On the Politics of Space

I’ll try to set up in my way the backdrop of our conversation by recalling some basic points about the relation between politics and space. Politics deals with the way in which bodies fit or don’t fit in a space. This space is both material and symbolic. What I call police is the organization of a community where everybody is at his or her own place. This does not mean that they are immobile. This means that they move in the circle of activities defining their occupation – which means at once their job and the way of being suiting their position in the community. It is not only a question of being at the right place and doing the right thing: it also means having the body and the mind adapted to this place and occupation. What I call distribution of the sensible is not only a distribution of occupations and capacities. It is also a structure of the visible, a distribution of the bodies in a common landscape.

Politics starts with the disruption of that landscape; it starts with the dissociation of the ‘normal’ relation between the materiality of places and their symbolic signification. We know that the very word ‘democracy’ first meant a rearrangement of the relation between the material space of dwelling and the symbolic space of the city. A demos was a neighbourhood. By constructing an abstract space made of places distant from one another, to reduce the material power of the landowners, Cleisthenes created, in the sixth century BC, the symbolic form of visibility of a ‘power of the people’. This is how politics is an aesthetic thing in its very principle and in its deployment. The power of the people is the power of people who are no more at their material and symbolic place and disrupt by that displacement the whole landscape of the visible. The artefact that best symbolized that disruption might be the barricade of the nineteenth-century revolutions. The barricade was not so much an instrument of military tactics as tis was a political configuration of the space of the city. In a way, it was an anti-architectural construction. It blocked the normal use of the streets, which is circulation. It was built by workers who were no longer in their workshops, with the stones that paved the streets to ease circulation, the carts destined to transport goods, and the mattresses and furniture used for family life. The barricade undid the normal distribution of the spheres – economic, political, domestic – which is also the normal set of relations between the inside and the outside, the private and the public, the utilitarian and the spectacular. It is this aesthetic subversion of a whole distribution of activities and a whole form of visibility of the city that created the insurgent people as a political subject.

This dissensual use of space was revived by the Occupy movements of the last decade. Those movements carried out a twofold form of dissensus: not only did they stay in a space destined for circulation by the police order, but also they broke away from the normal use of space in political protest, which is to move in the streets and shout slogans. Instead, the Occupy activists decided to stay, to discuss among themselves, and to build tents, creating thereby a redistribution of the public and the private.

From that point of view, the political situation of architecture appears to be paradoxical. Architecture normally does two main things: it builds houses for the everyday life of individuals and it builds monuments which symbolize the community and accommodate public powers. In a sense it appears to do exactly the contrary of politics. It separates the inside from the outside, the visible from the invisible; it gives to domestic life and to public life their location, apart from one another, it does all the more so as architecture has a very specific position in the realm of the arts, it is the art that, more than any other, determines the way in which its products will be used. This authoritarian anticipation of the use of a building has often be reduced by the functional principle ‘form follows function’ that has been harshly criticized during the last decades. But the functionalist formula is only a particular form of a more radical principle which seems to be the necessary credo of architectural practice: ‘use follows design’. The design of the architect anticipates the way in which the built form will be used. This gave to architecture a very strange position both in the aesthetic regime of art and in revolutionary politics. On the one hand this principle of destination is quite far from the idea of the aesthetic experience as free play with a free appearance, torn away from the hierarchies of knowledge and propriety. On the other hand, architecture was in the first line to realize the dream of the aesthetic regime: the construction of a new form of community where freedom and equality would be incorporated no more in laws and institutions but in the sensory experience of everybody.

In such a way there seems to an original tension between two ‘aesthetics’: the aesthetic ‘construction’ of the forms of life of a new community and the aesthetic process of construction of political people. The common space that the architects build is a space that cannot be blocked. Such was the city dreamed by many architects in the twentieth century: a town in which the functions and the modes of circulation are clearly separated. Cars circulate freely at the lower level. Pedestrians circulate freely at the upper level. But what has become impossible is that pedestrians turn cars upside down to construct barricades and construct themselves as a new political people.

It is true that such dreamed cities were never built. As a matter of fact, architecture is not only about constructing buildings and cities. It is also about constructing images and forms of perception. And it often compensates for the solidity and the immobility of the buildings by creating images able to initiate a perception of the common space where they are located as a mobile space. This is the case with the architectural or quasi-architectural projects that blossomed after the 1917 revolution in Russia, whose most famous example is Tatlin’s tower, a tower destined to both shelter the offices of the Third International and symbolize the movement of the revolution assaulting the sky. The striking feature of those architecture is the oblique line; a line of equality cancelling the verticality of the separation between low and high; but also a line of disorientation, cancelling the ordinary co-ordinates of perception, in order to teach people to dwell and act in a space that had become mobile, a space that had become time.

Building in space means at the same time playing with the representation of space. But the architects and urbanists are not the only actors on this stage. There are also the inhabitants of the city who invent forms of mobility that create another city in the urban space, another city which links differently dream and reality, past and future, mobility and immobility. In the 1920s, while the architects and designers of the Bauhaus set out to build a whole new style of life and the soviet artists imagined the forms of a new urban furniture, the surrealist poets invented a way of walking in Paris that prolonged the urban insurrections of the past by awakening a potential of desire and subversion ciphered in the signs or windows of outmoded shops or the architecture of the arcades, the passages doomed to destruction. In the 1950s and the 1960s the Situationists complicated the story by linking the mobility of the surrealist walk with that of modernist and utopian architecture. They first fond in the architectural utopias of Constant or in the new helicoidal building of American architects the models of places suited to the subversive practices of urban dérive through various ambiances before violently rejecting them and throwing the architects out of their international. Then they joined the action of the May '68 students who sent the ambiguous subversion of the urban dérive back to the clear line of separation symbolized by the barricade. But the barricade was not only a reminiscence of the past. It connected its old symbolic function with the struggle against the planning policies of the State and the revival of the dream which links the political subversion with the aesthetic one: the configuration of a new sensory space of the community where the partitions of territories and activities that sustain social hierarchies have been abolished.

