Towards the City of Thresholds. Stavros Stavrides

Adjacent enclaves of rich and poor: Paraisópolis, São Paulo and Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro.

      The contemporary metropolis presents itself to its inhabitants as a network of flows rather than a structure of places. As Castells has shown, the “space of flows” constitutes the dominant ideology’s structure of distribution of function and power in contemporary society (Castells 1996, 428). “The new dominant ideology” Castells explains, insists on “the end of history and the supersession of places in the space of flows” (ibid., 419). However, there still exist, albeit ideologically determined, experiences and practices of places as identity supporting spatialities. Besides describing a life divided between parallel universes (space of flows versus space of places), Castells is careful in describing an essential link between the mobility of managerial elites and their need to inhabit secluded enclaves, “establishing the ‘in’ and ‘out’ boundaries of their cultural political community” (ibid., 416).

      The experience of urban enclaves appears only as an exception in a city where movement prevails over localized inhabitation routines. But, is this really so? First, we must distinguish between those for whom movement is a privilege and those for whom movement is an obligation (Bauman 1998). We must also distinguish between different kinds of movement, defining in each case the horizon that limits them. Is it inside an enclave, traversing the city, connecting home with work, connecting significations of status around the world (as in the case of travelling managers or academics), etc. (Castells 1996, 417)?

It is important to observe how each occurrence of potential or actual movement influences the formation of different urban identities. Not all identities become temporary because somebody is on the move; some of them are fortified when performed in transition. For example, the successful businessman or international politician. In this case, a spatial frame is also a defining structure. Even though these identities are not circumscribed by the space in which they are performed, a series of well-defined enclaves constitutes the urban space of businessmen and politicians. This series of enclaves (corporate buildings, select restaurants, lobbies, and so on) constitutes a topologically functional frame outside of which the rest of the city appears almost nonexistent.³

      There is a whole range of contemporary urban spaces where the rules of urban identity formation do not seem to apply. People are always passing through such spaces, yet no one understands them as locations that define their inhabitants. In airports, supermarkets, motorway service stations or hotels, an apparent and generalized anonymity seems to prevail. Most people are in transit as if their lives were unfolding “in parentheses.”

      These places, where a solitary anonymity is performed, are nonetheless defining characteristics of contemporary urban identities. Those transit-identities of the motorway traveler, the supermarket shopper, and so on, construct the typology of the average modern city dweller. Explicit or implicit instructions for use always accompany these spaces, addressing each person individually, but eventually, as with advertising messages, they fabricate recurrent characteristics. Nonverbal messages are especially powerful, such as advertising images in department stores, company logos in fast-food restaurants or service stations. Transit identities are not the product of chance experience; on the contrary, they distill what is typical and recurrent out of what is contingent and personal in the experience of urban “non-places” (Augé 1995).

      Clearly these identities are framed as well, enclosed as they are between socially identified spatial and temporal parentheses. This framing has something in common with the snapshot. No matter how arbitrarily framed, these pictures somehow lose their contingent character as soon as they are shown and appear as recognizable typical scenes. Family and vacation albums are full of such photographs: “In front of the Eiffel Tower,” “Our baby walking,” “Daddy’s first fishing success,” and so on. Arguably, modern urban identities are framed spatially and temporally according to practices that transpose the experience of the partitioned city into the experience of partitioned identities. Metropolitan enclaves of various kinds but are always perceived and performed as defining frames that seem to ignore the urban space that surrounds them. Actually, however, their status is founded upon their relations with the surrounding environment and these relations are regulated by concrete checkpoints.

      Metropolitan enclaves are characterized by checkpoints. One must prove their innocence in advance, as Marc Augé (1995, 102) brilliantly remarks, in order to be allowed to use these enclaves. Checkpoints punctuate the city: you can see them in airports, office buildings, supermarkets and banks, clubs and theaters, and of course, in guarded public buildings.

      Checkpoints are modular elements of a prevailing rhythm that produce a new dominant experience of “being in public.” Checkpoints define distinct everyday routines for different categories of inhabitants of the partitioned city. Toll gates or subway turnstiles mark the everyday movements of many city dwellers. The rhythm of the supermarket cashier marks an everyday ceremony of shopping.

      Collective and seemingly individualized identities are enacted in the process of participating in such rhythms. Even the temporary identities of the traveler or the purchaser are marked by the act of crossing identifying entrance points. There, one has to show his or her passport, debit or credit card in order to be allowed a seemingly liberating anonymity—“the passive joys of identity loss” (Augé 1995, 103).