essay on modern city

483 Words Short Essay on modern City Life

City is a place where life has become modern and comfortable and also mechanised. It is a huge habitation with brilliant life and life style to be seen everywhere.

For a correct assessment of city life we have to look at both the pros and cons of the city life, understand its advantages and disadvantages, and its merits and demerits.

People throng to a city basically for their employment i.e. for a means for a living or earning. This of course is absolutely necessary for all human beings and a city offers more avenues and has greater potential for jobs and there are more job opportunities. It is for this main reason that people come and crowd the cities.

This does pay as; the city has more to offer for people of all categories. This is not available in smaller places or villages. No matter what the talents and capacities of individuals, all of them get absorbed in cities as; it offers them all the power to sustain themselves.

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Since every individual is busy looking for opportunities of livelihood there is bound to be in city a tough competition. Whether it is a competition for a job, for an examination or space or an office, or, as much as, even an area for begging, a city offers a very keen competition for all no matter what they follow.

This in turn results in the obvious tensions and hurry found in city life. In a city if we watch for some time, the impression we get is that, everyone is or at least seems to be running to his destination, lest someone else reaches there before.

There is besides the tensions of city life, a lot of glamour in most of them. This glamour also has its own attraction for the people rushing to cities. Life style becomes good as, there is a lot of money flowing in a city.

Just as job avenues are in plenty, the entertainment avenues are also in plenty. These avenues of entertainment and the light of glamour in cities have their charm and also their drawbacks.

The city children try to ape the scenes they see around full of glamour and priceless enjoyment. Seeing all this when most of them grow to be bereft of most of this, they feel left out and frustrated.

One most attractive point of city life is that here we find multifaceted avenues of education, which is completely lacking in small places. This gives the children a vast spectrum of choices of study to follow.

No matter what each child in a city is fond of doing, he/she is sure to find a place where his/her avenue of studies is taught. This is a great advantage to the children in cities, and this is exactly why, the city children are smarter and more exposed to the world, compared to their counterparts in villages.

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Essays About Cities: Top 7 Examples and 10 Prompts

If you’re writing an essay about cities, discover helpful examples of essays about cities and prompts in our guide to help stir your creative thoughts. 

Cities are the most stable social organization that has stood the test of time. A place achieves city status not only because of the sheer size of its population but also because of its territories, economic development, and political influence. Creating sustainable and resilient cities has attracted significant attention from academics, policymakers, civic groups, and the private sector over the years. This interest is spurred by pressing threats to the livability of cities, such as flooding, pollution, urban migration, and congestion. Whether you live in a city or dream of city life, writing an essay on this topic is a fantastic way to convey your thoughts on this topic. 

Check out below some amazing essay examples and prompts to help you create an insightful essay.

7 Best Essay Examples

1.  cities are scrambling to prevent flooding by casey crownhart, 2. putrajaya: the capital city you’ve never heard of by ronan o’connell, 3. japan’s hidden jewels: the abandoned island of hashima by hannah bergin, 4. planning to preserve — keeping heritage relevant in cities by marcus ng, 5. building the city of the future — at a $41 trillion price tag by aneri pattani, 6. 8 highlights from enabling masterplan 2030 to empower persons with disabilities by shermaine ang and goh yan han, 7. how cities are using technology to solve their trash problems by nell lewis, 10 writing prompts for essays about cities, 1. all about your city, 2. anti-congestion policies in your city, 3. fixing flood-prone cities, 4. green cities, 5. city vs. countryside, 6. cities in the metaverse, 7. what are megacities, 8. criminality in cities, 9. bucket list cities, 10. agriculture in cities.

“In many cases, their existing systems are aging and built for the climate of the past. And even upgrades can do only so much to mitigate the intense flooding that’s becoming more common, leaving cities to come up with other solutions.”

In this article, Crownhart delves into how states across the United States are experiencing unprecedented flood levels that are drowning out entire towns. While a total upgrade is urgent, it is also insanely costly.

“Building Putrajaya from scratch also afforded generous opportunities for innovation. Mahathir’s goal was to make Putrajaya Malaysia’s most eco-friendly urban centre and its most modern.”

In this Essay, O’Connell describes some capital cities we may not know of. Focusing on Malaysia, we learn that Putrajaya aimed to serve as Malaysia’s next capital during the worsening congestion in Kuala Lumpur. Now, Malaysia’s administrative and judicial capital offers the lure and peace of a sleeping eco-haven.

“A coal-mining site during the Meiji Restoration, Hashima has since been completely abandoned. All that remains of the once thriving site, are the crumbling bones of deserted buildings.”

Looking at some economic issues within cities, Bergin describes the coal mining industry within Hashima. Hashima was once a host to a thriving coal mining industry, but people abruptly left once the mine reserves had depleted. Now, the remnants of its glorious industrial past can only be glimpsed through Google images. 

“Preserving historical buildings and neighbourhoods helps to maintain a city’s distinctive character and engender a sense of belonging. The social fabric is also strengthened when planners work with local communities to create new and relevant uses for old spaces such as industrial neighbourhoods.”

The essay visits the culture and heritage preservation policies and efforts across various cultural cities, both old and emerging. Marcus Ng describes the importance of preserving significant buildings that enhance a city’s unique history and culture.

“As cities invest in air-quality sensors, solar-powered trash compactors, self-healing power grids and more, the opportunities for private industry are huge. Experts say there is just one problem: It’s virtually impossible to measure the return on investment for many leading-edge technologies first being put to use by the public sector.”

In the following decades, cities could be shelling out $41 trillion to build their smart capabilities to take living standards to the next level. However, a looming problem remains, and that is estimating a return from this investment. Pattani discusses the importance of building smart and sustainable cities.

“A new task force will work on designing alternative employment models such as micro jobs – temporary, task-type jobs – which can support more people to work, and increase the number of organisations that commit to being inclusive through the Enabling Mark and Enabling Employment Pledge.”

Among the top countries known for its friendliness to persons with disabilities (PWD), Singapore continues to roll out new efforts to make PWDs more at home in this Lion City. This intriguing essay shows how to progress with essential socio-economic growth within a city.

“As urban populations continue to grow, some cities are struggling to cope. Many are turning to new technologies for cost-effective solutions to clean up waste.”

From AI, automation, and converting waste to energy, cities are drawing up innovative measures to address their growing waste problem. In this essay, Lewis describes how technology can be used to tackle recycling issues in condensed and highly populated cities.

Read on to see writing prompts and ideas to help you get started:

This essay could serve as an ultimate city guide. First, write about the history of the city you line in, including the figures that envisioned and helped make the city blueprint a reality. Then, talk about its economic development and architectural changes over the decades. Finally, recommend the best landmarks tourists should visit.

Traffic congestion can easily rob a city of billions of dollars a year. But it remains the biggest challenge, especially for business hubs. For this essay, share how immense the congestion problem is in your city. Then, lay down the solutions being implemented by your city government or proposed by concerned communities.

With the rapid pace of global warming, flooding in cities is now a significant concern that demands urgent action. Look into model cities and highlight out-of-the-box strategies they are undertaking. Some examples could be Tokyo’s $2 billion floodwater cathedral and the Busan floating pontoon city project. You may also share about your own city’s flood mitigation program. 

Beyond improving the environment and reducing pollution, green cities also promote better health and wellness for their citizens. List down your city government’s efforts to shift toward a greener city. If you want to go the extra mile, interview city officials and city planners. You could also talk to groups advocating for green cities to know more deeply about the obstacles preventing your city from going greener and emerging policy proposals. 

The countryside is always a good place to escape the city’s bustle and hustle from time to time. But if you were to choose a permanent residence, would you go to the big city or the countryside? Make a pick by weighing the pros and cons of moving to the countryside or staying in the city. You may also mull over the push in many countries to bring commerce and jobs to the countryside. Answer how this could benefit provinces, promote countryside living and help decongest cities. 

Many companies are investing billions of dollars to become the first movers in the virtual world, where they aspire to build their cities and empire. This is compelling even government agencies to venture into this exciting new world. But what exactly are the opportunities and threats awaiting netizens in the metaverse? Identify the advantages and disadvantages of metaverse-based cities regarding economic opportunities and social development on an individual, community, and national level. 

Megacities are extraordinarily large cities with millions of residents and diverse cultures. Megacities promise greater connectivity, bigger and more reliable infrastructure, and greater integration of technology in everyday life. In your essay, discuss the global upward trend in the attraction of megacities as a center for business and prosperity. 

In your essay, you can try to answer whether community size affects the criminality rate. First, research by gathering available reports that analyze and compare criminality rates in urban and rural areas. Then, cite the primary factors that make cities more prone to criminal incidents. You could also search for the most violent cities in the world and find out factors that drove criminality in these cities to record highs. 

In this light essay, write about the city you’ve been dreaming of travelling to. Then, explain why this is your top pick. Your reasons may relate to the history of the place, grand aesthetic architecture, or even something more personal. To conclude your essay, list down the must-visit landmarks and must-do activities once you get the chance to visit this city.

Urban agriculture is one way to ensure food sufficiency and promote city livelihoods. First, write about model cities aggressively promoting agricultural farming, cultivation, and processing within city centers. Then, talk about your city’s urban gardening initiatives and how this has helped enhance food security. For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checker . If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

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The Spaces of the Modern City

Gyan Prakash

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

• Edited by Gyan Prakash and Kevin M. Kruse
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By United Nations estimates, 60 percent of the world’s population will be urban by 2030. With the increasing speed of urbanization, especially in the developing world, scholars are now rethinking standard concepts and histories of modern cities. The Spaces of the Modern City historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth of the city landscape. This interdisciplinary collection examines how the city develops in the interactions of space and imagination. The essays focus on issues such as street design in Vienna, the motion picture industry in Los Angeles, architecture in Marseilles and Algiers, and the kaleidoscopic paradox of post-apartheid Johannesburg. They explore the nature of spatial politics, examining the disparate worlds of eighteenth-century Baghdad, nineteenth-century Morelia, Cold War-era West Berlin, and postwar Los Angeles. They also show the meaning of everyday spaces to urban life, illuminating issues such as crime in metropolitan London, youth culture in Dakar, “memory projects” in Tokyo, and Bombay cinema. Informed by a range of theoretical writings, this collection offers a fresh and truly global perspective on the nature of the modern city. The contributors are Sheila Crane, Belinda Davis, Mamadou Diouf, Philip J. Ethington, David Frisby, Christina M. Jiménez, Dina Rizk Khoury, Ranjani Mazumdar, Frank Mort, Martin Murray, Jordan Sand, and Sarah Schrank.

"This ambitious collection of essays is the result of a series of seminars at Princeton University aimed at developing fresh thinking about the city as a dynamic physical space that 'shapes, and is shaped by, power, economy, culture and society.' A fascinating introductory essay by Gyan Prakash outlines recent urban theorising and counters the idea that, in an age of globalisation, specific cityscapes are losing their significance: our urban experiences still depend on 'local lifeworlds', rich with memories and imagination."— The Guardian

"This is a very ambitious collection of diverse, high quality essays. Prakash is certainly right that the study of the modern city is stuck in the literature of European metropolises, and I fully agree with the direction he stakes out in his introduction. The Spaces of the Modern City may be worth its price simply for the introduction."—Thomas Bender, author of The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea

"This is an interesting and substantial collection of essays. Combining conceptual sophistication with rich historical studies, the book moves beyond familiar reference points in debates about urban modernity to open up nuanced perspectives on experiences in a wide range of places and periods. The volume makes a significant addition to the growing literature on cities and urbanism."—David Pinder, Queen Mary, University of London

"Its global reach and attention to history make this wonderfully ambitious collection unusual. It is very much in line, in terms of scope and conception, with where historically minded urban studies should be heading. Its interdisciplinarity, determination to look beyond the typical Western cities, and insistence on urban centers remaining the source of local concerns—all this is to the good. This is a real landmark volume."—Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of China's Brave New World: And Other Tales for Global Times .

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Future cities: new challenges mean we need to reimagine the look of urban landscapes

Professor of Urban Design, Lancaster University

Senior Lecturer in Design (People, Places, Products), Lancaster University

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Imagining future cities has long been a favourite activity for architects, artists and designers . Technology is often central in these schemes – it appears as a dynamic and seemingly unstoppable force, providing a neat solution to society’s problems.

But our recent research has suggested that we need to significantly rethink the way we imagine future cities , and move our focus from an overarching technological vision to other priorities, such as environmental sustainability and the need to tackle social inequalities.

We need to answer questions about what can be sustained and what cannot, where cities can be located and where they cannot, and how we might travel in and between them.

The coronavirus pandemic has further reinforced this need. It has profoundly disrupted what we thought we knew about cities . It has further sharpened existing inequalities and brought about major challenges for how we physically live and work together.

