and pursue domestic goals. The private and public aspects of our lives are
intertwined, power structures operate in both, and sometimes conflict with
each other. The city can also be viewed in utopian and dystopian lights.
Cities are cultural and creative places where people meet, live and work
together productively. But cities can also be sites of violence, oppression
and conflict. Throughout the history of literature, writers have tended to
display an ambivalence about the city. They have been moved by it and seen
it as a place of excitement, creativity and sensuous experience, but also of
terror and repression (see Lehan 1998). Sometimes this difference within
the city registers itself geographically: the inner city is evoked as a site of
aggression and violence, and the suburbs as peaceful and safe. But such
polarities often reverse themselves: there may be domestic violence in the
suburbs.
Cities are both physical and imaginative spaces. Life in the city is
marked by memories and desires as well as events, buildings and activities.
As Jonathan Raban has said, ‘The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illu-
sion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the
hard city one can locate in maps and statistics, in monographs on urban
sociology and demography and architecture’ (Bridge & Watson 2003,
p. 14). The city expresses and embeds both the conscious and unconscious
aspects of our lives: visible emotions and repressed memories and desires.
In writing the city as a site of difference (Exercise 3), try to engage with
the contradictory emotions, impressions and thoughts that the city
stimulates. You might like to think in terms of opposites, such as vertical
and horizontal, violent and creative, friendly and impersonal, and build
your city text from there. Perhaps you can activate several of these
oppositions at once. Perhaps you can also show how these polarities are
constantly reversing themselves. For example, in Paul Auster’s novel ‘City
of Glass’ (1988) the beggars turn out to be the kings of the street.
CITIES RATHER THAN CITY
The city, then, has many different faces: in fact there are many cities with-
in the city. Let’s consider some of these and the way they relate to urban
power structures (Exercise 4).
The diasporic city
As the concept of the nation-state breaks down, people migrate and borders
shift. The modern western city has become a mixture of nationalities and
ethnicities: this has transformed food, clothing, customs, art and language.
260 The Writing Experiment