The Binary City

Abstract

The characterisation of the Western city through binary classifications seems increasingly inappropriate, first, because cultural fusions produce 'thirdspaces' which can only be captured in a more complex spatial language and, secondly, because a thirdspace politics is needed to resist the oppressions associated with binary oppositions. In this paper, it is suggested that the thirdspace arguments promoted by Soja neglect a history of resistance and academic critiques of binaries loosely associated with anarchism. Drawing on the 'British school' of object relations in psychoanalysis, it is also argued that the failure to think beyond binaries and to realise a thirdspace politics may be connected with the construction of the 'Western self' in a culture which is suffuse with oppositions of desire and disgust.