The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

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Borden, Rendell, Kerr, and Pivaro
it is commonly perceived in relation to memory, that indefinable human
hold on the past which is so necessary to the personal negotiation of
change and to the public elaboration of narratives of time. In its most
self-conscious expression of time and permanence—that is, the monumental—architecture
apparently manages to concretize public, collective
memory; yet the unconscious assumption that in memorializing the
past architecture can somehow anchor memory is, of course, largely illusory.
As Iain Sinclair observes, “Memorials are a way of forgetting,
reducing generational guilt to a grid of albino chess pieces, bloodless
stalagmites. Shapes that are easy to ignore stand in for the trauma of remembrance.
Names are edited out. Time attacks the noble profile with a
syphilitic bite.” 21
Memory, however, is but one operation of social time. We must
also consider that kind of time which, following Lefebvre again, is diversified,
at once social and natural, at once linear (the time of progress and
regress) and cyclical (the time of nature, of repetitions, death and life):
Time in the city and by the city will be independent of natural cycles
but not submitted to the linear divisions of rationalized duration; it will
be the time of unexpectedness, not a time without place but a time
that dominates the place in which it occurs and through which it
emerges. This will be the place and time of desire, above and beyond
need. 22
We offer a social or analytical conception of time: time as at once represented
consciously, experienced passively, reimagined actively, and embedded
into all the myriad of social practices that constitute social being.
Where then could this reassertion of time take place? For Lefebvre,
the restoration of time has to start within society itself, with the
spaces of representation (the most immediately active and hence the
most temporal of Lefebvre’s three kinds of space), followed by a reunion
with representations of space. It is by facing the constraints of time imposed
within contemporary society that people master their own times,
and so maximize the production of art, knowledge, and the lived. 23
Furthermore, it is in the modern city that one must consider the
different uses, productions, and inscriptions of time. Rethinking the city
necessarily involves the temporal. 24 Thus it is important to consider that
architecture is not just the space-time of the permanent, of the great
canonic works that stand seemingly immutable over the centuries while
all around them decays and is destroyed. It is also the everyday architecture
of the city—that which is embedded in all the routines, activities,
patterns, and emotions of quotidian life; that which ranges, spatially,