Imagining the Urban in Space and Time

The purpose of The Urban Imagination is to re-conceptualize the essence of the city and, through the establishment of patterns and parallels between separate settlements, make it more accessible and manageable in the pursuit of practical objectives. If there is one pervading theme throughout the course of this academic endeavor, it must be the realization of the city as a multidimensional phenomenon, ably defined in real terms of time and space, but also imbued with aggregated human perspective. One essay from Hum 54’s guiding tome in theory, The Blackwell City Reader, emphasizes this premise particularly well: Franco Moretti’s “Homo Palpitans: Balzac’s Novels and Urban Personality.” As a means of commenting on the literary work and achievements of Honoré de Balzac, Moretti lends insightful thought to the philosophical implications of urban organization and surmises that cities’ spatial structure enable vast social networks that extend beyond any discrete moment in history; elements of the past, present, and future exist within urban confines and are accessible through the lens of human imagination that ably associates events with locations. Such postulates manifested themselves in some of the crowning achievements of this scholastic campaign: The Omeka exhibits that relate some metaphysical motif to a particular city of study, and, in doing so, bear another fundamental aspect of The Urban Imagination – the utilization of a multitude of informational collection and presentation techniques that include field investigation, secondary research, and an array of digital tools that characterize humanistic work in the twenty-first century.