What Reveals the Taste of the City: The Ethics of Urbanity
Keyword(s):
The City
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Urbanity, a notion that originates in the discourses on rhetoric, designates an ethics proper to the city: a witty, distanced behaviour that replaces the authentic person by the playful enactment of a role. This involves - as every theatre - the presence of an illusion; a certain ‘as if’; a deception, yet one that does not deceive anybody. The belief in the illusion becomes interpassively delegated to a kind of virtual, naive observer. Postmodernity, with its obsession with questions of true identity, can be seen as the key enemy of this urban role-play. It thus contributes to the neoliberal privatization and destruction of urban, public space.