History is essential to studying and understanding any given area of knowledge. If the process behind the formation of a thing or place is not known, then there is a large gap in the complete conceptualization of this thing or place. Specifically for understanding urban spaces and cities, the large-scale historiography of the world is an effective tool to help see how civilizations have developed from small villages into towns and cities. Historiography is understood as the meta-historical study of history itself; the history of history. For example, thinking about how to classify periods in history is a historiographical venture; history is commonly split into periods such as the “bronze age,” “Renaissance,” or “the Enlightenment.”

 

Historiography is thus important to understanding the history of urban spaces as it gives the framework to conceptualize when a given city or town is being thought about and the characteristics associated with that age. Inquiring into the design of the city could bring up issues that go all the way back to the Victorian age, and understanding what that age entails would be essential to understanding the matter at hand. It also provides a narrative for the development of cities, tracing a line from the primitive hut up to the skyscraper. There are historiographical forces that push and pull the spirit of history too and fro, operating on all aspects of human life, especially the city and urban spaces.

 

There is, however, a large problem with the traditional understanding of historiography as a simple narrative of the steps of history moving linearly up to a final conclusion. This problem was most notably pointed out by French theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard, famously articulated in his work The Postmodern Condition. Lyotard is often quoted, in the opening pages of The Postmodern Condition, as saying that contemporary society is characterized as having an “incredulity towards meta-narratives” (7). Meta-narratives being the traditional ways of understanding the world; where all of humanity is in accord with a single way of thinking and life, and all knowledge is unified under a single theory. The “progress of history” as described earlier in the discussion on historiography is an example of a meta-narrative: in the official meta-narrative, history progresses according to measurable laws and humans are capable of driving history towards its ultimate end of social enlightenment and human emancipation.

 

For Lyotard, it is impossible to accept this today. This is because the nature and dissemination of knowledge have fundamentally changed in today’s information economy. As he writes: “Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhaps the major—stake in the worldwide competition for power” (5). Traditional commodities are no longer the sole source of communication and sales, the economy has been computerized. This means that commodities are stored and regulated in large databases, their access open, their content free: the digital commodity market is rapid and uncontrollable. Small, local narratives have been created as a result of this. Information is transferred at such a rapid rate through computerization that it is no longer feasible to tie it all together under a single narrative; everyone's viewpoint is public and considered, everything is decentralized and it’s impossible to organize it all coherently. This is why the meta-narrative is difficult to accept in contemporary society: knowledge and information is no longer a steady stream, but a rapid uncontrollable flash flood.

 

Importantly then, what does this mean for urban planning and everyday life? Firstly, it means that we must reconsider what we know about the history of urban planning itself. With the fantastic examples given earlier in the classic, of the first plans for Washington D.C. by L'Enfant and the original New York City grid, are prime examples of planning based on meta-narratives. These plans were effectively pre-built and imagined communities, with a set idea behind how they will function when they are created. This is the old way of thinking applied to urban planning, with a preset set of functional ideas with a population and city functioning that follows along with the plan to its end without fail; it’s the same way of thinking as the meta-narrative of historical progress towards enlightenment. Thus, this implies that nowadays, urban planning thinking has changed to understand the city as a decentralized rhizome, bringing together and interconnecting hundreds of disparate identities and peoples in a singular built environment. This is evidenced in the concept of urban sprawl, where urbanization loses regard for any form of planning and takes on a decentralized and unorganized form, even to the detriment of the towns it is taking place in. Urban sprawl, therefore, is the postmodern understanding of urban planning, or, rather, the lack of understanding.

 

Secondly, postmodernity is directly reflected in the design of the city itself, a point brilliantly articulated by French theorist Guy Debord. Debord and the Situationists created an urbanist theory known as psychogeography. Debord writes in the Theory of the Dérive, paraphrasing Marx, “People can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is animated. Obstacles were everywhere. And they were all interrelated, maintaining a unified reign of poverty” (Knabb 63). In other words, the city itself and its architecture have taken this form of the meta-narrative, creating an often oppressive and rigid form of the city. Psychogeography intends to be a more liberatory unraveling of the rigidity of the city through free association and simply walking through the city, connecting with the architecture on a personal level and taking routes less taken. This is the dérive: the walk through the city intending to free the mind from the monotonous daily travel and create a new spontaneity in the city. Debord put it in Situationist Theses on Traffic as: “architecture must be transformed to accord with the whole development of the society, criticizing all the transitory values linked to obsolete forms of social relationships” and that “[urbanism] aims to form an integrated human milieu in which separations such as work/leisure or public/private will finally be dissolved” (69). For the Situationists, the urban environment, with a new postmodern mindset, can be changed in a positive sense to liberate the people within the city by removing boundaries and bringing together separations. Whether or not this has happened in practice is something the Situationists would likely disagree with.

 

Personally, this impacts not only myself but effectively every young person today. We are constantly on social media, Google, and other forms of instant communication of information. There is no escaping it, even. So, we are more sensitive and tolerant of voices less heard, for better or worse, because it is far easier to hear them. Everyone has a platform now, regardless of who you are or where you come from. This can lead to fantastic dialogue between those who would otherwise not have a chance to engage together, or toxic harmful relations that grow in the anonymity of the Internet. Regardless, we are more open to those in the city and our communities too, because of this postmodern interconnection. This is likely a positive benefit to this new form of knowledge. However, it is also very difficult to conceptualize the problems in our world today with the information economy. Ecological catastrophe, the migrant crisis, international globe war, all of these are bits of information speeding through the Internet like every other twitter post and news article. It is nearly impossible to get a grip on how we can deal with these pressing issues because it is difficult to even begin to figure out where the problem is or how to solve it: we are oversaturated with information and overwhelmed. Science cannot help us, Lyotard teaches us that science can no longer get a grip on a single, accurate view of the “objective world,” but rather is subject to the many thousands new local narratives popping up constantly in the flood of information. With postmodernity, though connecting us in ways previously thought impossible, we are also confused and lack the conceptual tools to deal with the issues that face us. This is a problem that can be solved starting at the level of our communities and cities.

 

Bibliography

• Knabb, Ken (1981). Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets.

• Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.