Crossings

Towards home and away from home: the networked cosmopolitanism of Federation Square

Figure 3: Flows: imagining the city - The spectre of pedestrians flow out of the cityscape in front of Federation Square, their path intersecting that of trams.

Melbourne’s Federation Square, the new city square at the juncture of her river, rail and road, occupies a prime position (both in space and place) as a gateway to Melbourne. The Square is adjacent to Flinders Street Station, the city’s central railway depot, which is at once the origin and terminus of each of Melbourne’s commuter railway lines. It demands the gaze from Princess Bridge, a grand traffic artery connecting the CBD to Melbourne’s far-reaching southern suburbs. It is a tourist attraction housing the Melbourne Visitor Centre. It shares an edge with the Yarra, this city’s river that meanders in and out of her eastern suburbs, touches her CBD and empties into an international port, a fluid connection to the world’s cargo. The river cuts Melbourne from north to south like a brown scar, its colour remembering an industrially modernising, colonial city discharging the effluent of progress into its flow. Towards her mouth, however, this still-brown water spills into an area of de-industrialising, post-Fordist, urban gentrification as the cosmopolitan and corporate refit Melbourne’s rusted dockscapes. Federation Square is a gateway, a nexus both physical and symbolic, connecting Melbournians to their city and Melbourne to the world. It is a point of intersection, a nodal place for flows into and out of the city which are at once local, global, public, private, historical, in progress, national, transnational, political, personal, tangible, intangible, real, imagined, remembered and forgotten; this gateway is an inside kind and an outside kind.

Federation Square is also a kind of monument built to commemorate the centenary of Australia’s Federation in 1901, an event which is at once a coming together and a coming apart. Much of the rhetoric surrounding Federation, both in 1901 and in 2001, follows it semantically and highlights a joining of the states, the birth of the Australian nation. Federation also represents, however, a coming apart: a bordering of the confederated, forming a league against an other; it marks the official occasion of Australian independence from Britain. From this symbolic moment of rupture, Australians have struggled to balance their roots and routes, defining themselves as both a derivative of and in opposition to the British. With this new sovereignty, the first act of Australian parliament was to define its citizens against a racialised other in the Immigration Restriction Act (the white Australia policy). From within the nation, Aboriginals too were denied citizenship. Both of these discriminations persisted, officially in law and unofficially in more complex and imagined ways, for seven decades.

This coming together and coming apart is not quite a paradox; it is a question of scale mediated by the relationship that we assume to space and place. By scale, I mean that it is contingent upon our thinking categorically in terms of home/city/nation/world. Culture, says John Frow (1995, p. 2), is ‘always a matter of what binds together and what keeps apart’. In mapping the flows that both bind us together and hold us apart we must first understand the changed relation of space to place in this ever-globalising modernity.

Space and Place
Here space is defined as a site or location that is not necessarily a signifier for cultural identity. Space is also a concept and using an abstract logic, a certain geometry, we can measure it, divide it up, imagine how it stretches out, name it. Space is everywhere. In Australia, we have an awful lot of it; space is something we brag about and something that frightens us. Place, on the other hand, is defined as a site embedded in space that is a signifier for cultural identity. Place is, of course, connected to space intangibly, a kind of imagining; we call it home. Husserl believed that ‘space was in itself unknowable, or rather, only knowable through the process of perception’ (Barcan and Buchanan 1999, p. 7). If that is true, then space and place cannot be purified categorically in the business of making meaning – and collapsing them risks a larger logical collapse. Tony Birch (1999) has argued that there is not an easy categorical distinction between what is full and what is empty in terms of Australian spaces and places of identity.[1] Both space and place are at once built and imagined; they have a networked, circulating relation to subjectivities and objectivities - to the insides and outsides of ourselves and of the built spaces that we call home.

Anthony Giddens (1990, p. 18) argues that in premodern societies space and place mostly coincide since the spatial dimensions of social life were ‘largely dominated by presence’, but that ‘the advent of modernity increasingly tears space away from place by fostering relations between ‘absent’ others locationally distant from any situation of face to face interaction’. Zygmunt Bauman (2002, p. 87) remarks that globalisation signals an ‘end to the era of space’. Thus, globalisation shrinks distances in the world as the centripetal force of rapidly circulating, connected global flows pull inwards. Whilst this is true, Giddens rupturing of space and place in modernity also points to a corresponding centrifugal force, an expansion of the distance across interactions that implicates the politics of self and other in the networked flows of the global. Thus, the mapping of space to place in modernity involves both a coming together and a coming apart (which is why the nation-state is at once too big and too small). ‘Modernity’, writes Nikos Papastergiadis (1997, p. 1), ‘begins with the belief in both the journey away from and the permanence of home’.

