The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

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Borden, Rendell, Kerr, and Pivaro
We need to envisage a new cultural project that encompasses democracy,
sociability, adaptations of time and space and the body, life beyond the
commodity, and the slow transformation of everyday life. Human activity
must therefore be directed at new forms of content, seeking not just to
symbolize but also to transform life as a kind of generalized artistic practice.
“Let everyday life become a work of art!” 36
How such a critical sensibility might actually be achieved has
been the point of departure for a succession of twentieth-century artistic
and political movements—none more influential than the Situationist International,
whose desire for “the revolution of everyday life” led to activities
intended to illuminate the enfeebling mediocrity of normal life.
According to Sadie Plant, the Situationists believed that “Only an awareness
of the influences of the existing environment can encourage the critique
of the present conditions of daily life, and yet it is precisely this
concern with the environment in which we live which is ignored.” 37 In
particular the techniques of psychogeography, a very specific use of urban
“knowing,” suggested new ways to expose the soporific complacency
that seemed to characterize everyday experience under late capitalism.
This emphasis on the subjective sense of place has contributed greatly to
establishing that spatial formation and usage are critical determinants
of urban understanding.
Many of the chapters in The Unknown City acknowledge the debt
of contemporary thought to the Situationist movement; of particular importance
both to this book and to the Situationists themselves was the radical
tactical program they developed for cultural agitation. They devised
ways in which artists, architects, writers, and others might actively
politicize their practices in the services of urban thought and action. In
response to a similar impulse, The Unknown City project has sought to
embrace practitioners from a broad array of cultural disciplines, who
themselves have attempted to elaborate tactics for engaging with the urban.
Individual authors of course adopt a variety of approaches, from describing
a theoretically informed understanding of cities to prescribing
a critical practice. Some might wonder with Cixous: “What am I going to
do with my theories, all so pretty, so agile, and so theoretical. ... All my
more and more perfect, beautiful theories, my shuttles and my rockets,
my machines rivaling in precision, wit, and temerity the toughest research
brains, all the champion theories I have so carefully shaped, with
such satisfaction, all of them.” 38
In such formulations, the city and its architecture become not
just aesthetic objects but dynamic, practical realizations of art, unique
and irreplaceable “works” and not reproducible products—polyrhythmic