Urban Individuality and Urban Governance in Twentieth-Century Europe

This chapter proposes a reading of urban governance that moves beyond the dichotomy between top-down disciplinary power and bottom-up rebellion. Borrowing from the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, it takes individualised expectations as a starting point. Throughout the twentieth century, European city dwellers demanded that urban institutions and politicians treat them as individuals. Consequently, these institutions and politicians expanded municipal provision, while also struggling to cater for a variety of trajectories and pursuits. It was difficult for any regime to evade this pressure—even for the Third Reich, which tacitly recognised ‘Aryans’ as legitimate individuals while denying the same status to persecuted minorities and occupied populations. The democracies of the 1950s and 1960s were able to build social housing and public infrastructure on an unprecedented scale, thus putting communist regimes and Southern European dictatorships under competitive pressure. But they were soon confronted with a different version of individuality aiming for ‘autonomous’ spaces such as communal flats, squatted houses or alternative cultural centres. However, by the 1980s, even leftists ended up turning to municipal institutions for support. For all the tensions between urban individuality and urban governance, at least in Central and Western Europe the two have developed in conjunction