The first course of study for Prussian state officials was established by royal decree at the University of Halle in 1727. It gave rise to the field of knowledge known as Kameralwissenschaft (cameralism), or the science of Kammer-Sachen, which concerns matters or “things” of the princely chamber, itself the site for the administration of the princely domain.¹ The cornerstone of the curriculum was a textbook on the “art of householding” in five volumes under the title Oeconomus prudens et legalis by Florinus (1702–19). The first chapter of its second volume opened with an engraving of a building under construction (fig. 1). “To erect noble and respectable buildings,” the author wrote, “has at all times been considered … part of the office of a ruler. Then, whoever is responsible for the prosperity of a republic must also see to it that the common building system in the country is well ordered and arranged for both benefit and convenience.”² To be a good ruler, one must first build a house, giving a “proper and orderly organization [to the] temporal and material goods” within its domain—the things and productive activities that link it to the surrounding land.³ In that sense, governance starts with architecture.

View full image +

I am borrowing this story from the economic historian Keith Tribe, who argues that at the foundation of modern German economic thought, cameralism displaced an earlier concern with the legitimacy of political authority to ground the exercise of state power instead in the techniques of ordering or organizing the subjects, goods, and activities within a sovereign domain—what we might call today (territorial) administration. This conception of governance as “regulatory” administration did not yet imply political intervention within an otherwise independent civil domain, because the state was not understood to be an entity distinct from society in the modern sense. Rather, it viewed the well-ordered state as coextensive with a project of perpetual politico-social creation, “a condition which was to be permanently and deliberately under construction, an ever-extending and never-ending task.”⁴ The organization of the princely Kammer, including the “things” within it and about it in the land, was a material “model” (Modell) of a governance defined by its “constructability.”⁵ Tribe believes that such an active or creative concept of Ordnung (“order/ordering,” understood in a politico-economic or juridical-material sense) runs through the subsequent history of German economic thought. I want to suggest here that regional planning emerged in the first two decades of the twentieth century as a core field for the articulation of Ordnung as a mode of governance that relied on forms of spatial modeling. This refrain of spatial construction in the thought of governance gives some historical perspective on the efforts by professional architects and planners (at a moment when the distinction between the two disciplines was not yet fully established) to innovate in the domain of political and economic administration. In the specific example at the center of this investigation, the “region” was an architectural invention—more precisely, a creation of Robert Schmidt, a civil engineer by training. Schmidt, the municipal planner of the Prussian city of Essen, masterminded the first regional planning authority in Europe, the SVR (Siedlungsverband Ruhrkohlenbezirk, or Ruhr Coal District Settlement Association), founded in 1920, and served as its first director until 1932. But that architectural invention was advanced as an organizational solution to problems that were political and economic in nature, and its innovation is perhaps most clearly legible in the context of German juridical and economic thought.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, German planners did not employ the Latinate vocabulary of “region” and its derivatives, even as it became ubiquitous in international planning discourse, preferring instead a variety of terminological analogues. Nevertheless, the distinct problematic of governance as a perpetually unfinished work of territorial construction is a commonplace of German history, from the patchwork fabric of the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages through multiple projects of unification and into the recent past. The regional, defined in the domestic context through the interplay of the local and the national, reflects the tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces, between consolidation and fragmentation, that historians posit as a leitmotif of German political and cultural life.⁶ In practice, that tension gave a characteristically projective, even aspirational, cast to the processes of Ordnung, most significantly in Prussia. The aspect of irresolution was overlooked in post-WWII historiographies on the Sonderweg thesis, which positioned Prussian state-building energies, at once centralizing and expansionist, as archetypal of German modernity—from the iron kingdom to the iron cage. Contemporary historians, on the other hand, emphasize the recurrence of the local as a site of resistance, through the durability of its informal relationships of power and customary privilege, to successive statutory ventures of bureaucratic rationalization from the early eighteenth century onward. A recent authoritative history of Prussia sums up state consolidation as a “haphazard and improvised process that unfolded within a dynamic and sometimes unstable social setting,” where “administration” could sometimes be “a byword for controlled upheaval.”⁷ To insist on the historical pragmatics embedded within the discourses of governmental construction is to seek an analytic that could encompass both the confident formulations of planners, economists, jurists, and other such architects of governance, and the substrate of political contingency they implicitly addressed.

With no claim to comprehensiveness or evolutionary development, I want to propose some historical signposts that help us grasp the particular spatiality of regional “ordering” in the construct of the SVR. The agency of governance modeled by that pioneering regional planning authority was distinctly liminal. It concentrated its attention on the margins; the boundary or interface was its domain and theater of operations. Regional planning was situated interstitially within a layered field of multiple and heterogeneous orderings, and from that strategic position it wove its territorial networks of things and activities, its proper Sachen. But its schemas had at most an asymptotic relationship to the material territory within its ambit. The liminality of planning had precedents in long-standing zones of tension in German political life and thought, where sometimes fine-grained distinctions were introduced and operationalized in a variety of ways in changing historical contexts: relationships between center and periphery, territory and jurisdiction, law and administration, authority and capacity. If architectural thinking helped shape the projective spatial logics of regional administrative governance, its constructs were palaces built on shifting sands.

