Presented below are two extracts out of the book entitled Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban imaginaries in a globalizing age, partially written, compiled and edited by Andreas Huyssen. The extracts are located from page 3 to 5 in the Introduction: World Cultures, World Cities, sub category, World Cities and Urban Imaginaries.
"So what is an urban imaginary? Italo Calvino strikes a deep chord with this marvel of a book entitled Invisible Cities. Calvino himself once described his book somewhat nostalgically as “something like a last poem of love about the city”. Beyond its fictional premise, however, the title suggests that no real city can ever be grasped in its present or past totality by any single person. That is why urban imaginaries differ depending on a multitude of perspectives and subject positions. All cities are palimpsests of real and diverse experiences and memories. They comprise a great variety of spatial practices, including architecture and planning, administration and business, labour and leisure, politics, culture and everyday life. They consist of a cacophony of voices and, more often that not, feature a multiplicity of languages. In some deep dimension all cities remain invisible just as all cities today are world cities in the sense that there no longer is any pure, uncontaminated, monocultural, or monolingual locality –which historically may have been the exception rather that the rule anyway. And yet, locality is constantly produced anew by our very visible movements through the urban sphere, our recognition and negotiation with the built space of our environment, and by all of our interactions with urban life. An urban imaginary marks first and foremost the way city dwellers imagine their own city as the place of everyday life, the site of inspiring traditions and continuities as well as the scene of histories of destruction, crime, and conflicts of all kinds. Urban space is always and inevitably social space involving subjectivities and identities differentiated by class and race, gender and age, education and religion. An urban imaginary is the cognitive and somatic image which we carry within us of places where we live, work, and play. It is an embodied material fact. Urban imaginaries are thus part of any city’s reality, rather than being only fragments of the imagination. What we think about a city and how we perceive it informs the way we act in it…" (Continued from pg 3 to 4)
"Cities have always served to condense and thicken cultural developments and their dynamics, and they still do so today. In the wake of Charles Taylor’s use of the term social imaginary and Henri Lefebvre’s argument about the social production of space, the notion of urban imaginaries has become quite commonplace. However, there are different usages of the term. Some focus more on media images, cyberspace, and global popular music that connect cities with each other. Others focus on translocal social movements around land rights, squatting, and housing or on transnational Web-based grassroots efforts concerned with human rights or ecological issues. Yet others see the linkages between local embeddedness and translocal business connections and practices as key for urban imagination today. Indeed, all of these are key dimensions that, together with the longue dure’e of customs, languages, and everyday practices, generate the urban imagination today. To be sure, utopias of the good life and haunting spectres of crime, corruption, and decay have always existed side by side in urban imaginaries. Think of the shinning city on the hill and of the hard-edged modernist urban utopia or, alternatively, of the great whore of Babylon as a long standing gendered metaphor for the city. Think of the glittering metropolitan centres in glass and steel or of the sprawling megacity of the twenty-first century with its slums, ghettos and shantytowns. Both the shine and the darkness are today present in the everywhere in their specific early twenty-first century form: the modernist utopias in its current corporate and consumerist hubris, with its suburbs, ex-urbs, and gated communities, right next to a modernity noir of ghettos, shantytowns and favelas extending mile upon mile into the countryside.
But urban imaginaries are also sites of encounters with other cities mediated through travel and tourism, Diasporas and labour migration, cinema, television and the Internet. The global and the local invariably mix, a fact captured with neologism glocalization. Such linguistic acrobatics, which actually originated in a Japanese car ad before becoming popular in academe, remains as abstract as the preceding approach that simply opposed the local to the global in binary fashion. It, too, risks covering up more than it reveals. It discourages questions about specificities of the global-local mix in any concrete urban imaginary. However useful it first was as a critique of the earlier global-local binary, the global risks becoming a mere abstraction without historical depth…" (Continued from pg 5 to 7)
Andreas Huyssen. 2008
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(A. Huyssen. 2008. Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban imaginaries in a globalizing age. Duke University Press. Durham and London)
