ABSTRACT
The image presiding over Part I is Klee’s angel at the momentarily still threshold. Part II crosses the threshold into a city of movement, a city such as Simmel’s Berlin (1903) always in flux, disconnected from origins and with no predetermined end. Simmel describes the conditions of metropolitan cities which to him seemed radically new, but as the trams are housed in museums and the department stores give way now to malls and franchises, the vocabularies as well as the categories of urban discourse have changed. Instead of movement, or the Futurists’ celebration of the speed of a racing motor car, the key word might be mobility: geographical mobility in business travel and tourism; social mobility through education and fluid patterns of employment; cultural mobility in contrasting networks; political mobility as electorates switch allegiances more frequently, adhere to single-issue campaigns, or switch off altogether; economic mobility for some and dreams of winning the lottery for others . . . but always moving on. Identities, too, shift, produced in formations which are themselves in motion. Fashion demonstrates something of this flux when styles, represented by images in magazines, condition what people wear but are also themselves conditioned by street-level appropriations. The relation, however, is not entirely reciprocal because power remains with capital while consumers negotiate their space as best they can within what is on offer as well as in relation to other groups. Perhaps a key question of urban mobility is how they do that, how much they get away with.
