Porosity

Stub note: created at the Becoming Places ingest; requires fuller treatment as further Benjamin sources are ingested.

Definition

Porosity is Walter Benjamin's property of the Southern city — named for Naples in his 1925 essay with Asja Lacis — retrieved by Kim Dovey as the everyday condition of the cities of the south and their smoothness. Benjamin: "The stamp of the definitive is avoided. No situation appears intended forever, no figure asserts its 'thus and not otherwise' … one can scarcely discern where building is still in progress and where dilapidation has already set in. For nothing is concluded. Porosity results … above all from the passion for improvisation. … Even the most wretched pauper is sovereign in the dim dual awareness of participating, in all his destitution, in … Neapolitan street life" (quoted in Dovey 2010, p. 183). Dovey's translation of the property into his Bangkok vocabulary: "The property of porosity that Benjamin exalts has a lot in common with the smoothness and slippage outlined above. Slippage co-exists with poverty because it enables those without a place in the larger order to make a place in the interstices and cracks within it" (p. 183).

The concept is thus smooth space rendered social and economic: not a celebration of chaos but a description of how "those without a place in the larger order" survive inside it — the political-economy reading of smooth/striated space. Its warning is methodological: the Western gaze reads porosity as disorder to be fixed, "whether it flows from the global expert or the local planner," and that desire to fix "may run counter to the way the place operates for, and is experienced by, its inhabitants" (p. 184). The creed: "it is possible to analyse and understand Eastern urbanism without essentialism, and southern urbanism without paternalism" (p. 184).

Key Thinkers

• Walter Benjamin — the concept's author ("Naples," 1925, with Asja Lacis): the city where nothing is concluded; building and dilapidation indiscernible; the pauper's sovereignty in street life.
• Kim Dovey (with Kasama Polakit) — the concept's urban-theoretical retrieval: porosity as the everyday smoothness of Ban Panthom; the anti-paternalist method statement; the double duality (orientalism East/West; the economic divide North/South) within which the concept must be handled.
• Iain Borden — the wiki's adjacent Benjamin-lineage urbanist: everyday urban practices as the analysis of what planners' categories miss.

Related Concepts

• smooth-and-striated-space — the parent distinction: porosity as the lived, economic form of smoothness ("a field of vectors on which we ride or slide," Dovey p. 169).
• loose-parts — porosity's material agents: the trolleys, mats and parked cars that keep nothing concluded.
• informal-urbanism — the settlement form: the kampung and the trok network as porous fabric ("The labyrinthine forms of medieval cities that now attract tourists… were originally informal settlements," p. 85).
• becoming — the ontological rhyme: "no situation appears intended forever" as the city-scale statement of becoming against being.
• non-places — the contrast-case: Augé's transit spaces are defined by their conclusion (transit, waiting); porosity is the non-concluded space.
• terrain-vague — the vacant-land cousin: the interstice as expectant ground rather than leftover.
• gentrification — porosity's enemy process: the "cleaner and smarter and nicer" future Fitzroy's residents fear losing their character to (p. 66).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's founding source in this wiki: Benjamin's Naples quotation (p. 183); the porosity/smoothness/slippage identification (p. 183); the anti-orientalist, anti-paternalist method statement (p. 184); the Ban Panthom panopticon-reversal that gives porosity its protective depth (p. 182).
• Benjamin for Architects (Elliott) — the Benjamin-lineage context for the concept's source essay (the arcades, the flâneur, the Southern city).

Open Questions

• Benjamin exalts porosity as the pauper's sovereignty; Dovey's register is more anxious ("for better and worse… linked to the livelihood of the poor," p. 182). Is porosity an asset to be designed for, a description of poverty's resourcefulness, or both — and can it survive formalization?
• Does porosity have an interior-architectural form — the porch, the threshold room, the facade-stall? The kampung's interstitial porches ("the public/private interface is generally mediated by an interstitial porch space used for display and social activity," p. 89) suggest the porous interior is its own type; the wiki's thick-edge cluster may be its Western counterpart.
• Is porosity gendered and aged? The book notes girls' reduced street visibility and the gendered division of deep space. Who is sovereign in the porous city, and who merely exposed?