The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Unknown City is an intriguing title for a collection of chapters on the
city: the city is saturated with people, their movements; millions of eyes
watching the world . . . surely the city is well-known? Surely, there are no
places in the city that are unknown. On the other hand, no one knows everything
about the city. The question is, then, how—and why—particular urban
spaces become known and unknown. So, in this chapter, I intend to
examine some ways in which the city is produced as an unknown space.
There are many ways in which the city can be rendered unknown:
property relationships can limit people’s access to buildings and sites,
thereby locking the city “behind closed doors”; 1 places can be deliberately
hidden from sight; things can become so familiar that they are simply overlooked;
sites can be forgotten, or misrecognized, or buried under myth, or
become unreal somehow, or simply have new meanings attached to them; or
maybe the unknown is simply waiting to be discovered, lying off the beaten
track. The city is saturated with unknowingness: the huge Crown estates of
central London; the walls that surround luxury apartments in London’s
Docklands, with their security cameras and video entry-phones; the disused
stations of the London underground, the statue of Eros (not actually Eros),
Dick Whittington (and his cat), the livery companies, or the mosque in East
End London that was once a synagogue that was once a church; or maybe the
stormwater pumping station on the Isle of Dogs—or, as interestingly, the
nondescript Telehouse in East India Dock. 2 Knowingness and unknowingness
are constitutive of the city: each clads buildings in layers of visibility
and invisibility, familiarity and surprise. And geography is constitutive of
this (un)knowingness. Allow me to give one example.
Telehouse gives no indication that it houses the computers that
link the financial markets of the City of London with the world of global
telecommunications and financial flows. In this building, the wealth of the
City of London is connected to lines of information that crisscross the globe
through only a few centers. It is in these places that certain groups control
flows of commodities and money around the world. Even while they actually
have no idea what is going on, people in these centers of interpretation
read the runes in the flashing screens of numbers and gamble away obscene
amounts of money. Appropriately, Telehouse seems disconnected from its
locality, sited in a lonely place, yet its anonymous architecture is “styled” on
a similar building in New York. 3 These connections (and disconnections) are
at once hidden and visible: the building is simultaneously unknown and
known. Indeed, it is only when what goes on inside the building is known
that the building becomes the site of unknown transactions—but most people
wouldn’t give it a second glance. I would like to argue that the important
thing about the “unknown city” is not so much that there are parts of