The Return of the Excessive

Abstract

As the cities continue to grow, through the addition of more or less controlled enclaves, they develop into highly differentiated, heterogeneous urban fields of centers and that which lies in between. It seems like a mechanism or an unknown natural law is working against the homogenization and “in-formation” of the city for which the urban planning is working. The in-between spaces beyond the urban centers are made up by the part of the material structure of the city that cannot be defined positively and therefore is in excess. These backsides of the city are used and reappropriated as alternative public spaces, accommodating the rituals and meetings of people. As an alternative to the possibilities of a public appearance, offered by the increasingly staged and controlled primary public spaces of the urban centers, the alternative public exists at the backside of the spaces of the primary public and the way that people use the superfluous landscapes is a way of consuming them. These superfluous landscapes almost call for such consumption, just as they deny any idea of the disappearance of the urban heterogeneity. The article tries to understand and describe this through Bataillian ideas of heterogeneity and formlessness. The superfluous landscapes are seen as something that haunts not only the planners but the city itself, as unseen and undeveloped parts of the urban field that has to be understood as a part of an ongoing process of excretion and reappropriation. In the article, these ideas are related to observations of a concrete example—two hills of surplus soil.

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