Ash Amin , Nigel Trift The intelligibility of the everyday city Published in the journal Logos , number 3, 2002 Introduction Below we explore what can be considered knowledge about the city. We ask ourselves how one can theorize about the modern city without losing sight of its incredible diversity and vitality, and taking into account the signs of the practices prevailing in the city. We deliberately omit well-known works in our analysis, since we do not believe that the diversity of the dynamics of a city allows us to theorize about it in terms of driving structures. We turn to another urbanism, which sees the city as a place of mobility, as flow and daily practices, and which distinguishes cities by their recurring phenomenological patterns. Following Bruno Latour and Emilie Erman - we mean their wonderful photo album of modern Paris - such a view requires looking at the city from the perspective of an “oligopticon” 1, from above, below and between the city’s surfaces. We will outline the central metaphors of this new urbanism of everyday life. We see three such metaphors, clarifying the meaning of transitivity, daily rhythms and impacts of imprints for the organization and functioning of urban life. ‘These metaphors are placed, respectively, in the tradition of flanery, in rhythm and in the imprints of the city. Although widely recognized, we argue that this urbanismarchive exaggerates the importance of the city as a space for open flow, human interaction, and immediate reflexivity. Here we will try to approach knowledge about the city from a different standpoint - from the point of view of the institutional, transhuman and distant nature of urban life. New urbanism in context Prominent American urban theorists at the beginning of the twentieth century - Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and Louis Wirth - sought to generalize knowledge about the city in different historical eras as an integral system. They viewed the city as an organism. A certain organic integrity was guessed behind the confusion, noise, bustle and disorder of city life. The city seemed to be a spatially coherent entity that embodied a special way of life (rapid, secular, anonymous) with a distinct spatial and social division of labor within it, with a specific relationship to the village, the country as a whole and to the “outside world”, as well as evolutionary linearity (civilization and progress). These classics sought to theorize the city as a sociospatial system with its own internal dynamics. For example, Mumford saw the point in developing a typology of cities: Tyranopol s with its parasitism and gangster dictators, Megapolis with its greed, alienation and barbarism, and Necropolis with its looting and primitiveness following war, hunger and disease. The way Mumford interprets each type as an organic system is amazing. But, regardless of whether cities in different eras can be viewed from this point of view, modern cities are definitely not internally coherent systems. Theboundaries of the city have become too transparent and extensible (both geographically and socially) to theorize as a whole. The modem city has no end, it has no center, no clearly fixed parts. Rather, it is a fusion of often mismatched processes and social heterogeneity, a place of interconnection between near and far, a sequence of rhythms; it always spreads in new directions. It is this characteristic of the city that needs to be grasped and_— explained, _without succumbing to the temptation to reduce the diversity of urban phenomena to any essence or systemic integrity. Over the past fifteen years, urban theory has come a long way towards recognizing the diversity and plurality of urban life. Most prominent contemporary urbanists, including Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, Edward Soge, Richard Sennett, Mike Davis, and Michael Dia, acknowledge the inadequacy of a one-dimensional view of the city. They note the imposition of productive activity on new types of competent activity, on the co-presence of different classes, social groups, nationalities and cultures, on the striking contrast between wealth and luxury on the one hand and extreme poverty on the other, on the multiplicity of temporal and spatial parameters of various ways. the acqui the same time, it would be quite fair to ion of livelihood in the city. But at note that, capturing all the complexity of city life, There is, however, another tradition that stubbornly avoids such generalizations, trying to capture such an important banality of everyday life in the city. Everyday life has many dimensions. In Henri Lefebvre, for example, it consistsof “daily life,” defined as repeated material and human practices, of “everyday life” as an existential or state, and of “everyday life” which is something like an phenomenologic immanent life force that permeates everything and everything, “the only and unlimited time-space for“ life ”” (Seigworth 2000: 246), flowing in time and space. How does the city manifest itself in everyday life? - this question occupied, for example, surrealists, and later - situationists, who tried to understand this through unconventional city guides and maps, manifestos and reflections (Sadler 1998). This also marks the meditations of Walter Benjamin, wandering in the depths of various cities, and his study of mass consumerism in cities as a new way of life. We find the same motive in Michel de Certeau’s (1992) work on how the banality - “overwhelming commonality” (p. 5) - “becomes established in our habits” (p. 5) as “the grammar of everyday actions” (Gardiner 2000 : 174). At the heart of this urbanism of everyday life lies the feeling of the need to grasp phenomenality, which cannot be cognized in theory or in consciousness alone. In part, this feeling comes from the understanding of everyday life as an immanent force, as “an excess of energy that comes neither from the body, nor from the world separately, but from the banal movements of a pure process” (Seigworth 2000: 240). How can we grasp this ontology of “process in excess”? As Sigworth believes, “in order to look ‘beyond