16.2. The logic of the big city Jacobs and MIB

Jacobs:

“Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers. To any one person, strangers are far more common in big cities than acquaintances. More common not only in places of public assembly, but more common at a man’s own doorstep. Even residents who live near each other are strangers, and must be, because of the sheer number of people in small geographical compass.

The bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all these strangers.”

2.2. Classics: Walter Benjamin and Fritz Lang's Metropolis

Walter Benjamin: Some Motifs in Baudelaire

To a Passer-By

The street about me roared with a deafening sound.
Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,
A woman passed, with a glittering hand
Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt;

Agile and graceful, her leg was like a statue's.
Tense as in a delirium, I drank
From her eyes, pale sky where tempests germinate,
The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills.

A lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty
By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,
Will I see you no more before eternity?


Elsewhere, far, far from here! too late! never perhaps!
For I know not where you fled, you know not where I go,
O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!

Baudrillard

In the sonnet - says Benjamin - the crowd is nowhere mentioned. Yet the poem is possible only against a big-city crowd, like the wind in the sails of a boat. And this big-city crowd is the protagonist and subject of Benjamin's essay. He discusses the dynamics of experience when living in a big city is the norm; and the kind of poetry this could call for. He talks of shocks and our experiences of time, the loss of aura and all kinds of haloes. "Of all the experiences which made his life what it was, Baudelaire singled out his having been jostled by the crowd as the decisive, unique experience."

And then Lang's Metropolis - the dystopian future with a social-democratic happy ending...

19.1. What the course is all about and what the metropolis is

Eetu Viren gave an extensive lecture on the metropolis and its function in the global capitalist system.  He discussed the global metropolis as a multinational site of production and we watched a myriad Kanye West images showing how value is produced through creation of brands - and Ricky Martin with Maluma in Miami, the center of global music industry - and Shakira cycling barefoot in a new video underlining the "authenticity" which is such an important image in the global market now...

(I'll ask Eetu if he has some sum-up to publish)