In the Midst of Things: The Social Lives of Objects in the Public Spaces of New York City

IN THE MIDST OF THINGS

In the Midst of Things

The Social Lives of Objects in the Public Spaces of New York City

Mike Owen Benediktsson

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2022 by Princeton University Press

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For Slevy

CONTENTS

Preface xi

Introduction 1

PART I. APPEARANCE 21

1 The Public Lawn 23

2 The Folding Chair 55

PART II. DISRUPTION 91

3 The Traffic Divider 93

4 The Subway Door 120

PART III. DISAPPEARANCE 155

5 The Newsstand 157

Conclusion: The Bench 187

Acknowledgments 207

Notes 211

Index 241

It is the structure of the city which first impresses us.… this vast organization which has arisen in response to the needs of its inhabitants, once formed … forms them, in turn, in accordance with the design and interests which it incorporates.

—ROBERT PARK (1915)

We shape our buildings, and afterward, our buildings shape us.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL (1943)

PREFACE

While I was writing the concluding chapter of this book, a deadly new virus made its way from Asia and Europe into the United States, where it would wreak havoc on the bodies, livelihoods, and social lives of Americans for years to come. The coronavirus, or Covid-19, pandemic, as it has come to be known, transformed life in New York City practically overnight. It swept through the metropolis in spring 2020, killing more than twenty thousand New Yorkers and compelling previously unthinkable changes in the daily routines of the city’s residents.

Many of these changes were related to some of the central themes of this book. The virus transformed the way we interact with one another in public, the objects we use, and how we use them. We were forced, abruptly, to become self-conscious in our urbanism, thinking carefully about how we move through public space. Marks on the pavement appeared on the city’s sidewalks and on the grass lawns of its parks, indicating the proper spacing of human bodies. The informal proxemics of the street gave way to formal recommendations endorsed by public health agencies. An array of strange new objects appeared in public places, and took up long-term residence. New Yorkers accustomed to the nuisance of unwanted closeness now found themselves separated by plexiglass panels, disposable rubber gloves, cotton masks and plastic face shields, and, whenever possible, six feet of open space. The subway became a ghost town.

The New York City that appears in this book is a place that existed prior to these changes. In this bustling city of the recent past, congestion was a bigger concern than contagion. It has taken two full years for reminders of that city to reappear. In recent months, the city’s public spaces have reclaimed some, if not all, of their previous vitality. New Yorkers have reasserted their characteristically brash, unselfconscious use of the sidewalk and the subway platform. Restaurants are no longer empty. Vaccine cards are checked at the door, allowing a semblance of normalcy inside. Experts have repeatedly suggested that the end of the pandemic is in sight. But the city is not the same. In addition to the inanimate objects, laws, and social norms that guide behavior in public, there is another factor at work—a living thing that wields invisible power over the places where strangers congregate, creating anxiety and hesitation even when it does not produce sickness.

It is not clear at present what the future holds for New York City. Perhaps some of the changes forced by the virus will become permanent features of the urban landscape. Or maybe there will be a post-pandemic New York in which public space is, once again, governed primarily by laws and social norms that have little if anything to do with protecting public health against an infectious disease. In either case, it has become clear to me in the past eighteen months that the themes in this book will continue to be relevant, even if the book itself describes a city that no longer exists. As long as the residents of New York and its suburbs are relaxing on a lawn in a waterfront park, taking a moment to sit and watch the world go by in a public plaza, holding subway doors for one another, occasionally dodging traffic on divided highways, or talking to the vendor at their local newsstand, the public objects in this book will still be relevant, their lessons vital. Their stories, and the stories of the people, places, and spaces around them, will still be worthy of a closer look.

Introduction

If you look around at your home, or office, or wherever you happen to be reading this, your eyes will settle on countless manmade objects. This is not a risky speculation. They literally surround us at all times. In cities, they typically occupy our entire field of vision. What we generally do not see, however, is that these objects have ideas in them. Ideas about us. The chair in which you sit makes assumptions about you. Some of these might be correct, others incorrect. Your height and weight, the length of your legs, and the width of your torso—your chair has ideas about all of this. Your chair also has ideas about how you might like to sit. Erect or recumbent; rigid or relaxed. It may even contain ideas about how you should sit, imposing its own normative standards upon your posture. If you happen to be seated in a classroom, then your chair is probably a bit uncomfortable. This is intentional. It wants you to stay awake.