phenomena’, the philosophy of everyday life must focus its attention on ‘Life’, on its immediacy ... on life with all its viscous and relaxed human / non- human, inorganic / ethereal, phenomenal/ epiphenomenal and banal / saturated everyday ”(2000: 246). The urbanism of everyday life must penetrate the mixture of flesh and stone, human and non- human, motionless and fluid, emotions and actions. But which of this should be noted and which should not? And then, you need to know the city, inaccessible to consciousness, daring to invade the field of poetic revelations and sensual intimacy. But such a task is also not without problems. How can we be sure that these areas will reveal to us the virtuality of the city? How can we avoid completely useless efforts? that these areas will reveal to us the virtuality of the city? How can we avoid completely useless efforts? that these areas will reveal to us the virtuality of the city? How can we avoid completely useless efforts? One answer to these questions is the use of metaphors to capture current processes. Later in this chapter, we look at three powerful metaphors that are traditional in everyday urbanism. The first is a metaphor for transitivity , which marks the spatial and temporal openness of a city. The second metaphor depicts the city as a place where diverse rhythms converge , gradually engraved in daily contacts and numerous experiences of time and space. The third metaphor refers to the city as footprints: traces of the past, daily traces of movement along and across the city, as well as connections beyond its borders. Flanner and transitivity Walter Benjamin's speculative philosophy “in its most powerful aspects does not seek truth in completeness, but in neglected details and subtle nuances” (Caygill 1998: 152). And this is most of all manifested in the studies of the cities inwhich he wandered - Paris, Naples, Marseille, Berlin and Moscow. Benjamin used the concept of transitivity to describe the city as a place for improvisation and confusion, which is possible due to the fact that the city is permeated through the past and is also subject to various influences of space. This notion went from hand to hand in 1924 from a flaneur’s account of Naples; here it is quite obvious that Benjamin was struck by the theatricality of the city, its passion for improvisation, its irony. Naples flaunts its transitivity when a priest, publicly ranting about unseemly deeds, can stop to bless the wedding procession; when it turns out that Baedeker's guide can do nothing to help in the search for architectural sites or traces of the city "bottom"; when scenes are played out in a crowded square, where a noble gentleman bargains with an overweight lady for the reward he wants to receive for raising the fan she has dropped. “Porosity is an ineradicable law of urban life that manifests itself in everything” - in how “buildings and actions interpenetrate in courtyards, arcades and staircases, ... to become the theater of new, unforeseen constellations. There is no stamp of certainty *(Benjamin 1997: 171, 169). Transitivity / porosity is what allows the city to constantly shape and change its appearance. By highlighting this feature in a number of street improvisations in Naples, Benjamin makes it quite clear that this also applies to other cities. Using the example of Moscow in the 1920s, he examines the transitivity of the new socialism, based on. the co-presence of the state bureaucratic machine and the tacit improvisations ofindividuals engaged in informal trade and exchange. The transitivity of the city manifests itself in the confrontation between the new — monumental architecture and the pile-up of tents and boxes placed on the sidewalks by thousands of street vendors selling whatever they want. Transitivity in both cities has different implications, but in both cases the concept captures the city as a day-to-day process. By what means can transitivity be captured? To begin with, Michael Sheringham argues that the “hidden principle of variability” that drives urban life also requires ‘a corresponding movement on the part of the observer.” Traditional means - maps, descriptions, layouts, highlighting the essential - are of little use. It is necessary to get used to the reflective passer-by, the flaneur, who, plunging into a walk around the city through sensations, emotions and perceptions, enters into "two-way contact between the city and consciousness.” As a result of this contact, we receive “knowledge inseparable from this process of interaction” (1996: 104, 111). So, Sheringham notes that for André Breton, knowledge of the city depended on an attitude towards lyrical anticipation and openness, expressed in a mixture of the poetic and the factual. For Benjamin, on the other hand, his autobiograp al wanderer strives for purposeful activity gives. way to phantasmagorias. On his journey through idleness,” in which Marcel, Benjamin helped himself with moderate consumption of hashish to slow the flow of the observed and see it in a different way. In contrast, the Naples tale focuses on the Berliner’s enthusiastic experience of an incredibly theatricalMediterranean city, while in Paris he relies on balanced reasoning about arcade architecture. In the same way, Jacques Reda in the 1890s saw Paris through the prism of allegory, outlining the path along the associative connections that arose during the journey. to slow down the flow of the observed and see it differently. In contrast, the Naples tale focuses on the Berliner’s enthusiastic experience of an incredibly theatrical Mediterranean city, while in Paris he relies on balanced reasoning about arcade architecture. In the same way, Jacques Reda in the 1890s saw Paris through the prism of allegory, outlining the path along the associative connections that arose during the journey. to slow down the flow of the observed and see it differently. In contrast, the Naples tale focuses on the Berliner's enthusiastic experience of an incredibly theatrical Mediterranean city, while in Paris he relies on balanced reasoning about arcade architecture. In the same