A Guide to Urban Representation and What to Do About It: Alternative Traditions of Urban Theory
A Guide to Urban Representation and What to Do About It: Alternative Traditions of Urban Theory
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城市表征及其应对指南：城市理论的另类传统
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发表时间：
1996
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通讯作者：
R. Shields
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作者：
R. Shields
关于城市的本体论地位的争论--它是“真实的”还是“虚幻的”？- 已经让学者们忙碌了忙碌。当然，大多数人通常不会费心去猜测这个城市的真实的本质。想想这是谁的城市更有用。哪里有好地方？哪里有危险？这些充满价值的问题暗示了表征对于我们理解被我们描述为“城市”的环境的重要性。对我们自己和彼此来说，我们代表一个复杂的环境，很少有明确的边缘或边界作为“城市”或“城镇”或“邻里”。虽然我们可以愉快地把城市的“现实”说成是一种事物或形式，但它们是文化分类行为的结果。我们把一个环境归类为一个城市，然后把这个城市“具体化”（见下文）为一个“物”。“城市”的概念，城市本身，是一种表象。这是对环境的一种粉饰，它通过命令来指定，仅仅依赖于一种自我证明的断言，即一个给定的环境是“一个城市”。作为一个研究对象，城市总是一个令人困扰的、“危机对象”，它动摇了我们对“真实”的确定性。有些人认为，合乎逻辑的结论是，“城市”并不真正存在，或者是对“真实的”问题的一种附带现象的干扰，或者我们应该集中精力研究单个建筑而不是城市环境，以及人而不是邻里。
Debates over the ontological status of the city — is it ‘real’ or ‘imagined’? — have kept academics busy for decades. Of course, most people usually don’t bother with speculating about the real nature of the city. It is more useful to think of whose city it is. Where are the pleasant areas? Where is there danger? Such value-laden questions hint at the importance of representations for our understanding of environments which we characterize as ‘urban’. To ourselves and to each other, we represent a complex environment which rarely has clear edges or boundaries as ‘a city’ or ‘a town’ or perhaps ‘a neighbourhood’. While we may happily speak of the ‘reality’ of the city as a thing or form, they are the result of a cultural act of classification. We classify an environment as a city, and then ‘reify’ (see below) that city as a ‘thing’. The notion of ‘the city’, the city itself, is a representation. It is a gloss on an environment which designates by fiat, resting only on an assertion of the self-evidence that a given environment is ‘a city’. As an object of research, the city is always aporetic, a ‘crisis-object’ which destabilizes our certainty about ‘the real’. Some have argued that the logical conclusions are that ‘the urban’ does not really exist or is an epiphenomenal distraction from ‘real’ issues, or that we should concentrate on studying individual buildings rather than urban environments, and people rather than neighbourhoods.1,2