CITY, VO L. 4, NO .

2, 2000

Tales of the city: Situating

urban discourse in place and
time
Simon Parker
Our understanding of cities must depend to a significant extent on an awareness of the
language, including its figurative resources, that we use. In an exploratory reading of some
stages Antique, Renaissance, Industrial, Post-Modernand related figurative devices
used to characterize the development of cities, Simon Parker presents a cyclical rather than
a linear account. It may then be instructive at one level, for instance, to compare the bread
and circuses of late antiquity with the rhetoric used by the new city builders of postmodernity in which in the space-time compression of production and habitat the
aggregation of finance capital is busy disaggregating the human capacities on which this
fatal accumulation still depennds.

his paper begins from a simple and

obvious premise: certain social phenomena, and quite possibly all social
relations, are so complex and unbounded
that no one account, nor even a compendium of all hitherto existing and future
accounts can ever present us with a complete picture of the whole. The Cubists,
understanding the limitations of conventional two dimensional painting on the use
of perspective tried to show what the gaze
concealed as much as what it revealed.
Surrealism, took this unveiling further, by
making visible the dream work of the
unconscious. In literature, the function of
narrative is to animate past, present and
future in the authorial metadiscourse of
the narrating subject. The narrator is the
medium through which the chaotic and
seemingly random episodes of individual
life histories are brought together and
explained. Invariably the subtext of this

secular evangelist is utopian and homilistic,

in much the way that Scheherazardes Tales
of the 1001 Nights or the picaresque vignettes of Chaucer and Boccaccio contained
within them the ethical DNA of the modern morality tale. In other words, in telling
only part of the story we intend to say
something about the whole story, but what
we succeed in communicating is not how
life is, but how life should be.
As I want to argue, urban analysis is no
less prone to the deployment of narrative
as a means of rescuing a teleological order
from the chaos of the urban experience.
However, rather than rejecting narrative
as a myth sustaining discourse, I want to
explore the potential insights that critiques
of narrative-as-ideology (or self-sustaining
representations of the social order by its
privileged power holders) can offer as an
alternative to linear, evolutionist accounts
of urban development.

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/00/020233-14 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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CITY VO L . 4 NO . 2

Foucaults Genealogy of History and the

City
In the tropological space Hayden White
identifies in Foucaults History of Madness
and Civilisation we can identify four distinct
narrative tropes:1
metaphor (resemblance)
metonymy (adjacency)
synecdoche (essentiality)
irony (doubling)
It follows, writes White, that if discourse
takes its origin in a tropological space, it
must unfold within one or another of the
fundamental modalities of figuration in
which a relationship between words and
things can be construed. Consequently, the
style of a discourse, its certain constant
manner of utterance, can be characterized in
terms of the dominant trope that establishes
the originary relation between words and
things and determines what can be said
about things in proper discourse. For
Foucault tropology thus constitutes the basis
of the episteme of an age in the history of
thought and expression. It also provides a
way of characterizing the sequence of epistemes that make up the history of thought
about the topics he has studied in his major
books: madness, clinical medicine, the human
sciences, incarceration, and sexuality. This
theory of tropes is what underlies and
therefore clarifies his own characterization of
his archaeological method, namely the
play of analogies and difference. Sameness,
or rather its perception, becomes the basis of
social praxis where the manipulation of
Sameness and Difference permits the social
group to initially identify itself as a unity, and
then to form hierarchies of more or less
different groupings, some more alike than
others, some more sane, more healthy, more
rational, more normal, more human, than
others.2
Because Foucaults methodology resists
any form of executive summary, it is best to
illustrate the concept of tropology in Fou-

caults own account of the history of madness and civilization.3 In Foucaults genealogy of madness, for example, each trope
corresponds to a distinct representation of
madness associated with a definite period in
time. This genealogy occurs as each discursive formation undergoes a finite number of shifts before reaching the limits of the
episteme that sanctions its operations. Unfortunately, Foucault provides no clear explanation as to why such shifts occur or what
causes the threshold of the episteme to be
breached. Here I think historical materialism
offers a response, since each discursive crisis
would appear to be associated with a distinctive change in the mode of production (from
antique to feudal society, from feudalism to
mercantile or proto-capitalism, and from
early capitalism to the era of high capitalism).
This process is not immediate and visible, but
the relationship between words and things
must be dialectical if the process Foucault
describes is dynamic and capable of effecting
changes both in the object world and in its
forms of representation.4
Thus in the Middle Ages, madness is
symbolically associated with divine truth and
acts as a metaphor for sanctity. In what
Foucault calls the Classical age (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), madness
is set against Reason in the mode of contiguity or adjacency so that the insane are
physically confined to secure institutions at
the limits of (but still within) the confines of
reasoned society. In the nineteenth century,
the insane are partially freed from their
association with criminals insofar as madness
becomes medicalized and pathologized as an
incompleteness of the mental faculties.
Hence the emergence of the synechdocal
trope in this period is associated with the
birth of the asylum as a refuge wherein the
incomplete can be separated and protected
from wholesome society. By the twentieth
century, with the birth of the clinic and the
discovery of psychiatry and psychoanalysis,
Foucault views the claims of mental biologists such as Charcot and Freud to liberate
the subject from madness as ironic because

