Reading Socio-Spatial Interplay - Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i ...

R E A D I N G S O C I O - S P A T I A L I N T E R P L A Y P A R T 1historical urban development presented as a linear, evolutionary narrativefrom the striation-perspective: A history of changing regimes producing newlayers of urban environments in order to serve shifting needs as society andtechnology evolves. “The city”, which includes both a social, economic andpolitical context, but also the architecture of the city at a given moment, cantherefore be seen as the ultimately striated space. 47 But to describe the city asmainly a striated space (although in some ways possible to live in as smoothspace), does not mean that the city belongs to some sort of category, or that ithas a fixed set of properties: What is identified by the striated aspects is someproductive, transforming potentials: constraints to react upon, organizedmatter to disorganize, reorganize. Some aspects of the city, some strata in theurban structure, are “more striated”, others are “smoother”, and by that have agreater potential for striation. But which aspects that turns out to worksmoothly or striated has as much to do with what sorts of agency they turnout to be involved in, as with internal qualities. 48Deleuze and Guattari explain how the sea, the archetype of smooth space, canbe considered the archetype of all striations of smooth space: The reason isthat the smooth always possesses a greater potential of deterritorialisationthan the striated.Illustrations of such dynamics can also probably be drawn from thehistory of urban development: The Hausmannisation of Paris in the 19 thCentury can, as I see it, be used as an illustration of the archetype of Stateapparatus-striation of urban space. But if a process of striation only works onaspects of space seen as smooth space, the archetype of striation of urbanspace must also have been a reaction against a certain amount of urbansmooth space. The Hausmannisation of Paris can just as well be described asa counteract against a boiling social situation: a situation in which the smoothspace of the working class areas of central Paris were conceived as about tocreate a war machine threatening the position of the growing bourgeoisie, a47 “In contrast to the sea, the city is the striated space par excellence; the sea is a smooth space fundamentallyopen to striation, and the city is the force of striation that reimparts smooth space, puts it back into operationeverywhere, on earth and in the other elements, outside but also inside itself. The smooth spaces arising fromthe city are not only those of worldwide organization, but also of a counterattack combining the smooth andthe holey and turning back on against the town: sprawling, temporary, shifting shantytowns of nomads andcave dwellers, scrap metal and fabric, patchwork, to which the striations of money, work or housing are nolonger even relevant. An explosive misery secreted by the city, and corresponding to Thom’s mathematicalformula: “retroactive smoothing.* Condensed force, the potential for counterattack? (1987, p. 481) * Deleuzeand Guattari refer here to René Thom’s expression applied to continuous variation in which the variablesreacts upon its antecedents: Modèles mathématiques de la morphogenèse, Paris: 10/18, 1974, pp 218-219.48 “In each instance, then, the simple opposition ‘smooth-striated’ gives rise to far more difficultcomplications, alternations, and superpositions. But these complications basically confirm the distinction,precisely because they bring dissymmetrical movements into play. For now it suffices to say that there are twokinds of voyage, distinguished by the respective role of the point, line and space. (…) In short, whatdistinguishes the two kinds of voyages is neither a measurable quantity of movement, nor something thatwould be only in mind, but the mode of spatialization, the manner of being in space, of being for space.Voyage smoothly or in striation, and think the same way (… ) But there are always passages from one to theother, transformations of one within the other, and reversals.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 482).38