ABSTRACT
Planners and reformers since Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes have desired to make the city an object of knowledge and thus a governable, and even a perfectible space. Ways of seeing and understanding the city inevitably inform ways of acting on the space of the city, with consequences that, in turn, produce a modified city that is again seen, understood, and acted on. The city is both an empirical reality and an imagined environment. Images and metaphors (the city as machine, as organism, as laboratory, as network . . .) have shaped not only the fabric but also the experience of the city. In the development of modern cities, symbolic constructs deserve a place of equal importance alongside the emergence and institution of certain governmental rationalities. If these are two ends of a spectrum of ways of seeing the city, then we might place Healey at one end, Throgmorton at the other: Healey with her focus on institutions and governance, Throgmorton’s on story and storytelling (or representation, if you like). Yet each, in these chapters, is grappling with an emergent or perhaps newly dominant metaphor for the city in the context of globalization, that of the network: the city embedded in the network society.
