Imaging the City

Continuing Struggles and New Directions

Jr. Warner, Lawrence J. Vale, Sam Bass Warner Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138525757
• eBook ISBN: 9781000677584
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Planners face a controversial task because their professional role requires them to be spokespersons for the public interest. In a welter of conflicting pictures and voices, how might the public interest be discovered? Once identified, how might it be expressed so that competing publics attend to it? There are no easy answers, but the experience of planners today suggests ways of working and innovations of promise.The focus on planning practice prompted the editors to analyze images that are now at work in our cities. For Vale and Warner, all city design and constructions offer material that people should include in images of their environment. The built and building city are part of the experience of all city dwellers; it is theirs to incorporate, interpret, or ignore. Essays included in this text trace the interplay between physical objects of planners and architects and the social experience and outlooks of image makers and their audiences.Imaging the City explores urban image making from civic boosterism of medieval cities to iconic imagery of Times Square. Vale and Warner bring together urban historians, geographers, city planners, architects, and cultural commentators to analyze the creation of urban imagery from the signature skyscrapers of Kuala Lumpur to the re-creation of the South Bronx and the use of city images in film, literature, television, and on the Internet. Urban dwellers, urban planners, architects, municipal officials, sociologists, urban historians - all will perceive their worlds with a heightened sense of awareness after reading this book.

PART ISTRUGGLES OVER CITY IMAGES

DOI: 10.4324/9780429335211-1

1IMAGE CONSTRUCTION IN PREMODERN CITIES

DOI: 10.4324/9780429335211-2

Julian Beinart

■ EDITORS’ OVERVIEW

A significant push in economic development offices these days is devoted to luring tourists. Architect/urbanist Julian Beinart reveals that this is, in one form or other, a two-thousand-year-old tradition, although throughout most of history the effort has been to attract pilgrims, not tourists.

Before the era of the printing press, before books were available to the masses, the earliest Jewish, Christian, and Muslim guides and city eulogies had to be read aloud to their audiences. Yet, much of the content would be familiar to a listener of today: wondrous public buildings, extraordinary past events, notable families, booster statistics, and fabulous landscapes. In this tradition, Beinart especially examines the elaboration of the Cult of St. James by French and Spanish bishops to strengthen their competition with Rome. It was a corporate effort complete with a logo for all travelers (the scallop shell) and an accompanying book of miracles and tips on the best pathways to Santiago de Compostela.

In his conclusion, Beinart raises the core ethical and design question that bedevils image promoters. What if the images of the campaign differ substantially from the later experience of the visitors or the images of the residents? He doubts whether a good city can long sustain such a disjunction.

INSIDER AND OUTSIDER IMAGES

Just after July 4, 1998, Time magazine, no doubt wanting to associate local identity and national patriotism, invited its readers to (come visit seven places that do something better than anyone else does. They tend not to brag much, so we’ll do it for them.” One of the Time seven is Clinton, Montana, home of an annual Testicle Festival, where the previous September fifteen thousand people came to eat Rocky Mountain Oysters (delicately defined by Time as “the business part of the bull”). The Festival’s founder, a retired school superintendent, now a bar owner, says “A bar has to have a signature event…. I don’t care if it’s maggot races.” Time concluded that “a town needs an identity, or it doesn’t exist.”¹

Time’s conclusion, if somewhat abrupt, is nevertheless one of a few general propositions that emerges in research about image construction in premodern cities. Inevitably, there are two sets of images of a town: one, the mental images carried by its citizens; the other, those held by outsiders. Both images are manipulable. Kevin Lynch focused on the former; this book probes both. Time’s argument is that only when you manufacture a salable external image do you have identity (and presumably wealth). But identity is inescapable: nature mandates it. And naming something increases the intrinsic difference of identity. “We must never forget the importance of a name: giving a name to a city is giving it the very being of the name it bears.”² So Jacques Ellul emphasizes the significance of Cain, the exiled murderer and founder of the first city in the Bible, giving his city the same name, Enoch, as he does to his son. According to Time’s philosophy, neutrality of image—that is, doing very little to distinguish yourself—means no identity; therefore, “you don’t exist.” Of course, this is literally untrue. Towns, like individuals or firms, while inevitably different, are also different in their drive to externalize themselves.

There are places, although probably not too many, that advertise in order to repel. In 1973, a pamphlet entitled Guida Turistica di Controinformazione appeared in the small northern Italy town of Bergamo (fig. 1.1). To ward off outsiders, especially those from nearby Milan looking to purchase second homes in the town, this document focused on twenty-four horrible sites within the town. In the Corsarolo area, for instance, it warned that you can sleep only three or four hours a night because of traffic noise. The town cinema is open only two days a week. The Teatro Sociale, a significant Lombardian neoclassical theater and the mayor’s pride, has had unrepaired holes in the roof for a decade. In any case, the pamphlet concludes, three-quarters of the city is owned by the church.³ (In contrast, the Liber Pergaminus, the first of the twelfth-century city “praise” books, has only good things to say about Bergamo some eight hundred years earlier: “a quiet hill-town whose squares serve equally well as play-grounds for the children and for the trying out of the war horses.”⁴)

Fig. 1.1: Guida Turistica di Controinformazione, a 1973 publicity poster to dissuade people from being attracted to Bergamo.

