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Canadian Urbanism Uncovered

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  1. What are cities? There is that famous phrase sometimes attributed to Claude Levy-Strauss, “Me make the city, then the city makes us.”

    I have also felt many times, visiting many places, or just involved in my own work, that the city is the unconscious projection of the collective.

    The difficulty here is with coming to terms with ‘all and everyone’ that is included in that ‘collective,’ from the most ardent activist to the greediest financier.

    Freud opened “Civilization and Its Discontents” with his own rumination about Roma as an analogue for the human psyche. It strikes me to this day as a comparison in perfect balance: the city is best explained in reference to the functioning of a human being, the functioning of a human being in reference to a city.

    In what is the longest, continuously inhabited urban footprint in the west, the famed Vienna psychoanalyst invites the narration about the many periods of progress and decline suffered by the ancient capital. The Noli map (1736 – 1748) freeze-frames the culmination of one of the metropolis’s busiest periods: the time the Renaissance and Baroque Popes took over.

    Yet, alongside these ruminations of progress, we become aware of the many times the city was laid waste, or the long periods it lay in ruins, barely functioning.

    So while I experience cities with a great sense of immediacy, and worry about civic policy and the damage being wrought daily, I have that other place to go: Roma. A city that teaches us that no matter how much we screw something up, urbanism will always bounce back.

    Now, fair warning… it may take centuries.

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