way, Jacques Reda in the 1890s saw Paris through the prism of allegory, outlining the path along the associative connections that arose during the journey. Modern urbanism has revived the tradition of flannere viewing the city from close, street, distance. Here again we are bumped into the idea that the city as a “complex experience being experienced” (Chambers 1994) requires alternative descriptions and maps based on wanderings. A remarkable example of this work is the study by Rachel Lichtenstein and Ian Sinclair (1999), in which they literally traced the life and movements of the Jewish scholar and recluse David Rodinsky in order to provide a guide to the traces and places of this East Londoner in the early 1960s. This is the“psychogeography” of alien spaces, individual monuments, small towns and Jewish settlements, where London appears as a biographically marked city. We can take a look at an excerpt of this text - Sinclair's introduction to the guide - in Box 1.1. Box 1.1 Rodinsky as a psychogeographer Rodinsky was an artist in the tradition of Tom Phillips or Surrealists, he rediscovered objects. He made maps of London in accordance with his idea of what it should be, as if he were describing this city for the first time. These cards were hints rather than definite statements. If a page [of a London guide] caught his attention, he wrote all its margins in red. And other areas - Anfield, Stanmore, Willesden, Chingford, Hendon, Pewley, Crystal Peles, Sabiton, Tooting Beck, Wimbledon, Richmond, Eltham, Peckham Rye - were of no interest to him, he skipped them. He was a taxonomist, distributing a huge amount of information into categories that attracted his attention - prisons, _almshouses, cemeteries, orphanages, hospitals. These notes and became a_ projected autobiography, Dickens's tale of desolation, poverty and prison life. This is how Rodinsky sees the world: a dense forest of ignorance with its dark plac Accumulations of suffering, longing for the warmth of his red hand. His classification system was built around selected buildings, which were colonies of the doomed, institutions with strictly defined rules of behavior, gulags of the disappeared What was his system? If there was no red carpet leading to the highlighted buildings, did this mean that heconsidered them important objects, but did not visit them? What did the lines that traced the intricate routes mean - travel by bus or on foot? The Arsenal soccer field is circled but no longer marked. And along the rue Meir there is a red carpet that ends at the Clapham Ponds. Was Thistluate Street commemorated in honor of Harold Pinter (who lived there as a young man)? Does this mean some kind of connection, is it a relationship, between Pinter and Rodinsky? .. In the suburbs, Rodinsky focuses on “Jewish hospitals” and “Jewish cemeteries”, as if prescribing his future, anticipating the roads by which he will be carried away from Prinslet Street. ... These were the places that could be used to compose a story about a past life: Hineage Street (the synagogue where Rodinsky was last seen visiting Kiddush), the tower on Fieldgate Street, Cheshire Street, Hawksmoor Church, Brady Street cemetery. Islets where time was held in memory vessels. "I finally realized that the only way to comprehend the maps made by Rodinsky is to follow his red lines...”“Theorist” is a gifted pondering passer-by, deliberately lost in the everyday urban confusion and rhythms. This passer-by is endowed with both poetic sensibility and poetic science, which is almost impossible to separate from the methodology of city research. Benjamin, for example, did much more than simply absorb the transitivity of Naples, Moscow and Marseille. He was not a naive and impressionable dilettante. On the contrary, he was armed with a transcendental speculative philosophy that allowed him to select, order, and interpret his sensory experience of the city. These were reflexive wanderings, implying a special theory of urban life, requiring the disclosure of the smallest processes taking place in the city. Some researchers believe that it is the flaneur’s sensitivity that connects the space, language and subjectivity that are necessary to “read” the city. Such intellectual wanderings should not romanticize the city, but portray the diversity of street life, unexpected rebuttals of stereotypes. An illustrative description of New York by Jerome Cherin (1987): If you want to discover New York, go to the dunes: visit these caves in the South Bronx, where breakdancing begins as a ritual war between warring gangs of teenagers. Or take a stroll down the “unenhanced” Ninth Avenue, where you still feel an electrified neighborhood with some kind of anarchy that should be felt on the street. Young people and old peoplemix, quarrel, flirt ... Or go to Brighton Beach, where Russian Jews settled there, dressed in American clothes of the 50s, drink their borscht. See mafi country in Bath Beach, where young thugs stand outside restaurants in their silkiest shirts. Take a walk on the East Side, where Chinese, Latinos and elderly Jews are dumped into the streets and parks as if from the same little room (Quoted in Marback, Bruch and Eicher 1998: 80). There can be no doubt that this kind of flanery can reveal many of the city’s hidden secrets, But the secrets being revealed are special secrets, and from special parts of the city. They do not give “authenticity” to the city, not least because these descriptions are made from certain subjective positions. For example, flaneering has never been gender indifferent. The descriptions provided were mostly masculine, often burdened with sensual connotations (crowds, streets, salons, buildings were perceived as sexually arousing, or analogies were often drawn to the female body and femininity). And women were often stereotyped with selective gaze, as Angela Macrobie puts it: By displacing women through various kinds of violence into the household, into the world of shopping, into the inner world of the sexual body, femininity and motherhood, modernity was able to solemnly appear in the public sphere - in the space of