Becoming Places: Urbanism / Architecture / Identity / Power

Author: Kim Dovey (chapters 5, 6, 9, 10, 11 co-authored: with Ian Woodcock & Stephen Wood; Wiryono Raharjo; John Fitzgerald; Eka Permanasari; Kasama Polakit respectively) Year: 2010 (book completed November 2008) Source type: book Raw file: raw/books/dovey-2010-becoming-places.md

Pagination note: the raw extraction carries no inline page markers. Page numbers below are reconstructed from the book's own Contents pagination (Ch. 1 pp. 3–12; Ch. 2 pp. 13–30; Ch. 3 pp. 31–42; Ch. 4 pp. 43–54; Ch. 5 pp. 57–78; Ch. 6 pp. 79–102; Ch. 7 pp. 103–124; Ch. 8 pp. 125–138; Ch. 9 pp. 139–152; Ch. 10 pp. 153–166; Ch. 11 pp. 167–184) and the book's index; they are approximate to ±1 page. Quotes from the publisher's frontmatter are cited "blurb."

Summary

Becoming Places is a theory of place as assemblage in a state of becoming and a book about the place/power nexus: how "who we are becomes wrapped up with where we are" (blurb). Part I (Ideas) builds a Deleuzian toolkit — place as territorialized assemblage, becoming against being, smooth/striated space, segmentarity, rhizome/tree, desire as the base of power — joined to Bourdieu's account of why things do not change: the habitus, the field, and the forms of capital (cultural, social, symbolic) whose misrecognized circulation constitutes the "complicitous silence of place." Part II (Places) grounds the theory in seven case studies at every scale from the laneway to the nation: four Melbourne suburbs defending or manufacturing "neighbourhood character"; a Yogyakarta kampung (Sidomulyo/Kricak) as the morphology of informal urbanism; three Koolhaas buildings audited for programmatic innovation and its illusory surplus; three Melbourne courthouses as the architecture of legitimation; Smith Street's public heroin geographies ("safety becomes danger"); Jakarta's Monas and the fenced Merdeka Square (monuments and national identity); and Bangkok's Ban Panthom as smooth/striated streetscape. The thread that ties the cases is place identity in states of becoming: "closed becomes open, interior becomes landscape, character becomes caricature, illegal becomes legal, hotel becomes brothel, public becomes private – and vice versa in each case" (blurb). The book has no conclusion; its thesis is the unfinishedness of place and identity.

