A Companion to the City Edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson.. pot

23 Cities in Quarters 270Peter Marcuse24 Citizenship, Multiculturalism, and the European City 282Alisdair Rogers 25 Working out the Urban: Gender Relations and the City 292Liz Bondi and

A Companion to the City

Edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson

A Companion to the City

Edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson

Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson

John Rennie Short

3 Putting Cities First: Remapping the Origins of Urbanism 26Edward W Soja

4 Photourbanism: Planning the City from Above and from Below 35Anthony Vidler

5 The Immaterial City: Representation, Imagination, and Media

8 Sleepwalking in the Modern City: Walter Benjamin and

Sigmund Freud in the World of Dreams 75Steve Pile

Capitalist Accumulation, and Community: Competing

Cultures of Southeast Asian Societies 87Patrick Guinness

Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson

11 The Economic Base of Contemporary Cities 115Ash Amin

12 Flexible Marxism and the Metropolis 130Andy Merrifield

13 Monocentric to Policentric: New Urban Forms and Old

William A V Clark

14 Ups and Downs in the Gobal City: London and New York

Susan S Fainstein and Michael Harloe

15 Analytic Borderlands: Economy and Culture in the Global

Saskia Sassen

16 Turbulence and Sedimentation in the Labor Markets of Late

Nick Buck and Ian Gordon

17 Informational Cities: Beyond Dualism and Toward

Bob Catterall

18 Diaspora Capital and Asia Pacific Urban Development 207Chung Tong Wu

19 Capitalizing on Havana: The Return of the Repressed in a

Charles Rutheiser

20 Urban Transformation in the Capitals of the Baltic States:

Innovation, Culture and Finance 237Philip Cooke, Erik Terk, Raite Karnite, Giedrius Blagnys

Part III Cities of Division and Difference 249

Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson

22 Postcolonialism, Representation, and the City 261Anthony D King

23 Cities in Quarters 270Peter Marcuse

24 Citizenship, Multiculturalism, and the European City 282Alisdair Rogers

25 Working out the Urban: Gender Relations and the City 292Liz Bondi and Hazel Christie

26 The Sexual Geography of the City 307Frank Mort

27 From the Other Side of the Tracks: Dual Cities, Third Spaces,and the Urban Uncanny in Contemporary Discourses of

Phil Cohen

28 Gentrification, Postindustrialism, and Industrial and

Occupational Restructuring in Global Cities 331Chris Hamnett

29 Worlds Apart and Together: Trial by Space in Istanbul 342Kevin Robins and Asu Aksoy

30 Value Conflicts, Identity Construction, and Urban Change 354Lily L Kong

Part IV Public Cultures and Everyday Space 367

Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson

32 Reflections on the Public Realm 380Richard Sennett

Annette Hamilton

40 Street Boys in Yogyakarta: Social and Spatial Exclusion in

Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson

43 Planning in Relational Space and Time: Responding to

Erik Swyngedouw and Maria KãÈka

48 Power and Urban Politics Revisited: The Uses and Abuses of

North American Urban Political Economy 581Alan Harding

49 Social Justice and the City: Equity, Cohesion and the Politics

Riad Akbur has completed 3 years of a PhD at Queen Mary and Westfield College,University of London

Asu Aksoy Goldsmith's College, University of London

Ash Amin University of Durham

Alessandro Aurigi University College, London

Harriot Beazley Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge

Giedrius Blagnys Ecofin Vilnius Research Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania

Liz Bondi University of Edinburgh

M Christine Boyer Princeton University

Gary Bridge University of Bristol

Nick Buck University of Essex

Lesley Caldwell University of Greenwich

Bob Catterall University of Newcastle

Hazel Christie Edinburgh College of Art and Heriot-Watt University

William Clark University of California, Los Angeles

Allan Cochrane The Open University

Phil Cohen University of East London

PhilipCooke University of Wales, Cardiff

James Donald Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia

Michael Edwards University College, London

Susan Fainstein Rutgers University

Katherine Gibson Australian National University, Canberra

Ian Gordon University of Reading

Stephen Graham University of Newcastle

Patrick Guinness Australian National University

Annette Hamilton Macquarie University in Sydney

Chris Hamnett King's College, London

Alan Harding Salford University

Michael Harloe Salford University

Patsy Healey University of Newcastle

John Paul Jones III University of Kentucky

Maria Kaika Associate Researcher at the University of Oxford, Junior ResearchFellow at Linacre College, Oxford, and Lecturer at St Peter's College, OxfordRaite Karnite Latvian Academy of Sciences, Riga, Latvia

Michael Keith Goldsmith's College, University of London

Anthony D King Binghamton University, State University of New York

Lily Kong National University of Singapore

Alan Mabin Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg

Peter Marcuse Columbia University, New York City

Andy Merrifield Clark University

Steve Pile The Open University

Kevin Robins Goldsmith's College, University of London

Alisdair Rogers Keble and St Catherine's Colleges, Oxford University

Benjamin Rossiter studied sociology and cultural studies at La Trobe and MonashUniversities, Melbourne, and recently finished his PhD

Charles Rutheiser Johns Hopkins University

Saskia Sassen University of Chicago and Centennial Visiting Professor at LondonSchool of Economics and Political Science

Richard Sennett London School of Economics and Political Science

John Rennie Short Syracuse University

Edward W Soja University of California, Los Angeles

Erik Swyngedouw Reader in Geography at Oxford University and Fellow of St.Peter's College, Oxford

Erik Terk Estonian Institute for Future Studies, Tallinn, Estonia

Nigel Thrift University of Bristol

Alison Todes University of Natal, Durban

Fran Tonkiss Goldsmith's College, University of London

Patrick Troy Australian National University

John Urry University of Lancaster

Anthony Vidler University of California, Los Angeles

Sophie Watson

Chung-Tong Wu University of New South WalesThe Open University

1.1 Aboriginal inscription, Sydney (Steve Pile) 111.2a/b Sidewalk dwellers, Johannesburg (Sophie Watson) 123.1 Reconstruction and original of cityscape painting at CËatal HuÈyuÈk

(top: James Mellaart, CËatal HuÈyuÈk, 1967, plate 60; bottom: de la

Croix, Tansey, and Kirkpatrick, Art through the Ages, 9th edn,

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991: 46, figure 2±8,

land-scape with volcanic eruption (?), detail of a copy of a wall painting

from Level VII, CËatal HuÈyuÈk, ca 6150 bc) 318.1 Heavenly Dinner (# Sygma-Keystone-Paris 1989) 788.2 Paris Street: Rainy Day, (Gustave Caillebotte, 1848±1894; oil on

canvas, 212.2  276.2 cm; Charles H and Mary F S Worcester

Collection, 1964.336; Photograph copyright # 2000 The Art

9.1 A poor kampung by the river edge in Yogyakarta (Harriot Beazley) 9110.1 Hairdressing salon, South African township(Sophie Watson) 103

13.1 Hypothetical monocentric and policentric urban structures (a:

adapted from Bourne (1981); b: adapted from Cadwallader

13.2 The Southern California urban region 14813.3 Edge cities in Los Angeles/Orange Counties and population change

1970±1990 (Standardized selected census tract comparison) 149

17.1 The cosmopolite development model? An interpretation by the

King's Cross Railwaylands Community Groupof the London

Regeneration Consortium's and British Rail proposal for King's

Cross (from Michael Parkers, ``Planning Prospects, Planning

Edu-cation,'' in Regenerating Cities, 3 and 4, p 23) 19918.1 Hong Kong skyline (Sophie Watson) 20818.2 Hong Kong island (Sophie Watson) 209

