Mimes Over Matter

Purpose
    My Senior Project The Conscious City: Planning for Freedom is the culmination of my investigation on freedom over the last year 2012-2013.   What I set out to do was understand better what freedom is, uncover a problem that freedom can help to solve, and introduce a solution that incorporates freedom.  I feel the subject of freedom is an extremely important topic and should not just be relegated to political science.  Freedom in some form affects basically every single human experience, from food systems to developmental education, to urban planning.  
    Raised in a culture that values freedom so much, to the point that we go to war to enforce it in other counties, I was curious to understand what freedom even is, to see if I am free or how I can become free.  What became of the project is something very similar to my yoga and meditation practices.  It has become a very deep stretch, one that I am patiently and consciously settling deeper and deeper into.  I have not yet mastered the position, so this is not me trying to create anything drastically new.  What I am doing is breathing into the small subtleties that will allow me to personalize the stretch I am undertaking.  As I progress and become more flexible, patient, and aware, the goal is to master the stretch so as to bring its lessons into my daily life.  
    It is my belief that almost anything of worth takes times and patience to develop fully.   I see this project as my first real step in developing my philosophical and critically conscious self.  This project is an affirmation and a promise that hard work and intention pay off.  Through this project, I not only get to further my understanding of Freedom, I get to utilize the concept I am passionate about to propose a solution to a problem from which many people suffer.  With this being said, engaging freedom is an important and helpful way to start living and creating a better life.  

 

Preface
    The Conscious City: Planning for Freedom refers to what I believe is one of the most fundamental and important aspirations a person can have: the intention for consciousness.  Like almost any complex subject one word can’t encompass the totality behind the concept.  Consciousness is no exception, its meaning changes and deepens the more it is explored.  As I look into the situations I find myself occupying in the 21st century, I realize that to be truly conscious, people must also be free.  
     When I lived in Portland back in 2007 one of my favorite pastimes was to adventure out at night, exploring the city which seemed almost vacant, illuminated by neon brilliance.  I would sit under an overpass or walk along the waterfront imagining what the city would say if it could speak.  Would it be happy with how it’s being used, would it appreciate more parks, fewer cars, the same or a new economic structure?  I came to the conclusion that the city, like its people, is the product of the environmental, economic, and cultural structure it was built to serve.  Yet like a person, each city is a unique entity occurring nowhere else in the world.  In order to be conscious, a city must be free; and for the city to be free, the people who inhabit the city must be free.
    Aristotle claims that a thing is not some representation of an abstract ideal, but a product of its parts (Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, 1999).  For humans this distinction is especially true, what we are comprised of is a combination of the society we live in and the virtues we build over time.  Virtues are the ethical building blocks for Aristotle and the avenue for morality.  He thought that through continued action and rational discipline, what a person does and thinks on a daily basis is who he becomes.  If we practice and think about math all day we will develop the virtues consistent with being a mathematician, and eventually if we are dedicated enough and put the time in problems that were once hard will become easy; what was once unnatural to us becomes natural through hard work.  Aristotle also expresses a warning, that WHATEVER we spend our time doing we will become, so it is so important to be aware. A soldier will be a good killer, a thief a good stealer, an exploiter of animals a good exploiter.
    Cities develop in the same way; they are the conglomerate of their parts.  The city’s characteristic is determined by the people who inhabit it, their characteristics and values which in turn creates an environment which superimposes itself on the very same people who live there.  This cycle both for the city itself and the people who interact with the city can be extremely negative and subjugating when not addressed, examples of this range from racism, degraded public health, and alienation.  
    In this paper, I will be addressing the problem of alienation.  My method of inquiry will follow that of critical theory, which I believe to be a positive and productive way of using theory to help solve a problem.  Unlike traditional theory which is implemented to understand and demystify the unknown, critical theory has the goal of changing society (Allmendinger, 2009).  Summed up, critical theory’s purpose is “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer, 1982).  The common thread that ties critical theory together is the pursuit of emancipation.  Writing within the socio-economic structure of capitalism, theorists such as Karl Marx, Jurgen Habermas, and Herbert Marcuse wrote about fundamental issues of subjugation which have a narrowing effect on human experience. 
    Expanding on their ideas, I state that alienation is still subjugating people in the 21st century; exacerbated in fact by the way capitalist cities are structured.   To stop alienation, I argue people must be free; freedom cannot be forced.  However, through the subjugating forces of capitalism people have become alienated from freedom.  To facilitate people in discovering freedom in their own way, I claim the city needs to offer more avenues for personalized experiences.  To do this I introduce what I call sentimental planning because it is inspired by David Hume’s ethics.  Sentimental planing is a method of planning which melds feeling and rationality so as to expand epistemology, giving more tools to city planners so as to help them design for freedom. 
    In the following pages, freedom will be described in different ways: liberty, free will, and self-determination.  While there are important distinctions between these concepts, for the purpose of my argument, their meaning with be handled in the same manner, roughly self-determination. Also, I do not define the freedom that I am exploring to be political, individual, spiritual, or physical.  Freedom unless stated otherwise is freedom in its totality, a freedom that together we are trying to understand and have a conversation about.     

