The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Walking through the streets of Harlem, you will see many abandoned
buildings, the shadows of structures that were once strong and complete.
Growing up without material privilege, I knew that material wealth ensured
that one could live, work, and study in structures that would stand
forever, that would shelter and abide. For those living in poverty, shelter was
always something that could be taken away, that could fall down, disintegrate
around you. Even though I loved clapboard houses and wooden shacks,
everyone knew that concrete was the hope of lasting structures.
In small Southern towns that were the landscape of my dreaming—
the only worlds I knew growing up—we all lived in houses. Many of these
houses were tiny, with thin walls that just barely kept out the cold. Yet they
had stood the test of time, with little upkeep. They were abiding and life
would be lived in them from generation to generation. There were no apartment
dwellings in the segregated all-black world of my youth, not in the
black neighborhood. No matter how poor you were, no matter how destitute,
there was a little shack somewhere that would offer sanctuary. Land
surrounded you. The earth held you and your dwelling.
I share this to provide a background to frame my current relationship
to the city. In my youth that city represented to me only the unknown,
a place of mystery where one could be lost. It was impossible to lose oneself
in a small town. The first American city I journeyed to was Chicago. Although
relatives lived there, all I knew of it came from Carl Sandburg’s
poem, where it was described vividly as “hog butcher for the world.” The
city was too strange to enchant me. I lost my way there. Home as I understood
it was a place where I would never be lost.
Cities had no magic for me. In my imagination they were places
where too much was happening. All the movement of cities made it difficult
for folks to find time for one another. Small towns were places where
one could be recognized, where the familiar affirmed itself daily in habit,
routine, predictability. After Chicago, I went away to college and lived in
many small cities. There I discovered the groundedness of neighborhoods.
Even if one could not know the city in its entirety, one could live in the familiar
world of the neighborhood.
The first large city that I lived in was Los Angeles. When I came
there to live in my early twenties, I did not know how to drive a car and thus
the city was for a time always an alien place. One could never hope to traverse
its many boundaries without a moving vehicle. And yet once I got
behind the wheel, I would claim this city from a distance. My car was
constantly breaking down and so I would see many new neighborhoods trying
to find my way home. My deepest metaphor for life in the city continued
to be that the city was a place where one could be lost.