Reading Response: Ackbar Abbas

The reading mainly introduces and compares two different terms, generic city, and exorbitant city.

Exorbitant city, described as the invisible city in Calvino’s novel, is the city that escapes both power and representations, empire and raconteur. It is the city that is neither graspable nor representable by images or icons. Exorbitant city can change our relationship to images. We cannot fully learn the city from its icons or representations. Instead, the city is so complex in cultural and historical aspects that the city itself becomes unstable, phantasmagoric, and labyrinthine.

In contrast, the author also demonstrates the term generic city, which first appeared in Rem Koolhas’s theory. The generic city is the city that overcomes any fixation on identity. The more complex the city develops throughout the process of modernization and globalization, the less quality the city might have. Then it becomes generic, losing its identity as itself. In modern times, when the industrial revolution changed the way how people think about technology and our cities, architects were starting another revolution. Modern architecture, reconsidering technology, function or form, modern material, spatial arrangement, has become dominant in the field of architecture. Modern architecture brings a new possibility, but also gradually blurred the boundary between cities and cities, countries and countries. Later on, in the process of globalization, technology allows us to have a more connected and intellectual world. Every day,  we are exposed to an excessive amount of information. We see tourism advertisements, images of famous architectures, news of an Avant gart infrastructure, movies filmed in a particular urban setting…all of the information gives us an image of our cities, which is based on masses of data rather than the reality. The monotonous representations and icons given by the media erase the identity of a city. It seems that everything can be remade in the image with little reference to the cultural experience.  This is why we are facing the crisis of the generic city in our modernized and globalized world.