The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Un(known) City . . .
function, to clean its streets, to rid it of disease, and to allow ease of movement
of goods, information, and people, there are a vast array of underground
systems. As much as progress was measured in the size and spectacle
of large buildings, grand projects, wide boulevards, so under the streets lay
railways, sewers, gas and water pipes, pipes for compressed air and telephone
(telecommunication) cabling. As architectural and urban design render the
city on the surface known and transparent through spatial practices such as
urban planning, streets are repeatedly dug up, reburied, and scarred by the
doctoring of the city’s intestinal world. The city is indeed built on networks
of information, money, and people, but these do not exist in cyberspace: they
are encased in iron and plastic under the ground.
Skyscrapers and trains are often the desired epitomes of the stainless
(steel) success of the city: Kuala Lumpur celebrates its place in a global
network of cities by putting up the Petronas towers; London and Paris move
ever closer through the channel tunnel. Yet these triumphs have a fearful
underground life: excavations and tunneling remain dangerous activities.
Under solid ground, there is a world riddled with dangerous voids. The
building of the metropolis is as destructive as it is creative, but its destructiveness,
its dangers, and its wastes are openly buried, so that these are no
longer discernible. Perhaps what we do not want to know about the city
is that it creates new risks: the car crash in the tunnel, the breakdown in
telecommunications, the fire in the underground station. The sense that the
city is an orderly, unified system is bolstered by casting the unwanted into
the pit; but the underground is an unmapped space, a map without clear
passageways, a fragmenting and fragmented space of hidden infrastructures
of power.
UNDERCOVER CITIES
Metropolitan life is often depicted as chaotic and disorderly—a place where
unexpected, unpredictable encounters might lead to dreadful dangers (even
while these encounters might be desired). The city becomes a space of paranoia,
where unknown people are out to kill or harm, where there are undercurrents
of crime and violence, with an underworld, an underclass. Buried
below the civilized surface of urban life, there are spaces of secrecy: secret organizations
inhabit the city, undercover; some are even supposed to serve
and protect.
At Vauxhall Cross, there is a spectacular building, devised by architect
Terry Farrell (see figure 15.1). This building is home to a government
department: the secret service—MI6 (MI stands for “Military
Intelligence”). Before we look at the building more closely, perhaps it would