Cameralism, or, the Margin of Cohesion

Cameralism, then, as a provisional beginning. Can we place a discussion of the emergence of modern regional planning against such a distant historical horizon? Tribe sees the links he suggests between conceptions of economic administration in the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries as less a function of historical evolution than a “degree of symmetry” that marks a consistent preoccupation with the “processual orderliness of economic organization,” as well as its limitations.⁸ Indeed, once posited, the cameralist concept of administration as a “nonjuridical form of regulation”—that is, a mode of governance that does not pertain to questions of sovereignty but is instead concerned with the material elements of productive activity—may be seen to return in multiple historical guises.⁹ But it is also of course Michel Foucault who, by way of locating in eighteenth-century cameralism and mercantilism the genealogical point of origin for an “era of governmentality” extending into the late twentieth century, sought its principles expressed in architecture, especially in the layout of towns.¹⁰ In the functional planning of the built environment, conducted so as to facilitate the circulation of things and activities, of material elements and events, Foucault identified the workings of a technology of power that operated the “perpetual intrication” between territory and population, in the sense of “a multiplicity of individuals who … exist biologically bound to the materiality within which they live.”¹¹ The emergence of a governmental rationality focused on the management and promotion of life was signaled by such tasks of spatial distribution, which became its “urban model.”¹² Likewise, town planning also augured the constructive dimension of liberal economic governance, which arrived on the heels of cameralist and mercantilist innovations as a paradoxical project of the production and multiplication of social liberties through permanent and “omnipresent” state intervention.

If Foucault offers important insight into the specificity and historical continuity of economic administration as a mode of governance, as well as into its spatial productivity, there is a crucial area where the thematic of “order” in the German context diverges from the conceptual map sketched out by the analytic of “governmentality.” I will try to locate that point of divergence through a telling, if marginal, example. As it happens, in the academic year of Foucault’s lectureship at the Collège de France dedicated to eighteenth-century discourses of governance (1977–78), the study of their specifically German variant was assigned to Pasquale Pasquino, a participant in the seminar conducted in conjunction with the lectures.¹³ Pasquino’s remarkable study, published in revised translation in The Foucault Effect (1991), aligns with Foucault’s reading quite closely, except for one very interesting observation that has no counterpart in the lectures.¹⁴ In posing the question of the “field of reality” that the police ordinances of the princely authorities sought to regulate, Pasquino notes that it was first of all conceived as an essentially interstitial “void,” or “no man’s land,” comparable to the “vacant lots of a city.”¹⁵ The emergent governmental rationality thus inserted itself within a space that was already full and intricately reticulated by “established jurisdictions and clear relations of authority, subordination, protection and alliance” of the Ständegesellschaft, the feudal corporative society of estates. Targeting politically unformed marginal areas in that social field, princely administration crafted its own order by marking out relationships both within space (“squares, markets, roads, bridges, rivers”) and between “men and things,” in time producing the “web or ensemble of functions” that wove together the biopolitical doublet of territory-population described by Foucault.¹⁶ But it did so, again, by first “encroach[ing] on domains never previously occupied,” where a “void of power” could be detected.¹⁷ In Pasquino’s telling, administrative governance implants itself as a partial or differential capacity within a broader field demarcated by heterogeneous forms of authority.

Now, as is well known, for Foucault there is no such thing as a power vacuum; society is a dense network of powers, presupposing and continuously generating resistances or counterpowers. That also means that the field traversed by relations of power, stratified and differentiated as it may be at a secondary level of analysis into groups or institutions, is nevertheless fundamentally nondistributed or homogeneous.¹⁸ Power can be multiple, but it is never plural. It is “action upon an action,” situated within a complex of “singularities” whose ultimate point of reference is the individual as the bearer of what Foucault called the “intransitivity of freedom”—the site of resistance not just to power but to relation.¹⁹ So the politically decisive interface is between power and resistance, with the difference between the two “reduced to a minimum,” concentrated on singularities as bearers of the “margin of liberty.”²⁰ Correspondingly, Foucault conceives governmentality as a “singular generality,” applied at the level of the “population” as a “multiplicity of individuals.”²¹ Again, a kernel of that formulation can be found in Pasquino’s text but with a different inflection. For cameralist thought, Pasquino writes, the population consisted of “isolated persons,” and thus the object of governance became “the life of each and all … omnium et singulorum.”²² Foucault borrowed the Latin expression for the title of a talk he gave in fall 1979, arguing that Western “political rationality” is at once individualizing and totalizing.²³ For his part, Pasquino notes immediately after introducing the population-individuals binary that it appeared “where previously, in the old social structure, there had been only groups, Stände, orders or estates.”²⁴ What seems to be a minor qualification in fact suggests a quite different logic. “Population” is here like an ordering layer superimposed upon an already socio-politically stratified or differentiated field so that, it may be said, one belongs to the population inasmuch as one does not belong to an estate. (For Foucault, by contrast, the territorial management of population intervenes in a field of only “material givens.”²⁵)

Cameralist administrative governance was construed as a function of princely “authority” (Obrigkeit)—a concept that combined power with jurisdiction—and it presupposed the demarcation of distinct and at least latently conflictual spheres of activity.²⁶ This created for the new mode of administration, as Tribe notes, the constant problem of limits. Inasmuch as administration was not juridically identical to the state as a political entity, it was not an institutionally grounded coercive apparatus but rather an autonomously expanding function, oriented only to a theoretically unlimited set of materially defined “objectives” or purposes. Therefore, cameralist writers worked to determine the limits of authority, both in the sense of its “mechanism of closure”—a logical or pragmatic endpoint—and the boundary that differentiated administration from other, co-present, governmental forms and techniques.²⁷ In this essentially polycentric, heterogeneous, and relational field of power, the politically decisive interface is not between domination and autonomy, control and freedom, determining and determined instances, as it is for Foucault, but between association and differentiation, or even, to borrow from Étienne Balibar, “appropriation” and “disappropriation.”²⁸ From that standpoint, could we modify Foucault’s analytic to outline in the German case a distributive or “ordering” governmentality, understood as a mobile set of techniques of control relationally applied within a domain occupied by heterogeneous powers? In that regard, Foucault’s problem of the “margin of liberty” would be correspondingly displaced with something like that of the margin of cohesion.

