Читать книгу Towards the City of Thresholds - Stavros Stavrides - Страница 18

In contrast to the supposedly modernist quest for universal order, public space in the “postmodern” metropolis appears to embody chaos and randomness. These characteristics have been elevated to key positive attributes of emerging urban environments. Privatization, and the consumer ideologies of individualistic hedonism that accompany it, transform practices used to “perform” public space into practices of self-gratification. These practices represent the city as a collection of chances (and places) for consumer satisfaction.

As Peter Marcuse, among others, has shown, the “postmodern condition” goes along with a new “partitioned city.” Urban chaos goes along with a fragmentation of the city that is far from random (Marcuse 1995, 244). The contemporary metropolis is increasingly becoming a conglomerate of differently defined enclaves. In some cases, literal walls separate these enclaves from the rest of the city, as with large department stores and gated communities. Walls can also demarcate “pride and status of rule and prejudice” (ibid., 249). These are the invisible walls defining ghettos, suburban neighborhoods, and gentrified recreation areas.¹

One of the basic attributes of the “partitioned city” is that it destroys the public character of public space. Public space, a creation of the practices that inhabit it, “is always contestable, precisely because whereas there are criteria that control admission to its purview, the right to enact and enforce those criteria is always in question” (Henaff and Strong 2001, 4).

The partitioned city is full of privatized public spaces in which public use is carefully controlled and specifically motivated. No contestation is tolerated. Users of these spaces must be checked and categorized regularly. They must follow specific instructions in order to be allowed access to various services and facilities. A shopping mall or a large department store, for instance, are such quasi-public spaces. A company-owned town or an enclosed community, separated from the network of public spaces that surround them (streets, squares, forests, etc.), controls local space by limiting its use to certified residents. Holiday resorts often exhibit former traditional public spaces in theme parks featuring rural or village communities. Public life is reduced to the conspicuous consumption of fantasized identities in a sealed-off enclave that mimics a “holiday city.”

What defines these spaces as sites of “public life” is not the clashing rhythms of contesting practices (that create the political) but the regulated rhythms of routines under surveillance. The publicly exhibited identities of the users are enacted in accordance with those rhythms that discriminate and canonize them.

Social identities are performed in the quasi-public space of the partitioned city. The fact that different categories of people are allowed to enter the various enclaves and remain there is a critical indicator of their identity. Residential enclaves can exhibit recognizable collective identities, especially when inner or outer forces homogenize the residents. The suburban areas of American cities, the shantytowns of Africa, Latin America or Asia, the gentrified residential areas of different European cities, and the immigrant ghettoes all over the world equally exhibit visible urban identities. In these areas, public space is separated from the rest of the city and use is restricted to the members of the corresponding community of residents. Gated neighborhoods and impenetrable favelas take separation to the obvious limit.²

Identities are framed both spatially and conceptually. A frame is characterized by the clear demarcation of a contained space versus an outer space: what lies outside the frame does not contribute to the definition of the inside. Our experience of pictures, both in modern news coverage and advertising images, strengthens this socially inculcated intuition. A frame defines a situation, a subject, and eventually specifies information, attributing to it the status of a meaningful message. Framed messages are not connected to each other. Advertising messages float all around us on top of buildings, in magazines, and even on human bodies. News photographs appear next to each other in temporal or spatial jux-taposition, producing the image of a fragmented—or should we say partitioned—world. Framed identities correspond to the experience of a partitioned urban space where residential enclaves appear—or rather are fantasized—as completely independent of their surrounding public space.

Adjacent enclaves of rich and poor: Paraisópolis, São Paulo and Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro.

The contemporary metropolis presents itself to its inhabitants as a network of flows rather than a structure of places. As Castells has shown, the “space of flows” constitutes the dominant ideology’s structure of distribution of function and power in contemporary society (Castells 1996, 428). “The new dominant ideology” Castells explains, insists on “the end of history and the supersession of places in the space of flows” (ibid., 419). However, there still exist, albeit ideologically determined, experiences and practices of places as identity supporting spatialities. Besides describing a life divided between parallel universes (space of flows versus space of places), Castells is careful in describing an essential link between the mobility of managerial elites and their need to inhabit secluded enclaves, “establishing the ‘in’ and ‘out’ boundaries of their cultural political community” (ibid., 416).