PA R KER : TA LES
therapy remains a stranger to the sovereign
enterprise of unreason. In other words, it
tries to present a conversation between the
rational and irrational mind in terms of a
positive science, and denies the catachresis
that any dialogue between reason and madness must create. Here irony is used in the
sense of doubling where madness is identified with both normality and genius through
the identity of the patient and the mad
artist. In the former the quest for normality is
implicit in the concept of neurosis (or the
pathological state of the normal subject), in
the latter excess is taken as proof of the
possession of a transcendental gift or power
that makes a permission of a radical alterity
that would otherwise be treated or
punished.
If the urban theorist is in some sense a
critic of urbanism, then it is useful to
conceptualise the city as a multi-authored
work whose socio-economic functionality
while important cannot be seen as determinant of its polymorphous form. Even in a
conventional Marxist reading the city is not
the outcome but the site of class struggle,
hence the autonomy of the city (as a special
territorial embodiment of the state) consists
in its capacity to generate a plurality of
spatial imaginings in much the same way that
a work of literature (or art, or drama, or
music) contains the visible traits of authorship, but also those systems of meaning that
transcend or overdetermine the intentions of
the author. Just as everyday speech reproduces the hidden grammar inherent in each
language system, so the practice of everyday
life in the city reproduces (unintentionally)
the grammar of its own spatio-temporal
trope. In the remainder of the paper, I try to
apply Foucaults tropological schema to the
epistemic formations of the city in the
antique, renaissance, industrial and postindustrial (or postmodern) epochs (see Table
1). The tropology of the city in this account
has a longer duree than that developed in
Madness and Civilisation, and its epistemic
breaks appear at different diachronic intervals (for example I make no epistemic dis-

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Table 1. The tropics of urban form

Metaphor (resemblance)
Metonymy (adjacency)
Synecdoche (essentiality)
Irony (doubling)

Antique City
Renaissance City
Industrial City
Post-modern City

tinction between the renaissance and the

classic periods).
To add a final health warning, in no sense
should this enterprise be seen as offering a
rival account of the development of the city
such as that attempted by Weber, Mumford
or Sennett. The interpretative schema I propose, while drawn from sequential historical
time frames are not to be seen as time-place
dependent. Rather, a given urban formation
can be seen to exhibit aspects of one or more
tropes alongside (or better within) the dominant trope that provides the epistemic key
to any given urban complex. The metaphor
for the paradigm is closer to that of the
Chinese box whose volume can be expanded or collapsed than the idee fixe of a jigsaw
puzzle of interlocking sub-narratives that
together comprise the big picture.

The Constitution of Urbanity: The

Archetypal City in History and Theory
The city is the form and symbol of an
integrated social relationship: it is the seat
of the temple, the market, the hall of
justice, the academy of learning. Here in the
city the goods of civilisation are multiplied
and manifolded; here is where human
experience is transformed into viable signs,
symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of
order. Here is where the issues of
civilization are focused: here, too, ritual
passes on occasion into the active drama of
a fully differentiated and self-conscious
society. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of
Cities5
Corresponding in the collective
consciousness to the forms of the new

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CITY VO L . 4 NO . 2
means of production, which at first were
still dominated by the old (Marx), are
images in which the new is intermingled
with the old. These images are wishful
fantasies, and in them the collective seeks
both to preserve and to transfigure the
inchoateness of the social product and the
deficiencies in the social system of
production. Walter Benjamin, Paris: Capital
of the Nineteenth Century 6
Any community . . . is in some degree built
on fantasy. Richard Sennett, The Rise and
Fall of Public Man 7

At first sight it seems more straightforward

to ask the question: What is a city? rather
than What is urban discourse? But as we
begin to go more deeply into the question it
soon becomes obvious that in giving a formal
definition to the urban we are also describing its content. Necessarily then we are
engaged in a language game where the terms
of reference for the object of scrutiny prefigure the conclusion we are likely to draw
about its essential characteristics. Specifically,
the form and function exhibited by particular
cities in discrete places and times have been
characterized as evolutionary antecedents of
the modern city. I am not suggesting that this
approach is necessarily wrong, but that it is
possible to consider alternative readings of
the urban experience that might help us to
think more imaginatively about what a city
was, is and perhaps what it ought to be. This
requires us to think about time and space in
a less linear sense than has previously been
the practice among urbanists and urban
historians.
When we think about cities, are we thinking about a set of relations, institutions or
structures that differ substantially from society as a whole? The conventional response is
to say on the one hand yes, and on the other
hand no. Cities are both spaces where
ordinary human activity takes place, but
they also provide unique facilities and opportunities that only a particular concentration
of population, knowledge and resources can
permit. Thus it is possible to assert that the

city is not a microcosmos of human society

tout court, but that it constitutes the best
medium for the growth of new social practices, institutions, technologies, cultures and
mores. This emphasis on growth and novelty
is important because it distinguishes the
urban experience from what we might call
traditional society. Anthony Giddens sees
the city as the forerunner of modernity in the
capacity of the urban habitus to generate selfreflexivity. This is not the same as sustaining
an interest and awareness in the lives and
activities of other members of the community, but is a manifestation of routinized
behaviour that produces structures, institutions, norms and values, which combine to
produce a system of interaction that is
capable of being reproduced in space and
time.8
The first determinant of citiness, is this
sense of collective otherness in relation to
those who could be defined as countrydwellers. Simmel makes much of this identity of difference in his essay the Metropolis
and Mental Life.9 Here the dichotomy city/
country prefigured all other distinctions
between modern and traditional societies
such as liberal/conservative, intellectual/
physical, sophisticated/rude. In a sense then
the city always already existed as an intentional community whose members recognized in their peculiar form of voisinage and
metier a unique territorial identity that was
denied their country cousins.
But in what concrete sense does the
difference reside? Taking Mumfords example it is helpful to identify some essential
characteristics of the city that are transcendental, and which are common to metropolitan settlements in all places and in all
historical epochs. Such features would
include a commercial centre, a politicoadministrative apparatus, a place of learning
and a repository of knowledge, a space for
collective worship and entertainment, and a
means of legitimate coercion (see Table 2).
In the following sections I explore the
ways in which the identity of the city can be
viewed through the interpretive framework

