Contested Urban Rhythms: From the Industrial City to the Post-Industrial Urban Archipelago

Rehumanizing the city machine

Industrial society was, as we know, heavily criticized as anti-human. Both its opponents and its supporters considered mechanized production as this society's core characteristic. The image and idea of the ‘machine’ thus became emblematic. For the supporters, machines were connected to limitless transformative power, to the proliferation of goods and novelties, to progress. For the opponents, machines were replacing humans, destroying man-nature relations, alienating producers from their products.

Part of this dispute was focused on a very distinctive characteristic of the producing machines. Their rhythm. Rhythm, for some, meant power and speed, thus emblematizing the dynamic continuity of production and progress (or, rather, production as a prerequisite of progress) while for others rhythm symbolized a ruthless anti-human rationality.

W. Ruttmann's emblematic film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) begins with a sequence of wave images in rhythmic movement, continuing with alternating images of electricity poles and train rails intended to depict the tempo of a train's movement. These sequences seem to epitomize a characteristic attempt to compare the rhythmicalities of the industrial city with those of nature (Natter, 1994). It is not absolutely certain that Ruttmann chose to film so many instances of urban mechanical rhythms in order to praise the modern city's image as a well-functioning urban machine. He clearly inserts images in the film which show machine-like working rhythms as inhuman and full of anxiety (Natter, 1994). Ruttmann, however, does explicitly aim to present the city as a kind of synthesis of different rhythmicalities; mechanic, but also human or natural. This symphonic reading of the industrial city can be taken to represent a form of criticism that does not simply oppose dominant mechanic urban rhythms with an organic rhythmicality which can be used as an antidote to alienation. We can possibly understand this kind of criticism as a form of overcoming the organic versus mechanic antithesis through the power of the artist's/composer's gaze. Establishing a comparison between those two rhythmic domains, Berlin attempts a heroic synthesis comparable to that presented in Fritz Lang's Metropolis in the form of a final compromise between human aspirations and mechanical power. Ruttmann's ‘montage mapping of Berlin’ in a film characterized by ‘the rhythmic principles of its editing’ (Donald, 1999: 77) and Lang's attempt ‘to imagine motion pictures as a form for mediating between technological and organic rhythms’ (Cowan, 2007: 239), hint towards a possible reconciliation between mechanic and natural/human rhythmicalities in modern metropolis. Rutmann explicitly expresses this aim when referring to his film as a ‘film symphony’ created ‘from the million-fold actual energies of the great city organism’ (in Gaughan, 2003: 43). The choice of the word is crucial: an organism may have discrete parts (each one with distinct function/rhythms) but all of them belong to a coordinated and coordinating ‘whole’.

In a different context, humanizing rhythms has been thought of as a means to tame time as created and controlled by machines. This was explored by the vitalist theories at the beginning of the 20th century, which are especially focused on the workings of human body as a whole. E. Jaques Dalcroze's system of ‘eurhythmical gymnastics’ (May and Thrift, 2001: 30) gained an unprecedented fame because it proposed a kind of cure through body training for the alienating experience of industrial society's mechanic rhythms. There is a long history of analogous attempts to reactivate bodily organic rhythmicalities in order to discover a new balance with the outer world. What is important, however, is that organic rhythms were projected to specified repeatable acts and gestures bordering a complete geometrization of the human body. Strangely, gymnastics imitated the precision of machines in the coordination of human bodies. Organic rhythmicality was both a means to express the natural rhythms of human body and a means to educate bodies for a new life in a society characterized, in Simmel's famous formulation, by an ‘intensification of emotional life’ (Simmel, 1997: 70). The idea of depicting the ‘choreographed’ movement of the masses, in an effort to exalt the power modern society had to create the ‘new man’, is an idea which characterizes both critical art (as in Ruttmann's and Vertov's films) and Nazi (Strathausen, 2003: 34) as well as proto-fascist art (Herf, 1993). Elevated to an emblematic depiction of the collective power of the ‘people’ or the ‘Volk’, the image of a disciplined group that executes coordinated movements permeated the modernist imaginary. Coordinated bodies seem to have been considered as the locus of the only power that could possibly tame machine's dangerous dynamism (in direct contrast to impotent and alienated individuals).

Kracauer's criticism of the anti-human elements of a production system based on the intensification of mechanic rhythms is not based on a longing for a lost organic unity between man and nature. He does, however, explicitly seek to recuperate the emancipating potential of human reason trapped in the instrumental rationality of mechanic civilization (Reeh, 2004: 97).

