The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Things, Flows, Filters, Tactics
holes, but not the “happening.” We cannot see the city come into being
because no singular space or time reveals it to us; the city is not comprehensible
to the single glance or view. This is further complicated in that
the process continually recurs, at different locations, scales, and times
and with a myriad of different meanings and power relations. To “watch”
architecture, then, is not so much simply to slow down the passage of the
bullet with a high-speed camera, with an ever more attentive historical
lens, but to explode the whole notion of time and space; it requires comprehending
with multiple ideas and intellects, with the whole body, with
the heart and the hand, with political beliefs as well as with the eye.
“Watching the happening” of architecture and the urban means far more
than “seeing it happen.”
As the periodization of the production of space suggests, this formulation
incorporates a production of time. Time is also part of the revolutionary
or utopian nature of any political project, seeking a forward
projection of the periodization into the future. Knowing the city is ultimately
a project of becoming, of unfolding events and struggles in time
as well as in space. Thus time and space are not independent constructions
but interproductions, processes at once separate but necessarily interrelated.
However, this is not an easy formulation—the relation between
space and time remains problematic. There are, nonetheless, a few possible
ways of approaching this formulation, which we would like to introduce
here.
First we must consider the spatial context of temporal productions.
The abstract space of capitalism reduces time to constraints on the
usages of space and to a general dominance of time by economic space,
thereby rendering time a matter of clocks and labor, something uncelebrated
as lived experience. However, time can also resist such reductions,
reemerging as a form of wealth, as locus and medium of use and
pleasure. 20 How then might this resistance occur?
We might begin by periodizing time, seeking to chart its different
conceptions and enactments in different epochs. Such a knowledge would
free us from seeing abstract time as the natural or universal time of humanity;
we would become aware of the social constructedness of time and,
therefore, the potential for different constructions. But here we have not
taken this path, which we leave to more past-oriented historians and “geographers
of time.”
Instead, we look to the different kinds of time that are implicated
in social and spatial production. Architecture, in particular, has a
special role in representing sanctioned relationships of space and time;