Introd 2 Metropolis: The City as Text

1. Introd2Metropolis: The City as Text Concept City vs. Lived City Image:

2. Outline • Starting Questions • Review and Map • Concept C (2): Vienna’s Ringstrass • Lived C (2): G. Simmel • Concept C (3): Le Corbusier • Lived C (3): Space of Flows Image:

3. Review Questions 1. What are the advantages and limitations in the ideas of ‘concept city’ and ‘lived city’? How do we experience a city? 2. What have we known so far about urban planning? The metaphors some theorists used and their implicit ideologies? 3. City as grid: What do you think about the prevailing surveillance system in a city? 3. The differences between the city as space of rationalization, and as magic space? The connections between Baudelaire and Benjamin? 4. What is a flâneur? (439) Can we be flâneur or flâneuse? Are there other ways of walking in the city?

4. Concept City vs. Lived City

5. Concept C (2): Vienna's Ringstrasse The Ringstrasse is a wide avenue which encircles the old city of Vienna, Austria.

6. Vienna's Ringstrasse

7. Vienna's Ringstrasse: Problems Due to the massive nature of the Ringstrasse, the buildings served to draw attention to the open space, an inversion of these Baroque ideas. (source) Roads leading inwards towards the inner city from the suburbs, did not continue uninteruppted to the city center, but were drawn into the circular flow of the Ringstrasse, causing a seperation of city and suburb, not physically, but by urban design. Similar? The roundabouts in Taipei The Ringstrasse source.

8. Vienna's Ringstrasse: Problems • Furthermore, the buildings constructed along the Ringstrasse were not organized towards each other, but towards the street itself, further focusing the attention on the Ringstrasse. • Two critiques: • Sitte: finds that Ringstrasse betrays traditional values; wants to return to baroque-style, seeing the city in organic terms, • Otto Wagner, prefers modern aesthetic forms. (444) • What do we learn from this example? In what ways are our lives and personalities shaped by urban design?

9. London: Past & Present • Past: Sir Christopher Wren (1632 --1723 London's Great Fire of 1666 gave Wren a chance to present a scheme to rebuild the city. Utopian in concept, it was only partially realized. E.g. St. Paul Cathedral source) • Present: • Manhattanization of its business center • Dorkland renovation & gentrification

10. Georg Simmel (1858-1918) Urban mentality: The blasé attitude – 1.Definition: dictionary: bored or not excited, or wishing to seem so. 2. cause: bombardment of the senses + involving one fragment of personality "boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé because it agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all.“(468)

11. Blasé Proposition: The psyche of the Metropolis inhabitant is over stimulated through the "intensification of nervous stimulation" resulting in an inability to react at all. It is felt that this is an inverse relationship. As the stimulation increases so does the inability to react. Whereas, one could presume that if the stimulation was intermittent, one could react intermittently. Furthermore, if the stimulation ceased, one could react always. (source) p. 468 • See our excerpt for different types of impression and their influences-- p. 466 • E.g. moving through traffic, “a series of shocks and collision”; in a large city – looking at but not talking to people.

12. Sources of indifference: Urban Environment • Dominated by money economy + intellectualism (466) + excessive stimuli matter-of-fact attitude  indifference to individuality. (also 469)  calculative mind. • P. 470 loss of individuality and personal life

13. Simmel: City vs. Country • In a rural or small town context we find a personality born of the “smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase”, it “rests more on feelings and emotional relationships”; • in the city, meanwhile we find an “intellectualistic” psyche which through an “intensification of consciousness” has developed a “protective shield” with which to survive rapid “fluctuations and discontinuities in the external milieu.”

14. the urban psyche:summary • Has mastered instrumental calculation, the quantification and assimilation of diverse data • Has become indifferent towards others (blasé) • Has gradually suppressed feelings or emotions • Do you agree? Are all of our responses similar to nervous reflexivity?

15. Le Corbusier • Total modernism • Clear the city of its cesspools (e.g. slums, etc. p. 447) • Develop and separate a city’s fourfunctions: housing (high rises), work, recreation and traffic (from pedestrians) • Utopian – turning the city into a park • Re-design our lives.  middling modernism and public housing projects

16. Le Corbusier Villa Savoye, by Le Corbusier, at Poissy, France, 1928 to 1929.

17. Le Corbusier

18. Lived City (3):The Global City Global city: gentrification, globalization and ghettoization  the “rest” in the West: the important contributions of immigrants (455) Conclusion

19. References • GreatBuildings.comhttp://www.greatbuildings.com/gbc.html • Vienna's Ringstrasse http://www.macalester.edu/courses/geog61/aaron/ • Le Corbusier 1. http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Centre_Le_Corbusier.html 2. http://www.tu-harburg.de/b/kuehn/lecorb.html