This document discusses the relationship between architecture, urban space, and subjectivity in ancient Greece and modernity. It summarizes key thinkers who analyzed this relationship such as Baudelaire, Benjamin, Heidegger, Arendt, Bachelard, Foucault, Debord, and Lefebvre. It discusses how classical Greek cities like Athens used spaces like the agora, oikos, and ekklesia to define citizenship and political participation. It also analyzes how philosophy became institutionalized after Socrates' execution, removing it from public spaces of debate.

1. Designing Citizens: City Space,
Architecture, Subjectivity
Michael A. Peters
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ART KNOWLEDGE & GLOBALIZATION
(Re-imagining the Urban Habitus)
RMIT, December, 2008

2. Plotting the Cartography of the
Modern Subject
• Plotting co-ordinates of meaning, identity and
power across the sites of subjectivity, the body and
the city
• Affirming Aesthetic Modernity: Charles Baudelaire &
Walter Benjamin
• Place, Being & Anti-modernism: Martin Heidegger &
Hannah Arendt
• The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:
Adorno and Jürgen Habermas
• Space, Knowledge & Power: Gaston Bachelard &
Michel Foucault
• The Social Production of Space: Guy Debord &
Henri Lefebvre

3. Baudelaire's flâneur
• ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of
art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.’
• A flâneur is ‘gentleman stroller of city streets’ who walks the city in
order to experience it
• Observer-participant role – ‘a botanist of the sidewalk’
• Baudelaire's aesthetic and critical visions helped open-up the modern
city as a space for investigation
• Baudelaire as the quintessential poet of urban modernity
• Psycho-geography and a poetics of modernity: ‘Baudelaire's flâneur,
responding to the bourgeois, capitalist, and technological
developments of his time, was a figure in the crowd but not of it.’
• Benjamin used Baudelaire’s flâneur as a starting point and focus for his
Arcades Project (1927-40) and the analysis of crowds and modernity.
• In The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire ‘Benjamin
challenges the image of Baudelaire as late-Romantic dreamer, and
evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle
with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged
in Paris around 1850.’

4. Heidegger on Dwelling & Being
• ‘Dwelling, however, is the basic character of Being in keeping with
which mortals exist.’
• ‘What if man's homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not
even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight? Yet as soon as
man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer.’
• Heidegger also argues that, in practical terms, dwelling involves the
gathering of the fourfold--the coming together of earth, sky, people,
and a sense of spiritual reverence where dwelling is no mere
extension of existential space or place but rather the fundamental
human activity.
• Heidegger’s anti-modernism expressed as a legacy of Catholic anti-
modernism and German Romanticism that legitimates a singularity
of place in terms of care and existential priority that supports the
ideal of a pure (cultural-national) home of the self and seat of
belonging echoed in the purity of the German tongue, language as
the house of Being, and its unbroken lineage with Greek ideals.
Source: Heidegger, Martin, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Basic Writings¸ trans. and ed. David Krell. New York City: Harper and Row,
1977.

5. Arendt, Public Life and the
Agora
• “The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in
its physical location; it is the organization of the
people as it arises out of acting and speaking
together, and its true space lies between people
living together for this purpose, no matter where
they happen to be” (HC, 198).
• ‘For Arendt modernity is characterized by the loss of
the world, by which she means the restriction or
elimination of the public sphere of action and
speech in favor of the private world of introspection
and the private pursuit of economic interests.’

6. Bachelard & The Poetics of
Space
• ‘A house that has been experienced is not
an inert box. Inhabited space transcends
geometrical space.’
• Bachelard applies phenomenology to an
analysis of intimate space of architecture
basing his analysis not on purported origins
but on lived experience.
• Source: Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. Orig. 1958

7. Foucault: Space, Knowledge
and Power
• The great obsession of the nineteenth century was,
as we know, history: with its themes of development
and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of
the ever-accumulating past, with its
preponderance of dead men … the present epoch
will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We
are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the
epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and
far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at
a moment, I believe, when our experience of the
world is less that of a long life developing through
time than that of a network that connects points
and intersects with its own skein.
(Foucault 1986, 22)

8. Michael Foucault – ‘Of Other
Spaces’ (1967)
• ‘The present epoch will perhaps be above
all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch
of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of
juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far,
of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are
at a moment. I believe, when our
experience of the world is less that of a long
life developing through time than that of a
network that connects points and intersects
with its own skein.’