Key Claims

The central argument: from being to becoming. Place theory must "move from conceptions of place as stabilized being towards places of becoming" (p. 13). "So much of the thinking about 'place' treats it as a somewhat static concept. Places are identified with what does not change" — the book offers instead "an immanent theory of place that is not abstracted from its instances in everyday life, nor deferred to a presumed deeper or higher source" (p. 3). The ontological formula: "I suggest we replace the Heideggerian ontology of being-in-the-world with a more Deleuzian notion of becoming-in-the-world… there is always, already and only becoming-in-the-world" (p. 6).
The two theoretical frames are complementary, not rival. "If Deleuze gives us a sophisticated account of becoming, of how things change, Bourdieu provides a convincing account of why they do not and of how the appearance of change is often the cover for more of the same" (p. 7). Both are immanent, both refuse the subject/object division; "The rules of the habitus can be read as codes of the assemblage" (p. 7). The major contrast: "Bourdieu stresses the inertia and inhibition embodied in the habitus while Deleuze and Guattari stress flow and change. The tendency to take sides may not be the most productive position" (pp. 7–8).
Place vs space: intensity. Place differs from space in everyday language by "an intensity that connects sociality to spatiality in everyday life" (p. 3); "While a space may have physical dimensions, it is intensity that gives place its potency and its primacy" (p. 3). The book's conundrum: "space is socially constructed, the social is spatially constructed" (p. 6) — theories that cut across the sociality/spatiality divide are required.
Against essentialism and against constructionism. The deconstructive reduction of place to text "bypasses the question of ontology and strips the sense of place of some of its most fertile complications, most importantly its connection to ontological security" (p. 4); but the essentialist genius loci view conflates "the sense and the ontology of place into one seamless whole" (p. 5). Assemblage theory "avoids all forms of reductionism – both the reduction to essences and reduction to text" (p. 16).
Place as assemblage. An assemblage is "a whole 'whose properties emerge from the interactions between parts'" (DeLanda quoted, p. 16) — a "state of affairs" whose parts are "contingent rather than necessary" (p. 16). A street is an assemblage: "It is the relations of buildings–sidewalk–roadway; the flows of traffic, people and goods… that make it a 'street'" — "All places are assemblages" (p. 16). The assemblage has two axes: materiality/expression and territorialization/deterritorialization (pp. 16–17); "What we call 'sense of place' is a phenomenon that connects or spans this materiality/expression dimension; it cannot be reduced to an essence nor to social construction" (p. 17).
Desire as the base of power. Deleuze moves beyond Foucault's disciplinary power: "power is linked to flows of desire and processes of becoming. For Deleuze, desire is the primary force of life" (p. 14). "All of the places we inhabit can be seen as products of desire" (p. 15). Power's modes (force, coercion, manipulation, domination, authority, seduction — from Framing Places) are "largely limited to 'power over'"; Deleuze's is a micro-politics of productive desire (p. 14).
Segmentarity as the spatial form of the habitus. Three primary forms of segmentation — binary, circular, linear — are "geared to micropractices of power" (pp. 18–19); "supple" and "rigid" segmentarities are inseparable (p. 19). "Spatial segmentarity is a form of striation and in general terms linear and branching structures are more striated while permeable networks are more smooth" (p. 22).
Rhizome/tree — with the Pentagon example. Rhizomatic networks are "more resilient than tree-like structures"; when the planes hit in 2001 "the Pentagon building continued to function… while the stems of the towers melted" — and "rhizomatic structures such as the Pentagon may house the most hierarchical of social assemblages; there is no one-to-one mapping of the social onto the spatial. Both the Pentagon and the Internet were invented by the US military as structures that resist attack by having no stem" (p. 21). Markets are rhizomatic, the state tree-like: "the town exists only as a function of circulation" (D&G quoted, p. 21).
Smooth/striated as tools, not types. "These are not different types of space so much as spatial properties"; every real place is a mixture — "the two spaces in fact only exist in mixture"; "all progress is made by and in striated space, but all becoming occurs in smooth space" (D&G quoted, pp. 21–22). Place is the assembled mix: "The wholesale identification of place with being, stability and striation… is a narrow, self-deceptive and insular view. Place is an assemblage that stabilizes dwelling but also encompasses lines of movement and processes of becoming" (p. 23). Against Rajchman's "wings over roots": "The task is not to decide between an architecture of roots or wings but to understand that it is always both" (p. 24).
Sense cannot be extracted. The "sense of place" connects the material and expressive poles of the assemblage; "the attempt to make [sense] evident is a little like Carroll's Snark hunt" (p. 25). Extracting the sense neutralizes it: "What the discourse of 'place' so often does is to close down the authentic production of place. What the discourse of 'site' and 'space' so often does is to strip place of its sense" (p. 25). A "sense of place" can become "a 'despotic signifier' that seeks to stabilize meaning in service of a transcendent sense of power" (p. 25).