His approach to the ‘Tiller girls’ mass culture phenomenon (Allen, 2007: 23) is illuminating. For him, the girls, by coordinating their bodies in highly geometrical ‘dance’ formations, were actually expressing a kind of abstract rationalization of human movement. As in the experience of the chain of production, ‘organization stands above the mass’ and ‘community and personality perish when what is demanded is calculability’ (Kracauer, 1995: 78). What he terms as ‘mass ornament’ becomes a kind of empty abstraction which cannot express a humanizing attitude towards nature (human nature included). Tiller girls are bodies without meaning, bodies synchronized as useless machines. ‘Mass ornament’ becomes in this context an abstract imitation of machine, a mythologizing of machine rhythmicality which subtracts from machine civilization its only possible legitimization (the transformation and appropriation of nature through production). Eurhythmics is both perfected and hollowed out from its originating intention in the Tiller girls ‘gymnastics’: perfectly coordinated bodies and no-bodies at the same time.

Rhythmicality appears both in the form of a social illness and in the form of this illness's cure during a period in which the industrial model of production was dominant. Rhythms could express and become the battlefield of an ongoing struggle between man and machine. It is likely that the actual experience of the city's modern inhabitants was a mixed experience of diverse rhythmicalities overlapping and sometimes clashing with each other (May and Thrift, 2001; Amin and Thrift, 2002). What made mechanic rhythmicalities dominant was a prevailing hegemonic belief in technological progress which had projected an understanding of urban rhythms as instantiations of the ever-accelerating tempo of progress on to urban life.

Contesting urban rhythms in modernity's urban machine meant bringing natural rhythms (bodily or cosmic ones) into comparison with mechanical ones. Whether in search of a lost organic rhythmicality or in search of a creative synchronization with nature (emblematized in eurhythmics and symphonic interpretations of the city correspondingly), acts of contestation seem to establish a necessary common ground: the city considered as the locus of an unavoidable encounter between natural and mechanic rhythmicalities. Rehumanizing the city machine meant – for both perspectives – reinstituting this encounter, this comparison, in hope of a possible harmonious synthesis.

What has changed in post-industrial societies is (among other things of course) both the hegemonic belief in social time's accelerating tempo as well as the kind of criticism which attempts to appropriate rhythm as a means to rehumanize time that had become instrumental in machine production.

A new form of segmented time seems to have emerged in these societies. Diverse rhythmicalities organized in different spatiotemporal enclaves have imposed a dominant experience of discontinuous and dismantled time. It is not that the rhythmicalities of the modern metropolis have ceased to exist. It is that such rhythmicalities are now increasingly organized and separated into distinct urban settings, and defined as characteristic of those settings, rather than existing as part of an intense, machine-centred production of overarching urban rhythms. Contemporary urban rhythms appear as enclave-bound rhythms. And a crucial element for both their production as well as for their criticism, is their dependence on a mechanism which suspends the continuity of social time: the mechanism of exception.

The mechanism of exception and the city of spatiotemporal enclaves

As we will see, exception punctuates social time in the form of a temporary suspension of established rhythms. Exception is thus connected to some form of emergency, to some kind of need that justifies it, since social reproduction is, and always was, a form of control of the future through repetition. For exception to be imposed and to become recognized as necessary, a threat to social reproduction must appear to be imminent. Exception is, or at least promises to be, a temporary break in social time's continuity.

Let us consider an example: in contemporary cities temporary measures of control are imposed in urban space supposedly necessary to ensure ‘public safety’. Parts of the city are closed and people are not allowed to approach. ‘Red zones’, as they are called, mark those areas of exception.

Red zones appear to belong to these kinds of spatial formations that have nothing to do with the rhythms that organize public spaces. No cyclical rhythm seems to govern their emergence, no linearity calculates their presence in the modern city. Red zones instantiate a form of temporal conception which is not based on repetition, i.e. rhythmicality, but on exception. Red zones are erected in exceptional cases and represent the ‘state of emergency’. Red zones though, are not as exceptional as they seem. Rather they constitute ‘exceptional’ cases of a whole category of metropolitan rhythms that tend to define the characteristics of today's urban public spaces (Stavrides, 2010: 37).

Red zones define an area of a city in which access is temporarily either completely restricted or allowed for certain categories of inhabitants under specific terms explicitly defined through relevant special legislation or imposed ad hoc by the police. In the case of major meetings of world leaders (WTO and IMF meetings, EU Ministers' or Leaders' meetings, APEC meetings etc.) red zones supposedly protect potential targets of terrorist attacks but also attempt to keep protesters as far away as possible from the place of the meeting. Epstein and Iveson (2009: 274) show how the practice of defining a ‘Declared Area’ through a specific ‘APEC Meeting (Police Powers) Act 2007’ in Sydney essentially meant a ‘quarantining of dissent’ (2009: 277).

