On Monday we reflected on Sid Meier’s Civilization, both as a teaching tool and in light of some of the game’s limited views on human progress. As promised, for Rewind Wednesday, we’re going a bit deeper into the history of societal design.
Specifically, I want to introduce (some) folks to a figure who played a significant role in developing the pictorial language used in charts and maps for urban planning, and which is essential for game-play in a franchise like Civilization. Some of you might already be familiar with Otto Neurath—from a design background, perhaps, or a history of science or semiotics in your studies—but most will draw a blank.
(And for this reason, forgive me for not offering a deep-dive into the whole Vienna Circle today, O great readers with fuller backgrounds on this theme! There’s enough material there to be spread out across a few Rewind Wednesdays, later on.)
However, average readers might have a passing familiarity with Ayn Rand, and might even have read The Fountainhead (1943): a book in which Rand played out early ideas about individualism through the story of an architect adamant about creating structures that serve the artist’s vision over the needs of his clients. Near the end of the book, Howard Roark is on trial for destroying low-income housing, which he did because his designs were changed to serve the inhabitants’ needs. Roark’s speech about the importance of ego helps to advance Rand’s belief that, even at cost to other human beings, personal integrity must never be compromised in a just society.
The book is also not nearly as fictional as this premise might suggest.
The Fountainhead emerged in a Western world at war, and under the shadow of a great many social-engineering projects—from the intense institutional push of the Third Reich, to the equally intense state-building of the Soviet Union, to an array of socioeconomic projects spanning the democratic and colonial spectrum across the rest of Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
It’s easy to imagine these ideas as operating in fierce competition with one another, the same way that Rand envisioned an extreme individualism raging against social conformity—but such an approach to history would miss the forest for the trees.
Would it make sense to define a Republican without also understanding what a Democrat is? Could one exist without the other? Would the term “atheist” have any relevance in a world without theists? Similarly, many of the social projects and philosophical attitudes in this era were directly responding to ideas enacted around them—and as such, all spoke to a broader ideological paradigm.
When it came to architecture, urban planning, linguistics, philosophies of science, and public education, a hefty portion of Europe’s academics, scientists, and politicians were all “huffing the same air” in the 1920s and 1930s: driven by a shared body of environmental pressures to ask certain social questions to similar political ends.
We often talk about World War II as a turning point in Western self-awareness of our capacity for destruction, but WWI was already a deeply demoralizing affair that left the West with a “lost” generation; whole empires and schools of Realpolitik laid low; and average citizens struggling, amid the steady press of mechanical progress, with how best to build something better from the ashes left by the machinery of war.
And yes, everyone had different ideas about how this work of recovery might be done, but they were all nonetheless consumed by the pressing need to do something. Societies needed to be remade—but how? By returning to “tradition”? By disavowing the past? Through systems that taught citizens to conform? Through systems that encouraged citizens to cultivate more dynamic homes?
Every possibility was on the table.
And in the middle of these rich conversations, which were happening both in local salons and across whole nation-states, one of the most easily weaponized concepts was the role of science in social engineering. Even among people who advocated for societies driven by empirical thinking, rather than beholden to spiritualism and metaphysics, there were huge differences with respect to what a robust philosophy of science should contain, and how science should be used to develop state policies.
A century on, we’re still struggling to figure out how best to “design” our human world, and I doubt that any easy answers will emerge in this reflection. As ever, though, I hope that a better understanding of what’s been tried (and maybe why it failed) might provide us with the language we need to face similar challenges today.
Otto Neurath and his language of civilization
Otto Neurath was born in Austria in 1882, and got a very early start teaching political economy before WWI, after which he dove into museum studies and social planning with a strong interest in applying lessons from the war to life thereafter. His career would be consumed by related questions, but they would manifest in many different ways: from being tossed into prison for a bit, for being a socialist; to wrestling with urban policies around garden and housing projects; to founding a museum for city planning and throwing himself into the creation of a new visual language with which to make the theme accessible to average citizens; to trying to co-ordinate work among his philosophical peers in service to the creation of a united theory of science that might be applied holistically to the guidance and governance of society.
(Gee, is that all, Neurath?)
Neurath’s geopolitical circumstances changed significantly throughout his life’s work. For a golden period in Austrian history, its capital was known as “Red Vienna”, because it was essentially under the control of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. But the Austrian Civil War in 1934 made the country unsafe for socialists, and so instead of returning from a stint in Russia, Neurath went to the Netherlands to continue his international work, until the bombing of Rotterdam in 1940 drove him to Britain. After a brief stint in a refugee internment camp, he and his wife made a home for themselves at Oxford, where he was able to continue his work with a visual vocabulary for urban planning, called ISOTYPE, to aid in the renewal of British slums.
