Spaces of Pleasure and the Cultural Metropolis

• In Event: 4262 - Experience and Evaluation

Abstract

Paris, New York, Berlin. What these cities share in common is they instantiate a powerful trope of bohemianism and newness, albeit at different historical times. The iconicity of the cultural metropolis is not borne out of quantitative majorities or sanitized mainstreams: the mythology of the so-called ‘bohemian’ cities rests on other foundations that may be quantitatively negligible but qualitatively pivotal. In time these minoritarian, independent currents can seep into and even come to permeate the mainstream. That which at first seems strange, obscure or even objectionable can become foundational to how places are defined and experienced later on. This paper explores this process, discussing a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of an iconic cultural metropolis. Focussing on the case of post-Wall Berlin, we show the importance of materiality and meaning in the process of turning the heterogeneity of an urban center into an iconic signifier. Looking at concrete spaces and their affordances, we offer a perspective on how cultural mythologies emerge and proliferate. An entire city can come to fascinate through spaces of pleasure that radiate iconic meanings beyond the confines of the city itself, forming a cultural metropolis.

Authors

• Dominik Bartmanski, TU Berlin

• Martin Fuller