Celebrations in Cities— Space and time

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Space and time have mutually enfolding consequences for cultural practices. Together, they determine a dynamic that is usually lost when social scientists attempt a description that ignores either one of them. But this dynamic is also lost when social sciences mistake the notions of space they bring to/with their studies for those spaces where people live. Lefevbre calls the former “representations of space:”

Representations of space: conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers, as of a certain type of artist with a scientific bent—all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived.... This is the dominant space in any society (or mode of production).... (Lefevbre 1991, 38-39)”

The dominant space of Kyoto: this city’s iconic self-representation of space, is the Heian Shrine, built in the form of the original imperial palace. In this video too, we see the most dominant identity space of Kyoto: the geisha. So entirely dominated by her representational role—each geisha resembles all geisha, and as synecdoches, she represents all Japan—that she is allowed no personal expression whatsoever.
Video by author.

Representations of space fill the space of theories about space, and so these theories end up talking about the spaces that are produced at a level of theory. However, out there in the street, expressive cultural practices, such as festivals, architecture, and public art, color their spaces with other representations, constructing what LeFevbre called “representational spaces”—sites where culture is practiced:

“Representational spaces: space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’, but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. This is the dominated—and hence passively experienced—space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects. Thus representational spaces may be said, though again with certain exceptions, to tend towards more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs (ibid, 39).”

One of Kyoto’s few emerging representational spaces is the Higashi-kujo Madang. Here a troupe of dancers from nearby Utoro join in the festival.

But are we then caught by some irreducible discursive/practical divide? Are spaces of representation never built into places where they then inform representational space? Of course they are, and where Lefevbre is leading us in this discussion is to question just how and where these two spaces intersect, and from which side we should be grounding our ideas of the city. To begin with, we need to stop privileging spaces of representation over representational spaces: planning should be informed from the manners and symbolics of actually used space.

“...as I intend to show in the analysis of Brasilia, a counter-discourse would have to demonstrate that the delirium of power in master planning itself creates conditions over which the planners stumble and consequently conditions for its own subversion. Indeed, my objective is to produce such a counter-discourse, one precisely grounded in the tension that an anthropologically critical study of modernism creates between the normative ethnographic task of recording the natives' intentions in their own terms and the aim of evaluating those intentions in terms of their results.
(Holston 1989, 8-9).”

Lefevbre, by overstressing this distinction¹, perhaps hopes to show that planning from a space of representation results in spaces that cannot be lived as representational spaces. He puts this limit on the use of planned space, in favor of spaces that have arrived at their use through the work of users over a long duration of use. The planner should take their lesson not from Garnier’s (1989) “Cité Industrielle” paper drawings of perfectly rational cities, but from the streets of Quebec or Old Delhi and the piazzas of Florence or Venice.

Indeed the hubris of planning a city despite its history of use, what Holston called the “delirium of power,” develops spacial notions that are most liable to the exercise of planning. This results in the design of places that are made so as to conform to what LeFevbre calls the “illusion of transparency” (Lefevbre 1991, 27-28). These offer the spatial forms of what Foucault noted was the “confessional” practice of modernity—from paper to concrete and back into discourse—the spaces tell their planners what the planners want to hear: that life itself can be planned, shaped by the space that contains it.

“The production of spatiality is represented—literally re-presented—as cognition and mental design, as an illusive ideational subjectivity substituted for an equally illusive sensory objectivism. Spatiality is reduced to a mental construct alone, a way of thinking, an ideational process in which the ‘image’ of reality takes epistemological precedence over the tangible substance and appearance of the real world. Social space folds into mental space, into diaphanous concepts of spatiality which all too often take us away from materialized social realities
(Soja 1989, 125).”

Indeed, the idea of (transparently) connecting the original drawing to the discourse on planning and architecture—often without the inconvenience of having to construct anything (as with Garnier’s plans, which were never built)—was a comforting confession for the modernist planner. Renderings and models of future cities, such as Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin for the rebuilding of Paris (1925) were judged, critiqued, and copied without, or before, they were realized. The act of rendering buildings and cityscapes became the primary skill that separated the architectural super-stars from those who were simply good at making plans that worked. These drawings were reproduced in magazines and became the media through which modern planning ideas spread across the globe. Few people cared to ask about the built results.

