Urban Imaginaries-locating The Modern City

摘要

Because we experience only a small fragment of the city in our everyday lives, the city as a whole entity exists, in the words of Anthony King, "only in our heads." Using Benedict Anderson's notion that nations are imagined communities, it could be stated that cities are imagined environments as well. The articles in the edited volume by Alev Cinar and Thomas Bender focus on cities from this perspective. They analyze the ways in which social and physical urban spaces are imagined, and the daily practices of urban inhabitants are investigated as consequences and expressions of these images. Cities are highly complex mixtures of diverse places and social groups, yet each city is mostly identified as a single entity in which its multifaceted aspects are unified. This unification is brought about through practices of city administration but also through specific images of the city. These images are specific discourses that are, for example, manifested in unique ways people talk or think about the city.