How might Melbourne’s Federation Square approach the conceptual landscape of place and space? How is this process mediated by our histories and swept along by the agitated currents of a globalising world? These are questions of roots and routes and of how we choose the epistemological geometry of insides and outsides of identity, which will be related here to the framework of networked cosmopolitanism. Networked identities are formed in that unstable place where the complexities of subjectivity meet the circulating flows of the global and the gravity of history. [2]

In 1996, a brief was released for a design competition to develop the Federation Square site. The symbolic demands of the brief stipulated that the development must:

Kim Dovey (2005, p.97) argues that ‘the most significant program in this project was symbolic: the capacity of such a project to transform the image of the city, and to create a genuinely public space for a multicultural society’. When the winning design was announced the Premier of Victoria, Jeff Kennett, said: ‘It is almost multicultural … it is the coming together of a whole range of parts … and that’s what federation is all about, its also what Melbourne and Australia are all about’(qtd in Dovey 2005, p. 98). Dovey (2005, p. 98) notes that the winning design by LAB architect studio was ‘clearly and strongly influenced by the work of Libeskind’, whose work is ‘associated with the deconstructionist school’ and has a ‘fine sensitivity to the production of meaning in built form with a particular focus on issues of nationalism and culture’. With such a deep, symbolic investment in culture, nationalism, multiculturalism and hopes to ‘transform the image of the city’, how might we read the Federation Square project and its completed mosaic of sandstone, zinc and glass? Is Federation Square a cosmopolitan site – and what might this mean? This paper concentrates on answering the theoretical aspect of this question (how the site is designed rather than how people interpret it) using Federation Square as a scaffold upon which to imagine a theory of networked cosmopolitanism. [3]

I pose these questions within the discipline of cultural studies, a theoretical scaffold that Frow (1995, p. 1) notes is ‘a relatively arbitrary institutional demarcation, and as a set of problems still in the process of being formed and enunciated – is itself a symptom of one of these problems’. He notes that it is therefore part of the work of cultural studies [and part of the work of this essay] to subject this framework itself to a line of (often indirect) questioning.

Claiming/Reclaiming Space: Urban Interior Desert

Federation Square is a kind of little territorialisation, which reclaims space from the old Jollimont railyards that Melbourne had turned its back on for decades. Over fifty sprawling railway lines, once a symbol of progress and mobility, cut the city off from its river. They cluttered up this wide, monochrome strip of uninhabitable space traversed only by trains and graffiti artists. Using improved railway technologies, the Federation Square project reduced the number of railway lines in the Jollimont rail yard from fifty-three to twelve (Brown-May 2001, p. 3); it conquers this space, burying the remaining lines like a giant sloping bridge that re-connects the city to the Yarra.

Alongside its part in the ever modernising, gentrifying and de-industrialising development of Melbourne’s CBD, this territorialisation of Australian space into place is undercut and haunted by postcolonial histories. I can’t help but look upon my city (my home) with a kind of grief when I think of this; how strange it is to be given life in the body of the oppressor, to call home a place that was once invaded and is invaded in turn by the ghosts of its dispossessed. The design brief states that the square must engage with ‘indigenous contributions to Australia’. This is a complex requirement considering that it must also celebrate the federation of Australia as a white nation, the coming together that was also a coming apart (given that the Kooris were displaced from the nation culturally, legally and far too literally). [4] In 2003, Federation Square Management evicted a group of largely Aboriginal squatters from the vaults below the square (Armao, 2003). There seems an irony here if Federation Square is read as a semantically sincere ‘coming together’, whilst the vault eviction below remembers and perpetuates the coming apart of the settlers and the non-citizen indigenous population.

However, I will argue that the design of Federation Square imagines a framework for identity that reflexively engages with both a coming together and a coming apart in federating the Australian nation. Thankfully, Federation Square isn’t merely iconic and Dovey (2005, p. 103) notes that there is no suggestion that its desert motif is meant to refer to aboriginality. Such an iconic reference would collapse the relationship of traditional to contemporary aboriginality and run a large risk of cultural appropriation. Instead, Federation Square plies the line between appreciation and appropriation of the desert motif and seems to offer a reflexive, interrelated interpretation of both - of the iconic and the unconscious. The urban desertscape might be read as an interior desert: a reference to negotiating the badlands of white Australian identity that intersect those histories of Aboriginal dispossession, a haunting return of an imagined desert (a strange, barren exterior) to the interior of the city and the self. Conversely, it might also be read as an appropriation of a central Australian desert, a centripetal red heart, that joins the states together in sand and in symbolism, in geographies both physical and imagined. The stones used in Federation Square (that look nothing like stones found in this part of the country) were mined in the Kimberly region and then cobbled in Perth, suggesting a national rhetoric of sharing, not only of resources, but of a symbolism. This kind of symbolic, desert nationalism is often iconic, which means that it signifies in excess of itself: here the excess signification is actually ironic, it evokes the very opposite of a desert (an exterior, a harsh, barren landscape), imagining a symbolic home for all Australians whether or not they have ever seen a desert before, let alone set foot in one. Federation Square is certainly redolent with national sentiment, from the flagpole out the front to the Australia collection hanging in the National Gallery of Victoria. [5] The urban interior desert at once holds us together and keeps us apart, just as that disparate, imagined desertscape of Australia brings us symbolically together and at once unconsciously undoes us. Since Federation Square is both a deconstruction and a construction, its urban interior desertscape is at once a self-conscious parody (a city desert) and a celebration of imagined nationalism (a bush desert approaching appropriation or iconicity in the city) that acknowledges both a coming together and a coming apart in terms of a dialectic of exterior and interior to place and space.

