredited. At
best, it had anecdotal value, but one could no longer rely on
ordinary urban
experience to form the basis of rational operations in urban planning. Social
cartography partakes therefore of an analysis of the city with claims to scien-
tificity whose ambition was the objectivization of social problems. It represented
in turn one of the principal vectors in the fabrication of a new figure: the expert
in urban matters, called upon to supplant the local citizen and his ordinary
 273

knowledge.77 It this body of investigative techniques issuing from statistics,

was

empirical sociology, and human geography which did in fact enable an inter-
pretation of the city to be constructed which was capable of supplanting the
moralizing discourse of the early social reform movements, and which therefore
led to the legitimizing of the constitution of a profession founded on a rational
approach to the city. The internal and external efficacy of the modes of repre-
sentation were therefore very closely interwoven.
Here again, it would be unwise to claim that the figure of the expert was
instantaneously constructed on the basis of the possession of such instruments.
Perspective had already, in the Renaissance, played an important role in the
process of social recognition of the architect. Nevertheless, the preceding
remarks allow one to show which material mechanisms and support systems char-
acterize expertise in the field of urban planning. This expertise is not - at least,
not exclusively - constituted by a deeper knowledge of urban space, or by train-

ing that enables the planner to reason in a more expert way about the city. It
is based on recourse to instruments which are commonplace today, but which
make it possible to legitimize the approaches and choices of the urban plan-
ner.78
The partial and imperfect perception of ordinary people is, indeed, frequently
opposed to the overview of the urban planner. It is clear, however, that this
overview is not a mysterious matter: it does not issue from extraordinary intel-
lectual skills, but rather is embodied in highly concrete material forms. And it
is these forms which constitute the exclusive domain of the expert who is at
once their producer and their user. What is important in this process, a process

which is furthermore a characteristic feature of the way science works, is not so

much that the expert demarcates a personal territory but rather that he devises
both the forms of the knowledge concerned (and of the decision-making) and
the conditions of its verification. In this way a circuit or network is constructed,
within which the urban planners truth about the city and its development can
circulate unchallenged.79
With the zoning plan and social cartography, we are still only at the initial
stage of contemporary urban planning, since planning only really came into its
own at the end of the Second World War. Nevertheless, the instruments of urban

planning have remained unchanged in any radical way since then. We have seen
how the master plan, the local plan, the zoning plan, and the building regula-
tion were all devised in the nineteenth century. With variations according to
national and regional contexts, the basic equipment of the urban planners lab-
oratory was therefore already in place. An obvious objection to this might be
that urban planning has for the last 25 years represented an extraordinary test-
ing-ground for new techniques of creating and apprehending the city.g This
would, however, be to overlook the great inertia of the instruments we have seen
gradually stocking the urban planners laboratory. They effectively constitute the
core of that laboratory, almost everywhere resisting the onslaught of new ways
of doing things. This basic skeletal structure is now so taken for granted that
one very
frequently forgets to question its impact on the procedures of urban
planning. This oversight seems to me to be the surest sign of the naturalization
274
of these mediations, and the fact that it occurs seems to legitimize the objec-
tives set at the beginning of this study.
The three boreholes made into the history of urban planning make it possi-
ble to understand certain circumstances which have influenced the creation of
urban plannings basic range of instruments. In all three cases, I have tried to
clarify the efficacy intrinsic to each of the techniques of representation I have
looked at. These techniques have several points in common, in relation to which
a general conclusion can be suggested.