Sometimes, the ideas that are designed into objects are oriented on individual human users. Other times, they involve social norms or relationships, and here things get complicated. A dining-room table gathers, but not quite like a television does. A bathroom door separates, sometimes imperfectly. The window in the kitchen reinforces a gendered division of labor.¹ A rifle next to the door reflects the natural order of the universe.² Our material possessions, it turns out, are sociologically complex and fascinating things.

But this book is about a different class of things. When you leave your home and venture out into your community, you will encounter objects that do not belong to you, and that come together to constitute what is commonly referred to as public space. Let’s call these things public objects. These objects have ideas about you as well, but to them, you are only one of many—part of a collectivity. They will lump you together with the hundreds, or thousands, or perhaps even millions of other people who routinely occupy the same environment. The public, in other words.

Outside your door, you may be lucky enough to find a sidewalk. If you do, it will probably assume that you (now plural) prefer to walk in straight lines, rather than in sinusoidal patterns or circles. A public stairway will anticipate that you might need a handrail for support, or textured surfaces for added traction. A street sign will imagine your native language, your level of literacy, and your attention span. The great majority of public objects are humble things. Their purpose is to facilitate everyday life, and if they do their job well, we repay them by ignoring them completely. They are the small talk of the material world: if we find them to be a little boring, this is a feature, not a bug. At the same time, this class of objects is deceptively interesting, just like the objects in your home. As it turns out, the material landscape outside your door is not just a physical space. It is a densely significant cultural product, embodying countless assumptions regarding who you are, how you think, and how you should behave. And these assumptions can be massively important.

Unlike the artifacts in your living room, public objects are meant for use by the public. This means that they have to imagine who, exactly, that public might be, what it might want, and what it might need. Sometimes, the ideas designed into public objects are idealistic, expressing hope for a more just, inclusive, or joyful society. Other times they are practical, aspiring to greater efficiency or safety. And still other times, they reflect cynicism, mistrust, or a desire for hierarchy or domination. Not far from my home, a crosswalk has been painted the colors of the rainbow, to signify public support for the LGBTQ community. Several blocks away, a short stone wall is crowned with sharp, daggerlike rocks, to prevent people from sitting on it. One object expresses hope and inclusiveness, while the other embodies territoriality and suspicion. In fact, the ideas behind these objects have really only one thing in common. They are ideas about society itself—how it might be, or how it must be.

These ideas are not trivial, uniform, or universal. They always reflect a specific social context. The objects around us have much to say about the political and economic forces that prevail in our communities. The material world serves as a sort of sociological connective tissue, expanding outward from each individual; upward to political, economic, or cultural institutions; and backward through time. Social scientists often attempt to understand how micro and macro are linked, striving to identify the mechanisms that connect the small-scale world of the individual with the large-scale world of the society as a whole. Public objects compose such a mechanism. They tie our subjective, moment-by-moment experiences to those of many others. They guide our thoughts and movements along channels that reflect economic interests, bureaucratic routines, and cultural or political ideologies. When we leave our domiciles and move through public space, we have no choice but to use objects that were shaped by these forces. In doing so, we come into a fairly direct type of contact with the forces themselves. We engage them with our very bodies. Perhaps we resist their invisible propulsion. Or maybe we go with the flow.

This book examines the social lives of six material things found in the public spaces of New York City and its suburbs. Each of these public objects has a story to tell about the social and economic changes sweeping through New York City and its environs. And each of these stories illustrates an important but widely unappreciated fact of urban life—that material objects constitute a primary point of contact with the broader social and political currents that swirl around us. A newly built lawn on the Brooklyn waterfront reflects a competitive struggle between different conceptions of the public good, each drawing on a distinct ideological tradition. A low cement wall on a divided highway in New Jersey speaks of escalating suburban poverty and the demise of the postwar American dream. A metal folding chair on a patch of asphalt in Queens tells us of the political obstacles that face attempts to make the city more livable and sustainable.

Starting with a close look at these objects, and then expanding my focus to include the people, places, and spaces around them, I argue that social life occurs in the midst of things in two respects: we are surrounded by a material world that constrains and shapes our experience; and, through this experience, we come into direct contact with a much larger set of things—ideas, laws, markets, policies, and so on—that together constitute the broader ongoing narrative of social change.