At once beautiful and unsettling, part desert and part piazza, in parody and in celebration, this urban desert is about the deserts we imagine and the deserts we walk through. The fake, self-conscious stars on visible metal wires are deliberately accentuated using a diffraction filter. These become little rupture points in the realism of the photos: rupture points for our federated identities in this parody of the desert sky - a reminder that for Melbournians, the desert (like identity) is at once real and imagined. This desertscape, which is at once a desert and self-consciously not a desert, renders the nexus between space and place opaque. Mainly empty sky set beside the cityscape of the CBD (and highlighted by those stars) it looks strangely empty for peak hour in the centre of Melbourne on a Friday night.

A strange juxtaposition of ominous grey sky, metallic cityscape and the corner of that red, interior urban desert. Save for Federation Square, this photo could be any city – in fact this shot , taken on the first evening of Melbourne’s winter, seems to have more in common with other global cities than with Australia’s red centre. Here is the intersection of a corner of desert with a winter city and the silver shard behind that bears the technological flows of globalisation, live messages from the mobile phone network that are scratched into its self-conscious, metallic skin in neon.

Yet there is an Ariadne’s thread that would allow us to pass with continuity from the local to the global, from the human to the non-human (Latour 1993, p. 121).

Federation Square draws from the deconstructionist school of architecture and is celebrationally self-conscious in built form. The metal scaffold is often strikingly featured as a central motif and the tiled façade works towards a parody of itself, being partial and strangely detached. Unlike the buildings of modernism, which Frow (1997, p. 41) notes lay claim to ‘atemporal universality’ and tend to make use of the form of the grid, Federation Square has a more complex relationship to temporality and carves out ‘a space of flows in a fluid city’ (Dovey 2005, p. 107). It invests deeply in a playful, transparent exploration of its symbolism and modes of representation. The atrium provides striking examples of this, being as much about deconstruction as it is a construction. Early drawings of the atrium depict a streetscape that Dovey (2005, p. 107) suggests is ‘neither plaza nor sidewalk’, a ‘conflation of street, mall and corporate atrium’, imagining a throng of people flowing through it. Up to a thousand people can move through the atrium at any one time and almost four thousand tonnes of steel is networked into the atrium frame (Brown-May 2005, p. 90). This casts a shadow network onto the floor and intangibly snares any of the atrium pedestrians in flow.

Figure 6: Network/scaffold: North Atrium - An intangible network snares pedestrians in flow

Shards, like memories, reflect some things and obscure others. The South atrium reflects a networked CBD and the dwindling sunlight renders some of its steel scaffolding opaque. Into this flows the Yarra, the historical river whose brown hue remembers an industrial and colonial Melbourne in its flow. The shard creates a strange and networked juxtaposition of the rowing sheds across the bank, trees on the Yarra Boulevard and the reflected CBD.

Figure 8: Network/scaffold: We frame and are framed - MCG through the south atrium scaffold

It is worth quoting Dovey at length on the symbolism of the atrium, which he says suggests:

a new kind of urban subjectivity: a population on the move, a ‘space of flows’ in a fluid city. The space-frame of steel sections dramatically frames this space from above and casts a virtual ‘forest’ of shadows. However, it does not follow structural imperatives so much as it symbolises the interconnectivity of an information age, a virtual space framing the public space (Dovey 2005, p.107). [6]

This fluidity, he suggests, is ‘a desirable quality for a multicultural society in transition’(Dovey 2005, p. 107). But what exactly does this mean? I don’t mean to use the word ‘fluid’ flippantly or loosely here. I use the word in the sense that John Urry (2003) also uses it: to depict modernity’s diversifying effects of routes and flows, whilst acknowledging that these fluid flows are also rooted. The word fluid doesn’t mean that everything is free, floating and relative, but it doesn’t have to signify a dogmatic determinism either. In Terry Eagleton’s (2003, p. 57) words:

Human culture is not really free floating. Which is not to say that it is firmly anchored either. That would be just the flipside of the same, misleading metaphor. Only something which was capable of being anchored could be described as having floated free. We would not call a cup ‘floating loose’ just because it wasn’t clamped to the table with bands of steel. Culture only seems free floating because we once thought we were riveted in something solid, like God, or Nature or Reason.

Semiotic baggage aside, a fluid is an apt metaphor for identity in modernity - and fluidity, which is more flexible than atemporal modernism and less flexible that pure relativity, forms a dialectic of roots and routes. [7] The intangible ‘forest’ of shadows cast by the atrium scaffolding offers a striking, visual metaphor for what is sometimes called complexity theory (Jencks 2005), actor-network theory (Latour 1993 & 2005; Law 1994 & 1999) or networked cosmopolitanism (Urry 2003).[8] Like the atrium frame itself, this theory is really just an epistemological framework that tells us how we might study cosmopolitanism, how we might imagine identities in a globalised world.