The future – yesterday

The architect and influential urban planner Eugène Hénard was arguably the first to publicly discuss “future cities” in Europe during his 1910 address to the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. His vision anticipated the technological advances of the future, such as aerial transportation. This approach, prioritising technology, was also evoked in cinema in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis .

It was also mirrored by architects such as Le Corbusier in projects such as the 1924 Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City) . In this work, Le Corbusier developed his concept of the city as a symmetrical, regulated, and highly centralised landscape.

Such an approach can be traced through many subsequent visions for cities, portrayed as the physical embodiment of technological prowess.

A new focus

But rather than simply focusing on technology to shape our future, we also need to look at it through social and global lenses. These alternative approaches are increasingly urgent. To provide a safe and sustainable world for present and future populations, we need to think beyond “solutionism”. This is the idea that every problem we have has a technological fix.

An identifiable shift in how future cities are being conceived, designed and delivered concerns the people involved in these processes. This ranges from localised projects to global initiatives. For example, the Every One Every Day project in Barking and Dagenham in London aims to make practical participation in neighbourhood projects inclusive and available to all residents. On a much wider scale, the New Urban Agenda global vision by the United Nations’ Habitat programme, meanwhile, calls for more inclusive and sustainable urbanisation and settlement planning.

We may want our future cities to prioritise environmental renewal. The Green Machine , a design for a future city by architect Stephane Malka, moves like a mobile oasis, replenishing desert rather than causing more environmental degradation. This future city collects water through air condensation and uses solar power to drive itself over arid landscapes.

These are ploughed and injected with a mixture of water, natural fertiliser and cereal seeds as it passes. Agricultural greenhouses along with livestock farms support the city’s inhabitants and supplement local populations. The project is scaleable and replicable in relation to the number of people needed to be accommodated.

Climate change brings with it the possibility of dramatic sea level rise. Post Carbon City-State , a project by architecture and urban design group Terreform, imagines a submerged New York. The project proposes that, rather than investing in mitigation efforts, the East and Hudson River are allowed to flood parts of Manhattan.

The new city is rebuilt in its surrounding rivers. Former streets become snaking arteries of liveable spaces, embedded with renewable energy resources, green vehicles, and productive nutrient zones. This replaces the current obsession with private car ownership towards more ecological forms of public transport.

Both these projects emphasise responses to the impacts of climate change over technological innovation for its own sake.

Alternatively, the cities of the future may prioritise equality. This is illustrated by spatial design agency 5th Studio’s Stour City, The Enabling State .

This is a future city for 60,000 inhabitants, envisioned along the River Stour and the Port of Harwich in East Anglia, England. Based around the urbanisation and intensification of existing rail and port infrastructure, it features initiatives such as waste to power generation in order to support a viable, low-impact city, with priorities including affordable housing for all.

Imagining these cities helps us understand how we want our future lives to look. But we must open up the opportunity to conceptualise these futures to a wider and more diverse set of people. By doing so, we will be better positioned to rethink the shifts required to safeguard our health, that of other species and the planet we share. This is the significance of visions for tomorrow’s world – and why we need to create new ones today.

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The Way We Were, the Way We Are: The Theory and Practice of Designing Cities since 1956

Jonathan Barnett

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24: The Origins and Evolution of “Urban Design,” 1956–2006

What is the designed city, who wants to make it happen, and who designs it?

Today most urban design professionals would say that a well-designed city has three components: it conserves the natural environment and is responsive to it; it creates a desirable public realm that includes transportation, streets, civic spaces, shopping, entertainment, parks, and recreation; and it supports social interaction in residential neighborhoods, work places, and mixed-use downtowns. 

The three major political constituencies for implementing urban design concepts are environmentalists who want to shape development to conserve the natural world and preserve its systems, civic promoters who seek to distinguish their city from its competition by its higher quality urban and civic life, and community activists who want to preserve and restore the places where they live and who want new development to have the good qualities of traditional neighborhoods. 

Cities today are designed by an intricate interplay of private investment, public subsidies and incentives for development, government regulations, public participation, and public protest. The professional urban designer needs to know how to work with and guide all these forces. Landscape architecture, architecture, and city planning each relate most directly to one of the constituencies for urban design. The urban designer is likely to have a professional credential in one of these disciplines and needs to be conversant with all three. But how does the designer get a seat at the table when the decisions are being made?

Urban Design and the Natural Environment

In 1956, Ian McHarg, a recent Harvard graduate in both city planning and landscape architecture, was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. The next year he was to begin his course,  Man and the Environment , which led to a television program,  The House We Live In , and ultimately to his 1969 book,  Design with Nature . McHarg saw the natural environment as the equivalent of a design, the resolution into equilibrium of such elements as geologic forms, rain and flood­­-water, soil conditions, vegetation, and animal habitat. Ignorant interventions that disturb natural systems lead to incalculable consequences, many times adverse. Once you understand McHarg’s thesis, you see why summer houses built on dunes will wash away in hurricanes, why whole streets of houses in landslide-prone Los Angeles are fated to subside into valleys, and why Houston becomes more and more subject to flooding. 

The failure to relate the natural environment to urban design is a conspicuous blind spot in most of the Harvard Urban Design Conference proceedings. Richard Neutra provided an interesting exception when he said: “The urban landscape which we want to improve by our artifacts is in the first place a phenomenon to be understood on a biological basis,” 3  a statement that also includes Anne Spirn’s extension of McHarg’s philosophy to the existing city in  The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design . 4  (Spirn was McHarg’s pupil of at the University of Pennsylvania and was once head of Harvard’s Landscape Architecture Department.) McHarg helped define the need for today’s geographic information systems (GIS) which replace with “layers” on a computer the overlays on tracing paper, pain­stakingly researched and redrawn to the same scale by hand, which made up McHarg’s analyses of the most appropriate locations to build within the natural landscape.

Today GIS and the spatial analytics that they make possible are powerful tools that enable an urban designer to understand and describe natural systems at a variety of scales and to demonstrate with maps the interactions between development alternatives and natural systems. These demonstrations of the future impacts of different development scenarios can be shown interactively in real time at public meetings, giving the public a means of making informed comments on long-range regional design decisions like the selection of highway routes. This is one way that today’s urban designer can gain a seat at the decision-making table.

Urban Design as a Civic Vision

“The sponsors have avoided the term Civic Design as having, in the minds of many, too specialized or too grandiose a connotation,” reads the introduction to the 1956 conference summary in  Progressive Architecture . “Urban Design” was the name that the Harvard Graduate School of Design selected for its 1956 conference and for the “joint work of the architect, landscape architect, and city planner.” By explicitly discarding the term  civic design , the sponsors were disavowing the City Beautiful with its park and boulevard plans repeating formulations worked out in Haussmann’s Paris and the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (“too grandiose”), and its emphasis on public buildings grouped in a civic center (“too specialized”). Defining urban design as collaboration among professionals, rather than as a series of specific design objectives, reflected the then current thinking in the city planning profession, which was giving up on end-state plans and redefining planning as a continuous process.

Partly because of the 1956 Harvard conference,  urban design  has become the accepted term; it is too late to wonder about changing it. Many present problems in implementing city designs were described by the conference participants, but the conference also helped formulate urban design in a way that has itself contributed to current difficulties in creating coherent, well-designed cities. Discarding the word  civic  marked a significant change in city design priorities. The illustrations that accompany the summary of the conference express utility and perhaps social equality, but aside from the diagrams of Radburn and Welwyn Garden City, there is little in these drawings to connote more complex societal aspirations. 

While the design vocabulary for civic design in the United States was drawn from palatial European examples, Americans had never accepted such designs as if they were creating a place to watch the royal coach roll down the boulevard on the way to a state occasion. The Chicago Fair of 1893 was a populist fun-fest; Grand Central and Pennsylvania Stations glorified mass transit; impressive museums and libraries were open to everyone, as were the great civic parks in almost every city. However, Hitler’s and Stalin’s use of the classical design vocabulary established for many people that not only might such designs not be appropriate to the modern era but also that they were the language of oppression. It is understandable why the sponsors of the conference wanted to distance themselves from classical architecture, which had been renounced at Harvard for almost twenty years; the problem is that they confused it with civic design. There is still confusion about this today.

Not acknowledging the civic component of urbanism turns sidewalks and public spaces into utilitarian places between buildings, providing little more than light and air, and passages for pedestrians. Most urban plazas of the last fifty years provide good views of the buildings they front but are devoid of social significance. The research of Jan Gehl and William H. Whyte, among others, has helped establish how people use public space, and that in turn has helped show designers how to configure and furnish sidewalks and public places so that they will be used and thus regain signi­ficance in community life. Other lessons for the design of civic space have come from the devices retailers use to attract people to shopping precincts. “Place-making” has become a slogan of modern-day retailing. With retailers saying, “Hey, this stuff really works,” civic spaces have again become important in city design as a means of attracting people to the city and of keeping them there. Urban designers are now in demand to provide the inspiration for such places.

Defining civic spaces with groups of buildings designed by different architects at unpredictable intervals over a long period of time is a central task for the urban designer. As designers have rediscovered the importance of civic spaces, they have also discovered the devices used in the past to pull such places together: the guidelines of Baron Haussmann in Paris, those for the Back Bay in Boston, and the more abstract, form-based street walls and setbacks of New York City’s original 1916 zoning code. These elements of civic design derive from the classical tradition, but they are abstract enough to be incorporated into zoning codes. Zoning codes always determine city form, but the modern codes that came into use in the 1960s introduced floor area ratios as the basic bulk control, making the shape of buildings an often unanticipated by-product. Writing the preferred location and shape of buildings into codes makes them a major tool for realizing urban design concepts. Beginning with New York City’s special zoning districts in the 1960s, the design guidelines for Battery Park City in the late 1970s, and the “regulating plans” used at Seaside and other master-planned communities in the 1980s, “form-based coding” is now finding its way into zoning ordinances in such places as Louisville, Nashville, Miami-Dade County, and St. Paul.

Using zoning to implement urban design was discussed by Frederick Adams at the Harvard conference, but he assumed that requiring good design meant wide administrative discretion, and he expressed himself as doubtful that public officials would ever be permitted to exercise this kind of subjective control. Adams’s skepticism was justified, but he underestimated the ability of designers to identify the salient characteristics of good civic design and express them in ways compatible with zoning. Writing and administering codes is becoming another way for designers to gain a seat at the decision-making table.

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5 big challenges facing big cities of the future

Reaching new heights: 68% of people will live in cities by 2050 Image:  REUTERS

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Stay up to date:, cities and urbanization.

The UN estimates that 55% of the global population lives in urban areas – a figure that is projected to rise to 68% by 2050. With few exceptions, cities are expected to become bigger and more numerous.

As urbanization speeds up, particularly in Asian and African countries, here are five of the biggest challenges confronting the future of cities:

Rapid urbanization, which strains basic infrastructure, coupled with more frequent and extreme weather events linked to global climate change is exacerbating the impact of environmental threats. Common environmental threats include flooding, tropical cyclones (to which coastal cities are particularly vulnerable), heat waves and epidemics.

Owing to the physical and population density of cities, such threats often result in both devastating financial loss and deaths. Making cities more resilient against these environmental threats is one of the biggest challenges faced by city authorities and requires urgent attention.

Cities need resources such as water, food and energy to be viable. Urban sprawl reduces available water catchment areas, agricultural lands and increases demand for energy. While better application of technology can boost agricultural productivity and ensure more efficient transmission of electricity, many cities will continue to struggle to provide these resources to an ever-growing urban population.

Beyond these basic requirements, haphazard growth will see the reduction of green spaces within cities, negatively affecting liveability. As fresh water becomes scarce and fertile lands diminish, food prices may escalate, hitting the poorest hardest.

When it comes to both the provision of basic resources and resilience against environmental threats, the forecast is uneven for different groups of urban inhabitants. As the number of urban super-rich grows, many cities will also see increased numbers of urban poor.

The widening gap between the haves and have-nots will be accentuated in the megacities of the future. Such inequalities, when left unchecked, will destabilize society and upend any benefits of urban development. There is a critical need for policy-makers to ensure that the fruits of progress are shared equitably.

Technology will be increasingly used in the development and running of cities of the future. Smart planning used in Singapore can harness solar energy for use in housing estates and create man-made wetlands for ecological balance. Smart mobility technology can alleviate traffic gridlocks which plague many cities.

The use of environmental technologies which can cool buildings more efficiently or run vehicles that are less polluting will also lead to better future cities. Installing sensors in the homes of ageing seniors living alone can connect them to the community and summon help when they are unwell or hurt.

Have you read?

These 10 asian cities are the most prepared for the future, what global cities can learn from melbourne, this is what a smart city should do for its people.

However, technology can exclude urban inhabitants who cannot afford it or lack the capability required for its adoption. As future cities become more digitized, care must be exercised to prevent the emergence of a new form of social divide rooted in the technological.

