Cognitive Mapping: New York vs Philadelphia

The Hieroglyphics of Space Reading and experiencing the modern metro 3olis First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London E C4P 4E E E dited by Neil Leach zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONM Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group 0 2002 Selection and editorial material: Neil Leach; individual chapters: the contributor The right of Neil Leach to be identified as the E ditor of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Typeset in Galliard by Taylor and Francis Books Ltd Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA British L ibrary Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library L ibrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Library of Congress Data for this book has been applied for ISBN 0-415-19891-7 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-19892-5 (pbk) T is rl -1\7,‘x, Arf-srdr The legible metropolis 30 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 37 Hermann Bahr, 'Otto Wagner', E ssays von Hermann Bahr, ed. Heinz Kindermann, Vienna, 1960, pp. 283-4. 38 See, for example, Fritz Schumacher, 'Die Sehnsucht nach dem "Nenen"', Deutsche Bauzeitung, 31 (1897): 629-32. 39 Otto Wagner, 'Moderne Architektur', p. 263. 40 Otto Wagner, Modern A rchitecture, p. 109. 41 Otto Wagner, Modern A rchitecture, p. 103 42 See Otto A. Graf, Der Bauk unst der E ros, Vienna, 1996, for details of Wagner's early work and the personal context. 43 Otto Wagner, E inige Sk izzen, Projek ten und ausgefiihrte Baniverk e, Tubingen, 1987, p. 17. 44 Otto Wagner, Modern A rchitecture, p. 79. 45 Freiherr von Feldegg, 'Wiens zwcite Renaissance', Der A rchitek t, 1, (1895): 1-2. of the symbolic significance of the Ringstrasse, see Carl E . Schorske, 46 For a Fin-de-Siecle V ienna, London, 1980. 47 On the city railway in detail see Gunter Kolb, Otto 1V agner mid die Wiener Stadthahn, Munich, 1989. 48 On the increasing opposition to Wagner see Peter Haiko, Otto Wagner und das Kaiser Franz Josef-Stadtmuseum, Vienna, 1988. 49 On Lueger's policy see John W. Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in V ienna, Chicago, IL, 1996. 50 Otto Wagner, `Anttritsrede Otto Wagners, 1894', in Marco Pozzetto, Die Schule, Otto Wagners. 1894-1912, Vienna, 1980, pp. 144-6. 51 See Graf (ed.), Otto Wagner, 1, pp. 88-122. 52 Otto Wagner, Die Grossstadt, Vienna, 1911, p. 21. 53 Sec Sitte, City Planning. 54 On Freud, see Anthony Vidler, The A rchitectural Uncanny: E ssays in the .1Thdern Unhandy, Cambridge, MA, 1992. 55 See Christine M. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, Cambridge, MA, 1996. 56 Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, Cambridge, MA, 1994. 57 Wagner, `Die Grossstadt', in Graf (ed.), Otto Wagner Das Mile, II, p. 641. 58 See the articles on architecture in A.F. Seligman, Kunst and Kiinstler von gestern und heute, Vienna, 1910. 59 See Joseph Bayer, `Die Moderne und die historische Baustyle', Nene Freie Presse, 3 April 1902. 60 See Karl Henrici, `Moderne Architektur', Deutsche Bauzeitung, .X *4XX1, (1897): 14-20. 61 Adolf Loos, 'Ornament and Crime', in The A rchitecture ifA dolf L oos, London, 1897, p. 101. 62 Karl Kraus, 'The Demolished Literature', in The V ienna Coffee House Wits 1890-1938, ed. Harold B. Segel, West Lafayette, 1993, p. 65. Cognitive map-zyxwvut L- srLag qponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA New York vs Philadelphia Jonathan Hale Introduction In the essay 'Cognitive Mapping', published in 1988, cultural theorist Fredric Jameson sets out the possibilities for a new kind of Marxist aesthetic. By, considering the pedagogical function of the work of art as providing a sense of orientation towards the larger and in itself unrepresentable social totality, Jameson attempts to rehabilitate the project of political change through the media of visual and spatial form. The inspiration for this view of the work of art as a 'mental map' for the process of political action springs from two very different sources: one directly political and the other urbanistic and architectural. The first is the statement from Louis Althusser that defines ideology as `the Imaginary representation of the subject's relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence'.1 The second source is presented as an analogue to the first and comes from the work of architect and urban theorist Kevin .Lynch on the process of spatial orientation in city centres.2 Jameson highlights the parallel between the two ideas in the opening chapter of his book Postmodernism, ol; The Cultural L ogic of L ate Capitalism: There is, for one thing, a most interesting convergence between the empirical problems studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology ... Surely this is exactly what the cognitive map is called upon to do in the narrower framework of daily life in the physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole.3 By taking the notion of the cognitive spatial map into the realm of political activity — 'projected outward onto some of the larger national and global spaces' that he is concerned with in his work4 — Jameson is aiming, ultimately, at a means