SPATIUM NEGATIO.

Transitions in urban space representation through the

perspective of negativity.

Marta López-Marcos. PhD dissertation. University of Seville, 2018.

SPATIUM NEGATIO.
Transitions in urban space representation through the
perspective of negativity.

PhD dissertation. Marta López-Marcos.

University of Seville, Department of History, Theory and Architectural
Composition.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Carlos Tapia Martín. University of Seville.
Prof. Dr. David Grahame Shane. Columbia University, GSAPP.
Tutor: Prof. Dr. Víctor Pérez Escolano. University of Seville.

Seville, 2018.
Table of contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. 8

(DE)CENTERING. 12

Diomede Islands. 16
Moonwatchers. 22
The Path of the Sun. 24
Decentering Europe (I). 35
Objectives of the project. 50

Challenging totalizing conceptions of space. 53

Counterspace and (ir)rationality as motor. 56
Socio-spatial processes in cities. 62
Architecture as a discipline. 63

Methodological approach. 66

Critical interpretive research. 72

Counterpublics and counternarratives. 76
(Extended) relational aesthetics. 78
Seductions and (counter)movements. 82

Spatium negatio. 95

Recovering negativity. 95
Space (as exteriority) and negativity. 112
Negative avant-gardes. Interactions in space, negativity and politics. 123
Counterspaces in the city. 141

On (the Politics of ) Space. 161

Space as a social product. 161

Architecture after the spatial turn. 173
Politics of the (global) city. 185
Public space? 200
(RE)PLACING (or how the Western notion of space is challenged through
social practice in urban places) 224
Space and anti-space. 227
Leftover spaces. 240
The square as a socio-spatial product. 249

SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING. 276

New regime, new spaces. 280
Tiananmen square. 285
From China to the West and back. 295

(EM)BODYING (or how the corporeal emerges as a particular membrane

between the interior/exterior spatial gap) 312

Against architecture. 317

(Counter)revolution and autonomy. 328
New publics and bodies in motion. From panoptic to panchoreographic. 343

SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW. 368

Spaces-in-between. Oskar Hansen and the Open Form. 379

Anti-city, anti-monument. 389
Warsaw under construction. 402

(TRANS)FORMING (or how the immaterial supports an extended

understanding of urban social space) 412

Specters of the city. 415

Inside/outside. Space-time compressions and flows. 429
Noopolitics and urban space. 448
SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL. 475

“Crazy plans” and counter-plans. 479

Occupy! The case of Taksim. 493
Rendering visible the invisible. Urban space as commons. 501

(DIS)CLOSING. 518

Negativity beyond its borders. 520

Counterspaces as a tool for critique. 534
All that melted into air… 544
Urban politics and public spaces from a relational perspective. 551
Coda: Decentering Europe (II). 560

The West of the West. 560

East and South. Trajectories. 563
The moon over the archipelago. 568

ANNEX I: Interview with Steven K. Peterson. 578

A final comment by S.K. Peterson. 592

ANNEX II: Research map. 596

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.
The present work would never have been possible without the help and support of
many people who have accompanied me throughout this process for several years.
Of them all, it is fair to start by extending my gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Dr.
Carlos Tapia Martín, because he already conceived this project long before it was
in my mind. He showed me a new way of understanding (and doing) architecture,
a discipline which I would probably have abandoned if not for his lectures in third
year. He also introduced me to my other supervisor, Prof. Dr. David Grahame
Shane, whom I would like to thank for his great patience and commitment, as well
as his ability to bring order to chaos when the investigation was veering off course.
The third component of this triad has been my academic tutor, Prof. Dr. Víctor
Pérez Escolano, whose unconditional support and trust have been essential for this
project.

I would also like to thank the teams of the Institute of Architecture and Building
Science and the Doctoral Program in Architecture of the University of Seville for
the work they have done during these years to improve the quality and promote
the internationalization of research. I am particularly grateful to Prof. Dr. Antonio
Tejedor Cabrera, the director of both entities, for his guidance and interest in this
project; and to the members of the research group Out_Arquias [HUM853] for
supporting and giving me space.

During my research stays at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

and Delft University of Technology, I have been fortunate to meet many people
who have enriched my perspectives and contributed to this work. I am very
grateful to Prof. Dieter Dietz and Prof. Dr. Roberto Cavallo for their welcome
and assistance, allowing me to work jointly with their teams during those months.
The contributions of some colleagues have been especially relevant to this project;
therefore, I would like to thank Dr. Caroline Dionne, Dr. Darío Negueruela, Dr.
Maurice Harteveld, Dr. Heidi Sohn, Dr. Susanne Komossa, Dr. Arnoud de Waaijer,
Mark Pimlott and Oscar Rommens for their valuable comments and appreciations.
I am also grateful to Dr. Gregory Bracken, Dr. Tuna Tasan Kok and Dr. Xiaoxi Hui
for helping me get out of “the Eurocentric trap,” even for a few moments. I could
not forget the students of the MSc 2 studio, who have reinforced my vocation for
teaching and brought a refreshing outlook into some of my ideas.

I am also indebted to the staff of the Architecture Department of the Regional

Ministry of Development and Housing (Junta de Andalucía) for hosting me
for a year and showing me the role of public administration with regard to the
development of public space policies. I have really learnt a lot from them, since they
have helped me to become aware of the reality of my immediate environment.

I would also like to thank those who have allowed me to access their work and
materials to build this work. In this sense, Steven K. Peterson holds a special place
for his availability and generosity when discussing and updating his contributions.
Thanks also to Igor Hansen for making available to me the wonderful archive of
his parents, Oskar and Zofia Hansen, because the personal dicovery of their work

9
 has been a deeply moving experience. Obviously, this acknoledgement extends to
the staff of all the libraries that I have visited, both those of the aforementioned
universities and those of the Architects’ Association of Catalonia and Kunsthalle
Basel.

Finally, these last words of gratitude are for the most important people in my
life, without whom I would not have been able to carry this work to fruition.
Therefore, it is dedicated to my parents, who have always supported me and put
my career and well-being above everything else. To my sister Maria, for being my
confidant and for being always there to share our mutual concerns. To Fran, for
everything; for his patience, for being my positive counterpart and cheering me
up in bad times. To my friends and colleagues, for reminding me that there is life
beyond the screen and the word processor... and to my grandfather Tomás, wherever
he is, for teaching me how to read, write and, above all, to think.

10
11
(DE)CENTERING.
 Ich habe den Geist Europas in mich genommen –nun will ich den Gegenschlag
thun! (Friedrich Nietzsche, Fragmente Anfang 1880 bis Sommer 1882, vol. 3,
chapter 9, 8 [77])

The sun never shines at the same time in the same way. The Geopolitics of
philosophers Peter Sloterdijk and Alain Finkielkraut clearly point it the Sun
out during an intense dialogue by stating that “geopolitics of the sun
have become simple and plain geopolitics” (2008, 149). The image of
the sun has been habitual in religious and philosophical discourses,
since it functions as an absolute point of reference from which to
establish a relation towards the Other(s) while defining space in time.
In this regard, the philosopher Ray Brassier transforms Freud’s words
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “In the last resort, what has left its
mark on the development of [philosophy]1 must be the history of the
earth we live on and of its relation to the sun” (Brassier 2003, 421).
Every day, when the clocks in London strike 10 in the morning
and until 11.59, three different days coexist in the Earth at the
same time. During this short period, it is 23.00 the previous day at
the American Samoa, and 00.00 the next day at Kirimati Island, in
Kiribati. This temporal juxtaposition, which takes place day after
day, is a product of the human need for organizing spaces and times
with respect to natural courses and the path of the sun. Although
the cycle is permanent and has slightly changed in millions of years,
the measurement of time has helped to generate a differential spatial
conscience.
Even if each point in the Earth’s surface has a specific solar time
–more or less similar to that of the areas included within its time
zone, a system which became popular during the second half of the
nineteenth century– each region has adapted this zone according to
geopolitical reasons. Therefore, time zones are not identical segments,
but irregular areas covering the surface of the planet. Thus, natural
time is distorted and translated into a sort of “functional” time, a
time depending on geopolitical circumstances. For example, most of

1 Freud was referring to “organisms.”

Introduction 13
 01

the EU countries share a same time zone (GMT+1), while some of

them –such as Portugal, or some islands of Spain–2 are geographically
located within the GMT time zone. Continental China shows
another particular situation, as the whole country is included within
the Beijing time zone (GMT+8) while, following strictly geographic
parameters, it covers five of them.
World as Domination of time and space, as well as the relations of
constellations interdependence established between them, assigns to each
community a point of reference from which to understand their
reality, themselves and the others.3 Thus, the world appears as a
constellation, a myriad of times and spaces which coexist and happen

2 The time zone of mainland Spain was changed in 1940 during the dictatorship
of Francisco Franco, in order to make it coincide with the German schedule.
3 This is one of the claims of the sociologist Floya Anthias in her work on
positionality. Rather than using heuristic and ambiguous concepts such as ‘identity’ –
despite their importance– for analytical purposes, Anthias (2002) opts for the use of
specific aspects that integrate the question of identity, not by avoiding it, but displacing it
to multiple issues, because of its processual character. In this regard, narratives on position
are one among many ways of approaching the issue identity.

14 [DE]CENTERING
at once, and humans –as well as non-humans– continuously establish,
juxtapose, re-draw, blur and break the limits of these fragments of
reality. Some of these marks remain unnoticed, like slight streams
running under the surface, and others are deep and difficult to ignore.
Therefore, “to dwell means to leave traces” (Benjamin 2002, 9): to
draw, to mark the territory, even if those steps are never to be retraced
again. Although Benjamin was referring to the bourgeois interior
with these words, the use of spatial references highlights the necessity
of a certain sense of orientation, a method to re-read our traces and
leave new ones therefrom. If the scale is expanded, we find ourselves
immersed in a field of multiple traces, generating an infinite number
of trajectories and new references. In this regard, being in the world
requires the ability of navigating through this dense mesh of traces left
by oneself and the others, but this is only possible if accurate means
of orientation are available. Maps, as Michel Serres unveils in Atlas
(1995), are not made to lead us somewhere, but to make us aware of
where we are. Cartographies, lines, signals, beacons… either physical,
virtual or imaginary help us not to get lost through the life-long
process of inhabiting the world. What is essential is to recognize an
image of the world –beyond its materiality–, and to understand the
different realities that coexist within it.
The dividing line, either physical or virtual, implies a spatialization4
of conflict, a noticeable rupture between different worlds which has
been accorded between communities. Each one holds a position, a
referential location, and this gives birth to a wide range of spatial
denominations which are used to identify and recognize every one of
these groups and societies: Middle East, the West, global North/global
South… and of course hundreds of toponyms related to the relative
position with respect to the rest of the territory: Australia, North/
South America, South Africa…Many of them were given by colonial
powers; thus, the reference relates to the position of the metropolis.

4 Olivier Marchart (2012) defines spatialization by reviewing the critique that

Doreen Massey (2005) poses against Ernesto Laclau’s theory of space. Spatialization –or
sedimentation– is how space homogenizes time and diminishes its dislocatory effect
by means of repetition –although it would be impossible to control the whole system.
Spatialization is therefore identified with politics. However, and without renouncing this
dimension, spatialization will be treated throughout the text as a more extensive concept
implying any manifestation of thought (and ideology) in spatial terms.

Introduction 15
 However, some others like Zhongguo (China), which derives from
“Middle Kingdom” or “Empire of the Center,” comes from the
traditional names that the Chinese people gave to their territories, as
they considered their land to be in the center of the world; or Nippon
(Japan), meaning “the sun’s origin,” and which was given precisely by
the Chinese. Still today, the country is considered to be “the Land of
the Rising Sun,” as it is one of the most eastern points of the world
according to Western-centric representations.
Even in a time when globalization has blurred to a great extent
the decisive character of an original location conditioning the life
of the inhabitants of a specific place, the necessity of controlling
space and time is related to positions with respect to other realities,
usually leading to absolute systems of reference, that is, “eternal and
substantial” (Kierans 2007, 77), organizational principles not limited
by nature or history. Thus, the absolute –the unlimited, the somehow
mysterious Other– that lies above and below the human being
(natural forces, geological processes and elements, cosmic movements)
has functioned as a mean to comprise, arrange and give meaning to
countless constellations of relational strategies. Through a syncretistic
mixture of popular beliefs, science and religion, those elements
considered to be out of reach of human action –that is, the sun and
other celestial bodies, the ocean, telluric currents, etc.– have played
a significant role since the dawn of time in the way humans have
represented and understood their time and space. More specifically,
the relation between the cosmic –as the radically other– and the
terrestrial has been crucial for the tracing of divisions and differences,
as they emerge naturally from a simple counterposition of elements.
The sun and the stars, as elements that can be noticed from every
point of the Earth, have configured an absolute system of reference
for many groups and societies, first as divine-symbolic factors, then
as political benchmarks. This transition, from the mysterious to the
political, may be explained from a conflict-based view of politics, to
which we will return on several occasions hroughout this work.

Diomede Islands.

There is something supernatural about the space that connects the

northern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Arctic Circle. The

16 [DE]CENTERING
 02

Northwest Passage represents a disjunction between worlds that

challenges the explorer who attempts to cross it and face the division
by navigating beneath its icy waters.5 In this route, just in the middle
of the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia, two small islands are Tomorrow and
separated by less than three miles of distance and twenty-one hours of yesterday islands
time. The space where days end and begin unfolds between them, and
thus, empirical distance is somehow negated. The Diomede Islands
are separated by the International Date Line. Each island belongs to
a different state: Big Diomede (or Ratmanov Island) belongs to the
Chukotka Autonomous Okrug in Russia, whereas Little Diomede
is part of Alaska, in the United States. Despite their proximity they
remain in opposite sides of the world, and not only in physical terms.
During decades, both states –especially in the years of the USSR–
have represented two opposing poles, hence influencing their mutual
relations and those with other countries and regions. And yet, decades

5 The pre-raphaelite John Everett Millais reflected in one of his paintings the
difficulties of crossing the North-West Passage and the glory achieved by those who
succeeded. An old sailor, accompanied by his daughter, sitting at a desk full of complex
and incomplete maps stares at the observer with an expression of fatigue, but also of
hope. The title of the painting, which was synonymous with adversity and death, contrasts
with the subtitle with which Millais presented it: “It might be done and England should do
it,” emphasizing the importance of crossing the north of the American continent for the
British Empire.

Introduction 17
 of tensions, antagonisms and radical alterity seem to vanish in this
thin line of separation between two islands: a calm, silent, empty
space where nothing special appears to happen;. In fact, it is usually
divided in popular Eurocentric cartographic representations. However,
the continuity of days and nights is measured and referenced in this
space. It is here where the path of the sun ends and begins –though
arbitrarily– day after day. For that reason, Big and Little Diomede are
also known as Tomorrow Island and Yesterday Island: the continuum
space-time is at the same time ensured and altered between both
pieces of land.
Few inhabitants occupy this interstitial space between these two
countries; actually, the Russian island is not inhabited –only a weather
station and a base of Russian Border Guard troops remain there–,
and the American one is home to a small settlement (Diomede) with
less than 200 inhabitants. Despite the lack of population, political
resonances of this space are notorious, mainly because of their
confronted position and their proximity.
Polemos and Curiously, the very name of Diomede6 has strong political and
agon warlike connotations. In the fifth book of Homer’s Iliad, Diomede,
son of Tydeus, is presented as a brave Aechean warrior who fights
in the Trojan War. When he is prepared to confront Hector, Ares,
god of war –who fights on behalf of the Trojans–, intervenes as a
common soldier in order to protect the Trojan prince. Although in a
first moment Diomede recognizes the true nature of the warrior and
refuses to attack him, the goddess Athena, his protector, encourages
him to do it. During the battle, Ares throws his lance to Diomede,
but he fails and, by counter-attacking, the Greek hero injures the god,
stabbing him in the side and forcing him to abandon the battlefield.
After this and other diverse incidents, the furious Zeus orders all
other Olympians not to take part in this human conflict anymore.
Therefore, the action of Diomede, unleashing the anger of Zeus,
forces the transfer of polemos from gods to humans: the generation of
conflict and confrontation would lie solely in the hands of mortals,
who would have to deal with this responsibility from then on. This

6 Even though, the islands are named after St. Diomede, since they were re-
discovered by the Danish explorer Vitus Bering on August 16, 1728, the day on which the
Russian Orthodox Church celebrates the day of the martyr St. Diomede.

18 [DE]CENTERING
 03 04

episode is deeply related to the preliminary condition of politics,

which leads to the appearance and construction of spaces of (human)
conflict throughout history. Polemos was understood by Heraclitus –
and later by Nietzsche– as a primeval force emerging from the discord
and tension between opposites that keeps the equilibrium and unity
of nature and cosmos; it is a ruling principle of the universe based
on contradiction. Nietzsche would see in the Greek agon one of the
translations of polemos to the human realm. Agon is a non-destructive
force, but related to competition and fight as a way to human
excellence (Carrión Caravedo 2011) –therefore, it is also a dynamic
tension.7
Only a free, but nonetheless fortunate mental association
could lead us to return to the Bering Strait and the islands. Such a
controversial space has been object of multiple projects and actions
with strong political connotations. The “Ice Curtain,” the name given
to the frontier by Mikhail Gorbachev’s official spokesman Gennadi
I. Gerasimov, remains closed for more than sixty years. Symbolic
attempts to unite both islands have been made. For instance, the
American swimmer Lynne Cox crossed the icy waters from Little to
Big Diomede in the summer of 1987, aiming at dissolving the border
for a short period. The feat was celebrated both by American and
Soviet authorities, and the latter even received Cox and cared for her
after her arrival to the Russian island (Watts 2012).

7 However, the difference between polemos and agon is subject to multiple

positions; to the point that it would be possible to talk of “agonists” and “polemists”
(Garand and Prstojevic 2016). For instance, Chantal Mouffe and William Connolly would
be among the firsts –who see conflict as immanent to politics–, while Alex Thomson
(Schaap (ed.) 2009) could be included among the second group.

Introduction 19
 05 06

Counter- Two years later, a group of artists and architects also made their
monuments contribution for a rapprochement between the two powers. The
Institute for Contemporary Art in New York and the USSR Union
of Architects in Moscow launched the Competition Diomede in
1989, being “the first architectural competition sponsored by two
organizations in the USA and the USSR” (“Competition Diomede”
1989, 54). More than a thousand architects and artists from 28
countries sent their proposals, among which were well-known
figures such as Yona Friedman, Oskar Hansen, Paolo Soleri, Diana
Balmori or Aleksandr Brodsky and Ilya Utkin. This huge collection
of paper architecture curated by Glenn Weiss was shown in a
travelling exhibition – from New York to San Francisco, Seattle, Los
Angeles, Moscow, Leningrad, Minsk, Tashkent and Montreal– for
two years, so its impact could reach both blocs. However, everybody
knew that the ideas would never be materialized. For that reason,
most of the proposals were not at all realistic and did not aim at
designing a permanent encounter, since this was not the objective
of the competition. Instead, artists and architects were playing with
imaginary connections, virtual spaces that transcended the division
between both islands. Some of them did not even try to establish a
physical union; facing the Piranesian etchings of Brodsky and Utkin,

20 [DE]CENTERING
 07 08

who imagined a third floating space in the middle of the strait,

the Soviet Victor Smeernov or the Polish architect Oskar Hansen
established an immaterial relation between the pieces of land; Hansen
proposed a twin counter-monument that would be based on the
visual connection, whereas Smeernov conceived an aerial projection
combining light sources situated in each island. Others, like the
artist Sandy Gellis, preferred to create bridge-like spaces; in this case,
she would use boulders from different parts of the world and would
deposit them between the Diomedes, creating a platform that would
have ecological functions at the same time.
A distance of barely two and a half miles was enough to imagine
more than a thousand possible worlds. Resistance against division and
Cold War motivated the appearance of multiple ways of conceiving a
space that was fully constrained and regulated because of geopolitical
reasons. The reversal of the islands’ spatial conditions never succeeded
to become real, despite the strong political repercussions.8 The Cold
War would come to an end few years later.

8 On the verge of a new period of tense relations between the United States and
Russia, another architectural ideas competition for the Bering Strait was organized in 2009.
It is interesting to compare the entries for both competitions, since the last ones focus on

Introduction 21
 Moonwatchers.

Natural phenomena were the most basic and primary ways of

understanding the world and our position in relation to it. Cyclic
paths that lead from day to night, from life to death, from wakefulness
to sleep… cover an extremely wide spectrum of states and situations
which constantly succeed one another, through subtle –and sometimes
undiscernible– moments of transition. In this respect, the German
painter Caspar David Friedrich was an excellent portrayer of such
instants of suspension. One can feel these states of quiet alteration
while contemplating the series of couples gazing upon the horizon
9
(the famous Moonwatchers.) In these paintings, couples of men,
women, or both stand quietly against bright –though melancholic–
landscapes, looking directly at the setting sun or the moon. All these
similar scenes were painted between 1816 and 1820, and he would
return to the same motif during the decade of 1830 when his health
was progressively deteriorating.
The onset The contemplation of the sun requires a specific gesture; semi-
of dusk closed eyes, an unavoidable frown, pain and effort all at the same
time. The blinding light of noon makes it impossible to look directly
at it, whereas visibility progressively increases as the sun goes down
or during the first hours of the morning. That is the moment when
things, as well as the star, can be seen calmly, without being annoyed
by excessive brightness. At dusk, the shadows unveil forms, their
limits and contours, while the eyes of the viewer are not altered by
phosphenes or optical illusions of any sort. Sunset is the moment
of reflection and pause, but also of understanding a present that has
just escaped –like the owl of Minerva, flying “only with the onset of
dusk” (Hegel 1991, 23). This Hegelian thought finds its reply in the
work of his contemporary Friedrich, which emanates from a negative,
destructive aesthetic experience, sharing a common root with the
Burkian sublime (Burke 1757). His paintings predict the feeling of

much more practical connections (tunnels, platforms, etc.) than the ones designed twenty
years before.
9 An exhibition about the series was organized under the same title, between
September and November, 2001 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York
(Rewald 2001).

22 [DE]CENTERING
 09 10

disenchantment10 that would inspire the modern European subject,

which still clearly contains an important dose of restlessness and
unease–especially against the Other or the unknown, like the sun than
can be hardly looked at and impossible to grasp.
Despite the serenity of the scenes –the silence of nature, the Unruhe
absence of other people–, a profound rupture remains latent
behind this stillness: it is the break between nature and human
conscience, between the joy of the sensual realm and the spiritual
and intellectual introjection of the human being expelled from the
world. In Friedrich’s paintings, it is not possible to find any attempt
at conciliation, since all fissures remain inevitably open. Humans
stand in front of a whole world that overwhelms them, and maybe
the only comfort they find is the presence of the other, who remains
nevertheless absent. Thus, the quietude experienced by the depicted
couples is only apparent, since the scene is invaded by a sensation
of Unruhe11 –as Hegel would describe it. Even the observer is struck
by an invisible agitation: Unruhe emerges as a moving, internal force
which precedes an action that will never take place in the picture.

10 Disenchantment (Entzauberung) as a symptom of modernity has been studied

by many authors and thinkers. Although taken from Schiller –another German romantic–,
Max Weber (1999) is the one who develops the concept in 1919, by referring to the
progressive cultural rationalization and desecration of the mythical factor in Western
modern society. Also Antonin Artaud, Joachim Ritter following Odo Marquard in Glück im
Unglück, Giandomenico Amendola or Jean-Luc Nancy have dealt with this issue.
11 Unruhe could be translated as “restlessness.” “Hegel employs this term Unruhe
frequently throughout his corpus to characterize negation (…). It agitates, it does not stay
still. It persists like a current, but remains as invisible” (Hass 2014, 122).

Introduction 23
 How many possible worlds are hidden behind this feeling of unease,
restlessness, even anxiety? And what if this force remains contained
and does not succeed in becoming action?

The Path of the Sun.

The discovery To bring forward once again the image of the setting sun in a Western
of the Other context –specifically European, since that is the ultimate framework in
which this work is inserted– means to recognize the lineage of thought
that goes back to Ancient Greece with the “traumatic discovery” of the
Other –and therefore, of the plural, or the “many”– in Asia (Carrera
2015, 131). Since that moment, Western philosophy emerged, as
Alessandro Carrera points out, and the newborn Europe continued
to expand its horizons, positioning itself towards other territories
through an asymmetric perspective. Thus, Europe constructed an
image of itself that would be forever tied to Otherness. The Italian
philosopher Giacomo Marramao, following Merleau-Ponty (1964),
says:
What is, then, the European difference? Not just on the boundary between
ourselves and others, which is tracked in any collective logic of identity: from
the tribe to state, from the clan to the nation. (...) It is located rather in the fact
that, while all other civilizations are characterized self-centrically, identifying as
“the center of the universe” (...) Europe, however, is constituted by “an internal
polarity between West and East.” The antithesis between East and West is
therefore a mythical-symbolic exclusive property of the West, a typical Western
dualism unverifiable in other cultures. (Marramao 2006, 63)12

In many ways, the West has been regarded as the last land on
Earth –finis terrae–, beyond which the darkness of the unknown
spreads, as well as the hope for a better and more perfect existence.
Revolving around the point where Atlas embraces the world,13 the

12 See also Franke (2014, 87). Recalling Rémi Brague, he quotes: “nothing is really
proper to Europe except ‘to appropriate what is foreign to it’” (2014, 88).
13 “And here, here is the man, the promised one you know of -/ Caesar Augustus,
son of a god, destined to rule/ where Saturn ruled of old in Latium, and there/ bring back
the age of gold; his empire shall expand/ past Garamants and Indians to a land beyond the
zodiac/ and the sun’s yearly path, where Atlas the sky-bearer pivots/ the wheeling heavens,
embossed with fiery stars, on his shoulder” (Virgil and Day Lewis (transl.) 1986, 184).

24 [DE]CENTERING
 11

cycle –anakuklosis, which in Greek means “revolution”14 (Herman

1997, 15)– continues day after day. In this regard, the path of the sun
simultaneously allows a spatial and temporal differentiation. If the
East is the extreme which represents light, life, vitality, strength and
illumination, the West is that of death and decline, but also plenitude
and completeness, which uncovers the promise of a new rise and a
new cycle. Michel Houellebecq recovers this image in Les particules
élémentaires (1998) when the dejected Michel Djerzinski travels to
the Irish Atlantic coast to find death in the most western extreme of
Europe (Sloterdijk 2000).
Therefore, the symbolic meaning of both extremes –decline and
plenitude– led to a spatialization of the concept that societies had of
themselves. Actually, many cultures have had their particular centers,
“Easts” and “Wests” –being the latter understood not only as the
place where the sun hides and where the day finishes, but also as the
mythical threshold to another unknown world. Babylonians, Greeks,

14 Magun (2013, 6–11) traces a clear evolution of the meaning of the term. From
its astronomic/astrological origins, it is supposed to be transferred to the political realm.
The word “revolution” designates a sort of “countermovement”; it carries a contradictory
meaning between destruction, repetition and forward movement.

Introduction 25
 12 13

Egyptians and Romans, among others, recognized the West as a

symbolic construction related to these concepts of (in)finitude and
fullness (Jackson 2007, 68). However, Christian tradition –and more
specifically, the Augustinians–, driven by the eschatological narrative
of salvation, regarded the space from East to West as coinciding with
the direction of history, from Babylon to Rome (Jackson 2007, 80). In
consequence, the spatiotemporal cycle was interrupted and deployed
as a sequential, finite line –from Alpha to Omega (Herman 1997, 18).
Nevertheless, the modern understanding of the West as a
community –in the sense of sharing a common (poisoned) gift–,
and not as a mythical horizon,15 dates back to the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. This occurred when the conscience of
a European civilization arose mostly among French and German
thinkers – like Novalis or Schlegel, but also Rousseau or Turgot16
before them– who were particularly influenced by the ideals of the
French Revolution and Romanticism (Ginzo 2005, 31). Despite
Abendland their contributions on the issue, Hegel was the one who filtered the
classic and Judeo-Christian tradition through a Germanic perspective

15 The Spanish anthropologist Manuel Delgado (2008) differentiates the origins

of the community and the collective. While the first has romantic resonances present in
Tönnies’ primeval Gemeinschaft, the second has its roots in the transition to Gesellschaft
and the modern public sphere.
16 Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) also discussed the progress towards the West even
before Hegel. He was the first to suggest that “the civilizing process had reached its height
in modern Europe,” overcoming “the barbaric and savage part of its collective personality”
(Herman 1997, 25).

26 [DE]CENTERING
 14 15

and aimed to give a response to the debate of a singular or multiple

civilizations (Jackson 2007, 88). Furthermore, he recovers the term
Abendland (in opposition to Morgenland)17 as the territory where
world history reaches its end or its final plenitude; that is, Europe.
The notion of progress as a motor of civilization as well as its dark
reverse, decline, were, therefore, linked to history and geography from
a Western-centric tradition, in parallel with the course of the sun.
Friedrich, as well as his British contemporary William Turner,
was interested in that gloomy, steamy light that announced the fall
of the sun and the forces of sublime nature, which could almost be
regarded in a prophetic manner. However, nature, at least understood
as a mysterious anteriority,18 was not anymore the fascinating creation
and manifestation of God –the ultimate horizon of philosophy at

17 The German term Abendland (literally meaning “the land of evening”) was
first introduced as a synonym of Occident by the German theologian Caspar Hedio in
1529 (as the archaic plural Abendlender.) Since then, it has been used –and discussed– by
many writers and thinkers, especially those related to the German world (Martin Luther,
Hegel, Oswald Spengler… and more recently Massimo Cacciari or the Austrian filmmaker
Nikolaus Geyrhalter). The ideological connotations of the term are quite ambiguous, having
been recently appropriated by the xenophobic German group Pegida.
18 Pardo develops a new understanding of nature as a form of exteriority by
criticizing the traditional, nostalgic interpretation of it –which is fully invalidated, as
everything is artificial in one way or another- and placing techné as nature in motion.
Although today more than ever, nature has always been hidden: “(…) when I stop
imagining nature as a green field where men of the antiquity could go on the weekend
without traffic jams, pesticides or acid rain, I discover a hidden world that is constantly by
my side, and still, it is exterior and anterior to me. Something that, blinded by the idea of

Introduction 27
 that moment (Brassier 2003, 421), since a new way of uncovering
it was emerging through scientific knowledge. With the advent of
electricity, and thus of artificial light, the image of the sun lost its
symbolic strength; it was desecrated in a way, as it was no longer the
absolute source of light that ruled the rhythm of the world. Highly
rationalized modes of production led to the disappearance of the
division between day and night –one of the most urgent symptoms of
globalization. This emergent temporal continuum led to a progressive
appropriation of factors alien to human nature by a more developed
conscience of an interior realm. Consequently, interiors such as the
factory, the bourgeois home, or the commercial passage configured
the Western urban space of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. In these spaces, isolation from the outside provides a
specific atmosphere of protection and enclosure, motivating the
transition from communitas to immunitas.19 This degradation of
exteriority –understood as the constitutive characteristic of space–20
and, in consequence, the submission of space to time, is crucial to the
hypotheses of this work, and it will be necessary to go back to this
disjunction several times through the text.
The black sun Despite being substituted by the myriad of electric lamps that
illuminate the metropolis, the sun was still there, although it turned
black in the paintings of Odilon Redon and Marc Chagall –the latter
before and the former after the World Wars. It is a sun that no longer
illuminates, but rather confirms the association of the forces of decay
(fin-de-siècle, in the case of Redon) with the image of a “cosmological
catastrophe” (Larson 2004, 132). It is worth remembering that the
Greek katastrophé means a “mis-turning” or “over-turning” that

nature as an unlogged forest or an unfenced grass lawn, I would have never dare to call
nature” (Pardo Torío 1992, 115).
19 Sloterdijk studies the paradigm of immunity in a world where the human is
expelled in his trilogy Spheres. Besides, the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito has a very
fruitful work around communities (2003) and immunities (2005).
20 “[Space] is not exteriority in the sense that it is ‘outside’, but that it constitutes
the Outside; and such exteriority means that everything is exterior within it: each part of
space (each Space) is outside of space and at the same time constitutes the exterior of all
other spaces, of all space; if space is the expression of time, if the exterior is the distension
of the interior, then it must be said that each ‘region’ of space is exterior to all other
regions at certain points” (Pardo Torío 1992, 35). [T.A.]

28 [DE]CENTERING
Brassier (2003, 421), also following Lyotard,21 associates to the
distortion of “the terrestrial horizon relative to which philosophical
thought orients itself.” The shine of the triumphant setting sun of the
West was darkening because of horror, disenchantment and despair,
announcing the end of a cycle that seemed to never start again. The
sun was black as black was the art that Theodor Adorno formulated
in 1970 in his Aesthetic Theory (2002; Gutiérrez Pozo 2009); an art
pervaded by dark colors, and thought of as the only art capable of
salvation against the horrors of humanity.22 In a sense, the paintings
of Redon, especially his terrible noirs, seem to anticipate this ideal. At
the same time, the surrealists would play with an enigmatic sun that
throws improbable shadows: a “midnight sun” for Tzara or a “false sun
at three in the afternoon” was the light of Chirico’s The Enigma of a
Day, in front of which Man Ray would photograph Breton.23
On the opposite side,24 the futurist opera “Victory over the Sun”
by Mijaíl Matiushin and Alekséi Kruchónyj was premiered in 1913 in

21 “Wars, conflicts, political tension, shifts in opinion, philosophical debates, even

passions –everything’s dead already– if this infinite reserve from which you now draw
energy to defer answers, if in short thought as quest, dies out with the sun” (Lyotard 1988,
75).
22 Adorno’s ideal of blackness is deeply tied to his Negative Dialectics (2004), in
which the philosopher rejected the positive element in idealistic dialectics, arguing for a
dialectics which were free from this term. Even though the validity of this discourse has
been recently challenged by Peter Sloterdijk (2011), the main argument that Adorno
proposes –that is, that all the Real is not totally rational– is still interesting as a departure
point for this research (Tapia 2012, 166). This irrationalism has been studied by Cacciari in
the context of the modern metropolis (1993; 2010; 2011).
23 Denis Hollier (1994) wrote a magnificent essay on the shadow as an index in
the work of the Surrealists. The double, changing and ambiguous character of the shadow
would be extremely attractive for this group and other artists of the time, who would
incorporate it in numerous works, both two-dimensional and spatial.
24 With regard to the vast Russian territory, and returning to previous
considerations, there are some interesting place names that reflect the idea of space
domination, especially if we move to the limits of the country. Etymologically, Vladivostok
(the city on the east end, facing the coast of Japan) comes from the words владеть (vladét:
to possess, to dominate) and Восток (vostók: East). Similarly, Vladikavkaz (Kavkáz, Кавказ,
Caucasus) is located at the southern end of European Russia. Both names reflect the
primacy and control over an extremely extensive space. Besides, Caucasus comes from the
Greek Káukasos, the legendary Scythian shepherd murdered by Cronus and whose name
was given to the mountains. In Greek mythology, the Káukasos was one of the pillars that

Introduction 29
 16 17
the pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg offering a very different attitude
towards the sun, which is seen as an obsolete source of energy that
must necessarily give way to the era of the modern man: thus, the
star is removed from the firmament, confined in a concrete box and
given a funeral by the Strong Men of the Future. The work, written
in zaum (a “transrational” experimental language created and used by
Russian-empire futurists) and counting on the participation Kazimir
Malevich as costume and scenery designer, was received with anger
and discontent by the audience. Nonetheless, it was anticipating a
break with the linear conception of history based on the primacy and
absoluteness of the sun, bringing back human reason to the center.
Other suns While Europe was subsumed in one of the deepest crisis of its
history, broken and contemplating the black sun of despair and
melancholy for decades,25 brighter suns would appear in other parts

sustained the world. It is also affirmed that Prometheus was chained to these mountains
by Zeus for revealing the divine secrets to men, and thus the gods sent a flock eagles to
devour his liver, in continuous renewal. This myth, to a large extent, represents the soul of
Europe, in permanent crisis and regeneration.
25 In Soleil Noir (1987), Julia Kristeva traces the historical links between depression
and melancholia from a Freudian perspective. The title of her book is taken from a poem

30 [DE]CENTERING
 18 19
of the world; for instance, in the East, where the sun rises, particularly
in the People’s Republic of China. The very name of China has also
strong geopolitical connotations, as it means “the Central Kingdom”;
the center of a universe that contemplates the rising sun before any
other land in the world. The establishment of the Communist regime
opened up a completely new rhetoric of progress and development
which enhanced some of these visions; even Chairman Mao was
called the Great Helmsman, that is, the one who directed the destiny
of the nation towards the future. Consequently, the image of the sun
as a symbol of strength and progress is very present in contemporary
Chinese culture; indeed one of the projects considered for the leader’s
mausoleum had the shape of a huge red setting sun–as if the cycle had
been closed.26
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world –of course, if we adopt
the Eurocentric projection– the United States of America emerged

by Gérard de Nerval (1854), entitled “El Desdichado” (“The Disinherited”): “Ma seule étoile
est morte, - et mon luth constellé/ porte le Soleil Noir de la Mélancolie.” (“My sole star is dead
-and my constellated lute/ bears the Black Sun of Melancholy.”)
26 Paradoxically, today the contemplation of the sun in Beijing is almost impossible,
due to the thick cloud of pollution that covers the Chinese capital.

Introduction 31
 as the powerful extension of the old Abendland, operating as a more
advanced version of the Europe that could have been and never was.
In this regard, the Romanian-American illustrator, Saul Steinberg,
offered a sharp, critical view on the issue from an urban perspective.
His drawings were frequently published in the weekly magazine The
New Yorker. From the sixties on, Steinberg started a series of drawings
reflecting the world view of Manhattanites, towards the East or
the West and always using the sun as a referent. Steinberg’s earths
are extremely compressed, as if the eye could see the Eastern and
Western coasts of the USA at the same time. Everything in between is
deformed, hidden or shown in an arbitrary way: Northern Europe and
Africa are almost invisible, while Russia (or Siberia), China, Japan,
or India appear as a thin strip in the horizon announcing the arrival
at the American Pacific coast –in the drawing of the early seventies.
In the end, by emulating the old empires where the sun never set,
Steinberg bitterly advances David Harvey’s definition of globalization
as a “time-space compression” (Harvey 1992). These drawings
have been copied and reproduced countless times. Curiously, The
Economist’s front cover of March 21st 2009 showed an interpretation
of Steinberg’s visions from an equally caustic Chinese perspective,
depicting Europe as an insignificant island where expensive, luxury
items (represented by Hermès and Prada) can be bought. Still today,
this fascination for the sun is still alive in Manhattan –another center
of the world–, where thousands of people congregate twice a year to
contemplate the alignment of the sun with the streets of the urban
grid in the east-west direction; a phenomenon that is repeated in
many American cities, as a consequence of a rational urban structure
characteristic of the New World.
Still, European artists continue gazing at the sun, but in a different
way; either with terror, like Laurent Grasso and his Soleil Double rising
above the ruins of a warlike Europe and reflecting, once again, terrible
signs in the sky;27 or with pessimism, like Damien Hirst and his Black

27 Laurent Grasso has explored on many occasions the mysterious, threatening

character of the sun, for instance through strategies of duplication (in Soleil Double) or
absence (Soleil Noir) in past and future dystopian situations in medieval representations,
urban spaces and ruins

32 [DE]CENTERING
20 21

22 23

24 25

Introduction 33
 26

Sun made of death flies stuck on the canvas with resin.28 The image
of the dark sun appears once again, like in the paintings of Redon
and Chagall, but in a more terrible way through a mass of dead lives
that become recognizable as we come closer to the round canvas. The
titles of previous fly paintings (Armaggedon, Who’s afraid of the Dark?,
or names of diseases such as AIDS, Cancer or Leprosy) reinforce the
catastrophic-nihilistic character of the work, which seems to mirror
Michel Serres’ eclipse and the contradiction between the reversible
and irreversible character of time, also studied in Soleil Double’s
counterfilm Soleil Noir (2014) through the inert, darkened landscape
of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.
We anticipate the exact moment of an eclipse. We say: tomorrow, at twelve
thirty, the sun or the moon begin to hide. What does it mean: tomorrow? For
me, it means that one more day weighs on my past or shortens my future,
and so, because of wear and fatigue, death becomes closer. In the realm of the
planets, this concerns only a configuration as it has has already occurred and
that will be reproduced a considerable number of times. The prediction of this
eclipse, tomorrow, is the account of a closed cycle, the measure of a rhythm.
Therefore, we anticipate future or past, either. The time of this astronomy is
reversible. (...) The equilibrium of the world is only long, it is not eternal. The

28 Between October 2015 and January 2016, the Beyeler Foundation in Basel
organized an exhibition called Black Sun, devoted to the influence of Malevich upon
contemporary artists.

34 [DE]CENTERING
 return of the reversible is nothing more than an interval: withering, mediocre or
immense. (Serres 1991, 75–77)29

Other works, such as My Sunshine by the Macedonian artist Nikola

Uzunovski or Olafur Eliasson’s breathtaking installations at the Tate
Modern and Utrecht (The Weather Project and Double Sunset) reflect
the invalidity of the path of the sun as the way to an absolute and
finite horizon. In fact, Uzunovski and Eliasson have confirmed that
the sun can already be produced or “faked” through human work
and reproduced elsewhere, even duplicated by architectural means.30
By breaking with the Hegelian path and heliotropic history forever,
there are no absolute referents through which to rethink a Western
civilization with respect to the Other. The sun does not represent a
project; it never sets without rising afterwards. Decline and upsurge
always return, succeeding each other and even juxtaposing.

Decentering Europe (I).31

There is much controversy regarding the extension of the West and
its legitimacy. Although the origin of the concept can be found in
the counterposition between Greece and Asia, the modern West is
considered to be rooted in the core of Europe –mainly Germany,
France and the United Kingdom– and then extended to peripheral
Western European countries. However, the arrival of Columbus
to American land represented a turning point in the identification
of Occident with Europe, since the geographical West had been
displaced. The subsequent political and military alliance of European

29 Translation by the author [T. A.]

30 Besides, this techniques reflects on the very role of architecture from within
the discipline and with respect to its outside: “(…) even when Eliasson uses architectural
means (…) he does so in relation to an artistic questioning of the mechanisms of
representation and mediation in architecture and thus in relation to a critique of its socio-
political and architectural power” (Moravánszky and Fischer (eds.) 2008, 37–39).
31 The crisis of the modern project toward the end of the twentieth century led
to the assumption of instability and uncertainty as inherent to our time, as well as the
skepticism or refusal to grand narratives. Positions towards this situation were multiple:
while some decided to embrace the postmodern condition, others saw it as a tragic
situation, like Hans Sedlmayr’s (1957) “loss of the center” (Verlust der Mitte). Tafuri (2006,
xxviii) would criticize this nostalgic attitude, arguing for a “displacement” instead of a loss.

Introduction 35
 27

nations with the United States and the shift of power after the Second
World War reinforced the transatlantic displacement of the West
towards the American continent. Since then, contemporary West is
generally assumed to include the European (or rather, the European
Union and near Western countries) and North American (mainly the
United States and Canada) territories. However, this spatial division
is far from being definitive and consensual. In The Myth of Continents,
Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen (1997, 50 ff) propose seven versions
of the spatial West as conceived by several authors through history.
The first versions are extremely exclusive, including only England
or some original powers, such as Britain, France, the Low Countries
and Switzerland, whereas some others associate the West to medieval
Christendom. These conceptions are progressively expanded with the
Atlantic Alliance, to which some other territories were often added,
such as Japan, South Africa or Australia for different reasons (race,
wealth, “high culture”…) In the end, a final version is presented,
in which the whole world is included within a global, dominating,
dystopic West. Whatever the case may be, the West usually appears
as a broad territory defined through supremacist motives, such as
cultural, political, economic or racial hegemony. This is one of the
reasons why, facing the tradition initiated by Hegel and continued

36 [DE]CENTERING
by Oswald Spengler or Arnold Toynbee, an author like Alastair
Bonnett (2004, 1) declares that, despite being white, born and living
in England and educated in a Western context, he does not recognize
himself as a “Westerner.” In fact, it is hard to label oneself as a
Westerner being acquainted of such a disturbing lineage.
Nonetheless, the European-American union started to perish
severely with the end of the Cold War, but especially after the terrorist
attacks of 9/11 and the 2003 Iraq War (Lehti 2010, 93). In this
regard, Marko Lehti (2010) considers that the question of the West
is not territorial, but rather based on two different discourses: the
American one, founded on a “modernizing mission” (2010, 103)
and global hegemony, and the European one, which hinges upon
a community, cultural self-consciousness that constantly puts into
question its own limits and position. While the American West
“is used for seeking legitimation for American, as well as Western,
norms and values that are still claimed to have legitimacy for defining
hegemonic order,” the European West “omits claims for hegemonic
legitimacy in a global sense and is not used for claiming international
legitimacy but, rather, for seeking the approval of EU citizens” (Lehti
2010, 109). Besides, it is worth remarking the European rejection of
certain US policies and actions, either through a –mostly cultural and
social– “anti-Americanism” (Lehti 2010, 97) or a will to independence
in relation to American political and economic power. An example
of this attitude can be found in the initiative of Jürgen Habermas
and other European intellectuals such as Jacques Derrida or Umberto
Eco to publicly express their refusal of the Iraq War instigated by
the United States, as well as in the massive demonstrations that took
European streets for the same reason. In the core of the fracture
between Europe and the US lie two very different projects. Facing
the American self-conscience, which recognizes itself in the positive
side of binary antagonisms (good/evil, friendly/dangerous, self/non-
self ) and identifies itself with values such as hegemony, capital and
unity –the “utopia achieved” of Baudrillard (1988)–, it could be
argued that the European condition is deeply-rooted in negativity,
despite the attempts of civilizatory discourses centered on progress
and superiority: indeed, the notions of diversity, fragmentation, crisis
or difference are today, more than ever, present within the European
discourse and mentality.

Introduction 37
 The idea This argument, however, is quite paradoxical. The immanent
of Europe negativity of the “idea” of Europe, its irrational and ungraspable
rhythms –reflected in its very contingency and indetermination, also
in spatial terms–, are by no means compatible with a Eurocentric
conception of the world. In fact, negativity has been traditionally left
outside the rational project of the West: the idea of Europe as the
summit of the civilization process, launched by Hegel and extended
through the narratives of Enlightenment and Modernity ceased to
be sustainable long time ago. But in the end, after all the attempts
for reconstruction, positive celebration of difference and a pretended
“unity in diversity,”32 only Unruhe remains. The feeling of restlessness
and agitation that Hegel and Friedrich detected within the core of
European culture persists beneath the project of a common land in
permanent crisis. The protests against EU migration policies, the
strength of social movements during the first decades of the century
or the referendum on Brexit are just a few proofs of this everlasting
struggle that, ultimately, poses the question on European identity.
Who are the Europeans? Is there a European identity? And, with
regard to the topic of the research, how to define a European space, if
such a thing exists? Is the European Union, as Sloterdijk (2013, 171)
has diagnosed, the embodiment of a “great interior,” a geopolitical
apparatus for immunity? The answer is uncertain (Castells 2004;
Boyer 2006, 315), considering the plurality of discourses and points
of view.
In a report for the Portuguese Presidency of the Council of the
European Union in 2000, the sociologist Manuel Castells questioned
the existence of a European fixed identity. Rather, he advocated
“an identity in the making, that is a process of social production
of identity” (2004, 5) that should be parallel to a series of social,
political, economic and cultural aspects. Castells highlighted
possible strategies in education, communication, multiethnicity
or mobility that would contribute to the generation of a common
ground for Europeans and, among them, he outlined the relevance
of bridges between cities and regions to enhance cooperation and
the reconstruction of cultural ties. The urban realm emerges once

32 “United in diversity” was adopted in 2000 as the motto of the European Union
through a contest involving 80,000 students from 15 European countries.

38 [DE]CENTERING
again as a privileged field for political action and the construction
of difference. Despite the enormous leap between the European
medieval burgs and cities and today’s extensive urban networks
and agglomerations –a transition that Henri Lefebvre characterized
and extended as the progression from absolute and historical space
to abstract space (1991)–, there is still a sort of common logic
behind European urban space, usually parallel to the public sphere.
Theoretically, this space sustains and promotes relations among
individuals; it is not a simple scene for interaction, but rather an active
dimension in allowing or forbidding what can and cannot be done
or said –the scene versus the ob-scene–, which is agreed through social
consensus. Public urban space is the highest expression of democratic
space. Whether this ideal is translated into social practice, it puts
forward a problematic issue that will be addressed later. In any case,
to deepen in the European construction entails to reflect on its urban
dimension as a space for both encounter and conflict.
The success of the modern European-born concept of public
space33 linked to a democratic, bourgeois sphere, has provoked
its expansion and use as a homogenizing umbrella term under
which to designate diverse forms of urban –generally open– space.
However, this space presents different connotations in each society
or community that can hardly ever fit in the realm of the public as
it was originally conceived, even within Europe, where the modern,
romantic notion of an egalitarian and democratic public space no
longer provides an accurate model for conflictual, social contemporary
practices (Borja 2004; Berroeta Torres and Vidal Moranta 2012,
12). For instance, Beijing hutongs are completely different from
Manhattan’s grid, the Eixample of Barcelona or the Medina of Fez.
Although they all may be roughly considered to be “public spaces,”
both urban typologies and social practices are radically different in
each case. This generalization lies, once again, in the reduction of
differences that Western-centric perspectives impose –sometimes
unconsciously– to the rest of the world. Thus, if the West exists
because of contemplation of and confrontation with other realities,

33 Dense, compact, open and available, pervading the urban tissue. It differs from
the American one in scale and density, as the American city is usually much more disperse,
whereas European compactness favors participation and gathering.

Introduction 39
 the views and conceptions originated in its midst represent a burden34
over other spaces that tend to be assimilated under these conditions,
despite their diversity. In this way, the world appears as a centralized
entity, usually through a binary opposition between the “West and the
Rest,” as Shohat and Stam (2014) indicate:
Europe is seen as the unique source of meaning, as the world’s center of gravity,
as ontological “reality” to the rest of the world’s shadow. (…) Eurocentrism, like
Renaissance perspectives in painting, envisions the world from a single privileged
point (…) Eurocentrism (…) organizes everyday language into binaristic
hierarchies implicitly flattering to Europe: our “nations,” their “tribes”; our
“religions,” their “superstitions”; our “culture,” their “folklore”; our “art,” their
“artifacts”; our “demonstrations,” their “riots”; our “defense,” their “terrorism.”
(Shohat and Stam 2014, 2)

Within the academic field, the flattening effect of Eurocentrism

often leads to the reading of other spaces as mere objects of study for
Western knowledge (Tang 2014, 71), resulting in the obliteration of
their own epistemological categories. Thus, the European researcher is
forced to choose between this position and a schizophrenic mentality
–which is also typically European, as Félix Duque (Duque and
Hernández Sánchez 2009) diagnoses– that acknowledges both the
indispensability and inadequacy of European heritage (Charkrabarty
2007, 12; Crysler, Cairns, and Heynen (eds.) 2012, 13) for a wide
thinking beyond European intellection. Only this conscious doubling
allows a closer approach to distinct contexts. In addition to this,
nobody regards the history of the West as the history of the world
anymore –as Fukuyama did with his “Hegelian” view of the end of
history after the fall of the Berlin Wall (Charkrabarty 2007, 3). The
recognition of this decentering, already admitted by Merleau-Ponty
and Gadamer –among others– and indebted to the legacy of post-

34 “Concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human
rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the
idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality, and
so on all bear the burden of European thought and history. One simply cannot think of
political modernity without these and other related concepts that found a climatic form
in the course of the European Enlightenment and the nineteenth century” (Charkrabarty
2007, 4).

40 [DE]CENTERING
28

29

Introduction 41
 colonial studies, is the first step toward an inevitably partial, though
honest discourse on difference from any perspective.
The historical tension between the West and the East as its
counterpart –from which the very idea of the West emerges through
counterposition– opens a fruitful space for the exploration of inherent
contradictions within the European context. Without pretending
to ignore other regions, placing the focus on these traditionally
antagonistic constructions, with origins in the empire of the Persian
basileus and the European, Libyan and Scythian barbaroi (Duque
and Hernández Sánchez 2009, 5), makes possible an intensive
investigation that could be eventually extended to other areas and
communities. In the end, both constructs are equally imaginary
and fragmented in spite of their seeming monolithism, although
common roots –or ferments, as Merlau-Ponty (1964) would call
them– are still active and should not be disregarded. As for Europe,
its self-consciousness and internal problematic, being permanently
scrutinized as the subject of its own critique (Merleau-Ponty
1964; Franke 2014), represent its most remarkable strengths and
contributions to philosophy and thought; a differential element that
cannot be detached from the European attitude towards knowledge.
This self-negation and radical openness has its roots in apophatic
theology, in which God cannot be defined but negatively. This
evolves to the impossibility of totally grasping the Other, through
contributions of authors such as Novalis, Paul Celan, Georges Bataille,
Jacques Derrida or Gianni Vattimo. Even though, this condition is
not unique to Europe. Franke (2014) sees traces of “deconstruction
of any sort of concept of stable or self-subsistent identity” in several
Eastern texts and traditions like Advaita Vedanta, Mahayana
Buddhism or Taoism:
(…) even in its most radically self-negating forms, the critical universalism by
which Europe ostensibly distinguishes itself (…) turns out on historical and
cross-civilizational examination to be a factor actually connecting Europe with
other cultures and traditions rather than separating it from them. (Franke 2014,
91)

West / non-Wests Besides, Bonnett (2004, 2) argues in The Idea of the West that “it
appears that non-Western ideas about the West, in many cases,
precede Western ones; that it was the non-West that invented the

42 [DE]CENTERING
West.” The arrogant Western “closeness” is suddenly opened when
it clashes with other positions that, instead of trying to dominate
existence, aim at echoing “our relation to Being”– such as Chinese
or Indian thought (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 170 ff), which are not
empirical or anthropological specimens anymore, contrary to what
Husserl asserted (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 168). Without falling
into orientalism, and having attempted to dismantle a possible
“occidentalism”35–that is, understanding the West as a monolithic
construction– by making a distinction between different Wests, it can
be concluded that we face a dichotomy that is only apparent, since
each space is constituted by a myriad different realities. We are thus Double bind
immersed in a double bind36 that remains unresolved, since both parts
are permanently trying to unveil and understand the other in a non-
exclusive, counter-productive manner that is however incredibly fertile
for the purposes of a research whose interest mainly lies in openings
and contradictions, not conclusions. In this regard, the project may be
considered an apophatic one, because of its “radical openness” toward
the Others (Franke 2014, 86).
(…) I like maps, because they lie.

Because they give no access to the vicious truth.

Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly

they spread before me a world

not of this world. (Szymborska 2014)

35 The notion of Orientalism is a major contribution of the writer Edward Said,

who detects a Western attitude towards Eastern societies regarding them as undeveloped,
static and irrational. The term “occidentalism” has not had the same relevance, although
it has been used by authors such as Hanson, Margalit and Buruma (Bonnett 2004, 4 ff) to
criticize the images and ideas of the West generated outside of it, usually considering it as
an evil, uniform power.
36 The term “double bind” was coined by Gregory Bateson in his research on
schizophrenia. It refers to the conflict that arises “when an individual receives two
contradicting messages. The two messages cannot both be true which means that one has
to reveal or identify the other” (Mul and Meineche Hansen 2011, 2). The conflict, however,
is impossible to solve, since confirmation or negation are not conceivable within the
system.

Introduction 43
 Returning to the spatial issue, it may be clearer now why the idea
of a European space is so blurry and ambiguous. It is certainly not
defined by the borders of the European Union, and it is not easy to
define where geographical Europe starts and ends (is Russia European
or Asian? And what about the North African Spanish enclaves, or the
French DOM-TOM?) In Uncertain States of Europe (2003), the Italian
architect Stefano Boeri recognizes this complex relation between
European identity and European space, placing the emphasis in urban
space and the instrumental crisis for its representation. For this reason,
he develops a series of observational techniques that he calls “Eclectic
Atlases,” through which urban space is regarded from a combination
of multiple angles and viewpoints. Thus, the temporal dimension
could be included as well within an abstract, comprehensive depiction
of an urban space in permanent mutation. But despite the attempt
to overcome traditional geographic methods (which are inefficient
and insufficient to address the complexity of a transforming space)
by adding other materials and layers, Eclectic Atlases still fall into the
impersonal, hegemonizing, reductionist geographical representation of
space, according to the critique that the urban historian M. Christine
Boyer (2006) poses on Boeri’s strategy. Besides, the metabolic analogy
of European space as a self-organizing organism is problematic,
according to Boyer, since it is based on swallowing, positive synthesis
and overcoming of difference: “It sees territorial expansionism,
imperialism and militarism as natural processes and not contentious
processes of social, economic and political origin. Wars and conflicts
are merely viewed as inevitable outcomes” (Boyer 2006, 330). Finally,
she argues for the need of a strategy that “deconstructs the exaggerated
importance of Europe and reformulates East-West distinctions,”
(Boyer 2006, 326) taking into account other spaces –such as the
Mediterranean. This would entail an approach toward European space
through the irresolvable clash or crisis that takes place within itself
and in relation to other spaces. Consequently, geographical methods
–“abstract and detached from reality as any other map used as a
metaphor for spatial ordering, a surface for notating field observations,
or a medium of rationality” (Boyer 2006, 332)– should take second
place to “living” tools that suit the changing character of urban space.

44 [DE]CENTERING
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48 [DE]CENTERING
 10 Caspar David Friedrich. “Two men contemplating the moon,” 1819-1820. Source:
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Wikimedia Commons.

49
 01

Objectives of the project.

To put in a nutshell one of the main conclusions drafted from this

(de)centering of the research questions, and in order to redirect them
towards the issue of space, it can be assumed that, even before Hegel
(although his contributions were crucial in this regard), space has been
regarded in Western culture as a negated dimension with respect to
time, which has been considered as the linear thread that articulates
history from its beginning to a more or less predictable and immediate
end. However, the shift promoted during the second half of the
twentieth century (the so-called “spatial turn”1 in social sciences)
transformed the conception of space and the ways of exploring it,

1 Schlögel (2016) recognizes the proliferation of “turns” in the last decades

(linguistic turn, iconic turn, anthropological turn…) Unlike other authors who are
suspicious of this explosion, he does not consider the emergence of multiple turns to be
necessarily negative: on the contrary, they displace and reveal new points of view that
had not been fully explored before, even if they may not be key to new discoveries or
achievements.

Objectives of the project 51

 challenging the very articulation of historicity and spatiality. The
historian Karl Schlögel (2016), who has explored the where of history
through a series of particular events, attributes this shift to radical
experiences which transformed the general perception of time and
space during the last century, such as globalization, the increasing
predominance of new technologies or the “spatial revolutions” in
1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) and 2001 (September 11 attacks).
Although social sciences and disciplines such as geography, history or
anthropology have experienced this detour in knowledge to a greater
degree, the spatial turn also had strong repercussions for architecture,
which lost its status as the privileged producer of space (Stanek
2012). Almost at the same time, the interest for public space emerges
in academia and society, experiencing a new outburst after the first
decade of the twenty-first century. A space that has strongly negative
and conflictual implications –besides, in “formal” terms it is usually
represented as the negative of the city–, has paradoxically become
an oppressive tool in the hands of Western democracies in a very
sophisticated way, that can be related to Byung-Chul Han’s perception
of the new –neural– ways of life ruled by positivity and transparency
(2013).
Having established the context and motivations of the research
and after the review of the main contributions and visions on
the complex relations between space, politics and negativity, the
present project aims at further exploring these relations through a
different perspective that may extend and actualize the contemporary
comprehension of negativity, which has been displaced, criticized
and/or rejected by much of contemporary thought. However, the
position of several authors such as Diana Coole (2000), Ray Brassier
(2007; 2013), Gail Day (2011), Artemy Magun (2013a), and also
Hilde Heynen (1999) or Nadir Lahiji (2014b; 2014a) from the field
of architecture, lead to new questions about this topic and ways to
grasp the forces of the negative and the possibility of elaborating new
readings of the present by taking into account some aspects that have
been traditionally dismissed, such as how negativity can find space in
an urban context. Therefore, it is essential to reformulate the notion of
the negative in a productive way that can be understood and discussed
within contemporary theoretical debates on space and politics.

52 [DE]CENTERING
 02

Thus, the thread of the research connects the fields of architecture,

the city and politics by weaving a theoretical fabric that reflects the
pulsing of the negative in modern and contemporary times, as well as
the transitions and transformations caused by this force. Despite the
complexity of the task, the present work aims at unveiling possible
translations from political, historical and philosophical incursions
in negativity to the more specific field of urban space from a critical
standpoint.
Challenging totalizing conceptions of space.
Following Henri Lefebvre,2 space is today considered as a social Space as (social)
construction that is constituted through relations and, at the same construction
time, allows the establishment and development of such relations

2 “(Social) space is a (social) product” is one of the key hypothesis of Lefebvre’s

Production of Space (1991, 26). Although he would talk of “products” –following Marxist
terminology, where production implies an exact repetition, “the result of repetitive acts
and gestures” (Lefebvre 1991, 70)– instead of “constructions,” since he would associate
construction to the architectural space, it is also considered to be “a function of social
relations” (Lefebvre 1991, 159). Besides, even though a construction can be replicated,
it preserves a certain uniqueness and experience –going beyond the physical (Low 1996,

Objectives of the project 53

 (Löw 2006, 130; Stanek 2012, 50). However, it is important to
remark that this constructivist approach is not exempt of critique: the
passive notion of “space as construction” should also be understood
from its reverse, that is, social sphere is also spatially constructed
(Massey 2005; Marchart 2012). The comprehension of space as a
complex set of relational systems is an essential assumption of this
research, although it is true that relations are open to many different
readings and interpretations. During the last decades of the twentieth
century, globalization has been considered to be a major issue to
tackle, as well as a macro-model to understand spatiotemporal
processes and transformations of the world. David Harvey’s “space-
time compression” (1992), Thomas Friedman’s flat world (2005) or
Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) are just some of the most prominent
examples that illustrate the relevance that the concept has acquired in
spatial disciplines. Even Lefebvre pointed to an eventual “complete
urbanization society” (Lefebvre 2003; Merrifield 2014), although he
acknowledged not to understand certain areas of that space –China,
for instance (Lefebvre 1974, 229). As a result, his theories revolved
around Western space and were extrapolated to the rest of the world
(Tang 2014).
Although all these authors conceptualize globalization as
a neoliberal, capitalist phenomenon in order to oppose its
consequences, they usually tend to a generalization when talking of
space from this perspective. The very rhetoric of globalization has a
flattening effect on the complexity of space, since it assumes a taming
of it, as if all relations were subordinated to certain, socio-political
and economical forces coming mostly from the West. Despite the
considerable element of truth that this statement contains, it is not
plausible to reduce space to a bunch of relations that tend to converge
at one point determined by a specific society.3 Since it is neither an
unavoidable process, nor a law of nature, such a project, as Massey

861)– that is lost in the product. Setha M. Low sees that social production and social
construction of space are different, but coexistent (1996, 861 ff).
3 “(…) the neologism globalization makes its first appearance in the 1960s,
precisely in the field of international law to indicate the new terms of the ‘Hobbesian
problem of order’ (as a famous definition proposed by Talcott Parsons in his work The
Structure of Social Action, 1937) after the end of the ‘Westfalia model’, that is, an order
of international relations orchestrated by European powers and based on the exclusion

54 [DE]CENTERING
puts it (2005,5), implies both a simplification of the multiplicity of
space and a disdain for non-Western spatial practices and conceptions.
Besides, this “linearity” in time vaguely reminds of Hegel’s end of
history (2001):
We are not to imagine them as having their own trajectories, their own
particular histories, and the potential for their own, perhaps different, futures.
They are not recognised as coeval others. They are merely at an earlier stage in
the one and only narrative it is possible to tell. That cosmology of “only one
narrative” obliterates the multiplicities, the contemporaneous heterogeneities
of space. It reduces simultaneous coexistence to place in the historical queue.
(Massey 2005, 5)

In consequence, tackling the issue from an open (although particular)

position seems to be unavoidable if the conclusions are expected to
be as plural and adjusted to the global scale as possible; hence the
importance of contrasting visions from Western sensibilities with the
reality of other urban spaces that are not located in the West. What
motivates the return to this opposition –however obsolete it may seem
from the perspective of plurality and diversity that is sought through
the work– is that it is still valid, even if often hidden or silenced.
The difference between West and non-Wests still remains latent, at
least from the perspective of the Western subject. Then, the idea is to
displace the Western position by avoiding these narratives of progress
and predominance, despite the cultural background of the research.
The work is focused on a specific type of space, that is, urban Ubiquitous
space, and on the relations between its physical dimension and public space
socio-spatial practices that both configure and take place in it. It
has been already argued that the notion of public space, for which
urban space represents one of its most recognizable manifestations,
has a privileged position in the Western concept of space and it
appears to be a ubiquitous phenomenon present in most of the cities
of the world, since many studies and works have been devoted to
the issue (Negt and Kluge 1993; Mitchell 2003; Deutsche 2008;
Kingwell and Turmel (eds.) 2009; Delgado Ruiz 2011; Parkinson
2012). Nevertheless, the term is often adopted in a very broad sense,

of ‘non-sovereign’ or ‘with limited sovereignty’ areas, countries and peoples” (Marramao

2006, 24).

Objectives of the project 55

 without taking into account the diversity that it entails, and used
interchangeably with “open urban space,” due to the dislocation
between the physical and philosophical definitions of public space
and its inherent paradoxes (Marcuse 2014). While its ideological
connotations are undeniable (Delgado Ruiz 2013), the extended use
of the concept makes necessary its extension and/or reformulation in
order to adapt it to diverse situations and make it more inclusive.
Regarding the Western connotations of the notion of “public
space,” a broader framework should be regarded in order to expand
the meaning of this “ideal” kind of space, as an urban space of
participation that may be appropriated by diverse agents –thus
spatializing conflict–; maybe not in Western-centric terms, but in
relation to the forms of exteriority: city, body and nature (Pardo Torío
1992), as the privileged realms to think the Other and build bridges
towards it through the “pores” of the subject which cannot completely
retain being and thought. Departing from the triple definition of the
public that Nora Rabotnikof (2008, 38 ff) exposes to clarify the initial
dichotomy public-private (that is, the public as a matter of common
interest, as the visible and manifest and as that which is open and
accessible to the people), one of the tasks of the research is to explore,
redraw and blur the limits between both realms.
In short, the research aims at addressing the concept of public
space, by acknowledging its evolution and the approaches that from
architecture and urbanism have been critically promoted towards
the homogenizing and totalizing conceptions of urban space. After
all, spaces are relational and hold coexistence and simultaneities,
as Doreen Massey argues: space is, first, a set of constructions of
interaction and interrelation; second, it is open to possibility and
plurality; and third, it is never complete or finished, but always under
construction (Massey 2005, 9).
Counterspace and (ir)rationality as motor.
The question of negativity has been mainly explored in the fields
of philosophy, political science, humanities, art or cultural studies.
Despite the scarcity of explicit connections between negativity and
space, this category has traditionally been opposed to time as its

56 [DE]CENTERING
negation, as well as being considered a realm for the possible and the
multiple.
In this context that relates social sciences and humanities to Counterspace
the political and the spatial, the notion of counterspace emerges:
mainly outlined from the field of political geography (Lefebvre
1991; Oslender 2010), it suggests the organization of an alternative
space that cannot exist if not in the reverse of space itself. Despite
the interest that this Lefebvrian term generates when analyzing
relations of resistance and differentiation, its theoretical background
and connotations, as well as its materialization, have been scarcely
addressed by researchers. In this regard, a further exploration of
counterspaces and the clarification of their possibilities opens a wide
field of research that allows to rethink and enrich the contemporary
notion of space as it has been expounded before.
Although the Lefebvrian counterspace has been one of the main Contre-espace
triggers for the present project, it was the Franco-Belgian artist poétique
Raoul Ubac (1942) who first used the term to name “le contre-espace
poétique,” that is, the space recreated by the spirit which, often linked
to artistic creation, transforms and penetrates the immediate space of
experience as its reverse. The exploration of this contre-espace is clear
in Ubac’s photographic and sculptural work, influenced by surrealism
and employing a series of techniques (solarization, overexposure,
collage, “burning” or “petrification”) that distort the image, even
melting the negative of his photographs in order to reveal another
formless one that, however, would not be possible without the original
positive. Although Ubac’s counterspaces differ significantly from
the meaning that Lefebvre would give to the term decades later, it is
possible to find some connections between both conceptions, since
Lefebvre also proposes to imagine the city from its reverse:
The future city, if it is possible to sketch its outlines, would be pretty well
defined by imagining the reverse of the current situation and taking this inverted
image of the world upside down to the extreme. (Lefebvre 1968, 158)4

4 After pronouncing this suggestion, the proposal is suspended, as if waiting to

be explored. Peter Marcuse (2011, 19) would continue many years later: “(...) the city is
not a ‘thing’, it is not the traditional city, but its inverse; it is the social reality around us
in an increasingly urbanized world. We do not find a spatial definition either. A narrow

Objectives of the project 57

 03 04

Contropiano Another particular fact is the coincidence in time of the coining of

the term “counterspace” by Lefebvre in 1974 and the creation of the
Italian journal Contropiano (“Counterplan”) by Asor Rosa, Cacciari
and Negri, edited between 1968 and 1972. However different their
positions were, Lefebvre was also pointing to such a counterplan,
which would ultimately promote a counterspace “in opposition to
the one embodied in the strategies of power (…)” (Lefebvre 1991,
381). The interest of exploring such relations is evident, since they
represent a key point from which the translation from philosophy to
architecture is possible.
However, it would be difficult to imagine counterspaces as
closed entities or as the dialectical counterpart of hegemonic space,
inasmuch as this would imply a return to a binary comprehension of
the world that is far from the complexity observed and theorized in
contemporary times. It is rather crucial to bear in mind that if space
is relational, so is counterspace as well and, moreover, relations may
also have negative connotations of resistance, discontent, rejection,
etc., being these not only limited to “nodes,” events or phenomena.
What is at stake here is how negativity finds space in a contemporary,

interpretation of the ‘city’ in the sense of ‘city’ vs. ‘country’, or city as a specific spatial
form, would be a distorted understanding of Lefebvre’s work and, in any case, it would
imply an impoverishment of its meaning.”

58 [DE]CENTERING
 05 06

complex urban context where binary oppositions have been dissolved.

Periods of crisis are especially relevant for spatialization of negativity.
When hegemonic space is negated, counterspaces appear, and The abyss of
then models can be potentially altered. In fact, the irrational and reason
the imaginary, highly underestimated in the modern project, play
an important role in the constitution of a counterspace. Lefebvre
introduces the dimension of the negative –understood as “the
indecipherable, the unsaid, the prohibited, or the unconscious”
(Lefebvre 1991, 46)– to determine the complex, non-positive
character of the relations between the moments of his spatial triad (the
perceived, the conceived and the lived) and, when pointing to the next
step of the “architectural revolution” he would remark the need “to
turn the world upside down using theory, the imaginary, and dream,
to contribute to its multiform practical transformation, without being
restricted to a limited form (political, ‘cultural,’ ideological, and,
therefore, dogmatic) (…)” (Lefebvre 2014).
Taking this into account, other connections with many authors
who have explored spaces beyond the real and the possible appear.
Even if the Pythagoreans considered the irrational as inharmonic
for being deprived of “relations” (ratio) (Baudrillard et al. 1990,
164), its possibilities exceed the limits of the existing: it is an open,
infinite field for different relations, far from the grand narratives of
Modernity. Together with the surrealists and their refusal to restrict
reality to rational constrains, the works of Walter Benjamin and

Objectives of the project 59

 Theodor Adorno played an essential role in dismantling the rational
motor of the modern era. The former unveiled the phantasmagorical
character of Modernity and the metropolis as one of its most relevant
constructions, haunted by the ghosts of its own present (Andreotti
and Lahiji 2016).5 However, the most recent and persistent crisis
of reason takes place after the global, optimistic period of Fordist
growth in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the buoyant
perspectives of the welfare state began to vanish in the decades of the
sixties and seventies. Inaugurating a long period of harsh criticism
and reaction against the prospects of progress launched within the
Modern project, Theodor Adorno would denounce the impoverishing
dimension of rationalism and functionalism, in which things are
measured according to their economic value and purpose (Adorno
1979; Montaner 1997, 74–75); hence, “certain irrationalities –Marx’s
term for them was faux frais– are essential to society” (Adorno 1979,
33) –something that Hegel, in his view, failed to understand (Coole
2000, 55).
This has repercussions on space: “[t]he ‘irrational,’ indeed, may
amount to an enlargement of the social production of space by
means that are not so unreasonable after all” says Hays on Foucault’s
interview “Space, Knowledge, and Power” by Paul Rabinow (Hays
(ed.) 1998); an statement that could be shared by Adorno –despite,
again, the abysmal gap. How this irrationality emerges and works
within contemporary space is discussed from several, and sometimes
divergent, positions. Massimo Cacciari (1982; 1993)6 and Manfredo

5 Libero Andreotti and Nadir Lahiji have deeply studied this aspect of Benjamin’s
work in The Architecture of Phantasmagoria (2016), understanding “phantasmagoria” as the
ideological function of contemporary architecture.
6 However, it is important to remark that Cacciari “rejects as ideological
construction any irrationalist interpretation even of the Romantic period –of Novalis and
Schlegel– that precedes what he calls negative thought. No rhizomes, no philosophy of
imagination au pouvoir (imagination in power) in the Italian theory of the Metropolis. The
reader should then be aware that there are two types of rationality or rationalizations: one
positive, hopeful, sunny, even if in contact with modern negativity, and the other dark, with
no hope, no nostalgia, no projects, but endlessly at work as a process of rationalization,
capable of integrating the failure of reason into its total rationalization. As Cacciari phrases
it in his 1980 Oppositions article, ‘the uprooted spirit of the Metropolis is not ‘sterile’ but
productive par excellence.’” (Lombardo 1993, xxvii–xxviii)

60 [DE]CENTERING
 07

Tafuri also devoted part of their work to the emergence of irrationality

in architecture and the city, especially in the case of the Roman
historian and his comments on Piranesian scenarios (Tafuri 1976;
1987), in which it is possible to recognize a certain counterspatiality
and the non-exclusion between rationality and irrationality. However,
he would always recognize the destiny of modern architecture as the
“bearer of ideals of progress and rationalization” that it cannot escape:
in this regard, an architectural “counterspace” (controspazio, recalling
Contropiano, the name of the journal of Italian workerism in which
the article was published) would be impossible.7
In any case, the notion of counterspace is explored throughout
the text in light of multiple irrational and imaginary relations that
take place in an urban space that may well be considered as mutating
and unstable, escaping the traditional, solid tools of control and

7 “The ‘fall’ of modern art is the ultimate testimony of bourgeois ambiguity,

poised as it is between ‘positive’ objectives, the reconciliation of contradictions, and the
merciless exploration of its own objective commodification. No more ‘salvation’ is to be
found within it: neither by wandering restlessly through ‘labyrinths’ of images so polyvalent
that they remain mute, nor by shutting oneself up in the sullen silence of geometries
content with their own perfection.

This is why there can be no proposals of architectural ‘counterspaces’: any search for
an alternative within the structures conditioning the mystifying character of planning is an
obvious contradiction in terms” (Tafuri 1969, 79). [T.A.]

Objectives of the project 61

 knowledge developed within the disciplinary field. Even though this
interest for the irrational shall not be taken as a praise for its forces,
these may show “how a confrontation with the monsters and abysses
of reason may lead us to discover other, more satisfying worlds in
that which we call the world” (Cottom 1991, 21). If, paraphrasing
Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe (2009), we are acting in an uncertain
world in which techno-scientific paradigms are subject to permanent
fluctuation, it is worth emphasizing once again the role that art
acquires as a privileged field for spatial research. Nicolas Bourriaud
(2002, 13) asserts that art’s purpose is not “to prepare and announce
a future world” anymore, but rather to model “possible universes.”
At the same time, it should be kept in mind that any work of art is a
“symptom” that unveils the dominant mode of production –in our
case, a capitalist one, which implies an economic, cultural and moral
hegemony (Aguirre 2014, 203). From any of these perspectives,
artistic action becomes a “vector of knowledge” for architectural and
urban practice (Genard 2008, 104).
Socio-spatial processes in cities.
The city cannot be understood as an exclusively material composition
or fabric; neither as a closed, finite entity reflecting the perfect order of
the world, as it was in its origin. The space of the city is in permanent
construction and transformation through social practice, either of the
everyday life –recalling De Certeau (1984)– or the extraordinary, to
the point that the city itself can be considered as practice (Lefebvre
1968, 118) and a realm for possibility (Delgado Ruiz 2003, 124).
It is a process of permanent construction and destruction, always
re-organizing and trans-forming itself “on the way of becoming”
(Andreotti and Lahiji 2016, 11). This contingent character acquires a
particular relevance when associated with the notion of counterspace,
which is, at the same time, linked to processes of transition from how
The non-city spaces are to what they may become. Delgado Ruiz (2003) is aware
of this association between the city and its reverse, the unstable forces
that organize and disorganize it in a perpetual falling-apart and rising.
Thus, he liberates the “non-city” from its pessimistic connotations,
understanding it as a potential force, able to produce and destroy:
The non-city is an order that organizes and disorganizes society at the same time;
it is nothing other than a labor. That which founds the city is the same as that

62 [DE]CENTERING
 which dissolves it, a non-city that is not the opposite of the city, its dark side or
its inverted hidden face, but a perpetual undoing of what has already been done
and an incessant remaking of what we have just seen disintegrating before our
eyes. (Delgado Ruiz 2003, 124)8

Addressing practice as Isabelle Stengers (2005, 184) proposes, that

is, “approaching it as it diverges (…) feeling its borders,” allows to
detect how transitions between different social models –understood
as spaces of crisis– are spatially configured, and how these processes
have helped to determine and reflect future spaces. Therefore, the
research is engaged with social practice and aims at reconstructing
those transforming spaces between specific models through examples
and connections from architecture and other relevant fields. Focusing
on the concept of public space –and on its political and social
meaning–, several examples from different fields (architecture, art,
urban design…) will be explored to unveil such transitions and their
relevance to configure socio-spatial paradigms and models. This
would eventually lead to the detection of symptoms and signals that
unveil future socio-spatial community practices that may orientate
architectural action toward possible scenarios. The focus on three case
studies (Beijing, Warsaw and Istanbul) responds to the need of the
territorialization of knowledge. Here, the city, which “falls apart and
is remade before our eyes” (Lefebvre 1968, 96), is not considered to
be an urban continuum or a planetary amalgam extended by means
of globalization, despite the dense mesh of relations among cities.
Instead, cities are seen as coexistent realities which share common
characteristics but still keep some particularities that make each one of
them unique, such as the diversity of socio-spatial processes that take
place in them. Precisely, these processes are the constitutive elements
that allow to undertake a complex understanding of the urban, rather
than considering it as a specific set of typologies, that is, types of
physical settlement or enclave (Brenner 2013, 56).
Architecture as a discipline.
Finally, the research seeks to contribute to contemporary debates
on architecture in relation both to its own disciplinary character
and to society. Ever since architecture joined the cultural discourse

8 [T. A.]

Objectives of the project 63

 of capitalism more than two hundred years ago and was linked to
“commodity culture, radical politics and aesthetics” –because of the
lack of its own critical discourse (Lahiji 2014b, 2)– the role of the
discipline within society has been changing and re-adapting on a
continuous basis. Before that –and Lahiji clarifies: “before Hegel”–
architecture was relevant only in terms of “architectural metaphor”
and it served as a reference to other systems in order to ground
and stabilize them (Karatani 1995; Lahiji 2014b, 2). However, the
metaphor of architecture reappears much later in the works of Derrida
(Derrida and Meyer 1999), Hollier on Georges Bataille (1993) and
Karatani (1995), announcing a progressive return to an “architectonic
system,” at least in radical philosophy and currents of new materialism
(Lahiji 2014b, 3). The critique towards the architectural/urban object
has nonetheless lost its significance in a world in which architectural
joined the neoliberal repertoires long time ago.
However, the long and too-often sterile debates around the
autonomy9 of architecture and its separation –or not– from economy
and politics are important for the course of the research, since urban
space (and the elements that configure it) is where most of social,
political and economic actions and decisions emerge and take place.
Many questions on the position of architecture in relation to other
phenomena and its legitimate tools (roughly representing two of the
most discussed ways of understanding autonomy) remain open and
probably will never be solved. Architecture, as Libero Andreotti asserts
(in Lahiji (ed.) 2016, 72) has never been a monolithic discipline.
Therefore, positions within the debate are influenced by diverse
experiences and thoughts. Even without endorsing any particular
stance within the dispute, it is worth remembering that a radical

9 In this regard, the comprehension of autonomy that emerged during the

seventies and the eighties was highly influenced by structuralism: the historical and formal
foundations of architecture were understood as independent from other theoretical
paradigms (mathematics, social sciences, psychology...) Solà-Morales (2009, 121) clearly
formulates this reading: “Autonomy does not mean that architecture cannot be compared
with other cultural or technical phenomena, or that its scope is not related to other areas
of reality. Nonetheless, the autonomy of the discipline means that not only there are
specific tools for architectural analysis and that these critical instruments may be subject to
theorizing, but also that they will be the starting point of new contemporary architectural
practices.”

64 [DE]CENTERING
advocacy for autonomy has often resulted in “a retreat to the winter
quarters of formal ideology.” Moreover, “[t]his repeated retraction has
historically produced a repository of forms at the disposal of every
new dominant ideology, at the same time that it reduced the reach of
the disciplinary field to such a reduced core that it seems to have been
dissolved” (Minguet and Tapia 2016, 295). This crisis affects also the
role of the architect who, although not anymore the “Architect of the
world, the human image of God the creator” that Lefebvre (1968, 60)
saw in Le Corbusier, seems to be deprived from social agency and the
possibility of contributing to a fair society. One of the main objectives
of the research is to refute this assertion and claim for a relevant role
for architects that, together with other social agents, work for a sound
built environment taking into account socio-spatial processes, without
dismissing the singularities of the discipline.10 This involves the will
to find links for a re-elaboration of the socio-political commitment of
architecture.
Another consequence of the debate on autonomy is the question Architecture,
about the role of critique and theory within architecture. The frequent critique, theory
dismissal of theory by architecture practitioners (Graafland 2010)
–a new branch of the debate initiated in the journal Perspecta by
Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting (2002) and Michael Speaks (2006)
on the issue of criticality opened by K. Michael Hays (1984)– has
instigated a wave of counter-efforts to restore the role of theory and
within culture, and specifically architecture. Although Speaks is right
when suggesting that theory cannot work as “fast philosophy” (Speaks
2006, 101) and others, like Swyngedouw (Lahiji (ed.) 2016, 52),
confirm the deadlock in which “critical urban-architectural thought
is subsumed today,” the current circumstances make necessary “more
and better theory,” as Libero Andreotti claims (Lahiji (ed.) 2016, 78).
A theory capable of engaging the social context while taking into
account the possibilities of architecture and other spatial disciplines is
key to propose possible spatial actions and strategies which could be

10 See Montaner (2007, 23) in terms of architectural critique: “And not only
critique, history and theory are connected but also the field of architectural critique is not
autonomous at all. Since architecture is situated between art and technique, its language
and interpretation are always related to languages and interpretations of art, science and
thought. In short, the mission of architectural critique should be to establish bridges in
both directions (…)”

Objectives of the project 65

 relevant to unveil conflict and contradiction within the contemporary
framework. Besides, it may become a strong tool to question the
formal implications of architecture, away from their supposedly
autistic and autonomous character, in order to search for new media
for practice through socio-spatial means and to reinforce a critical
understanding of the urban environment and its socio-political
context. Otherwise, architecture loses its social strength, being
doomed to “an uncritical acceptance of the status quo” according to
Andreotti (Lahiji (ed.) 2016, 80), who points to the responsibility of
other authors and architects such as Patrick Schumacher, who claims
that “political debate within architecture overburdens the discipline”
(2013, 133). Rather, it is possible to generate spaces and architectures
of resistance without falling into the arguments of criticality or post-
criticality –although many of their arguments coincide, especially
those concerning “an autonomous architectural formalism” (Barber
2005, 248).11 What is clear is that the links between architecture and
politics are strong and relevant to an uneven, asymmetrical world
(Kaminer, Robles-Durán, and Sohn (eds.) 2011).12

Methodological approach.
(A)methodos To deepen once again in the dimension of space after centuries of
theory and knowledge through extremely diverse approaches is not
an easy task. The winding, multiple paths that have been traced –
and erased, and retraced– over the comprehension of space makes it
difficult to open a new one that may only add more confusion and
rhetorical intricacy to an already dense mesh of knowledge. Rather,
the approach followed throughout the research consists in revisiting
some of these paths and situating oneself in crossroads positions
that could shed some light over the questions posed before. For this
reason, the research method is not understood in the sense of the
Heideggerian methodos, defined by Derrida as a “technique (…) to

11 Daniel Barber (2005) has made an attempt to escape this division and recover
the sense of opposition to the status-quo within the architectural discipline by theorizing
what he calls “militant architecture.”
12 A long tradition of architectural interventions with political character supports
this assertion. For instance, see “Acción Política desde la Arquitectura” (Montaner and
Muxí 2011, 54–66).

66 [DE]CENTERING
gain control of the way [odos]” (in Leach and et al. 1997, 302), but
as an attitude towards the density of knowledge, of what has been
already said. In this regard, the (a)methodological approach of the Destructive
research is closer to the Benjaminian “destructive character” (1999, character
541 ff), which “sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he
sees ways everywhere (…) Because he sees ways everywhere, he always
stands at a crossroads” (Benjamin 1999, 542).13 It is possible that the
architectural character of the essay, full of spatial references –room,
space, emptiness, ways, walls, etc. – was one of the features that
fascinated Manfredo Tafuri, who in an interview in 1981 (Liernur and
Tafuri 1983) associated this passage with another one in the Arcades:
“Forge ahead with the whetted axe of reason, looking neither right nor
left so as not to succumb to the horror that beckons from deep in the
primeval forest” (Benjamin 2002, 842). From this, Tafuri concludes
that the notion of method is not thinkable in terms of critique, since
he does not know “how to destroy with a method” (Liernur and
Tafuri 1983). This refusal to a method challenges a research process
that has been motivated by critical positions and finds in critique one
of its main instruments for spatial inquiry.14 Therefore, the proposed
methodological approach can be assumed as a particular way of
walking through this “forest,”15 instead of using means to control and
dominate it– a negative methodology for a research on negativity.

13 This essay has been subject to multiple interpretations, often contradictory.

However, the most interesting and plausible ones –at least for the purposes of the
research– are the ones that see a certain glimpse of Benjamin himself in the text despite
it may seem the opposite (the essay was inspired in Gustav Glück, a friend who was the
director of the Foreign Section of the State Bank). Benjamin would be facing here an other
character that nevertheless shares affinities with his own. This position is maintained by
authors such as Wohlfahrt (1978, 64) and Sontag (1981, 132 ff).
14 “In architecture and urbanism, we cannot do without ‘ground’, nor can we do
without critical thinking” (Graafland 2012, 83).
15 The image of the forest is quite often associated to complexity as perceived in
Western culture. Going back to the initial contextualization of the West and its Others,
Pardo (1992, 203–4) writes a beautiful association between the presence of trees and their
significance in Christian and Muslim cultures: “A vast mantle of forests and moors, tinged
with more or less fertile cultivated clearings, such is the face of Christianity, similar to a
negative of the Muslim East, a world of oasis among deserts. While in the East the forest
is scarce, it abounds in the West; there the trees mean civilization, here, barbarism. Refuge
of the pagan geniuses, monks, saints and missionaries tear it down in an implacable way. All
progress in medieval West is based on clearing, on struggle and victory over the brush, the

Methodological approach 67
 The conclusion of the route may be uncertain, but there is no doubt
that it will be enriched by multiple confrontations and encounters
experienced along a way full of crossroads and intersections. Thus, the
words of Diderot when he regarded his own essays may be applicable
to the course of the present research: “Who knows where the chain of
ideas will lead me?” (Montaner 2007, 10)
The objectives explained above set a field of interests that make
more plausible the constitution of a frame of reference instead of
a fixed fulcrum from which to operate. The limitations of such a
decision are already known. For decades, research on architecture has
been absorbed by the model of the social sciences,16 and contemporary
academia somehow still privileges purely scientific approaches.
However, the field of architectural research is far from determined
and established, since it is in permanent construction. The uniqueness
of the discipline, halfway between the realms of theory and practice
–as well as science and art–, has promoted several efforts to find
appropriate methodologies of research, which at the same time may be
adapted depending on the topic or subject. Contemporary academics
such as Linda Groat and David Wang (2002; Sattrup 2012), Sanford
Kwinter (Kwinter and Risteen 2007), Ákos Moravánszky and Ole W.
Fischer (2008) or Peggy Deamer (Lahiji (ed.) 2016), among many
others, have reflected upon the condition of research in architecture
and accurate methodologies to conduct it. All of them agree on the
hybrid, particular character of the discipline and on the complexity
that undertaking a research project on architecture entails. From
this stems the necessity for “atypical or unexpected combinations of
methods” (Groat and Wang 2002, viii). In this regard, the work of
Groat and Wang offers a series of architectural research methods that
may be adjusted to the scope, subject and questions of investigation
motivated by the objective of acquiring knowledge “about how built
environments could enhance human life”(Groat and Wang 2002, xi).
Besides, they offer a wide view of potential topics that can be subject

bushes and, if necessary and when technical means and courage allow it, over the forest,
the virgin forest, the ‘gaste fôret’ of Perceval, the dark forest of Dante.”
16 Peggy Deamer (Lahiji (ed.) 2016, 113) associates this fact with architectural
autonomy as “a necessary response to save the discipline from non-creative forces” after
the sixties.

68 [DE]CENTERING
of architectural research, highlighting their diversity: from technical
and construction aspects to the generation of theory.
Before unfolding the set of tools and instruments that constitute
the operational framework of the research, it is worth reflecting on
the convergence between theory and practice in which architecture
–like other spatial disciplines, such as art or urbanism– is situated.
This position enables the transfer of knowledge between both realms,
which is essential for the purposes of the research.
Peter Sloterdijk (2013) traces an exhaustive genealogy of what he Bíos
calls bíos theoretikós, the way of life of those who were devoted to the theoretikós
inner domain of thought and absent from external circumstances,
as if they were “dead,” away from the world. The moments of
ecstasy (ek-stasis) and absence (often associated to apathy, athymia)17
experienced by the theoretical subject, whose first incarnation is
identified by Sloterdijk as Socrates, were to be designated as epojé, the
term that Husserl borrowed from the Greek skeptics to designate the
“abstinence of judgement” (2013).
Sloterdijk proclaims the death –or rather, murder by “modern
epistemologists (…) naturalist philosophers, ideologists and troubled
spirits of all kinds” (Sloterdijk 2013, 14)– of the homos theoreticus,
acknowledging at the end of the book that it is impossible to restore
this way of theoretical life: “(…) epistemological modernity has
decided (…) to break with the sublime fictions of disinterested
reason and to appeal to the cognizant to return from their contrived
mortifications”18 (Sloterdijk 2013). The need to “stop” in order to
exert theory requires a void amidst contemporary speed that is usually
difficult to open.19 However, Sloterdijk alludes to the possibility
of exercising a theoretical life in our days, although with a lower

17 The collision of ecstasy and apathy, as Magun points out (2013b, 89), leads to
melancholia –“another institution of negative affectivity that Aristotle proclaims to be close
to philosophy,”
18 [T.A.]
19 “(…) the sheer speed of telecommunications undermines the time needed for
scholarly contemplation. (…)Theory’s temporality is traditionally belated. (…) theory is
impossible because we have no time to register events” (Chun 2011, 94).

Methodological approach 69
 intensity. There is a third way in between the active and the passive/
contemplative that the author calls “exercitant life”:
According to its nature, exercitant life constitutes a mixture realm: it appears
as contemplative without sacrificing the features of activity; it appears as active
without losing the contemplative perspective. Exercise is the oldest form and
with the greatest consequences of a self-referential praxis: its results do not come
together in objects or external circumstances, as it happens when working and
producing, but they configure the exercitant himself and bring him ‘into shape’
as a subject capable of doing things. (Sloterdijk 2013, 17)20

This kind of life is more understandable in a contemporary context

and, at the same time, establishes a connection with the origins of
theory. According to its original meaning, the Greek theoria emerges
21
through observation. Theoros was a special envoy who took part in a
delegation to a foreign festival or a religious celebration. Hence, he is
mainly a spectator commissioned to attend a sacred ceremony, being
theory “the act of viewing” (Bill 1901, 199). Over the years, the term
would acquire the sense of speculative thinking: a mode of intellectual
comprehension that involves to see beyond what is observed. Thus,
theory arises from the contemplation of a particular practice, but at
the same time, contemplating is an act, that is, a way of participating,
even if a passive one:
(…) theoria is not to be conceived primarily as subjective conduct, as a self-
determination of the subject, but in terms of what it is contemplating. Theoria
is a true participation, not something active but something passive (pathos),
namely being totally involved in and carried away by what one sees. (Gadamer
2004, 122)

Maybe thanks to the “murderers”22 that Sloterdijk (2013) enumerates,

the relational character of theoretical activity has become an essential

20 [T.A.]
21 (Bill 1901; Moravánszky 2003, 3; Gadamer 2004, 122)
22 The author (2013) points to ten conditions that triggered the murder of
theoretical life: the re-implantation of theory into practice (mostly through neo-Hegelians,
such as Marx); the break of modern thinking with the fictions of epistemic sovereignism
(through Nietzsche); the infiltration of the classical principle of “apathy” by partisan
thinking (through Lukács); the subversion of the Western culture of rationality by the
phenomenological analysis (through Heidegger); the shock caused by events such as

70 [DE]CENTERING
condition to exercise thereof. In this sense, it is unconceivable today
to leave the sensible world and retire to the heights of thought without
contemplating the possibility of coming back. This progressive murder
made possible the translation of modern and contemporary modes
of theory to disciplines that had been traditionally tied to the realm
of practice (at least in the West), such as architecture and urbanism,
which until the eighteenth century (Hegel’s essay on architecture is
highly relevant in this regard) had only been nurtured with knowledge
directly derived from praxis.
Talking about space and negativity today from an architectural
point of view would make no sense if it were not oriented toward
a specific, sensible reality –in this case, urban space and its Western
connotations and identification with “public space.” For these reasons,
the notion of theory as “fast philosophy” is rejected here, in favor
of a movement that ties together theory and practice, reinforcing
each other: the theoretical moment of reflection on a perceived
reality infuses practice with new tools, while at the same time
contemporary architectural practice serves as a starting point for the
generation of theory. Besides, if this movement is filtered through a
critical perspective and put in relation with the social, the mission of
architectural theory and practice appears:
The task for architectural theory is to adjust the register of architectural activity
from the autonomous realm of aesthetic effect to an expanded realm of multiple
and unstable engagements with the social. The task for architectural practice
is to find available openings to destabilise current regimes of production—
continuously. (Barber 2005, 249)

Once the framework and positions have been clarified, and finally
facing Benjamin’s terrible forest, the instruments for the immersion
shall be displayed. Despite their diversity and their different origin, it
is unavoidable to combine them in order to undertake the research,

Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the belief in the disinterested knowledge of modern science;
the bombing of systematic philosophical thinking and natural-scientific worldview by
existentialism; the introduction of the academic discourse hustle by the sociology
of knowledge; the attempts of feminism to unmask all discursive orderings that have
been developed as fabrications of a dominant masculinity; the refutation that performs
contemporary neurology of apathy in theory, and the overcoming the myth of the isolation
of the knower in recent scientific research (through Latour).

Methodological approach 71
 given the complexity of the subject and the multiple angles from
which it is approached. The transfer of knowledge between different
fields is essential and amplifies the scope of the process.
Critical interpretive research.
Architectural and urban theoreticians have largely relied on the
hermeneutical method to develop their activity (Pérez-Gómez
1997; Muntañola Thornberg et al. 2002; Hassenpflug, Giersig,
and Stratmann (eds.) 2011; Kidder 2011; Bertin 2013; Seamon
2015), partly because of the possibilities that it opens when trying to
understand static, “silent” artifacts whose reality cannot be grasped
through merely material or positivist premises, but through their
interpretation, mainly based on the idea of “text analogues” that
are interpreted in order to learn “their intersubjectively shared, and
different meanings” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012). Since their
new rise in the sixties, hermeneutics as a method has evolved from a
textual character to be open to other realities.
Critical Together with phenomenology,23 hermeneutics constitutes the
hermeneutics philosophical background of what is called “interpretive research”
that can be identified with “investigations into social-physical
phenomena within complex contexts, with a view toward explaining
those phenomena in narrative form and in a holistic fashion” (Groat
and Wang 2002, 136). Schwartz-Shea and Yanow (2012), who have
devoted an entire book to this approach, acknowledge that both lines
of thought have influenced research practices based on interpretation
through a series of key ideas:

23 In Architecture’s Historical Turn (2010), Jorge Otero-Pailos explores the influence

of phenomenology on the transition to postmodern architecture and the emergence of a
renewed architectural theory in order to resist the consequences of postwar modernism.
Against the teleological-technological utopia embodied by modern architecture,
phenomenology served as a base for architectural theoreticians (from Norberg-Schulz
to Frampton, Labatut or Moore) to restore the intellectual, experiential (above all, in
terms of bodily experience) and historic dimensions of architecture. However, after this
first “generation” of architectural phenomenologists, different groups and currents –
especially from a post-structuralist context- started to diverge, putting into question their
production and excessive intellectualization of architectural thought, thus shifting toward
practice. Still today, phenomenology is a relevant discursive mode in terms of perception
and affects.

72 [DE]CENTERING
 (…) that the artifacts humans create, whether in the form of language, objects,
or acts, embody what is meaningful to their creators at the time of their creation;

(…) that those artifacts may, however, have other meanings to other (groups of )
people who encounter and/or use them: knowledge is situated and contextual
(or “local”), as are “knowers” (including researchers);

(…) that what is meaningful at the time of an artifact’s creation might change
over time or in a different location of usage;

(…) that meaning-making—the interpretation and understanding of those

artifacts and their meaning—has no one, single starting point; instead, meaning-
making begins wherever it begins, with whatever the interpreter (including
researchers) knows or understands at that point in time, in that place (his or her
prior knowledge);

(…) that meaning-making draws on “lived experience”—a term that has come
in some treatments to include the holistic, embodied ways in which humans
move through the world;

(…) that meaning-making is a social practice, as well as an individual one (in

many cases, the former providing the interpretive repertoire for the latter);

(…) that language is not a transparent referent for what it designates nor does
it merely “mirror” or “reflect” an external world but, instead, plays a role in
shaping or “constituting” understandings of that world, and is itself, in this
sense, one of the “ways of worldmaking” (…) (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012)

However, the present work is not focused on cities or buildings

as objects-texts that can be read or understood through literal or
semiotic interpretation, but rather as complex socio-spatial processes
that involve a myriad of agents, structures and other processes;
they are culturally mediated and permeated by forms of power, all
of which calls for the suitability of a critical approach that would
enable an “improved ethical practice” (Given (ed.) 2008, 151).
Critical hermeneutics, founded on the exchange between Gadamer
and Habermas (Roberge 2011, 7) and the later critique of critical
theory from poststructuralist positions, open a balanced field between
both approaches, in which social power relations are integrated into
the hermeneutic background (Given (ed.) 2008, 152 ff) and the
“specifically ideological deformation of language use” (Kinsella 2006)

Methodological approach 73
 is taken into account. Critical hermeneutics, rather than a closed
method, consist on a “theoretical project seeking to radicalize the
task of comprehension” (Roberge 2011, 17). It is still an ongoing
approach, always under transformation and reformulation, so it
usually leads to open conclusions and further questions; something
that may be seen as a limitation, but which undoubtedly matches the
character and objectives of the research since, as it has been clarified
before, the research does not seek for certainties or truths, but for
new ways of understanding. Consequently, the research endorses
the emancipatory paradigm (Groat and Wang 2002, 33), which
recognizes multiplicity and diversity as part of the inquiry process as
well as being promoting transversal approaches, taking into account
social, political, cultural, ethnic, and gender issues. Besides, it aims at
opposing “the unconscious dominance of racial, ethnic, gender, and
Western-focused biases in the vast majority of research” (Groat and
Wang 2002, 33).
An urban-architectural research from a critical standpoint would
not be fully accurate without acknowledging the work of Manfredo
Tafuri. The mere recognition of conflict as an essential moment in
the construction of space makes re-visiting his work worthwhile.
Despite his much-reviled pessimism and his chronological approach,
considering that history is not the core of architectural theory
anymore (Solà-Morales 2009, 124),24 his study of the urban and the
architectural from their connection to ideology and not as mere forms
supposed a shift on the understanding of the relation between space
and politics.
(…) I intend to describe forms of contradiction that are held together
“heroically” (…) by a cultural moment oscillating between the need of certainty
and leaps towards the unfounded. (Tafuri 2006, 26)

24 Even though, our historicity should be recognised and accepted (Pérez-Gómez

1997); not as a mere black box, but as a destabilizing force confronted with the present:
“The ‘weak power’ of analysis (…) is proposed as one moment in a process that leaves
the problems of the past living and unresolved, unsettling our present” (Tafuri 2006, xxix).
See also Hays on Tafuri’s Interpreting the Renaissance: “(…) the interpretations in this book
should be seen (…) as differentials focused against the horizon of our own time” (Hays
2006, xiii).

74 [DE]CENTERING
Besides, Tafuri’s contributions cannot be overlooked in a research on Negative
space and negativity, since he traces a readable articulation between thought
Cacciari’s negative thought and architecture,25 which is especially
pertinent to the purposes of the research, despite its contextual
limitations. Although this articulation will be further explored, suffice
it to say, by now, that Tafurian critique26 recognizes the contradictions
and limitations of architectural practice with regard to emancipation.
Thus, negative forces of capitalism –“the transitory, the temporary,
the contingent, and the oppositional” (Day 2011, 95)– appear
as unavoidable in its own advance and also in the architectural
project. This situation could only be countered by embracing and
unveiling these forces, consequently breaking with the dialectical
logic. This argument is particularly harsh, since he leaves no space for
alternatives: he “reveals every artistic and theoretical development—
apparently without exception—as operating within the logic of the
capitalist system and as being ‘historically necessary’” (Heynen 1999,
135).
Strictly following these theses, it would not make sense to
undertake any research on architecture in an emancipatory context.
Nonetheless, even when radical utopias are no longer possible, one
can still recognize the forces that maintain the capitalist project going
forward and unveil contradictions from within, though knowing that
its advance is practically unstoppable. An attitude that resembles the
“content pessimism” that Manuel Delgado describes:
That pessimism is, however, enough cheerfully cynical not to become into
passivity and not to imply abandoning social battles, but to join them even

25 “[Tafuri’s] approach draws on Cacciari’s research on central European culture

of the early twentieth century, particularly that of Vienna, and on Cacciari’s philosophical
interrogation of ‘negative thought’ from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche all conducted
from within the framework of a political project of radical emancipation. For some, this
was a controversial, not to say paradoxical, argument. This trajectory, which at its far
end engages the materials of irrationalism, is the produce of thought conscious of both
negativity’s dialectic of reason and unreason and its place in the avant-garde heritage” (Day
2011, 80).
26 “(…) hermeneutics is considered by Tafuri as a task that cannot be confused
with critique, precisely because of the political role of the latter, beyond the pure world of
the work” (Liernur 2006, 5).

Methodological approach 75
 enthusiastically, though always with the smile of someone who does it because
he has nothing more important to do or does not want to lose friends. (Delgado
Ruiz 2015)27

The political It is clear that “architecture (…) cannot conduct parliamentary

outside politics” (Van Toorn 2012, 60), but it is precisely this distance what
makes possible to interact relationally and politically with other
bodies. The unpolitical in Cacciari (2009), but also negotiation in
Coole (2000) refer to the relation between the political and its outside
(or reverse), “rather than negotiations within the political, such as
those between political representatives, for instance” (Kramer 2013,
477). These approaches will be further analyzed to find political
apertures through apparently neutral realities.
Counterpublics and counternarratives.
The situatedness of the project, which struggles for a wider
comprehension of the world from an acknowledged Western
perspective that is criticized at the same time, meets the premise
that all interpretation is situated (Kinsella 2006). After all, following
Solà-Morales (2009, 30), the hermeneutical appropriation does not
make sense when the objects of analysis are detached from their space
and time. In this regard, the local scale offers a clearer analytical
scenario where agents, structures and processes can be identified and
their relations studied. Facing the grand narratives of globalization
and capitalism, through which spatial emancipation seems to be a
project doomed to failure, the focus on urban fragments –which
never reflect a totality, as they belong to a wider constellation– leads
to the comprehension of specific realities that may offer hopeful
Counterpublics alternatives. Within an emancipatory paradigm, special attention will
be paid to different agents intervening in urban space, particularly to
counterpublics, which Nancy Fraser (1990) introduced as “subaltern
counterpublics” through her critique to Habermas’ –“bourgeois
masculinist” (Fraser 1990, 62)– public sphere. Unlike the public
as a social totality (Warner 2002, 65), counterpublics emerge as
multiple minorities, sometimes with opposite interests and claims.
Counterpublics arise when a group constitutes itself as a public and
enters into conflict with the dominant public, its norms (Warner

27 [T.A.]

76 [DE]CENTERING
2002, 122) and privileges. Being conscious of this difference –
because of class, race, gender, etc.–,28 they usually operate through
transformative actions, which obviously are located in space and
have spatial consequences. Contemporary urban (public) space is
a privileged field of study for these multiple relations and tensions
between publics and counterpublics that ought to be considered
permanently throughout the research process.29
Taking into account these counterpublics in the proposed case Counternarratives
studies makes it necessary to question the “official” or hegemonic
narratives on space. Therefore, counterspaces opened by these groups
will be exposed through counternarratives that “splinter widely
accepted truths about people, cultures, and institutions as well as
the value of those institutions and the knowledge produced by and
within those cultural institutions” (Given (ed.) 2008, 132)– and
we could add those narratives produced by power institutions in
general. Kagendo Mutua (Given (ed.) 2008, 132) proposes two
forms of counternarratives that are present in the research: the first
one questions the narratives generated from a Western perspective,
situating the West at the highest moment of development,
toward which all other cultures should strive. The second form of
counternarrative is more general, challenging any kind of widely
accepted narrative or story supported by unquestioned knowledge.
This double meaning is addressed through the critique to the concept
of public space from a Western perspective and the particular cases
that illustrate the presence of counterpublics and counterspaces in
non-Western contexts.

