Urban Culture

Not from me

Clearly the urban is much more than just condensed housing stock, mass population and the logistics of servicing such demographic bulk. Such indices are merely concrete and descriptive; yet cities are made up of these too. At a different more analytic level the urban form speaks of density, adjacency and a volatile juxtapositioning of uniformity and difference. So if an urban culture is the whole way of life of people living in towns this must include their hierarchies, their communities of inclusion and their strategies for exclusion, the material conditions of their existences and the ideal conditions for their hopes and aspirations. A city is at once an agglomeration of social members but simultaneously an elision (and often collision) of their beliefs, symbolic repertoires and codes. It is a fragile massing of mosaic pluralisms and a temporarily grasped consensus. Another way of seeing this is in relation to the interface between subjectivity and anonymity, the individual and the crowd.