| Abstract |
The starting point for this Thesis is the assumption that the issue of urban governance
coincides with the formulation of meanings and concepts, which attach to the city of modernity.
The beginning of the 20th century signals a historical breakthrough in mechanisms and processes of
knowledge production, as far as it concerns the human coexistence, both in social and material
terms. This field of knowledge will be assessed through a semiotic analysis of knowledge forms
(discursive and non-discursive formations), which refer to the urban space, based on the Deleuze
and Guattari theoretical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The first section seeks to reconstruct
the characteristics and properties of the regime of signs as the field of meaning construction. The
goal of this effort is to elucidate under which circumstances a given regime is transformed, forming
a diagrammatic level of correlations, readjustments, and modifications over which the subject
cogitates the urban field, and projects from within it a field of apperception of social becoming.
Ιn the second chapter, we develop the appropriate concepts, in order to show the way
knowledge integrates relations of power and constitute a process of governmentalization. The
Foucauldian knowledge - power perspective will help us to designate the role of strategy, modality
and microphysics of the latter. These parameters become a field of negotiation in the discourse about urbanism during the first decades of the 20th century. The theoretical framework and the
bibliographical research reveal the concept of the urban diagram as an operative rationality capable
of capturing lines of thought and mechanisms that aim to compose a new form of sociality. In a
more general sense, this diagram constitutes a new subjectivity, forming a condition of possibility
for the governance of modernity.
The empirical material is analyzed in light of the aforementioned theoretical schema. Thus, the
third chapter focuses on constitutive signs of modernism in architecture and town planning, so as to
underscore the importance of the relation between rationality and artistic creation, while these are
designated as two conditions of thought which expressed by rationalities and structures of social
interaction in the beginning of t h e 20th century. These two characteristics are investigated
successively through modern architecture, Art Nouveau, Italian Futurism and Bauhaus. The whole
process represents a diagram, a mixed regime of signs, which attempt a broadening of the
conceptual horizon concerning the city, or in other words, the technology of modernity’s urban
governmentality.
Consequently, the analysis in the forth and fifth chapter addresses specific discourses about urbanization
processes, notwithstanding a research limitation as a result of a one-dimensional focus
on European urbanism. A comparative analysis of Le Corbusier and CIAM with American sociologists
of the Chicago School is chosen so as to overcome this limitation, thus disclosing processes
and mechanisms that constitute a scientific discipline. This research area expands in a systematic
way and constructs a broad signifying regime for modern life in the city. The analysis of different
signs from the field of town planning and urban sociology, leads to the emergence of a common parameter:
urban segmentarity. This aspect becomes projected under the conceptual framework of
Deleuze and Guattari, in relation to the spatial and social segmentation of life, the micropolitics, and
more importantly the interconnections with the Foucauldian conception of power. Therefore, the
mapping of knowledge processes about urbanism is schematized as a trajectory of thought from
something abstract (chapter 3) to something concrete (chapters 4 and 5) and describes the production
of different mechanisms for the depoliticization of urban space.
|
Όψεις της αστικής κυβερνητικότητας : η "έννοια" της νεωτερικής πόλης στις αρχές του 20ου αιώνα
