Writing Spaces

Discourses of Architecture, Urbanism and the Built Environment, 1960–2000

C. Greig Crysler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134477920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Writing Spaces examines some of the most important discourses in spatial theory of the last four decades, and considers their impact within the built environment disciplines. The book will be a key resource for courses on critical theory in architecture, urban studies and geography, at both the graduate and advanced undergraduate level.

Chapter 1:
Introduction

Over the last four decades, the immense changes brought about by the reorganization of world financial markets, reductions in travel times, the growth of information technology, and massive increases in world migration have allowed the institutions and forces that create large cities to spread their operations around the globe and greatly expand the extent of interconnected urban networks. It is no longer possible to speak of cities as bounded domains (if it ever was, as scholarship on the colonial city and “systems of cities” reminds us). But it is not just the category the “city” that has been unsettled and reorganized in global time and space: the nation has also become increasingly detached from the formal territory of the nation-state through “long-distance nationalism” and the spaces of “diasporic citizenship.” In some cases, new building projects now occupy the space of an entire city (as in recent “mega-projects” in the Pacific Rim), and the process of design and construction by architectural firms (as well as the manu-facture of component parts) is now spread across nations around the world. These conditions suggest that the categories of nation, city, architecture, and building cannot be understood as separate entities: they exist as simultaneous and overlapping conditions.

If cities and their spaces now constitute intrinsically interdisciplinary, global conditions, how should theory that reflects critically on the activities of the built environment professions respond? That is the question investigated by this book. Given that disciplines such as architecture, planning, geography, and urban studies continue, for the most part, to be organized around professional training and research that is linked to specific scales of analysis, how should theory be transformed to meet the challenges of the globally interdependent conditions in the twenty-first century metropolis? I suggest that the answer not only requires changes within disciplines. It also requires us to rethink the relationships between them, and indeed, how (and why) disciplines are constituted as such.

That is why this book is about discourse, and the way texts define disciplines and their practices. In the following chapters, I examine a group of influential discourses in the built environment disciplines that have developed since 1960 and that have each, in their various ways, sought to challenge the self-enclosed disciplinary space from which they began. In doing so, they have attempted to relate the analysis of space to wider social and historical conditions.

My discussion is organized around case studies of five influential English language scholarly journals, based in disciplines extending from architectural history to geography. They include the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH), the oldest journal of architectural history in the United States; Assemblage, an important forum for architectural theory, design and criticism; Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review (TDSR), which focuses primarily on “traditional environments” in the rapidly industrializing countries of the so-called “third world”; the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), concerned with the political economy of urban and regional development; and Environment and Planning D. Society and Space (subsequently, Society and Space), a publication that has played an important role in adapting various forms of social and critical theory to the analysis of geographic space at various scales.

The case studies traverse the four decades between 1960 and 2000. The explosion in specialized scholarly publishing that forms part of the background to my discussion began in the post-Second World War expansion of tertiary education in most “Western” and “non-Western” countries, and intensified from the mid-1970s onwards. The journals I examine here construct a historical sequence that remains fragmented until 1989, when the contents of all five overlap for the last decade of the study. However, with the exception of the JSAH (which was founded in 1941), they have emerged in different ways from the social and intellectual transformations associated with what the historian Eric Hobsbawm has called the “crisis decades.”¹ Though the extended period of social unrest associated with this period was precipitated by the oil shocks in 1973, the deeper causes can be traced to the early 1960s, when so-called “first world” countries were coming to the end of a long period of unprecedented economic expansion. The crisis decades were marked by the dismantling of Keynesian models of national economic planning and widespread social turmoil that questioned the intellectual foundations and social legitimacy of capitalist modernity. From the 1960s, a growing civil rights movement, feminism, gay rights, left wing, and anti-colonial struggles, among others, raised issues that reverberated, and in some cases originated in student movements within expanding university systems internationally.

