The Contested Street | N;C

N;C

THE CONTESTED STREET

the relation of goverance and dissensus to the city

Nicholas Chung

CONTENTS Introduction

The Disillusioned Masses Methodology

11 12

Part 1: The City as Site of Power-Space Relations

Contested Space

Prologue: Inhabited Space

A Populist Concession

Ranciere’s Governance: Beyond Politics

The Right to Dissent

17 18 19 21

A Question about Legitimacy

Public Space

The Contested Street

Conflict and Space, Explained

23 26 28

Part 2: 10 Mechanisms of Spatial Appropriation

Establishing Boundaries

Contesting Boundaries

Surveillance

Creating Red Zones

Assuming Identities (and non-identities)

Public Transportation

Protest

Policing

Targeted Information Dissemination

Re-Surfacing the Urban Surface

33 34 34 36 37 39 40 41 42 43

Guidebook

46

Bibliography

90

GUIDEBOOK 01 pavement brick 02

handrail / guardrail

04

‘call to action’ posts

03 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

barricades

letter of no objection masks

police uniform water cannon tear gas buses mtr

mtr exits

ticket gates bridges

cctv cameras

the press (vest, camera, screen) blue or yellow lennon walls

effaced street

dried bamboo stalks (scaffolding)

MAP OF VIRTUAL CITY

Photo by Joseph Chan on Unsplash

i n t r o d u c t ion

The Disillusioned Masses

In recent years, the world has seen an increasing amount of social instability and political crises. Regardless of your citizenship or where you identify as home, it almost seems avoidable that conflict between those governing and those governed will impede your life. The presumed commitment between citizen and state is increasingly ambiguous as questions of identity multiplicities begin to marginalize the populist and their rights. In an alarming number of metropolitans, we see the retreat of those who govern from their responsibilities to their society while activists and corporate institutions begin competing for the right to own and appropriate space during these power vacuums.

The populist is becoming increasingly aware of their democratic identity in spaces that are inherently apolitical. Their disenchantment with public life and politics is expressed in through exercising their rights to dissent. Conversely, we also see nation states expanding the reach of governmental control across the vast geographical landscape. Protests, riots, and other acts of public demonstration renewed a sense that the space of the street is at stake and particular relations between individuals and collectives is critical in defining, or redefining, their projected and perceived identities.

We also see these power-space dynamics unfolding in a constantly evolving technocratic landscape. The modalities of spatial occupation and inhabitation proliferates individual multiplicities that fundamentally destabilizes the rigid boundary conditions of states. Much in part due to the collapse of distances and immediacy of communication, we are able to understand global spatial politics in its totality instantaneously and challenge notions about moral rights to the how we understand space, how we use space, and how we should live in space.

Spatial identity is unquestionably tethered to the identity of its inhabitants, their cultures, their rituals, how they are seen instantaneously and how they see themselves retrospectively as collective memory. Space is therefore not only contested for its expedience in facilitating human activity, but also in defining how one’s finite existence is registered and qualified as a collective progress. The contest of space is therefore not merely about what your transient affiliations may be, but about mechanisms of checks and balances that reflect how you wish to negotiate your relationship with your government, how you wish to be seen, or not seen by them.

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Methodology Positioning

As this is a study of the phenomena of governance and protest manifested in space, the aim is not to adopt a political position of either, or if possible, eliminate politics as a variable entirely. The goal of this inquiry is to hopefully provide an understanding of how power-space dynamics play out in the material space everyone inhabits, and hopefully, encourages discourse that expands the multiplicities in the ways we define ‘public space’ and our roles in it.

Researching + catalogue

This inquiry is heavily influenced by the writings of Ranciers, Stravides, and Foucault for they all theorize about the mechanisms and resulting aesthetics of power-space relations. Spatial images and identities are constructed by constituent players and the resulting spatial experience that we negotiate on a daily basis is a collage of these fragments that assert influence on the way we think and perceive urban life. A summary of the research approach might be to say that it first sets out parameters and definitions of conceptual ambiguities, then categorize the plethora of operations and externalities that are agents in power-space conflicts.

Virtual site

The latter half of this inquiry consists of a catalogue of artifacts that are agents in power-space conflicts. Due to the amount of global attention it has received recently, elements from the 2019-20 Hong Kong Protests have been identified and recreated on a simulacrum of the city’s streets. It is a simplified representation of the space between Victoria Park in Causeway Bay and the Government Headquarters in Admiralty, a frequent route of protests even before the inciting protest in June 2019. The streetscape retains important elements and visual cues as well a few important identifiable landmarks. The idea is that a simulation of governance and dissensus in conflict can be shown and understood expediently. It by no means reflect the totality of the situations’ complexities and controversies.

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Guidebook format

The idea to structure and format the catalogue as a guidebook of the created virtual space is inspired by Made in Tokyo by Momoyo Kaijima, Junzo Kuroda, and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto. Like their book, it aims to aid in navigating through urban space to facilitate an understanding of the multiple interactions each element engages in. It is also meant to reflect the space of the city, as well as the space of protest, as an expanding field in progress. Additional information or conditions not already mentioned in the research (Parts 1 and 2) will be noted in bullet-point form.

Images and citations

The research and compilation of this inquiry is completed retroactively after the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, meaning that primary/firsthand photographs are limited due to the temporal and geographical distance, as well as safety concerns during social disruptions. As such, images that are not my own are mainly sourced from professional photographers or the press, which will be accompanied by their respective citations.

However, for a few intangible artifacts or items that have an intentionally unidentifiable source, such as social media posts accessible to the general public, citations will either be partially or fully censored. This decision was made with an understanding that images and attachments (such as phrases or hashtags) carry significance and can be politically charged, which would undermine the objective approach of studying governance and dissent.

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Photo by JoĂŤl de Vriend on Unsplash

PART 1 T h e C ity as Site of Powe r - Sp ac e Rel a t i o n s

1.1 Contested Space

1.1.1 Prologue: Inhabited Space “A corresponding imaginary geography of emancipation has to understand space as a uniform continuum to be regulated by common will rather than as an inherently discontinuous and differentiated medium that gives form to social practices.”1

The evidence of human existence exists in the registrations of our activity in the physical environment. The predictable, background rituals as well as the exceptional moments of drama that transpire in daily life unfold within a myriad of spatial, textural, and sometimes ephemeral conditions that culminate as the dynamisms of our inhabited space. Therefore, before any meaningful contributions can be made about human activity writ large, we must first arrive at a working definition of ‘space’, more specifically ‘inhabited space’.

Architectural theorist Stavros Stravides puts forward the notion that space is a continuum, meaning an abstraction and entanglement of ground and time, thereby objectifying it from being an ambiguous whole to discrete processes attached to specific temporalities and activation conditions. It should be noted that although these “performances” of “moving from one place to another”2 proliferates human social conditions that are either personal or collective, but always temporal in their physicality.

Space is therefore a timetable of activities, that “is neither reduced to a container of otherness” (abstracted ambiguity) “nor to a contestable and distributable good”, but is instead “conceptualized as a formative element of human social interaction”3 expressed through the engagement of individual or collective identities.

Since space is the open-sourced environment that subjugates all human and non-human processes, a question of ownership and authorship arises. Is the access and ownership of space democratic? (the notion of democracy will become problematic as we go along) What does owning space mean and what are its limitations? Who are the stakeholders and what are their agendas?

The short answer is that the contested meaning of what Stravides calls “common space” is the paradox that undermines its own existence. The comprehensive answer is the following convoluted dichotomy involving governance and dissensus.

1 2 3

Stavros Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, Professional Dreamers, 2010. 135.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 29.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 136.

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1.1.2 A Populist Concession

If inhabited space is physical definition of a population of identities, then certain characters and groups would need to be identified. In other words, we need to understand the stakeholders of common space (i.e. space that everyone has a claim of ownership to) as well as their respective influences.

In a generic model of society, there is a governing body and the masses who are governed. For an efficient society, the governing minority establishes rule of law and policies to motivate and optimize human activity, which can range from economic prosperity to quality of life of its citizenry. The citizenry in turn confers upon its government by continuing its reliance and compliance on government, thereby legitimizing its actions.