to realise a coherent socialist political project. As against what he sees as the forces of fragmentation at work in society due to the dominant, 'late capitalist', ideology of the present, he claims that an orientation towards the social whole is the key to the organization of effective political action.' As he makes The legible metropolis 32 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA more explicit in the earlier essay on 'Cognitive Mapping' already referred to, the necessary function of ideology as a means of orientation in the social realm might be understood more clearly through a comparison with Lynch's empirical research: Cognitive mapping: N en, York vs Philadelphia 33 to the list above and the characteristics might vary between different cultures, the theoretical claim would remain substantially the same: orientation in a complex environment is fundamentally dependent on a sense of the larger, yet `invisible', whole. For Lynch this sense of orientation springs from the imageability of the urban scene — the perceptual clarity and vividness of the The conception of cognitive mapping proposed here therefore involves an characteristic spatial elements that allow their use by the inhabitant's imaginaextrapolation of Lynch's spatial analysis to the realm of social structure, tion. Once an overall framework has been constructed out of a series of that is to say, in our historical moment, to the totality of class relations on a distinctive and 'legible' components, any journey across the city can be global (or should I say multinational) scale. The secondary premise is also measured according to its relationship to a relatively stable and complete 'envirmaintained, namely, that the incapacity to map socially is as crippling to onmental image' of the whole.8 While Lynch's work remains constrained, as political ex erience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban Jameson suggests, due to its being 'locked within the limits of experience. It follows that an aesthetic of cognitive mapping in this sense is phenomenology',9 it might be possible to draw out the significance of his basic an integral part of any socialist political project.° insights by considering their historical antecedents. Jameson himself suggests the importance of the temporal dimension in his outline of what he calls a Having said this, quite how an aesthetic of cognitive mapping is meant to be `spatial analysis of culture', set out at the beginning of the essay on 'Cognitive realised as part of this larger objective remains unclear in Jameson's writing. As Mapping'. Jameson identifies three phases in the historical development of capiColin MacCabe has written in the preface to Jameson's more recent book on talism — 'classical' or market capitalism, 'monopoly' or imperialist capitalism, The Geopolitical A esthetic: 'cognitive mapping is the least articulated but also the and the current phase of global or 'late-capitalism', described in somewhat most crucial of the Jamesonian categories. Crucial because it is the missing apocalyptic terms as: 'a moment in which not merely the older city but even the psychology of the political unconscious, the political edge of the historical nation-state itself has ceased to play a central functional and formal role in a analysis of post-modernism and the methodological justification of the process that has, in a new quantum leap of capital, prodigiously expanded Jamesonian undertaking.'7 In an attempt to develop some of the possibilities for beyond them, leaving them behind as ruined and archaic remains of earlier the aesthetic of cognitive mapping that Jameson is suggesting in his writing, I stages in the development of this mode of production'.1 ° Jameson's further will return to one of the sources of his thinking in order to examine more claim is that each of the previous stages of capitalist development had found closely the contribution that spatial form might offer to the debate concerning expression in — and even been partly constituted by — a corresponding spatial the analogy with political orientation. zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA form. However, under present conditions we have lost this correlation, leaving us without a means to navigate in the wider 'geopolitical' realm. Rather than dismissing these earlier forms as 'ruins' or 'archaic remains' a closer examination Images of the city of the characteristics of these residual forms might yield further possibilities for In his book entitled The Image of the City, Lynch developed the notion that their meaningful survival in the present situation. As Lynch's studies also orientation in the urban environment is dependent on the construction of a suggest, the process of cognitive mapping is reinforced by this kind of correlamental or 'cognitive' map. E very inhabitant of the city develops their own tion between the patterns of use and movement in a city and its patterns of version of the map, dependent on their individual activities, but most people visual and spatial order. By considering the historical development of this relarely on common physical characteristics as reference points for their particular tionship I