Giovanni La Varra1 coined the term Post-it City to refer to a functional apparatus of the contemporary city which is involved with the dynamics of public life outside conventional channels. The phenomena which tend to resort to this type of microcategory, point directly to types of temporary occupation of public space for different activities (commercial, recreational, sexual,…) in a way that is far removed from the predictions imposed by the political codes underlying urban planning. Using this as our basis, we embarked on this research and archive project – interpreting the concept in way that is deliberately broad in scope2 – in the firm belief that, in the wake of post-it situations located in very disparate contexts, specific needs may arise that fracture specific social contexts and, at the same time, subjective skills in the task of reconquering public space faced with the institutional pressure it is subjected to. The result, which is open to different expansions and corrections, confirms this; however, the materials gathered here highlight the different problems and paradoxes that affect the overall nature of the project. In this text, we will attempt to pinpoint these problems, and order them in such a way that our line of argument will act as an initial self-critical assessment of the whole adventure.
The reflection we are proposing is organised in two episodes. Firstly, we will try to highlight the clear relationship between the Post-it City concept and the different calls for informal urban planning as a response strategy to the planned city. The matter is relatively simple; but the important thing perhaps involves acknowledging that this apologia for informality is closely linked to over-organised and affluent societies and their need to find conflicting, if not literally free, modes of practice. Within this context, we will have to calibrate the true political scope of post-it phenomena as eloquent situations of a rebellious subjectivity. However, a new question immediately becomes imperative: the debatable legitimacy of this fascination with the informal, when these same social contexts have multiplied (and extended) dynamics of exclusion and marginalisation which very often promote temporary occupations of public space as a mere alternative to survival; or, put another way, the obligation to analyse these same practices in their role as an explicit sign of social insecurity, must be added to the first possibility of extolling the idea of the Post-it City as a possible model for a series of subjective practices of renewed political potential. To put it even more succinctly: we are witnessing a progressive and covert identification between freedom and marginality, making it inevitable to devise mechanisms in order to rescue the former and condemn the latter. The idea of the Post-it City is nothing more than a tool for testing this requirement.