The pretense of any functional government is the compliance of its citizenry, meaning its ability to persuade the populist of its authority, and to a certain degree, its superiority. Georges Bataille remarks that it is through architecture that the state pits “the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements”, “to speak and impose silence on the multitudes”, and as such “inspire socially acceptable behavior, and often a very real fear.”4 The architecture of institutions and the state are the attachés of the intangible mechanisms they represent. The space they occupy is therefore not only symbolic, but also signifies the authority institutions wish to project upon the populist.

But herein lies the problem. Jacques Rancière states that “the institution of politics” requires something to “ground the power of rule in a community” but paradoxically the nature of democracy entails that “the very ground for the power of ruling is that

there is no ground at all.”5 Stravides’s notion of the city as a site for ‘commoning’ also undermines the acquisition and privatization of democratically distributed space. So a rational presupposition at this point would be to suggest that since a governing body requires “an account of the reason why some take the position of the rulers and the others that of the people they rule”6, the citizenry, on top of complying with its policies, concedes space to legitimize the rights (and the accompanying responsibilities) of governance. In short, the populist gives government the right to acquire, appropriate, and privatize inhabited space to create public space, which will project and enforce 4 Georges Bataille, “Architecture” in Rethinking Architecture edited by Neil Leach, Routledge, 1997, 19.

5 Jacques Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, Edited and translated by Steven Corcoran, Contiuum International Publishing Group, 2010, 50.

6 Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 51.

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desirable conditions and behavior back onto the populist. Rancière accepts this concession as “grounding the distribution of the power between the rulers and the ruled; and it is a temporal beginning entailing the fact of ruling is anticipated in the disposition to rule.”7 1.1.3 Rancière’s Governance: Beyond Politics “Democracy is the institution of politics as such, of politics as a paradox”8

Although it may be unseemly and unrealistic to disentangle politics from governance, these two notions are fundamentally alien to one another. Rancière writes that the notion of government exists as a fundamental concept for humanity, as it exists from within the smallest scales of domesticity to the institutionalized mechanisms that regulate communities. The elemental right to govern is found in either “the divine shepherd” that “rules the human flock” or “chance”, otherwise known as pure “democracy”.9 That said, the right of the religiously-ordained to govern has been relegated to mostly a symbolic capacity in contemporary society, so it bares less significance in this discussion of power-space dynamics.

Democracy, on the other hand, is complicated in its multiplicities, especially in contemporary society. Democracy, as Rancière states, is a game of chance and is indifferently equitable towards every constituent of society. Stravides’s idea of the “common space” depends heavily on the democratic distribution and accessibility to these spacs’ temporalities. But as mentioned, such democracy is conceded in favor of the democratic process (a simulacrum of democracy modified into a system) in order to legitimize the authority of a governing body.

So that leaves us with democracy as political ideology. As mentioned, the pretense to any functional government is in its assertion of its own legitimacy. The politics and policies asserted are the strategies available to persuade public opinion since “if politics has a specificity that makes it other than a more capacious mode of grouping or a form of power characterized by its mode of legitimation, it is that it concerns a distinctive 7 8 9

Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 51.

Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 50.

Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 52.

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kind of subject.”10 Simply put, politics implies “something extra – a supplementary qualification common to both rulers and the ruled”11, otherwise “the supplementation of all qualifications by the power of the unqualified.”12

Political ideology has little to do with one’s ability to effectively govern, but one might push it even further and suggest that governance and politics are inherently incompatible with each other. Firstly, democracy cannot exist in institutions since democracy “has an inherently unlimited capacity for self-criticism, which can also empower anti-democratic propaganda” or “act to revoke democratic rights in order to protect democracy.”13 This means that a ‘democratic institution’ is a paradox that undermines itself, and as such does not exist. What exists as ‘democratic institutions’ simulates democracy by satisfying the consumerist taste and needs of the populist majority, instead of the entire population as pure democracy would. On the other hand, Rancière writes that “the necessity of communism has been predicated on the impossibility of politics”14, the impossibility of democracy. Communism is also a process but is “in contrast to democracy, which merely represents freedom and equality in the separate form of law and state”, by “turn[ing] them into a sensory reality, embedding them into the forms of an existing common world.” 15

But since communism is a response to the shortcomings of democracy, it can be argued that the exigence is also a result of the capitalist society that democratic institutions sells to. Rancière argues that “because capitalist production produces fewer and fewer material goods, and more and more services or means of communication; and because its production is increasingly less material, it tends to shake loose its status as appropriated commodity and deceptive fetish.” 16 In short, democracy and communism are concerns of economy, concerns of individuals or collectives that profit off of the capitalist system. Given that “resistance is a field that is characteristic of the type of power which they oppose”17, capital agendas and interest 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

20

Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 27.

Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 52.

Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 53.

Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 52.

Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 78.

Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 76.

Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 78.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 109.

groups can only intensify the substance of conflict between governance and dissensus.

Confronting and potentially resolving ideological differences will not fundamentally resolve the conflicts that unfold in our inhabited spaces. As such, “the purification of politics is actually its eviction.”18 1.1.4 The Right to Dissent “Everybody has to be able to deal expressively with the risks and opportunities of city life. Where someone is allowed to be and how he or she confirms to spatial instructions of use, is indicative of his or her social identity.”19

“Generally speaking, the construction of spatial as well as legal orders is always a process open to social antagonism.”20 The universally inevitable challenge to any body that embodies power, be it the state or institutions that turn the gears of society, is the existence of its dissenters. In Foucault’s words, “where there is power, there is resistance.”21 The conflicts that exist between state and citizenry is fundamentally not about the opposition of ideologies or policy roll-outs, but the retreat of the governing from their social responsibilities to the populist as well as the public’s desire to take back custody of the common inhabited spaces they conceded to government. As mentioned, space is attached to temporalities, to activities and rituals of the citizenry’s daily life. Rancière explains that our determinable existence and human experience is the operation of “the sensible” and that “dissensus is not a confrontation between interests or opinions” but “the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself”22 So what the dissensus is after is a return to their agreed sensible. In a utopian model, the governing body would return the space it commandeered upon the disillusionment of its citizenry. But the reality is that the dissensus will rarely become the entire citizenry population and governments are unlikely to surrender power for the sake of either stability or power itself.

In summary, the city (i.e. inhabited space) is the site where the apolitical powerspace relations between government and dissensus unfolds. In the process, the space of the city itself becomes a contested commodity for it is both a projection and a conditioner of individual or collective identities.

18 19 20 21 22

Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 54.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 136.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 36.

Michel Foucault, “Discipline and Punish” translated by Alex Sherdian, Vintage Books, April 1995, 95.

Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 38.

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1.2 A Question About Legitimacy

1.2.1 Public Space

If the contested subject between governance and dissensus is the use of inhabited space, then the tectonic operations of space must also be defined and studied. As mentioned, common space is privatized by the state and remade public under certain conditions. Stravides writes that metropolis “is full of privatized public spaces in which public use is carefully controlled and specifically motivated” and that “users must often be checked and categorized”.23 This is important to understand the distinction between public space and free space as the former implies exclusive use by the citizenry, which at times is not the same as the entire population. In addition, the uninhibited use of public space is only true when the users abide by the rules set out by the institutions that own them. For instance, the state provides parks and other recreational spaces for its citizenry, but also imposes their expectations on the users.

Indeed, some of these expectations, such as ‘no littering’ or ‘supervise your children’, are desirable social behaviors and is implemented as “preventive designs, but only by popular demand”24. Public space, therefore, acts as proliferators of these conditions so that they are reproduced at every scale of city life. It therefore falls onto institutions to program the spaces they make public since “they can circumscribe the sphere of the political and restrict political agency to an activity performed by definite agents endowed with the appropriate qualifications; of they can give way to forms of interpretation and practices that are democratic, which invent new political places, issues and agents from the very same texts”.25

The problem with this is that since it is institutions that decide what qualities are reproduced, regardless of whether they reflect popular opinion or not, it opens the

possibility for abuse and suppression of ways of life that may undermine institutional legitimacy. But before discussing the issue of who has the right to appropriate the programs of public space, we need to understand what constitutes ‘public space’ and its effects.

23 24 25

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 26.

Theo Deutinger, “Handbook of Tyranny”, Lars Muller Publishers, 2018, 85.

Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 54.

