The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life

摘要

The modern city has always stirred the imagination of urban scholars. In the course of the twentieth century numerous books have been dedicated to how urban life intersects with a transition from the supposedly closed world of traditional cultures to a society which is seen as open, unpredictable, labyrinthine and heterogeneous. Generally, the study of 'the modern city' has focused on a rather univocal trajectory, which runs from the political revolutions and cultural experiments in nineteenth-century Paris and the political culture of avant-garde art and literary experiments in Berlin and Vienna, to the rise of popular culture in New York and the oft-proclaimed 'ending' of modernity in the postmodern metropolis of Los Angeles.