19.1 Havana and its neighborhoods 226

21.1 Aboriginal mural, Sydney (Steve Pile) 25121.2 A tale of two cities? Cape Town (Sophie Watson) 25226.1 Sydney gay and lesbian Mardi Gras parade (Steve Pile) 31231.1 Street barber in Hanoi (Sophie Watson) 37535.1 Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 (James Ensor, oil on canvas,

1888, 252.5  430.5 cm The J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) 41737.1 Art-stronaut Andrew Morrish has his daily headshave under the

watchful eye of early morning shoppers (photo: Angela Wiley;

37.2 In their ``living room'' the Urban Dream Capsule art-stronauts

perform for a Festival audience (photo: Penny Stephens; from

38.1 Location of the Lorraine Motel, site of the National Civil Rights

Museum in Memphis, Tennessee # John Paul Jones III 44938.2 King's assassination at the Lorraine (Photo by Joseph Louw/LIFE

magazine # TIME Inc used with permission.) 45038.3 Historical marker describing the significance of the Lorraine Motel

38.4 The National Civil Rights Museum At left is the entrance to the

38.5 The balcony outside the preserved wing of the motel The

auto-mobiles reference the cars captured in Joseph Louw's photograph

(Figure 38.2) # John Paul Jones III 45238.6 Jacqueline ``Jackie'' Smith protests the Lorraine's transformation

into a museum # John Paul Jones III 45238.7 Jackie asks Memphis residents and visitors to boycott the museum

38.8 The museum is a site for some of the city's cultural events # John

38.9 The street between Jackie and the museum is regularly traversed by

vehicles, such as this one, carrying tourists # John Paul Jones III 45638.10 The sign records the number of consecutive days Jackie has pro-

tested This photograph was taken in 1995 As of this writing, she

is still there # John Paul Jones III 45638.11 Memphis visitors inquire about the protest # John Paul Jones III 45740.1 Yogykarta, central Java: population 472,000 Malioboro street

runs through the center of the city, from the railroad station

towards the Alun-Alun (City Square) and Keraton (Sultan's Palace) 47440.2 Shoe-shiners on Malioboro (Harriot Beazley) 47540.3 City-square kids (Harriot Beazley) 47640.4 Bambang's (aged 11) mapof Yogyakarta: Focus is on the Malio-

boro and toilet area, as well as ngebong (Gerbong), by the train

tracks; Sosrowijayan Street (where tourists and backpackers stay);

Sopeng (the local market); and the Alun-Alun (City Square) 479

40.5 Sorio's (aged 10) mapof Yogyakarta Sorio has drawn the toilet

area (topleft of the map), the railroad station and railroad tracks

Malioboro street runs through the centre of the map Sorio

perso-nalizes his account by drawing a train on to his map, as well as

food stalls, a horse-drawn cart, and children playing under the tree

outside the toilet on Malioboro (note that one of the children is

carrying a tambourine for busking) 48040.6 Agus's (aged 12) mapof Yogyakarta The letters and numbers

relate to the numbered bays at the bus terminal, and the lines are

the bus routes which branch out from the terminal and run through

40.7 Hari's (aged 15) mapof Yogyakarta As well as Shoping (the local

market) and the WC (toilet) on Malioboro, the mapshows the bus

stops and bus routes on which Hari worked: Korem/Tempat

Nga-men (Korem/busking place, the numbers relate to the bus/route

numbers); and Naik Bis He also marks Cokro (the NGO Girli's

open house); Lisa (a favourite food stall) and the Tempat anak

tidur (``the place where the children sleep'') on Malioboro; Sosro

(the tourist street); the stasiun (railroad station) and Gerbong

(depicted by a gerbong/railroad car), and Rel Kereta (train tracks)

(Note: the writing on the mapis my own as Hari cannot read or

write, and he asked me to mark the mapas he instructed.) 48240.8 Edo's (aged 16) mapof Yogyakarta Edo has marked the toilet on

Malioboro, Rumah Girli (NGO open house); the Alun-Alun (City

Square); Shoping (local market); kantor polisi (police station);

BioskopPermata (a cinema); two prapatans (traffic light

intersec-tions); the Taman (City Park); the THR (the People's Entertainment

Park); and the stasiun (railroad station) Note the prominence of

the Rel Kereta Api, ``the railroad tracks'' running through the city 48341.1 The Internet interface for De Digitale Stadt, Amsterdam, one of the

best-known examples of a ``grounded'' virtual city which uses the

urban metaphor of ``town squares'' to organize its services (at

41.2 Cybertown, a ``non-grounded'' virtual city (at

41.4 City-related Internet sites in the EU, 1997 49641.5 Distribution of virtual city types in the EU by nation, 1997 49741.6 The Iperbole virtual city, Bologna, an example of an Italian ``holis-

tic'' virtual city (at

41.7 Relationships between originating institution and type of virtual

43.2 Fitting development projects into the ``spatial jigsaw'' 52143.3 Fitting development projects into the ``institutional jigsaw'' 525

52.1 A reintegrating city? Racial zoning in Durban under apartheid, and

52.2 Centrally located informal settlements in Cato Manor, and,

adja-cent, higher-income areas (copyright # Tony Smith Photography) 62152.3 The Cato Manor Development Project: one of the few opportu-

nities for urban integration (copyright # Tony Smith Photography) 622

At the start of the new millennium cities are firmly back on the agenda More peoplelive in cities and more people are affected by urban processes than ever before Citiesare the sites of complex global/local interconnections producing a multiplicity ofsocial, cultural, political, and economic spaces and forms It is no longer possible, if

it ever was, to look at the city from one perspective ± be it cultural or economic.Instead cities need to be understood from a variety of perspectives in the recognitionthat the cultural/social constructs, and is constructed by, the political/economic andvice versa It is only when we adopt such a complex and textured reading of citiesthat we will begin to be able to address the pressing social, economic, and environ-mental questions faced by cities across the world ± be it the postindustrial city ofNorth America or the rapidly growing megacity in China

This Companion sets out precisely to think about cities in these more complexways and to bring together scholars from a range of different fields to create amultidisciplinary approach to cities No longer is the city the privileged terrain ofurban studies or geographical analysis Instead academics and thinkers from dis-ciplines as diverse as film studies and economics or philosophy and geography haveturned their attention to the city and generated exciting new ways of thinking ThisCompanion has deliberately included voices from this diverse terrain in order topromote a dialog that for many years of urban analysis was dormant Poststructur-alist and feminist writers thus rub shoulders with Marxists and neoclassical econo-mists in order, hopefully, to provoke lively debate and new intellectual spaces.The Companion does not aim to map the field historically or to provide a chrono-logy of major writing on cities ± there are other excellent readers that do preciselythat (see Le Gates and Stout 1996; Short 1996) Neither does it aim to provide ageographical catalog of the conditions of contemporary cities, since that is done verywell by Habitat and other regional collections This Companion instead deals withcontemporary analysis of cities as well as some of the key issues in cities There hasbeen a tendency within urban studies historically to developan analysis and argu-ment based on Western cities and Western assumptions of cultural, social, andeconomic life, with little attention paid to the profound differences of social,

This universalizing approach has come under growing criticism and scrutiny frompostcolonial writers, feminists, poststructuralists and others who have pointed outhow western, male, and white assumptions have produced a global homogenousdiscourse which has masked and ignored difference It has also perpetuated domi-nant power/knowledge relations and written whole groups of people, cities, andcountries out of the picture.

