Half a block from my house is located an intersection at which two sidewalks meet. The state of Washington has a
law, 46.04.160, which states that a crosswalk constitutes any space within the intersection of a roadway where two
sidewalks converge (wsdot.wa.gov). A crosswalk, then, is not always painted stripes in the road. Indeed, the State has a
lawful name for this; the “Unmarked Crosswalk”. The unmarked crosswalk is present and enforceable by law at any city
intersection, and automobiles must yield and stop for any pedestrians walking within the space of the unmarked crosswalk,
or bodily implying the intention of using the unmarked crosswalk. This would seem to constitute a massive distribution of
state power into the hands of the pedestrian. In the practice of this law however, this power evaporates into
meaninglessness. Even if one were to look past the dangerous infrastructural space, woe to the bodily walker who trusts
this word of law into the hands of automobile drivers. My experience is that nine times out of ten, no car will yield, no
matter the intention of the walker. Police cars routinely drive past at the unmarked crosswalk, similarly ignoring the
law that they are supposedly equipped and enabled to enforce. One could say that the pedestrian is marginalized by
hegemonic automobile practices, but in truth it is that the social practice of the space dictates its use, and in this
case completely negates any lawful procedures codified by the state. The unmarked crosswalk is less than vapor. It is
less than anything, it is nothing. Similarly, the abstract space of law does not always produce dominant space. The
written word has no potency except in social practice, and it is because of this that revolution is inherent in all
space, even supposedly impervious ones.
Spatial practice is, as Henri Levebvre says, a dialectical interaction (Levebvre, The Production of Space). David
Harvey similarly states that we can create our truth rather than find it (Harvey, Social Justice and the City). It is
only in the last fifty years that automobiles have overwhelmed the street. It cannot be disproven that tomorrow we could
all wake up and take to the street by foot, and via social practice of the space marginalize the automobile and the
written laws that supposedly dictate its use.
A reappropriation of space contains the seeds of revolution through its spatial production. Levebvre argues that
space is produced before it is read, and when it is read, it is as a signifying list of do’s and don’ts. Thus, space is a
form of power. This reading is not performed visually, as one reads words, but as “someone who lives and acts in the
space…as the ‘subject’ with a body.”
Robert Smithson, who upon taking a walking tour of his hometown of Passaic, New York, encounters such dystopic
landmarks as a series of sewage pipes, a car dealership, and a highway construction site. Reflecting on these forces upon
the landscape, he thus considers the nature of our society to be one of entropy. He uses an interesting illustration of a
sandbox, in which the sand has been equally divided in two within the space, on the one half, the sand is black, and the
other white. A child then runs in circles within the sandbox, mixing the sands until a visual state of grey is reached.
Were this child to run counter-clockwise equal to his initial run, the sand would not be put back into its original state,
but would remain just as muddled. If a film were made of this, it could be shown in reverse, but the material state of the
film would disintegrate with time, thus also revealing the lie of media (Smithson, The Monuments of Passaic). Where
Smithson may have been linearly trapped is within his consideration of the abstract space of time, and that no matter
which way you go, processes of entropy become naturalized. Henri Levebvre considers time not as abstract, but rather as a
process that develops relatively, and acquires its absoluteness only in regards to the individual person’s being in the
world (Lefebvre, The Production of Space). Time can be considered then, in Levebvre’s terms, as a representation of space,
or a conceptualization of space. Here in our world, we mentally divide and compartmentalize time into metrics of seconds,
minutes, hours, days, months, years, and History. This is not a fact of time but rather a relative division and framing of
a space based on prior knowledge of it. Harvey states that our core consciousness since the Renaissance “rests upon the
dichotomy of all reality into inner experience and outer world” (Harvey, Social Justice and the City). Presuming that time
and nature are so black and white in the first place, as Smithson does, is perhaps a premature conclusion, a conclusion we
have all been trained in, for time is a form of knowledge.
Lefebvre considers the world’s natural, unexplored regions as a global space, an abstract void seeking to be
colonized and dominated. Perhaps it would be helpful to consider not that we can create absolute dominance over nature,
but rather that dominance itself is an illusion. Dominated space, according to Levebvre, is “closed, sterile, emptied
out.” How truly sterile a space can actually be produced? As I walk down a sidewalk and take a moment to glance downward
at a slab of concrete pavement; I come across a crack. Several cracks, even. One is sure to have noticed, on occasion,
where a tree root’s growth pushes upward from underneath the ground, crumbling the concrete above in a slow, methodical
upheaval. A tree is made of wood, and wood is considered to be metabolically softer than rock, of which concrete is made.
That is, a tree is made of tree, fleshy and filled with sap, water, and covered in bark skin. A tree can be, in our
culture, converted into wood when it is chopped down and divided into a resource; but this is not the ultimate conclusion
of a tree, nor a life, but merely an orientation of compartmentalization and division towards life. So a tree’s living,
fleshy constitution is able, through its own processes, to utterly confound and dismantle the space of the concrete.
Remove all the trees and one can still find a less dramatic example in that of the weeds that grow in the space of a crack
in concrete. Grasses and dandelion seeds find their way into the small crevasses of non-porous concrete surfaces, mingle
with other dust and soils, find a way to establish roots and grow, eventually spread and through similar processes as the
tree, disrupt and dismantle the concrete. In the middle of one nearby street crossing I observed moss in the cracks of the
roadway, black from the contaminants that are excreted by automobiles but alive and making for itself a process to grow
nonetheless. What does this mean? Lefebvre thinks that nature is slowly disappearing, resilient perhaps, but “it has been
defeated, and now waits only for its ultimate voidance and destruction.” Guy Debord quotes Karl Marx as saying, “Men can
see nothing around them that is not their own image…their very landscape is alive” (Debord, Theory of the Dérive). Perhaps
that is because the landscape is alive, not necessarily in the projected anthropomorphic or phenomenological way that Marx
identifies with capitalist systems and ideals of modernity, but in a system of life in which space itself constitutes a
type of living body, and no amount of dominance or compartmentalization can utterly destroy it.
Concrete again. Assembled, it form the surface of the world in which we primarily move. It appears and feels cold and
impervious, completely covering and dominating the soil beneath. However, in order for concrete to retain it’s
imperviousness, it must constantly be replaced and repaved, otherwise the natural processes described prior will actively
seek its destruction. It is easy (perhaps lazy) to presume that it will always be repaved. Defining concrete as impervious
is to grant it status as representational space, metaphor to the imperviousness that is produced by the absolute space of
capitalism. These spaces need not dominate and they thus need not be perpetual, foregone conclusions. Concrete must
continually be remade via street cleaning, pothole filling, repaving, and rebuilding. Each minuscule moment of the space
is in revolution - the forces of nature, or of society, must constantly be convinced of the prior dominance. Harvey
describes Karl Marx’s view of capitalism as “permanently revolutionary…mov(ing) in contradictions which are constantly re-
established”. Cell structures of roots slowly develop within the concrete; or perhaps in the form of the Deleuzian
rhizome. People must accept one more day, one more hour of repression and injustice, but perhaps slightly, even minutely,
they are progressively less inclined to do so. There is as much possibility that at some point in this circuitous loop, it
will not be allowed to repeat. This would imply that to change life then, we must change space, but I wonder if this is
necessarily so.