The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

stituted a collective mirror more faithful than any personal one.
Such a “recognition effect” has far greater import than the “mirror
effect” of the psychoanalyst.
The monument thus effected a “consensus,” and this in the
strongest sense of the term, rendering it practical and concrete. 20
There are debates about how effective grand monuments can really be. But
here on this estate the insight can be turned around. For one thing, these
spaces are distinctly nonmonumental. For another, most of them selectively
both welcome and reject. To walk along the parade of shops is to feel oneself
on occasions drawn in, at other moments repulsed, at yet others most clearly
excluded. And the sequence would be different for each of us. Here, in the
spaces and places of daily life, are “mirrors” that alternately embrace and
deny. Unlike monuments, whose purpose is to gather together in the consensus
of a common belonging, a shared identity, all those who walk by, the
multiplicities of ordinary spaces reflect the fact of differentiation and fracture—places
that you’d go and places that you wouldn’t. Monumental
spaces strive to tell you (to teach you) of your common membership. The
nonmonumental spaces within and through which we more habitually live
tell you more precisely of where you belong. (Indeed, monumental spaces
may well be needed precisely because other spaces so selectively welcome and
reject.) These things add to your understanding of who you are, of just how
you figure in this society, in the wider scheme of things. It is thus that spatialities
can literally place you. They can tell you where you fit in, let you
know your relative power.
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Living in Wythenshawe
For people like my parents—in their eighties, “working class”—I think
what many cities say is that you are living on the edge of what is really going
on (on the margins of society), picking your way through a world now
increasingly in the hands of others. The mirror held up by the spaces of the
postmodern metropolis reflects to many elderly people an image in which
they don’t appear. Like one of those Chinese photographs from which Lin
Biao has been airbrushed away.
But that would also be too negative, would be to oversimplify—yet
again—the patterns of power and space. Lefebvre also writes that
There can be no question but that social space is the locus of prohibition,
for it is shot through with both prohibitions and their counterparts,
prescriptions. This fact, however, can most definitely not
be made into the basis of an overall definition, for space is not only