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1.2.1.1 The City as Rhythms

Although the domain of a government begins and ends on its borderline, for the sake of this study, we will understand the city as the extents of urban emancipation.

Stravides writes that since “the ideal city-space” supports social life and “expresses those values that are necessary for social production”26, the form of public space should reflect changes in social practices. As mentioned, spaces are conditions of human occupation defined by their temporal extents, and both Stravides and Henri Lefebvre regards “the socially meaningful time of performed practices”27 as ‘rhythms’. Lefebvre explains that “every rhythm implies a relation of time with space, localized time, or if one wishes, a temporalized space”28. This can be understood as the speed of feedback loops between constituents or the experience of moving in the city. But in all cases, rhythm is a way to evaluate the efficiency of power exercised on space. But critically, what Lefebvre is arguing is that rhythms of space, much like rhythm of music, regulates tempo and dynamics, and strategies can be deployed to either prolong or destabilize the temporal rigidity to the programs of space.

Stravides remarks that the city consists of “a dominant rhythm and localized exceptions”, with the former being what Lefebvre calls “linear rhythms”. “Linear rhythms are defined by consecutiveness and the reproduction of the same phenomena, identical or almost at more or less close intervals.”29 In other words, “linear rhythms” is the spatial experience of the routine or the familiar. However, Stravides argues that public space is mobilized as an instrument to condition society since “the publicly exhibited identities of the users are enacted in accordance with those rhythms that discriminate and canonize them”. This means that public space is charged with an agenda to keep the citizenry in line, though the reasons for doing so can vary. As such, governments need “a carefully designed system of control is absolutely necessary for the regulation of socially defining rhythms”30 that asserts desirable social conditioning without giving the appearance of asserting upon the citizenry’s perception of their own freedom.

26 27 28 29 30

24

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 23.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 24.

Henri Lefebvre, “Writings on Cities”, Wiley-Blackwell, 1996, 230.

Lefebvre, “Writings on Cities”, 231.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 29.

1.2.1.2 The City as Circulation

Another way to understand the city is to see it as an active agent in the mobilization of urban life. The urban condition is “the spatial image of the passage” that expresses space through constituents’ “relation to others.”31 Stravides writes that “every society protects its passages” and the process of traversing “from one identity to another without the order of social reproduction being threatened.” In this case, the maintenance of the city falls onto the citizenry for it is they who thrive under the city’s amnesty. As the White Plans of the PROVO movement would suggest, the city is public property that has its agency and character. The citizenry’s social contract is no longer one with the state, but the living matrix of systems and interactions that facilitates their inhabitation and activity.

If operating on the premise that public space is modelled around democratic principles of indifference, and to an extent anonymity, the public space most accessed is the space of the street. Stravides likens the mobility of the city as blood circulation in the body as “the grounding precondition for the sustaining of urban life”32 and an expression of the city’s “health”33. As such, it would not be unfair to say that the street is an elemental component to all urban registrations. In its democratization, the street “naturalized a presentation of society as an agglomeration of individuals who, as the experience of the crowd, could be different and anonymous”34. In its democratization, the street exposes the imperfections of democracy, and often the inability of government to rectify those issues. It would make sense then, that the street remains autonomous and independent from any stakeholder’s influence. Yet at the same time, it makes even more sense that government would want to regulate the efficiency of the street in the same fashion as the dominant rhythm, for their legitimacy and stability is positively correlated to “the rational and never-broken control of traffic.”35 Much like a disrupting triplet in a regular Baroque rhythm, “social chaos” is “a city circulation out of order.”36

31 32 33 34 35 36

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 112.

Stavros Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, Zed Books Ltd, 2016, 129.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 130.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 132.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 133.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 133.

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1.2.2 The Contested Street “The human order is bound up from the start with the architectural order, which is nothing but a development of the former. Such that if you attack architecture, whose monumental productions are now the true masters all across the land, gathering the servile multitudes in their shadow, enforcing admiration and astonishment, order and constraint, you are in some ways attacking man.”37

To recap: the street as common inhabited space is privatized and appropriated as public space for mass consumption. The street, therefore, becomes not only an instrument to assert social order, but also an expression of governmental authority.

At the same time, the street is inexplicably attached to the perceived and projected identity of its users – the general public. The multiplicities of that identity is a compilation of shared experiences, communal standards and common expectations, as well as the image history of a society that standardizes what is sensible or normal. It is the collective memory of a citizenry that forms its collective identity. “Collective memory, thus, uses space as a kind of repository of meaning, open to those who know how to navigate their way in an inhabited environment marked by socially recognizable indicators.”38 As such, what is appropriated, and what is contested, is not only the space of the citizenry, but their collective memory, their access to those “recognizable indicators” that formulate the rhythms they expect to be regular and stable.

But as mentioned, the space of the city is an evolving process that changes individual components one at a time in a manner so slow that we often lose track of their meanings. Hans Hollein remarks that “there is a change as to the importance of

‘meaning and effect’”, affecting “the way I take possession of an object, how I use it, how it becomes important”.39 The environment as a spatial image becomes somewhat iconographic, to the extent that it only represents what it obviously signifies. The danger arises when spatial perception is “actively reconfigured” through “acts and gestures that interfere with the meaning of public space”40 for it “meaningfully distort the image of space by partially hiding some of its characteristics or by completely transforming the appearance”41 of the familiar environment.

37 38 39 40 41

26

Bataille, “Architecture”, 20.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 183.

Hans Hollein, “Alles ist Architektur”, Bau, 1968, 462 Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 184.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 185.

If the spatial image of a city reflects its citizenry’s current identity as defined by its government, then its mutually constitutive resistance should be allowed to engage in changing that image as a process that is not only a “quantitative understanding of the urban condition” but also “a qualitative critique of the contemporary city culture.”42 Such critique comes in “appropriation of the street by individuals, masses or communities in the process of contesting their character as public, communal.”43 In other words, the space of the city is contested because it is “the perceived oeuvre of the inhabitants, themselves mobile and mobilized for and by this oeuvre”44 as a legitimized privilege provided by their social contract with the city.

The contest of the street therefore is a contest to appropriate the perceived meaning of the city’s spatial image, and in that process, defining a citizenry’s identity. The material street is the site and asset of power legitimization because “conditions of living together in which survival practices interweave to create formal or informal support networks” are at stake, and how the populist relates to “important reference nodes in which the exchange of services and goods is recognizably spatialized.”45 In Stravides’s words, ”a crisis of power legitimation unites” the dissensus to “draw experiences from his or her own life that verify” “the total absence of justice”46, thereby self-legitimizing their right to defy and resist.

42 43 44 45 46

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 134.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 134.

Lefebvre, “Writings on Cities”, 173.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 149.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 178.

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1.2.3 Conflict and Space. Explained.

“Where there is power, there is resistance.”47

47

28

Foucault, “Discipline and Punish”, 95.

1. The inhabited environment contains and allows for autonomous identities to interact through individual or collective spatial and temporal performances.

Within inhabited common space exists those who govern and those who are governed.

2. At the societal scale, governance is operated by the state and the citizenry is the body of people they are liable to. The state/government’s goal is to proliferate social conditions that pacifies the populist in order to condition the citizenry to legitimize their authority. This is achieved by the appropriation of common space and programing them into public spaces that endorse social reproduction. The effectiveness in government’s appropriation of space is reflected in their public approval.

3. As a result of government being empowered by its citizenry, dissensus will form.

This dissensus is not a disapproval to the existence of governance, for they are mutually constitutive. But instead it opposes the way government is appropriating space or the conditions it is proliferating through its public space. Their goal is the delegitimization of government’s authority through acts of non-compliance or the active reclamation of space from government to dissuade a majority of citizens from acknowledging government’s authority.

