Urban Cultures

The Nexus between Cities and Urban Cultures

The discovery of the distinctive capability of the city to produce culture makes sense if one takes into account the famous German medieval saying, “The air of the cities makes men free.” As it was early recognized, living under urban conditions entails profiting from one of the major assets of the city: anonymity. Whereas rural living often implies close and intimate social bonds such as kinship or community-based ties in which everybody knows each other, the city is the quintessential environmental expression of the freedom that anonymity brings to society, as in the famous dichotomy by Ferdinand Toënnies of Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft (community vs. society). All of this was clear to the first urban sociologists, such as Georg Simmel and Louis Wirth. Simmel, in his celebrated essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” set forth his thesis of urban life and culture that may be summed up like this: People in urban settings are exposed to extreme environmental as well as psychological and relational stimulations and, needful of reducing complexity, they develop a psychological “blasé” attitude made of indifference to what is considered not relevant. Moreover, money becomes the only medium for deciphering social and urban life, and people become subject to a world in which monetary exchange is the dominating force. The rational calculation of city life was also, in Simmel's thinking, a matter of time calculation in which the individual citizen excelled as an integrated, modern, urban type. This wasn't considered in a purely negative way by Simmel, as it would have been by Marx, because the birth of the citizen in the modern metropolis was also a matter of leaving the traditional folkways of the countryside to build up the singularity of a living. This happened through the primacy of an eye [Page 1494]rapidly acquainted to the multiple milieus of the city, such as the opera, the university, or the newly born department stores. The sociology of the city, of fashion, and of shopping starts with Simmel in the Berlin of the early nineteenth century.

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