The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Architecture, Amnesia, and the Emergent Archaic
where the linearity of times spirals out into diverse tempos, the residual, the
archaic, and the premodern can become emergent as visceral details and
distortions undermine the dreamed-of purity of rational planning and functional
design. In its art of getting by (arrangiarsi), making do, and rearranging
available elements as props for a fragile urban existence, the presence of
Naples on the southern edge of Europe proposes an eternal return to the
enigmatic lexicon of the city, to the contingencies of an unstable language
in which all city dwellers are formed and cast. So, Naples is perhaps a
potential paradigm of the city after modernity. Connected in its uneven
rhythms and volatile habits to other non-occidental cities and an emerging
metropolitan globality, it proposes an interruption in our inherited understanding
of urban life, architecture, and planning. Participating in progress
without being fully absorbed in its agenda, Naples, as a composite city, reintroduces
the uneven and the unplanned, the contingent, the historical.
Viewed and, above all, lived in this manner, the interrogation posed by
Naples returns the question of the city to the relationship between politics
and poetics in determining our sense of the ethical and the aesthetic: our
sense of the possible.
We all write and speak from somewhere. We have an address, a location
in space, a material niche in time. Our views and voices bear the imprint
of different histories; they speak out of a particular place. So, whatever
I have to say on the question of architecture undoubtedly lies in my response
to the ambiguous, even enigmatic, context of where I work and live: the city
of Naples. At the same time, however, to nominate the site of my body, voice
and thoughts, desires and obsessions in terms of a particular city is inevitably
also to connect my observations to the habitat of the city as the
privileged site of modern existence. Both in economic and experiential
terms, it is seemingly the city that most immediately compresses history,
culture, and identities into configurations that command critical attention.
What is excluded from this metropolitan comprehension of our being—the
nonurban worlds of nomadism, peasantry, rural life, even the suburban
fringes, however populous and necessary these spaces may be for our existence
(from agriculture to tourism and residence, as well as the sustenance
of our imagination)—is considered to be subordinate to, if not merely an appendage
of, the city.
But if Naples is unwittingly thrust into the critical and global
limelight of metropolitan inquiry, it brings along its own form of disturbance,
a particular contribution to the simultaneous formation of concentration
and dispersal, that unheimlichkeit or uncanny return that eternally
doubles and displaces urban geometry with the unruly histories of the repressed—perhaps
the profoundest product of modern urban life. 1 Naples is