The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

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Borden, Rendell, Kerr, and Pivaro
and for urban thinkers and interventionists in general, a simple yet profound
lesson now emerges. Activities as particular rhythms of time and
space are not universal constructs: they are constructed in specific conditions.
To attempt to understand human history, to attempt to understand
the unknown-ness of the city—as we consider the conceived and the
lived, representations and experience—we therefore must be explicit
about what particular activity or activities are being undertaken: what
are the energies deployed, what patterns do they create, what objects do
they produce? In short, what productive work is being studied?
Planners, architects, and builders produce objects out of things
and divide spaces with objects. But, as we argued at the start of this chapter,
our consideration of the city should not be solely limited to such architectural
objects, nor to architecture qua object. Instead we must also
consider objects such as the visual images created by artists and filmmakers,
through which we view certain parts of the city. Similarly, we
should consider the words deployed by writers to communicate ideas.
These words have a specific relation to space—they describe or prescribe
space—and they too produce the city.
In relating to the urban realm, practices cannot engage with only
one kind of object—words, images, or things. Each has a different relation
to space and to the communication of meaning; thus the interrelation
between them, which enables one to inform the other, is vital. But ultimately
such interpenetration can happen only if the areas themselves are
redefined and transposed: words as things, words as matter, images as
objects, objects as ideas, and so on.
However elusive the notion of knowing a place might be, it is
nonetheless at a particular location that particular actions, words, images,
and things come together. “Knowing a place,” a useful and necessary
process, ranges from the tourist’s simple claim of familiarity with
a visited location to the intricate understandings of the permanent inhabitant.
In all cases, of course, what is being referred to is a personal
and unique ordering of applicable knowledge, a mental structuring of
spatial, cultural, and temporal data to create an internalized encapsulation
of that place—wholly individual, largely incommunicable, but utterly
essential for any degree of engagement with a given urban locale.
Anyone who seriously contemplates the political possibilities inherent
in knowing a place, in being not merely a resident but an active citizen,
sees the necessity of developing the critical tools to expose and to
critique how meanings and values are produced and manipulated in the
realm of urban space. To do so requires an elaborate weaving of theoreti-