The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Barry Curtis
3.3 | Proposed rail route into the center of Venice.
As most guidebooks point out, experiencing Venice involves a process
of aimless circulating, surrendering to complexity, and experiencing
sudden encounters. On at least two occasions it has been the site of formal
dérives (conducted by Ralph Rumney and Sophie Calle), but most visitors
enjoy a self-conscious experience of pragmatic reverie, which numerous
writings about walking in the city have explored. Venice is an exceptional
city, which provides an understanding of the general rules of urban conduct.
Patrizia Lombardo believes that “Venice, small and ancient as it is, with no
cars, apparently so ideal as a refuge from the hustle and bustle of today’s
world allows a powerful intuition of modernity.” 9
The literature of cities has explored the relationship between memory
and movement. The moving point of view is what makes possible the relation
of place to self by way of narrative and parallax. Since the late nineteenth
century, records of experiencing the city have tended to deploy a moving or
montaged point of view. The city has also been seen as destabilizing static perceptions.
Richard Sennett has written persuasively on a decisive shift away
from the conceiving of streets as ceremonial approaches to viewing them as
fixed objects in a system of circulation that emphasizes the journey and the potential
for travel and connection. He links this metaphor of circulation to the
emergence of free trade and the literal mobility of people in pursuing it, describing
the construction of flexible economic space in cities as “a conjuction
of functional use of space and opportunistic use of time.” 10
In considering the claims of place, we must account for the relationship
between modes of fixity, with all that these imply for community