Diasporic Agencies: Mapping the City Otherwise

Nishat Awan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317151265
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Diasporic Agencies addresses the neglected subject of how architecture and urban design can respond to the consequences of increasing migration. Arguing that diasporic inhabitations can only be understood as the co-production of space, subjectivity and politics, the book explores questions of difference, belonging and movement in the city. Through focusing on a series of examples, it reveals how diasporas produce new types of spaces and develop new subjectivities in the contemporary European metropolis. It explores the way in which geo-politics affects individual lives and how national and regional borders inscribe themselves onto diasporic bodies. The book claims that the multiple belongings of diasporic citizens, half-here and half-there, provoke a crisis in the standard modes of architectural representation that tend to homogenise and flatten experience. Instead Diasporic Agencies makes a case for a non-representational approach, where the displacement of the diasporic subject and their consequent reterritorialisation of space are developed as modes of thinking and doing. In parallel, mapping otherwise is proposed as a tool for spatial practitioners to work with these multi-layered spaces. The book is aimed at spatial practitioners and theorists of all sorts - architects, artists, geographers, urban designers - anyone with a general interest in mapping or those interested in working through issues related to migration and the contemporary city.

PART I
Diasporas and Agency

Potentialities of Diasporic Space

My exploration of the potentialities of diasporic space begins with the body, which through modes of inhabitation specific to the diaspora is able to enfold multiple temporalities. What counts as being present thus emerges as an important question for those in the diaspora. For us presence as well as the present are constituted differently. These differences are related to the ways in which space, time and duration are imagined differently by us. The linearity of the modern version of time makes no sense for those whose ideas of time are interwoven with memories and nostalgias of the past that reach out to the present and beyond. At the same time the rhythms of everyday life for us are often not only tuned to the time zone that we physically inhabit, but are also attuned to other places. This connection with other places also transforms the diasporic experience of space, which is always multiple. It also confounds traditional architectural conceptions of three-dimensional space, linear time and static ideas of scale.

The diasporic figure thus challenges prevalent notions of belonging and inclusion through such dynamic understandings of space and time based in difference. Here I follow Elizabeth Grosz’s conception of difference as entwined within an understanding of time as duration: ‘Difference generates further difference because difference inheres the force of duration (becoming/unbecoming) in all things, in all acts of differentiation and in all things and terms thus differentiated.’¹ The potential of diasporic space thus lies in its ability to proliferate differences.

NOTES

1.Grosz, Elizabeth. ‘Bergson, Deleuze and the Becoming of Unbecoming’. Parallax 11, no. 2 (2005): 4–13. doi: 10.1080/13534640500058434.

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Difference and Belonging

Certain specificities of the diasporic condition demand the conceptualisation of a different type of space than that articulated within mainstream architectural discourse. This Cartesian space dominated by the visual cannot account for the itinerant geographies of those whose lives occur in-between spaces and cultures. These require a relational approach where apparently disjointed spaces and times are connected in complex and unexpected ways through everyday interactions. But I do not want to idealise the diasporic experience of space and geography, because just as we are able to make connections we can also practice dislocations. At the same time these practices are not unique to the diasporic subject, the effects of what we have come to call globalisation mean that these qualities of diasporic space are not exclusive to it but are intensified in instances of migration.

DIASPORIC SPATIO-TEMPORALITIES

Since the homogenising tendencies of the dominant way of articulating space cannot accommodate the difference inherent in diasporic lives, what is important in conceptualising diasporic space is not any aesthetic concern but the need to embody notions of difference including how these are accommodated in everyday life. This difference is played out in the relationships between space and time and the ways in which these are mediated through the body. A common starting point for thinking through such concerns is Henri Lefebvre’s sociology of the everyday based on the seemingly simple premise: ‘(Social) space is a (social) product.’¹ It is useful for thinking space beyond the idealised empty container of Cartesian logic to one that is produced through the inhabitation of bodies. Whilst in the spatial discipline of architecture, as well as in related areas such as urban studies and geography, Lefebvre has been reified as the philosopher of space; he did not privilege space over time. In Lefebvre’s schema the spatiality of the lived experience within the social realm is given a strategic place in order to critique the notion of history and the linear time of modernity. He privileged lived cyclical time influenced by memory and recollection over time measured by clocks, making a break from classical Marxist thought in its conception of history and emphasis on causality. In his theory of moments Lefebvre suggests: ‘The moment has a certain specific duration.’² Each moment can be relived and in this repetition lies its ability to differentiate, meaning that moments embody the potential to resist the alienating tendencies of capital. If the role of the abstract notion of space is to homogenise then the element that it does not account for is the living, being, moving, gesturing body, which constantly produces difference through the way it lives in and through moments.

