For the poet Jean-Christophe Bailly, today’s urban space, whether heritage or functional, no longer lends itself to strolling and walking. To the memory imposed by museums, or to the construction sites of new towns, he opposes the memory in action of the passer-by, pensive and the only bearer of utopia.
This work brings together texts by Jean-Christophe Bailly on architecture and town planning published between 1997 and 2012. The coherence of the work is due to the postulate that the city only exists in the wandering of passers-by who travel through it and animate it. Indeed, for Bailly, memory is the essential link between urban space and those who use and inhabit it. Not a memory given once and for all, but a dynamic memory which is constantly updated in walking and wandering, a memory which creates the desire to speak of the city and to project it into language. The urban phrase is then understood as this relationship between walking and speaking, a joint dynamic of the feet and the tongue. According to the author, if we have so much difficulty recognizing the city in today’s urban sprawl, it is because urban space lends itself less and less to wandering. The physical obstacles to indeterminate walking are then reflected in the disintegration of speech about the city.
If Bailly’s book proves to be both theoretical and critical, its literary aspect must also be mentioned. Indeed, the author also deploys his own urban phrase, his experience as a walker, his variations on names à la Proust (The generative grammar of legs And Passage of hours, passage of names). He then puts his theory into action, he gives voice to his own memory as a walker in literary observations of cities he has passed through and loved (Paris of course, but also Barcelona, New York, Saint-Étienne…). But for the Bailly walker, it is clear that traditional towns, as well as suburbs and new towns, are increasingly hostile to walkers and are being transformed into places of utilitarian and obligatory journeys. Urban phrasing then tends to disappear: urban space is less and less “ city “.
On the difficulty of wandering in contemporary urban space
Reinventing the city would therefore mean reinventing the multiple flexions, connections and relationships specific to relaunching the movement concrete that brings it to life. Because, as we have just said, with Bailly, the phrasing of the city is first and foremost the passerby who effects it. Here we find the theme of urban wandering, so important in reflections on the city, from the stroll dear to Benjamin to the urban drift of the Situationists. The strength of Bailly’s reflection is to diagnose the material provisions of the urban fabric which today threaten the free movement of the stroller. In the space of suburban cities and new residential areas, the catastrophic disappearance of the street makes strolling impossible ; zoning, a utilitarian doctrine according to which the functions of living (housing, commerce, etc.) are spatially dissociated, dries up free wandering in the urban fabric. Consequently, the frequency of comings and goings in the city is exhausted and leads to a loosening of the emotional bond between the space and its occupants. According to Bailly, there is a strong “ bond of friendship between the city and those who pass through it: the more the city is looked at, is looked at like this, and the more real and distinct it becomes » (p. 191). The disappearance of the street affect lineage » (p. 257) is catastrophic, because if the space no longer affects the inhabitant as much, he tends to no longer recognize it, such a space no longer resonates in him, in other words the affect “ city » no longer exists for him, it being specified that this “ him » is the necessary peg for the tone collective of this city affect.
On the other hand, the heritage city undermines the continuity of the urban space necessary for the stroller by creating “ compulsory viewing areas » (p. 192). In fact, it isolates certain buildings and remarkable portions of space, thus erecting “ signs reported » (p. 180) detached from the urban flow, pure objects of cultural consumption. This culture of the object rather than the link, contemporary architecture victim of the cult of “ the large object » (p. 257) also emphasizes it every day ; in Paris, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Opéra Bastille are recent examples of the solipsism of large objects incapable of tracing continuity with the surrounding urban fabric (p. 81). With its old and new objects, the city thus becomes a museum with marked routes, an organization antithetical to the city with multiple routes open to the indeterminate wandering of the stroller.
Fluidity of space and fluidity of time
Zoning and elimination of the street, excessive heritageization and cult of large objects, all these trends specific to town planning and architecture which neutralize the free wandering of the walker gradually eliminate what Bailly calls urban phrasing. Urban phrasing is, as we have just seen, the step of the walker which constantly updates it, it is the memory of the city which it constantly reanimates and updates, it is finally the word which collects the city affect in it and makes it resonate in its own swirls. The city is concretely and permanently rewritten by the steps of the passers-by who cross it, by the multiple memory of the city thus perpetually updated. This “ generative grammar of legs » and its correlative urban speech is quite other than “ the discourse that the city holds about itself and to itself » (p. 174) ; in fact, the city of heritage objects communicates a lot, and its zones of obligatory gaze are accompanied by so many agreed discourses of an artificial self-consciousness (official memory), because it is removed from the movement of urban vitality. Bailly contrasts the deposited memory of heritage buildings with the actual memory of the passerby, “ the one, starry, alley, living and disappearing, of the echoes that the city raises in him » (p. 192).
Heritage memory is artificial because it freezes time ; the memory of the passerby is the living thread of time which is constantly regenerating: “ The passerby, the child of time that passes (…) Someone who passes, who inhabits time, the mobile residence of time where the city is also inscribed by wearing out » (p. 179). An urban space without a street ages poorly, because in the absence of passers-by, children of time, crossing it, it has no plasticity over time (p. 93) ; the museum city refuses the “ free use of the dormancy of the past ” And “ pretends to dictate his awakening » ; in town, the “ “duty to remember” is a catastrophe » (p. 87). Renovation of facades, isolated monuments marked as worthy of interest, excessive heritage development tends to fix time, and no longer leaves the passers-by the leisure to let the past come to them randomly on their journeys. There is a direct relationship between the fluidity of space and the fluidity of time (p. 192), between free wandering and the coming of time ; a city only exists in such a movement of time and space, the museum city exhausting in itself this movement, the “ city » news, she, not giving it substance.
Utopia povera and dormancy of time
In such a hostile context for the city to take shape, the question then arises of what is still possible. In an astonishing text, “ Utopia povera “, Bailly sets out the idea of a transformation of the utopian mode of operation which was so strong in the world of architecture and town planning. If the radical idea of the invention of a new social body no longer seems possible, or even desirable (living time is the past in action), the richness of utopian thought must be preserved. For Bailly, utopia would rather be sought in the dormancy of time, in the potential stored within the objects of the past, in the “ maintaining the possible in the accomplished » (p.159). Utopia would be the detection of the possible buried in things. This is a utopia. poor “, because it can be found everywhere ; the author discovers it in simple objects and workers’ houses in Le Creusot (p. 148). Thus, utopia would be the part of ideal which persists in all human creations, such as for example project of architecture which is not completely exhausted in its realization. If all human creation carries within it a part of the ideal, utopia would be a relationship with memory which tends to actualize this ideal, provided however that the materialized past is not “ meant » excessively, that is to say does not become a heritage object. A free and indeterminate relationship to the past and its materiality, such is the proposal for recasting “ the operator of utopia » by Bailly. Ultimately, we could say that city passers-by unknowingly activate a part of utopia in their active memory, because their wandering updates the collective project that was the city of the past in the present. The new notion of poor utopia should inspire architects and urban planners in their task of reconnecting spaces ; it would be a question of not stupidly conserving scattered heritage objects, nor of making a clean slate to rebuild everything, but of thinking about the common by subtly reworking the materiality and the possibilities of its collective past (the city where free movement is possible) . In another text entitled On the abandoned Parisians, the author suggests a concrete measure to guarantee spaces suitable for the coming of time (we will remember that fluidity of time and fluidity of space are correlative). This would involve leaving the various abandoned spaces of the city intact, “ temporary spaces of indefinite duration » (p. 206) and transform them thus “ in observation posts of this coming of time ; such would be the program of an urban planning that is not only thoughtful but also thoughtful » (p. 216).