(In)visible Cities: Subjects, Gazes. Metropoles and the Point of View.pdf (original) (raw)
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(In)visible Cities: Subjects, Gazes. Metropoles and the Point of View
Guest editors: Giorgio de Marchis and Maria Paola Guarducci ‘The photograph isn’t what was photog¬raphed, it’s something else. It’s about transformation’’, said the American photographer Garry Winogrand, quoted in an article about another photographer – René Burri – by Teju Cole, who adds: “The photographic image is a fiction created by a combination of lenses, cameras, film, pixels, colour (or its absence), time of day, season” (Cole 2015). Knowing that a photograph is always a mixture of readiness, chance and mystery, Teju Cole, a photographer and writer himself, wanders through the city of São Paulo, Brasil, looking for the point of view of an evocative snapshot by Burri dated 1960 and titled Men on a Rooftop, and comes to the laborious conclusion that “in discovering all that can be known about a work of art, what cannot be known is honored even more. We come right up to the edge, and can go no farther” (ibid.). The point of view, the ‘angle’ of a representation, Cole seems to say once he has found the exact place from which Burri took Men on a Rooftop, is not just a matter of perspective: not even in photography, which seems to have a cleaner, and therefore a more precise, relationship with visible reality than other imitative objects, as Susan Sontag put it in her famous essay on photography (Sontag 1977). The portrait of the city in the arts – literature as well as visual arts, music, multimedia – is therefore a fiction that acquires meaning and shape according to the point of view of its narrator. The gaze observing the city informs the special features of the portrait it presents, outlining hidden traits and spectacular aspects at the same time; private, intimate and unique marks, but also collectively relevant characteristics, which are such because they were originally thought like that, or because of the use people made of them, in time and possibly unpredictably. The city, which is born out of an act of ‘realistic’ planning is, however, also the site of utopia and dystopia, it is an open and changing place, threatening and welcoming, familiar and undecipherable. The urban space - unlike ghost cities, urban ruins from ancient times or the extreme contemporary ‘fake cities’ – is, per se, a manifold and elusive arena because it is crossed and changed by time, because it is metamorphic and irregularly fragmented with its gentrifications and abandonments, re-qualifications and new forms of neglect, homologations and intense characterizations. However, because of its many contradictions and its versatility, the city is a privileged topos in all forms of art whose meanings, we believe, are enhanced if scrutinized thought a contemporary critical lens. Furthermore, often conceived in female terms as a territory to conquer, to explore, to seize, the city is a space originally planned mostly by men, ‘naturally’, for the benefits of male subjects or, at best, for an abstract collective identity codified according to normative standards ruling out all minorities (whether numerical, cultural or political). The aim of this issue of de genere is to put together a series of articles as heterogeneous and interdisciplinary as possible focussing on the relationship between the point of view and the city, where the relationship is determined by a mixture of one or more connotations defining the gaze such as gender, social class, economic and/or legal status, age, etc. We ask contributors to explore how the metropolis’s polysemy – in any time and place – shapes the representation of the city as a place of integration/disintegration (or both), of stable/unstable meanings (or both), as a site of power, desire, fear, discovery, affection, growth, damnation, anonymity, belonging, exclusion, success or tragedy. We invite contributors from different disciplinary fields to submit their abstracts, also in a comparative key, analysing the urban space in all its possible declinations but always considering a specific point of view, be it implicit or openly declared, and privileging the following issues (or similar ones), in literature as well as in the other arts: - public and private spaces: subtractions, appropriations, occupations - crossing the city - the city’s poetics - the city’s politics - colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial/decolonial cities - mobility and immobility - cohesion and cohabitation: inclusive and ‘off limits’ urban spaces - the city of women/ of men - urban space’s polisemy - urban multiculturalism and/or monoculturalism - urban crossing overs - rootings and uprootings - dead cities / living cities For submissions and queries please write to us at degenere.journal@gmail.com. Deadline for abstract proposals (300 words and short bio): 5 April 2018. Articles will be due on 30 June 2018. For submission guidelines and further info please check our submissions page.
PERSPECTIVES ON THE CITY: FOR THE NON-CONFINEMENT OF THOUGHT
Diálogos: revista del Departamento de Filosofía, Universidad de Puerto Rico., 2020
The current pandemic forced restrictive measures upon the population’s way of life and spatial confinement of citizens in their homes. This summons urban thought to reflect about the present but also, or mostly, the future of the cities. I will grasp this opportunity to draw a few lines of flight that depart from the streets’ silenced rhythm, and to deal with relationality as the city’s own constitutive matter. Cities are usually thought in a dualistic mode (understood as oppositional or even as an ontological dualism), and they actuallygather different elements: physical city, discursivity, human, non-human, subjectivity, sensitivity, body. To take into account this relationality and its current outbreak from invisibility (like a virus), can help transform and diversify theoretical and practical perspectives on the cities, where the majority of human population is currently living.
