The City, the Camera and the Optical Unconcious

Walter Benjamin believed there was a symbiotic relation between cities and the medium of film. He himself sought to describe cities in writing but he always saw this project as being a manner of translating images into words. For Benjamin, the city had to be understood as a visual panorama, or what we might call a cityscape. Photographers have long been fascinated by cityscapes and have tried to capture their richness and complexity in their art. There is a great website where you can see images of cityscapes taken using a special 360-degree camera. Some of the images are quite arresting. One of the things that gives these images their power is the fact that they record a view that is simply unavailable to the human eye at any single moment. They capture what Benjamin referred to as "the optical unconscious": a feature of the visual world that is unavailable to our ordinary perception. Check out this page for Hong Kong. Pick a location from the map and once it loads up drag your cursor over the panorama image to look around. It can be quite dizzying.

Underground City

In Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the underground city of 2027 is portrayed as a domain where the underclass works under oppressive and alienating conditions. It isn't even clear what they are producing; all we know is that the workers spend their days toiling on huge machines.

What is the underground city like today? Toronto is home to one of the world's largest underground cities, with some 27 kilometers of underground pathways located beneath the city centre. Unlike in Lang's film, however, the so-called PATH system is not a world of consumption rather than production. Beneath the towers of the metropolis are shops, food courts, and entertainment. Rather than a space of industrial regimentation, it is a space designed to maximize consumption by preventing people from finding routes back to the world above ground.

As reported in the Star, the City of Toronto has tried repeatedly to establish a system of signage that would allow PATH pedestrians to find their way from place to place, even when they don't have the benefit of seeing the exterior cityscape. But planners have only been partially successful. In the end, the PATH system may be less like a system of streets and more like a casino, where clues about one's location in space and time are reduced to a minimum, and people are encouraged to think only about what is right in front of them.