This Companion aims to redress this imbalance It does not purport to be prehensive in its coverage or analysis of cities across the globe It does however aim

com-to consider the key themes of the book in a variety of contexts, places, and spaces Itsaim therefore is to give a taste at least of the complexity and texture of cities, cityspaces, and city interventions at the beginning of the millennium

All the chapters in this Companion were commissioned by the editors and are thusoriginal pieces of work They range from discursive and reflective pieces to discus-sions of original empirical research The Companion is organized around five themeswhich we consider to be a useful way of mapping the field: imagining cities, theeconomy and the city, division and difference, public cultures and everyday space,urban policy and interventions Each of the sections is introduced by a think piece bythe editors which is not intended as an introduction to the chapters in the section, butrather is an attempt to lay out the dimensions of discussion and suggest new ways ofapproaching the city Each section includes chapters from non-western1 cities inorder to highlight the variety and diversity of cities and analyses of cities globallyrather than to provide a comprehensive coverage of cities across the world

Cities are feats of the imagination and they affect the ability to imagine The firstsection, ``Imagining Cities,'' looks at the different ways cities have been imagined inplanning and design as well as media representations and the effects on the builtform and the social, cultural, and esthetic realms These are not just cognitive andcreative but unconscious and uncanny They are not just confined to planning andcultural discourse but influence ways of thinking the economic, identity, and differ-ence, constructions of the public and the private, and the sphere of politics Eachsection of the Companion is intended to cohere sufficiently to examine the maincurrents of discussion within each theme but also to provide openings, connections,and productive juxtapositions with the other sections of the book So ``The Economyand the City'' is not just understood in terms of academic disputes about materialprocesses (between neoclassical, Marxist, and post-Marxist analyses) but also asacts of the imagination and political will ± as much the terrain of cultural studies asconventional political economy ``Cities of Division and Difference'' explores thedistinctions of age, class, gender, ``race'' and ethnicity, sex, citizenshipin relation tourban space, and the disruptions of western and nonwestern understandings ofproductive recognition and prejudiced separation The extent to which these inter-relations result in a depleted public realm in cities is a concern that runs through thechapters in the section ``Public Cultures and Everyday Space.'' Rumors of the death

of public space might be a little exaggerated as the contributors seek the possibilities

of a rejuvenated public realm in the mundane, the unnoticed, and the everydaypractices of city life These insights give us new ways of thinking about urbanpolitics and the interrelations between formal, institutional policy-making, andinformal political activity in the uncelebrated spaces of the city

In all these arguments on the city and imagination, economy, division, the public,and politics we are seeking to unsettle assumptions and cross boundaries, not in thepursuit of endless displacement, but rather to identify new connections that lie at theconfluence of the imagination as economy, globalization as cultural difference and

as productive, and the political in acts that are normally ignored These disruptionsand juxtapositions are at the heart of the urban experience and offer a beginning for

a reconstituted understanding of the city in the third millennium

NOTE

1 There have been a number of ways of regionalizing discussion of cities such as the divisionbetween cities of the north and cities of the south Here we choose western and non-western to connote not just geographical location but sets of intellectual histories andassumptions in traditional literatures on cities

REFERENCES

Le Gates, R and Stout, F (eds.) 1996: The City Reader London: Routledge

Short, J 1996: The Urban Order: An Introduction to Cities, Culture and Power Oxford:Blackwell

Part I Imagining Cities

Chapter 1

City Imaginaries

Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson

Cities are not simply material or lived spaces ± they are also spaces of the tion and spaces of representation How cities are envisioned has effects Urbandesigners and planners have ideas about how cities should look, function, and belived, and these are translated into plans and built environments Cities are repre-sented in literary, art, and film texts, and these too have their effects The publicimaginary about cities is itself in part constituted by media representations as much

imagina-as by lived practices Ideimagina-as about cities are not simply formed at a conscious level;they are also a product of unconscious desires and imaginaries This Companionstarts with these city imaginaries to illustrate the power of ideas, the imagination,representations, and visions in influencing the way cities are formed and lived.Here we pursue two themes which organize thinking on the relationship betweenthe city and the imagination: how the city affects the imagination and how the city isimagined Although there are obvious links between these two they are a useful way

to think about imagining cities

The effect of the city on the imagination contains a tension between the conditions

of the city stimulating or constraining the imagination On the one hand cities arecreative, places that encourage the imagination, sites of stimulation People withdifferent ideas come together in cities and their webs of interconnection and sharing

of knowledge and ideas are productive creatively These ideas have material effects ±

in the form of economic innovation (for example in manufacturing) and profits fromselling ideas in the innovation and informational economy (see, for example, in thisvolume Amin, chapter 11, Catterall, chapter 17 ) The idea of the city as a cruciblefor ideas and innovation has a long history ± back to the very origins of urbanism infact Soja (chapter 3) argues that the stimulating effects of urban agglomeration(what he calls synekism) resulted in innovations in cultivation that produced theagrarian revolution Here the interactive conditions of the city encourage brightideas to overcome settled ways of thinking

Settled ways of thinking can be powerful acts of the imagination in themselves.Cities might act to constrain the imagination or to consolidate it in collectiveimagination as tradition and authority Cities, like nations, can be the locus for

the exercise of discipline and authority One of Short's three urban discourses(chapter 2) looks at the city as a source of authority, repression, and compunction.These influences act as chains on the imagination On the other hand such anauthoritarian city can be a source of identity and security The tensions betweenauthority and identity are evident in Patrick Guinness's account (chapter 9) in whichthe figure of the sultan acts as a powerful locus for the imagination on the ``subjects''

of Yogyakarta In many non-Western cities (and increasingly in many Western ones)the religious or spiritual imagination is a key locus of identity and impacts on thebuilt form of the city This cosmic city (as Short puts it) can come into conflict withthe dominant urban imaginary in the West which is that of capital accumulation.This also challenges conventional Western views of modernity and the city (viaWeber 1966; Simmel 1995, and others) on the secularization of society and forms

of individual alienation or anomie If Western urbanism was facilitated by theindividualism that came with a disenchantment with the world, the interaction ofcapitalism with other collective imaginations and representations (such as thosebased on religious faith) give a more unpredictable mix of confrontation or coopta-tion of capital and culture, and vice versa

It is clear that forms of collective imagination can be both positive and negative(Boyer 1994) Prejudiced imaginaries of ``the other'' are a source of racism, and theuntrammeled domination of certain collective imaginaries work to exclude others ±

as the burgeoning literature on postcoloniality points out (see Akbur, chapter 7;King, chapter 22) Similarly notions of community assume a homogeneity of popu-lation and can entail an idea of purification where those designated as outsidebecome the site of prejudice and segregation Postcolonial and feminist writingreveal the degree to which Western imaginaries of the city and the other wereoverwhelmingly visual in nature (the colonial gaze, the watching flaÃneur) AnthonyVidler (chapter 4) shows the extent to which this was true for the conceived space ofthe city in Western architecture and planning: Le Corbusier's imagination was fed byairplane flights above Paris

The speed of growth and the kaleidoscope of capital and culture in non-Westerncities challenges the visual imaginary through the synesthesia of the city and theimportance of other senses What makes cities extraordinary is that they containsites where the senses are bombarded and these can be read as a source of pleasure:the Spice Market in Istanbul, or the street markets of Hanoi; or displeasure, as in therush-hour spaces of underground stations

The city in its complexity and abundance of sensory data can also be seen as aspace which contributes to our sense of fragmented subjectivity or overload InSimmel's exploration of the relation between the subject's inner life and the city hesuggests that in the modern metropolis the individual becomes saturated withstimuli: ``There is no psychic phenomenon which is so unconditionally reserved tothe city as the blase attitude'' ([1903] 1995: 329) Yet with the influence of post-modernist thought the notion of fractured selves, lives, and complexity has shiftedfrom being constituted as a negative trope to a more positive one Thus Simmel'snotion of the city as a site of overstimulation and excess of feeling has beensubstituted by an imagination of the city as vibrant and exciting and a spacewhere the play of the senses and bodily pleasures can be celebrated and explored