Post-it City as a project

The western-type of Welfare State model continues to expand, despite the clear cracks that have emerged, and is accompanied by the illusion of good city form.3 There is, indeed, a close correspondence between the conquest of social – class – affluence and the resulting preparation of its natural setting as a planned and ordered city which has a fallacious desire to integrate. This phenomenon has been recognised and accurately described on numerous occasions; it is, for instance, the city of quartz4 designed to guarantee a harmonious ordering of the work, consumption and leisure of the middle class as the guarantor of a crystalline social homogeneity and, it must be added, as a renewed protocol to feed the infinite circulation of goods required by the invasive economy, which uses consumption levels as a core indicator of its supposed levels of progress and welfare. In this climate, public space becomes the repository of the prerogative which previously affected private and powerful social circles; that is, it becomes the territory where spontaneous action is excluded in the interests of expected behaviour.5 Of course, the urban planners elevated to the rank of organic intellectuals are mostly responsible for resolving the task, firstly, through planning proposals, which they deal with beforehand in the places where people live, where things are produced, where people shop and play, according to where and how people move; and if this planning is altered through parasitic interventions on the established, the order of command is transferred to political authorities through punitive measures which often turn into an explicit exercise in violence legitimised in the name of public order itself.
Richard Sennett, a pioneering analyst of these dynamics, has examined with intelligence the absolute closeness that operates between the precision6 of western cities and their effectiveness as an instrument for neutralising individual subjectivity. The grids drawn up in the offices of architects and urban planners highlight the legibility of space, but this codified nature of urban territory silences it as a lived space, reducing it to the condition of a disciplined space. This cause-effect relationship lies unquestionably in the biopolitical dimension of urban planning which has become a highly effective tool for providing guidelines for, and governing our lives in their most elemental structure: as bodies in space. However, Sennett’s analyses – true to the Weberian tradition – also highlight a psychological component that is crucial to our line of argument: the myth of a homogeneous and obedient community has a ritual character, sustained by an auto-repressive ethic, with the aim of guaranteeing the maintenance of the purified community.7 The basis of this equation consists of a mystification of family intimacy – the perimeter of the private – as an almost exclusive place for the development of personal contacts, relegating to the city’s public space the function of marking out a territory of closed and fearful solidarity, which is fully codified, and removed from an open economy of desire and, above all, inscrutable in the face of the vicissitudes and possible experiences deployed by complexity and disorder. The public space that results from this dream of happiness is a territory bounded by a sort of redemptive barrier with direct consequences: the annihilation of situations of confrontation and exploration between particular groups, the repression of everything that shows a hint of discrepancy and the demand for constant surveillance that guarantees the monotony of community life.
The Protestant roots of affluent societies lock them into a defensive stance when faced with conflict, at the expense of an explicit stifling of civil liberties; however, this same characteristic, which is perfectly visible in the dictates of early capitalism, is worsening in the era of today’s so-called cultural capitalism, involved in the mass manufacture of a laboratory’s subjectivity. While Fordist capitalism stifled individual subjectivity, cancelling the desire and adventurous impulse to guarantee a closed community, late capitalism acts with renewed mechanisms but with the same aspirations. The governance of subjectivity is no longer resolved by denying its public relevance, but by using a dominated public sphere as a showcase for the patterns of subjectivity that must stimulate the market. Today, public space has become not just the territory of the purifying utopia, but the advertising and media stage which channels an offering of goods that design beforehand the personal modes of being and the public mechanisms of living in the city. The landscape of affluent societies described by Sennett declined an almost silent public space; in turn, a seemingly noisy public space bursts on to the scene in contemporary western cities, but the permitted din stems only from the messages produced for consumption. Both settings share the negation of any unforeseen event that could disrupt the established script, so that any project designed as a retort to this imposition requires, to a greater or lesser extent, a defence of disorder which is able to generate a collection of social situations that weaken the desire for a controlled existence Incorporar cita original.8 This axiom must serve to interpret the long-established, critical tradition of urbanism, which is fascinated by the informal, and inside which the very idea of the Post-it City must be based.
Giovanni La Varra recalls young Mathias Rust’s amazing plane-landing in Moscow’s Red Square on 28th May 1987, and recognises that the substrate which makes it possible to shape the idea of the Post-it City is the continuous line that traces a clear relationship between the situationist tenets about unitary urbanism and the hippy gatherings in Windsor Great Park in the mid-seventies.9 Both extremes reveal the pressing need for a frontal reaction to the spectacle and consumerism of the affluent society, which a plethora of literature unleashed at the time.10 In the end, it was about an exhibition of disorders nourished by what Sennett called a tolerable way of using the wealth and abundance of modern times [as] the promise of greater personal freedom and greater mutual knowledge.11 This is, indeed, the latent power of the situations devised by Guy Debord: a moment of life, concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organisation of a unitary environment and a game of events. Indeed, the recreational impulse became a fundamental component in order to guarantee the effectiveness of these expectations, and this is why, when defending the event, Debord planned an explicit invitation to convert the city into an enormous playing field for all kinds of urban practices. Hence the implicit closeness between the situationist détournement and the traces marked out today by skaters. The problem, as we will see, lies in the limitation this perspective entails in order to register post-it phenomena rooted in social marginalisation (mobile stalls for illegal street-vending, the appropriate corners for the homeless and street prostitutes,…) which, as a consequence, cannot be compared with those other neo-situationist gestures, that are clearly conflicting in nature but are anchored in the youthful and affluent commitment to engender and exercise possible freedom. The mechanisms for appropriating public space in contemporary cities respond to two different dynamics which, although not exclusive, don’t display the same set of problems. On the one hand, there are practices of dissent and, on the other, practices of survival. When confronted with the first type of practices – those connected with the situationist tradition from a broad perspective – the concept of the Post-it City can act as a projectual idea; but with the second, it must be a sign that grants visibility to the new sibylline formats of racism and exclusion which, to some extent, call for a much broader analysis than the one stemming from unease.
The suggesting of raising the idea of the Post-it City as a project, means recognising and underlining the political potential of constructed situations as practices of dissent. Put another way, it is a question of revealing the micropolitical nature – the non-reproduction of the dominant modes of subjectivity production12 – of the poetizations created in the urban space. The core of this possibility lies in the reading of the post-it gestures of dissent as the explicit news items of a regressed subjectivity, replete with all its skills and abilities. Faced with the imposed dynamics, which a subjectivity without a life of its own is designed for, the temporary occupations of public space planned from ingenuity, recycling and parasitic action, reveal a singularised subjectivity, put in place and ready to institute, in an autonomous way, an imaginary different to the hegemonic one. The potential promise of the idea of the Post-it City is to abolish the communal illusion as an objective, and to focus attention on the mechanisms through which subjectivity aspires to a full life beyond the private perimeter of romantic intimacy, but also far removed from community consensus. This converts these practices, almost inevitably, into acts of sabotage, but this is precisely the discreet seed of revolution according to which, thanks to this powerful return to subjectivity, it could found and articulate its own sociability mechanisms. There is a long-standing tradition in the social sciences, which are fascinated by disorder – led by the Chicago School and Michel de Certau – that we could recognise as the basis for this reading. The notions that are at stake, with a nature that is in absolute proximity to what we now seek to recognise in the wake of the idea of Post-it City, are many: the unforeseen city, urban dialectics, urban violence, the practised city,…13 but it may suffice to refer to the well-known idea of heterotopia, formulated by Michel Foucault and defined as that type of counter-site capable of juxtaposing elements that are in themselves incompatible, and establishing a break in ordinary time. The idea of the Post-it City shares the same characteristics as an inappropriate occupation of space, above all, due to its ungovernable appearances and disappearances. In any case, the most significant thing, in the desire to define the projectual profile of the idea of the Post-it City, is that Foucault identified the paradigm of heterotopia as a boat laden with promises of adventure for its pirate crew.14

