Sublime

Our experience of living in the city, our understanding of why things are the way they are, or why things might be different in the future, no longer track neatly onto land use patterns or zoning regulations. We still lead our everyday flesh-and-blood lives, interacting with a few people and places, constrained by the physical limits of time and... See more

In All that is Solid Melts into Air, the late American philosopher and socialist Marshall Berman’s classic celebration of fizzing, thrusting, transfiguring, luminous, contradictory modernity (and paean to his beloved New York), he describes the modern condition perfectly: “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us

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To be modern is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its

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“Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”

―

John Berger

urban wandering in the style of Walter Benjamin