The Unknown City is a book about both the existence and the possibilities of architecture and the city. It is at once a history, geography and sociology of the urban as it presents itself today, and also a proposition, a move toward confronting the problems of how we might know of, and engage with, the urban. We offer here an approximation of this problematic, suggesting a move from things to flows, from filters to tactics. In doing so, essays shift from objects to actions, stasis to change, between external and internal, city and self, past and present, and so to future – and back again.

Publication Details: Iain Borden, Jane Rendell, Joe Kerr with Alicia Pivaro (eds.), The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space, (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001).