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Abstract
Cities are sites of cultural and aesthetic production engaged in a continual process through which human subjects refine the images of the spaces in which everyday life takes place. Dominant approaches to legal governance in the city construct it as a “legislated city” or “lawscape,” but this is not the only manner in which the city can be conceptualized and experienced. A number of artistic, social, and literary interventions suggest the possibility of “uncommissioned” cities existing in tandem with the conventionally legislated city. This article examines the conceptualization of the city underlying the novel The City & the City (2009), by China Miéville, and a number of artists who situate their artworks in urban space. The experience of viewing illicit images, whether experienced by the spectator as delightful or distressing, is one of “enchantment,” to draw upon Jane Bennett's sense of the term. The enchanting encounter with an illicit image reveals the existence of uncommissioned cities within the legislated one, and points to alternative conceptualizations of citizenship, property, and of cities themselves.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
In writing this article the author is deeply indebted to Tom Andrews and David Mence for both outstanding research assistance and conversations.
Notes
1. This article studies the emergence of street art as a distinctive, and often illegal, cultural practice. It examines social, cultural, and legal responses to street art in a range of cities with reputations for significant street art “scenes” (including Melbourne, London, New York City, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Paris) and utilizes a range of methodological techniques including discourse analysis of news media representations of street art, an ethnographic study of locations associated with street art in the selected cities, and qualitative interviews with 63 street artists, and 20 cultural professionals (such as gallerists, curators, and collectors). All quotations in the article from artists are taken from these interviews.
2. Another useful term is the lawscape as coined by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Law and the City (New York, NY: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007); Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and Sharron FitzGerald, “From Space Immaterial: The Invisibility of the Lawscape,” Griffith Law Review 17, no. 2 (2008): 438–53.
3. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, “Atmospheres of Law: Senses, Affects, Lawscapes,” Emotion, Space and Society 2 (2012): 35–44, 36.
4. Nicholas Blomley, Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011); A. M. Brighenti, “Lines, Barred Lines. Movement, Territory and the Law,” International Journal of Law in Context 6 (2010): 217–27; Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman, Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011); David Delaney, Law and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, “Law's Spatial Turn: Geography, Justice and a Certain Fear of Space,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 7 (2010): 187–202; Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, “Spatial Justice: Law and the Geography of Withdrawal,” International Journal of Law in Context 6 (2010): 201–16; Mariana Valverde, “Seeing Like a City: The Dialectic of Modern and Premodern Ways of Seeing in Urban Governance,” Law and Society Review 45 (2011): 277–312.
5. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 92.
6. Brighenti, “Lines, Barred Lines,” 223.
7. See, for example, a series of regulatory strategies and statutory innovations in Victoria, Australia: the State Environment Protection Policy (Control of Music Noise from Public Premises) No. N-2 (1989), which “aims to protect residents from levels of music noise that may affect the beneficial uses of noise sensitive areas, while recognising the community demand for a wide range of musical entertainment.”
8. The “2am lockout” was trialed in Victoria for three months in 2008, and a “3am lockout” briefly operated in Queensland.
9. Summary Offences Act 1988 s4.
10. For example, see the Graffiti Prevention Act 2007 (VIC) s 6: a person must not mark graffiti that is visible from a public place.
11. Brighenti, “Lines, Barred Lines,” 225; also A. M. Brighenti, “On Territorology,” Theory, Culture and Society 27, no. 1 (2010): 57–72.
12. For a recent ethnographic study of graffiti and graffiti writers in New York City, see Gregory J. Snyder, Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York's Urban Underground (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009).
13. On graffiti, see Jeff Ferrell, Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality (New York, NY: Garland, 1993); M. Halsey and A. Young, “‘Our Desires Are Ungovernable’: Writing Graffiti in Urban Space,” Theoretical Criminology 10, no. 3 (2006): 275–306; Richard Lachmann, “Graffiti as Career and Ideology,” American Journal of Sociology 94, no. 2 (1988): 229–50; Lachlan MacDowall, “In Praise of 70k: Cultural Heritage and Graffiti Style,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 20, no. 4 (2006): 471–84. On street art, see Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Convergence on the Street,” Cultural Studies 25, no. 4/5 (2011): 641–58; Cedar Lewisohn, Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution (London: Tate, 2009); Janet McGaw, “Complex Relationships between Détournement and Récupérationin Melbourne's Street (Graffiti and Stencil) Art Scene,” Architectural Theory Review 13, no. 2 (2008): 222–39; and Nicholas Alden Riggle, “Street Art: The Transfiguration of the Commonplaces,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (2010): 243–57.
14. On walls and other boundaries, see A. M. Brighenti, “At the Wall: Graffiti Writers, Urban Territoriality, and the Public Domain,” Space and Culture 13, no. 3 (2010): 315–32; and Brighenti, “On Territorology.” On barbed wire, see Reval Netz, Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004).
15. Sophie Watson, City Publics: The (Dis)Enchantments of Urban Encounters (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), 1.
16. Ibid., 3.
17. Ibid., 5.
18. Emily Colucci, “Who Is the Artist? Thoughts on Anonymous Street Art,” Hyperallergic (August 29, 2011), http://hyperallergic.com/33957/anonymous-street-art/ (accessed September 17, 2013).
19. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5.