Imagine a person standing at each of the shadow nodes on the atrium floor. Bruno Latour (2005) calls these people actors. Then the framework of shadows in between might represent the lines of force (or flows) that join the actors together and hold them apart. Latour attributes actants (forces, flows) to these lines of connection and differentiation (Latour 2005; Law 1994; Law 1999). Urry (2003, p. 122) notes that this creates a picture of society that has ‘no top or bottom… but many connections or circulations that effect relationality through performances at multiple and varied distances’. The dynamics connecting the actors can include positive or negative feedback loops; they are mediated by both local and global forces. Latour notes that there is ‘no zoom going from macro structures to micro interactions’, from the ‘life world’ to the ‘system world’ (qtd in Urry 2003, p.123) that has divided the social sciences from science, subjectivity from objectivity (Latour 1993). The networked shadows that connect the imagined subjectivities of people in the atrium to its built frame suggest an interconnection between subjects and objects; in the atrium, we frame and are framed.

How does this relate to identity? Consider the epistemological geometry of identity (that is, how we geometrically construct our knowledge of subject and object). Modernism dreamt up an arbitrary closed geometry with a connected line to describe an identity category arranging it in an inside/outside configuration that was attached to a simple economy of value: centre (subject) and margins (other). Knowledge was grounded in a polarised regime of exclusion: you were either inside an identity or you were outside, which in turn, defined the identities themselves.

Postmodernism, on the other hand (or perhaps the same hand depending on what you make of the post) retains certain aspects of the modernist framework, certain logics of its geometry. It gives a more unstable and more complex account of identity, declaring promisingly that the boundaries are ‘decentred’, ‘shiftable’ ‘porous’ or ‘fuzzy’ (my favourite). The decentering impulse of the postmodern is certainly a useful response to modernism but it is hardly enough. The postmodern hybrid seeks to disrupt the modernist polarisation of self to other (which it reverses up to a point) but it tends to concentrate on hybridising the ‘others’ and leaves those in the now floating, deformable centres pretty much alone. In this asymmetry it is a delicate task to keep the postmodern hybrid free from Eurocentrism. The dynamics of this exchange between self and other is further complicated (or perhaps left dangerously free) by the postmodern refusal of an economy of value; which parts of self and other are privileged or rejected when they come into conflict? The other had made a triumphant return to the centre, but had retained some of its former logic of insides and outsides. Postmodernism might claim that it has learned from the conceptual landscape of modernism, but it has no theoretical engagement with what Ghassan Hage (1997) has called ‘white multiculturalism’; it has no epistemological quarrel with Eurocentrism. [9] Instead it too frequently finds itself trapped in the opposition of fact to value (of moorings verses mobilities; roots verses routes; absolute verses relativist; essentialist verses constructionist… a potentially infinitely disseminating point of rupture) that haunts ‘postmodern’ cultural studies. Postmodernism retains aspects of modernism’s geometry, its insides and outsides, multiplying and re-arranging these so that there are now many insides and many outsides and no specific centre. The trouble is, mathematically, this is still a ‘non-connected’ geometry, a geometry where subjects and objects are demarcated from each other and are related oppositionally. Latour (1993, p.7) argues that this is an aspect of the ‘modern constitution’, an episteme whose ‘fabric is no longer seamless. Analytic continuity has become impossible’. [10]

But must identity retain a non-connected geometry? In geometry, a space is connected if any two points in the space can be joined by a curve lying wholly in the space (Weisstein 1999). That is, two points must be able to be ‘connected’ by at least one (continuous) curve that doesn’t cross a boundary of the space. How does a networked identity (such as that suggested by actor-network theory) differ from the geometrical constructions of the modernist and postmodernist episteme?

Latour (1993) argues that the categorical opposition of subject to object relies on a split between social science and science that was formalised in the modern constitution at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Foucault (1966) argues that it was upon this epistemological landscape that the invention of ‘man’ (and his human sciences) took place. The non-connected geometry invents an epistemological discontinuity, an infinitely disseminating point of rupture. But we were never modern, as Latour has so aptly noted; this ‘great divide’ never was, by which he means that subjectivity and objectivity (and nature and culture) are always intimately dependent. However, unlike the postmodernists, I will argue with Latour that collapsing these categories is a delicate task, one that requires a new geometry of identity. Networked cosmopolitanism provides a conceptualisation of identity that suggests such a geometry. In the networked identity there are no insides and outsides. The lines of force in the network scaffold do not demarcate the people in the atrium from each other in the sense of traditional boundaries, but at once connect them together and keep them apart. The network self evolves as the sun changes position outside; the shadows shift and the people in flux in the atrium move too.

Thus, the atrium provides a lovely metaphor for networked cosmopolitan identities that are at once held apart and brought together by the forces of modernity in a myriad of networked roots and routes. Networked cosmopolitanism is a true decentering and undoes the modernist margins and centres once and for all by complicating the relationship that we have to inside and outside in identity politics. It does this by adopting a geometry that is connected and makes a fetish of neither difference nor sameness, outsides nor insides. In the atrium network there is no true demarcation between the global and the local, between space and place, between art (read representation) and life, between the natural and the built environment. The atrium does not separate people from things or the city from nature, but joins them together in a crash course of subjectivities and objectivities of sunlight and of steel.