Plateau, not stasis. Via Bateson: "a plateau of intensity is substituted for climax" (p. 26); what we sense as stability of place "is often a plateau of development produced by locally sustainable limits" (p. 26) — the link to Jacobs's "self destruction of diversity" and to sustainability built into the sense of place (p. 27). Places are "intensive multiplicities" — soup, not jelly beans: when new people move in, "the sense of the larger place changes" (p. 27).
Diagrams, mapping, design. The "abstract machine"/diagram is "a 'diagram' or 'map' of the forces comprising an assemblage" (p. 27) — the shopping mall's dumb-bell diagram is the worked example (pp. 27–28). Alexander's pattern language is reclaimed as proto-assemblage theory: "Any pattern which, by being abstracted from a real situation, conveys the physical influence of certain demands or physical forces is a diagram" (p. 28). Mapping differs from tracing — "The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged 'competence'" (D&G quoted, p. 29) — but Dovey refuses Corner's mapping/planning division: "it makes no sense to draw a sharp division between a design and a plan" (p. 29).
Habitus: the theory of why things do not change. The habitus conflates "habit" and "habitat" to construct "both a sense of place and the sense of one's place in a social hierarchy" (p. 31); its importance "derives largely from its thoughtlessness or doxa – its silence" (p. 32). Bourdieu's key quotations: "The most successful ideological effects are those that have no words, and ask no more than complicitous silence" (p. 31); "We learn bodily. The social order inscribes itself in bodies" (p. 32). "The theory of the habitus is primarily a theory of why things do not change… It is the most crucial of concepts in understanding the deep complicities of place with power" (p. 33). Note the origin: Bourdieu adapted habitus from Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism — the concept itself "derives from architecture" (p. 32).
Fields and capital. Cultural capital (embodied, objectified, institutionalized), social capital (bonding vs bridging, via Putnam), symbolic capital — "not seen as a form of capital," "denied capital," a zero-sum game: "If everyone gets 'good' architecture, no one wins the symbolic capital" (p. 35). Aesthetic taste is the alchemy: distinctions between people "made to appear as pure aesthetic judgements" (p. 37).
The avant-garde as symbolic-capital engine. The avant-garde overturns codes "but only within the field as already constituted" (p. 37); deconstructive architecture was "very swiftly appropriated into the architectural canon"; the 1990s "folding" vogue was "a thin understanding of the concepts coupled to a strong imperative to produce new 'folded' imagery for the market" (p. 37); "the 'ever-the-same' returns in the guise of the 'ever-new'" (p. 37). "The apparent autonomy of the avant-garde is geared to its structural role in keeping the field supplied with a stream of new images" (p. 38).
The complicitous silence of place. "Architecture is mostly cast as necessary yet neutral to the life within… Yet this supposed neutrality of place is its primary power; the more that practices of power are embedded in place the less questionable they become and the more effectively they can work. This is the 'complicitous silence' of place" (p. 39). Buildings "are inherently coercive in that they enforce limits to action"; designers who refuse segmentation may enforce "an 'enforced' subjection to uncontrolled encounter and disciplinary gaze" (p. 39). "Architects inevitably manipulate modes of spatial encounter – the issue is not whether but how" (p. 39). Architecture is "society's superego" (Hollier quoted, p. 39). The programme: "We cannot erase the complicity of architecture but we can render it less silent" (p. 41). And the sharpest line on participatory rhetoric: "participation is a name we use for power when it is distributed evenly" (p. 41).
Critical architecture neutralized. Hays's "critical architecture" — "resistant to the self-confirming, conciliatory operations of a dominant culture" — confined criticality to form, "an alarming case of theory proceeding without history" given Mies's 1930s politics (p. 44). The critical project survives only through "the deep separation of form from function that enables critical discourse to co-exist with social reproduction" (p. 46): Eisenman's "most of my clients are Republicans" and his 1740s farmhouse ("I want the original thing… you can't get those kinds of wide boards any more") exhibit the representation/practice split and the social capital of "the right in-laws" (pp. 46–47). "The illusion of a 'critical' architecture can be constructed by containing it within formalist critique" (p. 47). Libeskind's Freedom Tower: architecture "is permitted to be critical at certain moments… where that criticality helps to both heal social division and legitimate the social order" (p. 48). Adorno's line read as "offering up the sickness as cure" (p. 50).
The media field: controlled critique. Architectural magazines are "framed by the imperatives of the promotion of products to the profession"; "The delivery of 'critique' to architects is the means to deliver architects to advertisers" (p. 8; see also pp. 50–51). Dovey's own experiences: the Murcutt/BHP Aboriginal housing critique that got him banned from Architecture Australia for a decade; the Seidler phone call ("whether I felt qualified to review his work"); the Docklands book offer withdrawn when he found the development un-integrated (pp. 51–52). Coffee-table monographs' "advertising value is linked to their misrecognition as genuine academic books" (p. 52).
