The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Barry Curtis
as well as determined attempts to understand the “everyday” aspects of
habitation. Venice, and particularly St. Mark’s Square, became a model for
constructing social and democratic space, 12 historically linked to the highly
validated notion of the agora and, at the same time, suggesting a model for
post-authoritarian and post-laissez-faire urban life. The problems of leisure,
learning, and self-determination, traditionally key concerns of the tourist,
became tropes of postwar planning theory. The versions of authority that the
new planning was intended to circumvent—commercialism, communism,
traffic, advertising, and mass media—were also conceived as the enemies of
“place.” The claim that Mediterranean cities and their culture provided defenses
against the encroachment of those enemies suggested urban models
that presented both classical and picturesque solutions based on a mixed
economy of constraint and freedom.
The recovery of “place” has been theoretically informed by anthropological
and perspectival understanding. It has taken place in relation to
reconceiving the city as system that relates to larger systems, both natural
and cultural. Concerns about reconceiving place have come at a time of danger—when
various anxieties have emerged regarding the loss of place in the
general decay of narratives, in the face of globalization, simulation, and indifference.
In particular, the triumph of the market in its related drives both
to make generic and to differentiate has put the notion of “public space” into
crisis. Anthropologists, cultural geographers, and theorists of racial and
gendered space have provided alternative readings of authorized urban texts
that demonstrate that place, like memory, is a work in progress.
As in Venice, where every adjustment threatens the densely coded
past, every urban solution now self-consciously walks the line between conservation
and development. Elizabeth Wilson builds on this abstract dichotomy
in her suggestion that most of us would like to inhabit a city
balanced between the two now-dominant urban models—one dangerous,
vital, and chaotic; the other prettified, intimate, and themed. 13
The economies of space are displayed in every real estate agent’s
window. “Real estate” is subject to a complex system of values, personal and
collective, that puts a premium on “centrality,” “exclusion,” and “proximity.”
The complex needs that these promises address are indicated in Doreen
Massey’s phrase “the spatiality of life.” 14 Desirable place is often a paradoxical
blend of closeness and distance. The formula “secluded, yet minutes
from” recurs as a compelling spatiotemporal device mediating “backwater”
and “mainstream”; it measures movement between the past and the present,
the interior and the exterior, as much as mere distance. One experiences the
conflation of time and space in the city where the passage of time is imag-