The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Notes
1 Conversation with Patrick Field, February
1997.
2 Much material for this study was supplied
by Christine Binney, who lived at Claremont
Road, and Patrick Field, who was a consistent
visiting activist.
3 “Lock-ons” are devices by which activists
could attach themselves to secure objects in the
street such that the authorities would have extreme
difficulty releasing them. Two varieties in
particular were perfected at Claremont Road.
The simpler one of these was a four-inch pipe inserted
between two sides of a chimney stack. Two
activists could each place an arm down the pipe
and handcuff themselves together. Separating
them without injury then required the piece-bypiece
demolition of the chimney—a precarious
and time-consuming operation. The more elaborate
method involved securing a shackle in concrete
beneath the road surface. A large, thick
steel plate with a hole just large enough for an
arm to be passed through would then be placed
over the shackle. If an activist lay on the steel
plate with a wrist attached to the shackle, extensive
excavation of the road under the plate was
then required in order to cut him or her free.
4 I use here Situationist when referring to
members of the Situationist International (SI)
and their ideas, and situationist when referring to
similar thinking by individuals not actually
members of the SI.
5 Guy Debord, “Separation Perfected,” chapter
1 of The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books,
1994), pp. 11–24.
6 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday
Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984), pp. 91–110.
7 Ibid., p. 92.
8 Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The
Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London:
Routledge, 1992), pp. 67–68.
9 Henri Lefebvre, “Towards a New Romanticism?”
in Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes,
September 1959–May 1961, trans. John
Moore (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 239–388.
The Claremont Road Situation
10 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space,
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell,
1991), pp. 1–67.
11 “Definitions” (1958), in Situationist International
Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb,
(Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), ‘Definitions’
from Internationale Situationiste no. 1
(June 1958) p. 45.
12 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist
Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1967), p. 90.
13 “Definitions,” p. 45.
14 Lefebvre, “Notes on the New Town,” in Introduction
to Modernity, pp. 116–126.
15 Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and Its
Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells, 3d ed. (London:
Architectural Press, 1971), pp. xxii–xxiv.
16 Alison and Peter Smithson, “Cluster City,”
Architectural Review 122 (November 1957):
333–336.
17 Alison and Peter Smithson, Ordinariness and
Light (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), p. 145.
18 Sandy McCreery, “From Moderne to Modern:
An Ideological Journey along London’s
Western Avenue from the 1930s to the 1970s”
(M.Sc. thesis, University College London, 1992).
19 David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1989), pp. 17–58.
20 McCreery, “From Moderne to Modern.”
21 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, pp. 123–124.
22 David Harvey, “From Space to Place and
Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of
Postmodernity,” in Mapping the Futures: Local
Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird et al. (London:
Routledge, 1993), pp. 3–29.