28 Usually the term is associated with groups that claim for specific social
rights (feminists, LGBTQ+, ethnic minorities, etc.) However, strictly speaking, other
counterpublics, whose demands are not so righteous, can be identified: neo-Nazis, or
white supremacists, who stand against a general, non-violent, liberal public.
29 “Relational ethics is a contemporary approach to ethics that situates ethical
action explicitly in relationship. If ethics is about how we should live, then it is essentially
about how we should live together. Acting ethically involves more than resolving ethical
dilemmas through good moral reasoning; it demands attentiveness and responsiveness to
our commitments to one another, to the earth, and to all living things” (Given (ed.) 2008,
748).

Methodological approach 77
 However, it seems convenient that a research on space counts on
other means than text to expand the comprehension of the actions
and socio-spatial processes that take place in specific situations and
contexts. To this end, images and visual material accomplish a crucial
function in spatial research; they are not a mere supplement to the
text, but they present their own discourse as “a hybrid space between
description and project” (Viganò 2012, 667). Thus, the juxtaposition
of texts and images adds a new layer of complexity to the research,
as they cannot be understood spearately. Notwithstanding the
deceptiveness that has been attributed to the image and the visual
in contemporary thought, their value as a source for interpretation
and construction of knowledge should not be undervalued. Instead,
visual material registers spaces and counterspaces that we construct,
producing at the same time a simultaneous gaze (Van Toorn 2008).
Beyond the aesthetic impression it may cause, the seduction power
of the image –which requires to be approached with caution, to the
point that Lefebvre stated that “image kills” (1991, 97)– is seen as a
way of engaging socio-spatial processes and extracting conclusions,
as well as opening new questions through the whole research process.
The unthinkable Images are not simple illustrations; in the end, they express what
cannot be said through textual language and unveil the unthinkable –
or the unthought– within a system (Boyer 2007, 172).
(Extended) relational aesthetics.
(…) art is increasingly being accepted as an equally valid form of access,
to ‘reality’ and can be seen scientifically as an externalization of perceptual
functions. (Moravánszky and Fischer (eds.) 2008, 45)

The relevance of art as a means of transforming space in ways that

are hardly accessible to architecture has already been highlighted.
Therefore, and especially after the emergence and the strength
acquired by post-humanism and speculative realism, it seems logical
that, if different agents (human and non-human) are being considered
from the point of view of relational ethics –that is, through the
connections, affinities or conflicts between them–, relational aesthetics
is also taken into account, since it places interaction at the core of
elaboration of meaning. The curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud
(2002) developed the idea of relational aesthetics to culturally
situate the art of the nineties –although some of his premises are still

78 [DE]CENTERING
 08

significant–, in an attempt that is characterized by the fascination

of art for new economy and technologies, the production of in situ
interventions (“artist-providing-services”), the idea of the “open work”
of art and the interaction with the spectator, who becomes an active
agent (Aguirre 2017). Thus, relational art, which opens new paths for
contemporary architecture, extends the context of the intersubjective
aesthetic experience to the social realm, instead of remaining within
the private symbolic space (Bourriaud 2002, 14). In this regard, we
could understand that relational aesthetics today have surpassed the
space of the museum and the gallery. However, it is important to Framing
acknowledge the limitations of this concept posed by authors such as negativity
Toni Ross (2006) or Peio Aguirre, who detects the multiple clichés
and even caricatures originated from the initial idea, which was
misinterpreted in some cases.30 Aguirre’s interesting analysis, which
raises the question of the unavoidable appropriation of the critical
moment of negation on the part of cultural institutions (“to frame
negativity”), returns to the initial moments of relational aesthetics –

30 Aguirre mentions, for instance, the polemic reading of Claire Bishop (2004) in
October, which was harshly criticized in a letter by Liam Gillick (2006), one of the artists
present in Bourriaud’s book.

Methodological approach 79
 even before the term was coined– in the context of art exhibitions and
galleries. For instance, he recalls how the artist and critic Liam Gillick
(2006, 106) detected in Cologne, at the beginning of the nineties, a
division between a group of artists who advocated transparency within
art (Andrea Fraser, Clegg and Guttmann, and others) and another
group that recognized the importance of finding and articulating “a
sequence of veils and meanderings” in order to “to combat the chaotic
ebb and flow of capitalism” (Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez-
Foerster and others). This latter position, which would occasionally
give birth to the notion of relational aesthetics, opens a space for
critique against a dominant culture that uses transparency as a main
tool for maintaining its hegemony.
Either within or out of the institution, relational aesthetics –
understood beyond its own temporality– provides tools to establish
the link between space and politics –either as negotiation and
consensus, as Bourriaud does, or in terms of antagonism, resistance
and negativity (Aguirre 2017)–, which is essential to the objectives of
this research project. Indeed, conflict appears as a very specific type
of relation and, at the same time, as the ultimate object of politics.
The work of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière seems to be
valuable to further elaborate this connection, as Toni Ross (2006)
understands when revisiting his writings on aesthetics and politics
in her response to Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics. It is important
to keep in mind that Bourriaud advocated the absence of conflict in
favor of negotiation and consensus in artistic practice. To counter
this assumption, Ross interprets Rancière’s notion of the aesthetic
regime of art in order to push relational aesthetics further from
the consensual constraints of liberal politics, based on symmetrical
relations that assume the existence of democratic equality in society.
Asymmetrical Considering that this equality is far from being real and that we are
relations immersed in a mesh of asymmetrical (power) relations, the possibility
of a relational aesthetics based on dissent and conflict appears to
provide a more fruitful framework for the purposes of the research.
One of Rancière’s most determinant contributions is the
examination of politics from an aesthetic perspective as “the
distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2004b), in which he detects
how “spaces, times, and forms of activity” determine how and in what

80 [DE]CENTERING
way individuals participate of the something-in-common shared by
the group (2004b, 12). Thus, following Aristotle, a citizen would be
the one who “has a part in the act of governing and being governed” Distribution
(2004b, 12), while those excluded do not possess this status. In this of the sensible
sort of choreography of partitions and distributions – of “spaces
and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise”
(2004b, 13)–, Rancière finds the aesthetical character of politics –
from a certain a-historical standpoint. Therefore, political activity
is understood as the activity of distribution: “nothing is political in
itself ” (Rancière 1999, 32), but rather everything is ordered through
politics. Thus, political activity –always local and precarious (Rancière
2004a)– is possible because the establishment of relations between
objects/bodies, as well as their calling into question. The author
adds a second term, the police, to designate the means by which this
distribution is regulated, the “law that defines a party’s share or lack
of it” (Rancière 1999, 29). The police is then in charge of establishing
consensus, while “dissensus” (disagreement, conflict) is an issue of
politics (Van Toorn 2012, 60).
The double theorization of “the politics of aesthetics” and
“aesthetics as politics” opens an interesting field that has been further
developed and explored. If Rosalyn Deutsche (1996) had already
introduced the link between spatial politics and artistic practice,
Roemer van Toorn (2012) relies on Rancière to transfer these notions
to architecture while advocating its political possibilities against the
post-critical discourse. By bringing together the critical concept of
autonomy and the interest of projective practice in everyday life, van
Toorn proposes the acceptance of conflict within the very discipline
as a political question. Besides, he places architecture’s political
potential in the capacity of organizing space and time and creating
“possible encounters” for new relations and conflicts (2012, 60). Once
again, the imagination of the possible appears as an essential task of
architecture –and the architect. As examples –despite the connotations
of interiority that both projects may present and that will be later
addressed–, he proposes Wiel Arets’ university library on the Uithof
in Utrecht and Rem Koolhaas’ Casa da Música in Porto, where spaces
and paths are juxtaposed not presenting clear, typical arrangements,
but opening the possibility for collective practice avoiding consensus.

Methodological approach 81
 09 10

With regard to urban space, the possibilities opened by an

extended relational aesthetics are amplified because of the diversity
of agents and the political implications of space –understood as a set
of processual and relational systems (Löw 2006, 120)–, among other
reasons that the research aims at unveiling by placing the focus on
particular situations and urban fragments. As Lieven de Cauter (2004,
7) points out, “the politics of the city is always an aesthetic politics.”
Seductions and (counter)movements.
To think is to describe a path in the geography of thought. (Pardo Torío 1992,
128)

The construction of public space is usually identified with urban

space, but it forms part of social space as well; hence the importance
of linking urban and architectural research and cultural studies
through politics. Working within this framework has the advantage of
not only acquiring knowledge through the observation of relations in
space, but also the possibility of spatializing this knowledge by means
of (spatial) practice.31 Nowadays, there is a considerable amount of
bibliography related to these issues as a consequence of a renewed
interest in urban space, which has grown especially after the citizen
manifestations and protests all around the world.

31 The notion of spatialization of thought as essential for the development of this

work has already been mentioned. Later we will refer to the figure of Giulio Camillo
(1480-1544) as the thinker who dreamed of the human mind as a theater-machine, an
interior space in which to keep and display all possible words, images and ideas (Bologna
2017, 10).

82 [DE]CENTERING
 However, the concern about Western connotations of public
urban space have to be addressed, thus invalidating an approach
concentrated exclusively on Western socio-spatial processes. Instead,
a methodological strategy based on negativity triggers a shift towards
the other and the different. Despite the cultural background in which
the research project –and the researcher– is inserted, the contestation
of a deeply assimilated concept requires to divert the gaze at some
point. If the seductiveness of images has already been outlined, the Seduction
diversity of cities and modes of life share this power. This fascination
for other urban universes is not because of exotism or their attractive
otherness, but by virtue of the reversal of certain values and situations
that are recognized as global from a Western perspective: they are
seductive because they force ourselves to abandon our convictions
and reconfigure our view of the world. The action of abandonment,
of deviating oneself from a fixed path, is at the origins of the wicked
force of seduction: to seduce (from the Latin se-ducere) means to lead
astray, to deviate. This force, however, was obliterated through the
bourgeois era according to Baudrillard (1990, 1), since it did not fit
within the natural and rational realms. But it is precisely its capacity
to destabilize and threaten which makes it fundamental for the
research:
Seduction, however, never belongs to the order of nature, but that of artifice
(…) This is why all the great systems of production and interpretation have not
ceased to exclude seduction -to its good fortune- from their conceptual field.
For seduction continues to haunt them from without, and from deep within its
forsaken state, threatening them with collapse. (…) Every discourse is threatened
with this sudden reversibility. This is why all disciplines, which have as an axiom
the coherence and finality of their discourse, must try to exorcize it. (Baudrillard
1990, 2)

The task, then, is not to completely decipher the code of the three
selected urban fragments to elaborate an extensive cartography of each
one of them, but rather to deviate the research apart from established
truths and narratives, both in a local and a global perspective that
challenges Western preconceptions. These three case studies –
understood as seductiones– do not belong to a traditional Western
context, although Western traces and relations can be detected in
different ways, either because of its influence or its absence. For

Methodological approach 83
 instance, Beijing can be seen as the urban embodiment of a physical
system that radically differs from the Western one throughout history,
although nowadays there is a tendency to endorse certain modes
of life and inhabiting that resemble some of the West that will be
further explored. Warsaw, on the other hand, is the capital of a state
that shares the European project and which holds some of the most
traditional values of Western culture such as the Christian-catholic
tradition. However, its peripheral condition with respect to the
European core and its alignment with the communist bloc after the
Second World War have left some traces that are worth revisiting,
such as the work of Oskar Hansen through human perception and
interaction between bodies and objects. Lastly, the case of Istanbul
represents both the scission and encounter between East and West; a
chiasm that poses a conflictual relation that still resonates today, even
in the virtual realm. The study of these three cases has been conducted
through a series of field trips, the revision of available bibliography
and graphic material and interviews with some main agents. The
objective is not to elaborate a thorough portrait of each city through
specific spatio-temporal situations, but to bring out some conditions
that remain concealed beneath their layers, as pentimenti that hide
possible, non-fulfilled stories and spaces that may reinforce the
understanding of their urban reality.
Thought and Finally, what remains now is the clarification of the structure of
(counter)motion the present work. For this reason, we should come back to Sloterdjik
(2013), who associates theoretical activity –now embedded within
exercitant life– with back and forth movements. The sage, once again
represented by Socrates, leaves the external world when thinking.
He is absent, somewhere else –“Where are we when we think?,”
Hannah Arendt asks (Sloterdijk 2013). As a consequence of the act
of thinking, this displacement suggests the mobile character of “being
outside”; Sloterdijk remembers that Heidegger32 also found an affinity
between the Greek ekstasis and the Latin existentia, revealing once
again the dynamic character of an apparent static activity. Hence,

32 Sloterdijk (2011, 20 ff) further elaborates on the figure of Heidegger as “the

thinker in motion.”

84 [DE]CENTERING
the moment of absence (that Husserl would associate with epoché,
suspension) acquires spatial connotations.33
The course of the present research has been enhanced by multiple
absences and returns to the world of practice. Many thoughts and
ideas have been bracketed –or suspended, as this is the function
that the Spanish philosopher Félix Duque (2001) attributes to this
orthographic sign– for long periods of time until they were ready to
be communicated. Therefore, the articulation of the work responds
to these round trips, exercising a movement and its opposite at the
same time: five movements and counter-movements towards the
realms of the physical city, the body in space and the real-virtual
relations between human and non-human agents, interrupted by three
seductiones to alter the prescribed path.

33 In fact, Sloterdijk (2013) suggests that Plato built the Academia as a space
(“heterotope construction”) for those who were entirely devoted to the activity of
thought.

Methodological approach 85
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92 [DE]CENTERING
93
Spatium negatio.

It is difficult –not to say impossible– to elaborate a singular,

unequivocal definition of the negative. Many authors and thinkers
have used the term in very particular contexts and fields, without
necessarily taking into account the contributions of the others. In fact,
negativity has been broadly considered as a vague, indeterminate issue.
As Diana Coole asserts (2000, 1), some understand that it would Defining
be impossible to name it without destroying it; that is, rendering it the negative
positive. Moreover, there is no univocal meaning of negativity, since
it has been given multiple connotations, such as “dialectics, non-
identity, difference, différance, the invisible, the semiotic, the virtual,
the unconscious, will to power, the feminine” (Coole 2000, 2). In this
regard, it would be rather easy to work within such a nebulous field
and establish suggestive relations among concepts and ideas, in a more
or less consistent way. Having said that, it is necessary to point out
that conducting a research work related to negativity is not an issue
without controversy and risks. How to operate scientifically within a
so heterogeneous realm, which is moreover associated to the irrational,
to the unexpected, to that which is not? And, besides, how may a
concept derived from metaphysics be of interest for contemporary
architecture and spatial practice? Thus, it is necessary to briefly outline
the philosophical origins of negativity, its relation to space and how
it is transferred to the realm of politics and social relations, in which
urban space plays a specific role. At this point, it is pertinent to follow
a chronological sequence to clarify the significance of negativity
and its uses in Western thought. The sense given to similar terms by
different authors may lead to confusion and misconceptions; hence
the importance of revising this central element of the research that
will be explored through the works of Diana Coole (2000), Benjamin
Noys (2010), Gail Day (2011) and Artemy Magun (2013), which
offer powerful insights into the question of the negative from different
perspectives.
Recovering negativity.
The aforementioned authors, although coming from diverse fields –
Magun and Coole from political science and sociology, while Noys’
work is related to philosophy and cultural studies and Day’s to art

Spatium negatio 95
 01

history–, share a common interest for the negative that each one of
them tackle from specific points of view. An intentional reading of
their contributions, always with the issue of space in mind, points
out the most relevant figures in the generation of a philosophy of
negativity that, in addition, have opened some bridges between space
and the negative. This means that not all Western philosophers of
negativity have been included in this section; rather, only those who
somehow offer productive relations between both space and negativity
have been taken into consideration.
Opposition, Unlike the other three authors, Artemy Magun starts his account
equilibrium on the theories of negativity from classical antiquity, to which we
shall return in several occasions throughout the text. Magun (2013,
83) detects that the forces of the negative are already present at the
origins of Western thought in Greece, particularly understood in a
rhetorical and dialogical manner. He places the origins of Western
negativity in the Pythagorean School, which understood the world
through the coupling of contraries (Magun 2013, 83). However,
this conception of the Pythagoreans –who believed in the unity
of astrology, music, mathematics and thought, as well as in the
numerical essence of reality– was based on a static equilibrium, a
cosmic perfection underlying the universe.1 It was Parmenides of
Elea who first questioned this universal reversibility, relegating the

1 The Greek historian Diogenes Laertius describes the interest of the

Pythagoreans in dualisms: “There are also antipodes, and our ‘down’ is their ‘up.’ Light and
darkness have equal part in the universe, so have hot and cold, and dry and moist (...)” Lives

96 [DE]CENTERING
negative to the realm of opinion (doxa), inferior to that of truth
(aletheia). This asymmetry inaugurates a whole tradition of thought
in which the path of negation is considered to be that of “ambiguity,
imagery and subjective irony” (Magun 2013, 83); besides, any Being,
negation implies an immediate affirmation just by naming what we not-Being
want to negate. Parmenidean metaphysics paved the ground for many
other thinkers and philosophers, such as Democritus, who approached
the question of being (associated to the full) and not-being (to the
void) from a materialist perspective where both being and not-being
coexist as real entities; or the sophist Gorgias, who associates negation
with imagination, criticizing Parmenides’ identification of being with
logos, as it is possible “to conceive and name the nonexistent things”
(Magun 2013, 84).
Magun does not mention other relevant episodes, such as the
Antilogies of Protagoras, in which the sophist –disciple of Heraclitus–
showed how the same argument can be presented from opposing
views, or the Socratic maieutic dialectics, the method to draw out
ideas through progressive dialogue and questions. Both the sophists
and Socrates influenced Plato, who was the first philosopher to pose
the problem of the negative as the problem of thought, or rather
“of thought’s ability to discriminate between that which is and that
which is not” (Brassier 2013, 177). Not only did he adopt the back- One and
and-forth dialectic developed by his master, Socrates, but he also Nothing
formulated the question of not-being and its relation to being by
suspending the Parmenidean axiom –“being is, and not-being is
not”–, although some of the ideas of the Elean are still recognizable.
For Plato, negation is difference, the Other of Being, and he
distinguishes four ways of thinking this otherness (Magun 2013,
85): as multiplicity; as ungraspable and transcendental otherness; as a
plural other facing the non-existence of the One, and as Nothing –the
absent and unthinkable One.2 The Platonic khôra, to which we shall

of the Eminent Philosophers. Book VIII, Pythagoreans [26]. Translated by Robert Drew Hicks
(1925).
2 In this sense, humans are permanently struggling with the contemplation of
truth and the imperfect means we have to reach it: “We are condemned to having to deal
with an addition of darkness in all things,” although philosophy would open the possibility
of illumination (Sloterdijk 2010, 24).

Spatium negatio 97
 return later, was already a spatial conception based on pure negativity;
it is the “receptacle without qualities” where images are generated,
appearing as a “formless space” only definable through that which
occupies it. The khôra described in Timaeus is a realm for specters,
imperfect images of the ideas, thus being a sort of interval between the
sensible and the intelligible which however situates negativity out of
dualisms, escaping binaries and dialectics (Derrida 1995).
Relational In his Categories, Aristotle argues for a relational negativity,
negativity that is, things are not positive or negative per se, but only when
opposed to another term.3 Thus, the Other, as well as in the work
of Plato, appears as the main pillar of negativity (Magun 2013, 86).
Parts 10 and 11 of the Aristotelic work are devoted to contrariness
and opposition, of which the philosopher identifies four types:
correlativity –for instance, the relation between “double” and “half,”
or “knowledge” and “the thing known”–; contrariety –between “good”
and “bad,” or “black” and “white” (“either/or” relations)–; privation
–“blindness” and “sight,” when one of the terms is considered to
be a natural state and the other represents a lack, a privation of a
positive state–, and finally, “affirmation to negation” or contradiction
between mutually incompatible statements –“Socrates is ill” and
“Socrates is well.” What is remarkable about these sections is that
Aristotle sees negativity as an active force and not as a static encounter
of “indifferent positivities,” thus anticipating the work of Kant and
Hegel on the negative (Magun 2013, 89). Besides, anticipating
future conceptions of space as a negative, relational realm, the Greek
philosopher would define space as the result of defining all contraries.4
Before discussing the role of negativity in modern thought, it
is worth recognizing the influence of Christian Neo-Platonism in
medieval and scholastic philosophy. Negation, through the so-called

3 “No one of these terms, in and by itself, involves an affirmation; it is by the

combination of such terms that positive or negative statements arise. For every assertion
must, as is admitted, be either true or false, whereas expressions which are not in any way
composite such as ‘man’, ‘white’, ‘runs’, ‘wins’, cannot be either true or false.” Aristotle.
Categories [4]. Translated by E. M. Edghill.
4 “Indeed, it seems that in defining contraries of every kind men have recourse
to a spatial metaphor, for they say that those things are contraries which, within the same
class, are separated by the greatest possible distance” (Aristotle, Categories chapter 6).

98 [DE]CENTERING
via negativa, was promoted as a privileged –although not exclusive– Apophatic
way to know God by stating what It is not, since it is impossible to thought
know what It really is. Hence, only a-gnosia and contemplation would
be possible. This mode of discernment, called apophasis (contrary
to kataphasis, related to affirmation), was followed by thinkers such
as Pseudo Dionysus the Aeropagite (who invites to know by not
knowing, illuminated by a “ray of darkness”) and later by John Scotus,
Meister Eckhart and scholastics such as Duns Scotus and Thomas
Aquinas, creating a language of “radical openness”5 (Franke 2014, 90)
towards the unknown through uncertainty and elusion. Again, it shall
be remarked that this way of knowing through negation is not unique
to Christian and Western thought, but rather it is present in earlier
Eastern traditions, such as the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana
Buddhism, wu wei in Taoism and Neo-Taoism,6 the Hindu school
of Advaita Vedanta and the Vedic notion of neti neti (“not this, not
this”), or later with the Sephardic Jewish philosopher Maimonides and
his Guide for the Perplexed (1904) and in Islamic negative theology,
lahoot salbi. Indeed, many Greek classical texts arrived in medieval
Europe through the Arabic culture, hence the assimilations and
transfers to Christian thought.
It is still possible to recognize the echo of this tradition in a crucial
assertion that has been traditionally attributed to Baruch Spinoza:
“Omnis determinatio est negatio” (“every determination is negation”)7

5 This type of negative critique is recognizable in the work of Adorno and

Horkheimer “contra the conceptual idolatry that is rampant in modern and postmodern
culture, with their unbridled consumerism, their commodity fetishism, and their culture
industry dominated by technocratic power” (Franke 2014, 96). More recently, it can be
identified as well in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Gianni Vattimo or Giorgio Agamben.
6 “Tao is the source of all being, but instead of identifying Tao with a creator
‘heaven’ or a ‘vital energy’ (ch’i), Wang Pi argues that Being originates from ‘non-Being’
(wu). The concept of non-Being, taken from Lao Tzu, brings to light the significance of Tao.
Nameless and formless, Tao as such can only be described negatively as wu, literally ‘not
having’ any feature” (Audi (ed.) 2004, 703). [T.A.]
7 In the letter 50 to Jarig Jellis, Spinoza wrote: “As to the doctrine that figure
is negation and not anything positive, it is plain that the whole of matter considered
indefinitely can have no figure, and that figure can only exist in finite and determinate
bodies. For he who says, that he perceives a figure, merely indicates thereby, that he
conceives a determinate thing, and how it is determinate. This determination, therefore,
does not appertain to the thing according to its being, but, on the contrary, is its non-

Spatium negatio 99
 when arguing that since the universe has no determinate form or
shape, all forms and shapes “introduce negativity” into God/the
universe, “who does not contain it per se” (Magun 2013, 92), as it is
infinite and ungraspable. Thus, affirmation and negation appear as
tied to each other, as different moments of a same logic. This would
have strong repercussions in German idealism, especially in Hegel,
who would understand negativity as the motor of his philosophical
Critique and system. Immanuel Kant would also deal with negativity at some
negation point, but it was not a central issue in his philosophy. Despite this,
some authors consider that he made some relevant contributions in
this regard, and so Magun (2013, 92 ff) focuses on his pre-critical
period, when he writes a brief text entitled “Attempt to Introduce
the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” (1992) in
1763. Departing from mathematical concepts, Kant makes a crucial
distinction between logical opposition –a sheer lack, “nihil negativum
irrepraesentabile” (Kant 1992, 211)– and real opposition, which
corresponds to a material force of resistance, repugnancy (Repugnanz)
–“nihil privativum, repraesentabile” (Kant 1992, 211). In the third
section of the text, Kant recognizes the negative, obscure character
of the psychological forces of imagination and the unconscious,
although he does not explain this further. Diana Coole (2000), who
explores the Kantian Critiques, perceives the German philosopher
as “an ambiguous figure (…) who engendered or succumbed to
negativity in his attempt to exile it, but in whose project of critique a
certain negativity is nevertheless embraced” (2000, 13), even though
when negativity as a modern problem had not yet been formulated.
Thus, in the texts of Kant, it is possible to appreciate the incipient
movement from classical negation –as action– towards a modern
sense of negativity, understood as potentiality. This negativity opens
the possibility of critique as a “process of interrogating rationally-
unjustifiable authority, whether philosophical or political” (Coole
2000, 40).

being. As then figure is nothing else than determination, and determination is negation,
figure, as has been said, can be nothing but negation.” [The last two sentences are
translated from Latin, being the original text as follows: Haec ergo determinatio ad rem
juxta suum esse non pertinet: sed e contra est ejus non esse. Quia ergo figura non aliud quam
determinatio, et determinatio negatio est; non poterit, ut dictum, aliud quid, quam negatio esse.]

100 [DE]CENTERING
 However, Kant is permanently struggling against inconsistencies
and contradictions when trying to establish the limits of reason –in
a spatial, almost cartographic system that is, according to Adorno
(2004, 388), “a system of stop signals”–, leaving outside those
elements that do not fit into the system, such as imagination and
doubt to a certain extent. This attitude is clearly reflected in his texts,
in which he always tries to overcome and rationalize negativity instead
of embracing contradictions and dualities –what Coole (2000, 41)
calls “generative negativity.” Kant aims at dissolving sceptical, pre-
critical thought by rendering positive and productive the problem of
the limit:
The problematic engendered by scepticism (…) undermines epistemic
confidence in the truth or accessibility of the given (the positive), sustaining an
interrogative and doubting attitude towards it. Things are not what they seem.
A sceptical attitude invokes the possibility, at worst, of a void (outside the mind
there is nothing; objective reality is an illusion; what seems to be present may be
absent) or, at best, of a slippage between subject and object, with its attendant
uncertainties concerning misrepresentation and error, where knowledge might
dissolve into contingency or fantasy. (Coole 2000, 16)

Thus, Kant’s negativity is not explicit, but it unavoidably emerges Negative

because of the placing of limits: it is not generative, but formal. noumena
Still, Coole finds an ultimate access to negativity in Kant in negative
noumena, which unlike positive noumena (that allow the transition
to the moral dimension), are accessible to the senses but not to
understanding: “Perhaps then there is a nonrepresentational ‘knowing’
that Kant’s sensibility/understanding configuration denies, where
knowledge is more fragile and opaque than the transcendental method
allows” (Coole 2000, 33). This form of knowing by not-knowing,
related to the ungraspable, non-understandable dimension of sensitive
experience acquires a renewed interest, when bodies and affects
occupy a relevant position in contemporary thought.
Nevertheless, after this brief overview of the most important Negativity
contributions on negativity in classical and pre-modern Western as motor
thought, Hegel is considered to be the first modern “adventurer”
in negativity because of his articulation of dialectics, in which the
negative comes to be the very motor of knowledge (thought) and
reality (life) through “a dynamics of becoming” (Coole 2000, 43). In

Spatium negatio 101

 02

this regard, his work represents a milestone that cannot be bypassed

or overlooked in any way. Whether to criticize, endorse or recover its
sense of negativity, it is continuously being re-read, re-interpreted,
re-appropriated, either for its extension or contestation. In fact,
after a long period of refusal and reaction against his philosophy
from very different positions, an incipient tendency is emerging
with a renewed interest for Hegelian –and Platonic– thought within
radical contemporary philosophy, as in the works of Alain Badiou
Architectural (2008; 2011) or Slavoj Žižek (1993; 2012).8 This can be regarded as
metaphor an attempt to recover an “architectonic system” or foundation that
stabilizes a philosophy that has been repositioned against reason –
mainly by Nietzsche and French poststructuralism (Lahiji 2014, 2
ff); a recovery that appears even more clearly through the theoretical
arch traced on the architectural metaphor by Derrida (1999), Hollier
(1993) and Karatani (1995). Lahiji also puts forward the opposition
between the architectural and the musical metaphor in philosophy,
represented mainly by Plato and Hegel –even Kant– on the one side,

8 Besides, Hegelian negativity had also been approached before by authors

like Julia Kristeva (1984; Kramer 2013) and Herbert Marcuse (1941)from different
perspectives.

102 [DE]CENTERING
and Nietzsche on the other, displaying a tension between “grounding”
and “freedom,” certainty and deconstruction.
Hegelian metaphysics are actually regarded as an extension –or
even the “consummation” (Sloterdijk 2010, 79)– of Christian-
Platonic metaphysics. His dialectics, simultaneously ontological and
methodological (Coole 2000, 52), is deeply rooted in the philosophy
of Plato and the introduction of difference within the realm of Being.
Both understood knowledge as a gradual process that moves from
elementary forms to concrete, more perfect ones, although Hegel
would be the one to introduce the dialectical character of time and
history, coinciding with the revolutionary discourse of Enlightenment
and opening a vast field to be explored by further adventurers.
Besides, the dialogical character of Platonic dialectics is not present
in Hegel, who understands the process as an individual progression
inserted in the path toward universal realization.
The movement of a being that immediately is consists partly in becoming an
other than itself, and thus becoming its own immanent content; partly in taking
back into itself this unfolding [of its content] or this existence of it, i.e., in
making itself into a moment, and simplifying itself into something determinate.
In the former movement, negativity is the differentiating and positing of
existence; in this return into self, it is the becoming of determinate simplicity.
(Hegel 1998, 32)

The abstract, floating ideas of Plato, which represent the ultimate Identity and
stage of knowledge, would crystalize into Hegelian particular difference
consciousness, which continuously evolves and goes beyond itself
through contradictions and entanglements, “to discover in the end
that its identity (…) lays not in an abstract sameness or an empty self-
contemplation, but in going outside itself (…): inhabiting exteriority
and difference is how we reach a knowledge of ourselves that,
moreover, always differs and escapes” (Barrios Casares 1995, 129).9

9 [T.A.] This interpretation of the Spanish philosopher Manuel Barrios is

interesting because it associates Hegel with exteriority, something that is quite unusual.
We shall return later to the duality interiority/exteriority as a reflection on the characters
of time and space. Suffice it to say at this moment that Hegelian thought is often related to
the interior, to the internal realm of time and Being: thus, the contrary of something is not
its extreme, but an internal “reflection of its other” (Magun 2013, 100). This would weaken

Spatium negatio 103

 However, negativity, which is essential for both Plato and Hegel,
remains secondary and subordinated to the positive (being). For
instance, negativity is overcome by the “negation of negation” in
Hegelian dialectics. Essence is thus related to the Absolute, and
difference is relegated to the background, as a force that fades after the
dialectical process to re-appear again and again.10
The disruptive forces of negativity drive things forward in a world
that, following Spinoza, is always already-negated, and where “any
fact or law” are “internally contradictory, implying the possibility of
its opposite” (Magun 2013, 97). Since everything carries its negation
–or its potential “becoming”– within, the possibility of critique is
radically opened up leading not to a nihilistic approach (Hass 2014,
7), but to an active one –even chronological, in the case of Hegel. This
has strong repercussions in the socio-political sphere, since dialectics
are ultimately a permanent renewal of conflict. Dialectics as a critical
practice, as Coole (2000, 55) sees it, “might allow the political to
unfold in a more rational way.” But still, the negative remnants of the
irrational, of that which cannot be surpassed by the dialectical forces,
are not further analyzed by the German philosopher.11 Besides, his
system, when applied to the logic of the state, aims at overcoming
contradictions within an irrational, individualist society (Marcuse
1941, 61). At this point, one of the deepest ruptures emerges in the
continuity of the Hegelian order.
Against Is Hegel a “positive” or a “negative” philosopher; a philosopher of
Hegel “identity” or of “difference”? This is by no means a simple question,

the Deleuzian interpretation of Hegel and, at the same time, evoke a retreat from the
exterior realm –which is theorized and explained by Pardo (1992).
10 “In continuity with the Platonic metaphysical tradition, [Hegel] is not ready to
give negativity full rein, that is, his dialectics is ultimately an effort to ‘normalize’ the excess
of negativity. For late Plato already, the problem was how to relativize or contextualize
non-being as a subordinate moment of being (non-being is always a particular/ determinate
lack of being measured by the fullness it fails to actualize; there is no non-being as such,
there is always only (…) In the same vein, Hegelian ‘negativity’ serves to ‘proscribe
absolute difference’ or ‘non-being’: negativity is limited to the obliteration of all finite/
immediate determinations” (Žižek 2012, 199).
11 “The modern history of the human spirit—and not that alone—has been an
apologetic labor of Sisyphus: thinking away the negative side of the universal” (Adorno
2004, 327).

104 [DE]CENTERING
and a definitive answer would be too simplistic, given the diversity
of interpretations to which the work of the German philosopher
has been subject. For instance, Marcuse mentions the reaction from
positive philosophy (mainly Schelling and Stahl in Germany) against
Hegelian negativity and the permanent critique of the real, which,
according to them, “repudiated any irrational and unreasonable
reality” (Marcuse 1941, 325) through a transcendental reason
that obliterates the nature and experience of things –in this sense,
positive philosophy establishes a link with scientific positivism. Later,
influenced by Nietzsche, French anti- or non-dialectical philosophers
such as Derrida and Deleuze would return to Hegel to criticize the
binaristic reduction to which plural and diverse difference is subsumed
in his philosophy. Rather, they would advocate a philosophy of
affirmation to a greater or lesser extent.12 However, Noys (2010, 25
ff) makes a clear distinction between these two philosophers; while
Deleuze represents an “adieu” to negativity, Derrida embraces a “weak
affirmationism” that cannot be reduced to an anti-dialectical position.
On the contrary, others have seen a predominance of the positive
in different aspects of his work. In this regard, Alexandre Kojève
(1980, 171)13 does not consider Hegelian dialectics as a dialectical
method, but an empiricist or phenomenological one “in Husserl’s
sense of the term”; even “positivist” and contemplative. For his part,
Merleau-Ponty, during his lectures at the Collège de France (1970),
explored dialectical philosophy and would detect a transition from the
earlier to the later Hegel, whose position evolved from the negatively

12 Partly because the profusion of spatial references in his work (folds, plateaus,
rhizomes…), Gilles Deleuze became –and still is– extremely popular among architects
and architectural theoreticians in the wake of deconstructionism, as a source of thought
and inspiration for projects and texts. However, his work has been often misread and
distorted, leading to the creation of pseudo-philosophical concepts to justify certain
decisions. Andreotti and Lahiji (2016, 157) and Spencer (2016), among other, warn about
the uncritical appropriations of Deleuzian terms in the field of architecture and relate
these practices to the proliferation of spectacular, iconic architectures which enhance the
neoliberal phantasmagoria generating an overloading aesthetic experience which stuns and
blocks the user/spectator.
13 There is a consolidated tradition in French philosophy around the notions
of negativity and the dyad identity-difference. Vincent Descombes (1988) recapitulates
the main contributions on the topic from philosophers such as Kojève and his Hegelian
interpretation, Derrida or Deleuze.

Spatium negatio 105

 03 04

to the positively rational. Therefore, the French philosopher saw in

this first period a possibility for the redemption of negativity, “not
as the Truth of a completed history, but as an expression of the
modernity whose particular mode of being-in-the-world is one of
rationalism and whose epoch acquires an appropriate, but limited,
level of self-understanding” (Coole 2000, 56). It is important to
remark that Merleau-Ponty would organize a great part of his thought
work dual structures, as in his posthumous book The Visible and the
Invisible (1968), in which he presents the figure of the chiasm within
his ontology of flesh, as a bidirectional relation between body and
things.
Negative Nonetheless, the most remarkable contribution has been
dialectics Adorno’s (2004) critique of Hegelian dialectics –influenced by
Marxist dialectical materialism and the philosopher’s relation to
Benjamin (Buck-Morss 1977)–, displacing the focus from identity
to non-identity, and elaborating a negative dialectics that does
not contemplate the moment of reconciliation. Stemming from a

106 [DE]CENTERING
society damaged by the horrors of World War II,14 after which the
real and reason do not concur anymore, negative dialectics aims at
resisting a Hegelian system “that reproduces the vices that it pretends
to eradicate” (Aguirre 2014, 188). Thus, contradiction acquires a
main role that had been denied by traditional dialectics, without
contemplating an Absolute, a totalizing logic or a final synthesis.
In any case, the ground broken by Hegel is so wide that it is Differential
impossible to navigate through it by following a univocal direction, negativities
as the amount and disparity of interpretations and works on him
demonstrate. This reflects the multiplicity of senses of negativity that
operate intertwined –and not sufficiently clarified– in his oeuvre,
which Coole (2000, 60) distinguishes as “differential negativities”:
(…) one whose mobility is unrepresentable yet invoked by stylistic strategies
that convey its generativity; one that is rendered more lawful via the deployment
of logical categories which structure dialectical dynamics; and finally one
that only masquerades as the negative. The first of these is the most elusive
and brings Hegel closer to philosophies of alterity and difference than is
often acknowledged; the second is associated with a critical hermeneutics
and praxis, as well as with a recognisably dialectical rhythm of formation and
rupture; the last is where Hegel’s infidelity to the negative is located in an
idealist, metaphysical move that renders him a philosopher of identity. These
three dimensions could again be described respectively as negativity which is
affirmative; as negation which mediates negative and positive, and as surrender
to positivism. (…)To the first, most heterogeneous, negativity there clings a
politically-radical aura since its generativity promises a relentless destabilising of
every reified form, although it is difficult to redeem its promises in any collective
action or critique. The latter are more definitively related to the second, where
the imbrication of negative and positive occur and where ideas and material

14 “History is the unity of continuity and discontinuity. Society stays alive, not
despite its antagonism, but by means of it; the profit interest and thus the class relationship
make up the objective motor of the production process which the life of all men hangs
by, and the primacy of which has its vanishing point in the death of all. This also implies
the reconciling side of the irreconcilable; since nothing else permits men to live, not even
a changed life would be possible without it. What historically made this possibility may as
well destroy it. The world spirit, a worthy object of definition, would have to be defined
as permanent catastrophe” (Adorno 2004, 320). See also the chapter After Auschwitz
(Adorno 2004).

Spatium negatio 107

 practices, positive institutions and their practical negation, occur. The last is a
fate always awaiting theories of negativity and the one against which the first two
are mobilised. (Coole 2000, 60)

As stated before, Hegelian thought became a central milestone in

Western philosophy, to the point that many of his successors felt
compelled to return to his work, either to praise, extend or criticize it,
since it presented a rational system-method that aimed at explaining
a totality. In broad terms, two great branches emerge in philosophy
after Hegel, dealing with his dialectical legacy and the becoming of
reason. The first includes those who adopt dialectics and transform it
as a means of understanding and unveiling different aspects of reality.
In this group, led by Hegel’s main disciple Karl Marx –who adapted
Hegelian dialectics to the understanding of productive socio-political
and economic forces from a materialist perspective–15 and the “young
Hegelians” such as Mijail Bakunin, we also find “dialectical” thinkers
like György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and a pleiad
of Neo-Marxist and post-Marxist authors such as Herbert Marcuse
and others from different disciplines, such as the geographer David
Harvey or the literary critic Fredric Jameson. The second group, which
is much more heterogeneous and cannot be considered as a single line
of thought, comprises those who openly reject Hegelian dialectics
as a linear progression of reason and history: among these anti-
dialectical and non-dialectical thinkers it is worth mentioning Arthur
Schopenhauer –contemporary and fierce critic of Hegel–, Søren
Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and later, the French poststructuralist
circle and its predecessors: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles
Deleuze or Félix Guattari. The inaugural thought of Nietzsche,
introducing the eternal return and the will to power, supposed a severe
blow to the Judeo-Christian tradition based on nihilism and denial of
life, in which Hegel and his conception of the State are inserted; later
philosophers would be greatly influenced by Nietzschean philosophy,
exploring the connections between affirmation and difference –even
when it can still be argued the very meaning of “difference” necessarily

15 “My relationship with Hegel is very simple. I am a disciple of Hegel, and the
presumptuous chattering of the epigones who think they have buried this great thinker
appear frankly ridiculous to me. Nevertheless, I have taken the liberty of adopting towards
my master a critical attitude, disencumbering his dialectic of its mysticism and thus putting
it through a profound change, etc. etc.” (Marx 2008, 32).

108 [DE]CENTERING
implies an “other” to be confronted with.16 As a parallel tendency
to the French one –often divergent, but with several interests in
common–, the Italian operaists reinterpreted Marxist dialectics per
via negativa, that is, they considered that the workers’ action against
their work caused the evolution of capital, not vice versa (Aureli 2008,
9). After the autunno caldo of 1969, Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri,
Raniero Panzieri or Massimo Cacciari were some of the philosophers
and political thinkers who concentrated around operaism, although
their ideas would soon differ.17
Having recognized the fracture opened after Hegel –and
broadened by Marx, once he deprives dialectics of its metaphysical
implications and introduces political dynamics, force and counter-
force, capitalism and proletariat–, it is necessary to land in order to
understand how negativity has been significant –and if it still is– in
the modern understanding of space. It should be noted that, despite
its metaphysical origins, negativity will be explored from now on
as a force intimately related to social action and resistance, as it was
conceived after the Marxian revolution. However, it is fundamental
to be aware of its origins –at least in Western thought–, as they will
shed light on some of the questions addressed throughout the text.
Thus, negativity will be mainly considered as a force, emerging from a
dialectical understanding of the world but being more than a reverse
dependent on affirmation or its positive counterpart. Rather, negation
is action; the negative is ultimately related to otherness (see Brassier
2013, 180) and difference; it does not represent a mere opposite,
since “everything seems pregnant with its contrary” (Marx 1969,
500). However, to elaborate a richer definition of negativity, other
contemporary positions should be considered. For instance, in a paper
on Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language, Sina Kramer (2013, 465)

16 In “Adieu to Negativity,” Benjamin Noys (2010, 51–79) dissects the relation of

Gilles Deleuze with negativity, influenced by Nietzsche but also by Bergson, who shares
with him a consideration of negativity as a “false problem.” He proposes the term “internal
difference” –distinct to contradiction, alterity or negation– which is immediate (non-
mediated) and impulses life as a force.
17 We shall return later to this group, since their contributions to spatial and
architectural theory in terms of a political counterplan are relevant to the purposes of the
research, especially regarding the so-called School of Venice headed by Massimo Cacciari
and the historians of architecture Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco dal Co.

Spatium negatio 109

 05 06

defines negativity as “the force that brings identity and difference into
relation,” opening the possibility to think negativity and exclusion as
political critique.
[Kristeva associates] Negativity (…) with excess, with the primary processes,
with heterogeneity and with “infinitesimal differentiation”. This negativity is a
disruptive movement, what Kristeva calls a “liquefying and dissolving agent”
that is the condition of the possibility of anything like a stable subject, but that
is also the possibility of that subject’s dissolution and fragmentation. (Kramer
2013, 467)

Either/or Once surpassed Hegel’s vision, it is, then, more accurate to talk of a
Both/and force that opens a wider space to alternative possibilities to being, not
only focusing on “gaps and disjunctures,” but also on “the negative
magnitudes of imagination” (Magun 2013, 117), which unveil the
possible hidden behind an hegemonic reality. In this regard, a radical
dialectical perspective of either/or is not as fruitful as the more subtle,
inclusive one (both/and), related to tangible realities and to abstract
conceptions and representations of space, as Peio Aguirre (2014, 187)
suggests when analyzing the task of critique today.
Given the complexity of the present situation, systems of reference
will be continuously changing throughout the discourse, in an
explicit or implicit way. In any case, a dichotomic understanding
of the negative seems reductionist and would not allow an accurate
comprehension of its potential. The negative is a working force, which
organizes and unsettles at the same time; it is both a foundation
and a revulsive, as Manuel Delgado (2003) points out in his
“non-city,” or as the English poet John Keats defines as negative

110 [DE]CENTERING
capability: contemplating the world without wanting to reconcile Negative
its contradictions or enclose it into a rational system, “when man capability
is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without
any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Keats, Letter to George
and Tom Keats, December 1817), which is nonetheless linked to
exceptionally creative characters.18 Similarly, negativity appears as a
fundamental attribute of art, at least as understood by the Frankfurt
School. Contrary to pop culture or consumerism, both based on
affirmation, one of art’s main functions is to “confirm the operations
of negation or rejection of the world as it is presented to us” (Aguirre
2014, 44). In any of these interpretations, the negative is regarded
as a strong transformative power, as this research project aims at
underpinning.
There is still a dimension of negativity that has not been addressed Negativity as
yet, and whose influence has been crucial to the Western conception exteriority
of space: it is that of a subordinate reverse, which emerges as an
asymmetrical relation usually applied to space as subsumed to time.
In fact, Pardo (1992, 48) sees that the whole Western philosophy is
founded over the “History of the Spirit –of culture– as the history
of the emancipation of conscience of all exteriority (progressively
represented by ‘space’) and gradually conquered ‘in the course of
time.’ Hence the permanent Hegelian distinction between ‘rational’–
or real– stories and ‘factual’ stories –irrational and unreal–, which
he precisely considered as ‘exterior.’” Once again, Hegel (2004, 37)
sets a point of departure for the research when he conceives space as
negated time that has to be itself negated in order to apprehend and
intuit nature. However, although this dimension will be explored in
the next section, we can anticipate that the modern transformations

18 The Bolognese Galleria Astuni organized in 2013 an exhibition in which

the notion of negative capability was related to the work of seven artists of different
generations, articulated in three poles: the suspension of judgment with respect to the
representation of space (Giulio Paolini and Reinhard Mucha); the negative charge in politics
(Pier Paolo Calzolari, Annetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkáčová) and a meditation on “abstract
representability” (Peter Halley and Carla Accardi). In the words of the curators Lorenzi
Bruni and Giovanni Iovane, “the work of art that emerges from this type of attitude aims
not to occupy a position in the space of reality, but escapes it (in an antagonistic, ‘resistant’
form as stated in the principles of Negative Capability) and, at the same time, aims to
double it.”

Spatium negatio 111

 of the relation between humans and nature and the “disappearance” of
nature as such would have its repercussions in further understandings
and conceptions of space.
Before concluding, we have seen that the meaning of negativity
has evolved throughout time. However, the general attitude towards
the negative today is quite different from what it used to be in
past situations. In our days, negativity is usually regarded with
caution, fear, or even disdain, and “being negative” has a terrible
reputation in a world that privileges happiness and positivity over
gloomy characters, pessimistic positions and critical readings. At
best, negativity has been absorbed within the norm, as a “necessary
counterpower” to speculate with –as it happened with the historic
avant-gardes that entered a sort of self-sabotage logic facing a cultural
industry that needs them (Aguirre 2014, 188- 189).19 Thus, resistance,
critique and opposition are conveniently dosed by power institutions
and corporations to validate their decisions and reinforce them toward
the public eye. The distance between reality and its potential, which
used to be the domain of critique and negativity, has been practically
abolished, as it will be discussed in further sections, taking the
arguments of Aguirre (2014) and Han (2013) as essential references.
Space (as exteriority) and negativity.
Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas. [Do not go
outwards, return into yourself. Truth lives in the inner man.](Augustine of
Hippo, De Vera Religione, 390, §39, 37)

Attend to yourself: turn your attention away from everything that surrounds you
and towards your inner life; this is the first demand that philosophy makes of its
disciple. Our concern is not with anything that lies outside you, but only with
yourself. (Fichte, First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge, 1797)

19 Aguirre (2014, 189-190) uses Gus van Sant’s film Promised Land (2012) as
an example of how some cultural products reflect how negativity is used by power for
its own interest. The film shows the struggle between the representative of a fracking
company who aims at convincing a small town of the benefits that such an activity could
bring them and an eco-activist who rejects the project and manages to change the minds
of the inhabitants. The contradiction between the character and occupation of the main
characters (the good guy is actually the multinational’s worker and his antagonist is the
ecologist) contributes to reinforce the conflict between positive and negative values.

112 [DE]CENTERING
Modernity could be explained through the process of subordination
of space to time. The Cartesian division between res extensa and res
cogitans already established the differentiation of two independent
realms: the first, abstract, exterior and separated from the sensible
reality; the second, subjective and belonging to the inner dimension
of mind, through which knowledge and thought are possible. Here,
José Luis Pardo (1992, 22) notes how these dimensions would be
associated to space and time respectively and how the privileged
realm of the subjective interior –identified with the subject who
thinks– would gradually become “time,” following a line of thought
“from Kant to Heidegger going through Hegel, Husserl, Dilthey and
Bergson.” Augustine had already advanced the idea of the rational Self,
who can only grasp the truth from within, and exterior would remain
as the realm of mutability and imperfection for centuries.20 Space has
been broadly identified with an exterior measurable and graspable
thanks to inner reason, which is the only certainty the modern
subject could trust. It is not surprising that the Kantian notion of a
human mind defined by the capacity to return to itself from cosmic
exteriority is directly reflected, according to Sloterdijk (2013, 25), in
Benjamin’s bourgeois interior that “for the private man, represents the
universe. In the interior, he brings together the far away and the long
ago. His living room is a box in the theater of the world” (Benjamin
2002, 9).
Long before this bourgeois inner fortress, the Western recognition Theater
of the interior as the privileged space of thought and truth is evident of mind
in spatializations such as those built by the Italian philosopher Giulio
“Delminio” Camillo. In L’Idea del Theatro, during the first decades
of the sixteenth century, Delminio conceived a hypothetical hybrid
space between theater and library in which all the universal knowledge
would be contained and interrelated thanks to the machinic capacity
of the human mind. This “Theater of Memory,” which as Bologna
indicates represents a miniature of the universe, manifests itself
spatially as “a totalizing encyclopedia based on the relations between
ideas, images and words” adopting the form of the Vitruvian
amphitheater that Fra Giocondo would later re-discover and interpret

20 Several contemporary authors undertake a critique of the primacy of interiority

(Pardo Torío 1992; Mattéi 2005; Escudero Pérez 2013).

Spatium negatio 113

 (Bologna 2017, 10).21 Already Hugo of Sainn Victor had introduced
in De Archa Noe a “spiritual edifice” to be built mentally through the
virtual reflection of the exterior. And while Delminio was working on
his universal theater, Ignatius of Loyola was designing his Spiritual
Exercises as a way for the subject to withdraw into himself to meet the
divine truth. According to Bologna (2017), all these incursions into
the space of the interior are part of the same great dream, which could
be summarized as follows:
[T]o transform our mind and that of all mankind into an internal building in
perpetual growth, in an organic machine of memory and creativity that could
itself morph and metamorphose the world through concentration, spiritual
exercise and the domain of the abysmal network of wisdom, transferring it to the
concrete life of individuals and even of collectivities and States. (Bologna 2017,
11)

However, it would be Hegel who sought to provide a rational

substrate to this primacy of the interior, being responsible to a great
extent for this association of a privileged inside containing the Self
and the spirit, and a chaotic, abstract, extensive exterior related to
the Other, the unthinkable. In his Philosophy of Nature (2004), the
philosopher devotes a section to the category of space, defining it as
follows:
The first or immediate determination of Nature is Space: the abstract universality
of Nature’s self-externality, self-externality’s mediationless indifference. It is a
wholly ideal side-by-sideness because it is self-externality; and it is absolutely
continuous, because this asunderness is still quite abstract, and contains no
specific difference within itself. (Hegel and Miller (transl.) 2004, §254, 28)

Abstract space Like time, space is a “pure form of sense or intuition” (2004, §258,
34), but both differ in their condition and relation to being, since
space is “abstract objectivity” and time “abstract subjectivity.” The
fact that space is considered to precede time in thought –also in the
structure of Hegel’s work– is quite significant, since it implies that
the philosopher perceives space as an inferior, more basic category

21 [T.A.] Apparently, Camillo designed a small Theater of Wisdom, built in wood

around the twenties-thirties of the sixteenth century, first in Padua and then in Paris.

114 [DE]CENTERING
compared to time,22 which is motor, transformative power: “[t]he
truth of space is time, and thus space becomes time” (Hegel 2004,
§257 Zusatz, 34). Conversely, space would be the distorted and
external expression of time.
(…) time itself is the becoming, this coming-to-be and passing away, the actually
existent abstraction, Chronos, from whom everything is born and by whom
its offspring is destroyed. The real is certainly distinct from time, but is also
essentially identical with it. (Hegel 2004, §258 Remark, 35)

Therefore, space is presented as the primitive, first dialectical moment

of nature, belonging to the realm of “thought gone outside itself as
the thought of outsideness” (Brann 2016), that eventually becomes
time through motion and thus is liberated from its “paralysis” and
indifference23 (Brann 1999, 26). If time is associated with the negation
of the negation and its positive outcome that allows transformation
within itself, negation in space is always related to an Other, as pure
exteriority. In this regard, the beginning of what Pardo (1992, 23)
would call a “prosecution against space” on behalf of philosophy
as metaphysics could be situated at this point. This is because of
metaphysics’ ascetic ideals –against which Nietzsche would famously
rebel– that privilege spirit as pure interiority; then, space cannot be at
the same level. (Pardo Torío 1992, 33) Thus, Hegel established time as
the truth of space, and space as the negative, distorted and fake image
of time.
It is not surprising to find that the approximation of Hegel to
space is mainly geometrical –space, unlike time, has its own science,
geometry–, recovering some aspects already observed in ancient
Greece, and of course by Descartes and Kant. Space is conceived as
pure extension which finds its negation in the point, concrete and
determinate (Hegel 2004, §256, 31). In fact, as Emmánuel Lizcano Against
(2011, 31) notes, certain schools of thought –Greeks, Romans, space
Arabs, etc.– had already posited geometry as a system “against space,”
that is, to control and measure it with delimited surfaces that could

22 Interestingly, architecture also appears in first place in his Aesthetics (Hegel

1975) –before sculpture, painting, music and poetry–, since it is considered to be the
primeval and less refined form of art.
23 Opposed to the main characteristic of time, that is, difference.

Spatium negatio 115

 07

avoid a complete dissolution. In Ousia and Gramme (1982), Jacques

Derrida traces, following Heidegger, the connections between Hegel
and Aristotle’s conceptions of time and space, based in permanent
oppositions, and affirms the Hegelian point as the negation of space
that, “developed for itself,” becomes time (Hegel 2004, §259 Remark,
37; Derrida 1982, 46). The point, sublating itself, thus becomes
a line, which is not an ensemble of points, but “the point existing
outside of itself,” and the same applies to the plane with respect to the
line.
This oppositional conception of space would have a remarkable
influence in the theory and practice of architecture, understood as
the discipline of the limitation and framing of spaces graphically
represented by sequences of fills and voids. As his whole work, Hegel’s
conception of architecture represents a milestone, to the point that
any philosopher that has reflected on architecture has necessarily
returned to Hegel’s contribution, either to confirm or refute it (Lahiji
2014, 2). In Architecture (1981), the specific section within his
lectures on Fine Art (Aesthetics), Hegel presents the evolution of what
he considers to be the beginning of art, since it “has not found for the
presentation of its spiritual content either the adequate material or the
corresponding forms” (Hegel 1975, 624). This situates architecture as
the most imperfect art, contrary to speech and poetry, which emanate
directly from the spirit, from the inside, without material or external
constraints. Nevertheless, Hegel recognizes an architecture that has

116 [DE]CENTERING
evolved throughout history from elementary forms –or symbolic
architecture, present in ancient Eastern civilizations such as Egypt
or India– to more sophisticated stages, that is, classical –Greece
and Rome– and romantic architecture, corresponding to European
Christendom. Needless to say that the association of different stages
of architecture with specific cultures is far from being innocent, since
the whole Hegelian philosophical system pointed to the superiority
of Western civilization over the rest of the world and, in this case,
differences in architectural systems served as a means to justify and
demonstrate this supremacy.
Architectural elements also evolved progressively into more Negative form
advanced and rational forms, harmonizing both purpose and beauty.
Subsequently, the column is more perfect than the pillar inasmuch
as the former is configured by itself, as an independent element
characterized by other components that clarify and expose its function
–the pedestal and the capital–, while the latter is constituted “as it
were to be a negative limitation imposed by something else, or to
be determined accidentally in a way not belonging to it on its own
account” (Hegel 1975, 666), as an external force or constraint –
anticipating the question of positive and negative space, the fill and
the void, that would be addressed by later generations.
Following the same logic, a building is the more perfect the more Primacy of
it depends on its own particularity, going beyond its purpose and the interior
material fragmentation. Hegel posits the Christian gothic temple
as the best example of this elevated form of architecture –romantic
architecture–, where utilitarian limitations are exceeded by a fixed
and eternal character that transcends any kind of purpose. Contrary
to the open Greek temples, the inwardness of the gothic church
responds to the interiority of the Christian spirit, that turns itself
towards the interior of human soul away from external and mundane
circumstances (Hegel 1975, 686). Once again, interiority and
enclosure prevail over exteriority, which does not possess an absolute
truth or ultimate value (Kierans 2007, 76).
Nevertheless, it is possible to find connections between space Relational
and negativity much before Hegel, through different systems space
and argumentations that still result to be of great interest for a
contemporary understanding of space. Before Hegel advocated an

Spatium negatio 117

 abstract, extensive space, inherited from the Cartesian tradition
and understood as an a priori category (Hegel 2010) as Kant did,
Leibniz had posited a model of space dependent on the relations
of the elements that coexist within it;24 thus, it is not an absolute
space, but a relational space that, although dismissed for many years
because of the prevailing Newtonian model, advanced the notion of
relative space that Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein would develop
many years later.25 For Leibniz, space is an illusion, but a strong one, a
“well-founded phenomenon” that supports knowledge. Leibniz never
defined space in explicit negative terms, even though it is possible to
detect a certain negative character on a space that does not exist by
itself, but only through other elements and relations between them.
From this topologic perspective, the notions of form and trans-
formation acquire certain relevance, being highly influential in some
branches of contemporary philosophy; for instance, for Gilles Deleuze
(1992) and his fascination for the fold and the Baroque context, in
which the world is seen as an infinity of folds in a compressed time-
space, or for some authors related to speculative realism,26 such as

24 In a letter from June 2, 1716 to Samuel Clarke, the British philosopher who
defended the physical system of Newton, Leibniz refutes this model as follows: “The
Author [Clarke] contends, that Space does not depend upon the Situation of Bodies. I
answer: ‘Tis true, it does not depend upon such or such a situation of Bodies; but it is That
Order, which renders Bodies capable of being situated, and by which they have a Situation
among themselves when they exist together; as Time is That Order, with respect to their
Successive position. But if there were no Creatures, Space and Time would be only in the
Ideas of God” (Clarke and Leibniz 1717, §41, 113).
25 In The Shape of Space (1994), Graham Nerlich offers an interesting and thorough
overview of the notion of space and the connections between Western metaphysics and
science, focusing on the debate between realists and relationists from the seventeenth
century to our days. These questions exceed the scope of this research, although they
have been very relevant for its contextualization.
26 It is remarkable how what is known as “Speculative Histories” has made strong
inroads into the mass media . To take one example reflecting the contemporary sense
of philosophic materialism and its transfer towards project action, the latest publications
of Zero Books deserve a visit, as they fertilize a specificity area with the OOO theory
(Oriented-Object Ontology) in which its main advocate, Graham Harman, strenuously
tries to establish connections with the most consolidated (but not less problematic, as
Manuel de Landa has written) Bruno Latour’s ANT theory (Actor Network Theory).
The movement of speculative realism was born after a conference held at Goldsmiths
College (University of London) in 2007. Headed by figures such as Harman, Ray Brassier,

118 [DE]CENTERING
Lars Spuybroek or Sjoerd van Tuinen (2017), who reflect on the
formal and generative conditions of Gothic and Mannerist space and
architecture, respectively.
The influence of these diverse conceptions of space and the Spatium
clashes between some of them would soon resonate in other parts negatio
of the world. The Oratorian Father Tomás Vicente Tosca, a Spanish
contemporary of Leibniz and Newton,27 exposed a heterogeneous
conception of space combining diverse elements in his Compendium
Philosophicum (1754). The work of Tosca as mathematician, architect,
philosopher and theologian is quite eclectic, combining ideas from
Aristotle and the Neoplatonic tradition, taking some advances from
his contemporaries. In the Compendium, Tosca asks himself about the
constitution of space in relation to bodies which occupy it, offering a
sensory and relational perspective in negative terms:
I know that some of the Ancients say that space is a real thing, which
can be penetrated with all bodies, and extends to all sides; this is indeed
not understandable, and is ridiculed by everybody. Furthermore, if the
aforementioned space is a “true positive,” it has certainly been created by
God. Namely, there are no non-created entities except for God: however, the
aforementioned space has also not been created (…) Namely, this space also

Quentin Meillassoux or Iain Hamilton Grant, speculative realism (and its variations, such
as speculative materialism) aims at undermining the “correlationist,” anthropocentric link
between thinking and being, privileging human over non-human existence: “the conviction
that there can be no access to a reality that is independent of human subjectivity and its
mediations through the senses, the unconscious, language, technology or, indeed, art and
aesthetics. ” (Van Tuinen (ed.) 2017, 1)
27 Tosca belonged to the Novatores movement, a group of Spanish scholars and
thinkers that developed their activity in a period preceding the scientific revolution and
the Enlightenment. They were usually rejected by the most conservative sectors of the
religious power, as their ideas tended to rationalism and empiricism –in fact, the name of
the group had pejorative connotations when it was first coined. The Novatores, in general,
were aware of the marginal role that the Spanish territories played in the European
scientific and philosophical scene (which persists today to a lesser degree), as the Valencian
doctor Juan de Cabriada shows in one of his writings: “(…) it is a pitiful and even shameful
thing that, as if we were Indians [!], we should be the last to receive the news and public
lights that are already scattered throughout Europe. And also, that men who should know
all of this are offended by the warning and bitter by the disappointment. O, and how true
it is that trying to set aside the impression of an antiquated opinion is the most difficult
thing that is demanded from men!” (Carta filosófico-médico-chymica, 1687)

Spatium negatio 119

 08

extends on the outside of the Heavens: but God has not created anything apart
from those things, which are contained in the World: Therefore, such a space
has not been created by God. Then, if this space has been created, for sure it has
been created in time: So, I now ask “Where is this space?” What was it?

Certainly, it was a capacity of this space: this capacity would also be a space.
Therefore, there would be a space outside of space, which would be a space of
the space, which is absurd: namely, the argument of a “space of the space” could
be continued to infinity.

Moreover, it is not negative either. Namely:

1. As it is stated in Metaphysica, negations have nothing of being real, but rather

of being objective.

2. If this space is any kind of negation, what does it negate? If you claim to
negate the body (corpus), what can be put?

(…) Namely, if a locus (place) is the negation of a locus, certainly this holds
for the corpus (body) in it, it is itself put into negation: you will see why this is
ridiculous. (…) So if a corpus is put in a locus, the locus vanishes. It is not worth
mentioning, that this space is not a negation; rather an absence of body (…)

120 [DE]CENTERING
 Moreover, all absence is subjected to this vastness: hence, what would this
subject then be, in which the aforementioned absence of body would be?
Certainly, such a subject, which would be a real positive (…) So, space (spatium)
is not something distinct from a corpus located, be it positive or negative (…)
Hence, there are no real spaces (spatia realia) in the world (Mundus), except for
the bodies themselves which exist in it. That is, in the world there are no other
actual spaces, except for the bodies themselves, which extend into the sphere of
the highest Heaven (…) can truly be called spaces.

In a similar way, it is summarized, that no made-up spaces of infinite extent are

given outside the world, which are clearly disproven by the abovementioned
reasons. However, there can be no spaces outside the World; neither above the
constitution of the World. (Tosca 1754, 208 ff)28

The question of space is being discussed from a negative perspective,

from what it is not, and certainly not being contrasted to time, as
Aristotle did in his Categories. The category of space is discussed in its
own nature, independent of time and even of God, but opposed to
the body (corpus), to sensory elements related to each other. However,
the conclusion of the discussion surprisingly determines that space
is something limited and finite: “there can be no spaces outside the
World; neither above the constitution of the World,” contrary to the
Aristotelian conception of space as continuum. Even before Hegel,
the space of Tosca is understood as an imperfect reality, belonging
exclusively to the earthly domain and devoid of the unintelligibility of
the Platonic khôra. It is a space that exists only because of the bodies
which exist in it.
His work as a cartographer sheds light on his spatial interpretation.
Tosca drew one of the first plans of the city of Valencia in 1704, in
which built blocks, streets, open spaces and surrounding fields are
represented, as well as the city walls, greeneries and other remarkable
points, such as fountains or bridges. The hierarchization of urban
spaces is very clear: the vertical projection of the streets contrasts with
the quasi-isometric representation of the blocks, of which the most
remarkable ones –that is, churches, religious buildings, towers or
city buildings– are meticulously drawn. The streets and open spaces,
however, appear as blank spaces without special details. This suggests

28 Translated by Andreas Kettner.

Spatium negatio 121

 that the focus has been placed on materials and solid forms against
the void, highlighting the relations and hierarchies among them. The
space of Tosca is only conceivable through the presence and absence
of bodies which are inserted within it, qualifying a discrete structure
of fills and voids. Besides, this space is not neutral, abstract or
homogeneous, but deeply relational and even political. Urban fabric
emerges as a space of difference and diversity of qualities, depicted
through scientific cartography.
Thus, the space of Tosca is far from a systematized, geometrical
abstraction influenced by the eternal and indestructible Platonic
khôra; rather, he adopts the Aristotelian notion of space as place
(topos),29 though emphasizing even more the relational perspective.
But unlike Aristotle, who sees topos as the limit of the containing
body, Tosca goes a step beyond and identifies place and body as
mutual reverses, where space is the absence of bodies, although it is
only conceivable through them.
These fluctuating definitions unveil two manners of understanding
space from a negative perspective that would permanently be
contrasted in Western thought: space as an absolute, abstract domain
(prior and inferior than time, although deeply related to it) or as a
relational/potential realm that exists only through relations and is
open to imaginaries, and even irrationality. However, these two visions
are not mutually exclusive and, despite their different lineages, it is
possible to appreciate certain encounters and coexistences between
both. While the former is the space of geometry, of form, a passive
extension that can be controlled and conceived –the traditional
space of architecture–, the latter sets the foundations of social space,
that still had to be introduced. Part of this constellation of clashes,
simultaneities and juxtapositions will be traced throughout the
text. More specifically, the focus will be placed on the disclosure of

29 Platonic khôra is an abstract, cosmic space, a “receptacle” to all the existing

which lies as the third basic element of reality together with Being and Becoming
(Montaner 1997, 31), allowing the possibility of “spacing” (Pardo Torío 1992, 123; Derrida
1995, 124). In Physics, Aristotle discusses Platonic space : “(…) place is something other
than bodies, and every sensible body is in a place (...) The place of a thing is its form and
limit (...) The form is the limit of the thing, while the place is the limit of the body/continent
(...)” [T.A.]

122 [DE]CENTERING
negativity as a force in both physical and social space, as well as on
their mutual interaction, since it would be impossible to grasp the
complexity of space from a singular perspective. We are in space, but
we also create space; it is continuously being produced, changing and
evolving in front of our eyes, around and within our bodies.
Negative avant-gardes. Interactions in space, negativity and politics.
Thanks to art, instead of seeing a Single world, our own, we see it multiply...
(Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, 1927)

The traumatic emergence of a new art in the transition of the Loss of

nineteenth and twentieth centuries is frequently depicted as a the center
negation. The Austrian art historian Hans Sedlmayr would articulate
his whole vision on art around the concept of loss (Sedlmayr 1957),
appealing to topics such as “ negation in sculpture,” “negation of
the earth basis in architecture” and “revolutions against architecture,”
“negation of art” and a strong criticism towards “ anti-humanism.”
In not so appalling terms, also Walter Benjamin talked of the
“decline of the aura,” and the Romanian art historian Robert Klein
mentioned the “anguish of the referent,” both referring to the modern
transformation of the arts and the rupture with former conceptions.
For Manfredo Tafuri (2006, xxviii), who recalls the reflections
of all these authors, considers their “mourning” as a succession
of “exaggerations,” and therefore he proposes to substitute their
“anguish” for an “accomplishment,” so the disappearance becomes a
“displacement.” Although refusing to endorse a tragic vision of art’s
fate, the work of Tafuri becomes a referent to start exploring the
insertion of architecture within the modern Western project.30
Before continuing with the argument, it is important to briefly Negatives
outline the core ideas of Cacciari’s pensiero negativo –negatives Denken, Denken
or negative thought, which has already been mentioned in the text
and that is crucial to understand Tafuri’s theoretical background. Solà-
Morales (2009, 25), in fact, asserts that it would be impossible “to
trace the experiences of contemporary architecture without offering

30 “The conjunction in each of their titles (theories and history, architecture and
utopia, language and its critique) stages an agon in which architecture’s social vocation is
enabled but also contained by its own powers of representation” (Hays 2006, xii).

Spatium negatio 123

 08

a preferential place to negative thought and radical criticism.”31

Embracing Negative thought entails an approach to capitalism different from
Krisis Marxian dialectics, arguing that it is crisis, and not synthesis, what
keeps advancing the system. Through the analysis of the utopian
and tragic moments in modernity – the first being almost negative,
“oriented toward historical continuity,” and the second fully negative,
“embracing crisis as the engine of changes that defy programmatic
prediction” (Lombardo 1993, xxvii)–, Cacciari reveals “the theoretical
legitimacy of capitalism as a crisis-based system” (Carrera 2009, 8).
The reading and interpretation of texts by anti- and non-dialectical
figures such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Weber,
Wittgenstein or Heidegger is the basis for Cacciari’s argument, which
he deploys in works such as “Sulla genesi del pensiero negativo”
(1969), Pensiero negativo e razionalizzazione (1978), Krisis (1982) or

31 [T.A.]

124 [DE]CENTERING
 09 10

11 12

Architecture and Nihilism (1993). The acceptance of life as conflict

and contradiction is crucial to understanding the exercise of power
and dominion, since they can only appear when struggle emerges.
Although harshly criticized by the militant bases of the Italian Left,
and intersecting theology in several occasions, negative thought,
which resists predetermination and synthesis proper of bourgeois
ideology (Mandarini 2009, 58), opens up the possibility of re-
elaborating new interpretations on architectural actions (as Tafuri
did) different from those that are presented ideologically, usurping
and subsuming contradictory conditions, since the essence of
negatives Denken lies precisely in the impossibility of synthesizing
contradictions dialectically. There are no irreducible crises to ultimate
synthesis; instead, new languages and forms of thought arise from
them.
Influenced by Cacciari’s negative thought, although establishing a
very particular path, Tafuri would elaborate an influential critique of

Spatium negatio 125

 the architectural project, which he considers to be fully embedded in
capitalist ideology. Some of his more relevant writings were focused
on modern central-European examples, such as “Per una critica
dell’ideologia architettonica” (Tafuri 1969) – which would later
crystallize in his major work Architecture and Utopia (1976)–, “Lavoro
intellettuale e sviluppo capitalistico” (1970), “Austromarxismo e
città: Das rote Wien” (1971a) and “Socialdemocrazia e città nella
Repubblica di Weimar” (1971b). In this context, his analysis on
the negative dimension of the avant-gardes and the trivialization
of the shock experience proper of the modern metropolitan
background should be inserted, as well as the study of Austrian and
German socialist urban plans and tools, especially those regarding
social housing.32 In the Neue Sachlichkeit and Hilberseimer’s
Großstadtarchitektur, Tafuri finds an architecture that is not a static
aesthetic object; rather, it embodies a dynamic process and unveils the
conditions of its production: the whole chain, from the factory to the
city.33
Space Turning the gaze on art when talking of architecture is an
depends unavoidable movement; not only because of their common spatial
implications, but also because art can usually reach questions and
fields toward which architecture is certainly limited. Nonetheless,
a permanent transfer between both realms opens a broad range of
understandings that deserve attention. The relation between space and
negativity has also been explored through artistic perspectives inserted
within particular contexts, acknowledging different spatial models
and conceptions. The question of perspective, for instance, could
be regarded as one of the main contributions of art to the Western
comprehension of space, as well as its destruction or inversion during
the first decades of the twentieth century. Besides, the scientific
shifts caused by Einstein’s theory of relativity or Poincaré’s spaces –
which deeply influenced this perspectival inversion–, also conveyed
a change in the relations between space and the human subject, who

32 Cacciari would also be interested in Viennese architecture of the early twentieth

century, especially in Loos and Wagner.
33 On the opposite side we can situate the works of Loos or Taut
(overemphasizing the object), or the Siedlungen settlements, which denied the chaos of the
metropolis in an antiurban fashion (Heynen 2000, 28).

126 [DE]CENTERING
saw its entire understanding of the world altered. Together with the
progressive transformation of Western society, after the industrial
revolutions, the constitution of modern states and the rise of the
bourgeoisie, space could not be read as an abstract realm or a pure
container (the space of Newton and Descartes). Rather, space depends.
It depends on a multiplicity of perspectives, systems of reference,
geometries (Euclidean and non-Euclidean), scales and, of course,
time. This relative conception of space, which is essentially modern,
could be further extended and connected with a wider notion, that is,
a relational (social) space, where space appears only through processes
and relations.34
The first decades of the twentieth century and the artistic
experiences that took place during these years offer a privileged
framework to observe the interaction between these different aspects
of space, along with a glimpse on the negative forces that configure
and emerge from it. Furthermore, from a socio-political perspective,
the context provided by European avant-gardes has proven to be
fruitful in order to analyze and interpret the connections between
space and society, mainly through art and –sometimes– architecture.
Many authors have deeply studied these connections from the
standpoint of negativity: from Renato Poggioli (1968) or Peter Bürger
(1984) to the Venetian tandem Tafuri-Cacciari (Tafuri 1987; Cacciari
1993), and more recently Cristoph Menke (2011), or Hilde Heynen
(1999; 2000), Gail Day (2011) and Sven-Olov Wallenstein (2016)
who clarify the Tafurian interpretation. However, it is necessary to
go back in time to understand how the space of the avant-gardes
emerges.
Hegel had definitely included architecture among the arts Architecture as
(specifically, the most primitive one), although his idealism would Raumkunst
gradually lose strength opposed to the rise of empirical modes of
knowledge. Thus, the interest for architecture from a theoretical

34 These three dimensions are explained by David Harvey (2004; 2012), while he
considers that there is not a hierarchy between them, but a dialectical tension that keeps
them together and related to each other. Although this terms come from the field of
political geography, they are useful to our hypotheses in the sense that they remark several
aspects of space that are relevant to architectural and urban practices. Other authors who
share these dimensions are Martina Löw (2008) or Christina Hilger (2011), among others.

Spatium negatio 127

 perspective and the motivation to approach it scientifically –due
to the great influence of positivism and natural sciences– arouse
among many remarkable art critics and historians. In fact, a whole
generation of scholars would regard architecture in relation to
visual sciences, psychology or physiology, far from a priori aesthetic
paradigms (Schwarzer 1991, 50). For instance, the German architect
and critic Gottfried Semper was the first to regard architecture as the
technique of space, departing from an anthropological point of view
that considered the division between interior and exterior to be the
main task of architecture. In this interstice between Raumkunst and
technique of space, the work of central European authors such as
the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, the German psychologist
Theodor Lipps or the Swiss-Austrian architect Hans Auer is situated.
From these, the German art historian August Schmarsow, was
Space as probably the most categorical, due to his understanding of space as
pure exteriority the art (Raumkunst) or “the essence of architectural creation” (1993),
rejecting other models, such as Semper’s “textile” architecture or
von Hartmann’s tectonic vision (Schmarsow 1993, 282). Rather,
architecture is seen as Raumgestalterin, “creatress of space” (1993,
288)35 that has to be perceived from within the body, that is, from
the observing subject’s point of view, and that extends itself to the
organization of the city, the roads or the fields –once again, space is
understood as pure exteriority. Despite the wide range of domains
that Schmarsow attributes to architecture in his lecture of 1893 at
the University of Leipzig, it is important to note that the sense of
sight is still predominant in his conception of space, which is seen
as an “intuited form” (Schmarsow 1993, 286) in line with Wölfflin’s
Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur (1886), in which the
understanding of the architectural work is deeply related to particular
psychological perceptions (De Stefani 2009, 10).
In Schwarzer’s insightful essay on Schmarsow, another relevant
figure in this tradition is mentioned. The Austro-Hungarian

35 Giulio Carlo Argan (1961) would situate the turning point between architecture
as representation of space and architecture as determination of space in the Baroque
period: here, space is not conceived as a pre-existent reality to be ordered, but as
something that can be created, transformed and materialized through clashes, folds,
cavities, contradictions…

128 [DE]CENTERING
 08

art historian Alois Riegl was also one of the initiators of a new
conception of space, although certainly more “Hegelian” than his
German colleague. Schwarzer (1991, 56) mentions Schmarsow’s
(1905) disagreement with Riegl’s vision of ancient architecture as
the enclosure of volumes, “the creation of clear boundaries, of strong
centralized entities,” which he had characterized through the image
of the Pantheon four years before (Riegl 1901). On the contrary, and
despite the importance of inner room for Schmarsow, movement and
“the generation of culturally stimulated rhythmic patterns” (Schwarzer
1991, 56) is, according to him, the essential task of architecture.
In any case, thanks to this whole line of study, space began to be
regarded as a dynamic object of study, and not as a “dead” a priori or
undialectical element in opposition to time, as it still happened until
the end of the nineteenth century (Moravánszky 2003, 122). Then,
architecture, like other arts, was not an imitation of the past or nature
anymore, but a dynamic, creative discipline capable of transforming
reality and not only simulating it. However, as Montaner (1997,
28) indicates, this kind of space (dynamic but enclosed, perceptible
although mostly visual) would be immediately surpassed with the
development of the artistic avant-gardes. The German sculptor Adolf Raumganze
von Hildebrand, belonging to the same generation but not so much
concerned about architecture as his contemporaries were, opened a
way for space as continuum (Raumganze) that would be crucial for the
emergence of the space of the avant-gardes, which some authors relate
to “anti-space” (Peterson 1980; Montaner 1997).

Spatium negatio 129

 08 09

However, not all the approaches on the spatial question that

emerged in Europe in these decades stemmed from art history and
psychology. In the meantime, the foundations of urban sociology were
being gradually set, while contributing to enrich the scientific corpus
built around space from other disciplines. By introducing social,
political and economic factors, the spaces of Karl Marx, Ferdinand
Tönnies, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber or Georg Simmel, in all their
diversity, contrasted with that of art critics and historians because of
Space and their lack of neutrality, or even innocence. Urban space became the
urban life real, experienced space of everyday life, modelled by the forces of
capitalism. Indeed, from this point of view, architecture was not the
privileged Raumgestälterin of Schmarsow, but rather another piece
contributing to the emergence of urban space, and only later would
be specifically addressed from a sociological perspective. In fact, it is
noteworthy that the Austrian architect and artist Camillo Sitte (1889)
saw Städtebau (urban design), and not architecture, as the main
Raumkunst.
In particular, the work of the German sociologist Georg Simmel
had a strong repercussion in the space of the avant-gardes according to
Manfredo Tafuri, who articulated the relations between architecture
and modern capitalism and saw in the avant-gardes an exceptional
episode regarding these connections. This chronological leap forward
leads us to his two main works addressing the topic – Architecture and

130 [DE]CENTERING
Utopia (1976) and The Sphere and the Labyrinth (1987)–, in which
capitalist progressive rationalization and Simmel’s metropolitan space
are regarded as a nurturing scenario for the avant-gardes. It is precisely
in the tension between capitalist rationalization and the “downfall
of reason” –especially perceived in metropolitan space (Tafuri 1976,
78)– where the Italian historian places the dialectical movement that
activated avant-gardes.
Through the frenzied rhythms of metropolitan life, Georg Simmel Metropolis and
(1997, 174–85) portrays an urban society that grows and lives parallel Nervenleben
to money economy, thus provoking an intensification of mental and
psychic life (Nervenleben) that affects both the individual and the
urban collective. Life in the metropolis is frantic and accelerated, and
the alteration of metropolitan times –punctuality, calculability and
exactness (Simmel 1997, 177)– is precisely detected through changes
in spatiality. Perfectly calculated and precise it works an enormous
machine that swallows and rationalizes all kinds of flows, either
economic or social and where individuals and objects are assigned
a specific monetary value. To appreciate this urban whirlpool, one
needs only to watch Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), Ruttmann’s Berlin,
Symphony of a Great City (1927) or take a look at Georg Grosz’s
scenes from Berlin or his own Metropolis (1917), in which the space
of the city is represented through an extreme perspective and where
nothing is static; even empty space seems to move, because it is not
empty at all, but filled with activity, people, advertisements, messages,
light, flows. Everything is connected to the rest of the metropolis,
unveiling a space of relations that still persists today, amplified, as well
as its effects over the psychic life of its inhabitants. This is reflected
in Tiqqun’s work, following the particular framework of the Bloom
Theory with a highly-Simmelian resonance:
The most demented, and at the same time the most characteristic concretion
of the spectacular ethos remains -on a planetary scale- the metropolis (…) In
the metropolis, man experiences his own negative condition, purely. Finiteness,
solitude, and exposedness, which are the three fundamental coordinates of this
condition, weave the décor of each person’s existence in the big city. Not a fixed
décor, but a moving décor; the amalgamated décors of the big city, due to which
everyone has to endure the ice-cold stench of its non-places. (Tiqqun 2010,
14–15).

Spatium negatio 131

 Although Simmel reveals the character of the metropolis, his
optimistic vision for “struggle and reconciliation” within the urban
space is not fully accurate, according to Cacciari (1993) –who would
deeply influence Tafuri on his characterization of modern avant-
gardes–, because of its nostalgic hope. Rather, he would recognize the
contributions of Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Nietzsche: the former
understood the “radical negativity” lying beneath the metropolis,
while the latter fully grasped the sense of tragedy “with no hope of
consolation” (Cacciari 1993, xxvii, 17 ff). Tafuri agreed:
The experience of the “tragic” is the experience of the metropolis. In face of such
an inevitable experience, the intellectual is no longer even able to assume the
blasé attitude of a Baudelaire. (Tafuri 1976, 78)

Entzauberung In this regard, the figure of the German sociologist Max Weber
and his notion of “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) are essential
to complete the Venetian tandem’s reading of the metropolis in
the twentieth century. Weber studied how the logic of technical
rationalization and progress had progressively pervaded reality,
displacing the realms of the magical and mythical, hence leading to
a sensation of “disenchantment of the world” (1946) –an expression
recalling Schiller’s Entgötterung der Natur (“the de-divinization of
nature”) – that becomes a defining characteristic of the modern,
capitalist society.36 Cacciari (1993, 31) would consider Weber as the
one who detects the essential negative character of the metropolis,
“the affirmation of a bourgeois-capitalist theory on the negative”
(Cacciari 1993, 15) that would eventually overcome Simmel’s analysis,
especially after his posthumous work The City (Weber 1987).
Without losing perspective on Weber’s disenchantment, Tafuri goes
one step beyond to grasp the forces of the “tragic” experience of the
metropolis (1976, 78) –which, according to him, is the ideal scenario
to contemplate the modern “downfall of reason” foretold by Piranesi–
within the domain of the arts. If Grosz, Lang or Ruttmann offered
direct, literal visions of the metropolis, Tafuri goes back to the text of
Simmel –through the gaze of Massimo Cacciari (1993)– in order to

36 Walter Benjamin also deals with a similar issue in his famous essay “The Work
of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (Benjamin 2008, 19–55), where he
poses the question of “the loss of the aura” affecting the modern work of art.

132 [DE]CENTERING
 08 09

situate the eccentric influence of capitalist rationalization on the art of

the avant-garde. An excerpt from Simmel’s Metropolis and Mental Life
(1903) is particularly significant for Tafuri, who directly quotes him in
Architecture and Utopia (1976, 86 ff):
All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of
money. All things lie on the same level and differ from one another only in the
size of the area which they cover. (Simmel 1997, 178)

And so Tafuri asks: “does it not seem that we are reading here a Merz
literary comment on a Schwitter Merzbild?” (1976, 88) By referring
to the collage works of the German artist Kurt Schwitters, Tafuri
points to the chaotic and everflowing forces of money economy
(Heynen 1999, 130). In fact, Schwitter’s Merzbauten represent the
most extreme materialization of such flows and their effects on things,
as if they were literally floating in space, disordered and accumulated
without an appreciable hierarchy. Thus, the Merzbau drives the
forces of the metropolis to its latest consequences in a giant spatial
collage. Static, Cartesian, enclosed space is definitely substituted

Spatium negatio 133

 by a continuous, open, transparent space where everything flows in
permanent movement.37
The shock This correlation that Tafuri establishes between capitalist money
experience economy and artistic strategies has its main motor in the continuous
rupture with the past that the avant-garde proposes by breaking with
the established order of things and generating new values. Hence,
through their reaction against bourgeois standards and mode of
life, avant-gardes found a way, even unintentionally, to activate the
engine of bourgeois development indefinitely: “a renewed bourgeoisie,
capable of accepting doubt as the premise for the full acceptance of
existence as a whole, as explosive, revolutionary vitality, prepared
for permanent change and the unpredictable” (Tafuri 1976, 56).
The question is, then, “how to absorb the shock provoked by the
metropolis by transforming it into a new principle of dynamic
development (…)” (Tafuri 1976, 88 ff), that is, to transform
the instantaneous moment of anguish “into a productive force”
(Wallenstein 2016, 27).
Tafuri’s extensive line of argument would require a deeper analysis
that exceeds the purposes of this research. However, the work of
Hilde Heynen (1999) offers a fruitful perspective that is worth
recalling at this moment. After acknowledging Tafuri’s theory on
the effects of the avant-garde, Heynen turns to the political debate
within their immediate context. At this point, Tafuri distinguishes
two apparently opposing trends with regard to the political character
of artistic-intellectual labor (Tafuri 1976, 65–66; Heynen 1999):
the first position aimed at preserving the autonomy of the work of
art through the “principle of Form” –De Stijl, Russian Futurism and
Constructivism– (Tafuri 1976, 93), while the second, mainly headed
by Dada, but also Surrealism, celebrated chaos, understanding art as a
means of political intervention (Heynen 1999, 131).

37 “If traditional space finds its highest expression in the unitary world of the
Renaissance, in which there is no analytical separation between the elements of space
and the form in which conic perspective expresses the image of man as the center, the
Copernican revolution of science in the seventeenth century is in the origin of anti-space.
This is when space begins to emancipate, when it becomes independent and relative to
objects in movement within an infinite cosmic system” (Montaner 1997, 28–29).

134 [DE]CENTERING
 10 11

Let every man shout: there is a great destructive, negative task to be

accomplished. Sweeping, cleaning. (Tristan Tzara, Manifeste Dada, 1918)38

However, both tendencies are deeply related to each other and, in

fact, this tension gives birth to the “dialectic of the avant-garde,”
which through chaos and order assimilates and reflects the logical,
mechanized order of capitalist civilization. “De Stijl and the Bauhaus
introduced the ideology of the plan into a design method that was
always closely related to the city as a productive structure; Dada, by
means of the absurd, demonstrated –without naming it– the necessity
of a plan” (Tafuri 1976, 93). In the end, despite their differences,
both movements, constructive and destructive, worked towards the
absorption of the experience of shock, to regulate the experience of
being subsumed into the modern reality. Thus, even the difference
between positive and negative avant-gardes fades, since the result is
the same: their integration within capitalist rationalization processes.
Nonetheless, it is important to remark that the distinction between Negative
positive and negative avant-gardes is controversial, since different avant-gardes
authors pose it according to different criteria. Gail Day (2011, 266)
attributes this distinction –that would also be considered by Tafuri–
to Renato Poggioli, although the perspective of both authors differ
significantly. Peter Wollen (1975) would also distinguish between

38 [T.A.]

Spatium negatio 135

 two avant-gardes: one compatible with the modern project and other
working for its dissolution; Kenneth Frampton (2001, 216) would
also specify this distinction with the terms “positive” and “negative”
avant-gardes. Terry Eagleton (1990, 373), for his part, understands
that the negative avant-garde “tries to avoid such absorption [by
bourgeois society] by not producing an object. No artefacts: just
gestures, happenings, manifestations, disruptions. You cannot
integrate that which consumes itself in the moment of production.”
On the other hand, “[t]he positive avant garde understands that
the question of integration stands or falls with the destiny of a mass
political movement.” In general, those avant-gardes whose ideals
attach neither to progress and future, nor to synthesis or production;
related to doubt, to the irrational, could be considered as negatives:
these are mainly Dada and Surrealism. Despite the diversity of criteria
and interpretations proposed by different authors, we could conclude
that different movements, such as De Stijl and Dada, converged in the
aim of a new synthesis39 between art and the absorption of shock and
anguish and their acceptance as inevitable conditions of existence. But
what distinguishes negative avant-gardes from other trends such as
constructivism is that they do not limit themselves to the destruction
of what lies outside art, but they focus on art’s own destruction. This
fact entails, as Rafael González Sandino (2005) diagnoses,40 that art
becomes the place where opposites –art and its denial– are confused,
inverted and merged: art is permanently facing its other in a process
of self-construction and self-destruction. Specifically, avant-gardes
occupy a space amidst the traditional visions of art as an autonomous
discipline (which correspond to a formalist discourse) and art as a
sovereign realm with a transgressive potential, which until then had
remained as opposite poles in art theory; thus, they inaugurate an art
in which autonomy and sovereignty are deeply related to each other:

39 The magazines Mecano, G, and Merz resulted from this synthesis. (Tafuri 1976,
95)
40 During a research seminar on the current situation of architecture organized
at the School of Architecture of the University of Seville in 2005, professor Rafael
González Sandino initiated a debate on negative avant-gardes and their reconsideration.
His presentation and the subsequent debate can be found in Spanish and English in: https://
outarquiaspublicaciones.wordpress.com/category/libro-sobre-la-situacion-actual-de-la-
arquitectura-genealogias-diagnosticos-e-interpretacion/

136 [DE]CENTERING
“truly autonomous art has to be revolutionary; truly sovereign art,
formally describable” (Menke 2011, 39).41
Returning to the subject of space, the rupture with the previous
model and the immersion into a spatial abstract continuum precisely
respond to the subjacent task of the avant-garde to subsume the
conditions of a mechanized society, influenced by the advance of
objective science and technology. Unlike philosophy, which had
preserved the primacy of time and the subject, factual sciences saw
the world represented as space and discredited the subjective vision
that led to their crisis (Pardo Torío 1992, 255). Accordingly, space is
a privileged medium for avant-garde artists and would be regarded
as means to transfer art into life, eventually leading to the Hegelian
“death of art” (Tafuri 1976, 89). Evoking the relevance of Schwitter’s
Merzbau, this is one of the main reasons why architecture, and
specifically the Bauhaus, undertook the task of translating these
experiences into a concrete, lived form, due to the incapacity of the
artistic avant-gardes to reach the productive reality (Tafuri 1976,
96).42
The city, “the real place of the improbable” (Tafuri 1976, 96), Nihilism
already observed by Baudelaire, Weber, Simmel, Benjamin and fulfilled
many more, represented the final scenario nurtured by all tactics
and strategies tested in art, the machinery that kept capitalist society
progressing as a giant “Metropolitan Merz.” Thus, architecture
definitely enters the political arena as an instrument to materialize
the modern utopia: first with the Bauhaus, then with Modern
Movement, architecture was the tool to organize the metropolis as
a productive, rationalized organism. “Architecture or Revolution”
was the slogan, coined by Le Corbusier in Vers une Architecture in
1922, that articulated the promise of a new society and a new (anti)
space; a promise that, according to Tafuri, was never to be fulfilled,
since architecture should be the object of the whole plan, and not the

41 [T.A.] Menke sets the basis of the aesthetics of negativity in this relation.
42 “Mondrian was to have the courage to ‘name’ the city as the final object toward
which neoplastic composition tended. But he was to be forced to recognize that, once it
had been translated into urban structures, painting—by now reduced to a pure model of
behavior—would have to die” (Tafuri 1976, 92).

Spatium negatio 137

 subject (Heynen 1999, 133 ff): “The prevailing conditions required
‘architecture,’ in its classic sense, to self-negate and required that
urban design fully acknowledge the contradictory processes of capital
accumulation” (Day 2011, 98). Both Cacciari and Tafuri studied this
process within modern architecture through the work of a series of
architects who opposed, rejected or unveiled the rational forces of
capitalism in urban –spatial– terms. In this regard, the figure of Loos
is central to Cacciari (1993), since his oeuvre contains the roots of
the critique that would be later launched against Modern Movement.
The disenchantment and lack of nostalgia that pervades Loos’ anti-
utopian constructions and writings –something that Benjamin
had already noticed– illustrate the resistance toward the project of
Modernity –“nihilism fulfilled” (Cacciari 1993, 199)– and give space
to contradictions and difference. This attitude contrasts with that of
Paul Scheerbart or Bruno Taut, who aimed at representing the flows,
circulation, exchange and hyperstimulation inherent to the system
by means of an architecture of glass associated to a Glaskultur, where
the “city of steel and glass” desecrates not only the aura, “but the very
possibility of experience” (Cacciari 1993, 188). However, according to
Tafuri, Ludwig Hilberseimer would be the one who fully assimilated
in his Großstadtarchitektur (1927) the contradictory character of the
metropolis and the disappearance of the architectural object, which
becomes a process in its wake (Tafuri 1969; 1976), contrary to the
more “anxious” positions of Loos or Taut or the followers of the New
Objectivity, such as Ernst May or Martin Wagner, and their politically
utopian projects. The greatest achievement of Hilberseimer would be
further developed by the Florentine studio Archizoom in their No-Stop
City, the city without architecture, which will be addressed in the next
Silence, chapters. Finally, the work of Mies van der Rohe (Tafuri 1976, 148;
transparency 1987) appears as the final negating, silent architecture that disappears
by its own means and dissolves itself within the metropolitan forces.
Here, the transparency and stillness of his skyscrapers has a completely
different meaning than in Scheerbart or Taut: “the glass no longer
violates the interior, but appears henceforth as that meaning of the
thing that it has helped to destroy” (Cacciari 1993, 199). There is,

138 [DE]CENTERING
indeed, a certain opacity in Mies’ transparency that detaches it from a
phantasmagoric character that will be later analyzed.43
Facing the impossibility of progress and utopia, the incapacity Negative
of architecture to change the world, the counterpart of the modern utopia
project –the “negative utopia”– emerges in silence, heir of Piranesian
atmospheres. Shane (2011, 25) describes negative utopias as spaces
of maintenance of memories and codes (monuments, libraries,
archives…) “meant to stand outside of the flow of everyday life and
time. They reflect and invert normal and everyday flows, and their
fixed visual order is important to a community’s sense of place and
continuity. They are meant to be static, resistant to progress (…)”
Idealized, still, perfect and stable, static models for a better world, a
better future, but which were “eventually integrated into the industrial
production process. Tafuri contrasts the fixed, negative utopias of
More or of Mies van der Rohe (…) with capitalist entrepreneurs’
restless drive toward perfection (…) and modern designers’ devotion
to a shifting, positivist utopia” (Shane 2005, 87). Thus, in the series of
Carceri, reflecting a massive, imaginary architecture in decline, Tafuri
(1978) sees the crisis of the architectural object and the problems
posed by the extensive infinity of space; a critique that would find
its extension in the drawings of the Campo Marzio and lead to
the dissolution of any language: “The Piranesian utopia” –Tafuri
concludes (1978, 103)– consists precisely in making this objective
contradiction absolute and obvious: the principle of Reason is revealed
as an instrument capable of giving birth –apart from all sueño– to the
monsters of the irrational.”44
According to the main scholars and critics of the avant-garde, Crisis of
including Tafuri, Bürger or Poggioli, historical vanguards failed (modern)
to articulate a project that could counter the totalizing system of reason

43 For the moment, suffice it to mention Rosemarie Haag Bletter’s questioning of

Mies’ transparency with the interrogations of Derrida: “What terms do we use to speak
about glass?... The terms of transparency and immediacy, of love or of police, of the border
that is perhaps erased between the public and the private, etc.?”
44 [T.A.] Tafuri is referring here to the inscription that appears in the famous
etching by Francisco de Goya, El Sueño de la Razón produce Monstruos (“The Sleep of
Reason Produces Monsters”), while at the same time the Italian historian inverts its
meaning: reason can be the very motor of the irrational.

Spatium negatio 139

 12 13

bourgeois-capitalist cultural production that would crystallize with the

end of the Second World War and the creation of the welfare state.
Decades later, a second round to destabilize the modern perspectives
of progress and prosperity in the sixties and the seventies, when
these started to show symptoms of exhaustion in the wake of the
global economic crisis that would eventually lead to the emergence
of neoliberalism and the post-fordist society. From this moment on,
the pervasiveness of the global market and its flattening effects on
global space become more and more accentuated, thus favoring the
reaction of the spatial turn in several disciplines as a way of thinking
the political from the spatial dimension in a world of increasingly
complex societies. This moment of crisis of modern reason would have
serious consequences in architectural circles that will be addressed in
further chapters.
To end this section, we turn to the beginning of Day’s chapter
on Tafuri and the Venice School of Architecture, entitled “Looking
the Negative in the Face” (Day 2011, 70 ff) Here, Day actualizes
the problematic of architecture and negativity by addressing OMA’s
project for Euralille, the hub for the TGV coordinated by the Dutch
office with the collaboration of a series of world-famous architects,
who were committed to design different parts of the complex. OMA
would use the phrase “Espace Piranesien” to describe the enormous
hub, a structure where transportation, commercial and social flows

140 [DE]CENTERING
intermingled in a dynamique d’enfer, as Jean-Paul Baïetto, the director
of the plan, described it (Day 2011, 73). A chaotic, urban piece which
grasps the flows of the metropolis and extends them beyond the local
limits through a continuous space where people are in permanent
movement.
Counterspaces in the city.
(…) many major creative acts require oppositions, polarities and contradictions
in order to emerge. (Zalamea 2013, 17)

We have seen how negativity acts as a force that pushes and Antinomies of
transforms reality through invisible but firm reactions. Also art, as creativity
producer of reality, is immersed in the processes of the negative and its
action is possible because of this condition. In a particular incursion
to this creative dimension of negativity in art, the Colombian
mathematician and writer Fernando Zalamea (2013) studies the
“antinomies of creation” through three major figures of Modernity
–Paul Valéry and his Cahiers, Aby Warburg and his Atlas Mnemosine
and Pavel Florensky and his transdisciplinary work on the limits and
antinomies of thought–, whose works unveil the essential character
of contradiction with regard to creativity and the modern experience.
These “major creative acts,” as the author argues throughout the whole
book, emerge from inner and outer tensions, struggles and ruptures
with reason that are situated at the very core of Modernity. A primeval
expression of this emergent force that triggers the creative act could
be found in what Hegel called Unruhe, the “restlessness” that agitates
spirit and precedes action.
However, when this Unruhe is transferred from the individual
subject to the social realm, new implications emerge. In this situation,
the creative act is not the achievement of a single subject anymore,
but a collective product in which multiple agents intervene. Thus,
political –and spatial– questions arise: how does space appear, how is
it transformed? What should it privilege and what should it obliterate?
Which are the tensions and relations –between governments, citizens,
minorities, migrants, etc.– that make possible the rupture and the
emergence of a new space? How do several views enter in conflict –the
ultimate object of politics– with the others?

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 12 13

The notion of an other space, a space or spaces facing canonical

spatiality and reversing is always latent beneath the layers of Western
Anti-sphere cultures and societies: from Dante’s Inferno –which Peter Sloterdijk
(2004, 526) sees as the ultimate anti-sphere and that would be
outlined in Terragni’s project for a Danteum–45 to Tafuri’s reading
of Mies’ architecture as a negative utopia; from Schmitt’s spaceless
universalism to the occupations of urban spaces in 2011, or from
counterspatial projective geometry46 to counterfactual logic, several
projects, images and narratives raise an awareness of the meaning of
“going (or spacing) against something.” Architecture has not escaped

45 See Schumacher 2009.

46 Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy inaugurates a particular way of knowledge in
which projective geometry and the mathematical approach to the idea of counterspace for
an understanding of the cosmos over spiritual foundations acquire great importance. By
reinterpreting Euclidean geometry and introducing the polar opposite of ordinary space he
experienced and presented a “negative space” characterized by its inward infinity, contrary
to the outer one of scientific, extensive space. This geometric counterspace, related to
the forces that intervene within living forms, has been also explored by Louis Locher-Ernst
(1957), director of the Mathematics section of Goetheanum, George Adams (1965) and
more recently by Nick Thomas (1999), from a purely geometric perspective.

142 [DE]CENTERING
 14

this subject either, especially after the construction of a political

project within the discipline –although the roots of this concern
are much deeper (suffice it to recall Piranesi or the architects of the
French Revolution).
In more recent times, the use of negative terms has become more Contre-projets
or less frequent in the architectural discourse in order to give space
to what is not real and to counter the forces of the status quo. For
instance, during the seventies, in a period of strong political activity
and commitment in universities and educational institutions,
architecture students at La Cambre School in Brussels developed
a series of contre-projets (counter-projects) under the Belgian
architect and urbanist Maurice Culot, in charge of the Atelier de
Recherche et d’Action Urbaines.47 Through these exercises, students
proposed alternative spaces to criticize existing urban situations, in

47 The multifaceted approach of Culot (as cultural historian, teacher and member
of ARAU) is not exempt from criticism, partly due to his ambitious objectives and the
complexity of the links between architecture and the city from a political perspective. This
issue is analyzed by Shane (1977) after Culot’s presentation at Peter Cook’s 1976 Art Net
Rally.

Spatium negatio 143

 14 15

16 17

a provocative48 but productive way (Doucet 2015; 2016, 93), led by

the spirit of the movements that worked for the reconstruction of the
European city.
Counter-sites Many years later, the prefix “counter-” still preserves the same
experimental value in architecture, urbanism and spatial practice
in general, despite the changes that this field has experienced. In
2012, during the 5th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam
–celebrated under the slogan “Making City”– a series of countersites
were selected in order to show alternative ways of thinking urban
politics, planning and design with relation to the public agenda

48 The director of La Cambre School of Architecture at that moment, Robert

L. Delevoy, declared once: “the architecture of tomorrow will be provoking or won’t be
at all” (quoted in Aron, J. 1982. La Cambre et l’architecture: un regard sur le Bauhaus belge.
Brussels: Pierre Mardaga, 165).

144 [DE]CENTERING
(Brugmans and Petersen (eds.) 2012, 6), together with three main
Test Sites in Rotterdam, Sao Paulo and Istanbul. Within this context,
the Dutch Randstad represents an example of a contemporary urban
ecology which works at different levels through counterposition and
differentiation of its parts, elements and agents. It constitutes an
urban region of global relevance that functions within a much more
local context, where relations between cities, provinces, industrial
or agricultural areas, institutions, companies, etc. create a particular
set of conditions which determine the role of such a region from an
international perspective. The Dutch architects and urbanists Daan
Zandbelt and Rogier van den Berg explored this spatial situation
in a project selected as countersite for the Biennale. The project –
entitled Mid-size Utopia: Best of Both Worlds– focuses on the vision
of a new intermediate region of interconnected, medium-scale cities
within the Netherlands, combining the benefits of the proximity
to a global leading region such as the Randstad with a more local,
attractive, healthier environment in connection to rural areas and
other European regions. In fact, one of the most appealing aspects
of the project is the preliminary distinction between the Randstad
and seven intermediate zones in its periphery. These spaces configure
a territorial structure with different islands and logics: mobility
networks, resources, economic activities and competitiveness,
urban and demographic density, transnational clusters… It is clear
that a whole system lies behind the performance of the Randstad
as a node of global relevance, and part of this success is due to
those countersites, which at the same time see the proximity of the
Randstad as one of their main strengths –and threats as well. In other
words, the global impact of the region is deeply related to specific
relations with other spaces, and even the differences between them are
crucial to understand its particular character. Without its countersites,
the Randstad would surely be different: it needs of these spaces –even
when they may enter into conflict– to maintain its status.
In this sense, it is possible to trace several coincidences between Reverse City
these projects and what Paola Viganò (2012) calls “the Reverse
City,” as a proposal for the contemporary European urban project
that emerges by inverting and breaking traditional codes within the

Spatium negatio 145

 context of urban fragmentation in order to go beyond this logic.49
Always from the perspective of the city-territory, Viganò proposes an
experimental scenario, “a sphere in which to investigate new spaces
such as under-utilized industrial areas which can become equipped
platforms crossed by concentrations of nature to serve the creation
of new businesses; streets which become narrative itineraries, dense
spatial stories not only of the past but of present relations” (2012,
669). Besides, she actualizes the logic of the fragment and the
difference within an urban context, and taking into account the legacy
of Rowe and Koetter –Collage City– or Cacciari’s archipelago, Viganò
brings again to the fore the link between the physical dimension of
space and its socio-political implications. The redefinition of urban
“solids” and “voids” in the Reverse City responds to the necessity of
thinking new models of city and territory for Europe where diversity
and mixture are possible, leaving behind hyper-specialized, mono-
functional structures gathering along highways –the model exported
from the United States to the rest of the world. Viganò acknowledges
that, once again, Lefebvre’s Production of Space has played an essential
role in defining capitalist spatial logic, which tends to segregation
and the elimination of difference. This is the main reason why we
shall return several times to the work of the French sociologist and
philosopher, who, in addition, coined the terms “differential space”
and “counterspace” to name the spaces opposing the abstract space of
capitalism.
Counterspace “The quest for a counterspace may take multiple forms,” says
and opposition Ulrich Oslender (Guerra, Pérez, and Tapia (eds.) 2011, 148)
with regard to Lefebvre’s contribution. Facing a privileged socio-
spatial reality, counterspaces remain as possible –even impossible–
alternatives, even though they may just be a pulsion, an improbable
world generated by discontent or will to transform an abstract space
generated through violence and war, imposed by the states and

49 “Contemporary space has inverted the traditional code of urbanity; there is

a new scale; there are new and original proportions between solid and void (…) The
Reverse City (…) is the space of the deconstruction of traditional urban relationships,
an ‘elementary city’ in which innovation becomes the combination and juxtaposition of
known elements and the invention of new materials. It is an inverse city because it negates
traditional meanings of urban space – its continuities and discontinuities – and transforms
them into new forms of urbanity within a territorial context” (Viganò 2012, 665).