Official rhetoric presents red zones as a necessary curtailment of the rights of a city's inhabitants, justified by presenting a potential threat to the city's peace as omnipresent; a threat which comes from people allegedly waiting for opportunities to destroy normal urban rhythms. Depending on each country's political situation and the corresponding form of social consensus those intruding ‘others’ can be presented as terrorists, violent and organized protesters, or simply villains. An attributed characteristic that all such ‘others’ share, however, is the will to upset the city's normality. Ironically, although red zones constitute spatiotemporal constructions which explicitly upset urban rhythms, they are legitimized by a security praising rhetoric which accuses ‘others’ as aiming to upset those very urban rhythms which define urban ‘normality’. Exception is justified by recourse to a normality threatened by possible exceptional acts.

Red zones do not, however, simply evaporate after the end of a meeting or a highly securitized mega-event such as the Olympics. In most cases, extra measures remain effective for an undefined period; supposedly having proven themselves necessary for the protection of a city's life from ongoing threats (Horne and Whannel, 2012). In Athens, for example, measures such as the installation of surveillance cameras and the closing of the street in front of the Presidential Mansion every day after 21:00, although imposed as extra security measures during the Athens 2004 Olympics, were never suspended afterwards. In Athens too, the monument of the Unknown Soldier in front of the Hellenic Parliament is, this year (2012), still routinely cordoned with fences when a demonstration takes place; a measure imposed after the violent clashes with the police during the massive anti-austerity demonstrations last year.

‘Security zones’ seem to have become normalized in major cities, as in the case of New York after 9/11. As Németh and Hollander (2010: 29–30) explicitly show, in this city there is not only an expanding ‘fortressing of public or civic structures’ but also a ‘clustering around high-value private buildings’ too (as, for example, around Goldman Sach's global headquarters). Security zones engulf public space by limiting and monitoring access. Wire mesh or wrought iron fences often mark those closed spaces which explicitly define ‘public’ and private buildings as highly controlled urban enclaves. Everyday urban rhythms (as, for example, everyday trajectories of people going to work) are readjusted according to these measures which, although they have the appearance of temporariness, become permanent. ‘Shrinkage of public space’ (Németh and Hollander, 2010) brings about a redistribution of public and private rhythmicalities.

Similarly, Jon Coaffee describes how a ‘ring of steel’ has been developed around London's ‘City’ area. At first, measures were taken to establish a security zone in response to Provisional IRA threats. But after 9/11, the ‘City’ gradually became an area characterized in ‘excluding itself from the rest of central London, through its territorial boundedness, surveillance and fortification strategies’ (2004: 294). It is highly indicative that many exceptional measures were gradually routinized by being renamed (and thus justified) as necessary and efficient traffic control measures (Coaffee, 2004). Once again the city's normality appears to be protected through explicit deviations from the very normality invoked!

The spatiotemporal definition of a ‘forbidden city’ in the form of an area declared as in need of extra protection measures, has something of a very old urban strategy. Borrowing Foucault's (1995) image of a plague-infected city which becomes an object of surveillance and scrupulous study by the authorities, Agamben (2001) describes the dominant logic of urban disinfection. Using the example of Genova during the anti-G8 protests in 2001, he shows how governing urban elites in cases of an urban threat attempt to control the areas of the city which are crucial for the reproduction of dominant urban habits and values. Thus, they define areas to be sealed off and disinfected from plague (the contemporary form of ‘plague’ being dissident acts and demands) by securing the enclaves of the rich and the powerful while abandoning other parts of the city to potential ‘unrest’. As the recent case of the police and army military operations in Rio's favelas proves, threats to the city's normalized order cannot be tolerated when the city (or the corresponding state) attempts to build a marketable global image of peaceful development. In the case of Rio, the Brazilian state obviously intends to showcase a peaceful urban environment (that may attract visitors and investment partners) ahead of the upcoming 2016 Olympic Games. UPP, the so-called favela ‘pacification’ programme, explicitly presents favelas as normalized through exceptional police forces' acts and measures. Normalization in those city areas which are literally occupied by the UPP special forces is imposed as a state of exception which authorities seem willing to extend well beyond 2016.

