The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

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space must account not only for each separately but, above all, for their
interrelation and linkages with social practice. 18 Real space and spatiality
are always constructed in and through some spatially and historically
specific configuration of the three.
In The Unknown City, “spatiality” then, thus refers both to the
production of spatial practices, representations, and lived experiences
and simultaneously to the dialectical configuration of those activities
that produce it. Such a formulation is necessary if we are to avoid the
extremes of pure physiological and biological determinism, where the
social is a physical world to which we apply ourselves, and of pure idealism,
where social being is an immaterialized abstraction. Both necessarily
restrict our conception of the social, either to the empirical horizon
of the physical or to the metaphysical floating of the inconcrete idea. For
social existence to enable self-production and self-determination—so
that people make lives for themselves, not simply surviving and adapting
to the natural circumstance to which they are born or projecting life from
idealized sources—consciousness and experience must form concrete elements.
And as social being must inevitably involve space, so it follows
that it must also involve consciousness and experience of space.
Time
Borden, Rendell, Kerr, and Pivaro
As a historical production, space is not independent of time; we must
consider how the city comes into being, how buildings are constructed,
and also how the whole edifice of the urban is continually reproduced.
Clearly, time makes a difference. Social relations in the city are dynamic
ones, and although we argue for the importance of space, time is increasingly
entering into discussions of the social production of spaces—not
solely the time of historical materialism, but also personal and irregular
times: bodily rhythms, unconscious and conscious memories, the flux of
complexity and chaos.
She didn’t see that first bullet, but it must have hit a wire or something,
coming through, because the lights came on. She did see the second
one, or anyway the hole it blew in the leather-grain plastic. Something
inside her stopped, learning this about bullets: that one second there
isn’t any hole, the next second there is. Nothing in between. You see
it happen, but you can’t watch it happening. 19
Like Chevette Washington in William Gibson’s cyberpunk fiction Virtual
Light, we can sense the process of architecture being built, the process of
formation and construction; and we can see the results, the buildings—