Future cities offer immense possibilities to enrich the lives of their inhabitants even as the challenges are stark. To make the best out of inevitable urbanization, good governance is imperative. Cities will increase in size and their populations become more diverse. Governing these cities will, therefore, be progressively complex and require the most dedicated of minds.

Increasingly, cities around the world are learning about the best governance and planning practices from one another, even as they remain accountable to their respective national governments. The broad goals of urban governance should address issues of equity, liveability and sustainability in cities of the future.

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Economy and Development in Modern Cities

• Kent Klitgaard 3  
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This chapter focuses on the roles of energy and strategies for capital accumulation as the primary determinants of urban development. The essay begins with a brief survey of the city in history: ranging from the mercantile trading city, characterized by craft production, to the rise of the industrial city with its large-scale industrial production, to the corporate city based on the service sector, paying special attention to the role of energy surpluses in transforming work processes and expanding economic surpluses. The chapter ends with a discussion of Third World cities, especially megacities, and their role origins in the globalization process, as well as a reflection on the possibility of sustainable cities in the future.

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Klitgaard, K. (2019). Economy and Development in Modern Cities. In: Hall, M., Balogh, S. (eds) Understanding Urban Ecology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11259-2_5

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City Life Essay

500+ words essay on city life.

City life is very busy, fast-moving and restless. All the necessary things are easily available in the city. Life is full of luxuries, and everything is within reach. The city has many things to offer, such as better job opportunities, higher living standards, medical facilities, clubs, shopping malls, stores, restaurants, etc. It has theatres, amusement parks, cricket stadiums etc., for entertainment. People from rural areas are shifting to the cities for a better quality of life. This essay on city life will throw light on the positive and negative aspects of city life. Students must go through it and try to write their own essays. For more practice, they can go through the list of different essay topics, which will help in improving their writing section.

Positive Aspects of City Life

Life in a big city is a whirl of activities. Very often, people from the countryside move to the cities in order to find decent jobs. It offers good educational facilities for children by providing the best schools, colleges and institutions. Cities have always been the hub of innovation, the home of creative thought, art forms, political ideas and many more things. People of the city do not waste their time as they keep doing something to gain growth and success in their life. Cities are well connected with road, railway and flight networks. So, it becomes easy for individuals to connect with other people and grow their businesses as compared to rural areas. Cities have become a potent force for addressing economic growth, development and prosperity.

Negative Aspects of City Life

Cities are very crowded places. The cost of living in the city is high. The houses are small and inadequate due to space limitations. Bad housing conditions can cause various health issues. The environment of the city is very polluted due to the air, water, land and noise pollution. This causes bad health and can infect people with various diseases.

Some of the cities are very dirty due to the lack of a proper disposal system. Also, drainage problems are often found in the city. People do not get fresh air to breathe and natural places where they can rejuvenate themselves. People in the city are often busy, so they do not socially interact with others. They limit themselves to their houses and families. Sometimes, they don’t even know about their neighbours and surroundings.

The impact of the city on a person’s life is both negative and positive. From the bad quality of air to noise pollution and restless life, it has affected peace of mind. But cities are also stimulating as centres of industry, art, science and political power. They are the focus of progress. By reducing the aggressive impact of the city on people, the essential positive aspects of city life can be greatly intensified.

Students must have found this city life essay useful for improving their essay writing skills. They can get the study material and the latest updates on CBSE/ICSE/State Board/Competitive Exams at BYJU’S.

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Counselling

• Smart Cities
• Sustainability

The City of the Future: This is How Cities are Becoming Smart

Cities are evolving, and innovation plays a huge role in this transformation. Almost 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers learned the secrets of selective breeding and agriculture and managed to grow their food. For the first time in history, humans found a way to survive without moving to a different territory to find new food sources. And that’s how everything started.

It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that modern cities as we know them appeared. New technologies deployed on a mass scale allowed these vast communities to grow faster than ever before.

Innovation has always been vital to improve and prevent communities from collapsing. Cities need sanitation systems, properly-built homes, and secure public transportation. And the list goes on forever. Even if we’ve evolved a lot since hunter-gatherers changed the course of history, there’s still much left to be done.

What is the future of cities?

As cities become increasingly populated and resources more and more sparse, cities need to focus on achieving smart growth . There’s no time for it to be a thing of the future - the future of cities is now.

Thankfully, many cities are already focusing on becoming smart and sustainable cities by implementing practices such as the circular economy, and smart mobility, helping reduce carbon footprint in urban areas.

Check out this short video of our action-packed Travel & Smart Cities EXPO 3 in Vienna, which brings fresh perspectives to the innovation landscape in the CEE region.

The city of the future: What are the challenges?

What will the city of the future look like? There is not one good answer.

Cities are made by the people inhabiting them, and people are profoundly affected by culture and the city itself. Thus, two cities facing the same problem might need two different solutions.

And that’s the main challenge encountered when developing a smart city. A smart city is not just a city that uses cutting-edge technology. It’s a city that carefully studies the habits and the needs of its citizens and tries to fix them in the most suitable way.

Image source .

But even though the solutions might differ, s ome main challenges affect most cities:

Smart mobility for the city of the future

Traffic consistently ranks as one of the main problems affecting cities. If there’s ever such a thing as the perfect smart city, smart mobility will play a key role. But let’s clarify something before anyone gets confused.

How 21st-Century Planning is Different

Governments have always tried to foresee potential problems and fix those already happening. However, the approach to solving these problems is radically different. For example, some decades ago, the solution to busy highways was to add a new lane.

Simple, right? Well, maybe not so much.

What seemed like an excellent way to reduce congestion brought, in fact, poor results. Adding a new lane didn’t reduce traffic, instead, it attracted new drivers who didn’t use that route. Cities ended up with equally congested roads (only, this time, they had an extra lane full of vehicles.)

The city of the future will face problems differently. Those trying to create a smart city should look at the main challenges of mobility from different points of view and ask questions like: Do we need that many cars? Should we own cars, or should we share them ? Would it be preferable to have autonomous vehicles ? The possibilities are endless, and the answers vary depending on the city.

So, back to mobility.

Some of the main elements that will shape mobility in the city of the future are:

• Shared Mobility : Ride-hailing services have been growing steadily for years. And every indication suggests that they will keep doing so. The city of the future is, without a doubt, a city where people will share transportation methods such as cars, motorbikes, or scooters. Why own a car when there’s such a thing as Mobility As A Service or MaaS?
• Electric vehicles : Electric cars are becoming more popular every year, but cities have a long way to go until they’re fully prepared to “host” these types of vehicles. The number of charging stations available is still low, and grid capacity needs to be improved (nowadays, it still needs to be fully prepared to charge vehicles such as electric buses.) These are some of the problems that get in the way of the mass adoption of electric cars, and cities will need to face them soon.
• Traffic Management : Traffic is one of the main problems for urban areas worldwide. Fortunately, new solutions are coming up daily to try to fix this problem (or at least mitigate its consequences). Cities are developing systems to try to address this issue. Pittsburgh, for example, deployed a video and radar to analyze traffic in 50 intersections and adjusts signals in real-time. This AI-based system has reduced travel times by 26% and vehicle emissions by 21%.

Buildings in cities of the future aren’t just buildings

Nowadays, 50% of the total human population lives in cities. Studies predict that 35 years from now, that percentage will rise to 75%. That means we need to find a home for 3 billion people in just 35 years.

And, if we want future cities to be smart cities, only some buildings are good enough. We need our skyline to be made up of buildings that are, amongst other things:

• Sustainable : The buildings where we work and live create almost 50% of CO2 emissions on the planet. Smart buildings are designed with sustainability in mind. This means low-energy houses, natural materials (like cork, clay, or recycled paper), renewable energy use, or waste reduction.
• Secure : We’re discussing buildings with integrated fire prevention systems or intrusion and access control - Protecting the building’s systems from hackers is also essential.
• Cost-efficient : There are many ways in which a smart building helps its inhabitants save money. It detects occupancy patterns and adapts to how much energy it consumes. Cooling and ventilation are regulated automatically. Sensors can see potential maintenance problems and stop them before they happen. And so much more.

IoT: The core technology upon which a city in the future is built

Without the Internet of Things, smart cities wouldn’t exist. These intelligent, interconnected cities rely on data collection for everything . And that is what IoT sensors do: they collect data and feed it into a platform to be analyzed.

In the city of the future, devices must be able to communicate with each other so that decisions can be made. Authorities must work hand in hand with network operators to position several connectivity points throughout the city to ensure proper communication.

The cities of the future will be sustainable (and this is not an option)

Sustainability is key in the development of any smart city, and it’s related to other challenges:

• Waste management : Smart cities need to face different problems related to waste management, such as overfilled trash bins, unoptimized truck routes, or the need to separate mixed materials for recycling. Smart waste management can help solve these kinds of issues. Sensors attached to trash bins can measure fill level, send an automatic alert if it reaches the limit, and optimize trucks’ collection routes.
• Energy : “ The city of the future will definitely be energy-efficient. It might even produce energy instead of consuming it. The main challenge is convincing companies and governments to invest more in this area, " said Daniyar Tanatov’s, Partner Account Manager at Spaceti. Cities can produce more energy than they consume by using turbines, solar panels or even solar walls - buildings with solar panels incorporated into their facade.
• Working hours : Unexpected, maybe? Current working hours vastly exceed what we could consider sustainable, concluded research conducted by the think tank Autonomy . Fewer working hours would mean less commuting, fewer products manufactured, and fewer resources used. Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence could help make the future of work sustainable.

The city of the future: Who is behind it?

Startups play a crucial role when it comes to finding new solutions to build the city of the future.

Smart cities' challenges are endless, and public institutions and large corporations can’t come up with all the solutions we need. Some of the most brilliant (and passionate) minds are in startups like Gaia Smart Cities, Recycle Smart, and Smart Air. For corporations, these startups are a threat but also an opportunity.

At Plug and Play’s Smart Cities accelerator , we match large corporations with top-tier startups that are changing the world as we know it. Together, they’ll build the cities of the future. Want to know more? Join our platform today.

Building the City of the Future

Read the rest of the collection..

Mobility, IoT, sustainability, and more. Smart cities will revolutionize the way we live.

What is Corporate Innovation?

• Corporate Innovation

9 Smart Cities Startups That Are Reshaping Cities As We Know Them

What's The Future of Finance? This Is Our Prediction For 2020

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35 Imagining the Modernist City

Scott McCracken, University of Keele

• Published: 18 September 2012
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This article examines the concept of the modernist city. It explains that the distinction between the modern and the modernist city lies in the difference between the historical city of the industrial age and the ways in which that city was imagined. The article argues that the modernist city was not simply a response but also a project for architects and urban planners, and argues that one of the things which characterize the modernist city is an aesthetic which attempts to capture the city as a whole, so that what is achieved is not a static totality, but one in constant motion, where the end-point remains unclear.

Escaping over enemy lines during the siege of Paris in 1870, the French balloonist Jules Durouf was mesmerized by the sight of Prussian cannonballs rising towards him then falling away in parabolic arcs. 1 This arresting image—Paris besieged, the balloon passing out of the city, eluding the missiles aimed to bring it down to earth—might act as a metaphor for the modernist city, which is best captured by startling perspectives and images of movement. This was the case even though Paris under siege was the quintessential modern city: for three months between November 1870 and January 1871, it was completely cut off, making Parisian life a purely urban experience. There was no access to the surrounding countryside. Livestock had been herded into the city before the siege began, but food supplies gradually ran out (although apparently wine did not) and the city turned to urban sources of meat: the animals in the zoo, dogs, cats, and rats. Parisian industry was reorganized to produce guns and munitions. Women were directed off the street into workshops to make uniforms. The city even found within its walls the resources to manufacture the balloons that could take news out to the rest of France.

However, if one of the abiding images of the siege was a dish of rat at the Jockey Club served with a strongly flavoured sauce, it was the movement of Durouf's balloon that best captures Parisian modernity. The distinction between the modern and the modernist city lies in the difference between the historical city of the industrial age and the ways in which that city was imagined. In this sense, the image of Durouf's balloon is a modernist one because it conjures up multiple imaginary perspectives on the city, from above and below, as well as the ever‐changing views of the receding city from the perspective of the moving balloon. 2 Modernist aesthetics might be understood as an attempt to represent the modern city on the move: the flows of traffic along its streets; in and out of the city; between the urban and the rural, the capitalist and pre‐capitalist parts of the French economy; between Paris and other modern cities; and between the imperial centre and the colonized periphery. 3

However, the image of Durouf's balloon is also relevant to another aspect of the modernist city. It was always imagined in relation to other cities, never just on its own terms. Variously described by cultural historians as the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’ 4 and ‘the capital of modernity’, 5 Paris's status as a modern city was achieved because it was a key node in a network that linked it with the rest of France and the world. As Steven Beller has written about the cities of central Europe in the same period, ‘the lines which are drawn around territories are not as important…as the lines which link cities.…Urban culture is…as much about networks as it is about boundaries’. 6 By the end of the nineteenth century, it had become impossible to imagine the modern city except in relation to other cities.

Earlier in the century, novelists such as Honoré de Balzac and Charles Dickens had pushed realism to its limits; but as the century progressed, writers and artists started to experiment with new aesthetics that were adequate to cities whose imaginative limits spilled over their geographical boundaries. Paris after 1870 emerged as not just a modern city, but the modernist city par excellence, not only because it was the centre of the European art market, but as a consequence of its key place in a widening series of cultural networks. These networks encompassed other European cities, but soon extended to have a global reach. If Paris was the centre for the avant‐garde movements that pioneered reimagination of the urban, that reimagination was always about Paris's key position in a widening international scene.

What was true of Paris was also true of the other modern cities after 1870: London, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Prague, New York, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City. To understand a city's modernisms, we have to understand its networks. Durouf's fascination with the parabola of cannonballs fired to shoot him out of the sky is at one with modernism's fascination with the movement of things, goods, and people, through, in and out of, and between cities. Modernist responses included not just high‐cultural (art and literature) but also the vernacular modernisms of mass journalism and advertising. Both elite and demotic forms were part of a reimagination of the urban, which in turn had an impact on the development of the city itself. The modernist city became not just a response but also a project for architects and urban planners.

Cities in Perspective: Paris, Brussels, London

However important the concept of a break or rupture with the past came to be for modernism, modernist responses to and visions of the urban did not, of course, emerge from nowhere. A popular fascination with representations of the modern city preceded artistic and literary modernism. From the late eighteenth century, panoramas and dioramas were popular spectacles. These theatrical devices, where pictures of a landscape or urban scene were viewed from a central position, offered spectators an opportunity of viewing an imagined city, a landscape, or a historical scene as a whole. Such perspectives prepared the way for modernist aesthetics. The most spectacular celebrations of a world viewed from one place were the Great Exhibitions. The Paris Exhibition of 1869 was, like the first Great Exhibition in London in 1851, designed to show off a distinctively national modernity; but it was at the same time a profoundly international affair, visited by the King of Prussia, the Russian Tsar, and international workers' delegations, and featuring exhibits from around the world. If the origins of the exhibitions lay in the vastly increased productive industrial capacity of the new industrial nations, the exhibits themselves, torn from their origins and placed in displays for public view, suggested that the new technologies would abolish scarcity, promising an unprecedented abundance of goods for all. A growth in advertising accompanied the new exhibitions, so that the dreamlands of the exhibitions spilled out onto the city streets where few, as yet, could afford the commodities on offer. 7 New modes of street lighting, first gas, then electric, illuminated the growing commercial districts of large cities, creating new exhibition spaces for a phantasmagoria of commodities from across the world.

The growth in international trade led to increased contact between nation states. The Franco‐Prussian War itself was played out on an international stage. Yankee generals, fresh from victory over the South, came to watch from the Prussian side. English journalists reported the siege and the subsequent uprising, the Paris Commune, in London's papers. France's defeat sparked uprisings in colonial Algeria and rebellion among Algerian troops stationed in France, while Italian and Polish nationalists, and Hungarian, Russian, and English socialists fought for the Commune. Although the relationship between these events and the emergence of the Parisian avant‐garde was not straightforward, the 1870s saw a marked change in visual and poetic form. The Second Empire, under Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew Louis Napoleon Bonaparte III, which lasted from 1851 until France's defeat, had pursued its own vision of the modern city. The capital had been redesigned, with wide boulevards radiating out from the Arc de Triomphe replacing the narrow medieval streets. The visual arts, however, had been subject to the conservatism of the Academy, which excluded the realism of Gustav Courbet and Édouard Manet as well as the innovations of the younger, and as yet unnamed, ‘Impressionists’.

Two figures in the Impressionist movement, Camille Pissarro and Claude Monet, spent the war in London, where their airy paintings of Crystal Palace and Green Park offered a striking contrast to the carnage of war and revolution. They only returned to France after the suppression of the Commune. Thus, their view of post‐war Paris was reached through the prism of London. Although both sympathized with the Commune (Pissarro was a committed anarchist, Monet, less militant, was appalled by the massacres committed by the Versaillese (French government) forces), Albert Boime argues that the Impressionist movement collaborated in the Third Republic's elision of the history of the Commune, and in particular its bloody aftermath. 8 Impressionist landscapes instead occluded the damage inflicted on Paris.

Boime picks out Monet's picture The Tuileries ( c. 1876) as an example. The painting portrays the garden area, relegating the ruins of the palace to the side of the picture. In fact, to the untutored eye, it is not clear that the palace is damaged at all. Boime's thesis is that such paintings assisted in the reconstruction of a bourgeois modernity. However, Boime's focus on the content of such paintings perhaps gives too little attention to the Impressionists' revolutionary innovations in form. The timing and place of Monet's 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise seems significant here. The painting is far more abstract than his earlier paintings. A fiery sun rises through a smoky fog, leaving a bloody stain on the water, suggestive of the fires that burnt across Paris as the Communards tried desperately to block the advance of the Versaillese forces. The painting, which gives its name to the first recognized movement of modernist artists, seems to make reference to the explosive events a year earlier. 9 However, as important as the painting's political meaning is its setting. It seems significant that the harbour is Le Havre, a port that connects France to England. Monet's new art finds its inspiration not in one city, but along the lines between cities.

The exact relationship between the politics of urban revolution and the revolution in poetic form that also occurred after the Paris Commune is equally difficult to establish, but a relationship existed nonetheless. Paul Verlaine's distinctive style emerged in his fifth collection of poetry, Romance sans paroles , published in 1874. Verlaine had been a (not very assiduous) member of the Paris city bureaucracy during the Commune, having refused to decamp to Versailles after the revolution of 18 March. However, the months that followed the defeat of the Commune coincided with his tempestuous affair with the young poet Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud, who had been inspired by Verlaine's earlier poetry and had come to Paris to meet him, is often seen as the poet of the Commune. 10 The couple's travels away from and back to Paris, to Brussels, and to London were motivated partly by Verlaine's desire to escape his disintegrating marriage, but also by his waxing and waning fears of government retribution for the part he and Rimbaud had played in the Commune. Romance sans paroles was written partly in Brussels and partly in London, both cities of refuge for exiled Communards. A poem such as ‘Streets II’, written in London, creates an urban sensibility that is the product not just of Paris or London, but of both cities at the same time. 11

O the river in the road! Which appeared fantastically Behind a five‐foot wall, It rolls without a murmur Its opaque and yet pure wave, Coursing through the pacified streets. The road is very broad, such That the yellow water, like a dead woman Hurtles full and without any hope Reflecting nothing but the fog, Even as dawn lights up The yellow and black cottages. 12

While the fog clearly signifies London, the deathly presence of the river in the streets might be read as the extinguishing of revolutionary hopes after the Commune. However different, the new visual forms found in Impressionism and its successors and the new poetic forms found after Verlaine and Rimbaud emerged in the context of urban revolution. While such innovations are not necessarily a signifier for revolutionary politics, two elements in the birth of the Impressionist movement and the new poetry are significant for our understanding of the modernist city.

First, the modernist city is imagined in terms of a rupture with the past. The end of the Second Empire and the revolution of 1871 are a particularly stark example of such a historical break, although the rapid pace of change experienced by modern cities meant that discontinuity was the universal experience of urban life. Such ruptures, while they may not figure in the content of all modernist artworks, are registered in innovations in form. Second, the modernist city is imagined from a distance. Monet's 1876 painting of the Tuileries is a typical, if partial, panoramic view. Whether seen from a natural upland, a balloon, or a high window, such views incorporate not just the city depicted, but the knowledge of other cities. The Tuileries has a clear relationship to Monet's painting of Green Park in London in 1871. His Impressionism tries to capture movement rather than the static scene. Movement was a characteristic of revolutionary Paris, which was a prototype for the cosmopolitan cities of the twentieth century, inhabited by a population in motion: travellers, migrants, exiles, and refugees. Later modernist movements, the members of which were often also immigrants, such as Pointillism, Expressionism, Cubism, Vorticism, and Surrealism, to name but a few, followed the Impressionists with further, more radical, innovations in visual form that attempted to track a world that was speeding up. This acceleration in the pace of life was a result of industrialization and new technologies, but it had psychological consequences.

Mental Life: Berlin, Vienna

After 1871, aided by the spread of railways, no major European city could be imagined except in relation to its peers. In the same period, telegraph and the steamship started to bring non‐European cultures and cities into closer imaginative proximity. 13 Art and literature responded to a world that was experiencing what David Harvey calls a process of ‘time–space compression’: ‘processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves’. 14 The period between 1880 and 1920 saw an intensification of the sense that the modern city produced a particular urban sensibility. Such a sense could already be found in the novels of Balzac and Dickens; but if the classic realist novelists of the mid‐nineteenth century still strove to represent the city as a whole—even while the city's perpetual motion always seemed to exceed their grasp—already from 1848 a few French poets and novelists, such as Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert, had started to experiment with forms that emphasized the fragmented, alienated experiences the modern city generated. No wonder nineteenth‐century literature was filled with the contrasting experiences of village or small‐town life and the excitement of the big city, or that revolutionary Parisians were contemptuous of the more conservative ruraux (inhabitants of the countryside). Urban life was qualitatively different, if contradictory. On the one hand, the opportunity was there to break free from family ties, religious supervision, social prejudices, and the inhibiting oversight of one's neighbours. On the other, the lack of these social anchors could be disorientating, leaving the city dweller lost and rootless, lacking a history or the common memories that give rise to community and solidarity. Nor should the primary economic reason for growing urban populations be forgotten. People were drawn to the city by the prospect of work. The breakdown of traditional bonds was useful to the owners of large industrial concerns as it offered a workforce without other resources. The experience of the urban was, therefore, caught between the excitement of liberation and the fear of isolation and exploitation. This contradiction was explored by many modernist writers and artists—Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893) or Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis (1915) might stand as significant examples—but it was also a matter of concern for philosophers and members of a new discipline, sociology, provoked into being by a desire to understand and to control the effects of modern industrial life.

The founding essay in the new science of urban sociology was Georg Simmel's ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’ (1903), usually translated into English as ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’. The translation preserves the alliteration of the original; however, it is worth noting that Simmel's Großstädte (literally ‘big cities’) is plural and Geist can mean intellect or spirit as well as mentality. Simmel's particular big city is usually taken to be Berlin, although, as David Frisby points out, the city is never mentioned by name. 15 The title is suggestive because it implies that the mental, intellectual, and spiritual lives of all large cities have something in common. It is not, therefore, surprising that Simmel's argument became the target for more conservative commentators, who saw his vision of a cosmopolitan urban spirit as an affront to the traditional values of an ethnically pure German Volk . That Simmel was Jewish was used to bolster a nationalist discourse already open to anti‐Semitism. 16

Simmel observed that the city imposes a kind of sensory overload on the individual. Bombarded and buffeted by objects, people, sounds, sights, and smells, exposed to a vast range of new tastes, the city dweller responded defensively with an attitude of indifference. He or she becomes blasé in the face of the city's excesses. Simmel's account of urban psychology was influential and was repeated in different forms by a number of different theorists of modernity. Karl Marx had already identified the alienation of the industrial worker, who receives just a small part of the fruits of his or her labour in Capital (1867). The German sociologist Max Weber focused on the process of rationalization that occurs in large organizations, such as offices or government departments, where work is parcelled up into small tasks and individual bureaucrats lose their sense of the overall process and its purpose. The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács combined these insights into his concept of ‘reification’ which describes the process by which abstract notions, such as time, become the objects of scientific measurement and control in modernity. 17 Thus, work and leisure are quantified in industrial society as delimited periods—shifts and breaks, working days and time off, for example. Processes of thought and reason become regimented and instrumental, that is, always directed to a particular end.

