Intramuros
Each citizen of the city lives in a city of bespoke dimensions.
Kevin Lynch outlined how the inhabitants of places like Boston and suburban New Jersey identified, interacted and navigated around their immediate urban environments, through sets of abstract signs or by recognising tangible landmarks. Each individual’s mental place map was unique - recognisable features for the soccer mom include her kid’s high school or the local Target, for the truck driver the freeway, gas stations, distribution outlets. Every set of maps lays over the other, each person exhibiting a form of city dysmorphia, perception modified by circumstance, experience, prejudice.
Guy Debord - Psychogeographic Map of Paris, 1955
Sometimes the factors influencing how we perceive the city do not just effect the individual or categories of individuals, but whole populations, a form of trauma issued against the urban consciousness. The Berlin wall dividing a whole city into separately administered mini-states, favelas in Sao Paulo grouping around the bases of luxury apartment buildings, freeways and train tracks cutting up a town like an infrastructural canyon.
Tuca Vieira, Paraisópolis, Sao Paulo, 2008
Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin
Like Jim Carrey in the Truman Show, we assume that what we grow up with is how the world is. It takes imagination, or experience, to leap beyond this assumption. Growing up in a small town near Munich in the aftermath of WW2, W.G. Sebald believed the ruins of bomb damage that he saw all around him were a normal feature of all cities. It was only until a school visit to Manchester that he realised this was not so.
Conan Doyle’s city was the locus of civilisation - Empire, Medicine, Detection, holding out against the bucolic or exotic Others that infiltrated its defences. The majority of the violent crimes that Holmes investigates in the earlier stories are outside the city walls. Curiously for Holmes, the majority are south of London in Kent, Sussex and so on, accessed on trains through Charing Cross, the station for Ferries to the continent, and therefore traditional arrival point in London for the Other. That swathe of land between the passenger ports of Dover and Portsmouth represents the liminal point between British and Foreign, civilisation and savagery, law and crime, that Holmes thrives in.
Franco Moretti:
“As Holmes moves away from London, crimes have a marked tendency to become bloodier. In the city, less than half of his cases have to do with violent death; in the countryside, the percentage of murders (or attempted murders) rises to three-quarters. In the first Holmes collection - The Adventures - the contrast of city and countryside was even starker, as none of the seven London stories involved murder, while all of the five countryside ones did. Then, murder became de rigueur for detective fiction, and Doyle must have tried to combine it with the urban setting. Given the much greater charm of the earlier, bloodless London stories (A Scandal in Bohemia, The Red-Headed League, The Man with the Twisted Lip), maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.”
Franco Moretti - Sites of Holmes’ Investigations, Atlas of the European Novel, page 138
The mind assembles sites according to type - home, work, happy, sad - house, office, cinema, cemetery. The types become cinematic conventions - segues and establishing shots for sitcoms and soaps, accompanied by a piece of trademark music, set the scene for the action to follow. Or Renaissance architect Serlio’s archetypal stage sets - Tragic, Comic, Pastoral, confirm that we expect certain types of activity to correlate to their built form. For the Tragic set Serlio writes that the “houses must be those of great persons, because amorous adventures, sudden accidents, and violent and cruel deaths such as we read of in ancient and modern tragedies alike have always taken place in the houses of Lords, Dukes, Grand Princes and, particularly, Kings.”
Tom’s Restaurant - Seinfeld Establishing Shot
Serlio - Set Design for Tragic Drama, 1545
It takes a special kind of urban form to estrange us from our expectations, to destablise the stables of house and homes. Something like the Bonaventure Hotel of Los Angeles, that Jameson says provides the ultimate post-modern experience, de-centering and disorienting its inhabitants, continuously circulating them around an interior system disconnected from the wider neighbourhood like an electrical circuit isolated from the power grid. Like Detroit’s Renaissance Center it is a city within a city. It is composed of 5 cylindrical towers each glazed in reflective glass, seemingly following the blueprints of Bentham’s panopticon, and topped by a revolving restaurant. Prisons, turbines, grain silos. Sites of neo-noir mysteries, science fiction, poetry? No, just a hotel, with windowless conference rooms, a subterreanean carpark, laminated menus and a thousand trouser presses.
