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Loading... The Art of the City: Rome, Florence, Veniceby Georg Simmel
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A quartet of essays on great European cities from the groundbreaking thinker Georg Simmel These brilliant essays, from one of Germany's greatest and most influential thinkers, are beautifully written and highly readable portraits of three Italian cities: Rome, Venice and Florence. Simmel saw the city as a work of art in itself, and taken together these pieces act as a powerful suite expounding that notion. A seminal work of psycho-geography, this collection has never been published together in English before. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)709.37The arts Modified subdivisions of the arts History, geographic treatment, biography Ancient World RomeLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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The essays on the cities are interesting in how he takes similar features of each and comes to different conclusions about what each city is or represents based on how these similar features are juxtaposed or used. I think the discussions, while interesting, might be somewhat time specific (these are from the turn of the last century) as far as whether he might come to the same conclusions in the current cities. That said, the thought processes are both worth reading and worth adding to our own arsenal of ways to think about location.
The extra essay is remarkably still applicable to the contemporary city. I don't agree with some of his subjective judgements about what things mean but the hows and whys seem to still hold a lot of water. In other words the methodology still holds a lot of value though the assumptions might be different now than then.
A short and interesting read if you're interested in urban areas, psycho-geography, sociology, and/or philosophy. If you're familiar with Simmel this is a handy collection, first time collected together in English. If you aren't familiar with him this is a very accessible introduction to how he thinks as well as an area in which he has probably had the most prolonged influence.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss. ( )