146 [DE]CENTERING
mainly controlled by geometric and visual means.50 Although Lefebvre
would not define the term “counterspace” explicitly, it appears several
times in his work, either related to everyday life or rather to the
extraordinary. It is, above all, a different space: it can certainly be an
“utopian alternative” (1991, 349), but it is also related to specific
spaces of contestation:
When a community fights the construction of urban motorways or housing-
developments, when it demands ‘amenities’ or empty spaces for play and
encounter, we can see how a counter-space can insert itself into spatial reality:
against the Eye and the Gaze, against quantity and homogeneity, against power
and the arrogance of power, against the endless expansion of the ‘private’ and of
industrial profitability; and against specialized spaces and a narrow localization
of function. (Lefebvre 1991, 381–82)

On the one hand, the critical dimension of the counterspace is

clear. In a capitalist society dominated by exchange value, he argues
in Marxist terms, the opposite alternative is the “primacy of use”
(1991, 381). On the other, however, a counterspace cannot be
separated from its reverse: space and counterspace –or counterspaces–
are doomed to coexistence. This explains the fact that, in many
occasions, counterspatial strategies require a (homeopathic) dose
of the space they are countering: “(…) it happens that a counter-
space and a counter-project simulate existing space, parodying it
and demonstrating its limitations,” and he adds “without for all that
escaping its clutches” (1991, 382).
At this moment, it would seem that Lefebvre’s utopian discourse
reaches a wall which it cannot surpass: the force of abstract space.
Moreover, he also acknowledges how difficult it is for a counterspace
to evolve and remain more or less durable, as they are often relentlessly
swallowed by dominant tactics. This is the case of leisure spaces, to
which we shall return later. In any case, the concept of counterspace
opens new possibilities for architecture, even if –and this has to be
clear from the beginning– counterspaces cannot be projected, as they
emerge through social practice. The task of architects, urbanists and
planners has been, according to Lefebvre (who criticized these figures
in several occasions), the representation and (re)production of abstract

50 See chapter 4: “From Absolute to Abstract space” (Lefebvre 1991)

Spatium negatio 147

 space, opposed to a particular kind of counterspace: differential space.
Comparable to McLuhan’s acoustic space or Foucault’s heterotopic
space (Cavell 2002, 29), differential (counter)space hosts and
materializes hidden, marginal practices that run counter to the logic
of capitalism. It is frequently associated to the practices of everyday
life –that the French Jesuit and philosopher Michel de Certeau (1984)
would later analyze, strongly influenced by Lefebvre–, but also to
countercultures and resistance (Hiernaux-Nicolas 2004, 20). While
it is easy to find common elements between these categories, it is
not so simple to situate architecture or determine its possible role
within a counterspace. Is it a mere scene or background where action
takes place? Does it manipulate and affect the space of practice? Is an
architecture against abstract space possible? And an architecture that
does not (re)produce representations of abstract space?
Arguably, the possibility of subversiveness in architecture may be all but non-
existent, but this does not totally rule it out. It is precisely the possibility of non-
hegemonic space that interests Lefebvre. (Coleman 2015, 61)

Architecture Two contemporaries, Lefebvre and Tafuri, share a very different

in crisis vision of the state of architecture in the last decades of the twentieth
century, as Cunningham (2010) observes in his theoretical triangle
which includes both authors together with Benjamin. Despite the
fact that their common discontent with the role of architecture at
that moment may be parallel and have similar motivations, Lefebvre’s
utopian –even romantic, but never nostalgic (Coleman 2015)– vision
contrasts with the doubter, pessimistic view of the Italian historian,51
who saw in the “very clever ‘games’ of Archizoom or the creations

51 In the introduction of Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment (Lefebvre 2014)

Łukasz Stanek accounts the connections and confrontations between Lefebvre and
Manfredo Tafuri –some of them in person, during a seminar on architecture and social
sciences in 1972 in Port Grimaud (Sturge-Moore (ed.) 1972). “The controversy between
Tafuri and Lefebvre concerned not whether architecture is to be put on trial but rather
what kind of critique should it be, how far should it go, and what should it aim at? In
Port Grimaud (Sturge-Moore (ed.) 1972), Lefebvre asked, ‘What is architecture? Is there
something specifically architectural? Is it an art, a technique, a science?’ He concluded, ‘I
argue that architecture is a social practice.’
The analysis of architecture in this perspective starts with recognizing the practice
of an architect as ‘a producer of space, but never the only one’ who ‘operates within a
specific space –the sheet of white paper.’” (Stanek 2011, 165)

148 [DE]CENTERING
 18 19

20 21

of sterilized anguish of Gaetano Pesce” (Tafuri 1976, 142) ways of

perpetuating the institutionalization of protest and subversion, even
when the influence of negative thought over their work was quite
relevant.52 Nonetheless, both seem to point to the same direction: the
disciplinary crisis of architecture and its role with regard to society. As

52 In this passage, Tafuri was referring to the exhibition “Italy: the New Domestic
Landscape: Achievements and Problems of the Italian Design” that took place at the
MoMA in 1972, in which Superstudio and Archizooom were included in the section of
“counter-design.” Tafuri, in his writings, severely criticized the work of neo-avant-gardes for
nurturing the utopian dream (Tafuri 1976; 1987; Biraghi 2014). Pier Vittorio Aureli (2008,
76–79) pictures and analyzes the relationship between the historian and these neo-avant-
garde groups.

Spatium negatio 149

 a question formulated long time ago that still hovers over architectural
practice, it cannot be ignored by contemporary critique and theory
(Andreotti and Lahiji 2016), despite the impossibility of a univocal,
satisfactory answer and current spatial conditions. Rather, it should be
re-addressed in order to keep the discipline alive:
What corresponds to a complex and incomprehensible world is a living
architecture, understood as work in progress. (...) The capacity to reconcile
opposites, the development of a conflictive and coherent thought at the same
time, being dialectical without falling into dogmatism, that is, being non-
dialectical at the same time; being methodological and intuitive, being more and
more creative and at the same time more objective regarding the needs of users.
(Montaner 1997, 22)

Urban Urban counterspaces open a field where this architecture, that

counterspaces Montaner describes, may be analyzed and practiced, even when
acknowledging that changing the system in which it is inserted is not
an achievable task. Counterspaces show the meeting of the diversity of
society and its spatial dimension, where conflict and irrationality are
not avoided, but grasped as essential forces in a hyper-mediated city
–heir of the nineteenth and twentieth century metropolis, although
radically different from it (Andreotti and Lahiji 2016)– that is far
from homogeneous and which manifests itself through a myriad of
codes around the globe, even when their abundance and complexity
may render them invisible, an unintelligible space (Pardo Torío 1992,
231).

150 [DE]CENTERING
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 11 Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Hochhausstadt,” 1924, in Großstadt Architektur, by L. Hilberseimer,
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158 [DE]CENTERING
159
On (the Politics of ) Space.

Space as a social product.

(…) and, in the meantime, we continued to live in space; neither
in astronomical space, colonized by mathematical physics, nor in
phenomenological time of transcendental consciousness, nor in the “authentic
temporality” of Dasein; not in the mere “geographical-natural” space, but on
the land, in the inhabited space; civil, public, private, open or closed, rural
or urban, our houses, our streets, our hospitals or our workplaces. A space
that (pre)occupies us and that we occupy, but (of ) which neither science nor
philosophy have occupied in recent times; A space that lodges our thought and
our sensibility, but which lacks accommodation in our thinking and our feeling
as they are nourished by that science and that philosophy; A space that cannot
be reduced to abstract ideality or temporality. (Pardo Torío 1992, 37)

In a seminal conference entitled Des Espaces Autres (1967), Michel Desacralization

Foucault noted that, although space had eventually supplanted of space
time as the main concern of knowledge and that it had started to be
approached from a wide range of techniques and perspectives, it had
not yet been “entirely desacralized” (1998, 177): even though Galileo
started this process by replacing the medieval space of localization
with the modern space of extension, Foucault noticed that certain
oppositions –“between private space and public space,1 between the
family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space,
between the space of leisure activities and the space of work”– were
still assumed. Fifty years later, these antinomies are still present in
society’s daily language and collective imagery –at least in Western

1 Martina Löw explores the condition of the division between private and public
space, showing how, despite the blurriness of this separation, it is tacitly perpetuated
by institutions: “However permeable and contradictory this distinction might be, it is a
constitutive societal principle upheld by rules and resources. This structure manifests itself
in a range of isolable and recursively reproduced structures. There are legal structures,
which, for example, guarantee privacy; social structures which prescribe a different code
of conduct in public and in private; economic structures of unpaid housework as opposed
to gainful employment, etc. But the separation of public and private is also articulated in
spatial structures, in the design of buildings, in the lockability of buildings, in the conception
of the living room as a space accessible to the public by arrangement, in the design of
cafés in imitation of private spaces, etc. these spatial structures enable action” (Löw 2008,
38–39).

On (the politics of) space 161

 01

societies–, although limits between these dyads become more and

more blurry by means of social practice. Certainly, this association of
space and society experienced an extraordinary boost; for instance,
through the sociological studies on the metropolis, as we have
seen before, but especially during the sixties and seventies with the
emergence of radical (critical) geography as a reaction to positivism.
Therefore, the space of the Earth shall not be considered “as it is,” but
as a reality subject to critique and transformation in order to make
social change and emancipation possible. Besides, space opens the
possibility of studying juxtapositions, coexistences and simultaneities,
which were not conceivable within the previous predominant
conception of linear time.
Influences received by this current (which also involved sociology
and other sciences related to the urban question) were diverse, but
Karl Marx and Max Weber were clearly the most prominent guidance,
to the point that many critical geographers and social scientists
could be classified as Neo-Marxians or Neo-Weberians (Harding and
Blokland 2014, 38). While the latter recognized the role of rationality
and bureaucracy in all modern societies –and not only in capitalist
ones (Harding and Blokland 2014, 44)–, the former were almost
exclusively interested in capitalist processes and concerned about their
durability, despite Marx’s conviction on the self-destructive tendency
within capitalism (Harding and Blokland 2014, 39). However, it was
Lefebvre –usually included among the Neo-Marxians but holding a

162 [DE]CENTERING
very particular and heterodox position that distances him from this
group– the one who directly addressed the question of space as such,
ultimately influencing radical urban scholars such as David Harvey,
Edward Soja and Manuel Castells –although the latter would fiercely
criticize the French sociologist in his first major work The Urban
Question (Castells 1977, 86–95).
Literature on Lefebvre is incredibly vast. After a period of oblivion La production
during the eighties and nineties –except for the enormous influence de l’espace
that he had on the works of geographers like David Harvey, Edward
Soja or Milton Santos–, his work has experienced a renewed interest
in the beginning of the twenty-first century: not only many of his
texts have been re-edited or translated –the Spanish version of La
Production de l’Espace was not launched until 2013–, but also they
have been object of research projects and scholarly texts by a second
generation of interpreters2 and disseminated among activists and
a general public interested in urban issues. Despite the fact that
Lefebvre’s work should be primarily understood within a post-war
urbanization context, its contemporariness lies in its attempt to
advance in the process of desecration and the will to make the space
of the city (or the urban realm) accessible to everyone. Lefebvre does
not provide, however, any set of practical tools or methodology to
work on the space of the city in order to transform it. Rather, his
complex, abstract theoretical reflection on space and the city –inspired
by German dialectics and French phenomenology (Schmid 2012,
60)– is open to appropriation by society and different generations to
project –even practice– their desire and expectations in their urban
context. It is pensée vive, living thought, which evolves and can be
even ambiguous in certain moments.
My hypothesis is the following: it is in space and by means of space where the
reproduction of capitalist production relations takes place. This space becomes
increasingly an instrumental space. (Lefebvre 1974, 223)

2 The project “Rethinking Theory, Space and Production: Henri Lefebvre Today,”
led by scholars such as Łukasz Stanek, Christian Schmid and Akos Moravánszky, started
in 2008 and has greatly enriched the Lefebvrian landscape through congresses and diverse
publications (Stanek 2011; Stanek, Schmid, and Moravánszky (eds.) 2014; Lefebvre 2014).
http://www.henrilefebvre.org/ (See also Elden 2004; Shields 2005).

On (the politics of) space 163

 After his research on the transitions from the rural to the urban and
the writing of his famous article Le Droit à la Ville (1967) and La
Révolution Urbaine (1970), La Production de l’Espace, was probably
the most ambitious Lefebvrian text, since it aimed at nothing less than
outlining a unitary theory of space (Lefebvre 1991, 11). By asserting
that “([s]ocial) space is a (social) product”3 (1991, 26), the author
intimately relates space to society, proposing that space is generated
through social relations that at the same time take place in it: space is
both a product and a “means” of (re)production. Thus, by discerning
the spatial codes of a society it would be possible to understand it. His
critical spatial theory clearly tends to a relational conception of space,
in which political, economic, social and ideological relations configure
and transform it.
Lefebvre articulates the transitions between different dominant
categories of space throughout Western (European) history, hence
introducing the temporal dimension as well. The first category
would be absolute space, corresponding to Antiquity; a mythical/
religious space where sacred, unknown forces of nature are present
and reverenced by primeval societies (as a primitive version of
heterotopias), and where towns coexist with the rural realm in
symbiotic equilibrium. In this context, societies are conscious of their
insertion in space and time through nature: the position of stars,
the elevation of the sun, the age and growth of living beings. “Time
was thus inscribed in space, and natural space was merely the lyrical
and tragic script of natural time” (Lefebvre 1991, 95). But with the
advent of the feudal system and pre-capitalist accumulation, historical
space emerges, and the city appears as a superior entity distinct from
nature (through walls, institutions, law, etc.), although absolute space
still remains latent underneath it. The development of capitalism
in Europe would radically transform these time-space logics, and
therefore, a new category would appear: that of abstract space, which
has been dominating Western societies from the emergence of the
capitalist system until our days.

3 It is a product and not a work because of its reproducibility: “[w]hereas a work

has something irreplaceable and unique about it, a product can be reproduced exactly, and
is in fact the result of repetitive acts and gestures” (Lefebvre 1991, 70).

164 [DE]CENTERING
 02 03

“As a product of violence and war, it is political; instituted by

a state, it is institutional” (Lefebvre 1991, 285). Abstract space is
objective, rational and apparently homogeneous –“space performing
the function of a plane, a bulldozer or a tank” (Lefebvre 1991, 285)–,
although it manifests itself through fragmentation and division.
Lefebvre detects three main causes –or “formants”– of the appearance
of abstract space: first, Euclidean geometry, adopted by Descartes
and regarded as the only objective and systematic way of dealing with
space; secondly, the optical or visual formant, that is, the dominance
of vision over other senses in social practice: the use of perspective
in drawing and construction, the relevance of written language and
the process of spectacularization signaled by Guy Débord and the
situationists are some of the examples that Lefebvre (1991, 286)
uses to illustrate his argument. Thirdly, the phallic formant, which
incarnates the masculine preponderance over spatial codes and that
manifests itself not only through violence and force (police, army,
power…), but also through the preeminence of the vertical and the
perpendicular in the orientation of physical space.4 Probably, many
more “formants” could be added to the list –for instance, a monetary
formant, recalling Simmel’s “moving stream of money” in which
Tafuri placed the logic of the Merz (1976, 88)–, but what seems
clear is that there are certain conditions and factors which visibilize

4 Lefebvre saw Picasso as the “herald” of this modern, abstract space: “What we
find in Picasso is an unreservedly visualized space, a dictatorship of the eye - and of the
phallus” (1991, 302). However, he paved the ground for a differential space, by depicting
the contradictions of the former.

On (the politics of) space 165

 04 05

and perpetuate the hegemony of abstract space, and that they should
be seriously taken into account in order to counter it –or at least,
proposing an alternative spatiality–, since abstract space tends to
pervade all aspects of social practice.
Against this reductionist, invasive model of space, illusory,
transparent and completely intelligible, Lefebvre glimpses the
possibility of other spaces that, although coexisting within abstract
space, are generated by counterforces and actions of resistance by
social minorities. Contradictions inner to abstract space allow the
appearance of differential space –which is a kind of counterspace.
Against abstract quantity, differential space poses quality; against
a value-based system, differential space may be based on use value
(1991, 381), and so on and so forth. Thus, space is not only a “stage,”
but the product of struggle and conflict. However, an assemblage of
many differential spaces would not be enough to supplant abstract
space, or any kind of dominant space, if we look beyond Western
capitalism. Instead, according to Lefebvre, a whole new “other
space” would be necessary for this task (Hiernaux-Nicolas 2004, 21).
Nonetheless, this does not subtract importance to the emergence of
counterspaces and differential spaces, since society may appropriate
certain spatial habits different to the dominant ones. The success of
these “other” spaces is, in any case, not relevant to the purposes of
the research at the moment. It is important to note that, despite the
critiques Lefebvre has received for his “utopian” character, others, such
as Mark Purcell (2013a; 2013b) prefer to understand his vision of
urban society as “a virtual object, a possible world (…) that is already

166 [DE]CENTERING
 06 07

in the process of emerging inside the body of the actual industrial

city. If we know what to look for, he says, we can see urban society
emerging, here and there, if only for a brief moment.”
Before moving into other questions, there is an essential feature of Spatial triad
The Production of Space that shall be addressed, since Lefebvre comes
back to it once and again to qualify the conceptual triad of space,
which may be considered in fact, a double triad, or a mirrored triad
in which relations are complex and unstable. The first component is
spatial practice, which “embraces production and reproduction, and
the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social
formation” (Lefebvre 1991, 33). It corresponds to perceived space.
The second encompasses the representations of space, “which are tied
to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ which those relations
impose” (Lefebvre 1991, 33). This is how space is conceived by
lawmakers, scientists, architects and urbanists, and it is the dominant
element over social space. The third component are the spaces of
representation,5 “embodying complex symbolisms, sometimes coded,
sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social
life, as also to art” (Lefebvre 1991, 33). It is the intangible space of
the artists, writers and philosophers; a lived space, but also the space
of individual or collective dreams, memories, fears or phantasies.

5 Nicholson-Smith translates the French term espaces de représentation as

“representational spaces” in the English edition of The Production of Space (1991). However,
in more recent works the translation as “spaces of representation” is preferred (Shields
2005; Stanek, Schmid, and Moravánszky (eds.) 2014).

On (the politics of) space 167

 This third component of the triad, in which David Harvey (2004,
8) glimpses the influence of Benjamin, introduces a differential
factor that redeems Lefebvrian theory and moves it away from plain
materialism.
These three moments are translated into spatial terms. Consciously,
Lefebvre opts for a triad, and not a dyad of elements, since two factors
would entail a binary, dialectical movement subject to oppositions and
antagonisms. He is indeed very critical with such dualities that have
pervaded Western philosophy for centuries,6 “with the Manichaean
conception of a bitter struggle between two cosmic principles”
(Lefebvre 1991, 39), forming a perfect, closed circle between two
antagonistic powers that would eventually bring some light over the
complexity –or rather, obscurity– of multiple systems. By resorting
to a triad, he questions the reducibility of contradictions to the
opposition of two terms and their synthesis (Stanek 2011, 157).7
Even when he poses binary contradictions in his texts (for instance,
the notion of counterspace against space),8 he clearly emphasizes
asymmetry and the multiple character of the opposing term. In
this regard, it is possible to appreciate a certain influence of his
contemporaries; especially Gilles Deleuze and his refusal of negativity.
For Heidegger, for instance, re-presentation is never more than double or re-
double, the shadow or echo of a lost presence. The re-presentation is, therefore,
presentation, but weakened and even concealed. (Lefebvre 1983, 19)

Finally, there are some limitations that ought to be considered when

dealing with Lefebvre’s socio-spatial theory –which is, in any case,
extremely suggestive and productive, as it has been shown– and
assuming some of its principles. Together with the aforementioned
dependence on dialectical materialism –Lefebvre never detaches

6 “Subject and object, Descartes’s res cogitans and res extensa, and the Ego and
non-Ego of the Kantians, post-Kantians and neo-Kantians” (Lefebvre 1991, 39). Many more
could be added: the One and the multiple, Platonic sensible and intelligible realms, body
and soul…
7 Edward W. Soja (1996, 60) would call this strategy “Thirding-as-Othering” in his
work Thirdspace, highly inspired by Lefebvre’s spatial triad.
8 Neil Brenner (2000, 373) uses the term “spatialized counterpolitics” to name
the strategy against abstract space.

168 [DE]CENTERING
his work from Marx, although he diverts his perspective in certain
occasions–,9 the relevance of representation in his work is quite
problematic, especially in a contemporary context in which relations
are paid more attention than events, contrary to what has been
done in traditional Western thought. Lefebvre does not totally reject
representational thought, although he was interested in its critique to
a certain extent. In the mid-twenties, he joined the founding team of
L’Esprit –a journal that was only published twice–, in which authors
questioned traditional philosophical practices “which privileged
representation over action,” and where Lefebvre once wrote: “To
represent Being, is to stop being” (Shields 2005, 33). Later, Foucault’s
concern on the gap between things and words and the influence of
Débord and the situationists paved the way for a period dominated
by a hostility toward the representational. However, the question of Presence and
representation plays a central role in his spatial triad in The Production absence
of Space, and in La Présence et l’Absence (1980) he addresses the issue
again from an ambiguous perspective. In his words, the aim of the
work is the following:
What is the purpose of this book? A theory. For what? To decree the end
of representations with the end of ideologies, or of culture composed of
representations? That would be too ambitious. What is at stake in the book
is situated between: a) the acceptance of the representational as a social,
psychic, political fact; b) global rejection. The theory does not allow to abolish
representation, but to resist those that fascinate us and perhaps to choose the
representations that allow to explore the possible against those that block it, that
fix when fixing. (Lefebvre 1983, 26)

As in The Production of Space, Lefebvre situates architecture in the

spotlight, as a decentered discipline between power (representation of
space) and multiple, particular representations of space that ought to
be confronted and overcome in order to build “a place of presences

9 Rob Shields (2005, 34) detects an important difference Marx and Lefebvre:
“Even though he was one of the greatest champions of Marx, Lefebvre’s own intuition
drew him and his formulation of Marxism towards a more Nietzschean, Bakhtinian
celebration of the unquashable character of ‘joy’ and ‘life’. It is in this sense that Lefebvre is
a philosophical romantic. Marx rages in favour of humanity, but under the sign of Reason—
the ‘crucified sun’ of repressed spontaneity, energy and desire that Lefebvre had first
revolted against (…)”

On (the politics of) space 169

 in a space of absences” (Lefebvre 1983, 247). Beyond the persistent
distinction between “space” and “place” posed by several authors, it
seems that, for Lefebvre, architecture is an “obstacle” that impedes
him to get rid of representation in his spatial theory, something that
Stanek (2011, 131) attributes to “his exchanges with architects and
by the discussions about the practice of design as a constant to-and-
fro between representations and lived space.” Still, Lefebvre is deeply
interested in practice and what we could call today “performativity,”
which brings him closer to contemporary non-representational
approaches10 (despite their Foucaldian and Deleuzian inspiration).
Notwithstanding the difficulties –if not the impossibility– that
holding a purely representational perspective entails today, it is
still possible to regard representations as performative mediations,
transitions between presence and absence as Lefebvre did:
Representations mediate between presence and absence. Lefebvre cannot resist
making representation into a pun on presence: re-present-ation. He renders
what might appear to be a dualism into a three-part dialectic of the whole
representation, the absent or illusory ideas or images being represented and the
sign or performance making these ‘present’ by doing the representing. (Shields
2005, 99)

The second limitation that can be attributed to the work of Lefebvre

is its geographical and cultural restraint to the West. As it was pointed
before, even Lefebvre was conscious about the problems that his
theory of total urbanization entailed when contrasted with other
contexts, such as China (Lefebvre 1974; 1991; Tang 2014). In any
case, one has to bear in mind that the Western knowledge about
China at that time was very limited compared to the present day, yet
it is still clear that differences persist, not only in China, but in many
parts of the world. Thus, one has to be careful when analyzing diverse
spatial situations with Lefebvre’s theory.

10 Representationalism entails that “representations and the objects (subjects,

events, or states of affairs) they purport to represent are independent of one another”
(Barad 2007, 28). Some of the most relevant contemporary critics of representationalism
are the geographer Nigel Thrift, who poses a non-representational theory from a
geographical-spatial perspective (2008) and the feminist philosopher and theoretician
Karen Barad (2007), who proposes performativity and agential realism as means of
approaching reality and material-discursive practices.

170 [DE]CENTERING
 08

In 1980, flying back to France from Oaxaca, Mexico, Lefebvre

started a letter to the Mexican poet Octavio Paz that he would
never send.11 In this letter, Lefebvre manifests his disquiet and
preoccupation about Europe, his homeland, and recognizes the
diversity of socio-spatial scenarios he has discovered in Latin-America
and Asia. Again, together with the problematic of representation, this
restlessness (Unruhe) appears as fear and anxiety, but also as a motor
for potential change:
I situate you among the greats of poetry. There is someone really great that you
seem to put aside: Hölderlin. It occurs to me to think that you, a Mexican, who
can confront the philosophy of the East and the West, the Latin culture (as it
is called) with the Anglo-Saxon and the Asian ones, has few relations with the
great Germany of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which spread works
and gifts with prodigious prodigality. Is it necessary to clarify that I speak of
Germany before Bismarck? When he takes the country in his brutal hands,
Nietzsche leaves. He flees the State.

11 The letter appears as a preamble in La Présence et l’Absence. It was not possible

to find a complete English translation of this beautiful text, so I decided to translate some
paragraphs that contain, to my mind, a very accurate portrait of the real Lefebvre and
his universal preoccupations, far from contemporary interpretations that may distort
his character. The Spanish version used for the translation is in La Presencia y la Ausencia
(Lefebvre 1983, 7–11).

On (the politics of) space 171

 With regard to representation (Vorstellung and/or Darstellung), I have before me
a passage by Hölderlin that disturbs me:”Die erste Idee ist natürlich die Vorstellung
von mir selbst... [it is him who remarks], als einem absolut freien Wesen.”12 Thus,
the world-object unfolds immensely, infinitely, before the subject-poet. For him.
Because of him? Hölderlin, philosopher poet, is represented freely, absolutely,
unconditionally, and infinite nature presents itself outside of him but before
him. Without there being neither spectacle nor fusion, but communion and
communication, thus presence. This emergence intrigues me, worries me. Is it
possibly the infinite what arises from the finite, things, signs, words, for and by
the poet? (…)

At ten thousand meters above the ocean, at this moment, I think with nostalgia
in your country, Octavio Paz, and with anguish in the country that I will find
again. My own ideas falter. What is the purpose of radical criticism, that of
everyday life, that of the State? The claim of the right to difference or to the
city? In the countries of America and Asia, I saw thousands and millions of
people aspire to a solid daily life, to yearn for a stable state, to worship political
leaders, expecting from them an acceptable daily life - bread and images - more
than freedom or quality. Are we not entering the time of crowds, into the mass
society, without knowing well what that represents? In this society, the masses
seem to accept the domination of people who have knowledge and power. (…)
If I understood Marx even a little, it seems to me that, according to him, the
working class can and should be overcome, therefore carrying to the extreme
automation to get to non-work. There is nothing in common between this
thought and the apologies of manual labor, of productivism, whether capitalist
or socialist.

However, I do not see anything today that corresponds to this revolutionary

project, except for a few appeals that happen to be the purest and worst utopia.
Here we are not before the Rubicon, but in the labyrinth. All the more so, in
contrast to the crowd and the mass, the individual explodes as a problem. That

12 “The first idea is naturally the representation of myself as an absolutely free

Being.” This quote belongs to a work entitled Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen
Idealismus (“The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism”) that dates from 1796-
1797 and that was first published by the philosopher and translator Franz Rosenzweig in
1926. Although Lefebvre attributes its writing to Hölderlin, the authorship of the work
is unknown. It could have been written by Hegel or even Schelling. It should be noted
that the three of them were colleagues at the Tübinger Stift. It can be found in Hölderlin,
Friedrich. 2014. Theoretische Schriften. Berlin: Hofenberg.

172 [DE]CENTERING
 is why I am writing to you, Octavio Paz, to inform you of my concerns, without
expecting from you some words that resolve these contradictions. Such words
are impossible, but the smallest word that indicates where we are, where we are
going, would have an incomparable value. In a few hours I will return to find
the Europe “of ancient parapets”; the Europe in crisis, as they say: the logos in
decline, France and the continent prey to its destiny. Would not that destiny
be, from the beginning, to render emptiness? Where do you see living, creative
forces? The best are devoted to deny, to destroy...

No doubt you, poet and philosopher, have more reasons to keep faith in the
future of your continent, your country, your work than we Europeans stalked
by disaster and despair. However, should we find the discoveries (what a word! I
hesitate to use it, when I think that it is still written in Europe that this or that
Western navigator “discovered” America or Mexico!), let us say, the promises
of West, to be null and void? You already know this question. It traverses your
poems and your theoretical work. As an initial quote to a book that I began
in Mexico and that I will dedicate to you, I will use this phrase that closes
Conjunctions and Disjunctions: “For the first and last time, the word presence
and the word love appear to the edge of these reflections: they were the seeds
of the West, the origin of our art and our poetry. In them, lies the secret of our
resurrection.” I agree, Octavio Paz. (Lefebvre 1983, 8–11)13

Architecture after the spatial turn.

(…) architecture is always the expression of a lack, a shortcoming, a non-
completion. It always misses something, either reality or concept. Architecture is
both being and non-being. (Tschumi 1995, 82)

It has already been explained how space became a central issue in Spatial turn
Western thought during the twentieth century, to the point that it
has been called “the century of space” (Foucault 1998; Löw 2015).
This interest served to reorient approaches and methods in diverse
fields, not only exact and natural sciences –with regard to the
emergence of non-Euclidean geometry, the theory of relativity and
so on– or engineering –which has allowed human exploration of
space beyond the Earth–, but also social sciences and humanities:
sociology (Lefebvre 1991), geography (Soja 1989; Harvey 1992),
history (Braudel, Santa Arias, Angelo Torres), literature studies (Hess-

13 [T.A.]

On (the politics of) space 173

 09

Lüttich 2012), philosophy (Pardo Torío 1992; Derrida 1995; Foucault

1998) or cultural studies (Jameson, Said, Appadurai, Bhabha,
Butler…), among others, together with the rise of urban studies. This
paradigmatic shift usually receives the name of spatial turn, which
some authors situate at the end of the second millennium (Soja 1989;
Löw 2015), even though its origins –as Soja (1989, 16) recognizes–
can be traced back to earlier decades, being Foucault Des Espaces
Autres (1967) an essential milestone for its institution.
As for architecture and the arts, the situation has been very
different. Indeed, a “spatial turn” in these realms had taken place
much before, with the contributions of central European historians
and critics, such as Schmarsow, Riegl, Lipps or Hildebrand, whose
work would later be the source for consensus on “space as the
essence of architecture” among art and architectural historians like
Sigfried Giedion, Nikolaus Pevsner or Geoffrey Scott (Stanek 2012,
49). Besides, many of the artistic trends of the avant-garde period
privileged space in their foundations, not only in plastic arts –Cubism,
Expressionism, Tatlin’s counterreliefs or Schwitters’ Merzbilder– but
also in Dadaist literature or the Theater of the Absurd (Löw 2015).
Thus, the spatial turn in social sciences in the sixties and seventies –a
period in which architecture began to be associated to this field of
knowledge and the urban (mostly the industrial, modern city) was
entering a deep crisis– put architecture in a complicated position.

174 [DE]CENTERING
Moreover, the events around 196814 supposed an attack against the
modern paradigm and its progressive character, and this included
architecture in a moment when people realized that they were able
to build their own space, with the generalization of “the right to
the city” and participatory spatial practice.15 If space was negated to
architecture –and architects– as its essence, what remained?
In fact, Stanek (2012, 49) remarks how some of the most relevant Architecture
architectural thinkers of the last decades position themselves against as space?
an “architecture as space,” such as Venturi and Scott Brown (2004;
also Venturi, Brown, and Izenour 1977, 6–7) or Rem Koolhaas
(2007). Also in Latin America, reactions against the spatial essence
of architecture was palpable, for instance in the works of the Chilean
writer José Ricardo Morales (1984), who criticized the inherited
conception of architectural space from Hegel and the central
European school, or the also Chilean architect Isidro Suárez (1986),
who followed the path of Juan Borchers against a reductionist use
of space in architecture (De Stefani 2009). Beyond the ocean, the
Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara, while praising the work of
Giedion and the association of a specific architecture to a concrete
epochal spatial conception, noted that this link would be unthinkable
in Japan, since the concept of “space” as such never existed there.
Moreover, notions like “temporal space,” “fluidity” or even the nexus
between architecture and progress are impossible to translate, as
there is no space, but void; hence, the beauty of traditional Japanese
architecture lies in the “non-existence of space” (Shinohara 2011,
244).
Interestingly, most of these critiques have something in common:
their refusal of space as an abstract entity. In general, the architectural
reaction to the spatial turn was a questioning of modern architecture
and its tights with the extensive, geometrical and dominant space of

14 1968 cannot be regarded as a singular moment in time, but as the trigger of a

longer period that comprises the crisis of the modern project. (See Crysler, Cairns, and
Heynen (eds.) 2012, 11)
15 Some of the pioneers for a participatory architecture were Ralph Erskine or
Lucien Kroll. In other aspects, the revalorization of vernacular architecture (Rudofsky
1964) or the proposals of counterdesign in Italy (Ambasz 1972) were also signs of a
certain interest in an “architecture without architects.”

On (the politics of) space 175

 capitalism. Thus, it is comprehensible that Western critics expressed
their discontent about space, while the rest tended to claim and
defend their particular spatial conceptions. It may be impossible to
dissociate architecture and space, but architecture shall not necessarily
produce and reproduce the spaces of a specific mode of domination.
Space of The blunt criticism that Lefebvre posed against the role of architects
the architect and their authority in spatial matters –ironically calling them “doctors
of space” (1991, 95–99)– followed this direction.16 Rather, he
proposed that architects work together with other spatial agents in
order to regenerate the “spatial code”:
The reconstruction of a spatial “code”–that is, of a language common to practice
and theory, as also to inhabitants, architects and scientists– may be considered
from the practical point of view to be an immediate task. The first thing
such a code would do is recapture the unity of dissociated elements, breaking
down such barriers as that between private and public, and identifying both
confluences and oppositions in space that are at present indiscernible. (Lefebvre
1991, 64)

In order to reduce the gap between society and architecture, it is

necessary that architects recognize social space. Here, Lefebvre offers
architecture “an opportunity for subversion” (Coleman 2015, 124),
while Tafuri launched a clear message: “architects as urban designers
are themselves functionally integrated into the ideological structure
of capitalist enterprise whose outcomes they wish to alter” (Cuthbert
Critical 2011, 51). In the end, according to both positions, architects, as social
architecture agents, are imbued in an ideological system that they want to change,
be it possible or not. In this context, a critical architecture emerges,
recognizing the constraints imposed by abstract space and aiming at
revealing its contradictions.
The idea of a critical architecture appears in an article by K.
Michael Hays entitled “Critical Architecture: Between Culture

16 “It may thus be said of architectural discourse that it too often imitates or
caricatures the discourse of power, and that it suffers from the delusion that ‘objective’
knowledge of ‘reality’ can be attained by means of graphic representations. This discourse
no longer has any frame of reference or horizon. It only too easily becomes - as in the case
of Le Corbusier - a moral discourse on straight lines, on right angles and straightness in
general, combining a figurative appeal to nature (water, air, sunshine) with the worst kind of
abstraction (plane geometry, modules, etc.) “ (Lefebvre 1991, 361).

176 [DE]CENTERING
 10 11

and Form” (1984) that triggered a long-lasting debate about the

pertinence of an oppositional architecture, “one resistant to the
self-confirming, conciliatory operations of a dominant culture
and yet irreducible to a purely formal structure disengaged from
the contingencies of place and time” (Hays 1984, 15). In his text,
Michael Hays exposes the existing dichotomy in the understanding of
architecture as an epiphenomenon –the interpreter plays with signs,
symptoms, and cultural values. The social function of the historical
critic is to reconstruct the originality of a time for a truth –and as an
autonomous form–, while the architect renounces the truth; the work
does not fit as a cultural object in its time. Against this situation, Hays
proposes an intermediate sphere (that he calls “critical”), in which
the artifact itself as well as its insertion in the world-culture are still
important.
The fact of appealing to Mies’ work to expose his hypotheses and
to show it as an architecture of resistance and opposition comes from
the interpretation that Tafuri –and Cacciari, by extension– make of it
in negative terms. The two projects for the Friedrichstraße in Berlin,
designed in 1919 and 1922, show this character. Order is immanent

On (the politics of) space 177

 to the surface of the building and depends on the world in which
it is inserted, suited to the political conditions of the German city:
a city that is torn between the modern metropolis and the capital
of the empire. The writings of Simmel on the Großstadt and the
reactions it provokes in the individual are essential to understand
the project of the skyscraper, as well as the debate that it opens
on the Germanization of the American skyscraper (Lampugnani
2001, 40). Therefore, it cannot be seen as anti-contextual, idealized,
autonomous, or formal by itself, but as a response and a resistance
to the uncertainty of life in the metropolis through the revelation
of its conditions. But at the same time, the project does not seek a
conciliation with its boundary conditions. The glass surfaces that
make up the facade of the building are excessively reflective, causing
the dissolution of the skyscraper within the metropolis whose image
it reflects. This does not imply a mere distortion of reality or the
generation of an urban silence, but also, as Robin Evans (1991,
262) points out, the mirror cannot only destroy coherence, but also
reveal it. More than in terms of autonomy, the glass skyscraper in its
abstraction and silence –communicating the context in which it is
inserted through the reflecting surface of the curtain wall (Jameson
1998, 44; Díaz 2012, 8 ff)– emerges as an aporetic, anti-dialectical
figure, showing the impossibility of synthesis and the impossibility
of resolving the conflict within the dominant system of financial
capitalism. By reflecting and accepting the other, the building acquires
a heterotopic condition which no longer operates through exclusive
binary oppositions.
Critical / It cannot be understood here, therefore, that this political response
post-critical is characteristic of its Zeitgeist, as Eisenman (1996, 17) argues; rather
it emerges against dominant tendencies. Indeed, Eisenman dismantles
binary positions through what he calls the post-critical, which
seems to derive in a certain way from the dissolution of political
conflicts and “the erosion of difference” (Kaminer 2005, 73) in the
West after the fall of the Berlin Wall, inaugurating a framework that
some authors also qualify as “third-way” or post-politics. Besides, he
denounces duality as an exclusion of form as political action and social
relief, thus transforming Hays’s argument: architecture would either
be infrastructure (media, without ideology), or still redemptive and
critical. Rather, Eisenman proposes surpassing criticality:

178 [DE]CENTERING
 Architecture should question the idea of its prior incarnation, both of meaning
and of its social function, and hence of its present modes of legitimation. And
what will the forms of this investigation look like when they carry out this
disengagement? These are the questions that architecture faces, an architecture
that no longer has canon, but only, as a starting point, its own, unique
possibility of being: its acquisition of form. (Eisenman 1996)

This debate on the validity of an architectural critical project, which

is born is the United States but exported to Europe several years
later, is directly related with the autonomy of architecture as a
discipline. Going backwards in time, North American groups such
as the Texas Rangers or the New York Five (among whose members
were Colin Rowe, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves or
Richard Meier) were interested in setting the basis for an architecture
mainly based in questions of form, without ideological constraints
and isolating architecture from the utopian promises of modernity.
Amidst this situation, the notions of criticality and autonomy appear
entangled in a debate –exceptionally summarized by George Baird
(2004)– that still resonates, however, through different authors and
interests.
Still, the attempts to escape the Tafurian trap, in which architects
remain paralyzed because of the impossibility of contributing to
societal emancipation due to the insertion of architecture in the
capitalist engine, succeed one another in the last years. Eighteen years
later, new interlocutors enhance the debate challenging criticality
and proposing an alternative “projective” architecture. By this,
Somol and Whiting (2002) meant a shift from the indexical to the
diagrammatic, from dialectics to Doppler architecture,17 from the
representational to the performative. To illustrate their argument, they
compare Eisenman’s18 interpretation of Le Corbusier’s Dom-Ino and

17 “If critical dialectics established architecture’s autonomy as a means of

defining architecture’s field or discipline, a Doppler architecture acknowledges the
adaptive synthesis of architecture’s many contingencies. Rather than isolating a singular
autonomy, the Doppler focuses upon the effects and exchanges of architecture’s inherent
multiplicities” (Somol and Whiting 2002, 75).
18 Although Eisenman can be considered one of the father figures of post-
criticality, many of the authors that support this perspective revolted against him. George
Baird (2004, 3) notes how many of them were actually Eisenman’s disciples.

On (the politics of) space 179

 Hays’ reading of the reconstruction of Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion –in
which disciplinarity appears as autonomy and representation– with
Koolhaas’ Downtown Athletic Club, where architecture as a discipline
is understood as force and effect.
Theory as Michael Speaks (2006) went one step beyond, also launching
negative practice in Perspecta a much less subtle attack against architectural theory
as a “negative practice” and its tendency toward resistance and
opposition,19 that would only lead to “the impossibility of
affirmatively intervening in a world dominated by capitalistic and/or
metaphysical oppressors” (Speaks 2006, 103). Thus, he proposes to
substitute theory for intelligence, just as theory substituted philosophy
in the late twentieth century vanguards. Once having get rid of the
burden of theory, according to the author, architecture would have the
possibility to conduct innovative, intelligent design practices together
with (technological) contemporary means –software, interactive
prototyping, 3D modelling, etc.– without aiming at solving any
problem, but “adding something not given in the formulation of any
kind of problem they have been asked to solve” (Speaks 2006, 106).
Despite the risk –not to say uselessness– that entails to assign
a “critical” or “post-critical” tag to architectural offices and
professionals, the pragmatism wielded by post-critical authors has
been quite successful in terms of contemporary architectural practice.
International offices, such as SOM, OMA or FOA, among many
others, head the production of innovative, technological mega-
projects that proliferate all over the world, usually working through
an additive logic, in the sense defined by Speaks. Some of these
architects contribute to this vision not only through their built
Architecture work, but also with written, “theoretical” production. The article
as politics? “Transgression. Innovation. Politics” (2013) by Patrik Schumacher,
Zaha Hadid’s office principal, has already been mentioned as a
particular stake against an oppositional, political architecture, arguing
that there is no need for it at the moment: “During normal times
architecture and politics are separated as autonomous discursive
domains” (Schumacher 2013, 133). Certainly, architecture cannot be

19 Speaks had been developing the idea of “Design Intelligence” from 2002, when
he started a series of twelve articles in A+U reflecting on several architectural offices that
practiced this mode of architecture.

180 [DE]CENTERING
12 13

14 15

16 17

On (the politics of) space 181

 regarded anuymore as a “saving” discipline, able to solve utopically the
problems that the world is facing today –this is not its task, despite
the aspirations of former universalist projects. Manfredo Tafuri (1987,
8) already recognized that “architecture as politics is by now such an
exhausted myth that it is pointless to waste anymore words on it.”
Nevertheless, the Italian historian pointed to a possible ground for
action:
But if Power -like the institutions in which it incarnates itself- “speaks many
dialects,” the analysis of the “collision” among these dialects must then be the
object of historiography. The construction of a physical space is certainly the site
of a “battle”: a proper urban analysis demonstrates this clearly. That such a battle
is not totalizing, that it leaves borders, remains, residues, is also an indisputable
fact. And thus a vast field of investigation is opened up -an investigation of the
limits of languages, of the boundaries of techniques, of the thresholds “that
provide density.” (Tafuri 1987, 8)

Even when our times may seem “normal” or “ordinary” to some like
Schumacher, there are still some circles within architectural theory
and practice that, although recognizing the exhaustion of previous
forms of criticality, still resist to lose the social vocation of architecture
and its possibility to think of an emancipatory space through the
borders, remains and residues that Tafuri detects, even acknowledging
that the battle could never end. In this regard, the field of “reflexive
architecture” proposed by Arie Graafland, opens a critical path
based not on discrediting, but on uniting, building bridges, and
therefore productive, without losing sight of “(human) nature,” that
is, notions of gender, ethnicity, wealth or and class. Referring to the
contributions of Bruno Latour on critique’s recent loss of strength,20
Graafland claims:
Instead of moving away from facts, we have to direct our attention toward the
conditions that made them possible. For architecture it implies the redirection
of our thoughts to what I would call an architecture of the street. A reflexive
architectural way of proceeding, renewing empiricism, and addressing the
sophisticated tools of architectural deconstruction and its inherent construction
– or better, the lack of– social construction. (Graafland 2012, 98)

20 Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact
to matters of concern,” in Critical Inquiry (30), pp. 225-248.

182 [DE]CENTERING
However, this is not enough for others. Having harshly criticized
the post-critical attitude as mere pragmatism in which practice –“the
real”– obscures underlying issues, Tahl Kaminer (2005) rejects the
projective approach as well, considering that it is associated with a
material and technological progress that, at the same time, implies
a certain paternalistic ethics (“a standard quality of life and well-
being has to be reached in order to transform society, i.e., export our
democratic, progressive mode of life to the others.”) The result of such
a strategy can be appreciated in testimonies like Zhu’s “Criticality in
between China and the West” (2005), from which it can be deduced
that China needs of the West –especially Koolhaas– to clarify and
evaluate its own architectural panorama. The reverse situation is also
considered, but with a clearly asymmetrical strength. In sum, the
refuge in aesthetics and projective practice –where Kaminer situates
Somol, Koolhaas, Van Toorn or Stan Allen– only covers up the
struggle of tackling the commitment between architecture and society.
But how can architecture address the impact of the financial crisis
in 2008, whose effects are still palpable? How to tackle the problem
of access to housing in Europe, the refugee crisis, the safety of women
and children in cities? Even when the aim of theory is not to solve
all the problems, or to give an answer to all questions, theoretical
reflection cannot be completely substituted by direct practice, as
tempting as it may be. To escape the deadlock, the written dialogues
between Peggy Deamer, Libero Andreotti, David Cunningham and
Erik Swyngedouw in Can Architecture be an Emancipatory Project?
(Lahiji (ed.) 2016) offer an interesting choral perspective about
renewed ways of constituting the architectural discipline, without
losing a certain autonomy, but also incorporating a critical perspective,
even from the earlier stages of the formation of the architect. Going
back to the issue of space, architects have much to learn from other
spatial agents, such as social movements, as Swyngedouw (2016, 66)
suggests. Moreover, it is necessary to rethink architectural methods
and organizations with regard to spatial intervention. Urban space, in
general more plural and complex than the spatial unit of the building,
opens a whole experimental field to this purposes.
In “‘Criticality’ and Its Discontents”(2004), George Baird was
curious about the future of the firm of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo

On (the politics of) space 183

 18

Scofidio beyond the context of the museum or the gallery, making

reference to the difference between being critical in the museum and
being critical “in the street” (Baird 2004, 2). Being particularly sharp,
Baird points to the relation between Diller and Scofidio and the
defenders of criticality. When Hays was appointed architecture curator
of the Whitney Museum in New York, his first major exhibition was
devoted to the work of the firm, in which the designs and installations
The High Line for museums and galleries prevailed over building projects.21 However,
the same year, together with James Corner and Piet Oudolf as
planting designer, the firm was selected for the preservation and
transformation of the old railroad running along the Lower West
Side of Manhattan into a linear space of public use. By creating a
new passable surface that crosses, cuts and rises over the urban grid,
pedestrians are able to contemplate the city from many points of view
that were inexistent until then; an inexistence that is only partial,
as they have been recovered from a hidden layer that had remained
latent under many others. Nonetheless, this should not be read in
a nostalgic-historical way, regarding the High Line as the return of
nature to the post-industrial city; neither is it a singular, free area that
emerges from urban chaos by means of spectacular architecture –or
at least it is not just that. Instead, the Line is interesting because it
embodies an unconventional, almost otherworldly time-and-space

21 He also remarks that “Diller+Scofidio have succeeded in embodying ‘resistance’

in a fashion that bears comparison with the one Tafuri admired in the late work of Mies”
(Baird 2004, 2).

184 [DE]CENTERING
rhythm, which makes it different from the urban fabric within
which it is inserted. This is why it is possible to read it as a reverse,
as an-other space that stands in contrast to the space below it. A
Foucauldian significance may be glimpsed here: “[t]he point of
heterotopia is not that it designates a type of space, focusing purely
on spatial arrangements or material/physical elements, but that it
approaches spaces as expressive or constitutive of (other) discourses”
(Wesselman 2013, 22).
The High Line has become a world-known example of a successful
public urban space, and it has become one of the major attractions
of the city. However, architecture and landscape design cannot take
all the credit here. It is often omitted that the project responds to
a social initiative that began in the eighties, when the activist Peter
Obletz defended the preservation of the structure against the group
of property owners that planned its demolition. In the first years of
2000, the newly instituted Friends of the High Line, which gathers
residents and sympathizers of the space, began a process to define a
proposal for the dismantled railway. Together with this bottom-up
process, in which architecture plays an accompanying role secondary
to the social process, it is important to remark the tension between
productive and counterproductive aspects that it presents. There is
no doubt that the park has become a major attraction for tourists
and visitors, but even if it has had a great economic impact in the
city, the Line for itself seems to avoid a productive logic, departing
“from the dominant discourse of economic profit” (Wesselman
2013, 24). Therefore, we are facing a place which does not produce
economic benefit per se –on the contrary, it is a place for leisure and
non-production–, but which is constantly interrupted by productive
devices –such as the cart described by Wesselman (2013, 24)– and
whose presence motivates consumption and economic activity. This
contradiction is never hidden, and is intrinsic to the whole structure.
Politics of the (global) city. Polemos, polis,
politics
There is a strong tie between the notions of polemos, polis and politics.
Beyond the semantic roots of each term, Chantal Mouffe (1999, 14)
exposes the relation of politics with polemos –antagonism, conflict–
and polis –the capacity of living together. Both realms have been
often considered to be mutually exclusive, giving priority to the civic

On (the politics of) space 185

 coexistence of the polis and ideally leaving no space for conflict. This
position is problematic because it dismisses a crucial dimension of
coexistence. Others, like Mouffe herself, situate conflict at the core of
politics.
The German philosopher Hannah Arendt (1997) deeply studied
the relation between polemos and polis through the question of war.
Although Arendt excludes war and violence from the political –as they
are incapable of producing something new–, she situates the origin
of politics in the war of Troy, something that could be understood as
a contradiction. However, the original “war of annihilation” (Arendt
1997, 107) would ground the foundation of Greek and Roman
civilizations; the former descending from the Achaeans, the latter
from Aeneas.
According to the interpretation that the Italian philosopher
Stefania Fantauzzi (2003) elaborates on Arendt’s texts, there are
two main aspects to be remarked about the links between war and
politics. The first question has to do with the space of the polis:
since war takes place outside the limits of the polis, it cannot be
considered a political issue. The second is related to isonomy, that is,
the condition of equality among citizens.22 This equality, however, is
also based on dispute and conflict. Fantauzzi (2003, 25), following
Arendt, establishes a continuity between the dyad polemos-polis and
the concepts agon and aristeuein respectively, both meaning the
aspiration of the citizen to be seen as the best among his equals. The
paradigmatic example of this model is narrated in the Iliad, through
the combat between Hector and Achilles.23
Zwischenraum Thus, equality would only be possible within the physical space
of the polis and the emergence of politics, in the space “in-between”

22 Women, slaves and foreigners did not have the right of citizenship in Ancient
Greece.
23 Sloterdijk (2018) mentions the resumption of pain after the Trojan War, which
resonates during the journey of Aeneas to Rome, the new Troy of the West. Through
Virgil, the fugitive Trojan hero would pronounce the following words before Dido, Queen
of Carthage, after she had asked him about the fall of Troy and his subsequent seven years
of wandering with his people: “Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem” (“A grief too great
to be told, O queen, you bid me renew.”)

186 [DE]CENTERING
citizens (Zwischenraum), that is, the space of freedom (Arendt 1997,
113), usually identified with the agora. This space does not exist
either in the domestic realm or outside the polis, with regard to the
relations with other territorial entities: in these domains, the exercise
of violence and imposition is the basic means of power. Transgressing
the limits of the polis –nomos and hybris at the same time– would
entail the loss of the citizen’s identity. Later, the Romans, after the
“repetition” of the Trojan war in the territory of Lazio –narrated by
Virgil in the Aeneid–, extend the political space outside the walls of
the city through the treaty and the alliance, “the natural continuation
of the war” (Arendt 1997, 118): construction after annihilation. With
this recognition of the other, first as enemy, then as ally, the law –lex,
consensus omnium– is created as a “durable bound” after the exercise of
violence (Arendt 1997, 120).
Despite the impossibility of returning to the polis model, especially
after the socio-political crisis experienced during the last years in
many cities of the world, the Greek polis and the Roman urbs-civitas
still resonate in the memories of the European city. However, the
political cannot be limited today to territorial and warlike questions.
For instance, Bruno Latour (2007, 818) detects up to five different
meanings of the political: the creation of new associations –between
humans and non-humans– and cosmograms, according to science and
technology studies; the identification of the political with “the public”
and its problems, connected to Dewey and pragmatist philosophy;
the political as sovereignity, following Carl Schmitt; the Habermasian
political as communication among citizens (deliberative asemblies)
and, finally, the political as “seemingly apolitical” governmentality, as Everything /
studied by Foucault and diverse feminisms, among others. It seems nothing is
that “everything is political,” as Foucault deduces from the Schmittian political
definition of politics (based on the friend-enemy distinction), adding
in turn that if “nothing is political, everything can be politicized,
everything may become political” (Foucault and Senellart (ed.) 2004,
505). We are facing here an ambivalence that has opened a broad field
of discussion that would crystallize into post-foundational politics
(Rancière 1999; Marchart 2007; Deuber-Mankowsky 2008), which
recognizes the absence of transcendental truths in the basis of political
thought. In particular, Jacques Rancière (1999, 32) would echo the
Foucaldian assertion adding that, for something to be political, it

On (the politics of) space 187

 should emerge from the clash between the “police logic and egalitarian
logic that is never set up in advance.”
Though this conflict, the division between la police and la politique
established by Rancière is particularly fruitful when understood in
spatial terms. In fact, the distribution of the sensible “reveals who can
have a share in what is common to the community based on what
they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed”
La police / (Rancière 2004, 12). The geographer Erik Swyngedouw spatializes the
le politique conflict between la police and le politique through the demonstrations
and protests that took place in 2011 all around the world. While la
police consists of a set of mechanisms and strategies for ordering and
distributing people, things and functions in specific places, le politique
rearranges what does not take place, in recording as voices what
for the police is noise. According to this view, architecture, urban
planning and design would be part of the police repertoire.
Whereas any logic of la police is one of hierarchy and inequality, le politique
is marked by the presumption of equality within an aristocratic order that
invariably “wronged” this presumption (…) Proper politics is thus about
enunciating demands that lie beyond the symbolic order of la police; demands
that cannot be symbolized within its frame of rererence and, therefore, would
necessitate a transformation in and of la police to permit symbolistaion to occur.
(Swyngedouw 2011, 23–25)

Global cities The relation between city and politics has always been present,
although they have been permanently reconfigured and retraced in
different times and spaces. Still today, we are witnessing a tendency
toward an increasing leading role of the cities as regional economic
motors and political centres. In fact, they are occasionally becoming
even more relevant than nation-states because of market deregulation
promoted by national governments, amidst other reasons (Jacobs
1985; Baird 2014, 121; Gelbke 2014, 167). After the rise of European
and American metropolis during the nineteenth and the early
twentieth centuries, a new term was coined to describe the new urban
phenomenon that consisted on bigger, stronger world-leading cities.
The notion of “global city” became popular after the Dutch-American
sociologist Saskia Sassen’s pivotal work on the issue (Sassen 1991;
2005). Already preceded by Patrick Geddes’ (1915, 46) understanding
of world cities as competing entities, global cities represent key

188 [DE]CENTERING
nodes in world economy because of the concentration of business,
financial and cultural services. These cities are highly populated,
internationally recognized and interconnected through physical and
communicational infrastructures that facilitate flows of people and
information. Although Sassen (1991) initially assigned this status to
three specific cities –London, New York and Tokyo–, the list is much
longer today, including Paris, Hong Kong and many others.
In the late eighties, David Harvey (1989) detected a shift to what Urban
he calls “entrepeneurialism” as a new model of urban governance competitiveness
based on competitiveness among cities, including business and
market-oriented strategies. In this regard, we are recently attending
an outburst of reports and documents from several agencies and
institutions addressing this issue. Research groups and networks like
the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) Research Network or
the consulting firm A.T. Kearney publish periodical rankings in which
cities are classified according to different parameters: business activity,
information exchange, personal well-being, cultural experience, etc.
If a city moves up or goes down on the list it means that its global
status has changed with respect to the last measurement. The tone
of this kind of reports is very variable depending on the publishing
institution or agency, using either a softer, socially-empowering
approach –such as The Competitiveness of Cities by UN-Habitat
(2013)– or directly remarking economic development and the
importance of private investment (The Economist Intelligence Unit
2012; Forum 2014).
As an example of the last category, the report named Hot spots:
Benchmarking Global City Competitiveness could be taken. It was
published in 2012 by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) –an
independent branch of The Economist Group– and commissioned by
Citigroup, one of world’s leading multinational banking and financial
services corporation. Similarly to other documents of its kind, several
rankings of cities are elaborated in order to compare them and assess
their competitiveness according to different indicators. These are
(in order of importance): economic strength (30%), human capital
(15%), institutional effectiveness (15%), financial maturity (10%),
global appeal (10%), physical capital (10%), environment and natural

On (the politics of) space 189

 19

hazards (5%) and social and cultural character (5%) (The Economist
Intelligence Unit 2012, 35–36).
Iconic One can easily imagine the main objective of the report by taking
architecture, a look at its cover page, which illustrates it in a very graphic way.
power The image shows an unusual Formula One race, in which cars are
representation driven across a spherical track (the globe) by some of the highest-
ranked cities in terms of urban competitiveness: New York, London,
Singapore, Hong Kong and some others approximating from
backward positions. Interestingly, the “drivers” of the cars are depicted
as groups of iconic buildings, most of them skyscrapers located at the
financial cores of each one of the cities: New York is represented by
the Statue of Liberty and buildings such as the Empire State and the
Chrysler; London by the Big Ben, St. Paul’s cathedral and the City;
and Singapore and Hong Kong by their respective Central Business
Districts. Cities in the background are represented by skyscrapers as
well.
There are some details of the illustration that might call the
attention of the observer, and one of them is the presence of historic,
monumental buildings in the representations of New York and
London –the Statue of Liberty, St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Clock

190 [DE]CENTERING
Tower–, while references to cultural heritage are almost non-existent
in the pictures of other cities. Even if the illustrator only pretended
to present a recognizable drawing of each one of them, we could
ask ourselves why historic monuments have been used to represent
the most competitive cities, which, besides, are Western. One could
argue that most of Asian cities that appear in the ranking –such as
Hong Kong and Singapore– do not have many representative historic
icons, as their development and transformation into “global cities”
are more recent. But it is not unreasonable to imagine that cities like
Buenos Aires (the first South American city that appears in the general
ranking), Cape Town or Nairobi (two of the very few African cities
in the document) would have been represented in a similar way, with
skyscrapers and central business districts. Besides, most of the built
heritage preserved in many of these cities was erected during colonial
periods, so their image is similar to Western representative buildings.
It seems that Western representational heritage works as an added
value: others are “less representative,” they do not mean anything to
the Western(ized) public –presumably most of editors and potential
readers–: they do not represent them, as they do not belong to their
space.
Another issue that comes to mind when analyzing the illustration
is that of iconic architecture as representation of power (in this
case, economic power). If economic forces have displaced politics as
the main structure ruling global relations, probably its spaces have
acquired more relevance than those of political and social function.
Corporate headquarters are the new icons of the city, extending the
influence of the twentieth-century skyscraper. In fact, the cover of the
EIU report does not show any parks, squares, streets or malls, which
have been usually considered to be spaces of community in urban
terms and the main elements that constitute the physical, “hard” layer
of public space.
In sum, the space of globalization is easily recognizable and
representable. The relevant constructions of CBDs, large-scale iconic
monuments and buildings and representative commercial spaces are
the spatial image of global capitalism; its representation of space –in
Lefebvrian terms– seems to have acquired universal dimensions.
This spatial scenario corresponds to the contemporary geopolitical

On (the politics of) space 191

 situation, in which the tendency toward homogeneization,
competition and global prominence in economic terms are reflected in
the means of making politics.
In a brief chapter entitled “Sorry for the inconvenience, we are
moving towards a new paradigm,” José Luis Pardo (2011) reflects
on the proliferation of terms like “postmodern,” “postindustrial,”
“telematic,” “globalization”... which aim at reflecting new conditions
of our time. Like Pardo, it is logical to be reluctant toward these
prefixes. Their sometimes indiscriminate use reflects difficulty and
uncertainty in letting modernity go, suspecting everything that may
come after it. Pardo attributes this to the desire of the modern subject
to attend the end of his/her own time and inaugurate a new epoch,
which, in his opinion, has proved a failure up to now –contrary to
what Fukuyama24 prophesied in 1992– since our conception of time
25
has not changed. On the other hand, Sloterdijk (2013, 38) links the
hasty and frequent use of the prefix to our conviction that paradigms
follow each other without any of them appearing to be definitive
and stable. Sometimes, “post-” can be used as a means for softening
the real, harsh connotations of a term, like in the case of the recently

24 Fukuyama’s End of History (1992) is one of the most controversial works of the
late twentieth century. Following the steps of Kojève and Strauss, he concudes that the
“end of history” has arrived, understood as the implementation of a social homogenous
status. Derrida, in Specters of Marx (1994), criticizes the link between the end of history
and Judeo-Christian eschatology. However, for Sloterdijk (2010, 38–39), the book has
been misinterpreted in many aspects, since its ultimate goal is not to make an apology
for neoliberal democratic systems, but to recover a “political psychology on a basis of a
reestablished polarity of eros and thymos.”
25 Pardo (2011) illustrates the rupture between modern and ancient times with
the image –already used by Walter Benjamin– of the French revolutionaries in 1789,
who took the streets of Paris shooting all the clocks they found along the way. It was a
way of saying that times were changing, that a new era was beginning: to break with the
temporality of the old regime implied the possibility to carry out a true revolution. The
political dimension of the ancient wheel of time, which is made explicit in Hamlet, cannot
be restored after a break in the pact between rulers and gods in modern times (Pardo
Torío 2011, 365). Canetti (1978) also highlights the importance of the order of time for
the wielder of power: great leaders (like Julius Caesar, Christ or Napoleon) saw their
person as the central, ordering element of time, just as Chinese history is told through
imperial dynasties. Thus, “[a] civilization comes to an end when a people no longer takes
its own chronology seriously” (1978, 398).

192 [DE]CENTERING
coined “post-truth,” which actually designs an emotional lie that
politicians and managers use to alter public opinion –even when their
speech have proven to be false.
Talking of a “post”-political situation, which would initially lead Post-politics
us to understand a temporal sequence, implies something more than
a moment of overcoming. Otxotorena develops the logic of “post” for
a space-temporality that confers to the last decades of the twentieth
century a sense of permanent controversy, marked by the symptomatic
proliferation of prefixes alluding to a future characterized by
remoteness instead of certainties. The list is quite extensive: post-
(Lyotard, Jameson), late- (Jencks), trans- (Rodríguez Magda), super-
(Augé and Starobinski), hyper- (Lipovetsky), ultra- (Todorov)... In the
words of Otxotorena (1992, 16), to use the “post-” prefix would imply
the existence of a past moment “and therefore failed, despite its own
initial expectations.” Thus, postmodernity is translated as the crisis of
modernity, this being understood as a change, a continuous transit
that has not yet reached its end. But leaving aside the genealogy of the
term –which may have arisen in the absence of a more adequate one–,
the post-political framework has been studied and articulated by some
contemporary authors and philosophers (such as Slavoj Žižek, Jacques
Rancière or Alain Badiou). Within it, opposition and difference are
totally obliterated in such a way that the forms of power have ceased
to be properly political. Within a post-political logic, capitalism and
market economy structure the social and economic order, apparently
without possible alternative systems. The forms of government are
structured around a false consensus which conceals any form of
difference or discrepancy. In this way, it is possible to undermine the
basis of any political system, since politics generates and deals with
conflict, but never does it attempt to elliminate it. Mouffe (2007,
4) also recalls that the political is always linked to issues that require
a choice between conflicting alternatives, and cannot be reduced
to technical issues to be solved by experts (Said 1983, 136).26 The

26 This conception is close to the agonistic vision of politics that share Mouffe and
Laclau, which lies in the impossibility of finding hegemonic systems that work perpetually;
on the contrary, there is a struggle between opposing hegemonic projects that can never
be rationally reconciled. “Contrary to the various liberal models, the agonistic approach
that I am advocating recognizes that society is always politically instituted and never forgets
that the terrain in which hegemonic interventions take place is always the outcome of

On (the politics of) space 193

 elimination of difference and control based on a false consensus are
the main factors to understand the post-political framework.27
Although in Poverty of Philosophy (1847) Marx announced the
end of political power understood as “the official expression of
antagonism in civil society,” this process seems to be taking place
today, but in reverse: antagonism disappears, although not through
the emancipation of the working class but through the dissolution
of antagonism within capitalism. Trends such as the so-called “Third
Way,” popularized by the former British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, or the announcement of the “end of History” proclaimed by
Fukuyama (1992), among others, are usually linked to the practice of
post-politics.
The scale and proportions of the capitalist system have varied
enormously in the last decades. Also in our daily life, we are facing
the post-political in and through a space transformed by relations
between power institutions and companies. An illustrative example of
this situation took place in the emblematic Puerta del Sol in Madrid:
if a few years ago the square was the epicenter of the Indignados
movement, becoming an icon of citizen struggle, a new nomenclature
of the metro station of the square was established in June 2013. Over
the next three years, the station –and the whole line 2 from September
2013– was named after a multinational telecommunications
company. The operation, promoted by the regional government,
implemented a system of “alternative financing” in order to face the
complaints of subway users due to tariff increases, which had reached
a record of 11% in 2012. Similarly, the Scottish geographer Ronan
Paddison (2010) recounts his experience as a participant in a small
neighborhood demonstration to prevent a company from installing a

previous hegemonic practices and that it is never an neutral one” (Mouffe 2007). It situates
conflict as an alternative to a violent resolution of it.
27 Hannah Arendt, among other authors, had somehow anticipated the advent
of the post-political, having stated that “(...) we cannot help calming our concern when
we have to conclude that, in mass democracies, both the impotence of people and the
process of consumption and oblivion have surreptitiously imposed themselves, without
terror and even spontaneously -although such phenomena are limited in the free world,
where terror does not prevail in the political in the narrower sense and in the economic
realm” (Arendt 1993, 15).

194 [DE]CENTERING
play area for children, consisting of a series of entertainments beneath
the trees of Pollok Park in Glasgow. Demonstrators protested over
the usurpation and economic exploitation of a public space by a
private company, but they were ignored in the official channels of
political management. According to Padisson, the main reason for this
exclusion lies in the fact that the demand of the citizens run counter
to the interests of the local government. However, rulers wanted to
justify that citizen participation had been conducted throughout the
process. Thus, the Glasgow Parks and Leisure department launched
a survey in 2005 to consult citizens which problems were affecting
urban green areas in their opinion and what they proposed to solve
them. The unanimous response was the demand for an improvement
of leisure facilities in parks. Nonetheless, how they should be
improved and under what conditions was not open to public inquiry.
Facing this deliberate silence, authorities decided that the best solution
was to leave the problem in the hands of a private company. In theory,
politicians were acting according to what citizens wanted, but they
did not let them choose how to transform their public space. This
consensus is rather dubious because of the strategies through which
it has been established: while protest generates confrontation, the
survey represents consensus, thus being much more characteristic of
post-political government logic: “Limiting participation to relatively
superficial forms of democratic engagement avoids conflict problems”
(Paddison 2010, 24). The art historian Rosalyn Deutsche (2008, 11–
12) uses the case of a small square (Jackson Park in Greenwich Village,
Manhattan) to illustrate how public space is basically a property from
a neoliberal point of view, when an association linked to the park
closes its gates to prevent homeless people from wandering around.
Thus, the post-political manifests itself spatially, also from its Dissolution
origins, which are usually situated in the fall of the Berlin Wall; of conflict
a fact that would forever change global geopolitical space. This
spatial reorganization is the expression of the dissolution of conflict
between the two great blocs (the Western-capitalist and the Eastern-
communist) and the beginning of an era in which politics is marked
by global consensus. With the fall of the wall, the rest of the world
opened its doors to capitalism. But the great change at a global scale is
not limited to a major crisis between two parts, but revealed through
a multitude of minor-scale crises and transformations around the

On (the politics of) space 195

 world, which Thomas Friedman (2005) calls “flatteners.” In fact, some
authors characterize the nineties as an intermediate period between
the fall of the Berlin Wall and the real “after,” which for Paolo Virno
(2004) corresponds to the beginning of the Bush era and the invasion
of Iraq after the September 11 attacks.
Due to these “flatteners” –such as the collapse of the Berlin Wall,
which materialized the dissolution of the antagonism between the
American and Soviet blocs; the appearance of workflow software and
open-sourcing; the relocation of international manufacturing plants
to foreign lands to reduce costs, or the development of information
and search engines– the global network becomes denser and more
complex, making it easier to overcome the obstacles of distance and
time difference. In many senses, the world is flat, as Friedman argues:
a space with no distances, where everything is at hand and where
everybody has the chance to be in any part of the world with the help
of a few devices. Such a perspective implies that geographical and
historical divisions are becoming less relevant; therefore, countries,
business and individuals need to develop strategies to survive in this
new scenario, within the stream of the global market.
The enemy Also Sloterdijk roughly outlines some conditions of spatialization
outside of the post-political in Rage and Time (2010). If spherology and the
condition of human immunity are forced to the point of generating
real terror and fear of what lies outside our space, one could say that
such a mechanism would be a perfect tool to control the radius of
action of every human being, staying in their own cells so as not to
threaten the balance of the system. From this it follows that dissenting
voices should not exist within the acceptable sphere: the “outside” no
longer exists since it is rejected and forgotten, so there is no longer
an “inside.” The figure of the enemy, the one that lies outside the
acceptable sphere, is necessary to understand post-political strategies.
The clearest example comes from the attacks of September 11,
2001 in New York, after which security systems became extremely
hypertrophic. Sloterdijk (2010) detects a “new ecosystem of threats
and defence measures” to which capitalism has had to adapt itself in
order to continue functioning “correctly.”
The “war on terror” posseses the ideal quality of not being able to be won
-and thus never having to be ended. These prospects suggest that the

196 [DE]CENTERING
 postdemocratic trends will enjoy a long life. They create the preconditions with
which democratically elected leaders can get away with presenting themselves
as commanders in chief. If political thinking limits itself to advising the
commander in chief, concepts such as democracy and independent judiciary
cultures are only chips in a strategic game. (Sloterdijk 2010, 219)

However, it is also necessary to pay attention to conflicts that appear Counter-

betond the core of a system. Some authors and collectives detect that laboratories
much of the real confrontation takes place in border and interstitial
spaces, such as in Giorgio Agamben’s (2008) counterlaboratories
as emerging models for the city of the future, in which private
property and the police practically disappear. Commenting
on Bauman’s intervention in Archipelago of Exceptions (2008,
107–15), counterlaboratories appear as “territorial laboratories of
contemporaneity, in negatives and in positives, places in which the
new conditions of habitability, of biohabitability, are tested.”28 This
idea of marginal laboratories in which to test the limits of life inserted
in the logic of globalization will be revisited in further chapters.
How, if possible, to counter these spaces of globalization, which are
perpetuated through narratives that avoid difference? How to restore
and visibilize conflict in the urban world beyond short-lived events,
demostrations and ephemeral spaces? These questions may result
paralyzing, even more so for architects and urbanists whose practice
is usually limited by professional conventions, budgets, client desires
and a reductionist conception of space. The first movement, then, is
necessarily a reflexive one. As Lefebvre proposed and did to a certain
extent, the paradoxes and contradictions of capitalist space should be
unmasked.
First, the narrative of a progressively homogeneous, “flat” world – Flat / spiky
recalling Friedman’s terminology (2005)– should be put into question. world
It is undeniable that we are facing a global process of homogeneization
because of certain trends, ubiquitous companies or the generalization
of the Internet, among many other factors. However, a quick but
deeper glance into a smaller scale will reveal the opposite: growing
social inequality, urban competitiveness, historical and political
differences, transnational alliances or the unequal distribution of

28 [T.A.]

On (the politics of) space 197

 20 21

natural resources are only a few examples which demonstrate that

the flatness of the world is far from being a reality. In fact, some of
the flatteners detected by Friedman have certain influence over those
non-flattening factors, since they contribute to increase inequality.
From this perspective, the world is not flat at all; rather, it is spiky, as
Richard Florida (2005) diagnosed the same year. The American urban
theorist studies the system of “peaks and valleys” of global population,
economic activity and innovation, tracing an economic topography
that highlights the relevant role of certain cities and regions in world
economy. If we narrow the scale, we notice how social stratification
contributes to this spikiness, focusing either on inequalities (“vertical
paradigm”: segregation, suburbanization, gentrification) or differences
(“horizontal paradigm”: sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, age)
(Harding and Blokland 2014). Thus, the paradox of a flat and spiky
world persists (Benach Rovira 2002; Mithas and Whitaker 2007;
Feiock, Moon, and Park 2008; Hagel 2012).
Local / global Second, the dialectical opposition between the local and the global
appears as a problematic commonplace. The risk of forgetting or
taking for granted the relations between the local and the global is
high, usually resulting on partial interpretations of space. Rather, one
cannot be understood without the other, since both offer different
perspectives over the same realities (Benach Rovira 2002) and “space
‘is’ whole and broken, global and fractured, at one and the same time”
(Lefebvre 1991, 356).
Likewise, the tendency to demonize the global in favor of
the local and vice versa usually leads to biased arguments. These

198 [DE]CENTERING
misunderstandings are usually rooted in the linear character of the
narratives of modernity, as Doreen Massey suggests:
Central to the history of modernity, for example, has been a translation of
spatial heterogeneity into temporal sequence. Different places are interpreted as
occupying different stages in a single temporal sequence in the various stories of
unilinear progress that define the West against the rest (such as modernization or
development). (Massey 2005, 229)

To Massey, this means that the approach to the global as a closed Westernization
space inserted within a linear temporality and oriented towards
progress implies that some countries or regions are more developed or
“advanced” –it is important to remark the temporal connotation of
the term– than others: “Western Europe is ‘advanced’, other parts of
the world ‘some way behind’, yet others are ‘backward’. ‘Africa’ is not
different from Western Europe, it is just behind” (Massey 2005, 68).
From this point of view, all groups and processes would tend to follow
the same line, the line of progress traced by Western societies. This
Western-centric approach, related to a colonial discourse, obliterates
difference and dismisses other narratives of space and time. Besides,
it is usually overseen that a half of the half of the world who lives in
cities, do not live in world, global or mega cities. (Cuthbert 2011,
252)
Facing this multiple and contradictory scene, some key aspects
can be extracted to include difference within the narratives of the
global city. Instead of studying them as competitive entities, they Urban
could be approached again as singular ones, with specific and unique fragments
characteristics despite the influence of global factors and relations.
Even when the city as a unit is seriously contested (Saunders 2005, 29;
Cuthbert 2011, 227) and the limitations of the city as a concept have
to be recognized, urban space offers a diversity of situations likely to
be approached without falling into the dialectical traps of local/global,
flat/spiky. Specifically, the urban fragment appears as a methodological
unit that is open to difference and singularity at the same time, being
part of a wider constellation of fragments that is not to be understood
from a global, homogeneous perspective. The solid research work on
the urban fragment, constructed by authors such as Rowe (1978),
Oswald M. Ungers and Rem Koolhaas (Aureli 2011; Hertweck and
Marot (eds.) 2013), Shane (2011) or Viganò (2012), facilitates the

On (the politics of) space 199

 22

understanding of different realities through urban-scale examples,

relevant for the architectural and social level without exceeding the
possibilities and objectives of the research. All these authors share a
common interest in the articulation between architecture, society and
the city.
Public space?
A proper (democratic) political space is one that recognises the constitutive
split of the people, antagonistic positionalities and the articulation of
incommensurable demands. It is a space which permits their expression on the
basis of the unconditional presumption of equality of each and every one qua
speaking beings. (Oosterlynck and Swyngedouw 2010, 1580)

The public is the neurotized “double,” the bad conscience of the private
individual. (Duque 2001, 107)

The world Going back once again to the form of the world and the images
as a sphere that we use to locate ourselves in it, the figure of the sphere seems
to be the most accurate, in principle, to represent our space or, at
least, the most usual. The world has not always been a sphere, except
for a few erudites who anticipated its cosmic shape much before
it was demonstrated with the Magellan-Elcano circumnavigation
and confirmed with the first pictures of the Earth from space in the
twentieth century. The perfection and regularity of the sphere make it

200 [DE]CENTERING
especially significant as a system of reference: as Félix Duque (2001,
39) notes, it has neither beginning nor end; neither top nor bottom;
neither right nor left. If anything, it has an interior. Not only Duque
justifies the pertinence of this figure as the image of modernity, but
others like Peter Sloterdijk associate modern space with the sphere, or
rather a multiplicity of spheres that, coexisting and composed by other
spheres, recreate our spatial belonging to a primeval cavern or womb:
we live (with)in couples, families, homes, groups, cities, societies,
environments… which constitute different –though not necessarily
independent– spheres.
Ultimately, the word “sphere” is used to designate certain domains
or realms; hence, we talk of a social sphere, of atmospheres, spheres of
action, influence or interest, a domestic sphere, a sensory sphere, and
even a public sphere. In particular, this last idiom was popularized by
Jürgen Habermas and his contributions on the public (1974; 1991).
In his original works, however, the German Öffentlichkeit does not
have the geometric connotations of the English (or Spanish) term.
Nonetheless, Öffentlichkeit defines the specific, enclosed domain
of publicness that ressembles the Arendtian “common world” that
“gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other”
(Arendt 1998, 52).
The urban /
The reason why urban space is not a mere background or
the public
scenography for social activity responds, to a great extent, to its
identification with this public sphere –at least in Western societies; to
the point that “urban space” and “public space” are usually mixed up,
blurred, not clear or taken for granted without further questioning.
Manuel Delgado finds other more accurate concepts to describe this
particular type of space: social, common, shared, collective or even
urban space “as a differentiated space-time for reunion, which registers
a generalized and constant exchange of information and which is
articulated through mobility” (Delgado Ruiz and Malet 2007).29 Even
if we will focus on public space under its urban meaning, it is worth
exploring the relationship between the urban and the public, which
have traditionally forged the negative form of the city.

29 [T.A.]

On (the politics of) space 201

 First of all, the meaning of “the public” should be clarified, since
it is a vast term that is frequently applied to different conditions.
Nora Rabotnikof (2008, 38–39) poses three heterogeneous criteria
in order to distinguish the public from the private. First, the
public designates the realm of common interest or utility within a
community, transcending individual or private interest as a collective
authority. Secondly, the public is what takes place openly, what is
manifest, visible and evident. It is related to the notion of “publicity”
and counterposed to the private as the secret or the hidden. Lastly,
Rabotnikof defines the public as that which is open, accessible
or usable by everyone. These three definitions are not mutually
exclusive and, as the author argues (2008, 39), they overlap in
The public different moments of history. Moreover, the relation of the public
between State with the State and civil society has varied in different periods and
and society thus, Western societies have evolved from a State-public to a social-
public. Regarding the notion of public space –under an intense
debate about its (re)definition and its articulation within the urban
context– Delgado (2011) highlights the current decline of the public,
and situates it as an element of mediation –already detected by Hegel–
for a reconciliation between civil society and state, traditionally
camouflaging any exploitation or exclusion. Somehow, this evokes
what the French philosopher Claude Lefort called the “loving grip of
the good society” (1986, 270), implying that public space ends up
being a morally-orientating, homogenizing element.
The public has yet another meaning, which emerges from this
impersonal signification and designates a group of people that,
however, is distinct from the simple mass. This meaning emerges in
the Europe of Enlightenment, in which critical thought and freedom
of speech become essential features of the public citizen, giving birth
to the rational dimension of Öffentlichkeit. It is not surprising that the
rise of critique in Western Enlightenment (which is precisely due to
the capacity of discerning, judging, that is, separating what is valuable
or good from that which is not) goes together with the ascent of the
public realm.
Publicness According to the literary critic and social theorist Michael Warner
and discourse (2002b), a public is a self-organized relation among strangers
constituted through mere attention. Contrary to the crowd –that

202 [DE]CENTERING
authors like Elias Canetti (1978) have studied–, the address of public
speech is both personal and impersonal. Discourse plays a very
importante role in the constitution of a public, since Warner (2002b,
99) also considers it to be “the social space created by the reflexive
circulation of discourse.” Similarly, Manuel Delgado (2011, 35)
defines the public as a “collective character.” Following Habermas,
Reinhart Koselleck, John Dewey and Gabriel Tarde, Delgado
segregates the public from the crowd (the rabble, the multitude): the Public vs. crowd
public, as the main community in democratic societies, is constituted
by means of a spiritual link; it is comparable to the spectators of
an auditorium, reflexive, critical and rational. Meanwhile, the
multitude is constituted through the agglomeration of physical
bodies, fussionated as a single one: from the nineteenth century
on –a period in which revolts and insurgency were common–, the
crowd has been described as “infantile, criminal, bestial, primitive,
histerical –that is, feminine [!], even diabolic” (Delgado Ruiz 2011,
35). According to the Spanish anthropologist, the mission of a “public Phantom
sphere” remains the same: to make the “dangerous” classes and groups public sphere
(slaves, workers…) think themselves as citizens forming part of an
“inter-class confraternity” (2011, 38). Thus, this emergent “public
space” is an imposed element by (Western bourgeois) citizenism, in
which the apparent preponderance of values such as peace, tolerance
or sustainability serves to create an intimidatory atmosphere, in
which dissident or marginal groups (homeless people, prostitutes,
immigrants…) are automatically repressed. In this regard, Rosalyn
Deutsche recalls Bruce Robbin’s The Phantom Public Sphere (1990),
in which he argues that public sphere is a phantom because of
the misleading and oppressive meaning in which the social ideal
“public” is founded: “The ideal of a non-coercive consensus that is
reached through reason is an illusion that is maintained through the
repression of differences and particularities” (Deutsche 2008, 53).
The quotations opening this section can be compared in the light of
this contradiction: in the end, public space is a spectral illusion, the
unattainable ideal of the democratic-individualistic society.30

30 Public space is therefore the “corollary” of democracy, and responds to its

very internal contradiction: “power emanates from the people, but belongs to no one”
(Deutsche 2008, 8). Thus, for their emergence, according to Deutsche following Claude

On (the politics of) space 203

 23 24

Counter-public Oppossed to this docile, “civilized” public that occupies the

spheres Habermasian public sphere constituting a social totality, Michael
Warner proposes the notion of “counterpublics,” first coined by
feminist authors such as Rita Felski (1989) –introducing the idea
of a “feminist counter-public sphere”– and Nancy Fraser (1990).
Counterpublics, like the public, constitute an ideological social force
but refuse conventional and dominant forms of publicness, although
they aspire “to a public or quasi-public physicality” (2002b, 111).
Through the example of the She-Romps, a club of women who appear
in a letter sent to The Spectator,31 Warner depicts the characteristics
of a historic counterpublic that appears as the inverse of social and
literary clubs and cafés, where cultivated, free men were starting to
give form to the modern public sphere.
[The members of a counterpublic] are understood to be not merely a subset
of the public, but constituted through a conflictual relation to the dominant
public. They are structured by different dispositions or protocols from those
that obtain elsewhere in the culture, making different assumptions about what
can be said or what goes without saying. In the sense of the term that I am
here advocating, such publics are counterpublics, and in a stronger sense than
simply comprising subalterns with a reform program. A counterpublic maintains
at some level, consciously or not, an awareness of its subordinate status. The
cultural horizon against which it marks itself off is not just a general or wider
public but a dominant one. (Warner 2002a, 423–24)

Lefort, it is necessary to abandon any positivity as a substantial fundament of the social;

rather, they emerge because of the negativity of the subject with respect to its other.
31 The Spectator was a daily a publication founded by the English writers and
politicians Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, lasting from 1711 to 1712.

204 [DE]CENTERING
The critical theorist Nancy Fraser brought to the fore the idea of
a counterpublic in an article in 1990 by criticizing Habermas’s
assumptions about the public sphere. Against an idealized, equalizing
vision of the public in which differences should be set aside fro
the sake of a rational debate, Fraser (1990, 64) denounces the
impossibility of overlooking difference within the public: “such
bracketing usually works to the advantage of dominant groups in
society and to the disadvantage of subordinates.” Thus, she proposes
to name as “subaltern counterpublics” those groups that have been
traditionally left outside the normative public: women, workers,
peoples of color, homosexuals or even children and elderly people,
since their capacities would be not recognized or needed within the
public arena. Recognizing a counterpublic as a reverse public dignifies
these collectives, since they represent a group with common interests
–as the dominant public does– without accepting its totalitarian
discourse –you are either in or out.
In addition to Fraser, several scholars and writers have remarked
some of the problems that a public sphere rooted in an illustrated
bourgeoisie poses. For instance, Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt
(1993) formulate the doubling of the public sphere through the pair
bourgeois-proletarian, being the proletarian public sphere a historical
counterconcept to the bourgeois one. However, the authors unveil
the integrative mechanisms of the bourgeois public sphere that make
possible its ubiquity, its hegemony beyond any disruptive counter-
sphere and the exclusion of other forces and counterpublics –in this
case, the proletariat as a parallel phenomenon to the emergence of the
bourgeoisie and the industrial city.
Today, talking of public space entails talking of the urban: both Polis vs. oîkos
social life and urban form can be understood as representational
elements of a city. Despite the contemporary generalization of this
identification, its roots are deeply embedded in Western culture, even
when it has not been always that evident. The most obvious starting
point to understand this pairing seems to be the classical distinction
between private and public, where the latter corresponded to the
space of the polis and the former to the domestic realm, oîkos. Hannah
Arendt (1993; 1998) devoted part of her work to the study of this
division stemming from Ancient Greece and, in a way, spatializing this

On (the politics of) space 205

 dichotomy and exposing the roots of the modern notion of the public.
Thus, the limited “space in between” free male citizens that reached
its highest expression in the agora and that would be later translated
by the Romans into the domain of law, has been extended today to a
wider diversity of groups and people who can freely act and express
themselves within the constraints of an agreed community –at least, in
theory.
Before moving to the modern conception of public space –when
it actually receives this denomination–, the notion of publicness also
evolved during the Middle Ages; a period when the idea of a Christian
West chrystalizes definitively. Social relations become more complex,
forming a feudal, pyramidal hierarchy, and urban form changes
around the apex of the pyramid, embodied first in the residence of
the feudal lord. However, the church would progressively become the
armature of medieval political space and the cathedral, located in the
center of the city and usually confronted to the town hall, emerges as
“the most accurate work of public art that ever existed” (Duque 2001,
31): not only because it is devoted to divine power, but also because it
emerges from the people, who does not experience it as an art work,
but as a primitive public space. In parallel, the spaces of the square or
the market, related to economic activity, represent the prototypes of
modern public space as a place of encounter and exchange among the
inhabitants of the city.
The Kantian The architectural historian Mark Jarzombek traces the relations
city between the space of the city and the Kantian vision of the public,
which, interestingly, he describes as a “negation” of the very modern
notion of it (2014, 69). The Kantian public is different from the
opposition that Rousseau establishes between the public person
and the private individual in Du Contrat Social (1762): rather, the
German philosopher bases his ideal “public”32 in the notion of sensus
communis, which is the product of a society that has successfully
completed the process of Enlightment: a society in which each one
of its components thinks for oneself, thinks in the mindset of others
and thinks consistently (Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790; Jarzombek

32 Different from das Publikum, constituted by people who “have not achieved the
Enlightment” (Jarzombek 2014, 71)

206 [DE]CENTERING
2014, 69). The capacity described in the second maxim, that is, being
able of become the other for a moment, suppressing self-hood and
having a “disinterested interest in the life of other people” (Jarzombek
2014, 73) is, according to Jarzombek, what clashes with the notion of
the public that, with the influence of Hegel, was generalized through
the emergence of European nation-states. The need of a stable public
within the sovereign state was not compatible with the Kantian
enlightened society, something that finds continuity in Delgado’s
arguments in El Espacio Público como Ideología (2011): “Kant (…)
wants us to do much more than just ‘express ourselves’” (Jarzombek
2014, 75), but to be able to surpass the barrier between me and the
others. As idealistic it may sound, this adds an interesting question
for a critique of contemporary public space: it should be more than a
space for mere communication and observation, and even more than
a space defined by conlict and confrontation, as it will be argued later.
Public space necessarily includes its Kantian spectre, in which the
individual has to go out of him or herself in order to become the other
for a while.
Still, the idea of the public that Kant evoked is far from becoming
possible and adopted in contemporary societies. Jarzombek finishes
his chapter with a description of an imaginary Kantian city:
First, it would be a city without houses. A house would be the symbolic locus of
“family” and there are no “families,” so no houses. It would probably be a city
of apartments. One could envision any number of scenarios from linear cities
to sprawling field cities to smaller more irregular towns. At regular frequencies
in the city there would have to be meeting and seminar rooms, and places
where people can visit and talk. A university as such would be too top heavy for
Kant; there would be instead a loose infrastructure of exchange-and-learning
centers and community colleges. The city would also have a good deal of glass,
both transparent and reflective, for in the Kantian world there is no mandate
for private intimacy as it is conventionally understood today, namely as an area
outside the jurisdictional gaze of the State. “Private space” as it conventionally
might be called would be needed, but only as places to get away and think about
things. (…)

There would also be no professions in the modern sense. And that means there
would be no architect professionals. As to how the city would get built, the
closest model today that might work for Kant would be “design-build” where

On (the politics of) space 207

 25

clients and architects work together to solve problems. But if everything were
design-build, there would be no progress, no conceptual jump into a better
world that is so critical to the Kantian Enlightenment project. We would just
have a continual repetition of the same. The genius, or several of them, would
be required, meaning that the city would have an occasional building by Frank
Gehry or Le Corbusier. We would study these buildings and appreciate them
just like the other great works of art that make up the history of civilization. The
city would even have an assortment of memorial statues dedicated not to our
politicians, but to these artistic geniuses as inspiration for those who think that
they can be the next genius.

This Kantian city would be a relatively serious place. It is hard to imagine

ballrooms or circuses in a Kantian city. There are no Foucaultian, heterotopic
zones. Nor would there be major public buildings like courthouses and
parliament buildings, since Kant wants us to work together to come up with
our own laws, from the bottom up, so to speak, and not just swallow whatever
comes down from above. Political parties would not exist, but there would be
associations of people who would come together to define a particular common
interest. (Jarzombek 2014, 75–76)

The cities that emerged in the wake of modern and industrial states
had little to do with this ideal urban space that Kant would have
imagined. In fact, the initial, modern public space of the citizens did
not ressemble this neutral, egalitarian space of the sensus communis at
all. The hypothetical transparent space for exchange and learning was

208 [DE]CENTERING
substituted by assemblies, parliaments and later, in a smaller scale, by
cafés and clubs where male bourgeois citizens discussed and created
public opinion, far from the irrational working-class crowds and
other secondary sectors of the population such as slaves and women.
Only exceptionally, figures such as Olympe de Gouges,33 Madame
de Staël or Olaudah Equiano were able to capture the attention of
society by addressing subjects of public concern through their writings
and actions. Being included in this public sphere, ruled by strict
communication and social codes, was not an easy task for people
like them, who did not share the characteristics of a mainly white,
bourgeois, male audience. This was the social situation that Habermas
took as the origin of the modern public sphere that, as it has been
stated before, has been strongly criticized from different positions.
At the urban level, the way in which open city space was organized
and designed at that time was also highly hierarchical and codified,
following the logic of public separation and scientific progress. Shane
(2011), following Françoise Choay, argues that the scientific urbanism
developed by Ildefonso Cerdà, which became a paradigmatic reference
in modern city planning, was deeply influenced by the ideas of Leon
Battista Alberti and Thomas More. Alberti proposed that “[t]he public
space of the city was controlled by the new science of perspective,
and each building had a place in the visual hierarchy of the city
corresponding to the social station of its owner” (Shane 2013, 85).
It was more a bottom-up strategy, designing types through scientific,
structured and combinatorial codes of diverse elements. Meanwhile,
More’s model was more static, top-down organized, but much more
critical towards the social order, staged on the city of London and its
poor conditions. “Public space was, in his vision, sacred space, an idea
descended from classical ideals about the Greek agora and Roman
forum” (Shane 2013, 85). The influence of these models, however,
would gradually disappear with the emergence of a new vision of
urban space as social, relational space, as it will be explored in further
chapters.

33 Marie Gouze, better known as Olympe de Gouges, wrote the Declaration of

the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen in 1791, counterpart to the Declaration of
the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789)

On (the politics of) space 209

Public space Still today, and despite the fact that our gaze is not exclusively fixed
as Western on Western phenomena anymore in order to understand the world,
construction the idea of a public space is dominant: it influences our behavior and
relations to others, as well as pervading our vision of society. Recently,
public space has become a global, ubiquitous concept that we tend to
assimilate and recognize everywhere, no matter in which part of the
world we find ourselves; to the point that some even detect a “public
turn.”34 But this pretended equality –or even flatness, regarding
its compatibility with the post-political framework– guaranteed
by a global public space is simply false if we consider complexity
and difference between societies, codes, spaces. Public space is an
ambiguous concept since “for all practical purposes, public space did
not exist (and still does not exist) as an inalienable right of the people
(…) You never know whose space are you in, what rights you have,
or what forms of behaviour are sanctioned” (Cuthbert 2011, 250).
As Doreen Massey argues (2005, 152), public space should not be
romanticized “as an emptiness which enables free and equal speech”
and, consequently, as a generic reality present everywhere, where
people and codes are always under the same circumstances, either
excluded or allowed. Instead, an inclusive public space –and Rosalyn
Deutsche (1996, 278) extends this to urban space– is, or should be, a
product of conflict. But this is not the only perspective from which it
can be understood today.
According to the environmental psychologists Héctor Berroeta
and Tomeu Vidal (2012), three different narratives on public space
coexist in our days, taking into account its contemporary, ideological
Public space dimension and the permanent threat of privatization. Consequently,
as loss the first approach corresponds to the notion of public space as a loss,
that is, a vulnerable element that is progressively disappearing. From
this point of view –being Richard Sennett and The Fall of the Public
Man (1978) one of its main exponents–, contemporary public space
would be a pale reflection of an hypothetical original space where
democratic values and social exchange would be the main pillars of
society. The ongoing processes of privatization –and the appearance

34 Mostly from the fields of literature and composition studies (Farmer 2013).

210 [DE]CENTERING
 26

27

of new pseudo-public typologies,35 such as the shopping center–,

individualization, state control and unequity would have been the
main causes of the degradation of public space with respect to its
initial form, which, in any case, seems to be an idealization developed
by the authors who support this narrative.
Secondly, public space is also regarded as a space for the Public space
construction of civility (Berroeta Torres and Vidal Moranta 2012, and civility
10), understood as the third term of the triad urbs-civitas-polis that
designates the three main dimensions of the city (physical-social-
political). This perspective, while recognizing the threats under which
contemporary urban public space stands, advocates the necessity of

35 The British journal The Guardian, in collaboration with Greenspace Information

for Greater London CIC (GiGL), has ellaborated a collaborative map that identifies
different sites in London that meet specific criteria for “pseudo-public space”: “namely
outdoor, open and publicly accessible locations that are owned and maintained by private
developers or other private companies” (The Guardian 2017).

On (the politics of) space 211

 creating more and better public space to guarantee a healthier and
more inclusive and participative city. In Europe, criticism against
the precepts of the Athens Charter marked a turning point in the
adoption of this narrative, which created a substantial link between
the form of the city and its social activity. Athough it is certainly
problematic to see this relation as definitory, since urban morphology
is insufficient to determine social behavior (Delgado Ruiz 2011, 73),
it should not be taken for granted, because it is a key factor for the
constitution of a public and still represents a good starting point for
those architects, urban designers and other spatial practictioners who
want to work for a better city.
The public sphere is the site where struggles are decided by means other than
war. (Negt and Kluge 1993, ix)

Public space Last, the authors detect a third narrative which consists on public
and conflict space as a space of dispute and conflict. We have already mentioned
the positions of several authors who, despite the differences between
them, may fit in this category: Habermas’ critics, such as Fraser,
Negt, Kluge, Deustche, etc., but also other authors like Lefebvre
(1967), De Certeau (1984),Mitchell (2003) Massey (2005), or those
who, like Chantal Mouffe (2007), hold an agonistic perspective
of public space.36 Thus, this position argues for “the reaffirmation
of identities, the reversion of inequalities and the preservation of
differences”(Berroeta Torres and Vidal Moranta 2012, 13). Getting rid
of an idealized, soft conception of public space, these authors situate
difference and conflict at its core, which can only be constituted by
appropriation, based on Lefebvre’s right to the city. In this regard, a
space becomes public precisely when people wants it to be public and
reclaims it.37

36 “To Mouffe, antagonism should be redirected towards agonism to make it

compatible with democratic pluralism. If the logic of antagonism is that of disjunction, that
of agonism is the logic of contradictory conjunction: both this and the other, yes and no. It
is the logic of adversaries, not of enemies, because if conflict does not acquire an agonist
form, it can become a dangerous antagonism. Thus, the objective is not to consolidate a
single interpretation of the world, but rather a multiplicity of interpretations which coexist,
adversely and in tension, reflecting democratic plurality” (Beraldi 2014).
37 “The space that is made public began as its own opposite. This was a space that
was never meant to be public at all: a royal space, or a presidential space, or a corporate

212 [DE]CENTERING
 Despite their differences, these three perspectives recognize
the disjunction between an “ideal” public space –understood as a
collective space for expression, exchange and confrontation– and
reality. There is, indeed, a gap between a healthy, diverse, open
public space and its pseudo-public, hypercodified substitute that is
often identified with open urban space. However, it would be too
pessimistic to talk of a failure of public space, considering that, as
space, it is in permanent construction and it should not be predefined
as if it were subject to a linear process with an expected result. Instead,
it would be necessary to react against both the narrative of loss and
the dominating conception of a soft public space, which limit the
possibility of an inclusive urban space where conflict can be shown
and managed. Would this shift entail the emergence of a public space
of counter-spaces?

space. This private and privileged space had inherent in it, from its beginning, the seeds
of public space: the fact of its existence provoked desire, its privacy functioned as a taunt
to the public that felt left out. Once that space has been taken over by force and made
public, it has inherent in it, in turn, the seeds of private place, the seeds of a redefined and
reinhabited privacy: the public that takes it over is working its way up to the royalty or the
presidency or the corporate office. Private space becomes public when the public wants it;
public space becomes private when the public that has it won’t give it up” (Acconci 1990,
904).

On (the politics of) space 213

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221
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222 [DE]CENTERING
223
(RE)PLACING (or how the Western notion of space is
challenged through social practice in urban places)
 The conquest of space by the project implies its rendering as omni-measurable,
its subdivision, and hence its conception as quantitatively calculable and
manipulable. The conquest of space is the liquidation of the place as a collection
of things, as a mutual belonging of things and dwelling. The conquest of space
is the plundering of places: it conceives of space as a void to fill, a pure absence,
a lack. Space is mere potentiality at the disposal of the technico-scientific
project. To the Architekt belongs precisely this conception of space: space is pure
void to be measured-delimited, void in which to pro-duce his new forms. It is
hence necessary, for this pro-ducing, to empty space of places-a radical Ent-
ortung of space. Making-space here becomes liquidating-nullifying, making-
void, “displacing”, rather than giving-places. For this producing, the void is
nothingness. But in this same notion of the void (die Leere) we do not hear
nothingness, but rather das Lesen, the collection, “in the original sense of the
collection that dominates the place.” To empty is, then, to prepare a place, to
grant a place, to collect in a place. (Cacciari 1993, 167–68)

Until now, the relation between space and place has deliberately been Space and
omitted. Much has been said about this complex nexus, which does place
not belong to the main framework of the research. Therefore, instead
of delving into the exhausted dialectical tension between a mainly
abstract, generic dimension and its concrete counterpart –already
studied by Swyngedouw (Swyngedouw 1989),1 Lefebvre (1991),
Entrikin (1991), Merrifield (1993), Tuan (2001), Massey (2005), Löw
(2008), Shinohara (2011) and many other authors–, the question will
be posed regarding the nature of the first movement that now starts.
If the metropolis followed a logic of “radical uprooting” that
annihilates the possibility of dwelling (Cacciari 1993, 199), place
(different from “fragment”) appears as the space that we inhabit and
frequent, if we understand “place” as the qualification of space, related
to daily life and habits. Therefore, it has connotations of belonging

1 Interestingly, the return to locality and uniqueness is deeply related to spatial

homogenization, as Swyngedouw already argued in 1989, observing the new strategies
in the organization of the 1992 Olympic Games and the implementation of the Single
European Act (1989, p.41).

225
 and appropriation by people and things located in it: somehow, we
feel we belong to certain places, or they belong to us, to our lives.2
The verb “to place” has a more or less univocal signification.
Originally derived from the ancient Greek term plateîa (shortening
of πɉȽɒɂȽ Ɂɟɑ, “broad way”) and the Latin platea (“wide street,”
“public square”), it means to situate, to locate something (locare,
to concede a locus) in a specific settlement, usually within space.3
However, “to replace” has a double meaning which sheds some light
over the relation between place and space. The first sense designates
the action of restoration to a previous position, whereas the second
means to occupy or fill this position with something else. Both
movements are described by a single term that always entails a new
action of placing. In the end, constituting space is a continuous act
of placing and replacing: not only people and living entities and
social goods, as Löw (2008, 38) remarks, but also trajectories, habits,
structures, ideas… which also configure and belong within space.
However, as she points out:
[Places] do not disappear with the objects. They remain available for occupation
by others. (…) Places come into being through situating, but they are not
identical with situating, since places continue to exist for a certain time even
without the situated, or merely through the symbolic effect of the situating. The
constitution of space therefore systematically generates places, just as places are
prerequisite to the coming into being of space. (Löw 2008, 42)

Through this chapter-movement, space is explored as a framework

for creating urban places, whether physical buildings or voids, and
their alteration and re-signification through social action. Thus, it will
be shown how urban physical and social space interact in different
situations, and how the discourses on a formal (physical) and on a
social counterspace relate to each other.

2 In this regard, non-places (Augé 1992) would be the opposite category:

irrelevant spaces of anonymity, which are not significant enough to be considered places.
3 Interestingly, for Hegel a place is time in space; he is responsible to a great extent
of the separation of space from place.

226 [RE]PLACING
 01 02 03

Space and anti-space.

During a lecture at the UIC School of Architecture in Chicago, the Grids, labyrinths
architect and writer Emmanuel Petit (2014) explored the transition and loops
between different spatial (political) models throughout the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. Petit argues that the expansive, scientific,
revolutionary space of the grid that characterized the first part of the
twentieth century was succeeded by the post-modern, evolutionary
space of the labyrinth, with no interior or exterior, embodying
values of democracy and freedom. However, he notices that, today,
the dominant spatial paradigm is oriented towards the interior by
means of centripetal spaces and constructions such as loops, orbits or
spirals, as a reversal of the former models. The transition between the
two last models has much to do with the relation between interior
and exterior: while the spaces of Modernity and Postmodernity
are expansive, and therefore eschew the possibility of an inside,
contemporary space tends to the construction of this inside, protected
from the external world, in the form of loops, vortexes or capsules.
To illustrate such an argument, the lecturer connects a series of
images of contemporary constructions (museums, headquarters,
public buildings, art installations…) that follow these formal involute
patterns in which space gravitates attracted by an internal core. Since
Petit suggests that this shift in the spatial paradigm is related to the
influence and proliferation of global media environments, it seems
that we are returning to the idea of a privileged interior (condensed in
this kind of “spatial terminals”) that resists against the extensive and
mutable exterior realm of the city.

Space and anti-space 227

 The way space is conceived and thought today has significantly
evolved throughout history, influenced by socio-political and cultural
factors, among others. However, the question of the cultural and
physical articulation of space and its inner-outer dimensions is far
from recent. It has been already argued that Modernity could be
understood through the process of subordination of space to time
under a dominant narrative of progress. While the notion of space
had largely been limited to the realm of geometry, the extraordinary
advance in sciences –especially from the sixteenth century onwards–
heavily influenced the perspectives of spatial knowledge: the impulse
of natural sciences and the process of spatial “desacralization”
started by Galileo (Foucault 1998, 176) initiated an extensive, open
conception of space that would progressively become prevalent in
all fields, although still subsumed to time/reason.4 The European
colonization of unknown territories in America also contributed to
expand the image of the Earth and, consequently, a transformation of
the conception of it as a spatial entity. Peter Sloterdijk considers the
recognition of an abstract, homogeneous space as an essential element
in the process of globalization:
Humans know, albeit in a confused and indirect fashion at first, that they are
contained or lost (…) somewhere in the boundless. They understand that they
can no longer rely on anything except the indifference of the homogenous
infinite space. The outside expands, ignoring the postulate of proximity in the
humane spheres, as a foreign entity in its own rights; its first and only principle
seems to be its lack of interest in humanity. The delusions of mortals that they
must seek something (…) necessarily remain very unstable, shakeable, auto-
hypnotic projects against a background of futility. What is certainly true is that
the externalized, neutralized and homogenized space is the primal condition
of the modern natural sciences. The principle of the primacy of the outside
provides the axiom for the human sciences. (Sloterdijk 2013, 23)

Besides, once architecture enters the modern political discourse –

roughly at the end of the eighteenth century, in the wake of the
French Revolution, as suggested by authors like Tafuri (1976; 1987),

4 Marc-Antoine Laugier and other eighteenth-century theoreticians settled

the basis for an understanding of the city as a natural phenomenon and the scientific
character of urban design (where even chaos and irregularity are expected), within the
Enlightenment’s unification of reason and nature. (Tafuri 1976, 8–9)

228 [RE]PLACING
Wallenstein (2009) or Lahiji (2014)–, space is no longer regarded as a
passive, indifferent milieu. Rather, it starts to be conceived as an active
element that can be –intentionally or subconsciously– transformed,
arranged and manipulated not only to produce sensations and
meanings, but also to embody the socio-political project of modernist
architecture during the first decades of the twentieth century for an
egalitarian, progressive society.
However, the project of Modernity started to show severe Exhaustion
symptoms of exhaustion during the second half of the past century, of Modernity
leading to a deep crisis of modern rationality. Jean-Louis Genard
(2008, 96) situates a relevant precedent of this reaction in the critique
of the imaginary order of reason on behalf of Heidegger and Adorno,
who would speak respectively of a “technical” and an “instrumental”
modern rationality, to which the problematic categories of
“standardization, functionalism, specialization” and many others are
ascribed. These questions were particularly challenging for architecture
and urbanism, directly embedded in the capitalist production system
and the functionalist logic. In this context, a new wave of criticism
emerged, giving rise to an important disciplinary crisis with multiple
positions. Interestingly, Charles Jencks (1984) situates the starting
point of this impasse in the “negative event” –as Petit (2013, 13)
describes it– of the demolition of Minoru Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe
residential complex in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1972.5 The fall of
the social housing towers represented the decadence of the modern
project and the inability of its architecture to reflect and improve the
conditions of real life.
Genard (2008, 96–100) distinguishes two narratives that stem Narration
from this crisis of reason in architectural circles. On the one hand, of loss
some authors like Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Christian Norberg-Schulz or
Marc Augé adopted a “retrospective narration of loss” which aims at
situating the capacity to make sense on something other than reason,
be it “tradition (...) the vernacular, regionalism, the body, the affect,
sensibility, the genius loci, the context of course and the historicist

5 The architect also built Manhattan’s WTC twin towers, which collapsed after
the terrorist attack in 2001. From that moment on, the “era of self-reflective irony in
architecture” that had begun with the demolition of another Yamasaki’s work came to an
end, as Petit (2013, 13) sharply points out.