 

Introduction
    This essay embraces the human experience as one that is becoming increasingly urban.  As the tribulations and triumphs of the 21st century continue to unfold the City will continue to take center-stage, becoming the iconic snap-shot of human development.   From smog-filled skies and children in rags to carbon neutral and community gardens, the City is the battleground for the soul of humanity.  To overlook the City is to discredit humanity, it is to devalue the magnificent effort of the generations that came before us, and it is to withdraw from the challenges that lie before us.  To invite progress, questions must be asked and ways of being must be examined.  Critically, and with the intention of love we must not only ask what is the City but how does the city make us feel?     
    The City is a living entity, always in flux, a mosaic of the society it serves.  The City is a relic of the past and the catalyst for the future, yet it is in the present where the City is truly experienced.  To question the City is not an easy task.  Where and how we live is such an intrinsic part of us that by questioning the City we are actively investigating and questioning ourselves, which is imperative yet somewhat an uncomfortable prospect.  For the purpose of this paper which is written with the intention of bringing attention back to a problem that has been systematically diminishing the human experience for the past 200 years, the claim is made that we must look at the city so as to readdress the crisis of alienation.  Alienation is a destructive and subjugating force that is the product of a technologically advanced capitalistic society that values functional rationality over substantial rationality (Bell, 1961 p.24).  Spilling over into the 21st century, alienation is the product of a capitalist system which has been subjugating people from the beginning of modernity.  Today it is exacerbated globally by much of what the capitalist culture promotes as essential, such as instrumental rationality, science, efficiency, profit, progress, consumption, and conformity. 
    The hope of this paper is to introduce a solution for the problem of alienation with regards to starting the conversation on how to explore and conceptualize new ways of thinking about and valuing our world so as to break the chains of alienation and all other contemporary world problems.  To accomplish this goal this paper is separated into three unique yet interconnected sections: Past, Future, and Present.  These sections are implemented to reinforce the multi-dimensional complexity of the problems we face.  
    The term Past is used to refer to the dogma, baggage, and pressures that affect both the present and the future.  It is the metaphysical and material substances that we don’t really have any control over.  The Past includes our biology, the culture, time period we are born into, as well as all known and unknown antecedent pressures on our lives.  The point here is that yes, the past has an influence on us yet the past is also an illusion, meaning the past itself only exists as memory or interpretations of physical or mental occurrences.   The Future, on the other hand, is fantasy.  It is what we hope will happen or what we fight to ensure does not happen.  Future projections, hopes, and desires act as a guide helping goals and actions that occupy the past and present to be addressed.  However the future is never certain and just like the past should always be considered critically, playfully, and lovingly.  For knowing that somewhere out there the future waits, gives the past importance and helps the present derive its meaning.  However, both the past and future when taken as absolutes can lead to stagnation, sorrow, and dogma which will turn the gifts of reflection and foresight into an Iron Cage.   The present is the most important experience, for it is malleable and is where we truly reside.  The present is where we interact with the world; it is where we change our lives.  Undeniably the only thing that we are certain of is what is happening right now right now.    
    This paper begins with a section in the Past, where alienation, which has been a problem of capitalist societies ever since its creation s introduced.  The discussion of alienation is positioned in the past because it is an epidemic problem that has been developing for over 200 years.  It is a problem that is affecting the present moment and that is why it must be dealt with, and yes it will continue to affect the future, however, to really understand and to deal with alienation properly is to address it at its core.  For almost as long as alienation existed people have been writing and fighting to diminish it.  Yet it still exists and is still very prevalent, taken as normal, accepted, and seen as just life in the 21st century.  The place to start addressing alienation is by looking at how it is affecting our cities.  Because many people are resistant to change and introspection is not a social norm, what is needed to combat alienation is the promotion and facilitation of freedom, so that people on their own will start unalienating themselves.   
    The next section deals with freedom and is entitled Future.  The future is a hope of what is to come.  This hope revolves around the concept of Freedom and is the fantasy that one-day humanity can be free from alienation.  Fantasies are not bad as they can push certain actions so that the fantasy can be reached, however, fantasies can be an escape rather than working for change.  When considering ‘freedom’ within the context of the future the hope is to inspire and give meaning to people right now who are looking to change.  To create meaning there must be a level of understanding and personalization available; this is why the discussion on freedom is presented as a conversation so that the writer and reader can learn together.  This is done by addressing freedom through asking questions.  The first is very important and asks is freedom even possible?  Next, the question is what is freedom? The last question is how can freedom help to mitigate alienation?  What the future section offers is a reassurance that freedom does exist.  The goal is to make the concept of freedom more assessable so as to facilitate people to start becoming free.  To do this it is argued that freedom encompasses both negative and positive liberty and that these two concepts of liberty are symbiotic and inseparable.  Described last is a freedom using Jean-Paul Sartre’s positive liberty and John Stewart Mills’s negative freedom so as to investigate a way to start diminishing alienation.  
    The last section is titled Present and introduces a solution to the problem of alienation.  The solution is the promotion of freedom through design and planning using a process called Sentimental Planning.  Sentimental Planning is a conscious melding of rationality and feeling so as to access new ways of viewing and addressing both problems and solutions.  Sentimental Planning utilizes the philosophy of David Hume to argue that to transcend alienation we must expand our ethics so as to interact and view the world in new ways.  To justify this claim, Hume argued that sentiment is a natural and an easily accessible human characteristic that can be used to the same effectiveness as rationality in understanding and developing projects.  By using sentiment in planning and design, professional planners, politicians, and concerned citizens have added another way for problem-solving and for addressing the complexities of modern living.   
    The purpose of this paper is not to just argue that alienation is a big threat to the 21st century; this has been done countless of times.  What is important, is to convey why alienation is a problem and to explain that the solutions that were given have not worked because the tools we have been using to fix the problem such as instrumental rationality, science, and technology are the same tools and mindsets that created the problem.  It is not to say they have no place, but it is to express with passion and love that we must make room for other ways of viewing and valuing our world.  This is to say that flexibility, empathy, and humility must replace the tunnel vision that has encompassed the 21st century.