Global Fusion 2002
Catalogue essay

Vienna@Melbourne urbanity and the other

Dr. Darko Radovic
2002

1
Cities are the most representative products of human civilisation, true reflections of the complex web of social relations, times and rhythms onto the specific place. Attempts to define urban phenomenon always prove futile. The subject remains essentially undefinable.
But we also know, or rather, we feel that there is something unbearably simple about cities; that what makes us able to recognise them and to use that single word to describe them - even in the most alien of cultures.
Oswald Spengler used word soul to describe the urban essence. The vagueness of the concept might not help the pragmatists, but for me it does come closest to that elusive, undefinable something.
That deceivingly simple essence, that what makes a city, is its urbanity.

2
Any serious definition of the city has many ingredients.
We recall Aristotelian concept of koinonia, critical relationship between humans and their cities. Greek polis was the locale where the density, the gravity of discourse was greatest. The place of art and invention. Aristotles declared that man is by nature intended to live in a polis. Humans and cities have to be studied together, because neither can exist without the other and neither has significance without the other.
Hebraic tradition offered a radically different view of urban life. God himself is set in a garden, the aim of all humans should be the re-entry into Eden. The city is intrinsically bad. Babylon, Enoch, Sodom, Gomorrah ... the list of cities as places of evil is endless.
Both Greek and Judeo-Christian attitudes still colour Western ambiguities towards urbanity. As Lefebvre clearly puts, to think about the city is to hold and maintain its conflictual aspects. The dialectics of the urban, thus (one must agree with Zijderveld), is axiologically neutral. It may produce wonders of human creativity and inventiveness, but also, and at the same time, abysses of misery and destitution.
Important part of any definition of the urban is recognition that cities permit difference; Sennett argued that they encourage the concentration of differences.
For Vienna and Melbourne the concept of difference has particular and complex relevance.

3
Vienna and Melbourne, obviously, have many more differences than similarities. What makes possible to think Vienna and Melbourne together comes from the fact that both belong to places that define the outer limits of Western European culture.
David Spurr finds that such places had critically shaped some of the key ideas of our era. The formative place for Derrida was his native colonial Africa, where the French Empire fades into the great open space of Africa. For Kristeva that was Bulgaria, the crossing-ground of the Crusades and the historical territory of contention between Christianized Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
Both Vienna and Melbourne are placed where the outer limits of the West were. In such places it is possible to live both in and beyond the West, looking southward or eastward as if toward regions of the unthought.

4
Many compare cities with another marvel of civilisation - the text. City is often described as palimpsest of interwoven messages and meanings. For Lefebvre, there is even the language of the city: particularities specific to each city which are expressed in discourses, gestures, clothing, in the words and use of words by the inhabitants. He speaks about urban language, language of connotations. There is, also, the writing of the city: what is inscribed and prescribed on its walls, in the layout of places and their linkages.
If city can be language then the texts of places like Vienna and Melbourne are, inevitably, in constant flux of simultaneous readings and translations. Translations to and from their many languages mediate between local and surrounding cultures, cultures of the observer and the observed - the process in which every citizen, potentially, belongs to both. Those are translations of words and spaces, steps and gestures, glimpses and forms - translations of all manifestations of urban life, from and to every language and dialect that makes their communities and those that border with them.

5
As translations are never accurate, they result in hybrid, in-between texts, where gaps and misreadings are not just unavoidable but (should be) welcome.
Places between cultures constitute zones of betweenness. Each of those zones is a zone of uncertainty, a zone of self-reflexivity and self-questioning in which we have an experience of otherness - and this otherness is not only difference and distance from other culture we are studying but also from our 'own' culture.
Both Vienna and Melbourne belong to such zones, they are zones of betweenness.

6
Zones of betweenness and difference imply inherent - and essential - foreigness.
Vienna borders with the Balkans and its ancient, often illegible urban traditions. Melbourne borders with rich spectrum of a profoundly different, Asian urbanity. Physical proximity to the critically different, nearness of the other, shapes the essence of both cities. The other they border is the other they contain - their past, present and potentiality.

7
The soul of cities placed at the limits of one culture is always ambiguous. That is why they are capable of extremes, of love and hatred, of generosity and cruelty.
Their nadir coincides with the times of crisis and greed, when people forget that distance from the other easily becomes the distance from their own self. Those are times of self-denial, when claims of superiority and ambition to dominate flourish.
The greatness of such cities is in times of tolerance. Those are times when they take pride of their ability to accept the stranger as stranger, to recognise the other as the rightful other. The other which is either Berman's another version of the same, assimilable, comprehensible, able to be appropriated and understood, or Derrida's tout autre, truly and radically different, which cannot be made transparent to the understanding, thereby dominated and controlled.
Vienna and Melbourne face civilisations they once dominated or wanted to dominate. In relation to the other they both experienced periods of colonial glory - or shame. History carries potential for a wiser future.
Vienna can not bring its glorious past back; Melbourne can not be an Imperial outpost any more. Today, their strength is where, traditionally, many would seek their weakness - in uncertainty, in ability for self-reflection and self-questioning, in what they border and what they contain, in an capacity to accumulate and cherish the difference. Their hopeful future is in denial of domination and superiority.
The urbanity of Melbourne and Vienna, their soul is their mentality of in-betweenness.
Places where one can live both in and beyond the East or the West are precious.