Red zones and security zones define areas of exception, areas which are cut from the rest of the city and are specifically controlled by forces allegedly devoted to ensuring public safety and security. These acts of defining separated and secluded areas necessarily demonize those who are to be kept ‘outside’. Those ‘others’ are defined as threatening potential trespassers, as sources of anomaly in a city which should remain peaceful and well ordered through its spatiotemporal routines if it is to remain ‘safe’.

Prototypical red zones, ‘designed to create and reinforce a distinction between ‘virtuous’ citizens and ‘unruly’ protesters' (Epstein and Iveson, 2009: 278), gradually evolve into spatiotemporal constructions which, by regulating urban rhythms, actually come to define an emerging model of citizenship. It is as if red zones ‘ceremonially describe the new citizen’ (Stavrides, 2010: 38) who inhabits a city in a permanent state of emergency. Curiously, law-abiding citizens are considered those who willingly abandon their allegedly universal rights (these very rights that constitutions and laws define) in exchange for a feeling of security. Their ‘right to the city’ is curtailed and defined according to enclave embedded regulations: lawful citizens are those who only know how to follow site-specific rules.

Perhaps the most extreme case of a red zone becoming a permanent construction, although still presented as the result of an ongoing state of emergency, is the wall erected by the Israeli government in Palestine. Palestinians are defined by this wall as a captive population of second-class citizens living in a discontinuous territory of ‘nonviable Bantustans’ (Sorkin, 2005: xix).

We need, here, to pause for a moment and discuss the phenomenon described as a ‘state of exception’. If we take as a starting point Agamben's relevant theorizations (Agamben, 1998, 2005), we discover in the state of exception two important moments. First, a period in which society is under threat and the state (or any other kind of sovereign authority) appears as the protector of society. Second, a period which is presented as temporary, during which certain important laws are suspended so as the state can effectively face the threat. This procedure has a very important prerequisite, however: only sovereign power has the ‘lawful right’ to suspend the law (Agamben, 1998: 21 and 28). Suspending the law proves power. But precisely because law is suspended, and not violated or eliminated, the ‘force of law’ prevails. What the mechanism of the state of exception ensures is that the promise of law (the force of law) remains, even though law is temporarily suspended (Agamben, 2005: 39). A state of exception, then, does not simply correspond to a state of anomie, it is not the opposite of law, it is a state in which law (ius) and concrete acts (factum) ‘fade into each other’ creating a ‘threshold of undecidability’ (2005: 29). When exception is prolonged, when exception becomes the rule, exceptional measures are turned into rules which completely obliterate any possible distinction between act and law (Agamben, 1998: 170). Normalized exception does not thus take the form of a set of new laws but rather that of a set of new routines; new habits which are justified by administrative reasoning alone. In a state of normalized exception, rules have the form of protocols which define patterns of behaviour without recourse to rights.

Controlling the city in modern metropolitan conditions increasingly poses new problems for the governing elites. Large, global cities are extremely complex mechanisms of social and economic relations. An emerging model of urban governance understands the city as an archipelago of urban enclaves, each one secluded and defined by a recognizable spatial perimeter. In those enclaves, administrative protocols direct people how to work, live and consume under defined and repeatable conditions.

The city of enclaves (Stavrides, 2010; Marcuse and Van Kempen, 2002), is ‘an archipelago of “normalized enclosures”’ (Soja, 2000: 299). In this city, spaces are defined and secured by specified use protocols which mould citizens as enclave users. In every enclave, as in a mall, an airport, a big stadium, a corporate tower, a recreation area or resort, a gated community or condominium, specific general rights supposedly guaranteed by law are suspended. ‘An urban enclave is usually a carefully planned system of human relations regulated by protocols of use. While such protocols have the appearance of administrative or functional directions for use, they essentially constitute a localized legal system in place of a suspended general law’ (Stavrides, 2010: 35).

Face-control in clubs, automated security control in large department stores and sophisticated entrance controls in gated neighbourhoods and big office buildings ask you to abandon the right to move freely in public or quasi-public space, the right to be anonymous or to choose your dress and expression codes, the right to work under generalized protection measures (a right brutally suspended in labour enclaves as in malls, fancy restaurants and various inner city sweatshops). To paraphrase Augé, entering an enclave obliges you to prove your innocence in advance (Augé, 1995: 102).

