retrospective. Cities are processes in which the material and embodiment – the city and the human body – constitute permanent feedback between each other. No temple, which has not been destroyed; no body which has not suffered from constructed architectures. In just three words, Building, Breaking, Rebuilding – the emblematic title of Chicago poet Charles Sandburg’s poem about his hometown – hits upon the very essence of this distinctive urban feature. In many regards, cities are not only physical collections of living spaces and built structures located in a geographic dimension. Cities are dynamic. The reproduction of the city in a museum-like style is, in this way, a contradiction. The so-called “theming” of postmodern urbanism, however, is only one phase in the continuous interplay between urban society and bodiness. Principally, both spheres cannot be separated from each other. A mode of understanding based on social processes is the product of the friction between the body and the requirements of the urban contingence, the process of building, inhabiting, governing, and participating over and beyond the body and the individual. Urban Bodies When we discuss the body, as we have until now, as places of perceptions, experiences and expectations which are pre-determined and not fully formed by memory, then the question arises: what is the particularly urban in this? Why does the urban context set particular frames and limits and why does it offer specific opportunities for the incorporation of the societal and the embodiment of the space? A starting point for further debate on this subject is the historical observation that cities are produced as societal spaces. These spaces develop and grow as a result of both their internal tensions and their external relationship to the outside world. In this way, cities can be understood as embodying an empirically accessible reality. They can be described by their material nucleus that can be mapped geographically, planned temporarily and whose physical realm is understood as a comprehendible space. This empirical understanding of the city highlights the shortcomings of the individual’s perception of the very nature of the city itself. In this way, the city is often assumed beyond a naturalist phenomenon. As there is (no longer) opposition to the city, the city cannot be understood through a binary structural logic. As far as scientific access to the urban is concerned,
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the everyday understanding and the rather narrow subjective view of the city is in need of adjustment. Operating in the urban environment, the urban dweller uses a concept of the city, which effectively enables the pursuit of his or her own objectives. Upon deeper reflection, however, we see that this is only a functional and opportunistic approach to the problem of the “urban”. The main problem with this perspective of everyday life is its selectivity; it fails to include other evident levels of description and experience. Without these additional layers, a real and pragmatic approach cannot operate in response to changing situations. Instead, this understanding is captured in the trap of an already made experience. In this instance, memory becomes a hindrance. In literature an urban narrative emerges in which subjects either fail in such an urban context; or in which subjects are able to pursue some form of personal development. The first genre is captured in many novels of the naturalist period (Strindberg, for example), while the second genre can be identified, for example, in the German Entwicklungsroman. Contrary to these approaches to the urban, it seems, at first, that definitions which attempt to explain the city objectively without taking into account the “voice” added by subjective and literary approaches. However, both ways of explaining and expressing the urban experience are not based on the communicative interaction and interplay between different urban situations, contexts and persons/bodies that, in essence, make up the complexity of the urban. Cities exist as a result of their tensions and dynamics which are generated by the permanent exchange between the present and the absent; the mobile and the remaining; change and continuity; the global and the local; individuality and sociability. The bodiness of the urban is located within these polar relationships and is characterized by its timely positioning at one or the other end of the poles. The exclusion of the bodiness from the city refers simultaneously to the sedentary folk and those who never arrive; the integrated locals and the global elites; attendants of local traditions and protagonists of change. The urban does not reflect one of these poles, but remains in an in-between position: it is this very process of constant positioning that defines the urban. This process, however, is not free-floating and abstract, but depends on intermediate structures to enable simultaneous stability and change. It creates forms of spatial expression and mental representations which can be understood only in the context of urbanization. This process is deeply embodied and in motion. It can sense, hear, feel, touch and read. It is an emotional landscape.
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