Scott argued that modern states must first make society legible - through cadastral survey, permanent surnames, standard measures, freehold tenure and the street grid - because only simplified, standardised facts can be counted, taxed and administered from a distance. Combined with high-modernist confidence, authoritarian power and a prostrate civil society, legibility turns catastrophic: Brasília, Soviet collectivisation, Tanzanian villagisation and scientific forestry all failed by suppressing the local practical knowledge he calls metis. The scientific forest, planted in rows and measured in timber volume, is his emblem of what abstraction leaves out. He takes Jane Jacobs as the counter-model of knowledge built up from use.
It gave planners the sharpest available account of why surveying and mapping are never innocent, and why plans drawn from abstracted land routinely fail the people living on it. The book anchored two decades of argument about informality, legibility, titling programmes and incremental urbanism.
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