Modern planning used its own rational spatial logic to inform the cities it would create:

“In this vast urban place, if one followed the dictates of Le Corbusier, space itself became a focus of social concern and an object of investigation and control. Everywhere the architect and city planner cut the fabric into discrete units and recomposed them into a structured and utopian whole: disorder was replaced by functional order, diversity by serial repetition, and surprise by uniform expectancy. These cuts and insertions, by imposing their ideal model of scenic unity in which solids dematerialized into transparent and interpenetrating forms and structures filled in or hollowed out space, decomposed the city into a random array of homogeneous sites, emptied of historic reference and ignorant of building types and city places specific to each location. Because this was a city where there was no need for tradition, only for documentation, history books were banished from architectural lessons, the picturesque urban schemes of the nineteenth century were ridiculed, and the cruel beauty of orthogonal grid-iron street patterns, elevating glass skyscrapers, and shocking modern mobility was celebrated. And so proliferated in the disciplined City as Panorama the mirroring curtain-wall skyscrapers in which today we see reflected the City of Spectacle. (Boyer 1994, 46).”

Tony Garnier’s “Une Cité Industrielle” urban drawings in the 1920s were early examples of the notion of a city (or a building) as a “machine for living.” His influential ideas included single-use zoning to separate industrial, commercial civic and residential districts, and a rationalization of movement based upon the automobile and mass transport. Many of these notions are apparent in the plans and the built environment of cities such as Kyoto. Kyoto, on the other hand, is aggressively moving toward its own vision of the industrial city, and its own history of mixed use—streets filled with shops and small-scale factories are being replaced by residential quarters, industrial zones, and shopping malls.

Such rejections of modern urban planning as an answer to spatial concerns, are centrally a rejection of the insertion of a uniform, ahistorical rationality, and of the creation of a single rational space as the goal of urban planning.

In Lefevbre’s words:

“We have seen that the visual space of transparency and readability has a content—a content that it is designed to conceal: namely, the phallic realm of (supposed) virility. It is at the same time a repressive space: nothing in it escapes the surveillance of power. Everything opaque, all kinds of partitions, even walls simplified to the point of mere drapery, are destined to disappear. This disposition of things is diametrically opposed to the real requirements of the present situation. The sphere of private life ought to be enclosed, and have a finite, or finished, aspect. Public space, by contrast, ought to be an opening outwards. What we see happening is just the opposite (1991, 147).”

The rationality that might be of some use in the public sphere, has been (mis-)applied uniformly to include private spaces. The underlying critique is that the over application of planning creates a repressive space, a space that can belong only to the planners and their benefactors.

“...if modernism and anthropology share certain critical intentions to shake the values of Western civilization, what makes their linking problematic is that both types of subversion are largely failures—or at least unfulfilled promises. That modernist architecture and city planning not only failed in their subversive aims, but often strengthened what they challenged will be demonstrated in the case study of Brasilia (Holston 1989, 7).”

This is very much the same critique that post-modern planners and architects have made about modernist design. But much post-modern architecture, in its mannerist “playfulness,” seems to have learned not from cityscapes but from movie set designs. And the result is an enforced playfulness that is not any more accessible to be appropriated by their users than is Garnier’s industrial city. To enter someone else’s completely designed fantasy world is not much different from entering someone else’s factory.

“The last condition [the ability to know friends from enemies] is not, however, met in modern urban environment. The latter is marked by the divorce between physical density and dense sociability. Aliens appear inside the confines of the lifeworld and refuse to go away (though one can hope that they will in the end). This new situation does not stem necessarily from the increased restlessness and mobility. As a matter of fact, it is the mobility itself which arises from the state-enforced ‘uniformization’ of vast spaces—much too large for being assimilated and domesticated by old methods of mapping and ordering deployed by individuals
(Bauman 1990, 152).”