PA R KER : TA LES
Table 2. Archetypal features of the city
1
2
3
4
5
6

An agora (or market)

A forum (or deliberative assembly)
A studium (or place of study)
A temple (or place of worship)
A garrison (or institution of legitimate coercion)
An arena or theatre (or place of public spectacle)

outlined above. In the final section, instead of

resorting to a synthetic conclusion which
would run counter to the intention of the
readings offered below, I leave some unanswered questions or rather post some road
signs towards what I hope are more one-way
streets than dead-ends.
The Metropolis as Metaphor: The City of
Classical Antiquity
It should be immediately obvious that the
features or institutions of urban life that I
have just described above are most characteristic of the Athenian city around the 4th
century before the birth of Christ. It is also
the case that contemporary societies, though
urbanised to a greater or lesser extent,
generally lacked the second and often the
third feature of this typology (Sparta for
example was never a democracy, and its
academy was dedicated to military training
and the skills essential for producing effective
warriors). Although the production of public
culture was certainly not exclusive to the
Athenian empire, its impact on the later
Roman Empire and on Western culture and
aesthetics sui generis cannot be underestimated. This is all the more remarkable given
that the population of ancient Athens never
rose to more than that of a small English
town.
Although they disagreed vehemently with
rival scholars and politicians over the ideal
form of civic governance, Plato and Aristotle
took it for granted that citizens (literally city
dwellers) were the constituents of civil-

O F TH E CITY

237

isation, and that those who lived directly

from the land were inferior and deserved to
be enslaved. However, the relationship
between Athens and the Attican hinterland,
or indeed the wider Athenian empire is more
complex than might appear at first sight. In
Athens, status derived from membership of
the deme which originally had been distinct
rustic communities dating back several centuries where kinship bonds formed the basis
of the duties and obligations (such as military
service) required of its members. Weber
points out that demic identity as a legal status
remained of primary importance in the civic
administration of Athens long after many
ancient deme had ceased to exist as physically
distinct communities. Blood ties and lineage
thus remained important sources of power
and authority in the polis despite the formal
equality enjoyed by its citizen legislators.10
This rather modern notion of citizenship
based on ethnos 11 (a legal status that still
applies in the Federal Republic of Germany
today) was accompanied by a highly unusual
form of state governance. For Runciman,
[t]wo necessary conditions are paramount.
First, a polis must be juridically
autonomous in the sense of holding a
monopoly of the means of coercion within
the territory to which its laws apply.
Second, its form of social organization must
be centred on a distinction between citizens,
whose monopoly of the means of coercion
it is, who share among themselves the
incumbency of central government roles,
and who subscribe to an ideology of mutual
respect, and non-citizens, the product of
whose labour is controlled by the citizens
even if the citizens do the same work (when
not under arms). The poleis which survived
and indeed in the Hellenistic and even
Roman periods were, therefore, poleis in
name only: they were urban communities
with a life of their own, but not
citizen-states in the sociological sense.12

If the Weberian genealogy of Runcimans

thesis is betrayed by his emphasis on the
monopoly of the means of coercion he

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CITY VO L . 4 NO . 2

makes it explicit in the following passage

where we read that in order for a polity to
exist
It only matters that its members are
wage-workers in a formally free labour
market, or junior kinsmen, or free tenants
or smallholders who are not, however,
entitled to carry arms. And finally, it
follows that the Weberian distinction
between a patrician city
(Geschlechterstadt ) and a plebeian city
(Plebejerstadt ) cuts across that betwen a
polis and an aristocratic warrior-state in
which the relations between patrons and
armed retainers, or commanders and
professional troops, or knights enrolled in
military orders and lay brothers or servants,
are more important than those between
citizens and non-citizens.13

Runcimans insistence on the absence of

hierarchy as a defining characteristic of the
Greek polis is interesting because Weber tries
to argue the same quality distinguishes the
late medieval or renaissance city from its
feudal counterpart. It is the absence of
arbitrary structures of vertical authority that
allows the medieval city to develop as a
commercial and intellectual centre, and ultimately to develop as the prototype for a
Zivillgesellschaft, which in their different
ways Sennett and Habermas identify with
the development of the public sphere in
social life.14
Thus the Athenian model constitutes a
metaphorical city in two senses: it serves as
an imaginary ideal or repository for all future
urban design and urban planning in the West,
and in the concept of the polis and politei we
see a duplication of political identity based
on a universal (if restricted) notion of citizenship that allows for the spatio-temporal
reproduction of Athens without the loss of
self reflexive identity that rival empires
appeared to experience. In other words, the
Athenian stood for Athens and Athens
stood for the Athenians. As Runciman
points out, this rather unusual politic-cultural-martial complex did not survive as a
form of territorial governance beyond late