Just because you tell people how bad things are does not mean they won’t come. This is apparently the message of the film Crazy People, in which a group of mental patients produceslogans such as “Come To New York: It’s Not As Filthy As You Think,” or “Come To New York: There Were Fewer Murders Last Year,”⁵ to market New York City. By contrast, sometimes you advertise what you think will attract, only to find that it turns off outsiders. I recall seeing a publicity brochure for the city of Lagos, Nigeria, that showed a traffic jam as evidence of how modern it is.

In many cases, the images created for external purposes and those designed to nourish the city’s own inhabitants are congruent. “I Love New York,” a slogan created to magnetize visitors, implies that New Yorkers themselves love their city. Bringing important ephemeral events to a city often involves binary image construction as well. So, when Hitler propagandized the Teutonic bond between ancient Athens and Nazi Germany at the 1936 Olympic Games, he did so both to distract the outside world (while there were detention camps on the outskirts of Berlin) as well as to manifest the eternity of the new Reich to his own citizens.⁶ In less demonic circumstances, cities continue to justify hosting the Games both for their external value (foreign attention, trade and tourism) as well as for their boosting of local morale, health, and infrastructure.⁷ Another connection between outside promotion and internal condition can be seen in a letter written by Duke Ercole I of Este to the Jewish families expelled from Spain in 1492, then temporarily resident in Genoa. The letter sets out the terms that presumably will attract the Jews to Ferrara, where the Duke believes that “We are certain that every next day they will be more happy to have chosen to come here.”⁸ Marketing Ferrara to the Jews in 1492 came at a time when the city was “very open and dynamic,” and municipal optimism was evidenced in the implementation of a new city plan.⁹

The frescoes painted more than a century earlier by Ambrosio Lorenzetti in a hall of the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, however, are images created entirely for internal purposes. Commissioned by a governing group of nine merchants and bankers whose regime had been threatened more than once by the city’s nobles, the Buon Governo/Mal Governo murals were, in the words of Chiara Frugoni, “intended as a propaganda manifesto …providing reassurance of its beneficial effects, and a warning to all who thought of attempting to replace it.”¹⁰ In the Good Government fresco, the benign authority of the ruling Nine is represented by a white-haired old man who supervises over the common wealth (comune) of the city. The form of the well-governed city is splendidly displayed: there are palaces, large-windowed buildings, towers and landscape, people working and maidens dancing and singing, even a grid of good stone roads leading to the city (figs. 1.2 and 1.3). Siena is to be read as a well-cared-for place, a “convincing picture, as if it might be an exact reproduction of reality.”¹¹ While Lorenzetti’s images of Siena clearly were aimed at locals, such image-making is part of a long tradition of efforts to promote the distinctive advantages of particular cities to outsiders as well.

Fig. 1.2: Ambrosio Lorenzetti, Good Government, the Effects in the City, fresco, 1338–1339. Siena, Palazzo Pubbilco, Sale della Pace.

Fig. 1.3: Ambrosio Lorenzetti, Good Government, the Effects in the Country, fresco, 1338–1339. Siena, Palazzo Pubblico, Sale della Pace.

THE PILGRIMAGE NETWORK

Very early in The City in History, Mumford proposes the primacy of flow over settlement in explaining the origin of cities. “The magnet comes before the container” is one of his most resonant metaphors: “this ability to attract non-residents to (the city) for intercourse and spiritual stimulus no less than trade…. The first germ of the city, then, is the ceremonial meeting place that serves as the goal for pilgrimage.”¹²

The construction and transmission of images to attract pilgrims of three major religions to premodern holy cities is the primary focus of this chapter. As mentioned before, there will be images made for visitors (“the magnet”) as well as those created for the cities’ own inhabitants (“the container”). While most of the material will be about the encouragement of movement for religious purposes (“spiritual stimulus”), there will also be examples of commercial attraction (“trade”). These were seldom separate in medieval life. “The religious impulse was so all-pervading an element of medieval life that even the entire economic structure depended on it,” writes von Simson in his book on the Gothic cathedral.¹³

Religion and commerce were responsible for the spatial network along which people moved in medieval times. Pre-Islamic Mecca lay on an overland trade route from suppliers in the East to purchasers around the Mediterranean; in the seventh century, Islamic Mecca suddenly became a center no longer only of regional goods transfer but of international religion as well.¹⁴ Traders and pilgrims traveled long distances, and danger and mutual benefit caused both traders and pilgrims to travel in groups. Pirenne suggests that even late medieval merchants traveled in caravan-like fashion.¹⁵ In the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s pilgrim describes the society of some twenty-seven fellow pilgrims in his group.¹⁶ The great German pilgrimage of 1064 to Jerusalem consisted of anywhere from seven to twelve thousand people;¹⁷ and the hajj of the African king Mansa Musa brought fifteen thousand to Mecca in 1325.¹⁸

Pilgrimage travel was dangerous and protection expensive. It has been pointed out that the word travel comes from travail, wh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About The Editors
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction ■ Cities, Media, and Imaging
• Part I ■ Struggles over city Images
• Part II ■ Responses to the Overwhelming City
• Part III ■ New Images and New Image Makers
• Appendix ■ City Imaging: A bibliographic essay
• Notes
• Credits
• Contributors
• Index