ancient cities

140 Cinematic Urbanism
environment endorsed by the pervasiveness of
cinematic devices in the information age, analyzing
how moving images are increasingly populating
spaces and surfaces of contemporary cities and
how urban design is increasingly turning into a
logistics of perception.
The etymology of the word cinematic is in the
Greek verb kinein, to move. The essence of the
cinematic urbanism is indeed in such relations as
movement/image and space/velocity. In this sense,
if the premodern urban condition has been one
characterized by settlement, intimacy, and a sense
of belonging to place and community, modernity
has represented a shift toward mobility, crossing,
anonymity, and otherness. Modern city, from
being the walled, defended site of staying, becomes
an attractor of flows, a node in a dynamic system
of trajectories, characterized by complex codification
of access procedures and sensorial overstimulation.
Far before the invention of cinema, it has
been the experience of traveling, the view from the
train passing through, to modify the perception of
landscape and the relation with places. It prefigures
annihilation of distance and time compression,
along with dominance of the visual perception
as the ultimate urban experience. Perhaps the first
to clearly capture this passage was Charles
Baudelaire, singing the “transitory, the fleeting and
the contingent” of urban life, praising the experience
of the anonymity in the crowd, picturing the urban
café as the screen through which to look at the
spectacle of the city. In the same era, Georges-
Eugène Baron Haussmann was opening up—through
demolition—the visual domination of the urban
space as an essential means of managing power.
Since then, modernity and visuality have been concepts
developing parallel with one another.
“Just as water, gas and electricity are brought
into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in
response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied
with visual or auditory images, which will
appear and disappear at a simple movements of
the hand, hardly more than a sign,” said Paul
Valéry, quoted by Walter Benjamin in “The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; the
view of Benjamin is probably the most influential
in anticipating the figures of a cinematic urbanism,
with his monumental project about Parisian passages,
its theorization of the flânerie as a lens to
capture modernity, and its capacity to preview the
effects of cinema in changing the perceived space
of citizens. “The film corresponds to profound
changes in the apperceptive apparatus—changes
that are experienced on an individual scale by the
man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical
scale by every present-day citizen,” states Benjamin
in the same piece.
More recent is the work of such thinkers as Jean
Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. In a frequently quoted
passage of America, Baudrillard notes, “The
American city seems to have stepped right out of
the movies” and “[t]o grasp its secrets, you should
not, then, begin with the city and move inwards
towards the screen; you should begin with the
screen and move outwards towards the city.” If
Baudrillard’s intention is to depict the inherently
cinematic nature of the American city, in opposition
to the nature of the historical European city,
globalization processes are in a way making this
observation appropriate in every context. But it is
probably Virilio, with his attention to phenomena
as time compression, the diffusion of visual technologies
and interest in dromology (the science of
velocity), who has developed one of the most influential
sets of analytical tools for the emerging cinematic
urbanism. In Virilio’s work, the development
of visualizing technologies produces visibility without
confrontation, in which the traditional vis-à-vis
streets disappears, giving way to the single temporality
of an instantaneous diffusion. “With the
interfaçade of monitors and control screens, elsewhere
begins here, and vice versa,” he wrote in
L’espace critique, describing the incoming overexposed
contemporary city. The idea of cinematic
urbanism as a product of postmodernity can be
retraced as well in the classical and controversial
work Learning from Las Vegas, by Robert Venturi,
Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Here, the
Las Vegas strip is interpreted as a new paradigm
for the urban, where billboards, signs, and buildings
act as signs, are designed according to the aim
of capturing the attention of the driver, stressing
the relation between visuality and velocity.
A Cinematic Epistemology of the City
The profound, constitutive relationship between
cinema and city is the topic of a range of recent studies,
as in Nezer AlSayyad’s attempt to retrace a history
of urban modernity “from reel to real.” In this