ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the management and development of the post-industrial cityscape, its recent transformation through the insertion of iconic architectural projects, and the associated production and management of urban experience. It is this distinction that is perhaps better made by Fredric Jameson in his assessment of the cultural realm of the postmodern city. As Benjamin points out, nineteenth-century Paris produced a set of seminal buildings, a new faade for the rapidly expanding city facilitated the advances in technologies such as glass and iron. The buildings have a prescribed or self-consciously fashioned sense of how they wish to shape the visitors' experience. It is also to set out why it is that Benjamin and Baudrillard, in constellation, both consolidate and challenge previous accounts of urban experience, offering fruitful and frustrating ways of reading the cultural spaces of contemporary cities.