antiquity, but its tropical legacy was bequeathed to Rome where the Athenian model was
refined (or perhaps vulgarised) but certainly
improved in terms of the organization of its
political economy, so that a mimetic urban
culture could be established from Cumbria
to Gaul and from Romania to Alexandria.
The Renaissance City: Urbanity as a
Vocation
From the fall of Roman Empire to the end of
the Dark Ages, the city as trope is lost in
history as the archaic form of traditional
society re-establishes itself with spectacular
vigour. It is not that cities cease to exist in
this period, but only in the Middle Ages does
urban discourse once more emerge as an
object of theological and philosophical
reflection in its own right in the concept of
civitas. The cities of the late Middle Ages
share the trope of metonymy, or relatedness.
Citizenship is a status that is above all
associational. It should not surprise us therefore that this is the period of history most
closely associated with the development of
guilds and of learned societies, and is associated with the foundation of gymnasium and
universities. The burghers of the late Middle
Ages develop as an exclusive caste and
provide the social foundation for what is to
become the industrial bourgeoisie. As Habermas and Sennet demonstrate, this is only
made possible though the creation of public
space.15 The piazza and the place become
key symbolic locations for the performance
of a public theatre of status display that shifts
the private world of the courtesan onto the
street. The demotic thus becomes an inescapable and necessary experience for an urban
nobility that through its collective consumption of culture begins for the first time to
inscribe the city with a consistent ideological
form.
The palazzi of the Florentine Medici are
only the most celebrated examples of this
urbanisation of seigneurial power in the
Renaissance, and although Italy provides the

PA R KER : TA LES
most comprehensive distribution of the citystate in its various guises (republican, theocratic, princely, oligarchic), many other
examples exist from the Hanseatic cities to
the Low Countries to Switzerland. The
steady growth in agrarian accumulation and
the improved trade routes and navigation
from the twelfth century onwards were
clearly major factors in the rebirth of civic
culture. However, it was the shift from
status to contract as the form within which
the content of urban society was played out
that unlocked the potential for a newly
emergent episteme. In the renaissance city,
sameness and difference could be reconstituted across new axes of signification
(particularly after the Reformation) along
lines of confessional identity, of education
and culture, and place.
At this time, cities begin to diversify into
distinct topographical communities of identity bearing subjects, and to the established
Hebrew Ghetto established by the Venetian
authorities are added new diasporic cities
within the city where contiguous settlements such as that of the Huguenots in
Spitalfields can live adjacent to but remain
symbolically (and in the case of the Quartier
Latin of the Parisian left-bank) often physically separate from the urban elite for whom
the existence of urban markets and an urban
producer class has become a sine qua non of
their continuing enrichment. While in the
town houses that were constructed in the
larger European cities in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, this physical separation
assumed a lateral dimension with resident
servants quarters located in the basement
part of the dwelling, with the uppermost
stories and roof space rented out to poorer
artisans, tradesmen and apprentices.
Of course the city, as Weber points out
has always contained elements from most
varied social situations and even in Antiquity free men, bondsmen and slaves emerge
alongside noble landlords, their court officials and servants.16 However it is not the
chance physical mixing of different social
elements that gives the renaissance city its

O F TH E CITY

239

metonymic quality, but the constitution of

difference through the sites of production
and exchange in so dynamic and powerful a
fashion that feudal elites are forced to grant
autonomous charters to the cities which
begin to organize themselves as mercantile
cartels that soon begin to rival the Court and
the Church as the patrons of the beaux arts
and the academy. From this period also
originate the secret associations (such as
Freemasonry) that are to provide a potentially subversive counter-organization and
ideology to decadent absolutism.

Last Exit to Brooklyn: Or the Swan and

the Minotaur
The growth of a great city is amoeboid:
failing to divide its social chromosomes and
split up into new cells, the big city
continues to grow by breaking through the
edges and accepting its sprawl and
shapelessness as an inevitable by-product of
its physical immensity. Lewis Mumford,
The Culture of Cities 17
What sphinx of cement and aluminium
hacked open their skulls and ate up their
brains and imagination? . . . Moloch whose
buildings are judgement. Allen Ginsberg,
Howl 18

In Baudelaires poem Le Cygne the poet

uses the death by thirst of the swan as an
allegory on the destruction of the forme
dune ville, but this death is counterposed by
the transfigured emblems of fragility which
together form a counter-world of the beautiful.19 Benjamin recognized in Baudelaire a
desiring imaginary that seeks to describe a
landscape of ennui and ecstacy which only
the Grossstadt (or metropolis) can offer as
the painful and glorious decor of civilisation.20 In this formulation the city is
constantly striving to escape the bonds of
classical and classicizing art through the
substitution of the solemnity of nature by
that of industrial labour where obelisks of
industry vomit a legion of smoke against

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the heavens.21 But even in the act of describing Baudelaires evocative rejection of the
classical aesthetic, Benjamin cannot avoid
recourse to classical metaphor: obelisks
become chimneys, the military power of the
Roman legionnaires is transfigured into the
steam and smoke of industrial capitalism.
Elsewhere we encounter the majesty of the
piles of stone; those spires pointing their
fingers to the sky as so many secular
cathedrals dedicated to the cult of
mammon.22
In the American city, and especially in the
secular cathedrals of Manhattan, we find the
pure exegesis of the industrial city as synecdoche not just for America, but for a dream
image of modernity that Europeans could
only hope to realize by emigrating. A city of
aliens, designed and built by foreigners, and
imitative of a defunct aesthetic style that
earned New York City its adoptive title
Gotham. If the Great American city is the
labyrinth of modernity, then its Minotaur
is the neo-Haussmanite figure of the
venture capitalist-cum-public entrepreneurcum-speculative builder of Robert Moses.
Moses gave New Yorkers more than two
tablets of stone, he gave them the Triborough
Bridge, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, turned
the ash heaps of Flushing Meadow into a
veritable Wimbledon-on-Bayside and converted hundreds of hectares of marginal
land into his signature Parkways. Moses
wanted to bring the discrete tribes of New
York city into a synchretic metropolis that
would give a hitherto undreamed of unity to
these islands sacred to the indigenous tribes
who hunted and fished along its shores long
before the arrival of the Dutch, the French
and the English.23 Yet it was the Regional
Plan Association (RPA) that decided to put
an end to the chaotic adjacency of the Middle
European diasporic metropolis that threatened to usurp New York Citys modernist
aspirations. As the Chief Economist to the
RPA and a leading figure in the movement
for the comprehensive redevelopment of
New York in the interwar period
complained:

