Michel Foucault

Foucault showed that modern power works less by prohibiting than by organising: it distributes bodies in space, sets timetables, makes visible and classifies. The prison panopticon served him as a figure for something far broader, a society that polices itself because it knows it is watched.

For the city he left two tools. His idea of «biopolitics» explains urban hygiene, sanitation and population management as acts of government; and «heterotopias» name those places — the cemetery, the hospital, the ship, the theme park — that run on their own rules inside the city.

A French philosopher, professor at the Collège de France from 1970 until his death in 1984, Foucault did not write about planning and yet few thinkers have influenced more how the city is studied. Discipline and Punish (1975) took Bentham's panopticon, the prison where everyone can be seen without seeing the guard, as the model of a society that disciplines through the gaze, and that model has since been applied to cameras, shopping centres and gated communities. His 1967 lecture on other spaces, published in 1984, introduced heterotopias, places such as the cemetery, the ship or the garden that suspend the ordinary order.

His 1977 and 1978 courses at the Collège de France, Security, Territory, Population, analysed the city as the place where modern government is born: eighteenth-century planning, with its markets, quarantines and circulations, is where power learns to manage populations instead of only punishing bodies. From there comes governmentality, which urban studies use to analyse the smart city, security and planning as ways of conducting conduct. Paul Rabinow, Christine Boyer and surveillance studies are his urban heirs.