Space, Power and Governmentality. Architecture and Urban Planning in the work of Foucault

Abstract

According to Foucault, while in disciplinary societies the city’s physical space was “made an architectural space” modulating it as a panoptic device to monitor and normalize individuals, biopolitical societies have developed a dual risk management device. On the one hand, statistics and cartography have built the new object of government (population) as well as the new medium in which to act (territory), together understood as a matrix of geo-localized data. On the other hand, the function of the architect-urban planner has ceased to be the panoptic formalization of space to become the socio-territorial adaptation of the medium that promotes productive self-management of space by its population. The consequence of the first movement has been the proliferation of Smart Cities. The second, the urban regeneration policies of the OECD and the EU. This article analyzes this governmental change of urban management, showing the power devices that underlie the legitimacy discourses of smart cities and participatory planning.