Waking up and getting off

• Main Author: Andrea Mubi Brighenti
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: professionaldreamers 2011-03-01
• Series: lo Squaderno
• Subjects: Urban Knowledges; lo Squaderno No. 19
• Online Access: http://www.losquaderno.professionaldreamers.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/losquaderno19.pdf#page=63

The first impression observers get of city life concerns its pace, the peculiar state of urban spatial and temporal concentration and compression. The notion of “stimulation”, as we know, has been at the centre of early urban theories that focused on the metropolitan experience as inherently “shocking”, due to constant solicitations. Yet if, following Tarde, we move from “similarities and repetitions of complex and confused masses to similarities and repetitions of details, more difficult to grasp, but more precise, elementary, infinitely numerous and infinitesimal”, then we may begin to notice that, within the relative compression of the urban state, all sorts of rhythmic modulations exist, which are far from uniform and which, in their superposition and composition, constitute the very fabric of the city, a fabric which is no less eventless than eventful.