Some of the poorest people live in

conveniently located slums on high-priced
land. On patrician Fifth Avenue, Tiffany and
Woolworth, cheek by jowl, offer jewels and
jimcracks from substantially identical sites.
Childs restaurants thrive and multiply where
Delmonicos withered and died. A stones
throw from the stock exchange the air is filled
with the aroma of roasting coffee; a few
hundred feet from Times Square with the
stench of slaughter houses. In the very heart
of this commercial city, on Manhattan
Island south of 59th street, the inspectors in
1922 found nearly 420,000 workers employed
in factories. Such a situation outrages ones
sense of order. Everything seems misplaced.
One yearns to rearrange things to put things
where they belong.24

This is a revealing tableau of the synechdocal

mind at work the city is conceived as a scale
model of the universe in which utopian
engineering on the grand scale through the
interchangeable agencies of power, capital
and knowledge can finally realize its potential. However, the new metropolis had not
only to possess functional rationality but also
to provide the greatest possible stage for
modernitys futuristic drama. It was Siegfried
Giedion, Marshall Berman informs us, who
immortalized Moses early version of SimCity as the apotheosis of the modern movement in urban design.25 Moses parkways
were compared to Cubist paintings, to
abstract sculptures and to the movies. Fritz
Langs dystopian vision of Metropolis is
projected back to the future as ironic mimesis, and the circle of art-imitating-life-imitating-art is complete.
Surrounded by water yet unable to drink,
the population of the Bronx slowly dies, the
neighbourhood where Berman grew up we
now know as an international code word for
our epochs accumulated urban nightmares:
drugs, gangs, arson, murder, terror, thousands of buildings abandoned, neighbourhoods transformed into garbage- and brickstrewn wilderness.26
The road that Moses built, the Cross-Bronx
Expressway, cuts through the boroughs centre, but offers deliverance only to the thou-

PA R KER : TA LES
sands of motorists who negotiate this deadly
fast, brick-lined conduit in a parody of
Giedions injunction to experience the spacetime feeling of our period while driving.27
The automobile may have been in at the
death of the Great American city, but to
choose an inapt metaphor it did not pull the
trigger. The Fordist City which sought to
integrate life, work and spectacle was ironically undone by the product of its own
manufacture, so that the condensation of
time-space through automotive and locomotive travel occasioned the exploding metropolis and the 100 Mile City of H.G. Wells. Yet
the suburban hollowing out of the metropolis had been encouraged since the late nineteenth century by rus in urbe campaigners
from Patrick Geddes and John Ruskin to
Ebenezer Howard, Raymond Unwin and
Octavia Hill. The resultant Garden City
movement can be seen as the oxymoronic
triumph of a sham urbanism that deploys the
synechdocal fiction of the urban farmer
(beloved of William Morris in News from
Nowhere ) as a social exclusionary class front
for Hampstead Garden Suburb and Levittown. As we have seen, the synechdocal trope
of industrial cosmopolitanism was already
reaching the limits of its epistemic tolerance
for a non-instrumental contiguity with the
dangerous classes as it built the barricadeproof boulevard, and the ghetto-proof
expressway. The demotic no longer offered
the prestige of spectacle; it merely lowered
land values and obstructed CBD-friendly
investment projects. In the following section,
the postmodern city emerges as an ironic
response to the failure of egalitarian modernity to rescue civilization from its accumulating urban discontents.

Leaving Las Vegas . . . London . . . Los

Angeles: The Postmodern City, or the
non-space urban realm of the commodity
form
Every city has its share (often increasing
and in some instances predominant) of

O F TH E CITY

241

concentrated impoverishment and

hopelessness, of malnourishment and
chronic diseases, of crumbling or stressed
out infrastructures, of senseless and wasteful
consumerism, of ecological degradation and
excessive pollution, of congestion, of
seemingly stymied economic and human
development, and of sometimes bitter social
strife . . . In some of the advanced capitalist
countries that dystopian vision has been
strongly associated with the long-cultivated
habit on the part of those with power and
privilege of running as far from the city
centres as possible . . . the upshot has not
only been to create endless suburbanization,
so-called edge cities, and sprawling
megalopoli, but also to make every village
and every rural retreat in the advanced
capitalist world part of a complex web of
urbanization that defies any simple
categorizations of populations into urban
and rural in that sense which once upon a
time could reasonably be accorded to those
terms. David Harvey, Cities or
Urbanization? 28
The city and the urban cannot be
recomposed from the signs of the city, the
semanthemes of the urban, although the
city is a signifying whole. The city is not
only a language but also a practice. Henri
Lefebvre, Writings on Cities 29

To ironize is to play fast and loose with

meaning, or rather to play to dress up,
take on a role, imitate (hence Fredric Jamesons preference for the term doubling
where [after Foucault] a discursive style is
turned in on itself).30 But it is not simply the
form of postmodern cities that draws attention to the ironic use of classical or gothic
styles in political economies far removed
from the conditions of their original creation.
Rather, we are concerned here with the
advent of a publicly deployed narrative of
power and space where there is no longer any
necessary relationship between urban form
and the content of city life. Neither does
technology any longer require metonymic
contiguity, thus for many (if not for a
significant minority) location becomes votive

