Investigating the Hieroglyphics of the Modern Metropolis

The metropolis is more than a collection of transport networks, buildings, parks, rivers and so on. It is an amalgam of cultural products imbued with content and implications, which is well beyond recognition by strictly positivistic views. A deep understanding of the modern metropolis and the roots of its social realities would require deciphering its hieroglyphics. What we see on the surface is the product of deeper underlying forces, and in order to understand these forces we need to explore these deeper levels. The task of any theorist intent on analysing the metropolis is to act like a detective, interrogating these traces and diving into their secrets. Beyond the positivistic methods, there are two alternative models of knowing the metropolis: reading and experiencing. This involves semiological and phenomenological methods. The metropolis as text can be read, meaning of its forms deciphered and its meaning understood: a problematic reading self-confessing of its multiple meanings. The city should be perceived by ontological potentials of human experience. Any city should always remain recipient of various interpretations of it, with meanings remaining multiple and contentious. In order to better understand the city one should not only keep the multiplicity of the ways in which we read the metropolis, but so too the ways in which any social class experience it. We should be aware of the impossibility of an all-encompassing picture of the reality of urban life, because the city fundamentally lacks such representation capacity.