The American City

The American CityAmerican Cultural StudiesDenan SubaiDamir SalkoviEmir HaliloviMiralem HrustiCan we read the city?One aspect of how we imagine America is as a vast city that appears to be all around us.However, despite its constant presence in our lives, the city remains mysterious and unknowable, like a familiar text whose final meaning evades us as we attempt to read it.The different layers of meaning within the city are hard to fathom and vary depending on where you read them from.

Can we read the city?Adopting this approach allows us to question these dominant interpretations and seek alternative ways of reading.There are many ways of reading such a text and the post-structuralist approach, where meaning is always in process and a text is a multi-dimensional space, sees the city as a chain of meanings in competition with one another, with certain interpretations emerging as dominant at certain points in time.By calling this diversity the city we acknowledge that the city is an imagined environment expressed through various discourses that constitute it.

Competing Versions of the CityJohn Winthrop spoke of his vision of a new community which employed the ideal of a heavenly city but whose image would be constructed through narrative.The problem of reading the city can be traced back to the foundation of America.The ever-differing notions about the nature of the city are typical of the ways American cities have been read.

This kind of conflict is indicative of the city as meaning in process rather than as fixed and static.The conflict has continued to be represented in the 20th century through numerous works, as is evident in the e.g. Woody Allens film Manhattan (1979), where the narrator is trying to write the definitive version of the city he loves, but finds the task at hand impossible.Competing Versions of the City

The Desire for Control and OrderThe American city is a text created, a story written by people who sought to impose their vision of order and designs upon the world, and to some extent control the wilderness into a contained and disciplined environment.But despite the constant effort of city planners to create a model of order and social control, the design of the city has always been at odds with the way people live within it, as if there is a natural resistance to the aforementioned desired principles.

The Desire for Control and OrderThe city planners also dreamt of erasing the working-class cultures offensive and disturbing foreignness in an attempt to contain and order the complexity of the city by incorporating the values of system and hierarchy into the lives of the streets.This has been termed a clash between civic horizontalism and corporate verticality, where the corporation accesses the tower as a symbol of its power and the rest of the city exists down below in its shadow.

The Undivulged CityEdgar Allan Poes The Man of The Crowd (1845) deliberates upon the meaning of the city suggesting that it is like crime itself whose essence is undivulged.The city, embodied in the story, is unreadable and somehow always beyond final comprehension.Those who try to fix its patterns into a single, identifiable shape are merely seeking to impose on the amorphous plurality of the city a set order and discipline, just like the narrator in Poes story believing such variety can be read and categorised.

The Persuasive LightOne of the novels in which the energies and the consequences of city life are explored in detail is Theodore Dreisers Sister Carrie (1900).For Dreiser, the city is a drug whose commerce is insatiable, a craving that leads us on into an endless cycle of desire and lack thus asserting Stephen Cranes sense of the city as a place of hierarchy and status where alienation, superficiality and selfishness are the norm.

In the novel, the city has cunning wiles which attract with the gleam of a thousand lights... the persuasive light; and represents the world of urban commerce as a beacon pulling in moths like Caroline Meeber (Carrie). The Spaces of the CityAn emphasis emerged upon the need to control this burgeoning environment that is the city and attempt to make it work for people rather than against them.The notion of a hysterical city had to be harnessed and brought to order and a number of social disciplines arose as attempts to do just that.The growth of the skyscraper suggested a new vision of the city which was exuberant and triumphant, but which cast great shadows down below.

The Spaces of the CityEdward Hopper is an example of an artist whose work was fascinated by the raw disorder of New York and its many spaces. In his art, the city takes many forms, moving away from a place of social elitism towards a world of moral relativism replacing the older fixed standards. A painting of his, Office at Night, takes us into the world of the office full of messages about city life which draws us back to the idea of the city as nothing short of complex and ambivalent.

Collage CityTo contrast the effort at portraying the city as a seamless whole, Hubert Selby Jr.s novel Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) expresses the brutalities and deprivations of urban life without unitary resolutions or hopeful escapes.Here, the city is more of a collage with the highly differentiated spaces and mixtures of the contemporary city. Seeing the city in this way, as a collage where texts intersect with other texts and where no single reading can ever be final returns us to the idea of the city as a place of competing discourses in an eternal contest for power.

Collage CityIn Estate, a silk-screen painting, Robert Rauschenberg plays with our perceptions constantly altering our point of view, creating the sense of collage and signifying a lot of things amongst which the motion and whirl of the city.

Jay McInerneys Bright Lights, Big City (1984) is an extraordinary urban text which asserts the sense of a post-modern city, a republic of voices, echoing the idea that all groups have a right to speak for themselves, in their own voice, and have that voice accepted as authentic and legitimate.Living with the CityRap is clearly an urban musical form grown out of the conditions of the city, mixing and sampling from the voices all around it.But what gives rap an important place in the soundtrack of the contemporary urban life is the unique combination of post-modern city rhythms with provocative, relevant lyrics.The Message (1982) was an early example of raps urban engagement against poverty, deprivation and inequality, its video a collage of city scenes, slums and graffiti.

Conclusion, is it possible?All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1983), by Marshall Berman, is a provocative book which discusses the nature of the city experience and its title, with its insistent irony and ambiguity, stands as a fine expression for the problems of trying to grasp the urban condition in any quantifiable way, for as soon as you have it, it disappears or meta-morphoses into something else.THE END