The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

I am a feminist, a feminist who wishes to tell you a story, a spatial story, 3 a
(hi)story of bazaars in early-nineteenth-century London. The two quotes
above summarize why and how I attempt to “know” these architectural
places. Contradictory, disorienting, strange even—these twin phenomena,
pursuit and exchange, are at the heart of my storytelling.
To admit that writing is precisely working (in) the in-between, inspecting
the process of the same and of the other without which
nothing can live, undoing the work of death—to admit this is first
to want the two, as well as both, the ensemble of the one and the
other . . . a multiple and inexhaustible course with millions of encounters
and transformations of the same into the other and into
the in-between, from which woman takes her forms. 4
In contemporary urban and architectural discourse, we are increasingly
obsessed by figures that traverse space: the flâneur, the spy, the detective,
the prostitute, the rambler, the cyprian. These all represent urban
explorations, passages of revelation, journeys of discovery—they are “spatial
stories.” 5 We all are spatial story–tellers, explorers, navigators, and discoverers,
exchanging narratives of, and in, the city. Through the personal, the
political, the theoretical, the historical we believe we are revealing cities in
“strangely familiar” ways, but we are also creating cities as we desire them
to be. Our desires frame our fragile understanding of architectural space. All
we ever offer is a partial glimpse. This chapter offers one such glimpse. “Desire
prevents us from understanding reality with well-known and habitual
criteria. The most distinctive feature of such a situation is that it is always
new, unfamiliar.” 6
KNOWING THE CITY
In wide arcs of wandering through the city
I saw to either side of what is seen,
and noticed treasures where it was thought
there were none.
I passed through a more fluid city.
I broke up the imprint of all familiar places,
shutting my eyes to the boredom of modern contours. 7
The Strangely Familiar project set itself a pursuit, an itinerary—to question
the understanding of architecture in the city framed through one specific
and self-contained discipline: architectural history. The contributors to that