The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Things, Flows, Filters, Tactics
people passive. 4 Architecture may thus, as monuments, express significance
in the city, but it will simultaneously mask the structures of power
that underlie it.
How, then, to further explore these considerations of space, the
city, and architecture? Central to the concepts of the Strangely Familiar
program (see the preface to this book) as a whole have been the ideas of
Henri Lefebvre, and in particular his ideas on the production of space.
Although there are many grounds for criticizing Lefebvre’s theories—
including the relative lack of attention given to global space, cyberspace,
and the postcolonial world—these theorizations are, by now, both
relatively well known and highly influential, and therefore deserve to be
recalled here. Space, Lefebvre postulates, is a historical production, at
once the medium and outcome of social being. It is not a theater or setting
but a social production, a concrete abstraction—simultaneously mental
and material, work and product—such that social relations have no real existence
except in and through space. 5 This relationship between the social
and the spatial—in Edward Soja’s term, the “socio-spatial dialectic” 6 —is
an interactive one, in which people make places and places make people.
Such ideas have, of course, precursors and analogues in the
fields of geography and anthropology. Urban geographers such as David
Harvey have long been concerned with the social production of space,
while anthropologists have argued that space is culturally produced—as
an integral part of material culture, space is intimately bound up in daily
life, social activities, and personal rituals. Taken together, work in anthropology
and geography encompasses all aspects of the built environment
rather than treating works of architecture as autonomous “one-off”
pieces of fine art or sculpture; thus it includes building users as well as
designers and builders as producers of space. Such work has influenced
those architectural historians who have critiqued the privileged status of
architecture and the role of the architect, suggesting instead that architecture
is continually reproduced through use and everyday life. 7
Feminist geographers and anthropologists in particular have
contributed to this kind of work. 8 Liz Bondi, Doreen Massey, Linda Mc-
Dowell, and Gillian Rose, among others, have argued that since social relations
are gendered, and space is socially produced, then space is
patterned by gender. 9 Gendered space may be produced through its occupation—the
different inhabitation of space by men or women—as well as
through representations. For descriptions of spatial characteristics may
be gendered, both by drawing similarities to the biological body and by
prescribing the kinds of spaces and spatial languages considered appropriate
for men and women.