Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
in a multicultural empire under severe stress, “language was the basis of
social as well as political identity in the bitter struggles for civil rights which
marked the
final years of Habsburg rule before the cataclysm of 1914” (Janik
and Toulmin 1973:65).
Urbanization carried deep cultural and psychological implications that
extended well beyond the realm of the material. City life, as Raymond Williams
(1975). insists, initiated the separation between working the land and know-
ing it intimately from the bourgeois view from afar. Walter Benjamin's obser-
vations of cities centered on how memory, history, and the built environment
became intertwined, in which the urban centers of the money economy gave
rise to new frames of mind. Urban writing, in this view, could shatter the
conventional linear narrative, with its assumption of linear progress, in favor
of a “spatialized time” that subverted meanings by juxtaposing them in novel
ways (Savage 2000). Benjamin saw the world of the Paris arcades—of glitzy
store windows, mirrors, boulevards, museums, art galleries, monuments, and
showcases—seducing the modern consumer, fetishizing commodities, and
seducing the masses into a narcoleptic dream state. Far more than asserting
the centrality of symbolic values (rather than use or exchange values), these
panoramas provided “sweeping views that unrolled before the spectators,
giving them the illusion of moving through the world at an accelerated rate”
(Buck-Morss 1993:311).
Mass urbanization represented a qualitative intensi
fi
cation in the frequency
and intensity of human interaction, an explosion of varied subcultures, the
chance to rub shoulders with strangers, try new experiences, meet new people,
see new sights, and be subject to an in
fi
nite variety of stimuli. The pace and
density of urban life, in contrast to traditional rural time, exhibited a frenzied
tempo of constant change, full of unplanned encounters; in short, it embodied
the very essence of modernity. In Gellner's (1983) view, urbanization trans-
formed the orderly, strati
fi
ed pre-industrial world into one in which disorder
and randomness were pervasive, giving rise to mass anomie for the
fi
first time
in history, a theme commonly found in the works of nineteenth-century soci-
ologists and later urban social ecologists. Of course, cities were not simple
sites of singular temporalities, but of multiple, complex, often contradictory
temporalities that varied greatly among the various social groups that came
to co-inhabit urban spaces (Crang and Travlou 2000). New urban environ-
ments inevitably involved a rede
fi
nition of interpersonal relations, a renegoti-
ation of individual identity as people adapted to the new spaces where
neighbors were located right next door. A long, vast literature in urban soci-
ology points to the psychological and emotional impacts of cities. Georg
Simmel (1950) noted that cities, commodity markets, exchange relations, and
standardized time reworked the sense of self, of people's obligations to one
another, and led urban dwellers to have many more stimuli to deal with than
did those in rural areas. Urbanization inevitably was accompanied by a feel-
ing of accelerated life, of “time pressure” and “fast-moving time.” Few cul-
tures adapted to the hectic pace of urbanization more readily than did the
fi
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