bigideas

The explosion of the popularity of city breaks in the 1990s occurred alongside the proliferation of literature about cities, London particularly. We take part in a popular urbanism when we revel in the dynamism of our own urban environments and that of others, exulting in the ebb and flow of masses of people, telling stories of the city’s crude, smoky past and consuming that thing called culture.

What place does a citizen have in this urbanism, this city of the city break? Paradoxically, though we revel in them, we no longer identify as closely with our own cities but are rather spectators and consumers of them – we are all tourists now. This shift matches that of the role of city authorities, from being managers of the municipality to being entrepreneurs. A city’s citizens are no longer one of its basic political units, they have been shunted to the margins.

Can there be an active citizen in a city today? Instead, are large-scale interests the principal actors now who determine what is built, used and sold? Can we any longer talk about ‘my city’?