The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

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Borden, Rendell, Kerr, and Pivaro
tions are critiqued as ideological instruments of colonialism in the
Maidan area of Calcutta (Helen Thomas, chapter 8) and in the nineteenthcentury
headquarters of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (Shirley
Wong, chapter 9).
Part II, “Filtering Tactics,” turns to particular urban conditions
that might be recognized for their resistive, celebratory, and liberatory
practices: that is, for their tactical qualities. Iain Borden (chapter 10)
proposes skateboarding as a model for performing a critical remapping
of the spaces and architecture of the city. In other essays that similarly
address forms of movement and remapping, Sally Munt (chapter 14)
gives an account of the flâneur from the perspective of lesbian women enjoying
anonymity and the city, while Steve Pile’s essay (chapter 15) reflects
on the possibilities of psychoanalytic theory for rethinking the
hidden and subterranean worlds “buried below the surface.”
Sandy McCreery (chapter 13) and Edward W. Soja (chapter 16)
both provide instances of particular spatial practices, respectively in
west London and Amsterdam, where residents have fought to maintain
distinctive modes of living and to creatively disrupt forces of urban renewal
whether in the form of roads or of gentrification. Lynne Walker
(chapter 17) describes how women in the nineteenth-century city transformed
domestic space, fashioning an arena of feminist politics. The occupation
of space is also the premise of Adrian Forty’s essay (chapter
11), which shows how the Royal Festival Hall operated as a place of
democracy. Tom Gretton (chapter 12) identifies a rather different space
of democracy, this time in the populist newspaper imagery of José
Guadalupe Posada in revolutionary Mexico.
Part III, “Tactics,” brings together some of most overtly interventionist
modes of practice, tactics that think about as well as engage
with the city. Bernard Tschumi (chapter 22) is the architect who has most
consistently addressed the importance of theory for radical practice, and
the experience of space for imaginative design. Nigel Coates (chapter 18)
similarly reinterprets architecture in the city in terms of tension and juxtaposition,
considering thematics such as theater and gardens, discord
and movement, reference and change. Recent projects from Fashion Architecture
Taste, a.k.a. Fat (chapter 20), also address the transitory nature
of architecture, employing multiple programs, everyday imagery,
and challenging, politicized agendas.
The projects of Cornford & Cross (chapter 19) and of Dolores Hayden
and The Power of Place (chapter 21) provide alternative modes of art
practice in the public realm of the city. While the former describe their
own work as a “twisted critique” of specific sites and urban conditions,