IMAGE + IMAGINATION = AGENCY

Athens as an Island (Point Supreme Architects)

The city has always been the expression of conflicting impulses, an eternal unresolved conflict whose solution seems only possible through its destruction. In the words of Burton Pike, the city is, by any definition, a social image where the conscious meets the unconscious and the imaginations of its citizens collide with the empirical city. The visible and the invisible coexist; stones and dreams are inseparable as soon as they become lived spaces that shape collective imaginaries.

The city is incomprehensible to its inhabitants. On one hand, the direct experience of the physical city can only be fragmentary even if one contemplates it from above. On the other, the unconscious city becomes an infinite number of memories and reveries impossible to collect. For its complexity, the city has always required a sort of simplification. In between reality and its re-presentation there is a whole limbo. And this limbo is habited by the imagination.

Along history the re-presentation of the city has been a recurrent and fascinating topic. Literature, painting and photography have incessantly reduced the city to words and images. Nowadays the digital revolution is offering again new gazes to the contemporary metropolis. No matter if it is a novel of Balzac, a photography of Berenice Abbott, the film Naked City of Jules Dassin or a view from Google Earth, the city has always required a representation. And every representation is subjective as well as its interpretation. If no real city can be grasped in its totality by any single person, then the way we conceive a city is ultimately a subjective work of the imagination, a urban imaginary.

What is important to consider here is that these urban imaginaries are not just fictional representations of the city but essential parts of its reality. The way we imagine a city is directly related to the way we act in it. Following Appadurai understanding of imagination as a social practice, imagination becomes central to all forms of agency in the new global order. If fantasy implies fiction, imagination implies action. Especially when collective, it becomes the space of contestation in which the individuals seek to annex the new global conditions. The impact of mass-media in the global world have allowed diasporic groups of people to imagine things together. The global flow of images and information has created diasporic communities of sentiment with no sense of place. Readers of a newspaper, members of NGOs or religious adepts are examples of these transnational communities that share an imagination.  When Appadurai claims that active role of imagination means that these communities are capable of moving from shared imagination to the collective action.

The creation of the image of a city is therefore a catalyst of action. In the way it arises different kinds of imaginations, it implies different types of agency. Therefore, images and imaginations have been strictly controlled by the nation-state to silence difference. However, electronic mass-mediation and transnational mobilization have broken the strict surveillance of the nation-state over the imagination. Imagination has become not only a cultural fact, but a political tool.