To briefly tie up the discussion of cameralism at this very schematic level, there remains the issue of the governance of towns, which, following a directly traceable trajectory, branches off in the decades around 1900 into the disciplines of city and regional planning. As it happens, the city played a key role in the development of German governance; it was at once a paradigm and a surface of friction for concepts and practices of state administration. Cameralism emerged within the plural and diffuse political structure of the Holy Roman Empire after the Treaty of Westphalia, characterized by a delicate but resilient balance of power among a great diversity of political entities—electorates, principalities, counties, bishoprics, imperial cities, and so on—none of which, including the emperor himself, possessed full sovereignty. In that constitutional “impasse among competing powers,” writes historian Mack Walker in his classic study of German cities, “the muddy complexity of jurisdictions and of political and familial relations rarely confronted any organized element of German society, or any organized community within it, with a clear choice between the violent alternatives of submission or rebellion.”²⁹ The territorial sovereignty of the princely domains that Polizeiwissenschaft sought to govern was that kind of indeterminate domination, in practice everywhere hedged by competing rights and privileges granted to corporate groups and communities formally within princely jurisdictions established by the empire and sometimes even by other principalities. Pasquino’s metaphor of an interstitial power in search of “vacant lots” within a densely built-up urban fabric should be understood in the context of such political complexity on the ground. Germany could be thought of as an aggregate of a thousand local communities (Gemeinde), possessed of a bewildering variety of political structures with customary, if not always juridical, autonomy.³⁰ The individualizing-totalizing systems of cameralist science were indeed a uniform grid—omnes et singulatim—but one projected over an impenetrable thicket of particularisms. Thus, Walker writes, cameralism “infiltrated or bypassed” the stratified socio-political structures of estate privilege without attempting to fit them to its mold, so that a “symmetrical state apparatus” was erected adjacent to local institutions in a kind of tense dualism of superimposed conflictual or complementary orderings.³¹ As a result, the rationality of Polizeiwissenschaft represented an abstract model of power in default of effective application, “not an overview of reality but a body of aspirations.”³² The political contradiction that cameralist writers perceived between the universality they projected and de facto constraints of bureaucratic administration could be rendered as a problem of limits, as outlined by Tribe, or as a problem of “cohesion” (Zusammenhang, literally, “tendency to join together”), posited by cameralist thinker Johann von Justi as the aim of state administration: to harmonize the well-being of each individual with the benefits of the whole.³³ Both independence and cohesion could be understood only marginally.

Urban Self-Governance, or, the Partial Whole

If cities epitomized the condition of relativized individuality, that characteristic could also be used to describe the specific quality of German political life in general. For example, eighteenth-century jurist Justus Möser spoke of German Eigentum (literally, “property”), an intersubjective conception of social identity accessed through collective affiliation, or in Walker’s reading, “identity as a silhouette projected on community [and] rendered and reflected only by community.”³⁴ Hence, the pivotal concept of Selbstverwaltung (“self-governance” or “self-administration”)—the customary right of urban communities to manage their own affairs, that is, to assume local autonomy and control without territorial sovereignty—might perhaps also be abstracted beyond the urban context as a general political principle of self-differentiating, or diacritical, consolidation. What is remarkable is the persistence of such a principle in German articulations of political organization through successive regime changes all the way through the Weimar Republic years. It could be seen to reappear in various guises, tilted in all directions of the ideological spectrum, as a philosophical theme, a programmatic orientation, or an analytical schema for assessing new tensions arising within political life.

For legal theorist Otto von Gierke, writing in the heyday of German nineteenth-century liberalism, a well-ordered polity was a series of “Partial Wholes,” including groups and individuals, each exercising authority within a mutually delimited sphere of action and related to the sovereign state by an isomorphism and reciprocity of parts whereby each reflected both each other and the whole. What assured unity here was not any mechanism of regulatory adjustment from above but the polity’s nature as a “purposive organization” with a shared end determined outside of itself.³⁵ Such was the Rechtsstaat, or the rule of law state—the specifically German version of the European liberal state, which Foucault describes as “self-limiting” with respect to the social freedoms it continuously produces.³⁶ For Gierke, the Rechtsstaat was only the ultimate link in a chain of associations or fellowships (Genossenschaften), cohering as a “plurality-in-unity” bound by law conceived as a juridical matrix of differentiating affiliations.³⁷ Gierke saw his conceptual framework accommodating an “incalculable wealth of new forms of association,” both public and private, political and economic, which actually reflected the pronounced corporative tendencies of late nineteenth-century German modernity.³⁸ But for his student Hugo Preuß, who would become the main author of the Weimar Republic constitution, the paradigmatic political associations were “self-governing” cities—the “little republics” whose emancipation from state control in the management of their day-to-day affairs both presupposed and reciprocally guaranteed the freedom of the constitutional Rechtsstaat, so that “the city constitution became the nucleus of the modern state constitution.”³⁹

Although local self-administration described the reality of German political structures since the Middle Ages, Selbstverwaltung was, somewhat ironically, only formulated and codified as a legal principle under Napoleonic occupation. Prussian municipal reforms of 1808, carried out by Minister of State Baron Karl vom Stein (who was trained as a civil servant according to the precepts of late cameralism), granted “self-governance” along liberal lines to local communities. His was, however, a typically contradictory project.⁴⁰ The French administration, Walker notes, had in a sense tried to realize the universalizing precepts of Prussian cameralism through a thoroughgoing reform of the entrenched estate hierarchies of German political life in the name of the liberal democratic principles of the French Revolution, but the administration was quickly foiled by the intractability of those customary structures.⁴¹ Vom Stein’s municipal reform was a compromise solution inasmuch as it construed local self-governance under state supervision and in accordance with the interests of the state. It was a way to delimit bureaucratic interventions of the state to the maintenance of general legal principles, while letting the individual localities manage their own practical affairs. In that general outline, Selbstverwaltung was incorporated into the constitutions of 1848, 1871, and the Weimar Republic, where local self-governance was guaranteed “under the legally regulated supervision of the state” and “within the limits of the law.”⁴²

This, however, produced the perennial problem of what Preuß called the “unresolved dualism” of authority between the locality and the state, a vacillation that was finally framed as a distinction between governance and administration.⁴³ The relational independence of cities within the state, Preuß wrote, rested on their being “subject to state supervision, but not to state management,” which is another way of saying “that they owe obedience to state laws but not to state administrative orders.”⁴⁴ This “structurally secured boundary between law and administrative command” was the core precept of Rechtsstaat order—“the differentiated organization of the constitutional state.”⁴⁵ In that sense, the city as subject and object of governance was coextensive and isomorphic with the distributive governmentality of the German liberal state, in which law “governs where the joint will occur between popular liberty and monarchical or bureaucratic administration.”⁴⁶ Preuß himself regarded that boundary and its tendency to be relentlessly blurred in the course of German history as one of the core problems confronting German constitutional democracy.