The test: the future at stake. "To be classed as 'architecture' there must be some idea about the future at stake… the end is the future which is at stake" (p. 52). "Architecture is rendered safe for critical attention by reducing social content to representation and by the severing of architectural discourse from any possible future" (p. 52). "The potency of architecture, its politics and its power, lies in keeping the future always at stake" (p. 52).
Character becomes caricature (the four suburbs). In Camberwell character is uniformity, modesty and taste defended against difference — "I'm surrounded by PLUs – people like us. I see that as a comfort zone" (p. 60) — a "Procrustean character, open to difference but only under condition that differences be renounced" (p. 62). In Fitzroy character is the edgy mix — defended by gentrifiers "against more of themselves" (p. 67). Beacon Cove ("We love living in Legoland!", p. 70) and Caroline Springs ("Choose your look, select your favourite façade", p. 73) manufacture instant place identity through covenants. The two laws of the chapter: "built-form controls can easily become social controls" and codification produces caricature — "The character of place, like the sense of place, cannot be reduced to its characteristics without producing caricature… The only real characters are slippery characters" (p. 78).
Covenants close becoming. Private covenants "are not negotiable or subject to democratic processes"; they embody "the paradox of a market-led antidote to free-market economics"; the state's enforcement is "a Faustian bargain because it also paralyses further change"; "Covenants are designed to produce an instant – but also final – place identity; in doing so they close down processes of becoming" (p. 78). What most characterizes the new developments "is the closure of debate – the character is settled" (p. 78).
Informal urbanism is the major global urbanism. "Over one billion people now live in 'squatter', 'slum' or 'informal' housing settlements globally; this population is expected to double by 2030, making it the major form of urban design and development globally" (p. 79). Informality must be defined separately from slums and squatting: settlements are "irregular rather than illegal since the tenure is generally in dispute rather than clear" (p. 79); "life in the slum is based on the planning and strategic action of the slum-dwellers themselves" (Evers & Korff quoted, p. 80).
De Soto's formalization as coercive displacement. Instant titling floods the market; "many former squatters sell their title to take the profit and end up moving to informal settlements elsewhere"; "Such instant formalization may be a greater current threat to informal settlements than forced eviction" — market-driven displacements are "far larger… and much more politically palatable" (pp. 82–83). "The distinction between formal and informal is not a dichotomy but a highly dynamic continuum" (p. 83).
The semiotics of tenure. "In the absence of secure land tenure residents pursue symbols of permanence and security through house form and materials – the quest for secure tenure is transferred from the legal field to that of urban semiotics. The heavier the material the greater the image of permanence" (p. 93). And the tenure ambiguity is functional, not residual: "the ambiguities of formal tenure are not so much residual characteristics of a traditional or rural land system but more a highly functional aspect of the squatter settlement as a formal modern assemblage" (p. 96).
"Everywhere striated but profoundly smooth." The kampung's morphology: "It would be easy to cast this settlement as primarily 'smooth' space, yet like most places it is always becoming striated. One way of characterizing it is to say that it is everywhere striated but profoundly smooth; another is that it has an excess of smoothness when it comes to land tenure" (p. 96). The informality is "a rhizomatic order of accretion rather than hierarchical control; its sophistication comes from many years of trial and error and from the incapacity of poverty to tolerate waste" (p. 85).
Aesthetics and poverty are inseparable (against Roy). Roy's "aestheticization of poverty" critique is respected but rejected as a separation: "any separation of aesthetics from politics and commerce is quite untenable. In our view the interests of the residents of informal settlements are best served by entering into the complex intersections of aesthetic and social issues" (p. 98). Gondolyu proves it: the painted artworks "worked as a form of political legitimation that has protected this community from eviction. In other words they have turned visibility from a problem into an asset" (p. 99). Squatter settlements are "distinctively modern settlement types… the modernism of cardboard, steel and plastic" (p. 99).
Koolhaas: programmatic sabotage audited. Kipnis's "More like a sadist than a surgeon, he has begun to knife the brief… Reductive disestablishment provides the crucial stratagem… the intellectual modus operandi by which the architect begins to transform the design into an instrument of freedom" (p. 104). The method: spatial syntax analysis (line/fan/net; depth) adapted through Deleuze, because spatial genotypes are how "architecture mediates social reproduction" (pp. 105–108). The verdict on three buildings is mixed: the Educatorium's shallow rhizomatic network stops at the examination rooms — "The fold of this building as it literally folds upwards is one of smooth folding into striation" (p. 114); the Bordeaux House's liberating elevator is "a patriarchal prosthesis" whose void "is created and erased in a gender-specific manner" (pp. 117–118); the Seattle Public Library's one-way spiral "resembles the shopping mall or department store" (p. 121) and is "a place for a particular kind of being more than it is open to new kinds of becoming" (p. 122).
