The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Jane Rendell
project, and now to this extended investigation, bring stories from inside
and outside architectural history. This intricate web of narratives shreds urban
epistemology and positions partial knowledge at multiple sites, at the
interfaces of particular practices that are themselves shifting in their mutual
interchange. The exchange of ideas about the city among geographers,
sociologists, filmmakers, artists, cultural theorists, literary critics, and
architects has located new kinds of spaces and new ways of interpreting, examining,
and even living within them. In this more fluid state, our ability
to know the city is always contingent, forever in flux.
Critical work is made to fare on interstitial ground. Every realization
of such work is a renewal and a different contextualization of
its cutting edge. One cannot come back to it as to an object; for
it always bursts forth on frontiers. ... Instead, critical strategies
must be developed within a range of diversely occupied territories
where the temptation to grant any single territory transcendent
status is continually resisted. 8
As a historian, I tell spatial stories somewhat differently than do
other storytellers; my stories are inspired by a desire to “know” the past, to
“tell it as it was” (and, if possible, to explain it). These “attempts at disclosure,”
as described by Steve Pile elsewhere in this book, are not as revealing
as they might seem; indeed, as Pile suggests, “the unknown is not so easily
known.” But “knowing” history is easy. Who can dispute our reconstruction
of places, dwelt in before we were born, today transformed beyond recognition,
and left as traces in obscure documents that only we will ever read? Is
this the historical imagination running wild? But why not believe these stories—aren’t
we always encouraged to believe in fairy tales? “[W]hy not then
continue to look at it all as a child would, as if you were looking at something
unfamiliar, out of the depths of your own world, from the vastness of
your solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation?” 9
KNOWING THE SELF
Believe me, I do not demand the reader to be a disbeliever, but rather request
that writers look more closely at the self in their work. Historical
knowledge is formed within the person, founded on our own subjectivity.
The (hi)stories we tell of cities are also (hi)stories of ourselves. I shape my interest
in architecture and history and I can be many things. I am a woman
and my fascination with feminism makes a difference to the way in which I
know. Questions of methodology embedded in feminist debates have ramifications
for understanding space and time, architecture and history. (For ex-