9. Guy Debord and the Situationists
• avante-garde artists and intellectuals influenced by
Dada, Surrealism and Lettrism
• The post-war Lettrist International sought to fuse
poetry and music and transform the urban
landscape
• Inspired by Socialisme on Barbarie Situationiste
Internationale established in 1957 (‘Never work!’)
• decategorize art and culture & to transform them
into part of everyday
• Society of the Spectacle - class struggle to reclaim
individual autonomy from the spectacle

10. Henri Lefebvre on the Situationist
International (1997)
• It started with the COBRA group (Dutch
architecture Constant Nieuwenhuys & Asper
Jorn) – ‘renewal of the action of art on life’
• ‘to create an architecture that would itself
instigate the creation of new situations’ (For
an Architecture of Situation, 1953)
• Inspired by Critique of Everyday Life (1974)
• ‘What art, what form of thinking could
assume the function of an avant-garde…?’
(Introduction to Modernity)
•
http://www.notbored.org/lefebvre-interview.html

11. Henri Lefebvre & The Production of
Space (1974, trans. 1991)
• A project to ‘divert’ the totality of capitalist space
• Centrality of ‘spatial practice’
• ‘With the advent of modernity time has vanished from social
space. It is recorded solely on measuring-instruments, on
clocks, that are isolated and functionally specialized as this
time itself. Lived time loses its form and its social interest --
with the exception, that is, of time spent working. Economic
space subordinates time to itself; political space expels it as
threatening and dangerous (to power). The primacy of the
economic and above all of the political implies the
supremacy of space over time.’
• ‘Social space is a social product - the space produced in a
certain manner serves as a tool of thought and action. It is
not only a means of production but also a means of control,
and hence of domination/power.’

12. Designing Cities/Designing Citizens
• Every society and therefore every
mode of production produces a
certain space, its own space. The city
of the ancient world cannot be
understood as a simple agglomeration
of people and things in space - it had
its own spatial practice, making its own
space

13. Kamiros
Houses, streets, temples, and agora

14. Classical Greek Town

15. Prehistorical site; inhabited until 4th
century

16. Architecture, Space, Subjectivity
Tholos of Olympia – Philippeion 338 BC

17. Korinth
Temple of Apollo, 550BC

18. Technē
• Heidegger suggests that technē is a mode
of knowing that consists in aletheia, a
bringing forth of being out of
concealedness.
• He establishes a series of meaningful
relationships between technology,
subjectivity, dwelling (architecture) and
space
• Foucault coins the term ‘technologies of the
self’  ‘gender technologies of the self’

19. Spatial Technologies
• Classical Greek society and the
invention of technologies of space
and new subjectivities: celestial
spaces; private spaces; public spaces;
space of theatre, of worship, of burial,
of democracy, of commerce.
• new spatialization of knowledge and
the self through pervasive networks,
including the Internet

20. Polis (city-state)
• its small size allowed for experiment in its political
structure
• Oligrachies replaced by democracy in 6th
century –
‘rule by demos’ (people) free males citizens
• Citizenship determined by descent (based on
kinship tribal organization) but allowed for
naturalization
• "it is necessary for the citizens to be of such a
number that they knew each other's personal
qualities and thus can elect their officials and judge
their fellows in a court of law sensibly" (Aristotle,
Politics)
• Plato fixed the number of citizens in an ideal state
at 5040 adult males.

21. Public-Private
• Agora (marketplace) became the heart of
Greek intellectual life and discourse
• Not two distinct worlds in the lives of the
citizenry
• All citizens were intimately and directly
involved in politics, justice, military service,
religious ceremonies, intellectual discussion,
athletics and artistic pursuits
• Greek citizens did not have rights, but duties.

