Space as a form of power

How does knowledge about the projects change through its spatial representations? And how is it then projected into a greater social and economic order in the American city?

I am interested in space as analytic of power, not in a theory of space that challenges a notion of power (Rabinow). As a form of power, space imprints bodies, particularly in built, architectural forms. Within this context it seems fruitful to consider architecture as part of what Rabinow calls a "shifting field of power and knowledge" where we can see the formation of class in a place like the inner-city ghetto (Rabinow). Architectural projects do not inherently have political significance, but they can be platforms and strategies constituted by a particular politics in certain historical moments. In regards to public housing, this can be a way to re-imagine how design and social-economic poverty intersect: could it be that the projects did not "concentrate the ghetto," but rather produced it through a specific configuration of space? A configuration through which power was articulated in an economy of design for the management and knowledge of bodies? Our knowledge of the projects, its residents and cultures, is then constituted by the form of a building/urban environment, a knowable object, that is inscribed upon the bodies that constitute the space.

Governmentality and home

Political power, governance, is spatially re-located in the projects. Housing, for the city of Newark, was the "center" of urban renewal, not city hall or other public/civic spaces. This inscribed the spaces of home as locales of governmentality, producing citizen-subjects and a knowledge about urban politics in the form of the housing project. Policy produced this space, yet this is cannot be unidirectional. How, then, does this inflect in the opposite direction? Does home, the projects, engender governmentality? Neglected, isolated space of poverty in the city is the spatial representation of the city government's power: de-regulation, dis-investment in mid-size, post-industrial cities is known through the urban ruins that populate its urban centers and peripheries. Such spaces reflect the state of governemnt funding for public entities at this particular moment, but also engender or produce,  a knowledge about poverty in the city that constitutes it racially, economically, culturally, but above all visually. The aesthteics of poverty produce a knowledge of poverty characterized through spatial and material conditions, conditions which are grafted onto the bodies the simultaneously construct the projects. Urban poverty can be recognized (known) by the way it looks, in architectural and corporeal form. This is more than representational but generative, a form of power, that produces a way of knowing poverty, not merely reflecting it, but embodying it.