The experience of urban enclaves appears only as an exception in a city where movement prevails over localized inhabitation routines. But, is this really so? First, we must distinguish between those for whom movement is a privilege and those for whom movement is an obligation (Bauman 1998). We must also distinguish between different kinds of movement, defining in each case the horizon that limits them. Is it inside an enclave, traversing the city, connecting home with work, connecting significations of status around the world (as in the case of travelling managers or academics), etc. (Castells 1996, 417)?

It is important to observe how each occurrence of potential or actual movement influences the formation of different urban identities. Not all identities become temporary because somebody is on the move; some of them are fortified when performed in transition. For example, the successful businessman or international politician. In this case, a spatial frame is also a defining structure. Even though these identities are not circumscribed by the space in which they are performed, a series of well-defined enclaves constitutes the urban space of businessmen and politicians. This series of enclaves (corporate buildings, select restaurants, lobbies, and so on) constitutes a topologically functional frame outside of which the rest of the city appears almost nonexistent.³

There is a whole range of contemporary urban spaces where the rules of urban identity formation do not seem to apply. People are always passing through such spaces, yet no one understands them as locations that define their inhabitants. In airports, supermarkets, motorway service stations or hotels, an apparent and generalized anonymity seems to prevail. Most people are in transit as if their lives were unfolding “in parentheses.”

These places, where a solitary anonymity is performed, are nonetheless defining characteristics of contemporary urban identities. Those transit-identities of the motorway traveler, the supermarket shopper, and so on, construct the typology of the average modern city dweller. Explicit or implicit instructions for use always accompany these spaces, addressing each person individually, but eventually, as with advertising messages, they fabricate recurrent characteristics. Nonverbal messages are especially powerful, such as advertising images in department stores, company logos in fast-food restaurants or service stations. Transit identities are not the product of chance experience; on the contrary, they distill what is typical and recurrent out of what is contingent and personal in the experience of urban “non-places” (Augé 1995).

Clearly these identities are framed as well, enclosed as they are between socially identified spatial and temporal parentheses. This framing has something in common with the snapshot. No matter how arbitrarily framed, these pictures somehow lose their contingent character as soon as they are shown and appear as recognizable typical scenes. Family and vacation albums are full of such photographs: “In front of the Eiffel Tower,” “Our baby walking,” “Daddy’s first fishing success,” and so on. Arguably, modern urban identities are framed spatially and temporally according to practices that transpose the experience of the partitioned city into the experience of partitioned identities. Metropolitan enclaves of various kinds but are always perceived and performed as defining frames that seem to ignore the urban space that surrounds them. Actually, however, their status is founded upon their relations with the surrounding environment and these relations are regulated by concrete checkpoints.

Metropolitan enclaves are characterized by checkpoints. One must prove their innocence in advance, as Marc Augé (1995, 102) brilliantly remarks, in order to be allowed to use these enclaves. Checkpoints punctuate the city: you can see them in airports, office buildings, supermarkets and banks, clubs and theaters, and of course, in guarded public buildings.

Checkpoints are modular elements of a prevailing rhythm that produce a new dominant experience of “being in public.” Checkpoints define distinct everyday routines for different categories of inhabitants of the partitioned city. Toll gates or subway turnstiles mark the everyday movements of many city dwellers. The rhythm of the supermarket cashier marks an everyday ceremony of shopping.

Collective and seemingly individualized identities are enacted in the process of participating in such rhythms. Even the temporary identities of the traveler or the purchaser are marked by the act of crossing identifying entrance points. There, one has to show his or her passport, debit or credit card in order to be allowed a seemingly liberating anonymity—“the passive joys of identity loss” (Augé 1995, 103).

“Advanced marginality” in Korogocho, Nairobi.

We can easily discern in those new urban rhythms, regulated by checkpoints, the emergence of new linear rhythmicalities. These linear rhythms generate ceremonial practices of identity confirmation. No matter how functionally necessary those control points are, their existence requires the performance of practices devoted to ritual repetition. As in the case of “prophylactic rituals” (Turner 1977, 168–169 and 1982, 109–110), devoted to protection from unexpected natural disasters, checkpoints appear above all as self-evident protection from practices that are unpredictable, other, different—in other words, protection from “a-rhythmical” practices. Checkpoints appear to protect society from outside, foreign, and therefore hostile elements. They “normalize” rhythms.