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Space and Culture
DOI: 10.1177/1206331206298544
2007; 10; 136 Space and Culture
Karen Wells
The Material and Visual Cultures of Cities
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136
The Material and Visual
Cultures of Cities
Karen Wells
Birkbeck College, University of London
The author adapts Lefebvre’s (1991) triadic theorisation of the production of space to the study of
objects and ways of seeing in cities. Governmental power is condensed in monuments, planning,
mapping, and film; capital organises the spaces and events of the city through the circulation of
commodities and the destruction and reconstruction of urban space. Local cultures of consumption
on one hand and spectacular events on the other shape the lived experience of the urban. In trac-
ing the history and networks of things and images, the article unravels the reification and fetishi-
sation of urban life that would hide the power relations that structure everyday life within the
glittering spectacle of the commodity or the smooth veneer of the monument.
Keywords: surveillance; cinema; town planning; monuments; spectacle; capital; Lefebvre
We do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as nar-
rated, thought of, imagined, conceived.
—Marx & Engels (1970, p. 47)
The study of material culture, with its origins in archaeology and anthropology, is
already a study of everyday life. In contrast, visual culture has its origins in art history.
Looking at the visual culture of the city signals a move away from art history to “the
ethics and politics, aesthetics and epistemology of seeing and being seen,” (Mitchell,
2002, p. 87) paralleling the move in cultural studies away from culture as elite practices
to understanding culture as a way of life. It is this quality of visual and material culture
to condense at once the everyday, the monumental, and the spectacular that makes its
such a powerful tool for analysing the power relations that structure city living.
Despite the potential for the interrogation of material and visual culture to release
the secrets of social life, the study of the city in the social sciences has mostly been the
study of the social relations of people in the city. Attempts to define the city as a generic
space and culture vol. 10 no. 2, may 2007 136-144
DOI: 10.1177/1206331206298544
© 2007 Sage Publications
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Material and Visual Cultures
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137
space usually refer, following Wirth’s seminal essay, “Urbanism as a Way of Life”
(1938/1996), to the population size, heterogeneity, and density of urban life—all char-
acteristics of urban populations rather than of material spaces. The canon of urban
sociology is dominated by narratives that describe how people who are strangers relate
to one another. These may be ethnographies drawn from observation of people’s rela-
tions in public or from other qualitative methods, such as interviews. In either
case, they tend to be dominated by accounts of how people talk about one another and
how they feel about life in the city or how bodies are defined by and occupy the city
This emphasis on people in the city is, perhaps, unsurprising given that the analysis of
the actions of people is the foundation stone of the social sciences. Nonetheless, this
focus on people can have the effect of making the materiality of the city disappear from
view, evoking “a world of social interactions where things are either absent, or simply
provide a kind of backdrop to relations between persons” (Tilley, 2006, p. 2). This inat-
tention to the materiality of the city is surprising given the work of material production
and the abundance of objects and images that make urban space; indeed cities them-
selves might be characterised as cultural artifacts.
Notwithstanding this neglect of city things, some of the most significant contribu-
tions to material culture studies outside of archaeology and anthropology have
appeared in scholarly meditations on cities (Benjamin, 1999; de Certeau, 1984;
Lefebvre, 1991) and urban sociology has long recognised the impact of the city on the
visual. The city presses on the senses and the defining sensory experience of the city is
its impact on sight (Simmel, 1950). In the absence of more personal contact (e.g., talk-
ing or touching), it is by looking at people and places that people categorise them and
thereby organise their perceptions of the city, its internal and external boundaries and
flows. One thinks, for example, of the depiction of 19th-century Paris through the
description of its objects in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (1999), or the rich
detail of urban life in Lyons described so vividly in Volume 2 of de Certeau’s The
Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau, Giard, & Mayol, 1998). In these volumes, mate-
rial and visual culture might be understood as encompassing all the objects of the city,
their arrangement in space, their interaction with bodies, and the vantage points from
which bodies see objects and are seen by objects. (How else to describe being looked
down upon by the towering monuments of urban space or the more literal overseeing
of the closed-circuit television camera?) The materiality of the city also informs both
de Certeau’s spatial practices and Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space.
If it can plausibly be claimed that the material and visual cultures of cities encompass
all those objects and images in urban space and their apprehension by bodies, there
remains the problem of how to interpret this broad field of inquiry. Objects and images
may be considered as another kind of text, comparable to linguistic texts that can be read.
