The Urban Condition: The Fragmented Metropolis of Globalisation

The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis (1999) is the collective volume in which the Ghent Urban Studies Team, an interdisciplinary group at Ghent University made up of specialists in architecture, urbanism, literature and cultural studies, tried to describe what happens to the city, to community and to the individual in the age of globalisation. Published by 010 Publishers in Rotterdam, the book combines theoretical essays with case studies and a rich iconography to sustain one thesis: the contemporary urban condition is that of a fragmented, dispersed metropolis crossed by global flows, which demands new tools for thinking and living it.

The end of the legible city: dispersal and fragmentation

The starting point is the end of the modern city as a legible unit. The industrial city had a centre, a periphery and a community that recognised itself in public space. The postmodern metropolis the Ghent team describes spreads without a clear limit, mixes shopping malls, theme parks, highways, airports and gated neighbourhoods, and replaces the square with the mall and the street with the screen. The authors trace that transformation from the periphery of Los Angeles to reunified Berlin and the urban regions of Flanders, showing that dispersal is not only a North American phenomenon.

Community: gated, elective and virtual

The second axis is community. If the city no longer offers a shared space, where is the social bond built. The essays examine gated communities that buy security and homogeneity, elective communities formed around consumption and lifestyle, and the virtual communities that the then nascent internet was beginning to make possible. The book neither celebrates nor condemns those new forms: it describes them as responses to a city that no longer produces community on its own, and warns that many of them are built by excluding whoever does not fit.

The self in the metropolis: literature, film and urban experience

The third axis is the self. The urban condition affects individual experience: the inhabitant of the dispersed metropolis lives among places they do not know, crosses spaces designed for transit and builds an identity from fragments, from the childhood neighbourhood to the global images of television and advertising. The authors draw on literature and film, from Georg Simmel to Paul Auster and from Blade Runner to Flemish cinema, to show how culture has recorded that experience of disorientation and freedom at once.

Context and relevance of The Urban Condition

The Urban Condition sits in the 1990s debate alongside the Los Angeles School of Michael Dear and Edward Soja, the critique of Mike Davis and the sociology of globalisation of Saskia Sassen, but with a European accent: attention to the historic city, to heritage and to the relationship between the built and the lived. Its sequel, Post Ex Sub Dis: Urban Fragmentations and Constructions (2002), deepened the analysis of fragmentation with new cases. Both volumes have been used above all in architecture schools and cultural studies as an introduction to the postmodern city.

The book's relevance lies in its questions more than its answers. A quarter of a century later, the dispersed metropolis it described has spread to the Global South, virtual communities have become social networks and urban fragmentation has deepened with financialisation and platforms. Reading it today helps recognise how much of the current city was already under way in 1999, and to ask what public space, what community and what individual experience a city can offer once it has stopped being a single place.