will attempt to open up a further possibility, that of the operable as acts of imaginary representation. From a series of questionnaires and interviews opposed to the imageable city, to go some way towards answering Jameson's conducted with the residents of three American cities, Lynch identified five call for an aesthetic of orientation that would allow effective operation within an categories of significant components or 'building-blocks' that contributed to otherwise unrepresentable totality. the formation of a navigational or cognitive urban map. These were: Paths, E dges, Nodes, Districts and Landmarks. Those features that people most often Patterns of thought/panerns of order referred to when describing or drawing their city centre from memory tended to fall into one of the above categories. Some of these categories overlapped, as The first phase of market capitalism in Jameson's three-part schema found its when major paths also formed distinctive edges to districts, or when the districts spatial counterpart in what he calls 'the logic of the grid, a reorganisation of themselves were centred on a memorable landmark, as well as possessing a some older, sacred and heterogeneous space into geometrical and Cartesian dominant building type or functional distinction such as industrial, retailing or homogeneity, a space of infinite equivalence and extension ...'.11 This underresidential uses. While other categories of spatial form could perhaps be added standing of the history of the grid in city planning overlooks the important 34 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA The legible metropolis distinction between two alternative traditions in Greek and Roman practice that have influenced the way the grid has been perceived down to the present day. The two ideas which I would like to draw out from these traditions arise from the ambiguous dialectical relationship between spatial form and political structure that was characteristic of the city grid even prior to its large-scale exploitation by the colonising Romans. The initial spread of the grid layout is generally attributed to the most famous of the Greek town-planners, Hippodamus of Miletus, who laid out the sea-port of Piraeus near Athens in the fifth century BC. But while the original authorship of the grid diagram is by no means historically certain — as the architectural historian Joseph Rykwert has taken care to point out12 — what is clear from the Greeks' deployment of the grid system ii-fhe importance of the spatial and social correlation referred to above. As the urban historian Spiro Kostof has stated, using the words of Aristotle: Aristotle writes that Hippodamus discovered 'the divisioning of cities,' ... and that 'he was the first man of those not actually involved in politics to make proposals about the best form of constitution.' Now, since Hippodamus could not have invented the grid, one possible interpretation of Aristotle's words is that he advocated a special instance of it and combined it with a social theory of urbanism. Indeed, Hippodamus, it would seem, proposed a political system 'whereby the population of the town was divided into three classes — craftsmen, farmers and soldiers — and the land divided into three portions, the first sacred, the second public (to support the soldiers) and the third private (to be owned by the farmers)'.13 E xtending the significance of the ordering power of the grid beyond the pragmatic concerns of everyday spatial organization, Hippodamus' work also provides the first clues to the cosmological capacity of the form of the city to provide an orientation to just the kind of `unrepresentable totality' that Fredric Jameson was attempting to come to terms with. It is this neglected cosmological dimension of Greek city planning that Joseph Rykwert draws close attention to, citing the French scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant's comparison of Hippodamus with another noteworthy Milesian, Anaximander, the reputed 'father' of Greek philosophy. The tiny fragment of Anaximander's sixth-century BC treatise which provides the first recorded words of Western philosophy betrays a clear preoccupation with the principle of flux and the ordinance or 'arrangement' of time" that was also to prove highly influential for subsequent Greek philosophers. In addition to his cosmological writings he is reputed to have been something of a scientist — devising the gnomon for telling the time by the shadow of the sun, constructing the first map of the world drawn out on the upper surface of a solid cylinder and also producing a celestial globe, though the last is more difficult to substantiate. The preoccupation with movement and change in Anaximander's thinking appears in another guise in the open-ended grids of those cities like Miletus and Priene where the layout of the streets is randomly Cognitive mapping: Nen, York vs Philadelphia 35 cut back to suit the ragged outlines of the local topography. A flexibility of growth is built into the Greek system, restricted only by the need for military fortifications and the limits of the natural geography. This flexibility seems to be generated by a sensibility towards