The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Doreen Massey
You know the kind of thing. Osbert Lancaster parodies the genre in Drayneflete
Revealed:
Few towns in England can boast so long a continuous history as
Drayneflete. From the earliest times human habitations of one sort
or another have clustered along the north bank of the River Drayne
at the highest point where this shallow but treacherous stream is
easily fordable. Or perhaps even earlier, for it is conceivable, though
admittedly there is little to suggest it, that primitive man dwelt
here before even there was a river at all, at a time when France and
England were joined by a land-bridge and vast mammoths and
sabre-toothed tigers prowled through the tropical undergrowth
where now stands Marks and Spencers. 18
The Domesday entry for northern Cheshire could make my heart
leap with connections and continuity. In the post-1066 redistribution of
land, one of the benefiting Norman landowners was none other than a certain
Hamon de Massey. There’s a place called Dunham Massey up the road.
Indeed, the Tattons only seem to have acquired Wythenshawe through the
marriage, in 1370, of their Robert to Alicia de Massey. 19 Had it not been for
patrilinearity, as a moviegoing child I might’ve gone not to the Tatton but
to the Massey.
In fact—I know this now—there are few continuities here, and no
bloodline connection. The construction of “home” can rarely be accomplished
by following back continuous temporal threads in the confines of
one place. One’s affection for a place—even a sense of “belonging”—does
not have to be constructed on a romanticism of roots and unbroken, spacespecific
lines of descent.
Rather, it is in other ways that places instruct you as to your identity.
Those paving stones remind you of your frailty. They actively, materially,
dis-able you. Changes in the material environment may tell you that
your time is passing. The blank impenetrability of the security blind on a
once-well-used but now closed shop. As the built space shifts to respond to
other, newer, desires, the consequent exclusions are part of what tells you
who you are. You’d not even know how to enter that shop with all the hi-fis
and computers. The very exclusion is identity-forming. Without hostility,
but simply with the exuberance of the new, a place constructed by and for
your generation (which itself offended the one before) gets taken over by another,
which you don’t fully understand.
Lefebvre has famously written that
Monumental space offered each member of a society an image of
that membership, an image of his or her social visage. It thus con-