City/Suburb

The city is one of the major sites of the study of everyday life. As the locus of transactions between governmental, mercantile and techno-cultural forces, the city has emerged as the site where “modernity” can be most easily “read”. This was especially true of thinkers of modernity such as Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin who found in the city, the raw material to dissect social life. Simmel’s work The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) is one of the pioneering works that deal with the impact of urbanization on the individual, focusing on the fragmentary and alienated experience of urban existence. Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project (1927-40), composed of fragments that ruminate on the nature of dwelling in and navigating modern Paris with its glass and iron architecture, remains a monument to the centrality of the city to critical theorists of the time.

Needless to say, the city has also been central to the cinematic imagination. This is especially true of early cinema where the fascination for the possibilities of accelerated movement and mobility seemed to mirror the technological possibilities of travel in cinema itself. A number of “city symphony” films emerged in cinema’s early period focusing on the novelties of both the city’s pluralistic sensorium and the cinema’s capacity to capture it in unprecedented ways. Some of the more famous examples of this genre include Manhatta (Dir. Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921) which is a poetic take on the city of New York, juxtaposing visuals of the city with lines from the poetry of Walt Whitman, and Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) which tried to capture the rhythms of city life in Berlin. But by and far, the best known example of this genre of films is Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929), which foregrounded the comparisons between the city’s rhythm and the cinematic machinery, very strongly.



Coupled with the notion of the city is the suburb. Unlike the city, the suburb has not been as extensively studied. But nonetheless, the suburb forms an interesting component of a dialectic of space along with the city. The Encyclopaedia of Urban Studies defines suburbs as “residential zones […] beyond the city centers” that has been caused by a “decentralization of the city and the town.” The growth of suburbs has been linked not only to the increase of the inflow of population to city centers for work, but also to the rise of transportation technology. In The Oxford Companion to United States History, Jennifer L. Kalish makes this correlation particularly clear in relation to the process of suburbanization in America. She says that while the urban life in the “first half of the nineteenth century city […] was shaped by the characteristics of the walking city”, the emergence of public transport (omnibus, railways etc.) “allowed well-to-do residents to move to the city’s periphery or beyond.” Kalish also goes on to point out the importance of the automobile industry to the rapid growth of suburbanization in the 1920s to such an extent that “suburbs grew at a faster rate than the city core” whereby such travel increasingly became more private.



The relationship of the potential of motorized travel, the ownership of vehicles and the consequent ability to shuttle between the suburb and the city core makes the suburb a place that is marked by certain class characteristics. For instance, Kalish points out that post-war American suburbs were “homogenous, racially exclusive” communities composed of “typically young, white, middle-class men who commuted to the city; wives who were committed to domesticity; and young children.” While this applies specifically to American suburbs, it can be surmised that the process of suburbanization within the capitalist paradigm has been similar across the board, inviting a tight class composition that is coupled with the desire to live in the quieter, “safer” suburb rather than in the plurality of sensorial and class configurations offered up by the city.

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