Cities and Desire: Introduction

It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires erase the city or are erased by it.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities [1] 

As a student in “The Urban Imagination,” I have learned to read two questions into the course’s title. The first is static: how can a city’s intangible landscape and identity—its “urban poetics”—be teased out through the study of cultural works? The second is aspirational: how are cities’ built environments imagined, and subsequently renovated, by those who see their hidden potentialities?

This second question has intrigued me since my first days in the class, particularly after my trip to Post Office Square in September. Standing under the park’s cool canopy of trees, I envisioned it as a utopian space, a replacement for the ugly dystopian squalor of the parking garage that once stood in the same location. Cities, I realized, are sites of endless revision, growing and changing to follow the dreams of successive generations.

How, though, are we to reinvent the city? Two schools of urban theory propose divergent solutions, which are organized by Richard Sennett into a dialectic between “closed” and “open” design. The former is championed by the architect Le Corbusier, who argued for a centrally planned, rigidly ordered metropolis in his 1929 work “The City of Tomorrow and its Planning.” The latter, pioneered by Jane Jacobs’ 1961 book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” and largely echoed by Sennett himself, argues for the organic growth of urban communities through limited external support.

These opposing views are, in some form, expressed in every city we have studied this semester. Using the methodologies I have learned in Humanities 54, I will evaluate both cultural accounts and my own urban case studies to compare “open” and “closed” forms of urban design. As we will see, the complex interplay between these two forms would not be fully identifiable without a nuanced understanding of both physical and cultural urban landscapes.

1. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. London, Vintage, 1997. Print.