This approach has been very influential since the linguistic turn in the social sciences
despite repeated objections to the way it ignores the irreducibility and specificity of
objects and images. Alternatively, they may be used as elicitation tools in interviews, gen-
erating a metanarrative about objects and images, the analysis of which can be substi-
tuted for the direct analysis of objects and images. If the first approach evades questions
about the specificity of the material and visual dimensions of urban culture by reducing
them to text, the second approach reduces the apprehension of material and visual cul-
ture to texts about things. The (often, hidden) presumption behind this method is that
asking research subjects to talk about objects or images reveals the authentic interpreta-
tion or truth of the meaning of the object or image. Of course, to interpret objects and
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images in the city, as in any context, requires mediation in language. The thing may have
to be described, the quality of its materiality evoked in words. The thing does not speak,
so how can one call forth meaning from it? These admittedly difficult problems of inter-
pretation are not, however, rendered any easier by asking city dwellers to talk about the
material and visual culture of their city. It is a paradox that the material culture of urban
life, although constantly engaged with, is little noticed by its practitioners: After all, liv-
ing in the city is, as de Certeau observed, about the practice of everyday life.
This, then, is both the limitation and the possibility that inheres in attending to
material and visual culture to interpret the city: One focuses on the unnoticed, the
unrecalled, the invisible presence that would otherwise not be available to them, but
their interpretations can only claim plausibility and internal coherence. The sense of
apprehending the real that continues in the social sciences to be attached to speech and
writing (notwithstanding an ambivalent conviction that photographic images capture
the real) will not be so readily accepted in the case of the interpretation of objects and
practices of seeing and being seen.
Given the centrality of the human subject to the history of the social sciences, why
focus on objects and icons? My contention is that the academic analysis of things and
images can be as revealing, if not more so, of the power relations that structure urban
life than asking people to recount how they feel or think about life in cities. In this arti-
cle I offer a framework for analysing things in the city, loosely following Lefebvre’s tri-
adic theorisation of space, that I hope will demonstrate how the study of objects and
images can contribute to unravelling the reification and fetishisation (in the Marxist
sense) of urban life.
Lefebvre’s representations of space, or what Bender (2006) referred to as “rhetorics of
spatial practice” (p. 305), is discussed in this article first in terms of how governments
materialise their rule in the organisation and surveillance of urban space and the erection
of monuments and memorials. I then go on to consider the role of capital in shaping the
material culture of the city in relation to its most obvious manifestations: the demolition
and reconstruction of urban neighbourhoods and spaces of consumption. This loosely
maps onto Lefebvre’s concept of spatial practices. (Lefebvre’s use of the term spatial prac-
tices, despite de Certeau’s (1984) use of the same term in “Walking the City,” is not a ref-
erence to practices of resistance. Lefebvre used the term representational space to refer to
practices of resistance although, as I will show, this equation is problematic). Lefebvre uses
spatial practices to mean how specific spaces are used and how the interrelationships
between spaces are ordered:“the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each
social formation” (1991, p. 33). Thus Lefebvrian spatial practice embraces both the factory
and the shop and both the shopkeeper (whether of the supermarket or the corner shop)
and the shopper as well as the routes that connect, inter alia, home to work to shopping.
I take up Lefebvre’s third typology, representational spaces, to discuss how people’s need
for material goods and the material culture of quotidian practices produces the symbolic
differentiation of urban space.
Representation of Space: The Rhetoric of Spatial Practice
1
Monumental buildings mask the will to power and the arbitrariness of power beneath
signs and surfaces which claim to expose the collective will and collective thought.
(Lefebvre, 1991, p. 143)
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Material and Visual Cultures
139
MONUMENTS
One way to think of the material culture of the city is to say that it resides in those
things that make the city distinct from other human settlements. These are, of course,
historically constituted and change over time: It is no longer the case that electric light-
ing distinguishes the city from the countryside as it was in 19th century Europe.
Nonetheless, there are things in cities that, in general, it is difficult to imagine having
in a place outside of the city, and this is in large part because of the close relationship
between urban space and political power. The widespread acceptance in social theory
of a Foucauldian concept of power as a kind of force that flows between people rather
than a thing that some people have and others lack has sometimes obscured the extent
to which government makes the urban landscape. One particularly clear manifestation
in material culture of both the desire of government to mark the urban landscape with
symbols of its rule and its frequent failure to impress the significance of these symbols
on the urban population is the construction of monuments and memorials in the pub-
lic spaces of the city and at its borders (see Mookherjee , 2007; Wells, 2007 [this issue]).
