ancient cities

858 Urban Culture
Attention has also focused on observing urban life
and identifying the specific cultural forms through
which urban culture is defined and expressed,
including popular culture forms. It was in this context
that some urban theorists highlighted the
importance of movement, public space, and the
street to constructing and negotiating urban cultures.
The work of cultural theorist Michel de
Certeau has been being particularly influential in
this respect.
According to de Certeau, people write and
rewrite urban space as their own through the varied
and unplanned ways in which they use the city.
The interplay of movement and “placefulness”
gives form to the city and its cultures, and while it
is possible to trace someone’s journey through the
city on a map or to record it in a photograph, representations
do not capture the quality of the
urban experience or reveal the ways in which
spaces are claimed and constructed as meaningful.
People use, experience, and relate to urban space
in a variety of ways with any given space routinely
being used differently and often at the same time
by different people for different reasons. For
example, an urban park can be a place for families
to picnic, its toilet block may be an active gay beat,
its benches home to the homeless, and its lawn a
place for office workers to meet for lunch. It will
be a different place during the day than it is at
night and daytime use on the weekend may not be
the same as daytime use on a weekday. Urban cultures
thus have many rhythms and the use of city
space changes over time. One space, different uses,
many meanings. For the city dweller, the invention
of place through use and movement also involves
the making and remembering of stories associated
with particular places. Many urban researchers
have been keen to document and highlight the significance
to urban culture of these spatial narratives.
Also significant is the analysis of urban
cultures through the study of urban space as text.
Within cultural studies the text is interpreted as
a combination of signs (e.g., a photograph, room,
or item of clothing), which reveal embedded cultural
meanings and social relations. Following this
approach, an urban text is regarded variously as a
physical structure (an individual building, monument,
or building façade), a specific lived space
(a public street, park, or shopping mall), or any of
the various official and unofficial documents that
represent the city, including architectural drawings,
maps, and real estate publications. By reading
urban texts singularly and in combination, analysts
seek to expose aspects of urban culture and social
relations that might not otherwise be evident.
The examination of urbanism through the study
of texts has two dimensions. First, there are those
who seek to identify and describe the experiences,
stories, and meanings that different users attach to
the city. These readings can be idiosyncratic and
frequently biographical. The other approach sets
out to analyze the urban text as a method for identifying
and exploring the broader social, political,
economic, and ideological factors that shape urban
environments and the experience of the urban. The
underpinning premise is that this method can disclose
how and why cities hold the specific meanings
they do and provide insights into the processes that
construct these landscapes as culturally significant.
It is argued that when explored in the context of
changing social relations, including those associated
with gender, class, and ethnicity, examining
city space as text can reveal many underpinning
and unchallenged aspects of urban power. For
instance, early feminist readings of urban landscapes,
such as shopping malls exposed embedded
masculine codes and prompted the development of
alternative geographies that highlighted the everyday
lives and cultures of women in the city.
By studying urban texts, theorists are interested
in the lived complexity of urban life as well as in
the ways in which cultural identities and power
relationships are inscribed in the landscape. Hence,
the city is not regarded as a monolith, which produces
a single urban culture, sensibility, or way of
life. Rather, it is many places, and its diverse cultures
are made through the active engagements of
people with these places. Recognition of the existence
of a diversity of urbanisms has led to calls for
reframing what is meant by urban culture and by
the field of urban studies itself.
Conclusion
Cities inform and shape particular ways of being in
space and the meanings urban dwellers attach to
these spaces. Urban cultures are thus constructed
through use and imagination. Louis Wirth’s basic
premise was that urbanism is the way of life of
people who live in cities irrespective of the city in