The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Doreen Massey
ability to express personal pride and individual imagination, and also the
breakup of the old coherent vision—of “the working class,” “the public.”
The assumptions of security in which my welfare-state generation
grew up (and for which our parents’ generation fought) have been fractured
by a nervousness that it is hard to put your finger on but you can feel, palpably,
in the streets. Every now and then a dreadful rumor brings the terror
that the rest of the estate might be sold off into private hands, or is it to a
housing association? A previous solid security, for which once the very
buildings seemed to stand, now feels threatened, one’s hold on things much
more precarious. The physical estate is still there, but its meaning has—ever
so slightly—shifted. And there are new buildings too, which are carriers of
the change: the nursing home where my mother is does indeed stand on exactly
the same spot where once my sister and I went to school. But the school
on that corner (the corner that was once a feudal field) was a state school; the
nursing home is owned by a commercial company. In such various ways,
changes in physical architecture and in the immaterial architecture of social
relations continually intersect with each other.
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The crisscrossing of social relations, of broad historical shifts and the continually
altering spatialities of the daily lives of individuals, make up something
of what a place means, of how it is constructed as a place. (Such a
picture could be endlessly elaborated, and more and more complexities
drawn out.) But a few things in particular seem important to stress. To begin
with, there is the open complexity of the spatiotemporality of any place.
As my parents’ lives close in, the estate’s new generation regularly saves to
go off abroad; a second runway is mooted for the airport up the road. All day
long, planes seem barely to skim the rooftops, their flight paths taking them
over “Localine” bus stops for wheelchair users. Senior citizens pass day after
day within four walls, and not many miles to the south the telescopes of Jodrell
Bank look out to the stars. There’s a multiplicity of times and temporalities,
as well. This “spot,” this “location,” is a palimpsest of times and
spaces. The apparent securities of longitude and latitude pin down a mobility
and multiplicity that totally belie their certainties of space and time.
So too with the apparent solidity of buildings, the givenness of “the
built environment.” That “givenness” is just one moment in the constant
process of the mutual construction of the identities of people and the identities
of place. Buildings, therefore, as precipitates of social relations, which
go on being changed by them and having a life within them. The “architecture”
of the city is also the frame of social relations through which we live