Transient urban spaces

Modernity has kraaled sacred space into particular sanctioned places like the cemetery or the Church, Mosque and Synagogue. These place are permanent and state sanctioned.

Ground Zero in New York after 9/11 became a paradigm for the temporary sacred space. Developing on from this idea, here we look at the way contemporary urban culture has reintroduced the idea of a transient holy or sacred space into everyday experience. In part, this is inspired by white bikes – literally old bikes, painted white – which have started to appear by the sides of roads where cyclists have died. Called ‘ghost bikes’, they form part of a coordinated action from Austria to New Zealand. This piece explores how sacred spaces are being created which both intervene in the urban landscape and provide an interstice for political action. In this instance it’s bike safety, but this can also be seen in the markings used to reaffirm identity in the case of gang-associated violence.

Writing from the UK, over the last year it’s hard to ignore the media attention given to knife crime in inner cities, London especially. This has accompanied the increasing visibility of locations of fatal car crashes, hit-and-run accidents and gang violence. As happens elsewhere, each place is demarcated with tributes to the victim whereby flowers, notes, mementos and articles of clothing are tied to lampposts and road railings.

There were twenty-five stabbing fatalities in London in 2008.[1] The victims of stabbing fatalities are, more often than not, young male teenagers who have either belonged to a gang or have been caught up in inter-gang turf wars. The social backdrop to many of these sites is one of social exclusion; class, ethnicity, economics.[2] All play a part in the biography of the victim. Spatially, the sites are often in areas like high streets around nightclubs and late night eateries where natural surveillance is minimal, if not absent; thus ‘escaping informal social control’.[3] In a census of urban street gangs in the 1920s, sociologists from the Chicago School found gangs were prevalent in the ‘interstitial’ sites of the city. This is a spatial observation still relevant today. Furthermore, neighbourhoods that suffer gang violence are linked to areas of ‘social disorganization’.[4] It is within these boundaries that crime is carried out as part of a performative relationship between authority and peer group, where the ‘excitement, even ecstasy (the abandonment of reason and rationale), is the goal of the performance’ and ‘excitement is directly related to the breaking of boundaries, of confronting parameters and playing at the margins of social life’.[5]

Following the tragedy of each stabbing, a temporary occupation of the murder scene is witnessed. The boundaries, originally marked by the police crime scene tape, are replaced by the portable architecture of grief, memory and celebration: commemoration. The bolt-on of a sacred space is a collective event. This is not the transport trucks and air balloons of Archigram’s [6] 1970s conception, but a relational, interpersonal construction of space. The site is policed and bounded through a sequence of transgression, social semiotics and occupation: graffiti; school ties hung up on railings and lampposts; flowers and, finally, peers of the victim who police the site.

The site becomes demarcated spatially via inscriptions, tags and general graffiti in honour of the deceased. In these sites there’s an inversion of techniques. Thus a ‘remembrance book’ is created through the use of pavement slabs, inscribed with tags and personal statements of loss or celebration. Graffiti is an important element of boundary. It ‘challenges the dominant dichotomy between public and private space. It interrupts the familiar boundaries of the public and the private by declaring the public private and the private public.’[7] Here, public space separates into private/sacred space. The site composes a strategy of ‘inversion and hybridization’. That’s to say that the socio-political position of the murdered and bereaved is reversed in the temporary sacred space through what David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal describe as ‘mixing, fusing, or transgressing conventional spatial relations’.[8] Chidester and Linenthal’s broader work identifies three typologies of sacred space: inversion and hybridisation are part of this triumvirate together with the strategy of exclusion discussed in the original article.

This process is akin to Homi Bhabha’s observation that hybridisation ‘terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery’.[9] The ruse in the spaces thus described is the very temporality of the event; the interruption of the flows of city experience and making visible the irony that ‘a space or place is perhaps revealed at its most sacred when people are willing to fight, kill, or die over its ownership and control’.[10] If the sacred spaces related to gang killings are transgressive, seeking to provide ‘resistance to domination’ and an alternative to the traditionally state endorsed memorial space, then the Ghost Bike movement provides more traditional networks of memorial and sacred space.
The movement’s website informs the visitor: ‘The Street Memorial Project honors cyclists and pedestrians that have been killed on New York City’s streets. We seek to cultivate a compassionate and supportive community for survivors and friends of those lost and to initiate a change in culture that fosters mutual respect among all people who share the streets.’[11]

