Nowa mapa miasta : między nudą a rewolucją

Abstract

Taking Scott Fitzgerald's prophetic prediction of the urban reality informed by "racy, adventurous feel [.. .] and the constant flicker of men and women and machines" as a departure point, the article aims at analysing the problem of contemporary representation and distribution of urban space. Populated in equal measures by the human and the technological, the cityscape inevitably enforces a redefinition of the urban self, locating it at the intersection of the technological, the textual and the virtual environments and thus narrating a significant departure from the traditional approaches to urban locality in favour of the cyber ones. Traces of the latter are identifiable across a number of textual representations, from the aforementioned Fitzgerald to William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, and from Melvin Webber to Jean Baudrillard and William Mitchell. Still, somehow contrary to Mitchell's enthusiastic views of the cyber-urban future, there appears a much more sinister tone of the threats posed by the excessive development of technological consumerism, which as J. G. Ballard's book Millennium People informs us, is likely to evoke all kinds of nihilistic and self-destructive reactions.