The regulation of social deviancy and the new science of social statistics created during the European Enlightenment intertwine with architectural discourse through the medicalization of architecture and the built environment, and through structures and systems of risk management. From bio-anthropometrics to ergonomics, and from diagrams to borders, bodies and the modern city become systematized for optimal reproductions of hegemonic narratives.
These constructions remain inscribed on our bodies and the contemporary city, and they are continuously rewritten. They establish an artificial threshold, defining a new framework of exclusion. Therefore they produce new subjectivities, as well as new processes of body territorialization.
The notion of human-centered sovereignty that began to develop in the 18th century has established a clear differentiation between what is made to live and what is allowed to die, thus delineating the exclusion of what is categorized as “the abject.” Before this period, the sovereign political project was differentiated between making die and letting alive. All these different temporalities and historical projects have merged into our contemporary political project.
The project of modernization is obsessed with organizing meaning: orders are systematically remade. In each new order, several elements are made redundant and obsolete. Consequently, some bodies are simply out of place. With the modern humanist project, bodies, organisms, and environment become taxonomized and dispersed into numbers and categories, functionalities and pathologies.
It was in that context that Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian statistician, astronomer, mathematician and sociologist, created the new science of social statistics and anthropometrics, based on constant observation and analysis and a massive generation of data.
Quetelet was inspired by the symmetrical Gaussian bell curve (or the normal distribution curve) used in probability theory to frame his “Homme Moyen” (the average man), the normalized body and behavioral archetype. Science often prefers the most elegant answers, which correspond to the simplest, most symmetrical, and static solutions.
In History of Shit (1978), Dominique Laporte explains how, in the 16th century, the politics of managing waste segregated spaces, isolating the abject and non-productive matter by placing them in domestic spaces. Thus institutional strategies of waste management aim to hide everything that is not archetypal from the public representational space.
Hygienic measures of waste treatment in cities have caused places of confinement to appear as cesspools, waste having been relocated to disciplinary and domestic architectures of isolation. Moreover, since the Enlightenment period in Europe, the word “city” has been inscribed with a description of the appropriate body to inhabit it: the behavior of this body must be hygienic, respectful, and standardized. The city became a sick body that needed to be healed by the processes of bleeding (sewers) or surgery (such as Haussmann’s plan of Paris, or the Pla Cerdà in Barcelona). At the same time, the body was regarded as corrupt, and needed to be moralized, segregated, and corrected.
In this process, the city of the 18th century French Republic looked to the hygienic measures of Vespasian’s Rome to develop the project of the modern city. Furthermore, the Republican project defines the body’s measures following the Vitruvian proportions of the ancient Roman, where man first began to take the consciousness of his body as a measure of the world, and to see the city as a sick body. In pre-Christian societies the gods were hybrids and monsters, but with Christianity the god-man began to snatch the body’s shape, in which power moves.
Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Marquis de Sade highlight the arbitrariness of the rules and concepts inscribed on our bodies. Universal concepts appear more as a universal consensus, developed from the needs of production, reproduction, and consumption.
During the European Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, a theory of degeneration emerged in relation to the rising urban population and the subsequent overcrowding of cities. In this period of social reconstruction, coinciding with processes of colonization and vast imperialisms, it was necessary to establish new categories of difference and a framework for the new possibilities of the body and territorial exploitation. It is not by coincidence that in this same time period, the science of criminology arose as a discretionary theory of social degeneration. Criminologists such as Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914), Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), or Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) followed Quetelet’s ideas of statistically studying bodies and behaviors, describing the abhuman and the inhuman in relation to the normal. These positivist statistical fictions traverse prior pseudo-scientific approaches like phrenology and physiognomy. Moreover, Francis Galton developed modern eugenics as an application of his anthropometric analysis.
Along with the statistical techniques of averages and correlations, photography was developed in the 19th century as a method to define the physiognomic characteristics of disease and criminality. The aim of this practice was to catalogue organs in static and isolated units and find a visual average. The pictures were organized and categorized into similar units in comparative tables. As Michel Foucault observes about animals and plants, through the natural sciences “bodies were not studied in their organic unity, but by the visible patterning of their organs,” (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 1966).
These procedures were also used to analyze new pathologies, such as hysteria, a female-specific pathology provoked by a disorder of the uterus. The diagnosis of this sexual dysfunction was based on the idea that women could not handle the stress of living in modern society. In the 19th century, women were confined into domestic and religious spaces, and many hysterical patients were enclosed in insane asylums. Due to the enormous variety of symptoms grouped under the same pathology, its study needed an exhaustive analysis of data. To accomplish this, collections of pictures were edited to represent the disorder’s most characteristic sets of movements. Although nowadays hysteria is considered a fictional, misogynistic illness, it was once documented and catalogued with the same techniques as used in criminology.
Henceforth, an innovative series of medical, juridical, economic, and architectural practices and discourses that understood the city as sick, dangerous, and dreadful appeared. The city had to thus be healed, disciplined, and aestheticized. These discourses inaugurated a radical historical transformation of the urban fabric. Once defined, normalization consequently appears as a necessity in educating and isolating bodies and behaviors.
