Project 1 : City of Ships and Stores: Tesco to Birkenau

City of ships!
[0 the black ships! 0 the fierce ships!
0 the beautiful sharp bow'd steam ships and sail ships!]
City of the world! [for all races are here,
All lands of the earth make contributions here;]
City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides!
City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede,
whirling in and out with eddies and foam!

City of wharves and stores -city of tall facades of marble and iron!
Proud and passionate city - mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!
Spring up 0 city not for peace alone, but be indeed yourself, warlike!
Fear not -submit to no models but your own, 0 city!
Behold me- incarnate me as I have incarnated you!
I have rejected nothing you offer'd me whom you adopted
I have adopted.
Good or bad I never question you - I love all I do not
condemn any thing,
I chant and celebrate all that is yours yet peace no more,
In peace I chanted peace, but now the drum of war is mine,
War, red war is my song through your streets, 0 city!

Walt Whitmon 'Leaves of Grass' 1885.

'The city' does not just refer to a set of buildings in a particular place. To put it polemically, there is no such thing as a city. Rather, the city designates the space produced by the interactions of historically and geographically specific institutions, social relations of production and reproduction, practices of government, forms and media of communication and so forth... The city, then, is above all a representation...I would argue that the city constitutes 'an imagined environment.'

James Donald 'Metropolis: the city as text', in Robert Bocock and Kenneth Thompson], Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity [Cambridge: Polity Press/O.U,19921, p. 422.