ABSTRACT
Every academic attempt to describe cities also uses the language of the city in question. What is more, according to John Tagg (1996: 180), the languages of economics, sociology, demography, statistics and cartography, empirical documentation, and theories formed enter into an exceptionally intimate relationship with the form of the city. Paris, which Walter Benjamin (2012) had not by chance declared the capital city of the nineteenth century, is the prototype for reflecting on modernity; New York has become the model city for the theory agenda of world and global city research, and today Los Angeles is synonymous with post-modernism (Berking and Löw 2005: 14). We can therefore assume that it is not a matter of chance where people do their thinking. The cities in which science is carried on also shape research perspectives in their function as a shared “experiential space” (Mannheim 1982). We adopt a twofold perspective: we first review contributions to sociological research that discuss space and the built environment in terms of specific experience in European cities. The focus is on the understanding of publicness (and privacy), such topics as atmosphere, territoriality, iconicity, and performativity, and on reflection on the building and appropriation of architecture. Second, we assess the discussion on the intrinsic logic of cities, currently the subject of heated debate in Europe.