20. Brighenti, “Lines, Barred Lines,” 222. Also Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (London: Polity, 2002), 81, who argue that “cities exist as means of movement” and also emphasize that such movement is a “means to engineer encounters through collection transport and collation.”
21. Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life, 5.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 4.
26. For details, see http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/AboutMelbourne/ArtsandEvents/ArtsParticipation/Pages/LeagueOfResonance.aspx/.
27. China Miéville, The City & the City (New York, NY: Del Rey Ballantine, 2009).
28. Miéville has written about split, dual, or parallel cities in other novels, notably: King Rat (New York, NY: Tor, 1999); and Un Lun Dun (New York, NY: Ballantine, 2007). Similar themes appear in novels by other authors; see especially: Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere (New York, NY: Avon, 1997); Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon, Mind the Gap: A Novel of the Hidden Cities (New York, NY: Bantam, 2008); and Simon R. Green, Into the Nightside (London: Rebellion, 2008). However, whereas these novels deal with the idea of a second city beneath London (that is, out of sight to the denizens of the city on the surface, but able to be entered by the protagonist), The City & the City takes this concept further to create a space in which two urban worlds are layered over each other.
29. Miéville, City & the City, 25.
30. Brighenti, “Lines, Barred Lines.” On “motility” in the city, see Tim Cresswell, “The Right to Mobility: The Production of Mobility in the Courtroom,” Antipode 38, no. 4 (2006): 735–54. On mobility, see Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life; and Hayden Lorimer, “Walking: New Forms and Spaces for Studies of Pedestrianism,” in Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects, ed. Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011): 19–34. On walking and pedestrianism, see Blomley, Rights of Passage.
31. J. Carr, “Legal Geographies – Skating around the Edges of the Law: Urban Skateboarding and the Role of Law in Determining Young People's Place in the City,” Urban Geography 31, no. 7 (2010): 988–1003, 992. On skateboarding and urban space generally, see Lain Borden, “Speaking the City: Skateboarding Subculture and Recompositions of the Urban Realm,” Research in Urban Sociology 5, no. 1 (2000): 135–54; and Chihsin Chiu, “Contestation and Conformity,” Space and Culture 12, no. 1 (2009): 24–42.
32. Brighenti, “Lines, Barred Lines,” 219.
33. Miéville, City & the City, 12.
34. Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 93.
35. This is not to construct a dichotomy between two cities, or two modes of legality, that cannot be breached. The legality of property based on ownership and exclusive use extends into the dealings of citizens of the uncommissioned city, as when disputes arise between graffiti writers as to who is entitled to tag on a particular wall, or who has sufficient skill to place work next to a respected artist. Norms and conventions regarding surfaces that should or should not be written on flow through graffiti and street art cultures; they may or may not be followed, as with all norms and conventions, but their existence points to the fact that the citizens of the uncommissioned city are not immune to the powers and pleasures of legalities based on exclusion and ownership. Similarly, it would be overly rigid to conceive of the legislated city as lacking adaptive creativity; in fact, the agility of reasoning that characterizes legal discourse would be an excellent instance of that phenomenon.
36. Nicholas Blomley, “Enclosure, Common Right and the Property of the Poor,” Social and Legal Studies 17, no. 3 (2008): 311–31; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2009); David Harvey, “The Future of the Commons,” Radical History Review 109 (2011): 101–7; Jane B. Holder and Tatiana Flessas, “Emerging Commons,” Social and Legal Studies 17, no. 3 (2008): 299–310; Peter Linebaugh, Enclosures from the Bottom Up (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Karl Linn, Building Commons and Community (Oakland, CA: New Village, 2007); Kathryn Milun, The Political Uncommons: The Cross-Cultural Logic of the Global Commons (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Jonathan Mitchell, “What Public Presence? Access, Commons and Property Rights,” Social and Legal Studies 17, no. 3 (2008): 351–67; Elinor Ostrom, “The Challenge of Common Pool Resources,” Environment 50, no. 4 (2008): 8–20.
37. Carol M. Rose, Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), 122.
38. Ibid., 125.
39. Holder and Flessas, “Emerging Commons,” 305.
40. See especially, Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Elinor Ostrom, “Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, no. 3 (2000): 137–58; and Ostrom, “Challenge of Common Pool Resources,” 36.
41. Blomley, “Enclosure, Common Right,” 36; Blomley, Rights of Passage; Paul Chatterton, “Seeking the Urban Common: Furthering the Debate on Spatial Justice,” City 14, no. 6 (2010): 625–8; Sheila R. Foster, “Collective Action and the Urban Commons,” Notre Dame Law Review 87 (2011): 57–134; Harvey, “Future of the Commons,” 36; Mitchell, “What Public Presence?,” 36.
42. Holder and Flessas, “Emerging Commons,” 299.
43. Blomley, “Enclosure, Common Right,” 36; Mitchell, “What Public Presence?,” 36.
44. Kafui A. Attoh, “What Kind of a Right Is the Right to the City?” Progress in Human Geography 35 (2011): 669–85, 674.
45. Ibid., 677 (added emphasis).
46. Michael Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 692–716, 714.
47. Miéville, City & the City, 312.
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Alison Young
Alison Young teaches and researches in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Street Art, Public City (2014), The Scene of Violence (2010), Street/Studio (2010), Judging the Image (2005) and Imagining Crime (1996), as well as numerous articles on the intersections of law, crime and culture. She is also an Honorary Professor in the Law School, City University, London.