Contemporary discourses of the city as constituting sites of pleasure are perhapsone of the many reasons that Benjamin's writings have received so much recentattention by urbanists For him the city and its crowds are intoxicating, fascinating,productive, and creative, while the commodity culture of the nineteenth century

is conceived as a dreamworld The modern metropolis for Benjamin was theprincipal site of the phantasmagoria of modernity and the new manifestation ofmyth, which is illustrated particularly in his writings on the covered shoppingarcades of Paris which were constructed from glass and intricate ironwork whichshone and sparkled The dreamworld and unconscious of the bourgeoisie, with itsdreams of progress, abundance, desire for pleasure and consumption are materi-alized in the architecture, commodities, and fashion of the city But the city forBenjamin is also an ambiguous place ± at once alluring and threatening (Buck-Morss1995: 66):

As a social formation, Paris is a counter image to that which Vesuvius is as a geographic one:

A threatening, dangerous mass, an ever-active June of the Revolution But just as the slopes ofVesuvius, thanks to the layers of lava covering them, have become a paradisiacal orchard, sohere, out of the lava of the Revolution, there bloom art, fashion and festive existence asnowhere else

His writings are not explorations of memory as such and the metropolis is notsimply a space remembered by Benjamin; rather memory is intricately interwovenwith particular sites (Gilloch 1997: 11, 66) Memory shapes the city at the same time

as being shaped by it

City and the Realization of Self

So far we have considered the city's effect on the collective imagination But urbanimagination can also be read in terms of realization or nonrealization of the indi-vidual ± the self It was in the ordinary spaces of the city that James Joyce'scharacters achieved self-realization ± those epiphanies or moments of insight andrevelation, so extraordinary, came in the everyday spaces of the city Equally thoseurban writers and scholars of the cosmopolitan school look to the encounter withothers as a form of psychic development and enlightenment (Sennett 1970; Young1990; Jacobs 1962) On the other hand the city and urban experience may also act toseparate the self from imagination and creativity Alienation is estrangement ForMarx this was a material process, an outcome of the social relations of production incapitalism In this sense much experience for many urban dwellers in western andnon-Western cities is a distance from the imagination and a denial of imagination.Yet even in the spaces of alienation, shackled to the production line, acts of theimagination like daydreams form sites of resistance (see Figure 1.1)

This distance from the imagination was enforced through bricks and mortar forEngels (Engels 1971) In his study of Manchester of 1844 the separation of workers

in different quality housing and separate districts led to the separation of theirimaginations and suppressed the possibility of them coming together to form arevolutionary consciousness These city trenches (to borrow Katznelson's 1981term) are trenches in the imagination In contemporary cities such trenches take

suburbs, all of which act to block imaginative identifications with the other.Alienation is one modernist trope; other imaginative influences on understandingthe city look to the fragmentation of self and suggest that there is no real self to beestranged from We could also argue that the notion of the self is a Western problem,

or at least a Western conceit when set against life on the Bombay pavements or in thesquatter settlements of Manila Nevertheless, the distance of self from deeperimpulses, desires, and fears continues to be a theme in understanding the urbancondition Here we encounter the relation of the imagination to the subconscious.Deepdesires and fears can emerge in the city ± hence its representation as a crucible

of civilization, as promethean, but also as the site of sin (as in Sodom and rah), or as unruly spaces that have to be managed The fabric of the city mightprovide glimpses of deeper psychic drives but it might also operate to keep them incheck The city might be the dreamwork that keeps those urges at a distance (seePile, chapter 8), or it might help reinforce our distance from the unconscious Thecity is a dream, a trance full of ghosts and traces and possibilities that never(literally) materialize

Gomor-We can also think of the city as a space of anxiety and fear, or drawing, asVidler (1992) does, on Freud, as the site of the uncanny Richard Sennett sees themodern city as reflecting the divide between subjective experience and worldlyexperience, or between the self and the city Thus cities reflect a great fear ofexposure, and are constructed instead to protect our inner (even spiritual) selvesfrom the threat of social contact and from differences There is some resonance herewith the idea of the fortress city (Davis 1992) of more recent construction whichplays on fear of ``the other'' and of violence to entice people into private gatedcommunities Suburbs are imbued with a similar imagery counterposed to thedangerous, congested, and criminal inner city as imagined spaces of community,safety and family

Early feminist writers looked to the city as a source of self-realization away fromthe constraints of the gendered space of the home and patriarchal relationships.Rather than following conventional views of the city as spaces of immorality,threat, and danger for women, feminists have also articulated the city as a space

of freedom and possibility away from the shackle of domestic life, constraint andsuffocation (Wilson 1991) Thus in the Australian context Barbara Brooks (1989:33±5) writes:

Coming from the country to the city was an escape into a freer more varied and tolerant way

of life the private and the public landscape interact, release each other Moving to adifferent place gives you the chance to shift habits and routines, move into a different persona

An urban or semi-urban environment gives more variety, more chance to move aroundbetween different groups and get lost in between

Other feminist writers and idealists have imagined new urban designs and city forms

as a potentially liberating force whereby women can be freed from domesticdrudgery (Hayden 1981) The fantasy here is that more collective built forms willenable and even determine a more collective and shared way of life Many utopiannovels written by women embody similar ideas

Figure 1.1 Aboriginal inscription, Sydney (# Steve Pile)

Clearly for people living outside of conventional norms, such as gays or singlewomen, or for those seeking to break the bonds of earlier ties, the city can represent

a space of liberation A different fantasy comes into play for many intercountrymigrants or rural±urban migrants leaving an impoverished rural life where agricul-tural opportunities have been stripped away, who may see the city as a potentialsource of livelihood and a better life The fact that many such migrants end upliving

in the poor areas of the American, British, or European city or ramshackle dwellings

on the sidewalks of Johannesburg, does not dilute the force of the imagined tages of the city to those who follow

advan-Cities, then, operate as sites of fantasy So also subjectivities are constructed in thespaces (both formal and interstitial, imagined and real) of the city and certain kinds

of feelings or a sense of self are made possible, and we remember these as emerging

in a particular site In Woolf's (1938: 119) The Years Rose is standing by theThames:

As she stood there, looking down at the water, some buried feeling began to arrange thestream into a pattern The pattern was painful She remembered how she had stood there onthat night of a certain engagement, crying Then she had turned and she had seen thechurches, the masts and roofs of the city There's that, she had said to herself Indeed it was a

Figure 1.2a,b Sidewalk dwellers, Johannesburg (# Sophie Watson)

splendid view she looked, and then again she turned There were the Houses of Parliament.

