Governing by design

Foucault developed his conception of governmentality through studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, where states and nongovern-mental institutions aggregated data to constitute knowledge frameworks and expertise profiles capable of managing populations by regulating their demo-graphics, health, housing, environmental conditions, employment, social lives, and culture. This “administration of life” constituted a biopolitics that the so-ciologist Mitchell Dean has described as being “aimed at enhancing the lives of a population through the application of a norm.”

 For Foucault, Dean, and others the goal of governmentality, and the raison d’être of the modern state, is to provide security to the processes of life—to tame risk, be it through social insurance schemes, food regulation, or housing norms.Governmentality works less by the application of raw state power than through a multiplicity of heterogeneous public and private agencies, standards, forms of knowledge, effects, outcomes, and consequences that Dean has de-scribed as “mobile, changing, and contingent assemblages” continually “con-structed, assembled, contested, and transformed.”

 It operates not in the reg-ister of high culture, politics, and history, but rather in what the anthropologist Paul Rabinow, writing about French planning practices, has characterized as “a middle ground where social technicians were articulating a normative, or mid-dling modernism . . . pragmatic technicians seeking to find scientific and practical solutions to public problems in times of crisis.
https://www.academia.edu/14619946/Governing_by_Design_Architecture_Economy_and_Politics_in_the_Twentieth_Century