The magician thesis. Koolhaas "operates in the mode of a magician, distracting the eye with one hand, concealing what he is up to with the other" (Colomina, quoted p. 123); "he uses the expressive pole of the assemblage to conceal materialistic interventions" (p. 123). The missing term: "an understanding of 'freedom' as a form of practice – something people do rather than images they consume" (p. 123). "Programmatic innovation can be reduced to significations of practice" (p. 123).
Authority and legitimation (the courthouses). "Authority is defined by unquestioned compliance and is the most efficient means of social control"; authority's "right" is "underwritten by the 'might' of force" (p. 125). The courtroom is "a form of state habitus… a strictly striated space where authority is threatened by most forms of smoothness" (p. 128). The open-court ideal is self-contradictory: "The idea of the court as conceptually 'open' co-exists with a clearly enforced spatial closure" (p. 128); "As one travels deeper and higher along these public-access paths to the courtroom, space becomes more striated" (p. 136). The three Melbourne courthouses (Commonwealth Law Courts, County Court, Children's Court) succeed differently and fail differently — the Children's Court built at two-thirds the per-metre budget of the adult courts, "raising questions about how evenly justice is distributed by age group" (p. 135). The terminus: "in a democracy the law is never settled" (p. 138).
Safety becomes danger. Heroin users in public space face a spatial dilemma: "more exposed means safer in the event of an overdose yet more danger from police; more secluded means safer from police yet more danger from an overdose" (p. 148). Injecting zones occupy "liminal places which slide between categories of private and public, safety and danger" (p. 139) — "smooth spaces without the strict territorial controls of the stricter and more striated streetscapes: 'cracks in the existing order' of the city" (p. 146). The identity trap: "using a drug is something someone does, a 'junkie' is something someone 'is'. Having a fix in public also fixes ones identity" (p. 150). Design under the slogan of "designing out crime" is "better termed 'redistributing danger'" (p. 150). Supervised injecting facilities should mirror the liminal qualities of existing practice — diffuse boundaries, multiple entries, ephemerality — and face the institutionalization dilemma: "If such facilities are really places of becoming then they must work with and between the desires for the drug and desires to control its use" (p. 152).
Monuments stabilize national identity — and leak. Monas/Merdeka Square: Sukarno's obelisk as "a modernist beacon of democracy and enlightenment"; "Architecture was deployed to keep the moment alive, space was deployed to hold time" (p. 156). Via Anderson: Javanese power as "the cone of light cast downwards by a reflector lamp" — power radiating from centre to periphery, so Monas is "not a legitimating image of authority so much as it is a literal concentration of power" (p. 158). Suharto rewrote the basement dioramas as "a false history of his own rise to power" and deleted the buffalo podiums (pp. 158–159); the Arjuna Wijaya chariot statue "works as an allegory of the relationship between Suharto and Sukarno… the symbolic killing of Bung Karno" (p. 159). The everyday infiltrations — beggars, vendors, prostitutes, homeless — "tell a truth that is not the official truth" (p. 163); Sutiyoso's 2002 fence purified the square: "The emptiness that is left after the real has been fenced out is at once a fantasy of wealth and harmony and also a collective void from which the search for national identity proceeds. The fence is the mediator in this assemblage, the screen we are not supposed to see but merely look through" (p. 164).
Smooth/striated streetscapes (Bangkok). Ban Panthom's place identity is "defined by its slippages": "Functions slip from house to shop to factory; from hotel to brothel; from sidewalk to restaurant to shrine to car park; from laundry to café to gambling house. Hawker trolleys become building renovations and renovations become demolitions… exchanges of money slip from a fine to a licence to a bribe; troks become sois as domestic reproduction slips into market production and local becomes global" (p. 182). The fine/bribe/fee slippage "keeps the fluid urban order under loose control" — and a stricter regime "could eliminate the incentive for enforcement" (p. 177). The panopticon reversal: "In many ways Ban Panthom does the opposite [of the panopticon] – a deeper realm of relatively free circulation (for locals) and high levels of social capital becomes relatively invisible and protected from state control" (p. 182). The striated morphology itself enables slippage: "the striated morphology of the trok network clearly plays a key role in both enabling slippage and resisting change" (p. 182).
Porosity (Benjamin's Naples) as the southern urban condition. Benjamin's Naples: "The stamp of the definitive is avoided… For nothing is concluded. Porosity results… above all from the passion for improvisation" (p. 183). "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 methodological creed: "it is possible to analyse and understand Eastern urbanism without essentialism, and southern urbanism without paternalism" (p. 184).
Method: places are cases. "Most place theory is ungrounded in the particularities of place… What is generally true of the sense of place is that each place is different – places are cases" (p. 8). Case studies are "a testing ground for theory," testing usefulness rather than truth (p. 8). "Place/power issues require multiplicitous methodologies linking phenomenology, spatial analysis and discourse analysis"; "Place is at once experienced, structured and discursively constructed" (p. 13).

