The city's imagination

How do we imagine the city? Or, perhaps more fittingly, how do we imagine the city imagines us?

We expect both a transience and a permanence from our urban landscapes: we expect our every move to imprint grooves and capture moments, and yet we acknowledge and even glorify the ephemerality of a constantly shifting space.

“Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing.” (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 6).

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Cities form the centers of our worlds, the hubs of development, and are thereby further pressured to reflect both the historical weight of the past and the cutting-edge potential of the future. We expect cities to serve as simultaneous repositories for memory and engines to churn forward. The space itself is bent by time, and time is variously defined by space, forging out of the city a metamorphic rock, a palimpsest of intertexts and marginalia. 

Using rock, paper, and scissors, we craft monuments to particular present moments of the city, knowing that these mimetic texts will themselves become termite paths in the crumbling structures we construct, knowing that as intentional and authorized our attempts at ordering the chaos, time and space will overgrow, muddle, and meld together an everchanging cityscape.

“If you pluck a special moment from life and frame it, are you defying death, decay, and the passage of life, or are you submitting to it?” (Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul, 14).

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The only option, it seems, is to continue to pluck out these moments, tracing them back to where they've been knotted and tangled temporally and spatially. Isolating three dimensions of the city– the nature, the manufacture, and the human– we can seek to better understand the complexity of the city and the imaginative capacity we project it to have.

 

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