Post-it City as a sign

The intersections between what we used to distinguish as practices of dissent and practices of survival are many and varied, but this doesn’t make it possible to identify them just like that. Illegal hawkers also have to deploy all their ingenuity in order to survive in the public space, but it would be excessively biased if we reduced their signification to this skill. In order to place the idea of Post-it City within a perspective that is able to record both types of practice equally, it is necessary to expand the scope of the right to the city15 beyond the creation of an art of living, in order to endow it with the ability to analyse class insecurity as well. It is no longer a question of finding a way to channel needless freedom by overcoming order, but of directing this very practice towards the unveiling of numerous latent needs. It is in this final context that the Post-it City can operate as a sign.
The demands to adapt the idea of the Post-it City to the condition of a tool for developing a critical economy of social insecurity makes it necessary, in the first instance, to recognise the sheer extent to which contemporary cities have multiplied their codes of exclusion. Capital constantly reconfigures space in order to make flexible the location of assets and resources and, within this dynamic, the entire city stage is subjected to radical specialisation which, inevitably, brings about a multiplication of waste doomed to risk and marginalisation. In the end, the equation is quite simple: the progressive conversion of the city into the stage for a regime of flexible accumulation16 which can adapt the space to surplus value (for instance, through gentrification processes), absorbs what assimilates it and expels what hinders it. The consequence is an increase in inequality, abandoned as waste or, in the best- case scenario, managed as a threat. It is the same process that explains the causes whereby the supposedly democratic discourse has replaced the objective of social rights and full employment, through the obsessive call for surveillance and the reorganisation of the public sphere. When confronted with this reality which disseminates and multiplies poverty for a wide range of groups, the only recourse is expressed as a bold occupation of public space. In this context, converting the notion of the Post-it City into a sign consists of the dual task of lending visibility to this set of problems and interpreting their spatial practices from the legitimacy of the appropriate.
The operation of lending visibility to the precariousness underlying specific occupations of public space is highly problematic. The archive of cases we are presenting in this project responds to our conviction of the pertinence of this gesture; but this doesn’t exempt us from considering that, on many occasions, it is necessary to keep specific practices secret in order to foster their fragile subsistence. In any case, we have tried to approach the subject with sufficient caution so that the visualisation of specific situations makes it possible to address the fundamental aspect – the fallacy of calling for cultural difference in order to disguise a problem that only responds to a condition of social class – without endangering them. Indeed, the post-it phenomena that are liable to be interpreted as survival practices (which have, among their protagonists, immigration in European cities, the Bolivian community in São Paulo, the Peruvian community in Santiago de Chile, and the Hispanic one in Los Angeles) are stigmatised by an institutional rhetoric that attempts to manage them as the consequence of a simple conflict between different cultural identities, without recognising that they respond to an ordinary social hierarchy in which there is an inevitable clash of interests.17 This type of discourse has gradually triumphed thanks to a call for multiculturalism that hides inequality behind a veneer of cultural differences which, as such, could even be consumed as exotic without any concern for what they suffer as a simple product of subordinateness. By giving visibility to spatial survival occupations, creating a complete portrait, not of the exotic features of its protagonists, but of their obligation to devise flexible mechanisms in order to remain and survive in the city, well-meaning literature dealing with the curiosities of multiculturalism stumbles and lays itself open to an interpretation that is more in keeping with its literally social dimension.
The social nature of specific occupations of public space, now saved from their false culturalistic reading, makes it possible to interpret them from the viewpoint that recognises them as an exercise stemming from need; that is, the perspective that turns this type of appropriation of space into the succinct act of making what is appropriate.18 While capital progressively privatises public space and governments manage it as an exclusive property, the social insecurity that stems from this process is legitimised in order to appropriate the hidden corners that still remain within its grasp in order to give an appropriate response to its most pressing needs. Taking this into consideration, this would call into question the effectiveness of the classic reformist discourses which, when faced with the proliferation of irregular activities in public space, seek to regulate them in order to foster their inclusion in the formal city. This is what happens, particularly in Latin American cities, where the sheer scale of the street economy is attaining important levels,19 but where attempts to normalise it only serve to intensify the paradox of making those who are mostly deprived of the material conditions which would allow them to play as equals, comply with the rules of the game. It isn’t legitimate to make deprived communities behave appropriately inside a social model organised in the shadow of accumulation. If traditional public space once invoked a kind of pact between private interest and the common good, the contemporary public sphere is infected by such a multiplicity of exclusions that disobedience can no longer be considered alien to the judgement of the just. Post-it City is an archive of disobedient practices, in this, the strictest of senses.

