Ecriture Urbaine: From Cities to Metropolises

In a historical perspective, writing about cities appears to be also writing cities themselves. Historical epoches come to life in large- and small-scale narratives that have fixated in time and space the process of becoming a metropolis every city that became worthy of a novel has been going through. The decline in populaity of literature notwithstanding, cities remain to be written if not in literary than in technical form of development reports, newspaper articles and magazine pieces that add up to a chaotic chronicle of each and every city that had made it into headlines, cover stories and video spots enough to become an urban buzzword on the lips of globe trotters. Cities become metropolises less and less because they can show absolute gains in industrial output for their status. It is the throngs of festival-, concert-, and exhibition-goers that on their way to numerous cultural events reimagine a previously planly modern city into a post-modern metropolis. This post-modern transition to metropilitan strategies of urban development is far from being problem-free. However, the rise to prominence of historical centers of capitalism and modernity has not infrequently been a disaster in the eyes of their commentators, critics and beneficiaries.

As global industries become reorganized on a previously unseen and unimaginable scale, cities around the world deem it worthy to reinvent themselves beyond the dimentions that modern urban development has made previously imperative. Cities that become assembled on the spot as World-Expo pavillions, cities that explode in every infrastructural direction from scratch, cities that shoot for cultural stars in an overnight remake of their urban landscapes, cities that challenge gravity of global trends in their race to become world centers of finance, fashion, industry, or culture. While it becomes doubtful that there will be an army of socialites, notables, experts and celebrities needed to breath social lifes into budding centers of metropolitan excellence that mushroom around the globe at the speed of skyscreapers on the shores of bay of Shanghai, the global circulation, compatibility, communication and connectivity becomes the order of the day. If each new historical game of cultural, economic, social and political accumulation was closely tied to a key metropolitan center, a leading language and a definable social class, the present global fray for instant urban celebrity is poliglot, transurban and inclusive.

People who move places in search of urban excitement, people who become part of emerging transnational trends, people who build virtual empires of cultural audacity, people who put together innovative solutions overnight, people who sail the ebbing seas of global adventure, people who throw new ideas into hyper-charged soil of unquenchable needs, people who unmoor their boats of ephemeral treasures towards bustling ports, people who lose outmoded illusions only to fall captive to brand new dreams. If Dickens' London struck the hour of the best of times and the worst of times at one and the same time of the long day of the nineteenth century, the mega-cities of tomorrow become the centripetal eye-points of the vortexes of all times that for good or bad are unstoppable in their swirl. As the scales of things of old worlds become just computation errors of new ones, the global world to come can be a community like no other. What can capture such change? A distant hair to universal expositions of yore, art biennials claim to do the impossible. Though fail they may, it is their resounding success of becoming ubiquitous that is going to be of importance to an assessment of their effects. As global trotters are joined by global franeurs, the archeology of global post-modernity waits to be written.