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Photo by Norbu Gyachung on Unsplash

PART 2 10 Mechanisms of Spatial Appropriation

[governance]

establishing boundaries

[both]

surveillance policing creating red zones

assuming identites (and non-identities)

public transportation

re-surfacing the urban surface

targeted information dissemination [dissensus] contesting boundaries

protest

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1. Establishing Boundaries

The tragedy of territory manifests itself not only in the increasing ambiguity between autonomous institutions, but also in the increasing definition of how inhabited spaces are partition by states within their own sovereignties. It is the responsibility of government to organize the “site of a phantasmagoria of freedom”48 for their own interests in governance. Governments affix specific characteristics and priorities within the process of continuous circulation, specifically continuous traffic, in order to “criticize and construct urban images as a means to establish or corroborate identities of urban places which may directly or indirectly support market activities.”49 The boundaries drawn between each participant strengthens the regulated mobility of a city by avoiding “conflicting interpretations and uses of the city”50 without disconnecting them from a limited set of interactions that facilitate mobility. The idea is that the citizenry learns “to negotiate their place and their trajectories” by “interacting freely to avoid accidents and find ways to coexist as street users.”51

All of this is a means to regulate the dominant rhythm of public space, but also a means to supersede movement itself. “The publicly exhibited identities of the users are enacted in accordance with those rhythms that discriminate and canonize them”52 so that the government can surveil the overall populist as to ensure that the ‘rules of public spaces’ are followed as well as monitoring inevitable dissent to avoid unannounced destabilization of their ability to govern. In addition, since the space of the city is a “spatial passage”53 that everyone protects, it can be said that the act of segregation is a strategy that strengthens a sense of security against the alien for the citizenry, who operates under the assumption that their fellow citizens comply with the conditioning of the state.

48 49 50 51 52 53

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 26.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 138.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 135.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 144.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 26.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 112.

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2. Contesting Boundaries

Much like many of the strategies that shall follow, each assertion of power from either government or dissensus will trigger a Newtonian reaction through a response that undermines the initial assertion. If drawing boundaries is an exercise of power, then its inevitable resistance comes in the ignorance, or indifference, towards those thresholds.

As public space, the street “represents a world of social disorder […] controlled through planning policies and authoritarian interventions in a direct clash with practices that appropriate the street as a possible common space.”54 Stravides notes that this defiance towards thresholds and their trigger conditions is achieved by “learning to use a less movement-defining spatial form that is less restrictive than the usual segregation-andcontrol paradigm.” A more innocent example would be jaywalking as it undermines social reproduction of a traffic crossing. A more explicit example would be acts of protest or defacement as an attack on the conditional relations prescribed by the state onto individual or mass identities. The participation of anti-programs, meaning engaging in relationships or feedback loops that are not authorized by government, expand the bank of “unauthorized meanings or uses for the streets, the pavements, the junctions, the residual spaces around and below highways, and the leftover spaces of urban peripheries.”55 3. Surveillance “It (the state) had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on alert, a long hierarchized network.”56

To monitor and appropriate social behavior, Stravides insists that “constant surveillance is a necessary part of the gentrification setting” through “mechanisms of control” and “the very form of spatial arrangements.”57 It is in the interest of the government to survey the users of its public space “to establish a safe setting for encouraged behaviors and to avert those that upset spatial and social order.”58 On the other hand, the citizenry also surveils the government through their experience of space 54 55 56 57 58

34

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 136.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 148.

Foucault, “Discipline and Punish”, 214.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 140.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 141.

and individualized portable cameras connected through the internet and social media, thereby making everyone’s spatial experience immediately visible and comparable. In turn, governments can also use exploit this network to trace the geographical footprint of each participant. Surveillance thereby performs as the instrument that “characterizes a particular articulation of power relations in a specific society, but also in the development and realization of those practices in a given social arrangement.” 59

Foucault’s writings on Panopticism provides an insightful dialectic on the motivations and ramifications of the surveillance state. He remarks the strategies deployed in Bantham’s design of a prison “can be integrated into any function” due to its ability to “constitute a mixed mechanism in which relations of power (and of knowledge) may be precisely adjusted to the process that are to be supervised.”60 The mechanisms of surveillance “automates and disindividualizes power […] in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up.”61 This process removes the necessity of specified identities and allow for the closed systems of power assertion to behave as “swarms”62 that circulate freely and perform with a large latitude of flexibility. This notion of ‘big brother always watching’ is assertion through paranoia, for amplifies “the internal and specific function” of behavioral conditioning, hence “developing around themselves a whole margin of lateral controls”63.

The principle motivation behind mass surveillance is to offset the imbalance between the governing minority and governed majority. The totality of what constitutes public space is a means to pacify the citizenry’s right to space, but also an instrument to preempt dissensus by regulating public order as right of government’s legitimized power. The majority must be able to quantify or impose specific identities to each individual of the anonymous mass in order to assert such power. Such power must be “permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent” through surveillance, thereby “making all visible as long as it could itself remain invisible”64. The delicate balance a government needs to maintain in public space is that it gives the pleasant illusion of respecting the right of constituents to engage in cross-boundary interactions in the inhabited space they willingly conceded as a means to consolidate their approval. Dissent and disorder occurs 59 60 61 62 63 64

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 104.

Foucault, “Discipline and Punish”, 206.

Foucault, “Discipline and Punish”, 202.

Foucault, “Discipline and Punish”, 211.

Foucault, “Discipline and Punish”, 211.

Foucault, “Discipline and Punish”, 214.

35

when the citizenry becomes aware of such an infringement on their rights, meaning that resistance is always inevitable in a surveilling state, it is only a matter of when its inhabitants become aware and uncomfortable about their inability to be anonymous.

4. Creating Red Zones

If the routine and sensible programs of city life is its ‘linear rhythm’ (as coined

by Lefebvre), then its opposite, meaning the disruption to the regular tempo of urban experiences, is what Stravides calls “red zones”. He remarks that “red zones instantiate a form of temporal conception which is not based on repletion, but on exception” as a “state of emergency”65. As mentioned at the start, space is a entangled to its program defined by temporality, and as such, “red zones” are an exceptional conditionals that exist as “temporary constructions aimed at permanent results.”66

The establishment of a red zone is a means to suddenly radicalize spatial programs and spatial images. In exchange for permanence, critiques of what is passed off as ‘sensible’ is forcefully confronted by the government and citizenry for its access to space and circulation is challenged. By enacting the “theatricality of a controlled clash that red zones are actually drawing lines inside society”, demonstrators “unmask that what appears as a modernized polyphyletic rite is in effect the metastasis of those discriminating rites of initiation.”67 In other words, the creation of a red zone is not necessarily a hypocritical critique of spatial appropriation, but can also be an accusation of the citizenry’s compliance in government’s abuse of authority.

On the other hand, a government can enact a new red zone to as a response to an unauthorized red zone. The act of clearly defining the spatial boundaries and characteristics of a red zone, it authorizes a necessitated assertion of control. If deemed necessary, a government can expand the boundary and temporality of its red zone unlike those created by its constituents, for its authority to appropriate space for the benefit of social order is legitimized by the citizenry that supports it. In face of “a constantly renewed threat, exception becomes the rule, emergency becomes canonic.”68 The potential here lies in the allowance of a normalized red zone normalizing abusees of spatial assertions, for example surveillance and the concession of civic anonymity. If 65 66 67 68

36

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 37.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 37.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 39.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 37.

the panopticon is an example of a red zone, whereby the authority of the governing is necessitated by circumstance, the notion of a normalized red zone “transforms a condition whose legitimation and efficiency was linked to an ‘emergency situation’ into a permanent site, a model articulation of techniques of surveillance with an exercise of controlling power”69.

5. Assuming Identities (and non-identities)

It has been established that space is a progenitor of the spatial image, which constitutes the perceived and projected identity of individuals or collectives. For the government, public space ensures “that identities remain distinct and distinguishable” so that they are “recognizable, classifiable, therefore predictable, in order to be governed.”70 Theses identities “are grouped and defined in terms of what they are and not in terms of what they might become or are becoming”, making them nontemporal. But as mentioned, as the space and programs of society is understood as serial processes that happen simultaneously, a conflict exists between “the rigid definition of an identity”71 and the contradictions created by the emancipation of these prescribed identities – the individual or collective identity crisis. Your identity is the façade you present in public space, it is how you introduce yourself to the passing stranger and how society characterizes your conditions. Assuming a specific identity, or conversely anonymity, projects your role and expected/unexpected range of behaviors or beliefs.

Assuming any identity beyond what the state prescribes to you “delegitimizes the very effort to produce and control closed identities” for it blurs the specificity of “individual histories and life trajectories.”72 Assuming Specific Identities

A specific identity refers to the explicit enunciation of an individual’s or collective’s prescribed or desired positioning in the social hierarchy. It underlines what relations it will engage in and to what degree that engagement would affect its fellow constituents.

