The City & the City, China Miéville (2009)

The novel presents the cities as each claiming various forms of experience and material representation as intrinsically tied to their respective identities, without ever explicitly describing the differences in full to the reader. In the interest of looking specifically at how spaces belonging to either city are arranged across a certain neighbourhood with crosshatches of various degrees and total areas, this project uses its own code to represent an abstraction of the borders between Besź and Ul Qoma. This project aims to highlight the use of codification to explain ownership/identity, and is driven by interests in perception and perceived realities. By presenting this project as a generic city drawn as a series on shapes within a boundary, this hopes to convey that objects are just objects until they are claimed by an Idea (or Ideas) to become a Thing.

Keeping in mind the nonlinearity of the implied condition of layering, adjacencies, and intersections in these two cities, we also know that objects of/in space and enclosed volumes can be marked as belonging to one city or the other due to the physical presence of boundaries (planes and edges), and the exterior relationships between multiple objects is distinct from the independent interior environments of each object. Objects and icons, as we have seen in various examples in history, can represent different meanings while taking on the same form.

This specific set of drawings is focused on the apartments of the two detectives located in a crosshatched residential area. The determined arrangement is specific to its surrounding environment, considering factors such as degree of crosshatch or proximity to and relationships with other conditions. Diagrammatically, the landscape of Beszel and Ul Qoma overlap and pass over each other in a convoluted system of ambiguous relationships. In reality however the city landscape is scarcely different from most cities in our memory, a showcase of plural versions of architecture placed in some kind of organising network. In chronological order of presentation, the drawings show an overall plan of the immediate neigbourhood, an elevation of the set of buildings where Inspectors Tyador Borlú and Quissim Dhatt live, a corresponding diagrammatic section, and a perspective. The drawings follow a colour code that begins to explain the complex system of layering and intersection of the two cities as extraneously claimed territories latched onto the skeleton of a city.

neighbourhood plan

The plan depicts the crosshatched residential neighbourhood with its largely shared streets and buildings represented in black. Circled in the middle of the page is the set of buildings that we are analysing, rendered with some transparency (contrasting the hardline colour coded zoning of the overall drawing) to allude to the manner in which these claimed territories exist around each other in section as well as plan. While neither completely irregular nor regular, the layout of this section of the wider urban plan alludes to the combination of city grid types, with streets that appear to be trying to create a square grid beginning to bend across the page towards different nodal points in each direction. The array of blocks themselves is an attempt by the city to compartmentalise itself neatly, although this is debatably successful. The more regularised areas with fairly standardised cubic blocks belong to the relatively modern Ul Qoma while the haphazard zig-zag building outlines mark that of Besź’s archaic city.

street-facing elevation

The crosshatched city is shared across most elements of public circulation and infrastructure such as stair/elevator cores and pedestrian walkways. In elevation, the set of buildings that make the Inspectors’ residences are depicted as crosshatched. Thus, the facade becomes a crosshatched display of the changing identity of the spaces inside, implying associations of codified information rather than explicitly and definitively showcasing the contrasts between the respective styles of each city.

diagrammatic section

The proposed division of space between the two cities across the three buildings with shared party walls is better understood sectionally, where the privately owned housing units vary in their decided described geographic location (Besźel or Ul Qoma) based on degrees of “modern-ness” of living as reflected in certain fixtures visible on its facade such as air conditioning units and balconies (small examples of modern housing luxuries). In this set of drawings, the top floors of these buildings are declared ‘dissesnsi’, places of no return – places that everyone knows not to go, but without real reason. The story explains dissesnsi and Breach in similar ways without explicitly confirming or denying their relationship, thereby setting these forces up as being versions of Big Brother, existing everywhere and also in a type of “nowhere” simultaneously. In a crosshatched and “safe” residential area it seems only natural that if they are present, dissesnsi or Breach areas would be such that people who enter are doing so deliberately, moving outside of what are considered normal spaces and routes. The ground floors of these crosshatched buildings are treated as an extension of the street and are crosshatched for the most part, relating to the housing units stacked above them with similar rules to that of the crosshatched city landscape and the rest its tightly defined Besź or Qoman tributaries: do not enter or look where you are not expected to.

perspective drawing

Finally, the perspective view shows the project in relation to its surroundings that have been rendered coarsely as generic masses. Unlike the previous drawings, this presents the buildings (the project and those adjacent) as slightly irregular objects produced by a collection of various masses, implying that the non-linear aggregation of space ownership reflected in the diagrammatic section (p.7) works in multiple dimensions and takes various forms. While the buildings each read as singular objects with implied hard boundaries that move through and across whole faces of the building, what is proposed is that this city/these cities is/are highly generic in aesthetic but organised nebulously in spatial arrangement. The City and the City are fundamentally the same place, each reflecting some version of a generic city that we understand from memory. Essentially, all cities are the same: networks of finance and commerce put into real space. What changes a city then is not the built world but the ideologies which occupy it and the projected meanings that tangible objects inherit as a result, ultimately developing the semantics by which we understand it.

Elements and objects are generic, acquiring meaning based on ideologies that can manifest themselves into highly codified physical objects and arrangements that comprise our experienced environments. This project aims to represent how a city can be organised according to multiple versions of grids in 3-dimensional space, creating opportunities for conceptual complexity while remaining fairly generic in terms of our aesthetic expectations of a city.