The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Things, Flows, Filters, Tactics
the latter is more concerned with the purposeful celebration and reclaiming
of forgotten histories and erased lives. While these two intervene
in the city through product and process, it is the city as backdrop, the
mundane and the everyday, which appears as Richard Wentworth’s art
practice (chapter 23)—his photographs and words document the street as
a place of the aleatory and the out-of-control.
The final element—Part IV, Section 4, “Tactical Filters”—once
more includes examples of transformative practice, this time specifically
relying on the medium of the written word. Using critical theory, Iain
Chambers (chapter 24) postulates a notion of “weak architecture” as the
place between stability and instability, between dwelling and decay. In her
essay, bell hooks (chapter 26) evokes a different mode of theorized prose,
this time from more personal reflections on love, home, and the city. Drawing
on both family history and political critique, Doreen Massey (chapter
28) reflects on social relations and aging in the spaces of the garden city.
The personal appears again in Jonathan Charley’s account of Moscow
(chapter 25), here as a semifictionalized, semirealist diary.
If the intersection of the personal with the political, the concrete
with the abstract, helps academic analysis to resonate with everyday
life, so, conversely, should the physicality and groundedness of the city
provide a datum from which to speculate, imagine, and purposefully
critique. Therefore, the apparent documentary and factual nature of
Patrick Keiller’s essay (chapter 27) should be situated in the context of
his films, enabling his words to assume a more evocative role and creating
a heightened awareness of the (post) industrial landscape. Patrick
Wright (chapter 29) also starts off from particular factual conditions of
Thatcherite Britain, where political concerns rapidly engender a passionate
attack on decay, mismanagement, and false ideology as he journeys
through the streets of London.
The Point Is to Change It
A central ambition of The Unknown City is to suggest and explore possi-
bilities for radical interventions both in the articulation of new understandings
of the city and, equally, in forms of practice that seek to
influence the production and reproduction of urban form and space. A
characteristic statement of the earlier Strangely Familiar project was
that “architecture and cities are far more than architects and planners often
consider them to be.” 50 In elaborating that proposition we sought to expose
other forms of activity, conscious and unconscious, that shape the
objects and meanings from which the city is constructed. The process is