The Special Purpose Association, between Law and Administration

Selbstverwaltung concentrated on the question of boundaries; this much was clear by the 1920s. As a legal entity, wrote administrative law expert Hans Peters in his 1926 dissertation titled “The Limits of Municipal Self-Government in Prussia,” “every self-administration must be administration [Verwaltung], that is, in the broadest sense, activity for the fulfillment of tasks that lie neither in the area of jurisdiction nor of legislation.”⁴⁷ Generally speaking, Peters explained, administration is a set of “vital functions” that fulfill “specific purposes.” Juridically, municipal government is a “public corporation” created by the state to fullfill “a range of tasks in specific areas where [the state] itself refrains from carrying out administrative activities.” Its independence lies only in the “boundary line” drawn by force of law within the domain of administrative functional “competences” that it shares with the state (and with other public corporate bodies). Nothing would be more erroneous than to consider this kind of governance “an end in itself.”⁴⁸ Peters did not consider it important to define the “nature of the tasks” delegated to municipal administration. “It is irrelevant,” he writes, “whether these are economic transactions in the field of private law or transactions under public law.”⁴⁹ The definitive criterion of Selbstverwaltung is that the field of functional authority is partitioned between the organs or instances of government (the city and the state), which overlaps a more fundamental divide between law and administration. Law delimits administrative reach; it provides the framework within which administration functions, at both the state and the municipal levels.⁵⁰

In his 1919 textbook, constitutional law expert Gerhard Anschütz is more precise. The political world for him consists of “communities” (Gemeinwesen), which are “associations” representing majority will and possessing an “organization for the formation and expression of this will.”⁵¹ All organized entities of political life are essentially associative “political communit[ies],” based on the “commonality of certain purposes [Zwecke] and views”—not just cities and states but also, for example, religious societies or other “associations for economic, social, scientific, artistic and other purposes.”⁵² In this field of active and purposeful associations, distinctions are drawn according to “sphere of activity” (Wirkungskreis).⁵³ Finally, spheres of activity distribute “competences” (Kompetenzen). The sovereign state has an “unlimited” sphere of activity, which means “the power to determine which political tasks it wishes to reserve to itself and which it wishes to leave to the community associations subordinate to it. [The state] is entitled to distribute competences among the various local authorities subordinate to it.”⁵⁴ As subordinate political communities, municipalities have an “unlimited” sphere of activity within their own area of competence but a limited one with respect to the state. In this distributive and functional conception of governance, the problem of boundaries within commonalities takes precedence over any distinction between state and society or political and economic areas. But, Anschütz notes, “in recent times,” municipal activities have “focused almost exclusively on the area of administration, particularly internal and financial administration.”⁵⁵ And Prussian civil servant Albert Mellin is less hesitant in his 1928 thesis that defines muncipal Selbstverwaltung as “economic management within the framework of existing laws.”⁵⁶ We would not be wrong to hear in this an echo of the things and productive activities of Kameralwissenschaft.

It is entirely in keeping with this discourse that it would locate in the so-called “special purpose association” (Zweckverband) a difference in function, but not in kind, relative to other forms of political association. “Towns, rural municipalities, districts, provinces and joint municipalities,” writes Peters, “are not the only types of communities that exist in Prussia… . There are several intermediate-level and municipal-type entities whose legal nature is often difficult to determine.”⁵⁷ Established by the Special Purpose Association Act of July 19, 1911, Zweckverbände were “public-law, corporately organized associations of municipal bodies with the right of self-administration for the fulfillment of certain municipal purposes” and thus characterized mainly by the delimitation of their sphere of activity.⁵⁸ They were one of Germany’s characteristically corporative responses to the urban transformations of industrial modernity. After 1871, cities had to contend with explosive population growth, which pushed urban areas past their physical and administrative boundaries, thus straining municipal services and complicating taxation arrangements. The 1924 Dictionary of Municipal Sciences indicated destabilization of the municipal “sphere of work [Arbeitskreis], especially in the area of public health care and social welfare, as well as [in] the economic field,” as the core motivator for the formation of special-purpose associations.⁵⁹ From that standpoint, one obvious solution, pursued in expanding metropolitan centers across Europe, was amalgamation or annexation. Many cities across Germany extended their jurisdictions in a wave of annexations at the turn of the century.⁶⁰ The Zweckverband was specifically positioned as an alternative to such jurisdictional incorporation. The 1919 Handbook of Prussian Municipal Constitutional and Administrative Law placed the special-purpose association in relation to the “joint municipality” (Samtgemeinde), an “association of several independent municipalities,” such as a district or a province, emphasizing that both share a “cooperative [genossenschaftlich] character,” but the latter is constitutionally grounded, whereas the former is bound only by its “public-law purposes.”⁶¹ Such purposes, the Handbook emphasized, “are as varied as the ‘municipal tasks,’” which in turn “cannot be defined broadly enough.”⁶² Thus, by 1919 there were intermunicipal special-purpose associations for the care of the poor, public schools, insurance, commercial courts, and police, as well as midwife districts, vaccination, hunting, tax assessment districts, and districts for chimney sweeps.⁶³ But major urban infrastructure, including public transportation, gas, electricity and water works, and building regulation were among the central administrative tasks addressed through intermunicipal association. Through the second half of the nineteenth century, such “purposes” were increasingly brought within the purview of city planning.

