Time and the City

What is the relation of the city to time? Analysis of temporality has emerged as a critical theme of contemporary political theory, but thinking about time has not made much of an impact in the field of urban theory. Yet if we understand power as the capacity to determine not only the space, but also the temporality of subjectivity, it seems clear that the vector of time is critical to understanding how urban and suburban spaces work.

The basic mode of understanding the relation between time and the city is that of the city as a site layered with different times. The best source for this account of time and urban space is Lewis Mumford’s conception of the city as both a spatial and temporal container, a physical and spiritual field (or magnet) that produces power, meaning, symbol and time. As Mumford writes in The Culture of Cities:

“Cities are a product of time. They are the molds in which men’s lifetimes have cooled and congealed, giving lasting shape, by way of art, to monuments that would otherwise vanish with the living and give no means of renewal or wider participation behind them. In the city, time becomes visible: buildings and monuments and public ways, more open than the written record, more subject to the gaze of many men than the scattered artifacts of the countryside, leave an imprint on the minds even of the ignorant or the indifferent. Through the material fact of preservation, time challenges time, time clashes with time: habits and values carry over beyond the living group, streaking with different strata of time the character of any single generation.”

For Mumford, the temporal layering of a city is most often a hierarchical layering, and it is this insight that helps him situate the city as the most important site for the production of power. Despite the simple force of this passage, with its image of the city as a space typified by a kind of archaeological layering, I think it is important to note that Mumford does not simply see the temporality of the city as a uniform field in which remnants of the past are only visible, giving us only a sense of the past as a linear progression littered with historically superseded temporalities. Mumford indicates that the city, perhaps because of its complexity and heterogeneity, may contain different temporal modalities (ie, may contain social ways of being that do not correspond to the most dominant at any given moment).

Thus not only built forms, but also fragments of social worlds corresponding to these forms, may survive in the urban environment. Obviously, older forms of life and associated built environments can exist outside of an urban milieu, but what is unique about the city is its capacity to contain these moments and forms contemporaneously, opening the possibility of a communicative relation between different temporalities. As an example of such a survival, Mumford cites the persistence of medieval life-forms in 18^th and 19^th century Paris.

While much of this may no doubt be true, it can lead to a rather romantic conception of temporality that contrasts the accelerated time of capitalism to the slower time of more traditional or more “organic” societies. Thus a relation is posited between duration and subjectivity, implying that accelerated duration is bad (in the sense that this acceleration is an effect of capitalist command) and slower duration is good (in the sense that elongated temporality opens the possibility of communicative relationships capable of resisting capitalist command.

Perhaps a better way of thinking about time is to think about it spatially; that is, understand capitalist temporality not in terms of its duration, but rather in terms of its tendency to uniformity. Capitalist time is indeed accelerated, but at the same time, and perhaps more importantly, it is also monopolistic, substituting circulation, time-of-consumption, the temporality of the wage and simple time-as-measure for all other experiences of time.

The source of my understanding of time and its relation to subjectivity comes from Negri’s Constitution of Time, as well as through Cesare Casarino’s essay Time Matters: Marx, Negri, Agamben, and the Corporeal. Casarino charts the relationship between Negri’s critique of the traditional metaphysics of time and his project of liberation, showing that the project of transformation rests upon the possibility of resisting the capitalist organisation of time. Capital must colonise and command time, but time is also a refuge and a source of productive creativity vital to the appropriation of wealth. As Casarino writes:

For Negri, the temporality of production – that is, the time most expressive of our productive and creative energies – is at once a temporality that cannot be measured as quantity and yet the temporality that capital endeavours to quantify and to measure all the time so as to control it and employ it in the extraction of surplus-value: the logic of equivalence is identified here as the harness of the incommensurable, as the strategy of containment that becomes instrumental for the continued exploitation of that which is fundamentally uncontainable about time.

On this reading, it would be then possible to think suburban space as a terrain of uniform, capitalist temporality. The production of new suburban built environments is not simply an effort to house the population; it is also an attempt to materially encode capitalist temporality at the expense of the more dense temporal possibilities that inhere in the classic urban environment. Thus it is the uniformity of time, not so much as the duration of time, that must be resisted in the suburban.