The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Things, Flows, Filters, Tactics
domain of practice(s) ranging from poetic writing to public art, from architectural
design to the elucidation of “archaeological” data.
Before we explain the structuring of this book, a few caveats.
Many of the essays, although by no means all, refer to places in the “Western
world.” This does not mean, however, that the insights gleaned are
only applicable to the cities on which they are based, for in this age of
globalism, all cities are to some extent open to similar processes and conditions.
Nor does this selection mean that there is nothing to be learned
from other cities not included here. Far from it. Indeed, we would hope
that any geographic or urban omissions that the reader might identify
would act as stimulation for new interpretations, new texts, new works of
all kinds.
The Unknown City is divided into four parts: “Filters,” “Filtering
Tactics,” “Tactics,” and “Tactical Filters.” Each section, and
each essay contained within, deals simultaneously with Lefebvre’s
spatial practices, representations of space and spaces of representations.
Each deals with ideas and action. Each deals with spaces, times,
and subjects.
The first stage in understanding the contemporary metropolis is
to comprehend—that is, to filter—preexistent urban conditions. Part I,
“Filters,” focuses primarily on this process, paying particular attention
to those conditions which threaten and challenge more liberatory practices.
Chapters 2 through 4 consider different ways in which memory, architecture,
and the city may be tied to dominant modes of urbanism. For
M. Christine Boyer (chapter 2), this means examining the attempt to alternatively
erase and remember New York’s Times Square, such that the
city itself becomes a simulation of its own history. Barry Curtis (chapter
3) undertakes a similar investigation, this time showing how Venice occupies
the interstitial ground between past, present, and future, and thus
between heritage, modernity, and progress. Joe Kerr (chapter 4) looks at
the ways in which memorialization has been used to represent, remember,
and reremember aspects of war in London.
Chapters 5 through 9 examine forces and processes of urban domination.
William Menking (chapter 5) unearths the burgeoning process of
suburbanization—not, however, in the suburbs themselves but in the most
urban of all locations: Manhattan. Philip Tabor (chapter 7) looks at
another insidious form of capitalism, that of surveillance and the videocam,
simultaneously capturing its controlling and seductive qualities.
In a rather different approach to the notion of seduction, Jane Rendell
(chapter 6) considers how urban rambling in Regency London represents
the city as a place of male pleasure. Urban and architectural representa-