Re-Presenting the City

Abstract

Classic representations of the city have focused on simplistic urban dichotomies such as renewal or decline, poverty or prosperity, and vice or vigor. We are left with the question of what actually constitutes a city and what makes it and its people succeed or fail. Recent writing on the city, however, has begun to question the images, metaphors, and discourses through which the contemporary city is represented.Discussing recent visual, architectural and spatial transformations in New York and other major world cities in relation to the themes of ethnicity, capital, and culture, Re-Presenting the City moves between interpretive representations of the newly emerging metropolis and the theoretical and methodological questions raised by the task of such representations. Contributors with backgrounds in urban planning, sociology, cultural studies, architecture, art history, geography, and philosophy reflect on the construction of both the real and the unreal city, the images, metaphors and discourses through which the contemporary city is represented, and the texts which both mediate our experience of, as well as contribute to producing, the city of the future.