Metropolis

In the Nineteenth Century, the Industrial Revolution gave a dramatic turn to the dialectic of city and countryside. The city of Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens and many other novelists is a thoroughly modern world, corrupt and corrupting, dominated by politics, commerce, finance and industry. It is a vortex that sucks in the energies of the young, dragging them away from the provinces. The rapid growth of the city puts an end to traditional forms of life. Terms such as “metropolis” and “cosmopolis” capture the primacy of urban life, its unpredictability, but also the city’s crucial importance as a new centre of meaning and as a catalyst for new conflicts. Modern novels are fascinated by the flux of urban life. The city is the domain of the Bildung: it is the terminus of a pilgrimage from province and countryside. Cities like Paris, London and Rome are powerful symbols that mark the success or failure of lifelong ambitions, struggles for survival, clashes between social classes. For the playwright, the urban household with its drawing room functions as a stage where individual fates and collective destiny are passionately debated. Even the visual arts, though continuing to celebrate the beauty of landscape, attempt to capture the novelty of street life, squares and urban interiors.

Nineteenth-century intellectuals try to get a grasp on city life through maps, narrative and pictorial records, as well as photographic, journalistic and sociological accounts (which Benjamin describes in all their complexity). They explore urban underworlds and the exclusive enclaves of the powerful; they put forward plans for radical urban reform (like Haussmann’s Paris). In later decades, the city is increasingly perceived as a place of anonymity and loneliness, of solitary crowds and of individual and collective neuroses. The origins of these neuroses are keenly observed by Baudelaire, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; the angst of the city-dweller is celebrated or condemned in the shrill proclamations of the avant-garde. Finally, the city becomes the crucial concern of a new art form, the cinema, whose absorption with city life is shown in innumerable works, from Metropolis to Blade Runner. The metropolis of our time has lost its coherence, displaying an increasing division between residential districts (sharply segregated on social and class lines), commercial, and industrial areas. This is most visible in the megalopolis, with its sprawling housing estates and vast suburbias: a city begotten by demographic explosions which transfigured earlier cities, engulfed towns and villages, filled in the open spaces that used to separate one from the other and preserve their distinctive features. However, many modern intellectuals and artists have made the great metropolis their affective home (Rome for Fellini, New York for Woody Allen). Only a big city can provide the means and audiences for new kinds of artistic expression, which so often combine different art forms or seek to grasp the complex phenomena of globalization. This complexity is particularly evident in Europe where the history and cultural heritage of many beautiful cities is constantly challenged by modernity, giving rise to an ongoing debate between innovators and traditionalists.

At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Weber and Simmel, whose thought is still influential, laid the foundations of urban sociology and inspired architects and town planners. However, novelists and poets were among the earliest explorers of modern city life, followed by painters, film-makers and other intellectuals. In spite of this, when cities are made the object of an interdisciplinary approach, literary accounts are rarely taken into consideration. Despite literature’s foundational role, little attention has been paid to narrative as a cognitive tool that maps and measures constant urban change. Synapsis, with its seminars on various cities and its wide range of specialist lectures, while embracing the wealth of recent interdisciplinary research, gives particular prominence to the ability of literature and cinema to generate new, creative dialogues about the city.