Material Sociology: Affordances and Programming

This book employs an approach that is far from paradigmatic in the Kuhnian sense.³ Material sociology, pardon the pun, is not really a thing. There is a good reason for this and a not-so-good reason. The good reason is that the material world does not seem to explain many of the things that are of interest to social scientists. The early twentieth-century sociologist Georg Simmel famously suggested that buildings and other material objects fix the contents of society. According to Simmel, objects anchor social processes in space, offering longevity to social formations that otherwise might dissipate with time. But, he acknowledged, they typically do not make things happen on their own.⁴

Obviously, objects enter into our social consciousness practically every day. They are useful metaphors—they make abstract social categories and processes more concrete. We communicate using an everyday poetry that links material things with our social world, without thinking about why these linguistic shortcuts work. We know that the white-collar worker or the pencil pusher is different from the blue-collar worker or the hard hat. The latte sipping elitist is different from Joe six pack. The white tablecloth banquet is different from the brown bag lunch. Social structure is not something we can easily see or feel, so we refer to its material correlates, in a form of metonymy.

Even more fundamentally, our daily social routines are closely linked to material things. Our lives are, in fact, impossible to describe without frequent reference to objects. Taking out the trash, going to the bank, and getting the car washed are cultural rituals that involve the routine care of material possessions. They make sense only if we assume that the material world exerts a constant power over our social reality. Nevertheless, material artifacts often seem trivial compared with the large-scale social forces that drive human behavior on a broader scale. The things that really matter—inequality, deviance, racism, rationality—can be said to take place through the material world, not because of it.

But if we are too quick to dismiss the causal significance of objects, we run the risk of failing to understand how they work. If objects fix the contents of the social life of the city, how exactly do they do this? This is one of the questions that I seek to answer in the pages that follow, occasionally drawing on concepts from several distinct fields of social research and theory.⁵ In the interest of doing so clearly and directly, it might be helpful to identify and define a couple of important ideas, right from the beginning. Throughout this book, I make use of the terms affordances and programming. Both concepts are vital for thinking about indirect consequences of design and planning and, by extension, the social control capacity of public objects and places—what they do (and don’t do) for specific groups of people in specific settings.⁶

Affordances are, generally speaking, the ideas that objects have about us. More precisely, they are the behavioral possibilities that are endorsed by an object or place.⁷ Affordances can be embedded in the design of an object, as well as the sign and rule systems that apply to an object’s use.⁸ But they are real only to the extent that they are recognized by an actual human being. In this sense, affordances do not exist inside of an object, but in the relationship between an object and a person.⁹ Programming is the act of embedding affordances in an object or place. Programming can be used to suggest not just what could be done with a thing, the essence of an affordance, but what should be done (or not done) through the imposition of prescriptive programs of use.¹⁰ Programming takes three forms: material, symbolic, and institutional. I’ll take a moment to discuss each one in turn.

Once programmed into the material surfaces of an object or a place, affordances can become physically coercive in their control over human behavior. The steel and plastic contours of playground equipment offer carefully selected affordances—slide here—while negating others—do not jump from here—seeking to guide children’s behavior in a way that provides both fun and safety. Subway turnstiles, speed bumps, and airport security checkpoints engage in similar sorts of behavioral engineering, coercing human action in specific directions in order to preserve the rule of law or to derive profits, as the case may be. But not all material programming is intentional. Some is coincidental, emerging from the unintended ways in which material form shapes human behavior. An industrial refrigerator is too large and too heavy to be carried in your pocket, but this is not to prevent theft or misplacement. Many restroom keys, on the other hand, are tethered to large and cumbersome objects for this exact reason.

The affordances implicit in design are often combined with signs, labels, and symbols that reinforce or modify the intended pattern of user behavior. This symbolic programming generally offers a cheaper and more flexible way of suggesting how users should behave. It would be tremendously expensive to design a parking space that physically exists only at certain times of day, but a cheap piece of pressed aluminum, mounted on a signpost, can advertise the local parking regulations and perhaps have a similar effect.

A third way in which public objects stabilize social life is through the institutional assignment of specific uses to objects. Unlike physical and symbolic programming, this institutional programming is typically invisible. The formal laws and informal norms that apply to a given object may be written down somewhere or advertised through signage, but in some cases, they are simply known, residing in the background knowledge of users.¹¹

Also unlike material or symbolic programs, institutional programs imply a third party—perhaps an anonymous stranger, a neighbor, or the federal government—who recognizes appropriate and inappropriate uses of an object and provides incentives or sanctions. In the case of privately owned objects and spaces, the most important third party is the owner, who often has wide leeway in dictating how an object should be used. Within the home, informal norms and sanctions typically take over. Many parents of young children, myself included, uphold a de facto anti-graffiti ordinance that is enforced not by the local police but by an inconsistently applied system of time-outs and television privileges. In public settings, on the other hand, an equally comprehensive authority may reside with the state, and institutional programming may consist of a complete legal code for public behavior. Sidewalks, because they are public, are institutionally programmed, or regulated, in a way that one’s living room is not.

