Convenience and efficiency became the raison d’être of the twentieth century. As the burgeoning markets of industrialism led to the shopping markets of consumerism, Washington, D.C. and Paris, France were competing to be the newest and the most efficient. As the cities became more efficient, they also became more automated: both in their infrastructure and in their denizens. It’s the nature of a city to be a hive for large numbers of people—incorporating them into various systems that serve their common needs. But with technology-driven capitalistic advances, that automation carries beyond shopping, over to living.
Whether through a subway system, an airport, a grid of houses, or renovated road systems, twentieth century cities took urban planning a step further than Haussman, Washington, or L’Enfant ever did — they began to work as machines. Not only were they more discrete; setting definite boundaries and creating a core-based, localized city, but mass production changed the way they function. The nineteenth century was characterized by mass production of items; that which previously was made by an artisan in a workshop, was made of iron with machinery and hundreds of hands in a factory. However, as the twentieth century dawned, bringing with it electricity, and production on an unprecedented scale, consumerism wasn’t just a new trend. It became modernism — a lifestyle.
Cultural commentary abounded in reaction to the trend of modernism seizing urban life. With new developments came excitement, and as artists saw these ideas come to fruition around them, they began to mimic (and mock) their ubiquity. Jacques Tati was the foremost name in mockery in 1960s france, and in his 1967 film Playtime he lampoons this grandeur. In one ...
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... that in the same way in which the world had learned to mass produce items, it had also managed to mass produce lives.
While this may be an extreme position, it’s inarguable that convenience and efficiency, which in turn lead to greater profits in the business world, were driving forces for development in both Paris and Washington, D.C. Overriding the past’s obsession with the beautification, these new no-nonsense ideals became the status quo, and the lives of citizens became saturated with consumption to fuel the cycle. Almost everything was affected in some way by this growing mentality, starting as simply being zealous with planning and real estate, and culminating in huge systematic installations. Though their effect on the psyche of citizens is debatable, the universal concepts of convenience and efficiency reigned supreme in Paris, France and Washington, D.C.
The chosen article is Two Cheers for Consumerism by James Twitchell. In this article he talks about consumerism, commercialism, and materialism. He argues the stand point of consumers and the role they live by every day. In other hands the critics, Academy, gives the consumers and overview description to their consumers.
Another noteworthy urban sociologist that’s invested significant research and time into gentrification is Saskia Sassen, among other topical analysis including globalization. “Gentrification was initially understood as the rehabilitation of decaying and low-income housing by middle-class outsiders in central cities. In the late 1970s a broader conceptualization of the process began to emerge, and by the early 1980s new scholarship had developed a far broader meaning of gentrification, linking it with processes of spatial, economic and social restructuring.” (Sassen 1991: 255). This account is an extract from an influential book that extended beyond the field of gentrification and summarizes its basis proficiently. In more recent and localized media, the release the documentary-film ‘In Jackson Heights’ portrayed the devastation that gentrification is causing as it plagues through Jackson Heights, Queens. One of the local businessmen interviewed is shop owner Don Tobon, stating "We live in a
called the New Paris, or the modern capital of Europe. The streets , buildings and the services
In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States heralded the coming of the “new industrial order.” With the advent of railroads, industrialization went into full swing. Factories and mills appeared and multiplied, and the push for economic progress became the grand narrative of the country. Still, there was a conscious effort to avoid the filth and poverty so prevalent in European factory towns. Specifically, the town of Lowell, Massachusetts, was held up as an exemplary model of industrial utopia. The mill town included beautiful landscaping and dormitories for the women workers. Indeed, it looked much like a university campus (Klein 231). Nevertheless, this idealized vision eventually gave way to the reality of human greed. The female factory workers worked long hours for little pay as their health deteriorated from the hazardous conditions (238). (Specifically, Carson’s Mill in Dalton, Massachusetts, served as the model for Melville’s short story [Melville 2437].) In this way, industrialization (and the subsequent desire for economic wealth) became incompatible with democratic principles. Originally, the prevailing consciousness was that industrialization would further democracy and the two would become a complimentary pair. However, the reality was that these societal changes brought economic divisions; the boundaries were drawn more clearly between the privileged class and the working class.