Latour (2005) notes that the work involved in mapping the flows of a networked, globalised modernity is painstaking. However, the geometry of the network gives us a new way to imagine a cosmopolitan identity that is free from a paradoxical reading that the globalised world pushes us inexorably away and towards ‘home’ in modernity. It lets go of the Eurocentric tendency to separate identity into an asymmetrical self and other, and brings transnationalism not only out across the borders of the nation states, but circulating back into the nation’s heart; the flows of the network have both centripetal and centrifugal forces. By deploying a word that truly frightened the Hansonites at the time of Hanson’s maiden speech to parliament (in 1996 Pauline Hanson attacked the ‘cosmopolitan elites’ for being ‘un-Australian’) networked cosmopolitanism imagines an identity politics in which such a bordered, monistic, non-connected approach to identity is incompatible with the conditions of modernity.

Aperiodic Tiling: Roots and Routes (Order-Disorder; Relative-Absolute; Fixidity-Fluidity)

Is there an economy of value in a self evolving network, an economy of roots and routes? What does it mean to say that fluidity is not a dogmatic fixidity or a floating relativity? How can the Federation Square design incorporate both subjectivity and objectivity? There is a further message for our metaphor encrypted into the tiling on the façade that is related to these questions: that networked cosmopolitanism is not a ‘representation of disorder’ nor of ‘subsuming authority’ (to use the designers’ words as qtd in Dovey 2005, p. 100), but represents a fluidity .Here I take exception to Urry’s (2003, p. 123) claim that ‘the very large number of elements in [complex] systems makes such systems unpredictable and lacking any finalised order’. This seems a case of (misleading) slippage between the words complexity and chaos; the semantic (read: semiotic) and the mathematical senses of both of these words have different meanings and a collapse of these would be disastrous for the theoretical underpinnings of this engagement with networked cosmopolitanism. (In fact, the metaphor encoded in the tiled façade of Federation square centrally informs the debate between agency and structure.) Many networked global flows are indeed mathematically chaotic (such as weather and financial flows of capital), which makes their dynamics non-deterministic (stochastic). However, unlike the despair that is suggested semantically, chaos theory relates these systems back to order. It is a sensitivity to initial conditions (the butterfly effect) that causes chaos in the dynamics of these systems, not a large number of elements (a dripping tap exhibits chaotic behaviour). Furthermore, chaotic dynamics (indeterminate dynamics) occur in determinate systems. [12]

singularities, differences and unique entities without the imposition of a centralising or subsuming authority’… The project is not a representation of disorder…[it seeks] to produce coherence out of difference and to materialise the cross affiliations so essential to a dynamic urban ensemble… The buildings and their array of courtyards, gardens, open plazas and circulation routes bring an array of vistas, framings and contingent relationships. (qtd in Dovey 2005, p. 100).

There is an interesting aspect of fluidity in the tiling on the façade, which hints at an unbreakable association between moorings and mobilities, the absolute and the relative, essentialism and constructionism, order and chaos (to name just a few dichotomies). The tiling is called a pinwheel tiling, which is a mathematical tiling that was discovered by Charles Radin in 1991 (Radin 1994). The tiling is constructed iteratively using a right angled triangle and a single, infinitely repeatable iteration that amounts to dividing the right angled triangle into a tessellation (an interlocking tiling) of five self similar triangles and then repeating this on each smaller triangle (Bourke 2002). Obviously the tiling on the Federation Square façade is a finite version of this tiling. The resulting structure is called a fractal, a geometric shape that exhibits self similarity across all scales (or in this case, a finite number of scales which counted by a measure called the fractal dimension). Fractals are related to chaos theory in mathematics as chaotic dynamics may take place on a fractal object. The pinwheel tiling is aperiodic, which means that it is not possible to find a shape (larger than a single triangle itself, which of course wouldn’t be a repetition) that can be repeated to produce the same tiling. That is, there are no self-similar panels that fit together to form the whole thing - even on the infinite plane. [13] The arrangement of triangles in the tiling is not repeated periodically; the dynamics of following a path along the network of tile boundaries is mathematically chaotic: its iterative construction is bounded in some way and its dynamics are intrinsically unpredictable. [14] On the infinite plane, all possible finite paths along the network are present! Thus, there is a fluidity in how such a network might evolve and how an actor might move within it even though it is rooted in the logic of the right angled triangle (a rather Cartesian contraption made of straight lines) and a simple mathematical iterative rule. The shading on the façade of Federation Square, helps to highlight the lack of periodicity of the tiling, which is why the eye finds it difficult to ‘stabilise’ a centre or pattern in it. This aperiodicity of the tiling suggests a fluidity that is, in the words of the architects, ‘beyond Euclidian [atemporal] geometry’ (qtd in Dovey 2005, p. 99) and yet it is not a completely floating or anarchic disorder. Rooted in mathematical logic, it is not relative as a totality either. It is infinitely ordered (in a fractal sense) and yet its dynamics are fluid and aperiodic. This is what I wish to evoke with the word fluidity – not a postmodern subjectivity, but a joining of subjectivity and objectivity; that moorings and mobilities or the absolute and the relative do not have to be in oppositional tension when one is in the business of making meaning; that subjects and objects are cut from the same epistemological cloth.

