Sprawl – Civic Engagement Add-On

Sprawl – Civic Engagement Add-On

Urban sprawl decreases civic engagement

“As this research shows, people who grow up in a sprawl environment (that is deprived of some of the components of traditional communities) are less likely to be civically active in later life. This is due to the lack of positive, civically-oriented stimuli in these areas. In contrast to traditional communities, suburbs and urban sprawl create the appearance of an urbanized metropolitan area, without many of the more traditional components of a functional and civically active community (such as public parks, pedestrian-oriented city centers, and other public spaces). Traditional communities have established forums for social and civic interaction, which are often located near where the participants live. These places include public squares and parks, community recreation centers, “meeting halls” of various sorts, churches (or other religious congregations), and locally owned and located stores and businesses, which is an often overlooked community gathering place (Putnam 2000). Without these kinds of outlets for interpersonal interaction, individuals in an urban sprawl environment are effectively isolated from other citizens. This can reduce their desire to become involved in the social and civic life of their communities.”

Civic disengagement prevents informed citizenship and risks totalitarianism

Lakeland 93 -Professor of Religious Studies at Fairfield University, (Paul “Preserving The Lifeworld, Restoring the Public Sphere, Renewing Higher Education,” Cross Currents, Winter, 43.4, p488, http://www.crosscurrents.org/lakeland2)

How did we get from a democratic society in which the citizens--no matter how small a minority of the total community they constituted--truly felt they owned it, to one in which so many are alienated from the political process? One reason is that in the earlier years the expansion of citizenship and the subsequent increase in educational opportunities did not lead to the admission of these newly educated classes into the dialogue. Educational reform and improvement in the standard of living took place within European societies whose class, gender, and race-based social constraints underwent no serious change; a little learning did not a gentleman make. Another, more recent reason is that democratization was accompanied by capitalization, so that the passive consumption of culture and commodities with its attendant apolitical sociability was the path preferred by, or at least open to, the vast majority. In other words, there are just a lot more citizens; but many of these citizens are the victims of structural oppression, and all are lured by the blandishments of material ease. Again, to return to Habermas's forms of expression, all this amounts to the progressive colonization of the lifeworld by the system. If, in the past two hundred years, the public sphere has so completely failed to fulfill its promise as a market-place for the discourse of a free society, the project must be to restore it through the revival of true communicative action, that is, to persuade people to talk to one another with respect, to listen fairly, to argue cleanly, and to move towards consensus on norms for action. That way lies a democratic future. Any other way leads to one or another form of totalitarianism, including the totalitarianism of mass consumption culture whose victims are so easily persuaded to pursue its spurious salvation and ersatz heaven. However, the character of our modern world requires that steps taken to transform the public sphere respect and reflect the complexity of modern society. We are not just so many individuals sorted into different social classes. We are rather members of a number of sub-groups, perhaps defined by race, class, gender or religion, as well as members of the larger body politic. What will be needed is a confluence of these autonomous publics or distinct interest groups coming together in common concern for the preservation of democratic life. The public sphere will have to include many more voices than it did in the time of Samuel Johnson, and the consensus on social goods may seem even more elusive; but the dynamics of the process, so argues Habermas, will help ensure the preservation of a human society. This late twentieth-century world possesses further characteristics that distinguish it from Athens, or Dr. Johnson's London. It is, as we have already noted, profoundly multicultural, and monocultural societies can be restored only by acts of violence. Second, in such a world societies have a tendency to understand themselves primarily as systems, and to apply systems-theory to the elucidation of their concerns and the solution of their problems. Thus they assert instrumental action as paradigmatic, consigning the specifically human communicative action to a secondary role. Third, societies show an extraordinary degree of professionalization (which some see as fragmentation) of social life. Fourth, they seem to prize technical expertise over moral influence. Finally, they put their faith in science and technology, rather than in some less tangible medium of meaning. The multicultural complexion of the modern world is a fact that could not be undone, even if it were desirable to do so. But the other four characteristics are much less firmly entrenched. This flexibility is fortunate, since the preservation of democracy in our world is going to require some adjustment in the degree to which the world is seen as system. In addition to calling for a new kind of harmony carved out of a wider participation of autonomous publics (racial, gender-based, sexual orientation-based, and so on), we need to redress the balance between expertise and influence and to look beyond the scientism of the machine age. Without these changes, the world will incline to making the human person an instrument of society. When that happens, the distinctively human activities of caring, thinking, and creating are either marginalized, relegated to some domestic privacy, or put to the service of the system. Is it not the case that today the vast majority of our citizens find their true human fulfillment at those times when they are not engaged as "productive members of society"? (Ask a group of students some time what they are really fascinated by, and then ask them what they expect to be their career directions, and note the wide discrepancies.) If so, can we not trace a connection between this unfortunate fact and the decline of "civic virtue," the rise of a taboo-morality ("If I don't get caught, it's OK") that seems increasingly to govern public life, and the combination of apathy and cynicism which most Americans reserve for reflection upon the political process?