A queer expression, half frown, half smile, formed on her face and she threw herself slightlybackwards, as if she were leading an army

The buildings and spaces of the city are formed in, and themselves form, memory,while memory becomes spatialized

Drawing on memory, learning from the past in one's relationship with the city ispart of this self-development and self-actualization Memory plays a part in theway that cities are imagined At the level of the everyday a smell in the street orthe sound of a piano from a room we are passing can evoke another place andtime The complex textures of the city are a rich source of memory for urbandwellers which may represent an absence for new migrants disembedding them, atleast initially, from a sense of place and belonging Antony Vidler (1992: 176)suggests that urban memory in the traditional city was easy to define as the image

of the city which made it possible for the individual citizen to identify with its pastand present as a cultural, social, and political entity: ``it was neither the `reality' ofthe city nor a purely `imaginary' utopia but rather the complex mental map orsignificance by which the city might be recognised as `home,' as something notforeign, and as constituting a (more or less) moral and protected environment foractual daily life.'' In this scenario monuments come to act as crucial signifiersconstructing particular meanings ± whether it is the triumphal arch or the splendor

of government buildings Once again this aspect of cities is captured by ViriginiaWoolf (1938: 165):

The omnibuses swirled and circled in a perpetual current round the steps of St Paul's Thestatue of Queen Anne seemed to preside over the chaos and to supply it with a centre, likethe hub of a wheel It seemed as if the white lady ruled the traffic with her sceptre, directedthe activities of the little men in bowler hats and round coats; of the women carrying attachecases; of the vans, the lorries and the motor omnibuses

This view of the significance of monuments giving cultural location is questioned

by Thrift (chapter 34) when he argues for the inconspicuousness of monumentsand encourages us to look to other everyday spaces in the city to find the extra-ordinary

As cities have become more complex, more global, and more diasporic it is harder

to construct cultural markers which make for a simple image of the city with which

to identify At whose imagination, we may ask, is the statue, the poster, the buildingfacade, or the pavement mosaic directed, and for what purpose? And what andwhose past are we drawing on in the construction of city monuments? As Vidlerpoints out (1992: 179), for modernists it was as much a story about erasing the past,forgetting the old city and what it stood for, its chaos and corruption, as it was astory about referencing earlier urban forms Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse, forexample, maintained the body as the central organizing principle and central refer-ence point echoing the classical tradition In a similar way current urban regenera-tion initiatives are also drawing on cultural imaginaries of earlier times, be itinvoking earlier traditions of local employment and industries ± as is classicallyseen in the reconstruction of dockland areas ± or cultural life

Representing Cities

All these tensions ± between imaginative innovation or constraint, between ization or remoteness, between the individual or the collective imagination ± emergenot just in the effects of the city on imagination but in the way that the city isimagined, the way it is represented in film and literature, in urban scholarship, and

actual-in urban plannactual-ing and politics City narratives can come actual-in many forms Cities taketheir shape through representation and the discursive practices which constructthem, and the boundary between real and imagined cities is difficult to draw.Jonathan Raban (1974: 10) puts it thus:

Cities, unlike villages and small towns, are plastic by nature We mould them in our images:they, in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try and impose a personalform on them The city as we might imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration,nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate in maps and statistics,

in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture

Different theoretical approaches tell different stories which purport to some kind oftruth about cities but which are themselves only one way of understanding the com-plexities that constitute a city There is no one narrative of a city, but many narrativesconstruct cities in different ways highlighting some aspects and not others

There has been a long tradition of the urban sociological imagination with writers

as diverse as Simmel ([1903] 1995), Benjamin (1985), Wirth (1938), and Lefebvre(1991) representing the city in a diversity of ways In the early days of urban analysisthe dominant imagining of cities was the Chicago School and the ecologicalapproach In this formulation, Burgess (1925), Park (1925), and others conceivedthe city as a plantlike organism which was ordered according to certain principleswhich divided the land into specific populations and uses thus achieving some form

of balanced growth In this model the analogy was of the city as a living organismoperating according to given laws Contained within this approach was an evolu-tionary model of economic growth and change where Chicago was taken as theepitome of the modern industrial city which was the culmination of a long evolu-tionary process dating back to much earlier historical periods The new spatialdivisions in cities were imagined as the product of the complex divisions of labor

in modern industrial society

The Chicago narrative was superseded by two dominant theoretical imaginaries

to understanding cities; one of these derived from Weber's work, the other fromMarx Ray Pahl (1975), among others, drawing on Weber, emphasized the import-ance of institutions and the decisions of urban managers in determining the shapeand distribution of resources and services in the city This was a relatively benignimaginary, wherein resided the possibility for change and reform David Harvey(1973) and Manuel Castells (1977) are two of the Marxist urban analysts who haveplayed a significant role in developing a political economy approach to the city Inhis work Harvey developed Marx's theory of capital accumulation to draw out theimplications for urban structures In the early texts he set out to explore theimportance of land in three circuits of capital: the primary circuit of production ofcommodities, the secondary circuit where capital is fixed in the built environment,

and the tertiary circuit of scientific knowledge and expenditures related to thereproduction of labor power Other Marxist writers developed different but relatedapproaches to understanding the city, but within each the prevailing imaginary was

of a city that worked in the interests of capital accumulation and exploitation In thisperiod, from the early 1970s to mid-1980s many writers sought to construct truerepresentations of the city, rather than recognizing that any representation of the citycould only ever be partial

More recently the cultural turn has meant the emergence of new city stories andimaginaries which foreground cities as spaces of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism,

as well as spaces of the psyche, memory and the imaginary Much of this writing hasturned back to the earlier analysts of the city in modernity to developnew paradigmsand new insights Other texts draw on postmodern writers such as Foucault,Lyotard, and Baudrillard to shift the focus from the material and economic spheres

to the imaginary, the cultural, and the hyper-real These paradigms self-consciouslydisrupt the boundaries between real and imagined cities and discursive and non-discursive terrains Notions of difference, fragmentation, complexity, virtuality,hyper-reality, simulacra, and cyberspace surveillance are thus now embedded inthese contemporary stories Cities have always been the repository of all sorts ofmyths and fantasies, some of which tend to the utopian-cities as sites of desire,others to the dystopian±cities as sites of fear Pro- and anti-urban representationsand mythologies have been as much a feature of literary and film texts as they have abeen a feature of the texts of social reformers, philanthropists, and politicians Forpro-urbanists and city lovers, cities are imagined as spaces of opportunity, of the co-mingling of strangers, as spaces of excitement, difference, cosmopolitanism, andinterconnection; and as spaces of culture, engagement, enchantment, fluidity, andvibrancy These pro-urban imaginaries themselves have translated into policies toencourage and enhance city living (see chapter 42 in this volume)

Another positive representation is the city as polis A political imaginary of the citydates from the early days of cities from the Mayan and Aztec cities of Central andSouth America to the cities of the Greek and Roman empires The archetypal city ofAthens stood, and continues to stand, for notions of democracy, civic culture, humanfulfillment, and urbanity For Marx the city represented a potential space of freedomfor the masses away from the conservatism and idiocy of rural life Taking seriouslythe politics of difference in the contemporary city Iris Marion Young (1990), amongmany other political theorists (Sennett 1990), proposes a political imaginary of thecity as a space of ``the being together of strangers.'' Different political imaginationsfind their way into urban design and form Harlow new town, for example, was builtafter the Second World War near London with a socialist vision of democracy andinclusion and with innovative ideas as to how the city could enable a more egalitar-ian way of life Similarly Brasilia was conceived as a symbol of modernity, wheresquatting was to be abolished, and order was paramount (Hall 1988: 219)

Anti-urban imaginaries have been forcefully in play in literary, art, and politicaltexts for as long as there have been cities Here the associations are with the city as asite of anomie, alienation, corruption, ill health, immorality, chaos, pollution, con-gestion, and a threat to social order In these imaginaries, the urban masses need to

be contained and controlled, for if they are left to their own devices the city willbecome a site of crime and potential revolution Fear and anxiety lie close to the

spaces of disorder The role of the social reformer or politician in this scenario is toimpose order in the midst of chaos, harmony in the face of disharmony, andcleanliness out of squalor This attitude is characterized in the reforming zeal ofthe mid- to late nineteenth century of philanthropists in the mould of William Boothand Octavia Hill in England.

