City Imaginaries

I have been talking about Spatial Imaginaries a lot for my blogs so far, what exactly is it, what examples can I give? I think the best and simple example can be illustrated by city imaginaries, which is a subset of the idea of spatial imaginaries. Space, or the spatial is the largest description of a general idea we have as oppose to the more specialized description of geography, landscapes, environment, urban and cityscape, and interior habitat or architectural constructions. City imaginaries are impressions or the idea of a certain city in people's mind. When impressions are involved obviously memories, cultural impressions and conditionings are involved. City imaginaries operate like this simple example: such as Paris. Whether you live in Paris or going for a visit, there is a Paris in your mind already, the city is so famous that one living in the industrialized West cannot possibly be not hearing about it. And so one get ideas of Paris from books, cinema, literature, history and all forms of media, a person's impression of the place is necessarily filtered through a thick layer of cultural and psychological mindset or even ideology before one's visit. And for those living in Paris the idea of their hometown is constantly being generated by their lives in it and the cultural idea of it, by its politics, culture, living events, and how the outside world see it. For the tourist or even the well traveled, the "City of Light" conjures up a complete set of iconic ideas, the tourists are being sold to the romance of the city, it is almost a synonym of Paris, the city monopolizes the meaning of Romance. You can have romance in Berlin I suppose but it is certainly not THE romance as is happened in Paris. And so city imaginaries are the iconic images and sets of imaginations in people's mind that trigger sets of social and behavioural responses. We are suppose to feel a certain way when we come to Paris, or a certain expectations are set in motion when we live and visit there. In fact the city imaginaries of Paris is so powerful, tourism depends on it. Movies and cinema draws on these imaginaries to perpetuate the myth of the city. Myths and legends that ties to our emotional attachments and adornment of a place. It amounts to a certain tyranny of the thinking of a certain place as in person. One can say there are imaginaries of everything, such as the worshipping of certain personalities, or objects and rituals, or the gender cultures. But with spatial analysis, we may be able to look at things with a unique angle, which I will try to decipher further in later blogs.