Neurath’s approach to depicting socioeconomic systems had two key components. The first was functionality—real functionality. As Eve Blau highlights in “Isotype and Architecture in Red Vienna: The Modern Projects of Otto Neurath and Josef Frank” (2006), Neurath and his peer shared a strong opposition to visions of architecture that relied too heavily on a kind of urban minimalism that only looked functional because each design adhered to simple geometric forms.
(If this concept seems too abstract, imagine a square courtyard that’s supposed to be “functional” because of its simple shape. Now imagine that everyday users routinely cut across this courtyard, ignoring the sidewalks along the perimeter and instead scoring hard-packed lines of dirt this way and that in the grass. How did this happen? Why didn’t they just use the sidewalks? Because everyday “function” often finds users engaging with a given space in a completely different way than the designer intended. Rand might have regarded this as an affront to the will of the architect, but many actual designers were also interested in streamlining production processes, so their notion of “functionality” was informed by assembly-line optimization more than user outcomes. This issue divided planners, architects, and other engineers of the era.)
As Blau wrote of Frank’s work:
These buildings embody Frank's notion of a non-doctrinal, empathetic modern architecture that is alive to the variability of human desire and experience, and that serves rather than dictates use.
But Neurath’s maps and charts went one further. He wasn’t just trying to “serve” users; he also wanted to awaken citizens to the idea of society as a set of useful spaces. He wanted citizens to think of their living environments as a series of distinct locales that housed different forms of human activity, and which operated together as an ecosystem—a garden, of sorts—that governments were meant to tend.
This approach to user functionality meant that Neurath was not only trying to depict specific civic spaces for planning purposes, but also to help humans see themselves as inextricably linked to their surroundings—especially through home gardening, and other projects that would keep citizens invested in a blending of modern life with a more intimate cultivation of their homes and neighbourhoods.
The second key component to Neurath’s vision of urban planning was an offshoot of the first, and it would later present a serious limitation to his whole dream.
As you might have guessed from the image above, titled “City Planning”, Neurath’s approach to design reveals a clear preference for single-use spaces, and for cities organized more like rural settlements. When growing populations called for greater urban density in city-planning initiatives, Neurath’s vision of low-rise buildings filled with citizens whose labour was inextricably linked to nature didn’t work as well.
Neurath did try to embrace this new reality, mind you! But imagine spending most of your life convinced that the problem of social engineering could be solved with just the right language to compartmentalize and visualize a city’s needs, one discrete territorial unit at a time (not unlike the way players Civilization are taught to see city tiles as having singular uses!). Then imagine coming to the hard realization, later in life, that many civic spaces do best when they are not only mixed-use, but also spaces where citizens can decide more fluidly, and for themselves, which uses matter most.
Did the increasing complexity of urban populations undermine Neurath’s core belief in the power of empirical thinking? Not at all—but it did throw up a heck of a lot more variability, and uncertainty, with respect to ever getting the “equations” of socioeconomic and urban-planning policy just right.
Today, some of our most important visual languages—for road signs, and for charts and maps accessibly depicting population and land stats—owe their existence to the tremendous groundwork laid by Neurath and his diverse peer group of museum scholars, semioticians, urban planners, and philosophers of science. We also have his cohort to thank for ways of thinking about architecture and urban planning that don’t just plop in human beings as passive users—but rather, treat them as active, intrinsic components of any “work” being done in social, political, and economic zones.
But Neurath is also an excellent example of how we can become so enamoured by the seeming simplicity of a concept, and by our life’s work in its furtherance, that we lose some of our empirical rigour over time. ISOTYPE was such a clever and useful invention from its outset, it became easy to forget that each symbol in this language was also imposing a view of reality: one in which different kinds of human labour fit neatly into specific zones, and citizens were easily reduced to a series of related stats.
W. H. Auden might have put the critique against this kind of thinking best, in “The Unknown Citizen” (1940), which reads:
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
While Rand’s vision of society goes to the opposite extreme, pathologizing any attempt to see the work of humans as intrinsically bound up in the work and shape of their communities, Auden’s poem gently notes that—even if important—civic statistics will always be an insufficient measure of the fullness of human life.
Today, what some urban planners strive for is closer to Frank’s vision of civic spaces built to be more receptive to changing human interests and needs. Rather than viewing all citizens as operational units that give different city “tiles” their purpose, or as individuals forever in combat with the oppressive nature of fellow citizens, our civic dreaming now routinely aspires to support more dynamic human interactions with (and acts of self-realization through) our local environments.
In plain terms: we’re not just a bunch of worker symbols on simplified area maps, and city zoning no more defines us than our presence defines the land around us.
And when we remember that—when we truly see ourselves as engaged in a much more complex set of civic interactions—we reclaim at least a little personal agency in a world run by many who would (unscientifically) insist on the existence of a “simple, scientific” solution to the ongoing problem of we relentlessly messy human beings.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML
Have you read/listened to anything by Loic Wacquant? He has done some more recent work in this field, and I believe David Harvey has done some work with this too.
https://loicwacquant.org/
https://davidharvey.org/