A Critique of Cities and Motion

By James Greene

With great subtlety and eerie detail, the author provides descriptions of cities, along with several working definitions of motion, and possible critiques therein. From here examples and metaphors arise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Greene
• Release date: Dec 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393321217

Book preview

1

Idea

A predominant amount of societal behavior is considered to be either in the mode of traffic or participation. This was the observation made by the famous twentieth century sociologist Erving Goffman. His opening chapters to Relations in Public provides a lucid description of a natural habitat, of social beings submersed within their daily activities with one another.

Goffman’s writing reads as though he were an ethologist looking at an animal species for the first time. He was never shy about being rather meticulous and clever with his scientific classifications. Terms such as body gloss, markers, and skin protection,[1] for example, precisely convey the human specificities of traffic modes, whether depicting someone walking down the street or driving down the road made no difference.

As objective as his descriptions may be, really, eventually it all gets sorts of wacky and weird.

Goffman claimed that the individual is a unit, a singular transporting vehicle where a pedestrian on the sidewalk, a bicycler, a driver in a car, or a passenger on a space shuttle for that matter, is to be individually considered as singular units of societal interaction.

The human animal in such an individual mode of traffic adjusts behaviors such as their glosses, markers, signals, flow patterns, and directional travel based upon, among other things, skin protection. Traffic patterns differ and vary predominantly by the degree of skin protection. The traffic patterns of a pedestrian may vary from that of an individual car due to the amount of an exterior territorial bubble—the infamous concept known as the territory of self.

Regardless, traffic vehicles must persist by placing themselves in motion for an eventual arrival. These are usually situations with other individuals lending to the mode of participation. While in the mode of participation, the intensity of bodily movement is focused into a singular space, usually a position that lacks relative motion, a place where more than one individual must occupy. Although the intense and unified modes of bodily movement may appear lacking, the motions become much more localized into what is called gesture, sign, symbol, voice, language, and tone.

The vast exchanges of our thoughts move and transport between one another in this way.   

Plato never clearly defined the idea.[2] We assume that it is an apparitional notion forming and positing within the mind that Plato laid out only through mere metaphorical examples. The prime example for his idea, the example with no other case, the singular example, or paradigm[3] as we call it, is the chora.[4] The philosopher Giorgio Agamben points out that it is an in-between space, the place in limbo, or perhaps an unoccupied place to be filled, a space that a body can occupy.[5] This term is more than just a referential idea of space—it has been geographically demarcated.

The chora was a designated rural region outside the boundary of the city.[6] It was also politically distinguished. It was said to be a regional area adjacent to the centralized authority of the city-state apparatus. This area was a kind of suburb, village, countryside, or farmland region that would surround the city. It was land for the plow and for cultivation, for game and leisure, and a place for privacy, recluse, and seclusion.

The outskirts of the city became the vital in-between space whereby individuals, pedestrians, or vehicles could move to and from the countryside into the city and back again.

The idea takes shape from this area.

In this region, individuations emerge and move into the central hub. And if we try not to overthink it, what we find is something very philosophically interesting. Here is a place where the individual surmises, speculates, and works with thoughts. Directly from the outskirts are the transports of a singular idea by individual contributions. The idea in its formation can be exemplified by the qualities of this in-between zone. These spaces we demarcate, occupy, and fill are the very same places we travel, transport, move, and venture forth in thought and action.

We are essentially trafficking and participating individual units of thought that contribute to a larger idea. 

2

Party

Anyone who lives in a city or township has an adequate idea of what is going on. Those who live right next to roads, sidewalks, and streets