The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Patrick Wright
of biopolitical assumption around, taking politics back into the body in one
way or another. If you were a white man you’d have difficulty speaking at all,
and should probably confine your utterances to programmatic statements of
support for more authentically oppressed constituencies. I’m exaggerating
here, but there were real problems that stood in the way of writing. Merely to
describe another person, a café, or a market stall was to abuse them. And to
fictionalize anyone else’s experience—well, that could seem like a crime
against humanity. I couldn’t write about the city without breaking through all
that, and a certain amount of querulousness and score settling was part of
making that visible.
Then there’s the opening chapter of the book—a scene which I fictionalized
with the help of two leading right-wing political figures, Sir Alfred
Sherman and Lord Keith Joseph. They were both inclined to peddle fervid pictures
of urban degeneration to justify Tory policy for the inner cities, and one
of them at least liked to use Hackney as a reservoir of vile and rhetorically
convenient images. I wanted to close the gap between the onlooking rhetoric
and the urban reality it exploits. So I took these two figures—Joseph and
Sherman—and brought them into Dalston Junction, where I stuck them on
soapboxes and had them giving speeches to an imaginary crowd. The
speeches did exist. They were articles that Sherman and Joseph had written,
so I wasn’t putting words into their mouths. Now some readers found this
confusing. There were one or two very irritated geographers, if I remember
correctly, and some thought the scene, which I was actually careful to describe
as a reverie, had really happened! But the main issue here for me is
that cities are partly made of stories and fables, and a place like East London
especially so. I wanted to keep that narrative quality in view, and to make
my own use of it. Once you accept that the city is made of stories, of memories,
myths, and traditions as well as concrete and roads and planning dispensations,
then you have to accept that narrative and fiction are part of the
urban texture—and you can use them without necessarily being untruthful.
JK: To return to the question of method: while your immediate object of
study—whether it be street, housing estate, or telephone box—is prominently
positioned in the foreground of your discussion, clearly this discussion
is informed by a profound acquaintance with cultural theory. Does the
fact that you don’t wish to create a detailed apparatus of academic references,
and that the subject is so grounded, imply a criticism of the normal usages
of those ideas?
PW: One of the advantages of not being employed in the university system is
that you don’t have to encumber yourself with a wheelbarrow full of peerreviewed
footnotes. I’ve read a lot of cultural theory, and I still keep an eye on