The architects, engineers, municipal administrators, social reformers, and economists who shaped the planning discipline in the last decades of the nineteenth century aimed to direct the processes of industrialization and the speculative development of urban real estate, as well as to regulate its detrimental social effects, such as problems of public health and housing. Their instruments were laws and public works: on the one hand, municipal regulations that defined the type and height of structures that could be privately built, and the relationship of buildings to the street; on the other hand, bridges and roads to channel the circulation of goods and workers, as well as sewer systems to control the spread of disease. Thus, city planning was a project of inscribing a juridical and administrative order within the physical urban fabric.⁶⁴ It figured urban governance as an active-creative regulatory ordering of both material things and immaterial activities inscribed in space. Planning is commonly understood this way. The history of association brings to the forefront the way in which the regulatory governmentality performed by the planning discipline was traversed in turn by the political problem of boundaries, within which dynamics of power operated through negotiations of inclusion and exclusion articulated in terms of distributive spatializations.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, municipal expansion through annexation was everywhere complicated by the resistance of smaller suburban communities, which was in turn overdetermined by the politics of local culture and class relations. As large cities sought to relieve their central areas of dense workers’ housing by relocating it to the periphery, the prospect represented for suburban city councils, dominated by propertied bourgeois notables, a dramatic change in the class composition of their areas and a corresponding loss of political control. In the words of one suburban official writing in 1906, annexation plans for the Düsseldorf municipal area—“the extension of the city of Düsseldorf’s sphere of control”—threatened to entrench “the big city’s policy to push the proletariat up to and over its borders.”⁶⁵ In debates surrounding such projects, Selbstverwaltung typically figured as an inviolable ideal that both signified and enacted the maintenance of marginal separations, the dynamics of autonomy and belonging.⁶⁶ Only when real estate activity made the population of suburban areas majority working class anyway did those areas stop resisting annexation. Prussian state plans for the amalgamation of Berlin and its surrounding towns into a unified province in the 1870s were obstructed by nearly all communities involved.⁶⁷ The pattern was repeated when the prospect of an administrative consolidation of Greater Berlin as a metropolitan region was again raised in 1908–10 through a widely publicized planning competition. In that case, the class politics coloring of the municipal boundaries problem was more pronounced, since the Social Democratic Party expected the unified Berlin region to yield a massive electoral benefit, while Prussian state authorities feared it for that same reason.⁶⁸ Greater Berlin would not be consolidated until 1920, as the capital of the Weimar Republic with a Social Democratic majority in its governing coalition. Meanwhile, in 1912, the Greater Berlin Special Purpose Association (Zweckverband Gross-Berlin) was formed as an independent intermunicipal organization that took over the tasks of regionally coordinated transit, services, and building and land regulations.⁶⁹ That context makes the special-purpose association legible as a compromise solution, a “substitute for annexation.”⁷⁰ The functional conception of governance oriented to delimited “purposes,” codified by the private law instrument of the Zweckverband, offered a way to bypass constitutional questions of authority, representation, and rights, as well as the political issues attendant upon them.

Formation of the Ruhr Coal District Settlement Association

Developments in Berlin were closely observed by the planning profession. In 1910, representatives of several municipal councils in the Düsseldorf administrative district (Landkreis), located in the Rhine-Westphalia coal-mining region of western Prussia, formed a committee to address a perceived need for public green spaces. Expansion of the mining industry after 1870 had led to rapid unplanned urban concentrations in areas close to mining shafts. Planning was now desirable, it was argued, in order to loosen the long stretches of dense development, in the interests of both public health and the settling of intermunicipal territorial conflicts.⁷¹ However, in light of the contentious amalgamation processes in the Düsseldorf municipal region, which started around 1880 and did not end until 1908, it is reasonable to think that district public authorities were interested specifically in alternatives to further annexation.⁷² Düsseldorf commissioned Robert Schmidt, chief planner of the neighboring city of Essen, to plan a park system. Inspired by events in Berlin, Schmidt then went far beyond his original assignment, proposing instead a General Settlement Plan (Generalsiedlungsplan) for the district, which would “balance the interests of municipalities in their bordering areas.”⁷³ The concept of a “unified organism,” in which “individual parts” are brought into orderly relationships “regardless of the political boundaries” of the different entities that compose it, resonates with the associative logic governing issues of municipal amalgamation.⁷⁴ The same is true of the focus, reiterated in multiple ways throughout Schmidt’s proposal, on liminal spaces (“border areas”) where adjoining heterogeneous entities confront each other, producing possible frictions and transgressions—areas where one municipality might “disadvantage or even kill off residential areas and green spaces” of another, or where work districts might “interfere” with residential districts that have “very different existential needs.”⁷⁵ Schmidt’s “general settlement plan” emerges, above all, as an instrument for the marginal resolution of conflicts anticipated to arise continually. The plan aims, Schmidt writes, “to regulate the orderly coexistence of the masses [Menschenmassen] so that conflicting needs do not repeatedly give rise to grievances.”⁷⁶ It is clear that this regulatory mechanism is conceived in juridical-economic terms, in the sense of material governance of the population in relation to territory, rather than purely as an instrument for the ordering of space. “Planning and implementation,” according to Schmidt, “must also take into account economics, the political economy, and socio-political considerations.”⁷⁷ This is the work of Verwaltung. Thus, Schmidt’s discussion closes by posing the question of agency: “Who is to carry out the finalized Generalsiedelungsplan, who is to monitor its implementation? Right away one hears the call for a Zweckverband.” The only issue that remains, he says, is the precise determination of its “purpose.”⁷⁸