She also introducing new urban building standards. This this article she talks about, the idea some people have of tearing it down and rebuilding. She also talks about ideas people have about some parts of towns. In Boston, she talks about the area of North End, and the change that it was over gone. During her second visit to this area, she discovered that it had changed. She talked to other about it, although the statistic were higher than the city, the people still saw it as a slum. They felt that they needed to tear it down in order to build something better. This leads to the conclusion that the urban planners to do understand that the people of the city need. They have ideas that were developed years ago that they are still using. These ideas do not take account what the people want. The author also introducing new ideas of a perfect city to live in and what it would look like. The idea of a garden city was introduced. This city would be built around a park. Although the new ideas sounded great they could not be put into place today. The idea of a Garden City is something that sounds nice, but it is not possible in society today. Today a city should reflect economic status, and in order to achieve this the city should be big, and convey an image of power. A city that has aspects of nature in it would not convey that image. That upkeep of a city of that kind would also be difficult. The do understand the author's point of view. The planners often times do not take into account the desires of the people. The town that I grow up in want to become more urbanized. In order to do this, they are building a large shopping center. This shopping center is located in the canyon rim. This canyon rim has been important the people for many years. We come to the area to walk, what bass jumpers, and enjoy the scenic views. This new shopping center took away this area. Many of the people
The Industrial Revolution was a time of great inventiveness and insight which would change the world, forever. Machines were being developed that did not require manpower or horsepower, and did work at a far greater output than its human counterparts could ever hope match. Likewise, thanks to the inventions of mass transit resources, products, and people were being transported across the country in greater numbers, at far greater rates. Of course, this in turn had great impact, not only on the American’s whose world was built through these new machines and factories, forged in the Industrial Revolution, and who, themselves, came to enjoy the products of such inventions; It also had tremendous effect on how American society came to view
‘Brave New World’ by Aldous Huxley is a science-fiction book in which people live in a futuristic society and a place called the World State. In ‘Brave New World’, Aldous Huxley used the idea of consumerism to describe the behaviors and lives of the citizens of the World State. The practice of consumerism by the people of the World State fulfilled their satisfactory and happiness. However, it also blinded purity and truth among its people. Different classes and different genders of people practiced different acts of consumerism such as consuming soma, technology and bodies. They sought happiness from them and eventually these acts became a social norm. However, these practices of consumerism also had side effects. It blinded truth such as
* Sheller, M. (2000). The City and the Car. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 24 (4), 737 – 757.
New Urbanism was a movement to revitalize communities and bring back the vitality within them that was slowly dying. Having seen a boom earlier in the century in suburbs and the want for American families to live in uncongested neighborhoods had the opposite effect: those fleeting to the suburbs caused for congestion in not only suburbs but there was also some forms of congestion in urban areas as well due to the newly epitomized automobile. New Urbanists saw an opportunity to rethink the ideals of urban planning and established a school of thought that focused on the pedestrian within a community, providing them with diverse commercial and economic options throughout the community within walking distance as well as maintaining civic engagement and social and economic diversity.
The Rules of the Game embodies the isolation, disillusionment, bitterness, and nostalgia portrayed during the Poetic Realism or French Impressionist cinematic movement (1934-1940) by contrasting the realistic and formative traditions. The Rules of the Game follows a nar...
My work proposes a broader view of the theatre-film interface, one that relies on intertextuality as its interpretive method. I believe it is valuable-both pedagogically and theoretically-to ask broad questions about the aesthetic, narrative, and ideological exchanges between the history of theatre and contemporary film and television. For example, this paper will study how the "Chinese Restaurant" episode of the sitcom, Seinfeld, intertextually reworks Samuel Beckett's modernist play, Waiting for Godot. In each text, characters encounter an existential plight as they are forced to wait interminably, and thus confront their powerlessness at the hands of larger social forces. As a pedagogical matter, this connection encourages the students to see academic culture in the guise of having to read Beckett's play for my course, not as foreign and alienating, but instead as continuous with their understanding of leisure activities like watching sitcoms. As a theoretical matter, this intertextual connection allows important ideological matters to come into bold relie...
Many researchers have theorized why the wealthy desire to move back into the city. Schwirian believes that many wealthy people are drawn to the architectural design of some of these old houses in urban areas (Schwirian 96). Harvey believes in a number of theories, and ...
Harvey, D. (1989). The Urban Process under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis. In R.T. Legates, & F. Stout (Eds.). The City Reader (pp. 116-124). New York, NY: Routledge.
The Fordist era and the rise of mass consumption relate to each other by two important factors: simplification or generalization and personal detachment. The Fordist era made a huge impact on society during the early twentieth century. Henry Ford was able to make labor easier by using industrial machines to make his model vehicles. Although the industrial revolution provided an assembly line before Ford’s time, he was able to put them into real use. This meant that workers would not have to provide as much labor on making Ford’s vehicles because machinery would do most of the leg work. Now that machines were able to produce Ford’s vehicles through the same process of placing its parts together, labor was barely needed from the workers. The simplified effort that Ford provided to his workers allowed for “mass production of standardized goods” of his automobiles. (Aldridge, 35)
...emergence of consumer or multinational capitalism. In many ways, its formal features express the deeper logic of this social system. We need only think of the way our sense of history has disappeared, of how our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past. We live in a perpetual present. We might say that the media help us forget the past (pp. 204-05). I have discussed two features of postmodernism--the transformation of reality into images and the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents. In this way, then, postmodernism replicates or reproduces or reinforces the logic of consumer capitalism (p. 205).