The Imaginative Structure of the City.

Andrew, Caroline

Blum, Alan. The Imaginative Structure of the City. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. Pp. x, 330. $44.95 (hardcover).

The Imaginative Structure of the City is a product of the Culture of Cities project, one of the very large Major Collaborative Research Initiatives (MCRI) funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The project is a broadly interdisciplinary comparison of Montreal, Toronto, Berlin, and Dublin, looking at the ways in which these cities are influenced by global trends and express their own distinctiveness. The project is centred on the cultural expressions of the cities, culture being understood in a broad way relating to the daily patterns of life.

The context of the book is to me essential to understanding the complex, many-layered reading of the city that Alan Blum proposes to us. The book seems to me both an intellectual argument for a project on the culture of cities and an intellectual argument for why a broad knowledge of political and social theory is useful to laying the foundations for understanding the modern city. Seen in this light, the book is first and foremost a contribution to, and a celebration of, an interdisciplinary approach to looking at cities. An incredibly rich and varied set of authors are brought into play to compose Blum's argument about why cities matter.

I will not do justice to the richness of Blum's argument about the potential importance of the city. What I took from his argument is that the city is a possible site for collective identity and, from that, collective action. The imaginative structure of the city "refers to the ways in which any city is conceived as orienting to the recognition, persistence, and maintenance of its difference as a feature of its routine problem-solving" (40). The problem-solving is about the mundane activities of daily life in the city but also about the big questions about existence. "The city is the place where (and it is a place because) the end of collective life is taken up as a question releasing experimentation and resistance, conflict and enmity. In taking up such questions, the city serves as a locus of collectivization for its civilization" (298).

As Blum relates culture back to problem-solving ("the notion of culture at its best makes reference to collective problem-solving in situations that are fundamentally destabilized" [19]) the culture of cities can be looked at in the production of new norms and in the ways in which this production serves as a locus of collectivization, as a potential site for collective action.

The different settings Blum examines in order to look at the production of new norms demonstrate the broad range of his analysis. To mention only a few that I found particularly interesting: cosmopolitanism (and parochialism), scenes, and nightlife all provide perspectives for Blum to analyze the ambiguities of the material and ideal dimensions of the city, and the ways these interact in the expression of distinctiveness. Cosmopolitanism and parochialism are both parts of all great cities, and Blum returns to his metaphor of the two-headed city, "both universal and local at the same time" (140). The analysis of "scenes" also plays on the idea of ambiguity--a scene is both art and commodity, pleasure and function, "as both a way of doing business and as an exciting departure from the routines of doing business" (188).

I found the discussion of nighttime particularly interesting, in part because of recent policies introduced in European cities looking at the 24-hour city. Blum concludes his analysis of nighttime and the expression of distinctiveness by asking whether globalization is turning all cities into identical 24-hour cities. And his answer, in the negative, suggests that "such specificity appears as those sorts of relations and observable practices through which cities mark the beginning and ends of their nights" (161). This describes very nicely the ways in which some cities have indeed been acting collectively to put into place programs and policies that take into account the 24-hour city, whereas others have not. As Blum says, global factors play out in all cities, but the reactions are not identical from city to city.

At the same time, this discussion of nighttime highlights for me the limits to The Imaginative Structure of the City or, rather, what I found disappointing about the book. With some exceptions, there is little about real cities, and after reading the book, I did not feel that I knew more about Toronto's expression of its distinctiveness or Berlin's particular way of expressing the objectives of collective life. However, I do have some new and interesting ideas about locations where the distinctiveness of specific cities could be expressed, and also how they could be examined. In addition, the book does succeed in building the intellectual argument that the expression of distinctiveness is possible, and important, for a city, even with globalization, and thus justifies our wanting to understand the particular expressions of a particular city's identity. And that certainly is a worthwhile project.

Caroline Andrew

School of Political Studies

University of Ottawa