How are we to understand the recent growth of interest in city cultures and
urban lifestyles? On one level we can rightfully argue that cities have
always had cultures in the sense that they have produced distinctive cultural
products, artefacts, buildings and distinctive ways of life. It is possible
to be even more ‘culturalist’ and assert that the very organization of space,
the layout of buildings, is itself a manifestation of particular cultural codes.
In this case particular ‘deep’ culture codes may dispose us to see cities as
for example primarily economic, functional or aesthetic entities. If there is
a switch from say a more economic and functional emphasis to a more cultural
and aesthetic emphasis does it help to try to relate this to the asserted
shifts from modernity and modernism towards postmodernity and postmodernism?
If we set aside this question for the moment and focus in the
first level, the notion that cities have always had cultures, we can take this
to imply two senses of the term culture: culture as a way of life (the anthropological
sense); and culture as the arts, spiritually elevating cultural products
and experiences (high culture). One of the central themes which I will
address in this chapter is that there has been a blurring of the boundaries
between these two senses of culture which has broadened the range of phenomena
designated as culture from the arts (high culture) to take in a wide
spectrum of popular and everyday cultures in which practically any object
or experience can be deemed to be of cultural interest. This has been
accompanied by a shift in attention from lifestyles conceived as a relatively
fixed set of dispositions, cultural tastes and leisure practices which demarcate
groups from each other to the assumption that in the contemporary
city lifestyles are more actively formed. Hence the focus turns away from
lifestyle as class- or neighbourhood-based to lifestyle as the active stylization
of life in which coherence and unity give way to the playful exploration
of transitory experiences and surface aesthetic effects. It is the
compound effects of these shifts which prove to be a source of fascination
for a number of cultural commentators who are disposed to regard them as
indicators of a more fundamental social and cultural displacement which is
increasingly referred to as postmodernism.