Marx's theory of alienation, Weber's rationalization, and Lukács's reification might all be understood as negative critiques of modernity. But Marx at least recognized that there was another side to the question. On the one hand, the capitalist mode of production detached the majority from the fruits of their labour. On the other, as we have seen, the commodities produced, devoid of the taint of their origin, assumed a remarkable, almost mystical, quality, which he called commodity fetishism. Spectacular commodity displays began, as we have seen, in the great exhibitions, but then moved to the shop windows of the new department stores—Le Bon Marché in Paris, Selfridges in London, Kaufhaus des Westens in Berlin, GUM in Moscow, Macy's in New York. Images of consumer goods proliferated in newspapers and magazines, on walls and vehicles plastered with advertisements. The new technologies of lighting illuminated the displays, extending the spectacle into the night. 18

The impact on consciousness was, if anything, to exacerbate the sense of the fragmentation of experience, even while the senses were dazzled and delighted. Modernist reactions tended to move between the mimetic and the responsive. Juxtaposed impressions, thoughts, images, and perspectives abound in modern art and literature; but, at the same time, there is almost always an attempt to understand urban experience through a formal aesthetic. Walter Benjamin's engagements with both the city and urban modernisms led him to distinguish between two types of modern experience that matched these two reactions. The mimetic function of modernism expressed the experience described by Benjamin using the German word Erlebnis , which is usually translated as ‘shock experience’. However, in his study of the poet Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin found another counter‐process at work, Erfahrung . Baudelaire's poetry not only recorded the fleeting, transient, ephemeral images encountered in the city, it attempted to respond to and reflect upon them. Baudelaire's modernism gave the city's fragments a new order so that they not only regained meaning, but made new connections. Far from being a jumble of unrelated parts, Baudelaire's ‘correspondences’ establish unexpected affinities between modernity's fragments, the ancient and the modern, the past and the present. 19

Such moments occur in later modernist works as well, most famously in Marcel Proust's long novel In Search of Lost Time (1913–27). The narrator is prompted by the familiar taste of a cake, a madeleine, to recollect the memories of his childhood, which have not so much been forgotten, but rather have become disagrégé , disaggregated, scattered, or fragmented. In Search of Lost Time is an exercise in the kind of reassessment that Erfahrung entails. Its lengthy descriptions and reflective digressions mask a deep structure, which attempts to return meaning to modernity. For Benjamin, who translated Proust into German, the root of Erlebnis —the fragmentation of experience—lies in the exploited and alienated conditions of the urban working class, 20 yet the city abounds in thresholds and boundaries which enable the possibility of reconnection, where different temporal and spatial experiences meet and absorb one another. Against the divisions and indifference the city inspires, Benjamin also saw the potential for new revolutionary, resistant, and cosmopolitan collectivities. It was this potential that made the relationship between the city and modernism so politically explosive. New and unfamiliar forms, social and aesthetic, threatened to blast open existing regimes of power.

Street‐Level

In Benjamin's view, the impact of urban modernity was more than mental. It affected the entire body. Late nineteenth‐century and early twentieth‐century representations commonly depicted the nervous anxiety that affected city dwellers, relating it to new technologies and forms of mechanized transport, such as railways, trams, and motor cars. But Benjamin, inspired by Surrealism, also saw the possibility of a positive collective ‘bodily innervation’ that would lead to revolutionary change. 21 As we have seen, for Benjamin, the mental life and bodily experience of the city comes into being in its material spaces—in its streets, offices, shops, cafés, and restaurants, its apartment blocks and suburban villas, and through the routes and modes of transport that connect these spaces. It is, in fact, the points at which different kinds of spaces meet that produce the city's most interesting encounters, when a space is two things at the same time. The city street, for example, so different from the older country ‘way’, 22 is both thoroughfare and home. 23 To a greater or lesser extent, the city street achieves a degree of individuality that means its name signifies more than just a position on a map. The Boulevard St Germain in Paris, the Strand in London, the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, Nevsky Prospekt in St Petersburg, or Fifth Avenue in New York, all signify what Pierre Bourdieu would call a ‘habitus’: a mode of living and consumption as well as a place. For Henri Lefebvre, the street is the point at which different rhythm's interact, from the bodily rhythm of the pedestrian, to the rhythms imposed by the physical structures of the road, pavement, and buildings, to the rhythms of vehicular motion. 24

Both modernist art and modernist fiction take street encounters or the clash of street rhythms as their point of departure. The Italian school of painters known as ‘I Scapigliati’ (literally, ‘the wild‐haired ones’), based in Milan, painted urban scenes in which buildings, trams, and people seem to be engaged in a wild, colourful clash of movement. The Scapigliati were followed by the Futurists, who took further an art that found its power in a fusion of speed, technology, and violence. Perhaps the most famous attempt to capture movement in art is Umberto Boccioni's Futurist sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space . However, the shock of other, new modernist paintings, such as Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) or Marcel Duchamp's A Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), can be attributed to the refusal of the painter to be bound to a still‐life, interior, or pastoral, carefully chosen landscape, embracing instead the points at which the city transgressed notions of interior and exterior, of private and public space.

Street encounters punctuate the great works of modernist fiction, structuring their episodic narratives. In James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Leopold Bloom's odyssey around Dublin brings him into contact with the range of characters found in English Victorian painting such as William Powell Frith's Derby Day (1858) or Ford Madox Brown's Work (1863). However, where the Victorian paintings attempt to capture a moment, characters in Ulysses reappear in different places as the narrative proceeds, each encounter creating a new constellation that illuminates another aspect of Dublin society. In modernist fiction, the street is a place of encounters and transactions, commercial and otherwise. Just as the modern city is best captured from the point of view of a spectator in motion, as from a balloon moving away from the city, so the internal life of the city is best characterized in terms of its traffic. When the city stops moving, it indicates a social crisis. In Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925), the mental distress of the character Septimus Smith, who is suffering from shell shock, is indicated by abortive encounters and a failure to move on with the traffic. Being not part of, but an obstacle to, the city's traffic signifies the extent to which he has become separated from society.

In the modernist city, traffic is both material fact and metaphor. 25 The concentration of population in the city necessitates the mass distribution of goods and the mass movement of people from one part of the city to another. The exchanges and transactions that occur in the course of this movement were constitutive of the new forms of social relations that formed the foundation of modern urban culture; and perhaps no social relationship was changed more profoundly than that between men and women.

Historians have shown that the persistent and effective Victorian ideology that confined women to the private sphere was contradicted by the lives of the majority of women in the nineteenth century. Working‐class women did work, when they could, and middle‐class women often took a role in business or participated in some aspects of public life. Most women, like most men, were drawn to the city by the demand for labour, but before systematic attempts were made to plan and improve working‐class areas, they were characterized by inadequate housing and little access to running water or sanitation. As a consequence, private life was limited. Families would often share rooms and beds or sleep in shifts. Community and social life was conducted in the courtyards, tenement landings and stairways, and narrow streets.

Street life permitted frank exchanges between men and women, both verbal and physical. Opportunities for women to work outside the home changed the relationship between men and women, and early accounts of the industrial city expressed horror at examples of young women who broke away from the patriarchal family and set up home on their own; but high levels of poverty and exploitation meant that violence and prostitution were also commonplace. While there was some loosening of familial control and religious surveillance, men's control over women could still be brutal. In addition, measures were taken by the state to control and regulate women's sexuality. In Britain the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s allowed the authorities in towns to perform a medical examination on any woman who looked as though she might be a prostitute. 26 Such measures and the exclusion of women from democratic reforms fuelled the emergence of women's movements in modern cities.

As a consequence, women's artistic responses to the modern city were different from men's. Although most women modernists came from the middle and upper classes—Virginia Woolf famously saw an income of £500 a year as a necessary minimum for a woman to become a writer—the ability or inability of women to move from the home into the street is a key focus for many women's texts. Stepping into the street becomes the first move in a journey to independence. Whereas the world of Leopold Bloom is made outside the home, even while the domestic and its anxieties prey on his mind all day, for Mrs Dalloway or the characters in Katherine Mansfield's short stories, the boundaries between the public and the private have to be carefully negotiated.

One of the most perceptive observers of these negotiations was Dorothy Richardson. Richardson never reached Woolf's minimum income. She worked for a pound a week as a dental receptionist in London's Harley Street. Having been close to poverty herself, often choosing books over food, Richardson portrays the heroine of her long prose work Pilgrimage (published between 1915 and 1967) as a skilled navigator of London's streets. Willing to venture out after dark, Miriam runs the risk of unrespectability, or being classified as a prostitute by male pedestrians or policemen. But she reaps the rewards of the freedom the city can offer to a single woman.

Jean Rhys, in contrast, wrote about the other side of being a lone woman in London and Paris. Her female characters suffer the consequences of economic dependence and rejection. Novels such as After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939) are studies in abjection. Yet even here the sense is of cities full of possibility. The Paris of Good Morning, Midnight is full of lost souls with whom Rhys's protagonist might (but does not quite) experience a meaningful relationship. The failure to overcome the barriers is not because they are necessarily insurmountable. It was just that, by the 1930s, the promise of the cosmopolitan, modernist city announced by Simmel had been thwarted by the shadows of war, fascism, and Stalinism. Rhys explores, from a woman's point of view, a much more pessimistic version of the city, versions of which had already been conceived by earlier writers such as George Gissing and Franz Kafka.

There is a pleasing paradox here, because male modernists' negative reactions to the city had been partly about their response to the increasing presence of women in the urban public sphere. As women's earning power grew, female spaces, such as department stores, cafés, and movie theatres, multiplied. There was even a kind of virtuous circle whereby—in addition to office work—theatres, shops, cafés, and restaurants also employed women workers, allowing more women to get closer to economic independence (although wages in these sectors were still very low). Women's increasing public presence was reflected in an anxiety in men's writing about the decline of the power of fathers. For some writers, such as George Gissing, whose fiction is still bound to a form of late nineteenth‐century realism, this anxiety was crippling. But for others, it was a liberation. Modernist fiction written by both men and women experimented with new forms that enabled new masculinities and new femininities, as well as new identities not recognizable as either masculine or feminine in the traditional sense. A novel such as Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936), created a carnivalesque cast of characters who populate Paris after dark.

Urban Planning—Urban Sprawl

Modernist fiction's interest was in how new forms of gender relations are made in the circulation and movement of men and women through the city's private and public spaces. But if one modernist project was to chart and map such movements, another was to reshape them through changing the city itself. Cities had always been a combination of planned and unplanned growth. With a few notable exceptions, such as St Petersburg in the eighteenth or Brasilia in the twentieth century, the city has come first and attempts to plan it have been after the fact. Urban populations grew (and are still growing), with such rapidity that planning always lagged behind. Designing a better city which would control or erase its less regulated aspects was always an aspect of the modernist project. Three categories of planned modernization can be identified.

First, there was the improvement of existing urban districts through, for example, slum clearance and the construction of new roads, and new houses with improved services and sanitation. Second, there were examples of the wholesale replanning of existing cities, for example Georges‐Eugène Haussmann's reorganization of central Paris. This plan, like many reimaginations of the modern city, had a political element. It aimed to replace narrow medieval and easily defended streets with wide boulevards, which it would be less easy to barricade during Paris's periodic revolutionary insurgencies. However, it also had a more practical function of increasing the speed of movement through the city, creating, in effect, a networked city. Such wholesale reorderings would also include the construction of sewer systems and public transport networks, both designed to increase the efficiency with which the city dealt with its inhabitants and their waste. Joyce's Ulysses in particular tracks the infrastructure that connects the city. Building these networks enacted a process of creative destruction, in which the old city, with its peculiar spatial configurations, was swept away and new urban formations took its place, a process noticed in literature as early as Dickens's Dombey and Son (1848). The construction of a new infrastructure meant that new forms of social interaction emerged. Third, whole new cities were planned, such as St Petersburg in the eighteenth century and Brasilia in the twentieth, or, on a smaller scale, new neighbourhoods. The movement for garden suburbs is an example of the latter. It began in England, but spread to Germany and central Europe, notably Czechoslovakia. 27 Such forms of modernization could extend to the micro level. Movements such as the Arts and Crafts in Britain and Bauhaus in Germany sought to transform domestic space in ways that then appeared revolutionary, but which, in the case of an ergonomic fitted kitchen, now seem everyday.

However, modern cities were in a state of permanent revolution, so that planning, even the building of new cities, was always overtaken by the city's own dynamics. The desire to plan and order cities demonstrated the extent to which the city was imagined as much as it was real. Images of the unruly, unregulated city competed with images of the city as an ordered utopia, such as Le Corbusier's vertical cities in the sky. The city dweller experienced her or his individual identity reflected back at her or himself through the city's reflective surfaces, mirrors, and shop windows, and the images reproduced in advertising and print culture. Modernist responses to the city addressed these subjective responses through dreamscapes and fantasy. However, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, the city itself was a kind of dream factory: ‘arcades, winter gardens, panoramas, factories, wax museums, casinos, railway stations’, as much as theatres, exhibitions, cinemas, and advertising, produced urban dreamscapes. 28

Such dreamscapes have always had a gendered dimension. As Rachel Bowlby has written, as women became increasingly visible in the public sphere they were placed in a paradoxical situation in relation to the city's visual culture. In the act of consumption, at theatres or department stores, they were also consumed. Theatres, music halls, and concert halls were a space for public display. 29 Fashion offered an opportunity to remake a public identity, but also positioned women as objects of a male gaze. However, men weren't immune from the new visual culture and were themselves the objects of the gazes of both women and men. Parts of London, such as Regent's Park, were cruising grounds for homosexual men. 30

In volume ii of In Search of Lost Time , the narrator, Marcel, is both subject and object of the male gaze. At the seaside resort of Balbec, he is fixed by the gaze of Baron de Charlus. But he himself gazes frankly at his friend‐to‐be, Saint‐Loup. Gazing almost daily at a group of young women, he experiences a desire, not for an individual, but for a kind of composite, not unlike a Cubist painting, made up of the fleeting impressions of the collective. 31 Desire here does not exist on one plane, and the gaze is more than an instrument of power. Rather it is more akin to a wager, thrown out in the hope of rich, but unknown, returns. While it is undoubtedly true that the odds were stacked in favour of men, the city did offer women chances, to desire and to act upon desire, that had not previously been available.

Dakar, Paris, New York, Buenos Aires

One of the things that set Simmel's Großstädte apart was their international nature. Imperial cities, such as Paris, London, and Berlin, drew in visitors, students, and immigrants from around the world. We have already seen how a small number of Algerian soldiers took part in the Paris Commune. Capitals of empires were both the hub, but also paradoxically often the sites of resistance to imperialism. Imperial cities afforded the meeting points and spaces that fed the cosmopolitan cultures that challenged colonialism in Africa and Asia. Paris in particular acted as a point of connection for intellectuals, artists, and writers of African descent. Although France had colonies in Africa and the West Indies, the French republican ideal was that French citizens living in France had equal rights. African-American intellectuals active in the struggle for civil rights in the US, such as W. E. B. DuBois, visited Paris in the years before the 1914–18 war. Dubois helped to organize the first Pan‐African Congress in Paris in 1919, an attempt to bring together and organize people of African descent in Africa and the Americas. 32 African-American troops found they were welcomed and given more respect in wartime France than in the US. West African troops fighting for France and Indian troops fighting for Britain were politicized by the contrast between their sacrifice and their subject status in their respective empires.

In the inter‐war years, Paris became a meeting place for writers from the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, from the United States, and from colonial Africa. The Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of art and literature that was located in the predominantly black part of Manhattan, had a strong influence on writers from French colonies and Haiti. But these influences were not one‐way. Rather, there was a circulation of people, texts, and images around what Paul Gilroy calls the ‘Black Atlantic’. 33 Cities such as Paris and London were important nodes in international networks, facilitating an exchange of ideas. The writer Claude McKay, for example, moved from his native Jamaica to New York, where he was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Later he travelled to France, including Paris and Marseilles, where he set his novel Banjo , and then to Morocco, then part of the French empire. The future president of Senegal Léopold Senghor lived in Paris between 1928 and 1935. The Negritude movement he helped to create with the Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire was inspired by the Harlem Renaissance, French Surrealism, and existentialism, but fed back into African nationalism, influencing post‐war struggles for independence and post‐colonial African literature. 34 London was also a meeting point for West Indian intellectuals in the 1930s such as C. L. R. James, who wrote The Black Jacobins (1938), a history of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), the first Caribbean struggle for independence. 35

Thus, the better‐known exchanges between Europe and its colonies, such as the influence of African art on Picasso, 36 are best understood in the context of a notion of urban traffic that extends beyond Europe to have a global reach. Inevitably, these exchanges were unequal and open to characterizations that portrayed non‐European art and cultural traditions as little more than an infusion of raw, natural energy into the European Enlightenment tradition. In the same vein, the journeys made to Paris, London, or New York by artists from the colonies could be depicted as pilgrimages from savagery to civilization, or, from the point of view of nascent anti‐colonial nationalisms, as a dangerous dilution of native cultures in the melting pot of the city.

Such debates had something in common with the original, nationalist and ruralist, attacks on Simmel's description of the great cities as a cosmopolitan mix of peoples and cultures. If the original function of imperial cities was the domination and exploitation of the colonies, their evolving relationship with non‐European peoples and practices changed indigenous cultures on both sides. Despite taking place in the context of the hegemony of the imperial culture, such exchanges were characterized by resistance as well as oppression. The consequence is that it is often difficult to extract a single national tradition out of the transaction that constituted either the culture of the modern city or the emergent national cultures of the emergent post‐colonial states.

The relationship between Latin American literature and European modernism is illustrative here. At the same time as black modernisms were in circulation around the Atlantic, Latin American states, relatively isolated since independence in the early nineteenth century, were coming to the end of their ‘hundred years of solitude’ 37 and becoming involved in a comparable process of internationalization. The three writers who constituted what Gerald Martin calls the ‘ABC of magical realism’, the Guatemalan Miguel Asturias, the Argentine Jorge Borges, and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, developed a form of writing that took a dialogic relationship between European culture and the Americas as its starting point. 38 Magical or, as Carpentier named it, maravilloso (marvellous) realism confronted Europe's classification of the Americas as exotic with the claim that the continent's physical and social terrains exceeded European structures of representation. As Martin argues, magical realism set up dialogues between the growing Latin American cities and their rural hinterlands, between a literate urban and pre‐literate indigenous cultures, and between a new Latin American literature and European modernisms.

Alejo Carpentier associated with the Surrealists while in political exile in Paris in the 1920s. His ‘marvellous realist’ novel The Kingdom of This World (1949) is set during the first anti‐colonial revolution in Haiti, and explores the importance of African religious beliefs to the slaves' revolt. Asturias's Men of Maize (also 1949) incorporated Mayan myth to write a Guatemalan national epic. However, Asturias's knowledge of Mayan culture came from his studies in Paris in the 1920s, where he was acquainted with Carpentier. Men of Maize , like The Kingdom of This World , or Borges's short stories, is the product of a circulation of ideas between Europe and Latin America. European modernist authors, including translations of Joyce and Woolf, Albert Camus and Jean‐Paul Sartre, were published in Latin America in journals such as Sur , in Buenos Aires, edited by Victoria Ocampo. 39 Borges, who had spent much of his early life in Europe, was a regular contributor. The cheap franc meant that Paris was a popular destination for Latin Americans in the 1920s. 40 But Latin America had its own modernist cities, notably Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Mexico City, which developed their own distinctive urban cultures. Mexico City, in particular, was a centre for artists such as Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo, as well as political refugees such as Trotsky. 41

In other words, from the 1920s at least, Simmel's Großstädte were no longer confined to Europe. After 1945 Asian and African cities, as they freed themselves from colonialism, started to be the new big cities, outgrowing the European prototypes. However, the question now arises whether these can properly be called modernist cities, and, if so, what relationship do they bear to the European modernist city? This is a complex question raising issues of time, space, and form. But it is important, as these issues have a bearing on the original modernist cities, as well as their successors.

Fredric Jameson has argued for a ‘singular modernity’; that is, one modernizing process: capitalism. 42 Different cities find themselves at different stages in the same process. Thus, Jameson has made a convincing argument that certain Third World cities now find themselves at the same point as European cities in the early nineteenth century, populated largely by rural immigrants. 43 It would therefore be possible to talk of realist cities, which then become modernist cities, and then postmodern cities, in which the complete commodification of society and consciousness has occurred. Other, post‐colonial critics have argued that new nations represent not a stage in the same process, but alternative modernities. 44 They accuse Marxist critics, such as Jameson, of a teleological approach, which suggests that all cultures go through the stages experienced by the first capitalist nations. Third World cultures, according to this teleology, would simply reflect a European pattern, whereas in fact they have their own distinctive trajectories.

However, it is not clear that Jameson's argument is as determinist as it has been painted. 45 In order to reconcile the two positions, it is necessary to return to our balloonist Durouf, who is still travelling over enemy lines. He can see more and more of Paris, as it spreads out behind him, but he is unsure of where the wind will take him. In this chapter, I have argued that one of the things that characterize the modernist city is an aesthetic that attempts to capture the city as a whole, but from a moving position, so that what is achieved is not a static totality, but one in constant motion, where the end‐point remains unclear. The modernist city is characterized by its traffic, through and between cities. Thus, it cannot be conceived except as part of a network. Monet's Paris becomes visible through London, his London through Paris. City streets in Verlaine or Rimbaud's poetry are both London and Paris. Modernist movements existed in and between cities.

This is not to deny that London and Paris have their own, distinctive histories, their own relationships with the English and French countryside, with the nation, and indeed with the British and French empires. But it is the connectedness of the imagined city of modernism that gives it a recognizable aesthetic. The period of high modernism is usually seen as the 1920s, and is certainly over by 1945 in Europe. But the network of cities continues to grow. Post‐colonial modernisms do not echo an earlier European pattern; they offer an aesthetic appropriate to a wider, global, more complex network. The term ‘postmodernist’ has been used to describe such new city narratives as Gabriel García Marquéz's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) or Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988), but it is difficult to arrive at an agreed definition of what an aesthetic after modernism might be. The modernist cities that existed before and after the 1914–18 war are no longer with us, but their legacies continue to reverberate in the ways the world imagines the twenty‐first‐century cities, where now more than half the world's population lives. 46

Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris: the Siege and the Commune 1870–1871 (London: Macmillan, 1965 ), 125.

For a good example, see the balloon in Édouard Manet's painting The Universal Exhibition (1867).

On the relationship between modernism and movement, see Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003 ).

See Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in Selected Writings , iii: 1935–1938 , ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002 ), 32–49.

See David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003 ).

Steven Beller, ‘Big‐City Jews: Jewish Big City—The Dialectics of Assimilation in Vienna c. 1900’, in Malcolm Gee, Tim Kirk, and Jill Steward (eds), The City in Central Europe: Culture and Society from 1800 to the Present (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003 ), 145.

See Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (London: Verso, 1991 ), 28.

Between 20,000 and 30,000 people were massacred by the victorious government forces; see Albert Boime, Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris After War and Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995 ).

Paul Tucker agrees that the painting makes reference to the war, but sees it as a patriotic statement; ‘The First Impressionist Exhibition and Monet's Impression, Sunrise : A Tale of Timing, Commerce, and Patriotism’, Art History , 7/4 ( 1984 ), 465–76.

See Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (London: Verso, 2008 ).

Paul Verlaine, ‘Streets II’, in Romances sans paroles: Œuvres poétiques (Paris: Éditions Garnières Frères, 1969 ), 164.

‘O la rivière dans la rue! | Fantastiquement apparue | Derrière un mur haut de cinq pieds, | Elle roule sans un murmure | Son onde opaque et pourtant pure, | Par les faubourgs pacifiés. | La chaussée est très large, en sorte | Que l'eau jaune comme une morte | Dévale ample et sans nuls espoirs | De rien refléter que la brume, | Même alors que l'aurore allume | Les cottages jaune et noirs.’

See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003 ).

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990 ), 240.

Frisby also points out that the occasion for the essay was ‘the representation of the city’ at a big exhibition, the First German Municipal Exhibition in Dresden in 1903. See David Frisby , ‘The City Interpreted: Georg Simmel's Metropolis’, in Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 101.

See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990 ), 83–110.

See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992 ).

See Walter Benjamin , ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Selected Writings , iv: 1935–1938 , ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003), 313–55.

Ibid. 328–9.

Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism, the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, in Selected Writings , ii: 1927–1934 , ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999 ), 217–19.

Walter Benjamin , The Arcades Project , trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), P2, 1, p. 519.

‘For what do we know of street‐corners, curb‐stones, the architecture of the pavement—we who have never felt heat, filth, and the edges of the stone beneath our naked soles, and have never scrutinized the uneven placement of the paving stones with an eye toward bedding down on them’ ( Ibid. , P1, 10, p. 517 ).

Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999 ), 11.

On the concept of traffic in literary modernism, see Mark Anderson, Kafka's Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Hapsburg Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992 ).

See Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982 ).

See Jane Pavitt, ‘From the Garden to the Factory: Urban Visions in Czechoslovakia Between the Wars’, in Malcolm Gee, Tim Kirk, and Jill Steward (eds), The City in Central Europe: Culture and Society from 1800 to the Present (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003 ), 27–44.

Benjamin, The Arcades Project , L1, 3, p. 405.

Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (London: Methuen, 1982 ).

See Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 ).

See Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove , vol. ii of In Search of Lost Time , trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Vintage, 1996 ).

See Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991 ), 46–62.

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993 ).

On Claude McKay, see Fabre , From Harlem to Paris , 92–113 ; on Negritude and the Harlem Renaissance, see ibid. 146–59 and F. Abiola Irele, ‘The Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude Movement’, in F. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi (eds), The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature , ii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 ), 759–84.

See Bill Schwarz (ed.), West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003 ).

See Simon Gikandi, ‘Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference’, Modernism/Modernity , 10/3 (Sept. 2003 ), 455–80.