Neither the modernist space nor its post-modern alternative is planned with an aim toward facilitating a distributed ownership of the design of the space. Both are pre-designed to a level that can preclude later creative appropriations. And both are commissioned at a scale that is too large to be adapted to local conditions of sociability, as Bauman notes. The scale of the modern city, not just its size, but the size of its internal zones, have become too large to acquire familiarity though use. They are, instead, designed to be familiar by their similarities—however this can have the reverse effect, as uniform similarity is never as familiar as something singularly distinct.

The City of Kyoto’s “planning map for construction of international sight-seeing city, Kyoto” is a good example of modernist urban planning, where zoning districts create “use ghettos” that separate homes from workspaces from stores. In this case, the southern area of Kyoto has been targeted for additional industrialization, and for high-density (high-rise) commercial and residential use. The larger map of city shows the northern portion being reserved for low-density, exclusive residential use, and for aesthetic and scenic preservation. The object is to hold the line on the degradation of cultural and scenic parts of north Kyoto, as a destination for the tourist trades. But this overall city plan carries a policy of concentrating the “negative” aspects of the urban mix on the south side to protect the north side. There are no plans for aesthetic use of the many open spaces (the empty lots) in Higashi-kujo.

Apart from the features of the built-space, what precludes new appropriations of space are those notions that hold the imagination of a space, as these are supplied by expert systems/institutions in and out of government. Impinging on the spaces that are lived are the spaces that are presented through the media: through television and film—spaces that occupy the life-style imagination through their link to the market for fashion-ability.

Certainly in Kyoto there is no lack of images of spaces presented through books, magazines, and other media, information provided about how space might and perhaps should be organized.

“Mediated experience, since the first experience of writing, has long influenced both self-identity and the basic organization of social relations. With the development of mass communication, particularly electronic communication, the interpenetration of self-development and social systems, up to and including global systems, becomes ever more pronounced. The 'world' in which we now live is in some profound respects thus quite distinct from that inhabited by human beings in previous periods of history. It is in many ways a single world, having a unitary framework of experience (for instance, in respect of basic axes of time and space), yet at the same time one which creates new forms of fragmentation and dispersal. A universe of social activity in which electronic media have a central and constitutive role, nevertheless, is not one of 'hyper-reality', in Baudrillard's sense. Such an idea confuses the pervasive impact of mediated experience with the internal referentiality of the social systems of modernity—the fact that these systems become largely autonomous and determined by their own constitutive influences
(Giddens 1991, 4-5).”

These mediated spaces of representation: television programs that showcase the homes of the “rich and famous,” and magazines that portray idealized life-style spaces, create both a desire to apply these spaces of representation to one’s lived (representational) space, and a felt lack (for most) because the ideal is maintained as a distance between actually lived spaces and those that only a few can afford. One of the main outcomes of visual media is a disenchantment with spaces that are actually lived, but that cannot compare with the spaces available in magazines and on television.

The other problematic that mediated spaces add to late modernity is their lack of locatedness, and their ability to travel great distances. They are everywhere and nowhere, and they bring this every/nowhere with them into places, into homes and streets alike. And our ability to theoretically apprehend the locus of what we studying is consequently confounded. As Jody Berland notes; “In theoretical terms, we need to situate cultural forms within the production and reproduction of capitalist spatiality. How does one produce the other: the song, the car, the radio station, the road, the radio, the town, the listener? What does it mean to conceive of producing a listening audience this way, to imagine it as mainly not temporal, not really subjective, not simply the expression of something called taste? Why is the literature on pop music, like that on other genres, other media, so often empty of cars, not to mention elevators, offices, shopping malls, hotels, sidewalks, airplanes, buses, urban landscapes, small towns, northern settlements, or satellite broadcasts? (Berland 1992, 39).”

“....something, something free...” The space of representation of consumer desire is coded as the space of freedom: here visually coded as well as mostly a space outside of Japan, in this self-promotion by the Association of Japanese Commercial Broadcasters.

Today the larger part of studies of the public sphere are now centered on the media. And these studies will, hopefully allow us to achieve a purchase on the spatial consequences of electronic media.

¹The disjunction between representational spaces and spaces of representation is nowhere more evident than in “planned” cities such as Chandigar or Brasilia. Even in these cases, however, local residents find ways to remake the built spaces of representation into lived representational spaces, although they do so against the will and the plans of the architect and the institutions that favored this plan.