The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

On Memory and the City
is the medium in which dead cities are buried.” 22 As the modern city supplied
the compressions and dislocations of meaning that served as an inspiration
and model to the modernist avant-garde, it also generated the
traumatic collisions that provoke particular kinds of memory. Benjamin,
recollecting the Berlin of his childhood, commented on the irrational intensity
of some memories and the imprinting of memories by shock. 23 Modernist
urbanism sought to eradicate these theatrical and fractal qualities.
One sign of the eclipse of rational modernism is the restoration of detail and
mnemonics to the urban landscape.
There is a well-established relationship between memory and narrative.
Cities are a densely coded context for narratives of discovery and the
recovery of experience. They have a capacity to act as social condensors and
to integrate complex aspirations and assimilations of people, styles, and
ideas. Among the defining characteristics of cities is their ability to relay information
and enable meanings to be “built” on historical and spatial axes.
With the coming of modernity, and forms of capitalism that could successfully
interpellate citizens as consumers, new relationships were established
between mobile subjects and a city of signs, enclaves, and clues. In the writings
of Dickens, Baudelaire, Doyle, Aragon, and Benjamin there is a preoccupation
with detachment and investment—a fascination with the uneven
development of cities. These writers dwell on resistances to change, discrepancies
between facade and “indwelling,” and the significance of telltale
displacements. Heroes emerge who are capable of decoding the mysteries of
“mean streets” without themselves becoming mean—men who retain their
integrity in the face of disintegration.
My own essay for Strangely Familiar took a customary route, associating
the experience of Venice with urban dreams and dérives and considering
the city as a kind of model for contemplating the relationship between
past, present, and future. Venice is fascinating because it is at once unique
and paradigmatic. It offers in literal and pedestrian forms frequent encounters
between two fundamental architectural tropes, the “bridge” and the
“door.” Georg Simmel conceived those as metaphors for connecting and separating,
respectively. Venice is remarkable in the way that it provides an intense
urban experience of extremes of public and private space.
Cities have always functioned in these spatially metaphoric ways,
creating opportunities for the coming together of disparate meanings.
Meaning is concentrated and dispersed by processes that can be analogized
to the operation of memory. Certeau’s conceptualization of “spatial practices”
involves an interpretation of the work of J.-F. Augoyard in which he
uses the terms “synechdoche” and “asyndetonal” to describe the ways in
which experiencing urban space can involve taking parts for a whole or