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CITY VO L . 4 NO . 2

and expressive and the life world is replaced

by the lifestyle.
As with previous urban tropes, this set of
spatio-temporal polarities is not new, rather
the novelty consists in the de-linking of
power strategies and their social outcomes
through an increasingly sophisticated universalization of utopian metadiscourses
where on the one hand urbanity has been
substituted for an infinite variety of themed
domiciles, while the power poor are increasingly forced into the interstices of a compulsory cosmopolitanism (the ghetto, the
shanty, the street . . . ). Of course the city has
always been topographically inscribed by the
power maps of its class antinomies. The
Manchester that Engels described in the
1840s (which David Harvey rightly regards
as a classic of urban analysis) is worth
reproducing at some length as a corrective
against the narrative of deceit peddled by the
current Whig establishment:
With the exception of (the) commercial
district, all Manchester proper, all Salford
and Hume . . . are all unmixed working
peoples quarters stretching like a girdle,
averaging a mile and a half in breadth
around the commercial district. Outside,
beyond this girdle, lives the upper and
middle bourgeoisie in regularly laid out
streets in the vicinity of working quarters
. . . the upper bourgeoisie in remoter villas
with gardens . . . in free wholesome air, in
fine comfortable homes, passed every half
or quarter hour by omnibuses going into
the city. And the finest part of the
arrangement is this, that the members of the
money aristocracy can take the shortest
road through the middle of all the
labouring districts without ever seeing that
they are in the midst of the grimy misery
that lurks to the left and right. For the
thoroughfares . . . suffice to conceal from
the eyes of the wealthy men and women of
strong stomachs and weak nerves the
misery and grime which form the
complement of their wealth.31

Many contemporary Mancunians would

have little difficulty identifying their city
from Engels description at over a century

and a halfs distance. But in this excerpt of

Mike Daviss account of modern Los
Angeles, a defensible space planning that
the Victorian bourgeoisie could only dream
of reaches its apotheosis
The city bristles with malice. The carefully
manicured lawns of the Westside sprout
ominous little signs threatening ARMED
RESPONSE! Wealthier neighbourhoods in
the canyons and hillsides cower behind
walls guarded by gun-toting private police
and state-of-the-art electronic surveillance
systems. Downtown, a publicly subsidized
urban renaissance has raised a forbidding
corporate citadel, separated from the
surrounding poor neighbourhoods by
battlements and moats. Some of these
neighbourhoods predominantly black or
Latino have in turn been sealed off by the
police with barricades and checkpoints. In
Hollywood, architect Frank Gehry has
enshrined the siege look in a library that
looks like a Foreign Legion fort. In Watts,
developer Alexander Haagen has pioneered
the totally secure shopping mall, a
latter-day Panopticon, a prison of
consumerism surrounded by iron-stake
fences and motion detectors, overseen by a
police substation in a central tower.
Meanwhile in Downtown, a spectacular
structure that tourists regularly mistake for
a hotel is actually a new federal prison.32

There are few better (or worse) manifestations of the ironic as an urban design trope in
the service of an oligarchy of politicians,
rentiers, speculators, capitalists and repressive state agencies as Los Angeles the only
city to have experienced a suburban riot. The
studium and agora now appear as the garrison, while the captives of Americas unofficial civil war live within the facade of
Caesars palace. Wacquant makes a distinction between the communal ghetto of the
1950s which developed in the wake of the
mass rural migrations from the South, and
the very different black inner-city of the
1980s and 1990s which he terms the hyperghetto. The communal ghetto was compact,
sharply bounded, and comprising a full

PA R KER : TA LES
complement of black classes bound together
by a unified collective consciousness, near
complete social division of labor, and broadbased communitarian agencies of mobilization and representation. In this sense it
corresponded to a metonymic community
within the synechdocal continuum of the
Fordist city. It was what I have termed an
embedded time-space nucleus built around
the constraints of poverty and race which
shaped its spatialization within the North
American economy (particularly in the cities
of Chicago, Detroit, New York, Los Angeles
and Washington D.C. which offered the
possibility of casual manual labour and
affordable shelter).33 The communal ghettos
temporalization occurred after the legal segregation of African-Americans ended and as
their confinement within the neo-feudal relations of production that still prevailed in the
South began to disappear.34
The hyperghetto, by contrast, is the product of a shift in government policy and in the
restructuring of capital away from the war
on poverty of the 1960s to the war on
welfarism of the 1980s and 1990s. Ironically,
as the civil rights reforms helped some blacks
into further education and hence into middle
class occupations, unlike their parents generations this newly mobile group of AfricanAmericans has tended to choose the path of
exit rather than of loyalty.35 Middle class
black flight from the power-poor space of
the inner city is typical, it can be argued, of
the shift in identification that results from
social mobility. Hence, in the case of 1930s
London, parts of the East End such as
Whitechapel were predominantly Jewish, yet
within the space of two generations that
entire population had moved to the suburbs
of north and northwest London, while the
East End is now home to a new generation of
Bengali, Kurdish and African migrants. This
is where the post-industrial meets the postmodern in the commodification of immigrant space through resort to ironic discursive tropes such as Banglatown to
promote Bengali Spitalfields and Whitechapel as cultural spaces.36

O F TH E CITY

243

However, for the blacks and Hispanics

living in the redlined zones of South Central
Los Angeles, their exclusion from society
extends to the impossibility of assuming a
mortgage, a loan for a car, or even acquiring
a bank account, as John Singletons movie
Boyz n the Hood amply demonstrated. But
no one appears to be offering movie tours of
Compton after the example of the Full
Monty pilgrimage to the altogether more
comfortable proletfolk of Sheffield. This may
be because the intensity and remorselesness
of the decitizenship of the urban poor is
turning vast swathes of urban America into
one vast decommodified non-space urban
realm,37 and this is only one facet of the
retreat from proximate community that is
casting a terrible shadow over the viability of
the city in the face of the endless expansion
of the commodified non-place urban realm
from Orange County to Guandong.38

A conclusion that isnt . . .

