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<!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">Hi everyone. I've posted to this list a few times in the past, but now I'd like to <i>really</i> post. I should introduce myself again - I'm a professor of New Media at Emerson College in Boston. My primary interests rest in the intersection of urban formation and media practices. Along those lines, I'm just finishing a book manuscript called <i>the Possessive Spectator: Media, Technology, and the American City</i>. It is yet another commentary about <i>flaneurie, </i>but it attempts to contextualize urban spectatorship in space, time and culture by describing a way of looking that has become dominant in the United States. I make the argument that the concept of the American city (really born in the late 19th century) was premised on the spectator's ability to <i>possess</i> as well as see. I've included the first few pages of the book's introduction at the bottom of this note...followed by the last few pages of the introduction. I'm very interested in engaging the people on this list in a conversation about possessive spectatorship. I argue that the American city was born of the assumption that "to see is to have, and to have is to experience" And that that assumption is reflected in trends of urban growth in the 20th century American city. I don't think that the concept is easily extractable to, say, the European city. The American city has had a very specific growth pattern over the last 100 years in response to and constructive of specific patterns of spectatorship. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">The Possessive Spectator: Media, Technology, and the American City</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">On the corner of 34<sup>th</sup>
Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, there are dozens of people looking at
little screens, typing on little keyboards, with plugs extending from their
ears.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Each of these people is
having a different experience, customized through their personal media.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The college student with his iPod
selects his music to correspond with the weather and time of day; the
businessman types an address into his GPS-enabled phone to find his next
meeting; and the tourist stares through her mobile phone camera to capture the
Empire State Building in the distance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Mediated by little devices, these people are shaping their experiences
of the city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Nicholas Negroponte <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite
ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Negroponte</Author><Year>1995</Year><RecNum>357</RecNum><record><rec-number>357</rec-number><ref-type
name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Nicholas
Negroponte</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Being
Digital</title></titles><dates><year>1995</year><pub-dates><date>January
11, 2006</date></pub-dates></dates><publisher>Alfred A.
Knopf,
Inc.</publisher><urls><related-urls><url><style
face="underline" font="Helvetica"
size="100%">http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bdintro.htm
</style></url></related-urls></urls><modified-date>April
15, 1996</modified-date></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]-->(1995)<!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--> famously noted that the world
of atoms (our bodies) would no longer need to correspond to the world of bits
(data) – that physical proximity would cease to be necessary for public
life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But as we can see on that
street corner, the world of atoms and the world of bits come together in the
city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>There is little distinction
between the practices of everyday life, and the technologies that enable those
practices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The soundtrack, the
map, the photograph: these artifacts of the everyday, are constructive of environments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The practices one adopts to navigate
and comprehend any space can never be seen as separate from that space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>New
technological practices introduce a profound complexity into everyday tasks,
and perhaps challenge accepted notions of urban life, including the nature and
scope of public interactions and the corresponding design of the built
environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Can one truly be
engaged in public space if they are looking through a viewfinder or tapping
sweet nothings with their thumbs on tiny keyboards?<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Can the city, as an entity, continue to matter when digital
networks enable public gathering without requiring the public to gather in
physical space?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The answer to all
of these questions is a resounding “yes.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>The modern American city has never been bereft of these complications –
from the hand held camera at the end of the nineteenth century to the mobile
phone at the end of the twentieth, the city has always been a mediated
construct.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The city enters into
the cultural imaginary as a hodgepodge of disconnected signifiers, often
organized by the technologies that produce them.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>When Kodak introduced its hand camera in 1888, it
provided a tool for people to record and retain experiences through visual
reproduction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Photographers
produced images and, even more importantly, possessed them and organized them
to manage their memories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Likewise, when Google introduced its mapping software in 2004, it
enabled people to record and retain experiences by marking places on a map,
keeping notes and connecting images.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Google Maps has been implemented as both a wayfinding tool and a
personal organizing tool; through its simple interface, it serves to manage an
individual’s understanding of space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Communication technologies certainly produce new information about the
world; but they also have the facility to organize that information through the
literal or metaphorical storage capacity of databases or archives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>They provide the spectator the unique
opportunity to at once experience space and possess its traces. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%">These traces, and
their inherent possibilities, have substantially altered the nature of media
