Friday 4 December 2015
‘Metropolis: The city as text’ in Bocock,
Robert and Kenneth Thompson 1992 Social and cultural forms of modernity by
Donald
J
This book was introduced
by me in the classroom. I was presenting the methodology case studies within
the book.
The research of
categories and images adequate to the metropolis is evident not only in
government reports and social scientific analysis but also in literature and artistic
conventions and in the perceptions and practices of everyday life.
The first chapter of
the book starts with a description of Charles Dickens novel Bleak House (1853).
I choose to read a part
the book to my colleagues as a way of interaction with them and gain their
attention. It was a method that none of my colleagues used from previous presentations
and I thought it would be interesting to try. I pick from the text the description of London which
Dickens so cleverly as a story telling chooses to make the reader think of which
city-metropolis might be describing according to the description. First,
I wanted to test whether the technique of ‘story telling’ description advanced
by Dickens worked for people who are not familiar with either the novels of
Dickens or London and secondly it was worthy to hear the possible answers.
The result of this exercise
was not unexpected as few find the correct answer although were a few that
couldn’t follow my reading due to books language and reading speed. The person who found that the
city that is been describing in the book was London was helped by the atmosphere
that the author was giving as a clue and the weather of the day that is been
describing. However, it worth it to try this method as everybody was very
skeptical on what to answer.
The reason Donald chose to start with the Bleak House and
refer to Asphalt Jungle is that ‘the city’ does not only refer to a set of
buildings in a particular space. – the city designates the space which
is produce by the interactions, social relations of production and
reproduction, practices of government, forms and media of communication.
Through different
sociologists, theorists, theologists, urban planners and architects the author
of the book examined a range of the concept of metropolis. This is because a metropolis is
not only consist with buildings and streets but rather influence from people
and other factors. Thus he gives
examples of the transformation of various cities such as Manchester, Paris and
Vienna and the reason for their transformations. Some of this important people are Michel
Foucault, Sir James Kay- Shuttleworth, Friedrich Engels, Michel de Certeau,
Walter Benjamin, Baron Haussmann, Charles Baudelaire, Camillo Sitter, Otto
Wagner and Le Corbusier. Each
one of the above people gives their analysis regarding the metropolis on the
book.
What does metropolis
mean?
-
The capital or chief city of a country
or origin
-
A very large and busy city
Origin of the word
metropolis- Late Middle English (denoting the see of a metropolitan bishop):
via late Latin from Greek mētropolis 'mother state', from mētēr, mētr- 'mother'
+ polis 'city'.
What are the
constituents of a metropolitan civilization? The role of institutions and
social interactions that bind the city together for example the law, the money,
trade, new technologies?
The
concept of the city and the experience of the city
city is
conceptulaized
the
way that the city is experienced
In the book are
explained two perspectives of the French theorist Michel de Certeau
1st
Perspective:
-
identifies the ‘concept city’ embodied
in ‘utopia and urbanistic discourse’
-
the
discourse must start to producing ‘its own space’ and ‘pure form’
-
He comment that rational organization
must repress all the physical, mental and political pollutions that would
compromise it
Utopia schemes to
banish these ills can thus be seen as a form of repression
2nd
Perspective: This emphasises that the fact of any city is always more diverse,
more messy and more active than reformers find comfortable or comprehensible.
-
The concept of the city can never get
its full measure: an accurate representation would require something more like
the experiential at
-
The rules and combinations of power that
have no readable identity proliferate without points where one can hold them
without rational transparency. They are impossible to administer. This says
something important: that discourses have limits and blind spots.
This
can be explained by the fact that many of the thing people got up to simply
would not fit the categories: they are too unpredictable, inventive and devious
for that.
He suggests that, when
we walk in the city streets, we are engaged in ‘illegible improvisations’. It
is like using a language, as in both cases we operate within a constraining
structure: the streets and buildings of the city from the grammar.
The urban text, Donald
is interested in is the opaque one inscribed by the bustling journeys of people
going about their business.
Rationality
and enchantment: Paris
Haussmann was
responsible for the transformation of the city, with new boulevards, parks and
‘pleasure grounds’ which provided the illusion of social equality. The
practical effect, however, was to raze working-class neighbourhoods and shift
the eyesores and health hazards of poverty to the suburbs.
Napoleon III and
Haussmann wanted to create a clean, light and airy city protected by policemen
and night patrols. They wanted to provide trees, schools, hospitals,
cemeteries, bus shelters and public urinals. The city was redesigned to allow
most efficient circulation of goods, people, money and troops.
Baudelaire coined the
term modernity to identify a pervasive and disturbing experience of newness. His
task as an artist was to capture ‘the ephemeral, contingent newness of the
present’. What become apparent in Baudelaire’s commentary is a consciousness of
an aesthetic based on the resourceful negotiations of the mythical and
metaphorical city.
During the second
empire of Napoleon III urban phantasmagoria of the original arcades spread
throughout Paris
Examples: The Grand
Palais, Trocadero, Eiffel Tower
By the turn of the
twentieth century, the debate about urban planning and architectural inevitably
entailed aesthetic and psychological considerations, social and political ones.
This argument was exemplified by the debate about the modernisation of Vienna.
The
metropolis and mental life
Georg Simmel was alert
to the possibilities of self-creation and sensitive to the city’s parade of
impressions. He stressed the psychological impact of social existence in his
definition of modernity:
The
essence of modernity as such is psychologism the experiencing and
interpretation of the world in terms of the reaction of our inner life and
indeed as an inner world, the dissolution of fixed contents in the fluid of the
soul, from which all that is substantive is filtered and whose forms are merely
forms of motion. Georg Simmel
He presents the
metropolis as the location of the everyday experience of modernity, as a
complex, interwoven web or labyrinth of social relations. Simmel was called the
first sociologist of the emotions and the senses.
The city is an imagined
environment shaped by the interactions of practices, events and relationships
so complex that they cannot easily be visualised. That may be why it is an
environment imagined in metaphors.
The metaphor of the
city as text: has the virtue of avoiding the functionalism inherent in organic
and underlines mechanical images and the interpretive aspects of both urban
experience and social analysis. It makes the point that we ‘read’ the city, and
make sense of a host of complex sign and signals.
The city as text is
comparatively weak when comes to identifying and understanding economic and
political faces. Underplaying the multi-layers and often the contradictory
texture of the city and over emphasising the interpretive role at the expense
of the agency of the urban experience.
Case
study methodology:
Case study research
involves an in-depth study of an individual or group of individuals. Case
studies often lead to testable hypotheses and allow us to study rare
phenomena. Case studies should not be
used to determine cause and effect, and they have limited use for making
accurate predictions.
There are two problems
with case studies
1.
Expectancy effects. Expectancy effects include
the experimenter’s underlying biases that might affect the actions taken while
conducting research.
2. These biases can
lead to misrepresenting participants’ descriptions.
Atypical individuals. Describing atypical
individuals may lead to poor generalisations and detract from external
validity.
This approach may help
to inform practice by illustrating what has worked well, what has been achieved
and what have been issues or dilemmas. It is a type of research inquiry that
examines a real life contemporary phenomenon. (University of Nottingham, 2016)
