AE120: City and Festival Walking Assignment

Marlisa Wise March 7, 2007

Simultaneously constructing and constructed, cities function as powerful environments for their inhabitants regardless of time or location. Their teeming agglomeration of human lives, ideas, agendas and ambitions create a fertile environment for the individual and the collective. The complex and simultaneous nature of intra-city networks allow us to inhabit vastly different mental and emotional states in the same location. Depending upon an individual’s membership and status in various social groups, each is equipped to experience the same space in entirely divergent manners. The essential point is that varying experiences of space simultaneously construct identities and construct the inhabited space. Where we are often is who we are, and vice versa.

It is not only the location we inhabit at a given time that constructs our identities but the traces of our prior spatial experiences as well – an archeological investigation of a human consciousness would reveal much about the places of their past. An example: a woman in her late sixties told me a few days ago about the town she grew up in and about the ties that hold her there. Though she has lived in Providence for thirty years, she still refers to Ukraine as “my country”. She told me that as a little girl, if she was worried or afraid of anything, she would wake up early in the morning to run to the local church. There she found small stones to put deep into her pockets and to tie onto her skirt with strings to keep her safe. She told me that the ground there was strong, that it protected her in her childhood and that sometimes even now she wakes up early in the morning, missing those stones and that dirt, missing the protection of her homeland. Our patterns of movement and the meanings of spaces inform our emotions, thoughts and souls.

When I walk the streets of Providence, I also fill my pockets with stones and broken bits of glass. I have jars full of them in my house, I find glass and rocks inside my clothes and my bags; I give handfuls of them to my lover when I want him to feel the pull of Providence. There is no denying that the experience of space is deeply psychological, that the design and practice of space reveal social structures and form identities. Since the early twentieth century, individual and social practices of space have been explored, uncovered and researched. Treated varyingly as a living organism, a tool of capitalism, an alienating mechanized world, and as a site of liberation, urban space has occupied a range of imaginary places and functions. For, it is what we imagine a city to be that makes a city itself. We are the transforming, destructing, creating force, our own city of a thousand gods.

As with most things, one’s experience of the city is a matter of perspective. For the scheming Modernist Corbusier, a totalizing vision from an airplane gave him the inspiration to recreate Paris[1]. The Marxist perspective from the ghettoes reveals power structures built into concrete and mortar; for feminists the public sidewalks are a constant performance of gender roles, identity-constructing forces in the city’s interstices. These material and bodily concerns are essential to an understanding of the city at street level. Today, with the privatization of public space and ever-accelerating invasion of surveillance technologies into private space it is more than ever imperative to grapple with the urban environment’s relation to the individual. The wild and dangerous urbanity which urban planners have attempted to combat is merely the humanity of the city, its human element in agglomeration. Lewis Mumford wrote of this culture growing as “an overgrowth of formless new tissue[2]”, while Rem Koolhaas terms it junkspace, a hyperreal environment of infinite possibility and dubious value. He writes, “junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fall-out”[3]. Yet this (over)growth is a manifestation of the populace as any urban landscape must inherently be- and it should be examined with curious attention rather than didactic attacks. For an investigation of our city (Providence) a Situationist derivè is in order, to remove the experience from schools of urbanism and create a direct connection.

Treatments of the city cannot take the same approach to urban life after the contributions of the Situationist Internationale. A methodological challenge to our experience of space was issued in the Situationist movement of the 1960s; articulated by theorist Guy Debord. Debord’s theory of the derivè (an intentional wander through the city) still haunts much of contemporary urban theory from Benjamin to Koolhaas. The Situationist derivè attempts to rupture our normal experience of space, to take us out of the gullies we’ve worn into the pavement traveling our daily routines. We experience old streets anew and discover unknown places, redefining the landscape and feeling its multitudinous nature. What follows is the record of my own Providence derivè.

I began my derivè with a friend on my arm who decided to go to a laundromat I’d never been to, where no one spoke and everyone looked uncomfortable. A clear feeling hung in the air among these strangers that all would rather be elsewhere. The space felt rejected by its own inhabitants’ yearnings to leave - we left…. and headed up an empty street. No cars, no pedestrians, cold wind and my friend’s cold hands shaking as they held her cigarette. College Hill is empty on a cold Sunday, the space is alive on a defined schedule (weekdays for University related activities and weekend nights for debauchery). Only passing by the Rockefeller Library did we see more than one person in one place. Down the hill, more cars on Benefit street and then behind the RISD architecture building, public art in an isolated location. Between the building and the canal a gleaming metallic circle rested on a pedestal, while the other sculpture (of a human male) stood half submerged in the water of the canal.

