Anonymity as an Example of Urban Poetics

In Richard Sennett's "The Public Realm," he argues that "[Hannah Arendt's] measure of urban space is in terms of its density, since she believed that density produced the freedom of anonymity; she was, I think, willfully blind to the violence embodied by Nazi crowds” (1). Their two conceptions of anonymity in the public sphere are not diametrically opposed; they both recognize a lack of culpability produced in the anonymity often produced by public spaces. Still, Sennett advances her analysis to require a more nuanced conception of anonymity that recognizes its shortcomings along with its advantages.

The methodologies we’ve used in this course contribute to a deeper and more integrated understanding of "urban poetics," a way of viewing the city's relationship to its citizens as it is expressed through and shaped by textual representations. Those methodologies include close analysis of various texts and representations that can, when probed, tell us something about a city, its inhabitants, and the way its inhabitants interact with the city. In other words, this class has enabled ample opportunity for reading a city through its physical, structural artifacts as well as its representational and artistic artifacts and artifacts like maps that fall somewhere in between. Through these texts, I have noticed the treatments of the concept of anonymity, an urban poetic in the texts of Berlin, Mumbai and Boston alike. Moreover, anonymity comes into contact with other ideas and analytical frameworks studied in this course. This tour will tease out some of the ways concepts from the course encounter each other in the texts of these three cities, while demonstrating the through-line of anonymity in each of them.

(1) Sennett, Richard. "The Public Realm." The Blackwell City Reader (2002): n. pag. Web. 9 Dec. 2016.