The writing which this volume brings together is as multifaceted as are its objects of investigation. Ranging from theoretical or design-based perspectives to historical and politically charged foci, the chapters reflect an amalgam of concerns with the social, visual, political and material aspects of developed and developing cities. While all share a passion for cities and incorporate the use of visual material as either objects of investigation or illustrative accompaniments to textual or ethnographic analyses, the mixed methodologies and theoretical paradigms employed reflect a wider academic trend towards a critical cross-breeding of disciplines for a more expansive, and arguably more inclusive, conceptualisation of the urban. The chapters reveal the city through the lenses offered by different fields, and speak to the multiple sites involved in the production, contestation and experiences of urban spaces. Each chapter offers explorations of the spatial and temporal scales of urban transformations, centring on the authoritative and oppositional acts that simultaneously make the city. In this sense, there is an inclination towards analysing representations of urban change, and the ways in which transformations are reflected in the fabric of city space and life. The authors address the politics and experience of urban change by travelling imaginatively between the past and the present, the abstract and the specific, the global and the local, the human and the material, and the social and the technological. In their creative engagements with the many textures of `the city´, they suggest the need for us, as readers, to pause, revise, and re-envision our own sense of urban forms and futures
Distant Cities: Thoughts on an Aesthetics of Urbanism
The city does not exist. The city is a fiction, an abstraction rooted in history and mythology. For how can we identify it? However it is identified or defined, the city is an environment of experience before it is anything else. Urban experience, in fact, is perhaps one of the most important and powerful of the complex dimensions that constitute the city, whatever it may be. I call this talk "Distant Cities" because I want to inquire into urban experience from a different, perhaps unfamiliar direction, urban experience as encountered from the outside, from a distance, as it were. How is the city seen and understood not by its inhabitants but by an outsider who may occasionally enter into the urban sphere for visits of limited duration? The question of urban experience is as complex, intricate, and elusive as its material condition, the city. Here we encounter massiveness – the physical mass of the urban conglomerate of skyscrapers, institutional edifices, commercial monoliths; urban regions, districts, and neighborhoods. We not only encounter massiveness; we face spatial extent, as the urban consumption of the landscape spreads across whole geographical regions, such as the megalopolis of the eastern seaboard of the United States stretching from Boston to Washington or the amoeba-like spread of construction across huge distances and often overlapping state lines, as in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis urban conglomerates. Moreover, we encounter social mass, as well, in teeming populations with their associations and organizations both formal and informal, official and subversive. And, related to this, mass culture is replete with the mass marketing and consumption of goods, entertainment, and anything that can be controlled and on which a value can be placed. Consumption also overwhelms the ambient environmental resources that, until recently, people took for granted, such as air, water, quiet (the absence of intrusive sound), and even in cities of a human scale, visual space and easy distance. This is more than mass culture; it is more a mass world. How can we understand this world? From this uncommon external perspective on urban experience, I want to consider what it can tell us about the possibilities of an aesthetic of urbanism. In particular, I want to recover the humane and civilizing possibilities of the city. This leads me finally to an unabashed sketch of how a responsible environment might be now understood.
The Image of the Contemporary City
paper presented at International Seminar on Urban Form (Guangzhou China), 2009
Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (1960) argued that a strong, "visible, coherent, and clear" urban image is the foundation of a livable, attractive urban environment. Has the scale and speed of urbanization since 1960 made Lynch’s idea of a clear, unified urban image obsolete? In Managing the Sense of a Region (1976) and A Theory of Good City Form (1981) Lynch anticipates the need for a more complex and multivalent idea of the urban image and proposes a line of research. How do qualities like ambiguity, instability, accident, intricacy, and “unfoldingness” help to create a strong urban image? Drawing upon our research and the work and writings of contemporary architects and theorists including Bernardo Secchi, John Hejduk, Manuel de Solà-Morales, Roberto Collovà, and Carsten Juel-Christiansen, we propose that a lack of morphological clarity does not prevent citizens of fast-growing metropolitan regions from establishing the identity of their city in more complex ways, from navigating by alternate mental maps.