Response to Sam's Nostalgia in the City

Response to Sam's Nostalgia in the City



Recently, I've been thinking of nostalgia and its relationship to London, especially when I was reading De Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, in the chapter Walking in the City. In it, he makes a geographic comparison between Rome and New York in which he discusses Rome's indebtedness to its past history (its architecture/tourism etc) in comparison to New York in which he writes:

'Unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away itself and challenging the future'

This of course makes sense, as New York is a far younger city than Rome. But I found myself thinking where does London fit into its own relationship with its past and its future. I think London is (perhaps like a lot of other European cities) a city that encompasses the middle point between the city that has learnt to grow old and the city which pushes to reinvent itself. Walking round central London, so much of the buildings are these typical English Renaissance, Baroque or Neo-Gothic; with many being listed buildings. Whilst on the same street, opposite them, there are these late 20th century or 21st century exposed office buildings, using minimal structures and relying heavily on open glass exteriors propped up with metal or concrete beams. This kind of collision of the two architectural styles I think is symbolic with London's own relationship with itself. In one hand its a city that boasts a rich history, once being the center of the world in terms of trade (and all the cultural and imperial implications of that), whilst now being one of the many global epicenters of a heavily finacialised global economy (which that style of architecture, for me at least, heavily embodies).

(Now, I'm gonna go on a tangent that has nothing to do with nostalgia, I just wanted to write it up somewhere and it bares some relevance to the course.)

This is of course the average street in central London. The symbolism behind the large skyscrapers plotted around the banks of the Thames and Canary Wharf is another point of interest to me, especially in terms of the political and economic implications. The views from these skyscrapers are another talking point for De Certeau, in which he writes about the view from the World Trade Center (writing in 1983), saying:

'To lifted out of the summit of the World Trade Center, is to be lifted out of the cities grasp (...) When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identiy of authors or spectators. An Icarus flying above these waters, he can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile and endless Labyrinths far below. His elevation transforms him into a voyeur or a God'

'The view constructs the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable and immobilizes its opaque mobility into a transparent text. The voyeur God created by this fiction only knows cadavers, and must disentangle the murky intertwining daily behavior and make himself alien to them. The ordinary practitioners of the city live 'down below', below the thresholds at which visibility begins. These practitioners makes use of spaces that cannot be seen, their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each others arms.'


I thought this was interesting, looking at the omnipresent skyscrapers of the financial district, towering over the city, removing any kind of connection to the identity of the people. However, its industry is one that constructs so much of the narrative of our lives for us. In the debt economy, the financial industry slices up our loans compiles them into a multiplicity of financial debt packages, selling them round the world every second of the day. In the time its taken me to write this text, my student loan has potentially been sold to over a hundred different investors all round the world. This to them is a far removed process of just obtaining capital, but to me and everyone else in the debt economy, this has real day to day consequences. If, like history has proven, the greed and recklessness of the financial industry enables another crisis, it is the debt recipients who will be hit the hardest. However, this ceases to be a thought in the day to day process of investment banking/trading. The implications of what they're doing does not matter to them, as they sit in the high towers like Icarus flying above the endless Labyrinth, painting our narrative whilst we walk the spaces below, blind as that of lovers in each others arms.