Relationality

We take our object of research to be not in the first place society, economy or culture but rather the city in its own right and as the other half of the human-environment relation. We believe that the city, besides being a product of planning, is also formed and constructed in a humanly lived order which is spatial, temporal and situated. This material phenomenal city and its order has been neglected in research agendas which tend to understand the city instead as a neutral container for social or economic processes and as subordinate to these orders. Today all spaces and times tend to be reduced by our analytical procedures to absolute space and time, but there exist still spaces and times of lived experience which structure the city for our experience and for our use of it, which determine what is present to us and what is hidden, and which account for a missing politics of space and centrality founded in the presence of people and things to us and our presence to them.

We take the city itself in its everyday movements and hierarchies to be a producer of spaces and times, and the material city to be then produced (even constructed) in these spaces and times. It is in the spaces and times of life and experience that parts of cities become central and other parts peripheral. It is here that parts of the city become active and well-used while others remain quiet and rarely visited; that parts become highly visible and feature strongly in the consciousness of inhabitants and visitors while other parts fall out of view. It is in these spaces and times that we determine the city’s outlines and profile and its practical meaning for us. Regularized, standardized and absolute spaces and times rather than being primary and the starting point for analysis, are themselves derived from the processes of our engagement with the world; they are not therefore the starting point for a research on the lived city, rather we need to show how all collective and shared spaces emerge out of immediate active relations between human beings and their environment. These primary active relations are called ‘intentionality’ in phenomenology and we understand this as relating to the vita activa and the space of presence and ‘appearance’ of Hannah Arendt for example.

The phenomenological position is sometimes characterized as ‘subjectivist’. This is incorrect according to many after Husserl – rather phenomenology, if it begins with the intentional relation, should be thought of not as relating to any interior ‘consciousness’ but as concerning the relations between things. It relates to the active and practiced rather than the contemplative, and the way the things to which we attribute essential and intrinsic natures – like people, things and places – are in reality products of their existence in relational ‘communities’ of other people, things and places. We, and the objects and places around us, are in the phenomenological view essentially plural and essentially products of our relations with others. All people, things and their natures become part of and subject to a dense web of intersubjectivity which is entirely relational and entirely real – and may be mapped, traced and researched.

We take a view on the city therefore that puts space, time and situation back at the center of things, and while we are interested in many views on urban space, we have been developing over the last years a view of the city and the urbanized landscape as a relational organization or system which draws people and their objects together around activity and work and the things they make and do, and around a constructed and coherent world held in common. The special properties of this city are: firstly that it is fundamentally indexical, constituting all the things and places and people it contains in a multiscalar matrix of co-reference; secondly that it is fundamentally but also loosely public in that it comprises a world held in common, not as a text or a set of rules but as a tacit agreement between people; thirdly that it hinges local and non-local processes and relations together, making it possible to relate to distant people and things and to act beyond the local. We see the city and its organization as enabling us to draw non-local people and things into the orbits of local lives. The organization that results is at once a space of inhabitation and a means by which distant places and larger concerns are taken up into situated lives. This organization also engenders the conditions of cosmopolitanism and of the vital and diverse urban life we recognize in the best of our contemporary cities.