Cities on the River [antikvár]

The modern city, the contemporary city In the nineteenth century Haussmann transformed Paris. The French capital became a new city - well-ordered by avenues and broad boulevards which eased communication and allowed traffic to speed up. At the time of industrialization many other European cities which for centuries had been restricted to the narrow confines of the Roman-Medieval walls broke out of their shell and started to expand and undergo radical transformation. The city came to be the stage of modernity, the symbol of progress, and the place where the new forms of production and exchange proper to industrialization tookfirm root. The nineteenth century - the century of the modern city par excellence - was alsó the century of the Romantic landscape. Caspar Dávid Friedrich placed the humán figure into the endless-ness of the landscape. The humán being - úrban, the protagonist of progress and civilization - gazed at nature with fascination and reinvented him/herself in its wild, untamed beauty. Contemporary post-industrial society defines itself by the new maps drawn up by globalization. One may speak of the formation of a new type of úrban environment going well beyond the traditional nineteenth-century concept of the city: extensive urbanized zones made up of homes and week-end houses, shopping malis, production sites, ports, airports, theme parks and other centres of leisure and consumption. These zones - interconnected by rapid transport - offer the same goods and services as the traditional city: you don't actually have to live within the city any more to experience an úrban lifestyle. In today's globalized society these new urbanized areas - including their constantly fluctuating streams of production, information and settlement that adapt to the dynamics of the world economy in a similar way as the cities - have come to play an increasingly important role. Orie gains the impression that a huge úrban network on the global scale is coming into being at present and that soon no place on earth will be able to escape the control of civilization. After having expelled the Romantic paradigm with its notion of an idyllic landscape offering withdrawal from the world the úrban space is turnéd into one of the stages par excellence of contemporary artistic practices. The typically úrban is now viewed as an aesthetic and contemplative element. Furthermore, the city is now turnéd into the focus of critical perception and into the object of artistic discourse of obviously social implications. 11