Images, Themes, and Urbanography

This collection of essays explores a symbolic realm of urban images and themes. Too frequently, this realm is treated as a backdrop, whereas it deeply influences the plot and characterization. We tend to be only dimly aware of this city of the mind that is the focus of the analyses presented in this book. The thoroughfares and buildings of this invisible city control our movement as much as do the actual streets of New York, Indianapolis, or Bombay. They are tangible to us as metaphors or symbols—the city as a creature of the state, the city as a machine or as an organism, the central city as a jungle or a reservation. Indeed, the concept of the city as a state subdivision or the likening of the city to a machine may presuppose the existence of a body of deeply held ideas—constraining or mechanistic notions whose power is immensely greater than that simply of an apt (or stale) figure of speech.