The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

A Spatial Story of Exchange
ample, early-nineteenth-century London holds interest for me because, arguably,
it seems to precede the establishment of the dominant paradigm of
gender and space, the ideology of separate spheres. In terms of traditional
historical periodization, it lies still largely obscured between the so-called
long eighteenth century and the Victorian period.)
There are millions of women, a myriad of feminisms, no single way
of knowing the city; but for many feminists the personal is an important
epistemological site. Negotiating a meaningful relation between the personal
and the critical is central to much feminist work. We are all different.
Our differences are different. Our sex can make a difference to who we are
and how we know, whose work we read and how we write. “Some differences
are playful: some are poles of world historical systems of domination. Epistemology
is about knowing the difference.” 10
KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE
“Knowing” the city invites, and invokes, a need to know the self, the one
who seeks knowledge. This female subject places herself in complex relation
to her subject matter. She is desirous of knowledge, but also fears her need
to know. For her, clear and certain knowledge, “knowing” without doubt, is
a masculinist pursuit that assumes knowing oneself. To make purposeful decisions
about historical lines of inquiry and interpretive strategies, one must
first know one’s own mind. “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the
master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily to beat him at his own
game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” 11
I do not know my own mind. I do not know what is on my mind. I
hardly know myself. How then can I be trusted to know the past? How can
I make a difference, bring about “genuine change,” if I do not know myself?
Outward, backward, our ephemeral links to the past lead us ever inward, toward
uncertain futures. What we have instead of an afterimage of what has
gone before is a view into the murky interior. The urban past, the cities we
seek to know, is made in our own self-image. “[T]he city which looked most
deeply like the womb with its Arabian Nights gentleness, tranquillity and
mystery. Myself, woman, womb, with grilled windows, veiled eyes. Tortuous
streets, secret cells, labyrinths and more labyrinths.” 12 What we call objective
historical knowledge cannot be separated from a fluid network of
cross-linking, feedbacking, constantly shifting and reciprocal relations between
outer and inner worlds, between the city and the self. “Cities new to
us are full of promise. Unlike promises we make to each other, the promise
of the city can never be broken. But like the promise we hold for each other,
neither can it be fulfilled.” 13