The (Dis)Continuous City

T oday, the city of class is widely viewed as a city of the past. The modern city as a place of commodification—a place, in other words, where workers and machines are placed together in one part of it to produce wealth, which is then appropriated by the owner who lives in another part—is dismissed on the grounds that capitalism has brought about a new urban landscape. In Postmetropolis , for instance, Edward Soja argues that, unlike the modern city, the postmodern city is a “fractal” city without any clear lines or patterns, as illustrated by the sprawling and apparently orderless city of Los Angeles. While the modern city was a space of clearly delineated class relations and spaces, the new hybrid space of what he calls the “postmetropolis” blurs all previously definitive spatial boundaries and establishes a “recomposed sociality that has become similarly fluid, fragmented, decentered, and rearranged in complex patterns” (265). The “Dual City” of class, from this perspective, has given way to the “patchwork city” of cultural difference and fluidity. The metropolis, as Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart put it, is best understood as “one in which, under the ceaseless influence of capitalist development, identities of all kinds are constantly solidifying, constantly liquefying” (x). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.