Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City

  by Alev Cinar and Thomas Bender
University of Minnesota Press. London, 2007
290 pp., illus. 15 b/w, col. Trade, $75; paper, $25.00
ISBN: 0-8166-4801-8; ISBN: 0-8166-4802-6.

Reviewed by Martha Patricia Niño Mojica
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Bogotá

Facultad de Artes Visuales

Carrera 7 Number 40-62

Colombia

ninom@javeriana.edu.co

The book discusses changes in the traditional concept of the city. It is not possible to represent a city in an objective way because it depends on the experience of each observer. The analysis of the city is done through three main topics: the city and its boundaries, competing narratives of the city, and the relation between city and nation.

The chapters take into account various themes related to urban imaginaries created through cinema, market relations, literary imagination, the official discourse of the state in front of immigrants, and gender relations. Rather than employing an abstract and decontextualized definition of modernity, the study considers locally produced meanings. In those urban imaginaries, Los Angeles is depicted through the discourse of NAFTA treatments and anti-migrant phobia of the 80’s that seem to be decreasing due to the raising of a “Hispanic Hollywood”. The borders of the city shift along with narratives of cultural citizenship and identity. Paris is analyzed from the point of view of its commercial arcades, formerly described by Walter Benjamin and also through the haussmannization of the city. Cohen draws attention to how 18th century Paris despised its waterways due to the ideology of the time that celebrated stability, unity, and fixity instead of flow, process, and transience suggested by water. Laleli- Istanbul is seen as place that redefines what we understand as city because it is a borderline with transnational markets. Therefore, it is defined more in terms of flows of people, goods, and money, rather than in terms of a physical space. In places like Ankara the conceptualization of the “world city” is closely related to world commerce. The city is not conceived as background for globalization, but as its primary factor. On the contrary, Amman is labeled “not a city” because it exhibits lack of globalization, market, nightlife, and it is mainly composed of displaced people who do not really have a bound of identity with the city.

The city is also represented through cinematic experiences. Jaguaribe examines the favelas in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo that constitute a city without maps. In this sense — they resemble Douala — a place that is not coded, structured or mapped in any known official way. Their urban imaginaries seem to offer a blend of violence with pretence trickery, profusion of talk, new words, new images, and new styles. They also signal the emergence of a new “realist fiction” that seeks to revitalize experience through the “shock of the real.”  The shock of the real is fabricated through brutal crimes, murders, shootings, violent disputes, tumultuous events and the destruction of identity. The representations of the favelas can be read as a synecdoche of the nation — while it resembles a spectacular American action film — devoid of realism.

The city also becomes an interesting object of social pathology. For example, Beirut is seen through the discourse of the rebuilding of the nation, after a bloody civil war that lasted 15 years and almost tore apart the whole country. The aim of the architectural strategy was to erase the memory of the civil war, thus, the center of the city was reconstructed in the absence of a strong national identity.

The spectre of post-colonial history that still haunts many countries, including Israel. This is another chief aspect, which is analyzed. Its conflicting urban narratives question Jaffa and Tel Aviv as neither urban, nor modern, nor public.

The book has no previous analysis of what modernity means, nor strong allusions to the role of industrialization in the creation of the cities — other than Paris — nor a clear differentiation of modernity, modernization, modernism, or postmodernism. The notion of technological progress and its paradoxes are not mentioned in the book. So, it is up to the reader to figure out how those conceptual elements interact with the urban imaginaries of the cities. The compilation of essays offers interesting examples of cities that challenge the notion of a hard city with clear borders and the way in which the media construct realities that are valuable for architects, historians and artists.