Through these overlapping material, symbolic, and institutional means, public objects confer structure, regularity, and a degree of predictability to the social life of the city. Paradoxically, when they do this job effectively, they disappear into the background, permitting us to go about our lives without wondering which objects to use, and when, and how. Theorist Bruno Latour famously referred to material objects as the missing masses, an army of actors who remain invisible when we fix our eyes on the social realm.¹² For Latour, objects are the sociological equivalent of dark matter: rarely observed but vital in explaining observable patterns of behavior. They are, in a sense, the most ancient of social media, helping us concretize and transmit our interests, ideas, and mental states. And to the extent that they are successful, social scientists (and people in general for that matter) are free to focus on what people do and why they do it without being distracted by the things they do it with.

When Objects Make Trouble: Appearance, Disruption, Disappearance

So, things fix or stabilize society. This is the good reason for ignoring material objects. The not-so-good reason for ignoring them is an assumption that the social world is stable all, or even much, of the time.¹³ New things are constantly appearing on the scene. Old things deteriorate, vanish, or simply fail to function as planned. During these moments, objects make trouble, disrupting social order, to repurpose a term used by sociologist Harold Garfinkel.¹⁴ When they confound our expectations, objects emerge from the background of social life into the foreground, becoming more visible to us. Theorists have offered some clues concerning when we can expect this to occur, highlighting three discrete phases of an object’s lifespan: when it first appears in a social setting, when it disrupts desired patterns of action, and when it gradually or abruptly disappears.

The first moment in which objects typically make trouble is when they first appear. For designers and architects, this occurs during the innovation phase, when the technical properties of objects remain unsettled and their social capacities are not yet taken for granted.¹⁵ For the public, objects generally appear a bit later, when introduced for the first time into an uncontrolled social environment. At these times, designers, planners, and ordinary users scrutinize the form of a new public object, a process that can expose the social implications of design decisions.

Designers and architects generate affordances during the earliest stage of an object’s life course, imagining patterns of social use. When they design physical structures, writes Thomas Gieryn, they theorize about society. To some degree, every blueprint is a blueprint for human behavior and social structure, as well as a schematic for the ‘thing’ itself.¹⁶ Design professionals have no choice but to make assumptions, not simply about the physiological or psychological traits of users but also about their sociological and cultural backgrounds, their lifestyles, or their personal histories.¹⁷ Through these inferences, they translate social context into material form, theorizing a social universe in which their object is rational, profitable, virtuous, and so forth. According to John Chris Jones, designers are obliged to use current information to predict a future state that will not come about unless their predictions are correct.¹⁸ The subject matter of urban planning, design, architecture, and engineering, in other words, is a fictional future that must be extrapolated, imperfectly, from the sociological present and then conjured into being through material means.¹⁹

Along the way, architects, designers, and planners construct hypothetical users whose qualities are defined in relation to the characteristics of the artifact under consideration. Even when based on deep knowledge of the social context around a proposed public object or public space, these users are fictional constructs. Unlike the protagonists of books and films, however, they bear little resemblance to actual human beings; they do not have complicated backstories, idiosyncratic personalities, or ambiguous motives. They are assembled out of implicit or explicit assumptions concerning how an object will be used, or a space inhabited. And, as fictional people, they continue to haunt a material artifact long after actual users appear on the scene. The resistance offered by a restroom door tells us about imaginary users’ strength, which has been programmed into its mechanisms; the mirror on the restroom wall tells us of their vanity; the stalls convey their desire for privacy. These physical and cultural traits do not belong to the actual users of a restroom, but their imagined counterparts, who remain imprinted upon the space’s surfaces and mechanisms, even after a living, breathing person has taken their place.

Occasionally, designers explicitly and earnestly describe the users they have in mind for a given object. When these moments occur, they are crucial, bringing the social implications of design to the surface. But typically, they do not occur in public. The social calculations involved in design generally take place on password-protected computer networks or behind closed doors. In the case of consumer goods, private corporations hide their market research in order to protect their designs from competitors, or to paint their products in a flattering light. Imagined users may appear later, in product marketing campaigns—a child on the box, whose job is to show that a toy is suitable for toddlers with small hands, an athletic young man hiking toward a distant ridge, who illustrates the appropriateness of a pair of pants for an outdoorsy lifestyle, or a pixelated human who lounges, admiring a computer-drawn sunset in an architectural rendering, offering intentional clues to the social programming of a proposed public space.

