Layers of the Interdisciplinary City

Abstract

Chapter 1: Layers of the Interdisciplinary City works through historical attempts to provide a complex definition of the city itself — for example. Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Louis Worth, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, David Harvey, Sharon Zukin and Saskia Sassen. This core set of ideas brings together a layered series of overlapping notions: the city as a set of physical structures, the city as a social institution, the city as a center of political and economic power, the city as a subjective experience, the city as an experienced subjectivity, the city as a temporal image, the city as a complex organism and the city as a work of art.