Space and anti-space 229

 anchor” (Genard 2008, 97). This position, strongly influenced by
phenomenology (Otero-Pailos 2010), could pool together the work
of architects such as Ricardo Bofill, Michael Graves and Robert and
Leon Krier, among others. This search for meaning in something prior
to instrumental/technical reason is also present, according to Genard,
in the idea of “the right to the city” and other concepts developed by
Henri Lefebvre.
Deconstructivist On the other hand, the second current corresponds to the
strategies narrations of deconstructivism, which eventually lead to a
“hyperindividualistic pathway” that still resonates in contemporary
architecture and its relation to authorship. The thinkers and architects
who embraced this position did not aim at mobilizing or recovering
a lost meaning against reason –in a nostalgic or historicist way, as
Genard would suggest–, but at denouncing “the hegemony of reason
and make room for an irreducible multiplicity of meaning, or rather
meanings, which are seen here as an affirmation, a personal expression
of the self or a collective expression of the group” (Genard 2008,
98). In the twilight of the era of grand narratives, the proliferation of
notions and arguments coined by authors such as Lyotard, Derrida
or Deleuze (difference, rhizome, affirmation…) would provide a basis
for the architectural practice of Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman,
Bernard Tschumi, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas or Zaha Hadid,
among others. Their work, paradoxically, emerges as a reaction against
the repressive character of Western culture of rationalization, while at
the same time it is deeply inserted within its most indicative economic
and political processes, such as individualization, aesthetization and
image-based strategies.
Another of the aspects that characterized this period of profound
change was the questioning of the linear and progressive conception
of time that had dominated the modern project from its very
beginning. The somehow interrupted “desacralization” of space was
taken up from diverse perspectives under the more or less diffuse
sign of postmodernism. On the one hand, from the field of political
geography and inspired by a neo-Marxist approach, authors such
as Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, David Harvey, or Doreen Massey,
took space as an articulating element to explain social, political
and economic processes. On the other, the strong influence of

230 [RE]PLACING
Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault in the following generations of
philosophers and thinkers contributed to the return of space as a
principal subject of study, which largely exceeds the constraints of
construction and geometry.
During and after this spatial turn, architecture as a discipline Loss of primacy
has experienced how one of its main instruments has become a over space
transversal, recurrent element of contemporary thought, this fact
implying a certain and progressive “loss” of primacy of architecture
over it, as it has been previously argued. In this regard, architecture
remains decentered, seemingly having lost one of its constitutive
elements. In fact, there is a wide diversity of positions concerning this
issue. For instance, Rem Koolhaas (2002) coined the term junkspace Junkspace,
to qualify the excessive, all-pervasive remnant of modern space that architecture
spreads across the cities, mallifying them by means of fake experiences as envelope
and simulacra in a time of consumption and homogeneity. Six years
later, Zaera-Polo (2008) explored the potential of the envelope and
its capacity for separating and regulating spaces as means for political
expression, always embedded within the physical dimension of
building; a membrane-like architecture that seems to be inspired
by Sloterdijk’s Sphären. Like Petit’s loops, all these impressions of
contemporary space and architecture offer a general prospect of a field
dominated by spectacular, performing thresholds that encapsulate
immersive interiors, isolated from what remains outside.
It has already been proposed that the contemporary, global notion
of space is broadly influenced by the neutral, abstract and omnipresent
space that science and colonization processes generalized before and
during the Enlightenment. This notion was largely embraced by
modern architects during the first decades of the twentieth century,
once freed from the constraints of Euclidean geometric space.6 If
in the sixties Aldo van Eyck (Smithson (ed.) 1962, 600) already

6 Still, the geometric structure through which we perceive reality is resistant and
cannot be dismissed easily: “Have you noticed that geometric figures cannot be visualized
except in a void? This characteristic is essential for understanding Euclidean space. It is
not all nature, it is an abstraction, an imaginative invention. For 2500 years, the concept
has conditioned our thinking so much that we are virtually forced to live in cubes and
rectangles: square rooms and houses, parallel streets. We cannot be comfortable with a
circle in architecture unless we have squared it” (McLuhan and Powers 1989, 133). [T.A.]

Space and anti-space 231

 considered the concept of spatial continuity and the erasure of the
articulation between inside and outside to be “sickness,” authors
such as Pier Vittorio Aureli (2008) warn today that the city has been
overcome by the process of urbanization. Thus, contemporary cities
grow as symbolic containers universally repeated, by irradiation from
a priori closed shapes, homogeneously and without roots, inserted
within the time of “universal mobilization” (Cacciari 2011). The same
forms are repeated ubiquitously, while closed, private, monofunctional
space predominates, endlessly reproduced. Precisely, this extensive
space, whose byproducts concern some architectural theoreticians and
professionals today, was already noticed during the years of decadence
of the modern project and the rise of postmodernism as a new
Space vs. paradigm. This is what the American architect Steven Kent Peterson
anti-space argues in ‘Space and Anti-space’ (1980a), a seminal contribution
to the issue of negativity in spatial terms. For the purposes of the
research, it is essential revisiting his thesis and discussing their force
today, when architecture, as a decentered discipline, does not possess
the primacy over space anymore, but produces it together with other
disciplines and through diverse experiences.
Influenced by Colin Rowe –his professor at Cornell– and
his contextualist critique of Modernism, Peterson addresses the
qualification of space in architecture and urbanism before and during
the period of the Modern Movement. The modern project, following
values of fluidity, openness and democracy, would liberate space from
geometrical constraints to give way to what Peterson calls “anti-space.”
This reversed space is continuous, dynamic, flowing, uniform, and
unformed, and according to the author, may have “disastrous” effects,
as it would lead to pure fragmentation and relativism under a promise
of freedom and a new order. As matter and anti-matter –the scientific
analogy from which Peterson’s argument stems–, space and anti-space
are antithetical: “Any coincident meeting of the two worlds will cause
their mutual obliteration” (Peterson 1980a, 91). Indeed, scientific
knowledge was, and still is, an essential source to our perception of
space (Moravánszky and Fischer (eds.) 2008). Quantum mechanics,
relativity, non-Euclidean geometry and many other branches of
science enhance the dominance of anti-space as a continuum –an
extensive, infinite realm that pervades everything. This influence was
very evident during the inter-war period and the rise of the artistic

232 [RE]PLACING
avant-gardes.7 However, this generalized vision would change during
the last decades of the twentieth century, when the spatial turn in
social sciences and the crisis of modern urbanism transformed the
conception of space and the ways of exploring it.
The very idea of articulating space and its other may well be Duality and
understood in a context of concern for dualities, division and non-identity
non-identity, which Emmanuel Petit (2014) reads as foundational
features of postmodern architecture.8 He finds a paradigmatic image
of this aspect in Steinberg’s cartoon of a dreaming cube, where the
discrepancy between the actual volume and the “metaphysical”
hexahedron is displayed.9 Besides, Petit traces the constitutive
character of non-identity with regard to the philosophies of paradox
and irony back to the aporetic thought of Zeno or Kierkegaard’s
two visions of life in Enten-Eller (“Either/Or”). The genealogy of
this maximum tension between opposites and doubles is extremely
complex and vast, and could be extended to other works and
figures such as Dostoyevsky’s disturbing novel The Double (1846)
on the self-destructive impulses in the search for identity, or in
the phantasmagoric, legendary image of the Doppelgänger. Also in
painting it is possible to find a large number of examples in which the
double, the reverse or the inverse are explored, either in a conventional
way (symmetries, copies, engravings…) or through very particular
expressions, such as the trompe-l’oeils of reverted framed paintings
by the Flemish Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts in the seventeenth
century, or the imperfect symmetries in the klecksographies of
the German poet and physician Justinus Kerner in the nineteenth
century, that curiously would be later used by some psychologists
–like Hermann Rorschach– as a tool for studying the subconscious
dimension of the human mind. More recently, we can find examples
of reflections on identity and difference in the sculptural work of the

7 See the section Negative avant-gardes. Interactions in space, negativity and politics.
8 But not limited to it… Adorno (2002) already pointed out that any work (of
art) is always reified, since its materiality places it in “a position of non-identity with regard
to itself” (Aguirre 2014, 209).
9 The capacity of Saul Steinberg to play with meaning and representation has
raised the admiration and interest of several authors and thinkers such as Roland Barthes
(2001) or E.H. Gombrich (1983).

Space and anti-space 233

 04 05 06

07 08 09

10 11 12

234 [RE]PLACING
Turner prize winner Rachel Whiteread, whose work deals with the
materialization of the void within and around objects through the use
of casts and diverse materials and the expression of absence through
imaginary realties, such as in her Nameless Library (2000) in the
Viennese Judenplatz. We could also cite –although the list would be
endless– Descombes’ Le même et l’autre (1988), written in 1979, and
its doubled title page, which are playfully distinguished by the author
with an interesting inscription showing the intrinsic otherness within
the identical, and thus unveiling the content and the main topic of
the book.10
Going back to architecture, double constructions such as Stanley Post-modern
Tigerman’s Little House in the Clouds (1976), John Hejduk’s Crossover doubles
House, the development of Eisenman’s cubic houses, Eduardo
Chillida’s Poet’s House (1980) or the more radical image of OMA’s
floating swimming pool (Koolhaas 1994, 307–10) which moves
when one swims towards the opposite direction that one wants to
reach, represent the postmodern insertion in this lineage of duplicity
and tension between the self and its other. Also Oswald M. Ungers
proposed a series of projects that explored the notion of duality
and non-identity, like in his project for a double house in Berlin-
Spandau (1977, in collaboration with Hans Kollhoff) or the “absent
column” built at the first Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980.
This last reference could be compared to the Hegelian description
of the pillar (Hegel 1975, 666), which takes its shape from without
itself, negatively, in opposition to the space it configures. Indeed,
we could recognize, with Daniel Berthold-Bond (1989, 79–80),
a possible translation from Hegelian negativity as motor to the
interplay of positive and negative spaces, being the latter more than
“sheer absence,” but rather the “other” that makes the positive figure
intelligible.
It seems that this series of unchained images and ideas provide an
interesting framework in which Peterson’s dyad of space and anti-
space may be inserted, and such connections have been revisited and

10 “This page reproduces the previous one. Other, it is the same. But to prevent
the reader from not taking into account this second page, attributing it for example to a
binding error, I had to write this warning, which does not appear on the first page. To be
the same, it must be other” (Descombes 1988). [T.A.]

Space and anti-space 235

 13

discussed in an interview –that can be found in the Annex I to this

text. Since he presents the connections and gaps between a “formal” or
“volumetric” sense of space and the “neutral,” open fluidity of anti-
space, he advocates “the creation of intentionally formed geometric
space” as “the essential medium for any architectural and urban
Negative space form.”11 Thus, he proposes a way in which space and anti-space can
be articulated by recovering the concept of “habitable poché”12 –which
he names “negative space,”13 the “void in-between” spaces (Peterson
1980a, 101)– in an almost dialectical manner, introducing a third
term that alters the dyad space/anti-space. The author detects the
use of this space in architecture in several sixteenth and seventeenth
century Roman buildings, such as Bramante’s plan for St. Peter, St.
Agnese on the Piazza Navona, or the Palazzo Barberini, but especially
in the works of John Soane, in which “volumetric space can exist next
to anti-space, separated by the thickness and independent surfaces of
negative space” (1980a, 102).
It is remarkable that most of the illustrations that appear in
Peterson’s article are building plans drawn with the black and white

11 See Annex I: “Interview with S.K. Peterson.”

12 See Annex I: “Interview with S.K. Peterson.”
13 Similar terminology, although with different meanings was used by Cristopher
Alexander in A Pattern Language (1977, 518–23). Alexander understands negative
space as a sort of anti-space, a shapeless residue between buildings, but from a more
reductionist approach than that of Peterson, since he does not introduce a third term, but
a dichotomy. However, both defend the importance of the geometrical cast of urban and
architectural space.

236 [RE]PLACING
“figure-ground” method. Drawing techniques have been essential for
architectural activity and, in this regard, the use of poché (generalized
by the Parisian Beaux-Art’s School system and used by architects and
urbanists such as Auguste Perret or Camillo Sitte to explore and show
spatial relations) used to be determinant in architectural compositions,
in which “full” and “empty” space were separated. Obliterated during
the first decades of the twentieth century, interest in this technique
was recovered by scholars and architects such as Louis Kahn, Colin
Rowe or Alan Colquhoun (Castellanos Gómez 2010, 171). Peterson
was aware of Kahn’s interest in the plans of the Scottish castles14 that
he shows in his article, and in the possibilities that the thick wall offers
for different uses and configurations (Lucan 2007, 42).
Robert Venturi (1977) would use the term, distinguishing between Open / closed
open and closed pochés, giving it a more “spatial” meaning and pochés
elaborating a critique on the modern paradigm of continuity and
flowing space that obliterates the distinction between interior and
exterior. Rather, he would focus on the contradiction and tension
between openness and closeness, following a disruptive both/and
instead of an either/or logic: differentiating as well as relating. Venturi
finds the treatment of leftover, residual spaces to be the gradating
element between this openness and closeness, which at the same time
configure the main, central space through “contrast and even conflict”
(1977, 82). Thus, the poché appears as something more than a graphic
tool or a figure-ground distinction to determine the form of the
built fabric, but it is also a means to explore and articulate its spatial
characteristics in an integral way.15
The impact of the ideas of Colin Rowe on Peterson’s work is
evident, and the topic of urban solid and void (and their inversion) is
also present in the master’s writings. In Collage City (1978), together
with his colleague Fred Koetter, Rowe observes the inversion of the

14 Jacques Lucan (2007, 42) also extracts this idea from Denise Scott-Brown
(1984), “A worm’s eye view of recent architectural history,” Architectural Record, february
1984.
15 There are several contemporary texts reflecting on the implications and
possibilities of the poché as a representational tool. We would highlight the studies of
Jacques Lucan (2007; 2012), Raúl Castellanos-Gómez (2010), Chiara Toscani (2011) or
Michael Hebbert (2016)

Space and anti-space 237

 14 15 16

solid/void pattern in the modern city during the thirties because

of the modern process of rationalization that affected the form of
buildings –and housing in particular– and the predominance of traffic
and vehicular circulation in societies. Therefore, the configuration of
housing was not constrained anymore by external circumstances, but
only by the needs of the residential unit (1978, 56). Thus, the exterior
realm remains, at least in theory, as a leftover that functionally meets
the basic needs for fresh air, healthy environment and leisure space
Solid / void without further consideration. The focus on the object –the block, the
house, the unit, the “fill”– became a central issue for the architects of
the Modern Movement, linked to the notion of a neutral, limitless
space that surrounded it –Le Corbusier’s projects, once again, are
presented as the paradigm of this vision. Perhaps anachronically, the
authors examine this inversion through the comparison of different
urban tissues and works in black (figure) and white (ground) plans
–“a favourite device of the Contextualists”(Shane 2011, 202)–, such
as Corbusier’s project for Saint-Dié and the historic center of Parma,
or Vasari’s Uffizzi Gallery versus l’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille.
Both extremes –predominance of object or space– cover a situation
of indeterminacy and crisis regarding the conception and design of
the city, since both models coexist problematically, without one of
them prevailing over the other. In order to qualify these antithetical
configurations and properly integrate and articulate them, Rowe and
Koetter go back to the poché as a tool to understand and transform
the texture of the city through “a solid matrix which frames a series of
major spatial events” (1978, 78). This matrix or texture, they propose,
may be useful in order to integrate –contextualize– buildings and
constructions within a determinate fabric, without placing special
emphasis neither on the object, nor on space, since both are not to be

238 [RE]PLACING
 17 18 19

separated from each other. In practice, Rowe and some of his former Figure / ground
students used this technique for their proposal in Roma Interrotta
(1978), the competition organized by the American architect Michael
Graves which reinvented Nolli’s figure-ground Rome plan16 through
the intervention of different architects and urbanists in separate
fragments. Contrary to other proposals, such as that of James Stirling,
whose proposal is fully integrated within the abstract, neutral space
of modernity, Rowe and his colleagues recover the density and texture
of the ancient capital, recovering the importance of streets and open
spaces from a French-nineteenth century perspective (Chimacoff, in
Graves (ed.) 1979).
Even before writing the article on space and anti-space, Peterson
explored –somehow unconsciously– these notions in his own projects.
The clearest example is the proposal he presented together with
Barbara Littenberg (his partner and also pupil of Rowe) and David
Cohn for the international competition for the transformation of Les
Halles in Paris that took place in 1979. The reversal of the traditional
walled town, situating the most active elements outside, embedded
in a “public wall”(Peterson 1980b) that works as a precinct of the
inner free, green space.17 The complex, articulated by means of

16 The most interesting feature of Nolli’s plan is the qualification of private and
public spaces, but also the recognition of the semi-public condition of some buildings, such
as churches, basílicas and other major pieces using fill and void patterns. Rowe, Sartogo
and other architects participating in the competition acknowledge and make their own
interpretations of this technique in a varying degree.
17 Another coincidence between Peterson and Venturi is the conception of the
Wall as an “architectural event” (Venturi 1977, 86), which creates space and configures
architecture.

Space and anti-space 239

 gates –and not buildings or facades– reinforces the idea of partition
and conscious division between interior and exterior, working on
the urban poché and, at the same time, materializing a critique to
modernist undifferentiated space through a sort of “contained and
intricacy” that Venturi recalls in Complexity and Contradiction (1977,
74).

Leftover spaces.
The contemporary notion of space seems to be far from radical
dualities and either/ors, as it is more a hybrid concept which does not
respond to such antagonisms: we are inhabiting a relational, hyper-
connected space where the encapsulated interior and the entropic
exterior are relative, to the point that Koolhaas’ junkspace—a sort
of anti-spatial space—has become our ordinary milieu. Thus, an
architecture that aims at recovering its sense of space is confronting a
much more complex scenario than that after the failure of the modern
project.
Nonetheless, Peterson’s text still offers evocative images that
certainly open new paths to rethinking the relation between
architecture and space. It is again in the work of Soane where he
detects a specific kind of space that acts as the counterpart of the
geometrical, contoured space of architecture. This negative space
(or derivative space, as he names it in the interview) is “the specific
design of a physical solid to solely serve the formation of space, both
inside and outside itself. It is a condition of multiple appearances,
looking solid and being empty” (Peterson 1980a, 101). In such
manner, John Soane’s appropriation of the space within the wall of the
drawing room of his house represents a clear example of this tactic.
This “condition of appearance” renders negative space extraordinarily
contemporary, since it brings together the real and the possible.
Residual space Going back to the initial idea and the controversial dominant
spatial model of our times, in which interior appears again as a
privileged realm, it is possible to revisit these notions in the light
of negativity and the possibility of a counterspace. With regard to
the existence of alternative, interstitial spaces which remain open to
innovative actions, it seems that acknowledging and embracing the

240 [RE]PLACING
 20 21

excessive, residual condition of contemporary space could be a first

step to redefine the relation between it and architecture.
In 2010, years after the postmodernist return to the poché, Slavoj Spandrels and
Žižek takes up the notion again to reflect on the tool as a means of byproducts
dealing with “uncanny” spaces in a subtractive way, showing –and he
puts it into Hegelian terms– “the dialectic of the envelope and the
body into the thickened envelope itself ”(2010, 276). Therefore, he
reinterprets a revealing space for architecture through the byproducts
of the architectural or urban project –which clash again with
Peterson’s understanding of urban and architectural space. Žižek noted
how spatial “excess” materializes in what the biologists Stephen Jay
Gould and Richard Lewontin (1979; Gould 1997), borrowing an
architectural term inspired by the pendentives of St. Mark’s basilica
in Venice, and applying it to the field of biology, call the “spandrels”
or spaces resulting from an intentional operation. The term, which is
returned to the architectural domain with new connotations, opens
a field of reflection around those spaces between the interior and
exterior, between formal configuration and social potential. Since they
have to exist, the original constraint forces an adaptation. Thus, the
Slovene qualifies these spaces as conflictual:
The struggle is up for grabs here -the struggle over who will appropriate them.
These “interstitial spaces” are thus the proper place for utopian dreaming- they
remind us of architecture’s great politico-ethical responsibility: much more is at
stake in architectural design than may at first appear. (Žižek 2010, 278)

Leftover spaces 241

Architectural Although the utopian aspirations of Žižek may be more or less
parallax invalidated, especially in the case of the architectural field, what
is suggestive here is the uncertainty, the potential offered by these
spandrels that are somehow connected with the interstitial, “negative”
space that Peterson claimed, despite his refusal to give it a political
meaning: spaces that resist form and imposition, and yet they are
not possible without them. This shall be understood in the general
framework of the chapter on the “architectural parallax” that he
borrows from Kojin Karatani (2003) –and he, in turn, from Kant.
The parallax is the apparent displacement or shift of an object when
observed from different angles. However, this “transformation” does
not imply that the object is different, but rather, the relation between
observer and object is “mediated” (Žižek 2010, 244), to the point that
the parallax (and Žižek uses the example of the architectural building)
opens a multiple reality where “the gap between the two perspectives
[parallax gap] thus opens up a place for a third, virtual building”
(Žižek 2010, 245).
Architectural and urban space cannot be separated from this
transforming mediation that unveils possible or potential places, even
within discarded situations. This fact, when analysed from a critical
point of view, has its social implications, beyond the aestheticist
discourse in which one could easily fall when talking of poché or fills
and voids. The excess of space, the gap,18 could be understood as
something more than a byproduct of the separation between skin
(envelope) and structure, but as a space for the indeterminate, the
unpredictable, open to the action of diverse agents and not only to the
ideal, planned image of the city (Žižek 2010, 271), that is, a political
scenario.19

18 To illustrate his argument, Žižek clarifies: “(…) inside and outside never cover
the entire space: there is always an excess of a third space which gets lost in the division
into outside and inside. In human dwellings, there is an intermediate space which is
disavowed: we all know it exists, but we do not really accept its existence – it remains
ignored and (mostly) unsayable. The main content of this invisible space is of course
excrement (in the plumbing and sewers), but it also includes the complex network of
electricity supplies, digital links, etc. – all contained in the narrow spaces between walls or
under floors” (Žižek 2010, 259–60).
19 The author uses the paradigmatic example of the slum as a place “whose
existence is not part of [the city’s] ‘ideal-ego,’ which are disjoined from its idealized image

242 [RE]PLACING
 The urban fabric of certain cities represents a paradigmatic example
of these adapted, interstitial spaces, such as the triangular parks
and plots which emerge after the imposition of an orthogonal grid.
However, in a smaller scale, new possibilities for these “spandrels”
are not so clear from an architectural perspective, unless we focus
our attention on those spaces which Soane and others have already
explored. It is interesting to cite here, albeit in a tangential way,
the comments of Adolf Loos towards this duality when it comes to
shaping space:
There are architects who do things differently. Their imaginations create not
spaces but sections of walls. That which is left over around the walls then forms
the rooms. And for these rooms some kind of cladding is subsequently chosen
(…) But the artist, the architect, first senses the effect that he intends to realize
and sees the rooms he wants to create in his mind’s eye. (Loos 2008, 170)

Nonetheless, the space of the room cannot be reduced to a monolithic Interiors

volume, but as we have seen, there are multiple possibilities when it of interiors
comes to articulating interior and exterior space. In this sense, several
contemporary interventions halfway between art and architecture
explore the possibilities of these “interiors of interiors,” the space
that hides behind flashy and hypertrophic architectural scenery. A
particular example of this strategy can be found in the project Haus
u r of the artist Gregor Schneider, which received the Golden Lion in
the Biennale of Venice in 2001. Schneider had been working within
a house on Unterheydener Straße in Rheydt (Mönchengladbach,
Germany) since 1985, reconstructing replicas of the rooms within
the rooms, generating a sort of double house –which clearly recalls
Whiteread’s work. As a consequence of the construction method,
a residual space remains between the original room and the double
one inside it. This space, almost inaccessible but real, is used for
different purposes; among them, to install devices to move the ceilings
and walls of the interior rooms, or to fix lamps in order to simulate
different daylight conditions. Some of this original rooms were
transported to Venice in 2001 for the Biennale exhibition of the Totes

of itself” (Žižek 2010, 271). The notion of Bauman and Agamben’s counterlaboratory as
a potential space to test new modes of subversion again the capitalist city seems to be
related to this interpretation.

Leftover spaces 243

 (Dead) Haus u r.20 For Schneider, this invisible space is as important
as the visible one, and as such is treated and filmed, provoking a
disturbing sensation of estrangement in the interior of the room. This
subversive way of working raises the reflection on the possible “life”
of the leftover and its presence as a determinant space of the building.
At the same time, disorder, accumulation and visible plumbing
and construction materials are used to reinforce the architectural
dimension of this leftover space.
Following a similar logic, the Swiss Chapuisat Brothers have
worked several times within the hidden space between visible rooms.
First with Hyperespace at St. Gallen (2005), later with Intra-Muros
in Basel, Vancouver and Zurich (2006-2008), the artists build
hidden, dark labyrinths within walls that the visitor can enter with
difficulty, because of the intricate physical disposition of the interior.
However, the uncomfortable, darkened space can be explored and
even inhabited thanks to the house-like distribution of elements
within the wall that, in Intra-Muros #1, includes a hypothetical
dining room, seats, closets and ventilation shafts. These hollow but
labyrinthine interiors are absolutely inconceivable from the exterior
appearance of the installations—Hyperespace, a huge cardboard
and wood installation, and Intra-Muros, a white wall around 50-60
centimetres thick. As in Haus u r, the relation between a hyper-
enclosed, dark, articulated interior and a silent exterior is exposed in
its full contradiction, questioning contemporary assumptions about
architecture as envelope.
Although the artistic realm apparently offers a less constrained
field of possibilities to explore the idea of an immersive interior from
a negative perspective, there are also several examples from normative
architecture that follow a similar logic within an inhabitable scale, that
is, within spaces that can –or could potentially– be inhabited during a
sustained period of time. It is not difficult to imagine how this leftover
spaces could work within the Archipelago city, or Viganò’s Reverse
City in a territorial level, since this fragmentary systems constitute

20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHL_dt518_0

244 [RE]PLACING
22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29

Leftover spaces 245

 a proper scenario for social action, tensions and conflicts between
different groups and elements, both human and non-human.21
Urban leftovers In this regard, Atelier Bow-Wow’s “pet architecture,” as a means
“to recycle unused urban openings,” offers new perspectives in this
direction, although we could envision more complex and functions
and dimensions beyond the playful and communicative character
that Tsukamoto (2003) describes. Such is the case of the self-built
residence of Rebekah and Casey Vallance (CultivAR) in Brisbane,
which stands over a narrow, former discarded parcel situated in
between existing buildings. Leftover spaces are given their own
structure and function by means of a linear articulation, squeezing
into the parcel without altering preexistent elements and boundaries,
although transforming the relations among them. Besides, the project
considered environmental issues in order to adequate space, such as
the elimination of polluting components (mainly asbestos cladding)
and a slow process of construction based on local techniques and
materials.
In a more radical approach, other architectures explore the
possibilities of these spatial in-betweens by means of re-densification
of urban space and new interiors. In 2013, the Danish architects
Mateusz Mastalski and Ole Robin Storjohann presented a project
named “Live Between Buildings,” in which they proposed to build
micro-pieces of apartments in the gaps between existing buildings
in dense cities such as New York, London, Amsterdam, Wroclaw or
Tokyo. A similar tactic has been followed in other paper architecture,
such as in the entries of Charlotte Bovis in 2009 and Matthew Barry
in 2016 for the President’s Medals prizes awarded by the Royal
Institute of British Architects. Bovis proposes a flexible modular
structural system which expands and contracts to fill the existing gap

21 Here, Shane’s interpretation of Foucault’s heterotopia may be of interest,

being understood as one of the urban elements that urban agents use when building and
qualifying their local spaces. In this way, heterotopia goes from being a theoretical and
descriptive concept to becoming a tool for the design and production of space. Bearing in
mind that the term heterotopia, coming from the medical field, refers to the presence of
tissue that differs from that of the organ in which it is located, in spatial terms we would
speak of spaces that “accommodate change or difference in the city” (Shane 2011, 37),
anomalous spaces that are distinguished within the general rhythm of the city.

246 [RE]PLACING
between buildings, creating new space for indeterminate uses, while
Barry projects a Spatial Enigma, a series of explorative platforms
among built elements, inviting people to enter and discover an
unknown, residual space that offers new possibilities of use, or non-
use.
Finally, the artistic-architectural display by Apolonija Šušteršic
in the lobby of the MUSAC –the Museum of Contemporary Art of
Castilla y León in León, Spain– in 2013 occupies an intermediate
position halfway between both disciplines. By reinterpreting the
iconic facade of the building by Emilio Tuñón and Luis Moreno
Mansilla, the work of Šušteršic brings together two conditions that
have been discussed throughout this chapter: first, the physical object,
conceived as a display case to exhibit other works by the same artist,
is presented as a marginal architecture dependent on the space of the
museum; however, its function is extended as a generator of activity,
inviting the visitors to interact with it, using it as a piece of furniture,
a display element or simply as an unexpected spatial reference.
Besides, the replication of the exterior design of the building dislocates
its identity, which is duplicated in its interior space through an-other
element, identical and different at the same time.
These materials form an apparently unconnected constellation of
examples that, however, could be analyzed and expanded with many
more situations, thus generating an unmapped but suggestive lineage,
spatializing the desire of situating oneself between the hypersensuous
comfort of the surrounding environment and the distressing
conscience of exteriority, therefore breaking with traditional and
dichotomic visions of space. Besides, in a time when architecture
as envelope has acquired a certain strength (both as a representative
facade and as a membrane to regulate thermo-hygrometric
conditions), it seems that, once again, the interior appears as a
privileged realm in a global scale, coinciding with what Sloterdijk
(2013) calls “the World Interior of Capital.” As a consequence, the
exterior space, the space of the city and social relations loses strength
and interest on the part of some sectors of the discipline. Against this
situation, some professionals and authors from diverse fields propose
to rethink the links between architecture and space from a relational
perspective, and not as a radical limit between involute enclaves and

Leftover spaces 247

 chaotic margins. Rather, authors like Peterson in the eighties –when
the relevance of space as key to understanding the world is recovered
with the spatial turn– as well as the contemporary artists whose work
has been mentioned, invite to recover a certain spatial “thickness” that
qualifies the gap between inside and outside, offering new relational
possibilities within the architectural/spatial construction.
As a closing for this section, and in order to introduce reflections
in next chapters, it is worth regarding the works analyzed from the
perspective of social sustainability. From a contemporary viewpoint,
today we are facing a dominant model architecture that recalls what
Georges Bataille defined in his Dictionnaire Critique (1970): an
architectural skeleton that pervades all form and shape. Despite his
drastic argumentation, his definition still has sense in our days when
one tries to understand the logic hidden behind certain architectural
constructions and arrangements in the city. Iconic buildings and
urban spaces are often the physical demonstration of a certain
order, of a way of structuring and managing the world. Corporate
headquarters, gated communities, shopping malls and privately
owned public spaces are examples of these “dominant forms,” which
embody “the expression of the very being of societies.” Against this
hypertrophic spatiality exceeded by overproduction, transparence and
positivity (expanding the influence of the all-pervasive junkspace),
leftover spaces represent an opportunity for resistance and difference
in the city. It is not about destroying the existing, but requalifying it,
perforating what is already there, instead of producing a neutral space
without limits. Paying attention to these minority, ephemeral practices
and interventions may be interesting not only in purely constructive
terms, but also in proposing alternative modes of doing and thinking.
In an increasingly urbanized world in which territory is extensively
being bought, built and occupied, it is refreshing and encouraging
to find other possible ideas that revert this logic of consumption,
advocating for a reuse and requalification of the built environment,
making us think of a more sustainable, responsible society in the
future.

248 [RE]PLACING
 30 31

The square as a socio-spatial product.

At this point, there are some words which have been used several
times throughout the text –(counter)space, void, urban, public,
openness, society, politics, representation, etc.– that lead us inevitably
to think of a certain spatial typology. Whether as a central, privileged
space of the city or as part of an urban network of local open spaces,
the square has usually been considered to be the quintessential
category of urban space. Sometimes called plaza or piazza, due to
the influence of the Mediterranean models, the square is a space full
of meaning and activity: it serves as a main meeting and gathering
point for inhabitants and foreigners. It is usually delimited by more
or less prominent constructions (churches, town halls, offices…)
and it often contains representative and symbolic elements that tell
us something about the history of the place, such as monuments,
statues or memorials. Besides, its spatial character, its openness and
dimensions –opposite to the more constrained axial configuration of
the street– facilitate a wide range of individual and collective actions,
either organized or spontaneous, so it works as a social condenser.
This apparent functional indeterminacy and the expression of certain
community values define the association of the square with the notion
of public space in Western societies, although in other contexts it
acquires similar values even when the idea of “public space” does not
correspond to the Western one.
In Lefebvrian terms, the square as such could be understood as
the product of specific representations of space, as it is an abstract
element derived from the management logic of the city and closely

The square as a socio-spatial product 249

 linked to the relations of production. Almost any square in the world
–not only the original Greek agora, but also many other open, central
spaces in other cities– is conceived after particular visions of space
together with social needs or ideological principles, from religion to
power, public space, commerce, exchange, etc. However, the deeply
symbolic character of the square also determines its function as a
representational space, a lived space which speaks and vibrates. In this
sense, the meaning of this element may experience a great variation
depending on its location.
Square as Although squares are usually considered to be necessary urban
urban void elements for several reasons –for instance, to gather a certain amount
of people, to condense social activity in certain spots, or to create a
vast scene for governmental events–, many of them arise as “negative
spaces,” resulting from the placement of other buildings and
constructions, either public or not. Félix Duque (2008, 22–23) recalls
how the public space of the square and the street was traditionally
articulated to separate the private-residential from representative zones
of activity, making possible the manifestation of people “without
further determination”:
something like the Hegelian Being, that is to say, “nothing,” the amorphous
subject of a pause, of a hollow in productive work, whose locus naturalis cannot
be in turn but a “void” to be filled on “special” occasions: festivities and patriotic
manifestations; filled, namely, at least by its own, useless bodily presence.

However, if the square has traditionally been the archetype of

urban void, resulting from the management of other elements of
representation, it is never a totally casual or residual open space, nor
a byproduct of some other spatial operation. On the contrary, it is
carefully planned with the purpose of reflecting a prevailing order that
organizes life in a particular community. Obviously, this transcends
the physical realm of public space and should be understood from the
perspective of spatial processes and symbolic conditions. Indeed, such
a reversal is an echo of the existence of the subjects who inhabit such
space.
Domination, This recognition of spatial reverses sets an ideal scenario for
appropriation observing alternate phenomena of domination and appropriation

250 [RE]PLACING
in terms of dominant and dominated-appropriated space.22 These
concepts were explained by Lefebvre23 from a Marxist perspective
–even though Marx himself did not define them clearly (Lefebvre
1991, 165). Although both characters may appear combined, the
domination of space implies a submission to technology and labor
force, while its appropriation has more social connotations. Besides,
the square can also be regarded as a dominant space, that is, as “the
realization of a master’s project” (Lefebvre 1991, 165). But once
again, the concept of domination should not be understood only
from a merely technical-productive perspective, as social aspects of
domination are always present: the square as space of representation is
usually a materialization of the established social order.
Nonetheless, not all squares have the same meaning: only some
concentrate this representative character within the urban fabric,
and always with different implications. The square can be the stage
of democracy, but it can also be the one of authoritarian power,
including military parades and public executions; or of protest and
insurgency, either by extending the space of power, or by reacting
against it. Arguably, there is not a dialectics as such between dominant
and dominated space; rather, this double contradictory condition
is always present. With regard to the mechanisms of appropriation
and reappropriation, Lefebvre (1991, 167) understands them as
processes implying a modification of the original purpose of a space.
As an example, he cites the case of Les Halles in Paris, a space that
went from being a market to a gathering point for the Parisian youth
during the transitional years between the sixties and the seventies. In

22 For an analysis of the reverse from an anthropological and geographically diverse

perspective, see the work of Balandier (1994), translated into Spanish by Manuel Delgado.
23 Lefebvre’s use of the term “appropriation” is different from the meaning given by
the also French philosopher and founder of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie Claude Lefort.
The former speaks of appropriation as an action against state power, while the latter
treats it as an action from it. However, despite this contradictory use of the word, their
ideas are not dissimilar: “Although Lefort does not specifically write about urban space,
his appropriation - a type of occupation of the public space through which it is invested
with an absolute meaning- resembles what Henri Lefebvre calls the domination of space
-the technocratic designation of objective uses that confer ideological coherence to space”
(Deutsche 2008, 10). What is interesting about this inversion of meanings is precisely the
ambivalent and complex character of the concept of appropriation.

The square as a socio-spatial product 251

 32 33

this case, the appropriation process has had more or less permanent
effects in time.
Agora If it has been decided to highlight the importance of the square
–and not any other type of urban space–, it is because the square
is much more than a mere spatial urban typology; it is also a social
construction that, besides, is deeply rooted in Western tradition.
Although we cannot deny the existence of similar spaces in different
town and urban areas forged by the influence of diverse cultures,
the Western (and particularly the Mediterranean) model has proven
to be a successful one, given its appreciable characteristics that
provide an open, sound, communal space for the general public or
the community. In fact, it can be argued that the physical form, or
void, of the square responds to its social function, and vice versa.
Once again, it is necessary to go back to Ancient Greece in order to
understand this specific type of urban space from its foundation.
The association of space and politics in the West has its first
precedent in the Greek polis, considered to be the seed of the
European city. The polis as an enclosed space ruled by specific laws
created by and for free-born citizens (excluding women, foreigners
and slaves) is the first clear association between politics, society and
space. Outside this confined zone, the private home and the foreign
territory remained as separate realms where freedom was unthinkable
because of the absence of the principle of equality (isegoria) beyond

252 [RE]PLACING
the limits of the polis. Therefore, as we have seen, these spheres were
governed by means of family and war, as hierarchical and dominant
structures where order was imposed through violence and strength. It
has been also mentioned that Hannah Arendt (1997; 1998) reflected
thoroughly on the foundations of the Greek polis, where freedom of
speech lies at the basis of the public domain, that is, word, speech
and discussion among equals were a condition –and a guarantee–
for freedom. As a consequence, space becomes an essential medium
for primeval democracy, since public speaking needs a gathering
point, a place where citizens can hear and see the others and be
heard and seen by them. Thus, the physical phenomenon of the
assembly has evident repercussions in spatial terms, and so emerges
the agora as the open space where all free citizens have the ability
and the duty to speak and express themselves to their peers. In this
regard, freedom and place are inextricably connected, since the
citizen is free only within the limits of the polis, where the space of
encounter between them (Zwischenraum) is possible (Arendt 1997,
133). This has its most palpable expression in the public area, the
vast, empty space in the middle of the polis where, besides, violence
and brutal imposition are excluded. Certainly, changes introduced
during the modern period, including the emancipation of women
and the working class, extended this freedom to every citizen, at least
theoretically, suppressing the aristocratic factor that characterized
classical democracy. Although this political-freedom identity has
varied enormously throughout time, still the public and representative
character of the square remains today.
However, the free space of the agora was also inevitably linked to
other kind of activities, mainly commercial and economic. The market
as the counterpart of the agora is the space of activity and production,
where trade and exchange relations take place. This function, which
was deeply assimilated in oriental cultures in the form of the bazaar,
was initially associated to productive life as a less refined and exclusive
mode of human activity:
(…) it was the ever-frustrated ambition of all tyrants to discourage the citizens
from worrying about public affairs, from idling their time away in unproductive
agoreuein and politeuesthai, and to transform the agora into an assemblage of
shops like the bazaars of oriental despotism. (Arendt 1998, 160)

The square as a socio-spatial product 253

 Indeed, commercial activity would gain ground on Western societies,
as a consequence of the extension of the public realm of the homo
faber, “the builder of the world and the producer of things” (Arendt
1998, 160), who needs to exchange products in order to establish
a relation with the others and, therefore, becomes the main subject
during the earlier stages of manufacturing capitalism.
Forum The Roman forum was the space that, roughly understood as the
evolution of the Greek agora, was adopted for new modes of civic
practice, since it hosted different and more diverse functions: trade,
justice, processions, speeches… The forum is not an empty space, but
a conglomerate of buildings, places and monuments which articulated
the most relevant civil activities offering specific spaces. The need
for an exclusive, open space for speech and dialogue among equals
had disappeared,24 partly because of the rupture between citizenship
and limited space generated by the Romans, whose lex surpassed the
limitations of the Greek nomos that restricted politics to the inner
realm of the polis. Roman territory and citizenship, on the contrary,
could be extended by means of alliances, treaties and agreements
with former rivals,25 and thus, a new in-between space emerges
(Arendt 1997, 120), where physical boundaries become codes. This
capacity favored the rapid expansion of Roman culture throughout
the territory, unlike the Greek city-states, which could never establish
permanent and stable alliances among them (Arendt 1997, 127).
The medieval and renaissance city consolidated the model of square
(piazza, plaza, markt…) that proliferates in European historic centers
and has been adopted and adapted –even imposed– in different
locations and periods. Contrary to the disperse forum, the square
emerges as a central space, the symbolic center of power –civil and/
or religious–, surrounded by relevant elements and buildings (church,
palace, town hall…) which configure an open area for gathering
and hosting different activities, such as markets, representations or
public executions. This accumulation of functions and constructions

24 Also the ancient agora of Athens was “forumized,” filled with different uses and
buildings after the Roman conquer of the Greek territories.
25 Arendt (1997, 124) considers foreign policy as a specifically Roman notion that
served as a basic form to their republican and imperial politics.

254 [RE]PLACING
 34

configure a key urban node that produces space through different

strategies (Duque 2001, 12): the opening of an empty void, delimited
and filled by volumes –“although rationally hollowed out”– hosting
local and collective functions and connected to the road network.
The publicness of the classic square reflects and visibilizes hierarchies Square,
and relations that characterize social order, working as a space of publicness and
representation where each social agent has a specific role and where representation
meanings, codes and symbols are rigorously established. In fact,
almost any square in the world, no matter its location and origin,
preserves a certain representational, collective character and embodies
certain social and identity values: it works as a scenario, where daily
life, but also death and the extraordinary takes place –it is impossible
to forget the scenes of the “autos de fe” under the Spanish Inquisition
power or the beheadings during the French Revolution and the so-
called Reign of Terror at the Place de la Concorde (former Place de la
Révolution). This ambivalence between life and death, attraction and
repulsion –that will be further studied in next chapters and that Denis
Hollier (1993), following Bataille, situates in the dyad museum/
slaughterhouse– is at the core of the social system.
With the emergence of the bourgeoisie and the notion of “the
public” as a third element between the private realm of the household
and the public power of State, the democratic character of the square
is reinforced, as an open space available for all classes, where people
can gather, stroll, see and be seen. Of course, it becomes a place to

The square as a socio-spatial product 255

 35 36

37 38

39 40

256 [RE]PLACING
spend leisure –unproductive– time after work or during the weekend,
together with parks and gardens. Thus, workers and middle-classes
share the city under a pretended democratic equality which unfolds in
space. Moreover, this relative strengthening of the public sphere and
the remote possibility of restoring a space of equality led to the use of
public squares and other open spaces as places for demonstration and
protest: not only in Europe, in the wake of the French Revolution and
during many riots and rebellions in England, Italy, Spain, Russia in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also in the United States
and Latin American countries during their processes of independence
and emergence of new states. However, most of these demonstrations
–led by proletarian, feminists, slaves and other counterpublics– would
be violently repressed by official powers. The proliferation of this
kind of events clearly transformed urban landscape through actions
of appropriation and occupation. In this regard, the contradiction
inherent to public space becomes clear in terms of violence and
repression: despite their civic, consensual nature, many public spaces
have been the stage for violent episodes, as Picon (2008, 10) recalls
when exploring the violent dimension of architecture.
Modern urbanism, as one of the strongest tools for the generation Urban planning
of new representations of space, was a useful means to control and social
these effervescent uprisings and suffocate their effects. Once again, control
Paris is the paradigmatic example of an urban transformation with
social objectives beyond modernization and the upgrade of health
conditions. Under the mandate of Napoleon III, prefect Haussmann
conceived and executed an ambitious renovation plan for the French
capital between 1853 and 1870, until then severely affected by
problems of crime, overcrowding, disease and social tensions. For that
reason, the Emperor commissioned a plan to transform the capital
into a modern, healthy, beautiful city, with an extensive network of
wide roads, boulevards and parks to improve circulation, ventilation
and light conditions, as well as providing the population with nice
spaces to inhabit. However, these humanitarian purposes were not the
only ones to motivate the transformation. Considering that Paris had
suffered continuous rebellions and riots prior to the establishment of
the Second Republic, Haussmannization has also been regarded as
an attempt to control the crowd in the streets and facilitate military
maneuvers in case of uprising (Mumford 1970, 96; Harvey 2003,

The square as a socio-spatial product 257

 145; Douglas 2007), since the labyrinthine medieval urban tissue was
a serious obstacle to operate and control insurrectional movements,
allowing the construction of barricades and facilitating escape routes
–a fact that Haussmann himself suggests in his memories, even when
he assures that this was not the main aim of the project (El Haddad
2017, 31):
It was the evisceration of Old Paris, of the quarter of the riots, of the barricades,
by means of a broad central road, penetrating, through and through, this almost
impracticable maze, accosted by transverse communications [...] Certainly the
Emperor, in tracing the Boulevard de Strasbourg and its prolongation to the
Seine and beyond, had no more in view the strategic utility of this extension,
as that of many other great ways , such as Rue de Rivoli, for example, whose
straight alignment did not lend itself to the usual tactics of local insurrections.
But if he did not seek, above all, this result, as the Opposition reproached
him, it cannot be denied that it was the very happy consequence of all the
great perceptions conceived by His Majesty to improve and to sanitize the
ancient city. This result served, concurrently with many other good reasons,
to justify, vis-à-vis France, that the tranquility of Paris is of primary interest
and the participation of the State in the expenses of these onerous enterprises.
(Haussmann 1893, 54–55)26

Haussmann’s operation entailed a deep transformation of socio-

spatial relations within the city. The application of rational, scientific
strategies to transform the old city into a metropolis became a model
for further urban plans, and can be considered a relevant precedent
of modern urbanism precepts, such as those of the Athens Charter.
Still, the social consequences of modernization, rationalization and
segregation of uses cannot be overlooked. Félix Duque (2001, 11)
describes Haussmannization as a “cynically bourgeois” strategy,27

26 [T.A.]
27 The plan was thoroughly implemented at all levels, not only the urban one,
but also on an architectural scale. Haussmann also traced specific rules for residential
buildings, creating a very specific type of block that characterizes the center of Paris. These
blocks were created for bourgeois families, but they had spaces for servants: the so-
called chambres de bonne were apartments on the top floor with a surface area of around
6–12 m2 and offering minimal facilities. Toilets were shared with other servants, and the
rooms could only be accessed by separate staircases, so wealthy families did not have to
share space with their domestics. Although in the beginning of the twentieth century new

258 [RE]PLACING
 41 42

since it expels the working classes and their workplaces from the city
center to the banlieues, leaving it free for high and middle classes, but
connecting both areas with large boulevards and roads to facilitate
police action in case of unrest. The straight line and the empty,
inaccessible square surrounded by traffic become spatial tools for
control and repression, as well as for the creation of a specific type of
public: “The expression of the Nation-State is, in fact, the emptiness”
(Duque 2001, 11). Lefebvre (1991, 312) also reflects on the utility
of abstract space and the fragmentation of social life, comparing the
Parisian Place des Vosges, as a meeting place, with la Concorde and
the space in front of the Royal Palace as voids with no life, inserted
within a visualization logic developed by the Haussmannian strategy
that “mortally wounded” the qualities of a particular urban space.
However, regardless of the objectives of the imperial plans, the
urban transformation of Paris proved to be unsuccessful in terms of
efficiency of military and police interventions. The Paris Commune,28

regulations were introduced in order to improve the quality of these spaces, still today
they represent a clear class division, since they are now hired by low-income workers or
students who want to live in the city center.
28 Marx devoted a brief text to the episode of the Paris Commune (Der Bürgerkrieg
in Frankreich, 1871), in which he treats it as a paradigmatic example of proletarian power.
Many years later, Lefebvre (1962) would return to the Commune after Marx, but from
his particular point of view. The counterposition that he articulates between Paris and
Versailles is interesting as a reflection of the opposition between the proletariat and the

The square as a socio-spatial product 259

 43 44

that brief experiment that temporarily put on hold the projections

of the bourgeois phantasmagoria, was finally possible in spite of the
wide avenues and the lack of refuge spaces. It is not surprising that,
once again, the destruction of the existent is a first step towards
appropriation: the fall of the Vendôme Column, the monument in
honor of Napoleon Bonaparte, challenged both social and spatial
order, in a vague return to the agora after the imposition of the
roundabout.
All these meanings, events, processes, etc. have produced several
layers that constitute our contemporary notion of square: an urban
void, an empty space for meeting and dynamic expression of social
and political values, either from publics or counterpublics, under
certain codes and restrictions regulated by the police or the state, with
a more or less strong symbolic charge, surrounded and qualified by
monuments, architectures, traffic roads, green surfaces… It certainly
fits the definition of Shane’s enclaves (inserted in the framework of
recombinant urbanism and urban ecologies), which reflects all these
conditions and recognizes the both static and dynamic character of
the square:

capitalist class, the new and the old order; as well as the qualification of its urban actions
as “revolutionary urbanism.” For Lefebvre, the Commune was a movement “aroused by the
negative elements –therefore, creators of the existing society.” [T.A.]

260 [RE]PLACING
 [A]n enclave is a self-organizing, self-centering, and self-regulating system
created by urban actors, often governed by a rigid hierarchy with set boundaries.
It serves to slow down and concentrate nomadic flows using a variety of
techniques, from perimeter walls and gatekeepers to formal, geometric devices in
the plan of the settlement. (Shane 2005, 177)29

At the same time, some squares can be considered as something Heterotopic

more than a mere enclave, because of their degree of multiplicity enclaves
and appropriation by urban actors. Thus, the Foucaldian notion of
heterotopia may be used as well to generate –or at least to clarify–
a more accurate understanding of these urban spaces. It is worth
recalling the medical origin of the term, which designates a specific
pathology entailing the presence of an ectopic tissue at an organ or
site with a different original tissue (in Greek, héteros means “distinct,
other” and tópos “place”). Applying this definition to the urban realm,
squares may work certainly as singular tissues inserted within a more
or less homogeneous urban fragment, altering its regularity through
exceptional, diverse and sometimes unpredictable and simultaneous
actions and configurations. Shane incorporates heterotopia to the
triad of organizational devices in urban design ecologies, together with
the enclave and the armature, being a space for “experimentation and
change, handling nonconforming urban activities and contributing
to the overall stability of the city through its capacity to host change”
(Shane 2011, 17). Thus, as a “heterotopic enclave,” the square is

29 A more extended definition appears in Urban Design since 1945: “The enclave
is a space defined by a perimeter with one or more entries and a clearly defined centre
(…) As an organisational device, the enclave serves as a collecting point for people, objects
or processes that fall within the purview of a single urban actor who controls the space,
its contents and its perimeter. Hierarchical systems of control and top-down command
structures radiate out from this dominant actor, who nests many enclaves within enclaves
to aid sorting and memory. This nesting of enclaves within enclaves can scale up to
encompass a whole city, as in imperial Beijing, focusing symbolically on the Forbidden
City. Urban actors altered the role of the enclave when they paid more attention to flow
and process in the city, so the enclave became a stationary point in the system, where
people, goods or services could be temporarily located and stored in places like hotels,
warehouses or storage yards, docks and containers. Later still, enclaves became containers
for urban fantasies and imagery, a means of way-finding, attraction and identification for
different areas of the city (…)” (Shane 2011, 37)

The square as a socio-spatial product 261

 45 46

essentially a space that hosts difference, “inverting and mirroring their

host societies.”30
Against Focusing again on the position of architecture within urban space,
the square Denis Hollier highlights, in the introduction to Against Architecture
(1993), the animosity that the French writer Émile Zola felt against
urban landscaping, regarding its products as absurd pockets of leisure
inserted into the urban fabric. In a text entitled “Les Squares,” Zola
writes: “The gates to the new Parmentier square, built on the site of
the former Popincourt slaughterhouse, will soon be opened to the
public. ( ... ) It looks like a bit of nature that did something wrong
and was put in prison” (Hollier 1993, xv).31
The Paris of Zola was undergoing a full urban transformation that
would have a strong impact on nineteenth-century literature and
thought. Asit has been explained before, one of the many objectives
of the major operation carried out by Baron Haussmann was to

30 Foucault introduced three types of heterotopias: heterotopias of crisis (Oxford

college, beguinages…), of deviance (related to domination and punishment: prisons,
schools, asylums…) and of illusion (gardens, cinemas, museums, amusement and thematic
parks…) Shane focuses on the latter, since they were the least studied by Foucault, but
they are interesting to dismantle and understand the phantasmagorias of bourgeoisie:
Disney World/ EPCOT and gated communities in the United States, Beaubourg in Paris
or the Guggenheim site in Bilbao are some of the case studies he analyzes (2008). There
is a fourth type that was even less developed, heterotopias of compensation, that some
authors study in Heterotopia and the City (De Cauter and Dehaene (eds.) 2008)
31 Quoted in Emile Zola, “Les Squares,” in Contes et nouvelles, ed. Roger Ripoll.
Paris: Gallimard, 1976, pp. 319, 321.

262 [RE]PLACING
 47 48

increase the rate of open space within the city, promoting more
hygienic and favorable living conditions to the Parisians, who had
hitherto inhabited an unhealthy city. While Baudelaire laments in
his poem “Le Cygne” the loss of the old Paris,32 and Engels criticizes
in The Housing Question (1872) the new structure of the city, which
represents a systematized instrument of alienation, Zola is amazed by
the new city and its healthy, vibrant, productive character, as if it were
a living organism in which each component has its specific function.
However, the writer would not feel so enthusiastic with regard Work vs.
to the position that recreational space for workers would reach, leisure spaces
necessarily inserted into the new Haussmannian plan. Since Zola had
“always identified laziness with waste,” and consequently “whatever
has no use” should have “no place” (Hollier 1993, xvi), he strongly
criticized urban open spaces, as he believed that recreational space
should not be present within central urban fabric, but rather outside
the city walls, as he idealized in his text about Saint-Ouen, published
in the Tribune in 1868, in which he describes a day off for the
working classes.33 Contrary to the enclosed, suffocating enclave of

32 “Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville/ change plus vite, hélas ! que le coeur
d’un mortel” (Les fleurs du mal, 1861, LXXXIX). “Old Paris is no more (the form of a city
changes, alas, faster than the mortal’s heart)” [T.A.]
33 “I stayed until evening in the midst of the people in their Sunday best. Not many
cardigans, lots of workshirts: a gay and open crowd of workers, young girls in cloth hats
showing their bare fingers covered with needle-pricks, men wearing cotton whose rough
hands still bore the imprint of tools. The joy in this crowd was a healthy one; I did not hear
a single quarrel, I did not see a single drunk… It was the gaiety of good children, sincere
bursts of laughter, pleasures with no shame attached” (Quoted in Hollier 1993, xvii).

The square as a socio-spatial product 263

 Parmentier square in the middle of the city –as well as other urban
spaces and forms of leisure–, which reverses the productive function of
the urban machine, the open space of the suburban park is tolerable
and necessary, since it places leisure and non-work extra muros,
without decelerating the frenzied rhythm of the city.34 The paintings
of Georges Seurat, depicting weekend scenes in the outskirts of Paris,
reflect the separation between the city as space of work and the open
areas of the peripheries used by the proletariat during their free days.
In Bathers in Asnières (1884), the division is clear: the smoky factories
in the background contrast with the scene that takes place across
the river, where workers relax and lie down, taking off their Sunday
clothes to have a refreshing bath in the Seine. The spatial distribution
of the city is harmoniously depicted, but the severity of the partition
cannot be denied.
The museum and Conditions of repulsion and attraction on public space evolve
the slaughterhouse along the line of thought that Hollier traces, linking the bourgeois
vision of Zola and the sacrificial perspective of Georges Bataille,
whose work is the main focus of Hollier’s book and to which we shall
return later. Both authors, Hollier argues, put on display the opposing
forces of life and death within the city. If the beatific space of Saint
Ouen is not free of disturbance and death in Zola’s work (in Therèse
Raquin, the park is the scene of the murder of Camille at the hands
of Laurent, his wife’s lover), Bataille deals with two different spaces
of the city that embody these forces of repulsion and attraction: the
slaughterhouse and the museum. The first is the pole of abhorrence;
it is centrifuge, while the second is centripetal, attracting people and
inhabitants of the city (Hollier 1993, xiii). The slaughterhouse is the
enclave in which Bataille detects sacrifice and death manifested in the
city; it is the place of loss in an almost religious sense: man kills and
devours the animal to live, but at the same time he witnesses his own
transformation into a terrible, monstrous form. It cannot be forgotten
that fear of death is precisely what the community shares, and it is
here where it materializes. The museum, as the refuge from horror,
counters the slaughterhouse. Bataille says: “A museum is like the lung
of a great city: every Sunday, the crowd flows into the museum like

34 The question of work and leisure will be addressed in the chapter “[Em]
bodying”.

264 [RE]PLACING
 49 50

blood and it leaves purified and fresh” (1970, 48).35 Hollier speaks of
these two poles of a system where work is the main core: through it,
“foundation and origin of humanity,” homo faber is able to “liberate
the animal” (Navarro 2002, 132). The factory, indeed, is the motor,
the core of the modern city. Although Zola understood the suburban
park or the square –and not the museum– as the epicenter of rest
and working catharsis, one could outline a parallelism between both
enclaves, since the contemporary museum reflects to some extent
the functions of the square: the place to see and be seen and, above
all, to enjoy stipulated leisure time; to spend a non-productive time
rigorously absorbed within the logic and times of labor.36

35 [T.A.]
36 Another parallelism between the square as central urban space and the
museum could be articulated from Agamben’s identification of the museum as the temple
of capitalism, acquiring a sacrificial dimension that the square has held –and still holds–
in some occasions: “everything today can become a Museum, because this term simply
designates the exhibition of an impossibility of using, of dwelling, of experiencing. Thus, in
the Museum, the analogy between capitalism and religion becomes clear. To the faithful
in the Temple (…) correspond today the tourists who restlessly travel in a world that
has been abstracted into a Museum. But while the faithful and the pilgrims ultimately
participated in a sacrifice that reestablished the right relationships between the divine
and the human by moving the victim into the sacred sphere, the tourists celebrate on
themselves a sacrificial act that consists in the anguishing experience of the destruction of
all possible use” (Agamben 2007, 84). Without delving into the square as a place for public
execution, it is possible to find multiple global examples of “museified” squares which have
lost their possibility of use.

The square as a socio-spatial product 265

 The project for the transformation of La Villette into a park in
the eighties is used by Hollier as a closing image for his arguments,
since it reflects the advent of post-structuralism and its desire to do
away with the symbolic authority of architecture. Like Parmentier
square, Parc de la Villette also stands over a former slaughterhouse,
one of the largest of those built in Paris around 1867 in order to
replace smaller ones which had been demolished and transformed
into squares and parks. Interestingly, once again, the park stands
over the slaughterhouse: loss and celebration occupy the same site,
as one cannot exist without the other. The impossibility of reducing
all reality to the logic of consumption is illustrated by Hollier (1994,
110), who detects the error of Zola (through Claude Lantier in Le
Ventre de Paris) when presupposing that “this will kill that,” re-using
the words of Frollo in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris to assert the
dominance of Baltard’s pavilions in front of Saint-Eustache. But the
church, as Hollier (1994) announced, had resisted triumphantly over
the demolished pavilions of the former slaughterhouse. Even so, the
tension remains after the construction of the new forum of Les Halles,
which embodies contemporary forms of consumption of goods, spaces
and times in a hybrid complex including a shopping mall and a train
station.
Negative
Thus, a square is multiple and indeterminate, a central place
urban ground
of celebration and absence at the same time; it is a physical space
subject to change and action. But who owns the square? As a space
for reclamation, the “right to the city” is an issue that has its utmost
socio-spatial expression in these urban voids which not only works
as a scenario for urban social life, but also as a place to reclaim the
possibility of exercising it. It seems that the square, indeterminately
open but highly codified at the same time, offers a significant space for
contemporary democracies, in which the power gap between state and
civil society is itself an imprecise void. Once again interpreting Claude
Lefort, Rosalyn Deutsche relates the notion of public space –the
“negative” ground of the city– and the ambiguity which stems from
an unclear legitimacy of power:
Democracy, then, has a difficulty at its core. Power sterns from the people but
belongs to nobody. Democracy abolishes the external referent of power and
refers power to society. But democratic power cannot appeal for its authority to

266 [RE]PLACING
 a meaning immanent in the social. Instead, the democratic invention invents
something else: the public space. The public space (…) is the social space
where, in the absence of a foundation, the meaning and unity of the social is
negotiated-at once constituted and put at risk. (Deutsche 1996, 273)

Beyond its physical and historical conditions, the square today is a Square
space for negotiation, a permanently contested and (re)appropriated as room
space. But above all, the square is a room, a heterotopia within an
atopic,37 limitless world of incessant circulation. Cacciari (2011, 35)
notices that the acceleration of the processes of urban transformation
prevents that the transits between successive generations are fluently
constituted and, as an immediate consequence, house and non-house,
dwelling and non-dwelling are connected; they are obverse and
reverse, front and back. To remain is not to inhabit. Only territory –
not the city– is inhabited, through the places it provides, like silences,
like stops. If everything is frantically moving in the metropolis and
subject to permanent acceleration, the square sets a measure to the
immeasurable, to perpetual mobility that only recognizes passages as
shortcuts. Thinking the place, in fact, implies a counterposition to
everlasting movement, the displacement that keeps things separate
from what they are. (Pardo Torío 1992, 119) And this displacement,
this projection of what space is or should be over space itself, is the
motor that keeps urban voids alive and relevant to societies.

37 From the Greek átopos, meaning literally “with no place,” out of place, strange.

The square as a socio-spatial product 267

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Source: World Digital Library.

45 Edgar Degas. “Place de la Concorde,” 1875. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

46 “Place du Théatre. Sortie des ouvriers Delaunay-Belleville,” c. 1910. Source: Wikimedia

Commons.

47 Georges Seurat. “Bathers at Asnières,” 1884. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

273
 48 Auguste Renoir. “Dance at the Moulin de la Galette,” 1876. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

49 La Villette Slaughterhouse, main hall. 1970s. Source: EPPGHV-Fonds SEMVI.

50 Bernard Tschumi. Points, lines, surfaces. Diagram for Parc de la Villette, 1982-1983.
Source: Plataforma Arquitectura.

274 [RE]PLACING
275
SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING.
 01

The city sprawls endlessly over the northern plains in the shelter of the
mountains. As an old tree trunk, its concentric structure unveils the
age of its multiple layers, which enclose one another like sacred rings
preserving the history and the form of the city. However, concentric
perfection dissolves progressively as we move away from the center
toward the peripheries, where the city becomes a living, formless mass
in permanent expansion. It is practically impossible to draw a fixed
map of ir, since it expands in an almost unpredictable way. Future
urban developments are constantly projected and rethought, making
it difficult to imagine how the city will look like in the next years.
The Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall hosts an impressive 302-square-
meter model on the scale 1:750 that shows how the Chinese capital
would look like in 2020. The historic core and the concentrations of
skyscrapers in business districts stand in contrast to developing areas
that have are provisionally represented by generic models of buildings
whose layout and arrangement are still to be defined. The model
stands over a huge 1000-square meter back-lit glass panel depicting
the outskirts of the city, which have been considered to be less relevant
for the purposes of the model and whose surface exceeds by far the
perimeter of the museum’s room. It is the indefinite projection of a
city in permanent becoming that however needs to materialize its
future appearance, even in an imaginary, ephemeral way.

277
 02 03

The city of Beijing was properly founded by the Mongol Yuan

Dinasty, under the rule of Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century.
Built over the remains of former villages, it was given the name of
Khanbaliq (“the city of the Khan”) or Dadu, in Chinese, meaning
the “Great Capital”. It was placed north-east of the former city of
Zhongdu (“Central Capital”), which had been destroyed by Genghis
Khan in 2014. The new city shared many similarities with the
former: it also had perpendicular streets, walls, water bodies, axes,
etc., although Dadu was more extensive, and soon began to expand
following a traditional urban structure. Indeed, the shape of the
Chinese capital responds to a complex system of references ranging
from Confucian philosophy to numerology and geomancy.
The central Two basic elements can be highlighted in order to understand
nation the generic structure of the Chinese archaic metropolitan model,
which can be observed –with differences– in Beijing as well as in
Xi’an: the north-south axis and the square. It is important to bear
in mind that the particular space of the capital was to be considered
the center of the world, maybe of the universe. As it was pointed
out in the introductory chapter, the Chinese name for the country,
Zhongguo (formally adopted after the 1911 revolution, although
used for centuries), means “central nation,”an expression that derives
from ancient denominations, which also refer to a central kingdom

278 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

 04 05

or civilization.1 This perception of a central position is influenced by

the fact that the Chinese territories have been strongly isolated by
physical boundaries (the Himalayas, the Pacific Ocean, Gobi Desert,
Siberia…), as well as the relative hegemony and stability that Chinese
culture has kept throughout most of its history: even during the
twentieth century, when other communist countries saw themselves
falling behind its Western counterparts, China never considered itself
a weak power, and its military, cultural and commercial strength led
to this perception of centrality (Hobsbawm 1995, 462–63). Indeed,
Beijing, competing during the seventeenth century with Istanbul,
Agra, and Delhi (Kostof 1991, 37–41), was the largest global
metropolis until 1800, when industrialization boosted the growth of
many cities and urban areas (Shane 2011, 87).
Interestingly, the Chinese character for “center” (中, zhong) looks
like a rectangle traversed by a vertical stroke, resembling the physical
layout of the traditional city. The city, as a representation of the Earth
in connection to the universe, acquired the form of the square, since
it was the mythical shape attributed to the Earth in ancient Chinese

1 The name of Beijing also has geographical connotations. While jing means
“capital,” bei is “north.” Beijing was conceived as the Northern capital, in opposition to
Nanjing, the Southern capital.These names have changed several times throughout history
depending on the situation of the capital for different dynasties.

279
 geographical thought.2 Its orientation was determined by the five –not
Numerical space four, since the center is also included– cardinal points. This layout
was extremely effective for the application of numerical schemes,
which played an essential role in quantity and spatial regulation: the
duality of yin and yang, five elements and cardinal points, the Nine
Divisions of the Hongfan (The Great Plan described in Confucius’
Book of Documents) twelve temporal markers, sixty-four hexagrams…
The numerical dimension of traditional Chinese culture, going
from “two to abundance” and differing significantly from Western
numerical orders –the One, duality, dialectics, trinity…– combined
all this elements to control and regulate the city, as well as granting
it a recognizable code for its intellectual understanding (S. Li 2014,
6–16). All these numerical references appear in varying degrees in the
layout of the ancient core of Beijing, the Forbidden City, built during
the fifteenth century and hosting the imperial residence for the Ming
and Qing dynasties within the Imperial City until 1912, with the
abdication of Puyi and the founding of the Republic. The multiple
palaces, gates and temples of the city are structured according to a grid
pattern, with a strong 7.8-kilometer long axis running from north
to south –since this is the orientation that favors the flow of qi, the
natural energy present in all living creatures.

New regime, new spaces.

The layout of the historic city was powerful enough to condition

the further development of the capital, even after the urban
transformations carried out during the first decades of the People’s

2 Chinese nonary cosmography is based on the nine-square formation invented

by Fu Xi or Yu the Great, two of the sage-kings of high Chinese antiquity. It was not a
mere intellectual abstraction, but also was applied to the domains of agriculture, urban
planning, written language or medicine. The Chinese character for “well” (jing) also
resembles the three-by-three grid, reinforcing its beneficial character. (Henderson 1994)
The Kaogongji (“The Book of Diverse Crafts,” 770-476 BC), an important treaty on science
and technology in Ancient China, also has references to this numerological system with
regard to urban planning: “a capital city should be square on plan. Three gates on each side
of the perimeter lead into the nine main streets that crisscross the city and define its grid-
pattern. And for its layout the city should have the Royal Court situated in the south, the
Marketplace in the north, the Imperial Ancestral Temple in the east and the Altar to the
Gods of Land and Grain in the west” (quoted in Sparavigna 2013, 56).

280 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

 06

Republic. Once Beijing was proclaimed the only capital of China

in 1949, it seemed necessary to give the city a new identity as the
center of the communist republic, whose values obviously clashed
with the imperial character of the urban tissue. Indeed, the idea
of modernizing and even demolishing the Forbidden City was
considered and supported by several officials and urban planners
(Sudjic 2011, 98; Martinsen 2010; Hung 2011), who saw it as an
awkward, counterrevolutionary symbol of the past. On the contrary,
others claimed for its preservation, because of its cultural, artistic
and symbolic value. One of the most vehement voices against the The double
intervention in the Forbidden City was the architect and Liang city
Sicheng, who was appointed vice-director of the Beijing Planning
Committee under the Communist rule. In 1950, together with
the urban planner Chen Zhanxiang, Liang presented a proposal to
relocate the administrative center of the People’s Republic government
to the west side of the old city, thus avoiding its demolition. The
result was a double urban core, hosting the past and the present of the
capital, and became highly controversial due to several reasons; not
only because it left the historic enclave unchanged, but also because
of the strange duplication of the city, which escaped Chinese –and
Soviet– planning logic.3 The great economic effort that the execution

3 Liang and Chen had studied in the United States and England, respectively, so
this fact maybe raised the suspicion of some officials and colleagues, who saw a certain

New regime, new spaces 281

 of the plan required and the possible subsequent abandonment of the
old city were arguments that finally led to the dismissal of the Liang-
Chen proposal.
However, following the advice and ideas of Soviet and Chinese
planners, the monumental complex was finally preserved as an
administrative-historical center –although some of its parts were
remodeled and part of its walls would be demolished to create a
perimeter ring road around it–, since it represented a state continuity
and centrality that the Maoist administration sought to maintain;
especially the traditional Chinese layout, which countered the
democratic conception of the modern Western city (Sudjic 2011, 98).
Conversely, the rest of the city was arranged according to the Soviet
model,4 which had Stalinist Moscow as a reference: also concentric,
imposing a series of radial axes and a clear center, as well as the
proliferation of representative buildings to glorify and consolidate the
identity of the People’s Republic. Different urban zones were devoted
to industry and production, and they were articulated through the
danwei policy, based on work units –inspired by Soviet mikrorayon
(Ling 2013, 50)– which concentrate all spaces and facilities needed
for working families within a reasonable distance: work center,
home, school, shops, etc. The idea, according to the city mayor Peng
Zhen, was to materialize the shift from the rural to the urban, from a
consumer to a producer city (Hung 2011, 31). Besides, the opening
of the east-west Chang’an Avenue would definitively break with the

“Western” and “bourgeois” attitude in their work.

4 The involvement of Soviet advisors in the development plans of the city was
crucial, as Hung explains in a specific section of Mao’s New World (2011, 36–41). However,
there were also aspects in which both administrations disagreed, such as the size and width
of Tiananmen Square or Chang’an Avenue. Chinese officials always advocated for greater
dimensions to show the importance and centrality of their regime. On these discrepancies
between China and the Soviet Union, which were spatially reflected, Hobsbawm (1995,
168) points out: “(...) the USSR, to which their parties were utterly loyal, strongly
discouraged such unilateral bids for power. The communist revolutions actually made
(Yugoslavia, Albania, later China) were made against Stalin’s advice. The Soviet view was
that, both internationally and within each country, post-war politics should continue within
the framework of the all-embracing anti-fascist alliance, i.e. it looked forward to a long-
term coexistence, or rather symbiosis, of capitalist and communist systems, and further
social and political change, presumably occurring by shifts within the ‘democracies of a new
type’ which would emerge out of the wartime coalitions.”

282 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

north-south axiality of the traditional city in order to establish a
modern, traffic-based urban model which required new roads for cars
to connect different parts of the city.
Controversy about the urban legacy of the old city and its North-south
pertinence also affected spaces around its core. The north-south extension
oriented layout of the city would be extended and modified through
urban and architectural interventions after Mao’s rise to power.
Tiananmen Square, which used to be a residual open space next to
the walls of the Forbidden City, suddenly became one of the most
significant political spaces of the twentieth century, deserving special
attention when analyzing reverses and counter-spatial conditions in
public space. With the increasing symbolic importance of this space
after Mao’s proclaiming of a new republic, the Chinese universe was
somehow displaced from the built environment of the old city –the
residence of the emperors–, to the great urban void as the main
political scene. This transfer, however, was not casual. Tiananmen used
to be the hinge between the sacred and the profane, the inside and
the outside; it was one of the few places from which the emperor (and
later the Republic’s chairman) addressed the people. Behind the walls,
everything remained in the strictest privacy (Watson 1995, 12). It was
only in Tiananmen where people could be in contact with the leader,
representing the duality between public and private life.
It is difficult –not to say inadequate– to label Chinese urban Chinese
open space as “public space” in a Western sense. Certainly, the high public space?
influence that the West has had over China in the last decades, also
in terms of urban planning, has blurred the differences between both
contexts (due to the flattening effect of globalization), so apparently
distinctions may be irrelevant in some cases. Indeed, especially in
urban areas, there are many open areas and plazas that are highly
appreciated, usually linked to shopping malls and commercial
activities that resemble European or American situations. But this
would be a mere simplification. Chinese “public” space –which is not
tied to the democratic notion of a public sphere, as in the West– is a
much fuzzier concept, often merged with private space as an extension
of it. For instance, the occupation of the street with home furniture
and domestic activities (cooking, playing, doing the laundry…)
is quite usual in traditional neighborhoods, such as the hutongs in

New regime, new spaces 283

 07

Beijing or the lilongs in Shanghai. Contrary to the centrality of the

West, it is a horizontal space, in the sense that urban notable elements
are not usually located in public squares (in fact, there may be only
one public square in Beijing), but submerged within the urban scape.
This horizontal depth –despite the proliferation of Western-like
skyscrapers in business districts– and complexity are essential elements
in Chinese urban space (W. S. W. Lim 2008, 114). Chinese spatiality
is marked by a distinction between an ordered interior and the chaotic
exterior: while relevant, dignified spaces –like the Forbidden City or
the domestic space of the hutongs– are articulated by means of paths,
gates, walls, bridges and other spatial elements, urban space has been
associated with disorder, and thus has been considered suitable for
functional purposes (traffic, greeneries, etc.), but not as a proper
“space of places” (Xu 2000; Hassenpflug 2010, 26). Therefore, it has
not deserved much attention until now, when social changes have
boosted the need and appreciation of urban free space.
(…) there is little “publicly” usable space available in China, and its condition
is often so deplorable because there are no traditions of how to deal with it.
Behavior is ambivalent: people want this kind of space, because they need it; but
they reject it, because it speaks a spatial language that they don’t understand.
Community space, neighborhood space, family space: yes! Space for civil society:
what is that? The pattern of dealing with what we term public space can thus be
described as torn between rejection and desire. (…) What we identify as public
urban space in China could, in a formal sense, be described as “civic” space, as
space subject to public law. However, in truth, in the everyday perception of the

284 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

 Chinese, it is only thought of as open, i.e. undefined urban space. It is the space
that fills the expanse between meaningful spaces with nothingness. Open space,
weak in meaning, differs decisively from closed space with strong meaning.
(Hassenpflug 2010, 26–27)

Tiananmen square.

Highly codified with severe rules about what is allowed and what is The illustrious
not within its perimeter, the case of Tiananmen Square is special for broad field
several reasons. It is not a conventional urban space, but rather the
symbolic center of the city and the country. It belongs to the category
of “noble or illustrious spaces” that Hassenpflug (2010, 29) considers
to be, together with commercial places, the main articulators of
Chinese social and symbolic space that would roughly coincide with
what is understood as “public space” in other contexts.5 The square
is a key space in the People’s Republic, as it provides the perfect stage
for massive concentrations which legitimize the established order:
parades, national festivities and commemorations take place in a
central urban space that works as a giant stage. Interestingly, the
modern Chinese term for the square is guangchang, meaning “broad
field.” The people in the square represent the identity of the masses, so
size and scale are relevant in the conception of such an extraordinary
space that has, and should have no equal in all of China.
During the imperial period, the square was not articulated as
such, although it did respond to the hierarchical structure of imperial
power: the T-shaped void with its arms emerging from Tiananmen6
represented sacred rays emanating from the Emperor’s head, the
heart of the Forbidden City,7 which radiated to all departments of
the empire (H. Wu 1991, 91). However, the space in front of the
southern gate deserved no special attention or care during the early

5 The neighborhood or community space would be a third emerging type

(Hassenpflug 2010, 29).
6 The name of the square is taken from Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace,
which delimits the Forbidden City to the south.
7 The spatial articulation of the Forbidden City, with successive walls, gates
and enclosures, responded to the very essence of imperial power: the Emperor was
powerful because “he was invisible from the public space and because he, and only he, saw
everything outside from his private space” (H. Wu 1991, 87).

Tiananmen square 285

 08 09

years of the Republican period, in which the zone became an informal

marketplace, losing the authoritarian, controlled character of the
imperial era (Hershkovitz 1993).
Spaces for Nevertheless, without the urban renewal during this period,
protest which consisted mainly on the creation of new streets and parks,
the development of the square would not have been possible. For
instance, the opening to traffic of the Forbidden City’s perimeter and
the creation of Chang’an Avenue in 1913 generated a crossing –with
its center at Tiananmen– which improved the connections with the
rest of the city, also in the east-west direction. Lee (2009) notes that
this was one of the reasons why Tiananmen became the space chosen
for the protests of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, instead of
the Central Park or the New China Gate, which until then were the
most popular meeting places. Tiananmen provided an ample space
that could accommodate lots of people. Moreover, neither prior
permission nor the payment of an entry were required to meet there
and, since it was a politically less significant place than the other two,
it caused less suspicion; in fact, it had been an ideal meeting point
prior to demonstrations until then (N. K. Lee 2009, 38 ff). The
fourth of May 1919, thousands of people –mainly students, around
3,000– protested publicly against the adverse treatment that China
had received in the Treaty of Versailles, which benefited the Japanese
enemy. This was the first subversive act that took place in Tiananmen
before its transformation. Thereafter, groups of intellectuals and
students became a recurrent symbolic image of resistance, since their
role as agitators was crucial for future changes (Hershkovitz 1993;
Haw 2007).

286 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

 On 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the birth of the Construction
People’s Republic of China from the Gate of Heavenly Peace. After vs. destruction
this, the space in front of Tiananmen began to undergo profound
changes that would transform it into the emblematic space that it
is today. Only a space of colossal dimensions could host the huge
mass that represented the supreme power of the president. Initially,
Mao wanted a space for a billion people, but after the conclusion of
the works in 1959, Tiananmen Square could “only” accommodate
400,000. After the chairman’s death, another expansion increased this
number to 600,000 (H. Wu 1991, 90). To generate the 44-hectare
void, it was necessary to demolish residential and commercial spaces
and to cut down several trees. Rather than a building operation, the
construction of Tiananmen Square entailed an enormous work of
destruction: the opening of an urban void –in less than ten years– to
place the new center of the universe.
With the exception of Tiananmen Gate and the southern edge of
the Forbidden City, the architecture of the square meets the canons
of Stalinist realism, adapting a very specific language that was already
being abandoned and criticized by the Soviet Union itself, led by
Khrushchev; a fact that highlights the cultural isolation of China at
that time (Sudjic 2011, 95; Haw 2007, 118). The Great Hall of the
People (home of the National People’s Congress), and the Museums
of Chinese History and the Chinese Revolution (now merged into
a single National Museum) were built between 1958 and 1959 and
flank the eastern and western sides of the square. However, the most Spatial
striking element was the new Monument to the People’s Heroes, a counterparts
giant 37.4 meter-high stone column, built shortly before them and
dedicated to the martyrs of revolution, extending the north-south
axis from the central core of the city. Although the monument was
conceived to be oriented to the south, as the tradition prescribed –in
order to allow the flow of qi –, it finally was placed towards the north,
so it directly faced the Gate as a counterpart. The enlargement of the
square desired by Mao also took place during this brief period of time:
in less than two years, in order to commemorate the tenth anniversary
of the People’s Republic, ten representative buildings were erected8

8 The so-called Ten Great Buildings are the Great Hall of the People, the National
Museum of China (both in Tiananmen square), the Cultural Palace of Nationalities, Beijing

Tiananmen square 287

 10 11 12

and the main square of the capital was renewed and extended. With
the building of the Mausoleum of Mao in 1977, the square was finally
completed: then, the center of Beijing was located at the Monument
to the Heroes, after a displacement of great symbolic impact. On the 9

contrary, the Forbidden City remained like a fossil, a museum piece,

a “frame against which new meanings, representations, and symbols
can be created” (Watson 1995, 9), while political and representative
activity was concentrated at Tiananmen Square, a perfect rectangular
Positive / extension. Thus, the negative character of the square as a void
negative space is reversed here; even the construction of new monuments and
some of the Ten Great Buildings in the square and the progressive
introduction of civic codes and behavior rules within its limits have
not overshadowed the significance of the extensive void, which may
be regarded as what Kern (1983, 153) calls a “positive negative space,”
that is, a void that transcends its secondary character to become as
relevant as the elements which configure it.
Until then, demonstrations and parades in the square had had
an unquestionably revolutionary, pro-Party character. Indeed, this
was the main objective of the spatial project for Tiananmen: an
immense esplanade to activate the “hectic phonotope” (Sloterdijk

Railway Station, the Workers’ Stadium, the National Agriculture Exhibition Hall, the
Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, the Minzu Hotel, the Overseas Chinese Hotel (demolished in
1990 and reconstructed) and the Chinese People’s Revolutionary Military Museum.
9 Wu Hung refers to the urban planner Chen Gan as the promoter of this shift;
after the 1949 revolution he applies Friedrich Engels’ argument about the significance of
“zero” to move the center of Beijing from the Imperial throne to the square (H. Wu 2005,
7–8).

288 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

2006, 475)10 of the masses that stage and legitimate the power of the
people. However, the turning point in which this purpose begins to
fluctuate occurs in 1976, after the death of the Premier Zhou Enlai,
one of the most respected leaders of the Party and who had played an
essential role in the preservation of the Forbidden City. Due to his
moderate attitude, Zhou was confronted with the radical “Gang of
Four” –to which Mao’s wife Jiang Qing belonged–, who represented
a highly strict political faction with an important influence during
the years of the Cultural Revolution. During the Qingming festival
–the “Tomb-Sweeping Day”– of that year, thousands of citizens
attended the Monument to the People’s Heroes in order to express
their condolence for the death of Zhou: for the first time, the
Monument facing Tiananmen, covered with white sheets and
paper chrysanthemums, was associated with the memory of a single
individual. This was particularly controversial, as the Memorial was
the most powerful representation of collectivity. On the night of 4
to 5 April, Party leaders met at the Great Hall, where they decided
to remove all symbols of mourning. But in the morning, tens of
thousands of people, appalled by what had happened, began a protest
in Tiananmen Square, despite the police and military presence.
Many demonstrators were shot and beaten when trying to resist. The (Counter)-
next day, blood stains had been carefully cleaned. Paradoxically, this revolutionary
conflict, described as “counterrevolutionary” by the leaders of the actions
Cultural Revolution,11 would be considered a brave revolutionary act
when Deng Xiaoping ascended to power three years later.
With respect to Mao, he would die a few months after Zhou,
and his mausoleum would again alter the spatiality of the square:
the symbolic display of opposites was completed with the relation
between the corpse of the leader inside the mausoleum and his
triumphal portrait on the Gate. However, it was not until 1989
that a popular demonstration would change the way Tiananmen is
understood in contemporary history. As in 1976, everything started
with the death of a leader; in this case Hu Yaobang, who had also
been dismissed by the regime and was considered a major advocate

10 [T.A.]
11 The members of the Gang of Four were judged and sentenced to imprisonment
in 1981 for crimes against the CCP, Marxist-Leninist ideology and attacks to their rivals.

Tiananmen square 289

 1989 of democracy by students and intellectuals. In addition to this, a
profound discontent arose due to the liberalizing reforms initiated by
Deng’s government, as they were considered insufficient by this group
and too aggressive according to peasants and workers.12
The protest began in a similar manner to that of 1976, but while
in this case the demonstration was held one hundred days after the
death of Zhou, in 1989 people began to gather a few hours after the
death of Hu, once again leaving their expressions of condolence at
the monument, now located in the center of the square. As the crowd
grew larger, the general feeling of mourning became a mass outcry.
Students formed the most active group, and progressively transformed
the space of the square with symbols of opposition to government
values, reversing the meaning of official elements. The demonstration,
which would continue for some days, acquired further relevance due
to the coincidence with other major events, even overshadowing
the visit of Mikhail Gorbachev to the People’s Republic. Therefore,
the welcoming ceremony to the Soviet leader could not be held in
Tiananmen Square, so it had to take place at the airport, and the
route towards the Great Hall of the People had to be diverted, instead
of going through the majestic Chang’an avenue. The square and
its surroundings had been completely taken by the demonstrators,
while a festive atmosphere pervaded the occupied space. Marches,
demonstrations and meetings of all sorts were held daily. Besides, not
only banners and images were used to express their demands, but also
the square became a habitable place for the protesters coming from
different parts of the country: even sleeping areas, toilets and water
taps were installed at various points (Hershkovitz 1993, 414). Once
again, more than any other monument or representative element,
empty space becomes a privileged field for revolution, as a gap from
which history could be re-written again and again. In his analysis of

12 This clash between intellectual and working classes was maintained even after
the death of Mao, who had fostered it under the appearance of a false class struggle
in which the intellectual was the enemy of the worker. In this way, more anger and
resentment emerged among the people, collected in that “national bank of revolutionary
affect” that had started with the antifeudal anger of peasants prior to Mao’s rise (Sloterdijk
2010, 172). Consequently, a wave of hatred and repression was triggered against
intellectuals, who were mistreated and publicly humiliated in all possible ways for the sake
of the Cultural Revolution (Lu 1996, 143).

290 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

13 14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21

Tiananmen square 291

 the French Revolution, Jules Michelet proclaimed this significance
in a very different context that, however, could be expanded to very
different times and spaces:
Empty space The Champ de Mars! This is the only monument that the Revolution has
as monument left. The Empire has its Column, and engrosses almost exclusively the arch of
Triumph; royalty has its Louvre, its Hospital of Invalids; the feudal church of
the twelfth century is still enthroned at Notre Dame: nay, the very Romans have
their Imperial Ruins, the Thermae of the Caesars! And the Revolution has for
her monument: empty space.13

As the protest started to gain national relevance, the urge to create

strong symbols for the event immediately arose. Thus, a group
of students who gathered in the square came up with the idea
of building a new monument that would reflect the spirit of the
protest. The Goddess of Democracy was sculpted in styrofoam and
plaster over a metal armature by art students. Wu (1991) remarks
that demonstrators decided to separate from the Monument to the
People’s Heroes because it had already represented too many causes.
Nevertheless, the location of the female figure –which bore some
similarity to the American Statue of Liberty14 and became one of the
most powerful visual references of the protest– was more important
than the sculpture itself: the statue was placed in the very north-
south axis of the city, between the Monument and Tiananmen Gate,
defiantly facing the portrait of Mao Zedong.
As a response to this act of provocation towards the regime, the
party newspaper People’s Daily published an article –mentioned by Wu

13 Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, 1847-1853 (quoted in Mitchell

2012, 17).
14 The events in Tiananmen became a subject of major interest for the Western
public, who saw it as an emergent triumph of democracy in the non-Western counterpart.
The contradictions and misinterpretations both in the Western interpretation of the facts
(favored by mass-media representation and narratives) and the Chinese appropriation of
Western democratic symbols (also in terms of gender, using the image of a white female
goddess) are brilliantly exposed by Rey Chow (1988) in “Violence in the Other Country.”
The symbolic and phantasmagoric character of the statue, for instance, seriously impressed
Paul Auster, as he shows through the narration of the main character of his 1992 novel
Leviathan.

292 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

(1991) and Hershkovitz (1993)– claiming for the sacredness of the
square and denouncing the protests as a grave offence to the people:
Someone erected a statue of the “Goddess of Democracy” without authorization
in dignified Tiananmen Square and this evoked various comments among
the people. (…) In the Square the Tiananmen rostrum, the flag poles, the
Monument to the People’s Heroes, the memorial hall, the museum, and the
Great Hall of the People are all built in good order and the layout is serious
and solemn. The Square is a site to hold grand ceremonies and major state
activities and is an important place for domestic and foreign tourists to visit with
reverence. It is the heart of the People’s Republic and is the focus of the world’s
attention. (…) No one has the power to add any permanent memorial or to
remove anything from the Square. Such things must not be allowed to happen
in China! (Y. Wu 1989 quoted in Wu 1991, 111 ff)

The official perception, as evidenced in this article, was that the

protesters were desecrating the holiest space in China, an argument
that would become essential to evict the demonstrators. In fact, the
protest was considered a private appropriation of a sacred space. Three
days after the publication of the article, a tank destroyed the statue
of the Goddess, which collapsed and shattered to pieces. Soldiers and
tanks from the People’s Liberation Army were sent to take control of
the situation and on June 4 protesters decided to leave the square.
Although the exact number of casualties remains unknown, it is
officially stated that nobody died in Tiananmen Square. However,
the fact that persecution and violent repression acts took place mostly
in the surroundings is usually hidden.15 Thus, the square has been
restored again as a holy national space free of dissent and conflict,
which have been conveniently deleted.16

15 Haw (2007, 129) states that the most accurate estimate is that around 400
demonstrators were killed, as well as a few hundred soldiers. The official preliminary figure
given by the Chinese government was 241, including 23 soldiers; however, the Chinese
Red Cross counted around 2,600-2,700 (L. Lim 2014, 7). A recently declassified British
diplomatic cable alleged that at least 10,000 people were killed in the massacre (Lusher
2017).
16 Louisa Lim (2014, 86) conducted an experiment with young students, asking
them if they recognized the famous “Tank Man” photograph by Jeff Widener depicting
a man standing alone in front of a line of military tanks in Tiananmen Square during the

Tiananmen square 293

 22 23

24 25

Spaces of Linda Hershkovitz (1993) conducted an interesting analysis of

the Other the phenomenon in spatial terms through a Lefebvrian approach,
assuming that “[t]he power of oppositional movements rests on their
ability to appropriate ‘the space of the other’ and transform it in
ways which articulate their own political vision” (1993, 395). Spatial
practice is the moment through which the “space of the other” is
appropriated, no matter how brief or temporary such appropriation
is. To Hershkovitz, the socio-spatial configuration of Tiananmen can
be explained in terms of Lefebvrian spatial dialectics, unveiling how
different forms of power have been reconciling different elements of
their symbolic geography. For instance, Mao managed to combine
the new revolutionary monumentality with symbolic elements of the
former empire under a new meaning and to establish and redefine
the concept of urban space in the new regime. However, this reveals
a first contradiction that cannot possibly be solved: Hershkovitz uses

protests. Some of them assured that they had never seen the image before, while others
gave vague answers or refused to speak about it.

294 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

Lefebvre’s definition of monumental space, a space that is determined
by what may and may not take place there, that is, the prescribed
and the proscribed, the scene and the obscene. But at the same time,
she emphasizes that public spaces can never be fully enclosed, “and
thus their uses and meanings can never be completely prescribed”
(Hershkovitz 1993, 416). This statement that Hershkovitz uses to
open a dialectical situation could be interpreted in a reverse way:
Tiananmen Square could never be a symbol for specific groups, as
it has been a space serving antagonistic elements: it means both a
thing and its opposite, revolution and counterrevolution. Despite
the attempts to overcome this confrontation, as it was done after the
demonstrations in 1989 with the memorial of the fortieth anniversary
of the founding of the People’s Republic –in which a provisional
group of statues representing a worker, a farmer, a soldier and an
intellectual stood where the Goddess of Democracy had been, as a
symbol of unity and submission to the regime– Tiananmen square
has shown the potential to become the scenario of different positions
–for or against power, which of course still claims the space as an
official symbol. As in many other parts of the world, the square is the (Counter)spaces
image of a space and its counterspace –the Forbidden City and the as battlefields
nearby streets should not be forgotten–, and from its civic, political
dimension it necessarily assumes that contradiction, even though
official Chinese spatiality does not expect opposing scenarios. Chantal
Mouffe (2007), from an agonist political perspective, claims for this
space that ends up being a “battlefield,” where different models are
faced with no hope of ultimate reconciliation.

From China to the West and back.

The fact that Tiananmen protests almost coincided in time with the Postmodernism
fall of the Berlin Wall reinforces the discourse on the post-political in China?
framework. With the 1989 protests, many see the beginning of a
radically new age in China: paradoxically, some authors and historians
match the riots with the advent of postmodernism in a country
that, despite the inexistence of a modern period17 comparable to the

17 In fact, at that moment, intellectuals wanted to revive the “project of Chinese

modernity” that had been traced after May 4 1919, brutally interrupted with the Cultural
Revolution (Lu 1996, 141).

From China to the West and back 295

 26

Western ones, began to experience the emergence of postmodern

trends in different areas. In fact, the period from Mao’s death until
1989 is often referred as the “New Era” (xin shiqi), while that
after 1989 until today is called “Post-New Era” (hou xin shiqi) (Lu
1996, 140). Fredric Jameson was the first to introduce the term
“postmodernism” in China in 1985 during a series of lectures at
Beijing University, although the notion was initially regarded as one
more of the many theories coming from the West in order to enliven
the Chinese cultural and philosophical scene (Lu 1996, 145).
In spite of the differences, some of the features of this post-new
China share similarities with those of Western postmodernism:
for instance, a certain disappointment emerged among intellectual
and creative workers who, after decades of silence and prosecution,
embarked on a bitter reflection about the Chinese past, adopting
critical positions toward hegemonic thinking through oppositions,
deconstructions of meaning, parody, pastiche, fiction, exploring the
boundary between the elitist and the popular (Lu 1996, 145). This
shift can be clearly appreciated in Chinese cinema during the last
decades of the twentieth century. The Fifth Generation, the most
prominent group of Chinese filmmakers during the mid-late 1980s,
focused on developing a new aesthetics that reflected the progressive
break with the government, after a period of ideological emancipation
promoted during the New Era: they “effected an imaginary act of
rebellion rather than an aesthetic revolution” (Chen 1997, 126) in
which revolutionary canons underwent aesthetic experimentation.
In effect, politics was present, but only in the background, as seen
in films such as Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, 1984) or One and Eight

296 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

(Zhang Junzhao, 1984): “this is not to say that the Fifth Generation
was apolitical. Its politics lay in the very act of seemingly apolitical,
formal, and aesthetic experimentation” (Chen 1997, 128).18 In this
sense, these works redraw new conditions away from the premises
of realism and the exaltation of ideology, which had prevailed until
then in filmmaking. In fact, both films depict the times of the alliance
between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party during the war
against Japan, but they are far from being used as propagandistic
elements, as it was done in the past: the political is disarmed,
reinterpreted from its very absence and in light of the aesthetic-
narrative experience. Interestingly, the production of this group was
enthusiastically praised in the West, where their films began to receive
several prizes and awards in international festivals. On the contrary,
they would not enjoy widespread popularity in their own country
because of censorship and the differences with the topics which
interested the general public.
At the same time, mass culture started to be introduced into Culture
commodified circuits through media and new technologies, thus and affects
producing a displacement of the intellectual class as a cultural referent.
Popular culture served to separate the masses from the former Maoist
official culture by means of more sentimental messages –soap-operas,
pop music, series, best-selling authors– that reflected the emotions of
the individual (even referencing taboos as sexuality) instead of those
of the nation. Moreover, these messages, which came from Western
or westernized societies such as Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong (Lu,
1996: 151-152), were also a tool to face “high culture” generated by
intellectuals, with which people did not identify themselves. After
years of disdain and rejection of anything that could be considered
culturally “Western” –such as contemporary art, but also TV series
or pop music– the Chinese government progressively recognized the
positive effect that these elements have on its overall image, and the
main consequence has been a greater tolerance toward new artists
and producers in terms of censorship. One of the most remarkable
milestones on this cultural shift was the production of the television

18 Chen (1997) labels this dual character between political and apolitical as “post-
political” in his essay, using the term in a different way than Western radical philosophers
have been doing more recently.

From China to the West and back 297

 27 28

29 30

series Kewang (“yearning”), which began airing some months after

the Tiananmen Square protests. Lu (1996, 161) accounts how most
of Chinese streets were completely empty during the emission of the
series, allowing people to forget the terrible situation that they had
lived a few months ago.
The government thus discovered the success of popular culture in
controlling collective behavior and affects, to the point of relocating
leisure functions from urban to domestic space. Beyond television
and pop music, it is normal today to stroll through art galleries
and workshops of Moganshan Lu in Shanghai and find strident
and colorful works, following pop-art trends in the most obvious
way, depicting what appear to be parodies and open critiques to the
government. However, nobody threatens the permanence of these
artists in their studios, as they do not seem to exceed a tolerable degree
of subversion. However, others have experienced serious trouble
when crossing the line, such as the world-famous artist Ai Weiwei or
the Gao brothers, who make use of “sophisticated” strategies in their

298 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

works to avoid confrontation with official culture. A good example
is the piece Mao’s guilt (2009), a statue of the leader on his knees,
with an attitude of remorse. As it is totally unconceivable for the
Chinese regime to depict the Great Helmsman in a humiliating pose
–since he is a quasi-divine cult figure for the nation–, the brothers
created a removable head for the statue in order to hide the identity
of the portrayed and avoid censorship. It seems that the piece wants
to transmit that the Chinese nation, represented in the body of the
leader, could only be released by ripping its own head, eliminating
the reason that has guided the nation for decades, evoking –surely not
intentionally- the Bataillean Acephale. In this regard, the work of Gao
brothers extends the production of “counter-images” (H. Wu 2005,
183 ff) initiated in the eighties by plastic artists who rejected the cult
of Mao. Through the iconoclastic deconstruction of the image of the
leader, new types of representation emerge in works such as Wang
Keping’s Idol (1987), Wang Guangyi’s Mao Zedong-Black Grid and
Mao Zedong-Red Grid (1988) or Wan Jinsong’s In front of Tiananmen
(1991), describing a trajectory in which Mao’s Guilt or Miss Mao
(2005) can be inserted.
In any case, through a semi-realistic, literal aesthetics –always
present in Chinese culture and art– and approaching the emergent,
officially favored star system, Gao brothers distort the image of the
revered leader, which is equivalent to the ideological foundations
of the modern Chinese state. Even today, a large section of the
intellectual class trusts art in order to express their desire for things to
change, although because of the articulation of the cultural landscape,
art and culture industry have become a double-edged sword, both for
them and for the government. Fluctuating between technology and
kitsch, exhibitions such as Post-Material –curated by Huang Du in
2000– unveil the subtle line between political criticism and surrender
to mass culture through works about the conquest of life by new
technologies, closely related to post-humanism. In such a context, it
is difficult to discern whether this new art serves to project a modern
image of the nation to the world in favor of the government or if it
is an art of denunciation, or even if it seeks the attention of Western
markets.

From China to the West and back 299

 31 32

Regarding Beijing’s urban dimension today, it is clear that things

have substantially changed with respect to the last decades of the
twentieth century. The activity and the social function of urban space
are gradually gaining ground in the capital. For instance, nightlife is
now surprisingly lively, at least in central areas, and trade and street
life, which have always played an important role in traditional areas,
contribute to enrich an emerging, new public scene. Abandoned
areas have been transformed into alternative art spaces –such as
798 Art Zone, in the Chaoyang District–, and the image of the
city is gradually blending in with the westernized world through
its architecture, like in the sports complex for the Olympic Games
2008, or the National Center for the Performing Arts, in the middle
of an artificial lake located west of Tiananmen Square. Meanwhile,
Tiananmen is still the geographic and symbolic center of the urban
fabric: each day thousands of tourists visit the square, impressed by its
extraordinary dimensions.
New urban However, Tiananmen is not the center of Beijing anymore, or
centres at least, it is not the only one. Deyan Sudjic (2011) describes a city
immersed in a process of diffusion. While the north-south axis has
been extended with the Olympic facilities, connecting the ancient
and the modern Beijing, the new urban cores are located in clusters
of gigantic skyscrapers throughout the eastern (CBD) and western
(Bejing Financial Street) districts of Beijing, where economic activity
is concentrated and intensely represented in the urban imaginary

300 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

through spectacular buildings and open spaces. Everything else, Demolition
especially old residential areas (in which the pace of time seems
to slow down with respect to the hectic rhythms of production
and consumption), is liable to be destroyed. Isolated pockets of
traditional urban life, with its domestic appropriation of collective
space, are gradually disappearing. Wang Jinsong reflects on this
situation through his work One hundred signs of demolition (1999),
by displaying a series of photographs of anonymous facades marked
with the chai (拆) symbol, which indicates that the building is being
demolished soon. Also the urban derives of the Gao brothers (Villard
2014) and the work of Zhou Jun revolve around the Chinese boom
in urban development in last years. Through a particular use of color
(gray and red), Zhou unveils the dissolution of the traditional city
amidst the construction and urban renovation turmoil. In China, the
speed of urban transformation reaches unexpected levels, and what
must today be preserved, tomorrow will be destroyed. In fact, the
Chinese city is in permanent transformation, where the private realm
emerges through commercial and office towers, hotels and banks.
The disproportionate architecture of large cities slowly devours the
small spaces of traditional, collective life –sometimes to the detriment
of heritage–, and creates a high-tech image that little has to do with
everyday realities. Somehow, the vision of the Chinese planning
model suggested by Henri Lefebvre (1974) –different from Soviet and
capitalist models– vanishes:
The Chinese [model] is totally different, as it aims at extending development to
the whole space, placing emphasis on people communities, small and medium
enterprises, small and medium-sized cities, rather than on large cities and
corporations.19 It is another conception of space whose objective is to combat

19 This model described by Lefebvre bears some similarity to the phenomenon

of counter-urbanization. This notion appeared in the United States within the field of
geography and it has been formulated in terms of positivist law: “Smaller areas grow
more than the larger ones.” This assertion synthesizes the idea of counter-urbanization
as the relationship established between two variables: demographic size and population
growth. It expresses a trend change that has been empirically observed: at the end of the
twentieth century, metropolitan areas of Western countries are not the ones that grow
the most anymore. In other words, the relationship between demographic size and growth
is reverted. The term “counter-urbanization” was coined by the geographer Brian J.L. Berry
in 1976 (Arroyo 2001).

From China to the West and back 301

 uneven development. One of the difficulties of our situation is that the Chinese
model or the Chinese way has not yet shown strong evidence of results. We are
still not sure that China, under global pressure, can keep this space strategy that
seemed to follow so far (...) When the whole space, the entire social space, is to
be developed, a decrease in the growth rate has to be assumed. When immediate
and rapid growth is required, the focus is placed on the strong points, towards
congestion. These are two profoundly different spatial strategies. Anyway, we
face strategic problems of dominant-dominated space. (Lefebvre 1974, 222)20

Perhaps, the fragmentary and diffuse understanding of the Chinese

reality from a Western perspective at that time –something that
Lefebvre (1974) remarks on several occasions– gave rise to thinking
of a new model that would favor the growth of a large-scale space,
and not exclusively focused on “strong points,” could be happening.
At first, one might think that a peasant –not proletarian– revolution
might lead to this spatial development process. Nevertheless, as
Sloterdijk clarifies (2010, 172 ff), this plan conceived during the Great
Leap Forward foundered when trying to implement a basic industrial
structure21 in rural areas once the collectivization of agriculture had
been achieved –according to Mao, “the countryside would surround
the city before conquering it” (Hobsbawm 1995, 81)–, causing the
death of millions of Chinese citizens from hunger and exhaustion.
Polarized Besides, after the death of Mao and the progressive economic
space openings, contemporary Chinese space has evolved into a network
space, specially reinforced in eastern urban and industrial nodes. It
was a surprise to Western economies to discover in the early nineties
that China was the most dynamic and rapidly growing economy in

20 [T.A.]
21 Even in the seventies, the Western lack of knowledge of what was happening
in China was evident, as Henri Lefebvre recognizes (1974, 229): “A rural nucleus operates
with a certain autonomy and disposes of a part of the social surplus value created in it,
but we do not know by what procedures. It should not be forgotten, on the other hand,
that China is starting. We lack theoretical and information elements. In Paris, rumor has
it the Chinese government has abandoned this path of fast development with regard to
armament, which requires the rapid growth of the metallurgical industry, and the urge
to reinforce the chemical sector has also emerged due to the need for fertilizers. Our
understanding of the Chinese case cannot, for the moment, be more than fragmentary,
and consequently we can make criticism of the Soviet model, but without opposing it to
other models with convincing arguments.”

302 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

 33 34 35

the world (Hobsbawm 1995, 412 ff). Today, if we divided the country
in two areas of equal size through an imaginary diagonal line from
Heihe (north-east) to Tengchong (south), the eastern part would
contain a 94% of the population. The rest of the country remains a
rural demographic desert.
This polarization is palpable even within the highly populated The image
area. When taking the high-speed train from Beijing to Shanghai, of China
more than a thousand kilometers of forgotten rural land are crossed,
whereas large urban areas grow in an impressive way, through
exacerbated construction and investments. It seems that the center
of China, if any, is no longer Tiananmen, but OMA’s CCTV
headquarters located in the East Third Ring Road within the CBD,
which emerges as a new “city within a city,” a complex system
which follows its own internal logic. The controverted Chinese
public television opts for a globalized and universal image, which
somehow replaces the traditional icon of Tiananmen with great
buildings showing the economic potential of China to the world.
The emblematic presence of Koolhaas’ creation –which has been
nicknamed “big pants” by locals–, has intensified the debate on the
iconic, literal character of urban image in China, which has been
always present even in the most traditional constructions. In 2016,
the Chinese central government issued a directive against an excessive
architecture which is qualified as “oversized, xenocentric, weird” and
deprived of cultural tradition. Instead, buildings should be “suitable,
economic, green and pleasing to the eye” (C. Li 2016).

