The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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M. Christine Boyer
portant places of the city were reduced to representational images that could
stand in for places no longer explored by pedestrians or remembered from
the details of direct encounters. This was a way of memorializing their loss
without relying on nostalgic reenactments. A certain degree of command
and control over these unknown terrains could be effected, however, by narrating
a series of technical facts and enumerating their characteristics. The
detective story and the police narrative are two such devices that can be used
to focus on, underline, point out, and re-member parts of the city that have
been covered over by mysterious events.
Edward Dimendberg argues in “Film Noir and Urban Space” that
the dominant visual trope of the genre of detective films known as film noir
is the material deformation and visual dematerialization of a city that once
held a physical center or series of experienced urban spaces. These had been
known to the pedestrian through numerous strolls and routines, or through
representational stereotypes such as gridded street patterns, skyscraper skylines,
public parks, and landmarks. Abandoned for the suburbs, fragmented
by urban renewal, and tormented by the automobile, the postwar American
city was a place of discomfort and disorientation, a space that was increasingly
unknown to the spectator. The dark city of film noir not only played
on this experience of loss and anxiety but also offered a set of mapping procedures,
synoptic views, and other communicating devices that presented
an imaginary centered and legible city, thereby enabling the spectator to
“cognitively map” or gain control over a place that was no longer experienced
directly. 24
Kevin Lynch uses the term “cognitive map” in The Image of the City
to explore how mental images not only affect a spectator’s sense of identity,
well-being, and belonging to a particular city but also make the city memorable
or imageable. 25 A good city form would have readable or identifiable
nodes, paths, edges, districts, and landmarks. Such readable symbols form a
cognitive map orienting spectators in space and time. Fredric Jameson argues
that this cognitive framework enables a spectator to project an imaginary
image of the total city, even when its image may appear broken in bits.
The spectator is able subsequently to gain a sense of place and to construct
a composed ensemble that, retained in memory, can be used to map and
remap the city along flexible and changing trajectories. 26 In postwar cities,
however, the relationship between the spectator’s perception of the physical
structure of the city had been shattered and a cognitive map could no longer
be based on direct experience. Some other mediating device had to render
the city readable. A cognitive map could be produced, for example, by the
realistic images of cities depicted in films and photographs.