Final Thoughts

The notion of "urban poetics" illustrates a fascinating and beautifully complicated conglomeration of film, literature, maps, urban landscape and more that collectively join together to present incredibly multi-disciplinary and integrated ways of investigating urbanism and the urban lifestyle. Through employing the methodologies in this course and looking at subjective works, we are able to establish new ideas and conclusions about the city that would otherwise be impossible from solely objective means. Furthermore, the ability of a creator of a subjective piece to selectively choose what he or she includes and excludes in the work is a fascinating means of expressing biased but valuable opinions concerning the individual experience in the city. Through exploring the various urban landscapes of cities like Boston, Mumbai, Moscow, Berlin, and Istanbul and select subjective works that come from each of these cities, especially through tools like Omeka and TimelineJS, we are able to obtain and analyze subjective sources of information to generate new layers of studying urban expression. Lastly, an interesting concept to note is the idea of all these subjective works and urban landscapes coming together to generate one large collection of research that acts as the ultimate informational source for urban studies as a whole. This interdisciplinary study in addition to more objective means of studying the city present to us a means of being one step closer to perfecting a fully integrated way of studying the urban environment.