Urban designs and city plans (such as those of Le Corbusier, Lloyd Wright, andEbenezer Howard) have often embodied, implicitly or explicitly, some version of anti-urbanism which evokes the city as a place to be tamed and ordered and madepredictable It is interesting to question what is at stake in the different discoursesand interpretations of the city and whose interests they serve Or to put this anotherway, what power/knowledge relations are in play in these representations? Plans anddesigns are never neutral tools of spatial ordering We can illustrate this point byconsidering the strategy deployed by the Republican Mayor of New York in the1990s, Rudolf Giuliani, to clean upthe city Dominant representations of the city asdangerous, dirty, and derelict legitimated fairly draconian measures to clear thestreets of unwanted people Rather than tackle the problem of the homeless throughhousing policy, homeless people were simply forced off the streets of Manhattan ± toother parts of the city ± so that Manhattan residents could walk the streets withoutencountering beggars In this case this representation acted in the interests of busi-nesses and established residents of the city both financially ± in the case of businesses

or property owners ± and in terms of quality of life As a result homeless people werefurther marginalized A dominant imaginary of Black people as threatening andviolent similarly legitimated an apartheid system in South Africa where Black peoplewere cast to marginal settlements on the edge or outside of the city If we take seriouslythe power of the imagination, then questions also need to be asked regarding in whichsites and institutions different imaginings are produced and with what effects.Representations of the city have tended to be dominated by the Western imaginary

± Peter Hall's mammoth text on cities (1998) is a case in point, where the only European or non-American city to warrant a chapter is Tokyo Western rationalistplanning imaginaries have also failed to cope with the conditions and particularities

non-of many non-Western cities This Companion has deliberately set out to includeexplorations and discussion of different kinds of cities not in an attempt to becomprehensive or even comparative, but in order both to shift the dominance ofwestern cities in contemporary urban collections and also to illustrate the diversityand specificity of cities across the globe This is all the more necessary as processes ofglobalization have disrupted cities as imagined homogenous spaces So too newracial imaginaries have begun to destabilize predominantly White representations

of city life and experience

In conclusion, imaginings of cities are powerful and have their effects In someinstances they may represent an attempt to overcome our sense of alienation from thecity; in others they are an outcome of that, and no doubt these responses exist in somekind of tension So too our imagination can be either an escape from the problems ofcities, or an act of resistance, or both Any representations and imaginaries are bound

to be in a state of flux and will also be subject to contestation by those who feelexcluded or on the margins of the dominant imaginary Increasingly culturalgeographies of locality are revealing the multiple stories of how space is lived and

imagined by different sections of the population from youth to small migrant munities, by women, and by gays There are many cities and many stories to be told.Not only are cities constituted in imagination and different forms of representa-tion, they are also themselves sites of imagination and creativity The very maelstrom

com-of the city to which Benjamin and others have drawn attention can itself be acreative influence, while in other circumstances it may be constraining Imaginationand the city are mutually constitutive and interwoven in countless ways and, as wehave seen, the membrane between specific sites of the city and memory and theimaginary is a porous one We see in Part 5 how imagination is translated into policyand how through the mechanisms of governance it has its effects

REFERENCES

Benjamin, W 1985: One Way Street and Other Writings London: Verso

Boyer, C 1983: Dreaming the Rational City Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Boyer, C 1994: The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and ArchitecturalEntertainments Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Brooks, B 1989: Maps In D Modjeska (ed.), Inner Cities: Australian Women's Memory ofPlace, Sydney: Penguin, 29±42

Buck-Morss, S 1995: The Dialectics of Seeing Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Burgess, E W [1925] 1969: The growth of the city: an introduction to a research project In

R Park et al (eds.), The City, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd edn, 47±62.Castells, M 1977: The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach London: Edward Arnold.Davis, M 1992: City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles London: Verso.Engels, F [1845] 1971: The Condition of the Working Class in England Oxford: BasilBlackwell

Gilloch, G 1997: Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City Cambridge: Polity.Hall, P 1988: Cities of Tomorrow Oxford: Blackwell

Hall, P 1998: Cities in Civilisation London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson

Harvey, D 1973: Social Justice and the City London: Edward Arnold

Hayden, D 1981: What would a non-sexist city be like? Speculations on housing, urbandesign, and human work Signs, 5(3) supplement, S170±S187

Jacobs, J 1962: The Death and Life of Great American Cities London: Jonathan Cape.Katznelson, I 1981: City Trenches New York: Pantheon Books

Lefebvre, H 1991: The Production of Space Oxford: Blackwell

Pahl, R 1975: Whose City? Harmondsworth: Penguin

Park, R et al (eds.) [1925] 1969: The City Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd edn.Raban, J 1974: Soft City London: Hamish Hamilton

Sennett, R 1970: The Uses of Disorder Harmondsworth: Penguin

Sennett, R 1990: The Conscience of the Eye London: Faber and Faber

Simmel, G [1903] 1995: The metropolis and mental life In P Kasnitz (ed.), Metropolis:Center and Symbol of our Times, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 30±45

Vidler, A 1992: The Architectural Uncanny Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Weber, M 1966: The City, tr and ed by D Martindale and G Neuwirth New York: Free Press.Wilson, E 1991: The Sphinx and the City London: Virago

Wirth, L 1938: Urbanism as a way of life American Journal of Sociology, 44(1), 1±24.Woolf, V 1938: The Years London: Penguin, 1998

Young, I 1990: Justice and the Politics of Difference Princeton: Princeton University Press

Three Urban Discourses

John Rennie Short

In this chapter I want to consider three fundamental discourses of the city: theauthoritarian city, the cosmic city, and the collective city These are ideas of thecity as well as urban social relations, intellectual discourses as well as politicalforces They are chosen from the many possible, because I feel they have a specialresonance at this millennial juncture

The Authoritarian City

Cities are sites of social aggregation that involve compulsion, order, and discipline aswell as freedom, anarchy, and self-realization In recent years, the latter rather thanthe former have been stressed While it is important to see the city as a site ofindividual and collective emancipation, a tradition that incorporates Marx andEngels as well as Nozick and Milton Friedmann, it is just as important to rememberthat the city is an imposition and adherence to a series of master narratives FromRameses II to Frank Gehry, through Baron Haussmann and Le Corbusier the city hasbeen inherently authoritarian, sometimes totalitarian and occasionally fascistic.All ideas are relational However, this notion of the urban as discipline is notcontrasted to a pastoral freedom I am not counterpoising a brutal urban with anidealized rural If comparisons need to be made I draw upon Bruce Chatwin's notion

of the nomadic alternative In a series of essays and particularly in his book TheSonglines he argued that nomadism was the ``natural'' human condition (Chatwin1987) The urban revolution was not a leapforward but a tethering of the humanneed to move While Chatwin's biologizing of social relations needs to be treatedwith extreme care, or we will fall into the reactionary, antimodern lauding of theidealized nomad apparent in the work of Wilfred Thesinger and Laurens van derPost, he raises an important point about cities as places of compunction

The debate on urban origins has long fascinated me The traditional view was thatthe urban revolution was predicated upon the agricultural revolution Agriculturalsurplus created cities An alternative was outlined by Jane Jacobs (1969) whoproposed a reversal of the process; urban trade created agriculture We can think

of an urban±agricultural revolution in which trade played a key role However, thework of Marshall Sahlins (1972) has convincingly shown that hunting-gatheringsocieties that prefigured this revolution spent less time working than agriculturalsocieties; he calls them the original affluent society In other words, pre-urban, pre-agricultural societies had more free time, more freedom The urban±agriculturalrevolution marks a loss of freedom, a greater work discipline and more time devoted

to the drudgery of work and the compulsion of social order Cities are a Nietzschianwill to power An example

