ABSTRACT
Representations are powerful formulations. They structure an understanding of urban life-worlds by organizing perceptions and everyday experiences of the city. By inscribing an idea of “the city” (which is only ever an idea), they impact materially and ideologically on notions of what the urban “is” and aspirations of what it could become. Whether considered in visual terms as modes of physical description (like the maps, plans, models and drawings of architects and urban designers) or non-visually, as the function of more abstract frameworks (like the economic and social policies, or municipal regulations of city planners) urban representations are a form of stabilization. They stall the mobile ground of urban territories, presenting “the city” as a rational construct and thereby making it available to analysis and critique. Acting as emulsifiers, projective imaging techniques as well as prescriptive regulatory constraints “discipline” a city’s inherently unsettled and unsettling qualities through neat maneuvering that conflates many conflicted and contestatory views of the urban condition into one smooth image.