This empty pedestrian space, designed for recreation, decorated with public art and made so explicitly public, was unoccupied except for a few architecture students on a cigarette break. I continued my walk over the canals and into the downtown financial area, Westminster Street as my entry point to the area. Getting excited by the increased amounts of human inhabitants, I began moving up and down the streets without aim, watching the people moving in and out of storefronts, women getting out of cars and children pulled down the streets by their hands. Turning a corner I heard noise, as I walked it became music and at the corner of the next street I found the bright red door where the sounds came from. Inside a band was practicing on this early afternoon, their muffled sounds enticing. We pressed our ears against the door imagining the musicians inside, trying to decipher the song. It was audible but unrecognizable, our ears got frozen by the cold metal and we were beaming with delight at the discovery. Music found amongst sterile-seeming skyscrapers, proof of the creative spark in our downtown.

Rambling through the streets I caught only snippets of conversations, mother to child and lover to lover – I speculated about their relationships and eagerly listened for the next passerby. We continued to walk, passing suited men and the bellboys who stood stoic in the cold, talking to each other and rubbing their hands together. On Empire Street we turned left up the slope that siphoned a line of cars over the bridge and onto the West side of Providence. The median stood in the middle of converging traffic, an unused remnant of urban space without purpose, design or inhabitants – seen and forgotten, rendered irrelevant by the flowing traffic and the choices of some anonymous civic designer.

Across the bridge, passing over the flowing highways and onto Broad Street. I am stopped short by the watery feeling of the roadway. The highway divides and defines Providence the way that rivers have defined urban growth for thousands of years. Paris and the Seine, Karkemish and the Euphrates: in modern times our cities grow against the pulsing highways which bring in trade and travelers like the ancient waterways.

From the Western side of the bridge I look back at the tall buildings of the downtown area and the brick wall formed by the buildings of College Hill, which looks like a walled city from this distance. In fact, College Hill does function as an exclusive and ‘walled’ city unto itself with a distinct community, with separate function and rhythmsfrom the larger city. Turning back toward the West I see the change in building materials and form. Buildings on this side of the highway are shorter, with vinyl siding and wood as dominant materials. Downtown was all glass and steel and concrete, College Hill all brick and well-kept historic houses. So far my walk had taken me on a descent from an exclusive and elevated area down into a forest of skyscrapers, bustling with visitors and workers (but without many residents) over a bridge and into a flattened landscape of cheap materials and mixed-use neighborhoods.

Here I found taquerìas and Pho restaurants, karate studios above houses, a school across the street from stores and house alike. Unlike the unused and ignored downtown median strips, here a cemetery that occupied a median strip between two gas stations and a Kentucky Fried Chicken, traffic flowing around headstones. The change from areas of strict zoning to one of mixed-use made the area seek more alive, vibrant and dynamic – for without the isolation that is the byproduct of zoning, various functions and rhythms confront each other, exist simultaneously in a shared space.

The population was more ethnically diverse, lower-income and there were far more bus stops along the roads. Public transportation altered the way these people experienced the city, taking the bus to get to work and seeing their landscape along the same route each day. The manner of travel through space for residents of the West Side, for the businessmen, for the students, and for the residents of various neighborhoods limit the way the space can be experienced. As the cars on the highway I crossed circle the city of Providence, they see the backsides of downtown buildings, the curves of the road and the off ramps. The bus passengers recognize stops on each route, the pedestrians have their habitual path over the city sidewalks – and today I had been different. By my Situationist-inspired derivè I had broken my routine experience of the city I live in; Providence was born into a new light.

The evening was coming on fast, the sun sinking on a cloudy day in that way that feels like slowly dimming lights, no colorful sunset, just the absence of day. My friend and I walked over to White Electric, a favorite coffee shop of ours to warm up and prepare for the walk back under a darkened sky. The coffee shop had been a tractor part store about 15 years ago, abandoned and reborn as a café where most of the clients were young and well-dressed. It was another place where I could view the habits of strangers, listening to the baristas discussing their regulars in quiet voices. The seat next to me was bent in the center, an imprint of many customers sitting in the same place, the dent an imprint of their habits. Customers here, all strangers together, created a very different atmosphere than that of the Laundromat. The coffee shop space was a destination, rather than a means to an end like the laundromat, and it was palpable in the air, in the smiles exchanged by strangers as a silent agreement that the situation was a thoroughly pleasant one.

Retracing our steps the city was filled with its new nighttime crowds, the red door was silent and the businesspeople had gone home. We walked back to the Laundromat, carried back up along the city’s paths to where we had begun, passing through familiar spaces with an altered perspective.

It is the rupture in vision that often provides the most fruitful sight. The practice of derivè offers a simple and accessible way to throw off the shackles of urban routine, to break with habit and embrace our environment wholeheartedly, to dive into the city and emerge with fuller understanding of urban life. This was the goal and the achievement of my walk through Providence, a way to hold the city up to the light for examination. At the end of the derivè my pockets were full of stones I had picked up along the way, I felt the city’s embrace and re-imagined the landscape as I walked through my home.

[1]DeCertau, Michel, “Walking in the City” in The practice of everyday life. S. Rendall (trans.), University of California Press: Berkeley, 91-110.

[2] Mumford, Lewis, The City in History, Hardmondsworth, 1960, p.619.

[3] Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace” in Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, Harvard Press, 2003.