ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, I posited the urban ethos as a determinative and interpretive tool for a symptomatic reading of expressive culture. There, the urban ethos offered a historical window on publicly circulated and shared ideas about how cities are and how people live in them and move through them. As a regime of poetic procedures, the urban ethos clearly forms an aspect of representation, in the broad sense that the word has developed in (postmodern) cultural studies. At the same time, however, I carefully underlined at key points that the urban ethos cannot develop autonomously, but rather it forms something of a continuum with the real unfolding (i.e., nonrepresentational—which is not to say that representation is not itself real) of urban space related to changes in capital accumulation (the latter having been outlined in the Introduction). Therefore, although in the first chapter of this book I detailed some crucial workings of place hitherto unstudied, I also pointed toward a more comprehensive, totalizing view in which shifts related to capital production played a central role. That nod toward totalization figured especially in the boundary possibilities, i.e., in those aspects of city life that moved in and out of sight, even as perhaps the vast majority of urban representations persisted through changes in the day-to-day metropolis. In the present chapter I offer a preliminary rationale for that more comprehensive view—though in reality, all the remaining chapters of this book can be taken to illustrate equally well the inseparability of changing city spatial structures and the poetics of expressive culture. But this chapter specifically and explicitly contrasts the approaches to music and urban geography through place and through space, arguing for a shift of emphasis from the former (which is currently rather popular) to the latter.
