What makes a city? That question has been answered in many ways, each answer in accordance with the concerns of its time: a city can be made by urban planners from above, and remade by technological paradigm shifts or capitalist recuperation; its contours emerge from the cyclical rhythms of daily life and the spontaneous actions of inhabitants as they break through the homogenization of space; it finds its form in the mazeways of neighborhoods that foster familiarity and confidence; it gains heterotopic shape through sensory boundaries or is opened up to the world through flows and global mobilities. In each case, the city is seen as a tangible entity, its proper name giving it perceived existence across time, placing it in a “nowhen” of immanence and essence.

We can write the history of Halsey Street in this classic manner, as a chronological account of the shaping and reshaping of the street from above through urban renewal, municipal ordinances, and enforcement, and from below through the practices of everyday life that either adhered to those regulations or found tactical maneuvers around their restrictions.  But as illuminative as such a history would be, does a linear, overt account truly capture the whole of urban experience? 

Writing at the height of poststructuralist thought in the 1970s and 1980s, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used the metaphor of the rhizome -- the underground weed root -- to describe human experience. In contrast to the tree, with its rigid, stratified (normative) structure from crown down to roots that fix order and priority in place, the rhizome spreads horizontally. Each rhizome connects promiscuously, transiently, opportunistically with other rhizomes. As Deleuze and Guattari write: “The tree imposes the verb ‘to be,’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and...and...and...”; and further: “a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo” (25). As the rhizome flees any inherent structure, it also disrupts order: “The rhizome is an anti-genealogy” (11). If the tree represents the causal ‘line of descent,’ rhizomes intrude and interrupt that causality, at times massing and thickening into ‘bulbs,’ at other times diverting meaning into alternate connections. In the context of lived experience, the rhizome deterritorializes, respecting individual experience and liberating individuals from any forcible inscription into a ‘higher’ narrative.

To do justice to the concept of the rhizome, we will narrate Halsey Street from the perspective of both overt rhythms of development and rhizomatic diffusions, allowing the tendrils of experience to expand and flow according to chance, with the expectation that occasionally a bulb will appear: the bulb of a rhythm, where flows coalesce into an identifiable narrative ‘event.’

To Be More Precise = Who We Are and What We Propose

We started with Newark Rhythms as a project to chronicle the rhythms of urban renewal in Newark. Those rhythms included the urban planning that displaced people, but also the rhythms that made the city an organic space, from the rhythms of migration, to the sensory experience in the city streets, to the rhythms of music, sound, friendship, and community.

From there, we moved on to the Labyrinth and the Grid to capture the phenomenological experience of four gridded streets -- Broad Street, McCarter Highway, Mulberry Street, and Halsey Street -- laid out in parallel rows but with starkly different atmospheres. We had two goals: 1. to look for urban thresholds: the sensory boundaries that divide inside from outside, determining who gets to go where, when, and how; 2. to tease out the labyrinth of experience: the ways in which people lived in the spaces laid out for them by planners and reappropriated them to suit their own purposes. We gave physical expression to the constrast between Lab + Grid in a series of affective and sensory maps, shaped into a mazeway.

We now move on to the Halsey Street project to connect these ideas with the deterritorializtion inherent in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome. Descriptions of rhythms, cause and effect, all types of histories both progressive and oppressive, are territorializations: they fix a vast assemblage of experiences and actions into a narrative structure of what is ‘important’ versus that which is extraneous. These narratives are necessary to create meaning, but they are also hierarchical and illusionary. As Deleuze and Guattari note instead, a society, a city, a streetscape: all are best grasped by what is fleeing from the impositions of meaning-making, by what is trying to be let loose from the strictures of normatives and narratives, by what is deterritorializing.

We propose to write the history of Halsey Street on all of these levels. The first step is to describe the street rhizomatically. No one story is more significant or important or causal than any other.  All nodes on the street are connected in a proliferating, horizontal way to other nodes. We aim to track the street’s Fluchtlinie, to borrow a German term that means both a line of flight/fleeing and a street’s building line or facade. Chronicling the assemblage of nodes along the street’s line of sight serves to identify what is fleeing, what is escaping the confines of narrative expectations and cooptations.

In other words: what is there, is simply there.

Our point is to aim for completeness as a form of equity as well as eternal expansion, the way that rhizomes grow and spread horizontally: every node is documented, regardless of its position in any narrative. From that initial rhizomatic structure, we will then piece together, in more traditional form, a story of the labyrinth: the spaces of sanctuary that resisted the surveillance and supervision of the forces of order. We will then set the story of the Grid, the city as laid out by urban planning, akimbo to the story of the labyrinth and the local rhythms that eluded urban gridding.