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Invisible cities: New York, fiction and alternative cartographies

Litchfield, R; (2006) Invisible cities: New York, fiction and alternative cartographies. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London). Green open access

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Abstract

Writing in 1988 David Harvey suggested that "the city is no longer treated as an entity malleable for broad social ends, but as a collage of spaces and people, of ephemeral events and fragmentary contracts."2 Although Harvey believes that it is capitalism that controls the geography of the city, here he recognises the notion that cities exist not as one objective reality, but as a series of understandings and experiences—representations—of the same space. As Westwood and Williams refer to it "the city is many cities,"3 which suggests that cities exist as a collection of fictional experiences. This notion of the city existing as and within layers of fictions is increasingly prevalent in contemporary urban theory.4 Shields argues that a variety of representations are what makes cities available for appreciation and comprehension5 and thus it is important to examine what the understanding and analysis of fictional texts, including those outside of the architectural theory discipline, bring to the dialogue about cities.

Type: Thesis (Doctoral)
Title: Invisible cities: New York, fiction and alternative cartographies
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Language: English
Additional information: Thesis digitised by ProQuest.
UCL classification:
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1569339
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