For the street, “neighborhoods may become important collective reference nodes in which the exchange of services and goods is recognizably spatialized.” 73 In this case, 69 70 71 72 73

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 103.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 137.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 137.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 137.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 149.

37

the majority position of the neighborhood can effectively define or limit the range of identities that individual constituents can adopt. An area can be defined by its income, its activity, or even its population diversity, which is why we tend to attribute certain assumptions of safety, behavior, and other adjectives for defined spatial temporalities.

Another type of specific identity is the projection of one’s relative position in society, meaning that individuals or collectives are no longer self-defined, but instead exist with multiplicities that can be defined by someone else. If one understands this as an act of artifice, it can be justified as either a desire to be “allowed a seemingly liberating anonymity”74 or present a face of empathy to pacify indeterminacy. Stravides suggests that “the State and its staff, those whose faces appear on the news, wear masks which present them as faces. The disguises of the State mislead, they try to fool the dominated. The distorting mirrors of power stage personalities that claim they care about the people” 75 as a means to win their approval. On the other hand, the intentional display of insignificance, of mediocracy, can enforce the image of not a specific identity, but a lack of specificity. If faces “mirror the outside”, they present a void that allows one “to see themselves.”76 It can strengthen the sense of the collective as it removes the image of governmental power assertion, and replaces it with the legitimacy of communing inhabited space.

Becoming Anonymous “They appear in history’s fore, not as distinct persons with distinct characteristics, but as persons – simultaneously visible and invisible – who are present in struggles that give them the only identity that can include them without wiping out their differences: the identity of the rebel.”77

Adopting an identity with no specificity can also mean the removal of all distinguishable traits that make you visible. This can someone be assuming an anonymous identity, “pretending they comply with normalized classifications” so that “control through classification loses its target, failing to produce reality as it produces knowledge.”78 It can also be achieved through adopting a non-identity, which unlike 74 75 76 77 78

38

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 31.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 124.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 123.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 121.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 113.

being anonymous, places emphasis on the fluidity or “incompleteness”79. This type of ‘mask’ is not meant to distort the face, but instead present a unity amongst those who do not have a face, those who are deprived from a public face. They perform as all identities would as they exist as defined spatial images in specific temporalities. They are seen by the state but the only difference is that they cannot be discretely classified individually. In many cases, “the use of masks has acquired a symbolic force which is completely compatible with their political particularity.”80 6. Public Transportation

Since circulation is critical to the life of the city, the systems of transit through space is critical in defining the spatial image of mobility, which is an indicator of prosperity and stability. If we adopt the position that the city is a normalized red zone, whereby the state has been necessitated to regulate the rhythms and spatial experience of the city, then one can only conclude that the space of the city has already been barricaded and partitioned. The defined boundaries that segregate traffic and identities exists in the webs of mass transit systems authorized by the state. The city as an open network of passages have been dammed by a series of checkpoints that ask the citizenry to prove their authorized identities in exchange for their “liberating anonymity”.81 “Transit identities […] distill what is typical and recurrent out of what is contingent and personal in the experience of urban ‘non-places’”82. The placement of bus stops, your visual experience as you exit the underground metro, the scenery you pass by as you move between ports and the metropolis are all framed “socially identified spatial and temporal parentheses”83 of the city designed by the institutions that populate the street image.

As insignificant and arbitrary as it may seem, these views of mass transit are highly curated and subliminally potent in how we decode the meaning of space, as well as its importance84. Our mutual awareness of these iconographic threshold is arguably what constitute both our anonymity within “a constructed network of intermediary spaces”85 for they assume their own temporal rigidity as “collective reference nodes”86. The

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 113.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 121.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 31.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 29.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 29.

Hollein, “Alles ist Architektur”, 462.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 42.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 149.

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citizenry’s compliance to these constructed thresholds and modes of mobility is seen in our continued insistence to meet friends at a specific metro exit, outside a specific entrance of an identifiable public space, where we accept the fact that institutions and the state can monitor us and we can be seen.

7. Protest

Although protesting can happening at any scale, from a child protesting to their parents to the political upheaval of states, protests on the street scale is the production of “unauthorized meanings and uses for the streets, the pavements, the junctions, the residual spaces […] and the leftover space of urban peripheries.”87 This means partaking forms of urban circulation beyond the allowed specifications of government-drawn boundaries. It means the occupation of motorways, the destruction of instruments of surveillance, the iconoclasm of governance signifiers. Dissensus is “the community developed through commoning, through acts and forms of organization oriented towards the production of the common.”88 As such, protest is the reaction to government’s unjust spatial appropriation through the citizenry’s demand that their inhabited space be returned to them. It signifies government’s loss of ground as a result of public space and public desire misaligning.

The space of protest is the new public space, not provided by the state but instead created as the imaginary of spatial emancipation. This new public space finds its dominant rhythm through the position of being against the current governing body. But Stravides will add that this new public is also “a network of connected microsquares, each one with a distinct character and spatial arrangement”89. Each of these new identities have “different routines and different aesthetics and organized different micro-events” that defines them as distinct “nodes” or “neighborhoods”. The space of protest is therefore a microcosm of the city, a critical antithesis of the status quo and current spatial experience of urban life.

87 88 89

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Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 148.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 165.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 166.

8. Policing

Although the job of policing public space is generally conflated with the description of the institution of governmental police, the definition of policing can also be generalized to be the responsibility of different citizenries. In that sense, policing should be defined as the curation of any public space, regardless of its exigence and legitimacy, and the police are those who take up the responsibility of intervening in any attempt to destabilize public space.

But in conventional terms,

“the police as an institution were certainly organized in the form of a state apparatus, and although this was certainly linked directly to the center of political sovereignty, the type of power it exercises, the mechanisms it operates and the elements to which it applies them are specific”.90 This means that it is not an autonomous agent carrying out its agendas, but a means of the state’s power assertion. It is defined by its lack of individuality, much like the mob.

Their design is conspicuously adjusted so that each individual adopts a non-identity and collectively share one identity – an instrument of government. It is in this capacity to be everywhere at the same time that allows government to facilitate their desired social conditions, even with an asymmetrical power balance. Much like the guard on the panopticon, the police in the city mobilizes disciplinary action upon the inhabitants of their jurisdiction so that they are conditioned to self-discipline.

In sum, the operation of any police is “the configuration of its own space”, “to make the world of its subjects and its operations seen”, “the manifestation of dissensus as the

presence of two worlds in one,”91 The police does not have the authority to unilaterally confront dissensus for it is constituted and necessitated by the government that controls it. If politics “consists in transforming this space of ‘moving along’, of circulation, into a space for the appearance of a subject”92, then as arbitrators of public space, the job of the police is to be apolitical, to “restore confidence in safety” and that “everything is at aby moment ‘under control’”93 whilst protecting the existence of all types of public spaces (regardless if it is a result of governance or protest), until instructed otherwise.

90 91 92 93

Foucault, “Discipline and Punish”, 213.

Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 37.

Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 37.

Deutinger, “Handbook of Tyranny”, 97.

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9. Targeted Information Dissemination

In a contemporary society that facilitates mobility and the collapse of space-time distance, information dissemination has moved beyond being an essential commodity, and has completely integrated into or terraformed the material texture of space. As space is appropriated to endorse conditions and behaviors, so is the modes of communication through it. For dissensus, information and communication is critical in “destabilizing collective faith in the system”94 since knowledge production no longer circulates through top-down instruction, but instead permeates through society laterally as ‘relative’ or ‘mini truths’. It is what Deutinger calls “the positive power of the masses” in “swarm intelligence, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, and crowd innovation”95 that generate “metastatic and expanding” “community-oriented or community-inspired actions”96.

Since information is disseminated indifferently across the entire geographical (or the non-geographical, digitized) landscape, communication can be encoded to “address people as potential actors”, acquiring “a power to mobilize people through sharing and participation.”97 What is circulated is no longer only the message, but a generic template of a mass identity that receivers can potentially identify with, and as such motivate the further proliferation of the message. Stravides further subdivides these new modes of spatial communication as “reinscription” and “relocation”.

