The City and Modernity

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This article examines the city; not one particular city, but the generic urban environment.  It’s been argued that the city is the archetypal modern environment, the realm of modernity.  Of course, there have been cities for thousands of years.  The ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome built cities.  But the 19th century experienced huge urban expansion.  Cities like London and Paris grew to unprecedented scale and gave rise to new patterns of urban life and new modes of experience.

The modern metropolis emerged in the 19th century.  This was a dramatic social change, so cities caught the imagination and became a key focus for artists, writers and filmmakers.  It was felt that the new environment of the city was fundamentally altering the human psyche.  A number of writers began to examine urban space.  In 1903 Georg Simmel published an essay called ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, which explored the effect that cities had on the psyche. 

Simmel explored the metropolis as a psychological construction.  He argued that the city was characterised by a sense of chaos.  In the city, we’re bombarded with information: signs, noises, traffic, crowds and so on.  Simmel says that in order to cope with the constant bombardment of sensory stimuli, the individual has to adopt what he called a blasé attitude or detached nonchalance.

He writes:

The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrimination . . . The meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial.

In other words you have to blank everything out.  This was a psychological defence against the chaos of the city.  Without it, Simmel argued you would become catatonic with awe.  So it was felt that slowly but surely the city was altering the human psyche.  He viewed the city as disorientating realm that generated neuroses like agoraphobia, the fear of wide open spaces. 

This conception of the city was echoed by writers and artists of the period.  Georg Grosz painted Metropolis (1916-7).  This is a view of the decadent, debauched west end of Berlin between the First and Second World Wars.  The image is deliberately non-realist.  Grosz was a German Expressionist painter: in his work forms are distorted to suggest psychological disturbance. 

This is a hellish vision of the big city.  The composition is formed from simultaneous scenes which overlap in one image.   The characteristic aspects of the city as he sees it have been abstracted and thrust together.  There’s an immense crowd of people with grotesque faces.  Fat businessmen in bowler hats and pin-striped suits jostle with prostitutes.  It’s a swarming tide of humanity that flows between the collapsing façades of the buildings.  The blood-red background suggests danger and eroticism.  German Expressionism often made use of striking diagonals that give the composition a sense of energy and instability.  The tumultuous composition and brash colours suggest the chaos of the city.  This is a powerful image of the psychological impact of the metropolis.  This echoes Simmel’s observations about the bombardment of sensory stimuli.

Simmel says that to defend ourselves against the chaos of the city we have to adopt a blasé attitude and basically close down our perception.  Because of that, the city is also a space of isolation where we encounter solitude among a multitude.  In Simmel’s words ‘one nowhere feels as lonely and lost as in the metropolitan crowd.’ 

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