Assignment #1

What is a city? What are some of the frameworks for considering and theorizing the mediated city? These are the questions that permeate this week's readings. In "What is a City?" Lewis Mumford views the city as a social institution and describes it thusly: "The city in its complete sense, then is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity." Mumford's focus is not on "the built environment" as such but rather the city as a theater in which "man's more purposive activities are focused and work out, through conflicting and cooperating personalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations." In "Visions of a New Reality" Frederic Stout chronicles emergence of a new visual culture and observes that "each historical era creates characteristic forms of expression and explanatory discourse that reflect, indeed construct, the social reality of the period." Stout examines the role of photography in creating and capturing the social reality of urban life in a mediated city. Eric Gordon in his Introduction to The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities From Kodak to Google, outlines his concept of possessive spectatorship, "a way of looking that incorporates immediate experience with the desire for subsequent possession" of the traces of that experience. Gordon is chiefly concerned with "how the dominant understandings of technologies, shaped through metaphors ... collide with the consumptive practices of spectators" and how "possessive spectatorship ... structured by architectural, urbanistic, and technological innovations, has influenced the shape of the American Concept-city." Georg Simmel outlines a more sociological-psychological framework in this "Metropolis and Mental Life." Simmel examines the influence of the environmental stimuli on the development of what he calls "mental life," namely the predominance of intellectuality and logic, the protective mechanism called reserve, the calculability of the money economy and the appearance of the characteristic blasé attitude as indicative of metropolitan influences. Michel de Certeau takes a more literary approach to theorizing cities. He views cities as texts, composed of "the tallest letters in the world", described by walkers who commit "speech acts" in a "rhetoric of walking", and "whose bodies follow the ... urban text they write without being able to read it." De Certeau draws upon Baudelaire's notion of the flâneur, the person who walks the city to understand the city and is both part of the crowd and simultaneously apart from it.