As material artifacts make their first appearance in uncontrolled social settings, these imaginary people are replaced with real ones. When a new foreign object is introduced into an existing social world, there is no guarantee that its users will react as designers intended. After an object or a built space is constructed, the well-behaved, imaginary people who appear in blueprints and designs are replaced by a more unruly and less predictable collectivity: actual human users. The potential environment envisioned by designers and planners is supplanted by the effective environment created through human use, to use a pair of terms coined by sociologist Herbert Gans.²⁰

At these fascinating moments, the affordances incorporated into new public objects can emerge sharply into view, through their contrast with the needs, desires, values, expectations, habits, or routines of a human population. In some cases, new social norms prove necessary. According to Claude Fischer, the home telephone was seen as a rude and socially intrusive object at first—much like a neighbor who barges in without knocking. The object compelled its users to decide on an appropriate greeting from a range of equally plausible options. (It turns out there was nothing natural or inevitable about Hello.)²¹ Focus groups, surveys, and prototypes provide an initial test of how an object will be received, but the real test comes when it is introduced into the sociological wilderness of unpredictable everyday life.

Luckily for us, material things rarely exert absolute control. They are used in ways that are unforeseen by their makers all the time. A paving stone can be thrown at the police. A book can be used to stabilize a wobbly desk. As Terrence McDonnell argues, the social contexts in which objects are used impose a degree of entropy, producing new meanings that were unforeseeable by their designers.²² Things that were originally functional—for example, the Green Monster in Boston’s Fenway Park baseball stadium—can take on profound symbolic meanings that supersede their utility, as Michael Borer has shown.²³

These new meanings may turn out to be far more significant than the old ones. The Blarney Stone, a limestone block embedded in a castle battlement in Ireland, was designed to stop arrows and crossbow bolts, and perhaps, once upon a time, it did. But it is now an object of rare celebrity, kissed by thousands of tourists who desire to be more eloquent in speech. Once devoted to fortification and defense, its current social function is to deliver likes on Instagram when paired with an appropriate hashtag. Central to the spectacle is the blunt humility of the stone, its own ineloquent silence, and the physical contortions necessary to kiss its underside. When artifacts are used in unforeseen or counterintuitive ways, the ideas that inspired their design are brought into relief, through their contraposition with new programs of use.

A second type of moment when the material world emerges into the foreground occurs when an object disrupts a desired or habitual course of action. The immediate causes of disruption can vary. Sometimes, an object breaks down, or malfunctions, failing to provide the service that it was designed to offer. Repair or redesign become necessary, bringing into view the object’s affordances.²⁴ Other times, it is the user who deviates from the object’s expectations, imposing new and unanticipated demands. Objects are frequently incorrect about us, as any left-handed person knows. When their assumptions are wrong, they force themselves into our consciousness. Often, we anthropomorphize the disobedient object in question, as if its resistance were personal. These moments reveal the extent to which we mentally blur the lines between people and things. We yell at the computer when it refuses to respond to our keystrokes. We kick the door when it jams, to punish it for being incalcitrant. We repeatedly jab at a lit elevator button, as if this expression of our frustration meant anything at all to its impassive circuitry.

Moments of disruption are particularly revealing in the case of public objects, because they elicit reactions from the people and organizations who hold power over things. In response to changing social or physical conditions, the affordances of a public space can be altered—reinforced, or adapted. And, again, this takes place through material, symbolic, or institutional means. Consider a large flowerbed positioned near the entrance of a public building (say a library) that, due to its position in between the sidewalk and the library entrance, has come to serve as an informal pedestrian route, resulting in a defined pathway, barren of vegetation.²⁵ A knee-high wrought-iron fence can be erected around the flowerbed, making it physically awkward to cut through the flowers on foot; a small sign can be planted, asking visitors to stay on the sidewalk; or library security guards can be tasked with keeping an eye on the flowerbed during their rounds, and asking patrons not to intrude. In these three hypothetical scenarios, the initial affordance (flowerbeds are for admiring, not for walking through) has not been altered, but instead reinforced physically, symbolically, or institutionally.

Now consider a fourth possibility. A landscaping company is hired by the library to create a formal path where there was previously an informal one. They remove the crushed daffodils in the place where people have chosen to walk, and line the resulting pathway with paving stones, while leaving the surrounding flowerbed untouched. The social meaning of the space