City Criticism Flashcards
Modernity and The City
Michael Whitworth
What is true of Dublin is not true of London. In the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis’, the first of the headlines in the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses is ironic, as in 1904 Dublin was the mother-city of a country that was not an independent state’ (Ulysses, p.147)
Perry Anderson identifies three threads of modernism: ‘the codification of a highly formalized academicism in the visual and other arts’ ; novelty of ‘the key technologies or inventions of the second industrial revolution’; ‘hope or apprehension’ of social revolution’.
Idea that space doesn’t have interdependent existence- it is contructed through not only architecture, but social practices such as commuting.
vision of Flaneur and gender debate –> interest in Mrs Dalloway and Street Haunting
theorising ‘the city’ neglects individual cities
George Simmel
The Metropolis and Mental Life
The metropolis exacts from man as a discriminating creature a different amount of consciousness than does rural life. Here the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery flows more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly.
If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time.
Punctuality, calculability, exactness are forced upon life by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence and are not only most intimately connected with its money economy and intellectualistic character.
Extract from Marshall Berman, ‘The Mire of the Mac- adam’, All that is Solid Melts into Air (1982; London: Verso, 1983), pp.155–64.
Baudelaire’s ‘The Loss A Halo’ echoes Marx’s Communist Manifesto: ‘The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every activity hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has transformed the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers’
Marx and Baudelaire both show ‘desanctificaiton’ of the individual.
‘I was crossing the boulevard, in a great hurry, in the midst of a moving chaos, with death galloping at me from every side’. The archetypal modern man, as we see him here, is a pedestrian thrown into the maelstrom of modern city traffic, a man alone contending against an agglomeration of mass and energy that is heavy, fast and lethal. The burgeoning street and boulevard traffic knows no spatial or temporal bounds, spills over into every urban space, imposes its tempo on everybody’s time, transforms the whole modern environment into a ‘moving chaos’.
But when Baudelaire’s poet lets his halo go and keeps moving, he makes a great discovery. He finds to his amazement that the aura of artistic purity and sanctity is only incidental, not essential, to art, and that poetry can thrive just as well, and maybe even better, on the other side of the boulevard, in those low, ‘unpoetic’ places like un mauvais lieu where this poem itself is born. One of the paradoxes of modernity, as Baudelaire sees it here, is that its poets will become more deeply and authentically poetic by becoming more like ordinary men.
Extract from Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’ (1985)
She criticises the male-dominated experience of men in writing such as Walter Benjamin and Baudelaire, whose Flaneures are all men.
1831 George Sand dressed as a boy to go into the streets, descrbing how she became ‘an atom lost in that immense crowd’
Henri Lefebvre
The Right to The City
The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.[5] (David Harvey)
Essay: ‘For the Street’, in ‘The Urban Revolution’
[The Street serves as a meeting place (top
Gemeinschaft / Gesellschaft
The Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft dichotomy was proposed by Tönnies as a purely conceptual tool rather than as an ideal type in the way it was used by Max Weber to accentuate the key elements of a historic/social change. According to the dichotomy, social ties can be categorized, on one hand, as belonging to personal social interactions, and the roles, values, and beliefs based on such interactions (Gemeinschaft, German, commonly translated as “community”), or on the other hand as belonging to indirect interactions, impersonal roles, formal values, and beliefs based on such interactions (Gesellschaft, German, commonly translated as “society”).[1]