We are certainly far from this dream today. But it sometimes looks as though the architects and urbanists tried to integrate in their plans all the contradictory forms of mobility that have characterized the last century. Under the too easy critique of functionalism, there is an attempt to include the oblique lines of revolutionary drawings, the surrealist wandering, the Situationist dérive, and even the activity of the insurgents on the barricades, in a kind of polymorphous mobile architecture. I am thinking of the projects presented two years ago in the American pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale under the title The Architectural Imagination. Architects were asked to imagine projects for the transformation of some transitory spaces in Detroit – conceptual projects destined to create a ‘new metaphor of the city’. What is fascinating in those projects is their obsession with mobility. There was the project of spiraling parking place which at the same time was a place for circulation and engendered out of its own movement, as it were, other spaces and notably cultural amenities on the top; there was the project of a bunch of pavilions an pergolas which were supposes to create porosity between the inside and the outside with the idea that the very distinction between inside and outside must be overcome so that people can move. And the book presenting the projects was introduced by a kind of credo which seems to transfer to porosity the revolutionary virtue of oblique lines: ‘a city of porous walls is a city that promotes equality’.

This unverifiable equation seems to be a response to the criticism to which ‘architectural imagination’ is exposes today, the criticism that says that its obsession with mobility, porosity or flexibility is perfectly attuned to the requests of capitalism. Yesterday capitalism need masses of people fixed in big residential complexes to work in big factories. Now, in our countries at least, it needs mobile people who can change their job and move to other places and make their time flexible to adapt themselves to the rhythms of financial capitalism and turn this adaptation itself into a new form of subjective experience of time and space. Detroit of course is a symbolic place in this respect. Moreover, there is the criticism that says that this play with mobile architecture is derisory, if we take into account the new forms of mobility that characterize our present and are no play at all, I mean the migrations of millions of people rushing to our countries as they flee economic misery or political persecution.

It is always bad politics that capitalizes on the feeling of guilt and complicity. But the sense of this conflict of ‘mobilities’ sometimes entails more interesting forms of combination of architectural imagination and political activism. Since we are in London we can think of the enterprise of ‘forensic architecture’ which uses architectural knowledge and techniques to create evidence about forms of violence both inscribed and erased on a territory, be it the evidence of land-grabbing in occupied Palestine, the reconstitution of the sensory experience of prisoners in a Syrian jail conceived to destroy that experience, or the itinerary of the forty-three students massacred in Mexico. Since we are close to the French coastline, we can think of the activity of a group of architects working with artists, writers and social scientists in the so-called jungle near Calais, where migrants stay while expecting to cross the Channel. The members of the group precisely questioned the separation of worlds entailed in the juxtaposition of spaces: a space where people live and a place where they survive. They questioned it in two ways: first, with a documentary work showing that even the makeshift barracks of the camp proved a sense of inhabiting a world; second, by elaborating a whole urban project, a cosmopolitan town of the twenty-first century erasing the separation between a decent provincial town and a muddy jungle. Not surprisingly, the project remained a project and the government razed the camp. Nonetheless, it is a significant case of displacement of the ‘architectural imagination’.

Farshid Moussavi proposes another kind of displacement; from the micro-political level of the position of architecture in the global capitalist process to the micro-political level of the practice itself, where the architect can play with the temporality of the building process and the material specificities of its elements to bend the rules of the game and divert the ways of being mobile or immobile. As I conceive of it, that micro-politics takes on various forms and that variety might reflect the tensions that I have tried to sketch. When Farshid Moussavi deals with the construction of a residential unit in Nanterre, she underlines the role of affects allowing the dwellers to construct their own sense of inhabiting and to establish in their own way the relation between inside and outside or privacy and community. In this case the micro-political intervention is intended to bring the neo-liberal ‘free choice’ slightly beyond or beside its normal standard. The dissensus is a deviation. Instead, in the case of the Yokohama Port Terminal, it becomes a clear conflict of ‘mobilities’: a place where normally you just go in a hurry at a precise moment in order to move to another place is turned into a place where people are invited to take their time, stay as long as they wish, and perform activities unexpected in this place, from strolling to sport or painting. In the case of the museum in Cleveland, she lays a significant emphasis on two elements: the stairs inside and the panels of stainless steel outside. Those two elements have a similar role: they offer a multiplicity of changing perspectives, making the museum a place for an aesthetic experience which is disconnected from the functional role of exhibiting art and polymerized into an infinite number of sensations provided by the building itself, which has been turned into a landscape that she describes in terms that sometimes remind us of those of the eighteenth-century landscape gardeners or travellers in wild lands. It is as though she perceived that the power of the architect is greater when she invites people to wider explorations in a common space that when she tries to influence their sense of inhabiting. The inhabitant of an affordable apartment where she has introduced materials foreign to affordable housing is also an economic agent who can make a profit by reselling it. Instead, the visitor of the ferry terminal or the museum enjoys an experience of equality which cannot be turned into an economic profit. The politics of architecture is located in this interval.