ancient cities

important than ever, but with the widespread
availability of digital cameras, almost everyone
can take pictures and transmit them to their friends
or the world at large through the Internet. The
professional/amateur distinction becomes irrelevant
as more and more of the established outlets of
visual mass communication become web­based
and actively seek submissions from anyone who
wishes to participate in the collective process of
visual documentation.
It is perhaps still too early to say definitively
what constitutes the cityscape of the postmodern
urban order. In the real world, it could be the post­
9/11 skyline of New York without the twin towers
of the World Trade Center, or it could be the featureless
sprawl of the postsuburban technopoles of
Europe and North America, or even the endless
peripheral shantytown slums surrounding global
cities throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
But in the virtual world, the postmodern city is
perhaps best expressed visually by the homepage
of MySpace or YouTube, by the mean streets of
computer games like Grand Theft Auto, or even by
the participatory alternate reality of SecondLife.
At some point, the distinction between visual culture
and urban reality fades, and the image of the
city becomes the city itself.
Frederic Stout
See also Architecture; Cinematic Urbanism; City and
Film; Flâneur; Globalization; Metropolis; Urban
Design
Further Readings
Hirsch, Robert. 1999. Seizing the Light: A History of
Photography. New York: McGraw­Hill.
Jeffrey, Ian. 1981. Photography: A Concise History.
London: Thames and Hudson.
Liggett, Helen. 2007. “Urban Aesthetics and the Excess
of Facts.” Pp. 9–24 in Encountering Urban Places:
Visual and Material Performances in the City,
edited by Lars Frers and Lars Meier. London:
Ashgate.
Newhall, Beaumont. 1982. The History of Photography.
New York: Museum of Modern Art/Little, Brown.
Rosenblum, Naomi. 2008. A World History of
Photography. New York: Abbeville Press.
Sandler, Martin W. 2002. Photography: An Illustrated
History. New York: Oxford University Press.
Piazza
Walker, Ian. 2002. City Gorged with Dreams:
Surrealism and Documentary Photography in
Interwar Paris. Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press.
Woods, Mary. 2009. Beyond the Architect’s Eye:
Photographs and the American Built Environment.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Pi a z z a
595
Squares form an integral part of the urban fabric,
and open spaces like the square are deemed paramount
for the liveability of our cities. This entry
traces the historical roots of squares in the urban
and subsequently unpacks how they improve the
quality of urban life.
The word piazza refers to the Italian word for
an open square in the city and at the same time
hints at the historical antecedents of modern­day
squares. In most urban settings, squares are public
spaces, that is, they are generally open to the public
although in some cases heavily controlled. The
square in the public imagination and as manifest in
many planning policy documents is intended to be
an all­inclusive open­air living room from which
people accrue economic benefit and improved mental
and physical health; also, the square is often
designed for children and young people and is
thought to reduce the fear of crime.
But squares are about more than living up to the
aspirations of those who write policy guidelines.
First, these living rooms are ordered spaces, made
and maintained by certain people and guided by
specific rhetoric and often direct interests. Second,
these spaces are made and remade through different
usages by different people, making the living
room a contested terrain. Last, the force of this
contestation resides not only in scripted or determined
political projects of those who order space
and the different users of that space but also in the
very materiality of space, so that the square holds
within its very materiality the force of its own
transformation, whichever direction this transformation
may take. The piazza, evoking images of
bustling Mediterranean life that one might enjoy
over a cup of cappuccino, a sunbathed living room,
also entails urban political life, from the very smallest
to the very grandest of confrontations.