The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Claremont Road Situation
sage through various ambiences.” 13 This often involved purposeful disorientation
to subvert “knowable” space (by, for example, following the map of
one area of the city while in another) and to allow a spontaneous drifting
that focused on bodily and psychological encounters, thereby exploring the
richness of human places replete with memory, myth, and imaginative possibilities.
But to actually reassert place, to contest the capitalist production
of space, Lefebvre and the situationists advocated the self-conscious construction
of new subjective environments—an unfolding of art through
space. This would involve the spatial exploration and celebration of the essentially
subjective unalienated areas of life, such as humor, creativity, play,
imagination, street life and carnivals, passion, history, spontaneity, and bodily
pleasures. Space would thus be saturated with Lefebvre’s “new romanticism”;
it would be “appropriated” from capitalism.
Such an appropriation of space through the construction of situations
is precisely what occurred at Claremont Road in 1994, and events
there graphically illustrate the space/place dialectic. For had the area not already
been rendered anonymous and banal, then the activists would not
have been able to impose themselves upon it so emphatically—place could
not have been so effectively reasserted over space. Certainly the view of the
Department of Transport seemed to be that no one cared about Leyton. Although
it housed many people, no one appeared to “live” there. Building a
motorway through the area should have been conflict-free. But the Department
of Transport made a tactical mistake; as it bought up the houses along
the route, instead of demolishing them immediately, it made them available
as temporary studios through Acme, a charity dedicated to finding space for
artists. These people began, initially without purpose, to practice exactly
what Lefebvre and the situationists had been preaching: they explored their
creative potential through their environment. An embryonic sense of place
developed, which provided the seeds of later resistance. The authorities presumably
employed West African security guards partly in an attempt to
mitigate against this strategic error. Besides being cheap to hire, these
people were also perceived by the authorities to be culturally distant, literally
dis-placed, and therefore were expected to be less sensitive to the unique
ambience being developed.
Claremont Road demonstrated that situationist tactics can be extremely
effective. It exposed the space/place dialectic so thoroughly that no
one needed to be steeped in French cultural theory to recognize these as the
fundamental issues being contested. This shows that Lefebvre and Debord,
writing largely before the era of mass car ownership, had remarkably prescient
insight; their arguments have proved valid. But it also reveals something
of a historical oversight, for they did not sufficiently emphasize the