Imaging The City

"The metro-media nexus occurs not only within the realms of film and television (not to mention older media forms); increasingly, urban images are conveyed through newer digital media. Popular computer-based games such as Simcity 2000 provide participants to direct the development of a metropolis, and encode a myriad of assumptions about how cities can be structured. Other alternative cyberworlds, also use physical cities as metaphors for creating new interactive social realms that allow those with computers to experience urbanism-at-a-distance.

Even as new communications technologies mediate the experience of the city through the creation of parallel fictional worlds, city imaging efforts also continue to thrive in the built world of urban real estate development. Here, too, the old values of "location, location, location" that drive urban redevelopment initiatives have gained new media partners. Increasingly, flagship development projects take on the trappings of staged ventures, in which image-building is at the head of the agenda.

In the effort to shift and lift public (or investor) confidence, places get named or re-named to convey future hopes-- as with Detroit's Renaissance Center-- or to convey a more upscale or pastoral image. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is one that seems to be diversifying and accelerating. At mid-century, tenements and slums were replaced by public housing projects with names like "Orchard Park" and "Elm Haven;" in the late 1990s, many failed housing projects are themselves being torn-down and rebuilt as New Urbanist mixed-income communities, again with new identities and new names, not to mention new glossy brochures and promotional videos. Baltimore's notorious Lafayette Courts project is reimaged as Pleasant View Gardens; Atlanta replaces Techwood Homes with Centennial Place; Chicago tries to bury the infamy of Cabrini-Green in a billion dollar new neighborhood.[6] Similar re-imaging occurs in other parts of American cities: now-seedy areas get recast as Arts Districts, and abandoned 19th century industrial landscapes become resuscitated as centers of Heritage Interpretation, Historic Preservation, and (it is hoped) Economic Development."

(Sam Bass Warner and Larry Vale, 1998)