New urban rhythms and the tactics of the weak

As people experience nowadays a period during which an enormous economic crisis directly affects the rules and forms of social reproduction, they are forced to accept that their society is under constant threat, and to live their lives in a constant search for protection and predictability. Sometimes control points assume an apotropaic character, exorcizing through their everyday metastatic presence the ‘evils’ of instability and unpredictability. Everyday ‘prophylactic rituals’ (Turner, 1977: 168–169 and 1982: 109–110), performed in order to allegedly protect from imminent ‘outside’ threats, ceremonially normalize exception: As in the case of traditional societies, ‘prophylactic rituals’ are practices meant to keep away exceptional threats (as natural disasters) and to ensure that arhythmical events will not destroy social spatiotemporal order.

In contemporary metropolises citizens are enclave-bound users, quasicitizens enjoying suspensible rights. And a large number of people live even below this line of formal citizenship. People with no rights at all, such as ‘illegal’ immigrants, have to live either secluded in stigmatized enclaves of misery and exploitation or in constant movement, chased by metastatic mobile control points. Those non-citizens present the limit of a process of advanced ‘enclavism’ (Atkinson and Blandy, 2005) in which urban form represents and enforces social hierarchical organization. Urban enclavism, thus, culminates in ‘advanced marginality’, to use Wacquant's term (2008) or, rather, advanced marginalization. The normalization of a state of exception is already part of the everyday practices of contemporary urban citizens who spend most of their lives in urban enclaves.

The mechanism of normalized exception increasingly dominates the production of contemporary urban rhythms. If the industrial modern city was the generator and locus of alienating mechanical rhythms, contemporary post-industrial cities seem to generate and sustain localized, site-specific rhythms which for many create predictable and thus relieving life conditions. The city of enclaves presents itself to most people as a city of opportunities, a city of fantasized choices, even though enclave rhythms are very strictly controlled and constantly checked.

Criticizing contemporary rhythmicalities cannot thus mean choosing organic or human rhythms in place of mechanic ones. If social reproduction is essentially rhythmical, that is canonizing, in today's societies this rhythmicality seems to have dispersed in a wide variety of social rhythms, space-bound rhythms which are separated and differentiated. The urban archipelago is not the locus of an existing or even fantasized rhythmical coordination, a coordination that once fuelled the dreams of Futurists (the city as a factory or arsenal) and the practices of constructivists (as in Arseny Avraamov's ‘Symphony of Factory Sirens’ and El Lissitzky's electromechanical show ‘Victory over the Sun’). The modernist imaginary, epitomized in the image of a man-creator who orchestrates urban symphonies by managing to tame and control natural and mechanical rhythms alike, has completely lost its power. What has replaced it is perhaps a postmodernist (or anti-modernist) imaginary which celebrates the post-industrial city's alleged polyrhythmicality and attempts to present it as a source of individualized pleasure and freedom. P. Marcuse convincingly warns us that this imaginary supports acts which veil existing patterns of hierarchical relationships among people with a ‘cloak of calculated randomness’ (Marcuse, 1995: 243). What appears as the freedom to choose, the freedom to enter or abandon an urban rhythm considered as a specific life-setting, is essentially a new form of partitioned and controlled urban order which assigns to people the urban rhythms which define them. Such defining rhythms can guarantee the privileges of some, securing their microcosms of secluded urban affluence. Many others, however, are threatened and chased by different urban rhythms, and are forced to devise ways to escape their regulating spatiotemporal perimeters.

Learning to inhabit exception is an important task for those who are in danger of being trapped in the rhythmicality of specific urban enclaves. For those for whom exception is meant to control and contain them, inhabiting exception indeed means finding ways to insert hidden rhythmicalities of survival, based on disguised and protected habits, into exception's closed spatiotemporal universe.

The way such vulnerable people inhabit urban rhythms can be understood through the model of everyday practices suggested by de Certeau. His idea of a distinction between strategies and tactics can provide ground to conceptualize urban rhythms as a field of asymmetrical contestation. Strategy describes the form of calculus which characterizes ‘a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) which can be isolated from an environment’ (de Certeau, 1984: xvii). Strategy has a rationality which effectively measures space-time. Strategy seems to be a form of practice which controls predictability by transforming time into space, by spatializing time.

Tactics characterize those ‘others’ (as opposed to the ‘proper’) who cannot count on controlling neither space nor time. What they can do, however, is to attempt to take advantage of opportunities opened in time: ‘A tactic depends on time – it is always in the watch for opportunities that must be seized “on the wing”’ (de Certeau, 1984: xvii). Tactics is not, however, a random set of ‘opportunistic’ activities. The weak devise ways to calculate too, to predict and to establish habits. Their rhythmicalities have therefore to ‘insinuate’ themselves into the dominant rhythms, not simply destroying or suspending them, but taking advantage of the opportunities created by them.