. . . Our historians, who are the most
penetrating on the globe, have invented a
method to correct chance. It is well know
that the operations of this method are (in
general) reliable, although naturally, they
are not divulged without some portion of
deceit. Furthermore, there is nothing so
contaminated with fiction as the history of
the Company. A palaeographic document,
exhumed in a temple, can be the result of
yesterdays lottery or of an ageold lottery.
No book is published without some
discrepancy in each one of the copies.
Scribes take a secret oath to omit, to
interpolate, to change. The indirect lie is
also cultivated. Jorge Luis Borges, The
Lottery in Babylon39

Discursively and epistemically we can say

that the postmodern city corresponds more
identifiably to the city of classical antiquity
than to the industrial or to the renaissance
city. The Greek belief in the cyclical nature of
time is displaced in the Enlightenment by a
metahistorical belief in the constant evolu-

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CITY VO L . 4 NO . 2

tion of society towards a complete mastery

of nature and the establishment of Augustines heavenly city as a heaven on earth.
From here, Voltaires Dr. Pangloss enters the
academies and the corridors of power and
sets out to reform the chaotic spontaneity of
rus in urbe with Haussmanns boulevards
and Robert Moses bulldozers. The rational
city reaches its apotheosis in the brutalist
modernism of the Stalinist city from Novy
Sibirsk to Brno where form followed function so slavishly that the monolithism of the
polity could only be reflected in the compulsive
monotony
of
its
didactic
monumentalism.
In Italo Calvinos Invisible Cities there are
several accounts of visits to what we assume
to be the same city, but we can never be sure.
Indeed we cannot be sure that the city itself
even exists, just as we cannot be sure if Marco
Polo ever did reach the Forbidden City of
Beijing. But as Benjamin continued to ask,
where does the fabulous end and the eigentlich (actual or real) begin in the historical
geography of urban life? Are the archaeologists of the ancient Andean cities poorer
historians because they do not possess the
census returns and parliamentary commission reports available to historians of urban
Europe since the late nineteenth century? Is
speculative reconstruction of the quotidian
routines of Pompeii before the volcano less
credible, less meaningful, less true than the
community studies of Young and Willmott
or Wirth, Redfield and Park? Is Booths
account of urban poverty better than Balzacs
or Zolas or Dickens or merely different?
Let us take a pluralist position and say for
the moment that urban discourse any
writing, speech, artefact, performance or
display that has the city for its subject
cannot be judged in terms of its exclusive
claim to truth. What then are the criteria for
comparing one account (or if we prefer
narrative) with another or others? For
Benjamin as for Baudelaire, beauty lay at the
heart of the work of Grossstadtverstehen
(metropolitan research), the Idea of the City
could not be represented through data, but

only in the profane and symbolic qualities of

language.40 Wiliam Blakes apocalyptic
poetry offered a similar vision of city life
where the terrible dichotomy between
heaven and hell is seen most vividly around
the steps of the great cathedrals. I believe the
real purpose of urban critique is to unlock
the dual hermeneutic that requires not only
an answer to the question what is the city,
but what are the terms in which such a
question is posed? What is the content of the
knowledge form in which the temporalspatial phenomenon of the city is grounded?
What, if we like, is the theology on which the
heaven of Las Vegas and the hell of Sarajevo
are built? For as Habermas apr e` s Benjamin
reminds us meaning is not produced by
labour, as value is, but can at most be
transformed in dependence upon the process
of production.41
If conventional methods of historical
enquiry seem to me unsuited to this task it is
because the notion of time as a linear
progression seems unconvincing in its heroic
account of the ascent of man. Modernity is
two-dimensional in its understanding of
space-time, deriving from the Enlightenment
its faith in a realizable future, a future that
offers the prospect of resolving the contradictions immanent within human society.
This is a vision that finds its apotheosis in
Hegel and which is contested by Heideggers
assault on the concept of ontologically fixed
space-time boundaries and the teleology of
history.
In this context it is pertinent to question
the purpose of a historical method which
takes for granted the internal coherence of its
own epistemology in a moment of genuine
crisis for the social sciences and humanities,
where for some time the ritual contrapositions of enlightened liberalism and
Marxism have failed to produce any real
variation on the canonical thought of nineteenth century industrial capitalism. In dismissing the many vacuous pronouncements
on the end of history through the globalisation of liberal market capitalism, it is
important to take seriously the rhetorical

PA R KER : TA LES
tropes employed by the new city builders
where in the space-time compression of
production and habitat the aggregation of
finance capital is busily disaggregating the
human communities on which this fatal
accumulation still depends.

