Just what is it that makes today’s cities so different, so appealing? The postmodern urbanity

Abstract

_{Starting with Richard Hamilton’s famous collage and W.H. Auden’s poetic rendition of the history of cities, we argue that what the Greeks called polemos has been the very element of urbanity. The conflict could imply tensions between the rich and the poor, aristocrats or the hoi polloi, but we have reached the stage at which such a rigorously dichotomic vision of the conflict does not provide one with an appropriate approach towards the phenomenon of urbanity. The model of binary oppositions should be supplanted by a much more diverse scheme which would allow for the integration of such elements as affects, desires, and dreams, the factors which do not readily succumb to dialectical analysis. Hence, following Deleuze, Merrifield, and Debord, we want to see the city as an intricate structure of many-layered elements, both physical and imagined}