Connections

Concepts: assemblage (place as territorialized assemblage — the book's central toolkit), becoming, place-identity, neighbourhood-character (character becomes caricature), spatial-segmentarity (binary/circular/linear), smooth-and-striated-space (Chs. 2, 6, 9, 11), complicitous-silence (Ch. 3's title concept), legitimation (Ch. 8; Ch. 10), informal-urbanism (Ch. 6), loose-parts and porosity (Ch. 11), aestheticization-of-poverty (Ch. 6 via Roy), habitus, symbolic-capital, social-capital, deterritorialisation, becoming-interior ("interior becomes landscape" — the Koolhaas case is the formula's built form), practiced-place (rhizomatic practices of everyday life), power, ideology (ideology without words), panopticon (courthouses; the Bangkok reversal; the fictional surveillance sign), liminality (injecting zones), site-of-memory (Monas), gentrification (Fitzroy; coercive displacement), terrain-vague (the derelict Bina Karya land), palimpsest (Fitzroy's layers), suburbanism and post-suburbia (the new-urbanist suburbs), building-genotype (spatial syntax), dwelling (becoming at home, the refrain), comfort (the comfort zone), nonhumans (desire beyond the human; the urinating dog), rhizomatic-matrix (rhizomatic thought and mapping).

Authors: Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari (the toolkit rendered transparent), Pierre Bourdieu (habitus, field, capital), Martin Heidegger (the spatial ontology engaged, not dismissed), Rem Koolhaas (Ch. 7's sustained critique), Bill Hillier & Julienne Hanson (spatial syntax adapted), Michel Foucault (disciplinary power and its beyond; the panopticon), Doreen Massey (the progressive sense of place), also cited: DeLanda, Bateson, Alexander, Corner, Jacobs, Sennett, Benjamin, Anderson, Geertz, Bhabha, Roy, de Soto, Turner, Colomina, Kipnis, Ghirardo, Speaks, Hollier, Eagleton.

Debates: power-and-space (the book's whole architecture is a place/power account: desire, authority, legitimation, complicitous silence; the courthouse and Monas as cases), critical-vs-projective (Ch. 4's audit of critical architecture), everyday-vs-iconic-architecture (the Monas infiltrations; the monumental vs the rhizomatic everyday).

Related source notes: Putting Architecture in its Social Place (Jones 2009) — cites Dovey's "silent complicity" (2000), the book's Ch. 3 concept; Deleuze and Space — the Deleuzian spatial theory the book domesticates for place; Outline of a Theory of Practice and The Logic of Practice — the habitus/field sources Ch. 3 synthesizes; Buildings and their Genotypes — the spatial-syntax method Ch. 7 adapts; The Construction of a Suburb (Røe 2015) — cites Dovey's Bourdieu interpretation for architectural taste-distinction; Event-space (Hannah 2018) — the monuments/austerity pole the becoming-place thesis answers.

Direct Quotes

"This is a book about place formation, about places in states of becoming. One could say this does not exclude much because all places are in a state of continuous change. Yet so much of the thinking about 'place' treats it as a somewhat static concept." (p. 3)

"While a space may have physical dimensions, it is intensity that gives place its potency and its primacy." (p. 3)

"I suggest we replace the Heideggerian ontology of being-in-the-world with a more Deleuzian notion of becoming-in-the-world. This implies a break with static, fixed, closed and dangerously essentialist notions of place, but preserves a provisional ontology of place-as-becoming: there is always, already and only becoming-in-the-world." (p. 6)

"In the most general sense an 'assemblage' is a whole 'whose properties emerge from the interactions between parts' (De Landa 2006: 5). It is perhaps best seen as a 'state of affairs' in contrast to a 'thing' or a collection of parts." (p. 16)

"All places are assemblages." (p. 16)

"'Nothing is ever done with: smooth space allows itself to be striated, and striated space reimparts a smooth space … all progress is made by and in striated space, but all becoming occurs in smooth space' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 486)." (p. 22)

"Place is an assemblage that stabilizes dwelling but also encompasses lines of movement and processes of becoming. The immanence of place is a field of differences within which tree-like stabilized identities are planted." (p. 23)

"The task is not to decide between an architecture of roots or wings but to understand that it is always both." (p. 24)

"What the discourse of 'place' so often does is to close down the authentic production of place. What the discourse of 'site' and 'space' so often does is to strip place of its sense." (p. 25)

"The sense of place always involves consistency and coherence, often misrecognized as uniformity and regularity." (p. 27)

"'The most successful ideological effects are those that have no words, and ask no more than complicitous silence' (Bourdieu 1977: 188)." (p. 31)

"We experience places primarily in states of distraction; we live in the world first and look at it second." (p. 31)

"The habitus conflates 'habit' and 'habitat' to construct both a sense of place and the sense of one's place in a social hierarchy." (p. 31)

"'We learn bodily. The social order inscribes itself in bodies.'" (Bourdieu quoted, p. 32)

