Page 228 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

URBANIZATION

Other approaches to the study of urban life put more stress on the cultural
aspects of the city, including questions of class, family life, lifestyle and ethnicity.
For those in a position to enjoy them cities offer unrivalled opportunities for work
and leisure, the context for mixing and meeting with a range of different kinds of 205
people and high degrees of cultural activity and excitement. In big cities as nowhere
else one can eat, listen to music, go to the movies, dress up, set off on travels and
play with identities.
The city can also be understood in terms of representation, that is, it can be
grasped as a text. Representing urban life involves the techniques of writing –
metaphor, metonymy and other rhetorical devices – rather than a simple
transparency from the ‘real’ city to the ‘represented’ city. Representations of cities –
maps, statistics, photographs, films, documents etc. – summarize the complexity of
the city and displace the physical level of the city onto signs that give meaning to
places. Representations of the spatial divisions of cities are symbolic fault lines of
social relations and a politics of representation needs to ask about the operations of
power that are brought to bear to classify environments. By revealing only some
aspects of the city, representations have the power to limit courses of action or
frame ‘problems’ in certain ways.
Links Capitalism, city, modernity, political economy, power, representation