The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
418
24
419
Iain Chambers
ist coherence. It is to engage with undoing the links of linearity and the teleology
of a time called “progress,” and to dwell on the emergence of the unsettling
presence of what modernity represses and yet ultimately depends
on: the exploitation of the forgotten, the disenfranchised, the alien, and the
negated—those condemned to bear the burden of modernity in the name of
progress, underdevelopment, backwardness, illegality, and the inevitable
activation of the glossaries of sexual prejudice, ethnic discrimination, and
racism that seek to supervise such scenes.
To directly inscribe such interruptions, such discontinuities, into
the contemporary accounting of time, into the balance sheet of our modernity,
returns us to the question of architecture. In his “Letter to Peter Eisenman,”
Jacques Derrida lists a series of relationships that in Heideggerean
fashion expose architecture to the provocation of its terrestrial framing, to
what both exceeds and yet envelops its discourse: architecture and poverty,
architecture and homelessness, architecture and ruins. He finally returns us
to the very foundations of such questioning by raising the question of the
Earth and the ultimate provocation sustained by our dwelling. 14
If language is ultimately the house of being, then it is in language
that a sense of dwelling, a sense of the city, of its architecture, buildings, and
streets, both endures and develops. The stones, steel, cement, and glass that
seemingly furnish the conclusion of a discourse, a project, a plan, a building,
a city, are merely material points of departure as architectural space is rendered
into place, is transformed into historical practices and cultural apertures:
into an irrepressible series of languages, bodies, acts, and provocation.
Architecture as the “spatial synthesis of the heterogeneous” is the
synthesis not only of forms and materials, as Paul Ricoeur suggests, 15 but
also of social, cultural, and historical forces and elements. As a text it is not
merely a plot to be read, it is also a story we tell and in which we are told.
So, we must bring to bear on the disciplines that think and project the
city—architecture, urban planning and government, investments and speculation—a
reading and listening that permits the other cities that exist
within the City to come into view and hearing: the gendered, sexual, ethnic,
and racial edifices that both constitute and inhabit urban space. To map
the city along these lines is to supplement, and sometimes subvert, the
understanding of this habitat grasped in terms of an abstract population,
generic civic space, anonymous labor pool, or commercial concentration. To
understand the city in this fashion is to decisively shift emphasis from the
prescriptive protocols of the urban plan, the architectural project, administrative
intention, and economic strategy to the inscriptive: to the city that
speaks, that narrates itself in diversity.