Interstitial Spaces

When Henri Lefebvre says "[everyday life] is . . . the time and the place where the human either fulfills itself or fails, since it is a place and a time which fragmented, specialized and divided activity cannot completely grasp, no matter how great and worthy that activity may be . . ." (27) I think of how the city of Bothell has so many maps, so many specialized ways of seeing, knowing and experiencing the city. Yet what eludes the Bothell elders? Terra incognita does not necessarily have to be at the end of some unimaginable frontier. Places like Seattle mark the point at which the western expansion into the unknowns of America would come to an end; but are those unknowns really abolished? As we can see, terra incognita is right here, in the blanks and lapses of each particular map. What are our own terra incognitas? They are created when the tools for seeing a landscape are only trained to see certain things. (N.b. the little triangle formed by the young woman between her piano lessons, school and home that Debord talks about.) For the Situationists, "the city would have to be surveyed for those elements, constructions and interstitial spaces that might be salvaged from the dominant culture, and, once isolated, put to new use in a utopian reconstruction of social space" (Ross, 45). Later theorists would be less idealistic about the potential these spaces had for revolution and change, but that is another story . . .