In all major metropolises ‘informal networks of communication, mobility, employment, exchange, and cooperation’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 254) sustain an everyday inventiveness of the poor, of the dispossessed and of those who live in marginal and precarious conditions. Through ‘expansive circuits of encounter’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 254) those people regularly manage to avoid control points, to devise ways to escape from the urban enclaves meant to contain their life, and to take advantage of urban rhythmicalities meant to regulate uses of public space. Informal traders, illegal workers and those who by need learn to travel without money, are inventive appropriators and trespassers who often occupy the interstices of the urban archipelago's spatiotemporal order.

An informal petit-merchant knows how to insinuate his or her selling habits into the dominant rhythms of urban public space. She knows where and how to stand, she knows which places can be used repeatedly, as they are less controlled, less prominent and so on (Brown, 2006, 2010). In informal trade a lot of learned tactics become important in establishing routines that can be both effective and, at the same time, keep people alert so as to be able to escape from sudden invasions (of racist militants, for example, who at times attack coloured informal traders in certain urban neighbourhoods). This kind of everyday wisdom is based both on the ability to read and recognize dominant rhythmicalities and on the ability to insert temporary rhythms into those spaces left open by dominant rhythms.

Lefebvre was hinting towards the idea of people being able to divert dominant rhythmicalities. He claims that ‘rhythms play a major role’ in ‘a struggle for appropriation’, as ‘the citizen resists the state’. Furthermore, ‘civil, therefore social time, seeks to and succeeds in withdrawing itself from linear, unirhythmic, measuring/measured state time’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 96). Lefebvre attributes a ‘non-political manner’ to these acts of space appropriation and he mentions diverse relevant practices: walks, encounters, intrigues, diplomacy, deals, negotiations (2004: 96).

Lefebvre's ideas can acquire new meaning in the context of the city of enclaves. Instead of a centrality (epitomized in the modern state's regulatory power) which organized the urban order and maintained its rhythms, we now experience an archipelago of centralities organized in the form of ordered spatiotemporal enclaves. People now have to resist not simply a unirhythmic dominant order but, rather, a set of disconnected rhythmicalities.

‘A tactic is an art of the weak’, de Certeau (1984: 37) tells us. There is a long discussion as to whether this art actually creates forms of resistance (see Bennett, 1998; Buchanan, 2000; Frow, 1991; Hetherington, 1998; Pile and Keith, 1997). But in terms of the reasoning developed in this essay, a tactic can be problematized as a possible locus of criticism thus: can the described tactics of the weak indicate a way of inhabiting exception not as a trap but as a place in which fugitive rhythmicalities may emerge? Urban enclaves of normalized exception strategically trap people in rhythms which reproduce defined roles (thus perpetuating stigma or privilege). But life in the sea of the urban archipelago, considered as a ‘public’ area punctuated by control and surveillance rhythms, can never be reduced to the order of those rhythms. People's tactics insinuate themselves in this order. People ‘invent livelihoods’ (Robinson, 2006: 86) and inhabit the world's cities as sites ‘for the constant reinvention of (already inventive) traditional practices’ (2006: 90). Lots of people live in this way, and, sometimes, they even find the courage to overtly challenge hegemonic rhythms.

The squares movement: Towards a polyrhythmical urban democracy?

What kind of rhythmicalities emerge in explicit acts of defying dominant rhythms in public space? A widely referred to and diversely interpreted passage of W. Benjamin seems to provide an interesting entrance to the question. He maintains that, ‘the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule … [i]t is our true task to bring about a real state of emergency and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism’ (Benjamin, 1973: 248–249).

What can a real state of emergency mean in this context? Is this another term for the well-known radical break with normality, revolution? Is this one more way to conceptualize in terms of time and space a radical otherness, a radical exteriority? Probably it is something more than that. In Benjamin's thought, interest for the past is always indicative of a sense of danger (1973: 247). Continuous time, either in the form of unstoppable progress or in the form of a narrative explanation of the present, is mythological time (1973: 254). Time that conceals opportunities, time that traps people and inhibits human emancipation.

To be able to go beyond these forms of time closure, people have to experience and value time discontinuity. People have to see past and present as each revealing the potentialities of the other. Instead of exception (considered as a rupture in social time's continuity) becoming the trap which contains new ways to impose dominant rhythms, instead of exception becoming the source and legitimization of localized rules, exception could become the testing ground of new rhythmicalities. This new ‘state of emergency’, urgently needed in order to create opportunities for a different future is thus an opening in time's closure. Virno (2008: 92) describes ‘innovative action’ as ‘urgent action’. ‘Those who accomplish it are always in a state of emergency’ (2008: 92).

