The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Steve Pile
the city that are unknown, but that urban space vacillates between the reassuring
solidity of knowingness and the sinister voids of unknowingness; in
this, the city becomes—in the phrase of the earlier project out of which this
book grew—strangely familiar.
The editors of Strangely Familiar argued, in their introduction, that
understanding cities and architecture—and communicating that
understanding—involves telling real stories about real places. ...
By using a narrative format, a route is provided which can introduce
the unexpected and unfamiliar. ... If you dig beneath the surface
then you discover the unexpected. This process can reintroduce
the city to the urban dweller, offering an opportunity to discover
something new, and through their own agendas and perspectives
find a new mapping and a new way of thinking about cities. The
strange becomes familiar and the familiar becomes strange. 4
Through telling new stories the unknown, undiscovered city can be laid
open to critical scrutiny, to new urban practices, new urban subversions.
This is a geographical enterprise, about exploration and mapping, about a
cartography of hidden or unexplored places: real places in the map of power
relations that make, and are made by, city form and urban life. The agenda
is radical in its intent, but I would like to suggest that the unknown is not
so easily known—it may be all too visible, right in front of our eyes, buried
in the underlying infrastructures of everyday lives, so intrinsic we hardly
even feel its presence anymore. And when we do, do we really want to know?
UNCANNY CITIES
Exploring the unknown city is a political act: a way of bringing to urban
dwellers new resources for remapping the city. Nevertheless, the unknown
might resist such attempts at disclosure. It could be that what is really unknown
about the city has been known all along. Indeed, sometimes the discovery
of the unknown can be quickly repressed. Let me relate a real story
about a real place; the story is not mine.
Freud was once walking in Genoa:
As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted
streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I
found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not long remain
in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the
windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow
street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a