“Reinscription is a process of marking out specific places through inscriptions that not only disseminate information but also connect places and create shared points of reference for specific emerging collectives that recognize them.”98 In other words, it is the collapse of the expanse of the city into a compact scale that unifies

the spatial experiences across multiple ‘micro-squares’ or localized temporalities. It is a means to encode the material environment with a collective identity that is present in all recognizable common nodes.

“Relocation has to do with […] new urban practices of public space appropriation and collective dissent through information exchanges with the aim of potentially coordinating those who participate in these exchanges. Information is not a flow, in this context, but an arrow directed towards potential receivers and returned as a 94 95 96 97 98

42

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 161.

Deutinger, “Handbook of Tyranny”, 97.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 161.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 163.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 162.

promise of mutual involvement.”99 This implies a changing definition of spatial determinacy brought upon by space reconsidered as non-synchronic processes that breaks down the rigidity of pre-drawn boundaries. It is an expression of the freedom and refuge brought upon by a new material condition of urban space now re-appropriated and available to all identities of inhabited space, both governing and governed.

10. Re-surfacing the Urban Surface “Because space becomes socially meaningful in the process of being performed, memory is not simply deposited in space but actively reconfigures space by directly affecting spatial perception.”100

The image of space is what formulates its and its users’ identities. Since the image of space is also actively attached to the public’s collective memory or imagination of it, instead of its reality, mechanisms that “interfere with the meaning of public space by manipulating images that shape its perception”101 can distort the collective’s interpretation of space. As the texture of space is highly expressive of its inhabitant’s identities, and any changes in the spatial image can be traced back to the acts of “defacement” or Latour and Weibel call “iconoclash”.

Stravides: Defacement “Defacaement refers to acts aimed at destroying the ‘face’, the expressive center of something’s or someone’s appearance. By distorting it, by partially hiding the face’s characteristics.”102

As previously discussed, all types of public space (legitimate or immediate) often signify the power that creates and programs it. The spatial image produced enforces ‘desirable’ conditions within its framed extents. Deutinger remarks that “a building is a medium charged with economic cultural, and political value” and “the decision to destroy these buildings specifically targets one of these values.”103 As such, defacement of these spaces would “mean targeting the perceivable characteristics of such space 99 100 101 102 103

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 163-4.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 184.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 184-5.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 185.

Deutinger, “Handbook of Tyranny”, 79.

43

that create its identifiable image”104. Attacking these spaces in public view attacks the sedimented collective memory that has become familiar to the dominant rhythm, it “brings forth ruptures in urban memory […] connected with socially crafted images of public space”105. For both government and dissensus, “defacement produces a comparison between the past and present status”106 of spatial images, making collective memory of the past and present a target of possible re-appropriation. However, this also means that public spaces and their ability to prescribe and protect identities “lose their defining stability and sometimes their attachment to a dominant authority’s control.”107

Defacement is therefore a mechanism that “temporarily convert[s] public space to common space if it triggers forms of collective reinterpretation”108, allowing inhabitants to agree upon what the new public space should look like. Although this can facilitate the positive mechanism of optimizing public space, it also can be exploited to efface the collective memory of justified spatial reclamation.

Defacement performed by the government can be legitimized as a necessity of resolving ‘red zones’, a tabula rasa of the field conditions that only those with temporal rigidity can survive. The effect of this is the “remaking of meaning and use of existing space to control and select their connections with the past, especially those connections based on material remnants.” A way government suppress and preempt dissensus is by erasing the identifiable nodes that dissensus initially converged upon.

The augmentation of spatial images reconditions public to enforce updated ‘desirable’ conditions and behaviors. Although erasure means an oppression to the citizenry’s right to spatial appropriation, much like many strategies the governing can deploy, their actions can be justified, even legitimized, so long as they present itself as an oppressive force. Soft violence of power can play out under the pretense of subjugating public order. In many ways, the aforementioned mechanism of establishing boundaries is defacement of inhabited space under the pretense of generating public space, we just assume it as the agreed-upon responsibility of government to act on the interest of its citizenry.

104 105 106 107 108

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Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 185.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 186.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 186.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 188.

Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 189.

Latour & Weibel: Iconoclash

If the image texture of the city adopts identifiable registrations of its encoder, the space of the city is a collage of these image fragments asserting their claim and influence over the overall reading of the spatial image. If this cacophony of readings is divided and sorted according to their scripters’ affiliation to either governance or dissensus, it would constitute an iconoclash, not to be confused with iconoclasm. Latour writes that iconoclash is not the destruction of spatial images for it is neither concerned nor aware of its repercussions in constructing or destroying spatial character109. Distinct stakeholders are not against the existence of expressive spatial imagery as it is what allows them assert power, they are instead only against the images of their opponents110, hence making them targets of mutual limited iconoclasm111. This implies a certain amount of irreverence towards concession for participants of iconoclash sees opposing imagery as only applicable to their opponent as “real” and “only symbolically”112 to themselves. The contest in this sense is about which spatial textures have true tangibility to city life and truly facilitates urban activity.

109 110 111 112

Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, “Iconoclash”, MIT Press, August 2002, 16.

Latour and Weibel, “Iconoclash”, 28.

Latour and Weibel, “Iconoclash”, 29.

Latour and Weibel, “Iconoclash”, 38.

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Photo by Erin Song on Unsplash

GUIDEBOOK

01

pavement brick

program: collectively form infrastructural elements, e.g. pavements or walls anti-program: removal from infrastructural systems, e.g. projectiles or barricades mechanisms: establishing boundaries, contesting boundaries, creating red zones, protest, resurfacing - the arrangement and material texture of the street signifies the contained boundaries of circulation routes.

- the pavement gives the spatial image of regularity, safety, and predictability to the common rhythm.

- the removal of the bricks signify a destruction to the authority that initially arranged the pavements, for the pavement is governmental assertion on the way we circulate through the space of the city - during the protest they were re-appropriated to create new spatial images - roadblocks and barriers provide a new use for the material texture of the city - instead of signifying uninterrupted, rationalized mobility, it inhibits any movement that is critical to the survival of the city, and the survival of the government - in many instances, the bricks were not repaved, creating a new urban texture and spatial image - it is an inconoclash of the stability and disruption to city life - it is either the inability of government to immediately source the materials or the state removing an instrument of resistance from the populist to prevent future repetition.

Photo by Nicholas Chung

Photo by Pop & Zebra on Unsplash

Photo by Dale De La Rey on GettyImages Nicholas Chung

Photo by Isaac Lawrence of onGettyImages GhettyImages

02

handrail / guardrail

program: divide categories of traffic, protect pedestrians and vehicles from each other anti-program: removal from their fixed positions, often used as barricades mechanisms: establishing boundaries, contesting boundaries, creating red zones, protest, policing, re-surfacing - their installation marks the planar boundary between traffic flows on the street in three dimensions - since the pedestrian and vehicles travel at different speeds, the rail is there to protect them from physically damaging each other, which would disrupt the dominant rhythm of the city.

- their removal and signified existence is seen in the registration of what once existed - the rails are no longer there but the poles still imply where they may be - they continue to exist as part of the street image metaphysically as a perceptual void, asserting the boundary between pavement and motorway

Photo by Isaac Lawrence on GhettyImages

Photo by Nicholas Chung

Photo by Richard Lee on Unsplash

Photo by Anothony Kwan on GettyImages

03

barricades

program: to inhibit specific destructive, or unwanted, flows of circulation anti-program: to inhibit the right of traversing or inhabiting specific spaces mechanisms: establishing boundaries, contesting boundaries, creating red zones, protest, policing - the aggregation of rigid forms to inhibit the movement through space - it can be seen as a means to hold the advancement of a space’s boundary or the fortification of an existing threshold, both stop movement - the material aesthetic of government and dissensus differs as a result their projection of relative temporal and physical rigidity

