From Simmel to everyday life in post-urban metropolis

This paper discusses Georg Simmel’s essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” focusing on the opposition between metropolis and small town, pre-capitalist and capitalist society. First, it outlines Simmel’s social and spatial perspective as a bourgeois intellectual living in Berlin around 1900. The second part analyses the relationship between the mental phenomena pointed out by Simmel and the broader context in which he situates them, exploring elements of his Philosophy of Money and showing that the metropolis that Simmel has in mind is equivalent to Lefebvre’s later concept of “abstract space”. The paper concludes with an attempt to understand what results from the dissolution of such a metropolis or from its spread into space in general.