Publisher's Synopsis
This work faces the crisis of the city in the late 20th century, embarking on a journey through theatres and museums, panoramas and maps, buildings and institutions that are used to construct a new reading of the city as a system of representation. Boyer brings together elements and concepts from geography, critical theory, architecture, literature and painting in a synthetic and readable work that is broad in its reach and original in its insights. What emerges is a sense of the city reinvigorated with richness and potential.;This book describes a series of different visual and mental models by which the urban environment has been recognized, depicted and planned. Boyer identifies three major "maps": one common to the traditional city - the city as a work of art; one characteristic of the modern city - the city as panorama, and one appropriate to the contemporary city - the city as spectacle. This illustrated and documented study pays considerable attention to the normally hidden and unspoken codes that regulate the order imposed on and derived from the city. A wide range of secondary historical literature and theoretical work is considered, with evident debts to structuralist analysis of urban form represented bv Aldo Rossi, as well to post-structuralist criticism from Walter Benjamin to the present.