Notes and references

1 H. White, The Historiography of Antihumanism in
The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and
Historical Representation, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1987, p.119
2 Ibid. p.117.
3 M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization. A History of
Insanity in the Age of Reason, Routledge, London,
1999.
4 Marxs account of this relationship in The German
Ideology of 1846 remains the most succinct and
compelling portrayal of the universalization of
bourgeois values in the very surface appearance of
things.
5 L. Mumford, The Culture of Cities, Seker &
Warburg, London, 1938. p.3.
6 W. Benjamin, Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth
Century in P. Kasinitz, Metropolis. Centre and
Symbol of Our Times, Basingstoke, Macmillan,
1995. p. 48.
7 R. Sennet, Community Becomes Uncivilized
reprinted in ibid. p.247.
8 A. Giddens, Living in a Post-Traditional Society in
U. Beck, A. Giddens, and S. Lash, Reflexive
Modernization. Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in
the Modern Social Order, Cambridge, Polity, 1994.
See also A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society.
Outline of a Theory of Structuration, Cambridge,
Polity, 1984.
9 G. Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life in K.
H. Wolff, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Free
Press, Glencoe, 1950.
10 M. Weber, The City, New York, Free Press, 1966,
p.206.
11 Though interestingly the original term ethne did not
mean tribe per se, but non-Athenian tribe.
12 W. G. Runciman, Doomed to Extinction: The Polis
as an Evolutionary Dead-End in O. Murray and S.
Price, The Greek City: From Homer to Alexander,
Oxford, Clarendon Press, pp. 347367 (p.348)
1990.
13 Ibid., p. 367, 348.
14 J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere, Cambridge, Mass., 1989. R. Sennett,
The Fall of Public Man, London, Faber & Faber,
1986.
15 Ibid.

O F TH E CITY

245

16 Weber The City, p.92.

17 Mumford, The Culture of Cities, p.234.
18 Cited in Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air,
London, Verso, 1983, p.290.
19 H. R. Jauss, Reflections on the Chapter Modernity
in G. Smith, On Walter Benjamin. Critical Essays
and Reflections, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press,
1995, p.182.
20 The quotation is from W. Benjamin, Charles
Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,
London, New Left Books, 1973. pp.88 ff.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Robert Fitch downplays Moses role in the
development of New York when he asserts that
. . .just about every highway and bridge credited to
Robert Moses was conceived and planned by the
RPA. Moses simply poured the concrete on the
dotted line. Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New
York, London, Verso, 1993, p.59. But could one not
equally well argue that Baron von Haussmans
dramatic reconstruction of Second Empire Paris
would never have been built without the active
patronage of Napoleon III?
24 Robert Haig, The Assignment of Ativities to Areas in
Urban Regions. Regional Plan of New York and its
Environs, New York, 1927, cited in Fitch, The
Assassination of New York, p.60.
25 S. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture. The
Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge, Mass.,
Harvard University Press, p.169. 1941 quoted in M.
Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Interestingly,
Giedion was also Walter Benjamins favourite
architectural writer, and Benjamin quotes Giedion
approvingly as a devotee of Le Corbusiers use of
air and light to subvert the interior/exterior
dichotomy of traditional architectural design. See E.
Leslie, Space and West End Girls: Walter Benjamin
versus Cultural Studies, New Formations, 38
Summer 1999, pp.110124 (p.115).
26 Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. p.290.
27 Giedion cited in ibid. p.302.
28 D. Harvey, Cities or Urbanization? City,12,
January, 1996, pp.3861 (p.38).
29 Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, Oxford,
Blackwell, 1996, p.143.
30 White, The Historiography of Anti-Humanism, p.110.
31 Cited in Harvey Cities or Urbanization, p.42.
Engels conclusion is that As long as the capitalist
mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to
hope for an isolated solution of the housing question
or of any other social question affecting the fate of
the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the
capitalist mode of production . . .
32 Mike Davis, Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization
of Urban Space in M.Sorkin (ed.) Variations on a
Theme Park, New York, Hill and Wang, 1992,
reprinted in Kasinitz, Metropolis, p.355.

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CITY VO L . 4 NO . 2

33 S. Parker, Community, Social Identity, and the

Sructuration of Power in the European City, paper
to the City of Durban Conference, University of
Natal, June, 1998.
34 L. J. D. Wacquant, The New Urban Color Line: The
State and Fate of the Ghetto in PostFordist America
in C. Calhoun, Social Theory and the Politics of
Identity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994, pp. 231276
[p.233].
35 See A.O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty.
Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and
States, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press,
1970 for the original formulation of this much
adapted behavioral model.
36 The information (not the interpretation) on
Banglatown originates from a paper by Michael
Keith given to the symposium Sustainability and the
Information City reported in the last issue of City,
Vol 4. No. 1, April 2000, p. 129.
37 The term is freely adapted from Charles Rutheiser,
Imagineering Atlanta. Making Place in the
Non-Place Urban Realm, London, Verso, 1996.

38 Some households in Guangdong province in

Southern China have a higher household income
(over $20,000) than many census districts in the
Bronx and Brooklyn (and South Central Los
Angeles), yet this fact has done little to unsettle the
cherished hierarchization of First, Second and Third
World cities in the general urban studies literature.
Fitch, The Assassination of New York, p.23.
39 From Labyrinths. Selected Stories and Other
Writings (ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby),
Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1980, p. 60.
40 Charles Rosen, The Ruins of Walter Benjamin in G.
Smith, On Benjamin, p.157.
41 J. Habermas, Walter Benjamin:
Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critque, in ibid.
pp.90-p.111

Simon Parker is Lecturer in Politics at

the Department of Politics, University of
York, Heslington YO1 5DD. E-mail
sp19@york.ac.uk.