In our last issue, we dealt with basic assumptions and premises underlying a Western conception of the city as the habitat of free citizens, and the understanding of such a citizenship in its relation to democracy. In the issue forthcoming, it is about the actual value of these assumptions and premises in recent cities and their successors, the urban agglomerations of today. We are witnessing the times of social media as a new kind of public space. The question arises if the assumptions and premises underlying the understanding of the Western city as it was are still valid; or if our understanding of city, citizenship and democracy has to be radically questioned.
In regards to the traditional, historical city as a place for citizens, for people who live there, mass tourism and AirBnBzation of historical cities has changed this dramatically. In addition, and not confined to historical cities, gentrification and the housing problem has led to the unaffordability of living in the core areas of a city. The city became an investment object, not a place for citizens. Together with these factors, digitalization of cities, lack of places deserving the name in modern cities and other effects led to an actual demise of the city in its traditional understanding, namely to be a place for citizens.
Today’s cities are seeing the deterioration of their city centres, with population moving out, business having to relocate, and abandonment seems to be the signature of the central city. What is left is a space without human beings, without commerce, without parks and gathering areas, just the concrete, steel, and glass of the buildings. This dehumanization of the city has the effect of destroying the concept of community, collective consciousness and the very identity that had built these cities into thriving spaces in past decades. Individuals seeing this cannot see a future in the city for themselves or for their children, the future generation. In turn citizenship is lost, and the question to be asked will be how to rebuild the city core to make it a setting for future generations. The very fact that this abandonment is happening does not bode well for the city, a place that civilized beings in the past had built as a space of culture, community, and belonging.
In many cities the non-development of green areas/parks and other places for people to meet in and have dialogue, as well as having a feeling of belonging is non-existent. Parallel to this the structural setup of transportation, other that the automobile, has lacked creativity and a much-needed updated city planning. Hence this fails community and citizenship itself.
If an active citizenship needs places to unfold where a sense of neighbourhood, belonging and identity can be developed, the majority of recent cities do not meet this criterion. If active citizenship is a premise for free citizens and hence for democracy, where is such an active citizenship possible today? If not confined to protests?
Outlay of Contributions
Loveneet Thakur addresses in Planned Utopia, Unplanned Periphery the changes of Chandigarh in India, a former ideal city built by Le Corbusier, that in new developments that led to the actual demise of the former ideal, together with a loss of the sense for citizenship.
In The Compound City, Francesco Procacci deals with compound settlements, a tendency towards gated communities that isolate themselves from the rest of the city and its inhabitants. A tendency with cumulative impacts for the city as a whole, and for the sense of citizenship as well.
Grant F. Raynham’s Collective Consciousness and Self Identity is investigating consequences that result from the emergence of a new public space, the social media. Paralleled by a weakening of social bondages in both the “old” public space of the city and this new public space, leading to a tendency towards nihilism on a social and individual level.
The contribution of Andy Harrod, Rewilding the Animal who lives with the City, looks at community gardens as a way out of the existing tendencies of social fragmentation and isolation of people. Such gardens revitalize a sense for community and belonging, as a counterforce to the neoliberal practice of individualistic isolation.
Jessie Croteau goes one step further in Let the City Fall Apart. Instead of looking at urban decline as a civic evil only, urban deterioration can be a chance for new developments. It is about decline as the possibility for new, positive unfolding.
In Palimpsest City Juliana Valentim lays the foundations for how the city can be interpreted as a palimpsest archetype and argues that memory can be seen as form of resistance against commodification processes.
Artistic contributions
Artistic contributions help to perceive life in today’s urban and social circumstances in an additional dimension. Together with texts, such contributions lead the way to a holistic perception of the topics dealt with in this journal issue.
In Urban Fragments from Faranak Tiba, relations between citizenship and consumption are looked at, offering perspectives of the urban environment shaped by recent liberal capitalism.
La Grande Bouffe by Isabel Engelmann searches for the cracks in the polished image of the modern city, symbolized by a triptych of three consecutive images. She presents standstills of consumption and void as sceneries, arranged in the tradition of the vanitas motive from former eras.
In When the City Breathes Again, Sonja Bell presents the artist Katerina Belkina‘s with her For All Mankind, a sequence of scenes focusing on a Zeitgeist-relevant manner of an isolated individual presenting itself.
Ulrich Gehmann and Andreas Sieß