"The theory of the habitus is primarily a theory of why things do not change." (p. 33)

"Symbolic capital is a fixed resource, a zero-sum game. There is only so much distinction and prestige to be distributed. If everyone gets 'good' architecture, no one wins the symbolic capital." (p. 35)

"This supposed neutrality of place is its primary power; the more that practices of power are embedded in place the less questionable they become and the more effectively they can work. This is the 'complicitous silence' of place." (p. 39)

"Architects inevitably manipulate modes of spatial encounter – the issue is not whether but how they do so." (p. 39)

"participation is a name we use for power when it is distributed evenly" (p. 41)

"We cannot erase the complicity of architecture but we can render it less silent." (p. 41)

"Architecture that is meant to be critical becomes incorporated into, and complicit with, a prevailing economic, political and social order: the ever-the-same returns in the guise of the 'critical'." (p. 43)

"The question is not whether architecture constructs identities and stabilizes meanings, but how and in whose interests." (p. 45)

"One could go on deconstructing the deconstructionists, however, my point is not to target individuals… It is rather to suggest that all this work exists, and all these agents operate, within a field that is structured in a manner that enables a seemingly 'critical' architectural practice to thrive while at the same time reproducing the very social structures, identities and practices that it purports to challenge." (pp. 48–49)

"To be classed as 'architecture' there must be some idea about the future at stake… The potency of architecture, its politics and its power, lies in keeping the future always at stake." (p. 52)

"The more the neo-traditional architecture tries to fit in, the more pretentious and tasteless it becomes." (p. 62)

"Like Procrustes of Greek mythology who would tailor his visitors to fit the guest bed, Camberwell has a Procrustean character, open to difference but only under condition that differences be renounced." (p. 62)

"The resistance is primarily from the gentrifiers… they are defending Fitzroy against more of themselves." (p. 67)

"'People have said to me … it looks like a stage set, a film set … well "legoland" perhaps … We love living in Legoland!'" (p. 70)

"Covenants are designed to produce an instant – but also final – place identity; in doing so they close down processes of becoming." (p. 78)

"The character of place, like the sense of place, cannot be reduced to its characteristics without producing caricature. But it is not the desire for character that causes trouble but the belief that it can be defined and contained in urban codes and covenants. The only real characters are slippery characters." (p. 78)

"Over one billion people now live in 'squatter', 'slum' or 'informal' housing settlements globally; this population is expected to double by 2030, making it the major form of urban design and development globally." (p. 79)

"The difference between the neatly zoned business district or upper class and the rest of the city is that the former is planned by architects, city planners and other government agencies, whereas life in the slum is based on the planning and strategic action of the slum-dwellers themselves." (Evers & Korff quoted, p. 80)

"Such instant formalization may be a greater current threat to informal settlements than forced eviction." (p. 83)

"In the absence of secure land tenure residents pursue symbols of permanence and security through house form and materials – the quest for secure tenure is transferred from the legal field to that of urban semiotics. The heavier the material the greater the image of permanence." (p. 93)

"One way of characterizing it is to say that it is everywhere striated but profoundly smooth; another is that it has an excess of smoothness when it comes to land tenure." (p. 96)

"The aestheticization of poverty is the establishment of an aesthetic and aestheticized (rather than political) relationship between viewer and viewed, between professional and city, between First and Third Worlds. It is an ideology of space." (Roy quoted, p. 98)

"they have turned visibility from a problem into an asset, wearing a colourful place identity (their difference) as a badge of pride." (p. 99)

"This is not the pure ideal of modern architecture but the modernity of capitalism; the modernism of cardboard, steel and plastic." (p. 99)

"More like a sadist than a surgeon, he has begun to knife the brief, hacking away its fat, even its flesh, until he has exposed its nerve." (Kipnis quoted, p. 104)

"The fold of this building as it literally folds upwards is one of smooth folding into striation." (p. 114)

"'The movement of the elevator changed, each time, the architecture of the house. A machine was its heart.'" (Koolhaas quoted, p. 116)

"The machine at its heart is a patriarchal prosthesis." (p. 118)

"This is a building designed for a particular kind of cosmopolitan subject: confidently engaged in information exchange rather than quiet reflection. It is a place for a particular kind of being more than it is open to new kinds of becoming." (p. 122)

"What is missing, however, is an understanding of 'freedom' as a form of practice – something people do rather than images they consume." (p. 123)

"Authority is defined by unquestioned compliance and is the most efficient means of social control." (p. 125)

"The courtroom is a strictly striated space where authority is threatened by most forms of smoothness." (p. 128)