Schmidt’s proposal for Düsseldorf stalled in 1912 but was picked up in a new guise in the transformed political circumstances of the Weimar Republic. The Ruhr Valley emerged as a place of great strategic importance after 1918.⁷⁹ The seat of the German coal industry and thus key to reparations payments imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, the area was also occupied by traditionally powerful agricultural elites jostled by rapid industrialization and attendant urban population growth—a fourfold increase to almost 4 million between 1871 and 1920. A 1918 state plan to resettle 150,000 miners and their families (approximately 600,000 people in total) to the Ruhr Valley to enhance industrial productivity threatened to add fuel to a highly combustible political situation. The frictions that occupied Schmidt’s attention six years prior were significantly aggravated over the course of the war and revolution. Labor unrest that had marked mining operations since the end of the nineteenth century erupted in increasingly violent strikes and protests in the fall of 1918, threatening to totally paralyze production by the start of 1920. In addition to the paternalistic system of management, working conditions, and wage scales, miner discontent centered on the inadequate provision of housing. Housing construction was further complicated by the uniquely fragmented administrative structure of the region, with the provinces of Rhineland and Westphalia governed by separate administrative codes, the former retaining jurisdictional units derived from the Napoleonic occupation and therefore French in influence.⁸⁰ The political fragmentation of the region—with more than three hundred municipalities and comprising eighteen urban districts and eleven rural counties, within three administrative districts and two provinces—was overlaid between 1875 and 1918 by the vertical integration of the dominant industrial concerns, which combined coal, steel, and heavy chemicals in systems of sectoral interdependency (fig. 2). Local communities found themselves both dependent on industry and unequally affected by its development, which tended to create urban agglomerations of dramatically disparate size and economic power. At the same time, single-factory towns were stripped of economic diversity and struggled in periods of recession. All this created layered and diffuse antagonisms: among municipalities that found themselves in competition for economic survival, between industry and public authorities who sought to assert control in municipal services and infrastructure, and between capital and labor. The growing influence of party politics after 1918 added to that complexity as the region became a Social Democratic Party (SPD) stronghold. The SPD and KPD (Communist Party) pushed for municipal amalgamation and centralization, while after 1920 the National Socialists (NSDAP) made inroads in rural and agrarian areas on the platform of local autonomy.

View full image +

The economic, political, and administrative fragmentation of the region emerged as a renewed problem of governance at a moment when, according to a contemporary observer, all across Germany “no state boundary or administrative demarcation seemed to want to stand still and everything was pushing for major new formations.”⁸¹ The first two years of the Weimar Republic were marked by the resurgence of both new and long-simmering projects for territorial restructuring in the Ruhr.⁸² Early in 1919, in an effort to reduce the expected outsize influence of Prussia on the affairs of the Reich due to its territorial and population size, as well as to create a more balanced federal structure, Hugo Preuß presented a proposal that would have disaggregated Prussia into separate provinces. Although Preuß’s proposal was quickly defeated, it stimulated efforts by parties in Rhineland to establish an independent Rhenish-Westphalian republic in the framework of the Reich constitution, which in turn aimed to counter a more radical Rhenish separatist movement being supported by the French. A competing plan would have administratively consolidated a Ruhr industrial province in the areas of strategic importance for mining and affiliated industries. It is against the background of such heated factional disputes about territorial reorganization that Essen’s mayor Hans Luther began his campaign with Prussian authorities for the establishment of a special-purpose association in Rhineland-Westphalia.⁸³ The plan, drafted by Luther together with Schmidt and Essen alderman Curt Bucerius, drew on Schmidt’s ideas from 1912. A political window of opportunity had opened for the distributive spatialization of power envisioned by Schmidt through the merger of the juridical form of the special-purpose association and the territorial instrument of planning.

Remarkably, in deliberations surrouding the establishment of what the Essen representatives called the Settlement Association for the Ruhr Coal District (Siedlungsverband Ruhrkohlenbezirk, or SVR), the issue of the exact “purpose” to be taken up by the association was overshadowed by the central concern over the precise limits of agency and distribution of powers—both among the different entities constituting the organization and with respect to its area of jurisdiction. It was understood that the SVR would engage in “settlement planning,” but the most concrete and pressing settlement task—mainly, the construction of housing on as yet undetermined sites for the expected influx of mine laborers—was quickly assigned to another cooperative state entity explicitly established for that purpose.⁸⁴ Schmidt argued before the Prussian State Assembly that, while the use of planning instruments was necessary for an orderly economic development of the region, the dynamic expansion of mining operations for the foreseeable future necessitated a correspondingly flexible and expandable organization of both competencies and territorial reach.⁸⁵ Thus, whatever this planning would entail, its main perceived virtue was its orientation to purely economic tasks, which offered it as an effective alternative and bulwark against an administrative consolidation of the region. From that perspective, deliberations focused on locating and fortifying the threshold beyond which a creeping transformation of the SVR into the dreaded industrial province might occur. The SVR would be the culmination of various efforts in the preceding decades to create administrative structures transcending municipal boundaries, but its uniqueness as a political solution was in its ability to generalize the problematic of delimitation and offer it as the core function of administrative governance. The association would not be granted authority to create a legally binding comprehensive regional plan for the entire territory within its purview.⁸⁶ The “purpose” of this special-purpose association was, in a sense, planning as such—a loosely and abstractly conceived technology focused above all on the formalization of limits. As one Prussian state official observed in a notably circular argument, the purpose of the association was to ensure that the planning of mining expansion (Ausbau) in the Ruhr “corresponds to the modern science of urban planning [Städtebau].”⁸⁷

