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This book examines how material systems such as transportation, energy and housing form the basis of human freedom. It begins by explaining this linkage by defining reliance systems, the basic way in which we become free to act not only as a result of our bodily capabilities or the absence of barriers but because of collectively produced systems. As virtually all of us rely on such systems – water, food, energy, healthcare, etc. – for freedom, the book argues that they must form the centre of a twenty-first-century politics. Rather than envisioning a healthier politics of reliance systems exclusively through rights or justice or deliberative democracy, we argue that they must become the centre of a new social contract. More specifically, we discuss the politics of reliance systems as a set of spatial contracts. Spatial contracts are the full set of politics governing any given system, and as such they are historically, geographically and system specific. In order to fully understand spatial contracts, we develop an analytical framework focused on three areas. Seeing like a system shows how systems thinking can enable us to avoid ideological approaches to understanding given spatial contracts, repurposing key ideas from mainstream and heterodox economics. Seeing like a settlement shows how systems come together in space to form human settlements, and exposes key political divides between urban and rural, and formal and informal. Adapting Iris Marion Young’s five faces of oppression enables an understanding of the specific ways in which reliance systems can be exploitative.
Nussbaum and others. We then focus on explaining in more depth what we mean by reliance systems, sketching out their general features, their complexity, their generally co-produced nature and their multi-dimensionality. We then address the question of how to think about the politics of reliance systems. We briefly touch on other approaches, and then develop an approach based on a modification of social contract thinking. We refer to this as the spatial contract . As a spatial contract, like a social contract, can be both healthy and unhealthy, we end by
systems should be the centre of politics, must be answered, ‘Yes.’ From reliance systems to the spatial contract We call the politics of this relationship between collectively provisioned systems and human agency the spatial contract . 10 A spatial contract is an informal or formal agreement governing the production and reproduction of reliance systems. Because these systems enable us to act, the spatial contract is a circular process – the capacities produced by these systems in turn are used to produce and reproduce these system
Over the past two chapters we have worked to develop an analytical framework for analysing reliance systems and spatial contracts. Certain assumptions and ideologies about systems can get in the way of developing healthy agreements, which is why we call for a system-centred politics, as opposed to a politics-centred system. When we start to see systems through settlements and vice versa, we also see more clearly other barriers, divides between space and place, and those between the formal and the informal. This much, at least, is required to realize
In the previous chapter, we outlined an initial analytical framework for examining systems from the ground up. Any reformed spatial contracts must be based on the specific ways in which systems differ from each other. Applied to the disposal of human waste, a system-centred perspective would seek to understand the historical development of any given system. It would examine cultural feelings towards waste and the power dynamics in a given area with regard to who gets sewerage. It would understand the provision and education of sanitary engineers
Thus far, we have worked to establish two critical points. First, human freedom is realized in reliance systems, social and material systems that have to be constantly made and remade. These systems, no matter our individual capacities, are always collectively produced. Second, these reliance systems are governed by a set of formal and informal political agreements which we call spatial contracts. Spatial contracts are spatial and not exclusively social because they are rooted in the materiality of specific systems, and thus in both space, place
are what we call spatial contracts. A spatial contract is not inherently good or bad, or healthy or unhealthy, as we put it. The health of any spatial contract depends on the terms of the deal. This book is also an initial analytical framework for understanding reliance systems. We develop three perspectives designed to examine reliance systems on their own terms, as they actually exist in the world, without falling prey to ideological approaches. The first is ‘seeing like a system’, an approach that uses systems thinking and various ideas from