The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Iain Chambers
frequently reviled for appearing to exist at the limit of Europe and modern
urbanism, clinging intermittently to those more ordered lifestyles associated
with London, Paris, Milan, and New York. Yet, in its seeming proximity
to the more “typical” world cities and civic chaos of El Cairo, Mexico
City, São Paulo, and Shanghai, this Mediterranean city also paradoxically
finds itself drawn into proximity with the cosmopolitan composition of Los
Angeles and London, as its internal history comes increasingly to be intersected
by the intrusion of extra-European immigration and the impositions
of global capital on its local concerns. In the space of these “new powers and
expanded intercourse on the part of individuals” that, incidentally, forcefully
invite us to radically rethink the spatial divisions of center and periphery,
of “first” and “third” worlds, the peculiar historical configuration
of a city such as Naples amounts to an insistence that cannot be readily disposed
of. In its uneasy insertion into modernity and capitalism, such an insistence—and,
however dramatically etched against the background of a
volcano and the blue of the Mediterranean, it is by no means unique to
Naples—returns to interrogate and disturb the projected homogeneity of
the blueprint born in the anxious midst of metropolitan powers desirous of
a seamless symmetry. 2 The plan contemplated by the eye, by the technologies
of visual hegemony and their management of the indivisible nexus of
knowledge and power, can be torn, punctured, or simply exceeded by further
regimes of individual and collective urban sense unexpectedly confuting
the administrative projection. The outcome of the struggle for a
common ground of meaning, or shared frame of sense, is rarely inevitable;
its politics reaches into the very heart of the matter at hand, into the very
heart of our being in the city, in modern life.
In the city the perpetual myth and desire for origins, for a secure
site of explanation, is constantly deferred by their being retold and rewritten.
This eternal return opens up an interval in the present that permits a
reconfiguration able to interrupt a further myth: that of “progress.” To narrate
the city in the physical passage of our bodies, to walk it and to measure
ourselves with and against it, is no doubt to seek in our environs the reasoned
paradigm of the ancient polis, the primary promise of the agora. But
that design and desire is inevitably intersected by modern motives and motifs—speed,
efficiency, rationalization: in a phrase, by the economic management
of technology driven by the telos of development. Most of us do
not walk the city, but ride it: in cars, subways, and buses. The crossings of
these multiple metropolitan trajectories—the mythical source of its space
and the modern injunctions of its organization—create a complex and composite
place in which the return of the repressed inevitably bubbles up