We need involved citizenship to prevent extinction

Bauman 99 - Professor of Sociology at Leeds (Zygmunt, In Search of Politics, p 169-171)

Throughout the history of the modern state, the ‘catchment area’ of nation and republic tended to overlap. This circumstance was a constant source of potential conflict, but also offered a chance of mutual correction, of each partner/competitor protecting the other from the dire consequences of going to the extreme and assuaging or balancing off the adverse effects each partner on its own might have on the plight of the individuals. The republic offers an avenue of escape into freedom when the loving yet insidious and domineering embrace of the nation becomes too tight for comfort. The nation offers escape from freedom: the situation when public space feels too cold and impersonal for self-assurance, and the responsibilities that republican life demands seem too onerous to carry. It is all changing now, though. The republic is, so to speak ‘emigrating’ from the nation-state which for a few recent centuries it shared with the nation. Not that contemporary states tend to become less democratic, and hence less in line with the essentials of the republican model; but democracy as practiced within the increasingly toothless and impotent to guard or adjust the conditions vital for the life of the citizens. Having lost much of their past sovereignty and no longer able to balance the books on their own or to lend authority to the type of social order of their condition of a viable republic: the ability of the citizens to negotiate and jointly decide ‘the public good’, and so to shape a society which they would be prepared to call their own and to which they would gladly give their oath of unswerving allegiance. It is because the republic in the nation-state is fast losing most of its welfare-defining and welfare-promoting potency, that the territory of the nation-state is turning increasingly into the private estate of the nation. The republic has little power left to ensure the long-term security of the nation and so to cure or mitigate its ‘besieged fortress’ complex and to defuse or reduce its pugnacity and intolerance. The nation no longer seems to be securely settled, its future no longer seems assured and in safe keeping – and so the failure of the republic ushers in the times of born-again, vigorous, rampant and unbridled nationalism. The most decisive parameters of the human condition are now shaped in the areas the institutions of the nation-state cannot reach. The powers which preside over preservation and change of those conditions are increasingly globalized, while the instruments of the citizen’s control and influence, however potent they might be, remain locally confined. Globalization of capital, finances and information means first and foremost their exemption from local, and above all nation-state, control and administration. In the space in which they operate there are no institutions reminiscent of the vehicles which the republican state has developed for citizen participation and effective political action. And where there are no republican institutions, there is no ‘citizenship’ either. The concept of ‘global powers’ captures the emerging, but already tough, resilient and apparently indomitable reality, while the concept of ‘global citizenship’ thus far strays empty, representing a postulate at best, but in most contexts not much more than wishful thinking. Being buffeted by the powerful tides, drawn by stormy winds blowing from distant places and arriving without warning, is a condition exactly the opposite to that of citizenship. The sudden upheavals and downfalls in collective fortunes today acquire an eerie likeness to natural catastrophes, though even this comparison looks increasingly like an understatement: as it happens, we have these days better means to anticipate the imminent earthquake or approaching hurricane than to predict the next stock-exchange crash or collapse and the evaporation of apparently secure places of mass employment. In a recent essay Jacques Attali explained the phenomenal popularity of the film Titanic by the remarkable resonance the viewers felt to exist between that parabolic case of human conceit floundering upon the iceberg which, due to the captains arrogance and his staff’s docility, was not (nor could be) taken seriously enough and spotted in time – and their own present day plight: “Titanic is us, our triumphalist, self-congratulating, blind, hypocritical society, merciless towards it poor – a society in which everything is predicted except the means of predicting…[W]e all guess that there is an iceberg waiting for us, hidden somewhere in the misty future, which we will hit and then go down to the sounds of music.” There are, Attali suggests, not one by several icebergs ahead, each one rougher and more treacherous than the last. There is the financial iceberg of unbridled currency speculation, profits shooting sky-high and shamelessly overvalued stocks. There is the nuclear iceberg, with about thirty countries, each of them embroiled in its own network of contentions and animosities, expected to be capable of launching a nuclear attack twenty years from now. There is an ecological iceberg, with the volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the global temperatures unstoppably rising and the dozens of atomic installations which – as all the experts agree – must sooner or later explode, causing a catastrophe of global proportions. Last but not least, there is the social iceberg, with three billions of men and women expected to be made redundant – devoid of economic function – during the life-span of the present generation. The difference between each one of these icebergs and the iceberg which sank the Titanic, Attali bitterly comments, is that when its turn to hit the ship comes, there will be no one left to make the film of the event or to write epic or lyrical verses about the mayhem that ensued. All of these icebergs (and perhaps certain other which thus far we cannot even name) float outside the territorial waters of any electoral constituency of any of the ‘world’s greats’; no wonder, therefore, that people operating political controls are placid or lukewarm about the magnitude of danger. But there is a still more potent reason for doing nothing than equanimity arising from lack of interest: ‘The politicians are no more in command of the ship launched to sail at full speed.’ Even if they wished, there would be little for them to do.

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