Blackwell Reference Online

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Cities are not simply material or lived spaces – they are also spaces of the imagination and spaces of representation. How cities are envisioned has effects. Urban designers and planners have ideas about how cities should look, function, and belived, and these are translated into plans and built environments. Cities are represented in literary, art, and film texts, and these too have their effects. The public imaginary about cities is itself in part constituted by media representations as much as by lived practices. Ideas about cities are not simply formed at a conscious level; they are also a product of unconscious desires and imaginaries. This Companion starts with these city imaginaries to illustrate the power of ideas, the imagination, representations, and visions in influencing the way cities are formed and lived.Here we pursue two themes which organize thinking on the relationship between the city and the imagination: how the city affects the imagination and how the city is imagined. Although there are obvious links between these two they are a useful way to think about imagining cities.The effect of the city on the imagination contains a tension between the conditions of the city stimulating or constraining the imagination. On the one hand cities are creative, places that encourage the imagination, sites of stimulation. People with different ideas come together in cities ... log in or subscribe to read full text