The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Unknown City is a book about both the existence and the possibilities
of architecture and the city. It is at once a history, geography, and sociology
of the urban as it presents itself today and a proposition, a move toward
confronting the problems of how we might know of, and engage with,
the urban. We offer here an approximation of this problematic, suggesting
a move from things to flows, from filters to tactics. In the process, essays
shift from objects to actions, stasis to change, between external and
internal, city and self, past and present, and so to future—and back again.
This introductory essay is divided into two parts. The first,
Things to Flows, sets out a framework for thinking about architecture and
the city based on the tripartite concerns of space, time, and the human
subject. The second, Filters to Tactics, sets out the ways in which we negotiate
the distance between city and self.
THINGS TO FLOWS
Architecture offers itself to us as an object, and the city as the ultimate
technical object: the fantastical concentration of wealth, power, blood,
and tears crystallized in office towers, roads, houses, blocks, and open
spaces. The appearance of the urban is then seemingly as a thing, as a
finite set of spaces—it is alternatively the machine, the artifact, the
body, the experiment, the artwork, the reflective mirror, the clothing,
the labyrinth, and all the other metaphorical understandings by which
people have sought to comprehend its objectival character.
But architecture is no object. At an interdisciplinary nexus, as an
intrinsic element of everyday life, architecture is not composed of isolated
and monumental objects. Architecture is ambient and atmospheric,
and architecture allows us to tell stories—it is both backdrop to
and inspiration for theoretical and poetic musings of all kinds, from love
to philosophy, theology to Marxism.
The work of Walter Benjamin provides an interesting approach
to architecture, one that is both thematic and methodological. Architecture
is Benjamin’s means of “spatialising the world,” part of a larger
project of developing a theory of modernity wherein it is a mythologized
image of the effects of capitalism. 1 Benjamin treats architecture not as a
series of isolated things to be viewed objectively but rather as an integral
part of the urban fabric experienced subjectively. His subject matter is
not a selection of specific buildings and his method is not to analyze these
as formal pieces of architecture. His work is not empirical: it does not
describe buildings aesthetically or functionally, or categorize them as
things in terms of style, form, or production.