the principles of growth and change at the core of the Greeks' understanding of the cosmos — bearing in mind in particular the origin of the term cosmos in the processes of ordering, arranging and adorning.15 In contrast to the principles of Greek cosmology — as partly constituted through the form of the gridded city plan — a second idea emerges from the Roman use of the grid layout, showing an altogether different interpretation of the notion of the city as a 'microcosm'. The Romans deployed the grid plan in their colonial expansion emblematically, as a fixed and finite form, as a reminder of their spiritual origins as much as an efficient organisation of land use. As a tool of political domination as well as psychological orientation, the image of the city of Rome — from which all roads inevitably led — could be seen drawn out across the landscape of E urope in the shape of even the most temporary of colonising settlements. The military camp ground or castrum, with its two principal routes crossing at right-angles at the centre, formed an emblem of the structure of the Romans' conceptual world. E ach new town became itself a new 'centre' by reiterating the structure of the absent 'mother city' through a diagrammatic idealisation rather than a literal representation of Rome as it actually appeared — more a reminder of the perception of the original metropolis in its role as the 'centre of the world'. In the hierarchical Roman grid layout the central north—south street or card° (`hinge') represented the axis of the earth's rotation. The main east—west route across the city also marked out the path of the sun across the sky.16 The resulting pure geometry embodied in the Roman grid — complete and finite as a form, in the image of a finite cosmos — shows little of the Greeks' sensibility towards the principles of flexibility and flux. The status of the boundaries of the Roman city also betrays this urge towards fixity and completeness of form due to its emphasis on the marking of the earth. As a means of making visible what for was the fundamental underlying order behind the chaos of immethe Romans zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA diate appearances, this marking out of an emblematic pattern on the ground had a particular, persistent significance. The rituals of city foundation and the setting out of religious enclosures both involved cutting into the surface of the ground, most notably the marking of the boundary of the city with a ploughed rectangular furrow defining the lines of the four city walls. At the crossing of the four main routes into the city the plough would be ceremonially lifted above the ground and carried to the other side, thereby preserving the sanctity of the boundary while allowing the inhabitants to pass in and out. Here the city gates would be erected, addressing the cardinal points of the compass, with each of the breaches in the wall protected by the image of a deity. As the sequence of choosing the site and the rituals of town foundation were also seen as a re-enactment of the founding of Rome itself, the colonial outpost would have taken on something of the status of a temple — a sacred, The legible metropolis 36 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA protected realm allowing communication with the spiritual legacy of Roman history. In addition to reiterating a cosmological model and providing a conceptual diagram of the larger spatial whole, the sense of familiarity provided by the standardization of the layout also allows an instant grasp of geographical orientation, as well as a sense of security, in an otherwise unfamiliar environment. As suggested by, the legend of the shipwrecked philosopher Aristippus, washed up on the shore of Rhodes, finding a geometric pattern marked out in the sand was cause for rejoicing — signifying not just another life, but the reassuring presence of a civilised human intellect." Rules and zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA models It should be clear from this account of the Roman appropriation of the Greek city grid that the process described by Fredric Jameson of a linear transition from a sacred to a secular geometry in city planning is more complex than he seems to suggest. E lements of both sacred and secular sources for the gridded city plan survive into the present as clues towards the kind of aesthetic of orientation that Jameson is suggesting, and to understand their possibilities we must consider the dialectical relationship between thought patterns and spatial forms that was already hinted at in the work of Hippodamus. The distinctions between flux and fixity in the two examples of grid planning discussed so far might also be considered under a different rubric, such as that suggested by the historian Francoise Choay in her writing on the theory of architecture and urbanism entitled The Rule and the Model, published in French in 1980 and only recently translated into E nglish.18 Choay's basic thesis concerns the Renaissance reinterpretation of the classical traditions of both architecture and city-building, seen in terms of the inheritance of two distinct methodologies. One involves the application of