In the shaping of urban systems, the state’s gaze has been central to how power is exercised. James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State unpacks how legibility – the rendering of society and nature into simplified, administrative forms – has historically enabled states to pursue large-scale interventions with uneven consequences. Scott highlights four critical elements of what he terms negative social engineering: the administrative ordering of society, an unshakeable belief in high modernist ideologies, the presence of an authoritarian state willing to impose those ideologies, and a civil society too weak to resist. Taken together, these produce environments where complexity is flattened, and the needs of the state override local nuance.
Central to Scott’s critique is the idea that legibility favors those in power. From forest management to land use, planning, and settlement patterns, value becomes defined by fiscal return. We see this manifested in the way plants, people, and patterns of life are either counted or excluded based on their usefulness to the state’s goals. For instance, forests are stripped of biodiversity and replanted in uniform rows for easier measurement and extraction. Local knowledge, typically involving trial and error and adaptation, is often ignored, replaced with standardized techniques that are not particularly suited to certain ecological and social contexts. This same logic has crawled into design and planning, where conformity and predictability have become virtues, even if they disconnect cities from real-life experiences.
The state’s interest in simplification for the betterment of society (or so the argument goes) is hardly neutral. Historically, the introduction of last names (or surnames), city grids, uniform statistics, and codified languages has facilitated control, taxation, and enlistment. These “legibility projects” often serve those at the top, not the communities being mapped or overseen. An illegible city resists these impositions by protecting local autonomy and alternative ways of living. A legible city, as described by Scott, sacrifices messiness for manageability. This impacts how we understand cities today, especially with an increasing dependence on automation and artificial intelligence. If, for a long time, we have depended on surveys and registries to standardize design, who becomes more or less visible because of the new technology we integrate? Who benefits and who loses out?
In The Just City, Fainstain echoes these questions through her critique of growth-centered urban development strategies that prioritize private investment over social equity. She argues that we shouldn’t measure a city’s success just by its economic growth or the shiny new developments. Instead, we should ask: Is the city fair? Who benefits from new policies or public investments? Who bears the costs? Those of us in design, planning, and policymaking are encouraged to prioritize equity, democracy, and diversity. Unfortunately, these values are often sacrificed in the race to attract investment or boost property values and attract capital. We see it in the way public land is given to private developers, and how public spaces are redesigned to appeal to tourists instead of longtime residents. Who makes these powerful decisions? And in the decision-making process, what options are accepted and discarded?
My reflection on Scott’s and Fainstain’s works is less of a critique and more of a desire to see a reorientation of planning practice, where instead of treating growth as the ultimate goal, we return to asking tangible questions that focus on social impact. For example, what aspects of complex urban life are worth protecting even if they don’t fit easily into standardized frameworks? How can we reimagine certain systems in infrastructure, governance, and technology as mechanisms for redistributing power and benefits more equitably? What would it mean to center the experiences of those most often rendered invisible by legibility projects, those whose knowledge, labor, or presence do not always align with the state metrics? I don’t have the answers yet, but I’m on a mission to understand these dynamics better and envision alternatives grounded in justice, care, and democratic possibilities.
Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nq3vk
Fainstein, S. S. (2010). The Just City. Cornell University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt7zhwt
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