Could we possibly understand the recent squares movement as an emergent form of such a contestation of dominant urban rhythms? Can we find in the collective appropriation of public spaces in square occupations which took place in certain European, Arabian and American cities, examples of new spatiotemporal rhythms?

We can approach the squares movement as a form of reinvention of public space (Miraftab, 2004). Authorities do not simply control public space but effectively impose the rules of its use. Use of public space is, thus, ‘authorized’ use (Hénaff and Strong, 2001). Through the explicit or implicit implementation of civic behaviour rules, authorities create relevant ‘urban imaginaries’, ‘mental and cognitive mappings of urban reality’ (Soja, 2000: 324) through which people learn to interpret city-space as public or private. Unauthorized uses are banned and often directly confronted by ‘security’ forces. In the contemporary urban archipelago public space is space moulded through rhythmicalities which sustain a state of normalized exception. Public space is thus inhabited and interpreted, under the influence of dominant urban imaginaries, as necessarily fragmented, secluded, use-specific and partitioned. This is why a growing critical discussion on the meaning of urban public space is focused more and more not simply on the idea of the erosion of public space but on the transformation of such spaces through which ‘publicness’ and ‘civility’ are destroyed or distorted (Low and Smith, 2005; Mitchell, 2003; Hou, 2010).

The squares movement has created a different kind of space: ‘common space’ (Angelis and Stavrides, 2010). Crafting new spaces of solidarity and communication was absolutely important for this movement. Not only because this made people more able to demand social and economic justice but because common space became a kind of performative representation of justice and equality.

Let us look at a concrete example: the Syntagma square occupation in Athens. Space was from the beginning organized in ways that greatly differed from the everyday routines which characterize the central square of Athens. Syntagma is not simply a very important circulation node in Athens centre. It also carries dense symbolic meaning, being situated in front of the Parliament building and containing a ceremonial focus point, the Unknown Soldier's Monument.

Greek ‘aganaktismeni’ (‘indignados’, rightfully angry) chose this square to express their rage against devastating and unjust austerity measures and to cry their discontent for politicians and corrupt state (Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos, 2011). By doing so, however, they have transformed the square to an area in which a temporary occupation gradually formed a new model of publicness. Protesting in common for many days has produced spaces of thinking in common, spaces of living in common, spaces of exploring alternative values in common.

In a way, the new uses of the square were invented in exceptional circumstances. Everyday rhythms were not, however, abolished but reintegrated to a new polyrhythmical urban environment in the making. What can be described as a decentralization recentralization dialectics (Stavrides, 2012: 589) can capture the dynamics of this polyrhythmicality. People were involved in various coexisting initiatives.

Each micro-square was thus characterized by its own space and time. Each was secreting its own urban micro-rhythms. But those micro-squares were not closed to themselves; they did not develop into alternative micro-enclaves. Remaining connected to the General Assembly – the centre of decisions taken in common – those micro-squares were more like passages than defined places. They were spaces in the making, spaces in which social roles were questioned and opened. In-between spaces are not spaces of a situated identity but spaces in which identities are negotiated and tested (Stavrides, 2010). Micro-squares, thus, as in-between spaces, participated in the development of a network of passages. Each of them contained a micro-community which simply developed an idea or an initiative to be included in a wider common cause.

The General Assembly was not, therefore, a centre of dominance but a centre in constant remaking; a centre dependent on the loose coordination and creative autonomy of the micro-squares. This has resulted in new emergent forms of urban rhythms. The General Assembly was meant to provide the canvas of rules on which dispersed initiatives would flourish. Coordination was not a simple technical task but the most prominent representation of collective solidarity. No dominant rhythms could be imposed in this process. Polyrhythmicality did not, however, result in a chaotic dissonance. The decentralization–recentralization dialectics ensured that certain motives of actions were regularized in ways that expressed and corroborated shared values. The taking care of, for example, the collection of garbage in the small tent city that developed in the square, was not organized as an ‘institutionalized procedure’ but was explicitly expressed in the idea of the rotation of duties. And when this task acquired a crucial importance, as the square had to be cleaned from the remains of poisonous tear gas after a brutal police charge, people were spontaneously coordinated as equals: Long chains were formed, through which water was transported hand to hand from the only available source, the square's fountains, in small bottles to be emptied on the pavement. This spontaneous rhythmicality of bodies coordinated with no coordinating centre, clearly expresses the meaning of direct democracy, so regularly debated in the square assembly. Direct democracy can, perhaps, mean not only an equality of opinions but also a self-conscious synchronization aimed at a commonly recognized cause. So different from the allegedly rehumanized ‘eurhythmical’ marionettes, the synchronized bodies of square ‘commoners’ possibly perform democracy as a rhythmicality of differences in coordination.