From China to the West and back 303

 36 37

While Tiananmen weakly resists as the political center of the

country,22 the true representation of space is present in these new
buildings that show the opening of the regime to international
capitalism –despite the fluctuations and instability of its market.
The wall and Once again, the economic structure subjugates state policies. This
the marketplace is the ultimate opposition between the two main conceptions of the
Chinese city: cheng and shi, the wall and the marketplace that, despite
being used interchangeably, the second seems to have displaced the
first (Bracken and Solomon 2013, 1): the enclosed city as the perfect
representation of an immanent universe has exploded to become a
sprawling, endless mega-city in an urban system that is expected to
contain more than one billion people in 2030.
This progressive transition from the closed cheng to the
extensive shi may serve to introduce the final reflection of this
urban seductio that has diverted the course of the research in order
to find connections, encounters and oppositions that enrich its
perspectives. If the chapter started with the cosmological references
to an immanent universe with no outside, generated by itself and
from within, which is reflected in urban space and the socio-political
order (Lee et al. 2013, 30),23 it could end with the displacement of

22 Its symbolic character has not been lost despite its museification: it still hosts
main national events and venues and, besides, it is still the chosen space for dissent and
attacks against centrality, as it happened in 2013 with the attack attributed to the Uighur
minority, a racial community from the Xinjiang region which often protests against the
policies of the central government.
23 “This metaphysics leads to a moral and familial (or bioethical) political construct,
with an emphasis on oneness, from the person to the family, the state, and the universe, as
one moral order. For Europeans in classical antiquity, however, the universe is generated by

304 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

 38

these references from cosmos to earth. The sun that appears in the
famous national mural This Land so Rich in Beauty (by Fu Baoshi and
Guan Shanyue, 1959) placed in the Great Hall of the People rises in
the east, contemplating the changing, diverse but unitary landscape
of mainland China, concentrating all times and seasons in a single
image. The same sun was expected to descend upon Earth after the
death of Mao, a turning point in the history of the country.24 All the
entries for the competition to build a mausoleum for the chairman
in Tiananmen’s Square pointed to the limitless relevance of the leader
as the main source of universal energy; indeed, one of the designs
featured a giant, 100-metre high red orb representing the rising sun
(Sang and Barmé 2008) –and not the setting sun, usually associated
with death in Western culture.
Finally, the sun arrived in Tiananmen Square, but not as a colossal The sun
tomb or a triumphant, rising star. The smog cloud covering Beijing over Beijing
evidences the strong pollution problems that the country is facing

something else, from outside, by something transcendent, ultimately by an external agent,

an unmoved mover, the First Cause (God), outside the universe; with this externality, all
things can be externalized and opposed to each other, and the world can be abstracted
into a pure scheme of absolute opposites, a position that leads to a legal and contractual
political construct with individuals and social entities conceived as autonomous and
opposed in an open outside” (Lee et al. 2013, 30).
24 The identification between Mao and the rising sun is present in many traditional
songs and poems; for instance, “The East is Red”: “The east is red, the sun is rising./ From
China arises Mao Zedong (…) The Communist Party is like the sun,/ Wherever it shines, it
is bright (…)” or the traditional children’s song “I Love Beijing Tiananmen”: “I love Beijing’s
Tiananmen,/ The place where the Sun rises./ Our Great Leader Mao Zedong/ Guides us as
we march forward!” (translated by H. Wu 2005, 53)

From China to the West and back 305

 due to its unprecedented industrial growth and the lack of motivation
to find effective solutions –which seems a paradox considering the
recent outburst of eco-cities and green architecture. The sun is now
possible only as an image; in 2013 and 2014, during several crisis
of dangerous levels of polluting particles in air, the rising sun and
the blue sky appeared on a giant TV screen installed in the square,
as advertisements to warn the population about the risks of air
pollution and asking for their contribution to avoid it (Nye 2014).
Contemporary China, although strongly anchored in its immediate
past, is gradually becoming aware of its position with regard to the rest
of the world and other actors, as well as global challenges that displace
the central focus on the country toward an outside. The effects of
globalization in China have even transformed its universe, which now
coexists with the extensive, flattening space of the world market.

306 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

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Sudjic, Deyan. 2011. The Edifice Complex: The Architecture of Power. London: Penguin Books
Limited.

Villard, Florent. 2014. “One day in Beijing avec les Gao Brothers.” In L’esprit des villes,
1:159–85. Gollion: Infolio Éditions.

Watson, Rubie. 1995. “Palaces, Museums and Squares: Chinese National Spaces.” Museum
Anthropology 19 (2): 7–19.

Wu, Hung. 1991. “Tiananmen Square: A Political History of Monuments.” Representations 35

(1): 84–117.

———. 2005. Remaking Beijing. Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space.
London: Reaktion Books.

308 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

 Wu, Ye. 1989. “What does the Statue of the Goddess of Democracy which appeared in
Tiananmen Square indicate?” Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily).

Xu, Yinong. 2000. The Chinese City in Space and Time. The Development of Urban Form in
Suzhou. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Images.

01 A woman looks at the model of Beijings city master plan. Source: Photograph by Guang
Niu, Getty Images. The Guardian.

02 The two ancient schemes for Chinese imperial capitals, Chang’an (Xian, top) and Beijing
(below). Source: Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History,
Bullfinch Press, 1991.

03 The various stages and positions of the capital Beijing through the ages. 1. Nanjing (Liao
Dynasty); 2. Zhongdu (Jin Dynasty); 3. Dadu (Yuan Dynasty) and 4. Beijing (Ming-Qing
Dynasty). Source: Quadralectic Architecture.

04 The plan of the ideal city of Wang-Ch’eng. Source: Quadralectic Architecture.

05 Beijing Temple of Confucius, representation of the universe. Source: Photograph by the

author.

06 Liang Sicheng and Chen Zhanxiang. Proposal for the new administrative center of Beijing,
1950. Source: Beijing Municipal Archives.

07 Street scenes. Beijing and Shanghai (2010-2016). Source: Photographs by the author.

08 Tiananmen Gate, 1901. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

09 Aerial view of Tiananmen and the Imperial City, 1900. Source: Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia
Commons.

10 Qing Tiananmen and environs, flanked by the government ministries. Source: Linda
Hershkovitz,“Tiananmen Square and the Politics of Place.” Political Geography 12 (5), 1993, 403.

11 Plan of Tiananmen Square in 1959. Source: Wu Hung, “Tiananmen Square: A Political

History of Monuments.” Representations 35 (1), 1991,103.

12 Plan of Tiananmen Square in 1977. Source: Wu Hung, “Tiananmen Square: A Political

History of Monuments.” Representations 35 (1), 1991,105.

13 Pro-democracy protesters link arms to hold back angry crowds, preventing them from
chasing a retreating group of soldiers near the Great Hall of the People, on June 3, 1989. Source:
Jeff Widener, Associated Press. Internazionale.it

14 First Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibit. Artists performing on “No Turning Back” signs,
February 1989. Source: zonaeuropa.com

15 A Chinese couple on a bicycle take cover beneath an underpass as tanks deploy overhead in
eastern Beijing, on June 5, 1989. Source: Rare Historical Photos.

16 Beijing University students put the finishing touches on the Goddess of Democracy in
Tiananmen Square, on May 30, 1989. Source: Rare Historical Photos.

309
 17 Goddess of Democracy, 30 May 1989. Source: Photograph by Liu Heung Shing, Associated
Press. New York Times (Chinese Version).

18 Opposing icons: the statue of the Goddess of Democracy faces Mao’s portrait, 1989.
Source: Wu Hung, “Tiananmen Square: A Political History of Monuments.” Representations 35 (1),
1991,111.

19 Demonstrators covering Mao’s portrait, May 23, 1989. 23 maggio 1989. Source: Ed
Nachtrieb, Reuters/Contrasto. Internazionale.it

20 Man standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square. Source: Jeff Widener, Associated
Press. New York Times (Chinese Version).

21 The burned and lynched body of infantryman Cui Guozheng, 1989. Source:
standoffattiananmen.com

22 Fences arournd Tiananmen Square, 2016. Source: Photograph by the author.

23 Entrance check point at Tiananmen, 2016. Source: Photograph by the author.

24 Monument to the People’s Heroes, 2016. Source: Photograph by the author.

25 Tiananmen Square, 2016. Source: Photograph by the author.

26 A man holding a Coke bottle at Tiananmen Square, 1981. Source: Photograph by Liu
Heung Shing. CN Create.

27 Sun Zixi. “In Front of Tiananmen Square,” 1964. Source: National Art Museum of China.

28 Wang Jinsong. “Taking a picture in front of Tiananmen Square,” 1994. Source: artnet.com

29 The Gao Brothers next to their work Mao’s Guilt, 2009. Source: Photograph by Shiho
Fukada,The New York Times.

30 Wang Guangyi. “Mao Zedong AO (black grid),” 1988. Source: Art Asia Pacific.

31 Wang Jinsong. “One Hundred Signs of Demolition,” 1999. Source: artspace.com

32 Zhou Jun. “Bird’s Nest No. 2,” 2006. Source: Red Gate Gallery.

33 Night view of Changan Avenue, Beijing. Source: Imaginechina, Corbis. The Guardian.

34 OMA, CCTV headquarters. Source: OMA, Ole Scheeren.

35 Beijing Central Bussiness District, 2016. Source: Wikimedia Commons, user: morio.

36 Fu Baoshi. “This Land so Rich in Beauty,” 1959. Source: Google Arts & Culture.

37 A design for the Mao Memorial Hall in Tiananmen Square featuring a ‘red sun’. Source:
Sang, Ye,and Geremie R. Barmé, “A Beijing That Isn’t (Part I).” China Heritage Quarterly, no. 14,
2008.

38 “Smog-hit Beijing shows sunsets on a giant TV to remind people what the sun looks like,”
2014. Source: The Register. ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images.

310 SE-DUCTIO I: BEIJING

311
(EM)BODYING (or how the corporeal emerges as a
particular membrane between the interior/exterior spatial gap)
 I once heard from one of our sages, that in our present state we are dead, and
the body is our tomb, and that part of the soul in which the desires reside is of
a nature liable to be over persuaded and to be swayed continually to and fro.
And so some smart clever fellow (…) turned this into a fable or allegory, and,
playing with the word, from its susceptibility to all impressions and capacity for
holding belief gave it the name of a jar, and the foolish he called uninitiated: in
these uninitiated, that part of the soul where the desires lie, the licentious and
non-retentive portion of it, he compared to a jar full of holes, because there was
no possibility of filling or satisfying it (…) showing that of all those in Hades
—meaning you know the invisible— those who are uninitiated will be the most
miserable, and have to carry water into their leaky jar in a sieve perforated just
like the other. And then by the sieve, as my informant told me, he means the
soul: and the soul of the foolish he likened to a sieve because it is full of holes,
as incapable of holding anything by reason of its incredulity and forgetfulness.
(Plato, Gorgias, 493)1

In this fragment of the Platonic dialogue of Gorgias, Socrates tells The barrel
a story in which the image of the perforated jar or vessel appears; of the Danaids
an image that would lie beneath the work of his disciple, Plato.
This singular receptacle that can never be filled, but spills the liquid
poured into it, is rooted in the mythological barrel of the Danaids,
the daughters of king Danaus who were condemned to fill eternally a
bottomless receptacle with water and a sieve, after being found guilty
of the murder of their husbands. This everlasting spillover, resulting
from the perpetual labor of filling and leaking, reflects the idea of
porosity, the quality of that which is permeable to fluids through a
perforated surface.
Pardo (1992, 85) uses the same image to illustrate exteriority, the
realm of passion, body and space. While “soul” is a recipient, it may
hold or spill the content poured into it. According to the fable, the
task of the philosopher –and the initiated– is to occlude progressively
the pores of the crater, so it can retain the “liquid” without losses,
creating a perfect interior. On the contrary, the “foolish” or
“uninitiated” cannot seal their jars full of holes, being constantly
permeated by desires and passions that overflow their necessities and

1 Translation by E.M. Cope (1864)

313
 cannot be satisfied; they are incapable of keeping anything because
of their “incredulity and forgetfulness,” in opposition to the sage, the
Academic, who preserves the interior by means of faith and memory
escaping the painful destiny of the eternal return. The incontinent,
exterior being is permeable, and thus oblivious and doomed to
repetition.
Body as Deepening in the multiple meanings of the fragment, Pardo (1992,
membrane 63) pays special attention to the condition of the human body as a
sepulcher, a tomb –“in our present state we are dead”–, which means,
according to the Spanish philosopher, that the body is the agent of
forgetfulness, transforming life into death because of oblivion, of its
capacity of leaking, letting go:
The body is the effect of oblivion; and since oblivion is nothing other than
the outpouring of the soul out of the barrel which contains it, the liquid
-the memory- which pours outwards is the body itself, the flesh in which the
soul incarnates and is buried. (…) Just as soul is an effect of memory, just
as memory is not a set of remembrances stored in a pre-existing cavity (the
soul), but memory, when preserved, when retained, constitutes a well-sealed
interiority (the soul-cavity), the flesh is the element of oblivion, that which
the soul becomes when it is poured through the holes of the bottomless crater.
Forgotten memories do not fall to an exterior that precedes them, but rather
constitute, when spilling out, the exteriority open on all sides, “un-covered, and
unrepressed,” naked, the surface without limits or outline that is the body itself.
(1992, 64)

The words of Pardo, following the Platonic fragment of the bottomless

crater that represents the insatiable character of the porous,2 open

2 The philosopher Jean-Louis Déotte (2013) would also study the porous
condition of architecture and the city through the experience Walter Benjamin. During
their stay in Naples, Benjamin and Asja Lacis (1978, 165-166), overwhelmed by the
changing rhythms and spaces of southern Europe, would write: “As porous as this stone
is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and
stairways. In everything, they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforeseen
constellation. The stamp of definitive is avoided. No situation appears intended for
ever, no figure asserts it ‘thus and not otherwise.’” This entails a way of understanding
space as something that retains and lets go at the same time. For Déotte (2013, 51), as
Benjamin understood, the city does not exist in itself, but is always mediated, configured by
apparatuses.

314 (EM)BODYING
 01

soul, echo the treatment the human body has received in Western
culture, as a contingent, perishable envelope whose only value lies
in the capacity of containing the soul. In the Christian tradition,
body has been despised for being considered an easily corruptible
element that nonetheless could become a vehicle for salvation through
physical suffering, deprivation, the repression of appetites and
passions and ultimately, work and labor. This tradition has heavily
influenced the modern understanding of the body, although many
voices have defended the importance of the corporeal dimension
and the possibility of embracing pleasure, life (as well as death) and
irrationality as intrinsic faculties of the human being.
This vindication of the exterior man –and woman– has been
made by many authors, to the point that it would be impossible to
elaborate on each of these discourses –nor is it the purpose of this
chapter. However, two of them may be useful as a starting point,
considering their relevance and their broad influence on the ideas of
many others. In this respect, Nietzsche was probably the one who
most fiercely opposed the Platonic-Christian primacy of spirit over
matter, soul over body, and the oppression exerted from the domains
of religion, metaphysics, moral or state. His frail, suffering body was
for sure a field of experience which made him grasp the forces of the
corporeal and its inextricable link to life and the subject: “it does not

315
 say I, but does I” (Nietzsche 2006, 23). From his particular discourse,
creative and destructive at the same time, the German philosopher
challenged the Western conception of the experienced body,
situating it as a (Dionysian) primeval field of tensions, latencies and
contradictory forces. Although a certain spirituality is still preserved
–more corporeal than intellectual (Coole 2000, 113)–,3 body appears
as a quasi-independent intelligence, having “an instinctual sense of
its own vital needs” that ought to be followed by the free subject. In
this regard, Coole notices how this Dionysian body is mostly spatial,
outward-oriented, since not only it exists in space, but also transforms
it:
(…) through its styles, its gestures, its dancing, the body also organises space,
carving it up, re-orienting it; it lives spatially and architecturally; it inscribes the
spaces that differentiate and give form to the spatial. Indeed the Dionysian seems
to inhabit space rather than time, which is why everything can coexist in one
differentiated and interconnected dimension in the cycles of eternal recurrence.
Perhaps it is in this negativity beyond time that its deification is finally achieved.
Nietzsche sometimes writes indeed as if action, performance, style – rhythmic,
gestural rather than linguistic, symbolism – were the only authentic mode of
inscribing meaning without doing violence to life. (Coole 2000, 114)

Almost sixty years later, further philosophical incursions in the realm

of the corporeal were made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty who, from a
phenomenological perspective –following and updating Husserlian
thought–, understands body as the means through which the world
is given to the subject: “It is through my body [à travers mon corps]
that I understand other people, just as it is through my body
that I perceive ‘things’” (2002, 216). “Flesh” (la chair) appears as
the lived, sensible body that regulates perception, criticizing the
traditional (Cartesian) dualism between body and conscience in his
Phenomenology of Perception and later in The Visible and the Invisible,
where he studies the chiasm between both realms that are inextricably
linked, being one the reverse of the other: visible exterior and invisible

3 “The body is a great reason, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace,
one herd and one shepherd. Your small reason, what you call ‘spirit’ is also a tool of your
body, my brother, a small work- and plaything of your great reason” (Nietzsche 2006, 23).

316 (EM)BODYING
interior that contain the other in the form of absence.4 This gap
or fissure keeps the lived body as a dynamic entity, unfinished and
incomplete, in permanent construction that extends itself in space, as
well as opening it.
These germinal ideas serve as an introduction to this chapter,
which, far from a phenomenological interest –that in architecture
could be traced back to Norberg-Schulz, Bollnow or more recently,
Juhani Pallasmaa, to name a few–, is devoted to the relations between
bodies and space, specifically situated in the fields of architecture
and the city. However, many other issues will be addressed in order
to offer a wider comprehension of these relations, which have been
explored from the angles of politics, biopower, literature or feminism,
considering that bodies are much more than perceptive structures or
productive/reproductive devices, but they can also be unproductive,
that is, not subject to a rational labor or breeding regime. Following
José Luis Pardo once again, body is a perforated membrane between
interior and exterior, one of the basic forms of exteriority that,
together with city and nature, incarnate the bottomless barrel that
cannot contain Being and thought in their entirety, but let them go
outside through the pores of its surface.

Against architecture.
Man is “the measure of all things, of the existence of the things that are and
the non-existence of the things that are not. (Protagoras, quoted by Socrates in
Plato’s Theaetetus, 152a)

In a text named “The city and the bodies,” the philosopher Luis Body and
Arenas (2011) recalls the humanist fascination with proportion and proportion
geometry in human body, reflected by canonical drawings such as
Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (literally inspired by Vitruvius’ treatise De
architectura)5 or the Modulor designed by Le Corbusier. Since nearly

4 This is a recurring topic in the work of the French philosopher, who through his
critique of rationalism as a form of violence and imposition in modernity (like in Theodor
Adorno), explores the impossible dissolution of “positive and negative –sense and non-
sense, visible and invisible, identity and non-identity” (Coole 2000, 122).
5 The proportions indicated by Vitruvius in De Architectura, relating human
body and architecture, were studied by many other thinkers, architects and artists of

Against architecture 317

 02 03

04 05

318 (EM)BODYING
five hundred years separate both of these works, it seems that some
of the most basic principles and interests of Western architecture had
barely changed during that period; among them, the identification
of more or less static geometrical proportions and symmetries as an
analogous model both to human beauty and built elements, reflecting
the regularity and precise, divine order of the world.
Although proportions and geometry have never been completely
abandoned and still persist in architecture in many different ways –as
Arenas (2011, 37) recognizes, until the end of the twentieth century
architecture has been “if not cosmography, at least antropography”–,
the art historian Rudolf Wittkower (1960) and some of his
contemporaries would intuit changes that were to come after the
definitive collapse of classical science, when proportion was relegated
to a matter of individual sensitivity. Already in 1957, Wittkower
and the British architect Peter Smithson had had a discussion at the
RIBA about the relevance of proportions, which Wittkower defended.
Instead, Smithson argued that they had only been valid until the
decade of the forties, when architects were seeking for certainties
and confidence. Bruno Zevi, who also participated in the meeting,
claimed that, at that moment, “no one really believes any longer in the
proportional system” (Wittkower 1960, 210). After this encounter,
Wittkower adopted a much more ambiguous position, avoiding any
attempt to defend a system based on proportions (Montes Serrano
2003, 70), and recognizing that future generations of architects would
probably detach themselves from proportion as a scientific system for
aesthetic order.
Antoine Picon (2008) has studied and typified this kind of
encounters between science and architecture. He also exemplifies

Renaissance Italy, like Fra Giocondo and Francesco di Giorgio Martini. Cesare Cesariano’s
scheme deserves a special mention. The first translator of the books of Vitruvius draw a
scheme in which the human anatomy is forced by elongating the limbs in an exaggerated
way, so that the body fits within the circle and the square at the same time, with the navel
in the center; unlike Leonardo, who adjusted the body to one or another figure through
different positions. Thus, Cesariano’s Vitruvian man seems to represent the primacy of
geometric proportion over the human body. Interestingly, the drawing would become
the emblem of Peter Eisenman’s IAUS, located in the center (navel) of New York, and
represented in a revolving door whose reverse was the Modulor of Le Corbusier.

Against architecture 319

 the evolution from an arithmetic-geometrical paradigm –typical
in Vitruvian architecture, but that can be traced back to ancient
cultures– to more complex, dynamic scientific notions: the study of
flows or biological evolution were some of the advances that caused a
shift in the relations between science and architecture –among which
we could clearly situate the emergence of anti-space. The increasing
complexity of scientific development, Picon argues, results in a
gradual divergence between both fields and a progressive approach of
architecture to technology. Thus, the relation with science becomes
more inspirational (metaphorical, poetic) than analogical, in a way
that can be “disconcerting” for sciences (2008, 63). Nonetheless,
architecture still preserves a strong desire “to offer a spatial expression
of an underlying order of things and beings” (2008, 51), consequently
working as a mediating element between intellection and sensorial
realm. In this sense, it is unavoidable to detach human agency from
the objectives and strategies of architecture, although conditions have
clearly changed.
Architecture Human body has gone from being the archetype and model of
as capsule construction –as the image of perfect nature or divinity– to becoming,
apparently and paradoxically in a post-human scenario, the ultimate
object of architecture in terms of thermal comfort, ergonomics and
usability.6 In this regard, architecture becomes essentially a capsule,
an enclosing and enclosed space, adapted to other type of human
parameters and incorporating the latest technological advances. Going
back to the idea of the envelope –which is not new; Sloterdijk (2006)
and many others have explored the progression of this tendency from
the nineteenth century on–, human body is no longer the measure
of architecture, since it has been swallowed by it and hypertrophic
technology. Shopping malls and office buildings represent the
predominance of insulated bubbles over open, free spaces, which
are being reduced to either privately owned spaces or neutral, vast
extensions without qualities. Escaping nature, as well as weather
conditions and climate change, the architecture of air-conditioning
has become the highest expression of contemporary space (although it
seems that some attempts from a social and environmentally-engaged

6 One of the core ideas of modernity is to separate natural and social spheres.
(Latour 1993)

320 (EM)BODYING
architecture are opening hopeful paths). Nonetheless, it is clear that
the relation between body and architecture is still instrumental and,
to some degree, oppressive and prescriptive, leaving aside other aspects
that are not exclusively functional or representational. Even the
deconstructivist attempt to incorporate entropy, excess and instability
in an architecture without essence, reflecting the destabilization of the
postmodern world (with Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi in the
lead) did not escape this representational character of architecture as
“the mirror of nature”; first as order, then as chaos (Arenas 2011, 41),
with architectures that trap the human body through intricate forms,
paths and loops.
Apparently, we may have liberated ourselves from nature, but
not from architecture. It is worth going back to the origins of this
bold pronouncement, inspired by a time when the question of the
oppressed human body was starting to be taken seriously in the West.
The work of Georges Bataille is compelling in this regard, as he tried
to break with the traditional view of the body as the expression of
ideal nature and divinity, but without detaching it from its nature
by subjugating it to reason. Instead, he embraced human body in
its full exteriority and multiplicity, amidst the generalized process of
disenchantment and rationalization of the corporeal –it should not
be forgotten that, during these years, scientific experimentation in
humans, eugenics and mass extermination methods were experiencing
an international golden age.
Body is the core around which the work of the French writer
pivots: it is the cursed and imperfect part of the Self, which it both
repels and tries to forget and hide. Through the tragic dichotomy
of eroticism and death, Bataille presents the human body in its full
crudeness, challenging the prudish conception of it as the impure
container of soul and reason. His provocative and disturbing
texts present the corporeal as “living quicksand” (Navarro 2002,
10), constructor and destructor of meaning at a time. Body is
contradiction and polarity, bringing together the opposing drives
of human condition; thus, it is impossible to reduce it to a single,
homogeneous discourse, since it is constantly vanishing, changing
and challenging its context. This fact, as Ginés Navarro points out
(2002, 10), represents a menace against all order and conceptual

Against architecture 321

 monuments and systems: the uncovered body, free from all clothes,
robes and accessories, is just corruptible flesh embodying absence and
dissolution of meaning.
Acéphale Bataille was fascinated by such lack, and was inspired by it to create
the journal Acéphale, as well as the secret society of the same name.7
The recurring figure of Acephalus, drawn by the French artist and
friend of Bataille André Masson, represented the understanding of
human body as permanent dissolution and disorder, being torn and
ripped by time, deprived of its own head and thus drastically open by
means of a major fissure that makes it incapable of retaining anything.
Hence, the (Nietzschean) image of the Acéphale is pure exteriority, the
irrational counterpart of the Vitruvian man, who incarnates the order
of cosmos. It is:
[t]he mythical and tragic emblem of sovereignty, as much social as political,
psychological, aesthetic and erotic. A headless being stands with his legs slightly
apart, resting firmly on the ground, a dagger in his left hand, calling for violence
and blood, a flaming heart-grenade in his right hand, a torch to see the unseen:
sun, blood, nakedness, corpses, war, madness, death. It has two stars for breasts
on the chest and its intestines appear through its abdomen, a maze in which it is
lost, an interior labyrinth of the absence of truth, labyrinth of life where the only
certainty is that of death. This transparent being has a skull in the place of sex,
thus designating the tragic bond of eroticism and death. (Teixeira 1997, 102)8

The prison Bataille would complete Masson’s drawing with the sentence:
“L’homme a échappé à sa tête comme le condamné à la prison” (“Man has
escaped his own head as the convict from prison”) (1936). Here, body
itself is compared to a prison, the paradigmatic building of order,
control and repression. Navarro (2002, 11) proposes to seek for “the
traces of the body” in pictures and words, but also in architecture:
“constructions, temples, monuments,” all of them being “metaphors
of the body.” From this anthropic view of architecture, Bataille
speaks of the prison as the generic architectural element reproducing

7 Previously, Bataille had founded another society named Contre-Attaque, together

with André Breton, as a reaction against fascism. The union would only survive a few
months between 1935 and 1936, although it would be the germ of further societies and
journals. (See Marmande 1985; Bataille and Breton 2013)
8 [T.A.]

322 (EM)BODYING
human’s own skin, understood as shell and enclosure: “The image
of Acephalus, thus, should be seen as (...) the negative imago of
an antimonumental madness involved in the dismemberment of
‘meaning’” (Hollier 1993, xii).
This symbolic attribution can be several times in the works of the
French writer, among them the one he wrote on Notre-Dame de
Reims in 1918, where architecture appears as the image of social and
cosmogonic order, emulating the body of Christ crucified. Over the
urban turmoil –the rambling, chaotic town–, the cathedral stands
still, vertical and triumphant. But after the German bombardment
of Reims during the First World War, the cathedral, that once
seemed eternal, ceased to be a symbol of order and beauty to become
a sign of death and destruction. Later, the Parisian Bastille would
be the analogous element that Bataille would describe in his essay
“Architecture” of 1929: architecture here is no longer a symbol,
but the imposition of order itself, so it is attacked and taken by the
revolutionaries, because of their rejection of established power:
(…) it is in the form of cathedral or palace that Church or State speaks to
the multitudes and imposes silence upon them. It is, in fact, obvious that
monuments inspire social prudence and often even real fear. The taking of
the Bastille is symbolic of this state of things: it is hard to explain this crowd
movement is other than by the animosity of the people against the monuments
that are their real masters. (Bataille 1970, 15–16)9

In his entry on “Architecture” in the Dictionnaire Critique (1970), Architectural

the author is somehow inverting the Vitruvian tradition that involves skeleton
that “Nature (…) has made the human body so that the different
members of it are measures of the whole” (Vitruvius, Ten Books on
Architecture, book III-1, 4).10 Later, many modern authors would
extend these assumptions from a scientific perspective, such as
Destutt de Tracy and his view of human body’s resistance towards
movement, which sees its reflection in architecture (Wallenstein

9 English translation in Hollier (1993, 47), by Betsy Wing.

10 Another historic quote on body and architecture can be found on Marsilio
Ficino’s Commentary on the Symposium of Plato (1489): “anyone asked in what way the form
of the body can be like the Form and Reason of the Soul and Mind, let him consider, I ask,
the building of the architect.”

Against architecture 323

 06 07
2009, 25). Also August Schmarsow’s “Das Wesen der architektonischen
Schöpfung” (1993) brings to the fore the issue of human axiality and
its correspondence with spatial conception and building. On the
contrary, Bataille defended the opposite: the human body is just an
intermediate element “between the apes and the great buildings”
(1970, 17).11 So, the author criticizes the architectural skeleton hidden
under classic painting, music, physiognomy, clothes and many other
aspects of culture. If architecture tends to place this skeleton under
all that exists, it means that we are caught in a vicious and violent
structure from which we cannot escape, a tyrannical and imperative
architecture, such as the prison, the cathedral or the palace.12 For

11 This assertion is particularly graphic considering the multiple representations

of bodies with edifice features, and vice versa, buildings with human characteristics. For
instance, in the 1931 Beaux Arts Ball, when architects such as William van Allen or
Stewart Walker dressed up as their buildings; on the other side, Madelon Vriesendorp’s
illustration for Delirious New York’s cover (named “Flagrant Delit”) represents a post-coital
scene between Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, caught in bed by the rest of the city
buildings. [http://socks-studio.com/2015/02/02/madelon-vriesendorps-manhattan-project/]
12 “(…) whenever we find architectural construction elsewhere than in
monuments, whether it be in physiognomy, dress, music, or painting, we can infer a
prevailing taste for human or divine authority. (…)It is clear, in any case, that mathematical
order imposed upon stone is really the culmination of the evolution of earthly forms,
whose direction is indicated within the biological order by the passage from the simian to
the human form, the latter already displaying all the elements of architecture. Man would
seem to represent merely an intermediary stage within the morphological development
between monkey and building. Forms have become increasingly static, increasingly
dominant. (…) an attack on architecture, whose monumental productions now truly
dominate the whole earth, grouping the servile multitudes under their shadow, imposing
admiration and wonder, order and constraint, is necessarily, as it were, an attack on man”

324 (EM)BODYING
 08 09
Bataille, the only way to get rid of this centuries-old tyranny of
architectural forms is the way impressionist painting opens up to the
formless and the monstrous.13 If this is read in terms of Lefebvre’s
Production of Space, it is evident the importance of the representative
to maintain existence and cohesion of social relations of production
and reproduction. In particular, relations of production are often
represented through buildings, monuments and works of art. Lefebvre
clarifies that this whole system has its own operating rules (1991,
32). However, is it possible to break with the logic of these systems,
or rather rewrite the conditions in which the representations of social
relations occur? Removing architecture’s link to violence seems to be a
complicated task.
After the revolt of the people against their own space (against Self-negating
the Bastille in Paris, but also during students and workers’ riots in architecture
1968), it is in La Villette where architecture turns against itself,

(Bataille 1970, 15–17). Translation by Dominic Faccini in: Dominic Faccini et al., “Critical
Dictionary,” October Spring (1992): 25–26.
13 Diametrically opposed to Bataille’s position, Hans Sedlmayr (Sedlmayr 1957,
95–111) denounced the “attack on architecture” that was being carried from diverse
fields. From his reactionary perspective, Sedlmayr considered that landscape architecture
and artificial ruins (depicted by Hubert Robert, Caspar David Friedrich and, we could
add, Piranesi) were the triggers for the dethronement of architecture because of their
“anti-architectural,” hazardous, formless condition. It was, paradoxically, revolutionary
architecture and the dominance of “basic geometrical forms” (such as the cube, the
pyramid or the sphere, in Ledoux and Boullée’s constructions, “negating the earth as a
basis”) that he points out as the definitive attack that would have an impact on modern
architecture, which he qualifies as “unsound and inhuman.”

Against architecture 325

 10 11

according to Bernard Tschumi, the designer of the park: “Architecture

only survives where it negates the form that society expects of it.
Where it negates itself by transgressing the limits that history has set
for it.”14 It is, thus, an architecture established before the subject,
before any kind of meaning, “an architecture that would not allow
space for time needed to become a subject” (Hollier 1993, xi). If
the body, as the “root of the impure (...), is a sign of the absence of
meaning” (Navarro 2002, 10), then humans would only be able to
free themselves from their own oppressing spatiality escaping –even
Formlessness ephemerally– their own head, their own reason. Certainly, we could
affirm today that neither Manet’s Olympia nor theory on formlessness
based on contemporary art –intensively explored by Yves-Alain Bois
and Rosalind Krauss through the exhibition Formless (1997)– seem to
have liquidated the imperative character of architecture as underlying
structure, since it needs a subjacent logic in order to be built, as
parametricist architecture strives to remind. However, the reason the
body of Olympia was scandalous was not because of its nakedness or
its detachment from the classical canons. Rather, as Roberto Calasso
indicates (2011, 262), it was because of her inexpressive and self-
indulgent gaze, oblivious to the spectator, whom he looks with the
impudent indifference of one who is aware of being inside a showcase.
Her head, separated from the body by a black velvet choker, remains
isolated from the rest of the figure, which manifests itself as an

14 This sentence appears in an image of the project Advertisements for Architecture,

by Bernard Tschumi, 1975-1976. Some of them can be accessed in: http://www.tschumi.
com/projects/19/

326 (EM)BODYING
 12

uncomfortable and incomprehensible body, comical and monstrous at

the same time.
Precisely, that kind of monstrosity (understood as interruption, Monstrosity
discontinuity, singularity) is what the idea of formlessness could
bring, like Olympia’s body, to the understanding of architecture. In
order to build bridges between the architectural and the biological,
Carlos Tapia (2017) makes a teratological reading aligning Bataille’s
considerations on the abject in “Les écarts de la nature” (“Deviations
of nature,” 1930) and the “hopeful monsters” of the geneticist
Richard Goldschmidt (1960), who argued that macroevolution was
possible because of isolated macromutations that, by mere good luck,
favored the adaptation of an organism to a new way of life. Thus, the
monstrous is that which presents an elementary inconsistency with
respect to its class, so that every being is, to some extent, a monster.
Precisely, the monstruous has also been traced in the field of
architecture: for Rowe (1950) it appears as “aberration” or “joke”
through a Modernity that goes from the late sixteenth to the
twentieth century, and for Donald Kunze (1988) and Marco Frascari
(1991) in historical mannerism, in which “nature reaches fullness
in its idealism, its mathematical and platonic absolute, (...) only
feasible under the gaze of art” through an “action of opposition”
(Tapia 2017, 13). Thus, in this intricate labyrinth between styles and
forms of life, Tapia (2017, 14) sees in the work of the artist Rafael
Canogar a contribution to this “project of consciousness,” in which
the genetic and the biological are intermingled with (and by means
of ) art. Teratologías (meaning “the science of monsters”), according to

Against architecture 327

 the author, projects ways of life by handcrafting technology, calling
human homogeneity into question and revealing “the monster inside
us” (Tapia 2017, 13). These “spatial monsters,” projected through
difference and interruption, are opposed to other models of abstract
and homogeneous spaces that emerge from the hyperrational and that
have, as it will be argued later, one of their clearest examples in the
factory and the workplace, where the body dissolves to become part of
the capitalist machine gear.

(Counter)revolution and autonomy.

The city of Turin is one of the vertices of the so-called Italy’s industrial
triangle, together with Milan and Genoa. Also known as the
Automobile Capital or the Detroit of Italy, the city is one of the most
industrialized poles of the country, playing an essential role during
the postwar years (thanks mostly to automotive industry), when
the Italian economy was starting to recover again. During times of
crisis, the cities of the triangle have hosted thousands of workers and
migrants from southern regions in search of stable jobs and salaries in
northern factories. Thus, the identification of the region with labor
and production is very present in the Italian –and even European–
social imaginary.
In the city center, in the middle of the significant Piazza Statuto
–inserted in the ancient Roman decumanus– a monument to the
construction of the first gallery of the Fréjus Rail Tunnel during the
second half of the nineteenth century, connecting Italy and France,
recalls the industrial character of Turin. The monument, inaugurated
in 1879, is a massive pyramidal mound of stone crowned by Lucifer,
the light-bringer, who floats triumphant over a group of exhausted
Titans, lying painfully amidst the rocks. The presence of the angelic
demon reinforces the mysterious character of the square, which was
once the site of the guillotine, close to the Roman necropolis and
the enclave for public executions. Originally the most occidental
zone of Turin, this orientation to the West (the place of dusk and
death) amplifies the legends and beliefs that relate this urban space
with negative, diabolic energies. Indeed, Lucifer has been regarded
as the fallen angel, one of the multiple incarnations of the devil in
the Christian tradition. However, the irrational and otherworldly

328 (EM)BODYING
 13 14 15

character attributed to the square contrasts with the dedication of the

monument to much more mundane activities.
The genie stands still, severe and serene, giving a condescending Luciferian
look at the struggling giants and their wasted bodies, weakened after reason
their colossal effort. The monument has been subject to different vs. working body
interpretations, considering its context, location and its mythical
character. Originally, it seems that it was built to represent the
primacy of reason over brute force –either human or natural–,
in a time when the positivist spirit impregnated knowledge and
thought: the engineers, illuminated by rational light and thanks
to their scientific knowledge and tools, had been able to overcome
the obstacles of the mountain, something which was previously
inconceivable. However, the monument has also been considered
to be a memorial for the suffering workers who built the gallery,
represented by the titanic group under the attentive, patronizing gaze
of the demon. In both cases, the duality between reason and corporeal
forces is very present, as well as the idea of domination of mind and
soul over the body, as separate entities.
This brief digression into the urban space of the Piedmontese
capital underscores the extent to which work and production
processes –which deeply affect and transform space– underlie our
daily movements and experiences, sometimes even unconsciously. This
subtle exercise of violence, accepted and embraced by the subject as a

(Counter)revolution and autonomy 329

 dignifying activity and source of profit, became a central field of study
thanks to the questions and ideas put forward during the nineteenth
century by Marx, Engels or Durkheim and, after that, it has been
thoroughly analyzed and studied from diverse perspectives. Some of
them have tried to come up with alternatives and systems countering
the capitalist modes of production and reproduction, with varying
degrees of success.
Operaismo, One of the most interesting critiques and bids to challenge
autonomia capitalist work logic emerges precisely in Italy during the sixties,
as “a kind of laboratory for experimentation in new forms of
political thinking” (Virno and Hardt (eds.) 1996, 1), parallel to the
poststructuralist turn in France that also aimed at unmasking and
criticizing some of the excesses and “underlying skeletons” imposed
by Western culture and structuralism. Contrary to the international
resignation after the mobilizations of 1968, its repercussions were
absorbed and amplified in Italy during some years. The Italian case
is interesting not only because of this fact, nor because it departs
directly from the violence exerted over the individual/collective
body of the worker, but also because it underpinned the theoretical
work of a wide range of intellectuals from diverse fields –including
architecture as institution and materialization of power. Tafuri, dal
Co and Cacciari were related to this movement, together with Mario
Tronti, Raniero Panzieri or Toni Negri, who oriented their research
and ideas toward the common objective of emancipation. In this
regard, the divergent but common-rooted movements of operaismo
(workerism, or operaism) and autonomia (autonomy, or autonomism)
disclosed a fruitful territory for integral alternatives. Having already
commented the influence of Cacciari’s negative thought in the radical
critique of architecture posed by Tafuri, it is worth to track its origins
and ties to the operaist group, which would trigger his first theoretical
contributions. These transfers between the fields of politics/work
and space/architecture are clearly unveiled in The Project of Autonomy
(2008), by the architect and scholar Pier Vittorio Aureli, representing
a valuable source for the purposes of the research.
Operaism emerges in a context of crisis, in a moment when
post-war buoyant capitalism and Fordist modes of production (in
Italy mainly represented by the northern automotive industry) were

330 (EM)BODYING
showing visible signs of exhaustion after a period of unprecedented
growth, leading to massive losses of jobs protests and generalized
discontent.15 Besides, the international Left was suffering a deep
transformation, boosted by the progressive destalinization of the
Soviet Union that, in consequence, was threatened by the fear of a
generalized loss of credibility of communism. These facts prepared
a breeding ground for the appearance of numerous international
critical groups around the Left –following the path traced by previous
collectives, such as the Johnson-Forest tendency in the States or
Socialisme ou Barbarie in France.16
In Italy, this particular situation led to the emergence of operaismo,
a political theory and movement founded by the politicians and
writers Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri and
visibilized through the creation of the journal Quaderni Rossi in
1961, which served as the dynamic theoretical base for the group.
The movement, far from homogeneous, would soon start to divide
because of multiple tensions, conflicts and theoretical disagreements
among its members.17 In any case, the main contribution of operaists,
at least at the theoretical level, was the inversion of the focus of the
critique of capitalism: instead of addressing the planes of circulation,
distribution, and consumption, operaists shifted the orientation
towards “a structural and global analysis of capitalism in terms of its

15 The Audiovisual Archive of the Worker and Democratic Movement (AAMOD,

Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico) offers an exceptional collection
of audiovisual material related to workerist actions and protests. For instance, the
documentary La Fabbrica (“The Factory,” 1970) by Alberto Lauriello and Lino De Seriis
shows the demonstrations of Fiat’s workers during the autunno caldo in Turin, including
the fights in Corso Traiano, the Faculty of Architecture and Piazza Statuto. The short
film Linea di montaggio (“Assembly line,” 1972) by Ansano Giannarelli reflects on the
relationships between the worker and the structures of production from a Marxist
perspective, through images of a working day at the factory Fiat Mirafiori.
16 In Italy, some of these groups, corresponding to different regions, were Potere
Operaio in the Venero, Lotta Continua in Turin, Il Manifesto in Rome, or Avanguardia Operaia
in Milan. (Day 2011, 112)
17 The best known rupture within the group was the departure of Negri after the
first issue of Contropiano. He would continue his activity developing the field of autonomia,
apart from institutions (such as the Italian Communist Party, in which his colleagues were
still integrated) and paving the ground for future, globally known contributions such as the
idea of “Empire,” together with Michael Hardt

(Counter)revolution and autonomy 331

 16 17

deepest source of power: the power over production” (Aureli 2008,

12), that is, workforce as a political subject. From this perspective,
even the bonds of cooperation and brotherhood established among
the workers were called into question, since they responded to an
external pressure which authorized them in order to accomplish the
capitalists’ plan.
Crisis as Panzieri reached this conclusion by following the increasing
motor development of technological, innovative means of production,
which put living labor in a complicated situation, oriented towards
an update of its skills (as in central Europe, with the rapid increase
of white collars, corresponding to a more advanced, opulent society.)
This fact resulted in a progressive improvement of living conditions
and wealth for the working class, who, in turn, became more and
more dependent on capitalism to maintain their status. This dynamic
of more social well-being and more innovation (better products),
served, according to Panzieri, as an everlasting motor which kept
capitalism alive and stronger (Panzieri 1961; Aureli 2008, 24–25).
From this point of view, technology represents a threat for workers,
but not because it could eventually substitute them, but because
it reinforces their integration within the system, reducing the
possibilities of insurrection and making it impossible to break the
circle –in fact, it continues working today, permanently creating
new needs and desires for the consumer/worker. For Panzieri, then,
the only way out was to empower the working class politically,
understanding production –their work– as an essential part of the
system and taking control of this technological development.

332 (EM)BODYING
 This idea was further extended by Panzieri’s colleague, Mario Reverting
Tronti, to the point of reversing his argument and causing a new capitalism
division within the group. Tronti saw, contrary to his fellow, that it
was the working class, and not the other way around, who exerted
pressure over capitalism provoking this kind of leaps forward,
determining the level of its development (Tronti 1963; Aureli 2008,
31–32).18 Thus, his proposal was to counter capitalism from within it,
since the development of capitalism would ensure a stronger capacity
of the working class to attack it:
This meant opposing to capitalism’s positive process of creating its own value the
workers’ negative process of creating value, which consisted of their will to be
nonwork, to refuse work, that is, to be the “material lever of capitalist dissolution
placed at the decisive point of the system.” (Aureli 2008, 32)19

In 1962, amidst the turbulent climate of restlessness and continuous

demonstrations and riots, a particular event caught the attention
of the institutional Left, being at the same time a cause for rupture
among different positions. Turin was the scenario of a series of protests
resulting from the clash between the workers of the metallurgical
sector and the reformist syndicate UIL (Unione Italiana del Lavoro,
Italian Labor Union), after the latter had signed an agreement with
FIAT without having previously negotiated or informed other, more
leftist unions. This was seen as a treason by thousands of workers, who
marched, full of rage, to the headquarters of the UIL, burning their
member cards and attacking managers and officials who attempted
to leave the building (Williams 2016). Protests continued for almost
three days (from 7 to 9 July), bringing together not only industrial
workers, but also people from the city or the marginal suburbs, who
occupied the center of the city –being Piazza Statuto the epicenter

18 The also collaborator of the journal Quaderni Rossi Romano Alquati reached
a similar conclusion, as indicated by Matteo Pasquinelli (2015a, 6): “At the beginning of
the industrial age capitalism started to exploit human bodies for their mechanical energy,
but soon it became clear, Alquati notes, that the most important value was originated by
the series of creative acts, measurements and decisions that workers constantly had to
perform. Alquati calls information precisely all the innovative micro-decisions that workers
have to take along the production process, that give form to the product, but also that give
form to the machinic apparatus itself.”
19 Quoting Tronti’s “La fabbrica e la società,” in Quaderni Rossi, (2), pp. 1-31, 1962.

(Counter)revolution and autonomy 333

 of the protest– destroying everything they found on their way. Cars,
pavements and urban furniture were object of the crowd’s fury. Aureli
(2008, 29) points out that the singularity of these events lied in
the fact that they were not conducted by proud, “skilled” workers,
organized and cooperating through formal labor unions, but by the
newcomers –mostly from the Italian south– who had emigrated in
order to find a job in the prosperous environment offered by northern
industries. Contrary to the traditional worker, this proletariat “was
much more alienated and thus rebellious against, if not indifferent
toward, work. The new workers did not just dislike their jobs, they
hated them. Their dependence on the factory was purely opportunistic
and devoid of traditional workers’ ethics and responsibility toward
production” (Aureli 2008, 30). It is not surprising that, many years
later, Negri and Hardt would propose in Commonwealth (2009, 249-
250) an overflowing and pathological vision of the metropolis as an
“inorganic body,” the body without organs in which the multitude
becomes and manifests itself. In a section entitled De Corpore 2, the
authors state that metropolis would be to the multitude what the
factory had been to the industrial working class, and that the “natural
common” would have given way to the “artificial common” of affects,
languages, images, habits and practices as the basis of the city as the
site of biopolitical production. In the ill metropolis, only rebellion in
and against it (the authors cite Paris, the movement of the Argentinian
piqueteros and the suburb of El Alto in La Paz, Bolivia) could counter
“its pathologies and corruptions” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 259).
As a consequence of the emergence of this new section of the
working class, traditional Left and its institutional organisms –parties,
unions, etc.– saw themselves on the verge of collapse, thus causing
multiple reactions from intellectual groups, such as those around
Panzieri and Tronti. The latter, probably inspired by the fatti of Piazza
Statuto and the subsequent events, exposed the terms in which the
counterplan, based on refusal, should become efficient:
It is between organization and refusal that the workers must insert their weapon
in order to reduce capitalism to a subordinate force. This weapon consists of the
workers’ threat to negate their own essential mediation in the whole system of
capitalist social relations. According to this, the tasks of the workers’ party are:
no to support capitalism’s needs, not even in the form of workers’ demands; to

334 (EM)BODYING
 force the capitalists to present their objective necessities and then subjectively
refuse them; to force the bosses to ask so that the workers can actively -that is, in
organized forms- reply to them: no. (Tronti 1966, 262)20

In order to start implementing a realistic, long-term counterplan, Counterplan

Tronti and his group began to focus on the oppositional movements
of capitalism to contain working class’ pressure. At this point,
following Carl Schmitt’s21 interpretation of Marx, they realized that
relations between bourgeoisie (and bourgeois thought) and capitalism,
as well as modern mechanisms of absorption that allowed the
reproduction of capitalism in periods of crisis, were extremely useful
for the working class and the success of their alternative counterplan.
Thus, it was necessary to develop a whole new culture as a weapon
for the working class, understanding theoretical achievements of
the bourgeoisie with regard to their adaptation to capitalism.22

20 Translation by Aureli (2008, 39)

21 Resorting to stigmatized figures like Smith provokes an uneasiness in the author
that increases when thinking about those who read the text. Keeping in mind that Aristotle
(who defended slavery and was the preceptor of an imperialist leader) clearly seems
to be above suspicion, the use of some of his most relevant thoughts is not sufficiently
exculpated. Facing a doctoral candidacy, the vulnerability of being wrapped in tissues
impregnated with the smells of other users can be considered as unscrupulous (or not).
Cacciari does not hesitate to distribute that heat throughout his texts, without having to
ventilate the smell, and so does Žižek (2002) when he takes from Schmitt the Kantian idea
of Einbildungskraft, or the transcendental power of the imagination, in the sense that, in
order to recognize the enemy, we must “schematize” its logical figure, transmuting what
was “in itself” for specific ends “from itself.” This does not eliminate vulnerability, nor
is it frivolized, but its use is justified. André Glucksmann leaves no alternative: either he
or Schmitt, because it is not an option to think of the Nuremberg trials as an arbitrary
imposition of the victors; therefore, the precise denial of the contravened assertion of its
opposite.
22 “Lenin wrote that ‘...the idea of seeking salvation for the working class in
anything save the further development of capitalism is reactionary.’ The working class
suffers more for the shortcomings of capitalist development than capitalism itself. In fact,
the bourgeois revolution offers the greatest advantages to the proletariat: in a way, it is ‘in
the highest degree advantageous to the proletariat.’ The bourgeois revolution continually
reproduces itself within capitalist development. It is the permanent form expressing the
growth of productive forces, the solidification of the technological levels, the class-tensions
within the relations of production, the system’s growing expansion over all of society,
and the ensuing political struggle between capital’s general interest and the capitalists’
particular interests. The bourgeoisie’s politically moderate soul is engaged, throughout the

(Counter)revolution and autonomy 335

 Under this spirit of countering capitalism from within, the journal
Contropiano was founded in 1968 by Cacciari, Negri and Alberto Asor
Rosa. Its pages collected ideas, research and reflections by different
authors willing to theorize a new path towards the autonomy of the
working class, offering a set of intellectual materials and references
–mostly central European– from diverse disciplines devoted to the
analysis of “the relations among capitalist development, working-
class history and practice, political institutions, and culture” (Aureli
2008, 44). In this context, Massimo Cacciari developed the notion
of negative thought and its capacity of penetrating the very core of
capitalism, mainly through Nietzsche’s will to power and Weber’s
disenchantment (Cacciari 1969, 183), which constituted the
foundation of bourgeoisie’s triumph and, according to him, ought to
be appropriated by the working class in order to run the counterplan
and institutionalize an antagonist culture.
Also Manfredo Tafuri contributed to the journal with some of his
most notorious writings on architecture and urbanism understood
within the capitalist framework, such as those already mentioned in
the section devoted to negative avant-gardes. However, his vision, as
well as his critique of certain operations such as the ones carried out
in the Red Vienna (1971), were regarded as awkward within certain
operaist circles, which felt much more identified with an autonomous
architecture rooted in place (locus), as the one studied and developed
by Aldo Rossi: an architecture of concrete, finite, specific elements and
artifacts versus the abstract and planned city-process or city-territory
that Tafuri (Piccinato, Quilici, and Tafuri 1962) advocated, taking
negativity to the extreme. On the contrary, Rossi was skeptical to
the ideas of openness (“open form”),23 networks, megastructures and
the advance of cybernetics and informational technology, defending
the pertinence and basic character of the closed form in architecture
and urbanism. This divergence of criteria can be clearly observed
in the entries for the competition for a new centro direzionale in

whole course of its history, to give a gradual peaceful form to the continual revolutionary
upsets of its own economic mechanism. (…) At different levels, the proletariat is called to
collaborate in the development. At different levels it must choose the specific form of its
political refusal. (Tronti 1963)
23 See chapter: “Se-ductio II: Warsaw.”

336 (EM)BODYING
 18 19 20

21 22 23

Turin in 1962,24 in which Tafuri collaborated with AUA studio and

Rossi with the architects Gianugo Polesello and Luca Meda: the
continuous, structural and dynamic project of the Roman studio,
irrupting through the city grid, contrasted with the silent rigidity of
the Milanese proposal, consisting of a closed, square volume with a
vast inner court, reinforcing the objectual singularity of architecture
constituting the form of the city. Interestingly, there is a strong
influence of Rossi’s Locomotiva 2 (the motto of the Turinese project) in
some of the proposals of Pier Vittorio Aureli as an architect, together
with Martino Tattara in Dogma. In 2010, they elaborated a proposal
for the area of Spina 4 in the same city under the name of Locomotiva
3, in which formal and theoretical similarities with Rossi’s project of
1962 are undeniable. Three years before, the studio had conducted
a research project called “Stop City” –inverting Archizoom’s
terminology–, proposing an urban theoretical model based on an
architecture without qualities or image, just as the form of the city.
Here, a certain influence of Tafuri’s interpretation of Hilberseimer

24 Competition entries were collected in a special issue of Casabella: “Concorso

per il Centro Direzionale di Torino.” Casabella 278 (1963).

(Counter)revolution and autonomy 337

 Limitless city can be detected as well, although Dogma does not accept the limitless
vs. absolute condition of the metropolis. Many of their projects preserve a singular
architecture character, as austere and unique artifacts providing islands within the
chaos of the city, as absolute architectures (Aureli 2011).
At the sunset of this fruitful period of alliance and discussions
between politics and architecture within the context of Italian
workerism, the Florentine group Archizoom are usually considered
to be the epigones of this generation, receiving and processing the
influence of the ideas, proposals and critiques elaborated during
City without the early sixties. It would not be possible to fully grasp the radical
architecture vs. critique of the metropolis and its negativity without mentioning
architecture their No-Stop City (1968-1972), the project which embodied the
without city
radical genericness, abstraction and perpetual mobility of the urban,
as a total refusal of representation, “devoid of demos and devoid of
cratos (people and power)” (Branzi 2006, 148). Collecting, once
again, Tafuri’s25 reading of Hilberseimer urban projects, No-Stop City
absorbs and presents the forces of capitalism led to the extreme, in an
urban scenario with no monuments, no residences or factories, but
only supermarkets hosting the basic functions of parking, storing and
shopping for metropolitan nomads. Technology and nature embrace
each other, leaving no space for architecture, which is definitely
defeated as system of representation in an amoral city; an operation
that can be compared to other proposals from that time such as
Superstudio’s Continuous Monument (1969)26 or Isozaki’s installation
Electric Labyrinth (14th Triennale di Milano, 1968), showing the
ultimate, anti-futurist image of a devastated city (Hiroshima) without
architecture. These urban scenarios unveil, from a reverse avant-garde
movement, the radical overcoming of the industrial metropolis that
placed work in the remote outskirts, responding to a guilty conscience

25 Nevertheless, Tafuri (1972; 1976) was very critical with these anti-utopian,
negative positions –also considering Superstudio or the work of Italian designers exhibited
at “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape” in 1972–, since he understood their proposals
as a retreat from mass production (from which architecture could eventually intervene
efficiently) to the limited realm of luxury and exclusive goods for the elites.
26 For Aureli (2013), No-Stop City was developed both as a counterpart and
an emulation of Superstudio’s Continuous Monument, which reduced architecture to a
monumental, single formal gesture that would progressively swallow the whole urban
world. Instead, Archizoom’s project represented the city without architecture.

338 (EM)BODYING
 24 25 26

27 28 29

that denied and refused these necessary spatial byproducts of social

organization, privileging the pre-industrial, utopian image of a
nuclear city. By unmasking this guilt and “recognizing a use value for
the urban environment,” Archizoom attacks “the holy of holies of
bourgeois morality, because there is the risk of introducing into the
world of culture the logic and immorality of production relations,
faced with which many people would be embarrassed if they had to
verify that their creativity is quantitatively, and no longer qualitatively,
measurable, and that it is once and for all equal to that of all people”
(Branzi 2006, 186).
Almost ten years separate Archizoom’s No-Stop City and the
groundbreaking events in Piazza Statuto. The contrast between the
violent, uncontrollable riot –under the astonished gaze of Luciferian
Reason–, with the crowd occupying a central space of the city and the
dissolution of the city itself into a silent, abstract turmoil of flows and
transactions illustrates the evolution of the reflections and perspectives
that had emerged during those years in workerist Italy: the physical
protest and the rebellion of forces against the capitalist system in
the bodies of the own workers –the insurgent agents of capitalist
production– makes way for the austere, intellectual execution of an

(Counter)revolution and autonomy 339

 integral counterplan that transforms the space of the once violented
city. At the same time, both extremes represent the different paths
followed by intellectuals, politicians and activists who were implied
in the course of these transforming years, with divergent results and
conclusions. Hence, a radical separation takes place between the
Italian Communist Party (PCI, in which some like Cacciari, Asor
Rosa and Tronti decided to remain, in an attempt to instrumentalize
the party as a means for the consecution of the counterplan) and the
extra-parliamentary left (headed by the new group Autonomia Operaia
founded by Negri, Franco Berardi Bifo or Franco Piperno, among
others). While the former advocated maintaining a unitary project
through parliamentary representation, the influence of the second
group gave rise to the movement of 1977, initiating a subversive
movement, totally incompatible with and incomprehensible to the
institutional apparatus. The fracture, which was already clear after
1968, was further opened.
Il Movimento del 77 was instituted as a post-workerist movement
which no longer contemplated the fight for a communist hegemony.
Hence, the idea of labor as the basis of political identity, until
then deeply rooted in the Left, was abandoned, and the way of
understanding capitalist society was reversed, following Deleuze, who
speaks of a transition from disciplinary societies to control societies
(Maio et al. 2007, 37) and understands work as one of the main
instruments for a decentralized domination. The possibility of non-
work and the desire for leisure and culture are placed at the center of
political debate, as well as the question of technological development
for industrial production: if the factory is already inserted in the
capitalist logic, the revolution should come from the periphery, from
the “non-guaranteed” (Guattari and Rolnik 2006, 213). As Bifo
explains (Maio et al. 2007, 27), 1977 was a year of creativity, free
expression, self-organization and alternative communication, but
it was also a violent year marked by fear and anger. In fact, some
like him consider 1977 as the birthdate of the punk movement.
The conditions of the insurgent Left were redrawn, renouncing its
traditional structures so that the capitalist attack on them would
finally be harmless. After the industrial era, characterized by polar,
fixed structures, the molecular makes its way by means of ephemeral
structures and new informational technologies.

340 (EM)BODYING
 Nonetheless, even though the actions of the movement represented Counter-
an important step forward for the Italian society, what happened revolution
after these bursting years was the opposite to what they intended.
Indeed, Paolo Virno (2003, 127) speaks of a “counterrevolution”
that appropriates and reverses revolutionary mechanisms and
achievements:
“Counterrevolution” is, literally, a revolution in reverse. That is: an impetuous
innovation of the modes of production, forms of life and social relations
that, nevertheless, consolidates and relaunches the capitalist command. The
“counterrevolution,” like its symmetrical opposite, leaves nothing intact.
It determines a prolonged state of exception, in which the expansion of
events seems to be accelerating. It actively builds up its peculiar “new order.”
It forges mentalities, cultural attitudes, tastes, uses and customs; in short,
an unprecedented common sense. It goes to the root of things and works
methodically.27

What happens after 1977 has been read as a full-blown

counterrevolution: while part of the former operaist group was totally
imbued into the institutional system within the PCI28 (later dissolved
and re-founded in 1991 as the Partito Democratico della Sinistra
(PDS), Democratic Party of the Left), all proposals and forms that
emerged from the antagonistic positioning to capitalism served to
promote the subsequent development of neoliberalism in the country,
integrating many of the ideas of the movement transformed into
“professional requirements, ingredients of the production of surplus-
value and ferment of the new cycle of capitalist development... Italian
neoliberalism of the eighties is a sort of inverted ‘77” (Virno 2003,
130).29 The success of this counterrevolution during the eighties
and the nineties is clear, since its effects –namely the acceptation
and implementation of post-fordist production in the industrial
sector, the reduction of working hours and the crisis of representative

27 [T.A.]
28 It has been recently restored, in 2016, aiming at recovering the values of
communism and the working class in Italy, following the figures of Gramsci and Palmiro
Togliatti.
29 [T.A.]

(Counter)revolution and autonomy 341

 democracy– remain even today.30 Berardi (Maio et al. 2007, 32–33)
recognizes two reasons why this happened, or more precisely, why
the movement failed to forge a political program from its anti-labor
approaches and to restructure the premises of the Left. The first
responds to the group’s own contradictory vision, considering itself
between the last communist movement of the twentieth century
and, at the same time, the first post-industrial and post-communist
movement in history. This identity problem, together with the
decentralization and lack of union within a pretended national
group, were the results of a confuse program. The second reason was
the violent repression exerted on the collective, as well as the lack of
support from the parliamentary left. In any case, the annihilation
of the movement after being absorbed by the prevailing system
represented an unprecedented capitalist victory in Italy, which would
be amplified in Europe years later, superimposed on the fall of the
Berlin Wall.
Indeed, the derive of the Autonomia project of the eighties and
nineties triggered its dissolution within the post-political turmoil, in
which alternative plans to capitalism –such as the one articulated by
Negri and Hardt in their famous Empire (2000)– lack of strength and
resolution to become effective, since their strategies are constantly
absorbed and appropriated, having lent themselves “to conformism
with the ‘prevailing trends’ of postmodern politics, from ‘pluralism’
and ‘multiplicity’ to the end of the working class” (Aureli 2008, 8).31
Apparently, however, this is where we are now, and the legacy of the
autonomist way has brought to the fore several interesting questions
which concern our contemporary situation and the transition between
an industrial to a network era.

30 Chiesa and Toscano give a very accurate account of the sociopolitical panorama
of present-day Italy in the introduction to The Italian Difference (Chiesa and Toscano 2009,
1–10).
31 This attitude coincides with the third stage of the project of autonomy
proposed by Castoriadis (2001). This phase, starting in the second half of the twentieth
century, determines the end of this project, based on the primacy of reason as
foundation for human emancipation. Castoriadis describes this period as “the retreat into
conformism,” as a time of passivity and “collective amnesia” after the World Wars, the
imposition and uncritical assimilation of the neoliberal discourse and the surrender to
“representative democracy.”

342 (EM)BODYING
 30 31 32

New publics and bodies in motion. From panoptic to

panchoreographic.

We have seen how one of the main contributions of operaism has Anthropogenic
been to place the variable of the body as one of the central elements industries
of the capitalist machinery, and how it has moved from the factory
to a more extensive urban environment. On the one hand, the body
appears appropriated by work forces as a means of production: this
is what Pasquinelli (2014, 197-188) reads from Marx’s Organic
Composition of Capital through Marazzi’s “anthropogenic industries,”
in which machinic fixed capital is transposed into the human living
body, presenting an uncertain scenario that can be seen either as
totalitarian or favouring autonomy and emancipation. On the other
hand, it has already been seen how Hardt and Negri (2009) celebrate
the “joyful encounters” of rebel bodies in the pathological metropolis,
apart from the chaotic rhythms of the capitalist machinery. This
connects with Bifo’s interpretation of the soul as clinamen (Smith
2009, 9), as the “tendency for certain bodies to fall in with others”
to constitute a world between them. However, despite these forces,
other voices recalled the enormous difficulty of counteracting
these mechanisms, preferring to delve into them from a negative
perspective. From a similar point of view, although keeping a certain
distance, some contemporary phenomenons could be read as a false
escape valve for the exhausted body, which unconsciously remains
within the infinite cycle of capitalist production.
Amidst the rationalized process of work and labor, the worker
counts on a few days per year to escape duty and free his/her body

New publics and bodies in motion. From panoptic to panchoreographic. 343

 from routine and practice. Certainly, this possibility is a great
achievement of the working class, after years of –even physical–
struggle and fight: the worker generally interrupts labor some hours a
week –or some days a year– and leaves the city to spend free time in a
different place: the park, the beach, the riverbank, the countryside…
searching, somehow, the lost space of nature, of which he/she is
deprived in the workplace. Nevertheless, as it has been argued before,
this conquest has been progressively integrated within the capitalist
logic, to the point that leisure has become an industry as well.
Tourism, as Lefebvre noted in the eighties (1991, 353), has become
one of the most powerful areas of investment and profitability, “a
victory of neocapitalism and an extension of bourgeois hegemony to
the whole of space” (1991, 383), stimulated by its connection with
the construction sector and property speculation. In this regard,
Lefebvre detects two types of violence, which are closely intertwined.
On the one hand, “natural,” exotic space is colonized and consumed
by the tourist longing for leisure, sunlight and relaxation (the author
offers the example of the Mediterranean coast, the holiday paradise for
the industrial Europe). This fact usually entails intense urbanization
and resource exploitation, transforming spaces into “quality” products
ready for consumption. On the other hand, leisure time imposes a
series of habits and spaces (tanning, sightseeing, selfie-taking, drinking
and eating, staying at hotel rooms, resorts…) to recreate the illusion
of a “different, richer, simpler” life (Lefebvre 1991, 353) responding
to inoculated needs and desires –what we shall do, or we shall visit
during holidays, reproducing established itineraries, behaviors
and routines. Still, this process is not irreversible, or at least, not
completely, since body can, according to Lefebvre (1991, 384), take
its revenge: “Thanks to its sensory organs, from the sense of smell and
from sexuality to sight (…), the body tends to behave as a differential
field (…), as a total body, breaking out of the temporal and spatial
shell developed in response to labour, to the division of labour, to
the localizing of work and the specialization of places.” To a certain
extent, it is possible to carry out empowering practices following a
state of semi-liberation of the corporeal: “body provides a point of
‘affordance’ between ourselves and our surroundings” (Crouch and
Desforges 2003, 7), allowing freedom of movement and relations,
constituting new forms of spatial practice through bodily, sensorial

344 (EM)BODYING
performance and the encounter with “the other.” But despite these
brief events of exteriority, the integration of the holiday period within
the capitalist work machinery becomes more and more evident over
time: hyper-sexualization of (female) bodies as attractive products for
touristic marketing, identifying beach as a site of seduction and desire
and exerting pressure on specific groups to obtain a “beach body”
(Jordan 2006); or the displacement of the household/workplace to the
holiday destination –affecting mostly women (Crouch and Desforges
2003)– are only some of the forms of bodily violence derived from
the “liberating” period of holidays. Neither must be forgotten the
consequences of the generalization of communication technologies,
which facilitate the interruption of vacation for working reasons, since
the worker is permanently available via e-mail or text message,32 or the
urban processes of “touristification” affecting diverse landscapes and
city centers.
Tourism is only one of the phenomena that illustrate what the Creating
Operaists like Panzieri were recognizing years ago: as the working class new publics
enjoys better, more comfortable living conditions, the capitalist system
keeps going. There is a need for new publics, new target groups who
benefit from it, constantly satisfying new needs and desires inoculated
by producers: firms, entrepreneurs, media… The intellectual worker
is the new laborer, outside the factory, producing immaterial goods to
be globally consumed by others who, in different parts of the world,
share and want to maintain the same status.
Still, the very idea of a “working class,” usually depicted as a grey
mass of tough, (male) workers leaving the factory where they spend
most of their time, is outdated and simplistic as a way of recognizing
this specific type of public, as so it is the romantic, indifferent attitude
of the bourgeois or the cool, cosmopolite and diverse “creative class”
dissected by Richard Florida –who would later recognize its capacity
to generate inequality in urban areas (Florida 2017). This type of
generalization of specific publics –like the Habermasian bourgeois
public sphere– tend to obliterate minorities and counterpublics,

32 French workers have recently achieved the “right to disconnect” from

technology during off-hours and holidays: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/
dec/31/french-workers-win-legal-right-to-avoid-checking-work-email-out-of-hours

New publics and bodies in motion. From panoptic to panchoreographic. 345

Non-normative at it has been stated before.33 Rather, contemporary publics are
publics fluid, diverse and even non-normative, as feminist and post-colonial
thinkers have shown, challenging the dominant idea of a labyrinthine
“world without an outside” (Antonio Negri quoted in Mandarini
2009, 78).
Indeed, authors like Irigaray (1974), A. Davis (1981) Butler
(1993), Grosz (1995), Garuba (2002), Romanow (2006), Romero
Ruiz (2012) and many others have investigated the issue of the
differentiated body as a socio-cultural/political artifact, from a more
or less accentuated spatial perspective. Their texts unveil the relations
between bodies and power, which Michel Foucault brought to the fore
in his History of Sexuality (1978) and subsequent texts and lectures.
Foucault –like Nietzsche, a suffering body–, introduced the field of
biopower and biopolitics to study the tactics of State domination
and administration of power through life (death) and the body as
Repression and biological processes. The acceptance, repression or extermination
confinement of different kinds of (docile) bodies and behaviors is, according to
the author (1978, 17), a recurrent strategy to the exercise of power
approximately from the seventeenth century onward. Going back
to heterotopias, architecture played an essential role in biopower
administration for Foucault, since it provides spaces of confinement
(heterotopias of deviance: mental hospitals, prisons, asylums…).
Moreover, it also creates structures to host and develop mechanisms
of social reproduction, such as schools and factories as well as their
counterparts: theme parks and holiday resorts; not to mention
the reinterpretation he made of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon as a
paradigmatic example of disciplinary technology and, ultimately, as
a formula for government (Foucault 1977; 2008, 67).34 Such spaces
facilitate different dynamics and processes of discipline and control
that ensure the continuity of the system. Taken to its extreme, the
biopolitical state preserves the life of the population through its

33 See chapter “On(the politics of) space.”

34 The idea of a panopticon is particularly strong when situated in a time
dominated by outer, general visions of the world: the whole Earth is seen and
photographed as a “Blue Marble” from the Apollo 17 for the first time in 1972. As a
counter-image, we could propose the Whole Earth Catalog, the countercultural fanzine
edited by Stewart Brand between 1968 and 1988, which collected reviews of different
products and tools and has been regarded as the Google search engine of its time.

346 (EM)BODYING
decision-making capacity and authority for violence, taking the form
of a body; not metaphorically, as in Hobbes’ Leviathan, but in a real
way: the state would exist through bodies and not outside of them
(Esposito 2005, 159).
Recalling again the work of Bataille, body would be the only
model that humans have to shape their world, and thus face the
impossibility of confronting chaos: “the model (...) will be the Self and
its other, its shadow, the body, because it is all they have” (Navarro
2002, 36). Hence, a duplication of the human being takes place: the Doppelgänger
Self is not integrated in the body as a mere instance of the psyche,
but comes off of it, as a doppelgänger that tends to remain hidden
and repressed. At least, this is what the French writer detects as a
recurrent symptom in Western culture for centuries. As a reaction,
the theorization of biopolitics and the emergence of the posthumanist
debate have prompted a different understanding of corporeality. From Devouring
the body itself, it is possible to interpret reality escaping the individual exteriority
sphere, since humans co-exist with other beings and things. If these
processes are further observed, it is noticeable that the condition
of immunity is constantly reflected even in places we inhabit, for
instance, in the city arranged to face the enemy or the plague. In
this sense, José Luis Pardo (1992) denounces the Western spatial
program, which involves the absorption of the Other within the Self,
“devouring” and consuming its own exteriority. Thus, the basic forms
of exteriority (nature, city and skin-body), through which the Self is
inevitably “spilled” from within outwards –as the Acephalus, whose
entrails appear before our eyes– open up a way to a counterfigural
understanding of human spatiality, different from Western traditional
assumptions.
Foucault’s inaugural line of thought meets the Nietzschean- Anti-humanism
Bataillean anti-humanist tradition. Thus, his contribution represents
a starting point for an approach that leaves aside for a moment
dominant communicational, discourse-based power relations to
focus on other planes of existence that escape, to a certain extent,
the established preeminence of reason. In this regard, his work
has been broadened, either through extension or critique –or even

New publics and bodies in motion. From panoptic to panchoreographic. 347

 33 34 35

both–,35 to the point of becoming a transversal reference for many

disciplines and fields. With regard to architecture, Foucault opens
a way to understand it “not as a system of representation and order
but as a means of production and ordering” (Wallenstein 2009, 42)
that explains and unveils its relations with power from a perspective
different –not radically opposite, but complementary– to the
Lefebvrian representational triad. In a brief but clarifying work on
Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture (2009), the
Swedish philosopher Sven-Olov Wallenstein re-reads the Foucaldian
notion of biopolitics and translates it to the realm of architecture
and territory, situating again the Enlightenment period and the
eighteenth century as the turning point for the shift in the discourse
on modern architecture and politics –as Tafuri (1976; 1987) or
Foucault (Rabinow (ed.) 1984, 239) himself did. After those years,
architecture has become a more and more integrated tool for social
and biopolitical ordering, although its conditions have changed
throughout all these years. Today, the idea of distribution or partage
du sensible developed by Rancière (2004) may be considered as a wider
framework to explain and analyze power relations from an aesthetic
perspective. It is worth recalling that Rancière –as well as Walter
Benjamin– understands aesthetics as the Greek aisthesis (ȽɐɅɄɐɇɑ),
the organization of feeling (Andreotti and Lahiji 2016, 2).
Wallenstein also acknowledges the importance of the work of
the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and his reinterpretation

35 Although some branches of feminist thought have been significantly nurtured by

Foucault’s work, feminist critique of it has expanded the scope of the analysis of power-
body relations. For instance, Monique Deveaux (1994)states that one of the major gaps
of Foucault’s thought is the absence of “women’s specific experiences with power” which
could articulate processes of empowerment (1994, 224).

348 (EM)BODYING
 36 37 38

and actualization of Foucauldian biopolitics. Beyond his idea

of sovereignty –lying on the split and encounter between bare,
“biological” life zoe and qualified political life bios (Agamben 1998)–,
the author sees the concentration camp as the spatial biopolitical
paradigm of modernity, where population is taken as the object of the
legal, disciplinary model analyzed by Foucault, and where the decision
between life and death is circumscribed.
It is interesting to read Agamben’s notion of the enclosed camp as Cum-munus
a space of control and power over life parallel to Roberto Esposito’s vs. in-munus
discourse on immunity and community, also analyzed by authors
such as Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy or Peter Sloterdijk. Munus, the root
shared by both terms –community and immunity–, refers to a gift
to share, a debt, but also to the poison everyone must carry: cum-
munus refers to those who share that gift or duty, while the ones that
remain exempt from this charge are immune, in-munus. There is a
definition of this munus as phármakon, when Esposito defines it as
potion and counter-potion at the same time. It is not a substance,
but a “non-identity, non-substance, a non-essence” (Esposito 2005,
127), which is configured as the emergence of a vacuum, or a non-
being, entering the realm of the physical, particularly with Paracelsus.
Sloterdijk goes a step further by tracing the origins of this immunity
logic when recalling Nietzsche’s reference to a “mental defense system”
embedded in a dominant center-itself, opening the critique of reason
to the immunity paradigm (Sloterdijk 2006, 159–60). Therefore,
immunity systems are basic for the generation of individualities and
the protection against the external aggressive element by means of
the shared gift. However, these terms are not antagonistic: every
community is covered by a form of immunity that protects life, but
always at the risk of sacrificing it –what Esposito calls “structural

New publics and bodies in motion. From panoptic to panchoreographic. 349

 aporias” (2005, 159). These are assumed as contradictions that occur
within immunity logic: the antigen, as negative motor, is not an
element to remove, but rather to incorporate in order to neutralize it.
Through the same mechanism of immunity logic, life and death are
neither one after the other, nor two sides of the same coin. It is death
as an “inner fold” of life that ensures its preservation. (Esposito 2005,
159)
According to this perspective, the discourse on the body, as
Esposito points out, cannot be understood anymore in terms of race
(as it happened in the thirties) or population (as Foucault did), but
from its technical transformation and the construction of systems
that guarantee the immunity of the individual/community. (Esposito
2005, 146) Technique is precisely the great immunity system through
which the protective “shell” against the external world is built; not as
cyborgs but as modified, prosthetic beings. Beyond this debate, which
can hardly be exhausted, the fact is that we cannot recognize ourselves
without technique, understood not as a saving element derived from
the mechanistic paradigm, but as a way of extending and placing
ourselves in the world. Again, the line between exterior and interior is
analyzed and requalified.
The old disciplinary functions that moved people from one closed segment of
space to another -from the school to the factory, from the factory to the hospital,
the prison, and so forth- have entered into a state of crisis, replaced by new,
smooth functions. Control is exerted over open spaces; it locates an element in
an open environment, for example an electronic bracelet worn by a prisoner,
which provides or denies access to a given segment of space at a certain point in
time. (Wallenstein 2009, 37)

There are abundant contemporary examples of corporeal

immunization and appropriation through space, also from the fields
of architecture and urbanism, being both extremely valuable tools
for social control and directly related to the Lefebvrian notion of
“representation of space.” In a territorial scale, Giorgio Agamben
(Bauman and Agamben 2008, 107–34), when reflecting on emerging
models for future cities, remarks –together with his colleague
Zygmunt Bauman– that the localizing factor plays a key role in the
processes of globalization, radically changing the way that conflicts
are resolved by relocating people (problems) outside their societies.

350 (EM)BODYING
 39 40

41 42

43 44

New publics and bodies in motion. From panoptic to panchoreographic. 351

 Testing life Through this reflection, Agamben also suggests that the future of
outside our cities could be being tested in this “outside” places, which he
calls counterlaboratories, adapting the term used by Bruno Latour
(1987, 79):36 these are the favelas and informal settlements, but also
sieges37 or refugee camps proliferating along the borders of several
states, performing as contemporary laboratories of habitability and
modes of life. These processes are intimately linked to what Agamben
calls in Homo Sacer “bare life”: “a biological existence that can be
sacrificed at any time by a colonial power that maintains the right to
kill with impunity but has withdrawn all moral, political or human
responsibilities from the population” (Graham 2011, xxv). But while
all these situations entail an experimental condition regarding future
power and life conditions (control, poverty, mobility, anonymity,
property…), they may also be understood as counterlaboratories
in the sense that these test experiments may, at the same time, be
reverted by their inhabitants, such in the case of the favelas, where a
marginal, limited enclave is ruled by its own codes.
Counterlabs, In order to better understand the quality and possibilities of these
camps and interstitial spaces, the term counterlaboratory could be re-read and
migrant subjetcs re-conceptualized. In fact, it shares some similarities with Henri
Lefebvre’s counterspace: the reverse of hegemonic space –one cannot
exist without the other–, throughout which differences and conflict
emerge. We could talk of other kind of spaces, where the same tools
used by governments and institutions are subverted in order to
generate resistant and resilient communities. For instance, the use
of social networks and apps which are mostly used to collect private
information, are also used to communicate and start the journeys.
For many years, the camp has been the chosen settlement model to
host refugees for a certain period of time, sometimes indeterminate.
As a matter of fact, thousands of people remain in these places, far
from any urban reality and living in permanent nomadic state, under

36 Latour uses the term in a techno-scientific context: the counterlaboratory

would be a laboratory built to refute or reshape the conclusions drawn in another
laboratory. In this sense, scientific production is described through a warlike antagonism.
37 Stephen Graham’s (2011) reading of the siege of Gaza by Israel as one of the
places where thousands of people are left to die away from the glare of the media could as
well be integrated within this notion.

352 (EM)BODYING
artificial and precarious conditions. As pointed before, some experts
detect urban-like features in refugee camps, as their inhabitants are
constantly transforming their environment into a more “human” one.
For Bauman (2008, 48), refugee camps are very similar to Goffman’s
“total institution,” of which there is no escape and which, in turn,
prevents any alternative way of life. Kleinschmidt also states that “in
the Middle East, we were building camps: storage facilities for people.
But the refugees were building a city. These are the cities of tomorrow.
The average stay today in a camp is 17 years. That’s a generation.
Let’s look at these places as cities” (Kleinschmidt and Radford 2015).
However, despite the tendency to recreate pseudo-urban conditions in
these sites, the camp is undoubtedly an anti-urban solution, lacking of
the facilities and deserving conditions of everyday life that inhabitants
need to feel safe and comfortable. In fact, some researchers have
demonstrated that “those refugees who have opted out of the camp
system – even when that means forgoing any humanitarian assistance
– have established an effective alternative approach to exile” (Hovil
2014). This will to live in the city, to be part of an urban community
–with all the advantages it has to offer–, brings once again the topic of
the city as a motor, as a node; and in this particular case of migration,
a proper spatial organization at all levels –especially in local and
regional levels– is essential. In this regard, the UNHCR launched two
years ago a new policy of alternatives to camps, recognizing that it is
more sustainable and positive to integrate refugees within urban or
rural communities. (UNHCR 2014)
The spatial dimension of all these processes is obvious, and the Liquefied bodies
idea of interiority appears again when dealing with this kind of
enclosed spaces. However, borders, which have traditionally been
understood as more or less defined regions separating interior and
exterior, have already exceeded their conventional definition to
become contingent or even fluid, since they no longer respond to
the physical form of a delimited space, but rather recreate a different
counter-figure which surpasses the limitations of an enclosed area.
This is particularly relevant in a moment when migration flows
(especially from countries at war or affected by social conflict to
other regions, such as Syrian people demanding refuge in Europe and
western Asian countries) are acquiring and unprecedented intensity.
An example of this transition from rigid borders to “liquefied bodies”

New publics and bodies in motion. From panoptic to panchoreographic. 353

 is documented by the researchers and experts in migration Brigitta
Kuster and Vassilis Tsianos (2013). The team collected the claims of
the demonstrators in the Refugee Protest Camp Vienna, established in
late 2012,38 demanding the deletion of refugees’ fingerprints from the
biometric database Eurodac. By means of this kind of mechanisms,
the border is no longer a real or virtual line or area on the territory,
but a transferable condition to human anatomy, to the morphology
of a finger. The authors tell the story of a group of North African
transmigrants in Igoumenitsa, Greece, from where ferries depart for
Italy:
“(...) they carried the border further themselves and, at the same time,
transgressed it. By this means –by disregard or as a misstep– these transmigrants
reterritorialized the border. They began to operate in Europe proper and to push
the border deeper into the territory –Vienna, Amsterdam, Berlin, Lyon, Paris...”
(Kuster and Tsianos 2013).

The border has, thus, become a bodily condition, as EU migration

policies and the last operations and proposals of president Trump
(such as the decision to end DACA) seem to confirm. Meanwhile,
holding very different privileges, citizens with US passport who
frequently fly between certain airports already have the possibility
to avoid some security checks if they agree to share certain personal
information with IATA –and it is likely that this practice will extend
further into Europe.
It seems that Henri Lefebvre (1974, 220) was not completely
wrong when he held the hypothesis that capitalism is incapable of
doing spatial planning, since it is increasingly based on immaterial
flows and connections, accounting items or financial balance. When
capitalism appropriated pre-capitalist sectors such as agriculture and
the city, it was ultimately appropriating space. Somehow, it is true that

38 As a contemporary version of the sans-papiers, the movement began with a

march on November 2012 from the Traiskirchen refugee camp to Vienna, organized and
supported mainly by anti-fascist and anarchist groups. Afterwards, an illegal camp was
erected in the Sigmund Freud Park between the University of Vienna and the Votivkirche,
creating a space of protest and vindication for migrants and asylum seekers. Since then, the
movement continued occupying new spaces and planning protest actions, being the seed
for further pro-migrant and asylum seekers movements across the world, especially during
2015 “long summer of migration.”

354 (EM)BODYING
contemporary capitalism does not plan space as it was traditionally
done, but it has found its particular way of doing so, linking spatial
planning processes paying attention to flows, fragments and, above all,
to security within its own space, threatened by external attacks (even
so, Lefebvre insists that capitalism tries to solve the contradictions of
space in its own way but has not been able to achieve it, because of
its efforts to redirect production relations by altering the functioning
of spaces). In any case, capitalist planning has also found destruction
as an essential mechanism through violent restructuring: it is what
Kenneth Hewitt (1983) called “place annihilation.”
Zygmunt Bauman quoted Adam Curtis and his documentary Exteriority
series The Power of Nightmares (2004) in order to explain how and fear
security has become a Western obsession and why nobody questions
these strategies of fear: “In an age when all the grand ideas have lost
credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left
to maintain their power” (Adam Curtis, quoted in Bauman and
Agamben 2008, 99). The endless war declared to terrorism by the
West has its main battlefield in the “external” territory (Iraq, Palestine,
etc.), while being attacked in its territorial “interior,” in a so-called
asymmetric war (Lambert 2012, 23), leading to an unprecedented
development of security technologies and prevention: for Graham
(2011, 88), militarism and urbanism have never been so close. Under
what he calls the “new military urbanism,” he defines a series of pillars
on which it relies, understood as a way of integrating militarized
surveillance, control and attack practices in all strata of the city.
These include infrastructures, day-to-day architectures and urban
networks as means of propagating political violence, which make cities
extremely vulnerable, in the face of threats of power outages, short
circuits, and interruption of service. On the one hand, the attacks of
the insurgents on the centrality of the system (attacks in New York,
London, Madrid, Paris...) are recognized; on the other hand, we
find practices of systematic de-modernization of urbanized societies,
as the United States and Israel have done against Gaza, Lebanon or
Iraq (2011, 100–103). There is also a fusion between these forms
of militarization and the cultural, urban and material currents
that occur in different societies, through a popular technological
imaginary materialized in surveillance circuits (CCTV), intelligent
vehicles, etc., but also in video games or virtual entertainment that

New publics and bodies in motion. From panoptic to panchoreographic. 355

 45 46 47

familiarize potential recruits with the modes of violence management

proper to this war against terrorism and insecurity. However, it is
also possible to revert these strategies, as in the case of the research
agency Forensic Architecture that, independently or at the request
of international lawyers and NGOs, investigate state and corporate
violence, particularly in the architectural and urban realms. Based on
the assertion that war has become an urban phenomenon (Weizman
et al. 2017, 7), the team led by Eyal Weizman makes use of graphic
and information technologies to generate expert reports, models,
animations, video analysis and interactive cartographies to denounce,
through materiality and damage, situations of hegemonic violence. In
this regard, it works as a counterlaboratory.
As we have seen, contemporary forms of control are not central
or unidirectional anymore, but fragmented and, to recall Zygmunt
Bauman, liquid. This combination of hard and soft strategies which
transmit specific behavior and conduct patterns to the population
displaces the mechanisms of control and surveillance from external
dispositifs39 to the body –and specially the neural system– of the

39 The notion of dispositif (usually translated as “apparatus”) was introduced by

Michel Foucault and has become a recurrent term in political philosophy. Even though
the French philosopher never gave a complete definition of it, Agamben (2009, 2–3)
summarizes the Foucaldian notion of dispositif as “a heterogeneous set that includes
virtually anything, linguistic and nonlinguistic, under the same heading: discourses,
institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions (…) The apparatus
itself is the network that is established between these elements,” and it “always has a
concrete strategic function and is always located in a power relation. (…) As such, it
appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge.”
Interestingly, Agamben traces a triple etymology of the term: first, it derives from the
Latin dispositio, which comes from the Greek oikonomia (“administration of the home”) and
that Agamben (2009, 10) reads from a theological perspective: “God entrusts to Christ the

356 (EM)BODYING
individual. As a self-controlling machine, humans are not only under
the gaze of the “Big Eye” of governments and power institutions,
but also under their own means of control. Thus, the contemporary Panopticon vs.
panopticon lies in the capacity of decision of each individual: what panchoreographic
should be communicated and what should be hidden. This results
in “unlimited surveillance” through both top-down and bottom-up
control chains which constitute a totalizing system. These conclusions,
elaborated by Han in The Society of Control (2013, 87–95), are
expanded through the active research conducted by the Spanish artist
Jaime del Val and the German philosopher Stefan Lorenz Sorgner.
Based on a metahumanist framework (2011), both assert that the
panopticon system is already obsolete, since we have passed from
the panoptic to the panchoreographic, a “biopolitical meta-system
of control” in which bodies are preventively appropriated. Basic
movements and habits, such as those involved in the daily use of
computers or video games, but also means of transport or sexual
practice, compose an inoculated “choreography” through which
bodies are programmed to continuously feel and satisfy artificial
needs and desires, something which is “crucial for the functioning of
markets, for the proliferation of contemporary regimes of affective
production and for the perpetuation of global violence” (Del Val
2009, 7). By producing global standard affections, the so-called
“capitalism of affect” (Del Val 2009, 2)40 presents a more complex

‘economy,’ the administration and government of human history.” Thus, the term dispositif
“designates that in which and through which, one realizes a pure activity of governance
devoid of any foundation in being” (2009, 11). Secondly, it is related to young Hegel’s
“positivity” as the “historical element (…) loaded (…) with rules, rites, and institutions
that are imposed on the individual by an external power, but that become, so to speak,
internalized in the systems of beliefs and feelings” (2009, 5–6). Finally, Heidegger also used
the notion of Ge-stell, (dis-positio, dis-ponere): the gathering together of the (in)stallation
[Stellen] that (in)stalls man, this is to say, challenges him to expose the real in the mode
of ordering [Bestellen]” (quoted in Agamben 2009, 12). However, it is worth mentioning
the warning in negative terms that Matteo Pasquinelli (2015b) makes about Agamben’s
interpretation of the Foucaldian dispositif: he reminds us, through an itinerary from
Foucault to Georges Canguilhem and Kurt Goldstein, that “[t]he contemporary history
of the concept of dispositif has been running, then, from normative potentiality (potentia,
puissance) to normative power (potestas, pouvoir) and not, as Agamben believes, from a
divine plan to a secularized technological plan.”
40 The “affective turn” is one of the numerous shifts that have been diagnosed
during the past decades. In this case, Patricia Clough (Clough and Halley (eds.) 2007,

New publics and bodies in motion. From panoptic to panchoreographic. 357

 version of capitalism in which the whole subject is involved, blurring
the limits between body and mind.
For the authors, a re-appropriation and a re-definition of the
technology of becoming is key to understand and adopt a critical
attitude toward this situation. During the period covered by the
Metabody project, multiple actions, encounters and workshops have
taken place in different parts of the world, including the PIKPA
refugee camp in Lesvos. This ubiquitous and limitless mise en scene
unmasks the fixed notion of exteriority that has pervaded in Western
culture for centuries, understood as “spectacle” and rooted in vision
as a means of control and power. Rather, the corporeal introduces a
different understanding of space beyond the physical, but also beyond
the rational: “We must also rethink space, not as physical entity but
as relational intensity: rather than going along with the assumption
that we inhabit and traverse space as physical, we should promote
the thinking of space in terms of how we produce it/are produced by
it” (Del Val 2009, 13–14). Thus, Metabody proposes an architecture
managed through bodily action and communication across networks,
either physical or virtual. In a perfect symbiosis between both realms,
emerging relations between interior and exterior are outlined. For
instance, the Metakinesfera41 prototype consists of a portable (even
wearable), nomadic architecture, which constructs a non-defined,
non-geometrical, amorphous interior in which the body, through
corporeal and technological devices, registers the exterior in which it is
immersed. Through an interaction between performance, architecture
and technology placed within the urban realm, the extended body
emerges: a body which is not inside or outside anymore, but in the
evanescent fissure which deepens through the hybridization of the real
and the virtual.

2) defines affect as “potential bodily (…) often autonomic responses” that exceed
consciousness and meaning-making processes, located in a pre-subjective realm. This
turn, which is produced to a great extent after the contributions of Deleuze, also has its
repercussions in architecture, as Petit (2013, 28) argues: “It was also Deleuze who offered
architects the notion of ‘asignifying form’ and ‘affect’ (including the complicated relationship
between affect and affection - affectus and affectio) to replace the previous construal of
form as signifying text.”
41 The term kinesphere was coined by the Hungarian dance artist and theorist
Rudolf Laban to define all the possible reach of a body.

358 (EM)BODYING
 48

In the same vein, Wallenstein (2009, 38) also believes that Anti-anatomical
techniques of normalization informed by relations of power and bodies
knowledge “produce subjects and objects through an infinite modeling
that today extends into the smallest fibers of our bodies and desires.”
However, this “infinite capacity” infused into bodies can impulse the
exercise of resistance and transformation. In this regard, the work
of Jaime del Val is significant from a corporeal perspective, since he
considers that bodies are essential for the (re)production of capitalist
strategies in the society of information as generators and embodiers
of affects. But at the same time, the artist operates immersing his
body within the dominant informational/communicative logic in
order to deconstruct it and show its contradictions. It could be argued
that Metabody is an attempt to accomplish the task that Benjamin
assigned to art, that is, “to undo the alienation of the corporeal
sensorium, to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses
(…) not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through
them” (Buck-Morss 1992, 5).
Thus, Del Val’s aperspectival, anti-anatomical work –showing
unrecognizable, monstruous bodies, amorphous flesh, sounds,
formless gestures... through intradermal cameras, sensors, and
other technological devices– dissolves binary assumptions and
standardized constructions around vision, bodies, gender... in a
way that he both makes use and dismantles hegemonic systems of

New publics and bodies in motion. From panoptic to panchoreographic. 359

 representation and logocentrism present in (Western) technopositivist
societies. It is essential, as Wallenstein states (2009, 39), to decode
the multiple directions and strata of the processes of discipline and
rationalization in order to resist them and initiate the moment of
counter-production, in which architecture may also participate under
these conditions of fluidity, formlessness, mobility… that seem to
contradict the formal, solid character which it has been traditionally
Counterform given. The Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck (Smithson (ed.) 1962)
announced, with some concern, during one of the meetings
organized by the Team 10, that society had no form; thus, it would
be impossible for architects to build its “counterform.” Maybe, under
contemporary conditions, this counterform should be understood
from a different perspective: not as the physical container or shape
adapted to social movements and needs, but as the emergent fields of
relation among agents, either human or non-human. It is precisely
within this in-between space, this force field, where architecture may
revise and reconfigure its relation to space.

360 (EM)BODYING
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19 Gianugo Polesello, Aldo Rossi and Luca Meda. “Locomotiva 2,” (axonometric drawing)
entry for the Competition for the Centro Direzionale in Torino, 1963. Source: Casabella, n. 278.

20 Gianugo Polesello, Aldo Rossi and Luca Meda. “Locomotiva 2,” (plan) entry for the
Competition for the Centro Direzionale in Torino, 1963. Source: Casabella, n. 278.

21 Dogma. “Stop City,” 2007. Source: Dogma.

22 Dogma. “A Simple Heart,” 2011. Source: Dogma.

23 Dogma. “Locomotiva 3,” proposal for the area of Spina 4, Turin, 2010. Source: Dogma.

24 Archizoom. “No-Stop City,” 1970. Source: Andrea Branzi, No-Stop City. Archizoom
Associati. Orleans: HYX, 2006, 54-55.

25 Archizoom. “No-Stop City,” 1970. Source: Andrea Branzi, No-Stop City. Archizoom
Associati. Orleans: HYX, 2006, 10.

26 Archizoom. “No-Stop City,” 1970. Source: Andrea Branzi, No-Stop City. Archizoom
Associati. Orleans: HYX, 2006, 96-97.

366 (EM)BODYING
 27 Archizoom. “No-Stop City,” 1970. Source: Andrea Branzi, No-Stop City. Archizoom
Associati. Orleans: HYX, 2006, 106-107.

28 Superstudio. “New York. Continuous Monument,” 1969. Source: Metalocus, Fondazione

MAXXI.

29 Arata Isozaki. “Re-ruined Hiroshima,” 1968. Source: MoMA.

30 “Seaside holiday,” 1900s. Source: Photograph by Cecil Hewitt. Daily Mail, Archant.

31 Tourist brochure, 1950s. Source: flickr, Steven Martin.

32 Condé Nast Traveler cover page, June 2014. Source: Condé Nast Traveler.

33 “The Blue Marble.” The Earth seen from Apollo 17, 1972. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

34 Cover page of The Capsular Civilization. Source: Lieven De Cauter. The Capsular
Civilization: On the City in the Age of Fear. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2004.

35 Edward Steed. “That’s where we are right now,” 2014. Source: The New Yorker.

36 Hugo Gernsback’s “Isolator,” 1925. Source: Science and Invention Magazine.

37 Haus-Rucker-Co. “Grüne Lunge,” Kunsthalle Hamburg, 1973. Source: Haus-Rucker Co,

Archive Zamp Kelp. Walker Art Center.

38 Tomás Saraceno. “Biosphere 06,” 2009. Source: The Fashion Commentator.

39 Immigrants in the fence of Melilla. February 18, 2014. Source: Photograph by Jesús Blasco
de Avellaneda, eldiario.es

40 Za’atri camp in Jordan for Syrian refugees as seen on July 18, 2013. Source: US
Department of State, Wikimedia Commons.

41 Kilis Camp, 2012. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

42 Kigeme Camp in southern Rwanda, 2012. Source: Photograph by Laura Eldon, Oxfam.
Wikimedia Commons.

43 Refugee Protest Camp Vienna, tents next to the Votivkirche, 2012. Source: 20000 Frauen.

44 Protest Camp im Sigmund Freud Park, Vienna, 2012. Source: respekt.net

45 Dancer interacting with Rudolf Laban’s Ichosaedron, c. 1950. Source: Digital Dance
Archives UK.

46 Reverso. “Metakinesphere,” 2014. Source: Reverso: Jaime del Val & Cristian García.
Metabody.

47 Reverso. “Microsexes/ microdances,” 2014. Source: Reverso: Jaime del Val, Metabody.

48 Reverso. Metabody Forum 2017 Greece, with the Refugees in Lesvos & Athens. “Metatopia
4.6 – Contesting hyperborders in the Algoricene.” Source: Photograph by Knut Bry. Reverso: Jaime
del Val, Metabody.

367
SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW.
 Europe is a process, always in fieri, something that is indefinitely becoming truth,
while facing a double risk: either to consolidate, still, as a center of irradiation
or, conversely, to alienate itself, being attracted to a more powerful orbit. It is
itself only when it is expelled out of itself. Hence the constant need for reflection.
Logically, its fate may be expressed by an infinite judgment (‘Europe is not-Asia’),
so it suits the ambiguity of the term Occidens (‘the one who/ what dies’ – ‘the
one who/ what gives death.’) (Duque 2003, 439)1

Understanding Europe as a process is not an easy task. As a land that Europe as

is constantly under construction, it is marked by convulsion and a process
change as a result of the many unifications and separations; a place
where territorial boundaries do not always reflect the limits of identity.
In its current disposition, this conflicting area is the outcome of many
theories regarding delimitations and counter-delimitations, which
one way or another have shaped the continent’s physical reality. There
has been, and still is, a permanent need to build bridges, but also to
reinforce individual identities of this segregated land, especially in
areas that have suffered the deepest transformations. The processual
swing of consolidation and alienation that Duque detects reaffirms
the hypothesis of the permanent mismatch between the concept
“Europe” and Europe as a geographical space. Throughout a complex
project of permanent construction, some fundamental “other spaces”
–using Foucauldian terminology– are activated in some important
moments of European space-time that should be explored again from
the angle of modern historical perspectives which are coexistent and
differentiable, such as those concerning the centrality or disintegration
of the Union.
At this point, it may be useful to turn the gaze towards a specific
space within the European framework, although still marked by the
geopolitical rift between East and West. Boris Groys (2003; 2004)
has studied this fissure beyond the fall of the Berlin Wall from both
the postmodern and post-communist subjects, as two opposing faces
reflected one in the other and reinterpreted in the light not only of
their own identity, but also of the image of themselves received by

1 [T.A.]

369
 01

Specular their counterpart.2 While the postmodern subject appears “out of

confrontation the past into the future,” its post-communist other does it “out of
the future into the past.” Hence,  the reversal of temporal and causal
orders are specific to the post-communist subject, which underlines
the paradoxes of its own condition that have been revealed today in
the fields of political theory, daily life and art (Wurm 2007). This
“mirror game”3 between different realities is, according to Otxotorena

2 Groys’ understanding of specularity has much to do with the Foucaldian

discourse in Les mots et les choses (1966) on emulation, present in analogy and metaphor:
“by duplicating itself in a mirror the world abolishes the distance proper to it (...) But which
of these reflections coursing through space are the original images? Which is the reality
and which the projection? (...) emulation is a sort of natural twinship existing in things;
it arises from a fold in being, the two sides of which stand immediately opposite to one
another” (Foucault 2005, 22). In another sense, Fredric Jameson (1983, 114) also resorts
to specularity when specifying the conditions of the postmodern, but in a different way:
pastiche, imitation or parody are related to the “death of the subject” and individualism.
However, for Baudrillard (1983, 126) the screen and the network have substituted the
scene and the mirror.
3 This specularity would therefore overcome the one developed in the pre-
Cartesian logic of representation that José Luis Pardo (1992, 344) analyzes: “We are
the mirror in which the world is reflected, but we do not have a mirror in which to
reflect ourselves in order to see, on our part, the world.” [T.A.] On the other hand,
contemporary artists like Michelangelo Pistoletto (1967) use the mirror as a means to

370 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

(1992, 79), what constitutes the historical space of modernity, and not
the sequence “innovation-stability-crisis.” Quoting José Luis Pardo,
the author suggests that the crisis, which is postulated as the mark of
the closure of the modern, is its clearest signal of recognition.
The space in which this specular confrontation4 can be detected
with greater intensity is in the geographical barrier between the former
eastern and western blocs during the Cold War, in which intermediate
nations and states were subject to permanent contingency. Such is
the case of the former Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary or East Germany:
the heirs of the “Second World” that Jameson mentions in The Seeds
of Time (1994). Due to this interstitial situation, their recent history
suggests the gestation of contemporary Europe through numerous
evidences and from different points of view. The intensity of the crisis
period makes it possible to record not only the advance of capitalism
throughout the continent, but also the oppositions from both blocs,
which have crystallized into the current situation that can no longer
be understood as any kind of synthesis.
The case of Poland is significant for several reasons. First, its
historical and territorial indefiniteness depicts a nation in permanent
transformation that has barely maintained a fixed location or borders

explore self-awareness: “Man has always tried to unfold himself in order to try to know
himself. Recognizing one’s own image in the pool of water or in the mirror is, perhaps, one
of the first authentic hallucinations that man has experienced (...) Mind has constructed
representation from its own reflex base. And art has become one of the specialties of this
representation.” [T.A.]
4 It is worth recalling here the image of the confronted pavilions of Nazi Germany
and the Soviet Union of Paris in 1937. With regard to official spatiality, especially in
authoritarian regimes, there is a clear desire to show the image of the state as wielder
of power and manager of violence. Sudjic (2011) highlights the mimicry of architectural
projects from opposite regimes –Nazism and Stalinism–, which were placed face to
face at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1937. Both pavilions are equally bombastic
and intimidating, with a material and aesthetic treatment so similar that it is virtually
impossible to distinguish which is the one by Speer and which by Iofan, if not for the
obvious symbolic elements (the swastika, the hammer and sickle...) Turning to the current
situation, it is possible to check that this mimicry still operates, as seen through the prolific
reproduction of “architectures of spectacle.” However, this mimesis responds to the logic
of consumption and branding: iconic architecture not only provides an opportunity for
economic growth, but also for the supposed assertion of identity and meaning of a place
inserted within the global network.

371
 throughout its history. Secondly, as a result of this, the construction
of the contemporary Polish nation is quite recent and has been
strengthened with the conclusion of World War II and the territorial
disputes between Nazis and Soviets. The Stalinist influence on the
People’s Republic would continue until Stalin’s death, giving way to
a more flexible socialist government that would end up collapsing
for various reasons (the appearance of Solidarność Labor Union, the
popular reaction against communism or the changes in the USSR,
among others).5 Finally, as previously mentioned, Poland has become
part of the European project despite having a peripheral position with
regard to the western core. This is precisely why an understanding for
a plural, though fragmentary, vision of its geopolitical entity seems
unavoidable.
Dissolving The interstitial situation in which Poland is placed is directly
the city reflected in Warsaw, the capital that was once considered to be the
“Paris of the East” and razed by the Nazis during World War II.
David Crowley (2008) recalls the spatialization of the city through the
new urban imaginary that Polish architects and planners generated
by thinking the new Warsaw, whether from western or eastern
perspectives –or from the tension between both positions. Probably
one of the most explicit links between both realities before the
War was articulated by the architects and planners Szymon Syrkus
and Jan Chmielewski (1935a; 1935b), who in the early thirties
presented the plan Warszawa Funkcjonalna (“Functional Warsaw”)
to the International Committee for the Resolution of Problems in
Contemporary Architecture (CIRPAC, the elected executive body
elected of the CIAM). The fundamental concept of the plan lied in
the intermediate position of Warsaw within the continent, between
the most representative cities of the European West and East, that is,
Paris and Moscow.6 The plan, being extremely conceptual, went far

5 In fact, Poland was part of the cordon sanitaire –along with Finland, Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania and Romania– through which the Western powers would try to
reconfigure the map of Europe and isolate the Soviet Union after World War I
(Hobsbawm 1995, 32).
6 “(…) Paris and Moscow were not only symbolic centres of the East and
West: they were sometimes invoked –albeit often in caricature– to represent different
conceptions of the modern city. One might be described as the image of the utopic city:
the other as its heterotopic shadow” (Crowley 2008, 773–74).

