Urban Imaginary

Definition

The urban imaginary is the set of shared symbolic and aesthetic representations through which a city's inhabitants institute their collective identity. The concept draws on Cornelius Castoriadis's "imaginary institution of society": just as societies constitute themselves as real entities through shared systems of signification (symbols, myths, rituals), cities institute their collective identity through an urban imaginary — and architecture is a key mechanism of this institution. Maria Kaika extends this to iconic architecture: buildings function as "urban totems," narrativising the desires of elites and instituting a "radical imaginary" for a new social order. Inge Goudsmit, deploying Kaika and Castoriadis in the context of Hong Kong's new towns, argues that cultural buildings are "an essential mechanism" for instituting an urban imaginary, and that their absence — the lack of places for collective memory and identity — is a denial of the right to the city.

The wiki's second register is Edward Soja's, for whom the urban imaginary is the Secondspace of cityspace: "a mental or ideational field, conceptualized in imagery, reflexive thought, and symbolic representation, a conceived space of the imagination" (Soja 2000, p. 11) — mental maps, urban utopias, urban epistemologies. Soja's postmetropolitan claim is that the urban imaginary is itself being restructured: by hyperreality and simulation (the "Simcity"), by cyberspace's electronic topography, and by the spin-doctored imagery of boosters and governments — so that "daily life is increasingly being played out as if it were a computer game." The imaginary is not superstructure for Soja but a Secondspace mode of regulation: the "softer manipulations of ideology" that keep the volatile postmetropolis together where the Carceral Archipelago's harder ones might fail (p. 299). See trialectics-of-space.

Key Thinkers

• Maria Kaika — architecture as the narrativisation of elite desire; the urban imaginary as the symbolic dimension of urban life.
• Inge Goudsmit — extends the urban imaginary to cultural infrastructure in new towns; its absence as a right-to-the-city question.
• (Related, not yet paged: Cornelius Castoriadis — the "imaginary institution of society"; the actual imaginary vs. radical imaginary.)

Related Concepts

• Iconic Architecture — the built form through which the urban imaginary is instituted, for better (public icons) or worse (autistic icons).
• Right to the City — the urban imaginary as what the right to the city demands: the collective capacity to produce a city's symbolic identity.
• Autistic Architecture — the urban imaginary produced by footloose transnational elites: self-absorbed, indifferent to the city.
• The Commons — the social form of urban life that a genuinely public urban imaginary sustains.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Who Wins and Who Loses in the Production of Cultural Iconic Architecture?
• Autistic Architecture: The Fall of the Icon and the Rise of the Serial Object
• Architecture and Crisis
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the Secondspace register: the urban imaginary as the conceived city (p. 11), its postmetropolitan restructuring through hyperreality, cyberspace and spin-doctoring (chs. 8, 11), and the imaginary as mode of regulation (p. 299).
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the theoretical root of the imaginary-under-simulation: "the precession of simulacra" (the model that "engenders the territory"), Disneyland as "a deterrence machine" that hides that "all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real," and the hypermarket that "preexists the metropolitan area; it is what gives rise to metro areas." Baudrillard is the source Soja's "Simcity" and Kaika's icon-as-urban-totem both metabolize. See precession-of-simulacra, deterrence, hypercommodity.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is the urban imaginary necessarily produced by elites (as Castoriadis/Kaika suggest), or can it be instituted from below — and if so, what forms of architecture and public space enable this?
• How does the urban imaginary relate to the "right to the city" — is the capacity to produce a city's symbolic identity a prerequisite for, or a consequence of, the right to the city?