The Demotic City – The Chattering Classes and Civility

Abstract

The city is its people, it is the place of the public, the territory of the demotic and as such it prominently features in the economic, literary, historical and sociological discourses of modernity. The city is less its architecture and more its sentiments. Italo Calvino has described every great city as surprisingly similar; each has its sweeping stone steps leading to a temple, library or star chamber, its moody dividing river and subsidiary canals, its
charming arcades of quaint shops and precious art galleries. What distinguishes one city from another are its secrets, the places where memories define desires, and where the
conventions conceal undercurrents. Los Angeles, for instance, ‘on the bad edge of post - modernity’1 is characterized by episodic moral panics and destabilizing crime waves. Clues to its secret identity are continuously spewed out with the production of popular culture. Los Angeles is the by-product of Hollywood, it is the underside of the entertainment industries. The mordant critic of mass culture, Theodor Adorno said that the city was where ‘the boundary between what is human and the world of things becomes blurred’2. The city is a site of meetings and  encounters, it is a point of intersection between reality and private imagination. According to Jonathan Raban it is where ‘two or more opposed cosmological sets can grow out of the same social earth’3.