The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

On Memory and the City
3.4 | McDonald’s.
ined to vary between locales—densely concentrated and stored in the “historic
centers” and present only as redundancy and decay elsewhere.
Evaluation is inherent in all planning procedures, particularly
when the object is to integrate or separate place from non-place. In recent
years the supposedly anomic experiences provided by modernization have
been discredited in favor of modes of village and street life. However, the
neutral spaces that are committed to contract and consumption have considerable
appeal as antidotes to the complexity and contradiction of postmodern
life. One customer in a Harlem McDonald’s has observed, “Ain’t no
hip-hop here, ain’t no profanity. The pictures, the plants, the way people
keep things neat here, it makes you feel like you’re in civilization.” 15 Marc
Augé, writing on the characteristics of “non-place,” has described the experience
as “contractual,” involving elements of identity loss and roleplaying.
16 These spaces provide not just symbolic reference to history and
context, but also a refuge from a palimpsest of references that can be seen as
an obstacle to a neutral present; they win back the mood of modernism at
the expense of intertextuality.
Many writings on the urban culture of the present converge in their
accounts of the increasingly immaterial, eccentric, and communicative na-