The City

"Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide -- extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space. Unlike Rome, new York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of praoxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding."

-- Michel de Certeau, "Walking in the City", The Practice of Everyday Life



I know people who profess a love for New York as if the city were an intimate friend. And in many ways, the city has become The City, both animated and personified. I hesitate to cite Sex and the City -- because, seriously, how obvious and tired an example is that -- but the show has made New York into a glamorous persona of its own. Who is Carrie Bradshaw, or indeed any of the ladies, without the beautiful, intimidating, and Sphinx-like background of The City?


What I do think is amazing is the ways we have come to conceptualize urban space. City brings to my mind grand skylines, and some cities have come to be defined by the peculiar features of their horizon: Seattle's Space Needle, Dallas' Reunion Tower, New York's World Trade Center (which is as evocative in its absence as it was in its presence). This view of the city (what Michel de Certeau would term "god's gaze") is so alluring that painters in the Middle Ages began depicting their urban spaces from this perspective even though the means of realizing the vantage-from-on-high -- namely, skyscrapers -- did not then exist. A specific subgenre of impressionist paintings, which sought to depict the realities of urban life, often adopted a bird's eye perspective so that it could reveal, in one sweep, all the motion and anonymity of city life (shown Claude Monet's Boulevard des Capucines, 1873). But this is not how we actually experience the city: in our daily lives, we more often walk the alleys of the city than see its peaks. I'd like to think that the expansive horizon of the city is so attractive not because we are voyeurs looking for an image of other people's lives, but because we are looking for a reflection of our own, and perhaps a confirmation that we are, happily and inescapably, a part of The City.