and urban practices in the twentieth century.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>I call the spectatorship structured around the desire for
possessing these traces, <i>possessive spectatorship</i><span style="font-style:
normal"> – a way of looking that incorporates immediate experience with the
desire for subsequent possession.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>And while this phenomenon has had implications for the modern city in
general, in this book I describe how it has been uniquely important for the
American city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What’s distinctive
about the American context is the timing in which the city becomes central to
the cultural imaginary. </span><i>The American city grew up in parallel to the
technologies that enabled its possession. </i><span style="font-style:normal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Not until the late nineteenth century,
corresponding to the introduction of the handheld camera and the cinematograph,
did the American city take on a meaning outside of mere urban
concentration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Prior to that time,
while cities were of course present in America, they did not </span><i>present</i><span style="font-style:normal"> themselves as unique constructs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>I argue that emerging media practices
transformed urban practices by naturalizing the notion that individual
spectators could not only see the city, but also possess it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And most importantly, I argue that this
spectatorship altered the material shape of the city as urban plans were
drafted to meet the expectations of a spectator eager to take control of the
city’s assembly.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"> <o:p></o:p></p>
<h4>Urban Practices / Concept-city</h4><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">The concept of possessive
spectatorship, on which this book focuses, places a decisive emphasis on
visuality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But even as visuality
is characterized as the dominant sense mechanism through which possession
occurs, it is by no means exclusive, and rarely operates independently of other
senses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Visuality is fundamentally
embodied.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>To return to that
fictional Manhattan street corner for a moment, the people standing around
(with or without mobile devices) have appropriated certain expectations and
practices into their everyday lives, integrating what they see into how they
move and relate to their physical environment <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<EndNote><Cite><Author>Ito</Author><Year>2006</Year><RecNum>507</RecNum><record><rec-number>507</rec-number><ref-type
name="Book Section">5</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>M.
Ito</author><author>D.
Okabe</author></authors><secondary-authors><author>Höflich,
Joachim &amp; Hartmann,
Maren</author></secondary-authors></contributors><titles><title>Every
Contexts of Camera Phone Use: Steps Towards Technosocial Ethnographic
Framework</title><secondary-title>Mobile Communication in Everyday
Life: An Ethnographic
View</secondary-title></titles><dates><year>2006</year></dates><pub-location>Berlin</pub-location><publisher>Frank
&amp; Timme</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite><Cite><Author>Wellman</Author><Year>2002</Year><RecNum>508</RecNum><record><rec-number>508</rec-number><ref-type
name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>B.
Wellman</author><author>C.A.
Haythornthwaite</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>The
Internet in Everyday
Life</title></titles><dates><year>2002</year></dates><pub-location>Malden,
MA</pub-location><publisher>Blackwell
Pub</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]-->(Ito and Okabe 2006, ;
Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002)<!--[if supportFields]><span style='mso-element:
field-end'></span><![endif]-->.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>They expect the ability to locate and communicate with their social
network in an instant; they expect the ability to query anything and retrieve
an immediate answer; they expect the ability to record and archive thoughts and
images.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And they have, to varying
degrees, internalized these expectations into their everyday engagement with
urban space, subtly manifested through the direction of a glance, the
instantaneous determination of acceptable social distances, and the interaction
with streets and buildings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%">The notion that
visuality and its corresponding technologies might alter the way one engages
with the urban environment is not particularly new.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>In a 1916 article in the photography magazine <i>Kodakery</i><span style="font-style:normal">, a journalist described how the camera had become
naturalized into urban practices even without the presence of a camera. "The
picture-thinking Kodaker has his eye out for 'likely' subjects wherever he
happens to be. When he walks to and from his office, when he gets on the
trolley, when he takes a trip to a neighboring city, he keeps his senses alert
for the picture possibilities about him” </span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<EndNote><Cite><Author>Snowden</Author><Year>1916</Year><RecNum>229</RecNum><Pages>9</Pages><record><rec-number>229</rec-number><ref-type
name="Magazine
Article">19</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Bayard
Breese Snowden</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>PIcture-Thinking</title><secondary-title>Kodakery</secondary-title></titles><pages>8-12</pages><volume>3</volume><number>8</number><dates><year>1916</year><pub-dates><date>April</date></pub-dates></dates><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]-->(Snowden 1916, 9)<!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]-->.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Almost a century ago, it was not fantastical to imagine a
world transformed by the cognitive and visceral transference of media
practices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It was not fantastical to
assume that expectations born of media practices did not necessarily depend on
the technologies that gave them life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span></p>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Ever since the handheld camera prompted shifts in
the framing of everyday vision, the process of collecting those visions has
been framed through metaphor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>According to Anne Friedberg, metaphors are necessary for the
accessibility of new media, as they wrap “the newly strange in the familiar
language of the past” <!--[if supportFields]><span style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite
ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Friedberg</Author><Year>2006</Year><RecNum>479</RecNum><Pages>15</Pages><record><rec-number>479</rec-number><ref-type
name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Anne
Friedberg</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>The
Virtual Window: From Alberti to
Microsoft</title></titles><dates><year>2006</year></dates><pub-location>Cambridge</pub-location><publisher>MIT
Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]-->(2006, 15)<!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]-->.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>The practices of viewing a film, looking at a mobile phone
screen, or listening to an iPod can easily seep into other practices through
the connection of metaphor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The
film becomes a means of travel to distant times and places, the tiny screen
becomes a portal to information and other people, and the iPod becomes a soundtrack,
connecting the urban landscape to cinematic scenery. <span style="font-family:
"Times New Roman""><o:p></o:p></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%">But while metaphor
suggests important representational strategies, it alone can’t provide much
insight into practices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This book
is concerned with how the dominant understandings of technologies, shaped
through metaphors of one kind or another, collide with the consumptive
practices of spectators.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And
ultimately how this collision serves to shape the city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Michel de Certeau introduces this
relationship in his essay “Walking in the City.”<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>The piece begins with a spectator standing atop one of the
1370-foot high towers of the former World Trade Center and looking down upon
the streets below.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>That view
“makes the complexity of the city readable,” he argues, “and immobilizes its
opaque mobility in a transparent text” <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite
ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>deCerteau</Author><Year>2002</Year><RecNum>403</RecNum><Pages>92</Pages><record><rec-number>403</rec-number><ref-type
name="Book
Section">5</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Michel
deCerteau</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Walking
in the City</title><secondary-title>The Practice of Everyday
Life</secondary-title></titles><dates><year>2002</year></dates><pub-location>Berkeley</pub-location><publisher>University
of California Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]-->(2002, 92)<!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]-->.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>The view from on high is a fiction or facsimile of the city,
like those drafted by planners or cartographers, but it does not provide access
to the practices that actually compose the city.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Those are only accessible by the “practitioners” of the city
that live “below the thresholds at which visibility begins.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>According to de Certeau, “These
practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them
is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms…it is as though the
practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness” <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite
ExcludeAuth="1"
ExcludeYear="1"><Author>deCerteau</Author><Year>2002</Year><RecNum>403</RecNum><Pages>93</Pages><record><rec-number>403</rec-number><ref-type
name="Book
Section">5</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Michel
deCerteau</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Walking
in the City</title><secondary-title>The Practice of Everyday
Life</secondary-title></titles><dates><year>2002</year></dates><pub-location>Berkeley</pub-location><publisher>University
of California
Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]-->(93)<!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]-->.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%">Urban practices,
themselves devoid of vision, always operate within what de Certeau calls the
Concept-city, a space of total vision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Each of the people on that street corner are blindly interacting with
their immediate urban spaces (despite their use of media devices), while their
understanding of those spaces is framed by the evolving Concept-city (enhanced
by those same devices).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Whether
directly mediated or not, each practice of the city is embedded within some
articulation of the Concept-city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>A man, brand new to New York, lifts up his arm to hail a passing taxi
(an action he has seen again and again in movies); a woman photographs the
Empire State Building contemplating the age of Art Deco that produced it; a
tourist gets her bearings in the crowded city by calling up a map on her phone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In each of these examples, the concept
of Manhattan (its logic and structure) influences the practice of its
spaces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>De Certeau aligns this
phenomenon to Ferdinand de Saussure’s characterization of <i>langue</i><span style="font-style:normal"> and </span><i>parole</i><span style="font-style:
normal"> – the overall logic of any language (</span><i>langue</i><span style="font-style:normal">) is implicit in each individual speech act (</span><i>parole</i><span style="font-style:normal">).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>All
urban experiences, he argues, are comprised of both the phenomenological
encounter (the blind, embodied practices of the street) </span><i>and </i><span style="font-style:normal">the overarching logic of the Concept-city (the
complete picture).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%">De Certeau
demonstrates the interaction between urban practices and the Concept-city, but
he doesn’t address how each of the elements is composed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What shapes the Concept?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What organizes practice?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This book begins from the dialectic he
provides, and offers possessive spectatorship as an explanation of how
practices and Concepts are structured around a complex assortment of media
technologies and urban representations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>How did the handheld camera change the way people walked through the city,
while simultaneously changing the shape of the city walked through?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>How did film spectatorship influence
