The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

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Borden, Rendell, Kerr, and Pivaro
Spatialized images, for Benjamin, are representations of philosophical
and historical ideas, and consequently architecture is also a dialectical
image in Benjamin’s work. It exists between antiquity and
modernity as an image of modernity in prehistory, and between technology
and art as an expression of the tension between the process of
modernization and traditional aesthetic values. The point at which
the dialectical image is blasted out of history is one where history, the
brought-about event, coincides with nature, the never-changing background.
As Walter Benjamin notes, “The destructive or critical impetus
in materialist historiography comes into place in that blasting apart of
historical continuity which allows the object to constitute itself. Materialist
historiography does not choose its objects causally but blasts them
out of it.” 2 Benjamin’s dialectic is an instantaneous image, that which occurs
at the intersections of nature, myth, and history. Dialectic images
recur as different fragments: as fossil (trace), fetish (phantasmagoria),
wish image (symbol), and ruin (allegory). This is Benjamin’s “microscopic
gaze.” 3 Such fragments include figures (the collector, flâneur,
ragpicker, prostitute), objects (dust), and concepts (fetish): all are interconnected;
each is an archaeological fragment capable of telling a
spatial story. Such fragments acted in this way for the Strangely Familiar
program—and hence also for the images and texts in this book—as
metonymic and metaphoric catalysts to thought and action. Ultimately,
then, architecture is less the constitution of space than a way of watching
and comprehending the spatiality of the city.
Space
There are three important points to note about the spatiality of the city.
First, we must consider scale. The city is not confined to the spatial scale
of the building, or indeed even that of the city itself, but encompasses the
whole, multiscalar landscape produced by human activity: from the corporeal
to the global, the worldly to the intimate. Second, the city cannot
be reduced to either form or representation: it is neither a collection of object-buildings
nor the equivalent of models, schemas, drawings, and projections
of all kinds. Third, the city is not the product of planners and
architects. While urban professionals such as planners and architects
might believe themselves to be in turn democratic negotiators, community
advocators, neutral social scientists, exponents of the beautiful, and
masterful shapers of space, they act only as part of much broader, much
deeper systems of power, economics, and signification. Too often, architecture
is designed (and consequently comprehended) as a purely aesthetic
or intellectual activity, ignoring social relations and rendering