Conclusions: individuals to obj ects/individuals as

objects
If one accepts the proposition, as I have done from the start, that modes of rep-
resentation, and in more general terms technical instruments, are not trans-
parent mediations, then one has to concede that the different instruments that
make up the urban planners laboratory during the period when this activity
became institutionalized have played a role in its definition. This role can be
evaluated by determining, as I have attempted here, the internal and external
efficacy of each of these techniques. It might be interesting in this respect to
go one step further and try to formulate a hypothesis concerning the family
resemblances between these different efficacies. This attempt is in fact what dis-
tinguishes the present study, since the social and historical context proper to
the chronological phase covering the birth of modern urban planning is well
documented.&dquo; But there has been no study that deals with the plurality of dif-
ferent histories left as a sediment, as it were, in each of the techniques grouped
together at the heart of the technology of urban planning when urban plan-
ning took its place in public administration and on university and technical train-
ing programmes.
These sedimented histories allow us to throw light on a process characteris-
tic of the evolution of urban planning in the twentieth century. This evolution
is characterized by a slippage of individuals towards objects. Contemporary
urban planning found its origin in the necessity of social reform in the light of
the living conditions of the most underprivileged categories of the population,
and of the dangers that they represented in terms of political stability. But urban
planning very quickly became, as we have seen, a practice claiming scientific sta-
tus, and as such an activity which had to purify itself of its political aspirations.
Social reform then gave way to a rational management of the urban organism,
implying an analytical division of urban planning into subdivided problems and
specialized fields, which encouraged its evolution towards bureaucracy and tech-
nocracy. This happened to such an extent that very often the discipline strikes
one today as essentially technical, complex, and hermetic.
The hypothesis I would like to put forward is that this evolution was in large
measure inscribed within urban planning technology, that is to say, within the
interconnected system of techniques situated at the heart of modern urban plan-
ning. The principal family resemblance between the ichnographic plan, the mas-
 275

ter plan, the zoning plan, and social cartography is that they synthesize the city
in terms of material objects, or individuals who are treated as objects, that is,
reduced to social types, operators of functions (living, working, travelling, recre-
ating) or of standard needs (norms of comfort, of noise, of household goods).
Urban plannings institutionalization and assumption of scientificity at the begin-
ning of the century by means of these instruments therefore signified as part
of the same movement: selecting/schematizing/synthetizing the urban world
according to the procedures common to these instruments. This entailed a grad-
ual moving away from social reform, which closely involved itself in the destiny
of concrete individuals, towards a management of forms and urban functions.
This privileging of objects, which we saw occurring in relation to the two forms
of inscription used by Booth, is partly intrinsic to the encoding procedures of
the graphic techniques that give priority to the visible, to material things, and
to the type, in preference to the invisible, immaterial, and particular.82
An essentially theoretical reading of the history of the discipline in terms of
a succession of paradigms, such as is often put forward, tends to ignore the iner-

tia of a range of instruments which continues to exercise its efficacy despite the
succession of ideas and phases of modern urban planning. Considering urban
planning as a form of visual thinking in action seems to me to make it possible
to understand, in new ways, the specificity of the discipline, its permanent fea-
tures, and certain of its current limitations.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Denis Cosgroveand to two anonymous referees for helpful com-
ments on an earlier version of this article. The research presented here consti-
tutes the first part of a longer study entitled L œil de 1expert: raison
urbanistique et amenagement dans les villes suisses, financed by the Fonds
National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique, Grant No 12-36284.92. A slightly
different version of this text is simultaneously published in Italian in Urbanistica
105 (1995), pp. 134-49, under the title Citt di carta: 1efficacia delle rappre-
sentazioni visive nella strutturazione dellurbanistica.

Instituteof Geography
University of Lausanne
BFSH 2
1015 Lausanne
Switzerland

Notes
1
R. Arnheim, Visual thinking (London, Faber & Faber, 1970), p. 278.
2
On this question, see J. Duncan, The city as text: the politics of landscape
representation in
the Kandyan kingdom (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990); J. Duncan and
N. Duncan, (Re)reading the landscape, Society and Space 6 (1988), pp. 117-26. For
contributions to the debate on one or the other of these questions, see T. Barnes and
J. Duncan, eds, Writing worlds: discourse, text and metaphor in the representation of land-
scape (London, Routledge, 1992); J. Duncan and D. Ley, Place/culture/representation
276

(London, Routledge, 1993). For a critique of textual metaphor in cultural geography,

see L. Mondada and O. Söderström, Du texte à linteraction: parcours à travers la

3
géographie culturelle contemporaine, Géographie et Cultures 8 (1993), pp. 71-82.
D. Cosgroves Social formation and symbolic landscape (London, Croom Helm, 1984),

