The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Steve Pile
Could it be, though, that this extravagant and highly expensive
building is simply camouflage—an excessive cover to disguise a deeper undercover
world?
SOLIDS, VOIDS, AND TRACES OF THE UN(-)CITY
In this chapter, I have suggested that the unknown city can be thought
about in many different ways. I have explored just a few—all related to a
kind of underground or repressed urban life. I have touched on Freud’s uncanny
experience of walking through Genoa, looked into the underground
systems that underlie and underpin modern urban life, and puzzled over the
mystery of the highly visible cover of an undercover organization. These stories
are interwoven, and I would like to conclude by pulling together some
of the threads.
One thread is that there is no such thing as the known or the unknown
city. The idea that either exists is a diversion: it is clear that spaces
and places in the city are both known and unknown, both real and imagined—and
they are known and unknown through the specific practices,
discourses, and narratives that call them to mind, or bring them into
(in)visibility. It is clear that the MI6 building both does—and in a very material
way—does not exist. What goes on behind its closed doors, I can only
guess at. Yet it writes itself through its building onto the face of London: simultaneously
there and not there, as much solid as void. The building materializes
identity, a sense of place, a city; its solids and voids are occupied by
people who replicate and reproduce power relations that are simultaneously
concrete and vacuous. The building houses “techniques of spatial occupation,
of territorial mapping, of invasion and surveillance,” which are the alltoo-well-known
“instruments of social and individual control”; 25 it thereby
dramatizes both the thereness and the not-thereness of power relations.
A further thread is that there is something “unconscious” about
city life. This is not to reduce the city to unconscious motivations, but to say
that everyday experiences are not simply rational nor fully knowing nor
cold-blooded. An emotional life lies at the heart of the city—and the city
can become a strange, pleasurable, hostile place through our reactions to its
buildings (irrespective of conscious designs). 26 It is these unconscious reactions
that inform Freud’s uncanny experience. Desire and fear, of course,
play a large part in urban lives: the city provides ample opportunities for expressing
the passions. However, Freud’s uncanny return to the place of desire
and humiliation tells not of the presence either of desire or of fear, but
of the way in which desire and fear are bound up one in the other. The unknown
streets of known quality speak of the intermeshing of desire and fear: