Title: URBAN BEINGS OR CITY DWELLERS? THE COMPLEMENTARY CONCEPTS OF 'URBAN' AND 'CITY'
Abstract: This paper discusses, essayistically, the concepts of urban and city. It starts with the acceptance that conceptualizing things is not an easy task. On the contrary, it is full of complexities, intricate approaches and calls for the consideration of a historical account on the epistemology of space and urban, and of the idea of cities as artefacts. Despite being closely connected, it is certain that urban and city represent different phenomena. On the one hand, through the revisiting of classic theorists such as Lefebvre, Munford, Harvey and others, we point out to the idea of urban as something intangible, or a way of life that reflects modern societies. The idea that the world is increasingly urbanized is in fact commonsense to many scientific fields since the Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, we argue that city is a material object, territorial bound, represented by the concentration of buildings, roads, public and private spaces, people, altogether concentrated in the least possible area. This justifies the title of this paper: just as we cannot deny that we organize ourselves and our spaces as if we were all urban beings, this condition does not necessarily imply that we are all city dwellers. Yet, the physical and ontological ties of these two concepts tend to become increasingly complex and blurred if one considers important technological developments (in recent years, mostly information and communication technologies), which tend to reduce the importance of physical boundaries and the friction of distance, making citizens more global than local. Thus in this context, we can ask if there is any reason to define the physical limits of a city? If we have our communication capabilities expanded beyond the immediate territories that define our living spaces, what are the real limits and boundaries of our cities? In this article, we try and shed some light to the relationships between the complementary ideas of urban and city vis-a-vis their theoretical differences and similarities in past and present days.
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 5
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