Although the monument mania of 19th-century Europe is generally understood as an
attempt to make concrete the rule of the “postrevolutionary bourgeois nation-state in
the grip of accelerating modernization” (Huyssen, 2003, p. 41), monumentalising
power is no modernist impulse. The tendency to literally make concrete the rule of
power (whether religious, financial, or administrative) is one that has afflicted govern-
ment seemingly from the inception of state power. Because the purpose of monuments
is often to commemorate a particular moment in a government’s ascendancy and at
the same time to insist on the permanence or atemporality of its rule, they are, of
course, difficult to dispose of. Mostly, they are simply left in place, ignored and disre-
garded like some latter-day Ozymandias, waiting a moment, an anniversary perhaps,
when they may be brought back into a line of vision.
Paradoxically, the recognition that monuments are often invisible has led to the pro-
duction of the countermonument or antimonument. These structures embrace the
invisibility of the monument by literally disappearing. Mostly an attempt in Germany to
find an appropriate way to commemorate the Holocaust without creating sites for Nazi
graffiti or desecration, these countermonuments are designed to disappear over time or
to insist on a dialogic encounter between the countermonument and the spectator
(Young, 1993). Whereas the countermonument is partly a response to the conviction that
some events cannot be adequately memorialized, it is also a hope that something that is
absent may be more present to the imagination than something that is present.
SURVEILLANCE
The purpose of monuments is to impress on the visual senses of the subject,
although they apparently fail to do so, notwithstanding animating moments. In this
respect, technological extensions of sight, what Jay (1994) referred to as visual pros-
thetics, particularly the ubiquitous presence of the closed-circuit television camera in
the modern city, may be thought of as a kind of modern monumentality. Conversely,
the monument may be considered as a concrete panoptician. Of course the monu-
ment cannot see the subject but nonetheless it reminds the subject that he or she can
be seen and of the consequences of being seen. In the monument’s memorialising of
people and events, people are reminded that their selves and their actions can be
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captured and inscribed in stone. Ironically, this is even the case when a monument is
ostensibly memorialising resistance to power because the commemoration is more
often of the murder by the state of resistant subjects than it is of the successful
overcoming of state power (see Mookerjee, 2007; Wells, 2007). In any event, the city
combines a feeling of anonymity, of not being seen, with an almost constant being
seen, whether through surveillance or the simple fact of the constant presence of
other people in public space.
TOWN PLANNING
The material and the visual are combined in town planning. The plan begins
through its envisioning of the city or the neighbourhood and translates that vision into
the layout of streets, the naming of streets,
2
the extent of housing and shops, the erec-
tion of buildings, and the demolition of other buildings. The plan has been closely
connected with modernism in architecture and urbanism (Gold, 1997). The capacity
to lay the plan over the space of the city, to render its vision concrete in the built envi-
ronment, is taken, inter alia, as a sign of the capacity of the modern state to penetrate
and organise life in public. Conversely, the failure to retain the clarity of the plan in the
real-world of the street is a marker of a city government’s incapacity and fragility. The
suburbanisation of favelas, parachute settlements, townships, and other unauthorised
urban expansions are material expressions of the constant urban dialectic between set-
tlement and movement.
The map can be considered as a kind of negative image of the plan, the plan after it
has been rendered concrete, a “mimetic representation of transparent space” (Blunt &
Rose, 1994, p. 8). In its attempt to record what exists, the map aspires to capture the
real more closely than the plan can be realised in the real. In practice, and as an indi-
cator of what might be called the secret life of the city, government constantly fails to
capture on paper what exists in the world because of its inability to penetrate the world
(see Rooke, 2007 [this issue]). Hence mapping and the accuracy of maps is a marker
of the capacity of governments to govern and the extent of those urban areas that gov-
ernments cannot map are indicators of the size of the urban population who escape or
are neglected by government.
3
CINEMA
The depiction of cities on film might also be included within Lefebvre’s representa-
tion of space. If the various ways film is interpreted by audience and critic as well as
the social space it is viewed in might have more to do with representational spaces (see
Puwar, 2007 [this issue]) than representations of space, the visualising of the city on
film can easily be accommodated within the rubric of a rhetorics of spatial practice.