1La Varra, Giovanni, “Post-it City: Los otros espacios públicos de la ciudad europea”, various authors, Mutaciones, Actar/ arc en rêve centre d’architecture, Barcelona 2001, pp. 426-431

2In order to reconstruct this perspective with which we have interpreted the concept, see the introductory texts on www.ciutatsocasionals.net , as well as the following articles: Peran, Martí, “Ciutats Ocasionals”, Butlletí, no.12, CASM, Barcelona 2005 and Peran, Martí, “Una nota sobre la ciudad latinoamericana (a propósito del proyecto Post-it city)”, Spam_arq, no. 4, Santiago de Chile 2008.

3
Lynch, Kevin, Good City Form, MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1984.

4 Davis, Mike, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Vintage Books, New York 1992.

5
For information about this historic process, see Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1999.

6
Sennett, Richard, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities, W.W. Norton & Company, New York 1992.

7
Sennett, Richard, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life, W.W. Norton & Company, New York 1992.

8
Sennett, Richard, idem.

9
See Arqueología Post-it City at http://www.ciutatsocasionals.net/archivocastellano/arqueopostit/arch_postit.htm.

10
Raoul Vaneigem published The Revolution of Everyday Life in 1967, the same year as Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.

11
Sennett, richard, Ídem, p. 241 i 269.

12
Guattari, Félix i rolnik, Suely, Micropolítica. Cartografías del deseo, Tinta limón / Traficantes de sueños, buenos aires 2005, p. 189.

13
Cottino, Paolo, La ciudad imprevista, bellaterra, barcelona 2005; Merrifield, andy, Dialectical Urbanism, Monthly review Press, nova York
2002; dollé, Jean-Paul, Fureurs de ville, bernard Grasset, París 1991; delgado, Manuel, El animal público, anagrama, barcelona 1999.

14
Le navire c’est l’hetérotopie par excellence. Dans les civilisations sans bateaux les rêves se tarissent, l’espionnage y remplace l’aventure, et la police, les corsaires (The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates ), Foucault, Michel, “Des espaces autres. Hétérotopies”, Dits et écrits I, 1954-1975, Gallimard, Paris 1984.

15
Lefebvre, Henri, Le droit à la ville, Anthropos, Paris 1968.

16
In order to reconstruct this process, see the works by David Harvey, particularly The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford 1991.

17
Manuel Delgado has examined this question with particular prescience in the context of Barcelona, Elogi del vianant. Del “model Barcelona” a la Barcelona real, Edicions de 1984, Barcelona 2005; “Barcelona y la diversidad”, various authors, Quórum, Institut de Cultura, Barcelona 2005, pp. 253-257.

18
We use the concept based on the well-known Marxist distinction between the Property/Privatisation and Appropriated/Appropriation binomials.

19
The many documents put together by StreetNet International contain an accurate analysis of the subject: www.streetnet.org.za