The SVR was incorporated by an act of the Prussian assembly on May 5, 1920, as a Zweckverband, with its statutory tasks and powers precisely delimited to those areas of settlement, transportation, and green space planning that extended beyond the scope of individual territorial entities comprising it and outward to the district as a whole.⁸⁸ Thus, the boundaries of planning as an expert field focused narrowly on the organization of spatial and territorial relationships would serve as a guarantee against the concentration of more comprehensive governmental controls at the regional scale. The association prevailed, according to an Essen political scientist writing in 1926, only inasmuch as “it could be pointed out that there was no reason to fear an expansion of [its] tasks beyond the precisely defined boundaries of its field of expertise, which would lead to a transfer of all administrative powers to the new authorities.”⁸⁹ Its governance structure was likewise designed to preserve existing political and territorial boundaries and distributions of power according to the principle of shared governance and proportional representation. It included both elected and appointed representatives from all the local territorial authorities and economic enterprises, including management and labor. Its administrative organs were loosely modeled on those of provincial government. There was the Association Assembly, a parliamentary legislative body whose 172 elected representatives were drawn, in equal numbers, from political entities (local governments) and economic institutions (industries and utilities), with the latter again split evenly between employer and employee groups.⁹⁰ By the end of 1920, the assembly had already become “politicized” through the inclusion of party-political factions, with deputies from the SPD and the Center Party (and by 1929, KPD and NSDAP also had seats in the assembly, with the total number of party delegates exceeding the combined total of the economic and municipal contingents).⁹¹ The Association Committee was a smaller executive body, with sixteen voting members appointed by the assembly from within its member ranks, their seats proportionally distributed across all constitutive groups. The association director, as the chief executive official, was appointed by the Association Assembly and was the seventeenth voting member on the committee.⁹² Contemporary observers tended to view the association through the lens of interest and power politics, foregrounding “balance of interests” as its key principle.⁹³ “It would likely be impossible,” opined a local government official in 1926,

for a single authority to oversee the interests of the winegrowers of the Ahr Valley, the Moselle Valley, and the Rheingau, the issues of Rhine shipping, the concerns of agriculture in the Lower Rhine, the interests of the major Rhenish cities, and the complexities of the Ruhr area that falls within the Rhine Province—and to administer them in a way that does justice to the vital interests of this area. The same applies to the province of Westphalia in view of contrasts between the interests of the Siegerland and those of the Minden area, the complexities of the Ruhr area, especially the southern and northern peripheral areas, and the special concerns of Münsterland agriculture.⁹⁴

Notably, no a priori distinction was drawn between public and private sector groups or processes, nor was it ever assumed that some interests were inherently opposed and locked in conflict—only subject to “frictions” in areas of adjacency, or “socio-political tensions.”⁹⁵ The governing conceptual model described a foundational plurality of entities, each representing a distinct arrangement of subjects, goods, and activities, and each equally endowed with “functional self-governance,” understood as an “organizational principle” even if not legally codified in all cases.⁹⁶

Regional Planning and Its Instruments

Robert Schmidt, in his capacity as the inaugural director of the SVR, worked to articulate the delimitative-distributive functions assigned to the institution in the concrete procedural and documentary forms of the plan. Translated in international venues as “regional planning,” Schmidt’s preferred term for the discipline he was engaged in formulating was Landesplanung.⁹⁷ “Regional planning” (Landesplanung), wrote Schmidt in 1926, “comes into play when industry, extraction of mineral resources, or trade have caused a concentration of economic activity combined with a concentration of the population in specific parts of the country, and when, as a result of the emphasis on special interests, mutual disturbances occur.”⁹⁸ The task of that planning was to identify such “settlement phenomena” as “elements [defined by] mass needs with large area requirements,” which must then be distributed in such a way that further development can occur with “a minimum of mutual impairment.”⁹⁹ In other words, the goal was to provide openings or “spaces” for the “free development” of the diverse “elements” of settlement, such as housing, public recreation, industry, and transportation. The spaces were of two main kinds: “areas” designated for specific land uses and “bands” for projected regional transportation lines. In both cases, the emphasis was not on facilitating but on forestalling new private development until such time that it may proceed in a manner agreed upon by the various parties included in the regional unit. The early years of the SVR focused on the designation of such open spaces for regional transportation and a public parks system, in addition to issuing settlement permits and developing a uniform regional building code.¹⁰⁰

By 1926, Schmidt called the technical outcome of such procedures a “general economic plan” (Generalwirtschaftsplan), emphasizing that its “forms [were] determined neither by technology nor art, but only by economics.”¹⁰¹ The focus of planning, he wrote in 1930, was to determine “what the economy demands of land.”¹⁰² Certainly, the planning process took on here the appearance of technocratic optimization of economic mechanisms—the elimination of “frictions” and greasing of wheels for the reproduction of capital—in line with contemporaneous concepts of the “organized economy.”¹⁰³ “Maximum performance,” as Schmidt put it, “is only possible through mutual adaptation in spatial and material terms.”¹⁰⁴ But to understand the administrative rationality of planning in such technocratic terms (as, broadly speaking, is the scholarly consensus on 1920s planning) would fail to take into account the politics of practice within which regional planning as an evolving discipline was inscribed, at least in the German context. Schmidt knew very well that the institutional basis of the Landesplanung he represented carried with it neither power nor mandate to execute anything like an optimization of territorial structures for economic production.¹⁰⁵ Recall that the practical planning activity of the SVR was conceived in mostly negative, rather than creative, terms, as it focused on designating existing territorial openings for temporary protection from development in view of anticipated possible futures. Thus, Schmidt considered the SVR’s work to be of a “mainly precautionary [voraussorgend]” nature, inasmuch as it “help[ed] to avoid all serious mistakes in expected future development.”¹⁰⁶ The “economic plan” is better understood as something of an aspiration, a projection of desirable futures, and, in the interim, a theoretical abstraction, the possibility of whose implementation assumed the necessary availability of multiple unstable relays. In that sense, the ordering discourse of regional planning replayed the cameralist modeling of a control schema within an unevenly distributed, conditional, and projective framework—its “bands” and “areas” a distant echo of Pasquino’s “vacant lots” in a densely settled territory.

