Techni-city

Re: Rama’s “The Lettered City”

The city is composed of two “super-imposed grids” – one is a labyrinthine unwritten knowing of streets and physical geography through encounter and exploration, the other is a labyrinthine knowing of symbols through writing, understandable through the “application of reason”. The systematic, structurising film placed upon the first physical, material film has come about through writing, the work of what Rama calls the “letrados”, and the city nowadays is understood through this layer of symbolism. As someone who has lived in Auckland for 10 years, for example, I have parts of its topology mapped out in my mind, and I am aware where places of interest are located, enough that I do not need to go exploring to stumble spontaneously upon them. Occupying and familiarising oneself with a space thus I deduce to mean understanding it in terms of symbols, meaning, power. I call the symbolic layer a sort of film because day-to-day it is indistinguishable from the physicality of the city, with its concrete and its corners.

The geography of Auckland 200 years ago lent itself to being written over, and by extension, built over by settlers (and Maori before that). The city’s pre-city physical geography then can be thought of in terms of Louis Armand’s “materiality”, and the idea of the city as an urban conglomeration and an economic seat of power comes from the “structurality” that is imposed upon it. Earlier, I referred to the latter film as structurising because when the city was written, construction began upwards, aiming towards the sky – hence we now have skyscrapers which are symbols of importance. The more tall buildings there are, the more important (and powerful) we consider the space to be.

(1860 - Looking north down Queen Street showing the site of the Bank of New Zealand, sourced from the Auckland City Council website)

Writing changed the physicality of the space – a beach became a harbour, a swamp became Queen Street. The physical geography had its own technicity – in a sense, it was its own techni-city. Settlers saw the place as ideal for the imported idea they had about what a city was, and they built up. Although writing is generally flat, it has terra(re)formic powers.