The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

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Borden, Rendell, Kerr, and Pivaro
From the rhythms of walking, seeing, and other bodily constructions,
to the everyday routines of urban life, to the deeper and more structured
rhythms of economics, nation-states, and politics as they influence
and are reproduced by the subject: through such processes, buildings
cease to be objects and become places of epistemological and social negotiation
conducted through the figure of the subject. Nonetheless, it is still
from the ground of the city, from its wealth of different spaces, times, and
peoples, that change and new life must emerge; there is no point in envisaging
a utopia as an entirely new creation formed in a distant land and
future time from unsullied minds. Instead, the utopian impulse must be
applied to the situation in which we find ourselves today. We must treat the
city and its architectures as a “possibilities machine,” as what Lefebvre
refers to as an oeuvre—a place of artistic production in its widest sense,
where the “texture” of the city is its creation of time-spaces through the
appropriative activities of its inhabitants; a place of nonlabor, joy, and
the fulfillment of desires rather than toil; a place of qualities, difference,
relations in time and space, contradictory uses and encounters.
The city should bring together the micro architectural and
macro planning scales, the everyday realm and the urban, inside and outside,
work and nonwork, the durable and ephemeral, and so forth; it must
be situated between the perceived and the lived. 49 Architecture then
emerges not as an object, not as a thing, but as a flow—or, more properly,
as a flow within other flows—the merely apparent pattern of a much more
complex set of forces, dynamics, and interrelations within the space of
the city.
THE UNKNOWN CITY
As one of the anonymous reviewers for this volume pointed out, there is an
emergent “new movement in urban studies,” one that offers an “antiformalist,
post-structuralist, even Situationist perspective for understanding
the city”; this volume represents “the first instance of the
diversity of postmodern theories applied to the field.” Apart from offering
this diversity of theoretical discourse, The Unknown City also, we feel,
makes a significant contribution in at least two other ways. First, the book
utilizes both images and texts in a manner highly unusual—outside of architecture
and art history, at least—for this kind of academic subject. Second,
and perhaps more important, the various contributors go beyond
simply describing or interpreting and attempt to mobilize ideas within the