Cultural ideas and symbols surely define the urban landscape but they are in turn redefined, remoulded, and transformed as they occupy a seat in the metropolis. The works of David Harvey, Documentaries like “The City” (1939) and “Keys to the City” (2022), and Films like “The Big City”(1963) along with a huge canon of knowledge supplement our understanding of the urban landscape and subsequently the symbols defining it. Metropolitan life is governed by money, time, space, rationality, calculability, and freedom. It is a place witnessing growing human-object relations along with increasing attitudes of reserve and self-preservation.

In David Harvey’s, “Money, Time, Space, and the City”, the discussion revolves around urban experiences and how money radically transforms the meanings of space and time in social life while consequently reshaping the form of urbanization. Money is a store of value and thus an indicator of social power. The money economy is a defining characteristic of any city and it shares a causal relationship with a certain kind of rationalism born out of exactness, rigorous measurement, preciseness, quantifiability, and calculability. Symbols of time like clocks and bells created a chronological net in which urban life was caught. Urban industrial capitalism had a sense of time as with the imposition of a new time discipline, new labour habits were formed along with the creation of time sheets, and surging significance of the timekeeper, informers, and fines. The rapid conquest of space through railroad, telegraph, telephone, and radio fast-tracked the process of imposing the universal sense of abstract and objective time. These monetary, chronological, and spatial nets are repressive which can lead to revolts. Money acts as a social power with its carefully cultivated command over time and space.

Is money a totalizing vision of city life? Such and many other questions found a voice through documentaries and films which served as popular culture in the urban discourse. “The Big City”  is one such film by Satyajit Ray. It explored various dimensions of metropolitan life. It showed how the community of money brings forth individualism, freedom, and liberty but also the erosion of traditional relations along with rising barriers between individuals as evident in the film through the growing distance between different characters. The city is no longer the meeting place of the classes, on the contrary, it is a structured space of separation. The traditional sense of community erodes as urban dwellers forge a new network of social contacts. The unit of family undergoes significant changes in the urban realm. With the distinction of workplace and home, gender conflict can be perpetuated. Male wage earners often think that bringing money home puts them in a privileged position to command the time of the family members and at the same time, the work time of women in the home is seen as a significant asset for freeing the time of others in the family so that more monetary benefits can be captured in the marketplace. Gender conflict in the film arises when both the partners (Subrata and Arati) take up jobs and it deepens when the male counterpart loses the job. The idea of leisure is also an important one in the urban space but doesn’t it take money to command free time? Another question arises of whether the citizens of the metropolis are considered ‘free’ in contrast to the small-town individual bound by prejudices and trivialities. City life is a different experience for different individuals because money is a source of social power. For the affluent classes, a city is a grandeur space characterized by big houses, serene music, and clean roads. In contrast, the lower middle class struggles to make ends meet and live in bustling streets with two to three generations of family living together in a small house.

Lewis Mumford very well captures how the geographical landscape of the metropolis under the rule of industrial capitalism is perpetually reshaping itself when he says “A spectacle of human power—immense but misapplied. Disorder turned to steel and stone. A million mechanisms. Almost human, superhuman in speed! Men and women losing their jobs, losing their grip unless they imitate machines, and live like machines! Cities unrolling ticker tape instead of life. Cities where people count the seconds and lose the days. Cities where people are always getting ready to live—always getting ready, never getting there.” Is by any means creative destruction necessary for the survival of the system?

Many other narratives were highlighted in “The City”. The documentary unfolds in three distinct sections over forty-four minutes with Mumford’s narration. At one instance, displaying bygone glories of community, family, and consensus achieved in small rural towns and at another, showing how bustling cities have become more complex and subsequently less fit for living. It expresses discontentment with industry, conformity, and modernity itself. But is the discontentment felt to the same degree throughout the city? The filmmakers talk about urban reforms as a solution to the urban ennui but can sunlit factories and green communities resolve the complicated living in urban spaces where money, space, time, rationality, and calculability command a strong control? Can fleeing from a city be considered a better resolution than fixing it? Another documentary called, “The Keys to the City” by The New Yorker is based on the chronicles of a New York Locksmith portraying many features of the metropolis giving rise to questions like do cities and neighbourhoods lose their gritty realism due to the process of gentrification? With an ever-increasing and rapidly changing technology whose impact is felt most in the cities, the market keeps on evolving and on the face of it, some professions lose relevance while some new ones find a way through. In the constantly changing market conditions, some individuals are met with hardships while others benefit. The documentary shows how the city is viewed differently by two individuals engaged in the same profession but belonging to different generations. Matthew, who has worked for a long time, wishes to leave the city and does not feel good there anymore but in contrast, George views the city as a haven of endless opportunities. The notion of freedom for the two is disparate and thus, the city of New York holds divergent meanings for the two.

Lewis Mumford popularly defined the city as a theatre of social action and rightly so because the urban realm is the place where cultural ideas shape experiences. Such experiences as evoked by Marshall Berman are “modes of vital experience – the experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils”, experience which, “promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”

References:

Harvey, David. (1985). The Urban Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Ray, S. (Director). (1963). The Big City [Film]. R.D. Bansal & Co. Mahangar (1963)

Van Dyke, R., & Steiner, W. (Directors). (1939). The City [Film]. American Institute of Planners. The City (1939)

Moubayed, I. (Director). (2022). Keys to the City [Film]. The New Yorker. Keys to the City (2022)

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Bhoomi Bohara is a graduate of Sociology from Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi.