Archive for the ‘urban’ tag
public space, democracy, consumption
public space: Call for entries for the 2014 European Prize for Urban Public Space
aim of recognising, encouraging and publicising examples of good practice in the ways in which European cities are dealing with the many challenges they must confront. Undergoing processes of exponential growth and far-reaching transformation, these cities are facing the fact that the age-old democratic ideal of striving for cohabitation on an equal basis within a plural society is in jeopardy. Segregation and inequalities, unsustainable construction and consumption or serious deficiencies in guaranteeing the right to housing and the right to the city are problems that are tangibly manifest in urban public spaces, and it is precisely on this front where they can be combated with better results.
“The Metropolis and Mental Life”
The concept of the flâneur is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity.
While Baudelaire’s aesthetic and critical visions helped open up the
modern city as a space for investigation, theorists, such as Georg Simmel,
began to codify the urban experience in more sociological and
psychological terms. In his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life”,
Simmel theorizes that the complexities of the modern city create new
social bonds and new attitudes towards others. The modern city was
transforming humans, giving them a new relationship to time and space,
inculcating in them a “blasé attitude”, and altering fundamental
notions of freedom and being:
| “ | The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon man to free himself of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Man’s nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others. Nietzsche sees the full development of the individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists to being leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super-individual contents of life. (“The Metropolis and Mental Life”) |