principles and rules and is best represented by the tradition of the architectural treatise inaugurated by L.B. Alberti in the fifteenth century. The other is concerned with the reproduction of complete spatial models and is part of an alternative strategy for the generation of built space inspired by Thomas More's Utopia published in 1516. As Choay says in comparing the two approaches: As a quantified topographical schema, the device of the utopian spatial model allows everyone to be assigned to, and identified with, a particular place, and thus it can be applied freely to the entire domain of human activity. In this sense it is as universal in scope as Alberti's rules, even if its function is to control specific kinds of practice and not to accommodate new projects ... However, this in turn constitutes a fundamental limitation. Whereas the Albertian rule is an operator which ... engenders infinitely variable spaces according to circumstances and desires, the Morean model, a model space and a model of space, is condemned to be replicated in perpetuity.19 Cognitive mapping: New York vs Philadelphia 37 The central thesis of Choay's work appears to support the earlier criticism of the limitations of the Roman hierarchical city — along with the fact that few of the cities laid out as 'perfect' geometric forms have survived the ravages of subsequent development — and she also points out the inherent flexibility of a design method based on the application of rules and principles, continually adaptable to different spatial and temporal situations, as in the Greeks' use of the open-ended grid. Having said this, the persistence of the literary and artistic tradition of representing ideal political communities embodied in pure and finite geometric structures provides a telling illustration of the power of this idea, hence perhaps Jameson's attraction to the idea of Lynch's imageable city. From Plato's 'lost city' of Atlantis, described in the dialogue Critias as a series of concentrically arranged islands encircled with canals,2° through to Tommaso Campanella's seventeenth-century vision of a Cittii del Sole, centred on a circular temple, the connection between pure form and political ideology has been a close one. One of the reasons for the strength of this relationship is the 'imageability' of physical form that started off this whole discussion, but the actual medium of these descriptions must also be taken into account. As a manifesto for political change through the act of city building the traditional utopian text is an almost literal example of the sort of cognitive mapping that Fredric Jameson was alluding to. However, rather than studying the fixed form of the city as described by Francoise Choay, perhaps there is another lesson hidden in the operation of the texts themselves as a stimulus to the workings of the imagination and the exercise of the processes of memory. As Frances Yates has attempted to demonstrate, in describing Campanella's creation in her history of mnemonic techniques entitled The A rt of Memory, the relationship between ideas and forms that surfaced earlier in this discussion deserves a further, more deliberate, definition: This is the kind of encyclopedic lay-out of a universal memory system, with a 'celestial' organising basis, with which [Giordano] Bruno has made us very familiar. And Campanella repeatedly stated that his City of the Sun, or perhaps some model of it, could be used for 'local memory', as a very quick way of knowing everything, 'using the world as a book'.21 This tradition of 'reading' buildings provides a useful clue to the survival of the classical 'arts of memory' as described by Frances Yates, in the similar operation of images in association with a sequence of architectural spaces. The technique involved the memorising of spoken passages such as long Homeric storylines or great political orations, by the matching of images from the speech concerned with a series of places in a building or a city. Whether real or merely imagined, the setting would be traversed in the mind of the orator during the recounting of the literary work and as each place in turn was visited, the image discovered there was meant to inspire recollection. The method effectively functions like a 'cinematic' record, in its relating of visual 38 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA The legible metropolis images to the content of spoken dialogue, but the use of a spatial armature for the structuring of the sequential memory provides another parallel to the cognitive map as Jameson initially described it. The Roman rhetoricians who set out this methodology were careful to describe the ideal environments for the technique to be most effective, with qualities like distinctiveness and vividness of place, and particularities of lighting and ornamental effects. E ach of the characteristics that reinforce memorability sound remarkably similar to those that Kevin Lynch was concerned with — albeit in his system of navigation the place is recognised through the image, rather than the image through the place.22 The key point to draw out of Yates' observations on the traditional techniques of memory involves a