Tales of the city: Situating urban discourse in place and time

Abstract

Our understanding of cities must depend to a significant extent on an awareness of the language, including its figurative resources, that we use. In an exploratory reading of some stages-Antique, Renaissance, Industrial, Post-Modern-and related figurative devices used to characterize the development of cities, Simon Parker presents a cyclical rather than a linear account. It may then be instructive at one level, for instance, to compare the 'bread and circuses' of late antiquity with the rhetoric used by the new city builders of postmodernity in which 'in the space-time compression of production and habitat the aggregation of finance capital is busy disaggregating the human capacities on which this fatal accumulation still depends'.