How the Modern City has been Shaped by Spaces and Practices of Consumption - Essay Example

Discuss How the Modern City has been Shaped by Spaces and Practices of Consumption Throughout the past few centuries the cities have become the centers of life on our planet. From the dirty crowded places which differed from the villages only be the amount of dwellers they have been transformed to the powerful political, social and cultural centers of the Universe how humans know it. The abyss between the mentalities of urban and rural dwellers is becoming deeper with each passing decade, so that it's possible that in a couple of centuries there would be more differences between them than the similarities. It's hard to tell who is dominant in the relationship between humans and cities. Are those people, who transform the place of their dwelling in accordance with their apprehensions about the ideal dwelling place, or are the cities the ones that make people desire the things they offer…There are numerous guesses considering this question, but still, nobody has a definite answer to it. Some scientists say that every city is the isolated reality, with its laws, rules, with its own religion and mentality. The main difference between the urban and non-urban spaces is that the villages and towns are places where people live, while the cities are the dwelling places for the crowds. " We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will. " - Gustave Le Bon says in his The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Book I. All of those, who live in the cities, subconsciously see the city dwellers as a crowd, and the crowds are cruel; it's the axiom that is fed to them from the early childhood. Thus, the law of the jungle becomes the one and only guiding rule for them. Feeling that if they didn't use someone for to reach their goals, he or she would sooner or later use them, the city dwellers tend to become savages – cruel, dangerous, and interested only in survival in the city jungle they build for themselves. It's true that most people that dwell in the cities have the same priorities. Most of them desire to be successful, to be better than his/her neighbor, colleague, or a schoolmate. "The images evoked by words being independent of their sense, they vary from age to age and from people to people, the formulas remaining identical". – again, Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Book II. The goals of the crowd are common for each individual who is the part of this crowd, and there are kind of trigger words that let the crowd understand what is being said to it. Those words, like "prosperity" and "stability" for capitalistic crowds, or "equality" and "revolution" for the hungry ones, seem to have some hypnotizing power, as the crowd obeys to the one, who uses them correctly and timely. The crowds are labeled "cruel" because of their attitudes towards the goals setting and reaching. Le Bon tells about the tendency of the crowd to transform the appearing ideas into acts immediately. "A crowd is not merely impulsive and mobile. Like a savage, it is not prepared to admit that anything can come between its desire and the realization of its desire" – he adds. The ones that don't want to feel themselves the parts of a crowd become the real loners in the cities where millions of people are around. The individual that doesn't share the values and persuasions of the crowd becomes isolated from the society, and it's not that the society rejects him. It's himself who feels terribly lonely among people, knowing that they are unable to understand him and vice versa. A persuasion exists that the modern world is the reality of consumption, a place where everything can be bought and sold, and where all of the needs are to be satisfied immediately. Thus, it would be logical to make an assumption that those are the human crowds that transform the cities, the places, where they dwell, into the centers of this consumption, adjusting them in the ways that would make consumption convenient and pleasant. People shape the existing reality for it to become the most convenient place possible. All of the inventions made from the dawn of humankind history have been designed for to make the life of their creators easier. Nowadays a person doesn't have to ride for a couple of days for to talk with a friend or relative, who lives in the neighborhood city. Today it is enough to lift a phone and press several buttons for to hear the voice of a person who is either in the same building, or in the other part of the world. Most of those, who live in cities, have almost forgotten how it feels to walk by feet for a distance longer than from the garage to the porch of their house, and from the car to the doors of the grocery store. Now we have cars, trains and planes that let us rest while our bodies are transported to the other spot of the reality. To survive in a city you don't even have to go out of your house. If you have money, you can order everything, from food to jewelry and gadgetry delivered to your doors. All of the labor and time-saving gadget people invented freed the enormous amounts of time. The authors of the utopias assumed that this time would be used for the personal development, for learning new things, and for creating the pieces of arts, but most people use this time for other purposes. To be concise, they don't use the time they got, they get rid of it. The existing situation