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| All Images: South Leicester, March 2025 |
“The kind of difference that defines every place is not on the order of a juxta-position but other takes the form of imbricated strata. The elements spread out on the same surface can be enumerated; they are available for analysis; they form a manageable surface. Every urban ‘renovation’ nonetheless prefers a tabula rasa on which to write in cement the composition created in the laboratory on the basis of discrete ‘needs’ to which functional responses are to be made. The system also produces need, the primary ‘substance’ of this composition, by isolating it. This unit is as neat and clean (propre) as digits are. Moreover, the lack of satisfaction that defines each need calls for and justifies in advance the construction that combines it with other needs. This is the logic of production: ever since the eighteenth century, it has engendered its own discursive and practical space, on the basis of points of concentration - the office, the factory, the city. It rejects the relevance of places it does not create.
“However, beneath the fabricating and universal writing of technology, opaque and stubborn places remain. The revolutions of history, economic mutations, demographic mixtures lie in layers within it, and remain there, hidden in customs, rites, and spatial practices. The legible discourses that formerly articulated them have disappeared, or left only fragments in language. This place, on its surface, seems to be a collage. In reality, in its depth it is ubiquitous. A piling-up of heterogeneous places. Each one, like a deteriorating page of a book, refers to a different mode of territorial unity, of socioeconomic distribution, of political conflicts and identifying symbolism" [1.].
[1.]: Michel de Certeau, ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’, (Trans. Steven F. Randall), Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1984
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