Photo by Isaac Lawrence on GhettyImages

Photo by Nicolas Asfouri on GhettyImages

Photo by Anthony Wallace on GhettyImages

Photo by Anthony Kwan on GhettyImages

04

‘call to action’ posts

program: to encourage mass action, to disseminate information outside the established institutions anti-program: to encourage behaviors that undermine anyone’s right to inhabited space mechanisms: targeted information dissemination, creating red zones - posts are designed for viewing economy and expediency - majority of posts are in traditional chinese to target a specific demographic (traditional chinese is the first language for a lot of Hong Kong citizens, and it examplifies the divide between Hong Kong and China, which uses simplified chinese nationwide) - leverages the consumption culture of social media, the posts do not ‘choose their targets’ in the conventional sense, for its target is the entire population - it suggests an indifference towards citizenry and populist, but instead values the result of the creation of a ‘mass’ - often used in the creation of unsanctioned ‘flash mobs’ under short time constraints, benefitial to ensure an appropriate distribution of participants according to programatic necessity - the quantity and the frequency and occurance on one’s feed is meant to enforce the notion of the existence of a mass, even if there is not, to persuade the audience that participation is fitting in and that the ‘mass’ guarantees a degree of anonymity as protection - social media as a new space is incapable of being bound by defined thresholds, making it the new public space where information dissemination has the greatest potential to be holistic, it allows for readings at various scales of detail - swarm intellegence: allow for the direct communication between any participant who has access to the internet - difficult to hold accountability: since the same information is distributed by a large number of users across a wide range of platforms, it is difficult to trace the origin of these posts, further enhancing the effect of the mob with no specific identity

05

le tter of no objection

program: to form an agreement with participants in regulating exceptional rhythms in society in order to maintain a specific spatial image of protest anti-program: to engage in activities beyond agreed upon conditions, to supress the right to dissensus mechanisms: establishing boundaries, creating red zones, surveillance, policing - protests are generally agreed upon between government and dissensus a week in advance - this allows the citizenry to exercise their right to dissent whilst the government can reassure those who do not participate, or those who rely on the continued operations of the city, that everything will be under control - it anticipates the appropriation of space whilst avoiding the total collapse of public life - it is in the interest of both government and dissensus to avoid such an outcome for it will destabilize public confidence in both CONVERSELY - letters of objection are due to either the inability of government to accommodate the needs of both dissensus and remaining citizens or an intentional oppression of the right to dissent

Photo by dimsumdaily.hk

06

masks

program: protection, creating an anonymous collective anti-program: a means to escape accountability for individual acts of power assertion mechanisms: surveillance, assuming identities, policing - the mask is a protection of identity against political retribution - it signifies its own anonymity and a uniformity added to all individual identities - the formation of the collective who all can only be defined by their inability to be identified - the mask is an allusion to the repeated/stereotyped history and culture of dissent - the mask as a protection against the environment, e.g. tear gas toxins

Photo by Joseph Chan on Unsplash

Photo by hk90s_photolifes on Instagram

Photo by Isaac Lawrence on GettyImages

Photo by ky0606_ on Instagrams

Photo by SOPA on GettyImages

Photo by Isaac Lawerence on GettyImages

Photo by Nicolas Asfouri on GhettyImages

07

police uniform

program: creating a collective, uniform identity, allow for identification for accountability, protection against bodily harm anti-program: becoming an unaccountable anonymous mass mechanisms: surveillance, identity, policing, targeted information dissemination - uniformity: a collective operating under the same agenda, thereby defined through collective autonomy - relative anonymity: the police officer has two identities, the first being an instrument of the state and the second being their private identity - the two should not conflate, as such their uniform should conceal its user’s private identity and only project the collective authority of every police officer (through an identification number) - the intentional obscuring of identity: officers who intentionally hide the means to be identified are dissolving themselves of accountability, thereby destabilizing the legitimacy and public confidence of the police as an institution - same as protesters who wear a mask, it removes all identifiable characteristics aside from not being able to be identified

Photo by Stand News

Photo by 1.490 on Instagram

Photo by Laurel Chor on GettyImages

08

water cannon

program: crowd control as a means of policing anti-program: a weapon deployed with malicious intent mechanisms: creating red zones, protest, policing - an instrument of crowd control - high-pressure jet shooting water from a tank - blue-colored water is sprayed as to tag its targets to later be identified, a measure for combating anonymity - vehicle is armored against destruction due to its tactical importance

Photo by SOPA on GettyImages

Photo by Dale De La Rey on GettyImages

09

tear gas

program: crowd control as a means of policing anti-program: a weapon deployed with malicious intent mechanisms: creating red zones, protest, policing - a strategy for crowd control - gas fired in grenade canisters that cause skin and respiratory irritation - limited quantity is sufficient to break up crowds - excessive use will case environmental pollution due to Dioxin (a carcinogen) - the city as a toxic environment to discourage public activity (see image below) - protestors would throw cannisters of tear gas back at the police as an act of resistance to power - it also aims to deter the advancement of the police as collective force

Tally of figures released in police briefings

Photo by Aaron Tam on GettyImages

Photo by Philip Fong on GettyImages

Photo by Isaac Lawerence on GettyImages

Photo by Billy H.C Kwok on GettyImages

Photo from GettyImages

10

buses

program: a means of traversing through public space between pre-designated identities and spatial images anti-program: its immobility, becoming a temporal space without ground mechanisms: establishing boundaries, contesting boundaries, public transport, protest - buses were targeted for facilitating the modes and routes of circulation enforced by the government to help the government regulate and monitor movement of individuals - buses trapped by protestors face the irony of advancing slower than the pace of walking, thereby disenchanting the speed promised by bureaucracy - as opposed to a defined moving space that brings people between two defined spatial images (i.e. the departing bus stop and the stop one disembarks), the bus becomes a space in limbo for it can no longer be defined - the meaning of the city and circulation is understood by both governance and dissensus - in certain cases, the mass protects the right to passage and sustains the ‘life’ of the city by allowing transit to continue

Photo by Carl Court on GettyImages

Photo by Chris McGrath on GettyImages

11

MTR

program: mass transit, facilitating or expediting travel anti-program: its destruction / inability to operate mechanisms: public transportation, creating red zones, policing - the MTR is short for Mass Transit Railway - it is an artificial system of circulation designed and modulated to connect specific spaces, and as such giving them, or deriving from them, significance - it is its own circulatory system, meaning there is no competition in traffic, creating an idealized flow of non-stop movement - a robust transport system is necessary for both government and dissensus in order to perform in space - its vandalism and intentional destruction is an act of dissent against the institutions that designed, authorized, and operates the spatial images, experiences, and conditions that the rail system proliferates - its closure is an act to forcefully inhibit mobility of the citizenry, making the congregation and movement of masses more difficult - it is also a disruption to the dominant rhythm, rendering the entire city as a red zone - the attack on its users is an attack on the citizenry that complies, of feigns compliance, to social conditioning of the state

Photo by 01 News

Photo by Anthony Kwan on GettyImages

Photo by Anthony Kwan on GettyImages

12

MTR exits

program: facilitate movement and transit between flows of traffic, integrating in between different spatial textures anti-program: the distortion of spatial image, restrictions to travel mechanisms: creating red zones, public transportation, protest, policing, re-surfacing - thresholds leading underground, entry conditions to traverse between two sets of circulation systems - convergence of material conditions between above ground (variable) and below ground (standardized) - its permanent material conditions enforces itself as part of the ground, resistant to time and programs - its re-appropriation leverages its necessity for traversing through the city - the new surface evokes a highly irregular spatial image, thereby drawing attention - its forced closure is a means to limit mobility of the citizenry, a right of the government within red zones

Photo by Billy H.C. Kwok on GettyImages

Photo by Philip Fong on GettyImages

Photo by Chris McGrath on GettyImages

Photo by Isaac Lawerence on GettyImages

13

ticket gates

program: regulate the passages of the city, modulate speeds and population of movement anti-program: inhibiting the freedom to move, the negation of the boundary conditions mechanisms: establishing boundaries, contesting boundaries, surveillance, assuming identities, public transportation - if the continuous passage of the city is to be regulated, the gate is the mechanism to both control population in undefined space as well as affirming the identity of citizens - to pass through them is to comply with the conditions set out by government in order to access a ‘liberating anonymity’, to be allowed to use public space with a degree of freedom - the indifferent attitude towards the gate or its intentional destruction signifies a disapproval of government’s regulation on fixed identity as well as fixed circulation

