historical conscience can be attributed to a linear conception of time. This time is “empty” and “homogeneous” (Benjamin 1992, 252) because what defines it is the linear rhythmicality through which time is measured. The everyday experience of time regulated by clocks and routinized in measured, repeated acts, can only have quantitative historical differences. With this framework, we can speak of an alleged “tempo of history” speeding up.
In modern societies, the myth of novelty is offered as a substitute to the experience of routines. Rhythmicality is banished as restraining and anonymous, whereas originality appears as the true mark of identity. Yet, imposed working and living routines are methodically regulated. Imposed order in time and space is half-concealed behind a well-calculated randomness. In its prototypical form, this condition resembles the structure of the advertising message: you are urged to buy something you know is produced in massive numbers, by being convinced that it was created “especially for you.” Your identity is supposedly verified and created through this act of buying.
The partitioned city and the “framing” of identities
In contrast to the supposedly modernist quest for universal order, public space in the “postmodern” metropolis appears to embody chaos and randomness. These characteristics have been elevated to key positive attributes of emerging urban environments. Privatization, and the consumer ideologies of individualistic hedonism that accompany it, transform practices used to “perform” public space into practices of self-gratification. These practices represent the city as a collection of chances (and places) for consumer satisfaction.
As Peter Marcuse, among others, has shown, the “postmodern condition” goes along with a new “partitioned city.” Urban chaos goes along with a fragmentation of the city that is far from random (Marcuse 1995, 244). The contemporary metropolis is increasingly becoming a conglomerate of differently defined enclaves. In some cases, literal walls separate these enclaves from the rest of the city, as with large department stores and gated communities. Walls can also demarcate “pride and status of rule and prejudice” (ibid., 249). These are the invisible walls defining ghettos, suburban neighborhoods, and gentrified recreation areas.1
One of the basic attributes of the “partitioned city” is that it destroys the public character of public space. Public space, a creation of the practices that inhabit it, “is always contestable, precisely because whereas there are criteria that control admission to its purview, the right to enact and enforce those criteria is always in question” (Henaff and Strong 2001, 4).
The partitioned city is full of privatized public spaces in which public use is carefully controlled and specifically motivated. No contestation is tolerated. Users of these spaces must be checked and categorized regularly. They must follow specific instructions in order to be allowed access to various services and facilities. A shopping mall or a large department store, for instance, are such quasi-public spaces. A company-owned town or an enclosed community, separated from the network of public spaces that surround them (streets, squares, forests, etc.), controls local space by limiting its use to certified residents. Holiday resorts often exhibit former traditional public spaces in theme parks featuring rural or village communities. Public life is reduced to the conspicuous consumption of fantasized identities in a sealed-off enclave that mimics a “holiday city.”
What defines these spaces as sites of “public life” is not the clashing rhythms of contesting practices (that create the political) but the regulated rhythms of routines under surveillance. The publicly exhibited identities of the users are enacted in accordance with those rhythms that discriminate and canonize them.
Social identities are performed in the quasi-public space of the partitioned city. The fact that different categories of people are allowed to enter the various enclaves and remain there is a critical indicator of their identity. Residential enclaves can exhibit recognizable collective identities, especially when inner or outer forces homogenize the residents. The suburban areas of American cities, the shantytowns of Africa, Latin America or Asia, the gentrified residential areas of different European cities, and the immigrant ghettoes all over the world equally exhibit visible urban identities. In these areas, public space is separated from the rest of the city and use is restricted to the members of the corresponding community of residents. Gated neighborhoods and impenetrable favelas take separation to the obvious limit.2
Identities are framed both spatially and conceptually. A frame is characterized by the clear demarcation of a contained space versus an outer space: what lies outside the frame does not contribute to the definition of the inside. Our experience of pictures, both in modern news coverage and advertising images, strengthens this socially inculcated intuition. A frame defines a situation, a subject, and eventually specifies information, attributing to it the status of a meaningful message. Framed messages are not connected to each other. Advertising messages float all around us on top of buildings, in magazines, and even on human bodies. News photographs appear next to each other in temporal or spatial jux-taposition, producing the image of a fragmented—or should we say partitioned—world. Framed identities correspond to the experience of a partitioned urban space where residential enclaves appear—or rather are fantasized—as completely independent of their surrounding public space.
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