further distinction between static form and dynamic-Tetion in the consideration of urban space. The use of a timestructured 'sequential' model for the mapping of city form highlights again the importance of the open-ended, rule-based, principles that Francoise Choay was describing. Likewise, Campanella's use of the analogy of the `world as a book' also brings to light a parallel tradition in the realm of both sacred and civic architecture that reached a peak with the medieval tradition of iconographical and allegorical interpretation of church buildings. Prior to the advent of the printed Bible, the texts of the scriptures would be known by most of the church worshippers only through the 'reading' of the form and ornamentation of the structure of the building itself. As Victor Hugo most memorably declared, seeing the downfall of a meaningful architecture in the face of the mass availability of books: It was a presentiment that human thought, in changing its form, would also change its method of expression, that the leading idea of each succeeding generation would no longer be inscribed with the same tools and in the same manner, that the book of stone, so solid and lasting, would give place to the book of paper, more solid and more lasting still. Looked at in this connection, the vague formula of the archdeacon had a further meaning; it signified that one art %vas on the eve of dethroning another. What it wished to say was, 'printing will kill architecture!'23 American excursus Notwithstanding Hugo's pessimistic prognosis it should have become clear from the preceding observations that the two realms are in some sense continually obliged to refer to one another. The kind of cognitive mapping proposed by both Jameson and Kevin Lynch is dependent on the dialectical interplay between a level of conceptual structure and a level of spatial structure that both constitute and are constituted by the experience of the other. In concluding this discussion, I want to return to the question of the `rule' versus the 'model' in city planning in the hope of illustrating the kind of cognitive mapping that I believe goes some way towards meeting Jameson's tentative definition. Considering the transition between the Cognitive mapping: New York vs Philadelphia 39 DODEIC] 011ELI EILIDU EEO [11:11-zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWV 1 DODD ODD LID zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTS -Li] 1111-1 a D [1 El TI EI oar ~ Li zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHG 1-1 Dm ~ DO zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 0 1 2000 f t Figure 2.1 Plan of Philadelphia (re-drawn by the author after William Penn's Plan fir Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1682) gridded street layout of Philadelphia, established in 1682 (see Fig. 2.1), and the later New York Commissioners' grid plan for Manhattan of 1811 (Fig. 2.2), it is clear that a shift has taken place in both intention and resulting effect. The original inspiration for the city of Philadelphia, like many colonial settlements, Nvas the desire to found an 'ideal' religious community, though in William Penn's case the founding of a free society of fellow Quakers also allowed the exercise of his architectural imagination.24 Having experienced the crowding and disorder of Restoration London, as well as the great disaster of the fire of 1666, Penn was inspired by the visions of a re-planned city being proposed by Sir Christopher Wren among several others. Along with most of the schemes for the City of London Penn began with a grid of streets for his new colonial city, and like the plans of Richard Newcourt he included five substantial public open spaces. His experience of London's few, pre-Georgian, open squares like Covent Garden and Lincoln's Inn Fields also gave his conception a more 'suburban' quality, though he set it out on a grand metropolitan scale. Like an archetypal Roman cosmological diagram Penn's two major streets meet at right-angles at the central 'city hall', subdividing the two-mile wide layout into four equal sections, with a large public space towards the centre of each quarter. This structure creates a `perfect' formal hierarchy in the original grid layout which was soon lost in its rapid and undisciplined extension. Penn's 'green country town', as he began by describing it, soon became a sprawling port city, as the strip of dense development along the harbour front broke out beyond the original north and south boundaries of the plan during the second phase of construction in the eighteenth century. Seen in comparison with the early American settlements like Philadelphia, the nineteenth-century gridding of Manhattan seems to have sprung from the opposite intention. The commissioners' grand proposals in the plan of 1811 40 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA The legible metropolis Cognitive mapping: New York vs Philadelphia 41 Conclusion The 'inflected network' of the New York grid layout poses an interesting possibility for the notion of cognitive mapping, like the comparison between the rule and the model, concerning the relationship between fixity and flux. Compared with the 'quartered