372 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

02 03 04

05 06 07

08 09 10

373
 beyond the physical reality of the city. Through a renewed, complex
network of continental connections through land, sea or air, Warsaw
was imagined to transcend the material realm as a dissolved node
in tension between two opposite poles. This was the first plan that
graphically represented Warsaw’s strategic importance as a point of
contact between East and West,7 and it was based on this geopolitical
vantage point that the proposal was forged to dematerialize the
physical city and give way to land flows, communication, spatial
relations and intersections between areas, fields, the city and even
chaotic, peripheral regions. This disintegration was the logical
outcome of a precarious urban structure – which would practically
disappear after the War – and was triggered by the possibility
of producing a dramatic change in the landscape, as in a real-
life experiment on a tabula rasa that had long been the object of
discussion in architectural circles.8 Warszawa Funkcjonalna opened
up a new school of thought regarding land use in which the priority
was to create and expand urban networks and infrastructure, taking
advantage of Warsaw’s – and Poland’s – intermediate position in
the middle of the European continent. For Crowley (2008, 769),
not only did the plan represent a project of Warsaw as a European
city; it “intended to become Europe itself.” These connotations were
obviously called into question after the Second World War, after
the bombing and destruction of the Polish capital by the Nazis.
The reconstruction of the city, which had disappeared in more than
80%, led to the need for a radically different position within the new
geopolitical configuration of Europe, which was then completely
divided. In this context, the plan becomes even more suggestive: when

7 “(…)Warsaw would rise to become the biggest European city in the 20th
century ‘due to the fact that this is the place where East meets West and where the most
colossal exchange to be imagined, the exchange between the continents, would take
place’ (…) In Warsaw goods and men changed from the Russian broad gauge to trains of
European scale” (Kohlrausch 2008, 7).
8 The plan was presented during the CIRPAC meeting held in London in 1934,
where it earned no shortage of praise from members such as Le Corbusier and Walter
Gropius (Kohlrausch 2008, 10).

374 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

the physical city has really disappeared, all spaces are possible. This
gives way to the question: where to direct the gaze?9
The devastating effects of World War II led to a tough post-war
period during which practically all efforts were focused on the physical
and spiritual recovery of the country. The reconstruction of Warsaw’s
Old Town was the flagship project to start restoring the identity of
a nation. In 1945, the National Council approved the creation of
an Office for the Reconstruction of the Capital to carry out such
an ambitious project. Under the leadership of the architect and art
historian Jan Zachwatowicz, who had been appointed head of the
Office’s Department of Monumental Architecture, the reconstruction
of Old Warsaw was a tremendous work of anastylosis in which
debris materials after the bombing where reused for buildings and
ornaments. However, the immediate pre-war Warsaw would not be
the main model for the reconstruction; instead, the inspiration came
from the idealized paintings of the Italian vedutista Bernardo Bellotto
–pupil and nephew of Canaletto–, who had been court painter to the
King Stanislaus Augustus II in Warsaw from 1768 until his death.
Thus, the renewed core of the old Warsaw, made possible with the
work and resources of its people, appears as a phantasmagoric city
that exists but never was, blending the material remains of the present
and the imprecise images of the past. Today, it is almost impossible Dialectical
to find any trace of devastation and to distinguish between reality constellations
and imagination. Krzysztof Pijarski (2013) accounts how several
publications during the reconstruction time used to juxtapose images
taken from the same vantage point, but showing the city before and
after the reconstruction, as “dialectical constellations” evidencing the
uncanny transformation of the identity of the same place.10 The rest

9 The search for a reference is usual during the processes of state reconstruction
after the war. In a way, this has strong repercussions in cultural and artistic production,
both in official trends and in more eccentric ones. In East Germany, for example,
Arno Fischer’s photography presents, in an alternative way, the process of the Aufbau
through apparently banal everyday scenes opposed to the images of the reconstruction
disseminated by the government (Crowley and Reid 2002, 85–104). In the case of Poland,
this debate on references is extended in post-Stalinist art and the relation between Polish
art scene and the West (Rottenberg et al. 2009).
10 Among these publications, Pijarski (2013) mentions Warszawski tygodnik
ilustrowany (“The Capital. Warsaw Illustrated Weekly,” 1957); Nowa Warszawa w ilustracjach

375
 11 12

of the city, on the contrary, was to be completely built anew in order

to show a radically different image to the rest of the world: the image
of the capital of a modern socialist state reborn from the ashes of its
past.
Opposite It is evident that, initially, the Soviet Union would be the main
values reference point, and so the plans presented by the Party Secretary
Bołeslaw Bierut at the Party Congress in 1949 set the guidelines
(the so-called Dekret Bieruta) for the new image of the city, which
should reflect the opposite values from those of Western, bourgeois
modernism.11 Among the many constructions and plans that
were executed after the bombing, there is no doubt that the most
representative building of the new Warsaw is the Palace of Culture
and Science, which has dominated the skyline of the Polish capital
for years. Inaugurated in 1955, the massive skyscraper12 was a gift
by Stalin, who clearly intended to show the primacy of the Soviet
Union over its “satellite” states. But as the Union was gradually losing

(“New Warsaw in Illustrations,” 1955) and Leonard Sempoliński’s exhibition Warszawa

1945, presented at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in 1969.
11 “(…) we have to make up for inherited neglect. In architectural forms we
still find the heritage of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, whose expression in the field of
architecture are colourless, box-like houses, the symbols of dull formalism. Our architects
should, to a greater extent than now, draw on the sound traditions of our national
architecture, adapting them to the new goals and new possibilities of building process [sic],
and infusing into them a new socialist spirit.” J. Jacoby & Z. Wdowifiski, “Pałac Kultury i
Nauki im. Jozefa Stalina,” Sport i Turystyka, 1955 (quoted in Crowley 1994, 190).
12 32,000 square metres of concrete, 50,000 tonnes of steel, 540 km of pipes and
34,000,000 bricks were needed for the construction of the Palace (Crowley 1994, 191).

376 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

 13

strength in eastern Europe, architecture and institutional art lifted

off socialist realism and began to turn back to forms and languages of
abstract expression, thus building bridges, on the one hand, toward
the West and, on the other, to the origins of Eastern modernity,
rooted in futurism, suprematism and other avant-gardes, but also on
the historic production of religious icons and representations.13
Hence, the newly established People’s Republic of Poland started
a process of detachment from the cult of Stalin after his death in
1953, as it happened in other states linked to the Soviet Union, albeit
with different intensities. As expected, after years of censorship and
the rise of socialist realism as the official and unique artistic model,
states would appropriate the modes of expression of this “modern
art” which had been evolving since the late nineteenth century
in order to use it as a new code, as a way of joining the wave of
modernity and progress that was moving the rest of the world. But
even though this response may be logical, artistic production during
these years –not only in Poland– was often devoid of content in favor
of the iconic projection of the state itself. Given this indiscriminate
use of art and architecture as propaganda tools, transforming the
language of modernity in a mere rhetorical device, there were several
architects who somehow reacted against this official trend, seeking

13 In this regard, the magnificent work of the Russian orthodox priest and
polymath Pavel Florensky The Reverse Perspective (2006b) is revealing in the sense that
he interprets the codes of the orthodox icon in the light of mathematical thought and
avant-garde art. Other essays on the perception of art have been collected in Beyond Vision
(2006a).

377
 14 15

refuge precisely in art, in the ephemeral, where they would have the
chance to keep experimenting and proposing a new spatiality outside
the limits of state power. Although many of them had the approval
of the government, most of the major projects of these architects
were never built, due to the inability to execute any public project
that did not respond to the interests of the Party. In fact, working
in groups was one of the main strategies followed by architects
excluded for ideological reasons in order to remain active (Fudala
and Zamecznik 2010). Properly speaking, the group could not be
labelled as subversive or radical –like other artists and collectives that
would appear in the seventies and eighties to denounce the situation
of the Republic, as Akademia Ruchu14 or Claus Hänsel.15 But beyond
specific political positions, architects and artists like Oskar and Zofia
Hansen, Stanisław Zamecznik, Lech Tomaszewski or Wojciech Fangor
continued working for a new spatiality and new forms of expression
Space to restore human relations towards the spatial environment. It seems
between us no coincidence that the exhibition organized in 2010 at the Museum
of Modern Art in Warsaw around the work of Zamecznik and his
colleagues was entitled The space between us; a headline with strong

14 Akademia Ruchu is an artistic collective founded in 1975. In its early years, it

was closely linked to protest against Poland’s political system. One of their most famous
recordings is placed in the context of the workers’ strikes in Radom and Ursus in 1976,
in which the actors display a series of banners showing the verses of Anatol Stern’s poem
Europa (1929). [https://artmuseum.pl/pl/filmoteka/praca/akademia-ruchu-europa]
15 One of Hänsel’s most representative works consists of a collection of
six photographs taken in Wroclaw in 1981, showing the confrontation between the
government forces and Solidarność, through banners and subversive slogans that were
immediately eliminated by the police (Christ and Dressler (eds.) 2010).

378 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

Arendtian connotations. For Arendt, politics is not linked to man as
individual, but to all men (and women), and more specifically to the
space that arises between them (Zwischenraum, space-in-between). The
German philosopher explains it as follows:
(…) wherever human beings come together –be it in private or socially, be it in
public or politically– a space is generated that simultaneously gathers them into
it and separates them from one another. Every such space has its own structure
that changes over time and reveals itself in a private context as custom, in a social
context as convention, and in a public context as laws, constitutions, statutes,
and the like. Wherever people come together, the world thrusts itself between
them, and it is in this in-between space [Zwischenraum] that all human affairs
are conducted. (Arendt 2005, 106)

Spaces-in-between. Oskar Hansen and the Open Form.

The members of this group –who were friends and collaborators,
though never constituted a formal collective– were committed to
the exploration of spatial possibilities from the perspective of the
subject, breaking with previous tradition and seeking an interaction
between the object and the individual. In this regard, the exhibitions Space and
organized by Fangor and Zamecznik, Studium przestrzeni and Kolor w perception
przestrzeni (“Study of Space” and “Color in Space”, in 1958 and 1959
respectively), represent an unprecedented attempt in Poland to situate
artworks in space in a different and interactive way, appealing to the
visitors and seeking their perceptive involvement while placing the
concern about the perception of space into a museum beyond a visual
approach, using space as a material. Fangor started to experiment
in some of his paintings with what he called “positive illusive space” Positive
through optical illusions, in which figurative signs were inverted and illusive space
placed against blurry backgrounds, thus generating a spatial effect
(Szydłowski 2012). Previously, the artists had gone a step further in
Studiumprzestrzenizintegrowanej (“Study of integrated space”, 1957),
in which Hansen also participated. Links between artworks and the
interior and exterior spaces of the Zachęta gallery were sought through
gravitating elements. The building, which is currently the National
Gallery of Art, was completed in the early twentieth century and is
among the few buildings that survived the bombing in 1939. The
gallery is placed within an urban neo-classical piece that powerfully
stresses the space around it. With the Studium experimental

Spaces-in-between. Oskar Hansen and the Open Form 379

 16 17

18 19

20 21

380 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

exhibition, the conditions of this space –which had been designed
according to a central element– are re-thought and re-projected; a
space that, in fact, would had probably been obliterated and degraded
after the war. The introduction of floating elements responds to a
desire to introduce new artistic languages and place art out of the
museum rooms, but also to emphasize the hidden dimensions of that
space, related to movement and its ephemeral condition facing the
heavy structure of the gallery.
“Study of integrated space” was not the only project in the Transforming
Zachęta, but one of the few that were finally executed. Hansen, space
Zamecznik and Tomaszewski had also developed a project for
the expansion of the gallery in 1959, once again seeking for an
incomplete, flexible architecture in line with the theory of Open
Form developed by Hansen. Next to the old building, a metal cubic
structure would be placed (they had previously worked on a spherical
model). Partitions and floors would be created and modified by
means of adjustable prefabricated panels, while glass facades and
roofs would follow a similar system. Thus, the new gallery would not
have a definite form; rather, it would change according to the needs
of the moment, opposing the permanent structure of the previous
building. Some years later, Hansen embarked on a new project for
the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje (former Yugoslavia)
in 1966. This time, the construction was conceived in the form of a
mobile triangular framework using telescopic and rotational structures
operated by a hydraulic system. This enabled even more possibilities
in all dimensions. Once again, the building is seen as an infrastructure
that is not only intended to house artwork, but also to create it:
a space “dependent on the artistic projects” (Hansen, Obrist, and
Parreno 2004, 25). This kind of projects, coupled with his interest
in social and participative issues, drew Hansen towards groups like

Spaces-in-between. Oskar Hansen and the Open Form 381

 Team X and the situationists,16 who he claims inspired his Open Form
Theory (Hansen, Graf, and Graf 1971, 165).17
Closed form The work of Oskar Hansen must be globally understood as a
vs. Open form gradual construction and perfection of this theory, through which the
architect shaped his own particular model by projecting architectural
vision onto socio-spatial issues. In contrast with the inflexible and
central conception of space adopted by political power –the “closed
form”– came a new flexible, non-central and relative take on space
–the “open form.” Through the latter, individuals recovered their
agency and their ability to perceive and produce spaces. Under the
Theory of Open Form, architecture would be capable of generating
a support-space upon which each individual could perceive, generate
and adapt his/her own space according to specific needs, always as part
of a larger group.
Before continuing, it is important to contextualize the idea of
the “open form,” which was not exclusive of Hansen’s work. This
notion had been previously coined in 1915 by Heinrich Wölfflin
in Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1921, 133–67) in order to
distinguish between the tectonic, self-contained, closed form of the
Renaissance and the a-tectonic, open form of the Baroque. Through
the display of opposites –a common methodological strategy in
Wölfflin’s work–, the art historian set a basic framework to read
artistic and architectural form that would be later adopted by other
authors. The philosopher Helmuth Plessner (2011) used the term
during a lecture in 1932 (for the celebration of the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the Deutscher Werkbund) to articulate the influence
of nature and technology in modernist art and architecture and the
utopian quest for a new ideal resulting from this relation, that he
would precisely link to the open form.

16 Lech Tomaszewski was highly involved in the situationist movement.

He elaborated a series of topological studies on “non-orientable surfaces” relating
mathematical and artistic concepts, which were published in The Situationist Times (1963;
1964).
17 Hansen’s relationship with Team X, as well as that of other Eastern European
architects, has been reported at length in Stanek’s edited work on the so-called “Team 10
East” (2014).

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 22 23

Years later, the term would acquire certain relevance in philosophy

–with Henri Bergson’s “open society” (1935) that would be later
developed by Popper (1945)–, but especially in semiotics with
Umberto Eco’s Open Work (1989).18 The Italian author reflected
on the introduction of movement and multiplicity in arts –and
specifically in literature– as a means to encourage the active
involvement of the reader in the course of the work. This openness,
which was also present in Roland Barthes’ studies on the text and
the relation between reader and author, does not entail that the work
can be conceived as a mere “conglomeration of random components
ready to emerge from the chaos in which they previously stood and
permitted to assume any form whatsoever”; rather,
[t]he “openness” and dynamism of an artistic work consist in factors which make
it susceptible to a whole range of integrations. They provide it with organic
complements which they graft into the structural vitality which the work already
possesses, even if it is incomplete. This structural vitality is still seen as a positive
property of the work, even though it admits of all kinds of different conclusions
and solutions for it. (Eco 1989, 20)

18 Although there are no references to this particular work, Hansen was aware of
Eco’s notion of the open work through his book Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994),
that Hansen mentions in Zobaczyć świat (2005b, 21).

Spaces-in-between. Oskar Hansen and the Open Form 383

 Spaces of All these ideas that were developed throughout the twentieth
transition century crystallized in an emergent generation of architects who,
raised under the precepts of the Modern Movement, rejected its
impersonal, functionalist and traffic-oriented approaches in favor
of an architecture that could restore the human dimension and the
wounds of the obsolete Fordist city. The so-called Team X appeared
in the mid-fifties within and against the CIAM, as a plural group
of architects (with Jaap Bakema, Aldo van Eyck, Alison and Peter
Smithson or Georges Candilis among them) who understood
architecture from a social, collective perspective, while at the
same time situating the individual in the core of the city, after its
degradation during the war.19 The search for in-between spaces was
also a major topic for the group, which distanced itself from the
Fordist discourse about the urban. Instead, their position “was marked
by a proliferation of debates about ‘intermediary spaces,’ ‘semi-public,’
‘semi-private,’ ‘spaces of transition,’ ‘spaces of negotiation,’ and ‘urban
voids’” (Stanek 2013, 121) that still resonate today, as it has been
argued in previous chapters.
The influence of the team on Hansen’s work is obvious, since
he shared many of the visions and objectives that emerged from its
activity. In fact, the Polish architect attended some of the international
meetings in which Team X participated: his proposals for the Zachęta
gallery, the Linear Continuous System and the museum in Skopje
were discussed in the last CIAM in Otterlo in 1959 and during
the Team X meeting in Urbino in 1966, through which he made a

19 In 1962, a special issue of Architectural Design edited by Alison Smithson was

launched under the title of Team 10 Premier. The journal collected diverse texts and
impressions of the members of the group (including Hansen) from a heterogeneous
perspective, with the purpose of echoing the multiple voices that were part of it and not
establishing a common ground, but a polyphonic knowledge. The following excerpt by Jaap
Bakema (previously published in Carré Bleu, 1961) reflects somehow the general objective
of the team: “New society will provide man with opportunities so that he will be able to
maintain an individual relation to total life: the right to have a personal opinion about life.
So we should create for men, by technical means, physical, psychological and aesthetic
conditions, so that he may have the possibility to define in space his personal opinion
about life. Constructed volume is a tremendous instrument in attainment of this goal”
(Smithson (ed.) 1962).

384 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

critical appraisal of the form-function relationships established in
contemporary architecture and urban planning (Scott 2014, 138).
Undoubtedly, the idea of an open form, flexible and adaptable Openness
to the needs and desires of the individual and the collective, had and democracy
strong political connotations, especially after the terrible experience
of war and totalitarian regimes that had affected the entire world
–hence the relevance it acquired for Hansen and his circle in a
country directly affected by the Nazi attacks and the Soviet influence.
The possibility of restoring individual agency was essential for the
consolidation of democratic societies. Hence, the city, as the stage
for democracy and public life, should allow a certain freedom and
enhance the capacity of the individual to produce his/her own
space and interact with the others to generate a collective one. This
resulted in a growing interest for open, undetermined architecture
that did not impose absolute representations of space: the infinite,
the evolutionary and the labyrinthine became recurring spatial
themes to express democratic values such as openness, tolerance
and freedom (Petit 2014). As Eco did with his open work, the open
form was not regarded as a chaotic, “arbitrary projection of the self,”
but as a means to produce an “ambiguous, complex but structured
architectural space” as an “alternative to the fatal ideas of mobility
and disintegration” (Norberg-Schulz 1971, 114).20 In this regard,
urban open spaces, and particularly spaces of play as the highest
embodiment of freedom and creativity, started to deserve special

20 Norberg-Schulz (1971, 114) detected certain similarities between his concept

of “intermediary object” (Norberg-Schulz 1965) and Van Eyck’s “intermediate spaces,”
Hansen’s “open form” and Venturi’s “difficult whole.” However, other architects and
urbanists were suspicious of the “open” approach precisely because of its indeterminacy
and the design difficulties it involved, as well as the “uncritical” use that may be made of the
term. Among them was Aldo Rossi, who expressed his doubts about openness during the
10th Convention of the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica, held in Trieste in 1965: “It is
difficult, if not impossible, to define the formal and spatial terms of urban transformation
within the presumed global vision of planning because planning often presumes a demiurgic
design of the entire territory... From the point of view of the design of the city it is
difficult to understand the exact meaning of expressions such as ‘open project.’ These
expressions are similar to such very fashionable aesthetic categories as ‘open form,’ and
they are mystifications in view of the fact that any design intervention addresses a problem
by means of a form. It is only the possibility of a closed, defined form that permits other
forms to emerge” (quoted in Aureli 2008, 65).

Spaces-in-between. Oskar Hansen and the Open Form 385

 24 25

attention in urban design. The socio-cultural dimension of the play

element explored by Huzinga in Homo Ludens (1949) or the later
situationist influence and introduction of the urban dérive were some
of the aspects that sustained the theoretical basis for urban spaces
open to free movement, creation and agency, such as Van Eyck’s
playgrounds for children in Amsterdam or Isamu Noguchi’s open
Open city, playspaces. These places introduce the relational dimension of space
open society also with regard to the human body, which is able to produce its own
space without specific material references or fix anchors, as Giacometti
had already explored in his Piazza or Three Men Walking (1947–48).
At the same time, Jane Jacobs or Richard Sennett (2014) would use
the term “open city” to define an urban environment which privileges
social relation, through elements like passages, incomplete forms and
development narratives.
Both dimensions –architectural form and social commitment–
were essential in Hansen’s theory, and were also present in the work
of most of his Polish colleagues. Thus, the Open Form consists of a
theoretical development based on the artistic-architectural form as a
recipient of the changes and the contingency of the context in which
it is inserted. It is not only about the relocation of the object, but the
search for an “open society,” in which urbanism, architecture and art
would favor the participation of citizens in the generation of space
and the world that surrounds them. This intertwining of form and
subject is explained and analyzed from diverse scales (macro-mezzo-
micro) and projects (most of them unrealized) in Hansen’s major
written work, Towards Open Form (Hansen 2005a).

386 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

 The obstacles that Hansen faced to build his architectural projects
were probably one of the main factors that triggered his career as
educator, which allowed him to concentrate on his theory and its
materialization through pedagogical experiments. Hansen himself
had been a brilliant student who, thanks to a scholarship of the
French government, had the opportunity to extend his training
with Pierre Jeanneret and Fernand Léger (who highly influenced
his artistic facet), as well as attending the CIAM Congress in
Bergamo and the CIAM International Summer School in London
in 1949 –in which he won a prize in a competition for a housing
development (Murawska-Muthesius 2010). Hence, he was aware
of the importance of pedagogy and training for the architects of
the future, who could become a fundamental vehicle to transform
society. He worked as a university teacher until 1986; first as teaching
assistant at the Interior Design Department of the Warsaw Academy
of Fine Arts, then as lecturer at the Planes and Solid Figures Studio
and the Visual Structures Studio at the Faculty of Sculpture, always
from an integrated, transdisciplinary approach. After receiving the
title of associate professor in 1968, he would be appointed head
of the Interdepartmental Faculty of Integrated Fine Arts at the
Academy. Although he finally retired in 1983, he would continue
his pedagogical work until his death, organizing and participating in
diverse seminars and workshops.21
Some exercises and methodological tools developed by Hansen Active
are particularly interesting from the perspective of negativity negatives
and the spatial interaction with the other. Indeed, the interplay
between subjects and their space would be a central topic in his
courses, developed through exercises deepening in the formation
of architectural space, like the “active negatives” (aktywny negatyw),
which entailed a “sensory recording” of a specific space through plastic
means. Similar to the cast of an empty space, active negatives did
not, however, reproduce physically the exact void in between built

21 His labor was also recognized abroad, since he was invited as lecturer and
teacher on several occasions in other countries. During his stays in Helsinki, Delft, Oslo,
Trondheim, Brussels, Antwerp, etc. he had the chance to meet other teachers and
students like Lucien Kroll or Svein Hatløy. The latter would later found the Bergen School
of Architecture, whose educational program is highly inspired by Hansen’s methods.

Spaces-in-between. Oskar Hansen and the Open Form 387

 26 27 28

elements and objects –otherwise, it would be a “passive negative”

(Hansen 2005a)–, but rather translate the direct experience of the
individual perceiving space.
Ephemeral The interaction of students with basic objects, forms and colors
tools was always present in Hansen’s exercises, in which the subjective,
emotional factor always played an important role. Probably the most
successful educational experiments and about which students felt
more enthusiastic were those conducted out of the school, in open,
natural spaces. Following a ludic approach, students recognized the
environment and interacted with it through ephemeral constructions
and interventions with diverse materials and simple objects, such
as paper or textile sheets. These workshops were often filmed and
photographed in order to register and document the process and
generate new material for analysis, and filmic language would
progressively acquire relevance in Hansen’s courses and in his student’s
careers –in fact, some of them would become established filmmakers,
such as Zofia Kulik, Paweł Kwiek (KwieKulik), Artur Żmijewski,
Grzegorz Kowalski or Wiktor Gutt (Wieder and Zeyfang (eds.)
2014). Sessions like Gra na Wzgórzu Morela in 1971 –which marked
a turning point in her mentor’s method, according to Kulik (2014,
75)– or Po Omacku in 1975 show some of this outdoor spatial games
in which interaction with other people, elements and the surrounding
landscape is evident.22

22 Both films can be accessed online through the film library of the Museum of
Modern Art in Warsaw: http://tpm.artmuseum.pl/en/filmoteka

388 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

 29

Hansen would apply this kind of strategies in his built

interventions, which were often reduced to exhibition and pavilionaire
spaces. The transformation of “closed” spaces by means of light
structures and ephemeral constructions offered new perspectives
and possibilities with regard to perception and experience, also
interacting with other elements such as sound or music (like in the
design of the Music Pavilion for the Contemporary Music Festival
in Warsaw in1958 or the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in 1962,
which would allow him to speak of “open music.”) However, from
a completely different scale, the Hansens’ urban projects would
represent the most radical application of the Open Form Theory and
its political and social implications. Despite the architect’s utopian
view – which earned him much criticism from certain sectors
(Szczerski 2014, 111; Stanek 2014, 232) –, the truth is that the
system had been designed to actually be constructed and implemented
in the following years, and a series of “pilot projects” were conducted
to test its efficiency and smooth running.
Anti-city, anti-monument.
Although Hansen’s relationship with the goverment was not Linear
particularly good, he openly sought the State’s involvement in his Continuous
Linear Continuous System (LCS) in order to bring the proposal System
to fruition. At the end of the day, a project of such sheer scope
required a supraterritorial agent with the capacity to organize space
on different scales and make the project viable, given that Hansen’s
vision ventured beyond strictly architectural boundaries. The idea was
to create a spatial model based on an underlying territorial structure
that would guide urban growth, encourage mobility and enhance the

Anti-city, anti-monument 389

 30 31

services offered to citizens. It is important to note that, during the first

half of the seventies, Poland’s urban population showed significant
growth, which would culminate in a financial boom that fostered an
optimistic atmosphere with a new outlook on the future. It became
possible to visualize a strong, socialist Poland ranking among the most
developed countries of the continent.
“How will we live in the year 2000” (Jak będziemy mieszkać w roku
2000), a documentary film by Jerzy Kaden (1971) produced by public
television, showed some of the ideas and projects that were on the
table at that time with a view to breaking away from the recent past.
In contrast with a still precarious present, the film showed images of
large urban hubs linked by hundreds of miles of roadways and public
transport networks, encouraging the mobility of its inhabitants, who
would live in modern, prefabricated buildings with state-of-the-art
technology at their disposal. In fact, the last part of the documentary
focuses on housing and its layout, showing ideas that were clearly
influenced by metabolists and by new architectural concepts emerging
in the West: basic units grouped in clusters, combining private spaces
with public areas, in close connection with mobility systems.23 Thus,
the country’s spatial arrangement in more or less delimited industrial
cities was finally overcome and gave way to a vision of urban structure
as a single system based on large development hubs connected to

23 The projects from the documentary were developed during the same years as
LCS and show some similarities: for instance, the use of linear systems linked to transport
lines, or the creation of architectural frameworks for housing, as proposed by Jacek
Damięcki. Other housing ideas included the dom ogród (garden-house) by Tadeusz Kaden
or the domy wiszące (hanging homes) of Wieslaw Nowak.

390 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

one another and linked to other smaller nodes. The functions of
the city were thus bound to the entire expanse of the land. It was
in this setting that Oskar Hansen developed the idea of the Linear
Continuous System, though this entailed a much deeper political
dimension than the proposals shown in Kaden’s documentary.
Hansen defined LCS as an “anti-city” –antymiasto (Hansen and Anti-city
Zalski 1969, 2)–: a concept that clashed with the feudal model,
which was created as a defence against outside enemies, and with the
capitalist model, which arose against the working class as the inside
enemy (Hansen and Zalski 1969, 2; Stanek 2014, 213). To some
extent, the theory of LCS developed during the sixties and seventies
introduced Poland to the distinction that Henri Lefebvre would
later make in his work between “the city” and “the urban,” which
represented quite a turning point for tackling urban issues in the
years to come. The city as a stable enclosure lost ground to the urban
lifestyle, in which space is arranged and organized with no distinctions
based on relationships that go beyond the city’s physical space. So it
was confirmed by Hansen himself on various occasions as he argued
that LCS consisted “in creating a common ‘house’ for those living in
cities and in the countryside”(Hansen 1969, 2).
Just a simple glance over the plans and blueprints of LCS reveals
the strong influence it had from the Linear City model of Arturo
Soria and Mata and the zoning systems promoted by the Athens
Charter. Oskar Hansen admitted on several occasions that he had
drawn inspiration from Soria, Le Corbusier –for the zoning strategies,
but also for Plan Obus in Algiers or Zlín in Czechoslovakia– and from
Nikolái Miliutin and Iván Leonidov’s plans for Magnitogorsk.24 Yet,
beyond the fact that they share a linear structure and certain purely
modern architectural and urban planning strategies, Hansen’s project
features a series of differences that set it apart from all others. First,
LCS puts every dimension of land to use. Despite the importance of
longitudinal direction, Hansen invested careful effort in designing
cross sections to ensure optimal mobility between housing, the

24 Andrzej Szczerski (2014) suggests other influences such as Roadtown by Edgar

Chambless in 1910, recalling that the idea of LCS arose from a debate on linear cities in
the CIAM’s circles, which would also give rise to proposals such as The Jersey Corridor by
Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves in 1965.

Anti-city, anti-monument 391

 workplace and leisure areas. The system’s overall layout consisted of
three parallel strips: a main strip containing housing, shops and light
industry; another strip combining rural areas and woodland with
traditional clusters and the mining industry (a deeply-rooted sector
in Poland); and, last of all, a strip for heavy industry. The main strip,
in turn, contained a central area for the means of communication
and, on the sides, workplaces, shops, cultural spaces, housing and,
lastly, green areas. All of them would be linked by longitudinal and
cross-sectional lines designed to run at different speeds to ease the
commute from home to the workplace. LCS was naturally conceived
for a socialist, working-class model of society, but also included areas
for leisure, family time and collective interaction. Secondly, Hansen’s
proposal was not limited to a basic outline, but had been planned
down to a micro scale for the actual territory of the People’s Republic
of Poland, bearing in mind existing geographical and urban features,
as well as geopolitical aspects. This fact particularly sets LCS apart
from all other similar proposals that stemmed from the socialist
imaginarium: it was not a utopian proposal, but one designed to
be implemented. Thus, in 1974, Hansen submitted a report on his
proposal to the Polska 2000 committee, which had been established in
1969 by the Polish Academy of Sciences to create prospective visions
for the country up until the year 2000 (Stanek 2014, 224 ff). So it was
that in 1972 a scheme emerged to implement LCS on a national level,
according to which four large constructed belts would be arranged
from north to south (taking advantage of the opening onto the Baltic
Sea) and would be linked by narrow arms – for industry, farming, etc.
– to existing urban clusters, thus equipping the land with a whole new
infrastructure network without altering the traditional structure.25
Rather than a tabula rasa operation, the scheme involved layering in a
similar way to that presented by Syrkus and Chmielewski for Warsaw.
European In fact, the influence of these two figures is clearer in another of
structure Hansen’s diagrams showing a hypothetical extension of LCS to cover
the entire European continent, establishing connections between

25 According to Hansen’s calculations, the belts would be capable of housing 12

million inhabitants in 400 km and would be arranged as follows: the most westerly strip,
along the river Oder; the next strip, from Upper Silesia to Central Pomerania; the third
strip, along the river Vistula; and the most easterly strip, from Przemyśl to the Masurian
Lake District (Szczerski 2014, 94).

392 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

 32 33

eastern and western states. Here again, the aim is to create a system
capable of linking Europe, with Poland playing a key role.
Lastly, if there is anything that sets LCS apart from other linear
proposals, it is the social and political aspect. Its feasibility depended
on the commitment of the government and the authorities in terms
of planning, given that this was a project that did not merely aim
to provide the land with a functional urban system. In addition
to ensuring mobility from home to work and highlighting the
importance of collective areas and community leisure spaces, the
model encouraged individual initiative by having residents build
their own homes. This involved a dual process: on one hand, each
individual had the freedom to create their own space in accordance
with their situation; on the other hand, each person’s interests
would have to be adjusted to suit the community, meaning that
the individual process was inextricably entwined with the collective
one. The flow of food, transport, resources and the like, as well as
the pursuit of greater efficiency in those processes, fostered what
Łukasz Stanek (2014, 220) defined as “biotechnological urbanism.”
In essence, LCS represented a laboratory, a support on which to test
lifestyles in an entirely socialist state based on an infrastructure in the
Marxist sense of the term; i.e., upon a material basis to determine
social development and change.26

26 Hansen believed that Open Form would provide a solution to the problem of
the Great Number (Hansen 1961), i.e. the difficulties arising from a gradual increase in

Anti-city, anti-monument 393

 34

35 36

Hansen’s proposal was taken with varying degrees of enthusiasm

by the authorities and by his colleagues, and although some believed
that it would fit in well with Polska 2000, it was eventually dismissed
on the basis that it failed to fulfil financial and technological criteria
(Szczerski 2014, 111), not to mention the criticism of the official
plans that Hansen’s documents contained. Moreover, during the
second half of the seventies, the financial situation that had spurred
people’s interest in the future of the nation began to crumble and,

population and in social and spatial needs, by means of individual and group initiatives. “The
Open Form (...) does not exclude the energy of the client’s initiative but on contrary treats
it as a basic, organic, and inseparable component element. (…) The Open Form is to aid
the individual in finding himself in the collective, to make him indispensable in the creation
of his own surroundings” (Hansen and Hansen 2014, 7 ff).

394 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

with it, the prospective plans and visions for a fully developed country
were cast aside as new concerns emerged in the economic and political
spheres.
Hansen nevertheless managed to carry out two prototypes that
would be used to put some of the premises of LCS and Open Form
into practice. These prototypes were the residential complexes named
Juliusz Słowacki in Lublin (completed in 1967) and Przyczółek
Grochowski in Warsaw (completed in 1973). The real circumstances
of these two projects prevented Hansen and his wife, Zofia, from
implementing a proposal as radical as LCS, and the difficulties they
encountered with the various agents involved throughout the course
of the project caused them a sense of disappointment (Kędziorek
and Stanek 2012, 4). Despite this, some progress was achieved in the
participative process by collaborating and conferring with various
agents –housing co-operatives, neighbors, sociologists and the like– in
the form of interviews, surveys and meetings. In fact, some flexible
modules were built in Juliusz Słowacki to be completed by their
residents, many of whom remain to this day.27
Hansen’s proposal anticipates a comprehensive and systematic
vision of the city by means of an urban plan and architecture that
act as the substrate to create social space. It is interesting to compare
the premises of LCS with the proposals that Stan Allen would
formulate years later regarding urban infrastructure planning. The
most distinctive features of this formula are that it “prepares the
ground for future building and creates the conditions for future
events;” and that it is open to change, as it “recognizes the collective
nature of the city and allows for the participation of multiple actors”.
It also aims to “accommodate local contingency while maintaining

27 This system would later be developed in an experimental project by the UN

for social housing in Lima, Peru (the PREVI Experimental Housing Project) in 1968. The
plan put forward by Hansen and Hatløy consisted in a group of houses arranged in several
parallel belts which would initially provide a basic structure that would be gradually
transformed according to each unit’s needs. Although the expectations developed under
the LCS concept were never entirely fulfilled, Oskar and Zofia were able to materialize
some of their ideas, which would later be retrieved and construed by the generations to
come; in fact, the idea of semi-built housing is very similar to some more recent projects in
Latin America, such as Quinta Monroy in Iquique (Chile), by Elemental studio.

Anti-city, anti-monument 395

 overall continuity”; “organize and manage complex systems of
flow, movement, and exchange” which, in short, “work as artificial
ecologies” and “allow detailed design of typical elements or repetitive
structures, facilitating an architectural approach to urbanism” (Allen
1999, 55–57). However, for Allen, the anti-city is not a place of
chaos, boundlessness and fragmentation in the sense that the term has
been used to designate other phenomena such as the American sprawl.
Instead, it is an attempt to redirect the forces of urbanization through
the vital –necessary and unrenounceable– counter-forces of social
and political reality so as to retrieve the most humane values of the
traditional city. Therefore, the anti-city emerged as a reverse concept,
by taking what works and applying it as an antidote to a compact
city that is enclosed in itself; an antidote that, nevertheless, needs the
city in order to be effective. In the words of Stefano Boeri (2011, 38),
despite their contextual and ideological distance,
the Anti-city is nothing other than the city which we are aware of or where we
live; it is not a form of cancer and nor does it represent the death of the city.
It is an underground city which has always flowed in the veins of every urban
community.

It has been already pointed out that approaches to the West became
usual while the Stalinist influence was progressively diluting during
the “thaw years.” This fact has had a serious impact on the symbolic
and representational level in a country with such a convulsive history
during the twentieth century. Even today, the debate about the
pertinence of certain monuments, symbols and memorials is still alive:
with the process of de-communization of the country, the focus was
displaced from the victims of fascism (victims of Stalinism has been
obliterated during many years) to a certain “Christianization” of the
memorial sites, especially Auschwitz after the visit of the Pope in 1979
and the commemorations of catholic martyrs like Maksymilian Kolbe
or Edith Stein (Ochman 2013, 36 ff). In 2016, the Polish Institute of
National Remembrance started a campaign to urge local authorities
to take monuments to the Soviet armed forces (the so-called
“monuments of gratitude”) off the streets and to change the names of
places related to the communist period, and one year later, president
Duda has signed into law a bill on the prohibition of communist
propaganda that regulates the demolition of Soviet-era monuments.

396 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

On the opposite side, the success of memorial sites for the victims of
National Socialism like Auschwitz or Treblinka, which have become
major tourist attractions, has generated unpleasant situations like the
frivolous selfies that tourists take and post to social media.
During the fifties, the need to remember the victims and show the The Auschwitz
brutality of war to the rest of the world was a major issue in Poland competition
and, in consequence, different commissions and competitions were
organized in order to materialize the generalized feelings of loss and
anger, but also hope and memory. Auschwitz-Birkenau was perhaps
the most relevant and controverted site in which to intervene for all
the horror and pain it represented. Therefore, in order to restore the
memory of the prisoners, a major competition was organized in 1957
by the International Auschwitz Committee (IAC) –an association of
Holocaust survivors– in cooperation with the International Union
of Architects to design an appropriate monument in Auschwitz II-
Birkenau, with the support of the Communist Party and the Polish
government. Several relevant artists and architects were appointed as
members of the jury, such as Jaap Bakema, Odette Elina, Giuseppe
Perugini, August Zamoyski or Henry Moore, who acted as chairman
(Murawska-Muthesius 2002). The British sculptor’s stay in Poland
has recently been commemorated through an exhibition in 2010,
after being treated as one of the greatest exponents of the much
reviled Western formalism, so different from the Soviet realist canon
(Murawska-Muthesius 2010). However, his popularity in Poland
and the thaw after Stalin’s death were decisive for his appointment as
member of the jury.
Oskar Hansen had already met Henry Moore during a stay in
England in 1949, and the work of the sculptor would influence
his theory of Open Form (Murawska-Muthesius 2010). The Polish
architect was one of the most recognized participants who submitted
their proposals –together with Carel Visser or Joseph Beuys– and
he constituted a team with his wife Zofia, Edmund Kupiecki, Jerzy
Jarnuszkiewicz, Julian Pałka and Lechosław Rosiński. The project they
presented in the second phase (Droga, “The Road”), which resulted
from the evolution of an initial proposal (Płyta, “The Slab”), was very
different from the rest of the entries, since it moved substantially away
from the characteristics and languages of the monumental.

Anti-city, anti-monument 397

 37 38

For some time after deciding to take part in this competition we felt helpless.
No gesture, no form of expression, no colour could, in our eyes, express,
commemorate, or celebrate what happened in this place. The realisation of
the fact that we are to create a symbol of the 20th century’s morality required
responsibility and humbleness from us. We all agreed that what we would design
had to be an expression of silence. (Hansen 2005a, 130)

The Road “The Road” consisted of a seventy-meter wide and one-kilometer

long walkway paved with black asphalt that crossed diagonally the
site of Birkenau, going through the traces and remains of crematoria
and barracks. The non-figurative character of the proposal and the
lack of any visual or textual reference were a means to strike the
visitor through a radical bodily and affective experience of absence
oscillating between tragedy and life.28 The black road traversed the
place without practically altering it or deforming itself, negating the
orthogonal structure of the camp. The line did not even cross the
main gate through which trains entered, since nobody, according to
the architects, should go through that entrance again. No recognizable

28 “The perspective of the wide, black slab of ‘The Road’ introduces the viewer,
fresh from of their everyday existence, into the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp
from the back (…)There is no single place of homage – the entire camp is a scene of a
tragic experience (…) Finally, when we reach the end of “The Road,” we enter the open
space of the fields...We return to life, to appreciate its value and to see our everyday
problems in a different light” (Hansen 2005a, 130).

398 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

 39

paths were remarked or reproduced, such as the itinerary followed by

the prisoners from their arrival until their execution –a gesture that
would have been quite predictable in an intervention of this type. The
only changing element would be the passage of time, which would
be noticed through the growth of woods and wild flowers and the
gradual ruining of the built elements.
Despite the positive assessment of the project by the jury, it did Negative
not meet the expectations of the surviving victims and their families affects
because of its “purely negative” character (Murawska-Muthesius
2002). Seweryna Szmaglewska, a survivor of Auschwitz, claimed that
Hansen’s work could hurt the feelings of the victims because of its
too theoretical background: “This is great for a poster, an illustration
or a book cover, but the materialised vision, transferred onto the
vast area of the camp as a wide road covered by snow or soiled by
mud during pilgrimages by many thousands, can completely destroy
this meaning.” (Pietrasik 2010) Moore, as chairman, had to finally
reject the project for its “lack of emotional content.” Oskar Hansen
withdrew from the competition after having been asked to continue
in the next phase, which obviously would have forced him to radically
transform the project and merge it with other proposals.

Anti-city, anti-monument 399

 Negative “The Road” has been read as counter- or anti-monument
sculpture (Murawska-Muthesius 2002; 2010; Maliszewska 2017).29 If sculpture
is often identified with the representative and the monumental
(hence its verticality and symbolic character), Rosalind Krauss (1983,
35) warns that this identification was already put into question
with Rodin’s Gates of Hell and the monument to Balzac at the end
of the nineteenth century. These are sculptural works that failed as
monuments, since there are multiple replicas of them throughout the
world and none of them remains in their original location. Thus, a
modern way of understanding the sculptural from the negative and
the experience of loss emerged. In this sense, Murawska-Muthesius
(2002; 2010) establishes an interesting comparison between
Moore’s and Hansen’s approaches to the problem of representation.
While Henry Moore –whose Recumbent Figure (1958) in front
of the UNESCO headquarters in Paris is considered to be an
exponent of Western modernist sculpture– was committed to the
monumentalization of form, Hansen did just the opposite, choosing
to put the focus not on the work, but on the observer as agent;
in other words, not only spatializing, but also monumentalizing
experience when the work itself is nothing more than emptiness, a
loss. From this perspective, the sculptural element is understood as
pure negativity (Krauss 1983, 36).30 While Groys would later recall

29 Quentin Stevens, Karen A. Franck and Ruth Fazakerley (2012) have recently
explored the notion of the counter-monumental as a critical mode of commemorative
practice in which power relations are spatialized in a different way by shifting the traditional
approaches around the subject, the site, visitor experience and meaning. They also
distinguish between those that adopt anti-monumental strategies (counter to traditional
principles) and those which they call “dialogic,” which counter a specific existing monument
and the values it represents. In this regard, The Road would be an anti-monument, like
other Holocaust memorials like the one by Jochen and Esther Gerz in Hamburg. Examples
of dialogical monuments are Henry Moore’s Goslar Warrior or Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans
Memorial in Washington.
30 Based on the concept of the sculptural understood as a combination of
exclusions (not-landscape, not-architecture), Krauss (1983) develops a Klein group to
relate the different environments from their understandings both positively and negatively.
Although the method is purely structuralist, it manages to establish complex relations
between the architectural and the landscape, the built and the unbuilt, to explain the
transition between the traditional sculptural and the sculptural in the expanded field, which
appears when problematizing oppositions among which the modern category of sculpture
is located. In this new field, the author places artists such as Robert Morris, Robert

400 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

 40 41

Benjamin’s “loss of the aura” to speak of the artistic installation as a

reversal of reproduction –consisting in the extraction a copy of an
anonymous circulation space and placing it in a topologically defined
context–, the work of Hansen already pointed to these “dislocations
and relocations (…)deterritorializations and reterritorializations
(…) de-auratizations and re-auratizations” that characterize the art
of our time, not defined by a certain form but precisely through its
“topological inscription” (Groys 2007; 2009). In “The Road,” the scale
of the project reinforces this element, since it could be considered
an installation on an architectural scale, in which space no longer
represents a mere context; rather, it becomes the very material of the
work.
At the same time, Hansen’s proposal is a counter-monument that Counter-
no longer responds to the central logic of the commemorative element monument
around which space is organized; instead, it is the visitor –and not the
architect or sculptor, as Giedion, Léger and Sert (1958) pointed out in
their Nine Points on Monumentality (1943)– the one who produces it
and provides it with meaning by walking through it and experiencing
it with his/her own body. There is no intention to transgress the
objectives of the construction of the memorial, but it rejects the
rhetorical spatiality of the traditional monument. Horizontality, non-
referentiality and the introduction of the temporal factor through
the path and the dynamic transformation of living and non-living
elements are the strategies that Hansen and his team used to reverse
the logic of the monumental.

Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, Walter De Maria, Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt,
Christo or Bruce Nauman.

Anti-city, anti-monument 401

 42 43

Warsaw under construction.

A dream In the early nineties, Poland experienced the definitive transition from
of Warsaw a socialist planned economy into a free-market one. The establishment
of a democratic state under the presidency of Lech Wałęsa and his
successors was finally consolidated with the accession to the European
Union in 2004, together with nine other countries; most of them,
like Poland, had been part of the former Eastern bloc. Nowadays,
the Soviet influence and the socialist past haunt the country as an
undesirable ghostly presence for most of the population. In Polish
cities, massive concrete residential blocks and gigantic industrial areas
(such as Nowa Huta in Kraków or the large panel-block housing
estates in Łódź and many other cities) are overshadow by renewed
and lively city centers, shopping malls and even skyscrapers in the
case of Warsaw. The Palace of Culture and Science, once the symbol
of the capital and almost the last nostalgic redoubt of Stalinism after
1989, has become just one of the many towers that shape the city
skyline. The lack of fondness for the building among the inhabitants
can be illustrated through a popular joke that goes that it provides the
best view of Warsaw because you cannot see the building if you are
inside it. In 2020, Foster and Partner’s Varso Tower will be the highest

402 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

building in Warsaw, definitely outranking the Stalinist palace. A more
radical attempt to surpass it –although only virtually– is depicted
in Tymek Borowski’s Gruz nad Warszawa (“Rubble Over Warsaw,”
2015), in which a giant column made of 18 million cubic meters of
debris which remained in Warsaw after World War II emerges from
the center of the city. The work was exhibited in Spór o odbudowę
(“Reconstruction Disputes,” 2015) during the seventh edition of the
Warsaw Under Construction festival; such an event gives an idea of the
persistence of the debate around the urban and its image in Poland.
Emblematic projects are increasingly occupying space in the city,
radically transforming its image through global architectural languages
and gestures: such is the case of Varso Tower, but also the Marriot
Hotel –built in 1989 and regarded as the formal and ideological
counterpart of the Palace (Klein 2014, 204)–, the curvilinear structure
of Złote Tarasy shopping mall or Libeskind’s residential complex Złota
44. This fact seems to reinforce Lidia Klein’s assertion (2014, 200)
that the proliferation of “architectural icons” is especially palpable in
the countries of the peripheral West, due to the need of legitimizing
their position and identity. Meanwhile, other uses of space, such as
small and chaotic street markets and bazaars, are being displaced
from their original locations to the suburbs, underground pedestrian
tunnels or integrated in bigger shopping malls, partially due to the
rising consumerism in post-socialist Poland (Kreja 2004).
In the documentary Sen Warszawy (“A Dream of Warsaw,” Confronting
Żmijewski 2005), Oskar Hansen appears with a group of the Palace
collaborators trying to visualize a proposal of the architect: a singular
tower that would virtually transform the skyline of the Polish capital
by confronting the dominant structure of the Palace. This action
brings us back to the initial subject of the mirror, which in this
case is manifested through analogy but also through irony, both
understood as conditions of our time and not as mere rhetorical
figures. For Otxotorena (1992, 122–23), paraphrasing Octavio Paz,
both are irreconcilable, since irony is born of linear and historical
time, while analogy proceeds from the manifestation of cyclic time
and is established as the foundation of mythical time. The latter,
being able to subsume differences without provoking a loss of
identity, is consecrated as a resource of thought to face complexity,

Warsaw under construction 403

 44

contrary to Baudelaire’s irony (“consciousness within evil”), with

his tense definition of the modern as “the transient, the fugitive,
the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and
the immutable” (Otxotorena 1992, 122).31 However, in Hansen’s
project it is possible to see how both, though irreconcilable, appear as
inseparable conditions of the same project. Facing the problem of the
Palace with regard to the form of the city, Oskar Hansen proposed
an imaginary skyscraper that did not respond to a certain political
ideology ( “closed form”), but instead was able to impregnate itself
with the action and interpretation of the users (an option that is,
nevertheless, ideologically linked to a particular interpretation of the
modern.) The form of the building contrasts with the Palace, but at
the same time resembles the Stalinist tower in scale and connotations.
Similarly, they are reflected in each other, in the search for an urban
referent that Hansen’s tower paradoxically puts into question, despite
the initially dialectical vocation of the project.
Beyond the internal logic of the intervention, and by placing the
model of the building outdoors to generate a false perspective, the
unlocatable is located in a time to which it does not belong. This
interplay of mirrors distorts the landscape of the city, which for a
moment is inserted in a non-existent time and space and in which the
Palace ceases to be, even ephemerally, the image of the imposition of a
power that has conditioned the city until our days.

31 [T.A.]

404 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

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Images.

01 German and Soviet Pavilions, Paris International Exhibition, 1937. Source: Everett
Collection.

02 Jan Chmielewski and Szymon Syrkus “Functional Warsaw.” Inter-maritime communication

(Baltic sea-Black sea) with respect to the great transcontinental way in its extension through
Central Europe. Source: Jan Chmielewski and Szymon Syrkus, “Warszawa Funkcjonalna.
Przyczynek Do Urbanizacji Regionu Warszawskiego.” Warsaw: Stowarzyszenia Architektów, 1935.

03 Jan Chmielewski and Szymon Syrkus “Functional Warsaw.” Inter-maritime communication

(Baltic sea-Black sea) with respect to the great transcontinental route in its extension through
Central Europe. Source: “Warszawa Funkcjonalna,” 1935.

04 Jan Chmielewski and Szymon Syrkus “Functional Warsaw.” Local deformation of

transcontinental routes in central Poland. Source: “Warszawa Funkcjonalna,” 1935.

05 Jan Chmielewski and Szymon Syrkus “Functional Warsaw.” Scheme of the main directions
of communication system in the Warsaw region. Source: “Warszawa Funkcjonalna,” 1935.

06 Jan Chmielewski and Szymon Syrkus “Functional Warsaw.” Scheme of planned areas in the
extension of Warsaw. Source: “Warszawa Funkcjonalna,” 1935.

07 Jan Chmielewski and Szymon Syrkus “Functional Warsaw.” Intersection nodes between
planning areas. Source: “Warszawa Funkcjonalna,” 1935.

08 Jan Chmielewski and Szymon Syrkus “Functional Warsaw.” Districts with planning
priority. Source: “Warszawa Funkcjonalna,” 1935.

09 Jan Chmielewski and Szymon Syrkus “Functional Warsaw.” Existing chaos in the Warsaw
region (analytical map, established by the Regional Plan Office of the city of Warsaw). Source:
“Warszawa Funkcjonalna,” 1935.

10 Jan Chmielewski and Szymon Syrkus “Functional Warsaw.” Network of communication

routes in the Warsaw region (adaptation of the theoretical scheme to the existing conditions).
Source: “Warszawa Funkcjonalna,” 1935.

11 Bernardo Bellotto. Miodowa Street in Warsaw, 1777. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

12 Bernardo Bellotto. The New Town Market Square with St. Kazimierz Church, 1778.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

13 The Marketplace of Warsaw after the WWII bombings (left), and after its reconstruction
(right). Source: Art in Society.

14 Wojciech Fangor. “Figures,” 1950. Spurce: Muzeum Sztuki Łódź. culture pl

15 Lech Tomaszewski. “Mesh- experiment with spiderweb,” 1970s. Source: Tomasz Fudala
and Marianne Zamecznik, Przestrzeń Między Nami/ The Space Between Us. Warsaw: Museum of
Modern Art in Warsaw; 0047 Oslo, 2010. Photograph by A. Wróblewski, Agnieszka Putowska-
Tomaszewska.

409
 16 Stanisław Zamecznik, Oskar Hansen, Wojciech Fangor. “Study of Integrated Space,” 1957.
Source: Archive of the Museum of Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw.

17 Wojciech Fangor. “Struktury przestrzenne/ Spatial structures,” 1969. Source: Muzeum

Narodowe w Krakowie, culture.pl

18 Oskar Hansen. Project for the extension of the Zachęta Gallery (section), 1959. Source:
Courtesy of Zofia and Oskar Hansen Foundation.

19 Oskar Hansen. Project for the extension of the Zachęta Gallery (model), 1959. Source:
Courtesy of Zofia and Oskar Hansen Foundation.

20 Oskar Hansen. Project for the Museum of Modern Art in Skopje, 1966. Source: Courtesy
of Zofia and Oskar Hansen Foundation.

21 Oskar Hansen. Project for the Museum of Modern Art in Skopje (model), 1966. Source:
Courtesy of Zofia and Oskar Hansen Foundation.

22 Oskar Hansen. “Closed form, Open form,” 1958. Source: Courtesy of Zofia and Oskar
Hansen Foundation.

23 Portrait of Oskar Hansen, 1996. Source: Phtograph by Erazm Ciolek / FOTONOVA.

24 Alberto Giacometti. “City Square,” 1948. Source: MoMA.

25 Isamu Noguchi. “Contoured Playgorund,” 1941. Source: he Isamu Noguchi Foundation

and Garden Museum, New York.

26 Students at Oskar Hansen’s studio with instrument for exercise “Rhythm”1957. Source:
Archive of the Museum of Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw.

27 KwieKulik.“Game on Morels Hill,” group action with Oskar Hansen, 1971. Source:
KwieKulik Archive.

28 Oskar Hansen. Active Negative of flat at Sędziowska street, 1955. Source: Courtesy of Zofia
and Oskar Hansen Foundation.

29 Oskar Hansen. Active Negative of flat at Sędziowska street. Different perspectives, 1955.
Source: Courtesy of Zofia and Oskar Hansen Foundation.

30 Network of transport routes planned for Poland. Frame of the documentary “Jak będziemy
mieszkać w roku 2000”, 1971. Source: Courtesy of Telewizja Polska.

31 Jacek Damięcki. Project fpr a flexible housing block (model), 1969. Source: Photograph by
Simone de Iacobis. Fundacja Bęc Zmiana.

32 Oskar Hansen. Extension of LCS throughout the continent, n.d. Source: Courtesy of Zofia
and Oskar Hansen Foundation.

33 Oskar Hansen. Scheme of application of LCS in the territory of Poland, 1972. Source:
Courtesy of Zofia and Oskar Hansen Foundation.

34 Oskar Hansen and team. LCS (model), Mazovia’s Belt, 1968. Source: Courtesy of Zofia
and Oskar Hansen Foundation.

35 Zofia and Oskar Hansen, Przyczółek Grochowski, Warsaw, 1973. Source: Courtesy of Zofia
and Oskar Hansen Foundation.

410 SE-DUCTIO II: WARSAW

 36 Zofia and Oskar Hansen, Przyczółek Grochowski, Warsaw, 1973. Source: Courtesy of Zofia
and Oskar Hansen Foundation.

37 Oskar Hansen and team. “The Road,” proposal for Auschwitz memorial, 1958. Source:
Courtesy of Zofia and Oskar Hansen Foundation.

38 Oskar Hansen and team. “The Road,” sketches for Auschwitz memorial, 1958. Source:
Courtesy of Zofia and Oskar Hansen Foundation.

39 Oskar Hansen and team. “The Road,” Auschwitz memorial (photo-collage), 1958. Source:
Courtesy of Zofia and Oskar Hansen Foundation.

40 Oskar Hansen and team. “The Road,” Auschwitz memorial (model), 1958. Source:
Courtesy of Zofia and Oskar Hansen Foundation.

41 Oskar Hansen and team. “The Road,” Auschwitz memorial (model), 1958. Exhibited at tate
Britain, “Moore & Auschwitz,” 2010. Source: Photograph by Magdalena Hueckel, swiatobrazu.pl

42 Tymek Borowski. “Gruz nad Warszawa,” 2015. Source: Tymek Borowski.

43 Daniel Libeskind, Złota 44 tower, 2017. Source: Złota 44 website.

44 Oskar Hanesen, Artur Żmijewski. “Sen Warszawy,” 2005. Source: Photograph by Artur
Żmijewski. Foksal Gallery Foundation.

411
(TRANS)FORMING (or how the immaterial
supports an extended understanding of urban social space)
 The new technology is not antagonistic to nature. Rather, it is creating a new
kind of nature. If nature as we have always known it is to be considered real,
then this artificial nature should probably be called virtual. And we people of
the modern age are provided with two types of body to match these two types of
nature: The real body which is linked with the real world by the fluids flowing
inside it, and the virtual body linked with the world by the flow of electrons. (Ito
2002, 344)

Until now, the question of space and negativity has been mainly (Im)material
addressed through physical, sensible approximations. In principle, space
this is what one would expect when facing an urban-architectural
discourse that, at least historically, are disciplines with a strong
anchor in material culture. As it has been already argued, the idea of
space and its reverses finds an immediate expression in architectural
and urban forms, through sequences of occupied and appropriated
fills and voids, as well as its byproducts. The body, the most basic
interface situated amidst the primeval disjuncture between interior
and exterior realms (which have been given an asymmetric treatment
in Western thought), has been regarded and explored as a particular
–though non-exclusive– means to apprehend and produce the space
in which it is inserted, in coexistence with multiple beings. However,
an understanding of space as a sort of “abstract materiality,” such
as the one largely promoted by modern sciences during the last
centuries, would be incomplete and insufficient in every respect. The
exploration of alternative, possible spaces, either real or imaginary,
has been present throughout the text in different occasions, thus
challenging solid, monolithic spatial conceptions such as those that
have dominated Western spatiality for ages. Indeed, the very notion
of a public space, associated to a complex public sphere (or spheres) of
relation, is inextricably linked to an immaterial, or virtual dimension
of a space that cannot be reduced to a mere support for bodies and
objects.
Subject to forms and counterforms, the material substrate of the
city is deeply related to the complexity of a dense mesh of relations,
images, myths, dreams, practices and other immaterial elements that
configure it. However, the strong connection between both realms,
as well as the impossibility to reduce one to another –and sometimes
even to distinguish them–, leads us to think of transformations

413
 that take place in (urban) space. Once again, an etymological
approximation to the term may serve as a point of departure for
the following section or as a statement of intent. If the question of
architectural form has already been addressed with regard to space,
the Latin prefix “trans” adds a prepositional meaning of movement
“across,” thus invoking a displacement “beyond” and “through”
form. In this occasion, the proposed movement consists on gradual
approaches to the manifold relations between the physical and the
virtual, form and formlessness, with regard to the (re)production and
generation of spaces.
New Paradoxically, new technologies already represent an old-fashioned
materialities topic in academia. Talking today of how technology and the media
are transforming cities is far from being an innovative subject; so
are the technopositivist discourses that imagine an utopian (or
dystopian), hyper-technological city deprived of a material/corporeal
dimension.1 What seems certain is that the city cannot be understood
today through exclusively material and physical relations and forms,
although there are strong currents in philosophy and architecture
theory that aim at redefining a new materiality (Picon 2004; Harman
2011; Lange-Berndt (ed.) 2015; DeLanda 2015). The city is a
mediated entity,2 and its conditions have radically changed from its
origins to our days, to the point that we are facing a very different
milieu which is translated into different relations, practices and habits.
Both realms –the virtual and the physical–, as well as their multiple
layers and the gaps and superpositions that appear between them,
generate an endless work field. However, although the virtual has
acquired a particularly relevant strength today, it is important to

1 “The cyberspace dream of the Self, liberated from the attachment to its natural
body by turning itself into a virtual entity floating from one to another contingent and
temporary embodiment, is the scientific-technological realization of the Gnostic dream of
the Self getting rid of the decay and inertia of material reality” (Žižek 2006, 100).
2 “Mediation (…) is a dialectical term in Hegelian philosophy, developed in
particular in his Science of Logic in the context of his difficult notion Aufhebung – which in
English is rendered inadequately as ‘sublation.’ (…) He writes: ‘Nothing is immediate; what
is sublated, on the other hand, is the result of mediation; it is a non-being but as a result
which had its origin in a being. It still has, therefore, in itself, the determinateness from which
it originated.’” (Andreotti and Lahiji 2016, 11)

414 [TRANS]FORMING
remark that it is not relegated to the exclusive field of new (and not
so new) technologies and media as catalysts for the purely immaterial,
since “reality” is always already virtual.3 Architecture and urbanism
are not an exception: both are disciplines that project future, possible
spaces that remain under permanent transformation, not only during
the early stages of creation and design or construction, but also when
these are being occupied, used and appropriated.
Michel Serres (Serres and Alberganti 2001) denounces the stigma
of the virtual when it is asserted that it leads to the loss of contact
with reality and to disrupted social relations. Instead, he argues
that the virtual is not an invention of modernity, but a much older
concept that goes back to Aristotle and constantly appears in all
kinds of human activity. The author conjures up the image of a
jaded, apathetic Madame Bovary in Normandy, while her husband
is far from home, visiting his patients: “Most of the time she makes
love more in her imagination than in reality. It is completely virtual.
Madame Bovary is a novel of the virtual,” and likewise we are in the
virtual when reading a book, when remembering or when falling in
love with a movie star. “The virtual is the very flesh of man.”4 (Serres
and Alberganti 2001)

Specters of the city.

What architecture tries to work upon ultimately, as a cultural production, is
social imagination. (Picon 2008, 69)

The spaces of the city, opening and closing, folding up and out, are
constantly changing and evolving in order to host new activities and
uses in different places: wide squares, streets, malls, interiors, walls
or narrow passages. However, urban space transcends the physical
dimension and extends through the rhythms and habits of elements,

3 Gilles Deleuze would invert the relation between the virtual and the real arguing
that the virtual is the ground for the actual: “The virtual is not opposed to the real, but
to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual” (Deleuze 1994, 208). On the
contrary, he opposes the real to the possible: “the process undergone by the possible is
therefore a ‘realisation’. (…) The process it [the virtual] undergoes is that of actualisation”
(1994, 211).
4 [T.A.]

Specters of the city 415

 01

groups and individuals that occupy it. Built environment influences

social behavior and, in turn, the city is configured by the action and
decisions of different agents (natural, artificial, social...)
During the last centuries, under the processes of modernization,
the urban has progressively pervaded the conducts and performance
patterns of its inhabitants as a way of life, beyond the palpable
realm: as the title of Marshall Berman’s book announced (1982), the
solid city has also melted into air, as a fluid and ubiquitous entity.
Therefore, after having explored urban and architectural space from
the perspective of physical openness and closeness, the focus will be
placed on the intangible dimension of the city as a hyper-mediated
space composed of instantaneous images produced by technological-
capitalist means (Lahiji 2015, 2), as the expanded, contemporary
version of the Benjaminian city of the nineteenth-century.
Non-existing The recurrence of the non-existing, which nevertheless works
as an illusionistic image susceptible of being perceived, was firstly
addressed by Benjamin as a symptomatic mechanism of modernity,
especially present in post-Enlightenment rationality (Andreotti and
Lahiji 2016, 30). However, it must not be forgotten that a specter is
an in-corporation, a becoming-body, as Derrida points out (1994),

416 [TRANS]FORMING
 02 03 04

which works as a hinge between the carnal and the spiritual.5 In his
work on Paris –which he recognizes as being indebted to Benjamin’s
oeuvre to a large extent–, David Harvey (2003, 19) notices how the
German writer (as other Marxist authors, such as Henri Lefebvre)
appreciates imaginations, dreams, conceptions and representations
as essential elements that transcend the material world, as they
“mediate that materiality in powerful ways; hence his fascination
with spectacle, representations, and phantasmagoria.” Some of these
imaginary representations which tend to supplant reality as dreamlike
hallucinations are reflected in the idea of the ghostly or the spectral.
Benjamin would choose the notion of “phantasmagoria” to elaborate
a critique, in his very particular materialist terms, on the triumph of
technology and commodity culture over the organization of the city.
Paris, as “the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” –the exposé that
opens the major work of the Arcades (2002)–, embodies this illusory
image that concretizes the aspirations of the bourgeois society in an
industrial era. The arcade, as the paradigmatic architectural typology
of European industrial bourgeoisie, mixing antique appearance and

5 The work of Richard Wagner as Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) has been
crucial for the characterization of the modern phantasmagoria as mythical illusion and the
relations between aesthetics and the political project (aesthetization of politics). Theodor
Adorno (2005) was the first to study this relation based on the “occultation of production
by means of the outward appearance of the product” (Adorno 2005, 85), which has led to
further studies and explorations by different authors.

Specters of the city 417

 modern construction techniques, appears as a recurrent image, as the
incarnation of a phantasmagoria that masks the real conditions of
existence, in terms of class and commodification. Thus, it appears as
“a false synthesis of real and fictional worlds (…), a false synthesis of
all social contradictions (…)” (Berdet 2013, 4).
Architecture and Far from being an outdated notion or the image of a recent past
Phantasmagoria fascinated by ghostly apparitions and hallucinations, phantasmagoria
is still very present in contemporary society, although its mediation
mechanisms have evolved with the emergence of the technologies of
the virtual and the expansion of global communications. This subject
has been revisited by different authors, such as the British geographer
Steve Pile (2005), who studies the dreamlike components of urban
life through diverse case studies; or the French sociologist and expert
on Benjamin’s work Marc Berdet, who has proposed Eight Thesis on
Phantasmagoria (2013), in which he recognizes the architectural and
urban reification of the phantasmagorical imagery. More recently –
and from a more specific architectural and urban approach–, Nadir
Lahiji and Libero Andreotti reflect on the “ideological function
of contemporary architecture” (2016, 19) in Architecture and
Phantasmagoria (understanding ideology as the ultimate delusional,
invisible curtain which determines the individual’s view of the world.)6
According to the authors, in this advanced version of Benjamin’s
historical stage of the media city, contemporary architectures of
spectacle act as projectors of self-referential images and illusions in
the hyper-mediated city, saturated by constant flows of information
and stimuli to be contemplated with amazement and perplexity. The
architect as designer of “luxury objects for wealthy clients” (Lahiji
2015, 8) occupies and transforms a concrete space in the city alterring
and reshaping not only urban landscape, but also accumulation and
consumption patterns in a large scale. OMA’s CCTV headquarters
and Herzog & de Meuron’s Olympic Stadium in Beijing, Gehry’s
Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or Hadid and Calatrava’s buildings
in Zaragoza are just few examples of this tendency, in which

6 “Ideology is not in the first place a set of doctrines; it signifies the way men live
out their roles in class-society, the values, ideas and images which tie them to their social
functions and so prevent them from a true knowledge of society as a whole.” (Eagleton
2006, 8)

418 [TRANS]FORMING
hypertrophic forms, interiors and exuberant devices create authentic
global nodes, around which the economy and expectations of the
whole city revolve. Aware of this effect, policymakers of all around
the world have promoted an “urbanism of phantasmagoria,” wishing
to enter global circuits as competitive, recognizable hubs which boost
economy and production.
In a global culture dominated by pure presence (Han 2014) and Pure presence,
circulation,7 this universal conglomeration of urban images have a sensorial
direct impact on the way we perceive the world. Beyond the iconic overflow
building, Lahiji, recalling the notion of anesthetization proposed by
Buck-Morss (1992), invites the reader to walk around the centers of
some of these cities: Times Square in New York, Leicester Square or
Piccadilly Circus in London, the Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo or the
Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto are examples of hyper-mediated
spaces, where architecture becomes pure image, blasting the senses of
passers-by in an almost intoxicating manner:
(…) the result is a form of “urban trash” characterizing a modern experience
that one can only respond to through cerebral numbness or its opposite – as
the proponents of this architecture and city experience would suggest – full
acceptance and immersion. (Lahiji 2015, 9)

This sensorial overflow developing a neurotic process inserted within

the ideological realm, which has also been identified by Berdet (2013,
2) as one of the main features of phantasmagoria, should not be
understood as a mere metaphor, or rhetorical image characterizing the
experience of the urban subject. In fact, according to a recent research
study on mental health and neuroscience (Lederbogen et al. 2012),
urban life and upbringing have been proven to affect social stress
processing in humans through the identification of different neural
mechanisms. Although the authors have not identified the specific
factors that trigger these reactions (pollution, toxins, crowding,
noise, or demographic factors could be some of them), their study
has evidenced the prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders in city

7 The artist Hito Steyerl (2013) speaks of “circulationism” to characterize the

way an image emerges, not by merely producing it, but by “postproducing, launching, and
accelerating it” within the new media public sphere. It would be a further step after Soviet
productivism, which claimed that art should enter production and the space of the factory.

Specters of the city 419

 05 06

07 08

dwellers and supported the fact that the incidence of schizophrenia

is also higher among this group, as other scientific studies confirm
(Krabbendam and van Os 2005; Peen et al. 2010).
However, from a more intuitive perspective, the relation
between city and mental disturbance was already noticed during
the transitional period between the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. The work of Georg Simmel in 1903 on the metropolis and
Nervenleben has already been mentioned, being the most recognized
text on this topic: the blasé attitude of the metropolitan subject,
who is jaded and indifferent towards urban hyper-stimulation
(which is precisely the cause of his temperament) is the paradigmatic
condition within a highly rationalized and accelerated metropolis

420 [TRANS]FORMING
that incessantly grows, accumulates and produces through permanent
activity and spectacle. Benjamin (2002, 10) also noticed about the
experience of shock following Baudelaire and his flâneur through the
streets of Fin-de-Siècle Paris:
(…) the gaze of the allegorist, as it falls on the city, is the gaze of the alienated
man. It is the gaze of the flâneur, whose way of life still conceals behind a
mitigating nimbus the coming desolation of the big-city dweller.

Anthony Vidler (1991) relates the perspectives of Simmel and the Agoraphobia
also German writer Siegfried Kracauer under the “spatial pathology”
suffered by the metropolitan society of their time, being described
as agoraphobia,8 that is, the fear (but also related to the desire) of
space as void or emptiness, contrary to the immersive interior of the
passage, the Adornian intérieur or Kracauer’s Hotelhalle. For both
Simmel and Kracauer, the metropolis is a structure where everything
is in permanent move and the individual behaves as a nomad and a
stranger to the other, permanently trapped within the contradictory
dyad of the void or empty space –“of physics, the abstract sciences,
and (..) of the ratio, or rationalized modern life” (Vidler 1991,
44)– and the erfüllter Raum of being with (or surrounded by) the
others, which may cause the opposite fear, claustrophobia. The space
of the hotel lobby described by Kracauer (1995) emerges as the
paradigmatic “space of indifference,” where anonymous hotel guests
wander or sit as isolated particles with “a disinterested satisfaction in
the contemplation of a world creating itself ” (Kracauer 1995, 177).
Here, the notion of Ent-ortung as de-localization and uprooting that
Cacciari (1993) proposes when analyzing Adolf Loos’ thought from
a Heideggerian perspective, seems quite accurate to describe the
character of these spaces, produced by an architecture and urbanism
that annihilate place by means of extreme rationalization.
Ildefonso Cerdà’s grid in Barcelona (and other modern cities) is
a clear precursor to the modern Ent-ortete metropolis, considered
to be the best infrastructural form for the modern city and the

8 Agoraphobia was identified by the German psychologist Carl Otto Westphal as

a condition of urban anxiety. Similar terms were coined and used: Platzschwindel, by Moritz
Benedikt, Platzscheu by Camillo Sitte (1889, 57), and also “peur d’espace, horreur de vide,
topophobia, and street fear” (Vidler 1991, 34).

Specters of the city 421

 09 10

most rational and adaptable pattern to the new flows of transport

and communication (railway, boulevards and other armatures),
articulating full/void space and well separated areas. It allowed a
regular development and extension of the city. However, it could
host social inequalities as well. Urban elements were built following
the boulevards and streets: “Here the new urban life-world of the
wealthy bourgeois would unfold in cafés and restaurants.” Not only
operas, theaters, museums… but also cabarets, cafés and public bath
houses (Shane 2011, 92). The urban grid, inserted within the Western
bourgeois way of life, can be read as a binary, polar model of class
struggle, a phantasmagoric, abstract and totalizing presentation of
reality where everything can happen and everything can be replaced.
This is also applicable to other strategies, such as Le Corbusier’s urban
plans and other projects based on the precepts of the CIAM and the
Athens Charter, which openly privileged building over architecture
because of the scientific and rational character of the former, opposite
to the contingency of the latter (Frampton 1982, 269).
Metropolis and Although all these visions were articulated within a very specific
neural condition context (mostly central European, during a short period of time),
the intensification of emotional and neural life is still ongoing under
different and more exacerbated conditions, due in part to the ease
with which images and information are produced and transmitted,
stimulating the subject thanks to the development of the virtual.9

9 “(…) the phantasmagoric images in the configuration of the hyper-mediated

city, grounded as they are in the ‘new’ technology, have not only altered our cities, but

422 [TRANS]FORMING
 11

Besides, this acceleration is not only temporal, but also spatial, since
contemporary technologies are available and ready to use in almost
every corner of the world. Thus, it is not surprising that Han’s “twin”
works (The Burnout Society in 2010 and The Transparency Society
in 2012) can be better understood when read together, since the
seductive transparency of a world dependent on images and the
exhaustion of the subject are deeply related.
Han underlines the predominance of neurological illnesses Capitalism
(“depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), of anxiety
borderline personality disorder (BPD), and burnout syndrome”)
at the beginning of the twenty-first century, contrary to the
former prevalence of immunological diseases. Contemporary
neural pathologies, according to the author, “do not follow from
the negativity of what is immunologically foreign, but from an
excess of positivity” (Han 2015, 1). This excess is considered to be
symptomatic of a society over which the exercise of violence derives
from this positivity paradigm: “overproduction, overachievement,
overcommunication” (Han 2015, 5) that, far from dialectical tensions,
contribute to the production of transparent, available contents,
informations and images prone to be absorbed and assimilated
without limits. We could even go a step further with Peio Aguirre
(2014, 92), who already talks of a “capitalism of anxiety.”

they have also altered the human sensorium and the mode of perception in the subject’s
experience in a way that is qualitatively different from the previous historical make-up that
Benjamin discussed” (Lahiji 2015, 2).

Specters of the city 423

 Supression It seems that the Western suppression of the negative (Jullien 2005,
of negativity 132) has its impact on the individual. A subject who is permanently
forced to be successful, visible, exposed, to accumulate things and
not to have negative feelings, may suffer from exhaustion and fatigue,
as “abreaction and refusal” of excess. There has been a shift from the
control exerted by external means to the implementation of these
control mechanisms within the subject itself, who collaborates with
an exhibitionist attitude toward the public eye, perpetuating the
apparatus of transparency. Thus, the contemporary urban type is
less like the flâneur and more like the badaud, the gawker, the one
who walks the city passively, ignorantly astonished, mentally numb,
disappearing in the crowd for its irrelevance.
Besides, new modes of agoraphobia emerge in the wake of the
expansion of the (phantom) public sphere and the loss of its original
sense, as Rosalyn Deutsche (1996; 2008) detects.10 From her
perspective, the public sphere is also a phantom, an illusion that acts
as a void between state and society and serves as a medium to project
the desires and ideals of democracy. Manuel Delgado (2011) traces
a very similar argument when talking of public space as ideology: a
space of hegemony and consensus where conflict is obliterated.
Reality of In the transparency society, the solidity of buildings and
the unreal constructions is only apparent in a contemporary city that,
paraphrasing Huyssen, Andreotti and Lahiji (2016, 46) qualify as the
“illusion of the absolute reality of the unreal.” In spite of the frequent
association of architecture with the solid (opposite to the void) and
the material, the urban realm has been subject to an intense process of
dissolution for a long time, to the point that the perceptive experience
Visual has been reduced to pure mechanisms of visibility. Sight becomes the
culture and privileged sense and the most accurate medium to access reality, and
spectacle thus a whole genealogy and critique of vision and spectacle has been

10 Deutsche offers an interesting remark about the unfulfilled task of public space
from a gender perspective: “From a sociological perspective, agoraphobia is primarily an
affliction of women. In city streets and squares, where men have greater rights, women
devise strategies to avoid the threats that present themselves in public spaces. The phobic
woman may try to define, and stay within, what she considers a zone of safety. She invents
‘cover stories’: explanations for her actions that, as one sociologist writes, ‘do not reveal
that she is what she is, a person afraid of public places.’” (Deutsche 1996, 325)

424 [TRANS]FORMING
 12 13

traced throughout the course of the last centuries by authors as diverse

as Benjamin himself, Debord, Derrida, Foucault, Ricoeur, Baudrillard,
Vattimo or Jay. However, this theoretical unmasking of ocularcentrism
has not succeeded to stop the expansion of visual phenomena in
practical terms, especially when dealing with the urban: the image,
as ungraspable fast information, is the predominant material that
frenziedly circulates in the city, which in turn becomes “something
very similar to nothingness” because of the imperceptibility of its
space.
The city as urban fabric has become invisible (replaced by signs and images that
falsify objects and people, buried under “publicity” as a vacuous iconic space of
simulacra) (Pardo Torío 1992, 231)11

Going back to Times Square, as one of the most recognizable

products of visual culture –and urbanism–, the urban historian M.
Christine Boyer (1999) reacts against the new plans for the area of
42nd street and the transformation of the square into an image of
itself, deprived of the possibility of offering a real experience beyond
its representations on TV or cinema. Its hectic rhythm and activity,
coming from Broadway’s golden decades and the subsequent years

11 [T.A.]

Specters of the city 425

 14 15 16

of decadence and popular appropriation –“ its burlesque shows, its

B-rated movies, its fleapit paradises” (Boyer 1999, 77)– is becoming
progressively invisible through regulations and privatizations that
somehow aim at “cleaning up” space of undesirable elements and
substituting them with more light, more images, instantaneous
messages sent by private users via Internet to be projected on screen.
Here, the Benjaminian diagnosis is rendered actual: “nothing is
technological that is not also a psychic, spectral, and therefore also
phantasmagorical reality” (Andreotti and Lahiji 2016, 66).
According to Boyer, this “erasure” has had a double phase:
first, during the post-war period, Times Square had already lost
its glamorous aura to become a central space threatened by crime,
prostitution and drugs, thus disappearing from usual pedestrian
routes. This lost urban gap was represented, for instance, in films
such as The Naked City by Jules Dassin (1948) or in Weegee’s raw
street photographs (Sharpe 2008, 402). In this regard, the media
exposure contributed to the insertion of the image of Times Square
in the “cognitive map” of the spectators/inhabitants of the city, even
when this representation is projected and fragmented. The second
phase is contemporary, and differs from the first on the substitution of
“realistic representations of urban space” for new forms that “display
a taste for simulation, for delight in wax museums, theme parks,
retroarchitectural splendors” (Boyer 1999, 84); a taste that the author
traces back to the nineteenth century and the fascination for magic
shows and the doubling of reality through instrumental, rational
control and technical means. Although she does not mention the idea
of phantasmagoria, she alludes clearly to its roots.

426 [TRANS]FORMING
 Times Square, by now, is known only through its representations, its sign
systems, its iconic cinematic presence. Pleasure now derives from experiencing
the illusion of “The Great White Way” by simulating its Lutses [Light Units in
Times Square], by planning its unplannedness, by foregrounding the apparatus
that produces these manipulated representations. (…) Times Square has been
incorporated into a larger sense of assembled space, where all of its simultaneity
and immediacy can evaporate into astonishing imagescapes. (Boyer 1999,
85–86)

The excess of representation, thus, renders the urban experience Excess of

invisible, suffocated by the overload of images and visual data. representation
Paradoxically, however, the invisible has been traditionally associated
to Truth as an absolute value in metaphysical terms. As Bouman and
van Toorn (1994, 12) argue:
The invisible was the infinite, the absolute, the unreachable, and it was seen as
being one with God, with the Platonic Forms of the True, the Beautiful and
the Good, with the ghost in the machine or with the Weltgeist. Faith in the
invisible truth has been so steadfast that five hundred years of Humanism, two
hundred and fifty years of Enlightenment, a hundred years of Modernist creative
destruction and twenty-five years of Post-Modern radical doubt have proved
insufficient to unmask it decisively. The invisible truth has invariably seduced the
rational biped.

How, then, to understand this singular contradiction that manifests

itself in the city? Bouman and van Toorn judiciously refuse to go
back to the idea of an invisible truth as the essential substrate of the
existing. However, within “a culture whose products appear more and
more to be nothing but representations” (1994, 12), the irresistible
seduction of the image cannot be grasped –and countered– but
through the image per se. Here, a new task is proposed in negative
terms, as in Calvino’s inferno (1974) imaginarily described by
Marco Polo. One can accept it to the point of becoming it, or rather
recognizing it and “give space” to that which is not image. Boyer
reaches a similar conclusion in her article on Times Square and
situates herself in the first position, when she proposes to abandon
any kind of nostalgia about the disappearance of the city –either in
the form of melancholy or mourning– and recovers the Deleuzian

Specters of the city 427

 idea of the “any-space-whatever,”12 suggesting that we must accept and
grasp “unpredictable conjunctions, in stabilities and chaos of social
arrangements, and hybrid forms of personal identities” (Boyer 1999,
88). Still, no matter how powerful images are, they are insufficient to
condense the reality of the city, since the urban exceeds the strength of
the iconic. This social, vital excess introduces a third dimension that
should be considered when studying the urban phenomenon.
Is it possible, then, to counter phantasmagoria and its narcotic
effects? Berdet (2013, 4) thinks that it is only possible from the
opposite side of the bourgeoisie, by means of class struggle: in this
regard, the insurrectional movement of the Paris Commune in 1871
was “a provisory end to phantasmagoria.” It is worth mentioning that
the destruction of representative built elements was an important
factor to reinforce this attack against the established regime: the
Vendôme column, l’Hôtel de Ville or the Palace of Justice were
violently assaulted by the crowd, visibilizing the opposite values to the
dominant ones.
However, contemporary conditions have changed, partly because
of the rise of the virtual and its capacity to produce and reproduce
images, informations and impressions, which float and proliferate
amidst a junkspace that constitutes the Western illusion of a global
interior in which the outside is unconceivable. In a hyper-mediated
city, phantasmagorias are global and all-pervasive, inserted within a
post-political context that further hampers an ideal “synthesis of the
real world and the possible world, of awakened consciousness and of
dream consciousness” (Berdet 2013, 6). The fall of the World Trade
Center towers after the terrorist attack in 2001 has not killed the most
radical illusions and phantasmagorias of the West –far from it, they
have been reinforced–, and architecture, once again, plays a central
role in the restitution of specters. Significantly, Peterson comments

12 “Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places. It is

a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of
its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made
in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus
of the possible. What in fact manifests the instability, the heterogeneity, the absence of
link of such a space, is a richness in potentials or singularities which are, as it were, prior
conditions of all actualisation, all determination” (Deleuze 1986, 109).

428 [TRANS]FORMING
 17 18

on the reconstruction of the area: “there was no choice but to build

towers.”13

Inside/outside. Space-time compressions and flows.

The railway kills space, so we are left with time. If we only had enough money to
kill time, too! It is now possible to go to Orleans in four and a half hours or in
as many hours to Rouen. Wait until the lines to Belgium and Germany are built
and connected with the railways there! It is as if the mountains and forests of all
countries moved towards Paris. I can smell the scent of German linden trees, and
the North Sea is roaring in front of my door. (Heinrich Heine, Lutetia, 1843)14

It has already been argued that contemporary space is subject to a

particular tension between interior and exterior realms and subsumed
into deep contradictions. Articulated through multiple layers of
reality, there is a gap, a mutating fissure between both domains.
If, together with skin and nature, the city is one of the forms of

13 See Annex I.
14 Translation by Spiekermann and Wegener (1994) from Heine, H., 1964. “Lutetia
(II): Berichte über Politik, Kunst und Volksleben.” In H. Kaufmann, ed. Heinrich Heine:
Sämtliche Werke, vol. XII. Munich: Kindler, pp. 5–160.

Inside/outside. Space-time compressions and flows 429

 19

exteriority, this fissure may deepen when these elements interact,

and the complexity in which they unfold –at the same time real and
virtual– fosters the appearance of new connections and fields to be
explored. Considering that humans are generic beings producing
their own nature –since man lacks both a specialized instinct and a
specific ecological context (Marullo 2014, 85)– and thus their own
conditions, we have seen how the body acquires a special relevance
when discovering interior and exterior spaces in the contemporary
city, as porous surfaces through which being and thought spill out.
Besides, we have already glimpsed how this context is in permanent
construction and transformation, and how certain elements
have become fundamental to understand and structure our lived
environment. In this regard, phantasmagorias, illusions, images
and specters still constitute an intrinsic dimension to contemporary
societies, which long for illusive representations of themselves in
the era of the selfie. In fact, modernity and its subsequent extension
have worked as an enormous factory of illusions under the hopeful
expectations of progress, limitless mobility and speed and possible

430 [TRANS]FORMING
compressions of space and time as the definitive steps into a global
society, in which the whole world becomes homogeneous.
Although mobility is undeniably a constitutive factor of this
modern conception of the urban, the so-called “vehicular space,”
in which private car and television sustained the machinery of
capitalist representation (Crary 1984, 289), began to lose strength
as soon as the home computer (and later the mobile phone) made
its appearance, pervading millions of households around the world.
The central, unidirectional screen of the TV has been substituted by
a myriad of interactive screens that surround us and condition our
relations with the environment.15
Beyond the utopian/dystopian visions and predictions made during World without
the eighties and early-nineties (Crary 1984; Baudrillard et al. 1990; an outside
Virilio 1991; Mitchell 1995; etc.), which may be more or less accurate
with regard to the current situation, it seems that, today, interaction
with the world can be mediated almost exclusively through the use
of digital devices. These modes of interaction are possible through
the production of multiple closed circuits that occasionally lead to
self-enclosed structures “without avenues of escape, with no outside”
(Crary 1984, 294). Again, the idea of a nonexistent or irrelevant
exterior gains strength and is reflected spatially. When Peter Sloterdijk
points to a change in the morphological paradigm of human spatiality
in his Spheres trilogy, he depicts a society in which individual space
becomes a sort of shell or bubble that wraps the subject completely.
The interaction of the individual with the world around him/her is,
due to the condition of immunity, inevitably subject to uncertainty
and fear on all scales: from the fetus in the womb to be expelled
into the world to a society bewildered by problems generated in the
peripheral area (terrorist threats, immigration, natural disasters…)
Thus, the world in which we live manifests itself as an involute
labyrinth, where there is no difference between inside and outside,
so the Other –the enemy– becomes unconceivable and ought to be
expelled at any cost. It is not the Greek mythical labyrinth anymore,

15 “Are we not more and more monads with no direct windows onto reality,
interacting alone with the PC screen, encountering only the virtual simulacra, and
yet immersed more than ever in the global network, synchronously communicating
with the entire globe?” (Žižek 2001, 26)

Inside/outside. Space-time compressions and flows 431

 since “inside” and “outside” have disappeared: therefore, it is
impossible to escape. This means that within the acceptable sphere
there are not, or at least should not be, dissenting voices. “Outside”
no longer exists as it is rejected and forgotten, so there is no longer
an actual “inside,” which dissolves because of the disappearance
of its counterpart. Therefore, the labyrinthine condition of the
world reaches its height. It is impossible to escape or embrace the
labyrinth since interior and exterior are undiscernible, as Georges
Bataille describes it (Hollier 1993, 61). This means that the enemy
(that is, the elements which do not fit in the hegemonic sphere, the
discordant bodies and objects) is externalized and forgotten, and in
this way annihilated. This fear for the other is precisely what limits the
possibility of politics, whose main task is to manage conflict.
Weltinnenraum On a larger scale, and re-signifying Rilke’s notion of the world
interior,16 Sloterdijk (2013) examines the historical process of
globalization as the construction and consolidation of the “great
interior,” der Weltinnenraum des Kapitals,17 through the progressive
cognition of the Earth and especially after the grand oceanic journeys
of European conquerors and seamen, which radically transformed
the way humans interact and situate themselves in a world that
Shrinking for the first time appears as a globe. The possibility of reducing
space (almost to the point of annihilation) the effects of spatial distance
–first by means of navigation, then by mechanized transport and
communication technologies– leads to a progressive de-spatialization
in which the planet “shrinks to an almost-nothing” (Sloterdijk

16 This concept appears in a poem entitled “Es winkt zu Fühlung fast aus allen
Dingen,” in which Sloterdijk (2013, 197) sees “a mode of world-experience typical of
primary narcissism,” in which the horizon is not a “boundary and transition” towards the
exterior, but “a frame to hold the inner world.” Durch alle Wesen reicht der eine Raum:/
Weltinnenraum. Die Vögel fliegen still/ durch uns hindurch. O, der ich wachsen will,/ ich seh
hinaus, und in mir wächst der Baum./ Ich sorge mich, und in mir steht das Haus. “Through all
beings extends the one space:/ world interior space. Silently the birds fly/ through us. O, I
who want to grow,/ I look out and the tree grows in me./ I care and the house stands in
me” (Translation by Wieland Hoban, in Sloterdijk 2013, 197).
17 Emmanuel Petit (2013, 31) detects the transition between the extensive,
“modern” conception of a universal and homogeneous space –which German architectural
theory designated as Allraum– and the immersive space of Weltinnenraum (inner world
space).

432 [TRANS]FORMING
2013, 13). Peripheries –and not the center, as some like Sedlmayr
anticipated- are progressively lost, as the different and the remote are
no longer unfamiliar to us: globalization “carries the screened outside
everywhere” (Sloterdijk 2013, 30) and the boundaries can always be
further extended, like in Emerson’s Circles,18 making the world interior
safer, transparent, unconcealed and familiar to those who inhabit it.
Globalization is, ultimately, the process of negating “the externality of
the external” (Sloterdijk 2013, 96).
In a previous chapter, we have seen how some authors argue that Thin-walled
cities are increasingly displacing nation-states as the most relevant societies
form of socio-political organization. Interestingly, Sloterdijk (2013,
152) resorts to the spatial –and very urban– image of the wall to
explain the transition of societies from territorially, symbolically and
usually linguistically grounded communities (“thick-walled societies”)
to the free-moving, mixed and more open “thin-walled societies.”
The wall, which represents the immunological hard membrane that
protected, isolated and defined a certain local group from its external
surroundings (like the fortification of pre-modern cities) loses
thickness with the increase of transnational mobility and exchange.
Territories and cities become, more than ever, spaces of negotiation
at all levels, losing their strength as immunological dispositifs in favor
of the individual body, through means such as private insurances,
pension funds or dietetics (Sloterdijk 2013, 154). Again, Tiqqun’s
qualification of the contemporary metropolis illustrates the
unavoidably immersive and contradictory character of the urban,
in which immediate proximity and absolute estrangement coexist
pervading the whole Earth through this thin-walled membranes and
devices:
[T]here is no outside of the metropolis: the territories that its metastatic
extension does not occupy are always polarized by it; that is, they are determined
in all their aspects by its absence. (…) Metropolises are distinct from the other
grand human formations first of all because the greatest proximity, and usually
the greatest promiscuity, coincide in them with the greatest foreignness. Never

18 “There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The man finishes

his story,—how good! how final! how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky.
Lo! on the other side rises also a man and draws a circle around the circle we had just
pronounced the outline of the sphere” (Emerson 1897, 67)

Inside/outside. Space-time compressions and flows 433

 20 21 22

23 24 25

have men been gathered together in such great number, and never have they
been so totally separate from one another. (Tiqqun 2010, 14–15)

The modern The grand interior of modernity finds its ultimate expression in
interior Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace that was built in iron and glass to host
the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London’s Hyde Park. In his Notes
from Underground published in 1864, Fyodor Dostoyevsky expresses,
through the figure of the narrator, his impressions after the visit to
such huge construction, which he reads critically from a non-Western
position. The Palace emerges as the great monument of immersive
aesthetics: artificially climatized, transparent but enclosed, built to
host thousands of visitors each day to contemplate the marvels of the
modern world (around 17,000 exhibitors from the main world powers
and their colonies) with perplexity and stupor. It concentrates the
whole world within a protective shell, a huge collective capsule which
separates an agoraphobic civilization from an outside that can be
seen from the interior, but appears as a mere illusion beyond the glass
wall.19 There is no place for negativity in the building, no shadows, no

19 Once again, the glass appears to be the privileged material of modernity,

allowing vision from the interior while it becomes pure reflection when observed from its

434 [TRANS]FORMING
hidden elements. Everything is visible and flowing; all elements float
in a homogeneous space bathed in light.
The Crystal Palace disappeared in 1936 after a destructive fire.
But since then, the model of the interior, enveloping atmosphere
has been reproduced in several occasions; in fact, some buildings
and replicas imitating the original Crystal Palace in London were
built in New York, Montreal (both destroyed by fire in 1858 and
1896 respectively), Madrid, Paris or even in Disney World Resort
in Orlando (where one can have a meal with the famous cartoon
characters). There has been even a recent attempt to reconstruct the
original Palace led by a Shanghai-based investing and developing
firm under the auspices of the former London’s mayor Boris Johnson,
although the project, which attracted a select group of world-known
architects such as Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers or David Chipperfield,
was finally discarded. This reflects to what extent a persistent
fascination for immersive interiors prevails today.
In a different way, contemporary art also produces similar
enveloping atmospheres, echoing the spatiality and the experience
of the all-encompassing interior. Such is the case of Anish Kapoor’s
Leviathan (2011), the immense spatial sculpture built inside the
Grand Palais in Paris during the fourth edition of Monumenta.20
Taking its name from the work of Thomas Hobbes, the monstrous
space is an unexpected cathedral within the Beaux-Arts structure
of the palace, that is, an interior within an interior that swallows
the visitor as soon as he/she crosses the entrance. Four intersecting
semi-transparent red-plastic spheres constitute a 120-meter long and
35-meter high amorphous membrane which can be either observed
from the outside –opposed to the glass and steel frame of the Grand
Palais– or experienced from within as a pervasive atmosphere that, far
from being oppressive, generates a sensation of levity and wholeness,
but also of estrangement at the same time. Contrary to the Crystal
Palace, the walls of the Leviathan do not totally allow the entry of

outer side.
20 Leviathan is referred by Emmanuel Petit (2013, 29–30) as an exemplary
construction with regard to the turn to immanence in contemporary architecture,
together with SANAA’s Rolex Center in Lausanne.

Inside/outside. Space-time compressions and flows 435

 26 27 28

light, so the exterior is perceived from within through shadows and

blurry figures: something happens on the other side, but we cannot
figure what it is.
Virtual Other artistic experiences play with this artificially-mediated
dreamlands interior/exterior opposition by articulating immersion through virtual
devices: recordings, video-games and VR environments take the place
of former recombinant operations –decoupage, collage, bricolage,
montage, photomontage, assemblage, rhizomic assemblage… (Shane
2005)– which do not seem enough to achieve the sensation of an
immersive space. In this regard, the exhibition Dreamlands that took
place between October 2016 and February 2017 at the Whitney
Museum offers some interesting keys to understand the effects of
dominant inwardness and how they have been boosted with the
emergence of the technologies of the virtual from the twenties to our
days. The exhibition offers an overview of unconventional approaches
to the filmic experience that go beyond the relation between the
spectator and the screen, which become more than a mere eye and a
projecting surface. The works, ranging from Anthony McCall’s light
sculptures to Lorna Mills’ Ways of Something –a contemporary remake
of John Berger’s series Ways of Seeing – or Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the
Sun explore different types of absorbing atmospheres, which reflect
and alter at the same time the perception of reality. The very title of
the exhibition is already significant: it warns us that we are entering
a parallel immaterial and illusory world that is necessarily isolated
from the actual one, although reflecting it from a multiplicity of
devices and strategies that project its reverses. In fact, Dreamland
was one of the three iconic amusement parks which were built in
Coney Island at the beginning of the twentieth century, together with

436 [TRANS]FORMING
Luna Park and Steeplechase Park. The exhibition takes as its starting
point the short film Coney Island at Night, recorded by the American
filmmaker Edwin S. Porter in 1905 and in which the leisure complex
is shown through a series of night panning shots. The images offer a
mesmerizing view of the parks, which appear as immaterial, fantastic
castles of glowing light bulbs shining amidst the black background,
creating a surreal, dreamlike effect. At the same time, the possible
counterpart of the American Dreamland would be reflected years
later by the filmmaker Lindsay Anderson, one of the promoters of the
British Free Cinema of the 1950s,21 focused on showing the everyday
life of the big city from a direct and non-contrived approach. O
Dreamland (1953) shows the anodyne working-class consumption of
leisure time in a disturbing, uncanny amusement park, showing a gray
and mechanical reality with no soundtrack other than the squeaking
of the devices, the repetitive music and the loud laughter of the
automatons (Aguilar 2009, 19). Thus, the short film shows the sinister
reverse of the phantasmagoria embodied by the amusement park, as
an illusion of enjoyment and free time.
Theme parks are indeed one of the best examples of modern Capsular space
interiors, presenting a heterotopic, spectacular parallel reality within
an enclosed space devoted to the consumption of leisure time.22
However, the clearest –and probably most successful– example of the
absolute interior today may well be the shopping mall, a typology
combining fascinating transparency and consumerism in a shiny
artificial atmosphere that brings together the essential dreams of the

21 Interestingly, the artist Eduardo Paolozzi (who after a few years in Paris knew
first-hand its cultural panorama and specifically, the work of Henri Lefebvre and who was
related to the Free Cinema group) would introduce Alison and Peter Smithson to the
photomontage technique for their Golden Lane project. In their images, postwar London’s
East End is shown through the “celebration of the ordinary,” allowing the architects “to
discover its inspirational source in reality ‘as found’ and to turn it into a new architectural
paradigm” (Capdevila Castellanos and Iborra Pallarés 2013).
22 The anthropologist Scott A. Lukas, has recently edited a volume collecting
several essays on the immersive character of theme parks: Lukas (ed.), S.A., 2016. A
Reader in Themed and Immersive Spaces, Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon, ETC Press. Other
authors who have reflected on the nature of these spaces are Koolhaas –on Coney Island
parks– (1994, 29–80), Benjamin (2002, 18), De Cauter and Dehaene (2008) and Shane
(2008; 2011).

Inside/outside. Space-time compressions and flows 437

 29 30 31

32 33 34

35 36 37

438 [TRANS]FORMING
capitalist society: proximity, happiness, exchange, leisure… everything
at hand for everyone. From the original American models of the fifties
and sixties –among which Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center near
Minneapolis (USA) should be highlighted– to the hyperscaled malls
of east-Asian cities like the 5-million-square-feet Utama Mall in Kuala
Lumpur (Malaysia), this kind of commercial interior –sometimes
characterized as a theme park itself– has persisted until our days
thanks to its versatility and capacity of adaptation to different social
contexts and individual tastes, offering a total immersive experience.
Taking it a step further, these spaces of collective interiority (the
museum, the amusement park, the shopping mall…) can become
even more pervasive, wrapping up a single individual as a monadic
capsule. Authors such as Anthony Vidler (2000) or Lieven De
Cauter (2004) have characterized the psycho-spatial conditions
of contemporary warped spaces, constituting what the latter calls
a “capsular civilization,” in which systems of immunity become
personal and customized, adapted to the necessities and particular
fears of each individual and reinforced by the effects of the global
preoccupation for safety and shelter. Although the architectural
materialization of this type of space may be not so evident in everyday
life (excluding, for instance, Japanese pod hotels or the emergence of
micro-apartments in urban slums, due to precarious work and poor
living conditions), the proliferation of pavilionaire architectures in
representative contexts, such as art exhibitions and venues, public
spaces or temporary events, anticipates the notion of a nodal space in
which functions and activities are condensed within interior, capsular
enclaves from which the relation with the surrounding environment
is more or less artificially, semi-transparently mediated, like small-
scale reproductions of the monumental hothouse. On a larger scale,
the model is quite similar: the construction of brand new cities in
isolated territories –especially in Asia and the Middle East– presents a
spatial determination that differs significantly from the extensive logic
of its precedents. According to Petit (2013, 28–29), the conclusive
morphology of these cities “reveals a certain indifference to formal
and political dialogue with an ‘other’; each addition to the city relies
on an exclusively interior set of sociopolitical and formal demands.”
The shoreline developments in Dubai depending on an iconographic
pattern or the planned self-sufficient eco-city of Masdar in the

Inside/outside. Space-time compressions and flows 439

 38 39

Emirates (designed by Foster+Partners) are some of the examples that

illustrate this tendency.
Extensive Indeed, if the network model is one of the most accurate patterns
network, to describe the contemporary spatial condition, as it will be argued
involute nodes later, its very existence requires the presence of a number of singular
nodes –which in this case, could be considered to be almost infinite
in number. This means that connection is only possible by the
simultaneous isolation of the connected. Although the argument
appears to be contradictory, this negative configuration of space
–depending on relation and isolation at the same time– has been
suggested by several authors like De Cauter (2004), Sloterdijk (2009),
Frichot (2009; 2010) or Petit (2013) mentioning ZDF’s Grüne Hölle
(“Green Hell”) broadcasting studio or the White Room in Matrix,
showing an involute perspective of space: autonomous, generic and
hermetic, but interconnected fragile bubbles, capsules or globes are
the figures used to depict this condition that acquires its reticular
structure when connected to other nodes, such as in networks,
electronic flows or foams. As in Anthony McCall’s work, one has to be
inside the node in order to see the others, to establish a relation with
them. Otherwise, we remain unnoticed, outside, since the space of
flows is only possible through the existence of connected, interrelated
knots.
According to Manuel Castells, this ever-expansive space of
flows, which replicates and reproduces itself through the massive
appearance of new nodes-interiors connected to the global network
is “the dominant spatial form of the network society” (Castells 2010,
448). Thus, he suggests that architecture should act somehow as

440 [TRANS]FORMING
 40 41

the expression of this tendency, as a “signifying code to read the

basic structures of society’s dominant values.” However, contrary
to previous spatial models, Castells argues that the advent of this
space of flows erases and blurs “the meaningful relationship between
architecture and society” (2010, 449). Apparently, this leads us to a
certain loss of spatial identity, to a society that can no longer have its
“counterform” built, but only a scenery composed of recognizable
milestones scattered all over the city. Interestingly, the author coins the
expression “architecture of nudity” to describe the character of much
of contemporary architectural production:
(…) paradoxically, the architecture that seems most charged with meaning in
societies shaped by the logic of the space of flows is what I call ‘the architecture
of nudity.’ That is, the architecture whose forms are so neutral, so pure, so
diaphanous, that they do not pretend to say anything. And by not saying
anything they confront the experience with the solitude of the space of flows. Its
message is the silence. (Castells 2010, 450)

Interestingly, Castells seems to be evoking the architectural silence

that Tafuri and many others23 found in Miesian constructions,
which admitted no dialogue or communication with its environment

23 “These interpretations range from the aesthetic of renunciation proposed by

Tafuri, who saw in Mies’s American projects the explicit interiorization of the abstraction
of social life itself in the form of a paradoxical formal autonomy per via negativa, to
Massimo Cacciari’s reading of Mies’s abstraction (and of modern architecture) as a
conscious image of fulfilled nihilism; to Michael Hays’s use of Mies as an example of critical
architecture, posited as both a radical detachment from all that is outside architecture and
a reflection of the conditions that permit such distance; to Detlef Mertins’s rendering of
Mies’s redeeming use of technology; to Sven-Olov Wallenstein’s interpretation of Mies’s

Inside/outside. Space-time compressions and flows 441

 as a means to confront the chaotic experience of the metropolis.
The Spanish anthropologist identifies the silence of contemporary
architecture in buildings such as Bofill’s Barcelona airport, Rafael
Moneo’s remodeling of Atocha railway station in Madrid, Holl’s
D.E. Shaw and Company’s offices in New York or Koolhaas’ Lille
Grand Palais Convention Center –curiously, all of them are grand
infrastructural spaces which work as flow condensers, erected by
means of light, neutral, transparent materials. However, the very
materiality of this apparently mute architecture resists somehow
the abstract, dominant space of urban flows; an interpretation that
brings Castell’s position closer to Aureli’s absolute architecture (2011)
that remains separate from its reverse, that is, the space of the city.
Through this radical separation, “architecture reveals at once the
essence of the city and the essence of itself as political form: the
city as the composition of (separate) parts” (Aureli 2011, ix), thus
emphasizing the agonistic relationship between architecture and its
environment. Once again, reading Tafuri, Aureli takes Mies’ buildings
as the paradigmatic example of an architecture that resists, in silence,
the forces of urbanization; a fact that becomes determinant in the
work of Aureli’s office itself, Dogma. In the opposite pole, a tendency
towards an over-expressive, infographic architecture, produced with
computer-based technology and overloaded with iconic meaning has
been consolidated as a dominant model. In both extremes we may
situate different projects that appear to offer “pseudo-solutions” to
“pseudo-problems” in order to justify an aesthetic, non-conventional
gesture for the sake of the built object (Trachana 2013, 52).
Atopia Leaving aside this debate, what stems from these arguments is
the capacity of architecture to condense and interact, in one way or
another, with the abstract space of flows that pervades the urban.
The degree of stupefaction of Heinrich Heine in the passage that
opens this section towards the speed of the first steam trains and the
subsequent reduction of travel times and distances would certainly
increase today, when the hyperloop vactrain is in experimental stage.
Meanwhile, some mathematicians have been able to design warped
worlds within non-Euclidean curved spaces that may be visited

silence not as an act of negativity and rejection, but an act of harboring a plethora of
words to come (…)” (Aureli 2011, 36).

442 [TRANS]FORMING
with standard VR devices (2017). Surely, the successive industrial
and technological revolutions have led to a more diffuse, ephemeral
notion of place, ultimately pointing to the atopia that theoreticians
like Eisenman (2007) or Augé (1992) have analyzed under diverse
categories, the popular non-places among them.
But despite the apparent dissolution of space-location, the space Revenge
of flows is not capable of encompassing the whole bodily and social of places
experience, either human or not. Despite the influence of a pervasive
space of flows, the urban experience is increasingly diverse and rich,
at least in some parts of the planet; thus, some authors agree that we
are witnessing a “revenge of places” (Pflieger et al. 2008, 219). In the
end, we are still bodies occupying a place. This apparently obvious
concept is discussed by Massimo Cacciari (2010; 2011), who rightly
points out that the body ultimately resists to the space-without-place.
There may come a time when the body could dissolve in order to
move, but could it be in perpetual movement? Wouldn’t it need “to
land” at some point? Is it possible to renounce place being our own
body a place? (Cacciari 2011, 36–37). The problem is that the city
is mired in the contradiction –even schizophrenia (Castells 2010,
458)– between two fundamental extremes: on one hand, the city is
understood as a space for contact, communication and gathering. On
the other, the immediate city, where everything is available instantly
without any spatiotemporal obstacle, emerges as a consequence of the
networked space of flows, leading to a certain agoraphobic reaction
against long distances. Both requirements are equally present: “we
keep demanding two opposite things from the city” (Cacciari 2010,
26).24 Sloterdijk (2013, 152) explores the same idea with different
terms, arguing that globalizing and mobilizing societies oscillate
between two poles: the “nomadic pole” of the self without a place and
the “desert pole,” or the place without a self.
Given this contradiction, Cacciari argues that utopian constructs
such as the “city of bits” proposed by Mitchell (1995) –articulated
through opposing dyads– are nothing but a reactionary and
conservative pose, yearning for past urban models, such as the agora
and the polis. Mitchell speaks of a city inserted within a computer-

24 [T.A.]

