Introduction

The urban setting is an intricate and complex phenomenon whose multitude of layers and personalities makes it complicated and difficult to study. For years, people have tried to study the city through objective means such as identifying its quantifiable patterns and analyzing datasets of numbers and values. However, as Preston and Simpson-Housely discuss in their Blackwell City Reader essay titled “Writing the City,” one of the most important ways to capture the complexities of the urban setting is through examining the human metropolitan experience. They write,

“The city’s air, too may be blent, composed of the hopes, aspirations, disappointments and pain of those who live in it… The city is an aggregation or accumulation, not just in demographic, economic, or planning terms, but also in terms of feeling and emotion.” (1)

Preston and Simpson-Housely underscore the notion that studies of the city need to involve more than just objective measurements and analyses. By studying the subjective works of individuals in the city such as literature, film, maps and more, we can attain a deeper, more interdisciplinary and thus more integrated understanding of urbanism.

This concept of “urban subjectivity,” while brings about an entirely separate and new layer to examining the urban lifestyle, is itself a complex and intricate phenomenon. Urban subjectivity can be described as a means of capturing the individual’s experience in a city. What makes urban subjectivity different from more objective sources of information concerning the city is the author or creator’s ownership of control over the material. More specifically, a maker of subjective urban material such as a film, a piece of literature, or even the urban landscape itself has the choice to omit some concepts of the city while purposefully including others. In creating any piece in a subjective medium, the creator inherently generates individualization and subjectivity through this complicated interplay between inclusion and exclusion. As viewers, not being exposed to all or even most of the information presents to us an inherently biased view of the urban lifestyle. While “bias” is commonly referred to as a negative concept, in these situations, it is these exact biases that collectively present to us the “accumulation… of feeling and emotion,” that Preston and Simpson-Housely refer to as being so important to the study of urbanism. Thus, this concept of urban subjectivity, generated through a creator’s ability to control the complex interplay between inclusion and exclusion of information, presents a unique way of looking at an individual's life or individuals’ lives in the city and creates an additional layer of perspective that contributes to a deeper understanding of the urban lifestyle as a whole.

Works Cited