The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Things, Flows, Filters, Tactics
cal knowledge with the comprehension of the material realities of any
single place.
We must therefore realize, with Michel de Certeau, that subjective
self-knowledge and collective understanding of the community are
the necessary stores from which the particularities of real cities can be
revealed to resist the totalizing concept of the “city.” 47 Turning to personal
and subjective categories of knowledge does more than directly
oppose the objective, functionalist, and technocratic discourses of
modernism; it also suggests an order of understanding wholly at variance
with the scientifically based urbanistic view that such discourses
produce. In many of the essays that follow, readers will discern a tradition
of thought and practice led by French theorists, one that permits the
reimagination of the city, and of cities, in order to resist the elimination
of the unique and the irrational that the abstracted vision of the “concept
city” implies.
A particular mode of constructing “pictorial” narratives of the
everyday world, rooted deeply in the insights of surrealist practices and
depending on the defiant privileging of the detail over the whole, or the
arbitrary juxtaposition of the mundane with the significant, evokes not
merely the urban landscape but simultaneously the existence of the narrator
in that place. Such a narrator can capture just something of the
subjective sensation, the sheer vividness, of urban experience and movement
and perhaps hint at the “secret history” of the city, as Iain Sinclair
demonstrates:
Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes,
shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting
purposefully is the recommended mode, trampling asphalted earth in
alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself.
To the no-bullshit materialist this sounds suspiciously like fin-de-siècle
decadence, a poetic of entropy—but the born-again flâneur is a stubborn
creature, less interested in texture and fabric, eavesdropping on
philosophical conversation pieces, than in noticing everything. Alignments
of telephone kiosks, maps made from moss on the slopes of Victorian
sepulchres, collections of prostitutes’ cards, torn and defaced
promotional bills for cancelled events at York Hall, visits to the homes of
dead writers, bronze casts on war memorials, plaster dogs, beer mats,
concentrations of used condoms, the crystalline patterns of glass shards
surrounding an imploded BMW quarter-light window. ... Walking, moving
across a retreating townscape, stitches it all together: the illicit cocktail
of bodily exhaustion and a raging carbon monoxide high. 48