Spatialise Your Discourse

On Space (reflections on studying place under Waheed Chaker and Peter Allison)

Autumn 2026

The city, one might argue, was first properly understood by people who simply went for a walk and paid attention. Walter Benjamin, a Berlin critic of formidable learning and hopeless practicality, spent the years between 1927 and 1940 filling notebooks about the glass-roofed shopping arcades of Paris, which he regarded as the dream-houses of the nineteenth century. He borrowed from Baudelaire the figure of the flâneur, the idle gentleman stroller who reads the street as other men read newspapers, and turned him into a whole theory of modern life. The Arcades Project was never finished. Benjamin died fleeing the Nazis at the Spanish border in 1940, and the manuscript survived only because Georges Bataille hid it in the Bibliothèque nationale. Two decades later Guy Debord and his fellow Situationists took the stroll and made it mutinous. Their dérive, or drift, involved wandering the city with no purpose other than to notice how it pushed and pulled at you, a practice they called psychogeography. Debord once cut up a map of Paris and rearranged the pieces according to mood rather than geography, which is more or less how Birmingham should be navigated.

If Benjamin and Debord were interested in the street, Gaston Bachelard was interested in the bit you retreat to afterwards. A postal clerk from Bar-sur-Aube who became a philosopher of science and then, rather late and apparently to his own surprise, a philosopher of daydreams, he wrote The Poetics of Space in 1958. It argues, with great tenderness and not a single floor plan, that the house is essentially a machine for dreaming, with the cellar holding our fears, the attic our reveries, and the corners our wish to curl up and disappear. I have read it twice and still cannot tell you exactly what it says, only that I came away feeling I ought to be kinder to my loft. Michel Foucault, bald, turtlenecked and not obviously a man given to reveries in attics, looked at the same rooms and saw something far less cosy. In Discipline and Punish (1975) he revived Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, a prison in which a single unseen guard can watch every cell, and argued that modern schools, barracks, hospitals and factories were all built on the same principle. He also gave a lecture to a room of architects in 1967 on "heterotopias", those strange other-spaces such as cemeteries, gardens and ships that sit slightly outside ordinary life. The ship, he concluded, was the heterotopia par excellence, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has spent a night on a cross-Channel ferry.

Henri Lefebvre, a Marxist who lived to ninety and seemed to disagree with most people for most of that time, took the argument out of the building and into the whole of society. For him space was not a neutral container but something society manufactures, like shoes or tinned peaches, and The Production of Space (1974) sets out to explain who does the manufacturing and who gets stuck with the result. His earlier and much shorter The Right to the City (1968) has since become a slogan on banners from São Paulo to Hackney. David Harvey, a geographer from Gillingham who decamped to Johns Hopkins, picked up Lefebvre's baton and has been running with it ever since, cheerfully explaining that when capitalism has a surplus of money with nowhere to go it tends to pour it into concrete or in The Donald’s case, ballrooms. Having looked at the Nine Elms skyline, I find this hard to argue with. Harvey has also been teaching Marx's Capital to anyone who will listen for half a century, latterly online, so that there are now teenagers in Ohio who can explain the spatial fix better than most planning committees.

No discussion of cities can proceed for long without Le Corbusier turning up, round spectacles glinting, to propose knocking something down. Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in Switzerland, he gave himself a one-word name, as pop stars later would, and in 1925 unveiled the Plan Voisin, which suggested flattening much of central Paris and replacing it with identical cruciform towers set in parkland. Paris, to its eternal credit, said no. He described the house as a machine for living in, which is true in the sense that a washing machine is also a machine and nobody wants to live in one. Jane Jacobs, who had no architecture degree and no particular respect for anyone who did, spent the 1960s dismantling this entire outlook from her front step in Greenwich Village. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) observed, with devastating common sense, that streets are safe when people are watching them, that mixed uses beat tidy zones, and that old buildings matter because they are cheap. She then helped stop Robert Moses from driving an expressway through Lower Manhattan, which is roughly the urbanist equivalent of David felling Goliath with a sharply worded pamphlet and is most ably recorded in Joni Mitchell’s lines “they paved paradise and they put up a parking lot”.

While Jacobs was sitting on her step, two other men were trying to work out what the city actually looks like from the inside. Kevin Lynch, at MIT, went to Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles and asked ordinary residents to draw maps of their neighbourhoods from memory. From the results, published as The Image of the City in 1960, he extracted five elements (paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks) that people use to hold a city in their heads. Bostonians drew rich, confident maps. The people of Jersey City, poor souls, largely struggled to draw anything at all, which tells you something about Jersey City. Gordon Cullen, an illustrator at the Architectural Review, took a more painterly approach. His Townscape (1961) proposed "serial vision", the idea that a street is best understood as a sequence of unfolding views, each glimpse of a spire or turn of a lane teasing you onward. He made his case almost entirely in charming little pen drawings, and the result did more to shape British conservation areas than any number of government circulars.