cosmos' of the Philadelphia four-square plan, the openness IE RMIE IMME DZIE ROE IMMIllifillE MMIIIIMME N AE RMIRME MME HE IRE MMUME E TTUEMLE M and extendibility of the Manhattan grid system, cut to suit the limits of its ii111111111111111i11111111111111W1111,1111:11 , LILt 111111U zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 011 gailaffid11 natural topography, might provide a clue to a new kind of cognitive map — the iiiiralmllilminimmffinfrorwoll 11111111110 I'lUll operable as opposed to the iniageable city of Kevin Lynch's work. As a way of 1 •111111111111111111111111111111111111iiii i RtiliNi11111111111 THMEEREH navigating through a complex and 'unrepresentable' environment an opera1671nammi tional understanding of the structure of the system should be more useful than fa1ifililliffillY111111= 11M111111111WRIIIIDMill BRIETLIEI an all-encompassing image. One great lesson from the teachings of the Classical , cumumnim c"icnqu'i111111! zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 1zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA srqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJI HGFEDCBA DEMI Lill IIII Iizyxwvut rhetoricians is the use of the journey as the basis of their method. Based on the .....axgrw rim m unnum w DOWIEW MOD' unfolding of a rhizome-like series of spaces and events, each memory yields the MKT clue to the next — instead of fixing the limits of the form, new components can DUMP' be added and assimilated through the sequence of their encounter. For 0 1 HOD II zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Jameson's concept of cognitive mapping to prove useful for its purpose, it might develop along the lines of the 'inflected network' suggested by the Manhattan grid. As the distinction that Michel de Certeau makes clear, between Figure 2.2 Plan of Manhattan (re-drawn by the author after the Commissioners' Plan of New York City, 1811) small-scale tactics as opposed to large-scale strategies, the spatial and social practices of navigation are best understood at the most local level — in the unfolding seem bewildering at first sight and superficially contain nothing of William relationships between image and place. As he writes in the introduction to the Penn's sense of overall hierarchy and structure. A vast chequered blanket has book The Practice of Everyday Life: been thrown over the Indians' Island of Many Hills' with the effect of hiding any underlying natural features.25 Where Penn was happy to shift his main Many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, north—south street to sit along the high ground off-centre of the original plan, cooking, etc.) are tactical in character. And so arc, more generally, many the New York city planners ignored even the established routes around the `ways of operating': victories of the 'weak' over the 'strong' (whether the island, which, apart from Broadway, were never again to reappear. At first strength be that of powerful people or the violence of things or of an glance the grid seems relentless and intimidating and it wasn't until much later imposed order, etc.), clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, in the nineteenth century that Central Park appeared on the plan providing a `hunter's cunning,' maneuvers, polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries, hint of a larger-scale order. What is not so clear from the two-dimensional nietis. poetic as well as warlike. The Greeks called these 'ways of operating' zyxwvutsrqponmlkj drawing, but which has a major effect on the experience 'on the ground', is the But they go much further back to the immemorial intelligence displayed in shift in the orientation of the grid. Instead of Penn's square city blocks and the tricks and imitations of plants and fishes. From the depths of the ocean identical width streets, the New York plan uses an asymmetrical system, with the to the streets of modern megalopolises, there is a continuity and permawider 'avenues' running north—south and the more closely spaced streets going nence in these tactics.26 east—west, providing a critical distinction between routes at each corner which, except at the centre, the Philadelphia plan never allows. Apart fi-om the two What I have attempted to demonstrate in the above discussion is that a ruleprincipal streets at 100 feet wide, all the others in Penn's scheme were meant to based rather than a model-based approach to cognitive mapping — as suggested be exactly half that size, with the effect of making orientation very difficult by the Greek as opposed to the Roman tradition of city-planning — yields a while moving through the grid — unless one can follow the street signs. E ven powerful yet paradoxical possibility. Instead of the fixed form of the 'Roman' with the image in mind of Penn's distinctive Roma quadrata layout there are Philadelphia's ideal religious community, now lost amidst subsequent expanfew' clues to direction available at street level. With the pure 'fixed' form of the sion, the more Greek-inspired Manhattan grid — the archetypal space of original being extended without structure, this problem is made worse as one monopoly capitalism in Jameson's argument — can also be seen as giving rise to moves away from the centre — losing contact with the main axes and any visual its opposite: an operative or tactical, rather than strategic, urban map, born out connection with the four open squares, one soon suffers a disquieting loss of of a subtly inflected network of differences that allows any individual to navigate direction. within it according to its rules. The clarity and flexibility of the open-ended mcdEOEDIL 42 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA The legible metropolis New York grid goes a long way to demonstrate how an understanding of the rules by which a system has developed provides a much more useful means of understanding the rules by which to subvert it. zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 3 Benjamin's London, Baudrillard's Veirgcti Notes 1 Quoted in Fredric Jameson, 'Cognitive Mapping', in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 347-57 (p. 353). 2 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. 3 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or Me Cultural L ogic of L ate Capitalism, London: Verso, 1991, p. 51. 4 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 51. 5 Jameson, 'Cognitive Mapping', p. 353. 6 Jameson, 'Cognitive Mapping', p. 353. 7 Frederic Jameson, The Geopolitical A esthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, London: British Film Institute, 1992, xiv. 8 Lynch, The Image of the City, pp. 6-13. 9 Jameson, 'Cognitive Mapping', p. 353. 10 Jameson, 'Cognitive Mapping', p. 350. 11 Jameson, 'Cognitive Mapping', p. 349. 12 Joseph ltykwert, The Idea of a Town, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988, pp. 86-7. 13 Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History, London: Bulfinch, 1991, p. 105. 14 Jonathan Barnes, E arly Greek Philosophy, London: Penguin, 1987, p. 75. 15 Indra Kagis 114cE wan, Socrates' A ncestor: A n E ssay on A rchitectural Beginnings, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, p. 43. 16 llykwert, Idea of a Town, pp. 41-71. 17 Retold by Vitruvius in the preface to Book VI of Dc A rchitectura, trans. Frank Granger, 2 vols, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985, II, 3. 18 Francoise Choay, The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of A rchitecture and Urbanism, ed. Denise Bratton, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. 19 Choay, The Rule and the Model, p. 145. 20 Sec Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee, London: Penguin, 1977, pp. 154-5. Plato suggests the combination of the functional and symbolic qualities of geometry — describing the circular capital city accompanied by a hinterland of gridded irrigation canals. 21 Frances Yates, The A rt of Memory, London: Pimlico, 1966, p. 289. 22 Yates, The A rt of Memory , pp. 22-28. 23 Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris, London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1910, p. 165. 24 John W. Reps, The Mak ing of Urban A merica, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1965, pp. 160-5. 25 Reps, The Mak ing of Urban A merica, p. 298. 26 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of E veryday L ife, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984, pp. xix—xx. Graeme Gilloch Introduction The writings of Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard suggest a number of fruitful points of comparison which have yet to be fully explored by contemporary critics. Drawing upon Benjamin's interpretation of E dgar Allan Poe's 'The Man of the Crowd' and Baudrillard's reading of Sophie Calle's Suite venitienne, this chapter takes as its point of departure one particular shared motif — the pursuit of a stranger through the labyrinthine urban environment. The complex interplay of pursuer and pursued is explored with respect to Benjamin's understanding of the mimetic faculty and Baudrillard's concept of seduction. It is argued that antithetical moments of mimesis are at play in these writings, namely, interpretation and imitation. The elusive and confounded hope of mimetic reading in Benjamin, to 'read what was never written', is counterpoised to the mimetic compulsion of seduction in Baudrillard, the enticing invitation to 'please follow me'. Mimesis and fly aerie Was niegeschrieben wurde, lesen — `To read what was never written'. (Hofmannsthal) This enigmatic statement appears in at least three places in Walter Benjamin's writings: in his 1933 fragment on the origin of language, 'On the Mimetic Faculty';2 as one of the epigrams to `Konvolut M The Fliineur' of his now renowned yet unfinished and fragmentary study of nineteenth-century Paris, the Passagenarbeir,3 and in the initial notes for his 1940 'Theses on the Concept of History'.4 These locations point to a fundamental set of connections between these texts; namely, that elements of the so-called mimetic faculty described by Benjamin are somehow reconfigured in the activities of the flaneur, the perambulating pedestrian of the modern metropolis, and that they thus come to form a model of critical practice for the social theorist and historian. The mimetic faculty is a constitutive element of the phantasmagoria of