the meaning of urban movement, and how did that new meaning get worked into the
development of the Concept-city?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Each chapter in this book explores these and similar questions in order
to renegotiate de Certeau’s urban dialectic in light of possessive
spectatorship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Images, interfaces,
and protocols shape urban experiences, structures of urban desires, and plans
for urban spaces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Media practices
mold de Certeau’s walker into a historically contingent subject.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>So while there is a well regarded
tradition of aligning urban representation with totalizing spectacle –
“everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation” <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<EndNote><Cite><Author>Debord</Author><Year>1994</Year><RecNum>161</RecNum><Pages>7</Pages><record><rec-number>161</rec-number><ref-type
name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Guy
Debord</author></authors><subsidiary-authors><author>Donald
Nicholson-Smith</author></subsidiary-authors></contributors><titles><title>Society
of the
Spectacle</title></titles><dates><year>1994</year></dates><pub-location>New
York</pub-location><publisher>Zone Books</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]-->(Debord 1994, 7)<!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--> – I argue that spectacle, or
Concept, is always directly lived, especially when mediated by screens and
radio waves. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%"><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%">...</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%">
<!--StartFragment-->
</p><h1><span style="font-weight:normal"><u>The Map<o:p></o:p></u></span></h1><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">This
book is an attempt to map out specifically how possessive spectatorship in the
United States, structured by architectural, urbanistic and technological
innovations, has influenced the shape of the American city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Each chapter describes a particular
iteration of the Concept-city and the urban and media practices that developed
alongside it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In the first
chapter, I discuss the planning and implementation of the White City and
investigate how handheld photography factored into its design and
implementation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The Concept-city
quite literally conformed to the potential of photographic renderings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The White City offers an ideal starting
point for my discussion of urban spectatorship as it provides the model from
which subsequent forms take shape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>It was not simply a collection of buildings; it was an experiment in the
presentation of the Concept-city wherein meaning was largely dependent on the
possessive practices of spectators.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>This
came into clear relief as official practices of spectatorship, dictated by the
Fair’s Department of Photography, butted heads with a growing population of
amateur photographers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The
conflict between a perfectly assembled city of images and a personally
assembled city of images would, more than anything else, succeed in
transporting possessive spectatorship to contexts outside of the White
City.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The American flaneur was
defined by its populism and gestures towards democratic accessibility. This is
the subject of chapter two.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span>As
Kodak’s hand-camera soared in popularity, concerns emerged over the new
populist spectatorship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Could the
masses be trusted with framing experience?<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Could they be trusted with making history and defining
beauty in such a playful manner?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>And could the Concept-city survive its own success as a commodity
readily available to this unrefined spectator?<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%">While these
debates raged in amateur photography magazines, the practical knowledge of the
city found its greatest transformation in the emerging medium of cinema.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The aesthetics associated with
Kodaking, mobile and playful, got abstracted into new forms of media
exhibition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In chapter three, I
look at the development of early cinema and its connections to “spectacular”
advertising in Times Square.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>As
the playful possession of urban imagery gets transposed from the still
photograph to larger-than-life displays, the intimate gaze of the spectator
gets transformed into a spectacle of mass consumption.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In the early development of Times
Square, from 1904 to about 1915, the spectator’s desire to possess the city in
the form of movement becomes quite apparent.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Even though the spectator is not literally in possession of
images, as he was with the hand-camera, those same urban and media practices
are appropriated in this new context.</p><p class="MsoFooter" style="text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%;tab-stops:.5in">But
by the 1920s, this spectacle achieved yet a bigger scale.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The Nickelodeon gave way to the movie
palace, and as skyscrapers reached unprecedented heights in New York City and
network radio connected distant spaces with invisible ether, the camera was no
longer sufficient for capturing all the distant images of the city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Chapter four describes how the new
scale of the Concept-city made it so each act of possession implied speculation
– the vastness of the city was always greater than a visual perspective could
capture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What I call “speculative
architecture” was manifested in the artwork of the architectural renderer Hugh
Ferriss, as well as the midtown Manhattan development Rockefeller Center.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Each represented a Concept-city that
could be assembled only through the speculation of the spectator.</p><p class="MsoFooter" style="text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%;tab-stops:.5in">After
World War II, the culture of American cities was drastically altered. The 1950s
transformed the spectatorial distance associated with speculation into a
distance associated with alienation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>Chapter five looks at how urban renewal projects sought to erase the