James Donald (1995) said that film imagines the city as “the juxtaposition between
panorama and myth” (p. 77) but also that the multiple perspectives and accelerated
rhythm of film echoed the speed and intensity of urban life. The city, he said,
“is not a place....‘The city’is better understood as a historically specific mode of seeing,
a structure of visibility that incorporates not only the analytic epistemology theorised by
Benjamin and achieved by Vertov [in Man With a Movie Camera], but also the primitive
fantasies hypothesised by de Certeau and realised in the fantastic cities of Ufa, Hollywood,
and Manga.” (p. 92)
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Spatial Practice: Capital and the Material
and Visual Culture of the City
[For Marx,] a commodity is a figurative, allegorical entity, possessed of a mysterious life
and aura, an object which, if properly interpreted, would reveal the secret of human his-
tory. (Mitchell, 1987, p. 188)
The gaze of the flaneur is the abiding, if rather mythical and certainly masculine,
figure of urban visual theory. Less romantically, one might speak of the shopper or
even “the badaud, the mere gaper entirely taken in by what he sees” (Jay, 1994, p. 119).
Jay (1994) spoke of the “weakening of the defenses of the urban viewer” (p. 119) in
response not only to the disruption to daily life wrought by Haussmann’s rebuilding of
19th-century Paris but the appearance of les grand magazins. The spectacle of desire,
although undoubtedly falling short of many people’s experiences of shopping, contin-
ues to be evoked in advertising and film and in the window displays of up-market
department stores. The disenchantment of the world that Weber (1992) anticipated is
belied in these cathedrals of commodities where the exploitative character of produc-
tion is veiled by the prospects of looking at, if not owning, all kinds of glittering and
expensive things (Campbell, 1989; Tester, 1995). The possibility (or danger) of “seduc-
tion by the spectacle of modern life” was for the situationists “far more politically
nefarious than Big Brother’s omnipresent watchfulness” (Jay, 1994, p. 411). For the sit-
uationists, the spectacle “arrives in its mature form at the ‘moment when the com-
modity has attained the total occupation of social life’” (Jay, 1994, p. 477, citing
Debord). Whether such a moment has arrived, the significance of cities as concen-
trated sites of consumption, both spectacular and prosaic, can hardly be overstated. If
monuments and memorials are testimony to the close connection between state power
and urbanisation, the proliferation of shops in urban centres, whether as high street,
arcade, mall, or market, speak to the connections between cities and capitalism.
But there is another kind of visibility of capital in the city that constantly threatens
(or promises) to tarnish the glitter of the spectacle: the visibility of class and social
inequality. If expensive department stores succeed in fetishising commodities, the
work that has to be done to produce goods, sell goods, build shops and offices, clean
the city, and transport people around the city belies the neoliberal insistence on the
declining significance of class. Attending to objects means also attending to the rela-
tionships between objects and people. In asking how objects are produced, arranged,
and circulated and how their production, arrangement, and circulation shapes the
practices of people, one can begin to undo the fetishisation, in the Marxist sense, of
objects. This need not involve psychoanalysis of the object (or indeed of workers). The
materiality of material culture encourages an attention to surfaces: What do things and
bodies look like, how much space do they occupy, where have they travelled from, how
settled are they, are they smooth or rough, neglected or nurtured, shiny or dull?
Nonetheless, unravelling the object as fetish does require an attention if not to depth
(which implies precisely a kind of psychoanalytics) then to elsewhere, to questions
about how this thing came to be in this place and why it remains here.
Finally, the constant demolition and reconstruction of urban space must figure
prominently in any consideration of how capital shapes the materiality of the city. It is a
trope of modernity that “everything that is solid melts into air” but if capitalism has this
dissolving quality it is also the case that, phoenix-like, new structures are built on the ashes
of the old. It is this process of demolition and construction, destruction and creation, that
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space and culture/may 2007
makes material culture such a fruitful method for interpreting the space and time of the
city. The “past leaves its traces” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 37; see Weszkalnys, 2007 [this issue]).
Lefebvre’s (1991) distinction between abstract and concrete is complicated by an attention
to the material and visual cultures of the city, suggesting that such erasure is difficult if not
impossible to achieve. Indeed, Lefebvre’s concept of abstract space may be thought of as
the attempt to grasp the ways that capitalism seeks to erase not only the history of space
but also the ontology of the present through the covering over of the concrete relations
that produce space. In this case, the analysis of the concrete history of space (both
literally—its buildings, walkways, and statues—and metaphorically—the social relations
that produced it) parallels Marx’s analysis of the concrete exploitative relations of pro-
duction underlying the abstract concept of the market.
Representational Spaces
Representational space is alive: it speaks (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 42)
Government and capital are powerful determinants of the materiality of cities.
