7th Megacities Lecture:

As in 2002, the 7th Megacities Lecture took place at the head office of the ING Group in Amsterdam. The speaker was Richard Sennett, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. Arnold Reijndorp gave the co-review and the final discussion was chaired by Roger van Boxtel.

Professor Richard Sennett announced that his lecture would involve more questions - and provocations - than answers. Although his professional work is primarily theoretical, he chose to focus on concrete issues: the way modern capitalism affects social categories, political conditions, ethnicity and the community.
Many of us consider community and ethnicity as fixed. We therefore fail to see how both are transformed by the enormous and fundamental changes generated by neo-liberalism in the recent past. Up to now these changes have been more manifest in the United States and Great Britain than in the rest of Europe. To illustrate the full significance of these changes, Professor Sennett compared the present situation with the sociological model Max Weber presented a hundred years ago. In this 'Weberian pyramid', labour is organised on the lines of a clear, almost military hierarchy. Everyone knows who he or she is. The pyramid is the basis for a sense of community and a lifelong, shared narrative. In the last 25 years, however, neo-liberalism has led to the collapse of the pyramid, and it is the megacity that has been affected most.
The Weberian pyramid has been replaced by a concentration of power on the one hand and fragmentation of labour on the other. The Microsoft Corporation is a case in point. In this company, power has been concentrated in a very small group at the top; at the same time, middle management has been cut back severely. Many different teams work alongside each other, without much coordination. Old style labour analysts think this is a mess but Microsoft's approach has actually proven very effective.
There has also been a fundamental change in terms of time. Traditional work is based on repeating similar tasks during a long period, producing a fixed identity. These days, companies tend to prefer short projects. Microsoft usually organizes teams for a specific task that lasts, say, nine months. As a consequence employees experience work more as a transaction than as a relationship, and labour loses its narrative and communal qualities. Work identity becomes more obscure.

Megacities like New York, London and Beijing are the places where this trend is most manifest. They are, so to speak, neo-liberal territories. The effects are visible in at least three fields: ethnic relations, community and poverty.
To start with, it may be a surprise to learn that neo-liberal companies tend to be very benevolent to migrant labour. Most migrants are unorganised individuals and therefore very suitable for work in the flexibilised labour market. They are prepared to do jobs for limited periods of time and their expectations do not include lifelong careers. Moreover, as people don't need each other any more for longer periods, relations become indifferent and identities become fragmented. This leaves us with the difficult task of keeping cities together.
Flexibilised firms also give new opportunities to other groups. Young women, for instance, are much more easily hired as firms don't bother about their 'risk' of getting pregnant. Retired people also qualify for shorter-term tasks. At the same time, traditional family life is losing ground. In London, 37% of households already consist of just one person (while urban planning is still wrongfully founded on families with two or three children).
Given the new forms of community, it makes no sense to stick to the language of the traditional neighbourhoods. Nowadays it seems more appropriate to build communities around work, as that is where people spend most of their time. But here too planning is oriented backwards. Community planning is still about where people sleep, instead of where people work.
With regard to poverty, it is commonly supposed that neo-liberalism has created greater disparities between the rich and the poor. This supposition, however, requires modification. In fact, neo-liberalism has opened up more opportunities for people at the bottom. The real issue is the position of the people in the middle. That is where wealth sharing stagnates. Dynamism at the top mirrors stagnation in the middle, not at the bottom. The welfare state deals reasonably well with real poverty. But if the decline of the middle is not addressed, the outcome will be that the losers' resentment will lead to attacks on groups at the bottom who are weaker than themselves.
Professor Sennett admitted he had presented a gloomy lecture. Ethnicity will be replaced by mutual indifference, not only between ethnic groups, but also between generations. Fragmentation is becoming a way of life, but fragmentation prevents cities from cohering. As announced at the beginning of his talk, Professor Sennett had no answers to the questions he raised, only the recommendation that we urgently need to change our mind set about what cities look like.

Co-review by Arnold Reijndorp
The co-review was given by Arnold Reijndorp, who was announced as "an independent researcher and consultant at the cutting edge of urbanism, social developments and cultural trends in the urban field". The full text of his contribution can be read elsewhere on this site.
Mr. Reijndorp praised Sennett's "combination of social consciousness and intellectual incisiveness", but at the same time he questioned some of his arguments. In Mr. Reijndorp's view Sennett overlooks some new perspectives in the development of cities. In that respect, Mr. Reijndorp places his hopes on what he calls the creative city. The concept of the creative city is based on the idea that the true capital of cities is to be found in people's creative capacities. For the creative city, immigrants are a pre-condition, not an obstacle. Moreover, the creative city may support a revaluation of craftsmanship.
An essential development in cities is the emergence of new social groups. Not only immigrants, but also the category known as 'new urbanites' or the 'creative class'. On the other hand, there is a group of citizens who feel increasingly threatened. As these citizens give up being the cultural generator of cities, it is up to the new groups to take over this role. They must help the shift from the informational to the creative city.

Debate
The debate that followed Reijndorp's co-review was moderated by Roger van Boxtel, former minister of urban and integration policy.
First, Professor Sennett was asked if Mr. Reijndorp's creative class could provide prospects for the declining middle groups he had mentioned. Professor Sennett replied that one needs to be more specific about the meaning of 'creative'. He endorsed the value of the notion of the creative city, but at the same time he noted that it is mostly the creative 'upper middle class' that benefits. Mr. Reijndorp admitted that the creative class is not a large group. But creative people are in a position to act as a cultural generator and to build bridges between communities.
Another questioner thought he had found a contradiction in the lecture. First, Professor Sennett had stressed that work is losing its capacity to provide people with identity, and then he suggested that communities should be built around the workplace. Professor Sennett agreed that this is an important issue. As we cannot go back to the Weberian pyramid, ways must be found to build 'work identity' by establishing a longer time frame for fragmented work.
The concept of developing communities at the workplace seems to conflict with the idea of working at home using electronic communications. Professor Sennett thought this idea belonged to the nineties. He even qualified it as a bad use of information technology. The dynamism of work requires personal contact. It depends on informal encounters at, for instance, the water cooler. For the same reason, he opposes the flexible office where nobody has his or her own workplace. That too undermines the emergence of a community.
Finally, Professor Sennett pointed out that making communities is not the only challenge. We also desperately need social bonds that are not, like communities, founded on mutual understanding. "For that our capacity is much greater," he emphasised.

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