Manuel Delgado's Urban Anthropology: From Multidimensional Space to Interdisciplinary Spatial Theory

"Una antropología urbana, en el sentido de lo urbano, sería, pues, una antropología de configuraciones sociales escasamente orgánicas, poco o nada solidificadas, sometidas a la oscilación constante y destinadas a desvanecerse enseguida […] una antropología de lo inestable, de lo no estructurado, no porque esté desestructurado, sino por estar estructurándose […]."

—(Manuel Delgado, El animal público 12, original emphasis)

"Though all the photographs of a city taken from all possible points of view indefinitely complete one another, they will never equal in value that dimensional object, the city along whose streets one walks."

—(Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind 160-61)

As spatial theory spreads from the social sciences into the humanities—from geography into literary circles—it becomes important to recognize spatial theory itself as an interdisciplinary area of investigation, one that shares significant methodological concerns with literary analysis and philosophical inquiry. Through the articulation of urban anthropologist Manuel Delgado's texts with key problems from the writings of Jane Jacobs, Susan Sontag, Juan Benet, Henri Bergson, and Henri Lefebvre, this essay argues that urban criticism depends on the humanities as much as the humanities need spatial theory. The result is stronger support for the Lefebvrian argument that to change the quality of urban life it is necessary to change the process through which space is perceived, conceived, and produced and, ultimately, to change the movement of thought itself.

Taken as a whole, Manuel Delgado's El animal público and his two conferences (edited for publication) "Memoria y lugar: El espacio público como crisis de significado" and "Tránsitos: Espacio público y masas corpóreas" are important contributions to the contemporary study of urban spaces.¹ In these works, Delgado builds upon the fundamentally multidimensional view of space articulated by Henri Lefebvre (The Production of Space) while emphasizing space as a process over the reification of given spaces. Moreover, throughout Lefebvre's and Delgado's works there is a strong Bergsonian undercurrent that points to the differential unity of memory (representative of consciousness) and space (understood as matter) and consequently to the interconnection of philosophical, anthropological, and geographical concerns. This interconnection is just as crucial in approaching the complexity of 'public' and 'private' city-spaces as it is in restructuring the hard lines of disciplinary borders and in renovating the aims of traditional scholarship.

Delgado's contribution to studies of space is in fact an enfolding of Lefebvre's triadic model of spatial productions and Bergson's non-dualistic spatial and temporal philosophy. This amalgam of paradigm shifts, digested as they are from the realms of geography and philosophy, suggests as much for the study of space as it does for the re-conceptualization of the very idea of 'space' itself. Incorporating the phenomenological questioning of perceiver and perceived into a superb materialist critique of capitalist spatial practices, Delgado draws together the imagined and physical aspects of our spatial production. The consequences of this type of scholarship cannot be overemphasized given the contemporary accelerated drive for capital accumulation through the production and reproduction of city-space (Harvey, Condition; Justice; Spaces). Urbanism suffers, in Delgado's (2001) words, from the need to "architecturalize everything"/ "arquitecturizarlo todo,"

[c]omo si la tarea en última instancia colonizadora del urbanista tuviera como su peor enemigo la tendencia que todo espacio socializado experimenta hacia la ambigüedad, hacia la indefinición, como consecuencia de la propia naturaleza indeterminada de los usos que registra.

(Memoria 8)

In what follows, I want to emphasize the above premise of Delgado, one that he shares with Lefebvre and Bergson, that process enfolds and includes the particular—that immaterial forces enfold and include material forces.

I will first show how Delgado's urban anthropology, one that poses the question of public space as a central one, unites immaterial and material forces in a non-dualistic relation. I argue that this special theory of geographical processes is not far at all from the way innovative critics of art and literature, such as Susan Sontag and Juan Benet, have dissolved the clear distinction between...