The title of perhaps the most famous magical realist work, the Colombian Gabriel García Marquéz's Cien años de soledad (1967).

Gerald Martin, Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1989 ).

See John King, Sur: A Study of the Argentine Literary Journal and its Role in the Development of a Culture, 1931–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 ).

Gerald Martin, who argues strongly for the influence of Ulysses on magical realism, comments that there were more young Latin American writers in Paris in the 1920s than ever before or since; Journeys Through the Labyrinth , 136.

There is undoubtedly more to be said also about modernism and the Japanese city between the wars.

Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002 ).

See Fredric Jameson, ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital’, Social Text , 15 (Fall 1986 ), 65–88. For a Marxist critique of this essay, see Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992 ), 95–122.

See Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (ed.), Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001 ).

For a reconsideration of the debates, see Ian Buchanan , ‘National Allegory Today: A Return to Jameson’, New Formations , 51 (Winter 2003–4), 66–79.

See Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006 ).

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GEOG2046 The Making of the Modern City

• Taught: Semester 2 (Jan to Jun) View timetable
• Credits: 20
• Class Size: 150
• Module Manager: Dr Asa Roast
• Email: [email protected]
• This Module is approved as a Discovery Module

Discovery module overview

Module Summary

This module is a critical history of urban planning, and covers changing social conditions and the planning of cities in the 'modern' world (roughly 1850 to late 20th century). The origins and development of modern urban planning are considered with special emphasis placed on their growing complexity and diversity in the 20th century. The focus is on understanding the logics and ideologies which formed interventions into urban and regional geography by individuals and institutions in positions of power. The worldwide diffusion of European planning practices is examined, as well as its impact on local populations, as part of a broad international scope of investigation.

On completion of this module students should have acquired:

• i) an understanding of issues and themes in the planning and development of cities in the modern world (c. 1850 to late 20th century), with particular regard to issues of power, social injustice, and modernist planning and development.
• ii) an appreciation of how modern urban geographies were produced, and why.
• iii) an appreciation of the politics of planning urban space and their integration with broader issues of social justice, race, colonialism, ideology and geopolitics.
• iv) an understanding of critical theoretical and philosophical perspectives on urban planning and development in the modern world, and the ideas of the modern and modernity
• v) an understanding of the challenges to and failures of modernist planning, and how these relate to contemporary planning challenges.

This module provides a critical history of urban planning, concentrated on the period from approximately 1850 to the late 20th century, and introduces students to the following themes:

• -Urbanisation and urban redevelopment in periods of industrialisation and colonial expansion.
• -Urbanization and urban redevelopment in periods of deindustrialization and post-colonial fragmentation
• -Social change in cities in Britain, Europe and selected other parts of the world, including East Asia. Eastern Europe and North and South America.
• -The development of ideas and practice in urban planning and modern architecture and the diffusion of planning and architectural practice around the world.
• -Challenges to and failures of modernism, rational planning and postwar urbanism.
• -Knowledge of an understanding of the rise of postmodern perspectives on urbanization and how this relates to contemporary planning

Learning Outcomes

• - An understanding of modernist planning and urbanization
• - An understanding of the logics and ideas behind interventions in cities and regions throughout the world
• - An understanding of the historical and geographical relationship between urban development, power, and ideology
• - Detailed knowledge of the character of selected cities, and their place within wider systems. This includes Asian, African, Latin American, Eastern European, Western European and North American cities
• - Skills in the identification and acquisition of literature and other sources, and knowledge of selected techniques of information retrieval, analysis and presentation in oral and written formats

Skills Outcomes

Research and analytical methods such as use of primary source materials in crafting an argument and a research-based essay Cognitive skills

• -Abstraction and synthesis of information from a variety of sources
• -Assessment and critical evaluation of the merits of contrasting theories, explanations, policies
• -Critical analysis and interpretation of data and text
• -Developing reasoned arguments
• -Solving problems and making reasoned decisions

Practical/professional skills

• -Plan, design, execute and report geographical research both individually and as part of a team
• -Collect, interpret and synthesise different types of quantitative and qualitative geographical data
• -Recognise the ethical issues involved in geographical debates and enquiries
• -Learn in familiar and unfamiliar situations
• -Communicate effectively (in writing, verbally and through graphical presentations)
• -Use information technology effectively (including use of spreadsheet, database and word processing programmes; Internet and e-mail)
• -Identify, retrieve, sort and exchange geographical information using a wide range of sources
• -Work as part of a team and to recognise and respect the viewpoints of others
• -Manage time and organise work effectively.

Assessment and teaching

Private Study

Private study will take two forms:

• 1) General reading to prepare for and supplement weekly lectures and seminars.
• 2) Research aimed at the completion of a final project.

Progress Monitoring

Seminars will be used for preparing students for the final projects, and will help ensure understand of material and assessments. There will be a dedicated formative feedback workshop towards the end of the module.

Teaching methods

Reading list.

Back to Discovery Themes

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Security and the Modern City, Essay Example

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Security has become one of the main aspects of today’s society, especially after the attacks of 911. There is more surveillance, more security and more officers on the roads within all of the United States and Canada. Laws are stricter and people are more leery of doing specific things. Our privacy has been taken from us in order to make an attempt to keep people safer. Charles Sykes in “Privacy and Surveillance” couldn’t have said it better. He states that “privacy is like oxygen. We really only appreciate it when it’s gone” (Code and Keall, “Privacy and Surveillance”). This is very true. However, the modern city has gone overboard with security and continues to take away privacy as well as other forms of security in our people.

Surveillance is high in the modern city now, especially surveillance in places such as Toronto. The police, government, military, and multiple companies are consistently using surveillance cameras and surveillance media in order to “protect” the public. The use of CCTV’s (small cameras used to watch patrons in banks, shopping malls, and other places) are used more commonly in the modern city. Police are now using these cameras at the majority of street lights in cities in order to capture people breaking the laws of the road. This is a big change as many cities did not have this technology before 911. These cameras are used to combat crime and are much cheaper than using police officers to do the work for them (“Example: Surveillance Cameras in Public Places”). Eavesdropping is another form of surveillance that is more prevalent in the modern city these days. Police and the government use “bugs” in order to overhear what people may be talking about. These bugs are put in vehicles, on telephones, and even through our email (Code and Keall, “Privacy and Surveillance”).

Since 911, security specifically has been heightened. There are a great number of security officers and security measures in airports, shopping malls, travel destinations such as Disney World, and many other places. Security in airports is probably the most prevalent today as we have seen a huge difference in the security measures in the last 12 years. There are more cameras, more security officers, and more security measures being put into place in these airports all over the world. “The traveler is identified, probed and monitored in ways that would never have been tolerated a decade ago” (Code and Keall, “The City in Crisis: Terrorism and Other Challenges”).

Fortification has also been heightened by the military in order to protect boundaries in both Canada and all of the United States. More and more military personnel are building walls per se in order to keep intruders out of our country. This is important to do; however, just like surveillance and security, there has to be boundaries. It is important for the military and government to understand what they are truly doing to the country.

There are many advantages to the heightened security of the modern city. However, there are just as many disadvantages. There are economic, social, political, technological, and administrative repercussions in the midst of the trying to secure our cities, our people, and our country. Economically, more companies are paying for cameras, officers, and ways in which to keep their products and customers safe. This is costly to the companies as well as its patrons. Socially, more and more people are afraid of talking to each other. We, in the modern city, never know when we are being watched, taped, bugged, or seen based on the security systems that have been put in and many are afraid to speak their own minds. Politically, many are fighting the new security measures saying that they are unconstitutional or unfair which makes it difficult for officers and the government to do their jobs. Technologically, more and more people are working harder to maintain equipment that suits the government’s standards of security. This means more labor, more pay, more equipment, and more money. Administratively, there are more people watching cameras, taking notes, spending hours reviewing security measures and laws. All of this creates some form of conflict. As stated, there are advantages and disadvantages that many have to consider as we continue to build security and surveillance in the modern city.

Works Cited

Example: Surveillance Cameras in Public Places.”. N.p., 22 Apr 2000. Web. 3 Apr 2013.<http://debate.uvm.edu/handbookfile/pubpriv/208.html>.

Lewis Code and Peggy Keall. Privacy and Surveillance . 2012-2013. Print.

Lewis Code and Peggy Keall. The City in Crisis: Terrorism and Other Challenges. 2012-2013. Print.

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Las Vegas: The First Postmodern City in the World Essay

General statement, what does a postmodern city look like, is las vegas the world’s first postmodern city, are there any other contenders.

Postmodernism is a term used to refer to the general changes that occur in the institutions. The term modern refers to the present and post modernism refers to events that happened after modernism. Post modernism came into being in the 20th century and it covered the theories that related to changes in the literature, architecture, design, drama as well as the various changes that are experienced in our economic and industrial cultures. The changes that have occurred after the era of modernism have given a new wave to the value and the condition or state of the institutions today. The overall considerations of the changes in the politics, economics, culture, philosophy and institutions has given rise to new cities which are referred to as the postmodern cities. In the global sphere, a postmodern city has been attached to various changes which reflect the cultural framework of the city, changes in the economy and a new orientation in the post industrial capitalist society. Post modernism gives a reflection of post modern city that depicts a lot of fun in the lifestyles of the locals, freedom and also sex.

Postmodernism describes the appreciation of the changes that occur in today’s institutions, culture, economy and how these changes are sustained. The structure of a postmodern city has been defined by various scholars. This has given rise to questioning of what the postmodern city really comprises in terms of the various described changes that are deemed to have occurred after modernism. The paper assesses the query of what the postmodern city looks like and what changes one would expect to find in these cities as opposed to other cities. The paper also analyses the theory of Las Vegas being the first postmodern city in the world. An in depth study of the changes, structure, culture among other changes are analyzed against the description of the postmodern city. The final analysis takes a look at other cities and gives a statement on their ability to be considered as contenders to the consideration of being postmodern cities against Las Vegas. Each of these sections comprises different descriptions of the topic, examples, background and conclusions of how the topics supports the thesis.

A postmodern city must have defined characteristics and conditions that must be satisfied in order for that city to be considered postmodern. In the global category Las Vegas was the first city to meet these conditions and is therefore considered the first postmodern city in the world. Over time, other cities have struggled to meet the prescribed conditions and this therefore means that there must be other contenders of the postmodern city description.

The issues related to the postmodern idea emerged with the reactions that were brought forward against modernism. Post modern cities are created through the recognition of the key principles and values that lead to their formation and sustaining. Post modern city can be defined with the rise of the invention of tradition by imitating older forms. This has been referred to as historical eclecticism. Another feature of a postmodern city is the presence of multi culture which has its roots to the locality and the ethnicity of the people who occupy the region. The final aspect of the postmodern city is the commercialization and the theater. The post modern city gives a reflection of the change from modernism to postmodernism through the changes in the economic and also the cultural codes. The postmodern city is described to be more flexible in the economic issues. The city has better methods of mass production which incorporate international considerations. There is a great transition from the fordist system of mass production to flexible methods of accumulation. The city is also deemed to have a lot of space that incorporates self contained cities and also continued rediscovery of the local aspects. Other features that incorporate the postmodern city include the overlapping themes such as contextualism, historicism, regionalism, anti-universalism, collage, reflexivity, self-referentiality, fragmentation, commercialism, politicization among others. The rise of the postmodern cities is viewed as change of values which are brought about by activities of the communities with the consideration of pluralism and also regionalism, the urban design, mixed ecological approaches and also pedestrian design (Burbank, 2005, p17).

The postmodern cites are comprised of various urban designs which place the city beyond competition with other cities. The urban planning in these cities is more directed to the issues related to age and their different ideas towards the planning of the city. The postmodern cities focus on projecting a city that has very attractive images. The environmental, historical and public image is a major consideration in the urban planning. The planning and design usually addresses the global competition, public realm and the sustainability of the city. The social aspect of the city is greatly influenced by cultural vocabulary which gives a new look into the culture and the ethnicity of the region. Environmental factors are also considered as they relate to the biodiversity and energy efficiency.

According to Robert, postmodern cities are more cynical about the future and they delight in the uncertainty. They are more expressed using a description of their art; literature and also music. The postmodern cities are also differentiated in the structure of urban design, planning and also transportation (1997, p23). Other scholars such as Docker describe the postmodern city as reflecting a variety of approaches in designing the urban city. This include the approaches related to the urban public space, street lights, traffic, aspects that affect the culture, commercial predominance and social behavior of the locals (1994, p34). He further clarifies that postmodern cities are continuously involved in the preservation and the renovation of the older buildings such as housing, offices, and institutional buildings and also the commercial strips into more compatible and attractive housing.