In the desert South West of the United States, there are remains of an importanturban culture They were called the Anasazi and their independent urban civilizationwas centered on Chaco Canyon, New Mexico The traditional rendition goes likethis: between the tenth and twelfth centuries the Anasazi culture, based on efficientagriculture, flowered into cities with vast cliff dwellings, and major feats of engin-eering, architecture, and art Brilliant pottery, sophisticated irrigation systems, andkeen solar and astronomical observations round out a picture of an urban civiliza-tion that follows the old precept that cities equal civilization

There is another interpretation of the Anasazi The work of anthropologistChristy Turner presents a darker side of Anasazi culture (Preston 1998) It appearsthat the Anasazi culture was prefigured by the Toltec empire which lasted from theninth to the twelfth century in central Mexico This was an empire centered onhuman sacrifice and cannibalism Thugs from the Toltec empire moved north intowhat is now New Mexico and found a pliant population of docile farmers whomthey terrorized into a theocratic society Social control was maintained through acts

of cannibalistic terror The Anasazi culture, so long admired, was a Charles type social order where the bad and powerful controlled the weak The great feats ofart and astronomy, road building, and city formation were less sparks of humaningenuity and more the mark of organized social terrorism

Manson-An extreme example But the past is less a fixed reality than a mirror of temporary concerns While others would want to remind us of the ingenuity in CËatalHuÈyuÈk, I want to remind us of the terror of Chaco Canyon

con-The authoritarian project is not always successful con-The city is a place of resistanceand contestation And while these have emerged as important topics in recent years,

it is well to remember that something is being resisted, something is being contested.There is a structure to all this agency

Neither am I suggesting that the authoritarian project is always bad We mayagree with the classical liberal theorists like Locke and Hobbes that we need someform of social contract in order to save us from the excesses of the more powerful.The city is the embodiment of the social contract

Cities have an authority embedded in them Street layouts, traffic lights, police,the location of things; there is an imposed structuring to our lives, our behaviors,the paths that we trace through time and across space Whatever the question,Lenin suggested, the answer is always power The city both reflects and embodiespower Urban society involves an order in time and space, a discipline of spaceand time The urban built form is a system of boundaries and transgressions, centersand peripheries, surveillances and gestures, gazes and performances At a funda-mental level there is something inherently fascistic about architecture and urbanplanning

of unbound Prometheus breaking through the bonds of tradition and establishedorder, a theme best exemplified by Peter Hall (1998) This has been the dominantrendering of the city for the past two hundred years including the socialistemancipatory project, the gaze of the flaÃneur, modernist sensibilities and a post-modern irony In recent years it has morphed into a market-driven, so-calledneoliberal narrative that has called for loosening planning controls and deregula-tion The implied call of freedom has now been attached to the unfettered opera-tion of the market I want to stress very strongly that this discourse needs to

be challenged Because the city is inherently authoritarian, the calls for lessplanning and deregulation should be challenged for what they are: struggles overwho is doing the planning and what are the redistributional consequences ofregulation Deregulation is always reregulation that reflects economic and polit-ical power And the real question is not whether urban planning is done or not, butwho is doing the planning If planning controls over land use disappear more power

is transferred to private interests When we have a view of the city as the operation

of power; then debates become released from the phoney dichotomy of controlversus freedom to the more politicized debate concerning the question Who is incontrol?

Power is a practice, a ritual, a process, wielded by some people over others It isunevenly distributed and unequally imposed Work on the authoritarian city such asthat of Michel Foucault has revived interest in the practices of power, the operation

of discipline, the spaces of exclusion, and the sites of control An edited book byNicholas Fyfe (1998), for example, draws together interesting contributions onsurveillance and policing, and ties in the connection between control and identity

in public spaces These are the more obvious uses of power Power is exercised in anumber of ways from direct coercion through adherence to community standards

At one extreme are the personnel and techniques of the coercive state and corporatistapparatus, at the other the social norms that define what is proper The nature of theauthoritarian city varies from the direct operation of centralized power includingimprisonment, punishment, and bodily torture to the individual incorporation ofvalues and standards into a taken-for-granted view of the world A thumbnailhistory of the authoritarian city would show a reliance on both but in democraticcapitalist societies a greater use of the latter

The authoritarian city comes in a number of thicknesses Authority is thickestwhen everyday practices are overlain with the practice of power and thinnestwhen power is part of people's desires Consider the contrasting utopia/dystopiasimagined by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell in their respective novels Brave NewWorld and 1984 These are arguably the most emblematic political novels of thetwentieth century Huxley describes a place where order is maintained by sexualpromiscuity and easy availability of drugs Orwell's world is puritanical, harsh, andbitter Orwell's depicts a thick authoritarian city, Huxley presents a thin authoritar-ian city

While the obvious and direct uses of power are worthy of investigation, especially

as new more subtle forms of surveillance are introduced and employed, it isalso important to realize that the more powerful chains are ones that weimpose on our own imagination When we internalize power relations we become

our own repressive police state There are connections between Brave New Worldand 1984.

Excavating previous intellectual debates can be useful, not so much for providinganswers but for posing questions After the First World War when the first flush ofthe revolutionary impulse had fizzled throughout much of Western Europe, a num-ber of radical thinkers sought to understand how the social order was maintainingitself The Marxist belief in the the inexorable dynamic of revolution was beingshattered by the tenacity of the capitalist system to survive It was in this context thatGramsci developed his notion of hegemony, the Frankfurt School was developing acritical theory, and in particular Herbert Marcuse (1964), in One Dimensional Man,sought to understand the process of introjection in which the values of a capitalistsociety become embedded into an individual psyche

A succession of French theorists, rarely seduced by the notion of participatorydemocracy, have outlined similar ideas Althusser wrote of an ideological stateapparatus, including schools and universities that maintained loyalty to the capital-ist order And Pierre Bourdieu (1998), echoing a theme of Noam Chomsky, arguedthat social consent is manufactured, representative democracy is an illusion, andthat the struggle for domination is less in the marketplace and more in the mediaplace where bourgeoisie culture perpetuates itself

The very notion of struggle has been displaced While local struggles over workingand living conditions will always occur, we have lost, at least for the moment,the sense of big struggles over the shape of the social order The real success ofcapitalism has been to persuade us of its rightness and to embrace us in its working

We are all capitalists now Through the creation of an all-embracing marketmentality, the seductive power of the commodity and the wrapping of fulfill-ment and desire with purchase and consumption, capitalism has shown itself soinfinitely adaptable that even resistance and contestation is commodified and sold.There is now a strong and binding connection between commodities and identity,satisfaction and consumption A linkage between political economy and psycho-analysis, first outlined by Eric Fromm and Charles Reich, would seem to be animportant way for us to unravel some of the strands that bind us to this tenacioussocial order

We should be wary, however, of accepting a hermetically sealed connectionbetween order and consent If consent is manufactured how does radical changecome about? How does any change come about? One view is that we are recyc-ling notions: from focus groups come advertising campaigns and media strategiesthat package our beliefs and fears into commodities, a closed cycle of desireand satisfaction, endlessly repeating itself from dream to commodity back todesire and commodity But change does occur and it takes place when peopleinteract; when discourse is ``real''; and that occurs when people come together,

or are brought together to talk, discuss, share, complain; and when individualfears and dreams are shared and shaped by comparison and contrast, empathyand argument And this takes place most palpably in cities Taking to the streets

is not only an age-old political strategy, it has become a necessary corrective tothe imposed media images Resistance takes place when lived urban spaceconflicts with the dictates of the marketplace and the commodified images of themedia place