So there is no grand narrative or overarching economy of value in the tiling of Federation Square that tells us how the different parts of the network will fit together, but an example of how subjectivity and objectivity need not be estranged by a modern, atemporal geometry; logic remains. The tiling does not tell us how to order the different parts of the network, but how not to (in a purely subjective or purely objective fashion). In a network, there is nothing to hold apart mathematics from discourse; perhaps nothing intrinsically does. Both of these languages are at once subjective and objective. Here, there is no insides and no outsides to the epistemological construction of identities, but an infinite number of contingent pathways mediated by logic (that we use to make meaning). [15] What is left is the painstaking task of mapping the fluid economies that hold together and keep apart the roots and routes of networked cosmopolitanism: Federation Square begins this task by contingently framing and consciously celebrating a ‘space of flows in a fluid city’.

Dovey suggests that the tiled façades of Federation Square, ‘blatantly detached from the buildings, can be seen as a kind of mask or burqu that obscures the identity behind it and fixes it externally’. He sees it as a kind of ‘camouflage’ (Dovey 2005, p105). I would argue instead that the façades are self-conscious, tending towards parody, a kind of anti-mask (as far as walls go) revealing more than they conceal. The façade has irregularly shaped (that is, aperiodic) gaps in its pinwheel tiling and is partially translucent; critics complain that this makes it look ‘unfinished’. Barthes (1981, p. 28) notes that ‘it is this word [mask] which Calvino correctly uses to designate what makes a face into the product of a society and its history… the mask is meaning insofar as it is absolutely pure’. Thus, Barthes (1981, p. 13) notes: ‘photography turns subject into object’. The Federation Square façade does the opposite, it turns Barthes’s structuralism back in upon itself; deconstructing, it turns object (the built environment) into subject (identity). This reversal of polarity creates a disruptive paradox, a kind of double vision that undoes the purification of subject from object. But far from leaving us in a wasteland of nothing (undoing objectivity, undoing things themselves, as postmodernism does) a more poststructuralist deconstruction undoes the order of things (Foucault 1966): the episteme upon which our knowledge of them is a ‘modern invention’ reliant upon the purification of subjectivity from objectivity. Dovey does note though (somewhat inconsistently given his use of the word mask), that ‘the facades frustrate the gaze that seeks to stabilise identity’ (Dovey 2005, p105): an effect of its aperiodicity.

Dovey’s reading of the ‘camouflage’ façade is that it ‘masks difference’. He suggests that Federation Square creates a ‘new face for the city’, one where the SBS logo represents the ‘other’, which (in his words) ‘migrates from the margins to the centre [as] a generic brand of difference [that] ironically cuts across the camouflage; national identity is asserted as impure, hybrid and multiplicitous’. Dovey’s ‘new face for the city’ is thus an ‘impure’, unstable juxtaposition of ‘patches of varied fleshtone’ in which the invasion of the other (the SBS brand) is ironic (Dovey 2005, p105). But, using a postmodern logic that deconstruction erases the object and the other, has Fanon’s black skin/ white mask (Fanon 1967) become: varied fleshtone mask/ white multiculturalism here (Hage 1997)? The trouble is that difference has an economy of value, an economy of routes and roots. In irony, the actual meaning is opposite to the literal meaning; the city expects a white face, but instead irony gives it a face of difference. Dovey (2005, p. 103) notes elsewhere that the discourse of multiculturalism was ‘infused with a superficial tolerance for diverse traditions coupled with a deeper resistance to change’. But, does his reading of the facade disrupt an ironic white multiculturalism or can it presume one? What is left when, once it has been uttered, this irony becomes opaque - when the other is simultaneously crossed out and brought into the centre? Far from breaking down the ruptured binary of difference in self/other, the irony here actually relies upon it. Did the designers really envisage the SBS logo cutting ironically into the camouflage (which I suggest is not a camouflage at all)? This relies upon a postmodernist logic of difference that seeks to collapse the modernist margins into the centre in a non-connected geometry, but it performs an all too easy collapse (or perhaps not enough of a collapse, self consciously celebrating the differences that it supposedly collapses): one that is continiously shadowed by the spectre of assimilation. It may be true that when it was named in the Whitlam era, SBS (Special Broadcasting Services) might have operated as a ‘code for difference’ – but thirty five years on, could the Federation Square design have a slightly different (or not so ‘different’) kind of cosmopolitan identity in mind?

There is an alternative way to read the façade in terms of networked cosmopolitanism, which re-addresses the potential for Eurocentric asymmetry in postmodernism’s fetish for difference and reconfigures the geometry of identity where postmodern subjects float dangerously free of their crossed out objects. There is no irony to cut through the camouflage of a masked white multiculturalism. In reading the façade in terms of networked cosmopolitanism, the self and the other are not ironically separated from each other, but are at once connected and held apart by the network: in flow, in a dialectic of roots and routes. The SBS sign is positioned in flux upon the unstable network of the aperiodic façade (a mathematical construction of simple roots and complex routes). In this aperiodic network the SBS sign has no quarrel with difference, with non-connected epistemological geometries; it is both held together and held apart by the self evolving network. The giant satellite dish beside the SBS sign faces the world, crosscutting the urban desert; it collects information and then beams it back out. It casts an invisible, silent and networked web across the self conscious desert sky, pulling the self both towards and away from home unparadoxically, with no point of rupture in its scaling of inside to outside.