In his research about the description of the postmodern city, John (1999) describes the new approach of rebuilding the cities that has been up taken by major cities which are trying to achieve the level of the postmodern city. In his book he states that:

“… There is a great decline in the heavy and manufacturing industries that have dominated the modern city. This has since been replaced by the increasing importance of the post industrial industries. The changes have also been coupled by a change in the social and the demography of the cities. These processes reflect a lot of diversion in terms of space and also social formations and this has had a great effect in impacting change on the upcoming postmodern cities. These changes are described as advancing capitalism into the postmodern outlook. There is a new global symbol in the economy which depicts change into massive mass production and consumption. Other changes in the postmodern cities include a diversion in culture and the image of the cities into more projected images.” (p 64).

This exhibit clearly indicates that these cities must undergo various changes in the social, cultural, political, environmental and also economic changes in order to achieve the goal of a postmodern city. There is prove on the ground of many cities moving away from the modern industries in the post modern industries which include the banking services, advertising, financial sector and other retail sectors such as entertainment and leisure. This has seen the move into mass production which is demonstrated by the new era of capitalism. The cities organize their economic structure in a manner that will sustain the post industrial sectors of their economy. Most of the activities in the postmodern cities have moved to the service sector. There is a shift to the production and consumption culture. Changes in culture are demonstrated by the new outlook of the city which is appealing to the public. Post modern cities are therefore generally shaped by the city style, urban design and also culture.

The above discussion clearly agrees with the thesis that the formation of the postmodern city must be met with some conditions. The studies and research performed on the design, structure and the appearance of the postmodern cities clearly brings out some crucial factors that any city working towards this goal must fulfill. Various changes must be performed especially on the issues related to art, culture, urban design, politics and also the economic sphere of the city. The changes performed on these cities must not only meet the needs of the local people but it must be possible to attract other cultures into the city. Changes made in the city must continually be reinvented in order to meet the needs of the changing multicultural population. This therefore means that the formation of such a city must factor in the sustainability of changes in the social culture.

The elements that are traced in Las Vegas are a great role model for other upcoming postmodern cities. Las Vegas used to be described as the city of sin and it is known to be one of the fastest growing cities in America. The city has been described as the city with exemplary growth in the twentieth century. This city began its transformations back in the 1980’s and has developed over the years to become America’s most thriving city. The city has a population that is estimated to 603,093 as at U.S Census bureau 2008. In its bid to become a postmodern city, Las Vegas started by reinventing its image of Disney by constructing hotels that were very appealing to the visitors and also attractive in the environment. It has seen through various changes in culture which is clearly revealed in its environment. The city has many fantasy buildings along its Las Vegas strip which are not similar to each other. The city has a variety of modern entertainment that keeps its visitors coming back. Sceneries and entertainment in this city are sufficient enough for families since it satisfies both adults and their children. It has monuments such as the Luxor hotel and casino which is described as an imitated version of the ancient Egypt (Transparency now). The pyramid shaped hotel provides the visitors with great scenery of mystery images. Other postmodern commercial businesses include a variety of cultural hotels such as the Polynesian and the Chinese hotels. McCracken (1997)

The city has an international history about its major activities such as gambling, shopping malls and entertainment. Las Vegas is actually referred to as the entertainment capital of the world. It is a major setting area for major films and programs. The lighting in the Las Vegas Strip is superb just like other areas in the city. The spacing in the city makes it the brightest area in the world. The growth of the city has mainly been attributed to its legalizing of gambling as a legal business in 1931. The city is also known as the pioneer of the trails to the west through its rail road of the 1900 (Littlejohn, 1999, p10). Most of the surrounding areas shipped their goods from here to the rest of the country. The economy of this region basically concentrates with the involvement in tourism, gaming and also conventions which in turn provide a basis for the other retail and dining industries. The Major drive of this economy is therefore the service industry. It serves as the headquarters for the world’s largest gaming companies. Other major companies focus on the production of the gaming machines and marketing of tourism services. Its major technologies are concentrated in the electronic gaming and telecommunication sector. Cultural trends in the city include the celebration of local artists and musicians on the first Friday of every month. Other cultures include the zoology and botanical parks besides the performing of different arts such as dances, opera, orchestra which are aimed at attracting and entertaining tourists. The city is also involved in sports although this is not a major event in Las Vegas (Burbank, 2005, p23).

Various studies have been documented regarding the growth and the transformations of the Vegas city as a postmodern city. Smith and Valerie (2000) trace the development of the city to its heavy investment in architectural sociology. The various architectural forms in the city have had a great effect on its cultural transformations. The city is continuously changing and always reinventing its marketing strategies, culture and very high incorporation of technology. This in turn has resulted to mass production especially in its service sector (P1). They describe the city as one with impossibilities in its achievements especially with its predominant characteristics of differentiation, approach in technology, diversity, simulation and commodification. Brien, 1995 further describes the development of the city as the reinvention of the dead or old styles into modernity which is characterized by a lot of potentials, individualism and personalities. They reinforce the fact that the city basically developed due to its distinguished architectural works and also differentiated culture. He also points out the great development of the city owing to technology, especially electronic gaming. The study also explores the great nature of the hotels in the region which are well designed to fit the modern culture. Springer editions (1995) also bring out the importance of architectural works in Las Vegas besides its dominance in the gambling sector. They argue that Las Vegas was made a postmodern city owing to its architecture which brought out a new city. Other postmodern elements in the city such as the reconstruction of the Las Vegas city has made the city to move to higher levels of gambling. They conclude that postmodernism is generally owed to the cultural aspects and framework that is adopted by the city.

Las Vegas is a city that has invested in the reproduction and invention of original ideas which demonstrate a lot of creativity in their culture. This has enabled the city to have a variety of new technologies which are adopted to sustain the economy and the culture of the city. This makes it very differentiated from other cities in that it has very distinguished and unique features. Smith and Valerie, 2000 bring out a very clear description of the city which makes it the most vibrant city in the world where all things can be experimented or invented; “Everything that is supposedly enjoyed and experienced can be encountered on the grandest of scales in Las Vegas, including the New York Skyline, the great monuments of Paris, instantaneous escapes to Rio, the exotic lure of Asia at Mandalay Bay, the pyramids and mysteries of ancient Egypt, the Caesars, queens, and gladiators of ancient Rome, sinking pirate ships, remembrances of early Hollywood, and dueling Knights of the Round table.

The belief is that anything that can be imagined can also be designed and accomplished in Las Vegas.”(p1)The ideas brought out in its description indicate that Las Vegas is a city that has strived to bring changes that are unique in their kind. There is no other city in the whole world that has been described to bear the descriptions of the ever changing features, economy and culture which sufficiently satisfies a multitude of people all over the world. The exhibit brings out the different architectural works of the city which describe the great works of invention and renovation that characterize the city. The culture of impossibility makes the locals achieve great heights in sustaining Las Vegas as a postmodern city.

The description and the debate brought forward by various studies leave no doubt of Las Vegas being the world’s first postmodern city. The different features and elements found in the city meet the characteristics described to form a postmodern city. It is described as a role model for other cities. This has seen other cities imitate its culture of reconstructing, invention and also innovation to create a distinguished postmodern city. The uniqueness of the city in its transformations and sustained changes in architecture, culture, economy urban developments and design in world’s history support the thesis that Las Vegas is the pioneer of the postmodern cities in the world.

Other Cities within the nation have been competing to achieve the heights of the Las Vegas city. This includes cities such as Florida City, Las Angeles and Miami. Florida is a city that has endeavored to hire very qualified architects in bid to improve on its image by constructing very appealing buildings. The architects are expected to factor in the art of cultural buildings in masking renovations within the city. This led to the successful creating of the Guggenheim art museum. The city strives to achieve comfort levels for its residents. The city has also put effort in creation of new parks and investing in public spaces among other urban developments. Other transformations have been greatly invested in the economic changes, culture, symbolic manipulations and constructions. The city of Las Angeles has made various attempts in meeting the elements of a postmodern city. However this city has been met with a lot of challenges such as the limited geographical space. The activities in the city such as the entertainment and advertising do not bring out the city as a center for fun and freedom. The architectural considerations of the city are also low compared to Las Vegas. The city has high incorporation of technology especially in industrial development. The region has made a remarkable approach to urban design changes which feature the self contained urban space. The city also experienced a great transformation in its financial sector in the 20 th century (Jeff, 2005, p23). This marked its efforts in the reexamination of urban growth. The financial transformations were characterized by widened gaps which brought great dynamics in the banking sector. This is reflected in the social changes within the community which featured social inequality. Miami on the other hand is a city that has placed its focus on the social and cultural foundations. The approach to the postmodern city is focused on the changes in the social races and ethnicity. Its efforts also depict a wider scope in the changes towards identity of power and definition of politics. The city also takes a new look into its housing developments and institution such as schools.

Previous studies indicate that a city such as Los Angeles has greatly anticipated constructing unique full service shopping malls such as supermarkets, restaurants and other retail shopping malls that are distinguished from other cities. The city has also made changes in its fashion and design of the housing units (Jeff, 2005, p25). The city of Florida has been involved in the efforts of redesigning the city over the past few years. Wilkerson, 2000 describes the various programs that have been initiated in Miami to make improvements on the neighborhood, economic growth and prosperity and also introduction of more diversified entertainment blogs. These programs have been designed in a manner that will incorporate changes as the social and economic cultures assume different directions. This serves as a step towards satisfying the cultural needs of the changing society (p28).

Main developments especially in Florida and Las Angeles describe their endeavors to compete with the Las Vegas city in being postmodern cities. Wilkerson, 2000 took a greater depth into the study of these cities and states that:

“Los Angeles has set the pace for privatized, unplanned and sprawling growth into post modernism. The city developed to be the host of a vast number of public parks and backyard swimming pools. Florida has not been left behind in its efforts to create changes in economy, culture and architectural works.” (p31).

This statement supports the existence of competitors into development of postmodern cities. The cities have invested to make various changes as depicted above in the urban designs, buildings, culture, economy among other changes required to meet the requirements of a postmodern city.

The developments in the above cities indicate that Las Vegas is in competition with many other cities which are effortlessly trying to make changes to meet the characteristics described for the postmodern city. The uniqueness in the transformations of the Las Vegas city still leaves it as a very distinguished postmodern city.

In conclusion, the study thesis can be described to be 80% accurate as the research that has been taken on the study brings out the true picture of the postmodern cities. The previous studies conducted by the previous scholars have greatly supported the thesis. The studies have brought out the various conditions that are considered essential for any city to be considered as a postmodern city. The thesis that certain conditions must be met therefore turns out to be true. The development and the transformation of the Las Vegas city were unique in its kind and this makes the research more accurate in proposing that Las Vegas was the first postmodern city in the world. Over the years, other cities have been in the race to meet the postmodernism elements and this lays a background for competition of Las Vegas with other cities. This study however leaves room for further studies and research into the topics in order to prove or disprove the thesis.

Lastly I would like to recommend a visit to the city of Las Vegas to the individuals who have never been into this region. A visit to such a city always gives the visitors a great experience of marvelous sceneries, and entertainment. Just like it has been described as a postmodern city, it is truly a city of fun where every one would like to spend their leisure time. It is always a welcoming, entertaining and satisfactory place to be.

David Littlejohn (1999). The real Las Vegas: Life beyond the trip. Oxford University Press.

Jeff Burbank (2005). Las Vegas Babylon: True tales of glitter, glamour and greed. New York.

John Docker (1994). Postmodernism and popular culture: A historical history. Cambridge University Press.

Kevin O’Brien (1995). Fear and loving in Las Vegas – concept of pastiche in postmodernism. Web.

Robert D McCracken (1997). Las Vegas: The great American playground. University of Nevada Press.

Ron Smith and Valerie Bugni. Defining Architectural Sociology. Web.

Springer (1995). “Postmodern” Las Vegas and its effect on gambling. Journal of Gambling Studies,Springer Netherlands. Web.

Thomas Ainlay, Judy Dixon and Charles, Sc (2003). Las Vegas: the fabulous first century. Arcadia publications.

Transparency now. Las Vegas: Postmodern City of Casinos and Simulation. Web.

W.R Wilkerson (2000). The man who invented Las Vegas. Beverly Hills.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, December 7). Las Vegas: The First Postmodern City in the World. https://ivypanda.com/essays/las-vegas-the-first-postmodern-city-in-the-world/

"Las Vegas: The First Postmodern City in the World." IvyPanda , 7 Dec. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/las-vegas-the-first-postmodern-city-in-the-world/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Las Vegas: The First Postmodern City in the World'. 7 December.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Las Vegas: The First Postmodern City in the World." December 7, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/las-vegas-the-first-postmodern-city-in-the-world/.

1. IvyPanda . "Las Vegas: The First Postmodern City in the World." December 7, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/las-vegas-the-first-postmodern-city-in-the-world/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Las Vegas: The First Postmodern City in the World." December 7, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/las-vegas-the-first-postmodern-city-in-the-world/.

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