Though calls for some form of interdisciplinarity are routine today, they can arguably be traced to concerns about an expanding postwar university system that was, from the perspective of many critics at the time, co-opted to the intentions of a technocratic and imperialist “state apparatus.”² Seminal critiques of the university as a training ground for a professional-managerial class focused on the ideological separation of knowledge into discrete and instrumental specializations.³ On one level, therefore, this book is part of the continuing effort to challenge the segmentation of critical thought about cities, urban and architectural space into non-communicating subspecializations. I consider how some of the major discourses in architectural history and theory, and in the social sciences, can contribute to an understanding of the globally interdependent conditions of the contemporary metropolis. At the same time, however, I also undertake an analysis of the silences and limitations of these discourses. It is in the very nature of this task that I have placed emphasis on those aspects that I believe can be seriously questioned, and as a result my discussion and conclusions are at times quite critical.

This does not, however, in any way diminish the very valuable and important contributions that the journals and those who have edited, advised or contributed to them have made, both individually and collectively, to the understanding of the contemporary city and its built environments. Indeed, the very fact that I am able to construct the criticisms I present here is due to the efforts that have been invested in these journals, and the many insights I have gained from reading them. In my analysis, I attempt to locate the contradictions, silences, and reversals in the positions I have examined, not to dismiss them, but to point out ways in which the arguments could be developed more fully. My criticisms often seek to extend what are already valuable debates to another level of development.

All the discourses I discuss here have attempted to move beyond modernist paradigms in which space (whether at the scale of the building or the urban region) is regarded as a thing in itself, and towards the analysis of buildings and urban spaces in relation to wider social and historical conditions. In doing so they have played important roles in changing the terms of critical debate in their respective disciplines. They have introduced fundamentally new questions about everything from how the architectural critic represents what s/he criticizes, to the changing influence of corporate capital in the planning and development of urban infrastructure. This has involved, to borrow a term used in Assemblage, the “transcoding” of ideas from other disciplines. The research I examine in this book, to a greater or lesser degree, draws upon discourses and debates from other disciplines (such as philosophy, literary studies, political economy, history, anthropology, geography, and sociology).

Yet, as I ask in the case studies, how, and upon what terms, does this interdisciplinarity operate? Academic discourse makes use of shared terms and ideas that define “boundaries” around what is considered important, and what is not, and indeed, how a discipline’s very context of operation will be understood.⁴ Interdisciplinary work often combines established blocks of knowledge without questioning how these bounded domains are constituted as such. In doing so, research objects are first granted an independent existence, ignoring the presuppositions that underlie their foundation in distinct areas of knowledge. To move beyond simply rearranging established blocks of knowledge is itself a spatial operation. As Rosalyn Deutsche has argued,

Radical interdisciplinary work…takes account of its own spatial relations. It interrogates the epistemological basis and political stakes of disciplinary authority… such work is based on the premise that the objects of study are the effect, rather than ground of disciplinary knowledge.⁵

Discourse produces intellectual territories composed of social and geographic distributions of knowledge and power, fields of disciplinary norms and scholarly representation, and embodied spaces of intellectual identity. It is a space-forming practice. It can either reinforce the boundaries between disciplines and the social worlds they construct, or cut across and link them together. “Technical” interdisciplinarity adds to the terrain controlled by an existing discipline, thereby reinforcing its legitimacy and authority as such. The search for “transdisciplinary” modes of critical operation is a different project. It acknowledges that the disciplines, or specializations of architecture, urban studies and geography are not going to disappear any time soon, and therefore to negate them in the service of some new meta-disciplinary category is naive at best.⁶ At the same time, however, transdisciplinary theory insists that the “spatial politics” of contemporary cities can only be fully understood by exploring how these categories are linked together in social practice.

In this book, I argue that journals and their discourses matter: texts have a determinate effect on how we understand, imagine, and act in relation to the world around us. Texts and writing play an instrumental role in shaping the critical and imaginative space in which members of a built environment profession—architecture, planning, urban design—operate. By intervening in the politics of writing we intervene in the politics of built form. Each journal is therefore studied as a space of knowledge, governed by shared methods and practices. It is to the underlying assumptions that inform these textual, institutional, and socio-political “worlds” that my analysis and criticism is directed. What sort of worlds do these discourses construct?⁷ Which spaces become visible and which become invisible? Which theories are included and which are excluded? Who speaks and who is silenced? Whose histories, cultures and geographies become important in these representations, and upon what terms?

