Urbanity (urbanitas, Urbanität, urbanité, urbanità, urbanidad…) — An Essay

Abstract

This article deals with the meaning and the historical change of the term urbanity with the aim of making urbanity as an analytical term fruitful. Since urbanity is both a historical concept and the object of analysis, a brief semantic history must be undertaken. It takes us (at least) back to the time of the Roman Republic, experiences a change of meaning in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, and shows how urbanism and urbanity finally found their way into scientific discourse, starting with the social sciences about 100 years ago. Far from representing a uniform concept, it is also often normative or based on quantitative, measurable criteria, thus neglecting practices and ideas. All this (historical change, regional differences, tendency towards normativity in scientific discourse) makes it seem necessary to venture a new approach. My proposal is therefore to understand urbanity as a concept of form that allows for the analysis and better understanding of spatiotemporal configurations, practices and representations in relation to cities.*1 Exposition: Phenomenon or process addressed, agents, media In his novel Invisible Cities, the Italian writer Italo Calvino imagines a scene between Marco Polo and the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. The Great Khan possessed an atlas charting the cities of his empire and the surrounding kingdoms, which even included maps of lands with promising cities that remained to be discovered. He thus asks the traveller: where will the favourable winds take us? which cities shall we visit next? Yet as the Khan leafs through his atlas of real and imagined cities, he is seized by a dystopian imagination. Earlier in the novel, Marco Polo had told the Khan of his extensive journey, which included visits to many cities that, over the course of the report, increasingly painted a panorama of a world threatened with ruin. Pulled by this current, the Khan asks Polo whether everything is not in vain if the last harbour (on a journey) can only be the city of hell. 'The inferno of the living,' Polo responds, 'is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together' (Calvino 1972: 165). One can escape this inferno by accepting it and becoming part of it, so that one ceases to see it. Or-the riskier path-one can 'seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.' This exchange between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo in Calvino's novel could be applied to the project of this resource on 'Religion and urbanity'. Which cities will be visited and explored under such a perspective? Which will be looked at only in a historical atlas? Will this publication remain relevant despite its narrow, nearly whimsical selection of cities and case studies? How might its publication and its readers grasp what is important because it is shared? The ambivalence of these selected places also deserves to be examined-which can be heaven or hell or both at the same ti...

Entangling Urban and Religious History: A New Methodology

“…4 Detaching urbanity as a concept from such normative connotations and opening it to a trans-epochal and trans-cultural analysis is therefore central for our undertaking -while at the same time resisting an a priori limitation to religious phenomena and their effects on urban life. Based on this, urbanity is now considered a concept of form with which processes of materialization, temporalization, and spatialization can be observed in specific, city-related contexts (Rau 2020). These processes are by no means limited to urban space.…”

“…In this openness, the term allows object-language or meta-linguistic terms of other cultural and linguistic traditions to have an epistemic function, from ville to village and polis to nāgara. 5 An academic study can build on this historical use of the term (Rau 2020). Accordingly, the starting point is not the term urbanization, which describes urbanization in quantitative terms and refers to the founding of more and more cities and their growth in terms of space and people (in pre-modern times especially linked to an influx of people).…”

“…Accordingly, the starting point is not the term urbanization, which describes urbanization in quantitative terms and refers to the founding of more and more cities and their growth in terms of space and people (in pre-modern times especially linked to an influx of people). Once again sharpening our focus, we propose emphasizing the social character of urban space by foregrounding the concept of urbanity in all processes of urbanization, despite the narrow semantic range of urbanity in its nonacademic English usage Rau 2020). Thus, it is not to fulfil lists of parameters, as in Childe, but the practical or even conceptual attribution of a specifically 'urban' or a cultured man (Hartmann 2017).…”

“…The contributions were gathered in the framework of the international conference "Blurring Boundaries in 2021. For the closing comments see (Rau and Fuchs 2021).…”

“…17 Discussed in the framework of the international conference "Blurring Boundaries" in 2021, organized by the "Religion and Urbanity" group. For the closing comments see (Rau and Fuchs 2021) and the Virtual Collected Issue on Religion and Urbanity online: https://www.uni-erfurt.de/en/max-weberkolleg/forschung/forschungsgruppen-und-stellen/research-groups/humanities-centre-for-advanced-studieskolleg-forschungsgruppe-kfg-religion-and-urbanity-reciprocal-formations-for-2779/publications/virtualcollected-issues/blurring-boundaries.…”