Inside/outside. Space-time compressions and flows 443

 42

based futurism which reconciles communication and gathering space

with the immediacy provided by technology. Nevertheless, this model
is succumbing to the traditional temporality of the polis, by simply
describing a future scenario. Hence, he is not proposing a radically
new model for the city, but adapting the current one to technical
advances. The contradiction between the “need of place” and the
desire for immediacy cannot be solved, but a different urban model
could emerge precisely because of this crisis. According to Cacciari
(2011, 38), the conflict would be solved if bodies were able to dissolve
and recompose, to be transmitted as information within a sort of
“angelopolis,” a city of pure message and communication. However,
space is always present, it takes revenge by preventing this immediacy
through distances (no matter how short or reduced) and the very
presence of other moving bodies and goods. In the end, as Montaner
(1997, 52) argues, places and non-places, spaces and anti-spaces are in
permanent transformation and exchange, constituting hybrid spatial
experiences. Others, like Castells (2010, 459) note the importance
of building “cultural, political, and physical bridges” between both
spatial logics in order to reinforce the concrete experience of space.
Space vs. Facing a confusing picture of perpetual mobility and presentism,
distance the notion of relational space developed by Doreen Massey may offer
a different perspective to address these irresolvable contradictions.
Through this concept, she aims at clearing that, from a relational
perspective, it is inconceivable to speak of the annihilation of
space and place. Given the widespread confusion between time
and distance, Massey (2005, 90–91) recognizes speed and time
reduction as a way to expand space –“in the sense of the formation
of social relations/interactions, including those of transport and
communication.” Thus, she reminds us that space is more than

444 [TRANS]FORMING
distance, which seems to be the most defining and problematic
dimension according to other authors:
Distance is a condition of multiplicity; but equally it itself would not be
thinkable without multiplicity. And we might note that while cyberspace is a
different kind of space (…) it is most definitely internally multiple (…) (and,
ironically, often rendered in a language of spatial metaphor which is resolutely
Cartesian). Multiplicity is fundamental. No one is proposing (I assume)
that screens, or instantaneous financial transactions, or even cyberspace, are
abolishing multiplicity. (…) And if multiplicity is not being annihilated (which
would render the whole business of transport and communication anyway
entirely redundant) then neither is space. (...) Space is more than distance. It is
the sphere of open-ended configurations within multiplicities. Given that, the
really serious question which is raised by speed-up, by ‘the communications
revolution’ and by cyberspace, is not whether space will be annihilated but what
kinds of multiplicities (patternings of uniqueness) and relations will be co-
constructed with these new kinds of spatial configurations. (Massey 2005, 91)

By starting one of the sections of her book For Space (2005) with a
routine train journey from London to Milton Keynes –under very
different conditions to those of Heine’s trip in France–, Massey
proposes that the nomadic is inherent to space, a continuous
movement between interior and exterior: “At either end of your
journey, then, a town or city (a place) which itself consists of a bundle
of trajectories. And likewise with the places in between. You are,
on that train, travelling not across space-as-a-surface (…), you are
travelling across trajectories” (Massey 2005, 119). Therefore, relational Relational space
space is understood as a “product of interrelations (…), the sphere
of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity (…) always in the
process of being made” (Massey 2005, 9). In this regard, relational
space offers a framework in which to think of possible strategies for
spatial practice from various disciplines –including architecture.
Instead of rejecting and resisting the inside/outside fissure, the
recognition of this very contradiction could open new ways of action
only by identifying and recognizing the contemporary diffusion of the
notions of exteriority and interiority and grasping its contradictory
force. Besides, as Pardo suggests (1992, 34–35), between time and
space there is a “non-spatial distance” that separates interior from
exterior and that constitutes the possibility of experience: thus,

Inside/outside. Space-time compressions and flows 445

 43

“experienced things (…) are nothing more than concentrated time–

spaces, relation networks, bundles and collections of difference (each
of them repeating the difference interior-exterior).”
Inside / outside If the Crystal Palace was the image of the transparent and
fissure safe interior of modernity, its insertion in the abstract space of
flows –amplified by means of globalization and communication
technologies– reinforces its immune character, as a giant shell that
hosts countless capsules in diverse scales that materialize the desire
for place of the individual amidst networks of perpetual circulation.
This prevalence of pure interiority, as a means both to preserve the
primacy of the subject/individual against its exterior (immunity) and
to desperately find a place to stop can be explored and questioned,
once again more clearly from the field of art, less subject to the
constraints that usually limit architecture. Even within the structure
of an actual crystal palace (in this case, the one in the Retiro Park in
Madrid) it is possible to find different spatial qualities that transform
the inward character of the glasshouse. In 2006, the Korean artist
Kimsooja displayed her installation To Breathe- A Mirror Woman
within the transparent walls of the pavilion, offering a radically
different perspective of it. By placing a translucent diffraction film

446 [TRANS]FORMING
in the glass surface of the palace, the initial achromatic transparence
of the structure becomes pure reflection and spectral color that alter
the perception of both the interior and the exterior of the palace,
reaching its maximum splendor during the hours before sunset. This
visual strategy is complemented by a sound one which reinforces the
introspective character of the installation: once inside the building,
the recorded respiration of the artist is heard, with different degrees of
agitation that may either calm down or disturb the listener. As if the
spectator were inside a colorful, monumental womb, the sensation
of being in the space of an other (female) being rapidly emerges,
creating a contradictory impression. Besides, the floor is completely
covered with an extensive mirror that offers the inverse image of the
actual space in which visitors wander together with their inseparable
reflected doppelgänger, who at the same time seem to prevent the Within the
actual spectator from falling into the void, the infinite reflected Other
space. This doubled, reverse spatiality offers the contrary experience
to virtual reality, in which intangible objects create a sensation of
materiality; rather, the material is present in To Breathe, but it is used
to generate an ethereal atmosphere composed of things that are there
and not at the same time. Contrary to the silent skyscrapes of Mies
van der Rohe, which reflected the abstract flows of the metropolis
resisting them, Kimsooja captures the forces of the environment
through interrupted glows, breaths and counterparts in a feminine
interior that evokes the presence of the different. The capsule is not
an immunological terminal anymore, but a relational extension that
incorporates the external and the other into experience. In a political
sense, this relation could be read under the perspective proposed by
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001, 125), who argue that the
external other “prevents me from being totally myself.” The relation
between both extremes does not stem from “full totalities, but from
the impossibility of their constitution.” The presence of the other is
thus unavoidable, and cannot be completely subsumed “as a positive
differential moment,” but grasped through both recognition and
negation. This runs counter to the neurotic, self-conscious space
traversed by total transparency that Han (2014, 19) sees integrated
within the contemporary logic of self-exploitation.25

25 The American writer and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich offers an

interesting work on the consequences of this logic of self-exploitation that Han would

Inside/outside. Space-time compressions and flows 447

 Noopolitics and urban space.

Soft power We have seen how the means of spatial production and organization
transcend the corporeal and material realm. Together with physical
tactics, such as border checkpoints, walls, enclaves, fences or camps,
other methods, related to intangible elements, appear. These have
to do with what is usually called “soft” power,26 conducted through
cultural and ideological means, that is, persuasion instead of coercion.
Hence, the neural and affective repercussion of these strategies is high
and they are directly related to contemporary dispositifs, such as the
panchoreographic or the society depicted by Han. The recurrence
to policies articulated through displacements, discourses, flows or
communicational strategies can be sometimes more relevant and
effective than physical elements. Many authors have analyzed the
dispositifs by means of which soft politics are possible. These are
usually related to informational and communicational –not only
Internet-based– networks which bring new possibilities to the political
field. In fact, it is interesting to observe how the Foucaldian war-
oriented and military terminology on dispositifs coincides with the
concern that his ideas (and those of other French intellectuals) arose
among defence and security forces and agencies like the CIA in the
United States. Gabriel Rockhill (2017) shows this relation after a
disclosed 1985 report27 in which the intelligence agency examines
the influence of French Theory in the European and international
political scene, recognizing its importance and the necessity to
understand its mechanisms in order to counter Marxism and
communism; such is the interest of power administration organisms
in cultural and ideological activity in order to use them as effective
means for the exercise of soft power. Thus, it seems clear that there

later diagnose. In Smile or Die (2009), Ehrenreich criticizes the impact of the generalized
exhortation of thinking positively when facing struggle, disease, frustration, etc. (being
particularly rooted in American society) and how it may result an exhausting, even
destructive habit for those who practice the culture of extreme positivity as a means to
achieve our life goals and desires.
26 The term was coined by Joseph Nye (1990) in the wake of the neoliberal
“counterrevolution” of the eighties and the substantial changes in the global political scene.
Soft power emerges as an alternative means to war and economic pressure.
27 https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-
RDP86S00588R000300380001-5.PDF

448 [TRANS]FORMING
 44

are significant translations between soft and hard power not only in
terms of war, surveillance and military or police repression –which,
as Graham (2011) points out, intervene equally in the territorial and
psychological level–, but also of social and spatial organization, as it
will be argued in the next paragraphs.
Before starting to explore how these modes of power are translated
politically into urban spaces and counterspaces, it is important
to understand how soft and hard power work spatially. In 1999,
the American defense experts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt
elaborated a report for RAND Corporation (a global policy think-
tank related to the US army) in which they found an advance of the
diffuse and the informational in terms of power. Admitting that,
despite their differences, both hard and soft power strategies appear
often intertwined or combined, Arquilla and Ronfeldt sketched a
“geopolitics of knowledge” (Aberkane 2015) articulated around the
space of a Noosphere, the “globe-girdling realm of the mind” (Arquilla
and Ronfeldt 1999, 4).
Coming from the Greek ɋɟɍɑ (“knowledge”), the scientists and Noosphere
intellectuals Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Vernadski
spatialized the whole of the products of human thought (knowledge,

Noopolitics and urban space 449

 45

ideas, concepts, speculations, affects…) through the idea of an

imaginary additional terrestrial layer, superimposed on the geosphere
and the biosphere. However, this vision of a noosphere elaborated in
the first decades of the twentieth century, being arguably too exclusive
and anthropocentric, acquires a more complex dimension today,
once we acknowledge the multiplicity of relations and intellectual
exchanges between humans and non-humans, be they animals,
plants, minerals or machines. Indeed, Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1999,
4) include the realms of cyberspace and the infosphere (cyberspace
plus the media), thus opening the field –though not implicitly–
to different agents, with special emphasis on the instrumental
devices which enable communications and the rapid exchange of
information. Cable systems, satellites, the Internet, mobile phones,
broadcast and interactive media configure a material base for the
airy realm of the noosphere, whose relevance and potential increase
thanks to interconnectivity. According to the authors, the reasons
for this development can be placed at three levels: technological
innovation, the emergence of a new organizational ecology28 and the
rise of informational soft power strategies and their importance in
international politics.
At this point, the RAND Corporation report shall be left aside,
since its purposes are too specific for the scope of this research.
Instead, the focus is placed now on the circumstances that make the
noosphere relevant for the understanding of contemporary urban
space, besides the fact that the notion of a projected sphere that

28 The authors point mostly to the strength of new NGOs, but later they would
also recognize that the most effective example may be the global network of jihadis as a
new form of spatializing conflict (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2007).

450 [TRANS]FORMING
 46

extends the existence of the actual Earth already has substantial

(counter)spatial connotations. Contrary to what it is usually assumed,
noopolitics is not just limited to the “soft” realm, but also alters
tangible reality. In a world in which global connectivity increases every
day, relations and modes of making tend to complexity. The expert in
knowledge economy Idriss J. Aberkane (2015) notices how classical
geopolitics has been based on the “interaction of kinespheres over
what are usually zero-sum exchanges (territories, natural resources,
stable markets, trade routes, etc.),” giving a territorial dimension to
the term “kinesphere.” Consequently, the wider the extension of a
particular state’s kinesphere/controlled space, the greatest its power
over others, at least according to the classical doctrine. However,
the increasing development and awareness of the importance of the
noosphere leads to a deep transformation of geopolitics in terms
of power organization and distribution. Following the ideas of the
geographer Serge Soudoplatoff, Aberkane formulates a law which
claims that “knowledge exchanges are positive sum: when one gives
away, say an ounce of gold, one does not have it anymore; when one
gives away knowledge, or an idea, one still has it.” This fact, according
to the author, makes the accumulation, generation and control of
knowledge one of the most powerful tools for states and corporations,
since they usually lead to apparently “win-win” situations that leave
little space for discontent and critique. The clearest example of this
may be found in the “new forms of labor-force extraction” that Google
or Amazon have established, profiting from the unremunerated work
of the users who spend their time and attention as basic currencies
in exchange for their free services (Andreotti and Lahiji 2016, 129)
and the accumulation of stock in what the editor of The New Inquiry
magazine Rob Horning calls “our digitized identity containers” or

Noopolitics and urban space 451

 47 48

self-representation profiles which project a specific subject to the rest

of the connected community: “Interiority has become a factory; social
media the showroom floor” (Horning 2012).
In spatial terms, this shift of interest from territorial to knowledge
economy as a more profitable way of power administration and the
transition from a hierarchical to a network organization is reflected
in the emergence of new tools and strategies for space production
at all levels –territorial, urban, architectural, domestic, artistic, etc.
For instance, we are witnessing how, in some contexts, conventional
urban policy-making is giving more importance to the inclusion
of participatory processes and best-practice exchange, or how
international architectural firms open branch offices in other parts of
the world; not to mention the radical transformation that spaces of
sociability have experienced, going from meeting and encounter in the
city streets and squares to social exchange through forums, chats and
diverse social networks. In fact, noopolitical approaches have played
a significant role in the generation of urban and regional networks:
formation of cultural nodes, rapid exchange of information, creation
of common markets, or development of place branding campaigns
are just some of the strategies undertaken by global actors in order to
organise and control economic and political domains. Certainly, this
does not entail that traditional spatial practices have disappeared or
that they will in the future. Besides, these examples do not illustrate
a completely new, surprising reality that has suddenly changed our
lives. Rather, it is already evident that the global ecosystem consists of

452 [TRANS]FORMING
multiple, hybrid networks that allow different types of relations and
spatial configurations.
In previous chapters, the space of the square has been examined
as the paradigmatic example of urban void, enabling a whole field
of action with a wide range of potentialities for spatial practice. As a
space subject to political appropriation and reappropriation, in which
multiple, indeterminate conditions may emerge, the consolidation of
the network society has led to situations that, while not completely
new, present meaningful differences compared to past practices in
the square space. We have already explored the reversal of urban
spaces such as the Bastille prison in Paris, the social unrest in Beijing’s
Tiananmen Square and the workerist protests in Italian piazzas and
central places during the years around the autunno caldo. Urban Multiple
space, and the square in particular, have been a natural scenario for bastilles
demonstration and sociopolitical manifestation for centuries. Still
today, the succession of citizen revolts that have been taking place in
the first years of the twenty-first century –from Iceland and Tunisia
to Egypt, Spain, Syria, the U.S., Turkey or Ukraine– entail the rising
of numerous “bastilles” across the planet. However, the insertion of
these events in a hyperconnected global network has transformed
and extended their scope, effects and consequences, to the point that
some, like the artist Vito Acconci (Acconci and De Jongh 2011),29
have doubts about the present value and purpose of this space
understood as urban room for gathering and demonstrating, since
its former functions would have been transferred to other domains.
Besides, their excessive codification and surveillance may hinder or
impede the course of certain practices. In this regard, reducing the

29 “Also I don’t know if things happen in a so-called public space. I think things
happen over the telephone, through the Internet, in back alleys, in city streets, not
so much in plazas. Well, the United States has no plazas. They really don’t. The only
public spaces in the United States are corporation plazas and they are just there for the
corporation to get more space. Plazas were incredibly important in the past: they were
places where people met and discussed; I am not sure whether that is true now. Now, it
seems as if a plaza is a convenient place for a city to get a large number of people together,
so they can have a surveillance system. It’s almost like you know what it is people are doing
when they are all in that place. You don’t know what they are doing in alleys, what they
are doing in back streets. So, I don’t know whether a plaza is a viable revolution notion”
(Acconci and De Jongh 2011, 1–2).

Noopolitics and urban space 453

 question of space to physical issues is inconsistent in this moment,
when urbs and civitas unfold in different realms.30
Networks and The unrestrainable development of information and
democracy communication technologies allows a permanent connection between
all kind of things, either human or non-human. It is needless to say
that the increasing importance of the virtual realm has bolstered
this conception of space as a network. Manuel Castells is one of
the scholars who has studied the connections and entanglements
between urban space and the network society from its early stages,
presenting his conclusions in several writings and books like The
Internet Galaxy (2001), The Rise of the Network Society (2010) and,
more recently, Networks of Outrage and Hope (2012). In this last book,
the author examines the origin and the course of the protests and
demonstrations that took place all over the world between 2009 and
2011. Although the reasons behind the movements were different in
each country, all of them shared at least two essential factors: first, the
general atmosphere of discontent and mistrust of ruling governments,
regimes and power institutions; second, the occupation of public
space from both its urban and virtual dimension. While it has already
been argued how networks are crucial in the organization of power
and the promotion of neoliberal globalization, all these movements
are proof that the Internet is also instrumental to protest and
mobilization against the established order; in these cases, to demand
more democracy. The disaffected crowd is (not only) on the street, but
has moved to the network for greater connectivity and organizational
possibilities. In fact, this has led to the creation of Internet-based
communities and platforms which act exclusively within the digital
domain, such as the diffuse hacktivist movement Anonymous or
network-based political parties (with questionable success) like Partido
X in Spain, which appeared after the Indignados protests in 2011,

30 The philosopher Félix Duque (2011, 78) explains the distinction between urbs
and civitas: the first is a combination of physical elements of residence and public space,
while the second embodies the political and cultural manners of citizens: “Today, civiltà
is apprehended through electronic media (virtual public sites, participation in chats or
communities, broadcast of events from other sites: for example, New Year’s Eve at Times
Square has become a global media scene).” [T.A.] However, he does not mention the polis,
the third dimension of the city, which consists on the legal and institutional definition of
the city.

454 [TRANS]FORMING
WikiPartido in Mexico or the Online Party of Canada, now renamed as
Party for Accountability, Competency and Transparency.
Concerning urban-based political movements, David Harvey asks Spatial
himself in Rebel Cities (2012, 117) if the city is a mere scenario, “a affordances
passive site (or pre-existing network) –the place of appearance– where
deeper currents of political struggle are expressed.” At the same time,
he acknowledges that some urban spaces are more prone to host
demonstrations and protests than others, due to their “environmental
characteristics,” such as centrality (“Tahrir, Tiananmen, and
Syntagma”), narrowness (“the more easily barricaded streets of
Paris compared to London or Los Angeles”), or connectivity (“El
Alto’s position commanding the main supply routes into La Paz”),
depending on the case. But beyond these physical qualities, which
undeniably condition spatial practice because of the affordances31 and
constraints they present, the place for protest or demonstration is not
chosen randomly: rather, as Castells (2012) notes, occupied spaces
are usually charged with symbolic and/or historical meaning, being
central places in which the influence of state authorities or financial
institutions is very present, or evoking certain past events which are
relevant to the community. This double condition of urban space,
presenting both material and symbolic affordances, entails other
types of relations between the actual and the virtual that enables the
emergence of a common space, beyond the realm of the Internet and
ICTs.
Nonetheless, as already mentioned, the introduction of the
technological-virtual is the differential component between the 2010s
demonstrations and previous similar ones. At the beginning of 2011,
a 26-year-old Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi died
after having set himself on fire in front of a government building in
protest against his precarious situation as a worker and the treatment
received by authorities because of his situation. The event shocked
a large part of Tunisian civil society that, after being under the rule

31 The psychologist James Gibson (1979) developed the notion of affordance from
an ecological understanding of visual perception, considering the way animals interact with
the environment through what it offers and provides. Later, Donald Norman (1988) would
define affordances as “perceived action possibilities” in the context of human–machine
interaction.

Noopolitics and urban space 455

 of the dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali for more than twenty years,
reacted against the regime authorities leading to the start of the so-
called Arab Spring, the succession of revolts in different North-African
and Near-Eastern countries. Probably, the self-immolation of Bouazizi
would not have had such an impact if his cousin had not recorded the
episode on video and uploaded it on the Internet, but it is also true
that the protest would have not been so effective if it had not been
materialized in a concrete space with a specific meaning, and through
the sacrifice of an actual body in flames. Both dimensions have been
equally important in the domino effect that led to the international
protests.
The city, which can be read (although not exclusively) both as a
workplace –replacing the factory in some parts of the world– and
as a product of the labor of many workers, is today the clearest
construction made of spaces and counterspaces, which oppose but
cannot exist without the former. Hence, Harvey (2012) proposes to
pay attention to urban “living space” conditions to extend the analysis
of social dynamics which, until recent times, had been reduced to
the workplace. On the urban terrain, he argues, “distinctions based
on gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and culture are frequently more
deeply etched into the social fabric, while issues of social reproduction
play a more prominent, even dominant role in the shaping of political
Every revolution subjectivities and consciousness” (Harvey 2012, 133). Here, the
has its square Lefebvrian fundamental notion of the “right to the city” takes on its
full meaning, considering all the layers and factors that constitute
the urban construct. Immaterial communicational and work flows,
shared ideas and knowledge acquire specific strength and visibility
within place-bound situations, shared spaces, bodies and materials
that the city offers. On the one hand, it is not only about reclaiming
space or demanding equality, but also “staging” it, interrupting the
“normalised geographical order of the sensible”32 and exposing “the
aristocratic configuration and inegalitarian ‘wrongs’ of the given,” as
Swyngedouw (2011, 24) clarifies when asserting that “every revolution
has its square.” On the other, through dialogue with collectives such

32 The work of Erik Swyngedouw, mainly focused on geography and politics, is

influenced by the work and concepts developed by Jacques Rancière, specifically those
related to the partage du sensible.

456 [TRANS]FORMING
as Zuloark, dpr-barcelona or Paisaje Transversal,33 which understand
architectural and urban practice from a social perspective close to
activism, it becomes clear that it is possible to produce a complex
reality and manage it through different types of networks, and that
the contemporary city is also inserted within these management
processes. Generating city, after all, also means strengthening links
between communities to enable the creation of social structures.
This phenomenon extends through the Internet, where citizens can
communicate and extend their action in time by means of social
networks and different platforms. These processes activate an open
field consisting in the “massive re-appropriation of corporate social
networks and the invention of new free instruments, together with
large-scale hacktivist strategies for organizational purposes and
political-viral communication” (Alcazan et al. 2012, 7). A Twitter
user linked to the Spanish 15-M movement explains the relation
between material and virtual public spaces as follows:
@arnaumonty: We can talk about the square-network or the network of
connected squares, about the street-network and the network of connected
streets, or about the city-network itself or the connected metropolis. Once the
street-network dichotomy is broken, political action unfolds at the same time
in both territories, inseparable, in permanent feedback, in a living symbiotic
process. The network has reduced the participation costs of political action;
physical exhaustion or isolation itself and the city, the square and the streets
have reemerged as a spatial embodiment of the immateriality of the network, as
affective space for the encounter of rebel bodies. Once the boundaries between
cyber-territory and geo-territory are broken, nothing will be as before (…)
because the power of this hybridization in the hands of connected commons
never existed before, a new field of possibilities has been open to never close
again. (Alcazan et al. 2012, 25)34

33 During a series of sessions on new technologies and social networks of the

Master in Sustainable Architecture and City at the University of Seville starting in March
2013, several virtual meetings took place between the students and different practitioners
involved in the study and development of new urban practices and scenarios in relation to
citizenship and technology (Manu Fernández, dpr-barcelona, Stepienybarno, Domenico Di
Siena, Zuloark and Paisaje Transversal). The session of March 2016 can be seen here: https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpImpaaM4Mk&feature=youtu.be
34 [T.A.]

Noopolitics and urban space 457

 49

Nevertheless, the question arises whether it is possible to activate

and transform the political scene from this new location: is not the
network a decidedly undemocratic structure? Its nodal –and therefore,
also hierarchical– structure makes it paradoxical to speak of a “virtual
democracy,” especially when social inequalities both caused by and
derived from the access to network technologies are still wide in terms
of gender, age, race, class, country, urban or rural context etc. (Di
Maggio and Hargittai 2001; Van Dijk 2012; “ICT Facts and Figures
2017” 2017), even though the digital divide may be progressively
Big Brother vs. closing in some contexts. Besides the legitimacy of the exercise of
little sisters violence that falls on the states, we have already experienced how
control is also exerted through virtual and psychological means:
Castells (2001, 180) states that there is no Big Brother anymore –in
this regard, the inverted-panoptic sphere of BIG’s Stockholmsporten
master plan seems anachronistic. Instead, there is “a multitude of little
sisters,” that is, companies that sell the users’ private information to
governments and other companies, either for control or commercial
purposes. He also evidences the fact that the structure of the network,
in any of its applications, is essentially undemocratic. Besides, it
includes and exposes particular strategies of distribution –one can be
either in or out of it:
What characterizes the networking logic embedded in the Internet-based
infrastructure is that places (and people) can be as easily switched off as they can
be switched on. The geography of networks is a geography of both inclusion and
exclusion, depending on the value attached by socially dominant interests grant
to any given place. (Castells 2001, 238)

458 [TRANS]FORMING
Thus, the network is a paradigmatic spatialization that conditions
“what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought,
made, or done” (Rancière 2004, 85), and works as a specific mode
of distribution (of the sensible) entailing modes of inclusion and
exclusion, that is, a clear separation between those who have part in it
and those who do not. Indeed, networks suit the post-political logic
quite well, since they offer a managerial structure in which decisions
and operations can be undertaken rapidly, effectively, and sometimes
uncritically, as it happens in the wake of post-truth and fake news.
However, as Michel Serres (1991, 61) acknowledges in his textual The melting
journey through the North-West passage, we have never lived in network
the Leibnizian network, the harmonic, graphic model of a complex
system that depicts the relations and interactions between its elements.
The network, which was adopted by classic sciences and is transferred
to modernity especially through the theories of communications and
systems (structuralism), enables the rapprochement of more or less
distant elements in space and time. However, the connective network
and its rigid structure “melt under the energy of the Industrial
Revolution” and becomes uncontrollable, fluid and chaotic: “the
observer finally enters the boiler, in which only partial information
is found” (Serres 1991, 62). This complexity exceeds a network that,
although present as a basic scaffolding, is dissolved to become air,
steam, cloud, a disordered order in which everything is connected in
a chaotic whirlpool. It is not surprising that the current computation
system is known as “the cloud” because of its decentralization and
flexibility; data is not hosted in our physical computer anymore, but
floating somewhere in the global server system, available whenever
we want. Still, Serres does not dare to give a name to this model,
although it reflects the fluent, hyperconnected character of the global
space permanently traversed by flows, bursting with activity. But
the ethereal fuzziness of the cloud is interrupted by the concrete
materiality of bodies and objects which occupy a determinate spatial
fragment.
In fact, the materiality of an image may revert the delusional force Hypotopia
of phantasmagorias in order to render noticeable the contradictions
and irrationalities inherent to the system and the abstract flows that
keep the pace of global economy. Such is the process followed in

Noopolitics and urban space 459

 50

Hypotopia, the fictional city created by a group of students from the

Technical University of Vienna after the bailout of the Hypo Alpe
Adria bank in 2014, which had an impact of nineteen billion euro
on the Austrian public budget. In order to raise public awareness
about the resources that the state had employed to rescue a failed
private entity, the students decided to build a meticulous model
of a hypothetical city that could be created and sustained with the
same amount of money: a city that could host 102,574 inhabitants
–becoming the sixth largest city in Austria– with plenty of resources
and services for a sustainable urban life. The model was exhibited
in front of the Karlskirche for three weeks, attracting thousands of
visitors and originating a series of lectures on urban issues and a final
demonstration in which participants carried the wooden and concrete
blocks of the dismantled model shouting: “We bear the burden of the
future” (Niranjan 2014) Hypotopia represents the concrete dimension
of capitalist flows, which are unmasked, and their transformation
into a physical reality that, though imaginary, generates a space of
interaction among citizens. The prefix hypo-, taken from the name
of the bank but also meaning “under,” is combined with topos, place,
highlighting the spatial dimension of the intervention.
In the end, while urban protest and dissent become more
effective thanks to the potential field that virtual communications
offer, it needs to be staged, performed, embodied publicly in the
living space of the city to acquire its full significance and strength.
Social movements, as Delgado (2015) argues, are actual movements:
“displacements, locomotions, physical coincidences, activities in
which the mobilized move, gather, circulate together, occupy urban

460 [TRANS]FORMING
streets and make them theirs.” As the nodes and connections of the
network melt and become more diffuse, so do the individual bodies
which conform a certain public or counterpublic, becoming a fluid,
more or less homogeneous and uncountable mass35 that conquers
urban space. In these situations, the limit between the public and the
crowd becomes blurry.36
Whether well-organized or not, the mobilized crowd can become Destructive
a transforming, even destructive element. Sloterdijk (2010, 209) protest
comments on the riots that took place in the suburbs of Paris in 2005,
in which young French Muslims of African origin protested for their
precarious situation. The protests raged like a plague on the periphery
of the capital: cars and urban furniture were burnt; public buildings
were looted and there were violent clashes with the police. While
Baudrillard (Sloterdijk 2010, 208) concludes that the country has
not been able to integrate and develop a consciousness of belonging
among African and Arabic migrants and their descendants, Sloterdijk
(2010, 209) blames it on the great load of subversive eroticization that
the masses have experienced, thus dissolving the “thymotic ensemble
of people, nation, party, and confession.” This means that the desire
to possess (rights, benefits, etc.) inserted on the basis of the capitalist
logic would have replaced the values of pride and courage of the

35 Indeed, the density of the mass is seen as an indicator of the validity and
strength of a specific movement. Media, governments and civil society associations often
make use of these data and try to present it in a way that matches their interest. As a
consequence, and due also to the diversity of counting methods, it is usual to find very
different participation figures depending on who presents the information, sometimes
leading to impossible situations.
36 Traditionally, the Western notions of public and mass have been considered to
be similar, although different. The public is mostly a communicational construct, composed
of independent individuals who share a particular interest, while the mass or multitude
works as an agglomeration of bodies that acts irrationally, moved by common interests and
aspirations. This dichotomy, analyzed popularized by the French sociologists Gabriel Tarde
and Gustave Le Bon in the beginning of the twentieth century, stems from the classification
between illustrated, ordered bourgeois public and uneducated, disordered proletarian mass
or multitude. More recent authors have attempted to redeem the notion of multitude
and provide it with a more complex meaning in a time when social movements emerge
as specific publics and counterpublics in a massive scale. (Hardt and Negri 2004; Castells
2013; Delgado Ruiz 2015)

Noopolitics and urban space 461

 51 52

citizen who feels represented in a certain collective.37 In any case, it

seems that the only possible way to express widespread discontent in
this context is through destruction, anger directed against everything
that exists, eliminating everything in its path with a no less violent
reaction from security forces.
Why burn all this? Simply burn the scenery that we can no longer bear to
see, this misery that oppresses us, the rotten city that encloses and suffocates
us. Burn the controlled means of transportation that have to be paid and that
humiliate day by day our desire to come out of this gray color. Burn the schools
of the Republic that are the first place of selection, exclusion, and learning blind
obedience... To burn but not to steal. Just to be able to see the smoke of the
merchandise that burns... (López Petit 2010, 59) 38

37 Although the most violent outbreaks in the banlieues have taken place since
the 1980s, when they become associated to the immigrant population, these have always
been problematic areas. The violence generated in the Parisian suburbs contrasts with
the violence exerted on them through mass unemployment, discrimination and police
repression. (Gandy ed., 2011:59-61)
38 Text by the Collectif de la Cité des Bosquets (Montfermeil), published in Espaces
et Sociétés, 2005, n. 128-129.

462 [TRANS]FORMING
If the French riots had been an isolated case, there was probably
nothing to worry about. However, in 2006, French students initiated
a further wave of violent riots to express their complaints. Something
similar happened in the United Kingdom in 2011, and thus a long
list of riots unleashed after a concrete event could be elaborated.
The negativity of these forms of rage lies in the impossibility of
articulating them morally and collecting them politically (Sloterdijk
2010). López Petit (2010) places them in the peripheries, facing
the indifferent “center,” which remains enclosed in itself forgetting
the voices that come no longer from inside or outside, but from the
surroundings.39 Those known as the “barbarians” are on the periphery,
those who “open the spaces of anonymity,” which are remote to power
institutions.
Against destructive protest, which speaks of a probably Allagmatic
malfunctioning society that does not see the reason or the way to efforts
organize (because it does not even know how to channel its demands),
there are other examples in which the occupation of a public space
can reach a surprising degree of organization. The aerial view that
BBC News published in February 2011 to inform about the protests
in Cairo’s Tahrir Square40 depicts the amalgam of people that met
daily during several weeks. But what cannot be seen with the naked
eye are the different spaces (tagged with labels) in which the square
was structured as an appropriated space: there were campsites, prayer
and protest areas, a main stage, a kindergarten... Even an ephemeral
but well-organized infrastructure was arranged to facilitate the stay
of protesters: pharmacy, clinic, water points, Internet connection or
rubbish bins, among others. Similarly, the organization of Toma la
Plaza movement in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol reorganized the space
of the square and the adjacent streets with areas designated for
assemblies, commissions, food distribution points, mailboxes, lost
objects, etc. In a sense, the urban fabric is almost instantaneously
transformed by accumulation, redistribution of objects, facilities,

39 The author warns that articulating dualities through the concept of exclusion is
not enough, since capitalism invariably operates from abandonment and seizure, which in
the end are the same mechanism. Seizing, or the action of grabbing, is for Canetti (1978)
one of the most primitive forms of power, together with the act of incorporating.
40 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12434787

Noopolitics and urban space 463

 groupings ... through informal architecture and planning carried
out by the demonstrators themselves, who build and modify the
space they occupy: an allagmatic architecture,41 managed with
no instruments but their bodies and communication through the
networks, either physical or virtual. In a perfect symbiosis between
both realms, emerging political spaces appear. Perhaps in these spaces,
rather than in suburban protests, politics becomes a critique of
politics.

41 The notion of the allagmatic is recovered by the architect and writer Léopold
Lambert, who retakes the criticism that the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon posed
on the Aristotelian hylomorphic paradigm, in which he considers that a third factor
is lacking so that the matter (‫܄‬λη, hyle) acquires form (μορφή, morfé), that is, energy.
“To remain outside of the magical hylomorphic scheme, it is necessary to consider the
energy that the formation process requires and, by extension, the physical effort that
produces this energy. Simondon defines the ‘allagmatic operation’ as one in which energy
is considered as a fundamental element in the production of an individual object or body.
The individual is no longer a being, but an act that requires energy to exist. In this act, ‘the
becoming of each molecule resounds on the becoming of all others.’ Such a definition can
also be applied to various insurrectional movements because a collective action of political
emancipation precisely constitutes an act of individuation” (Lambert 2012, 99). The author
speaks of the tunnel and barricade as examples of militarized architecture created through
these processes, to which the occupied squares could be added.

464 [TRANS]FORMING
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37 NBBJ, Amazon Headquarters, Seattle (under construction). Source: NBBJ.

38 Rafael Moneo y Pedro Elcuaz, Atocha Railway Station, Madrid. Spurce: Photograph by
Pedro Pegenaute, Metalocus, 2010.

39 Grau, White Rabbit. “Station de métro aérien,” Miami, 2009. Source: Pinterest.

40 Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building Plaza. Source: Wikimedia Commons, user:
dandeluca.

41 Hao Tian, Huang Haiyang,and Shi Jianwei. PH Conditioner Skyscrapers, 2013. eVolo
Skyscraper competition. Source: eVolo.

42 Klaus Spiekermann and Michael Wegener. Europe 60 km/h-grid maps (from left to right:
base map, railway travel times in 1993 and in 2020). Source: Spiekermann & Wegener Urban and
Regional Research.

43 Kimsooja, “To Breathe – A Mirror Woman,” Palacio de Cristal, Madrid, 2006. Source:
http://andayporqueno.blogspot.com.es

44 Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, “Information via the Noosphere (according to Vernadsky),” 1995-
1998. Source: Tufts University Art Gallery.

45 Rammstein, “Amerika” (music video), 2004. Source: YouTube, Rammstein Official.

46 Interactions between users in social networks in Spain during the 15M protests, 2011.
Source: Universidad de Zaragoza. YouTube Bifi Unizar.

47 Purple-water canyons against prtesters in Srinagar, Kashmir, India, 2008. Source: TIME
Lightbox

48 “Indignados,” in Seville, Spain, May 15, 2011. Source: Photograph by F. Ruso, El Mundo.

49 BIG, Stockholmsporten Masterplan. Source: BIG, Bjarke Ingels Group.

472 [TRANS]FORMING
 50 Hypotopia model in Karlsplatz, Vienna, 2014. Source: Left: Photograph by Armin Walcher,
The Guardian. Right: Twitter, user: Daniel Boehm.

51 Riots in a suburb in Paris, 2007. Source: Photograph by Pascal Rossignol, Reuters, The
New York Times.

52 Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring, 2011. Source: BBC News.

473
SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL.
 The temptation to see Asia as one unit reveals, in fact, a distinctly Eurocentric
perspective. Indeed, the term “the Orient,” which was widely used for a long
time to mean essentially what Asia means today, referred to the direction of the
rising sun. It requires a heroic generalization to see such a large group of people
in terms of the positional view from the European side of the Bosporus. (Sen
1997, 13)

The dual condition of togetherness and otherness between two The two
territories, Asia and Europe (Cacciari 2009, 200–201), appears in the women
dream of Queen Atossa, mother of the emperor Xerxes, that the Greek
tragedian Aeschyllus describes in The Persians. In her vision, two
women appear pulling a carriage. Both are sisters, equally beautiful
and majestic; however, a conflict (stasis) emerges between them, so
the emperor cannot control the situation: the first woman, Asia,
proudly accepts the task of carrying the emperor, while the second –a
nameless woman that Cacciari (2009, 201) identifies with Eleutheria,
the Greek freedom– breaks the harness, indomitable, throwing Xerxes
off the chariot. The relationship between both women, their common
lineage, is at the same time their confrontation.
If Cacciari frequently turns to his city, Venice, as the enclave where East and West
the archipelago and thalassocracy manifest, land and sea,1 East and
West at the same time –tragic character, pure contradiction–, Istanbul,
the ancient Byzantium and Constantinople, might be concealed
in this text as the physical union and division where both women
unite their hands. It is the point of rupture and contact between the

1 Cacciari’s understanding of the sea as the field in which islands manifest,

intertwine and from which they nourish is opposed to the vision of Rancière, who
advocates a politics that, by means of philosophy, takes off from the sea: “Empirical politics,
that is to say the fact of democracy, is identified with the maritime sovereignty of the lust
for possession, which sails the seas doubly threatened by the buffeting of the waves and
the brutality of the sailors. The great beast of the populace, the democratic assembly of
the imperialist city, can be represented as a trireme of drunken sailors. In order to save
politics it must be pulled aground among the shepherds” (Rancière 1995, 1) The author
thus moves from the dichotomy sea-land image to that of cavern-mountain to connect
with the Platonic discourse.

475
 01

two civilizations of the ancient world. Specifically, Cacciari situates

the appearance of conflict and division between East and West in
this geopolitical context of the Greco-Persian wars. This progressive
recognition of the Other, the enemy, impulses the emergence of the
polis as a purely Western phenomenon, and politics (Carrera 2009,
38).
To focus now the attention in a specific location such as Istanbul
has a double motivation: first, to study a very specific case of
reclamation of public space from public space itself –understood
from its urban and political dimension– in a very specific neoliberal
context;2 second, to detect other forms of (counter)spatiality through
the processes that have configured the city in recent years. Istanbul,
which in 2012 was the scene of massive protests against the policies
of Erdoğan (who was Prime Minister at the time), has reflected
throughout its history a relation of otherness between territories.
The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk (2006) recounts his memories
through the image and pace of his hometown, as if his own life was
identified with Istanbul through a sort of parallelism. In a chapter

2 Information about the current situation in Turkey and the transformations

experienced between the Kemalist period and Erdoğan’s government has been obtained
thanks to prof. Dr. Tuna Tasan-Kok (University of Amsterdam) during an interview in May
2016.

476 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

 02

on the construction of Turkish identity, Pamuk tells how East

and West can be distinguished depending on how people talk of
certain historical facts: “For Westerners, May 29, 1453, is the Fall of
Constantinople, while for Easterners it’s the Conquest of Istanbul”
(Pamuk 2006, 172). The different naming of the same event, the
coexistence of different worldviews and ways of like in a same space
–like the descendants of the Byzantine Greeks that aroused much
curiosity in Pamuk when he was a child–, the gaze of the foreigner
Antoine Ignace Melling,3 who drew the city from within... All these Hostis / hospes
elements that the writer includes in his memoirs show an Istanbul
that can be read as the spatial manifestation of the recognition of
the Other: the exterior is assimilated; it is incorporated as something
different to ensure the permanence (immunity) of the city. It was
once a place where relationships were not mere exchanges, but where
the foreign –the alien– was a guest. This hospes-hostis duality runs the

3 Pamuk was fascinated by the paintings of Antoine-Ignace Melling (1763-1831),

born in Karlsruhe and of French and Italian descent. He was appointed imperial architect
by the Sultan Selim III through his sister, Hatice Sultan, for eighteen years. Melling had a
privileged position to observe the city from within, as it is reflected in his paintings of the
Bosporus and the city: “(...) he saw the city like an Istanbulite, but painted it like a clear-
eyed Westerner” (Pamuk 2006, 75).

477
 risk of being flattened by an extreme Schmittian friend-enemy logic,4
which comes from the absolute oblivion in which the islands fall with
regard to the others. No longer guests, but refugees. Instead, Cacciari
offers a different view:
It is impossible to ignore the Other because “we are” the Other: otherness
with respect to the other “outside” of us is possible because we are others in
ourselves. From this anthropological conception, it is possible to go beyond
mere pragmatism on the issue of solidarity: because my individuality is given in
this community of the absolutely different taken essentially into consideration.
(...) A community founded on a Cum that is different from the one proclaimed
by this “mass”; a Cum that can keep the difference and the relationship
between hospes and hostis; a Cum which is not given among the identical: only
when the neighbor is the enemy (hostis) and the enemy inhabits with me, the
community is possible. The homo democraticus does not tolerate difference,
he needs homogeneity. But the urge to eliminate distances does not generate
the community (...) Here lies the intelligence towards the Other, towards the
different: it is not about capturing or grasping it, but hosting it as the perfectly
different. (Cacciari 1999, 154–55)5

Perhaps at some point, Istanbul embodied the urban experience of

coexistence between strangers-hosts: a city where many “Others”
coincide together, different but inseparable, as cohabitants of the same
land and the same sea that connected and yet separated them from

4 Schmitt’s ideas were key to the theoretical basis of national-socialism in

Germany. The division between friend and enemy can be read in terms of annihilation
of the other, which is seen as an external body out of the boundaries of the established
order, as Sloterdijk (2013, 110 ff) points out when analyzing the establishment of European
colonies overseas and comparing it to massive extermination during World War II: “The
other, viewed as a body in the external space, is no cohabitant of a shared lifeworldly
sphere, no fellow carrier of a sensory-moral resonator, ‘culture’ or shared life, but rather
an arbitrary component of welcome or unwelcome external circumstances (…) The
colonies and the seas beyond the line were the practice sites for the exterminism that
would return to Europeans in the twentieth century as the style of total war. If it takes
place on the outside, the battling of a foe can no longer be clearly distinguished from the
extermination of a thing. Carl Schmitt rightly pointed out the role of the ‘friendship lines’
agreed upon by the European naval powers, whose purpose was to mark out a civilized
space beyond which the outside, as an extralegal space, could formally begin.”
5 [T.A.]

478 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

 03 04

other cities, cultures and islands.6 However, after the overthrow of

the last Sultan in 1922, the nation started a process of modernization
under the leadership of Kemal Atatürk, in order to gradually approach
its secular European neighbors. Thus, Istanbul became a modern,
westernized metropolis in a relatively short time.
“Crazy plans” and counter-plans.
The Republic brought new codes to urban space representation from
a secularist perspective, moving away from Islamic and Ottoman
references. Ankara became the capital of the modern Turkey,
experiencing a deep transformation after a master plan developed by
the German urbanist Hermann Jansen and including spaces based on
Western-oriented, secular practices and social codes (Gül 2009, 87):
large parks and avenues, leisure and recreational spaces, cultural and
educational facilities were mostly designed by Swiss, German and
Austrian architects. Meanwhile, Istanbul remained in the background

6 Also from an urban perspective, Istanbul could be understood as a “city

of islands,” of “enclosed fragments (...) existing in levels of isolation and homogeneity,
shaped by the dominant visions of the global city, private capital and city planning,” that
nonetheless still remain connected by means of “strategic responses [that] address this
isolation through the promotion of a collective vision within the urban poor that can
effectively challenge these imposed visions of the city” (Boano et al. 2010, 10). Some of
these visions and (counter)strategies will be explored in this chapter.

“Crazy plans” and counter-plans 479

 for some time, neglected by the ruling regime and treated as an
obsolete reflection of the past –after all, it had been the capital of two
of the most long-lived empires in history. The rise of Ankara resulted
in the loss of many jobs and resources that were once placed in
Istanbul; a fact that deepened the economic crisis and undermined the
morale of the citizens.
Westernizing However, the city would also be subject to important urban
Istanbul transformations from the thirties on, since the government was
perfectly aware of its importance as the country’s gate to the world,
and therefore should not be overlooked (Gül 2009, 92). Several
renowned international architects and planners were invited to present
their proposals for the new Istanbul – a fact that, once again, reflects
the westernizing tendency of the Kemalist administration and was not
well received by Turkish professionals, who considered that a foreigner
could never totally perceive the complexity of the city (Gül 2009, 96).
Donald Alfred Agache, Hermann Ehlgötz, Jacques-Henri Lambert
and even Le Corbusier and Martin Wagner elaborated a series of
plans following very different approaches and criteria, considering
for instance the convenience of transforming the historical structure
of the city. Finally, it was the French urban planner Henri Prost who
prepared the master plan and was appointed local chief planner from
1936 until 1950, focusing especially on the transformation of the
Istanbul Peninsula and the Beyoğlu district, the most representative
parts of the city. Besides, he emphasized the character of Greco-
Roman and Byzantine heritage over Ottoman monuments, although
these were still to be carefully preserved and their importance was
always acknowledged (Gül 2009; Steele and Shafik 2010). In terms of
urban planning, Prost clearly advocated for urban zoning according
to functional areas and the transformation of traditional urban
fabric, imposing an uninterrupted, dense traffic network with great
boulevards, bridges, viaducts and tunnels. However, although the plan
was quite radical and envisaged the demolition of several old quarters
and obsolete areas, it was finally not so aggressive due to technical and
economic restrictions. In the end, most of Prost’s ideas would never be
implemented.
Istanbul’s urban transformations during the first half of the
twentieth century stand in contrast to the ones carried out during

480 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

 05 06

the last decades. After having been set aside during the first part
of the Republican period, the city was progressively regarded as a
potential global city, with a privileged position between Europe and
Asia and extremely rich cultural and historical values. Besides, the
city benefited from the political changes that took place in Eastern
Europe and the implementation of liberal economic policies during
those years (Baycan-Levent 2003, 10–11). These factors paved the
way for Istanbul to become a relevant urban actor at the regional and
global level. Thus, after the military coup in 1980 and the institution
of a democratic government three years later, the country was
embroiled in a series of major reforms, also at the level of planning
and management of the territory. The Mayor of Istanbul Bedrettin
Dalan, elected in 1984, was the first to seriously enhance the vision
of a global Istanbul through diverse urban operations such as the
second Bosphorus Bridge or the new highway along the Marmara Sea
to connect the Atatürk Airport with the center of the city, as well as
starting to transform Istanbul for the bid for the Olympic Games; a
venue that could have definitively consolidated its position as a world
city.
However, urban dynamics would experience a substantial shift after Ekümenopolis
the AKP (Justice and Development Party) won the general election
in 2002. The documentary Ekümenopolis: Ucu olmayan sehir (“A City
without Limits,” Azem 2011)7 portrays the planning and development
operations that the city has undergone in recent years, mainly focused

7 The term “Ecumenopolis” was coined by Constantinos Doxiadis to illustrate the

idea of an eventual fusion of the great urban areas of the future into a global continuum,
according to urban growth trends.

“Crazy plans” and counter-plans 481

 07

on the connections by land of both sides of the Bosphorus and

exacerbated building of large residential complexes driven by the
Turkish Housing Development Administration, TOKI –founded in
1984–, in order to host new inhabitants from the countryside and
small towns coming to bigger cities in search of job opportunities.
Population flows Due to these internal migrations, Istanbul has become a “megacity” in
terms of population and extension. If in the eighties the population
had reached five million, Istanbul is today one of the most populated
urban areas of the world, heading the list of European cities with
fourteen million inhabitants approximately. It will maintain this
position at least until 2030, when it is expected to host more than
sixteen and a half million people (United Nations 2016). The arrival
of newcomers and the need for space to accommodate them generate
an urban situation that is often problematic because of the struggle
between different socio-cultural groups sharing their place in the
city (Broekema and Kuipers 2013). Besides, economic growth and
the desire to attract investors from diverse sectors boost the cyclical
processes of urban renewal and gentrification in central areas, while

482 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

population living in these zones is usually expelled to the outskirts,
where they cohabit with rural migrants in sprawling residential areas,
both formal and informal. All these population flows configure a
complex system of zones and developing areas which often come into
conflict, without properly addressing the need for a sound housing
environment in the city.8
In Ekümenopolis, the former General Secretary of the Istanbul
Branch of the Turkish Chamber of Architects Mücella Yapıcı, explains
that Turkey undertook huge investments and development projects to
transform the main cities of the country into global cities, especially
during the early nineties, to increase the competitiveness of the
country as a world power. By doing this, the country was expected to
grow and eventually become a strong candidate to join the European
Union. This new political agenda widened the possibilities of Istanbul
to become a global city (Klein 2011, 25), considering its privileged,
strategic position with regard to Europe. If, as it has been already
argued, the ambition for a modern, internationally relevant Istanbul
had been forged through several years of transformation, the end of
the developmentalist period of the seventies (Aygünes 2011, 24 ff)
and the rise of AKP brought the implementation of liberal measures
in order to integrate the country –and especially Istanbul– into the
world economy (Klein 2011, 25).
Eraydin and Tasan-Kok (2014) have argued that clientelist and
entrepreneurialist models that had been adopted during the seventies
and eighties in several states to suppress public reaction against
urban transformations can also be detected in Turkish policies during

8 Burcu Yigit-Turan (n.d.) warns of the social problems generated in these

peripheral spaces with poor spatial quality, which however are perceived by some of the
newcomers as positive for the simple fact of offering free spaces. Many of these residents
feel powerless and incapable of transforming their space or claiming better conditions,
even considering the management of the government to be positive and without thinking
that they have the right to a better city. “In this sense, informal urbanism should not be
normalized or aestheticized, or power of activist research, planning and design practice
should not be underestimated, despite of their negative baggage generated with superficial
populist design practices and discourses. There is a serious need for understanding the
situations of these ephemeral urbanities comprehensively and for producing solutions
for creating the possibilities of integration, access, inclusion and diversity in the city for
everyone.”

“Crazy plans” and counter-plans 483

 those decades at a general level. However, contemporary neoliberal
approaches based on a “new authoritarianism” –aiming “to pacify
the opponents to neoliberal urban management with authoritarian
and entrepreneurial state interventions” (2014, 114) resorting to
soft power strategies–9 do not fit the Turkish model, which has
evolved following different tactics. It is important to keep in mind
that, in order to rapidly achieve high rates of economic growth, the
ruling party started to develop an intense building activity; thus, the
construction sector has become a cornerstone for the legitimization
of AKP’s socio-political project (Eraydin and Tasan-Kok 2014,
118), which will be addressed later. Consequently, the government
transferred most of the planning rights from municipalities to
central government bodies like TOKI, which is today one of the
most empowered state departments, controlling more than 40% of
Istanbul’s urban land and having the capacity to develop new housing
estates and participate as entrepreneur in construction projects
(Eraydin and Tasan-Kok 2014, 119; Tan 2014, 154). This has led to
an extension of market dynamics throughout the territory and the
frequent commodification and privatization of urban land.
Development In order to maintain the pace and economic profitability of
and seggregation building activity, the acquisition of urban land has become a major
priority for the government. But such a limited resource cannot be
achieved without conflict, since many potentially developing urban
areas are occupied by lower classes who usually live in informal
settlements and small self-built houses. Thus, the normal procedure
followed by TOKI comprises the eviction of these residents, who
are usually offered a new, better home somewhere else in exchange
for leaving the place. Once the inhabitants are gone, the existing
buildings are demolished and new, more expensive ones are erected.
This process leads to an extreme polarization of urban and social
scenarios: on the one hand, new urban developments, megaprojects

9 “New ways to moderate urban contention and deliberation (…) were then
introduced. The main motivation was to neutralise dissent through co-optation. One way
was to sponsor entrepreneurial interventions, whereby the state acts as a ‘speculative
investor’ in a coalition of private-sector stakeholders (…) City branding and investment in
large-scale infrastructure, waterfront redevelopment, and other large-scale urban projects
are well known elements of the entrepreneurial ethos (…)” (Eraydin and Tasan-Kok 2014,
115).

484 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

and housing estates constitute isolated profit-making urban
fragments fully equipped with leisure and commercial facilities,
thus consolidating a satisfied middle-class and a comfortable way
of life. On the other, lower classes –migrants, ethnic minorities,
low-income families, etc. – are displaced and uprooted from their
neighborhoods and communities. If they decide not to accept a new
TOKI home, their only option is usually to move to other informal
settlements in which living conditions are similar to the previous ones.
The introduction of Law 5366 in 2005 has displayed new tools for
mass urban renewal and gentrification, facilitating the conversion of
gecekondu areas10 into luxury residential complexes (Vanstiphout and
Relats (eds.) 2014, 66). Therefore, not only does the problem remain
unresolved, but aggravated in terms of segregation and housing
quality.
Together with massive, identical housing estates and gated
residential communities, the fever for representative buildings and
city-branding strategies has transformed the very singular cityscape of
Istanbul in order to host international companies, hotels and banks,
replacing other constructions –sometimes of artistic or heritage
interest– that have been demolished during the process (Klein 2011,
26). The continual bids for organizing international events such as the
Olympic Games11 have only intensified the rhythm of transformation
of urban space through the planning and building of infrastructures
and facilities and the destruction of some parts of the old urban fabric
and several green areas, especially the vast forest lands north of the
city. The rhetoric of urban competitiveness definitely enhanced the
transformation of Istanbul.
In 1980 the first plan for Istanbul on a metropolitan scale was produced. In that
plan report, it is noted that the topography and the geographic nature of the city
would only support a maximum population of 5 million. At the time, Istanbul

10 Gecekondu means “built overnight.” It is a term that designates the precarious

construction of houses during a single night in order to bypass a regulation that forbids
illegal building. However, since the immediate demolition of existing buildings is not
allowed, dwellers build their homes overnight and upgrade them afterwards, so when
inspectors arrive in the morning the construction has already finished.
11 Istanbul has bid for the Olympic Games of 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2020,
only succeeding as a Candidate City for 2020, although Tokyo was finally selected.

“Crazy plans” and counter-plans 485

 had 3.5 million people living in it. Now we are 15 million, and in 15 years we
will be 23 million. Almost 5 times the sustainable size. Today we bring water
to Istanbul from as far away as Bolu, and suck-up the entire water in Thrace,
destroying the natural environment there. The northern forest areas disappear at
a rapid pace, and the project for a 3rd bridge over the Bosphorus is threatening
the remaining forests and water reservoirs giving life to Istanbul. The bridges
that connect the two continents are segregating our society through the urban
land speculation that they trigger (…) Ecological limits have been surpassed.
Economic limits have been surpassed. Population limits have been surpassed.
Social cohesion has been lost. Here is the picture of neoliberal urbanism:
Ecumenopolis.12

During the last decades, different proposals, transformations and

plans for Istanbul have been succeeding one another at a frantic pace.
For instance, a master plan by the Greater Municipality of Istanbul
was approved in 1995, when Erdoğan was mayor of the city. The main
objective of this ambitious plan was “to maintain the balance between
the conservation and development and to integrate the city to the
economy of the world while playing a pioneering role in its region
(Middle East, Asia and Europe),” with special focus on development
at all scales (regional, national and international), controlled growth,
decentralization, development of the urban macro-form in a linear
structure (East-West), and the preservation of natural, cultural and
historical assets (Baycan-Levent 2003, 12). It is important to remark
that the tendency to avoid urban growth towards the north responds
to the importance of the vast areas of green land that spread in this
direction, such as Fatih and Belgrad forests or Polonezköy Nature
Park. These zones ensure the environmental balance of the region,
since water is a scarce resource and the amount of green space per
capita in Istanbul is very low (about six square meters, according to
Istanbul Municipality, while the World Health Organization standard
sets a minimum of nine).13 In this sense, any attempt to extend the
growth of the city toward one of its most precious natural resources

12 Synopsis of the film. Found in the website of the European Council of Spatial
Planners: http://www.ectp-ceu.eu/index.php/en/8-newsletter/newletter-articles-no-3/223-
ecumenopolis-city-without-limits [Accessed January 28, 2018]
13 The loss of urban forests is estimated from 270,000 hectares in 1970 to
240,000 hectares in 2009 (Ocak and Sönmez 2014).

486 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

was considered an outrage; even the mayor Erdoğan fully rejected the
possibility of a third bridge over the Bosphorus Strait since it “would
mean the murder of the city”(Letsch 2012). However, he would
change his mind after his election as Prime Minister of the country in
2003.
In 2009, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality elaborated a new
master plan following the same lines of the former and adapting them
to the new changes and challenges of the metropolitan region.14 The
plan was the result of the conjoint work of hundreds of academics,
urban planners, civil engineers, community groups, and other
stakeholders under the coordination of the Istanbul Metropolitan
Planning and Urban Design Center, aiming at an equilibrium
between economic development and environmental preservation
(Istanbul Metropolitan Planning and Urban Design Centre 2007,
1; Steele and Shafik 2010, 5). Despite initial controversies and a
certain reluctance by some activists and NGOs, many experts and
sectors of the population considered the plan to be quite reasonable,
democratic and balanced, since it recognized the threats affecting
urban sustainability and proposed consequent strategies (51N4E,
H+N+S Landscape Architects, and Architecture Workroom Brussels
2012, 17).15 Besides, the plan focused on a general, transversal vision
for the city, preserving north green areas and developing the east-west
regional corridor as a polycentric response to urban growth.
Before continuing with the reaction of the central government to West vs. Islam
the plan, it is important to situate this series of urban transformations

14 “The most important problem of the city is insufficient physical and social
infrastructure. The city cannot meet the increasing demand for housing, education and
health facilities. Particularly the high rate of internal migration has made difficult to provide
public services and a planned city growth and development. The uncontrolled development
of the city has led to expensive public services (...) A lack of co-operation among
institutions and the existence of several responsible institutions have led to conflicting
decisions for the city” (Baycan-Levent 2003, 9).
15 Istanbul was chosen as a test site during the 5th IABR in 2012. In this context,
a design atelier was jointly organized by the Biennale and the Municipality of Arnavutköy
(a district in the North-West area of the city). The resulting analysis and proposal were
in line with the environmental and social concerns reflected on the master plan of 2009
(Brugmans and Petersen (eds.) 2012, 89–98; 51N4E, H+N+S Landscape Architects, and
Architecture Workroom Brussels 2012).

“Crazy plans” and counter-plans 487

 within the ideological context of the country during the last years. As
it has been stated before, the transformation of Turkey into a modern,
secular state during the first part of the Kemalist period involved
the obliteration and destruction of many religious and dynastic
symbols throughout the country: when the caliphate was abolished
in 1922, many religious schools and centers were closed, Sharia laws
were separated from civil laws, polygamy was banned, and modern
Western clothing was promoted instead of traditional elements such
as headscarves or fezzes. At the urban and architectural level, the new
capital Ankara was designed as a modern city, following Western codes
and avoiding any reminiscence of the past. Meanwhile, Ottoman
buildings were progressively abandoned without any attempt for
reparation or refurbishment.
However, religion never ceased to be a daily issue for the Turkish
people, and many did not agree with some of these restrictions. This
is one of the reasons why, many years later, the discourse of Erdoğan
was welcomed by several sectors of the population during the decade
of the nineties, since he defended the relevance of Islam for the
nation and the restoration of Islamic symbols in the public sphere.
After his imprisonment for reciting a nationalist poem, which was
considered to be an incitement to violence and religious hatred, he
won the elections in 2002 with the newly found AKP, becoming
Prime Minister of the country. During the first years of his mandate,
and despite his pro-Islamic and nationalist convictions, he showed
a certain tolerance toward different minorities, even adopting a
Marxist-like discourse that attracted less conservative sectors of the
population: for instance, he started to negotiate solutions for the
Kurdish and Armenian conflicts, and in 2011 he made some reforms
to return properties of Christians and Jews which were seized by the
Turkish government in the decade of the thirties. However, after
the failure of the reconciliation attempt with Armenians and Kurds,
Erdoğan’s politics experienced an authoritarian shift, which soon
had its consequences at a spatial and social level. AKP’s objective to
reestablish conservative Islamic-rooted values in society and the state
apparatus was progressively acquiring strength. Indeed, this “neoliberal
Islamism,” understood as the mixture of neoliberal accumulation
strategies with Islamic authoritarian, conservative values (Batuman

488 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

2015, 894), represents one of the many obstacles for an eventual
integration of Turkey in the European Union.16
Turning back to Istanbul, the city seemed then to be the perfect
symbol for a new Turkey, proud of its Ottoman past and Islamic roots.
If the popularization of the image of a city and the accumulation of
symbolic capital are typical strategies to increase its competitiveness, it
was obvious that Istanbul was a safe bet for the government because of
its undeniable attractive, its splendorous past and its strategic position
between two continents. Thus, it went from being an industrial
city to a service-oriented and finance metropolis, while it has also
recovered its character as the core of the Islamic Turkey. Former Prime
Minister and now President Erdoğan has continuously worked for an
emblematic city reflecting these values through diverse instruments
and strategies. The most controversial one took place after the
approval of Istanbul’s Master Plan in 2009 by local authorities, leading
to a conflict that still resonates.
In order to commemorate the centenary of the foundation of the Vision 2030
Turkish Republic, a list of goals to be achieved in 2023 was proposed
by the central government. Among Vizyon 2023 objectives are to
situate the country among the first ten world economies and to be
one of the first tourist destinations. This time horizon also sets an
ambitious plan for Istanbul,17 through which a series of opulent urban
interventions (that Erdoğan himself called “crazy projects”) would
be carried out. Some of them have already been inaugurated, like
the Marmaray Tunnel in 2013 or the Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge in
2016, becoming the third bridge over the Bosphorus; others, such as

16 Žižek (2012, 80 ff) recalls an anecdote about the Turkish Minister of Interior
in 2011 to illustrate how the country is emerging as “a new model of authoritarian
capitalism” that is far from the Western conception of Turkey as a moderate country and
a model of tolerant political Islam. “[The Minister] claimed that the Turkish police were
imprisoning thousands of pro-Kurdish BDP members without evidence and without trial,
in order to convince them that they were indeed free prior to their imprisonment. (…) since
you claim there is no freedom in our society, you cannot protest when you are deprived of
your freedom, since you cannot be deprived of what you do not have” (Žižek 2012, 81).
17 All undergoing and completed mega-projects in the metropolitan area of
Istanbul can be consulted in http://megaprojeleristanbul.com/# [Accessed January 28,
2018]

“Crazy plans” and counter-plans 489

 the transformation of the area of Taksim Square and Gezi Park in the
center of Istanbul, the new airport or the ambitious Istanbul Canal
connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, will be completed in
the coming years. The grandeur of these “crazy” plans was one of the
main AKP weapons for the national election in 2011, which the party
won for the third consecutive time (Tan 2014, 162).
However, none of these plans were included in the master plan
approved by the municipality in 2009, so the central government
had to bypass it. To do so, TOKI proved to be a very effective tool,
since one of its recently acquired tasks was to search for new areas to
redevelop according to state priorities, such as tourism. Since Taksim
Square and its surroundings undoubtedly represent an area of touristic
interest, it was possible to include Erdoğan’s vision of the zone among
the new “crazy projects” for Istanbul, and thus, the measures approved
in the municipal master plan were invalidated.
Together with the urban and environmental consequences
after Turkey’s transformation during the twentieth century, social
consequences are also remarkable: Atatürk’s Republic promoted
secularism and certain women’s rights, and during the last decades
a greater tolerance to minorities is gradually emerging –despite the
seriousness of some major conflicts, such as the relation with the
Kurds or the Armenians. In any case, these changes have led to a
polarization between a highly westernized society that concentrates
in large cities like Ankara, Istanbul or Izmir, and rural areas, which
remain more traditional, presenting significant differences with other
Islamic countries of its environment. For this reason, a large sector of
the population openly expresses discontent with Erdoğan’s policies,
who has promoted a shift towards Islam (being aware of the relevance
that Turkey has on the Middle East), and the growth of major cities
from a neoliberal –political, more than economic (Eraydin and
Tasan-Kok 2014; Yörük and Yüksel 2014, 122)– perspective. Under
this situation, tensions and differences among Turkish citizens have
been increasing more and more. On the one hand, “lower-middle
classes, disaffected segments of the working class, and the new socially
conservative, economically liberal intellectuals” (Eraydin and Tasan-
Kok 2014, 124), as well as rural population and moderate Islamists
constitute the general basis that supports the AKP government. On

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 08

the other, former intellectual and professional elites (among the, the
Chamber of Architects, one of the most active groups against “urban
renewal”), disadvantaged groups, minorities –such as LGBT, anti-
capitalist Muslims, the hyper-secular nationalists, Kurds and Alawites
(Abbas and Yigit 2015, 63)–, educated workers and students (Yörük
and Yüksel 2014) represent the main opposition groups that consider
themselves to be excluded from decision-making and the scope of the
ruling party. In this regard, urban land and property market policies
have contributed to increase social tensions, favoring certain groups
and penalizing others (Eraydin and Tasan-Kok 2014, 124). In fact, the
most recent urban transformations in cities like Istanbul have aroused
discontent and bewilderment among opposing sectors, so the number
of platforms and organizations against new urban transformations
policies augmented significantly at the beginning of the 2000s
(Eraydin and Tasan-Kok 2014, 121).
There should therefore be no cause for surprise when a space-related issue spurs
collaboration (often denounced on that basis by party politicians) between
very different kinds of people, between those who “react” —reactionaries,
in a traditional political parlance— and “liberals” or “radicals”, progressives,
“advanced” democrats, and even revolutionaries. Such coalitions around some

“Crazy plans” and counter-plans 491

 09 10

11 12

13 14

492 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

 particular counter-project or counter-plan, promoting a counter-space in
opposition to the one embodied in the strategies of power, occur all over the
world (...)(Lefebvre 1991, 380–81)

Occupy! The case of Taksim.

The case of Taksim Square and its surroundings is particularly
significant because it shows how all these processes and conflicts
crystallize in social and spatial terms. In 2013, Taksim and Gezi Park
were the scene of one of the most intense demonstrations in Turkey
in recent years, bringing together a highly heterogeneous group of
people of diverse backgrounds and ideologies against the government
and its authoritarian drift. Having analyzed some of the triggering
factors of this climate of disaffection and unease, the configuration of
Taksim Square and Gezi Park area, a central space for Istanbul’s city
life, shall be outlined in order to better understand how it became part
of a socio-spatial process of opposition and to detect counter-spatial
strategies that took place during the protests.
Taksim is not a square in the Western sense of the word, but a Square vs.
meydan, which entails a much more flexible and mundane character meydan
than the agora. Unlike the Western square, it is not a structured void
generated through the more or less harmonious grouping of buildings
around it; rather, a meydan is a junction of ways and axes that
appears as the common ground for structures and spaces that were
not designed intentionally to define a single, integrated spatial entity
(Baykan and Hatuka 2010, 51–52). This distinction is important to
understand the heterogeneous character of Taksim, which works as
an open, wide confluence space in which very different buildings and
elements coexist without apparent formal or symbolic relations among
them.
Interestingly, Taksim means “division” or “distribution,” since one
of the main reservoirs of the city was located here.18 From Takism,
running water was distributed to different zones (Baykan and Hatuka
2010, 53). Close to the area, the Pangaltı Armenian Cemetery,

18 The construction of the Taksim water system began in the eighteenth century,
during the reign of Mahmut I (1730–1754) and was completed in 1839 (Baykan and Hatuka
2010, 53).

Occupy! The case of Taksim 493

 15 16

founded in 1560 after an epidemic during the rule of Suleyman the

Magnificent, remained as the largest non-Muslim cemetery in the
city. Also under Ottoman control, a military barracks and training
camps for the army were built during the nineteenth century. The
artillery barracks Halil Pasha would be transformed into the Taksim
Stadium from 1921 until 1940, the year in which the building was
demolished –as the Armenian cemetery some years before– to create
the Gezi Park, which was included in the urban plans commissioned
by Atatürk and designed by the Prost in order to modernize Istanbul.
The park was designed to extend the public space of Taksim and to
provide quality open spaces in the center of the city. Meanwhile, the
square keeps a strong republican character, since it was transformed
to commemorate the War of Independence and the foundation of the
Turkish Republic in 1923. The Monument of the Republic, crafted
by the Italian artist Pietro Canonica and inaugurated in 1928, stands
Space for in the middle of the square. Therefore, Taksim is one of the most
contestation significant spaces in Istanbul and the Turkish state, and has been
the scene of numerous political and social protests that sometimes
ended violently. For instance, it has hosted Labor Day demonstrations
in several occasions, like in May 1, 1977, ending up in a massacre
(Baykan and Hatuka 2010, 63) that caused the prohibition of these
celebrations in the square from 1980 to 2012.

494 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

 17 18

Taksim is today one of the principal traffic nodes of the city, where
seven major avenues meet –including Istiklal Avenue, the busiest
pedestrian street in Istanbul– and where both vehicles and pedestrians
coexist amidst some relevant twentieth-century buildings, such as the
Atatürk Cultural Center (AKM), the Atatürk Library or the Marmara
Taksim Hotel. Its metro and funicular terminal is one of the busiest
stations of the city. Gezi Park, whose surface has been decreasing
due to the progressive building of its surroundings, lies next to this
node as a green oasis in the middle of this busy central area. Despite
its current use as a main traffic node, Taksim has not lost its highly
political significance and, therefore, stands as a representative space for
pro-republican movements against governmental policies, especially
when these embody certain values that oppose the modern, secular
way of life. Obviously, this symbolic-political meaning was somehow
uncomfortable for the project of the new Prime Minister Erdoğan,
who has worked to change and reverse the political meaning of the
square through some of his “crazy” urban interventions. Through New plans
the Greater Municipality of Istanbul and deliberately ignoring the for Taksim
municipal master plan for the city (Castells 2013; Marschall and
Aydogan 2015), his team designed a reform project for the square
and the park that involved a significant reduction of the already scarce
green space, the reconstruction of the former Ottoman barracks for
the creation of new facilities –including a shopping center– and the
erection of a new mosque and an opera house or museum in the

Occupy! The case of Taksim 495

 site of the AKM. The operation was clearly oriented towards a new
representation of official space by evoking, on the one hand, the
forces of modernization and economic progress driven by the national
government (represented by the shopping mall) and, on the other, the
glorious past of the Turkey (represented by the neo-Ottoman-style
barracks and the mosque). This way, the center of Istanbul would
be transformed into the urban core of a neoliberal Islamic nation,
deleting all elements of Republican architecture.
The presentation of the first images of the Prime Minister’s
proposal were published in January 2011. A few rendered images
showed a new pedestrianized Taksim Square, with the reconstructed
barracks occupying the surface of Gezi Park. The reaction was
not long in coming, and local politicians, as well as architects and
activists, denounced the lack of a thoughtful, participative process to
achieve consensus on the project by integrating the opinion of local
authorities and different sectors of the population. However, Erdoğan’s
project went unnoticed by most of Istanbulites, since the plan was
designed bureaucratically and in a non-transparent way, without
much publicity. It was on May 2013 that the first major warning
signal made the population realize that something was happening in
Taksim: on the night of May 27 a bunch of bulldozers arrived in the
park to start cutting down trees and clear the construction site.
Spatial While those who started the protest that morning were just some
coexistence dozens of members of urban and environmental movements grouped
under the name of Taksim Solidarity seeking to prevent the destruction
of Gezi Park (Özkırımlı (ed.) 2014, 142), soon protesters of all kinds
joined the demonstration, including women, students, workers,
Kurds, progressive Islamists and ultimately a wide diversity of citizens,
belonging or not to social minorities (Abbas and Yigit 2015, 63), who
were expressing their discontent with the attitude of the government
and demanding their right to public space. As a consequence of such
an heterogeneous gathering, very different symbols appeared on the
square representing different positions: anti AKP-banners, rainbow
LGTB flags, purple feminist symbols, Kurdish or Kemalist emblems
coexisted in a protest that had transcended its initial purpose. It was
not just about the cutting of some trees, but a general outcry against
the authoritarian imposition of ideological codes in public space.

496 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

 19 20

21 22

Thus, a myriad of coexisting diverse spatial practices took place in

the protest site: there was a camp for the demonstrators, but also a
small garden created by environmental activists, information desks,
solidarity tables to have a meal, an infirmary and even a “Revolution
Museum” inside a container left by the construction workers
(Batuman 2015, 899).
After several days of increasingly large demonstrations in the park
and the subsequent evictions by the police, resistance became stronger
and violence intensified at dawn on the 31: tear gas, pepper spray
and water cannons were the weapons employed against cobblestones
and street furniture.19 From the other side of the city, thousands of
people joined the protests by crossing the Bosphorus bridge, and in

19 The course of the protests in Taksim has been reconstructed by using diverse
press sources from all over the world: El País, El Mundo, The Washington Post, BBC News, Le

Occupy! The case of Taksim 497

 other Turkish cities like Izmir or Ankara several mobilizations were
organized to support the protesters in Istanbul. Besides, excessive
police violence was disapproved by governments and agencies from all
around the world, such as Amnesty International. The then Turkish
President Abdullah Gül affirmed some days later that the message
of the demonstrators had been heard, while Erdoğan disqualified
them as “extremists” and “looters,”20 insinuating that foreign secret
services were behind the protests (Hurriyet Daily News 2013; Sherlock
2013). After the death of a protester in the southern province of
Hatay by an impact to the head, gestures of solidarity multiplied,
and Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arinç apologized for excessive
police force. After several days of occupation and following a “final
warning” (Özkırımlı (ed.) 2014, 144) by the Prime Minister on June
12, a great attempt to evict the park was conducted before a meeting
between Erdoğan and a group of representatives of the demonstrators.
They finally agreed to refer the issue to the Court, and if the Prime
Minister’s project was found to be legal, he would consider to call a
public consultation managed by the Municipality of Istanbul, and
the government would accept the result (Butler and Pamuk 2013).
This gesture did not convince the demonstrators, who reoccupied the
square once again.
Finally, on June 15 and without prior notice, Taksim was
definitively and violently evicted. Hours later, a rally organized by
AKP took place in Istanbul’s Kazlıçeşme, where thousands of followers
gathered to support the Prime Minister. During the following months
of July and August, new protests were organized, although the social
movement progressively lost strength over time. Despite President
Gül’s banning of the project and the temporary suspension of the
project of pedestrianization and reconstruction of the barracks by
Istanbul first Regional Court in July 2013, the plan has been resumed
and reinforced after Erdoğan’s ascension to presidency in 2014. Years
of protests and struggle seem to have ended up with the authority
of the Chamber of Architects and many other organizations and

Monde, Die Welt, Berliner Zeitung, CNN, New York Times , Hürriyet, Sabah, Yeni Şafak... (See
also Özkırımlı (ed.) 2014, 142 ff)
20 The term for “looters,” çapulcu, led to the verbal form “chapuling” that soon
became viral (Eraydin and Tasan-Kok 2014, 120).

498 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

 23 24

25 26

individuals who rejected or criticized the proposal. Two years after the
court’s decision, the Turkish Council of State cancelled the ban, thus
paving the way to the implementation of the whole urban project
(Hurriyet Daily News 2015). The president has expressed his will to
reconstruct the Ottoman military barracks and to continue with the
transformation process that was interrupted by the protests in 2013,
which he qualified as “an attack against Istanbul’s ability to keep
differences alive together” (Hurriyet Daily News 2016). In addition
to the barracks, a great mosque occupying an approximate area of
2,000 square meters is being built in Taksim, after the approval of the
local cultural protection board on February 2016. With this project,
Erdoğan finally fulfills his long-lasting wish to erect the mosque that
Taksim Square was missing in order to become the central space of the
nation;21 a demand that he had been holding since his term as Mayor

21 “Let us see what the nation says. Every country in the world is referred to by
such squares. But we do not have a proper square” (Erdoğan quoted in Hurriyet Daily News
2016).

Occupy! The case of Taksim 499

 and that was supported by many neighbors and religious sectors of the
population.22 The building, designed by Şefik Birkiye (who designed
Erdoğan’s Presidential Palace) and Selim Dalaman, reinterprets the
traditional image of a mosque through an Art Deco language, and
includes a parking lot and a conference room underneath the worship
area, which will have the capacity to host around one thousand
people. This project substitutes the former one by Ahmet Vefik Alp,
consisting of an elevated dome fifteen meters in diameter and hosting
a Museum of Religions and a parking lot in its seven-storey basement.
Alp aimed at overcoming conflict by creating a consensus space that
would welcome all religions, through a more abstract language that
could be eventually accepted by secularist sectors of the population
(Batuman 2016, 335 ff). The shift from a cosmopolitan, universalist
language to the neo-Ottoman mimicry reflects, according to Batuman
(2016), the desire to detach the nation’s representational narratives
from any Western or secular reference. At the same time, it works as
an “ideological simulacrum” merging Islamist politics and Turkish
national identity.
Another interesting strategy is the transformation of the AKM,
once a reference in Istanbul’s cultural life and now abandoned after
its closure in 2008 for renovation. Although the center is one of the
most important icons of the Kemalist transformation of Turkey and
its sober, ahistorical language reflects the values of a westernized,
secular society, a total demolition has been rejected due to the conflict
it would entail to suppress such a reference to the “Father of the
Nation.” Rather, Erdoğan has adopted a conciliatory position by
preserving the image of the original facade (which during the protests
had been used as an improvised board for banners and posters)
and inviting Murat Tabanlioglu, son of the AKM’s architect Hayati

22 The building of a mosque in Taksim square was not a mere whim of Erdoğan,
but a long standing demand of Islamist sectors: “(…) the building of a mosque in Taksim
was a major spatial element of the Islamist imaginary in Turkey since the 1950s. A Taksim
Mosque-building Society was established as early as 1952 (…) From then on, Islamists
often raised the demand for a mosque in Taksim, which has to be understood as an
attempt to appropriate public space along ideological lines. The mosque was a hot topic
in the 1990s, while Prime Minister Erdoğan was serving as the mayor of Istanbul. Within
the political turmoil that led to the outlawing of the RP, the Taksim mosque was out of the
agenda, only to be revived during the reign of the AKP” (Batuman 2015, 895).

500 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

 27 28

Tabanlioglu, to realize the project for the new center, which will
include a new opera house, smaller concert halls, exhibition halls,
shops, bars and restaurants. However, the demolition of the AKM is
considered by many as a new victory of the AKP over the republican
values, which is materialized in the urban landscape. The barracks, the
mosque and the new cultural center complete Erdoğan’s project for
the new core of his vision of Turkey.
It can be concluded that Taksim has been a space in permanent Permanent
conflict since the beginning of the last century, which has been conflict
subject to alternate meanings and appropriations by different groups
and ideologies. The square, the park and its surroundings have
shown how relations between state and society manifest themselves
in spatial terms, and how different representational elements
come into play with a varying degree of relevance. In this regard,
architecture and urbanism emerge as very powerful tools to impose
specific representations of space; however, they can be contested,
altered and re-signified through social and political action. Clashes
and conflicts between dominant and alternative discourses, publics
and counterpublics, determine to a great extent the publicness of a
space. Moreover, it is not only a question of state power against social
minorities, but also of different ideologies and visions of the world
which come into conflict.
Rendering visible the invisible. Urban space as commons.
The resonance of the protests and the reaction to them in other parts Spatial
of the world enable to better understand the meaning and elements resonance
that constitute a public space in general terms. While some media
suggest some similarities between the Gezi Park movement and

Rendering visible the invisible. Urban space as commons 501

 29 30

other protests that took place during the same period, such as those
of the Arab Spring or in Moscow after the general election in 2011
–motivated against a ruling party that had been holding power for
more than ten years (BBC 2013)–, what characterized the fight in
Taksim was that it could not be reduced to a specific issue, even if the
environmental protection of the green area was the main trigger of
the protests. On the contrary, it was a struggle for and within public
space, hence making possible the accommodation of very different
demands and positions, as well as the emergence of questions about
citizenship, political participation and the role of Islam in society
(Abbas and Yigit 2015, 62). It is precisely for this reason that the
mass protests in Turkey deserve a separate chapter: unlike other
manifestations, such as those in Egypt, Spain or the United States,
in which motivations were exclusively political, social or economic,
the object of struggle in Istanbul was public space itself and its
redefinition as a common good; in other words, it was “both the locus
and the focus of conflict” (Batuman 2015, 882). In consequence,
relations established during Gezi Park protests were not necessarily
among equal or similar positions. Instead, different groups with
different interests were able to establish a heterogeneous network, a
joint force in which polarities coexist –but not disappear– for several

502 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

days, even between antagonist sectors, such as certain Muslim groups
and secular nationalists or LGBT activists; Kurds and Kemalists.23
The events of Taksim were supported and replicated in other parts
of the world, like Germany, where Turks represent one of the largest
ethnic minorities. On June 9, 2013, citizens of Turkish origin and
other supporters marched through the streets of Berlin’s Kreuzberg
district to endorse the protests. Similarly, the pianist Davide Martello,
who had been playing the piano in Taksim during the protests at
Gezi camp, played again on August 15 at the main square of Ulm,
transferring part of the sound of the Turkish revolt to a different
space. In this way, a specific space is moved to another location, not
physically but as an intangible element, reproducible and resonant
in other urban contexts. Even a global platform was created under
the name of Everywhere Taksim, reflecting the possibility to locate the
square everywhere else in the world. However, this global impact,
which became possible through the infinite mesh of nodes provided
by virtual social networks, would have not been so strong if physical
occupation had not occurred. For instance, the world-famous image
of the “standing man” would have not become viral if Erdem Gündüz
had not decided to stand in silence in front of the AKM for eight
hours. His body –as well as the bodies of those who joined him in
his passive protest– was the instrument to make resistance visible,
to give it space amidst the turmoil of the square. Harvey (2012)
explains the importance of bodily presence in protest movements
through the events in Tahrir and New York, which in this sense can
be extrapolated to other cities which were scene of social unrest and
demonstrations during these years:
Spreading from city to city, the tactics of Occupy Wall Street are to take a central
public space, a park or a square, close to where many of the levers of power are
centered, and, by putting human bodies in that place, to convert public space
into a political commons-a place for open discussion and debate over what that

23 Yörük and Yüksel (2014) offer a very clear overview of the social and cultural
background of the protesters in Gezi with respect to total population. Through different
graphics, they conclude that culture and political orientation, and not class, are the
variables that explain the heterogeneity of the movement. Some of the figures also show
the presence of opposite ideologies (left-right) and religious beliefs (non-religious-very
religious, secularists-Islamists) among the demonstrators.

Rendering visible the invisible. Urban space as commons 503

 power is doing and how best to oppose its reach. This tactic, most conspicuously
re-animated in the noble and ongoing struggles centered on Tahrir Square in
Cairo, has spread across the world (Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Syntagma Square
in Athens, and now the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral in London and Wall Street
itself ). It shows us that the collective power of bodies in public space is still
the most effective instrument of opposition when all other means of access are
blocked. What Tahrir Square showed to the world was an obvious truth: that
it is bodies on the street and in the squares, not the babble of sentiments on
Twitter or Facebook, that really matter. (Harvey 2012, 161–62)

The fact that the question of public space has been placed at the
center of Taksim protests has resulted in a clear reinforcement of its
understanding as a common ground for performing both dialogue
and conflict, as well as its extension beyond purely physical or
virtual limits. We have already seen how protests triggered by very
specific reasons, like those in Gezi park, may serve as a platform for
further demands that transcend those initial reasons. However, it is
important to consider that the debate on public space in Turkey did
not start with the demonstrations of 2013. Rather, the conjunction
of scattered, apparently unrelated actions and contributions from
different approaches –activism, design, art, etc. – seem to have
contributed to put the issue of urban public space at the core of public
debate. Perhaps, this is the victory of “chapullers” over the central
government and its spatial policies: the bazaar against the cathedral.
Cathedral In a clarifying report that unveils some of the keys to understand the
vs. bazaar socio-spatial dimension of Taksim movement, the Spanish journalist
Bernardo Gutiérrez (2013) resorts to these two images, previously
used by the hacker Eric S. Raymond that contrasts two different
models in the elaboration of software. Gutiérrez draws a parallel
between software dynamics and urban space that perfectly describes
the struggle in Turkey during the last years:
The Cathedral represents the model of hermetic development and vertical of
proprietary software. The bazaar, with its horizontal and “bustling” dynamics,
would represent Linux and other free software projects based on community
work. No place like Istanbul, with its bustling Grand Bazaar, better embodies
the urban metaphor of Raymond’s thesis. On one side, the cathedral of top-

504 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

 down, propietary recipes of Erdoğan’s Government. On the other, the great
human bazaar of Istanbul, its public space, the pro-communal tradition of the
communities in the city. (Gutiérrez 2013)24

In this regard, the urban activist and researcher Yasar A. Adanali

has been collecting in his blog Reclaim Istanbul a series of facts and
materials which may serve to illustrate how urban transformations
progressively led to situations of social –and spatial– injustice that
eventually triggered the protests and other alternative practices.
The objective of the blog –which is extended through the cross-
disciplinary platform Beyond Istanbul– is to open a space for reflection
on the city to transform it into a sustainable environment, report
changes and interventions that affect its proper functioning and show
new practices that may offer grounds for alternatives to dominant
spatial narratives. Since April 2011, Adanali has developed a virtual
cartography that reflects the state of the city through its inhabitants’
lifestyles and spatial practices, its problems –such as gentrification in
districts like Sulukule, Tarlabaşı, Fener-Balat and Tophane (Gutiérrez
2013),25 unsustainable growth or social exclusion–, as well as
alternatives and actions to reclaim urban space.
The first public demonstration that the blog echoes is the protest
that took place on April 17, 2011 against the demolition of the
historic Emek Cinema in Beyoğlu, which was demolished in 2013
and reconstructed in 2016 as part of the new Grand Pera high-end
shopping and leisure center. Shouting “Emek is ours, Istanbul is ours,”
protesters occupied the old cinema (placed within the Cercle d’Orient
building, used for various purposes since its construction in 1884) and
remained in the street for several days, projecting films to express their
rejection towards arbitrary, neoliberal policies based on privatization
and the destruction of urban heritage. Indeed, the demands posed
during the reclamation of the Emek Cinema do not differ much from

24 [T.A.]
25 Unlike its Western counterparts, gentrification processes in Istanbul started
around the eighties –almost three decades later than in other cases-, when the rural
exodus had already occurred and the decadent neighborhoods of the city center became
an ideal ground for real estate investments and business opening. Thus, gentrification in
Istanbul has taken place in a phased manner, in different areas and with different intensities
(Pehlivan 2011, 7 ff).

Rendering visible the invisible. Urban space as commons 505

 other similar demonstrations in which citizen groups or associations
unite to protest against the treatment given to a good of public
interest, whether a building, a space or any other significant element.
Urban space Many argue that the problem of Istanbul –of which the occupation
as commons of Gezi Park was just the tip of the iceberg– is the attack that the
government is conducting against the commons (Gutiérrez 2013),
which in turn mobilizes certain sectors who advocate the enjoyment
of certain elements –natural and cultural– that belong to all citizens
and should remain accessible to all, never privatized. The idea of city
space as a commons immediately rises certain questions about who
has the right to enjoy it –the famous “right to the city” proposed by
Lefebvre (1967)–, why and how it should be managed and treated,
which priorities should be established or how far the state should go
with regard to its regulation, among many other issues. Obviously,
Istanbul is not the only city in which these questions have emerged;
rather, the topic resonates in many other places, since it provides a
framework that can be analyzed and applied to any city in the world,
to a greater or lesser extent.
Public and common realms are deeply intertwined and often
confused. To focus on common space instead of public space offers a
different overview of property and power relations among coexisting
subjects, and thus with the different other. Quilligan (2012) makes
a clear distinction between both domains depending on how goods
are administered in a society. The administration of public resources
usually falls on the ruling authority of a political system (a democracy,
a dictatorship, a patriarchy, etc.), which distributes those resources
and regulates their use. On the contrary, common goods –defined
in economics as rivalrous and non-excludable– are those managed
by a group or society as a whole, through bonds of social mutuality,
solidarity and collaboration; therefore, a responsible, equitable use
of resources is to be made if all members want to enjoy them. In
this sense, urban space can be regarded as a commons, an extremely
valuable open access good, which besides works as a support for
interaction between those who enjoy and share it (Foster and Iaione
2016, 297). However, the administration of commons (water,
food, services, land, urban space, air…) is usually transferred to the
governing authority –either after social, divine or self-mandate–,

506 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

which codifies and regulates them on behalf of the community.
While this system has clear advantages, it becomes a major source
of conflict when ideological factors or private interests interfere in
the management of such goods. In the case of urban space –not only
in Turkey, but in most countries of the world–, its commonality is
threatened because of its arbitrary regulation, often favoring private
interests, and the exclusion of certain sectors of the population. Thus,
Quilligan poses a critique of the wide use of the term “public” to
designate certain procedures which do not include all social segments:
“Public” no longer signifies a community’s authority to manage its local
resources and express its own social or ecological demands; “public” now means
the central governing authority to whom we have surrendered the control of
these resources, which then meets our demand through conventional private
markets. Everyone sees the growing discontinuity between the masses who are
excluded from governmental decision-making (through partisan majorities, rule
of law, executive administration and judicial decisions) and the relative few who
dominate the process to advance their own private gain. Yet there is little outcry
when the word “public” is routinely applied to both the excluded masses and
privileged insiders. This facile, misleading use of “public” persists chiefly because
citizens have lost their direct understanding and connection with the commons.
The strong epistemological frame of reference that once linked the “public
sector” to our collective potential for governing and valuing our own resources
and asserting a countervailing authority to private markets, has virtually
disappeared. In theory, public still means people; in practice, public means
government (as captured by elite interests who regularly impede the people’s
political rights and capacity to control their common goods). (Quilligan 2012)

Among the most serious attacks against Istanbul’s urban commons

that activists and authors consider, we may find projects and situations
of all kinds, such as the construction of the third Bosphorus bridge,
which endangers the diversity and integrity of the northern Belgrade
Forest, or the repression of socio-cultural events in public space,
as in the case of street weddings (Gutiérrez 2013). The project
Mapping the Commons, promoted by the platform hackitectura.
net and led by the researcher Pablo de Soto, sought to analyze the
condition and challenges of urban commons in different cities.
The first maps were related to Athens and Istanbul, although the
project was later extended to other cities. Through a collaborative

Rendering visible the invisible. Urban space as commons 507

 mapping application, Istanbul’s cartography was divided into four
main categories: natural resources, such as the Bosphorus or the
forest; cultural elements, such as street weddings; public spaces, like
Taksim and Gezi Park, the banks of the Golden Horn or the Galata
Tower square, and digital spaces. Although no entries have been
introduced in the last category, Gutiérrez (2013) cites the testimony
of a demonstrator in Taksim, who claims that, due to malfunction of
the 3G connection in the country during the demonstrations and the
alleged use of radio frequency jammers by the police, citizens began
to connect their devices through VPN (virtual private networks) in
order to communicate and spread information about the protests to
the world, mainly through hashtags like #OccupyGezi. Moreover,
different shops, restaurants and other small retail businesses in the
area opened their Wi-Fi networks for public use. On June 2, 2013,
the Prime Minister stated: “There is a problem called Twitter right
now and you can find every kind of lie there (…) The thing that
is called social media is the biggest trouble for society right now”
(quoted in Resneck 2013). These words preceded the identification
and prosecution of several users of social networks who had expressed
their opposition and critiques towards the new project for Gezi Park.
Again, the multiple condition of virtual space appears: while it is
essential for opposition movements, it is, in turn, a fundamental tool
for repression.
Thus, there is a whole constellation of precedents related to
Taksim’s great outburst of May 2013, even though not all of them
emanate from the field of activism and urban practices, or at least
not directly. Interestingly, during the first Istanbul Design Biennial
in 2012 (one year before the protests), the exhibition Adhocracy26
displayed a series of works that explored the contemporary scene
from the perspective of social and technological insurgencies and
their impact on the field of design. The main question proposed was
how solutions can be generated from a local scale to share them with

26 The term adhocracy refers to a flexible mode of organization, away from

bureaucratic structures and hierarchical systems, and based on much more organic and
horizontal structures. In a certain sense, the term is related to noopolitics, in the sense of
a renunciation of the hierarchical to give way to the horizontal and diffuse. The exhibition
was curated by Joseph Grima and an international team.

508 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

 31

others through networks, whether virtual or not; and all this through
easily transferable projects that could be adaptable to different local
circumstances (Grima et al. 2012). The interest in promoting the
defense and responsible use of the commons was the key topic of the
exhibition, as organizers said, from a hyperlocal scale to a much larger
one, global and almost geopolitical.
Also in Adhocracy there was room for critical designs and works, as The shadow
the giant silhouette of a drone that the British artist James Bridle drew of the drone
on the street pavement next to the school in which the exhibition
was located. The “shadow of the drone” thus becomes a powerful
icon, representing an invisible power, a violence without face, but
deadly and implacable at the same time: “UAVs [Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles] are the key infrastructure of the 21st Century shadow war:
unaccountable, borderless and merciless conflicts” (Bridle 2012). As
the artist states, the Turkish government has been using information
captured by US forces to punish the actions of the PKK (Kurdistan
Workers’ Party) in Turkey and the north of Iraq, while it seems
to be very interested in drone technology, currently developing a
Turkish model. Representing the shadow of the drone with chalk on
the ground means to counterpose the object itself with the space it
controls, revealing the reverse of the aerial in the terrestrial domain. At
the same time, unnoticeable elements for the citizen become visible,
yet being part of the representation of space in which he or she is
inserted:
The drone also, for me, stands in part for the network itself: an invisible,
inherently connected technology allowing sight and action at a distance. Us and

Rendering visible the invisible. Urban space as commons 509

 31

the digital, acting together, a medium and an exchange. But the non-human
components of the network are not moral actors, and the same technology that
permits civilian technological wonder (…) also produces obscurantist ‘security’
culture, ubiquitous surveillance, and robotic killing machines.

This is a result of the network’s inherent illegibility, its tendency towards

seamlessness and invisibility, from code to ‘the cloud’. Those who cannot
perceive the network cannot act effectively within it, and are powerless. The job,
then, is to make such things visible. (Bridle 2012)

By stating that we all live under the shadow of the drone –

“although most of us are lucky enough not to live under its direct
fire” (Bridle 2012)– the artist brings forward again some of the
characteristics of Graham’s military urbanism (2011): omnipresence
of surveillance systems and security, militarization of citizen and state
control strategies, loss of sovereignty of states as a result of mutual
cooperation... But at the same time, he is reopening the debate on the
construction of these hypertrophic immunity systems of our time.
Also, Bridle mentions those who remain outside, who are subject to a
system that, in order to protect life inside it, uses power to administer
death. Turkey is, in every way, between these two realms.
Actually, maybe Istanbul never ceased to be the confrontation and
meeting point it ever was. Since the tension between East and West
can be read through its urban space, Istanbul has become a relevant
indicator to measure the pulse of local realities that try to resist
authoritarianism and a total, flattening globalization. Undoubtedly,
the space of Taksim has gone from being a specific urban area to
become a much more complex reality, which cannot be limited to the

510 SE-DUCTIO III: ISTANBUL

physical space of the square, but that extends itself to all parts of the
world that are suffering similar threats. For Pamuk (2013), the life
of a single neighborhood can resonate in the whole city. Could what
happens in a city resonate in the rest of the world?
In my memoir, “Istanbul,” I wrote about how my whole family used to live in
the flats that made up the Pamuk apartment block, in Nişantaşı. In front of
this building stood a fifty-year-old chestnut tree, which is thankfully still there.
In 1957, the municipality decided to cut the tree down in order to widen the
street. The presumptuous bureaucrats and authoritarian governors ignored
the neighborhood’s opposition. When the time came for the tree to be cut
down, our family spent the whole day and night out on the street, taking turns
guarding it. In this way, we not only protected our tree but also created a shared
memory, which the whole family still looks back on with pleasure, and which
binds us all together. (Pamuk 2013)

Rendering visible the invisible. Urban space as commons 511

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517
(DIS)CLOSING.
To conclude always implies to define a limit. In the end, a conclusion
is a confinement, a restriction beyond which one should not (or
cannot) go further in order to preserve, deliberately or not, a certain
unity and coherence within the final product, be it a discourse, a
work, an idea or anything else that has emerged from a more or less
discursive and rational process. A doctoral thesis is a good example
of something from which one would expect a final, complete text
delimited by a set of conclusions drawn from a scientific dissertation.
Although it would be irresponsible to undertake a research project
without the intention of reaching some kind of clarification that
helps setting new limits (or pushing further the existing ones), it was
already warned at the beginning of the text that the objective of this
research project is not to find absolute certainties and facts that could
operate as stable grounds. This is mainly due to two factors: first, the
dynamic and ever-changing character of the conception of space and
the ungraspable multiplicity of interpretations and positions from
which it can be addressed makes it difficult –not to say impossible– to
trace a univocal, all-encompassing theory of space –neither is it the
goal of the research, in any case. The second aspect lies in the fact
that these routes followed until now only lead to further paths and
questions that remain unexplored, but that have been unveiled for
future incursions. To navigate through such an immense ocean of
references, visions, projects and ideas entails a serious challenge which
can by no means lead to an enclosed, defined proposition. Therefore,
the Benjaminian forest is still dense and dark but, nonetheless, it is
possible to glimpse new ways of walking it, with renovated references
and implications.
The interest of a map lies not in what it shows and (re)presents, Negative maps
but rather in what it does not. As it is to be expected from an
expedition into the negative, what has not been said –that is, what
remains concealed by means of language– may be more revealing than
that which has been exposed. In this regard, the present work is an
attempt to trace a map that not so much situates and clarifies what
the notion of space means today, but rather examines and detects its
potentials and the possible directions from which it could be explored
in a productive way. This leads to the last back-and-forth movement,
generated by the simultaneous needs of concluding the research

519
 without setting definitive borders. If “closing” means to conclude
–related to the Latin claudere, also present in the root of clavis,
“key”–, this action should be completed here with its counterpart,
the disclosure that uncovers, that leaves the door open with visible,
manipulable (that is, flexible and tractable) keys in order to go
through it.
After having explored the notion of space with regard to negativity
(a task which, as any research, necessarily requires a political reflection
and the recognition of one’s position in the world), it is possible
to display a set of ideas that respond to the main objectives of the
project, while at the same time leave the doors open to explorers and
researchers who feel compelled by the complexity and potentials of
the topic.

Negativity beyond its borders.

In the chapter Spatium Negatio, it has been argued how the forces
of negativity have deployed their influence in the West going in
hand with dialectics. In this sense, Hegel has been the pioneer
of negativity, placing it at the core of a system that sees life and
thought in permanent conflict and sublation. This system acquired
an unprecedented strength when translated by Marx and Engels into
a (philosophical) method to unveil and explain processes, clashes
and contradictions inherent to the incipient capitalist framework of
The end the nineteenth century. Dialectics, as a total system, has been used
of dialectics? to study nature and science, but also history, culture and political
economy, always placing the focus on oppositional movements and
forces which succeed one another in time and space. The success of
Marxian dialectics could be measured by the number and diversity
of interpretations and applications that have emerged since then,
even becoming a “state philosophy” (Jameson 2009, 6) as dialectical
materialism in some parts of the world during the twentieth century
with the rise of communist states. This transformation into an
ideological program was one of the precipitating factors of dialectics’
fall into discredit among certain sectors of Western thought. From
positivism and pragmatism to postmodern and poststructuralist
traditions, reactions against totalizing (sometimes understood as
“totalitarian”) Hegelian dialectics and its derivatives have arisen

520 (DIS)CLOSING
from multiple sides, especially during and after the Cold War –
paradoxically, a moment of absolute dialectical tension in global
politics. This account of dialectics as a “pernicious and dangerous
ideology” (Aguirre 2014, 221) on the part of many Western thinkers
must be read together with the limitations of Marxist dialectics
and its own temporality, since Marx could never have imagined the
consequences of the transition from a market economy to a financial
one. Trade and exchange are not based on objects or the material
substrate of things anymore (at least, not exclusively), but on elements
which until then had not been reduced to the category of commodity,
such as desires, ideas, experiences, or even time. The rules of the
game have changed, and thus the Marxist framework appears to be
insufficient to explain contemporary transformations in a world in
which immaterial flows prevail over material ones.
The generalized suspicion of Hegelian-Marxian dialectics Affirmationism
contributed to the articulation in recent continental theory of what
Benjamin Noys (2010; 2013) characterizes as “affirmationism”:
Affirmationist theory is one of the strongest and most developed attempts to
provide a solution to articulating agency in the context of an ontology of capital
that operates through the voiding of content and the distribution of differences.
It challenges the notion of difference as constituting a possible counter-ontology
to capital, insisting on the need for a positive point of orientation to truly
disrupt the void or absence of determinations at the heart of capitalism. (Noys
2010, 13)

Within this framework, Noys situates thinkers and authors from

very different contexts and affiliations (although all of them sharing a
common root in Nietzschean affirmationist culture) who address the
critique of contemporary capitalism in a way that avoids replicating
the negativity and indetermination which keep it moving and
expanding. In this regard, affirmationism embodies the desire “to find
a superior economy of excess” in order to “exceed the Hegelian ‘circle,’
which is always taken as the restraint of negativity” (Noys 2013,
142). Therefore, the dialectics of capital absorbs the negative moment
rendering it inoffensive, taming and controlling it to accelerate its

Negativity beyond its borders 521

 expansion and favor the processes of accumulation.1 Negativity is
thus deprived from its transforming power against hegemony, being
confined to “mere remains” that Noys (2013, 147) situates in the
suffering of the mortal human body and the explosion of “nihilist”
acts of violence.
In addition to this stance for affirmation and the rupture with
negation because of its perceived incapability of engaging with anti-
capitalism and political change, there is another way in which “the
positive” –if this general term could encompass a shared ground
between capitalism and its critics– is evident, that is, in the pervasive
and phantasmagorical veil of positivity and optimism which covers the
machinery of global capitalism, showing its friendly face through the
capacity of fulfilling the desires and expectations of consumers, who
at the same time are made responsible for their own happiness and
success. In terms of space, maybe the most evident sign of negativity’s
loss of strength is globalization as a process that reinforces this
smooth, transparent, shiny positivity in which the antagonist figure of
the proletarian has transmuted into the consumer and where non-
assimilable negatives are expelled from the scene (declared ob-scene):
refugees and migrants, people with functional diversity, Islam, radical
feminism…2 Only in few occasions these topics come into the public
sphere generating discomfort and perplexity, just to be immediately
expelled again or, in some instances, appropriated by dominant
discourses, deprived from their conflictual strength.
The end Given this situation, the question posed by the research at this
of negativity? point could be formulated as follows: is the role of negativity as a
critical, disruptive force at an end? Despite the previously discussed
hegemony of the positive, as well as the influence of the authors that
appear aligned with affirmationism –as a way of engaging political

1 It is worth recalling the periods of counter-revolution in the eighties, as in the

case of Italy or in the counter-revolutionary period between 1976 and 1995 in French Left
circles that Badiou frames in Metapolitics. (2005, xxxiv)
2 In this regard, it is not hard to find a certain parallelism with Hegelian racism
towards Asia and Africa as underdeveloped territories when compared to the West, and
the dismissal of certain groups by reason of gender, race, class, etc. in a contemporary,
globalized world, which moreover is still subject to a certain primacy of the West (namely
the United States) in many aspects.

