ABSTRACT
Technological innovations have always had a close relationship with the practical aspects of our mundane daily routines, and also with how we envisage life in the future. An urban phantasmagoria is essentially a virtual representation of a possible urban reality that is still uncertain, and not desired with any certainty: something that is imagined in a sociotechnical framework in the imminence of existing. Phantasmagorias are intentionally embedded in indexes of the world the audience lives in. Cinema is an industrial art form. Urban phantasmagorias are an intrinsic part of the construction of modern urban imagery. Cinema may strengthen the links between the virtual and the material aspects of the city that emerged with industrialization and are becoming stronger as information and communication technologies infiltrate daily life. Metropolis could be considered the first urban phantasmagorical film. Fritz Lang was the son of a Viennese urban planner, and a former architecture student in Munich and Vienna.