The movement has developed, since its artistic inception in 2005, into a global campaign for change in road safety. The structure and ideology of the pressure group belongs to a modernist sphere of democratic protest. It does not call upon the carnevalesque and performative, nor a strategy of hybridization as already discussed but, rather, a strategy of inversion; ‘reversing a prevailing spatial orientation’. It provides a framework for symbolic gesture rather than the spatial intervention seen at Ground Zero or the bolt-on relational space commemorating the victims of knife crime.
The movement relies upon the symbolism and aestheticisation of the object: a decommissioned bicycle painted white. The problem of meaning – semiosis – and any slippage in connotation is countered by its presence on the World Wide Web: the Web coordinates meaning. Rather than a tool of radical communititive rupture to social action, the Internet provides a mapping tool.

The memorial project does not create a physical architectural space as in the other examples discussed in the original article, but instead provides a semiotic intervention. It allows death and its cultural associations with ritual and sacred space to be brought into urban living as a phenomenological experience. This forces the ‘organization of these experiences into causal relations’.[12]
Ghost Bikes is part of a broader series of art practices, which have created a range of critical interventions in the everyday of urban living: the globally active Reclaim the Streets Movement [13] for instance, or the installation work of Cornford and Cross. In one project, the latter created a temporary peace garden over the entrance to a Cold War nuclear bunker in London’s Southwark.[14]

The Ghost Bike Movement makes a coordinated, conscious intervention into the city/urban centre and, as such, draws upon a more traditional methodology – i.e. Religion and art practice – in creating an urban sacred space. Is it the one example that sits most comfortably in an organised, modernist typology of the sacred?

And finally…

This isn’t a postmodern account of the sacred, living between the Mall and New Ageism. Nor is it to overturn the structures of modernity. If anything, the sacred is not attached to a grand-narrative, but rather, a sacred space which is ‘rich, complex, open’.[15] It is one that is situated in a public sphere which is still susceptible to personal ‘democracy’. In The Sacred & The Profane, Mircea Eliade captures the spirit of how sacred (church) and profane experience co-habitat in the city: ‘…the threshold that separated the two spaces also indicates the distance between two modes of being [sacred and profane]. The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds. At the same time, it is the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where the passage from the profane tothe sacred world becomes possible.’[16] The transient nature of the sacred spaces and architecture provide this bridge. Not one between the fixed architecture of churches and memorials, but a relational infrastructure which can, briefly, embody the non-places of shopping areas, roadways and car-parks.

A longer version of this article was originally published in Monu - Magazine on Urbanism ‘Holy Urbanism’ Issue 10
References

1 P. Allen, ‘Teenagers Murdered in London in 2008’ in The Guardian, Tuesday 18 November, 2008.
2 A. Topping, ‘I Only Get Angry When the Police are Rude’ in The Guardian, Friday 12 December 2008.
3 Marcus Felson,‘Those Who Discourage Crime’ in John E. Eck and David Weisburd (eds.), Crime and Place, Vol. 4 (Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 1995): 53-66.
4 Luc Anselin et al., ‘Spatial Analyses of Crime’ in Criminal Justice, Vol. 4 (2000), 213–62.
5 Mike Presdee, Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime (New York: Routledge, 2000).
6 ‘The first stage programme [of the Instant City] consisted of assemblies carried by approximately twenty vehicles….’ and ‘Instant City’, see Archigram/Peter Cook (London: Studio Vista, 1972).
7 Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
8 David Chidester and Edward Tabor Linenthal, American Sacred Space. Religion in North America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
9 Homi Bhabha, as discussed in ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 The Street Memorial Project www.ghostbikes.org/new-york-city
12 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception: and Other Essays Psychology on the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, James M. Edie (ed.), (Evanston: Northwestern U P, 1964), 228.
13 http://rts.gn.apc.org/
14 Words Are Not Enough, 2007, www.cornfordandcross.com
15 Graham Holderness, ‘The Undiscovered Country’: Philip Pullman and the ‘Land of the Dead’ in Literature & Theology, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2007): 276.
16 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred & The Profane: the Nature of Religion (London: Sheed and Ward Ltd,1957).