What makes a city? That question has been answered in many ways, each answer according to the mores of concerns of its time: a city can be made by urban planners from above, and remade by technological paradigms 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 metaphore of hte 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 an order, the rhizome spreads horizontally. The rhizome connects promiscuously, transiently, opportunistically wiht 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 “a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo” (25). As the rhizome flees structure, it disrupts order: “The rhizome is an anti-genealogy” (11). In any causal line of descent, rhizomes intrude and interrupt that causality, at times thickening action and protruding into (sidelined) bulbs, at other times diverting meaning into alternate rivulets as they pass through the stream of action, territorializing and deterritorializing people in the process.

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 and creative effluences, 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 what it was, 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 the 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 known by what is fleeing, 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 as rhizome. 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 us a German term that means both a line of flight or fleeing and the building line or facade of the street. 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 meaning-making.

In other words: what is there, simply is. That step must be taken first.

The point is completeness not coherence, as a form of equity and eternal expansion, the way that rhizomes grow and spread horizontally: every node is documented, regardless of place and position in any narrative. From that initial rhizomatic structure, we will then gather, in more traditional form, a story of the labyrinth, the spaces of sanctuary that resist the surveillance and supervision of the forces of order. We will 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.