The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Steve Pile
the known and the unknown. This suggests that what passes under cover of
the term power is as much solid as it is void, as much familiar as it is strange.
What is normally called power is fragile, contingent, arbitrary; it is at its
most barbaric when under threat, and needs to be believed to be effective. Is
this why MI6 sits in its highly visible building—because now we know it is
there (even though what it does is unknown)? And is it an exaggeration to
say this is also a matter of life and death? Possibly. But from the familiar and
the strange, specters of power appear to haunt the un(-)city.