4
published well over 10 years ago, is a notable exception.
J. B. Harley, Deconstructing the map, in T. Barnes and J. Duncan, Writing, pp.
231-47; C. Jacob, Lempire des cartes (Paris, Albin Michel, 1992); J. Schulz, La cartografia
tra artee scienza: carte e cartografi nel Rinascimento italiano (Modena, Franco Cosimo
Panini, 1990).
5
On landscape, for example: see F. Farinelli, I segni del mondo: immagine cartografica e
discorso geografico in età moderna (Scandicci, Nuova Italia, 1992); L. Mondada, F. Panese
and O. Söderström, Leffet paysager in Mondada, Panese, and Söderström, eds,
Paysage et crise de la lisibilité (Lausanne, Presses Centrales, 1992), pp. 335-83.
6
D. Livingstone "Never shall ye make the crab walk straight": an inquiry into the sci-
entific sources of racial geography, in F. Driver and G. Rose, eds, Nature and science:
essays in the history of geographical knowledge (Cheltenham, Historical Geography
Research Series No 28, 1992), pp. 37-48; J. Ryan, Visualizing imperial geography:
Halford Mackinder and the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee,
1902-1911, Ecumene 1 (1994), pp. 157-76.
7
Cf. G. Rose, Feminism and geography: the limits of geographical knowledge (Cambridge,

8
Polity Press, 1993); R. Deutsche, Boys town, Society and Space 9 (1991), pp. 5-30.
Though see two papers by P. Gabellini, Il disegno del piano, Urbanistica 82 (1986),
pp. 108-27, and Astengo e la codificazione del linguaggio visivo, in F. Indovina, ed.,
La ragione del piano: Giovanni Astengo e lurbanistica italiana (Milan, Franco Angeli,
1991); B. Secchi, Teoria del piano urbanistico e ricerca sociale: un programma di
ricerca (1), Archivio di studi urbani e regionali 42 (1991), pp. 41-63, and H. Raymond,
Architecture: les aventures spatiales de la raison (Paris, Centre de Création Industrielle,
1984).
9
Cf. M. Breheny and A. Hooper, eds, Rationality in planning: critical essays on the role of
rationality in urban andregional planning (London, Pion, 1985); J. Muller, From sur-
vey to strategy: twentieth century developments in western planning method, Planning
Perspectives 7 (1992), pp. 125-55; J. Forester, Planning in the face of power (Berkeley,
10
University of California Press, 1989).
See S. Woolgar, Science: the very idea (London, Tavistock, 1988) for a very general intro-
duction to these arguments.
11
B. Latour, Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society (Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press, 1987).
12 Latour has probably unleashed the most ferocious attack on epistemology in the lit-
erature, notably in his Les microbes: guerre et paix. Suivi de Irréductions (Paris, Métailié,
1984, pt. 2).
13
See esp. M. Lynch,M. Woolgar, and S. Woolgar, Representation in scientific practice
(Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1988); G. Fyfe and J. Law, eds, Picturing power: visual
depictions and social relations (London, Routledge, 1988); B. Latour, Les "vues de le-
sprit" : une introduction à lanthropologie des sciences et des techniques, Culture
Technique 14 (1985), pp. 5-29. I deal more fully with this question below.
14
R. Arnheim, Visual thinking (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969).
15I have touched on this question in a previous paper analysing a particular planning
controversy; see O. Söderström, The moral power of representation: trust, rational-
ity and urban planning, in F. Farinelli, G. Olsson, and D. Reichert, eds, Limits of rep-
resentation (Munich, Accedo, 1994), pp. 155-74. Among the many texts that deal with
 277