satisfies all of the needs they have. Lots of the dwellers of our consumerist society don't have the needs other than consumerists, thus they don't use the free time they have for creating something new. The existing system hasn't inculcated these needs in them, thus the result is that lots of the average city dwellers are at the same intellectual and cultural level as the French peasant in the 18th or 19th century. He didn't have an opportunity, and our contemporaries don't have a desire, but the result is the same. This phenomenon has triggered the development of various branch of entertainment industry, beginning from gambling and to various kinds of prostitution. People don't know where to put the huge amounts of time they have, but they still try to lessen the amount of actions they have to perform, by inventing the new ways to employ technique where previously people have been employed. The city dwellers have developed their own religion, which may be referred to as Consumerism. And, every respectable religion has to have temples. If we considered the amount and the size of the sacred places to be the defining criteria for the religion's prevalence, than we would say that Consumerism is the dominant one in the cities. The malls, which are the temples of the adepts of this religious movement can be found in every huge city worldwide. Those huge shopping centers provide a sense of identity that is valued so much by most of the believers. The malls are almost the same in all of the countries in the world. Regardless of the country, where the door to the white huge space is situated, in the USA, in France, Italy, Russia or China, you will have a familiar feeling entering it. "I've been here before" – is what the adept of Consumerism would say entering a mall in any city in the world. If we look closer, it is obvious that the architecture of the mall is much alike of that of the cathedrals. "The sense of vast, open, larger than life space that one receives within both cathedrals and malls induces the sense of awe, wealth and power" – says the author of the article about the modern temples of consumption (1988). There is the variety of places of worship for the various categories of believers, beginning from the low-income families of working poor, and ending with wealthy individuals. The representative of one category of worshippers feels unwelcome and uncomfortable in the temple that is designated for the other category, regardless of the fact that in theory every believer can worship his god in any place he chooses. Going to the malls has become the favorite pastime for families. A hundred years ago it was Sunday when most people took their kids and spouses and went to the cathedral to pray, to see the other representatives of their communities, and just to communicate. Nowadays malls substituted going to churches, as they allow performing the same things, while getting much more fun from them. Mall is a place where you can meet the other representatives of your community, and compare yourself to them. It is in the mall that a person can measure his/her worthiness, ie his/her of consumptive potential, and to sum up the meaning of one's labor. One more feature proving that malls are sacred places, is that in most of those you won't find anything reminding of politics, or some other secular activities. Malls are not politically or socially affiliated, and they discourage their visitors from being distracted to something other except for the process of worshipping. The contemporary city dwellers enter the world that was described in dystopias by Ray Bradbury, perfectly comfortable, filled with high-tech gadgetry, and ruled an omnipotent and omnipresent machine. In the case of the modern city dwellers this machine is referred to as "public opinion". The identity is slowly lost in this world, and people are becoming the parts of the crowd, the mass that has the same desires and longings, and that is easier to control than the individuals. Of course some people are sure, that the modern city is on its way towards the brand new world described in utopias, to the reality, "where he inhabitants share most values and consent to whatever degree of social control they experience; the inhabitants of utopias are portrayed as free and to have transcended contemporary problems such as poverty, sexism, war". Those are the individuals who believe that the material wealth and comfort will finally lead to the moral progress of the humanity, and that given time, a human being will use it for to develop morally, mentally, and physically. Instead we see that people use this time for having fun, and the more time it is, the more fastidious ways of killing it they invent. Modern city is shaped the way its dwellers want to see it, or vice versa, it has shaped it's dwellers for to need what it offers. It is a place where all desires are to be fulfilled, where there is little opportunity of preserving your identity, and where people worship the opportunity to buy. Bibliography 1. Lebon, G. 2003. The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind. Kessinger Publishing 2. Simmel, G. 1950. The Stranger. in Wolff. K. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press 3. n.d. TEMPLES OF CONSUMPTION:SHOPPING MALLS AS SECULAR CATHEDRALS. TRINITY UNIVERSITY. (1988) (accessed February 14, 2006) 4. Linehan, D. Spaces and Subjects of Modernity. Lecture notes. (accessed February 12, 2006) Read More