The need of a multimodal approach to the study and representation of the city

“The notion of urban culture is inevitably very broad and difficult to delineate…Urban culture is commonly used to draw attention to those aspects of city life which give cities a distinct flavor and sensibility, a specific sense of place, an atmosphere, which might define one city as different from another, or which define the city in ways that are not reducible to the local economy or even the social mix of the people who live there.

            Cities are constituted, culturally, by a complex mix of their histories, architectural legacy, topography, industries and commerce located there, by their cultural industries, by the juxtaposition in close proximity of a diversity of groups, by the cultural practices performed there—from graffiti to opera, and countless other influences which constitute the cultural life of the city.”

                       

Introducing Urban Politics and Urban Cultures, The Blackwell City Reader (2^nd edition), p. 255

 

As the setting and source for sociocultural life, cities are by definition highly complex entities. From a physical perspective alone, cities are formed by multiple elements: paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks, as Kevin Lynch proposed[1]. But the urban complexity extends way beyond a purely materialistic sense. Cities give rise to endless human experiences and their infinite, multicolor aspects; cities are the stage where these experiences come into being, unfold, and conclude, not without leaving important traces behind, material or immaterial. Cities thus come to represent a canvas where human lives come together across time and space to give the city a distinct flavor and sensibility, a unique “urban culture”.

This urban culture is anything but monolithic. A city is complex not only because of the large number of material and immaterial elements that comprise it, but also because these elements are enormously diverse in nature: from their physical, architectural, geospatial layout, to their historical, sociopolitical and economic aspects, to their sensory perception, sights, sounds, smells, to the psychological states arising from the combined experiences of the aforementioned elements.

 

The video below captures the sights and sounds of daily life in different European cities. It was added here as an (somewhat unrelated, yet beautiful) illustration of the inexhaustable complexity of the city life.

 

HAPPY life from mojebory on Vimeo.