22. The Agora
• The Agora in ancient Greek cities was an open space that served as a
meeting ground for various activities of the citizens.
• The name, first found in the works of Homer, connotes both the assembly of
the people as well as the physical setting; it was applied by the classical
Greeks of the 5th century BC to what they regarded as a typical feature of
their life: their daily religious, political, judicial, social, and commercial
activity.
• The agora was located either in the middle of the city or near the harbour,
which was surrounded by public buildings and by temples.
• Colonnades, sometimes containing shops, or stoae, often enclosed the
space, and statues, altars, trees, and fountains adorned it. The general trend
at this time was to isolate the agora from the rest of the town.
• archaic and Ionic agora – square or rectangle that influenced the Roman
forum - a specific, regular, open area surrounded by planned architecture.
• The use of the agora varied at different periods. Even in classical times the
space did not always remain the place for popular assemblies.
• A distinction was maintained between commercial and ceremonial agoras
• The agora also served for theatrical and gymnastic performances until
special buildings and spaces were reserved for these purposes.
• http://history-world.org/agora.htm

23. Ancient triptych of space &
subjectivity
• Ekklesia (assembly) public
• Agora (market place) public/private
• Oikos (household) private

24. Bauman on agora
• ‘The distinction between private and public spheres is of
ancient origin; it goes back to the Greek oikos, the household,
and ekklesia, the site of politics, where matters affecting all
members of the polis are tackled and settled. But between
oikos and ekklesia the Greeks situated one more sphere, that
of communication between the two; the sphere whose major
role was not keeping the private and the public apart and
guarding the territorial integrity of each, but assuring a smooth
and constant traffic between them. That third and
intermediate sphere, the agora (the private/public sphere ...),
bound the two extremes and held them together. Its role was
crucial for the maintenance of a truly autonomous polis resting
on the true autonomy of its members. Without it, neither the
polis nor its members could gain, let alone retain, their
freedom to decide the meaning of their common good and
what was to be done to attain it.’ (p. 87)
• Bauman (1999) In Search of Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.

25. The Beleaguered Agora
• The agora is central to the sustainability of
democratic politics
• But it is open to attack on two fronts
• ‘the long story of the war of attrition
launched against the agora from the side of
ekklesia’, p. 96 - totalitarian tendencies
implicit in the ‘modern project’
• the increasingly privatised sites of human
experience (oikos), which constitutes the
current threat to democracy

26. Rebuilding the Agora
• ‘And the first step to be taken once the
reorientation takes place is rebuilding the
agora to make it fit the task ... To make the
agora fit for autonomous individuals and
autonomous society, one needs to arrest,
simultaneously, its privatisation and its
depoliticisation. One needs to restart (in the
agora, not in philosophy seminars) the
interrupted discourse of the common good
– which renders individual autonomy both
feasible and worth struggling for.’
• Bauman, (1999, p. 107)

27. Participation
• Both Aristotle and Plato describe the ideal of
citizenship in terms of participation. A citizen
is one who belongs to and in the
community. The concept of community is
one of shared location, values, language,
and activities. Since citizen participation
takes place within the broader community,
it takes place in an atmosphere which
enhances the possibility of successful
communication, negotiations, and
collective action.

28. Institutionalization of philosophy
• The execution of Socrates signalled a radical break
between the philosopher andhis community.
Having realized that the open teaching of
philosophy on the streets and squares of Athens was
no longer possible, Socrates' pupil Plato turned his
back on city-state politics; his founding of the
Academy, an autonomous community of
philosophers isolated from the larger community of
Athenian citizens, meant that, for the first time in the
ancient world, philosophy was institutionalized as an
autonomous sphere having nothing to do with the
world of political action in which every citizen of the
Greek city-state had until then been involved.

29. Aristotle and The Good Life
• ‘Since we see that every city-state is a sort of
community and that every community is
established for the sake of some good (for
everyone does everything for the sake of what they
believe to be good), it is clear that every
community aims at some good, and the community
which has the most authority of all and includes all
the others aims highest, that is, at the good with the
most authority. This is what is called the city-state or
political community.’ [I.1.1252a1-7]
• He defines the citizen as a person who has the right
(exousia) to participate in deliberative or judicial
office (1275b18-21).

30. Edutopologies
1. Textual spaces/ spaces of representation (Literary
Studies)
2. Embodied and gendered spaces – spaces of
identity (Philosophy; Feminism; Anthropology)
3. Institutional and dwelling spaces (Architecture)
4. The city, the region, the country (Geography; Urban
Planning)
5. Globalization and transnational spaces
(Economics; Cultural Studies)
6. Spaces of history – colonial spaces (History)
7. Imaginary spaces (Utopian Studies)
8. Topological spaces (Discrete Mathematics)
9. The space of migrations, diasporas, flows (Migration
studies)
10. The technologies of networked spaces
(Information studies)