Nonetheless, the materiality of the city is also made from below. The forces that com-
bine to organise people into neighbourhoods are multifarious. Some, of course, are
those of government. When the Windrush docked in 1948, it was government agencies
that organised the transportation of its West Indian, mostly Jamaican, passengers
from the Tilbury Docks to a disused air raid shelter in Clapham, near Brixton. Private
capital also played its part. Black landlords already resident in Brixton provided rented
accommodation for Jamaican settlers that many White landlords refused them. Both
these actions, by government and private capital, are in Lefebvre’s terms spatial prac-
tices: the city (or neighbourhood) as it is there to be perceived by those who will live
in it. Today Brixton maintains its identity as a Jamaican neighbourhood, despite the
constant flow of a tide of White gentrification that washes over it and the intermittent
currents of new immigration from the Horn of Africa and, latterly, Brazil and Portugal.
The robustness of its identity is in part due to the concentration of Jamaican and
British-Caribbean people but, I would suggest, the material culture of the neighbour-
hood is as important in signifying its identity. As with the bourgeois department stores
of 19th-century Paris and its signification of the emerging cultural presence of a new
class, in Brixton, as in other socially marked (whether by class, nationality, ethnicity, or
sexuality) urban neighbourhoods, it is primarily though the material cultures of con-
sumption that this identity is produced, performed, and recognised (see Lou, 2007;
Rooke, 2007; Puwar, 2007 [all this issue]), or, as Lefebvre might say, lived.
THE SPECTACLES OF PERFORMANCE, PROTEST, AND POWER
Less everyday, and perhaps more closely related to Lefebvre’s original concept of rep-
resentational spaces, is the way that the spaces of the city lend themselves, precisely
because of their close connection to governmental and financial power, and the density
of their populations and the spatialisation of inequality to spectacular moments and
events. I use spectacular here in the sense of a spectacle, a performance, a central aspect
of which is that it is seen. Despite Lefebvre’s intent to have these as spaces of resist-
ance from below, spectacularity can never be classified in the abstract as radical or reac-
tionary, from a leftist perspective, nor is it limited to acts of terrorists, insurgents,
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Material and Visual Cultures
143
revolutionaries, or carnivalistas. From the public execution of regicides to the shock and
awe of the bombing of Baghdad, the state has always used the spectacle in its rhetoric and
practice of power as much if not more than the urban crowd has used it as a rhetoric or
practice of resistance (Stallybrass & White, 1986). In any event, whether the spectacle
emanates from above or from below, the events and moments that have been burned
into a global (historical) imaginary are, almost without exception, urban events.
4
Conclusion
Lefebvre’s triadic theory of the production of space is a useful conceptual tool for
thinking about the material and visual cultures of cities in ways that do not simply
reduce them to language. More than this, it shows how the study of the material and
visual in urban space offers social scientists a way to represent the multilayered multi-
plicity of urban space, unravelling the tendency to represent cities, even in those
accounts that celebrate the multicultural city, as ordered spaces organised into rela-
tively discrete neighbourhoods forming a kind of mosaic of social space. Thinking
about objects in the city, one can ask how they were produced, by whom, with what,
and why in this form and in this place? An expanded notion of visual culture as ways
of seeing and being seen likewise allows one to ask questions about the epistemology
of images. In answering these kinds of questions, one can begin to undo the reification
and fetishisation of the social-spatial relations of the city.
Notes
1. In her entry, “Place and Landscape,” in The Handbook of Material Culture, Bender (2006)
rendered representation of space as “the rhetoric of spatial practice.” This formulation is very
helpful for thinking about how monuments, planning, surveillance, and so forth are attempts to
persuade the subject of the legitimacy or at least the unassailability of political rule.
2. The renaming of East Berlin’s city streets following reunification is an example town plan-
ning reflecting a new vision for an area.
3. Good examples of this might be the entirely schematic map of Addis Ababa available in
1991, when as much as four fifths of the city was unaccounted for on the map, or the “invisibil-
ity” of the Kasbah on maps of contemporary Marrakesh.
4. Hanawalt and Reyerson’s (1994) City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe illustrates the close
connection between urban space and the “urban ceremonial.”
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The texture of memory: Holocaust memorials and meaning. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Karen Wells is a lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research interests
are in material and visual culture and urban childhoods. She has published articles in the
Journal of Consumer Culture, Social and Cultural Geography, and Ethnic and Racial
Studies. She is the author of a forthcoming book, Childhood in a Global Context (Polity).
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