this question in the domain of the sciences. See Lynch et al., Representation.
16
On these issues of coding and expert knowledge, see C. Goodwin, Professional vision,
American Anthropologist 96 (1994), pp. 606-33.
17
Once formulated in these terms, the analysis of representations in urban planning
may be compared to work which has recently led to a critical reform of the history
of cartography. See references in n. 3.
18
Latour, Science.
19
Planners, especially if they are trained architects, might find the term laboratory
offensive: from their point of view, urban planning has more to do with intuition, art,
and politics than science. This may very well be true, but notwithstanding, as recent
work in anthropology of the sciences and technology has shown, the differences
between these various fields are much less important than they may seem at first sight.
Thus there are important similarities to be observed between the procedures of the
human sciences and those of the laboratories of the experimental sciences: in both
cases, scale representations of the objects of study, enabling combination and synop-
tic apprehension by a researcher or professional, are essential procedures. In both
cases also, specialists would be rendered powerless if they had to do without the instru-
ments which stock their laboratories. On this parallel, see M. Callon, Le travail de la

20
conception en architecture in Les cahiers de la recherche architecturale (forthcoming).
Cf. B. Latour and S. Woolgar, Laboratory life: the social construction of scientific facts
(London, Sage, 1979) and, for an opposing view, P. Rabinow, Studies in the anthro-
21
pology of reason, Anthropology Today 8 (1992), pp. 7-10.
In this case, as with many others, a discursive formation and practice thought to have
been fathered, as it were, by the nineteenth century, localized in an epistemological
configuration which is said to have its origins at the turn of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, really only consecrate changes that have already occurred and only
define fields which had already been theorized in the fifteenth century (F. Choay,
La règle et le modèle, Paris, Seuil, 1980, p. 11).
22 M. Serres, Gnomon: les débuts de la géomètrie en Grèce, in M. Serres, ed., Eléments
dhistoire des sciences (Paris, Bordas, 1989).
23
Cf. the fine books by C. Frugoni, Una lontana città: sentimentie immagini nel Medioevo
(Turin, Einaudi, 1983) and P. Zumthor, La mesure du monde (Paris, Seuil, 1993).
24
On this aesthetic, see the classical texts recently re-edited by A. Grabar, Les origines de

25
lesthétique médiévale (Paris, Macula, 1992).
This paper focuses on graphic representations of the city. On the production and use
of models, see Rassegna 32 (1988), a special number on architectural models, esp. the
article by R. Pacciani which underlines the importance of models in simulating static
behaviour in the Renaissance: I modelli lignei nella progettazione rinascimentale,
Rassegna 32 pp. 6-19. Cf. also the recent article by H. A. Millon, I modelli architet-
tonici nel Rinascimento in Millon and V. Magnago Lampugnani, eds, Rinascimento:
da Brunelleschi a Michelangelo: la rappresentazione dellarchitettura (Milan, Bompiani,
1994), pp. 19-73. Millons analysis looks at the long tradition of model production
since classical times, and identifies its different possible functions in the building
process (as project tool, as representation designed to ensure the patrons agreement,
as visible candidatures in architectural and planning competitions, and finally as guide
for the effective realization of the project). It is very rare, according to Millon, to find
builders, like Leon Battista Alberti, using models as concept tools. The majority of
them would consider the models as communication or project tools, so it is this aspect
which has conditioned my choice.
26
Choay, La règle.
278
27 For a description of Albertis multifarious activities, see J. Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti:
universal man of the Renaissance (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1969) ; and, more
recently, the exhibition catalogue edited by J. Rykwert and A. Engel, Leon Battista
Alberti (Milan, Electa, 1994).
28
The reason we can call this method innovative is because classical Forma urbis - an
extremely precise map of Rome - remained unknown until 1559, a date at which a
planimetric tradition already had developed independently of classical precedent and
with Alberti as guiding principle. For more on this subject, see J. A. Pinto, Origins
and development of the ichnographic city plan, Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians (1976), pp. 35-50.
29
L. Vagnetti, La Descriptio urbis Romae: uno scritto poco noto di Leon Battista Alberti,
Quaderno dellIstituto di Architettura e Rilievo dei Monumenti di Genova 1, pp. 25-59. For
an analysis of the context within which the method was produced, see L. Mondada
et al., Leffet paysager.
30
In the sense in which Habermas talks about knowledge-constitutive interest in