Polyrhythmical life developed in the occupied square. And this polyrhythmicality was at times opened to new rhythms and at times was condensed in common rhythms, rhythms developed in common. This was a different way of inhabiting exception. Exception was not a trap but rather a spatiotemporal threshold.

Inside the temporary space of the occupied square, people could develop new habits and new roles, new rhythms which characterized new forms of life in common. This was only possible, however, because the square itself was never closed, never fantasized or practised as a ‘liberated’ enclave, as an alternative stronghold. The square was something like an urban threshold, belonging to everybody and nobody at the same time, in which different groups and individuals could negotiate their presence, their acts and their suggestions.

It was the police and the media that tried to enclose this area, to convert it to a trap, to an exception-as-trap. When the police charged (either provoked by stone-throwing or simply in an effort to ‘clean’ the area), the square was meant to be defined as a closed world, as a ghetto or as an illegal stronghold. People, however, remained peacefully in the square with amazing courage and determination. In one of these police charges characterized by brutal physical violence, some gathered at the centre of the square and started to dance to the music of a Cretan lyre. As if to expressly reflect the power of solidarity and direct democracy, those coordinated bodies symbolically escaped the brutal trap of an imposed state of exception. And it was this act that gave people the courage to return to the square and peacefully reoccupy it.

Conclusion

Contesting urban rhythms meant, in the context of the industrial city, attempting to think and live beyond the predominance of mechanic rhythms. Although the modern city never developed along the lines of the model envisaged by the prophets of eternal progress, understanding this city as an ordered rhythmical universe not only played a role in the dominant practices of social control but also created a shared imaginary in which machines were presented as generators of modern urban life.

Today's large cities are not anymore dominated by mechanic rhythms. Nor can they be explained by recourse to an imaginary saturated with either images of triumphant productive rhythms or nightmare images of alienating mechanization. In the contemporary urban archipelago, a different kind of canonization-through-control prevails. Normalized exception legitimizes and produces enclave-bound urban rhythms which participate in various levels of social reproduction. Attempts to contest or criticize dominant rhythmicalities have to thus change form and not simply content. It is not that a different kind of rhythm dominates now but that a different co-existence of rhythmicalities has emerged. These rhythmicalities are actually defined by the spatial boundaries of the corresponding urban enclaves and are not meant to be compared, changed or synchronized. The urban archipelago thus corresponds with an archipelago of urban rhythms, island-rhythms floating on a sea of chaotic noise (which is often marked by the metastatic rhythms of public space control points).

Contesting urban rhythms, in this context, means, perhaps, attempting to create polyrhythmical spaces of negotiation and coexistence, in which porous boundaries prevent both spatial as well as temporal closure. People forced to devise ways to inhabit exception, people who invent ways to insert their own fleeting and hidden rhythmicalities into existing urban spatiotemporal enclaves, can perhaps provide valuable examples of an art of the weak which recognizes urban rhythms as a contested terrain.

People can even cross and sometimes do cross the boundaries of everyday inventiveness to discover that their life can be shaped through practices of collective appropriation of space and time, practices of polyrhythmical commoning. Their practices can perhaps ‘produce a lacuna, a hole in time, to be filled by an invention, a creation. That only happens, individually or socially, by passing through a crisis’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 44). In a period of crisis, like the one we live in, new forms of life in common may possibly emerge. The squares movement has shown us that crisis can be connected to collective creativity. Collective action may indeed ‘become irregular’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 44) in search of new, collectively produced and controlled rhythms of social coexistence. Collective action has not, however, simply added new rhythms or, even, new kinds of rhythm to the dispersed polyrhythmicality of the post-industrial enclave city. Collective creativity has expanded and enriched potential encounters thus establishing the ground of comparison between different collective rhythms. Emerging rhythmicalities of mutual recognition and coexistence are rhythmicalities meant to be compared, meant to be coordinated in gestures of solidarity with no orchestrating centres (real or fantasized), meant to be always open to transformations through exchanges. In light of this prospect, can we possibly understand and experience direct democracy as polyrhythmical commoning?