I suggest that texts and built environments comprise a mutually dependent, rather than opposed, condition, thereby linking the politics of space to the politics of writing. In the first part of this introduction I explore some of the larger theoretical arguments that underpin this book. I describe how the opposition between the real and imaginary (central to the presumed opposition between words and buildings) was first challenged in the text-based humanities disciplines, and explore the significance of these arguments for writing that addresses various scales of space. In the second part, I explain in more detail my decision to focus on academic discourse and in particular the scholarly journal, as the context for my study. One of my central concerns is to treat different forms of writing as situated social practices grounded in specific institutions and the actions of particular agents. I discuss how the double identity of the scholarly journal as text and institution permits such an interpretation.

It will become clear as the reader proceeds through the chapters that the journals I examine are based upon very different assumptions, and expressed through languages that are remarkably distinct from each other. When I began this study with all but the most cursory familiarity with the journals I have selected, I was initially overwhelmed by the variation in how they represent their ideas. As I suggest in the case studies, some of the journals expend more energy on producing a common style, and the journal reads as the work of a collective author, while others have encouraged contradictions in writing styles and research methods, and there is much greater breadth in how ideas are represented.

After having spent a number of years studying these journals, I feel confident in saying that none “add up” to a totally coherent and completely unified position. In each of the case studies, I have tried to represent some of their complexity, and non-linear, sometimes unexpected, development by tracking how arguments emerge in a relational manner, and build upon each other (and changes in cities and the world) over time. However, as I suggest at various points throughout the book, it is clearly impossible to represent all that is written in each of the journals. To those who come to this book as readers of the journals I discuss, or, indeed, their various editors over the years, the members of their editorial boards, and their many contributors, I apologize in advance for any misrepresentations or oversights.

In the third part of this introduction, I describe in further detail my criteria for selecting the journals, and the questions I asked when analyzing them. In doing so, I further define the questions that guided my partial and selective of reading of these journals.

SCHOLARLY WRITING AND LITERARY THEORY

The transformation of built environment theory documented in this book follows in the wake of similar changes in text-based humanities disciplines that began in the 1960s. In much the same way that the critical paradigms examined here question space as a socially transcendent category, so too did the reorientation of literary theory challenge the status of the text as an autonomous formal system of meaning. Post-Second World War Anglo-American literary theory initially developed in tandem with cold war culture. The dominant mode of critical analysis at the time, known as the “New Criticism,” was concerned with “close readings” that posited the literary text as a closed system. The sealed boundaries of interpretation reproduced the insulated social and cultural position of the West, then caught within the dichotomies of cold war politics.⁸

It was precisely this disinterested abstraction that came under attack as new social movements entered and transformed the Anglo-American academic system. Campus revolts in the late 1960s, sparked by the civil rights movement, decolonization, the emergence of feminist politics, the growing importance of the gay and lesbian movements, drew attention to the often-unacknowledged Eurocentric and masculinist values embedded in the Western canon. As a result, New Criticism’s transcendent critical operations became the subject of vigorous and at times polarizing debate. The “culture wars” in literary studies reached their apogee in the 1980s, with recalcitrant warnings about the “closing of the American mind.”⁹ Allan Bloom and others argued that the universal values of Enlightenment culture were threatened by minor(ity) scholarship and its basis in an emerging politics of cultural difference. Much of the ensuing debate centered on the political responsibilities of the intellectual: should the professional critic uphold the canon and transmit its core values, or should those values be represented as mutable, biased, and historically contingent?

Similar questions emerged in other disciplines. Yet the attempt to rethink the theoretical presuppositions of disciplines such as history, art history, and anthropology in terms of the social relations of power, arguably began by rethinking academic writing as a form of literary production. Hayden White’s 1979 Tropics of Discourse is one of the seminal contributions to this debate.¹⁰ In this influential book, White argues that historical inquiry has been traditionally concerned with “mimesis,” or the faithful imitation of historical events: the historian’s job is to find the “correct” facts and then arrange them in a way that would accurately reproduce a historical event in words.¹¹ I...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Writing Spaces
• The Architext Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Silent Itineraries: Making Places in Architectural History
• Chapter 3: Strategies of Disturbance and the “Generation of Theory”
• Chapter 4: Unsettled Traditions and Global Modernities
• Chapter 5: Economies of Representation
• Chapter 6: Bodies of Theory
• Chapter 7: Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography