ancient cities

142 Cinematic Urbanism
2. The essentially vertical articulation of semantic
surfaces, that is, the representational space
where symbolic productions are displayed,
distributed, and exposed to the public, including
not only shop windows and billboards, signage
and architectural facades, galleries, and cultural
centers but also, and increasingly so, screens of
computers, televisions, and PDAs (personal
digital assistants)
3. A networked dimension, that is, the mediated
space of information communication
technologies; linking together both the former
dimensions, it has the extensivity of the first
combined with the parametric temporality of
the second. In this last perspective, public space
becomes essentially interface. It has no
inherently spatial nature, but instead is strictly
dependent on the material presence and
performativity of wires, cables, antennas, chips,
encoders and decoders, magnetic supports, and
data storage devices.
The urban production process in the global system
is increasingly distributed in delocalized networks,
but it emerges from production to consumption
through the vertical articulation of surfaces that represent
the predominant aspect of the contemporary
global city, determining an urban palimpsest experienced
as a succession of frames. Programmed flows of
images represent the core of the urban experience.
The screen becomes the main morphological element
in a city where to be visible is as important as
what is actually done inside architecture, if not
more. Persistence succeeds existence in the essential
urban ontology.
Such conditions are determining the emergence of
what can be analyzed as a vertical urbanism, urbanism
in which the semantic use of vertical urban surfaces
is overcoming the horizontal logistic use of
spaces in engendering value and rent. Urban design
moves from fields to frames: Land’s logistic use of
horizontal surfaces loses relevance with respect to
the semantic use of vertical surfaces. If, in the past,
the design of the city has been basically drawing
plans from an aerial point of view, distributing functions
through the physical space in a primarily horizontal
articulation, now we face the emergence of a
discipline aimed at organizing the visual perception
of the citizen. Citizenship tends to be understood as
spectatorship flattened into audience, a vision that in
many respects recalls not only Guy Debord’s arguments
in The Society of Spectacle (1967) but also a
phenomenon recognized by David Harvey as an
effect of the flexible accumulation regime.
Spatial transformation processes are increasingly
influenced by the necessity to capture the
potential attention of citizens/spectators, determining
what has also been depicted as an attention
economy, connected more and more with the distribution
of information through digital networks.
It is not a coincidence if, among the most important
players in the urban new economies, we find
today corporations of the entertainment and media
sectors, which deploy an aggressive attitude toward
monopolizing control of urban surfaces and
exploiting their communication potential, and
that often extend their interests to sectors such as
mobility, retail, urban furniture. Their strategies
are easily inscribed in the entrepreneurial transformation
of urban government, significantly contributing
to a neoliberalist urbanism focused on
private–public partnership and remarkably unbalanced
toward speculative attitudes.
Image Production
As a matter of fact, the process of image production
assumes a fundamental role in the urban
economies, redirecting capital toward specific spatial
transformation, redefining the architectural
consistency of the city, or reshaping citizens’
everyday experience through intensive mediation
of personal interchanges. It is a form of production
that implies a massive use of tools and techniques
derived from media and the entertainment
industry, redirected to engender and exploit value
from the urban location. Image production stands
out as the complex production–consumption chain
reshaping the urban experience of citizens as an
essentially visual one; engendering a metropolis
where the space of exposure becomes the structured
embodiment of public space, designed to
optimize the exposition of city users to the spectacle
of goods, being impressed, entertained,
directed by flows of commodified images. The
management of imagery is therefore more or less
evident at the core of the main phenomena affecting
the contemporary urban world and in many terms
inhabiting current disciplinary discourse. Urban