Between the Planned and the Lived City: New Road, Brighton Drawn

Background

At around the turn of the last century there were a number of interactions between writers and thinkers that combined to develop particular ways of inventing the city. Their concerns were with the psychological effects of the modern city, qualities that are explored in the work of, for example, Walter Benjamin. His acknowledgement that the modern city was a collection of fragments has been a key influence on literary, social and cultural thinking in the 20^th century and this interest has been rekindled by the more recent publication in 1999 of the English language translation of his last unfinished work The Arcades Project (started in 1927). Charles Baudelaire’s artistic portrayal of modernity in the mid-nineteenth century is evident in Benjamin’s work and also in the narrative of geographer David Pinder’s (2001) writing. On the other hand, architectural historian and urban commentator Iain Borden, on skateboarding (2001a and b), is concerned with the sensorial affects of sound and the feel, or kinaesthetics, of moving through the city. Each of these writers is concerned with the psychogeography of the city although each expresses it differently and at different times in history.