Federation Square playfully handles the flux of these flows, absorbing them and reflecting them in an array of contingent framings. It is a point of intersection for subjects and objects, a nodal place for flows into and out of the city which are at once local, global, public, private, tangible, intangible, real, imagined, remembered and forgotten; this gateway is inside kind and an outside kind. Federation square moves towards a new networked cosmopolitanism, celebrating a space of flows in a fluid city. In theory and in the built environment, Federation square is a site of hope. As MacArthur (qtd in Dovey 2005, p. 109) notes, reflecting on the reception of Federation square by the public: ‘The people of Melbourne are, by all accounts, pleasantly shocked’. The result is what he calls a ‘liberating bewilderment… it opens up a space for the public to feel that we [original emphasis] might be something else’.

The broadcasting of television turns humans into electrons, beams them into the dark expanses of space (represented by the over accentuated stars) and then turns those electrons back into humans again; it turns objects (bodies) into subjects (television characters). It turns subjects back into objects too in a fierce circulating (and territorial yet globalised) consumer culture. The television networks connect the flows between subject and object, ever filling our skies with criss-crossing radio waves. In this medium SBS finds hope of cultural exchange. Beam me up Scottie, is an image that remembers not just the global flows into Federation Square, but the flows out of it too. In the background of the ‘interior desert’ these tangible satellite reminders of the intangible communications of a globalised modernity disrupt the geographic connection of space to place, of subject to object, of outside to inside, of self to other.

Federation Square is a gateway for the flow of people into and out of Melbourne, but the site also engages with less tangible flows in modernity. The silver shard on the Flinders Street side of the Square is decorated with these little neon ribbons of mobile communication. Anyone with a mobile phone can text a message to be displayed on the shard, which bears the flows of communication between people (and between people and the city) intersecting it in a criss-cross pattern as the messages run through each other (in what looks like part of a network). This is a network of physics and discourse. The neon words literally flow across the shard from right to left, intersecting our identities like they do on the metallic skin of the building. On the left hand side of the shard the peak hour traffic is also in flow, painting a red and yellow ribbon of tail and head lights that point both away from and towards this gateway.

The spectre of people (the ghosts of feet) flow from the square. Just as the ribbons of textual flow intersect on the silver shard, the tramlines intersect at its corner. The traffic lights remind us that flows are often regulated. There is an economy of value, made both from steel and semiotics (built to withstand the forces of nature and carry the arbitrary language of colours: red, amber, green).

Figures 13 and 14: Flows 5 & 6 - As the weather rolls in so too do the peak hour commuter flows and the nightly news headlines that reflect around the shards in the square.

1 This is to say that empty spaces are not necessarily culturally empty and that these spaces of desolation feed back into the places that we have colonised and call home. Tony Birch argues that we build giant iconic monuments (that is, structures that signify in excess of themselves, for example the giant koala) to fill up empty or abandoned landscapes in Australia. These far reaching, desolate spaces have been associated with terror in the Australian unconscious.

2 Here I wish to point out that the use of the word gravity isn’t meant to suggest that history follows a universal law that is the same for everyone (a dusty modernist idea that tends to assume that there is an essentialism in science that just isn’t there). In fact, to get technical, in modern physics gravitation is described by Einstein’s General Relativity of 1915. Gravitation between two bodies depends on their state relative to each other, so it really is a nice metaphor for a kind of anchor, a kind of weight, a root - but with a certain fluidity, a route, a space for plurality. This doesn’t mean that everything is relative – but that there is an dialogue between absolute and relative, between roots and routes, between subjectivity and objectivity. History is a kind of anchor, and although it might be a slightly different shape for different identities, it retains one objective logic: causality. This isn’t the same as determinism (looking forwards), but simply means that you can never erase the history that has already occurred.

3 Here, I take the word multiculturalism as a departure point for the word cosmopolitanism. Each carries nuanced semiotic baggage and cosmopolitanism draws some political aspirations from multiculturalism. However, these terms are semantically distinct and, temporally separated, they have developed different theoretical agendas. Multiculturalism was used in the academy at the time of the writing of the design brief in 1996, but academics have mostly abandoned the word fearing it has been politically hijacked and has since ossified into dogma.

4 In a period that Museum Victoria called the killing times, twenty-five thousand members (of a total Koori population of twenty-eight thousand) perished in the first twenty years of white settlement (Bunjilaka Gallery exhibition, Melbourne Museum 2003).

5 The Australia collection, a sentimental collection of Australian art (featuring works by some of Australia’s most well known artists Boyd, Streeton, Lindsay, et cetera) was moved from the National Gallery across the bridge to a new home in NGV Federation Square.

6 Where Dovey uses the word used by Frederic Jameson (1991) in his study of the Bonaventure) I prefer the word ‘intangible’. This isn’t a perfect choice either, but at least it doesn’t signify fantasy and the ‘unreal’ (the antonym to ‘virtual’ is ‘actual’). The (intangible) space to which Dovey refers is that of culture, whose dynamics are driven along in part by (invisible, but also physical) flows of information and culture itself is intangible. Flows of culture are at once real and imagined, so culture actually has a complex connection to the word ‘virtual’. In this work, I am minimising any reliance or connection to the work of postmodernism, which I believe internalises some of the modern geometry and paradoxes of identity. See Latour (1993) and Frow (1991).

7 Fluid dynamics, a branch of mathematics, provides a description of a fluid. Fluids flow – in fact, that is the definition of a fluid: something that can take on the shape of any container. A fluid can be any shape. Subject to forces, a fluid can go anywhere. A fluid is made up of millions of particles which have forces holding them apart and pulling them together. These particles are subject to both local and global forces: forces from the properties of the fluid itself; from the vessel that contains it; and from the physical environment. These forces mediate the properties of the fluid, they mediate its flow, although in part, the flow is also created by random motion of individual particles. The local and global forces interact in a way that depends on the situation (which is the hard part to unravel) and one must decide which of these forces must be included and which can be neglected in the overall description. We can use the case of fluid dynamics to provide a metaphor for a description of fluidity: a dialectic of logical roots and many possible routes.

8 Latour Notes that the name actor-network theory is problematic because its hyphen seems to suggest a divide between structure and agency (See Law and Hassard (1999) for an exploration of this supposed dilemma). I would argue that structure and agency are both built in to the actornetwork; subjectivity and objectivity collide head on in both science and social science. Furthermore, critiques that the theory is a dilution of agency rely on the structure/agency, subjectivity/objectivity divide that Latour argues against (See Latour (1993) for an explanation of this). Let us patch nature and culture back together, argues Latour (1993, p.144), ‘and the political task can begin again’.

9 Much of what is written under the banner of cosmopolitanism (excluding networked cosmopolitanism) imagines identity from the point of view of those who move. Eagleton (2003) remarks that postmodernism’s ‘rock star’ migrant is similar to modernism’s cult of the exile; both retain a fetish for difference. It could be argued that this doesn’t work to unsettle the self/other binary; there doesn’t seem much of a focus on how these hybrid identities might also hybridise the identities that shelter safely within the nation and have no quarrel with movement, creating a pure/impure divide and having no tools with which to combat Eurocentrism or any deep seated desire for assimilation.

10 Criticising postmodernism’s modern separation of subject and object, Latour (1993) writes ‘I can not find words ugly enough to designate this intellectual movement, or rather, this intellectual immobility through which humans and non-humans are left to drift’. He argues that postmodernism can not claim to come after a time that never started, because we were never modern. By this, he means that we could never fully claim the separation of subject from object and of science from the social sciences. In this discussion, I have left structuralism and poststructuralism alone, although a similar analysis (bearing different results) could be done for these intellectual movements. I note here that Latour’s work (and that of the other actor-network theorists) is clearly inspired by and draws from Foucault (1966), a defining work of poststructuralism. (See chapters 9 and 10 of Foucault (1966).)

11 A friend suggested to me that she imagines the postmodernist hybrid identity as two intersecting circles (think of a Venn Diagram for ‘A’ intersects ‘B’): this is still non-connected. My drawing is just a more de-centred version of that.

12 Non-linear mathematics has changed the conceptual landscape of order and chaos, and determinism and indeterminism since the sixties. This might be a bit of a shock to those ‘moderns’ who prefer to think of science and mathematics as an essentialist, overarching, deterministic nineteenth century affair (represented by the Euclidean and Cartesian grid). Something happened to objectivity (at least in mathematics and physics) at the beginning of the twentieth century (enter Einstein in 1905). What is strange (but very modern) is that what most people on the subject side of Latour’s modern constitution failed to notice (in science) was subjectivity itself!

13 This point seems slightly confused in Dovey’s discussion of the fractal façade (the aperiodic tiling is not discussed). Dovey claims that the panels are self similar when, in fact, the point I make here (via chaos theory) is that they are not.

14 It is difficult to give an exact definition of mathematical chaos, but the essential features of its current use in mathematics is that: 1. It occurs in a deterministic system that is bounded (that is, the iterations themselves of the tiling into right angled triangles are deterministic; the iterations are finite, bounded); 2. The dynamics that take place on this system have a sensitive dependence upon initial conditions, which is popularly called the butterfly effect and makes the dynamics intrinsically unpredictable. Note that dynamics involves the dimension of time so a fractal itself is not chaotic, but the path of someone moving along it would be (that is, the path taken by an actor in the network is highly sensitive to where the actor is in the network; actors at adjacent nodes could take wildly different paths which are intrinsically unpredictable); 3. There should be an orbit which is dense in some set, but also some (possibly infinite) subset of initial conditions which are ordered, periodic or regular (that is, the number of possible finite paths is dense in the network of the pinwheel tiling as all possible finite paths (an infinite number of them) are contained in the whole network, yet it is possible to also find an infinite amount of geometric order within the fractal, which can be connected to its regular, iterative construction). Fractals connect order and chaos. They are often strikingly beautiful (for example, the famous Mandelbrot and Julia sets) and are found, not only in architecture, but in nature (for example, in leaves and snowflakes). Jencks (2002) suggests that the connection between architecture and nature in the fractal Federation Square design suggests a ‘new paradigm in architecture’. See ‘fractals’ at www.mathworld.wolfram.com for a popularised description of fractal geometry and its relation to chaos theory.

15 In this essay I confine myself (as Foucault does) to epistemology (and have no quarrel with ontology).

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