The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Un(known) City . . .
they are both present and absent. The presence of one allows the other space,
each becoming solid and void in the presence/absence of the other. If that
sounded mystical, then how about this? Freud could only recognize the
“known” quality of the “unknown” street once fear of the (un)known quality
of the (sexed) female body had been shifted and sifted by desire into a fear
of the (seemingly) known quality of the (apparently prostitute: supposedly
aggressive) women. Through desire for and fear of the female body, the
street becomes at once recognizable and unfamiliar. Freud was compelled to
reenact his movement through the streets not because fear and desire were
separate, but because they were bound up in each other; and it is this dynamic
that bound him into helpless repetition. In this regard the city is not
of unknown quality: it is, in part at least, built on the fragility and ambivalence
of dominant masculinities and subversive femininities.
In each of these stories about the un(known) city is a sense of movement:
unseen, hidden, closed off—for one reason and another. These movements
are relayed at different scales: the walker on the streets, the movement
of services (water, gas, sewage) through networks under the city, and the interconnections
between and beyond cities through secret networks of information.
None of these movements is “free,” either in the sense of being able
to go anywhere anytime, or in the sense of lying outside the infrastructures
of power, infrastructures that enable as much as control movement. These
movements create a porous city, whose boundaries are perpetually and necessarily
crossed. But some boundaries are not meant to be crossed. And these
boundaries are warily policed: as Freud becomes self-aware and alarmed, so
the women become aware of, and “excited” by, Freud; as MI6 watch the
edges of their building, people pass in and out constantly. Sometimes, in
the shift from one place to another, something is revealed about the
un(known) city—as Freud discovered on his street walk.
The un(known) city, furthermore, has required some digging beneath
the surface to find the truth that lies below. However, depth models
of knowledge remain obstinately difficult: truths are also to be found (as
well as hidden) in surfaces, in facades, in the way things appear. A constant
referral to subterranean processes carries the manifest danger of missing the
obvious. And I would like to end this chapter on one obvious point: whatever
is known and unknown about the city is produced and reproduced
through power relations and resistance to authority, domination, and/or exclusion.
But there is no map of the un(-)city; there is no map of power relations
or of the memories of everyday struggles in the face of violence and
oppression. The connections I have traced between the unconscious, the uncanny,
the underground, and the undercover are the faded marks left by intersecting
relations of power; traces are produced by the vacillation between