Re-Presenting the City

Representations of the city have typically focused on urban dichotomies such as renewal or decline, poverty or prosperity, and politics or culture. These simplistic portrayals leave many fundamental questions unanswered. What constitutes a city? What images and discourses are used to construct it? What makes city dwellers succeed or fail?

Discussing recent visual, architectural and spatial transformations in New York and other major world cities in relation to the themes of ethnicity, capital, and culture, Re- Presenting the City moves between interpretative representations of the newly emerging metropolis and the theoretical and methodological questions raised by the task of representation itself. Contributors from an wide range of backgrounds--urban planning, philosophy, sociology, folklore studies, cultural studies and architecture--reflect on the construction of both the real and the unreal city, the images, metaphors and discourses through which the contemporary city is represented, and the texts which both mediate our experience of, as well as contribute to producing, the city of the future.