The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

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Living in Wythenshawe
other council policy); it is a presence whose meaning closes down your spatiality
in a million ways. And there is the entirely nonantagonistic, but still
power-filled, attempt to live together by a group of people who—as anywhere—have
highly differentiated demands on space: skateboarders and
unsteady older folk; babies in prams pushed through City vs. United on the
street. The “public” for whom this estate was built turns out to be multiple
and differentiated: to have varying demands on space, to give it different
meanings, to want to make different, and sometimes conflicting, places.
“Public space” turns out to be a tricky concept. And binary notions of “domination”
and “resistance” fall apart in this intersection of a multiplicity of
spatialities.
SPACE/IDENTITY
In this intersection, identities are molded. Your spatiality can “place” you.
Places are part of what tells you who you are.
But there are ways and ways of constructing this relation—between
personal and place identity. There is, for instance, place as continuity,
and there is place as eternal home. Both present difficulties.
If you like, I could tell such a tale of this place, woven around
long historical continuities and that kind of notion of “home.” In On Living
in an Old Country, Patrick Wright evokes the standard parish-history format:
start from the Domesday book (after brief speculation re earlier occupants)
and proceed in gentle linear fashion through the ages to today. 17