speculative city with the operative city - a representation with no visual
relationship to the thing it represents, only to its function. As the
middleclass rapidly left the city for the suburbs and were no longer interested
in actively participating in the construction of the city, the government
intervened to produce a Concept-city that could “compose” itself through
machine intelligence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>By looking
closely at the renewal of Los Angeles’ downtown, this chapter describes an
unprecedented intervention into urban spectatorship where individual possession
is sacrificed for the conveniences of machine intelligence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>For the first time in the modern
American city, urban practices are subordinated to the Concept-city. </p><p class="MsoFooter" style="text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%;tab-stops:.5in">But
in the 1970s, the spectator is re-centered through the popular negotiation of
history and nostalgia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Chapter
six, by looking at the case of Boston’s Fanueil Hall, describes how the
preservation movement introduced historical proximity to remedy the
geographical distance caused by renewal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>The urban experience takes on the character of television reruns – a
continuous repetition of the familiar to evoke an intimacy and feeling of being
at home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The “rerun city” would
become the foundational principle for the neo-traditional New Urbanism movement
and help to shape practices of urban spectatorship that relied on the
possession of space as well as time.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span></p>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent">The basic tenets of the rerun city get reworked in
the contemporary context, as historical proximity is reoriented to historical
accessibility. <span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">The city remediates
its previous iterations in order to present itself anew.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But distinct from the logic of the
rerun discussed in the previous chapter, the contemporary American city employs
the logic of the database.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Just as
television was shifting from linear, broadcast television to Netflix, on
demand, and file sharing, urban spaces were tasked with the job of presenting a
platform from which the user could assemble historical and virtual references. </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In the book’s final chapter, I describe
the “database city” - a Concept-city that gives extraordinary freedom to the
spectator to assemble her own experiences and urban imaginaries and organize
them into something comprehensible, searchable and exportable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This becomes particularly clear in the
redevelopment of Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>The functionality of the Concept-city corresponds with new
digital aggregation tools from Facebook and Google Maps to smart phones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>As possession and assembly of space,
time, and social life are made quite literal by digital networks, the database
city provides the platform for possessive spectactorship, a way of looking
where individual spectators continually reinvent the city from their personal
digital assembly lines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Each chapter in this book describes an interaction
between a Concept-city and its corresponding urban and media practices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And while these interactions influence
the perception and manifestation of cities throughout the world, I focus on a
particular element that is uniquely dominant in the United States – the
cultural impulse to possess, control and assemble the experience of the
city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The consistently shifting
shape of the American city in the twentieth century can be seen as a series of
accommodations and reactions to the urban practices aligned with possessive
spectatorship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>As such, my goal is
not to provide a comprehensive history of the twentieth century American city;
rather, it is to provide the reader with a new framework from which to view
that history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And as media becomes
ever more entrenched into the practices of everyday life, this framework
becomes even more essential in shaping our understanding of the American city
–<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>not as a reflection, but as a
hypothesis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The city, constantly
emerging in a collision between practice and concept, has to be considered
proactively by architects and planners.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>The challenge would seem to correspond with how Wyndham Lewis
characterized the city of the immediate future in his modernist manifesto: the <span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">“first great modern building that arose
in this city would soon carry everything before it; and hand in hand with the
engineer, and his new problems, by force of circumstances so exactly modern
ones, would make a new form-content for our everyday vision” </span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='font-family:"Times New Roman"'><span style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite
ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Lewis</Author><Year>1986</Year><RecNum>43</RecNum><Pages>34</Pages><record><rec-number>43</rec-number><ref-type
name="Book
Section">5</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Windham
Lewis</author></authors><secondary-authors><author>Paul
Edwards</author></secondary-authors></contributors><titles><title>How
the Fact of Style Obstructs</title><secondary-title>The
Caliph&apos;s Design: Architects! Where is Your Vortex?</secondary-title></titles><dates><year>1986</year></dates><pub-location>Santa
Barbara</pub-location><publisher>Black Sparrow
Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">(1986, 34)</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='font-family:"Times New Roman"'><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>While this book is about the past, it is also about where we go from here,
and how we settle on the processes that determine new directions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Seeing the city as both the subject and
object of seeing will go a long way towards effectively designing a city that
corresponds with the cultures that live within it.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span></span></div>
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