31
Knowledge and human interest (London, Heinemann, 1978).
Pinto, Origins.
32 This interpretation has been disputed recently by research which attributes the plan
of Imola to Danieso Maineri, a Lombard engineer who, it is supposed, drafted the
document some time between 1472 and 1474, basing himself on Albertian transcrip-
tion methods. Cf. L. Vagnetti, Roma nel gioco matematico di Leon Battista Alberti,
in G. Macchi, ed., Artee scienza per il disegno del mondo (Milan, Electa, 1983), pp. 46-51.
Leonardo, according to this theory, only intervened some 30 years later by adding
some final touches to the document.
33
It was German cartographers, especially at Nuremberg, who most eagerly took up the
Italian innovations, becoming very quickly the main producers of ichnographic rep-
resentations, as Bonifaz Wohlmuets plans of Vienna demonstrate (1547) and Augustin
Hirschvogels of the same city (1552). These map-makers rapidly became a school,
owing to the popularizing effects of map-making and planimetric manuals which soon
made ichnographic plans the standard visualizing technique (Pinto, Origins, p. 49).
34
C. W. Westfall, In this most perfect paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V and the invention of con-
scious town planning in Rome 1447-1455 (London, Pennsylvania University Press, 1974).
35
For information about Borgo Leonino and Albertis role, see T. Magnuson, The pro-
ject of Nicholas V for rebuilding the Borgo Leonino in Rome, Art Bulletin 36 (1954),
36
pp. 89-115.
M. Foucault, The order of things (New York, Random House, 1973).
37 This does not mean that Alberti was a conscious urban planner in the modern sense,
but that his visual creativity was crucial to the future development of this activity.
38
There is a highly detailed and interesting study of Jacopos view by J. Schulz. Earlier
but more pictorially coded are Francesco Rossis views, notably of Naples (1465),
which are forerunners of the genre. Cf. J. Schulz, Jacopo de Barbaris view of Venice:
map making, city views, and moralized geography before the year 1500, Art Bulletin
55 (1978), pp. 425-74.
39
Schulz, op. cit., has, however, ruled out the hypothesis that a systematic survey of Venice
must have been undertaken to produce the view. He clearly demonstrates the many
distortions existing between the dimensions and position of the represented forms
and their exact dimensions and position, even if we readjust these measurements in
the light of the rules of perspective.
40
For D. Cosgrove, Jacopos view represents a synthesis between the map of the world
produced by Venetian cartographers and the nascent genre of the pianta prospettiva:
 279
The Palladian landscape: geographical change and its cultural representations in sixteenth-cen-
tury Italy (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1993), ch. 7.
41
F. Farinelli, I segni del mondo: immagine cartografica e discorso geografico
in età moderna
(Scandicci, Nuova Italia, 1992), pp. 17-34.
42
Farinelli also observes that geometrical representation constitutes a useful instrument
for the economic management of an urban space, for it privileges exchange values
rather than use values, putting the emphasis on the surface area and position of build-

43
ings.
Eighteenth-century military authorities had great difficulty reading these city plans,
and maps were strange and incomprehensible to many soldiers during the nineteenth
case of the inferiority complex - as far as geo-
century. This is particularly clear in the
graphical knowledge is concerned - developed by the French after the defeat of 1870
at the hands of the Germans. Cf. V. Berdoulay, La formation de lécole française de géo-

44
graphie (1870-1914) (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, 1981).
Le Corbusier is a typical example. The way he locked himself into graphic space bor-
ders on a Copernican reversal of the purposes of representation: the space on the
geometrical plan is to be converted into real space and not the other way round. The
good city must accord with the rationality of the geometrical drawing. On this topic,
see Raymond, Architecture, pp. 30-45.
45
To do justice to this subject would necessitate a history, as yet unwritten (at least not
in its entirety) of cadastral surveying, since the selection process effected by modern
planimetry is part and parcel of the long and complex story of property and the dif-
ferent modes of its inscription. This history would help one to distinguish the advan-
tages gained by graphic inscription of information which during the Middle Ages was
publicized, first in oral then in written form, and then as a plan raised to the eye;
the raised plan was perfected towards the end of the seventeenth century through
improvements in surveying techniques (the planchette). Apart from producing precise
images of the structure of buildings, these representations had an immediate effect
on urban planning, since they led to the systematization of land tax, which accumu-