Within the hygienic project of the new nation states, the healthy and safe body needed to be protected and defined against the other, in order to distinguish the right to citizenship. The bodily data collected segregated this otherness by defining and fixing normality. Moreover, these artificial lines confined the body to a state of bureaucratic management. The space is over-managed by a technocracy with a homogenizing will. Visual, moral, and representational spaces are continuously redrawn.
Anthropometrics and the science of social statistic are born from the will to detect patterns and identify the criminal, racial, and pathological body — and architects work with these archetypes when designing the buildings and the urban environment. The city is planned as an extension of the normalized human body. Our environment is designed in a perfect ergonomic relationship to our archetype.
The anthropo-bio-metric approaches and devices become tools used to measure and regulate the human body and the environment within the architectural process. Treaties such as Ernst Neufert’s Architect’s Data (1936) or Charles George Ramsey’s Architectural Graphic Standards (1932) use the anthropometric methods to standardize the process of architectural design. The design of the statistical body merges with urban planning.
Consequently, the body inscriptions are speculative cartographies transcribed into the territory and the environment through architecture and metric exclusion. The body measurement tools describe the subject as an object of the process of construction; an object filled of physical and moral connotations and inscribed with the patterns to inhabitation and cohabitation. The abject body and behavior are progressively erased of the space of representation.
Rob Nixon describes in his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), processes of slow violence characterized by a violence that takes place gradually and often invisibly. As such, we can say that the formulation of social statistics science is a process of slow violence that brings these issues into the present through its uninterrupted implementation.
These representations of the normal human body conceive minorities within the city and construct identity and memory through contemporary urban space. They unveil the relationships between cultural history of urban politics, postindustrial immigration, postcolonial cities and the contemporary city as a category of political and cultural experience. The process of abstraction is not only a technique but also an epistemological framework in which the act of seeing the world reinvents itself on a scientific basis. Through the scientific revolution, the way to understand the world was transformed and began a massive taxonomization and abstraction of the environment. A paradox, which aims for a veridical representation of space and bodies as a construction whose principle is to exclude accidents with the certainty of a repeatable and quantifiable formula.
The normalized body becomes an architecture constructed by immutable or unaltered transcendent structures. However, the normalization of the average body implementing social statistics and mathematics does not constitute the design of the normal but, rather, of the abject body.
The abnormal exception reinforces the power of the norm: we use abstractions to operate in the world and the modern project consists in dividing and cataloguing organs. In the process of humanizing the human, the normalized body, behaviors and environment became taxonomized and dispersed into numbers and categories, functionalities and pathologies.
Perhaps, these bodily cartographies are evidence and actors of the construction of an ontological condition. They are related to new forms of colonization and reformulations of order meaning as well as they are connected to the production of a new subject and new politics.
The social sciences based on statistics are still operative in our contemporary society. They permeated into the form of the cities, the big data market, speculated futures, and also into our social relationships. In this process of splitting up behaviors and bodies into data, they are incorporated as nodes in the circuit of production and consumption. Moreover, these forms of abstraction have generated a speculative knowledge of the future where the old fatalism of pre-modern societies, that subjugates actions to destiny, is supplanted by modern cause-effect determinism. This allows implanting future fictions in the present, supported by statistical confirmation.
In our everyday life, we could interchangeably mix vocabularies concerning medical, military and systemic defense, for their direct association with categories already constructed on fear. Then, words such as epidemic, contagion, virus, defenses, toxic, prevention, eradication, protection, propagation, intrusive body, crisis, immunity, etc. would cause similar reactions on us, with the ultimate consequence of producing an effect despite the lack of a cause.
These procedures become tools for the construction of future fictions of fear and desire through abstractions acting as a form of demand for privatization, protection and segregation. Through prophylaxis, borderlines are drawn around the body and the city to prevent human disease and contamination. The contact limits are defined to inhibit the spread of contagion. These barriers stigmatize a territory that becomes an untouchable area, mutilating exchanges.
Moreover, the role of statistics is highly relevant for the construction of fictions in neuroeconomics, as an empirical approach to explain human decision-making. Against a series of probabilities, forms of anticipation through speculation are operating to remove this undesirable image of the future designing the right urbanism offering anticipatory measures and prevention campaigns: prophylaxis, active immunity, medicalization, preventive medicine, preventive war, preventive urban planning, risk groups, surveillance cameras, anti-theft precautions, bruise-proofing, devices targeting homeless persons.
Despite this, the attempt to colonize the future from the present leads to architectures of abstraction, spectral fears or virtual images. And the paradox of fear production is brought on by its very prevention; in the same way as the production of desire is made through designed stereotypes.
Architecture becomes then a speculative technology for desirable futures construction and ergonomic urban models for the typological archetype. Furthermore, it produces and reproduces invisible and visible borders on bodies, cities and territories.
Space is not harmless, it is instead politicized in all directions and architecture is a fundamental part in the composition of historical narratives. As Donna Haraway writes, “it matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems” (“Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” 2015).