522 (DIS)CLOSING
 01

action from creativity, desire, productive potential and novelty

(Bunyard 2011)– the answer cannot be reduced to a simple “yes” (or
“no”). In fact, there have been recent remarkable attempts to rescue
negativity and dialectics in a contemporary world that suspects almost
anything that has to do with refusal and that has harshly reviled
and rejected Hegelian and Marxian systems (sometimes justifiably,
sometimes misinterpreting them) through the prism of French theory,
on the one hand, and that of neoliberalism, on the other. Authors
such as Fredric Jameson, Benjamin Noys, Diana Coole and Gail Day
have traced, through different perspectives and focuses, the contours
and potentialities of the negative today, acknowledging its limitations
and conditions when inserted in a contemporary framework. Their
search for a reconstitution of philosophical negativity serve as an
opening toward renovated relations of these forces in relation to space.
In Valences of the Dialectic (2009), Fredric Jameson accounts how
Hegelian and Marxist dialectics have been repudiated partly because
of their transformation into a philosophy that some have regarded as
an authoritarian model. This is not surprising, as he points out (2009,
15), since dialectics does not become visible until the emergence
of capitalism (a system which is totality and unifying force.) Thus,
Jameson undertakes the difficult task of restoring the values that
dialectics offer today, separating it from its totalizing features that
seem dissonant in a culture still largely influenced by postmodern
positions. To do so, he offers a new reading of the work of authors
such as Derrida and Deleuze, which are usually situated within
affirmationist thought, to argue that it is possible to find dialectic
elements in their work: even resistance against dialectics is an essential
part of it. Diana Coole (2000), through her connections between
the dialectical and the “anti-Hegelian” Dyonisiac, and Benjamin

Negativity beyond its borders 523

 Noys (2010) reach a similar conclusion when they explore the
negative traces in the work of Deleuze and Derrida (among others),
acknowledging the importance that both of them have when it comes
to resituate dialectical thought in our times, despite their non- or anti-
dialectical character; indeed, their ideas have proven to be fruitful and
productive in order to rethink negativity today, also in terms of space
Aufhebung vs. and architecture. Derridean différance, understood as the interruption
différance of Hegelian Aufhebung,3 or Deleuze’s notions of differentiation, the
virtual and the association of negativity with affirmation (influenced
by Nietzsche)4 share some affinities with dialectics, although avoiding

3 “Although différance involves a complex of meanings, two are preeminent:

the temporalisation of deferral and the spatial distribution of differences. The first defies
completion or synthesis, since this play (unlike the ‘labour of the negative’, as Deleuze
had insisted on calling it) is unlike dialectical dynamism: there is no progressive, temporal
succession, a coming-to-meaning. (…)The second, however, looks more reminiscent of the
Hegelian process of engendering identity from difference. (…) If for Hegel there is always
a negation of the negation – the co-defining other is taken back into the thing to enrich
its identity – for Derrida identity is deferred along the chain of signifiers and the other is
never assimilated in a synthetic process.
The spacing that produces effects is thick with relations, but it does not obey any
logical category in its productivity. It has no location and is no immediacy; rather it is a
mobile and genetic operation, an active spacing, that inscribes alterity within every position.
‘Spacing designates nothing, nothing that is, no presence at a distance; it is the index of an
irreducible exterior, and at the same time of a movement, a displacement that indicates
an irreducible alterity’ (...). It has no identity of its own, but interrupts all identity while
producing it (it ‘carries the meaning of a productive, positive, generative force’, a ‘genetic
motif’ (...)). Unlike Kantian space it neither metaphorically circumscribes reason vis-à-vis an
unknowable exterior, not adumbrates any causal and universal Newtonian order. Unlike
Hegelian temporality, there is no becoming.
Like dialectics, différance indicates an affirmative process of engendering attributable to
the negative, but it never engenders unified wholes” (Coole 2000, 77).
4 The Deleuzian critique of dialectics and positioning for a generative difference
over negativity are transversal, and can be traced in works such as Nietzsche and Philosophy
(1986 [1962]), Difference and Repetition (1994 [1968]) or Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari 1983 [1972]). Noys (2013, 145–46) explains how
the French philosopher imposes affirmation over negativity in order “not to sink into
acceptance of ‘things as they are’ or into a mere plurality of pacified differences (…)
Hence Deleuze’s fear (…) is that the abandonment of the dialectic will only lead to its
replacement by ‘respectable, reconcilable or federative differences’ (…) In the case of
Deleuze, this fear leads to a constant insistence on the affirmative, on the ‘proper degree
of positivity,’ as the only means to break the circle of constrained negativity. The result
is that every case or suspicion of negativity must be eliminated. This is most evident in

524 (DIS)CLOSING
the final moment of absolute synthesis, or the negation of the
negation in which identity is constituted after alterity.
Beyond the totalizing structures articulated by means of binary
oppositions –“the paradigmatic form of all ideology”–, Jameson
(2009, 18–19) proposes to get rid of the “pseudo-Hegelian caricature
of the thesis/antithesis/synthesis” and assume that “any opposition
can be the starting point for a dialectic in its own right.” Moreover, he Both / and
advocates a comprehensive thinking of the positive and the negative
“together at one and the same time” (2009, 421), that is, embracing
contradiction and grasping it, both positively and negatively. In this
regard, he exposes the ambivalence of the system, considering, with
Marx,5 that capitalism is both the most productive and destructive
phenomenon of history.
To illustrate such an ambivalence, he uses the case of Walmart –
the multinational retail corporation– as a provocative example. The
success of the chain lies in its low prices and the enormous diversity
of products it offers in a single space, which represent important
advantages for the client. Although mostly criticized because of its
aggressive model that threatens local business and the way employees
are treated (the company has been involved in several lawsuits
regarding poor working conditions, low salaries, inadequate health
care and even gender discrimination), the truth is that Walmart
has largely surpassed its competitors, becoming the world’s largest
company by revenue in 2017 and being present in twenty eight
countries operating under more than sixty different names, always
showing a trustworthy, familiar face to the consumer who sees

Deleuze’s account of art and literature, where any sign of morbidity or negativity in an
artist or writer is regarded as our own failure to properly register their truly affirmative
function. So, we find Deleuze attracted to the radical re -reading of oeuvres we might
usually regard as ‘negative’: Kafka (…), Beckett (…), Francis Bacon (…), and so on. In each
of his readings, ‘negativity’ is reversed into affirmation, precisely to exclude any trace of a
form of difference that would become mired in the ‘weakness’ of negativity as such.”
5 “The Manifesto proposes to see capitalism as the most productive moment
of history and the most destructive one at the same time, and issues the imperative to
think Good and Evil simultaneously, and as inseparable and inextricable dimensions of the
same present of time. This is then a more productive way of transcending Good and Evil
than the cynicism and lawlessness which so many readers attribute to the Nietzschean
program” (Jameson 2009, 551).

Negativity beyond its borders 525

 02 03

Walmart as part of his/her daily life. This is an evident case of world-

flattening phenomenon, recalling Thomas Friedman’s work (2005), in
which a single company dominates the global market by controlling
flows, workplaces and consume patterns through a network of
relatively small stores which hide the real dimension of the structure
and the machinery behind. Indeed, its accessibility to the lowest-
income households is at the same time the source of their poverty, “the
prime mover in the dissolution of American industrial productivity
and the irrevocable destruction of the American small town.” But if,
as one anonymous CEO acknowledged, Walmart has “killed free-
market capitalism in America,” Jameson (2009, 421) sees here “the
purest expression of that dynamic of capitalism which devours itself,
which abolishes the market by means of the market itself.” Within this
expansive and contradictory scenario, Jameson (2009, 49) suggests
that, although Walmart is just an example that is not precisely
positive, the exercise of reading it in progressive (positive) terms may
open new ways for alternatives to the system.
In a much less utopian and pro-dialectical manner, Noys articulates
his quest for a renewed negativity around the work of “affirmationist”
philosophers (Derrida, Deleuze, Latour, Negri and Badiou) in which
he detects the presence of the negative settled in a non- or anti-
dialectical framework. Thus, he seeks a productive confrontation
between those who advocate negation and critique and those who
prefer to operate through creativity and decentralization within the
abstract framework of capitalism in order to elaborate a response to
Relational it. However, Noys considers that the “points of rupture” (2010, 96)
negativity that the negative provides are essential to break the aforementioned
common ground between the smooth, accelerated space of capital and

526 (DIS)CLOSING
affirmationist critique, which has significantly reduced the possibility
of disruption. In this regard, he remarks the importance of “relational”
forms of negativity which, based on opposition, contradiction or
confrontation with the other, allow to articulate a strategic thinking of
agency that affirmationism hinders when understanding all relations
as “constrained and delimited” (Noys 2013, 153).
The first and last chapters of Noys’ book constitute the beginning
and the end of an itinerary that starts with what the author considers
to be the immersion of Continental theory into anti-negativity, and
finishes with a possible passage out of it. It is Derrida, according to
him, one of the first authors to negotiate a non-dialectical negativity,
with différance as an “affirmative opening to alterity.” Thus, he is
seen as a liminal figure, as a “weak affirmationist,” since he adopts
negativity but “in a register of political impotence, and at the service
of a prior positivity” (Eyers 2011). It is questionable, though, that if
affirmationism is “the attempt to resist the via negativa of Otherness,”
as Noys (2010, 2) himself defines it, Derrida can be placed under
this heading, considering his engagement and development of
deconstruction (with its controversial relation to architecture),
ultimately “the modulated derivation of the positive opening to the
Other from the primary negative spacing of différance” (Eyers 2011).
More consistent is the last chapter on Alain Badiou, situated “on Re-inventing
the edge of the negative” and offering keys to “re-invent the negative” the negative
amidst the contemporary “crisis of negation” (Noys 2010, 135).
Having explicitly addressed this issue in several occasions (Badiou
2008b; Badiou, Lucchese, and Smith 2008; Badiou and Van Houdt
2011), Noys brings forth the procedures of access to the real that
Badiou unfolds in The Century (Badiou 2007b) both as “destruction”
and “subtraction.” Identifying both of them with different moments
of twentieth-century avant-gardes,6 Noys detects how both forms

6 “Art provides the first guiding thread for our attempt to think the couple
‘destruction/subtraction’. The century experienced itself as artistic negativity in the sense
that one of its themes, anticipated in the nineteenth century by a number of texts (for
example, Mallarme’s Verse in Crisis, or farther back still, Hegel’s Aesthetics), is that of the
end of art, of representation, of the painting, and, finally, of the work as such. Behind
this theme of the end there obviously lies, once again, the question of knowing what
relationship art entertains with the real, or what the real of art is.

Negativity beyond its borders 527

 04 05

are essentially negative, although subtraction appears as a positive

negation while destruction is a negative one, thus establishing a
hierarchy in which subtraction is privileged after the dominance
of destruction during the last century roughly until the decade of
the eighties. This is because, although for him both dimensions
are essential to any formulation of emancipatory politics (Badiou,
Lucchese, and Smith 2008, 652), subtraction has the capability of
creating and producing the new, as well as providing a space for
autonomy, hence the “affirmative” character of Badiou’s discourse,
which at the same time associates pure destruction to a nihilistic,
pseudo-religious dimension that results on terrorist attacks such

It is with regard to this point that I would like to call on Malevich (…) We find here the
origin of a subtractive protocol of thought that differs from the protocol of destruction.
We must beware of interpreting White on White as a symbol of the destruction of
painting. On the contrary, what we are dealing with is a subtractive assumption. The
gesture is very close to the one that Mallarme makes within poetry: the staging of a
minimal, albeit absolute, difference; the difference between the place and what takes place
in the place, the difference between place and taking-place. Captured in whiteness, this
difference is constituted through the erasure of every content, every upsurge.
Why is this something other than destruction? Because, instead of treating the real as
identity, it is treated right away as a gap. The question of the real/semblance relation will
not be resolved by a purification that would isolate the real, but by understanding that
the gap is itself real. The white square is the moment when the minimal gap is fabricated”
(Badiou 2007b, 55–56).
On the contrary, destruction is represented by Dada a certain trends within
Surrealism, working through a permanent, violent process of discrediting and unmasking.
In both, “the desire to dwell in the purity of the absolutely real find s its final correlate in
suicide - what we might call absolute terror directed against the self” (Noys 2010, 136).

528 (DIS)CLOSING
as those of September 11, consistent of “a violent destabilization
whose concept is ungraspable” (2008, 655). However, this hierarchy
is revised in further texts in which Badiou seems to concede an
unprecedented relevant to negation. Such is the case of the lecture
on Pier Paolo Pasolini (Badiou 2007a), in which he reflects on the
balanced relation between subtraction and destruction to articulate
a change, which necessarily entails rupture. He reaches the following
conclusion when reading a fragment of Pasolini’s poem Vittoria
(1964):7
We can now conclude: the political problems of the contemporary world cannot Destruction vs.
be solved, neither in the weak context of democratic opposition, which in fact substraction
abandons millions of people to a nihilistic destiny, nor in the mystical context
of destructive negation, which is an other form of power, the power of death.
Neither subtraction without destruction, nor destruction without subtraction. It
is in fact the problem of violence today. Violence is not, as has been said during
the last century the creative and revolutionary part of negation. The way of
freedom is a subtractive one; but to protect the subtraction itself, to defend the
new kingdom of emancipatory politics, we cannot radically exclude all forms of
violence; the future is not on the side of the savage young men and women of
popular suburbs, we cannot abandon them to themselves. But the future is not
on the side of the democratic wisdom of mothers and fathers law. We have to
learn something of nihilistic subjectivity. (Badiou 2007a)

7 “ ‘All politics is Realpolitik,’ warring/ soul, with your delicate anger!/You do

not recognize a soul other than this one/ which has all the prose of the clever man,/
of the revolutionary devoted to the honest/ common man (even the complicity/ with
the assassins of the Bitter Years grafted/ onto protector classicism, which makes/ the
communist respectable): you do not recognize the heart/ that becomes slave to its enemy,
and goes/ where the enemy goes, led by a history/ that is the history of both, and makes
them, deep down,/ perversely, brothers; you do not recognize the fears/ of a consciousness
that, by struggling with the world,/ shares the rules of the struggle over the centuries,/ as
through a pessimism into which hopes/ drown to become more virile. Joyous/ with a joy
that knows no hidden agenda, / this army-blind in the blind/ sunlight-of dead young men
comes/ and waits. If their father, their leader, absorbed/in a mysterious debate with Power
and bound/ by its dialectics, which history renews ceaselessly/ if he abandons them, / in the
white mountains, on the serene plains,/ little by little in the barbaric breasts/ of the sons,
hate becomes love of hate,/ burning only in them, the few, the chosen./ Ah, Desperation
that knows no laws!/ Ah, Anarchy, free love/ of Holiness, with your valiant songs!” (Pier
Paolo Pasolini, 1964. ‘Vittoria’ In: Poesia in forma di rosa. Milano: Garzanti. Translation by
Badiou, 2007a)

Negativity beyond its borders 529

 Suburban Here, the author opens a productive interstice with regard to the
negativity question of space and politics from a clearly negative perspective.
Badiou, through Vittoria, is pointing to the spatialization of negativity
in urban space, specifically in the suburbs, recalling the protests that
have taken place all around the world, not only in Paris (Badiou
participated actively in the French political scene during the sixties
and seventies) or in Italy, where Pasolini expressed his disappointment
with the Communist Party years before the autunno caldo and amidst
a background of social mobilization. Some contemporary examples
have been highlighted in previous chapters: France in 2005, United
Kingdom in 2011… In any part of the world –Badiou (2008) also
alludes to the suburbs of Shanghai, Bamako, Chicago, Baghdad or
Beirut–, the suburb represents certain conditions of existence which
remain distanced from the State and its dominant layers. Contrary
to the image of Koolhaas’ generic city or the celebrated, spectacular
scenario of the city center, the suburb appears as the massive, bursting
space that, despite its generic global condition, acquires strength as
a (negative) motor for urban and political transformation. Again,
Bauman and Agamben’s idea of counterlaboratory (2008) is pertinent
here. Also the notion of courage as political affect, which Badiou
(2008a, 76) introduces as the mean to orient ourselves “amid the
global disorientation,” resonates in these spaces where capitalist flows
are interrupted.
The subject of courage is nor a subject transfixed with breaking the world in
two, but one who practices, in Badiou’s words, a virtue that takes time as its
‘raw material’ and that involves “holding on, in a different duration from that
imposed by the law of the world.” (Noys 2010, 41)

No more heroes However, if courage is ultimately affirmative for Badiou, Noys (2010,
152–53) inverts this reading in negative terms and, contra the French
philosopher, associates courage with the non-heroic, thus emerging
as a political virtue that exerts “a stubborn insistence against the
vacuities of affirmation, in the name of negativity –woven out of
political memories which are not mere nostalgia, but also critique and
re-formulation.” Becoming a hero has lost its epic meaning, especially
after the fall of the Berlin Wall that exemplified the end of the last
grand geopolitical antagonism and the advent of post-politics. The
lyrics of David Bowie’s song (1977) describing the encounter between

530 (DIS)CLOSING
 06 07

two lovers coming from both sides of the city is the last cry for the
possibility of an epic or tragic heroism. But at the same time, this
possibility evaporates with what Hito Steyerl (2012, 49) glimpses
in a music video8 in which Bowie himself appears as the new type
of hero after its fall: the image-hero, as object and commodity, or
as a ghost, as Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2015) would describe it years
later. In this situation, Noys’ suggestion (2010, 40) for a politics of Untermensch
the Untermensch rather than of the Nietzschean Übermensch –which
represents the epitome of affirmation– is clarifying, since it opens up
a space for a new type of agency in which negativity regains strength
as a disruptive, critical force. Not falling into weakness or defeatism,
the detachment of negation from heroism entails a much more
diffuse framework for agency, in which Brits (2010, 4) sees a critique
of representation towards a certain kind of invisibility, in line with
the anonymous work of the Invisible Committee or, we may add,
the unnamed subjects who inhabit and protest in the banlieues. The
consequences of this crisis of representation, which has been already
addressed in some fragments of the text and that has repercussions in
architectural and urban space, will be discussed later.
Through these incursions, it is possible to articulate negativity
beyond the constraints of classic dialectical schemes that, furthermore,
do not work properly when applied to non-Western realities and
modes of doing and knowing. As Badiou points out (2011, 235),
we are in a world that “searches for new forms of negation” that may
not be necessarily dialectical. What seems clear is that, in a world

8 https://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=Tgcc5V9Hu3g

Negativity beyond its borders 531

 in which dominant powers gain ground through homogenizing
strategies typical of globalization, the articulation of spaces of critique,
resistance or differentiation are crucial for a more just and inclusive
society, even when the possibility of an alternative counter-system
resembles impossible –and questionable.
Before directly entering the question of space within negativity,
the work of Gail Day (2012) can be read as a hinge element between
new negativities and space, given her political interrogation of
Cacciari and Tafuri’s arguments, which already aimed at articulating
a non-dialectical understanding of culture and capitalism –including
architecture and the city– through negative thought. Although
imprisoned in its own temporality, and discredited by some after
the course that Cacciari’s political career has taken in the last years,
it is still relevant in some aspects, like its direct translation to
architectural thought, and so Gail Day devotes an entire chapter to
it. Day undertakes the task of re-reading and rehabilitating negativity
following a different path from that of Noys. Alternatively, she focuses
on thinkers who take postwar art and architecture as their material
to elaborate relations and ideas within a context of left politics.
Having contextualized and discussed the course and implications of
negative thought in previous chapters, we could conclude, together
with Day, that the common ground shared by art and politics and
the engagement of the former with a practice of negativity is far
from closed, as we have seen through diverse works and actions
(also in public urban space) which contest and/or dismantle certain
contradictions in current systems, or at least leave them exposed.
Inferno “Giving space” to those who/which “are not “inferno,” as Calvino
imagined in the words of Marco Polo, is the immersion in “the
currents of the Metropolis” that Cacciari and Tafuri see as “the only
means to avoid being blinded by its effects” (Day 2011, 107).
And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is
one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form
by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for
many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer
see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension:
seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not
inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” (Calvino 1974, 164–65)

532 (DIS)CLOSING
Dada or De Stijl as negative avant-gardes inaugurated the immersion
in the inferno of capitalist disenchantment, rendering evident the
final absorption of any opposing element to it. The Tafurian critique
of architecture and its impossibility of becoming a truly critical tool
only concedes a certain capacity to assimilate and reveal these forces
to projects such as Hilberseimer’s Großstadtarchitektur or Mies’
skyscrapers, with Archizoom’s No-Stop City as the ultimate attempt
to fully grasp the forces of the metropolis by spatializing them.
However, these strategies are inserted, according to Noys (2012, 3),
in a kind of thinking that could be defined as “accelerationism”; an
association that makes sense considering the links between negative
thought and some currents of Italian operaismo. We have seen how
after the counterrevolutionary shift of the eighties –when the world
order and the distribution of labor are radically transformed through
the rise of neoliberalism– and the one of the first decades of the
third millennium –inaugurated with Trump’s election (Catterall
2016)–, the possibilities to articulate resistance and open a “non-
infernal” space amidst the inferno become even more reduced; not
to mention architecture’s insertion in the contemporary dynamics of
transparency, acceleration, hypervisibility, etc. and, at the same time,
the increasing demand for sustainable strategies that help postponing
the consequences of global warming and the overexploitation of
resources –since stopping them seems to be impossible at this
point. This is why Day makes an effort to recover the emancipatory
possibilities that negative thought and other incursions into negativity
may have today; namely setting the negative free from its dialectical
constraints; maintaining the tension between the actual and the
potential; rejecting extreme positions of optimism and pessimism
and rendering perceptible the contradictions and conflicts that may
appear within the system in which we are irredeemably inserted
and which easily absorbs any opposition to it. It is here where the
notion of counterspace may acquire a renew productivity, working
as a constructive framework to situate and think new modes of
making and thinking the spaces of the city, including its architectural
dimension.

Negativity beyond its borders 533

 Counterspaces as a tool for critique.

Dualities Throughout the text, and with special emphasis in the cases of Beijing,
and disjunctures Warsaw and Istanbul, several doubles and dyads have been mentioned
and explored, showing the disjunctures, gaps and fissures between
their components. It seems that binary polarities have lost strength
during the last decades after the generalized decline of dialectics and
the postmodern questioning of grand narratives. Indeed, the interest
in dualities, divisions and non-identity that, according to Petit (2014),
characterized the beginning of postmodern architecture can be seen as
an attempt to spatialize these divisions and expose their inner tensions,
as well as breaking the binomial logic through new elements. The
incursions of Peterson in the relation between space and anti-space –
and his proposal of a third term, “negative” or “derivative” space– may
be read in this context as well. Besides, the crisis of representation
today in favor of presentation and pure presence –a question that also
entails a deeply binary problematic and that has been addressed both
positively (Barad 2007) and negatively (Han 2014)– has reinforced
this dissolution. However, in a globalized world pervaded by positivity
and in which difference has been practically reduced to a marketing
strategy, one of the main objectives of the present research has been to
rethink the negative as a necessary counterpart to a total whole (the
One) and to expand its understanding through non-evident relations.
Given the architectural and urban background of the research, a
reflection on spatial concepts and processes and their insertion in the
space of the city has been posed as a means to undertake this task.
Negativity, The fact that the idea of the negative has been mostly addressed
space and from the field of philosophy and developed by means of discourse and
politics language makes it difficult, in principle, to establish a correlation with
the notion of space, which pervades all disciplines and cultures, being
present in the highest scientific spheres as well as in the much more
prosaic daily life. The task reveals itself to be more arduous when it
comes to find connections with the concept of space understood from
much more “functional” disciplines like architecture and urbanism.
Throughout the text, the political character of space has proven to be
if not the clearest, one of the most fertile interpretive keys to display
the relevance that the negative has in its configuration: either from or
without a dialectical approach, space reveals itself as a milieu which

534 (DIS)CLOSING
 08

contains and produces forms, but also as a negotiated, relational realm

in which we move and interact, where relations of power take place
and where they can be contested. In this regard, space cannot be
detached from politics, whose ultimate function is the performance
and management of conflict.
The association of time and space as the primary dimensions
in which everything rests and evolves is also quite plural, and it
has changed through different periods and places. Space has been
regarded as a receptacle or vessel (the Greek khôra), as a structured
matrix, as a flowing continuum, as a perceptive category, as distance
and as a relational field, among many other conceptions. All of
these models emerge after different approaches and contexts, and
on many occasions they can be taken as complementary and not
mutually exclusive. Besides, there is something that most of these
interpretations have in common: space is usually identified with
exteriority, as a more or less extensive domain that would constitute
–and exceed– the limits of all things located in it, while their interiors
would belong to other dimensions.

Counterspaces as a tool for critique 535

 It has been already argued that Hegel’s understanding of time
and space as the first determinations of nature were decisive for the
articulation of the modern (dominant) reading of space, specifically
subsumed to time. According to him, nature can only become when
space, as an indifferent, abstract entity, unfolds into time –and
vice versa– by developing the moments of identity and difference
inherent to them. Although both dimensions are equally significant
and they cannot be separated, Hegel establishes a certain hierarchy
when he relates time to spirit, that is, the highest sphere of human
reason, related to the Divine, which enables the subject to think for
and through itself, permanently becoming and sublating itself. It is
precisely in this intertwining of nature (time) and spirit where history
emerges, dialectically constituting the basic triad of Hegelian thought.
Later, in his Philosophy of History (2001), he would spatialize the path
of human spirit by tracing a progressive line that goes from what he
considers as the most primitive cultures –that is, the Orient in varying
degrees; Africa is not even included since it lacks historical interest for
him– to the West as the most advance stage of development, obviously
going through Greece and Rome as its immediate, Mediterranean
precedents. In a similar way, he would establish a hierarchy among
the arts (1975), depending on the adequacy between nature and
spirit: architecture would be the most basic one (symbolic), while he
considers poetry to be the highest, since spatial separation has been
completely suppressed and meaning incorporated.
Thus, once time remains tied to the privileged realm of spirit, space
is relegated to a secondary position, since it is pure exteriority, the
primeval, abstract realm in which nature manifests itself, already not
fully apprehended by reason. The abstract, indifferent character of
space was reinforced by its representations in science and geometry,
as an absolute extension which could only be conceived by means of
counterposition and the imposition of systems of reference (Cartesian
coordinates, visual perspective, etc.) At the same time, the notion of
space in Western architecture and urbanism did not differ significantly
from the scientific one, although the incipient political project of
modernity and the placing of the individual in the center of the
world would stimulate further incursions in the domain of spatial
perception (mostly from an optical-visual approach). However, the
privilege of time over space would continue during pre- and post-

536 (DIS)CLOSING
 09

war periods, especially because of the qualitative leap in transport

and communication technologies. Immediacy and speed, which
fascinated the futurists and were included in any successful program
(suffice it to recall Le Corbusier’s obsession with cars, or the essential
role that motorized circulation played in modern urban plans) were
seen as evident symptoms of progress. This meant that space could be
eventually surpassed and eliminated, and its relevance was practically
reduced to a question of distribution and efficiency, as evidenced
by the idea of an Existenzminimum to mitigate the crisis of housing
after World War I, or the zoning of the city according to functional
areas promoted by the Athens Charter. Needless to say that this
hierarchization had been already assimilated by the political project
of modernity, in which the anthropocentric values of progress and
universalism entailed a vision of history and the world that did not
differ much from the Hegelian one. Space was destined to become
a global one, with no local differences, through standardization and
effective production. Indeed, the world in which we live today has

Counterspaces as a tool for critique 537

 kept some of these spatial attributes as a result of increasing processes
of globalization.
Spatial and Not surprisingly, the loss of credibility of the modern project led to
cultural turns a questioning of its most distinctive premises, including the primacy
of time and the vectors of linear progress. One of the most significant
contributions of postmodern thought has been the “spatial turn” –one
of the many turns that would take place in different disciplines–,
understood as the introduction of spatial categories to understand
society and culture. In addition to this, the articulation of cultural
studies as an independent field of knowledge and the growing interest
in the question of identities –in terms of gender, race, etc. – against
dominant narratives drew the attention toward spatial notions such as
place, location or the global/local dichotomy.
The work of Henri Lefebvre is located within this context, and
his purpose of elaborating a full theory of space resulted in a prolific
series of publications that triggered the emergence of new concepts
and works on space: for instance, David Harvey, from the fields
of political economy and radical geography, adopted and further
developed several Lefebvrian ideas, such as “the right to the city” or
the possibility of an “urban revolution” (Harvey 2012). Edward Soja
(1996) adapted the triad “representations of space-representational
space-spatial practice” to a system of spatial trialectics, introducing
the notion of thirdspace to describe those spaces which are real
and imagined at the same time. There is also a clear Lefebvrian
influence in De Certeau’s (1984) interest in everyday life, and we
could continue to elaborate an endless list of authors who have
discussed and extended elements from the vast theoretical corpus
left by the French philosopher. It is important to remark that his
heterodox Marxist position, the diffuse and somehow imprecise
character of his work and his interstitial position and connections to
the most prominent intellectual circles of his time (not only French
poststructuralism and Neo-Marxism, but also Italian thinkers linked
to operaism such as Tafuri or Negri) may have contributed to the
Spatial easy spread –and critique– of his ideas. With regard to their relevance
justice today, the problematic processes of homogenization, growing
inequality, gentrification, touristification, privatization etc. affecting
contemporary urban realm demand a serious reflection on social and

538 (DIS)CLOSING
spatial justice that has encouraged a return to his ideas almost four
decades later, as it can be deduced not only from the high number of
academic works and projects related to his ideas –among which the
production of authors like Stanek, Moravánszky or Schmid features
prominently–, but also from the adoption of some of his key concepts
in international urban forums and regulations, such as the right to the
city, which has been included –though modestly– in the New Urban
Agenda (UN-Habitat III 2017) elaborated after the UN Conference
on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) in
Quito.
Despite the thorough analysis and readings of Lefebvre’s work, Differential
there are still some terms and concepts that, for different reasons, space vs.
have gone practically unnoticed by most of the authors who have counterspace
delved into it. One of them is the notion of counterspace that
has been explored and reinterpreted through the course of the
research. Lefebvre used this term very occasionally, and it is probable
that its potential has been eclipsed by the notion of “differential
space,” whose relation to “difference” makes it easily relatable to its
immediate context, since many other French authors were talking
of difference at that time. Indeed, the disparity between both terms
is hardly noticeable, and sometimes it seems that they may be used
interchangeably. However, Lefebvre associated differential space
to abstract space in a way that seems to go back to the traditional
dialectical scheme that,9 despite its relevance and strength, has
proven to be insufficient to grasp the contradictions that move
the world today, and in which space itself is subsumed. On the
contrary, and maybe because of its indeterminacy, the notion of
counterspace appears to be a more elastic one, less constrained by
previous significations and systems, because it does not propose

9 “The reproduction of the social relations of production within this space

inevitably obeys two tendencies: the dissolution of old relations on the one hand and
the generation of new relations on the other. Thus, despite -or rather because of- its
negativity, abstract space carries within itself the seeds of a new kind of space. I shall call
that new space ‘differential space’, because, inasmuch as abstract space tends towards
homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities, a new space
cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences. It will also restore unity to
what abstract space breaks up -to the functions, elements and moments of social practice”
(Lefebvre 1991, 52).

Counterspaces as a tool for critique 539

 10 11

Counter vs. anti a final resolution or surpass of the conflict. The prefix “counter”
already allows both a distantiation from and a certain dependence
on that which is countered, thus escaping the absolute rupture of
the “anti,” which responds to a logic of “either/or” rather to “both/
and.” The relation between space and counterspace is not based on
mutual exclusion, but on the manifestation of gaps and disjunctures
in their common margins, exposing the contours and inconsistencies
of dominant spaces. This idea somehow meets Peterson’s reflection
on the question of urban forms and voids as negative, potential fields
for action and the recovery of this space to host conflict and the
right to the city. Just as Ulrich Oslender (2010, 111) acknowledges
in his particular quest for a counterspace through the examination
of alternative spatialities produced in Colombia by black population
groups in the Pacific coast region and the FARC, the construction of a
counterspace is a complex process, full of ambiguities and always tied
to the entanglements between power and resistance.10 Indeed, it would
be possible to find examples in which the notion of counterspace
appears blurred and questionable, even leading to a confusion between

10 As an extension of the FARC counterspace described by Oslender, we could

place here the so-called Transitory Village Zones for Normalization that the Colombian
government and the guerrilla agreed as temporary sites to locate about 8,000 former
guerrilla fighters. These zones, which should have disappeared in 2017 after the relocation
of their inhabitants in normalized areas, persist as nuclei in which situations and
relationships of an urban nature have emerged and consolidated despite their temporality
(Uribe Botero 2017).

540 (DIS)CLOSING
space and counterspace: such is the case of Israeli settlements and
occupied territories in Palestine.
As it can be deduced from the examples posed in the text, these
tensions can be present in several scales and contexts, from the global
and the territorial to the hyperlocal, from the virtual space of the
network to the enclosed space of the museum and, of course, in urban
space. However, if it is impossible to articulate an alternative spatiality
that could resist the dominant one, counterspaces should not be
thought so much in terms of its actuality or “physical” materialization,
but rather from its potential capacity to imagine, reflect, project and
even produce the possible.11 Thus, an understanding of counterspaces
tied to the irrational, the unexpected and the erratic may be more
fruitful than a literal, constructed one when it comes to disclose
the contradictions inherent to capitalist abstract space and to work
within its phantasmagoric character. In this respect, counterspace
emerges as a tool for critique, whose main task is to reveal contours
and operate from (and against) them. Peio Aguirre (2014) reminds us Productivity
that the productivity of critique –ultimately, of negation– lies in the of negation
capacity of situating oneself both within and without the dominant
system, thriving on everything that remains outside a particular
discipline. Thus, we cannot speak of space –or art, or architecture–
without addressing the larger cultural phenomenon (derived from the
postmodern paradigm) in which the aestheticization of the market
and the commodification of culture meet: indeed, architecture and
urbanism, like art, belong to the realm of cultural production, which
transcends, and does not transcend at the same time, the hegemonic
framework. They are inserted within it, but also within a critical
process, as Jane Rendell understands it contra the disaffection of post-
critical arguments.

11 In this sense, the Lefebvrian counterspace is still utopian, although he

recognizes the rapid absorption of emergent counterspaces, as it happens in the case of
leisure spaces: “Such spaces appear on first inspection to have escaped the control of
the established order, and thus, inasmuch as they are spaces of play, to constitute a vast
‘counter-space’. This is a complete illusion. The case against leisure is quite simply closed
-and the verdict is irreversible: leisure is as alienated and alienating as labour; as much an
agent of co-optation as it is itself co-opted; and both an assimilative and an assimilated part
of the ‘system’ (mode of production)” (Lefebvre 1991, 383).

Counterspaces as a tool for critique 541

 12 13

14 15

Given the disastrous changes to the Earth’s climate caused by carbon dioxide
emissions, along with the intensification of imperialist aggression by oil-
dependant nations as demand outstrips supply, it is not possible to go along with
corporate capitalism in a pragmatic mode without critique – to do so would
be to support without question the inequalities that are integral aspects of this
economic system. (Rendell et al. 2007, 3)

Lefebvre suspected architecture and urbanism and he used to

place them among the instrumental disciplines that articulate
the representations of space –that is, how space is conceived and
organized by technicians and planners, usually at the service of
power. As we have seen, it is hard, not to say impossible, to find

542 (DIS)CLOSING
any productive connection between these fields and the notions
of counterspace and negativity from this point of view, since their
insertion in capitalist modes of production is inescapable, as Tafuri
imagined. However, Lefebvre’s attempt to detach himself from the Architecture de
restrictions of the Tafurian Marxist approach led him to rethink an la jouissance
architectural imagination of enjoyment –architecture de la jouissance
(Lefebvre 2014)– that leaves space for hope with regard to the debates
in architectural and urbanism today, even when enjoyment may
have also entered capitalist circuits to a great extent. It seems clear
that architecture and urbanism today cannot be simply confined to
the processes of projecting and building; at least during the years of
building crisis, there is a widespread climate of reflection and desire
for change in multiple aspects: work tools, education, redefinition
of the profession, critique, relation to society and other fields of
knowledge and, ultimately, the statute and role of architecture and
urbanism in the world. In the case of the present research, special
attention has been paid to architecture and urbanism as processes,
to both social and non-human agency, to artistic practice, as well
as reflecting on recent events with spatial repercussions. These are
tasks and elements to be included within a discipline that is now
more transversal than ever; contrary to what Argan (1961, 18)
believed, “the idea that the architect determines space in which the
life of the community develops is a premise that is already fully
accepted and fundamental” is not valid anymore. Indeed, it is worth Inoperative
asking ourselves if an architecture of not-doing12 –or inoperative architecture
architecture (Boano and Talocci 2017)– may be beneficial in social
terms; an architecture of processes and potentialities that lets the
others produce their own space. Rather than mourning the loss
of primacy of architecture over space, this should be taken as an
opportunity to establish collaborative links to other fields, even
when a direct translation to building practice may not be possible.
Against the frustrating block that one may experience when facing the
impossibility of escaping or transforming the existing conditions, the
recognition of architecture’s “relative autonomy” (Lefebvre 2014) or
semi-autonomy opens a way for critical practice.

12 One cannot but recall here the non-intervention of Anne Lacaton and Philippe
Vassal in Léon Aucoc square in Bourdeaux.

Counterspaces as a tool for critique 543

 In this regard, it is interesting to consider and extend the clues
that Stanek (2014, xvi) exposes in his foreword to Lefebvre’s Toward
an Architecture of Enjoyment: an architectural imagination that is
negative, political and materialist. Negative, because it aims at “a
‘concrete utopia’ that strategically contradicts the premises of everyday
life in postwar capitalism”; political, because habitation –and we could
add the urban– “becomes the stake of political struggle”; and finally
materialist, not so much in the sense of Marxist historical materialism,
as Stanek proposes, but with regard to a certain physical entity, related
to the body, its rhythms, and the material spaces and flows of the city,
always keeping in mind that space is more than the relational ordering
of people and social goods.

All that melted into air…

Global After Marx, the destructive/productive capacity of capitalism that
fuzziness emerges with special strength during the modern period can be
compared to a massive process of liquefaction, or gasification, in
which all certainties, all material and instrumental relations “melt
into air,” as Engels and Marx himself asserted in The Communist
Manifesto of 1848 and Marshall Berman (1982) confirmed more than
a century later. From a different perspective, Peter Sloterdijk (2013)
has depicted the transitions between the solid, liquid and gaseous
orders of the world in spatial terms, considering that progressive
spatial “conquests” –circumnavigation, air transportation, the
Internet, and so on– have significantly changed our way of being in
the world, evolving from the most local certainties and limitations to
the expansive fuzziness of the global. This melting, dematerialization
or fluidification becomes evident in the global system of capitalist
flows, which are inserted within a limitless space provided by virtual
technologies, dealing with both material and immaterial goods in
permanent exchange at an incredibly high speed –with financial
economy, industrial delocalization and digital currencies playing an
essential role in this acceleration.
Networks Parallel to these processes, dominant (Western) spatial models
and orbits are progressively becoming more and more diffuse as well: in this
sense, Emmanuel Petit (2013; 2014) exposes a spatial progression
from the modern model of the grid, to the postmodern labyrinthine,

544 (DIS)CLOSING
 16 17 18

centerless condition and finally to the gravitational type of the orbit

and the loop, which coexists, as we have seen, with the space of the
network. The expansive character of previous models have given
way to a concentrated, interior space which appears “in the form of
architectural galaxies, orbits, nests, spheres, clouds, and whirls –all
of which invert the 20th-century expansive logic and turn it inward”
(Petit 2013, 32). Thus, these spaces work as interconnected terminals
within the “connective tissue” of the “global, inter-urban network”
which unfolds itself both physically and virtually, leading once again
to the contradiction of a spatial model that is both concentrated and
expansive. This tension between the involute and the atmospheric-
diffuse is reflected in floating, performative ambiences without a
defined function; in this regard, Petit (2013, 26) detects how this
overcoming of form in favor of the atmospheric –that responds at
the same time to the turn from metaphysics to immanence– can be
seen in multiple works from different disciplines, such as Diller +
Scofidio’s Blur Building in Yverdon (2002), Tomás Saraceno’s In Orbit
installation in 2013 or Sloterdijk’s Spheres: all of them “participate in
a similar project of defining a gravitational space over the articulate,
analytical, and labyrinthian forms of postmodern architecture
(…)” The idea of the “anti-object” by Kengo Kuma, developed in a Anti-object
work subtitled as The Dissolution and Disintegration of Architecture
(2008) may be included in this line of action, which often leads to
paradoxical situations between a critique of “self-centred and coercive
architecture” (Kuma 2008, 1) and the production of iconic, self-
referential objects.
However, these arguments are not a claim for a “retrospective
horizon” to articulate a critique of the present by recalling

All that melted into air… 545

 19 20 21

architectures and urban spaces of the past. This would only lead to
a fall into a certain nostalgic vision of a space of places dominated
by a space of flows, as Genard (2008) detects in some fragments of
Castells’ work. Indeed, the “solid” character that has been traditionally
attributed to architecture and urbanism and their insertion as
disciplines within capitalist cultural production reinforce the tension
produced by contradictory and paradoxical situations such as
Reverse Theater those described above. In this regard, it is interesting to remark the
strategies of reversal adopted by Kuma in some of his works, such
as the intervention in Chofu Theatre in Tokyo for the performance
Humidity of Transmission, carried out by the theatre group Et in Terra
Pax in 1997. Through a project that can certainly be classified as
transdisciplinary, Kuma inverts the classical scheme of the theatrical
stage and auditorium, vaguely recalling the inversion of the viewpoint
in Debord’s film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978).
Like Debord, although without mentioning his influence, Kuma
operates from a critical position towards the visual paradigm and
structuration of the spectacle, detecting a turning point in the rise
of the (fluid) cinematic image and the screen and the subsequent fall
of the (Wagnerian) opera as a (solid) means of transmission. Against
the unilateral relation between the image-product and the viewer-
consumer, Kuma (2008, 81–89) advocates interactive relations such
as those that appeared with the emergence of the PC –disclosing,
once again, the contemporary contradiction between immediacy (no
mediation, pure presence, as expressed by Han) and hypermediation
(Andreotti and Lahiji 2016). Thus, after having located the seats
in the stage and the space for representation in the auditorium
space, reversing their position, he separated both zones with an
interactive water screen in which the volume of liquid and the degree
of illumination could be regulated by means of a computer. The

546 (DIS)CLOSING
spectator thus becomes an agent of the performance, and acquires a
new status in relation with a space which is actual and virtual at the
same time, interacting with fluid, distorted images which appear in
different layers.
In a different way, strategies of spatial reversal can be found
in the work of Philippe Rahm and Jean Gilles Décosterd, whose
climatic architecture takes the interaction between the body and its
environment (humidity, temperature, metabolism, radiation, non-
human elements…) as its primary (im)material. We could mention,
for instance, the specific installation Reverse for the exhibition
Intrusiones at the Andalusian Centre for Contemporary Art in Seville
in 2004. The intervention offered an inverted spatiality through a
screen which loses information, instead of receiving it, through the
projection of electromagnetic emissions. Due to the temperature
difference between bodies in the room and the surface of the screen
(between zero and two degrees Celsius), the infrared radiation emitted
by the skin is absorbed by the screen, which becomes a projector of
invisible information. Like Kuma, Rahm and Décosterd question
the primacy of the visual representation in art by means of a more
qualitative, immersive space.
Both examples seem to confirm something that has been addressed
throughout the text: the impossibility of architecture (and urbanism)
of escaping spatial representation. Because of the very nature of their
products, they always work as anchors to reality that, as we have seen
through the se-ductiones (especially in Beijing and Istanbul), societies
need to project themselves or go against certain imposed values:
architecture and urbanism are both “imposing skeletons” and scenes
to perform social practice. However, there are also gaps between
presence and absence, in which the essence of representation lies, and
it is possible to render them noticeable by means of space. In the end,
architecture and urbanism are defined by spatial processes; maybe not
in an indexical way –as the first detractors of “critical architecture”
denounced (Somol and Whiting 2002)–, but because of their capacity
to embody and expose the nature of those processes. Rather than
focusing on a final product, this intertwining between representation
and performance seems to be a suitable field for spatial action, either
from an architectural/urban perspective or any other discipline.

All that melted into air… 547

 22 23

The pervasiveness of generic, abstract space without qualities

characterized as junkspace (Koolhaas 2002), can be counterposed
to these intense experiences in spatium which mediate aesthetically
between bodies and qualitative spaces, that Per Nilsson (2013) would
call “littoral landscapes” that can momentarily escape their reduction
into abstract, quantitative space. This goes beyond the “politics of
the envelope”13 proposed by Zaera-Polo who, taking the building
skin as the only space available for an autonomous architecture, fails
to recognize the production relations hidden behind the membrane,
which remain untouched. (Díaz 2012, 14) Rather, this liminal-
littoral condition, relevant in architecture and urban space, has been
explored in different levels through the forms of exteriority enounced
by José Luis Pardo (1992), which almost thirty years later still remain
valid –although nature today has different connotations, and thus
its understanding has been amplified in terms of environment, both
actual and virtual–– and highly related to the urban phenomenon,
not really opposed to it.14 This notion of exteriority is different
from the exteriority of transparency that Han (2014, 45) detects in
contemporary societies, in which information is permanently exposed

13 See “Spatium Negatio,” section “Space and Anti-space.”

14 Otherwise, we would be endorsing the division posed by Lefebvre in The Urban
Revolution (2003 [1970], 7) between “pure nature” and the urban, which he relates through
a linear axis.

548 (DIS)CLOSING
as image and nothing remains concealed (producing a “massification
of positivity”), thus becoming the ultimate and most subtle veil of
ideology. Instead, the exteriority of the categories of city, body and
environment/nature allow an articulation of space without falling into
the “trap” of the primacy of human reason and interiority, which leads
to a conception of space as pure, abstract extension with no place
for difference. The focus on the articulation of inside and outside, Between
interior and exterior, closeness and openness, etc. unveils that these interior and
dichotomies are more fruitful when analyzed from the gap between exterior
terms –that is, what escapes the binary relation–, and not from their
radical opposition or conciliation. If Aldo van Eyck denounced that
architecture and urbanism had assumed the task to create an “interior
both outside and inside” (Smithson (ed.) 1962, 104; Stanek 2013,
121) –an assertion reinforced by the diagnoses of Petit (2012; 2013)–,
the relevance of exteriority in a world where interiority prevails
might make us turn the gaze towards the other, the different, and
the possibility of creating and integrating diverse spaces; something
essential for a dynamic and plural urban life.
Contemporary space has been described as oblique, rhizomatic,
flat and spiky at the same time, depending on the qualities to
be emphasized in each case. All these adjectives add interesting
characteristics that may help describing different aspects of a global
space that, as it has been argued, can be conceived as a planetary
interior, in which everything flows within well-established limits,
and where discordance is either absorbed or obliterated. However, Archipelagic
after having explored the possibility of counterspaces –through space
(architectural, urban, artistic, social) agency, and specially throughout
the cities studied as se-ductiones–, it can be argued that this “world
interior of capital” could be, if not countered, at least rethought
as an archipelagic space that, preserving the floating character
of contemporary society, still leaves room to the existence and
differentiation of islands which remain independent and interrelated
at the same time. Understood by Cacciari (1999) as a genuine
geopolitical model –with its clearest precedent in the Mediterranean

All that melted into air… 549

 24

25

space–, and used by Serres (1991) as a metaphor of contemporary

modes of knowledge,15 the archipelago is able to incorporate
multiplicity and otherness, allowing an understanding of space from
a relational perspective per via negativa, since it only makes sense
when islands are placed amidst and counterposed to other islands.
Besides, it follows the logic of the fragment –different from a logic
of “fragmentation” (Lefebvre 1991, 9; 355)– that, after all, has not
completely vanished after its postmodern introduction, as Viganò
(2012) and Aguirre (2014) –in urban and communication terms,

15 “I will then assume fluctuating shreds, I look for the passage between these
complicated cuts. I think, I see, that the state of things is rather a sowing of islands
in archipelagos over the noisy, badly known disorder of the sea, ridges of torn songs
scourged by the undercurrent and in perpetual transformation, wear, breaks and overlaps,
emergence of sporadic rationalities whose links are neither easy nor obvious. (…)
Archipelagos for space and time, and not this naive classification grid where, between
two types of knowledge [exact and human sciences], there is only an interface or a thin
partition” (Serres 1991, 23). [T.A.]

550 (DIS)CLOSING
respectively– remind us. In this regard, Aureli’s (2011) reading of
the archipelago through urban projects such as Koolhaas’ City of the
Captive Globe and Ungers’ Green Archipelago in Berlin articulates
an interesting model that runs counter to the totalizing space of
urbanization. The city-archipelago, with its absent center, is a space
of both separation and union, in which limits work as territories for
exchange, articulating inside and outside –even though Aureli relies
too much on architecture and its capacity of building such limits,
going back once again to a privileged role over space that does not
correspond to it anymore. Rather, all elements present in the city
contribute to its permanent becoming, redrawing its limits in an
archipelagic –and not merely insular–16 space that changes constantly,
that always manifests in a different way through transforming/
destructive forces.

Urban politics and public spaces from a relational perspective.

We live in an increasingly globalized and unequal world (both flat and Phantasmagorias
spiky) in which post-political strategies (Rancière 1999; Žižek 1999; of public sphere
Mouffe 2005; Swyngedouw 2009; Lahiji 2014) have a strong impact
in the way space is conceived and produced. To the usual strategies
of managerialism, entrepreneurialism, expertise and obliteration
of conflict that characterize the post-political as the overcoming of
adversarial, antagonist politics, new elements could be added in the
recent years: the advent of post-truth –or “alternative facts”– and
the influence of fake news in public opinion represent the new
phantasmagorias of the public sphere.
In this context, cities consolidate as planetary economic motors,
competing with each other to attract investors and projects.
Touristification in European city centers, the demolition of obsolete

16 The condition of insularity is described by Sloterdijk (2006, 238) arguing that

“islands are prototypes of the world in the world,” where the sea is the isolating element,
propitiating particular climates and atmospheres (climatic islands). The philosopher
describes three technical forms of contemporary insularity: separate or absolute islands
(ships, planes, space stations...); climatic islands (greenhouses that mimic the conditions
of natural islands) and anthropogenic islands, “in which the coexistence of human beings,
equipped with tools, with their peers and the rest, triggers a retroactive incubator effect
on the inhabitants themselves” (Sloterdijk 2006, 242). [T.A.]

Urban politics and public spaces from a relational perspective 551

 26 27

tissues and privatization of urban areas for economic profit like

in the case of Istanbul, continuous bids for exceptional events
(Olympic Games, culture or green capitals, etc.), the proliferation
of free economic zones and territories or the creation of new smart
cities in the East (such as Masdar in the Emirates, Songdo in South
Korea or the future Xiongan in China) respond to this scenario
of competitiveness. Strategies of industrial, services and cultural
accumulation, among others, contribute to the polarization of
global space, which leaves abandoned areas amidst the highest
developed poles and regions. Together with social consequences –
the emergence of “zones of abandoned ‘monetary subjects without
money’ (particularly in Africa, and in the new global slums)” and the
“new forms of spatial apartheid (border controls, gated communities,
exclusion zones, etc.)” (Noys 2010, 11)–, the environmental ones
should be considered as well, as Erik Swyngedouw has done in several
occasions with regard to the post-political context. Recently, the New
Urban Agenda (2017) has been adopted to address the challenges of
increasing global urbanization from the perspective of the Sustainable
Development Goals (also established in a UN summit in 2015.)
However, the relevance of the topics included in the Agenda (access to
housing, migration, security, gender, climate change, governance…)
and the ambitious commitments acquired by the participant countries
stand in contrast to the real situation of cities, in which problems
such as pollution, social inequality and poor housing and public space
conditions remain frustratingly unresolved due to different reasons.
What seems clear is that, while the exercise of global power lies

552 (DIS)CLOSING
 28 29

largely in the hands of private multinational companies, the effects of

globalization will continue spreading, and its derived problems will
remain and worsen over time.
Polarized, compressed space –though extensive and replicable,
at the same time– has become almost ignorable for the sake of
immediacy. Sloterdijk (2013, 251) points out how “the space of
distance, separation and placement called nature” has been replaced
“by the space of gathering, connection and compaction” of the
technical environment –a fact that reinforces the hypothesis of the
evolution of nature as a form of exteriority. Thus, the defense of The
“the uncompressible,” according to the philosopher, turns out to be uncompressible
a necessary reaction against a contracted world. But where to find
it? In principle, the local seems to be the most suitable dimension
to find possible resistances to the dominant forces of global space.
However, Sloterdijk warns of an understanding of the local as the
antonym of the global, since this apparent contradiction results in the
assimilation of both terms (“the universal as the local without walls”),
through concepts such as the “glocal” or “glocalization” coined by
Roland Robertson (1995). Rather, he proposes to re-emphasize the
condition of asymmetry that lies within the very concept of the local,
corresponding to its relation to dwelling:
Where there is habitation, things, symbionts and persons are joined to form
local solidary systems. Dwelling develops a practice of locational fidelity over an
extended period – this is especially palpable, incidentally, among nomads, often
misunderstood and cited as witnesses to cheerful infidelity, who usually seek out

Urban politics and public spaces from a relational perspective 553

 30

the same places in a rhythm of long-term cycles. Dwelling creates an immune

system of repeatable gestures; through successful habitualization, it combines
being-relieved with being-burdened with clear tasks. For this reason, indwelling
is the mother of asymmetry. It may be that social philosophers are right in
teaching that humans are ‘socialized’ by learning to take over the role of the
other; this does not mean taking over the dwelling of the other. The place held
by the other can neither be stolen nor be rented. (…) Even in new situations
(…) one establishes oneself in a particular place and extends oneself by means of
local resonances. (Sloterdijk 2013, 256–57)

However, this sort of interiority –Sloterdijk talks in terms

of immunity– does not mean isolation. The local is thus the
uncompressible realm in which one inhabits and extends oneself,
separated from, but together with others, establishing different types
of communities and groups. An important lesson to be learnt from
the case of Oskar Hansen and his work in Poland is that the urban
realm is a privileged space for co-dwelling and coexistence –as it has
been evidenced with the rise of municipalisms, grassroots movements,
urban activism and public space occupations–, understanding
asymmetry not as inequality, but as the nature of the inter-mixed

554 (DIS)CLOSING
relations among human and non-human elements, which sometimes
escape the scope of human science and politics (Tironi and Farías
2014, 169).17 It seems clear that the public and private dimensions
of the city, as a form of exteriority (and also as a-oîkos, outside the
home), are never permanent, but continuously redrawn. Public space Bodies in
is one of the multiple constructions to understand and experience (public) space
exteriority; not as bodies without space, but as bodies in space,
or rather bodies that inhabit space (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 161),
establishing a link to the Other without absorbing it. Although
Bauman (2008, 104) points out to the impossibility to solve global
problems from a local scale, it is possible to produce resilient contexts
from this perspective. This resilience recognizes and includes forces
that generate life and innovation, as well as being linked to resistance.
These relations become more evident and complex in a noopolitical Asymmetrical
context, in which layers of knowledge, affects and immaterial ecologies
production are added to traditional means of hard power and material
relations. In this regard, and after having analyzed contemporary
spatial conditions, the notion of ecology, for its intrinsic diversity,
appears to be particularly accurate to characterize an understanding of
(counter)spaces from the perspective of the local and the asymmetrical
–considering that “eco” (oîkos) refers to the domestic, the home in
which we dwell. Shane (2011, 36) defines an ecology as “a more or
less stable set of relationships that can be maintained over time and
give order to the city, people’s relationships and the flow of goods

17 Although it may not be easy to find world-renowned architectural studios

who actually transfer these political issues to building practice –with some exceptions
such as the Turner Prize winners Assemble, Diébédo Francis Kéré or Recetas Urbanas-,
academia and the publishing sector have proven to be prolific fields for the study and
development of spatial strategies and ideas which engage with a fairer, inclusive social
space: research and design teams such as Place Lab at the University of Chicago, QSPACE
at Columbia University, Design as Politics at TU Delft… collectives and projects such
as The Funambulist, dpr-barcelona, Col·lectiu Punt 6, Jane’s Walks… or urban design
participative processes such as PlanBude in Hamburg or San Fermín Library in Madrid, to
name but a few, represent the efforts undertaken by the architectural community to resist
the consequences of hegemonic capitalist space. Even though, the map is still incomplete
and too much tilted towards privileged positions (Western, white, male authors and
professionals… that even pervade the text of the present research…), but also within
academia there are groups trying to restore other perspectives, like Decolonising Our
Minds Society, led by the SOAS Students’ Union based in London.

Urban politics and public spaces from a relational perspective 555

 and ideas.” Shane (2005), as well as Graafland (2012, 55), evaluate
the meaning that Kevin Lynch (1981)18 gave to the term and its
relation to city design, that today can be extended, beyond its organic
connotations, to small scale, bottom-up strategies, taking other agents
(not only human) into account (Shane 2005, 70).
Publicness as The inclusion and exclusion of different agents within a particular
separation spatiality determines its publicness to a great extent –if, with Aureli
(2011, 46), we agree that publicness is a form of separation. Despite
homogenizing tendencies in contemporary societies –the generic city,
the thematization of city centers, the mimicry of certain (Western)
formal languages and patterns–, the production of space is an uneven
process at all scales, and this is particularly clear in the separating
condition of public space. As we have seen, the identification
of public and urban space in Western societies is rooted in the
communicational-political project of the Enlightenment. The triple
condition of the public –common interest, ostensibility, accessibility
(Rabotnikof 2008)– responds to the rights of equal individuals in a
democratic context, becoming one of its essential pillars. However,
this apparent equality turns out to be a mere projection of the ideal
democratic civilization, an ideological veil that hides or masks the
real contradictions and unevenness present in society. Besides, the
Western conception of a “public space” is often used to code and
decode other urban spaces that respond to different cultural and
social backgrounds, and thus it becomes a dominating tool for
the interpretation and design of the city. The examples proposed
throughout the text show that classic Western notions such as the
public/private dichotomy (usually understood in terms of ownership,
forgetting other dimensions) or the symbolic-representative charge
of certain urban configurations (for instance, the square or the
piazza) cannot be directly translated to other contexts with diverse
backgrounds. The very existence and constitution of social groups
and communities differ significantly from the Western public, with
its particular values and characteristics. Hence, the proposal to
understand urban space as a commons, rather than a public good,
presents a more universal framework to read this kind of space, since

18 Kevin Lynch proposed the Ecological City as the evolution of former models,
the City of Faith and the City as a Machine.

556 (DIS)CLOSING
 31 32

33 34

it does not lie exclusively in the modes of power administration, but

in social relations of any type. Ultimately, the administration of urban
resources and spaces is a task that concerns all members coexisting in a
group, regardless their mode of political organization.
However, our whole cultural baggage, with all its references,
prejudices and points of view, determines our capacity of
understanding any reality –including urban space– that escapes
our immediate context. The difficulty of setting this baggage aside
results in the application –either conscious or not– of our particular
categories to approach a different context. This does not necessarily
entail an imposition or a misinterpretation, but rather it can be
regarded as an opportunity to add new layers of complexity to a

Urban politics and public spaces from a relational perspective 557

 35

certain space, as well as to extract new keys to re-read and put into
question our own conceptions of (urban, public) space; that is,
contributing to the process of “desacralization of space” that Foucault
announced by questioning the supposedly “‘inviolable’ oppositions
that modern scientific institutions and practices have not yet ‘broken
down’, such as those between public and private, work and leisure,
family and social space” (Shane 2005, 233). In this regard, notions
like counterspace or counterpublic –even the idea of “commons”–,
though coined on the basis of Western socio-spatial categories,
are useful in order to unveil the structures and configurations of
dominant spatialities. Besides, their reverse character and their
definition per via negativa make them non-totalizing and more flexible
toward non-Western contexts. Needless to say that the contributions
of feminist, queer, post-colonial and post-human critiques and
theories have been crucial to the enrichment and versatility of both
notions.
Artistic-urban In the end, a renewed understanding of urban politics requires
counterspaces to unveil the limits of the political and to recover the role of
confrontation and conflict in its core. It is worth remarking once
again the relevance of artistic practice in this sense and the generation
of strategies that, although may not be completely absorbed
or appropriated by architecture and urbanism because of their
disciplinary constraints, point to directions and situations that may
serve as vectors for conjoint thought and change. This happened in
Valie EXPORT’s Tapp- und Tastkino (1968), resituating the limits
of the (female) body in the space of the city through a performance

558 (DIS)CLOSING
in which passers-by are invited to palpate the artists’ breasts hidden
inside a theater-like box. In this kind of performative spaces it is
possible to manifest difference and conflictual positions (in this case,
from an element considered as obscene in Western public space,
at least when not inserted in a market strategy),19 even when space
itself is not projected under a determined political sign, or from an
intentionality with properly political connotations. Valie’s work, who
also reflects on the notions of duplicity and countering on many
occasions, highlights the socio-spatial dimension of art as a privileged
field not only for the redefinition of public and private spheres, but
also for the alteration of traditional perceptions and conventions
established around public space. Even so, as Chantal Mouffe (2007)
warns, it is naive to think that a certain “artistic activism” could
change a whole system, but it can play an important role when it
comes to occupying normative public spaces and establishing new
limits and separations; perhaps, rather than talking of a “political
art,” it makes more sense to align with the processes of a critical art,
which reveals dissent conditions instead of contributing to create a
consensual public space. Giving voice and space to that which cannot
be noticed or heard in the city, even for a few minutes, may be more
fruitful for a fair, inclusive urban society than many expert reports
and policies. Works like Valie’s performance alter the urban rhythms –
through times and countertimes, recalling the monographic exhibition
devoted to her work in Vienna and Linz in 2010– and articulate
new relations in space through the reaction of the spectators, who
immediately become participants of her action, ultimately producing
an urban-artistic counterspace.

19 Tapp- und Tastkino has been reenacted and interpreted on many occasions
by other artists and/or activists with varying degrees of success and accurateness.
For instance, the Swiss artist Milo Moiré used a mirror box to cover and show her
breasts and genitals; and Eva and Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.org) recreated
the performance through virtual characters in Second Life (https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=YrM8SUEvhsg). Probably one of the most problematic reenactments is the
version that the art researcher Fiacha O’Donnell conducted in Reformance (Festival of
Recycled Performance, organized by the art center CA2M in Madrid), in which he repeated
the action with his male genitals, completely distorting the proposal of the original work.

Urban politics and public spaces from a relational perspective 559

 36

Coda: Decentering Europe (II).

Constitutive While searching for an end to these reflections, several images appear
outside in the media, scattered across the subcontinent, and reaffirming
the initial diagnosis of European space in permanent tension and
redefinition. If a negative approach requires the definition of a
“constitutive outside” –borrowing the term from Judith Butler
(1990; 1993)– that draws the limits of what is being studied, a final
imaginary cartography may be traced to resituate the (geocultural)
background and context in which the research is located and against
which it is somehow confronted.
The West of the West.
The walls of the South Reading Room in the John Adams Building
of the Library of Congress in Washington are decorated with a series
of murals by the American painter Ezra Winter dedicated to Thomas
Jefferson. On the south wall, the panel over the clock contains an
excerpt from a letter that the former president wrote to his successor
James Madison in Paris in September 1789, during the French
Revolution:
The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and
what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too
of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please.

560 (DIS)CLOSING
While certainly the sentence should be read in a wider context, its
location in the wall of a room devoted to sciences and business does
not seem casual. Indeed, both knowledge fields represent how the
world and its resources are rationally controlled, dominated and
managed by humans. It is comprehensible that this idea acquired
special strength in a newly founded nation that wanted to start its
own history (obviously omitting its pre-Columbian past and leaving
behind the European identity) and to build a prosperous future based
on a vast land plenty of natural resources. Especially after the two
World Wars, the “shift in the political centre of gravity of the West”
from Europe towards the USA became evident (Bonnett 2004, 131),
thus consolidating the triumphant spirit of the “land of opportunity”
and the free market model that has become progressively global.
If Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century and its arcades
the representation of the semi-open, fluid, urban space of European
modernity, New York replaced it as the heart of the West during the
following decades. This transition is articulated through the passage
from the exposés in The Arcades Project (Benjamin 2002) to Kishik’s
The Manhattan Project (2015), which is haunted by Benjamin’s spirit
and replaces the Parisian arcade with the New Yorker street, the
exemplar space of contemporary Western urban life that is inserted
in the universal grid, the “negative space, to be left untouched (…)
concerned with the unproduction of space” (Kishik 2015, 68), setting
the limits of continuous change and permanent expansion, which
finds its way in the vertical direction. Perhaps there is no other city
that represents more clearly the concept of “global city,” not only
because it heads innumerable lists and world rankings that measure
different social and economic parameters, but also because it embodies
one of the most powerful references of the global imaginary. It would
be difficult to find someone who does not have a particular idea of
New York through film, literature, music, art, fashion, architecture
or television, despite never having been there. The mediated images Sheer life
we receive from New York reflect an ideal and consensual space
that embodies the “sheer life” that Kishik (2015, 27) –following
Benjamin once again– opposes to “bare life”: the city and the camp,
the human and the inhuman, the vibrant and significant against the
minimal and meaningless. Thus, New York receives its form “from
the desert it opposes” (Calvino, quoted in Kishik 2015, 28), and it

Coda: Decentering Europe (II) 561

 37 38

is pure image and positivity, oscillating between the structures and

rhythms of late capitalism and a humanized, friendly street life,
which is nonetheless perfectly integrated within the first. The physical
dimension of New York, dominated by large corporate skyscrapers,
shopping malls and hypertrophic interiors, is the image of global
capitalism, and therefore gives rise to the emergence of resistances,
real and imagined, around the world. As Régis Debray (2013, 32)
points out, only the West is able to present its own particular interests
as those of humanity in general, and hence New York becomes the
geographical emblem of this capacity hosting the UN headquarters
in the iconic skyscraper conceived by Le Corbusier in the late forties:
“The institution accredited as the universal conscience, located in the
heart of the solo superpower; the metropolis of the highest law is that
of greatest military force.” Amidst this opposition, the city incarnates
the capacity of immunization of the West through the controlled
absorption of conflict and negative criticism; “herein lies the West’s
great talent, its dynamism and its armour-plating” (Debray 2013, 36).
The good the West believes it embodies is a trompe-l’oeil, ever less convincing.
But whether we like it or not, for the time being it remains in pole position;

562 (DIS)CLOSING
 hugging the rope, the French would say. And not about to find another one with
which to hang itself, as Lenin once cheerfully predicted. (Debray 2013, 44)

During the twentieth century, the image and narratives of America

have been compelling and dominant as the final sublimation of the
West, and so the drawings of Steinberg (already mentioned in the
introductory chapter) reflect a world view in which the rest of the
world would be something that happens in between the Eastern and
Western coasts of the United States, with New York at its epicenter.
At least until now. The election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth
president of the US has destabilized the hegemony and credibility of
the country which posited itself as the guarantor of universal justice
and rights. Now, it seems that the North-American Right, anticipating
the end of the empire (always from a historical, linear perspective),
chooses Trump to resist “so long as it lasts.”20 Thus, other global actors
gain relevance, such as China, which has adapted capitalist market to
its particular socialist regime, the everlasting Russian antagonist, and
many others actors that counterbalance the Western influence with a
fragmented, weakened Europe, in which nationalism, populism and
certain ghosts from the past seem to be returning –conveniently, Žižek
(2012, 15) recommends to “save Europe itself from its saviors.”
East and South. Trajectories.
Between 2008 and 2011, the Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili Transgressing
developed two consecutive projects based on map-making from the border
the perspective of individuals who had abandoned their homes
in order to undertake an illegal cross-border journey from their
countries of origin to a safer land, usually a European country. In The
Mapping Journey Project, each one of the participants was recorded
remembering his/her itinerary, which was traced over a map with a
permanent marker. These elementary exercises, in which the border
is transgressed with a single ink stroke, are just the depiction of an
arduous path that traverses diverse spaces and borders going against
them, at different speeds and by various means of transport: from
Jalalabad to Rome, from Beni-Mellal to Torino or Utrecht, from

20 “Pourvu que cela dure!” This sentence, quoted by Sloterdijk in Die schrecklichen
Kinder der Neuzeit (2014), was pronounced by Letizia Ramolino, mother of Napoleon
Bonaparte, after the victories of her son, as a bitter, laconic expression of temporality.

Coda: Decentering Europe (II) 563

 39 40 41

Ramallah to Jerusalem or from Al Fashir to Istanbul, passing through

Tripoli, Athens or Barcelona. Countless stories and anecdotes –
escapes, detentions, illness, deportation– are hidden behind the two-
dimensional surface of the map, in which any obstacle or achievement
within the complex transnational space between Europe, Africa and
the Middle East takes the form of a simple line.
Migration tendencies and causes are permanently changing
and presenting new challenges to societies. It is difficult –if not
impossible– to grasp a more or less stable snapshot of the situation, as
new decisions and conflicts appear almost every day, especially after
the “long summer of migration” in 2015. This situation is particularly
delicate in the Mediterranean region, since avalanches of people that
come from the Middle East, escaping from war and violence in their
countries (mostly from Syria and Iraq) are added to the regular flows
between Western and Sub-Saharan Africa and the South of Europe,
dramatically increasing the flow intensity in transnational routes.21

21 “For decades there have been boats and smugglers bringing people in search of
jobs over the Mediterranean via Spain and Italy. They came and continue to come mostly
from the Maghreb region and from Western Sub-Saharan Africa. They were mostly regular
migrants (…). These older, smaller, flows continue today, coming mostly via Morocco and
the Canary Islands. They tend to fit the standard definition of migrations.

A major difference in this current flow, compared to decades old flows is that the
center of gravity has shifted to the Eastern Mediterranean. Greece has become the
strategic link for these migrations: (…) already in early 2015 it surpassed Italy as the
main recipient, receiving 68,000 refugees, mostly Syrians but also, among others, Afghanis

564 (DIS)CLOSING
Therefore, the Mediterranean area witnesses the appearance of new
critical regions in terms of migration, especially the one comprised of
Turkey and Greece, including the Aegean islands like Lesvos or Kos.
Besides, displacements and movements within the Israeli-Palestinian
territories should not be forgotten, representing part of a local-scale
conflict that has reached global repercussions.
It is difficult to provide accurate figures, since data about
arrivals and status are often mixed or incomplete, and terms such
as “migrant,” “refugee” or “asylum seeker” are usually confused by
the media, the states and the general public (Access Info and The
Global Detention Project 2015; Couldrey, Herson, and (eds.) 2016,
30–31). Moreover, the number of people arriving European territories
fluctuates every day, but statistics are usually not weekly or even daily
updated. Most of the time, these data do not reflect reality because of
the dispersion of the phenomenon and the lack of means to carry on
a reliable count. For this reason, the problem of migration becomes
extremely complex and the task of thinking possible –even provisory–
solutions is unavoidably tied to indeterminacy.
Regional responses are no less variable and contingent. At the
moment, European countries – facing their own problems of
economic crisis, fear to terrorism, etc. – are still debating about
the number of people that each state has to receive, and the real
number of hosted refugees differs significantly from the agreed
quotas. National and international interventions to rescue migrants
(like Operation Mare Nostrum, led by Italy) have been reduced,
and new fences, similar to the ones in the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta
and Melilla have been built in some Eastern countries (Hungary,
Greece or Bulgaria) and between France and the United Kingdom,
which are also closing their borders to avoid the massive entrance
of migrants. Meanwhile, countries neighbouring the conflict zones
–such as Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, and Lebanon– have adopted a
common strategy coordinated by UNHCR, called the 2018 Regional

and Iraqis. Until 2015, the rise in Mediterranean Sea arrivals was felt primarily in Italy. In
2014, Italy received over three quarters of all maritime refugees and migrants (170,000).
In contrast, Greece received 43,500. In this new turn of events, the central and eastern
Mediterranean routes have become comparable in size. But the people in each come from
different countries. (…)” (Sassen 2016)

Coda: Decentering Europe (II) 565

 Refugee and Resilience Plan (3RP), although the number of refugee
people in these countries is overwhelming considering the resources
on which they count to integrate them. In July 2015, Turkey had
“already been host to nearly 2 million Syrians since civil war broke in
early 2011” (Demirtas 2015) and Jordan and Lebanon experienced
a population increase of 10 and 25% respectively at the same time.
“With no political solution in sight, host countries are implementing
new measures to alleviate the burden on their economies” and the
increasing strain on their infrastructures (Balsari et al. 2015, 942).
While European territory is being permanently rethought, opened
and closed through borders and fences that separate the geographical
Union from its outside, European society shows a very different
reality today. Facing the question “who has the right to Europe?,”
we find a wide diversity of subjects, from different origins, races and
religions that in other time –and even today, in some cases– would
have been considered as non-European (black, Roma, Muslim…)
Europe as It happens that European society oscillates between the desire for
negativity integration and assimilation and the suspicion of anything that has its
immediate origins beyond its current borders –forgetting, precisely,
that Europe is always defined negatively, by opposition. In the end,
Europe is a constellation in which references have to be provisionally
created through “reference points” in a space “where landmarks do not
exist.”22 The consequential project of Khalili, The Constellation Series
(2011), depicts this imprecise, trans-territorial questioning over the
space of Europe.
Other projects, like Remixing Europe (2014) –conducted within the
framework provided by Doc Next Network–, reflect on the position of
European society towards otherness: the testimony of the Ecuadorian
activist Aída Quinatoa in Spain about migration and the housing
crisis, the media campaign targeting illegal migrants conducted by
the UK government’s Home Office, the situation of internal migrants
affected by urban transformation in Istanbul or the case of Ukrainian
female domestic workers in Poland are analyzed from the perspective
of young media makers, in order to extract conclusions about the way

22 These words are an excerpt of a publication by the artist in Artforum. A

fragment can be read in Khalili’s website: http://www.bouchrakhalili.com/the-constellations/

566 (DIS)CLOSING
 42

migrants are depicted and imagined in European mainstream media.

As the historian and professor Fatima El-Tayeb concludes in the
publication derived from the project (interestingly illustrated with pen
sketches of the studied countries upside-down), the multiculturalist
discourse –which has been much questioned in recent years– still
preserves a racialized, exclusionary understanding of Europeanness
that considers the other as a being-in-transit, without roots in a host
country: “a linear narrative of Europeanness has been constructed
and is used as foundation for an identity that transcends national
divisions but remains firmly within internal limits” (V.V.A.A. 2014,
78). Conversely, she proposes a narrative based on remixing –recalling Counter-
the experimental artistic technique– to think an European society discourses
that is not necessarily white and Christian, but much more plural and
diverse, beyond binaries such as Orient/Occident, fundamentalism/
enlightenment, Islam/Europe, past/future… and negating the spatial
logic of the Union through trans-local and trans-ethnic counter-
discourses:
The particular forms of exclusion produced by this system require methods
of resistance that cannot always be direct, and instead have to use detours,
disidentifications, and diversions in order to produce positionalities from
which to break the silence around Europe’s deeply racialised sense of self. This
strategy of “queering” ethnicity, practised across the continent by multi-ethnic
hip-hop crews, black and Muslim feminists, queer performers, urban guerrilla
video artists and many others, is grounded in the shared, peculiar experience
of embodying an identity that is declared impossible, even though it is lived by
millions, the experience of constantly being defined as foreign to everything one
is most familiar with. (V.V.A.A. 2014, 79)

Coda: Decentering Europe (II) 567

 43
The moon over the archipelago.
In the introductory chapter, we have found a wide range of stories
and images to depict our “land of sunset.” Although the list could be
endless, maybe Abendland (2011), the documentary of the Austrian
filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, is the best way to represent the
European status quo. Five European cities are filmed at night revealing
the advance of a democracy which had here its universal center. Today,
surveillance cameras, fences, brothels, and borders divulge our success
or, better said, the permanent advent and decay of success. In the
meantime, the fear of the Other keeps affecting a society in which
xenophobic groups and parties proliferate, such as the extremist Pegida
in Germany, which appropriates the notions of Europe and the West
The inseparable –understood as exclusive entities– for its own racist purposes. In
Other this regard, the Schmittian logic of the enemy is being applied to its
most terrible extreme, forgetting what Cacciari clarified some years
ago: the hostis is always a hospes, that is, the stranger (the enemy, the
other) is always a guest at the same time. “It is precisely by asserting
my difference from the other that I am with him. The other is my
inseparable cum” (Cacciari 2009, 204).

568 (DIS)CLOSING
 It seems that, in his series of paintings, Caspar David Friedrich was
reflecting on how Europe probably stopped looking at the sun a long
time ago –or maybe we “crucified” it, as Henri Lefebvre understands
the overcoming of vitality and life by means of “morality and social
duty” (Shields 2005, 8). It is easier, as well as less damaging, to look
at the moon, when the limit between the visible and the unknown
has already been surpassed. Schopenhauer had already noticed that:
“(…) the moon remains purely an object for contemplation, not of
the will (…) the moon gradually becomes our friend, unlike the sun,
who, like an overzealous benefactress, we never want to look in the
face” (quoted in Rewald 2001, 12). To close the parallelism of Europe
regarding its own destiny and its own position in the world, maybe
gazing calmly at the moon is a better depiction of the European
society. A society which prefers to find refuge under the harmless
shafts of moonlight and accept its own contradictions and moving
forces, and thus recognizing its links with the rest of the world.
It is not a coincidence that Europeans, when reformulating their historical
project in the fifteenth century, begun to dream of desert islands. As good
Western, one demands an island simply to restart. Desert islands are the
archetype of utopia. (…)

One cannot be a good representative of Western civilization without sharing the

requirement of a second start. (Finkielkraut and Sloterdijk 2008, 153 ff)

We could conclude, through the words of Sloterdijk, that this is European

the European élan.23 Europe should not miss its chance to live up élan
to the responsibility of being the focus of attention and source of
actions in order to avoid a last sunrise and break definitely with the
linear and misleading path of Western history. Even if the European
project cannot find its solution in the archipelago –understood as a
multiplicity of islands, united and separated by the sea at the same
time–, it does offer another perspective on certain issues, such as those
concerning the centrality or disintegration of the Union. Islands, in
a way, must cease to be islands in order to connect with the rest of

23 The most recognizable use of the term –although much discussed and even
reinterpreted by some authors, such as Gilles Deleuze-is that of Bergson and his élan
vital, related to the complex generation and self-organization of life. In this context, élan is
understood as an intrinsic force of impulse, as a vigorous spirit.

Coda: Decentering Europe (II) 569

 the archipelago (or archipelagos, in plural), and so point to a new
beginning, a Nietzschean “backlash” –which in German contains
Gegenschlag the vivid prefix referring to a counteraction, gegen-schlag– to the very
essence of Europe.
According to Sloterdijk in Not Saved (2017), Hegel was right,
in the eyes of Heidegger, “to provide truth with a story;” but at the
same time, the author of Time and Being thought that he was wrong
when articulating it through a displacement from Ionia to Jena, and
representing it as a “solar process” with dawn and sunset. If we take
into account Heidegger’s comments about the history of truth and
the fatal destiny of Being (Gestell), emanating from the state of affairs
of our time, it is not like the path of the sun. Instead, it resembles
“the burning away of a conceptual fuse that winds from Athens
to Hiroshima” in 1946 and continues to our days through other
pathways, such as the Mexico-United States barrier, the global war in
Syria or the massive sale of private information of Facebook users to
data-mining agencies like Cambridge Analytica. Both geopolitical and
private boundaries explode to give way to a global, transparent space
in which, however, it is still possible (and necessary) to think of an
archipelago of different (though interrelated) worlds.

570 (DIS)CLOSING
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576 (DIS)CLOSING
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577
ANNEX I: Interview with Steven K. Peterson.
 01

M.L.: 1The first paragraph of the article is illustrated with Abraham

Bosse’s “Perspecteurs (1648),2 the perception of space as volume, integral
with geometry and form,” although it is a tool that progressively lost its
relevance and reliability and, as it is stated in the text, its decline coincides
with a shift in the conception of space (and the appearance of anti-space).
However, central European architecture theoreticians and art historians
(Semper, Schmarsow, Auer…) would start recognizing space as the main
object of architecture during the nineteenth century, much after it had
been theoretically liberated of its identification with form and geometry
(Copernican turn). Space began to be regarded as a dynamic object of
study, not as a “dead” a priori or undialectical element, as Moravanzski
(2003) says, in opposition to time. To what extent is it due to reasons
that lie outside architecture as a discipline –revolutionary discourse,
romanticism, etc.? What are the exchanges/ transfers that make possible a
transition to an architecture interested about space?

1 This interview has been published as: López Marcos, Marta. 2017. “Revisiting
anti-space. Interview with Steven K. Peterson.” Risco: Revista de Pesquisa em Arquitetura
e Urbanismo (print version), 15(1): 141–150. http://dx.doi.org/10.11606/issn.1984-4506.
v15i1p141-150
2 In the book Manière universelle de M. Desargues, pour pratiquer la perspective par
petit-pied, comme le géométral, ensemble les places et proportions des fortes et foibles touches,
teintes ou couleurs. (1648)

Interview with S.K. Peterson 579

 02

S.P.: My own view is that space as a perceptual architectural element

was invented by the Romans as a result of the plasticity of concrete
vaulting and the consequent bending of the walls below domes. A
positive volume of emptiness resulted and then this was explored
though Roman ingenuity. See, for example, the small bath at
Hadrian’s villa for a complex almost free style arrangement. The
Romans also invented the first pictorial space of depth as witnessed in
Pompeian wall paintings. All this before the geometrical ordering of
perspective in Brunelleschi’s reinvention of it.
Prior to this neither architecture nor painting, as in pottery
images or temples, was spatial. Greek temples do not create external
or internal space. They guide and filter the flow of the surrounding
natural visual forces as Scully pointed out in The Earth, the Temple,
and the Gods (1962) which incidentally is a book about the space of
nature and its tensions, perceptions and dynamics.
So, in a way the background “radiation” of continuous space
(which later became “anti-space” in my characterization of our
attitude) was always there in some form of our understanding and
perception. Space as figural entity is a man-made innovation. It is a
medium of expression.
M.L.: Hegel, as Goethe, looked back at gothic architecture and praised
its character of transcendence and freedom from functional purposes and
rational constraints and relations (1975, 684; 1981, 120). Form is still
relevant, but it is not tied to the concept of space (his description of the

580 ANNEX I
space of the gothic naves is dynamic, fluid, multiple… very similar to the
notion of anti-space). This is associated, he argues, to the complexity of
human interiority.
Romanticism, according to your article, was one of the factors that
motivated the rise of anti-space. Still, Hegel’s texts reflect an intermediate
situation of transition between space and anti-space. Somehow, this
moment is not reflected in the text. How could this transition be
articulated? May the relational space of Leibniz shed light on the issue,
as contrasted to the built-continuum of Hegel and the later appearance of
anti-space?
S.P.: It is not a zero sum game. There is no transition from space
to anti-space. They both exist conceptually and perceptively after
the Roman period. One, the endless is bound to our ideas of the
natural background, the other to a conscious deliberate act of willful
manipulation. Unfortunately, it is this very attitude toward a history
of progressive development that is problematic. This historicist
process is a bias of thought that insists that the presence of the most
contemporarily apparent phenomena is true and sequentially latest
thing has to eliminate the “older.”
M.L.: The relation between space and anti-space emerges as an analogy
of matter and anti-matter. Both realms are possible, although they cannot
coexist –you state in your article that “any coincident meeting of the
two worlds will cause their mutual obliteration” (1980, 91). Scientific
knowledge has been an essential source to our perception of space:
quantum mechanics, relativity, non-Euclidean geometry… enhance the
dominance of anti-space as a continuum, extensive, infinite realm that
pervades everything. This influence was very evident during the inter-war
period and the rise of the artistic avant-gardes. How has this influence
evolved until our days? Has anti-space “crystallized” to the point that it
has become our natural conception of space?
S.P.: Perhaps we should use “anti-space” only as a term for an attitude
rather than a description of the actual continuum space. It is an
expression of a necessary duality to understand. If there is space as
closed form this is clarified by thinking of space as also open ended
formless.

Interview with S.K. Peterson 581

 Of course, it is becoming “crystallized” as our culture’s “natural”
image. That is the very danger I am writing to warn about. It is a great
loss capacity and finally will be the end of place, if it is not recognized
and resisted.
The ideas from the fields of knowledge you mentioned are false
analogies for architectonic space, because man-made closed space is
basically static. It does not correlate with or derive in any way from
these theories, which are about motion, the interaction of dynamic
forces, and acceleration. All this knowledge comes from realms that
are outside of human tactile visual perception and can never be
experienced. What does non-Euclidean geometry feel or look like?
Just because something has been widely adopted or tolerated does not
make it true or beneficial.
M.L.: Drawing techniques have been essential for architectural activity
and, in this regard, the use of Beaux-Art’s poché used to be determinant
in architectural compositions, in which “full” and “empty” space were
separated. Obliterated during the first decades of the twentieth century, its
interest was recovered by scholars such as Colin Rowe or Alan Colquhoun
(Castellanos Gómez 2010, 171). Robert Venturi (1977) would use the
term –distinguishing between open and closed poché–, giving it a more
“spatial” meaning. How could this renewed interest be explained? Is
this return to former tools also an attempt to return to an autonomous
architecture?
S. P.: I like open and closed poché. I had never read that before. Of
course poché was not a Beaux- Arts invention. It occurs naturally as a
consequence of packing together a series of volumetric shapes. There
will always be something left over.
However, it was obliterated by modernist architecture precisely
because that architecture wanted to be “autonomous” with the
consequent destruction of the cities’ urban fabric. So, bringing the
idea of closed space forward again is the opposite of a return to
autonomous forms. It is about reintegration of solid and void co-
dependency and it arises out of a fundamental dissatisfaction with
modernist proscriptions against any closure or defined space. Post
Modernism is much derided today but it did constitute a revolution.

582 ANNEX I
 03 04

M.L.: According to the article, space is perceived and anti-space,

conceived. Coincidence or not, these are the terms that Lefebvre (1991)
links to spatial practice and representations of space respectively. Is there
a connection? Conceived/perceived by whom? Is anti-space related to a
controlled –invisible– plan and space to perceptions of everyday life?
S.P.: I think it is simply that we can know that the universe is 15
billion light years in extent but we can’t perceive or believe it through
experience. You know, it takes a real mental effort to look up at the
sun as it rises in the morning and convince yourself to actually feel
that the ground is not flat but is a rotating giant sphere moving at
2500 miles per hour while the sun is virtually still. It is not wrong.
For all practical purposes the sun does rise and set. Conceptual and
perceptual don’t really cancel each other out.
M.L.: The perception of space as an articulation of physical –
architectural– elements has also been explored through the perspective
of negativity. In fact, the Polish architect Oskar Hansen developed a
pedagogical tool called “active negative” which consisted on modelling the
perception of space through three-dimensional models. The idea was not to
represent exactly the shape of an inner space (regarding architecture as a
cast; that would be a “passive negative,” similar to Luigi Moretti’s models),
but to study and record the subjective perception of space. Also Bruno Zevi

Interview with S.K. Peterson 583

 reflected on representational tools of architectural space using positive/
negative diagrams.
These exercises reflect a deep interest in spatial questions. They are
integrated within the theory of Open Form, which is also related to ideas
of open space, dynamism, flows, subjective perception… that are linked to
the definition of anti-space. There is a certain ambiguity in all these terms
and socio-political contexts have definitely something to do with it, with
associations such as openness-democracy; closeness-totalitarianism, etc. Are
we still unable to describe and attribute qualities to space, or better said,
is it impossible to reach a common language?
S.P.: Moretti’s models of architectural voids always fascinated me. Of
course it is understood that the building fabric which define these
“solid spaces” have been stripped away. It is a method of analysis to
break out a part of something from its whole as a constituent part
to better understand it. The act of isolating the space from the rest is
itself a product of modern scientific method.
As to a kind of space corresponding to a political or social system,
you are right this is the common perception of spatial contexts;
“openness=democracy” and “closeness= totalitarianism” or in more
contemporary terms, you could also say “openness=freedom of
individual” and “closeness= restriction on choice.” Of course, the
opposite is true. This is the point of space and anti-space, which was
meant as an intellectual fable warning of this misconception.
Closed forms of space produce multiple places, which allow for
more choice, more freedom, more diversity, and the possibility of
change without destruction or revolution. The more diverse specific
figural spatial forms that are created and available, the more freedom
there is to be different without interfering with others. This applies to
both cities and architectural plans.
In an open-ended spatial infinite flux where everyone expresses
themselves there would be chaos and without boundaries there will
be conflict. Boundaries are by –valent they both separate and join. In
Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall (1914) two men are fixing up their
common country stone wall, one neighbor asks why do we still need

584 ANNEX I
this? The other neighbor replies with the proverb, because “fences
make good neighbors.”
As to definitions of space types, first, I think the notion of
“negativity” is not useful as a descriptive term and of course “anti-
space” is not real in the sense of being descriptive either –it is a
rhetorical devise that serves as a warning about its uncritical use. Let’s
try a different approach suspending philosophy, science, and politics
for a moment.
There are really just three conditions of space that we can
experience as phenomena in our lives.
The first is man-made; formed, closed, figural space (exterior
piazzas or interior rooms and all the streets corridors and links that
make sequences and patterns).
The second is: the natural unformed, surrounding, background, -
the open continuous space (includes parks, landscapes, oceans, and
the sky that we look at and also fly through, the whole earth seen from
the moon).
The third is: that which is formed only as an ancillary to the design
of figural space. It is the left over at the edges infilling between the
elements of grouped composition. Let’s call it derivative space (this is
habitable poché, the in between zone, left over area or what I used to
call “negative space”).
For example, let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine a group of
different shaped coasters; ovals, squares, rectangles, octagons, etc. all
pushed together to touch and interconnect. Together, they make a
new assembled complex figure composed of figural space.
Then place this assembly on a tight fitting rectangular tray and
observe the leftover surfaces of the tray. This left over space derives
from both the edges of the assembled figure of coasters and the
bounding edge of the tray. It is derivative space and cannot exist
without the interchange between the created boundaries of figural
space and a further outer boundary of enclosing form.

Interview with S.K. Peterson 585

 Then take the tray out into an open back yard. Place it on the lawn
in the surrounding world. The tray is then siting in the emptiness of
continuous space.
If we added ten trays and grouped them as a grid with space
between each tray then these would form streets and we could make a
little defined square so it was like a town of trays. All of it sitting in a
continuous space background but made up of layers of figural space,
blocks of trays and residual derivative spaces.
M.L.: The former works (Moretti’s and Hansen’s) share some coincidences
with Colin Rowe’s proposals around the figure-ground phenomenon.
However, the political background behind them is absolutely different…
For instance, Hansen was concerned about individual capacity and
empowerment in a socialist country, whereas a few years later, North
American groups –Texas Rangers, Five Architects, etc. – were interested
in setting the basis for an architecture mainly based in questions of form,
without ideological constraints. Do you see it reflected in the recent debate
on criticality vs. post-criticality?
S.P.: I don’t know about criticality… The majority of buildings going
up around the world now, which are publicized, consist of towers.
They are so various in shape, that there is no apparent idea of any
analytical critical thinking among them. They are each just striving
so hard to be spectacular and different, that no objective analytical
comparisons are possible.
M.L.: The negative space described in the article appears as a formal –
volumetric– question, and this, somehow, renders it contemporary with
current concerns of a certain sector of architectural theoreticians and
professionals. This apparently “residual,” hidden space that appears as a
“byproduct” (as Slavoj Zizek puts it,3 with the example of the spandrel)
of the built environment has been regarded as a really powerful realm for

3 Žižek quotes Michael Hammond’s Performing Architecture (2006): “‘For many, the
real magic of this building is the dramatic sense of place in the ‘leftover’ spaces between
the theatres and the enclosure. The curvaceous shapes of these public areas are the by-
products of two separate design processes- those of the acoustic- and logistic-driven
performing zones, and the climactic- and structure-driven envelope.’ Is this space -which
offers not only exciting views of both inside and outside, but also hidden comers in which
to take a stroll or to rest- not a potential utopian space?” (Žižek 2010, 276)

586 ANNEX I
architecture in projective terms. A space that remains hidden, unexpected,
in-between or even taken for granted… This architecture “of walls” has
also been explored by artists like Gregor Schneider (Haus UR).
What may be the motivations to this turn to negative space? Is there
a necessity of “useless” space, for unexpected actions? To what extent is this
a reflection on the contradictions between inner and outer space and/or a
critique of an “envelope” architecture?4
S.P.: As I am thinking about this again, I believe that, these are good
terms– “residual” “byproduct” space (just like the above “derivative
space”) All these terms imply a dependency on first making plans for
buildings as well as piazzas or streets in cities formed as figural space.
There can be no theory or actuality of “residual space.” It does not
exist by itself. It is a byproduct of something else.
M.L.: Because of their antithetical condition, coexistence of space and
anti-space is not possible, and only gradable by means of negative space,
according to the article. This idea somehow connects with Cacciari’s
negative thought (1982; 2009) and the impossibility of resolution of crisis.
Is it possible to work within this contradiction in spatial terms?
S.P.: Figural space (space) and continuous space (anti-space) can and
do coexist in reality. There is no inherent problem formally unless you
insist on an ethical or moral argument that continuous space is the
only true space (like the only true religion).
Then you are forced to argue that figural space is out of date,
no longer new. It is wrong and even culturally dangerous. Anti-
space must scrub away all traces of the other in a kind of formalistic
counter-reformation.
M.L.: Today we talk of an “informational” society; relations of production
have changed again with the dissolution of certain physical constraints.
However, with the outburst of contemporary design tools, formal concerns

4 Once again, Adolf Loos’ critique: “There are architects who do things differently.
Their imaginations create not spaces but sections of walls. That which is left over
around the walls then forms the rooms. And for these rooms some kind of cladding is
subsequently chosen (…) But the artist, the architect, first senses the effect that he intends
to realize and sees the rooms he wants to create in his mind’s eye.” (Loos 2008, 160)

Interview with S.K. Peterson 587

 seem to come back again, although the “individual” control of the
architect is somehow diluted, and distributed among many professionals.
How is anti-space (and space) related to the virtual, in a moment when
the network society has been assumed?
S.P.: Human beings still communicate through words and images
whether these are face-to-face or digital. However, even with the cell
phone, you are always somewhere when you use it. It is too early to
tell how this will sort itself out. We still need places to be, so we need
to make them as rich as possible.
M.L.: “The loss of space as an architectural medium is, in effect, the loss
of meaning” (Peterson 1980, 110). This assertion comes into conflict with
Stanek’s (2012):
would it not be better to abandon the discourse on ‘space’ and restrict architectural
discourse to ‘buildings’, ‘streets’, ‘squares’, ‘neighborhoods’, ‘parks’ and ‘landscapes’?”
or “some of the most innovative contributions to architecture discourse and practice
over the last 40 years were developed explicitly against the definition of ‘architecture
as space:’ from Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown arguing for ‘an architecture
as sign rather than space’; to Rem Koolhaas’ confession to having ‘always thought the
notion of ‘space’ [was] irrelevant’ despite his frequent use of the term.

How would it be possible today to talk of space as a constitutive, still

relevant element in architecture? Besides, do you think that architects,
today, should still go back to the notion of (formed) space, once they have
lost their privilege over it? How to define the role of the architect today,
amidst the crisis of the profession?
S.P.: Well certainly, it is obvious that Rem thinks of space as irrelevant.
It shows and it is a major flaw in his project for Lille where there is no
differentiated meaning among the parts but just a giant oval wrapper
that makes it a giant object repulsing all of its surroundings.
It is a basic premise of information theory that you need as many
different forms (words, numbers, and differentiated shapes) as possible
to represent and “carry” more and more complex ideas. Figural space
is a carrier of meaning because it multi formed and not universally
neutral (continuous space which is undifferentiated)

588 ANNEX I
 When Mr. Stanek uses “architecture as space” in your quote, I
think he is actually referring to “modern space” as a universal open-
ended condition that could be revealed. Modernism was obsessed with
space talk, but it wasn’t figural space that was meant. It was a striving
for universal sameness.
When Mies van der Rohe says about his own work “It is the will
if the epoch translated into space” there are no rooms made. The
architecture is about revealing the transparent universal continuum of
a new order of uninterrupted flow.
Bob Venturi wanted to reincorporate ornament, symbolic elements
and historical references into his work and eliminate the bland
neutrality of Modern space. He is creeping up on making figural space
in his buildings, even in his mother’s early fragmented plan there are
subdivide areas and little bits of poché. I don’t think you can argue that
he intended to substitute symbols for space. They are not mutually
exclusive after all.
M.L.: About urban space, it seems logical to associate this “negative space”
with the “voids” of the city, the space between buildings, public space…
In the article, the delimited space of streets and squares is contrasted with
the open “anti-space,” “unsuitable to the city,” that could be associated to
sprawl or certain modernist ensembles. “Anti-space promotes utopianism
because it rejects the language of its antithesis” (Peterson 1980, 110). If
anti-space is egalitarian, homogeneous, random, formless, neutral… space
is hierarchical, diverse, leading to movement, contradiction and conflict
between groups; but both sides may appear in a same city, one next to the
other. Could we find here the spatial encounter between the “volumetric,
plastic” and “political” negatives, beyond the mere rhetorical analogy?
S.P.: I still do not understand your continued interpretation of
“negative space” nor what you mean by “political” negatives. It
surely does not apply to urban spaces like streets and squares. These
are positive entities. There can be negative space in cities (in my
definition) but it is mostly residual areas within the blocks, backyards
irregular courts etc., but streets and squares are positive volumes of
figural spaces shaped by the block surfaces, the void figures to the
solid ground of the blocks. Urban space is not a leftover; it is the
primary medium of urbanism.

Interview with S.K. Peterson 589

 So, again, urban space is not “negative space” (even in my
apparently misunderstood definition, which I am quite happy to
abandon for clarity of discourse, as I said, let’s call it derivative space).
Urban space is the communal exterior figural space. There can be
no urban in cities without networks of linked figural space. Space is
the primary and essential medium of the urban condition.
The city is destroyed by the submission to and adherence to the
idea that open continuous space should dominate because it represents
the true spirit of the time or is like scientific mathematical space. It
becomes anti-space (that is anti-spatial, by rejecting the use of figural
space) it is a cultural attitude (as well as economic) that continuous
space is given exclusive legitimacy. It is a corruption of thought that
gives rise to this uncritical acceptance of anti-space.
M.L.: With regard to your participation in Les Halles competition in
Paris (1980b), it is possible to detect some of your ideas on negative
space in your team’s proposal: the reverse of the traditional wall town,
“the inhabited wall,” the articulation of the urban poché, the critique to
modernist space… To which extent did this project have an influence on
your Space and Anti-Space, especially on the development of the negative
space concept?
Besides, do you see an evolution of your ideas in your recent urban-
scale project proposal for Manhattan Ground Zero? (It seems that the
plan loses importance in favor of tridimensional space: the sunken garden,
the articulation of different heights…) For the local newspapers, your
proposal was the most “manhattanist” in the final shortlist. Why did they
affirm this? We see on your project more gradual, livable spaces, human-
scaled relationship with persons; so is this a kind of desire in the collective
unconscious against the NY heights?
S.P.: You realize of course, that both projects, the Les Halles in Paris
of 1978 and WTC Rebuild project of 2002 are designed around
the same formal idea. They both use the same “parti” of an “inside”
precinct hidden within the city. The inner precincts of public gardens
are also approximately the same size.
So, to be honest, the formalized idea of a theory of space or for
sure “negative space” had not even occurred to me when we did Les

590 ANNEX I
Halles. It was 5 years before I wrote the article. That doesn’t mean,
of course, that I didn’t learn from the designing of it, but it was not
conscious.
Then, Ground Zero- to participate in the design competition it was
required to rebuild the exact 10 million sq. ft. that had been lost and
it had to be office space.
There was no choice but to build towers. The question became
for us how to also incorporate traditional urban space on the ground
in order to counteract or at least work with the destructive dynamic
vertical aspect of towers. How can you have both city towers and
urban texture? Your quote “collective unconscious against NY heights”
is wishful thinking. I wish it had been the case but New York –the
public– wanted “their skyline back” –literally in letters to the editor
and public demonstrations– The Empire State building, the Chrysler
Building, the Rockefeller Center complex– What else is there? The
Statue of Liberty, but that is the image of NY.

Interview with S.K. Peterson 591

 05

A final comment by S.K. Peterson.

These two plans represent opposite conceptions of architectural space

and form.
On the left, Borromini’s San Carlino interior is designed of
multiple voids, each a different shaped volume, each a discrete
independent room. It is made of Space itself wrapped by various solid
surface boundaries. The whole complex is buried in a larger urban
block; the outer façades while referencing the interior also define
exterior space, two separate streets and the diagonal corner fountain.
On the right, Le Corbusier’s Mill Owner’s Association building
is designed of objects located within an empty unrestricted spatial
continuum. The whole architecture is a square object composed of
planes and screens floating on the open site. The interior is also a
collection of objects floating within the walls on an open floor. No
closed static volumetric voids are allowed in this conception. No
interruptions are made to the background void that everything sits in.
It even flows into and through the object interiors, curving them into
spirals and bending curves. It is, in this sense, anti-spatial, unrestricted
in order to achieve a free field of object dominance. It is the opposite
of San Carlo. It is not the design of Space. It is the design of things
within anti-space.

592 ANNEX I
 Although conceived in opposite spatial terms, these two plans are
almost identical in every other organizational way. Curiously, they are
virtually the same size. They have their main rooms in the same left
half of a bisected overall plan. They have the same dynamic shaping
of those main room walls, one oscillating, and the other spiraling.
They have the same gathering space on the right half of the plan, the
columned cloister in one, and the columned open “loft” hall in the
other.
It goes on. They both have the same “left over” areas around the
back, left sides of their main rooms, one a sequence of mini spaces to
get to the corner crypt/ tower stair, the other, visually apparent but
physically inaccessible, dead ended by a rectangle for chair storage.
Even the location of main stairs is the same, both the switch back
rectangular ones in the front right and both the curved spirals in the
back right are in the same locations.
Borromini’s San Carlino could very well be the conscious
antecedent for Corbusier’s Mill Owner’s building in Ahmedabad,
India. It would not be a critical observation to make and it is
unimportant except to note that they are very much the same “parti.”
Their common logical arrangement is so similar that it allows for an
accurate basement of different attitudes and methods. It shows that
Modern space is placeless by comparison, and is the necessary enabler
of an architectural desire for dominant objects.
It is too facile to say, that they are just different, one Baroque,
the other Modern. Juxtaposed, they expose the consequences of an
architecture made exclusively of either space or anti-space.

Interview with S.K. Peterson 593

 Bibliography.

Peterson, Steven K. 1980. “Space and Anti-Space.” Harvard Architecture Review, 88–113.

Peterson, S K. 1980b. “Steven Peterson. Littenberg, Cohn. New York City. Project No:
874.” Architectural Design september- (A.D. Profile 30: Les Halles: Consultation Internationale sur
l`Amenagement du quartier des Halles): 70–73.

Cacciari, Massimo. 1982. Krisis. Ensayo sobre la crisis del pensamiento negativo de Nietzsche a
Wittgenstein. Madrid: Siglo XXI.

———. 2009. The Unpolitical: On the Radical Critique of Political Reason. Edited by
Alessandro Carrera. New York: Fordham University Press.

Castellanos Gómez, Raúl. 2010. “Poché O la representación del residuo.” EGA. Revista de
expresión gráfica arquitectónica 15 (15): 170–81.

Hegel, Georg W. F. 1975 [1835]. Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Volume II. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.

———. 1981 [1835]. La arquitectura. Barcelona: Kairós.

Loos, Adolf. 2008 [1898]. “The Principle of Cladding.” In Raumplan versus Plan Libre: Adolf
Loos, Le Corbusier, edited by Max Risselada, 170–73. Rotterdam: 010 publishers.

Moravánszky, Ákos. 2003. Architekturtheorie im 20. Jahrhundert: eine kritische Anthologie.

Wien; New York: Springer.

Scully, Vincent. 1962. The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods; Greek Sacred Architecture. New
Haven: Yale University Press.

Stanek, Łukasz. 2012. “Architecture as Space, Again? Notes on the ‘Spatial Turn.’” SpecialeZ 4:
48–53.

Venturi, Robert. 1977. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: The Museum
of Modern Art.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2010. “The Architectural Parallax.” In Living in the End Times, 244–78. London;
New York: Verso Books.

Images.

01 Abraham Bosse. “Les Prespecteurs,” 1648. Source: Manière universelle de M. Desargues, pour
pratiquer la perspective par petit-pied, comme le géométral, ensemble les places et proportions des fortes et
foibles touches, teintes ou couleurs. Bibliothèque Nationalde de France, Gallica.

02 Cubiculum (bedroom) from the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, 5040 B.C.
Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

03 Luigi Moretti. Model of interior space of Santa Maria, Lisbon, 1952-1953. Source: Luigi
Moretti, “Strutture e Sequenze di Spazi,” Spazio (7) 1952-1953, 19.

04 Oskar Hansen, Active Negative, 1958 (exhibited at MACBA, 2014). Source: Photograph
by the author.

05 Left: Francesco Borromini, San Carlino alle Quattro Fontane, Rome, 1630. Right: Le
Corbusier, Mill owners’ Association Building, Ahmedabad,1953. Source: Courtesy of Steven K.
Peterson.

594 ANNEX I
595
ANNEX II: Research map.
The course of the research cannot be understood if not through a
spatialization of the thought that generates it. By means of a map
that, as we have seen, does not intend to fix absolute references or be
a precise reflection of reality, but rather the cartography of a process
in continuous evolution, some of the most relevant elements of the
research are highlighted and interrelated through a constellation of
connections and gaps. Some of these elements are shown explicitly;
others, consciously or not, have been omitted. But concealment
reveals at the same time new lines and paths that can be followed,
extended, questioned or forgotten.

Research map 597

Modernity could be explained through the process of subordination of space to time. The Cartesian division between res
extensa and res cogitans already established the differentiation of two independent realms: the first, abstract, exterior and
exceeding the realm of reason; the second, subjective and belonging to the inner dimension of mind, through which
knowledge and thought are possible. Western thought progressively associated these dimensions to space and time
respectively, the latter becoming the privileged realm of subjective interior, identified with human spirit and the thinking
subject. However, this historical negation of space was put into question after the so-called “spatial turn,” in which social
sciences recovered space as a central category during decades of social, political and economic transformations in a global
scale.
The understanding of space as a social product traversing multiple fields of knowledge led to a certain displacement of
architecture, which until then had been considered to be the practically exclusive discipline of space. After decades of
engagement with the progressive socio-political project of Western modernity and its subsequent crisis during the last
decades of the twentieth century, architecture retreated into questions of form and its autonomy as a discipline; a debate
that persists today in certain academic and professional circles.
Under this scenario, now amplified with the global hegemony of (Western) capitalism, a revision of the category of space
seems pertinent in order to determine its contemporary relation to the formal and socio-political dimensions of architec-
ture. Although now deprived from the strength of dialectical approaches –harshly criticized by the major currents of
contemporary philosophy–, the perspective of negativity and its multiple connotations may offer a renewed theoretical
framework from which to understand if space is still a relevant element for a contemporary architecture in crisis. In this
regard, the field of urban public space, as an ideological construction that materializes in the city, appears as a fruitful field
of study in which to trace transitions between dominant conceptions of space during the last centuries through negations
(understood as the overcomings of space from different areas: temporal, productive, visual…); reverses (understood as
counterspaces, the term coined by Henri Lefebvre to designate alternatives to abstract, capitalist space), and the multiple
spatial practices that configure and take place in this type of space, extending the purely architectural and urban action.
The project is structured around the relations between dominant conceptions of space and the forms of exteriority, the
main membranes through which Being spills out facing otherness beyond its subjective limits. Therefore, the articulation
of the work responds to a series of back and forth drives: five movements and counter-movements towards the realms of
the physical city, the body in space and the actual-virtual relations between human and non-human agents, interrupted
by three seductiones from non-Western contexts (Beijing, Warsaw and Istanbul) to alter the prescribed path and put into
question the pervasive character of the notion of public space.

PhD programme in Architecture.

University of Seville. Department of History, Theory and
Architectural Composition.

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Carlos Tapia Martín. University of Seville.

Prof. Dr. David Grahame Shane. Columbia University.

Tutor: Prof. Dr. Víctor Pérez Escolano. University of Seville.