Blackwell Reference Online

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In this chapter I want to consider three fundamental discourses of the city: the authoritarian city, the cosmic city, and the collective city. These are ideas of the city as well as urban social relations, intellectual discourses as well as political forces. They are chosen from the many possible, because I feel they have a special resonance at this millennial juncture. Cities are sites of social aggregation that involve compulsion, order, and discipline as well as freedom, anarchy, and self-realization. In recent years, the latter rather than the former have been stressed. While it is important to see the city as a site of individual and collective emancipation, a tradition that incorporates Marx and Engels as well as Nozick and Milton Friedmann, it is just as important to remember that the city is an imposition and adherence to a series of master narratives. From Rameses II to Frank Gehry, through Baron Haussmann and Le Corbusier the city has been inherently authoritarian, sometimes totalitarian and occasionally fascistic. All ideas are relational. However, this notion of the urban as discipline is not contrasted to a pastoral freedom. I am not counterpoising a brutal urban with an idealized rural. If comparisons need to be made I draw upon Bruce Chatwin's notion of the nomadic alternative. In a series of essays and particularly in his book The Songlines he argued that nomadism ... log in or subscribe to read full text