Photo by Anadolu Agency on GettyImages

Photo by Philip Fong on GettyImages

Photo by Anthony Wallace on GettyImages

Photo by Billy H.C. Kwok on GettyImages

14

bridges

program: pathways of circulation, different categories of traffic segregated anti-program: disruption/inhibition of traffic flows mechanisms: establishing boundaries, contesting boundaries, creating red zones, public transportation, protest, policing - the bridge as a linear path of circulation, and only accessible to linear movement, one cannot interject midway - this creates a tension between origin and destination, between two camps that entrap and advance - the texture of iconoclash and physical material clash comes to a head, creating a limited frame of conflict manifested - the cross-inhabitation of traffic lanes also contests the boundaries of each circulation path designated by the government to monitor movement - the escape from this linear pressurized pathway is not impossible, though requires drastic strategies (such as roping down from the sides)

Photo by Anthony Kwan on GettyImages

Photo by Chris McGrath on GettyImages

Photo by Anthony Wallace on GettyImages

Photo by Bloomberg on GettyImages

15

cctv cameras

program: maintaining and enforcing prescribed spatial images, programs, identities anti-program: infringement on the citizenry’s right to identity/identities mechanisms: surveillance, creating red zones, assuming identites, policing - ironically, surveillance becomes visible, and even accentuated, by their destruction for they are designed to blend into the generic spatial image of the city - They generally blend into the material texture of the city, as to avoid intentionally drawing attention, thereby enabling the government to avoid identities become artificial as the populist feign compliance when they are aware of the cameras - the data from these cameras are highly contested, for they are voyeurs of the city and can be a tool that incriminates both dissensus and the government

Photo by SOPA Images on GettyImages

Photo by SOPA Images on GettyImages

Screenshot form South China Morning Post

Photo by Nicholas Chung

Photo by NurPhoto on GettyImages

16

the press (vest, camera, screen)

program: to be the eyes of the public, allowing for the citizenry to survey public space anti-program: biased towards showing an asymmetrical spatial image of public space mechanisms: surveillance, assuming identities, policing, targeted information dissemination - if the cctv cameras are the eyes of the state that surveil the city, the camera of news and journalists are the eyes of the citizenry - the space of the city can now be groundless as the viewer can be a passive inhabitant of the spaces of conflict - journalists wear a high-visibility jacket with the word “PRESS� in both Chinese and English on it, as to designate their role as voyeurs and supposed neutrality - it is therefore important that they are not targeted or obstructed - the press becomes a target of the state when their objective reporting of an unfolding situation can destabilize the legitimacy of either side’s appropriation of space - their antagonization by the state and law enforcement can be either a natural condition of red zones or an abuse of power

Photo by AFPTV on GettyImages

Photo by SOPA Images on GettyImages

Photo by Bloomberg on GettyImages

Photo by Dale De La Rey on GettyImages

17

blue or yellow

program: enforcing identities, encouraging specific action anti-program: encouraging biased violence mechanisms: assuming identities, targeted information dissemination, re-surfacing reference: Hannah Beech, “Yellow or Blue? In Hong Kong, Businesses Choose Political Sides” in The New York Times, 19 Jan 2020.

- an example of swarm intelligence enacting relocation - businesses take ‘political stance’ to avoid retribution from either government or citizenry - blue businesses are pro-establishment whilst yellow businesses voice their support to the dissensus, the former becoming a target of dissensus whilst the latter becomes identifiable nodes of resistance - spatial image becomes highly polarized - information is circulated on social media in order to update and inform entire population - it is less about endorsing a specific course of action but more about informing the citizenry about how their identities will be distorted by possible actions

Photo by Lam Yik Fei on New York Times

Photo by Lam Yik Fei on New York Times

18

le nnon walls

program: formation of collective identity, information sharing anti-program: vandalism of public surface and authorized spatial image mechanisms: creating red zones, public transportation, protest, targeted information dissemination, re-surfacing - reinscription of public surface creates a commonly identifiable space to congregate and share information - it also becomes a new type of public space with its temporality limited by its nonremoval - it re-textures the spatial image and experience of traversing between defined programs, making non-space a specified destination - its existence on the street, a non-space, also amplifies the lack of boundary and infinite expansiveness of information - the ‘surface’ of the street is not limited to walls and pavements, moving components such as people and transportation can also be treated as targets of image appropriation

Photo by Nicolas Asfouri on GettyImages

Photo by SOPA Images on GettyImages

Photo by Chris McGrath on GettyImages

Photo by Anthony Wallace on GettyImages

Photo by Anthony Wallace on GettyImages

19

effaced streets

program: the destabilization of red zones, removal of dissent images anti-program: removal of dissent images, opposing freedom of appropriation mechanisms: creating red zones, policing, targeted information dissemination, resurfacing - effacement is often committed by the ‘citizen police’, who work to maintain the spatial image of the state in an unofficial capacity - effacement by the government happens under the guise of defacement, meaning a non-total removal of spatial images in order to not ‘infringe on the rights of the citizenry’ - acts of effacement are often non-symmetrical and biased - the intentional targeting, or iconoclash, of spatial image and identity in order to remove subtext that undermine one’s own authority - not necessarily an act of total removal, but a register of evident inability to further re-appropriate in the future

Photo by Nicolas Asfouri on GettyImages

Photo by Bloomberg on GettyImages

Photo by Anthony Kwan on GettyImages Photo by Nicholas Chung

Photo by Chris McGrath on GettyImages

Photo by SOPA Images on GettyImages

Photo by Bloomberg on GettyImages

20

dried bamboo stalks (scaffolding)

program: construction scaffolding anti-program: destruction, make-shift construction, e.g. catapults, barriers, watchtowers mechanisms: Contesting boundaries, creating red zones, re-surfacing - bamboo stalks are used as scaffolding during building construction - it provides a net that contains the unstable image of a building as well as providing a means of traversing vertically and laterally - it is a skin that stabilizes the condition of construction and inhabitation as a still, monolithic image - its re-appropriation by dissensus subverts the common association of construction to establish instruments that disrupt or destroy the common rhythm and image of the city - similar to how a matrix of stalks freezes the dynamic image of a building, its redeployment on the ground freezes the dynamism of the street and its traffic - both suggest a space in progress, in emergence, without concrete definition in performance and identity

Photo by Gerhard Joren

Photo by Roman Becker

Photo byPhilippe Gerber

Photo by Phlip Fong

Photo by SOPA Images

Photo by SOPA Images

MAP OF VIRTUAL CITY 01

pavement brick

02

handrail / guardrail

03

barricades

04

‘call to action’ posts

05

letter of no objection

06

masks

07

police uniform

08

water cannon

09

tear gas

10

buses

11

mtr

12

mtr exits

13

ticket gates

14

bridges

15

cctv cameras

16

the press (vest, camera, screen)

17

blue or yellow

18

lennon walls

19

effaced street

20

dried bamboo stalks (scaffolding)

[public library]

20

02

03

04

12

01

11

20

09

[shopping mall]

17

05

[police headquarters]

10 18

06

15

08

07

[transit terminal]

16

19

14

12

15 [government headquareters]

13

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beech, Hannah. “Yellow or Blue? In Hong Kong, Businesses Choose Political Sides”. The New York Times, 19 Jan 2020. https://www. nytimes.com/2020/01/19/world/asia/hong-kong-protests-yellowblue.html

Deutinger, Theo. Handbook of Tyranny. Lars Muller Publishers, 2018.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alex Sherdian, Vintage Books, April 1995.

Hollein, Hans. Alles ist Architektur. Bau, 1968.

Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel. Iconoclash. MIT Press, August 2002.

90

Lefebvre, Henri. Writings on Cities. Wiley-Blackwell, 1996.

PROVO. The Technique of How to Provocate. In Bamn: Outlaw Manifestos and Ephemera, edited by Peter Stansill and David Zane Mairowitz, Penguin Books Ltd, 1971.

Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics.

Edited and translated by Steven Corcoran, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010.

Stavrides, Stavros. The City as Commons. Zed Books Ltd., 2016.

Stavrides, Stavros. Towards the City of Thresholds.

Professional Dreamers, 2010.

91

The Contested Street

by Tsz Man Nicholas CHUNG First Edition, May 2020 Originally submitted as Exhibiting Theory for ARC242 - Architectural Theory at Syracuse University School of Architecture Advised by Assistant Professor Britt Eversole