The epistemic status of the plan as a technical document should also be understood with respect to the assumed contingencies of its implementation. In his 1912 proposal for Düsseldorf, Schmidt had already found it necessary to employ some terminological innovation to describe the kind of intermunicipal planning he envisioned. The Siedelungsplan, he wrote then, “is not merely a building plan [Bebauungsplan], but is supplemented by regulations in the area of building and housing policy in accordance with our existing law. Its planning and implementation must also take into account economics, the political economy, and socio-political considerations.”¹⁰⁷ The stock-in-trade of city planning since the middle of the nineteenth century, the Bebauungsplan was typically produced for narrowly circumscribed areas and showed the layout of streets and building lots in relation to zoning codes and building regulations. It was primarily an instrument for the regulatory control and spatial design of the urban fabric. The concreteness of such documents, both in a material and a juridical sense, was entirely inappropriate for the expression of the indirect and abstract measures Schmidt envisioned. To illustrate his Generalsiedelungsplan concept, he sketched out a “schematic depiction” showing a proposed distribution of land use areas within an industrial district, variously dedicated to parks, industry, business, and residential uses and connected by traffic lines (fig. 3).¹⁰⁸ It was a conceptual or diagrammatic representation, framed entirely in heuristic terms, to explain and perhaps convince an institutional client about a general planning approach—an aid to communication rather than an aid to realization. The Generalwirtschaftsplan he later pursued as director of the SVR may be seen to translate the abstraction and heuristic motivation of the schema into the technical terms of a planning document.

View full image +

The association’s founding statute did not use the term Wirtschaftsplan (economic plan), nor, as we have seen, did it give authority to generate binding instruments of such comprehensive scope.¹⁰⁹ Nevertheless, over the course of its first decade of existence, the SVR produced a series of documents that, in contemporary terms, are recognizable as land use plans. Drawn up for different localities within its jurisdiction, the documents were meant to be stitched together into an overall regional plan for the entire association territory (fig. 4).¹¹⁰ Such a “general economic plan,” Schmidt felt, could be accompanied by local Bebauungspläne produced by municipalities themselves as needed. “Every building plan,” he wrote in 1926, “is a land subdivision plan, but an economic plan is something quite different.” Its creative essence, its innovation, was in relation to “administrative form,” not to the physical forms of the built fabric. Its success depended less on “the solution of technical issues” but above all on “administrative issues,” because “without a change in the administrative form, the desired goal [would] have to remain unattainable.”¹¹¹ The administrative creativity of regional planning was conceived as a marginal substitute for territorial governance, a way of seeking out the interstitial voids or joints between multiple powers and jurisdictions where control over the built fabric could be projected in its fullness only as image, never assured. Reporting on the ongoing work of the association in 1922, deputy director Philipp Rappaport described the distribution of regional “traffic bands” in the process of being drawn up for the territory as a “development overview plan” (Bebauungsübersichtsplan).¹¹² The “schematic overview” of the proposed road network that this plan represented, Rappaport noted, had a “certain tight clarity of structure” because it was to serve as a baseline for negotiation, a way to clearly explain a general and provisional arrangement (fig. 5). It was produced, he explained, through a series of compromises among the public and private stakeholders, the goal of the association being to preserve, rather than usurp, the autonomy and thus also the practical and financial responsibility of the various constituents over the physical territories within their purview. It took “many a hard struggle.”¹¹³ In practice, the plan was something like a platform for the negotiation of competing interests or, one might say, a framework for the determination of a margin of cohesion among functionally differentiated organized entities. The “general planning” (Gesamtplannung) of the SVR, as Josef Umlauf, the association’s director from 1959 to 1965, would write in 1958, was conceived as “an orientation framework and argumentation aid, … not a binding plan, but an elastic internal working tool.”¹¹⁴ Regional planning was the production of spatial models for an “ordering” governmentality situated within a politically plural and juridically unstable domain, rather than political-economic control systems reified in space.

View full image +

View full image +

The historical trajectory briefly sketched out here could help frame a broader problematic of construction in architecture’s relation to governance. Planners of Schmidt’s generation were typically trained as architects or civil engineers. Schmidt held a degree in civil engineering. His administrative inventions (constructions) were developed against the foil of existing practices and instruments of spatial design, such as the Bebauungsplan. In 1912, he could still assert that the final outcome of regional planning must be “a compositionally and aesthetically flawless work of art.”¹¹⁵ From the princely task of house and domain building to the grids and striations of regional planning, the spatial intelligence of architecture played a role in shaping the distributive spatializations of governmentality. Into the second half of the twentieth century throughout the West, the growing disciplinary split of architecture and planning assigned to the former the direct production and manipulation of physical spaces, while administrative governance at territorial scales became the purview of the latter. But that division of agency in a sense mirrored the instability of the circuit connecting distributive governmentality to spatial organization. The very logic of a governance that relied on instrumental spatial models for its articulation precluded the realization of those models in anything other than partial, contingent, and “elastic” form. Its orientation to liminalities made it constitutively tenuous. It could be said that the realization of planning concepts depended on the ability to locate a margin of cohesion, a circumscribed area where a partial overlap of heterogeneous powers and ends could be secured, always temporarily.

To be sure, German planners found such perpetually shifting ground frustrating. Throughout the 1920s, their professional associations tirelessly lobbied for legislation that would consolidate and stabilize the authority of planning instruments. The Free German Academy of Urban Planning was founded in 1922 for that explicit purpose, with Robert Schmidt as one of its key founding members and its president from 1929 to 1934.¹¹⁶ Between 1925 and 1931, several drafts of urban planning laws that would mandate the coordinated production of binding territorial planning documents for different areas, from the local to the national, were put forward for parliamentary debate both in Prussia and the Reich as a whole. Each of these bills failed to secure a majority in its favor. Until, that is, in a series of legislative acts passed with remarkable ease between 1933 and 1937, the National Socialist revolution brought about the centralized and hierarchical administrative integration of planning functions at all territorial scales—but within the matrix of a radically novel governmental rationality that was no longer focused on the obligatory preservation but the total elimination of the marginal.

My thanks to the editors and peer reviewers Ayala Levin, Manuel Schvartzberg Carrió, and Hollyamber Kennedy for their incisive critiques and suggestions.