The enigma of the body — its secret, at once banal and profound — is its ability, beyond “subject” and “object” (and beyond the philosophical distinction between them), to produce differences “unconsciously” out of repetitions — out of gestures (linear) or out of rhythms (cyclical). In the misapprehended space of the body, a space that is both close by and distant, this paradoxical junction of repetitive and differential — this most basic form of “production” — is forever occurring.³

Certain moments of everyday life play out rhythmically creating difference through repetition and with it another kind of space, what Lefebvre called a ‘differential space’.⁴ This entwined relationship between space, time and difference is a basis for conceptualising ‘diasporic spatio-temporalities’ that are produced through the displacement of bodies. They modulate space and time through memories and recollection and produce the multiple realities that are the product of the particular spatial consequences of globalisation and non-linear time.

A space-time that privileges relations and associations, that moves away from hegemonies and identity politics may require at its core a more radical shift in perspective. It would need to start with difference rather than ending up there. How that difference is embodied in and of space and through multiple temporalities is described in Gilles Deleuze’s concept of ‘becoming’. Deleuze questions the very idea of Being as a basis for thought arguing that there is no determinate foundation for knowledge, instead we should study how languages, cultures, political systems, spaces and subjectivities transform or become; the challenge is to address this becoming in all of its diversity. The feminist philosopher, Elizabeth Grosz describes the specificity of thinking such difference: ‘In conceptualising a difference in and of itself, a difference which is not subordinated to identity, Deleuze and Guattari invoke notions of becoming and of multiplicity beyond the mere doubling or proliferation of singular, unified subjectivities.’⁵ Difference and becoming are here central concepts for conceptualising diasporas beyond fixed notions of identity towards what Rosi Braidotti has called ‘multiple ecologies of belonging’.⁶ By imagining a mode of belonging that works through difference the possibility of internal contradictions and discontinuities emerges between our understandings of ourselves as diasporic subjects and the communities we inhabit, whilst at the same time opening up the possibility of constructing communities beyond for example a shared ethnicity.

Difference, normally defined in relation to what it is not, is instead defined affirmatively as the ability to transform, to become. Deleuze’s critique of western philosophy is based in its suppression of the simulacra, which for him are the embodiment of difference; their unfaithful copy of the Form produces difference. ‘If the simulacrum still has a model, it is another model, a model of the Other (l’Autre) from which there flows an internalized dissemblance.’⁷ Unlike the Platonic copy, which still possesses a knowledge (savoir), the simulacrum is outside knowledge. ‘[T]here is in the simulacrum a becoming-mad, or a becoming unlimited … a becoming always other, a becoming subversive of the depths, able to evade the equal, the limit, the Same, or the Similar: always more and less at once, but never equal’.⁸ Such a definition of difference allows us to move beyond equality as a defining factor in oppositional struggles towards notions of multiplicity.⁹

What might a corresponding space of differentiation look like? Here I turn to the difference in the understanding of space (and time) between Newton and Leibniz, a famous exchange that is one of the underlying concepts for conceptualising differential or relational space. Whilst for Newton objects exist independently of space and time, which provides a backdrop, an absolute frame of reference, for Leibniz space and time exist only as relations between objects and without these would not exist at all. In simple terms, this would mean that two identical objects in different locations are not identical because of the spatial and temporal relations of which they are a part; swapping them would also change their properties. Deleuze has written extensively on Leibniz’s relational understanding of space which he calls a ‘Baroque perspective’: ‘The new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mould — in other words, to a relation of form-matter — but to a temporal modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form.’¹⁰ This way of apprehending the world has consequences for how space, time and subjects are conceptualised: ‘The Baroque introduces a new kind of story in which … description replaces the object, the concept becomes narrative, and the subject becomes point of view or subject of expression.’¹¹ For spatial thinking, it is the privileging of relationalities over attributes, the topological over the topographic. Here differences are of degree and intensity (continuous variation) and there is no ideal in contrast to which others are set up as different — no ideal whiteness from which to determine others, no ideal space and no outside from which to apprehend the world. This differential space that is composed of a geography of relations is by its nature topological.

TOPOLOGICAL SPACES

Deleuze’s continuous variation is embedded in mathematical thinking and in particular in the notion of topology. In architecture we are perhaps more familiar with the word topography. The topography of a site is its contours, the way the land rises and falls and the arrangement of geographical features upon it. What becomes clear, even from this very short and partial description of topography, is its relation to the ability to measure in three dimensions. This way of thinking leads to a conceptualisation of space as territory with fixed spatial geometries. It also leads to a conceptualisation of scale as inherently stable. Whilst topography is about fixed spatial geometries topology privileges relations.

A branch of modern mathematics, topology is the study of forms under continuous deformation, one of the most cited examples of this being a coffee cup that deforms into a doughnut and vice versa. Topology is therefore concerned with the mathematics of continuity and connectivity through change. Topological thinking can be traced back to Leibniz’s ‘geometry of place’ that, as described above, made a decisive break from the Newtonian notion of space and time as neutral backdrop. The most general version of topology, point-set theory, stu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Prologue
• Diasporas and the City
• Part I Diasporas and Agency
• Part II Mapping Otherwise
• Index