lated money which could then be invested into urban planning. Cf. S. Malfroy, Les
documents cadastraux comme sources pour la connaissance de la morphogenèse
urbaine et territoriale, Départment dArchitecture, École Polytechnique Fédérale de
Lausanne, unpublished paper.
46
For an inventory of these meetings, a list of the principal journals, and an anthology
of the German manuals between 1871 and 1914, see G. Piccinato, La costruzione
dellurbanistica: Germania 1871-1914 (Rome, Officina Edizioni, 1974).
47
On the subject of the great continuity in urban planning practices in Germany, see
H. Häussermann, Stadtplanung: Machtkampf, Kunst oder Fachdisziplin?, Leviathan
1, pp. 102-16.
48
In his survey of German urban planning, Piccinato (Costruzione, p. 92) insists (rightly
when one reads Baumeisters text) on the importance of purely economic motives in
Baumeisters reasoning: the main objective, which conditions and justifies all others,
is to maximize and distribute in an even manner the wealth deriving from the rise in
the value of the land.
49
F. Mancuso, Le vicende dello zoning (Milan, II Saggiatore, 1978), p. 23.
50
For a description and detailed interpretation of the social and economic determi-
nants of zoning, see op. cit. Mancusos definition of zoning (p. 22) is the following:
an instrument designed for administrative and planning purposes whose basic func-
tion is to regulate the real-estate business within the confines of a town or city. It is
based upon the principle of subdivision of the town/city into zones, assigning to each
280

of them definite parameters governing construction.

51
Baumeister, Stadterweiterungen in technischer, baupolizeilicher und wirtschaftlicher Beziehung
(1876) ; cited from Piccinato, Costruzione, pp. 225-6. Hippodamos of Miletus had
already defined three different zones, corresponding to the structure of the urban
activities of the time: the sacred, the public, and the private.
52
Latour ),Science when discussing this characteristic of laboratory work, speaks of re-
(
53
representation.
In the following few sentences concerning the rapid adoption of zoning, I am
indebted to Mancuso, Vicende.
54
It is interesting to note that Baumeisters professional activity, like that of Joseph
Stübben, author of a monumental and influential manual published between 1883
and 1933, led him to suggest highly pragmatic modes of administrative organization
for the public services concerned in urban planning. Stübben, for example, clarifies
the division of roles of the different public services.
55
More than was the case in Germany, zoning was explicitly used in the US as an instru-
ment of social segregation, functioning to prohibit certain activities in defined zones.
56
J. P. Gaudin, Lavenir en plan: technique et politique dans la prévision urbaine 1900-1930
(Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 1985).
57
For a description of the sociohistorical conditions underlying the emergence of urban

planning in Great Britain, see P. Hall, Cities of tomorrow: an intellectual history of urban
planning and design in the twentieth century (Oxford, Blackwell, 1988), ch. 2. Hall in fact
traces the origin of contemporary urban planning back to this period.
58 H. Meller, Patrick Geddes: social evolutionist and city planner (London, Routledge, 1990).
59
Op. cit., chs. 4 and 5; see also D. Matless, Regional surveys and local knowledges: the
geographical imagination in Britain, 1918-39, Transactions of the Institute of British
60
Geographers 17 (1992), pp. 464-80.
The dominance of political geography, and of the figure of Mackinder, over British
geography was the principal cause of the failure of Geddes project to develop applied
geography during the period.
61
H. J. Dyos, A Guide to the Streets of Victorian London, in D. Cannadine and D.
Reeder, eds, Exploring the urban past: essays in urban history by H. J. Dyos (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1982) pp. 190-201. Dyos shows that these innovations
were produced in the context of the development of tourism in London and of the