"The ideal of an open court paradoxically requires a good deal of security and closure… the design of the truly open, accessible, enlightened, transparent, democratic and legitimate courthouse may have too many contradictions for architects to resolve. But the quest is producing interesting buildings that at their best can reveal the fact that in a democracy the law is never settled." (p. 138)

"Those who inject drugs in public space are caught in a dilemma – needing privacy from the public and police yet exposure in the event of an overdose; safety from police becomes danger from an overdose." (p. 139)

"These are smooth spaces without the strict territorial controls of the stricter and more striated streetscapes: 'cracks in the existing order' of the city (Massumi 1993: 104) or breaches in the habitus." (p. 146)

"Places of becoming in the sense that while using a drug is something someone does, a 'junkie' is something someone 'is'. Having a fix in public also fixes ones identity." (p. 150)

"Many of the urban design practices which occur under the slogan of 'designing out crime' could be better termed 'redistributing danger', the displacement of unwanted behavior and perceived threat into someone else's neighbourhood." (p. 150)

"If such facilities are really places of becoming then they must work with and between the desires for the drug and desires to control its use." (p. 152)

"Architecture was deployed to keep the moment alive, space was deployed to hold time." (p. 156)

"The emptiness that is left after the real has been fenced out is at once a fantasy of wealth and harmony and also a collective void from which the search for national identity proceeds. The fence is the mediator in this assemblage, the screen we are not supposed to see but merely look through." (p. 164)

"The identity of the place can be defined by its slippages, by the fluidity of forms, practices and meanings." (p. 167)

"Functions slip from house to shop to factory; from hotel to brothel; from sidewalk to restaurant to shrine to car park; from laundry to café to gambling house. Hawker trolleys become building renovations and renovations become demolitions." (p. 182)

"In many ways Ban Panthom does the opposite [to the panopticon] – a deeper realm of relatively free circulation (for locals) and high levels of social capital becomes relatively invisible and protected from state control." (p. 182)

"There is no room for nostalgia in Ban Panthom – the traditional canal settlement is long gone." (p. 182)

"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)

"While there is no easy way to overcome the problems of orientalism or of poverty, it is possible to analyse and understand Eastern urbanism without essentialism, and southern urbanism without paternalism." (p. 184)

"In each of the four cases 'character' is described as a 'feel' of the neighbourhood that is at once social and material, slipping easily from spatiality to sociality. As 'character' becomes coded into either urban design codes or private covenants as a set of formal characteristics, character becomes fixed and reduced to caricature." (p. 8)

Open Questions

The habitus/assemblage synthesis. Dovey proposes reading "the rules of the habitus… as codes of the assemblage" but stops short of a unified theory ("The tendency to take sides may not be the most productive position"). What would an integrated Deleuze–Bourdieu place theory look like — and does the habitus page's open question (reproduction vs. transformation) find its answer here?
The zero-sum claim for symbolic capital. "There is only so much distinction and prestige to be distributed" — is architectural symbolic capital genuinely zero-sum, or (contra the Bourdieu citation) can design quality expand the field? The wiki's iconic-architecture sources (Sklair, Jencks) assume growth; Dovey assumes scarcity.
The "freedom as practice" test. Dovey demands "an understanding of 'freedom' as a form of practice – something people do rather than images they consume." Does the wiki's event-space/spatial-performativity cluster supply exactly this — and would Dovey's syntax-based audit of Koolhaas survive a performative rather than segmentary analysis of the same three buildings?
Gender in the becoming-place. The Bordeaux House's "patriarchal prosthesis" and Camberwell's gendered comfort zone surface gender only episodically. Would an Ardener-style reading (muted groups, gate-keeping) of the same case studies yield a different map of who can become where?
The fence problem generalized. Merdeka Square's fence, Beacon Cove's covenants, the Bina Karya wall, the injecting-laneway fences: is enclosure the master form against which place-becoming is defined — and does the wiki's boundaries cluster yet distinguish the fence that protects becoming (Gondolyu's visibility) from the fence that forecloses it (the square)?
Pagination. The raw extraction carries no inline page markers; all page numbers above are reconstructed from the book's contents pagination and index (±1 page). Verify against the print edition before formal citation.
Co-authorship. Five chapters are co-authored (Woodcock & Wood; Raharjo; Fitzgerald; Permanasari; Polakit) and Dovey credits them on the title pages of the chapters; this note cites the book under Dovey's name per its title page, but per-chapter claims above are co-produced.