Kinetics of the City

Our modern cities may be chaotic and unruly, but they are a remarkable feat of human achievement - and a marker of our modern epoch.

By 1938 western sociologists had become ambivalent about the modern city. For example, Georg Simmel begins his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” by pointing out that “the deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in overwhelming social forces, historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.” He explains that these forces overwhelm a citizen’s ability to subjectively engage with the city and its people, forcing him or her to recoil toward the safe spaces of the mental interior. The result, he says, is that the modern city, “makes one blasé because it agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all.” American sociologist Louis Wirth interprets the experience and the fact of the city a bit differently, suggesting that “the growth of cities and the urbanization of the world is one of the most impressive facts of modern times.” He argues that while the modern, post-industrial city may feel unruly in its size and complexity, its ability to centralize social, political, and economic forces into one location is a remarkable human achievement. Furthermore, while the interactions that we have with one another in urban environments may be more fleeting than those in rural environments, obscuring the “bonds of solidarity,” cities in fact require us to become more mutually interdependent upon one another.4 Indeed, we may perceive this skepticism of the city’s beneficence to human life in various images between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries.

The modern city can be a nest of degeneracy containing a cacophony of visual and audible stimuli.William Hogarth linked the city with vice and the dereliction of social obligations in his print Gin Lane (1751; The Metropolitan Museum of Art). With the help of an addictive foreign influence, gin, citizens of London are “driv’n to despair,” where “theft, murder, perjury” play out in the city’s streets as buildings crumble to the ground. In twentieth-century New York, the Ashcan School produced paintings of an American city still reeling from the events of the American Civil War but swelling from the influx of new immigration from across western Europe. For example, in George Bellows’ Cliff Dwellers (1913; Los Angeles County Museum of Art), small scenes of daily life unfold within a sea of humanity. More than Hogarth’s scene of alcoholism in London, Bellows’s painting comes closest to articulating the overwhelming sensory stimuli of the modern city. Young boys brawl in the painting’s foreground and tenants hang their laundry on clotheslines that traverse a street teeming with life. The image is an innocent slice of life, but the bright colors and irregular angles evoke a feeling of chaos and noise. Following Wirth, the divisions of labor and the specialization of occupations imbue the city with a kinetic visual quality that life in the rural areas lack. In both cases, the city may be overwhelming, but still abides by the regularized patterns of existence described by Simmel: the pawn broker conceivably keeps regular hours on Gin Lane and the street cars keep to their schedules in Bellows’s Lower East Side New York. However, this regularity is obscured by the city’s temporal, human, and architectural aggression.