gradual transformation of the city into a vast open-air exhibition. On this topic, see
also D. Gregory, Geographical imaginations (Oxford, Blackwell, 1994), ch. 1.
62
It will soon be clear why Geddes, when he heard of Booths inquiries, expressed his
great admiration for the investigation.
63
For an excellent analysis of the cognitive logic used by Booth in both fields, see C.
Topalov, La ville "terre inconnue": lenquête de Charles Booth et le peuple de
Londres, 1886-1891, Genèses 5 (1991), pp. 5-34, translated as The city as terra incon-
gnita : Charles Booths poverty survey and the people of London, 1886-1891, Planning
Perspectives 8 (1993), pp. 395-425. Page references in the following notes are to the
original French text.
64
P. Rabinows work on the emergence of urban planning in France relativizes some-
what the novelty of Booths inquiries. He shows how in Paris and Nantes extremely
detailed inquiries were indeed carried out from the mid-nineteenth century on, fol-
lowing the 1832 cholera epidemic. What is important, however, is not the fixing on
a date and place of origin, but rather the development at the time of new
configu-
rations of power/knowledge, as Foucault and Rabinow would say; and it is in this
respect that Booth probably introduced the most efficient instruments. See P.
 281

Rabinow, French modern: norms and forms of the social environment (Cambridge, MA, MIT
Press, 1989).
65
C. Booth, Life and labour in London (New York, Kelley, 1969; first published 1902) I,
p. 6.
Op.
66
67
cit., pp. 26, 172.
Topalov, op. cit., Charles Booth, p. 21. On this same subject, but dealing with social
inquiries in France in the mid-twentieth century, see I. Astier and J.-F. La6, La notion
de communauté dans les enquêtes sociales sur lhabitat en France: le groupe dé-
conomie et humanisme, 1940-1955, Genèses 5 (1991), pp. 81-106.
68
69
Topalov analyses this taxonomy in Charles Booth.
70
Op. cit., p. 26.
Booth, Life II, p. 56.
71
These are Booths own terms: he believed it was necessary to treat those whom he
qualified as savage separately from the deserving poor, for whom aid policies needed
to be developed.
72
Charles Booth, pp. 17-18.
73
Choay, La règle.
74
In this difference between social organization and exercise of power, Foucault locates
the difference between a disciplinary society ( ) and a society of security
société disciplinaire
). He identifies urban planning as the field of activity best suited to
société de sécurité
(
illustrate this phenomenon. See M. Foucault, De la gouvernementalité: introduction aux
cours des années 1978 et 1979 (tape-recording) (Paris, Seuil, 1989). Cf. also Rabinow,

French modern, who develops this analysis.

75
Foucault, Gouvernementalité.
76 F. Driver, Moral geographies: social science and the urban environment in the mid-
nineteenth century in England, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 13
(1988), pp. 275-87.
77
On this point, see C. Topalov, De la "question sociale" aux "problèmes urbains": les
réformateurs et le peuple des métropoles au tournant du XXe siècle, Revue
Internationale des Sciences Sociales 125 (1990), pp. 359-76.
78
On this subject, see my preliminary work on authorized and legitimate representa-
tion within the framework of urban conflict: Söderström, Moral Power.
79
The construction of these networks, sometimes compared to cold chains that guar-
antee the preservation of the truths of science, has been the subject of recent stud-
ies in the anthropology of science and technology, notably the collection of essay
edited by M. Callon, La science et ses réseaux: genèse et circulation des faits scientifiques
(Paris, La Découverte, 1989).
80
To get an idea of the extent of these experiments and of the complex dance of par-

81
adigms in the field, see in particular Breheny and Hooper, Rationality.
G. Piccinato, Costruzione; Hall, Cities; C. Topalov, Lurbanisme comme mouvement
social, Annales de la Recherche Urbaine 44-5 (1989), pp. 139-54; Topalov, Charles
Booth; Question; A. Sutcliffe, ed., The rise of modern urban planning, 1800-1914
(London, Mansell, 1980); Rabinow, French modern.
82 This explanation is not in itself sufficient, since it is quite possible to represent social
practices in graphic terms and to comprehend meetings or routes taken, for exam-
ple, through a drawing. But these more recent modes of representation, have not
made their way into the urban planners laboratory.