The Cosmic City

The city is a religious artifact For modernists this sentence may seem strange, evenincomprehensible Religion has been too long counterpoised to the continuingenlightenment project of rationality The city has been so long associated with themodern and the contemporary in the Western imagination that it is read as the site ofthe irreligious and the secular But cities have always reflected and embodiedcosmologies The earliest cities mirrored the world Indeed they were the world.The size, shape, orientation, location, siting, and naming of cities were tied to adeeper vision of the connection between the sacred and the profane The Athens ofPericles, often depicted as the birthplace of Western rationality, was named after thegoddess Athene She was glorified and worshiped by the citizens and the success ofthe city was seen as a mark of her benevolence The Parthenon was dedicated to herand once a year citizens marched in a long procession to the Parthenon atop theAcropolis and presented a sacred garment to the 40-foot-high statue of the goddessmade from gold and ivory The ancient Chinese cities such as Changan and Beijingwere laid out on precise rectangular lines orientated to the four points of thecompass that embodied the shape of the world and the symbol of order in Chinesecosmology The Aztec city of Tenochtitlan was also laid out in four equal parts, fourbeing a magical number in Aztec cosmology indicating the completeness of theworld The boundaries of the four quarters of the city met at a central point occupied

by the Great Temple and imperial palaces City layout and building design were ahomology with the wider cosmos In the Hindu city of Angkor Wat each stepon thetemples marked a stage in the solar cycle, each terrace represented a tier of theworld The earliest cities were marketplaces and living places but above all they wereceremonial sites of religious recollection and cosmic narrative The site and shapeechoed religious cosmology Even the grid, a seemingly secular form of urban design,contains a fantasy of turning chaos into order, transforming topography into geo-metry The very act of founding a city and planning a city was connected to how thewider world worked; human involvement in and responsibility for the world wereembodied in city location, city form, and city shape The city was the cosmos, thecosmos was embodied in the city This macrocosm±microcosm also extended fromcity to body The walled, quartered medieval city was a microcosm of a larger worldbut also a metaphor for a bounded, divided self

The urban cosmologies justified (they still do) the social hierarchy The cities gavesubstance to the line from the gods to the people through the ruling classes Throughthe built form of the city and urban rituals the social hierarchy was sanctified andlegitimized Festivals, ceremonies, and rituals tied the people, the rulers, and thegods together in spectacular urban connections

The long history of urbanism would reveal a steady secularization of the city, agrowing disenchantment In the West, the advent of the merchant city, the humanistcity, and the capitalist city all undermined the city as the site of cosmic narrative.Religious observance did not disappear, it often increased in outbreaks of religiousfervor, but the city itself lost its religious significance There were individualchurches and religious communities but the city was reduced to a meaninglessbackground for human behavior The city became illegible as a religious document;

it was no longer a religious artifact, a text for understanding the world; less and lesswas it a site for taking part in rituals of cosmic significance that tied together peopleand place, the sacred and the profane The word ``profane,'' by the way, means

``outside the temple.'' Over time more of the city was outside the temple The citybecame part of the God-shaped hole of the modern world

The market city, based on individual adherence to the power of the market (I amwhat I consume), provides little in the way of cosmic significance Consumption-and wealth-display provide only one layer of meaning and little by the way ofspiritual depth and resistance to the contingencies of human life and suffering Themarket gives us social positioning, not human understanding; social ranking, notcommunal meaning At its existentialist bleakest the city becomes a setting for themeaningless passage of the individual through a blind universe, bereft of meaning.One of the more dramatic images is provided in James Kelman's (1994) novel HowLate It Was, How Late: a man wakes upin jail, blind He stumbles his way through

a Kafkaesque nightmare There is something heroic about the will to ``batter on'' but

it is tragically heroic, an act of blind individual will in the face of an indifferent, coldworld A meaningless life beyond the will to survive

This existential crisis is not a global phenomenon In many non-Western cities,religion has survived; and even in the West many are looking at religions, less as falseconsciousness ± the opiate of the people ± and more as acts of collective identity andresistance to globalization More accurately it is an accommodation with globaliza-tion as extended communities around the world shape their sense of themselvesthrough religion The postcolonial city is becoming the more religious city Manycities are becoming enlivened by new faith communities, new sites of religiousobservance; even club culture can be seen as a Dionysian celebration as acolytesorgiastically dance the night away In the city there are many and varied attempts tofill the God-shaped hole at the center of our materialistic culture Thomas Moore(1997), for example, writes of the need for, and practice of, more soulful cities Thepostmodern city has become the site for a rich variety of religious cosmologies.The Collective City

Cities are sites of collective provision, collective consumption, and the workings ofcivil society They are shared spaces, a place of parallel and sometimes intertwinedlives, joint projects, externalities, and neighborhood effects The organization of thiscollective project has varied over time and across space I will examine briefly twoissues: collective goods and services, and the notion of civil society

The city is a site for the provision and consumption of collective goods andservices Two basic divisions can be identified in the organization of collectivegoods and services: private or public provision, and private or public consumption.The resultant fourfold division provides a basic anatomy of the city Take the case oftransport, which can be either provided by the market or by the state In most casesthe large, capital investment projects, such as highway construction or mass transitsystems, tend to be handled by the state The market shies away from such big, long-term risky projects The work of David Harvey (1982) has pointed to the connec-tions and tensions of this public/private split in the production and configuration ofthe capitalist space economy The consumption can vary from the more private, such

has been from public to private consumption and it is tied to trends of individualismand the decline of civic engagement.

These divisions are more than just alternative ways of providing or consuminggoods and services ± they have become the epicenters of fundamental debates aboutthe social contract In recent years there has been an assault on the notion of thepublic provision of the collective Collective provision and consumption has beenassociated with the discredited Left Socialist cities were meant to take away thepower of the market to influence social and spatial outcomes The defeat of com-munism, the decline of the Eastern bloc and the apparent failure of the socialistagenda to garner mass support has meant a withering away of the collective ideal To

be sure this has not prevented the state from assuming huge influence and spendingpower In the US, for example, critics of big government and government spendingsee no apparent paradox in their demands for less government, but call for moregovernment spending on ``defense'' and on giving the the power of capital punish-ment to the state Governments cannot be entrusted with providing basic humanservices but seemingly they can be given carte blanche to spend billions of dollars onarmaments or to take human life

Collective goods are described less by fiscal realities and more by social andpolitical power Subsidies to corporate interests, corporate welfare, are less discussedthan income support to low-income households Subsidies to home owners are seen

as less destructive to the social order than subsidies to the unemployed One islegitimized, the other is delegitimized The big debate about political control ofthe market is made most vivid in our discussions on collective goods and services.There has been a decline of the Keynsian city and a withering away of the socialistcity At this millennial juncture we are in the process of a fundamental shift in thecollective organization of the city Civil society has emerged from the set of rules andpractices established in the shared space of the city The first cities were gatedcommunities and notions of a public good or civic order were slow to develop,always it seems, able to be undermined by family and grouployalties

There is now a great deal of interest in civil society, social capital, and all thoseinterstitial areas between the realm of formal politics and the marketplace Civilsociety operates between the state and the market The decline of the Keynsian statehas undermined reliance on the state, while the operation of the market createsinequalities in social and spatial outcomes For a number of commentators civilsociety has now become a terrain of social opportunity providing one of the fewpossibilities of maintaining an emancipatory project A number of commentatorshave stressed the positive forms of civil society Robert Putnam's (1993) notion ofsocial capital, for example, refers to the ability of civil society to transcend familyand group ties; and John Friedmann (1998) has written on the possibly emancip-atory connections between civil society and urban planning

While civil society is important we should be careful of seeing it as a panacea.Janet Abu-Lughod (1998) reminds us that civil society contains the Michigan Militiaand Ku Klux Klan as well as chess clubs and benign neighbor groups Moreover,underlying many of the debates concerning civil society and the state is a Greeknotion of the polis, a small, almost homogeneous, community The contemporarycity, however, has always been a problem for the workings of democracy Growing