The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

On Memory and the City
and residential meaning, and the transitions and connections provided by
modernity. Is place more plausibly conceived as habituation, or is it produced
from a dialectic of travel and return? Speed of transit and passage have
traditionally been considered as inimical to the integrity of place. The argument
between conservers and modernizers in the case of Venice has often
centered on the issue of transport—the rail link, the road link to Piazzale
Roma, the plans for tunnels, bridges, and subways—all conceived as ending
forever the distinctive claims of the city as an integrated “place.”
Provision for transit has been widely conceived as an enemy of ritual
reflection. This is vividly demonstrated by the poignant trope, represented
on television news, of marking the sites of urban tragedies at bus
stops, curbs, and walls with flowers or childrens’ toys: attempts to furnish
non-places with meanings appropriate to remembrance. Place has been intimately
associated with dwelling, as part of the problem of devising satisfactory
urban architecture that can intensify and commodify meaning. The
forms of electronic communication being developed at the turn of the millennium
constitute the latest mode of transit and association; it remains to
be seen if their impact will reinforce “placelessness” or stimulate a recognition
of place’s importance.
Modernism, in seeking an aesthetic and ethical transformation of
ways of living, neglected in its polemics the historical claims relating to the
importance of place. Modernist architecture and planning maintained a dialectic
between eliminating place in favor of continuum while at the same
time seeking to understand spatial organization from “primitive” and exotic
sources. As Adrian Forty has suggested, the possibility that building could
be conceived in terms of other things can be seen as evidence of discontent
with modernism. 11 The space between an ahistorical past and a transhistoric
future is one that various revisions of the modernist grand narrative have
sought to fill. As part of the rediscovery of “place” in the late twentieth century,
space has been conceptualized as practice and event. This represents
the continuation of an anthropological sensibility that was part of the modernist
project; but it has been progressively nourished by existential and
poststructuralist notions of subjectivity and identity. The literature of travel
and tourism has attained a priority in the fusion of those concerns with particular
relevance to transcultural traveling and cultural negotiation.
The period immediately after the 1939–1945 war was marked by
a distinct turning away from functionalism to explore the mysterious aspects
of urban monuments and cores. The revised concerns of the Congres
Internationaux de l’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) betray this interest in rediscovery—especially
as it related to the “living” quality of cities. Such interest
involved inquiries into the constituents of significance and pleasure,