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Performative Urbanism
Sophie Wolfrum
In the early 1920s Nikolai Anziferow, geographer in St. Petersburg, pursued urban excursions as excursion science. The sensual experience of urban space delivered findings as important as research in libraries and cartography. A perilous practice, evidently, that caused him to be banished to a concentration camp. His book The Soul of Petersburg (1922) became a cult book in the late Soviet Union. He can be seen as one of the forerunners of urban and cultural studies, for whom travel, careful observation of daily routine, intensive involvement in place and the banality of transitory places were important. Cultural Landscape Studies consider the landscape randomly shaped by man just as the gardens and parks of advanced civilization, which were hitherto the object of theory and history. John Brinckerhoff Jackson drove his motorcycle from the east to the west coast of the USA and everything he saw was important. Lucius Burckhardt took up excursion science as ‘walk science’ or ‘promenadology’. In 1980 Michel de Certeau wrote: “The act of walking is for the urban system what verbal expression (the speech act) is for language or for formulated statements” (Certeau 1988, 189). In present-day language Francesco Careri referred to ‘walkscapes’, and refers, of course, to the Situationists, radical actionists of the 1960s, who again find receive particular attention today.
With la dérive the Situationists around Guy Debord develop aimless ramblings, movement as perception and a production of space, an urban method. The unintentionality of the flaneurs, who sauntered through the passages of Paris at the turn of the century, reappears half a century later in their aimless ramblings. Fifty years later the reception of Situationist International is unbroken. With the concept of psycho-social production of space, psycho-geography, this exerts a great influence on urban development, and its radicalness makes it a recurrent point of reference in fine arts. Evidently there are various traditional strands behind the current interest in walking and travelling, physical recognition and lived space, cultural production of space, situative or performative urbanism.
Architectural theory likewise takes a line of discourse that underlines the performative aspect of architecture. The performative aspect stresses the component of spatial experience and action that is indispensable in architectural reality. Accordingly, architecture has a repertoire of specifically architectural means and structures, that only develop reality character in a cultural event, in a situation of use, movement and ‘being in it’ during the reception. In this performative act architecture distinguishes itself from the fine arts on the one hand and from systematic planning on the other. Scenic space – Baudrillard uses the expression for exactly this situation – is a critical aspect of exposed architecture. “ [...] scenic space, without which, as we know, the buildings would only be structures and the city only an agglomeration” (Baudrillard 1999, 12). The architecture of the city is evaluated against this background far beyond its object or visual qualities. The architectural substance is a prerequisite and component of events, but it first develops in performative acts, acquires a social and aesthetic relevance.
In the foreground of this understanding of architecture and city are the processual quality of the spatial experience, the event structure of spatial coherence, the openness of spatial structures. Performative urbanism, however, does not stop at a psycho-geographical reception of city, but acknowledges the urgency of architectural design.