Christopher Alexander, a Viennese-born mathematician turned architect, thought that the problem with modern planning was structural in the most literal sense. In a celebrated 1965 essay, "A City Is Not a Tree", he argued that planners laid out cities like branching diagrams, with every function neatly in its box, whereas real cities are tangled, overlapping lattices where the newsagent, the bus stop and the bench all quietly depend on one another. He followed this with A Pattern Language (1977), a 1,100-page compendium of 253 design patterns running from the scale of an entire region down to the height of a window seat. Architects mostly ignored it; software engineers adored it, which is why the wiki exists. Jan Gehl, a Danish architect who credits his psychologist wife for making him wonder why people behave as they do in public, simply went out and counted them. For years he stood on Copenhagen's Strøget, pedestrianised in 1962, with a clipboard and a stopwatch, recording who walked, who sat and who lingered. Life Between Buildings (1971) turned that patient loitering into a method, and when New York closed Broadway through Times Square to traffic in 2009, it was Gehl's clipboard it had in mind.

The Italians, meanwhile, were having a different conversation, conducted largely in Milan and Venice and principally, as far as I can make out, over whether a city remembers things. Aldo Rossi said it does. In The Architecture of the City (1966) he argued that buildings are vessels of collective memory and that cities are assembled from recurring types (the courtyard, the arcade, the portico) that outlast whatever use the buildings were originally for. His cemetery at Modena, all bone-white ranks of square windows, looks like a place that has been expecting you for some time. Carlo Aymonino, his colleague and sparring partner, oversaw the Gallaratese housing complex outside Milan and generously let Rossi design one block of it, which is rather like inviting a friend to your party and watching him become the only thing anyone photographs. Giorgio Grassi, the sternest of the three, believed architecture should be logical, restrained and entirely free of showing off, and he proved it by restoring the Roman theatre at Sagunto so thoroughly that the Spanish courts ruled it should be undone. It takes real conviction to annoy a supreme court with brickwork.

In 1978 two books appeared that looked at the modern city and drew spectacularly opposite conclusions. The first was Collage City, by Colin Rowe, an English architectural historian who had settled at Cornell, and his colleague Fred Koetter. Rowe's great trick was the figure-ground drawing, in which buildings are shown in black and open space in white. Set the dense, carved streets of Parma beside Le Corbusier's plan for Saint-Dié and the two images are almost exact negatives of each other, one all solid with pockets of space, the other all space with a few lonely objects. Rowe's conclusion was that cities work best as collages, patchworks of fragments from different eras, rather than as grand utopian schemes. The second book was Delirious New York, by Rem Koolhaas, who had passed through Cornell himself a few years earlier and was evidently not persuaded. Koolhaas arrived at architecture from journalism and a stint writing screenplays (one of them for Russ Meyer, which is not a sentence you expect to read in an architectural biography), and he proposed that Manhattan had been following a wild, unwritten manifesto all along, and that he would kindly write it down for it. Where Rowe saw congestion as something to be tamed, Koolhaas saw it as the whole point, and he has since given the world the Bigness theory, the essay "Junkspace" and the CCTV headquarters in Beijing, which looks like a building that tripped on the way to the party and decided to style it out.

Two thinkers of the 1980s and 1990s took London as their laboratory and came back with the same insight at entirely different scales, namely that what matters about a place is how it is connected. Saskia Sassen, a Dutch-born sociologist raised in Buenos Aires, argued in The Global City (1991) that New York, London and Tokyo had become the command centres of the world economy, more tightly bound to one another than to the countries around them. The City of London, in her account, has more in common with Wall Street than with Wolverhampton, which Wolverhampton could have told you for free. Bill Hillier, at the Bartlett, looked at London from about three feet off the pavement. He invented space syntax, a method for measuring how easily you can get from one place to another and then predicting, with unnerving accuracy, where people will walk, loiter, shop and get mugged. It was his team's analysis that helped persuade everyone that pedestrianising the north side of Trafalgar Square would work, so the next time you stroll past the National Gallery without dodging a bus you may thank a mathematician. Sassen traced flows of capital between continents and Hillier traced flows of pedestrians between street corners, and between them you have a fair picture of why rents in Soho are what they are.

It seems only fair to end with two men who spent their careers noticing that places were quietly turning into nowhere. The first was Ian Nairn, a former RAF pilot with a mathematics degree and no architectural training whatsoever, who in 1955 filled a special issue of the Architectural Review with a furious polemic called Outrage. In it he coined the word "subtopia" for the smear of lamp posts, car parks, wire fences and municipal verges spreading across Britain until Southampton and Carlisle were indistinguishable. He went on to write Nairn's London, still the best guidebook to the city ever produced, and to present BBC programmes in which he wandered through Leeds and Stockport in a crumpled mac, looking as though he had just stepped out of a pub, which he usually had. He died in 1983 at fifty-two, largely of drink, and London has been a little less well observed ever since. Nearly forty years after Outrage, the French anthropologist Marc Augé, who had done his fieldwork in Côte d'Ivoire and then, rather more bravely, on the Paris Métro, arrived at much the same place by a far more scholarly route. His 1992 book Non-Places argued that airports, motorway service stations, hotel chains and supermarkets are spaces designed to be passed through rather than lived in, where nobody knows you and the only history on offer is the next departure. Nairn raged about this and Augé merely described it, but anyone who has eaten a panini at Membury services at eleven at night will recognise that they were both right