Introduction

“People moving through the city at ground level write the ‘urban text’ without being able to read it. The city is provisionally created as a patchwork quilt of individual viewpoints and opinions. ‘The created order is everywhere punched and turn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.” – Michel de Certeau “The Practice of Everyday Life”

In the “urban imagination,” we are looking to study the city as holistically as possible – moving on beyond descriptions and predictive models. As a city, its built environment and its experienced space are very complex. Across social space, while there is an amalgamation of very discrete and diverse experiences, there still does exist some collective experiences. Then there is the complexity of time and physical space that make the social experiences more complicated and rich. Due to the complex nature of understanding “the city,” there is a need to study the city not only in a multi-disciplinary way, but through multiple types of sources. Two methodologies central to our class that enhance our analysis is the ideas of “urban poetics” and “digital humanities.” “Urban poetics,” allows us to not just think of the city not through texts, but to study it as an aesthetic object itself. “Digital humanities” lends itself easily to be inclusive of many different mediums of “texts” including pictures, videos, timelines, maps, etc. It is unsurprising that a holistic understanding requires a multi-disciplinary analysis, which would include multi-media sources as they would highlight different aspects of experiences, and in turn, present the analysis in a multi-media medium like Omeka.

Just there are individual and collective experiences in each city, in our class, we’ve all gone through the same primary sources and lectures – yet, each student, coming from different personal and academc backgrounds and going through individual research and thinking for our assignments, has come away with a different view of the five cities that we’ve covered (Boston, Berlin, Moscow, Istanbul, and Mumbal).

Through the use of a multi-discipline and a multi-media method of analyzing the city through looking at Boston, Istanbul, and Mumbai, we have a better understanding of the complexity of urbanism. We have looked at Boston as a palimpsest (understanding a single physical space as connection between different time periods), Istanbul as a “lieu de memoire” (understanding a place as a symbol separate from its physical object), and the interplay of indivudal and collective experiences through the “close reading” maps of Mumbai. In tandem with the multi-media and multi-disclinary approach of this course, these concepts layer on multiple frameworks of analyzing the phenomenon of “urban poetics.”